riven in every day from
the mountains. Wretches who before the fire had been hiding in alleys of
the Subura, and were perishing of hunger in ordinary times, had a more
pleasant life now. The danger of famine was averted completely, but it
was more difficult to suppress robbery, murder, and abuses. A nomadic
life insured impunity to thieves; the more easily since they proclaimed
themselves admirers of Caesar, and were unsparing of plaudits wherever
he appeared. Moreover, when, by the pressure of events, the authorities
were in abeyance, and there was a lack of armed force to quell insolence
in a city inhabited by the dregs of contemporary mankind, deeds were
done which passed human imagination. Every night there were battles and
murders; every night boys and women were snatched away. At the Porta
Mugionis, where there was a halting-place for herds driven in from the
Campania, it come to engagements in which people perished by hundreds.
Every morning the banks of the Tiber were covered with drowned bodies,
which no one collected; these decayed quickly because of heat heightened
by fire, and filled the air with foul odors. Sickness broke out on the
camping-grounds, and the more timorous foresaw a great pestilence.

But the city burned on unceasingly. Only on the sixth day, when the
fire reached empty spaces on the Esquiline, where an enormous number of
houses had been demolished purposely, did it weaken. But the piles of
burning cinders gave such strong light yet that people would not believe
that the end of the catastrophe had come. In fact the fire burst forth
with fresh force on the seventh night in the buildings of Tigellinus,
but had short duration for lack of fuel. Burnt houses, however, fell
here and there, and threw up towers of flame and pillars of sparks. But
the glowing ruins began to grow black on the surface. After sunset the
heavens ceased to gleam with bloody light, and only after dark did blue
tongues quiver above the extended black waste, tongues which rose from
piles of cinders.

Of the fourteen divisions of Rome there remained only four, including
the Trans-Tiber. Flames had consumed all the others. When at last
the piles of cinders had been turned into ashes, an immense space was
visible from the Tiber to the Esquiline, gray, gloomy, dead. In this
space stood rows of chimneys, like columns over graves in a cemetery.
Among these columns gloomy crowds of people moved about in the daytime,
some seeking fo