The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City Read Free Page A

had nothing to with Christianity.
     
    Was this entire section of the Annals text a forgery, as some believe? Or did the person responsible for the interpolation merely change a word here and add a sentence there to distort Tacitus’ original, for religious propaganda purposes? What if, for example, the original text had described those arrested and executed for starting the fire as followers of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and not as Christians? In that instance, all the interpolator had to do was replace “Egyptians,” as followers of Isis were known, with the word “Christians.”
     
    The worship of Isis was among the most popular of the religious cults followed at Rome by noncitizens during the first century. The first altars to Isis appeared on the Capitoline Mount early in the first century BC. Destroyed by the Senate in 58 BC, they were soon replaced by a temple to Isis, the Iseum, which was leveled on Senate orders eight years later. The so-called First Triumvirate, Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus, had a new temple to Isis and her consort Serapis erected in 43 BC—the Iseum Campense—on the Campus Martius, on Rome’s northern outskirts. Other large Isea, or temples to Isis, would eventually be built at Rome—one on the Capitoline Mount and another in Regio III, with smaller ones on the Caelian, Aventine, and Esquiline hills.
     
    Isis, who was seen as a caring goddess welcoming both men and women, rich and poor, and who promised eternal life and aid with her followers’ earthly woes, soon had thousands of followers among all classes at Rome, but particularly among the lower classes. The cult of Isis involved certain mysteries, which Isiacs were not permitted to reveal to nonbelievers. There were even a number of similarities between the cult of Isis and the later Christian faith, not the least being initiation by baptism in water, the belief in resurrection, and the adoration of a holy mother and son—Isis and Horus. Later statues of the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Jesus Christ bear a striking resemblance to the earlier statues of Isis nursing her son Horus, which may well have inspired them.
     
    By AD 64, the cult of Isis had been in and out of favor at Rome for a century. In 21 BC, Augustus’ efficient right-hand man, Marcus Agrippa, forbade the rites of the cult of Isis to be practiced within a mile of Rome. In AD 18-19, during the early years of the reign of the next emperor, Tiberius, four thousand “Egyptians” and Jews, all of them freedmen of military age (18 to 46), were rounded up at Rome and sent to repress brigands on the island of Sardinia.
     
    The remaining Egyptians and Jews at the capital, including those who held Roman citizenship, were required to either abandon their faith or depart Italy by a given date. In addition, said Suetonius, Tiberius forced “all citizens who embraced these superstitious faiths to burn their religious vestments and other accessories.” 14 Those priests of Isis who failed to give up their faith were crucified, on Tiberius’ orders. According to the author Philo Judaeus, a first-century Jewish elder at Alexandria, this pre-Christian persecution of the Jews was driven by Tiberius’ Praetorian prefect, Sejanus, who possessed, in Philo’s words, a “hatred of, and hostile designs against, the Jewish nation.” 15 Tiberius, meanwhile, was said to have personally cast a statue of Isis into the Tiber River.
     
    Under the next emperor, Gaius—Caligula, as we know him—both Egyptians and Jews returned to Rome, and Isis was officially adopted into the Roman pantheon. Caligula even dedicated his new palace on the Palatine Hill to the goddess, calling it the Aula Isiaca, or Hall of Isis. But his successor Claudius expelled all followers of Isis from Rome for, according to Suetonius, “creating disturbances.” Jews were separately banned from the city by Claudius for similar “disturbances.” 16 Under Nero, not only was the cult of Isis permitted at Rome, but