The Early Christians in Rome

by H. D. M. Spence-Jones

Up to this time—in the eyes of most of the Romans—the Jew and the Christian were one people; they considered that if any difference at all existed, it was simply that the Christian was a dissenting Jew. Now apparently, after the burning of Rome, for the first time was any distinction made. It happened on this wise: the Jews had powerful friends in the court of the despotic Emperor. Poppæa the Empress, if not a Jewess, was at least a devoted proselyte of the chosen race. There is no doubt but that her influence, backed up no doubt by others about her person at the court, diverted the suspicions which had been awakened, from the Jews to the Christians. These, it was pointed out, were no real Jews, but were their deadly enemies; they were a hateful and hated sect quite improperly confounded with the chosen people. The Christians were now formally accused of being the real authors of the late calamity, and the accusation seems to have been generally popular among the masses of the Roman population. Our authorities for this popular hatred—we may style them contemporary—are Tacitus and Suetonius and the Christian Clement of Rome. The testimony of Pliny the Younger, who governed Bithynia under the Emperor Trajan, will be discussed later.

Under the orders of Nero—who turned to his own purposes the popular dislike to the new sect of Jewish fanatics, as they generally were supposed to be—the Christians were sought for. It turned out that there was a vast multitude of them in the city, “ingens multitudo,” says Tacitus; and Clement of Rome, the Christian bishop and writer, circa A.D. 96, also speaks of their great numbers. Many of the accused were condemned on the false charge of incendiarism, to which was added an accusation far harder to disprove—general hostility to society, and hatred of the world (odio generis humani).

A crowd of Christians of both sexes was condemned to the wild beasts. It was arranged that they should provide a hideous amusement for the people who witnessed the games just then about to be celebrated in the imperial gardens on the Vatican Hill—on the very spot where the glorious basilica of S. Peter now stands.

Nero, anxious to restore his waning popularity with the crowd, and to divert the strange suspicion which had fixed upon him as the incendiary of the great fire, was determined that the games should surpass any former exhibition of the like kind in the number of victims provided, and in the refined cruelty of the awful punishment to which the sufferers were condemned. He had in good truth an array of victims for his ghastly exhibition such as had never been seen before. A like exhibition indeed was never repeated; the hideousness of it positively shocking the Roman populace, cruel though they were, and passionately devoted to scenic representations which included death and torture, crime and shame. Numbers of these first Christian martyrs were simply exposed to the beasts; others clothed in skins were hunted down by fierce wild dogs; others were forced to play a part in infamous dramas, which ever closed with the death of the victims in pain and agony.

But the closing scene was the most shocking. As the night fell on the great show, as a novel delight for the populace, the Roman people being especially charmed with brilliant and striking illuminations, the outer ring of the vast arena was encircled with crosses on which a certain number of Christians were bound, impaled, or nailed. The condemned were clothed in tunics steeped in pitch and in other inflammable matter, and then, horrible to relate, the crucified and impaled were set on fire, and in the lurid light of these ghastly living torches the famous chariot races, in which the wicked Emperor took a part, were run.

But this was never repeated; as we have just stated, the sight of the living flambeaux, the protracted agony of the victims, was too dreadful even for that debased and hardened Roman crowd of heedless cruel spectators; the illuminations of Nero’s show were never forgotten; they remained an awful memory, but only a memory, even in Rome!

There is good reason to suppose that one of the lookers on at the games of that long day and sombre evening in the gardens of the Vatican Hill was Seneca, the famous Stoic philosopher, once the tutor and afterwards for a time the minister of Nero. Seneca had retired from public life, and in two of his letters written during his retirement to his sick and suffering friend Lucilius, encouraging him to bear his distressing malady with brave patience, reminds him of the tortures which were now and again inflicted on the condemned; in vivid language picturing the fire, the chains, the worrying of wild beasts, the prison horrors, the cross, the tunic steeped in pitch, the rack, the red-hot irons placed on the quivering flesh. What, he asks his friend, are your sufferings compared with sufferings caused by these tortures? And yet, he adds, his eyes had seen these things endured; from the sufferer no groan was heard—no cry for mercy—nay, in the midst of all he had seen the bravely patient victims smile!

Surely here the great Stoic was referring to what he had witnessed in Nero’s dread games of the Vatican gardens; no other scene would furnish such a memory at once weird and pathetic. The strange ineffable smile of the Christian in pain and agony dying for his God, had gone home to the heart of the great scholar statesman. Like many another Roman citizen of his day and time, Seneca had often seen men die, but he had never before looked on any one dying after this fashion!

From the days of that ever memorable summer of the year 64 until Constantine and Licinius signed the edict which in the name of the Emperors gave peace and stillness to the harassed Church, A.D. 313, roughly speaking a long period of two centuries and a half, the sword of persecution was never sheathed. For practically from the year 64, the date of the famous games in the Vatican gardens, there was a continuous persecution of those that confessed the name of Christ. The ordinary number of the ten persecutions is after all an arbitrary computation. The whole principle and constitution of Christianity on examination were condemned by the Roman government as irreconcilably hostile to the established order; and mere membership of the sect, if persisted in, was regarded as treasonable, and the confessors of Christianity became liable to the punishment of death. And this remained the unvarying, the changeless policy of the Government of the State, though not always put in force, until the memorable edict of Constantine, A.D. 313.

After the terrible scenes in the games of the Vatican gardens, the persecution of the Christians still continued. The charges of incendiarism were dropped, no one believing that there was any truth in these allegations; but in Rome and in the provinces the Christian sect from this time forward was generally regarded as hostile to the Empire.