The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City Read Online Free PDF Page A

the center of the city, to conduct his business for the day before preparing for a lavish banquet with his most intimate friends. Before the sun had risen that morning, Nero had gone to the Capitoline Mount, where a great crowd of plebeians had gathered to declare their allegiance to him and offer prayers for his health, safety, and prosperity in the coming year, as was the custom each New Year’s Day.
     
    At dawn, in his capacity as pontifex maximus , chief priest of Rome, Nero had presided when the special New Year sacrifice was conducted in the Arx, the most sacred area on the Capitoline Mount, in the presence of the augurs and the priests of Rome’s various religious orders. The organs of the sacrificial bird had been unblemished, and the haruspex, the chief augur, had declared that the omens were auspicious for a good year for Rome and for the emperor. All was well in Nero’s world. All was well in the Roman world.
     
    “Never had there been so profound a peace,” historian Tacitus said of this period. 2 A revolt in Britain that had almost seen the province overrun by the Celtic war queen Boudicca and her hundreds of thousands of rebel Britons had been brutally put down three years before, and Roman rule and Roman commerce were again flourishing in Britain. Trouble in the east, which had seen the Parthians occupy Armenia and threaten Syria and other Roman provinces, had finally and convincingly been terminated just a year back by Nero’s doughty, determined general Lucius Domitius Corbulo. Not only had the Parthians been thrown back, but Corbulo had forced the Parthian-born king of Armenia, Tiridates I, to become a Roman ally and promise to come to Rome to bow down to Nero and acknowledge him as his sovereign lord. What a boost to Nero’s prestige that would be!
     
    For several years now, Nero had been expressing his artistic side, on a limited scale. “Nero from early boyhood turned his lively genius” to the arts, said Tacitus. “He carved, painted, sang.” Nero also exhibited some ability as a poet. Tacitus begrudgingly credited him with “occasionally composing verses that showed that he had the rudiments of learning.” 3 Nero’s biographer Suetonius would write that Nero “would dash off verses enthusiastically, without any effort,” and that after Nero’s death, his enemies would claim that he had stolen his best poems, which were published in Nero’s lifetime, from other authors. But, said Suetonius, Nero’s notebooks, in his own handwriting and complete with his corrections, came into the biographer’s possession, and they proved, to him, that Nero was indeed the original creator. 4
     
    Nero possessed a singing voice of which he was proud, and he had become an accomplished player of the lyre, a stringed instrument like a small harp, with which he accompanied himself. “Music formed part of his childhood curriculum,” said Suetonius, “and he developed a taste for it early.” 5 Not long after he came to the throne, Nero had summoned the greatest lyre player of the day, Terpus, to sing to him after dinner at the Palatium. For several nights, Terpus had performed for the emperor, singing and playing until a late hour. Inspired by Terpus, Nero himself had taken up the study of the lyre and mastered it.
     
    Nero had made his first public appearance as a singer by competing in the Juvenile Games as an adolescent, prior to becoming emperor. Since taking the throne, he had sung in the houses of friends and in the imperial gardens, before small but appreciative audiences made up of his intimates and retainers. These performances, he decided, were “on too small a scale for so fine a voice.” 6 Now, with the coming of the new year, Nero had made a resolution—to take his talent to a much broader audience and compete in public singing contests.
     
    Yet, for all his confidence in his own singing prowess, Nero was nervous of how the ordinary people of Rome would receive their emperor’s