Nerone poeta

This paper focuses on Nero’s literary and poetic otium, which becomes absolute and all-encompassing, and which constitutes a real break with the traditional conception of Roman political power. Suetonius, Martial, Pliny the Younger and Tacitus discuss Nero’s poetic attitude and his alleged doctrina, passages that are the subject of the analysis proposed here. I will then investigate the theme of spectacle, which, in Nero’s case, overlaps with the political exercise of power: measures and initiatives oriented in this perspective bear witness to this. Spectacle and poetry for Nero were understood in an “agonal dimension” that finds in the figure of Paris a significant antecedent on which to orientate its own self-fashioning.