The Ancients - Nero the Antichrist?

Episode Date: October 4, 2020

The Emperor Nero is one of antiquity's most infamous figures, having a particularly hostile relationship with the Christians. But did the early Christians associate Nero with the Antichrist mentioned in the New Testament? Joining me to sort the fact from the fiction is Shushma Malik (@MalikShushma), Lecturer at the University of Roehampton and the author of The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm. Shushma explains how this association between Nero and the Antichrist was invented in the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries by later Christian writers of antiquity. We also explore how this association was revived in the 18th and 19th centuries and how widespread this revival's influence became. Including its influence on the 1951 American epic historical drama Quo Vadis. Shushma also taught me at university a few years back, so it was great to catch up!Shushma's Twitter: @MalikShushmaTristan's Twitter: @ancientstristan

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. The Emperor Nero, one of the most infamous figures of antiquity. But did the early Christians associate Nero with the Antichrist mentioned in the New Testament,

particularly the beast in Revelations? Joining me to sort the fact from the fiction is Shushma Malik. Shushma is a professor from the University of Roehampton and she's recently written a book all about Nero's portrayal as the Antichrist in Christian literature and indeed throughout history and this was a fascinating chat. We first of all look at Nero's relationship with the Christians and then we explore how this association with the Antichrist was invented by 3rd, 4th and 5th century Christian writers. And then we go on to the 18th and 19th centuries, where this association was revived, and how it spilled over into the 20th century and a famous Hollywood production called Quo Vadis.

Here's Shushma. Shushma, it is great to have you on the show great to see you again thank you it's lovely to see you as well now this pardon the pun is one hell of a topic it really is yeah it doesn't get much more apocalyptic so i mean nero and the antichrist this association you would argue this was a link that was invented later and then also later later revived yes yes exactly so i think this is a idea about nero that really came to being fully fledged in about the third century a, so as the Roman Empire was sort of getting towards its later period after the, what we would call the heyday of sort of the second century, and then revived, like you say, in the 19th century, when we start to find the idea of Nero's The Antichrist popping up in, well, French and British literature, literature actually in particular, as a way of understanding

the Antichrist that was going against kind of anti-papal rhetoric that was quite prevalent at the time in the mid-19th century. Wow. So let's have a talk first about Nero and the Christians during his reign. So in the mid-first century AD, what is the Christian population in Rome? In the mid-first century AD, what is the Christian population in Rome? How significant are they at this time? So we don't have any concrete sort of numbers, unfortunately. That's, as you know, true of ancient history generally. But we know that there was a population in Rome. So, for example, Paul, in his letters, writes to the Romans.

Included in the Bible is Paul's letters to the Romans. So we have an idea that there was a congregation, if you like. And don't think of this as sort of a physical church building where people could go to congregate. It's more a group at this point of Christians in Rome. We certainly know that the bigger populations of Christians were in the East. So of course, Christianity started in the East in Judea. So there were some in the West and in Rome at this point, but we're not talking about a great number in the first century when Nero was reigning. So they're quite a small group at this time, we can presume. And how do the Romans in Rome at this time, how do they consider the Christians? So we don't really have any contemporary evidence.

By that I mean we don't have any accounts from the mid-first century of people talking about, of, you know, pagan Romans, as it were, talking about what they thought about the Christians or those sorts of things. What we do have is the testimony of later Romans, so mid-second century, the 130s-ish, 120s, 130s-ish AD. And that's mainly a Roman historian named Tacitus. And this is how we know about what Nero did with the Christians as well, because Tacitus writes about Christians being in Rome in the

mid-first century AD under Nero, that people thought of these Christians as a superstition, basically. So you had the religion of Rome in Latin, religio. So that was your Roman cults and, you know, sacrifices, the festival calendar, all of those sorts of things. But then you also had a superstitio. The superstitio or superstition was Christianity because it came from the East and also because it didn't want to sit

within religio. It didn't want to kind of be another cult that you could practice worship of alongside other cults. The idea of having just one cult for it being, you know, just one religion that you followed was not particularly conducive to how the Romans thought of religion at this point. So Christianity sat outside of this. And that's true of Judaism as well. Judaism sat outside of it. But I think perhaps one of the differences at this point is that Judaism was very happy to sit outside of it within small communities doing what they wanted to do whereas Christianity was more concertedly particularly later on trying to get people to follow Christianity and so conversion was more of a Christian attribute than we would necessarily think of as tied to the Jewish sect.

So there's some suspicion about Christians, according to Tacitus at this time, and certainly by his time in the mid-second century, early to mid-second century, that superstition we see elsewhere as well. So one of his friends is a Roman politician um named pliny pliny the younger and he is made governor of a province in the east called bithynia and when he goes over to bithynia he writes a letter back to the then emperor trajan saying i've come across this group of christians and i'm not quite sure what to do with them um you know whether then practicing christianity is enough to bring legal action against them and you know whether whether then practicing Christianity is enough to bring legal action against them. And, you know, whether that's not enough, or whether the fact that they're,

you know, causing riots or causing problems, should I be, what should I be doing, basically. So these questions are coming up at this point. And Trajan's response is perhaps quite a good one. It's sort of, don't ask, don't tell. If they're not bothering anyone and no one's complaining, leave them alone. People start complaining, then, you know, we can think of doing something on them for the grounds of breaking the peace, that kind of thing. That's interesting. But so 50 years earlier, there are still also question marks appearing about what the Christians are, about how they can fit into Roman society emerging in Rome? Oh, absolutely. Yes. So there's understandings and misunderstandings about this cult. So

Tacitus recognises them as a sort of offshoot of Judaism, as having some connection to Judaism, which does demonstrate an understanding, certainly at least. But he's also not quite sure where they fit and what they're doing but he does say that you know other Romans don't particularly like them they're kind of people who are a community in and of themselves and that you know it's not very sociable. Well when do we first hear about Nero coming into contact with this community within itself? Well that's it it's not until the second century that we come across this so it's Tacitus in fact is our earliest source for Nero and the Christians. There are three kind of historical biographies that we still have of Nero

and there would have been others, it's just unfortunately they don't survive. So Tacitus was writing like I say in sort of the early to mid-second century AD under the emperor Trajan, probably, and perhaps a bit earlier. Similarly, a rough contemporary of his was a biographer named Suetonius. And then we have another source from a bit later called Cassius Dio, who's writing in the late second century, so about 50, 60 years later under the emperor Commodus and afterwards. So Tacitus mentions that well Tacitus is our best account for what happened with Nero and the Christians by best I mean the longest account of what happened to Nero and the Christians and Suetonius mentions it very briefly

all he says is during Nero's reign there was a group called Christians in Rome and Nero punished them and this was a good thing that Nero did Suetonius is not normally a big fan of Nero but at the beginning of his biography he sort of lists some some good things that Nero did and that's one of them that he punished the Christians he doesn't say he killed them but he does say he punished them we can infer from that what we would like And we generally tend to infer from it that there was a punishment of death because of the account of Suetonius, which I'll come back to in just a second. The other thing to know about Suetonius is that he doesn't relate this to the fire in Rome. So he doesn't say the Christians were blamed for setting fire to Rome, therefore Nero punished them. He just talks about punishment

in a fairly sort of short abstract sense. Tacitus, on the other hand, does give us much more detail. So as Tacitus tells us, in AD 64, there was a big fire in Rome, and 10 out of the 14 districts in Rome were kind of destroyed by fire. So it was was really brutal some people thought because after the fire Nero implemented this huge building program and most of it was very good it was very sensible he was winding streets he was using better building materials that were less flammable that kind of thing but he also took the opportunity to build up like a brilliant new palace for himself called the Domus Aurea the golden house so because people saw him doing this um tastas tells us um rumors started going around in rome that nero had started the fire himself so

he could rebuild rome as he wanted and in order to stop those rumors tastas says that nero found this group of people in rome that were already a bit unpopular pinpointed them for the fire and punished them in a very severe and disproportionate way. So he had in the gardens of the palace that he was building, he opened them up and had people, sort of spectators, in to watch and he crucified Christians at night and then lit them up as burning torches or had wild animals attack them so it was a really horrific account a really horrendous account of the punishment of these Christians and Tacitus in fact says it was so horrendous even people who disliked the Christians still thought this punishment was disproportionate they felt that Nero's cruelty was too much towards them so not a particularly good starting point

towards them so not a particularly good starting point for Nero in terms of Christian history but why kind of historians find this a bit problematic and there's been scholarship on this recently a very good article in 2015 came out about this was the fact that Tacitus is our first source for this so we don't have anything contemporary and Tacitus is really the only one like I say Suetonius mentions a little bit but not very much and Tacitus gives us his full account but then Cassius Dio doesn't mention it at all the Christians at all so it's difficult it's difficult in evidence in evidence wise but that's the story that's Tacitus's story. So Tacitus's story as you said from there it sounds like he uses the Christians as a scapegoat as it were for who started the great fire of Rome and if this

persecution did happen if we believe Tacitus's story or it happened to the extent that it did were there any significant Christian figures who suffered in the persecution? Yes so then we have a later tradition that emerges actually roughly contemporaneously with Tacitus, sort of early 2nd century BC, that one of the people caught up in the fire, in the punishments of the fire, was St Peter. The story went that St Peter, and this now we're switching to Christian tradition,

so Tacitus doesn't talk about this at all and the pagan historians don't, but early Christian writers start to put this together, that Sir Peter was in Rome during the fire and therefore that he was caught up in these punishments and was crucified on the site that we now have Sir Peter's Basilica. So those familiar with Rome will know the beautiful, amazing Sir Peter's Basilica. The original version of that was built on the site that Peter was supposed to have been crucified in Rome. The other slightly less straightforward Christian figure to be caught up in this is St Paul. So again, kind of when we get to later Christian writings, St Paul also gets subsumed into this,

but actually Christian writers even fairly early ones were starting to differentiate between the stories of Peter and Paul and Paul was arrested for inciting a riot and brought to Rome because he was a Roman citizen so he had the right to be heard by the emperor if he wanted to be so he asked to be taken to Caesar this is according to Acts in the Bible so this is what Acts tells us so he was taken to Rome and then put in prison he was a Roman citizen so he had the right to a trial and this sort of thing and this wasn't caught up in the fire but probably happened around the same sort of time so if we think the fire was 64 the Christians are probably punished around about early 65, and then we think

around about 67 was when Paul died, is sort of scholarly consensus at the moment. So it's all kind of fairly similar in terms of time scale, but it's not that St Paul was crucified as part of the fire, you know, narrative. He is beheaded later on because of a different incident but it's still a you know one of the founders of the christian church meeting his end under nero well i guess it shows that nero didn't have a very good relationship with the christians then um actually that was fascinating what you just said about acts just there does act say the emperor in it and can we infer from that that the emperor is nero they They call him Caesar, yes, so when you say you know you're taken to Caesar that's whomever the emperor is at that point and

that would have been Nero. So and with the timeline as well if you think of Christ died in about 31, 32, somewhere around there and then you have the narrative of St Paul's conversion and so if you kind of put the timeline together, you know, modern theologians and historians sort of, you know, have pieced that together in that way as well. They've been on St. Peter in Rome scholarship recently, some brilliant scholarship coming out of Germany as well,

that has, I think, quite conclusively or substantially proved that Peter never went to Rome and wasn't in Rome during that period. But really the reality of this is less important for how Nero ended up being looked at in Christian history, because like I said before, all of these traditions were being kind of created and solidified later anyway in the second century. None of this is contemporary with Nero in terms of its history and literature. Fascinating. So let's go on to the topic of the Antichrist itself in the New Testament. First of all, whereabouts in the New Testament do we hear

about the Antichrist? Right, so the word Antichrist in and of itself, so that word Antichrist is only actually used in one book of the New Testament and that's the letters of John. So the first and second letters of John and they talk about either an antichrist or antichrists. So like the false prophets basically that are going to come about at the time of the end times and then cause that division between good and evil where you can get then the final final judgment on earth so that's the only place where that word antichrist is used but we also have kind of antichrist figures apocalyptic figures in paul's second letter to the thessalonians where we have a man of lawlessness and a mystery of iniquity and that is seen by early Christian commentators from the second century onwards as being

Antichrist literature, if you like. They talk about the two together. And then we also have the first beast in the Book of Revelation, which is perhaps the most famous sort of Antichrist figure, if you like, because Revelation is now a very widely read book. In antiquity, Revelation was very controversial. It was deemed very difficult in terms of putting it into the canon because it's so difficult to understand. It's a really difficult book to read. And Eusebius, who was one of the very influential church fathers, didn't like Revelation. So it was canonized eventually in the fourth century, but it had a bit of a tricky relationship with some of the earliest Christian writers and some of the most

influential Christian writers. But certainly since then and to now, the first beast in Revelation is very clearly seen as an Antichrist figure. So those are the key kind of parts of the Bible that are used from about the third century onwards to say Nero was the Antichrist. So the one that comes up the least is the letters of John, then Paul's two Thessalonians, and then Revelation is the most popular by far. Yeah, so how have scholars tried to associate these creatures with Nero in the New Testament? these creatures with Nero in the New Testament? So this is really interesting because on the one hand,

you've got the biographies of Nero from people like Tacitus and Suetonius and Cassius Dio, who attribute so many kind of tyrannical ideas and motifs to Nero. So he's a murderer, he's destructive in in terms of you know perhaps burning Rome and Suetonius blames him very firmly for burning Rome he does think it's him um he's he's destructive he's murderous he's deceptive um if you think of of Nero in Tassus and Suetonius he's quite a theatrical emperor but with being a theatrical person you're also lying a lot because no one can really understand what you're thinking or what you're doing. And you're going to change on a whim. You might say one thing that mean another thing.

Those kind of attributes also fit very well with an Antichrist. The very fact that he is pagan, in inverted commas, in that he followed traditional Greco-Roman religion, is then for Christianity a problem. That's not unique to Nero, of course. But when you kind of marry all of these things together, the idea that he was a zealot, you know, zealous about pagan religion, which doesn't actually come through particularly in the sources, but you can kind of use it anyway, that he was destructive, that he murdered his family, that he murdered people in Rome. You you know all of those things together fit very nicely with the idea of what an antichrist will be like from the man of lawlessness or revelation the sort of destruction and the falseness the

false prophet of revelations first beast um Nero was seen as as fitting quite nicely with but um so there's that but the other the thing that I also find fascinating about what Christian writers from sort of the third to the fifth centuries do is that then they also take things that aren't necessarily in the New Testament and say well this is further evidence so Nero was a sexual deviant or he you know those kinds of things so he had lots of affairs with women and men and you know those kinds of attributes of him and also his theatre the fact that he liked to act on stage and he was a liar player and he was a chariot racer those things would have been controversial for their converted

audience people who grew up knowing these stories these Roman stories who were perhaps new converts or new in their family to Christianity, it works both ways. So he works very nicely as an Antichrist because of the destructive elements, but they could also bring this in and say, well, you know this about Nero already, you know he's a sexual deviant, you know that he's a theatrical emperor, these are not things that people, you know, Roman elites are supposed to be. So they were quite clever, I think, and they used all of it to sort of bring together this idea about Nero. Forgive my ignorance. What are the qualities of this beast in the New Testament, this first beast? So the first beast is created, is the spawn of the devil, basically the devil figure in the dragon in Revelation. And he will appear at the time, the beast will appear at the time of the end times,

of the precursor to the apocalypse, as it were. And he will be a king and people will worship him. And people will follow him because he's a false prophet. So the idea is that he will be a ruler and people won't realize necessarily but then those who follow him when we get to the time of the apocalypse and the resurrection of christ the people who followed nero who believe in the false prophet to continue to believe in the false prophet will receive the mark of the beast and the mark of the beast is 666 so that's the role that the first beast has in revelation then eventually he will be

destroyed and he will die in the lake of fire be thrown into the lake of fire and he also rides sorry lots of imagery here rides on the whore of babylon so in revelation and you also have the whore of babylon who's normally thought to kind of, you know, represent Rome and its decadence and that sort of thing. So that sort of marries on according to later writers there as well. But you would argue then that the early Christians, they didn't fear Nero returning from the dead, as it were, as this Antichrist figure, as this beast? Yeah, so this might sound odd i understand that it might sound odd that i don't think that nero uh would necessarily be something someone that you know a lot of christians feared in the first century because of what i've just told you

about tacitus's account and everything else so bear with me basically if we Basically, if we want to, if we want in the first century, so in he was emperor from 54 to 68. If we want to think that Christians in this period and in its immediate aftermath, so sort of, you know, the 70s ish A.D. That enough Christians across the Roman Empire. So if I if I kind of go back to where we started, which is where Christian communities were, like I say, the majority of them are in the East, and the letters that are being addressed that have these Antichrist figures in them, the Thessalonians, right, in Greece, and then you also have the seven churches of Asia Minor, so modern-day Turkey, kind of that area, and seven churches who are the addressees of Revelation, that's to whom John of Patmos addresses it. So we are talking about kind

of understanding of Christians in the East. And the reason why I think it's difficult to say that John or Paul, or whomever wrote these texts, because actually, it's tricky in terms of who these people were and whether they were who they said they were, that sort of thing. Whomever wrote these texts wrote it with Nero specifically in mind, that everybody should interpret these figures as Nero, or that Nero is even the most obvious person to interpret these figures as. I think it's a little difficult because it means taking everything that someone like Tacitus or Suetonius says as exactly right.

So as an exact representation of the historical figure of Nero, not only how he would have been thought of in Rome, but how he would have been thought of all the way across the other side of the empire in the East as well. And the reason why I find that difficult is because Nero was actually quite popular in the East as well. And the reason why I find that difficult is because Nero was actually quite popular in the East. According to the non-literary, the archaeological evidence that we have, a statue was put up of him in the mid-second century AD in Trales, long after he was gone, because, you know, clearly he still had a bit of popularity there. Historians talk about him thinking of fleeing to the east when he's, you know, realises that his time in Rome is coming to an end, he's been declared a

public enemy by the Senate. His first thought, according to Suetonius, is, oh, I can go to Egypt, maybe, you know, I'll be allowed to go and be a prefect in Egypt. But everyone in Rome has deserted him to such a point by that time. I don't want to kind of come across as someone who's saying Nero was a good guy and everyone just misunderstood him. I think there's lots of complexities there and it's difficult to sort of, you know, I don't want to seem like I'm whitewashing Nero. But what I do want to pay more attention to, and I think is worth paying attention to when it comes to understanding the Antichrist problem, is how different people in the Roman Empire would have seen Nero differently. And because we have these stories about anecdotes and rumors going around in Rome,

we can't assume that that is what people in the East understood. I know what the comeback to that is, is, well, he killed Christians, surely. And I get that. that I understand that and I agree with that but what I don't think we should do with that with what he did to Christians in the aftermath of the fire is interpret that as a persecution in the way we think of persecution so these Christians were killed for setting fire to Rome yes they were Christians and that helped them be pinpointed for this, but we're not talking about religious persecution the way we might think of it now, and we're not talking about systematic persecution either. This was a discrete group of people

who suffered horrifically, if Eutacitus is to be believed, in Rome, but that doesn't necessarily mean that communities of Christians in the East would have expected that was coming their way there were no edicts issued this was not seen as something that was going to be empire-wide in terms of persecution and groups in Rome were kind of killed by different emperors all the time for various reasons all I mean is I don't think that in this period in the mid-first century mid late first century, in the east of the Roman Empire, we necessarily need to think about Nero in the way that we're told about him in Tacitus and Suetonius and Cassius Dio. And what I found when researching this topic is the way in which scholars have thought about Nero as the Antichrist before is by looking at Tacitus Suetonius Cassius

Dio, finding correlations in the descriptions, and then thinking about the Antichrist in Revelation and Paul's letters. And I just think it's a bit more complicated than that. Of course, of course. And actually keeping on the East and actually keeping on the topic of resurrection, is it in the history, I can't remember which source it is but after nero's death they say in the east maybe in parthia that there are these pseudo neros as it were absolutely the false neros uh yeah definitely so these these come across all three of our sources actually so suetonius mentions one tacitus mentions two um there may have been three we're not quite sure whether suetonius mentions one, Tacitus mentions two, there may have been three, we're not quite sure whether Suetonius is talking about the same one as Tacitus, but, and then also Cassius Dio later

on mentions them as well. So this is something that, you know, is fairly consistent. So this is the idea that after, as I said, when Nero was kind of, you know, going through his death scene in Rome, he thought, oh oh maybe I could go over to Egypt and everything would be okay we're then told by Tacitus Suetonius and well sorry not Tacitus because we've lost that bit we've lost his death in Tacitus unfortunately but in Suetonius and Cassius Dario we're told no Nero went to the villa of his freedmen he heard kind of the Victorian guard coming and he had his freedman Epaphroditus help to kill him so he committed suicide with the help of the freedmen and he then had a very

lavish funeral his funeral was paid for by the state and he was you know not in secrecy he was taken up he was given a proper funeral and you know in all that. So none of these historians are in any doubt that he died. But what did happen was that rumours started coming to Rome in about the year after, so around about 69 AD, and then again, probably in the early 80s as well, the two that we know of under the Emperor Titus, we think that may have been another version of this but in the east um people had started to win supporters by saying that they were nero so like you said someone in parthia um which is the kind of empire that that was on the east of the roman empire that they were constantly fighting over territory in armenia that that sort of thing under nero but they um

you know came across into into um the Roman Empire saying that they were Nero building up some support and the idea was that they were going to then come and claim the the throne in Rome um this was dealt with very quickly by the Roman army the governor came across he was already in that area came across killed that person body taken back to Rome maybe just the head it's not quite clear but but body parts of body or body taken back to Rome maybe just the head it's not quite clear but but body parts of body or body taken back to Rome everyone said oh yeah it does look a bit like Nero and that's sort of the end of it um so that this is a you know extraordinary well it's an extraordinary story it's not extraordinary in that this is the first time this had happened it's the first time it had

happened with an emperor but um earlier on we'd had two members of of the imperial family or people close to the imperial family we've had people pretending to be them so Agrippa the son of um Agrippa the friend of Augustus so um Agrippa the friend of Augustus uh married Augustus's daughter Julia they had children the last of those children who actually was born after Agrippa's death was named Agrippa Posthumus. When Agrippa Posthumus died a slave pretended that Agrippa Posthumus was still alive and pretended to be him and we have another character called Drusus where there's a sort of similar misunderstanding or someone you know similar pretender. So Nero is

not the first but he is the first emperor to have this happen to him but in a way that's used also by some of our sources as a testimony to how popular Nero still was in the east that after his death he could use his name and people would follow you and so yeah they're fascinating stories. I mean I brought it up mainly because this was kind of keeping this idea of the resurrection idea of the Antichrist in the Bible. Could this possibly be a historical basis on which later Christians pounce on, they use to try and further affirm their belief that he is going to come back, as it were? Yes, absolutely. You're dead on there. That's exactly what they do. This is another way in which Nero's kind of biography is used. And obviously, the real Nero had no idea about this, but, you know, the way his story is told.

So this story then gets distorted. So in our text, in our historical text, Tacitus, Antonius, and Cassius Dio, like I say, nero has a funeral no one is in actual doubt that he's died everyone's quite clear on that these pretenders appear people follow them because they want to help overthrow rome maybe something like that but then you know killed quickly done fine everything goes back to normal. What happens in later Christian sources, Christian histories and homilies as well, so kind of sermons that are preached, is that becomes a

story of Nero dying and being resurrected. So not that he didn't die, which is what these stories say. He didn't die. He fled to the East, you know and and was there that's what people in asia said they believed when they were following him uh people in rome he was already dead you know that's fine those two things sort of get conflated and there's an idea that he he's died he's been resurrected he's come back as is told in you know the apocalypse but also as mirrors um you know christ the christ story so the expectation of a resurrection. So yeah, those things kind of match up very nicely to then give you a way of understanding it. There are a few different interpretations, actually, because that's one. So Nero died and will come back at

the time of the apocalypse in order to carry out his last role as the false prophet um another source name another historian named lactantius says that nero didn't die but was spirited off to the heaven to well actually come down maybe but was taken away no he was taken off um this is all part of the divine plan so he was taken off and he is going to be held somewhere until the time of the apocalypse until the end time so there are some variations going on with what the story is incidentally lactantius doesn't believe it he thinks it's ridiculous but um others uh you know other other people believe it and he says it's a very popular idea at his time but uh certainly yeah those stories get manipulated in a few different ways

um sometimes he dies and he comes back other times he goes away and is being held somewhere and will come back other times he goes to the east amasses followers and somehow gains some supernatural strength and comes back straight away so there are a few different versions that start to appear like i say in in the later centuries and just before we really go into these later centuries and when this Antichrist myth is really invented, you mentioned the number 666 earlier. What is the supposed link between Nero and this number? Numerology, the idea that numbers can be used to stand in for letters, is quite a common one in antiquity. We it um in Pompeian graffiti you know there are examples

of it I love a girl whose number is I forgot what the number is now but a number you know is a way of disguising her name that kind of thing so it's used fairly straightforwardly or regularly actually one of the things is it's not particularly straightforward because of course um you know if you're not very clear about who you mean then there are lots of different ways that this can be interpreted so the way that Nero is seen to be tied to 666 is if you convert his name Nero Caesar to Neron Kaiser um and then convert that to Hebrew the letters in Hebrew add up to 666. So that's one way in which it can be done. The slight problem then is also, and this may be more or less familiar to you and your

listeners, but there was a change in the manuscript at some point, we think probably early second century, where 666 was changed to 616. I don't know if you've come across that variation, that sometimes it's the number of the beast is 616 and not 666. And that can also be used to spell Nero if you translate it to Greek instead of Hebrew. So there are different ways. But then you also get later on in another source, in a Donatist text from the early 5th century named the Liber Gengenia Logis

what they decide to do is put up Antichristus in Latin convert that to number so a is one etc Antichristus in Latin and then times that by the number of letters in Nero's name but only using Nero so not Nero Caesar but just and then that will give you 616 and then other people say 666 is actually a reference to light and not to Nero and someone who thinks of themselves as light so it's it's very complicated in well by which I mean they don't agree in terms of how to get to this and you could also use similar kind of manipulations to make Julius Caesar be 666 or Caligula be 666, or in more recent history, Mussolini 666. That was a very common one in the context of the post-war period. So there's lots of

ways, and in the Middle Ages and then as a result of the Reformation as well, the Pope was often 666. So an unsuccessful Pope in the Catholic tradition, or then with the Reformation to try and to talk about kind of the Pope as an Antichrist, there's ways that that could work as well. So it's been different in different periods, but certainly Nero is somewhat implicated in that early on. It's interesting how that number is associated with several figures throughout history, not just one as it were. so let's go on to the inventing well will you believe the inventing of the Nero Antichrist link in the third century is it the third century yeah so mid-third century um probably so um in this period we get a poet

named Commodion who has sometimes been um dated to 5th century but I think he was probably third because of the way that he's interpreting this particular story and sort of seems to fit to me but even if he is 5th century there's another person that we can firmly date to the 3rd century called Victorinus, Victorinus of Petau or Batavia and he is actually writing the first commentary of Revelation so if we think Revelation was maybe written again this date is very contested so late first century maybe early second century but but somewhere around that sort of time frame in the mid-third century we get our first commentator focusing particularly you know in detail on the text so commodian going back to commodian for a second writes a poem a very long poem in which he talks about apocalyptic scenarios

and he really channels revelation so he's sort of putting revelation into a poetic context and he's expanding in some ways on what it says and what it doesn't say and that sort of thing and the thing is nero's name isn't in Revelation. Caesar isn't in Revelation, like we talked about it being in Acts. There is no, you know, it's not that straightforward. But what Commodion does is he puts Nero into his poem as that sort of character. So he talks about Nero, the one who punished Peter and Paul in Rome. He will come back and return as the Antichrist, as the first beast

in Revelation. So then he goes on to kind of furnish his poem with other motifs from Revelation and also other returning figures, Enoch and Elijah, who are spirited away in their story, are thought to come back and all sorts of things like that. So he's really interpreting this in a poetic context. Victorinus is a little bit more straightforward, thankfully. He is going through the chapters of Revelation. And when he comes to the bit with the beast and the beast being wounded and, you know, those sorts of things, he says, well, this is Nero. That's done. It's Nero we're fine let's

move on he doesn't when he gets to 666 he's one of the ones that starts to talk about this as being light about light and leadership he doesn't talk about Nero in that context but he does say kind of the first beast is Nero so that's our first kind of bit where this is named. This is like, right, we have an Antichrist figure in the Bible. This is Nero. That's the first time we really get that in any sort of straightforward way. So that's the kind of start of it. Clearly it took off because the character I mentioned before, Lactantius, writing in the early 4th century, late 3rd, early 4th century, talks about how popular this has become this idea has become many believe he said as he says many crazed people believe but they did delirium but many believe that this is this is Nero um and then this sort of carries

on in in um some you know texts that we have um John Chrysostom who is um you know seen as quite a an important Christian um preacher and bishop, talks about this as well in relation to Paul in particular. So when he's interpreting Paul's two Thessalonians for his congregation, but also for a friend of his who writes to him, a woman actually, Algarzia, writes to him and says, what do you make of this? He says, well, it is Nero, the man of lawlessness is Nero and then we sort of come to the fifth century and Augustine writing in his City of God says we could think of you know people have thought of this as Nero but this is wrong you know it isn't Nero I think more widely

this is the Roman Empire is how he interprets Paul so and that I sort of see is a bit of a shift because we do get some references to him, Nero is the Antichrist after that, including by one of Augustine's followers, Orosius, and another one. But Augustine not buying into it is maybe a little bit of a seed change for that. But we do have sort of two and a half centuries, really, where this is quite a, you know, know popular idea and is really making the rounds in the east and the west of the empire as a way of interpreting Paul's two Thessalonians and Revelation and also John's letters a bit is smattered around here and there

as well. It's quite interesting if it was popular in the eastern Mediterranean compared to what you were saying earlier when just after Nero's, he was seen as actually being very popular. Yeah, there are fewer in the East than the West, I have to say. However, I don't think that's necessarily because Nero was popular, because by this point, he's clearly, that's clearly been lost to some extent. been lost to some extent because Cassius Dio whom I mentioned earlier that that historian that Roman pagan historian writing at the end of the second century beginning of the third century writes a horrific count of Nero it's really I mean he is a tyrant kind of doesn't mention the Christians but in every other way he is a sort of canonical sort of tyrant par excellence so um even though Nero is still popular in the east

you know in the aftermath of his death and then in like I say in the second century we have evidence of this as well Cassius Dio seems to maybe he's railing against it I think I would argue he's railing against that popularity to some extent he doesn't want Nero to be seen as popular but we have got kind of a different idea Nero has become more of a canonical tyrant by this this point um because he's at the end of a dynasty because he is the last of the Julio-Claudians if you bring down a dynasty it's not necessarily going to be a good thing for you in the history books think of Domitian think of Commodus um as well they're not normally seen as particularly good emperors in later periods once the tradition starts to settle but in the first century you know while

we don't have any contemporary accounts we do have a historian named Josephus telling us they were good accounts and they were bad accounts you know there was this mixed range of things it's just that by later periods it's the bad ones that kind of became the favourite ones and survived. So over those three centuries, as you were, before Augustine, it's as if this association is invented and it develops, it gets more popular, more popular, more popular. I find it also quite astonishing when we consider those three centuries, when we consider some of the emperors like Diocletian, Decius, I think they're all and they're persecuting the Christians, but it is Nero who is the one that they portray as the Antichrist. Yeah. And this again is fascinating. This I think is because you have Nero is the first, and this is so important. And as I was saying before, in terms of what actually happened in

the first century, by the third century that doesn't matter this has become persecution this has become the first persecution of the christians and that becomes incredibly powerful so when orosius who was one of um augustine's followers when orosius writes his um his universal history so like a potted history of everything that happened from adam and eve through to his own time sort of thing he talks about nero as the first persecutor of the christians then he talks about domitian as a second persecutor of the christians the first after nero and then he relates every single person to their number and what number they are after nero so decius the 10th or diocletian the 10th I forget but the ninth after

Nero so all of this goes through in relation to Nero so that idea of him being the first is really important because also then the idea there's a theological concept called millennialism which is particularly influential to Victorinus which is why I think this kind of emerges in the third century really actually millennialism dictates that the last will mirror the first there's this sort of reciprocal relationship so i think that's why despite the fact you have decius like you say that is the first systematic persecution that is you know horrific and then you have diocletian at the end of the third century uh as well beginning of the fourth, you know, in the East in particular, mass widespread persecution of the Christians. These still aren't seen in the same apocalyptic role as Nero because Nero started it for these historians and commentators.

Gotcha. So because he's the first, he's the one, he's, as it were, he's the end of his Julo-Claudian dynasty, but he's the start of the Christian persecution dynasty. Absolutely. Very well put. Yeah, definitely. There you go. So going on from the invention, going on from those three centuries, you mentioned at the start how this idea is revived in, is it the 17th and the 18th centuries? Well, you see kind of, you do see smatterings of it in kind of medieval history and later on there are you know there are commentators on Revelation who will still kind of talk about Nero but nothing new happens with it it's not developed in the way that it's

really being developed I think in the third to fifth centuries. Where it really comes back to being developed and fleshed out properly again is actually the 19th century. So in the 19th century in England, but also there's a sort of crisis of Catholicism. There's a pope that's quite, quite controversial, Pope Pius. And we've also got in England as well, in particular, the rise of what's called a papal aggression movement from about the 1850s so we see a lot of pamphlets and popular literature which start again to really talk about the idea of Catholicism being the inheritor of paganism the Catholic altar is the pagan altar that that sort of association and how these are you know how catholicism is is not

the form of christianity you should be following it should be protestantism or anglicanism as it was here um but also in this period to add to that context or to make this kind of you know more prescient um we have the sort of risings in england of a anglo-Catholic movement. So this is what's known as the Oxford movement. So people like John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey and a few others. So Oxford dons, essentially, who start to write about why high Anglicanism, by high Anglicanism, I mean something that is more why high Anglicanism, by high Anglicanism, I mean something that is more perhaps ritualistic than liberal evangelism, that is the sort of counterpoint to that. They start to write about the merits of high Anglicanism and, you know, and why this should be practiced and why Christianity should be practiced in these ways. But what actually they end up doing, John Henry Newman,

these ways. But what actually they end up doing, John Henry Newman, of course, very famously becomes a cardinal, is convert to Catholicism. So we get some fairly prominent at this stage, Anglo-Catholics who talk about the ritual of Roman Catholicism and see the value in that. And alongside this, or in this environment, then we start to get the revival of the Nero Antichrist idea because if you're fighting against the papal Antichrist what you can do is say uh no look at your history books go back to your Lactantius go back to your Augustine go back to these people who are they saying is is the Antichrist oh it's Nero even if Augustine didn't believe it he still says you know in the text Nero is in there so that's enough um so Nero. Even if Augustine didn't believe it, he still says, you know, in the text, Nero is in there. So that's enough. So Nero provides a very good alternative, a very, you know, historically

solid alternative in the context of this movement, in the context of Anglo-Catholicism and the Oxford movement, in particular. But it's actually a French intellectual and philosopher who fleshes this out properly, again, for the first time, since late antiquity, since the 5th, 6th century. And that's Erich Non. So he wrote a seven volume history of Christianity, including a very controversial life of Jesus as well. But the fourth volume of his history of Christianity is called The Antichrist, and it is entirely about Nero. Entirely. So again, he is very clear that the first beast of revelation, that is Nero. actually between the idea that Nero will return as the Antichrist which is what which is what is being said in late antiquity Nero will return at the time of the apocalypse to bring forward the end times that gets conflated with Nero's reign being the reign of an Antichrist so it gets put back into this

sort of first century context almost and And again, the persecution is so important in this. And this particular idea is fleshed out even more in a two volume historical novel by a man named Frederick William Bowery. He was dean of Canterbury and he was actually better known for writing children's books. Eric Little by Little is a very famous one. books. Eric Little by Little is a very famous one. But he wrote a two-volume historical novel about Nero called Darkness and Dawn, or Scenes of the Days of Nero, which was set in Nero's reign, but was the apocalypse. And in his story, he has famous kind of victims of Nero from the historical tradition. So Nero is supposed to have killed his stepbrother Britannicus and caused the death of his

wife Octavia. She commits suicide because of her treatment by Nero. In Varys, Darkness and Dawn, these people become Christians. He has Britannicus and Octavia convert to Christianity and the person that is helping to convert them is John who wrote Revelation. So he mixes all of these things out. It's brilliant, it's a brilliant novel. It has footnotes, it's a novel with footnotes. But he mixes all of these things together

and mixes them all off to create this historical novel, which is very popular in and of itself, but is even more popular because it then forms the basis his novel is where Wilson Barrett gets the idea to write The Sign of the Cross the play The Sign of the Cross and a Polish writer named Heinrich Sienkiewicz gets the idea to write Quo Vadis and both of these novels that they write based on Farrah's Darkness of Dawn are going to become big hits in the early film industry so Charles Lawton stars in The Sign of the Cross big name you know Nero and Peter Ustinov of course in the canonical kind of 1951 of course

yep is right there so So these become really popular. The play and the novel, of course, are quite popular, but the films are. You know, they're big Hollywood spectacles. Think of, you know, Quo Vadis was around the same sort of time as things like Cleopatra and, you know, that sort of thing. So the big Hollywood Roman epic spectacles. Nero and the Christian story are in those.

He's there. So it's really darkness and dawn has a lot to answer for i mean it's fascinating you say how it's as it were it survived into the 20th century with covalence as you say now through the film industry yes absolutely yeah so so the timing is is brilliant um you know not for nero but for a historian me i like looking at So the timing is brilliant, you know, not for Nero, but for a historian like me, I like looking at it. The timing is brilliant because you do get that the revival in the 19th century allows this then to go into, you know, popular literature and popular categories of entertainment. entertainment and one of the things about Quo Vadis, so in the book, in Sienkiewicz's book, Nero is the Antichrist, he's spoken of as the Antichrist, he's called the Beast, Revelation is in there, Peter is in there

and he really does have that very clear Antichrist label in the book. That falls out a bit in the famous version of the film, in the 1950s version of the film. Nero is still dangerous. He's unpredictable, but he's also quite easily led and, you know, a bit effeminate and other attributes that normally get put onto Nero away from the sort of Ant a different kind of Nero for Quo Vadis, in the opening voiceover of the film, as they're kind of introducing the film and you've got the Roman army being, you know, the main character Marcus Finicius is leading the Roman army back into Rome, the opening voiceover says this is in the reign of the Antichrist known as Nero. So it's there, you're introduced the idea from the very beginning but then the film gets to play on the lighter side of Nero to to a big extent but then of course it ends with Christians

in an arena being eaten by lions and that you know that that very famous um scene of the film almost eaten by lions for some of them because you know they're rescued but uh and then the inevitable kind of death of Nero but it is you know that that idea is is still informing it even if it's not leading those those film representations indeed indeed and I guess to sum up can we say that all this derives ultimately from Commodion in the third century getting a bit ahead of himself and assigning Nero to the revelations in the beast yes absolutely so Commodion in the third century getting a bit ahead of himself and assigning Nero to the revelations in the beast. Yes, absolutely. So Commodion and Victorinus, perhaps it's all their fault.

And those are the earliest ones we have, whether it happened before that. There were hints of it before that in slightly problematic oracle texts. So the Sibylline oracles talk about, again, they never name Nero, texts so um the sibylline oracles talk about um again they never name nero but they talk about an emperor who is more easily identifiable as nero because they say that he you know liked to act on stage and that kind of thing the sort of ideas that aren't in revelation um and that he is going to come back and be a destructive force that sort of thing but it's not quite the same because he's not dying and resurrected or any of those sorts of things and these are probably sort of second century so when those ideas are starting to be formed anyway so um yeah certainly it's all commodian's fault with perhaps a little bit of blame

pointed towards the sibiline oracle's way as well well commodian's got a lot of money for the hollywood film industry though so good for him shma, that was fantastic. Your book is called? The Nero Antichrist, Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm. There you go. Shushma, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's been brilliant. Thank you.