The burning of Rome: Nero or the Christians?

 

The great fire that burned down most of the city of Rome broke out during the night of 18-19 July AD 64. It started in the commercial district, in the shops at the south-eastern end of the Circus Maximus. Town fires were not uncommon in cities, then or in later centuries. This one took its particular place in history because of its severity and because it was alleged, both then and subsequently, that the emperor himself had started it.

The flames were fanned by a strong summer breeze and spread quickly from district to district, burning down the wooden shops and tenements. The blaze raged for six days and nights before finally petering out. When it was over, ten out of Rome’s fourteen districts were destroyed, seventy percent of the area of the city. Rome was a smouldering ruin.

Rumour spread, equally quickly, that the emperor Nero himself had ordered the city to be torched, and that he had stood watching the fire from the top of the Palatine Hill, playing his lyre as the city burned below and all around him. It was a powerful image, and one that has stuck to Nero’s memory ever since.

The reality was that Nero was in his palace in Antium (Anzio) when the fire broke out. When he heard about the fire he rushed to Rome and ran about the city without his guards for the whole of that first night, personally directing the fire-fighting operation. But people preferred to believe that Nero had started the fire, and he looked for someone to blame. He used the Christians as scapegoats. The Christians were a small, fringe sect, and their obscurity laid them open to accusations of inexplicable antisocial behaviour. The perennial fear of the foreign meant that Nero’s strategy worked. This led to a major persecution of the Christians. In spectacular ‘games’, Christians were fed to lions, crucified or burned as human torches to entertain the masses – and to remind them who started the fire. But suspicion that Nero had indeed been behind the fire grew when a lavish new building programme replaced the ruins with a city of marble, with wide streets, arcades for pedestrians and a newly designed water supply system. Debris from the ruins was cast into the surrounding malaria-ridden marshes. It began to look as if the clearing of a large area of the city for redevelopment had been carefully planned.

One of the main sources about the episode was the historian Tacitus. He was born in about AD 56 and was eight or nine years old at the time of the fire. He wrote his eye-witness account in The Annals in the year 116.

 

Now started the most terrible and destructive fire which Rome had ever experienced. It began in the Circus, where it adjoins the Palatine and Caelian hills. Breaking out in shops selling flammable goods, and fanned by the wind, the conflagration instantly grew and swept the whole length of the Circus. There were no walled mansions or temples, or any other obstructions, which could arrest it. First, the fire swept violently over the level spaces. Then it climbed the hills, but returned to ravage the lower ground again. It outstripped every counter-measure. The ancient city's narrow winding streets and irregular blocks encouraged its progress.

Terrified, shrieking women, the helpless old and young, people intent on their own safety, people unselfishly supporting invalids or waiting for them, fugitives and lingerers alike - all heightened the confusion. When people looked back, menacing flames sprang up before them or outflanked them. When they escaped to a neighbouring quarter, the fire followed them - even districts believed to be remote were affected. Finally, with no idea where or what to flee, they crowded on to the country roads or lay in the fields. Some who had lost everything – even their food for the day – could have escaped, but preferred to die. So did others who had failed to rescue their loved ones. Nobody dared fight the flames. Attempts to do so were prevented by menacing gangs. Torches, too, were openly thrown in, by men crying that they acted under orders. Perhaps they had received orders. Or they may just have wanted to plunder unhampered.

Nero was at Antium. He returned to the city only when the fire was approaching the mansion he had built to link the Gardens of Maecenas to the Palatine. The flames could not be prevented from overwhelming the whole of the Palatine, including his palace. Nevertheless, for the relief of the homeless, fugitive masses he threw open the Field of Mars, including Agrippa’s public buildings, and even his own gardens. Nero also constructed emergency accommodation for the destitute multitude. Food was brought from Ostia and neighbouring towns, and the price of corn was reduced. Yet these measures, for all their popular character, earned no gratitude. For a rumour had spread that, while the city was burning, Nero had mounted his private stage and, comparing modern calamities with ancient, had sung of the destruction of Troy.

By the sixth day enormous demolitions had confronted the raging flames with bare ground and open sky, and the fire was finally stamped out at the foot of the Esquiline Hill. But before panic had subsided, or hope revived, flames broke out again in the more open regions of the city. Here there were fewer casualties; but the destruction of temples and pleasure arcades was even worse. This new conflagration caused additional ill-feeling because it started on Tigellinus' estate in the Aemilian district. People believed that Nero was ambitious to found a new city to be named after himself.

 

Tacitus may have witnessed the fire, but he was too young for his account to have much credibility. He must have relied on the accounts of others to assemble his own. Pliny was the only other Roman historian to live through that period to write about the fire, and he only mentions it in passing. There is a forged letter (forged by Christians) purporting to be from Seneca to St Paul, which includes the detail that ‘132 houses and four blocks’ were destroyed in six days. If true, that implies that less than one-tenth of the city was really destroyed by the fire. But really nothing much can be learned from a forgery.

The historian Suetonius has Nero singing The Sack of Ilium dressed in stage costume as his city burned, but Suetonius was intent on portraying the Roman emperors as decadent and wicked. What he wrote about them cannot really be taken as historical fact. Cassio Dio tells a similar story, though it is interesting that Suetonius has Nero singing and playing as he watched from the Tower of Maecenas on the Esquiline Hill, while Cassius Dio places him on the Palatine Hill. Tacitus has him singing in private. There is enough variation among the accounts to justify discounting all of them.

The popular image of Nero fiddling while Rome burned clearly cannot be true, as the fiddle had not been invented. Nero could no more have played the fiddle than the electric guitar, a far more vivid image. He could, on the other hand, have sung and played the lyre, but he may have fallen back on this in despair on the second or third days, and only after he had realized that his efforts to quench the flames were futile. It is not at all unusual for people to seek refuge in music, poetry or prayer at times of personal crisis.

In the aftermath of the fire, Nero opened his palaces as shelters for the many people who had lost their homes in the blaze. He also organized emergency food supplies for the survivors. He did indeed redesign the areas of the city that had been devastated, but with a view to making them more fire-resistant. The wide roads were to act as fire-breaks. The new houses were built with gaps between them, again to stop fire jumping so easily from building to building. Where he made a major political error was in laying out a huge and expensive new palace complex for himself within the area cleared by the fire. This was obviously open to misinterpretation. The new palace was the Domus Aurea, a huge 300-acre development of villas and pavilions set in a landscaped park with an artificial lake. The complex also featured the Colossus Neronis outside its entrance, a bronze statue of Nero that soared over a hundred feet into the air. These extravagances inevitably made Romans wonder whether Nero had deliberately started the fire in order to create the new palace. If Nero had built a palace complex of this kind out in the countryside somewhere, it would probably have occasioned no adverse comment, but to build it in the city, where the land was clearly needed for commerce and housing, was an extraordinarily insensitive decision on Nero’s part, and he would have known that under normal circumstances he would not have got the Senate’s approval for it.

If Nero was to blame for the fire, he might have had more than one motive for starting it. One might have been to clear the site for the Domus Aurea and other redevelopment. Another might have been to destroy the houses of the senators who were troublesome to him. On the other hand, we know that Nero rushed back to Rome and spent all night trying to organize the fire-fighting. He also lost his own palace, the Domus Transitoria, which was a huge complex that stretched from the Palatine Hill to the Esquiline Hill. The Italian archaeologist Andrea Carandini has been excavating in Rome for twenty years and he has examined the layers of ash left after the fire of 64. His conclusion was that the destruction was very severe indeed. ‘Everything was destroyed. Not a single house was left standing.’

Carandini also found that the area of the Forum where the senators lived and worked was destroyed. As a result the Roman aristocracy no longer had a place to live. The open avenue down the centre of the Forum survived, but that became a kind of shopping street, a commercial area built on the ruins of the Roman aristocracy. The way the fire struck had the effect of severely weakening the power of the senatorial class.

The ferocity of the fire has been corroborated by other evidence. Nails holding roof tiles down fell from roofs and melted. Large numbers of coins found in the Forum seem to have been the small change in the pockets of Roman citizens caught there in the firestorm.

We are left with four possibilities. The fire may have started deliberately on orders from the emperor Nero. It may have been started deliberately by the Christians. It may have been started deliberately by some unknown arsonist. It may have been an entirely accidental town fire. As many as a hundred small fires broke out every day in ancient Rome. Even major accidental fires were fairly common. The city was burned again in the time of the emperor Vitellius in 69 and in the reign of Titus in 80. The chances of the fire of 64 having broken out accidentally are quite high.

Tacitus argued that the fire could not have spread naturally because the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. In other words, the fire spread into the wind. In recent decades, our understanding of the physics of fire has improved to a point where this objection of Tacitus can be discounted. What happens in a big conflagration is that when the flames consume all the available oxygen in the area they will spread outwards into adjacent areas where oxygen is available – and that includes areas that are upwind. A large fire creates a strong updraft, and this in turn sucks air in from all around, creating a distinct microclimate that cuts across whatever the regional wind pattern might be.

Tacitus also argued that the fire spread through the stone and marble temples and the concrete dwellings of the rich just as easily as through the wooden tenements of the poor, and this pointed to deliberate arson. But even if buildings are made of non-flammable materials, wooden furniture, rugs, mats, wall hangings and curtains can still catch fire, especially if the windows are open. Roman buildings were particularly vulnerable in this respect, as the windows were usually left open and unshuttered, and they were designed for maximum ventilation. An archaeological experiment was carried out, in which a replica of an aristocrat’s house was built inside a fire chamber. A small fire was set in one corner of the replica house. It soon spread to the furniture and consumed the whole house.

Suetonius and Cassius Dio both accused Nero of being the arsonist. Nero himself accused the Christians. It has for a long time been assumed that the Christians were innocent scapegoats, the victims of a cruel, sadistic and self-centred tyrant. But there is some evidence to suggest that Nero may have been right, that the Christians were the ones who started the fire.

Tacitus summarized the ‘scapegoat theory’ in the following way.

 

Consequently, to put an end to the report [that he himself had started the fire], Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.

 

Tacitus mentions that the Christians pleaded guilty, though as in many court cases of the modern day this may not be the same thing as an admission of guilt. It may be that that they pleaded guilty in the hope of more lenient treatment, a form of plea bargaining, or it may be that they were tortured into admission.

One reason for thinking that the Christians were to blame is that the fire started in an area where they were living. Another is that they believed that Rome would soon be destroyed by fire. Starting that fire would simply have been a way of making the prophecy come true. Professor Gerhard Baudy of the University of Konstanz has studied ancient apocalyptic prophecies, and discovered that Christians living in the poorer districts of Rome were circulating revenge-ridden texts that told of a raging inferno that would reduce the city of Rome to ashes. These were not submissive, meek and mild Christians, but Christians with a zeal for change. There is tendency to forget that early Christianity was quite unlike the religion that it became later. This was, after all, thirty years before the Book of Revelation was written, a book full of strange and frightening prophecies. And Revelation refers to the Whore of Babylon, an evil beast with seven heads. The text itself tells us that ‘the seven heads are seven mountains’ and Rome was famously the city of seven hills. Probably the writer of Revelation had the city of Rome in mind as the source of all evil. The constant mantra of the oracles of the Roman Christians was that Rome must burn. That was their objective.

With their interest in prophecies, those same Christians would very likely have heard of the Egyptian prophecy that the great city would fall on the day Sirius rose above the horizon. In AD 64, Sirius rose on 19 July. It was on that day that the great fire of Rome started. It could have been a coincidence, but in the context of the Roman Christians’ own predictions of destruction by fire it does seem an extraordinary coincidence. Professor Baudy believes that the Christians were the deliberate instigators of the fire, and that Nero’s accusation against them was right.

Even if Nero was innocent of starting the fire, he was unable to escape the political fall-out from the huge disaster. With both the senate and the army against him, within four years he was forced to flee from his rebuilt city and commit suicide.