Considerable stress has been laid in the preceding pages on the question of the duration of the periods of persecution and the consequent number of martyrs who suffered in these periods. It has commonly been assumed that after the death of Nero a lengthened period of quiet was enjoyed by the Church of Rome as in the provinces, and that the sect of Christians was generally left unmolested during the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, and indeed of Domitian, until quite the last years of his life. It has been shown that this was by no means the case, and that the Christians were harassed more or less all through this period of supposed quiet. And after, through the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, the rapidly growing Christian community was perpetually persecuted by an unfriendly and suspicious government, often at the instigation of a jealous and hostile populace. Again and again these attacks, probably at first mostly local and partial, flamed out into a general and bitter persecution. In the days of Antoninus Pius the harrying of Christians even grew more and more general and cruel, and when Marcus Antoninus became Emperor, the sufferings of the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth became decidedly more acute and pronounced, and a terrible period of persecution set in and became the lot of the Christian subjects of Rome. We have awful examples of this bitter “Antonine” persecution in the sad records, undoubtedly genuine, of the martyrs of Vienne and Lyons, of the Scillitan martyrs in North Africa, of the heroic Mauritanian victims, in the striking and pathetic acts of Perpetua and her companions.[114] Again it has been not unfrequently urged, and very largely believed, that the Christian traditions exaggerated the number of martyrs who suffered during the long though occasionally interrupted periods of persecution. As regards this early period, the first two centuries, the age we are now especially dwelling on, this supposition, very generally more or less accepted, is absolutely baseless. Indeed, the exact contrary is the case. So far from exaggerating the numbers of confessors of “the Name,” or painting in too vivid colours the story of their martyrdom, the earlier Christian writers dwell very little either on the number of the confessors or on their sufferings. It does not appear that any mention of martyrs or confessors of the second century appears in the oldest extant Church calendars; no allusion in these lists is recorded of martyrs until after the middle of the third century. Only in the case of some celebrated martyrs and confessors is an exception made. As a rule, save in very special cases, no anniversary of second-century martyrs appears to have been kept. It is only from the general tone of the earliest Christian writings[115] that we gather that the community was exposed to an ever-present danger, and that the shadow of persecution was ever brooding over the heads of the followers of “the Name.”