Nero needed an audience and had sent messages to all the highly placed people he knew were in Rome. He had also ordered a thousand Praetorians to come and they were eating and drinking, seated on the grass under the well-watered trees in the gardens. Below us, the burning parts of the city glowed like crimson islands in the darkness, and the great swirls of smoke and fire seemed to reach right up into the sky.
Nero could wait no longer.
“In front of us lies a sight such as no mortal man has seen since the destruction of Troy,” he said in ringing tones. “Apollo himself has come down to me in a dream. When I awoke from this dream, stanzas came welling out from my heart as if in divine madness. I shall sing to you a verse I have composed on the burning of Troy. I think these stanzas will reverberate through the years to come and will make Nero immortal as a poet.”
A herald repeated his words as Nero climbed up the tower. There was not room for many people but naturally we did our best to get as near to him as possible. Nero began to sing, accompanying himself. His powerful voice rang out high above the sound of the fire and reached his hearers in the surrounding gardens. He sang as if bewitched and his poetry secretary supplied him with stanza after stanza which had been dictated during the day. But during the song, Nero composed new ones and another scribe was kept fully occupied writing more and more stanzas.
I had been to the theater to hear the classical drama often enough to know that he was quoting freely and had changed well-known verses either unconsciously in the moment of inspiration or using the license an artist is entitled to in such things. He sang for several hours on end. The centurions were hard put to keep the exhausted Praetorians awake with their batons.
But the experts kept saying that they had never heard such brilliant singing against such a splendid background. They applauded loudly in the intervals and said that what they had just experienced would be something to tell their children and grandchildren in times to come.
In the back of my mind, I wondered if Nero could possibly have become mentally deranged to choose to perform on a night like this. But I comforted myself with the thought that he had probably been deeply hurt by the accusations made by the people and so had transferred his great burden to artistic inspiration to relieve his feelings.
He stopped when the smoke forced him to and he began to cough and blow his nose. Then we took the chance to call out as one man, begging him to preserve his divine voice. But
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afterwards he was still scarlet in the face and radiant with sweat and triumph, promising to continue the following evening. Here and there on the edges of the fire, great clouds of steam rose into the sky as the aqueducts were opened and the water poured out into the smoking ruins of the city.
Tullia’s house on Viminalis lay quite near at hand, so I decided to go there and get a little sleep during the hours of the morning. I had not been worried about my father hitherto, for their house was safe for the time being. I did not even know whether he had come in from the country or not, but I could not see him among the other senators in Nero’s audience.
I found him alone, guarding his almost abandoned house, his eyes inflamed by the smoke. He told me that Tullia, with the help of a thousand slaves, had on the first day of the fire moved all the articles of value from the house out to a country property.
Jucundus, who had had his boy’s hair cut in the spring and had a narrow red border on his tunic, had run off to look at the fire with his friends from the Palatine school. Both his feet had been badly burned when a stream of molten metal had suddenly poured down a slope from one of the burning temples. He had been carried home and Tullia had taken him with her into the country. My father thought he would be a cripple for life.
“Then your son at least won’t have to do military service,” he added, stammering a little, “and spill his blood in the deserts of the East some-where beyond the Euphrates.”
I was surprised to see that my father had been drinking too much wine, but I realized that he was very shaken by Jucundus’ accident. He saw me looking at him.
“It doesn’t matter that I am drinking wine again for once,” he said angrily. “I think the day of my death is approaching. I am not grieving over Jucundus. His feet were much too swift and had already taken him along dangerous paths. It is better to find the kingdom of God as a cripple than to let your heart be destroyed. I myself have been a spiritual cripple ever since your mother’s death, Minutus.”
My father was already well over sixty and he liked to return to the past in his memories. One thinks about death much more at his age than mine, so I did not take much notice at the time.
“What were you muttering about the deserts of the East and the Euphrates?” I asked him.
My father took a large gulp of the dark wine in his gold goblet and then turned to me.
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