The witness of the anonymous first martyrs of Rome

A Reflection for the Optional Memorial of the First Holy Martyrs of the Holy Roman Church

Find today’s readings here.

The fire raged for a week. From its start in the Circus Maximus, flames spread throughout the city of Rome in the year 64 A.D. Nero was not, as popular imagination would have it, fiddling in Rome while it burned. He was away from the city, near the sea. But when he returned, where others saw devastation and destruction, he saw an opportunity. 

Nero’s reputation had already suffered greatly. He had already murdered his own mother and first wife, and most other tempering influences in his life. But the fire gave him a chance to rebrand: to supply food and shelter to those who lost their homes as well as an opening to rebuild the city anew. Like a perverted urban planner, his enthusiasm for clearing away the rubble and starting construction was so great that it was arousing suspicion among the common people that maybe Nero himself had started the fire. And thus the fire gave Nero his most important gift: a scapegoat.

The Roman historian Tacitus tells us: 

Therefore, to stifle rumour, Nero made scapegoats of, and marked out for most particular punishment, those whom the masses called Christians, and who were loathed for their abominations. Christus, from whom the name derived, had suffered the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by order of the procurator Pontius Pilatus. (Annals Book XV:XLIV)

The Christians were rounded up and convicted, not so much for arson but for “hatred towards the rest of the human race.” 

Because the Circus Maximus, a natural site for games and festivals, had burned, Nero opened up his own gardens near the Vatican hill for this onslaught of torture. Tacitus goes on to describe the sadistic scenes: “Derision accompanied their end: covered with wild beast skins and torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or set alight and, when daylight failed, burned to serve for nocturnal illumination.” 

Today, just outside the edifice of St. Peter’s Basilica but inside a Swiss Guard security gate, there is a square named for the spot where it happened: Piazza dei Protomartiri Romani, Square of the first Martyrs of Rome. It is these forerunners in our faith, whom we celebrate in today’s optional memorial, the day after their companions Saints Peter and Paul. 

“I am convinced that neither death, nor life…nor powers…nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Did they, these anonymous, first martyrs for the church, have Paul’s words, addressed to them a few years prior, present in their minds while they suffered? And can we, those of us who today might feel distant from God at times, find consolation in Paul’s conviction that nothing will separate us from the love of God? 

Nero saw the fire and thought he could rebuild his city, his empire and his reputation. It would not work. Nero died by his own hand a few years later after the senate declared him an enemy of the state. The empire would eventually fall. Instead, the suffering of those first Christians became a spark that spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ further than any flames could reach. 

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