in the flames by a peculiarly atrocious method.[1] Nevertheless the Christians maintained their ground and thirty years later were regarded with hostility by the tyrant Domitian as a body of proselytizing Jews in the capital.[2] At the dawn of the second century the younger Pliny found them so numerous in his province of Bithynia as almost to have subverted the established religion. In great concern he wrote to the Emperor Trajan questioning whether he should proceed to extremities in his efforts to suppress them. This epistle is extant, and through it some details were first made public as to their tenets and mode of worship. Before daybreak on a certain day they met and recited an address to Christ as to a god; bound themselves by oath to commit no crime against society, and partook together of a common meal. The cultured Roman, imbued with literature and philosophy, estimated the Christian belief as a depraved and extravagant superstition, the eradication of which was dictated by state policy, but his master counselled him to disregard it unless popular animosity should in particular instances compel him to drag its devotees from their obscurity.[3] The Christian missionaries pursued their labours unremittingly and were*
- ↑ They were coated with inflammable matter, pitch, etc., and used for torches to illuminate the public gardens at night (Nov., 64); Tacitus, Ann., xv, 44; Suetonius, Nero, 16, etc.
- ↑ Dion Cass., lxvii, 14; Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., iii, 18, et seq.; cf. Lactantius, De Morte Persec., 3; Suetonius, Domitian. Clement, a cousin of this emperor, appears to have been put to death for being a Christian, and has been claimed by some as one of the first popes.
- ↑ Pliny, Epist., x, 97, 98. This correspondence and, indeed, the whole book which contains it has been stigmatized as a forgery by some investigators; see Gieseler, Eccles. Hist., i, 33, for refs. The same suspicion rests, in fact, on every early allusion to the Christians. It certainly seems strange that they should be such unfamiliar sectaries to Trajan and Pliny if they were well known at Rome under Nero and
