Age of Nero

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The reign of the emperor Nero, who reportedly “fiddled while Rome burned,” captures the popular imagination more than any other period in Roman history. How can we separate fact from fiction in the salacious stories of a ruler as notorious for his cold-blooded murders as he was for his megalomania? In this course, we will scrutinize images of Nero in biographies, histories, portraiture, and plays, from antiquity to the present day. We will be equally concerned with the masterworks of the so-called Neronian Renaissance, which yielded some of Rome’s greatest achievements in literature, architecture, and art. Ancient sources (read in translation) will include texts by Suetonius, Tacitus, Seneca, Petronius, Lucan, and Persius.