Down to the reign of Nero Christians in the Roman Empire were regarded by the ruling powers merely as a Jewish sect, harmless and guilty of nothing which could call for the interference of the State with their ways of life or of worship. They were therefore unmolested. But during the reign of the infamous Emperor in whom they saw antichrist and the actual embodiment of the symbolic monstrosities of the Apocalypse, the Christians began to be recognized as a separate people, and from milder persecutions at first, under cover of legal procedure, they were soon subjected to outrages, tortures, and deaths than which history has none more revolting and pitiful to record. In Kaulbach's great painting of Nero's persecution there is enough of portrayal and suggestion to add a terrible vividness to the ordinary historian's word-pictures. The Emperor, surrounded by his boon companions, stands on his garden terrace to receive divine honors, while a group of suffering Christians--among them St. Peter, crucified head down, and St. Paul, passionately protesting against the diabolical work--move to compassion a company of elderly men and a body of German soldiers who look upon the horrible spectacle of martyrdom. This, the first persecution of the Christians, reached its culminating point of ferocity in A.D. 64, after Nero had been accused of kindling, or conniving at the work of those who did kindle, the great fire in Rome. In order to divert attention, even if he could not turn suspicion, from himself, having charged the Christians with causing the conflagration, he ordered the atrocities which added a still darker stain to his personal and imperial record of shameless crime and savage inhumanity. First such as confessed themselves to be Christians were dealt with, and from these information was extorted on which vast numbers were convicted, "not so much on the charge of burning the city as of hating the human race." Nero's character and acts have been depicted by many writers and in famous works of art, but not even the pencil of Kaulbach can make more keen the realization of those scenes enacted in this persecution than the thrilling narration of Farrar, which for picturesque eloquence, fired with dramatic intensity, has seldom been surpassed in English literature.