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Nero and the Art of Tyranny
Today, the Roman Emperor Nero is remembered as the quintessential tyrant gone mad; an anti-Christ figure who seduced and killed his mother, stomped his wife to death, set Rome ablaze and used the inferno as a backdrop for one of his tone-deaf musical performances. However, the real Nero was far more interesting than that.
Dragged to the upper echelons of power by his murderous mother, under the leadership of the philosopher Seneca and the general Burrus he led Rome through a short, glorious period. The young prince vowed to rid Rome of the corruption that had plagued the courts of his predecessors, and to return the Senate its due powers and authority. For many years Nero upheld those promises, reinforced with a series of magnificent works, populist reforms and the greatest spectacles that Rome had ever seen.
Nero was a man of boundless ambition; a musician, an actor and an athlete who longed to raise the Empire to new cultural heights. However, as the boy became a man, his passions got the better of him. Nero slipped further and further into his own mythology of delusion - towards a dramatic bloody downfall.
Hareth Al Bustani recounts how Rome’s first royal family finally collapsed beneath the weight of its own violent and hedonistic excess. Along the way, Al Bustani re-examines Nero’s legacy - unveiling the good, the bad and the ugly alike.
Dragged to the upper echelons of power by his murderous mother, under the leadership of the philosopher Seneca and the general Burrus he led Rome through a short, glorious period. The young prince vowed to rid Rome of the corruption that had plagued the courts of his predecessors, and to return the Senate its due powers and authority. For many years Nero upheld those promises, reinforced with a series of magnificent works, populist reforms and the greatest spectacles that Rome had ever seen.
Nero was a man of boundless ambition; a musician, an actor and an athlete who longed to raise the Empire to new cultural heights. However, as the boy became a man, his passions got the better of him. Nero slipped further and further into his own mythology of delusion - towards a dramatic bloody downfall.
Hareth Al Bustani recounts how Rome’s first royal family finally collapsed beneath the weight of its own violent and hedonistic excess. Along the way, Al Bustani re-examines Nero’s legacy - unveiling the good, the bad and the ugly alike.
154 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 28, 2021
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February 1, 2022
Needs proofreading and editing. Full of sloppy mistakes, missing words and dodgy punctuation.
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