The Ancients - The Great Fire of Rome

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

In July 64AD, the Great Fire of Rome tore across the city, and ultimately burnt two thirds of Rome to ashes before it could be bought under control. A devastating event that can still be seen in the archaeology today, it ultimately led to the first persecution against the early Roman Christians. With legends of the narcissistic Nero playing the fiddle as his city burnt around him, and conspiracy theories as to who actually started this catastrophic blaze - what actually happened in July 64AD?In this episode Tristan welcomes Professor Ginna Closs to the podcast to help shine a light on this murky day in Roman history. Looking at the ancient fire brigade that eventually helped to quell the blaze, the legacy that Nero left, and ultimately how the city was rebuilt - it's fair to say the Great Fire of Rome was a defining moment in history. So what really happened, and what can we learn from the new evidence coming to light?For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, we're going to one of the most well-known cases of a fire in ancient history. We're going to the city of Rome, we're going to 64 AD to the reign of the infamous Emperor Nero and the time when a massive fire gripped this capital of the Roman Empire and caused

massive destruction, burning a huge part of the city to the ground. It's an event for which we have quite a lot of literature surviving and we also have archaeology too. It's also a destructive event that has quite a vivid legacy down to the present day, the image of the Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned, or the aftermath of the fire when this emperor infamously used Christians as a scapegoat to blame them for the fire when actually he had a role in it himself. The Great Fire of Rome reflects pretty badly on the Emperor Nero. But how much of this is truth and how much is fiction? How much can we really believe?

Well, in this episode, I was delighted to interview Professor Gina Kloss all about the fire, Nero's role in it and its legacy down to the present day. Gina, she's a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and it was wonderful to interview her all about it. So without further ado, to talk all about the Great Fire of Rome, here's Gina. Gina, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Thank you, Tristan. It's wonderful to be here. And to talk about a topic like this, the Great Fire of Rome, there seem to be many, many fires from ancient history. But this one, the one that engulfed Rome during Nero's reign,

it's become the big one. Surely there's not a more well-known fire from ancient history. Yes, I would agree with that. And it's really, I think it's a combination of a few things. One is it really was the biggest fire that had ever hit Rome at the time. And I think it's also that it coincides fairly closely with the fall of Nero and, you know, he was forced to suicide and it ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty. And so it also became a really big opportunity for the next dynasty that came along to use the fire to demonise Nero

and promote their own agenda. So it really caught on in history, partly because of what happened after it. Right, that whole demonising Nero idea, which we'll definitely be getting back to. But okay, so it is the reign of the Emperor Nero. But before the fire breaks out, just set the scene for us, Gina. What's the situation in Rome with Nero's Rome?

It was materially a place where fires were just going to break out all the time because there were no building regulations. I mean, there were in ancient Rome, but they were not carefully followed. And just the norm of everyday structures in the city was building things fast, building things cheap, and building them quite flammable. We think of this sort of marble columns, monumental idea of the city when we imagine ancient Rome. But really, there were a lot of structures that were just sort of wicker and wattle and daub, it's called, basically wicker with plaster on top of it. So highly, highly flammable. And of course, there were fires everywhere for everyday life and industry that could easily start a blaze. So it's kind of a surprise that nothing like this had happened

sooner. And then, of course, politically at the time, we're at a situation where there's been about a century of ruler by one man, by an emperor. And there have been several emperors who were all terrible and scary in their own ways. Both of the ones before Nero had already met sticky ends. And Nero himself was young and popular with just sort of the general populace of the city, unpopular with the senators and other figures who were likely to write history. And he was actually not in town when the fire began. He was out at his country at his seaside villa in Anzio, which is on the coast. And he was kind of, I think, caught by surprise if we don't want to believe that he started the fire when it broke out. You can kind of imagine that it took him a few days. And this is what history records. He was not immediately inclined to come back to the city when he heard that the

fire had broken out. And this is taken as a sign of his terrible lack of interest in the city and its safety. But realistically, there must have been fires breaking out all the time, and many of them must have taken more than a day or two to go out. So you can see that it might have taken him time to realise how serious it was. What I found so interesting there when you were talking, if we go back to the city of Rome itself, was, as you say, there's this common perception of Rome as this city of marble with all of this incredible marble architecture. But at that time, should we actually be imagining

large parts of the city, old Rome almost, lots of wooden houses closely packed together, small interweaving streets, almost like a tinderbox for an actual fire to come about. Yes, very much so. And there were also buildings that were stacked many stories up, especially the insulae, as they called these apartment block dwellings, where there would have been no method of escape if you were up on, say, the sixth or seventh floor of one of these rickety old buildings. If there's a fire on the first floor, and actually Juvenal says this, he's a later writer, but he's talking about fires at Rome.

And he says, by the time you in the attic hear that people are shouting there's a fire, you're really already dead. So there are no safety regulations that would have mitigated the effects once a fire really got going. And they did have a fire really got going. And they did have a fire brigade. Yes. What is this fire brigade? Yes. Yeah, they're called the Ouigiles. And they had been established by Augustus in 6 CE after there'd been, the sources say, one day where there were multiple fires breaking out all over. And so he instituted this citywide system of almost paramilitary forces. They wore kind of military looking uniforms and they slept in barracks and they patrolled around the city. And their only real tactics, though, were bucket brigades.

They had big mats that they would wet down and sort of try to smother the fire. They had the ability to, if there was no other remedy, they could demolish buildings in the path of a fire to create a fire break. But I think they were organized, and this is an important point, on a local basis. So they were organized by administrative region. Augustus had organized the city into 14 regions. And they had never had an event where more than one region had been affected. So they wouldn't have had the opportunity to practice coordinating across regions when something like the 64 fire transpired. And so I'm sure they were doing their best. I think there are some sources that claim there were agents of the emperor running around demolishing buildings and setting fires. And possibly this is a misunderstood interpretation of this fire breaking activity that they were trying to carry out.

So they were there, but there wasn't a lot they could do. And in fact, the closest fire station to the place where the fire broke out, the Circus Maximus, was across the river. Marcus Maximus, was across the river. So you can imagine what would happen as this fire breaks out, all of these people are running the other direction on the bridge, and these poor firefighters are trapped across the Tiber, and probably it took them some time to get over. So just really a combination of totally predictable factors could have led to the fire. A total anarchy as well. I mean, I find that really, really interesting, the fact that, you know, so you have this fire brigade, the logistics behind it, of course,

trying to get and tackle one of these fires. But you mentioned a fire station. So do we have from the surviving archaeology, or is it from the literature that we know where these fire stations were? Well, it's a combination. There's a giant study by a French scholar called Robert Sabiro from the 90s,

where he goes through all the evidence we have for these cohorts of the Wigulés. So he's pinpointed a number of the locations. And I think the one across the Tiber, in fact, there is an archaeological site that you can visit. So some of them, yes, we have little spots that we can connect with them physically. And then I think others are attested in the literature. The best one we have is actually out at Ostia Antica. It's not in Rome at all, but that's a fairly complete fire barracks out there that you can kind of see what it would have been like in the city. Well, let's delve into the literature a bit more because you mentioned there, the literature and our sources. So what sources do we have for piecing together this

great fire of 64 AD? Right. Well, we do, first of all, have the physical evidence in the city. I mean, Rome is incredibly archaeologically disturbed, but I've been on excavations myself where you know when you hit the 64 destruction layer, because it's just a thick band of ash that runs through every site in the city that preserves that much archaeology. You're like, oh, there it is. There's 64 when you see it. And it's a major tool for establishing chronologies in archaeological digs because it's so recognizable. So there is, even in, say, the Forum, in that lair were preserved things like sort of melted piles of coins that had probably been dropped at some kind of money exchange table. And so there is, in certain cases, physical evidence of the fire that you can see and investigate. And we have that.

But I think what classically we use to establish the narrative of the fire is, of course, the literary sources. And the most important three are probably Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio. And Tacitus is obviously in his annals, describes the fire in great detail. And he's probably the earliest source we have, 110, 120 CE. Suetonius is maybe just a tiny bit later, essentially contemporary, but of course he's writing biography. So he's mentioning the fire as part of a general condemnation of Nero's character, and he's not necessarily going into the details of what happened when. And then Cassius Dio is writing histories in the late second, maybe more like early third century CE. He tends not to give details that we can't already have found in earlier sources, but he occasionally organizes the information in a way that makes certain things more clear. So they're mostly what we look at. And then, of course, there are numerous literary sources who just mention the fire in passing that also provide additional information.

I did not realise how in Rome today with the archaeology, there is that distinct burnt layer, which is so fascinating because in the UK you have Colchester, we have London, which are both burnt to the ground by Boudicca and you have that burnt layer with artefacts surviving, kind of showing you how vicious, how hot the fire was, burning glass. But it seems like you can also gather that from the archaeology in Rome, the heat of the fire, the extent of the fire by the state of the artefacts that have been uncovered. Yeah, of course, in Rome, I suppose as with London, it's very spotty because so many things have happened before and since. And a lot of the places, we don't even really know the full extent of the fire and where it burned because it's too

difficult to establish archaeologically what the perimeters would have been. But there is, at least in several places I've seen, it's very apparent. And one place I think you can see it pretty clearly is in the Basilica San Clemente. You can take a tour where you go down through the layers of time, as it were. And at one stage, you can see the burn marks on a building that was probably a grain store that we think was definitely the 64 fire that did that particular damage. Well, there you go. Well, let's therefore go back in time to 64 AD and the fire itself. time to 64 AD and the fire itself. So take it away, Gina, from the archaeology, from the sources, where and how does the fire begin? Well, I'll tell you when, where and how. On the night between July 18th and 19th of 64 CE, the fire breaks out among the market stalls that were kind of packed into the eastern end of the Circus Maximus. So that's

kind of right up against the edge of the Palatine Hill. And carried by a very strong wind, the sources tell us, the flames sort of quickly sweep through the shopping area and up the wooden superstructure of the circus. So the circus is, we think of it again as this big stone monument, but a lot of the upper stories were wood. And so they were just primed to go off. And then they kind of have this clear valley of the Circus Maximus to just proceed unimpeded. And then from there, it spreads up the hills, which are on either side, and then it's off to the races. So that's where it began. And then it continued for six days or so, just burning all over the city. And there are accounts in Cassius Dio and, of course, in Tacitus of the devastation and the panic and the human cost that that entailed. On the sixth day, it did stop partly because of these firebreaking tactics, which I mentioned. They demolished a bunch of buildings that were in the likely path of the fire. And so they got it almost totally out. Unfortunately, it rekindled and very suspiciously rekindled on the property of Tigellinus, who is Nero's Praetorian prefect and kind of all around henchmen. So that looks bad, but again, it's the kind of thing that

could happen. Continues for another three days and mostly at this point burns monumental zones. So less loss of life, but destruction of sort of Rome's heritage and Rome's identity in the form of these monuments that were destroyed. And that was it, about nine days. Do we know of any particular monuments are there any particular names monuments that say circus maximus aside that are mentioned as being prime victims of the fire well most of the palatine hill which was where the imperial residence was was destroyed and what got nero to come back at least according to uncharitable sources from his seaside villa when this happened is that his own new house which he had building, he called it the Domus Transitoria,

and it sort of ran from the Palatine through parts of the Forum. It burned down. And then, of course, the whole area where the Colosseum is now was residences, and that's actually been excavated, and it was kind of a commercial and elite housing zone. It was all destroyed, which kind of made room for Nero to, of course, build his golden house later. And then it did get most of the campus marshes. A lot of that had to be rebuilt. What's interesting is Tacitus does kind of give us a little list of all the buildings that are all these temples that had been destroyed. of all the buildings that are all these temples that had been destroyed. And most of them, they wouldn't really ring a bell for readers today because they were gone after that. But he does sort of make a point that almost every one of them was associated with some really significant

point in Rome's history. Either the kings had built it or it had been a victory temple for some great war during the Middle Republic. And so the way Tacitus describes it, it really is a destruction of Rome's history. And he also mentions that many literary sources were also destroyed, which were, of course, important for him when he was trying to write history. So he sees it as sort of an erasure of Rome's identity more broadly. That is sometimes something that's overlooked, isn't it? The libraries that would have been destroyed in these fires, like, you know, the fire which took the Great Library of Alexandria out, isn't it? That's a great point to highlight there. I mean, what's

also quite interesting there is the, you mentioned at the start before giving the description of the fire itself, we know the actual day in 64 AD or night that this massive devastation occurred or began? We do. But even that, it's a little suspicious because the way we know it is partly due to the reaction afterwards, which wanted to make a strong connection between the fire of 64 and the Gallic sack, which is traditionally dated to 390 BCE. And so Tacitus again tells us there were people who were making these sort of calculations saying that there was an equal number of years, months, and days between the two fires. And so it, I think, did begin on the day that we are given in the sources, you know, the 18th, 19th of July. But it's also true

that something maybe was massaged a little bit there to connect it to the previous great destruction of Rome, which had taken place centuries ago and was at the hands of a foreign invader as opposed to allegedly at the hands of Rome's own emperor. Okay, then the big question, of Rome's own emperor. Okay, then the big question, what or who do we think caused this fire? Ooh, well, I don't know what we think. I think this is obviously something we can never truly know. And even Tacitus, who is again, our earliest source, he goes out of his way to say that it's only a rumor that Nero started the fire and that he allegedly played some kind of stringed instrument while he watched the fire. I think because I've looked at how fires started in Rome and in other ancient cities generally, that it's just incredibly likely that something

like this was going to happen. I think that to me, it almost certainly was an accident. And it's also true that we have a couple of indirect pieces of evidence suggesting Nero's innocence. I mean, one, he was definitely away at the time. He couldn't, I mean, no one thinks he personally threw the torch. I think what they think is that he ordered it, of course, to be done by other people. And it's also true that he didn't take it as seriously as you think he might have if it was his plan all along. Like, why would he want the sort of bad PR of having stayed away from the city and ignored the problem? Wouldn't he want to come right away and play the hero? So I think both of those things suggest that this caught Nero unawares. But it's also true that he didn't do

himself any favors in the aftermath by building this massive palace that looked like it was his dream come true. And it sort of made it seem like he had done this on purpose. And Suetonius says that he did it as if in disgust at how old and broken down Rome had been, and because he wanted to clean it up and build a beautiful new city. But again, Suetonius is very happy to report rumours and accusations as fact, and it isn't something that we can necessarily take too seriously. So in my opinion, it was accidental, but I can never prove that. I mean, you think the fire is accidental and you know absolutely credible reasons for that but we've got to highlight this nero fiddling while rome

burned story or myth i mean what exactly is this story how does it come about in which of our sources it is again earliest sources tacitus but suetonius and Cassius Dio both put their own spin on it. And the earliest thing that we have is that he goes on to what is described as a private stage or a domestic stage that he has in the palace, or it's not clear, somewhere on his imperial property, and that he sings about the destruction of Troy, comparing ancient misfortunes to new disasters. That's more or less what Tacitus gives us. So that already leaves a lot of questions. We don't know if it's his own composition that he sang. He did sing or perform his own Troy poem actually after the fire. So we know he had something, but it could have been

any number of other ancient Greek or Roman poetic sources. And we don't know where he would have done this either because Suetonius and Tacitus Dio give us two different explanations of where he was somehow in either in a tower or at the top of a hill where he could see the fire unfolding. And they do say that he enjoys the view, but he somehow wasn't in danger himself. So it all gets really murky. And the way people try to add these extra details to me suggests that there's sort of a folkloric aspect to it, or there's this kind of shaky witnesses kind of inventing details later, you know, to make the story seem more complete. So yeah, we don't have all the details. And we also don't know. He certainly didn't play a fiddle. I think if he played anything at all, it was probably the

kithara, which was the sort of giant concert lyre, a very difficult instrument that he was famous for playing and performing with, which was considered kind of outrageous and offensive by Roman standards. And I think this really gets to why it's questionable. His lyre playing and his performances were already considered so abnormal and so deviant. Of course, these two stories would join up. His performing and his propensity for this kind of poetic ridiculousness would get connected to this awful thing that happened during his reign. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, host of the new podcast, American History Hit. Twice a week, I'll be exploring stories from America's past to help us understand the United States of today.

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Join me every Monday and Thursday for American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. What better way to deride a bad predecessor for a new regime than to pick this person in the worst possible light and in views of Roman virtue at the time, isn't it? It's astonishing. And I guess with that story, mentioning how it almost evolves over time, correct me if I'm wrong, but you know, that whole story of Nero and the Fiddle, it's been meme-ified in more recent times too. Oh, so much. Yes. There are so many examples. I think most disturbingly, right before the pandemic hit in the United States, Donald Trump tweeted something. It was retweeted, rather, an image of himself playing a fiddle and saying no one knows what's coming next or something. but I like it. And of course, what everyone thinks it was referring to is portraying him as Nero fiddling while Rome burned. But really, almost any politician you mention, if you just Google their name plus fiddle plus burn, you're going to find a political cartoon that has them in front of

some crisis in their own government playing some kind of stringed instrument and acting unconcerned. I think it really caught on because it just conveys this frustration that I think everyone has in times of disaster, that leadership is not up to the task and that leadership is so far removed from the concerns of everyday people that they can just kind of enjoy themselves and pursue some kind of hobby rather than focus on this immediate concern. So if we go back, therefore, to 64 and following the fire, Rome is emerging again from the ash. And how quickly is it before rumours seem to start circulating that maybe it was Nero who started the fire? Oh, absolutely, immediately. It's striking because, again, Tacitus and Suetonius, who normally don't do Nero any favours in their representation of him, both go out of their way to say how fast and how efficient Nero was in getting a clean-up and rescue and recovery efforts in the wake of the fire.

You know, he got all the rubble carted down on barges to deposit it in some swamp. He issued grain at vastly reduced prices. He made housing for people in a part of the city, the campus marshes, that hadn't been affected by the fire. So he did an absolutely fabulous job. affected by the fire. So he did an absolutely fabulous job. And it still wasn't enough because, again, Tacitus tells us he couldn't beat these rumors that were already arising, that he had, one, started the fire, and that, two, he had done some sort of weird performance during the fire. And so this is why, according to the sources, he found a group to scapegoat, which was the Christians.

They were already kind of suspected of being hostile to Rome due to their religious practices and refusal to participate in state religion. And Tacitus actually doesn't have anything nice to say about them. He kind of calls them a dangerous cult who, you know, were hostile to Rome. cult who were hostile to Rome. And so he doesn't seem to really object to Nero's punishment of them on the grounds that he thinks that they're good people, but he does seem to think that it was more or less a pretext and a diversion that would keep Nero from being accused of the fire himself. And it's quite gruesome, but if Nero, he puts all the blame on the Christians, he's already had the run-in with St. Paul, hasn't he? And that terrible, dreadful execution of St.

Paul. But what happens to the Christians? It's not pleasant, is it? No, this is, again, it sounds really extreme, but it's not really that different than the kinds of punishments that other emperors inflicted on other people they were condemning as criminals. Sort of spectacular public executions were a form of entertainment in imperial Rome generally. But there does seem to have been maybe a connection between the punishment and the alleged crime because what a lot of them, what happened to a lot of the Christians is he kind of had a big festival of punishment out at his properties, which were in the Vatican. And he, it seems to have been a nighttime celebration where things were lit by human torches, essentially.

Christians were tied to some kind of stake and set on fire. And the blaze illuminated this sort of carnival that Nero was sponsoring for the public in this entertainment venue. And that is actually related to where the Basilica of St. Peter's is today, because those original martyrdoms were kind of the site that they wanted to commemorate when they were building the original structure of the Vatican as we know it today. So there were a bunch of other mythologically based executions that looked awful and probably were entertaining to the public. Actually, Tacitus does say that even the public kind of thought things went too far and there were too many people killed. And so even this effort that Nero makes to kind of appease public sentiment by punishing

an accused wrongdoer doesn't seem to have really succeeded. But it becomes an incredibly important part of the whole Christian tradition thereafter. I mean, absolutely, 100% it does. I mean, we're therefore talking about how it doesn't really work because this rumour of Nero still abounds that he caused the fire, he's involved with this great fire. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the next year, 65 AD, is there this massive conspiracy against Nero that might also have its roots in the fire? Yes, I think after the fire, he loses a lot of credibility with leadership and I think even with the provinces as well, because he taxes apparently all of Italy

and a number of the Eastern provinces very heavily to finance the rebuilding at Rome. And so this makes a lot of people unhappy. And I think, honestly, most people in the senatorial class had not appreciated Nero for some time. He had at this point killed probably his stepbrother, definitely his mother, and also his first wife, who was the Emperor Claudius's daughter. And so he'd shown an ability to end the lives of people around him in a pretty indiscriminate fashion. And so I think for this elite class, that was already very dangerous. And so I think after the fire, maybe they saw an opportunity finally, because now he seemed vulnerable and maybe public opinion wasn't as much on his side. So yeah, they get a whole bunch of people together and the person they think will be emperor

afterwards is this Piso, this member of a fairly distinguished family who maybe had the right lineage and could maybe get the Praetorian guard on his side. And so there are a lot of people involved in this, allegedly the poet Lucan, who wrote the Pharsalia, maybe the author Petronius, who possibly is the person who wrote the satiric on, but people argue about this. So a lot of literary figures are also involved. And then basically they get too many people, I think, involved in the plot. So it does get discovered. Everyone gets hauled in and tortured, and they all give up other names. And there just is actually this massive kind of web of torture and execution that radiates out

from this conspiracy. And it eventually involves even Lucan's uncle, the philosopher Seneca, who had been Nero's tutor. But they had kind of been on the outs, actually, since the fire. Seneca had been trying to distance himself from Nero. And I think he almost certainly wasn't actually involved. But Nero saw it as a convenient excuse to finally get rid of someone who bothered him. And so he was ordered, as many of these individuals were, to end his own life, to save Nero the trouble of executing him. Right.

But let's definitely focus in a bit more on Seneca, because it does seem to have, as you hinted at there, this link to the Great Fire of Rome, following the Great Fire, Seneca distancing himself from Nero. And I know you've done quite a bit of work on one of his letters, the Epistulae Morales 91, because what is this? What's it talking about about and there's a potential link to the Great Fire too. Yes I think so and I'm not the first person to see this but it tended to get mentioned as sort of an aside in discussions of the letter and I think when you really look

at the letter there's so much more evidence that this is kind of a shadow commentary on the Great Fire and that's what I really wanted to explore in my book and some other things I've done. So yeah, to set the scene, Seneca has been this major figure of philosophy of drama at Rome for some time. He is very closely associated with Nero and his court. And he even was sort of Nero's ghostwriter for most of his speeches because Nero wasn't really up to that kind of rhetoric himself. He was more interested in poetry. So they had a long and complicated history. And around the time, maybe even a little earlier than 64, Seneca had been trying to put himself into a kind of self-imposed exile without upsetting Nero.

He'd been asking if he could go because he really needs to focus on his writing and he wanted to live away from the court. So he maybe had already been doing this for some time, but after the fire, it becomes more pronounced. And there's even, according to Tacitus, there are some attempts to poison Seneca to get him out of the way because it didn't look good for Nero that people were kind of shunning him in this way. called Lucilius, whose name might mean little Lucius, and then Lucius Domitius and Abarbus was Nero's original name. So everyone, there's the thought that maybe these were sort of his letters to a Nero figure, you know, saying what he'd like to say to a young man who needs to think about his leadership and his role in the world. And he uses these letters as a way to kind of give little bite-sized pieces of his philosophical views on, you know, mostly,

of course, he's a Stoic, so propounding Stoicism for this young, aspiring Stoic leader. And so letter 91 is a little unusual because it mentions a specific event. Most of these letters, we can't really assign a date to them because they seem to be kind of deliberately avoiding talking about current events because, yeah, commenting on things in the wrong way in Neronian Rome was not very good for your health. And Seneca knew this better than anyone. So this letter, he does say, is inspired by a fire, which he says takes place in Lyon, like Lugdunum, which is the provincial capital of Roman Gaul. Lugdunum, which is the provincial capital of Roman Gaul. And we know from other sources that there was a giant fire in Lyon, maybe as little as like four or five months after the Great Fire

of Rome. So if we can kind of safely assume that this is the same event, we have Seneca writing a matter of months after the Great Fire about a big fire that destroys a city, just not Rome, allegedly. However, in this letter, he quickly kind of removes, there are really very few indications that Lyon is really the focus. He doesn't mention any buildings or any people other than this friend of his, he says, is upset about the fire of Lyon. So he doesn't really connect it with any specific place at all. He really speaks in much more general terms about a great city, maybe even the greatest city in the world has now been destroyed. And it's possibly his way of getting

across his opinion and what he would like to tell the Roman public about the event of the fire and how they should understand it without upsetting Nero and with this plausible deniability that he's really just talking about this other event. So this is the kind of thing you had to do under an emperor like Nero because he was not the only emperor who was incredibly sensitive about any kind of comment or even indirect comment on his rule. But he certainly at this point would have been, I think, quite paranoid. And as we find out, justifiably so, because in fact, people were conspiring to kill him. But yeah, I think that Seneca at this point was really maybe writing for the future as much as anything. I think maybe he even knew his number

was coming up and kind of see that in a lot of the letters. He anticipates his own death quite a lot. And in fact, that's kind of what he says we should do. We should all do when we experience a disaster such as this great fire in this allegedly Gallic city is reflect on what this means for us and how short our time on earth is and all that kind of thing that Senecaeneca likes to talk about it's so fascinating when you look at the surviving literature and try and see that potential link or blame rightly or wrongly associated with nero for this massive event in rome's ancient history in the first century as we start wrapping up now, Jenna, if we go back to the fire itself, architecturally, how did this fire change the whole layout of Rome going forwards? Well, this is one thing that I think Nero can take credit for because the sources are unanimous in saying that this was his big effort in the wake of the fire. He insisted that all streets be laid out more regularly on a grid.

And actually, you can compare in some places in Rome before and after the fire and see that this is true. He banned party walls connecting one property to another. He legislated that there sort of be porticos around large buildings that would maybe create sort of a fire break or also maybe be a little bit of a fire escape for people who were trying to get out from upper stories. He saw to it that there was a greater supply of water around to put out fires immediately when they broke out. And he also even, he cracked down on sort of illegal taps into the water system that people had been using, which had sort of drained off the water supply and created problems for when they were trying to put out the fire. So it was really

comprehensive. And he, I don't think, gets enough credit for this. And that's partly because it probably wasn't really all completed by the time he died. That was only four years later. And so the bulk of the rebuilding that happened after the fire really was done under the Flavians, the next dynasty. But they did follow all of Nero's directives while energetically attacking his memory. And so there's a certain irony there. And I mean, it's also true that he did spend a lot of money and took up a lot of space with his own dream house project. And this, of course, is remembered very negatively that he, in the middle of the city over all of this burnt zone,

created this massive estate with a huge water feature and a monumental statue of him and all these buildings with these very cool sounding architectural features, like a dining room that revolves under a sort of canopy of stars and really is gorgeous, but it looks incredibly self-indulgent. And the Flavians, again, in the next dynasty, they really capitalized on this by demolishing most of it. And then where his giant artificial lake had been, this is where they put the Colosseum.

So it becomes this really strong visual statement. You know, Nero was selfish and took all this land away from Rome, but we're giving it back to the people with this massive entertainment complex. And so it really worked out very well for the Flavians, I think. Very much so. Yeah, you can very much see the Flavian legacy in how the story of the Great Fire of Rome has been passed down to us in present day, can't you? And so people like yourself trying to sort the fact from the fiction, it must be an extraordinarily

difficult task. Gina, this has been absolutely fantastic. I mean, last but not least, is there anything else you'd like to add about the Great Fire of Rome that you find particularly fascinating and would like to highlight? I think I'd like to actually talk a little bit more about the notion of Nero fiddling while Rome burned and how it's caught on, I think, specifically in English language culture because of the word fiddle, which with anything, it's sort of pointless. And it can even be sort of negative. If you fiddle the books in a bank or something, you've done something nefarious. So it has all these other resonances and it just sounds so irresponsible, I think, in a way that nothing else quite would. Played the liar, you're not even sure what that is. But fiddle just really, it pops. And it's also created this indelible visual image that is

so immediately recognizable. And so I think it's really taken off as sort of a brand or as you know, as you've said, a meme that anybody can instantly deploy when they want to attack a leader and everyone understands what it means. And I found found that really striking because it's become, I think, kind of the one fact that people know about ancient Rome. If they know one thing, they know this story. And it's partly just because of how good a soundbite it is. I mean, very much so. Yeah, exactly. Like Et tu, Brute? And all that from Shakespeare, isn't it? It's very similar. Anyway, Gina, well, this has been absolutely brilliant. And it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Thank you, Tristan. This was wonderful. Well, there you go. There was Professor Gina Kloss talking all about this destructive event that gripped Rome in 64 AD. The Great Fire of Rome. Looking at the actions of the Emperor Nero, but also other figures such as Seneca too. And of course, so much more. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Last thing from me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you are enjoying the ancients and you want to help us out as we get up to the next bar, as we keep growing the podcast to even greater heights as we develop new ideas well you know what

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