Ancient World Review

Great Zimbabwe: African City Of Stone

"'Zimbabwe' is a Shona name that, while the translation varies, can mean houses of stone. The ruins contain numerous stone enclosures with soaring walls as tall as 11 meters (36 feet). They were made without the use of mortar." Source: Live Science.

"Much of Great Zimbabwe is unexcavated and what the different enclosures were used for is a source of debate among archaeologists. The earliest written records for the city date to the 16^th century, a time after it was largely abandoned. "

Great Zimbabwe is thought to have been built by the Gokomere culture (ancestors of the Shona) over several centuries between the 11th and 15th centuries AD. The central ruins may have been a royal palace and the city was probably an important trade center. According to Wikipedia, "[c]auses for the decline and ultimate abandonment of the site around 1450 A.D. have been suggested as due to a decline in trade compared to sites further north, the exhaustion of the gold mines, political instability and famine and water shortages induced by climatic change." In other words, no one really knows what happened.

The area around Great Zimbabwe was apparently well-developed at one time. According to Wonders of the Past (1943) (1), "when the Rhodesian pioneers burst into Mashonaland, and spread over the country in search of gold, they were vastly surprised to find that they had been anticipated. Over a great area of gold-bearing country, 600 by 700 miles in extent, they found open workings and closed mines reached by shafts which went down to a depth of from 70 to 150 feet, and worked-out reefs to lengths of from 300 to 7,500 feet. The bygone miners must have been industrious beyond belief..."

(1) Wonders of the Past is a rare two-volume collection of essays on a wide range of archaeological sites and ancient history subjects. Though out-of-date in many ways, it includes a lot of fantastic old photographs, line-drawings, color plates and exploration stories, and the essays were written before political correctness had infected academics. Highly recommended if you can find it. (I stumbled on my copy by accident at a local library sale).

Next video was produced by the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority. Yes, this failed state has a tourism industry. Besides the local wildlife (if there's any left), maybe foreign visitors get to see the sites where white farmers were murdered over the years in some of Mugabe's land grabs.

According to the academic consensus, the stone structures in Zimbabwe were built by the ancestors of the local Shona tribes who have traditionally been subsistence farmers. The Shona are known for their stone sculptures and "the precolonial Shona states received a great deal of their revenues form the export of mining products, especially gold and copper," (Wikipedia). The Great Zimbabwe State (12th - 16th centuries AD) was one of several kingdoms that rose and fell in the region over the years.

If the ancestors of the Shona built Great Zimbabwe, the obvious question is what what happened to their knowledge of stoneworking. According to Wonders of the Past, the original Rhodesian explorers found the natives living in "huts made of reeds and clay," so if the consensus is correct the picture that emerges is of a relatively advanced culture and trading center that collapsed long before the first colonialists arrived.

Did The Brazen Bull Actually Exist?

This charming contraption is regularly featured in sensationalistic stories and videos about ancient death machines. According to Wikipedia, "the brazen bull, bronze bull, or Sicilian bull, was a torture and execution device designed in ancient Greece. According to Diodorus Siculus, recounting the story in Bibliotheca historica, Perillos of Athens invented and proposed it to Phalaris, the tyrant of Akragas, Sicily, as a new means of executing criminals." The brazen bull may have had its origins in Carthaginian human sacrifices and ancient bull worship, assuming that it actually existed, of course.

I haven't been able to find much information about the alleged inventor, Perillos of Athens, other than that he was a brass worker who was supposed to have invented and suggested the use of the Bull to the tyrant Phalaris. If true, Perillos must have had a sick mind and he apparently came to a well-deserved end when Phalaris (disgusted by Perillos's sadism) used him as a guinea pig to test his new invention. Perillos was cooked inside the bull for a while, then taken out alive and thrown off a cliff. That's the story, anyway.

The question is: How much of this story is actually true? The history is extremely murky, but as far as I can tell, no archaeologist has ever uncovered hard evidence that the brass bull as described here ever existed. According to NNDB (a kind of Who's Who database that I'd never heard of before), "the story of the bull cannot be dismissed as pure invention. Pindar, who lived less than a century afterwards, expressly associates this instrument of torture with the name of the tyrant [Phalaris]. There was certainly a brazen bull at Agrigentum, which was carried off by the Carthaginians to Carthage, from where it was again taken by Scipio [Africanus?] and restored to Agrigentum."

Pindar was probably just passing on a story he found in the sources. Likewise for Diodorus Siculus, whose reliability as a historian is still a matter of debate. A very scholarly discussion of Diodorus Siculus's historical method in relation to the story of the bull of Phalaris can be found here [PDF]. As for the brass bull at Agrigentum mentioned above, I haven't been able to find any evidence that it was the same bull as the famous Brazen Bull or that the Agrigentum bull was anything more than a statue. The bull was sacred to several ancient cultures.

There's no limit to human cruelty, but I'm guessing that the story of the Brazen Bull is an early example of propaganda designed, in this case, to smear the reputation of Phalaris, a hated tyrant who was eventually overthrown for his viciousness (and supposedly burned inside his own torture device). According to Livius, "Phalaris became the prototype of an evil dictator" and the story of the invention of the brass bull "...was clearly invented to suggest what tyranny was all about, but there may be an element of historical truth."

Related: Two ancient accounts of the Bull of Phalaris.

Phalaris - The Source Material

First Farmers Were Malnourished Forced Labor?

Video from 2017. Closed-captions helpful.

"Humankind first started farming in Mesopotamia about 11,500 years ago. Subsequently, the practices of cultivating crops and raising livestock emerged independently at perhaps a dozen other places around the world, in what archaeologists call the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. It's one of the most thoroughly-studied episodes in prehistory -- but a new paper in the Journal of Political Economy shows that most explanations for it don't agree with the evidence, and offers a new interpretation." Source: Science Daily.

According to this study, farming, at least in the beginning, was less efficient than hunting:

"'It is very unlikely that the number of calories acquired from a day's work at the advent of farming made it a better option than hunting and gathering and it could well have been quite a bit worse' ... Prior studies, including those of human and animal bones, suggest that farming actually took an extreme nutritional toll on early adopters and their livestock. So why farm in the first place?"

One possibility is that farming was a kind of forced labor imposed on one group by another, but if the first farmers were malnourished slaves then who were their masters?

"Some have suggested an inferior technology could have been imposed by political elites as a strategy for extracting taxes, tribute, or rents. But farming was independently adopted millennia before the emergence of governments or political elites capable of imposing a new way of life on heavily-armed foraging communities."

This theory doesn't require a "political elite," however. A large, strong clan of hunter-gatherers could have easily enslaved a smaller tribe and forced them to do farm work. That's a perfectly plausible scenario and I wouldn't be surprised if it actually happened at different times and places, but saying that this is how the Neolithic Revolution started is a completely different matter.

The agricultural revolution couldn't have started this way. The problem is that these hunter-gatherers must have already known how to farm before they could force another clan to do it for them.

Paleolithic Cave Art & Shamanism

The El Castillo Cave art -- the oldest of which is thought to be around 40,800 years old -- could be "the oldest known well-dated cave paintings in the world—a title previously held by France's Chauvet cave paintings, believed to be at least 37,000 years old," according to National Geographic (2012). Very ancient cave paintings have also been discovered in Indonesia, but they seem to date to around the same period as the Chauvet paintings:

"Paintings of wild animals and hand markings left by adults and children on cave walls in Indonesia are at least 35,000 years old, making them some of the oldest artworks known." Source: The Guardian (2014). (See next video.)

What does all of this cave art mean? Why was it created in the first place? No one really knows and archaeologists have tended to focus on technical issues like dating the art rather than speculate about its purpose:

"Ever since the beginning of the 20th century, several attempts have been made to find the meaning(s) of Paleolithic rock art. Art for art’s sake, totemism, the Abbe Breuil’s hunting magic and Leroi-Gourhan’s and Laming-Emperaires’s structuralist theories were proposed and then abandoned one after the other .... Since then, most specialists have made up their minds that it would be hopeless to look for the meanings behind the art. They prefer to spend their time and efforts recording it, describing it and dating it, to endeavor to answer the questions 'what?', 'how?' and 'when?', thus carefully avoiding the fundamental question 'why?'." Source: Bradshaw Foundation.

The South African scholar David Lewis-Williams has proposed that Paleolithic cave art provides evidence for Stone Age shamanism. (Next video is from an interview with Graham Hancock.)

"Considering the fact that shamanism is so widespread among hunter-gatherers and that Upper Paleolithic people were admittedly hunter-gatherers, looking to shamanism as a likely religion for them should have been the first logical step whenever the question of meaning arose." (Bradshaw Foundation).

"... shamanic religions evidence several characteristics which can make us understand cave art better. The first one is their concept of a complex cosmos in which at least two worlds - or more - coexist, be they side by side or one above the other. Those worlds interact with one another and in our own world most events are believed to be the consequence of an influence from the other-world(s). The second one is the belief of the group in the ability for certain persons to have at will a direct controlled relationship with the other-world. This is done for very practical purposes : to cure the sick, to maintain a good relationship with the powers in the other-world, to restore an upset harmony, to reclaim a lost soul, to make good hunting possible, to forecast the future, to cast spells, etc." (Bradshaw foundation.)

Stone Age cave paintings are very similar around the world, a striking fact in itself. If Lewis-William's theory is correct, it means that some form of shamanism was the original religion - the primal religion - of the human race. It also suggests that religion may have a pre-human or pre-Homo Sapiens origin since some experts have conjectured that the art discovered in the El Castillo Cave may have been created by Neanderthals.

The Mysteries Of Chartres Cathedral

Chartres Cathedral is a spectacular example of the way Christianity usurped the old pagan religions and literally built its churches over the sacred sites of the pagan world in an attempt to erase them from history.

According to Chartres Cathedral.net, "the town of Chartres has been of religious importance since ancient times. It was the site of Druid ceremonies, which were held around a well that was later discovered under the cathedral crypt.

"Sometime later, a Gallo-Roman temple stood on the same spot. The early Christians erected a basilica there during the 4th century, and St. Bernard preached the Second Crusade there in 1146. Later in history, Chartres was the coronation site of Henry IV in 1594."

Part Two here.

Chartres is surrounded by legends, many of which can be traced back to pagan beliefs. According to Ancient Origins, "[the legendary roots of the site] come from the time when Druids, the Celtic priests of Britain and Gaul, held sacred rites there." A Druidic statue of the mother goddess of infants found at the site may have inspired the Christian legend that the pagans "had foretold the story of a virgin who would give birth to a child for the good of the world." This is speculative, but it makes sense considering the way the Christians hijacked pagan beliefs to support their new religion.

"During the Gallo-Roman times, the underground waters of the site were believed to have been revered by the Druids. Legend also says that Roman soldiers attacked Christians while they were celebrating their faith at the virgin shrine. It seems that Christians identified the mother goddess of the Druids with the virgin Mary." (Ibid)

The cathedral has been associated with the Knights Templar, the famous Catholic military order founded in 1199 to protect pilgrims traveling to the Kingdom of Jerusalem after its liberation by the First Crusade. Originally consisting of only nine men who could do little more than provide an armed escort for pilgrims to the Holy Land, the order grew into one of the richest and most powerful organizations of its day until it was violently suppressed and virtually exterminated in 1307.

Surrounded by conspiracy theories then as now, "[t]he Knights Templar have become associated with legends concerning secrets and mysteries handed down to the select from ancient times," (Wikipedia). According to Ancient Origins, the Chartres cathedral's association with the Templars comes from the two black madonnas which can be seen there:

"According to legend, the Black Madonna was a lady of the Templars. The statue of the Black Madonna with a child was commissioned in 1508. It is perhaps a black wooden copy of the silver Madonna that was located on the main altar before. The statue sits on the top of the pillar and is often called the ''Lady of the Pillar''. Before the French Revolution, the Chartres Cathedral had a second Black Madonna in the crypt. Unfortunately, it was probably burned during the revolution, although some resources are convinced that the church didn't suffer in this period. Today, tourists and pilgrims can see a copy in the church that was made in 1857. "

These black madonnas are apparently found in churches all over France and other countries in Europe.

"Throughout Europe, especially in France, about 500 Black Madonnas, painted or carved in wood or stone, stand in Catholic churches, with a few in museums. Most date from the 11^th to the 15^th centuries. These medieval images of the Virgin holding the Christ Child gaze benignly on their devotees, who come as pilgrims and associate them with miracles and healing." Source: Europe Up Close.

I'm not sure what to think about the Templar connection with these images, but they seem to have a pre-Christian origin. According to Europe Up Close, "[m]any scholars say that the Black Madonna is a link to religions that existed long before Christianity. Her shrines are often in locations that were once pagan shrines to Diana, Artemis of Ephesus, Cybele and other goddesses. Some Black Madonna figures look just like the Egyptian goddess Isis with her infant son Horus, showing the influence of old ways on changing faiths. Even further back than that, she may represent the archetypal Earth Mother, the ancient, eternal power of the feminine force."

The great Oswald Spengler saw the Gothic cathedrals as prime symbols of the Faustian spirit of Western civilization, but even though Spengler believed that the Classical and Western worlds were fundamentally separate, the pre-Christian influences on Christianity, especially on Catholicism, can be seen both in its teachings and its architecture. These fantastic cathedrals contain all sorts of mysteries that can be traced back to very ancient times. As for the Chartres cathedral, was being restored back in 2015 (I'm not sure if the work has been completed yet). The renovation apparently created a lot of controversy.

Video from 2016.

Were The Viking Berserkers High On Something?

"In the Old Norse written corpus, berserkers ... were warriors who purportedly fought in a trance-like fury, a characteristic which later gave rise to the modern English word 'berserk' ... Berserkers are attested to in numerous Old Norse sources, with their name literally rendered as 'bear-coats', along with úlfhéðnar ('wolf-coats')." Source: Wikipedia.

"...It is proposed by some authors that the northern warrior tradition originated in hunting magic. Three main animal cults appeared: the bear, the wolf, and the wild boar." The legend of the werewolf may be related to these ancient stories:

"Old Norse had the cognate varúlfur, but because of the high importance of werewolves in Norse mythology, there were alternative terms such as ulfhéðinn ('one in wolf-skin', referring still to the totemistic or cultic adoption of wolf-nature rather than the superstitious belief in actual shape-shifting). In modern Scandinavian also kveldulf ('evening-wolf'), presumably after the name of Kveldulf Bjalfason, a historical berserker of the 9th century who figures in the Icelandic sagas." (Wikipedia)

Berserkers, like Shieldmaidens, may be completely mythological. According to the National Museum of Denmark, there is little to no archaeological evidence that they ever existed. Assuming that they were real, however, and that the stories about their ultraviolent frenzies are accurate, what could account for their deranged behavior?

The Viking berserkers, we are told, went into battle in a trance-like rage and were supposed to be almost uncontrollable killing machines. Dressed in wolf and bear pelts, they would attack friend and foe alike and their homicidal madness sounds a lot like a drug-induced frenzy of some kind:

"This fury, which was called berserkergang, occurred not only in the heat of battle, but also during laborious work. Men who were thus seized performed things which otherwise seemed impossible for human power. This condition is said to have begun with shivering, chattering of the teeth, and chill in the body, and then the face swelled and changed its colour. With this was connected a great hot-headedness, which at last gave over into a great rage, under which they howled as wild animals, bit the edge of their shields, and cut down everything they met without discriminating between friend or foe. When this condition ceased, a great dulling of the mind and feebleness followed, which could last for one or several days." -- Fabing, Howard D. (1956). "On Going Berserk: A Neurochemical Inquiry. (Subscription-access only)

Note: A detailed commentary on berserkers in general and Fabing's paper can be found here.)

The legends suggest that the berserkers might have taken some kind of drug that caused these fits of berserkergang. Whatever it was, it came on with a rush of "shivering, chattering of the teeth and chill in the body," caused a spike in blood-pressure ("the face swelled and changed its color") and body temperature ("a great hot-headedness") and ended with a hangover with could last for days. No one really knows if the berserkers were high on something, but various candidates have been suggested:

"While some researchers believe the Berserkers simply worked themselves up into a self-induced hysteria before fighting, others maintain that it was sorcery, the consumption of drugs or alcohol, or even mental illness, that accounted for their behaviour. Some botanists have claimed that berserker behaviour could have been caused by the ingestion of the plant known as bog myrtle, one of the main spices in Scandinavian alcoholic beverages." Source: Ancient Origins.

The problem with the bog-myrtle theory is that the plant was commonly used to make beer back then and doesn't appear to produce this kind of dramatic effect on people. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn't find any mention of it in The Vaults of Erowid, a site which covers psychotropic plants and herbs in exhaustive detail.

Bog Myrtle (Myrica Gale) is a natural insect repellent, among other things. It was used (along with other herbs) to flavor beer in the middle ages until "hops supplanted gruit herbs for political and economic reasons." (Wikipedia). Bog Myrtle itself isn't psychedelic, as far as I can tell, but various mixtures of gruit herbs could act as euphorics and some of them had hallucinogenic or deliriant properties, so the idea that the Berserkers were stoned on some kind of herbal drink when they went into battle isn't all that outlandish.

"Helpful for enhancing lucid dreaming and astral work generally, bog myrtle was a flavoring for a type of European beer known as gruit up until the introduction of hops. The other components of gruit (1) were yarrow and wild rosemary. Some say this brew was behind the Berserkers [sic]. In northern Europe, bog myrtle and yarrow have been ingredients in fermented drinks made from grain, honey, or fruit since the Iron Age, and it is still used in Scandinavia to make a liqueur called 'snaps.'" Source: Alchemy Works.

(1) Medieval brewers used a wide variety of gruit herbs in their beer.

If the berserkers were high on something, the most likely candidate is gruit beer, but if they were that drunk it's hard to see how they could function very effectively. Some sources I've found speculate that they were tripping on the psychedelic amanita muscaria mushroom, but the psychoactive ingredient in the mushroom is muscimol, which is described as a "sedative-hypnotic," i.e., a tranquilizer -- just the opposite of what you would expect. Also, I've never heard of a psychedelic that consistently produces outbursts of violent rage. If the berserkers were taking a drug, it sounds like it was a medieval form of PCP.

Were the berserkers mentally ill? Again, it doesn't sound like it. Their furies seem to have been situation-specific, only occurring during battles or perhaps when they were working in their villages. If they were crazy they would've been prone to go berserk for no reason at all, but none of the sources I've found describe them flipping out at random. So, unless they were elite warriors who ate some plant that drove them into a homicidal rage the most plausible explanation for their reported behavior is that the berserkers are simply characters from Old Norse mythology. In other words, maybe they never actually existed.

Related:

Norse Power: A Brief Look At Berserker Rage

Did The Vikings Get A Bad Rap?

The Mysterious Woman Of Tadcaster

Note: The Romans originally built a settlement and fort on this site. According to Wikipedia, "The suffix of the Anglo-Saxon name Tadcaster is derived from the borrowed Latin word castra meaning 'fort', although the Angles and Saxons used the term for any walled Roman settlement. Tadcaster is first mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where it appears as Táda, referring to the place where King Harold assembled his army and fleet before entering York and proceeding onwards to the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066."

Footage From King Midas' Tomb 1951/1957

Note: This footage shows the excavation of Gordium, Turkey and the supposed tomb of King Midas by a team of University of Pennsylvania archaeologists in 1951/1957. According to the video description, "The Midas Mound was opened in 1957 by an archaeological team headed by Rodney Young who appears at the beginning of the film and makes a brief appearance as he pieces together decorative wall moldings."

The burial chamber of King Midas was discovered under the Midas Tumulus or burial mound. According to the LA Times (1988), "About 90 pyramid-shaped mounds of earth rise on the land [Anatolian plateau in western Turkey] where the Phrygians had their ancient capital of Gordion. The largest and highest of the burial mounds is believed to be the tomb of King Midas, who is said to have lived from 725 BC to 675 BC."

Proto-Elamite - A Still Undeciphered Ancient Language

Video from 2012.

"Proto-Elamite is the last undeciphered writing system from the Ancient Near East with a substantial number of sources (more than 1600 published texts). It was used for a relatively short period around 3000 BC across what is today Iran." Source: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CLDI, 2013).

Reflectance Transformation Imaging, the technology being used to study these tablets, "...is a computational photographic method that captures a subject’s surface shape and color and enables the interactive re-lighting of the subject from any direction," according to Cultural Heritage Imaging.

"For a majority of the tablets the only available images are hand copies, drawn 80-100 years ago, but for a growing number of texts kept in the Louvre Museum high quality images are available," according to the CDLI.

Related: Deciphering Proto-Elamite

Elamite Scripts

8 Ancient Writing Systems That Haven't Been Deciphered Yet

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.