burned to death.  Nero made use of his own gardens as a theatre on this occasion, and also exhibited the diversions of the circus, sometimes standing in the crowd as a spectator, in the habit of a charioteer; at other times driving a chariot himself; till at length these men, though really criminal, and deserving exemplary punishment, began to be commiserated as people who were destroyed, not out of regard to the public welfare, but only to gratify the cruelty of one man” ("Annals,” book xv., sect. 44).

This was probably written, if authentic, about A.D. 107.  The reasons against the authenticity of this passage are thus given by Robert Taylor:  “This passage, which would have served the purpose of Christian quotation better than any other in all the writings of Tacitus, or of any Pagan writer whatever, is not quoted by any of the Christian Fathers.

“It is not quoted by Tertullian, though he had read and largely quotes the works of Tacitus:  and though his argument immediately called for the use of this quotation with so loud a voice, that his omission of it, if it had really existed, amounts to a violent improbability.

“This Father has spoken of Tacitus in a way that it is absolutely impossible that he should have spoken of him had his writings contained such a passage.

“It is not quoted by Clemens Alexandrinus, who set himself entirely to the work of adducing and bringing together all the admissions and recognitions which Pagan authors had made of the existence of Christ or Christians before his time.

“It has nowhere been stumbled on by the laborious and all-seeking Eusebius, who could by no possibility have missed of it....

“There is no vestige nor trace of its existence anywhere in the world before the fifteenth century.

“It rests then entirely upon the fidelity of a single individual.  And he, having the ability, the opportunity, and the strongest possible incitement of interest to induce him to introduce the interpolation.

“The passage itself, though unquestionably the work of a master, and entitled to be pronounced the chef d’oeuvre of the art, betrays the penchant of that delight in blood, and in descriptions of bloody horrors, as peculiarly characteristic of the Christian disposition as it was abhorrent to the mild and gentle mind, and highly cultivated taste of Tacitus.

* * * * *

“It is falsified by the ‘Apology of Tertullian,’ and the far more respectable testimony of Melito, Bishop of Sardis, who explicitly states that the Christians, up to his time, the third century, had never been victims of persecution; and that it was in provinces lying beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire, and not in Judaea, that Christianity originated.

“Tacitus has, in no other part of his writings, made the least allusion to Christ or Christians.

“The use of this passage as a part of the ’Evidences of the Christian Religion,’ is absolutely modern” ("Diegesis,” pp. 374—­376).