document of the utmost importance. It tells us exactly what was the feeling of the imperial Flavian House towards the Christians—they represented an evil which it was well to extirpate.
It is possible that in a mutilated passage of Suetonius a reference occurs to Vespasian's actions at this period (in the year following A.D. 70) in respect to the Christians. The passage runs as follows: "Never in the death of any one did Vespasian (take pleasure, and in the case of) merited punishments he even wept and groaned." This is clearly a reference to some class of individuals whose punishment Vespasian felt bound to accept, while he regretted it. "It is inconceivable that Vespasian, a Roman soldier of long experience in the bloody wars of Britain and Judæa, wept and groaned at every merited execution. . . . We think of the punishments which by the principle of Nero attached to the Christians . . . the principle in question continued permanently, and Suetonius alluded to it on account of the detail, interesting to a biographer, that Vespasian wept while he confirmed its operation."[1]
But a yet more precise statement, that persecution was actively continued under Vespasian, is to be found in the Latin Father, Hilary of Poitiers, who ranks Vespasian between Nero and Decius as a persecutor of the Faith.[2] Some critics have supposed this notice an error. Lightfoot, however, thinks it more probable that it was based upon some facts of history known to Hilary, but since blotted out by time from the records of history.[3]
Towards the end of Domitian's reign, circa A.D. 95, the persecution became more bitter. Indeed, so severely were the Christians hunted out and prosecuted that the period had become memorable in history. Domitian is constantly men-*
- ↑ See Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Empire, xii. 2.
- ↑ See Hilary (Poitiers), Contra Arianos, 3.
- ↑ Bishop Lightfoot discusses at some length the great probability of the accuracy of this definite statement of S. Hilary of Poitiers, and decides that the absence of any mention of Vespasian among the persecutors in Melito and Tertullian by no means invalidates Hilary's mention; no systematic record was kept of the persecutions; the knowledge possessed by each individual writer was accidental and fragmentary. Lightfoot, Ignatius and Polycarp, vol. i. pp. 15, 16.
