The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  I - THE JANUARY OATH

  II - THE RIVAL PREFECTS

  III - THE POETS

  IV - THE FORMER CHIEF SECRETARY

  V - THE FLAME

  VI - THE WATER COMMISSIONER

  VII - THE SINGING EMPEROR

  VIII - THE GLADIATORIAL CONTEST

  IX - THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIANS

  X - THE LAKE BANQUET

  XI - THE CHARIOTEER

  XII - THE FIRE

  XIII - THE BLAME

  XIV - THE CONSPIRACY

  XV - THE UNRAVELING

  XVI - THE SUICIDE OF SENECA

  XVII - THE PURGE

  XVIII - THE NEW STAGE

  XIX - THE INFORMERS

  XX - THE CROWNING OF A KING

  XXI - THE TRIAL OF THRASEA AND SORANUS

  XXII - THE NEW ALEXANDER

  XXIII - THE APOSTLES AND THE JEWISH REVOLT

  XXIV - THE FALL OF NERO

  XXV - THE FINAL CURTAIN

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  My sincere thanks go to Bob Pigeon, executive editor with Da Capo Press, for commissioning this work. It turned out that Bob and I had shared a fascination with the Great Fire of Rome for many years.

  I also extend grateful thanks to my New York literary agent, Richard Curtis, for putting Bob and me together.

  And, as always, I record my gratitude to my wife, Louise. She has been the great fire in my life for the past twenty-eight years.

  Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, 37-68 AD (Antiquarium of the Palatine)

  INTRODUCTION

  Rome’s Great Fire is one of the best known of all historical events. Yet, strangely, few books have been written about the fire and the events surrounding what came to be one of history’s great turning points—the end of the Roman dynasty created by Julius Caesar.

  Could it be that we think we know all there is to know about that great catastrophe? Who, after all, has not heard the story about the mad emperor Nero setting fire to Rome and then fiddling while the city burned around him, only for him to blame the Christians for the fire and to make human torches of them? Ah, but was Nero mad, did he set the fire, did he fiddle, and did he in fact burn a single Christian? Was there much more to the Great Fire than previously believed?

  In the twentieth century, many scholars and historians began to reap-praise Nero the ruler. Has Nero been misrepresented down through the ages? Certainly, the fiddling incident can quickly be consigned to myth. The fiddle was an instrument that did not emerge in Europe until a millennium after Nero. So, Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned. Did he perhaps play some instrument? The lyre, for example? Yes, he was a noted player of the small, harplike lyre, the only stringed instrument used by Romans in classical times. But did he play the lyre at Rome on July 19, AD 64, or during the following days, while Rome burned?

  If we are to believe Tacitus, one of Rome’s more reliable first-century historians, who lived through the Great Fire as a nine-year-old, Nero did not play the lyre at Rome while the city burned. But he did play the lyre on the night the fire broke out—Tacitus put Nero at the city of Antium, modern-day Anzio, on the west coast of Italy, playing the lyre. Not that this would preclude Nero from having ordered the lighting of the fire.

  Nero, said Tacitus, played the lyre in a musical competition at Antium, the emperor’s birthplace, on the evening of July 19. After he was informed of the fire, he returned to the capital, where he industriously directed firefighting operations and the provision of shelter and food for the population. It was another Roman historian, Cassius Dio, a senator, onetime consul, general, and governor of several Roman provinces, who wrote that Nero gleefully played the lyre at Rome while the city burned, and it is primarily from him that the fiddling-while-Rome-burned story has come down to us. But Cassius Dio wrote his version of events some 165 years after the Great Fire. And in writing what he did about Nero and the fire, Dio evidently misinterpreted or misquoted Tacitus and another first-century Roman historian, Suetonius.

  Here, in part, is what Dio said, in the third century, about the way the Great Fire of Rome started, laying the blame for the conflagration squarely at the feet of Nero: “He secretly sent out men who pretended to be drunk or engaged in other kinds of mischief, and caused them to first set fire to one or two or even several buildings in different parts of the city, so that the people were at their wits end, not being able to find any beginning of the trouble nor to put an end to it.”1 This claim by Dio, that the fire of AD 64 was deliberately set in a number of buildings in different parts of the city, is at variance with the information from Tacitus. The Tacitus version, which is widely accepted by historians, says that the Great Fire began at a single location, the Circus Maximus. But let us follow Dio’s line a little further.

  He also wrote, after graphically describing how the fire affected the city’s million or more residents and caused widespread grief: “While the whole population was in this state of mind, and many, crazed by the disaster, were leaping into the very flames, Nero went up to the roof of the Palatium [his palace on Rome’s Palatine Hill], from which there was the best general view of the greater part of the conflagration, and assuming the dress of a lyre-player, he sang the ‘Capture of Troy,’ as he called the song himself, though, to the eyes of the spectators, it was the Capture of Rome.”2

  To begin with, everything on the Palatine Hill, including the Palatium, was, as Dio himself would write, destroyed in the fire. Along with every other building on the Palatine Hill, the palace was consumed in the fire’s first stage. Even if we assume that Dio meant that Nero ascended the Palatium roof to play his lyre during the early stages of the fire, before the flames reached the palace, no other Roman writer put Nero on the roof of his palace at Rome, playing the lyre, at any time during the Great Fire. Tacitus wrote that Nero only set off back to Rome when he heard that the fire was approaching his palace.

  Dio clearly took his lead from Nero’s biographer Suetonius, whose parents actually lived at Rome at the time of the Great Fire—Suetonius himself was born some five years later. Suetonius made Nero culpable for the conflagration, writing:Pretending to be disgusted by the drab old buildings and narrow, winding streets of Rome, he [Nero] brazenly set fire to the city. Although a party of ex-consuls caught his attendants, armed with tow [the coarse and broken part of flax and hemp] and blazing torches, trespassing on their property, they dare not interfere.

  Suetonius went on to say of Nero:He also coveted the sites of several granaries, solidly built in stone, near the Golden House. Having knocked down their walls with siege engines, he set the interiors ablaze. The terror lasted for six days and seven nights, causing many people to take shelter in monuments and tombs. Nero’s men destroyed not only a vast number of apartment blocks, but mansions that had belonged to famous generals and were still decorated with their triumphal trophies. Temples, too, vowed and dedicated by (Rome’s) kings, and others during the Punic and Gallic wars. In fact, very ancient monuments of historical interest that had survived up to that time. Nero watched the conflagration from the Tower of Maecenas enraptured by what he called “the beauty of the flames,” then put on his tragedian’s costume and sang “The Sack of Ilium” from beginning to end.3

  Here then was Suetonius’ account, written several decades after the event, in which Nero was described as singing while Rome burned, but
not from the roof of his palace. Cassius Dio wrote his history of Rome using the works of earlier writers, adding his own opinions, biases, and flourishes—such as changing the name of the tune supposedly played by Nero, apparently to give more emphasis to the claim that Nero celebrated the destruction of his capital. And, of course, Suetonius’ account of the fire was one to which Dio would have had access long after it was written.

  Even though Tacitus makes no mention of it, there is a high probability that when Nero arrived back at Rome from Antium, he did indeed observe the fire from the vantage point of the Tower of Maecenas, which stood on the Esquiline Hill, in the imperial gardens of Maecenas—the fire was eventually brought to a halt at the foot of the Esquiline. And perhaps Nero did sing a song or two during that fraught week of the fire. But did he celebrate the fire, and did he in fact set it, as Suetonius, alone among first-or second-century writers, claimed and as Dio much later echoed?

  Some of Suetonius’ “facts” in his book De vita Caesarium, or Lives of the Caesars, in which he wrote the above passages about the Great Fire, are demonstrably incorrect, while others are mystifyingly jumbled, and some, obviously invented. Suetonius apparently commenced writing this book during the reign of the emperor Hadrian, when the historian had charge of the imperial records held in the Tabularium, Rome’s official archives. Suetonius seems to have only completed the first three sections of his book on the Caesars, covering Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, and Tiberius Caesar, when he fell out with the emperor and lost both his post and his access to the official records after acting impolitely toward the empress Sabina.

  Up to that point, his book abounds with quotes from the letters, journals, and unpublished memoirs of the figures he wrote about. From that point on, Suetonius had to rely almost entirely on other sources for his information—mostly gossip. Consequently, in his biography about Nero, we often find attributions like “some say,” “according to my informants,” and “it is said,” as Suetonius relates one sensational and scurrilous anecdote about Nero after another. To his readers, ancient and modern, Suetonius’ revelations about Nero and his imperial subjects made for risqué reading. They do not necessarily make for reliable history.

  Flavius Josephus, the Jewish rabbi, general, and author who became a favorite of the Flavian emperors, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, and who was at Rome at the time of the Great Fire, would write, some years later: “There have been a great many who have composed the history of Nero, some of whom have departed from the factual truth because of favor, having received benefits from him.” Josephus would have been referring here to the likes of Cluvius Rufus and Pliny the Elder, both of whom are known to have written about Nero, although their works, to which Tacitus several times referred, are no longer extant. “While others,” Josephus went on, “out of hatred for him [Nero], and the great ill will that they bore him, have so impudently raved against him with their lies, that they justly deserve to be condemned.”4

  One of the authors who fell into Josephus’ latter category would have been historian Fabius Rusticus. Considered the “finest of modern writers” by Tacitus, Fabius had been raised to his “position of honor” through his friendship with and patronage by Seneca, and he would subsequently have resented Seneca’s bloody end, giving him cause to hate Nero and to be among those who “impudently raved against him” after the emperor’s demise. Even Tacitus had to admit that of all his contemporaries, Fabius was the only author who claimed that Nero had lusted after his own mother, Agrippina the Younger. Every other historian of the day, said Tacitus, had written that it was Agrippina who had attempted to seduce Nero, to regain her power over him, and that this was the accepted truth of the matter.5

  Josephus himself had no reason to love Nero. It had been on Nero’s orders and in Nero’s name that Vespasian and his son Titus had gone to war against the Jews in Palestine in AD 67 and destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple. Yet Josephus, who claimed that his only interest was in the truth, had no time for those who falsely vilified Nero. Suetonius fitted into the category of those “impudent liars” who wrote falsehoods about Nero. It is easy to suspect Suetonius’ fabrications, which seem far-fetched even for the political and moral climate of that time, but it is not as easy to prove them. “Nor am I surprised by those who have written lies about Nero,” Josephus continued, “since in their writings they have not preserved the historical truth regarding those events that took place in prior times, even when the subjects [of those works] could have in no way incurred their hatred, since those writers lived long after their day.” Josephus may have died before Suetonius published his Lives of the Caesars, with its sensational claims about the habits, lifestyles, and peccadilloes of earlier Caesars, as well as those of Nero. So, other authors were equally scurrilous. “As far as those authors who have no interest in the truth are concerned,” Josephus went on, “they can write what they like, for that is what they delight in doing.”6

  The question of veracity in the works of Roman authors brings us to the widespread modern belief that in an effort to find scapegoats for the fire, Nero martyred the Christians of Rome, a belief that has become embodied in Christian legend. Where did that belief originate? In Suetonius’ Nero, we find the brief reference in his description of Nero’s overall life and career: “Punishments were also inflicted on the Christians, a sect professing a new and mischievous religious belief.”7 This lone sentence appears out of context and without any reference to or connection with the Great Fire and can almost certainly be dismissed as a later fictitious insertion in Suetonius’ original text by a Christian copyist.

  Surprisingly, Tacitus, in his Annals, claims that Nero specifically punished the Christians at Rome for the Great Fire, though the Annals can be regarded as an otherwise quite reliable work in terms of historical fact. As typified by the listing for “Nero” in recent editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica, many modern-day historians believe that this tale of Christian persecution was apocryphal and was inserted in Tacitus’ Annals by a Christian copyist, centuries later.8

  None of the copies of the great Roman books such as the Annals that exist today are originals. All are later copies, often created centuries after the first edition, in the laborious, handwritten production process that all books went through prior to the invention of the printing press, making the insertion of invented interpolations simple and, unless a reader was in possession of the original text, undetectable. These copies of ancient Roman works were found, over the past several hundred years, in the libraries of Christian monasteries and institutions (the task of writing books by hand became the province of monks in Christian society) and in the private libraries of devout Christian aristocrats.

  One of the reasons for suspecting the authenticity of the Christian reference in Tacitus, and the reference in Suetonius, is that the term Christian makes no other appearance in Roman literature of the first century. Tellingly, neither Saint Paul nor Saint Peter, who are believed to have died during Nero’s reign, describe their followers as Christians in their Gospel letters. Neither does the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles, thought to have been written by Saint Luke. Many early followers of Jesus Christ, a Jew, were Jewish, like Paul and Peter. To the Roman masses, this religion based around the Nazarene was nothing more than a Jewish cult, and so its followers were, for a long time, labeled Jews.

  Cassius Dio, writing in the third century, described how, in AD 95, the emperor Domitian had a number of people arrested, including the emperor’s own cousin Flavius Clemens, and Clemens’ wife Flavia Domitilla—who was also related to the emperor, being the daughter of Domitian’s sister. “The charge brought against them both was that of atheism, a charge on which many others who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned,” said Dio.9 Many later Christian scholars believed that “Jewish ways” was a reference to the Christian faith. They cited the case of another leading Roman arrested at this same time—according to Dio, on the same charge—and who, like Clemens, was executed. The man in question was Manius
Acilius Glabrio. In support of Glabrio’s supposed adherence to Christianity, some scholars have claimed that his remains were found in a Christian catacomb at Rome. Critics of this supposition point out that this catacomb was only first used several centuries after Glabrio’s death.

  Nowhere in Dio’s text are these people referred to as Christians, a term in common use by Dio’s time in the third century. To further erode the claim that Glabrio was a Christian, and a Christian martyr at that, Suetonius, who was a man of twenty-six or so and living at Rome at the time of Glabrio’s execution, makes no reference to any charge of atheism against the man. In fact, according to Suetonius, Glabrio was one of three former consuls executed by Domitian because they were “accused of conspiracy,” not for atheism or “drifting into Jewish ways,” as Dio wrote more than a century later. Suetonius did, however, write that Glabrio was initially exiled before being executed in exile for conspiracy. 10 As was the case in the reign of Nero, frequently a person initially exiled for conspiracy would ultimately be executed as a consequence of the original charge.

  Less important, perhaps, is that passages in the Annals refer to Pontius Pilatus (Pilate) as a “procurator,” a title always accorded Pilate in Christian literature. Pilate actually held the lesser rank of prefect in Judea, something that Tacitus, who had access to the official records at Rome’s Tabularium and frequently quoted from them in his Annals, should have known.

  After explaining that there was a widespread “sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order” from the emperor, the Annals go on:Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populous. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.