In Nero's Image

E-Book: The Ancient Novel

Dear Classical Wisdom Readers,

Some people just want the world to burn… literally:

The view from our airbnb on Sunday night

“We’ll know in a year,” he told us at the coffee shop, where we were doing some reconnaissance on the situation.

“After the full investigations are done?” we inquired.

‘No, no… you just have to see what they build in the spot.”

Once it had been confirmed that the forest fires were the result of arson (after all, it would be miraculous for six of them to have started at the exact same time), the locals came forward with their theories.

Essentially, the forest areas are protected by the government. As such, developers are not permitted to build there. Mysteriously, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘wild’ fires tend to appear right by beautiful and popular beaches. Annually. Apparently (and very tragically) it’s common… and was a theory we heard echoed quite a few times.

It was a pretty sound hypothesis, I thought to myself upon hearing it… in part because it was an ancient tactic as well.

In fact, that was the exact same idea the ancient Romans had (mistakenly) about the great fire that ravaged Rome in 64 AD. They believed that the emperor Nero had actually began the fire himself… just so he could indulge his aesthetic tastes in the city’s subsequent reconstruction.

It was Nero’s attempt to shift the blame, actually, that destroyed his image so much more (and for so long!) He said the wicked Christians did it… and this turned out to be the first time the government clearly distinguished the Christians from the Jews. Thus, he accidentally initiated the later Roman policy of an -albeit halfhearted- persecution of the Christians, earning himself the reputation of Antichrist in the early Christian tradition.

But what was Nero’s image beforehand? Today’s in-depth article delves into the remarkable story of Satyricon - one of the first novels - which portrays Nero… well… I’ll let you decide.

Classical Wisdom Members, today’s article comes from our Ebook, The Ancient Novel, which you can enjoy below. Though examples of dialogue, history and poetry abound, the dearth of creative prose narratives in antiquity is indeed surprising… but understandable when one considers that the novel did not really ‘exist’ for much of the ancient world.

Though it’s hard to give a definitive date as to the origin of the ancient novel, in this anthology we will bring you the first three meaningful examples of it… these three books have the special trait of being both hugely influential – they would inspire works like The Great Gatsby, Picture of Dorian Gray, and the Wasteland – as well as being fully entertaining and engaging in and of themselves.

If you aren’t already a Member, make sure to subscribe below to access The Ancient Novel:

All the best,

Anya Leonard

Founder and Director

Classical Wisdom and Classical Wisdom Kids

P.S. A big thank you to the excellent firefighters who worked so hard to control the fires. The situation here in Corfu is now fine due to their amazing efforts. We watched the helicopters as they brought water from the sea and applauded the men and women whose tireless efforts saved everyone.

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In Nero’s Image

By Ben Potter

There is (at least) one important step between the birth of western literature and the age of modern prose… and that is the genesis of the novel.

Here we are hot on the heels of our recent look at the ancient novel in the guise of Daphnis and Chloe, a bucolic idyll of star-crossed love. The twisted account under scrutiny today, however, could not be further from the beauty, purity and innocence ubiquitous within the previous work’s pages.

The founding text in question is the Satyricon, written by Gaius Petronius Arbiter in the 1st century AD during the reign of the emperor Nero.

If the finicky or pedantic wanted to poke holes in the above summary, they might point out that the Satyricon may not have been, in fact, the very first novel. Neither perhaps was it written by Petronius… nor in the reign of Nero.

Oh, and possibly, it wasn’t even called the Satyricon, as it is sometimes labelled as the Satyrica.

Though, of course, the attribution and date go hand in hand.

To give us some firmer ground on which to stand, we can state that Petronius was unquestionably a member of the Neronian court (famously represented by Leo Genn in the motion picture Quo Vadis). Moreover, chronicles of his lavish, lazy, witty, hedonistic and amoral character make him a good match as a potential author of the risqué Satyricon.

Because the style of the novel strongly suggests it is Neronian and there is no other viable candidate to whom we can attribute the work, Petronius almost ascends to the title of authorship simply by a process of elimination.

Though despite evidence of undoubted, and occasionally high-brow, literary skill, Petronius (well... his mother anyway) may have welcomed the fact that his name is on the cover in pencil rather than ink.

The Satyricon is lubricious, grotesque, subversive, picturesque, imaginative, and perverted in almost equal measure.

One can imagine it being something Roman Senators hid under their mattresses, passed around at the bathhouses and only read in public when concealed in a dust-jacket of Aristotle’s Ethics.