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

Virgil. One of the students in one of the better schools, this winter of AD 64, was the nine-year-old Publius Cornelius Tacitus, the future historian.
     
    Bankers, scribes, and up-market stores occupied the Basilica Aemilia: the best jewelers; importers of ridiculously expensive food delicacies; purveyors of the finest wines, including Italy’s prized Falernian vintages. The brightly colored imported fabrics, particularly silks, of fabric merchants attracted Rome’s wealthy ladies. A relief shows one such fabric store, with rich cushions hanging from the ceiling. Two staff members unravel a roll of cloth for several seated female customers. Fashion and fad drove the shopping impulses in Roman times, just as much as they do today. After he had ceased to be a man of power and of extravagance, Seneca wrote to a friend: “Look at the number of things we buy because others have bought them or because they’re in most people’s houses.” 12
     
    All this shopping activity generated a hubbub that meant a visitor approaching Rome on the morning of any business day would hear the city before seeing it. The visitor might also see or smell evidence of it on the wind; according to Seneca, the air of Rome reeked of smoke and poisonous fumes from all the cookers of the metropolis, and ashes commonly floated on the breeze from the same source. 13 Here was Horace’s famous “smoke, splendor and noise of the city,” in this the commercial heart of the empire. 14 Tigellinus the Praetorian prefect had a tidy share of that commerce, but he would always be looking for more profit, more rewards, more real estate.
     
    Greed was the driving force of Rome. More than one landlord of the city’s forty-seven thousand insulae , or apartment blocks, had been guilty of setting fire to their own properties in the past. Not for insurance money; insurance was one innovation that escaped the otherwise business-savvy Romans. Landlords would then hastily build larger buildings on the ruined sites, providing smaller rooms and demanding larger rents. The landlords’ profit in such instances was a long time coming. Tigellinus was interested in more immediate rewards.
     

III
     
    THE POETS
     
    M arcus Valerius Martialus, or Martial, as later generations would come to know him, rose before dawn as usual this winter morning. From his small apartment, three floors up in a nondescript apartment block sandwiched between countless others on Rome’s Quirinal Hill, where once Cicero’s good friend and correspondent Atticus had lived, and girding his cheap cloak around him, Martial made his way across the city though crowded, darkened streets to the house of Annaeus Mela, one of Rome’s wealthiest men.
     
    In his twenties, Martial had been born at Bilbilis in Spain. Although he boasted Celtic blood, Martial was a Roman citizen and the son of a Roman citizen. His parents had given him a good education, including tutoring in grammar and rhetoric. When Seneca was still Nero’s chief secretary, the young Martial had come to Rome seeking to make his fortune. Martial rated earning above learning. “My parents were stupid enough to have me taught literature, a paltry subject,” he would say, years later. “But what good were teachers of grammar and rhetoric to me?” 1 He had arrived from Spain with an introduction to Seneca, a fellow Spaniard. Their shared heritage paid dividends: The rich and hugely powerful chief secretary had taken Martial on as one of his many clients.
     
    This promising start to Martial’s career soon hit a major obstacle. Seneca retired from office not long after Martial arrived at Rome. Determined to melt into obscurity so as not to antagonize Nero, Seneca had divorced himself of most of his clients. Cast aside were men such as the wealthy and very social Gaius Piso, the noted author Fabius Rusticus, who, through Seneca’s patronage, had risen to fame, and complete unknowns such as Martial. Only Seneca’s physician, his in-laws,