On the night of July 18, 64, a fire broke out among the shops at the eastern end of the Circus Maximus, where stalls stacked with lamp oil and cloth caught quickly. A hot wind carried the flames down the length of the racetrack and into the crowded lanes of Rome, where wooden tenements five stories high stood so close together that neighbors could clasp hands across the alleys. The fire burned for six days, then reignited on a second front before it finally died. Of the fourteen regions of the city, three were erased completely, seven more stood gutted, and only four survived whole.
More than two-thirds of the most crowded city on earth lay in ash, and hundreds of thousands of people had nothing left but what they wore when they ran. The emperor was not in Rome when it started. Nero was at Antium, his birthplace, thirty-five miles down the coast. He returned only when the fire reached his own palace on the Palatine, and by then nothing could be saved.
Tacitus, the most careful historian of the age, recorded that the emperor rode back and threw himself into the relief effort. He opened public buildings and his own gardens to the homeless, brought grain up the Tiber from Ostia, and cut the price so that hunger could not become profit. He wrote new building laws requiring wider streets, height limits, and fireproof stone. None of it quieted the rumor that he had set the fire himself.
The story spread through the crowds that while Rome burned, Nero had climbed onto a private stage, dressed as an actor, and sung the sack of Troy. Suetonius, writing decades later, claimed the emperor was so taken with the beauty of the flames that he performed the whole song of Troy’s fall with the burning city as his backdrop. Cassius Dio went further, claiming Nero sent men out in disguise to start fires in several places at once. Tacitus heard the same rumor but refused to write it down as fact.
He called it talk, and he noted plainly that Nero was not in Rome when the fire began. The prosecution of Nero’s memory rested on that rumor, and the evidence seemed to follow. While the ground was still warm, his surveyors marked off more than a hundred acres in the center of the city. Ground that had been packed with homes and shops and shrines was taken by the state and turned into a private estate.
The palace they built there was called the Domus Aurea, the Golden House. It spread across the Oppian hill with more than three hundred rooms, none of them bedrooms. Walls were sheathed in polished marble and panels of gold. One dining room rained flowers and perfume from carved ivory ceilings through hidden pipes.
Another was a rotunda under a concrete dome that Suetonius said revolved day and night, keeping time with the heavens. At the entrance stood a bronze statue of Nero as the sun god, one hundred twenty feet tall. Beyond it lay an artificial lake that looked like a sea, ringed with woods and fields and vineyards laid out where a neighborhood had once stood. Nero walked through the finished palace and said, according to Suetonius, that at last he was beginning to be housed like a human being.
The implication was not lost on the people whose homes had burned to clear the ground. To kill the rumor that he had set the fire, Nero found a scapegoat in a small, unpopular group in the city, and Tacitus, no friend to them, called the punishment savage. By 68, the cost of the fire and the palace and the taxes behind it had grown unbearable. Governors in Gaul and Spain rose in revolt, the Praetorian Guard was bought away, and the Senate declared Nero an enemy of the state.
He fled to a villa outside the city and, with horsemen coming up the road to take him alive, ended his own life. He was thirty years old, and the line of Augustus died with him. The tyrant was gone, but his house still filled the center of Rome. The men who inherited a broken, bankrupt empire had to decide what to do with it.
Vespasian, the soldier who clawed his way to the throne in the year of four emperors, could not live in it, and he could not leave it standing. To move into the Golden House would be to declare himself Nero’s heir. So he drained Nero’s private lake and on its exact footprint raised an amphitheater for the whole people of Rome, paid for with the spoils of Jerusalem. It was called the Flavian Amphitheater.
We call it the Colosseum, a name taken from the colossal bronze statue of Nero that still stood beside it. Vespasian had only its face reworked into the sun god. Even the name of the most famous ruin on earth is an echo of the house it was built to bury. His sons carried the work of erasure forward.
Titus opened the amphitheater with a hundred days of games and dedicated baths over another wing of the estate. Domitian built his own palace on the Palatine so no emperor after him would covet Nero’s ruin below. The final sentence came under Trajan, the first emperor born outside Italy. He wanted a site for public baths so vast they would dwarf the ones Titus had left, and he chose the last great wing of the Golden House.
His architect, Apollodorus of Damascus, did not waste effort tearing the halls apart. Workers stripped the marble from the walls, bricked up the doorways, cut holes in the painted vaults, and poured in earth and rubble room after room until the whole palace was packed solid and buried under a hill. On top of it, Trajan raised his baths, dedicated in 109, where ordinary Romans could wash and gather on the same ground where Nero had walked alone through his private woods. The burial worked for nearly fourteen hundred years.
Then, in the last years of the fifteenth century, a young Roman walking on the Oppian hill felt the ground give way and dropped into a painted room, colors still clinging to the plaster in the dark. Word spread, and the painters of the Renaissance came running. Raphael, Pinturicchio, Giovanni da Udine, and later Michelangelo had themselves lowered on ropes through holes in the vaults, torches in hand, and walked through halls no living eye had seen since the reign of Trajan. They believed they were in the ruins of the baths of Titus and called the underground chambers grotte.
The strange, weightless patterns they found covering the walls, creatures half plant, thin candelabra, architecture that seemed to float, they called groteschi after those caves. The style spread from the buried ruin to the palaces of popes and cardinals, decorated the Vatican itself, and helped light the Renaissance. The art of a condemned emperor had climbed out of the earth. The deep irony is that the attempt to destroy the Golden House is what preserved it.
Trajan’s contemptuous decision to entomb it under a mountain of fill cut it off from light, air, and rain, and turned a palace into a vault. The rooms survived because they were buried. Now that archaeologists have reopened them, damp and the tread of visitors are doing what fourteen centuries of burial never could. The frescoes fade a little more each year, and in 2010 a section of the vaulting collapsed under the weight of the garden above.
The Golden House was an act of theft beyond argument, a seizure of land that broke every rule of restraint, a project so costly it stripped temples and debased the coinage and helped pull an emperor down. It was also a laboratory for concrete, the birthplace of the dome that would crown the Pantheon, and the source of an art that waited out the centuries underground and then helped ignite a Renaissance. The verdict of the Senate was death. The verdict of the Flavians was erasure.
The verdict of history turned out to be stranger and more lasting than either. One panel of painted plaster, cut from the walls of a palace Rome tried to wipe from the earth, still hangs in a room below street level, its reds still burning against the dark.