10 Historical “Facts” That Have Ultimately Been Proven Very, VERY Wrong

It’s true that the fiddle did not yet exist in 64 AD, when the city of Rome caught on fire, but that isn’t enough on its own to dispel the myth. If Nero had been playing an instrument, it would have been another string instrument, like a lyre, which was popular at the time. 

The real issue is this: In order to have watched over the city and played the lyre, or the cithara, or even a grand piano whilst everything around him burned to the ground, Nero would have had to actually be in Rome at the time. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, Nero was actually away at his villa in Antium when the fire broke out.

Tacitus writes that Nero returned to the city and immediately began relief efforts for the “homeless and fugitive populace,” even opening up his own palace gardens to make room for temporary shelters. But, Tacitus writes, his measures “failed of their effect; for the report had spread that, at the very moment when Rome was aflame, he had mounted his private stage,⁠ and typifying the ills of the present by the calamities of the past, had sung the destruction of Troy.”

Sounds a bit like an ancient smear campaign. But don’t worry, Nero wasn’t undeserving of bad press in general. He wasn’t exactly a great guy.