The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City (23 page)

Read The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City Online

Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins

Tags: #History, #Ancient, #Rome

POPPAEA SABINA, Nero’s last manipulative wife, former wife of Nero’s close friend Marcus Otho. (Archaeological Museum of Olympia, Greece)
 
LUCIUS SENECA, Nero’s clever tutor and later powerful chief secretary. Depicted here at the height of his power, he would lose much weight after changing his diet subsequent to learning of a plot to poison him. (Antiquities Collection, Altes Museum, Berlin)
 
VITELLIUS, who as chief singing contest judge, called Nero back to perform on stage after the young emperor suffered stage fright. A lover of luxurious living, Vitellius would spend heavily during his brief reign as emperor. (Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek, Copenhagen; photograph by Wolfgang Sauber)
 
A MODEL OF ROME IN THE FOURTH CENTURY. The city had grown along the lines sketched out by Nero following the Great Fire, which leveled much of that part of the city seen here. The Circus Maximus, bottom left, where the Great Fire began, continued to dominate Rome, while the palaces on the Palatine Hill, immediately to the right of the circus, had risen from the ashes of the fire. The circular Colosseum, Vespasian’s Hunting Theater, at right, had been erected on the site of Nero’s Pond. (Museum of Roman Civilization, Rome)
 
THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS, where more than 200,000 spectators watched chariot races, and where, on July 19, AD 64, the Great Fire of Rome broke out. (Drawing by G. Gatteschi from Albert Kuhn,
Roma
1913)
 
THE AQUA CLAUDIA, one of nine aqueducts serving Rome in AD 64, still cleaves through the Italian countryside on its way to Rome.
 
CORBULO, Nero’s tough general, who reconquered Armenia for Rome, only to be implicated by his son-in-law in a plot to murder the emperor. (Plaster cast of an original portrait in the Centrale Montemartini of the Capitoline Museums, Rome, once indentified as Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo)
 
OTHO, for a long time Nero’s good friend, turned against him after his wife Poppaea Sabina set her sights on becoming empress. Otho would briefly be emperor in AD 69. (Capitoline Museum, Rome)
 
NERVA, himself later a respected occupant of the throne, served as one of Nero’s four special investigators who sought out sympathizers to the AD 65 Piso Plot against the emperor’s life. (Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, National Museum of Rome, Rome)
 
DOMUS AUREA PLANS showing a portion of Nero’s vast Golden House.
 
DOMUS AUREA. Modern-day ruins of part Nero’s extravagant Golden House palace at Rome.
 
GALBA was an austere man of seventy when the Senate declared him emperor after deposing Nero. (Antiques Museum in the Royal Palace, Stockholm; photo by Wolfgang Sauber)
 

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