Did Nero fiddle while Rome burned?

Where Nero really was

The fire broke out on the night of 18 to 19 July, AD 64, in shops full of flammable goods in the part of the Circus Maximus next to the Palatine and Caelian hills. The wind drove it through the narrow, winding streets of old Rome. Nero was at Antium, today’s Anzio, the seaside town where he was born, about 55 kilometers (35 miles) south of the city.

Tacitus, our most careful source, says Nero did not come back until the flames neared the house he had built to join his palace to the Gardens of Maecenas. Then he acted. He opened the Field of Mars, Agrippa’s public buildings and his own gardens to the homeless, put up temporary shelters, brought in food from Ostia and cut the price of grain to three sesterces a peck.

Where the fiddle came from

None of it helped him, Tacitus says, because a rumor had spread that while the city burned, Nero had gone onto his private stage and sung of the destruction of Troy. Tacitus reports it as a rumor. Suetonius, writing a few years later, tells it as fact: Nero watched from the Tower of Maecenas, delighted by the beauty of the flames, and sang the whole Sack of Ilium in stage costume. Cassius Dio, a century after that, puts him on the palace roof.

Nero’s instrument was the lyre, the cithara of Greek singers, and he really did perform in public, to the horror of Rome’s upper class. But no bowed instrument existed in his world, and the violin took shape in Italy only in the 1500s. To fiddle while Rome burns is an English saying for wasting time in a crisis, and it handed Nero an instrument he never saw.

Did he start the fire?

Tacitus does not know. Authors, he says, gave both accounts. Suspicion grew afterward. When the fire seemed to be out, after almost a week, it flared again on land owned by Tigellinus, Nero’s praetorian prefect. Of Rome’s fourteen districts, three were leveled and seven left in ruins. On the burned ground Nero built his Golden House, a palace with parkland and a lake in the heart of the city. To many Romans that looked like a motive. Most historians today think the fire was probably an accident, in a crowded city of timber and narrow streets where fires were common.

The Christians take the blame

Nothing, Tacitus says, could kill the talk that the fire had been ordered. So Nero found scapegoats: the people Romans called Christians, named after Christus, whom Pontius Pilate had executed under Tiberius. Some were dressed in animal skins and torn apart by dogs, some crucified, some burned as torches after dark in Nero’s gardens. Tacitus is the only ancient writer to tie this persecution to the fire, but it is the first we know of, and tradition puts the deaths of Peter and Paul in Nero’s reign.

Rome already had a church. A few years before the fire, around AD 57, Paul had written to it:

to all who are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, that your faith is proclaimed throughout the whole world.