Short Stuff: Nero and His Fiddle

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1:09Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry sitting in for Dave, and that makes this an official Short Stuff. We have the quorum. Let's go.

1:19Josh Clark:That's right. Do you recognize this article?

1:22Chuck Bryant:No. Who wrote it? Did I write? Did you write? Yeah, you wrote it. Did I really? Uh-huh. Wow, I was like, this is pretty good. I took your name off of it because I was hoping you wouldn't remember this one. That's awesome. Yeah, this is not a bad article at all. That's great. Thank you for that because, yeah, I like this. I was like, I like the cut of this writer's jib.

1:44Josh Clark:Yeah, so this is from the old HowStuffWorks.com days. And I was surprised we hadn't done a shorty on this. I was like, surely we have. The story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. And when I looked it up, there you were, buddy.

1:58Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I actually searched for an episode, too, because it just sounds like we've definitely talked about it at some point, but it just had to have been a part of a larger episode. So let's dig in, because I feel like everybody, thanks to my article, has heard that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. And it turns out that that is probably a piece of ancient propaganda that survived almost 2 ,000 years at this point.

2:27Josh Clark:I feel like you have a little extra wind beneath your wings now that you know this is yours.

2:31Chuck Bryant:I've never felt more alive than I do right now.

2:34Josh Clark:Yeah, we're talking, obviously, about the great fire of Rome for six days and seven nights. That's when Rome saw, and this is AD 64, saw 70 percent of its city destroyed and only four of its 14 districts intact afterward. And the Roman historian Tacitus wrote that out of about half the people, of the million people, which would be by my count 500 ,000, were rendered without a home because of this great fire.

3:04Chuck Bryant:I knew that.

3:09Chuck Bryant:So this being a massive tragedy, which 2 ,000 years, I feel like we can add a joke or two at this point. But it was such a huge tragedy and it was just so out of nowhere that, of course, people just have an innate need to blame, to find cause, assign blame. People love doing that, even back in the day. And also, people back in the day were as susceptible to rumors and urban legends as we are today. And those things started up really quickly. One of the main ones was that somehow the government was involved in this. Yeah, for sure.

3:45Josh Clark:Like, hey, we saw people, we saw men fanning the flames. And when confronted, they said that they were under orders to do so. Or, you know, maybe somebody actually started this fire on purpose. And Nero, the Emperor Nero, was kind of the prime suspect, it seems like.

4:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that he ordered it, that he set the fire. Or some people, he had to rebuild Rome. I mean, you had to rebuild it after so many of the districts were just totally leveled. And he was like, let's build this in, I don't know, Nero style, which is surprisingly close to the craftsman style of the 1920s. Oh, really? No. I was like, that's very surprising.

4:28Josh Clark:I thought you were going to say Art Deco.

4:30Chuck Bryant:I was going to at first and I was like, no, let me come up with something else. Right. I should have just said Art Deco. It would have gotten a better laugh. But he rebuilt it in a manner that he liked. I mean, he was in charge at the time. And people were like, that's why Rome burnt, because this guy wanted to rebuild it more in his image.

4:48Josh Clark:Yeah, exactly. So that rumor was going around, and through that rumor came the story that while the Great Fire was burning, Nero played his fiddle and just sort of watched it happen. Should we take a break right there?

5:04Chuck Bryant:We should, because, I mean, what's coming up next is just eye-popping.

5:08Josh Clark:That's right. More goodness from Josh Clark of 15 years ago, right after this.

5:27Josh Clark:30 years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City. Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors? Or will you trust the people five miles overseas? This is a story about neighbors turning on each other. And what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough. We reached for a feeling that exists in this city. But we're not stopping, are we? I'm Ben Nadeff-Haffrey. And for my new series on revisionist history, I took a deep dive into Staten Island's attempt to secede from New York City in the 1990s. and what it all has to do with the politics of resentment that dominate America today.

6:13Josh Clark:Listen to Revisionist History, The Staten Island Problem, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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7:33Chuck Bryant:So, Nero's like, wait a minute, wait, wait. I wasn't fiddling. We'll find out why that's definitive in a second. Why are you blaming me? And they're like, we're just blaming you. You got to accept it. He's like, I don't. I'm going to find a scapegoat myself. I'll trot them out publicly, and then you can just stop blaming me. And he looks around, and he's like, these Christians are new. I'm going to persecute them. And this actually became the first persecution of Christians in history. This was 64 CE. And, I mean, Christianity was so new that there were still original apostles around who ended up being executed in this persecution.

8:13Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Paul, who was the other one? Paul and Peter. Paul was beheaded and Peter was crucified upside down. Yeah.

8:23Josh Clark:So like torturous, brutal executions are happening because Nero is looking for a scapegoat because he was blamed for this fire. You know, when you said before, we're going to talk about why it's definitive that he definitely didn't fiddle is because there was no fiddle at the time. Music historians basically agreed that the vial class of instruments, which is like a violin, didn't come around to the 11th century. So about 1 ,500 years later. So there literally were no fiddles at the time.

8:54Chuck Bryant:No, but he did play something called the Sithara, which is like a lap top harp. The top is like for strumming. The bottom is for plucking. You've probably seen something like it before, but he was really into it. So much so that when Rome conquered some new land, he would schedule music festivals in these new lands. And he would schedule them at times that he could go and compete. He would compete. And the Senate was not happy about this. They're like, you're competing against commoners. You're the emperor. And apparently Nero actually was more alike than we think he was today, especially among the lower classes of Rome, because he didn't behave nearly as superior toward them as other elites in Rome had and did.

9:42Josh Clark:Oh, okay. Well, you know, one thing he definitely did was in the immediate aftermath of the fire, he did a lot, actually. He took a lot of measures to provide for the citizenry. He was at his place in Antium on the outskirts of Rome when it broke out. He immediately rushed back to the fire. Tacitus, that historian that I mentioned, was a boy at the time during the blaze. and he provided accounts of like, hey, Nero helped coordinate the firefighting himself on the first night. He opened up public buildings for housing. He opened up his own gardens for temporary shelter. He imported grain from other cities close by that I guess he sold, but sold like super cheap.

10:25Chuck Bryant:Yeah, he still sold it though. I thought that was a little hinky.

10:28Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure.

10:29Chuck Bryant:But yeah, so he was, a lot of the residents of Rome liked him And Tacitus tells us, like, he did actually swing into action, and yet he still managed to bear the blame throughout this. Like, his persecution of Christians did not work. And apparently, like we said, the fiddling thing was not—it's not possible that he fiddled. It is possible he was playing the Sithara, but because of his responsiveness, it seems like that's probably not the case. So because this was probably largely created by the Senate, like I think they were working hard to keep the blame on Nero, right? There's a 1940s historian from University of North Carolina named Mary Frances Giles.

11:17Josh Clark:Go Tar Heels.

11:18Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And yes, if you're a Tar Heel, you can be proud of Mary Frances Giles because she was one of those rare people who managed to see something that everybody knows in a different light, at a different angle. And she's like, you know, fiddling doesn't just mean playing a violin. It can also mean just kind of doing something like with your fingers, like ineffectually, like you're wasting time and energy. You're just fiddling around. Maybe that's what they originally meant. I don't know why I never thought of that. I definitely hadn't either. Even after writing this, it didn't even look familiar.

11:54Josh Clark:Yeah, she was like, you know, maybe he's just fiddling as in like doing something sort of useless at the time. It sounds like that didn't happen either. But, yeah, maybe they viewed it as inadequate at the time, like what he was doing. Maybe the truth wasn't getting around that he was actually kind of helping.

12:12Chuck Bryant:And that actually fits with the idea that this is propaganda. that the Senate was basically saying Nero's responses were not nearly enough. He was just basically messing around.

12:23Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. But, you know, if you're like, man, Nero got a bad rap, there's a brilliant writer who took that into consideration, but probably, I don't know, 15 years ago-ish, and said, hey, don't feel so bad for Nero, because Nero ascended to the throne because his mom killed his uncle, And then Nero had his mom killed. And then, of course, the persecution of the Christians, you know, hanging people by their feet and decapitating them. Like, don't feel bad for this guy.

12:56Chuck Bryant:No. There was also damnatio ad bestias, which is sicking wild animals on people for executions.

13:04Josh Clark:Yeah, no good.

13:05Chuck Bryant:So Nero essentially was on his heels after that great fire. Again, remember, the Senate didn't like him that much. I can't stress that enough. And so the army, which he had been on really good terms with for a while, was like, we're not going to work for you any longer. So there's a potential coup brewing. The Senate declared him a public enemy, which is not something you want levied against you as an emperor. It meant that he was probably going to be executed. So he pushed a dagger into his throat about four years after the fire came and went. Yeah.