Volume 5 University College Dublin, Ireland Dissidence and Literature Review by Brian Arkins University College Galway Dissidence and Literature under Nero by Vasily Rudich, Routledge, London 1997. It is a commonplace of modern critical theory that every person carries ideological baggage of some kind. These tragedies, which had such an enormous impact on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage provide implicit comment on the reign of Nero by portraying evil, and especially evil in the ruler.
Ambiguity becomes inevitable.
After Seneca engages in servile flattery of Claudius in Ad Polybium , he rehabilitates himself through a satirical account of the adulation directed at Claudius in Apocolocyntosis . In De Clementia , Seneca praises Nero - after the murder of Britanicus. R. correctly notes that Lucan's pessimism about Roman politics covers not merely the Julio-Claudian dynasty, but the oligarchy of Republican times. He is accurate about Caesar's absolutism in the poem and about Pompey's inadequacy, but is too ready to endorse Cato as 'supreme sage'. R. is also too ready to deny a satirical edge to Lucan's apparent eulogy of Nero towards the beginning of Book 1.