Did Nero really play the fiddle while Rome burned?

In A.D. 64, a great fire consumed Rome for six days and seven nights. Some rumors speculated that Nero set the fire, and even played a fiddle as the city burned. Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn if this is fact or fiction.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Skipson, joined by Curious like a cat
staff right, Josh Clark. How's it going, Josh Rare Candice Rare. Um,

(00:23):
I can't sing the lyrics quite as fast as the
incomparable Billy Joel. But we are kind of wondering who
started the fire? And back in eight six Rome was burning. Yes,
it was a bad burn too. I think half of
the citizens of Rome, which was pretty expansive at the time,
lost their homes. Yeah. Burn for six days and seven nights.

(00:45):
About the city was destroyed. Yeah. There were fourteen districts
to Rome at the time and only three were left intact,
and most of the other ones that were birn were
just totally leveled. It was a horrible fire. And at
the time, the person running the show in Rome was
the Emperor Nero, who was wildly unpopular. Um. I think

(01:05):
people kind of perceived him as a distracted leader. Um.
He seemed kind of Namby Pamby From the research I did,
he he just didn't really seem like a He was
no Alexander. Let's just put it like that, Okay, fair enough,
And there were actually rumors that he started the fire
on purpose because he didn't like the way that the
city looked and he wanted to rebuild it to his

(01:26):
own esthetic standards. Yeah yeah, And you know, once people
start throwing rumors like that around, you're in big trouble.
But one of the other accusations that um I came
across when I was researching the Roman Fire of sixty
four um was that Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned,
which is just seems mad, uh, And I've heard it before,

(01:50):
but I'm asking you what is it fact or is
that fiction? That's fiction. We're not quite sure where this
idea came from. I mean, the idea of a city
leader sitting around in his palace, you know, um plucking
the strings of his instrument while his city's residents became
homeless and utterly distraught. Again is just very sad and tragic.

(02:12):
And we know for a fact that he did play
a string instrument, but it wasn't the fiddle, and that
actually wasn't invented until fifteen years after the event anyway,
So that blows a story right out of the water.
But there are historical accounts from Tacitus that show neuro
Is actually present at the burning, and he was coordinating
firefighting efforts, he was housing the homeless and his own gardens,

(02:35):
and he was trying to get food available at a
discount to the city's residents. But despite all of this,
he still didn't do a very good job trying to
coordinate the raised city as it were. Yeah, but even
though he did try something, that's that in stark contradiction
of the image, the public image he had, So at
least he tried something right. He tried, but then he

(02:57):
tried to blame it on the Christians too and persecuted
them horribly, and he became even more unpopular when the
Senate declared him a public enemy. And then his own
soldiers started to revolt, and he realized that things were
going really downhill. So four years after the fire, he
took his own life. He stabbed himself in the throat. Indeed,
so Nero was a ritual zero, and you can read

(03:20):
more about him, and in Nero really played the fiddle
while Rome burn on half stuff works dot Com. We're
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