age, either in
gratitude for triumphs or in fulfilment of vows, had consecrated, in
times of prosperity, or in seasons of dismay. Through Greece and Asia,
indeed, the gifts and oblations and even the statues of the deities were
carried off.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] According to Suetonius, Nero turned the public calamity to his own
private advantage. He promised to remove the bodies that lay amid the
ruins, and to clear the ground at his own expense. By that artifice he
secured all the remaining property of the unhappy sufferers for his own
use. To add to his ill-gotten store, he levied contributions in the
provinces, and by those means collected an immense sum.

[28] By a law of the Twelve Tables, it was provided that a space of
something more than two feet was to be left between all new-built
houses.

PERSECUTION OF THE CHRISTIANS UNDER NERO

A.D. 64-68

FREDERIC WILLIAM FARRAR

Down to the reign of Nero Christians in the Roman Empire were
regarded by the ruling powers merely as a Jewish sect, harmless and
guilty of nothing which could call for the interference of the
State with their ways of life or of worship. They were therefore
unmolested. But during the reign of the infamous Emperor in whom
they saw antichrist and the actual embodiment of the symbolic
monstrosities of the Apocalypse, the Christians began to be
recognized as a separate people, and from milder persecutions at
first, under cover of legal procedure, they were soon subjected to
outrages, tortures, and deaths than which history has none more
revolting and pitiful to record. In Kaulbach's great painting of
Nero's persecution there is enough of portrayal and suggestion to
add a terrible vividness to the ordinary historian's word-pictures.
The Emperor, surrounded by his boon companions, stands on his
garden terrace to receive divine honors, while a group of suffering
Christians--among them St. Peter, crucified head down, and St.
Paul, passionately protesting against the diabolical work--move to
compassion a company of elderly men and a body of German soldiers
who look upon the horrible spectacle of martyrdom.

This, the first persecution of the Christians, reached its
culminating point of ferocity in A.D. 64, after Nero had been
accused of kindling, or conniving at the work of those who did
kindle, the great fire in Rome. In order to