Revelation 17:8

As the Beast seen by the seer cannot be described as non-existent, it must denote here (as in Revelation 13:3 f., though differently) not the empire but the emperor, or one of its own heads. Such an identification was natural in the ancient world especially, where a king and his capital or state were interchangeable terms. The emperor, here Nero redivivus (cf. the saying of Apollonius, cited in Philostr. Vit. Apol. iv. 38: “Regarding this wild beast,” i.e., Nero, “I know not how many heads he has”), embodied the empire. The Beast is a sort of revenant. To rise from the abyss was the conventional origin of the Beast (cf. Revelation 11:7) even in the primitive tradition; the Nero-antichrist, however, introduces the fresh horror of a monster breaking loose even from death. True, he goes to perdition eventually, but not before all except the elect have succumbed to the fascination of his second advent. The Beast of the source here is evidently the antichrist figure of Revelation 11:7 (also a Jewish source) transformed into Nero redivivus. There is less reason to suspect the hand of the Christian editor in 8 (Bousset) than in 9 a (J. Weiss).