Short Stuff: Nero and His Fiddle

**Josh Clark** (0:04)
Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry, sitting in for Dave, and that makes this an official short stuff. We have the quorum, let's go.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:13)
That's right. Do you recognize this article?

**Josh Clark** (0:16)
No. Who wrote it? Did I write? Did you write?

**Chuck Bryant** (0:19)
Yeah, you wrote it.

**Josh Clark** (0:20)
Did I really?

**Chuck Bryant** (0:21)
Uh-huh.

**Josh Clark** (0:21)
Wow, I was like, this is pretty good.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:24)
I took your name off of it, because I was hoping you wouldn't remember this one.

**Josh Clark** (0:28)
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 jib.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:38)
Yeah. So this is from the old housestuffworks.com days, and this is about the, and I was surprised we hadn't done a shorty on this. I was like, surely we have. The story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. And when I looked it up, there you were, buddy.

**Josh Clark** (0:53)
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 2,000 years at this point.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:21)
I feel like you have a little extra wind beneath your wings now that you know this is yours.

**Josh Clark** (1:25)
I've never felt more alive than I do right now.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:28)
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 AD 64, saw 70% of its city destroyed, and only four of its 14 districts intact afterward.

**Josh Clark** (1:43)
Wow.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:44)
And the Roman historian Tacitus wrote that out of the, about half the people, of the million people, which would be, by my count, 500,000, were rendered without a home because of this great fire.

**Josh Clark** (1:58)
I knew that.
So this being a massive tragedy, which 2,000 years, I feel like we can add a joke or two at this point, but it was such a huge tragedy, and it was just so out of nowhere, that of course people just have an innate need to blame, to find cause, assign blame. People loved 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.

**Chuck Bryant** (2:38)
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.

**Josh Clark** (2:58)
Yeah, that 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 1920s.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:18)
Oh, really?

**Josh Clark** (3:19)
No.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:20)
I was like, that's very surprising. I thought you were going to say Art Deco.

**Josh Clark** (3:24)
I was going to at first and I was like, no, let me come up with something else. Right. I should have just said Art Deco, it would have gotten a 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.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:43)
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 watched it happen.
Should we take a break right there?

**Josh Clark** (3:58)
We should, because what's coming up next is just eye popping.

**Chuck Bryant** (4:02)
That's right. More goodness from Josh Clark of 15 years ago, right after this.

**Josh Clark** (4:27)
So, Nero's like, wait a minute, wait, wait. I wasn't fiddling. We'll find out why that's definitive in a second.