Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm editor Candice Skipson, joined by Curious like a cat
Speaker 1: staff right, Josh Clark. How's it going, Josh Rare Candice Rare. Um,
Speaker 1: I can't sing the lyrics quite as fast as the
Speaker 1: incomparable Billy Joel. But we are kind of wondering who
Speaker 1: started the fire? And back in eight six Rome was burning. Yes,
Speaker 1: it was a bad burn too. I think half of
Speaker 1: the citizens of Rome, which was pretty expansive at the time,
Speaker 1: lost their homes. Yeah. Burn for six days and seven nights.
Speaker 1: About the city was destroyed. Yeah. There were fourteen districts
Speaker 1: to Rome at the time and only three were left intact,
Speaker 1: and most of the other ones that were birn were
Speaker 1: just totally leveled. It was a horrible fire. And at
Speaker 1: the time, the person running the show in Rome was
Speaker 1: the Emperor Nero, who was wildly unpopular. Um. I think
Speaker 1: people kind of perceived him as a distracted leader. Um.
Speaker 1: He seemed kind of Namby Pamby From the research I did,
Speaker 1: he he just didn't really seem like a He was
Speaker 1: no Alexander. Let's just put it like that, Okay, fair enough,
Speaker 1: And there were actually rumors that he started the fire
Speaker 1: on purpose because he didn't like the way that the
Speaker 1: city looked and he wanted to rebuild it to his
Speaker 1: own esthetic standards. Yeah yeah, And you know, once people
Speaker 1: start throwing rumors like that around, you're in big trouble.
Speaker 1: But one of the other accusations that um I came
Speaker 1: across when I was researching the Roman Fire of sixty
Speaker 1: four um was that Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned,
Speaker 1: which is just seems mad, uh, And I've heard it before,
Speaker 1: but I'm asking you what is it fact or is
Speaker 1: that fiction? That's fiction. We're not quite sure where this
Speaker 1: idea came from. I mean, the idea of a city
Speaker 1: leader sitting around in his palace, you know, um plucking
Speaker 1: the strings of his instrument while his city's residents became
Speaker 1: homeless and utterly distraught. Again is just very sad and tragic.
Speaker 1: And we know for a fact that he did play
Speaker 1: a string instrument, but it wasn't the fiddle, and that
Speaker 1: actually wasn't invented until fifteen years after the event anyway,
Speaker 1: So that blows a story right out of the water.
Speaker 1: But there are historical accounts from Tacitus that show neuro
Speaker 1: Is actually present at the burning, and he was coordinating
Speaker 1: firefighting efforts, he was housing the homeless and his own gardens,
Speaker 1: and he was trying to get food available at a
Speaker 1: discount to the city's residents. But despite all of this,
Speaker 1: he still didn't do a very good job trying to
Speaker 1: coordinate the raised city as it were. Yeah, but even
Speaker 1: though he did try something, that's that in stark contradiction
Speaker 1: of the image, the public image he had, So at
Speaker 1: least he tried something right. He tried, but then he
Speaker 1: tried to blame it on the Christians too and persecuted
Speaker 1: them horribly, and he became even more unpopular when the
Speaker 1: Senate declared him a public enemy. And then his own
Speaker 1: soldiers started to revolt, and he realized that things were
Speaker 1: going really downhill. So four years after the fire, he
Speaker 1: took his own life. He stabbed himself in the throat. Indeed,
Speaker 1: so Nero was a ritual zero, and you can read
Speaker 1: more about him, and in Nero really played the fiddle
Speaker 1: while Rome burn on half stuff works dot Com. We're
Speaker 1: more on this than thousands of other topics because at
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