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00:00The fire is still one of antiquity's greatest mysteries.
00:07Why, in a city where fires were frequent, was this one so devastating?
00:16Many Romans accused the young emperor Nero of arson.
00:20He blamed a new religious sect, the Christians, and had them publicly burned.
00:30Nearly 2,000 years on, we reveal new evidence of how the flames spread so far, so fast.
00:41And an inspired piece of detective work into who burnt Rome.
00:47The Roman Forum, heart of ancient Rome, political centre of its vast empire.
01:00Ransacked, burnt and rebuilt throughout ancient times.
01:04Now a maze of ruins.
01:06But as today's archaeologists dig deeper and deeper, the truth about the great fire is finally being unearthed.
01:16When the fire came through, it swept through this whole district.
01:19We've seen in some of the excavations, houses completely devastated.
01:23Materials exploded, the timbers black and charred and so forth.
01:29And this essentially wiped out this luxurious whole city.
01:33The fire went right down to the place of the kings.
01:36They're called the Regia, the temple of Vesta was burned, right to the very edge of the forum.
01:42For centuries, excavations in Rome ignored traces of fire damage in the search for underlying buildings.
01:52But as this team penetrates layer after layer of ancient history, everything found is painstakingly recorded.
01:59The excavation is the brainchild of the greatest living Italian archaeologist, Andrea Carandini.
02:11His finds reveal the ferocity of the fire in the very centre of Rome.
02:19It's 20 years that I'm digging here.
02:22And in these 20 years, we have dug 10,000 square metres.
02:28And first, we saw all the imperial phase.
02:33And then we arrived at the fire of Nero.
02:38And 64 after Christ.
02:41And we found all the layer, you know, of ashes.
02:45And we dug the layer.
02:47And we went down.
02:49And we found the house of the aristocracy of Rome.
02:53Everything was destroyed.
02:58There was not one single house standing.
03:10Built on seven great hills in the valley of the river Tiber, Rome was the biggest city on earth.
03:16Its five square miles contained about a million inhabitants from all over the empire.
03:27The story of the fire is the tale of two cities.
03:30Weighted on by slaves, the elite lived in luxury in rich Rome, hub of the huge empire, full of great buildings of stone and marble.
03:39The vast majority lived in poor Rome, a dangerous teeming slum, full of speedily built multi-storey buildings rented out by the rich.
04:00The poor slept where they worked, dreaming of riches that never came.
04:14The tenements were a recipe for social discontent and fire.
04:19The fire risk must have been appalling in these buildings because, first of all on the ground floor, the commercial premises were full of flammable articles, wooden furniture and a whole lot of junk everywhere.
04:35And then the multi-storey buildings, each storey had timber joists, as in a modern building separating the floors.
04:42And then, if they were partly timber-framed buildings, a typical construction was a timber framing with stones and mud filling it in.
04:52And so there was a tremendous amount of timber there.
04:55So it was partly the nature of the buildings, but it was partly the chaotic nature of the life that went on in them.
05:01You know, people trying to cook and do their craft activities, some of which would, of course, have involved fire, in these very crowded, disorganized spaces.
05:11The night of July the 19th, 64 AD, was a full moon.
05:18Emperor Nero was partying outside Rome.
05:21In summer, fires were frequent and Rome had a fire brigade of 7,000 men with buckets and axes.
05:27But even in their worst nightmares, few can have imagined the disaster that lay in store.
05:33The fire began right by the Circus Maximus.
06:01A huge arena seating a quarter of a million spectators.
06:11The most reliable ancient historian to describe the fire is Tacitus.
06:16The fire broke out in shops selling flammable goods.
06:19And fanned by the wind, the conflagration instantly grew and swept the whole length of the Circus.
06:29The suggestion is that the fire rage down this side of the Circus here.
06:35Now, the modern buildings that we can see here, if we take away the traffic of Rome, give us a tiny bit of the feel of what there might have been.
06:44Some rather scruffy-looking shops with wooden shutters on the front.
06:48And we must imagine that they rose two or three stories higher than this.
06:53Because Tacitus goes on to say why the fire travelled so fast.
06:58He says, the mischief travelled fast and the town being an easy prey owing to the narrow twisting lanes and formless streets typical of old Rome.
07:08So not only were there these shops full of, well, first of all timber furniture and structures inside and flammable articles in them.
07:16But they were jumbled higgledy-piggledy together in rather poorly built and partly timber buildings.
07:22And so it was very easy for the fire to rage down through them.
07:30Tacitus says fire gutted the whole Circus Maximus district.
07:34But how did it spread from here to the Roman Forum?
07:38Thanks to some new discoveries, we now know one route, the triumphal way.
07:43Now a highway, this was the road taken by Rome's conquering heroes as they progressed to the Roman Forum,
07:58turning west at the present site of the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, both built after Nero.
08:05Six metres below ground level, recent excavations found clear traces of the Great Fire.
08:12In particular, apart from pieces of burnt wood, we found things like nails from the beams of the roos
08:41that had fallen onto the basalt pavements and completely melted.
08:53North of the road that went up towards the Forum, we found a gate completely twisted by the fire.
09:00It had fallen along with the decorative masonry of travertine stone that lay strewn across the paved road.
09:09The flames even burnt their way into steps of travertine stone.
09:18Nearby, the scattered remains of the bronze base to an imperial statue.
09:24It had exploded into fragments, suggesting temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees centigrade.
09:31Inscriptions on another statue base dated to between 59 and 70 A.D.
09:36So Penela is certain this must have been the fire of 64.
09:43The fire, at least in this valley, must have been truly terrifying.
09:52To melt nails, to melt travertine stone, to melt marble, or to leave strong imprints of fire on solid elements, marble, stone or whatever.
10:05All this means the heat must have reached remarkable levels.
10:17Having progressed up the triumphal way, the fire was about to engulf the Forum, home to Rome's rich and powerful.
10:25How was it making such violent progress?
10:27A sinister explanation from Tacitus.
10:31Nobody dared fight the flames.
10:34Attempts to do so were prevented by menacing gangs.
10:37And torches were openly thrown in by men shouting that they acted under orders.
10:46The fire burnt on for a full nine days.
10:49Who or what was stoking it?
10:57The great fire of 64 A.D. would sweep over the Palatine Hill, long the site of Rome's imperial palaces.
11:16It would also rage through the Roman Forum, part of Nero's vast empire.
11:21But what was driving it?
11:27Andrea Carandini is excavating the slope from the Arch of Titus, built after Nero, into the Forum itself.
11:37The most exclusive district of ancient Rome.
11:43Down there, there was the best place to live in Rome.
11:48One could say the Manhattan of Rome, or even the centre of Manhattan of Rome.
11:52And where all the consuls would live.
11:57The consuls' great rival for power, Nero, who'd now been emperor ten years.
12:03Murderous, vain and tyrannical, he wanted political power at their expense.
12:08Here in the Atrians, the private courtyard of aristocratic Rome.
12:13A short walk from the Senate House, the consuls plotted against Nero.
12:18He's often been accused of arson, as the fire destroyed their mansions.
12:22The aristocracy were living down there, in big aristocratic houses of 800 square metres, of many layers, with big atrium to receive, you know, friends, and to make the politics.
12:38Because it's in those atrium of those houses, that the politics of Rome was decided, you know, because they were the men in power.
12:46Men in power.
12:47The men in power would soon be powerless in the face of the blaze.
12:52So, when the North was a ship, there was no longer in power.
12:57The moment we thought of the name of the الا friends, I was lucky to have picked up a cop in your own place.
13:02This man, I was lucky and the king, I was lucky to have.
13:03The moon is the only one to have a hero in my life.
13:05The sun is the only one to have a hero in my life.
13:07So, let's just, what you know, the blue moon.
13:09Arson or accident, ever since there's been fierce disagreement.
13:30For the accident theorists, this just happened to be a fire that got out of control.
13:35In Rome, on any given day, there might be as many as a hundred minor fires we'd start.
13:43This was a huge, chaotic city, and out of those hundred fires a day, perhaps two or three might be serious.
13:50There was immense possibility for fire breaking out, and in the high summer season, when this warm, dry wind blows in,
13:58given the carelessness, sacrifices taking place all over the place, which involved burning in many cases,
14:04minor cooking activities of an uncontrolled sort, were just two of the very easy reasons why fires might break out.
14:14But once it had broken out, could the fire have spread with such ferocity through the stone and marble houses of rich Rome, purely by accident?
14:23One answer could lie in their furnishings. Could they help explain how the fire spread within houses, and, most important of all, between them?
14:35To test that out, we designed the pyrotechnic experiment at the building research establishment in Watford.
14:42The purpose-built fire chamber contains household objects typical of aristocratic Rome.
14:49It's predominantly the contents of most buildings that contribute to the initial stages of the growth of a major configuration of fire anyway.
14:58In this mock-up of a room in a fairly affluent Roman household, we hope to show how the contents of that room will react in the event of a fire.
15:09Fire looks for an upward path as much as it can until it finds a window, a door, or any opening in which it can escape.
15:16If it can't escape, it builds up a layer of heat, which gets deeper and hotter, radiating heat down, rather like a grill, heating up all horizontal surfaces below it.
15:38Whatever its scale, fire needs air supply, fuel, and heat. Without any one of these three, it dies.
15:46The fire feeds off the fuel of the household contents. Within a few minutes, it generates its own air currents as flames seek out the oxygen they need to spread.
16:00Temperatures soon rise to around 600 centigrade.
16:04Items far from the fire source are grilled by such advance heat radiation from above.
16:20They smoke and catch fire before flames actually touch them.
16:24Temperature than expected, the blaze peaks twice and lasts a full half hour.
16:42The fire produces such extreme heat, part of the ceiling collapses.
17:00The flames even eat their way through the top of the fire chamber, and the fire has to be put out.
17:13So the test shows how fast the fire could have spread within Rome's great mansions.
17:22Excavations show these were built cheek by jowl, even in the forum.
17:28So how easily could the fire have jumped from one building to another?
17:32As a fire advances across either an item such as this, or from building to building, it's the same thing.
17:43When it comes to jumping a gap, if this building is a light, the radiant heat from that building is drying out this one opposite.
17:53It is effectively creating ideal conditions for that item to reach its spontaneous ignition temperature.
17:59That is the temperature at which it will ignite without the application of a naked flame.
18:04What's more, excavations show just how much rich Rome was built not of marble or stone, but of wood.
18:24When a temple just outside the forum collapsed in the blaze,
18:28fragments of wood were preserved underneath as heat turned them into carbon fossils.
18:34These wooden time capsules are being analysed at Rome University.
18:47There are 3,000 of them, from miniature hardwood carvings to big chunks of structural timber, ancient roof supports.
18:55This is probably the largest piece.
19:06It's from a beam that has been split in two so that we can analyse it.
19:11You can see the yearings in the wood.
19:13This is fir, a wood that the Romans used to import because it didn't grow in this area in the first century AD.
19:20These beams could also have been used in the upper floors of the rooms that collapsed.
19:27Excavations inside the forum also reveal roofs, upper floors and terraces all made of timber.
19:41Rich Rome was a sitting target for accidental fires.
19:44And its spread was remorseless.
19:50At the bottom of the forum, it reached the temple of the Vestal Virgins.
20:00Their duty, to keep alight day and night, the sacred flame that symbolised the life of Rome.
20:07The Temple of Vestal, which we know was burnt down, was the sacred hearth of Rome.
20:33This was, as it were, the home of the city, the very heart of the city.
20:38And these special Vestal Virgins had existed since the time of the kings in Rome, going way back 600 BC,
20:45to protect the hearth, to protect the centre of Rome.
20:49The building in which this was done was burnt down.
20:52Now I have to say, this did actually happen at other times.
20:55They did have fires, because they were looking after a hearth that was always kept burning.
20:59But in this particular context, with the burning of a very large part of the city,
21:03this must have seemed, psychologically, the most tremendous blow.
21:10For many, there was nowhere to run.
21:12The forum was probably hit by a three-pronged attack, as flames spread into it from one end,
21:18via the Triumphal Way, from the other end, near the Capitol, and over the top of the Palatine Hill itself.
21:24Grand imperial buildings constructed after the fire now cover much of the Palatine.
21:40But fines both here and in the forum show this was the scene of a great catastrophe.
21:45There's an unusual piece of evidence from the forum itself, and also from this Palatine Hill.
21:54And this is in the finds of coins.
21:56The coins found include a large number of the smallest Roman coin, which was called a quadrant.
22:03It was rather like our old-fashioned farthing.
22:05And this is the sort of small change which people would have in their pocket.
22:08And the fact that so many have been found in the forum area suggests that money was dropped just as it was in people's pockets.
22:17And if you find a collection like that, it suggests that some catastrophe has happened, which has frozen things.
22:23The finds from the forum are very like those from Pompeii, which, of course, was also stopped by a catastrophe.
22:29Tacitus indicates a south-easterly wind fanned the flames as they spread along the Circus Maximus.
22:38But now the flames had gone, in spite of the wind, both south and north.
22:43Up the Aventine Hill to the south, and up the Palatine Hill to the north.
22:48The Watford experiment suggests that this too could have been accidental.
22:57The bigger the fire, the bigger the updrafts it creates as flames search for oxygen.
23:02Huge updrafts would have swirled up and round the tall buildings and hills of Rome.
23:07The result, an inferno spreading in more than one direction, impossible to control.
23:13It's extremely difficult when a fire reaches such an advanced stage, a major configuration.
23:25It's out of control, beyond the means, certainly, of the Imperial Rome Fire Brigade.
23:33Flames then destroyed the Sabura, the vast slums to the north,
23:37where hundreds of thousands were crammed into wooden tenements, a tinderbox waiting to go up.
23:43Nine days after it began, the fire was finally put out.
23:55Historian Cassius Dio wrote, countless people died in the calamity.
24:00Tacitus reports ten of Rome's 14 districts destroyed or badly hit.
24:05Next to the Sabura, the majestic Forum of Augustus was only saved by its 30-metre-high firewalls made of Tufa, a volcanic rock.
24:17A sanctuary in the middle of what Henry Hurst believes was an accidental catastrophe.
24:21We are here in a sort of protected island of this Forum and Temple in its open space, but from the description of ten-fourteenths of the city, so that's five-sevenths of it, being damaged or totally destroyed by the fire, I think we can imagine that round us there must have been the most horrendous scene of devastation.
24:47But does the accident theory really hold up?
24:54Tacitus says arsonists obstructed firefighters and added to the blaze.
25:00Why did this fire wreak such havoc? Did arson make the difference?
25:09The Watford test could also be seen as supporting the arson theory, as it confirms the extreme flammability of Rome.
25:18In a city where fires were common, this would have been well known to any arsonist with a grudge against Rome's elite.
25:24What of the fire's merciless three-pronged attack on the Roman Forum? Could this happen without human intervention?
25:38Did the flames really pan out on their own, with the wind to the north and against it to the south?
25:47Another sinister fact. After six days, the fire was out. But strangely, it started up all over again.
26:04Tacitus says it did so in a highly suspect location, implicating the Emperor.
26:13Before panic had subsided or hope revived, flames broke out again in the more open regions of the city.
26:20This new confirmation caused additional ill-feeling, because it started on the estate of Tigellinus.
26:27Tigellinus was Nero's closest advisor. Are we to believe the fire just happened to reignite on his land?
26:35Or did Nero order him to restart the fire? And if so, why?
26:44After the great fire, extra sacrifices were made to appease Vulcan, the fire god.
27:02But many accused the emperor of arson, saying he wanted to raise Rome to the ground and rebuild it in his own name as Nerooponus.
27:15The supreme egotist with a passion for the arts, Nero was a power-hungry killer who'd kicked his own wife to death.
27:22He was vain and ruthless enough to have had Rome torched.
27:31Till now, there's been little hard evidence that the fire suited his grandiose building plans.
27:36But new excavations lend weight to the ancient rumours.
27:41Nero wanted to build a colossal series of palaces, and he needed a third of all Rome to build it up.
27:56Now, if all the houses were private and with private ownership, it was quite difficult to expropriate them, also for Nero.
28:06But if a great fire would destroy them, then that would be the great occasion to reform all the urbanisation of Rome in this area.
28:18Carandini's excavations show that after the fire, Nero rebuilt the forum at the expense of his political enemies, the aristocracy.
28:26He commandeered their land, tearing down their charred homes to turn them into a shopping mall.
28:32All these houses were destroyed, so the aristocracy didn't have a proper place to live anymore in the centre of Rome.
28:42And the mall remained, but it became a shopping mall, storehouses.
28:50And here, these walls are the walls of the storehouses, you know, very commercial type of building,
29:00which are built on the top of the aristocratic Rome, which existed before the fire, and which never was rebuilt.
29:10So it's the end of the, in a way, of the power of aristocracy Rome.
29:20The forum would now glorify Nero.
29:23His architects straightened the Via Sacra, the sacred way,
29:26that led to the colossal new statue of the emperor at the entrance to the Domus Aurea,
29:31his huge palace built right after the fire.
29:41If those houses wouldn't have been destroyed,
29:44there would have been no entrance to the Domus Aurea.
29:47So it's completely functional.
29:49That is the reason why you see a connection, you see.
29:52But when you look at things, then how could he have arrived through the crooked way,
29:57which was much lower down?
29:59It had, everything had to be changed, you see.
30:02And so the forum would have been a sort of vestibulum of the house of the tyrant.
30:07A bit, you know, you know the archer, you know the architect of Speer in Berlin for Hitler?
30:13That sort of thing.
30:15The great octagonal dome in Nero's Domus Aurea, or Golden House,
30:41named after the gold leaf that covered much of its interior.
30:45The ultimate palace.
30:47It included a vast park and lake in the very centre of Rome.
30:51All that's left now, an underground ruin.
31:01The Domus Aurea is really an interesting kind of palace,
31:05because it's not a palace at all.
31:07It's really structured much more like a villa,
31:09situated in the city.
31:12And it would have been seen as very inappropriate on the part of the elite in Rome.
31:18They had aspirations as well,
31:21and they would have been happy if Nero had built the Domus Aurea out in the country.
31:27But to do it here in the city really was an extraordinary kind of statement.
31:32And the fact that it occupies the urban heart of the city also,
31:35was an enormous statement of Nero's position and prestige.
31:44In just four years, Nero rebuilt central Rome.
31:47He issued some of the first ever building regulations to help prevent fire.
31:52Thanks to him, it became a city of boulevards, much more like Rome today.
32:01You can see why the fire of 64 spreads so fast,
32:07if you look at the building regulations decreed by Nero straight after the fire.
32:12He ordered everyone to use a particular type of brick or stone.
32:22There must be a secure distance between houses.
32:25At the time of the fire, the houses had been attached with no gap between them.
32:30And also, houses had to have a portico setting them back from the road.
32:35The fire gave Nero an opportunity to really start from scratch
32:44and have grand wide boulevards that ran at right angles to one another
32:50and long colonnated streets.
32:52And even Tacitus has to admit that after the fire,
32:56the reconstructed, rebuilt, reborn city of Rome was truly impressive.
33:05But would Nero, so keen to prevent fire after 64,
33:09have burnt Rome to rebuild it, the Domus Aurea its crowning glory?
33:14Here the experts disagree,
33:16and strong arguments suggest Nero wouldn't have ordered arson after all.
33:23It seems unlikely that Nero would have started the great fire of AD 64
33:28because it destroyed his palace, the Domus Transitoria,
33:32the palace that preceded the Domus Aurea.
33:35And this palace, too, was a huge villa-like complex
33:39that stretched from the Palatine to the Esquiline.
33:41So I hardly think that Nero would be fiddling while Rome burned
33:45because his own palace was going up in flames
33:48and had to be entirely reconstructed.
33:51Besides, Nero had always courted the masses with games,
33:56spectaculars, and free handouts.
33:58Would he totally reverse that policy
34:01and alienate the people with a huge fire?
34:05It would be completely crazy
34:07to burn down a very substantial part of your capital city,
34:11dispossess a population which was always prone to riot
34:14and to be rather unstable.
34:16No even semi-crazy ruler is going to do that.
34:20Nero may have been a bad guy, but he wasn't totally crazy.
34:23Many authorities believe Nero would never have ordered the fire,
34:30so if it was us, and if it wasn't the emperor, who was it?
34:34One leading scholar believes the culprits belonged to the underclass
34:38Nero was so afraid of, packed into the tenements on the eve of the fire.
34:42If one's imagining what Rome was like on the 18th of July, AD 64,
34:57we're talking about extremely hot summer conditions.
35:01We're talking about congested back streets in which disaffected people are meeting
35:08to give each other mutual support, but also quite likely to be working each other up.
35:13We talk about how desperate they are, how difficult the times are.
35:17So we're talking about a volatile political situation
35:21in which riots and disturbances are all too common,
35:25and in which a major outbreak of violence of one form or another
35:29would be something that the authorities would be quite likely to expect at any time.
35:36Was the great fire the ultimate act of violence by Rome's dispossessed?
35:40Ingenious research has produced a radical new theory,
35:44suggesting just who among the masses set fire to the city,
35:49and why they chose July the 19th to do so.
36:11After the great fire, other burnings.
36:14Nero blamed the fire on a new religious sect, the Christians.
36:18He had them dressed in animal skins and crucified,
36:21or strung up and burnt as human torches.
36:32Many assume the Christians were Nero's innocent scapegoats,
36:35not violent arsonists.
36:37What interest had the Christians to do it?
36:44To be persecuted? I don't think.
36:47Is there any evidence for the poor Christians,
36:50who are, you know, dying in the circuses and in the amphitheater,
36:54as human tortures, or, you know, eaten up by lions,
37:00or crucified with the head down as St. Peter?
37:03There's no interest for them to do that.
37:07The catacombs of Rome, huge burial chambers deep underground,
37:24begun shortly after the fire.
37:26Here, Christians were laid to rest in open graves,
37:29awaiting Christ's second coming.
37:31German scholar Gerhard Baudi has spent 15 years studying ancient apocalyptic prophecies.
37:48It's revolutionized his view of early Christians.
38:00I used to believe just what I'd been taught,
38:06that Christianity was a pacifist religion.
38:12However little most other people have been prepared to question this,
38:15I am now amazed at my own naivety.
38:18No one knows how many citizens of Nero's Rome called themselves Christians.
38:30Most were disaffected Jews,
38:32living in the slums far from their homeland conquered by Rome.
38:39With no legal outlet for their discontent,
38:41they voiced it in apocalyptic prophecies foretelling Rome's destruction.
38:48In all of these oracles, the destruction of Rome by fire is prophesied.
38:57That is the constant theme.
38:59Rome must burn.
39:01This was the long-desired objective of all the people who felt subjugated by Rome.
39:09And this desire expressed itself in literature,
39:12so that leaflets appeared everywhere stirring up public opinion against Rome,
39:17proclaiming the very thing people hoped to achieve.
39:20This city must go up in flames.
39:28Written only thirty years later,
39:30the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament,
39:33is in the same apocalyptic tradition.
39:36It equates the source of evil, the seven-headed whore of Babylon,
39:40with Rome, the city of seven hills.
39:44I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast,
39:47full of names and of blasphemy,
39:50having seven heads and ten horns,
39:53and upon her forehead was written Babylon the Great,
39:57the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.
40:01Christians laid to rest here in the catacombs,
40:12were anxious to preserve the remains of their bodies,
40:15because they awaited the resurrection.
40:17Then, Christ's followers are called upon to reach for their weapons.
40:27There's no way they were meant to just stand there passively,
40:30expecting the kingdom of God to become a reality of its own accord.
40:34Instead, the angel of the Lord calls upon all Christian believers
40:38and tells them to pay back the whore of Babylon,
40:42by whom they mean Rome.
40:44They are meant to take revenge.
40:50Steeped in vengeful prophecies,
40:52Christian Jews in Nero's Rome
40:54lived in the slums of the capital of the empire
40:57that had killed their messiah and colonized their homeland.
41:01Had they set fire to the Rome of their masters?
41:05As for the fire restarting on the estate of Tugelinus,
41:08what better target for them than Nero's right-hand man?
41:13From the Jewish perspective,
41:15the city of Rome has come to be regarded as the persecuting city,
41:20the place which is excessively wealthy,
41:24which has conquered the world,
41:26and which stands for moral corruption,
41:29and above all, for excessive wealth and the abuse of power.
41:32It's in a context like that,
41:41in which you're hoping that Rome has the answer for your future,
41:45but you loathe the fact that you're there in the first place,
41:48and you loathe what it's done to your homeland,
41:51that prophecies of this kind can take root,
41:54and in which people might actually come to the point
41:58where they're tempted to turn a prophecy into reality.
42:03But why on that exact date?
42:06Gerhard Baudi was fascinated that the fire began on July the 19th,
42:11the anniversary of the other great fire of Rome over 400 years before.
42:16Had arsonists chosen this date in AD 64?
42:20Next, Baudi discovered an ancient Egyptian prophecy,
42:26then widely known throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
42:30This foretold the fall of the great evil city
42:33on the day when the dog star Sirius rises.
42:36The date Sirius rises is also July the 19th.
42:41Did Christians burn Rome that very night
42:44as a call to arms throughout the empire?
42:47The day of the rising of Sirius was on a highly significant date,
43:07with symbolic meaning internationally.
43:10So, the people who reduced Rome to rubble and ruins on July the 19th, 64 AD,
43:22would have hoped that all the provinces in the eastern Mediterranean
43:26would also understand this signal correctly.
43:29But they would take it as a sign that the end of the Roman Empire had come,
43:36after the great city had been destroyed in a kind of last judgment.
43:41They had some success at first, at least in Judea,
43:58because two years later, war broke out.
44:02But unfortunately for them, this rebellion was ultimately crushed in 70 AD.
44:14Was the great fire meant to bring down the Roman Empire,
44:17headed by the Antichrist Nero, notorious for his crimes and his orgies?
44:23And the angel said unto me,
44:26The woman which thou sawest is that great city,
44:29which reigneth over the kings of the earth.
44:32Therefore, she shall be utterly burnt with fire.
44:36And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication,
44:40shall lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning.
44:44Baudi has made it much more likely that somebody set fire to Rome.
44:55The accident theory now doesn't sound nearly so convincing as it used to.
45:00And I find it more difficult to believe that Nero and his advisers
45:04undertook the rather risky process of setting fire to lots of different bits of Rome
45:11in the hope that there would be a large enough fire
45:14for them to be able to rebuild it in a systematic sort of way.
45:17I find that harder to believe than some prophecy-reading disaffected individual
45:25from a back street thought that this was the time of year
45:29when it was appropriate to try to give the evil city its comeuppance.
45:35Perhaps Nero didn't persecute the Christians,
45:40but just administered the normal sentence for arson under Roman law.
45:51That's the consequence of my theory.
45:53The Christians were in no way sentenced as Tacitus describes,
45:57used as scapegoats to divert suspicion from Nero.
46:00They were condemned for what they were, arsonists and insurgents.
46:13The fire claimed one more life.
46:18By 68 AD, Nero's costly rebuild of Rome made him so hated he was hounded from power.
46:25He had a slave knife him to death and passed into history,
46:31vilified by Christians and pagans.
46:38His Christian victims would be celebrated forever
46:40as the innocent forefathers of the Catholic Church,
46:43soon founded within the very city they may well have burned to a syndrome.
46:48Coming up next on for Francis Ford Coppola's stunning and seductive film of a classic horror story,
47:02Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder and Anthony Hopkins star in Bran Stoker's Dracula.
47:07The
47:22The Channel 4 book More Secrets of the Dead is out now priced $14.99.
47:26To order your copy, please call 0870 1234 344
47:31or click onto channel4.com forward slash shop.
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47:39Another terrible view of the modern JIM presents
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47:59The Marineста DC World,
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