On this trip, we made our first visit to the Forum, where the remarkable advance of western civilization by the Roman Empire was spiced with a strange assortment of Emperors who seemed intent on concurrently leading a degradation of individual morality.
One of the strangest was Nero, who was said to have fiddled while Rome burned, a story I remember from childhood. I think it was included in some popular cartoons on TV. It turns out he played a lyre rather than a violin, and perhaps he strummed it like a young Elvis strummed his acoustic guitar while singing on stage.
Did you realize that Nero actually wasn't in Rome when it burned? I had an image of him on a veranda playing his instrument with blazes rising against the black of night in the background.
Nero was actually on stage singing and playing his lyre in costume in Antium, about 35 miles south of Rome.
Actors and performers were considered to be near the bottom of the social strata in ancient Rome, which of course is quite a contrast to today, when they are treated like royalty. Nero, however, insisted on taking to the stage to entertain the masses as emperor. The crowds loved Nero's hamming it up, reciting poetry and performing on stage.
He was also quite an athlete. Nero raced chariots and always won the races he entered. Once, his chariot overturned, and he couldn't finish the race, but he was still given the gold medal. Everyone understood that a good sport to Nero was anyone who let him win, and that not letting him win, whether he deserved it or not, could not be tolerated and might lead to imprisonment or death.
Sexually, let's just say that Nero was a champion of debauchery, including castrating a boy to take him as his wife and raping a Vestal Virgin. A joke of ancient Rome said that Nero was every noble woman's husband and every nobleman's wife.
Did Nero start the fire to clear an area to build his new palace? He seemed capable of doing anything, including killing his own mother. Perhaps like the Godfather's baptism/murder scene, Nero intentionally picked a time to execute his plan when he would have a solid alibi, sending his henchmen to do the deed.
In any case, when he came back to Rome, he needed a scapegoat. This being 64 A.D., the Christians had begun proselytizing Romans with their new religion. Like Hare Krishnas in the 1970s, the early Christians apparently were annoying a lot of people anyway, so Nero decided to blame the arson on them.
Nero publicly humiliated and executed Christians in the Coliseum, serving to entertain the mob at the same time. It was so cruel and obviously unfair that eventually Nero made martyrs of the Christians and, when they refused to recant and showed such firm belief to the end, the spectacles actually converted more Romans to Christianity. Without Nero, perhaps we wouldn't have so many Christians today.
