Plinivs - Vol. 1 Ch. 3 - Nero
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As an historian and a classicist, this manga is quite interesting reading.
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@freakofnature I spent an hour trying to figure out how to conjugate "Praefecti Vicarius Siciliae," hope I didn't mess it up...Yamazaki's Latin leaves a lot to be desired and she makes frequent mistakes in the Katakana.
@LoktarOgar Mostly the French and Polish editions cross-referenced with as much of the Japanese as I can decipher; the French translation is very loose to the point where they sometimes redraw text bubbles (?!?), so I don't like to rely on it.
@LoktarOgar Mostly the French and Polish editions cross-referenced with as much of the Japanese as I can decipher; the French translation is very loose to the point where they sometimes redraw text bubbles (?!?), so I don't like to rely on it.
@sylvacoer More modern assessment of Nero suggests that he wasn't crazy. A lot of the signs of madness he was accused of showing are either apocryphal or unlikely to have been properly recorded. Things like the reason he had for murdering Poppaea would have been private, yet later writers supposedly knew the reason like they could read his mind.
What is clear is that Nero was needlessly cruel at times, utterly unable to balance his books, prone to squeezing money from the Roman upper classes thanks to his profligacy, displayed open homosexual tendencies of the wrong persuasion (it was okay to have a male lover but definitely not okay to have a eunuch/transgender one), and was too thoroughly Hellenized. The final one made him very popular in the East, which may explain the appearance of the later myth of Nero Redivivus after his death, but definitely worried the Roman establishment and the Senate.
What is clear is that Nero was needlessly cruel at times, utterly unable to balance his books, prone to squeezing money from the Roman upper classes thanks to his profligacy, displayed open homosexual tendencies of the wrong persuasion (it was okay to have a male lover but definitely not okay to have a eunuch/transgender one), and was too thoroughly Hellenized. The final one made him very popular in the East, which may explain the appearance of the later myth of Nero Redivivus after his death, but definitely worried the Roman establishment and the Senate.
@sylvacoer Well, yeah. I wasn't saying he was somehow better because he was sane, just that scholars now think he wasn't crazy the way Roman histriography depicted him. He was a cruel and incompetent emperor and they got rid of him for it. The problem was that he was also a very popular emperor with the masses, especially in the East. So much so that Otho managed to become emperor just on the virtue of having been Nero's pal in life and looking a bit like the man. Vespasian also depicted himself as Nero's friend and avenger in the beginning. The cult of Nero Redivivus believed that Nero was either not dead or elevated to divinity and would return with an army from the East to retake his throne. Nero's continued popularity even after death was probably the reason Roman historians had to depict him as totally bonkers later on.
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All later Roman historiography is written from the point of view that Nero was a BAD, BAD MAN, AND WE MEAN REALLY BAD. The obvious reason for this is that later historians were writing during later dynasties which had supplanted the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and their legitimacy was, to a certain extent, based on the fact that the Julio-Claudian dynasty's legitimacy had been lost with Nero. Thus, Nero had to be bad -- or later dynasties would be varying degrees of illegitimate.
It's reasonable to consider much of the talk about Nero having killed his mother to be invention or hyperbole, aimed at painting Nero as a villain. Much more credible are the events where some specific transgression witnessed by many people ( for instance, crossing the pomerium at a point that was not a gate, after the great fire) is described.
It's reasonable to consider much of the talk about Nero having killed his mother to be invention or hyperbole, aimed at painting Nero as a villain. Much more credible are the events where some specific transgression witnessed by many people ( for instance, crossing the pomerium at a point that was not a gate, after the great fire) is described.
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