divert attention, even
if he could not turn suspicion, from himself, having charged the
Christians with causing the conflagration, he ordered the
atrocities which added a still darker stain to his personal and
imperial record of shameless crime and savage inhumanity. First
such as confessed themselves to be Christians were dealt with, and
from these information was extorted on which vast numbers were
convicted, "not so much on the charge of burning the city as of
hating the human race."

Nero's character and acts have been depicted by many writers and in
famous works of art, but not even the pencil of Kaulbach can make
more keen the realization of those scenes enacted in this
persecution than the thrilling narration of Farrar, which for
picturesque eloquence, fired with dramatic intensity, has seldom
been surpassed in English literature.

Nero was so secure in his absolutism, he had hitherto found it so
impossible to shock the feelings of the people or to exhaust the
terrified adulation of the senate, that he was usually indifferent to
the pasquinades which were constantly holding up his name to execration
and contempt. But now[29] he felt that he had gone too far, and that his
power would be seriously imperilled if he did not succeed in diverting
the suspicions of the populace. He was perfectly aware that when the
people in the streets cursed those who set fire to the city they meant
to curse _him_. If he did not take some immediate step, he felt that he
might perish, as Gaius had perished before him, by the dagger of the
assassin.

It is at this point of his career that Nero becomes a prominent figure
in the history of the Church. It was this phase of cruelty which seemed
to throw a blood-red light over his whole character and led men to look
on him as the very incarnation of the world-power in its most demoniac
aspect, as worse than the Antiochus Epiphanes of Daniel's Apocalypse, as
the Man of Sin whom--in language figurative indeed, yet awfully
true--the Lord should slay with the breath of his mouth and destroy with
the brightness of his coming, for Nero endeavored to fix the odious
crime of having destroyed the capital of the world upon the most
innocent and faithful of his subjects--upon the only subjects who
offered heartfelt prayers on his behalf--the Roman Christians. They were
the defenceless victims of this horrible charge, for though