The thirteen essays that constitute this collection all deal with Nero's legacy in Western culture. Most are case studies of examples drawn from this reception. Some deal with the Classical world: D. Pausch summarises the debate over Suetonius; P. Esposito engages with Lucan. Others treat broader discussions of a corpus or an issue: H. Seng parallels the reigns of Tiberius and Nero; S. Günther analyses the role of the people in the later accounts of the figure of Nero; R. Bol comments on the statues of the emperor.
The other contributors focus on the modern world: D. Kreikenbom provides an account of the eighteenth-century debate over Nero through the figures of Bernoulli and Winckelmann. J. Rostropowicz, in an interesting essay that unfortunately is not paralleled with the contemporaneous renderings in painting, treats the subject of Nero's reception in Poland with Rome and the Reign of Nero, a novel written by the best-selling author J.I. Kraszewski and published in Warsaw in 1866. L. Sannicandro engages with the 1901 tragedy Nerone of the Italian author Arrigo Boito. P. Schollmeyer proposes a synopsis of the interest for Nero demonstrated by the early twentieth-century German sect leader Alfred Schuler. In her opening contribution, W. describes the image presented in Der jugendliche Gott, a novel written by the Jewish Austrian writer Johanna Alma König on the year of her death in deportation in 1942. A. Lenz discusses Martin Walser's Nero lässt grüssen, which came out in 1989.
The last two essays seem to be somehow separate from the others: Y. Maes draws from materials spanning from Seneca to the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica to provide an account of cruelty; and N. Shumate, in her closing contribution, seeks to draw a line between Nero, Guy Debord's society of the spectacle and the presidency of George W. Bush.
All the case analyses are contributions to the already rich field of studies in the reception of Nero and draw attention to texts with which the general scholar of Nero is not necessarily familiar. They provide data, and by adding this data to the many pre-existing publications, reinforce the conclusion that this emperor has had one of the most wide-ranging and varied legacies of the whole history of the Roman world and, furthermore, indicate a considerable presence in modernity.
Many questions are raised while reading this book. First, the contributions are extremely diverse and follow different methods: in some of them, authors provide a summary of the source they discuss and a doxography of most commentaries on it. In some cases – for the most recent books they discuss – there is no doxography, simply a summary. Other essays feature a true attempt to demonstrate something – such as S. Günther's. His discussion of the ‘res publica’ vs ‘res popularis’ is not breaking new ground, but it none the less seeks to propose an interpretation. Some essays, such as those of Maes and Schumate, might puzzle readers who will find themselves on unstable ground: the writings stand between critical theory and history, without clearly belonging to either of those two fields.
Furthermore, the fact that five essays are devoted to readings in the Classical world and the remaining eight to the legacy of Nero in the modern world makes this book a hybrid: there is no straight line leading from one essay to the next. These are separate, non-related case studies, spanning over nearly 2,000 years of history, without any specific connection. It can be argued that the choice of a chronological and cultural space between the Classical and the modern world would have been beneficial to the coherence of the volume. There are already studies in the legacy of Nero throughout later Antiquity: to mention book-length studies, those of K. Heinz, Das Bild Kaiser Neros bei Seneca, Tacitus, Suetonius und Cassius Dio (1948); W. Jakob-Sonnabend, Untersuchungen zum Nerobild der Spätantike (1990); C. Schubert, Studien zum Nero-Bild in der lateinischen Dichtung (1998). In the modern world, these reception studies are much scarcer, and the contribution would therefore have been greater.
One cannot help but compare this collection with the seminal Reflections of Nero, Culture, History and Representation edited by J. Elsner and J. Masters in 1994. This volume truly broke new ground: the quality of every contribution (notably that of J.-P. Rubiés, ‘Nero in Tacitus and Nero in Tacitism’) still stands unparalleled. Their individual strength established the importance of the volume as a whole. The topics featured were well-chosen and dealt with well enough to make the book more than a collection of case studies. In the attempt to build a history of reception, Reflections of Nero was far more successful than Neros Wirklichkeiten: this book proposes neither a radically different take on Nero's legacy nor a better narrative from the same perspective.
Another considerable issue raised by this volume is apparent in the title: ‘Wirklichkeiten’ suggests that every figure of Nero is autonomous and has a reality of its own; ‘Reflections’, on the other hand, emphasised the central articulation of the purpose around the historical character of the emperor. In that difference lies a critical separation between two historiographical approaches: one according to which the location of Nero's different occurrences matters more than the source from which they all emanate; the other according to which all figures, whatever their diversity, are united under one name, one figure. The difference between these two figures leads to Y. Maes' contribution, in which he proposes to differentiate ‘Nero’ – the historic figure – from ‘NERO’ – the character constructed by the legacy.
This could be a firm deconstructive stance for the book, one in dialogue with which strong arguments can be built – after all, it is difficult, even in the most disconnected forms of the legacy, to forget that they all emanate from an element of the Neronian narrative, which in itself comes from the historical life of the emperor. However, the book as a whole does not offer any such argument: what the authors seek to achieve is rather unclear. Some abide by this deconstructive approach; others do not even envisage it (notably the authors dealing with the classical world). W., in her introduction, suggests the ‘inevitability’ of this ‘constellation’. The problem of constellation is that it often leads to dispersion, and it is difficult to forge an opinion, let alone a narrative, from the contributions brought together in this volume.
In that regard, this volume might appear useful in the sense that it exposes the issues at hand in reception studies, and in Neronian studies in particular, thereby inviting scholars to explore all the different approaches that are only touched upon here: a study of the modern Nero; an encyclopaedia of all the different figures of Nero; perhaps, most importantly, what is most severely lacking in this volume, a narrative, a story, a thread that would connect all these different forms and explain how they are articulated the one after the other, and eventually what is at stake with the figure of Nero.
Even though readers will certainly find some interesting comments in this volume, they will find no logic, no lesson, no proposal. It will remain up to them to make something of its methodological limitations. It is not a problem anymore for scholars to engage with examples from modern culture at large; but if they do so, they still need to find ways to relate it to the history of the Ancient world, and to explore the meaning of the dialogue between them. Furthermore, at a time when publishers are increasingly limiting the numbers of collections of essays, there is a need for the collections eventually to produce a specific view on a given topic, and not simply gather disparate contributions.
