I'm John Dacher. Nero, actresside music and murder in Imperial Rome, Anthony Everett, and Roddy Ashworth, the authors.

It is 64 AD. Summer in Rome, a city crowded, never built in any fashion to sustain fires that are routine here and there and everywhere

in the crowded neighborhoods, except a fire begins near the circus maximus and spreads.

Anthony, the fire spreads because or despite the efforts of the firefighters?

Do we know today, because there are accusations

that they did this to destroy the city so Nero could burn it?

Is he guilty or innocent?

He's actually a very effective sort of out of the problems

after the fire was over.

The fact is that people put, malevolent rumors about the fire, mistaking what were fire

breaks, the building of fire breaks, mistaking that for people, the soldiery, purposely setting fires. And that's

not true. It's the parlor is quite clearly an effort to create fire breaks. Nero was blamed

for the fire, largely because there's nobody else around to blame.

He handled the whole thing very well.

He redesigned the city.

He organized improvements to the public environment.

Nero's blame for the fire.

His response is to rebuild Rome, rebuild Rome with marble and with

the Golden House, but Nero blames the Christians, or does he? I'm careful of all of this because

the distortion after 2,000 years can be enormous. Does Nero say this sect of Jews is responsible?

Well, he seems to, but in fact, there's good evidence that the section of the text in

Pascitus that goes into all of this is in fact written by somebody completely different

...