First Century
Of the Unheard of Cruelties Nero Practiced in Slaying the Pious Christians
Concerning the manner in which the Christians were tortured and killed in the time of Nero, A. Mellinus gives the following account from Tacitus and other Roman writers: namely, that four extremely cruel and unnatural kinds of torture were used against the Christians
First, that they dressed them in the skins of tame and wild beasts, so that they might be torn to pieces by dogs or other wild animals.
Second, that they, following the example of their Savior, were fastened alive on crosses, and that in many different ways.
Third, that the innocent Christians were burned and smoked by the Romans with torches and lamps, under the shoulders and on other tender parts of their naked bodies, after these had been cruelly lacerated with scourges or rods. This burning was done also with shavings and fagots, they (the Christians) being tied to stakes worth half a stiver.* Therefore they called the Christians sarmenticii, that is, fagot people, and semissii, that is, half stiver people, because they stood fastened to half stiver stakes, and were thus burned with the slow fire of fagots.
Fourth, that these miserable, accused Christian martyrs were used as candles, torches, or lanterns, to see by them at night.
Of those who were burned, some were tied or nailed to stakes and held still by a hook driven through the throat, so that they could not move the head when the pitch, wax, tallow, and other flammable substances were poured boiling over their heads and set on fire, so that all the greasy matter of the human body, flowing down, made long, wide furrows in the sand of the theater. And so human beings were lit as torches, and burned as lights for the wicked Romans at night.
Juvenal and Martial, both Roman poets, and Tertullian state this in a different way, namely, that the Romans wrapped them in a painful or burning mantle, which they wound around their hands and feet, in order to melt the very marrow in their bones.
Furthermore, it is stated by A. Mellinus (from the authors mentioned above), concerning those mantles, that they were made of paper or linen, and that, having been thickly coated with oil, pitch, wax, rosin, tallow, and sulfur, they were wrapped around their whole body and then set on fire.
For this spectacle Nero gave the use of his gardens, and he appeared among the people himself in the dress of a charioteer, taking an active part in the Circusian games, standing in the circus himself and driving a chariot as charioteer.
These proceedings, according to the testimony of Tacitus, although it seemed that the Christians were punished as criminals who had deserved the utmost penalty, nevertheless moved the people to compassion; for they understood well enough that the Christians were not destroyed for the good of the commonwealth, but simply to satisfy the cruelty of one man, Nero. Compare Abr. Mellin., 1st book van de Histor. der vervolg. en Mart., printed in the year 1619, folio 11, column 4, and folio 12, column 1, with Tacit. Annal., book 15, and Tertul. Apol. Contr. Gent., chapter 50, and adv. Marc., chapter 5. Martinal. Epig. 25, book 25.