For Nero, our main source is Suetonius. Let's see how much like the gospels his "biographies" are:
"The biographer, however, does present interesting perspectives on aspects of ruler cult, notably on the propriety of deifying women and of requiring a witness of divine ascension, and the reality of the godhead of Divus Augustus, despite also presenting much that is conventional for a Roman of his status, for example his treatment of divine honours received during an emperor’s life. Although in this article I will concentrate on Suetonius’ portrayal of Augustus, in connection with whom the most striking of Suetonius’ views are expressed, it is necessary to range more widely in order to determine how well Augustus fits into the broader framework of Suetonius’ views on a religious phenomenon that is one of the most distinctive features of Roman religion of the early empire."
From Wardle's "Suetonius on Augustus as God and man"
Classical Quarterly 62(1)
I went over the treatment of historicity in Homer
here, and will again below, but let's look at a much better comparison: Socrates. If you look in the collection
Mémoires de literature tires de l’Academie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres depuis l’anness 1761 jusque et compis l’année 1763, you'll find a paper by M. L'Abbé Garnier titled “Caractére de la Philosophie de Socrate.”. The lecture (published by the academy it was for) was given in 1761. It concerns something that had become problematic: who was the historical Socrates? Before Garnier, Fréret gave a lecture himself read to the same academy on the same issue in 1736. Only two years later Dresig's De Socrate iuste damnato came out and addressed the same issue (who was Socrates?). 4 years after that, the first part of J. J. Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophiae was published. And these are just some of most important early works, not all of the 18th century scholarship on the historical Socrates.
The equivalent to the "quest for the historical Jesus" is known as "the Socratic problem". Schleiermacher, Hegel, Schweitzer, Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Burnett, and hundreds of others whose work is now known only to comparatively few specialists have produced a mass of scholarship dating back centuries on whether (and who) this "historical" Socrates was.
The relevant comparisons don't stop at a name for a particular historical inquiry. Schweitzer, in his famous
von Reimarus zu Wrede, states we have more evidence for Jesus than for anybody in antiquity, but he singles out Socrates as an example: “Für Sokrates liegt die Sache viel ungünstiger: er ist uns von Schriftstellern geschildert, wobei der Schriftsteller selbst schöpferisch war.” Why are we in such a better position when it comes to Jesus? Schweitzer's use of "Schriftsteller", literary authors rather than historians, is deliberate. He was neither the first nor the last to say that all we have of Socrates are literary depictions.
Thanks especially to those like Gigon and Dupréel, it isn't just a matter of which sources for Socrates is more reliable because all belonged to a specific type of fiction, not history. Dupréel is a perfect example of this view. For him, we have only artistic literature that is both artful and complicated (“une composition très travaillée”
. Like Homer’s heroes, Socrates was just another legend, a philosophical version of Achilles. If there was history anywhere were weren’t going to find it: “Le très authentique personnage du nom de Socrate ne fut ni l'homme ni le penseur qu'en a fait la légende.”
Aristotle, in his discussion of poetry, refers to τούς Σωκρατικούς λόγους, a “genre” of Socratic dialogues. Like the gospels, many modern scholars have argued that the logoi Sōkratikoi belong at least in many ways to a specific genre. Diogenes Laertius, writing centuries later after Socrates, claims that a certain Simon the Shoe-maker invented the genre, and even gives us an origin story: ἐρχομένου Σωκράτους ἐπὶ τὸἐργαστήριον καὶ διαλεγομένου τινά, ὧν ἐμνημόνευεν ὑποσημειώσεις ἐποιεῖτο [“Whenever Socrates came into his workshop and they discussed something, he would remember these talks and would take notes”].
Thus, the idea that all we have are on Socrates is a genre of fiction was around long before Schweitzer. And it continues today for a few scholars.
More importantly, the scholars in 19th century historical Jesus studies are often also scholars in 19th century historical Socrates studies. F. C. Bauer's Das Christliche des Platonismus (1837) has plenty of comparable works, but most authors didn't combine a study of Jesus and of Socrates to that extent. More common was the numerous references to Socrates in a founder of mythicism David Strauß.
But the above just shows that historians can be critical. What we need is to see whether or not they are being critical when it comes to Jesus, or whether they are more credulous in general than with Jesus (or Socrates, for that matter). For that, we turn to what everybody agrees is myth: the Homeric epic
The Iliad.
Latacz's final section of
Troia und Homer: Die Lösung eines uralten Rätsels opens with a reference to a chapter from Bryce's
The Kingdom of the Hittites. Trevor Bryce is a leading scholar hear, and Latacz agrees with his conclusion Basically, they argue that given recent findings and the application of the historical-critical method there is no doubt as to the historicity of the legend of the Trojan war.
Latacz concurs, and says of the Iliad's historicity that 20 years of research has increased our confidence in the veracity of the Homeric myth thanks to scholarship in multiple disciplines. He states (to be specific and to translate) that "Homer should be taken quite seriously" as a historical source and that the evidence for treating Homer's Iliad as a historical is "nearly [or almost] overwhelming".
There are more historians who believe we can use the Iliad as a reliable source than there are historians who buy into the Jesus mythicists bunk:
"It can no longer be doubted, when one surveys the state of our knowledge today, that there really was an actual historical Trojan War...The internal evidence of the Iliad itself . . . is sufficient, even without the testimony of archaeology, to demonstrate not only that the tradition of the expedition against Troy must have a basis of historical fact, but furthermore that a good many of the individual heroes . . . were drawn from real personalities"
Raaflaub, K. A. (1998). Homer, the Trojan War, and history.
The Classical World, 386-403.
For Caesar, we have documents purporting to be written by him; plenty of epigraphic, numismatic, and similar archaeological-like evidence, and several independent accounts. However, we have the same kind of evidence for Zeus, the historical sources for Caesar are riddled with myth and often are quite late, and we have about as many ancient forgeries (e.g., pseudepigrapha) as we do actual texts written by the purported author. However, while the actual manuscripts that attest to some original work by Caesar or some other ancient author date from the middle ages and are we have only a handful we know have been corrupted, there is no figure from antiquity for whom exists more textual critical attestation than there is for Jesus. Instead of a few dozen middle age or early modern manuscripts, we have thousands and thousands of manuscript witnesses to the NT (not including translations). One could easily argue that, given what we know is true of the ways in which texts are corrupted, falsely claimed to be written by famous individuals (Socrates, Euripides, Paul, James, Hippocrates, etc.), and are unreliable even when genuine and written by ancient historians, that Caesar is no more historical than Romulus or Achilles.
Granted, such a conclusion is moronic. We have plenty of evidence that Caesar existed and every scholar whose field is remotely relevant here would conclude Caesar was historical. The same, though, is true for Jesus. Those who question this are those who aren't aware of the nature of historical evidence in general, but rather except as given that figures like Pythagoras, Socrates, the Caesars, Galen, etc., are historical because they don't care and don't bother to apply the same level of skepticism for these figures that they do for Jesus. In fact, the almost invariably have no idea what our sources for virtually all figures from antiquity are (and even if they know that we have some documents that name some figure or are supposed to have been written by one, they don't know how the authenticity and accuracy of such sources is determined, still less how many inauthentic sources of the same sort we have).
And like you said, it is interesting.
