A fair-haired, bull-necked, poetry-loving ruler, with an eye for interior design, pathetically desperate for his subjects’ affection, sexually incontinent, lazy and slapdash in his handling of public affairs, prone to showing off his knowledge of Greek in public, and later to be remembered as the most disastrous political leader his country had ever produced – why have the Roman Society and the British Museum chosen this year of all years to commemorate the emperor Nero? It is hard to think of any meaningful parallels with the statesmen of our own day. Suggestions on a postcard.

The character of Nero’s principate has been debated in the Journal of Roman Studies since our very first issue, way back in 1911. Trajan supposedly used to say that Nero had in fact been the best of all emperors for five years of his reign, and the notion of ‘the Five (Good) Years of Nero’ has had a long and lively afterlife in modern scholarship. But Tacitus and Suetonius are quite clear that Nero was a rotter from the outset, and you need to squint rather hard to see any real difference between the first five years of his reign (AD 54–59) and the rest. In his ‘Trajan on the Quinquennium Neronis’, JRS 1 (1911), 173–9, J.G.C. Anderson ingeniously suggested that the relevant five years were in fact the last five years of Nero’s reign (AD 63–68), and that what Trajan was praising was Nero’s exemplary rebuilding of the city of Rome after the fire of AD 64. Strong arguments have since been raised against Anderson’s view, including in the pages of the JRS (F.A. Lepper, ‘Some Reflections on the Quinquennium Neronis’, JRS 47 (1957), 95–103), but Anderson’s paper is still well worth reading today – and it’s admirably short.

More recently, the legacy of the great fire of AD 64 is the subject of an absorbing article in the JRS by Virginia Closs, ‘Neronianis Temporibus: The so-called Arae Incendii Neroniani and the fire of AD 64 in Rome’s monumental landscape’, JRS 106 (2016), 102–23. Closs tackles an extraordinary and neglected group of monuments, a set of massive stone altars to the god Vulcan dotted around the city of Rome, vowed by Nero in the immediate aftermath of the fire of 64 but only completed by Domitian in (probably) the mid-80s. As Closs brilliantly shows, these altars originally belonged to a set of eminently sensible and practical new urban fire-safety measures planned (and partially implemented) by Nero in the mid-60s AD. But the Flavians, committed as they were to vilifying Nero and all his works, chose instead to make ideological hay out of Nero’s impious failure to complete the altars, a religious fault only belatedly remedied by the impeccably devout Domitian.

Finally, the posthumous blackening of Nero’s reputation is also the subject of a brilliant and controversial paper by Brent D. Shaw, ‘The myth of the Neronian persecution’, JRS 105 (2015), 73–100. Nero’s alleged scapegoating of the Christian community of Rome in the wake of the fire of 64, vividly described by Tacitus in his Annals (15.44), has long been one of the very few fixed points in the early history of the Christian Church. Shaw argues that this ‘Neronian persecution’ is a retrospective fiction, developed only in the decades around AD 100, and that it is profoundly unlikely that the Christians were even recognised as a distinct group – let alone persecuted – by the Roman state as early as the 60s BC. Shaw’s thesis has been hotly debated over the past six years, and it is probably still too early to say whether it will gain wide acceptance. Still, sparking these kinds of controversies is part of the point of a journal like the JRS, and I very much hope that the Roman Society’s New Research on Nero Webinar (15 May 2021, jointly organised with The Association for Roman Archaeology) and the British Museum’s Nero exhibition (27 May – 24 October 2021) will inspire more young scholars to join the debate.

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Peter Thonemann is Editor of the Journal of Roman Studies. The papers mentioned in the blog above are free to access until the end of May 2021 at www.cambridge.org/JRS/Nero.