Chapter XXXVIII
THE GLADIATORS’ SCHOOL
‘Commorabor inter homicidas, inclusus turpiore custodia et sordido cellarum situ.’ ‘In ludo fui, qua pœna nullam graviorem scelera noverunt, cujus ad comparationem ergastulum leve est.’--QUINCTILIAN.
Although the intervention of the vestal and the kindly ruse of Pudens had saved the life of Onesimus, his condition was far from enviable. He was once more--now for the third time in his life--in overwhelming disgrace. It is true that all the legal customs were observed, in a house controlled by that respect for archæology which the fashion had been set by Augustus. The chains were taken off his limbs and flung out of the court through the impluvium. None the less he felt that he was marked and shunned. One day, after his escape, Nero passed him in one of the corridors, and, struck by the appearance of a handsome youth, beckoned him to approach. He came forward trembling, and the Emperor, peering into his face, recognised the purple-keeper of Octavia. Inspired by sudden disgust at the memories thus called to his recollection, he summoned his dispensator Callicles into his presence, and ordered him to get rid of ‘that worthless Phrygian.’
‘Shall I put him in prison, or have him sent again to the ergastulum at Antium?’ asked Callicles.
‘Neither,’ said Nero. ‘The City Prætor, Pedanius Secundus, is about to give some votive games of beasts and gladiators. Make a present to him of this youth.’
Onesimus heard the words, and his heart sank within him. But resistance was useless. On his way he passed the door of Acte’s apartments, and not without peril ventured to sing a few notes of the old Thyatiran ballad which had first attracted her notice. She heard it, and came out.
‘That youth comes from my native land,’ she said to the dispensator. ‘Step back a few paces and let me have a word with him.’
Callicles would hardly have granted the favour to any one else, but every one loved Acte, and he only said, ‘If Nero should come?’...
‘I will hold you clear,’ said Acte.
Onesimus, overcome with shame, knelt on one knee, kissed the fringe of her robe, and whispered, ‘Oh, Acte, I am condemned to be a gladiator.’
‘In which school?’
‘Under Rutulus, the trainer of Pedanius Secundus--the cruellest man in Rome.’
He told her something of his story, and she saw that to help him was beyond her power. All she could do was to slip into his hand her own purse, and to tell him that if ever the day came when she could befriend him she would do her utmost. More she dared not say, for the suspicious eyes of Callicles were upon her, and she had to repress the emotion which agitated her frame.
In the school of Rutulus, Onesimus experienced a phase of misery even deeper than in the slave-prison of Antium. Once more he was the companion of felons of every dye and fugitives of every nationality. Every day came the severe drill, the coarse food which was worse than hunger, the odious society of hardened ruffians, the recounting of the brutal tragedies with which they were familiar. Among them all he found but one whose society he could tolerate. He was a dark-haired, blue-eyed Briton, young like himself, but in all other respects unlike him. For Æquoreus, as they called him, was full of manly pride and hardihood, and had none of the subtle softness of the Asiatic in his temperament. He had been reduced to his hard lot for no other crime than the outburst of a passionate independence. He had been brought over with Caractacus, as one of the Britons pre-eminent in stature and beauty to grace the ovation of Claudius and Aulus Plautius. He had not been treated cruelly, for the admiration inspired by the dauntless bearing of the British king had secured protection to his countrymen; but Glanydon--to give him his Silurian name--loathed the effeminate luxuries of Rome, and, forgetting that he was a captive, had once struck in the face a Prætorian officer who insulted him. For this offence he had been first scourged and then handed over to the master of the gladiators. It was ordered that he should fight, as soon as he was trained, in some great display. Onesimus saw that the young Briton shared his own disgust at the orgies of ribald talk in which their fellows indulged. The two had no other friends, and they were drawn together for mutual defence against the rude horse-play of their comrades. Glanydon was one of the class of gladiators called Samnites, who fought in heavy armour, while, after various trials, the trainer (lanista) decided that the exceptional activity of Onesimus marked him out for the work of a net-thrower (retiarius). Their training had to be hurried on at the utmost speed, for the games were to take place within a month.
The other gladiators sometimes talked of their lot with pretended rapture. They spoke of the liberal supply of food, of the presents sent them, of the favour with which they were regarded by fair ladies--even by the wives and daughters of great patricians--of the fame they acquired, so that their prowess and the comparison of their merits was one of the commonest topics of talk at Roman dinner-parties. They boasted of the delight of seeing their likenesses painted in red on the play-bills; of the shouts with which a favourite fighter was welcomed; of the yell of applause which greeted them when they had performed a gallant feat; of the chance of retiring with wreaths and gifts and money, when they had earned by their intrepidity the wooden foil.[74]
‘Poor wretches,’ said Onesimus to Glanydon; ‘they do not talk of the panic which sometimes seizes them, and how they are howled at when, in ignominious defeat, they fly to the end of the arena to beg for their lives; how, when they see overwhelming odds against them and grim death staring them in the face, they are still driven into the fight with cracking scourges and plates of iron heated red hot; nor--but what is the use of talking of all this, Glanydon? you know it all better than I do.’
‘Brutal, bloody, slaves and women, are these Romans,’ cried Glanydon. ‘The Druids of my native land served the gods with cruel rites, but they did not play with death as though it were a pretty toy, as these weaklings do. And to think that by arms and discipline they conquered my countrymen! Oh, for one hour again under Caradoc or under Boudicca! I would never leave another field alive.’
‘You do not, then, fear death?’ said Onesimus.
‘Why should I? What has life for me? The maiden I loved is in her hut on my Silurian hills. I shall never see her more, nor set foot on those purple mist-clad mountains. I shall be butchered to amuse these swine. Death! No,’ he said, while he indignantly dashed away the tear which had burst forth at the thought of his home--‘I do not fear death, but I hate to die thus.’
‘Did your Druids think that death ended all?’
Glanydon turned his blue eyes on the speaker. ‘I do not think they did. There were mysteries which they hid from us. But’....
With amazement Onesimus saw him sketch in the dust the helmet of a mirmillo, of which the crest was a dolphin. The Phrygian said nothing, but scratched in the dust the same symbol. Glanydon started up and seized his hand. ‘A Christian?’ he asked in amazement; ‘and yet here?’
‘You too are here,’ said Onesimus, hanging his head.
‘Ah, yes!’ said the Briton; ‘but surely for no crime. What could I do but strike a wretch viler than a worm? Nor have I been illuminated-- my teacher would not baptise me till he could see proof that I had controlled the fierce outbursts of passion.’
‘Your teacher?’
‘There came from Jerusalem an old white-haired man. They called him Joseph. He had seen the Christ; he had buried Him in his own tomb. --But you, Onesimus?’
‘I am no better than a renegade. My own follies have brought me here. There is no more hope for me. Ask me no more.’
‘Do you fear death?’ asked the Briton. ‘If so, I pity your lot.’
‘The gods--or God if there be but one God--cannot be worse than men,’ answered Onesimus gloomily.
Glanydon was silent. After a pause, he said, ‘I am a rude barbarian, as they call me here; yet he who taught me spoke much of “love for all and hope for all.”’
Onesimus sat with bowed head, and the Briton was moved. ‘We are brothers,’ he said. ‘Even in this hell we can love one another.’
But one sickening thought was in the breasts of both of them. They had sat side by side in daily intercourse; their common friendlessness, their common sympathies, had thrown them together in the closest bonds, and those bonds had been strengthened by the discovery that both had been taught at least the rudiments of a holy faith. But the day of the games was rapidly approaching, and the chances of the lot, or the caprice of the Prætor, might easily cause them to be pitted against each other. It was horrible to think that either of them might be compelled to drive sword or dagger into the throat or heart of his friend.
‘Supposing that we are matched together?’ said Glanydon, the evening before the display.
‘Then we must fight,’ said Onesimus. ‘Have we not taken the oath “to be bound, to be burned, to be scourged, to be slain,” or do anything else that is required of us as legitimate gladiators, giving up alike our souls and our bodies?’[75]
‘Which of us will win?’ asked Glanydon, with a sad smile.
‘You,’ said the Phrygian. ‘You are stronger than I am, and taller.’
‘Yes, but you are quicker and more active, and you can’t tell how I hate that net of yours. I know you will catch me in it--’
‘If I do, you will still have fought so well that the people will all turn down their thumbs, and you will be spared. A tall fine fellow like you is just the gladiator whom the Roman ladies like to look at, and they won’t have you killed in your first fight. But as for me--a mere Phrygian slave!--Yes, Glanydon, to-morrow your short sword will perhaps be red with my blood.’
‘Never!’ said Glanydon. ‘I will fight because I must, and will do my best; and when my blood is up I might kill you or any other opponent in the blind heat of the combat; but as for slaughtering in cold blood I could not do it--least of all could I murder the friend I love.’
‘You won’t be able to help yourself, Glanydon. And we netsmen (worse luck!) have our faces uncovered. Many of the spectators, like the late “divine” Claudius, as they call him, like to see us killed, because our dying expression is not concealed by a helmet.’
‘But why should we not both escape?’ asked the Briton. ‘Perhaps before this time to-morrow we may each be the happy possessor of the ivory ticket with “Sp.”[76] upon it, or even of the palm and the foil. Who knows but what by our bravery we may be rude donati?’
‘Don’t you know, then, that to-morrow’s games will very likely be sine missione? We must either die or kill.’
The Briton had not been aware of it. He sank into gloomy silence. Onesimus gently laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and said, ‘Well, perhaps, like Priscus and Verrus, we may both be victors and both vanquished. Pugnavere pares, succubuere pares.’
Glanydon shook his head. He said, ‘Let us talk no more, or we shall both be unmanned. Life--death--to-morrow; the rudis or the stab? Which shall it be?’
‘It is in God’s hands,’ said Onesimus, ‘if what we have been taught is true.’
With that awful issue before them, overshadowed by misgivings and almost with despair, finding life horrible, yet shrinking from the death which neither of them dared to regard with full Christian hope, the two youths lay down on their pallets. Before they closed their eyes in sleep, each of them had breathed some sort of unuttered cry into the dim unknown.
Chapter XXXIX
THE FIGHT IN THE ARENA
‘Quid vesani sibi vult ars impia ludi? Quid mortes juvenum? quid sanguine parta voluptas?’
PRUDENTIUS.
‘Mera homicidia sunt.’--SENECA, Ep. 7.
The morning broke in cloudless splendour. Long before the dawn thousands of the Roman populace had thronged into the amphitheatre to secure the best places. The City Præfect was known to be a man of taste and a favourite of Nero, and the Emperor himself was certain to grace the display with his idolised presence. The pairs of gladiators were not numerous, nor were there many wild beasts; but everything was to be choice of its kind, and it was rumoured that some beautiful foreign youths were to make their first appearance as fighters.
About eleven o’clock the rays of the sun became too strong for comfort, and a huge awning, decorated with gay streamers, was drawn over the audience by gilded cords.
By this time the amphitheatre, except the seats reserved for distinguished persons, was thronged from the lowest seats to the topmost ambulatory, where stood a dense array of slaves and of the lowest proletariat. They did not get tired of waiting, for the scene was one of continual bustle and brightness, as group after group of burghers, in their best array, took their seats with their wives and families. Any well-known patrician or senator was greeted with applause or with hisses. The buzz of general conversation sometimes rose into a roar of laughter, and sometimes sank into a hush of expectancy. Little incidents kept occurring every moment. Interlopers tried to thrust themselves into the fourteen rows of seats which were set apart for the knights, and an altercation often ensued between the seat-keeper, Oceanus, and these impostors. Now the people laughed at the unceremonious way in which he shook one of them who, to escape notice, had pretended to be asleep. They were still more amused when the impatient official turned out a finely dressed personage who protested that he was a knight, but unluckily dropped in the scuffle a large key, which showed him to be a slave.
At last the shouting of the multitude who thronged about the principal entrance announced the arrival of the Præfect. Amid the acclamations of the populace, the magnificent procession by which Pedanius was accompanied passed round the arena to the reserved seats. Pedanius was scarcely seated, when the Emperor, surrounded by a group of his most brilliant courtiers, took his place in the imperial box. As the roar of applause continued, he rose again and again with his hand on his heart, to bow and cringe before the public--omnia serviliter pro imperio. For the mob of Rome was at once his master and his slave, and was as ready at slight excuse to burst into open menaces as into blasphemous adulation. Nero was as well aware as Tiberius that ‘he was only holding a wolf by the ears;’ and he often quoted the saying of that keen observer, that few realised ‘what a monster Empire was.’
Then Pedanius rose in his seat and flung down the scarlet napkin which was the signal that the sports were to begin.
The opening amusements were harmless and curious. First a number of German aurochs were led round the circus. They had been trained to stand still while boys hung from their huge horns, or danced and fenced standing on their broad backs. A tiger was guided by its keeper with a chain of flowers. Four chariots swept past in succession, the first drawn by leopards with gay silken harness, the second by stags champing golden bits, the third by shaggy bisons, the fourth by four camels who amused the people by their expression of supercilious disapproval. Then an elephant performed some clumsy dances under the bidding of its black keeper. Next a winged boy led in a wild boar by a purple halter. Last of all, a tame lion was introduced, which, to the delight of the shouting populace, dandled a hare in its paws without hurting it, and then suffered its keeper to put his head and his hand in its open mouth. But at this point a frightful tragedy occurred. Wherever the dazzling white sand of the arena chanced to have been disturbed or stained, it was raked smooth, and fresh sand sprinkled, by boys dressed as Cupids with glittering wings. One of these boys, presuming on the lion’s tameness, hit it rather sharply with his rake. The royal brute had been already excited by hearing the howling of the animals of all sorts with which the vivarium was crowded, as well as by the shouts of the spectators, and its keeper had stupidly neglected to notice the signs of its rising rage. But when the sharp edge of the rake struck it, the lion’s mane bristled, and with a terrific snarl he first laid the poor lad dead with one stroke of his paw, and then sprang with a mighty bound upon a second lad, on whose quivering limbs he fleshed his claws and teeth.[77] A cry of horror and alarm rose from the people, and those who sat just above the level of the amphitheatre started up in terror, for they were only protected from the wild beasts by rails, which had been finished off with amber and silver, but did not look very strong. The brute, which had thus shown ‘a wild trick of its ancestors,’ was soon overpowered, for the keeper was skilled in the use of the lasso. But this incident did but whet the appetite of the spectators for blood. They shouted to Pedanius to begin the venatio and the wild-beast fights which formed the morning show. No expense had been spared to sate the insatiable cruelty of the mob. For an hour or two longer they were gratified with a prodigality of anguish. Ostriches and giraffes were chased round and round, and shot to death with arrows. Wild beasts fought with tame beasts and with wild beasts, and beasts with men. Bears, lions, and tigers were worried and hacked by armed bestiarii, and sometimes a bestiarius in his turn lay rolling on the sand, crushed by a bear or torn by the fierce struggles of a panther. Lastly, some unskilled, defenceless criminals were turned loose into the amphitheatre amid a fresh batch of animals, infuriated by hunger and mad with excitement. None of the poor weaponless wretches--sine armis, sine arte, seminudi--could stand up for a moment against the bear’s hug or the tiger’s leaps. They stood in attitudes of despairing stupefaction, watching the horrible rolling gait of the bears, or the crouching of the tigers as they glared on them with yellow eyeballs and bristling manes, lashing their haunches with their tails, and at last, with a hoarse carnivorous roar, curving their backs for the final spring. The venatio degenerated into a mere butchery meant to fill up the time.[78]
All this was regarded as child’s play in comparison with the luxury of courage, skill, and massacre which was expected in the afternoon; but it was already too much for one of the spectators. This was the philosophic thaumaturge Apollonius of Tyana, who happened to be paying a brief visit to Pætus Thrasea. Thrasea had been compelled to be present, because he knew that everything which he did or failed to do was watched with deadly suspicion; and Apollonius had accompanied his host from a desire to see the strange animals which were to be exhibited. At first he had looked on with real delight and interest; but when he saw the noble creatures wantonly killed, his Greek instinct for the beautiful was disgusted. He had been shocked by the callousness with which the vast audience had recovered from its momentary fright when the two poor boys had been slain by the lions; but when he saw them shouting with delight while the arena was wet with the blood of mangled men and tortured beasts, he turned his back on the amphitheatre with disdain and horror, and whispered in the ear of his companion, ‘Rome is a Bacchante rolling in blood and mud.’
Of all these scenes Onesimus and Glanydon had been spectators; and such spectacles were little calculated to dispel the gloom of dreadful anticipation which hung over the coming afternoon. They had marched in the procession of gladiators which formed part of the opening pomp, and from behind a lattice-work of one of the dressing-rooms they could see all that was going on. But now the rays of the early summer were pouring a dazzling flood of warmth and light which penetrated even through the awning. The vast audience required a little rest. The awning was sprinkled with perfumes. Saffron-water fell in a delicate dew upon the hot and tired multitude. The passages between the seats were flushed with pure cold water. Refreshments and baskets of fruit were freely handed about, and while they were enjoying the light mid-day meal every one chatted freely with his neighbour.
‘Who are those in the podium with the Emperor?’ asked a provincial from Gaul of the young Spaniard who sat beside him.
‘Don’t you know?’ said Martial, for he it was. ‘That well-dressed, handsome, smiling man is Petronius. The tall senator with the intellectual face is Seneca. He is a countryman of whom I am proud.’
‘Seneca!’ said the provincial; ‘the greatest man of his age! Only to think that I have seen Seneca!’
Martial only smiled. Such enthusiasm was refreshing.
‘The young man with black hair who sits just behind him with a frown on his forehead is his nephew Lucan, the poet. The king in purple robe is Herod Agrippa II., with his lovely sister Berenice by his side. Just watch the flash of that diamond on her neck. That splendid fellow with fair hair, all smiles, who has grace and beauty in every movement, is the actor Paris, and beside him is his friend and rival, Aliturus. The exquisite, who looks as if he would be paralyzed by the weight of his own rings, is Senecio.’
‘And that lady with her face half veiled, so that you only catch a glimpse now and then of her loveliness?’
‘That is Poppæa, Otho’s wife. No wonder Nero loves her better than that pale sad lady who sits among the six vestals.’
‘Yet she, too, is young and beautiful. Who is she?’
‘The Empress.’
‘Octavia, the daughter of Claudius? May the gods bless her!’
The provincial gazed long at Octavia.
‘But now tell me,’ he continued, ‘who is that purpureal personage, with large rings, scarlet boots, and a very white forehead?’
Martial laughed aloud. ‘His forehead may well be white,’ he said. ‘Do you know what it is made of?’
‘Made of?’ asked the young Gaul in astonishment.
‘Yes. It is made of sticking-plaster! If you took it off, what do you think you would see under it?’
‘His skin, I suppose.’
‘His skin, yes! But with three letters on it.’
‘What three letters?’
‘O Simplicitas!’ said Martial; ‘the three letters F. U. R.’
‘Is he a thief?’ asked the Gaul. ‘Then why do they let him sit there among the knights?’
‘Because his thieving has made him rich,’ answered Martial.
‘But his riches don’t make him honest; and every one seems to be treating him with great respect.’
Martial laughed long and loud. ‘O Sapientia!’ he exclaimed, ‘O Innocentia! From what new Atlantis do you come? Don’t you know that at Rome the rule always is “Riches first, virtue next”?’
‘If that be the rule at Rome,’ said the other, ‘I should prefer to live at Ulubræ or at Venta Belgarum.’
But Martial had no more time to listen to a morality so refreshingly unsophisticated. ‘Hush!’ he said. ‘They are going to scatter down the presents and the lottery tickets on us.’
First came a shower of countless coins of thin metal, every one of which was stamped with a wanton image. Then all kinds of little presents like those exchanged at the Saturnalia. The audience did not exert themselves to catch these, but it was very different when handfuls of lottery tickets were flung among them. For these they scrambled wildly, and with many a curse and blow; for he who secured one might find himself the happy possessor of a slave, a statue, a fine vase, a rare foreign bird, a suit of armour, a Molossian dog, a Spanish horse, or even a villa; although the mystery which the number concealed could not be made known till he presented the ticket the next day.
But by this time the attendants with rakes were scraping the surface of the arena smooth, and sprinkling it afresh with dazzling white sand brought in ship-loads from Africa, to hide the crimson stains of the life-blood of animals and men. For now was to begin the splendid exhibition of strength and skill and pluck, and the awful pageantry of death, under that blue sky, under that gleaming sunlight; and men and women were preparing themselves to be thrilled with sanguinary and voluptuous excitement which would make the blood course through their veins like fire. Most of the gladiators were men of approved prowess, stalwart and well known; and from the senators’ seats to the topmost gallery bets were being freely laid on their chances of victory, and on those who should be left dead at evening, indifferent forever to those wild shouts. The only two who were not spectati--the only two tiros who were to make their appearance-- were the young British captive and the young Phrygian slave.
The long defiant blast of a trumpet smote the air; the folding doors of the main entrance were flung open, and, headed by their trainer, the gladiators in a body marched in proud procession and with firm steps to the space beneath the podium, on which stood the gilded chair of the Emperor. They were only sixty in number, but had been selected for their skill and physique, and belonged to various classes of gladiators. They were clad in glittering array--their helmets, their shields, and even their greaves, richly embossed and gilded.
And none were more curiously scanned than Onesimus, who walked last of the net-throwers, and Glanydon, who closed the file of the Samnites. It was impossible not to observe the towering stature and herculean mould of the Briton, the lithe and sinewy frame of the dark-eyed Asiatic. Then the Prætor once more flung down the napkin, in sign that the fighting should begin. Grouped under the Emperor’s seat, they all uplifted to him their right hands and chanted in monotone their sublime greeting: ‘Hail, Cæsar! we who are about to die salute thee!’
Nero flung them a careless glance, and scarcely broke the animated conversation which he was holding with Petronius.
Before the hard fighting began there was some preliminary skirmishing among all the gladiators, with blunt weapons, merely to display their skill; and a pair of andabatæ amused the people by their difficulties in fighting practically blindfold, for their loose helmets had no eyelet-holes.
Then the trumpet blew once more, and a herald cried out, ‘Lay aside your blunt swords and fight with sharp swords;’ and Pedanius examined the weapons to see that they were duly sharp. The display began with the contests of the horsemen and the charioteers (essedarii). It was not long before two of the chariots were broken, and their wounded occupants flung down under the hoofs of their own plunging horses.
Next, two horsemen, both of them popular favourites, of well-tried prowess and well-matched strength, rode out on white horses to fight each other in mortal conflict. Hippias wore a short mantle of blue, and rode from the east side of the arena; Aruns, in a red mantle, rode from the western side. Both wore on their heads golden helmets, and military standards were carried before them.[79] The combat between them was long and fierce, for each knew that it was to be his last. They charged each other furiously, raining on heads and shoulders a tempest of blows, till, after a tremendous bout, Aruns thrust his spear through a joint in the armour of Hippias, and the stream of crimson blood which followed was greeted by the roar of ‘Habet!’ from eighty thousand throats. The rider fell lifeless. He required no finishing stroke, and the mob cried, ‘Peractum est!’ (‘There’s an end of him!’) This contest had excited much interest from the fame of the fighters, and large sums of money changed hands on the result. One of the senators, named Cæcina, had hit on an ingenious way of telling his distant friends whether they had lost or gained. Since Hippias was in blue, and Aruns in red, he had carried with him into the amphitheatre a number of swallows in two cages, of which some were painted blue and some red; and, since Aruns had slain his adversary, he let loose those which were painted red.[80]
After this the other mounted gladiators joined combat. In a very short time nearly all were wounded, and three acknowledged their defeat. Dropping their swords or javelins, they upheld their clenched hands with one finger extended to plead for mercy. The plea was vain. No handkerchief was waved in sign of mercy, and, standing over them, the victors callously drove their swords into the throats of their defeated comrades. The poor conquered fighters did not shrink. They looked up at the shouting populace with something of disdain on their faces, as though to prove that they thought nothing of death, and did not wish to be pitied. To see that none were shamming dead, a figure entered disguised as Charon, who smote them with his hammer; but the work of the sword had been done too faithfully--he only smote the corpses of the slain.[81]
By this time the whole atmosphere of the place seemed to reek with the suffocating fumes of blood, which acted like intoxication on the brutalised passions of the multitude. They awaited with savage eagerness the next combat, which was to be the main show of the afternoon. Twelve Samnites and mirmillos were to be matched against as many net-throwers and chasers; and the contest was all the more thrilling because the latter were very lightly clad, so that every wound and gash was visible in all its horror on their naked limbs, while the unhelmed faces showed every triumphant or agonised expression which swept across them in that stormy scene.
After half an hour’s fighting in terrible earnest, in which each side had exchanged many a well-aimed blow, and had shown prodigies of skill, valour, and swiftness, many of the gladiators had fallen, and others dropped their arms in sign of defeat. Their vanquishers strode over them awaiting the signal to be executioners of their brethren. The fight was stopped till the signal had been given with ruthless unanimity. The defeated men, like those who had been killed before them, gazed without blenching on the hard and lolling multitude, as though to show by their calm demeanour how easy a thing it was to die.
But to make sure that they had been really killed, once more a slave entered, who, for variety’s sake, was dressed in the wings and carried the serpent-rod of Mercury. He touched each corpse with a red-hot iron wand. No limb shrank from his touch. Other attendants, therefore, laid the dead on biers--which the admiring spectators observed to be inlaid with amber--and they were carried out through the gate of Libitina into the spoliarium, where they were carelessly flung out in a heap.[82]
So far both the tiros had escaped. They had instinctively avoided each other, and neither had butchered his opponent except in fair fight. Of the eight who survived, four were Samnites and mirmillos, four were net-throwers. They thought that the fight was over and that they might severally be regarded as victors, and might look for the gifts of crowns and money, or even of the foil which set them free from the horrid trade. They stepped back beyond the lines which the trainer had marked, resting on their arms, and expecting to be ushered out of the triumphal gate.
The multitude had far other intentions. They were not yet sated with slaughter; they had not yet gloated long enough on faces convulsed with the death-agony; they wanted to see how the beautiful young Phrygian would look when an opponent stood over him with a sword at his throat.
But the soul of Glanydon was filled with disgust and disdain. He loathed those fat, shouting, comfortable burghers, those hard-faced women, those finical dandies, of whom he felt that he could have driven a score before him like sheep. He strode to the barriers and set his back against them, refusing to fight.
A yell of fury rose from the people. ‘Kill him!’ they shouted. ‘Kill him! scourge him! burn him! Why is he so afraid of cold steel? Why can’t he die like a man? Ho! scourgers, lash the youth into the combat again, to make the sides equal.’
The Briton stood as in a dream, and as his thoughts reverted to his home and the maiden whom he loved, the amphitheatre swam before his eyes. Five or six mastigophori came running up to him, and he felt the curling lash of one of them come stinging round his body. The agony aroused him. With a cry as of a wounded lion he sprang on the scourger, and with one buffet laid him senseless, while the others fled in confusion before him. Then, with the boldness of despair, he strode under the podium, and, raising his clenched fist, cursed the Emperor aloud.
‘Murderer of thy mother!’ he cried; ‘thou infamy of manhood, I will fight again. But think not that thou shalt escape. Speedily the doom shall overtake thee, and thy death shall be more shameful and horrible than mine.’
He had thundered forth so loudly his indignant words that they rang through the whole amphitheatre, and the wildest tumult arose. The Emperor cowered back in his seat, pale with superstitious terror, yet almost suffocated with rage; and his favourite page, springing up from the low stool at his feet, began to sprinkle his face with perfume.
The Prætorians drew their swords, and in one moment would have slain the criminal who thus dared to blaspheme their human god. That a common gladiator--a thing to flesh men’s swords upon--should dare to curse the Emperor! It was a portent! But there was no time to interfere, for, with a shout, Glanydon sprang back among the gladiators, and began so furious an affray that the other side gave way and fled. He sprang on an opponent, and the crimson rush that followed his sword-thrust again awoke the deep ‘Habet!’ of the excited crowd. But as he pressed on, now blind with fury, he fell, face forward, over the loose helmet of a slain mirmillo, and before he could recover himself a netsman, seizing his opportunity, flung his net, entangled the limbs of the Briton by a dexterous twist, and, without waiting for any signal, drove his trident into his breast. The Briton died without a groan. But the advantage of the light-armed fighters was only momentary. Their courage had been daunted by Glanydon, and, after a few moments of flight and fight, the Samnites were victorious and the net-throwers were all wounded and dropped their arms, except Onesimus. They knelt with their forefingers uplifted, and, as they had fought with courage and had been hardly used, handkerchiefs began to be waved in their favour and thumbs to be turned downwards. Octavia and Acte had both recognised the face of Onesimus as he retreated before one of the Samnites, and failed to entangle him by the throw of his net. Filled with pity, they turned their thumbs downward in sign that the combat should be stopped and the lives of the defeated be spared.
But unhappily Onesimus was only a few feet distant from Nero, and Nero had recognised him too. The curse of Glanydon had shaken the Emperor’s nerves. He was in a peculiarly brutal mood, and, with thumb turned towards his breast, he gave the fatal sign that the four netsmen should be slain. Three of them were so deeply wounded already that their limbs were bathed in blood, and without an instant’s pause the Samnites thrust their swords through them to the hilt. But the sight seemed to inspire Onesimus with some divine despair. He seized his trident and dagger--he had already gathered the net round his shoulder--and, springing towards one of the Samnites, flung, entangled, tripped, and stabbed him. Plucking his trident from the wound, but not waiting to recover his net, he flew on the second and smote him down. The third, who was already staggering from a wound received earlier in the fight dropped his arms and upheld his forefinger, and, before the fourth could recover from his amazement, Onesimus, leaving the defeated combatant, had again seized his net and chased his opponent with it in act to throw. Being far superior in speed, he swiftly overtook him, flung the net and, hurling his opponent to the ground, brandished his dagger over him. The peopled walls of the amphitheatre rang with shouts of delight and admiration. Never had they seen a more astonishing and gallant feat. This retiarius--and he a mere tiro--had, single-handed, defeated four Samnites in succession. The thing was unheard of. Every thumb was turned up for Onesimus to give the finishing stroke to his conquered enemy, and thousands of voices clamoured that, as the sole surviving victor of the combat, he should be rewarded with the palm and foil.
But the brief spasm of wrath was over. Onesimus could not and would not butcher his comrades in cold blood. He recognised in the young Samnite a gladiator named Kalendio, one of the least objectionable of his fellows in the school--the only one who had never gone out of his way to annoy or taunt him. At the same moment he caught sight of the body of Glanydon. A rush of tears blinded him; he flung down net and dagger and trident, and, retreating to the barrier, stood there with folded arms. The acclamations which had greeted his prowess were followed by a groan of astonishment and disappointment. Kalendio had by this time torn and cut himself free from the net, and sprang upon the unhappy Phrygian who had spared his life. Onesimus did not resist him or appeal for mercy; the Samnite, who was an utter stranger to the scruples and compunctions which had led Onesimus to spare him, drove his sword into him; life and sense flowed from him, and he fell heavily upon the bloody sand.
Chapter XL
THE SPOLIARIUM
‘Sanguinem quoque gladiatorum bibunt, ut viventibus poculis, comitiales morbi ... At hercule illi ex homine ipso sorbere efficacissimum putant calidum spirantemque, et una ipsam animam ex osculo vulnerum.’--PLINY, N. H. xxviii. 2.
A few days before the scene described in the last chapter there had been gladness in the bright but humble home of Pudens. He had risen to the rank of a primipilar centurion, and was now in a position to ask the British king Caradoc for the hand of his lovely Claudia. He had only delayed his nuptials until he felt himself able to give his bride a secure and fitting home. Everything was fresh and beautiful in the adornments of the house. The atrium was full of flowers and statues, the door was hung with garlands, the frescoes in the tablinum and triclinium were all new. No mythological scene had been admitted, but the walls of the triclinium were painted with festoons of fruit and flowers and trellises of roses, among which little winged genii held their sports; and the tablinum with scenes of street life and the toils of agriculture, and purple vineyards, as perfect as the pencil of Dorotheus could make them. One little corner of the fresco was universally admired as a masterpiece. Pudens had asked the painter to imitate one of the vases of iridescent glass which were then in fashion, and, in honour of Claudia, to fill it with lilies. Pudens had greatly admired a similar painting on the wall of the house of Germanicus on the Palatine (where it may be seen to this day), and in reproducing it Dorotheus had surpassed himself.
The betrothal had taken place some time before, and on that occasion Pudens had given to his future bride a golden necklace of old Etrurian workmanship, with pendants of amethyst. It gleamed round her fair neck as she sat waiting for the bridal summons in her father’s house, trying to dispel the gloom which fell on the old king when he recalled that he was losing for a time the light of his home.
All the ordinary conventions of a Roman marriage were carried out, except such as were purely pagan. Claudia was dressed in a long white tunic with purple fringe, bound round the waist with an embroidered girdle. Her bridal veil and her shoes were of bright yellow, as custom required, and the long fair hair which fell over her shoulders had been duly parted with the point of a spear. It was evening, and the three youths who were to accompany her stood laughing in the vestibule, and ready to start. One of them was Titus, who was to carry before her a torch of white-thorn; the other two were Flavius Clemens and young Aulus Plautius, who walked on either side to support her arms. The fourth lad, who was called the camillus, and who carried in a vase some of the bride’s jewels and childish playthings, was Marcus, the bright little son of Seneca. She herself bore in her hand a distaff and spindle full of wool, as a type of domestic industry. Outside the door waited her friends, five of whom carried wax candles and the others pine-wood torches. And so, with songs and laughter and snatches of the old Thalassio, the happy procession made its way through the streets till they reached the door of Pudens. When she had wound wool round the doorposts and touched them with wolf’s fat, his groomsmen--who were chiefly his brother-officers--lifted Claudia across the threshold to prevent any ill-omened stumble. Within the vestibule stood Pudens, with fire and water. These she had to touch, as symbols of purification, which might be regarded as Christian no less than pagan; and then she spoke the marriage formula--‘Where thou art Gaius I am Gaia.’ After this she was led to a seat upon an outspread sheepskin, and Pudens handed to her the keys of the house. The bridal supper followed, and its mirth was none the less sparkling from its perfect innocence.
By the wish of both Pudens and Claudia, the slaves of the household were invited to have their share in the festivities, which lasted for several days. But the newly wedded pair had in store for Nereus and his daughter Junia a bliss which they had not dared to anticipate. At the close of the week of rejoicing he bade them, with a smile, to accompany him to the Prætor’s tribunal. The order could have but one meaning--that he meant to set them free. The tears rushed into the old slave’s eyes. Nereus and Junia had, indeed, learnt to be content with any condition to which God called them, but now that liberty had spontaneously been offered they felt an almost incommunicable joy.
Pudens sympathised with them in their emotion, and, with a few cheering words, bade them walk behind him towards the Forum. The ceremony of emancipation was very brief. The centurion stated to the Prætor that he wished to manumit Nereus and Junia--of whom the latter had been born in his house--for their great merits and long faithfulness. The Prætor’s lictor laid a rod on each of their heads, with a slight blow, and turned them each round; then the Prætor declared them free in accordance with the right of citizens, and they became liberti. On their return home, the rest of the familia, formerly their fellow-slaves, received them with showers of sweetmeats and clapping of hands and congratulations, and were allowed to hold one more humble banquet in their honour.
Nereus still wished to serve Pudens and Claudia as their freedman; but it was arranged that he should live in lodgings near the house. He and Junia soon made the new home of their freedom look as pleasant as their circumstances admitted, and one evening they were sitting hand in hand thanking the Lord of their life for His mercy, when a timid knock was heard. Opening the door, Junia saw a pretty slave-girl, who asked to speak with her in private. Junia had known her as one of the slaves of Pedanius Secundus, and felt the deepest pity for her because she was afflicted with epilepsy--a disease which among the ancients was so ill-omened as to be the cause of endless trouble and distress.
There was but one remedy for the disease which the ancients thought perfectly efficacious, and it is conceivable that the desperate nature of this remedy may have had some mysterious effect upon the nerves, and have proved in some cases to be a real cure through its influence on the mind of the sufferer. It was to drink blood from a recent wound.
The consequences of a fit of epilepsy were disastrous. It was called the comitial disease, because its occurrence put an end to the most important business of the commonwealth by necessitating the dissolution of any public assembly. Consequently, persons so afflicted were condemned to a life of misery, and could never move about with freedom. Their presence in a house was regarded as a misfortune, and they were sometimes got rid of to save trouble. The pretty face and winning ways of poor young Syra had saved her, but since she heard of the supposed cure for her malady her one desire had been to avail herself of it.
This had made her go frequently to the games of the amphitheatre, and linger near the gate of Libitina, through which the confector, who had, when necessary, to give the finishing stroke, dragged the dead and wounded gladiators into the spoliarium. She had thus attracted the notice of the young slave Phlegon, who held this horrible office.
That he did so was not his own fault. He too was a slave of Pedanius, who had cruelly degraded him to this place in the amphitheatre as a punishment for a trivial offence, followed by an outbreak of resentment, when, in his younger days, he had been a favourite cup-bearer of his master. It would be useless to aver that his character had not been somewhat brutalised by the hideous duties forced upon him; but he regarded himself as the victim of necessity, and therefore as not responsible--a view not without a grim element of truth in the case of a pagan slave. Seeing Syra as she lingered about the amphitheatre, he had been struck by her helpless prettiness, and she had learnt to admire a face which still retained its good looks, if not its good expression. They fell in love with each other; but when she was forced to tell him of her misfortune, he declared all question of marriage to be impossible unless she were cured of her comitial disease. He had himself persuaded her to come this evening to the spoliarium after the games, and to try the remedy which alone seemed to offer any chance of success.
But poor Syra dared not go alone through the darkening, crowded, and vicious streets, and thought that Junia, as she was now a freedwoman, could protect her. Junia was always actuated by the principle as well as by the instinct of kindness. Not guessing the object of the girl’s errand, but knowing her hapless love for Phlegon, she consented to accompany her. It cost her a pang to leave her father on that happy evening, but she knew that with him, no less than with herself, the claims of charity were paramount, and all the more towards those who seemed to need it most.
‘Could you find no better youth to love than one of so dire a trade, Syra?’ she gently asked the girl, as, with their heads covered with shawls, they went in the deepening dusk down the Via Sacra towards the amphitheatre.
‘It is not his fault, Junia. He hates it. His heart is naturally pitiful. He was brought up in the midst of luxury in the house of Pedanius, where he was a favourite. But Pedanius is a wretch, and once he treated Phlegon so cruelly that, in a fit of rage, the boy struck him. He might have been crucified for it, or flung to the lampreys; but, instead of that, Pedanius made him take to this work in the amphitheatre. How else could he live?’
‘There are some lives worse than death,’ said Junia.
‘Well,’ answered Syra; ‘many a time he has longed to stab himself with his own sword; but ... he loves me.’
‘I did not mean that he should have killed himself,’ said Junia; ‘none of us have a right to fling away the life which God gives us. I meant that it would be worth while facing any risk to escape doing wrong.’
‘Nothing can be wrong which our masters make us do,’ answered Syra simply; and Junia could only sigh, for she knew that this was an axiom with both slaves and their masters.
By this time they had reached the outer door of the spoliarium, and, in answer to a whispered watchword, Phlegon admitted Syra, who promised to return very speedily, while Junia waited for her outside.
A few moments only had elapsed when Syra sprang out of the door agitated and breathless.
‘Oh, Junia!’ she cried; ‘I did it! I did it!’
‘Did what?’
‘I have drunk some blood from a fresh wound, and I am cured.’
‘Horrible!’ said Junia, with a shudder, now for the first time understanding what Syra had come for.
‘Yes; it was horrible,’ said the girl; ‘but how could I help it? Every one who saw me in a fit, however slight, used to spit so as to avert the omen. I tried everything first. I tried galbanum, garlic, hellebore; I ate some young swallows; I tried to get a bit of the liver of an elephant, or the brain of a camel, which they say is a certain remedy.[83] But how could I? Never mind! I am cured now. But oh, Junia!’ exclaimed the girl, ‘as he lay there’--
‘As who lay there?’
‘The young gladiator who fought so bravely to-day, and was dragged out by the hook as dead--well, he is not dead! His limbs were warm. I put my hand on his heart; there was a faint pulse.’
‘But who is he?’
‘I thought you knew him, for he was once a slave in your house--that young Phrygian.’
‘Onesimus!’ exclaimed Junia, with a startled cry.
‘Yes; that was his name. Did you not know that he fought as a net-thrower to-day?’
‘No,’ she answered faintly. ‘We never go to the games. I had long lost sight of him, and thought that he had left Rome, or was dead. Syra, save him!’
‘Phlegon will be glad to save him, if it can be done undiscovered. He loathes stabbing the poor gladiators when they have not quite been killed. Yet, if it were discovered that he spared but one of them, he would certainly be torn to pieces or crucified.’
Junia’s mind was instantly made up. At all costs, Onesimus should have such chance of life secured to him as nature rendered possible. She told Syra to let Phlegon speak with her. Entering the spoliarium, and repressing the awful sense of repugnance which almost made her faint as the dim light of his lamp glimmered over the heap of mangled corpses, she recognised the features of Onesimus, and convinced herself that the spark of life was not wholly quenched in him. Then, putting into the hand of the confector a gold coin which had been the gift of Claudia, she entreated him to let her come back and remove the hapless youth. He consented, and touched by her anguish, he himself took the body of the gladiator in his arms, laid him on his own pallet of straw, and poured some common Sabine wine down his throat. Junia, meanwhile, thankful now for the slave-girl’s company, went to the house of Linus, which was near at hand, and implored his aid. The good old pastor readily consented, and, when it was quite dark, took a mule and went with the two girls to the door of the spoliarium, where Phlegon awaited them.
He had not been idle. With such rough kindness as was possible to him he had washed away in tepid water the stains of blood from the breast and face of the poor gladiator, and had bandaged the deep wounds in his breast.
With tender care they lifted the still unconscious Phrygian upon a bundle of soft clothes which they had laid upon the mule. Linus, though the task was not without peril, agreed to tend and give him shelter for that night.
Then Junia fled back through the deserted streets. Nereus had begun to be anxious at her long delay, and listened to her story with a grave face. He had never liked Onesimus, and the youth’s many sins and errors might well have shaken his confidence. But he and Junia had read not long before the letter which Paul of Tarsus had written to their brother-Christians in Corinth; and, if he wavered for a moment, he was decided in the cause of mercy by Junia’s whispered words, ‘Love suffereth long and is kind; love thinketh no evil; beareth all things; believeth all things; endureth all things; hopeth all things.’
It was agreed that after dark next evening Nereus should remove the dreadfully wounded sufferer from the house of Linus. Pudens, to whom he told the whole story, arranged, with Claudia’s full consent, that Onesimus, as a former member of the household, should be concealed and tended in the hut of one of their country slaves who had charge of a little farm not far from Aricia. This peasant was a Christian, and he carried out the injunctions of his master with faithful kindness.
For many weeks Onesimus hung between life and death; at last, slowly, very slowly, he began to recover. Youth and the natural strength of his constitution, aided by the fresh air of the country, the pure milk, the quiet, the simple wholesome food, and the fact that there was nothing to thwart the recuperative forces of nature, won the day in the battle, and once more Death released the victim whom he seemed to hold securely in his grasp.
Chapter XLI
THE KING OF THE GROVE
‘Vallis Aricinæ sylva præcinctus opaca Est lacus, antiqua religione sacer.’
OVID, Fast. iii. 263.
When Onesimus recovered full consciousness he did not recognise his unfamiliar surroundings, and was too weak to piece together the broken threads of his memory. Gradually he recalled the incidents of the past. He remembered the gladiators’ school, the fight in the amphitheatre, the death of Glanydon, the recoil of feeling which prevented him from killing the Samnite Kalendio, even the sensation which he felt when the sword-thrust pierced his ribs. All the rest was darkness. Where was he? How had he been rescued from the spoliarium? How had he escaped the finishing blow of the confector?
Old Dromo, the vineyard-keeper, was very reticent, for he did not wish to endanger any of those who had taken part in the youth’s deliverance. But the quick intelligence of Onesimus, working upon broken hints conjectured that Nereus and Junia, as members of his old familia, must have had some share in saving his life. Pudens, when he visited his vineyard to receive his accounts, came and saw him, and spoke a few kindly words; but the youth could see that the centurion had lost his old regard for him. He saw no one else, except occasionally one of the peasant neighbours. Junia, of course, came not. Such a visit would have been impossible to her maiden modesty. What could she do but silently combat a love which she felt to be hopeless? How could she ever marry a gladiator with such a past, and with so hopeless a probable future--a renegade, to all appearance, from the faith of Christ? She could but pray for him, and then strive to prevent her thoughts from turning to him any more. And Nereus came not to see him. He distrusted him, as he thought of all the crimes through which he must have fallen, from the position of a Christian brother, into such a sink of degradation as a gladiators’ school.
Lonely, disgraced, abandoned, in deadly peril of his life from a hundred sources if once he should be recognised, prostrated by weakness, often suffering torments from the pain of wounds which as yet were but half healed, Onesimus sank deeper and deeper into despair. Repentance and the love of God may often grow in the midst of adversity, like some Alpine gentian amid the snows; but sometimes there is a deadliness in the chill of hopeless misfortune which kills every green leaf of faith. The youth, smitten by so many calamities, began to feel as though the river of his life, which might have been so full and rejoicing, had lost itself in mud and sand. His sun had gone down while it yet was day. What was he to do? How could he live? Why had they saved him? If Nereus and Junia and Pudens had done it, by what means he knew not, it was a cruel kindness. Why should they have preserved him to a destiny so miserable? Junia must despise him now: why should she have wished that his life should be spared?
He murmured against God in his heart. He cursed the day of his birth. He had had many chances and recklessly flung away one after another. Sometimes he thought of Christ and of all that he had heard from the lips of Paul in Ephesus about the Friend of publicans and sinners. But had he not denied the faith? Had he not lived like an apostate? If Christ could still love him, why was he left in all this misery and hopelessness? Why did no ray of light gleam through his darkened sky?
And thus he made his heart like the clay which the fire does but harden, not like the gold which it melts. But, notwithstanding his despair, he grew stronger. In two or three months his wounds healed, and he was free to leave his couch of hay and beechen leaves and to wander about the exquisite scenery of his temporary home. Aricia was built in a valley, the crater of an extinct volcano, at the foot of the Alban Mount. Below it the Lacus Nemorensis, ‘the Mirror of Diana,’ lay gleaming like a transparent emerald, while the steep lava slopes which descended to its level were rich with vineyards and groves and flowers.
But he seldom ventured out in the broad daylight. Aricia lay on the Appian road, only sixteen miles from Rome, and its hill was the haunt of a throng of clamorous beggars, who assailed with their importunity every vehicle that passed along that ‘queen of ways.’ Hundreds were familiar with the features of Onesimus, and, though their beauty was now impaired by pallor and emaciation, he might again be recognised, with fatal consequences. He only went out after sunset, and by the unfrequented paths which led him towards the grove of Diana and the Nemorensian lake. The lower slopes of the Alban Mount were so overshadowed with dense foliage that, among the woods, he could easily escape observation and indulge without disturbance in his melancholy thoughts.
One day, as he sat under a huge chestnut-tree, he heard the pipe of a shepherd lad driving home his herd of goats from the upland pastures; and, as the hut of the boy’s parents adjoined the lodge of Pudens’ vineyard, he recognised him as an acquaintance whose name was Ofellus. But instead of coming up to talk with him, as usual, the boy gave a low whistle and beckoned. Onesimus thought that Ofellus only wanted to play a game at mora after he had herded his goats, but the boy laid a finger on his lip, and made signs to him to be on his guard until they had got some distance from the place where he was sitting.
‘What is the matter?’ whispered the Phrygian, in alarm. ‘Is any one pursuing me?’
‘No,’ answered Ofellus, ‘but if the king sees you he will think you mean mischief.’
‘The king! What king?’
‘Don’t you know?’ said the boy. ‘Come and help me to drive in my goats, and I will tell you.’
When they were well out of the grove, and the goats, with their frisking kids, which gave Ofellus so much trouble, were safe in their pen, the boy said: ‘We may speak aloud now; but don’t you really know who the king is?’
‘I did not know that Romans had had a king since Tarquin the Proud,’ said Onesimus, laughing; ‘unless you mean some Jewish or Eastern Alabarch, like Herod or Izates.’
‘No, no,’ said Ofellus, ‘but the priest of yon temple has been called for ages “the King of the Grove.”’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know why, except that there are some sacrifices which only a king can offer; so they have to call him king, just as they call one of the priests at Rome “the King of the Sacred Rites.”’
‘Well, but why were you in such terror of this so-called king?’
Again the boy lifted up his hands in astonishment, with the question, ‘Don’t you know?’
Onesimus explained that he was an Asiatic, and did not know much about the neighbourhood of Rome. Ofellus therefore garrulously poured out the legend of the place. ‘There was once some Greek or other,’ he said, ‘named Hippolytus, who had vowed to live a virgin life for Diana. He was killed by the jealousy of his father, who got Neptune to frighten his chariot horses with a sea monster. So the poor youth was flung out of his chariot, and dragged to death. Then Diana brought him here, and raised him to life again, and called him Virbius, and he was her priest. But, because he was raised to life, every priest has to murder his predecessor before he can be priest himself.’
‘And may any one kill the priest who can?’
‘Yes, but first they’ve to pluck the golden bough.’
‘The golden bough?’
‘Yes. It is not really golden, you know; it is that yellow-white plant, which grows on an old oak in the wood.’
‘Mistletoe?’ said Onesimus.
‘Yes. If a man wants to be king he has to pluck it, and then fight or murder the present king. If he fails he is killed; if he wins he kills the king, and becomes king in his place.’
‘Is the king often killed?’
‘Very often. Some runaway slave is sure to kill him, and so escape the cross or the branding-iron. Hardly a year passes that he is not attacked. My father says that, before I was born, one king, who was very strong and fierce, was priest for a good many years; and then the Emperor Caligula, out of sheer mad malice, sent a strong young slave on purpose to kill him.’
‘But what harm would the king have done to us?’
‘None to a boy like me, nor to one who is free-born; but--’
‘You take me for a runaway slave?’ asked Onesimus.
Ofellus nodded his head, and added, ‘I saw the king among the trees.’ And then he quoted an old Roman song about--
‘The dim lake that sleeps Beneath Aricia’s trees; The trees in whose dim shadow The ghastly priest doth reign: The priest who slew the slayer, And shall himself be slain.’
Onesimus, too, had seen the Priest of Diana; but, as he was some distance off, had not observed him closely. Now, however, the goat-boy’s words seized his attention. Whoever succeeded in killing the Nemorensian King was secure from the consequences of all past misdeeds, and had ample maintenance and a fine spacious temple to live in. Wandering down the rocky bed of the stream sacred to Egeria, Onesimus had seen the shrine, and had wondered why the trees around it were hung with so many gay woollen streamers, and so many votive tablets; and why women came to it from Rome with garlands on their heads and torches in their hands; and why they treated the priest with so much reverence.
Surely the man’s life was a ghastly one, with a murder on his conscience and a murderer on his track! Yet a terrible purpose gradually fixed itself in the mind of Onesimus. He persuaded himself that he was utterly God-forsaken; that such a deluge of calamities could not otherwise have come upon him. Every hope of his life was frustrated; for him there seemed no future possibility of honesty, or happiness, or home, and his heart was burdened with the sore weight of a hopeless love. Why should he not become the King of the Arician Grove? ‘The king is always a runaway slave.’ Those words of Ofellus rang in his ear. He was regaining strength. He was swift of foot. His gladiatorial training had taught him how to wield a sword. If Christ had forsaken him, why should not he forsake Christ? What mattered it that he would soon be murdered in his turn? For a few years, at any rate, he might keep his life, and be in honour, and share in gay festivals. He resolved to watch for his opportunity, and to try his chance.
Full of his desperate purpose, he stole under the dark shadows of the trees, with no guide but the straggling starlight, to find the great oak which Ofellus had described to him. It grew deep in the green hollow close beside the lake, and the hoary mistletoe tufted its upper branches. He climbed the tree, plucked ‘the golden bough,’ and waited for the rising of the moon to attack the Arician priest if he came out of the temple, as he usually did, before he went to rest.
It was not long before the moon began to silver the dense foliage of the grove, and then he heard a wicket open, and from the place where he knelt crouched among the brushwood he saw the tall figure of the priest, whose shadow fell across the sward and almost reached his hiding-place. He was a gaunt-looking man, but of powerful frame. He carried a large sword in his hand and looked round him suspiciously on every side.[84] In his excitement Onesimus moved, and a fallen branch snapped under his foot. The priest looked round with a startled glance, and Onesimus could see his features working in the moonlight. He had armed himself for his frightful purpose with the only weapon he could find--a reaping-hook, which he took down from Dromo’s wall. Listening intently, the priest walked along the grassy path, but as no other sound followed he seemed to relax his vigilance and turned back. Then, with a sudden shout, Onesimus sprang upon him.
But habitual terror had made the priest an adept at self-defence. It was impossible to take him wholly off his guard. At the first sound he turned, quick as lightning, and, dropping his sword, seized with one arm the hand which grasped the reaping-hook--the gleam of which he had caught in the moonlight--and with the other dealt Onesimus a blow on the face which knocked him stunned upon the turf. To stoop over his prostrate form and wrench from his grasp the reaping-hook, was the work of a moment. With a scornful laugh he flung the weapon over the wall which enclosed the sacred shrine, and then placed his foot on the youth’s breast.
Onesimus came to his senses, felt the heavy foot on his breast, and opened his eyes.
‘So,’ said the priest, with a grim laugh, ‘you wanted to be Rex Nemorensis, did you? It’s none so enviable a post, let me tell you; and it will take a stronger and craftier man than you to kill Croto when his day comes.’
‘Kill me at once,’ said the Phrygian, with a groan.
Croto stooped to pick up his sword, and placed its point at the throat of his assailant; but he paused. ‘By Hercules,’ he said--‘or perhaps officially I ought to say by Virbius--I have seen this face before!’
Onesimus looked up at him, and dimly recalled the slave-prison at Antium.
‘Do you know me?’ asked the priest.
‘I once gave an aureus to a man named Croto to let me escape from a slave-prison. You are like him.’
‘I am Croto,’ said the priest, again laughing grimly. ‘Is that how you repay your benefactor? Do you know that it is through you I am here, and am never sure any day of not being murdered before evening? Some sneaking slave betrayed that I had let you escape from Antium. I was threatened with chains and torture. I had seen enough of that sort of thing, so I fled. I thought of Aricia; plucked the golden bough, as I see you have done; and killed Manius, my predecessor.’
‘I did not know,’ answered Onesimus. ‘Kill me. I ask nothing better.’
But Croto still did not drive home the sword. ‘Poor wretch!’ he said. ‘You are but a youth, and are you tired of life already?’
‘Utterly tired, or I should not have been the wicked fool I have shown myself to-night.’
‘Why should I kill thee?’ said Croto. ‘Swear never again to attack me, and thou shalt go unscathed.’
‘It would be kinder to kill a wretch whom God hates.’
‘Go,’ said Croto. ‘Diana has so many victims, she can spare this one. Give me your “golden bough,” and let us part good friends.’
Onesimus rose, miserable and crestfallen. ‘I am penniless,’ he said, ‘or I would try to show myself grateful.’
‘Tush!’ answered Croto. ‘I am King of the Grove and priest of Diana and of Virbius--whoever Virbius was,’ he added under his breath. ‘The women give me so many offerings that, but for the never knowing where or when the sword will smite, I should be as fat as a Salian, and I feed nearly as well. Nay, poor lad, I can well do something for thee and never feel the loss. I have more money than I know what to do with, for I can never leave the grove. Take some. I dare say you will need it.’
He forced into the youth’s hands a leather bag, full of silver coins, and turned away. Onesimus stood abashed in the moonlight. Then he burst into tears. He had found pity and magnanimity in the heart of the doomed and murderous fugitive! Was there no hope for such a man? Shall any germ of good in man’s soul perish unperfected? Shall generosity and forgiveness pass without their reward? The unexpected mercy extended to him by the grim priest of Virbius, in that dark wood of Nemi, brought a blessing to Onesimus, and as he went back to Dromo’s hut, the whole scene--the lake, the white mist, the moonlit-silvered foliage, the twinkling of the stars, the song of the nightingale, the silence of the hills--fell with a healing touch on the anguish of his heart.
Chapter XLII
A MASSACRE OF SLAVES
‘Frigidus a rostris manat per compita rumor.’
HOR. Sat. II. vi. 50.
‘Servos in numero hominum esse non pateris?’--SEN. Ep. xlvii., ap. Macrob. Sat. i. 11.
Rome was in a state of wild excitement. The city had hardly been more agitated when the news of Caligula’s murder had spread among the citizens. The assassination of an emperor was always a possible event. The little human divinity was certain to make so many enemies, and was envied by so many powerful rivals, that the fate of Cæsar after Cæsar made it no more than a nine days’ wonder if another fell. But the victim this time was not a Cæsar. It was one of the chief men in the city, a man of consular rank--no less a person than the Præfect of the city, Pedanius Secundus.
And the dread news was whispered from mouth to mouth that he had been murdered by one of his own slaves!
The people in the Forum and the Velabrum and the Subura and at Libo’s Well, and the merchants at the Janus, and the patricians in their palaces, and the priests in the temples, and the boys of Rome as they played on the steps of the Julian Basilica, were all discussing this sinister event.
Tigellinus and Petronius, and a group of courtiers, were standing together under the porch of the Temple of Castor when the news reached them. They eagerly questioned the messenger.
‘Is it certain that the murderer was a slave?’ asked Tigellinus in tones of horror.
‘He was caught red-handed,’ said the messenger. ‘The dagger was wrenched from him, dripping with blood. His name is Vibius and he does not deny the crime.’
‘And what was his motive?’
‘Some say that the Præfect had promised him his liberty for a certain sum of money. The slave pinched himself for years to raise it, and when he brought the money Pedanius broke his bargain.’
The hearers only shrugged their shoulders.
‘That happens commonly enough,’ said Cæcina Tuscus, Nero’s foster-brother, who had himself been born a slave.
‘It only meant,’ said Senecio, ‘that the Præfect had changed his mind.’
‘Others say,’ continued the man, ‘that Pedanius had a favourite, who had been also a favourite of Vibius, who was driven wildly jealous.’
‘The notion of a slave presuming to have a favourite!’ lisped the effeminate Quintianus. ‘What next?’
‘How many slaves had Pedanius?’ asked Petronius.
‘Four hundred.’
‘Is that all?’ said Tigellinus. ‘It is lucky that he had no more. They will be executed, every one of them--that’s one comfort. Let us thank the gods for the Silanian law.’
They saw Seneca approaching them; and it was evident that he had heard the news, for his face wore a look of sorrow and alarm.
‘How say you, Seneca?’ asked Lucan; ‘is the Silanian law to be carried out, and are all Pedanius’s four hundred slaves to die?’
‘I should hope not,’ said the philosopher, indignantly. ‘What! are we to butcher this multitude, of whom three hundred and ninety-nine are probably innocent? The Silanian law is fit for barbarians. Every good feeling within us abhors the cruel wrong of murdering young and old, innocent and guilty, in one promiscuous massacre.’
‘But that the Præfect of Rome should be murdered by one of his own slaves!’ murmured his hearers.
‘By one of his own slaves--but maddened, report says, by an intolerable wrong.’
‘Wrong?’ answered Vestinus, in surprise. ‘Are not, then, our slaves our chattels? Has a slave rights?’
‘He has the rights of a human being,’ answered Seneca. ‘Are not our slaves of the same flesh and blood as we? Has not a slave feelings? Has not a slave passions?’
‘Yes; very bad passions,’ said young Vedius Pollio.
‘Do they stand alone in that respect?’ asked Seneca, fixing a keen look on him. ‘Do masters never show bad passions?’
Every one understood the allusion, for in the days of Augustus the young man’s ancestor, Vedius Pollio, had ordered a slave to be flung into the fish-pond to feed the lampreys, merely because he fell and broke a crystal vase. Augustus, who was dining with Pollio that day, was so indignant that he ordered the slave to be set free, and every crystal vase in the house to be broken.
‘Seneca will begin to think himself mistaken if I say that I agree with him,’ said Petronius. ‘Nevertheless, I do. I cannot bear to enter a friend’s house and hear it clanking with chains and ringing with yells, like an ergastulum.’
‘Petronius is the soul of good nature,’ said Cassius Longinus; ‘but I pity Rome if those maudlin views prevail.’
‘Yes,’ echoed the fierce Cingonius Varro; ‘so many slaves so many foes. We nobles live all our lives in a sort of beleaguered garrison. If the Senate does not do its duty, I shall emigrate.’
‘Who makes our slaves our foes?’ answered Seneca. ‘Mine are not. Most of them are faithful to me. They are my humble friends. I believe they love me. I know that many of them would die for me. We become slaves ourselves because we have so many.’
‘Tush!’ said Scævinus. ‘These sentimentalities will ruin us. Why, some of us have a thousand slaves, and some of us have more. We don’t know their names, and have to keep a nomenclator to tell us. Galba is the only person I know who keeps up the ridiculous old fashion of all the slaves and freedmen coming in twice daily, to say “Good morning” and “Good evening.” Are we to waste our time in trying to curry favour with them? I rule mine by the lash and the chain and the torture. Ha! Pudens, my grave newly-wedded primipilar; here will be some work for you.’
‘Never!’ said Pudens. ‘I would rather resign my commission than carry out the Silanian law and superintend the slaughter of the innocent.’
‘And you, my young Titus?’ asked Petronius. ‘I hear you are going soon to see some military service. Do you think that your step-mother Cænis and the boy Domitian will be able to keep your slaves in order?’
‘We have but few, Petronius,’ said Titus; ‘but they love us. When I was ill, all the familia were as tender in their attentions as if they had been brothers.’
‘Like to like,’ whispered Tigellinus. ‘He is half of slave-origin himself.’
‘And what may your origin be?’ asked Vestinus, to whom the remark had been made, and who loathed Tigellinus.
The rumour had spread that all the slaves of Pedanius were to be executed, and the attitude of the people grew very threatening. Many of them had been slaves themselves, and many of them lived in intimacy with the slave population, which immensely outnumbered the freedmen. Familiar with the insolence and the exactions of the wealthy, they assembled in throngs and demanded that there should be a trial, and that the innocent should be spared. Their language became so menacing that the Senate was hastily convened. It was hoped by all the more just and kind of the senators that mild counsels would prevail, and the Silanian decree be repealed or modified. They pointed out that the extreme rarity of the crime showed that the peril was not great; that, in this particular instance, Pedanius, besides being a merciless master, had provoked his own fate; that there was not a tittle of evidence to prove the complicity of the familia in this deed of isolated vengeance; that it would be monstrous to kill innocent boys and girls, and faithful men and women, for one madman’s crime. But the Senate was carried away partly by the selfish fears of many of its members, and partly by the impassioned speech of Cassius Longinus. An eminent jurist, a conservative who considered the traditions of the past incomparably superior to the wisdom of the present, a man of great wealth, high rank, and a certain Roman integrity, he rose in his place, and threw the weight of his influence into the scale of the old pagan ruthlessness.
‘Often have I been present, Conscript Fathers,’ he said, ‘at meetings of the Senate in which I have only protested by my silence against the innovations which are almost invariably for the worse. I did not wish you to think that I was unduly biassed by my personal studies, nor did I wish to weaken such weight as I may possess by too frequent and fruitless interpositions. But to-day the commonwealth demands my undivided efforts. A consular of Rome has been murdered in his own house by a slave’s treachery, and an unrepealed decree of the Senate threatens punishment to the whole family of slaves who neither prevented nor revealed the plot. Decree impunity for them, that when the chief magistracy of the city has been no protection we may each of us, forsooth, be defended by our own dignity! Who can be protected by any number of slaves, if four hundred were not enough to protect Pedanius Secundus? If fear did not suffice to make his slaves vigilant, which of us will be safe? There are some who do not blush to pretend,’ he continued, darting an angry glance at Seneca, ‘that the murderer did but avenge his own wrongs! Let us, then, pronounce at once that Pedanius was justly murdered! Are we to argue a case which our wiser ancestors have already decided? Why, even if the decision had now to be made for the first time, do you imagine that a slave would have had the daring to murder his master without one threat, without one rash murmur about his design? He concealed his plan, forsooth; he prepared his dagger, and no one knew of it! Could he, then, with equal facility pass through the slaves who were on night-watch, unfasten the doors of the bedchamber, carry in a light, perpetrate the bloody deed, without one person being aware of it? Guilt betrays itself beforehand in many ways. If slaves reveal to us our peril, we can live, though we be single among multitudes, safe among those who tremble for themselves--at the worst not unavenged among the guilty. Our ancestors looked with suspicion on the character of slaves, even when the slaves, born on their estates or in their houses, had learnt from infancy to love their master. But in these days we count nations among our households. Their rites are different; their religions are foreign or nil. We cannot keep in order this sink and scum of humanity except by fear. But, you say, “some of the innocent will perish among them.” Be it so! Are no brave soldiers beaten to death with rods when a routed army is punished by decimation? No great example can be inflicted without some unfairness, but the public advantage outweighs the individual injustice; and in any case, if four hundred slaves do perish, it will be a cheap loss.’
There was more than one senator who burned to refute the glittering sophisms and cruel hardness of the jurist’s speech; but Pætus Thrasea was absent, as he often was, and Seneca was cowed by his habitual timidity. He felt how easily he could have torn the speech of Longinus into shreds, and with what genuine lightnings of indignant conviction he could have shattered its pedantries and its inhumanity. But he had not the nerve to confront the impulses of a selfish panic. He longed to plead the cause of mercy and of justice, as he was so well capable of doing, and had the murmurs of dissent which the speech of Cassius evoked been but a little louder he might have plucked up courage and have saved the Senate from a deed of blood. But it was whispered on all sides that Nero leaned to severity, and Seneca’s heart failed him once more. The murmurs died away; and Cingonius Varro, emboldened by the devilish plea of necessity, rose to propose further that not only the slaves of Pedanius should be killed, but all the freedmen who lived under his roof be banished. Nero, however, made known that, while he did not wish the ancient severity to be mitigated, neither did he wish it to be increased, and the proposal dropped without a seconder.
But let us notice in passing that retribution followed cruelty. The merciless met with no mercy themselves. Cassius, who meanwhile had become blind, was not long afterwards banished by Nero to unwholesome Sardinia. Varro, a little later, was put to death by Galba just after he had become Consul elect. Many who thus voted for the murder of the innocent were murdered though innocent themselves.
The Senate might decree, but the people were indignant even to fury. Those who knew one or other of these poor slaves, and knew their innocence of what had been an act of sudden fury on the part of Vibius, did their utmost to raise a tumult. Hermas, the slave of Pedanius, whom Onesimus had seen in the Antian ergastulum, was known to all the Christians as one of their brethren; and though their principles forbade them to resist the decree of the state by violence, their lamentations and appeals that some pity should be extended to the victims stirred the hearts of the multitude. And they knew that many senators and Prætorians were in their favour. At one time an attempt at rescue seemed probable. A crowd armed with stones and torches gathered in front of the house of Pedanius, where the four hundred slaves were now in chains under a guard of soldiers. But they were terrified by the blind deification of the imperial authority, and a mixed and cowardly mob found no leader to inspirit them to attack the house.
Titus was deeply moved and excited, and he went to his old friend Pudens to see if anything could be done. Pudens was dreading lest he should be appointed to see the execution carried out. When Claudia, hanging on his shoulder and looking into his manly face with her innocent blue eyes, entreated him to fear God rather than man, he assured her with a kiss and a smile, that at all costs, even at the cost of martyrdom, he would refuse. But Nereus had told him about poor Hermas, and the sweet and engaging character of that young man was so well known in the Christian community, that Pudens would have been ready if possible to provide for his escape.
‘I wish,’ said Titus, ‘that Onesimus had not been killed as he is said to have been at the last gladiatorial show. There is a rumour that, after all, he escaped with his life, but if so he has disappeared, poor fellow, no one knows where. He helped us when Britannicus was in danger. He might help us now.’
The centurion shook his head. He knew nothing of the attack on the King of the Grove, and supposed that Onesimus was still with Dromo at Aricia, but he thought it safest to say nothing about him even to Titus.
They could think of no step to take; but Nereus, who, as a confidential freedman, had been present, heard the hint, and he determined to act upon it on his own responsibility. He knew that Onesimus was not available, but he knew a young Christian slave-boy named Protasius in the house of Pudens who had been acquainted with some of the home-born slaves of Pedanius, and was thus familiar[*12] with the slaves’ cells in his house. There was no time to lose. The massacre was to be carried out the next day. Nereus went to the boy, who said that he knew of a little neglected window half hidden by thick bushes in the peristyle, and if he could only get there he could make his way to the cell of Hermas. The night would be dark and moonless, yet the risk would be terrific, the chance almost hopeless. But the Christians were taught not to hold their lives dear unto themselves, and they considered that martyrdom in the cause of duty was the most glorious of crowns. Further than this, they always acted together, as a faithful, secret, well-organized body. With the connivance of the Prætorian Vitalis, who was a Christian, Nereus found means to get the boy introduced into the house, and, creeping along in the darkness, he found Hermas tied with cords in his cell. He had taken a knife with him, the rope was quickly severed, and both he and Hermas, knowing every intricacy of the house and grounds, got away in safety with an ease which they attributed to the special interposition of Heaven in their behalf. What were those glimmering lights which seemed to flash and fade in the dim silence as they stole through the peristyle? Was not some white angel of God helping to deliver them, as angels had stood by the three youths in the furnace, and had liberated Peter and John from prison? The belief aided them, for it gave them a confidence which was ready for any emergency, and contributed in no small measure to the unheard-of facility of their escape.
Nereus had confided to Junia his secret attempt to save Hermas, and she pleaded that something should be done at the same time to save the hapless Syra, who in the mean time had been married to Phlegon. But this proved to be impossible. All the women slaves were shut up in the triclinium together, and the door was carefully guarded. Syra remained among the doomed. Phlegon was still technically the slave of Pedanius, but as he was not in the household he had been passed over. This was poor Syra’s only comfort, and it was taken from her. Phlegon left his duties at the spoliarium, and behaved so menacingly in the mob that he was seized and, on the evidence of a freedman, included in those set apart for execution.
Meanwhile, after the humiliating adventure in the grove of Diana, Onesimus was unwilling to linger at Aricia. With no plan, but in the restlessness of despair, he disguised himself as well as he could, and by unfrequented paths slunk back to Rome, not knowing and not caring what might befall him there. He slept under the vestibule of the Temple of Mars, and next morning, mingling with the crowd that surged through the streets, he heard that the dreadful sentence against the slaves of Pedanius was to be carried into immediate execution. All thoughts of a rescue had been abandoned, for Nero had published a notice that any interference with the sentence would be treated with the extremest penalty. The clang of soldiers’ armour was heard on every side, and Prætorians lined the entire distance between the house of Pedanius and the remote part of the Esquiline, where the slaves were to be killed. The poor victims, tied together by fours, were led out of the house. Eagerly Onesimus scanned their faces, and was glad that he did not see the face of Hermas among them.
A little delay occurred when the soldiers on guard discovered that Hermas had escaped, but as they themselves ran serious peril of being punished for carelessness in the matter, they prudently held their tongues.
When the procession began to move, the wail which rose from the doomed victims was taken up by the multitude, and they abandoned themselves to their emotions with all the passion of a Southern people. They wept and wrung their hands, and raised their arms to heaven, as though to appeal for vengeance. But the Prætorians surrounded the slaves with drawn swords, and armed gladiators, who lined the streets, sternly thrust back the surging mob. A ghastly sense of fascination drew Onesimus to the scene of execution. There was no time to be particular as to the mode of death. The soldiers, dreading a riot, were chiefly anxious to get through their odious task as quickly as possible. One after another, amid groans and shrieks, and pools of blood, old grey-haired men and women, and young boys and little children and fair girls, had the sword driven into their throats or through their hearts. The agony of the boys was pitiable to witness. Some of them had belonged to the order of slaves who were chosen for their beauty, were dressed in rich robes, and pampered with every form of luxury and indulgence. Their mode of life had left no courage in them, and death meant to them the end of all things, or some tormenting Tartarus. But in vain they wept, in vain they pleaded for mercy.
On the other hand, the high bearing of some of the slaves moved a deeper pity than the fate of these victims of luxury and cruelty. For some of the Christians in the household of Pedanius, who had not been so fortunate as Hermas, knew that their brethren were looking on with prayer and sympathy, and went to their fate, not only with Stoic dignity, but with beautiful humility and simple peace. They felt something of the glory of martyrdom. A light shone in their upturned faces, and there was an accent as of music in their murmured prayers. There were a few of their heathen fellow-sufferers who bared their breasts to the sword with stolid indifference, and even with unseemly levity; but the Christians went to death as to a coronation. One poor boy--his name was Verus--moved many to tears. When first he heard the groans of those who fell as the sword smote them, he shrank back and trembled, for he was little more than a child. His father had become a convert of Linus, and he had caused his children to be baptised in infancy, and this was his favourite son. Even in that evil slave-household the boy had grown up unstained, like some white lily whose roots are in the mud. When Verus saw the sword driven into his father’s heart, he sprang back with a cry, and in his excitement grasped the hand of one of the legionaries. The brutal executioner flung him back so violently that he fell. Instantly regaining his composure, he rose to his knees, clasped his hands, and turning his eyes heavenwards, began to pray--‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ At that moment the sun shone forth out of dark clouds, and as the light streamed over him, and made a natural aureole round his bright hair, they saw his face as it had been the face of an angel. Even the soldier who had raised his hand to strike stood amazed, and delayed his blow. But with a jeer the ruffian who had flung him back, brought down his sword on the boy’s head. He fell without a word, and the blood streamed over the bright face, and bedabbled the fair hair. As for Syra and Phlegon, they stood hand in hand in mute despair, and perished together, having known no consolation in life but their pure love for each other, and appalled by the mystery which crowned lives so miserable as theirs had been with a death so cruel and undeserved.
In vain the agonised spectators cursed the soldiers, cursed the dead Pedanius, cursed the Senate, and in their madness did not even refrain from cursing Nero. Before an hour was over the deed was done. The yet warm bodies, the yet palpitating limbs, of these three hundred and ninety-eight victims, were flung into one of the deep pits of the Esquiline, and a cartload of sawdust soaked up the bloody traces of that slaughter of the innocent.
Sickened, dazed, horrified, Onesimus left the dreadful scene, and went back to the Forum, where he sat half-stunned, on the steps of the great Julian Basilica. The life of Rome was going on as though nothing had happened. Peasants were selling chestnuts and olives and macerated chickpeas to the crowd. Idlers were sauntering up and down, occasionally stopping to listen to the lampoons of a bawling poetaster, or to watch the tame vipers of a snake-charmer. Others, who could not stand poets reciting in the dog-days, were devoting their attention to the performances of a learned pig.[85] The vestal Rubria passed by in all the pride of her stola, and tasselled pallium, and jewelled necklace, amid the deep reverence of the people, and unconscious of the coming doom which Nero’s vileness had soon in store for her. Boys were playing at draughts on the circles which they had cut in the marble pavement, where they may still be seen. The swallows twittered and chased each other about under the blue sky; but nothing could charm away the gloom of the Phrygian’s heart, and with his head bent over both palms he sat, the picture of despair.
A touch on the shoulder, the whisper of his name, made him spring to his feet in alarm; but looking round he saw the bright, honest face of Titus smiling down on him.
‘How did you recognise me?’ he asked.
‘A disguise does not often deceive me,’ said Titus; ‘but I recognised you by your figure and attitude. I won’t betray you. Come here, behind the shrine of Vesta, and tell me about yourself.’
‘How wretched and ill you look!’ he said, as they stood alone under the shadow of the little circular temple and the House of the Vestals. ‘Where have you been this long time? What has happened to you? Why are you here? I was mentioning you to Pudens only this morning, and if we had known that you were in Rome you might have been of use.’
‘You once helped to save my life,’ said Onesimus, ‘when I did not deserve it. I will tell you all.’
He gave an outline of what had befallen him, concealing only the shameful attack on the Rex at Aricia.
‘And what will you do now?’ asked Titus.
‘Starve--beg--die!’ he answered, in deep dejection.
‘Listen,’ said Titus. ‘I have just heard from Pudens that he is likely to be sent to a command in Britain, and I shall go with him. Claudia will accompany him, and the old British king, Caractacus. I think that when you left Aricia you might have come to Pudens and shown yourself more grateful for his kindness. But the centurion is very good and forgiving, and, if I ask him, I am sure that he will let you go with us to Britain.’
Onesimus longed to accept the offer, but he thought of Junia. He was near her now.
‘Is Nereus to go?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Titus. ‘Nereus is a freedman now, and he is too old for so distant a voyage and so hard a service.’
Then Onesimus confessed his love for Junia, and the wild hope which he still entertained that he might some day be accepted by her. Humbly he took the hand of Titus and kissed it, and said--
‘Forgive me; I will struggle on as best I may.’
‘Nay,’ said Titus; ‘I have not forgotten what you once did for me and Britannicus, though in that matter, too, you fell short afterwards. I never forget Britannicus,’ he added, sadly, and stood for a moment silent. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I know two people in Rome, besides Pudens, who are good and kind. One is my uncle, Flavius Sabinus; the other is Pomponia Græcina. I am sure that one of them would find some place for you. Acte has asked about you more than once, and was, I know, fond of you. But it would not be safe for you to enter Nero’s Palace again.’
‘Then let me serve the lady Pomponia, if I may.’
‘Follow me,’ said Titus; ‘I will see what I can do for you.’
Their way led towards the Capenian Gate, where the Appian Road enters the city. They had not proceeded far when they met a procession of humble people thronging round a band of soldiers, who were entering Rome in charge of several prisoners.
Chapter XLIII
A NOTABLE PRISONER
‘He that hath light within his own clear breast, May sit i’ the centre, and enjoy bright day; But he that hath a dark soul, and foul thoughts, Benighted walks under the mid-day sun; Himself is his own dungeon.’
MILTON, Comus.
A Roman centurion, whose armour gleamed in the sun, was walking at the head of the decuria of soldiers, several of whom were attached by a loose coupling chain to the arms of various prisoners. The spectacle was common enough, and in the varied turmoil of the principal thoroughfare, with the stream of travellers which swept to and fro about the capital of the world, there was nothing in it to attract notice. But the interest felt in one of the prisoners had induced a throng of people--mostly foreigners, slaves, and artisans-- to go and meet him.
Titus recognised in the centurion an old friend. ‘Ha, Julius!’ he cried; ‘so you have returned from Cæsarea. You will have long stories to tell us about those curious and turbulent Jews. Will you sup with my father to-night? You will be welcome.’
‘Yes!’ said Julius, ‘gladly, for I am tired with a long day’s march.’
‘You know our frugal ways. You will have to recline on couches made only by Archias, and sup mainly on vegetables off earthenware plates,’ said Titus laughing, and quoting Horace.
‘It will be a supper of the gods after our fare in the nights and days of storm on the Adramyttian ship off Clauda and Malta,’ said Julius. ‘But I must hurry on now to hand over my prisoners to the Prætorian Præfect.’
‘Who are your prisoners?’
‘They are of the ordinary sort except one. He is the strangest, bravest, wisest man I ever met; and yet he is a fanatical Jew--one of this new sect which the mob calls Christians.’
‘Which is he?’
Julius pointed to a prisoner chained to the foremost soldier, on either side of whom nearly all the visitors were grouped, listening eagerly to every word he uttered, and showing him every sign of love and reverence. He was a man with the aquiline nose and features of his race, somewhat bent, somewhat short of stature, evidently from his gestures a man of nervous and emotional temperament. His hair had grown grey in long years of hardship. Many a care and peril and anxiety had driven its ploughshare across his brow. His cheeks were sunken, and the eyes, though bright, were disfigured by ophthalmia. He was evidently short-sighted, but as he turned his fixed and earnest look now on one, now on another of his companions, the expression of his deeply-marked face was so translucent with some divine light within, that those who once saw him felt compelled to look long on a countenance of no ordinary type of nobleness.
Titus gazed at him. Nothing could be more unlike the worn and weary Jew who had been buffeted by so many storms and escaped from so many terrific perils, than was the athletic young Roman, with his short fair hair which curled round a face ruddy in its prime of youth and health. In the prisoner’s aspect there was none of the Roman dignity which marked the look and bearing of Pætus Thrasea; none of the manly independence which looked the whole world in the face from the eyes of Cornutus or Musonius Rufus; none certainly of the rich Eastern beauty which marked Aliturus or the Herodian princes. Yet Titus as he watched him was, for a moment, too much astonished to speak.
‘He looks all you say of him,’ he murmured. ‘Who is he?’
‘His name is Paulus of Tarsus. He is evidently a great leader among these Christians.’
Hitherto Onesimus, absorbed in his own sad reflections, had neither heeded the throng, nor attended to the conversation between Titus and Julius. But suddenly he caught the name, and looked up with a hasty glance.
He saw before him not a few of the Christian community of Rome. Many of them were known to him. Nereus was there and Junia; and from the household of Cæsar he recognised Tryphæna and Tryphosa and Herodion; and there were Linus, and Cletus, and the soldiers Urban and Celsus, and Claudia Dicæosyne, wife of a freedman of Narcissus, and Andronicus, and Alexander, and Rufus, sons of Simon of Cyrene who had borne Christ’s cross, and many more.
In a single glance he took in the presence of these, and a sense of danger flashed across him, lest any one of them, perhaps a false brother, should penetrate his disguise as Titus had done. But it was not at them that he looked. His whole being was absorbed in the gaze which he fixed on him whom he had always heard spoken of as the Apostle Paulus.
Yes, there he stood; his face thinner and more worn than of old, his hair now almost white with an age which was reckoned less by years than by labours and sorrows; but otherwise just as he was when Philemon had gone from Colossæ and taken with him his boy-slave to listen to the words of impassioned reasoning and burning inspiration which Paul poured forth at Ephesus in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. What a flood of memories surged over the young Phrygian’s soul as he saw him! As though his life, since then, had been written in lightning, he thought in one instant of that long tale of shame and sorrow--from the theft at Colossæ to the wanderings with the priests of the Syrian goddess, the gladiators’ school, the attempted murder at Aricia. It all flashed upon his recollection, and he felt as if he could sink to the earth for shame. His first impulse was to spring forward and cast himself at the Apostle’s feet. But he heard Julius say that they had halted too long, and that he must press forward with his charge. The word ‘Forward, soldiers!’ was given, and Onesimus hid himself behind a tomb, only rejoining Titus when the Christians had passed by. Titus seemed lost in thought, but as they were near Pomponia’s house, he said:
‘Onesimus, did you see that prisoner?’
‘Yes. And I saw him when I was a boy in Ephesus.’
‘I know men when I see them,’ said Titus. ‘He is a man,’ and then he repeated the Greek line--
‘How gracious a thing is a man, if he be but a man.’[86]
‘He is a Jew; he is small and bent; he is ugly; yet somehow his ugliness is more beautiful tenfold than the beauty of Paris or Tigellinus.’
‘You should hear him speak!’ said Onesimus.
Titus shrugged his shoulders. ‘A Christian!’ he said; ‘a worshipper of a Jew whom they tell me Pilatus crucified! And yet,’ he added, ‘there is something more in these Christians than I can fathom. Britannicus was very much struck by them, and I believe Pomponia is a Christian. She told me once that “no weapon forged against these Christians prospers.” Pilatus, they say, came to a bad end.’
‘What happened to him?’ asked Onesimus.
‘They say he became a haunted man. His wife Claudia Procula turned Christian. He was banished to Helvetia and there committed suicide; and his ghost haunts a bare mountain, and is forever wringing and washing its hands. But I believe it is all nonsense,’ said Titus; ‘and here we are at Pomponia’s house.’
They found the gracious noble lady with her boy by her side in the peristyle tending her flowers among her doves, which were so tame that they would perch on her head and shoulder, and coo softly, as they suffered both her and the young Aulus to smooth their plumage.
‘Bathed in such hues as when the peacock’s neck Assumes its brightest tint of amethyst Embathed in emerald glory.’
The heart of Pomponia was open to every kind impulse, and as there was little difficulty in finding room for another slave in the ample palace of a Roman noble like Aulus Plautius, Onesimus, saved once more from ruin and destitution, slept that night in the cell of a new master.
Meanwhile Julius and his prisoner had proceeded on their way. Leaving the Circus Maximus on their left, and going along the Vicus Tuscus, amid temples and statues and arches of triumph, they passed the Prætorian Camp, built by Sejanus, near the Nomentan Road, and reached the Excubitorium and the barracks of that section of the Prætorians whose turn it was to keep guard over the person of the Emperor. Here the centurion found Burrus, and in consigning to his charge the prisoner who had appealed unto Cæsar, handed to him at the same time some letters respecting him from Felix Festus, and King Agrippa. Burrus read them with interest.
‘This is a remarkable prisoner,’ he said. ‘The Jews accuse him of sedition and profanity; but they have sent neither evidence nor witnesses.’
‘We passed through a fearful storm off Crete,’ said Julius, ‘and were shipwrecked at Malta. I hear rumours that another large vessel, which sailed soon after us from Cæsarea, with many Jews on board, foundered at sea. I expect that some of the accusers of Paulus perished with her.’
‘Well, if so, his case will be delayed. He is innocent, I suppose?’
‘Perfectly innocent, I am certain. Christian as he is, it is such men whom the gods love. We all of us should have perished at sea but for his wisdom and good sense, and if we had listened to his advice we should not have been wrecked at all.’
‘Ha!’ said Burrus; ‘he shall be well treated.’ He called to a Prætorian and said: ‘The prisoner in the outer room may hire a lodging for himself. He will, of course, be in custody. The men must take their turns to be chained to him; but mark--choose out the kindest and most honest men for the work, and let them understand that I order him to be as gently dealt with as can be, consistently with his security.’
That night the dream of the life of Paul of Tarsus was accomplished; he was sleeping in Rome. He was an ambassador, though an ambassador in bonds.
Chapter XLIV
A SUPPER AT VESPASIAN’S
‘You’ll have no scandal while you dine, But honest talk and wholesome wine.’
TENNYSON.
‘Arma quidem ultra Littora Juvernæ promovimus, et modo captas Orcadas et minima contentos nocte Britannos. Sed quæ nunc populi fiunt victoris in urbe Non faciunt illi quos vicimus.’
JUV. Sat. ii. 159-163.
The centurion Julius was genuinely pleased with the invitation of Titus, and duly presented himself at the modest house of Vespasian. The other guests were Aulus Plautius and Pomponia, King Caradoc, Pudens and Claudia, and Seneca, together with several members of the family, and among them Vespasian’s brother, Flavius Sabinus, who had just been appointed Præfect of the City, in the place of Pedanius Secundus. The fortunes of the Flavian house were rising rapidly; but Sabinus, an eminent soldier, with his blushing honours fresh upon him, was regarded as the head of the family.
Vespasian was poor, and was also fond of money. That he had not amassed a fortune in his various commands was much to his credit. His house, afterwards occupied by Josephus, was so unpretending as to excite the wonder of those who saw it after he had become Emperor, and his entertainments were usually marked by a more than Sabine simplicity.
On this occasion, however, since a king, a prime minister, and a consular--his old commander--who had enjoyed the honour of sharing an Emperor’s triumphs, were among his guests, Vespasian had donned the unwonted splendour of his ‘triumphal ornaments,’ a flowered tunic, over which flowed a purple robe, embroidered with palm branches in gold and silver thread. He was not half at ease in this splendid apparel, and told his wife Cænis that he was an old fool for his pains. The entertainment was sufficient, though Otho would have thought it hardly good enough for his freedmen. The board was graced with old Sabine and Etruscan ware of great antiquity and curious workmanship, as well as with objects of interest which Vespasian had bought when he was an officer in Thrace, Crete, and Cyrene.
But Vespasian himself, who was sturdily indifferent to fashion, and took pleasure in showing how little he regarded the criticisms of Roman dandyism, drank out of a little silver cup which had belonged to his grandmother, and which he would not have exchanged for the loveliest crystal on the table of Petronius. And Caradoc, as he sat there in his simple dress and golden torque, was far more happy at that modest entertainment than he would have been at the house of any other of the Roman nobles.
The party was, so to speak, a British party, for most of them were familiar with the storm-swept Northern island, which was regarded as the Ultima Thule of civilisation. That day Pudens had received an appointment to go to Britain and support as well as he could the wavering fortunes of Suetonius Paulinus. Caradoc was permitted to return with him and take up his abode at Noviomagus, the town of the Regni. They were to sail as early as possible from Ostia. More than this, Aulus Plautius, to whose powerful influence these appointments had been due, had secured for his young friend Titus the excellent position of a tribune of the soldiers to the army in Britain. It was a graceful recognition of the services which Vespasian had rendered to him twenty years before, when, as his legate of the legion, he had fought thirty battles, captured more than twenty towns, and reduced the Isle of Wight to subjection. It was in Britain, as Tacitus says, that Vespasian had first been ‘shown to the Fates.’ The whole party were in the highest spirits. The old king rejoiced to think that he should rest at last in the land of his fathers. Claudia longed to escape from the suffocating atmosphere of Roman luxury. Pudens knew that in Rome his Christian convictions might speedily bring him into peril, and that in far-off Britain he could breathe a freer and purer air. Vespasian had much to tell of the glories of the country. Lastly, Titus felt all the ardour of a young soldier entering on high command in new and deeply interesting fields of adventure, and in the company of the officer whom he most respected and loved.
It was natural, therefore, that the conversation should turn on Britain, and the tremendous events of which it had recently been the scene. Aulus Plautius had heard from Suetonius Paulinus himself the story how he had carried his soldiers on flat-bottomed boats across the Straits of Mona, while the horses swam behind; how the British women, with dishevelled hair, stood thick upon the shore in dark robes, and, with torches in their hands, ran to and fro among the soldiers like Furies; above all, how the Druids stood there conspicuous, their long white beards streaming to the winds, and, with hands uplifted to heaven, cursed the Romans; and how at last, ‘falling on the barbarous and lunatic rout, he had beaten them down, scorched and rolling in their own fires.’ But darker news had followed. Roman emissaries--‘and those bad young Romans are the curse of Rome,’ said the old commander, looking up from the tablets of Suetonius--had behaved with infamous cruelty to Boadicea, the heroic Queen of the Iceni, and she was burning to revenge her wrongs. Paulinus described her as ‘a woman big and tall, of visage grim and stern, harsh of voice, her hair of bright colour flowing down to her hips, who wore a plighted garment of divers colours, and a great golden chain under a large flowing mantle.’
‘He has sent me some fierce British verses, King,’ said Aulus, turning to Caradoc, ‘which one of his literary officers--Laureatus, of the island of Vectis--has translated from British into Latin galliambics, the metre which, he says, most resembles their tumultuous lilt. The translator must be a true poet, for not even the “Atys” of Catullus is more impassioned. I shall be half afraid to read them to you, for they will stir your blood like the sound of a trumpet, and you will fancy yourself charging us again at the head of your Silures.’
‘Ah!’ said the old warrior, sadly; ‘my fires have long sunk into white embers. A king who has been led in fetters through the capital of his enemies can fight no more for a free nation, however intolerably it may have been wronged.’
Claudia pressed her father’s hand, and tears shone in her blue eyes.
‘Nay, Claudia,’ said the king; ‘I did not wish to sadden thee. Thou and I have other and brighter hopes than once we had, and it will be like new life to us to tread once more by the broad rivers of Britain, and on her heathy hills. I am an exile and poor. My jewels and trappings were carried before me at the triumph of Claudius and Aulus;--though Cartismandua, who betrayed me, still has her golden corslet and her enamelled chariot. These things are, I know, as the gods decide, and sometimes they suffer wickedness to triumph. But let Aulus Plautius read us the verses.’
Aulus read the galliambics into which the poet of Vectis had translated the British war-song,[87]
‘They that scorn the tribes, and call us Britain’s barbarous populaces, Shall I heed them in their anguish? Shall I brook to be supplicated? Hear, Icenian, Catieuchlanian; hear, Coritanian, Trinobant! Must their ever-ravening eagle’s beak and talon annihilate us? Bark an answer, Britain’s raven! bark and blacken innumerable! Hear it, gods! The gods have heard it, O Icenian, O Coritanian! Doubt not ye the gods have answered, Catieuchlanian, Trinobant! Lo! their precious Roman bantling, lo! the colony Camulodune, Shall we teach it a Roman lesson? shall we care to be pitiful? Shout, Icenian, Catieuchlanian; shout, Coritanian, Trinobant! Bloodily, bloodily fall the battle-axe, unexhausted, inexorable! Take the hoary Roman head, and shatter it, hold it abominable, Cut the Roman boy in pieces in his lust and voluptuousness. Fall the colony, city, and citadel, London, Verulam, Camulodune!’
‘Ye gods! What cannot a poet do?’ exclaimed Seneca, with enthusiasm. ‘Those lines would have made me die in battle, if I had been a Briton.’
‘They have caused eighty thousand to die in battle,’ said Aulus. ‘A later letter of Paulinus tells us that, after a fearful massacre of the Romans at the three colonies of Londinium, Verulamium, and Camulodunum, the Britons assembled two hundred and thirty thousand warriors, with whom he fought a tremendous battle near Verulamium. But how could those woad-painted fighters withstand the skill, the discipline, the heavy armour of our legionaries? We lost but four hundred, Paulinus says; and Boadicea, who, in a chariot with her two daughters, had raged through the battle like an angry lioness, has taken poison in despair.’
The wild passionate verses had produced strangely different effects on the little audience. The old king started up from his couch, his breast panting, his eyes full of fire, and then sank back again and hid his face in his mantle. For the lines recalled to him his own heroic struggles, and his great father, Cunobalin, and his noble brothers. Claudia mused in silence, thinking of the day when the Prince of Peace should come again--a thought which Pomponia divined as she laid her hand on the fair head of her friend. Vespasian looked grave, and thought it rather treasonous of a Roman poet to turn such verses into Latin. Pudens and Titus felt a pang of regret that, in combat with a free people, the name of Rome should be stained with the infamies of scamps and weaklings who had provoked that terrible revolt.
Seneca little knew that Aulus, in reading extracts from the letter of Suetonius, had suppressed a passage in which the general had indignantly stated as one cause of the insurrection, not only the wrongs of Boadicea, but the fact that Seneca himself had suddenly called in large sums of money which he had lent to the British at usurious interest, and that the demand for repayment had reduced the poor Iceni to bankruptcy and despair.
‘We have been talking about Britain all this time,’ said Titus; ‘but here is our friend Julius straight from Palestine, and he must have plenty of news to tell us about those odd fanatics, the Jews.’
‘How goes the world in Jerusalem?’ asked Vespasian. ‘The question is very interesting to an old soldier like me. We constantly hear of risings there. I am told that affairs are getting desperate, and who knows but what the Emperor may some day despatch me thither at the head of a legion?’
‘Nothing is more likely,’ said Julius.
‘Unless you snore while the Emperor is singing, father, as you did at Subiaco,’ said Titus, laughing, as did all the guests.
‘Impudent boy!’ said Vespasian, joining in the laugh. ‘Let Julius go on.’
Julius told them that ever since the days when Pontius Pilatus had half maddened the Jews by bringing the Roman ensigns into Jerusalem, and Caligula had reduced them to stupefaction by proposing to set up his own image in their Temple, they had been on the verge of sedition.
‘Felix,’ he added, ‘only got off their impeachment by the influence of his brother, Pallas. Festus had hard work with their bandits. At present they are raging in a first-rate quarrel with young King Agrippa.’
He proceeded to tell them how Agrippa, for the delectation of his friends, had built a dining-room at the top of his Palace, so that his guests as they lay at the banquet could enjoy the highly curious spectacle of all that was going on in the Temple precincts. Indignant at this encroachment, the Jews built up a blank wall of such a height as not only to exclude the view from the Asmonæan Palace of Agrippa, but also to shut out the surveillance of the Roman soldiers in the tower Antonia. Agrippa was furious, and Festus ordered them to demolish the wall. But they said that they would die rather than consent to do this. They appealed to Nero, and Festus allowed them to send their High Priest, Ishmael ben Phabi, with nine others, to plead their cause with the Emperor.
‘I suspect that this deputation was on board the vessel whose shipwreck I mentioned,’ said Julius.
‘Will this appeal be successful?’ asked Vespasian.
‘I believe it will,’ answered the centurion; ‘for Poppæa is very favourable to the Jews.’
‘Shall we really see a Jewish High Priest in Rome?’ asked Pomponia.
‘Yes, lady,’ answered Julius; ‘but a very unworthy one. He rules by terror. He robs and defrauds the inferior priests to such an extent that they die of starvation, and his blows have become proverbial. To the disgust of the Jews he wears silk gloves when he is offering sacrifice, in order to keep his hands clean. And yet, so scrupulous are these oddest of people, that they would not let his father perform the very greatest sacrifice in their whole year because of the most insignificant accident.’
‘What was it?’ asked Pomponia.
‘You will really hardly believe it. On the eve of the great festival which they call the Kippurim--a sort of day of expiation--the father of this High Priest was talking to Aretas, king of Arabia, and by an accident a speck of the Emir’s saliva fell on Ishmael’s beard. This made him “unclean,” in their opinion; and a deputy, whom they call the Sagan, had to perform its principal function!’
The guests laughed.
‘But tell us now,’ said Vespasian, ‘about these new Christians. I suppose they, and their Christus, are more turbulent even than the Jews?’
‘So we Romans are led to believe,’ said Julius. ‘It is exactly the reverse. The Christians are the most peaceful of men, and they reverence the Roman power.’
‘Have you seen much of them?’ asked Aulus.
‘I witnessed a remarkable scene,’ said Julius, ‘just before I left Jerusalem. Festus, as you are aware, died the other day, worn out with cares and worries. Pending the appointment of his successor, Agrippa appointed a new High Priest--Annas, son of the priest before whom Christus was tried. This Annas took upon himself unwonted authority. He summoned the head of the Christians--James, a brother of their Christus--before their Sanhedrin, and ordered him to be stoned to death. But this James was almost worshipped by the people, who called him “the Just.” To give him a chance of life, they asked him what he thought of Christus, and he called him a God. On hearing this answer they flung him down from the roof of the Temple. The fall did not kill him; he was able to rise to his knees and pray for them. It was a wonderful sight--that man of noble presence, with the long locks streaming over his shoulders, and his white robe stained with blood, kneeling in the Temple court among his furious enemies! One of the bystanders pleaded for him; but a fuller came up and dashed out his brains with a club.’
‘The cup of that nation’s iniquity is full,’ said Pomponia, who had listened with a shudder to this tale of martyrdom.
‘It is,’ said Julius. ‘Immediately after I had witnessed this sad scene, I was talking to a brilliant young priest in Jerusalem named Josephus, of whose abilities they think highly, and who evidently has a great future before him. He made the same remark.’
‘But tell us something about that wonderful prisoner whom you brought to Rome,’ said Titus.
Julius detailed to them his voyage, the storm when they drifted so long up and down Adria in the starless nights and sunless days; the strong influence of the Jewish prisoner over the whole crew; the spirit which he breathed into their despair; the practical wisdom of all his counsels; the intense gratitude which he had kindled in the Protos of Malta and in the barbarous inhabitants, by what they believed to be a miraculous healing. ‘His teaching,’ he added, ‘is the most wonderful thing I ever heard.’
‘What can a Jew really teach?’ asked Seneca, with some disdain.
‘He preaches that their Prophet whom Pilatus crucified, was God Himself,’ said Julius; ‘and no sane man can believe that. But there is a sort of supernatural spell about the goodness of this Paulus; and when I hear him speak to “the brethren,” as he calls the Christians, I am always reminded of Homer’s lines--
‘In thought profound His modest eyes he fixed upon the ground; But when he speaks, what elocution flows, Soft as the fleeces of descending snows! The copious accents fall with easy art, Melting they fall, and sink into the heart.’
‘He may have the gift of speech,’ said Seneca; ‘many Orientals have. But it is monstrous to suppose that a fanatical Jew, with a senseless creed, should have anything to teach us.’
‘Has he written anything?’ asked Flavius Sabinus.
‘Yes; he has written some wonderful letters--a strange mixture (as friends in Palestine told me) of fantastic doctrine and perfect ethics.’
‘Has he taught a single moral truth which has not been taught for four centuries, since Aristotle and Plato and Chrysippus?’ asked Seneca.
‘I have not read his letters,’ said Julius. ‘They were difficult to get hold of, for the Christians are very shy about their writings. But he lives the truth he teaches.’
‘Ah!’ said Seneca; ‘if he has the secret of that--! As for us, too many of us are open to the reproach that we are only philosophers by wearing beards.’
‘Well,’ said Titus, ‘I have been to hear the lectures of Musonius Rufus, and I defy any mortal man to teach better truths than he and Cornutus do; for I must not speak of the illustrious Seneca in his presence. We have no need to consult barbarian Jews with insane new mythologies.’
Pomponia and Claudia and Pudens were of necessity silent in that mixed company; but they thought that the good soil of the Christian faith was the one thing lacking to Seneca, which might have made the roses of his moral teaching produce something better than mere perfume.
And if Titus had but laid aside the ignorant disdain which marked him in common with the mass of philosophic Pagans, his manly virtues might have shone forth with yet more beautiful lustre, and he might have been saved from the sins and errors wherewith he afterwards defiled a noble name.
Chapter XLV
POPPÆA VICTRIX
‘On that hard pagan world disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust Made human life a hell.’
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Not long after the arrival of Paul at Rome, Burrus died. He was seized with inflammation of the throat, and Nero, under the pretence of solicitude, betrayed an ill-concealed satisfaction. He had not dared to get rid of Burrus, whom the Prætorians loved; but he fretted under the restraint of the soldier’s presence, and resented an influence which endeavoured to exert itself for good. Nero could not mistake the innuendos of Tigellinus, that this was a good opportunity to set himself free. He promised to send Burrus a remedy recommended by his own physician. The remedy was a poison. Burrus perceived the fact too late. When Nero came to visit his sick bed, he turned away from him, with undisguised aversion.
‘How are you, Præfect?’ asked the Emperor, taking his hand as it lay on the coverlet.
Burrus hastily withdrew his hand. The question recalled to him the scene of the death of Scipio, the father-in-law of Pompey, who, seeing his ship in the possession of the enemy, stabbed himself, and on hearing the question, ‘Where is the general?’ answered, ‘The general is well.’ Burrus remained silent, but when the Emperor once more asked how he was, answered, ‘I am well.’ They were the last words he spoke, and every good man in Rome mourned the loss of one of the few virtuous men of whom the state could yet boast.
Nero might have bestowed the vacant command on the best soldier of his time, the brave and honest Corbulo, who had supported the fame of Roman courage on so many a hard-fought field.
He thought of no such man. In spite of Corbulo’s utter loyalty Nero feared to trust him. He divided the office between Fenius Rufus and Sophonius Tigellinus. The former was popular from his generosity as corn commissioner in a time of famine, and it was hoped that the appointment would cover the deadly unpopularity of his colleague. But it was with Tigellinus that the real power rested. In his hands was the sword of Nero, and the secret of his influence lay in the similarity of his vices to those of the Emperor. The career of the man from boyhood upwards had been a career of infamy. He had been a lover of Agrippina, and of her sister, and he had paraded his crime with cynical coolness. With him Nero could always throw off the mask, and display the depths of his own turpitude. He was a tenth-rate Sejanus, only more deeply dyed in infamies. If he pandered to Nero’s vices with sumptuous profligacy, this was part of a deep-laid design to drag the imperial purple through the foulest mire. But the scum of many nations which called itself the populace of Rome applauded each vileness, in proportion to its monstrosity, and was glad to see its Emperor the slave of passions as abject as its own. The degeneracy caused by such scenes was incredible. The ultimate result was that--
‘Rome now might nowhere rid herself of Rome: The heavens were all distempered with the breath Of her old age. She, very nigh to death, Paced through her perishing world in search of air Unpoisoned by herself.’
Though Britannicus had been done to death, there were still two men who might stand seriously in the way of the new favourite’s schemes. One was Faustus Cornelius Sulla, the last of that famous name. He was poor and slothful, but he had for a time been the husband of Antonia, the daughter of Claudius, and the freedman Graptus had already persuaded Nero to banish him to Marseilles, on a trumpery charge of complicity in a plot. Tigellinus persuaded Nero that Sulla only simulated indolence, and that he was tampering with the legions in Gaul. Executioners were sent to Marseilles, and Sulla was murdered as he lay at supper. Rubellius Plautus was the next victim. He had imperial blood in his veins, and many had fixed their eyes upon him with hope, for he was a man of Stoic dignity and domestic virtue. In A.D. 60, a comet had been interpreted to indicate a change in the Empire, and Nero recommended Plautus, though he was only living the quiet life of an ordinary citizen, to retire to his estates in Asia. He obeyed without a murmur, living in simple duties with his wife Antistia, and devoting his thoughts to philosophy. Soldiers were now despatched to murder him. A faithful freedman, at imminent risk of his life, made his way to Asia, arrived before Nero’s centurion, and warned Rubellius of his impending doom. He was the bearer of a letter from his father-in-law, Antistius Vetus, urging Rubellius not tamely to submit. Only sixty soldiers were coming to carry out the iniquitous mandate of Nero; let him repulse them, throw himself under the protection of Corbulo, and all would be well. But Rubellius was sickened by the thought of doubtful hopes. He wished, if possible, to avert, by submission, the future ruin of the wife and children whom he loved. Further than this, his philosophic teacher, Cœranus, persuaded him that a firm death was preferable to troubled and uncertain life. He therefore took no step in self-defence. The centurion found him at mid-day, stripped of his clothes, taking athletic exercise in his gymnasium, and butchered him on the spot, in the sight of the worthless eunuch, Pelago, whom Nero, as though he were some Asiatic despot, had sent to keep watch over the officer and soldiers. According to the ghastly fashion of the times his head was carried back to Nero. ‘Why did you want to be a Nero?’ said the brutal jester. ‘Gods! what a nose the man had!’
Thus it was reserved for a Domitius Ahenobarbus to put to death Rubellius Plautus, the last descendant of Tiberius, as he afterwards put to death L. Junius Silanus, the last descendant of Augustus.
But there was an influence over Nero which was more powerful than that of all the other wretches of his Court. It was the influence of Poppæa. His infatuation for this beautiful, evil, astute woman had taken complete possession of him. She had led him on step by step, now alluring, now repelling him, keeping him ever in a maddening fever of passion, on which she played as on an instrument. Already she had sufficiently established her empire over him to permit of his sending Otho to Lusitania. Nor had she hesitated to leave her home and to become an inmate of Nero’s Palace. But it was far from her intention to sink into the humble position which had been enough for Acte, who, in her ignorance, had felt for Nero a love ten times more genuine than that which she had inspired. Poppæa, whose infantine and cherubic loveliness could easily have secured for her the hand of the noblest of the patricians, intended to be Empress and nothing less. She knew the evanescent character of such love as she had kindled, and she bent the powers of her mind to rule Nero by playing with his hopes. There was but one obstacle in the path of her ambition. Octavia still lived, and Octavia must be got rid of.
It is true that the hapless Empress had long been reduced to a cipher by the mutual repulsion of herself and her husband. She could scarcely help shrinking from his touch. To look in his face made her shudder. While still in the charm of youth he had been odious to her. Now that his face was unhealthy with excess, his cruel frown and lowering countenance wore in her eyes the look of a demon. His faithlessness did not wound her, for the gleams of happiness which rarely illumined the tragedy of her life came to her only when he neglected her utterly. Nevertheless, she was Empress. She had the undeniable rights of her position, and in public it was necessary for Nero to treat with decency the daughter of the divine Claudius and the granddaughter of the beloved Germanicus.
Yet Poppæa had determined that, on one pretext or other, she should be set aside, and never doubted that sooner rather than later she would goad the timid Emperor to repudiate his wife, that he might be free for another marriage.
One day when Poppæa knew that Nero intended to visit her she prepared all her wiles. He came in after the mid-day prandium, and he found her reclining on her couch of ivory and silver in the cool, well-shaded, voluptuously-furnished room. She had let loose over her shoulders the splendid ripples of her golden tresses. An odour as of blown roses clung to her person and her robes. Every jewel that she wore, whether ruby, or sapphire, or emerald, or diamond, was so arranged as to set off her soft and glowing complexion, and there was exquisite grace in her way of handling the fan of peacock’s feathers which swept in iridescent glory over her dress from the golden handle which drooped from her right hand. Nero, as he took his seat beside her, felt like a clumsy and awkward boy.
‘Why do you pretend to love me, Nero?’ she asked.
‘Love you!’ he said. ‘It is not love, it is passion, it is adoration!’
‘Words are all very well, Nero,’ she said, in a voice which seemed to tremble with tears; ‘but see how you treat me! When I came to the Palace you were not Emperor, but the slave of Agrippina. I helped you to free yourself from that bondage. You have taken me from Otho, my dear and noble husband--’
Nero frowned angrily, but Poppæa took no notice.
‘You have,’ she continued, ‘banished him to Lusitania, and have brought me to this dull Court, under pretence that you would make me Empress. Yet I am no nearer becoming your wife. Go to your pale, sad Octavia: doubtless you think her common features fairer than mine. Her dreary talk and drearier silence cannot fail to be more fascinating.’
‘I loathe her,’ said Nero.
‘And she loathes you, whereas I worship the ground you tread upon. No, no!’ she said, as he attempted to seize her hand; ‘I will not live here to be your mere plaything. I will rejoin Otho in Lusitania. He loves me, and knows how to treat me properly.’
Nero rose in a passion. Fearful lest she should goad him too far, Poppæa called him to her side and changed her tone.
‘Your home is empty, Nero,’ she said. ‘No child will succeed you. I have a little son. Octavia must be dismissed, if you would have an heir to be Emperor of Rome.’
‘How can I dismiss her?’ said Nero gloomily. ‘Even my freedmen espouse her cause. Doryphorus is for her, and Pallas.’
‘Doryphorus! Pallas!’ she repeated, with a laugh of ringing scorn. ‘An effeminate slave-minion; a miserly dotard! Tush, Cæsar! be a man. Sweep aside these flies. Poison them both; no one will miss Doryphorus, and Pallas has riches which will prove very convenient to you.’
‘That shall be done,’ said Nero. ‘I am sick of Doryphorus, and Pallas has lived long enough. But to repudiate Octavia is different. She is strong in the name of her father, and stronger still in the favour of the people and the Prætorians.’
‘Is Cæsar truly Cæsar?’ she asked, with contempt.
‘Cæsar can do what he likes in his own private life,’ he answered; ‘but woe to Cæsar if he degrade the majesty of Empire by any public deed.’
He said truly, and she knew it; but she knew also that he had not yet fathomed, as she had done, the abysses of Roman servility. Had they not applauded him after the murder of Agrippina? Had they not passed in silence the murder of Britannicus? Had they not suffered the doom of Sulla and of Plautus to pass by without creating so much as a ripple on the surface of the general tranquillity?
By her urgency, by her wiles, by her taunts, by the supreme ascendency which she had now acquired over the Emperor, she prevailed on him at length to divorce Octavia on the plea of her barrenness, and to make Poppæa his wife. This, however, did not content her, while her unhappy rival remained an inmate of the Palace. Poppæa therefore endeavoured to blacken her character. She put into play every poisonous art of slander. In most cases nothing was easier than to trump up a false charge against any one whom the Emperor desired to ruin. The white innocence of Octavia, her stainless purity in that age of infamy, were no protection to her. The faithful love of her few attendants was a partial safeguard. Most of them were tampered with in vain. At last, however, a worthless Alexandrian flute-player, who had sometimes played before her to while away a heavy hour, was induced by a great bribe to swear that he had been her lover. The charge was too monstrous to deceive a single person, but on this pretext Octavia’s handmaids were seized and tortured. The majority, however, stood firm even against the torture-chamber, and one of them, named Pythias, cried out to Tigellinus, as he heightened the torture and pressed her with questions, that Octavia’s worst offence was white as snow beside the blackness of his best virtues. It was impossible to pretend a conviction on evidence which would have been invalid against the humblest slave.
It was, nevertheless, decided that Octavia should be removed from the Palatine, and she was sent from the home of her father with the ill-omened gifts of the estate of Plautus as her dower, and the house of Burrus as her residence.
The unhappy girl--she was but nineteen--obeyed without a murmur. She had wept floods of tears when her husband, instigated by his cruel paramour, had attempted to stain her name. She shed no tear when she laid aside the purple of the Empress, and, clad in the simplest garb of a Roman matron, was conveyed to her new home. Thither, too, were sent her unhappy maidens. Those who had most enjoyed her confidence--and among these the poor Christian girl, Tryphæna--were still disabled by the dislocations of the torture. With tenderest solicitude Octavia herself visited their cells, and ministered to their infirmities. She flung her arms, weeping, round Tryphæna’s neck, and thanked her and Pythias for the heroic constancy with which they had held out and, when stretched on the rack, had unflinchingly asseverated the stainless honour of their mistress.
‘How could you endure it, Tryphæna?’ she asked. ‘The blood of the Claudii and of deified emperors flows in my veins, yet if my frame had been wrenched with such pangs, I know not what my lips might not have said.’
‘Lady,’ said the slave-girl, ‘I hardly felt it. The spirit sustained the body. I thought of--’
‘Go on,’ said Octavia.
‘I thought of Him of whom I have read to you in the letter of Peter of Bethsaida; and how He had endured the contradiction of sinners against Himself; and I was not weary, and did not faint in my mind.’
‘How could the Crucified One help you?’
‘He is not the Crucified One now,’ answered Tryphæna. ‘He is the Risen, the Ascended: and He sits on the right hand of the Father.’
‘Oh that I could believe all this!’ said Octavia. ‘I have scarcely had a happy hour in all my life. I have been more miserable than any slave-girl. If He whom you called the Risen One were all that you say, why does He not help the innocent?’
‘He does help them,’ she said. ‘Not by delivering them out of all their troubles, but by enabling them to bear, and by making them feel that their brief troubles, which are but for a moment, are nothing to the eternal weight of glory.’
‘Did He help you?’
‘He did. As I lay outstretched on the rack I saw Him for a moment, His hand upraised to bless.’
‘Does He do so for all Christians when they suffer?’
‘I think He does, for all His true children. Lady, do you know that Paulus of Tarsus--the Apostle whose letters to the churches I have read to you--is in Rome?’
‘So Pomponia told me,’ said Octavia, ‘and she asked if I would not see him. But how can I? Burrus is dead, and Paulus sits chained to a Prætorian soldier in his own lodging.’
‘He has friends who would bring you his teachings,’ said Tryphæna. ‘One of them I have seen. His name is Lucas of Antioch, and he is a physician. To comfort me after I had been tortured, he told me how Paulus, before his conversion--when he was a blasphemer, and persecutor, and injurious--had witnessed and even incited the stoning of our first martyr, the young deacon Stephen; and how when Stephen stood before the Council, and they were all gnashing their teeth at him, his face was as an angel’s. And he says that Stephen saw the heavens opened, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.’
While Octavia stood talking with the young slave-girl, she was told that Pomponia had come to see her, and humbly kissing the poor sufferer on the brow, she went to the tablinum to receive her guest.
‘Wherever sorrow is, there Pomponia comes,’ she said, embracing her.
‘That is not my individual virtue,’ said Pomponia. ‘We Christians are all taught to be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgives us.’
‘Your faith seems to make you all very happy.’
‘It does indeed. Oh, if you could see our Paulus, how would he comfort you!’
‘What made him a Christian?’ asked Octavia. ‘Tryphæna has just been telling me that he was once a persecutor.’
‘He saw a vision of Christ, as he went to extirpate the Christians at Damascus. From that time he has preached the faith which he once destroyed. While Burrus lived the guards were bidden to leave him when his friends came, but since Tigellinus has been Præfect his lot is harder. I know not how you can with safety visit him. But his friend and companion is Lucas the physician. Why should you not have him sent for to tend your poor wounded slaves?’
The hint was taken. Octavia’s household was now a very simple and quiet one. The swarm of courtiers had deserted her. None of the fine ladies of Rome who desired the approval of Nero, came near her gate. The last of the great house of the Claudii, the wife and daughter and descendant of emperors, was left to her seclusion, and she rejoiced in it. She spun wool among her maidens; she was considerate of the happiness of her slaves. She manumitted Pythias and Tryphæna, who had suffered for her. Fair peace began to reign around her, and she nursed the hope that she might be suffered to live out her life in quietude until a fairer day should haply dawn. Lucas was summoned, and to her, as to the Christians of her household, he proved himself to be indeed also a physician of the soul.
He was an Asiatic in the prime of life, with a countenance singularly radiant and refined. He spoke the purest Greek, and had been accustomed to the society of Theophilus of Antioch and other persons of rank, to whom he had been endeared by his medical skill. Already, during the imprisonment of Paulus at Cæsarea, he had busied himself in the collection of those facts which he was soon to enroll in ‘the most beautiful book in all the world.’ It was common for Roman families to listen to readings from accomplished Greeks, and it was not difficult for Octavia, with the aid of Pomponia and her Christian slaves, to arrange that Lucas should read to them his yet unfinished records of the Life of the Saviour. Those records, and the conversations which she held with the Evangelist, and his answers to her questions, at last convinced the heart of the Empress. She saw that in the faith of the gospel there was a peace, a beauty, a blessedness, such as she had never known, of which she had never dreamed. Perilous as the decision was, she determined to be admitted by baptism into the flock of Christ. One morning, at break of day, in the presence of Lucas, Pomponia, and Tryphæna, but otherwise in the deepest secrecy, she was baptised by Linus.
And thenceforth there reigned in her heart a peace which no further waves of trouble could disturb. She began to understand why it was that, in spite of her mourning garb, in spite of her many trials, Pomponia, though her face was often sad, was far happier than any of the Roman matrons. She began to experience that there is a bliss in faith and hope and love which the world can neither give nor take away.
And this boon of heaven only came just in time to save her from sinking into utter despair under the horrible tempest of afflictions which fell upon her.
For though Nero would have been content to dismiss her into obscurity and oblivion, Poppæa was not content. She wearied the Emperor with her insistence that he should take still further steps against his repudiated wife. Nero ordered Octavia to leave Rome and live in Campania.
As she was preparing to obey the insulting order, which was rendered still more insulting by the addition that she was to be kept under military surveillance, it struck Pomponia that it might add to the comfort and safety of the Empress if she could once more command the services of Onesimus. Octavia had been pleased with his assiduity when he was her purple-keeper, and she knew that he had once rendered a high service to her beloved Britannicus. In the solitudes of Campania it would be well for her to have at hand a slave and messenger whom she could implicitly trust. With the precaution of a disguise he might remain unrecognised, and serve as a medium of communication between the ex-Empress and her friends in Rome. Onesimus was more than willing to undertake the charge. At Rome he was never safe. After all that had occurred, he did not dare to enter the secret assemblies of the Christians, though it was there alone that he could hope to see Junia. After Octavia had started with her despised and scanty retinue, he made his way to her villa with letters from Pomponia, and was retained in her service as a Greek reader, under a changed name.
But scarcely had his wife vanished from Rome when Nero became alarmed by the temper of the people. They openly murmured at his conduct. In the circus and the amphitheatre they received him with grim silence or cold applause. He knew that the mob was his ultimate master, and, being a coward, he hastily sent word that Octavia might return to Rome and resume the style and title of his wife.
When this edict was published, the people went wild with joy. All loved Octavia. No base, no cruel action, no rapacity or folly, could be laid to her charge. If deadly crimes were committed, they knew that Octavia disapproved of them no less entirely than themselves. Every honest citizen who enjoyed but one gleam of happiness on his own domestic hearth pitied the pale and neglected daughter of Claudius, and felt inclined to protect her from further wrongs. Their enthusiasm communicated itself to the crowd. When Octavia re-entered Rome they surrounded her litter with tumults of delight. Their affection cheered her heart, and, stirred by her words of gratitude, they broke into dangerous excitement. Rushing through the city, they flung down and trampled and spat upon the statues of Poppæa. Those of Octavia they uplifted on their shoulders, showered blossoms over them, and, carrying them to the Forum and the temples, crowned them with garlands. They shouted their approval of Nero’s tardy repentance, and, donning their holiday attire, organised an immense procession to the Capitol, to thank Jupiter for the restoration of their Empress. Returning from this procession they crowded to the Palatine, and Nero in alarm appealed to the Prætorians. Tigellinus let loose the soldiers upon the people. He had armed them with batons, and they struck out without discrimination among the swaying mob. When this was insufficient to disperse the crowd, they drew their swords, and charged them in close array. It was night before they had swept the streets clear of obstruction, and replaced the statues of Poppæa upon their pedestals.
Poppæa was nearly wild with fear and hatred. After Nero had supped she entered his room, and, flinging herself at his feet with dishevelled hair, burst into passionate tears. She wailed that, though to wed with him was dearer to her than life, she had now come, not to plead for her marriage, but for mere safety. Who did he suppose was the real author of that disgraceful riot? Octavia, of course. He thought her simple. Her simplicity was but the veneer of deeply-seated cunning. Was it the people who had broken into sedition? Not at all. It was only the clientage and varletry of Octavia who had dared to assume the people’s name. If they had but found a leader, who could say whether Nero might not by this time have been a fugitive or a mangled corpse?
‘The tumult has been aimed at you,’ she cried, ‘not at me. What harm have I done to any one, that they should hate me? Do they hate me because I shall give Cæsar a genuine heir? Do they prefer the offspring of Octavia and some Egyptian flute-player? Be a man, Nero! It only needs the smallest display of resolution to suppress these disorders. But if you show yourself timid and incapable, the rebellion may become formidable. If the people despair of making you Octavia’s husband, they may make Octavia another’s wife.’
The daring and indomitable purpose of the woman succeeded. She goaded his timidity; she fired his rage. He sent for Tigellinus, determined at last to stop short at nothing.
With Tigellinus he needed no concealment.
‘Præfect,’ he said, ‘Octavia must at all costs be got rid of.’
‘Locusta is here,’ said Tigellinus, with alacrity.
‘No, no,’ said Nero, stamping on the ground; ‘I will not have the scene of Britannicus acted over again. I am haunted by too many ghosts already.’
‘Devise something,’ he said, impatiently, while Tigellinus mused. ‘Poppæa, suggest something to this fool.’
‘A charge must be made against her,’ said Poppæa, eager if possible to shame as well as to kill.
‘The last charge broke down.’
‘Nonsense!’ answered Poppæa. ‘Say that you have positive evidence that she has made away with her own unborn child.’
‘No one will believe it. And, besides, I have just divorced her on the charge of barrenness.’
‘Say it all the same, Nero. Some person of importance must be induced to confess.’
‘Who would be so infamous?’ said Nero. ‘After all, Poppæa, you know she is innocent--ten times more innocent than you.’
‘Call me some infamous name at once,’ said Poppæa, bursting into passion. ‘And is it for you to taunt me? Was it not for love of you that I became faithless to my Otho? No,’ she cried, as Nero approached her; ‘keep away from me! I will return to the wronged Otho. He loved me. He will take me back.’ And she rushed towards the door.
‘Poppæa,’ pleaded Nero, hasting to intercept her flight, ‘forgive me. You see how miserable I am. I have no one to love me but you.’
‘And who could help loving you?’ she continued, weeping crocodile tears in floods. ‘Who could resist those golden locks, that lovely countenance, that divine voice?’
Her cajolery won the day. Nero played with her hand, and turned an inquiring look on the Prætorian Præfect.
‘I have it,’ said Tigellinus. ‘Send for Anicetus.’
Nero winced at the name. Anicetus was still admiral of the fleet at Misenum; but, since his share in the murder of Agrippina, Nero could never see him without recalling the image of his mother’s bloodstained corpse. He had practically banished Anicetus from Court, and when the sunshine of court favour was withdrawn from him, the wretch had sunk into contempt. But now his unscrupulosity was once more needed for a crime which was, if possible, still blacker. He had murdered Nero’s mother by violence; he was to murder Nero’s wife by calumny. He was offered a vast reward, and a purely nominal punishment, if he would confess and make it public that Octavia had treasonably tampered with him, to seduce the allegiance of the imperial sailors at Misenum, and that, in furtherance of her object, she had not stopped short of offering him her hand.
The infamous tale was published; and since Nero proclaimed his conviction of its truth, the world was compelled to profess belief in it also, although every man and woman in Rome knew it to be a lie. An edict was published proclaiming Octavia’s guilt, and she was banished to the dreary islet of Pandataria.
Chapter XLVI
THE DEATH OF OCTAVIA
‘O gioia! O ineffabile allegrezza! O vita intera d’amore e di pace! O senza brama sicura ricchezza!’
DANTE, Paradiso, xxvii. 7-9.
In one sense all the people of Rome were the friends of Octavia; in another she was nearly friendless. For the multitudes of every rank were degraded by selfishness and cowed by terror. So long as they were personally untouched by the orgies and crimes of the Emperor, and so long as he was supported by the swords of the Prætorians, they neither wished nor dared to interfere. Rome lay helpless under the bonds of the tyranny which her own vices had riveted. Nero might indeed be murdered, but in what respect would the Empire be better off? There was no Cæsar left. If Nero died, there seemed to be no prospect for Rome except the horrors of civil war with all its attendant pillage, massacre, and crime. It seemed better to endure Nero’s infamies than to see the Empire torn to pieces. After all, were not many of the senators, of the generals, of the aristocracy, capable of becoming as licentious and as cruel as he was, and would not their elevation make their vices loom as monstrous as his?
They rejoiced, therefore, that the popular tumult had been so speedily repressed, and they steeped their consciences in immoral acquiescence. The bad plunged themselves yet more shamelessly into vice, and manœuvred to make their vices known as a passport to imperial favour. As for the better Romans, they tried to bury themselves in such obscurity as would shelter them from notice; or they sought solace in the refined egotism of the Epicureans; or inured themselves to the chances of death and ruin by assuming the haughty self-dependence of the later Stoics. Pætus Thrasea and his friends took refuge in the belief that it would be an absurdity to attempt the impossible. The heart of Seneca was torn with misgivings; but was not he himself in peril? What could he do? He had never spoken out against any one of Nero’s crimes, or lifted a finger to prevent them. Lucan longed to overwhelm the Emperor with invective; but he could only brood in silence over his wrongs, and gloomily await the day of vengeance.
From none of these did Octavia receive any help. If they compassionated her misery, no murmur of pity reached her ears. But from those who were now her fellow-Christians she received both help and consolation. Pomponia, whose gentle influence moved fearlessly with halcyon wings over the turbid abyss of crime, exerted herself to add comfort to the dreary retreat of the Empress in the volcanic isle. With her strong good sense she made arrangements for Octavia’s comfort. She obtained the leave of her husband, Aulus Plautius, to despatch some of her slaves to Pandataria the very day that the decree of Octavia’s banishment was published, with directions to secure for her as fitting a home as was possible, and to take with them such things as might conduce to her well-being. In this she was secretly aided by Acte. The beautiful and generous girl sought an interview with Octavia before she left Campania, fell at her knees, and begged the daughter of Claudius to pardon the wrong which in earlier days her beauty had inflicted. ‘I was but a slave once,’ she said; ‘nor did I know the truths which have since been taught me. I have forsaken the past. Empress, you will forgive me, and accept such little services as I can render?’
‘Rise, Acte!’ said Octavia, with tender dignity. ‘I know that thy heart was innocent, and that no wiles of thine were spread to catch Nero’s love. I forgive thee. Who am I, in my misery, that I should condemn thee?’
She raised the weeping girl from the ground, and gently kissed her. ‘Do not weep any more,’ she said. ‘Acte, it has been told me that thou art a Christian. Nay, start not, and see how much I trust thee. I am a Christian, too.’
Acte was almost speechless with surprise; but Octavia continued: ‘Yes; thou seest that I put my life in thy hands; but are we not sisters now? I used to talk with my brother Britannicus about this new faith, and often with Pomponia, and now I have seen Lucas of Antioch, and from him I have heard of Jesus. Lucas has lent me the letters of Paulus of Tarsus. He has written that “not many rich, not many noble, not many mighty are called;” but though I am noble, I am poor, and weak, and unhappy except for that consolation which He who died for us sends to the sorrowful.’
‘God be praised,’ said Acte, ‘that thou hast found that peace.’
‘Yes,’ answered the Empress; ‘peace I can truly say in the midst of shame, and slander, and tumult. My life will be short; but for us, Acte, the islands of the blest, of which the poets sang, are neither dreams nor fables. Farewell.’
‘Farewell, Empress,’ said Acte. ‘Day and night will our brethren lift up holy hands for thee, and many a purer prayer than mine will rise for thee like incense.’
As Acte left the villa she passed Onesimus. She had long been ignorant of his fate, and shame prevented him from speaking to her. He recognised her at a glance, but she did not penetrate the disguise which changed him into a fair-haired slave, and he shrank back from her presence. He regretted when it was too late that he had not revealed himself to her, for even now she might possibly have retarded the tragedies which were to ensue. Alas! when once men have shown themselves unfaithful, how often do their best impulses come too late!
But he devoted himself heart and soul to the service of the young Empress. She had been permitted to take with her into exile one or two only of her hundreds of slaves. She had chosen Tryphæna to be one of these, though the poor girl, after her cruel torments, was still barely able to stand. She had also chosen Onesimus, by the advice of Pomponia, though she did not yet know that he had been brought under Christian influence.
Nor was he the only disguised Christian in that small and saddened household. The position of Hermas since his rescue from the house of Pedanius had been very perilous. If he were recognised, the fact of his having escaped might be fatal to others besides himself. The Christians were mostly too poor to introduce a stranger into their households. They would have been willing to share with each other the last crust; but the crowded state of the insulæ,[88] in which they mostly lived, rendered it difficult and dangerous to procure extra accommodation. The only thing possible, therefore, had been to conceal him in the house of Pudens; but as it was now necessary to find a new home for him he had been enrolled among the out-door slaves in the villa of the Empress, and was selected to accompany her to the lonely island, until his history and face should have been forgotten.
Anicetus, who had been made the vile instrument of Octavia’s destruction, received the guerdon of his infamy, and was dismissed into nominal exile in Sardinia. To such a man--a slave by birth and a villain by nature--the exile was nothing. He had never regarded life as anything but a feeding-trough, and as long as he had wealth to spend on his own indulgences Sardinia served him as well as Rome. It happened that the ship which was to carry him to Caralis, the Sardinian capital, sailed from Ostia on the day that Octavia was to be conveyed to Pandataria. Thousands of spectators, and among them many Christians, had flocked to Ostia to see her embark. If they dared not express their feelings, they longed at least silently to show their sympathy. They recognised Anicetus. He embarked amid a tempest of groans and hootings so full of execration that he trembled lest he should be torn to pieces by the mob, and abjectly entreated the protection of his guards. Thenceforth he vanishes from history. He died in Sardinia, rich and impenitent; but even there he did not escape the hatred which he felt more than the load of infamy with which he had crushed down his worthless soul.
Later in the afternoon the multitudes caught sight of the litter which was bearing Octavia to the shore. A trireme was waiting to take her away forever from the home of the rulers of the world. Prætorian guards marched on either side of her with drawn swords. Behind her, in a humble carruca, came her few household slaves, and the scanty possessions which alone she could take with her. A deep murmur of pity arose, and as she approached the quay it swelled into a cheer, in which the spectators gave vent to the indignation which they felt against her oppressors. At one time it seemed as if they might break out into violence; but the Prætorians menaced them with their swords, and the angry murmurs died away.
The Christians--who recognised Tryphæna and others of their brethren among Octavia’s slaves, and who, though they did not know the secret of Octavia’s conversion, knew her innocence--showed their sympathy in more quiet ways. They sighed forth prayers and blessings, and strewed with flowers her pathway to the vessel. Onesimus, as he passed, caught sight of Nereus and Junia. No one knew him, but he felt almost certain that he had seen a flash of recognition in Junia’s eyes. Beyond doubt she stood gazing intently on him as he leaned over the vessel’s side. Ah, well! the day might come, he thought, when, purified from shame by suffering, he might obliterate the memories of his dishonoured past, and be worthy once more to stand by her side.
And one incident occurred which, not for him only, but for all that little company, was fraught with blessed consequences. Linus stood with Luke of Antioch in the undistinguished throng, but neither of them had been forgetful of the sorrowful sighing of those who were going into captivity. Linus had told to Paul the prisoner, in deep secrecy, the story of Octavia’s baptism, and the heart of the Apostle was sad at the thought of her sufferings. He had written her a brief letter of comfort, which Linus slid into the hand of Hermas amid the bustle of the embarkation. Nor was this all. Luke also had not been forgetful of the anguish of the last of the Claudian house. Filled with that deep sense of brotherhood which linked all ranks together in the Christian community, he had written out for the exiles some inestimably precious fragments of the materials which he had been collecting for his Gospel. He found means unobserved to give them to Tryphæna, when ceasing for a moment to lean on the arms of the two slaves who were supporting her feeble footsteps, she turned to bid farewell to her mother, Nympha.
The emotion of the spectators made it more easy for the watchful Christians to communicate with each other. For there were few dry eyes among them. Some of them were old enough to have seen Julia, the lovely daughter of Augustus, sail to the same sad bourne. They had seen her daughter, the younger Julia, banished by Claudius to the yet more distant island of Tremerus. They had wept tears almost as bitter when they saw the elder Agrippina driven to the same prison by the insatiable malice of Tiberius. But the case of Octavia was far sadder than that of her noble kinswomen. The elder Julia was steeped in shame, and had well-nigh broken the heart of her father. The younger Julia had also disgraced her high lineage. The wife of Germanicus had been a Roman matron of the purest stamp, yet her passionate haughtiness had diminished the sympathy which would otherwise have been felt with her in her calamities. And, further, these others had enjoyed their days of superb sunlight and prosperity. Ruin had not overtaken them till the happiness and beauty of their youth were past. Not so the pale and hapless girl who was now embarking. Octavia had known no joy. Her childhood had been darkened by the three murders of those whom she best loved. From the first her husband had hated her. His youthful love had been given, not to her, but to her freedwoman; and now, unprotected by her own white innocence, she had been smitten to the earth by a horribly false condemnation. She was still scarcely twenty years old![89] And she was being conducted amid centurions and soldiers to a barren rock, which was haunted by memories of death and anguish. She was as one dead, but without the peace of death:--so thought her pagan sympathisers, and were confirmed in their misgiving that either there are no gods or they care not for the affairs of men.
And Octavia did not deceive herself. She well knew that those islets of the Tyrrhene Sea were wet with the blood of noble exiles; and that Caligula, on being told by one who had been recalled from banishment that the exiles spent their time in praying for the death of the reigning Emperor, had sent soldiers round the islands to put all the prisoners to death. She knew her peril, but she clung to life with the tenacity of youth. Nero had no child. She thought that his excesses would precipitate his end, and that some virtuous man might be chosen by the Senate to succeed. After the death of Narcissus she had been told the anecdote of the physiognomist who had prophesied that Titus would one day be Emperor, and she thought that under her brother’s devoted friend there might be the dawn of brighter days. She therefore wrote a letter to Nero, before the trireme started, in which she said she would but live as his widow and his sister, with no thought of returning to the Palace. She even ventured to remind him that she had always experienced his mother’s protection, and that, as long as Agrippina lived, her marriage dignity had not been assailed.
All was now ready. The sailors drew up the anchor, and the assembled crowd watched the white sails of the trireme till they became rosy in the light of sunset, and the vessel dipped beneath the horizon.
Octavia awaited, in deep anxiety, the answer to her letter. There were points in it which might perhaps have touched the heart of Nero if Poppæa and Tigellinus had not been at his elbow as the evil genii of his degradation. But, when the tablets of Octavia came, Nero was sitting with the enchantress. Taking them out of his hands, she turned the letter into such ridicule, and laughed over it so sweetly and so immoderately, and mixed her silvery laughter with so many acts of fascination, that the fear of her ridicule--to which, like all vain persons, Nero was inordinately sensitive--quenched in his heart all thoughts of mercy. She also played upon his fears. ‘As long as Octavia lives,’ she said, ‘neither you nor I will be safe. You saw how the people rose in her behalf. You do not know what assassins she may have in her pay. All that the spirit of insurrection needs is a leader, and, while Octavia lives, conspirators have only to provide her with a husband, and she will bring him the Empire as her dower, as she did to you. The tomb is the only safe prison. The dead excite no tumult and tell no tales.’
So the messenger was sent back without an answer, and Octavia knew that she had only to prepare for her fate. No day dawned that might not be her last; no sail shone on the horizon which might not be bringing her executioners from Rome--nay, the orders might even now be in possession of her military guard, and the tramp of the changing sentries each morning and evening might be to her the echoing foot-fall of death. No situation in the world is more harrowing or more terrific than this. We can confront death when we know that we stand face to face with him; but to have his sword dangling over our necks by a thread of gossamer, and not to know at what moment it will fall; to know that somewhere near us he lies in wait, but not to know where or how he will leap out upon us--this adds a nameless dread to the king of terrors, and it has been sufficient to break down the iron nerves even of trained soldiers who have ridden fearlessly to many a bloody fight.
There was not a person on the little island who was not aware that Octavia was thus standing on the edge of the awful precipice. Great, therefore, was the astonishment of all, and especially of the Roman soldiers, at the strange placidity, the sweet fortitude which she displayed. None else could laugh during those sad days; but she could laugh--laugh more gaily than she had ever done in the gorgeous chambers of the Palatine. As escape was impossible, she was left free, and she loved to sit on the rocks in the evening sunlight and enjoy the cooler breeze. Unfamiliar with the sea-shore, it was a pleasure to her to watch the black-headed sea-mews rising and falling on the gentle swell of the tideless waters, or waving over it their immaculate white wings, or suddenly dashing down on some fish, and breaking the surface into concentric rings of rippled gold. She found pleasure in the shells, and sea-weeds, and purple medusæ, and laughed again and again as she noticed for the first time the curious motion of the hippocampi as they gambolled in the shallow waves. It was strange, too, to the few islanders to see her gathering garlands of their wild flowers, and having them placed in her bare, half-furnished rooms. She had never cared for splendour. It wearied a soul which had never seen it dissociated from guilt. The simplicity of her new life had a charm for her, and if Nero would but relent she could gladly live here, reading and doing her little acts of kindness and musing on the high thoughts which had recently become so radiant to her--sustained by the hope that better days would come on earth, or that, if not, there was a heaven beyond.
There were three of her household who knew the secret of the calm and resignation which struck her Prætorian custodians with astonishment. One of the officers, a rough youth named Vulfenius, had been heard saying to his comrade that the Empress must have been getting private lessons from the Stoics or Cynics;--‘only,’ he said, ‘a hundred of those philosophers are not worth a cracked farthing--arrant humbugs nearly all of them. But this girl--she smiles death in the face!--Or is it that she does not know?’
Yes, she knew; but the source of her cheerful courage lay in those scrolls which had been handed to her attendants by Linus and by Luke. Ever since the lustral dews of baptism had touched her brow, she had felt a change in her whole being, but her deep peace was confirmed by what was now read to her daily by Onesimus, or Hermas, or Tryphæna.
It was with strange feelings that when she broke the silken thread of the small waxen tablets of Linus, she had read the salutation in which Paulus, the prisoner, wished grace, mercy, and peace to Octavia, Empress, and now beloved in Christ. But as she eagerly read the few lines which he had engraved with his trembling stylus--for he had written this message in large letters with his own hand--she felt his words thrill into her soul with strange power. He rejoiced and thanked God that He had called her out of darkness into His marvellous light, and told her that this was a boon more precious than all the kingdoms of the world. He comforted her under all the affliction with which she was afflicted, with the comfort wherewith he too was comforted of God. He told her that she was a partaker of the sufferings of Christ, and that the sufferings of this present time were not worthy to be compared with that glory which shall be revealed in us. He exhorted her to look, not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.
Such words fall too often on our cold and careless ears with the triteness of long familiarity; but to Octavia, as to all who first learnt to feel their meaning in that despairing age, they seemed to be written in sunbeams. The new wine of the Kingdom of Heaven filled them as with divine intoxication; that which to the Pagans appeared like a half-insane enthusiasm or a blank obstinacy[90] was, in truth, but the exhilaration of conviction, in comparison with whose preciousness the whole world and all the glory of it seemed but as the light dust of the balances. Octavia had not been unaccustomed to hear the paradoxes of the Stoics; and she regarded them as spurious ornaments of life’s misery--spangles sewed upon its funeral pall. But in the words of Paul the prisoner, and of the poor persecuted Christians, there rang tones of perfect sincerity. Their doctrines were not learnt, but lived. They came attested by the evidence of characters not only innocent but holy; such as had been hitherto unknown to the world, and had no antitype even in the fabled age of gold. They came, morever, as the revelation of a law, not only general, but individual. In those who had grace to accept them, the Spirit Himself bore witness to their spirit that they were children of God.
Knowing the doom which trembled over Octavia’s head, and the impossibility of her escape, the soldiers who were in charge were ordered to allow her such liberty as the little islet permitted, and not to intrude upon the occupations of her household. Hence, during the early evening hours, it was possible for her to call one or two of her Christian handmaids around her, while Onesimus, as the Greek reader, read to them the scrolls which Luke had sent as his parting present. He had selected those which he thought would convey the deepest consolation. As Onesimus read them to that little circle, they were as the oracular gems on Aaron’s breast--Urim and Thummim ardent with the light of heaven. One of them was the Parable of the Prodigal Son. To Onesimus it was as the voice of God calling him back from the far country and the rags and the swine. As he read its concluding verses, again and again his voice was broken with sobs. Even when he had read it aloud on several evenings he could never come to the verse--
‘I will arise, and go unto my Father, and will say unto Him, Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee--’
without stopping to recover from the emotion which stifled his utterance, and the tears which blinded his sight.
Another little fragment contained the Evangelist’s record of the Sermon on the Mount. As Octavia heard it she felt more and more that her miseries had been blessings in disguise, and that if her life had been spent in the blaze of luxury and prosperity she could never have become an inheritor of that kingdom of which the commands were not burdens but beatitudes.
But what came most deeply home to all of them was that scroll on which Luke had written the story of the Crucifixion. They could never hear it read without requiring Onesimus to read after it the record of the last scroll, which contained the story of the two disciples at Emmaus, of whom it was privately thought among the Christians that Luke himself had been one. As Octavia listened to those inspired records, if the dreadful act of dying had not lost its horror, yet the grave had lost its victory, and death his sting.
* * * * *
Entranced by the rapture of these wondrous narratives, they had been reading later than usual. It was the ninth of June. The dusk of evening had fallen; the lamps had been lit. They had been too much absorbed to notice the Liburnian galley whose red sail on the horizon had attracted all the inhabitants of their rocky prison to the shore. They had not seen the Prætorians from Rome, who landed at the little jetty.
Ah! but they could not be deaf to the unwonted murmur which began to swell about the villa, nor to the clank of legionaries, nor to the gruff unfamiliar voices of command. They knew too well the meaning of those sounds. With faces whitened by terror they heard the summons at the gate, and the tramp of armed feet, and the cry, ‘A message from the Emperor!’ Hardly knowing what they did, Onesimus and Hermas barred the entrance to the chamber where they were sitting, while Tryphæna and the two other maidens grouped themselves round their mistress. There came a thundering challenge, followed by fierce blows rained upon the door. A moment afterwards it gave way with a crash. Hermas and Onesimus, as if by an instinctive motion, thrust themselves in the path of the advancing soldiers. A legionary struck down Hermas with the flat of his sword; Onesimus was dashed aside by a blow of the centurion’s iron glaive. They tore away the slave-girls who clung to their fainting mistress. Her they fettered, and opened her veins in many places. But she had sunk into a swoon, and the blood would not flow. Then they dragged her to the bath, heated it to boiling heat, and suffocated her in the burning vapour.
Nor was this enough for Nero’s vengeance. The corpse of the daughter of Claudius, the chaste wife of the Emperor, was not suffered to rest in peace. Poppæa would not be satisfied with anything short of the visible proof that her rival had been swept forever out of her path. There lay the fair form, with its long dark hair and girlish beauty, and more beautiful than in life, for a look as of rapturous surprise had lit up her pale features. It availed not. The head was struck off by the centurion, and he carried to Rome the ghastly relic, at once to claim his reward, and to glut the eyes of Poppæa with the sight of ‘death made proud by pure and princely beauty.’
And for this crime the slavish and degraded Senate vowed gifts to the temples! In those days every unjust banishment, every judicial murder inflicted by the Emperor, was the signal for a fresh outburst of infamous adulation. The thanksgivings to the gods, which had once been the signs of public prosperity, became the certain memorials of private infamy and public disaster.
Chapter XLVII
A FETTERED AMBASSADOR
Ὥστε τοὺς δεσμοὺς μου φανεροὺς ἐν Χριστῷ γενέσθαι ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ Πραιτωρίῳ καὶ τοῖς λοιποῖς μᾶσι.--Ep. S. Paul ad Phil. i. 13.
There was one spot in Rome which was calm amid all tumults, happy amid all calamities, though it was the last place where any of the Roman world would have deemed it possible for happiness to dwell. It was the narrow room which served as a prison to Paul of Tarsus.
As long as Burrus was Præfect of the Prætorians the prisoner’s lot had been made as easy as the strictness of Roman discipline allowed. He had been allowed to hire a lodging of his own, and no hindrance was placed on the visits or kindly offices of his friends. He was, indeed, compelled to submit to the one intolerable condition of being fastened night and day by a coupling-chain to the wrist of a Roman soldier; but Julius and others had spoken to Burrus about him in such warm terms that, as in the case of Agrippa I., care was taken that he should be consigned to the charge of a kind centurion, and that the Prætorians to whom in turn he was chained should, as far as possible, be good-tempered and reasonable men.
There was no service which the soldiers more hated than this of guarding prisoners. Each soldier was for the time as much a prisoner as the prisoner to whom he was chained. To be chained to a Jew was regarded by most of the Prætorians as an intolerable humiliation. If indeed the Jew happened to be a handsome and cosmopolitan young prince like Agrippa, the duty had its alleviations; but at the present time the soldiers had in charge some Jewish priests sent to Rome by Festus, who shuddered to be brought into contact with them. To be chained to these haughty hierarchs, who did not conceal their disdain for their gentile guards, was a cause of incessant annoyance, and there was not a Prætorian who did not groan when it was rumored that Julius had consigned to them another Jew, of weak bodily presence, and with health enfeebled by toil and hardship.
But the soldiers to whose lot it first fell to be coupled to the new prisoner soon spread a favourable report of him. They told their comrades that though he was not only a Jew, but a Christian, he was yet so sweetly reasonable, so generously considerate, so anxious to alleviate the necessary tedium of their duty, that it was a pleasure, and not a misery, to take a turn in guarding him. Unlike the priests, he seemed to take a human interest in everything human. He would talk freely with them on gentile subjects. He listened earnestly to all they had to tell him of Rome, its daily incidents and accidents, its senatorial debates, its foreign campaigns, the edicts of the Emperor, and the fortunes of the imperial family. It was whispered that everything which he did and said was worthy and noble, and the centurions observed a marked change for the better in some of the men who had been brought into contact with him. The Jews, it was noticed, looked on him with hatred as a renegade, and even of the Jewish Christians there were few who visited him. But some Christian was almost always with him, and these friends of his, particularly the modest and engaging Timotheus, deepened the favourable impression which the prisoner himself had made.
In truth, this was not the least happy period of Paul’s career. He was freed from the fret of endless anxiety and embittered opposition; he was no longer harassed by the multiform and terrible perils by which for so many years his life had been assailed. To many the forced cessation of the great work of their careers would have seemed an intolerable trial, and faith would have been weakened by the semblance of God’s desertion. It was not so with Paul. He knew that he was where God meant him to be, and that he was still an ambassador, though, as he playfully said to his friends, an ambassador in a coupling-chain.
He ought in justice to have been brought to speedy trial, seeing that he had already been imprisoned for two years at Cæsarea on a charge wholly without foundation. But in his shipwreck the documents sent by Felix and Festus had been lost, and when fresh documents came Nero’s capricious idleness put off the trial from month to month. So Paul continued in prison, and became a missionary to the Prætorium, and to many Romans. His imprisonment was not lacking in elements of interest. Linus and many of the Roman Christians sought his lodging, and showed him every mark of affection. Luke was constantly with him, consulted with him about every detail of his Gospel, and took charge of his health. He was in frequent correspondence with his friends and with the converts of the churches which he had founded. Timotheus, who was the child of his heart, treated him with all the tenderness of a son. Tychicus and Epaphras came from Asia, and brought him news of the Church of Ephesus and of the valleys of the Lycus. Mark, the cousin of his first companion, Barnabas, came to cheer him with news of Peter and of Jerusalem, and of his travels in many lands. Epaphroditus ministered to his necessities by bringing him a gift from his beloved and generous Philippians. The soldiers heard the letters which he dictated to his converts, and heard what Luke read to him of his Gospel. Many of them were deeply influenced by the new world of thought and holiness which was thus revealed to them. Some were converted and baptised, and found that the lodging of the Jewish prisoner was to them the vestibule of the house of God.
And when the soldier on guard was a brother, the intercourse which the prisoner could hold with any who came to visit him was unconstrained. Most of all was this the case when the Prætorian Celsus was chained to him, and the veteran soldier was so happy in the charge that he was ready to relieve any Prætorian by taking his turn in addition to his own. It was the armour of Celsus, as it lay beside him on the floor, dinted with the blows of many a battle, which suggested to Paul his beautiful description of the Christian panoply.
One day there came to the Apostle a lady deeply veiled attended by a Christian freedwoman. She was so agitated that, when she had sunk on one of the humble seats, she could scarcely find words in which to pour forth her anguish. When she grew a little calmer, she lifted her veil, and Celsus rose and made her a respectful salutation, for he recognised the mourning robes and sad but beautiful face of the wife of Aulus Plautius.
‘The Lady Pomponia,’ he said, ‘may speak freely, and fear not. I will unloose the coupling-chain, and go into the outer room,’
Pomponia thanked him, and told the Apostle that she had long been a baptised sister, and had read his letters to Rome and other churches, and had now come to him for consolation in unutterable distress of heart. She had but one son--the young and beautiful Aulus, the heir and the hope of their great house. But Nero had begun to hate her husband and herself, and was jealous lest some day the army should prefer the Conqueror of Britain to the tenth-rate actor and singer. For Agrippina, in one of her fits of rage, had, before her death, unwisely and unkindly mentioned the youthful Aulus as a virtuous boy who might one day wear the purple more worthily than Nero, who disgraced it; and Nero, wounded in his vanity, had determined on revenge. With a wicked cruelty which would have been infamous even in a Tiberius or a Caligula, he had invited the boy to the Palace, had subjected him to the deadliest insults, and had then ordered him to be slain, accompanying the order with a brutal jest against his mother Agrippina. And the people knew of the crime, and hardly did more than laugh and shrug their shoulders; and the Senate knew of the crime, and did not cease for a single day from its adulation to the tyrant; and the army knew of the crime, and not one sword flashed from its scabbard; and the philosophers and the poets knew of the crime, and not one denunciation scathed that deed of hell.
Pomponia’s heart was broken. Did God deal thus with His servants? Was the Christ far away in His blue heaven, and heeded not these things? And was it not lawful, was it not a duty, for Christians to help to sweep away from the earth such a monster of iniquity? Might she not rouse her husband, Aulus Plautius--not to avenge the individual wrong which was breaking his heart, and bringing him down to the gates of the grave--but to rid mankind from the incubus of an intolerable curse?
The Apostle saw that his task was difficult. For a moment he bowed his head, and clasped his hands in prayer. He needed threefold wisdom--to console the mother’s anguish; to avert the thought of vengeance; to strengthen the faith which had been assailed by sore perplexity. And the grace came to him. He banished from Pomponia’s heart the dread that because her Aulus had died unbaptised, he was doomed to perish: he told her not to dream that the boy, who had thus gone home, had departed unloved by his Heavenly Father. Fearful times were coming on the earth, and her beloved son, in whom the signs of virtue had not been wanting, might have been taken only to save him from the furnace of moral temptation and the wrath to come. Then taking from the hand of Luke the scroll in which he had been writing the great discourse on the Mount of Olives, he read to her the words of Jesus: ‘Ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake. And yet a hair from your head shall not perish. In your endurance ye shall acquire your souls.’
‘Alas!’ she cried, ‘how may I interpret this promise that a hair of our heads shall not fall, when my very heart is cleft in twain?’
He answered that the Lord spake not of earthly things. He warned us that in the world we should have tribulation; but He has overcome the world. And he prayed her not to dream of hastening the tyrant’s punishment. ‘Leave him in God’s hands. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”’
When his voice ceased, the passion of Pomponia’s grief had sunk to rest. The tears which still coursed down her cheeks were but the natural tears of a mother’s bereavement. Her beautiful soul was prepared for consolation, and her faith had but bowed for a moment like the upper foliage of a tree under the stress of some mighty storm. To calm her yet further, the Beloved Physician began to read aloud a passage here and there from the Evangel which occupied his daily thoughts. He read of the love of Jesus for children; he read the beatitudes; he read the story of the Cross. The music of the words and thoughts, borne on the music of his sweet and solemn voice, sank into Pomponia’s soul. She thanked the Evangelist, and, asking for the blessing of the Apostle, dropped her veil and departed to her desolate home.
The Heavenly Father who had suffered anguish to fall upon her had also sent medicine and a physician of the soul to heal her sickness. When she reached her palace on the Aventine, she was able to devote her whole strength to save her husband from succumbing to a sorrow which for him was beyond the reach of consolation. He had chosen for the epitaph of his boy’s tomb the defiant words, ‘I Aulus, the son of Aulus Plautius, uplift my hands against the gods, who took me hence in my innocence, at the age of fifteen years.’[91] But she dissuaded him. ‘Why complain,’ she said, ‘against the decree of Heaven? It may be good, and even the best, did we but know it. Nay, my Aulus, carve rather on his tomb a green leaf, and the two words, “In peace,” and add, if thou wilt, the line of Euripides,
‘“Who knows if life be death, and death be life?”’
Chapter XLVIII
ENSLAVED AND FREE
‘These rags, this grinding, is not yet so base As was my former servitude, ignoble Unmanly, ignominious, infamous, True slavery.’
Samson Agonistes.
Pomponia Græcina was only one of many to whom Paul of Tarsus from his prison-lodging brought joy and consolation. There was a twofold element in the happiness which seems to rise to exultation in the letter which he wrote from Rome to his Philippians. On the one hand he felt that from his bonds there streamed illumination, so that the grace of Christ became manifest even in Cæsar’s household, and among his chosen soldiers; and, on the other, he was enabled to hear the groanings of them who were in a captivity far sorer than his own--to undo many a heavy burden, and let the oppressed go free.
Shortly after the visit he had received from Pomponia, he was told that a young man was waiting outside who desired to speak with him. His sympathy with the young in their trials and temptations was always deep, and he asked Luke to admit the visitor. With hesitating step and downcast mien he entered, and the Apostle bade him come and sit by his side.
‘Dost thou recognise me?’ asked the visitor, in a low voice.
‘I have met many youths in many cities,’ answered the Apostle, ‘and I have seen thy face before, but where I cannot remember. Art thou Eutychus of Troas?’
‘No,’ he answered, glancing at the Prætorian; ‘but,’ he added in a whisper, ‘I am, or rather I was, a Christian.’
‘Speak without fear,’ said Celsus; ‘I, too, am one of the brethren.’
‘Thou wilt soon remember me,’ said the youth to Paul, removing the disguise which covered his dark locks and greatly altered his appearance. ‘I saw thee in the school of Tyrannus at Ephesus, when I came there with my master, Philemon of Colossæ.’
‘Onesimus!’ said the Apostle. ‘Welcome, my son--though I have heard sad things of thee from many.’
‘It is true, it is all true, that thou hast heard of me, O my father!’ said Onesimus, as he knelt before the Apostle, and kissed the hand on which his tears were falling fast. ‘Yes; I stole money from Philemon, my beloved master. I ran away from him; I am a worthless fugitive, a thievish Phrygian slave, whom most masters would crucify. And worse--I have denied the faith; I have done all things vile. Can there be forgiveness, can there be hope, for such as I am?’
‘My son,’ said the Apostle, ‘there is forgiveness, there is hope, for all who seek it.’
‘But oh, thou knowest not, my father, to what depths I have sunk. I have stolen a second time. I have been drunken with the drunken, slothful with the slothful, unclean with the unclean. I have been false to my trust. I have been in the slaves’ prison, and the gladiators’ school. I have fought in the amphitheatre. I have served the shameful wandering priests of the Syrian goddess. Twice over have I been all but a murderer. Can all this be forgiven?’
‘My son,’ said Paul, deeply touched, ‘thou hast sinned deeply; but so have many, who now are washed, cleansed, justified, sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of our God.’
‘Ah, but,’ cried the youth, ‘they have never been renegades.’
‘Onesimus,’ answered Paul, ‘hast thou not heard how the Lord Jesus told us to forgive our brethren, not only seven times, but seventy times seven? Will He be less merciful than He has bidden us to be? I bid thee hope in His infinite forgiveness. The blind and the leper, the publican and the harlot, the impotent man, and she out of whom he cast seven devils, went to Him, and were forgiven. Go thou, if thou canst not otherwise, as a leper, as a demoniac, as a paralytic, and He will abundantly pardon. Hast thou, indeed, sought Him?’
‘Nay, father, I could not,’ said Onesimus. ‘Ever since that theft from Philemon, ever since that flight, I have prayed but faintly; I felt as if I could not pray, as if no prayer of mine could be heard. A cloud of despair has hidden God’s face from me. Oh!’ he cried, wringing his hands, ‘I am an outcast--I am a castaway. I have no part in Him. My lot is now with this world, of which I have seen the infamies and loathe the crimes. It was but two weeks ago that any gleam of hope came back to me.’
‘What gave thee hope?’
‘Lucas of Antioch, whom I see with thee, gave some parts of his records of Jesus to one of Octavia’s slaves. I, too, went with the unhappy Empress to Pandataria, and there I read the Master’s parable of the Prodigal Son, and I tried to say, “I will arise and go to my father, and will say--”’
But here Onesimus stopped, and though he made an effort, he was unable to proceed.
With all his heart the great Apostle pitied him; indeed he pitied him so much that he found no words to speak. He could only lay his hand gently on the suppliant’s head, and uplift his eyes to heaven in prayer.
So Luke spoke and said, ‘I can tell thee, Onesimus, of other words of the Master. He cried: “Come unto me, all that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will refresh you;” and “him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out.”’
‘Did He say that? Did He say that?’ asked Onesimus, eagerly.
‘He did,’ said Luke, ‘and no word of His can pass away.’
The Prætorian Celsus had heard the conversation, and he too was touched. ‘Those words,’ he said, ‘called me from Satan to God. I was as deep a sinner as any man in the cohort, and no man can be much worse than that. I used to shrink from no cruelty, and to abstain from no sin. I was one of the soldiers employed in the massacre of the innocent slaves of Pedanius Secundus. So deep was my misery that one night I went in full armour to the Sublician Bridge, meaning to end a life so shamed and empty. But as I climbed the parapet, I was seized by the strong arm of a man in a slave’s dress. I drew my dagger and asked him, with a savage oath, if he held his life cheap, since he, a slave, thus dared to interfere with me, a Prætorian soldier. He fixed his steady eyes on me, and said, “I am unarmed; you can slay me if you will; but I will try to prevent you from self-murder.” “My life is my own,” I answered sullenly. “It is not your own,” he answered. “It is God’s, who gave it. He set you here, and you have no right to desert your post.” The man was Nereus, now the freedman of Pudens. He drew me away from the bridge, and I talked long with him. He was the first to give me the hope that I might live for better things. He taught me about Christ, and Christ’s promise that He would cast out none who came to Him. That saved me. When I was a Pagan I knew shame and guilt, but never knew that it could be washed away.’
‘Thanks be to God for His great goodness,’ said the Apostle. ‘And thou, my son, Onesimus, hear what Celsus has said. Thou hast had no fruit in the things of which thou art now ashamed, for the end of those things is death. But now, if thou wilt return to Christ, thy fruit shall be to holiness, and the end shall be eternal life.’
That interview completed the change in the heart of the Phrygian youth. He had returned from Pandataria a freedman, for on the night before her murder Octavia had freed her Christian slaves. He had also received gifts from his generous mistress which placed him above present need. He had therefore hired himself a lodging, and now, being readmitted, at Paul’s intercession, into the Christian assemblies, he recovered life and happiness. He waited on the Apostle with ceaseless assiduity, and anticipated all his wants. If ever Paul needed one to serve him--which was often the case, for Timotheus had been sent on a message to Ephesus--the Phrygian was at hand, and the Apostle found in his society and cheerful vivacity a great alleviation of a captive’s weariness. It was not long before he confided to the Apostle his whole story, concealing nothing, and he asked for his advice as to his future course.
That advice fell like a death-blow on all his hopes. With the impetuosity of youth he had entirely lost sight of the fact that he was still Philemon’s slave, and that the manumission conferred on him by Octavia, in her ignorance that he was the personal chattel of another, was legally invalid. He was, therefore, stricken with amazement when the Apostle told him that he was not a freedman, but still a slave. At those words the fabric of his life seemed once more to be smitten into ruins. He had exulted with passionate joy at the thought that he was no longer at the beck and call of a master, no longer liable to the horrors of the cross and the branding-iron, of the scourge or the furca. To be told that he was still a Phrygian slave, that duty required him to go back to the familia of Philemon, to restore what he had stolen, to face any punishment which the law of Colossæ might inflict on him, to place his future life unreservedly in the hands of his owner, and to face the humiliation of returning to the company of his old companions as a thief and a runaway--this was like a sentence of hopeless condemnation. And there was yet another circumstance which made the pang more deadly. He still cherished for the gentle daughter of Nereus a love which might not have seemed hopeless. If he stayed at Rome, if as a freedman he could strike out for himself an honourable career--which his Greek education rendered possible--he felt sure that he could yet win the hand of the Christian girl. But to return to Colossæ as a slave, and a guilty slave, and to be perhaps compelled to grow old in servitude on the banks of the Lycus--it seemed too terrible a sacrifice!
Yet his sincerity stood the test. After a great struggle with himself he bowed his head, and answered: ‘If it is my duty, my father, I will do it.’
‘It is thy duty, my son Onesimus, and doubt not that the path of thy duty will also be the path of thy happiness. Thou wilt gain by losing. I know and I love Philemon, and his wife Apphia, and their son Archippus; and I will write to Philemon for thee, and I do not doubt that now he will set thee free--for indeed I need thee. Thou art as a son to me; I have begotten thee in my bonds, and thou art true to thy name in all thy help to me. But even if Philemon does not set thee free, he is now thy fellow-Christian, and therefore thy brother beloved, and no slavery can make thee other than the Lord’s freedman.’
The letter to Philemon was written--the Magna Charta of ultimate emancipation--and Onesimus was sent with it to his former master. He was accompanied by Tychicus of Ephesus, who was charged with the circular letter to that and other cities, as well as with the letter to the Colossians. They had an affecting parting with the Apostle, for though he was full of hope, yet the issue of his approaching trial was uncertain, and they knew not whether they should ever see his face again. He shed tears as he embraced Onesimus, to whom he had grown deeply attached, but they left him in the kind care of Aristarchus, and of the two Evangelists Mark and Luke. Above all, Timotheus had again come from Ephesus to stay with him, and Timotheus was to him as the son of his old age.
His case excited little attention. When it was heard in Nero’s presence the Emperor was amusing himself with composing a loose satire, paragraphs of which he handed from time to time to some delighted favourite. He polished his wicked verses again and again, till his note-book was almost illegible with erasures, and he paid little heed to the Apostle’s accusers. The evidence, scanty as it was, broke down completely, and testimony in favour of the innocence and the services of the prisoner was given gladly by gentile witnesses.
The impeachment might have been more formidable but for the shipwreck of the vessel which, as Julius had told Vespasian, was conveying to Rome a commission of his accusers among whom were two persons no less important than Josephus, the young and learned Rabbi of Jerusalem, and Ishmael ben Phabi,[92] the High Priest. But their ship foundered in a terrible storm. Its entire cargo was lost, including the documents on which the Sadducean hierarchs of Jerusalem had relied to procure the Apostle’s condemnation. Of the two hundred souls on board only eighty had been picked up, by a ship of Cyrene, after they had swum or floated all night in the tempestuous waves. Ishmael and Josephus had indeed been saved, but several of their witnesses had perished. On the other hand, when men so different as Felix the brother of Pallas, and the honourable Festus, and the centurion Julius, and Publius the Protos of Melite, and Lysias the chief captain at Jerusalem, all wrote in Paul’s favour, and when the good-natured King Agrippa II. and Berenice had taken the trouble to subscribe to this favourable testimony with their own hands, there could be no reason for detaining him. Not even Tigellinus had any object in keeping his clutch upon a prisoner who was too poor for purposes of extortion. The Apostle was acquitted. Accompanied by rejoicing friends, he went to Ostia, and thence set sail for Ephesus. After a brief sojourn in the city of Artemis, he paid his promised visit to Philemon at Colossæ. The first to greet him with happy smiles in the house of the Colossian gentleman was Onesimus, and as the Apostle pressed him to his heart, he learnt that all his hopes had been fulfilled. Philemon, on receiving Paul’s letter, had summoned the fugitive to his presence, and frankly forgiven him. Orders were given to all the slaves of the household that no reference was to be made to the past. Apphia and Archippus treated the runaway with marked kindness, and he himself restored the full sum which he had stolen and strove in every way to repair the old wrong. Philemon had not thought it advisable, under the circumstances, at once to set Onesimus free, but now in honour of Paul’s visit he manumitted him and others of his Christian slaves, and allowed him henceforth to devote his grateful services to the comfort of the Apostle, with whom he set forth for Crete.
Chapter XLIX
THE DEPTHS OF SATAN
‘He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crowned his hair with flowers-- No easier nor no quicker passed The impracticable hours.’
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
It became daily more difficult for Nero to stimulate the jaded pulse of appetites at once sated and insatiable; but in the year A.D. 64 a new and immense sensation broke the tedious monotony of a life cursed with the gratification of every desire. The influence of Poppæa grew irresistible when it became evident that she was about to make Nero a father. In due time she gave birth to a daughter, who seemed destined to continue the imperial line. Nero went wild with joy. The child was born in the villa at Antium, where he himself had first seen the light. The highest of all titles, that of Augusta, was immediately conferred not only upon Poppæa, but even on the unconscious infant. Public vows, which had already been undertaken for her safety, were paid and multiplied. Thanksgivings on the most superb scale were given to the gods. A temple was reared to the goddess Fecundity. Golden statues of the Antian goddesses of Fortune were placed on the throne of the Capitoline Jupiter. Coins were struck on which the baby was glorified under the names of Claudia Augusta. The entire Senate set forth in long procession from Rome to congratulate the Emperor and Empress. Nero seized the opportunity to indulge his hatred against Pætus Thrasea. When the other senators were received into his presence, he sent an order that Thrasea was not to be admitted. Every one understood the significance of the message. It was a presage of certain doom. But Thrasea received it with unmoved countenance, and set out on his return to Rome with undiminished cheerfulness. To a noble and virtuous Roman all life was at that time the valley of the shadow of death.
The birth of Nero’s child greatly strengthened his position as Emperor. While he remained childless there was the possibility that when he died, or was swept away, the Senate might be able to summon to the purple some worthier successor. That hope was now cut off. Seneca withdrew himself to the utmost from public notice. The fate of Pallas was an additional warning to him. The boundless extravagances of Nero were rapidly exhausting a treasure which would have sufficed for anything except a superhuman rapacity. The wealth of Pallas proved too strong a temptation for Nero. He had the freedman poisoned, and seized his ill-gotten gains. To avoid a similar fate, Seneca entreated the Emperor to accept all his possessions and to suffer him to retire. Nero received the request with hypocritical assurances. How, he asked, could Seneca possibly suspect a prince who was so deeply indebted to his care? But, though Nero refused to accept either his resignation or his property, the philosopher did not deceive himself. He shut himself up in a seclusion into which he suffered none but his most intimate friends to intrude. He found his sole relief in writing to his friend Lucilius letters which were meant to console those who were living like himself under the daily pressure of agonising anticipations.
But the extravagant joy of Nero was rudely quenched. Before four months had ended the infant Claudia Augusta died, and Nero was plunged in a grief as extravagant as had been his delight. The birth of his child was to him a proof that the gods had averted their wrath, by omens of which he was frequently terrified. To train youths for the Neronian games, he had built a gymnasium, in which was placed a bronze statue of himself. The gymnasium had been struck by lightning, and the statue had been fused and disfigured into a mass of shapeless metal. The omen was horrific, and was followed by the news that the bright and wanton little cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum had been shaken almost into ruins by an earthquake of unusual severity. The safe birth of a child had alleviated the haunting fears which these events had excited in his mind; but they returned when the little Claudia died, nor were they greatly eased by making her a goddess, by striking coins with the inscription ‘Diva Claudia Neronis,’ and by appointing in her honour a pulvinar, a temple, and a priest!
Those who understood his needs and his character saw that life could only be made tolerable for him by excitements still more intense, and crimes still more colossal, than those to which he had grown accustomed. It had become his constant boast that the Emperor could do anything he chose, and that he had been the first Emperor to find out the fact. He therefore never hesitated to secure the death of any one whom he disliked. If they were insignificant persons, he had them poisoned and seized their goods. As no instinct of gratitude prevented him from thus murdering Pallas, who had been the chief agent in procuring his adoption and his succession to the Empire, he had the less hesitation in sacrificing others of less fame. Since Torquatus Silanus was the great-great-grandson of Augustus, he determined to get rid of him on charges of ostentation and seditious practices. When he had driven him to suicide he proclaimed that he had intended to forgive him. Against the Senate he cherished so deep a grudge that with his intimates he discussed the plan of putting all the members of the order to death and distributing its functions among the knights and freedmen. Cruelty had not been among his natural vices, but he now became athirst for blood.
But hatred could only be gratified by spasms of brief indulgence, and the animal passions also required something ever new to galvanise their decrepitude. No one understood this better than Tigellinus. Himself a voluptuary, who had exhausted the resources of every base pleasure, he sought to supply by effrontery the lack of new sensations. With this view he organised continuous revelries which should be unparalleled either for costly extravagance or for outrageous infamy.
Ruinous to the well-being of the State as were these portents of materialism, they were innocent in comparison with the deliberate corruption of public morals. Things are at their worst when vice is so hardened that, instead of seeking concealment, it courts notoriety. All Rome, even her ordinarily vicious population, recalled with shame the orgies, at once monstrous and vulgar, which were planned and paid for by Tigellinus to please his patron. Happily the world has never seen or heard of an entertainment more abominable. In the centre of the Campus Martius, near the Pantheon, was the Lake of Agrippa, surrounded by a park full of groves, gardens, and shrines. On the lake Tigellinus had constructed a raft for the guests. The gondolas moored by the margin to convey the banqueters to the raft were decorated with gilding, and vermilion, and silken streamers, and rowed by boy-slaves from Britain, Greece, and Asia, with long curled hair and bracelets of gold on their bare arms and ankles. On the raft were erected pavilions, filled with delicacies, and furnished as luxuriously as the tents of Eastern kings. When the actual feasting was over the whole of the gardens were filled with choirs of musicians, and all the varletry of either sex that could be assembled from the confines of Rome. Not one honest or honourable person was invited. It was to be a banquet of reprobates. Slaves, and gladiators, and nobles, and women of consular families, and soldiers, and men who had held high offices, and the gilded youth of Roman effeminacy, and Greeklings skilled in all refinements of evil, roamed promiscuously under the light of numberless cressets, their heads crowned with roses, their hearts inflamed with wine. It was a chaos of abomination, such as would not have been possible in any other age than the first century after Christ, or in any other place than imperial Rome. No Christian pen can paint that revelry of Antichrist, or do more than distantly allude to the scenes which followed, when Nero, disguised in the skin of a bear, crawled on all fours among the vilest of those wretches, and gave to him ‘who saw the Apocalypse’ the image of the wild beast who sprang from the foul scum of the world’s most turbid sea.
Yet though there was no truce to such scenes of darkness, except such as was imposed by the premature paralysis of excess, they were insufficient to occupy Nero’s tedium, or fill to the brim the cup of his desires. To be an actor, to be a public singer--that seemed to him to be the culmination of earthly bliss. Nothing would satisfy his burning caprice but to appear before the multitude as Paris and Aliturus did. But he dared not as yet insult the majesty of Rome with the spectacle of a stage Augustus, and therefore determined to sing first before an enchanted provincial audience, and thence to proceed to Greece, not displaying himself in the theatre of the capital till he could return as a victor in the Olympic and Pythian games. But when he had got as far as Beneventum he changed his mind, and determined to visit Egypt and the Eastern provinces instead of Greece. In Egypt he meant to re-enact with unheard-of splendour the old revelries of Antony and Cleopatra, and thought that in the hot, luxurious valley of the Nile he might hear of new forms of pleasure and luxury. Magnificent preparations were set on foot for his reception, and his foster-brother, Cæcina Tuscus, was sent to superintend them. Tuscus ventured to bathe in a sumptuous bath constructed for Nero’s use, and for this harmless act Nero sentenced him to exile. But the visit to Egypt was never paid. On his return to the Palace, he entered the Temple of Vesta, beside the Forum. Whether he was suddenly smitten with superstitious dread from the recollection of his crimes or from some other cause, he was there seized with a violent fit of shivering. His conscience smote him, not for other enormities, but for a crime which, in mere wanton wickedness, he had committed against the majesty of Vesta and the most sacred beliefs of Rome. In defiance of every law, human and divine, he had recently seized Rubria, one of the vestal virgins. It had become one of the horrible characteristics of his mind that half the fascination of wickedness consisted for him in the scandal which it caused. His rank elevated him above human vengeance, but in that circular shrine, and in presence of the ever-burning fire, he felt as if he were in the power of the goddess, and swooned away. The omen frightened him. Pretending that he could not endure to see his people saddened by the thought of his absence, he abandoned his journey, and announced that he would not leave them.
What new thing could be devised to dispel his weariness? He passionately longed for some tremendous sensation to dissipate his lassitude. If the hours had passed with leaden pace when he first tasted the sweets of autocracy, how unutterably weary had they now become!
‘Tigellinus, cannot you invent for me some new excitement?’ he asked. ‘I shall commit suicide from sheer fatigue. Tiberius went to Capri, but a rock like that would not suit me. I cannot live in the vulgar respectability of an Augustus or a Claudius.’
‘Shall I give you another feast like that at the Lake of Agrippa?’
‘That was all very well,’ said Nero, ‘but things grow tedious by repetition. Petronius used to be suggestive, but even he has long ago exhausted his inventiveness.’
‘I never knew why you gave up going to Greece,’ said the Præfect.
‘I thought it better to put it off till my voice was still more perfect. But what am I to do now? I am dying for a new experience. Of what use is life except to concentrate its essence into thrilling sensations?’
‘Was it not a new sensation, Cæsar, when the elephant walked on the tight rope with the knight Julius Drusus on his back?’
‘It amused me for once,’ said Nero. ‘It would be stale a second time.’
‘Well, then, when you had the “Conflagration” of Afranius put on the stage, and let the actors pillage the burning house?’
‘Aye,’ said Nero, ‘that was worth seeing. It gave me a hint or two for my poem on the “Taking of Troy.” What might not art gain, and how might not my poem be enriched, if I had an actual scene to draw from!’
‘You would hardly like to see Rome in flames, Cæsar?’
‘Indeed I should. It would be worth living for. Happy Priam, who saw the Burning of Troy, about which I can only write.’
‘But Rome is something different from Troy,’ said Tigellinus.
‘Rome!’ answered the Emperor. ‘I am sick of it. Look at these close, narrow, crowded streets. I should like to see a city of broad streets, and palaces, and gardens, like Thebes, or Memphis, or Babylon. Ninus and Sardanapalus had cities worth living in.’
Their conversation was held in a spacious room of the Domus Transitoria, with which Nero had filled up the whole space from the Palatine to the Esquiline.
‘Does not this Palace suffice you?’ asked the Præfect.
‘Not at all,’ replied Nero. ‘Many of the neighbouring[*13] houses and temples are in my way, and I should like to clear them off, and give myself air to breathe.’
‘Are you serious, Cæsar?’
‘Of course I am,’ he answered, petulantly.
Tigellinus shrugged his shoulders, and quoted a line from the Bellerophon of Euripides:--
‘When I am dead, let earth be rolled in flame.’
‘Nay, while I live let earth be rolled in flame,’ answered the Emperor, altering the iambic. ‘Anything would be better than to smoulder to death for want of something to amuse me.’
Nero was not altogether in earnest. His conversation was habitually grandiose, because he fed a perverse imagination with phantasmagorias and monstrosities. He was suffering from that blood-poisoning of unchecked vice which has so often maddened Eastern despots.
The fixed idea of watching a conflagration, and getting illustrations for his Trojan epic, often returned to this Emperor of melodrama. Without resolutely entertaining the purpose of wrapping Rome in flames, he allowed himself to hint at it and to play with it. But he had made Tigellinus much more in earnest than himself. That evil genius of the Emperor thought that from such a calamity he at least would have nothing to lose, and might have everything to gain. He had inexhaustible riches at his disposal, and numberless wretches in his pay. He meant to see what could be done. Not long after the above conversation Nero went for a few days of literary leisure and musical practice to his villa at Antium, and Tigellinus gave him hints that at Antium he might expect startling news, and that a first-rate sensation was in store for him. For the magnitude and horror of that sensation even Nero was not prepared.
* * * * *
To us it all seems incredible. It did not seem incredible to Tacitus, and it is positively affirmed by Suetonius, Dion Cassius, and even by the grave and learned Pliny the Elder, who, as a contemporary, must have known infinitely better than we can do ‘the depths to which despotism in delirium can descend.’