No, Emperor Nero Did Not Play the Fiddle as Rome Burned

It is one of the most iconic illustrations of the Emperor Nero’s decadence: the story that, during the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, the maniacal emperor stood atop his balcony, playing the fiddle and rejoicing at the sight of the burning city below him. The story, however, is completely false. Not only did Nero not play the fiddle as Rome burned, his reaction to the fire won him great praise and admiration, even from his enemies.

Nero and the fire

First of all, Nero could not have possibly played the fiddle because, at the time when Nero was alive, the violin—the instrument commonly referred to as a “fiddle”—had not yet been invented. Nero died in 68 AD, but the violin was not even invented until the early sixteenth century AD—nearly 1,500 years after Nero’s death.

Furthermore, according to the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (lived c. 56 – c. 120 AD), who provides us our most reliable account of the Great Fire of Rome in Book Sixteen of his Annals, Nero was not in the city of Rome at the time that the fire broke out at all; instead, he was in his villa at Antium, located thirty-two miles (fifty-one kilometers) south of Rome on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea. According to Tacitus, Nero returned to Rome after hearing that the fire was approaching his house on the Palatine.

Tacitus tells us that, after the fire, Nero opened up the Campus Martius, the buildings of Agrippa, and even his own palace garden to shelter those whose homes had been destroyed. He also organized for food and supplies to be brought in from the countryside to prevent the people from starving and lowered the price of grain so people could afford to buy it.

In fact, Tacitus, who was no fan of the emperor by any means, actually speaks rather highly of Nero’s devotion to helping the Roman people in the aftermath of the fire. Here is the beginning of his account of Nero’s reaction to the fire in his Annals 15.29, as translated by J. Jackson:

“Nero, who at the time was staying in Antium, did not return to the capital until the fire was nearing the house by which he had connected the Palatine with the Gardens of Maecenas. It proved impossible, however, to stop it from engulfing both the Palatine and the house and all their surroundings. Still, as a relief to the homeless and fugitive populace, he opened the Campus Martius, the buildings of Agrippa, even his own Gardens, and threw up a number of extemporized shelters to accommodate the helpless multitude. The necessities of life were brought up from Ostia and the neighbouring municipalities, and the price of grain was lowered to three sesterces.”

Nero’s bad publicity after the fire

Nero soon began making plans to rebuild the city of Rome grander than ever before, using Greek-style architecture. Unfortunately, Nero wasn’t entirely in touch with popular attitudes; the centerpiece of Nero’s “New Rome” was to be the Domus Aurea (“Golden House”), a luxurious pleasure-palace like no other, reserved for the emperor alone and with a colossal statue of Nero himself standing in the center of it.

Partly as a result of these plans, rumors quickly spread claiming that Nero had secretly ordered one of his men to set the fire so that he would be able to rebuild the city how he liked it. In a famous passage from his Annals 15.44, Tacitus describes how Nero attempted to absolve himself of guilt. Here is Jackson’s translation of the passage:

“Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. First, then, the confessed members of the sect were arrested; next, on their disclosures, vast numbers were convicted, not so much on the count of arson as for hatred of the human race. And derision accompanied their end: they were covered with wild beasts’ skins and torn to death by dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and, when daylight failed were burned to serve as lamps by night. Nero had offered his Gardens for the spectacle, and gave an exhibition in his Circus, mixing with the crowd in the habit of a charioteer, or mounted on his car. Hence, in spite of a guilt which had earned the most exemplary punishment, there arose a sentiment of pity, due to the impression that they were being sacrificed not for the welfare of the state but to the ferocity of a single man.”

Obviously, Nero’s brutal torture of Christians following the fire was totally morally inexcusable, but it is important to remember that the ancient Greeks and Romans almost universally regarded Christians as corrupt, immoral, sexually deviant, atheistic scoundrels whose sole mission was to destroy the very fabric of civilization itself. (Basically, the Greeks and Romans saw Christians almost exactly the same way that modern Christians regard LeVeyan Satanists.)

ABOVE: The Torches of Nero (1876) by Henryk Siemiradzki

How the story of Nero “fiddling while Rome burned” arose

Returning back to the original subject of this article, the story of Nero “fiddling while Rome burned” probably originates from a story reported by Tacitus right after his account of Nero’s relief efforts after the fire. Tacitus tells us, in Jackson’s translation:

“Yet his measures, popular as their character might be, failed of their effect; for the report had spread that, at the very moment when Rome was aflame, he had mounted his private stage, and typifying the ills of the present by the calamities of the past, had sung the destruction of Troy.”

Tacitus was a very careful historian and he is very clear about the fact that this is just a rumor that was going around at the time; he never claims that this event actually happened, only that there was a story going around that claimed it had happened.

Later historians, though, weren’t nearly so cautious as Tacitus. The Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (lived c. 69 – after c. 122 AD), who is known for being super gossipy and unreliable, repeats the story in his Life of Nero 38 as though it were fact, without giving the slightest implication that the report might be untrustworthy. He writes, as translated by J. C. Rolfe:

“Viewing the conflagration from the tower of Maecenas and exulting, as he said, in ‘the beauty of the flames,’ he sang the whole of the ‘Sack of Ilium,’ in his regular stage costume.”

The later historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 AD) retells the story in his Roman History 62.18.1, writing, as translated by Earnest Cary:

“While the whole population was in this state of mind and many, crazed by the disaster, were leaping into the very flames, Nero ascended to the roof of the palace, from which there was the best general view of the greater part of the conflagration, and assuming the lyre-player’s garb, he sang the ‘Capture of Troy,’ as he styled the song himself, though to the enemies of the spectators it was the Capture of Rome.”

This story, reported by Tacitus as a rumor and by Suetonius and Kassios Dion as fact, eventually morphed into the famous story of Nero “fiddling while Rome burned” that we all know today. In early modern English sources, the instrument that was supposedly played by Nero while Rome burned is referred to anachronistically as a “lute” and, from there, it eventually became a “fiddle.”

The whole story about Nero singing while Rome burned, though, is just an unsubstantiated rumor that we have no good reason to believe and the story about Nero playing the fiddle is certainly apocryphal because the fiddle wasn’t invented until long after Nero’s death.

ABOVE: The Fire of Rome (1861) by Karl von Piloty

Did Nero order someone to set the fire for him?

As for the question of whether Nero actually ordered one of his men to start the fire, it is unlikely that we will ever know the real answer for certain. That being said, it seems highly doubtful that Nero ordered the arson. Accidental urban fires were commonplace, both in antiquity, and in more recent history. (Think of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.)

Furthermore, all of the circumstantial evidence indicates strongly in favor of Nero’s vindication. The fire started a full 0.6 miles away from where Nero later built the Domus Aurea, on the opposite side of Palatine Hill, which would make the location an extremely poor one to choose if Nero had been wanting to clear space for his new palace.

The fire also heavily damaged Nero’s pre-existing palace, the Domus Transitoria. After the fire, Nero attempted to salvage as much of the artwork from the palace as he could to use in the Domus Aurea and much of the new artwork produced for the Domus Aurea was modeled on the art that had been destroyed in the Domus Transitoria. All of these factors demonstrate that Nero clearly had not been expecting his palace to be burned.

Finally, the timing of the fire was extremely unideal for committing an act of arson; the night when the fire started was only two days after a full moon, meaning there would have been little cover of darkness for any would-be arsonists.