the reign of Claudius, as well as that of his twenty-five years' episcopate, we may dismiss from our consideraItion. They are an outgrowth of the legend of Simon 2 Magus in Rome, which took its origin (as modern scholars have seen) from the misreading of an inscription by Justin Martyr, and may date in its fully-developed form from the time of Hippolytus.

There can, however, be little doubt that to the Christians of the sub-apostolic age SS. Peter and Paul were linked together as the founders of the Christian Church in Rome. The writers whom we shall have to take into account are the author of the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians' (let us not prejudge the question of his identity or date); Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, who was put to death in Rome in the later years of Trajan; Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, where he was martyred at the age of eighty-six in A.D. 155 or 156; and his pupil Irenæus, who when a presbyter at Lyons was sent on a mission to Rome during the papacy of Eleutherus (A.D. 177-193), and afterwards returned to his Church as Bishop.

In

Prof. Merrill makes a vigorous onslaught on the traditional ascription of the first-named document to St Clement of Rome, who occupies the third place in the list of the successors of St Peter (though Tertullian, it is true, says that he was ordained Bishop by the Apostle himself). He even goes so far as to question the historical existence of St Clement the Bishop. the 'Shepherd' of Hermas, for the date of which we have no direct evidence save the statement in the so-called 'Muratorian fragment' on the Canon that it was written by a brother of Pope Pius I (A.D. 142-157), the recipient of the visions is directed to make a copy for 'Clement, who will send it to the cities abroad, since that is his function'; and Prof. Merrill makes the suggestion (which has nothing to commend it) that the name of this secretary of the Roman Church was attached to an anonymous epistle, and actually inserted in the list of Roman bishops! It is difficult to square this with the facts without doing violence to all probability. The Epistle of Clement was certainly known to and used by Polycarp; and Irenæus, evidently referring to it, says that it was written 'when Clement was Bishop, the third after Peter and Paul had Vol. 245.—No. 486.

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founded the Church and made Linus bishop-Clement, who had seen the Blessed Apostles and consorted with them'; and since Polycarp was (presumably) a younger contemporary of Clement, and Irenæus was Polycarp's pupil, it seems unreasonable to reject so precise a statement. Moreover, the internal evidence of the Epistle points to an early date. The author speaks of a persecution in which many Christians lost their lives; but this is clearly that of Nero, since he calls to the mind of his readers noble examples belonging to our own generation' of those who 'contended unto death,' amongst whom he places foremost 'the good Apostles,' Peter and Paul, who bore their testimony' and went to their place of glory, and goes on to speak of the 'vast multitude of the elect which was gathered unto them, suffering many indignities and tortures.' On the other hand, his attitude to the civil power is, as Harnack says, 'objective,' and there has as yet been no irreparable breach with the Imperial Government. These conditions would be satisfied by the traditional date of Clement's episcopate (A.D. 91-96), but of course no stress should be laid on this fact. The cognomen Clemens is a common one, and it is no more than a conjecture that it may have been borne by a freedman of Flavius Clemens, the cousin of Domitian and husband of his niece Domitilla.

We come next to Ignatius. Whilst on his journey as a prisoner from Antioch to Rome he wrote from Smyrna certain letters, which may reasonably be accepted as genuine, to the Churches of Ephesus, Tralles, and Rome. In the first he writes, I issue no commands to you as though I were some one "'; in the second, I am not so self-important as to issue commands to you as an Apostle, being a condemned criminal'; to the Romans, however, he writes, 'I issue no commands to you as Пérpos Kaì Пavλoç. They were Apostles, I am a condemned criminal.' Prof. Merrill may be right in his contention that the Greek words mean, not ' as Peter and Paul did,' but 'as though I were a Peter and a Paul.' But even so it is surely natural to regard the introduction of the names as due to the well-known fact that they were the joint founders of the Roman Church.

The testimony of Irenæus has been cited above

ed

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à propos of the authorship of the First Epistle of Clement. There can, at any rate, be no doubt as to his beliefs. For him Peter and Paul were the joint founders of the Church in Rome, and the succession of the bishops who followed them, beginning with Linus, is fixed beyond doubt.* It has to be remembered that Irenæus was a disciple of Polycarp, whose life spanned the gap between the reign of Nero and that of Antoninus Pius. From the lips of Polycarp he heard stories of Jesus' life and sayings which the venerable Bishop of Smyrna had derived from those who had seen the Lord'; and as communications between the outlying Christian communities and the capital of the Empire were constant, it is not to be doubted that Polycarp would be familiar with the story of the Early Roman Church. Prof. Merrill, however, propounds a theory of his own to explain the appearance in the writings of Irenæus of a list of Roman bishops. About the middle of the second century A.D. a converted Palestinian Jew named Hegesippus, a fervent propagandist of the new faith, who was especially concerned to establish the 'fixed tradition of the Apostolic preaching,' travelled from East to West in order to collect historical material, which he embodied in five volumes of 'Records.' He spoke of his visit to Corinth, where he was shown 'a notable letter which had come from Rome,' doubtless the First Epistle of Clement, which, as Dionysius (Bishop of Corinth about A.D. 170) tells us, used to be 'read in Church' in that city. In Rome he compiled a 'Succession of Bishops' down to Anicetus, whose traditional date is A.D. 157-168; † and the theory of Prof. Merrill is that Hegesippus 'made up' the list, for which no trustworthy material existed in the shape of archives, in the interest of his favourite doctrine, and imposed it on succeeding

* The variation which appears in our sources with regard to the number assigned to Hyginus ('eighth' in some texts, 'ninth' in others) seems best accounted for by supposing that St Peter was by some included in and by others excluded from the list.

†The account of Hegesippus here given is probable, but not in all its details certain. Even the 'Succession' of Bishops depends on the accuracy of the MS. text of Eusebius (γενόμενος ἐν Ρώμῃ διαδοχήν εποιησάμην μέχρι 'AVIKÁTOV, where diaтpißhv, 'residence,' has been suggested). That he came from Palestine is rendered probable by the fact that he displays special knowledge of the history of the Christian Church in Jerusalem.

generations. The following quotation will give a fair summary of his view (p. 228):

'Irenæus quotes the list of bishops of the Roman See as if in some way it was a guarantee of the secure preservation in Rome of the unimpaired apostolic doctrine. This is a precise repetition of the thought of Hegesippus. As Irenæus apparently borrowed the idea from Hegesippus, so also he probably took from him the list of the Roman bishops. But of course Irenæus may have got both idea and list from the Church in Rome on the occasion of his visit to the capital. But the Roman Church had them from Hegesippus.'

Neither the dogmatic assertion with which the passage closes, nor the slender probabilities suggested in the preceding sentences, inspire confidence in the doctrine which forms the keystone of Prof. Merrill's arch.*

In dealing with the relations of Christianity with the Imperial Government Prof. Merrill is at his best when he is combating the efforts of some modern theologians to clothe the skeleton of recorded fact with tissues of the historical imagination. Mr Edmundson's reconstruction of the genealogy of the Flavian Emperors and their connexions by marriage may, perhaps, be described as 'an agreeable historical diversion'; his attempt to show that St Clement, Bishop of Rome, was a brother-in-law of the Emperor Titus † is more ingenious than convincing; and if the scholarship of theologians is to be judged by Prof. Gwatkin's quotation of a sentence of Cicero's 'De Legibus' as from the Twelve Tables (Merrill, p. 67), it is certainly not adequate in respect of Roman law.

To show that the traditional account of the early persecutions found in Christian writers contains inconsistencies and inaccuracies is no doubt relevant to Prof.

Merrill's main argument. We may agree that the institutum Neronianum mentioned in a famous passage of Tertullian is not to be construed as an enactment

* Prof. Merrill also lays the ascription of the Epistle to the Corinthian Church to Clement the Secretary,' mentioned in the 'Shepherd' of Hermas, at the door of Hegesippus; yet he believes the Epistle and the 'Shepherd 'to be contemporary, and accepts the statement of the Muratorian fragment that Hermas' was the brother of Pius I. It is then surely incredible that Hegesippus should have taken the further step of elevating 'Clement the Secretary' into Clement the third bishop of Rome.

† 'The Church of Rome in the First Century,' pp. 235, 253f.

laying a permanent ban upon Christianity, and that the e policy of the Government towards the Churches was opportunist.' This is the result to which all recent historical criticism tends. But we cannot follow Prof. Merrill, for example, in his attempt to minimise the importance of Domitian's breach with the Christian community. There is a growing recognition that that Emperor persistently and insistently developed the cult, not merely of his deified predecessors, but of the whole Flavian house, in whose members ran the divine blood of Vespasian. Every deceased descendant of Vespasian, as the inscriptions show, bore the title divus or diva (including a daughter of the Emperor who died before his accession, though not his wife); the family residence on the Quirinal was turned into a templum Flaviæ gentis ; and the piecing together of some recently found fragments of the Marble Plan of Rome has shown that Domitian constructed in the Campus Martius (partly on the site now occupied by the Palazzo di Venezia) a magnificent Porticus Divorum in which chapels were assigned to Vespasian and Titus.* All this was, of course, part of the strongly dynastic' policy which the upstart family of the Flavians felt bound to pursue in order to consolidate their position; and we can well imagine the wrath of Domitian when he learned that a religion which could make no facile facile compromise with the apotheosis of the Emperors was gaining adherents in his own house, amongst them his sister's daughter Flavia Domitilla, who by her marriage with her cousin Flavius Clemens was the mother of the two boys already designated as the heirs of the Imperial throne and placed under the tuition of Quintilian. There can be no reasonable doubt that the atheism' with which she and her husband were charged was the treasonable refusal of conformity to the Imperial cult which the practice of Christianity entailed. The context of the abridgment of Dio Cassius' narrative on which we here depend suggests that the practice of Judaism was the gravamen of the charge; but it is easy to see how this

I believe that a beautiful relief now in the Louvre, representing an Emperor sacrificing, which was found near S. Marco, belonged to the 'High Altar' of this building. It is reproduced in my 'Companion to Roman History,' pl. 50. The features of the Emperor have been restored.