The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City Read Free Page B

the emperor also added several Isiac feast days to the official calendar. Nero was going through a period in which he was obsessed with all things Egyptian, and it has been suggested that his interest in Isis came about through the influence of Chaeremon, former librarian at the Sarapium, the temple of Sarapis, at Alexandria. This Egyptian Stoic was said to be briefly Nero’s tutor when he was a boy.
     
    It has also been suggested that once Nero became emperor, Apollonius of Tyrana, a client of Nero’s who, guided by Egyptian priests, professed himself to be a teacher from heaven and was a follower of Isis, influenced Nero’s beliefs. Many scholars believe that Nero, wracked by guilt after he brought about the murder of his mother in AD 59, began a search for spirituality that saw him, for a time at least, personally embrace the cult of Isis, the mother goddess. While his interest in Egypt and Egyptian customs had not waned by AD 64, Nero seems to have moved on from Isis in his restless quest for spiritual relief.
     
    Some Christian legends even suggest that Nero consulted the Apostle Paul while the evangelist was at Rome, and that Nero’s freedwoman mistress Acte and his official cup-bearer at the Palatium were converted to Christianity by Paul. It was through this pair’s influence, so legend has it, that the emperor consulted Paul. The traditional belief that Acte was a Christian, or certainly the modern perpetuation of it, stems from the 1895 novel Quo Vadis by Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, who made the character of Acte a Christian. Part of the attraction of Paul’s creed to Nero supposedly was the belief in a holy mother and a virgin birth—a belief shared by Christianity, the cult of Isis, and other Eastern religions—but this is contradicted by the fact that the Virgin Mary never featured in Paul’s teachings.
     
    Tacitus makes it clear that despite every benevolent act by Nero immediately following the Great Fire, which, Tacitus says brought him great short-term popularity with the public, he could not overcome the power of the rumor that swept through the city even faster than the all-devouring flames: that he had caused the disaster. It was in character for Nero, a twenty-six-year-old dominated by others all his early life, wracked by major self-confidence issues, and plagued by a perplexing rumor campaign that set the blame for the fire at his feet, to find scapegoats, to shift the blame from his own shoulders.
     
    The cult of Isis, while initially attracting Nero, had come to disappoint him. In the end, he very publicly scorned the cult. In laying blame for the Great Fire at the feet of the followers of Isis, he could have been sure of tapping into widespread public distaste for the cult. The followers of Isis were generally disliked by other Romans, particularly those of the upper classes. The poet Juvenal, for example, ridiculed followers of Isis. His contemporary, Plutarch, the Greek historian who served as a priest at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi at one time, considered the cult of Isis detestable. Suetonius, writing early in the second century, described the cult of Isis as “that rather questionable order.” 17
     
    One of the criticisms that most Romans had of the cult was its adoration of animals—the crocodile, the ibis, and the long-tailed ape among them. Isis herself was depicted with the horns of a bull jutting from her head, while her male consort, Sarapis, god of the underworld, was often represented as a bull. In the Navigium Isidis, the festival of Isis that took place on March 5, which became part of the Roman calendar as the opening of the Mediterranean sailing season each year with the blessing of the fleets, a priest wearing the dog head of Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, took part in the official procession that opened the festivities. These animal gods were hideous to Romans accustomed to worshipping deities that took human form, while