The ancient sources themselves were conscious of this intriguing possibility of fiction on the stage having its counterpart in reality, noting, for instance, that Nero played such roles as Orestes, Alcmeon, and Oedipus and that he committed in real life many of the same crimes for which these fictional characters were noted. B. points to the arrangement in Suetonius who reverses historical fact by reporting first Nero's acting roles, then the murder of his mother, and finally the graffiti that commented on the murder by likening Nero to two mythical matricides. Sensibly, however, B. does not see this as necessarily deliberate distortion on Suetonius' part so much as perhaps a convenient grouping of his material. In this chapter, we begin to make the transition to the second paradigm, that of doublespeak, but for the time being the focus is still mainly on the audience, not the author. B. argues that under the empire the audience came to assume the initiative in discovering a hidden message, one that the author dared not make plain because he was living under a tyrant.
Attention is drawn to the way in which political comment in the theater differed under the republic.
It was the audience, therefore, who took the lead in discovering a subtext, and this in turn led authors often to adopt the expedient of protesting against reading a hidden meaning into their words. Chapter four turns away from the audience and considers the intent of the author to subvert the apparent meaning of his own text. To my mind, this chapter is the most valuable in that it offers a new and challenging interpretation of two apparently contradictory texts by bringing to bear some of the themes found in the earlier part of the book. On the other hand, in his second speech he presents the decline of eloquence as an inevitable consequence of the lack of contentiousness which has been banished by peace and prosperity under the auspicious rule of Vespasian. According to B., the author deliberately subverts the import of his own words, and he does so not by employing irony, whose message is intended to deceive no one, but by resorting to doublespeak which conveys one meaning to the emperor and his supporters and quite a different meaning to the opponents of the regime.