TNA's The Final Deletion: 8 Things You Totally Missed

5. Playing The Fiddle As Rome Burns

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impactwrestling.com

Matt summons Jeff to the battlefield by playing a violin, an instrument he claimed was given to him by Antonio Stradivari. Ol' Antonio died in 1737, so it is unlikely that there is any truth behind this particularly wild claim. I'm not here to talk about Italian craftsmen though.

In truth, this one is fairly simple. Matt has referred to Jeff as Brother Nero throughout, so his playing a violin as Jeff approaches the battlefield is apt. 'To fiddle while Rome burns' is to engage in seemingly trivial acts as something disastrous approaches, and Matt's playing of the violin is exactly that.

The idiom itself comes from the myth that Roman Emperor Nero played the fiddle as his beloved Rome burned to the ground. Nero, Brother Nero, violin, fiddle.

Contributor
Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.