‘Nero’s Torches’ by Henryk Siemiradzki (1843–1902). The painting imagines the scene described by Tacitus (?56-?120) in Annals XV.44, recalling what happened after the Great Fire of Rome in 64, a catastrophe blamed on Christian extremists, but widely believed to have been contrived by Nero as a work of art. The brutal execution of large numbers of Christians was his way of creating a distraction in the face of bad publicity. See Suetonius on Fiddling While Rome Burns, and Jacobus de Voragine, author of the thirteenth-century The Golden Legend, on Why Rome Persecuted the Christians.
Part 1 of 2
BUT neither human aid, nor imperial bounty, nor atoning offerings to the gods, could remove the sinister suspicion that the fire* had been brought about by Nero’s order. To put an end therefore to this rumour, he shifted the charge on to others, and inflicted the most cruel tortures upon a body of men detested for their abominations,* and popularly known by the name of Christians. This name came from one Christus, who was put to death in the reign of Tiberius by the Procurator Pontius Pilate; but though checked for the time, the detestable superstition broke out again, not in Judaea only, where the mischief began, but even in Rome, where every horrible and shameful iniquity, from every quarter of the world, pours in and finds a welcome.
* See Suetonius on Nero Fiddling While Rome Burns.
* Wild rumours flew about concerning the Christians, including charges of cannibalism based on a garbled account of the Eucharist. Writing to the Emperor Trajan (Letters X 96), Pliny the Younger (61-?113), Governor of Bithynia, admitted that Christians he had questioned were not at all like their reputation, and ate “food of an ordinary and innocent kind.” He believed that most of his Christians stopped going to church following an gubernatorial edict banning hetaerias (brotherhoods or fraternities), though two slaves, deaconesses, were made of sterner stuff and were tortured.
Précis
Roman author Tacitus recalled how, after the Great Fire of Rome in 64, Emperor Nero had tried to distract the public from rumours that he had started it by blaming the fire on Christians. Popular opinion regarded them as anti-social and typical of the influx of foreign sorceries brought by Rome’s many immigrant communities from the East. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
‘A Christian Dirce’ by Henryk Siemiradzki (1843–1902). Suetonius tells us that as one of his entertainments, Nero had the bright idea of re-enacting the Greek myth of Dirce. Dirce became Queen of Thebes when her husband, Lycus, inherited the crown from his brother Nicteus. Lycus and Dirce kept Nicteus’s daughter Antiope captive and subjected her to years of misuse. One day Antiope escaped, and when her sons heard about her long captivity they grew so angry that they slew Lycus and tied Dirce to the horns of a maddened bull, which thrashed her about until she died. For Nero’s pageant, a beautiful but disposable Christian girl was chosen to play the part of Dirce, for real.
FIRST those who acknowledged themselves of this persuasion were arrested; and upon their testimony a vast number were condemned, not so much on the charge of incendiarism as for their hatred of the human race.* Their death was turned into a diversion. They were clothed in the skins of wild beasts, and torn to pieces by dogs; they were fastened to crosses, or set up to be burned, so as to serve the purpose of lamps when daylight failed. Nero gave up his own gardens for this spectacle; he provided also Circensian games, during which he mingled with the populace, or took his stand upon a chariot, in the garb of a charioteer. But guilty as these men were and worthy of direst punishment, the fact that they were being sacrificed for no public good, but only to glut the cruelty of one man, aroused a feeling of pity on their behalf.*
* The Christians were decried as ‘haters’ because they refused to soothe their fellow citizens’ outraged sensitivities, and say that the Christian god was one of a number of equally good gods, along with e.g. Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. By insisting that other deities were at best imaginary and at worst demons, they put themselves in the same doghouse as the Jews, whom Tacitus whipped with the ‘abominations’ and ‘haters’ tags in his Histories V. 5:
“Their other customs are impious and abominable, and owe their prevalence to their depravity. For all the most worthless rascals, renouncing their national cults, were always sending money to swell the sum of offerings and tribute. This is one cause of Jewish prosperity. Another is that they are obstinately loyal to each other, and always ready to show compassion, whereas they feel nothing but hatred and enmity for the rest of the world.”
* On the ‘public good’ served by persecuting Christians, see Jacobus de Voragine on Why Rome Persecuted the Christians in The Golden Legend. As we say today, Romans could tolerate anything except intolerance: putting the ‘haters’ to death was a solemn act of collective virtue so long as it was done as a ‘teachable moment’ for society and not just for the fun of it.
Précis
Nero’s means of distracting the citizens was to inflict wretched deaths on Christians, setting them alight as if they were street-lamps, throwing them to savage dogs and making bloody sport of them in the arena. Tacitus felt that such ‘hateful’ persons deserved death, but admitted that he and many others found this spectacle stirred pity rather than civic pride. (59 / 60 words)
