2024 p/b 234pp £22.99 (ISBN 9781108798358)
The voice-over, which introduces the 1951 film Quo Vadis, based on the novel by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, informs us that ‘this is the story of an immortal conflict in the early summer of AD 64 in the reign of the Antichrist known to history as the emperor Nero…’, thereby apparently implying that Nero was identified by the early church as the Antichrist in his own time.
By drawing our attention to this apparent identification of Nero as the Antichrist by his contemporaries, Shushma Malik, lecturer in classics at the University of Roehampton, takes the opportunity of arguing that this contemporary identification is mistaken.
She discusses how two threads within early Christianity came to be intertwined. One was the concept of the Antichrist, a being whose existence and ultimate overthrow would bring in the apocalyptic end days. The other was the almost literal demonising of the emperor Nero, who, as the first Roman emperor to persecute the early church, became an ideal candidate for the role of the Antichrist.
But, M. argues, this identification took time until ‘late antique literature made use of Nero in two ways. First, he was a key figure in newly constructed Christian histories as the first-ever persecutor and killer of Peter and Paul. Then he was an Antichrist figure…’
M. suggests that this identification could be passed on in written form for the literate, and in preaching to a wider (and presumably less literate) audience.
M. then traces how Nero’s reputation for ‘wickedness, cruelty and violence’ developed in antiquity as Christian writer after Christian writer piled on the opprobrium, until by the 5th century Nero’s candidature for the role of the Antichrist was the only one on offer.
M. then fast-forwards to the 19th century, offering case studies of three approaches to the Nero–Antichrist paradigm: first, that of the French philosopher Ernest Renan, whose committed but tentative Catholicism was made more ambiguous by what he saw as the excesses of Pope Pius IX, but who concluded that ‘the ultimate enemy of Christianity was not an inept pope but Nero’; then that of the Anglican theologian and Dean of Canterbury F.W. Farrer, who ‘considered Nero’s actions during his principate to warrant the label of Antichrist over and above anyone else’; and finally, the approach of the wit Oscar Wilde, who described part of this life as ‘his Neronian hours’—his ‘days of gilded infamy’.
M. then offers a series of reflections on the different ways in which distinguished actors have portrayed Nero from Charles Laughton’s ‘conception of the emperor as feckless, theatrical, effeminate’ in The Sign of the Cross (1932) to Christopher Biggins’ mummy’s boy in I, Claudius (1976).
But (perhaps as a result of the increasing secularisation of society) emphasis on Nero as Antichrist has become less and less apparent and M.’s concluding sentence tells us that ‘English-speaking film and TV audiences have not had to engage, in any explicit way, with the Nero-Antichrist paradigm’.
This scholarly and fascinating book concludes with a list of early Christian references to the Nero-Antichrist, a comprehensive bibliography and a useful index, and is to be highly commended.
Ray Morris