FJA Hort offered a concise summary of the argument against dating Revelation in the reign of Domitian and for a Neronian date in his 1908 study of The Apocalypse of St John I-III.

First, the negative case rests on a sense of the limits of the persecution of Domitian: “The last few months of Domitian’s life were a veritable reign of terror, in which many of the noblest Romans were sacrificed. Among them were two near kinsmen of Domitian himself, Flavius Clemens and DomitUla. Their Christianity was evidently brought against them, though it is more probable that this was a mere pretext. But we cannot doubt that other Christians perished too, perhaps many others, whether by the putting in force of a dormant edict of Nero’s, if the edict implied in Pliny’s letter was his, or by a new edict, or without an edict under comprehensive laws. Yet there is nothing in the accounts which suggests anything like a general persecution of Christians, even at Eome : it would rather seem that Christians of wealth or station were mainly, if not wholly, struck at. And further, the two accounts of Tertullian and Hegesippus leave it difficult to doubt that Domitian himself stopped the persecution. Beyond [the mention by Hegesippus of the arrest of Jude’s grandsons and] the vague statement of the late Orosius, there is not a particle of evidence for persecution beyond Rome, and there is nothing in external events as far as they are known to lead either to that or to any great disturbance of society. The special features that seem to fit St John are not really distinctive. What is told of banishment by Domitian would suit the case of St John only if he was banished from Rome, a possibility certainly not to be discarded, considering some of the legends, when our knowledge is so small; but still only one alternative” (xxiv).

By contrast, the era of Nero fits Revelation well. Hort offers two main arguments. First, “The whole language about Rome and the empire, Babylon and the Beast, fits the last days of Nero and the time immediately following, and does not fit the short local reign of terror under Domitian. Nero affected the imagination of the world as Domitian, as far as we know, never did” (xxvi).

Second, “The book breathes the atmosphere of a time of wild commotion. To Jews and to Christians such a time might seem to have in part begun from the breaking out of the Jewish war in the summer of 66. Two summers later Nero committed suicide, and then followed more than a year of utter confusion till the accession of Vespasian, and one long year more brings us to the Fall of Jerusalem. To the whole Roman world the year of confusion, if not the early months of Vespasian’s reign, must have seemed wholly a time of weltering chaos. For nearly a century the empire had seemed to bestow on civilised mankind at least a settled peace, whatever else it might take away. The order of the empire was the strongest and stablest thing presented to the minds and imaginations of men. But now at last it had become suddenly broken up, and the earth seemed to reel beneath men’s feet. Under Vespasian, however, the old stability seemed to return : it lasted on practically for above a century more. Nothing at all corresponding to the tumultuous days after Nero is known in Domitian’s reign, or the time which followed it. Domitian’s proscriptions of Roman nobles, and Koman philosophers, and Roman Christians, were not connected with any general upheaval of society. It is only in the anarchy of the earlier time that we can recognise a state of things that will account for the tone of the Apocalypse” (xxvi-xxvii).