Posted: Jan 15, 2022 2:25 pm
Meanwhile the Vridar site continues with this discussion of the fire in Rome which Nero is supposed to have blamed on christians.
https://vridar.org/tag/barrett-rome-is-burning/
So far the evidence for Nero starting the fire is pretty thin. Indeed, as Barrett points out,
the first explicit and documented claim that Nero was responsible for the fire is made no earlier than the final years of Domitian’s reign (he died in AD 96), in the line of the Silvae of Statius, quoted above, about the flames of the guilty tyrant ranging over Rome’s heights. (p. 123)
So the record shows us that
there was a common belief by the end of the first century that Nero had been responsible for the fire.
And it was after that time that the historians we rely upon for the fire — Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio — wrote their works.
https://vridar.org/tag/barrett-rome-is-burning/