The objective of this course is to provide an overview of the culture of ancient Rome beginning about 1000 BCE and ending with the so-called "Fall of Rome". We will look at some of the key people who played a role in Rome, from the time of the kings through the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. We will also focus on the city of Rome itself, as well as Rome's expansion through Italy, the Mediterranean, and beyond.
4. Guest Lecture: Dr. Phillip Waddell on Roman Historiography and Nero
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From the course by University of Arizona
Roman Art and Archaeology
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From the lesson
Augustus and the Early Roman Empire (31 BCE - 1st century CE)
Augustus - formerly known as Octavian - set the tone for the next major phase of Rome: the Roman empire. His family-related successors, the Julio-Claudians, would continue his rule. Yet none of his successors had the charisma or vision of Augustus himself, and some such as Caligula and Nero have become synonymous with profligacy and decadence of an extreme nature. By the year 69 CE. Rome was in chaos. But the emperor Vespasian restored order and dignity - not to mention humility - to the office, and instituted his own dynasty, the Flavians. Unfortunately, Vespasian's second son, Domitian, brought his Flavian dynasty to an end through dreadful administration. Domitian was murdered in 96 CE.
Meet the Instructors
David SorenRegents Professor of Classics and Anthropology
Classics and Anthropology
Philip Waddell is a classicist, but he's also an ancient historian.
And he's very interested in ancient writers, such as Tacitus,
Suetonius, and what they have to say about Roman emperors.
One of his particular focuses has been on the emperor Nero,
and on the image of Nero.
Is Nero a goodie or a baddie?
We can take a look at that by inviting Dr. Waddell to say a few words for us.
Should we do that, Lana?
>> My name is Philip Waddell,
I'm an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Arizona.
Now the best account we have of Nero, we have two great ones,
we have one by the historian Tacitus and one by the biographer Suetonius.
Tacitus weaves the narrative of Nero into his Annals,
which is a longer historical work going from the death of
Augustus all the way through, we presume, the death of Nero.
Nero, in all of our sources really, both Tacitus and
Suetonius, comes across as a person who really always
wanted to be an artist, rather than an emperor.
It's as if Andy Warhol became ruler of the entire world.
It's terrifying, the kinds of power that the person
who took over his reign in his late teen years could wield.
And was much more interested in looking at architecture, the arts,
performing the arts, which for the Romans was very deeply troubling for emperors.
This is something that you don't do.
That this had a loss of citizenship involved with these
kind of performances, making a spectacle of yourself.
And delighting in spectacle was, for the Romans, deeply problematic,
especially for the senatorial historians who give us our histories.
Tacitus includes aspersions, not proved, but
aspersions that he probably poisoned his step brother.
Definitely killed his mother, in addition to his wife.
And so he's just a, history regards him as a monster.
And probably this is unfair, Nero was much more than this, and I think
that you can see some in this in what we have left of Nero's Rome, the Domus Aurea.
You can get the idea that Nero is much more than a monster more concerned with
his own pleasures than with ruling the empire.
But more than that I think he's a visionary in terms of art and performance.
The idea that the empire should be a show,
that this is something that's great to watch and great to participate in.
So yeah, it's brief but it gives you kind of an idea.
So a description of the golden house, the Domus Aurea,
this was first of all, problematic in its location.
There was a great fire in Rome in 64 CE where
most of the city was leveled flat, including the old downtown.
And in addition to doing a lot of very popular Red Cross sort of things,
Nero actually took a lot of this land for
himself to build this gigantic estate really, is better than a house.
It's a villa rustica, this is this gigantic area which,
Tacitus says is notable not so much for the gemstones engraved in the walls,
in which they were there, and the ivory ceilings.
But that it encompassed within its borders forests, and meadows, and lakes.
And it's the idea of bringing the country into the city.
It's as though a private person leveled massive amounts of New York and
put a private Central Park in the center of it.
And so this is deeply troubling already.
But the lavishness of the Domus Aurea was untold.
Suetonius talks about rooms that can rotate and that there are panels,
ivory panels set into the ceilings and the walls that are all push buttons,
that you could just push something and then the flowers or perfume would fall.
And you could touch something and a personal gift for
everybody at the table would show up.
And so this automated idea, we unfortunately don't have much of it left,
this is, for a lot of reasons you can see, a very problematic building.
And the Flavians who took over after Nero's forced suicide,
tried to obliterate as much as they could of it, very successfully.
We do have parts of what's called the Esquiline wing left, and
you can see in this the Romans tend to be very squaric kind of people.
They build square rooms with square roofs.
And Nero in one of the rooms we have extant is really playing
with this new found use of concrete.
That you can pour rooms into any shape.
There's a large octagonal room with a hole in the ceiling,
which kind of prefigures later Roman architecture.
But Nero was one of the first people to really give massive amounts of funding and
support to very avant-garde, very out there, very,
for the Romans very space-age architects.
The difficulty of establishing Nero's perception in antiquity comes back,
really, to our sources.
And we have, as Tacitus presents very much of
a one-sided view that Nero is the worst of the Julio-Claudians,
which fits into his idea of slow degeneration with the emperors.
That you have someone like Tiberius, who's a good emperor, who started off good, but
the office, this absolute power corrupts.
And with someone like Nero, who takes over so young and
has very questionable morals, then this corruption happens much, much faster.
And that's kind of Tacitus' point.
In Suetonius we have a little bit different image of Nero.
It's much more like Star magazine, where there are rumors in there and
there are very over the top stories, but
there's also positive views of what Nero was doing.
In terms of Nero knew not to expand the empire,
he knew to basically keep it within its boundaries.
And so, people could always castigate him for this, but in reality,
he probably was doing the right things, it's the same thing that Augustus did.
He also knew to pay the armies well.
One of the things that shows up in the Year of Four Emperors is that the armies
continually demand correct rights for Nero even long after his death.
There are sightings of false Neros that show up all over the place, even 15,
20 years after his death, something like Elvis where
he's this amazing iconic figure, no one can quite believe he's dead.
Especially when he's so young when he took over and
much of his reign played up this perpetual youth and
perpetual entertainer and bon vivant, this party man.
And so the idea is that person can be dead is very shocking.
Especially to the legions, the legions loved Nero.
We have a later anecdote from the Scriptorius Historiae Augustae
that Trajan,
often regarded as one of the best emperors ever, lamented being born after Nero.
Saying that basically we could never top that, we could never do what Nero did,
Nero's already done it all and done it better.
And was a much better performer than any of us could ever be.
And so yes, I think our image of Nero is, through the historian especially,
very unfairly tampered with.
Whereas, I think the empire was running great under Nero, the armies were
very satisfied, but he did kill a lot of very high ranking senators and
so, in this case, the losers write the history books.
And so you have this senatorial elite, who's not going to forgive him for that.
And Nero's performances were, for
one thing the kinds of performing that he would do were seen as anathema for
the Romans, getting up on stage, dancing, singing.
These are things that slaves did, or freed people.
These are not things that freed citizens, let alone senators,
let alone an emperor, would do.
He also apparently had a huge desire to drive chariots.
He wanted to be a professional charioteer,
in addition to a professional singer and a professional actor.
One of the things that he would do, actually with his acting, this is what
showed up a lot in Suetonius, that people would make comments about this stuff,
is that he would perform as an actor the most un-PC, un-appropriate topics.
He would enact Hercules Furens, in which Hercules, in that part of the myth,
kills his wife and children, shortly after killing his own wife and child.
So with Nero, I think later on in his reign, began to live increasingly
in a world of make believe, reality is make believe is reality.
Nero, infamously, also would have guards throughout the audience.
And so, if you're falling asleep while the emperor is singing,
the guards will notice you and you could be arrested or killed for that.
So there's the idea, which Shadi Bartsch has made famous in her
Actors in the Audience, this is what the Roman people became.
They became professional audience goers for this professional performer.
Rome had never seen anything like it before.
There were definitely mutinies during Nero's reign, but
he's not unusual in this.
Even some of the best, who we regard as the best emperors, have these mutinies,
Augustus had mutinies, Tiberius had mutinies.
Nero's problem was that he didn't deal with it,
that he preferred to believe in a way that it didn't exist.
So I think that might point
to a kind of a detachment from reality, which we might consider mental illness.
But that was the issue, is not that the soldiers were unhappy,
the soldiers in the Roman Empire were generally unhappy.
The terms of service were not that great, and so
they had to have this idea of firm discipline.
And when there was originally a very small mutiny which was then not dealt with and
not dealt with.
And Nero didn't dispatch anyone to deal with it and
it kept festering until it became a real problem.
Tacitus, I think is a, first of whom was a Roman historian,
which is very different than a modern historian.
A Roman historian is much more like a producer of say,
a modern historical-based mini-series, where he really wants characters,
and the characters should be very realistic and true to the major events.
But I think Tacitus is very stagey in his portrayal that he,
even at the level of the Latin, will leave a lot up to the reader.
And a lot of it's done by innuendo and insinuation.
There's a construction in Latin called the Ablative of Absolute,
which is a detached part of the sentence entirely.
Which can be translated as either a win or a sense of an although, and
the reader has to make that call.
Usually in writers, the information put into these constructions is unimportant.
With this person being emperor,
this happened, during May of that year, this happened.
With Tacitus, it's the other way around.
All the important information is loaded into these Ablative of Absolutes.
So the reader has to make these choices about, is it although Nero is emperor that
Rome is trouble, or is it because Nero is emperor that Rome is in trouble?
And Tacitus will guide you all the way through and
he'll give you what are called loaded alternatives.
It's either that Nero's a wonderful person who never did anything wrong, or
it's that he's a horrible monster who's killed members of his own family.
Then Tacitus will support the second view, since he's a horrible monster that killed
members of his own family, we can go on and say further things about him.
For example,
one of the most famous things people think about with Nero is the Great Fire of Rome.
So the fire of 64 happens, most of Rome burns,
Nero built the Domus Aurea at the end of it.
But during it, according to Tacitus, Nero is actually out of town.
He's at Anteum, he's at one of his country estates.
And in fact he hears news about it, immediately comes back to Rome,
opens up what's left of his palace as kind of
a hospital, pays for the upkeep of all the people,
who are now refugees, out of his own money.
Does very positive things, but according to Tacitus, he could never, with all this,
escape the rumor and Tacitus points out that it's a rumor and it's untrue.
That he, in the middle of a fire, climbed the great Tower of Misenus and
sang the fall of Troy as Rome is burning.
And this is given some credence,
I think Tacitus is juxtaposing events that didn't happen the same day.
But later on, and possibly this is this kind of un-PC bad taste
that Nero was infamous for, played the fall of Troy as a stage play.
And there's several things, he was kind of interested in fire.
He did a play called The Burning House,
where he actually on stage burns down a house, and
people can carry away whatever's the goods of the house as rewards for showing up.
So there are things that Nero did that could have been done at better times.
The equivalent I often draw is that this would be something like George W Bush
constructing a gigantic water park over the ruins of New Orleans right after
Katrina.
This is this horrible lack of tact and this divorce from reality,
which turned the reality into the mythical, and
Nero as the star of the play.
And that, I think, is what Tacitus is trying to show us, absolutely.
Tacitus, at the beginning of the Annals, talks about writing sine ira et studio,
without anger or partisanship would be a good way to say that.
This is not to say that he's out for the truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth.
He's just saying that he's not motivated by any personal hatreds or
personal favors that he owes to his subjects.
In fact, his subjects were probably dead before he was born.
So we tend to forget that, we think Tacitus is ancient in time, and
Nero's ancient, and Tacitus is writing a good 60 years after Nero.
So something like someone now writing about JFK and
Joe Kennedy and all the possible scandals there,
and we know what to expect with certain narratives, so we think.
And at a point, the myth becomes more true than reality.
And Tacitus, I think, is part of that process.
[MUSIC]
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