Frank and Ernest by Thaves for April 14, 2010

Rome didn’t have a fire department. That was the problem.

What have they got an abacus for, that doesn’t work in Roman numerals. Can you imagine trying to do engineering in Roman numerals?!!

He can just blame the Christians

Good catch Chief and the Abacus is laying on its side too

That will be VII denarius

Actually Rome did have a Department of Fire, though.

Actually, Abacuses work just fine with Roman numerals: Is and Xs and all the rest correspond to the different columns. In fact, adding and multiplying are much easier with an abacus than on papyrus, which was probably pretty pricey anyway.

Not only that, but Nero personally organized firefighting brigades and helped rescue people from burning buildings. The “fiddling” (which can’t be true because violins and fiddles weren’t around until the early Renaissance) story cam about becasue, according to one account, while taking a rest from directing the rescues, he composed a song of elegy for his burning city.

At the time the fire broke out, Nero was at a villa some 20 miles outside the city, making it unlikely that he had a personal hand in starting it. Fires were a common occurrence in Rome and other cities of the time.

Of courst, that doesn’t mean that Nero was otherwise a nice fellow. In other things, he was rather monstrous.

Togas were whatever color the cloth came out, generally somewhat brown in color. That is, except for those of candidates for office who used to color their togas a bright white so as to inform people that they were candidates. The word candidate itself comes from the Latin “candida” meaning white.

Rome burned because Nero was fiddling with matches.

Kind of like Bloomberg in NYC.

@ ChuckTrent64

actually, rome did have a fire department, and their hoses were made from leather.