What did emperor Nero play?
Then, in July AD 64, the Great Fire ravaged Rome for six days. The historian Tacitus, who was about 9 years old at the time, reports that of the fourteen districts of the city, ‘four were undamaged, three were utterly destroyed and in the other seven there remained only a few mangled and half-burnt traces of houses.’ This is when Nero was famously to have ‘fiddled while Rome burned’. This expression however appears to have its roots in the 17th century (alas, Romans didn’t know the fiddle). The historian Suetonius describes him singing from the tower of Maecenas, watching as the fire consumed Rome. Dio Cassius tells us how he ‘climbed on to the palace roof, from which there was the best overall view of the greater part of the fire and, and sang ‘The capture of Troy” Meanwhile Tacitus wrote; ‘At the very time that Rome burned, he mounted his private stage and, reflecting present disasters in ancient calamities, sang about the destruction of Troy’. But Tacitus also takes care to point o
