Was Nero far enough gone in mind to torch his own city? Or to treat its destruction as an occasion for song? What would have been his purpose in setting the fire—to build a new Rome in his own image, a Neronopolis, as Suetonius says he planned to do? Or to lash out at disapproval of his new persona and at the Stoics, whose scowls hurt him so deeply? Rome was his conscience, the city he dreaded to enter after killing his mother, the city that had, briefly, made him ashamed to reject Octavia. If, as psychologists tell us, arson often springs from buried rage and a quest for revenge, then Nero
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