Nero died A.D. 68. From that time, for at least twenty-seven years, the Church enjoyed absolute repose. There is no credible evidence whatever of the smallest interference with its freedom till the last year of the reign of Domitian; and a striking illustration of the fearlessness with which it exhibited itself to the world has been lately furnished in the discovery, near Rome, of a large and handsome porch leading to a Christian catacomb, built above ground between the reigns of Nero and Domitian, in the immediate neighbourhood of one of the principal highways.(831) The long reign of Domitian, though it may have been surpassed in ferocity, was never surpassed in the Roman annals in the skilfulness and the persistence of its tyranny. The Stoics and literary classes, who upheld the traditions of political freedom, and who had already suffered much at the hands of Vespasian, were persecuted with relentless animosity. Metius Modestus, Arulenus Rusticus, Senecio, Helvidius, Dion Chrysostom, the younger Priscus, Junius Mauricus, Artemidorus, Euphrates, Epictetus, Arria, Fannia, and Gratilla were either killed or banished.(832) No measures, however, appear to have been taken against the Christians till A.D. 95, when a short and apparently not very severe persecution, concerning which our information is both scanty and conflicting, was directed against them. Of the special cause that produced it we are left in much doubt. Eusebius mentions, on the not very trustworthy authority of Hegesippus, that the emperor, having heard of the existence of the grandchildren of Judas, the brother of Christ, ordered them to be brought before him, as being of the family of David, and therefore possible pretenders to the throne; but on finding that they were simple peasants, and that the promised kingdom of which they spoke was a spiritual one, he dismissed them in peace, and arrested the persecution he had begun.(833) A Pagan historian states that, the finances of the Empire being exhausted by lavish expenditure in public games, Domitian, in order to replenish his exchequer, resorted to a severe and special taxation of the Jews; that some of these, in order to evade the impost, concealed their worship, while others, who are supposed to have been Christians, are described as following the Jewish rites without being professed Jews.(834) Perhaps, however, the simplest explanation is the truest, and the persecution may be ascribed to the antipathy which a despot like Domitian must necessarily have felt to an institution which, though it did not, like Stoicism, resist his policy, at least exercised a vast influence altogether removed from his control. St. John, who was then a very old man, is said to have been at this time exiled to Patmos. Flavius Clemens, a consul, and a relative of the emperor, was put to death. His wife, or, according to another account, his niece Domitilla, was banished, according to one account, to the island of Pontia, according