As far as I know, a lot of that suffers from the problem of many telling it decades or centuries after the fact. And Suetonious **had **an ax to grind against Nero.
Others point out that Nero could not had sang while Rome burned because he was not in Rome when the fire took place. What I do remember is that Nero had a fixation on being an artist or singer and some noted that Nero was in a different city, doing a play about the destruction of Troy IIUC.
IMHO it would be like when some tried to make hay out of GW Bush reading “My Pet Goat” when NY and the Pentagon was burning.
For that and other reasons is that Historians nowadays do doubt that Nero was responsible.
IMHO what he did (like Bush) was to not let a disaster that he did not cause to go to waste.
I’m sure that at least half of the stories told about Nero by Roman historians are wild exaggerations, or satire taken as truth, or plain false. It’s difficult to tell what the truth is at this distance in time, but we can analyse the information we have, making due allowances for its reliability.
If Nero really was into playing the cithara and singing - and given the many coins showing Nero playing the cithara, this seems to be a pretty safe assumption - the story doesn’t sound farfetched.
Troy was regarded as the ancestor of Rome (see Virgil’s Aeneid), and it’s perfectly plausible that when Nero (wherever he happened to be at the time) heard the news that Rome was burning, he played and sang a passage about Troy burning. It sounds like just the sort of thing he would do.
Tacitus, who was in a position to hear plenty of first-hand accounts of that time, says that all Nero’s positive and common-sense actions regarding the fire had little effect because this story about him singing had become widely circulated, and the public took a dim view of it. We still don’t know whether it was true or not, but it seems reasonable to accept that it was widely believed at the time.
The historians in question make a very weak case. Their arguments are essentially, “Sure, people at the time heard rumors that Nero started the fire. But rumors aren’t proof.”
Obviously, rumors aren’t proof. But they are evidence. It’s incredibly unlikely we’re ever going to see a document from somebody who can say “I was there in the room when Emperor Nero paid Arsonicus fifty sesterces to start a fire.” It’s not something Nero would have wanted to be public information; he would have concealed it if it had happened.
Rumor is the evidence we have for most historical events. Virtually all of history is people talking about events they didn’t personally witness. If you dismiss rumor then you have no history.
Side note:
The Latin word ‘cithara’ is the origin of our modern English word ‘guitar’.
From the OED:
guitar, n. a. Sp. guitarra, and its mod.F. adaptation guitare (Pr. guitara, It. chitarra), a. Gr. κιθάρα. The word had been adopted in classical L. as ˈcithara.
Uh, sorry to say, but what I reported is what most historians do conclude, if you have better evidence against it do report it, but in the meantime it has to be noted that what I pointed out is what most historians now agree.
Mind you, if one insists about rumor being evidence then I have to tell you that there were indeed rumors that the Christians did, if not started, celebrated the burning of “Babylon”. (and there are scholars that do report that “the beast” in the bible was Nero).
And they just found this out? One of my pet peeves with history class is that they way they talked (or rather, did not talk) about political systems between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the French Revolution, many people think that every country in Europe and for over 1000 years was under the Ancien Regime. If you live in Europe, it takes about five minutes to realize that’s like thinking every person in the US is Marilyn Monroe.
If historians didn’t know that until recently, they were quite asleep.
Now, I have problems with the History Channel, but even they do point about how inaccurate the Paul Revere tale in the popular poem was.
From the quote there:
Two other men, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, rode alongside him,
and by the end of the night as many as 40 men on horseback were
spreading the word across Boston’s Middlesex County.
I thought Wadsworth’s poem began:
Listen my children while I pause to tell of the ride of William Dawse ...
You must be reading different historians than I am. The consensus among the historians I’m familiar with is that, while there is a question, Nero probably was responsible for the fire. The evidence is basically threefold:
The widespread rumors at the time. As I wrote above, I agree with the historians who feel that rumors point towards the facts not away from them.
Nero’s response to the fire. It’s historically documented that Nero officially blamed the Christians for the fire and that he instituted public relief efforts. Neither of these were Nero’s usual practice, which is evidence he felt some special reason both to assign blame and to make amends. It can be argued that Nero was just responding to the rumors that he was guilty rather than to actual guilt. But Nero was accused of a lot of things in his reign and he normally didn’t appear to care what the public thought.
Nero had already made plans before the fire. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, Nero produced plans for a major rebuilding of the city (which included a huge new palace for him). These plans appeared so quickly there was no credible way they were made after the fire. So Nero apparently had been making plans about how he would rebuild Rome just in case it happened to burn down - or he had been making plans for a fire he knew was going to happen because he was going to start it.
The arguments in defense of Nero come down to this:
A lot people thought Nero started the fire. Therefore he didn’t do it.
As I wrote above, this doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Nero wasn’t in Rome when the fire occurred.
Yes, that’s true. I don’t think anyone believes Nero personally went out with a torch starting the fire. He was the Emperor. He had minions for things like that.
Obviously we can’t take ancient historians at face value. They were writing history for a reason, and chose to tell the stories they told for various reasons. They leave out other things for various other reasons, and the most common reason for leaving stuff out is that the knowledge was so common that it wasn’t considered worthwhile to write down. So for lots of things we have to rely on physical evidence, because there are no surviving records of what we want to know.
So take stuff like George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. How do we know this story didn’t really happen? Well, what is the earliest appearance of the story? Did George Washington tell the story himself? Is it written down anywhere?
We have enough documentation of Washington’s life that we can conclusively rule this story an invention by a particular person, and the story was repeated credulously by others, who not so much assumed the story was true, but rather thought the truth or falsity of the fable was irrelevant.
So if we go back 2000 years to the Roman Empire, the problem is that the primary sources are much more sparse. We literally only have fragments. So some of the famous stories about various ancient historical figures are probably just as apocryphal as the cherry tree story.
So some people believed that Nero set the fires deliberately. Today some people believe Obama was born in Kenya. Those beliefs don’t make it true, and they don’t make it false either.
All we can say is that it doesn’t make any sense for Nero to burn down half of Rome. That’s where he kept his stuff. We can’t prove he didn’t, all we can say is that it’s very unlikely that he did.
You said it as a joke, but a lot of our history is based on “Fake News” - an awful lot of writing that survives from Ancient times, especially Roman writing was actually rival politicians making up outlandish stories to discredit their opponents or promote themselves. Part of the work historians do is try to figure out what pieces are real and what was about as true as “Obama is a Kenyan Muslim” vein. I didn’t really understand this back in high school history class, I had the idea that people made a bunch of accurate records and only some survived, not that some of the records were outlandish exaggerations or outright lies.
I don’t want to have a pointless argument over whether or not Nero started the fire. There’s no proof either way so it’s ultimately just supposition.
However, I don’t think anybody would say that Nero was unhappy about Rome burning. As I noted above, he wanted to rebuild the city in his own image and the fire gave him the reason to do that. That doesn’t prove he started the fire; it could just be a coincidence that the fire started right at the time Nero wanted the city to be destroyed.
It’s irrelevant whether it’s Nero or Apollo playing the cithara on the coins. Apollo actually seems more likely, but the quality and size of the images makes it difficult to tell.
However, this was not a random image. The designs of Roman coins were very carefully chosen, and were almost always intended to promote a message or idea. If Apollo playing the cithara (as opposed to other deities, or other aspects of Apollo) was chosen, it was for a reason. And given that all the accounts of Nero say that he was serious about playing and singing, entering music competitions, etc. we can take the coins as being confirmation of these accounts.
This is the *cui bono *logic that underpins all manner of conspiracy theories. Take 9/11: the Bush Admin, via the PNAC, wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks gave them the reason to do that. That doesn’t prove they were behind the attacks; it could just be a coincidence that the attack happened right at the time the Bush Admin wanted a cause for war.
Yes, yes it could be a coincidence. And it is. And for (broadly) the same reason. Terrorist attacks happen without the need for false-flag conspiracies; fires happen without the need for arson. Rome was a crowded wooden city whose inhabitants lit tens or hundreds of thousands of small fires daily. That a fire happened in Nero’s reign isn’t some odd event that requires explanation; it would be far stranger if no fire had happened.
The key point here is the is a massive difference between ancient and modern history. Relative to the modern era, there are an incredibly small number of surviving sources (the Nero fiddling case that’s taken up this thread, you are comparing two sources who say how say it happened, against one who said it didn’t).
Given how few sources there are, it is amazing to me that there are some ancient events about which you can be fairly sure happened, have quite a bit of detail about what happened there, and even some idea of the motivations of the protagonists.
Even fake news tells us an awful lot about what actually happened. The “Obama is a Kenyan Muslim” trope tells us that between 2008 and 2016AD the US was (uniquely up to then) ruled by a president of East African ancestry, with a Muslim name, who faced massive opposition from certain parts of the society (possibly because of his race and ancestry). That is a pretty decent amount of “true” knowledge for a historian separated by millennia (to whom, maybe, the idea of racial prejudiced would be as alien as the Senatorial roman classes hatred of leader who would deign to play an instrument to modern sounds to us*)
All that changes in the modern era, you have an order of magnitude more sources ranging from contemporary histories to personal accounts of protagonists, as well as detailed records of numbers of people involved and causalities. The dubious details in a patriotic poem notwithstanding, we have a pretty good understanding of the facts of the battles of Lexington and Concorde, and can say with some certainty what occurred there.
Even with the predilection of the modern society to store stuff on electronic media that does not hold up particularly well, it would take an awful lot more than a common or garden societal collapse to change that for future historians.
this is part of the story that is often lost on modern ears. The criticism wasn’t just that he ignored the plight of Rome. The idea that he would play an instrument like a common entertainer would just as shocking to Romans
This is a matter of interpretation of facts, selection of which facts matter more and fighting over labels. A pastime that is I am sure going to continue to employ historians until they are picking over our fossilized remains.
Regardless of whether you view feudalism as a “construct” or not. The “feudal” rulers involved ruled (at least the later ones for which records exist), the wars were fought, and the peasants were generally not given a crap about until they turned up with pitchforks and started killing archbishops. How important were the wars? What did the peasants think of it all? That is all debatable.
