Alex Levine’s Reviews > Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty > Status Update

“Disasters chase their own tails. They create the need for major expenditures, which have to be funded; but the economic dislocation means that there is likely to be less revenue available.”

“All buildings are to a greater or lesser degree ephemeral. Eventually they collapse or decay, or are restored and refurbished to the extent that virtually none of their original fabric remains intact.”

Arguing in chapter 6 that Nero’s post-fire rebuilding projects were incredibly innovative architecturally, marking a pioneering transformation in the use of concrete, arching, and the removal of beams. Barrett argues the “Golden House” can be regarded as having made the “single most significant advance in architectural innovation.”

The Colosseum’s name comes from the enormous statue Nero commissioned after the great fire, which was moved next to the stadium by Hadrian.

“But we must be open to the possibility that if there was in fact actions against the Christians after the fire, it might have had little or nothing to do with Nero,” but rather the result of local administrators in Rome.

Interesting point that Christians may have been blamed in its wake for the great fire, because the area of the city they likely settled in by the 60s CE was on the other side of the Tiber to the fire, and so was undamaged.

Fascinating, in order to combat the fire, firebreaks were needed. In the urban setting, this required tearing down flammable houses/structures in the fire’s wake. Yet, the fire moved so quickly that the only way to do so was by controlled burns. Thus, fires were being started to prevent the larger conflagration’s spread, a phenomenon Tacitus misidentifies to implicate Nero as causing the fire.

It’s interesting how Barrett’s using not just archeological sources, but also the notebooks of architects from the 19th and 20th century, to see how they understood their finds and quotidian aspects of finds that might not have made it into published research, but nevertheless can hint at fire damage.

The fire started in the Circus Maximus - a fire trap, filled with wooden stalls/standa. But infrastructure/the city isn’t independent, but always related to political decisions about space and the wider physical environment. It could have been worsened by Nero’s regulations concerning the cooking of food at Circus-adjacent stalls, and was made into a “great” fire by swirling Mediterranean Sirocco winds.