Fiddling while Rome burned

Professional classicists have a habit of pouring cold water on popular facts about the ancient world.  Take something that everyone thinks they know about Greece and Rome, and the finger-wagging scholar loves nothing better than saying it’s wrong. My own curmudgeonly assault a few posts ago on “Et tu Brute” was a case in point. It must rank as one of the most famous phrases in the Latin language – and guess what, smirks the don, it was written by Shakespeare.

Well, for a change, the good news is that Nero did fiddle while Rome burned. It just depends what you mean by fiddle.

Most people, I fear, take “fiddling” in the wrong sense.

This struck me when I was reading the previews in the weekend papers of the new BBC series of Roman drama-docs I’ve been involved with. The first episode features Nero (don’t ask me to explain here and now, but the episodes don’t move in chronological order: the “earliest” programme, featuring Tiberius Gracchus, is actually episode three).

With good historical credentials, Nero is shown being an energetic and responsible emperor in the aftermath of the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD. He provides emergency housing for the victims and sets about rebuilding the city in a way that wouldn’t make it such a tinderbox in the future. This idea obviously appealed to the TV critics – more than one of whom wrote something along the lines of “So Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned. Rather he returned to his capital to help his people . . “. In fact, the same thought appeared so often that I began to suspect, correctly as it turned out, that they had lifted it straight from the BBC’s own publicity material.

Hang on, thought the smirking don. These guys obviously think that Nero has wrongly been accused of “fiddling” in the sense of “footling around”. In fact Nero’s “fiddling” was a wholly musical gesture. What the phrase refers to is his playing, if not the violin (=fiddle), then its nearest ancient equivalent, the lyre.

For, before he got into his emergency response mode, according to the historian Dio, he went up on the roof of the palace, put on his lyre playing outfit and sang a song on an all too apt subject – the “Fall of Troy”. Suetonius in his biography of Nero has a similar story of the singing (though minus the lyre). Nero’s crime was not “footling around”. It was that his first instinct in the face of crisis was to take refuge in the arts and high culture.

Whether we will ever now rescue what I think of as the “real meaning” of this phrase is doubtful. In fact,  it may be a better idea to celebrate the shift of meaning rather than pedantically lament it. It certainly makes it more easily applicable. When  George W Bush was widely accused of “fiddling while Rome burned” as New Orleans drowned, I don’t think his detractors had in mind a misplaced devotion to high culture.

Comments

[Paul]

I realise this article is quite old now, but I also hadn't realised that people took it any way other than musically.

I presumed that when it was applied to other leaders, it meant undertaking some task other than the immediate response required.

I didn't realise that "to fiddle" as "to idle away time" had particularly wide usage either. "To fiddle about", sure. But "to fiddle"?

[Cailean Babcock]

Funny, I always figured that he actually played a musical instrument while Rome burned, especially as that's how I've often seen him portrayed in that context. This must be a relatively new misunderstanding.

[kate]

I feel that humanity is still being exposed to the same treatment by their leaders in that our Governments still "fiddle" or twiddle their thumbs as society suffers under laws which cause great "disharmony."Sorry I don't know if Nero was actually a good Lyre-ist with an ear for music or not.

[Mary]

Sadly, I must assure Dave that most people take the phrase as I have suggested. Indeed I have had to explain the 'real' sense even to some in the BBC..who expressed amazement. And I have taken wide popular soundings among my non classical friends. Still it is kind of encouraging to know that he is on the side of the angels here.

[Dave Arthur]

I really don't believe that people take 'fiddling' to many mean messing around. I've never met anyone in my life who didn't imagine that Nero 'fiddled' (played music) while Rome burned. His playing music whilst watching the conflagration is a piece of popular folk belief. I think you misinterpreted the reviews, and assumed that 'these guys' have been living on some other planet for most of their lives.

[mary]

Jackie

The Golden House? Yes, it would have been possible to stress that more. And you're right to say that, in the literary accounts we have, it is one of the things (I think only one) that got up the nose of the elite. (Why? is a good question. Size in part, but also because of the introduction of the pleasures of the country into the city ....and that we get to some interesting views about Roman space). The justification for playing it down was really to show that the whole question of overspend/overbuild was much wider than that.
One thing that proves hard in dramatising Nero's riegn is that it is (surprisingly) long. One kind of wants to bring the murder of Agrippina close to the fire and the Pisonian conspiracy; but actually there's years between them. How much telescoping is justified?

Wonder what anyone else thinks.

[Jackie]

I've just watched the first episode and find myself a little puzzled. Apart from 'fiddling while Rome burned' Nero was also famous for his Domus Aurea. There was a great deal of busy building going on, including the huge statue of Nero, but no mention of the Golden House. Why not? Surely that was one of the things that REALLY annoyed the senators.

[David Kirwan]

Thanks, Mary... Obviously 'one of those things we unlearn later on'! I look forward to the program.

[Mary]

In answer to David Kirwan: well, of course we don't actually know. The fact that more than one ancient writer mentions it may only mean that they copied the story from each other,or from a lost source. And Tacitus in Annals Book 15 does flag it as "rumor".

That said, it does seem better established than some of the things we think we 'know' about the classical world. It certainly used to be the case that people generally said that Suetonius had got it from some source hostile to Nero...but I have increasingly lost patience with those who want to find "opposition" history underlying our standard narratives. As for Suetonius himself, I think most people would say that he had fallen out with Hadrian (a euphemistic way of putting it) by the time he wrote his life of Nero.

[C.N. Read]

In fact, during the Hurricane Katrina crisis, G.W. Bush was engaged in musical "fiddling" as well: on 30 August, the day after the hurricane hit, he was at a photo-op, having a jolly time playing a guitar that had been presented to him by a country-western musician.

[David Kirwan]

By the way, still writing as one of a certain age, I am sure we were taught at school that the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned was a base canard (or anas vilis) promulgated by Suetonius to butter up Hadrian by dissing his predecessors, as Nero was at Antium (literally alibi) at the time.

Or is that one of the things you learn at school and have to unlearn later on?

[Alexandra P]

I have never thought that people imagined 'fiddling' meant mucking around - I always just assumed that people thought he was playing msuic! Maybe this is me assuming that everyone else knows the same things that I do...

[David Kirwan]

Nero may or may not have fiddled while Rome burnt, but those of us of a certain age know for certain that he lit the fire, inspired by Dr Who (William Hartnell)'s accident in setting fire to the map of the Emperor's redevelopment plan while he was temporarily marooned in Ancient Rome.