In a.d. 112, Pliny the Younger wrote to the emperor Trajan to describe a legal investigation he had undertaken in Bithynia (modern Turkey) following complaints against local Christians. Having tortured a number of them, including young girls, Pliny wrote, he had only really been able to establish that they followed a “bad . . . and extravagant superstition” that “is spread like a contagion.”
