One of the best known and simultaneously most notorious figures from Roman history, Nero (r. AD 54-68) is usually characterised as a tyrannical and ineffectual emperor, a ruler who proverbially 'fiddled while Rome burnt'. However, as new research demonstrates, this reputation is crudely reductive and was carefully crafted in antiquity by hostile elite authors, who envisioned a different form of rule more mindful of the demands of their own social...