Nero

THE BLOODY POET--Desider Kostolanyi--Macy-Masius ($2.50). In a parade of purple, the emperors of Rome go through the pages of old histories with the sound of loud horns. In the annals of Tacitus and those of medieval chroniclers, these men are present; their frail lusts and meagre rascality grown enormous through the grandeur of the empire which they destroyed. In writing about them, it is hard to make them merely human; some aura of the supernatural clings to the absurd magnificence of their palaces and their crimes. Now the wildest of them all, Nero, the Bloody Poet, is imagined not by a historian but by a novelist. Author Kostolanyi, a Hungarian who writes in German, well translated by Clifton P. Fadiman, makes him a weak man, a pathetic youth unable to learn how to live, "a bad poet and a bad ruler." Whether this is what Nero was in truth, no man can say. But his character, so presented, has the truth of fiction, the illusion of reality. The book reaches for the atmosphere of imperial Rome and achieves it, presenting as well the story of a man, great by accident, and, by the necessity of humanity, both absurd and tragic.