Latest / Nero: Mad Tyrant or Misunderstood Emperor? — Fexingo History / Nero and the Great Fire: The Christians as Scapegoats
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the Great Fire of 64 AD—whether Nero started it, how he rebuilt Rome, the Golden House. But there's a part of that story that looms enormous in later history, and we've only touched on it. Luna: You mean the Christians, right? Lucas: Exactly. Because whatever the cause of the fire—accident, arson, imperial megalomania—Nero needed a scapegoat. And he found one in a small, unpopular religious group that had been simmering in Rome for maybe a decade or two. Lucas: Our main source is Tacitus, writing about fifty years later. He says Nero 'inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.' That's the first clear mention of Christians in Roman literature outside the Bible. Luna: And Tacitus doesn't seem to like them much himself. Lucas: No, he calls their creed a 'deadly superstition' and says it broke out again in Judaea before spreading to Rome. But he also makes it very clear that Nero was using them as a cover-up. According to Tacitus, Nero wasn't just punishing arsonists—he was putting on a spectacle. Lucas: The punishments are infamous: some were covered in animal skins and torn apart by dogs, others were crucified, and still others were set on fire to light the night sky—human torches in Nero's gardens, which were part of the Domus Aurea complex. Luna: That's the kind of detail that sticks in the memory. But how reliable is Tacitus here? Lucas: It's complicated. Tacitus had access to senatorial records and eyewitness accounts, but he also had his own biases—he was part of the senatorial class that resented Nero. He might have exaggerated the scale. But the core event—that Nero blamed Christians and killed them brutally—is corroborated by Suetonius and later Christian tradition, though Suetonius just mentions it in passing. Lucas: Cassius Dio, writing a century later, doesn't even mention Christians in connection with the fire. So we have to weigh the sources carefully. Luna: What do we actually know about the Christian community in Rome at that time? Lucas: It was small, mostly Greek-speaking, and likely centered on the Jewish quarter across the Tiber. Paul's Letter to the Romans was written around 57 AD, so there was an established church. Tradition says both Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome under Nero, likely around 64-68 AD. Lucas: Paul, as a Roman citizen, would have been beheaded. Peter, tradition holds, was crucified upside down at his own request. The Vatican Hill and the area of San Paolo Fuori le Mura are tied to those martyrdoms. Luna: So the Neronian persecution is the foundation of the Roman church's apostolic legacy. Lucas: Exactly. And that's why Nero looms so large in Christian memory. The historian John Pollini argues this was a local, one-time event, not a systematic empire-wide persecution. There's no evidence Nero enacted laws against Christians. It was a brutal crackdown in Rome itself, probably confined to 64 AD. Lucas: Tacitus says that despite their guilt—in the sense of being guilty of 'hatred of the human race' in his view—they deserved pity because they were sacrificed not for the public good but to satisfy one man's cruelty. Luna: That's a striking line. So even a hostile historian saw through the scapegoating. Lucas: Right. And later Christian writers like Tertullian and Eusebius amplified the story, making Nero the first persecutor, the Antichrist figure. That's where the legend of Nero as the beast of Revelation comes from—some scholars think the number 666 is a coded reference to Nero. Luna: Wait, really? How does that work? Lucas: In Hebrew gematria, the letters of 'Neron Caesar' add up to 666. Some manuscripts of Revelation have 616, which would be 'Nero Caesar' without the final 'n'. So yes, many scholars believe the Book of Revelation was written during the persecution of Domitian but using Nero as the archetypal tyrant. Luna: That's a powerful link between Roman history and Christian scripture. Lucas: It shows how one event—the scapegoating of Christians after the fire—echoed for centuries. Nero's name became synonymous with persecution. But we have to be careful: the popular image of Christians being thrown to lions in the Colosseum under Nero is anachronistic. The Colosseum wasn't built until Vespasian. Nero's spectacles were in his private gardens on the Vatican Hill, near where St. Peter's Basilica now stands. Luna: So the real geography of the persecution is actually the Vatican. Lucas: Precisely. Excavations under St. Peter's have uncovered a necropolis and a monument that may mark Peter's grave. But direct archaeological evidence of Nero's persecution is elusive. We have Tacitus's text and later tradition. Lucas: It's a reminder that our understanding of Nero depends so much on which sources we privilege. If we only had Suetonius, we'd know Nero punished Christians, but not the lurid details. If we only had Cassius Dio, we'd miss the connection entirely. Luna: It makes you wonder what other stories are hidden because the sources didn't survive. Lucas: Absolutely. And that's one of the things I love about digging into history with you—it's never just one story. It's a mosaic of fragments, and we have to piece them together carefully. And if you've been coming along with us through these conversations... Lucas: you know that we try to bring that mosaic to life, episode by episode. We keep the show ad-free and independent, and if it's something you value, listener support makes all the difference. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo—that's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just a way to help us keep digging into these stories. Luna: Yeah, it really does help. And we're grateful for everyone who listens. Lucas: So back to Nero and the Christians—I think what's most interesting is how this episode, which was a local act of cruelty, became a template for martyrdom. The early church remembered it as a defining moment. And it shaped how later Romans—and later Christians—thought about the relationship between empire and faith. Luna: It's almost like Nero handed Christianity a gift: a martyr origin story. Lucas: In a grim way, yes. The blood of the martyrs, as Tertullian said, is the seed of the church. And that's exactly what happened. The Neronian persecution, for all its horror, gave the Christian community in Rome a powerful narrative of innocence and sacrifice that would resonate for millennia. Luna: It's a heavy legacy for one emperor's scapegoat. Lucas: It is. And it's a reminder that history is never just about what happened—it's about who tells the story, and how it's used. Nero's fire and the Christians who died in his gardens: that's a story that's still being told, and still being debated, two thousand years later.