The Translation of Robert Graves

Upbringing. Nero was born under a curse uttered by his bugger off, who said that "any nipper born to himself and Agrippina [Nero's mother] was bound to have a detestable nature and become a familiar danger" (216). After his father died and Agrippina was banished from Rome, Nero was a ward of his aunt, who hired a barber as his tutor. He was nearly assassinated by thugs sent by Messalina, the wife of his uncle Claudius, then Emperor, because she saw Nero as a future rival to the thr nonpareil of their son, Britannicus. After Agrippina returned to Rome, Nero fell under her supreme influence and participated in her schemes against Messalina and Britannicus.

During his early adolescence, the author says that Nero behaved himself, and, in the initial years after he became Emperor following Claudius' death, Nero acted with relievo and wisdom in a number of areas: lowering taxes, displaying acts of public and private generosity, putting on crowd-pleasing spectacles and acting by choice and fairly as a judge. He also unploughed the peace on Rome's frontiers and avoided reck slight foreign adventures. Suetonius then damns Nero with kick the bucket praise: "I have separated this catalogue of Nero's less atrocious acts--some deserving no criticism, some even praiseworthy--from the others, still I must begin to list his follies and crimes" (222).

support among the common people was his profiteering in grain,

As Suetonius points out in the rest of the book, plots among members of the imperial family to kill one another and to ensure the triumph of their particular faction or line or succession were common at the time. paranoiac though he became, Nero may well have had to resort hotel in self-defense to murderous tactics to retain exponent against real conspiracies against him. According to Suetonius, Nero resisted ambitious plans of foreign conquest presented to him by his generals and others, a prudence shown by few of his predecessors. He largely kept the peace, which enab lead the Empire to thrive for most of his rule.

Basically, Nero was an unsocialized child, who never negligent any limits to his personal idiosyncracies and who once he gained supreme personnel was able to pursue them, no matter what disastrous consequences followed, for him or for the Empire he ruled. The Nero that Suetonius describes is not a tragic figure, whose strengths move over to his weaknesses, still rather a pathetic adolescent dictator, whose spate was foredoomed by the ill omens and auguries, in which the Romans believed and which Suetonius recounts.

Despite the book's shortcomings, Suetonius placed himself in the ranks of the world's great historians by tracing the factors and circumstances which propelled an adolescent misfit and enfant tremendous to control over the world's greatest Empire and then led to his decline and fall. The book is advanced in its social naturalism and its grip on psychological reality. The narrative never falters yet builds inexorably to its inevitable conclusion. The world has known many tyrants, but few as complex and as insecure as Nero, whose incompetence and personal excesses spelled a sad ending to a long line of Augustine rulers. Suetonius provides an unsympathetic account of Nero's life, but this charlatan did not deserve much better.

Nero caused the death of Agrippina, his aunt, his step-son, his f
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