Surely here the great Stoic was referring to what he had witnessed in Nero’s dread games of the Vatican gardens; no other scene would furnish such a memory at once weird and pathetic. The strange ineffable smile of the Christian in pain and agony dying for his God, had gone home to the heart of the great scholar statesman. Like many another Roman citizen of his day and time, Seneca had often seen men die, but he had never before looked on any one dying after this fashion! From the days of that ever memorable summer of the year 64 until Constantine and Licinius signed the edict which in the name of the Emperors gave peace and stillness to the harassed Church, A.D. 313, roughly speaking a long period of two centuries and a half, the sword of persecution was never sheathed. For practically from the year 64, the date of the famous games in the Vatican gardens, there was a continuous persecution of those that confessed the name of Christ. The ordinary number of the ten persecutions is after all an arbitrary computation. The whole principle and constitution of Christianity on examination were condemned by the Roman government as irreconcilably hostile to the established order; and mere membership of the sect, if persisted in, was regarded as treasonable, and the confessors of Christianity became liable to the punishment of death. And this remained the unvarying, the changeless policy of the Government of the State, though not always put in force, until the memorable edict of Constantine, A.D. 313. After the terrible scenes in the games of the Vatican gardens, the persecution of the Christians still continued. The charges of incendiarism were dropped, no one believing that there was any truth in these allegations; but in Rome and in the provinces the Christian sect from this time forward was generally regarded as hostile to the Empire. The accusation of being the authors of the great fire had revealed many things in connexion with the sect; the arrests, the judicial inquiries, had thrown a flood of new light upon the tenets of the new religion, had disclosed its large and evidently rapidly increasing numbers. Most probably for many years were they still confused with the Jews, but it was seen that the new sect was something more than a mere body of Jewish dissenters. It was universally acknowledged that the Christians were innocent of any connexion with the great fire; but something else was discovered; they were a very numerous company (_ingens multitudo_) intensely in earnest, opposed to the State religion, preferring in numberless instances torture, confiscation, death, rather than submit to the State regulations in the matter of religion.