Mary Stocks, scholar, political activist, writer and journalist, published a play in 1933, provocatively titled Hail Nero! A Reinterpretation of History in Three Acts. It presents the notorious emperor (who reigned AD 54 to 68) as a figure driven by his concern for social justice and women’s rights. Stocks’ Nero sets up a resort at Antium near Rome for the common people, tries to combat disease in the slums and champions the female scientist Locusta, a woman whom others wrongly thought was a prolific poisoner. The published version of the play included a preface written by Mary’s husband John, then Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester, which explained the reasons for writing such a story about an emperor traditionally viewed as a murderer, arsonist and political tyrant:

In those days [antiquity] the historical conscience and the law of libel were both young and weak ... it is not beyond the resources of modern scholarship to restore even Nero to respectable company … The author of this drama uses the privileges of the imagination to carry the restoration a stage further.

While Mary Stocks may have taken full advantage of dramatic licence in her play, her instincts were correct in terms of second-guessing prevailing narratives about complex and distant historical figures. In recent decades, scholars have been doing just that.