Chilperic I

Gregory of Tours, a near-contemporary and no admirer of his, is the principal source and portrays Chilperic in a distinctly hostile light, memorably dubbing him a 'Nero and Herod of our time' — a characterization modern historians such as Ian Wood and Guy Halsall read critically rather than at face value, while still treating the broad outline of his reign and his 584 assassination (by an unidentified killer) as solid. His genuine literary interests, including experiments with new Latin letters, are a real, well-documented, and often under-used aspect of his character worth setting against Gregory's uniformly hostile 'tyrant' portrait.