Who Really Burned Rome?
The image of Nero 'fiddling while Rome burns' is a resilient one in the collective consciousness, but is it true?
At the time of writing, over ten days have elapsed since devastating fires erupted across the metropolitan area of Los Angeles. It is a disaster in which sorrow at the extraordinary loss has been matched only by anger at both the inadequate preparation of the authorities and, chillingly, the growing evidence that arson has played a major role in the scale of the tragedy.
Fire, of course, has been a peril to human settlement, from rural farmsteads to capital cities, since time immemorial. The burgeoning scandal that surrounds Los Angeles, however, is reminiscent of another catastrophe in the annals of history. Few events, after all, have commanded the infamy of the great conflagration that struck the city of Rome in the summer of AD 64, a little under a century after the birth of the Empire.
So absolute was the destruction, and so powerful the narrative that surrounded it, that the image of Nero, the then reigning emperor, apparently ‘fiddling while Rome burned’, has been a defining image of the Imperial Era ever since.
But how far has the popular perception of what occurred strayed from what we actually know, and how did Rome recover from the near total loss of her capital city?
The Problem of Power
It has long been fashionable to dismiss the imperatores of Rome as decadent and despotic. Despite nearly a hundred men succeeding Augustus as ruler of the Roman Empire prior to its fall in the West, the competence and at times visionary brilliance of many of them seldom pierces the veil cast by the salacious stories that surround a carefully picked few — namely Caligula and, of course, Nero.
Quite apart from the severe distortion of history this entails, the problem is the unfortunate nature of power that this presentation has so effectively masked. Those emperors who simply ‘got on with the job’ arouse the indifference of history. Those who successfully pursued aggressive policy abroad without rocking the boat at home are remembered as among the greatest, as Trajan. Those who appeased the senatorial class at the expense of the people could afford to be otherwise incompetent and still be remembered as ‘good emperors’, as Nerva.
Those among the Caesars however who yearned for and sought the approval of the people above all else, and were prepared to challenge the oligarchic classes openly, invariably faced a violent end and the condemnation of history. The Emperor Domitian is the prime example of this — though so too, in a different way, was Nero.
Nero
If we sustain that Nero was, as is commonly believed, a figure of cartoonish evil, then we encounter a complication. How then, does one explain the popularity of this emperor long after his death?
Indeed by many accounts, what endured went far beyond popularity, but quasi-religious reverence:
“Yet there were some who for a long time decorated his tomb with spring and summer flowers, and now produced his statues on the rostra in the fringed toga, and now his edicts, as if he were still alive and would shortly return and deal destruction to his enemies”
Suetonius, Life of Nero, 57.1
Even three hundred years after the emperor’s death, Saint Augustine of Hippo lamented the persistence of this Messianic belief:
“And hence some suppose that he shall rise again and be Antichrist. Others, again, suppose that he is not even dead, but that he was concealed that he might be supposed to have been killed, and that he now lives in concealment in the vigour of that same age which he had reached when he was believed to have perished, and will live until he is revealed in his own time and restored to his kingdom”
Saint Augustine of Hippo, City of God, XX.19
Archaeological evidence too, attests to the continuing popularity of Nero even at the twilight of the empire in the West, when contorniates, a form of celebratory medallion bearing an emperor’s image, were frequently exchanged as gifts in the city in the 4th and 5th centuries. Incredibly, the popularity of Nero as a choice of subject appears to have been rivalled only by that of Trajan, the optimus princeps (‘best of emperors') himself.
Clearly, the reality of the Emperor Nero was rather more complex than the cartoon of popular culture. The narrative of the Great Fire of Rome, indeed, forms something of the front line in this war of memory.
Disaster in Rome
The Rome of the 1st century AD was no stranger to urban fires. By the reign of Nero, the Eternal City was a hybrid of grand fora and temples interspersed by districts that were the result of steady and organic growth rather than urban planning. Cramped and rickety dwellings from the Republican era, built of highly flammable materials, were ubiquitous well into Julio-Claudian Rome.
The tremendous risk this situation represented was only partially mitigated by the establishment, by the Emperor Augustus, of the Western world’s first professional fire brigade, manned by the vigiles, in AD 6. Fires continued to break out, but were generally contained to single districts. Containment, however, would fail absolutely in AD 64.
Naturally, given the intense controversy surrounding the circumstances in which this terrible disaster began, how the Great Fire of Rome started is everything. What happened during the fire and afterwards, however, can assist in understanding it.
The epicentre of the fire is revealed by the Annals of the historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus:
“It took its rise in the part of the Circus touching the Palatine and Caelian Hills; where, among the shops packed with inflammable goods, the conflagration broke out, gathered strength in the same moment, and, impelled by the wind, swept the full length of the Circus: for there were neither mansions screened by boundary walls, nor temples surrounded by stone enclosures, nor obstructions of any description, to bar its progress”
Tacitus, Annals, 15.38
Taken in isolation, there is little that is inherently suspicious about this, as the area of Rome in question was prone to fire. In AD 36, the Aventine Hill was ravaged by a conflagration that emanated from the southern side of the Circus Maximus. Nine years earlier, the Caelian, a somewhat rustic part of Rome today but densely populated during the reign of Tiberius, had also burned with unusual vigour.
Allegations of foul play, however, would soon proliferate.
Arson in Rome?
Two of the three main sources on the fire, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus and Cassio Dio, accuse the emperor of orchestrating the entire disaster. Suetonius begins his account thus:
“For under cover of displeasure at the ugliness of the old buildings and the narrow, crooked streets, he set fire to the city so openly that several ex-consuls did not venture to lay hands on his chamberlains although they caught them on their estates with tow and fire-brands, while some granaries near the Golden House, whose room he particularly desired, were demolished by engines of war and then set on fire, because their walls were of stone.”
Suetonius, Life of Nero, 38.1
To this most extraordinary allegation, the author adds the fateful anecdote that would endure for millennia:
“Viewing the conflagration from the tower of Maecenas and exulting, as he said, in "the beauty of the flames," he sang the whole of the "Sack of Ilium," in his regular stage costume.”
Suetonius, Life of Nero, 38.2
Cassius Dio, writing a century later, repeats this story almost verbatim:
“While the whole population was in this state of mind and many, crazed by the disaster, were leaping into the very flames, Nero ascended to the roof of the palace, from which there was the best general view of the greater part of the conflagration, and assuming the lyre-player's garb, he sang the "Capture of Troy," as he styled the song himself, though to the enemies of the spectators it was the Capture of Rome”
Cassius Dio, Roman History, 62.18
Broader examination, however, casts doubt on this narrative, as a curious break in the consensus emerges. Neither Cassius Dio nor Suetonius were alive at the time of the Great Fire of Rome. Only one of the three principal surviving sources had living memory of the disaster — Tacitus.
Given the profound bias that all three openly and repeatedly express towards Nero elsewhere in their works, as well as the institution of the Principate itself, it should be of immediate note that Tacitus, who even owed his career to the dynasty that succeeded Nero, should break ranks and write this:
“Nero, who at the time was staying in Antium, did not return to the capital until the fire was nearing the house by which he had connected the Palatine with the Gardens of Maecenas. It proved impossible, however, to stop it from engulfing both the Palatine and the house and all their surroundings. Still, as a relief to the homeless and fugitive populace, he opened the Campus Martius, the buildings of Agrippa, even his own Gardens, and threw up a number of extemporised shelters to accommodate the helpless multitude.
The necessities of life were brought up from Ostia and the neighbouring municipalities, and the price of grain was lowered to three sesterces. Yet his measures, popular as their character might be, failed of their effect; for the report had spread that, at the very moment when Rome was aflame, he had mounted his private stage, and typifying the ills of the present by the calamities of the past, had sung the destruction of Troy”
Tacitus, Annals, 39.1
Not only does Tacitus describe Nero as displaying admirable leadership and concern for his subjects, he goes out of his way to record that the emperor’s conduct and honourable intentions were undermined by malevolent rumours spread by shadowy sources — rumours to the substance of precisely what Cassius Dio and Suetonius recorded as objective fact. Furthermore, neither Dio nor Suetonius entertain even the possibility of an alternative explanation to ‘Nero did it’.
If there is a motive for Tacitus to fabricate a narrative to cover for Nero — a man he otherwise despised absolutely, yet after whose death he wrote this account — an explanation has yet to materialise.
The Toll of the Fire
The tragedy of the disaster that unfolded defies exaggeration. For six days and seven nights the flames ravaged the Eternal City, burning all the valley of the Circus Maximus, the Forum Boarium, and the slopes of the Palatine and Capitoline. A frantic mass demolition of houses halted their advance at the Esquiline, before the ordeal was prolonged by a secondary blaze that erupted in the Campus Martius.
Of the fourteen districts of Imperial Rome, ten were reduced to cinders. An incalculable quantity of the city’s heritage was lost — from the historic dwellings of ancient heroes to temples dating back as far as the monarchy, and others dedicated during the Punic Wars, centuries earlier. Priceless works of art that we shall never know were entirely lost to history.
In the midst of such calamity, with rumours apparently outpacing the authorities, the situation was only ever going to turn ugly. When it came to the apportioning of blame, one of the most infamous deeds of Nero’s reign rears its head — the scapegoating of the Christians.
Despite its fame today, Tacitus is the only one of the three sources to explicitly tie the persecution of Christians to the Fire:
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