story is taken from Hegesippus.]

But although the obscurity of the house of David might protect them
from the suspicions of a tyrant, the present greatness of his own
family alarmed the pusillanimous temper of Domitian, which could only be
appeased by the blood of those Romans whom he either feared, or hated,
or esteemed. Of the two sons of his uncle Flavius Sabinus, [51] the
elder was soon convicted of treasonable intentions, and the younger,
who bore the name of Flavius Clemens, was indebted for his safety to
his want of courage and ability. [52] The emperor for a long time,
distinguished so harmless a kinsman by his favor and protection,
bestowed on him his own niece Domitilla, adopted the children of that
marriage to the hope of the succession, and invested their father with
the honors of the consulship.

[Footnote 51: See the death and character of Sabinus in Tacitus, (Hist.
iii. 74 ) Sabinus was the elder brother, and, till the accession of
Vespasian, had been considered as the principal support of the Flavium
family]

[Footnote 52: Flavium Clementem patruelem suum contemptissimoe
inertice.. ex tenuissima suspicione interemit. Sueton. in Domitian. c.
15.]

But he had scarcely finished the term of his annual magistracy, when, on
a slight pretence, he was condemned and executed; Domitilla was banished
to a desolate island on the coast of Campania; [53] and sentences either
of death or of confiscation were pronounced against a great number of
who were involved in the same accusation. The guilt imputed to
their charge was that of Atheism and Jewish manners; [54] a singular
association of ideas, which cannot with any propriety be applied except
to the Christians, as they were obscurely and imperfectly viewed by the
magistrates and by the writers of that period. On the strength of so
probable an interpretation, and too eagerly admitting the suspicions of
a tyrant as an evidence of their honorable crime, the church has placed
both Clemens and Domitilla among its first martyrs, and has branded the
cruelty of Domitian with the name of the second persecution. But this
persecution (if it deserves that epithet) was of no long duration. A
few months after the death of Clemens, and the banishment of Domitilla,
Stephen, a freedman belonging to the latter, who had enjoyed the favor,
but who had not surely embraced the faith, of his mistress, [54a]
assassinated the emperor in his palace. [55] The memory of Domitian was
conde