Rehabilitating Nero, an Emperor With a Bad Rap
He is known as a cruel tyrant who played his lyre while Rome burned. That’s exactly what his enemies wanted you to think, the curators of a new exhibition argue.
LONDON — The mangled window grille isn’t everybody’s idea of a museum piece. It’s a rusty piece of iron, bent out of shape. Yet for the next five months, it has a vitrine of its own at the British Museum.
The grille is a relic of the Great Fire of Rome in A.D. 64 and a centerpiece of the museum’s sprawling new show “Nero: The Man Behind the Myth,” about the first-century Roman emperor who, for some 2,000 years, has been blamed for starting the inferno and playing music while it spread. What the exhibition aims to demonstrate is that Nero got a bad rap.
“Nero is famed as the Emperor who fiddled while Rome burned, a tyrant who was cruel and ruthless towards his family and a somewhat pathetic megalomaniac prone to excess,” the British Museum director, Hartwig Fischer, wrote in the exhibition’s catalog.
Yet through sculptures and architectural fragments, coins and jewels, frescoes and writing tablets, the British Museum offers an alternative narrative of a young man who became emperor when he was not yet 17 and was driven to suicide by his adversaries at 30.
