The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City

by Dando-Collins, Stephen

  The task now faced by the city prefect was formidable. The fire was burning fiercely in the lowlying areas of several southern precincts, and it was advancing up the Aventine Hill, consuming the homes of the rich and the famous and the several temples that adorned the hill. But the wind that had driven the fire into the southern suburbs with such speed and ferocity had surprised everyone and had turned. Now it was blowing strongly from the south, fanning the glowing cauldron that was the Circus Maximus and sending flames from it toward the residences lining the southern slopes of the Palatine and Caelian hills. At the same time, the flames in Regio I were being driven north across the flat into Regio’s II and V.

  One of the first things that the prefect did was dictate a dispatch to the emperor at Antium to tell him of the disaster. Several grim-faced riders from the Praetorian Cavalry were soon galloping south along the Appian Way, bound for Antium. One of the cavalrymen bore a leather dispatch case over his shoulder containing the prefect’s message. All along their route, foot traffic and riders alike would move aside for the Praetorians.

  Nero awoke early on the morning of July 20 in good spirits. He had won the singing contest the night before, and he intended to compete again on the Antium stage over the next day or two before returning to Rome in time for the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris’ three days of chariot racing at the end of the month. By the middle of the day, the message arrived from Rome telling him of the fire. His first reaction was to ignore it. Singing came first. He would let the city prefect deal with the fire; that was his job.

  Later in the day, a second message arrived; the fire was continuing to spread, it said. The flames were climbing the Palatine, Caelian, and Aventine hills and were pushing around the bases of the Caelian and the Palatine and driving north toward the Esquiline Hill, threatening the heart of Rome. This latest message won Nero’s attention. The course of the fire was taking it both toward the old palaces on the Palatine and toward his latest construction, the Domus transitoria, a long, colonnaded building that ran from the Palatine all the way across the city to the Gardens of Maecenas, which occupied the Esquiline Hill.

  Sending a message back to Rome with instructions that all steps must be taken to protect his property, Nero issued orders for a return to the capital the first thing next day.

  Up the Tiber came the emperor, with his flotilla of small boats. Smoke from the fire would have been visible for many miles before the party reached the city, while the sky over Rome would have been a dirty brown, with the sun an orange orb hanging in the firmament.

  It was July 21, the third day of the fire, which was burning more fiercely than ever. Rome was in the grip of a firestorm, the likes of which would not be experienced in Europe again until the aerial bombing campaigns of the Second World War. It is likely that Nero landed downstream of the city, for the flames in the dock area of Regio XIII would have negated passage. There were other landing places further upstream, beside the Campus Martius, but the fire along the river’s east bank would have made the river impassible. A shocked Nero would have traveled the last part of the journey by litter. Met outside the city by City Prefect Sabinus, he received a sober briefing: The city was at the mercy of the fire, which had “outstripped all preventative measures.”11

  Coming up the Via Prenestina, with the city burning away to their left, Nero and his party passed the intact barracks and stables complex of the Praetorian Cavalry, which sat at the foot of the eastern slope of the Esquiline Hill, outside and below the Servian Walls. In the stables, thousands of horses, smelling the smoke in the air, would have been whinnying with fear as their grooms attempted to calm them. The fields spreading east from the barracks, normally used by the cavalry for their training exercises, were filled with distraught refugees, who watched the imperial party pass, some wailing at the emperor in their distress, others gawking hollow-eyed at the long train of litters, soldiers, and servants tramping by.

  Nero passed through the Esquiline Gate, where Praetorian troops stood uselessly on guard, then turned right and entered the Gardens of Maecenas. Up the paths and steps that, in better times, made these gardens reputedly the most attractive perambulation in all of Rome, Nero and his party climbed the Esquiline Hill. The gardens that covered this hill had been created late in the first century BC by Gaius Maecenas, who along with Agrippa had been the most senior of the emperor Augustus’ lieutenants. Eccentric in dress and habits, Maecenas had been the patron of the poets Virgil and Horace and had himself some aspirations as a poet. Maecenas had a “passion for self-display,” in the opinion of Seneca, a passion exemplified by his magnificent gardens.12

  “Maecenas’ greatest claim to glory is regarded as having been his clemency,” said Seneca. “He spared the sword, refrained from bloodshed, and showed his power only in his defiance of convention.”13 But it was his gardens for which most Romans would continue to remember him. On his death, his mansion and the gardens on the Esquiline had been willed to Augustus, and they had been imperial property ever since. Maecenas’ mansion, on the southwestern side of the hill, had been used by Tiberius for a time prior to his becoming emperor. When Philo Judaeus, Jewish envoy from Alexandria, had met with the emperor Caligula one summer during his reign, three decades before this, it had been in the Gardens of Maecenas. Philo had noted that Caligula spent the previous three nights in the gardens, apparently staying in Maecenas’ old mansion. Caligula had led the Jewish party on a tour of deserted buildings in the complex.

  When Nero now topped the Esquiline Hill and looked down over the gardens spreading below, he could see that all the buildings fringing the gardens had been rapidly and deliberately demolished by the city and Praetorian cohorts and imperial slaves over the past twenty-four hours, to create a fire break and prevent the fire from spreading up the hill. Nero ascended a tower on the hilltop. The Tower of Maecenas was not a tall, narrow structure as might be imagined, but a solid, squat building of three stories. From the top, accompanied by senior members of his retinue, Nero gazed silently out over his burning capital.

  Across the valley, the Palatine Hill, and all the imperial palaces of Augustus, Germanicus, Tiberius, and Caligula that occupied it, and the private mansions on the same slopes, were ablaze. The city prefect had managed to rescue most of the valuables and portable works of art from the various Palatiums and the Domus Transitoria, among them the solid gold chariot used by the emperor Augustus for his triumphal processions and by Nero’s grandfather Germanicus in his Triumph of AD 17. This ceremonial quadriga was normally kept in the Temple of Apollo, which adjoined the Old Palatium, as Augustus’ original, now gutted palace on the Palatine was colloquially called.

  Suetonius indicates that many of the books held in Rome’s libraries were destroyed in the fire, but a large number of the records held in the Tabularium, the state archives, a massive, 140-year-old building sitting on the lower slope of the Capitoline Mount overlooking the Forum, were removed to safety by the vigiles or City Cohorts. These rescued records, in handwritten scroll form, ranged from the Acta Senatus, the verbatim record of every word spoken in every single session of the Senate since the late Republic—made possible by the invention of shorthand by Cicero’s secretary Tiro—to copies of every edition of the Acta diurna, the government’s daily newspaper.

  All these records Tacitus would consult, back to the reign of Augustus, when he came to write his Annals, three decades after the fire. The private, unpublished letters and memoirs of Augustus and the memoirs of Nero’s mother, Agrippina the Younger, were among other records preserved, for Suetonius would be able to quote from them when he wrote his biographies of the twelve Caesars half a century after the conflagration.

  The fire had reached the Forum Romanum at the foot of the Palatine, where it destroyed buildings, including the House of the Vestals, the Temple of Vesta, and the Regia—once the home of the kings of Rome and, later, of the pontifex maximus. Also being assaulted by the flames was Nero’s Domus Transitoria, construction work on which had only recently
been completed. It, too, burned before Nero’s eyes. Rising high into the air, orange and red, turning, curling, dancing, across mile after square mile of the city, the flames were awesome in their destructive majesty. Nero was overheard to murmur that these mesmerizing flames possessed a certain beauty.14

  Making the Gardens of Maecenas his base, Nero directed that more buildings below the Esquiline be leveled, to put a vast space in front of the fire. Having noted that the Servian Walls could and should prevent the fire from spreading north to the Campus Martius, he directed that the Gardens of Agrippa and all the public buildings associated with them on the campus be thrown open, to “receive the destitute multitude,” along with all imperial gardens, which included the Gardens of Sallust on the Campus Martius and the Gardens of Caesar and the Servilian Gardens west of the Tiber. To provide shelter for those affected, Nero ordered that temporary structures be raised on the Campus Martius, which quickly became a vast and crowded refugee camp.15

  Foodstuffs in the affected areas had been consumed by the fire, as had the grain warehouses on the Tiber docks in Regio XIII. Vast grain stocks were maintained at Ostia, the port at the mouth of the Tiber, so Nero ordered that supplies be brought upriver from Ostia and from all towns immediately surrounding the capital. For the time being, too, the price of grain to the city’s remaining bakeries was substantially reduced. These disaster relief measures all won widespread approval for the emperor, said Tacitus.16

  All the while, the fire continued to burn and to spread until the flames reached the cleared area at the foot of the Esquiline in Regio IV, where, said Tacitus, “the violence of the fire was met by clear ground and an open sky.”17 As dawn broke, five days after it had begun, the fire had apparently been brought under control. From their country resorts, Rome’s wealthy and their houseguests hurried back to the city to survey the damage and ascertain their losses. Apart from their city homes, many of these people also owned apartment buildings in the city. They returned to find that much of their property had been lost.

  That same day, as embers glowed and smoke continued to fill the air and attempts were made to calculate the scale of the damage, the fire sprang up anew. It began in the shops of the Aemilian Basilica, the property of Tigellinus the praetorian prefect.18 From there, flames spread up onto the Capitoline Mount. The Capitol had been spared the ravages of the fire prior to this because the walls and colonnades on the sacred hill had proven a barrier to the flames, which had swept over the neighboring Palatine. In addition, the direction of the wind on the second day of the original fire had pushed the flames past the Capitol’s ancient walls. But now the flames advanced up the Capitoline, too. Fire destroyed the sanctuary’s wooden gates, then swept on, at terrifying speed.

  The pace at which the fire had advanced uphill since the first outbreak on level ground had taken the Romans by surprise. Logic told them that flames would travel over the flat more rapidly than when they had to climb a hill. Even today, in modern times, we still have much to learn about the behavior of fires. New research in Australia on wildfires, or “bush fires,” as they are known in Australia, where massive, death-dealing fires blacken thousands of acres every summer, has shown that a fire can travel up to eight times more quickly going up a hill than on flat ground. The greater the incline, the faster the burn.19

  The soldiery of the capital had by now been thrown into the task of attempting to stem the flames and to remove the treasures kept in the Capitoline temples—an untold fortune in gold in trophies from wars waged and won hundreds of years past against the Carthaginians, the Gauls, and the city-states of Italy. Then, too, there were priceless relics such as the Sibylline Books, three books of ancient prophesies from the time of the Roman king Tarquinus Superbus, or Tarquin the Proud, seventh and last king of Rome. These books were normally kept under lock and key in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, to be consulted by the Senate in emergencies. Many treasures were only just rescued in time.

  Soon, Rome’s most sacred temples were tasting the flames. The historic Temple of Jupiter the Stayer, which had been vowed by Romulus, founder of Rome, was engulfed, as the fire reached the ancient timbers that supported the roof, burned them through, and brought the terracotta roof crashing down. The same fate was met by a six-hundred-year-old temple to Luna dedicated by Servius Tullus, sixth king of Rome, and the Temple of Hercules, another of the “historical monuments of men of genius,” in the words of Tacitus, which was left a blackened ruin.20 Priceless frescoes within these temples were likewise destroyed.

  The fire continued on down the steep reverse slope of the Capitoline, leaping the Servian Walls at this point and setting alight several large public buildings at the foot of the Capitoline on the southern fringe of the Campus Martius, soon bringing rafters and roofs crashing down. One of the buildings gutted here was a basilica; another, the Theater of Taurus, was a medium-sized amphitheater of stone, brick, and timber erected only thirty-five years before by the immensely wealthy Sisena Statilius Taurus, a consul in AD 16, who had used the spoils of war to finance its erection. Here, too, the flames reached “the porticos which were dedicated to enjoyment,” in the words of Tacitus.21 It was only when the wind dropped, it seems, that a broad, protective expanse of stone colonnades beyond these buildings prevented the fire from spreading further across the Campus Martius, which was now home to hundreds of thousands of traumatized refugees.

  Two days after the second outbreak and a week since the first flames had taken hold at the Circus Maximus, the Great Fire of Rome finally ended. The destruction across the city had been immense. Of the fourteen regios or districts of the city of Rome originally delineated by the emperor Augustus, three had been totally leveled by the fire and by firefighting measures. In another seven regios, “a few shattered, half-burnt” residences remained standing. Only four precincts had escaped the fire altogether.22

  One of the latter was Regio XIV, on the west bank of the Tiber, for the waterway had held the fire back. The three other precincts where hearth and home had been preserved were mostly located north of the Servian Walls—Regios VII and IX, which between them covered the Campus Martius, and Regio VI, which included the Quirinal Hill residential district, home to Martial and Vespasian and his brother Sabinus. Regio VI was also the site, in the northeast of the city and beyond the walls, of the Castra Praetoria, barracks of the Praetorian and City Cohorts.

  Now that the destruction and the dying had ended, the time had come for the recriminations.

  XIII

  THE BLAME

  By dawn on the morning of July 26, after the flames had consumed the city for six days and seven nights, the conflagration was at an end. Refugees from the disaster crowded the Campus Martius and the imperial gardens west of the Tiber. Other homeless Romans had taken shelter in the often massive tombs and monuments built for wealthy citizens of bygone days and which lined the numerous roads leading from the city.

  A pall of smoke continued to hang over Rome, and the acrid stench of burnt matter and of death filled the nostrils. The destruction had been so complete that in the most devastated areas, only piles of ash and useless rubble remained, and most streets were impassible. The very marble and bricks of the city had seemed to melt in the flames. Modern experts would calculate that at its center, the Great Fire of Rome generated temperatures in the region of 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit.1

  Many bodies had been entirely consumed. Nonetheless, corpses, often charred and beginning to rot in the summer heat, could be seen in the ruins. “Countless people perished,” Cassius Dio would write.2 There was no accurate way of calculating precisely how many people, free or slave, had died, although all chroniclers agreed that the old and infirm, who had been too slow to escape the flames or had remained in their lodgings and made no attempt to flee, accounted for the majority of the fatalities. It was also known that the number of deaths caused by the second eruption of the fire had been much less than that caused by the initial blaze. Compared with some of the afflictions experience
d by Rome—in a single autumn one year during Nero’s reign, thirty thousand deaths from plague were registered in the city—the death toll from the fire was negligible.3

  To prevent looting, Nero issued an edict: “He offered to remove corpses and rubble free of charge, but allowed nobody to search among the ruins even of his own mansion,” said Suetonius.4 During daylight hours, the search for bodies and the cleanup became the task of the City and Praetorian Cohorts and the thousands of imperial slaves, and, after dark, of the vigiles. That task began at once. Nero decided to remove all the rubble from the city, rather than build over the top of it, as had been the practice after past fires. Once each of the many barges regularly bringing grain upriver from Ostia was unloaded, it was piled with rubble, which it then carried down the Tiber to the marshes at Ostia. This shuttle service proceeded day in, day out, and before long the Ostian marshes would be reclaimed by the blackened fill from Rome.

  Even while the fire had still been burning, the same questions had been posed again and again by the shocked citizenry.

  “How did it happen?” some asked, understandably.

  “Who kindled it?” others pondered.5 Why would they ask such a question? None of the larger fires that had singed Rome earlier in the century had been blamed on arson. Kitchen fires that got out of hand, careless workmen, even lightning could be pointed at as the source of previous blazes. Still, deliberate fires were not unknown. Roman landlords had frequently been suspected of fires that had gutted their own apartment blocks. Six years from now, two businessmen in Antioch, capital of the province of Syria, would be found guilty of deliberately setting a fire that destroyed 20 percent of their handsome city. That pair only intended to destroy the city archives, which contained records of their substantial debts, but the archives fire inevitably spread to other buildings.

  Faster than the fire itself, stories spread about the men who had prevented others from dousing the fire on the first night. Who were they? No one knew. Under whose orders had they acted? Greedy landlords? Possibly. But names were soon being suggested, and one name in particular: Nero. As fire breeds on oxygen, so rumor bred on these reports and took hold of the people. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio all chronicled these rumors and perhaps embellished them.