Nero and the Great Fire
Nero was out of town when the fire started, at his vacation
house in the country. When he heard about the fire, he came back to Rome.
People expected that he would help out somehow: maybe give people money
to rebuild their houses, or hand out blankets,
or something. But he didn't. Instead, Nero announced that he was going to
take a lot of the land where the buildings had burned down and build himself
a great big new palace there, called the Golden
House. And he did (you can see it today, if you go to Rome).
People were angry that he hadn't helped them, and they started saying that
Nero had started the fire himself in order to clear land for his palace.
Nero needed to find someone else to blame, fast!
Nero thought of the Christians. By this time people had learned that Christians were different from Jews. Many people hated the Christians anyway, so they wouldn't mind blaming them. They hated them mainly because they were different, and because they tried to get other people to become Christians too. So Nero arrested a bunch of Christians. He blamed the fire on them, and had them burned alive. We know about this from both Suetonius and Tacitus (although both of them are repeating things they were told; Tacitus was about nine years old and living far away in Gaul, and Suetonius wasn't born yet, so they didn't know about it for themselves).
