Background information: In my freshman year of college several years ago I took an Early Medieval Europe class (I know this is after the Roman Empire fell, just keep reading) and the one thing I still remember the most from this class was a random comment our professor made on Nero.
Somehow the class got to talking about how new discoviers could change our entire understanding of different events we were learning about.
Our professor (Ph.d from Oxford) then says "Yes, an example of this can be seen with Emperor Nero and the Great Fire of Rome. It is now being thought after the fire which burned a lot of the parts of Rome where the Christians lived, Nero then let all these Christians squat and live in the temples of the Roman gods. Because of this the historians, writers, and sculptures of Nero's time started hated on him after his reign because of this".
I've always found this statement extremely interesting but I've never found anything else backing the professor up. So my question is there any truth to this or was my professor BSing to help support a point?
Thanks in advance.
TL;DR Professor once said Nero's hate comes from the writers and sculptures of the time hating Nero for letting the Christians live in their pagan god's temples, any support for this?
Edit: spelling
I don't know anything about squatting in the temples -- I don't think there's any textual mention of it, which would be what I would most likely be familiar with. Tacitus makes reference to him allowing the displaced into his palace, if I recall correctly. I'm curious if anyone else has anything more on the claim being made here.
Funny that you mention the Christians. I did a course on the Julio-Claudians and my prof noted a lone German scholar's thought experiment. Apparently the fire happened on July 19, the same day as the destruction of the city by the Gauls way back in 390 BCE. Some clever Roman figured out this was exactly 418 years, 418 months, 418 days between the two dates. So a lone scholar suggested that Jesus had only been crucified 31 years ago and Peter and Paul had been spreading the Christian faith in Rome. At the time Christians may have been expecting the imminent return of the saviour. The scholar suggested that maybe an apocalyptic fringe sect wanted to bring Christ back and used the major catastrophe as a trigger. The magic formula of 418 may have added to it.
My prof didn't take this seriously, just an amusing 'what if'. But maybe Nero was right all along...
I'd be somewhat skeptical of this assertion. Firstly, it would be very unlikely that the man who blamed the fire of Rome on the Christians would also be helping them, and indeed risking his own popularity in doing so.
Secondly, it's not documented as having happened by any of the major sources on the fire we have, though as /u/QVCatullus pointed out, some displaced were allowed into the palace according to Tacitus, but no mention of Christians specifically, nor of temples.
Secondly, this is definitely not remembered by Christians. For them, Nero starts off over two hundred years of on-and-off persecution, and in literature such as Revelation is compared to the eschatological figure of the Antichrist.
As neither Christian nor Roman sources appear to recall such an event, i'd be reluctant in admitting it happened, even without the fact that I doubt Nero would be persecuting Christians and letting them squat in the holy places at the same time!