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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 September 2021
‘Fiddling while Rome burns’ is arguably the most familiar English saying inspired by classical antiquity. The image of Nero actually playing an instrument during the Great Fire is not, in fact, found in ancient sources: the first English reference belongs to Cooper's 1548 revision of Elyot's Latin–English Dictionary, where Nero is said to play a harp during the conflagration. In 1649 the royalist poet George Daniel applied the term ‘fiddle’, and the familiar modern form of the expression, as a byword for a leader's neglect, was apparently coined in a 1680 English parliamentary speech by Silius Titus.
I am grateful to Kathrin Pfister and Anne Toner for guidance in searching Early English Texts and to Peter Paul Schnierer for his observations on the texts of Shakespeare. I wish also to acknowledge the valuable insights and suggestions of the anonymous reader for Greece & Rome.
1 Tac. Ann. 15.39.3: ‘These were measures aimed at the people, but they proved a dismal failure. For the rumour had spread that, at the very time that the city was ablaze, Nero had appeared on his private stage and sung about the destruction of Troy, drawing a comparison between the sorrows of the present and the disasters of old.’ Suet. Nero 38.2: ‘Nero looked out over this conflagration from the tower of Maecenas, delighting in the “beauty of the flames”, as he put it, and he sang “The Capture of Troy”, dressed in his stage costume.’ Cass. Dio 62.18.1: ‘While the whole population was in this state of mind, many, crazed by the disaster, were leaping into the very flames. Not so Nero, who climbed to the highest point of his palace, from where most of the conflagration could best be seen, and, putting on his citharode's costume, sang what he called “The Destruction of Troy’”, but what was actually perceived as being “The destruction of Rome”.’ Translations are taken from A. A. Barrett, J. C. Yardley, and E. Fantham, The Emperor Nero. A Guide to the Ancient Sources (Princeton, NJ, 2016), 156–7.
2 See Barrett, A. A., Rome Is Burning. Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty (Princeton, NJ, 2020), 232–45Google Scholar.
3 When Charles II suggested that, as a compromise, his Catholic brother, James, be allowed to succeed under certain conditions, Titus said that such a scheme was akin to allowing ‘a lion in the lobby and then voting to secure ourselves by letting him in and chaining him, rather than by keeping him out’: Calamy, E., A Letter to Mr. Archdeacon Echard, upon Occasion of His History of England Wherein the True Principles of the Revolution Are Defended (London, 1718), 34Google Scholar.
4 In 1680, 17 November fell on Sunday in the Gregorian calendar, but on Thursday in the Julian system still officially in use in England until 1752.
5 A Collection of Debates in the House of Commons, In the Year 1680. Relating to the Bill of Exclusion of the Then Duke of York (London, 1725), 80.
6 As pointed out by Gyles, M. F., ‘Nero Fiddled While Rome Burned’, CJ 42 (1946–7), 211–17Google Scholar.
7 The cithara, which in some respects resembles a small harp, is constructed artificially, mainly from wood. The lyre, associated symbolically with Apollo, uses ‘natural’ components, a tortoise shell for the sound box, and horns for the instrument's arms. ‘Lyre’ tends to be used generically and casually for both instruments.
8 Taming of the Shrew 2.1.165–6.
9 R. Ash (ed.), Tacitus. Annals, Book XV (Cambridge, 2018), 186: ‘stage clothing’.
10 Orosius, Pag. 7.7.5 paraphrases Suetonius’ scaenico habitu as tragico habitu (Orosius also assumes that Nero was reciting the Iliad).
11 Nederman, C. J. (ed.), John of Salisbury. Policraticus (Cambridge, 2012), 204Google Scholar; Lumby, J. R. (ed.), Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis (London, 1872)Google Scholar, iv.9.395; A. Hofmeister (ed.), Ottonis episcopi Frisingensis chronica. Sive, Historia de duabus civitatibus (Hanover, 1912), iii.158; H. R. Luard (ed.), Matthaei Parisiensis, monachi Sancti Albani Chronica majora (London, 1872), i.109.
12 As a continental example, in 1625 Lope de Vega, the great playwright of the Spanish Golden Age, printed his Roma abrasada (Rome Burned). It contains an animated description of Nero watching the fire, in this case not from a tower but from the Tarpeian rock, reciting his poetry and playing a lyre: mira el incendio Romano / cantando al son de una lyra, / que alegre vista! (758–62).
13 Eliot, T., The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot, Knyght (London, 1538)Google Scholar.
14 Eliot, T., Bibliotheca Eliotae, augmented by T. Cooper (London, 1548)Google Scholar.
15 Perkins, W., Foure Great Lyers, Striuing Who Shall Win the Siluer Whetstone (London, 1585)Google Scholar.
16 Henry VI Part 1, 1.4.95–6; see Gyles (n. 6), 215.
17 I owe the observation on the text of Henry VI to Professor Schnierer.
18 H. Broughton, ‘To the worshypfull and learned, the Vicechauncelour, and others the gouernours of learning-houses in the Vniuersitie of Oxeforde’, in To the most high and mightie prince Elizabet… ([London], 1594), sig. A2.
19 The first extant work devoted entirely to the emperor since Suetonius’ Life was Matthew Gwinne's play Nero, performed in Oxford in 1603. The most celebrated of such dramas was Nathaniel Lee's Tragedy of Nero, staged in London in 1674/5. Among poets, the prolific Thomas Heywood (1570s–1641) published his Troia Britannica in seventeen cantos in 1609, in which he proclaims: ‘Now did Nero sing, / Upon a hill Troyes burning to his lyre / Having before set stately Rome a-fire’ (lines 360–2).
20 The Tragedy of Nero, A Collection of Old English Plays (London, 1624), 3.3.
21 W. B. Gwyn, ‘Cruel Nero: The Concept of the Tyrant and the Image of Nero in Western Political Thought’, History of Political Thought 12 (1991), 421–55.
22 G. Daniel, Trinarchodia. The Several Reigns of Richard II, of Henry IV and of Henry V (London, 1649), 3.133, lines 163–4; R. A. Anselment, Loyalist Reserve. Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark, 1988), 94.
23 The sentiment, if not the precise wording, may have influenced Aphra Behn. In her epistolary novel Love-Letters between a Noble-Man and His Sister, published in 1684, claimed by some to be the first novel written in English, the philanderer Philander writes to his sister-in-law Silvia that ‘were the Nation sinking, the great Senate of the world confounded, our Glorious Designs betray'd and ruin'd, and the vast City all in flame; like Nero unconcern'd I'd sing my everlasting Song of Love to Silvia’: A. Behn, Love-Letters between a Noble-Man and His Sister (London, 1684), 35.
24 F. Hewerdine, The Danger and Folly of Evil Courses. Being a Practical Discourse, Shewing the Base and Vile Nature of Sin, and the Dreadful Consequences of It (London, 1714), 88–9: ‘It's a scandalous thing for him who / God has fitted for great and weighty affairs, like Nero, to spend his time fiddling.’
25 J. Arbuckle, A Collection of Letters and Essays on Several Subjects, Lately Publish'd in the Dublin Journal (London, 1729), ii.111 (16 July 1726): ‘barbarous pleasure which Nero took in seeing the capital of his empire in flames and imperially fiddling over the conflagration’.
26 E. Young, The Centaur Not Fabulous. In Five Letters to a Friend, on the Life in Vogue (London, 1755), 374: praising a writer ‘is like admiring Nero for his fiddle, when, through his own frenzy, his glorious Capital was in flames’.
27 J. Cradock, The Life of John Wilkes, Esq; in the Manner of Plutarch. Being a Specimen of a Larger Work (London, 1773), 31.
28 For the Lords, see The Noble Cricketers: A Poetical and Familiar Epistle, Address'd to Two of the Idlest Lords in His Majesty's Three Kingdoms (London, 1778), preface: ‘May it produce an amendment. That Nero fiddled while Rome burned.’ For rebellious colonists, see Plan of Re-Union between Great Britain and Her Colonies (London, 1778), 100: ‘were its proud cities on fire, they could stand like Nero and fiddle over the conflagration’.
29 Browne, A., Miscellaneous Sketches. Or, Hints for Essays (London, 1798), i.158Google Scholar.
30 Cooper, J. F., The Ways of the Hour. A Tale (New York, 1871), 313Google Scholar.
31 Bush and Trump are not being singled out: a quick perusal of ‘Nero fiddling’ in Google Images will reveal the same motif, embracing every president from Clinton on, fiddling while the flames of some political disaster blaze in the background. And it is not only in America: the New Statesman for 29 July 2019 carried the headline ‘[Boris] Johnson accused of “fiddling while Rome burns”’.
32 Gwyn (n. 21), 454–5. And no doubt among English-speaking students everywhere.