AT that time, besides an immense number of dwellings, the houses of leaders of old were burned, still adorned with trophies of victory, and the temples of the gods vowed and dedicated by the kings and later in the Punic and Gallic wars,* and whatever else interesting and noteworthy had survived from antiquity. Viewing the conflagration from the tower of Maecenas* and exulting, as he said, in “the beauty of the flames” he sang the whole of the “Sack of Ilium”* in his regular stage costume.* Furthermore, to gain from this calamity too all the spoil and booty possible, while promising the removal of the debris and dead bodies free of cost he allowed no one to approach the ruins of his own property; and from the contributions which he not only received, but even demanded, he nearly bankrupted the provinces and exhausted the resources of individuals.
* The Punic Wars were a series of three wars between Rome and Carthage between 264 BC and 146 BC. The Gallic Wars were Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul in 58 BC to 50 BC.
* The Gardens of Maecenas, constructed by Gaius Maecenas (?40 BC to 8 BC), was an estate on the Esquiline Hill in the Roman suburbs which included the city’s first heated swimming pool, a luxurious villa and a tall tower. It was from the safety of this tower that the fascinated Nero watched the conflagration unfold.
* Homer, of course, wrote the most famous tale of the Fall of Troy, the Iliad, and there was another epic of similar antiquity, the seventh-century BC Iliupersis, which is now almost wholly lost. But satirist Juvenal (fl. 100-127) indicates that the song was Nero’s own, and regarded it one of the Emperor’s greatest crimes. Even Orestes, he said, who murdered his own mother Clytemnestra in revenge for the murder of his father, even Orestes himself never murdered his own sister, never poisoned his own family “and never wrote an Epic upon Troy!” See Satire 8. Emperor Vitellius (who ruled from 16 April to 22 December 69, the last in the Year of the Four Emperors after Nero, Galba and Otho) had the musicians play “something from the Master’s Book”, Nero’s collected works, in tribute to his predecessor, and Suetonius tells us that he jumped for joy when the music started.
* For Tacitus this rumour — for he was not prepared to commit himself further — had undone Nero’s attempts to win back favour by lavish disbursement of aid. “Popular as these measures were, they aroused no gratitude; for a rumour had got abroad that at the moment when the city was in flames Nero had mounted upon a stage in his own house, and by way of likening modern calamities to ancient, had sung the tale of the sack of Troy. [...] To put an end therefore to this rumour, he shifted the charge on to others, and inflicted the most cruel tortures upon a body of men detested for their abominations, and popularly known by the name of Christians.”