This article examines a pair of anecdotes in the works of Suetonius and Cassius Dio, describing Nero's passionate late-career interest in the instrument known as the hydraulis or water-organ. The first half of the article contextualizes the water-organ episode in light of both the history of the instrument's reputation and the wider characterization of Nero in the literary sources. The rest of the article uses the episode to shed light on Nero's self-representation as princeps, focussing on the significance of the water-organ as both a musical instrument and a technological marvel. On the one hand, the organ's popularity with Roman audiences of the Early Imperial period made it a politically strategic choice for a music-loving emperor with strong populist leanings. On the other hand, the association of the organ with the intellectual world of Hellenistic Alexandria appealed to a certain group of Roman elites (including Nero himself), who shared a keen interest in technological innovation and technical knowledge more broadly. In the end, however, Nero's experiments with the water-organ were cleverly trivialized by hostile writers and redeployed as an illustration of the emperor's most appalling vices.

Because ‘doing business’ significantly contributes to altering the Earth's atmosphere and depleting limited natural resources, business education should be re-oriented so that global sustainability is the core and economic sustainability a subset. The neo-Aristotelian foundation of this paper proposes eudaimonia (human flourishing) as a teleology, and divides human activity, particularly learning into technē (practical utilitarian skills) and phronesis (experience, insight, and intuition). By developing intellectual, affective, and moral virtues, business students can attain a meta-virtue of phronesis, which provides a potential capacity to deal with uncertainty, mutability, and duality of human life and development. The principles of social practice wisdom provide the basis of a proposed sustainability curriculum.