Hello I'm Mary Beard and I'm glad you can join me to explore some of my favorite things in the
British Museum exhibition Nero: The man behind the myth. I'm standing here in the first main
section of the show. As you come into it you pass a full-length statue of a young boy, about 12 or
13 years old, clad in a toga. He is actually the young Nero and he's an important reminder to us
that Nero, well he wasn't 13 when he came to the throne but he was not much more. He was about 16.
He was in other words a boy emperor. As you come around the corner you come and meet his family
and very important amongst his family are the women of the imperial house
and perhaps most important of all is Nero's mother, Agrippina. She was the last wife
of the emperor Claudius who was Nero's predecessor on the throne and it is always said that Agrippina
wangled Nero onto the throne in preference to the legitimate natural children of Claudius himself.
She was the power behind the throne. Here you see her looking actually very beautiful. This
absolutely gorgeous miniature lustrous green stone portrait of Agrippina. A very nice symbol of
the way imperial women get represented in all kinds of materials and all kinds of shapes and
sizes. Here Agrippina looks out at you all green, but there's one statue here which I think is quite
easy to walk past, and it's actually a statue of Messalina who was the previous wife of the
emperor Claudius before Agrippina and she's rather special, and I want to show you a bit about her.
Meet Messalina behind me. Now Messalina's no direct relation of Nero at all but she is the last
but one wife of the emperor Claudius and she was followed by Agrippina, Nero's mother. What you see
is a very stately lady and I think for some people that's a bit of a surprise because what roman
writers said about Messalina was frankly terrible. She was supposed to be well, adulterous is putting
it mildly and she was finally killed off by her husband Claudius after one of her more lurid
escapades, and then he married Agrippina. But she doesn't look here as anything but a perfect roman
wife. She's clad in her stola, she is cradling her child who must be Britannicus, Claudius's son.
And it was poor little Britannicus who Nero kind of bypassed on his way to the throne.
She's perfection. She is the wife of Claudius the Roman emperor and the perfect mother. I have to
say little Britannicus does look a bit odd but I think that's because he was quite heavily restored
later. But there's a secret to this statue which you might not spot
instantly because actually the Roman sculptor has based this very closely on a famous 4th century BC
statue, that's 500 years earlier, showing the goddess Peace holding her child little Wealth.
So he he's taken the template of this famous statue and turned it into Messalina. Now I
think what's interesting about that is that it's showing you, it's underlining how these
empresses whatever stories you read about them in the scurrilous roman texts they could be
seen as not just perfect mums but pretty much close to the divine. Messalina here stands for
peace, wealth and prosperity. She doesn't stand for adultery. And the same is going to go for
Agrippina, Nero's mum. This is Agrippina Nero's mom, full size. Now her reputation is about as bad
as Messalina's. She's supposed to have schemed her son Nero onto the Roman throne partly by murdering
Claudius with a bowl of poisoned mushrooms. She is said to have had extreme influence
over Nero when he was still a young ruler; Such extreme influence that there were rumors that they
had an incestuous relationship. And pretty soon Nero is supposed to have got so fed up with mum,
that he killed her. Now how much of any of that is true it's very hard to know. Part of at least
I'm pretty sure, is one of those kind of 'blame the woman' stories.
We're very used to that in modern politics, you know if you want to know why a prime minister
or president is doing something you don't quite approve of, you blame the wife or the girlfriend.
And part of that I think has landed on Agrippina and probably also on Messalina before. So I have
more of a soft spot for her than you would gather if you read the histories of Tacitus or Suetonius.
But this statue of her for me is really really precious. It has come to the exhibition from Rome
although I have to tell you it's a statue with a very complicated history, and its real head has
actually ended up in Copenhagen and this is an exact replica. But it's a statue in this really
precious hard bassanite black stone. We're so used to thinking about ancient statuary as it was
partly bronze few precious stones but largely white marble that we forget there were
these extraordinary versions in different sorts of stone and I think that to a Roman viewer,
whatever they thought about Agrippina – whether they believed the rumors or not – they would
have recognized this as extremely precious. It is a really, really, really hard stone.
This would have taken months and months to carve and in a sense it's that that kind of
simple signal, the enormous labor that it would have taken to make, that makes this shout out at
you this is a very expensive piece from the Roman royal family. But let's now escape from the really
posh royal family. We're going to see something from much more ordinary house
in Pompeii. Ancient rome was a theatrical culture it wasn't just the emperor Nero who was mad keen
on the theater it was popular entertainment too. And I know we think of the Roman people as being
more interested in gladiators than anything else but actually they flocked to theatrical displays
and drama of all kinds. From revivals of fifth century Greek tragedy to modern farces and the
very very very rich and the not quite so rich also took scenes from theater and decorated
their houses with them and this is a great example from a house in Pompeii which shows you
a scene from Euripides's play; Euripides the 5th century BC Athenian dramatist. His play Iphigenea
in Tauris which, told the story of the Greek princess Iphigenea who had been sacrificed by her
father Agamemnon in order to get a fair wind from the gods on his way to the Trojan war. But no one
really knew what actually happened to Iphigenea, there were loads of stories. Euripides tells the
story of her becoming a temple attendant, a priestess on the black sea. And here she is,
the daughter of Agamemnon, now holding court in her temple
but not very much longer because her brother Orestes with his friend Pylodes has come to look
for her and is about to rescue her. Now it's quite interesting from a female point of view because so
many of Euripides' tragedies centered on a female main character and here we see that female main
character but now replicated on the walls of a house at Pompeii. We think of Pompeii as a very
ordinary little Roman town and in some ways that's exactly what it was, but there were clearly some
people with money here. I mean it took quite a lot of money to have a painting in this kind of style.
But you can go even further than that and some of the villas outside the city have produced
really exquisite valuable silver treasure and one of the highlights
of this show is a part of a treasure from a place called Morigena just outside Pompeii
and it is the silver dinner service of someone with a very great deal of money.
The silver treasure from Moregina really is splendid but it does play a bit into our image
of the romans as rich and luxurious well some of them certainly were and actually you can see in
the nero show some of the really exquisite bits of decoration from Nero's own palaces but I've got a
tip here the Romans weren't all rich and luxurious and you should always say to yourself when you're
looking at something like this treasure; Who made it? Who cleaned it? And who did the washing up?
Now among all the wonderful precious and intriguing works of art in this exhibition
it might surprise you to know that this is my very favorite object of all.
It looks a bit of a boring block of marble, that's what it is. And it's a tombstone.
And the name of the dead person is inscribed on it Claudia Ecloge. Who's she? You might say. So what?
Well actually this is 99.9 certain the tombstone of Nero's wet nurse.
Who was called Ecloge and she was also one of the people who took Nero
off to be buried after he'd killed himself when the armies were rebelling against his rule.
We're 99.9 percent certain because the biographer Suetonius writing in the second century A.D
tells us her name: Ecloge. She was a slave. She certainly started out life as a slave. When she
was his nurse. Her name Claudia Ecloge suggests at a certain point she was given her freedom.
Now there's something for me which is kind of poignant about this I mean this is a
real connection between Nero's nanny and us. This is where she was buried.
Now I don't want to be too sloppy and sentimental, I mean I think that there are
lots of nasty dictators in the world who have had very faithful nurses, but
it still kind of just hits me that this is really Nero's nurse. The very woman who took him off at
the last to bury him. So I hope that when people actually come and visit the exhibition they don't
walk past this ordinary block of marble because it's not an ordinary block of marble at all.
Thank you very much for joining me on this tour. It's been a pleasure to take you around, and if
you come to the show itself make sure you stop and have a good look at Claudia Ecloge. Thank you.