In these strange times that persecutor of Christians and sadistic pervert and matricide Emperor Nero seems to be undergoing a rehabilitating revision by academic historians. A closer look makes clear why. Nero was all about breaking sexual taboos and having a sense of entitlement to validation regardless of objective and aesthetic judgement. Whether charioteer, poet, or musician, Nero expected praise. He was an all-powerful and mad millennial snowflake in ancient Rome. One can possibly see his character type in the very masculine transgender who demands to be told he looks feminine.
Contrary to our own era’s revisionists, we know from sources as different as Suetonius and Tacitus that Nero was a complete degenerate. In particular his sexual depravity is well known. Suetonius recalls a scene, one perhaps fitting for a future Pride parade:
“Nero practised every kind of obscenity, and after defiling almost every part of his body finally invented a novel game: he was released from a cage dressed in the skins of wild animals, and attacked the private parts of men and women who stood bound to stakes.”
Tacitus recalls his cruelty to his wife Octavia and finally her death:
“But Octavia was bound, and all her veins were opened. However, her terror retarded the blood flow. So she was put into an exceedingly hot vapour bath and suffocated. An even crueller atrocity followed. He head was cut off and taken to Rome for Poppaea to see.”
His elaborate plots to commit matricide on his mother Agrippina reached burlesque levels. She had ensured through cruel Machavellian politics his accession to the position of Caesar, but he decided he wanted rid of her. Collapsing boats failed, but she was eventually despatched.
For centuries the Western world regarded Nero’s vicious perversions as a sign of moral turpitude, but in the modern West this is celebrated and seen as something to be proud about. He hated the Church and had the martyrs thrown to the lions in the circus for the voyeuristic entertainment of the masses. Today our masses gorge themselves on the bread and circuses of reality television, artificial food and consumerism. It is almost as though Nero prefigured our culture. In particular, just as in Nero's Rome the Church is hated by our own establishment elites.
Nero has sometimes been identified with the number of the Beast, six-hundred and sixty six in the Apocalypse. Whether it was murdering his brother, his wife, or his mother or engaging in depraved sexual acts, the proud and easily-offended Nero, so needy of praise, looks like the lowest depth to which humanity could sink, despite his elevated position as Emperor of the whole known-world.
And yet despite the martyrs, despite his depravity, despite his vanity and despite his cruel murders it was at this time that the Apostle Paul, to be put to death and martyred by Nero in Rome, instructed the Church to honour the emperor as being ordained by God. It might have been that declining pagan Rome produced Nero, but the office itself was still a bulwark against the forces of chaos and a capstone of the order of society. The Church is not a politically-revolutionary movement.
As we look at today's political attacks on our Christian inheritance it seems to be often directed through attacks on supposed sexual-restrictions. In that sense we are seeing a manifestation of Nero's spirit that expressed itself in pushing sexual taboos to their limit. If Nero can be identified in some sense as a type of the apocalyptic beast then as the enemies of the church use "sexual liberation" and "pride" as their key weapons of attack we seem to be participating in a dark and demonic pattern.
The right to be able to practise any form of sexual deviance is now how those in the Pride movement define their identity. To condemn, question or be repelled is seen as an injury to them, analogous to not enjoying and sycophantically praising one of the Emperor's recitals. The most opaque aspect of the Pride movement is the mysterious "+". What is this intended to promote? There is surely a point when sexual passions pass a boundary of acceptability? For a society to function it cannot simply be a permissive arrangement of “anything goes”, but rather we have to hold together the general consensus of decency and morality. Under Nero, Rome still had some residual sense of sexual standards and public probity and an idea of what a good emperor should be - Augustus. Nonetheless, for all Seneca's stoical instructions of the young Nero, nothing stopped the reprobate's depravity, even Seneca himself became his victim.
What we must therefore be very wary of then is politics dedicated to liberation from taboos and that this does not push us yet further. If we want to understand where we will end up, we should remember the Emperor who fed the Christians to the lions and burnt down the city of Rome. Political movements dedicated to the destruction of taboos and the celebration of the passions will not benefit the common weal in the long run. And the survival of the common weal requires an enforcement of common standards of moral behaviour, not simply tolerance alone.
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