UCLA

This dissertation examines the idea of imitation in Roman imperial succession using the case study of the emperor Nero. Analyzing an array of texts and authors, it argues that Nero is consistently remembered as confounding the categories of original and copy, reality and representation. We are told, for example, that Nero assimilated the Great Fire of Rome to the Fall of Troy (Tac. Ann. 15.39.3); that he performed onstage wearing a mask of his own face (Suet. Ner. 21.3); that he tried to make his lover Sporus into a copy of his deceased wife Poppaea Sabina (Dio Chrys. Or. 21.6-10); and that he authorized the False Neros who imitated him after his death (Tac. Hist. 2.8-9, Dio Chrys. Or. 21.10, Suet. Ner. 57.2). This dissertation posits that these and other instances of Nero’s doubling are symptoms of his double reception: legitimized and delegitimized by the same imperial system, he demonstrates how the strategies of repetition and doubling that sustained the principate also constructed its dysfunction. Each chapter engages with a different theorization of mimesis in which Nero is enmeshed: intertextuality, imperial cult, exemplarity, and imperial Greek mimesis, which engages with both Platonic concepts of mimesis and exemplarity. The first two chapters focus on Tacitus’s Histories and Annals: the first interrogates the uneasy difference between the emperor Nero and his pretenders, and the second investigates a similar unsteady relation between the emperor and his images. The third chapter traces Suetonius’s construction of a mimetic genealogy of Nerones in De Vita Caesarum, and the fourth chapter explores how Nero is conceived by a selection of imperial Greek authors (Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch, Pseudo-Lucian, and Philostratus), who, like Nero, are invested in imitating the Classical Greek past. Guiding my analysis is the distinction articulated by Deleuze between Plato’s copy versus his simulacrum, and, correspondingly, the imperial successor versus the impostor. While the copy/successor maintains internal fidelity to the Platonic form, the simulacrum/impostor looks like the form but contains oppositional content. The simulacrum/impostor does not merely negate the original; rather, it destabilizes the difference between original and copy. All of the authors under examination frame Nero as an impostor rather than a successor, yet my analysis shows that the distinction between the two positions is more ambiguous and less hierarchical than the authors theorizing imperial succession sought to construct.