‘When I am dead, let earth be rolled in flame.’
‘Nay, while I live let earth be rolled in flame,’ answered the Emperor, altering the iambic. ‘Anything would be better than to smoulder to death for want of something to amuse me.’
Nero was not altogether in earnest. His conversation was habitually grandiose, because he fed a perverse imagination with phantasmagorias and monstrosities. He was suffering from that blood-poisoning of unchecked vice which has so often maddened Eastern despots.
The fixed idea of watching a conflagration, and getting illustrations for his Trojan epic, often returned to this Emperor of melodrama. Without resolutely entertaining the purpose of wrapping Rome in flames, he allowed himself to hint at it and to play with it. But he had made Tigellinus much more in earnest than himself. That evil genius of the Emperor thought that from such a calamity he at least would have nothing to lose, and might have everything to gain. He had inexhaustible riches at his disposal, and numberless wretches in his pay. He meant to see what could be done. Not long after the above conversation Nero went for a few days of literary leisure and musical practice to his villa at Antium, and Tigellinus gave him hints that at Antium he might expect startling news, and that a first-rate sensation was in store for him. For the magnitude and horror of that sensation even Nero was not prepared.
To us it all seems incredible. It did not seem incredible to Tacitus, and it is positively affirmed by Suetonius, Dion Cassius, and even by the grave and learned Pliny the Elder, who, as a contemporary, must have known infinitely better than we can do ‘the depths to which despotism in delirium can descend.’
CHAPTER L
A CITY IN FLAMES
‘Hoc incendium e turri Mæcenatiana prospectans, lætusque flammæ, ut aiebat, pulchritudine, ἅλωσιν Ilii in illo suo scenico habitu decantavit.’—Suet. Nero, 38.
Ἔκραζον ὁρῶντες τὸν καπὸν τῆς πυρώσεως αὐτῆς—Apoc. xviii. 9.
Nero set out for Antium on July 17. Two days afterwards Rome was in a sea of surging flame. Men noticed that it was the anniversary of the day on which, four and a half centuries earlier, the city had been burnt by the Gauls. The fire had burst forth in the neighbourhood of the Circus Maximus. The shops and storehouses which surrounded that huge structure were full of combustible materials, including the machinery and properties used in the public spectacles. Here the flames seized a secure hold, and, raging about the Cœlian, rolled toward the eastern front of the Palatine. Checked by the steep sides of the hill and its cyclopean architecture, the fire swept down the valleys on either side—to the right, along the Via Nova; to the left, along the Triumphal Way. It ravaged the Velabrum and the Forum; it consumed the temple and altar reared to Hercules by the Arcadian Evander, the palace of Numa, and the circular Temple of Vesta, which enshrined the ever-burning hearth and Penates of the Roman people. Sweeping into the Carinæ, which was crowded by consular palaces, it devoured those stately structures, and the many trophies of ancient victories with which they were enriched. On the Aventine it destroyed the temple which Servius Tullius had erected to the Moon, and in it the priceless relics of Greek art which L. Mummius had brought from Corinth. Rolling back to the Palatine with more victorious violence, it reduced to a blackened ruin the venerable temple which Romulus had vowed to Jupiter Stator. Then, licking up everything which lay in its path, it rioted with voluptuous fury in the more densely crowded regions of the city, raging and crackling among the old, tortuous purlieus and crazy habitations of the Subura. With its hot breath it purged the slums and rookeries, foul with a pauper population of Oriental immigrants, who were massed round the ill-famed shrines of Isis and Serapis. When it had acquired irresistible volume in these lower regions, it again rushed up the hills as with the rage of a demon, to sweep down once more in tumultuous billows over the helpless levels. For six days and seven nights it maintained its horrible and splendid triumph—now bounding from street to street with prodigious rapidity, now seeming to linger luxuriously in some crowded district, flinging up to heaven great sheets of flame, and turning the nightly sky into a vault of suffocating crimson.
No words can paint the horror of a scene which transformed into a Gehenna of destruction a city enriched with the magnificence of nearly eight centuries of victory. There were districts in which the heat was so intense that they were unapproachable, and the rarefaction of the atmosphere, joined to a strong breeze which seemed in league with the destroying element, filled the air with a roar as of ten thousand wild beasts. Here stores of resinous material made the consuming flames white with intensity; and there the burning and smouldering débris, which for a time half choked the conflagration, poured forth black volumes of smoke, which hid its progress under a pall of midnight. Here an insula, many stories high, collapsed with a crash which was heard for miles; and there whole streets, falling simultaneously on both sides, caused continuous bursts of sound like the long roll of incessant thunder.