Tacitus, Annals, 15.20­-23, 33­-45. Latin Text, Study Aids with Vocabulary, and Commentary, 2013a

Stage 1: AD 54–58
Stage 2: AD 59–63
Stage 3: AD 64–68
Rigorous programme of training in music;
attention to circus entertainment and religious
attendance at the games
Singing before the people on stage at his private
Juvenalia; racing before a private audience in a
specially built circus
Performance of music and racing in public
The theme runs throughout Tacitus’ Nero-narrative, from 13.3 (where
we catch the youthful Nero exercising his singing and charioteering) to,
presumably, his death in the lost portion of the Annals. Suetonius reports
that Nero’s final words were ‘qualis artifex pereo’ (‘What an artist dies in
me!’). 58 In Tacitus, an avowed Hellenophobe, Nero’s artistic inclinations
receive an exceedingly bad press. 59 But once placed in context, matters are
not that simple. Ted Champlin has recently challenged the once orthodox
view that Nero’s sponsorship of, and participation in, these activities was
a total turn-off: 60
Despite the moral strictures of the authors who report Nero’s actions, the
social context must be seen as an ambiguous one, and public attitudes
as deeply ambivalent. Many of his people surely disapproved of their
emperor’s games and the damage done to his imperial dignity, but many
more just as surely applauded him. His actions sprang from patterns of
behavior familiar in contemporary noblemen and approved by ancient
precedent, and his people encouraged him. Killing relatives and rivals, real
or imaginary, was cold political reality; performing in public may have been
a fantasy, but it was one shared by a large part of Roman society. Whether
it could be seen as part of the supreme imperial virtue, civilitas, is a matter
for debate.
From this point of view, Nero’s cultivation of his showbiz talents and his
desire to turn himself into the biggest star of the imperial entertainment
58 Suetonius, Nero 49.
59 See Syme (1958) 515–16, in a chapter on ‘Tacitus and the Greeks’.
60 Champlin (2003) 68, with page 286 n. 38 where he defines civilitas, civility, as ‘the ability
of the emperor to act as an ordinary citizen, or at least as an ordinary Roman nobleman.’
See also page 291 n. 85: ‘From the beginning of the reign he had allowed the people to
watch him exercise in the Campus Martius; he often declaimed in public; and he had
read his own poems not only at home but in the theatre “to such universal joy” that a
supplication to the gods was decreed and the poems themselves were inscribed in letters
of gold and dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinus: Suetonius . 2. These were the actions of an
affable emperor, the civilis princeps.’