Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

What mattered to Nero was that people believed him guilty. He threw himself into the reclamation of the city and of his battered reputation. He poured fortunes from the treasury and from his own funds—the two were hard to distinguish—into relief and reconstruction. And he began a campaign to shift blame from himself to others. The sect the Romans called Christiani, and their founder Christus, appear first in Latin literature in Tacitus’ account of the great fire. According to this famous passage, the Christians were arrested on spurious charges and brought to Nero’s palace grounds for horrendous ordeals. They were dressed in animal skins and then were set upon by wild beasts; they were wrapped in pitch-soaked cloth and set on fire; or with a significance Nero could not have intended, they were nailed to crosses to suffocate to death. Perhaps Peter or Paul, or both, met their deaths in this savage purge—though evidence is strangely lacking, in both Roman and Christian sources, on the fates of these apostles.