Nero by Anthony Everitt & Roddy Ashworth

Nero: Matricide, Music, and Murder in Imperial Rome
By Anthony Everitt & Roddy Ashworth
Random House Books 2022

Nero: Matricide, Music, and Murder in Imperial Rome
By Anthony Everitt & Roddy Ashworth
Random House Books 2022

There’s a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde split-brain pathology that tends to afflict modern biographies of ancient figures like the Roman emperor Nero, and it’s a pathology rooted in the bifurcated nature of the sources. On the one hand, there are often furious and always partisan ancient writers, lampooning the living and slandering the dead for their own reasons in their own living worlds, ignoring or misusing primary documents that modern-day historians would give their eye-teeth to see. And on the other hand, there are ancient sources that seem less partial, piles of coins or the chunks of epigraphy that can tell a very different story. 

This leads to some of those modern biographies scorning the very idea of consulting those partisan ancient written sources at all, invoking them only to mock them. It leads some others to grapple with the silliest and most exaggerated ancient written sources, hoping to squeeze sober reliability out of them by some weird combination of industry and credulousness. Both approaches are doomed to failure. No matter who wins, the reader loses. 

At times, that split-brain phenomenon seems to define the latest mainstream attempt along these lines, Nero: Matricide, Music, and Murder in Imperial Rome by Anthony Everitt & Roddy Ashworth, out now from Random House, and sometimes it looks alarmingly literal. Right at the beginning of the book, in introductory pages designed to present the popular view of Nero as a savage dilettante who fiddled while Rome burned, we get a a strongly-worded forthright guess stated as a fact:

As a matter of fact, he was quite a good singer and musician. The secret of Nero’s personality lay in his commitment to art. He was no dilettante and took music and drama extremely seriously. Audiences loved him. He was the prototype of a pop star.

But later on in the book, the subject comes up again – and this time the tone is very different:

Was he a great poet and music maker? His tragedy is that he was not. He seems to have had a real but middling talent. One has the impression that he himself did not know whether he was any good. We do not know either, but what is certain is the seriousness and application he devoted to his creative work. 

Even the book’s meta-data is weirdly contradictory; the unsigned Preface speaks in “I,” but the Acknowledgements speak in “we.” Granted, this book was a shared work, but even in collaborations, it’s customary for the people involved to know each other a bit. 

At the outset of the book, readers are assured that this is an account of Nero that is aware of all the scandalous stories that have circulated about him – and it keeps all of that scandalous stuff in, rather than prudishly omitting it or scrupulously scorning it. But when it comes to figures like Nero, the question is never whether or not the ancient gossip will be included, it’s whether or not it’ll be presented as credible. And despite all the books to Everitt’s credit, “Nero as pop star” is, to put it mildly, not credible – which makes the book’s insistence on that aspect of Nero’s career not only weird but sometimes, fatally, funny:

As for the well-known allegation that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, he may very well have done so, although Tacitus has it only as a rumor. (In any event he would have played a cithara rather than the not yet invented violin.) But he will have been too busy dealing with the aftermath of the catastrophe to give a major concert immediately. 

So in the aftermath of the fire that burned a large chunk of his Rome, Nero would probably have been too busy to play Wembley Stadium? Duly noted. 

It’s customary, when staggering back into the sunlight after reading a book like this, for a plaintive critic to ask “Who is this book for?” But in this case, the answer’s obvious. There’s been a buying audience for this kind of Nero book for two thousand years. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News. A compilation of his writing can be found at SteveDonoghue.com.