In less than two years after the acquittal of Paul and his subsequent departure from Rome on his last long missionary journey, the terrible persecution directed by the Emperor Nero against the Christian community at Rome began. The date of this awful calamity was August, A. D. 64. With more or less severity this persecution lasted some four years.
Before telling the dark story of the Neronic persecution, which to a certain extent determined the hostile relations that, with intervals of partial quiet, were henceforward to exist between the Christian sect and the Imperial Government for nearly two centuries and a half, it will be well to give some description of the Roman Christian community, which at the early date of A. D. 64 was numerous enough and of sufficient importance to attract the hostile notice of the Emperor Nero and his advisers.
We have already dwelt on the fact that in the first days of Christianity the Church of Jesus Christ was purely a Jewish community. The Divine Founder in His earthly relationships was a Hebrew of the Hebrews. His disciples, their converts, the first Christian communities, were Jews; to the ordinary Roman citizen, Christians were simply a Jewish sect.
Rome, from the year A. D. 33 onwards, was more than the capital of the civilized world; more than merely the seat of the Government of the Roman Empire; it was the center of all its life, civil, military, literary. To take a modern comparison, Rome in the first and second centuries of the Christian era was all that London and Paris, St. Petersburg, modern Rome, and New York together, are to the civilized world of the twentieth century.
In this great center of peoples, the Jew for a considerable period had been a well-known personage. As early as 138 B. C. there was a Jewish colony in Rome. In 58 B. C. we come upon a curious reference to the presence and influence of this people in the great metropolis. Cicero was pleading in the Forum for one Flaccus, who had incurred the enmity of the Jews of Rome by forbidding the sending of the sacred tribute to Jerusalem; and from time to time in the course of his pleading, we read how the great lawyer lowered his voice in order that what he said might not be heard by the crowd of Jews thronging the forum: "You know," said the famous advocate, "how numerous they (the Jews) are, and how united, and what commanding influence they exert, sometimes turbulently in the public assemblies; to offend the Jews is a matter of the gravest import."
Julius Caesar, in his day of supreme power, markedly courted these stranger residents, and bestowed on them a succession of favors. While he lived these Jews were among his most steadfast adherents, and after the Dictator's murder they showed their attachment by gathering round his funeral pyre on the Campus Martins, weeping and uttering loud cries of lamentation by night as by day. The Emperor Augustus (27 B. C. to A. D. 14) continued the favors shown to them by the first and greatest of the Caesars. After the death of Augustus the influence which these, for
the most part, poor stranger folk, gradually acquired in Roman society evoked considerable jealousy, dislike, and suspicion; and an anti-Jewish feeling, somewhat of the character of the modern Juden-hetze (hatred of the Jews), so common a feature in the nineteenth century in many of the Continental cities of Europe, suggested strong measures of repression on the part of the Government. In A. D. 19, under the Emperor Tiberius, they were summarily expelled from the city, and a similar decree in A. D. 49 again banished them from Rome. Yet these expulsions had but little permanent effect. The Jews were too deeply rooted to be eradicated permanently, and very soon after each banishment they seem to have returned to the metropolis in greater numbers than ever.
What now was the secret of their power, of their influence? The question has been often asked, it is being asked still. The Jews were not a specially beautiful race, if physical beauty is in the question. They have rarely been singled out as specially winning writers or profound thinkers, or far-seeing statesmen; they have numbered in their ranks but few soldiers or sailors of preeminent skill, or conspicuous valor, though perhaps an average number of each and all of these have never been wanting in the Jewish race. No important historian, however far above all race-partiality or favor, would dream of speaking of them as a lovable people, as a people likely to call out feelings of enthusiasm or admiration. The feeling the Jew has evoked has been rather dislike—not unmixed with envy at their strange prosperity, particularly in commercial matters important and unimportant, and their vast unexplained power in the various centers where any considerable numbers of them have settled. What then was their secret? The answer is found in the Old Testament story. For some reason unknown to men the Eternal God Whose ways are not our ways, ages before the Caesars ruled in Rome over the world, chose them as His peculiar people, and in spite of their faults and many shortcomings, the blessing of the Eternal God has ever rested on them. Again and again they forfeited through their faults and repeated disobedience the position among men they might have occupied; the awful deed of the century of which we are writing, consummated at Jerusalem in the year of grace 33, was the crowning sin; henceforth they were the people under the Divine curse. But the immemorial blessing was still theirs; the blessing which has preserved them as a separate people, powerful even under circumstances of the deepest degradation and oppression. Changeless in the midst of change, the Jew is with us still. Is it then a baseless dream which sees for this strange deathless race a glorious future, when they shall look on Him Whom they pierced as their Messiah, Friend, Redeemer, God?
But at no period in their long drawn-out, wonderful history does it seem that the Jews exercised a greater and more peculiar an influence than in the society of Rome, the world-capital in the first century of the Christian era. The Jewish Sabbath, for instance, is frequently alluded to by the poets of that age; curiously enough, this exclusively national observance found favor even in; certain Pagan circles. Not a few among the higher ranks in the Roman world became in greater or less degree converts to Judaism, under the general appellation of "proselytes of the gate." Poppsea, the powerful mistress of Nero, was probably one of them, as was Fuscus Aristius, the friend of the poet Horace, to take well-known instances. But the influence of the Jews of Rome extended far beyond the circle of professed proselytes. In a restless, immoral age the fervor, the rigid morality, the intense earnestness of the Hebrew colony impressed Roman society and gave them a moral influence quite disproportioned to their actual numbers.
But the number of Jews who made up the Roman Jewish colony was not inconsiderable. About the middle of the first century they have been computed as amounting to between twenty and thirty thousand, or even more. They were mostly very poor, the few richer members of the colony—and there were a few, doubtless, very wealthy members—studiously concealing their riches.
A modern writer in a brilliant and vivid word-picture has painted the Ghetto or Jewish quarter of modern Rome, before the Ghetto was swept away to make room for recent improvements. It is an accurate description of a city settlement of the changeless people, and with singularly little alteration would admirably describe a Jewish quarter in the Imperial Rome of the first century. "The old Roman Ghetto was a low-lying space enclosed within a circuit of a few hundred yards, in which four or five thousand human beings were permanently crowded together in dwellings centuries old, built upon ancient drains and vaults that were constantly exposed to the inundations of the river (the Tiber), and always reeking with its undried slime; a little pale-faced, eager-eyed people, grubbing and grovelling in masses of foul rags for some tiny scrap richer than the rest and worthy to be sold again; a people whose many women, haggard, low-speaking, dishevelled, toiled half-doubled together upon the darning and piecing and smoothing of old clothes, whose many little children huddled themselves into corners to teach one another to count; a people of sellers who sold nothing that was not old or damaged, and who had nothing that they would not sell; a people clothed in rags, living among rags, thriving on rags, a people strangely proof against pestilence, gathering rags from the city to their dens when the cholera was raging outside the Ghetto's gates and rags were cheap, yet never sickening of the plague themselves; a people never idle, sleeping little, eating sparingly, laboring for small gain amid dirt and stench and dampness, till Friday night came at last, and the old crier's melancholy voice ran through the darkening alleys: 'The Sabbath has begun'—and all at once the rags were gone, the ghostly old clothes that swung like hanged men, by the neck, in the doorways of the cavernous shops flitted away into the utter darkness within; the old bits of iron and brass went rattling out of sight like specters' chains; the hook-nosed antiquary drew in his cracked old show case; the greasy frier of fish and artichokes extinguished his little charcoal fire of coals; the slipshod darning-women, half blind with six days' work, folded the half-patched coats and trousers, and took their rickety old rush-bottomed chairs indoors with them.
"Then on the morrow, in the rich synagogue with its tapestries, its gold, and its gilding, the thin, dark men were together in their hats and long coats, and the sealed books of Moses were borne before their eyes and held up to the north and south and east and west, and all the men together lifted up their arms and cried aloud to the God of their fathers.
"But when the Sabbath was over they went back to their rags and their patched clothes, and to their old iron and their antiquities, and toiled on patiently again, looking for the coming of the Messiah.
"And there were astrologers and diviners and magicians and witches and crystal-gazers among them, to whom great ladies came on foot, thickly veiled, and walking delicately amidst the rags, and men, too, who were more ashamed of themselves, and slunk in at nightfall to ask the Jews concerning the future—even in our time as in Juvenal's, and in Juvenal's day as in Saul's of old."
Into the midst of this busy, active, teeming population of Roman Jews fell the seeds of the Gospel message at a very early date—perhaps even as early as A. D. 33—born by some of those "strangers of Rome" mentioned by the writer of the "Acts of the Apostles" when he tells the story of Pentecost and its marvel, and particularizes the nationality of the first hearers of Paul at Jerusalem. These "strangers of Rome" on their return to their Italian home would probably have told the wondrous story they had heard in Jerusalem, and so in the Imperial City no doubt sprang up at a very early date in the Jewish colony a little band of men, ever rapidly increasing, who believed in the Risen Jesus.
Roman Catholic writers consider that some ten years after the "first" Pentecost the Jewish Christian Church at Rome was visited by the great Apostle Peter himself, who after that date, roughly given as A. D. 42, resided in Rome until A. D. 49, in which year the Emperor Claudius banished the Jews from the city. Peter, of course, left Rome with the rest of his fellow-countrymen. These writers consider that the Apostle did not return to the capital before A. D. 62, and that it is highly probable that the two Apostles met in Rome shortly before the spring of A. D. 63, the date usually assigned for the acquittal of Paul and his release from his long imprisonment. Paul then, according to their theory, went forth again, journeying westwards, resuming his missionary travels, Peter remaining in Rome. Paul returned to the city, it is generally assumed, in A. D. 67, and in that year, or the following, with his brother Apostle Peter, suffered martyrdom.
The questions, however, of the duration of Peter's ministry at Rome, and of the authenticity of the earlier visit, circa A. D. 42-3, although of the deepest interest on many accounts to the student of early Christian records, are not of vital importance. Of the highest importance, however, is the condition of the Roman community at the epoch of the persecution of Nero, which began in the middle of the year 64. This terrible experience of the Church of the metropolis we are about to relate with some detail It was no mere passing cloud; its dread results were far-reaching. It may be said without exaggeration to have largely determined the position of Christians in the Empire for a period roughly of two hundred and fifty years.
There is no doubt whatever that the Church of Rome in A. D. 64 was a considerable and even in some respects an influential community. The language of Tacitus, who was by no means kindly disposed to the growing sect, is decisive as to its numbers. Had the Christians of Rome not been a well-known and somewhat influential body, Nero would never have thought it worth his while to turn his attention to them, and to make the sect his scapegoat in the matter of the great fire, of which he was suspected to have been the contriver.
We possess no definite records of the Roman Church of this early period. The salutations of Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, written from Corinth circa A. D. 58, and in his Epistle to the Philippians, written during his Roman imprisonment circa A. D. 61-2, help us to form our conception of the community. Besides these contemporary references to the state of Christianity at Rome in the years 58-62, we possess a striking incident connected with the year 57 related by Tacitus—an incident upon which De Rossi's later discoveries in the Catacombs throw considerable light.
What now do these references—Christian and Pagan—tell us? That the Roman Christian community was made up of very different elements; was of a composite character; that in it the majority were certainly poor, including not a few slaves and freedmen in its ranks; but that there were on its rolls the names of some high-born personages. Varied nationalities also were represented in this great typical early Christian community. The Jew, and the Pagan by birth and training, stood side by side. The Greek and the Oriental, as well as the Italian and the Roman-born, had each at some time during the period covered. by the "Acts of the Apostles" received from the lips of a Peter or Paul or John, or perhaps had heard and welcomed through the medium of an Evangelist unknown to fame, the message of life.
When Paul wrote to the Roman Christians from Corinth in A. D. 58, although he had never been at Rome, he evidently knew well many of the members of its community. The long list of salutations addressed to individuals of various nationalities and to persons of different ranks tells us this; while households even are included in these greetings of the "travelled" Apostle. The references in his epistle written from Rome to the Philippians circa A. D. 61-2 are even more suggestive, especially the well-known greeting from " the members of Caesar's household" (Phil. iv. 22). The "domus Caesaris," "domus Augusta" (the household of Caesar) who sent their salutations to Philippi were presumably earlier converts who did not owe their knowledge of Christ to Paul's teaching at Rome. The "household of Caesar" in the first century of the Christian era occupied a large and conspicuous place in the life of Rome. It included persons of exalted rank and of the highest consideration, as well as a great crowd of slaves and freedmen. The most elaborately organized of modern royal establishments would give only a faint idea of the multiplicity and variety of the offices in the palace of the Caesars. The departments in the household were divided and sub-divided, the offices were numberless. The "tasters," for instance, constituted a separate class of servants under their own chief; even the pet dog had a functionary assigned to him. The aggregate of Imperial residences on or near the Palatine formed a small city in itself; but these were not the only palaces even in Rome. Moreover, the country houses and estates of the Imperial family all contributed to swell the numbers of the "domus Augusta."
But besides the household in its more restricted sense, the Emperor had in his employ a countless number of officials, clerks, and servants of every degree required for the work of the several departments, civil and military, which were all concentrated in him as head of the State. And
this vast "household of Caesar" was made up of all nationalities as well as being composed of all sorts and conditions of men. There were Romans, of course, among them, and Italians by birth, but perhaps the greater number were Greeks, Egyptians, and Orientals, including a fair proportion of Jews.
It was into this great Imperial household that Christianity at a very early date penetrated. It was from some among this mighty mixed house of Caesar that the greetings contained in the Philippian Epistle were sent by Paul. But it must be remembered that the "Faith" which was living among them was a power—how real, events soon showed—before the great Gentile Apostle had arrived in Rome as a closely guarded prisoner.
It is no baseless thought that the presence, the long continued presence, according to the immemorial tradition, of such a one as Peter had helped to fan the flame of devotion which Paul found burning so brightly when, as a prisoner, he was lodged in or near the great Praetorian barracks or camp outside the wall to the north-east of the city, hard by the "modern Via Nomentana."
Thus the synagogues of the thirty or more thousand of the Jewish residents in Rome, the vast mixed multitude of the dwellers in the metropolis of the world, including the "household of Caesar," supplied their quota to the ever-growing company of adherents to the new faith.
But besides these were some—few perhaps, but still enough to give a powerful influence to the strange community—out of the mighty and exclusive Patrician order who had no special connection with the " house of Caesar." There is a well-known story in Tacitus J of a great lady—one Pomponia Graecina, the wife of Plautus, the general who conquered Britain under the Emperor Claudius. In the year 58, Pomponia was accused of having embraced a "foreign superstition." The matter was referred, in accordance with Roman custom, to a Domestic Court, in which her husband sat as chief judge. The noble lady was adjudged innocent. She lived afterwards, we read, to a great age, but in continuous sadness. No one, however, interfered with her any more, protected as she was by her stainless character and exalted rank. For a long while the strange superstition in which this eminent person was accused of sharing was supposed by many students to have been "Christianity," but later discoveries have converted the supposition into what is almost a certainty. In the course of his exhaustive investigations into the network of subterranean corridors devoted to the burial of the dead Christians around the Catacomb of Callistus, De Rossi has shown that the oldest portion of that vast cemetery on the Appian Way, known as the Cemetery of Lucina, belongs to the first century. In this ancient burial place a sepulchral inscription belonging to the close of the second century has been found with the name "Pomponius Graecinus," other neighboring monuments bear the names of the same Pomponian House. It is clear from the character of the decorations of the sepulchral chambers that the crypt was constructed in the first instance by some Christian lady of high rank before the close of the first century for her poorer brother and sister Christians." De Rossi considers that the name "Lucina," which belongs to this division of the Catacomb of Callistus, is only another name of Pomponia Graecina herself; the name "Lucina" not being found in Roman history, the famous archaeologist considers it highly probable that it was assumed by Pomponia Grsecina in accordance with early Christian phraseology, which spoke of baptism as an "enlightening." Be this how it may, the strange discovery of the connection of the Pomponian family with the ancient cemetery is a strong confirmation of the surmise long entertained by scholars, that Pomponia was a Christian.
No doubt she was an example of other persons of high rank who had accepted the easy yoke and light burden of Christ in that age of inquiry and fervent longings after the nobler and better life. Only a few years later, as we shall see, history tells us of yet nobler converts. For before that first century had run its course, the religion of Jesus had found its way into the family of the Caesars. The "Atheism" for which the Emperor Domitian's cousin, Flavins Clemens, suffered death in A. D. 95, and for which his wife Domitilla was banished, was doubtless only a name for Christianity.
Such were the materials out of which the Roman community of Christians was composed. With the exception of the faithful who came from the "household of Caesar," the same elements made up the communities of the Church of the first days in those other important centers we hear of in the "Acts," Corinth, Ephesus, Antioch, and other less populous cities, such as Philippi, Thessalonica, Colossae. But the community of Rome in the year 62-3 was undoubtedly the largest and most influential. There the two Apostles who, during the thirty years which followed the Ascension and the miracle of Pentecost, occupy unquestionably the first place in the story of the Church, for a considerable time had resided and had taught. There Christianity had evidently made a firm lodgment, and counted its adherents probably by thousands.
Apart from the hostility of some of the Jews, who, as we have said, had in the capital a large and powerful colony numbering at least some thirty thousand—probably many more—the Christian sect practised its simple rites, and quietly multiplied its converts without opposition. The Imperial Government, while quite aware of their existence, chose to regard them as a Jewish sect, and the Jewish religion was at the time, we know, legally recognized by the Roman power.