Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire (Wikipedia)

A reference encyclopedia survey of the pre-Constantinian persecutions of Christians under Rome, covering Nero's response to the fire of 64 CE, the disputed Domitianic episode, and the third century campaigns of Decius, Valerian and Diocletian. On Nero it records Tacitus's Annals 15.44 as reporting an "immense multitude" convicted and describes the manuscript giving the group's name as the garbled "Chrestianos" rather than "Christianos", a spelling scholars read as authentic evidence of confusion within Rome's population rather than as a later Christian interpolation; it notes that the vast majority of historians accept the episode's core historicity even though a minority, including Brent Shaw, have pressed the case for skepticism, and that the punishment was confined to the city of Rome rather than empire-wide. On Domitian it records that Eusebius, writing over two centuries later, is the first source to allege a systematic persecution, that no pagan writer of the period corroborates it, that Pliny's later correspondence with Trajan implies no established precedent for prosecuting Christians existed, and that the two cases most often cited, the execution of Titus Flavius Clemens and the banishment of Flavia Domitilla, are recorded by the contemporary Cassius Dio as punishment for "atheism and Jewish sympathies" rather than Christianity specifically, so most modern historians no longer accept a general Domitianic persecution of Christians occurred.