On the night of 18 July 64 AD, a fire broke out and swept across Rome, ravaging the city for over six days. It would become known as the Great Fire of Rome and legend states the decadent and unpopular emperor Nero ‘fiddled’ whilst his city burned before him. Being accused of doing nothing is bad enough but what if Nero was actually the architect of those fires? Is there any truth in this historical theory?
The traditional view has Nero laying the blame for the fire at the door of the Christians, beginning nearly three centuries of Roman persecution against them. No primary sources about the fire survive, instead, we rely on the secondary accounts by Roman historians Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio. Tacitus, our main ancient source on the subject, documented his account around sixty years after the event itself as did Suetonius whilst Cassius Dio wrote over a hundred years later. Their accounts differ in a variety of ways, leaving the truth of the fire up for historical debate.
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