fiddle while Rome burns, to

To busy oneself with trivial matters during a crisis. The expression comes from the legend that during the burning of Rome (A.D. 64), the Emperor Nero played his lyre while watching the spec- tacle from a high tower. Indeed, the historian Suetonius alleged that Nero had ordered the fire set in order to see how Troy had looked when it burned. The expression was probably already a cliché by the time Charles Kingsley wrote in Westward Ho! (1855), “It is fiddling while Rome burns to spend more pages over . . . Rose Saltenere, while the destinies of Europe are hang- ing on the marriage between Elizabeth and Anjou.”