Ancient World Review

Did Nero Burn Rome?

Was Nero the victim of an ancient smear campaign? Of course he was. Just to take one example, the famous story that he set fire to Rome and then played the lyre while watching the city burn is an obvious fabrication.

Here's the Roman historian Suetonius's description of what happened:

"Pretending to be disgusted by the drab old buildings and narrow, winding streets of Rome, he brazenly set fire to the city; and though a group of ex-consuls caught his attendants, armed with tow and blazing torches, trespassing on their property, they dared not interfere. He also coveted the sites of several granaries, solidly built in stone, near the Golden House; having knocked down their walls with siege-engines, he set the interiors ablaze. This terror lasted for six days and seven nights, causing many people to take shelter in monuments and tombs. Nero's men destroyed not only a vast number of apartment blocks, but mansions which had belonged to famous generals and were still decorated with their triumphal trophies; temples, too, vowed and dedicated by the kings, and others during the Punic and Gallic wars -- in fact, every ancient monument of historical interest that had hitherto survived. Nero watched the conflagration from the Tower of Maecenas, enraptured by what he called 'the beauty of the flames'; then put on his tragedian's costume and sang The Sack of Ilium from beginning to end." -- from "Nero", paragraph 38, Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars.

This is an entertaining story, but it's pure fiction. In fact, this account of Nero's crime is so outlandish that it's almost comical.

Just think about it. According to Suetonius and other sources, Nero sent his flunkies out to burn the city because he wanted to clear land to build his Golden Palace, aka the Domus Aurea, a "vast landscaped palace ... in the heart of Rome." (Wikipedia) This would be like an American president sending out his personal staff to burn down the neighborhoods around the White House so he could build a gigantic complex of mansions and pleasure gardens.

Nero's men weren't subtle about their arson, either. If Suetonius is to be believed, they ran completely amok for six days and seven nights, using siege engines to knock down walls and torching apartment blocks and other buildings that were presumably swarming with people. The chaos and panic this would have caused can easily be imagined. That would be bad enough, of course, but Nero also destroyed monuments and tombs and temples and "mansions which had belonged to famous generals."

This wholesale destruction would attract some attention, to say the least.

Rome was a big city at the time, but it wasn't that big and Nero's orgy of destruction supposedly went on for an entire week, right out in the open. Everybody would have known what was happening and who was responsible. According to Suetonius, a group of ex-consuls, no less, caught Nero's men setting fires but were afraid to do anything about it. In other words, they knew who the arsonists worked for.

The point is that none of this was a secret. When it was all over, everyone from the patricians in the Roman government to the ordinary plebs on the street would have known that Nero was responsible. He would have been universally condemned, but that isn't what happened:

"The Great Fire of Rome was an urban fire in July of the year AD 64. It caused widespread devastation in the city on 19 July, before being brought under control after six days. Differing accounts [emphasis added] either blame Emperor Nero for initiating the fire or credit him with organizing measures to contain it and provide relief for refugees." Wikipedia.

Why would there be differing accounts of what happened if Suetonius's version of events is correct? Remember, some of Nero's arsonists were supposedly caught in the act. This wasn't a covert operation. If Nero really did order his people to "brazenly" attack and burn his own city, it wasn't exactly deniable.

Nero himself was in Antium when the fire started. According to Wikipedia, "[h]e returned to the city and took measures to bring in food supplies and open gardens and public buildings to accommodate refugees." Curiously, he wasn't lynched on the spot after committing such an atrocity. On the contrary, he was given credit, at least in some sources, for his relief efforts.

Nero, like Caligula, was the victim of an ancient smear campaign, but that doesn't mean he was a particularly good emperor. He wasn't, but even though Rome apparently rejoiced at his death (according to Suetonius), he was still popular with part of the population when he was finally overthrown and murdered during the revolt of Vindex and Galba in 68 AD. Even Seutonius concedes as much:

"...there were people who used to lay spring and summer flowers on his grave for a long time, and had statues made of him, wearing his fringed toga, which they put up on the Rostra; they even continued to circulate his edicts, pretending he was still alive and would soon return to confound his enemies. What is more, King Vologaesus of Parthia, on sending ambassadors to ratify his alliance with Rome, particularly requested the Senate to honor Nero's memory. In fact, twenty years later, when I was a young man, a mysterious individual came forward claiming to be Nero; and so magical was the sound of his name in the Parthians' ears that they supported him to the best of their ability, and only handed him over with great reluctance." -- "Nero," from paragraph 57.

People don't usually put up statues to honor deranged lunatics who attack and burn their own capital cities. For the real story, at least as far as it can be reconstructed, check out The Great Fire of Rome by Stephen Dando-Collins. Highly recommended.

Is The Necronomicon A Real Book?

Some people believe that the Necronomicon was invented by the writer H.P. Lovecraft. These same deluded people also believe that Lovecraft wrote fiction.

Fools! Their minds have been poisoned by modern rationalism and their ignorance of our true position in the cosmos.

In reality, of course, the abhorred Necronomicon is all too real and it is just one of a number of forbidden texts which include ancient books like "the sinister Liber Ivonis, the infamous Cultes des Goules of Comte d'Erlette, the Unausprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish De Vermis Mysteriis." Source: The Haunter of the Dark. More information here.

The rest of this nonfiction article can be found here.

The history of the Necronomicon is well known to adepts. It was written around 730 AD by the mad poet Abdul Alhazred in Damascus under the title Al Azif -- "Azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons." The book was translated into Greek by Theodorus Pheltas in 950 AD as the Necronomicon and in 1228 AD the Danish physician, natural historian and antiquarian Olaus Wormius translated the Greek version into Latin. Over the years, various editions were printed in Germany, Italy and Spain. According to Lovecraft, "an English translation made by Dr. Dee [I think the reference is to the famous John Dee] was never printed, and exists only in fragments recovered from the original manuscripts." Source: A History of the Necronomicon.

The original Arabic version of the Necronomicon has supposedly been lost, but the book still survives despite centuries of suppression by the church and secular authorities. Copies of the Latin text (various editions) can be found in the British Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Widener Library at Harvard, Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts and the University of Buenos Aires. According to Lovecraft, "numerous other copies probably exist in secret, and a fifteenth-century one is persistently rumoured to form part of the collection of a celebrated American millionaire. A still vaguer rumor credits the preservation of a sixteenth-century Greek text in the Salem family of Pickman; but if it was so preserved, it vanished with the artist R. U. Pickman, who disappeared in 1926."

Note: Pickman may have taken his copy of the Necronomicon with him when he disappeared. The artist was encountered, presumably at a later date, by the author Randolph Carter in an episode described in Lovecraft's nonfiction work The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath.

The libraries mentioned above have the Necronomicon under lock and key. If you ask them about it, they'll just laugh and deny that the book is real, but obviously they're lying to conceal its existence from the world, probably under the advice of Henry Armitage, head librarian at Miskatonic University in the late 19th or early 20th century (the dates of his term of office are unknown, but he was definitely head librarian in 1928, the year of the terrifying Dunwich Horror, a real event which has been assiduously covered up ever since).

Books which purport to be the Necronomicon have been published over the years, but they're all hoaxes. If for no other reason, we know that they can't be the real Necronomicon because they're not long enough. The real Necronomicon (the Latin edition) is at least 751 pages long, a fact attested to by Wilbur Whateley's father, Old Whately, who owned a copy of the incomplete English translation:

"More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows -- an' that grows faster. It'll be ready to sarve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye'll find on page 751 of the complete edition, an' then put a match to the prison. Fire from airth can't burn it nohaow." (The Dunwich Horror)

If you research this material, every source you'll find will claim that the Necronomicon is fictional. Most sources even claim that Miskatonic University doesn't exist even though you can look it up in the Arkham, Massachusetts, telephone directory. The university even has its own web site. As for Lovecraft, he wasn't a fiction writer at all. He may have started off writing Poe-like short stories, but his interests changed in later years as his research led him into new and unexpected areas. Above all else, he was a journalist recounting the stories of obscure antiquarians, explorers and scientists who stumbled upon secrets that ended up driving most of them mad. I'm putting my own life and sanity in jeopardy by revealing all of this, but the truth must be known.

Related: The complete Cthulu Mythos stories from HorrorBabble. Highly recommended.

Calanais Stone Circle Marks Ancient Lightning Strike?

"New evidence of a massive lightning strike at the center of a hidden stone circle in the Outer Hebrides may help shed light on why these monuments were created thousands of years ago." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"... While studying prehistoric Tursachan Chalanais, the main stone circle at Calanais on the Isle of Lewis, the project team surveyed nearby satellite sites to reveal evidence for lost circles buried beneath the peat.

"Geophysics revealed that not only was the stone originally part of a circle of standing stones, but also that there was a massive, star-shaped magnetic anomaly in the center—either the result of a single, large lighting strike or many smaller strikes on the same spot."

Closed captions helpful.

The Stonehenge Burials

Stonehenge "maintains its less explored, darker aspects, not least of which are the enigmatic burials scattered in and around this famous Neolithic monument. What can these burials, both cremation and inhumation, tell us about the rituals and activities that went on at Stonehenge more than four millennia ago?" Source: "The Stonehenge Burials," Ancient History Encyclopedia.

"...During the 20th century CE nearly 60 cremation burials were uncovered at Stonehenge, with perhaps a couple of hundred more remaining in unexcavated areas of the monument. Interestingly, the latest of these cremations has been radiocarbon dated to c. 2300 BCE, which illustrates that cremation was still being practiced at Stonehenge long after the bluestones and sarsens had been erected."

Video from 2017.

Related: Stonehenge May Have Been Burial Site For Stone Age Elite.

"In Stonehenge's early years, ancient people used it as a cemetery. In fact, excavations from 1919 to 1926 revealed the cremated remains of up to 58 people, 'making Stonehenge one of the largest Late Neolithic burial sites known in Britain..." Source: Live Science (2018).

"These cremated remains were discovered in the Aubrey Holes, a series of 56 pits at Stonehenge that were named in honor of the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey, who first wrote about them. All of the human remains were moved into Aubrey Hole 7, which was then re-excavated in 2008."

Video from 2018.

Related: Lives before and after Stonehenge: An osteobiographical study of four prehistoric burials recently excavated from the Stonehenge World Heritage Site.

How Was The Friction Method For Making Fire Discovered?

"The discovery of fire, or, more precisely, the innovation of the controlled use of fire was, of necessity, one of the earliest of human discoveries," according to the Thought Company. "... The human control of fire likely required a cognitive ability to conceptualize the idea of fire, which itself has been recognized in chimpanzees; great apes have been known to prefer cooked foods, so the very great age of the earliest human fire experimentation should not come as a terrific surprise."

Comment: "Conceptualizing the idea of fire" is one thing, but learning how to make it is a completely different matter. The techniques for starting fires using the friction method are well known, but I can't imagine how the basic principle was ever discovered in the first place. After all, prehistoric men couldn't have known that friction would cause heat which would in turn ignite kindling. This isn't intuitively obvious and it doesn't seem like the kind of thing you could just stumble across by accident, though I suppose someone might have noticed that rubbing things together warms them up. In any case, it takes time to make fire this way and the method requires specific materials and techniques.

I can see how a Stone Age hunter might accidentally learn that striking stones together creates sparks which in turn can start a fire. Sparks are a natural byproduct of flintknapping, but I don't see how anybody could inadvertently start a fire with friction. It takes too long, for one thing. The more I think about how the basic principle of this technology could have been discovered, the more mysterious it becomes.

"Successfully creating fire by friction involves skill, fitness, knowledge, and acceptable environmental conditions. Some techniques involve crafting a system of interlocking pieces that give the practitioner an improved mechanical advantage; these techniques require more skill and knowledge but less fitness, and work in less ideal conditions." Source: Wikipedia.

The discovery of how to use friction to create fire becomes even more baffling when you realize that it must've been done millions of years ago, perhaps before modern humans even came along:

"The controlled use of fire was likely an invention of our ancestor Homo erectus, during the Early Stone Age (or Lower Paleolithic). The earliest [?] evidence for fire associated with humans comes from Oldowan hominid sites in the Lake Turkana region of Kenya. The site of Koobi Fora (... dated 1.6 million years ago) contained oxidized patches of earth to a depth of several centimeters, which some scholars interpret as evidence for fire control. At 1.4 million years of age, the Australopithecine site of Chesowanja in central Kenya also contained burned clay clasts in small areas." (Thought Company)

The idea that Australopithecus might have known how to make fire is truly mind-boggling. Apes have been known to make fires, but they cheat by using lighters.

Related: The Discovery of Fire by Humans: A Long and Convoluted Process

The Sky Caves Of Nepal

"Mustang Caves or Sky Caves of Nepal are a collection of some 10,000 man-made caves dug into the sides of valleys in the Mustang District of Nepal. Several groups of archaeologists and researchers have explored these stacked caves and found partially mummified human bodies and skeletons that are at least 2,000–3,000 years old. Explorations of these caves by conservators and archaeologists have also led to the discovery of valuable Buddhist paintings, sculptures, manuscripts and numerous artifacts belonging to the 12th to 14th century. The caves lie on the steep valley walls near the Kali Gandaki River in Upper Mustang. Research groups have continued to investigate these caves, but no one has yet understood who built the caves and why were they built.^" Source: Wikipedia.

Note: Back in 2011, National Geographic announced that "The remains of 27 ancient men, women, and children" had been discovered in these caves. Several of the bodies had been defleshed and "many of the bones bear cut marks that point to a previously unknown Himalayan death ritual." Defleshing or excarnation "refers to the practice of removing the flesh and organs of the dead before burial, leaving only the bones." (Wikipedia)

According to Mental Floss (2016), "[s]cientists recently sequenced the whole genomes of eight individuals found in these ancient chambers, revealing the secrets of the first inhabitants of the Himalayas." The DNA analysis revealed that "the first inhabitants of the Himalayas came down from the north, from East Asian populations of the Tibetan plateau. Their genetic profile most closely resembles modern-day Sherpa and Tibetan populations."

Video from 2011.

Human Ancestors Left Africa Earlier Than Thought?

I'm not sure how accurate the dating is in this 2015 video.

Ancient tools and bones discovered in China by archaeologists suggest early humans left Africa and arrived in Asia earlier than previously thought. " Source: Science Daily (2018).

"...The artefacts show that our earliest human ancestors colonised East Asia over two million years ago...The artefacts include a notch, scrapers, cobble, hammer stones and pointed pieces. All show signs of use -- the stone had been intentionally flaked."

Note: As far as I can tell, no human or prehuman remains were discovered at this site, but I'm guessing that these stone tools -- if they are stone tools -- were made by Homo Erectus, currently believed to have migrated into Asia around 1.9 million years ago.

Homo Erectus is known to have been a tool maker. For instance, back in 2013, Live Science reported that some very old stone axes were discovered in Ethiopia. These tools, associated with Homo Erectus remains, were around 1.75 million years old.

Poppaea Sabina - Evil Roman Beauty

"Poppaea Sabina, daughter of [Titus] Ollius (d. AD 31) and named after her maternal grandfather, [Gaius] Poppaeus Sabinus (consul AD 9, governor of Moesia 12-35), was married first to Rufrius Crispinus, prefect of the praetorians under Claudius, by whom she had a son later killed by Nero. By 58, during her second marriage, to the future emperor Otho, she became mistress of Nero ... It was allegedly at her instigation that Nero murdered Iulia Agrippina [his mother] in 59 and in 62 divorced, banished, and executed Claudia Octavia [his wife]." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised)

Comment: According to the OCD, Poppaea "is supposed to have died [in 65 AD] from a kick which Nero gave her in a fit of temper, and was accorded a public funeral and divine honors." The story about her death has made her a kind of feminist icon and symbol of domestic violence, but who knows if it really happened? I think the main sources for her life are Tacitus and Suetonius, both of whom were writing many years after her death. Tacitus's sources (and probably Suetonius's as well) included the historian Fabius Rusticus, known to be hostile to Nero, and Cluvius Rufus, who knew many members of Nero's inner circle and sometimes appeared as Nero's herald at the games. If Nero did kick Poppaea to death, Rufus would probably have known about it.

The Villa Poppaea in Pompeii, thought to have been used by Poppaea Sabina when she wasn't living in Rome.

However she died, Poppaea was definitely born into the highest levels of the Roman aristocracy. If her biography is at all accurate, she was a Machiavellian character who married the man who killed her own son (perhaps not by choice) and engineered the deaths of her rivals, including Nero's wife Claudia Octavia, sleeping and murdering her way to the top. She supposedly had Jewish sympathies, but she didn't do the Jews any favors when she used her influence with Nero to have Gessius Florus, a friend's husband, appointed as procurator of Judea. Florus was a brutal incompetent who was mainly responsible for instigating the Great Jewish Revolt which led to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD.

Did Nero actually murder Poppaea Sabina? Considering the fact that so many of the other stories about his crimes and depravity are just ancient propaganda, I'm guessing that this one probably isn't true, either. There's no way to know for sure, of course, but some (sketchy) documentary evidence does exist suggesting that the story isn't accurate:

"In A.D. 65, while Poppaea was pregnant again, she died. Ancient writers say Nero killed her with a kick to the belly. However, [a] newly deciphered poem from Egypt casts doubt on this, showing Poppaea in the afterlife wanting to stay with Nero." Source: Live Science (2013)

Sappho Of Lesbos, "The Most Iconic Lesbian Poet In History," Wasn't A Lesbian After All?

"Sappho of Lesbos (c. 620-570 BCE) was a lyric poet whose work was so popular in ancient Greece, and beyond, that she was  honored in statuary and praised by figures such as Solon and Plato. Very little is known of her life and of the nine volumes of her work which were widely read in antiquity only fragments survive. Contrary to popular opinion on the subject, her works were not destroyed by closed-minded Christians seeking to suppress lesbian love poetry but were lost simply through time and circumstance." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.

The popular image of Sappho as the "original lesbian" is relatively modern. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2rd ed. revised), "Her sexual inclinations have occasioned much speculation from antiquity to the present. From Attic comedy onward she was credited with an implausible selection of male lovers. [Emphasis added] She is described as a lover of women only in post-Classical times, and in later European tradition was often regarded as heterosexual." The truth is that hardly anything is known about her personal life or her work other than the fact that she was highly regarded during her time. As for her supposed lesbianism, the truth may have been far different:

"Even Sappho’s sexuality, which for modern readers is the most famous thing about her, has been controversial from the start. However exalted her reputation among the ancient literati, in Greek popular culture of the Classical period and afterward Sappho was known primarily as an oversexed predator — of men. This, in fact, was the ancient cliché about 'Lesbians': when we hear the word today we think of love between women, but when the ancient Greeks heard the word they thought of blow jobs. In classical Greek, the verb lesbiazein — 'to act like someone from Lesbos' — meant performing fellatio, an activity for which inhabitants of the island were thought to have a particular penchant." Source: "Girl, Interrupted," Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker.

The strong possibility that Sappho, "the most iconic lesbian poet in history," may have actually been a notorious heterosexual man-eater famous for her knob jobs is absolutely hilarious and all too typical of the way real history so often turns out to be the exact opposite of what everybody thinks they know.

The Meaning Of Easter Island's Statues?

"Based on a 5-year excavation of two Moai found within the Easter Island quarry called Rano Raraku, the Easter Island Statue Project released the first definitive study to reveal the quarry as a complex landscape and link soil fertility, agriculture, quarrying and the sacred nature of the Moai. Chemistry testing suggests the soil in the quarry itself was made more fertile by the act of quarrying, with traces of taro, banana and sweet potato in the area. " Source: Science Daily.

"...Ancient Rapanui carvers worked at the behest of the elite ruling class to carve nearly 1,000 Moai because they, and the community at large, believed the statues capable of producing agricultural fertility and thereby critical food supplies, according to a new study from Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Easter Island Statue Project, recently published in Journal of Archaeological Science."

2014 tourist video showing the Rano Raraku quarry. Good views, but the audio's not the best.