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Short Stuff: Nero and His Fiddle · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey him, Welcome to short stuff Josh, Chuck, Jerry sitting
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: in for Dave. And this makes this an official short stuff.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: We have the quorum. Let's go.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: That's right. Do you recognize this article?
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: No? Who wrote it? Did I write? Did you write?
• 0:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: You wrote it?
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Did I really?
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Uh?
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Huh wow? I was like, this is pretty good.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: I took your name off of it because I was
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: hoping you wouldn't remember this one.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: That's awesome. Yeah, this is not a bad article at all.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: That's great. Thank you for that, because uh yeah, I
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: like this. I was like, I like the cut of
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: this writer's Jim. Yeah.
• 0:38
  Speaker 3: So this is from the old house stuffworks dot com
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: days and this is about the And I was surprised
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: we hadn't done a shorty on this.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: I was.
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: I was like, surely we have the story of Nero
• 0:47
  Speaker 3: fiddling while Rome burned. And when I looked it up,
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: there you were, buddy.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I actually searched for an episode too, because it
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: just sounds like we've definitely talked about it at some point,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: but it just had to have been a part of
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: a larger episode. So let's dig in because I feel
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: like everybody, thanks to my article, has heard that Nero
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: fiddled while Rome burned, and it turns out that that
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: is probably a piece of ancient propaganda that survived almost
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: two thousand years.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: At this point, I feel like you have a little
• 1:22
  Speaker 3: extra wind beneath your wings.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: Nowner, you know this is yours.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: I've never felt more alive than i'd do right now.
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we're talking obviously about the Great Fire of Rome.
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: For six days and seven nights, that's when Rome saw
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  Speaker 3: and this is eight sixty four, I saw seventy percent
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  Speaker 3: of its city destroyed and only four of its fourteen
• 1:41
  Speaker 3: districts intact afterward.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: And the Roman historian Tacitus wrote that out of the
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  Speaker 3: about half the people of the million people, which would
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: be by my count, five hundred thousand were rendered without
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: a home because of this great fire.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: I knew that. So this being a massive tragedy which
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: two thousand years, I feel like we can add a
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  Speaker 1: joker to you at this point, but sure that it
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: was such a huge tragedy and it was just so
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: out of nowhere. And of course people just have an
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: innate need to blame, to find cause, assign blame. People
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: love doing that even back in the day. And also
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: people back in the day were as susceptible to rumors
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: and urban legends as we are today, and those things
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: started up really quickly. One of the main ones was
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: that somehow the government was involved in this.
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, Like, hey, we saw people, we saw
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: men fanning the flames, and when confronted, they said that
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: they were under orders to do so, or you know,
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: maybe somebody actually started this fire on purpose. In Nero,
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: the Emperor Nero was kind of the prime suspect.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: It seems like, yeah, he ordered it, that he set
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: the fire, or some people. He had to rebuild Rome,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: I mean, you had to rebuild it after so many
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: of the districts were just totally leveled, and he was like,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: let's build this in I don't know, Nero style, which
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: is surprisingly close to the craftsman style of the nineteen twenties.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Oh really no. I was like, that's very surprising. But
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: they're gonna say art Deco.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: I was going to at first, and I was like, not,
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: let me come up with something else, right, I should
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: have just said art Deco would have gotten better. Laugh.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: But he rebuilt it in a manner that he liked.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, he was in charge at the time. And
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: people were like, that's why Rome burnt, because this guy
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: wanted to rebuild it more in his image.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
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  Speaker 3: So that rumor was going around, and through that rumor, okay,
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: came the story that while the Great Fire was burning,
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: Nero played his fiddle and just sort of watched it happen.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: Should we take a break right there?
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: We should, because I mean, what's coming up next is
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: just eyepopping.
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: That's right, more goodness from Josh Clark of fifteen years
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: ago right after this.
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  Speaker 1: So Nero's like, wait a minute, wait, I wasn't fiddling.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: We'll find out why. That's definitive in a second. Why
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: are you blaming me? And they're like, we're just blaming you.
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  Speaker 1: You got to accept that. He's like, I don't. I'm
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: going to find a scapegoat myself. I'll trot them out
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  Speaker 1: publicly and then you can just stop blaming me. And
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: he looked around. He's like, these Christians are new, I'm
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: going to persecute them. And this actually became the first
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: persecution of Christians in history. This was sixty four CE,
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: and I mean Christianity was so new that there was
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: still original apostles around who ended up being executed in
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  Speaker 1: this persecution.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, Paul, who was the other one.
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  Speaker 1: Paul and Peter. Paul was beheaded and Peter was crucified
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  Speaker 1: upside down.
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So like torturous, brutal executions are happening because Nero
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: is looking for a scapegoat because he was blamed for
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: this fire. You know, when you said before we're going
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: to talk about why it's definitive that he definitely didn't fiddle,
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: it's because there was no fiddle at the time. Music
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  Speaker 3: historians basically agreed that the vile class of instruments, which
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: is like a violin, didn't come around to the eleventh century,
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: so about fifteen hundred years later, So there literally were
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  Speaker 3: no fiddles at the time.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: No, but he did play something called the scythara, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: which is like a laptop harp. The top is like
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: for strumming, the bottom is for plucking. You've probably seen
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: something like it before. But he was really into it,
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: so much so that when Rome conquered some new land,
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: he would schedule music festivals in these new lands, and
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  Speaker 1: he would schedule them at times that he could go
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  Speaker 1: and compete. He would compete, and the Senate was not
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: happy about this. They're like, you're competing against commoners, you're
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: the emperor. And apparently Nero actually was more like than
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: we think he was today, especially among the lower classes
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: of Rome, because he didn't behave nearly as superior toward
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: them as other elites in Rome had and did.
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: Oh okay, well, you know one thing he definitely did
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: was in the immediate aftermath of the fire, he did
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  Speaker 3: a lot. Actually, he took a lot of measures to
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: provide for the citizenry. He was at his place in
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  Speaker 3: Antium on the outskirts of Rome when it broke out.
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  Speaker 3: He immediately rushed back to the fire. Tacitus, that historian
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  Speaker 3: that I mentioned, was a boy at the time during
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: the blaze, and he provided accounts of like hey, Nero
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: helped coordinate the firefighting himself on the first night. He
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: opened up public buildings for housing, He opened up his
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: own gardens for temporary shelter. Yeah, he imported grain from
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: other cities close by that I guess he sold, but
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: sold like super cheap.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he still sold it, though I thought that was
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: a little hinky, Yeah for sure. But yeah, so he
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: was a lot of the residents of Rome liked him,
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: and Tacitus tells us like he did actually swing into action,
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: and yet he still managed to bear the blame throughout this,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: like his persecution of Christians did not work. And apparently,
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  Speaker 1: like we said, the fiddling thing was not It's not
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: possible that he fiddled. It is possible he was playing
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: the sthara, but because of his responsiveness, it seems like
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: that's probably not the case. So because this was probably
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: largely created by the Senate, like the I think they
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: were working hard to keep the blame on Nero.
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: There's a nineteen forties historian from the University of North
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: Carolina named Mary Francis Giles Go tar heels, Yeah, and yes,
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: if you're a tar heel, you can be proud of
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Mary Francis Gilds because she was one of those rare
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: people who managed to see something that everybody knows in
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: a different light, at a different angle. And she's like,
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  Speaker 1: you know, fiddling doesn't just mean playing a violin. It
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: can also mean just kind of doing something like with
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  Speaker 1: your fingers, like ineffectually, like you're wasting time and energy,
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  Speaker 1: you're just fiddling around. Maybe that's what they originally meant.
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  Speaker 2: I don't know why I never thought of that.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: I definitely hadn't either. Even after writing this, it didn't
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: even look familiar.
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, she was like, you know, maybe he's just fiddling,
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  Speaker 3: as in, like doing something sort of useless. At the time,
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: it sounds like that didn't happen either, But yeah, maybe
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  Speaker 3: they viewed it inadequate at the time, like what he
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: was doing. Maybe the truth wasn't getting around that he
• 9:04
  Speaker 3: was actually kind of helping, right.
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  Speaker 1: And that actually fits with the idea that this was
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: propaganda that the Senate was basically saying Nero's responses were
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: not nearly enough. He was just basically messing around.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: But you know, if you're like, man Nero got a
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: bad rap, there's a brilliant writer who took that into consideration.
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: But probably I don't know, fifteen years ago ish and said, hey,
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: don't feel so bad for Nero because Nero ascended to
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: the throne because his mom killed his uncle, and then
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: Nero had his mom killed. Yeah, and then of course
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: the persecution of the Christians, you know, hanging people by
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: their feet and decapitating them, Like, don't feel bad for
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: this guy.
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  Speaker 2: Now.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: There was also dumb Nascio Abestius, which is sicking wild
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: animals on people for executions.
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no good.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: So Nero essentially was on his heels after that great fire. Again, remember,
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: the Senate didn't like him, like him that much. I
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: can't stress that enough. And so the army, which he
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: had been on really good terms with for a while,
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: was like, we're not going to work for you any longer.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: So there's a potential coup brewing. The Senate declared him
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: a public enemy, which is not something you want levied
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: against you as an emperor. It meant that he was
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: probably going to be executed. So he pushed a dagger
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: into his throat about four years after the fire came and.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: Went, yeah, he said, I sense a cupbrew. That was it.
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you talk like that.
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: You know, I'm watching the show right now and it's.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: Oh, Star City, have you heard of this?
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: Star City is a show that is I can't remember
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: the name of the first show, but there was a
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: show about the Space Race, and there was an American
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: version for All Mankind is what that was called from
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: the American perspective, and Star City is the Space Race
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: from the Soviet perspective.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: And it's really good. I think you would like it.
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: But they cast all British actors and are doing British
• 11:16
  Speaker 3: accents sort of like they used to just do for
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: all movies back in the day. And it's just I
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: got to wrap my head around every single episode when
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: all these Brits are talking. I try to hear it
• 11:27
  Speaker 3: in like with a Russian accent in my head, and
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: it just kind of drives me nuts.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I can get used to that kind of thing,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: but I think it's also something that if you once
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: you focus in on it, you just can't get past.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: I don't know why in twenty twenty six they just
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: didn't say, like, you know, do a Russian accent.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: I know it's appropriations or Russians. It's very strange, but
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: I guess that's it for the short Stuff, right, That's right, Okay,
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: well everybody. Short Stuff is out.
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: Stuff you should know is a production of Iheartrating.
• 12:00
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  Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.