Nero

Nero Claudius Caesar became emperor in AD 54 at the age of sixteen, after the death of his adoptive father Claudius. His early years were guided by his tutor Seneca and the Praetorian prefect Burrus. Later came the killing of his mother Agrippina in AD 59 and a growing passion for the stage. He sang and played the lyre in public, which shocked senators who thought performing beneath an emperor's dignity.

The ancient accounts of the fire disagree. Tacitus writes that it is uncertain whether it was an accident or the emperor's crime, and reports the singing only as a rumor. Suetonius, writing at about the same time and hostile throughout, states that Nero set the fire himself and sang of the sack of Troy in stage costume while watching from the Tower of Maecenas. Cassius Dio repeats a version of the story. None of them mentions a fiddle, an instrument that had not yet been invented. According to Tacitus, Nero blamed the Christians of Rome and had many of them put to death. On the cleared ground he began his vast palace, the Golden House. In AD 68, abandoned by the Senate and the army, he took his own life.