ex tenuissima suspicione interemit.Sueton.in Domitian.

c.
15.] But he had scarcely finished the term of his annual magistracy, when, on a slight pretence, he was condemned and executed; Domitilla was banished to a desolate island on the coast of Campania; [53] and sentences either of death or of confiscation were pronounced against a great number of who were involved in the same accusation.

The guilt imputed to their charge was that of Atheism and Jewish manners; [54] a singular association of ideas, which cannot with any propriety be applied except to the Christians, as they were obscurely and imperfectly viewed by the magistrates and by the writers of that period.

On the strength of so probable an interpretation, and too eagerly admitting the suspicions of a tyrant as an evidence of their honorable crime, the church has placed both Clemens and Domitilla among its first martyrs, and has branded the cruelty of Domitian with the name of the second persecution.

But this persecution (if it deserves that epithet) was of no long duration.