After the death of Nero, during the very brief reigns of Galba Otho and Vitellius, probably the persecution of Christians, owing to the disturbed state of Rome and the Empire, languished. When, however, the Flavian House in the person of Vespasian was firmly placed in power, the policy of the government of Nero, which held that the Christians were a sect the tendency of whose beliefs and practice was hostile to the very foundations and established principles of the Roman government, was strictly adhered to, and possibly even developed. The followers of the sect were deemed outlaws, and the name of a Christian was treated as a crime. There is a famous passage in Sulpicius Severus (fourth century) which most modern scholars consider to have been an extract from a lost book of Tacitus. It is an account of a Council of War held after the storming of Jerusalem, A.D. 70. In this Council, Titus the son and heir of Vespasian--the hero of the great campaign which closed with the fall of Jerusalem--is reported to have expressed the opinion that the Temple ought to be destroyed in order that the religion of the Jews and of the Christians might be more completely rooted up; for these religions, though opposed to each other, had yet the same origin. The Christians had sprung from the Jews, and when the root was torn up the stem issuing from the root would easily be destroyed. There is no doubt but that this report of Titus’ speech at the Council of War is an historical document of the utmost importance. It tells us exactly what was the feeling of the imperial Flavian House towards the Christians--they represented an evil which it was well to extirpate. It is possible that in a mutilated passage of Suetonius a reference occurs to Vespasian’s actions at this period (in the year following A.D. 70) in respect to the Christians. The passage runs as follows: “Never in the death of any one did Vespasian (take pleasure, and in the case of) merited punishments he even wept and groaned.” This is clearly a reference to some class of individuals whose punishment Vespasian felt bound to accept, while he regretted it. “It is inconceivable that Vespasian, a Roman soldier of long experience in the bloody wars of Britain and Judæa, wept and groaned at every merited execution.... We think of the punishments which by the principle of Nero attached to the Christians ... the principle in question continued permanently, and Suetonius alluded to it on account of the detail, interesting to a biographer, that Vespasian wept while he confirmed its operation.”[13]