13 - Day of Wrath

A few days after the magnificent banquet thrown by Tegellinus, he arranged for the entire city to witness Caesar’s departure from Rome when he set out for his summer palace at Antium. The procession was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. The Roman masses, especially the poorest of the plebes, saw the grandeur and wealth of the emperor streaming out into the country.

No one could count all the senators, generals, patricians and matrons, carried in their litters as they followed the glittering chairs of Nero and Poppea. There were many freedmen with their overseers, chamberlains and staffs of servants. Who could count the bathmasters, hairdressers, perfume mixers, masseurs, wardrobers, cooks, waiters, butlers, and wine tasters? There were hordes of slave musicians with their instruments.

And of course, the dancers, actors, comedians, clowns and mimes, many famous throughout the empire, weren’t left behind either. And as these went along they danced, they tumbled, and they caricatured the great of Rome, including some of those actually in the procession. They sang, made obscene jests, and uttered their vulgarities against the aristocracy. Some even dared to hint at Caesar himself, alluding to one who’d sent his own mother and stepfather into the nether world. One imitated a woman floundering in the water, Caesar’s attempt to drown Agrippina. Another lifted an invisible drink to his lips and contorted himself in mimic agony, mocking the death potion that Claudius had finally been made to drink. The mob howled with glee.

Behind the mimes came the freaks and cripples, some more animal than human. They hopped on one leg or crawled on all fours. The more grotesque the creature, the more the mob strained to see them. From roofs and niches ragged spectators shouted encouragement, and spasms of merriment passed like waves across thousands of brutal faces. And after the freaks came the animal fighters, the men reserved for battle with wild beasts in the arenas, leading chained lions and tigers.

The procession lasted several hours. The front was already entering the Via Sacra when the end was at the Equiline hill. It poured through the Forum and into the Via Nova, past the Circus Maximus, winding about like a huge serpent. Nero wanted all of Rome, and particularly the poorest sections, to see him and hail him on that day. He kept on blowing kisses to the mob with his stumpy fingers, and the mob answered in a delirium of joy. The mob was so happy to see all these things, that it even applauded the long procession of asses that provided the milk for Poppea’s daily baths.

* * * * *

A few days later, on the night of July eighteenth, in the year sixty-four, according to our reckoning, fire broke out in the oil and flour depots among the houses of the thickly populated area around the Circus Maximus.

Now there was nothing remarkable about a fire in Rome. Indeed the city had a fire brigade, for the maze of streets was filled with flammable material. Whenever a fire broke out, police, soldiers, and even nearby citizens were called on to help in localizing it by razing the adjoining buildings.

But no one tried to stop the fire on this night. On the contrary, many witnesses later reported that they had seen certain individuals running through the alleys with lighted torches and throwing them into the houses. The fire spread with lightning speed, feeding on stores of oil, grain, and rope. A dense, choking cloud of smoke burst from the flaming houses, so that it became impossible to get to the center of the fire.

Soon other fires began to appear from various corners of the area. No one tried to stop the men running with the torches, for they acted like men who’d received instructions from the authorities. The billows of smoke became so heavy that it was impossible to even get to adjoining houses to demolish them and create a space around the conflagration. The population could only flee from the asphyxiating flames.

In an incredibly short period of time, the fire leapt across into the Circus Maximus. The immense structure was empty and there was plenty of flammable material there from wooden materials of all kinds to hay and straw for the animals, as well as multitudes of masks and costumes for the actors. Everything fed the fire, and the flames sprang higher and higher, so that within an hour or two the whole vast building was a roaring inferno, from which waves of intense heat spread out in all directions.

One wave rolled toward the lower slopes of the Aventine hill, where a number of granaries immediately flamed up, the fire leaping through alley after alley of flimsy and dilapidated houses of Rome’s poorest inhabitants. A second wave threw itself mightily on the Coelian hill, while a third wave flung itself up the slopes of the Palatine hill.

The fire did meet with some resistance there in the massive buildings erected by several generations of Caesars. There were temples that had been standing for centuries. But the resistance was only temporary. Continuously fed from below by inexhaustible stores of fuel, the fire grew in volume and intensity until even metal gates and railings melted. With a triumphant roar it hurled itself across to the military barracks and the stables of the German mounted auxiliaries, seizing building after building.

After their initial hesitation, the fire brigade and police did what they could to pull down row after row of buildings, but they could no more have stopped the advance of the flames than they could have held back the tide at Ostia. Millions of sparks and tongues of flame simply blew across the spaces they created. The buildings behind the firefighters would begin to burn and no sooner did they level these than the buildings on the farther side were already beginning to glow. With the heat and blinding smoke on all sides, the fire fighters lost their sense of direction. Exhausted, bewildered and choking, they simply fell at their posts, like insects sucked in by a candle flame.

For three days and nights the fire raged until the whole vast area of three precincts, among the most populated in Rome, had been converted into a fiery sea. The city of Rome was covered with a dense cloud of smoke by day and illumined by lurid flames at night. When the fire came to the banks of the Tiber, the flames suddenly stopped and changed direction. Instead of moving from the Palatine hill into the Forum, where it would again have encountered some resistance from a group of massive stone buildings, it mounted the sirocco wind that set in and turned toward the Esquiline hill, and like a beast licking its prey, began to lick the houses on the lower slope.

The flames had to work harder at the stone buildings on the hills and overcome them one by one, but in the valleys there was no such resistance and the fire could spread effortlessly and joyously, covering the dense labyrinths with a thick pall of flame and smoke. It seemed like the fire was a living thing with a conscious will of its own.

The valley that meandered between the irregular slopes of the Aventine and Coelian hills was a particularly choice tidbit. The twisted stairways, niches and narrow alleys set up a series of draughts. The foundations of the houses were rotten, the walls supported by countless wooden buttresses, dry as kindling. The cellars and lower floors were filled with moldering refuse, rags, and smashed furniture, to say nothing of the store of house fuel in each cellar.

Many of the inhabitants, having waited until the last moment, were caught in the fiery trap. Mothers snatched their little ones to their bosoms and tried to escape over the rooftops. But most of them never made it, for somewhere on the third or fourth floors the wooden stairways gave way under them. Some people jumped through windows to be dashed to death on the glowing street or buried under collapsing walls. The men snatched up as many of their most precious possessions, the tools of their trade or most valuable pieces of merchandise, and fought their way into the street.

The pavements were cluttered with tools and merchandise made of cloth and leather, as well as bundles of sandals and furniture. These not only burst into flame under the showers of sparks, they also prevented the people from escaping, so that those who did manage to get into the open found themselves running like insane things in a circle of flame from which there was no escape. The young, the old, the sick, some running, some crawling, some being carried, collapsed while fleeing. There was no way to know where the next sheet of fire would burst out. People on the upper slopes tried to run down into the valleys; those below tried to make their way to the upper slopes. Wherever they turned, the implacable beast confronted them. Fire just seemed to rain down from heaven and to burst upward from the earth.

Men and women went mad, either with screaming panic or with dumb paralysis, for the fire seemed to develop hypnotic power to draw people into its blazing heart. Some of them might have escaped, but they became victims of a self-destructive panic or of a horror that robbed them of the will to act. Some scurried about insanely with no plan at all. Others sat on their bundles of household goods with faces devoid of all intelligence or feeling, and waited for the destruction to reach them.

Some actually threw themselves into the flames. Women, tearing themselves out of the grips of the men who tried to hold them back, went racing back into houses to try to rescue their little ones. Some merchants and artisans, seeing their life’s accumulation of possessions or the means of their livelihood in the flames, ran into the roaring ovens to perish. Some stood around laughing hysterically, or crying out to the gods or against Caesar, before giving themselves to the fiery death.

Survivors were camping in the streets, for even in places where the fire hadn’t reached, no one dared to stay indoors. It seemed the gods had condemned Rome to a fiery destruction, and they had no way of knowing if their house would be next.

The untouched areas were literally jammed with people, not just freedmen, but with thousands of slaves who weren’t just homeless but without masters as well. Without a place to report to or someone to give them commands, they just wandered aimlessly through the jammed streets. Rumors circulated that Caesar had ordered that Rome be burned so that not one stone would be left on another.


There was no feeling of unity among the people of Rome, being made up of races, tribes, and nations, both civilized and barbaric, from every part of the empire. The slaves in particular, whose lives had been nothing but labor and punishment, had only hatred in their hearts for their masters, and many took this opportunity to help themselves. There was also a vast underworld criminal class, for whom the hour of chaos was the hour of harvest. Its members now swarmed out freely from their hiding places and a wave of criminality followed the wave of fire. The wretched victims who escaped with little bundles of food or household goods weren’t safe in the streets, and countless murders took place, often for just a handful of food. Even the houses of the rich were defenseless.

The “Pax Romana” that kept a world in order collapsed at the heart of the empire.


On the sixth day, the still unexhausted fire surrounded the entire Esquiline hill, and reached the palaces of the aristocracy, including one of Nero’s. Patricians lived on the summit of the Esquiline, among theaters, temples, and ancient monuments.

A frightened Tigellinus sent word to Caesar to return to Rome at once. He called out the Praetorian Guard and had them use battering rams against a ring of buildings to clear a space on the Esquiline. This succeeded in holding the fire back, but not before it destroyed many famous national monuments, including the Temple of the Vestal Virgins. Even the palace that held the masterpieces brought to Rome from Greece was destroyed. Many statues lay in fragments among the fallen and shattered columns. Precious vessels of Corinthian bronze, ancient Greek vases whose sides were adorned with bas-reliefs by the old masters, were now either shapeless masses of metal or heaps of shard. Among the blackened remnants of ivory stools and couches were scattered the ashes of rare manuscripts, silk carpets and hangings imported from Persia and India. And in the midst of this smoking chaos there hung the faint odor of Oriental unguents and perfumes, the immense collection of toilet articles that were the pride of Sabina Poppea.

The belly of Caesar’s house had been ripped open, like the belly of the pig on that festive night in the Agrippa gardens, and its contents scattered abroad.


Caesar finally returned to Rome to find that the fire had indeed dried up the swamp of poverty and ugliness at the foot of the Palatine, but it left the swamp on the farther side of the Esquiline, the Suburra, in all its foulness. At the end of the sixth day, when it seemed the flames had been brought under control, they suddenly broke out anew. This time the place of origin was in the gardens of Tigellinus, which bordered Caesar’s gardens on the side leading toward the Suburra.

Once again mysterious men were seen running through the streets of the slums bordering on the Circus Maximus, throwing blazing torches, soaked in oil and flax, into the houses of the poor. This time the conflagration wasn’t as sudden or as furious, but it was better prepared and more solidly founded. Step by step it proceeded down the slopes of the hill until it reached the cramped homes of the Suburra, where it found an immense accumulation of fuel. It spread swiftly, roaring from street to street, until it joined hands with the fire on the Via Sacra, where the great shops and magazines of the rich merchants were still blazing. Thus the Esquiline hill was surrounded on three sides by an immense sea of fire.

Standing on the summit of a watchtower that had remained unscathed in the central area of the Esquiline, Nero looked down on the capital of his empire transformed into a blazing pit. He could hear the desperate screaming from the trapped population of the Suburra. He could even make out, by the lurid sheen of the flames, tiny individual figures scampering about like poisoned mice. In any direction he looked, there was fire, only fire. Rome was roasting like a sacrificial beast on an altar.

Caesar put on an actor’s robe, covered his face with an actor’s mask, took up his harp and broke into ecstatic song for the benefit of those who were with him, improvising his “Destruction of Troy.”

“Your song is worthy of the model, O Caesar!” said Petronius, indicating the burning city with a wide gesture. “The world will forever remember both.”