Since the British Museum seems reluctant to do so, let’s talk about Sporus. You won’t find much on the Roman emperor’s companion who went by that name in its new exhibition, Nero: the man behind the myth. This coyness may tell us something about the impulse behind a show that aims — in the words of the museum’s director Hartwig Fischer — to replace the “distorted histories” that have traditionally vilified the last of Rome’s Julio-Claudian rulers as a vain, crazed tyrant with “a more nuanced understanding” of his personality and reign. Historical nuance is good, right? Better, for sure, than one-dimensional tales of pantomime villainy — or even solemnly evasive apologias that blame Nero’s bad rap solely on so-called “elite authors” whom we can discount as patrician snobs. And Sporus gives us Roman nuance in all its fabulous oddity.
In 65AD, 11 years into his 14-year rule, Nero’s beautiful and beloved second wife, Poppaea Sabina, died. According to the often hostile historians who transmit most of the ancient written record about Nero — Tacitus and Suetonius in Latin; Dio Cassius in Greek — he fatally kicked his pregnant spouse in the stomach. Reasonably, the British Museum fingers this plot device as a corny literary trope, and instead blames Poppaea’s death on “complications from a miscarriage”. According to two of the “elite” detractors, though, the heartbroken emperor then sought out, and found, a lookalike replacement for his lost wife. Sporus (which coarsely translates as “Spunk”) boasted all the original’s grace and beauty, but had one troublesome drawback. He was male.
Undeterred (“Nobody’s perfect”, as we know from Some Like It Hot), Nero — so the hostiles report — had Sporus castrated. He married his new love, “with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil,” says Suetonius. The pair toured Greece as a royal couple on a triumphal tour that took in stage performances (starring — the one and only Nero!) and a first prize for the emperor in an Olympic chariot race he failed to finish.
How much of this really happened? Certainly, the relationship with Sporus — which this exhibition largely glosses over — has as much or little grounding in the sources as other Neronian yarns that the exhibition takes pains to debunk or revise: from fiddling while Rome burned (he was out of town for the Great Fire of 64) to the execution of scapegoated Christians by public burning in its aftermath. Tacitus writes (according to the translation Edward Gibbon uses in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) that they were “smeared over with combustible materials” and “used as torches to illuminate the darkness of the night”. The British Museum’s guide doesn’t quite rebut that legend but drily comments that “their punishment seems to have followed standard practice in that it mirrored the nature of the crime”. So that’s alright, then?
With Sporus, historians have recently suggested that the scandalous liaison stemmed not from nostalgic attachment to the dead Poppaea, still less the conventional lust of an upper-class Roman male for a puer delicatus (“boy toy”), but the need to control a potential rival whom Nero believed to be of imperial descent. Hence, in the succession-obsessed Roman governing class, the insistence on castration. Given that Suetonius mentions that Sporus stuck by Nero to the bitter end during his overthrow in 68, might the couple have actually grown fond of each other? Now there’s a truly heretical idea. And, sadly, an unlikely one: Sporus declined to commit suicide alongside Nero and quickly partnered — whether by choice or force — with two of the warlords who succeeded him.
As with much to do with Nero, legend, fiction and historical memory have fused into an inextricably tangled mass — like the warped iron window-grating you can see in the BM, striking proof of the Great Fire’s ferocity. But the Sporus story hints at a layered complexity to Nero and his narratives that goes beyond the binary model currently on offer in Bloomsbury. Nero: the man behind the myth seems to belong to a class of revisionist historical argument you might dub “reverse cancellation”. Emperor X, King Y or President Z — from Genghis Khan to Joseph Stalin — has suffered too long from the lies and libels of partisan chroniclers with skewed agendas. Now, we will unmask the fake news and reveal (as the British Museum puts it here) a “much less clear-cut” story. Occasionally, the rescue of a tarnished reputation can surpass scholarly score-settling and touch the heights of art. Consider all that Hilary Mantel has done for Thomas Cromwell, once a byword for state thuggery.
For sure, the Great Man theory of history that Thomas Carlyle propounded has always required, on the other side of its mirror, a Bad Man theory. To the extent that it replaces such cartoon thinking with an open and sceptical scrutiny of Nero’s reign, curator Thorsten Opper’s exhibition does an admirable job — and does it against a splendid backdrop. The show throngs with evocative examples of first-century statuary, reliefs, frescos, artefacts, coinage and even luxury tableware, drawn not only from the museum’s collections but European lenders ranging from the Louvre in Paris to collections in Rome and Naples.
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