The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose, page 169 by Various Authors
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gress of the fire several men of consular rank met Nero's domestic servants with torches and combustibles which they were using to start fires, but did not dare to stay their hands. Livy asserts that, after it was destroyed by the Gauls, Rome had been rebuilt with narrow winding streets.]
[Footnote 119: A city in the central Apennines, six miles from Lake Fucinus.]
[Footnote 120: Near the Esquiline.]
[Footnote 121: The house, gardens, baths and the Pantheon of Agrippa are here referred to. Nero's gardens were near the Vatican.]
[Footnote 122: The palace of Numa, on the Palatine hill, had been the mansion of Augustus.]
[Footnote 123: Carlyle, in his essay on Voltaire, refers to this passage as having been "inserted as a small, transitory, altogether trifling circumstance, in the history of such a potentate as Nero"; but it has become "to us the most earnest, sad and sternly significant passage that we know to exist in writing."]
[Footnote 124: Claudius already had expelled the Jews from Rome and included in their number the followers of Christ. But his edict was not specifically directed against the Christians. Nero was the first emperor who persecuted them as professors of a new faith.]
[Footnote 125: From Book III of the "History." The Oxford translation revised. Pliny, Josephus and Dio all agree that the Capitol was set on fire by the followers of Vitellius.]
[Footnote 126: Porsena did not actually get into Rome, being induced to raise the siege when only at its gates.]
[Footnote 127: The capture of Rome by the Gauls under Brennus took place in 390 B.C. The destruction of the Capitol in the first Civil War occurred in 83 B.C., during the consulship of Lucius Scipio and Caius Norbaius. The fire was not started as an act of open violence, however, but by clandestine incendiaries.]
[Footnote 128: From Book III of the "History." The Oxford translation revised. Near Cremona had been fought the first battle of Bedriacum by the armies of Vitellius a