Rome burns. Nero (Peter Ustinov) fiddles. Christianity rises. Featuring 110 speaking parts, 30,000 participants and a filmed-on-location panoply of marching legions, magisterial pageantry and massive spectacle that includes the martyrdom of Christians thrown to the lions before cheering Coliseum throngs. Robert Taylor plays the Legion commander whose love for a Christian slave girll crosses the divide between Empire and a sect with a higher loyalty. Presiding over all is Nero. He is Caesar, madman, murderer - an imperial ruler of the spectacular, and spectacularly doomed, glory that was Rome.