Researching the emperor Nero's amphitheatre (more on this soon), I searched through the two more recent books on Nero which I own.
Again, I was struck by the brilliance of Edward Champlin’s Nero (2006 paperback edition), which is at heart, or so I think, a psychobiography. Here is a Bryn Mawr Review.
The other one is Miriam Griffin’s Nero: The End of a Dynasty, revised edition 1996, of which she writes: “This study is intended to be a hybrid, biographical in its concentration on the Emperor's personality and problems, historical in its analysis of his fall in terms of the interaction of that personality with the political system. Nero's reign is here examined from two standpoints: first, his own inclinations and the way his expression of them was affected by his particular circumstances and the advice of others; then the pressures inherent in the Principate, pressures which were bound to condition any ruler's conduct even if he was not continuously aware of them.”
