Introduction: The Neronian (Literary) “Renaissance”

Abstract

Nero's extraordinary love for and ambition in the arts created an environment in which art and literature could flourish. As the authors under Nero harked back to their Augustan predecessors and revived forms and genres practiced in this period they garnered Nero's reign the flattering epithet of the “Neronian Renaissance”. His eccentric personal conduct and capacity for ruthlessness and brutality, however, ensured that the cultural boom he facilitated would not outlast him. This chapter attempts to connect a few of the dots that link the oeuvres of the three most prominent Neronian writers, Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius, to shed some light on what is at stake in the Neronian literary Renaissance. In addition under Nero, politics and literature converged when teachers of rhetoric became senators and Seneca, the son of a rhetoric teacher, turned himself into the richest and most powerful man in Rome.

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