The Great Fire of Rome and Nero’s Persecution

The fire began on 19 July among the shops beside the Circus Maximus and burned for six days, then broke out a second time. Of the fourteen districts of Rome, Tacitus says, four were untouched and three were levelled. Nero was at Antium when it started. He returned, opened the Campus Martius and his own gardens to the homeless and lowered the price of grain, but a report spread that he had sung of the fall of Troy while the city burned (Tacitus, Annals 15.38–41). Tacitus leaves open whether the fire was an accident or the emperor’s doing (Tacitus, Annals 15.38–41). Suetonius and Cassius Dio say outright that Nero set it (Suetonius, Nero 38) (Cassius Dio, Roman History 62.16–18).

What followed is told at length by Tacitus. Neither relief nor religious rites, he says, could end the belief that the fire had been ordered. To stop the rumour Nero put the blame on a group “called Christians by the populace”. Tacitus explains the name: Christus had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilatus in the reign of Tiberius, and the movement had spread from Judaea to the capital. First those who confessed were arrested. On their information a great number were then convicted, less for arson than for “hatred against mankind”. Some were dressed in animal skins and torn by dogs, some were crucified, and some were burned as torches after dark. Nero gave his gardens for the spectacle and went among the crowd dressed as a charioteer. Tacitus thinks the Christians deserved punishment, yet he records that people pitied them, because they seemed to die for one man’s cruelty and not for the public good (Tacitus, Annals 15.44).

Suetonius confirms the punishment and not the occasion. In a list of Nero’s public measures he says that penalties were inflicted on the Christians, “a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition” (Suetonius, Nero 16.2). He describes the fire in another place and does not connect the two (Suetonius, Nero 38). Dio’s account of the fire does not mention Christians (Cassius Dio, Roman History 62.16–18).

A Christian letter from Rome, a generation later, may refer to these deaths. After speaking of Peter and Paul, the letter known as 1 Clement adds that a “great multitude” of believers suffered insults and tortures, among them women (1 Clement 6). It names neither Nero nor the fire. By about AD 200 Tertullian, in words that Eusebius quotes, called Nero the first emperor to persecute the Christians (Eusebius, Church History 2.25.3–4).

The sources cited here give no number of the dead, mention no law against the Christians, and speak only of the city of Rome. Later tradition placed the deaths of Peter and Paul in this persecution; see the Martyrdoms of Peter and Paul.