Kraus, 'Reflections of Nero: culture, history, & representation', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9409
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9409-kraus-reflections
Jas Elsner and Jamie Masters (edd.), Reflections of Nero:
culture, history, & representation. Chapel Hill and London:
The University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Pp. viii + 239.
$42.50. ISBN 0-8078-2143-8.
Reviewed by Christina S. Kraus -- University College London
Until recently I lived in a New York City building, one of
whose doormen was a former Olympic wrestler who had played the
gladiator Croton in Quo Vadis. When two years ago I spent
a year in Durham, where Peter Ustinov had just been installed as
chancellor, I suspected the existence of a theme. And indeed, now
comes the chance to review this new collection of essays, the
cover of whose British edition features a still from Sign of
the Cross, a fetching Charles Laughton in full decadence,
leaning enticingly toward the reader.[[1]] Inside are a baker's
dozen of articles by young scholars, investigating from many
angles the proposition that the picture of Nero-the-monster that
has been transmitted in our sources--the man who, in Mervyn
Leroy's words, was 'a guy plays with himself nights'[[2]]--is
'impossibly crude' (1). Instead, the contributors suggest a
scenario (one in fact familiar from the BBC version of 'I,
Claudius') in which the imperial court factions control an
essentially powerless princeps who is allowed to follow
his desires only if they further the wishes of his keepers. Add
to this a popular, theatrically-inclined emperor who could really
sing and dance, and a group of historians and poets who produced
competing and exaggerated representations of that emperor, and
one could end up with the familiar Neronian myth: 'Nero's
populist policy was, it appears, remarkably successful (and his
positive reputation survived for a surprisingly long time in
popular tradition); but in the end he had been too imaginative
for his own good. Perhaps the very vehemence with which he was
condemned at the end of his reign is an indication of just how
nearly he succeeded in portraying himself as the glorious
culmination of the Julio-Claudian dynasty--cultured, generous and
magnificent--against all attempts to represent him as an
incompetent egomaniac with a taste for arson and matricide. They
had tried to control him; they had nearly failed; and their
revenge was crushing' (4-5).
This reexamination of 'the problem of believing the image of
Nero' falls into three parts: 'The representation of Nero,' in
which three contributors interrogate the cinematic,
historiographical, and biographical traditions; 'Tropes of
history,' four papers on Nero's self-presentation; and 'Tropes of
literature,' six investigations of Neronian literary production
and its relationship to both contemporary and modern images of
the artistic tyrant. Ancient citations are translated throughout;
each paper has its own bibliography, and there is a collective
index. The individual articles vary, of course, in quality as
well as in approach. Yet, while there are few cross references
among the papers, the positions argued show a remarkable
coherence and a convincing result: not a rehabilitation of Nero,
but a certainty that his traditional image rests on extremely
tenuous and in many cases untenable assumptions.
In 'Make like Nero! The appeal of a cinematic emperor' Maria
Wyke discusses the 19th-century novel Quo Vadis? and the
films of the book, the best known of which are DeMille's Sign
of the Cross and Leroy's Quo Vadis, but also including
several pre-WWII Italian versions. She argues that each country
reinterpreted the story of Nero and the persecution of Christians
in the arena to suit its own political and nationalistic myth
(sometimes paradoxically, as DeMille, e.g., appropriated the
beneficent Nero to epitomize Hollywood's generosity).[[3]] While
there are some interesting points in the essay, however, to me it
reads as if it were constructed largely from previous studies of
film and of the classical tradition. The second piece, Joan-Pau
Rubies on 'Nero in Tacitus and Nero in Tacitism: the historian's
craft,' is also disappointing. Its two aims, to show how the
Renaissance used Tacitus as fuel for pro- and anti-despotic
arguments (=Tacitism), and to demonstrate that Tacitus' Nero was
a 'literary figure,' an 'anti-Agricola' (38), do not come
together very well. The conclusion that Tacitus is rhetorical and
that we must be aware that we read him through the film both of
his own manipulations and of the centuries of intervening
interpretation, is true, but does not take us very far (Syme,
whom Rubies cites at the beginning as a defender of Tacitus'
reliability (19), is an easy target in such matters).[[4]] I
would have been happier to see much of the second section
replaced with more on the 'many possibilities for active
engagement with Tacitus' rhetoric' in the later tradition
(36)--and it is a pity that Rubies could not take advantage of
T.J. Luce and A.J. Woodman, Tacitus and the Tacitean
tradition (Princeton 1993). Last in this section, Tamsyn
Barton on 'The inventio of Nero: Suetonius' brings a
welcome clarity to a discussion of the traditional image of
Suetonius-as-sieve, which she argues is based on a misreading of
Suetonius' deceptively disengaged authorial persona. She
shows how Suetonius' description of Nero's character reverses
traditional categories of encomium (a nice parallel, which she
does not mention, are the popular top-to-toe ugliness catalogues,
most famously in Shakespeare's 'My mistress' eyes are nothing
like the sun'); I found especially enlightening the section
adducing comparanda from contemporary physiognomical treatises
(56-7).[[5]] Her demonstration of Suetonius' place in the
tradition of 'plausible and well-constructed invective' (58) does
not claim that the biographer was an outright liar, but posts a
large, well-lighted, and much-needed sign: caveat lector.
'Tropes of history' turns from readings of Nero to the
historical record more narrowly conceived. In the clever and
well-argued 'The tyrant at table,' Justin Goddard contends that
Nero's extravagance had a designedly popular basis. The emperor's
feasting and related activities, especially his inclusion of and
even imitation of the lower classes, demonstrated the imperial
virtue comitas; where Nero failed was in neglecting (and
often endangering) the elite--who were, of course, to write his
story. Next, Catharine Edwards investigates the combined glamor
and shamefulness of actors in Rome.[[6]] Following Dupont, she
connects the deep suspicion aroused by actors to the 'vital
performative force' of speech in Roman law and public life
(84-5): the words of actors, being not their own and yet capable
of moving an audience, were dangerous and threatening to the
authoritative voice of the state. Nero-the-actor presented an
impossible, subversive challenge to Nero-the-emperor. 'Beware of
imitations: theatre and the subversion of imperial identity'
closes with a look at acting and the theater as metaphors
deployed not only by Nero but also by his hostile chroniclers,
who represented his rule as the triumph of illusion and
dissembling (92-3). Edwards's able and thought-provoking look at
the acteur-roi is followed by Susan E. Alcock, 'Nero at play? The
emperor's Grecian odyssey,' which rereads the most notorious acts
of Nero's tour: his involvement in the games, his removal of
statues from sanctuaries, his failed Corinthian canal, and his
liberation of Greece. Alcock invites us to see these as the acts
of a ruler trying to foster contemporary Greek culture: not the
dead Greece of Athens and Sparta, but the living Greece, as most
clearly centered in the colony of Corinth, 'a unifying, pro-Roman
force in provincial life' (105). By participating in the games
Nero gave personal imperial approval to a long-standing Greek
cultural heritage as well as establishing his own authority (105;
a useful comparandum might be the Athenian self-boosting in the
tragic festivals of the mid-fifth century); in 'transferring'
cult-images to Rome he may have intended to share them, rather
than to appropriate them as part of 'a game of domination and
symbolic control' (101; this argument is the least persuasive,
and badly needs a parallel); the Corinthian canal, as well as
reflecting a time-honored method of demonstrating imperial power
by dividing the world up in a new way,[[7]] would have
immeasurably benefited the Greek economy (102); while the
liberation of the Greeks would have brought Nero real political
advantage through increased popularity, and may have been part of
larger trends toward 'deprovincialisation' in the East (103). All
of this, of course, was rewritten by those who cast Nero as a
flamboyant madman. Next comes what is to my mind the best paper
in the collection so far, Jas Elsner on 'Constructing decadence:
the representation of Nero as imperial builder.' Like Goddard and
Alcock, Elsner argues that Nero was a purposely popular emperor
whose innovative and extravagant building programme comprised the
three types of buildings--monuments honoring the imperial family,
public buildings (including temples), and luxurious palaces
(which still maintained some public function)--celebrated in the
laudatory accounts of Augustus' rebuilding of the city and
perpetuated by the other Julio-Claudians. After Nero's fall, his
architectural programme, which like other imperial building
'encapsulated both the self-presentation of emperors by contrast
with their predecessors and a public definition of their
relationship with the populace' (123), was countered by the
prudent and conservative Vespasian, and almost immediately we
find in Pliny, 'a highly mythologised and polemical version of
Nero, in which his activities, his buildings, and the nature of
his principate become mapped ... onto a negative ideal of how not
to be an emperor' (118). If Nero had not fallen, even the
Domus aurea would have been the subject of praise; as it
is, by transgressing the 'natural' boundaries of Roman
topography, and especially as a rural villa in the center of Rome
which brought the country into the city (121-2), it came to
epitomize unnatural Neronian vice.
The third and longest section considers Neronian literature.
Emily Gowers, in 'Persius and the decoction of Nero,' traces the
thematics of 'boiling down' (as most famously represented in the
decocta Neronis, Nero's experimental yuppie water) through
the sunlit glare of Neronian literature, the 'galloping
consumption of the genres of Augustan poetry' by writers fated to
die young, burned out, victims of the emperor's own 'feverish
haste' (131-2). She begins with Nero himself and the images of
haste, vegetable growth, and extremes of temperature found in
accounts of his reign; reading Nero via Detienne's work on the
gardens of Adonis and the Roman 'moralisation of luxury,' she
focuses on the contrast between precocity and early withering,
praecox and decoctus, in the emperor's life, loves,
and murders. She then moves to Persius and his two voices: 'one
.. preaches salvation; the other is irredeemable but can see his
inevitable end. The uncooked youth bubbling and spitting in bed
is always looking ahead to the final stage of putrefaction'
(143). Gowers's style, in this piece itself hinting at a lush
fullness, fortunately does not burn out like its subject: I was
sorry to see this essay end. Less satisfactory, though with
flashes of brilliance, is Jamie Masters on 'Deceiving the reader:
the political mission of Lucan Bellum Civile 7.' Masters's
1992 book, Poetry and Civil war in Lucan's 'Bellum
Civile', unambiguously established Lucan as a doctus
poeta and Masters as a consummate reader of his difficult
epic. In this paper he returns to Lucan (though with less flair,
I thought), and specifically to the poet's political bias. After
establishing the critical context for the discussion, Masters
shows, via a careful reading of the notorious death of Domitius
at 7.205-13, that Lucan is (surprise!) playing
games-through-exaggeration. We cannot believe the pro-Pompeian
reading of this scene: its very sincerity deconstructs itself.
Masters concludes by arguing that 'Lucan's poem is a reductio
ad absurdum of politically committed writing (as it is,
indeed, of every other feature of Vergilian epic)' (168). As
such, this 'insanely provocative project' makes sense only if
Nero was tolerant of such libertas (171), and indeed
wanted to advertise that 'persecution of literary figures was a
thing of the past'; after Lucan's political fall, his
artistic project would naturally have been (re/mis)read as
propaganda against the emperor. While I am sympathetic to the
idea of misreading, I am less so to the idea that Lucan designed
his epic to be misread in a very subtle and complex way (169): to
put it simply, as a sophisticated joke (168, 171). Take too much
of the terrible passion out of Lucan--and there is passion there,
however ironized and however unsure as to which side is/was right
(can either side ever be right in a civil war?)--and the poem
collapses back into the 'mere rhetoric' which sanitized it for so
long and from which it has only recently been rescued by Ahl,
Johnson, Henderson, and Masters himself.
The next three papers deal with [Seneca] and Seneca. Gareth
Williams, in a smart, close reading of the Octavia, shows
that the Nero it represents is the incarnation of negative Stoic
virtues, as his rule is the embodiment of the Iron Age.
Particularly illuminating is the section on Nero in love, where
Williams argues that the emperor takes on the attributes of
Amor--right down to his fire, which Nero/Cupid wields in his
vengeance on the popular resistance to his authority (189). The
end of the play, in which Nero emerges unscathed and Rome remains
in the Iron Age, problematizes the whole Stoic ideal (191).
'Nero, Seneca and Stoicism in the Octavia' ends by
supporting the consensus that this fabula praetexta is
post-Neronian, and that it therefore affords us an early example
of the creation of the Nero monster after his death. In 'Seneca's
Thyestes and the morality of tragic furor,'
probably the most difficult and theoretically sophisticated piece
in the volume, Alessandro Schiesaro explores the metatheatrical
elements of the play's prologue. In this compelling reading
Schiesaro shows that from the very beginning Seneca constructs an
opposition between repression and its removal, encoded in the
dialogic form of the prologue and explicit in the struggle
between Thyestes, who would silence the scelus and the
nefas of his house and the Fury, who would give them
voice--make them, literally, fas. This opposition repeats
throughout the play, which 'hinges on the antithesis of two
series of characters who are functionally similar: on the one
hand the Fury, Atreus and Tantalus, on the other Tantalus'
shadow, the satelles, Thyestes' (206-7). The poet and the
audience are deeply implicated in the desire for violence and
sin, without which there is no poetry: 'The audience is made to
realise that the aesthetic pleasure afforded by the play is
coextensive with that [tragic] nefas' (203). Also
interested in the opposition of fundamentals, and in the tendency
of a text to contain its own unraveling, is Yun Lee Too, who
writes on 'Educating Nero: a reading of Seneca's Moral
Epistles.' She reads the philosopher as a retiree from the
world and from politics who yet manages, by consistently
privileging the word over the thing--the res, including
the res publica--to take the world with him. Though her
arguments are at times too fast, even slippery, to my mind, it is
long past time that these letters were read between the lines;
Too is particularly good on Seneca's metaphors, and on the
problems that the concept of translatio poses for a
philosophy that on the surface advocates stability.[[8]]
The collection closes with 'Famous last words: authorship and
death in the Satyricon and Neronian Rome,' an interesting
(if in places overly tentative) examination of what Catherine
Connors calls 'a Roman discourse of authorship and death' (227).
She moves from epitaphs through 'a text [that is] produced or
re-enacted in the final moments of life' (228, e.g., Seneca's
reenactment of Socrates' death) to similar enactments of parodic
texts (e.g., the Tacitean deaths of Lucan and Petronius) and to
less-easily classified deaths of creators who perish with their
art: e.g., Petronius' Eumolpus, who writes his Bellum
civile during a shipwreck that nearly drowns him, or the end
of Nero himself, who 'marks the close of the artfully manipulated
narrative that is his life with a remark that calls attention to
his status as a monument builder'--which, she notes, playfully
echoes closural gestures like Horace's exegi monumentum
(230). In conclusion, she suggests that Eumolpus/Petronious
consciously echoes the end of Lucan's Bellum civile in
such a way as to remind us that the emperor prevented that epic
poem from being finished. Whether or not that echo was intended
as a criticism of Nero she leaves open: 'Perhaps such openness to
competing interpretations is just what we should expect from a
text produced in the latter part of Nero's reign' (232).
Despite occasional unevenness and a slow start, this is in
general an admirable collection. It is designed to be provocative
and some readers may find it overly so, though its contributors
work entirely within traditional academic discourse. Aside from
individual arguments, however, the volume is important from a
methodological standpoint. Scholars increasingly emphasize the
theoretical point that the historical and literary record of any
period can--and should--be read in many different ways.
Reflections of Nero shows how it can be done, and should
open fruitful debate on the last of the Julian dynasty.
NOTES
1. The American publishers have inexplicably replaced the
picture with an unattractive arrangement of reflected and shadowy
letters, leading one to wonder exactly where our priorities are.
2. I thank David Levene for showing me Peter Ustinov's memoir,
Dear me; the section on the making of Quo Vadis is
in chapter 14.
3. Though I question her bald assertion (19) that 'the eagle
signifies an oppression and moral decadence which is
quintessentially foreign' to America--there are eagles and there
are eagles, after all.
4. In general, I found the piece fuzzy and hard to follow, and
at times self-contradictory: e.g., p.39 claims that Tacitus'
Seneca is spared the 'direct criticism of double-standards hinted
at by Suetonius and Dio Cassius,' but the top of p.40, on
Seneca's letter justifying Agrippina's murder, seems to belie
this statement. The proofreading does not help (punctuation in
the notes is inconsistent; parenthetical dates on p.32 and in fn.
14 are unexplained; the titles of Connors's and of Barton's
papers in this volume (nn.66, 70) seem to be from earlier
versions), and important classical bibliography is ignored, e.g.,
J. Ginsburg, Tradition and theme in the annals of Tacitus
(Salem, N.H. 1984) on the conflict between annalistic and
imperial style (p.37); A.J. Pomeroy, The appropriate
comment (Frankfurt am Main 1991) on the style of deaths in
Tacitus (p.40); anything on Tacitus' life under Domitian, which
'seems [!] to have coloured his assessment of imperial power in
earlier times' (n.49).
5. N. 17 cites Syme (1980), which is not in the bibliography;
on the topos of impious tyrants, T.P. Wiseman in Clio's
cosmetics (Leicester 1979) would have been illustrative, and
I do not think that the quotation from 'Hermogenes' (53) supports
purely conventional accusations of temple-robbing, though it does
allow for its development in conventional terms 'once agreed
that so-and-so is a temple robber' (italics mine); it is
scarcely true that Pliny's Panegyricus is 'the sole
survivor of what must have been a constant outpouring of encomia
of the living emperor' (50; sole of its period, perhaps).
Barton's argument bears comparison in large with K. Sacks's
similar study, Diodorus Siculus and the first
century (Princeton 1990).
6. Those interested in the subject will also want to see C.A.
Barton, The sorrows of the ancient Romans (Princeton
1993), which must have appeared too late to be included in
Edwards's bibliography.
7. One could compare the water-manipulation of world-builders
throughout ancient literature, from Herodotus to Lucan, not just
Xerxes' canal--an inescapable model for Nero's.
8. Her assigning the Ad Herennium to the early first
century AD (p.220) must be a slip (the latest dating of which I
am aware, by A.E. Douglas, CQ 10 [1960], is late
Republican); I am not sure what Seneca's 'failure to fulfil his
own language' (218) means, and something has gone wrong with the
sentence beginning 'Such an individual' on p.221; Frede 1980
(n.7) is not in the bibliography, while J.E.G. Zetzel on
emendatio (CP 75 (1980)) might have been (n.20);
Parker's Literary fat fadies, though in the bibliography,
is not cited in the notes.