ODIUM

The last day of June is dedicated to the First Martyrs of the City of Rome. It is a minor memorial following the solemnity of the martyrdom of Sts Peter and Paul, and easily overlooked.

We know about them from the great Roman Historian Tacitus (56-120AD), who was a child at the time of their martyrdom. This is the background.

The emperor Nero, a populist and moral degenerate was believed by the people to have caused the hugely disastrous great fire of Rome (64AD) in order to build himself a “Golden Palace”. He tried to calm public outrage by organising vast displays of piety to the gods and lavished bribes all round, but popular anger was not quelled. Then he fixed the blame on the Christians, a small new sect.

Tacitus writes: “Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind (he uses the latin phrase, ‘odium humanae generis’). Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or covered in tar and set alight to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”

All of these spectacles were staged in the Circus of Nero which Nero had built on the Vatican Hill outside the city walls. The climax of these cruel shows was the mockery of the crucifixion of Christ: according to a second-century tradition, the Christian leader Peter was crucified upside down. He was buried on the same hill. Now it is occupied by the Vatican City.

It is interesting that Tacitus is one of the first non-christian writers to mention Jesus. In the same passage he wrote: “Christus, from whom the name (Christian) had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators,  Pontius Pilate”. He tells us that the “Christians were hated for their "abominations”, and were “a most mischievous superstition”. He was obviously no admirer of Christianity. And he adds that “in Rome, all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular”. He counted Christianity among these.

St John, writing about the same time in Revelations, refers to Rome as “the famous prostitute, the mother all the filthy practices of the earth”. Satan was very much in control there, and it is no wonder that the populance were easily persuaded to hate Christianity. Their emperor publicly condemned for “odium”, the Church, God’s very life-force by which he “so loved the world that he sent his only Son” and the Holy Spirit so that humanity might be saved.

It is an old trick of Satan to call white black, and it does not work. St Clement I, who was Pope between 88 and 97AD, who also bears witness to the martyrdom of St Peter, tells us that the witness of the faith, courage and calmness of those first martyrs softened the hearts of people and a new appreciation of Christ began to spread