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In the year 64 CE, a fire broke out which would destroy the greatest city in the Roman world and forever cast a shadow of villany upon the man who ruled that city. What followed the burning of Rome would be one of the darkest chapters of Roman history, ending the line of conquering Caesars and beginning the road to Rome’s fall as a world power.
The man so often blamed for the great fire was Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, commonly known simply as Nero. He ruled Rome from 54 -68 CE, and though his reign wasn’t always smooth, it was one of the freest and most prosperous times in Roman history.
When Nero came to the imperial seat, he was hailed by Plebian and Patrician alike as a just and decent man. He had much prestige as a benevolent monarch, and put on many of the good airs so studiously fostered by his tutor and close advisor, the philosopher Seneca. These airs, along with his outward appearance of benevolence, disguised his dark obsessions and foul passions from both Forum and Senate. He convincingly vowed, before an audience, to follow the principles of the great Caesar Augustus, and his mercy, liberality, and general good humour were the talk of all Rome.
However, Nero’s outward display had very little to do with the man inside, and much more to do with the great Seneca’s careful styling. Seneca had seen, from the very beginning, that the real danger with Nero lay in the savage vehemence of his lusts and obsessions. The able tutor made it his chief occupation to stave off the dreaded outbreak of Nero’s cruel nature by every means in his power. So Seneca endeavored to indulge Nero’s less perverse tastes and help him to enjoy the sweetness of popularity with none
of the actual burdens of government. Because of this very tactful and prudent plan, little occured in the first five years of Nero’s reign to dampen popular enthusiasm for the new Emperor. The Senate found itself free to rule Rome and its provinces properly, and under that freedom the Roman world flourished.
When Nero first came to power, Roman politics were an uneasy blend of bureaucratic legislature from a largely progressive Senate and Imperial mandate from a line of increasingly self-serving and petty Emperors. Those first years of Nero’s reign, Seneca’s prudent plan of imperial indulgence kept the Emperor largely out of political affairs, and the Roman political world began a shift toward a parliamentary monarchy, with the Emperor as little more than a figurehead. But the shift was to be only
temporary.
With the death of Nero’s mother, Agrippina, and the resignation and suicide of Seneca, Nero’s new wife, the power hungry Poppaea, cultivated the madness and unorthodox obsessions in Nero that Seneca and Agrippina had so carefully distracted. At Poppaea’s urgings, Nero soon thrust himself back into the political ring, and the high spirited prosperity of his early reign soon decayed into complete and oppressive tyranny, not so much by Nero, who was weak-willed and inactive, but by his grasping,
manipulative wife and her devious ministers. However, Nero did manage, all on his own, to cut the weight of both gold and silver coinage by approximately ten percent, leading to inflationary prices and decreased monetary value.
Perhaps the most famous of all Nero’s edicts, however, came after the great fire, with his anti-Christian legislature declaring Christians to be “haters of all men,” and treacherous villians who were to be put on public display and executed.
The great fire, for which Nero so quickly blamed Christians in the city, broke out the night of July 18, 64. It started among the wooden booths at the south-east end of the Circus Maximus and burned for six days before it died to embers, only to restart again. When the fire was finally completely extinguished, only four of the fourteen regions of Rome remained untouched by the fire. Three had been utterly destroyed, and the other seven reduced to ruins.
Though Nero blamed the Christians quickly enough, responsiblity for the blaze was a matter of some controversy for later historians. Tacitus, though he mentions the rumours of Nero’s involvement, graciously maintains that the origins of the fire were uncertain. However, none of the authorities who followed him were so kind. Virtually all of them blamed Nero himself for starting the fires, justifying their accusations with evidence of his insatiable lust for death and chaos and his search for an excuse to execute the Christians he saw as a threat to his own divinity as Caesar. However, in spite of his apparent capacity and motive for the act, there remains, to this day, no physical proof of his guilt.
After the fire, Nero ransacked his own provinces to finance the reconstruction of Rome, obliterating his now-fragile support among Senators, local commanders, and prefects alike. When vast sums of the collected money went to building Nero’s famous palace, “the Golden House,” popular outrage reached fever pitch, and Roman politics moved sharply toward bureaucratic rule free of Imperial involvement, and the line of Caesars was quickly deposed as a new era of Roman government began under an Emperor chosen by the Senate, rather than heredity. Even to this, Nero did not muster himself to act. Ironically enough, tThe only stand Nero took in his life was at his death. When Roman troops came to drag him away for trial, Nero took his stand by taking his own life.
No era of Roman history is as complexly misinterpretted as during the fifteen years when Nero ruled from the Imperial palace. And, when Nero’s reign ended, no upheaval was greater than the one to follow. In the history of the world, one man’s villany would eclipse the prosperity of his reign, and Nero’s end would bring about a
legend more enduring than such an ineffectual leader was ever worth.
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