Nero
I, Titus Petronius Niger, aesthete, author and erstwhile Adviser on
Taste to Nero Claudius Caesar (the gods rot the little bugger) have
reached a climacteric in my existence; I might say two climacterics,
for although autobiography and suicide aren't normal bedfellows they're
both pretty final, and I've no intention of rushing either to oblige
anyone; certainly not by poking a sword through my own gut, which may
be the traditional recourse of the Roman gentleman but is, in my view,
hopelessly crude, not to say extremely messy and hell on the upholstery.
No. I will bleed to death in comfort, like a civilised being. If done
in a leisurely fashion by tightening and loosening the
wrist-tourniquets (as I will do it), opening one's veins allows one to
hang up one's clogs at a decent pace. If I really have to die before my
time (and needs must, ho hum, when the emperor drives, even when the
emperor is poor loopy Lucius) then I intend to savour every minute of
the process. Even if it kills me...
History has not been kind to Emperor Nero: the one fact that everybody
knows about him is that he fiddled while Rome burned. Outlawed by the
Senate and deserted by most of his friends, he died a suicide, his last
words, infamously, being: 'What a loss to art!'
But what elements of nature and nurture combined to make such a
notorious character? An entertaining view is presented by Titus
Petronius, Nero's pleasure-loving Adviser on Taste, through whose eyes
we see the tumultuous, and ultimately tragic, life of the emperor. Nero
emerges as a well-intentioned but mentally unstable young man out of
sympathy with the society he rules; a sensitive and talented artist who
is also capable of sexual perversions, incest, matricide and acts of
appalling sadism.
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