Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty

By Anthony A. Barrett

Drawing on new archaeological evidence, an authoritative history of Rome’s Great Fire—and how it inflicted lasting harm on the Roman Empire

According to legend, the Roman emperor Nero set fire to his majestic imperial capital on the night of July 19, AD 64 and fiddled while the city burned. It’s a story that has been told for more than two millennia—and it’s likely that almost none of it is true. In Rome Is Burning, distinguished Roman historian Anthony Barrett sets the record straight, providing a comprehensive and authoritative account of the Great Fire of Rome, its immediate aftermath, and its damaging longterm consequences for the Roman world. Drawing on remarkable new archaeological discoveries and sifting through all the literary evidence, he tells what is known about what actually happened—and argues that the disaster was a turning point in Roman history, one that ultimately led to the fall of Nero and the end of the dynasty that began with Julius Caesar.

Rome Is Burning tells how the fire destroyed much of the city and threw the population into panic. It describes how it also destroyed Nero’s golden image and provoked a financial crisis and currency devaluation that made a permanent impact on the Roman economy. Most importantly, the book surveys, and includes many photographs of, recent archaeological evidence that shows visible traces of the fire’s destruction. Finally, the book describes the fire’s continuing afterlife in literature, opera, ballet, and film.

A richly detailed and scrupulously factual narrative of an event that has always been shrouded in myth, Rome Is Burning promises to become the standard account of the Great Fire of Rome for our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691208503

Book preview

ROME IS BURNING

TURNING POINTS IN ANCIENT HISTORY

Barry Strauss, Series Editor

Turning Points in Ancient History presents accessible books, by leading scholars, on crucial events and key moments in the ancient world. The series aims at fresh interpretations of both famous subjects and little-known ones that deserve more attention. The books provide a narrative synthesis that integrates literary and archaeological evidence.

Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty, Anthony A. Barrett

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Eric H. Cline

ROME IS BURNING

NERO AND THE FIRE THAT ENDED A DYNASTY

ANTHONY A. BARRETT

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2020 by Princeton University Press

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [e-mail]

Published by Princeton University Press

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All Rights Reserved

First Paperback Printing, 2022

Paperback ISBN 9780691233949

eISBN (eBook) 9780691208503

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows:

Names: Barrett, Anthony, 1941- author.

Title: Rome is burning : Nero and the fire that ended a dynasty / Anthony A. Barrett.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2020. | Series: Turning points in ancient history | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020017929 (print) | LCCN 2020017930 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691172316 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691208503 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Great Fire, Rome, Italy, 64. | Rome—History—Nero, 54–68. | Nero, Emperor of Rome, 37–68.

Classification: LCC DG285.3 .B37 2020 (print) | LCC DG285.3 (ebook) | DDC 937/.6307—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017929

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017930

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Rob Tempio and Matt Rohal

Production Editorial: Sara Lerner

Text Design: Lorraine Doneker

Cover Design: Karl Spurzem

Production: Erin Suydam

Publicity: Maria Whelan and Amy Stewart

Copyeditor: Karen Verde

Cover Credit: Alphonse Mucha, Nero Watching the Burning of Rome, 1887. Oil, 73.3 x 113 cm. Aclosund Historic / Alamy Stock Photo

CONTENTS

List of Illustrationsvii

Series Editor’s Forewordix

Acknowledgmentsxi

Timelinexiii

Prologue1

I

Introduction7

THE FIRE

II

Fires in Ancient Rome27

III

The Great Fire57

IV

Responsibility114

THE AFTERMATH

V

The Christians and the Great Fire143

VI

The New Rome175

VII

The Significance of the Great Fire223

EPILOGUE

The Great Fire as an Enduring Cultural Phenomenon253

Principal Sources: Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio259

Notes269

Glossary305

Bibliography311

Index335

ILLUSTRATIONS

Map

1.1. Traditional hills of Rome

2.1. The Augustan Regiones

3.1. Proposed chronology of the Fire

3.2. The Circus Maximus

3.3. Domus Tiberiana

3.4. Bagni di Livia

3.5. Houses on north edge of Palatine destroyed in the Fire

3.6. Compitum Acilii

3.7. Area around the Meta Sudans

3.8. Augustan Meta frieze fragment with traces of burning

3.9. The Augustan Meta destroyed in the Fire

3.10. Collapsed debris, area of the Meta Sudans

3.11. Dedication, inscription of musicians

3.12. Burned steps leading to the Small Temple

3.13. Grate distorted by heat

3.14. Road surface shattered by heat and falling masonry

3.15. Workshops and houses

3.16. Workshops and houses in perspective

3.17. Compacted burned material

3.18. Workshop B. Burned floor

3.19. Workshop C. Burned wall and floor

3.20. Burned metal

3.21. Burned pot

3.22. Burned floor beneath Colosseum

3.23. Ludus Magnus

3.24. Grating distorted by fire

3.25. Lanciani’s section

3.26. Piranesi drawing

3.27. Possible extent of the Fire

3.28. Ara Incendii on Quirinal

6.1. Possible traces of the Golden House and Domus Transitoria

6.2. Reconstruction of the Golden House, looking west

6.3. Neronian Dupondius

6.4. Circular structure, Golden House, Palatine

6.5. Substructure of rotating chamber below Vigna Barberini

6.6. Base and inner steps, central pillar

6.7. Reconstruction of portico. Southern edge of vestibule

6.8. Lake and vestibule

6.9. Area between vestibule and lake

6.10. Southern corner of vestibule and lake

6.11. Van Deman’s Sacra Via and vestibule

6.12. Van Deman’s reconstruction of Nero’s portico

6.13. Detail of portico

6.14. Reconstruction of Oppian Wing

6.15. Oppian Wing and Baths of Titus

6.16. Octagon Room

6.17. Octagon Room, construction of vaults

6.18. Octagon Room plan

6.19. Oppian Wing painting

6.20. Odysseus mosaic, Oppian Wing

7.1. Neronian Silver Denarius AD 64–65

SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

This is an exciting, if troubling, time to be a historian. As I write, a global pandemic and the ensuing dislocations demonstrate all too well that small events can change the world in a big way. So it was with the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64.

In this, the second volume in the series Turning Points in Ancient History, Anthony Barrett offers an eloquent, scholarly, and innovative account of one of the most infamous events of antiquity. Our focus in the series is to look at a crucial event or key moment in the ancient world whose consequences rippled outwards. Each book combines archaeology and literary texts and ranges in focus from the elite to ordinary people. In Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty, Barrett does all that.

Although Nero may not have fiddled while Rome burned, there are plenty of other reasons to think the emperor misbehaved during the conflagration, the worst in Rome’s history. Indeed, some claimed he even unleashed the fire, in order to have an excuse to rebuild Rome on a grander scale, as indeed happened afterwards. That is unlikely, but neither the calamity nor its consequences is in doubt, as Barrett shows.

The Great Fire ended Nero’s golden years and turned the Roman elite against him for good. Nero supposedly tried to deflect the blame onto Rome’s Christians, whom he persecuted. Many scholars doubt the veracity of that tale but even if it is true, it didn’t save Nero. Four years after the Great Fire, his many enemies forced him out of office and he committed suicide. The result was the end of the dynasty founded by Augustus (Nero’s great-great-grandfather). It was the beginning of a new way of choosing the emperor, one that opened up the purple to a wider group—from Spain to North Africa to Syria—but also opened the door to instability and, too frequently, to civil war.

On the plus side, Nero’s rebuilding program after the fire initiated a lasting revolution in architecture, including Rome’s first dome and the use of concrete in vaults. Rebuilding did not come cheaply, however, and spawned inflation. Rome witnessed the first serious devaluation of its currency by the reduction of the amount of silver in its coins. The first, but not the last: by the third century AD there was little silver left in Rome’s silver currency.

Regime change, inflation, political instability, and possible religious persecution all came in the wake of a ruinous fire, along with the more positive results of the opening-up of the elite and the re-imagining of Roman architecture. All of these results had consequences stretching into the distant future. True, some of them might have occurred anyway without the fire. As Barrett argues, however, a single spectacular disaster sometimes crystallizes the opposition to a regime and helps bring it down. Barrett compares the Great Fire of Rome to Chernobyl.

With his exceptional knowledge of Roman topography and of the archaeological and literary evidence, Barrett meticulously reconstructs the terrible events of the blaze and afterward. He guides the reader on a journey that, now more than ever, is well worth taking.

Barry Strauss

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book was first suggested to me by Rob Tempio of Princeton University Press, and since then he has guided me through the whole process patiently, amicably, and ably. At the more practical stage of putting the book into production, I further benefited from the cheerful and efficient guidance of Matt Rohal and Sara Lerner, and my copyeditor Karen Verde was impressively vigilant in exposing blemishes in my manuscript. I confess that at the time of taking on the task I did not have a full appreciation of the complexities it would involve, but, whatever the difficulties, they have been much lightened by the generous assistance of a number of colleagues and institutions. I have had the good fortune to work in libraries with excellent collections and dedicated staff, the Library of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, the Sackler and Bodleian libraries in Oxford, the Universitätsbibliothek and the Institute libraries of Alte Geschichte, of Klassische Philologie, and of Anglistik in Heidelberg. With equally good fortune I have benefited much from guidance on specific topics from Rhiannon Ash, Andrew Burnett, Philip Burton, Ian Carradice, Peter Paul Schnierer, Brent Shaw, Anne Toner, Peter Wiseman, Tony Woodman, and the two anonymous readers who reported on the manuscript for the Press. Virginia Closs and Lucas Rubin kindly made available to me some of their then unpublished material. Joseph Walsh’s engaging Great Fire of Rome was not yet available when my manuscript was more or less completed, and he generously sent me his digital files just in time for me to take them into account. The manuscript was read in part or in its entirety by Jacky Barrett McMillan, Valérie Louis, and Károly Sandor, and for three years my colleagues have given a sympathetic ear to my incendiary ramblings, occasionally, I hope, interesting, but more often, I fear, unpardonably dull. I am much indebted to all of them. It goes without saying that I take complete responsibility for any errors that may have crept into my text via various subsequent drafts.

The translations of the main sources for the Great Fire are based, with minor adjustments, on those made by John Yardley and myself for Tacitus, The Annals (Oxford World’s Classics) and for The Emperor Nero: A Guide to the Ancient Sources (Princeton University Press): I am grateful to John, who contributed the lion’s share of those translations, for endorsing their use here. The final product would literally have been impossible without the illustrations that accompany the text. I have been impressed by the willingness of colleagues to allow me the use of their material and by the efforts they in many cases made to supply me with high-resolution images—Heinz-Jürgen Beste, Emanuele Brienza, Raffaele Carlani, Claire Holleran, Lynne Lancaster, Eugenio La Rocca, Henri Lavagne, Eric Moormann, Giacomo Pardini, Frank Sear, Joseph Skinner, Françoise Villedieu, Bryan Ward-Perkins, and Adam Ziółkowski. Also, Kornelia Roth came to my assistance once again in providing a number of drawings. In noting such acknowledgments it is customary not to single out any individual, but I do wish to make an exception and to record my particular gratitude to Clementina Panella, who was helpful beyond the demands of duty in making available extensive photographic material from the archive of her important excavations in the center of Rome.

TIMELINE

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ROME IS BURNING

Prologue

During the evening of July 19, AD 64, a small fire broke out near Rome’s great racing stadium, the Circus Maximus. It was to change the course of history. The imposing structure of the Circus was lined by a crowded mishmash of small shops and modest eating places, and during daylight hours the atmosphere was cheerful and noisy. Fruit-sellers, astrologers, perfumers, prostitutes, basket-weavers, fortune-tellers—all are attested there. When night fell the area grew much quieter, and in a way more dangerous—not because of criminal elements, but simply because there were fewer people around to keep an eye on the unregulated piles of merchandise stored there, much of it quite flammable and something of a firetrap. On this occasion the fire started in the stock of some unidentified merchant. Initially it can have caused little, if any, concern. But there happened to be a strong and erratic wind that night, and the flames spread first to the other stalls and then, far more ominously, to the fabric of the Circus itself, whose upper stories were still largely made of wood. It got worse. So unpredictable were the powerful gusts of wind that the flames were able to travel from the Circus to the foot of the exclusive Palatine Hill standing to its northeast, where they rapidly climbed the slope and then ranged over the crest, cutting savagely through the imposing residences of the imperial family and the grand homes of Rome’s upper crust. As devastating as this was, it was in essence merely a prelude. The fire passed over the hill and down through the lower levels beyond, and now began ruthlessly to consume the crowded tenements of the heavily populated poorer districts. Remarkably, it was to rage in all for nine agonizing days. To judge from the ancient accounts, the horror was unimaginable. People were trapped inside the burning multi-story buildings; those who managed to make their way outdoors ran the risk of being trampled to death as they tried to flee, and, because the winds kept changing direction, as soon as they escaped the flames, as they thought, they found themselves rushing into brand new firestorms that seemed to spring suddenly from nowhere. To cap the almost universal sense of despair, there were rumors that the emperor, Nero, had been seen dressed in theatricals and looking down over the spreading devastation from the safety of a high tower on the Esquiline Hill, oblivious to the suffering below and focused on drawing poetic inspiration from the awesome inferno while he recited his great epic poem on the sack of Troy.

The fire that had started as a random spark in a run-of-the-mill pile of merchandise proved to be the most devastating in Rome’s history, and sections of the ancient city were reduced to a smoking wasteland. The people who had lived through it would likely have been haunted by the experience for the rest of their days. But did the fire have a significance beyond its effect on the personal lives of a relatively limited number of individual Romans? A very strong case can be made that indeed it did, and that in reality it initiated events that would produce profound changes in the course of Roman history. Historians have long debated the concept of turning points, and a universally agreed definition of such events, as of most artificial scholarly constructs, remains frustratingly elusive. That said, it is at least broadly recognized that a historical turning point must be an occurrence that was not only perceived as dramatic at the time it occurred, but that also, when examined in retrospect, demonstrably had an enduring impact on subsequent history. This last point is crucial. Although the Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai’s famous and much quoted response when asked how significant the French revolution was—that it was too early to tell—is almost certainly apocryphal (he was probably referring instead to the 1968 student riots), the point of the rather dubious anecdote remains valid. An event like, say, the Great Crash of 1929, which must have seemed truly catastrophic at the time but whose global impact had largely dissipated little more than ten years later, is not usefully defined as a turning point. And even where an impact is long-term, the relationship between cause and effect is often ambiguous and controversial. As one example among numerous, the fall of Byzantium in 1453 is generally recognized as a major historical turning point, but clearly by the mid-fifteenth century the Byzantine Empire was so weakened by internal conflict and the Ottomans were by contrast so nearly invincible that the conquest was all but inevitable, whether it happened in 1453 or ten years earlier or ten years later. But 1453 can still legitimately be considered the turning point, simply because it was in fact then that events began their new course. The same reasoning can be applied to other major turning points of history, whether the Battle of Gettysburg, or Caesar crossing the Rubicon, or the signing of the Magna Carta, or Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. And the same reasoning can also be applied to the Fire of AD 64.

The impact of the Great Fire proved to be fatally destructive, not only for the hapless Romans caught up by the flames, but ultimately also for Nero himself. Until then he had enjoyed a golden reputation, so much in charge of things both at home and abroad, and apparently so successful at them, that people were prepared to overlook his occasional transgressions. But the rumors about his conduct during the fire, the ineffectiveness of the fire services operating under his authority to bring it to a speedy end, as well as a seemingly callous scheme to build a massive palace complex on land now cleared of its fine old properties, led to a massive collapse of faith, and caused an irreparable breach between the emperor and Rome’s powerful elite. Nero reputedly tried to shift the blame onto the Christians, already an unpopular group, and subjected them to savage punishments. If this did in fact happen, it failed to help. His extended honeymoon period was well and truly over: from AD 64 on, his reign was marred by suspicion and conspiracies, leading eventually to overt rebellion, and to the death, in decidedly squalid circumstances, of the emperor himself. And because Nero’s personal demise also represented the demise of the ruling dynasty to which he had belonged, the Julio-Claudians, the fire marked the first stage in a process that would transform how the rulers of Rome were chosen. Henceforth they would no longer come from the line of the first emperor Augustus, that golden thread of consensus and stability. In AD 68, within four years of the fire, the leadership of the Roman Empire was opened up to competitive bidding, and this phenomenon persisted intermittently as a seriously destabilizing factor for as long as that empire existed. Of course it is undoubtedly the case that had Nero not alienated his powerful colleagues because of the fire, he inevitably would have found some other means of alienating them, and that because of his self-evident shortcomings he was almost guaranteed to come eventually to an unhappy end; and it is equally true that if the Julio-Claudian dynasty had not ended with Nero it would have ended at some point in any case, as all ruling dynasties have inevitably done throughout history, be they Hapsburg, Hanoverian, or Hohenzollern. Nero’s premature death and the end of the Julio-Claudian line may both have been inevitable, but they happened when they did as a consequence of the aftermath of the Great Fire. Their ultimate historical inevitability does not make that event any less of a turning point.

There were other major developments that can be legitimately associated with the Great Fire. The building program initiated afterward by Nero, as exemplified by his Golden House, manifested a number of revolutionary innovations in the field of architecture. It boasted the first dome constructed in Rome, and the imaginative use of concrete in the construction of vaults was extraordinarily innovative. And there was also a serious negative economic consequence of the disaster. Rome’s silver coin, the denarius, the cornerstone of its commercial activity, was seriously devalued for the very first time in AD 64, almost certainly as a result of the financial crisis that followed the fire. This led to a series of later devaluations, progressively more serious, until the third century AD, by which time the silver coinage in fact contained virtually no silver at all. Clearly, this form of monetary inflation would have a major impact on the Roman economy. Arguably, even without the fire some other ruler would at some point have succumbed to the almost irresistible temptation to increase the money supply by debasing its metallic content. But the fact remains that the debasement happened specifically in AD 64, and any consequences that ensued could trace their origin to that year.

One other feature of the events of AD 64 gives the Roman fire a special place within the cohort of Great Fires. Every great urban fire is unique. Just as no two cities are identical, so the fires that with dependable and depressing regularity devastate them can never be identical. That said, there is inevitably a certain sameness about great, and even lesser, fires. Property is destroyed, lives are lost, economies dislocated. This has been the case no matter where—Chicago, London, even Oulu, Finland (it boasts eight official Great Fires between 1652 and 1916!). But the fire that devastated much of Rome in July, AD 64, seems to differ from every other great fire of history in being so intimately associated with a single individual. And that individual, the emperor Nero, is, deservedly or not, widely viewed as the epitome of the erratic tyrant. The events of the Great Fire of Rome and the reputedly egregious conduct of Nero, before, during, and after it, are inextricably interwoven in a way that simply does not happen with any other Great Fire. And because the fire is so closely associated with Nero, it means that in order to understand its origins, progress, and consequences, we not only need to locate it within the context of the fires that preceded and followed (as we might in a study of the Fire of London, say, or of Chicago), but we must also understand it as one of the major political events of its age.

Accordingly, in the first chapter the focus is not so much on the fire itself as on the historical background of Nero as emperor, on what sources are available for him as well as for the calamity that had such an impact on his reign, and on the nature of the city that was so devastated. The information provided in this chapter is aimed squarely at the non-specialist and can safely be skipped by anyone with the most cursory knowledge of Rome’s early imperial history. The next chapter (2) places the great conflagration of AD 64 within the known record of fires in Rome and considers the measures that Romans adopted to deal with them. There follows a reconstruction of the events of the fire (3), then a chapter on the strength of the case against Nero as the prime suspect for starting it (4). There follow two chapters on the immediate aftermath—one on the targeting of the Christians as convenient scapegoats (5) and the other on the architectural transformation of the devastated city (6). The last full chapter assesses the significance of the fire for the subsequent course of Roman history (7). A final brief epilogue considers Nero and the Great Fire as a cultural phenomenon that has persisted from its own time down to our own. Finally, there are translations of the accounts of the fire by the three most important ancient literary sources, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, followed by a glossary of terms likely to be unfamiliar to the non-specialist.

Any thorough study of the Great Fire of Rome will pose a particular problem, in that it must not only involve a careful study of the ancient literary sources and of the scholarly work that has contributed to a better understanding of those sources, but also, no less important, it must acknowledge the results of the major archaeological endeavors that have recently produced new evidence for the fire and that have tended to be neglected by scholars outside the Italian academic community. There are also of course the general challenges faced by a book of this type, one intended to appeal to specialists as well as to a general readership. On the same page one may find basic and elementary information alongside quite dense and, some might think, recherché argumentation. The map that is provided at the front of the book contains most of the important buildings mentioned in the text. The location of some of them is highly contested, and the map is intended only as a general guide. It makes no claim to topographical precision. Particularly frustrating for a study of this kind are the different national practices for recording measurement. In the archaeological discussions, I have generally adhered to the standard convention of using the metric system. But in citing earlier archaeologists making broad calculations without any claim to precision, or ancient sources citing measurements in Roman feet or miles, it would have seemed bizarre to convert their figures. Hence in places I have retained the original imperial or Roman units. I see no satisfactory alternative to such inconsistency.

I

Introduction

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

When Nero succeeded as emperor in October, AD 54, he inherited a form of government put in place some eighty years previously by his illustrious ancestor, Augustus. Still known then as Octavian, Augustus had crushed the combined forces of his rival Antony and Antony’s ally and mistress, Cleopatra of Egypt, in September, 31 BC, at the great battle of Actium in northern Greece. His conduct afterward marked the end of a republican system of government that had been in force since the expulsion of the last Roman king, traditionally dated to the end of the sixth century BC. Some four years after Actium, he nominally surrendered to the senate the territories that he had ended up controlling. In gratitude for his generous gesture, the senate bestowed on him the title of Augustus and assigned to him authority over an enormous "province in the unsettled frontier areas. Its governors (provincial legates," legati Augusti), and the commanders of the legions stationed there (legionary legates, legati legionis—such technical terms are explained in the glossary at the end of the book), were his direct appointees, so that in effect he became commander-in-chief of the Roman armies. The remaining public provinces were governed by proconsuls selected by lot from the senate.

Despite the veneer of republicanism and the pretence that Augustus was merely the leading citizen (princeps), his determination to be succeeded from within his own bloodline betrayed the essential fraud of what was for all intents and purposes a monarchy. To complicate matters, he and his last wife, the much admired Livia, produced no living offspring. The rulers of Rome’s first imperial dynasty were subsequently descended from the Julian line of Augustus, beginning with Julia, his daughter by his previous wife, and from the Claudian line of Livia (the name Livia had been acquired through adoption), and they are familiarly known as the Julio-Claudians. Augustus eventually designated as his successor the Claudian Tiberius, Livia’s son by a previous marriage and the husband of Julia. Tiberius was an outstanding military commander, it seems, but destined to be an uncharismatic and undiplomatic emperor when he succeeded Augustus in AD 14. Like Augustus, he had no obvious successor in waiting in his later years. Tiberius died in 37, to be replaced by his grandson (by adoption), Gaius Caligula, a rare example of an emperor whose villainous reputation challenges even Nero’s. In AD 41, Caligula was assassinated by officers of his guard and succeeded by his uncle Claudius, a man deemed by many, including Claudius’s own mother, to be mentally incompetent, but who in fact proved a highly capable emperor. It was during Claudius’s reign that the young Nero first came to public attention.

Nero was born in Antium (Anzio), on December 15, AD 37. His father, Gnaeus, a man of seemingly limited character and few attainments, died during Nero’s infancy. His mother, Agrippina the Younger, a great-granddaughter of Augustus, seems to have been the dominant force in the family and was ruthlessly ambitious on her son’s behalf. She married Claudius in 49, and within a year had persuaded him to adopt her son. In AD 53, Claudius also sanctioned Nero’s marriage to his daughter, Octavia. Claudius died in AD 54, supposedly helped on his way by a poisoned mushroom added to the dinner menu by Agrippina. Nero was whisked off to the camp of the Praetorian guard, and enthusiastically greeted there as emperor. A compliant senate contributed by heaping imperial powers on the sixteen-year-old. The later image of Nero as the bloated tyrant is so firmly stamped onto the popular imagination that it is perhaps hard now to appreciate that the succession of this handsome and charming youth was greeted by Romans with exuberant enthusiasm as the dawn of a new Golden Age. The fervor of the time was palpable, reflected in the ecstatic response of the bucolic poet Calpurnius Siculus, a golden age is reborn in an age of serene peace.¹ The optimism may seem strangely naive, but the reaction does seem to have been genuine, and widespread. And, most significant for our present purposes, still, in AD 64, on the eve of the fire that devastated Rome, that enthusiasm seems hardly to have abated.

The excited public response to Nero’s succession was, of course, carefully orchestrated by the powers behind the throne. His very first speech before the senate was written for him by his old tutor, the philosopher Seneca, and was a model of tact and deference. Nero announced to the delighted, if deluded, senators that he would model himself on Augustus, and, perhaps most important, ensure that the senators would retain their ancient privileges, which of course was bound to be well received. It all created the happy illusion, in the view of Tacitus, that in some ways the old free republic was still alive and well. All in all, an excellent start. This early phase of the reign was not completely free of dark shadows, such as the suspicious death of Claudius’s natural son, Britannicus. But it is not until the fifth year, AD 59, that we have the first overt and indisputable proof that Nero could, if need be, behave with breathtaking ruthlessness. For reasons now difficult to determine—perhaps a mixture of political and psychological—he decided to eliminate his own mother, Agrippina. His reputed means were fascinating, and tradition has passed down to us an account of an elaborate, and thoroughly implausible, plan to sabotage a boat on which Agrippina was a passenger, so that it would break apart in mid-ocean. She succeeded in swimming to shore. Nero then sent assassins to her coastal villa to finish the job.

Even the barely disguised murder of a mother seems not to have made any serious dent in Nero’s broad appeal. The surrounding towns even went so far as to celebrate the murder, carrying out sacrifices and sending delegations to offer their congratulations. On his return to Rome after the event, the general populace responded with near delirious expressions of enthusiasm. To no small degree Nero’s powerful standing was due to his fine sense of knowing what would make the public happy. After murdering Agrippina, he proceeded with breathtaking sang froid to establish games in her honor, with entertainment that included a distinguished but unnamed knight who rode an elephant along a tightrope. One of the shows was particularly ominous, although no one in the audience could possibly have imagined its prophetic significance. The Fire by the highly regarded comic playwright, Lucius Afranius, was apparently staged with such vivid realism that the furniture had to be rescued by the actors from a genuinely burning house. They were allowed to keep it.²

Perhaps even more than Caligula before him, Nero was fundamentally a people’s emperor. One facet of his behavior that causes deep offense to the later literary authorities was his eagerness to perform as a singer on the stage, or as an actor in the theater, or as a charioteer in races. But these activities apparently did no damage to his standing with the masses at the time. In fact, the masses may well have approved of them. Pliny the Younger, in a panegyric on the emperor Trajan, in AD 100, observed that by Trajan’s day the people had turned away from professional actors as something vulgar, while in an earlier age they had actually enjoyed the performances of the actor-emperor Nero.³ Among the upper classes there was perhaps a certain ambivalence about such conduct. Although in the years preceding the fire they may have felt to a greater or lesser degree uncomfortable with the notion of their emperor performing on stage, they were perfectly willing to countenance it while their own material and political lives were happily prospering. Cynicism was not a scarce commodity in imperial Rome.

In the early 60s any lingering tensions from the fallout from Agrippina’s murder seem still to have been limited to court or family circles. In AD 62, Nero divorced the popular Octavia, so he could marry his second wife, Poppaea Sabina. According to Tacitus, the treatment of Octavia did lead to popular disturbances, but significantly Tacitus goes out of his way to emphasize that the protests were not directed against Nero. Instead, they targeted Poppaea. In fact, the crowds competed to heap praise on the emperor. We are much accustomed to hearing of Nero the crazed tyrant, the murderer of his family, the persecutor of the Christians, all in all a generally loathsome individual, and we can be lulled into forgetting that before the fire Nero was still very much Rome’s Golden Boy. By the first half of AD 64, his personal position must have seemed unassailable.

The fire seems to have been the catalyst for the great divide that opened up between Nero and members of Rome’s elite, one that would ultimately claim Nero himself as a victim. When the governor of Gaul, Gaius Julius Vindex, rebelled in March 68, Nero should have been able to weather the crisis, and five years earlier he almost certainly would have weathered it (the mutinous Vindex was in fact defeated and died two months later). But he dithered, and the lack of support among the senatorial elite encouraged the revolt of the highly regarded military commander Servius Sulpicius Galba, at that time serving in Spain. Nero seemed overwhelmed by events and incapable of responding effectively, alternating between panic and inertia. The unrest spread to Africa, and in Rome the Praetorian guard abandoned him, thus sealing his fate. He was declared a public enemy (hostis) by the senate and escaped to a private villa, where he took his own life, in June 68.

Nero’s melodramatic death was the prelude to more than a year of political turmoil, as rival commanders competed to fill the vacancy he had created: Galba, Otho, and Vitellius all took turns serving as emperor, but the tenure of each was spectacularly brief. The situation finally settled down when Vespasian, already in de facto control while his predecessor, Vitellius, was still alive, was formally acknowledged as princeps by the senate in December 69. The dynasty that he founded, the Flavians (Vespasian, 69–79, his sons Titus, 79–81, and Domitian, 81–96), seems to have made the denigration of Nero one of the central props of its propaganda, which doubtless helped shape the earliest impressions of the Great Fire and of Nero’s responsibility for it.

THE LITERARY SOURCES

Whatever period of history we choose to study, we inevitably find ourselves at the mercy of the sources available. Ancient history poses its own special challenges. Even when sources are relatively plentiful, and we are far better informed about the Julio-Claudians than about, say, the early Middle Ages, the quality of the material can leave much to be desired. A very brief introduction to this issue as it relates to Nero and the Great Fire is therefore appropriate. This short section is far from comprehensive and makes no effort to treat all the ancient authorities who appear in the course of this book. Many of these are incidental, and some brief background information will be provided on the spot where it seems relevant. The focus here is on the three major literary sources for the Neronian fire, whose accounts appear near the end of the book.

None of the three main authorities for the fire, Tacitus (AD 55?–120s?), Suetonius (AD 70?–130s?), and Cassius Dio (AD 165?–235?) was, at the time he wrote, a contemporary of Nero. They all depended on earlier writings. These are now almost entirely lost and even the identities of their authors are very difficult to determine. There is, however, one extant source cited generally by both Suetonius and Tacitus: the prodigious Pliny the Elder (AD 23 / 24–79), a polymath whose scholarly enthusiasm led to his death during the eruption of Vesuvius. Pliny’s great encyclopaedic work, the Naturalis Historia, was published in AD 77 in thirty-seven books and survives as an opulent mine of fascinating information on almost every aspect of the ancient world, including the reign of Nero. References to the emperor are scattered throughout the work. The tone of the material is unabashedly negative, with emphasis on Nero’s extravagance and willful eccentricity. Pliny does make one specific and potentially significant comment on the fire and Nero’s potential culpability, but his information is seriously flawed by a manuscript problem (see chapter 3). He also wrote a more conventional history, the Historiae, in thirty-one books.⁴ Unfortunately it is now lost, but Tacitus made use of it, citing it for information on the major conspiracy that followed the fire.⁵

Publius (?) Cornelius Tacitus is broadly acknowledged as the senior historian of the Julio-Claudian period. He pursued a successful career under the Flavian dynasty that followed it, which he capped with a series of important historical works. By AD 100 he had written his Histories, covering the succession and reigns of the Flavians: only the first four books and fragments of the fifth have survived. He then turned to an earlier era for his

Reviews for Rome Is Burning

[la2bkk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book will represent the preeminent work on the causes and effects of the great fire of Rome in 64.A noted historian, the author closely analyzes the written accounts left by the three major historians who wrote on the subject, and also addresses subsequent archeological finds. Among the issues addressed are where the fire began, what areas were damaged, what was the cause (probably not Nero) and the aftereffects. I particularly enjoyed the thorough analysis of Nero's alleged persecution of the Christians. I would have ranked this book even higher except that at times the author dwelt in too much fine detail- for example, his somewhat confusing discussion of the archeological remains of the various structures throughout the city districts.Highly recommended for those who have an interest in this specific subject.

[macdad-236140 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The great fire of Rome in 64 CE is one of those events that remains embedded in the Western cultural memory. Yet the irony that Anthony Barrett describes in this book is that the things we remember about it, such as Nero fiddling while his capital went up in flames, are false, while we overlook its true — and truly enormous — historical significance.As Barrett explains, the burning of Rome was an event of lasting historical importance. Over the course of nine days, the blaze devastated the core of Rome itself, killing thousands and gutting numerous homes and public buildings. In its aftermath, Nero (who was not even in Rome when the fire started) began a massive rebuilding campaign that was still underway when he died four years later. Barrett details how it was the legacy of the fire that contributed to his demise, as the enormous expense of the effort led to the stripping of the provinces of the wealth and the devaluing of the currency. Faced with rebellion at his policies, Nero was killed by one of his secretaries on his orders; as Nero died without any surviving children, his demise brought an end to the Julio-Claudian dynasty and inaugurated a new era in Roman history.As a longtime scholar of of the Julio-Claudian era, Barrett draws upon his familiarity with both the literary and archaeological record to provide his readers with a comprehensive history of the fire and its aftermath. Its coverage is impressive, ranging from his examination of the ancient city's longstanding experiences with fire to the modern-day representations of the event and what they reveal about its perpetuation. Generously illustrated with both photographs and drawings, it makes for an outstanding history of the Great Fire of Rome, one that should be on the reading list of anyone with even a passing interest in Roman history or the history of the great city for which the empire was named.