In reference to a rather different problem, I once wrote that the purpose of historical research is to create by description and explanation but that sometimes it is destruction that is required. So it is in this case. One of the sure and fixed points in modern historical narratives of the early Church is that the first deliberate action of the Roman state directed against Christians, known by this name, was the mass execution of believers ordered by the emperor Nero in the year 64. Attached to this event, and almost always adduced as supporting evidence of a more general hostile response by the Roman imperial state at that time, are the deaths of two individual Christians: the executions of the apostles Peter and Paul. Nero's spectacular executions of large numbers of Christians in the aftermath of the fire that raged through the city of Rome in July of 64 is commonly regarded as a foundational event in the history of Christian martyrdom. They were the first executions of Christians performed at the behest of the Roman state. In almost every history of the early Christian Church, the event is marked as a dramatic turning point in the relations between Christians and the imperial government.Footnote 2 Given the surprisingly widespread acceptance of the great significance of this axial event in Christian history, the thinness of the evidence on all aspects of it is quite striking. The paucity and weakness of the data, however, have not prevented acceptance of the historicity of this ‘first persecution’ as an undisputed fact. Indeed, the degree of certainty in the Neronian persecution stands in almost inverse proportion to the quality and quantity of the data.Footnote 3 Those who have expressed even modest scepticism about the historicity of the one explicit passage in the historian Tacitus that attests to the executions have been voces clamantium in deserto.Footnote 4 The simple argument of this essay, deliberately framed as a provocative hypothesis, is that this event never happened and that there are compelling reasons to doubt that it should have any place either in the history of Christian martyrdom or in the history of the early Church.
ANCILLARY CASES
Before turning to the Neronian persecution of the summer of 64 c.e. as a critical episode in the history of early Christianity, let us begin by dismissing any connections of the executions of the apostles Peter and Paul with the supposed executions of other Christians in the aftermath of the great conflagration that levelled many districts of the city of Rome in July of 64. A specific link between the demise of Peter and specific anti-Christian acts ordered by Nero is perhaps the easiest to dismiss.Footnote 5 Almost nothing reliable is known about Peter's death. We do not know why it happened or how, or indeed even where. Two facts that were often asserted about his death in Christian accounts in later antiquity — that it occurred in 64 c.e., the year of the fire, and that Peter was crucified — are palpably the construction of writers who very much desired both things to be true.Footnote 6 They wanted Peter, like Paul, to be a victim of a Neronian persecution and they wanted his death, also like that of Paul, to be connected with the Great Fire. They wished the two deaths be seen as typological replays of the executions of John the Baptist (by beheading) and of Jesus of Nazareth (by crucifixion). The assertion that Peter was crucified is found as early as the African exegete Tertullian who was writing around 200 c.e., but he says nothing about when the execution took place or in what fashion.Footnote 7 Much later, Eusebius is the first to state that Peter, at the end of his apostolic travels, came to Rome where he was ‘crucified head downwards as he himself had requested to suffer’. Oddly enough, Eusebius does not say when this happened. In this same passage, however, he mentions the martyrdom of Paul under Nero, claiming Origen's (lost) commentary on Genesis as his source. But even he does not connect Peter with the fire.Footnote 8
The story that Peter died by being crucified head downwards at his own request is also found in the apocryphal Martyrdom of Peter that is part of the larger Acts of Peter. It is rather difficult to date this late antique confection. The collection of which it is a part is like a novelette featuring Peter's various stand-offs with Simon the Magician. The driving themes of the virginity of women, the refusal of wives to have sexual relations with their husbands, and the raft of invented and fictitious characters and exaggerated scenes of confrontation are redolent of later fourth- and fifth-century fabrications like the Acts of Paul and Thekla.Footnote 9 The whole of this later tradition appears, in part, to be a way of configuring Peter's death so as to make it fulfill prognostications found in the evangelist John. The prophetic announcement was one in which Jesus states that when his disciples grow old they will ‘stretch out their hands’ and that someone will put a ‘belt’ around them and take them where they would rather not go. The writer of John interprets these words as Jesus indicating the kind of death by which Peter will give glory to God.Footnote 10 The later dramatic accounts of Peter's death were manifestly shaped so that his execution would be an ex post facto fulfilment of the prophecy.Footnote 11 There are truly remote possibilities that Peter could have died in the 60s and perhaps even at Rome, but there is no sound evidence to sustain the claim that he was crucified or crucified upside down. Nothing about Peter's death in these later fictions has any connection with a general attack on Christians in the 60s much less with the great fire of 64, for which claims there are no supporting data at all.Footnote 12 Quite the opposite. Compelling, if not definitive, arguments have been made that there is no good evidence to demonstrate that Peter was ever in Rome. It seems more probable that he died, perhaps even peacefully in bed, in Judaea in the mid-50s.Footnote 13
The case of Paul is equally irrelevant. The violent outbursts, even riotous ones, that were caused by his presence in the Temple at Jerusalem, probably around the year 58 (but perhaps even a year or two earlier) drew his presence to the attention of the Roman authorities in the city. When he was arrested by the tribune in command of the cohort in the city, along with some of his centurions, (so it is claimed) the words exchanged between Paul and the tribune make clear that the latter thought that Paul was none other than the dangerous ‘Egyptian’ who had recently caused riots in the city and who had led 4,000 rebels and sicarii, ‘knife men’, into the desert.Footnote 14 The tribune was almost certainly referring to an incident in the governorship of the procurator Felix reported in some detail by Josephus. A millennarian prophet had acquired a large and dangerous crowd of followers who were only repressed by the use of violent force by the Roman garrison.Footnote 15 Manifestly, there were suspicions, no doubt excited by those who were hostile to Paul, that he was somehow connected with followers of the insurrectionist ‘Egyptian’ who were labelled ‘knife men’ and bandits. Following an apparently futile attempt by Paul to explain his presence and to defend himself against the imprecations of the hostile crowd near the Temple, he was taken to the barracks of the cohort in the city. There he was bound in preparation to be flogged in a corporal mode of inquiry. It was at this point that Paul asserted to the centurion who was in charge of the impending physical torture that he possessed Roman citizenship. It was on this basis that Paul questioned whether it was legal physically to assault the body of a Roman citizen who had not been charged and found guilty.Footnote 16 Declaration of his possession of the citizenship was a tactic, we are told, that Paul had employed several times previously and with success.
Faced with the fact of Paul's Roman citizenship, and mounting threats of a situation getting out of control, the tribune, Claudius Lysias, had Paul taken under guard to Caesarea Maritima for a hearing before the Roman governor of Judaea, the procurator Marcus Antonius Felix, most probably on charges having to do with seditious behaviour.Footnote 17 This was certainly the intent of those making accusations against Paul who labelled him a ‘plague’, a loimos, stirring up trouble throughout the entire world, the oikoumenê.Footnote 18 They were echoing the words of the emperor Claudius in his strict cautions delivered to the Jewish community in Alexandria when he accused the Jews of being a plague, a nosos, stirring up trouble throughout the whole world, the oikoumenê.Footnote 19 The purpose was to impute a kind of insurrectionary behaviour against which a Roman governor might be moved to act. Given the kinds of accusations levelled against him, Paul was careful to state that he had been in the Temple ‘without any mobs or disturbances’ and to deny having committed any wrong ‘against Caesar’.Footnote 20 After an initial hearing, Felix decided to keep Paul in detention and whether wilfully (i.e. he did not wish to handle a case that was potentially disruptive of the peace and order of his term) or as a matter of course (i.e. it was not that important a case, and it dropped down the list of urgent issues to be dealt with), he left the matter to be dealt with by his successor. About the year 58/59 (the precise year is in doubt) his successor, the procurator Porcius Festus, finally did decide to deal with the matter.Footnote 21 Once again, Paul asserted his status as a Roman citizen, this time making a ‘call out to [be heard by] Caesar’.Footnote 22 This seems not to have been an appeal against a sentence given, but rather an assertion that Paul, as a Roman citizen facing a capital charge, had the right to be heard by a Roman court of his preference (although, it should be noted, only if the governor so assented). Since the alternative presented itself, no doubt Festus felt it was in his self interest not to hear such a contentious case in Judaea. In consequence, he dispatched Paul to Rome for a final and inappellable hearing.Footnote 23
Paul spent some further years at Rome awaiting his final hearing (about two, according to the historian of Acts-Luke), most likely, it seems, under a form of limited custody amounting to a type of house arrest.Footnote 24 In this final step, in theory the emperor, but much more likely some lesser official delegated with the requisite powers in such matters upheld the validity of the serious charges against Paul. He was then executed, by beheading if the later sources have any merit.Footnote 25 The year in which this happened is uncertain. A likely year seems to be 60–61 c.e.; almost certainly it was not much later.Footnote 26 Whatever the precise date of the execution, two simple matters relevant to our inquiry are manifest. No matter how it was seen and interpreted by later Christian sources, Paul's hearings and his execution were subject to normal Roman judicial procedures. He was not executed on the charge of being a Christian, but as a man who had been found guilty of creating unlawful and seditious disturbances in the province of Judaea. And there are no specific links of Paul with Nero (other than the formal appeal made to whoever happened to be ‘Caesar’ at the time) and even less with a fire in the city of Rome. There were no contemporary connections made between these various elements, nor should we expect there to be. Paul was not in Rome because of any imperial persecution. He was there because he himself had asked to be sent to Rome, and because of the fortuitous decision of the Roman governor of Judaea who had him sent to Rome rather than executing him on the spot. Naturally, these events could later be seen and interpreted as somehow connected, linking Paul (and Peter) with Nero and, subsequently, with the idea that emerged later that this evil emperor was a persecutor of Christians, indeed their first persecutor. Certainly by the time of Eusebius, traditions had arisen that directly connected Paul with Nero. A series of statements by Paul about being rescued ‘from the lion's mouth’ were now being interpreted as referring to the emperor Nero as a great beast like a lion, a wild beast that symbolized Satan. These interpretations were attached to a biographical tradition that had grown up around Nero having had an initial ‘good’ part of his reign as opposed to a later ‘bad’ phase into which he degenerated — namely, the mid- to late 60s when he persecuted Christians. ‘Probably at the beginning’, Eusebius muses, ‘Nero's disposition was more receptive to the exposition of his [i.e. Paul's] views, but as he [the emperor] advanced to more reckless criminal acts, the apostles were attacked along with the others’.Footnote 27 The whole thing is pendant on later historical interpretations of the successive modes and phases of Nero's reign.
THE GREAT CONFLAGRATION
What the later Pauline narratives show is that at some point in time there had emerged a triangulation between the apostles Peter and Paul, the emperor Nero, and the construal of the individual events in which they were involved as part of a general persecution of Christians (under this name).Footnote 28 This inventive narrative then produced a new Christian image of some power and authority: Nero as the first persecutor of the Christians. As we shall see, all these points were then connected with the catastrophe that struck the city of Rome in midsummer of 64 c.e. when a great fire raged for nine days between 19 and 27 July, devastating large parts of the imperial metropolis.Footnote 29 The most reliable and detailed account of the conflagration is found in Tacitus. He begins his account by noting the extent of the destruction.Footnote 30
A disaster followed. Whether it happened by chance or by a malicious act of the emperor is uncertain. Some authors offer the one version, some the other. There now began a more destructive and savage fire than Rome had ever experienced … At the time a rumour had been running about that while the city was burning Nero had mounted his household stage and, in likening the present evils to disasters experienced in distant antiquity, he had sung about the destruction of Troy … Of Rome's fourteen districts only four remained untouched. Three were burned to the ground. The few remnants of houses in the other seven were reduced to stripped and half-burned ruins. Just to count the grand houses, the apartment blocks, and the temples that had been destroyed would be very difficult.
It is in this lengthy narrative about the Great Fire that Tacitus embedded his statements about the first persecution of the Christians. The difficult question that must be answered is, quite simply: did Nero's execution of Christians as the real or pretended culprits happen or did it not? Very frequently, pure speculation, ancient and modern, on other connections between Nero, Christians, and the fire has only added fiction and confusion.Footnote 31 Nor are the sometimes marvellously complex and artful explications of Tacitus’ rhetorical skills relevant to the problem of the bare historicity of the event.Footnote 32 Nor does claiming that this first attack on Christians by Nero in the aftermath of the fire in 64 c.e. was not a persecution im engeren Sinn allow us to escape facing the basic problem.Footnote 33 Were Christians as Tacitus states — although he carefully suggests that he believes that they were not to blame — punished by Nero as the culprits responsible for the Great Fire or were they not? The problem as it is configured in many of the modern responses is more than just one of belief. It is, rather, an attitude marked by a fundamental refusal to face the questionable quality of the primary sources.Footnote 34
There is every good reason for historians to have grave doubts about the story of an attack on Christians by Nero that emerged decades after the fire itself. They should be sceptical to the point of dismissing the commonly accepted idea of Nero as a persecutor, indeed the first great persecutor of Christians, specifically in connection with the conflagration that raged through Rome in July of 64. What seems to make the idea so compelling and impossible to dismiss is that it is based on a high quality historical source of apparently unimpeachable fidelity, the Annales of the historian Tacitus. The historian's qualities of veracity and accuracy, within the tolerable limits of the sources available to him, are not generally open to serious question.Footnote 35 Arguments have been ventilated, from time to time, that the passage, in whole or in part, was a later interpolation into the text of the Annales. The possibility has been frequently suspected and continues to hail forth a fair number of detailed studies. Half a century ago a commentator on the passage was already able humorously to note that the investigators who had devoted themselves to the interpolation problem themselves constituted a multitudo ingens. Footnote 36 I am mostly convinced that all of the passage on the fire is genuine Tacitus, and that no easy answer to the problem is available by way of that route.Footnote 37 Even if only to provide the strongest possible case for a Neronian persecution of the Christians in the 60s, however, and as a tactic of criticism I shall provisionally accept that the words are indeed those of the historian. In this light, it is important to understand that Tacitus is the only source for the involvement of Christians with the fire and their persecution in its aftermath. Given its critical significance in deciding the strict historicity of this event — i.e. quite simply, were Christians selected by Nero for punishment in the year 64? — it is perhaps best first to provide the whole text from the fifteenth book of the Annales that makes specific reference to their involvement with the Great Fire and to their consequent punishment. The relevant passage follows immediately on the end of Tacitus’ description of the fire.Footnote 38
Et haec quidem humanis consiliis providebantur. Mox petita dis piacula aditique Sibyllae libri, ex quibus supplicatum Vulcano et Cereri Proserpinaeque, ac propitiata Iuno per matronas, primum in Capitolio, deinde apud proximum mare, unde hausta aqua templum et simulacrum deae perspersum est; et sellisternia ac pervigilia celebravere feminae quibus 5 mariti erant. Sed non ope humana, non largitionibus principis aut deum placamentis decedebat infamia, quin iussum incendium crederetur. Ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis adfecit, quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat. Auctor nominis eius Christus Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio affectus erat; repressaque in praesens exitiabilis superstitio rursum erumpebat, non 10 modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque. Igitur primum correpti qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitudo ingens haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis convicti sunt. Et pereuntibus addita ludibria, ut ferarum tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent, aut crucibus adfixi [aut flammandi atque], ubi defecisset dies in usu<m> nocturni 15 luminis urerentur. Hortos suos ei spectaculo Nero obtulerat et circense ludicrum edebat, habitu aurigae permixtus plebi vel curriculo insistens. Unde quamquam adversus sontes et novissima exempla meritos miseratio oriebatur, tamquam non utilitate publica sed in saevitiam unius absumerentur.Footnote 39
Note the following concerning the text:
1. dis: Gronovius’ correction of the second Medicean's (henceforth M2) a diis.
7. Chrestianos is the correct reading of M2 reported by the Teubner text rather than the frequently ‘corrected’ reading of Christianos as found, e.g., in the Oxford Classical Text.
8. I believe that the Christus of M2 has similarly been corrected (as one hand had already tried to correct the Chrestiani to Christiani) from Chrestus. Such alterations were rife, as when, from Orosius in the fifth century to William of Malmesbury in the twelfth, the reading of Chrestus in Suet., Claud. 25.4 was ‘corrected’ to Christus. And it makes the most logical sense for Tacitus to say that Chrestianus would come from Chrestus. Nevertheless, I have maintained the reading of Christus found in M2.
8. Reads Tyberio in M2 for which I have printed the standard Tiberio.
9. M2 reads affectus rather than adfectus.
11. Getty Reference Getty and Wallach1966: 286–8, has argued that correpti quidam fatebantur ought to be read for correpti qui fatebantur, on the basis that it was illogical for people to have confessed before they were arrested, but I have kept the text as in M2: in the circumstances following the trauma of the fire, no one could guarantee punctilious due process.
13. As with Heubner, I prefer the convicti of the recentiores to the coniuncti of M2.
14. The clause following crucibus adfixi is especially troublesome. Of all the suggested fixes, I prefer that supported by Barnes Reference Barnes2010: 333–4, going back to Georg Andresen, who simply excised the aut flammandi atque; but neither this nor any of the other many proposals (such as the suggestion by Lund Reference Lund2008 that aut flammandi should be ad flammas dati, ut …) materially affect the arguments being made here. For a list of the numerous editorial fixes proposed for the words in M2, see Wellesley Reference Wellesley1986: 157–8.
These were the measures devised by human planning [i.e. Nero's new building code changes after the fire]. Next sacrifices were made to the gods and the books of the Sybil were consulted, according to which supplications were made to Vulcan, Ceres, and Proserpina. And Juno was propitiated by Roman matrons, first on the Capitol and then at the nearby seashore from which water was drawn and sprinkled on the temple and the image of the goddess. And then the women who had husbands celebrated ritual banquets and nightly vigils. Not by any human resources, not by the benefactions of the emperor, and not by any placating of the gods did the sinister rumour fade by which it was believed that the fire had been ordered. To get rid of the rumour, Nero found and provided the defendants, and he afflicted with the most refined punishments those persons whom, hated for their shameful acts, the common people were accustomed to call Chrestiani. The originator of this name, Christus [Chrestus?], suffered (capital) punishment in the reign of Tiberius through the agency of the procurator Pontius Pilatus. At the time, the lethal superstitio was repressed, but it burst out again not only throughout Judaea, the origin of this evil (sickness), but through the City (of Rome) to which everything that is savage and shameful flows from all directions and is actually celebrated. At first (only) those persons who confessed were arrested, but then because they were pointed out (denounced) by those (i.e. who had already confessed) a very large number were convicted, less on the charge of having set the fire than because of their hatred of humankind. And to those who were dying mockeries were added. Covered with the hides of wild animals they perished by being torn to pieces by dogs or, fixed to stakes (or, crosses) they were set afire in the darkening evening as a form of night lighting. Nero had reserved his own gardens for the spectacle. He also presented a circus entertainment and in the dress of a charioteer he either mixed with the crowd or stood in his own chariot. Even if it was for guilty persons who deserved to suffer extreme and exemplary public punishments, there arose a feeling of pity because it was not for the public good but to satisfy one man's savagery that they were being liquidated.
When was Tacitus composing these words? One set of arguments, made by his most perceptive and sympathetic modern student, places the composition in the late ’teens or the early 20s of the second century.Footnote 40 It is a view not accepted by everyone. Others argue for a date in the mid-teens. But dates close to Syme's estimate must be near the truth, and anything within this time range is sufficient for our purpose. And what sources might Tacitus have had? Of the written sources, which need not be the determinate ones in this case, Cluvius Rufus, Fabius Rusticus, and the elder Pliny are obvious candidates.Footnote 41 For our arguments, the detailed history of the elder Pliny should provide a reasonably good test since it was surely consulted by the historian.Footnote 42 If any history of the period covering the year 64 would have specified the fire and those punished for it, it would have been the elder Pliny's detailed narrative. Alas, nothing survives of it that can help us. The elder Pliny's only explicit statement regarding the fire of 64 holds Nero to blame for it and, in consequence, for the destruction of an important rare species of tree.Footnote 43 But nowhere in the more than 20,000 facts collected from 2,000 books and 100 different authors in his Natural History does Pliny so much as refer to any people called Christians or Chrestiani, much less does he make any connection of them with the fire that destroyed large parts of the imperial metropolis.Footnote 44 In short, there is no known sign in any of the lost sources for histories that covered the reign of Nero to indicate where Tacitus would have found the facts about Christians that are retailed in our passage, or anything to controvert the observed fact that the first mentions of the Christians by this name in Latin sources are those made by the younger Pliny and Tacitus. There is no need, as Syme noted, to fret too much. The historian could simply have consulted the acta senatus, as we know that he frequently did.Footnote 45 And Tacitus also had at his disposal, and used, oral sources, and in this case items of information being conveyed in conversation by his contemporaries might well have been among the most significant.
OTHER WITNESSES
If Tacitus is the only source that connects Christians, their persecution, and the fire, we might usefully ask: what do other sources say about this same matter? Cassius Dio, whose sources differed in important ways from those used by Tacitus, provided a rhetorically exaggerated narrative of the Great Fire, but he says nothing at all about Christians, nor anything about their connection with the fire or about Nero's punishment of them as the guilty parties.Footnote 46 His silence in this connection, however, might well be more a matter of the historian's attitude to things Christian.Footnote 47 The question here is not with the existence of the fire of 64 c.e., which we accept as fact, but rather with the involvement of Christians with it as the persons whom the emperor blamed and whom he had executed in large numbers, so initiating the Roman state's persecution of Christians. Later sources are useless for deciding the matter. They might seem compelling but, like Sulpicius Severus, they are wholly dependent on Tacitus.Footnote 48
… quin et novae mortes excogitatae, ut ferarum tergis contecti, laniatu canum interirent, multi crucibus adfixi aut flammas usti, plerique in id reservati, ut, cum defecisset dies, in usum nocturni luminis urerentur.
The precise diction, if nothing else, shows that Sulpicius was ultimately borrowing from, indeed almost copying Tacitus. He offers a summary of what Tacitus has to say in almost the same words that were used by the historian himself. Like all other later Christian writers, Sulpicius is not an independent witness to what actually happened in July of 64.
The one other source contemporary with Tacitus that contains an explicit statement relevant to this matter is the biographer Suetonius. In his life of Nero, he notes that the emperor inflicted certain ‘punishments’ on Christians. Importantly, however, Suetonius does not connect these coercive measures with the fire at Rome, despite the fact that he provides one of the very few full narratives of the conflagration.Footnote 49 In a single brief clause in a section having no connection with the fire, Suetonius notes the measures taken by Nero against Christians as one example, among several, of actions that the emperor took to constrain various unacceptable behaviours at Rome. Since Suetonius is frequently taken as a second independent witness to Nero's persecution of Christians, we might consider his words in some detail.Footnote 50
… affecti suppliciis Christiani, genus hominum superstitionis novae ac maleficae …
… Christians were afflicted with punishments, a type of men of a new and evil superstitio …
What was Suetonius saying and what is the value of his words as independent testimony? First of all, the context for this statement is a series of brief notices on general coercive measures taken by Nero. Limits were placed on luxury expenditures, public banquets were limited to those funded as sportulae, taverns were limited to cooking pulses or vegetables as foods for sale, the free-wheeling playfulness of charioteers in which they had been accustomed to rampage down the narrow streets of the city was now forbidden, and pantomimes and their supporters were banished from the city.Footnote 51 The brief notice about the Christians is stuck in the middle of this legal potpourri. All the other notices refer to measures that were regulatory in nature which suggests that the measures taken against the Christians were of a similar type. We might first note that the clause attached to the main statement is almost certainly a contemporary observation, a gloss written by Suetonius for his readers that reflects a knowledge about Christians which was shared by his contemporaries, including the younger Pliny. The fact that he adds this gloss about ‘who they are’ to the main statement is in itself significant, but the words add little to an understanding of what did or did not happen under Nero. Second, whoever the people were who were ‘broken by punishments’ under Nero, it is most improbable that they were called ‘Christians’ in the 50 s and 60 s. Last of all, given the fact that Suetonius does describe the fire in some detail but nowhere connects the Christians with it, it is reasonably certain that whatever coercive measures were taken — actions surely conceived as comparable to the other minor policing measures described in the passage — they did not include savage punishments of the kind vented on those who were found guilty of having set the fire in 64 c.e.
There are good reasons, therefore, to suspect that Suetonius placed a new and recent label on the persons concerned who in the 60s were then seen as sectarians who shared in one of the occasional banishments of Jews from the city of Rome. This was something that had happened, for example, under the emperor Claudius, in an incident also noted by Suetonius who says that the disturbances in the city of Rome had been incited by a certain Chrestus.Footnote 52 The significance of the incident is rather difficult to unpack, but it seems to be linked with measures taken against certain Jewish elements in the city.Footnote 53 The problem in interpreting what Suetonius was writing in the 110s and 120s is that the people identified as ‘followers of Chrestus’ or Chrestiani (as they were now seen in Suetonius’ own time) were a group who embodied a new and evil superstitio. The words closely echo an opinion of the Christians that had been formed by his acquaintance and coeval, the younger Pliny. So it is not without significance that Tacitus used the spelling Chrestiani for the group concerned.Footnote 54 What seems to have happened under Claudius and then again under Nero is the temporary banishment of some Jewish sectarians from the city of Rome, but not, in any event, persons who would logically have been labelled at the time as ‘a new and evil superstitio’, words which were used only much later by Roman officials to label Christians.Footnote 55 At the time, and indeed up to the decades after 100 c.e., among Roman writers, including Tacitus, it was the Jews rather than the Christians whose beliefs and practices were being labelled a superstitio, albeit not a novel one.Footnote 56
The only other source that has sometimes been taken to link Christians with the punishments that followed the Great Fire is a passage in the Pseudo-Clement's Letter to the Corinthians. It mentions certain women who were spectacularly executed, dressed up as Danaids and Dircae. They had been denounced as Christians by their jealous husbands.Footnote 57 The trope of the jealous spouse delating his wife to Roman authorities in the city of Rome is also found in the writings of Justin Martyr who was probably writing in the mid-second century.Footnote 58 The two narrative lines look too similar to be independent of one another. Before coming to this episode, Clement says that some early Christians at Rome who were ‘most righteous pillars of the church’ were persecuted ‘through jealousy and envy’, but that they resisted to the point of death. No specific persons are named, and no place or date is given. The words seem to be linked with the notice that follows in Clement concerning the death of Paul which, however, is not connected in any way with Nero or with the fire. The problems here are almost overwhelming. No specifically identifiable author can be fixed for these letters. The third or fourth bishop of Rome has been proposed, but there are numerous pseudepigraphical texts attached to his name and no certain provenience or date can be established for the text. It is possible that a Christian writer of second-century date intended this passage to refer to events connected with Nero and the fire. Presuming this much to be true, one might then further speculate about what was happening to the women concerned. But between such hypotheses and the text there are considerable unfillable gaps in the evidence.Footnote 59 Therefore, unless one simply presumes, in a complete void of supporting data, that the words in the pseudo-Clement must have some relationship to the fire in 64 c.e., there is nothing in the text that would lead any reasonably critical reader to connect the two events. It is best dismissed from serious consideration of this problem as yet another one of the parasitic texts that have come to be attached to the fire and the first persecution under Nero in the assiduous hunt for any possible evidence that might strengthen the general argument.
TACITUS AND CONTEXT
We are therefore left with the Tacitean account. It is the absolutely apical and focal account on which all others depend. All later sources of any consequence that connect the Christians, Nero, and the fire, including Christian writers from Tertullian to Eusebius, depend on his words. They are not independent witnesses to anything that happened in Nero's reign.Footnote 60 To a point halfway through the passage quoted above, there are no real problems. The narrative follows Tacitus’ detailed description of the fire and his claim that rumours had arisen among the people of the city that the emperor himself was in some fashion responsible for setting the fire and arranging for its spread. This is where the account assumes real relevance to our inquiry. At this juncture, Tacitus claims that to deflect blame from himself, Nero rounded up the necessary defendants, presumably on charges of having set the fire. Finding them guilty, he subjected them to the most refined of punishments. Then comes the clause most centrally at issue. The historian glosses precisely who the guilty parties were: ‘persons whom, hated for their indecent and shameful acts, the common people called/were accustomed to call Chrestiani.’ The verb tense is important because the claim is that people in the city of Rome in the early 60s knew about and called a specific group of persons ‘Chrestians’ at that time.Footnote 61 To begin with, taken in these precise terms the statement seems improbable. There will be more later about the problem of names, but for the moment it is sufficient to note that the lines that follow are basically an epexegetical excursus appended to the main clause. They explain to the reader who these people were and why they merited the suspicion and hatred of the Roman people. Tacitus states that the originator of the name ‘Chrestian’ was one Christus who was punished with the death penalty under the reign of Tiberius through the agency of his procurator Pontius Pilatus.
All of this is very interesting, but it is not directly relevant to any connection of Christians either with the fire at Rome or with the executions of the supposed guilty parties in its aftermath. What it does demonstrate is that when Tacitus was composing the Neronian books of the Annales he had in his possession a kind of ‘factual knowledge’ that he could use to compose an historical gloss on who the people were whom Nero had had punished. In this sense, his words are structurally parallel to the near contemporary sentence found in Suetonius: (a) a certain people were punished who were Christians, and (b) this is who these people were: a distinctive kind of people who embodied a new and evil superstitio (meaning, basically, a bad or unacceptable religion). The sort of information to which Tacitus had access and might have had in mind can be seen not just in the language of this passage but also in what Suetonius has to say about expulsions from Rome and what Tacitus himself has to say elsewhere about analogous matters. All of it, significantly, relates to Jews and Judaea. Although initially repressed in its homeland of Judaea, Tacitus says, the deadly superstitio burst out again not only in Judaea, its place of origin, but even in the city of Rome where, as the historian remarks in a satiric vein, ‘all savage and shameful things flow from all directions and are actually celebrated’. I need not dilate on the obvious echoes about eastern pollutions found in his contemporary Juvenal. As has already been perceptively remarked, in this regard Tacitus and Juvenal can be considered ‘parallel and coeval phenomena. Style, tone, and sentiments are comparable’.Footnote 62 The fears were ones of the time. It was Tacitus’ friend, the younger Pliny, who similarly described Christians not just as a superstitio, but as a disease, contagio, that was spreading throughout the countryside of his province.Footnote 63 Tacitus then circles back to the narrative relating to events at the time of Nero. He says that at first only those were arrested who confessed but that when other culprits were denounced a much larger number of persons were convicted less on the charge of having set the fire than because of their ‘hatred of human kind’. We need not tarry too long on the odium generis humani that was the supposed basis of the popular dislike, if not hatred, of the persons who were accused of setting the fire. Up to the point of its use in this passage by Tacitus, as a condemnation of an ethnic group, the phrase had only been used to designate a perceived peculiarity of the Jews.Footnote 64
Tacitus composed this passage approximately at the end of the second decade of the second century, perhaps assembling notes and other research earlier in the years after 110 c.e. when he had completed his Histories. It betrays some modernizing or up-dating of the facts, among them calling Pontius Pilatus, the governor of Judaea, a procurator. The rank was true of Tacitus’ own time, but not of Pilatus’ own when praefectus was the title held by the governor of Judaea. The historian certainly knew the difference between governors who were praefecti and those who were procuratores, and elsewhere he notes the distinction.Footnote 65 Such modest modernizings occur outside of this particular passage, however, and so are typical of the writer. For example, when Tacitus says that there arose a distaste towards Nero for his executions because they were perceived to be a concession to the emperor's bestiality and not a contribution to the utilitas publica of the state, he is surely echoing a dominant ideology not of the 60s but of his own age. Another move of this kind, as we have just noted, is the transfer of the ‘hatred of humankind’ label to Christians, probably made in parallel with the use of the specific name of Chrestiani for them. Other new ideas shared by his contemporaries are apparent in the language and the specifics of the ‘new data’ known by Tacitus. Prime among these links are those with Tacitus’ friend, the younger Pliny. Pliny certainly knew about Christians. Along with Tacitus, he was the first Roman writer in Latin who has anything to say about them. The difference is that Pliny's evidence is a contemporary report and not a reference in an historical narrative or an interpretation set in the distant past. And there are possible echoes in diction. Tacitus labels Christian beliefs an exitiabilis superstitio. His friend Pliny reports that, on interviewing Christians about their ideas and practices, he found nothing other than a superstitio prava et immodica.Footnote 66 The historian made the label more powerful and deadly.
The tendency to bring the description up to date surely includes another obvious item. Tacitus knows to call the people Christians. It is a manifest anachronism. It is difficult to know when the Christians were first called Christians, when they began calling themselves Christians or, much more important for our purposes, when Roman figures of authority like governors and emperors identified them as such. The claim by the historian of Luke-Acts that the Roman governor of Judaea, Antonius Felix, ‘happened to be well informed about the way’ is manifestly a later assertion that is difficult to decipher, but in no way does even this statement have him recognizing anything like ‘the Christians’.Footnote 67 We do know that up to the end of the apostle Paul's life, approximately to the mid-60s, the term was not used. When Paul was accused before the Roman authorities, he was called a Nazorean not a Christian. About the year 60, the High Priest Ananias appeared with his advocate Tertullus before Felix the Roman governor of Judaea to make the case against Paul. Paul is charged with raising riots in Jerusalem and ‘being a ringleader of the sect of the Nazoreans’.Footnote 68 As for the term Christian, some aspects of its origins and use are reasonably certain. First, it was a Latinism in Greek where the ‘(i)anus’ suffix was used to indicate that someone was the fictive son or daughter of another person, as frequently, for example, in the Roman practice of naming in adoption. Metaphorically speaking, such persons were seen as the children or the followers of a particular person, in this case of Christ.Footnote 69 The logical context that suggests itself is the need for a formal Latin-form term in Greek that would be useful in an official context, and the one that logically suggests itself is for use in designating ‘bad persons’ before the tribunals of Roman governors.Footnote 70
The relevant question is not to ask when Christians came to be called Christians by people who did not like them, or to ask when they themselves, like Lutherans and Methodists, adopted an initially disapproving term as a type of self-identification. The important question, rather, is to ask when secular Roman writers of high social rank like Tacitus, Pliny, and Suetonius became aware of the term. The first use of the name Christianos as a mode of self-identification is claimed by the historian of Luke-Acts to have occurred in the community in Antioch. But writing, perhaps, as late as the 90s, it is difficult to control the precise mise-en-scène. Even if the students of Jesus began to call themselves Christianoi at some point in the 40s and 50s in an eastern city of the Empire, it is difficult to know what sort of general purchase this naming had in the high social and political ranks with which we are concerned.Footnote 71 And even if the contemporaneity of the reference could be guaranteed, which it cannot, the use of the term still appears to be highly localized and internal to the community itself. The only other explicit case is found in a letter attributed to the apostle Peter in which the name ‘Christian’ is specifically attached to a concatenated sequence of accusation, conviction, and punishment: ‘Yet if anyone suffers as a Christianos, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name. For it is the time for judgement to begin in the household of God.’Footnote 72 As the introduction to these words indicates, they are explicitly connected with judicial attacks on members of this community: ‘Do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you … If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed … But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or a bandit.’Footnote 73 But when was this happening? The critical dating of the letter is taken to belong to some time between the late 90s and the 110s. The manifest context of persecution and martyrdom behind the words points directly to years when these had become real threats.
Among Christian writers, Ignatius of Antioch is the first person who consistently and repeatedly uses the appellation Christian as a probative type of self-identification in a context where a large alien public and figures of authority such as governors recognized and used the term. The letters, in the form that we have them, probably date to the 150s to 160s, or even later.Footnote 74 The chronological and geographic dispersal of these first uses points to the eastern origins of a Latin-type word that was used to label the followers of a well-known person, a term that was initially used in a negative context.Footnote 75 The circumstances that would have prompted such a use would be ones that encouraged the identification of ‘bad persons’, i.e. known followers of a Christos, before a Roman magistrate. ‘This person is one of them’, using Christianos to designate the followers or adherents of a man whom the Roman state had executed for reasons of threatening the public order. This usage of the word, however, was rather late and was certainly preceded by different ones, like Nazorean, which also seem to be negative in origin. Every piece of evidence that can be assembled therefore suggests a specific time period, years focused on the 110s, when the extant data first clearly indicate persons who were being charged and executed for bearing the name of Christian. That is, the age when Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius were writing about Christians and were using the term.Footnote 76 The connections and the similarity of sources, ideas, and diction are surely not accidental. Relations of close mutual friendships, of formal amicitiae, linked the three men. They provided information for each others’ works, they read one another's compositions, and they were alert to the new public discourses of the time.Footnote 77
It, therefore, seems improbable that the persons who were executed by Nero were a specific social group whom the mass of the common people of Rome knew well enough to call Christians or Chrestianoi, persons who were hated or despised because of their disgraceful or shameful deeds. The most detailed analysis of the available data is not able to proffer any substantial proof or preponderance of evidence that would lead one to believe that there was a sizeable community of persons publicly known as Christians in Rome and Ostia, or, indeed, more widely in Latium, as early as the 50s and 60s.Footnote 78 Christians, who were probably not called or even known by this name at the time, were hardly a sufficiently distinctive group within the Jewish communities at Rome in the 60s to be noted for their own peculiar identity, much less a well-known group under this name and recognized as such by the ordinary inhabitants of the city. Moreover the words per flagitia in this precise form, meaning ‘because of’ or ‘for their shameful/ disgusting acts’, are used by only two prose authors in the whole corpus of Latin literature: Tacitus and Pliny.Footnote 79 It seems hardly accidental that the flagitia that attached to the Christian name were one of the main things that concerned Pliny when, as special governor of Bithynia-Pontus in the years between 110 and 113 c.e., he was staging judicial hearings of Christians who had been delated to him.Footnote 80 This draws attention to the relationships between the two senators, and their friends and acquaintances, in the first decades of the second century as being relevant to the problem of the connection of ‘Christians’ with the great fire at Rome in 64 c.e.
The attested personal relations between Pliny, Suetonius, and Tacitus, and their texts, are, I believe, directly relevant to sorting out this problem. The knowledge fields that these men shared about any given social group like ‘the Christians’ can, I think, be assumed to be modestly similar. And yet the one thing that we know about Pliny's knowledge of Christians is that when, as governor of Bithynia-Pontus, he interrogated some of the accused he knew rather little about them.Footnote 81 Pliny was unsure of what to do when certain locals filed accusations before his tribunal against Christians. He had to make detailed inquiries of the persons themselves, with the use of torture in some cases, to find out who they were, what they believed, and what they actually did. He freely admits that he had never been party to any judicial hearings in which such persons had been involved, that he knew nothing about any existing governmental decisions concerning them, and, a fact important to our argument, that he knew nothing about how they had been punished.Footnote 82 Even if some of this lack of knowledge was rhetorically fashioned, it is still a remarkable level of professed ignorance. Pliny was about as highly educated a member of the Roman élite of the time as one could be. He certainly knew about his Roman past. If persons known as Christians had been responsible for setting the fire that almost destroyed the metropolis of the Empire — or who, at the very least, were firmly believed to have been the culprits — and had been punished for this act of monumental criminality, that Pliny knew nothing about these matters or about Christians is simply not credible.
The absence of this specific connection in Pliny's mind is all the more striking since we know that in the reign of Domitian, when both Pliny and Tacitus were serving as junior senators and holding magisterial posts at Rome, the terrible damage done by the fire was being remembered on public boundary markers that established and confirmed a fire-clearance zone where building and other activities were forbidden under a law to be enforced by praetors.Footnote 83 The two men must have been aware of the still-existing damage and the threat posed by a possible recurrence of the fire. But there is not so much as a reference to Nero or his punishment of Christians in the aftermath of the fire in 64 in the exchange of letters between Pliny and Trajan. The gaps are striking lacunae in the knowledge of a senator from Italy, frequently resident in or near the imperial capital, who was well informed on these matters, if in fact Christians had been found guilty of a monstrous crime against the Roman state in the mid-60s. Furthermore, the routine fashion in which Pliny phrases his ignorance presumes that the emperor himself did not expect Pliny or any other high-ranking Roman to possess such obvious knowledge of the Christians. If it was not based on any knowledge of the past, then how was new information about Christians circulating among members of the governing élite of the time? One possible mode was through personal transfers of information. We know that they communicated on a range of other matters, and in this case proximity of official duties might well have helped.Footnote 84 Even if it was on some other occasion not related to their mutual administrative assignments, it seems probable that Pliny and Tacitus, like other Roman officials of the time, informally exchanged information on an unusual sectarian group then becoming known as ‘Christians’ who presented a perceived threat to the social order.
A terrible fire did in fact destroy large parts of Rome. And most probably there were rumours floating about that Nero was responsible for it. Emperors were conventionally held liable for keeping the people of Rome safe and fed. Dereliction in these duties was a serious, even a dangerous matter, especially in circumstances in which a majority of the city's people were traumatized by losing the lives of persons close to them and their own lifetime's possessions.Footnote 85 Nor is it unbelievable that large numbers of people were arrested and found guilty of having caused the fire. Fires often provoked responses of conspiratorial accusations in which subaltern persons were held to be responsible for creating a dangerous and uncontrollable public danger.Footnote 86 Popular demands no doubt held that someone had to be found who would bear the responsibility.Footnote 87 The punishments of the guilty were also normal. They were a species of what have evocatively been called ‘fatal charades’. That is to say, persons guilty of incendiarism would themselves be set on fire, in this way embodying the specific nature of their guilt.Footnote 88 The rococo-like elaborations of punishment, survaluations that turned them into entertainments, were precisely the elements of mockery that were added, the addita ludibria referred to by Tacitus. But it is most unlikely that Christians were specifically targeted as such. Not only the production of human torches, but also the first of the ‘humorous insults’ that Tacitus mentions, the setting of wild dogs on the guilty to tear them to pieces, were not specifically mocking anything particularly Christian. What the punishments signified is difficult to say, but no Christian connections suggest themselves. For the savage dogs, the most obvious tale that would suggest itself to the onlookers would have been the story of the death of Actaeon.Footnote 89 Nothing, even in the symbolic nature of the executions, suggests any anti-Christian persecution connected with the Great Fire and so any Christian martyrdoms. They were punishments that mimicked the firing of the city and not crosses that evoked the execution of Jesus at Jerusalem at some time in the 30s. The correct translation of the final phrases of the account must be more or less along the following lines: such persons ‘were burned fixed to crossed pieces of wood for use as nocturnal illumination in the dwindling daylight of the evening’.Footnote 90 The guilty were torched in imitation of the fire itself.
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
What did happen? I accept that Tacitus was an historian of high calibre not given to outright invention. He surely felt that he had good evidence in his hands as of the later 110s and early 120s indicating that a new people known as Christians had been accused of having set and helped spread the fire of 64 c.e., and that they were severely punished by Nero to deflect hostile rumours from himself and to erase his supposed responsibility for setting the fire. The historian composed his narrative accordingly and, as has been frequently noted, he did it with a consummate art and skill that wove together themes of impending disaster, a final conflagration, and a tyrannical emperor. And this evidence, focusing its special emphasis on the Christians and the execution of their leader under Pontius Pilatus in the reign of Tiberius, appears to have come to his attention after he wrote the Histories. Even given that the surviving part of the Histories under consideration was setting up the subsequent war and was a set-apart programmatic ethnography of the Jews in Judaea, two things are striking.Footnote 91 In the Annales, Tacitus lays stress on the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilatus under Tiberius. The origins of a terrible affliction that was to erupt again later and to threaten the Empire are located by him in Judaea and in the reign of Tiberius. Yet in the Histories he had nothing to say about any of this. His sole remark, in just three words, is that everything in Judaea was just fine under Tiberius: ‘sub Tiberio quies’.Footnote 92 Despite the historian's different agenda in the Histories, that silence, I would argue, suggests that a different kind of information had come to the historian's attention in the years after he wrote the Histories.Footnote 93
Given the weight of all of the surviving evidence and the known historical trajectory of development of the Christian movement, the burden of proof must be placed on those who would use a few phrases in a single passage in Tacitus’ Annales as sure evidence for a Neronian persecution of Christians. Manifestly, there were two developments that took place before Tacitus wrote. The figure of Nero had somehow come to be connected with Christians and then, in turn, Christians were linked to the guilty persons who had had severe punishments inflicted upon them in the aftermath of the Great Fire. The connections were happenstance. They were not necessary, but a matter of choice. Just how arbitrary they were is shown by the lines of Christian writing in Latin that made none of the required connections. The Christian rhetor Lactantius, for example, in his De mortibus persecutorum went out of his way carefully to detail the wrongs committed by tyrannical rulers against the Christians and to give the reasons why they persecuted his fellow believers. But he says nothing at all about a fire under Nero. Nothing. Instead, he connects Nero's attack on the Christians, and the killings of Peter and Paul, with the fact that people were abandoning traditional cult. That is to say, he pinpoints the very kinds of problems reported by the younger Pliny for the region of Bithynia-Pontus some two centuries earlier.Footnote 94 It is hard to believe that Lactantius was wholly unaware of Tacitus.Footnote 95 He nevertheless does not subscribe to the historian's account of Nero's reign. The entirety of his focus in condemning Nero concentrates on the preaching of Peter and Paul at Rome and the effects of their ideas in the city. The absence is doubly striking since it was precisely a fire at Nicomedia (two of them, in fact) that caused Galerius and Diocletian to turn on the Christians in the Great Persecution of 303 c.e.Footnote 96 Deliberately to overlook and to ignore such a parallel with an earlier known tyrant whom Lactantius himself accepts persecuted Christians, and thereby to miss the opportunity to tie together the first and the last of the persecutors, is almost inexplicable unless he was unaware of the connection or had discounted it for some reason. The lack of connection is all the more striking since Lactantius was well aware of the tradition that Nero was a persecutor of Christians and of the rumours that Nero was going to return to earth, in some form, to renew the persecution.Footnote 97
Accepting a lower but perhaps more pragmatic standard of the preponderance of the evidence, I would argue that the following conclusions seem reasonably certain.
(i) Paul was likely executed at Rome, probably at some time in the early 60s. But his execution had nothing to do with any anti-Christian moves by the emperor Nero. The emperor's officials were simply hearing and deciding, on appeal, the original charge against Paul that had been sustained by the governors of Judaea in the mid- to late 50s. That initial charge manifestly had nothing to do with his being a Christian. It was based, rather, on accusations that Paul was provoking violent disturbances or was dangerously threatening the public order: in sum, that he was engaged in seditious behaviour of some sort. Decisions regarding such matters normally fell under the coercive powers of a governor. Paul's arrest and subsequent execution had nothing to do with the Great Fire at Rome or with a persecution of Christians. Both had proceeded correctly according to proper legal form in a matter that was of concern to the Roman governors of Judaea at the time.
(ii) What happened to Peter is very uncertain indeed. It has been suggested that he might have died in the reign of Nero and perhaps at Rome. But everything about him in these contexts is radically uncertain and unclear. On the balance of the available evidence, it seems more probable that he never even made it to the imperial metropolis. It is almost certain that he was not crucified, upside down or otherwise. Nor did his death have anything to do with the charge of being a Christian. Such an identity would have had no meaning to secular Roman officials as early as the 60s. It is difficult to imagine the charge on which he might have been executed (if indeed he was) unless it was something akin to what happened to Paul. Perhaps some persons had successfully charged him with dangerously disturbing the public peace. But such hypotheticals only serve to add more pure speculation to an already obscure history. The data, such as they are, indicate that Peter died a natural death in Jerusalem at some point in the mid-50s.
(iii) There is no objective contemporary evidence that would definitely indicate an attack on Christians by Nero, either in connection with the Great Fire or otherwise. It seems probable that certain persons were denounced by the common people of Rome in the aftermath of the conflagration as responsible for setting the fire and for aiding and abetting its destructive spread. Nero seized on this development to exculpate himself from the blame that was being heaped upon him. Even if this was not true, he at least advanced to the punishment of persons who were popularly held to be responsible for the fire in order to be seen as holding someone accountable for the terrible damage and destruction. As emperor, Nero had to show that he had discovered the culpable parties and that he had punished them.Footnote 98 The explanation for the kinds of refined punishments that were vented on these persons is that they were a mimicry of deserved rewards. As a spectacle of punishment staged at dusk, some were tied to stakes and set on fire as living torches, while others were exposed to wild beasts in a manner that was deemed appropriate to the nature of their crime.Footnote 99
(iv) The specific connection of Christians with the fire in Rome as the persons who were punished for the conflagration somehow developed later. Most surviving sources point to the decades on either side of 100 c.e. as the time when this was happening. This conclusion suggests at least two developments that contributed to the linkage. One was the growing awareness of high-ranking Roman officials, especially those who were confronting Christians in the circumstances of judicial hearings, that there were people denounced to them as Christians — Chrestiani or Christiani — whose ideas and behaviours were perceived to be a subversive threat to local order, primarily because they so upset the sensibilities of provincial communities. They could now be identified as dangerous persons as such (i.e. under this name) and were therefore punished for the name. The second development was the growth of a powerful popular mythology that focused on the emperor Nero. This popular fascination began hailing Nero forth as a figure who was either especially beneficial or who was especially malicious to different types of subject peoples in the Empire. The emergence of a series of ‘false Neros’ beginning in the late 60s and early 70s is but one sign of this powerful obsession with the deceased emperor as a living presence who was closely linked with strong popular desires.Footnote 100 The Jewish fascination with Nero as a figure was obviously connected with the fact that it was in the last years of his reign that the Roman war against the Jewish community in Judaea was launched. It is not surprising that there developed a literature in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple, perhaps beginning as early as the 70s and 80s, in which Nero became identified as a bestial and destructive figure. The oddly bifurcated attitude towards Nero, however, had its analogues even within Jewish lines of thinking. In some strands of thought and image, admittedly later in date and more remote in origin, Nero was to become a convert to Jewish beliefs and was actually to assist in keeping divine anger at bay.Footnote 101
All of these recorded responses occurred in the eastern Mediterranean where, it seems, Nero was gradually being adopted into what might very broadly be called the flourishing apocalyptic literatures of the time.Footnote 102 Christian writings came to latch on to Nero in connection with the known execution of Paul at Rome in Nero's reign and the claimed execution of Peter under the same emperor, also in the imperial city. These strands coalesced in writings that were producing a high-profile figure of Nero as the First Persecutor of the Christians.Footnote 103 Among these is a confection known as the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah, which in its Christian form seems to date to the 90s or slightly later. In it Nero, the criminal matricide, is portrayed as a terrible avatar signalling the end of the world. He is explicitly identified with the figure of the Antichrist. The other influential Christian shaping of the legendary Nero, and perhaps the one that is most directly relevant to the argument here, is found in the Book of the Revelation.Footnote 104 Here Nero is portrayed as a figure who has come to assume the rôle of the second Beast of the Apocalypse. ‘Let anyone with understanding’, says the prophet, ‘calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person; its number is 666’.Footnote 105 But when was this happening? Almost all estimates (and they are that) about the date of composition of the Book of Revelation point to the mid- to late 90s or the early 100s.Footnote 106 In these Christian accounts, Nero was not seen, as one popular strand of perception had it, as a benign figure who was the great benefactor of ordinary people, a millennarian avatar bearing their hopes and yearnings, but rather as a transcendentally evil and threatening figure, a bestial monster. Senatorial historiography and imperial biography, if nothing else, provided Christians with the appropriate imagery with which they could work. We know that these popular millennarian views of Nero, no doubt shared by both Jews and early Christians, were working their way into élite historiography. Tacitus himself is one of our main sources for the eastern phenomenon of the false Neros, writing one of the striking instances into his Histories.Footnote 107
(v) I should make it very clear that in proffering this argument I am most emphatically not suggesting that Tacitus was consciously creating fictions or that he was in any way behaving in a mendacious manner. Far from it. When he wrote these words, he firmly believed (I believe) that there was good evidence that linked these events in a single coherent narrative. The connections were such that Tacitus had at his disposal, in either written or oral sources, what he believed to be credible and compelling grounds to accept the stories that linked the Christians, Nero, and the fire at Rome as elements of a true narrative. Parts came from written records about the fire, and oral recollections; others came from contemporary cognizance of imperial administrators about such an identifiable and threatening group, and still others were further contemporary sources that linked the Christians with Nero. His beliefs in these matters, however, were tempered in ways that compel one to speculate.Footnote 108 But whatever the nuances, he wove this subversive history into his Annales. He was not alone. His contemporaries — but, noticeably, not a single writer before them — men like Pliny and Suetonius, were also reproducing various strands in these new developments as contemporary reports, as analogous happenings in the past, and as true history. Once the event was retailed in an authoritative Roman history of the Empire in its imperial language, there was nothing to prevent subsequent writers from readily accepting the matter as fact and elaborating the theme. In the terms and modes of the writers of Christian history, the event was logically interpreted as the deliberate persecution of their forebears, and it provoked the tendency to lump Peter and Paul into a general Neronian persecution. Certainly by the late second century, the whole story was accepted by Christians themselves: ‘Consult your own records’, says Tertullian, ‘there you will find that Nero was the first to have raged with the Caesarian [sc. Imperial] sword against this sect of ours as it was beginning to rise at Rome.’Footnote 109 Whatever historical value this statement has other than the idea of Nero as the first persecutor is difficult to specify. It is probably of an historical piece with the immediately preceding notice in this same passage in Tertullian in which he states that Tiberius received personal confirmation of the Christ's divinity from Syria Palaestina.Footnote 110
PATTERNS OF PERSECUTION
The conclusions are simple. There are no sound probative reasons to accept the mirage, however appealing it might be, that Christians were attacked by the Roman state as a special group and were martyred under Nero, and no good evidence, contemporary or even later, that links them with the Great Fire in 64 c.e. There is even less good evidence to sustain the Christian fiction of Nero as ‘the first persecutor’. There is no evidence — I mean none at all — to indicate that the emperor would have been capable of forming such a conception or that he would ever have executed such an imperial policy.Footnote 111 It is completely anachronistic. The whole incident and its surrounding ‘historical’ addenda should be excised from histories of the early Church, and the sooner the better. The consequences are significant, not the least for the long-term history of Christianity and Christian martyrdom. There was no ‘first’ in 64 c.e. There never was any Institutum Neronianum or any general covering law or senatus consultum or any such official anti-Christian measure concocted in connection with (or in the aftermath of) the Great Fire. But such an idea, as we know, had become entrenched, at least among Christians in the West, as early as Tertullian who, in the late 190s, specified this ‘established practice’ of Nero's as the only one that survived the general condemnation of all of his other acts.Footnote 112 Whatever forces gradually encouraged this story to coalesce and to come into focus happened rather later, at some point around the turn of the century. This observation draws our attention back to the decades in which Tacitus and Pliny were writing and to their sense of contemporary events. The first decades of the second century were the watershed in which religious identity and history were beginning to be reshaped in new ways that had not been previously witnessed.
The larger longer-term consequences that follow, I suggest, are very important. If the fictitious Neronian persecution is removed from the record, as surely it must be, then what follows about confrontations between the Roman state and the Christians as Christians? The plain answer seems to be almost nothing until the years focused on the coterie of texts that include Ignatius, the writers of the Prophecies of Isaiah and the Book of the Apocalypse, Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius, Juvenal, and others: that is to say, in the decades following the early 100s.Footnote 113 Everything points to this temporal synapse when there emerged an official consciousness in the Roman ruling élite of a distinctive group of people named Christians. By retrojecting this new information and filling out various parts of the known past, they shared in creating some of the past history of the Christians. Most persons of the time were willing to accept and to believe the new construction because it was both convenient and useful to their current view of the world. But if this first persecution never actually happened, a wholly unusual and anomalous large spike-like intrusion is removed from the story, and a far more probable and logical chronology of development presents itself. The relationship between the Roman state and Christians did not begin with such an enormous bang and then relapse into a strange and inexplicable amnesia of action and concept over the next five to six decades. Instead of 64 c.e. being a sudden violent confrontation and a dramatic turning point, not much of anything that can be firmly demonstrated happened until the first two decades of the second century. The larger and more concatenated events that locked some Christian communities in conflict with local agents of the Roman state happened first in eastern venues of the Empire — in the rich, culturally eminent, and intensely networked cities of Asia Minor — and not in the metropolis of the Empire itself. Only later did these local outbursts spread to the western Empire and then, notably, first to urban centres in Gaul that had demonstrable networking contacts with the Christian communities in the major urban centres of Asia Minor. As far as the available evidence indicates, before the empire-wide assault launched on them by a decree of the emperor Decius in 250 c.e., general persecutions of Christians as a defined religious group never happened at Rome, the caput imperii. In the imperial metropolis only individual executions are attested and then only rarely. As for the rest of the Empire, local persecutions — that is, specific knowing actions involving officials of the Roman state — were at first fitful and much later in date than the 60s, only gaining their first real traction in official eyes (and in official action) in the transitional years of Trajan's reign.Footnote 114
