Persecutions

 

“They died in torments, and their torments were embittered by insult and derision. Some were nailed on crosses; others sewn up in the skins of wild beasts, and exposed to the fury of dogs; others again, smeared over with combustible materials, were used as torches to illuminate the darkness of night. The gardens of Nero were destined for the melancholy spectacle, which was accompanied with a horse-race, and honored with the presence of the emperor, who mingled with the populace in the dress and attitude of a charioteer. The guilt [sic] of the Christians deserved indeed the most exemplary punishment, but the public abhorrence was changed into commiseration, from the opinion that those unhappy wretches were sacrificed, not so much to the public welfare as to the cruelty of a jealous tyrant.”

   - Tacitus, quoted by Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter sixteen.

 

“[sic]” addition mine.

 

Just finished Volume I of Gibbon’s great work, the first fifteen chapters detailing the reigns of Aurelius to Constantine, roughly 180 to 310 AD. Volume II starts off with a grim and powerful exploration of why the Empire, famous for its tolerance of religious polytheism, persecuted the Christians in waves of vicious bloodshed. Tough read for me, and I am detecting a slightly-more-than-slight anti-Christian bias in Gibbon that I had been warned about. Still, faults and all, productive reading. Learning much about an Empire that reached the peaks of splendor with frequent descents into valleys of madness, often at the whim of the personality of the man in charge.