Feli woke up first, when the floor of the landing shuddered. Then she saw the glow coming from downstairs; she felt the heat and she smelled the fire. Like the oven at the bakery, but without the bread.
She shook Desi’s shoulder, then prodded the next kid, sleeping on the straw mattress closest to them, and motioned him to wake the others, pointing at the glow from downstairs.
Desi understood at once that this was not a leisurely early morning wake-up call, at the side of Feli’s warm, familiar body. This was the night of the fourteenth to the kalends of Sextilis; this was the fire! She could smell it and hear it crackling.
They all stood up in a hurry and girdled their tunics. Then Feli rapped her knuckles on Desi’s head: from now on she was in charge and Desi would follow her unquestioningly, until her friend “gave back” her command.
The deaf girl motioned the others to follow her too, and opened the door of the Pomponius garret. The neighbours’ children started knocking on their own doors, and then followed the two older girls into their apartment.
The smoke and the heat were just starting to overwhelm the landing as the other adults emerged from their homes. They saw their kids disappearing behind Feli and Desi, and as the smoke gripped their throats and the heat hit their faces, they realized there was no time to lose: the landing was going to burst into flame at any moment now, and the deaf slave seemed to have a plan. She was a clever one.
Sextus and Claudia woke up to find their humble home invaded by all their neighbours, and could see through the door and the smoke that the staircase had changed into a roaring whirlwind of fire; the flashing flames illuminated the room with flickering brightness. They too understood at once what this meant: they were trapped in their garret. Now that the stairs and the landing were burning, the fire would spread sideways and devour the dwellings, feeding on the wooden floors and the roof beams. They were caught like mice in a trap; they would burn like rats.
But meanwhile Feli was crouching in the corner, at the lowest point under the roof, between two beams, and she was pushing up the tiles. With quick movements of both hands she pried them loose one by one, pushed them out and sent them sliding down the eaves, crashing into the street below. Within seconds she had made a hole big enough for even an adult to go through. One of the men helped her break off the wooden slats that still barred their way.
Within minutes the whole company was emerging on top of the roof, the smoke billowing from the gaping hole. Feli made Desi crouch low, and stood up to take stock of the situation. There were fires everywhere, all around them in the neighbourhood. The moon was shining bright. In front of her the tiles above the staircase were smoking too, and the glare of the flames showed through the cracks that were starting to appear. They needed to move on, but they would have to move to the courtside of the insula first, and circle around the staircase. Then they would see.
They were huddling right by the edge of the roof; one wrong step would have you hurtling down to your death in the street below. So Feli went down on all fours, made Desi hold on to her ankle, and started crawling forward as fast as she could, keeping the safest course possible between the fire and the edge of the abyss. All the others imitated the two girls and followed them as closely as possible, single file. As they all set off, Desi cried out anxiously, “Mater! Are you there?”
“Yes, sweetness, I’m right behind you!”
Crawling along behind his wife, Sextus thought, “Desi is not asking for me!” But he knew all too well why his daughter was angry at him. She’d pleaded and pleaded. “Oh my father, please, please, we must leave, spend the night at an inn outside Rome! I’ll pay for it with the money from the baths.” But he’d rubbished the idea, calling it an obsession again, and pointed out that the money she and Feli had made belonged to him anyway. How stupid he’d been! Looking at the gaping edge of the eaves, Sextus felt cold shivers going down his spine, but then he felt how hot the roof tiles were becoming under his hands and knees. He focused desperately on his wife, moving on steadily in front of him. As always, Claudia seemed to be the epitome of calm and composure, a real Roman matrona.
Desi, and especially Feli, had spent the previous days preparing an escape plan. Feli told Desi about the rickety tiling above their heads. “We can escape right through the roof!” And she knew precisely where they needed to go. There were three adjoining insulae on their block, and the third one would have a chimney, because there was a bakery downstairs, at street level. Its staircase rose along an outside wall at the back. The layout of the three buildings was utterly familiar, as the girls had explored them and played all over the place for years. Growing up, they’d spent many rainy or cold winter days running around on those staircases with their playmates.
Feli led the way for twenty people crawling one behind the other, following her path like panicking ants. Eight adults and a dozen children, crawling as fast as they could, crawling for their life, between the abyss and the fires. When they crossed over the second insula by way of the courtside, the flames of its burning staircase were plainly visible over the top of the roof, the raging flames reaching for the heavens on the street side. They hurried on, and there it was: the chimney of the bakery on the third insula. That was where they needed to re-enter the dwellings.
As soon as they reached the last roof at the end of the block, Feli started uprooting the tiles again, sending them crashing into the courtyard. As she’d anticipated, this building was not on fire yet, because the bakery had a vaulted stone ceiling and the wooden staircase was on the outside and at the back, separated from the street by solid walls. The fire from the neighbouring buildings could not spread to this one as easily as that. Yanking off the tiles’ supporting slats, she finally completed their escape hatch and could help Desi down into the room below. Before she followed, Feli looked back over her shoulder and saw the whole roof of their own insula collapsing in an eruption of fire and sparks. The others, just behind her, could hear the screams of the neighbours in their death throes, those from the other side of the landing, and from downstairs. Their group had made their escape just in time.
And on that night, Gattus, the cat who used to dart around the garrets, had also made his escape. He’d jumped right after the fugitives through the hole in the roof, then he’d darted ahead of them, waited patiently for them to catch up with him, and he’d been the first one to jump into the second hole they made, and disappeared.
They all emerged into the street soon after him, having crossed a dark and deserted garret room and found their way to the exterior staircase. So far so good. But all around them now it was total chaos, people running and screaming, raging fires flickering everywhere; it was overwhelming. However, for Feli it was a silent spectacle of panic; she did not let the jumble of frantic movement disorient her, did not lose her focus. She took stock and decided which way to go. As she and Desi and their little group moved on down the street, she saw a dead woman lying on the pavement, killed by a falling roof tile, its shards still scattered around her body. People were just stepping over her while they fled. Maybe she’d been hit by one of her tiles, Feli realised in a flash… but on the other hand, she’d just brought twenty people down to safety, so better not dwell on it.
On that night, somewhere in those same streets, an eight-year-old boy was running for his life too, like everybody else. His name was Tacitus, and fifty years later, as a middle-aged man, he wrote down what he’d witnessed in his famous Annals:
“The blazes in their fury ran first through the level portions of the city, then rose to the hills, while they again devastated every place below them, outstripping all preventive measures. The calamity was rapid and had the city completely at its mercy, with those narrow winding passages and irregular streets which characterised old Rome.
“On top of all this there were the cries of terrified women, the feebleness of the aged, the helpless inexperience of the children. The crowds who sought to save themselves or others, dragging out the infirm or waiting for them, added to the confusion by their hurry in the first case, by their dithering in the other.
“Often, while they looked behind them, they were intercepted by flames from the side or in front of them. Or if they sought refuge in a neighbouring quarter, when this too was engulfed by the fire, they found out that even places which they had imagined to be safe, were involved in the same calamity. In the end, doubting what they should avoid or where they should go, they crowded the streets or flung themselves down, while some who had lost everything, even their very daily bread, and others out of despair for their loved ones, whom they had been unable to rescue, let themselves perish, although escape was within reach.
“And no one dared to stop the calamity, because of incessant menaces from a number of persons who forbade the extinguishing of the flames, because again others openly hurled burning brands, and kept shouting that there was someone who gave them authority, either seeking to plunder more freely, or obeying orders.”
Things were slightly different with the little group of survivors from a certain attic floor of a Subura insula. Here the infirm were leading the able-bodied, hurrying them along. They were moving against the stream of fleeing crowds, down the Argiletum in the direction of the Forum. Sextus had the feeling they were going the wrong way, towards the heart of the conflagration. He stepped up to his daughter and asked, “Desi! Wouldn’t it be wiser to go to the Porta Esquilina instead? That’s the closest gate, the other way! Our best chance to escape!”
“Feli knows what she’s doing,” Desi answered coldly, “if she didn’t, she’d ask me. As long as she’s not asking, that means that she knows. You can go to the Esquiline Gate if you want, but leave Mater behind with me!”
Sextus looked at his wife, and saw her shaking her head ever so slightly, so he kept moving on with the two girls.
Feli suddenly veered off into a small side ally; they passed a public fountain, its spout still gurgling incongruously; then they reached a heavy wooden grate set into the flagstone street surface. She motioned the four men of the group to help her lift it up, and together they were able to remove it rapidly. A steep stone staircase became visible in the glow of the fires. The two girls led the way down. Soon they were all marching on through the filth, and Desi called out, “Hold on to the person in front of you! Follow me and keep moving; I’m not bothered by the darkness!”
The layer of human excrement clogging the sewer tunnel was even thicker now than the last time, the stench was worse than ever, but they kept moving on at a steady pace.
“You’ve done this before, huh?” Sextus called out to his daughter.
“Of course, PF, Feli and I are real sewer rats! But I understand the plan now: we’re going straight to the Tiber; the riverbank is the safest place to be. If the Island and the Trastevere are not burning, we can cross one of the bridges to safety. Otherwise we’ll keep moving along the riverbank until we’re clear of the fires.”
“Nero at this time was at Antium, and did not return to Rome until the fire approached his house, which he had built to connect the palace with the gardens of MAecenas. It could not, however, be stopped from devouring the palace, the house, and everything around it.
“On the other hand, to relieve the populace, driven out homeless as they were, he threw open to them the Campus Martius and the public buildings of Agrippa, and even his own gardens, and raised temporary structures to receive the destitute multitude. Supplies of food were brought up from Ostia and the neighbouring towns, and the price of corn was reduced to three sesterces.”
And the Pomponius household, together with their attic neighbours, ended up in makeshift shacks on the Vatican Fields. These were the “structures” in the emperor’s own gardens mentioned by Tacitus. They’d been erected swiftly by platoons of navy carpenters under the direction of admiralty engineers. But first the stranded survivors had spent several nights in the open air, and gone hungry for several days, while Rome went on burning on the other side of the Tiber, in plain view of the refugees. Sleeping out in the open had not been too bad, as the nights were still warm and the weather clear; hunger had been a lot more of an ordeal.
The fires would not come to an end, rekindled relentlessly by sparks swept along by a steady wind. The emperor—through Tigellinus—ordered the praetorian guards and the urban cohorts to join the regular vigilēs firefighters. Twenty thousand extra men were mobilized. But it was still not enough, volunteers were recruited among the refugees, and Sextus was among the first who applied. He now spent his days clearing the rubble of burned-out insulae that were blocking the narrow streets. This also involved extricating dead bodies from the ruins, the charred remains of the victims, entire families that had been trapped in their homes. He also helped with the demolition and excavation of undamaged buildings to create firebreaks. At strategic locations in the city, broad swaths of the urban fabric had to be razed, after the ‘uniforms’ had forcibly expelled the inhabitants. When he came ‘home’ at nightfall, dirty and exhausted, Sextus would feel like he’d just spent another day on a battlefield: Rome had become a disaster zone, a moon landscape, a nightmare. And still the fires started all over again in the most unexpected corners.
“At last, on the sixth day, the conflagration was brought to a halt at the foot of the Esquiline hill, by the destruction of all buildings on a vast space, so that the violence of the fire was met by clear ground and an open sky.
“But before people had laid aside their fears, the flames returned, with no less fury this second time, and especially in the spacious districts of the city. Consequently, though there was less loss of life, the temples of the gods, and the porticoes which were devoted to enjoyment, fell in a yet more widespread ruin.
“And this outburst was tinged with greater suspicions because it started on the AEmilian property of Tigellinus, and it looked like Nero was aiming at the glory of founding a new city and calling it by his name.
“Rome, indeed, is divided into fourteen districts, four of which remained uninjured; three were levelled to the ground, while in the other seven only a few shattered, half-burnt remains of houses were left.”
When he reached the part of the shacks where he lived, a strange and soothing sight awaited Sextus. Claudia, Desi, Feli and a dozen other women were standing or sitting on makeshift stools in the shade of a tree and they were carding and spinning wool. Nero’s gardens were still quite attractive, with their shaded lanes, although they were now full of shacks and crowded with refugees. Looking at his wife spinning and chatting with the other women in the peaceful evening, Sextus couldn’t help himself, he still had to see it as a quaint hobby, a fad that kept them amused and whiled away the idle hours. It made him smile and relax: such a charming tableau!
Most remarkable was that even Desi was participating. Apparently, carding the wool between two bats was a mechanical process that didn’t require eyesight to perform correctly. With her fingers she could feel when the fibres were aligned smoothly enough. As for Feli, she seemed to be very adept at spinning, and obviously there was nothing wrong with her eye-hand coordination.
Claudia had revived the cartel with the money she’d salvaged from the fire. In the few moments between waking up and escaping through the hole in the roof, she’d had just enough time to open the familiar old chest and grope around under Sextus’s toga and her best stola for the leather purse containing the cartel’s capital, fifty-six denarii and forty-five sestertii. She’d retrieved it and tied its strings to her waistband before making her escape. In the first days, when they’d gone hungry, she’d used some of the money to buy food from local farmers. The small-time producers from the countryside showed up at the makeshift camps where the refugees spent their nights, and they tried to cash in on the survivors’ deprivation. Claudia didn’t begrudge them their windfall and paid with a smile. After all, part of the cartel capital, her own share, was hers to spend as she saw fit. This was when Sextus had found out about it. He’d been furious: so she’d made lots of money with this spinning business and had never told him?
“Well, what do you expect, Sextus? You’re always banging on about how everything in our household belongs to you, only you, by rights… But this money belongs to a cartel of housewives and none of us is going to let our husbands take control of it. So I kept it hidden to avoid fights, that’s all.”
Claudia had been unexpectedly fierce about this; harsh words had fallen, along the lines that he, Sextus, had never earned a single quadrans of an as with honest work in his entire life. “Even Desi and Feli have done more to provide some income for the Pomponius household!” This had stung, and goaded Sextus into applying for a job as a temporary firefighter.
On the day the markets should have been held, Claudia, on a hunch, had gone out to the Via Flaminia, not far from where they were camping out in the park, and sure enough, her usual supplier had arrived from the north with his cart. So she’d bought a bale of fleece, some carding bats and spindles from him, and “the housewives’ cohort” had been back in business. The three other women from their landing were in, of course, and a couple of other survivors of the original club, but there were also new recruits from the camp. And Claudia saw prospects for some good business opportunities ahead: many people had lost their wardrobe in the fire, few would be producing yarn or cloth in the immediate future. And the survivors needed something to do, urgently. Now that the authorities were providing food and shelter, the refugees had less worries, and more time for productive work.
The exhausted firefighter was warmly welcomed by the whole company. Claudia dropped her spinning at once and hugged her husband tightly, even though he was rather grungy. He’d washed up a bit by the Tiber on his way home, but his clothes were still streaked with sweat, soot, and dust. They all missed the bathhouses terribly.
“How was your day, carissimus? We can still see smoke rising from the city centre; what’s going on?”
Everybody wanted to hear his news, assuming that he knew more for having been on the spot. But Sextus realized all too well now that the foot soldiers on the battlefield are not always better informed about what is happening.
“I don’t know, carissima, there are rumours about looters relighting the fires so they can search for valuables undisturbed. The whole place is a huge mess.”
“Have you had any news from Canio or his clients?” Desi asked. She’d also hugged her father warmly. They had made up, and probably the hard work Sextus was putting in was a way of atoning for not listening to his daughter before the fire. Now she was simply very curious to hear the latest news when he came home, but she was careful not to talk too openly about ‘the plot’, as it still put the PF’s nerves on edge.
“Actually, I met Canio himself today. He tried to stop us when we were tearing down some of his properties for a firebreak. He protested with the uniforms in charge, but they gave him short thrift: orders are orders; if you have complaints, go through the proper channels… So I went over and said hello to him. He told me that his domus on the Esquiline is unharmed, and that I’m welcome to visit him there at the usual time if I want.”
“Some things never change… but I’m glad for him, especially as I need to talk to him again.”
“Are you still going on about that?” Sextus asked wearily, “I know that Canio and I should have listened to you before, but now it’s too late and you should let it go.”
“Well, I’m still concerned for the emperor’s safety, that’s all.”
But it was no use. With a tired wave of his hand Sextus put an end to the discussion. “Let’s all get us some grub. I want to go to bed early, I’m exhausted.”
Rumours went round that Nero was indeed following in his stepfather Claudius’s footsteps, getting personally involved. He’d made appearances at the hardest hit locations, inspecting the damage and consoling the victims. Rufrius and the others had been correct: the emperor wanted to be seen taking a personal interest in his people’s plight, and he must have been very vulnerable. Even if the most elite praetorian bodyguards never left his side, “one of us—or anyone—could kill him and get away with it.” Someone had to warn the authorities, Desi thought.
She would have liked to venture out into the ruined city on her own, or rather with Feli, obviously, and try to find someone who would listen to her. It was urgent to raise the alarm about the plot. But her “twin sister” refused to help her. She refused to budge from the spot.
“You already tried to talk to this politician who owns your father: he didn’t listen. But he knows everything now, so it’s his problem. We stay out of it, it’s too dangerous.”
“I’m not sure I really mentioned the plot against Nero to Canio: I only warned him for the fire; I was being cautious. Besides, we could go looking for any other uniformed big shot… you know?”
“I say let’s keep out of it. This is none of our business. Why should we care if they kill this emperor? Then we’ll get another one; it’s all the same to me.”
“No, Feli, no! This is a good emperor; I care about him because he’s a good man.”
“Are you in love with him? How can you fall in love with a man you’ve never met? And I can’t even tell you if he’s good looking or not!”
Matters of the heart were very serious matters for both girls. Desi was always asking Feli whether a boy was good looking when they would run into some neighbourhood youngster who sounded attractive to her. Then they would discuss his merits and drawbacks endlessly, and enjoy themselves very much doing so. That is why Desi had an idea, at this stage of the discussion. She asked her mother to lend her a coin—any coin—with Nero’s likeness on it, then she handed it over to Feli, and said playfully, “There, that’s him: the man I love! How does he look?”
Feli considered the question for a moment, fingering the tiny profile.
“Bah… ugly face, I’m telling you.”
“Well I don’t care: I’m blind!”
But it was no use. Feli could be very stubborn. She kept saying it was too dangerous to interfere with this business. And that is why they had stayed at the shacks and learned to card and spin under Claudia’s guidance.
After another three days the fires had finally been extinguished for good, and Sextus decided he could take a day off and go pay a visit to Canio with his daughter. Claudia had even managed to clean up the only tunica he had a bit; it was decided that Feli would stay back with her. And off they went.
They crossed Nero’s bridge and walked down the main thoroughfare across the Campus Martius, hand in hand. Sextus described the damage to Desi, and concluded, “You know the Via Triumphalis, right? Well you wouldn’t recognize it anymore.”
“I know this street all right, dear PF, but I’ve never seen it, really, so I can’t tell the difference, no.”
“My point exactly, you’ll just have to take my word for it.”
“It sounds different, though.”
“There are a lot of people camping in the ruins of their houses. Maybe that is what you hear.”
“Yes, and they are awfully subdued. You don’t often hear Romans talking so softly.”
At the Porta Carmentalis they had to pass a checkpoint. The urban cohorts were making sure no looters could enter the city through the Servian wall. But Sextus had a firefighter’s tag on a string around his neck; he was guiding a blind girl; they let him through without asking too many questions. As they went on across the Forum and into the Subura, he told his daughter what he saw: the badly damaged public buildings and temples; the narrow streets like their own that had been levelled by the fires. On every corner, public slaves were still busy pushing aside the heaps of rubble. Finally they went up to the Esquiline, where the nice houses of the rich had not been much affected by the conflagration. As they wound their way to Canio’s place through shaded alleys, Sextus cautioned Desi once more: if she was given the opportunity to talk to the great man, she should not mention Piso.
As it turned out, the great man wanted to see his client’s blind daughter immediately. They were led through to his private office as soon as they arrived, and the senator greeted them warmly, before getting down to business at once.
“Desiderata! tell me, do you really think this disaster was caused by arsonists, like you said?”
“Yes, Senator, now I’m sure of it. You’ve probably heard the rumours about people throwing burning torches and shouting that they had the authority to do so, that they were obeying orders. It is also very suspicious that for days on end the fires kept coming back from the most unexpected places.”
“Yes,” Sextus added, “I’ve really wondered about that. It makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“And I can tell you what happened on our own block on that first night