Short Stuff: Nero and His Fiddle

Summary

Stuff You Should Know: Short Stuff – Nero and His Fiddle

Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Release Date: August 12, 2026
Duration: ~15 minutes (content: 01:19–15:06)

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Episode Overview

In this Short Stuff episode, Josh and Chuck take on the legendary story of Roman Emperor Nero "fiddling while Rome burned." Drawing on Josh's own older article for HowStuffWorks, the hosts explore the origins of the tale, the historical events of the Great Fire of Rome, why the story persists, and why it's likely propaganda rather than fact. The episode examines how myths take root, the real history of Nero's actions and reputation, and how language and political motives shape the stories we inherit.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origin of the Topic and Setup

• Josh discovers he wrote the source article
  • Chuck surprises Josh with an old HowStuffWorks piece—written by Josh himself—on the Nero legend.
  • Josh: “I like the cut of this writer's jib.” (01:30)
• Why the topic stands out
  • Despite its fame, they hadn’t dedicated a specific episode to the Nero fiddle story, only referencing it as part of larger discussions before.

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2. The Historical Context: The Great Fire of Rome

• Timeline and Devastation

  • Great Fire occurred in 64 AD, burned for six days and seven nights.
  • Rome saw about 70% of the city destroyed; only 4 out of 14 districts remained.
  • “Out of the… million people, which would be, by my count, 500,000 were rendered without a home because of this great fire.” — Chuck (03:04)

• Human Need to Assign Blame

  • Ancient Romans, like people today, sought explanations for disasters, with rumors and conspiracies quickly spreading.
  • Early accusations suggested the government, and especially Nero, may have started the fire for personal reasons (03:44).

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3. Why Did People Blame Nero?

• Rumors About Motives

  • Suspicions grew that Nero wanted to rebuild Rome to his own tastes.
  • “He was like, let's build this in, I don't know, Nero style, which is surprisingly close to the craftsman style of the 1920s.” — Josh (04:03)
  • They joke about architectural styles, keeping things light.

• Birth of the Fiddle Story

  • The infamous image: Nero “played his fiddle and just sort of watched it happen." (04:48)
  • The hosts note this quickly became a central rumor.

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4. The Reality: Did Nero Actually Fiddle?

• There Were No Fiddles

  • The violin family (“viol class”) did not exist until the 11th century—1,500 years after Nero’s time (08:31).
  • “It’s definitive… there literally were no fiddles at the time.” — Chuck (08:31)

• What Instruments Did Exist?

  • Nero played the “cithara,” similar to a lap-harp (09:02).
  • Nero was a music enthusiast, even organizing and competing in music festivals in newly conquered territories.

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5. Nero's Behavior and Public Image

• Nero's Response to the Fire

  • Was not in Rome when the fire began; rushed back from Antium; helped coordinate firefighting and provided public aid (09:50).
  • He opened public buildings and gardens for shelter, imported cheap grain; may have sold it for “super cheap,” but “still sold it, though.” (10:33–10:37)
  • Tacitus (Roman historian) documented these actions.

• Why Did the Story Persist?

  • Despite tangible help, blame persisted; persecuting Christians as scapegoats backfired and cemented his infamy.
  • The hosts cite Tacitus, and explain the Senate’s likely propagandistic role.
  • “His persecution of Christians did not work. And apparently… the fiddling thing was not… possible” — Josh (10:38)

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6. Origins and Meaning of "Fiddling"

• A Modern Language Twist

  • UNC historian Mary Frances Giles: “Fiddling” may not have meant literally playing music, but rather acting ineffectually or wasting time (11:27).
    • “Maybe that's what they originally meant.” — Josh (11:54)
  • The phrase “fiddling while Rome burned” could have referenced inattentiveness or inadequate action, not actual music.

• Quote:

  • "Fiddling doesn't just mean playing a violin. It can also mean just kind of doing something, like, with your fingers, ineffectually, like, you're wasting time and energy. You're just fiddling around." — Josh, paraphrasing Giles (11:27–11:54)

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7. Nero: More Villain Than Victim

• Sympathy for Nero? Not So Fast…

  • Despite highlighting the propaganda aspects of the “fiddle” story, Josh and Chuck remind listeners that Nero was a brutal ruler:
    • Ascended to the throne through murder; later had his own mother killed.
    • Persecuted Christians, ordering brutal executions like beheadings and crucifixions.
    • “Don't feel bad for this guy.” — Chuck (12:31)

• Damnatio ad bestias

  • “Sicing wild animals on people for executions.” — Josh (13:04)

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8. Nero’s Fall and Death

• Political Enemies and Downfall
  • Senate declares Nero a public enemy; the army deserts him, coup looms.
  • “[He] pushed a dagger into his throat about four years after the fire came and went.” — Josh (13:49)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I've never felt more alive than I do right now.” — Josh (02:31)
• “I don't know why I never thought of that.” — Chuck (11:54) [on the alternate meaning of ‘fiddling’]
• “If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much.” — Humorous aside (06:00, ad break, can ignore for summary)
• “There was also damnatio ad bestias, which is sicing wild animals on people for executions.” — Josh (13:04)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 01:19–01:44: Opening banter about the article’s origins
• 03:04: Destruction statistics and personal impact of the fire
• 04:03: Speculation about motives for rebuilding Rome
• 08:31: Disproving literal “fiddle” usage
• 09:50–10:33: Nero’s real emergency response
• 11:27: Mary Frances Giles’s reinterpretation of “fiddling”
• 12:31–13:13: Notorious actions by Nero and why not to defend him
• 13:49: Nero’s death and the Senate’s final verdict

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Tone, Language and Style

Josh and Chuck employ their signature friendly, witty, and conversational tone. They exchange playful barbs, make jokes about historical architecture and pop culture, and weave in scholarly insights without getting too academic.

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Takeaway

The myth of "Nero fiddling while Rome burned" is likely ancient political propaganda, not a literal or musical act. While Nero was a controversial figure—and indeed a tyrant not deserving of much sympathy—the famous story is more about the power of rumors, propaganda, and language change over time than about how one emperor spent his evening during a disaster.

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For more myth-busting and history deep-dives, check out other episodes of Stuff You Should Know!

Transcript

[Announcer]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Josh Clark]

Guaranteed Human with no fees or minimums on checking accounts. It's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also tell you about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep. Even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com bankguy Capital One NA member, FDIC. Let's be real. Eating is a huge part of our lives. It fuels us, it brings us together. And yes, it's one of life's great pleasures. But once a meal's over, we don't think much about what happens next. Unless something starts to feel off. Introducing Eating Interrupted, a new podcast from I Heart Ruby Studio, hosted by longtime journalist and Crohn's patient, Cynthia McFadden. Listen in to unpack what it means when your body doesn't always respond to food the way you expect, and what science is now revealing about why. Listen to Eating interrupted on the iHeart app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry, sitting in for Dave. And that makes this an official Short stuff. We have the quorum. Let's go.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. Do you recognize this article?

[Josh Clark]

No. Who wrote it? Did I write. Did you write it? Yeah, you wrote it. Did I really?

[Announcer]

Uh huh.

[Josh Clark]

Wow. I was like, this is pretty good.

[Chuck Bryant]

I took your name off of it because I was hoping you wouldn't remember this one.

[Josh Clark]

That's awesome. Yeah, this is not a bad article at all. That's great. Thank you for that because, yeah, I like this. I was like, I like the cut of this writer's jib. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So this is from the old housestuffworks.com days. And this is about the. And I was surprised we hadn't done a shorty on this. I was like, surely we have the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. And when I looked it up, there you were, buddy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I actually searched for an episode too, because it just sounds like we've definitely talked about it at some point, but it just had to have been a part of a larger episode. So let's dig in, because I feel like everybody, thanks to my article has heard that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. And it turns out that that is probably a piece of ancient propaganda that survived almost 2,000 years at this point.

[Chuck Bryant]

I Feel like you have a little extra wind beneath your wings now that you know this is yours.

[Josh Clark]

I've never felt more alive than I do right now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, we're talking, obviously, about the Great fire of Rome. For six days and seven nights, that's when Rome saw, and this is AD 64, saw 70% of its city destroyed and only four of its 14 districts intact afterward. And the Roman historian Tacitus wrote that out of the. About half the people, of the million people, which would be, by my count, 500,000 were rendered without a home because of this great fire.

[Josh Clark]

I knew that. So this being a massive tragedy, which 2,000 years, I feel like we can add a joke or two at this point. But it was such a huge tragedy, and it was just so out of nowhere that, of course, people just have an innate need to blame, to find cause, assign blame. People love doing that, even back in the day. And also people back in the day were as susceptible to rumors and urban legends as we are today. And those things started up really quickly. One of the main ones was that somehow the government was involved in this.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. Like, hey, we saw people. We saw men fanning the flames, and when confronted, they said that they were under orders to do so. Or, you know, maybe somebody actually started this fire on purpose. In Nero, the Emperor Nero was kind of the prime suspect.

[Josh Clark]

It seems like, yeah, that he ordered it, that he set the fire, or some people. He had to rebuild Rome. I mean, you had to rebuild it after so many of the districts were just totally leveled. And he was like, let's build this in, I don't know, Nero style, which is surprisingly close to the craftsman style of the 1920s.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really? No, I was like, that's very surprising. I thought you were gonna say art Deco.

[Josh Clark]

I was going to at first, and I was like, no, let me come up with something else.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

I should have just said art deco. It would have gotten a better laugh. But he rebuilt it in a manner that he liked. I mean, he was in charge at the time. And people were like, that's why Rome burnt because this guy wanted to rebuild it more in his image.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. So that rumor was going around, and through that rumor came the story that while the great fire was burning, Nero played his fiddle and just sort of watched it happen. Should we take a break right there?

[Josh Clark]

We should, because, I mean, what's coming up next is just eye popping.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. More goodness from Josh Clark of 15 years ago, right after this.

[Yamaneika Saunders]

This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamaneika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem.

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If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men do better or do less so I don't have to do so much.

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[Kerry Brownstein]

Hey, Portlandia fans.

[Fred Armisen]

Kerry Brownstein and Fred Armisen here.

[Kerry Brownstein]

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[Fred Armisen]

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I thought he was gonna write. I thought you were all gonna write a song.

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Listen to Podlandia Ayo. Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your pod.

[Josh Clark]

So Nero's like, wait a minute, wait, wait. I wasn't fiddling. We'll find out why that's definitive in a second. Why are you blaming me? And they're like, we're just blaming you. You gotta accept it. He's like, I don't. I'm going to find a scapegoat myself. I'll trot them out publicly, and then you can just stop blaming me. And he looked around, he's like, these Christians are new. I'm going to persecute them. And this actually became the first person persecution of Christians in history. This was 64 CE. And, I mean, Christianity was so new that there were still original apostles around who ended up being executed in this persecution.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Paul. Who was the other one?

[Josh Clark]

Paul and Peter. Paul was beheaded and Peter was crucified upside down.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So, like, torturous, brutal executions are happening because Nero is looking for a scapegoat because he was blamed for this fire. When you said before we're gonna talk about why it's definitive that he definitely didn't fiddle, it's because there was no fiddle at the time. Music historians basically agreed that the viol class of instruments, which is like a violin, didn't come around to the 11th century, so about 1500 years later. So there literally were no fiddles at the time.

[Josh Clark]

No, but he did play something called the Sith, which is like a laptop harp. The top is like for strumming, the bottom is for plucking. You've probably seen something like it before. But he was really into it. So much so that when Rome conquered some new land, he would schedule music festivals in these new lands, and he would schedule them at times that he could go and compete. He would compete. And the Senate was not happy about this. They're like, you're competing against commoners. You're the emperor. And apparently, Nero actually was more alike than we think he was today, especially among the lower classes of Rome, because he didn't behave nearly as superior toward them as other elites in Rome had and did.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, well, you know, one thing he definitely did was in the immediate aftermath of the fire, he did a lot, actually. He took a lot of measures to provide for the citizenry. He was at his place in Antium on the outskirts of Rome when it broke out. He immediately rushed back to the fire. Tacitus, that historian that I mentioned, was a boy at the time during the blaze, and he provided accounts of, like, hey, Nero helped coordinate the firefighting himself. On the first night. He opened up public buildings for housing. He opened up his own gardens for temporary shelter. He imported grain from other cities close by that I guess he sold, but sold, like, super cheap.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he still sold it, though. I thought that was a little hinky.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

But, yeah, so he was. A lot of the residents of Rome liked him. And Tacitus tells us like, he did actually swing into action, and yet he still managed to bear the blame throughout this. Like, his persecution of Christians did not work. And apparently, like we said, the fiddling thing was not. It's not possible that he fiddled. It is possible he was playing the sithara, but because of his responsiveness, it seems like that's probably not the case. So because this was probably largely created by the Senate, I think they were working hard to keep the blame on Nero. Right. There's a 1940s historian from university of North Carolina named Mary Frances Giles.

[Chuck Bryant]

Go Tar Heels.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And yes, if you're a Tar Heel, you can be proud of Mary Frances Giles because she was one of those rare people who managed to see something that everybody knows in a different light at a different angle. And she's like, you know, fiddling doesn't just mean playing a violin. It can also mean just kind of doing something, like, with your fingers, like, ineffectually, like, you're wasting time and energy. You're just fiddling around. Maybe that's what they originally meant.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know why I never thought of that.

[Josh Clark]

I definitely hadn't either. Even after writing this, it didn't even look familiar. Yeah, she was like, you know, maybe

[Chuck Bryant]

he's just fiddling, as in, like, doing something sort of useless. At the time, it sounds like that didn't happen either. But, yeah, maybe they viewed it as inadequate at the time, like, what he was doing. Maybe the truth wasn't getting around, that he was actually kind of helping.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And that actually fits with the idea that this is propaganda, that the Senate was basically saying Nero's responses were not nearly enough. He was just basically messing around.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. But, you know, if you're like, man, Nero got a bad rap. There's a brilliant writer who took that into consideration, probably, I don't know, 15 years ago, ish. And said, hey, don't feel so bad for Nero because Nero ascended to the throne because his mom killed his uncle. And then Nero had his mom killed. And then, of course, the persecution of the Christians. You know, hanging people by their feet and decapitating them. Like, don't feel bad for this guy.

[Josh Clark]

No. There was also damnatio ad bestias, which is sicing wild animals on people for executions.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, no good.

[Josh Clark]

So Nero essentially was on his heels after that Great fire again. Remember, the Senate didn't like him that much. I can't stress that enough. And so the army, which he had been on really good terms with for a while, was like, we're not going to work for you any longer. So there's a potential coup brewing. The Senate declared him a public enemy, which is not something you want levied against you as an emperor. It meant that he was probably going to be executed. So he pushed a dagger into his throat about four years after the fire came and went.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he said, I sense a Kubru. That was it. I don't know if he talked like that. You know, I'm watching this show right now and it's. Oh, Star City. Have you heard of this?

[Fred Armisen]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

Star City is a show that is. I can't remember the name of the first show, but there was a show about the space race, and there was an American version for all Mankind is what that was called from the American perspective. And Star City is the space race from the Soviet perspective. And it's really good. I think you would like it. But they cast all British actors and are doing British accents sort of like they used to just do for all movies back in the day. And it's just I gotta wrap my head around every single episode. When all these Brits are talking, I try to hear it with a Russian accent in my head, and it just kind of drives me nuts.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah, I can get used to that kind of thing. But I think it's also something that if you, once you focus in on it, you just can't get past.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know why in 2026, they just didn't say, like, you know, do a Russian accent.

[Josh Clark]

I know, it's appropriation.

[Chuck Bryant]

Russians. It's very strange.

[Josh Clark]

But I guess that's it for the short stuff, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, well, everybody, Short Stuff is out.

[Fred Armisen]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.