OCW: You emphasize the public image of the emperors and the way that image was both constructed by the emperors themselves and subverted by representations in literary texts from the period. How do your undergraduate students take to this kind of historical analysis? Do they find it difficult to view texts and objects as subjective representations rather than as sources of objective information?
William Broadhead: Students have not found it difficult to shift into a mode where we’re identifying and analyzing the subjective nature of the literary and artistic images of these emperors. Once they realize (usually in the very first meeting!) that the subject of the class is precisely the rhetoric of imperial power, that no image of Augustus or Nero simply exists as an objective fact, that all such images are constructed or “made” (hence the title of the subject), most students very quickly take to the idea of reading our sources in this way.
Given the nature of the surviving sources, Roman history turns out to be an excellent case study in the prominence and power of rhetoric in almost every domain of human discourse. As such, most students embrace the material as an excellent way to cultivate their ability to recognize persuasive rhetoric and to make compelling historical observations even on the basis of the most obviously subjective sources. Was Nero really as bad as the sources—almost all written after his death and with clearly hostile intent—assert? No. The image of Nero “made” by those sources almost certainly bears little resemblance to what the objective reality of Nero might have been. But the hostility of the sources is itself an important part of the historical record and, subjective though it is, tells us a lot about the motives and priorities of Nero’s successors.
