Friday, March 25, 2011

Historic disastrous fires?

The Great Fire of Rome  was an urban fire that occurred in AD 64. According to Tacitus, it spread quickly and burned for five and a half days. Only four of the fourteen districts of Rome escaped the fire; three districts were completely destroyed and the other seven suffered serious damage.The only other contemporaneous historian to mention the fire was Pliny the Elder, who wrote about it in passing. 


Other historians who lived through the period (including Dio ChrysostomPlutarch and Epictetus) make no mention of it. The only other account on the size of fire is an interpolation in a forged Christian letter from Seneca to Paul: "A hundred and thirty-two houses and four blocks (insulae) have been burnt in six days; the seventh brought a pause". This account implies less than a tenth of the city was burnt. Rome contained about 1,700 private houses and 47,000 insulaeor tenement blocks.

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