In the dark of the night of July 19, AD 64, a fire broke out in the slums of Rome and, swept along by vicious winds, devastated the town, leveling several districts entirely. The fire burned for six days, died down, was reignited, and burned for three more. Hundreds of people were killed; many more were left destitute and homeless.
In the midst of it all, the famously conniving Emperor Nero—who was away in his holiday home on a cool hillside when the fires began—was reported by the historian Tacitus to have placidly watched the city burn as he nonchalantly played his fiddle or plucked his lyre. (Tacitus was writing years later; he was a teenager when Nero died, and historians have argued since that we know little about his sources or biases.)
Per Tacitus, Roman citizens began to suspect that Nero himself had ordered the fires set, to consolidate his power and reconstruct Rome in the manner he saw fit. Or he had allowed the fires to keep burning for the same reason, even sending mobs to prevent citizens from quashing the flames. Nero, meanwhile, blamed the fires on an upstart religious group, the Christians, and used the pretext to merrily persecute and crucify them. Many parts of the story have been called into question by modern scholarship, but the Nero-fiddling-as-Rome-burns version is one of the earliest known examples of two things. First, it's a conspiracy theory about the government unleashing chaos to extend control; second, a government official used a conspiracy theory to realize political ends.
All these many centuries later, conspiracy theories relating to September 11 echo the Roman fire incident: that the Bush administration either passively allowed the attacks to happen or orchestrated them for political ends. (The two branches of 9/11 conspiracism have become so entrenched that they have their own acronyms: LIHOP, for “let it happen on purpose,” and MIHOP, “made it happen on purpose.”)
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