Isis, who was seen as a caring goddess welcoming both men and women, rich and poor, and who promised eternal life and aid with her followers’ earthly woes, soon had thousands of followers among all classes at Rome, but particularly among the lower classes. The cult of Isis involved certain mysteries, which Isiacs were not permitted to reveal to nonbelievers. There were even a number of similarities between the cult of Isis and the later Christian faith, not the least being initiation by baptism in water, the belief in resurrection, and the adoration of a holy mother and son—Isis and Horus. Later statues of the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Jesus Christ bear a striking resemblance to the earlier statues of Isis nursing her son Horus, which may well have inspired them.
By AD 64, the cult of Isis had been in and out of favor at Rome for a century. In 21 BC, Augustus’ efficient right-hand man, Marcus Agrippa, forbade the rites of the cult of Isis to be practiced within a mile of Rome. In AD 18-19, during the early years of the reign of the next emperor, Tiberius, four thousand “Egyptians” and Jews, all of them freedmen of military age (18 to 46), were rounded up at Rome and sent to repress brigands on the island of Sardinia.
The remaining Egyptians and Jews at the capital, including those who held Roman citizenship, were required to either abandon their faith or depart Italy by a given date. In addition, said Suetonius, Tiberius forced “all citizens who embraced these superstitious faiths to burn their religious vestments and other accessories.”
14
Those priests of Isis who failed to give up their faith were crucified, on Tiberius’ orders. According to the author Philo Judaeus, a first-century Jewish elder at Alexandria, this pre-Christian persecution of the Jews was driven by Tiberius’ Praetorian prefect, Sejanus, who possessed, in Philo’s words, a “hatred of, and hostile designs against, the Jewish nation.”
15
Tiberius, meanwhile, was said to have personally cast a statue of Isis into the Tiber River.
Under the next emperor, Gaius—Caligula, as we know him—both Egyptians and Jews returned to Rome, and Isis was officially adopted into the Roman pantheon. Caligula even dedicated his new palace on the Palatine Hill to the goddess, calling it the Aula Isiaca, or Hall of Isis. But his successor Claudius expelled all followers of Isis from Rome for, according to Suetonius, “creating disturbances.” Jews were separately banned from the city by Claudius for similar “disturbances.”
16
Under Nero, not only was the cult of Isis permitted at Rome, but the emperor also added several Isiac feast days to the official calendar. Nero was going through a period in which he was obsessed with all things Egyptian, and it has been suggested that his interest in Isis came about through the influence of Chaeremon, former librarian at the Sarapium, the temple of Sarapis, at Alexandria. This Egyptian Stoic was said to be briefly Nero’s tutor when he was a boy.
It has also been suggested that once Nero became emperor, Apollonius of Tyrana, a client of Nero’s who, guided by Egyptian priests, professed himself to be a teacher from heaven and was a follower of Isis, influenced Nero’s beliefs. Many scholars believe that Nero, wracked by guilt after he brought about the murder of his mother in AD 59, began a search for spirituality that saw him, for a time at least, personally embrace the cult of Isis, the mother goddess. While his interest in Egypt and Egyptian customs had not waned by AD 64, Nero seems to have moved on from Isis in his restless quest for spiritual relief.
Some Christian legends even suggest that Nero consulted the Apostle Paul while the evangelist was at Rome, and that Nero’s freedwoman mistress Acte and his official cup-bearer at the Palatium were converted to Christianity by Paul. It was through this pair’s influence, so legend has it, that the emperor consulted Paul. The traditional belief that Acte was a Christian, or certainly the modern perpetuation of it, stems from the 1895 novel
Quo Vadis
by Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, who made the character of Acte a Christian. Part of the attraction of Paul’s creed to Nero supposedly was the belief in a holy mother and a virgin birth—a belief shared by Christianity, the cult of Isis, and other Eastern religions—but this is contradicted by the fact that the Virgin Mary never featured in Paul’s teachings.
Tacitus makes it clear that despite every benevolent act by Nero immediately following the Great Fire, which, Tacitus says brought him great short-term popularity with the public, he could not overcome the power of the rumor that swept through the city even faster than the all-devouring flames: that he had caused the disaster. It was in character for Nero, a twenty-six-year-old dominated by others all his early life, wracked by major self-confidence issues, and plagued by a perplexing rumor campaign that set the blame for the fire at his feet, to find scapegoats, to shift the blame from his own shoulders.
The cult of Isis, while initially attracting Nero, had come to disappoint him. In the end, he very publicly scorned the cult. In laying blame for the Great Fire at the feet of the followers of Isis, he could have been sure of tapping into widespread public distaste for the cult. The followers of Isis were generally disliked by other Romans, particularly those of the upper classes. The poet Juvenal, for example, ridiculed followers of Isis. His contemporary, Plutarch, the Greek historian who served as a priest at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi at one time, considered the cult of Isis detestable. Suetonius, writing early in the second century, described the cult of Isis as “that rather questionable order.”
17
One of the criticisms that most Romans had of the cult was its adoration of animals—the crocodile, the ibis, and the long-tailed ape among them. Isis herself was depicted with the horns of a bull jutting from her head, while her male consort, Sarapis, god of the underworld, was often represented as a bull. In the Navigium Isidis, the festival of Isis that took place on March 5, which became part of the Roman calendar as the opening of the Mediterranean sailing season each year with the blessing of the fleets, a priest wearing the dog head of Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, took part in the official procession that opened the festivities. These animal gods were hideous to Romans accustomed to worshipping deities that took human form, while participation in the cult was considered shameful.
Other evidence hints at the identity of those who were executed on Nero’s orders after the Great Fire. Look again at what the
Annals
says about them: “Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished.” Consider also that followers of Isis were seen by Romans to worship animals, and that Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, had the head of a dog. Conversely, the priests of Isis eschewed all contact with animal products, which were considered unclean, and wore linen garments and sandals made from papyrus. For all these reasons, the mockery to which Tacitus refers—with the condemned made to wear animal skins as they were torn to pieces by dogs—strongly suggests that these people were followers of Isis.
There was one other connection: As Nero would have known, fire played a key part in Isiac religious observances. This made the burning to death of some of the prisoners another mockery of the cult, just as it would have made the connection between the worship of Isis and the Great Fire credible to Romans at the time. It is not impossible that followers of Isis were indeed guilty of either spreading the fire, to “cleanse” Rome, or of possibly setting the second-stage blaze in the Aemilian property.
The first part of the relevant passage from Tacitus, as he wrote it, may have originally read something like the following: “Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, followers of the cult of Isis, called Egyptians by the populace, which had taken root at Rome, where all things hideous and shameful find their center and become popular.”
All the indications are that the cult of Isis was subdued over the next few years after the Great Fire, before one of the first three of the four emperors of the tumultuous year of AD 68-69—Galba, Otho, or Vitellius— again permitted the worship of Isis. So rehabilitated did the cult of Isis become under the Flavian emperors that in AD 71, Vespasian and his son Titus actually spent a vigil in the Iseum on the Campus Martius the night prior to celebrating their joint triumph for putting down the Jewish revolt in Judea.
Vespasian’s second son, Domitian, last of the three Flavian emperors, owed his life to his disguising himself as a priest of Isis in December AD 69. He may have shaved his head as the priests did—they shaved their entire bodies every three days—and donned their simple, ankle-length linen robe, to effect his escape from the burning Capitoline complex, accompanied by his cousin Clemens, who was similarly disguised. They may also have worn the dog’s-head mask of Anubis, as was the case when an aedile named Marcus Volusius used the same disguise, that of a priest of Isis, to escape the First Triumvirate’s proscriptions that followed the murder of Julius Caesar. Domitian’s escape came when men of the emperor Vitellius’ bodyguard, the so-called German Guard, were besieging Vespasian’s brother Sabinus, his family members, and supporters on the Capitoline Mount.
Once he ascended the throne, Domitian declared himself the incarnation of Isis’ consort Serapis and actively encouraged and promoted the cult. He repaired the Temple of Isis on the Campus Martius, which was seriously damaged in the fire of AD 80, and he decorated several other temples to Isis and Serapis, including the one on the Capitoline Mount. Domitian is also believed to have erected a new temple to Isis at Beneventum, in AD 88.
Historian Tacitus, a senator during the reign of Domitian, despised the cruel, vindictive young emperor and everything that he stood for, but was ashamed of himself for acquiescing to Domitian’s bloody rule. Without doubt, like fellow historian Suetonius, Tacitus also despised the cult of Isis and had no hesitation in branding it “hideous and shameful,” if for no other reason than the fact that it had been adopted by Domitian. In reality, it is doubtful that Tacitus, a clearly dedicated adherent of the Roman gods, had ever heard much about either Christianity or Christ, while he would have lifelong exposure to, and some knowledge of, the cult of Isis. This all made it much more likely that he would describe Isiacs as “hideous and shameful,” but not Christians.
Yet, for all this discussion of fiddles and Christians, and questions about the mystery of who lit the fire, much more complex historical questions relating to the Great Fire need to be explored. The Rome of AD 64 was a bustling, flourishing metropolis that famously never slept. It was experiencing boom times, as was Rome’s empire as a whole. Military disasters in the east and in Britain several years before were now recent history. In Britain, the Celtic war queen Boudicca and her rebels had been bloodily quashed in AD 60-61, and it was business as usual for Roman commerce there. In Armenia, brilliant Roman general Domitius Corbulo had twice overrun Armenian and Parthian forces and in AD 63 had forced the Parthian-born king of Armenia, Tiridates I, to become a Roman ally.
More than that, Corbulo had wrung agreement from Tiridates that he would come to Rome, bow down to Nero, and acknowledge him as his sovereign lord—which he would do in AD 66. Never before had a Parthian bowed down to a Roman emperor. Nero’s fame and popularity were at their zenith with the ordinary Roman people. How is it then, that within four years of the Great Fire, Nero would be deserted by his people and forced to flee his throne? What changed the public’s attitude toward, dampened their ardor for, and destroyed their loyalty to their young emperor, the last member of the revered family of the Caesars?
There had frequently been serious fires at Rome prior to AD 64, and several more conflagrations would destroy significant portions of the city over the forty years that followed. The next major blaze would be a deliberately lit fire that destroyed the Capitoline complex in AD 69. Another fire caused widespread devastation on the Campus Martius in AD 80, while yet another did serious damage in the center of Rome in AD 104.
Nonetheless, the destruction of almost two-thirds of Rome by a raging fire was a disaster matched only by the destruction of much of the city by the Celts in 390 BC. It was an event that undoubtedly traumatized the population. And within months of the AD 64 fire, several plots by both Roman aristocrats and officers of Nero’s own palace guard to overthrow him would be exposed. Within another year of those plots, major revolts against Nero’s rule would explode in Judea and Gaul, and the die would be cast. Nero’s inglorious end was nigh.
This book explores two aspects of the Great Fire—the physical fire that engulfed the capital of the Roman world in AD 64 and the political fire unleashed in its wake and which led to the destruction of the Caesar dynasty. Using the texts of numerous classical authors as its sources, this book faithfully follows the lives of Nero and many of the figures whose fortunes would be affected by the Great Fire. The narrative begins as the year AD 64 began, on New Year’s Day.
I
THE JANUARY OATH
S
ilence. The winter wind ruffled the golden-yellow horsehair parade plumes on their gleaming helmets. Large, curved, wooden shields bearing the thunderbolt emblem sat on their left arms. Right hands rested on the hilts of the Roman short sword, the
gladius
, sheathed on each man’s right side. Rank upon rank upon rank of men in segmented body armor and blood red tunics. Recruited exclusively from Rome and central and southern Italy, the best-paid men in the Roman army. The Praetorians.