Volume 286, Issue 3

Nero remains an enigma. The Roman Emperor (54–68 AD) who murdered his mother, who is said to have incinerated Rome, who was the first to widely persecute Christians, who appeared in public as charioteer, poet and stage actor, and who finally, in solitude, had to take his own life, still causes considerable problems to academic research. This paper opens up a new approach towards this princeps. Based on his journey to Greece in the year 66/67, the sources about Nero's acts are evaluated in relation to the limiting factors and freedom of action available to a princeps of the early Roman Empire. Allusions from antique historiography to Nero's unique self-image as an artist – often the object of ridicule, but nevertheless affirmed through archaeological and numismatic evidence – are consistently taken into consideration and thought through. As a result, a sovereign is revealed who defined himself less as a princeps than as an artist, who aspired to a mythical quality of this role and only did not reach his goal because he was not, at the end of his rule, able to cope with the increasing momentum of the developments around him.

This study suggests looking at small states as a special form of early modern statehood which so far has not been at the centre of academic research. Early modern small states were characterized by their small territories, their limited natural resources, and their reduced sovereignty. The estates of the German empire were equipped with “Landeshoheit” (territorial sovereignty) only and were subject to the emperor and the empire. Likewise the Italian small states were tied into the imperial or papal feudal systems. Proceeding from these basic observations, this article examines the relationship between small and large states, the networks and differentiations between the small states and comments upon domestic politics. Thus, it discusses the possibility to reach a kind of “microhistoire totale” by considering the political, social and cultural dimensions of individual case studies – a new, intensified and comparative approach to the history of early modern European statehood.

In a critical analysis of T. H. Marshall's classic lecture “Citizenship and Social Class”, this article argues that the precise limits of the body of citizens, to which Marshall accorded little space in 1949, are well worth detailed consideration. An empirical investigation of which groups profited from citizenship rights, and of the question which institutions determined inclusion or exclusion promises new insights into the importance of nation states as opposed to, for instance, local administration in this regard. This could also lead to a more precise definition of the term citizenship, which plays a central role in academic debate but has become fuzzy, in part because of blind spots in Marshall's perspective.