Nero

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.

Nero killed himself in 68 and the eastern provinces did not entirely believe it. At least three men claimed to be him in the following decades and attracted support, and the expectation that he would return, from beyond the Euphrates and at the head of an army, appears in the Sibylline Oracles and elsewhere. That is the background to the most discussed identification in the book of Revelation.

The number of the beast, six hundred and sixty six, has been read as a cipher for his name since the nineteenth century, on the following ground. Written in Hebrew letters, which carry numerical values, the Greek form Neron Caesar totals 666. Some manuscripts of Revelation give the number as 616 instead, and the Latin form Nero Caesar, without the final letter of Neron, totals exactly 616 by the same method. A cipher that explains both the number and its variant is a strong argument, and it is the reason this reading is widely held. It remains an inference. The text does not name him, the practice of encoding names in numbers was common enough to generate coincidences, and other candidates have been proposed. The atlas records it as the best supported reading and not as a certainty.

What the identification does explain, if it is right, is the tone of the book. A community writing under an emperor who has already killed its members, in a province where he is expected to come back at the head of an army, has a concrete reason to describe a beast that had a mortal wound and recovered. The atlas notes that the reading gains its force from the historical setting rather than from the arithmetic alone, and that the arithmetic on its own would not persuade anyone.