The Kingdom of the Wicked (2010)
“I have been reading in a rather rare book which appeared during the imperiate of Galba, brief and perhaps apocryphal, its title A Dialogue Between the Emperor Nero and His Friend Gaius Petronius. Petronius you will know from his scurrilous but witty Satyricon, which I sometimes think to be a mockery of Luke's 'Pauliad', but this dialogue, more of a monologue, for Nero interjects only phrases of wonder or agreement, has been recognized as a dangerous work and copies have probably been privily bu...rnt by censorial decree. It presents a philosophy which I have already made the young Nero adumbrate in a discussion with Seneca. This philosophy is said to have been derived from Gaius Petronius's youthful indoctrinations by a poet exiled for blatant sodomy in the unequivocally heterosexual Claudius's reign, his real name unknown but his sobriquet Selvaticus. Briefly, the philosophy states that everything must bow down to beauty, and that the artist is above the regular moral concerns of ordinary humanity.MoreLess
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