Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Nero and His Fiddle

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Did Nero play his fiddle while Rome burned during the Great Fire of 64 CE? Absolutely not. Find out how we know when Chuck and Josh bust a two thousand year-old myth. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And many, many more. Open your free High Heart Radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Totoro. And listen now. Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry, sitting in for Dave, and makes this as an official. short stuff, we have the quorum. Let's go. That's right. Do you recognize this article?

No. Who wrote it? Did I write? Did you write? Yeah, you wrote it. Did I really? Uh-huh. Wow, I was like, this is pretty good. I took your name off of it because I was hoping you wouldn't remember this one. That's awesome. Yeah, this is not a bad article at all. That's great. Thank you for that, because, yeah, I like this. I was like, I like the cut of this writer's gym. Yeah. Yeah, so this is from the old how stuffworks.com days, and this is about the, and I was surprised we hadn't done a shorty on this. I was like, surely we have the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. And when I looked it up, there you were, buddy. Yeah, I actually searched for an episode too, because it just sounds like we've definitely talked about at some point, but it just had to have been a part of a larger episode.

So let's dig in, because I feel like everybody, thanks to my article, has heard that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. And it turns out that that is probably a piece of ancient propaganda that survived almost 2,000 years at this point. I feel like you have a little extra wind beneath your wings now, but you know this is yours. I've never felt more alive than I do right now. Yeah, we're talking, obviously, about the great fire of Rome for six days and seven nights. That's when Rome saw, and this was AD 64, saw 70% of its city destroyed, and only four of its 14 districts intact afterward.

Wow. And the Roman historian Tacitus wrote that out of the, about half the people, of the million people, which would be, by my count, 500,000, were rendered without a home because of this great fire. I knew that. So this being a massive tragedy, which 2,000 years, I feel like we can add a joker to it.

this point, but it was such a huge tragedy, and it was just so out of nowhere, that of course, people just have an innate need to blame, a fine cause, assigned blame. People loved doing that, even back in the day. And also, people back in the day were as susceptible to rumors and urban legends as we are today. And those things started up really quickly. One of the main ones was that somehow the government was involved in this. Yeah, for sure. Like, hey, we saw people, we saw men fanning the flames and when confronted, they said that they were under orders to do so. Or, you know, maybe somebody actually started this fire on purpose. And Nero, the emperor Nero was kind of the prime suspect, it seems like. Yeah, that he ordered it, that he set the fire. Or some people, he had to rebuild Rome. I mean, you had to rebuild it after so many of the districts were just talking. totally leveled. And he was like, let's build this in, I don't know, Nero style, which is surprisingly close to the craftsman style of the 1920s. Oh, really? No. I was like, that's very surprising.

I thought you're going to say Art Deco. I was going to at first and I was like, no, let me come up with something else. Right. I should have just said Art Deco. It would have gotten a better laugh. But he rebuilt it in a manner that he liked. I mean, he was in charge at the time. And people were like, that's why Rome burnt because this guy wanted to rebuild it more in his image. Yeah, exactly. So that rumor was going around. And through that rumor came the story that while the Great Fire was burning, Nero played his fiddle and just sort of watched it happen. Should we take a break right there?

We should because, I mean, what's coming up next is just eye popping. That's right. More goodness from Josh Clark of 15. years ago, right after this. There's no shortcut for saving time. But saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellairdirect.com.

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first persecution of Christians in history. This was 64C.E. And I mean, Christianity was so new that there were still original apostles around who ended up being executed in this persecution. Yeah. Paul, who was the other one? Paul and Peter. Paul was beheaded and Peter was crucified upside down. Yeah, so like torturous, brutal executions are happening because Nero is looking for a scapegoat because he was blamed for this fire. You know, when you said before, we're going to talk about why it's definitive that he definitely didn't fiddle. It's because there was no fiddle at the time.

Music historians basically agreed that the viol class of instruments, which is like a violin, didn't come around to the 11th century. So about 1,500 years later, so there literally were no fiddles at the time. No, but he did play something called the Scythara, which is like a laptop harp. The top is like for strumming. The bottom is for plucking. You've probably seen something like it before, but he was really into it, so much so that when Rome conquered some new land, he would schedule music festivals in these new lands. And he would schedule them at times that he could go and compete.

He would compete. And the Senate was not happy about this. They're like, you're competing against commoners. You're the emperor. And apparently, Nero actually was more like than we think. think he was today, especially among the lower classes of Rome, because he didn't behave nearly as superior toward them as other elites in Rome had and did. Oh, okay. Well, you know, one thing he definitely did was in the immediate aftermath of the

fire, he did a lot, actually. He took a lot of measures to provide for the citizenry. He was at his place in Antium on the outskirts of Rome when it broke out. He immediately rushed back to the fire. Tacitus, that historian that I mentioned, was a boy at the time during the blaze. And he provided accounts of like, hey, Nero helped coordinate the firefighting himself on the first night. He opened up public buildings for housing. He opened up his own gardens for temporary shelter.

He imported grain from other cities close by that I guess he sold, but sold like super cheap. Yeah, he still sold it, though. I thought that was a little hinky. Yeah, for sure. But, yeah, so he was, a lot of the residents of Rome liked him, and Tacitus tells us, like, he did actually swing into action, and yet he still managed to bear the blame throughout this. Like, his persecution of Christians did not work. And apparently, like we said, the fiddling thing was not, it's not possible that he fiddled. It is possible he was playing the Sothara, but because of his responsiveness, it seems like that's probably not the case.

So because this was probably largely created by the Senate, like the, I think they were working hard to keep the blame on Nero, right? There's a 1940s historian from University of North Carolina named Mary Francis Giles. Go Tar Heels. Yeah. And yes, if you're a Tar Heel, you can be proud of Mary Frances Giles because she was one of those rare people who managed to see something that everybody knows in a different, light at a different angle. And she's like, you know, fiddling doesn't just mean playing a violin. It can also mean just kind of doing something like with your fingers, like ineffectually,

like you're wasting time and energy. You're just fiddling around. Maybe that's what they originally meant. I don't know why I never thought of that. I definitely hadn't either. Even after writing this, it didn't even look familiar. Yeah, she was like, you know, maybe he's just fiddling as in like doing something sort of useless at the time. It sounds like that didn't happen either.

But, yeah, maybe they viewed it as inadequate at the time, like what he was doing. Maybe the truth wasn't getting around that he was actually kind of helping. Right. And that actually fits with the idea that this is propaganda, that the Senate was basically saying Nero's responses were not nearly enough. He was just basically messing around. Yeah, for sure. But, you know, if you're like, man, Nero got a bad rap. there's a brilliant writer who took that into consideration, but probably, I don't know, 15 years ago, ish,

and said, hey, don't feel so bad for Nero, because Nero ascended to the throne because his mom killed his uncle, and then Nero had his mom killed. Yeah. And then, of course, the persecution of the Christians, you know, hanging people by their feet and decapitating them. Like, don't feel bad for this guy.

No. There was also domnacio ad bestias, which is sicking wild animals on people for executions. Yeah, no good. So Nero essentially was on his heels after that great fire. Again, remember the Senate didn't like him, like him that much. I can't stress that enough. And so the army, which he had been on really good terms with for a while, was like, we're not going to work for you any longer.

So there's a potential coup brewing. The Senate declared him a public enemy, which is not something you want levied against you as an emperor. It meant that he was probably going to be executed. So he pushed a dagger into his throat about four years after the fire came and went. Yeah. He said, I sense a coup brew. That was it. I don't know if you talk like that.

You know, I'm watching this show right now. And it's, oh, Star City. Have you heard of this? No. Star City is a show that is, I can't remember the name of the first show, but there was a show about the space race, and there was an American version for all mankind is what that was called, from the American perspective.

And Star City is the space race from the Soviet perspective. And it's really good. I think you would like it, but they cast all British actors and are doing British accents, sort of like they used to just do for all movies, back in the day. And it's just, I got to wrap my head around every single episode when all these Brits are talking. I try to hear it and like with a Russian accent in my head. And it just kind of drives me nuts. Yeah. Yeah. I can get used to that kind of thing. But I think it's also something

that if you, once you focus in on it, you just can't get past. I don't know why in 2026 they just didn't say like, you know, do a Russian accent. I know. It's appropriation. Russians. It's very strange. Well, I guess that's it for the short stuff, right? That's right. Okay. Well, everybody, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio.

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