Fiddle-dee-dee. Fire, Fire, Fire, This Fire Talk's Spoiling All The Fun

Remember when we discussed Vulcanalia and Mt. Vesuvius? I mentioned the great fire of Rome in 64 C.E.?  And I said how it was gossip that Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned?  Well, let's take a deeper look at that today, shall we?

The rumour, even at the time it happened, was that Nero was responsible for Rome burning, and that he did nothing to stop it.  According to people at the time, he set the fire to clear room for a new palace, and he sang parts of "The Sack Of Ilium" (a Roman epic poem, part of the Trojan cycle), dressed in stage costume, while he let the city burn.  Later on, the rumor morphed into Nero playing the fiddle while he watched the city burn.

"We don't need no water, let the motherf*@#er burn!"

Much like the awesomeness of the story of Vesuvius erupting the day after Vulcanalia, this story is ruined by a few dull and boring facts.

The first being that fiddles didn't exist in Nero's day.  Nothing that could even vaguely be called a fiddle existed for over 800years after Nero died.  As far as stringed instruments go, they had harps, lyres and something called the cithara (from which the word guitar is derived).  They all look pretty much the same to me, but then again, I think a ukulele is just a tiny (awesome) guitar, so I'm probably not the best judge here.  The point is, no fiddles.  Which isn't to say that he didn't play the lyre (or cithara or harp) while he watched Rome burn to cinders, since he did fancy himself to be quite the musician.  Maybe he even played along while he sang The Sack Of Ilium.

Except that's not true either.  According to the only historian who was alive at the time and felt that the burning of the world's largest city was worth more than passing mention, Nero wasn't in Rome at the time.  Tacitus said, "Nero at this time was at Antium, and did not return to Rome until the fire approached his house..."  Alright, so maybe he wasn't singing epic poetry while he watched his capital burn to the ground, but he wasn't exactly doing a lot to stop it personally.  So maybe there's some truth to the rumour that he burned down Rome to make room for a new palace.

Except there isn't.  Or if there is, Nero was even more messed up than anyone's given him credit for, and he's pretty much known for being tyrannical, excessive and kind of crazy.  I mean, according to the various historians of the time, he poisoned his stepbrother, tried to kill his mother by poisoning (three times, she survived all three) and then by building her a self-sinking boat (she survived the sinking) before finally just hiring assassins to stab her and try and make it look like a suicide.  Since all the historians seem to know about the assassins, I don't think they managed to make it look like a suicide.

But back to the fire... If he did burn Rome to make room for a new palace, he did it in a totally ridiculous way.  Why?  Because the new palace he built was situated 1km away from the suspected starting point of the fire.  It wasn't built yet, but the Colosseum (technically the Flavium Amphitheatre) currently stands about halfway between where the fire started (Palatine Hill) and where Nero's new palace went up (Domus Aurea).  If you're going to use arson to clear space for a new palace, wouldn't you start the fire where you want to build the new palace in case people get the fire under control quickly?  Not quite a ways away?  Check out how far apart the hill the fire started on and the location of the new palace are:

Click to embiggen, clicky-poppy.

So, Nero didn't start the fire (or have it set for him) to make room for a palace.  He didn't watch the city burn.  He didn't play the fiddle.  Where the hell did this whole, "Nero fiddled while Rome burned" thing get started anyway?  Well, there's the previously mentioned rumours, and as I'm sure you know, rumours can be hard to kill even when they're false.  Then there's the very real possibility that it's all based on the fact that the word fiddle is a homonym.

There's fiddle the noun and associated verb, meaning a violin-like instrument and the playing of said instrument, and then there's fiddle the unassociated verb, meaning to waste time.  There's a couple other homonyms, but they're not important to the topic at hand, so we'll ignore them for today.  So, while Nero didn't "play a violin-like instrument while Rome burned," he did "waste time while Rome burned."  Remember, he wasn't even in the city at the time and didn't come back until he got word that his own home was in danger of being incinerated (it was, despite his return).  His initial response was hardly the bold leadership one would hope for from someone who found out his city was in flames.  He basically fiddled around in his vacation home for a couple of days.  There's no way to prove that this is what was originally meant by "Nero fiddled while Rome burned," since it's hard to track down origins even for certain modern phrases, but I strongly suspect that it's a major part of it.

Likely it's a combination of the original rumours of Nero playing music while the city burned and the truth that he fiddled around instead of doing something right away (anyone else picturing George W Bush and The Pet Goat?), but we'll never know for certain.

Nero: Crazy emperor, musician, but not a city-burning crazy emperor musician.

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Sources:
Nero watching Rome burn image taken from RebuildTheUS blog - what is it with US political blogs having great images of Rome burning?
Annals, Book XV by Tacitus
The Classical Journal Vol 42, No. 4, reproduced on the University of Chicago website
The Church of God Daily Bible Study
Squidoo.com
Dictionary.com entry for fiddle
Wikipedia articles on the Great Fire of Rome, Nero and Nero's mom