Already, you have an intriguing story with accounts that don’t quite match up.

You have a very hostile elite, but we also know that the common people in Rome, the plebs urbana, honored his memory for decades after his death. “Nero’s memory was contested after his death, and that really was divided along class divisions. Photograph: British Museum/Colchester Museums/PA The Fenwick hoard will be on display for the first time. The eruption of Vesuvius more than a decade after his death preserved a lot of graffiti in praise of the late emperor, said Opper, an example of which from Pompeii will be on display. Nero’s empire was certainly cruel – a slave chain found in Anglesey is witness to a culture of ruthless exploitation which, the British Museum’s curator Thorsten Opper said, is “a red thread that goes through the exhibition”.īut contrary to the “brutally biased and partisan” accounts of his reign, written by the ruling elites in the decades after his death in AD68, the evidence shows Nero was popular among the masses.

The Fenwick hoard, hastily buried by fleeing Romans during that raid and discovered only in 2014, will be displayed as part of the exhibition for the first time, an example of the turbulence of the emperor’s 14-year reign. These include a statue of the young Nero aged about 12, already with his distinctive close-cropped fringe and prominent ears, who just four years later would become ruler of the vast Roman world, and the famous bronze head found in a Suffolk river and probably torn from a statue toppled during Boudicca’s destruction of Colchester in AD61.

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