The phrase “fiddling while Rome burns” has been in the news a lot again lately for some rather surprising reasons. As most people already know, the deadly COVID-19 epidemic is spreading across the globe. According to The New York Times, as of today, at least 973 people in the United States have tested positive for COVID-19 and at least thirty people in the United States are confirmed to have died of it. It is currently estimated that COVID-19 has a case fatality rate of around 3.4%. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to plummet at record rates.
Donald J. Trump—who is somehow the actual president of the United States—reportedly spent a large part of the weekend golfing at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. For some reason, though, on Sunday, 8 March 2020, Trump decided that it would be a good idea to retweet a meme of himself literally playing a fiddle with the caption “My next piece is called… nothing can stop what’s coming.” Trump commented on the meme, saying, “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!”
Naturally, people immediately began using the meme to criticize Trump’s response to the ongoing crises, comparing him to the Roman emperor Nero (lived 37 – 68 AD), who is famously said to have played the fiddle during the Great Fire of Rome in July 64 AD, which destroyed large parts of the city of Rome. I wrote a detailed article back in November 2017 debunking the story about Nero “fiddling while Rome burned.” Given the contemporary situation, I figured I’d revisit the subject and debunk it afresh.
Why Nero definitely didn’t play the fiddle while Rome burned
First of all, Nero couldn’t have possibly played the “fiddle” while Rome burned. Nero died on 9 June 68 AD, but the violin (the instrument that is most often referred to by the word “fiddle” and that is shown in the meme shared by President Trump) was invented in the sixteenth century—well over a millennium after Nero’s death. It is therefore virtually impossible that Nero could have literally played the fiddle while Rome burned.
The Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (lived c. 56 – c. 120 AD), who is one of our most reliable sources of information on Nero’s reign, records in his Annals 15.29 that Nero was not in Rome at the time of the fire, but rather in his villa at Antium, located fifty-one kilometers south of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Tacitus states that Nero did not go to Rome until he heard that his own house on the Palatine Hill was threatened by the fire.
Tacitus tells us that, once Nero arrived in Rome, he implemented sweeping relief efforts, which included opening up the Campus Martius, the buildings of Agrippa, and his own imperial gardens to house people who had lost their homes. Tacitus further records that Nero brought in food and supplies from the countryside to feed the population and that he lowered the price of grain to only three sesterces so the people would be able to afford it.
ABOVE: Nero Views the Burning of Rome, painted c. 1861 by the German Academic painter Karl von Piloty
Nero singing about the fall of Troy
All of Nero’s efforts, however, were to no avail. Tacitus tells us that rumors spread in the aftermath of the fire claiming that Nero had sung about the fall of Troy as the city itself was in flames. Tacitus writes, as translated by J. Jackson for the Loeb Classical Library:
“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.”
Nero was known for being a singer and he is also known to have composed a piece about the fall of Troy, so it is easy to understand how the story about him singing about the fall of Troy while Rome burned might have arisen.
Nonetheless, Tacitus was a very careful historian and he makes it very clear that this whole story about Nero singing about the fall of Troy during the burning of Rome is nothing but an unverified rumor that was floating around. Even though Tacitus absolutely loathed Nero, he very consciously avoids saying that there was any truth to the rumor.
The birth of a legend
Later writers, however, weren’t nearly as careful as Tacitus; the biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (lived c. 69 – after c. 122 AD), who is known for being extremely gossipy, repeats the story about Nero singing while Rome burned as fact. Suetonius writes in his Life of Nero 38, as translated by J. C. Rolfe for the Loeb Classical Library:
“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. He writes, 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.”
The story of Nero singing while Rome burned eventually passed into legend and now it is one of the best-known stories of ancient Rome. Our version of the legend developed in the early modern period, when the instrument supposedly played by Nero during the burning of Rome was commonly described in English sources as a “lute” and, eventually, a “fiddle.” In Henry VI, Part 1, Act I, Scene IV, for instance, Talbot says:
“and like thee, Nero,
play on the lute, beholding the towns burn:
wretched shall France be only in my name.”
It is largely on account of references like this one that “fiddling while Rome burns” has become such a prominent proverbial expression. The internationally bestselling novel Quo Vadis by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz is also partly responsible for popularizing the image of Nero playing the fiddle as the city of Rome burned beneath him.
Now, of course, Donald Trump is inadvertently doing exactly the same thing by obliviously posting memes on Twitter of himself playing the fiddle in the middle of a crisis.
ABOVE: Illustration from 1897 by M. de Lipman for an edition of the bestselling novel Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero by Henryk Sienkiewicz, originally published from 1895 to 1896
Conclusion
The long and short of it all is that Nero definitely didn’t play the fiddle while the city of Rome burned. There was apparently an unverifiable rumor floating around at the time claiming that he sang a song about the fall of Troy while Rome burned, but we have no reliable evidence to indicate that this story is true.
Most likely, someone who knew that Nero liked to sing and that Nero had written a song at one point about the fall of Troy made up the whole story about Nero singing that song during the Great Fire of Rome because they didn’t like Nero and they wanted to tell a story to make him look bad. In other words, the tale is probably nothing more than a baseless canard.
None of this means Nero was a good emperor; by all accounts, he was not. Nonetheless, Nero is probably not guilty of the one thing that he is most notorious for having allegedly done.
