Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

Rome — The Barbarian Peoples and the Persecution Record

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

DRAFT — CULTURAL REVIEW PENDING. These history classes are a publisher’s draft blend of the Collection’s history research, standing on its own website. Cultural review precedes any public release of this strand. Readings carry the research labels unchanged: DOCUMENTED · TRADITION · DEBATED · OWNER'S TEACHING. This page carries no advertising.

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

For the teacher — teacher-facing guidance for this class stands in this box only; the reading below is the student reading. Senior band only. Teach the two-layer honesty first: the teaching at its class, the record at its — David's teaching stands at the head as OWNER'S TEACHING, and below it every claim carries exactly the class the research file gives it, DOCUMENTED · TRADITION · DEBATED · OWNER'S TEACHING, never flattened one into the other. The triangulation in §3 is the class's centre — students hold both sides labelled, the teaching printed and the record printed, the conflict printed not resolved. Shame on the oppressors and their policies, never on the oppressed — the owner's ruling for this material. The barbarian peoples are subjects of their own histories, named severally, never a backdrop and never a mass.

OWNER'S TEACHING — the head of this class

Class: OWNER'S TEACHING. David's teaching (2026-10-19, restated 2026-10-28), standing as OWNER'S TEACHING, never flattened into the record:

“Rome killed over 300,000 within the first couple of years after they crucified Yeshua. In the Colosseum era they burned the Bibles and murdered the Christians. Rome fought peoples it called barbarians.”

His provided source for this teaching is the History and Introduction essay on the Didache in Joseph B. Lumpkin, The Complete 70 Book Apocrypha, photographed by David and transcribed source-faithful in his own files. What that book actually carries is set out in §0; the 300,000 figure is triangulated in §3; the Colosseum, the burnings, and the murders are documented in §2; the barbarians are named in §1. The classes used throughout this class are those of the research file: DOCUMENTED (the surviving record carries it, source named) · TRADITION (carried by the church's later memory, not by a contemporary document) · DEBATED (the sources or the scholarship conflict; both sides printed) · OWNER'S TEACHING (the owner's word, standing as his, never flattened into the record and never used to inflate it).

§0 — THE HELD WITNESS: what David's book actually says

HELD, complete as photographed: the Didache History and Introduction essay stands photographed and transcribed across printed pp. 327–333 — pp. 328–331 photographed 2026-10-19, and p. 327 and pp. 332–333 in the completion batch of 2026-10-20, with pp. 328–331 re-photographed in that batch as second witnesses and checkpointed in full agreement.

What the essay carries (DOCUMENTED — as the contents of the held book):

p. 328: “In Rome, Christians were being hunted down. Soon, in Jerusalem, Jews would be killed by the hundreds of thousands.” — the essay's one mass-death figure attaches to the Jewish nation at Jerusalem, in the phrase “hundreds of thousands.” David's own pen put a check mark in the margin beside this paragraph.
p. 328: Peter's death is dated by the essay, following Margherita Guarducci's research, to 13 October AD 64, in Nero's persecution after the fire of Rome; the essay quotes 1 Clement ch. 5 (written c. 80–98) on Peter's martyrdom — a text David also holds in its own right.
p. 328: “James was killed between 62 and 69 C.E.”
p. 331: Ignatius of Antioch “martyred in Rome by beasts in the beginning of the second century”; the Martyrdom of Polycarp described as “the earliest preserved story of Christian martyrs,” recording Polycarp “burned at the stake.”
The essay's pp. 332–333 (held) continue with the Q / Lord's Prayer discussion, the Exodus quotations, a three-branches passage, a Mithras list (1)–(10), and “The Nicene Creed” set in its printed lines.

What the essay does NOT carry: no line in pp. 327–333 counts Christians killed by Rome in the first two years after the crucifixion, and no figure of 300,000 appears anywhere in the held pages. The one number in the essay's neighbourhood is the “hundreds of thousands” — of Jews, at Jerusalem.

OWED: the essay breaks off mid-sentence at the foot of p. 333 (“…the ascended Jesus appeared and instructed him. Did Paul really”) and its concluding lines stand on p. 334, never photographed, NOT HELD. The held gap is stated plainly: p. 334 is owed above all (see §4). An earlier brief named p. 332 as the owed page; the completion record corrects that — pp. 332–333 are held.

§1 — WHO THE “BARBARIANS” WERE

1.1 The word itself

DOCUMENTED. “Barbarian” is not a people's name; it is Rome's label for everybody outside Roman rule and Roman culture. It descends from the Greek barbaros — originally a man whose speech sounded like “bar-bar” babbling, i.e., one who did not speak Greek — and Rome took it over (Latin barbarus) for the peoples beyond its frontiers who lived under their own kings, laws, and gods. After AD 212, when the Constitutio Antoniniana made nearly every free inhabitant of the empire a citizen, the word did not retire: it settled on the peoples outside the frontier line, and increasingly on the federate peoples settled inside it. When the empire “fought barbarians,” it was fighting named nations with their own histories — most of them older in their lands than Rome's presence there. They are named below, people by people, as subjects of their own histories, not as a backdrop to Rome's.

1.2 The Germanic peoples, severally

DOCUMENTED (the wars and settlements are in Ammianus Marcellinus, the Historia Augusta, Jordanes, and the standard record; dates as the record gives them):

Marcomanni and Quadi (with the Sarmatian Iazyges, §1.3) — the Marcomannic Wars, AD 166–180, fought by Marcus Aurelius on the Danube through plague and invasion; the peoples crossed into Italy itself and besieged Aquileia. Rome won the wars and settled defeated Marcomanni and others inside the frontier.
Alemanni — first named in the record in the early 3rd century on the upper Rhine; defeated by the emperor Julian at Strasbourg in 357 (Ammianus, Book 16) and still there to inherit the frontier when Rome's line gave way.
Franks — appear in the record from the mid-3rd century on the lower Rhine; by treaty and by pressure they settled inside Gaul, and under Clovis (r. 481–511) founded the kingdom that became France. Clovis's baptism into the Nicene (Catholic) faith — c. 496, the exact year debated — set the Franks apart from the other Germanic kingdoms (see §1.6).
Goths — Visigoths and Ostrogoths. Driven west by the Huns (§1.5), the Goths were admitted across the Danube as refugees in 376, were starved and cheated by Roman officials (Ammianus, Book 31), revolted, and on 9 August 378 at Adrianople destroyed the eastern field army and killed the emperor Valens — the defeat from which the empire's military balance never recovered. The Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome itself in 410 and settled a kingdom in Gaul and then Spain. The Ostrogoths under Theodoric took Italy in 493 and ruled a Roman-Gothic kingdom from Ravenna.
Vandals — crossed the Rhine in the great crossing of 406 (with the Alans and Suebi), crossed to North Africa in 429, took Carthage, and from Africa sacked Rome in 455 — a fourteen-day systematic stripping of the city. Their kingdom fell to Justinian's general Belisarius in 534.
Burgundians — settled by Rome as federates in Sapaudia (Savoy) in 443; their kingdom on the Rhône was absorbed by the Franks in 534.
Saxons — raiders of the “Saxon Shore” coasts of Britain and Gaul from the late 3rd century; after Rome withdrew from Britain (c. 410), Saxons, Angles, and Jutes settled the lowlands and founded the English kingdoms.
Lombards — the last of the great migrations: entered Italy in 568 under Alboin and held most of it for two centuries, until Charlemagne took their crown in 774.

1.3 Celts, Picts, and the steppe peoples

DOCUMENTED.

Picts — the peoples of northern Britain beyond Hadrian's Wall, first named in a panegyric of 297. In 367 the “barbarian conspiracy” (Ammianus 27.8) — Picts, Scots, Attacotti, Saxons, and Franks striking together — overran Roman Britain's defences. Rome's written answer to Britain ends with Honorius's rescript of 410 telling the cities to defend themselves.
Sarmatians and Alans — Iranian-speaking horse peoples of the steppe and the Danube plain. The Iazyges fought Rome in the Marcomannic Wars; Marcus Aurelius settled thousands of Sarmatian cavalry as far away as Britain. The Alans crossed the Rhine in 406 in company with the Vandals, and Alan settlements were planted across Gaul; the Alans' descendants persisted longest in the Caucasus (the Ossetians' ancestors).

1.4 Dacia, and the eastern front — classed precisely

DOCUMENTED, with the class distinction stated. The Dacians (kingdom of Decebalus, in modern Romania) were conquered in Trajan's two wars of 101–102 and 105–106 and made the province of Dacia — Rome's one great annexation of the era, celebrated on Trajan's Column, and abandoned by Aurelian c. 271.

On the eastern front Rome faced not tribal peoples but a peer empire, and the record must class it differently: Rome itself treated Persia as the one comparable power. The Parthian empire (to AD 224) fought Rome over Armenia and Mesopotamia for three centuries — Trajan took its capital Ctesiphon in 115, Avidius Cassius again in 165, Septimius Severus again in 198. The Sasanian Persian empire that replaced Parthia in 224 was stronger: Shapur I defeated three Roman armies and in 260 captured the emperor Valerian alive at Edessa — a Roman emperor dying in Persian captivity, carved by Shapur in triumph on the rock faces of Naqsh-e Rostam. (This capture is also what ended the persecution of Valerian, §2.3.) Julian died on retreat from Persia in 363; the eastern war ran on, with truces, to 628 — outlasting the western empire entirely.

1.5 The Huns

DOCUMENTED. The Huns — a steppe confederation, not a single tribe — appeared west of the Volga in the 370s, broke the Alans and then the Goths, and thereby set the whole migration age in motion: it was flight from the Huns that drove the Goths across the Danube in 376 and so to Adrianople. Under Attila (r. 434–453) they held an empire of tribute from the steppe to the Danube, were turned back in Gaul at the Catalaunian Plains in 451, raided Italy in 452, and dissolved as a power within a generation of Attila's death in 453.

1.6 Rome's reliance on the peoples it fought — and their conversion

DOCUMENTED. The empire's late army was increasingly barbarian in its ranks and its command: whole peoples were settled inside the frontier under treaties (foedera) as foederati, soldier-farmers owing military service. The western empire's last great commanders were of barbarian descent — Stilicho, the power behind Honorius's throne, was half-Vandal; Aëtius, “the last of the Romans,” fought the Huns with Hunnic and Gothic federates; Ricimer made and unmade emperors. In 476 the Germanic officer Odoacer deposed the last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and sent the imperial regalia east to Constantinople, ruling Italy as a king with the eastern emperor's nominal blessing. The western empire did not fall to an outside army storming a defended Rome; it had long since handed its own defence to the peoples it called barbarians.

DOCUMENTED, at its evidence level. Many of those same peoples were receiving Christianity in the very centuries Rome was persecuting or tolerating it — and in a form Rome's church later fought as heresy. Ulfilas (c. 311–383), consecrated bishop of the Goths in 341, devised a Gothic alphabet and translated the Bible into Gothic — the earliest Bible in any Germanic tongue. His fellow-churchman Philostorgius records (Church History 2.5) that Ulfilas omitted the Books of Kings from his translation, judging that a warlike people needed the war stories less, not more. The Gothic faith was of the Homoian confession — the form the Nicene church condemned as “Arian” — and the Visigothic, Ostrogothic, Vandal, Burgundian, and Lombard kingdoms were all founded professing it; the Vandal kingdom in Africa persecuted Nicene Christians in its turn (Victor of Vita's History of the Vandal Persecution is the surviving record). The Franks' direct conversion to the Nicene faith under Clovis is the great exception, and much of later European history runs along that seam.

§2 — THE COLOSSEUM AND THE PERSECUTIONS

2.1 The building, and what paid for it

DOCUMENTED, with one element classed as reconstruction. The Flavian Amphitheatre — the Colosseum — was begun by the emperor Vespasian (c. AD 70–72), on the drained lake of Nero's Golden House, and dedicated by his son Titus in 80 with one hundred days of games (Dio; Suetonius, Titus 7); Titus's brother Domitian completed it. It held on the order of 50,000 spectators and staged animal hunts, executions of condemned criminals, and gladiatorial combats for some four centuries.

The funding — DOCUMENTED by reconstruction and consensus, with the mechanism named. No dedicatory inscription survives in its letters; what survives is a marble block whose later (5th-century) text overlays the dowel holes of an original bronze inscription. In 1995 the epigrapher Géza Alföldy published a reconstruction of the original from those holes: the emperor (Vespasian, with Titus later inserting his own name) “ordered this new amphitheatre to be made from the spoils” — ex manubiis. The inscription does not name the war; the identification of the spoils as those of the Jewish War — the sack of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 — rests on the date (construction began immediately after), on the triumph of 71 in which the Temple vessels were carried through Rome (shown carved on the Arch of Titus), and on there being no other Flavian triumph of comparable wealth. That identification is the strong scholarly consensus and is classed here as DOCUMENTED by reconstruction and consensus, with the mechanism (a reading from dowel holes) named — the reader is told exactly what kind of evidence it is.

Two cautions stand with it: ex manubiis was a formula also used on other monuments (Aulus Gellius notes it on Trajan's Forum), so the phrase alone does not prove the source; and the claim that Jewish captives' labour built the amphitheatre, often repeated, is a plausible inference from the mass of war captives brought to Rome, not attested for this building specifically — classed DEBATED/inference, not document.

So much of David's teaching the stones themselves support: the Colosseum is, in its financing, a monument of the destruction of Jerusalem — raised by the dynasty that burned the Temple, out of the Temple's treasure.

2.2 The Colosseum and the martyrs — exactly what the record does and does not say

DOCUMENTED (negative finding, stated plainly). No ancient source names the Colosseum as the place of any Christian's execution. Arena martyrdoms are documented elsewhere by near-contemporary texts: the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne in 177, Blandina among them, in the amphitheatre at Lyons (Eusebius, Church History 5.1); Perpetua and Felicity at Carthage in 203, whose Passion is a surviving near-contemporary record. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to execution at Rome in the early 2nd century, wrote expecting to be thrown to the beasts there (his Letter to the Romans, a text David holds) — but the letter does not name the venue, and the Colosseum, though standing by then, cannot be assigned to his death by any document.

TRADITION. The Colosseum's veneration as martyrs' ground is a later tradition: it grew in the early modern period and was fixed when Pope Benedict XIV consecrated the building to the Passion of Christ and the memory of the martyrs in 1749–50, planting a cross and stations in the arena. The tradition honours real suffering — the persecutions of §2.3 are not tradition but document — but its attachment to this one arena is not in the ancient record, and this class does not write it as if it were.

2.3 The persecution waves, in order

Before the waves: two deaths inside the apostolic generation belong to Jerusalem, not to Rome's state — Stephen, stoned by a crowd with council involvement (Acts 7; date c. 34–36), and James son of Zebedee, executed by the client king Herod Agrippa I (Acts 12; c. 44). Rome's machinery enters the record a generation after the crucifixion.

1. Nero, AD 64 — DOCUMENTED (Tacitus, Annals 15.44; Suetonius, Nero 16). After the great fire of July 64, Nero fixed blame on the Christians of Rome to deflect the rumour that he had set the fire himself. Tacitus — a pagan senator who despised the Christians, which makes his witness to the persecution itself the stronger — records arrests, convictions on a charge of “hatred of the human race,” and deaths by crucifixion, by being sewn in animal skins and torn by dogs, and by being burned alive as torches in Nero's gardens. Of numbers Tacitus gives none: his words are multitudo ingens, “a huge multitude,” and the persecution was local to the city of Rome. Peter's death in this persecution is carried by 1 Clement ch. 5 (c. 80–98, a held text) and the whole early tradition; the held Didache essay (§0) dates it 13 October 64 following Guarducci — classed TRADITION as to the day, DOCUMENTED as to the persecution and Peter's martyrdom within it.

2. The long second century — localized and sporadic, DOCUMENTED in pieces. There was no standing general law; the governing precedent was Trajan's rescript to Pliny (c. 112, Pliny, Letters 10.96–97): Christians were not to be hunted out, anonymous accusations were void, but those brought before a court who refused to sacrifice were to be punished. Under that regime men and women died in particular cities in particular years: Polycarp of Smyrna, burned at the stake in the stadium of Smyrna — the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the earliest surviving martyr account, a text David holds (his book dates it c. 155; the scholarly range for the year runs 155–167 and beyond — the date DEBATED, the text and the death DOCUMENTED); the Lyons and Vienne martyrs of 177 (§2.2); and others the record names one by one.

3. Decius, AD 250 — DOCUMENTED (Cyprian; the surviving libelli papyri). The first empire-wide measure: an edict requiring every inhabitant to sacrifice before official witnesses and obtain a certificate (libellus; dozens survive on Egyptian papyrus). Its harvest was less a count of the dead than a crisis of the lapsed — the great mass who complied, bought certificates, or fled, and whose readmission split the church (Cyprian's On the Lapsed). Bishops died (Fabian of Rome among the first), Origen was tortured and died of it; no ancient count of the executed exists.

4. Valerian, AD 257–260 — DOCUMENTED (Cyprian's letters and Acts of the Proconsular Council; Eusebius 7). Two edicts aimed at the church as an institution: clergy ordered to sacrifice on pain of exile, then of death; assemblies and cemetery visits forbidden; church property and the property of Christian senators and officials confiscated. Cyprian of Carthage was beheaded in 258, Sixtus II of Rome executed the same year. The persecution ended not by repentance but by catastrophe: Valerian marched east and was captured by Shapur I of Persia in 260 (§1.4), and his son Gallienus issued a rescript restoring Christian property — the “little peace of the church,” c. 260–303.

5. Diocletian — the Great Persecution, AD 303–313 — DOCUMENTED (Eusebius, Church History 8 and Martyrs of Palestine; Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors). The last and the systematic one. On 23 February 303 the great church at Nicomedia, in sight of the palace, was demolished and its scriptures burned; the next day the first edict was posted: churches everywhere to be razed, the Scriptures to be destroyed by fire, Christians of rank degraded, Christian household slaves barred from freedom. Eusebius, an eyewitness of the era, writes that they saw “the divine and sacred Scriptures committed to the flames in the midst of the market-places” (HE 8.2). This is the Bible-burning of David's teaching, and it is document, not legend — with one precision: what burned were the church's scriptures in their codices and rolls; the canon was not yet one bound book, and the edict's target was every copy of the sacred writings in every congregation. Further edicts followed: all clergy arrested (303); clergy released only on sacrificing; finally (304) a universal order to sacrifice. Enforcement was fiercest in the East under Galerius and Maximinus Daia and lightest in Gaul and Britain; it produced the traditores — clergy who handed over the scriptures — and, in the quarrel over their readmission, the Donatist schism. Galerius, dying, revoked the persecution in his Edict of Toleration (311); the settlement of Milan in 313 (Constantine and Licinius) made Christianity legal and ordered confiscated property restored, and the era of the persecutions closed.

A word on totals for the whole period 64–313: no ancient author counts the martyrs, and this class constructs none. Eusebius names the Great Persecution's victims person by person, province by province — Martyrs of Palestine is a roll of names, not a statistic. Modern scholarly estimates of those executed under Diocletian and his colleagues vary widely and are commonly placed in the low thousands for the whole empire — printed here as what they are: a DEBATED modern estimate range, not a count.

§3 — THE 300,000 FIGURE: triangulation — both sides printed

The claim as taught (OWNER'S TEACHING): Rome killed over 300,000 within the first couple of years after they crucified Yeshua; David's provided source is the Didache history essay in Lumpkin's Complete 70 Book Apocrypha.

Side one — what the provided book carries (§0, verified against the held transcription). The essay contains no such figure and no such event. Its mass-death line is “hundreds of thousands” — of Jews, at Jerusalem (p. 328). Its Christian dead of the first generation are named men, dated by the essay itself to a generation after the crucifixion: James killed 62–69; Peter on 13 October 64. The essay's Rome line is qualitative — “Christians were being hunted down” — and it is the line David marked with his own pen. Read strictly, the provided book supports the teaching's world (Rome hunting Christians; Rome drowning Jerusalem in blood) but not the teaching's number, its victims, or its dates: on its own pages the “hundreds of thousands” belong to the Jewish nation in 70, and the hunting of Christians begins under Nero in 64.

Side two — what the surviving contemporary record carries.

For c. 30–35, the “first two years”: nothing. No Roman source records any state action against Christians in the 30s AD. The deaths the New Testament itself records in that window are Stephen (a Jerusalem crowd and council, Acts 7) and, a decade later, James son of Zebedee at a client king's order (Acts 12) — neither is Rome, neither is a campaign, and neither carries a count. Rome first notices the Christians in its own records under Claudius (Suetonius, Claudius 25.4, disorders “at the instigation of Chrestus” and an expulsion from Rome, c. 49 — the identification DEBATED) and first persecutes them under Nero in 64, thirty-one to thirty-four years after the crucifixion, in one city, with no number given by the source (Tacitus's “huge multitude”).
A demographic bar: on any reading of the record, the entire Christian movement in the early 30s numbered in the hundreds to the low thousands, in Judaea and the first diaspora congregations combined. There did not yet exist 300,000 Christians for Rome to kill. This is not an argument about Rome's character; it is arithmetic about the size of the movement in the window named.
Where the era's vast counted dead actually stand: the Jewish nation, three times. (i) Jerusalem, AD 70: Josephus — an eyewitness who served the Roman command — gives 1,100,000 dead in the siege and 97,000 captives (Jewish War 6.420–421); Tacitus gives 600,000 besieged (Histories 5.13; his death figure is lost with the missing part of his work). Both are classed as the authors' figures: modern historians generally judge Josephus's totals far beyond the city's plausible population (Menahem Stern, for one, treats his 23,400 armed men as realistic while rejecting the vast totals) — the figures are printed as Josephus's and Tacitus's, not adopted as counts; the catastrophe itself, famine included, is not in doubt. (ii) The diaspora revolt, AD 115–117: Dio (68.32) gives 220,000 killed by rebels in Cyrene and 240,000 in Cyprus — Dio's figures, again of the Jewish war's convulsions. (iii) Bar Kokhba, AD 132–135: Dio (69.14.1–2) records 580,000 slain in raids and battles, 985 villages and 50 outposts razed, and the dead by famine, disease, and fire “past finding out.” This figure carries a live scholarly dispute, printed both sides: long-standing skepticism of Dio's numbers, answered in 2021 by Raviv and Ben David (Journal of Roman Archaeology 34.2, 585–607), whose archaeological reassessment concludes Dio's demographic data rest on contemporaneous documentation. The dispute is DEBATED and stands unresolved here.
The persecution chronology (§2.3) shows what Rome's killing of Christians actually looked like across 250 years: beginning in 64, local under Nero, sporadic through the second century, empire-wide only from 250, systematic only in 303–313 — named victims, named places, and no total in any ancient source, with modern estimates for the worst decade in the low thousands for the empire.

The conclusion, at the exact level the evidence supports. David's figure stands in this class as OWNER'S TEACHING, printed at the head of the class and not deleted, softened, or argued out of his mouth. Beside it, the record stands as it stands: no Roman-era source counts 300,000 Christians killed in the first two years after the crucifixion, or in any two years; the movement did not yet number 300,000 in the window named; and the vast counted dead of the era in the surviving sources are the Jewish nation, destroyed by Rome at Jerusalem in 70 and in Judaea in 132–135, in the sources' own hundreds of thousands. The conflict is printed, not resolved: a reader of this class holds the teaching and the record side by side, each labelled as what it is — which is the same two-layer honesty this Collection keeps between every witness and its edit. What neither layer permits is the opposite error: Rome's documented record — a capital city hunted in 64, certificates of sacrifice demanded of every soul in 250, the scriptures in the market-place flames in 303, and a nation in Judaea ground down across three wars — needs no borrowed number to stand condemned, and this class lends it none.

§4 — OWED / NOT VERIFIED REGISTER, in brief

An honest gap stands as a gap. Nothing in this register is filled by inference.

Didache essay, p. 334 — the essay's concluding page. NOT HELD, OWED ABOVE ALL. The essay breaks off mid-sentence at the foot of p. 333 (“…Did Paul really”); the conclusion stands on p. 334, never photographed. When David photographs p. 334, the witness is complete and §0 of this class is to be re-checked against it.
A total of the Christian martyrs, any period. None exists in any ancient source — a permanent gap in the record itself; §2.3 prints the modern estimate range labelled as such.
Christians executed in the Colosseum specifically. No ancient documentation; the association stands as TRADITION only (§2.2).
Jewish captives' labour on the Colosseum. Inference only (§2.1); not attested for this building.
The year of Polycarp's martyrdom. The held text is complete; its year is debated (155–167 and beyond). Not resolvable from the held materials.

Sources

Held witnesses (David's files): Lumpkin, The Complete 70 Book Apocrypha, “Introduction to The Didache — History and Introduction,” printed pp. 327–333 (transcriptions for pp. 328–331 and for pp. 327, 332–333, with the completion record and second-witness checkpoints for 328–331), cited as the held witness. The Martyrdom of Polycarp and the epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp — recovered in David's files from the same volume. 1 Clement is likewise held (quoted within the essay, p. 328).

Ancient sources named in the text: Tacitus, Annals 15.44 and Histories 5.13 · Suetonius, Nero 16, Claudius 25.4, Titus 7 · Josephus, Jewish War 6.420–421 · Cassius Dio, Books 68.32, 69.14 (and on Titus's games) · Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96–97 · Cyprian, On the Lapsed and the proconsular Acts of his martyrdom · Eusebius, Church History Books 5, 7, 8, 10 and Martyrs of Palestine · Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 12–13, 34, 48 · Ammianus Marcellinus, Books 16, 27, 31 · Philostorgius, Church History 2.5 (Ulfilas) · Victor of Vita, History of the Vandal Persecution · the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity · Aulus Gellius 15.25.1 (the ex manubiis formula) · Acts 7, 12, 15, 18.

Modern scholarship named in the text: Géza Alföldy (1995), reconstruction of the Colosseum's dedicatory inscription from its dowel holes — the amphitheatre ordered built ex manubiis · Margherita Guarducci, on the date of Peter's death (as reported in the held essay) · Menahem Stern, on the realism of Josephus's smaller figures against his vast totals · Dvir Raviv and Chaim Ben David, “Cassius Dio's figures for the demographic consequences of the Bar Kokhba War: Exaggeration or reliable account?”, Journal of Roman Archaeology 34.2 (2021), 585–607 — the archaeological defence of Dio 69.14, printed against the long-standing skepticism.

Record: ROME_BARBARBARIANS_PERSECUTION_RESEARCH.md (study_materials/rome_persecution_barbarians_2026-10-28/) — the DRAFT research dossier from which this class is condensed, its classes carried unchanged. The owed register stands in §4 above: p. 334 above all.