Short Stuff: Nero and His Fiddle

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with the Elizabeth Smart on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're Bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of over thought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to short stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry, sitting in for Dave. And that makes us an official short stuff. We have the quorum. Let's go. That's right. Do you recognize this article? No, who wrote it? Did I write? Did you write? Yeah, you wrote it. Did I really? Wow, I was like, this is pretty good. I took your name off of it because I was hoping you wouldn't remember this one. That's awesome. Yeah, this is not a bad article at all. That's great. Thank you for that because yeah, I like this. I was like, I like the cut of this writer's gym. Yeah, so this is from the old house stuff works.com days. And this is about the, and I was surprised we hadn't done a shorty on this. I was, I was like, surely we have the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. And when I looked it up, there you were, buddy. Yeah, I actually searched for an episode two 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 2000 years at this point. I feel like you have a little extra wind beneath your wings. No, this is yours. I've never felt more alive than I do right now. Yeah, we're talking obviously about the great fire of Rome for six days and seven nights. That's when Rome saw, and this was AD 64. I saw 70% of its city destroyed and only four of its 14 districts intact afterward. Well, and the Roman historian Tacitus wrote that out of the, about half the people of the million people, which would be by my count, 500,000, were rendered without a home because of this great fire. I knew that. So this being a massive tragedy, which 2000 years, I feel like we can, we can add a joker to you at this point. But it was such a huge tragedy and it was just so out of nowhere. Of course, people just have an innate need to blame, to find cause, assign blame. People 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. 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 it seems like. Yeah, he ordered it that he set the fire or some people, he had to rebuild Rome. I mean, he 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 1920s. Oh, really? No. It's like, that's very surprising. But they're going to say Art Deco. I was going to have first and I was like, not let me come up with something else. Right. That should have just said Art Deco would have gotten better laughed. 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. Cause this guy wanted to rebuild it more in his image. Yeah, exactly. So that rumor was going around. And through that rumor came the story that while the great fire was burning, Nero played his fiddle and just sort of watched it happen. Should we take a break right there? We should because I mean, what's coming up next is just die popping. That's right. More goodness from Josh Clark of 15 years ago right after this. [Music] When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're a for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm gonna have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. So Neuros, like, wait a minute, wait, 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 gotta accept it. 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 going to persecute them. And this actually became the first persecution of Christians in history. This was 64 CE. And I mean, Christianity was so new that there were still original apostles around who ended up being executed in this persecution. Yeah, Paul. Who was the other one? Paul and Peter. Paul was, Paul was beheaded. And Peter was crucified upside down. Yeah. So like torturous brutal executions are happening because Neuros 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 is because there was no fiddle at the time. Music historians basically agreed that the the vial class of instruments, which is like a violin, didn't come around to the 11th century. So about 1500 years later. So there literally were no fiddles at the time. No, but he did play something called the Sithara, which is like a laptop harp. The top is like for strumming the bottom is for plucking. You 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 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, Neuro actually was more like them. We think he was today, especially among the lower classes of Rome because he didn't behave nearly as superior toward them as other elites in Rome had indeed. Yeah, 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. immediately rushed back to the fire. Tacitus, that historian 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 sold like super cheap. - Yeah, he's 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 that's like his persecution of Christians did not work. And apparently, like we said, the fiddling thing was not, it's not possible that he fiddled. It is possible he was playing the Sathara, 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, right? There's a, 1940s historian from the University of North Carolina named Mary Francis Giles. - Go Tarheals. - Yeah. And yes, if you're a Tarheal, you can be proud of Mary Francis Giles 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, 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 your wasting time and energy, you're just fiddling around. Maybe that's what they originally meant. - I don't know why I never thought of that. I definitely hadn't either. Even after writing this, I didn't even look familiar. (laughing) - Yeah, she was like, you know, maybe she'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 as inadequate at the time, like what he was doing. Maybe the truth wasn't getting around that he was actually kind of helping. - Right. 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. - Yeah, for sure. But 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, 15 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 Nero had his mom killed. - Yeah. - And then of course the persecution of the Christians, hanging people by their feet and decapitating them, like, don't feel bad for this guy. - No, there was also Dom Nassio ad Bestius, which is seeking wild animals on people for executions. - Yeah. - No good. - So Nero essentially was on his heels after that great fire. Again, remember, the Senate didn't like him that much. I can't stress that enough. And so the army, which he had been on really good terms for a while was like, we're not going to work for you any longer. So there's a potential co-brewing. The Senate declared him 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 went. - Yeah, he said, I sense a co-brew. That was it. - I don't know if he talked like that. - You know, I'm watching the show right now, and it's, oh, Star City, have you heard of this? - No. - 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. And it's really good. I think he would like it, 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 and like with a Russian accent in my head, and it just kind of drives me nuts. - 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. I don't know why in 2026 they just didn't say, like, you know, do a Russian accent. - I know. It's appropriate. - It's a Russian, it's very strange. - I guess that's it for the short stuff, right? - That's right. - Okay, well everybody, short stuff is out. - Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts of my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. [MUSIC]