Rome Burns — Nero: Artist on the Throne, Rome in Flames

After his mother’s death no one restrains Nero. He has dreamed of the stage since childhood, so he begins with the games “of the youth,” which anyone may enter, and performs in them himself with the kithara. Tacitus notes that Burrus stands beside him looking sad, and applauds all the same.

In AD 62 Burrus dies. Tacitus does not know whether he died of illness or of poison. What is known is that Rome mourns him, and command of the Guard passes to two new prefects: Faenius Rufus, popular with the people, and Tigellinus, a man without scruples who knows every whim of the emperor and has greater influence with him. Seneca asks to retire and offers to give up his fortune. Nero embraces and kisses him, but refuses. The philosopher fades into the shadows. The last voice of reason is silenced.

That same year Nero divorces Octavia, Claudius’s daughter, and marries Poppaea. Romans take to the streets, carry images of Octavia on their shoulders, and pull down statues of Poppaea. Nero answers with troops. Octavia, not yet twenty, is sent to an island, and after a few days receives an order to die. Tacitus records with icy calm that for this the Senate voted thanksgiving offerings.

Now nothing stands between the emperor and his fantasies. July AD 64. On the nineteenth of the month a fire breaks out in the shops by the Circus Maximus. The wind spreads it through the narrow, crooked lanes of old Rome, where there are no walls able to stop it. The crowd flees blindly, trampling its own loved ones. And where is the emperor? In Antium, at his seaside residence. Now it is your turn.

Nero returned when the fire approached his own house. Tacitus admits that afterward he did what he could. He opened the Campus Martius, Agrippa’s buildings, and his own gardens to the homeless, ordered temporary shelters built, brought grain from Ostia and the surrounding towns, and cut its price to three sesterces a measure. This was popular. And it achieved nothing, because a rumor was making its way through the city.

Who started the fire? Tacitus writes honestly: it is not known, the authors give both versions, accident or the emperor’s design. Suetonius has no doubts: Nero had the city set on fire because the crooked lanes disgusted him, and from the tower of Maecenas he watched the fire, delighting in “the beauty of the flames,” and sang “The Capture of Ilium” in stage costume. Dio adds that he sang from the roof of the palace. Tacitus mentions only a rumor: that at the moment of the fire the emperor went onto a private stage and sang of the fall of Troy.

Let’s check this the way a historian would. Tacitus and Suetonius wrote half a century after the fire, Dio a century and a half. Tacitus, closest to the facts, repeats the gossip and does not vouch for it. Modern scholarship hesitates: some think the fire started by accident, others do not rule out arson, and scholars treat the image of the singing emperor as a literary motif that recurs with great fires. And the fiddle? Many people see it in their mind’s eye. True or myth?

After the fire Nero does what rulers do: he builds. On the ashes rises the Golden House (Domus Aurea), a residence stretching from the Palatine to the Esquiline, with a lake in the middle, a giant statue of the emperor, and a dining hall that revolves day and night like the sky. When he opens it, he says that at last he is beginning to live like a human being. Suetonius quotes this without comment. Rome gets wider streets and building regulations: the lower parts of houses of stone, separate walls instead of shared ones.

And the guilty must be found. Tacitus writes that to silence the rumors Nero singles out a scapegoat: the Christians, a group disliked by the people. He condemns them publicly, in the gardens and the circus. Even Tacitus, who does not like them, records that it aroused pity, because they were dying not for the good of the state but to satisfy the cruelty of one man.

Rome will rebuild. Trust in the emperor will not. In Rome the whispering about a successor begins, and an emperor who has killed his mother and his wife does not like whispers.