In July of AD 64 a fire broke out near the Circus Maximus and burned for six days. Ten of Rome's fourteen districts were damaged or destroyed. The Emperor Nero raced back from Antium, opened his own gardens to the homeless and cut the price of grain. But a rumour spread that he had watched from a tower and sung about the fall of Troy. He never fiddled: the fiddle wouldn't be invented for 1,500 years. The words are imagined.