[87] Tertullian, On Female Dress, xi. 13.
[88] Examples of these are given below; see p. [313] of this work.
[89] Some of the more remarkable of these are quoted in Book IV. pt. iii. (pp. [309–312]).
[90] On “the Mortality,” i.e. the plague of Alexandria, 20–24.
[91] This Rutilius was a Gallic gentleman of high position who had filled important offices at Rome, and had become a Senator. His undisguised opinion of the Christian sect appears in a graceful poem descriptive of a sea-trip from Rome (Ostia probably) to South Gaul. The work in question was composed circa A.D. 416.
[92] The testimony of the Roman catacombs here is also very weighty. See Book III. part iii., where the numbers of martyrs and confessors buried in the catacombs are especially dwelt on.
[93] In this Third Book, where the question of the persecutions to which the early Christian Church was subjected is discussed, the period especially alluded to stretches from circa A.D. 64 to A.D. 180, including the reigns of the Flavian Emperors, of Hadrian and the Antonines.
But the conditions under which the Christians in the Roman Empire lived during the century and a quarter which followed the period above referred to, in very many respects differed but little from those that prevailed in the earlier years—only in the later period there were more years of comparative immunity from active persecution, while, on the ether hand, when the comparatively “still” years came to an end, the cruelties inflicted upon the Christians were more marked, and the severity of the punishments meted out by the dominant pagan party in the State were greater and more far-reaching than in the earlier days—notably in the reigns of Maximin, Decius and Diocletian.
[94] This early and usually accepted date, circa 65–7, seems the more probably correct. It is the traditional date, and generally fits in with the life and work of S. Peter as given in the ancient authorities. Prof. Ramsay, however, The Church in the Empire, puts it some fourteen or fifteen years later, and concludes that the Apostle’s martyrdom took place after A.D. 80. If, however, this later date be adopted, the references to the continual persecution would be even more striking than if the earlier and traditional date be accepted.
[95] The reference here is to pagan Rome, as “the woman drunken with blood”; so Mommsen quoted by Ramsay, who dwells on the fact that the death of the saints springs directly from their acknowledgment of their religion, and not for conviction for specific crimes.