Political Dissidence Under Nero

Vasily Rudich examines the phenomenon of dissidence from both a historical and psychological perspective. He investigates the interaction of the universal components of human motive--thought and action--with those that are culturally conditioned. He portrays the predicament of the dissident in Nero's Rome as seen and felt by the dissidents themselves, recreating their thought and conduct through their own conceptual and verbal means. Those who endured the tribulations of Nero's rule were broadly divergent in their motives and backgrounds: they ranged from cynical opportunists to intransigent oppositioners.Political Dissidence Under Neroshows their various efforts at adjustment to a hostile reality through dissimulation, and places their careers in a chronological, increasingly dramatic narrative. Although Rudich's insights may owe something to his own dissident experience under totalitarian rule in Russia, the author carefully avoids any direct parallel orretrojection. His detailed and innovative analysis of senatorial politics under the early Empire is firmly rooted in the rich evidence found in classical sources. This is a study of a society suffering from a crisis of values and of people who were at the same time the victims and perpetrators of that crisis. In turn admirable, pitiable and contemptible, they offer us remarkable examples of both political failure and moral victory.