Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  One of the main sources about the episode was the historian Tacitus. He was born in about AD 56 and was eight or nine years old at the time of the fire. He wrote his eye-witness account in The Annals in the year 116.

  Now started the most terrible and destructive fire which Rome had ever experienced. It began in the Circus, where it adjoins the Palatine and Caelian hills. Breaking out in shops selling flammable goods, and fanned by the wind, the conflagration instantly grew and swept the whole length of the Circus. There were no walled mansions or temples, or any other obstructions, which could arrest it. First, the fire swept violently over the level spaces. Then it climbed the hills, but returned to ravage the lower ground again. It outstripped every counter-measure. The ancient city's narrow winding streets and irregular blocks encouraged its progress.

  Terrified, shrieking women, the helpless old and young, people intent on their own safety, people unselfishly supporting invalids or waiting for them, fugitives and lingerers alike - all heightened the confusion. When people looked back, menacing flames sprang up before them or outflanked them. When they escaped to a neighbouring quarter, the fire followed them - even districts believed to be remote were affected. Finally, with no idea where or what to flee, they crowded on to the country roads or lay in the fields. Some who had lost everything – even their food for the day – could have escaped, but preferred to die. So did others who had failed to rescue their loved ones. Nobody dared fight the flames. Attempts to do so were prevented by menacing gangs. Torches, too, were openly thrown in, by men crying that they acted under orders. Perhaps they had received orders. Or they may just have wanted to plunder unhampered.

  Nero was at Antium. He returned to the city only when the fire was approaching the mansion he had built to link the Gardens of Maecenas to the Palatine. The flames could not be prevented from overwhelming the whole of the Palatine, including his palace. Nevertheless, for the relief of the homeless, fugitive masses he threw open the Field of Mars, including Agrippa’s public buildings, and even his own gardens. Nero also constructed emergency accommodation for the destitute multitude. Food was brought from Ostia and neighbouring towns, and the price of corn was reduced. Yet these measures, for all their popular character, earned no gratitude. For a rumour had spread that, while the city was burning, Nero had mounted his private stage and, comparing modern calamities with ancient, had sung of the destruction of Troy.

  By the sixth day enormous demolitions had confronted the raging flames with bare ground and open sky, and the fire was finally stamped out at the foot of the Esquiline Hill. But before panic had subsided, or hope revived, flames broke out again in the more open regions of the city. Here there were fewer casualties; but the destruction of temples and pleasure arcades was even worse. This new conflagration caused additional ill-feeling because it started on Tigellinus' estate in the Aemilian district. People believed that Nero was ambitious to found a new city to be named after himself.

  Tacitus may have witnessed the fire, but he was too young for his account to have much credibility. He must have relied on the accounts of others to assemble his own. Pliny was the only other Roman historian to live through that period to write about the fire, and he only mentions it in passing. There is a forged letter (forged by Christians) purporting to be from Seneca to St Paul, which includes the detail that ‘132 houses and four blocks’ were destroyed in six days. If true, that implies that less than one-tenth of the city was really destroyed by the fire. But really nothing much can be learned from a forgery.

  The historian Suetonius has Nero singing The Sack of Ilium dressed in stage costume as his city burned, but Suetonius was intent on portraying the Roman emperors as decadent and wicked. What he wrote about them cannot really be taken as historical fact. Cassio Dio tells a similar story, though it is interesting that Suetonius has Nero singing and playing as he watched from the Tower of Maecenas on the Esquiline Hill, while Cassius Dio places him on the Palatine Hill. Tacitus has him singing in private. There is enough variation among the accounts to justify discounting all of them.

  The popular image of Nero fiddling while Rome burned clearly cannot be true, as the fiddle had not been invented. Nero could no more have played the fiddle than the electric guitar, a far more vivid image. He could, on the other hand, have sung and played the lyre, but he may have fallen back on this in despair on the second or third days, and only after he had realized that his efforts to quench the flames were futile. It is not at all unusual for people to seek refuge in music, poetry or prayer at times of personal crisis.

  In the aftermath of the fire, Nero opened his palaces as shelters for the many people who had lost their homes in the blaze. He also organized emergency food supplies for the survivors. He did indeed redesign the areas of the city that had been devastated, but with a view to making them more fire-resistant. The wide roads were to act as fire-breaks. The new houses were built with gaps between them, again to stop fire jumping so easily from building to building. Where he made a major political error was in laying out a huge and expensive new palace complex for himself within the area cleared by the fire. This was obviously open to misinterpretation. The new palace was the Domus Aurea, a huge 300-acre development of villas and pavilions set in a landscaped park with an artificial lake. The complex also featured the Colossus Neronis outside its entrance, a bronze statue of Nero that soared over a hundred feet into the air. These extravagances inevitably made Romans wonder whether Nero had deliberately started the fire in order to create the new palace. If Nero had built a palace complex of this kind out in the countryside somewhere, it would probably have occasioned no adverse comment, but to build it in the city, where the land was clearly needed for commerce and housing, was an extraordinarily insensitive decision on Nero’s part, and he would have known that under normal circumstances he would not have got the Senate’s approval for it.

  If Nero was to blame for the fire, he might have had more than one motive for starting it. One might have been to clear the site for the Domus Aurea and other redevelopment. Another might have been to destroy the houses of the senators who were troublesome to him. On the other hand, we know that Nero rushed back to Rome and spent all night trying to organize the fire-fighting. He also lost his own palace, the Domus Transitoria, which was a huge complex that stretched from the Palatine Hill to the Esquiline Hill. The Italian archaeologist Andrea Carandini has been excavating in Rome for twenty years and he has examined the layers of ash left after the fire of 64. His conclusion was that the destruction was very severe indeed. ‘Everything was destroyed. Not a single house was left standing.’

  Carandini also found that the area of the Forum where the senators lived and worked was destroyed. As a result the Roman aristocracy no longer had a place to live. The open avenue down the centre of the Forum survived, but that became a kind of shopping street, a commercial area built on the ruins of the Roman aristocracy. The way the fire struck had the effect of severely weakening the power of the senatorial class.

  The ferocity of the fire has been corroborated by other evidence. Nails holding roof tiles down fell from roofs and melted. Large numbers of coins found in the Forum seem to have been the small change in the pockets of Roman citizens caught there in the firestorm.

  We are left with four possibilities. The fire may have started deliberately on orders from the emperor Nero. It may have been started deliberately by the Christians. It may have been started deliberately by some unknown arsonist. It may have been an entirely accidental town fire. As many as a hundred small fires broke out every day in ancient Rome. Even major accidental fires were fairly common. The city was burned again in the time of the emperor Vitellius in 69 and in the reign of Titus in 80. The chances of the fire of 64 having broken out accidentally are quite high.

  Tacitus argued that the fire could not have spread naturally because the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. In other words, the fire spread into the wind. In recent decades, our understanding of the physics of fire has improve
d to a point where this objection of Tacitus can be discounted. What happens in a big conflagration is that when the flames consume all the available oxygen in the area they will spread outwards into adjacent areas where oxygen is available – and that includes areas that are upwind. A large fire creates a strong updraft, and this in turn sucks air in from all around, creating a distinct microclimate that cuts across whatever the regional wind pattern might be.

  Tacitus also argued that the fire spread through the stone and marble temples and the concrete dwellings of the rich just as easily as through the wooden tenements of the poor, and this pointed to deliberate arson. But even if buildings are made of non-flammable materials, wooden furniture, rugs, mats, wall hangings and curtains can still catch fire, especially if the windows are open. Roman buildings were particularly vulnerable in this respect, as the windows were usually left open and unshuttered, and they were designed for maximum ventilation. An archaeological experiment was carried out, in which a replica of an aristocrat’s house was built inside a fire chamber. A small fire was set in one corner of the replica house. It soon spread to the furniture and consumed the whole house.

  Suetonius and Cassius Dio both accused Nero of being the arsonist. Nero himself accused the Christians. It has for a long time been assumed that the Christians were innocent scapegoats, the victims of a cruel, sadistic and self-centred tyrant. But there is some evidence to suggest that Nero may have been right, that the Christians were the ones who started the fire.

  Tacitus summarized the ‘scapegoat theory’ in the following way.

  Consequently, to put an end to the report [that he himself had started the fire], Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.

  Tacitus mentions that the Christians pleaded guilty, though as in many court cases of the modern day this may not be the same thing as an admission of guilt. It may be that that they pleaded guilty in the hope of more lenient treatment, a form of plea bargaining, or it may be that they were tortured into admission.

  One reason for thinking that the Christians were to blame is that the fire started in an area where they were living. Another is that they believed that Rome would soon be destroyed by fire. Starting that fire would simply have been a way of making the prophecy come true. Professor Gerhard Baudy of the University of Konstanz has studied ancient apocalyptic prophecies, and discovered that Christians living in the poorer districts of Rome were circulating revenge-ridden texts that told of a raging inferno that would reduce the city of Rome to ashes. These were not submissive, meek and mild Christians, but Christians with a zeal for change. There is tendency to forget that early Christianity was quite unlike the religion that it became later. This was, after all, thirty years before the Book of Revelation was written, a book full of strange and frightening prophecies. And Revelation refers to the Whore of Babylon, an evil beast with seven heads. The text itself tells us that ‘the seven heads are seven mountains’ and Rome was famously the city of seven hills. Probably the writer of Revelation had the city of Rome in mind as the source of all evil. The constant mantra of the oracles of the Roman Christians was that Rome must burn. That was their objective.

  With their interest in prophecies, those same Christians would very likely have heard of the Egyptian prophecy that the great city would fall on the day Sirius rose above the horizon. In AD 64, Sirius rose on 19 July. It was on that day that the great fire of Rome started. It could have been a coincidence, but in the context of the Roman Christians’ own predictions of destruction by fire it does seem an extraordinary coincidence. Professor Baudy believes that the Christians were the deliberate instigators of the fire, and that Nero’s accusation against them was right.

  Even if Nero was innocent of starting the fire, he was unable to escape the political fall-out from the huge disaster. With both the senate and the army against him, within four years he was forced to flee from his rebuilt city and commit suicide.

  William Rufus: A Hunting Accident?

  On the face of it, the death of William Rufus, the second Norman king of England, looks an open and shut case of death by misadventure. The official account circulated at the time was that the king died as a result of ‘friendly fire’: an arrow fired by one of his hunting companions. Yet some people at the time had their suspicions that it was no accident, but murder.

  The first Norman king of England, William the Conqueror, is one of those historical figures everyone has heard of; he invaded England, set up a new administration and a new aristocracy, replacing the Anglo-Saxon elite with Norman barons. By contrast his son and successor is a dim and shadowy figure, remembered mainly for his red hair and his mysterious death in the New Forest. That death, inadequately explained at the time as a hunting accident, has become an almost mythic event. We hold in our minds an iconic rustic image of deer running through an August forest, a medieval king on horseback, cantering in dappled sunlight beneath oak trees, felled without warning by a stray arrow during the chase. William Rufus has been turned into a figure from a pagan realm, where horned gods hold sway in the ancient forests and treacherous courtiers conspire against their kings.

  But William Rufus was a genuine historical figure and historians have a great deal to tell us about him. Perhaps the key information about him is his deep unpopularity. He was enormously disliked as a man; he was even more disliked as a ruler. He shared many of his father’s personality traits, and that may go some way towards explaining why William the Conqueror chose him among his sons as his successor; he was the favourite son. Rufus was also being rewarded for his unswerving loyalty to his father. During the Conqueror’s lifetime, William Rufus was always at his side, supporting him during the rebellions stirred up by his elder brother Robert. But for those rebellions, Robert would have been the natural heir, and William I of England would have been succeeded by Robert I, not William II.

  The date of William Rufus’s birth is uncertain. He was probably born between 1056 and 1060, and he is known to have been a boy at the time of his father’s momentous conquest of England. He was crowned king on 26 September 1087, following his father’s accidental death. Outwardly, the Conqueror had left him a securely conquered kingdom, but he also left him with an insoluble problem with the power structure. The feudal lords in England also held lands across the Channel in Normandy, and leaving England to William and Normandy to Robert meant that these lords owed unswerving homage and loyalty to two masters instead of one. The problem was intensified because of the bitter rivalry between William and Robert; offering support, service and loyalty to one often meant antagonizing the other. It was not surprising that the barons became restless under the new regime, and not surprising that plots developed.

  William Rufus was built like his father: short, muscular, stocky and rather fat. What made his appearance distinctive was his wild red hair and ruddy complexion. It was this that gave rise to his nickname, ‘Rufus’. William had an unattractive personality. He disliked people, he was tyrannical, cruel, greedy, brash. Because he was the king, there were no constraints on his antisocial traits. He was given to violent fits of temper and vindictive paranoia, though as events turned out he may have bee
n right to sense conspiracies gathering round him.

  He caused offence to the Church with his blasphemies. He used his royal powers to exact heavy taxes from the Church. William was motivated by greed, not by any anticlerical mindset. He manipulated the feudal law in a similar way to benefit his treasury; shire courts were instructed to impose heavy fines, confiscation of property was used far more than before as a punishment, and very high inheritance taxes were introduced. In the same spirit, he treated the Church as the wealthy corporation it was, siphoning off its wealth for his own use. He also caused great offence to the Church by quarrelling with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, and driving him into exile.

  Because of these transgressions, he was intensely disliked by churchmen. In the years after his death, William’s reputation suffered greatly at the hands of chroniclers, most of whom were monks. In reading character sketches of the king, due allowance has to be made for the bias of the writers. William was also gay and sympathetic towards the Jews. A revisionist historian writing today might portray William in a sympathetic light, but these tendencies were disastrous for any public figure, especially a king, in an age that was strongly anti-semitic and strongly homophobic. They also made him even more of a hate figure as far as the Church was concerned.

  One of the most critical of the monastic chroniclers was Peter of Blois, who blamed many of the problems on Ranulph, the Bishop of Durham, whose advice William acted upon. In Peter’s eyes, it was Ranulph who was the cruel extortionist and the woeful oppressor of the kingdom, rather than William himself. William was criticized for holding ‘in his own hands’ the archbishopric of Canterbury, four bishoprics and eleven abbeys; he was ‘keeping all these dignities for a long time for no good reason whatever’, and of course taking all the income from the vast ecclesiastical estates. Peter of Blois painted a black picture of England under the rule of William and Ranulph. ‘Chastity utterly sickened away, sin stalked in the streets with open and undaunted front and, facing the law with haughty eye, daily triumphed.’ A godless kingdom was afflicted with alarming portents. ‘There were thunders terrifying the earth, lightnings and thunderbolts most frequent, deluging showers without number, winds of the most astonishing violence, whirlwinds that shook the towers of churches . . . fountains flowing with blood, mighty earthquakes, while the sea, overflowing its shores, wrought infinite calamities to the coasts.’ Today most people would attribute these phenomena to natural causes, but the monkish chroniclers saw them as expressions of God’s displeasure; the disasters were the voice of God telling England that William was a bad ruler.