At least while Rome was burning Nero merely played with his stupid fiddle.
He didn't join the barbarians in the streets sacking the city, putting its residents to the sword and its buildings to the torch. After the last week in Australian climate politics, I doubt whether anybody from the government would be able to show the same forbearance. Scott Morrison would probably have a high old time of it, running around whacking people upside the head with his giant lump of coal.
It can be hard in the witless hysteria of the moment to take the longer view, but here it is.
This year was hotter than last year. Next year will probably be hotter than this one. It will go this way now, with occasional quirks in the statistics, a marginally cooler year, a massively hotter and stormier one, until there is a discontinuity; that is, until human civilisation comprehensively breaks its dependency on fossil fuel technologies, or climate change breaks human civilisation.
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After this last week, I got a shiny dollar says we all die screaming. Except for ScoMo, who'll probably go out smirking and scratching the arse of his toga while Rome burns and he eats a big piece of coal like a shiny black fossilised apple.
Lest you read this as another attack on a conservative government by a lentil-eating idiot, I prefer sausages to lentils, cold beer to latte, and believe that the ALP and the Greens are both deeply culpable for the septic mess we have instead of energy policy in this country.
But neither of them brought a big lump of coal into the Parliament on the eve of an extreme heatwave that will soon enough fade into everyday memory as more and more of these event's pile up on the calendar.
And neither of them, unlike the Turnbull government, are actively sabotaging the modernisation of Australia's energy infrastructure to favour the commercial interests of party donors.
Neither of them are throwing around fibs about existing renewables infrastructure like a dead cat at a garden party. It should be a shocking surprise to learn that the PM's office was informed that blackouts in SA had nothing to do with the amount of wind or solar capacity on the grid down there, that, rather, they were a function of so many towers being blown over in a severe storm.
But it's not a surprise, is it? Because these clowns couldn't lie straight in bed. Of course they'd ignore professional advice about the true reason for the blackouts in favour of tilting at windmills.
In one sense what they do is irrelevant anyway. The fallback position of the fossil fuel lobby and their trained monkeys in Parliament and the press, that it's pointless doing anything unless the US and China move first, is true.
And given the energy policies of the gibbering hate carrot now in the White House, that hard truth is even more depressing.
But both China and India, the most likely hyper-powers of the next one hundred years, are accelerating away from dependence on coal and betting the national farm on exporting to them is setting up our economy for its own catastrophic discontinuous event a decade or so from now.
That's why even the Business Council of Australia, which would turn the union movement into Soylent Green if it could, wants the certainty of real costs built into the energy market.
At the moment the price of coal is artificially low because the costs of mitigating the damage it does to the atmosphere are not factored in. That is a distortion, and in markets distortions and imbalances either get corrected or they correct themselves, like they did in 2008 and earlier, more spectacularly in 1929.
Markets are bit like the climate in that way.
It's weird that the party of free markets doesn't see that, but I guess all the money from Big Coal is a distraction.