The First Persecution, and How Little Is Known About It

What is known about the killing of Christians under Nero comes down to a small number of texts. Tacitus is the fullest: after the fire of 64 the rumour that the emperor had ordered it would not go away, so he supplied culprits, and the group the crowd called Christians was arrested, convicted and put to death with public cruelty in his gardens and the circus. Suetonius mentions punishment inflicted on the Christians in a list of measures he counts as reforms, in a single clause and with no connection to the fire. A letter written from Rome toward the end of the century speaks of a great multitude suffering, without naming an emperor.

Almost everything else is inference. There is no surviving edict, no legal enactment, and no evidence that anything was made illegal in a way that outlasted the moment. Whether the charge was arson, or membership of the group itself, is argued from the wording of Tacitus and is not settled. The episode appears to have been confined to the city of Rome and to a short period. Christian tradition places the deaths of Peter and Paul in this reign, but the sources that say so are later than the events by generations, and the atlas records the tradition as tradition.