Thread by @pjgoodman

A few thoughts about the Nero exhibition, then. Overall I think it's better than the catalogue made me expect, with some nice design and layout decisions and great artefacts. But the source material sure sets up a problem which I don't think any exhibition on Nero can escape.

This is the opening question of the exhibition, right by the ticket desk before any artefacts. It gets to the nub of the issue - Nero's reputation as a 'bad emperor'. Any scholar will want to point out that the sources painting that picture clearly have a hostile agenda.

But because the 'good emperor, bad emperor' dichotomy is so strong, if you say the sources painting Nero as a monster are biased, it sounds like you're saying he was good after all. This is the closing Q of the exhibition, which shows it is literally framed by that dichotomy.

Because it's so baked into our sources, I don't think it can be escaped. Instead, you have to start from what 'everyone knows' about Nero - the cruelty and lust, the fiddling while Rome burnt. And so this exhibition does, with this reconstructed Baroque bust and Peter Ustinov.

One thing the exhibition tries to do is show him in context, as a product of a system. This is him as a child, with ghostly-looking statues of other Julio-Claudians seen through a curtain behind him. Because the exhibition focuses on Nero, though, it generates a sort of paradox.

This came across more in the catalogue than the exhibition, but putting Nero in context can end up sounding like you are saying, "Exen if he did these bad things, he was no worse than the rest." I feel a better approach would be a thematic exhibition on the principate as a whole.

That's the only real way to get out of the question of whether one particular emperor was 'good' or 'bad'. And there are so many great themes which could be used! E.g. succession and legitimacy, emperors seen from the provinces, imperial palaces (that's one's Mary Beard's idea).

(I should say, this is an unfinished thread as we've now been ushered back into the exhibition for the workshop bit. I've got lots of very complimentary things to say about the design and layout, as yet unwritten!)

Just adding this link to my later comments after our discussion workshop here, so I have one single thread I can link to elsewhere.

https://twitter.com/pjgoodman/status/1443678723136528390