xix. 20, xx. 10) who seduces the inhabitants of
the earth to worship the first Beast, and probably interpreted this
figure as applying to the Roman provincial priesthood.[6]

But this version of the idea of Antichrist, hostile to the Jews and
better expressing the relation of Christianity to the Roman empire, was
prevented from obtaining an absolute ascendancy in Christian tradition
by the rise of the belief in the ultimate return of Nero, and by the
absorption of this outcome of pagan superstition into the
Jewish-Christian apocalyptic conceptions. It is known that soon after
the death of Nero rumours were current that he was not dead. This report
soon took the more concrete form that he had fled to the Parthians and
would return thence to take vengeance on Rome. This expectation led to
the appearance of several pretenders who posed as Nero; and as late as
A.D. 100 many still held the belief that Nero yet lived.[7] This idea of
Nero's return was in the first instance taken up by the Jewish
apocalyptic writers. While the Jewish author of the fourth Sibylline
book (c. A.D. 80) still only refers simply to the heathen belief, the
author of the (Jewish?) original of the 17th chapter of the Apocalypse
of St John expects the return of Nero with the Parthians to take
vengeance on Rome, because she had shed the blood of the Saints
(destruction of Jerusalem!). In the fifth Sibylline book, which, with
the exception of verses 1-51, was mainly composed by a Jewish writer at
the close of the first century, the return of Nero plays a great part.
Three times the author recurs to this theme, 137-154; 214-227; 361-385.
He sees in the coming again of Nero, whose figure he endows with
supernatural and daemonic characteristics, a judgment of God, in whose
hand the revivified Nero becomes a rod of chastisement. Later, the
figure of Nero _redivivus_ became, more especially in Christian thought,
entirely confused with that of Antichrist. The less it became possible,
as time went on, to believe that Nero yet lived and would return as a
living ruler, the greater was the tendency for his figure to develop
into one wholly infernal and daemonic. The relation to the Parthians is
also gradually lost sight of; and from being the adversary of Rome, Nero
becomes the adversary of God and of Christ. This is the version of the
expectation of Nero's second coming preserved in the form given to the
prophecy, under Domitian, by the collaborator in the Apocalyp