Chapter L

A CITY IN FLAMES

‘Hoc incendium e turri Mæcenatiana prospectans, lætusque flammæ, ut aiebat, pulchritudine, ἅλωσιν Ilii in illo suo scenico habitu decantavit.’--SUET. Nero, 38.

Ἔκραζον ὁρῶντες τὸν καπὸν τῆς πυρώσεως αὐτῆς--Apoc. xviii. 9.

Nero set out for Antium on July 17. Two days afterwards Rome was in a sea of surging flame. Men noticed that it was the anniversary of the day on which, four and a half centuries earlier, the city had been burnt by the Gauls. The fire had burst forth in the neighbourhood of the Circus Maximus. The shops and storehouses which surrounded that huge structure were full of combustible materials, including the machinery and properties used in the public spectacles. Here the flames seized a secure hold, and, raging about the Cœlian, rolled toward the eastern front of the Palatine. Checked by the steep sides of the hill and its cyclopean architecture, the fire swept down the valleys on either side--to the right, along the Via Nova; to the left, along the Triumphal Way. It ravaged the Velabrum and the Forum; it consumed the temple and altar reared to Hercules by the Arcadian Evander, the palace of Numa, and the circular Temple of Vesta, which enshrined the ever-burning hearth and Penates of the Roman people. Sweeping into the Carinæ, which was crowded by consular palaces, it devoured those stately structures, and the many trophies of ancient victories with which they were enriched. On the Aventine it destroyed the temple which Servius Tullius had erected to the Moon, and in it the priceless relics of Greek art which L. Mummius had brought from Corinth. Rolling back to the Palatine with more victorious violence, it reduced to a blackened ruin the venerable temple which Romulus had vowed to Jupiter Stator. Then, licking up everything which lay in its path, it rioted with voluptuous fury in the more densely crowded regions of the city, raging and crackling among the old, tortuous purlieus and crazy habitations of the Subura. With its hot breath it purged the slums and rookeries, foul with a pauper population of Oriental immigrants, who were massed round the ill-famed shrines of Isis and Serapis. When it had acquired irresistible volume in these lower regions, it again rushed up the hills as with the rage of a demon, to sweep down once more in tumultuous billows over the helpless levels. For six days and seven nights it maintained its horrible and splendid triumph--now bounding from street to street with prodigious rapidity, now seeming to linger luxuriously in some crowded district, flinging up to heaven great sheets of flame, and turning the nightly sky into a vault of suffocating crimson.

No words can paint the horror of a scene which transformed into a Gehenna of destruction a city enriched with the magnificence of nearly eight centuries of victory. There were districts in which the heat was so intense that they were unapproachable, and the rarefaction of the atmosphere, joined to a strong breeze which seemed in league with the destroying element, filled the air with a roar as of ten thousand wild beasts. Here stores of resinous material made the consuming flames white with intensity; and there the burning and smouldering débris, which for a time half choked the conflagration, poured forth black volumes of smoke, which hid its progress under a pall of midnight. Here an insula, many stories high, collapsed with a crash which was heard for miles; and there whole streets, falling simultaneously on both sides, caused continuous bursts of sound like the long roll of incessant thunder.

But the physical horrors of the scene, as it was witnessed by a million or more spectators who thronged from every town of Latium and Campania to behold it, were nothing compared with the prodigies of human agony and the multiform images of death and crime. At first there had been wild efforts on the part of many to save their homes. But their efforts were rendered futile by many causes. The conflagration seemed to break forth, not in one spot, but from various quarters, which rolled together their concurrent seas of flame. No means were adequate to resist a foe which seemed to be ubiquitous. The scorching heat drove back the boldest firemen. The buckets, from which the police derived their nickname of sparteoli, were ludicrously inadequate for an emergency so tremendous. The supplies of water were not available in the wild confusion. It was rumoured on every side that slaves and agents of the imperial household were seen with tow and torches in their hands, which they flung into the houses of the nobles; and, if any attempted to check them, they menacingly declared that they had authority for their doings. If a senator tried to organise his slaves to quench the flames or impede their advance, he was bidden to take care what he was about. Burglary and rapine were let loose. The criminal population of the city seized the opportunity to plunder every burning palace into which they could force their way. Nor was it long before self-preservation became the one absorbing passion of the multitude, surprised by the ever-swelling dimensions of the catastrophe. Here a group of women, as they stood shrieking and tearing their hair, unwilling to leave their homes or unable to save their little ones, were trampled down under the hurrying rush of some group of fugitives. Here the father of a family, hindered in his flight by the helplessness of age or childhood, found himself swept along by reckless pillagers, and with unutterable anguish was compelled to abandon some little child or decrepit grandsire who had been flung down on the pavement with bruised or broken limbs. As the inhabitants of regions which the fire had freshly invaded rushed to escape, they plunged into winding alleys overarched by meeting flames, or their flight was impeded by smouldering ruins, or they were overwhelmed by the thunderous fall of some huge building, many, losing their heads altogether, stood stupefied with despair, and the smoke stifled them, or the fire scorched them, until the streets were filled with charred corpses. Others in raging defiance, seeing themselves reduced to penury by the loss of all they possessed, or with hearts lacerated by the death of their beloved, leapt madly into the flames. Rome during all that week was a pandemonium of horror, in which, amid shrieks and yells and every sound of ruin, were witnessed the wrath of the elements, the passions of devils, and tragedies of despair, and anguish which no heart can conceive, no tongue describe.

At the first news that Rome was in flames, and that they were already approaching his Domus Transitoria, Nero hurried back from Antium. Now indeed he had a sensation to his heart’s content. At first he was shocked by the magnitude of a catastrophe more overwhelming than had ever before happened to Rome or any other city. He mounted the tower of Mæcenas, and gazed for hours upon the scene--thrilling with excitement which was not without its delicious elements. Safe himself, he was looking down on a storm of tempestuous[*14] agony, which he could regard in the light of a spectacle. He was accustomed to gaze unmoved on human pangs in the bloody realism of the amphitheatre, and to see slave after slave flung to the lions, with their arms bound in chains concealed with flowers. But what scene of the circus, when the gilded chariots were reduced to a crashing wreck of collisions, in which the horses kicked one another and their charioteers to death--what gladiatorial massacre, filling the air with the reek of blood, was for a moment comparable to the sight of Rome in flames? The sublime horror of the moment stimulated in him all the genius of melodrama and artificial epic. Surrounded by his parasites, he compared Rome, now to a virgin whom the tigers of flame devoured, now to a gladiator wrestling with troops of lions in the arena. He was lost in admiration of the beauty of the fire. Now he called it a splendid rose, with petals of crimson; now a diadem of flaming and radiating gold; now again an enormous hydra with smoky pinions and tongue of flickering gleam. He wrote many a quaint and fantastic phrase in the notebooks which were crowded with his much-lined commonplaces of poetic imagery! Here were the materials for many future poems before him. He could, for instance, write an Ode on Tartarus--its horrible spaces of silent anguish, its black vapours, its brazen gates, and iron pillars, its ghosts and demons gibbering and shrieking in the shade, its torments and its Pyriphlegethon with cataracts of blood and fire. He felt sure that after these incitements of emotion and infusions of realism, his poem on the Burning of Troy would be immortal, since it could not fail to catch from such a scene a tinge of voluptuous sublimity!

And as he gazed for hours together of the day and of the night, he endeavoured to realise the aspect of the spectacle, and did not allow himself to be disturbed by the multitudinous agonies which it implied. He did, indeed, accept some suggestions of Seneca, who, abandoning his seclusion from generous impulse, hurried to him as soon as it became evident that the fire meant wide-spread destitution. Nero felt a spasm of terror when the philosopher expressed a doubt whether sullen misery might not flash up into rage, and cause a formidable rebellion. For want of houses, the people were huddling into tombs and catacombs. Nero, therefore, took the hint that he should offer the Campus Martius and the monuments of Agrippa--his porticoes, baths, gardens, and the Temple of Neptune--as a refuge for the shivering throngs whom the flames had driven from their homes. But, this done, he flattered himself that the public disaster would redound to his popularity; and as it never occurred to him that any one would suspect his complicity, he gave himself up once more to æsthetic enjoyment. He ordered masses of roses to be strewn around him on the summit of the tower; he twanged his harp as he thought of refrains and songs which he intended to write on the subject; and he meant that Troy should stand as a transparent symbol of Rome. When he was for a time tired of watching, he induced his minions to ask him for an opportunity of hearing once more his celestial voice; and putting on his tragic syrmos, appeared on a private stage, harp in hand, and affectedly chanted to them his insipid strophes and emasculate conceits.

But even these first-rate sensations became in time monotonous. He had seen as much as he wanted, and to his great delight the conflagration had destroyed the buildings near the Palace on which he had cast covetous eyes. When after a pause the fire, which had been checked on the seventh night, broke out a second time from the Æmilian estate of Tigellinus, and raged fitfully for three days more, he was tired of it. There was no object in suffering the whole of Rome to be destroyed. He assented to a proposition that masses of buildings should be pulled down on the Esquiline, in order that the progress of the flames might be checked. The expedient was successful. There was now time to note the extent of the devastation. Rome was divided into fourteen districts. Three of these were reduced to utter wreck and destruction. Seven more were in a condition of desperate ruin; four alone remained untouched. The loss of antiquities, of venerable buildings rich in historic associations, of precious manuscripts, of priceless relics of the past, above all, of works of art,

‘the hand of famed artificers In cedar, marble, ivory, or gold,’

was such as none could estimate. The rumour arose that Nero was about to rebuild the city with unparalleled magnificence and call it Neronia; but whatever gain might accrue to another generation from endless straight lines, ‘vast monumental perspectives, and sumptuosities of parade,’ those who regarded cities as something more than official masses of architectural monotony were wounded to the heart. No new Rome could ever make up to them for the loss of the old beloved city which sat dreaming on her seven hills among the glorious memories of the past.[93]

The name of Nero was on every lip, and it was blended with curses not loud but deep. As he wandered over the blackened areas, his lictors accompanying him, his head crowned with garlands and his thoughts full of magnificent schemes of reconstruction, he became aware that the blank walls of the ruins were already scribbled over with infamies with which his name was connected, and that scowling brows were bent upon him and looks of hatred mingled with terror. His proclamation that none were to approach the ruins of their own houses, since he would charge himself with the burial of the human remains and the clearance of the débris, was interpreted into a design to enrich himself with any objects of value, or uninjured works of art, which might be disencumbered[*15] from the general destruction. He found it necessary to take measures to prevent the indignation of the multitude from finding vent in furious outbreak. Inviting aid from the senators, he started a sort of patriotic fund, which did not differ greatly from a forced loan. He threw open his gardens to the desolate paupers, who had no distant villas such as those in which the rich took refuge; he ordered the erection of multitudes of temporary huts; he decreed that the necessaries of subsistence should be imported with all haste from Ostia and the neighbouring municipalities, and he reduced the fixed price of corn to the lowest possible limit. Under ordinary circumstances such measures would have been welcomed with gratitude, as they were some years later in the reign of Titus. As it was, they were insufficient to remove the odium with which rumour surrounded his name. The public voice accused him of being the author of a misery which it was beyond his power to alleviate. It was all very well for him to lavish a liberality which cost him nothing, and came from national resources; but while he was still steeped to the lips in superhuman luxury, who could restore to that nation of ruined men their lost children and relatives, their lost homes and cherished possessions, their lost materials and opportunities for gaining an honourable livelihood? The story that he had harped and sung and poetised while the city was crashing into ruins had first been whispered as a secret, but was now familiar to every lip; and it filled all hearts with execration and contempt. The ruthless egotism of the Emperor seemed likely to cost him dear.

All that was left of religious feeling in the old Paganism was overwhelmed with a sense that the gods were wroth. There rose a clamour that expiations and purifications were necessary. But litanies, and vigils, and sacred banquets were in vain, and Rome presented the piteous scene of a starving and homeless populace who regarded the past with horror and the future with despair, having no hope, and without God in the world.

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Chapter LI

AN INFERNAL SUGGESTION

‘I, under fair pretence of friendly ends, And well-placed words of glozing courtesy, Baited with reasons not unplausible, Wind me into the easy-hearted man, And hug him into snares.’

MILTON, Comus.

Nero was harassed night and day by a new terror. The grand spectacle of Rome in flames, and the touches of local colouring, æsthetic and realistic, which it had enabled him to add to his poem on the Taking of Troy, would have been dearly purchased if they were to involve the forfeiture of his throne and life. Yet the sinister attitude of the people could not be mistaken, nor their menacing murmurs hushed. Tigellinus began to doubt whether the allegiance of the Prætorians, Germans and other foreign mercenaries as many of them were, would remain unshaken. They showed inclination to sympathise with the proletariat in their dangerous disaffection.

Except Tigellinus and Poppæa there was no one to whom the Emperor dared open his secrets. Both of them were closeted with him, but could suggest nothing to awaken him from the abject alarm into which he was sinking. It was evident that alike the people and the Senate held him responsible for the late conflagration, and it was impossible to detect the author of the rumours which had made his actions the common theme of Roman gossip. The only way to save himself from the hatred which threatened to destroy him, would be to divert the suspicion of the masses into some other channel. But whom could Nero accuse with any semblance of probability? Tigellinus was unscrupulous and Poppæa shrewd, but they knew not what to advise.

While they were thus consulting, a slave announced that Aliturus, the Jewish pantomimist, accompanied by the High Priest of Jerusalem and a distinguished Rabbi, desired an audience.

‘Aliturus is welcome,’ said Nero; ‘but I do not want to be troubled by his countrymen.’

‘Give them an audience, Cæsar,’ said Poppæa, who was secretly addicted to Judaism, and had even been admitted as a proselyte of the gate. ‘Aliturus presented them to me at Puteoli. They are worth conciliating. This High Priest is so rich that his mother (I am told) once presented him with a tunic worth a hundred minæ, and he only deigned to wear it once. You know the prophecy of the astrologer, that you are to have an Oriental Empire, and perhaps to reign at Jerusalem.’

Nero consented, and Aliturus, who was always among his favourites, was ushered into his presence. The actor wore the ordinary dress of a wealthy Roman youth, but the two friends who accompanied him were in the costume of the East, with rich robes and silken turbans. The elder of the two was an old man, whose white beard flowed in waves over his breast, and whose sumptuous dress and haughty bearing accorded with the dignity, if not with the humility, of the High-Priesthood. The younger was a man not yet thirty years old, splendidly handsome and full of the genius of his race.

‘Welcome, Aliturus,’ said the Empress. ‘Cæsar, this is the venerable Ishmael ben Phabi, High Priest of the Jews, on whose ephod has hung the twelve-gemmed oracle, and who has worn the golden robes; and this is Josephus of Jerusalem, son of the Priest Matthias, a Priest, a Rabbi, and a soldier.’

The High Priest and the Rabbi bowed almost to the ground, and kissed the hand which Nero extended to them as he asked them on what business they had come to consult him.

‘Half of our task in Rome has failed,’ said the High Priest. ‘We came, commissioned by our nation to impeach Paulus of Tarsus, a ringleader of the Galileans, for a sedition which he stirred up in Jerusalem; but while our shipwreck detained us your clemency has acquitted the criminal. We came also to entreat the liberation of some of our priests who are here in prison, sent hither on frivolous charges by the Procurator Festus.’

‘I will intercede for them,’ said Poppæa. ‘Those Procurators of Judæa constantly maltreat an innocent and venerable people.’

‘The last Procurator is of your appointment, Poppæa,’ said the Emperor. ‘I only nominated Gessius Florus, because you are a friend of his wife Cleopatra.’

‘And he is the worst of them all,’ whispered Josephus to Aliturus. ‘He takes bribes from the bandits. He impales Jews who are knights and Roman citizens, and he would not desist, though Berenice went before his tribunal barefooted and with dishevelled hair.’

‘I have no doubt that Florus will be kinder than his predecessors,’ said Poppæa. ‘The others have stirred up against Rome the anger of the Jewish God.’

‘Who is that?’ asked Nero. ‘Is it Moses?’

‘Moses,’ said Ishmael, ‘was a great law-giver, to whom was granted more than human wisdom; but we worship not a mortal man. Our God is He who made heaven and earth.’

‘Anchialus?’ asked Nero.[94]

‘Anchialus is some gentile scoff which I understand not,’ said the High Priest, with dignity.

Nero whispered to Poppæa a line of Lucan’s:--

‘Judæa, votaress of a dubious God.’

‘Suffer me to answer,’ said Josephus; ‘and as the Emperor is learned in Greek I will answer in the line of an oracle given by the Clarian Apollo himself:--

‘“Deem that the God Supreme, the Lord of Lords, is IAO”’[95]

‘And do you mean to say that this God of yours--Iaô, as you call him--can injure Rome?’

‘He punishes all who insult His majesty,’ answered the young Rabbi, ‘and He blesses those that honour Him. Cæsar, in his wisdom, knows how Pompeius burst into our Holy of Holies, and found that we did not worship, as men lyingly said, the image of an ass, but that the shrine was dark and empty. But from that time forth, Pompeius was overwhelmed in that sea of ruin which flung him, a headless corpse, on the shore of Alexandria. Heliodorus, the treasurer of Seleucus Philopator, was scourged out of our Holiest by a vision of angels. But Alexander the Great bowed before our High Priest Iaddua, and God gave him unexampled victories. And Julius, your mighty ancestor, was dear to our race, and he prospered through our prayers.’

‘Yea,’ said the High Priest, ‘and when the Cæsar Gaius would have profaned our Temple with a statue of himself, our God smote him with madness, and ere a year was over the dagger reached his heart.’

Nero had fits of superstition, and he listened with greedy ears. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that you Jews hated all mankind except yourselves.’

‘We hate them not,’ answered Ishmael. ‘On the contrary, we pray for all the seventy nations of mankind, and we offer daily sacrifices for their welfare. If those sacrifices ceased, the world would perish.’

‘Listen, Cæsar, to the High Priest’s words,’ said Poppæa, ‘and set these priests free.’

‘What Poppæa asks is done,’ said Nero. ‘But,’ he continued, turning to the Jews, ‘is not your nation seditious and turbulent?’

‘It is not,’ answered Ishmael. ‘We never stir unless we are wronged. We would fain sit in peace, each under his own vine and his own fig-tree. We offer sacrifices in our Temple for the Emperor’s safety.’

‘Nero must not confuse us with the Christians,’ said Josephus, quietly. ‘The Romans and Greeks have not yet learnt the difference between us; and all their crimes are set down to us.’

‘The Christians?’ said Nero. ‘Who are they? I have heard of them as malefactors, the scum of the earth, but always thought they were a sect of Jews.’

‘Forbid it Heaven!’ said the High Priest, vehemently. ‘They worship a crucified mesîth, who deceived the people. Some of them, I confess with anguish, are of our race, but far more are Gentiles.’

‘But did not Claudius drive the Jews from Rome, because they were always rioting at the instigation of one Chrestus? Indeed, I thought they were called Chr_e_stians.’

‘They like to be called Chrestians,’ said Josephus, ‘as though they were chrestoi, or excellent. But Christos is the Greek for “anointed,” and they use it for our Hebrew Messiah. It was not the Jews who rioted in the days of Claudius, Emperor, but the sect of Christians. Their Christus was crucified, thirty years ago, by Pontius Pilatus. This Paulus of Tarsus is their chief man now.’

‘Paulus?’ said Nero. ‘I vaguely remember his being tried and acquitted a month ago. He seemed to me a harmless sort of man. He spoke, as I remember, very eloquently. Agrippa, and Berenice, and Festus, and even Felix, spoke well of him.’

‘They are the enemies of our race,’ said the High Priest, ‘and they deceive thee, O Emperor. It is this very Paulus who turns the world upside down, and not only preaches against our holy law, but forbids to pay tribute to Cæsar, and teaches men to worship Jesus as their king.’

‘Do they dare to set up another king than Cæsar?’ exclaimed Nero, hotly. ‘This must be seen to.’

‘I have heard of them,’ said Poppæa. ‘It is they, and not the Jews, who hate the whole human race.’

‘I am sorry I let that Paulus go,’ said Nero. ‘Tigellinus, have you any complaints against these imprisoned priests?’

‘None,’ said Tigellinus; ‘they cost nothing, for they live chiefly on olives and figs.’

‘Then set them free this evening.’

‘We thank Cæsar for his goodness,’ said the High Priest, once more making a low obeisance; ‘and we hope that he will deign to accept our present.’

The present was a golden box, in which were many vials of rose-tinted alabaster, full of the most precious balsam of Jericho, which filled the chamber with perfume as Josephus took it from an attendant slave and laid it at Nero’s feet.

‘This shall be for Poppæa,’ said the Emperor, ‘and on her behalf I will send you a purple hanging for your Temple. I hope you will ask Iaô to be propitious to me.’

They were ushered out, and no sooner had they left the room than Tigellinus rose, and impetuously exclaimed--‘I have it! Those Jews have taught me the secret. Strange that it never occurred to me before.’

‘What is the secret, Præfect?’ asked Poppæa.

‘The Christians! we must accuse them of being the incendiaries of Rome. Cæsar, dismiss your fears. The propitiated gods have found a victim, and the people will be satisfied.’

Nero’s spirits instantly rose. ‘Excellent!’ he exclaimed; ‘and thanks to that handsome Rabbi for the hint; but who will tell us something more about them?’

‘Aliturus will,’ said Poppæa. ‘As an actor he moves constantly among the people.’

Aliturus had hardly left the Palace when he was summoned back to the imperial conclave, and asked to tell what he knew about the Christians. He retailed all the vile calumnies which were current in antiquity about the ass-worship, the drinking of the blood of slain children, the promiscuous orgies of darkness, the deadly hatred to all mankind, the Thyestean banquets and Œdipodean unions. He told all these things because he had heard them from common report, and had never taken the trouble to ascertain the truth.

‘Have they any friends among the populace?’ asked the Præfect.

‘None,’ replied the actor. ‘The people hate them. They are foes to all pleasure: they will not enter a theatre. They spit when they pass a temple; they turn away with horror from sacrifices. They hate wine, and will never wear a garland. They are morose misanthropes, devoutly brutal, and capable of any crime.’

‘It would be a good thing to get rid of such enemies of gods and men,’ said Tigellinus. ‘Do you think they could have been the authors of the late conflagration?’

‘It is more than possible,’ answered Aliturus. ‘I hear that they often talk about the burning up of the world.’

‘Yes,’ said Poppæa; ‘and the part of the city which has most completely escaped being burned is the region across the Tiber where most of them live.’

Nero clapped his hands with delight. ‘Suspicion all points in that direction,’ he said; ‘but how could we get evidence against them?’

‘It would not be easy, Cæsar. They meet in the most secret places, and have their watchwords.’

‘That looks bad,’ said Nero. ‘I do not like secret meetings.’

‘Could you not get into one of their assemblies and bribe some of them?’ asked Tigellinus.

‘I will try,’ said Aliturus, ‘if Cæsar wishes it. I can at any time disguise myself and alter my face so that no one can recognise me; and I dare say some slave will find out their watchword for me.’

‘Manage this for us, Aliturus, and your reward shall be gold enough to make you a rich man for life. I gave a senator’s property to Menecrates, the harpist, and a Consul’s patrimony to Spicillus, the mirmillo, and a town-house and a villa to Paneros, the usurer. Cæsar knows how to reward with a princely hand those that serve him.’

‘Cæsar is a god,’ said the supple actor; ‘and Aliturus will not fail him.’

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Chapter LII

ALITURUS AMONG THE CHRISTIANS

Ἐὰν δὲ πάντες προφητεύωσιν, εἰσέλθῃ δὲ τις ἄπιστος, ἐλέγχεται ὑπὸ πάντων, ἀνακρίνεται ὑπὸ πάντων.--S. Pauli I. ad Cor. xiv. 24.

Aliturus did not find it easy to fulfil his promise. Ishmael Ben Phabi, stimulated by Sadducean hatred, made every inquiry among the Jews of Rome, and learnt much that was useful to him. Josephus, who had no special hatred against the Christians, but wished to know more about them, because, as a Pharisee, he was interested in their doctrine of the Resurrection, was able to give him some useful hints. Esther, a Jewish freedwoman of Nero, wife of Arescusus, was still more serviceable. At one time she had been drawn to the Christians by their sanctity of life, but she was an intense enthusiast of Mosaism, and, shocked by the views of gentile converts respecting the nullity of the Law, she had felt the reaction of antipathy against them.[96] But Primitivus, who had succeeded Phlegon (the lover of the epileptic girl Syra), as keeper of the Spoliarium, gave him the key he needed. Primitivus, in his work at the amphitheatre, had more than once come in contact with Christians, and Phlegon had told him what he had heard about them from Syra. He revealed to Aliturus the mystic watchword of the Fish.

Armed with this watchword, the actor managed to establish relations with Philetus, a slave of dubious character, who had nominally joined the Christians because he found among them a sympathy and a kindness which he had forfeited in his gentile surroundings. This thankless traitor conducted him one evening, in the disguise of an Ephesian merchant, into the remote sand-pit where the Christians held their largest gatherings.

He found himself in an assembly of at least a thousand persons, who had come by various roundabout obscure paths. A narrow opening led to the half-subterranean place of rendezvous, and this was strongly guarded by a body of Christian youths, who challenged and scrutinised every comer. As they entered, the worshippers extinguished their lamps and torches, and the vast space was in complete darkness, except that a few lights glimmered in its deepest recesses. Aliturus was accustomed to scenes of hardened wickedness, but he shuddered in expectation of the nameless horrors which pagan slander led him to suppose he would witness. How deep was his astonishment at the order, the decorum, the innocent fervour, the holy devotion, the almost childlike simplicity of the entire ceremony! Truly these men and women were no orgiastic rioters! Linus was in the chair of the chief pastor, and he was assisted by Cletus and other presbyters. Sometimes he offered up prayers for all, sometimes the whole assembly joined in common prayer, and the deep ‘Amen’ swelled like the sound of a mighty wave. They joined in hymns addressed to God and to Christ, and then the assembly was swept by the indescribable emotion of Spiritual Presence which found vent in speaking in the Tongue. But there was nothing disorderly or tumultuous in the manifestations, for the worshippers had taken to heart the warnings which Paul had given to the Church of Corinth. The pantomimist was struck with the awful depth and penetrative force of those strange sounds, which no skill of his--trained as he had been for years--would enable him to reproduce. When some rose to interpret the mysterious utterances, he heard many allusions to Babylon--which his Jewish origin made him recognise as a cryptogram for Rome--and references to the recent fire. But it was only spoken of as an awful judgment of God, a sign of Christ’s second Advent, a prelude to the conflagration of the world. He heard nothing wicked, nothing seditious. On the contrary, every exhortation inculcated innocence and purity of life; and prayers were offered for the Emperor, and all in authority. In Roman society he had heard many a bitter jest, many a mordant innuendo aimed at the Emperor, by men who were too vain to conceal their sarcasms, even when they were perilous.[97] But here he heard no such objurgations. When the interpretation of tongues was over, Linus rose to address his flock.

He spoke first of the conflagration, and of all the disasters which they had recently witnessed. He alluded with many tears to the brethren who had perished in the burning streets, or lay buried under the ruins of fallen houses, and he bade them not to sorrow as men without hope, since the dead who die in the Lord were blessed. How far more awful was the fate of those worshippers of false gods, who had lived in defiant wickedness, and who, instead of passing from life to life, had passed from death unto death, and a fiery looking for of judgment! One practical duty he pressed upon them. Most of them were poor; but God had given them the true riches. And now that so many of their brethren were left destitute, it was their duty to show that they believed the words of the Lord Jesus, that it is more blessed to give than to receive. The heathen said, ‘See how these Christians love one another.’ Yes, they loved one another, and all who were of the household of faith; but let them also be kind and gentle to those who treated them despitefully, remembering Him who had said, ‘I say unto you, “Love your enemies.”’

From this topic he passed to the duty of watchfulness. All around them lay the kingdom of Satan and of darkness. They knew its grossness, its misery. Their beloved Apostle Paul had painted it for them to the life in his letter to their Church. ‘Be sober, then,’ he said, ‘be vigilant! Already there are wars and rumours of wars, and earthquakes, and famines, the sea and the waves roaring, and men’s hearts failing them for fear of the things coming on the earth. Is not the mighty calamity which we have witnessed one of the birth-throes of the Messiah? Love not the world, therefore, brethren, nor the things of the world. Count the things that are, as though they are not. For, speaking in the Spirit, I tell you that very soon will the great tribulation begin, which must be before the end. But ye know the words of the Master, “He that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved.”’

A deep murmur rose from the multitude, and many wept at the thought of coming woes. But they did not shrink from the peril of that baptism of blood which they knew would be to them the portal of salvation, and the murmur swelled into an Hosanna and a Hallelujah which rang with steadfastness and exultation.

Then Cletus, the second presbyter, rose and said: ‘Our father Linus has spoken. He has warned us that evil days are at hand. Already it is whispered, we cannot tell by whom, that our hands kindled this great conflagration. You know, brethren, that we would rather die than be guilty of such a monstrous crime. But at the bar of the Gentiles innocence will not avail us; nor will pity touch the hearts of our enemies in Babylon, where Satan’s throne is. But though a host should encamp against us, yet will we not be afraid. He who set His angel to stand by the three children in the furnace; He who saved Daniel from the lions, and Jonah in the belly of the whale, will not forsake us. We thank God in this great crisis that Paul, the Apostle to us Gentiles, has been set free. He knew not what was coming, or he would have stayed with us; but John the beloved is on his way to us, and he will comfort us in all our afflictions.’

At the close of his address, young men, clad in white, of modest demeanour, went round among the worshippers and received in earthen vessels the humble contributions of men and women, of whom not a few were themselves in deep poverty. Aliturus, moved to an extent of which he could give no account, dropped into the vessel every piece of gold which he had with him, and amazed those who afterwards counted the offerings. With uplifted arms and solemn voice, Linus pronounced the benediction. Lanterns and torches were rekindled, and silently, in twos and threes, by the same secret paths, the multitude melted away.

But as he made his way home with the attendant slave, the heart of Aliturus burned within him. He had come to curse and to betray; he went back blessing these Christians altogether. How unlike was the reality to the lies which he had confidently believed! These men and women, whose name was the synonym of malefactor--those of whom the scum of the Forum spoke as incestuous cannibals--they were innocent, they were holy! they alone were innocent, they alone were holy! Aliturus had heard the philosophers talking together. How hard and unnatural were their doctrines; how inconsistent their lives; how hopeless their aspirations; how hollow their vaunts of blessedness compared with those of these men! Among these was happiness, or it was nowhere. He had seen palaces--their gilded misery, their monotonous weariness, their reckless guilt--he had experienced the emptiness of that intoxicating fame which shouted in the voice of innumerable spectators. Alas, alas! what a bubble was the life of the gentile world, and what spectres followed those who chased it!

His thoughts went back to the days of a childhood spent in Hebron under the rustling boughs of the oak of Mamre. Happier for him had he lived and died in his native Palestine, unknown, innocent, faithful to the religion of his people. But his grandfather had been implicated in the tearing down of the golden eagle, instigated by the two bold young Rabbis Judas and Matthias, in the days of Herod the Great, and had been put to death. His father had struggled in vain against adversity, and his widowed mother, left in utter destitution, had died of a broken heart. Penniless and an orphan, the boy had been carried down to Gaza by a villanous agent of Herod, and had been sold to a Roman slave-dealer. This trader in human flesh had seen in him the promise of extraordinary beauty, which would enable him to repay himself in a few years a hundred times over the paltry sum which he had paid for the Jewish orphan. He kept him with care, fed him well, had him taught Greek, and gave him an artistic education--not from any feelings of kindness, but solely with a view to ultimate gain. He kept him apart from the other slave-boys of his shop, who were meant for less luxurious destinies, and would only command moderate prices as grooms or foot-boys. They, with chalked feet, were exposed for sale on the public catasta in sight of every passer-by, and could be purchased for little more than five hundred sesterces; but those who wished to see the brilliant Aliturus must be persons of wealth and distinction, who were admitted into the inner apartments, and who would be willing to pay at least eight thousand sesterces. He had been purchased by the wealthy and luxurious Sulla, who, charmed by his vivacity, grace, and genius, saw a means of enriching himself by having him trained as a pantomime. During these years Aliturus had not only seen the darkest side of pagan life, but had grown familiar with its viciousness in every form. Abandoning the religion of Moses, he had found no other in its place, and lived only for the present. On the stage he had rapidly surpassed all competitors, with the exception of Paris, who shared with him the position of a favourite of the Roman people. The large sums of money which he amassed by his art enabled him to purchase his freedom before he was twenty-three; and, in a career of unchecked outward prosperity he had become a familiar inmate of the noblest patrician houses, and even of the imperial circle. For some years he had been the favourite of all the gilded youth, the darling of the Roman ladies. But the faith of his childhood still hung about him. Amid the giddiest whirl of vice and pleasure, he still felt in his heart an aching void; and the events of this evening had revealed to him not only how aching the void was, but also the misery and failure in which his life would end, with no vista beyond it save the darkness of the grave. Often before, in his lonelier moments, he had seen virtue and pined for its loss; but now that pure ideal shone before him with a more heavenly lustre, and remorse pierced him like a sword.

He awaited the next gathering of the Christians with feverish impatience--not with his first purpose of accumulating evidence for their extirpation, but rather for the sake of his own soul and that he might leave no stone unturned to save them. He was also deeply anxious to see him whom Cletus had described as ‘John the beloved.’ He longed to hear more of the Master whom the Christians worshipped with such passionate devotion, and to know wherein lay the secrets of the hope which He had kindled, of the peace which He had bequeathed, of the righteousness which He had placed within reach of attainment, not only by the noble and the learned, but by the despised and by paupers and by slaves.

It was to him a time of anxiety and trial. He had to act that week one of his favourite, most exciting, and most unworthy parts. He was pledged to it; myriads were expecting to see him in it; he had already received for it a large sum of money from Varro, the president of the games, and he had neither the courage to withdraw from it nor any appreciable excuse for doing so. He acted it with all his accustomed supremacy of skill, but he acted it mechanically and with a wounded conscience; and he listened to the thunders of applause which his grace evoked with loathing for himself and for his degraded audience. He returned to his house physically weary, but even more mentally prostrate, and, flinging himself on a couch, turned his face to the wall and wept. A summons from the Palace forced him to rouse himself, to put on a court dress, and assume his usual aspect of easy gaiety.[*16] Nero asked him with feverish eagerness whether he had succeeded in tracking the Christians to their haunts, and what evidence he had been able to collect against them.

‘Give me time, Cæsar,’ he said. ‘I went three days ago to their assembly and I heard nothing which could be construed into sedition, and I saw nothing to their discredit. I am driven to disbelieve what I told you about them.’

‘They are sly foxes,’ said Nero. ‘Poppæa has heard more about them from the Jew Josephus. You are not initiated into their mysteries, so that you did not really see what they are.’

‘And what matters it what they are?’ said Tigellinus. ‘We must have some criminals to accuse of having caused the fire; and who so handy as this secret, morose, man-hating, child-killing, flesh-eating sect of darkness, whom the people detest, and whom in any case it would be a merit to exterminate?’

‘Poor wretches!’ said Aliturus. ‘I should be sorry to do them more harm than I have done already; but after the next nundine I may have more to tell you.’

‘That man is wavering,’ said Tigellinus, when Aliturus had gone. ‘He is a Jew, and he is not so much in earnest as he was. He seems to be touched by the squeamish effeminacy of pity.’

‘Poppæa says that the Jews hate these Christians even more than we do,’ answered Nero.

‘Nevertheless, Cæsar, you may be certain that the two superstitions spring from the same root. I will find out the Christian haunts for myself. It is high time to strike a blow.’

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Chapter LIII

‘HE WHO SAW THE APOCALYPSE’

‘Questi è colui, che giacque sopra ‘l petto Del nostro Pellicano; e questi fue Di su la croce al grande ufficio eletto.’

DANTE, Paradiso, xxv. 112-114.

The slave Philetus came to the house of Aliturus on the next Sunday evening, and told him that the Christians now knew themselves to be menaced by imminent peril. They had consequently changed their place of meeting to another sand-pit near the Appian road, where they would be assembled in unusual numbers, expecting the presence of John, one of the twelve companions of Jesus whom they called Apostles. Aliturus, seeing the character of the man, who was one of those who are ever ready to sell their souls for gain, said as little to him as possible; but while he donned his Ephesian disguise he determined to do his utmost to warn the Christians secretly of the toils which, before he knew their true character, he himself had designed to spread for them.

The worship of the congregation resembled that on the previous First-day evening, except that the impression of solemn expectation was even more thrilling and intense. Aliturus was at a distance from the Apostle, whom his fellow-Christians surrounded with a reverence akin to awe, and whose bearing, though full of love and humility, was yet more full of natural dignity than Aliturus had ever observed in Consul or Emperor. During the day the Apostle had walked through the areas of encumbered ruin and blackened waste, which in ten regions of the city were all that was left of Rome. He had walked along the lines of temporary huts in the Campus Martius, and heard the wail of men and women who refused to be comforted for the loss of all. He had stood behind the base of a half-calcined pillar on the Aventine when Nero had been carried past him in an open litter of silver, in which he lolled on purple cushions. He was discinctured and clad in a light Coan synthesis, looking the picture of cruel and dissolute effeminacy. A young Greek slave shared his litter, and some of his worst associates laughed and jested by his side. The sight of the Antichrist had stirred the heart of John to uttermost indignation, and as he now rose in the assembly, the mystic golden petalon of priesthood upon his forehead flashing under the light of the lamps in the far recess of the sand-pit, his whole figure seemed to burn and dilate with inspired passion. He spoke at times with something of the holy frenzy of a Hebrew prophet, in language purposely couched in Eastern metaphors. To those who were unfamiliar with the style of Jewish Apocalypses, much of what he said might have seemed wholly unintelligible; but most of those who heard him had a clue to his utterances, either from their Jewish birth or from familiarity with sacred books of the Hebrews. Among these was Aliturus. Knowing the high authority of the speaker, the whole assembly listened with beating hearts to the tones of a voice which throbbed with fire and life, and sometimes rose to awful power.

In imagery afterwards embodied in his Apocalypse he spoke of a wild beast, rising out of the sea with a name of blasphemy on his forehead. And men worshipped the beast, and said, ‘Who is like the wild beast?’ and ‘Who can fight against him?’ Those who had heard of Nero in his disguise at the infamous banquet on the Lake of Agrippa knew that by the wild beast he meant the Emperor, and by the sea the sea of nations, and by the name of blasphemy the divine title Augustus, and by his superhuman exaltation the adoring flattery of his votaries. He described the misery of the people as of men gnawing their tongues for pain; and he spoke of a war of the wild beast against the saints, and of blood rolling in a great river; and of the vengeance which should follow, and of the vain rage of the nations against Him which is, and was, and is to come.

His voice ceased. He sat down, and an awful hush fell over the listeners. And then the whole assembly knelt down as with one great sob, and Aliturus sobbed with them. Pitying their emotion, the Beloved arose once more, and said: ‘Nay, brethren, you must not return thus with broken hearts to your homes. It is given unto me to foresee that ye must resist unto blood. Many of you must be tortured, many slain. At this moment there is a traitor among you, and it is no longer possible to escape. And there is another, not a traitor, but who meant to be an open enemy.’ The speaker paused, and the heart of Aliturus became chill as a stone within him. ‘But,’ continued the Apostle, ‘the grace of God hath called this one to repentance, and he shall be saved, though through much tribulation. And now, my children, give your customary gifts to God and to the suffering ones, for many are now in depths of affliction, and there are not a few of you whose children shall be fatherless and their wives widows, who must be the care of the Church hereafter. But I say to you all, as our Lord said the night that He was betrayed, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” And as my last words, take this His new commandment: “Little children, love one another.”’

He bade them sing a hymn to calm their troubled souls, and they sang:--

‘Curb for the stubborn steed, Making its will give heed; Wing that directest right The wild bird’s wandering flight; Helm for the ships that keep Their pathway on the deep; Our stay when cares annoy, Giver of endless joy, O Jesus, hear!

‘Thine infant children seek, With baby lips all weak, Filled with the Spirit’s dew From that dear bosom true, Thy praises pure to sing, Hymns meet for Thee, their King; O Jesus, hear!

‘We, heirs of peace unpriced, We, who are born in Christ, A people pure from stain, Praise we our God again! O Jesus, hear!’[98]

The deacons went round among the worshippers, and collected the alms. Aliturus, more deeply moved than ever in his life, flung into the offering the large sum of gold which he had received for his unhallowed dance. Linus rose and said, ‘Beloved, the times are perilous. We know not when or where the cloud will burst. Let us meet again on the third day hence, and hear the word of exhortation.’

Then the Apostle committed them to God’s gracious mercy and protection, and to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the communion of the Holy Spirit; and once more, like phantoms, that great throng melted into the darkness.

But Aliturus, telling Philetus that it would be better for them to separate, dismissed him, and waited for the presbyters who were conducting John to the house of Linus.

‘I would speak to thee,’ he said, addressing the Apostle in Hebrew, which he had not entirely forgotten since the day when he learnt it at his brave father’s knee. ‘I am--’

‘I know thee who thou art, my son,’ answered the Apostle, in the same language. ‘Thou wast born a child of Abraham; thou hast become a firstborn of Satan. Yea, weep, for thy sins have been many; yet rejoice, for thou shalt be snatched as a brand out of the burning.’

‘I have never been a Christian, O Apostle,’ said Aliturus; ‘I have never heard the name of Christ except in mockery; but now, convinced of all, judged of all, I see that the secret of God is with you. I have led you into peril, but I did it ignorantly, and now, if thou wouldst direct me, I fain would do my utmost to save you all.’

‘Thou shalt be forgiven, my son, because (as thou sayest) thou didst it ignorantly: but save us thou canst not. Nevertheless, do what thou canst, and may God be with thee!’

‘Oh that I might ask for thy blessing; for my heart is sore even to breaking.’

‘My son,’ said the Apostle, laying his hand on the bowed head of the actor; ‘the blessing of God is with them that repent, and the Lord rejecteth none who come to Him.’

They parted in the darkness, and the next day Aliturus sought an audience with the Emperor alone. He had been so great a favourite that Nero always rejoiced to see him, and to while away an hour under the spell of his natural brightness. But, to his surprise, Aliturus had no sooner kissed his hand than he flung himself at his feet and craved his indulgence.

‘What ails the gay actor?’ asked Nero. ‘Is it something more about these Christians?’

‘It is,’ said the actor. ‘Spare them, Emperor. Spare them, I entreat you. I have ascertained that they are perfectly innocent. Cæsar has no more virtuous subjects.’

‘Virtue?’ said Nero. ‘It is three-fourths humbug, and the other fourth hypocrisy. Give me pleasure; give me art. These fanatics would quench all joy in the world. They would kill Venus and starve Bacchus. I hate them.’

‘Would Cæsar slay the innocent?’

‘Innocent? They are anything but innocent. They are conspirators, and sorcerers, and murderers, and haters of mankind.’

‘Oh, Cæsar,’ exclaimed the actor, in despair. ‘I, too, believed this; but these are only the lies of the multitude.’

‘At any rate, they are gloomy and pestilent fanatics. Why should Aliturus care for the wretches who worship a man whom Pilatus crucified? What is their execrable superstition to Rome’s favourite pantomime? I am to be king of the East, and these Galileans set up another king, whom they call Christus. It is flat sedition! Besides, how am I to appease the populace, if I do not find them some victims?’

‘You may yet find the true criminals, Cæsar; it may be that they are nearer your own person than these poor Christians.’

‘Don’t let Tigellinus hear you say that, or you may yet know what the tunica molesta is like, and may leave a trail of burning pitch on the sand of the amphitheatre! Come, Aliturus, this is tedious. Enough of it. I prefer your dancing.’

At this moment Poppæa entered, and the young man withdrew. As he passed down the corridor the slaves were surprised to see the bright darling of the populace wringing his hands and muttering ‘Too late! too late!’

On one point he was determined. No word, no sign of his should do any further injury to the Christians. He would not reveal their meeting-place, nor help their enemies.

Alas! his aid was no longer needed. We can abstain from evil deeds, but when we have done them their consequences are beyond us, nor can we escape their punishment. Tigellinus, by his spies, had put himself in communication with Philetus; he knew enough to palliate in the eyes of the people the arrest of a community which they regarded with detestation. His nets were spread in every direction. Unless the Christians abandoned all attempt at meeting together, it was impossible that they could escape the agents of the tyranny which had determined to destroy them as the scapegoat of its own crimes. To warn them would in any case have been in vain, and Aliturus was unable to warn them, for Tigellinus did not make him a confidant of his intentions.

Unaccompanied by Philetus, the actor went to the meeting which Linus had announced, and found the Christians gathered in undiminished numbers, anxious to hear once more the words of him who at the Last Supper had leaned his head on the bosom of their Lord.

Again--lest in the presence of traitors and enemies he should use language which might be turned into an engine of condemnation against the brethren--the Apostle addressed them in allegoric terms. The Christians understood his words, and the rich comfort which lay beneath their poetic imagery. But he had not been speaking long, when from the narrow entrance which led into the sandpit--for the Christians had barricaded every approach but one--there arose first a cry of surprise, then a sound of struggling, and a clash of arms, and a tramp of feet. The youths to whom was entrusted the guardianship of the approach were borne back by numbers, and flying into the assembly raised a shout of ‘Fly, brethren, fly! the Prætorians are upon us.’ The lamps flashed on the gilded armour of a centurion, who leapt, sword in hand, into the midst of the worshippers. In a moment every lamp was extinguished, and by the straggling starlight might be caught glimpses of a scene of wild confusion, as men and shrieking women sprang in vain to the egress, and, driven back on each other by the swords of the soldiers, struggled in mad panic towards the various subterranean hiding-places and passages, which branched out of the sandpit, and were the beginning of the catacombs. Many made their escape in the tumult, for they were more familiar than the soldiers with the exits and winding ways. Except that one or two Christians were struck to earth and trampled upon in the obscurity, no blood was shed; for the principles of the Christians forbade them to resist lawful authority. The centurion, the moment he entered, strode straight towards the group of presbyters, and arrested Linus, who sat in the seat of the bishop. Another officer laid his hand on the robe of the Apostle, but while Aliturus involuntarily sprang forward to make him release his hold, a gigantic fossor--whose trade it was to hew graves in the tufa for all the brethren--flung his arms round the officer, and pinned them to his side, while Cletus, seizing the hand of John, hurried him along a tortuous and half-subterranean path by which they emerged into the upper air. They lay concealed among the thick leaves of a vineyard, until they heard the tramp of the soldiers who marched off with about a hundred prisoners, whose arms they had tied behind their backs. Aliturus was in no personal danger, but he had followed the escaping steps of Cletus and the Apostle, and he lay hidden with them in the vineyard till the sound of footsteps had died away in the echoing gloom.

‘Alas, father, what can I do?’ exclaimed the presbyter. ‘I am but a freedman in the house of the senator Nerva. I have no home, no refuge to offer thee which would not be full of hardship and the peril of certain death.’

‘Come to my house,’ exclaimed Aliturus to the Apostle, eagerly. ‘I am not a Christian--I am but a pantomime. But, if thou wilt trust me, thy life will be safer with me than in any house in Rome, till opportunity enables thee to escape to Asia.’

‘My son,’ said the Apostle, ‘I trust thee. Lead me on.’

That night the son of Zebedee was sheltered in the house of the actor, who told his most confidential slaves to treat with all honour a friend of Jewish race who had come from Palestine. But all night long the Apostle was on his knees, praying for his brethren. For the Great Tribulation--the first of the ten great Christian persecutions--had begun.

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Chapter LIV

IN THE BURNING FIERY FURNACE

Ἀγαπητοὶ μὴ ξενίζεσθε τῇ ἐν ὑμῖν πυρώσει πρὸς πειρασμὸν ὑμὶν γινομένῃ.--1 Pet. iv. 12.

‘Christianus etiam extra carcerem sæculo renuntiavit, in carcere autem etiam carceri.’--TERT. Ad Mart. 2.

The prisoners, men and women alike, were hurried into promiscuous dungeons, in a suffocating confinement which was itself an anticipated death. Next day an edict was published by the Emperor, saying that the Christians were the incendiaries of Rome, and would be set apart for exemplary punishment. He characterised the whole sect as public enemies, enemies of the gods, and of the human race, whom he should make it his duty as far as possible to exterminate. The edict was well received. It was at first supposed that its allegations were true, and that the Emperor had really succeeded in lifting from his rule the vast weight of indignation which had threatened to endanger it.

Next day, half suffocated and half starved, and altogether in miserable plight, a number of the prisoners were put to the torture, to enforce confession and a betrayal of their accomplices. Tigellinus personally presided, and gloated over their torments. It had become known that Linus was their leader, and he was the first to suffer. The old man remained nobly constant. Urged to confess his crime, he said, ‘I am a Christian; but to be a Christian is not a crime.’ Charged with complicity in the deeds of darkness which were attributed to Christians, he indignantly repudiated them, and said that the laws of Christians branded not only such deeds with infamy, but even those vices which the heathen regarded as indifferent or venial. Bidden to give up the names of his fellow-Christians, he said that they were many, but that he would rather die than betray them. No added intensity of torment could wring from him anything further, and he was carried back to prison, a pitiable sufferer, dislocated in every limb. Indeed, so nigh was he unto death, that the jailors, burdened by the crowded and horrible condition of the prisoners, accepted a bribe from the Christians to allow him to be removed. He was taken, by Pomponia’s kindness, into her own house, and there was lovingly tended many days. He lived to send a greeting to Timotheus by St. Paul some years later; but he was never again able to resume his functions as the bishop of the little community. Stricken to the heart by the anguish of witnessing the apparent destruction of the Church, and hopelessly maimed by torture, he was removed in secrecy to one of the country villas of Aulus Plautius, and after being long confined to his bed, he died no less a martyr of the Neronian persecution than any of his brethren.

Others showed equal fortitude. Foiled and savage, Tigellinus noticed among the prisoners a timid, shrinking boy, and ordered him to be stripped and laid upon the rack, confident that anything might be wrung from him. But the poor boy could only keep repeating,

‘I am a Christian! I am a Christian! but we are innocent. We do no wrong. The crimes you charge us with are false.’

‘Give up the names of your accomplices, jail-bird,’ said Tigellinus, striking him fiercely on the cheek.

‘I am no jail-bird,’ said the boy; ‘I am free-born. Oh, set me free from this anguish! I have done no wrong.’

‘You shall try another turn or two of the rack first, crucisalus,’ said Tigellinus. ‘Confess, and you shall not only be set free, but rewarded.’

His limbs were stretched still further. A groan of agony burst from his lips, and the sweat stood in thick dews over the face which had become pale as death; but he spoke not, and fainted. When they were taken back to prison, the Christians did their utmost to tend and console the glorious young confessor.

‘How were you strengthened,’ they asked him, ‘to endure such pangs?’

‘When all was at the worst,’ he said, ‘it seemed to me that music sounded in my ears, and a fair youth with wings stood by me who wiped the perspiration from my forehead. And seeing him I felt that I could hold out even to death.’

‘Try a woman this time,’ said Tigellinus.

The executioners seized the deaconess Phœbe, who, since she left Cenchreæ with the Epistle to the Romans, had stayed and worked in Rome; and with her they seized two other virgins who were also deaconesses.

But the constancy of womanhood also remained unshaken, and the Præfect began to fear that the attempt to secure evidence would fail as completely as in his plot against Octavia. He stamped, and cursed the Christians by all his gods, and raved impotently against their brutal obstinacy, as effort after effort failed. Then he ran his experienced eyes over the throng, and fixed them on one man whose abject face seemed to promise good effects from the application of terror. His name was Phygellus.

‘Seize that man,’ he said to the lictors.

‘Oh, do not torture me!’ exclaimed the wretch. ‘I am not--I am not, indeed, a Christian.’

The other Christians turned their eyes upon him with a look of reproach, and he trembled; but he continued to asseverate, ‘I am not a Christian.’

‘Then how came you to be arrested in the assembly of those vagabonds?’

‘They seduced me; they bewitched me; they are sorcerers.’

‘Then throw these grains of frankincense on the fire in honour of Jupiter, and worship the Genius of the Emperor.’

The man did as he was required, though the Christians murmured to him--

‘Will you be an apostate? Will you deny the cross of Christ?’

‘Now then,’ said Tigellinus, ‘tell us the names of their ringleaders.’

Phygellus hesitated. He had been ready to save himself; but he had not contemplated the destruction of his fellows.

‘On to the rack with him!’ said Tigellinus.

The man was laid shrieking on the instrument of torture, but the moment the screw was turned, he cried,

‘I will confess; I will confess.’

‘Do the Christians kill infants, and eat their flesh?’

‘No.’

‘Do you persist in that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Try the rack again.’

‘Spare me! spare me!’ he cried. ‘If you torture me, I shall say anything--any lie you ask me; but these stories about the Christians are not true.’

‘Will you now tell us all you know, without any more torture?’

‘I will.’

‘Did the Christians set fire to Rome?’

‘I did not see them doing it; but they were always talking about Christ being manifested in flaming fire, and about the burning of the world.’

‘That will do. Now give us some names.’

‘There are hundreds--there are thousands of them,’ said the renegade.

‘Then it will be all the easier for you to tell us some of them.’

‘Must I?’ he pleaded. ‘They have done no harm.’

‘On to the rack with him,’ said Tigellinus, furiously. ‘He trifles with us and wastes our time.’

‘No, no,’ moaned the coward; ‘I will tell you. There is Linus the bishop, and Cletus the presbyter, and Prisca, and Aquila.’

‘Who are they?’

They are Jewish tent-makers, and they live on the Aventine; but they left Rome recently. And Amplias, Claudia, Stachys, Apelles, of the household of Narcissus; Persis, a freedwoman of Pomponia Græcina; Asyncritus, Patrobas, slaves of Flavius Clemens; and Nereus and his daughter Junia, manumitted by the centurion Pudens.’

‘We want more names still.’

‘There are Marcus, Felicitas, Phœbe, Helpis, in the house of Aulus Plautius; and there are Tryphæna, Tryphosa, Stephanus, Crescens, Thallus, Herodion, and Artemas, of Cæsar’s household.’

‘None but slaves and freedmen?’

‘There is Aristobulus, the auctioneer, who has a house in the Subura. He and all his family are Christians. And Andronicus, and Junius-- they are merchants who import goats’ hair from Cilicia, and are relations of Paulus of Tarsus, whom they call an Apostle.’

‘Come, this is to the purpose,’ said Tigellinus, rubbing his hands. ‘Are there any soldiers?’

‘Yes; Vitalis and Celsus, the Prætorians, and, I think, Pudens the centurion, who has gone to Britain and--’

He stopped suddenly, and his face assumed a look of terror. For the soldier Urbanus who stood behind the chair of Tigellinus was one who, though not yet a Christian, had been among those who had been chained to Paul, and had acquired a kindly feeling towards the persecuted brethren. Fixing his eyes on the apostate, he made so menacing a gesture with his hand on his dagger, that Phygellus began to stammer.

‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘the names of any more soldiers.’

‘Are there any persons of rank?’

Fortunately Phygellus had never found much favour among the Christians. Their leaders had not entrusted to him their secrets. He was unaware that Pomponia was a Christian, and had not heard of the conversion of Flavius Clemens and Domitilla. But he ventured at haphazard to mention Aliturus, whom he had seen in the tumult.

But Tigellinus knew that it was not yet time to interfere with such a man as Aliturus. He laughed aloud.

‘What!’ he said; ‘do you think that on the evidence of such scum as you we are going to arrest the delight of the populace--the gayest and fairest pantomime in Rome? There, we have had enough of you.’

And, spurning him with his foot, he bade the lictors to keep him safe till more evidence was required.

There were a few others--chiefly neophytes and catechumens of unformed character--who, either from indifference and insincerity, or to escape for the moment from the tormentors, gave evidence sufficient for the nefarious purpose of the Præfect. The consequence was a wholesale series of arrests, till every prison in Rome was crowded to deadliness with innocent confessors, who, while they denied all crime, admitted themselves to be Christians, and were ready, if God so willed, to die for their faith.

Tigellinus savagely recommended to Nero that they should be executed in a mass.

‘Rome,’ he said, ‘is too crowded. As it is, Cæsar, you are maintaining many thousands of the destitute, and among them hundreds of these Christians, whose lodgings have been burnt. Why not get rid of such criminal wretches?’

‘All the people hate them,’ said Poppæa, ‘as despisers of the gods, and all the Jews hate them. From Josephus, and the High Priest, and Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of their great writer Philo, who once headed a deputation to the Emperor Gaius, I hear nothing of them but evil.’

‘Their arrest has made a wonderful difference already,’ said Tigellinus, ‘and has silenced many inconvenient rumours. Publish another edict, Emperor, saying that you have now the amplest evidence of their guilt, and that they shall be executed when you have decided the method of their death.’

‘I will reserve some of their ringleaders for more conspicuous punishment,’ said Nero. ‘The common herd can be dealt with afterwards.’

‘We have got the man they call their bishop,’ said the Præfect. ‘He is an artisan named Linus. He has been tortured, and is said to be dying. But we can strike a deadlier blow yet. My spies tell me that one of the Twelve they call Apostles, whose name is John, is in Rome, and that another is on his way whose name is Peter. They were friends of him whom they call Christus. We have lost sight of John for the moment; but we shall make sure of having them both soon.’

* * * * *

The Church in Rome was smitten to the very dust by the terrible blow which had befallen her, and it was necessary that the brethren should take the utmost precautions, and meet only in the deepest secrecy. In this they were aided by Aliturus. He had a villa a short distance from Rome on the Salarian road, the grounds of which could be approached by country paths known to few but shepherds and goatherds. To this villa he took the Apostle John for safety, and there he received from him such wise and loving instruction that he became a catechumen. Meanwhile he freely used the wealth which he had acquired, to alleviate the sufferings of the brethren. The visiting of those in prison was regarded as one of the primary duties of the Christian’s life, and no considerations of personal safety were allowed to interfere with it. The Apostle went from prison to prison breaking bread, and entrusting to the officers of the Church, or to those who had been longest in the faith, the money which was supplied to him by Pomponia and by the actor. In this way he and others, who were as yet unmolested, were enabled to minister to the necessities of the captives, and also to speak to them such words of hope as fell upon their souls like dew from heaven. It was inevitable that his noble and venerable figure should soon be recognised. The spies of the Præfect were everywhere, and, noticing the profound reverence with which the Elder was received, they were soon able to identify him. He had prepared Aliturus to expect that if on any day he did not return to the villa it would be because he was lodged in prison. The ordinary dungeons were so full that the Apostle was confined in the wet and rocky vault of the Mamertine.

In that prison he was visited by Pomponia, who contributed by every means in her power to mitigate his hardships, and received his counsel and his apostolic blessing. She no longer hesitated to go in person to console the confessors. She found, indeed, that they needed but little consolation. The majority of them were in a state of spiritual exaltation which made their faces radiant and transformed their hard fare into manna which was angels’ food. They turned their prisons into minsters, and the coarse pagan jailors and German guards were amazed when they heard those abodes of misery ringing with sweet voices and the holy melodies of unknown songs. In each place of confinement they held their daily worship, conducted by presbyter, or deacon, or reader, and broke with one another the bread of Holy Communion. They knew that death awaited them, but death was to be a martyrdom, and they looked to it, not as a curse, but as a coronation. Pomponia, sharing all their feelings, found that it was only to their bodily wants that she had need to minister.

She did not shrink from personal danger: if arrested, she would have at once avowed that she was a Christian. But her name had not been mentioned by those who gave evidence. Having once been tried on the charge of holding a foreign superstition and acquitted, it was contrary to the principle of the Roman law that she should again be accused. The deadly wrong which Nero’s wickedness had already inflicted on Aulus Plautius had excited an indignation among all the best elements of Roman society, which, though it was voiceless, had made itself felt; and among the populace Pomponia was half worshipped for her abounding kindness and large-handed charities. Her visiting of the prisons was set down to the same strange but harmless eccentricity which made her eschew jewels and wear robes of such sombre hue.

One day, during a visit to the largest prison, she encountered Tigellinus, who was going his rounds with an escort of Prætorians to exult over the multitudes of his victims. He inspired such dread that the noblest senators cringed to him, and Pomponia had reason to know that he hated her with all the energy of wickedness which is reproved by the spectacle of virtue.

He made her a low obeisance of mock respect, which she scarcely noticed by the slightest inclination of her head.

‘The fair Pomponia is fond of prisons,’ he said, with a sneer, ‘but she despises the poor Præfect of the Prætorians.’

‘Pomponia,’ she replied, ‘is not accustomed to the language of insincere and empty compliment. She despises none; but, if the Præfect desires her opinion, there are some of his humblest soldiers whom she respects more than him.’

Tigellinus cast on her a glance of savage hatred. He quailed before her queenly dignity of goodness, but could not bear to be foiled in the hearing of his escort, whose smiles had scarcely been suppressed.

‘Let Pomponia take care that she does not herself become the denizen of a prison. Some have whispered that she is as much a Christian as these whom she visits, and deserves the same fate.’

‘I deserve it,’ she says, ‘as much and as little as these do, for none knows better than Tigellinus that they are perfectly innocent.’

Tigellinus lost all self-control. ‘Do you not know, woman,’ he exclaimed[*17] hoarsely, ‘that your life is in my power?’

‘Man!’ she answered, with the calmest disdain, ‘you are addressing the wife of Aulus Plautius. My life is not in your power, but in the power of Him who gave it. I leave you, and shall continue to tend these hapless prisoners.’

She passed by him and he dared not meet her glance. To beard Tigellinus required a courage of which scarcely one person was capable. But Pomponia thought it her duty to attempt a yet more dangerous effort, and, if possible, to have an appeal made to the Emperor on behalf of the doomed Christians. She went to Seneca in his retirement. She found him anxious and miserable, full of disappointment and self-disgust. He did not respond to her entreaties. ‘I have no sympathy,’ he said, ‘with the Christians. They are only a sect of the Jews, and I should like to see their whole superstition eradicated.’

‘You call it their superstition,’ said Pomponia. ‘Is it more of a superstition than the worship of what you have called “our ignoble crowd of gods”?’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Seneca. ‘But the popular religion is one thing, and philosophy is another.’

‘Would you, then, be content to see the mass of the pagan population unjustly tortured, unjustly slain, because their religion is a noxious superstition?’

‘They do not render themselves amenable to the laws.’

‘Nor do these poor Christians. I know their tenets. Their moral teaching again and again reminds me of your own, which it sometimes resembles almost to verbal identity.’

‘I have heard,’ said Seneca, ‘that their Paulus of Tarsus has genius and style; but it is to me incredible. What can he know of philosophy?’

‘Pardon me, dear friend,’ replied Pomponia, ‘he knows a philosophy far diviner than that of the Porch, far nobler than that of the Garden or the Lyceum. It is a philosophy which may not puff up the pride of intellect, but can sway the motives of the life. You may perhaps find in Rome--though I doubt it--ten philosophers who live purely and simply, but I could find you many hundreds of Christians.’

‘Men of the common herd,’ he said, in a tone of some disdain.

‘Are they not our fellow-men? Did not one God make them and us? Did He mean only a handful to be blessed, and the rest to perish? Have you no pity for them? Have not you yourself said, “Man is a sacred thing to man”?’

‘Why should I waste my life in an unavailing pity? Pity is a weakness which the true philosopher should suppress.’

‘Ah!’ replied Pomponia, ‘I see the secret why Stoicism fails. It talks of following nature, and it flings away its sweetest elements.’

‘I could do nothing for you, Pomponia, even if I would,’ said Seneca, wearily; ‘I live a daily death.’

‘A daily death?’ she replied--‘in this splendid palace, with every resource of wealth, with slaves, with villas, with books, with gardens, with boundless fame, with a wife faithful and beloved, with a host of friends?’

‘What avail such things,’ said Seneca, ‘with the sword of Damocles trembling over my neck? My only safety is the life which I describe in my little tragedy of “Thyestes”--a life which causes neither jealousy nor fear, and where one does not dread to drink poison in golden goblets.[99] If I am alive at this moment, I believe I owe it to the fact that my freed man Cleonicus, whom Nero bribed to poison me, failed to do so because I only eat fruits from the tree, and drink nothing but running water.[100] Yet I am wretched. Sometimes I all but accept the view that, after all, men are no better than a laughing-stock of the gods, whatever gods there be.’

‘And are you so miserable, Seneca,’ she said, ‘and so hopeless? Come with me to the prisons of the poor Christians, and I will show you men who are poor and yet happy; ground to the dust by daily hatred and cruelty, in hunger, and nakedness, and prison, and yet happy; with torture and the vilest deaths immediately awaiting them, and yet happy. Shall I tell you how Paulus of Tarsus describes himself and them? “We are troubled on every side,” he wrote to Corinth, “yet not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.”’

‘That is very eloquent,’ said Seneca. ‘I should like to read more that this Christian has written.’

‘You shall,’ she answered; ‘and you will find in his letters something better than eloquence of style. But will you despise, will you do nothing to assist, the men and women whose faith enables them not only to write thus, but thus to live?’

Seneca sighed deeply. ‘My power with the Emperor is gone, and I am menaced with death and confiscation. But I am rich still, Pomponia. Take the sum of gold in this purse. It may at least help to relieve the sufferings of these poor creatures, perhaps even to secure by bribes the escape of some of them. It is all that I can do.’

Pomponia did not refuse it, and bade him a kindly farewell. But she never visited the philosopher without feeling, in spite of her affection for him and her gratitude to him, how ineffectual were his half-truths, how vain the pomp of declamatory epigram in which they were enshrined. The same ineffectualness, having its roots in an insincerity so insincere as to be habitual and unconscious, marked the whole of the contemporary morality. It ended, and was understood to end, in self-deceiving words.

But, having failed with Seneca, Pomponia hardly knew what to do. To the Emperor himself she would not go. His mere presence, since his foul murder of her young Aulus, made her tremble with loathing as though she stood before an incarnate demon. His leering sensuous looks, his slothful obesity, his face deformed by an eczema caused by gluttony, intemperance, and uncleanness, filled her with such repulsion that she could not speak to him. But she had sometimes met Poppæa in her least guilty days, when she was the wife of Rufius Crispinus, and she hoped that there might remain some spot in the heart of the lovely Empress which was not wholly callous to the appeal of pity.

To her surprise she found Poppæa bathed in tears, and gently asked her why she wept. There was something about Pomponia which seemed at once to awaken confidence. She had that temperament which in modern times would be called magnetic, and she always called out the best feelings of those with whom she spoke. The haughty, beautiful, triumphant wife of Nero would not have dreamed of suffering any one to be admitted to her in a moment of sorrow and weakness, except the wife of Aulus Plautius. To others she never appeared except in dresses such as the world could not parallel, surrounded by luxury, and breathing of the most delicate perfumes. But as Pomponia entered she did not even attempt to remove the stain of tears from her glowing cheeks, or to arrange the disordered tresses of her gleaming hair.

‘Pomponia is welcome,’ she said. ‘She does not often deign to visit the poor Empress. She should have been a vestal virgin, and moved about surrounded by sanctities. But we wicked people have our sorrows too. I was thinking of my boy Rufius. I love him more than anything on earth, and Nero hates to see him, and will not let him visit me. The poor boy might just as well have no mother.’

Pomponia paused before she spoke, and had to gulp down a choking sob. ‘I can sympathise with you, Empress. My son Aulus was a little older than your charming Rufius. He was manly; he was beautiful; he gave promise of all his father’s virtues.’

‘I know, I know,’ said Poppæa, turning away her face, on which rose, in spite of herself, a burning blush. ‘He offended Nero in some way, and he is dead.’

‘He offended him not,’ said Pomponia. ‘How could an innocent lad like my Aulus have been guilty of treason? Let us speak no more of him. There are those for whom death is more merciful than life, and I did not come here to bewail my own bereavements.’

‘I pleaded for your boy, Pomponia--indeed, I did. I deigned to prostrate myself before Nero that he would not injure him, that he would not have him slain. Would you believe that I--I, the Empress, --have fears lest something evil should be done to my young Rufius?’

‘May Heaven protect his youth!’ said Pomponia. ‘If it will be any comfort to you I will see him, and ask him to our palace. My husband is kind to all the young, and will love him for the sake of his own lost boy. And I will take your messages to him.’

‘Thanks, Pomponia, thanks,’ said the Empress. ‘Nowhere could he be better than in your virtuous home. But why have you sought me--you to whom the Palace is justly hateful?’

‘I come,’ answered Pomponia, ‘to plead for your pity. There is not a prison in Rome which is not full of innocent men and women, called Christians. They are charged with having set fire to Rome, and with many other atrocities. Empress, they are innocent! Will you not use your influence for them? If you have ever done evil--forgive me, Poppæa, but I know not the language of falsehood, or of flattery-- will you not now try to do a great deed of good?’

‘Your kindness deceives you,’ answered the Empress. ‘From all that I have heard they thoroughly deserve their fate.’

‘Your mind has been poisoned against them by their enemies the Jews. Believe me, Poppæa--for I know them well--their lives are almost the only beautiful lives spent in this wicked city.’

‘Anything I could say for them would be in vain, Pomponia. I am not as you are--would that I were!--but let me tell you what no other living being should hear from me. Since our child Claudia died, I am no longer all-powerful with Nero. I can stimulate his course in evil--a touch will do that; but I cannot turn him from any wrong on which he and Tigellinus have agreed.’

Seeing that her efforts were useless, Pomponia left her, and would have kissed her hand; but the Empress kissed her on the cheek, and said, ‘Oh, Pomponia, deign to be the friend of the hapless Poppæa. The work of her ambitious guilty dreams is already crumbling into ruins. She needs to have one friend who is not wicked.’

* * * * *

In times so oppressive the Christians who were still free could not forego the duty and support of common prayer and Holy Communion, however great might be the risk. Accustomed to hatred and persecution, they were also accustomed to precautions and secret signs, and by ways of communicating with each other unobserved and unexpected they made it known that on the next Sunday, deep in the night, they would meet in a secluded vineyard at the back of the villa of Aliturus, and that Peter of Bethsaida, the Apostle of Christ, had arrived in Rome, and would be present.

By far routes, under the curtain of darkness, they met in the vineyard, a deeply sorrowing and diminished band. But they felt reasonably secure. Aliturus was beloved by his slaves, to whom he was always generous, and he had trusted those in whom he most confided to watch on every side, and give signals by waving a torch at the slightest approach of danger. He himself went to the assembly, and, though as a catechumen he could not receive the holy mysteries, he joined in the prayers, and received the blessing of Peter, as he had received the blessing of John. Nothing could have been more comforting than the brief words of the great Apostle. His gray hair added to the venerable aspect of his advancing years; but his eye was undimmed, his cheek still ruddy with the long years of the winds of Galilee, and holy courage shone in his weather-beaten features. There was a certain fire and force in all he said which gave it an impressiveness beyond that which was contained in the words themselves. Plain and practical as was ‘the pilot of the Galilean Lake,’ there hung about him a reflection of something which elevated him above himself--as though the sunlight of Gennesareth still played around him, and the glory of Hermon shone upon his face. Everywhere among the good he commanded the deep reverence which his simplicity did not seek; and everywhere among the evil, he inspired the awe which his humble manliness might seem to deprecate. He told the Christians that he had hastened his journey to Rome, when he had heard at Corinth the frightful perils with which his beloved brethren were surrounded. Were they suffering as Christians? Then happy were they! Had not Jesus said, ‘Ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake; but he that endureth to the end shall be saved’? Only let them give no ground for the enemy to blaspheme. ‘It is the will of God, brethren,’ he said--and every syllable came home to their hearts in the deep stillness--‘that by well-doing ye put to silence the ignorance of foolish men; as free, yet not using your freedom as a pretext for vice, but as the servants of God. Christ suffered for us; let us be ready to suffer for Him. Be united, then, brethren; have compassion one for another in this dread crisis; be not afraid of their faces; be not afraid of their words; be not afraid of their terror; neither be troubled, but sanctify the Lord God, and the peace which passeth understanding shall stand sentry over your hearts.’

The Apostle ceased, and Cletus, who during the desperate illness of Linus was the leading presbyter, told the brethren that, from information which had reached him, a fresh edict would be immediately proclaimed, which declared Christianity to be an unlawful religion, and threatened with the worst forms of death any one who was convicted of it. Under these circumstances they could not find a securer place of meeting than the present, but they were surrounded by spies, and in spite of all caution must be prepared for the worst. And John the Beloved, from the vault of the Tullianum, had sent them his blessing, and messages of peace.

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Chapter LV

TWO MARTYRDOMS

‘And as the Apostle, on the hill Facing the Imperial town, First gazed upon his fair domain, Then on the Cross lay down:

So thou, from out the streets of Rome Didst turn thy failing eye Unto that mount of martyrdom, Take leave of it, and die.’

NEWMAN.

‘... aut crucibus affixi, aut flammandi.’--TAC. Ann. xv. 44.

The Apostle Peter, whose friends were chiefly among the Jewish Christians, went to his humble quarters across the Tiber, where Miriam, a Jewish widow, had provided a lodging for him, his wife Plautilla, and his daughter Petronilla. If he had held his life dear unto himself, he would have left Rome without delay, or only have walked out at night and in secrecy. So long as he stayed in the Trastevere, it was not likely that the myrmidons of Tigellinus could find out his hiding-place. But this he would not do. The restless energy of his character rendered inaction impossible to him, and a voice ever rang in his ears from the lilied fields of Galilee, ‘I was hungry, and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; naked, and ye clothed me: sick and in prison, and ye visited me.... And inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto Me.’ He asked Miriam’s son to guide him to the prisons, and spent the whole day among his suffering brethren. Wherever he went, his presence was to them as the sunlight, and the most wavering could not but be confirmed by his calm wisdom, his genial tenderness, and the lessons which he so freely imparted to them from his personal memories of the Divine Example. It needed money to secure admission into their places of confinement, and Aliturus and Pomponia had seen that sufficient was provided for all his needs. But the inevitable result followed. The jailors noticed the tumult of joy which hailed his presence, and saw that he was some great leader among the Christians. Tigellinus had given orders that the ringleaders of the baleful superstition should be seized, and especially those whom they called Apostles. His emissaries, listening to the conversations of the Christians among themselves, were not long in ascertaining that this was Peter of Bethsaida, and that in securing him and John they would have seized two chief personages of the entire Christian community throughout the world, and two who had been personal friends and followers of the Crucified founder of the sect. Before evening the spies had ascertained the quarter of the city where Peter was lodged.

It was from Simon the Sorcerer that Tigellinus learnt who Peter was, and how important was the place which he filled in the new community. This miserable impostor--the father of all heresies--had won himself wealth and power, and something not far short of adoration, not only in Samaria, but in many kingdoms. It was owing to his detestable machinations that Drusilla, the sister of Agrippa, had been persuaded to desert her husband, King Azizus of Emesa, and to become the mistress of Felix, brother of Pallas, who, by his brother’s influence, had risen from a slave to be Procurator of Judæa, and the husband, or lover, of three queens. Simon had now come to Rome to push his fortunes, and his keen eye had caught sight of the Apostle in the streets. He had set a savage dog upon him, which instantly became gentle when the Apostle laid his hand upon its head. He was afraid of his counter-influence, and still remembered with burning wrath the old days when Peter, shaming him before his Samaritan votaries, had overwhelmed him with the apostrophe, ‘Thy money perish with thee!’ He gave immediate notice to Tigellinus that the leading Christian was in Rome. He felt more secure in his attempted miracles and professed inspiration, when Peter was in prison, and he was left unchecked to dupe the Emperor or the gullible women of the Roman aristocracy.

That evening there was a little meeting of Jewish Christians who had met together in the house of Rufus and Alexander, sons of Simon of Cyrene, to eat the Supper of the Lord. The meeting was surprised, and many were thrown into bonds. But Rufus, at the first sound of alarm, hurried the Apostle to his lodging by a path at the back of the house. Before they reached it, Miriam’s son, Nazarius, a bright and active boy, met them with the warning that his mother’s house had been seized; but that Plautilla and Petronilla, being unknown, had taken refuge in the house of the Samaritan Thallus. The weeping Christians entreated Peter to fly from Rome while there yet was time: for the brethren at Rome he could do nothing more; to stay among them meant death, and his life was sorely needed by the Church of God. Overcome by their entreaties, and those of his wife and daughter, he started at the grey dawn with the young Nazarius for his guide, and proceeded about two miles on the Appian Way. There, as Nazarius afterwards described the scene, a light seemed to shine round them; the Apostle stopped as if amazed, fell on his knees with uplifted hands, spoke earnest words, and then, with wet eyes, said, ‘We must return, my boy. It is the will of Christ.’ To him he said no more; but he afterwards told his fellow-Apostle that (near the spot where now stands the little church of ‘Domine quo vadis’?) he had seen a vision of Christ walking towards Rome, and bearing His Cross. ‘Whither goest thou, Lord?’ he asked, in amazement. ‘I go to Rome,’ He said, ‘to be crucified again.’ ‘Lord, I return,’ said the Apostle, ‘to be crucified with Thee.’ And the Vision smiled upon him, and vanished.

So Peter went back with the boy to the house of Thallus, and next day began to visit the prisons once more. Seeking for Miriam to console her, and tell her of the safety of her son, he found that she was a prisoner. He had hardly entered the first dungeon when he was roughly arrested, and carried off to the rock-hewn Tullianum. He was chained to the floor beside his brother-Apostle John, in that damp and dreary vault. There King Jugurtha, before he was strangled, had complained so bitterly of the cold; there the brave Gaulish patriot, Vercingetorix, had been led aside from Julius Cæsar’s triumph to pay the forfeit of his life; there the Catilinarian conspirators, Lentulus and Cethegus, had expiated their crimes. Fervently did the Apostles embrace one another, and between the two there blossomed up reminiscences of early days, infinitely tender and sacred. They talked of the summer hours when they had played in boyhood on the strip of silver sand beside the limpid lake at Bethsaida; of the fisherboats, and draughts of fish, and straining nets, in the years when they were partners together; of bright Capernaum, with its marble synagogue, throwing its white reflection on the waves lit with the rose of eventide; of the green hills beyond, with the naked demoniacs among the tombs. Then they spoke of the time when they had gone with Andrew and Nathanael to see the prophet of the wilderness, whose notes of warning had made the flinty echoes ring with the preaching of repentance. Then, with hushed voices, in regions of sacred thought where we may not follow them, they spoke of the days of the Son of Man.

They who looked down into that vault from the upper aperture would have seen a rocky chamber, lighted only by one iron lamp, bare of all but the merest necessaries. The prisoners had nothing but a water jar, and two wooden seats, and mats upon the rocky floor, on which at night they could stretch their cramped and wearied limbs, and which Pomponia had bribed the jailor for permission to supply. And in this cell would have been seen two men of Jewish aspect and poor clothing, of whom the elder had exceeded man’s threescore years and ten, and the younger was long past life’s prime. Chilly, and in chains, and fed only on bread and water, and the leaders of a cause on which the world poured its most passionate execration they yet felt perfect trust in God. With Emperor and mob alike arrayed against them, and with hundreds of their brethren in the same evil case, and with death in its ghastliest form striding visibly upon them, amid what looked like the extreme of uttermost failure--might not even their enemies have pitied them? Pity? Nay, Nero might have given all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them, and Seneca have bartered all his wisdom and his wealth, for one hour of their radiant serenity, of their unshaken peace!

In the evening the jailor, Martinianus--who had been so much touched by their bearing, and by all that he had heard from them as they talked, that he was already in heart almost a Christian--came full of sorrow, to tell them that on the morrow they should die. To his amazement a light as of heaven dawned upon their faces, and they turned and looked on each other with a smile. They asked him in what way they were to suffer. He either was uninformed or shrank from telling them, and they were content that the morrow should reveal it.

‘I knew it, my brother, I knew it,’ said Peter. ‘Again and again a Voice has repeated in my dreams, “Verily I say to thee, When thou wast young thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.” And I am not troubled that I know not yet by what death I shall glorify God. But thou, my brother, shalt not die yet.’

‘How that may be I know not,’ replied the other, deeply musing. ‘But to us to live is to die. Said He not, “He who is near Me is near the fire; he who is far from Me is far from the kingdom”?’

The jailer had told them truly. The execution of the Christians was to be hurried on with all speed, for Nero had on hand the weighty business of supervising the reconstruction of his capital and of his Golden House. He could only recover the popularity necessary for these undertakings by sacrificing a holocaust of victims to assuage the popular suspicions. And the most diabolic feature of this massacre of the innocent was to be that they were not only to be slain, but that their tortures were to subserve the amusement of the people. The solemn moment of each Christian’s death was to be the motive for delighted acclamations and shouts of laughter--in which, surely, all the demons joined! To any feelings less exalted, to any hope less fervent than theirs, it would have been the most intolerable aggravation to die amid pagan pageants and brutal idleness, insulted by bacchanalia of revelry and sanguinary pomp.

But the inventiveness of cruelty which Tigellinus and Nero studied and planned together amid the faint, unavailing remonstrances of Poppæa, had to be hastened, for the special reason that already their victims were beginning to escape them fast through the narrow gate of death. Owing to the suffocating atmosphere of over-peopled prisons in the malarious autumn air, a dangerous form of typhoid had broken out among the Christians. Not a few had died, robbed, as they feared, of the crown of martyrdom. It had required all the wisdom and tenderness of their fellows to persuade them that they had deserved no less than others the longed-for amaranth, and that they would not be losers by not surviving until that second coming which many of them were expecting from hour to hour. Tigellinus was not more anxious to bestow than they to receive the death of violence. All Nero’s aims would be frustrated, if, with so great a multitude of victims ready for them, the wild beasts of the amphitheatre, human as well as animal, were baulked of their infernal festival and their infernal joy.

Pending, therefore, the necessary preparations to deal with the rest in mass, bizarre and insulting forms of death were devised for the leaders on the following day. Notice was given that of the two Jewish ringleaders of the Christian sect, whom they called Apostles, one would be crucified head downwards by the obelisk in the Circus on the Mons Vaticanus, under the terebinth tree, and that the other would be flung into a caldron of boiling oil on the Latin Road.

And that night a great joy was permitted them. They had noticed that again and again Martinianus had not only shown them kindnesses to which the prisoners of the Tullianum were little accustomed, but also that he had humbly lingered in their presence, had asked permission to listen to them when they spake of Jesus, had put many questions to them, had evidently felt in his heart some stirrings of heavenly grace. That night he came to them, and, falling on his knees, said that they had taught him to believe in Christ, and begged baptism at their hands. The spring was there welling up, as it still does, from its native rock. Nothing hindered. Martinianus received baptism at the hands of the Apostles, and afterwards died a martyr.

The morning dawned sulphurously hot, and there seemed to be menace and meaning in the sky which glowed overhead like molten copper. At the entrance of the Tullian vault the Apostles enfolded one another in a long farewell embrace. They reminded each other, with faces which smiled through the tears of parting, of the blessings and words of Christ, and, being then rudely separated, were led in opposite directions by two decurions with their soldiers, amid accompanying throngs. The places of execution had been fixed in order that spectators might have their free choice of delightful horror, and that the division of the multitudes might enable all to have a good view.

A fresh trial awaited the elder Apostle. He had hardly been set free from his chains, that he might walk to the place of execution with his hands tied behind his back, when he saw his wife, who was also being led on her way to die. Brief, and free from all anguish, were the words that they interchanged.

‘Be of good cheer,’ he said, ‘true yokefellow. He will be with thee who raised thy mother from the great fever at Capernaum. I rejoice that thou, too, art going home.’

‘Farewell, my beloved,’ she replied, in a firm voice; ‘I am not afraid. In one short hour we shall be with Him where He is.’

He cast one long look upon her, and said in Hebrew, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.’ And when they were parted he still turned round to her once more, and said, ‘Oh, remember the Lord!’

Most of the spectators who accompanied the procession had seen the then common spectacle of crucifixion; but to see a man crucified head downwards was a novelty sufficient to have assembled all the dregs of the populace, but for the counter-attraction at what, for the sake of brevity, we will call the Latin Gate.[101] In point of fact, Nero had read in Seneca’s ‘Consolation to Marcia’[102] that tyrants had been known to adopt this grotesque form of cruelty, and he himself suggested it to Tigellinus, and said that he meant to witness it. When St. Peter was told what awaited him, he only smiled. He well knew that what had been intended for insult was overruled to him for mercy. He would be spared the long unspeakable pangs of lingering death. On the ordinary cross he might have lived for three days in complications of agony, but crucified head downwards, he knew that in a very short time he would pass from unconsciousness to death.

Nero, as he had promised, was present to see the new sight. While the cross was being prepared, Peter caught sight of the Emperor, and lifting the right hand, which for a moment the executioner had loosened, fixed his gaze on him till he shrank.

He spoke not, but one of the Christians, who had noticed the Emperor’s alarm, exclaimed--

‘O murderer of the saints, yet a little time hence, and thou, too, shalt be summoned before the bar of God.’

‘Crucify him!’ said Nero, passionately. ‘Stop his ill-omened and blaspheming mouth!’

But the speaker had shrunk back into the dense multitude.

They nailed St. Peter to the cross, and lifted it with his head downwards; but while the brutal heathen laughed, and the fear of death could not suppress the wail of the Christians, he said only--and they were the last words of the great Apostle--‘I rejoice that ye crucify me thus, for my Master’s sake. I am much unworthy to die in the same manner as He died.’

The old man passed speedily and almost painlessly away, and in the glimmering, flashing sky, over which, in the far distance, began to roll the chariot wheels of gathering storm, the brethren thought that they saw the wings of angels and shadows of the avengers.

The Christians always perplexed and irritated their pagan persecutors by behaving in a manner the very opposite to what was expected. After their first shuddering emotion at witnessing the martyrdom of their great Apostle, they seemed rather radiant than depressed. But the reason for this was that their young deacon, Clemens, speaking to them in Greek, said, ‘I see him, not head downwards, but upright on the cross, and the angels crown him with roses and lilies, and the Lord is putting a book into his hands from which he reads.’

It was natural that they should desire to keep his mortal remains. Marcellus, who had been a pupil of Simon Magus, but whom Peter had converted, obtained his body from the executioner for a great sum of money, bathed it in milk and wine, and had it embalmed. That night they conveyed it to a spot, secretly remembered, at the foot of the Vatican hill.

Marcellus watched by the grave that night; but as he watched he thought that the Apostle came to him in vision, and said, ‘Let the dead bury their dead. Preach thou the gospel of God.’ On that spot was reared the humble ‘trophy,’ or memorial cell, which the presbyter Gaius saw there in the second century. Thence, in due time, the relics were removed to that unequalled shrine, where the tomb which enclosed them is encircled by ever-burning lights, and visited century after century by the devotion of tens of thousands. Fools counted his life madness and his end to be without honour. How is he numbered among the children of God, and his lot is among the saints!

The procession which accompanied the Apostle John had taken longer to arrive at the scene of martyrdom. The awful heat of the morning, the more crowded parts of the city through which they had to pass, the greater throngs which accompanied them, had caused delay. The Apostle walked with firm step in the midst of the ten soldiers. Though his hands were tied behind his back, his appearance struck all beholders with involuntary dread. The high forehead, the long hair which streamed over his shoulders, the perfect self-possession, the beauty of holiness, gave to his movements an unconscious majesty. His face was mostly lifted heavenward in prayer, but whenever he turned on those around him his bright and searching glance their eyes fell before him. If any began to jeer at him and utter words of ribald blasphemy, he had but to look towards them, and in spite of themselves they stopped short. An unwonted hush fell on the throng which surged around the soldiers--a silence of which the multitudes themselves could give no account.

‘He is a sorcerer, that is certain,’ said Tullius Senecio as he looked down on the passing procession from a window in the house of Crispinilla.

‘He must be,’ she answered. ‘I never saw the crowd of the Forum so strangely quiet.’

‘Let me see the Christian,’ said a boy in the crowd. ‘Soldier, lift me up that I may see him.’

‘What, Gervasius? How camest thou here? But thou art a soldier’s son, and I will humour thee,’ said the decurio. ‘Thy father and I were comrades in Palestine, and it was once his lot to see a scene after which he never had one happy day.’

He lifted the boy in his arms, and he gazed long.

‘Is that the Christian?’ he said. ‘Yon man does not look like an enemy of the gods, or an eater of children’s flesh.’

The Apostle heard him, and turned towards him with a soft light of blessing in his eyes.

‘I should not mind being like thee,’ said the boy, ‘and I will not go to see thee killed.’

Fifty years later he remembered that gentle glance when in a later persecution he, too, was led out to die.

At the scene of execution a high scaffolding had been erected so that many thousands could be gratified by witnessing the new form of death. On the summit, on ten rows of bricks, had been kindled a fire, and over this was placed a huge caldron of iron, full of boiling oil. Not blenching in a single feature, with a step of perfect dignity, without assistance, without the slightest tremor, the Apostle mounted the wooden steps and stood in the sight of all, the fire flinging its red glare over him as the executioner tore off his outer robe.

But meanwhile the storm, gathering into its bosom the fierce heat of that day in late August, had begun to burst over Rome. The thunderclouds passed from threatening purple into midnight blackness, and roll after roll of thunder throbbed and crashed as though to menace the guilty city with the doom of its congregated iniquity. Then blazed forth the lightning, and filled the air, and ran along the ground. So tremendous were the explosions of sound, whose rending, cracking, and splitting outbursts settled into a long, continued roar, and so vivid were the flashes of forked lightning which gleamed like dazzling dagger-stabs aimed at an enemy who must at all costs be slain, that the soldiers and the executioners and the spectators grew livid with dread. Women shrieked and cowered, and clung to their husbands, and men looked round them uneasily, and some began to hurry away, and the hearts of all were benumbed as with some strange misgiving.

An exceptionally terrific crash of the artillery of heaven, a flash of levin which seemed to wrap them all in a white robe of dazzling flame, a shriek from hundreds of voices! And when the crash ended, the Christians were murmuring together in awestruck voices, Maranatha! Maranatha! and there arose scattered cries from the multitude. ‘He is a sorcerer! Stay the execution! We are all dead men! The wrath of the gods is upon us!’ The ancients, from ignorance combined with superstition, were far more terrified than the moderns by thunderstorms. It was evident that they were in the centre of the storm. The scaffold and the caldron formed its inmost focus, having attracted the electric fluid by their woodwork and iron. The decurion himself and his soldiers and the executioners were terrified. They dared not disobey their orders, yet amid the general terror they seemed paralysed into helplessness. Aliturus, hoping that he might in some way render some kindness, had asked to be one of those spectators, of higher position than the mob, who were allowed to stand on the scaffold. Seizing his opportunity, he hastily whispered, ‘The executioner has untied your hands. You have friends in the crowd. Escape! Fear not the lightning--this skin of a seal which I brought under my robe, expecting a thunderstorm, is an amulet against lightning.’

‘I thank thee, my son,’ said the Apostle; ‘unless the will of God be clearly manifested, I cannot fly. And if we trust in God we need no amulet, for neither the pestilence nor the arrow can hurt us.’

Again the thunder roared, again they were wrapped in a blinding flash. Hardly conscious what he did, the Apostle uplifted his right hand. It became the nucleus of the electric phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s fire, and at once appeared to burn like a torch with lambent flame. A cry of fresh terror rose from the heathen multitude. ‘Fly, fly!’ they exclaimed; ‘he is a sorcerer or a god. He lifts against us his flaming hand, tipped with the fire of Castor and Pollux. We shall all be killed by fire from heaven. The spot is accursed. It is a bidental.’[103]

A rush took place, and the crowd fled promiscuously in every direction. The soldiers could not resist the contagion. They leapt down and fled, and the decurio followed, shouting to them in vain. The executioners joined the soldiers in their flight. For a moment the Apostle and Aliturus stood alone on the scaffold, and then hurried down the steps. Scarcely had they reached the ground when the lightning struck the metal caldron and tore it from its chains. It fell with a mighty crash, and the oil streaming over the flame burst up in a fierce blaze which would very rapidly have reduced the whole scaffold to ashes had not the deluging rain begun to fall in cataracts, quenching the fire, but leaving a charred and shapeless ruin.

The news was brought to Nero and Tigellinus that evening by multitudes of witnesses when the storm had cleared and the heavens had resumed their azure sleep. They shared the superstition of the mob, and thought that, by magic powers unusually terrible, the Apostle had brought down the wrath of Heaven. At the same time this could have nothing to do with the Christians in general, for had not the execution of the other Apostle been carried out with perfect ease? They were officially informed that the Apostle, of his own free will, had thought it right to return to the door of the Tullianum and surrender himself as a prisoner. Such strange security deepened the impression that he could wield supernatural powers. Afraid to detain him in Rome, Nero ordered him to banishment in the rocky Ægean island of Patmos.[104]

Thither the Apostle was conveyed, and there, gazing on the sea that burned like glass in the sunlight, he wrote his Apocalypse. In that strange book we can still read the echo of the horror kindled in the heart of an eyewitness by an Emperor who had degenerated into a portent of iniquity, fighting with empoisoned breath and dragon-like fury against the saints of God. The Apocalypse is the ‘thundering reverberation’ of the Apostle’s mighty spirit, smitten into wrathful dissonance amid its heavenly music by the plectrum of the Neronian persecution. All the horrors of that frightful age of storms, and eruptions, and earthquakes, and falling meteors, and famine, and pestilence, and threatenings of Parthian invasion and imminent massacres of civil war, threw gigantic and blood-red shadows across the Apostle’s page. The air was being shattered by the trumpet-blasts of doom which would bury in flame and ruin alike the Harlot City on the seven hills which had made herself so drunken with the blood of the saints, and the Holy City which had become a den of murderers-- which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt--where the Lord was crucified. When he wrote his vision, three or four years later, the souls of those who had been slain in the great Neronian tribulation for the Word of God and the testimony which they held were still under the altar, and cried, ‘How long, O Lord, how long dost thou not avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ But white robes were given them, and they were bidden to rest yet a little while till the number of their brethren was fulfilled. And afterwards one of the four-and-twenty elders who sat around the throne asked him, ‘Who are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?’ And he said unto him, ‘Sir, thou knowest.’ And the Elder answered, ‘These are they which came out of THE GREAT TRIBULATION, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’

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Chapter LVI

Ὁ νειδισμοῖς τε καὶ θλίψεσι θεατριζόμενοι.--Hebr. x. 33.

‘SEC. BR. O night and shades! How are ye joined with hell in triple knot.

* * * * *

Is this the confidence You gave me, brother?

ELD. BR. Yes, and keep it still.

* * * * *

If this fail The pillared firmament is rottenness, And earth’s base built on stubble.’

MILTON, Comus.

The news of the Neronian persecution did not reach St. Paul at once. When he left the hospitable home of Philemon he first rejoined Timothy at Ephesus. He left him to arrange the affairs of the Church of Ephesus, and Onesimus took the place which had been filled by the son of Eunice in former years. He became the Apostle’s travelling companion, to lend him the affectionate attendance now necessary to his age and infirmities. It was not till they reached Corinth that they heard the heart-shaking intelligence that the Christian Church at Rome had been smitten by Antichrist as with red-hot thunderbolts. Though no accurate details reached them, Paul’s first impulse was to fly to the succour of his Roman brethren; but Titus of Corinth, who was with him, urged him to remember that two of his brother Apostles were at Rome; that the persecution was now certain to break out in nearly every Church of the Empire, and that his presence was more needed in Crete and in the Churches of Asia and Europe of which he had been the immediate founder. Anxious to confront the growth of subtle heresies, more perilous in his eyes than persecution, he reluctantly abandoned his wish to return to Italy, and sailed to Crete. It was some time before he learnt that St. Peter had sealed his testimony by martyrdom and that St. John was a prisoner at Patmos.

But Onesimus was distressed at heart by the perils which would befall the beloved daughter of Nereus, and he entreated the Apostle to let him be the bearer to Rome of his messages of consolation and encouragement. Receiving ready permission, he hurried to the capital by the earliest ship, and arrived on the very day of the storm which had witnessed the crucifixion of St. Peter and the miraculous deliverance of the Beloved Disciple.

With amazement he saw Rome lying in ruins and the Christian cause apparently destroyed forever. ‘Christian’ was now the synonym of incendiary and desperate malefactor. His heart sank within him as he went from house to house only to find that the Christian inhabitants had disappeared. So great a multitude had been arrested that for the time being the prisons were the only churches. He went to the palace of Aulus Plautius, thinking that there he was certain to receive information; but there, too, he found that scarcely one of the Christian slaves was left, and that Pomponia herself had caught the virulent typhoid which had broken out among the crowded sufferers, and lay unconscious and dangerously ill.

Risking everything, he visited the prisons, and in one of them he found Nereus, wasted and haggard, but still animated by a cheerful courage. From him he learnt, with a deep sense of relief, that at the first outbreak of danger he had sent Junia to the safe refuge of Aricia. Pudens, when he sailed for Britain, felt a prescient intuition of the days which were to come, and told the Christian members of his household that they might always find a place of shelter with Dromo in the little country farm. Thither Junia had gone with a few others, obedient to the wish and command of her father, though reluctant to leave him. There Onesimus found her, and carried to her the blessing and the messages of Nereus. Nereus sent her word that he was doomed to die, as they were all doomed to die, though by what form of death was as yet unknown to them. He bade her to stay at Aricia. She could do nothing for him, and to come to Rome would only be to throw away her life. In the few lines he was able to write to her he commended Onesimus. He confessed that in former days the youth had been altogether displeasing to him, but now he was a changed character. Paulus had won him back to the paths of holiness. He had been illuminated. He had tasted of the heavenly calling, and had devoted himself to the personal tendance of the aged Apostle. In Rome he had given proof of his courage and consistency by showing pity for the prisoners and not being ashamed of their chains. It was no time now to talk of marrying or giving in marriage, for surely the day of the Lord was very nigh at hand; yet, if Junia loved the youth, Nereus would not forbid their plighting troth to each other, and awaiting the day when the marriage might be possible. And this he granted the more readily, for he feared that very soon Junia would be left alone, a helpless and friendless Christian maiden in the midst of an evil world.

So the lovers met, but the interchange of their common vows were solemn and sacred, under the darkening skies of persecution, and as it were in the valley of the shadow of death. For Junia entreated Onesimus to return to Rome and do his utmost to watch over her father and to save him if by any means it were possible or lawful. He bade her farewell, and found time to pay one brief visit to the temple at Aricia that he might express his gratitude to the priest of Virbius for having spared his life. Alas, he was too late! A new Rex Nemorensis--the ex-gladiator Rutilus--reigned in Croto’s room. He had surprised and murdered him the evening before, and Onesimus saw the gaunt corpse of Croto outstretched upon its wooden bier awaiting burial in the plot assigned to the succession of murdered priests.

Sick at heart, Onesimus hurried from the dark precincts, and by the morning dawn he was in Rome.

On that day the terrible massacres began which were to baptise the infant Church in a river of blood, and to consecrate Rome in the memory of Christendom as the city of slaughtered saints. For there Paganism was to display herself, naked and not ashamed, a harlot holding in her hand the brimming goblet of her wickedness, drunken with the blood of the beloved of God. Mankind was to see exhibited a series of startling contrasts: human nature at its best and sweetest; human nature at its vilest and worst:--unchecked power smitten with fatal impotence; unarmed weakness clothed with irresistible strength: --pleasure and self-indulgence drowned in wretchedness; misery and martyrdom exulting with joy unspeakable, and full of glory. On the one side was the splendour and civilisation of the City of the Dragon revelling in brutal ferocity and lascivious pride; on the other side the down-trodden and the despised of the City of God rose to a height of nobleness which no philosophy had attained, and enriched with sovereign virtues the ideal of mankind. While the deified lord of the empire of darkness with his nobles and his myrmidons sank themselves below the level of the beasts, paupers and nameless slaves, young boys and feeble girls towered into tragic dignity, faced death with unflinching heroism, and showed that even amid satyrs and demons humanity may still be measured with the measure of a man--that is, of the angel.

Herein lay the secret of the victory of Christianity. In the Rome of Nero heathendom showed the worst that she could be, and the worst that she could do; and Christianity showed, coinstantaneously, that manhood can preserve its inherent grandeur when it seems to be trampled into the very mire under the hoofs of swine. The sweetness and the dignity with which the Christians suffered kindled not only amazement but admiration in many a pagan breast. It was seen that with the Church in its poverty and shame, not with the world in its gorgeous criminality, lay the secret of all man’s happiness and hope. Many a senator, as he looked on the saturnalia of lubricity and blood, felt that the Christian slave-girl, tied naked to a stake in the amphitheatre for the wild beasts to devour, was more blessed than the jewelled lady by his side, whom he knew to be steeped in baseness; and there were youths to whose taste the apples of the Dead Sea had already crumbled into dust, who in their secret hearts felt themselves nothing less than abject compared with those Christian boys who, with the light of heaven on their foreheads and the name of Jesus on their lips, faced without flinching the grotesque horror of their doom.

But Nero and Tigellinus, and those who advised with them, never wavered in their hideous policy of purchasing popularity by making the murder of thousands of the innocent subserve the brutal passions of the multitude. They thought to abase the Christians, and they kindled round their brows an aureole of light. They thought to flatter the people, but made them vile by a carnival which showed that their natures had become a mixture of the tiger and the ape.

The jubilee of massacre began with cruel flagellations, for the intention was to combine amusement with utility and to represent these unnumbered agonies as a festival of expiation. So low had the Romans sunk since the days when they had believed that the wrath of the gods had been kindled because before some public games a master had scourged his slave round the arena!

As they wished to add derision to torture, it did not suffice them that at these piacular displays men should merely fight with wild beasts who would soon be glutted with the multitude of victims. A novelty was devised for the delight of the spectators.

The first batch of martyrs were clad in the skins of wolves and leopards and torn to death by hordes of fierce and hungry dogs.

Others had to take part in mythologic operas. Among them was the soldier Urbanus. Clad in the guise of Hercules on Œta, he was burned alive upon a funeral pyre. Another martyr, Celsus, had to figure as Mucius Scævola, and to burn his hand to ashes in a flame upon an altar, with the promise that his life should be given him if, in carrying out his historic rôle, he would voluntarily consume his right hand, and not once shrink. Vitalis had to take his part in the favourite drama of Laureolus, in which character, after being made a laughing-stock, he was first crucified, and then, while yet living, devoured upon the cross by a bear. It was thought a favourable opportunity to try experiments. Simon Magus, after securing the arrest of Peter, had been admitted to an interview with Poppæa, whose superstitious turn of mind inclined her to consult every charlatan who visited the capital, and through her he gained admittance to the Emperor. He awakened Nero’s interest in a machine by which he pretended that he could enable men to fly. Nero determined to test the capabilities of the machine in corpore vili. The story of Dædalus and Icarus should be enacted, and as a slim and graceful youth was needed for the part of Icarus, poor Nazarius, the son of Miriam, was selected for this character. A lofty wooden tower was erected in the mimic scene. The wild beasts were roaming loose in the amphitheatre, and if either Dædalus or Icarus was not killed by a fall from the tower, he would be devoured in the arena. The martyr Amplias, who represented Dædalus, was precipitated at once, and killed by a lion. The broad wings of the machine upbore for a moment the light form of Nazarius as he sprang from the tower, but he fell on the very podium of the Emperor, and so close beside him that, to the horror of all, and with an omen of the worst import, he spattered the white robe of Nero with his blood.[105]

Unsated by these scenes the spectators demanded the sacrifice of the women victims. Hundreds of them were crowded in cells under the amphitheatre, and were informed that they were to appear in a series of pageants representing the torments of the dead. The spectacle was deemed impious by many, but it had been exhibited by Egyptians and Ethiopians in the days of Caligula. Fifty of these poor female martyrs were to be clothed in scarlet mantles as the daughters of Danaus, and, after undergoing nameless insults, were to be stabbed by an actor who personated Lynceus.[106] To many of them it was an anguish worse than death that they should have to bear part in dramas which represented the idolatries of heathendom; but Prisca, the wife of Aquila, who had returned from Ephesus to Rome with her husband on matters connected with their trade, visited the sufferers in prison, and effectually consoled them. This Jewish matron, to whom with her husband had been granted the honour of no inconspicuous share in the founding of the three great churches of Rome, of Corinth, and of Ephesus, had not been arrested by any informer, owing to long residence in Achaia and Asia. She told the poor women that resistance was in vain, and that no insult inflicted on them by the heathen could dim the lustre of their martyr-crown. Cheered by her calm wisdom, they paced across the stage carrying vases on their shoulders, and bore their fate without a cry.

More terrible was the destiny of others. They were to enact the part of Dirce. One after another, in imitation of the much-admired statue now known as the Farnese Bull, which had recently been brought from Rhodes, they were tied by actors representing Amphion and Zethus, to the horns of furious oxen, and so were tossed or gored to death. They, too, were sustained by the presence of the Invisible, and the modesty of their bearing, even in such agonies, caused a pang in the hearts of all but the most hardened spectators.

At all these spectacles of shame Nero looked on. There he sat day after day in the podium, lolling on cushions of gold and purple, staring through the concave emerald which helped his short-sightedness, and finding new sensations in the spectacle of insulted innocence. He was never tired of wondering whence these wretches got their ‘blank callosity.’ And they, ere their eyes opened on that other land, where they knew they should gaze upon their King in His beauty, saw as their last glimpse of earth, this despicable Antichrist, with his face like that of a base overgrown boy, watching with greedily curious stare the agony of their immolation.

But there were too many martyrs to render it easy to dispose of them. After they had exhausted the inventiveness of cruelty, after they had heaped up the puticuli even to the danger of pestilence with crucified, charred, and mangled corpses, at least a thousand of the great multitude still rotted in the feverous prisons. Then an idea truly infernal presented itself to the mind of Nero. Were not these masses of human beings supposed to be expiating their crimes as incendiaries? But the proper and congruous punishment of incendiaries was the tunica molesta, or robe of pitch. He wondered that he had never thought of it before! It would, indeed, be somewhat tame merely to burn alive a certain number of people in succession. At first there might be an agreeable sense of curiosity in studying the faces of men and women in such circumstances, and in hearing their groans and cries. But after watching the first dozen or so, that pleasure would grow monotonous. He determined to prevent the danger of any satiety in the gratification by concentrating it all into one hour of multiplex and complicated agony.

He possessed magnificent gardens, stretching from the Vatican Hill to the Tiber. There was a circus, rich with gilding and marble, of which the meta was the obelisk, brought from Heliopolis, now standing in the piazza of St. Peter’s. He would throw open these gardens to the public, for one of the nightly spectacles of which he had copied the fashion from the mad Caligula. Every one should wander at will about the green copses, and the umbrageous retreats, and he would furnish them with an illumination unseen, unheard of, in the world’s history before or since. It should be the illumination of a thousand living torches, of which each should be a martyr in his shirt of flame!

And it was done. Martyrdoms inflicted by wild beasts, and dogs, and gibbets, had become tedious from repetition. Here should be a new and intense sensation for himself, and for all Rome, for he would be present in person and enjoy to the full his hateful popularity. At intervals, all along the paths, masts, strong and large, were driven deep into the ground. To each of these was tied a man or a woman, who were taken in throngs from the pestilential and now emptied prisons. Each was tied to the stake, and in front of each was put a smaller stake with a sharpened point, fixed under the chin, lest their heads should sink on their breasts and baulk the festal sightseers from gloating on the expression of their dying agonies. Hundreds of Nero’s slaves were at work, for the preparations had all to be begun many hours before the dusk fell. The last thing which had to be done was to saturate the robes of the martyrs with pitch and oil, and then to heap around the feet of each, as high as their waists, a mass of straw and brushwood and shavings. These balefires were not to be kindled till it was dark, in order that the world of Rome might have complete enjoyment of the pageant and look in each other’s rejoicing faces by the mighty blaze.

But Onesimus had determined to do his utmost to save Nereus, if nothing else was possible. Hanging about the gardens in the dress of a slave, he managed to gain admission by the connivance of a Prætorian whom he knew to be a secret Christian. Once inside the precincts, he could easily escape detection among the hundreds who were so busily employed. Carrying now a stake, and now a bucket of pitch, and now a heap of fuel, he hurried from place to place, at each convenient moment whispering some bright message of cheer such as St. Paul had taught him, and rewarded by grateful smiles from those who were so soon to undergo their awful fate. At last he saw Nereus, who, happily for the young man’s purpose, had been fastened to a stake at the end of one of the remoter alleys. Nereus, deep in prayer, and dead to the things of earth, did not recognise him, but started when he heard a voice whispering to him that he should attempt to secure his escape.

‘It is impossible,’ said Nereus. ‘I am more than ready to share the fate of my comrades, and to win their crown.’

‘Nay, father,’ said Onesimus, ‘think of Junia, who, if thou diest, will be left a helpless orphan in the world. I dare speak no more, but be ready to fly in one instant behind yonder shrine, if I am able to set thee free.’

Reconnoitring the ground, Onesimus observed that the green alley where Nereus was tied was close beside a wall. At no great distance beyond the wall he knew that there was one of the corpse-pits into which were thrown the bodies of the poor. Gliding about, he saw on the ground a basket containing a hammer and large nails. He snatched it up, and, hid from observation behind the tangled masses of rank foliage at the back of a shrine of Priapus, he drove the nails one over the other between the huge disjointed stones, so as to make it easy to climb the wall. Then he awaited his opportunity, which he knew would be when the crowd of more than a hundred thousand spectators pushed and crowded into the gardens, and the fires of death began.

He was right in all his calculations. A scene of tumultuous excitement, and the hoarse murmur of innumerable voices, greeted the almost simultaneous kindling of many of the stakes. At that very moment, before the executioners had reached the end of the alley, Onesimus, gliding behind Nereus, cut his thongs, slipped the chain over his head, tore off the pitchy outer robe, and hurrying the old man to the back of the shrine of Priapus, half dragged him up the wall, and took refuge in the dense gloom of a subterranean passage in the dreadful burial-place.

The executioners noticed, of course, that one of their victims had, by some strange unknown means, escaped; but it did not greatly concern them. One simply whispered to the other, ‘It will not be observed. Let the poor cacodæmon get off. What matters it to us?’

Meanwhile on every side the flames shot up around the stakes, and glared with hideous brightness, and sent up huge tongues of waving light, and each stake became a torch of hell, and black smoke swirled around them, and groans and cries of anguish arose which were drowned in bursts of music and laughter and ribald songs. And all the while the moon was silvering the rich foliage, and the stars shone down with peaceful rays over that revelry of hell, and the smoke and flame were to those poor sufferers as chariots of fire and horses of fire to bear their souls to heaven. And while the agony and madness and hilarity were at their height, and the statues of obscene gods and lascivious nymphs, which glimmered from beneath the trees, looked like demons over whose faces the red glow flickered in smiles of seeming ecstasy as they watched this triumph of demoniac wickedness --at this moment shouts of adulation arose, and Nero was seen, his face wreathed in smiles, in the dress of a charioteer. With some of his basest creatures round him, he mingled familiarly with the mob, exchanged jokes with them, and stood peering with them into the ghastly faces in which flickered longest the gleam of life.

‘What think you of these sarmenticii, these semaxii?’ he asked repeatedly of the plebeian throng.

‘Call us “faggot-birds,” and “stake-fellows,”’ said one of the martyrs, who calmly awaited the rekindling of his stake from which, by some chance, the flame had expired. ‘These faggots with which we are burned, these stakes to which we are bound, are our robes of victory, our triumphant chariot.’[107]

‘Child of the Devil,’ exclaimed another, before his robe had caught the flames, ‘I would not, even at this moment, change my lot with thine.’

‘Antichrist,’ murmured another, ‘thine hour is nigh.’

Nero shrank before the prophecy, but afterwards sprang upon his chariot, and seeking the applause which rose like a storm wherever he appeared, drove his four horses round every part of the circus, and the broad paths of the gardens, until the last human torch had flared out, and the multitude began to stream away.

It was an amazing thing that pagan fathers and mothers should have taken even their children to see such sights as these. But, inured as they were to blood and anguish by the harrowing homicides of the amphitheatre, their hearts in these matters were ‘brazed by damned custom.’ And so it happened that a Roman knight named Cornelius Tacitus had led his little son, a grave child of eight years old, to walk through the gardens of Nero on that awful night. He looked on the scene with an impulse of childish pity, and asked his father ‘whether these Christians had really set fire to Rome.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said his father.

‘Why, then, are they burnt alive?’ he asked.

‘They are criminals,’ said the knight; ‘and they hate the whole human race. They are akin to the Jews, and it would be no bad thing for the Empire if both of those accursed superstitions were destroyed.’

The young Tacitus remembered and recorded the remark more than thirty years later, when he had become a great historian. He was influenced, too, by the conversation which he then heard between his father and the friends who accompanied him. ‘These men,’ said one of them, ‘die every whit as bravely as the Stoics whom we so greatly admire.’ But the elder Tacitus would not admit the analogy. ‘In these Christians,’ he said, ‘the contempt of death is mere custom, or madness, or sheer obstinacy.’

Seneca, too, was in those gardens of the Vatican for a few moments, perplexed, horrified, miserable. The Emperor had commanded his presence, as though it would lend some sanction to the carnival of horror. The agonising deaths of such a multitude were indeed, to him, a repulsive sight, but it was not so wholly unfamiliar as to harrow his feelings to their depths. What struck him most, and what he has dwelt upon in his obvious allusions to this monstrous execution, was the inexplicable fortitude, the unflinching heroism, shown, not by nobles and philosophers, but by slaves, and women, and boys, and the very dregs of the populace. He pondered in vain over that disturbing problem.[108]

* * * * *

Before an hour had passed, the stakes stood charred and black, and underneath them were horrible heaps of death, still keeping some awful semblance of humanity; and the smoke curled and writhed about them, and streams of the melted and bubbling pitch quivered with small blue flames, or left black furrows on the burnt grass or the trampled sand.

And thus amid foul laughter the martyrs had died whose lives alone were innocent, who alone loved one another and all mankind. And the moon still shed her soft lustre on the scene, and the stars looked down through the untroubled night, and lighted home the myriads whose consciences, seared as with hot iron, smote them in no wise for their share in that crime--the vilest in the long annals of the world’s vilest days.

The numerous and flourishing Church of Rome was all but destroyed; yet on that night the seed of her mighty power in the development of Christianity was sown afresh. Watered by the blood of the martyrs, that seed sprang into more vigorous[*18] life, and rushing sunwards, spread forth arms laden with fruit and foliage, and grew into a giant bole, strong with the rings of a thousand summers, under whose shadows and ‘complicated glooms and cool impleachèd twilights,’ the hopes and fears of generations found their refuge--yea! and shall find it for evermore, unless it be severed from the root, and blighted into barrenness, and the axe be uplifted and the doom go forth, ‘Never fruit grow upon thee more!’

And the obelisk which witnessed that night of abomination, and which is now dedicated ‘To the Unknown Martyrs,’ still towers into the clear air, and on it is inscribed--

‘CHRISTUS REGNAT: FUGITE PARTES ADVERSÆ.’

And over the ground with its groves and gardens where they perished --those nameless heroes, those nameless demigods--rose the vast cathedral to the honour of the Christ for whom they died; and round its dome is written in huge golden letters the name of the Apostle who fell first before the wild beast’s wrath:--‘I say unto thee, Thou art PETER, and on this rock will I build My Church.’

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Chapter LVII

A CONSPIRACY AND ITS COLLAPSE

‘Ma cruauté se lasse, et ne peut s’arrêter, Je veux me faire craindre, et ne fais qu’irriter, Et le sang répandu de mille conjurés Rend mes jours plus maudits et non plus assurés.’

CORNEILLE, Cinna, iv. 2.

‘Our emperor is a tyrant, fear’d and hated; I scarce remember in his reign one day Pass guiltless o’er his execrable head. He thinks the sun is lost that sees not blood, When none is shed, we count it holiday; We who are most in favour, cannot call This our own.’

DRYDEN, The Cruelty of Tyranny, v. 15-16.

The persecution of the Christians, once begun, did not cease, but broke out again and again, in various parts of the Empire, like a conflagration which only pauses from the exhaustion of materials which it can devour. But a few more sporadic executions could furnish no further excitement to Nero, after he had supped so full of horrors. The jaded ‘old man of thirty’ therefore turned his whole attention to the building and embellishment of the Palace, which was not only to cover the vast area of the Domus Transitoria, but also the additional room which he had snatched from the ruins. It extended over a space equal to that covered by the Louvre and Tuileries together. It was called the Golden House, and exceeded in sumptuosity everything which the world had hitherto seen. It showed the degeneracy of taste which marked that age, by its tendency to hugeness of size and strangeness of material. Nothing but the grotesque and the enormous suited the diseased appetite of Nero. At the entrance stood a colossus of himself, of which the base is still visible, beside the Colosseum. It was a hundred and twenty feet high, and was the work of Zenodorus. Inside the hall was also a picture of Nero, a hundred and twenty feet high, painted on linen, which was afterwards burnt up by lightning.[109] The famous architects Severus and Celer were set to work, with all the power of the Empire to back them, and all the treasures of the world at command. Triple colonnades of marble pillars led to the Palace from the vestibule, and the outer spaces of the columns were filled with statues and flowers. At the four corners of the hall, on tables of citron, of which the veins looked like curled tresses, stood huge vases of silver, embossed by Acragas, with scenes of the chase derived from the ‘Cynegetica’ of Xenophon. The painter Fabullus, who stood at the head of the artists of the age, was bidden to enrich the halls of audience with scenes of history and mythology. One of his paintings was a Pallas, which to the astonishment of the spectators seemed always to follow them with her eyes. The most distinguished pupils of the schools of landscape, founded by Ludius, and of the rhyparographer Pyroeicus, were set to adorn the private chambers. A thousand statues of bronze, alabaster, gold, silver, and delicately tinted marble were ranged about the building, and in porticoes a thousand feet long. Not only were the old temples of Rome plundered of their treasures, but Acratus the freedman and Carinas the Greek philosopher were sent to Greece to seize whatever was most precious in her ancient cities. So shameless was the rapacity with which they served the Emperor’s greed, that at Delphi--from which he carried off five hundred statues of bronze--the population rose in arms to protect the images and bas-reliefs of their temples.

The baths of alabaster, inlaid with lapis lazuli, were supplied from the Aqua Virgo, and from the sea, and from the pale sulphur-impregnated waters of the river Albula. The vaulted roof of one banquet-room was made to represent the heavens, and to revolve in imitation of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars. The roof of another, fretted with gold and ivory, was so constructed as to shower roses on the guests, or to sprinkle them with the fine dew of fragrant essences.

Nero’s own bedroom was a prodigy of gorgeousness. It contained the golden statue of Victory, which spread her wings in sign of good omen over the slumbers of successive Cæsars. On a slab of agate stood the statuette of Nero, five inches high, armed in a corslet which had been carved with infinite labour out of hard jasper. A debased art--which did not rely for its triumph on the genius of the artist or the beauty of the result, but stimulated the languors of imagination by the conquest of apparent impossibilities--was further illustrated by other minute images cut out of emerald or topaz, like those described by Pliny. On abaci of carved ivory stood myrrhine vases--the most precious known to antiquity--red, veined, lustrous, of a value which could hardly be expressed in terms of purchase. Besides such treasures there was a little gem of sculpture, the Amazon of Strongylion, known as Eucnemos, from its exquisite proportions, which Nero took with him wherever he went. A place of special honour was assigned to Nero’s harp of gold, adorned with precious stones.

Still more marvellous were the gardens. They covered a space so large that a single lake on which imperial galleys were moored, sufficed, when filled up, for the site of the Colosseum. They were full of grottoes, and gardens for exotic plants, and waterfalls shaded with masses of foliage, and pastures in which the sheep, with revolting bad taste, were dyed blue or crimson. They also contained aviaries of rare tropical birds, and dens for animals--among the rest a monster which was said to be fed with human flesh. The palace-stables of Nero’s favourite horse Asturco, and of the other horses which drew his chariot, were in distant parts of these enchanting grounds, and were far more magnificent in their appointments than the houses of the poorer senators. The chief ornament of the garden was a temple of Seia, the goddess who was propitious to harvests. It was built of a newly discovered marble, so warm and glowing that, according to Pliny, it seemed rather to enclose than to transmit the light.

But the splendour with which he had surrounded himself soon became insupportably wearisome. It involved him further in pecuniary anxieties. Buoyed up for a time by the chimera of a Roman knight, who, giving credence to a dream, promised, at small expense, to discover the legendary treasures which Dido had carried with her from Troy, and which were supposed to be hidden in the caves of Carthage, he was compelled, when that bubble burst, to have recourse to expedients both pitiful and violent. With great peril to himself he had to let the payments of his Prætorians fall into arrears. Instead of half the patrimony left by his freedmen, he now impropriated nine-tenths. Confiscations raged on every side. Temples were plundered, and their statues--even those of the Roman Penates--were sent to the melting-pot. A law was made against wearing amethystine colours, and once when he saw a lady with the forbidden colour at the games, he pointed her out to his Procurator, and not only inflicted the fine, but forfeited her entire property. No meanness was too base for him to practise, no wrong too cruel for him to inflict. Italy, the provinces, the allied peoples, the free states, groaned under intolerable burdens.

And while his bodily functions, disordered by riotous living, made of his life a physical burden, he was distracted by daily superstitions. In his theatric way he used to tell his intimates that he was haunted by all the Furies. His effeminated intellect was constantly unnerved by rumours of storms, and earthquakes, and strange births, and comets, which the astrologers interpreted to imply change and political disaster. A revolt of gladiators at Præneste threatened a renewal of the devastations in the days of Spartacus. In consequence of an ill-advised order of Nero, the whole fleet of triremes and smaller vessels was hopelessly shipwrecked at Misenum, and he had to bear the odium of the disaster.

While he was thus wearied and agitated, there burst upon him the immense weight of Piso’s conspiracy, which afforded him a proof how many and how varied were the forces of hatred and contempt which he had kindled in the hearts of all.

Piso stood at the head of the great Calpurnian house, and was connected by ties of relationship with many of the noblest families in Rome. He was not himself the author of the conspiracy, for which, indeed, his character was altogether too unstable and corrupt. He was dragged into it by Subrius Flavus, a tribune, and Sulpicius Asper, a centurion of the Prætorian guards. Fænius Rufus, the Prætorian Præfect, approved of the plot, out of disgust for the machinations of his rival, Tigellinus, who was constantly incriminating him to the Emperor. Seneca lent a dubious sanction, which many believed to be mixed up with personal designs. Lucan was goaded into complicity by the wrongs heaped upon him by Nero’s jealousy. Perhaps the most important, courageous, and disinterested adherent was Plautius Lateranus, the consul-elect. He had no motive but a noble patriotism which felt the shame of a Roman at being governed by a histrionic debauchee. Joined to these were very unpromising elements. No credit could accrue to any cause from the support of such men as Flavius Scævinus, a man of dissolute character and slothful life; Quintianus, stained with the same vices which made Nero infamous; Senecio, a dandy long endeared to Nero by similarity of tastes; Natalis, a confidential friend of Piso, who had probably meditated treachery from the first; and Epicharis, a freed woman of the lowest character, though for some unknown reason she proved herself the most impassioned and the most courageous of them all.

The conspiracy was revealed through the fantastic and effeminate folly of Scævinus, but not until it had left Nero almost wild with terror. Natalis, Scævinus, Quintianus, Senecio, shrinking from the thought of torture--which the poor freedwoman heroically braved, and under which she expired--turned informers. The friends of Piso strove in vain to awaken him to manly counsels. He went home, and lay hidden there till the band of tiros arrived whom Nero--distrusting the older soldiers--had sent to bid him kill himself. He opened his veins, wrote a will full of the grossest flattery to the Emperor and ignobly died.

More courageous was the death of Lateranus. When Epaphroditus came to question him, he answered: ‘If I should have anything to say, I will say it to your master.’ Nero did not allow him to choose his mode of death, or to embrace his children. Hurried to a place of servile execution, he maintained a disdainful silence, not even reproaching the tribune Statius, an accomplice in the conspiracy, by whose hand he was to die. He stretched out his neck without a word, and stretched it out again when the first blow failed.

Fænius Rufus did not escape. He overdid his part by trying to terrify the conspirators as he sat by Nero and Tigellinus before his own name had been denounced. It was too much to expect that among that crowd of cowards, dupes, and traitors no one would find it intolerable to have the same man as both an accomplice and inquisitor. So, as he browbeat and threatened Scævinus, he answered with a smile that no one knew more than Rufus himself, and urged him to show his gratitude to such an excellent Emperor. Rufus turned pale, stammered, and so completely betrayed his guilt that Nero ordered a powerful soldier to seize and bind him then and there. His death was pusillanimous. He poured his lamentations even into his will.

Subrius Flavus was the next to be betrayed. ‘As if I, a soldier, could ever have undertaken such work with such helpless women as these!’ he exclaimed. But, pressed with questions, he confessed and gloried in the deed.

‘What made you forget your oath of allegiance to me?’ asked Nero.

‘Because I hated you,’ he answered. ‘While you were worthy to be loved, you had no more faithful soldier than myself. I began to hate you when you displayed yourself as the murderer of your mother and your wife, a jockey, a mummer, and an incendiary.’

The words struck the ears of Nero like a terrific blow. Familiar with crime, he was unaccustomed to be charged with it. Indifferent to the deeds, he shrank from the name of a criminal, and nothing in the conspiracy caused him worse pain than this. He ordered the tribune Veianus Niger to execute Flavus. To increase the terror of the condemned it was customary to dig a grave before their eyes. The grave was dug for Flavus in a field hard by. Looking at its shortness and shallowness with contempt, as at a scamped piece of work, he exclaimed with disdain, ‘You cannot even do a thing like that as a soldier should.’

‘Stretch out your neck manfully,’ said Niger.

‘Would that you would strike as manfully!’ he replied.

Unwarned by the answer which he had received from Flavus, Nero, who felt himself specially injured by the defection of his soldiers, asked Sulpicius Asper also ‘why he had conspired to murder him.’

‘It was the only remedy left for so many infamies,’ answered the centurion; and spoke no more.

After this Nero still continued to bathe in blood. The consul Vestinus was his enemy, and a man of courage, but he had not engaged in the plot. He had once been one of the Emperor’s intimate circle, and Nero, who had felt the weight of his rough wit and shrunk from its truthfulness, had cause to dread his spirit. Before the consul had been accused or even mentioned, the Emperor sent a tribune with a cohort to seize his best slaves, and take his house as it were by storm. Vestinus was giving a banquet, and when summoned by the soldiers, rose from the table without hesitation. He was immediately shut up in his chamber, his veins were opened, and, without uttering so much as a word of complaint, he was stifled in a bath. His terrified guests were meanwhile kept in their places by the soldiers, expecting that their fate would follow. It was late at night before Nero, who had secretly gloated over the imagination of their terrors, allowed them to be dismissed, with the remark that they had been sufficiently punished for their consular banquet.

Nero seized the opportunity to get rid of all who were for any reason obnoxious to him. Rufius Crispinus was banished because he had once been Poppæa’s husband; Verginius, because he was an eloquent orator and instructor of youth; Musonius Rufus, because he was a genuine Stoic. There was no room for such eminence in such a Rome.

There was no room even for a Petronius Arbiter, by the side of a Tigellinus. To pagan conceptions Petronius, despite his dissolute life, was still a gentleman, and Tigellinus, whatever might be his position, was the opposite. Petronius, however vicious, was the reverse of cruel; Tigellinus, far blacker and baser in his vices, superadded to them a savage ruthlessness. It was he who developed this phase of Nero’s degradation, whereas Petronius entirely disapproved of it. The Præfect felt, therefore, that Petronius must be crushed. He suborned one of the household to give false witness against him, permitted him no defence, and threw most of his slaves into chains. Petronius had left home for Campania to pay his respects to Nero. At Cumæ he was ordered to stop, and, not choosing to await the tedious delays of hope and fear, he set the example of a death as satirical as any which history records. There was nothing tragic in it, nothing remotely serious. He treated death as a jest no less contemptible than life, and died with complete coolness, effeminately brave, and sincerely frivolous. If in the deaths of some of the philosophic republicans of that day we see the theatric pomposity of Stoicism, in that of Petronius we see the callous levity of the infidel voluptuary.

Opening his veins, he discoursed with his friends, not on high topics, but on trivial literature and vers de société. If he felt interested, he had his veins bound up again, and banqueted, and slept, to make his death seem a matter of freewill, not of compulsion. He had his bad slaves scourged, his good slaves rewarded. Instead of mentioning Nero and Tigellinus in his will with lying adulation, he penned a scathing satire, in which he drew a vivid picture of Nero’s infamies, and sent a sealed copy of the document to the Emperor himself. Then he broke his signet ring, that it might not, after his death, be abused for purposes of forgery and delation; and dashed into shivers a myrrhine vase for which he had paid a fabulous sum, that it might not fall into Nero’s hands. When Nero received his satire, he writhed under it. He could not tell how Petronius had become acquainted with some of those deeds which he had concealed in the closet and the midnight, but which were here blazoned in the noonday. Thinking that Petronius could only have learnt them from an abandoned lady, named Silia, the wife of a senator, he drove her into exile on the suspicion that she had betrayed the secrets which she had shared and witnessed. At the same time he banished the ex-Prætor Minucius Thermus, and tortured one of his freedmen, because the latter had spread similar reports about Tigellinus.

And so, day after day, ‘the hard reality of death was brushed by the rustling masquerade of life,’ and society presented the spectacle of a lascivious dance on the edge of a precipice, over which some dancer or some indignant spectator from hour to hour was violently hurled.

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Chapter LVIII

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF SENECA

‘Hoc inter cætera vel pessimum habet crudelitas, quod perseverandum est.’--SENECA.

The family of Spanish Romans from Cordova of which Seneca was the head had risen to strange prosperity only to be dragged through deadlier overthrow; but the fate of their greatest scion, the poet Lucan, was the most humiliating. He might seem to have been marked out from infancy as the spoiled favourite of fortune. While little more than a boy, he had gained such a reputation for ability, that Nero had summoned him from Athens before his studies were completed. For a year or two he was the Emperor’s intimate friend, and at the same time he rose to be the favourite poet and writer of the day. When he recited in the lecture-rooms he achieved an astonishing success. He was appointed augur and quæstor before the legal age, and when, as quæstor, he exhibited games to the people, he was received with thunders of applause as loud as those which had greeted Virgil in the days of Augustus. It is impossible to imagine a giddier pinnacle of temptation for a hot-blooded Spanish youth of genius, who at the age of twenty could not have been a friend and courtier of Nero without being plunged into every sort of moral temptation. Let it be remembered in Lucan’s honour, that if he did not escape from that furnace unscathed--if his hair had been singed and the smell of fire had passed upon his garments--he yet never showed himself lost to virtue. In the midst of deplorable weakness he retained his conviction that freedom, and truth, and purity, were best.

Nero’s jealousy showed itself in the most public and insulting manner, when one day he got up and went out of the room for no reason whatever, in the middle of one of Lucan’s readings. It culminated in a prohibition to Lucan to read or publish anything further. The young poet, feeling within him the true fire of genius, nursed his rage in secret, and changed the tone of the ‘Pharsalia’ from inflated Cæsarism to savage denunciation. He mocks at the sham liberty which it accorded; brands with satire its shameful flatteries; and treating its apotheoses as a sacrilegious comedy, declares that the day would come ‘when a freer and truer Rome would make a god, not of Cæsar, but of Cato.’[110] Ten years earlier he had been writing of Nero as a supreme divinity; now in his writing-desk lay the fierce complaint that, as a consequence of the civil wars, men had come to worship shadows in the temples of the gods.[111] He consoled his seclusion by living in virtuous union with the young wife whom he loved, and as he poured forth the epic of a soul lacerated by indignation, conscious of his future immortality, he wrote in secret--

‘Pharsalia nostra Vivet, et a nullo tenebris damnabitur ævo.’

When Piso’s conspiracy began, Lucan became its passionate supporter. Men might ask what was the use of substituting one actor like Piso for another like Nero, but if a republic was impossible, Lucan felt that no change of a Cæsar could be for the worse, and in his burning hatred promised that he would slay the Emperor with his own hand.

Alas! when detection came; when he saw knights and senators and soldiers sinking all around him into treacherous weakness; when the grim executioner stood at his elbow pointing to the rack, Lucan had none of the inward strength or ennobling convictions which might have enabled him to retain his manhood. Sinking to an incredible depth of baseness, he betrayed the name of his own mother as an accomplice in the plot. His momentary infamy did not save his life, though it must have cost him a pang worse than that of death. Bidden to die, he opened his veins in four places, and went into a hot bath. His last thoughts at the end of a life so brief, so full of glory, so full of shame, are left unrecorded. Only as he watched the blood flow, he was reminded of the fantastic lines of the ‘Pharsalia’ in which he had described the similar death of a soldier on the field of battle. He recited them with a feeble voice, and spoke no more. That he should, at such a moment, have recalled verses so fantastic is characteristic of a soul not naturally ignoble, but distorted and, so to speak, encrimsoned by the horrors of life’s tragedies and life’s amusements in the midst of which he lived.

The death of his father, Mela, was also stained with dishonour. Avarice seems to have run in the family, and not even the death of his glorious son could check Mela’s besetting vice. A nobler man would have hid his head in shame as well as sorrow, but Mela showed a discreditable eagerness in recovering the debts due to Lucan, whose great wealth was now added to his own. Among other debtors, he pressed hard on Fabius Romanus, who had been Lucan’s intimate friend. What a picture do we see of the noble and literary society of Rome when we are told, as if it were a quite ordinary occurrence, that, in base revenge, this intimate friend of a poet who had betrayed his mother resorted to forgery in order to ruin his friend’s father! He forged a letter of Lucan to prove an imaginary complicity in the plot between him and his father. Mela knew that his wealth would be his death warrant. Nero no sooner read the forged letter than he summoned Mela to his presence, with a keen eye on his possessions. Mela saw that the game of life was over, and opened his veins, after having written a will which was doubly base. To save his estate from confiscation, he left a large donation to Tigellinus, and his worthless son-in-law, Cossutianus Capito. He added spite to his greed and baseness. ‘I am condemned to die,’ he said, ‘though I have done nothing to deserve punishment; but Crispinus and Anicius Cerealis live, though they are enemies of the Emperor.’ Anicius Cerealis was the consul-designate who, after the conspiracy, had proposed in the senate that a temple should with all speed be reared at the public expense ‘to the Divine Nero.’ His abjectness did not save him. On hearing of the sentence in Mela’s will he, too, committed suicide.

The senators seemed to take a pleasure in pusillanimous adulation. They decreed supplications to the gods, and a special honour to the Sun as the detector of the conspiracy, and a restoration of the Temple of Fortune from which Scævinus had taken his dagger. Amid these decrees, ‘the sweet Gallio’ pleaded humbly that his life might be spared, although his only crime was his relationship to Seneca and Lucan. Whereupon a senator got up and denounced him as an enemy and a parricide. The rest had the decency to interfere on behalf of their popular and distinguished colleague. They begged the accuser to let sleeping dogs lie. But Gallio felt that his career of glory and popularity was over, and he too committed suicide.

The city was full of deaths, and the streets witnessed the daily spectacle of the stately funerals of these political victims, of whom so many were judicially murdered for their wealth, or to gratify the hatred of the Emperor. Yet such was the prevalent baseness, that men whose sons, or brothers, or friends, or kinsmen had been thus slain, returned thanks to the gods, adorned their doors with laurel as at the news of a public victory, and rushed to fling themselves at the knees of Nero, and cover his hand with their kisses! Many of the people believed that the reign of terror had been enacted simply to replenish the Emperor’s treasury, and pitied the murdered aristocrats as though they had been as innocent as the murdered Christians.

No delation pleased Nero more than when Natalis coupled the name of Seneca with the name of Piso. How far Seneca was really an accomplice is doubtful. He had been cautious, but he can hardly have been ignorant that Subrius Flavus had formed a design to set Piso aside and elevate Seneca himself to the Empire. It was certainly suspicious that on the eve of the conspiracy Seneca had returned from his Campanian retreat, and stopped at one of his villas only four miles from the city. There was no evidence against him except this: --Natalis had been sent from Piso to complain that Seneca would never see him, and to ask ‘why their friendship should thus be allowed to drop.’ Seneca had replied ‘that frequent intercourse was inexpedient for them both, but that his happiness depended on Piso’s safety.’ But it was whispered among Seneca’s most intimate friends that he had, in fact, assented to the assassination of Nero ‘in order to free Rome from Nero, and Nero from himself.’ The glittering antithesis betrayed its own authorship.

Nero sent a Prætorian tribune, named Silvanus--not knowing that he too was one of the conspirators--to require an explanation from Seneca. He found the philosopher at supper with his beloved wife, Pompeia Paulina, and two friends.

Seneca gave a calm explanation. He had merely told Piso that he was in weak health, and desired perfect quiet. ‘Why,’ he said, in reply to the Emperor’s inquiry, ‘should I have preferred the fortunes of a private person to my own safety? I am no flatterer, that I should have made such a speech. No one knows this better than Nero, who has experienced my boldness more often than my servility.’

When Silvanus brought back the answer, he found Nero sitting with Poppæa and Tigellinus--a bad omen for Seneca’s safety.

‘Is he preparing to put himself to death?’ asked the Emperor.

‘No,’ said the tribune. ‘He showed no sign of panic. His look and his words were entirely cheerful.’

‘Go, bid him die,’ was Nero’s brief answer.

Silvanus was, however, unwilling to deliver such a mandate in person to a brother conspirator. He sent it in by a centurion.

On receiving it, Seneca quietly rose from table and said to a slave, ‘Bring me my will. I should like to leave a few legacies to those who love me.’

‘I am sorry,’ said the centurion, ‘that the Emperor’s commands admit of no such delay.’

‘Be it so,’ said Seneca, turning to his friends. ‘Since, then, I have nothing else to leave you, I will leave you my fairest possession, the memory of my life. Be mindful of it, and you will win the fame of honest purpose and loyal friendship. Nay, my friends, do not weep. Where is your firmness? Where is your philosophy? I forbid these tears. Have I not been long preparing myself for this crisis? Was any one of us unaware of Nero’s cruelty? After murdering his mother and his brother, what remained for him but to kill his tutor?’

Then he embraced Paulina, and, softening for a moment, entreated her not to waste her life in endless grief, but to mitigate the pang of widowhood by ever recalling that the life of her husband had been spent in virtue.

‘I will die with you,’ said Paulina. ‘Let the physician open my veins as well as yours.’

‘I will not check you,’ said Seneca, ‘if such is your glorious desire. Were I to forbid it, I should but leave you to the endurance of future wrongs. If you prefer the dignity of death to the endurance of bereavement, let us both die with courage, though the greater distinction will be yours.’

In truth it would have been strange, and far from creditable, if Seneca had shown any pusillanimity when the hour of his condemnation came. Many of the philosophers had contracted life into a contemplation of death. The constant presentment of death to the mind in days so perilous was natural, and the possibility of a violent death must have been in Seneca’s thoughts as often as though, like Trimalchio, he had possessed a little skeleton of articulated ivory, and had it passed round among his guests at every banquet with the melancholy refrain, ‘What a little nothingness is man!’ Even Lucan, in his short life, had come to the conclusion that ‘Man’s best lot is to know how to die, and the next best to be compelled to die’--

‘Scire mori sors prima viris, sed proxima cogi.’[112]

The veins of Seneca and Paulina were opened with the same cut, but, as Seneca was old and attenuated by asceticism, his blood flowed slowly, and the veins of his legs were also cut. The ancients were under a strange delusion in supposing that bleeding was a mild kind of death. Seneca was so convulsed with agony that, fearing to break down Paulina’s courage, he persuaded her to depart to another room. When she was gone, he began to dictate his last words. They were afterwards published and had been read by Tacitus, but they were so well known that he would not record them. They probably added little or nothing to what he has said about death so many times in his letters to Lucilius. He still lingered in agony, and bade his physician, Statius Annæus, to give him hemlock. When the poison failed to act, he stepped into a hot bath to expedite the flow of blood, and as he did so he sprinkled the slaves nearest to him, saying that it was his libation to Jupiter the Liberator. He was then carried into a bath-room and stifled with the vapour. His body was burnt, by the direction of his will, without any solemnity of funeral. Nero meanwhile had forbidden the suicide of Paulina. Her wounds were bound up, and she recovered; but during the few years of her survival the excessive pallor of her face was a memorial of those tragic hours.

That Seneca’s life was a failure is admitted even by those who justly regard him as a seeker after God. He knocked at the gates of virtue, but he scarcely entered. He lacked consistency; he lacked whole-heartedness. Charity makes us reject the dark charges made against him by the malice of Dion Cassius, but the history of his life shows that he laid himself fatally open to the accusation of hypocrisy. A Christian he certainly was not, though it is far from impossible that, through Pomponia or some other Christian, he may have seen some of the writings of St. Paul, and that this may account for the singular resemblance of tone and expression between some passages. Yet the resemblance is more superficial than real, and between the character of the Christian Apostle and that of the pagan philosopher there is an impassable chasm. In the whole course of his life and in every action and writing of it, St. Paul gave splendid evidence that his convictions swayed the whole current of his being; but Seneca’s high-wrought declamations constitute the self-condemnation of every decisive incident in his personal history. A life dominated by avarice and ambition was unworthy of a professed philosopher; it fell far below the attainments of the humblest of those true Christians whom Nero burnt and Seneca despised. Seneca did little or nothing to make his age more virtuous; the Christians were the salt of the earth. The Pagans fled from despair to suicide; the Christians, in patient submission and joyful hope, meekly accepted the martyr’s crown.

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Chapter LIX

THE AGONY OF AN EMPRESS

‘Satiety And sloth, poor counterfeits of thee, Mock the tired worlding. Idle Hope And dire Remembrance interlope, And vex the feverish slumbers of the mind: The bubble floats before; the spectre stalks behind.’

COLERIDGE, Ode to Tranquillity.

In one of the most enchanting rooms of the Golden Palace, surrounded by every object of beauty and splendour which the wealth of kingdoms could supply, sat Poppæa, miserable in heart with a misery which nothing could alleviate--no luxury of the present, no memory of the past, no hope of the future. Like Agrippina, like Seneca, like Nero, she had been ‘cursed with every granted prayer.’ Nothing which this world could give was left for her to attain. Of the honours which overpower, of the riches which clog, of the pleasures which inflame the soul, she had unbounded experience. They had left her heart weary and her life in ashes, and she had never dreamed of the secret which had enabled so many thousands of humble Christians, whom she would have regarded as the dust beneath her feet, to find exaltation in abasement, wealth in penury, and joy in tribulation.

She was Empress; she was Augusta; she was mother of an infant who had been deified; her smile meant prosperity, her frown was death. Of what avail was it all? Could this awful power, could those inestimable gems, could the gorgeousness of her Golden House fill up the void in a heart numbed by satiety and chilled by despair? What had she to aim at? Her enemies had been swept out of her path. What had she left to hope for? There was no object of earthly wishes which she had not attained. Ah! but what work worth doing could she find to do in order to fill up the vacuity of aimless self-indulgence? Who was there to love her, or whom she could love?

She thought of her early home, of her lovely mother, of her consular and triumphant grandfather, of the adoration which had surrounded her in the days of her own dawning beauty. She thought of Rufius Crispinus, the bridegroom of her youth, who had loved her tenderly, and whom she had loved, and of the little son whom she had borne him. He had grown up into a beautiful and gallant child, and the mother had always listened with pride to the anecdotes about him which were secretly brought to her. One of the heaviest of the many afflicting thoughts which were weighing upon her to-day was the manner in which Nero had treated her former husband and her son. Rufius Crispinus had once been Prætorian Præfect, and had been rewarded with consular insignia, but Nero hated his very name because he had been Poppæa’s husband; and he had taken advantage of Piso’s conspiracy first to banish him to Sardinia and recently to order him to put an end to his life. How fatal had her love been to him! It had blighted his career; it had stained his home; it had cut short his life. But what had her poor boy done that he too should perish? She had heard only a few days since that simply because in his games the high-spirited lad had played at being general or emperor, Nero had given orders to his slaves to drown him by suddenly pushing him into the sea while he sat fishing on a rock. She knew that this crime had been committed, and his bright young life sacrificed simply because he shared her blood; and what maddened her most of all was that she dared make no complaint, dared not even to reveal that she was aware of the murder, because to allude to her first husband or her son was always to rouse Nero into a paroxysm of fury. In the brightest and most luxurious room of the Golden House she sat solitary, and sobbing as if her heart would break.

Then she thought of Otho. Dandy as he was, and debauchee, to her at least he had been passionately faithful. She had abandoned Crispinus to live with Otho partly from a certain fascination which hung about his wickedness, but even more from motives of ambition, and because he was Nero’s most cherished favourite. She heard good accounts of his administration in Lusitania. Her intrigues to entangle the love of Nero had succeeded; but would she not have been incomparably more happy if she had remained in the home of Otho, and still more if she had lived as the virtuous wife of her first husband?

For with Nero she had long been disgusted, while she was obliged to feed his gluttonous vanity with perpetual eulogies of his beauty. And when in the close intercourse of daily life she saw to the depths of the man’s nature, it was impossible for her to find any words sufficiently bitter for the expression of her contempt. And this wretched meticulous creature, with no manliness in him; this tenth-rate singer and dilettante twangler on harps; this lump of egregious vanity; this catspaw of Tigellinus, whose effeminacy was steeped in the blood of the innocent which he had shed like water--this womanish man, with none of the worth of Crispinus, and none of the charm of Otho, was to be her husband and companion for life! The day for other lovers, the day when she could have the excitement of secret intrigues, was past, for anything of the kind would mean instant death. And yet she felt more and more that it was impossible to retain secure hold on such love as Nero’s. It was an ignoble love, tigerish and animal, which would evanesce long before her youth and beauty had faded away. If Nero had been a man--if there had been in his passion for her a single ennobling element--she might have retained him in her bondage for long years, as she could certainly have retained Otho. But already Nero preferred to her society the flattery of parasites and minions, and at this very time, though she was very sick and languid with the approach of motherhood, to which she looked forward with neither hope nor happiness, he had left her to her weary solitude, and for days had scarcely so much as seen or talked with her. Was some rival casting her spells over his volatile and evil nature, and taking vengeance on her for the wrongs of Octavia? The thought made her heart burn with a fury of impotent indignation.

She was determined that she would sit up this night and await his return in his own bedchamber; and, as opportunity occurred, would either assail him by reproaches, or win him back by caresses. How could she kill the interminable hours? She had no friend, no child, no confidante--none near her but slaves who hated her and yet trembled at her presence. She had no resources in herself, nothing to occupy her but her own evil thoughts and deplorable regrets.

The Empress grew more and more weary, more and more tormented with intolerable thoughts through the leaden hours. At length, long after midnight, she heard the footsteps of the watch and of many slaves as they conducted Nero to his chamber.

‘What! you here?’ he said with contemptuous indifference as he dismissed his attendants.

She looked at him. He had evidently been drinking, and was fresh from one of the scenes of debauchery which always formed the conclusion of his charioteering displays. For he still wore the dress of a jockey of the green faction, and its succinctness revealed his thin legs and protuberant person. To her he looked a spectacle of ignominy. Where was the passionate courtesy with which her Otho would have greeted her? Where the fond caress which Crispinus would have printed on her cheek? To think that this thing was the Emperor of Rome!

She half-rose from her couch, her pale face aflame with indignation.

‘Jockey!’ she hissed out. ‘Companion of base minions, comrade of coarse gladiators, where have you been? Why do you thus steep manhood in ignominy and drag the purple of Empire through the mud?’

It was the pent-up passion of her woman’s heart which thus burst forth, and it came on Nero like an unexpected blow. He looked at her for a moment with eyes opened to their fullest, and then, staggering forwards, dealt her a brutal kick.

Poppæa, with a groan of anguish, sank swooning to the ground. She lay on the floor as dead, her features white as marble, her hair streaming from its bands and covering the floor with its gleaming waves. The sight sobered Nero. Had he killed her? Furious as he was, he had not intended that. He loudly summoned his slaves and Poppæa’s attendants, and they bore her, still unconscious, to her own apartments. Nero did not tell any one what had happened, but when the physicians saw the bruise which his foot had made they knew everything, and when she had awoke from her swoon Poppæa disdainfully told them the simple truth. From the first they did not conceal from her or from Nero that, in her delicate situation, her life would be in extreme peril.

She lingered on in anguish for many days, her heart broken, her life sacrificed. Nero would fain have testified his maudlin and unavailing remorse. He passionately desired a child to continue his line, and now he had shattered his own hopes. If he had ever loved any woman with anything resembling real love, it was Poppæa. He had only kicked her in the blind rage of ruthless egotism. Nothing had been further from his intention than to murder her or even to cause her excruciating pangs.

He asked to be admitted to her presence, but she refused to see him. She sent to tell him that unless he wished to kill her, he would not visit her. The physicians assured him that the mere suggestion of his entering the room had thrown her into dangerous convulsions. As for the expressions of regret which he had written to her, she was too weak and ill to write any reply, and she deigned to send no message.

There was one person, and one only, whom she wished to see. It was Pomponia Græcina. For her Poppæa had always felt an involuntary respect, and had been deeply impressed by her words and bearing when she came to plead for the Christians. If there were any one who could bring healing to her wounded soul, or suggest one moment’s peace to her tortured heart, it was the stainless wife of Aulus Plautius.

Pomponia had been sick nigh unto death. The prison fever which she had caught in ministering to the Christians had been a virulent typhoid, from which she would not have recovered but for her untroubled conscience, her pure and simple life. For herself she did not wish to live. Not only had her young Aulus been disgraced and murdered, but what she had witnessed of the treatment of the Christians, and what she had heard of their exterminating martyrdoms, had ploughed up the depths of her soul with horror. She almost longed that it could have been permitted her to share the fate of all those dear men and women whom she had known, and who had now passed with white robes and palms in their hands into the presence of their Saviour. But her husband was falling into deep melancholy, and for his sake she made every effort to recover. And because in all her troubles the peace of God was with her, her constitution triumphed over the ravages of the disease, and when she received a message that Poppæa was lying on her death-bed and longed to see her, she was daily regaining her strength in her villa at Tibur.

She did not hesitate;--for what purpose was there in life if it were not to do deeds of helpfulness and love? She was carried in her litter from Tibur to the Golden House, and conducted to the chamber of the Empress. She was spared the trial of meeting Nero, who that day was taking part in a contest of singing and harp-playing on the public stage at the quinquennial Neronia. To prevent that disgrace, the Senate had spontaneously offered him the crowns of eloquence and song. But the semblance of victory did not suit his vanity. He played at being a fair competitor. The theatre was crowded to suffocation, not only with Romans but with provincials, and several knights and burghers had been trodden to death in the opening rush to secure seats. And there stood Nero on the stage, harp in hand, bowing and scraping to the assembly, and trembling with sham nervousness before the adjudicators! It was an infinitely dreary entertainment, for the soldiers stood in every gangway with batons, beating those who did not applaud or who applauded in wrong places, and as no one was allowed to leave the theatre on pain of death, not a few were taken seriously ill, while some braved the risk of dropping down from the outside, and some pretended to faint or die that they might be carried out of the theatre. It was on this occasion that poor Vespasian fell into new disgrace. Harp-playing and singing, whether good or execrable, was not at all in his line, and, do what he would, he found it impossible to prevent himself from falling asleep, as he had already done in the villa at Subiaco. He was caught in the act by Phœbus, the freedman of Nero, who roughly shook him by the shoulder, and abused him without stint. He was very near being condemned to death, but so many persons of distinction interceded for him, that this time Nero spared him. He was, however, forbidden ever again to appear at Court, and received a strong hint that the more entirely he kept out of the way the safer it would be for him. ‘What am I to do?’ he asked Phœbus, ‘and whither am I to go?’ ‘Abi Morboniam! Go to the dogs!’ answered the insolent freedman. A few years later, when Vespasian wore the purple, the freedman implored his pardon for the insult. ‘Abi Morboniam! Go to the dogs!’ was the only answer of the good-humoured Emperor.

While Nero was fooling away his Empire in such scenes Pomponia entered the chamber of death. There lay Poppæa in the miserable wreck of her youth and loveliness. Wicked she had been, and crowned with every gift but that of virtue, yet Pomponia could not but pity one so young and so lost, childless, hopeless, unloved, bereaved-- thrice wedded, though little more than girl, and now the victim of her husband’s brutality.

Poppæa turned her languid glance towards the opening door, but when she saw who her visitor was, the poor face, drawn and convulsed with pain, brightened for an instant. The ‘amber’ tresses which Nero had sung of had been cut off to relieve her feverish brows, and Pomponia’s experienced eye detected on her countenance the seal of death.

‘You think that there is no hope?’ whispered Poppæa as she saw the look of compassion deepen on Pomponia’s face. ‘Ah, tell me the truth as it is, and do not flatter me with false hopes as these slaves do.’

‘I fear that you will die, Augusta,’ answered Pomponia, solemnly yet tenderly.

‘Call me not by that vain title. Would that I had never borne it! Would that I had died in childhood, or in my first home! Had I done so, loving faces might have been looking on me now.’

‘Linger not in the thoughts of the past, Poppæa; it is irrevocable.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is irrevocable; and I cannot bear the faces which look upon me so reproachfully--the face of my murdered husband, Crispinus; of my drowned son; worst of all the sad face of Octavia.’ A shudder ran through all her frame. ‘At every moment,’ she said, ‘directly I close my eyes, her head is before me, as I saw it in all its ghastliness.’

‘Grieve not for Octavia,’ said Pomponia. ‘I have heard all about her death. She died forgiving all her enemies, and in perfect peace.’

‘Peace? Where is it to be had?’ asked Poppæa. ‘It is not a pearl, I think, of any earthly ocean.’

‘No,’ said Pomponia, ‘but of a heavenly.’

‘Heavenly? What is heaven?’ asked Poppæa, wearily. ‘All that we know is life; and life has given me all that pleasure can give, and rank and riches, and the adoration of self; and it has left me so miserable that life itself has grown hateful to me, while yet I fear death.’

Pomponia listened in profound sadness. ‘Poppæa,’ she said, ‘I need not fear now to tell you that I am a Christian; and we Christians have been taught that “he who saveth his life shall lose it, and he who loseth it for Christ’s sake, shall find it.” It is too late for you to redeem the life which you have flung away, or to find the pleasure which you have slain in seeking for it. But while there is life, there is hope. The God in whom we Christians believe is a God of mercy, and we believe also that Christ, the Son of God, died for our sins, and that by Him they may be washed away.’

‘All the waters of Adria would not wash mine away. Oh, Pomponia, do you know that Seneca, and Octavia, and many others owed their deaths to me?’

‘You have sinned deeply; but you have, I know, been taught about the sacred books of the Jews, and have you not read there of a guilty king, an adulterer and murderer, who yet prayed “Oh, pardon mine iniquity, for it is great”? And has no Jewish teacher read you the promise of God by His prophet, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool”?’

‘I have heard those words,’ said Poppæa. ‘They were quoted to me once by Helen, Queen of Adiabene, who is now living as a proselyte at Jerusalem; and I have been taught that there is but one God.’

‘Oh, pray to Him, then,’ said Pomponia, ‘for He is abundant in pardon.’

‘I know not how to pray,’ said the dying Empress; ‘pray for me.’

If Poppæa knew not, Pomponia knew well; for to her, as a Christian, prayer had become the habit, the attitude of her life. Poppæa had never before heard such words as those. She knew that when she died she would be made a goddess by the Senate, as her infant child had been; yet here by her bedside Pomponia was speaking of her as though she were any other woman, speaking of her deep sinfulness, and not making any difference between her case and that of the commonest slave-girl who might have lived an evil life. And all that she could do was to resign her soul, and suffer it to be borne along unresisting on that stream of prayer.

And yet she felt, even in her misery, some dim sense of consolation, some faint gleam of hope such as she had never felt before. She knew that death was near, and urged Pomponia not to leave her. Pomponia sat by the bedside, holding the weak hand, and doing every act of tenderness, and speaking words of consolation, until the sinful troubled life had ebbed away.

Such a mind as Nero’s had become was incapable of sorrow. He announced, indeed, that he was overwhelmed with grief, and he indulged in a certain amount of hysterical and theatric lamentation, which interfered in no way with his follies or his appetites. A funeral was decreed to Poppæa at the public expense, and Nero at the Rostra pronounced a eulogy--not on her virtues, for there were none on which he could speak, but on her beauty and high fortune, and because she had been the mother of a divine infant. By her own wish--learnt doubtless from the Jews--she was buried, and not burnt as was the Roman custom. Nero had so many spices burnt at her funeral that the learned doubted whether Arabia could furnish more in a single summer. But not one genuine tear was shed upon her grave.

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Chapter LX

THE DOOM OF VIRTUE

‘Each new morn New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds.’

SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth, iv. 3.

Nero went on, unchecked, from folly to folly, from crime to crime. One of his earliest objects was to secure another Empress. He paid his addresses to Antonia, the only surviving child of Claudius, the half-sister of Octavia and Britannicus. She spurned his odious offer of marriage, and paid the forfeit with her life. In adopting Nero the unhappy Claudius had caused the murder of all his race. The Emperor then married Statilia Messalina, wife of the consul Vestinus, whom he had already killed.

In reading the affairs of Rome at this period we seem to be suffering from nightmare. The whole of the sixteenth book of the ‘Annals’ of Tacitus is one tragedy of continuous murders. Whenever Nero wanted to terrify a noble Roman by the presage of death, he inflicted on him a public insult. The world understood what was meant when Caius Cassius, the great lawyer, whose speech about the slaves of Pedanius we have already recorded, was forbidden to attend the funeral of Poppæa. The real cause of Nero’s hatred was that he was a man of wealth, of ancient family, of moral dignity; but the charges brought against him were that he had a likeness of Cassius, the murderer of Cæsar, among the waxen masks of his ancestors, and that he had taken an interest in Lucius Silanus, a noble youth, the great-great-great-grandson of Augustus. The youth’s father, Marcus Silanus (the ‘golden sheep’ of Caligula), had already been poisoned by Agrippina, and his uncle been driven to suicide. It seemed a good opportunity to destroy the nephew also. He was attacked with false charges of magic, and was banished to Bari. Cassius, being an old man, was relegated to Sardinia, and Nero was content to wait for his death; but Silanus was young, and a centurion was sent to bid him open his veins. The youth refused to kill himself with the sheeplike docility of so many of his contemporaries. When the centurion ordered his soldiers to attack and slay him, he fought for his life with his unarmed hands, and was hewn down as though in battle.

At this point the historian Tacitus grew so sick and tired of his task in recording events so dismal, that he pauses to apologise to his reader, and to say a word for all these great nobles who, at the command of a Nero, committed suicide one after another so tamely. He begs the reader not to suspect his motives in detailing their slavish patience and pusillanimous acquiescence.[113] All that he can say is that it was destiny--it was the wrath of heaven against the crimes of Rome.

We pass over many a tragic scene in silence, but we cannot escape from this long death-agony of a Paganism which poisoned the world with its dying breath before its corpse was swept aside by Christianity. The wild beast who had dipped his foot in the blood of the saints, and made the tongue of his dogs red through the same, was now bathing in the noblest blood of Rome. The world was in a condition truly horrible, and there were all kinds of portents and physical disasters, as though Nature sympathised with the birth-throes of the coming age. There were earthquakes in divers places, shaking down city after city in Asia Minor, and volcanic phenomena, and irruptions of the sea, and rains of meteors as though the stars fell from heaven, and comets, and eclipses, and monstrous births--which all afflicted the guilty conscience of Paganism as signs of the anger of the gods at the degree of wickedness at which it had arrived. The year 65 marked by the many atrocities which we have narrated, was foul with storm and pestilence, which caused untold misery. A whirlwind swept over Campania, wrecking villas and orchards and harvests in its ruthless course, and leaving famine and destitution in its rear. A pestilence broke out with fearful malignity. It spared neither young nor old, neither rich nor poor, neither slave nor master. The houses were filled with corpses, the roads with funerals. Streets in the infected quarters became little more than dwellings of the dead. The dead among the poor were flung into common pits, whither their bearers had often to be flung after them; and while the wives and children of the rich sat wailing round the funeral pyres, they were often swept off by the same disease, and burnt in the same flames. Senators and knights fell victims to the plague no less than paupers; but their fate was less pitied, for it seemed less sad to pay the common debt of mortality than to perish by imperial cruelty. In that pestilence thirty thousand perished in Rome alone.

Nero was safe enough, for he could escape the infection in his distant delicious villas at Antium, or Baiæ, or Naples, or Subiaco, and could live in the midst of his dissolute enormities undisturbed. He was turning the world giddy with his senseless vanities, his Golden House, his prurient art, his insane ostentations, his statues and portraits a hundred and twenty feet high. Yet he had his own dread warnings that, though the sword of Heaven was not in haste to strike, it was not thrust back into the scabbard. There were hours when the voice of flattery was hushed perforce, when the incense of adulation grew sickening, when pleasure became loathsome, and when in the dark and silent hours the torturing mind shook its scourge over him. Not even at Subiaco was he safe from conspirators; he never knew what slave, what soldier, what minion might stab his heart or poison his wine. Of the society which had thronged that villa in his earlier days of empire, there was scarcely one whom he had not killed. Britannicus and Octavia, Seneca and Burrus, Lucan and Vestinus, even Petronius, had been in turns his victims; and poor, handsome Paris did not long escape. Pale faces, dyed with blood, looked in upon him from dim recesses, or started to meet him from the bushy garden-dells. Tigellinus was with him, and his new colleague in the Prætorian Præfectship, the big, brutal Nymphidius, a man of base origin, who boasted that he was a natural son of Caligula, but was probably the son of a gladiator. But these men had nothing wherewith to amuse him--no wit, no learning--nothing but the coarse satieties of adulation, debauchery, and blood. No poet, no artist, no great writer now graced the board which was polluted by parasites, and poisoners, and effeminate slaves. And to add to his secret misery and terror, one day, as he was feasting at Subiaco in such society, a storm came on, and rolled among the mountains with reverberating echoes; and, as though he were the sole mark for the thunderbolts of heaven, the lightning dashed out of his hand the golden goblet which he was lifting to his lips, and split the citron table at which he sat. He fell back screaming upon his couch, and for some time grovelled there--a heap of abject terror. But the cup of his iniquity had yet to overflow the brim, as this and every other warning was sent in vain.

Indeed, he sometimes imagined that he was elevated above the reach of all human destiny, and that the gods were weary of opposing his prosperity. When some of his precious effects had been lost in a shipwreck, he told his friends that the fishes would bring them back to him. For now an event happened which powerfully magnetised the imagination of the Romans, and elevated Nero to a splendour which Augustus might have envied. Tiridates, the Parthian, the descendant of the Arsacids, was journeying all the way to Rome, to receive from Nero’s hand as a vassal the crown of Armenia. Being a Magian, he would not pollute the sacredness of the sea, and therefore came all the way by land, and on horseback, only crossing the Hellespont. He was accompanied by his harem and family, and by three thousand horsemen. The journey occupied nine months, and when he reached Italy he did not stop at Rome, but went to Naples to visit Nero. The scene of the Parthian’s investment with the diadem of Armenia was the most magnificent which Rome had ever beheld. Armed cohorts were ranged through all the temples round the Forum. Nero sat on the Rostra, among the standards and ensigns of the army, robed in triumphal insignia. Tiridates, mounting the steps, knelt before him. Nero raised him by the right hand, and embraced him. The king then begged that he might receive a diadem from the Emperor, and his petition was repeated to the people by a Prætorian interpreter. Nero placed the diadem--a band of purple silk woven with pearls--upon the head of Tiridates, and he was conducted to the Theatre of Pompey. It had been redecorated for the occasion, and was so enriched with gilding that the day was known as ‘the gilded day.’ The purple awning over the theatre was richly broidered with a picture of Nero in the costume of Apollo, driving his chariot among the stars. On this occasion Nero sang and drove his chariot in public, and won the hearty contempt of the wily Parthian, who, struck with his weakness in comparison with the manly valour of his general, Corbulo, remarked to him that ‘in Corbulo he had a good slave.’

The sums which Nero lavished on the Parthian by way of largesse before his departure were almost incredible. It was believed that one motive for urging the visit had been the Emperor’s desire to be initiated into the secrets of necromancy by the Persian Magi, in order to appease the angry manes of his mother. Attempts were made, and it was whispered that human blood had not been lacking as one of the ingredients of the incantation. But the initiation was futile, and the Magians secretly averred that the failure was due to the unworthiness of the novice. The Armenian king vanished like a gorgeous cloud, leaving Nero more than ever in need of funds and more than ever reckless in the wicked means by which they might be amassed, though he dedicated a laurel wreath in the Capitol, and closed, as Augustus had done, the Temple of Janus.

But the time when the whole attention of the populace was absorbed in the pomp of this reception was purposely selected for the commission of further crimes. Nero had tried to obliterate on false charges the innocent Christians; he had swept away all the noblest of the aristocracy; he had banished or killed the philosophers; he now ventured to strike a blow at Pætus Thrasea and Barea Soranus, the two most honoured and virtuous of the Roman senators; and in doing so, as Tacitus says, to exterminate virtue itself.

The question arose whether Thrasea should defend himself, or treat the accusation with disdain, and die. The braver spirits longed to hear him speaking in the senate and rising above the sluggish acquiescence with which so many had obeyed the tyrant, and bled themselves to death in their private baths. His feebler friends advised him not to undergo the insults, the contumelious speeches, possibly even the personal violence, which might await him in that degraded assembly of the timid and the servile, in which even the good would be sure to be cowed into base concessions. His defence would assuredly be in vain, and it might involve the ruin of his wife, his family, and all whom he loved. The young tribune Rusticus Arulenus went so far as to promise that he would exercise his ancient tribunician privilege, and veto a decree of condemnation. But Thrasea decided to follow the ordinary course. He forbade the generous tribune to plunge himself into futile peril. His life and his career were over; those of Arulenus were only beginning. He decided to await the decision, and not to appear in his own defence. When his friends remonstrated, he quoted to them with a smile a line from the ‘Œdipus’ of Seneca--

‘Tacere liceat; nulla libertas minor A rege petitur.’

‘Let Nero,’ he said, ‘at least accord me the privilege of holding my tongue.’ We can only regret that he did not rise to an energy which might have startled the degenerate nobles from the pusillanimity which yielded everything in despair of striking a blow. Thrasea might, indeed, have been murdered in the Senate-house, but such a murder would have aroused a reaction and precipitated a beneficent revolution. Daring is contagious, and one dauntless spirit may flash nobleness into a host of slaves.

The Senate was summoned to meet next morning in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, and found the temple beset by two Prætorian cohorts, who, in insolent defiance of the law, did not hesitate to display to the assembling senators their menacing swords. The Emperor’s complaints were read by a quæstor. Without naming any one, he inveighed against senators who set a slothful and pernicious example by neglecting their legislative duties. Then Capito sprang to his feet, and used this charge like a fatal weapon. But though he was animated by personal hatred of Thrasea, the speech of the orator Marcellus Eprius was still more passionate and envenomed. With frowning brow, with threatening gestures, with his eyes, his face, his words blazing with fury, he charged Thrasea with encouraging the spirit of sedition by impotent disdain for his clear duties. But if the senate was terrified by this lucrosa et sanguinans eloquentia,[114] it was terrified still more by the crowd of soldiers and the gleam of arms. Thrasea was condemned to death; his son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus, was banished from Italy.

It was evening, and Thrasea was in his gardens among a throng of illustrious men and women. They were listening to his conversation with the Cynic Demetrius on the nature of the soul, when a messenger came to tell Thrasea of his condemnation. He urged all his friends to leave him immediately, and not to imperil themselves by association with one who had been condemned. In those days compassion was dangerous; the kindly bonds of human relationship had been snapped by fear.

He was only allowed an hour in which to die. His wife, Arria, wished to die with him. Her mother, the elder Arria, when her husband, Cæcina Pætus, had been condemned under Claudius, plunged a dagger into her own breast, and plucking it from the wound, put it into the hand of her husband with the words, ‘My Pætus, it does not hurt.’ The daughter would fain have emulated her mother. But Thrasea would not let her open her veins. He bade her to live for the sake of their child, Fannia. In the porch he met the quæstor, and seemed more cheerful at the thought that Helvidius had been spared than grieved that he himself had been condemned. ‘Nero may slay me,’ he said, ‘but destroy me he cannot. He can kill me, but he cannot make me do wrong.’

He took Helvidius and Demetrius with him into his chamber. The indomitable spirit of the latter was well adapted to confirm his resolution. Demetrius had reduced life to its simplest elements, and Seneca, who greatly admired him, said that he delighted to leave courtiers arrayed in purple and to talk with this half-clad philosopher, to whom nothing was lacking because he desired nothing. On one occasion, when Nero threatened Demetrius with death, he calmly replied, ‘You denounce death to me, and Nature denounces it to you.’

Thrasea sat down, and extended both arms to the physician. When his blood began to flow he sprinkled some of it on the ground, and exclaimed, as Seneca had done, ‘I pour a libation to Jupiter the Liberator.’ Then calling the quæstor nearer to him, he said, ‘Look, young man. May Heaven avert the omen from you, but you are born to times in which it is well to fortify your mind by examples of constancy.’

They are his last recorded words. His funeral was humble. His pyre burned silently in the gardens of his deserted house, and when they had gathered his ashes his wife and daughter had yet to endure the anguish of parting with Helvidius. The hours of their heart-breaking sorrow were insulted by shouts of rapture with which the people greeted the Parthian Tiridates and the murderer of their beloved.

During the condemnation of Thrasea and Helvidius the Temple of Venus Genetrix had been the scene of a tragedy still more pathetic--of a tragedy perhaps the most pathetic ever witnessed in that assembly of woe. Barea Soranus, like Thrasea, was a Stoic. He had been the Proconsul of Asia, and was charged with the double crime of friendship for Rubellius Plautius and of having administered his province rather with a view to his own glory than for the public good. This was an allusion to his honourable conduct in having supported the people of Pergamus in their opposition to the greedy robbery of their statues by Acratus, the freedman of Nero. These were old charges, but to them was added the new and deadly one that his daughter, Servilia, had practised arts of sorcery and given money to the diviners of horoscopes.

The hapless Servilia was little more than a girl, yet she was practically a widow. Her husband, Annius Pollio, had been driven into exile, as an accomplice in the Pisonian conspiracy, though no evidence had been brought against him. The poor young widow--she was not yet twenty years old--was falling sick with the intensity of her anxiety for the father whom she tenderly loved. She had merely consulted the Chaldeans, in the anguish of her heart and the inexperience of her youth, to know whether Nero would be placable, and Soranus be able to refute the charges brought against him, or, at any rate, to escape with his life. The impostors, after accepting large sums and exhausting her resources, had basely betrayed her.

On opposite sides of the tribunal where Nero sat between the two consuls stood the hapless prisoners--the father grey with age, the young daughter not even venturing to lift up her eyes to his face, because in her rash affection she had increased his perils.

The accuser was a knight named Ostorius Sabinus. ‘Did you not,’ he asked the trembling girl, ‘sacrifice the revenues of your dower, did you not even sell the necklace off your neck, to get funds for your magic incantations?’

Servilia prostrated herself upon the ground, and for some time could find no voice to speak; then rising, and embracing the altar of Venus Genetrix, ‘I invoked,’ she exclaimed, ‘no infernal deities; I uttered no prayers of imprecation. The sole object of my ill-omened supplications was that thou, O Cæsar, that ye, O senators, might preserve to me this the best of fathers. I gave the Chaldeans my gems, my robes, the adornment of my matronly dignity; I would have given them, had they demanded it, my blood, my life. Let them look to it; their very existence and the nature of their arts were hitherto unknown to me. I never mentioned the name of the Emperor, except among the deities. And of all that I did my father knew nothing. If what I have done be a crime, I have sinned alone.’

‘Senators!’ exclaimed her father, Soranus, ‘let her be at once acquitted. She is free from all the charges urged against me. She did not accompany me to my province; she was too young to have known Rubellius Plautus; she was in no way implicated in the accusations against her husband. Her sole error has been her filial affection. Separate her case from mine. She is still in early youth. Let one victim suffice you. I am prepared to undergo whatever fate you inflict upon me, but spare my child!’

At those tender words he opened his arms, and his daughter sprang to his embrace, but the lictors lowered their cruel fasces, and interposed between them.

Then the witnesses were called, and a murmur of contempt and indignation broke out even among those abject senators when Publius Egnatius Celer stepped out first among them. The lip of Soranus curled in strong disdain, and he muttered the one word ‘Traitor!’ For Egnatius was a professed Stoic; he was a client of Soranus; he had been his teacher in philosophy; he was old, and Soranus young; he had received from his hands unnumbered kindnesses; he had himself encouraged Servilia to consult the astrologers. He wore the dress of a philosopher; he had trained his features to assume the aspect of Stoic dignity. But on this day he tore the mask off his own face, and revealed himself as what he was--a lecherous, treacherous, avaricious, hypocritic villain, who, having concealed his leprous character under the guise of honour, did not hesitate for a moment to sell his friend for money in the hour of calamity, and thereby dishonoured his grey hairs, and earned for himself the execration of all time.[115] The wretch lived on in deserved and general infamy. In better days he was accused by Musonius Rufus and himself condemned. But to Soranus and Servilia were meted out such justice as could alone be expected from such judges. The only mercy extended to them was the permission to choose their mode of death.

Such was the state of things in the days of Nero. The aristocracy were like men who live in an unknown land, glancing on every side at the slightest sound. Seneca, who had lived through that reign of terror, most truly depicts it. His sole remedy is stubborn resignation. Even abstinence from action requires prudence, for you may be condemned for what you do not do. Above all must men shun the Court, ‘that sad prison of slaves.’ But, after every precaution, no one could be safe, and therefore, Stoic-fashion, men must accustom themselves to regard all calamities as matters of indifference. ‘Above all, is not suicide always possible?’ Seneca asks; ‘and is not that the best antidote to tyranny? The path of escape is open everywhere. Do you see this precipice? It is the descent to Liberty! Do you see this sea, this well, this river? Liberty lies hidden in their depths! Do you see this little barren, distorted tree? Liberty hangs from its branches!’[116] The historian is reminded of the picture of Pascal. ‘Imagine a number of men in chains, all condemned to death, some of whom have their throats cut daily in sight of the rest, while the survivors see in their fate their own condition, and gaze one on another with sorrow, and without hope.’

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Chapter L

Chapter LI

Chapter LII

Chapter LIII

Chapter LIV

Chapter LV

Chapter LVI

Chapter LVII

Chapter LVIII

Chapter LIX

Chapter LX