Idiom
fiddle while Rome burns
Meaning
To busy yourself with trivia while a disaster you could be addressing unfolds.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“They are arguing about the logo while the company runs out of money — fiddling while Rome burns.”
“With the flood water rising, the council spent the meeting debating parking permits, and the local paper accused it of fiddling while Rome burned.”
“To spend the last week before the deadline redesigning the cover was to fiddle while Rome burned, and everyone in the room knew it, which is precisely why nobody wanted to be the one to say so.”
Examples
simple
“They are arguing about the logo while the company runs out of money — fiddling while Rome burns.”
contextual
“With the flood water rising, the council spent the meeting debating parking permits, and the local paper accused it of fiddling while Rome burned.”
complex
“To spend the last week before the deadline redesigning the cover was to fiddle while Rome burned, and everyone in the room knew it, which is precisely why nobody wanted to be the one to say so.”
Origin
The Great Fire of Rome broke out in July of AD 64 and burned for six days, destroying most of the city. Tacitus, writing about fifty years later, reports a rumour that while it burned Nero went on his private stage and sang about the fall of Troy.
Tacitus does not endorse the story, and the fiddle is an outright anachronism — the violin was still fifteen centuries away. If Nero played anything it was the cithara, a large lyre he performed with in public, to the horror of the senatorial class. Tacitus also records that Nero was thirty-five miles away at Antium when the fire started, returned to organise relief, and opened his own gardens to the homeless.
None of which mattered. The image of a ruler making music while his city burns was too good to lose, and English has used it since the sixteenth century for anyone fussing over small things in the middle of an emergency.
Key words
Related idioms
Stories
Empire & the Arena · See all Roman origin
Emperors, spectacle, and the machinery of keeping a city entertained.
bread and circuses — Food and entertainment handed out by those in power to keep the public quiet.
circus — a show with performers like clowns and acrobats, or a place where many streets meet; it can also describe a very busy or chaotic situation.
a Roman holiday — Enjoyment taken from watching somebody else suffer.
Triumph — a great victory or a very successful result. You use this word when someone wins something difficult or achieves a big goal.
Laurel — an evergreen tree with shiny leaves that people used to make crowns for winners in ancient times. Today, it is often used to talk about honor or success.
rest on one's laurels — To rely on past success and stop making the effort to keep improving.
- Level
- C1 · Advanced
- Updated