There has been no shortage of books on Nero. ‘Nero has attracted significant attention’, as John Drinkwater notes with typical understatement in his impressive, convincing, but occasionally frustrating evaluation of Nero's reign (10). At over 400 pages, with great attention to detail, this book challenges M. Griffin, Nero. The End of a Dynasty (1984) as the obvious English starting point for Neronian events and politics. For a comprehensive analysis of the Pisonian conspiracy (197–219 with table 2), a good overview of what we know of the Golden House (248–63), or a detailed description of Neronian finances, imperial avenues of income and fiscal management (326–68), this is now the book to consult first. Yet D. aims to do more than that. He wants to show how Nero was neither mad nor bad, nor a divine autocrat. D. argues forcefully that there was a ‘wider team behind a single princeps’ (59) and that this ‘Establishment’ successfully ran the Empire. Nero had no clear idea about what role to play. He first acted the princeps, but although he was capable, he ‘grew bored with the details of administration’ (129). Nero therefore increasingly detached himself from responsibilities, taking up ‘acting the sportsman and artist’ (293). This was fine as long as the Establishment could solve problems without him, but when in 68 Nero needed to ‘play’ the general, he refused to do so (407), and was dropped by the Establishment. Nero was ‘never in charge of the Empire’ (416). Others were, and did a good job, explaining why so much went well in Neronian times.

This reconstruction may be correct, and D. suggests sensible scenarios for how matters played out. He does so through ‘considered inconsistency’: sources are accepted or rejected ‘on the grounds of plausibility’ (13). This often works well, certainly in the first chapters (Part I: Background, 7–168). D. sets out problems in Neronian historiography, argues convincingly that Nero never placed the status of senators in doubt (26), and describes in detail the people who would surround Nero throughout his reign: his mother (32–55) and then ‘the Establishment Team’ (56–80). In the course of his argument, D. debunks some persistent myths. His Neronian court, against V. Rudich's court in Political Dissidence under Nero (1993), was a place ‘where people were not afraid to air at least some of their opinions’ (116), and Neronian times were ‘the opposite of an age of suffocating repression’ (128). At a military level good commanders were appointed, who were given a relatively free reign, even if ‘grasp of the wider political and military situation appears to have been weak’ (152).

In other parts of the book, ‘considered inconsistency’ works less well, especially in the chapters brought together as Part II: Assessment. Surely D. is right that Nero was not the murderous monster of our literary sources, and his chapters analysing prominent deaths in Nero's reign are very good on the detail (169–232). But responsibility for the death of Agrippina is too easily shifted away from Nero on the grounds of plausibility (183–7). Where, in other cases, killing is undeniable, it was ‘due to political necessity and managed by the Establishment’ (232). Why, moreover, does D. accept Suetonius’ claim (Ner. 56) that Nero urinated on the image of Dea Syria (266 and 287), other than that it fits his argument against eastern influences on the emperor? And how is Nero's declaration ‘that he was at last beginning to be housed like a human being’ (Suet., Ner. 31.2) ‘conclusive proof’ that there was no divine connotation to the Golden House and hence no Neronian interest in ‘divine status’ (272)? Simply wrong is the claim that the reliefs from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias are ‘official statuary’ (39). As to Nero's presumed madness, D. chooses to discuss and dismiss it through ‘the gamble of psychoanalysis’ (277). Reconstructions are plausible, as always. It may be true that Nero's fall was partly due to some sort of burn-out, with Nero ‘disinclined to save himself’, whatever the Establishment tried (294). The last part (End, 372–415) discusses Nero's relation to Greece and his fall. Again, much is sensible and convincing, for instance how the emperor's much-discussed ‘triumph’ may have been a ‘celebration of the successes of peace’ (382–4).

None of D.'s reconstructions go against the evidence and many of the scenarios he proposes will become the new points of departure. Occasionally, however, it feels that evidence is deemed plausible if it fits the pattern that D. has established. This is not helped by continuous and frustrating cross-referencing, often to later parts of the book (e.g. 156 n. 31 refers to 293, which for evidence refers to 304 n. 274; but examples are legion). This heightens the sense that D. is arguing a case as much as analysing his sources. As D. recognises, almost all reconstructions of Neronian politics reflect the times in which they are written. Notwithstanding his monumental attempt to weigh the evidence fairly, D. does not entirely avoid that trap. His Nero seems to function in a much more recent setting: his liberti are compared to Samuel Pepys (65), the concilium is a ‘privy council’ (67), and Nero might even be kept in check by ‘a loyal opposition’ (154) and supported by a ‘freedman-based fiscal machine’ (350). The Pavilion in the Golden House was a sensible new centre of power, and ‘much smaller overall than Buckingham Palace’ (257). This is a very British Nero.