Before Jerusalem Fell

Clement of Alexandria 73
which lay behind his personal character and misdeeds. The dismal
and prosaic tragedy called the “Octavia,” written in the early part of
Vespasian’s Principate, lacks all poetic merit, and has in solitary
compensation one historic interest, revealing to us how quickly Nero’s
character could be stereotyped as that of the blackest of all villains
under the dynasty which had replaced the Julian. Otherwise the
journalist of a law court could write a more moving tragedy. Martial
and Statius the poets hurl at Nero’s head their choicest and most
abusive epithets. Domitian could in later years be loaded with no
greater reproach than that of being a second Nero, a “bald-headed
Nero.” . . . Marcus Aurelius used him as did Epictetus earlier, as
type of the evil character. “To be violently drawn and moved by the
lusts atid desires of the soul,” said the philosopher King, “is proper
to wild beasts and monsters, such as Phalaris and Nero were.” And
the inferior scribblers of later generations who wrote the Emperors’
lives inscribed on a permanent black-list the names of six Emperors
— Caligula, Vitellius, Domitian, Commodus, Heliogabalus, and,
always, Nero. 34
Nero scholar Miriam T. Griffin speaks of Nero’s tyrannical behavior
thus:
Commenting on the unanimity of opinion about the Emperor Nero
that prevails among the ancient authorities, the historian Charles
Merivale wrote, ‘With some allowance only for extravagance of colouring,
we must accept in the main the verisimilitude of the picture they
have left us of this arch-tyrant, the last and the most detestable of the
Caesarean family. . . . Nero was the first Princeps to be declared a
public enemy by the Senate. . . . 35
. . . .
In European literature Nero has served as the stock example of
unnatural cruelty, a matricide in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a fratricide in
Racine’s Britannicus. The hero of the Marquis de Sade, he has fascinated
decadent writers as the inzredibilium cupitor longing to overcome
human limits through extremes of luxury, cruelty and depravity. . . .
Certainly no serious historian has been tempted to whitewash the
tyrant.36
34. B. W. Henderson, Thz La> and Primi#ate of the Emperor Nero (London: Methuen,
1903), pp. 418-419.
35. Grifth, Nmo, p. 15.
36. Ibid., p. 16. The statement that no modem historian “has been tempted to