August 12, 2026 • 12 mins
Did Nero play his fiddle while Rome burned during the Great Fire of 64 CE? Absolutely not. Find out how we know when Chuck and Josh bust a two thousand year-old myth.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey him, Welcome to short stuff Josh, Chuck, Jerry sitting
in for Dave. And this makes this an official short stuff.
We have the quorum. Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
That's right. Do you recognize this article?
Speaker 1 (00:16):
No? Who wrote it? Did I write? Did you write?
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:19):
You wrote it?
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Did I really?
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Huh wow? I was like, this is pretty good.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I took your name off of it because I was
hoping you wouldn't remember this one.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
That's awesome. Yeah, this is not a bad article at all.
That's great. Thank you for that, because uh yeah, I
like this. I was like, I like the cut of
this writer's Jim. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
So this is from the old house stuffworks dot com
days and this is about the And I was surprised
we hadn't done a shorty on this.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I was.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
I was like, surely we have the story of Nero
fiddling while Rome burned. And when I looked it up,
there you were, buddy.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
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
(01:19):
two thousand years.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
At this point, I feel like you have a little
extra wind beneath your wings.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Nowner, you know this is yours.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I've never felt more alive than i'd do right now.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
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 eight sixty four, I saw seventy percent
of its city destroyed and only four of its fourteen
districts intact afterward.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
And the Roman historian Tacitus wrote that out of the
about half the people of the million people, which would
be by my count, five hundred thousand were rendered without
a home because of this great fire.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
I knew that. So this being a massive tragedy which
two thousand years, I feel like we can add a
joker to you at this point, but sure that it
was such a huge tragedy and it was just so
out of nowhere. And of course people just have an
innate need to blame, to find cause, assign blame. People
(02:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Yeah, for sure, 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. In Nero,
the Emperor Nero was kind of the prime suspect.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
It seems like, yeah, 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 nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Oh really no. I was like, that's very surprising. But
they're gonna say art Deco.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
I was going to at first, and I was like, not,
let me come up with something else, right, I should
have just said art Deco would have gotten 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.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
So that rumor was going around, and through that rumor, okay,
came the story that while the Great Fire was burning,
Nero played his fiddle and just sort of watched it happen.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Should we take a break right there?
Speaker 1 (03:58):
We should, because I mean, what's coming up next is
just eyepopping.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
That's right, more goodness from Josh Clark of fifteen years
ago right after this.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
So Nero's like, wait a minute, 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 that. 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 looked around. He's like, these Christians are new, I'm
(04:49):
going to persecute them. And this actually became the first
persecution of Christians in history. This was sixty four CE,
and I mean Christianity was so new that there was
still original apostles around who ended up being executed in
this persecution.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah, Paul, who was the other one.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Paul and Peter. Paul was beheaded and Peter was crucified
upside down.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Yeah, 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,
it's because there was no fiddle at the time. Music
historians basically agreed that the vile class of instruments, which
(05:39):
is like a violin, didn't come around to the eleventh century,
so about fifteen hundred years later, So there literally were
no fiddles at the time.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
No, but he did play something called the scythara, yeah,
which is like a laptop 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
(06:09):
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 like than
we think he was today, especially among the lower classes
of Rome, because he didn't behave nearly as superior toward
(06:31):
them as other elites in Rome had and did.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
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
(06:57):
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. Yeah, he imported grain from
other cities close by that I guess he sold, but
(07:18):
sold like super cheap.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah, he still sold it, though I thought that was
a little hinky, Yeah for sure. 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,
(07:40):
like we said, the fiddling thing was not It's not
possible that he fiddled. It is possible he was playing
the sthara, 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 the I think they
were working hard to keep the blame on Nero.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
There's a nineteen forties historian from the University of North
Carolina named Mary Francis Giles Go tar heels, Yeah, and yes,
if you're a tar heel, you can be proud of
Mary Francis Gilds 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,
(08:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I don't know why I never thought of that.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
I definitely hadn't either. Even after writing this, it didn't
even look familiar.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
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 inadequate at the time, like what he
was doing. Maybe the truth wasn't getting around that he
was actually kind of helping, right.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
And that actually fits with the idea that this was
propaganda that the Senate was basically saying Nero's responses were
not nearly enough. He was just basically messing around.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
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, fifteen 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
(09:39):
Nero had his mom killed. Yeah, 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.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Now.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
There was also dumb Nascio Abestius, which is sicking wild
animals on people for executions.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, no good.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
So Nero essentially was on his heels after that great fire. Again, remember,
the Senate didn't like him, 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
(10:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Went, yeah, he said, I sense a cupbrew. That was it.
I don't know if you talk like that.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
You know, I'm watching the show right now and it's.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Oh, Star City, have you heard of this?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Star City is a show that is I can't remember
the name of the first show, but there was a
show about the Space Race, and there was an American
version for All Mankind is what that was called from
the American perspective, and Star City is the Space Race
from the Soviet perspective.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
And it's really good. I think you would like it.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
But they cast all British actors and are doing British
accents sort of like they used to just do for
all movies back in the day. And it's just I
got to wrap my head around every single episode when
all these Brits are talking. I try to hear it
in like with a Russian accent in my head, and
it just kind of drives me nuts.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Yeah. Yeah, I can get used to that kind of thing,
but I think it's also something that if you once
you focus in on it, you just can't get past.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
I don't know why in twenty twenty six they just
didn't say, like, you know, do a Russian accent.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
I know it's appropriations or Russians. It's very strange, but
I guess that's it for the short Stuff, right, That's right, Okay,
well everybody. Short Stuff is out.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Stuff you should know is a production of Iheartrating.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey him, Welcome to short stuff Josh, Chuck, Jerry sitting
in for Dave. And this makes this an official short stuff.
We have the quorum. Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
That's right. Do you recognize this article?
Speaker 1 (00:16):
No? Who wrote it? Did I write? Did you write?
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:19):
You wrote it?
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Did I really?
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Huh wow? I was like, this is pretty good.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I took your name off of it because I was
hoping you wouldn't remember this one.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
That's awesome. Yeah, this is not a bad article at all.
That's great. Thank you for that, because uh yeah, I
like this. I was like, I like the cut of
this writer's Jim. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
So this is from the old house stuffworks dot com
days and this is about the And I was surprised
we hadn't done a shorty on this.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I was.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
I was like, surely we have the story of Nero
fiddling while Rome burned. And when I looked it up,
there you were, buddy.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
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
(01:19):
two thousand years.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
At this point, I feel like you have a little
extra wind beneath your wings.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Nowner, you know this is yours.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I've never felt more alive than i'd do right now.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
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 eight sixty four, I saw seventy percent
of its city destroyed and only four of its fourteen
districts intact afterward.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
And the Roman historian Tacitus wrote that out of the
about half the people of the million people, which would
be by my count, five hundred thousand were rendered without
a home because of this great fire.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
I knew that. So this being a massive tragedy which
two thousand years, I feel like we can add a
joker to you at this point, but sure that it
was such a huge tragedy and it was just so
out of nowhere. And of course people just have an
innate need to blame, to find cause, assign blame. People
(02:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Yeah, for sure, 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. In Nero,
the Emperor Nero was kind of the prime suspect.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
It seems like, yeah, 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 nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Oh really no. I was like, that's very surprising. But
they're gonna say art Deco.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
I was going to at first, and I was like, not,
let me come up with something else, right, I should
have just said art Deco would have gotten 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.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
So that rumor was going around, and through that rumor, okay,
came the story that while the Great Fire was burning,
Nero played his fiddle and just sort of watched it happen.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Should we take a break right there?
Speaker 1 (03:58):
We should, because I mean, what's coming up next is
just eyepopping.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
That's right, more goodness from Josh Clark of fifteen years
ago right after this.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
So Nero's like, wait a minute, 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 that. 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 looked around. He's like, these Christians are new, I'm
(04:49):
going to persecute them. And this actually became the first
persecution of Christians in history. This was sixty four CE,
and I mean Christianity was so new that there was
still original apostles around who ended up being executed in
this persecution.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah, Paul, who was the other one.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Paul and Peter. Paul was beheaded and Peter was crucified
upside down.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Yeah, 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,
it's because there was no fiddle at the time. Music
historians basically agreed that the vile class of instruments, which
(05:39):
is like a violin, didn't come around to the eleventh century,
so about fifteen hundred years later, So there literally were
no fiddles at the time.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
No, but he did play something called the scythara, yeah,
which is like a laptop 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
(06:09):
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 like than
we think he was today, especially among the lower classes
of Rome, because he didn't behave nearly as superior toward
(06:31):
them as other elites in Rome had and did.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
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
(06:57):
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. Yeah, he imported grain from
other cities close by that I guess he sold, but
(07:18):
sold like super cheap.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah, he still sold it, though I thought that was
a little hinky, Yeah for sure. 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,
(07:40):
like we said, the fiddling thing was not It's not
possible that he fiddled. It is possible he was playing
the sthara, 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 the I think they
were working hard to keep the blame on Nero.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
There's a nineteen forties historian from the University of North
Carolina named Mary Francis Giles Go tar heels, Yeah, and yes,
if you're a tar heel, you can be proud of
Mary Francis Gilds 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,
(08:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I don't know why I never thought of that.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
I definitely hadn't either. Even after writing this, it didn't
even look familiar.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
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 inadequate at the time, like what he
was doing. Maybe the truth wasn't getting around that he
was actually kind of helping, right.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
And that actually fits with the idea that this was
propaganda that the Senate was basically saying Nero's responses were
not nearly enough. He was just basically messing around.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
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, fifteen 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
(09:39):
Nero had his mom killed. Yeah, 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.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Now.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
There was also dumb Nascio Abestius, which is sicking wild
animals on people for executions.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, no good.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
So Nero essentially was on his heels after that great fire. Again, remember,
the Senate didn't like him, 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
(10:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Went, yeah, he said, I sense a cupbrew. That was it.
I don't know if you talk like that.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
You know, I'm watching the show right now and it's.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Oh, Star City, have you heard of this?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Star City is a show that is I can't remember
the name of the first show, but there was a
show about the Space Race, and there was an American
version for All Mankind is what that was called from
the American perspective, and Star City is the Space Race
from the Soviet perspective.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
And it's really good. I think you would like it.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
But they cast all British actors and are doing British
accents sort of like they used to just do for
all movies back in the day. And it's just I
got to wrap my head around every single episode when
all these Brits are talking. I try to hear it
in like with a Russian accent in my head, and
it just kind of drives me nuts.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Yeah. Yeah, I can get used to that kind of thing,
but I think it's also something that if you once
you focus in on it, you just can't get past.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
I don't know why in twenty twenty six they just
didn't say, like, you know, do a Russian accent.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
I know it's appropriations or Russians. It's very strange, but
I guess that's it for the short Stuff, right, That's right, Okay,
well everybody. Short Stuff is out.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Stuff you should know is a production of Iheartrating.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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