Nero and the Christians - the Great Fire of Rome

Nero and the Great Fire

In the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, in 64 AD, there was a great fire in the city of Rome. It started in a very poor slum area downtown called the Subura (suh-BOO-rah), and at first none of the rich people cared very much: fires often burned down apartment buildings in the poorer areas of Rome, because people lived in three- or four-storey wooden buildings and heated their rooms with fires in little braziers (like a hibachi).
Forum of Augustus
You can see the stone wall in the back of this picture
The rich people just built a big stone wall between the slum and the better parts of Rome, to keep the fire from spreading to their own houses. But this fire spread over the wall. It burned down a lot of downtown Rome. People were very upset.

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).

The Julio-Claudian Emperors
Nero's Golden House
Domitian and the Christians
Main Christianity page
Main religion page





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