Nero’s Torches
Sensing that the Great Fire of Rome in 64 (though entertaining) was damaging his public image, the Emperor Nero looked around for someone to blame.
64
Roman Britain 43-410
Sensing that the Great Fire of Rome in 64 (though entertaining) was damaging his public image, the Emperor Nero looked around for someone to blame.
64
Roman Britain 43-410
In 64, a terrible fire swept Rome, and in little over a week two thirds of the city had been destroyed. The whole spectacle had been watched with fascination by the Emperor Nero, from a place of safety of course, strumming on his harp as he sang an epic lay of his own about the Fall of Troy. There were those who said that the whole catastrophe had been Nero’s idea of performance art.
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.