Nero [Paperback]

Oedipus Rex, as everyone knows, murdered his father and slept with his mother. The emperor Nero slept with his mother and murdered his mother, Julia Agrippina, the granddaughter of Augustus Caesar and the third wife of the emperor Claudius. Nero also condemned to death hundreds suspected of conspiring against him; participated with associates in nocturnal killing sprees; committed sodomy and pederasty with children under ten years of age; and, upon returning from Actium during the great fire in Rome, donned a tragic gown, perfume, eyeliner, and other makeup, and, from a vantage point on the Palatine which afforded a panoramic view of the destroyed city, gave a stirring performance of his tragic bel canto 'The Sack of Troy' while accompanying himself on a cithara. Indifferent to the suffering and destruction in the poorest wards of Rome, he soon thereafter designed and oversaw a scale model of a new capital whose centerpiece was a massive palace complex extending from the Palatine to Maecenas Gardens, an area whose existing structures were destroyed in the great fire. None of this was his fault. He was, simply, mad, too unstable to cope with the demands of a position which had been forced upon him and which, at least initially, he did not desire. Such, at least, is the viewpoint of Titus Petronius Niger, the first-person narrator of this gripping fictionalization by David Wishart of the reign of Nero and the unofficial court Adviser on Taste, who is better known as the author of the Satyricon, a picaresque novel of lower-class life in Italy during the first century A.D. Nero, it seems, is also a man of taste and vision, blessed with a remarkable singing talent, who seeks to civilize the bloodthirsty Roman masses by introducing them to Greek-modeled concerts and dramas as intended complements and eventually replacements for the brutal gladiatorial games, whose awful spectacles cause him to vomit. By reason of his own iconoclasm, Petronius finds himself more in sympathy with Nero than with the Senate, even after Nero signs his death warrant, and this perspective lends the tale a measure of objectivity that mitigates what would otherwise be an intolerable catalogue of Gothic horrors. The story provides so many analogies to our own era as to achieve the quality of timelessness. Consider, for example, the imperial stratagem of blaming the Christian population, which appears to consist mostly of slaves and freedmen, for the great fire. In Roman tradition, groups of them, unarmed, are released into a stadium to face armed assailants. But instead of running or resisting, they simply sit down together and, much to the disapproval of the spectators, serenely await their fate. No educated contemporary reader can fail to compare their reported behavior with that of the nonviolent followers of Mahatma Gandhi. Again, when the city prefect, Pedanius, is murdered by one of his slaves who had purchased his freedom only to be doublecrossed by his master, who failed to return the money, this sounds like an aborted twenty-first century drug deal. And when, in accordance with Roman law, all four hundred slaves in that household, including men, women, and children, are slain in reprisal for the killing of the master by only one of their number, the scene evokes images of the Nazi epoch, in which the murder of an SS officer by a concentration camp inmate automatically resulted in the execution not only of himself but also of at least fifty of his fellow inmates. In sum, in his haunting portrait of the Roman emperor Nero, David Wishart has created an unforgettable anatomy of madness, creative genius, wanton cruelty, and the consequences of unrestrained capricious behavior. Its two hundred seventy-three pages virtually cry out to be read at a single sitting.

An excellent well researched tale of Nero and life in Rome during his upbringing and his reign.

Seen through the eyes of a sceptical onlooker, a broad striper who is invited everywhere but prefers to be an observer we watch as the story unfolds with plots and counterplots - thrilling stuff!

I fully appreciate that I know little about the Latin language, but many (or even the majority) of the words in the book have a distinctly Anglo-Saxon feel about them. Whilst an ok read if you have a long flight, I wouldn't really recommend it. If you are expecting I, Claudius, then you are wasting your time. Lots of sex though (for the boys) sustained, just about, by a distinctly wobbly plot.