Sublime

One of the major players in this cover-up operation was a character called Eusebius who, at the beginning of the fourth century, compiled from legends, fabrications and his own imagination the only early history of Christianity that still exists today.

We are told that he found a new category of human scapegoats in the Christians, who were crucified or thrown to the beasts in the arena, condemned both as arsonists and as misanthropes. 15

“Nero’s Big Weekend,” which goes back again to the story of Poppaea. But he began to be taken rather more seriously. In Britain, Ted Hughes created a stripped-down version of his Oedipus in 1968, which emphasized the horror and bleakness of the original. 35 Seneca gradually began to seem relevant again, not (as in the early modern period) as an

It was materially impossible to alter these documents, for the priests had the care of them; and it was greatly to the interest of religion that they should remain unalterable.

From time to time in the first two centuries CE, Roman authorities punished the Christians. There was at this period no general or systematic persecution; there was no sign of that until the mid third century CE. In practice, most of the early generations of Christians lived untroubled by the intervention of the state. Yet they were occasionally