Chapter 52. Persecution and Martyrdom: From Nero to Diocletian

Between the fire of Rome in 64 and the Edict of Serdica in 311, the Roman state and the Christian communities went through cycles of indifference, local violence, legal procedure and, at three points, empire-wide coercion. How this history is told has a politics of its own. The church’s account is of an unbroken line of tyrant-emperors and countless martyrs, and it became the foundation of Christian identity and of the cult of saints. A revisionist line that runs from the seventeenth-century treatise De paucitate martyrum through Gibbon to Catherine Nixey holds that the persecutions were brief, the deaths few and the martyr literature largely fiction. This chapter sets out the events and then both readings, together with the eastern view from the Persian church and the political-philosophical reading of Mitchell Heisman.

Nero, the Fire of 64 and the Apostles

Tacitus is the foundational non-Christian source. Kerrigan quotes him: Nero “fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace… Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired”. He also gives Suetonius’ charge that Nero himself had the city fired to clear ground for his Golden House [Kerrigan, Dark History of the Catholic Church, #71131, ch.1 “Fire and Sword”]. Dunn reproduces the same Tacitean passage, including the “pernicious superstition” (exitiabilis superstitio) that broke out “not merely in Judea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself”, in his section 35.2 “Persecution under Nero” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §35.2]. Nixey adds Tacitus’ detail that the formal charge was not arson but “hatred of humankind”. She also notes that Tacitus’ mention of Christus “executed by the governor Pontius Pilatus” is “the sole mention of this event in a non-Christian source from this period” [Nixey, The Darkening Age, #70864, ch.4].

Tradition places the deaths of Peter and Paul in this context. Kerrigan summarises it: Paul, a citizen, was beheaded; Peter was crucified “upside-down, it’s said, at his own request”, and “a great basilica was later raised up above his grave” [Kerrigan, #71131, ch.1]. Dunn treats the historical questions in §35.3 “The Martyrdom of Peter” and §34.7 “When Did Paul Die?” [Dunn, #63287]. The anonymous popular history Vatican Secret Archives opens its account of the archives with the same story: “The first great persecution of Christians broke out during Nero’s reign… Nero, wanting to allay suspicion that he had Rome set on fire, blamed the Christians”. The printed text gives the year as “44”, where the fire is otherwise dated 64, and the same chapter places Diocletian’s persecution “at the beginning of the 5th century” [Vatican Secret Archives, #68123, ch.1].

Apocalyptic writing turned Nero into the type of the Antichrist. Negru quotes the Ascension of Isaiah, in which Beliar descends “in the form of a man, a lawless king, the slayer of his mother: who himself (even) this king will persecute the plant which the Twelve Apostles of the Beloved have planted”. He shows how later Fathers kept the identification: Augustine reports “many… who think that Domitius Nero was the Antichrist”, and Chrysostom read 2 Thessalonians the same way [Negru, A History of the Apocalypse, #62383, Part II “Christian Apocalyptic”]. Kerrigan notes the gematria by which “for the name Nero, the figures came to 666” [Kerrigan, #71131, ch.1 sidebar “Getting Nero’s Number”].

The Persian church remembered Nero in the same terms. The Chronicle of Arbela, the history of the church of Adiabene, states: “Now the first who persecuted the Christians was Nero the Wicked, who not only personally tortured them, but also wanted to show that the Christians were the cause of all evil” [Chronicle of Arbela, #55002]. It goes on to describe persecution under Sasanian kings, including “two wicked kings, Yazdgird [I, 399-420] and Bahram [V, 420-438]”. Its editor notes that Shapur II doubled the taxes on Christians to pay for his wars against Rome, and that “the persecutions resumed” when they objected [Chronicle of Arbela, #55002, text and editor’s n.205].

Law and Procedure: Pliny and Trajan

The first Roman administrative record of Christians is Pliny’s Letter 10.96 from Bithynia (c. 110-112). Nixey reads it as a document about public order, not religion. Pliny was reacting to anonymous denunciations and local discontent, since “the preservation of order is his primary duty”. He confessed: “I have never been present at an examination of Christians… I do not know the nature of the extent of the punishments usually meted out to them” [Nixey, #70864, ch.5 “These Deranged Men”]. Pagels gives the harsher passages. His soldiers “tortured two Christian women, both slaves”, who revealed that the group “met regularly before dawn on a certain day to sing a hymn to Christ as to a god”, eating only “ordinary, harmless food”. Yet Pliny wrote: “I ordered them to be taken away and executed; for, whatever they admit to, I am convinced that their stubbornness and unshakable obstinacy should not go unpunished” [Pagels, Beyond Belief, #63510, ch.3]. The reference shelf summarises the outcome: Pliny gave the accused “multiple chances” and executed those who refused three times. Trajan’s reply made being known as a “Christian” “sufficient for judicial action”, but it also shows that “Christians were not sought out or tracked down by imperial orders”. As Timothy Barnes puts it there, persecution before Decius was “local, sporadic, almost random” [Wikipedia: Pliny the Younger on Christians].

Arthur Darby Nock characterises Pliny as “a man of gentle piety” who reported with satisfaction that people were “again thronging to the Bithynian temples” [Nock, The Roman Army and the Roman Religious Year, #60166]. The Seventh-day Adventist scholar Samuele Bacchiocchi studies the same letter for a different reason. He examines whether Pliny’s “stato die” (“a fixed day”) must mean a weekly Sunday. He suggests that because Christians in the province were being “denounced, processed and condemned”, they may have varied “the day and place of their gathering” to avoid suspicion [Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday, #63620, ch.4].

Under Marcus Aurelius local violence intensified. Pagels relates the burning of the eighty-six-year-old Polycarp at Smyrna, who answered the crowd’s cry “Away with the atheists!” with the same words. She also describes the pogrom at Lyons and Vienne (177), where Christians were barred from baths and markets and then “hounded and attacked openly… assaulted, beaten, and stoned”, and where the governor asked the emperor whether citizens should die in the arena or by beheading [Pagels, #63510, ch.3]. Tertullian, writing c. 190, gives the pagan charges: “a sacred ritual in which we kill a little child and eat it; in which, after the feast, we practice incest”. He also gives the defiant reply: “the blood of Christians is seed!” [Pagels, #63510, ch.3]. Kerrigan adds Minucius Felix’s catalogue of rumours, including infant blood rites and worship of “the head of an ass”. He links the first of these to the later blood libel against Jews [Kerrigan, #71131, ch.1 sidebar “Blood Sacrifice”].

Decius, Valerian and the Army

The third century brought the first general measures. Nixey describes Decius’ edict of 250 as “requiring everyone in the empire to sacrifice”. Its intent was “to ensure loyalty”, and it “almost certainly had not been aimed at” Christians and lasted little more than a year. Christians “were given repeated opportunities to comply and pre-announced dates gave ample opportunities to flee” [Nixey, #70864, ch.4-5]. The reference shelf concurs that under Decius and Valerian “there is no evidence that these edicts were specifically intended to attack Christianity” [Wikipedia: Diocletianic Persecution]. Those who sacrificed, the lapsi, were readmitted only after penance [Kerrigan, #71131, ch.1 “Unwilling Apostates”].

Valerian’s edict was aimed at the clergy and church property. The same book says that in 258, “as the state treasury was empty, the emperor decided to eliminate the leaders of the Church and seize her assets”. Pope Sixtus II and his deacons were killed, and Lawrence, keeper of “the papal library and archives”, died with them [Vatican Secret Archives, #68123, ch.1]. Kerrigan records the tradition of Lawrence on the grill (“Turn me over, I’m done on this side”) [Kerrigan, #71131, ch.1].

The army was a front line in these conflicts. Nock observes “that from the beginning of the third century many Christians found service in the army compatible with their beliefs”, and that “Diocletian and his associates used the dismissal of Christians from the army, as from office, as a penal measure”. Diocletian, he writes, “was passionately Roman in feeling”, and the titles Jovius and Herculius put the tetrarchs “under the protection of old deities of the eternal city” [Nock, #60166, §iv “Pagans and Christians in the Roman Army”]. Nock is sceptical of some military martyr acts. Of the Acta S. Dasii he writes that “the saint’s existence is not doubted, but I cannot believe that human sacrifice at the Kronia was permitted in a Roman camp” [Nock, #60166, n.].

The Great Persecution, 303-311

The reference shelf summarises the sequence. In his first fifteen years Diocletian “purged the army of Christians, condemned Manicheans to death, and surrounded himself with public opponents of Christianity”. Galerius pressed for a general persecution in the winter of 302. After the oracle at Didyma was consulted, persecution began on 23 February 303. A series of edicts followed, and later ones targeted the clergy and “demanded universal sacrifice”. Enforcement was “weakest in Gaul and Britain”, where Constantius applied only the first edict. Galerius ended the persecution in the East with the Edict of Serdica in 311, Maximinus resumed it, and it ended with the Edict of Milan in 313 [Wikipedia: Diocletianic Persecution].

Kerrigan gives the political motive. “The Emperor Diocletian was tolerant by nature”, but with the empire “coming under strain” from financial mismanagement it “made sense… to underline the ‘Romanness’ of the Roman world by reaffirming its cultural values”. Quoting Eusebius, he says officials were “to tear down the churches to their foundations and destroy the sacred scriptures by fire”. He continues: “Contemporary sources claim that 10,000 martyrs were crucified side by side on the first day. And while this is surely an exaggeration, there’s little doubt that many thousands must have died” [Kerrigan, #71131, ch.1 “The Great Persecution”]. Samuel Dill, writing in 1899, judged that “the persecution of Diocletian revealed the inextinguishable force of the Christian faith” [Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, #60233, Book I].

How Many Martyrs? The Two Narratives

Nixey’s chapter “On the Small Number of Martyrs” is the library’s fullest revisionist statement. Her claim is direct: “Christian literature would go on to portray Roman emperors… as demonically possessed servants of Satan who hungered insatiably for Christian blood. It is a very potent picture. But it is not true.” She counts “fewer than thirteen” years of imperially ordered persecution in three centuries and adds: “For two and a half centuries the Roman imperial government left Christianity alone”. She cites Origen’s admission that martyrs were few and that Christians had died only “occasionally”, and the seventeenth-century paper “De paucitate martyrum”. She quotes Gibbon’s estimate of an “annual consumption” of martyrs of no more than 150 a year in years of persecution. She accepts that the Great Persecution “was responsible for around half of all early Christian martyrdoms” and that “while it was going on, it was terrible”, but she holds that “fewer than ten martyrdom tales from the early Church can be considered reliable” [Nixey, #70864, ch.4]. She also records that the Church placed Gibbon’s Decline and Fall on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum [Nixey, #70864, ch.3].

She further stresses voluntary martyrdom. Christians presented themselves for death, and the proconsul Arrius Antoninus told one such crowd: “If you want to die you have cliffs you can jump off and nooses to hang yourself with”. Antony went to Alexandria in 311 “burning with a desire for martyrdom” and was ignored by the judge [Nixey, #70864, ch.5]. Guiley’s Encyclopedia of Saints bears out the uncertainty of many cult figures. Of Agatha (d. c. 250) it says that “none of the legendary details of her life or death can be authenticated”, and of Agnes (d. c. 304) that “the circumstances of her martyrdom are not documented” [Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Saints, #87523, “Agatha”; “Agnes of Rome”].

The Political Meaning of Martyrdom

Mitchell Heisman treats the contest in terms of values, not body counts. He argues that Roman virtue rested on kin-based self-sacrifice: “Romans loved their extended families enough to risk their lives in mortal combat”, and “the virtue of duty that made the Roman way possible required that Romans sacrifice much of their individual interest to the good of their empire”. The Christian command “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” universalised and inverted that ethic. The library’s section summary of his argument puts it this way: “Roman virtue sustained empire but Christian memes, spread by Paul as ‘Minister of Propaganda,’ weakened that empire from within” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section summary]. On this view a martyr dying without resistance attacks the martial premise of Roman order.

Key points

• Tacitus is the core source for Nero’s punishment of Christians after the fire of 64, on a charge of “hatred of humankind” [Kerrigan, #71131; Nixey, #70864; Dunn, #63287].
• The Ascension of Isaiah made Nero the human form of Beliar, and the Persian Chronicle of Arbela calls him “Nero the Wicked”, the first persecutor [Negru, #62383; Chronicle of Arbela, #55002].
• Pliny’s letter (c. 112) shows a procedure of accusation, a test by sacrifice and execution for “obstinacy”. Bacchiocchi reads its “fixed day” for the history of Sunday worship [Pagels, #63510; Bacchiocchi, #63620].
• Decius (250) required universal sacrifice and Valerian (257-258) struck at clergy and property. Diocletian purged the army before the general persecution of 303 [Nock, #60166; Vatican Secret Archives, #68123; Wikipedia: Diocletianic Persecution].
• Kerrigan calls Diocletian “tolerant by nature” yet responsible for “many thousands” of deaths. Nixey, following Gibbon, argues that the numbers were small and the martyr literature largely legend [#71131; #70864].
• The cult of saints rests partly on figures whose acts, Guiley notes, “cannot be authenticated” [#87523].
• Heisman reads Christian non-resistance as a value revolution against Rome’s kin-based martial virtue [#38252].