remarked that the commencement of this fire showed
itself on the fourteenth before the calends of July, the day on which
the Senones set fire to the captured city. Others carried their
investigation so far as to determine that an equal number of years,
months, and days intervened between the two fires.

To proceed: Nero appropriated to his own purposes the ruins of his
country, and founded upon them a palace; in which the old-fashioned,
and, in those luxurious times, common ornaments of gold and precious
stones, were not so much the objects of attraction as lands and lakes;
in one part, woods like vast deserts: in another part, open spaces and
expansive prospects. The projectors and superintendents of this plan
were Severus and Celer, men of such ingenuity and daring enterprise as
to attempt to conquer by art the obstacles of nature, and fool away
the treasures of the prince: they had even undertaken to sink a
navigable canal from the lake Avernus to the mouth of the Tiber, over
an arid shore, or through opposing mountains: nor indeed does there
occur anything of a humid nature for supplying water, except the
Pomptine marshes; the rest is either craggy rock or a parched soil:
and had it even been possible to break through these obstructions, the
toil had been intolerable, and disproportioned to the object. Nero,
however who longed to achieve things that exceeded credibility,
exerted all his might to perforate the mountains adjoining to Avernus:
and to this day there remain traces of his abortive project.

But the rest of the old site not occupied by his palace, was laid out,
not as after the Gallic fire, without discrimination and regularity,
but with the lines of streets measured out, broad spaces left for
transit, the height of the buildings limited, open areas left, and
porticoes added to protect the front of the clustered dwellings: these
porticoes Nero engaged to rear at his own expense, and then to deliver
to each proprietor the areas about them cleared. He moreover proposed
rewards proportioned to every man's rank and private substance, and
fixt a day within which, if their houses, single or clustered, were
finished, they should receive them: he appointed the marshes of Ostia
for a receptacle of the rubbish, and that the vessels which had
conveyed grain up the Tiber should return laden with rubbish; that the
buildings themselves should be raised to a certain portion of their
height without beams, and arched with