CHAPTER L A CITY IN FLAMES

‘Hoc incendium e turri Mæcenatiana prospectans, lætusque flammæ, ut aiebat, pulchritudine, ἅλωσιν Ilii in illo suo scenico habitu decantavit.’—Suet. Nero, 38.

Ἔκραζον ὁρῶντες τὸν καπὸν τῆς πυρώσεως αὐτῆς—Apoc. xviii. 9.

Nero set out for Antium on July 17. Two days afterwards Rome was in a sea of surging flame. Men noticed that it was the anniversary of the day on which, four and a half centuries earlier, the city had been burnt by the Gauls. The fire had burst forth in the neighbourhood of the Circus Maximus. The shops and storehouses which surrounded that huge structure were full of combustible materials, including the machinery and properties used in the public spectacles. Here the flames seized a secure hold, and, raging about the Cœlian, rolled toward the eastern front of the Palatine. Checked by the steep sides of the hill and its cyclopean architecture, the fire swept down the valleys on either side—to the right, along the Via Nova; to the left, along the Triumphal Way. It ravaged the Velabrum and the Forum; it consumed the temple and altar reared to Hercules by the Arcadian Evander, the palace of Numa, and the circular Temple of Vesta, which enshrined the ever-burning hearth and Penates of the Roman people. Sweeping into the Carinæ, which was crowded by consular palaces, it devoured those stately structures, and the many trophies of ancient victories with which they were enriched. On the Aventine it destroyed the temple which Servius Tullius had erected to the Moon, and in it the priceless relics of Greek art which L. Mummius had brought from Corinth. Rolling back to the Palatine with more victorious violence, it reduced to a blackened ruin the venerable temple which Romulus had vowed to Jupiter Stator. Then, licking up everything which lay in its path, it rioted with voluptuous fury in the more densely crowded regions of the city, raging and crackling among the old, tortuous purlieus and crazy habitations of the Subura. With its hot breath it purged the slums and rookeries, foul with a pauper population of Oriental immigrants, who were massed round the ill-famed shrines of Isis and Serapis. When it had acquired irresistible volume in these lower regions, it again rushed up the hills as with the rage of a demon, to sweep down once more in tumultuous billows over the helpless levels. For six days and seven nights it maintained its horrible and splendid triumph—now bounding from street to street with prodigious rapidity, now seeming to linger luxuriously in some crowded district, flinging up to heaven great sheets of flame, and turning the nightly sky into a vault of suffocating crimson.

No words can paint the horror of a scene which transformed into a Gehenna of destruction a city enriched with the magnificence of nearly eight centuries of victory. There were districts in which the heat was so intense that they were unapproachable, and the rarefaction of the atmosphere, joined to a strong breeze which seemed in league with the destroying element, filled the air with a roar as of ten thousand wild beasts. Here stores of resinous material made the consuming flames white with intensity; and there the burning and smouldering débris, which for a time half choked the conflagration, poured forth black volumes of smoke, which hid its progress under a pall of midnight. Here an insula, many stories high, collapsed with a crash which was heard for miles; and there whole streets, falling simultaneously on both sides, caused continuous bursts of sound like the long roll of incessant thunder.

But the physical horrors of the scene, as it was witnessed by a million or more spectators who thronged from every town of Latium and Campania to behold it, were nothing compared with the prodigies of human agony and the multiform images of death and crime. At first there had been wild efforts on the part of many to save their homes. But their efforts were rendered futile by many causes. The conflagration seemed to break forth, not in one spot, but from various quarters, which rolled together their concurrent seas of flame. No means were adequate to resist a foe which seemed to be ubiquitous. The scorching heat drove back the boldest firemen. The buckets, from which the police derived their nickname of sparteoli, were ludicrously inadequate for an emergency so tremendous. The supplies of water were not available in the wild confusion. It was rumoured on every side that slaves and agents of the imperial household were seen with tow and torches in their hands, which they flung into the houses of the nobles; and, if any attempted to check them, they menacingly declared that they had authority for their doings. If a senator tried to organise his slaves to quench the flames or impede their advance, he was bidden to take care what he was about. Burglary and rapine were let loose. The criminal population of the city seized the opportunity to plunder every burning palace into which they could force their way. Nor was it long before self-preservation became the one absorbing passion of the multitude, surprised by the ever-swelling dimensions of the catastrophe. Here a group of women, as they stood shrieking and tearing their hair, unwilling to leave their homes or unable to save their little ones, were trampled down under the hurrying rush of some group of fugitives. Here the father of a family, hindered in his flight by the helplessness of age or childhood, found himself swept along by reckless pillagers, and with unutterable anguish was compelled to abandon some little child or decrepit grandsire who had been flung down on the pavement with bruised or broken limbs. As the inhabitants of regions which the fire had freshly invaded rushed to escape, they plunged into winding alleys overarched by meeting flames, or their flight was impeded by smouldering ruins, or they were overwhelmed by the thunderous fall of some huge building, many, losing their heads altogether, stood stupefied with despair, and the smoke stifled them, or the fire scorched them, until the streets were filled with charred corpses. Others in raging defiance, seeing themselves reduced to penury by the loss of all they possessed, or with hearts lacerated by the death of their beloved, leapt madly into the flames. Rome during all that week was a pandemonium of horror, in which, amid shrieks and yells and every sound of ruin, were witnessed the wrath of the elements, the passions of devils, and tragedies of despair, and anguish which no heart can conceive, no tongue describe.

At the first news that Rome was in flames, and that they were already approaching his Domus Transitoria, Nero hurried back from Antium. Now indeed he had a sensation to his heart’s content. At first he was shocked by the magnitude of a catastrophe more overwhelming than had ever before happened to Rome or any other city. He mounted the tower of Mæcenas, and gazed for hours upon the scene—thrilling with excitement which was not without its delicious elements. Safe himself, he was looking down on a storm of tempestuousT14 agony, which he could regard in the light of a spectacle. He was accustomed to gaze unmoved on human pangs in the bloody realism of the amphitheatre, and to see slave after slave flung to the lions, with their arms bound in chains concealed with flowers. But what scene of the circus, when the gilded chariots were reduced to a crashing wreck of collisions, in which the horses kicked one another and their charioteers to death—what gladiatorial massacre, filling the air with the reek of blood, was for a moment comparable to the sight of Rome in flames? The sublime horror of the moment stimulated in him all the genius of melodrama and artificial epic. Surrounded by his parasites, he compared Rome, now to a virgin whom the tigers of flame devoured, now to a gladiator wrestling with troops of lions in the arena. He was lost in admiration of the beauty of the fire. Now he called it a splendid rose, with petals of crimson; now a diadem of flaming and radiating gold; now again an enormous hydra with smoky pinions and tongue of flickering gleam. He wrote many a quaint and fantastic phrase in the notebooks which were crowded with his much-lined commonplaces of poetic imagery! Here were the materials for many future poems before him. He could, for instance, write an Ode on Tartarus—its horrible spaces of silent anguish, its black vapours, its brazen gates, and iron pillars, its ghosts and demons gibbering and shrieking in the shade, its torments and its Pyriphlegethon with cataracts of blood and fire. He felt sure that after these incitements of emotion and infusions of realism, his poem on the Burning of Troy would be immortal, since it could not fail to catch from such a scene a tinge of voluptuous sublimity!

And as he gazed for hours together of the day and of the night, he endeavoured to realise the aspect of the spectacle, and did not allow himself to be disturbed by the multitudinous agonies which it implied. He did, indeed, accept some suggestions of Seneca, who, abandoning his seclusion from generous impulse, hurried to him as soon as it became evident that the fire meant wide-spread destitution. Nero felt a spasm of terror when the philosopher expressed a doubt whether sullen misery might not flash up into rage, and cause a formidable rebellion. For want of houses, the people were huddling into tombs and catacombs. Nero, therefore, took the hint that he should offer the Campus Martius and the monuments of Agrippa—his porticoes, baths, gardens, and the Temple of Neptune—as a refuge for the shivering throngs whom the flames had driven from their homes. But, this done, he flattered himself that the public disaster would redound to his popularity; and as it never occurred to him that any one would suspect his complicity, he gave himself up once more to æsthetic enjoyment. He ordered masses of roses to be strewn around him on the summit of the tower; he twanged his harp as he thought of refrains and songs which he intended to write on the subject; and he meant that Troy should stand as a transparent symbol of Rome. When he was for a time tired of watching, he induced his minions to ask him for an opportunity of hearing once more his celestial voice; and putting on his tragic syrmos, appeared on a private stage, harp in hand, and affectedly chanted to them his insipid strophes and emasculate conceits.

But even these first-rate sensations became in time monotonous. He had seen as much as he wanted, and to his great delight the conflagration had destroyed the buildings near the Palace on which he had cast covetous eyes. When after a pause the fire, which had been checked on the seventh night, broke out a second time from the Æmilian estate of Tigellinus, and raged fitfully for three days more, he was tired of it. There was no object in suffering the whole of Rome to be destroyed. He assented to a proposition that masses of buildings should be pulled down on the Esquiline, in order that the progress of the flames might be checked. The expedient was successful. There was now time to note the extent of the devastation. Rome was divided into fourteen districts. Three of these were reduced to utter wreck and destruction. Seven more were in a condition of desperate ruin; four alone remained untouched. The loss of antiquities, of venerable buildings rich in historic associations, of precious manuscripts, of priceless relics of the past, above all, of works of art,

‘the hand of famed artificers

In cedar, marble, ivory, or gold,’

was such as none could estimate. The rumour arose that Nero was about to rebuild the city with unparalleled magnificence and call it Neronia; but whatever gain might accrue to another generation from endless straight lines, ‘vast monumental perspectives, and sumptuosities of parade,’ those who regarded cities as something more than official masses of architectural monotony were wounded to the heart. No new Rome could ever make up to them for the loss of the old beloved city which sat dreaming on her seven hills among the glorious memories of the past.93

The name of Nero was on every lip, and it was blended with curses not loud but deep. As he wandered over the blackened areas, his lictors accompanying him, his head crowned with garlands and his thoughts full of magnificent schemes of reconstruction, he became aware that the blank walls of the ruins were already scribbled over with infamies with which his name was connected, and that scowling brows were bent upon him and looks of hatred mingled with terror. His proclamation that none were to approach the ruins of their own houses, since he would charge himself with the burial of the human remains and the clearance of the débris, was interpreted into a design to enrich himself with any objects of value, or uninjured works of art, which might be disencumberedT15 from the general destruction. He found it necessary to take measures to prevent the indignation of the multitude from finding vent in furious outbreak. Inviting aid from the senators, he started a sort of patriotic fund, which did not differ greatly from a forced loan. He threw open his gardens to the desolate paupers, who had no distant villas such as those in which the rich took refuge; he ordered the erection of multitudes of temporary huts; he decreed that the necessaries of subsistence should be imported with all haste from Ostia and the neighbouring municipalities, and he reduced the fixed price of corn to the lowest possible limit. Under ordinary circumstances such measures would have been welcomed with gratitude, as they were some years later in the reign of Titus. As it was, they were insufficient to remove the odium with which rumour surrounded his name. The public voice accused him of being the author of a misery which it was beyond his power to alleviate. It was all very well for him to lavish a liberality which cost him nothing, and came from national resources; but while he was still steeped to the lips in superhuman luxury, who could restore to that nation of ruined men their lost children and relatives, their lost homes and cherished possessions, their lost materials and opportunities for gaining an honourable livelihood? The story that he had harped and sung and poetised while the city was crashing into ruins had first been whispered as a secret, but was now familiar to every lip; and it filled all hearts with execration and contempt. The ruthless egotism of the Emperor seemed likely to cost him dear.

All that was left of religious feeling in the old Paganism was overwhelmed with a sense that the gods were wroth. There rose a clamour that expiations and purifications were necessary. But litanies, and vigils, and sacred banquets were in vain, and Rome presented the piteous scene of a starving and homeless populace who regarded the past with horror and the future with despair, having no hope, and without God in the world.