In the game of “name the most grotesque Roman emperor,” Nero comes pretty much on top. He didn’t quite make his horse a consul (that was Caligula, his predecessor-but-one). But his reputation for wickedness is nevertheless lurid. Aside from famously fiddling while Rome burned, he is said to have killed his wife by kicking her in the stomach while she was pregnant and to have commissioned an elaborate trick boat designed to collapse mid-voyage in order to despatch his inconveniently powerful mother, Agrippina. (The dowager empress managed to swim to shore but was later killed more conventionally, with a sword.) Vain, greedy, incompetent, murderous: the man seems unsalvageable.
And yet. Increasingly historians— including those behind a new exhibition at the British Museum, which runs until 24th October—have argued that there is barely one hostile anecdote in near-contemporary portraits that cannot be filed away as pure invention. How can we tell?