uman life; but more extensive
havoc was made of the temples and the porticoes dedicated to amusement.
This conflagration, too, was the subject of more censorious remark, as
it arose in the AEmilian possessions of Tigellinus, and Nero seemed to
aim at the glory of building a new city and calling it by his own name;
for, of the fourteen sections into which Rome is divided, four were
still standing entire, three were levelled with the ground, and in the
seven others there remained only here and there a few remnants of
houses, shattered and half consumed.

It were no very easy task to recount the number of tenements and temples
which were lost; but the following, most venerable for antiquity and
sanctity, were consumed: that dedicated by Servius Tullius to the Moon;
the temple and great altar consecrated by Evander the Arcadian to
Hercules while present; the chapel vowed by Romulus to Jupiter Stator;
the palace of Numa with the temple of Vesta, and in it the tutelar gods
of Rome. Moreover, the treasures accumulated by so many victories, the
beautiful productions of Greek artists, ancient writings of authors
celebrated for genius, and till then preserved entire, were consumed;
and though great was the beauty of the city, in its renovated form, the
older inhabitants remembered many decorations of the ancient which could
not be replaced in the modern city. There were some who remarked that
the commencement of this fire showed itself on the fourteenth before the
calends of July, the day on which the Senones set fire to the captured
city. Others carried their investigation so far as to determine that an
equal number of years, months, and days intervened between the two
fires.

To proceed: Nero appropriated to his own purposes the ruins of his
country,[27] and founded upon them a palace; in which the old-fashioned,
and, in those luxurious times, common ornaments of gold and precious
stones, were not so much the objects of attraction as lands and lakes;
in one part, woods like vast deserts; in another part, open spaces and
expansive prospects. The projectors and superintendents of this plan
were Severus and Celer, men of such ingenuity and daring enterprise as
to attempt to conquer by art the obstacles of nature and fool away the
treasures of the prince. They had even undertaken to sink a navigable
canal from the lake Avernus to the mouth of the Tiber, over an arid
shore or through opposing mountains; nor indeed does there occur