Metropolitan Manliness: Ancient Rome, Victorian London, and the Rhetoric of the New, 1880–1914

Abstract

The fin-de-siècle London metropolis was the glittering capital of empire but also the site of overcrowding, disease, and perceived degeneration. One way writers could articulate the opportunities and anxieties inherent in modern urban existence and debate the social, moral and physical condition of the London metropolitan male was through parallels with ancient Rome. This spoke directly to urban existence, the glory of the empire, and the fear of degeneration. The health and vigor of the New Imperialist was captured while also focusing conservative fears about the deviance or degeneracy of the urban male. This article examines the dual significance of ancient Rome by analyzing the increasing prevalence of Roman parallels in journalism, fiction, and new popular entertainments such as the toga play, which emerge in this period and function as a means of expressing anxieties about modern urban existence and the new, distinctly Neronian figure of the Decadent.

IN THE OPENING LINES of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887), Dr. Watson describes the London metropolis as “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”¹ His words hint at growing tensions in 1880–1914 between the imperial periphery and the metropolitan centre, but also between the hardy imperial male and his “lounging,” “idling” urban counterpart. Moreover, a downcast and directionless Watson includes himself as part of the problem. After being injured in the shoulder during active service in the second Anglo-Afghan War, and suffering a series of “misfortune[s] and disaster[s]” which have ruined his health, Watson finds himself unable to participate in the imperial project which “brought honours and promotion”² as the rewards for manly courage and endurance. Furthermore, his failure to embody the physically robust ideals of imperial manliness is marked by a corresponding geographical shift from the spaces of empire to the urban centre: at this point in the novel Watson is living beyond his means in London hotels.

His words are representative of a larger cultural need among writers of the fin de siècle to find new strategies for speaking about the London metropolis, at once the glittering capital of empire but also, after almost a century of urbanization and urban population growth, a site of overcrowding, disease and perceived degeneration.³ One means by which writers could articulate the opportunities and anxieties inherent in modern urban existence, and to debate the social, moral and physical condition of London and the metropolitan male who inhabited it, was through parallels with ancient Rome. After all, the Roman legacy was at once one of imperial splendour and of empire built on militaristic, expansionist models; but so too was it linked with Gibbonian narratives of decline and fall, especially of decline and fall catalysed by decadent (and therefore failed or diseased) masculine vigour. The Roman parallel seemed to speak directly to both facets of urban existence at the fin de siècle: the glory of the empire and the fear of degeneration in the urban capital. It captured the health and vigour of the New Imperialist whilst also focusing conservative fears about the deviance or degeneracy of the urban male. This article examines the dual significance of ancient Rome by analysing the increasing prevalence of Roman parallels in journalism, fiction and new popular entertainments such as the toga play, which emerge in this period and function as a means of expressing anxieties about modern urban existence and the new, and distinctly Neronian figure of the Decadent.

Roma & Londinium: Writing the Modern City

Periodical sources from the last quarter of the nineteenth century show an increased public interest in the physical spaces of ancient Rome, which no doubt reflects popular interest in ongoing excavations of the Forum Romanum, but which goes beyond the mere reporting of archaeological or historical facts to speak to very contemporary experiences and anxieties in British society.⁴ As a space both foreign and familiar to the late-Victorian imagination, the Roman city could be used to draw flattering comparisons with London or function as a warning narrative and frame critiques of British urban experiences. The article “A Day in Ancient Rome” (1890), for instance, opens with a clear statement of difference: namely that in terms of the daily lives of the working populations “two cases of more striking apposition could not be quoted”⁵ than those of ancient Rome and modern London. The main point of difference, we are told, is “the general exodus from suburbs to town which takes place in London at eight or nine every morning” and which “in Rome could have no existence, for Rome possessed no suburbs.” The Victorian urban experience is set up as distinctly different from that of “the age of Nero or Domitian.” Yet the remainder of the article conducts readers on an imagined tour of the ancient city and some of “the great businesses and manufactories” operating therein, the overriding impression one of similarity, or at least recognisability, between ancient Rome and modern London. In the factories and workshops of Rome, for instance, the author insists that the only difference in appearance and functionality compared with equivalent factories in Britain would be “the absence of machinery, and the natural deficiency in certain trade improvements with which two thousand years have rendered men more familiar.” “A Day in Ancient Rome” emphasises the parallel industries of the two imperial cities, noting that “there were publishers in ancient Rome no less than in modern London” and that, in these ancient spaces, “the same division of labour prevails as in a printing office”⁶ and the same tasks carried out. The new urban landscapes and working environments of Britain are rendered less intimidatingly new by comparison with ancient Rome, which was believed to be the only city in history with a population of one million until Victorian London almost two millennia later.

Yet it was distance as well as similarity that rendered Rome so helpful as a means of talking about the city, particularly when it came to voicing more incisive social critique. In an 1892 article in the National Review, Edward J. Gibbs compares data on the size, population, distribution of wealth and the availability of social care in Rome to complain of aristocratic privilege and class inequality in London itself. Gibbs concludes: “both in population and wealth the city of Rome under the Empire was fully equal to modern London; while in the magnificence and beauty of its public buildings, in the splendour of its gratuitous entertainments, and in the profusion of its liberality towards the poor, it was much superior.”⁷ That ancient Rome was both an Other and an ancestor to British culture meant that social ills arising from the modernity of the age could be lamented in public discourse whilst posing little real threat to the stability of a collective national identity for Britain as an imperial power.

Equally, for those wishing to celebrate the novelty of the urban experience, the imperial Roman parallel also facilitated a corresponding, celebratory narrative of London as the glittering centre of empire. Indeed, as the opening lines of Henry James’s Golden Bowl (1904) suggest, the boundaries of representation and reality within the Roman metaphor become increasingly blurred in fin-de-siècle discourses on modern urban experience:

The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute, he recognised in the present London much more than in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed to either of those places that these grounds of his predilection, after all sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned with him, guided his steps; he had strayed, simply enough, into Bond Street, where his imagination, working at comparatively short range, caused him now and then to stop before a window in which objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold, in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or in leather, steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories.⁸

Here London has so successfully attained the power and splendour of an imperial capital that to walk the streets of the modern metropolis has become the closest a man can come to experiencing the reality of life under the Roman Empire. Prince Amerigo’s Italian nationality serves to authenticate and underwrite his recognition of the national values of ancient Rome in the modern British nation. As the Prince moves through the urban landscape, we are invited to view a succession of landmarks, including London Bridge and Hyde Park Corner, as surpassing the greatness of their ancient Roman equivalents.

However, there is a problem, James suggests, with any simple refiguring of London and its inhabitants as a new Rome and new Romans, and it is a problem of metropolitan masculinity in an imperial society. With the act of turning away from these great monuments of imperial infrastructure and governance, the Prince seems to embody a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the meaning of Rome in New Imperialist discourse, and with New Imperialist ideology more broadly as a basis for masculine identity. If masculinity were solely “a question of Imperium,” why then should the Prince, seeking aesthetic and imaginative fulfilment, feel compelled into Bond Street and a very different urban landscape? One explanation lies in James’s description of the objects on display. Though the intended function of the imperial “loot” is presumably to emphasize the commercial and military power of the British Empire, the rough materials and “massive,” “lumpish” nature of the objects on display hint at a brutish quality not just about the imperial project, but also the men who serve it. James’s prince is also perturbed by an apparent absence of connoisseurship in the collecting and displaying of the artefacts, which are indiscriminately “tumbled together” in the shop windows. In his urban wanderings, his sensitivity to the objects as commodities, and his longing for the ordering of those objects according to some aesthetic principle, the Prince bears a striking resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s archetypal flâneur, and to the aesthete and the Decadent of late-nineteenth-century culture.⁹ Indeed, to the more conservative reader he could easily fall foul of Dr. Watson’s more hostile, imperialist characterization of such urban males as loungers and wastrels.¹⁰

New Imperialism

Imperialist discourse had found it relatively uncomplicated to figure the British Empire as a new and improved Roman empire, and the New Imperialist as a modern-day Roman. The empire had transformed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a naval, commercialist enterprise for which ancient Greek and maritime Athenian empire proved a much more fitting parallel to an expansionist, land-based project that drew increasingly on Roman models. In 1876 Victoria was granted the title Empress of India, a move that amounted to an official sanctioning of the Roman parallel as a framework for talking about empire. After all, as George Bowyer noted that same year in a speech to the House of Commons concerning the Royal Titles Bill: “History showed that the title of Emperor was derived from the Roman Empire—from Caesar; and the idea of a Roman Emperor was that of a King over other Kings, a potentate who had for subjects tributary Kings…. In India the Queen was undoubtedly the Sovereign over Sovereign Princes.”¹¹ In the decades following the bill, the commentators and administrators of empire followed suit in looking to Rome in order to conceptualise and codify Britain’s imperial present, but also the particular masculine qualities required to govern such an empire. In Ancient and Modern Imperialism (1910), which he published after retiring from his twenty-four-year term as Consul-General of Egypt, Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer examines the practical and ideological challenges of imperial governance by means of an extended comparison of the ancient Roman and British empires. The origins of Victorian imperialism are located by Cromer firmly in the Roman past, whilst Greece is rejected entirely as a useful model for imperial governance and gender ideals:

The concept of Imperialism, as we understand, and as the Romans, though with many notable differences, understood the term, was wholly foreign to the Greek mind.… The undisciplined and idealistic Greek, with his sense of individuality, was far less suitable to carry an Imperial policy into execution than the austere and practical Roman, who not only made the law, but obeyed it, and who was surrounded from his cradle to his grave with associations calculated to foster Imperial tendencies.¹²

The main point of similarity between the ancient Roman Empire and Cromer’s understanding of British imperialist values is the regimented, organized and even disciplinarian way in which the empire is administrated in order to ensure maximum efficiency and the success of the imperial project. It is a vision of imperialism underwritten by notions of collectivism, especially with regards to the identity and values of the thousands of men who served the empire. Cromer contrasts this notion of collective masculine discipline with what he considers to be the less useful, more emphatically Greek ideals of individualism. Likewise, in The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India (1914), James Bryce praises the British Empire not as a mercantile institution, but a military enterprise sustained by the discipline and physical robustness of its male representatives:

The English in India are primarily soldiers. True it is that they went to India three centuries ago as traders, that it was out of a trading company that their power arose and that this trading company did not disappear until 1858. The covenanted civil service, to which Clive for instance belonged, began as a body of commercial clerks. Nothing sounds more pacific. But the men of the sword very soon began to eclipse the men of the quill and the account book.… It is a military society, military first and foremost … military questions occupy everyone’s thoughts and talk.¹³

Both Cromer and Bryce acknowledge the commercial origins of the British Empire under the East India Company—the same commerciality that had underpinned the use of the Greek model for constructions of mercantile masculinities in the late eighteenth century. Yet both writers imply that the British Empire by the high imperial period had progressed beyond the Greek model and the “timid,” “passive,” maritime manliness, towards a more exclusively Roman set of imperial values which sat at the heart of New Imperialist manliness.

Decadent Rome & Urban Anxiety

However, transposing the Roman parallel onto the urban landscapes of Britain’s imperial capital proved much more complex, not least because of the narratives of decline and fall that had become associated with the excess and debauchery of the Roman court. Ancient Rome became a contested space as the new metropolitan male challenged the traditional Victorian uses of antiquity, and particularly in the formulation of masculinities. Perhaps the most notable challenge to the equation of decadent Rome with negative notions of decline and degeneration is to be found in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885). Set during the reign of the Antonines, with Roman civilization poised on “the eve of decline,”¹⁴ the novel attempts to complicate the binary of positive health and growth versus negative decay and degeneration. In place of a conventional narrative of Decadence as the starting point of a downward trajectory leading inevitably to the decline and fall of civilization, Pater substitutes a cyclical model of perpetual decay and rebirth whereby decay is: first, an entirely natural phenomenon, as necessary for the growth of civilizations as winter is for rebirth in the natural world; and, second, free from associations of moral or masculine deviance.¹⁵ The work is a serious and sober defence of aestheticist principles, although it was followed by more deliberately shocking and antagonistic representations of more illicit Roman pasts by writers of the Decadence movement.¹⁶

For the majority of conservative writers, however, parallels with decadent Rome remained firmly pejorative, especially when they spoke to modern urban experiences. Writing to H. Rider Haggard in 1899, Lord Walsingham (1843–1919) expressed neatly, if anxiously, the perceived correlation between London’s increasingly urbanized spaces and contemporary fears over the “health and vigour” of British masculinity both at an individual and national level: “Take the people away from their natural breeding grounds, thereby sapping their health and strength in cities such as nature never intended to be the permanent home of man, and the decay of their country becomes only a matter of time. In this matter, as in many others, ancient Rome has a lesson to teach.”¹⁷ In a move consistent with the ostensibly masculinist rhetoric of imperial ideologies, which promoted the notion of mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body), Walsingham locates positively charged concepts of health and strength and natural growth in Britain’s rural landscapes. Conversely, “decay” and the physical, mental, moral and national degeneration implied by the “sapping” of that strength are presented as urban phenomena and serve as the negative pole in a binary that promotes New Imperialist notions of masculine ideality. If the countryside and the empire were spaces of masculine rejuvenation in the late nineteenth century, and ones which increasingly found expression through the Roman parallel, then the “lesson” of Rome that Walsingham refers to is surely the Gibbonian narrative of the “decline and fall” of such an empire as a consequence of “decayed” masculine virtue. After all, as Daniel Pick reminds us, it was felt that “a relative deterioration in the body of the city population” could have “disintegrative effects upon the nation and the empire.”¹⁸ By framing his concerns about urbanization in these terms, Walsingham is drawing upon a number of fin-de-siècle scripts that had begun to equate physical weakness with diseased or degenerate masculinity, but which also used decadent Rome—particularly the Rome of Nero—to designate such masculine deviance as unnatural, criminal, and liable to spread among urban populations like fever.

Earlier in the century, Charles Dickens had described the urban adventures of the young David Copperfield in terms that directly foreshadow those deployed by conservative commentators of the fin de siècle. The young David, eager to act the part of the “young gentleman” and to be “thought … manly,” experiences a number of new sensations on a visit to the London theatre:

Being then in a pleasant frame of mind (from which I infer that poisoning is not always disagreeable in some stages of the process), I resolved to go to the play. It was Covent Garden Theatre that I chose; and there, from the back of a centre box, I saw Julius Caesar and the new Pantomime. To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect. But the mingled reality and mystery of the whole show, the influence upon me of the poetry, the lights, the music, the company, the smooth stupendous changes of glittering and brilliant scenery, were so dazzling, and opened up such illimitable regions of delight, that when I came out into the rainy street, at twelve o’clock at night, I felt as if I had come from the clouds, where I had been leading a romantic life for ages, to a bawling, splashing, link-lighted, umbrella-struggling, hackney-coach-jostling, patten-clinking, muddy, miserable world.¹⁹

This outing is an awakening for David primarily because it constitutes his first encounters with both the ancient Roman world and the amusements of the London metropolis that have not been mediated and superintended by adult male authority figures. Unlike the Rome of the Victorian schoolroom, with its associations of arduous rote learning—hence David’s recollections of “having his ears boxed with the Latin Grammar”²⁰—the Rome of the popular theatre is presented as a dizzying, dreamlike succession of sensory pleasures heightened no doubt by another first—inebriation. Yet David’s transition from the heat and noise of these Roman “regions of delight” to the rain and chill of the city streets outside is a vertiginous one, which leaves him disoriented and feverish for the remainder of the evening. Upon returning to his hotel, David’s “fast beating heart” is attributed to “the play [which] was still running high” in his mind; the images of Rome are twice described as “revolving” in the kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinatory motion of fever dreams. Indeed, when David does sleep, we are told he “dreamed of ancient Rome.”²¹ The episode represents a prefiguration of what Andrew Smith in Victorian Demons (2004) has identified in much later works as the growing use of pathological models and the language of medical and scientific discourse for talking about fin-de-siècle masculinities. Smith argues that the fin de siècle witnessed literary representations of masculinity—often couched in gothic tropes—locked in a two-way dialogue with medical, social and legal constructions of the middle-class male, with each influencing the terms by which the other is understood and expressed. Conservative masculine narratives, codified in these terms, are engineered to serve as defences from any perceived threats to dominant masculine ideology. The episode from Dickens shows that conservative uses of Roman decadence function in much the same way—indeed they are often interchangeable with the vocabulary of fever—and are deployed as part of the same gendered project of tracing social deviance as medical abnormality.

The terms of this Romano-medical metaphor become noticeably intensified in the final decades of the nineteenth century in direct correlation with mounting fears over the “new,” with what Smith calls the “notion of crisis … staged within the dominant masculinist culture.”²² Thus, where David Copperfield’s Roman revels produced a flush of euphoric fever but left no lasting damage in terms of his developing sense of masculine identity, the metropolitan male of the late nineteenth century is assigned a certain culpability by conservative commentators for his role in perpetuating and popularizing notions of aesthetic and Decadent manliness. The body of the metropolitan male becomes a locus of fear, but also a locus of blame as the “fever” of urban, pleasure-seeking manliness comes to be figured as virulent, degenerative disease, whilst the parallel with ancient Rome in discourse concerning the metropolis and its inhabitants becomes increasingly associated with Rome’s most notorious emperor, Nero.

In “London Amusements,” A. Marshall laments the lack of wholesome entertainments in the capital and the “too aesthetical delights [of] the metropolitan music hall” in precisely these terms. For instance, he insists that the “noise” and “coarseness” of the music hall spectacle, supplemented by “beer and porter, pipes, whisky, and brandy,” results in “a dissipation of the head and the heart, and also of the liver and the lungs.”²³ Read metaphorically as organs of conscience, morality and emotion, the inclusion of “head” and “heart” on this list suggests a degeneration of masculinity that is at once physical, mental, moral and social. Its breeding ground is the metropolis, its symptoms manifest as disease in the male body. For Marshall, “aesthetic” pleasure is necessarily a loaded term, implying sexual or moral depravity, inscribed as abnormality or disease in the male body. When describing the aftermath of a man’s “debauch” in the music hall, Marshall writes that “A thick mist of obscurity, relieved only by a headache and a sense of having paid to be brutalized, must be the companions he takes with him to bed.… No one ever got improvement from a music hall—happy they who only got headaches.”²⁴ Such euphemistic descriptions of the music hall entertainments and their side effects as the “paid … companions” of the metropolitan male can be understood in the context of contemporary debates over the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1868 and 1869, the subsequent movements calling for the repeal of this legislation and medical writings on the spread of venereal disease. Marshall’s reference to the “companions” that the theatregoer “takes with him to bed” implies a parallel between the unwholesome environment of the music hall and the social stigma of prostitution. The final observation that the music hall might lead to an affliction far worse than a headache hints at the possibility of contracting—literally or metaphorically—a sexual disease. The aesthetic pleasures of the theatre become sexualized and the theatregoer himself is assigned a portion of social and moral blame for his actions at a time when, as Smith notes: “it was the behaviour of the middle class client, rather than the working-class prostitute, which concerned the medical profession and social reformists alike.”²⁵

The intensification of the medical metaphor from one of fever to one of degenerative disease is paralleled by the increasingly frequent use of decadent Rome—and particularly the Rome of Nero—by anxious commentators. Thus Marshall’s polemic against London’s popular amusements opens with a rallying cry for more wholesome entertainments and an overtly Neronian comparison:

Cannot some one invent a new amusement?… Nero—but every one knows this—offered half his kingdom for a new pleasure; yet, to be sure, his ideas of pleasure were so exceedingly debased that we are glad no one responded to the call. A new pleasure for Nero could only have meant a new iniquity; and iniquities were exhausted under his empire. We live, however, under Christian civilization, not under Roman corruption; and it should not be hard to find a new pleasure of the licit and intellectual kind.²⁶

The acerbic tone of the opening, as well as the persistently negative values assigned to Nero as a sign, are typical of conservative discourse on the new, which insisted on the inevitable progression from decadence to degeneration to death, positioning conventional masculine and national values of “intellect,” “empire” and “Christian civilization” within a positive rhetoric of health and growth. Thus, in his comparison of the ancient Pompeiian theatre with those of nineteenth-century London, Marshall concludes that just as “Music halls are degenerated theatres,” so too are the “plebeian entertainments” of the music hall degenerated forms of “the more muscular features of out-door and manly excitement.”²⁷ The metropolitan male in this formulation is merely a debased form of the Victorian gentleman, the Muscular Christian, or the New Imperialist. According to such hostile codifications of masculinity, the emperor Nero becomes the embodied enemy of more gentlemanly or hardy masculinist identities. Marshall’s reader in 1875 is encouraged to question not the terms of the parallel, but his own place in the binary it represents. He is encouraged to declare for and defend conventional constructions of physically and morally robust manliness, or else to accept the associations of deviance and degeneracy which have been the primary meaning inbuilt into the Neronian connection since antiquity.

The prevailing image of Nero that survives from classical sources—most significantly Tacitus’s Annals and Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars—is one of early promise followed by a swift decline into tyranny, cruelty, and criminality. The emperor’s decadence is presented as both a symptom and a cause of his decline in our ancient sources. Nero’s performances as an actor and musician and his famous recitation of the “Sack of Troy” during the fire of Rome in 64 BC are overshadowed in their infamy only by the murders which are attributed to him. Ancient sources implicate Nero, to varying degrees, in the murders of his stepbrother Britannicus; his mother Agrippina; Seneca, his tutor and advisor; and two of his wives, Octavia and Poppaea.²⁸ These murders are, of course, additional to the systematic persecution of Christians during Nero’s reign and the building of his vast Golden House over the site of the destruction of the fire. It is this Neronian legacy of decadent criminality and criminal decadence that Marshall evokes when he assumes a universal familiarity among his readers (“everybody knows this”) with the history and meaning of the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors. Indeed, with the exception of Decadent writers of the fin de siècle, who took a playful and perverse pleasure in identifying with Nero, there are remarkably few attempts by nineteenth-century writers to reassess conventional meanings of Nero as an emblem of deviant or failed masculinity. Charles Merivale’s History of the Romans Under the Empire (1858) does not call into question the negative associations ascribed to Nero, nor the processes by which those meanings have been transmitted and acquired. Rather, he insists upon the reliability of Tacitus and Suetonius as sources for Nero’s deviance: “With some allowance only for the extravagance of colouring, we must accept in the main the verisimilitude of the picture they have left us of this arch tyrant, the last and most detestable of the Caesarian family.”²⁹ It is a legacy of arch tyranny, Christian persecution, and decadent sensuality which was seized upon time and again by conservative writers of the 1890s, who found in Nero a useful antagonist to their traditional values. Religious literatures of the late nineteenth century, exemplified by the enormously popular toga plays which came to prominence in this period, were especially vehement in placing Nero at the heart of a rhetoric of hostility towards the new, and particularly towards alternative notions of manliness which deviated from traditional understandings of morality as a foundational principle of Victorian masculinity.

The Decadent as a New Nero

The so-called toga play captured the imagination of the British theatregoing public from the 1880s until the almost wholesale transposition of the genre onto film in the early twentieth century, where it would evolve into the iconic classical epics of 1950s cinema. Utilizing tropes from earlier nineteenth-century melodrama, the spectacular elements of classical burlesque, and capitalizing on the growing taste for revivals of ancient drama, the toga play staged Pagan-Christian conflict through plots relating the moral fortitude of virtuous characters facing “persecut[ion] by Roman villains such as Tigellinus and the Emperor Nero … who act on such malign motives or disturbed psychological states as greed, lust, vanity, avarice, envy, ambition, jealousy, megalomania, and sadism.”³⁰ The toga plays were religious in moral content, even, as the contemporary commentator G. W Foote observed, to the point of privileging earnestness and piety over dramatic or literary merit. “All the pagans are wicked people—tyrants, sycophants, intriguers, assassins, drunkards, thieves, and prostitutes. All the Christians are good people—pure, benevolent and merciful,” Foote writes, frustrated with the lack of subtler characterization. His frustrations extend to the audiences of toga drama, who, he quips, “might be called a congregation. It seemed to be the emptyings of the churches and chapels of London. Most of the people … walked as though they were advancing to pews, and took their seats with reverential expectation.”³¹ Codes of audience response served to bolster the religio-moral essence of the toga play, which positioned Nero as an enemy and oppressor.

Early examples of this form of toga play include W. S. Gilbert’s Pygmalion and Galatea (1871) and the 1883 play Claudian, whilst turn-of-the-century adaptations of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur and Henry Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis illustrate the scale and spectacle of the genre and mark the zenith of its popularity. The appetite of the British public for this spectacular and morally prescriptive drama was whetted in the intervening years by plays such as Wilson Barrett’s The Sign of the Cross, which toured the North of England in 1895 and opened in London in 1896.³² Barrett’s treatment of plot and character borrows heavily from Quo Vadis in this tale of Marcus Superbus, a Roman prefect in the time of Nero and a favourite among the women of the court. Despite rejecting the suggestion of marriage on the grounds that he “hate[s] the tedious formalities of divorce,”³³ Marcus falls in love with the Christian girl Mercia, converting to the Christian faith in order to become spiritually wed to her, and faces death in the arena rather than return to the orgiastic decadence of Nero’s court and the manipulative advances of the lady Berenis and the Empress Poppaea.

Though Barrett’s Nero does not appear onstage until the third act, the audience is continually reminded of the Emperor’s constant malevolent presence in the lives of the Roman people through a series of cues encoded in the language, structure and staging of the first act. Most important, a statue of Nero is positioned onstage during the opening street scene, appearing to oversee the suffering for which he is responsible. This brutality includes physical violence towards captive Christians by the Roman slaver Servilius, who insists that capturing Christians “pays well and is good sport too”³⁴ under the current regime, where a captured Christian can fetch up to 200 sesterces. The systematic persecution of Christians is not just a religious persecution, but also a form of economic tyranny exercised by the emperor over the citizenry, designed to perpetuate the political hegemonies and extravagant lifestyles of Nero and his court. The Christians in this early scene become a commodity and brutality a trade under such an emperor, who dines at banquets costing upwards of four million sesterces, yet exploits the poverty of his own people, turning them into agents of surveillance and repression, and corrupting in them any instincts or virtues which a Victorian audience might accept as conventionally manly or virtuous.

Nero’s first words in the play are reported, rather than delivered in person, and the expectation they establish is one of viciousness and paranoia:

To my well-beloved servant, Marcus Superbus, greeting. I learn that the accursed sect of the Christians, so far from being exterminated, is increasing, and that they plot together to destroy my throne and life. They will not bow down to me nor call me king nor pay tribute unto me. They are murderers and fanatics, venomous and bloodthirsty. Arrest all suspects—put them to the torture until they confess—spare neither man, woman nor child. If you prove any guilty, slay instantly those who are dangerous. The others I will send to the beasts in the arena. Show mercy to none. On thee, Marcus my prefect, be the whole responsibility to purge Rome of these pests. Caesar, Emperor.³⁵

The excessive strength of this rhetoric, the fixation on violence and criminality, and the framing metaphor of “extermination” of the Christian “pest,” harness all the conventionally negative aspects of Nero’s legacy and couch them in the language of Philistine condemnations of decadent or nonconventional masculinities.³⁶ When the emperor does appear, however, he is utterly unmanly, and his failed masculinity takes the dual form firstly of infantilization at the hands of his wife Poppaea, who “moves and speaks with great authority,” while Nero stammers and defers to her commands; and, secondly, of effeminacy. Surrounded by a retinue of heralds and guards in exotic leopard skins, languishing in ornate sets, and clad himself in “soft, cream-coloured silk, richly embroidered with gold, scarcely reaching to the knee,” Nero becomes an unsettling variant of the oriental “beauty” known from the fictions of Haggard, or from contemporary representations of Cleopatra which abounded after Britain’s annexation of Egypt in 1882. That this kind of display amounts to a loss or failure of manliness is highlighted by Nero’s hanging “on the necks of two feminine-looking boys,” who “mime and smirk with all the airs and graces of girlhood.”³⁷ In the Victorian toga play, then, Nero becomes a master sign for any act of speech, thought or conduct which must be rejected according to its moralising agenda, and it is through Nero that Barrett emphasises the perceived connections being drawn in conservative discourse between decadence, immorality and failed masculinity.

The Reverend F. W. Farrar affirms this link in no uncertain terms in a preface to his ancient Roman novel Darkness and Dawn; or Scenes in the Days of Nero, An Historic Tale (1891): “I have endeavoured to choose a title for this book which shall truly describe its contents. The ‘Darkness’ of which I speak is the darkness of a decadent Paganism; the ‘Dawn’ is the dawn of Christianity.”³⁸ By plotting “good” and “bad” in these terms, Farrar reinforces the same binary oppositions of light/dark, growth/decay, health/disease, virtue/criminality and Christian/Pagan that characterised Marshall’s “London Amusements,” and which underpin larger conservative discourses on the new and their implications for gender ideals at the fin de siècle. Indeed, Farrar succeeds in incorporating several of these sets of binary opposites into a single passage describing the murder of Britannicus: “[Nero] decided that the deed should be done at some private meal, and at the hands of one of the boy’s tutors, who never thought of shrinking from the infamy. In that midnight and decadence of a dying Paganism the crime of ordinary murder was too cheap to excite remorse.”³⁹ It is important to note that it is not a simplistic Christian/pagan division that is driving Farrar’s construction of moral manliness. Pagan characters can possess qualities indicative of masculine virtue. As one contemporary reviewer noted, the use of these pairs of opposites as axes of ideal or failed masculinity means that there is scope in the novel for the reader to “set off against the Neronian orgies the better side of Paganism, in the frugal simplicity of the household of Vespasian, the gentleness, humanity and genuine love of goodness … of Seneca … Epictetus, Thrasea, and Soranus.”⁴⁰ These characters, despite their Pagan faith or service to the Neronian regime, are redeemed to a degree by qualities indicative of masculine virtue according to nineteenth-century ideologies. This explains why many Victorian writers found in the austerity and self-restraint of Roman Stoicism a useful halfway house for designating “good”—that is, potentially Christian traits.

Nero’s degeneracy lies in his wilful rejection of the advice and good examples of characters like Seneca and Octavia, and his determination to “give himself up, heart and soul, to selfish aestheticism and voluptuous delight.”⁴¹ In a novel that deals with the persecution of Christians under Nero, “Darkness,” written here as “midnight,” can signify Decadence almost as directly as it signifies pagan oppression. Nero is thereby doubly monstrous both, to use Farrar’s words, as “Emperor and Aesthete.” To this end, there are few descriptions of Nero’s crimes in the novel where aestheticism and Decadence are not directly cited either as symptoms or causes of the problem. A particularly chilling example of this comes after the murder of Agrippina, when Nero goes to view his mother’s body: “The colour fled from his cheeks; but after a moment or two he grew bolder. The matricide was still an aesthete. ‘I did not know,’ he said, ‘that I had so beautiful a mother.’”⁴² The episode is an expansion of Tacitus’s Annals 14.9 and in it Farrar’s mention of Nero’s blanching when confronted with his mother’s corpse—the physical evidence of his crimes—suggests a partial, or at least potential recognition by the emperor of the magnitude of his wrongdoing. It is in many ways a natural revulsion to the altogether unnatural crime of matricide, as well as the natural grief of a son for a deceased parent. Yet these “natural” responses are quickly overridden by aesthetic impulses, as Nero begins to perceive the corpse as an art object, whose meaning and values can be distinguished and disassociated from the crimes it represents. It is a shift in the meaning of Agrippina’s corpse which echoes the “shift from physical touch to sight”⁴³ which Elizabeth Bronfen has identified as typical of Victorian literary representations of the relationship between the male possessor/viewer and the body of the female corpse as an object of erotic desire. Understood in this context, the criminality of the original act of matricide pales in comparison to the far more unsettling subtexts of necrophilia and incest which accompany Nero’s aestheticism. It is a subtext that Farrar invites the reader to notice in the “Preface” when he insists that “All who know thoroughly the real features of that Pagan darkness … will see that scarcely even by the most distant allusion have I referred to some of the worst features in the life of that day.⁴⁴

Farrar relies on the unutterability of Nero’s supposed crimes to heighten the severity of the insinuation, and to strengthen the suggested link between aestheticism and the perverse. Furthermore, any failure on the reader’s part to reject and condemn Nero amounts to complicity or tolerance of such criminality. Just like the language of disease, the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors becomes a cipher in a hostile gender discourse which insists upon the equation of aestheticism with deviance, degeneration and the perverse. Thus Farrar’s Nero, whilst he is never openly charged with crimes of incest and necrophilia in the novel, may as well, according to such hostile codifications, be guilty of both.

The culmination of Neronian comparisons and pathological models to vilify the aesthete and the Decadent in fin-de-siècle culture comes with Max Nordau’s seminal work on Degeneration in 1891. Building on Darwinian models and theories of atavism, Nordau’s work argued that, under particular conditions—most notably the rapid urbanization of Europe’s capital cities—and without due vigilance from society at large, Western races and civilizations faced the possibility of decay and decline both of the individual and society. Nowhere is Nordau more scathing in his condemnation of Decadence, presented as both a symptom and a cause of degeneration, than in his descriptions of the French Decadent writer Charles Baudelaire. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the contentious issue here is the metropolis and, specifically, Nordau’s outrage at Baudelaire’s description of Paris as a city populated with “useless” people, whose uselessness is rooted in their being “wholly inaccessible to literary pleasures”:

If this simpleton had the power, he would no doubt wish to pursue his idea to the end and sweep the “useless” out of the ranks of the living, as Nero put to death those who did not applaud his acting in the theatre. Can the monstrous ego-mania of one demented be more audaciously expressed than in this remark of Baudelaire’s?⁴⁵

Nordau’s styling of Baudelaire as simultaneously a demented simpleton and a modern-day Nero demonstrates the extent to which Roman decadence and pathology had become interwoven. That these terms can function interchangeably, but that their accepted meaning is always a pejorative one when describing masculinity had become the default position of conservative writers hostile to aestheticism and decadence. After all, to describe a set of masculine traits or values in the language of disease is to imply abnormality and the departure, wilful or otherwise, from a “normal” state of health and vigour. Such discourse offers no alternative model of masculinity except as a failed or perverse departure from the masculine norm. By offering a diagnosis of Decadence as physical, mental and social disease, Nordau also reinforces the authority of the diagnoser of this condition. In fact, the real cause of Nordau’s anger here is not so much Baudelaire’s decadence and its perceived deviation from conventional notions of manliness, as his use of the term “useless” to denigrate those same conservative ideologies. Nordau refutes the cultural authority of the “Decadents and Esthetes”⁴⁶ to designate usefulness in fin-de-siècle culture and to challenge the meaning of the narratives and signifiers through which masculinity is constructed and inscribed. Baudelaire’s statement is therefore an unauthorized utterance which must be invalidated—by means of the Neronian parallel and pathologized language—as the voice of an unsound or underdeveloped subjectivity.

What is even more interesting about Nordau’s Degeneration, however, is that those same sanitary and Roman metaphors become increasingly literal. Later in the text, Nordau describes Baudelaire as a kind of demonic “Master” of a host of degenerate disciples who have each inherited certain “symptoms” of their creator’s condition, including “his predilection for disease, death and putrefaction (necrophilia)” and “his sexual aberrations and lasciviousness.”⁴⁷ Decadence is tantamount here to a disease of the body and mind which is not a merely metaphorical condition represented by Nero, but is also a literal disease with which Nero himself, like Baudelaire and his disciples, was afflicted. The aesthete and the Decadent are not merely Nero-like in their deviance, according to Nordau, but uncanny reincarnations of Nero himself. A further consequence of this more literal rendering of masculine deviance is that, as a disease both masculine and social, decadence is a contagious problem, communicable between men, not least in the densely populated spaces of the metropolis which so preoccupied late-Victorian writers on both sides of the decadence debate.

The male body becomes a metonym for civilization in a hostile discourse whereby the only sanctioned narrative of aestheticist and Decadent masculinity is a downward trajectory, progressing inevitably from urban decadence, to degeneration, to death. Tracing the interconnectedness of the Neronian parallel and the language of pathology demonstrates that this very conservative narrative is at its core Gibbonian, charting the decline and fall not just of the individual male, but also of civilization as a whole. The dominant position of ancient Rome in New Imperialist discourse, where it was used to figure the acquisitive and physically robust manliness of the New Imperialist, runs alongside an equivalent, condemnatory reception of the decadent Roman past. In fin-de-siècle codifications of masculinity, Rome stands at the heart of the anxious, even antagonistic, relationship between the New Imperialist and the urban male.