Tacitus, Annals, 15.20­-23, 33­-45. Latin Text, Study Aids with Vocabulary, and Commentary, 2013a

(‘On the occasion of a stubborn fire in the Aemiliana he remained in the
Diribitorium for two nights, and when a body of soldiers and of his own
slaves could not give sufficient help, he summoned the commons from all
parts of the city through the magistrates, and placing bags full of money
before them, urged them to the rescue, paying each man on the spot a
suitable reward for his services’). Nor does it do Nero credit, especially
after his great claims of patriotism, that he only returned when his own
property (domui eius) was threatened. The emphatic position of non ante
stresses that this was the only thing that motivated his return, and the
delayed subject ignis propinquaret suggests he waited for the last possible
minute.
This is the so-called
Domus Transitoria: cf. Suetonius, Nero 31.1: Non in alia re tamen damnosior
quam in aedificando domum a Palatio Esquilias usque fecit, quam primo
transitoriam, mox incendio absumptam restitutamque auream nominavit (‘There
was nothing however in which he was more ruinously prodigal than in
building. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the
Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage, but when it was
burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, the Golden House’). Nero’s
palace lay between the site of the traditional imperial residence, Augustus’
house on the Palatine (whence our word ‘palace’) and the great gardens
of Maecenas on the Esquiline Hill, which he left to Augustus. The verb
continuaverat exaggerates the scale of Nero’s immense crosstown palace –
but also skewers Nero’s own hubristic wit in dubbing it ‘Passageway.’
neque tamen sisti potuit quin et Palatium et domus et cuncta circum
The emphatically placed neque tamen underlines again the
impossibility of controlling the blaze, and the repetition of Palatium and
domus from the previous sentence emphasises that nothing could be saved.
The polysyndeton et ... et ... et ... and the alliterative cuncta circum both help
to underscore the total devastation of the fire.
minutum usque ad ternos nummos.