According to his biographer Suetonius, the Roman emperor Nero "practiced every sort of obscenity,” ranging from incest to cruelty to animals to homicide. Nero was such a bad guy, in fact, that he may very well have been the first Antichrist in the Christian tradition. But did Nero actually fiddle while Rome burned? In strictest terms, no. In slightly less strict terms, probably not. In very loose terms, perhaps so.
Ancient tradition has it that Nero was so moved by the sight of the great fire that swept across the capital of his empire in the summer of 64 CE that he climbed to the top of the city walls and declaimed from a now-lost epic poem concerning the destruction of Troy. It is said that he wept copiously while reciting lines describing the conflagration that the Greeks put to the fallen city of Troy. Suetonius tells us that Nero wore theatrical garb to fit the occasion, while the later historian Dio Cassius added the detail that Nero dressed in “cithara player’s garb.” The cithara was a forerunner of the lute, which in turn gave rise to the modern guitar.
By the early Middle Ages, stringed instruments generally fell under the categorical term fidicula, from which our word “fiddle” derives. William Shakespeare correctly identified Nero’s instrument of choice when, in the first part of Henry VI, he wrote:
Plantagenet, I will; and like thee, Nero,
Play on the lute, beholding the towns burn.
Somewhere between that play, composed about 1590, and a play called The Tragedy of Nero, published in 1624, the lute had become a fiddle. In 1649 the playwright George Daniel committed this line to print: “Let Nero fiddle out Rome’s obsequies.” And ever after, through Samuel Pepys and Samuel Johnson to our own time, Nero has been fiddling as Rome burned.
So did Nero fiddle while Rome burned? No. Sort of. Maybe. More likely, he strummed a proto-guitar while dreaming of the new city that he hoped would arise in the fire’s ashes. That isn’t quite the same thing as doing nothing, but it isn’t the sort of decisive leadership one might hope for either.