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Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
Tags: #History, #Ancient, #Rome
The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City (15 page)
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Fighting the raging, wind-driven blaze with buckets of water soon proved next to useless. All Prefect Nymphidius could do was order preventative measures such as the removal of inflammable materials from the path of the fire. Another measure, employed when desperation made it necessary, would entail knocking down buildings to create a fire break. But to maneuver the battering rams used in building demolition into position would take time. The speed of the windblown flames was threatening to defeat that measure before it could be attempted.
With the vigiles fully engaged and losing the battle, the ordinary people of Rome were left to fend for themselves. Cassius Dio described just how quickly the conflagration moved: “Here, men while assisting their neighbors, would learn that their own premises were on fire. There, others, before word reached them that their own houses had caught fire, would be told that they were destroyed.”
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Tacitus, too, wrote of how the fire seemed to come from several directions at once to confront the residents: “Often, while they looked behind them, they were intercepted by flames on their side or in their face.”
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Everywhere, collapsing masonry blocked the narrow streets.
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Tacitus, too, wrote of how the fire seemed to come from several directions at once to confront the residents: “Often, while they looked behind them, they were intercepted by flames on their side or in their face.”
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Everywhere, collapsing masonry blocked the narrow streets.
Modern-day research on the behavior of wildfires has shown that no matter what the direction of the prevailing wind during a fire, embers will be carried in all directions and will ignite new blazes seemingly all around the source of the fire, almost as if someone were deliberately setting these new blazes. It is no wonder that many Romans came to believe that arsonists were at work, spreading the fire behind the backs of those trying to combat it.
The streets of the threatened areas were filled with people. “There was shouting and wailing without end,” said Dio, “of children, women, men, and the aged, all together, so that no one could see anything or understand what was said because of the smoke and the shouting.” While panic sent many running blindly, shock froze others in their tracks; some residents, said Dio, were seen “standing, speechless, as if they were dumb” at the sight of the conflagration devouring one narrow winding, irregular street after another.
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Most residents were able to escape with their lives, but very little else. “They crowded the streets or flung themselves down in the fields” outside the city, said Tacitus.
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Others who rushed back into the burning areas in search of missing loved ones never returned. Sinister incidents were to follow. Looting became rife. Meanwhile, some people were seen hurling burning brands into untouched buildings. Were they pyromaniacs? Perhaps.
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Others who rushed back into the burning areas in search of missing loved ones never returned. Sinister incidents were to follow. Looting became rife. Meanwhile, some people were seen hurling burning brands into untouched buildings. Were they pyromaniacs? Perhaps.
Reports would also emerge that when individuals attempted to fight the flames, they were warned away by unidentified men who claimed that they were under orders to prevent the fire from being extinguished. When challenged, these mystery men claimed, “There is one who gives us authority,” although they would not name that person. These same people, too, were seen to plunder abandoned shops and houses.
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As dawn broke over the burning city and a pall of smoke hung over the southern regions, Flavius Sabinus, city prefect of Rome, took charge of the firefighting efforts, as responsibility for the security of the city transferred from the exhausted prefect of the vigiles at the start of the first daylight hour. The equally exhausted vigiles withdrew to find some place to sleep, handing the task of battling the conflagration over to three thousand men of the City Cohorts—just two of the City Guard cohorts were in the city—and imperial and state slaves such as the men of the water gangs. Prefect Sabinus’ own house on the Quirinal Hill seemed safe from the fire. As for his family, it is likely that he had sent them, along with many of his household staff, to one of his country estates at the start of the summer.
Sabinus was a mature, pragmatic man in his late fifties or early sixties and not prone to panic. Once, when leading the 14th Gemina Legion during the invasion of Britain in AD 43, his unit and his younger brother Vespasian’s 2nd Augusta Legion had been trapped by British tribes beside the River Medway. Sabinus, his brother, and their troops had endured a desperate night, fending off the Britons until another legion had fought its way across the river the next day to relieve them. Sabinus had not panicked then, and he would not panic now. He had served one term as city prefect early in Nero’s reign, as the nominee of Seneca and Burrus, only accepting the post again in AD 61 after his successor as city prefect, Pedius Secundus, had been murdered by one of his own slaves. Future emperors would also entrust Sabinus with the post of city prefect, such was the respect he garnered for the way he executed his duties.
The task now faced by the city prefect was formidable. The fire was burning fiercely in the low-lying areas of several southern precincts, and it was advancing up the Aventine Hill, consuming the homes of the rich and the famous and the several temples that adorned the hill. But the wind that had driven the fire into the southern suburbs with such speed and ferocity had surprised everyone and had turned. Now it was blowing strongly from the south, fanning the glowing cauldron that was the Circus Maximus and sending flames from it toward the residences lining the southern slopes of the Palatine and Caelian hills. At the same time, the flames in Regio I were being driven north across the flat into Regio’s II and V.
One of the first things that the prefect did was dictate a dispatch to the emperor at Antium to tell him of the disaster. Several grim-faced riders from the Praetorian Cavalry were soon galloping south along the Appian Way, bound for Antium. One of the cavalrymen bore a leather dispatch case over his shoulder containing the prefect’s message. All along their route, foot traffic and riders alike would move aside for the Praetorians.
Nero awoke early on the morning of July 20 in good spirits. He had won the singing contest the night before, and he intended to compete again on the Antium stage over the next day or two before returning to Rome in time for the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris’ three days of chariot racing at the end of the month. By the middle of the day, the message arrived from Rome telling him of the fire. His first reaction was to ignore it. Singing came first. He would let the city prefect deal with the fire; that was his job.
Later in the day, a second message arrived; the fire was continuing to spread, it said. The flames were climbing the Palatine, Caelian, and Aventine hills and were pushing around the bases of the Caelian and the Palatine and driving north toward the Esquiline Hill, threatening the heart of Rome. This latest message won Nero’s attention. The course of the fire was taking it both toward the old palaces on the Palatine and toward his latest construction, the
Domus transitoria
, a long, colonnaded building that ran from the Palatine all the way across the city to the Gardens of Maecenas, which occupied the Esquiline Hill.
Domus transitoria
, a long, colonnaded building that ran from the Palatine all the way across the city to the Gardens of Maecenas, which occupied the Esquiline Hill.
Sending a message back to Rome with instructions that all steps must be taken to protect his property, Nero issued orders for a return to the capital the first thing next day.
Up the Tiber came the emperor, with his flotilla of small boats. Smoke from the fire would have been visible for many miles before the party reached the city, while the sky over Rome would have been a dirty brown, with the sun an orange orb hanging in the firmament.
It was July 21, the third day of the fire, which was burning more fiercely than ever. Rome was in the grip of a firestorm, the likes of which would not be experienced in Europe again until the aerial bombing campaigns of the Second World War. It is likely that Nero landed downstream of the city, for the flames in the dock area of Regio XIII would have negated passage. There were other landing places further upstream, beside the Campus Martius, but the fire along the river’s east bank would have made the river impassible. A shocked Nero would have traveled the last part of the journey by litter. Met outside the city by City Prefect Sabinus, he received a sober briefing: The city was at the mercy of the fire, which had “outstripped all preventative measures.”
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Coming up the Via Prenestina, with the city burning away to their left, Nero and his party passed the intact barracks and stables complex of the Praetorian Cavalry, which sat at the foot of the eastern slope of the Esquiline Hill, outside and below the Servian Walls. In the stables, thousands of horses, smelling the smoke in the air, would have been whinnying with fear as their grooms attempted to calm them. The fields spreading east from the barracks, normally used by the cavalry for their training exercises, were filled with distraught refugees, who watched the imperial party pass, some wailing at the emperor in their distress, others gawking hollow-eyed at the long train of litters, soldiers, and servants tramping by.
Nero passed through the Esquiline Gate, where Praetorian troops stood uselessly on guard, then turned right and entered the Gardens of Maecenas. Up the paths and steps that, in better times, made these gardens reputedly the most attractive perambulation in all of Rome, Nero and his party climbed the Esquiline Hill. The gardens that covered this hill had been created late in the first century BC by Gaius Maecenas, who along with Agrippa had been the most senior of the emperor Augustus’ lieutenants. Eccentric in dress and habits, Maecenas had been the patron of the poets Virgil and Horace and had himself some aspirations as a poet. Maecenas had a “passion for self-display,” in the opinion of Seneca, a passion exemplified by his magnificent gardens.
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“Maecenas’ greatest claim to glory is regarded as having been his clemency,” said Seneca. “He spared the sword, refrained from bloodshed, and showed his power only in his defiance of convention.”
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But it was his gardens for which most Romans would continue to remember him. On his death, his mansion and the gardens on the Esquiline had been willed to Augustus, and they had been imperial property ever since. Maecenas’ mansion, on the southwestern side of the hill, had been used by Tiberius for a time prior to his becoming emperor. When Philo Judaeus, Jewish envoy from Alexandria, had met with the emperor Caligula one summer during his reign, three decades before this, it had been in the Gardens of Maecenas. Philo had noted that Caligula spent the previous three nights in the gardens, apparently staying in Maecenas’ old mansion. Caligula had led the Jewish party on a tour of deserted buildings in the complex.
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But it was his gardens for which most Romans would continue to remember him. On his death, his mansion and the gardens on the Esquiline had been willed to Augustus, and they had been imperial property ever since. Maecenas’ mansion, on the southwestern side of the hill, had been used by Tiberius for a time prior to his becoming emperor. When Philo Judaeus, Jewish envoy from Alexandria, had met with the emperor Caligula one summer during his reign, three decades before this, it had been in the Gardens of Maecenas. Philo had noted that Caligula spent the previous three nights in the gardens, apparently staying in Maecenas’ old mansion. Caligula had led the Jewish party on a tour of deserted buildings in the complex.
When Nero now topped the Esquiline Hill and looked down over the gardens spreading below, he could see that all the buildings fringing the gardens had been rapidly and deliberately demolished by the city and Praetorian cohorts and imperial slaves over the past twenty-four hours, to create a fire break and prevent the fire from spreading up the hill. Nero ascended a tower on the hilltop. The Tower of Maecenas was not a tall, narrow structure as might be imagined, but a solid, squat building of three stories. From the top, accompanied by senior members of his retinue, Nero gazed silently out over his burning capital.
BOOK: The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City
10.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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