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

by Dando-Collins, Stephen

  Like many rumors, the most persistent of them was based on fact. Tacitus reported: “A rumor had gone forth everywhere that, at the very time when the city was in flames, the emperor appeared on a private stage (that of his theater at Antium) and sang of the destruction of Troy, comparing present misfortunes with the calamities of antiquity.”6 Now the fact that the second outbreak had occurred on the property of Praetorian Prefect Tigellinus reflected not on the landlord, but on the landlord’s imperial master. “It seemed that Nero was aiming at the glory of founding a new city and calling it by his name,” said Tacitus, and this was the next rumor to do the rounds.7

  In an instant, all the credit that Nero had received from the public for his prompt and humane disaster relief measures was negated by the accusation that now flew from mouth to mouth—that the fire had been ordered by Nero so that he could build a new city on the ruins of Rome and call it Neropolis. Some people, said Tacitus, observed that July 19, the day the fire broke out, was the anniversary of the fiery destruction of all of Rome except for the Capitoline Mount in 390 BC by an army of Gauls. The intimation was that the Great Fire had been deliberately ignited on this date with the same intent, the destruction of the city.8

  By the time that Suetonius came to write his biography of Nero, fifty years after the Great Fire, the rumors and the innuendo had become part of folklore, and Suetonius happily repeated them as fact. He himself firmly believed that Nero had been behind the fire. “Pretending to be disgusted by the drab old buildings and narrow, winding streets of Rome, he brazenly set fire to the city,” Suetonius wrote. The author added a claim that a group of former consuls had caught Nero’s attendants armed with blazing torches and incendiary material trespassing on their property, implying that these attendants of Nero had gone on to set the fire. Suetonius also wrote that after the fire, Nero sang “The Sack of Ilium.”9 This was the sum total of Suetonius’ evidence against Nero, his proof that the young emperor was behind the disaster.

  In the third century, more than a century and a half after the event, Cassius Dio was equally convinced that Nero was behind the fire. On the basis of some assumptions and the claims of the likes of Suetonius, he wrote, “Nero had set his heart on accomplishing what had doubtless always been his desire, namely to make an end of the whole city and realm in his lifetime.” He went on: “Accordingly, he secretly sent out men who pretended to be drunk or engaged in other kinds of mischief, and had them begin by setting fire to one or two or even several buildings in different parts of the city.” He offered no source for this claim. Dio also stated, as Tacitus had done, that Nero sang of the capture of Troy. But to color his narrative, Dio made the additional claim that Nero sang the song from his palace roof while the city burned around him.10 This was the source of the later myth that Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

  Dio actually contradicted Tacitus, his primary source: “There was no curse that the populace did not invoke against Nero, although they did not mention his name, but simply cursed in general terms those who had set the city on fire.” Dio wrote that during the reign of Tiberius, an oracle predicted that Rome would perish through internal strife in 900 years. The prediction, he said, was now “on everybody’s lips.”11 According to the belief of the day, 864 years had by this time passed since the infant brothers Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, had sheltered beneath a tree where the Comitium building now stood, putting the 900th anniversary of the city’s origination little more than thirty years away. Nero, said Dio, quickly scotched this rumor by announcing that no record of any such prophesy could anywhere be found, after which those behind this story began singing new libelous tunes against the emperor. 12 Who the originators of these stories were, nobody knew.

  Nero was, without doubt, deeply depressed by the disaster and by the loss of his own newly expanded palace in particular, and his depression could only have been exacerbated by the aspersions being cast against him by persistent but anonymous enemies. It is quite likely that he did, for a time at least, as Suetonius claimed, take up his lyre, close himself away, and sing sad songs. But he soon roused himself to action. He announced that the rebuilding of Rome would commence immediately and that for this purpose, he was establishing a relief fund, to which all the provinces of the empire would be expected to contribute. He also announced a range of imaginative measures to assist the rebuilding and to prevent a repeat of the disaster.

  In formulating these measures, Nero took the advice of two men who were unlikely city planners. Only several months prior to the fire, Nero had launched a major construction project, a shipping canal from Lake Avernus in Campania to the mouth of the Tiber River. The canal would be 160 miles long and broad enough to permit two warships to pass each other, according to Suetonius. Nero had been inspired to undertake this project by Publius Egnatius Celer, a member of the Equestrian Order and a native of Berytus in Syria, modern-day Beirut in Lebanon, and by young senator Verulanus Severus. Celer was a philosopher of the Stoic School and, ultimately, a visionary of sorts. A favorite of Nero’s mother, Celer had, for a time, been an administrator of the emperor’s private estates in Asia. Severus, only in his thirties, had until very recently been commander of the 6th Ferrata Legion, in Syria, leading the unit during Corbulo’s last Armenian campaign. It seems that Severus had been befriended by Celer the Syrian, who had come up with the idea of the Avernus canal.

  According to Tacitus, Nero had “a love of the impossible.”13 But Nero saw lasting benefit in the grand project, to Rome and to his name. In times to come, he could imagine, people would say, “Nero Caesar did this,” in the same way that people of his own time said, “Julius Caesar did this,” or “Augustus Caesar did this,” referring to the public works of the first Caesars. Nero had authorized the canal project, and teams of prisoners “from every part of the empire” had been shipped into Italy and had begun hacking into the dry, rocky hills south of Rome.14 Now, those prisoners had to be diverted to clearing rubble in the city and working in stone quarries. The canal project was halted, never to begin again. Writing four decades later, Tacitus would scornfully refer to the scarred hillsides that evidenced Nero’s abandoned canal project: “There still remain the traces of his disappointed hope.”15

  In the wake of Rome’s great disaster, Severus and Celer, the pair behind the canal project, stepped forward to again offer the emperor their services and their advice. Under the influence of Severus and Celer, in the words of Suetonius, “Nero introduced his own new style of architecture to the city.”16 Nero announced that the reconstruction of the city would not go forward without planning or controls. Rome’s affected precincts would be rebuilt, he said, with streets laid out with precision; they would be straight and measured. Here was the influence of Severus the general, for every legion camp was laid out with this measured precision, based on a grid pattern. Nero’s new street design also provided for several broad thoroughfares where previously there had been narrow streets of one lane.

  Now, too, Nero decreed a slew of building regulations, the first such regulations in Rome’s long history. As a fire prevention measure, there would be restrictions on the height of private buildings. No new building could share a wall with adjoining structures. It would be mandatory for owners of new apartment blocks to provide courtyards at their properties and to erect colonnaded porches fronting the street—“to serve as firefighting platforms,” noted Suetonius.17 Nero undertook to personally meet the cost of these colonnades. All lower floors had to be “solidly constructed without wooden beams, of stone from Galbi or Alba, that material being impervious to fire.”18 The gray stone of Alba and Galbi famously resisted both fire and frost.

  To encourage prompt rebuilding, Nero introduced an incentive scheme whereby each landowner was paid a bounty, in relation to his status and property, but only if and when he completed the construction of a certain number of houses or apartment blocks on his land within a prescribed period.

  Nero had apparently received reports from City Prefect Sabinus an
d his Night Watch counterpart that their men had experienced difficulty finding sufficient water to fight the fire; either the supply had been meager at the water basins or the basins were inadequate in their distribution and location. Water Commissioner Marius was no doubt the one who now explained to the emperor that Rome had a water supply problem, because abuse of regulations had seen great quantities of water “illegally appropriated.”19 This was the problem of the “puncturers” that Julius Frontinus would chronicle and counter. Nero appointed several officers to ensure that this deficiency was overcome, and he also specified that water be delivered from the city’s aqueducts to the courtyards of the new apartment blocks. “Everyone was to have, in the open courtyard, the means of stopping a fire,” he announced.20

  “These changes,” Tacitus wrote, “were liked for their utility,” and “also added beauty to the new city.” Yet, Tacitus would note, there were those who were set in their ways and complained about Rome’s new broad streets and open spaces. They were convinced that the old, narrow streets of Rome had been “more conducive to health,” he said, because they had provided shade. Now, they complained, as clearance and reconstruction moved along at breakneck pace, the city’s streets would be “scorched by a fiercer glow” of the sun.21 Modern-day health experts and city planners would disagree; for the city’s health, Nero’s plan was the right one.

  While Nero himself had been exploring Eastern religions over the past several years, he recognized that Romans were intensely superstitious and fearful of offending their pantheon of gods. There were major concerns among the populace that the gods must be propitiated to ensure that the new city did not suffer a disaster in the future. So, at Nero’s direction, the Sibylline Books were consulted. A fifteen-member religious order, the Quindecimviri, was responsible for the safekeeping and reading of the ancient Sibylline Books, with the most senior of the quindecimvirs reporting their interpretation in accordance with the question put. In this case, the question was, Which deities was it necessary to appease to ensure Rome’s future safety from disaster? The Sibylline Books were duly consulted, said Tacitus, “by the direction of which prayers were offered to Vulcanus, Ceres, and Proserpina. Juno, too, was entreated.”22

  Religious festivals devoted to each of these gods were in place on the Roman calendar during the months following the Great Fire, in the order that Tacitus set down above, and it is clear that the special prayers for the future of Rome were delivered on these occasions. The Vulcannia, the festival of Vulcan, god of fire, took place first, on August 23. The Fast of Ceres, goddess of agriculture, but more importantly also goddess of grain, on which Rome depended, was scheduled for October 4. A sacrifice was always offered to Ceres after a Roman funeral, to purify the house of the deceased; many funerals had taken place since the Great Fire. Meanwhile, prayers on the sacred day of Proserpina, daughter of Ceres and a deity associated with the underworld, would be offered on November 25.

  Then there was Juno, goddess of homes and of protection, and the most powerful deity of the four. Several festivals were devoted to Juno through September and October. Juno, said Tacitus, “was entreated by the matrons” of Rome, “first, on the Capitol.” There was a temple to Juno the Warner on the Capitoline Mount, and these prayers would have been offered there in the partly rebuilt temple. The prayers to Juno continued “on the nearest part of the coast, from where water was procured to sprinkle on the sanctuary and image of the goddess.” The significance of the latter ritual is unknown. “And there were sacred banquets and nightly vigils celebrated by married women.”23

  Cassius Dio wrote that when it became known that Nero had ordered the Sibylline Books consulted, a new rumor took hold in the city. This rumor claimed that the sacred Sibylline Books had revealed a prophesy: “Last of the sons of Aeneas, a mother-slayer shall govern.”24 This, the rumor mongers said, referred to Nero and implied that he would be the last of his line. Nero had indeed had his mother killed, while his forebears of the Julian line claimed that they were descended from Trojan hero Aeneas, who, legend had it, had escaped to Italy after the fall of Troy and established the town of Lavinium.

  Dio questioned the veracity of this supposed ancient prophesy and wondered whether it was not “for the first time inspired” by the present situation.25 But to many Romans, it would have had a ring of truth about it. Through it, a seed was sown, casting doubt on Nero’s future and the future of the Caesarian dynasty. For this rumor to take hold, its source had to be credible. Several years later, one of the Quindecimvirs responsible for the Sibylline Books, Thrasea Paetus, would come under suspicion as an enemy of Nero.

  No matter what Nero did over the months following the fire, he could not escape the accusation that he was an incendiary prince. “All human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order,” said Tacitus. “Consequently, to rid himself of the report, Nero fastened the guilt on a class hated for their abominations.”26 This “class” was, it is now clear, made up of the numerous followers of the cult of Isis in Rome. Nero had interested himself in Isis, the Egyptian mother goddess, to such an extent that he had introduced Isean feasts to the official Roman religious calendar. But while he retained a fascination with all things Egyptian, his attitude to Isis had changed abruptly.

  It is likely that Nero’s disdain of Isis had been sponsored by the death of his infant daughter Augusta the previous year. Feeling let down by the goddess, he had grown contemptuous of her and her cult. Now he found in the followers of Isis, most of whom were slaves and freedmen, easy scapegoats for the Great Fire, even though one of the cult’s own temples, on the Capitol, would have been destroyed by the blaze. The average Roman abhorred and execrated the cult’s apparent worship of gods in animal form and would have applauded the cult members’ persecution. At first, a few admitted followers of the cult of Isis, who were known as “Egyptians” by the general population, were arrested. Priests of Isis, with their shaven heads, were easy to spot. These men were put to the rack, and “on their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.”27

  As noncitizens, this “multitude” of guilty people had no right of appeal or to a clean execution in the form of decapitation. Theirs was to be a painful and humiliating death. For some, it was a slow demise nailed or tied to a cross. Others among the convicted were reserved for the arena, the usual destination for a slave convicted of a capital crime. They were kept behind bars until the next spectacle. In normal times, this event would have been the Ludi Romani, the Roman Games, also known as the Ludi Magni, or Great Games. Running for fifteen days from September 4, they were the longest games on the calendar. The Great Games were traditionally held at the Circus Maximus, but that fire-ravaged venue was of course now out of commission and in only the early stages of reconstruction.

  One other circus remained intact at Rome, the Circus Flaminius, which had been established on the southwestern side of the Campus Martius in 220 BC. Apart from the marble Arch of Germanicus, dedicated to Nero’s grandfather, which stood at the entrance, and an ancient temple dedicated to the sun god Sol, there were little in the way of permanent structures at the Circus Flaminius. Temporary wooden stands were erected around the race course each November for the Ludi Plebii, the Plebeian Games, and then dismantled again. This lack of incendiary material was no doubt why the Circus Flaminius escaped the Great Fire even though the nearby Theater of Taurus was severely damaged. Nonetheless, by sacred tradition, the Great Games had to be conducted in the Circus Maximus. No Circus Maximus, no Great Games; like the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris, they would not be celebrated this year.

  As November approached and with the offerings to Vulcan, Ceres, and Juno made, the first opportunity to execute prisoners in the arena presented itself. The Plebeian Games of November 4-17 had, from their beginning, been held in the Circus Flaminius, and as that venue was int
act, these games could go ahead. For the most part, the Plebeian Games program opened with stage performances and concluded with three days of athletics and horse races. Chariot races were not normally included.

  It had been almost half a year since the last chariot races at Rome. Nero had missed them, and so, too, would have his fellow Romans. So, the emperor announced that he was sponsoring a day of chariot races at these Plebeian Games. The racecourse of the Circus Flaminius was smaller than that at the Circus Maximus, but it would still permit four two-horse teams to compete. Similarly, the seating capacity was no match for the Circus Maximus, but the members of the population without tickets would still wager on the races from afar. Perhaps, Nero would have been hoping, the announcement that within several days the Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites would again be racing, courtesy of the emperor, would finally divert public attention away from the malicious gossip and rumors and put him in a good light.

  So, members of the cult of Isis went to their deaths during the Plebeian Games. Many of the “Egyptians” were herded into the arena, where packs of savage dogs were let loose on them to tear them to pieces. “Mockery of every kind was added to their deaths,” Tacitus later remarked. To anyone who knew anything about the worship of Isis and about ancient Egyptian religion in general, that mockery was quite apparent. Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of death, had the head of a jackal, or dog, and these condemned “Egyptians” were executed by dogs. Even more poignantly, Tacitus noted that the Egyptians were sent to their deaths “covered in the skins of animals.”28 Priests of Isis traditionally eschewed animal products, wearing linen robes and sandals made from papyrus. To be covered in the skins of animals was a gross insult to the beliefs of the followers of Isis.