History Myths Checked
Nero's Fiddle, the Salem Witch Burnings and the "Dark Ages"

Three stories almost everyone has heard: Nero fiddled while Rome burned, witches were burned at Salem, and Europe fell into a Dark Age when Rome fell. Each has a grain of history in it, and each has grown in the telling. Here is what the sources say.

1. “Nero fiddled while Rome burned”

Myth Nero could not have played a fiddle. Writing in The Classical Journal in 1947, Mary Francis Gyles, then a graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina, noted that “musical historians agree that the viol class of instruments did not develop until about the eleventh century”, and that “There can be no doubt that the instrument employed by Nero was the cithara”. Bowed instruments arrived many centuries after Nero.

The story behind the myth is genuinely ancient, but the three Roman writers who tell it disagree.

• Tacitus (Annals XV, trans. John Jackson) says the cause of the fire was uncertain — “whether due to chance or to the malice of the sovereign is uncertain”. He writes that “Nero, who at the time was staying in Antium, did not return to the capital until the fire was nearing the house”, and gives the singing only as a rumour: “the report had spread that, at the very moment when Rome was aflame, he had mounted his private stage,” and “had sung the destruction of Troy.”
• Suetonius (Nero 38, trans. J. C. Rolfe) states as fact that “he set fire to the city”, and that “Viewing the conflagration from the tower of Maecenas” he “sang the whole of the “Sack of Ilium,"" “in his regular stage costume.”
• Cassius Dio, writing about 150 years after the fire (trans. Earnest Cary), puts Nero on “the roof of the palace”, where “assuming the lyre-player’s garb, he sang the “Capture of Troy,""

So Tacitus has Nero away at Antium when the fire broke out and back in the city while it was still burning, and he reports the song only as a rumour; the later writers put him watching the fire from a height in Rome and tell the song as fact. Jackson’s note on the cause of the fire is blunt: “There is obviously no possibility of deciding the question.”

Where the fiddle came from. Gyles traced the instrument through later literature. In Henry VI Part 1, Talbot vows to “Play on the lute, beholding the towns burn”. The 1623 First Folio does not print Nero’s name in that line; modern editors add it, reading the line as an allusion to him. On that reading, Gyles writes, this is where “for the first time an instrument is placed in Nero’s hands during the burning of Rome” — and it is a lute, not a fiddle. A play printed in 1624 calls Nero a “fiddler”, and “in 1649 George Daniel is found writing, “Let Nero fiddle out Rome’s obsequies."" Her conclusion: “it is impossible to prove that Nero played a musical instrument during the burning of Rome.”

Verdict in short: the fiddle is a myth; that Nero sang while the city burned is UNVERIFIED — Tacitus reports it only as a rumour.

2. “Witches were burned at Salem”

Myth No one was burned in the Salem witch trials of 1692–93. According to the University of Virginia’s Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive, “nineteen were executed by hanging, one was tortured to death, and at least five died in jail due to harsh conditions.”

The court records say how. Bridget Bishop, the first person executed, was sentenced “to be hanged by the neck untill she be de[ad]”, and the sheriff’s return records that he “Caused the s’d Brigett to be hanged by the neck untill Shee was dead” on 10 June 1692. The hangings continued on 19 July, 19 August and 22 September 1692.

The man who died another way was Giles Corey. The judge Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary: “Monday, Sept. 19, 1692. About noon, at Salem, Giles Corey was press’d to death for standing Mute” — he had refused to enter a plea. (The archive’s case index gives 16 September; Sewall wrote at the time, and 19 September 1692 in the calendar then used in the colony did fall on a Monday, by our calculation.)

Witchcraft had been a capital crime in the colony since its 1641 Body of Liberties, which says a witch “shall be put to death”. But in 1692 the colony’s old charter had been suspended and its new one had only just arrived, and the special court set up that year was told to act “according to the law and custom of England and of this their Majesties’ Province”, as the Massachusetts Trial Court Law Libraries explain. The colony passed its own witchcraft act only in December 1692, after the last execution. It kept “pains of death as a Felon” for the gravest offences and for a second conviction, and gave lesser ones a year in prison.

Burning witches did happen elsewhere. In Scotland, the University of Edinburgh’s Survey of Scottish Witchcraft notes, “Those convicted were almost always strangled at the stake and then their dead body was burned.”

3. “The Dark Ages”

Myth as a description of the Middle Ages as a whole. The image of a dark time after Rome goes back to the Italian poet Petrarch, who in his Latin epic Africa looked forward to a day when “discussis forte tenebris” — the darkness perhaps dispersed — later generations could return to the pure light of old (our translation). He was lamenting lost classical learning, and he never used the term “dark ages” itself. But the idea of such a period starts with him: as the word historian Dave Wilton puts it, “the concept of such a period was first promulgated by Petrarch in the mid fourteenth century.”

The English phrase came later, and at first it was religious polemic. Wilton also records that “In early Protestant writing, dark ages was often used to refer to the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church prior to the Reformation”, and that, “As applied to c. 500–1100, the term is a misnomer and has largely been abandoned by professional historians.”

Why historians avoid it: the archaeologist Howard Williams summarises the critics’ case — the term is seen as “inappropriate, out-dated and pejorative”, and “text-orientated”, as if centuries with few written sources were beyond study. “Most importantly,” he adds, “it is already a rare term in academic contexts.” Not every scholar has abandoned it, and Williams himself defends some of its uses.

Disputed Did anything decline? Here historians genuinely disagree about emphasis. One school, which the historian James J. O’Donnell traces to Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (1971), stresses transformation rather than collapse: in O’Donnell’s summary, it speaks “of rises rather than falls” and gives more weight to the eastern empire and to religious and cultural history. Another is represented by Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), whose case O’Donnell summarises as “a significant decline in the complexity of organization and the prosperity of society in post-Roman times” in the West. O’Donnell, who counts himself on the other side, conceded that in the post-Roman West “stuff happened, bad stuff, lots of it”, while arguing that leaving out the eastern empire means the case “does not go far enough”.

So “the Middle Ages were a dark age” is a myth, but so is “nothing was lost when Rome fell in the West”. What remains open is how to weigh the losses against what continued and what was new.

Our reading

All three myths turn a disputed or partial story into a clean image: a fiddling emperor, a burning witch, a lights-out millennium. The records underneath are messier and more interesting — a rumour reported by a careful historian, a colony that hanged nineteen people convicted by its special court, and a real argument among scholars about what the end of Rome meant.

Sources

• Tacitus, Annals XV, trans. John Jackson, Loeb (1937).
• Suetonius, Nero 38, trans. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb (1914).
• Cassius Dio, Roman History 62, trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb (1925).
• Mary Francis Gyles, “‘Nero Fiddled While Rome Burned’”, The Classical Journal 42.4 (1947).
• Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, University of Virginia: overview; The Salem Witchcraft Papers, ed. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (1977), rev. Benjamin C. Ray and Tara S. Wood; SWP No. 013 (Bridget Bishop); SWP No. 168 (bill of December 1692); diary of Samuel Sewall.
• The Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641), Hanover Historical Texts Project.
• Massachusetts Trial Court Law Libraries, “Witchcraft law up to the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692” (archived copy).
• The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, University of Edinburgh.
• William Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 1, 1.4: First Folio (1623), Internet Shakespeare Editions; Folger Shakespeare edition.
• Francesco Petrarca, Africa IX, ed. N. Festa (1926), Perseus, Tufts University.
• Dave Wilton, “dark ages”, Wordorigins.org (2024).
• Howard M. R. Williams, “Bring Back the Dark Ages!” (2016).
• James J. O’Donnell, review of Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2005.07.69.
• Dennis E. Trout, review of Rita Lizzi Testa (ed.), Late Antiquity in Contemporary Debate, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.07.38.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Byzantine Empire”.

Checked September 2026.

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