it is the beginning of health--salvation, _salutem_."[64]

[Footnote 60: Ep. xxvi. 4.]

[Footnote 61: De Clem. ii. 6.]

[Footnote 62: Ep. xcv. 51.]

[Footnote 63: De Vita Beata, 14.]

[Footnote 64: Ep. xxviii. 9.]

Words such as these suggest others. They are anterior to those which
they recall. The latter are more beautiful, they are more ample, there
is in them a poetry and a profundity that has rarely been excelled.
Yet, it may be, that a germ of them is in Seneca, or, more exactly, in
theories which, beginning in India, prophets, seers, and stoics
variously interpreted and recalled.

However since they have charmed the world, their effect on Nero was
curious. Seneca was his preceptor. But so too was Art. The lessons of
these teachers, fusing in the demented mind of the monster, produced
transcendental depravity, the apogee of the abnormal and the
epileptically obscene. What is more important, they produced
Christianity.

Christianity already existed in Rome, but obscurely, subterraneanly,
among a class of poor people generally detested, particularly by the
Jews. Christianity was not as yet a religion, it was but the belief of
a sect that announced that the world was to be consumed. Presently
Rome was. The conflagration, which was due to Nero, swept everything
sacred away.

Even for a prince that, perhaps, was excessive. Nero may have felt
that he had gone too far. An emperor was omnipotent, he was not
inviolable. Tiberius was suffocated, Caligula was stabbed, Claud was
poisoned. Nero, it may be, in feeling that he had gone too far, felt
also that he needed a scapegoat. Christian pyromania suggested itself.
But probably it suggested itself first to the Jews, who, Renan has
intimated, denounced the Christians accordingly. Such may have been
the case. In any event, then it was that Christianity received its
baptism of blood.

All antiquity was cruel, but, barring perhaps the immense Asiatic
butcheries, Nero contrived then to surpass anything that had been
done. Bloated and hideous, his hair done up in a chignon, a concave
emerald for monocle, in the crowded arena he assisted at the rape of
Christian girls. Their lovers, their brothers and fathers were either
eaten alive by beasts or, that night, dressed in tunics that had been
soaked in oil, were fastened to posts and set on fire, in order that,
as human torches, they might illuminate palace gardens, through which,
costumed as a jockey, Nero raced.

Th