The Great Fire of Rome by Joseph J. Walsh

Author:Joseph J. Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Another source suggests that two further methods of execution likely offered even more variety to Nero’s proceedings.50 Writing towards the end of the first century, just a few decades after the Great Fire, Clement of Rome mentioned Christian “Danaids and Dirces” having suffered ghastly deaths.51 The most plausible interpretation of Clement’s assertion is that these were women the Romans dressed up as Danaids or Dirces and executed in enactments of other Greek myths, and the only plausible context for these enactments is Nero’s notorious scapegoating executions.52

In their tale, forty-nine Danaids murdered their bridegrooms on their wedding night and so, in one version, were condemned to an eternity of pouring water from jugs into a bottomless tub. Did Nero stage some sort of watery death for the Christian “Danaids”?53 He might have had them drowned before the crowd, for example, possibly in some unexpected way. The Romans were, after all, antiquity’s masters of all things hydraulic, as their aqueducts, bathhouses, and fountains testify,54 and their ingenuity was boundless when it came to staging executions. In a different myth, a stepmother worthy of the grimmest fairy tales, Dirce tried to get her stepsons to kill their mother; instead, they tied Dirce to the horns of a bull, which dragged and gored her to death. Did Nero present bulls savaging Christian “Dirces” (fig. 6)? The use of animals in executions was standard operating procedure among the Romans—think of those dogs again—and around 130 years later a heifer was used to dispatch the Christian women martyrs Perpetua and Felicity in a Roman arena in Africa.55

Tacitus did not mention Danaids or Dirces, but we should not assume that in his brief account of the Christians’ sufferings he was enumerating every act in Nero’s production. If the martyrs Clement mentioned were part of Nero’s spectacle, there may have been an additional point to their inclusion. The only building Dio named as destroyed in the Great Fire was the Amphitheater of Taurus, named after the general who erected the amphitheater and whose name translates as “Bull.” The myth of Dirce might have offered a bit of vicious poetic justice to the putative destroyers of Bull’s Amphitheater. The Great Fire may also have approached, reached, or even damaged or destroyed the colonnade of Danaids that mostly fronted the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, and the temple and colonnade may have been the site of one of the vigiles’ most successful defenses of Rome’s architectural and religious heritage.56

If so, then how satisfying must it have been to dress these impious arsonists as the Danaids they had threatened or even harmed and to extinguish their lives with fire’s primary adversary, water? The Romans relished this sort of nasty wit. Besides, one of the functions of the fatal charades was to restore what the Romans deemed to be the proper order of things and among people. A definitive restoration of order required that the villains be deprived of their dignity and even their humanity. Moreover, if vigiles did save the

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