re: #162 steve_davis

christians really were eaten by lions. the empire was fine with you worshipping whatever or whoever you wished, as long as once a year, you could go into the temple and mouth the words that the emperor was in fact god. (this is one of the things that Britannia, otherwise a Donovan-fueled drug orgy of wrong history, actually gets right). Christians could not do this. They were not willing to play that game. And they did get rounded up and fed to lions in the collosseum. they also occasionally got used as human torches for the occasional Nero dinner engagement/book signing.

Mythbusting Ancient Rome - throwing Christians to the lions (University of Queensland)

TL;DR: no.

The lede:

‘CHRISTIANS TO THE LIONS!’ rang without end through all quarters of the city.

So writes Henryk Sienkiewicz in his novel Quo Vadis (1895). By the end of the 19th century, the image of cowering Christians huddled in the arena awaiting their deaths as lions prowled towards them was the defining symbol of Roman religious persecution and the subject of many famous paintings.

The 1951 Hollywood version of Quo Vadis, starring Peter Ustinov and Deborah Kerr, enshrined this grisly scenario in popular culture. Today, the prevailing modern conception of the relationship between the Roman state and the Christians is that a number of emperors, including Nero and Marcus Aurelius, were responsible for introducing policies of persecution.

(more)

This is a modern take on the pagan Roman Empire, which Christianity had every reason to vilify (they were pagans).