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This is what I find so fascinating about Nero. But, as Wilde was well aware, ten years before his visit to the Parisian barber, the famous French intellectual, Ernest Renan (whose works Wilde knew and admired), had resurrected a far more sinister idea about Nero that had been prevalent amongst early Christians of late antiquity, that ‘the name for Nero has been found Nero shall be the Anti Christ.’

It was Nero who trampled on the boundaries of acceptable Roman elite male behaviour when he acted in public on stage, and Nero who built himself a Golden House from the ruins of a fire-ravaged Rome. Wilde imitated Nero to confirm his own rebellious spirit to his friends and acquaintances, and what better way to achieve this than by evoking one of Rome’s most rebellious emperors. Looking for a way to outrage bourgeoise society, he chose a bust of Nero from the Louvre to serve as the model for his new look. In the Spring of 1883, Oscar Wilde went to Paris to get his hair cut.