The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City by Stephen Dando-Collins Read Free Book Online

Plautus went about his regular routine. 11 At noon one day shortly after, he was at the bathhouse. Stripped down to a tunic and an undergarment, he was exercising before entering the baths. The doors burst open, and in trooped the Praetorian centurion and his death squad. At their head was Pelago, a freedman on Nero’s personal staff, who had been sent with the Praetorians to ensure the task was completed.
     
    Without any ceremony, the centurion forced Plautus to kneel on the tiled bathhouse floor and ordered him to stretch out his neck. Unsheathing his gladius, the centurion hacked off Plautus’ head, which Pelago promptly bore away. The dead man’s distraught wife, Antistia Pollutia, came running to find her husband’s headless body. Dropping to her knees, she clutched Plautus’ corpse to her, ignoring the blood that covered her clothes. For the rest of her short life, Pollutia would retain the bloodstained garments worn by her husband at the time of his violent end.
     
    The removal of Sulla and Plautus brought no outcry at Rome. This lack of public reaction, along with the very act of their removal, was a great relief to Nero, who heaped rewards on Tigellinus. These events cemented Tigellinus and the emperor’s relationship and increased the distance between Faenius Rufus and Nero, as Tigellinus had hoped. By early AD 64, Tigellinus’ power was increasing with each passing week.
     
    That power was both financial and political. Nero had made Tigellinus a wealthy man with his gifts and rewards. One of those rewards was, apparently, either the entire Basilica Aemilia, or the basilica’s portico fronting the Forum, which contained a number of shops. This massive building, 330 feet long and 100 feet wide, with two floors supported by columns and massive arches and topped by a third, attic floor, was one of Rome’s major retailing precincts, the shopping mall of its day. At the intersection of the Via Sacra (Sacred Way) and the Argiletum, itself a street known for its cobblers’ shops and booksellers at this time and fronting the Forum Romanum—the Fifth Avenue of ancient Rome—these Aemilian shops occupied prime retail real estate.
     
    Five centuries earlier, there had been butchers’ shops here. A century later, bankers had taken over the site. After a subsequent fire, the shops were renovated and became known as the tabernae nova , or new shops. In 179 BC, work began here on a basilica that was completed by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. The Aemilian family had added to the building down through the decades. In 55 BC, a new, grander building, the one that now stood in AD 64, was erected on the site by Lucius Aemilius Pailus.
     
    Early in the imperial era, the building had come into the possession of the imperial family. After another fire, in AD 14, the emperor Augustus had it restored. Another renovation eight years later was at the expense of Marcus Lepidus, of the Aemilian family. And now, the structure, or part of it, was Tigellinus’ property. Indoors, rows of marble-floored shops lined a central nave. The basilica’s restored portico, fronting the Forum, was similarly lined with shops and was dedicated by Augustus to his grandsons Gaius and Lucius.
     
    Considered by some the most beautiful building in Rome, the Basilica Aemilia was certainly one of the most profitable, with the shops returning prime rents. To the Basilica Aemilia hurried slaves and freedmen each morning to shop on behalf of their masters and mistresses who lived in the mansions on the nearby Palatine, Capitoline, Caelian, and Aventine hills.
     
    By a 59 BC edict of Julius Caesar, most wheeled traffic was banned from Rome’s narrow streets during daylight. So, it was in the night that merchants’ heavy four-wheeled wagons and farmers’ two-wheeled carts streamed into the city from the outskirts and the Tiber River docks, laden with both manufactured goods and produce, fish and livestock. And dodging around them would be the carriages