Fiddling while Rome burns is a hard charge to dislodge. Nero did nothing, or he played the violin (so I was taught as a child), while the city went up in flames. Blaming Christians for the fire, he had them burned alive in pits, before building a giant golden palace on the ruins. He also murdered his mother, brother, two of his wives and much of the Roman elite.
The only surviving accounts of Nero (37-68 AD) – by Tacitus and Suetonius, near-contemporary historians, and Cassius Dio in the second century – are almost unanimously hostile. A teenager put on the throne by his scheming mother, Agrippina, Nero is greedy, violent and homicidal. In addition to fratricide, matricide and uxoricide, he is even guilty of the unusual crime of “urbicide”, having set fire to Rome himself.
The British Museum’s stupendous new blockbuster buttonholes you at the door with the proposition that you see the show and then decide between Nero as unfairly maligned or “egomaniacal, excessive and evil”. It takes a certain effort of will not to see everything that follows as evidence. Does this coin of Nero and Agrippina’s overlapping heads show him as a weak-willed mummy’s boy? Does this ivory figure of a tragic actor, accompanied by the news that Nero played the mother-killing Oedipus on stage before the public – only think of the irony! – prove he was the narcissist of Tacitus’s telling?
A Roman window grating lies at foot-level before you, warped nearly out of recognition by the flames that devastated the city in AD64. The sight is a shock, particularly since it comes from the very place where the fire started, by the Circus Maximus. But it cannot tell you who – if anybody, as opposed to an accidental spark – committed the arson.
The show starts with a coup de theatre: a long, black corridor suddenly rounds a corner to take you face to face with Nero himself, his sightless marble eyes spotlit in the darkness. This magnificent loan, from the Capitoline Museum in Rome, is probably the most famous portrait of Nero in existence. The wide, square head, thick neck and cumbersome chin, the facetious curl of the fleshy lips: he appears immediately thuggish. Though surely there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.
The likeness is both a revelation and – supposedly – a fraud. We are told that only the upper head is ancient, the rest a 1660s restoration “based on hostile accounts”. Whereupon the British Museum presents a colour photograph of a modern recreation, in which Nero is a pocked redhead with a hideous neck beard; many removes, now, from any kind of truth.
Yet vigilant visitors will notice lineaments of the very same physiognomy throughout the exhibition, in coins, reliefs, bronze and marble heads. The rudiments are even there in a statue of Nero as a boy, arms lifted angelically. The Capitoline bust can hardly be so scathing if it agrees with Nero’s own triumphalist propaganda.
The show sustains its theatre from first to last. The imperial family tree spelled out in a parade of lifesize statues, ghostly in the gloom. Nero with a lyre (it was never a fiddle). Ceiling fragments from his golden palace, painted with gods and sphinxes. Exquisite silver horse trappings that once belonged to Pliny the Elder.
The staging is superbly eventful, so that you move from pomp and circumstance straight into horrific reality – a colossal chain, looping heavily between neck rings, worn by slaves labouring for the Romans in Wales. This assault on humanity is so displayed to hang around your own head height, casting its vicious shadow on the earth below. Five necks, strung agonisingly close together: it is the most devastating sight in the show.
Later, you are confronted by a pair of gladiators’ helmets, heavy as scuttles, caged over the face, and the massive thigh protectors that tell you these fighters were never small. The scale jumps are marvellous, from muckle warrior to tiny tragic actor, shuddering in shock; from outsize Nero to miniature marble slave boy, drooping over the lantern he is supposed to hold up. Apparently, there was a market for such kitsch, which says something about the Romans. Yet if a slave committed a crime, in Nero’s time, all the other slaves in the household could be killed.
Mortality is palpable, even among the gilded dinner plates. Here is the gleaming Roman jewellery left behind when highborn Romans tried to outrun death, fleeing Boudicca in Colchester. Here is half a human jaw lately discovered beneath the streets. And Nero himself, with his lubricious mouth and extravagant Regency sideburns, killing his enemies until the Praetorian guard eventually come for him and he kills himself at the age of 30.
We are asked to believe, on fairly flimsy evidence, that Nero’s wet nurse loved him and that he was tremendously popular for his Broadway-style shows and rebuilding of Rome after the fire. Yet it seems clear that Nero did fiddle, uselessly, for the first three days. And it also seems likely, from all the visual evidence here, including a terrific bit of a graffiti from a Roman shop, that he saw himself as a champion athlete, actor and poet, with famous hair.
But what makes this show so unusual is precisely its offer of different truths. Nothing in it convinces me that Nero was a hero, but neither does it damn him on the basis of Tacitus and his colleagues. Its true subject, in a sense, is the way that history calcifies into dogma, but may come alive again, in all its complexity, through modern minds and eyes.
