What are the critics saying about the British Museum’s Nero exhibition?

The show attempts to completely rewrite the story of a historical monster. Can it possibly succeed in setting the record straight?

Nero
A marble bust of Nero (c AD 55): unjustly maligned?
(Image credit: Photo by France…zionale di Cagliari)

Few figures in history are quite as notorious as the first century Roman emperor Nero, said Farah Nayeri in The New York Times. “The charge sheet against him is long and familiar”: Nero is seen as the “prototypical tyrant”, a “bloodthirsty pyromaniac” who murdered his half-brother, two of his wives and his mother – with whom he also conducted an “incestuous relationship”. He supposedly revelled in excess, slaughtered Christians by the hundreds, and infamously played music as Rome burned; it was even rumoured that he himself had started the fire in order to pave the way for a gargantuan new palace.

Yet this new exhibition at the British Museum argues that most of what we think we know about Nero is wrong. Far from being a sadistic tyrant, the curators suggest, Nero was a reasonably enlightened ruler who strove to serve the needs of the people over those of the “Roman elite”. That elite, it seems, cultivated the myth of the emperor’s wickedness when his social reforms started to threaten their status.

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