Rome was scorched clean of all whom Nero or Tigellinus considered threats. It was as though the ekpyrosis, the world-ending conflagration of the Stoics, had arrived but in a different form than expected. Rather than cleansing the world of a corrupt human race, the blaze claimed only the best and the brightest, the flowers of Rome’s literary elite and military officer class. Among the last to go into the inferno was Thrasea Paetus.
