cult and sometimes impossible to determine where the threads were drawn from. Clemen’s Religionsgeschichtliche Erklérung des Neuen Testaments (1909) is a convenient handbook to the whole subject of these highways and byways of the apocalyptic fairy-land.
§ 5. The Nero-redivivus Myth.—The most central of these co- efficients, drawn. from a mixture of supernatural and political legends, is the belief in the return of a Nero-antichrist from the underworld.
The massacre of Α.Ρ. 64 had invested Nero with such peculiar infamy for the early Christians, that it is not surprising to find Satan’s chief agent in the final attack upon God’s kingdom depicted by the prophet John as an infernal Nero, issuing from the under- world to head a coalition of the East against Rome and then against the Christ. Both the Jewish and the Christian literature of this period show traces of the successive phases of the Nero-redivivus anticipation (Suet. Nero, 47).1 The legend sprang up on Roman soil. People could hardly credit the tyrant’s death, so sudden and secret had been its circumstances. A curious mixture of relief and regret prevailed after the removal of the last member of the Julian dynasty at the age of thirty-two. For some time, indeed, a more or less sincere belief (Tacit., Hist. Π. 8,9) prevailed, that he could not have died, but must be lying hidden somewhere in the East. This idea was suggested by his friendly relations with Parthia, and per- haps corroborated by the wide-spread notion, which he had encour- aged in his own life-time, that he would reign over the East from Jerusalem, or that Rome was to be supplanted by an Eastern empire (Suet. Nevo, 40, Vesp. 4, Tacit. Ann, xv. 36, Hist. v. 13, 3: pluribus persuasio inerat antiquis sacerdotum litteris contineri eo ipso tem- pore fore ut ualesceret Oriens profectique Judaea rerum potirentur ; cf. Joseph. Bell. vi. 5, 4). On the strength of this superstition, edicts were actually issued in Nero’s name, ‘quasi uiuentis et breui magno inimicorum malo reuersuri’ (Suet. Nevo, 57). The East was disturbed by pretenders, who exploited this superstition. One
1 In Sib. iv. 119 f. the great king (1.ε., Nero) flies away wounded across the Euphrates into Parthian territory, while in Sib. iv. 137-139 (after 80 Α.Ρ.) the erup- tion of Vesuvius is taken as a portent of Nero’s immediate return from the East with a huge retinue to wreak vengeance on Rome. In another of these Asiatic oracles (v. 143-147, dating 71-74 A.D.) the flight of the detested and unpopular Nero from Babylon ({.ε., Rome) to the Parthians is described. He reaches the king- dom of the Medes and Persians, to return in the last days (361 f.) for a bloody con- quest of the earth (κοσμομανὴῆς πόλεμος). Cf. Geffcken’s studies ‘‘ Zur alteren Nero-sage” in Nachrichten d. Gétting. Gesellschaft d. Wissensch. (1899), pp. 443 f. The presence of the Nero-myth in the Apocalypse seems to have been first re-dis- covered by a Spanish Jesuit, Juan Mariana, who commentéd on the book in 1619.