‘Very well-spoken of in the advertisements.’ These words, uttered by the mother of the famous ‘advertising man’ David Ogilvy whenever she planned to buy some new product, fit beautifully the blurbs on the back cover of this book. The praise is justly deserved, since the three distinguished Classicists who created it have produced A Guide to the Ancient Sources for Nero that is comprehensive, accurate, interesting and easy to use. The work comprises a brief and useful historical introduction (including a survey of the main sources), followed by ten chapters laid out in a roughly chronological sequence, involving topics such as ‘The Making of the Emperor’, ‘Parthia’, ‘The Great Fire’, ‘Conspiracies’ and ‘Death’. Each chapter begins with an account of the development of its main issues, usually accompanied by a useful map; there then follow all the main ancient sources in English translation, including, where relevant, works later than Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio; and these are accompanied by frequent footnotes which constitute a detailed commentary; frequently there are discussions of various types of realia including papyri, coins and inscriptions generally (the picture of the Acraephia document is particularly striking: ILS 8794 = Smallwood 64). There are also useful chapter-by-chapter bibliographies at the end of the book.

As with many such works today, the target audience is not simply people who do not understand Latin or Greek, but also university students and professional Classicists. The language is easy-going and candid; in the preface (p. 1) the authors admit that the choice of topics is essentially subjective: ‘This shortcoming we cheerfully concede’; and (p. 2) ‘This is not a conventional sourcebook … This book reflects the interest and expertise of the collaborators’. Given this candour, the temptation to disagree with this and that while reading the material is disarmed.

There is, however, one section where radical changes seem to have been made at a very late date. This is the sub-section of Chapter 6, ‘The Great Fire’, simply called ‘The Christians’ in the chapter bibliography. It concerns the long, detailed and somewhat dogmatic (but certainly correct) paper by B. Shaw, ‘The Myth of the Neronian Persecution’, in JRS 105 (2015), 73–100. This issue of the JRS would have been available to the authors in December 2015 – and The Emperor Nero was published in 2016 (with Shaw's paper listed in the chapter bibliography, but not otherwise cited). The main area of contention is Tacitus’ Annals 15.44.2–3, where there occurs the only near-contemporary statement that the Christians were blamed for the fire. The introduction to this sub-section is five pages long (pp. 161–6) and argues against the authenticity of Tacitus’ remarks (and even suggests, somewhat unconvincingly, the possibility of later Christian interpolation). This whole section seems to have been rewritten quickly and not fully revised, since at the beginning of the chapter the following appears (p. 152): ‘The most dramatic consequence of the fire was the persecution and horrific treatment of the Christians’.