At Rome, the preaching of Christianity had begun in the reign of Claudius, and as it stirred up incessant quarrels among the Jews, which led to the disturbance of public order, the emperor had them all expelled from the city. Suetonius ascribes these scenes of disorder to Christ; it is the first time that we meet with the name in a pagan author, and the phraseology of Suetonius appears to indicate that, in his opinion, Christ was a person who lived at Rome in the time of Claudius: “_Judæos, impulsore Christo assidue tumultuantes, Roma expulit._” According to Dion Cassius, the Jews were not expelled from the city, but were forbidden to assemble together. The Christians were confounded with the Jews; the distinction first began to be made under Nero. “They put to the torture,” says Suetonius, “the Christians, a sort of men holding a new and noxious superstition.” A terrible fire, which destroyed more than half of Rome, gave occasion for these tortures. Rumour accused Nero of having set fire to Rome that he might rebuild it in greater beauty; it was even said that during the fire he had gone up into his theatre and sung the destruction of Troy. “To put an end to these rumours,” says Tacitus, “he sought for guilty persons, and inflicted the most cruel tortures upon persons detested for their infamous practices, who were commonly called Christians. This name they took from Christ, who was condemned to death under Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate. This pernicious superstition, suppressed for the moment, had since overflowed, not only in Judea, where was the source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all crimes and shames meet together. Those were first seized who confessed, and afterwards, on their testimony, a great number of others, who were convicted, less of having set fire to Rome than of hating the human race. Mockery was added to torture; they were wrapped in the skins of beasts to be cast to dogs to devour; they were crucified; they were set alight like torches to give light by night. Nero had offered his gardens for this spectacle, and he mingled with the people in the garb of a charioteer or driving a chariot. Thus these wretches, though deserving of exemplary punishment, inspired pity, for they were not sacrificed to the interests of the public but to the cruelty of a single man.”