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| The Death of Nero as shown in an engraving from The Story of the Greatest Nations, 1901. |
I recently ran across a passage written by Lactantius in his enigmatic and fascinating work entitled On the Deaths of the Persecutors about the demise of the original persecutor of Christians, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus—that is, Nero. Writing in the early 4th century AD, or about 250 years after the fact, Lactantius says the following of Nero:
When Nero heard of those things [that is, the growth of Christianity in Rome] and observed that not only in Rome but in every other place a great multitude revolted daily from the worship of idols and, condemning their old ways, went over to the new religion, he being an execrable and pernicious tyrant, sprung forward to raze the heavenly temple and destroy the true faith. He it was who first persecuted the servants of God. He crucified Peter and slew Paul. Nor did he escape with impunity, for God looked on the affliction of His people, and therefore the tyrant, bereaved of authority, and precipitated from the height of empire, suddenly disappeared, and even the burial-place of that noxious wild beast was nowhere to be seen. [Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, Chapter II]
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There are several things that are interesting about this passage. Most obviously, it seems to run contrary in some of its details to the accounts of earlier secular historians. For example, in Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius, written about fifty years after the facts recorded, we find that Nero committed suicide with the help of one of his freedmen. Far from disappearing after his death, Suetonius records that Nero's corpse was...
...buried at a cost of two hundred thousand sesterces and laid out in white robes embroidered with gold….His ashes were deposited by his nurses, Egloge and Alexandria, accompanied by his mistress, Acte, in the family tomb of the Domitii on the summit of the Hill of Gardens, which is visible from the Campus Martius. [Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars: Nero]
Furthermore, Suetonius claims that the location of Nero's tomb was not only well known but that “there were some who for a long time decorated his tomb with spring and summer flowers.”
Based on these details, some might assume that Lactantius was merely ignorant of Roman history. I consider this unlikely. Lactantius was brilliantly educated in the best Roman tradition prior to his conversion to Christianity and his Latin prose was so fine that later scholars would call him "the Christian Cicero."
Suetonius himself may provide a clue to the answer. In another passage directly following the ones quoted above, he mentions that some of Nero's admirers pretended that the emperor was still alive and would return shortly to bring vengeance upon his enemies. This rumor had enough legs that even decades later, the Parthians would protect a man who claimed to be Nero, probably in an attempt to cause political chaos among the Romans. Suetonius relates:
Twenty years later, when I was still a young man, a person of obscure origin appeared, who gave out that he was Nero, and the name was still in such favor with the Parthians that they supported him vigorously and surrendered him with great reluctance. [Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars: Nero]
This rumor and the impostor associated with it brings us back to Lactantius and early Christian traditions about the death of Nero. Clearly, the admirers of Nero who put forth the rumors of his continuing Elvis-like existence in hiding were not Christians. However, Christians may have picked up on these rumors and placed them into a completely different context. Curiously, following his description of Nero’s fall and death, Lactantius echoes Suetonius, saying that some persons of “extravagant imagination” believed that Nero had been taken to a distant place where he remained alive even 250 years after his death. He even incorporates pagan prophecy, saying:
To him they apply the Sibylline verses concerning, “The fugitive, who slew his own mother, being to come from the uttermost boundaries of the earth,” as if he who was the first should also be the last persecutor, and thus prove the forerunner of Antichrist. [Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, Chapter II]
That this was a popular view among early Christians is corroborated by St. Sulpicius Severus writing near the end of the 4th century, about 80 years after Lactantius. In the following passage from his Sacred History, St. Sulpicius writes:
Nero, now hateful even to himself from a consciousness of his crimes, disappears from among men, leaving it uncertain whether or not he had laid violent hands upon himself: certainly his body was never found. It was accordingly believed that, even if he did put an end to himself with a sword, his wound was cured, and his life preserved, according to that which was written regarding him,—“And his mortal wound was healed,”—to be sent forth again near the end of the world, in order that he may practice the mystery of iniquity. [Sulpicius Severus, Sacred History, Book II, Chapter 29]
The phrase, “And his mortal wound was healed” quoted by St. Sulpicius above is taken from the Apocalypse of Saint John (Revelation) 13:3 as part of St. John’s description of the Beast with Seven Heads: “And I saw one of his heads as it were slain to death: and his death’s wound was healed. And all the earth was in admiration after the beast.”
It seems that some Christians with "extravagant imaginations" had interpreted this passage to identify Nero as the beast with the healed wound, and furthermore extrapolated that he would return again as the forerunner of the Antichrist. Lactantius, however, is much more cautious when it comes to offering such speculations on the meaning of prophetic utterances in Sacred Scripture. He wraps up his short history of the reign and persecution of Nero as follows:
But we ought not to believe those who, affirming that the two prophets Enoch and Elias have been translated into some remote place that they might attend our Lord when He shall come to judgment, also fancy that Nero is to appear hereafter as the forerunner of the devil, when he shall come to lay waste the earth and overthrow mankind. [Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, Chapter II]
As a reporter of history, Lactantius certainly favors the Christian viewpoint, but it is noteworthy that he is not prone to accept the wilder flights of fancy associated with some Christian Roman writers of his day.
Certainly, On the Deaths of the Persecutors is among the most fascinating and informative works of history from the late Roman period relating a myriad of accounts and anecdotes that appear nowhere else among the contemporary histories of that era. For those of you who have visited this blog before, you may remember seeing numerous quotes from On the Deaths of the Persecutors in a variety of posts, including:
- Was the wife of Diocletian a secret Christian?
- "They Leveled that Lofty Edifice with the Ground" ~ The Destruction of the Church at Nicomedia and Commencement of the Great Persecution
- Death of Constantius I, the father of Constantine the Great ~ Primary Accounts
- Constantine's Vision of the Cross ~ Early Accounts and Backstory
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