It is stated in verse eleven that the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seventh, and goeth into perdition. There is a repetition here of verse eight, to which the reader may refer, concerning was, is not, and yet is. But verse eleven affirms the affinity and continuity of the imperial beasts. From the sixth to the seventh the vision was extended, in verse ten; and verse eleven presents the eighth as having the same genus, the spirit of the persecuting beast appearing in one emperor after another until their course was run. To the church at Smyrna the Lord said: And ye shall have tribulation ten days. This undoubtedly referred to the period of the ten persecuting emperors from Nero to Diocletian, who vowed to obliterate the name Christian from the Roman Empire; and it fixes the time period of these apocalyptic disclosures from Nero to Diocletian, the tenth emperor from Nero--thus assigning the date of Revelation to the early part of Nero’ s reign, before the siege and destruction of Jerusalem; and its symbols to the Nero-Diocletian period of persecution.