Chapter LXI…

Chapter LXI

BEFORE THE LION

Καὶ ἐῤῥύσθην ἐκ στόματος λέοντος.

S. Paul. ad Tim. β. iv. 17.

When Onesimus had succeeded in rescuing Nereus from the pitchy tunic on the dreadful-glorious night of the Church’s martyrdom, the two made their way through the darkness to Aricia, which they reached at the earliest dawn. Old Dromo welcomed them, and Junia received her father with transports of love and gratitude. Onesimus hung modestly back during their meeting, but when the girl had ceased to weep on her father’s neck, she turned to his deliverer, and thanked him from her heart as one to whose courage and devotion she owed his preservation from that death of agony.

During that day they arranged their plans. In the little farm and vineyard of Pudens there was ample room for free labour, and it was settled that Nereus and Junia should stay there for the present, Nereus working in the vineyard, and Junia helping in the care of the flocks and fowls, and in the management of the household. Among those groves, in that remote and humble homestead, they were safe in their obscurity, and there they could abide until some other opportunity offered, or happier times came round.

Onesimus thought it his duty to return to the Apostle, to whose service he had devoted his life. The generosity of Octavia had left him with sufficient funds for his simple needs, and he prepared to make his way to Crete, where he expected to find St. Paul. But before he started he asked Nereus to sanction his marriage with Junia. Both of them were baptised Christians, and Onesimus had now sufficiently proved the sincerity of his faith, and the depth of his repentance for former errors.

‘I am grateful to thee, youth,’ said the old man, ‘and I know that thou art a brand plucked from the burning. But the coming of the Lord draweth nigh, and the sky is red and lowering, and Antichrist is striving to destroy the Church of God. Is it a time to marry and give in marriage? Is it not rather a time for them who have wives to be as though they had none, and for the unmarried to abide as virgins because of the present necessity?’

‘I know it, my father,’ said Onesimus; ‘but thou mayst die, and Junia be left an orphan in these evil days. Let us be married, and she will have an earthly arm to defend her and toil for her. We will marry, and will separate to-day. I will seek the Apostle, and if it be God’s will He will make our way plain before our face.’

Nereus consented. At a little distance from Rome, in the loneliness of the Campagna, the fossors had already begun to construct the catacomb now known as that of St. Callistus, and there in a small subterranean chapel in one of those dim galleries, the Christians began to hold their evening or early morning assemblies. Thither after sunset Nereus, Onesimus, and Junia made their way. They found but a handful of Christians who had escaped the fury of the persecution, and though these were, in one sense, deeply discouraged by the shattering blow which had destroyed their Church, and almost heartbroken at the agonising loss of their loved brethren, in another sense they were full of hope and exalted courage, and uttered to one another their watchword Maranatha, with more intense conviction. And among them was Cletus, who had escaped as by miracle. His name had been denounced, but being young and active, he had succeeded in hiding himself and eluding research. He was now the humble bishop of the ruined community. He it was who joined the hands of Onesimus and Junia in the holy bond, and he it was who blessed the bread and wine of which the little band of brethren partook in humble communion. Marriage gladness, marriage festivities there were none. The Phrygian freedman and the Roman maiden pledged their faith to each other under the shadow of the Cross.

Before the dawn was red, Onesimus was making his way to Rhegium, whence he purposed to get to Messana, and so by ship to Lasæa on the stormy shores of Crete. On his arrival he found only Titus of Corinth, whom St. Paul had left in charge of the young and struggling Churches. He sailed in search of the Apostle, and his ship stopped for a day at Patmos, where he found the Beloved Disciple in his exile. The ascendency of St. John’s personality had overawed the inhabitants of that rocky islet, and he was suffered to spend his time in freedom. Onesimus sat with him under a grey olive tree, on the grassy summit of a rock, the highest point of the island, and discoursed with him for hours. The scene was lovely. The brilliant sapphire of the sea lay beneath them in unbroken calm, rippled here and there by the white wings of the beautiful seabirds. The crags glowed a deep rich red, except when they were covered with grass, on which the pink sea-thrift had already faded into white. On every side the sea-line was broken by the fantastic contour of isles and islets. Eastward on the Ionian shore, so rich in heroic and philosophic memories, they saw the historic summit of Mount Mycale, and northwards the island of Thera. A burning mountain, cast into the midst of the sea, and at that time in a crisis of violent eruption, it vomited, as though from the depths of the abyss, its volumes of turbid smoke which hung like a cloud at one spot of the far horizon.[117] It was here that St. John heard from Onesimus the scenes which had followed his providential deliverance from the boiling oil, the illumination of Nero’s gardens with living torches, the orgies of the wild beast from the sea of nations as he wallowed in the blood of the saints. His whole soul was already brooding on the awful manifesto in which he answered the fury of the world, and spoke of the impending destruction of the two great cities of antiquity--Jerusalem, the metropolis of God’s olden Temple; Rome, the metropolis of the dragon and the Antichrist. Here, too, he entrusted to Onesimus--in whose youth, prudence, and courage he was interested--some of the keys to that strange cryptogram of the Apocalypse, which, if it had been written otherwise than in symbols, might have involved the ruin of whole communities. Among other things he told him that, by the cabbalistic system of Gematria, which the Greeks called isopsephism, ‘Nero Cæsar’ in Hebrew letters gave that which he had called the number of the Beast, 666. It was necessary that such secrets should be kept with care, for in the hands of an informer they might lead to overwhelming disasters; yet Onesimus did not wholly throw into the Mæander the key to the secret; but in due time revealed enough to guide the guesses which Irenæus and others of the ancient Christian Fathers had heard through the martyr Polycarp.

From Patmos Onesimus sailed to Ephesus, but did not overtake the Apostle Paul till he had followed him to Nicopolis, in Epirus. After a restful winter there St. Paul went through Macedonia to Troas. There, in the hospitable house of Carpus, he was suddenly arrested at the instance of Alexander the coppersmith, who was animated by trade grudges, because that part of his work which was connected with small images of Diana of the Ephesians had suffered from Paul’s preaching. Paul was seized by night, and so suddenly that he had no time to take with him his few precious books and documents and his large cloak. He was hurried to Ephesus, and tried before the proconsul; but, knowing that there he was little likely to obtain justice, he again appealed to Cæsar. During his imprisonment at Ephesus he had been cheered by Onesiphorus, and by the son of his heart Timotheus, who had shared with him for so many years in the life of a despised and hunted missionary. They parted with streaming tears which Paul long remembered. With Onesimus as his attendant, and Luke, Demas, Tychicus, Trophimus, and Erastus as his fellow-helpers, the glorious prisoner set forth on his last journey. Trophimus fell ill at Miletus; Erastus stayed at Corinth, of which city he had been chamberlain. They went over the Diolkos to Lechæum, along the Gulf of Corinth, and across the Adriatic to Brundisium. Thence they made their dreary way to Rome. This time there were no rejoicing crowds of Christians to meet them at Appii Forum or the Three Taverns, at sight of whom he could thank God and take courage. He found the Church of Rome in its ashes. No one could visit him without peril; and indeed no Christian of rank was left at Rome. Clemens and his family shared the disgrace into which Vespasian had fallen, and were living at the Sabine farm. Pomponia, after her visit to Poppæa, had suffered a severe relapse, and had been moved to a distant villa in the Apennines. Every leader of the Christian Church except Cletus and Hermas had perished in the persecution. Pudens was in Britain with Caractacus and Claudia. In later days the devotion of Christians to their imprisoned brethren struck Pagans with curious amazement, but Paul himself discouraged visits which might so easily bring death to the visitors. He was left, therefore, in painful loneliness, except for the loving care of Luke and Onesimus. Of his companions, Demas had forsaken him, and the presence of others had been necessary in various Churches. He was imprisoned, as his brother Apostles had been, in the Tullianum, and it was difficult to find out where he was. The Ephesian Onesiphorus, who came to Rome for the purpose, cheered his heart by fearlessly seeking him, and, unashamed of his chain, refreshed him in this his seventh imprisonment with that sense of human sympathy which he most required. But this one gleam of light was speedily quenched, for Onesiphorus caught the prison fever, and died at Rome.

Nero himself presided at the first trial of the Apostle. The crime which the Emperor had committed against the Christians was so enormous that the recollection of it haunted him, and intensified his hatred. He would not lose the opportunity of condemning the greatest of the Christian leaders. Paul was conducted to the basilica in the Golden House. It was a hall of the utmost splendour. The floor was of mosaic, in which porphyry, and serpentine, and giallo antico blended their soft lustres in patterns of wonderful variety and grace. The pillars were of light-green cipollino, the walls were inlaid with pavonazzetto from the Apennines near Pisa, and their cornices of alabaster were sculptured with animals and dolphins, and winged figures. The Emperor sat in the centre of the apse, which was divided from the body of the hall by a balustrade of white marble. His gilded and ivory chair was elevated on an inlaid pavement, approached by steps of porphyry. Round him stood a group of Prætorians with their silver eagles and other military ensigns. The lictors with their axed fasces stood at the back of his chair, and near him on lower seats sat Tigellinus, Eprius Marcellus, Cossutianus Capito, and other informers who had recently been enriched with the spoils of the innocent. Not far from these were some of the leading Jews, and conspicuous among them were the High Priest Ishmael, the alabarch Tiberius Alexander the unworthy nephew of Philo, and the foxy features of that arch-impostor, the magician Simon.

The great prisoner was made to stand in front of the balustrade on the spot marked by a circle of giallo antico on the floor. His hands were fastened together with a long coupling chain. The two chief Ephesian accusers, Alexander the coppersmith, and Demetrius the silversmith, were animated with the keenest hatred. And Paul was left absolutely alone. Onesimus and Luke accompanied him to the entrance, but they were both ‘suspects,’ and were not permitted to enter. But there were Gentiles and soldiers who might have helped him had they chosen, and the Apostle would not have been human if he had not felt the bitterness of desertion. ‘At my first trial,’ he wrote to Timothy, ‘no man took his place at my side. All abandoned me. God forgive them!’ In all that city, where his previous bonds had made the Gospel known alike in the Palace and the camp; in that world, for which he had sacrificed his life in loftiest services, there was no patron to protect, no advocate to support him, no favourable witness to plead extenuation. But he felt and said that One more powerful than many legions stood by him--even the Lord whom he had served.

Nero was in his most savage mood, and Tigellinus as always, added fuel to his rage. He insulted Paul, he glared upon him, he roared at him, he attempted to browbeat him, with utter violation of every principle of justice. Paul was a man the very sight of whom naturally inspired Nero with ferocity. For Nero, whom all the world knew to be a robber, a poisoner, a murderer, a matricide--a sensualist, effeminate, degraded, and unutterably depraved--had become aware that these Christians lived lives of purity and holiness, the possibility of which he affected to deny. And his guilty splendour and luxurious misery were forced at last to blush and tremble before the irresistible weakness of that despised, ragged, fettered prisoner. For Paul did not in the least fear him, and Paul’s courage was so marvellous to those who were accustomed to the pusillanimity of senators, who went away and committed suicide if Nero did but frown at them, that the courtiers and soldiers turned their eyes from the purple of the world’s master to gaze upon the rags of this sick prisoner who stood there with his pale countenance, his stooping figure and thin sable-silvered hair, more dauntless in chains, and under the axe of doom, than the Emperor amid his guards.

The first trial turned on Ephesian accusations of riot and disorder, and Paul, producing the diploma of his franchise, stood on his rights as a Roman citizen. He demanded to answer for himself, and, in the manly speech which he made, the chained ambassador of Christ struck a feeling akin to terror into the heart of the deified autocrat of heathendom. He was able to prove by the written evidence of the Recorder of Ephesus, and of friendly Asiarchs, that the testimony of the metal-workers was false, and that he had ever behaved as a peaceable citizen. The calm dignity of his defence, and the perfect courtesy and fearlessness which he had shown in his desperate position, left a deep impression on the jurors. Eprius Marcellus tried to cow him with that Hercules-Furens style of oratory which had so often driven the blood from the cheeks of consulars and generals. But when Paul turned on him his quiet glance, Eprius Marcellus stopped short, stammered in the middle of a sentence, and ignominiously sat down, muttering something about ‘the evil eye.’

In spite of Nero’s scorn and anger, the jurors voted in accordance with their convictions. When the votes were counted in the urn there were a few C.s for Condemno dropped by Court sycophants, but most of the tablets were A. for Absolvo and N. L. for Non Liquet, ‘not proven.’ To the astonishment of all, this first offence ended in acquittal on the first capital charge, and ampliatio--the postponement of the trial--for the examination of the second count. The second count was that Paul was a Christian, and, as such, the adherent of an illegal religion. On this he knew that he could not escape; but of the result of the first trial he wrote to Timothy with heartfelt gratitude that ‘God had saved him out of the mouth of the lion.’

There was nothing to cheer his cold and rocky prison except the light within his soul, and that human tenderness which, when all others had deserted him, was still lavished upon him by Onesimus and Luke. The Evangelist did all that was in his power to keep alive in Rome the flickering flame which the violence of persecution had overwhelmed. In this way Onesimus could do but little. He regarded it as the present work of his life to console and tend the Apostle, and he devoted himself to this work with all the more thoroughness because, when he was able to visit Aricia, Junia impressed him with its necessity and sacredness. He had his reward; for day by day he himself advanced in righteousness and knowledge, as he listened to words which have helped forward the regeneration of the world.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Book III

* * * * *

‘ATROPOS OCCAT’

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter LXII

NERO IN GREECE

‘Hæc opera atque hæ sunt generosi Principis artes Gaudentis fœdo peregrina ad pulpita cantu Prostitui, Graiæque apium meruisse coronæ.’

JUV. Sat. viii. 224.

Nero grew weary of Rome. While he was there he could not wholly exclude the voice of the conscience of mankind which awoke echoes in his own. With art, and æsthetics, and the race-course, and the theatre, he tried to create around him the elements of a sham and shadowy world. It was a world filled with the ghosts of crime and weird with insensate projects and monstrous revellings. He had attempted everything, abused everything, polluted everything, and ‘the scoriac river of passion accursed,’ of which he drank so freely, did but consume and burn up his powers. He had become like a dead thing in a wilderness of dead capacities, inspired at once by ‘insatiable desires and incurable disgusts.’ While he played the god he sank lower than Christian eye can follow him, into the beast. With Domitian, Tiberius, Caligula, and Helagabalus--with Vitellius, Commodus, and Maximin--he was one of a group of Cæsars who have been set forth last on the stage of history, a spectacle to angels and to men to show that human nature can sink into ‘half beast and half devil’ when there are no restraints to save men from all that is most abject. They became, as St. Paul said, inventors of evil; not only doers of whatsoever things are vile, whatsoever things are infamous, whatsoever things are of ill report, but also delighters in those that do them.

But at Rome, even in his beloved theatre, Nero was not safe from insults. They scorched him as with the touch of flame, and yet were so impalpable that he could not avenge them unless he put a whole population to death. Opposite his Palace, or on the outer circus, were written, in chalk or coal, denunciations so stinging as to show that if blank walls are the paper of fools they may also be the avengers of tyrants. One of these pasquinades hailed him as the true descendant of Æneas, since Æneas ‘took off’ his father, Nero his mother. Another criticised the over-grown space of the Golden House, and bade the Quirites to emigrate to Veii, if the House did not forestall them by extending so far. Yet another reminded him that the Parthian could be an Apollo with his arrows no less than Nero with his harp.

He pretended indifference to these things, but he felt them, and longed to find a fresh scene for display. At Rome he considered that his musical talent, though he had exhibited it to the promiscuous populace, was yet a flower which blushed unseen. The astute and adulatory Greeks had sent him the crowns of all their citharœdic contests. He was delighted, and asked their delegates to supper. When they begged him to give them a specimen of his powers, they went into such ecstasies over his performance that he said the Greeks were the only connoisseurs who were worthy of his proficiency.

To Greece, therefore, he set forth with a retinue which would have sufficed for the conquest of India, only that they were more concerned with masks and robes and musical instruments than with arms. He was accompanied, too, by all his train of minions, as well as by an army of claqueurs. When he appeared at Naples he was so enchanted by the ‘Kentish fire’ of some Alexandrians who were present--a mode of applause which was new to him--that he took a number of these Egyptians into his service. He had also trained a band of youths of equestrian rank, and more than five thousand of the lustiest plebeians to act together in bands and learn certain modes of cheering, which were called ‘buzzings,’ ‘tiles,’ and ‘jars.’ They were mostly boys, and were arrayed in fine dresses, with their thick hair shining with perfumes, and with rings on their left hands.

With such accompaniments he might feel tolerably secure of victory, yet when he appeared at a contest he always felt or pretended a girlish timidity. The Emperor of Rome might be seen on the stage of Greek towns bending his knee before the mob, humbly adoring them with his hands, assuring the judges that he had done his little best, tremblingly solicitous to observe the slightest rules, and perspiring with anxiety if he made the smallest mistake. Besides this, he debased himself with all the pettiest intrigues of tenth-rate theatrical life. He defamed his competitors, or bribed them not to do their best, or cajoled them to cede the victory to him. When an Epirot, with a fine voice, refused to cede the prize unless Nero paid him ten talents, he was pushed against a column by Nero’s clique and stabbed to death. It required the power of the Emperor to secure the rewards of the comedian.

Without believing, or even alluding to, the deeds recorded of him by Dion Cassius, it is clear that his plunderings, and crimes, and secret orgies continued unabated. From the Thespians he stole the Cupid of Praxiteles in Pentelic marble; from the Pisatans of Olympia the statue of Ulysses among the Greek chiefs drawing lots to answer the challenge of Hector. Rich men were proscribed in consequence of secret delations, which often sprang from the greed of the detestable Calvia Crispinilla, who was now the keeper of the wardrobe of Sporus. They were struck down, unheard, and their possessions were divided. Rome had been left under the government of two ex-slaves, Helius and Polycletus, who were so rapacious that the people complained of being under two Neros instead of one.

Amid such crimes little was thought of the fate of Paris. The poor pantomime, whose beauty, grace, and skill had been the delight of Rome, had excited the jealousy of Nero because he could not teach him how to dance. Paris, like Aliturus, had been no better than a slave, and we cannot blame him too severely if, in such an age and such surroundings, he had been stained by the vices in the midst of which he lived, and his nature, not originally ignoble, had been

‘subdued To what it wrought in, like the dyer’s hand.’

But his death, like that of Roscius, ‘eclipsed the gaiety of nations,’ and gave one warning more--had it been needed--to Aliturus, that the friendship of tyrants means death.

But the worst of these Grecian enormities--many of which cannot be narrated--involved the acme of treachery and ingratitude. No man had shed a purer lustre over the age of Nero than the brave and honest Corbulo. His life had been devoted to the service of the Empire. To him had been due those splendid victories which kept the Parthians in check, and induced Tiridates to put the colophon on Nero’s glory by coming to receive at his hands before the Roman people the diadem of Armenia. Well might the Arsacid tell Nero that in Corbulo he had a good slave. The great victorious general had spent his life in foreign service. He had never come near the Court; had received no civil honours; had never returned to enjoy a triumph or an ovation. He had been content to keep himself away from those scenes of gilded slavery and miserable splendour, and perhaps anticipated the sole reward which tyrants can give to true greatness. Now, however, that Nero was in Greece, he wrote to Corbulo a letter of almost filial reverence, and invited him to come and receive proofs of his gratitude. To refuse would have been tantamount to rebellion, and Corbulo had always been stainlessly loyal to his worthless master. But good men invariably have their slanderers, and one of his officers, Arrius Varus, had been whispering suspicions about him into the Emperor’s ear. He was not granted so much as an audience. No sooner had he landed at Cenchreæ than Nero sent him the command to die. Corbulo wasted no words on execration or complaint. For a moment, perhaps, it flashed across him that he would have been wiser to listen to the voice of Rome and of the East, which had invited him to be their liberator. But it was too late to repent of the fault of putting trust in a monster. He drew his sword and stabbed himself with the single word ‘Deserved!’[118]

We cannot wonder that Nero did not visit Sparta, because every tradition of Sparta would have cried shame on his histrionic effeminacy. He did not visit Athens, because Athens did not deign to invite him, and because he shrank from eliciting a keenness of wit which had not spared the bloodstained Sylla. But his chief reason for avoiding ‘the Eye of Greece’ was because he dreaded the Temple of the Furies, who had avenged the less guilty and more expiable matricide of Orestes. Nor did he dare to visit Eleusis, because the voice of the herald forbade the profane to be initiated into its mysteries. He did not even venture to present himself to the hierophants of the little mysteries of Agra on the banks of the Ilissus. Visits opened to the humblest, and mysteries revealed to the simplest of the pure, were barred to him.

And before his journey was over, amid his sham triumphs, he began to be disturbed by disquieting rumours.

Judæa was in a state of violent revolt, and the presence of an able general was urgently needed. Nero therefore appointed Vespasian to the command. The old general was expiating in seclusion and obscurity the crime of having snored while Nero sang. One day an Imperial messenger was announced at his humble home. His blood ran cold, for he made sure that the soldier brought him an order to die. Instead of that he brought a nomination to the government of Judæa and the command of the army. To these high offices Nero appointed him because a man of valour and military ability was wanted. Nero overlooked what he called his want of taste because, though eminent as a soldier, he was a man of such humble name and origin that he could not possibly be regarded as dangerous. But the revolt of the Jews, though it was a serious matter, was far less alarming than the other news which now reached Nero.

Helius wrote to say that affairs in the city urgently required his presence. ‘You summon me back,’ he wrote in reply; ‘your wish ought rather to be that I should return worthy of Nero.’ But the menace of disaster was too grave to admit of its being neglected for a verbal pomposity, and Helius hurried to Corinth in person to rouse the Emperor from his insensate frivolity. The weather was so stormy that his enemies fondly hoped for his shipwreck if he sailed. Delay, however, was impossible. His day of doom was close at hand.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter LXIII

MUTTERING THUNDER

Αἰεὶ τὸ μὲν ζῇ, τὸ δὲ μεθίσταται κακόν, τὸ δ’ ἐκπέφηνεν αὖθιν ἐξ ἀρχῆς νέον.

EURIPIDES.

The insistency of Helius, and the alarming reports which reached Nero from all quarters, roused him at last from his intoxication of frivolous vanity and compelled him to cut short the ‘ignoble masquerade with which he had soiled Greece.’ But he would not reveal the least consciousness of alarm, and, indeed, in the madness of the moment, he did not realise it. What did it matter if he was deposed? ‘All the world,’ he used to say, ‘supports art,’ and he could easily gain his living as a favourite harpist or singer on the public stage. The glory of the actor, won by his own talents, should be more dazzling than the diadem of the Emperor, which was but the heritage of his race!

He first entered Naples, because there he had made his first stage appearance. He entered it as a hieronices, riding in a chariot drawn by four milk-white steeds, through a breach made in the walls. He made the same magnificent entry into Antium, dear to him as the place of his birth, and into Alba, the city where the Temple of Jupiter Latiaris was venerated by the entire Latin race. But he reserved for Rome the fullest magnificence of a triumph heretofore undreamed of, and such as might well cause every true Roman to blush for shame. He degraded to his ignoble purpose the chariot in which Augustus had triumphed after the battle of Actium. His robe was of purple; over it flowed a chlamys gleaming with golden stars; on his brow he wore the olive wreath of the Olympic victors; in his right hand he carried the laurel crown of Pythia. Seated in the chariot by his side was no brave soldier or noble statesman, but Diodorus the harpist! Before him went a long procession of heralds, each carrying some garland of victory, with tablets on which were inscribed the names of those whom he had conquered, and the songs or tragedies in which he had gained the prize. Thousands of the trained applauders whom he called Augustiani, followed his chariot proclaiming themselves the soldiers and comrades of his successes. An arch of the Circus Maximus had been broken down for him, and through it he made his way along the Velabrum and the Forum, not to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, or to that of Mars the Avenger, but to the Palace and the temple of his patron Apollo. The Senate had gone forth in festal robes to meet and greet him. As the champing steeds tossed their white manes and bore him slowly along, every door and window and roof and lattice was crowded with spectators, and the air was rent with shouts of ‘Hail, Olympic, hail, Pythic victor! Hail, sole periodonices![119] Augustus, Augustus! Hail, Nero-Hercules! Nero-Apollo! Hail, sacred voice! Happy are they who hear it!’ In street after street victims were immolated as he passed; showers of fragrant saffron were sprinkled down; the air was rich with the perfume of incense burning on hundreds of altars; birds and little ornaments, and jewels and flowers were scattered over him. It rained roses from the balconies full of matrons and maidens. Of his eighteen hundred and eight crowns he arranged the choicest in his own bedchamber and around his bed. The rest he sent in masses to adorn the great Egyptian obelisk which Augustus had reared to be the goal of the Circus Maximus.

Such men as the consuls of the year--the dull poet Silius Italicus and the orator Trachalus--might estimate highly the successes of a comedian, but the indignant shade of Thrasea might have rejoiced in its Elysian fields to have been spared the sight of such a triumph!

But so far from being ashamed, Nero henceforth made his celestial voice his chief concern. As it was too precious to be wasted in addressing crass Prætorians, he contented himself with sending messages to them, or having his addresses read aloud in his presence. What he had to say to the Senate was similarly read by one of the consuls. An attendant whom he called a phonascus stood constantly at his side to warn him to be careful of his throat, and to keep a handkerchief before his mouth. Whoever extolled his wretched voice was his friend; whoever praised it insufficiently was his enemy.

It is part of the subtle irony of history that the zenith of apparent prosperity is often the culminating moment of misfortune, and the scene of most splendid exaltation is that in which the fingers of a man’s hand steal forth and write on the palace-wall the flashing messages of doom. The triumph of the sole periodonices whom the world had ever seen was the last hour of his sham glory. The patience of God and man was exhausted, and ‘down rushed the thunderbolt.’

Romans might be too deeply abased to avenge the degradation of their name by the latest of those triumphs which seemed to cover with ridiculous parody the three hundred which had preceded it. But there was yet a Gaul brave enough to arouse the Empire from its fatal apathy.

His name was Julius Vindex, and he was the Proprætor of Gaul. He was rich, and he was a senator, as his father had been before him, for Claudius had granted this distinction to the descendant of the ancient kings of Aquitania. Nero envied his wealth, but Vindex, in order to make the greedy parasites of the Court think that he would soon die and leave them his possessions, drank cumin-water and made himself artificially pale. In Gaul he received constant news of Nero’s villanies both paltry and heinous, and his soul burned within him. He sounded the legionaries to discover whether they were as much ashamed and weary as himself of the tyranny of a comedian and a monster. He found them ripe for rebellion. He had no personal objects. He knew that a Gaul could hardly be Emperor, and he secretly offered the Empire to Galba. On March 16, A.D. 68, he gave, a little too prematurely, the signal of revolt. Nero had gone to Naples to refresh himself and to rest his precious voice, and there he received the news of the insurrection on March 19, the anniversary of the murder of his mother.

The idiotic frivolity with which he acted upon such serious intelligence astonished even his courtiers. He only laughed, and pretended to rejoice at the opportunity which would thus be afforded him of spoiling the wealthiest of the provinces. He went into the gymnasium, and watched with affected transport the contests of the athletes. At supper still more perilous tidings reached him, but he contented himself with saying, ‘Woe to the rebels!’ Meanwhile the walls of Rome were scrawled over with satirical inscriptions. Yet for eight days he took no step whatever, answered no letters, gave no orders, attempted to get over the peril by calmly ignoring it. His long impunity had made him a fatalist. Had not Britain been lost and recovered? Had not Armenia been lost and recovered? Whatever happened, was he not promised an Eastern kingdom, or could he not support himself by his voice and lyre?

A few days later came an edict of Vindex, in which he spoke of Nero as Ahenobarbus, which angered Nero as much as it angered Henry VII. to be described by Richard III. as ‘one Henry Tidder or Tudor.’ Vindex also described Nero as a wretched twangler on the harp. Now indeed he was furious. To call him a wretched twangler! Did any of his friends know of a better harpist than himself? Was not such a criticism a proof of ignorance and bad taste? Let the Senate rouse itself to avenge him! He would come in person, but that he felt a certain weakness in his throat.

Messenger after messenger came spurring to Naples, and Nero was compelled to hurry back in alarm to Rome. Vindex was by this time at the head of a hundred thousand men, yet Nero quite recovered his spirits when, on his road to Rome, he saw the statue of a Gaulish soldier subdued and dragged by the hair by a Roman knight. At the sight of it he leapt up for joy, and adored heaven. When he reached Rome, instead of summoning an assembly of the Senate and the people to meet him, he only invited a few leading men to the Palace, and after a brief consultation, spent the afternoon in showing them new kinds of hydraulic organs. ‘I intend to display them all on the stage,’ he said--with the affected afterthought ‘if Vindex will let me.’

When Galba first received the secret overtures of Vindex he temporised. He had only preserved his life under various tyrants by consummate care, and by affecting a policy of submission and indifference. Vindex implored him to constitute himself ‘the leader and avenger of the human race,’ but he took no step until he discovered that Nero had sent secret orders that he was to be murdered, and found that he had only escaped very narrowly and by the merest accident. Besides, as his officer T. Vinius reminded him, he had hesitated in his allegiance, and to hesitate was to be lost. He must either assume the purple or prepare to die.

The fresh intelligence that Galba and the two provinces of Spain had also revolted, struck Nero with panic. He swooned away, and remained for some time speechless and motionless. On recovering his senses he tore his robe, and beat his head, with the cry, ‘I am ruined!’ His nurse tried to console him with the remark that other Princes had suffered similar calamities. ‘Nay,’ he answered, ‘my fate is more unheard of than that of all others, for I lose the Empire while yet I live.’ Some steps were suggested to him. He recalled some troops from Illyria, and put Petronius Turpilianus at the head of such forces as he could secure. He set a price on the head of Vindex, and Vindex replied with the ‘sublime gasconade,’ ‘Nero promises ten million sesterces to any one who will bring him my head. I promise my head to any one who will bring me his.’ But scarcely a single plan occurred to Nero which was not puerile; not one measure which was not monstrous. He would execute the provincial governors, and appoint new ones. He would send round to the islands and kill all the exiles, for they might join the revolters. He would order a general massacre of all the Gauls in Rome, for they might favour their countrymen. He would give up the Gallic provinces to be plundered by the soldiers. He would invite the whole Senate to a banquet, and poison them. He deposed the two consuls, appointed himself sole consul, and as he left the banquet, leaning on the shoulders of his intimates, he declared that he would present himself before the legions unarmed and weeping; and, when he had melted their hearts by his tears, he would sing strains of victory to the rejoicing soldiers--which he must immediately compose. Above this ‘lugubrious buffoonery’ he could not rise!

His other preparations to meet the crisis--such as they were--bore the same stamp of infructuous folly. They were all tainted with vanity, imbecility, and corruption. In choosing vehicles for his expedition, his chief care was about those which were necessary for his stage properties. The women who were to accompany him had their hair cut short to make them look like Amazons, and were armed with axes and targets. In raising money he was very fastidious that the silver should be freshly minted and the gold fine. Many flatly refused to contribute, exclaiming that he ought to get back the sums with which the informers had been gorged to repletion. He was made daily to feel that his power was gone. When he summoned the city tribes to renew their oath of allegiance, and to enrol themselves as soldiers, the result was such a failure that he had to order each household to furnish a proportionate number of slaves. Among these he would only enrol the most approved, not even excepting stewards and secretaries.

But he had to submit to the agony of daily insults. The people were suffering from famine prices, and the arrival of an Alexandrian corn-vessel was announced. This always gave an occasion for rejoicing, but when it turned out that the vessel was only laden with a cargo of Nile sand to sprinkle over the arena, there was an outburst of rage and contumely. Scoffs at his chariot-racing and singing were heard everywhere. Burghers pretended to get up quarrels with their slaves at night, and then shouted Vindex! Vindex! as though they were merely appealing to the police. Nor was this all. He was tormented with dreams and portents of every description, which made his days and nights hideous. He dreamt that he was steering a ship, and that some one wrenched the helm out of his hand; that his murdered wife Octavia dragged him into the nethermost abyss; that he was covered over with a multitude of winged ants. There was a stateliness and tragic sense of condemnation in another of his dreams, in which the ideal statues of the nations at Pompey’s theatre sprang to life, surrounded him, and blocked his path. It was rumoured that on the first day of the year, the Lares had fallen down in the middle of a sacrifice, and that the great gates of the mausoleum of his family had opened spontaneously, while a voice came from their awful recesses which summoned him by name. When a solemn rite was to be performed at the Capitol, the keys were nowhere to be found. When his speech against Vindex was pronounced in the Senate, and he said that ‘criminals should soon meet the end they had deserved,’ the senators had joined in an ill-omened shout of approval. It was noticed, too, that the last tragedy which he had chanted in public was that of ‘Œdipus in Exile,’ and that the last verse which he had spoken was--

‘Wife, Mother, Father, join to bid me die.’

If, on receiving the news of the revolt of Vindex, he had put himself, like a true Roman Emperor, at the head of his legions, the terrible prestige of a Cæsar, the remembered failure of previous conspiracies, and the disunion of his enemies, might have secured his triumph. For the German legions of Verginius Rufus disdained to follow the initiative of the Gauls. Their own general refused the Empire, and declared for Galba; but an unhappy and accidental collision between the jealous cohorts led to a battle in which twenty thousand Gauls were left dead upon the field. Vindex, in despair, stabbed himself with his own sword. Galba, in scarcely less despair, meditated suicide at Clunia, hearing that the soldiers of Verginius were anything but favourable to his claims. If but one pulse of true blood of his brave patrician ancestors had stirred in the veins of Nero, if he could have shown but one momentary flash of their spirit, he would have been gloriously saved. But his abuse of passion, his disgraced manhood, his polluted mind, his enervated frame, stamped upon him the curse of nullity, and the infamous throng of contaminated courtiers who formed his band of intimates were as empty and effeminate as himself. No strength was left among them to evoke the ghost of a manly sentiment in that sty of transformed humanity in which they had long voluntarily wallowed. No heart was left them to do, or dare, or even nobly to die.

And so Nero, while sitting at dinner, received fresh letters, telling him that his sluggishness and ineptitude had alienated from him the last semblance of allegiance among the legions; Otho had declared against him in Lusitania; Clodius Macer, in Africa; Vespasian, more or less covertly, in Syria. The bitterness of death was come, if it was not passed. In petulant passion he tore the letters to pieces. Then, like a spoilt boy in a rage, he seized from the table two crystal cups, of priceless value, of which he was specially fond, and which were embossed with scenes from Homer, and dashed them to shivers on the marble floor.

More wild and wicked follies suggested themselves to his diseased and whirling brain. Why should he not again set fire to the city, and prevent all attempts to extinguish the flames, by sending to the vivaria of the amphitheatre, and letting loose all the wild beasts among the people? What a scene it would be! Lions, and tigers, and bears, and panthers, growling, leaping, roaring, amid the streets of a city bursting everywhere into conflagration, and--while themselves wild with terror--striking fresh terror into a screaming populace! Incapable of consecutive thought, he had not even considered what would come of this. Suffice it that it would be a magnificent excitement, a thrilling and supreme sensation! He did not repent of this design; he was not appalled by the stupendous and selfish wickedness; he was only deterred by the impossibility of carrying it out. It may be said that such schemes betray the madman; but Nero’s brain was undisturbed by any madness except that which consists in, and is the Nemesis of, a soul eaten away by conceit, selfishness, and lust. Caligula, it has been truly said, would, in modern days, have found his way to Bedlam; but Nero to Tyburn. His hour was come. He sent his most trusted freedman to Ostia to prepare the fleet. He sounded the tribunes and centurions of the Prætorian guard to see if they would share his flight. Some of them made excuses; some flatly refused; one of them even dared to quote to him the line: ‘Is it so very difficult to die?’ As for his Præfects--Tigellinus, whom he had laden with wealth and honours; Nymphidius, the son of a slave-woman-- creatures who had crawled and sunned themselves in the noon of his prosperity, they shamelessly and without hesitation betrayed and abandoned him. The poisonous sunlight of his favour had bred no creature nobler than adders. What should he do? Should he array himself in his tragic robe and present himself as a suppliant before the Parthians, or before Galba, moving them to tears by his histrionic skill? But how could he get so far in safety? No; he would clothe himself in black garments, would go to the Forum, and there would weep before the Rostra, imploring pardon for the past, and begging the people--if only he succeeded in moving their minds--at least to allow him to be Præfect of Egypt in place of Tiberius Alexander! He even wrote the oration which he intended to deliver on the occasion, and it was found in his writing-desk after his death. His one dread was that, if he so much as ventured outside the gates of the Golden House, he would be torn to pieces before he could make his way to the Forum. He postponed the decision, and, summoning Locusta, obtained from her a poison which he placed in a golden box. Then he passed over to his favourite retreat in the Servilian gardens, and slept as well as he could his last wretched sleep on earth.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter LXIV

AT THE THREE FOUNTAINS

‘For out of prison he cometh to reign.’--ECCL. iv. 14.

‘Lieblich wie der Iris Farbenfeuer Auf der Donnerwolke duft’gem Thau Schlimmert durch der Wehmuth düstern Schleier Hier der Ruhe heitres Blau.’--SCHILLER.

After his first defence, the Apostle Paul had lived on in his narrow prison, indomitably cheerful though death stood almost visibly beside him. Himself undaunted, he strove to kindle the same faith and courage in those whom he loved. He had heard that Timothy was sad and despondent, and had not got over the grief of being separated from him. The Apostle had a deep human yearning to see once again the dear companion of his earlier conflicts. He wrote to him the beautiful, pathetic letter which contains for us his last words. He exhorted him to strenuous cheerfulness, and urged him to face the shame of the Gospel at Rome, and to come and share his sufferings. ‘Come, my child’--such was the burden of his message--‘come before winter; come quickly; come, or it will be too late.’ And when he comes let him send to Carpus at Troas for the large cloak which Paul had left at his house in the hurry and tumult of his arrest, and the books, especially the parchments. It is often cold in his prison, and that old ‘dreadnought,’ which he had woven with his own hands out of the black goat’s-hair of his native province, old as it was, and often whitened with the dust of the long Roman roads, and drenched in the water-torrents of the Taurus, and stained with the brine of Adria, would yet be a comfort to him as he sat on the rocky floor. And the papyrus books and the parchments--few and worn as they were--would help to while away the monotonous hours, and were very dear to him. With some of them he had been familiar ever since he was a happy boy in the dear old Tarsian home. So when Timothy comes to shed the last rays of life’s sunshine on Paul’s prison, let him bring the old cloak and the books--poor inventory of a saint’s possessions after unequalled labours for mankind! And let him, if possible, bring Mark the Evangelist with him; for Peter, with whom Mark had travelled, had now sealed his testimony by martyrdom, and Mark’s knowledge of Latin might be serviceable, and his personal tendence would be very dear. The immediate danger of arrest would not be great, for the rage of the informers had now been glutted to repletion, and the State and the Emperor had more than enough to occupy their thoughts. Pudens and Claudia had written to him with all affection from their British home, and had sent to minister to his necessities. He gives to Timothy the greetings which they had sent supposing him to be at Rome. Linus had also sent greetings, in a letter dictated from his bed of death. As for himself, he was more than ready to die. He had finished his course; he had kept the faith; henceforth there was laid up for him the crown of righteousness. Thinking, perhaps, how Pætus Thrasea and Seneca had sprinkled their blood as a libation to Jupiter the Liberator, he wrote the striking words, ‘I am being already poured out in libation, and the time of my setting sail is close at hand.’ Was he heavy at the thought? Not so. He quotes a fragment of a fine early Christian hymn which had consoled many a martyrdom:--

‘If we died, we shall also live with Him; If we endure, we shall also reign with Him; If we deny Him, He will deny us. If we are faithless, He abideth faithful. He is not able to deny Himself.’

And thus the old man’s soul was joyful in the Lord.

Did Mark, did Timothy come to him

‘Before the white sail of his soul had rounded The misty cape, the promontory Death’?

Mark was at Alexandria, and Timothy did not see him. The Lycaonian hastened to Rome the moment he had received Paul’s letter, but he came too late--came to be himself imprisoned, though happily only for a time. The Apostle was not mistaken in saying that his death was imminent. During Nero’s absence in Greece he had been summoned before the two wretched freedmen, Helius and Polycletus, on the second ground of his indictment--that he was a Christian, and therefore the preacher of a forbidden religion. That cause needed no trial. The accused not only confessed, but gloried in the accusation. Defence, therefore, was superfluous, since no apology for Christianity could alter the now established law that its practice was prohibited on pain of death. He would have been put to death at once, but Nero in a letter from Greece had expressed some wish to see him, and to ask him some further questions about the Christians before he attached his sign manual to the order of execution.

The truth was that Nero was half mad with anxiety, and as all magic incantations had failed to give him the least inkling of the future, he desired to learn something from the Christians. Among the slaves in the Palace who had been denounced as Christians by the informers, Herodion only had been spared, not only because of his age and blameless fidelity, but also because, in a household where the buzz of incessant gossip made it impossible to keep anything secret, it had been generally rumoured that he possessed the gift of prophecy. Nero therefore summoned Herodion into his presence. But Herodion refused to speak, and Nero, in a transport of fury, unsheathed his dagger, and held it over the poor old slave with his uplifted hand. But Herodion’s countenance did not blench, and he said with perfect calmness--

‘O Cæsar, thou canst not kill me if thou wilt.’

‘How? canst not?’ said the Emperor, stooping to pick up the dagger, which had dropped from his astonished grasp. ‘Canst not? One step, one thrust, and thou art a dead man.’

‘Canst not,’ said Herodion, with unmoved serenity. ‘I shall die, indeed, but it is not thus, nor by thy hand, that I shall die.’

‘Lead him off to death,’ said Nero. ‘These fanatics are inexplicable.’

But his yearning to divine the future was only intensified, and Simon Magus persuaded him that he might learn it from the imprisoned Apostle, whom he represented as a powerful sorcerer.

Once more, therefore, the Apostle stood face to face with the Emperor, on one of the troubled tumultuous days which followed his hasty return from Naples, after he had received the news of the revolt of Vindex. It was an interview, not a judicial audience. The Emperor saw him in private, with no one about him except a few trusted freedmen, and one favourite slave, named Patroclus. Several amulets lay scattered round him to avert magic and the evil eye. For form’s sake he first asked the Apostle about the crimes with which Christians were charged, and heard once more the proofs of their righteousness, loyalty, and holiness. Then he offered Paul his freedom and pardon if he would reveal to him the future. Onesimus, who had been allowed to attend the Apostle, and who stood at the far end of the apartment among a group of slaves, used to say afterwards that if the Apostle would only have spoken a word of hope, or even some ambiguous promise which might be interpreted in almost any way, the chains would have been struck off his hands. But he answered that the secrets of the future were in the hands of God alone, and that he had no commission to reveal them. Nero was scanning his features with intense anxiety, and as the Apostle fixed on him his earnest, undaunted, pitying gaze, the Emperor--more than ever convinced that he could prophesy the unknown--told all the slaves except Phaon and Patroclus to withdraw. But Paul, weak with long imprisonment, and scarcely able to stand, begged that he might support his weary frame on the shoulder of Onesimus. Otherwise they were alone. The Emperor, who had no dignity at that hour of calamity, appealed to his prisoner. ‘They tell me,’ he said, ‘that thy God, or thy Chrestus, does enable thee to foretell events to come. I am in danger. The legions are revolting against me on all sides. The astrologers have promised me that I shall be King of Jerusalem. All is uncertain. See, I appeal to thee. I, the Emperor, ask thee, the doomed and wretched Jew, to tell me what will happen. Will Vindex conquer? Will Galba conquer? Will the guards be faithful? Shall I be murdered? Answer me these questions, and I will spare thy life, and send thee away with rich rewards.’

‘I answer,’ said the Apostle, ‘as a Prophet of the East answered a king before. If Nero should give me his house full of silver and gold, yet cannot I go beyond the word of the Lord; and the Lord has not bidden me to speak to thee. And what were wealth, and what were all the Empire to me? Thinkest thou, O Emperor, that I fear death? To us Christians to die is to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better; and Christ hath conquered death.’

‘Wilt thou not even tell me whether I shall be killed? I adjure thee by thy Christ, or thy Iao, or whatever thou holdest most sacred, tell me!’

The Emperor was trembling and weeping.

Another might have scorned his unmanliness, or rejoiced with malignant triumph over the disgrace of the enemy of all the good. But Paul knew too much of human weakness to indulge in scorn. He felt for him a sincere, a trembling, a yearning pity. He uplifted his eyes to heaven, paused for a moment, during which the Emperor’s eager and almost imploring gaze was fixed upon his face, and then solemnly replied--

‘Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live.’

‘Tell me more,’ said Nero passionately.

‘I may not tell thee more. Only,’ he continued, raising his chained hand, ‘I say to thee, repent! Repent of thy life of crime and infamy! Repent of thy many murders--the murder of thy brother, the murder of thy mother, of--’

‘Accursed Jew, darest thou revile me?’ said Nero, leaping up from his gilded chair, his face burning with fury.

The Apostle remained unmoved. Onesimus told afterwards that he had not felt the tremor of a single muscle as the storm of the Emperor’s rage burst over him. Nero stood amazed--his wrath stilled before so majestic an indifference.

‘Tell me more,’ he said again, in a voice of entreaty.

‘Think, rather,’ said the Apostle, ‘that thy hour of judgment is nigh at hand--yea, it standeth at the door. The blood of the innocent, slain by thee, cries against thee from the ground. I pity thee--Paul the prisoner, Paul the aged, pities thee, and he will pray for thee if haply the thoughts of thy heart, and the shames of thy wickedness, may be forgiven.’

‘Dismiss this man,’ whispered Phaon to the Emperor, impatiently. ‘He is a Jew, evidently half insane with dreamings in prison. Were it otherwise, I would here and now chastise his insolence.’

‘Nay,’ said the boy Patroclus, in a voice of deep emotion. ‘Rather listen to him. O Nero, I will confess to thee that I have talked to Acte; I have talked to Christian slaves--once my fellow-slaves--in thy Palace and the household of Narcissus, and I know that the gods--or that God, if (as they say) there be but one God--is with them. Dismiss Paulus, I entreat thee; set him free. He tells the truth.’ And with these words the young cupbearer flung himself on his knees with a gesture of appeal.[120]

Nero had been startled--almost moved--by the solemn tones and inspired aspect of the Apostle; but the appeal of Patroclus and his mention of Acte produced a different effect from what the youth had intended. The Emperor was jealous that such potent influences should have been at work in his own Palace; that in spite of his persecution of the Saints, in spite of his having made Christianity an illegal religion, those who had been so near to his own person as Acte and Patroclus should reject his divinity, and own Jesus as their king.

‘Thou art bewitched,’ he said to Patroclus, rudely pushing the boy aside.

And, unhappily, at that moment Gaditanian strains, accompanied by the words of a gay song, reached his ear from an adjoining room in which some of his light companions and favourites were sitting. The sound awoke all his heartless and incurable frivolity. Bursting into a forced laugh, he said, ‘I see there is no more to be got out of this Jew. Take him hence,’ he said to the Prætorian in attendance, ‘and see that he be led to death as soon as the day shall dawn.’

‘He is a Roman citizen,’ said the centurion.

‘Yes,’ said the Emperor. ‘He has been tried and condemned. I will here countersign the condemnation which orders him to be beheaded.’

* * * * *

The Apostle spent that last night on earth in sleep as sweet as that of an innocent child. He rose in the morning smiling and refreshed, and Onesimus was early at the prison to help him in all his last arrangements and preparations. As the soldiers would allow Onesimus, and no one else, to accompany him, he bade an affecting farewell to Luke, who had been for so long a time his beloved physician, and started on his way.

His doom was secret and sudden. At that early morning hour the centurion and soldiers were not likely to be troubled with many spectators. One or two humble Christians from the poorest haunts of the Trastevere would fain have followed, but the soldiers, who were in savage humour from the perilous uncertainty of the times, suffered none of them to attach themselves to the little procession. Hence the death of the Apostle was so lonely and obscure that scarcely a breath of tradition survived to commemorate it to posterity. An ordinary faith might have been overwhelmed by the apparent utterness of failure which had crowned that life of unparalleled exertions for the cause of Christ and for the good of man. Deserted, abandoned, a pauper, a prisoner--the founder, indeed, of Churches, but of Churches some of which were already the prey of Judaisers and of alien heretics, and were cold to him--in the capital of the world, where he seemed to be but an insignificant atom, and where Jew and Pagan were united in irreconcilable hostility to the faith which he had preached--deserted by all them of Asia--no one with him but the poor emancipated slave--yet he was in no sense disillusioned, nor did his faith fail. It did not trouble him that the curtain was about to fall in darkness on one of the noblest and greatest of all human lives. That life seemed to him but as the life of a great sinner whom God had forgiven, whom Christ had saved. The winter of his trials was past, the eternal spring of the resurrection was breathing through the air its heavenly perfume.

Along the Appian road they passed, through the gate of Rome which still--nigh upon two thousand years afterwards--is called by his name. They passed the pyramid of Gaius Cestius, with all its statues. Only one incident occurred on his journey. Just as they were passing the pyramid of Cestius, a lady, young and deeply veiled, met the mournful procession, and stopped the centurion in command of the soldiers. ‘I am Plautilla,’ she said, ‘the daughter of Flavius Sabinus, the Præfect of the City, the relative of Aulus Plautius and Pomponia Græcina. Suffer me for a moment to speak to your prisoner.’

Impressed by the great names which she had mentioned, the centurion bade the soldiers stand aside for a moment, and Plautilla, kneeling on the grass, asked with tears for the Apostle’s blessing. He laid his chained hand on her head and blessed her, and she gave him from her kinswoman Pomponia a handkerchief with which to bind his eyes as he knelt for the blow of the executioner. He gratefully accepted it, and said, ‘I know the name of Pomponia. It is ever pronounced with the blessings of the saints of God.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘O Apostle, and my brother, the nephew of Vespasian, who is in command in Judæa--he too is a Christian.’

The Apostle upraised in thankfulness his fettered hands. ‘The night,’ he said, ‘is far spent. The day is at hand.’

The centurion beckoned to the soldiers to proceed, and Plautilla stood gazing after them under the shadow of the pyramid.

About three miles from the walls of Rome, on a green and level space amid low, undulating hills, was the spot then known as Aquæ Salviæ, and now as Tre Fontane. To this spot they marched in the early morning--the chained prisoner with the soldiers round him, and the centurion walking at their head. Onesimus followed close behind. The martyr scarcely spoke. His face was lit with an inward rapture; his lips moved incessantly in silent prayer. He had no fear. Lovely to him as the colours of the rainbow on the thundercloud gleamed the azure of his home. They reached the green level under the trees. The prisoner was bidden to kneel down. Onesimus helped him to take off his upper garment, received his last few words of prayer and encouragement and blessing, and the gentle pressure of his hand in farewell. He bound over the Apostle’s eyes Plautilla’s handkerchief, and then turned away, hiding his face in his hands, weeping as if his heart would break. Then he heard the word of command given. For one instant he looked up--in that instant the sword flashed, and the life of the greatest of the Apostles was shorn away.

The work of the soldiers was over. They had no further concern in the matter, except that the centurion had to certify to Nero that the execution had been carried out. They left the mortal body of the martyr on the green turf. When they were gone, the Christians, whom they had repelled but who had followed them afar off, came to weep over it and to bury it. Onesimus took his part in digging the nameless grave. But the site of it was kept in loving remembrance until in due time there rose over that spot the ‘trophy’ which existed, as we are told by Gaius the presbyter, as far back as the second century, where now stands in all the splendour of its many-coloured marbles the great church of San Paolo fuori le Mura.

And, as they sorrowfully left the scene of martyrdom, the grey light which had touched the eastern clouds began to flush into the rosy dawn, and the sun rose on the world’s new day.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter LXV

IN THE CLUTCH OF NEMESIS

‘I’ll find him out,

* * * * *

Or drag him by the curls to a foul death, Cursed as his life.’

MILTON, Comus.

‘And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of the holy...: this also is vanity.’--Eccles. viii. 10.

It was on the evening of June 8 that Nymphidius Sabinus betrayed Nero, and, by the forged promise of an enormous donative, which was never paid, induced the Prætorians to embrace the cause of Galba. A worthless master makes worthless slaves. This man, whom Nero had lifted out of the dust as a reward for his crimes, sold his bad benefactor without a blush.

Nero heard the grim news before he retired to rest in the evening, and he was well aware that the morrow must decide his fate. At midnight he leapt from his troubled couch, and from that moment there began for him once more the long slow agony of an irremediably shameful death. The first thing he discovered was that all the soldiers who guarded the Palace, and whose barracks were in the Excubitorium, had deserted their posts. In utter despair, he sent for advice to those whom he deemed to be his friends. As he received from them no word of answer, he went to their houses, one by one, in the dead of night, with a few attendants. Inconceivably dreary was that walk through the dark streets, which, as he passed by the silent palaces, seemed to be haunted by the ghosts of the many whom he had slain. But he found every door closed against him. Not a single response was made to his appeals. Almost mad with misery, he returned to his splendid chamber in the Golden House, only to find that during his brief absence the attendants and slaves had fled, after plundering it of all its magnificence, even to the embroidered purple coverlets and the golden box which contained Locusta’s poison. Recalling the memory of his murdered mother, he sought everywhere for the amulet--the bracelet containing the serpent’s skin found near his cradle--which Agrippina had clasped upon his boyish arm. But he had once carelessly flung it away, in a fit of petulance, and now it could nowhere be seen. Then he sought for Spicillus, the mirmillo, to stab him; but neither he nor any one else could be found to fulfil the office. ‘So,’ he said, with one of the small smart epigrams which showed throughout these last scenes that the spirit of melodrama had not deserted him--’so, it seems, I have neither a friend nor an enemy!’

Upon this he set out to fling himself into the Tiber, and the back door by which he went led through a part of the circus which had witnessed his disgraceful triumphs. But when he was half way, his courage failed him, and he told his attendants that he wanted some quiet hiding-place in which to collect his thoughts. His freedman Phaon, one of the very few who, to their credit, remained true to him in the hour of his utmost shame, offered him his suburban villa. It was at the fourth milestone from the city, between the Salarian and Nomentan roads. It lay on a more remote path called the Patinarian Way, on the other side of the Anio. On that hot night of June Nero had gone out only in sandals and a tunic; so he threw over his shoulders an old washed-out cloak, covered his head with the hood, held up a handkerchief to conceal his face, and mounted the first sorry horse which could be obtained. Thus, in beggar’s guise, he left the gorgeous scene of his manifold iniquities. None were found to accompany him except his secretary Epaphroditus, his freedman Phaon, and Sporus his unhappy favourite. They started together before the first gleam of that most miserable day. The stories that, as he rode, he felt the shock of an earthquake, and saw a flash of lightning which gleamed on the ghostly faces of his victims rising to menace him from the abyss, are doubtless coloured by the agitation of the witnesses. But on his way he had to pass through the Colline gate, and there he heard the shouts of his Prætorians cheering for Galba and cursing Nero. There were but few stirring on the roads at that early hour, but from one group which they passed they heard the remark, ‘These men are in pursuit of Nero.’ ‘Any news about Nero?’ asked another traveller. This was disturbing; but it was a far more serious incident when Nero’s horse swerved at the stench of an unburied corpse which lay by the roadside, and the handkerchief fell from his face. For at that moment a discharged Prætorian chanced to pass, who not only recognised but saluted the Emperor, rendering it too certain that the pursuers would soon be on his track.

By this time it was light. It was the anniversary of the murder of his wife, Octavia!

When the fugitives reached the path that led to Phaon’s property, they let their horses run loose among the trees and brambles, and made their way to the back of the villa by a track through a bed of reeds where the oozy sludge was sometimes so deep that they had to fling a cloak over it to prevent their sinking in the mire. There was obvious peril in taking refuge here. A great price was sure to be set on Nero’s head, and how could the freedman trust his rustic slaves with so perilous a secret? He therefore urged Nero to hide himself in the deep cave of a neighbouring sandpit till something fresh could be devised. But Nero refused. ‘What!’ he exclaimed tragically, ‘go alive into the bowels of the earth?’ The only other course was to make an opening in the back of the villa, through which he could creep secretly, unknown to the household. While this was being done, he complained of thirst. There was nothing for him but some stagnant water in a pool. He drank a little from his hand, with the remark, ‘This, then, is Nero’s choice drink!’ He sat down ruefully in his tattered cloak, which had been torn to shreds by the briers through which he had forced his way; and when the hole in the wall was large enough, crawled through it on all fours into the empty cell of one of Phaon’s slaves. There he flung himself down on the mean straw pallet of the slave, with nothing to cover him except its old dirty coverlet. Hungry and thirsty as he was, it was difficult to procure him any food without arousing suspicion. They could only get him some black bread, at which his stomach revolted, but he drank a mouthful or two of tepid water.

It became evident to them that all hope of escape or concealment was impossible. The fatal recognition of Nero by the Prætorian betrayed the course he had taken. The numberless mounted pursuers would be sure to find the four horses which they had let loose; nor would it be possible for him to conceal the fact of his presence from Phaon’s slaves. His three companions therefore urged him, time after time, to save himself by suicide from the nameless contumelies which awaited him. Even Sporus entreated him again and again to show himself a man. It was in vain! In that coward and perverted nature every spark of manliness was quenched. ‘It is not time yet,’ he said. ‘The destined hour has not arrived. How cruel you are to me!’

‘Cruel?’ said Epaphroditus, indignantly; ‘do not we--alone of all your thousands of slaves--risk our lives for your sake? Since you must die, were it not better to die like an Emperor than like a whipped hound?’

‘Well, then,’ whimpered Nero, ‘can’t you at least dig me a grave, one of you? See, I will lie down to show you the right length.’

They began to dig the grave, and he whined out, ‘Oh, what an artist to perish! What an artist to perish!’

‘The grave is ready,’ said Phaon.

‘But can’t you find some bits of marble to adorn it? Surely there must be some lying about.’

They saw through his pusillanimous delays, but managed to pick up a few fragments of common marble, while he still kept whimpering, ‘Only to think that such an artist as I am must perish!’

‘That is all the marble we can find,’ said Phaon.

‘Well, but you will have to burn my body,’ he said. ‘You must get some water to wash me, and some wood for the pyre.’

‘Nero, Nero,’ said Sporus to him again, ‘will you not die like a man?’

In the midst of these idle pretexts a runner came with a letter for Phaon. Nero snatched it out of his hand and read ‘that the Senate had pronounced him a public enemy, and decreed that he should be punished after the fashion of our ancestors.’

‘What punishment is that?’ he asked.

Is it possible that he did not know? He, who had so often heard it passed on others? he who, as men believed, had secretly wished that it should be inflicted on Antistius for libelling him? he who had suffered it to be pronounced against L. Vetus and the innocent Pollutia? Nevertheless Epaphroditus told him that it meant stripping him naked, thrusting his head into the opening of a forked gibbet, and then beating him to death with rods. Nero turned deadly pale. The thought of such agony and such outrage overwhelmed him. He plucked from their sheaths two daggers which he had brought with him, tried the edge of them, and then once more thrust them back with the threadbare tragic phrase, that ‘the destined hour had not yet come.’ Again the unhappy Sporus entreated him to remember that he was a man, a Roman, an Emperor.

‘There is time, boy,’ he said. ‘Sing my funeral song; raise a lamentation for me.’ And all the while he wept, and whimpered, ‘Such an artist! Such an artist to perish!’

Phaon and Epaphroditus rebuked his abject timidity.

‘Oh!’ he cried, ‘I cannot die. “Wife, father, mother, join to bid me die,” but I dare not. Will not one of you kill himself and show me how to die?’

They were amazed at such depths of abject selfishness, and, reading his condemnation in their faces, he groaned out, ‘Nero, Nero, this is infamy; come, rouse thyself; be a man!’

But how could the soul of this vicious, babyish, self-indulgent, overgrown, corrupted boy--this soul steeped through and through its every fibre with selfishness, vanity, and crime--how could it be thrilled with one virile impulse? The man within him was dead--only the cowardly animal survived.

The sound of horses’ hoofs was heard galloping along the rough road leading to the villa. It denoted the approach of horsemen who had been bidden at all hazards to seize him alive. Strange that even at such a moment he could not help being self-conscious and melodramatic.

‘“Thunder of swift-foot coursers smites my ears.”’[121]

he said, trembling--quoting a verse of Homer. But at last, when not one second was to be lost, he placed the dagger against his throat, and, seeing that he would be too much of a poltroon to inflict anything more than an ineffectual wound, Epaphroditus with one thrust drove it home.

Then in burst the centurion. Anxious to seize him alive, he cried, ‘Stay, stay, Nero! I have come to help you!’ and tried with his cloak to stanch the bleeding wound.

‘Too late,’ gasped the dying wretch.--‘Is this your fidelity?’

With these words he died, and the spectators were horror-stricken at the wild, staring look of his rigid eyes, which seemed to stand out of his head.

Fidelity! What fidelity had Nero himself shown to God, to human nature, to Rome, to his mother, his adoptive father, his wives, his brother, his tutors, his family, his friends, his slaves, his freedmen, his people, his own self? What more worthless life was ever disgraced by a more contemptible and abject death?

Forty-one princes and princesses of his race had perished since the beginning of the century, by the sword, by famine, or by poison; and the historian imagines the shades of those unhappy ones gathered round the miserable pallet on which--more miserably, more pusillanimously, more guiltily, more abjectly than any one of them--perished the last of a race whom heaven had been supposed to receive as gods, and whom earth rejected with disgust. And had their race ended in this manikin, in this cowardly and corrupted actor? ‘The first of the Cæsars,’ says the historian, ‘had married four times; the second thrice; the third twice; the fourth thrice again; the fifth six times; and lastly this sixth Cæsar thrice:--of these repeated unions a large number had borne offspring.’ Where were they all? Cut off for the most part by open murder, or secret suicide, or diseases mysterious and premature! And now the prophecy of the sibyl had been fulfilled--

‘Last of the Æneadæ shall reign--a matricide!’

How many of his fancied enemies, how many of the innocent, had he caused to be decapitated! How often had he allowed their heads to be the mockery of their enemies! How had he himself insulted the ghastly relics of Sulla and of Rubellius Plautus; and suffered his mother and his wife to insult the murdered remains of Lollia Paulina, and of the sad and innocent Octavia! His one dread was that his head should be similarly insulted; his one main entreaty to the companions of his flight had been that he should be burnt whole, and his head not be given to his enemies.

Fairer and kinder measure was dealt to him than he had dealt to others. Among those who hurried to the villa was Icelus, the powerful freedman of his rival Galba. Nero had thrown him into prison at the news of Galba’s revolt, but at Nero’s flight he had been set free. It was not the usual way with the Romans to make war with the dead, and Icelus gave permission that the body should be burnt. It was consumed in the white robe broidered with gold which he had worn at his ill-omened sacrifice on the first of January.

No hindrance was put in the way of his funeral. Two women who had nursed his infancy, and Acte, who had loved him in his youth, wept over his bier. No tear was shed besides. They laid his ashes in a porphyry sarcophagus, over which was raised an altar of the white marble of Luna, surrounded by a Thasian balustrade.

He was but thirty-one when he died; and he had crowded all that colossal criminality, all that mean rascality, all that insane degradation, extravagance, and lust, into a reign of fourteen years!

So great was the exultation over his fall of the people whom he had pampered, that the whole body of plebeians appeared in the streets wearing hats. A slave could only wear a hat after he had been manumitted, and the people wished to show that by his death they had been emancipated from slavery. Yet he and they had mutually corrupted each other, and the vicious populace had reacted on the vicious ruler. Nor was it long before those to whom vice was dear began to show their sympathy by adorning his tomb with spring and summer flowers. Every base and foul ruler who succeeded him--lascivious Otho, gluttonous Vitellius, savage Domitian, womanish Elagabalus, brutal Commodus--all who disgraced the name of Roman and of man--made him their ideal and their hero.

And since so very few had witnessed his death, the multitude in every land persisted in the belief that another body and not his had been burnt; that he had taken refuge among the Parthians; that he would return to take vengeance on his enemies. The fancy gilded the brief fortune and precipitated the miserable punishment of at least two impostors. Of these Perkin Warbecks and Lambert Simnels of antiquity, one was put to death in the reign of Otho, the other in the reign of Domitian; and for nearly three centuries the legend lingered on in the Christian Church that Nero was the wild beast, wounded to death, but whose deadly wound had been healed--the Antichrist who should return again.

And the people fancied that his restless, miserable ghost haunted for centuries the Collis Hortulorum, the Monte Pincio, where stood the monument of the Domitii; until in pity for their terrors it was exorcised in 1099 by Pope Pascal II., the superb successor of the humble Linus. The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo stands to this day as a witness of the changed fortunes of that Church which Nero well-nigh extinguished and exterminated when he made light more ghastly than the darkness by kindling those living torches in the gardens of the Mons Vaticanus. Over that desecrated spot, as I have said, now falls the shadow of the vast Christian basilica, and the obelisk of Heliopolis, which towered over Nero as he drove his chariot through lines of burning men, testifies by its triumphant inscriptions to the victory of the faith of Christ.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter LXVI

L’ENVOI

‘Many kings have sat down upon the ground, and one that was never thought of hath worn the crown.’--Ecclus. xi. 5.

‘All is best, though we oft doubt What the unsearchable dispose Of highest wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close.’

Samson Agonistes.

But little remains to be said; for, unless the writer has entirely failed of his purpose, the history of the preceding pages has told, and the fiction has illustrated, the truths which it was his object to set forth. We have seen something of what Paganism had become in the days of the Empire, and of what Christianity was in its life, and motives, and purposes. The contrast between the two gives us the secret why Christianity was destined to grow from that tiny grain of mustard-seed to a great tree, under whose shadow the nations of the world should rest.

But the reader may perhaps care to learn what was the future of those who played their little hour on the stage of life and have appeared in these pages. It is characteristic of that age of trouble and rebuke and blasphemy, in which the sun and the moon were darkened and the stars of heaven shaken, that many of the great and mighty and rich hardly looked for any other death than the steep declivities of murder and suicide. Heathendom had grown to a monster which, like the decrepit Saturn, devoured its own offspring. Those whom we ushered into the reader’s presence at the beginning of this book had nearly all been swept away by violent deaths before the period at which it closes. We have seen the murders of Claudius, of Agrippina, of Britannicus, of Octavia, in that Palace thronged with the ghosts of crime. We have stood by the dreary deathbed of the honest and manly Burrus, and by Corbulo when he fell on his own sword, and by Poppæa when she passed away in agony, her husband’s victim. We have seen the shameful end of Lucan and of Mela; the terrible disillusionment and suicides of Gallio and of Seneca. We know how Pætus Thrasea died, and how the great nobles--the Silani, and Sulla, and Rubellius Plautus, and Antistius Vetus, and Ostorius Scapula, and Piso, and that host of conspirators--met their doom. Vice, and the favour of the Emperor, proved no protection to such gay courtiers as Tullius Senecio and Cæcina Tuscus; nor genius and refined Epicureanism to Petronius Arbiter; nor beauty and talent to poor handsome Paris. The vicious as well as the virtuous were often mingled in indiscriminate ruin. Of the guests whom we saw assembled at the Villa Castor, and to whose conversation we have listened as they gathered round the citron tables of Nero and Otho, the majority met with a miserable doom. With the exception of the family of Seneca, the literary men escaped fairly well. Persius died young, and by a natural death. The elder Pliny, who was a successor of Anicetus in the office of Admiral at Misenum, perished of the scientific curiosity which led him to watch too closely from the Liburnian galleys of his fleet the great eruption of Vesuvius, which destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii in A.D. 79. Martial grew up to disgrace himself by shameful epigrams, to practise the arts of a fawning parasite to ‘his lord and his god,’ the vile Domitian, and at last to marry a rich wife, and retire to Spain with the memories of talents wasted, for the most part, over things vain and vile.

The philosophers were scattered and banished. Musonius Rufus, whom Demetrius the Cynic saw at work as a common labourer on the Isthmus of Corinth, was recalled by Galba, and honoured by Vespasian. He had the satisfaction of bringing to justice the infamous Publius Egnatius Celer, who had caused the murder of Barea Soranus and his daughter. Cornutus, who carried to the grave his sorrow for his bright young pupil, Persius, was banished in the last year of Nero’s reign, and we hear of him no more. Demetrius the Cynic was banished by Vespasian. The Emperor passed him after his condemnation, and Demetrius, deigning neither to rise nor salute him, broke into open abuse; but Vespasian was not cruel, and took no further revenge than to utter the one word ‘Dog!’

The freedmen, too, were swept away one after another, Narcissus was poisoned by the order of Agrippina; Pallas and Doryphorus by the order of Nero. Epaphroditus was put to death by Domitian for having helped Nero to drive into his own throat the fatal dagger-thrust. Sporus--miserable victim of an evil age--had urged Nero to show one touch of manliness, and dare to die. Not long afterwards he, too, died by his own hands, rather than submit to that degradation of appearing on the stage which Nero had so often done and so eagerly desired to do. Helius, Polycletus, Patrobius, and others, were condemned and put to death by Galba, after having been led through the streets in chains. Spicillus, the favourite gladiator of Nero, was tied to one of his statues and crushed to death by it; Locusta died a death of infamy amid intense and universal rejoicing.

The informers met, for the most part, the fate that they deserved. Under previous emperors they had been--it is the comparison used by Seneca--like dogs whom their patrons fed with human flesh.[122] They cut men’s throats with a whisper. A joke, a sarcasm, the babble of a drunkard, the confidential remark of private intercourse, the most casual and unpremeditated reflection--nay, even a careless gesture before the dumb image of the Emperor--might become, in their hands, an engine of destruction. They could earn one-fourth of the spoils by accusing a man either for something which he did, or for something which he did not do. Upon this evil gang of scoundrels, the worst curse of that day, Titus laid his heavy hand. He ordered the vilest of them to be beaten with rods in the Forum, to be dragged round the Amphitheatre, to be sold as slaves, to be deported to the rockiest and most desolate islands.

EPICTETUS, who had been sold as an infant from his cradle in Hierapolis, and whom we have heard talking to Titus and Britannicus in the days when he was the little slave of Epaphroditus, lived to bequeath to the world the legacy of thoughts purer and sweeter than any which we have received from classical antiquity, with the exception of those uttered by Marcus Aurelius, that ‘bright consummate flower’ of pagan morality. Those thoughts seem to absorb and to reflect the auroral glow of Christianity,[*19] and could never have been attained by a Pagan if Christianity had not been in the air. Epictetus was so poor that his sole possession was a small lamp--and even that was stolen from him! His virtue and political insignificance, his plain living and high thinking, did not save him from banishment. He retired to Nicopolis (where the Apostle Paul had spent his last winter), and there

‘taught Arrian, when Vespasian’s brutal son Cleared Rome of what most shamed him.’

And when he ended his peaceful life of obscurity and self-denial in extreme old age, he deserved the epitaph, ‘I, Epictetus, was a slave, and lame, and a pauper, and dear to the Immortals.’

And did vengeance suffer such wretches as Nymphidius Sabinus and TIGELLINUS to escape? After crimes so many and so heinous, did they come to a good end? The traitor Nymphidius, after a futile and impudent attempt to secure the Empire for himself, was murdered by his own Prætorians. He dragged down with him to destruction the fierce Cingonius Varro, who had written an oration which Nymphidius was to pronounce to the soldiers. Tigellinus, indeed, was strangely protected by Nero’s old and miserly successor when the clamour of the people demanded his life as an expiation for his crimes. He escaped by giving enormous bribes to Titus Vinius, Galba’s legate, and priceless gems to his daughter Crispina. But to him also as to all, ‘punishment was but another name for guilt, taken a little lower down the stream,’ and vengeance in due time fell upon him, and suffered him not to live. After a vain attempt to bribe his executioners, he committed suicide at Sinuessa amid a coarse and brutal orgy, which reads like a parody upon the death of Petronius Arbiter. It was a death exceptionally squalid, vile, and agonising--fit end for a traitor, a coward, a villain of the deepest dye.

As for the succeeding Emperors, the spasm of their brief elevation was marked by universal horrors--wars, and rumours of wars, and massacres, and civil conflicts; nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom, plagues and famines and earthquakes in divers places. There was, as Christ had warned His disciples, great tribulation, such as had not been since the beginning of the earth, no nor shall be. These things were the beginning of troubles. The epoch is so described on the sacred page, and the best comment on those Christian prophesies is furnished by the dreary summary of the greatest of pagan historians.

And amid all these calamities and this unbelief, as the lightning cometh from the east and shineth even to the west, the sign was seen in heaven of the Son of Man coming in power and great glory. Against the old dispensation and the old world the doom visibly went forth. The abomination of desolation--the desolating wing of Rome’s abominable eagle--was seen in the Holy Place. The marble floors of the Temple of Jerusalem swam in blood. Zealots laid their gory and brutal hands on the holiest things. Priests, gaunt with famine, were seen leaping madly into the flames kindled upon the altars. The gold which overlaid the cedarwork ran molten through the hissing stream of the carnage of its defenders, and the Holiest Place sank into heaps of ghastly ruin to have its site defiled with swinish offerings and pagan shrines. The Temple was doomed to annihilation, because it was the centre and type of an inferior and abrogated worship. And the same year which saw this visible abrogation of Judaism and all its pompous ineffectuality of ceremonies and sacrifices, saw also the great temple of the Capitoline Jupiter reduced to ashes in the fierce faction-fight between Sabinus, the elder brother of Vespasian, and the partisans of Vitellius. Thus, within a few months, the chief shrines of the Jew and the Pagan were polluted with massacre, and flung high into the air their flaming signals of the new faith which was to dominate the world. Their destruction was a beacon-light of the coming fulfilment of the old and awful prophecy, ‘I will overturn, overturn, overturn, saith the Lord, till He come whose right it is.’

The three shadowy Emperors who followed Nero passed away within a few months, like phantoms, in defeat and shame. GALBA--old, prosaic, unattractive, niggardly, with his feet so gouty that he could not wear a shoe, and his hands so gouty that he could not hold up a book--had disgusted Rome before six months were over, and was butchered in the streets. His body was left lying where it fell till a common soldier, returning from harvesting, flung down his corn, cut off Galba’s head, and, since there was no hair to hold it by, first hid it in his bosom, and then brought it to Otho with horrible indignities. OTHO, hurried to imperial dignity by his freedman and a score of soldiers, was Emperor for ninety-five days, and then was totally defeated by the German legions of Vitellius at the bloody battle of Bedriacum. It happened that one of the legionaries had brought evil tidings, and, being treated partly as a liar and partly as a coward who had fled from battle[*20] drew his sword, and, stabbing himself, fell dead at Otho’s feet. Otho shuddered and recoiled at the sight. ‘Men so brave, men so well-deserving,’ he exclaimed, ‘shall not be further imperilled on my account.’ He might still have held out; he might still have been victorious; but at the age of thirty-seven he had seen enough of life. He had drained to the dregs the cup of its unsatisfying pleasures; he had discounted its hopes and fears. He wrote some kindly letters; divided among his servants what he had at hand; pardoned some deserters; saw any one who wished to see him; and then, hiding a dagger under his pillow, closed the doors and fell fast asleep. He awoke at dawn, and with one blow drove the dagger into his heart. He felt his own total unfitness for Empire. Τί γάρ μοι καὶ μακροῖς αὐλοῖς; ‘What have I to do with long flutes?’ he was often heard to murmur to himself. Voluptuous, unheroic, this ‘sweet and impudent creature’ had, at one time, been more at home in the rites of the Bona Dea than among the banners of the legions. He was half inclined to fancy that he was one of those who are raised to power by a jest of fortune;--but he had been sobered a little by responsibility, and there was a touch of grace in the courage of his end.

His successor, VITELLIUS, the yet more infamous son of an infamous father, after a reign of seven months, chiefly noticeable for its drunkenness and voracity, was murdered in the streets with every expression of contumely. His body, pierced with multitudes of slight wounds, was first flung down the Gemonian steps, and then dragged through the streets by a hook, and flung into the Tiber.

The good plebeian, VESPASIAN, inaugurated a respite of simpler manners and better days, in which Rome and its society returned to decency and good sense. A man of robust commonplace and kindly instincts, he won the Romans by his honesty and rough wit. When the Consular Menstrius Florus corrected his pronunciation (as Kemble did that of George III.) and told him that he ought not to say plostra (wagons) but plaustra, he only resented the impertinence when he met him the next day by addressing him, not as Florus, but as Flaurus (φλαῦρος), or ‘not worth much.’ When a youth came, reeking with perfume, to thank him for an appointment to the Prætorship, Vespasian, with a frown of disgust, said, ‘I would have preferred that you smelt of garlic,’ and cancelled the dandy’s office. Tolerant and fearless, he resented no injuries, and ruled for ten years without making an enemy. Too sensible, and with a conscience too much at ease, for superstitious fears, when a comet was pointed out to him as portentous, he said--alluding to the Roman expression ‘a hairy star’--that, ‘it could not refer to a bald person like himself, but to the King of the Parthians, who had long hair!’ When he felt the first touch of mortal illness, he observed, with a jest at the folly of senatorial apotheosis, ‘I think I am becoming a god.’ He was charged, indeed, with avarice, and the story was told that, when informed of a colossal statue which was to be reared to him at the public expense, he held out the hollow of his hand as though for the money, and said, ‘The pedestal is ready.’ But, if he was parsimonious, it was for the public good, and he returned from the proconsulate of Africa so poor that he had to mortgage all his possessions to his brother Sabinus. A thorough man of business, he was indifferent to parade and pomp. Napoleon I. was probably but half sincere when, on his return from the magnificences of his coronation, he flung his gorgeous robes into the corner, and said that ‘he had never spent so tedious a day in his life;’ but Vespasian was quite in earnest when, on the day of his great Judæan triumph, he found the procession so tardy and tedious that he called himself ‘an old fool who had been deservedly punished for his silly vanity.’

And what shall we say of TITUS, who has played a considerable part in our earlier pages? A Marcus Aurelius he was not; nor did he knock at the door of truth so earnestly or sit at the feet of virtue so humbly as did that saintly heathen. Yet there was an infinite charm about him. He was a man of fine presence, of dignified yet winning demeanour, endowed with great personal strength and tenacious memory, eloquent, poetic, accomplished, a splendid rider, a fine swordsman, a patient and skilful general, a soldier of unflinching personal bravery. Josephus is constantly telling us of his firmness, his pity, his stern discipline, his splendid bravery. Again and again he exposed his person as freely as the commonest soldier in his ranks. Again and again he extricated himself from personal peril, and his legions from imminent defeat, with a strength which was unequalled, and a prowess which was contagious. At the siege of Jerusalem he constantly rode near the walls, and on one occasion shot down twelve of its defenders with twelve consecutive arrows. Amid all his heroic labours and anxious responsibilities he lost none of the fascination of his youth. When he left the Province to visit his father, the soldiers, who had already saluted him Emperor, demanded with supplications, and almost with threats, that he would either stay or take them with him. Unjustly suspected of a disloyal intention to found for himself an Eastern kingdom, he hurried to Rhegium, and thence to Puteoli with the utmost possible speed; and when he reached Rome, bursting into his father’s presence, as though to confute the calumny, he embraced him with the touching cry, ‘I have come, my father, I have come!’ He did not escape the sins and temptations of his youth, and his passionate love for Berenice, which she as passionately returned, involved him in discredit. But while he was still the support of his father’s throne, he gave proofs of his faithfulness and self-control, and if he had been guilty of the faults which scandal charges upon him, the change which came over him when he was summoned to the purple was greater than the traditional change of our own hero-king, Henry V. As an Emperor, no vice was visible in him, but many supreme virtues. Deeply as he was attached to Berenice, he dismissed her from the city because Rome condemned an amour which would have been held venial and almost innocent in a Nero or a Domitian. He became chaste and self-controlled, full of munificence, entirely free from avarice. Gracious and generous to all, he acted on the rule ‘that no one should leave the Emperor’s presence with a gloomy brow.’ His famous saying, ‘Friends, I have lost a day,’ was spoken when, at supper-time, he was unable to recall a favour conferred on any one since morning. He courted the goodwill of the people, but without base concessions. Desirous as Pontifex Maximus to keep his hands unstained by the blood of the innocent, he declared ‘that he would rather perish than destroy.’ Nothing was more touching than the forgiving lenity with which he tolerated the plots and hatred of his execrable brother, Domitian. Aware of his wicked designs, he only took him aside secretly, and begged him with tears to act as a brother should. A deep misgiving oppressed his soul. At the end of the games which he had displayed to the people, he wept abundantly, and, oppressed by evil omens, started for his Sabine farm, full of grief. Stricken down with fever before he reached his home, he drew back the curtains of his litter, and looking heavenwards, he murmured, ‘I do not deserve that my life should be thus cut short, nor have I done any deed to be repented of, except one.’ What that one sin was he did not reveal, and no one could conjecture. He died in the same homely villa as his father, and, though he had only reigned two years and three months, in that brief time he had earned an affection which expressed itself in a genuine outburst of eulogy and regret, and which won for him the title of ‘the darling of the human race.’ But how vain a thing is glory! On the Arch of Titus the hero is represented being borne heavenward by an eagle with outspread wings. Vain triumphs! Vain and profane apotheosis! Little did it avail him to have won the passionate affection of his subjects! There is something infinitely sad in his shortened days and his brief tenure of power. It is only too probable that he fell a victim to the machinations of his brother, and died by poison secretly administered. And Destiny-- let us say rather the will of God, of which he was the instrument-- forced him, against his own wish, to be the exterminator of the city and--had extermination been possible--of the nationality of the chosen people. To them the darling of the human race is Titus ha-Rashang, ‘Titus the Wicked.’ They fable how, when he boasted that he had escaped vengeance, after escaping from a storm at sea, God sent a tiny gnat, which crept up his nostril into his brain. On his brain it fed, and caused him, day and night excruciating agonies. Finding once that it ceased to gnaw for an instant on hearing the banging of an anvil, he had an anvil constantly banged with a huge hammer at his side. But the creature soon became accustomed to the sound! When Titus died, it was taken out of his brain, and found to be of the size of a bird, and to be furnished with a beak and claws of iron. Such is the torment which hatred devised for the best of the Twelve Cæsars, and the best but one or two of all the Emperors for three hundred years. But the sad truth is that, apart from such frenetic imaginations, the last years of the life of Titus were full of anxiety and disquietude, for which he did not find in a sounding philosophy the alleviation which he would have found abundantly in a humble faith.

With DOMITIAN we have happily been less concerned. How such a mixture of depravity and savageness, of falsity and ingratitude can have sprung from the virtuous union which also produced a Titus, is a mystery of atavism. But at last the dagger of Stephanus struck him down, and a better phase of the Empire was renewed. Rome gauged his character right when she nicknamed him ‘the bald Nero.’

Of the Jews whom we have introduced, ISHMAEL BEN PHABI vanishes into obscurity. He lives, however, in the energetic curse which the Talmud pronounces upon family after family of the priests of that epoch. He occurs in the line which denounces the violence of himself and his sons: ‘Woe to the family of Ishmael Ben Phabi! woe to their fists!... Their servants strike the people with their rods!’

JOSEPHUS became the devoted creature of the Flavian dynasty. By timely prophecies he managed to secure the favour of Vespasian and Titus, as he had won their admiration by his genius and courage. He played his difficult part with consummate astuteness, and secured his safety in spite of the execration of the Jews and the suspicion of the Romans. But what shall we say of a man who, in spite of his boasted patriotism, could, after being an eyewitness of the long, slow agony of his country’s dissolution, be a guest of the Romans during the games in which hundreds of his miserable fellow-countrymen perished in the amphitheatre?--of a man who could commemorate without a pang the unequalled splendour of the triumph at Rome, when Vespasian and Titus, robed in purple and silk and crowned with laurel, sat in their chariots amid rivers of splendid spoils, and Domitian rode a gallant war-horse by their side, and Simon Bar-Gioras, after cruel insults, was led aside at the foot of the Capitol to be strangled in the Tullian Vault? Judæa Captiva wept under her palm-tree, desolate, broken-hearted, with her hair about her ears, and the famous Arch of Triumph was built which still shows the golden candlestick, and table of shewbread, and vessels of incense--beneath which it is said that no Jew will walk, because even in a strange land they remember thee, O Zion! But the sleek priest and warrior who had been selected as one of the defenders of his country, accepted an assignment of land from devastated territories of his native country; inhabited a suite of rooms in Vespasian’s own house; and continued to live in the sunlight of court favour, not only under Titus, but also under Domitian. And then, not by martyrdom, not as a patriot, but as the pensioned favourite of those who had massacred his countrymen and destroyed the tombs and city of his fathers, he died, and went to his own place, leaving behind him, even in the light of his own falsified records, an ignoble and dishonoured name.

KING AGRIPPA II., after a considerable portion of his domains had been reduced to a desert, lived also in Rome, as a titular king, and died, at the age of seventy, in the reign of Trajan--the last prince of the House of Herod. Happy had it been for him if St. Paul had, not almost, but altogether persuaded him to be a Christian. He languished on, wealthy and despised, with Josephus as his bosom friend. It might have been said of him, in the language of the Prophet: ‘All the kings of the nations, all of them, sleep in glory, every one in his own house. But thou art cast away from thy sepulchre, like an abominable branch.... Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land, thou hast slain thy people.’

BERENICE, the widow of two kings, was no longer young when she won Vespasian by her splendid presents, and Titus by her Eastern beauty and fascination. But he listened to the voice of duty when he dismissed her from Rome, and when she returned he avoided seeing her. She, too, vanished into the darkness, and died we know not when.

ALITURUS, no longer the apostate Jew, but the humble Christian, found it, of course, impossible to play any longer the part of the favourite pantomime of the Roman stage. He loathed the thought of ever again wearing his motley before the grinning and degraded populace. He would fain have aided the struggling Church of Rome, but there was nothing that he could do; and the presence of one whose person was so well known would only imperil the gatherings of that handful of slaves and artisans in the catacombs. The Christians themselves advised him to leave the city, which he could not dissociate from his dead past. He sold his house in Rome, and his villa in the suburbs, and, leaving a large sum in the hands of Cletus to help his flock, he sailed for Palestine, receiving before he started the blessing of Paul the prisoner, and carrying with him letters of commendation from the Beloved Disciple to Simeon and others of the Desposyni, or ‘relations of the Lord.’ These letters neither revealed his real name, which he had changed to Amandus, nor his past history, which might have created an invincible prejudice; but certified that he had been converted to the faith, and was now a brother, faithful and beloved. He freely gave of his wealth to the destitute, and was of great service to a church pre-eminently poor.

And, remaining in Jerusalem, he was an eye-witness of all that horrid siege, in which a nation overwhelmed with unutterable calamities, intensified by their own unutterable guilt, sighed in vain to see one of the days of the Son of Man. Joining the moderate party, he did his little best to counteract the overweening tyranny of John of Giscala. He witnessed the slaughter committed by the Idumeans, when they had been invited into the city. He saw the insults heaped on the corpse of the murdered High Priest Hanan; and the martyrdom of Zechariah, the son of Baruch, in the middle of the Temple; and the High Priest Matthias murdered by Simon Bar-Gioras, after his three sons had been slain before his eyes. He heard the roar of internecine conflict, when three sections of fanatics fought furiously against each other. Day by day he was agonised by the inconceivable miseries of the starving and maddened people. He saw the granaries madly burnt in civil discords; the marble floor of the sanctuary wet with footsteps dipped in blood; the gore of worshippers slain by the hurtling engines of zealots, mingling with the blood of the sacrifices; the deserters sent back with their hands cut off, or ripped open to search for the gold which they had swallowed, or crucified outside the city-walls, till wood failed for the crosses, and crosses for the bodies; the streets and houses full only of the corpses of those whom famine had slain; the horrible disorders of rampant licentiousness, which were the expression of blasphemous despair. He saw Martha, the daughter of the wealthy Gamaliel, trying to pick grains for food from the ordure of the streets; he saw the miserable mother who, in the pangs of hunger, roasted and devoured her own child. He heard the incessant thunder of the battering-rams upon the walls, and the whizz of the dazzling stones hurled from the catapults, and the monotonous cry of the poor scourged maniac wandering about day and night with the wail: ‘A voice from the East, a voice from the West, a voice from the four winds! Woe, woe to Jerusalem, and to the people, and to the Holy House!’ He heard Josephus and Titus pleading with the frantic people, and the false prophets deluding them. He heard the crash of the falling cloister which buried six thousand men, women, and children under its ruins, and the roaring of the flames, and the groans of the wounded, and the shout of the victors, and the despairing yell of the defeated. He saw the priests tearing the gilded spikes from the Temple roof, and hurling them down upon the Romans. In spite of the strong efforts of Titus--under the urgent entreaties of Agrippa and Josephus--to spare the Temple, he saw a Roman soldier, as though inspired by some divine fury, snatch up a burning brand, and spring upon the back of a comrade, and hurl his torch through the golden window of one of the chambers which surrounded the Holiest Place; and then, when the flames burst out on every side, he saw the whole Temple hill assume the aspect of a great bellowing volcano stored with fire, while amid the upheaped corpses the blood, streaming in rivers from fresh wounds, hissed and bubbled as though it would almost have quenched the flames. He saw something of that awfully desperate struggle of madness and fury,

‘When through the cedarn courts, and gates of gold, The trampled ranks in miry carnage rolled. To save their Temple every hand essayed, And with cold fingers clutched the feeble blade; Through their torn veins reviving fury ran, And life’s last anger warmed the dying man.’

And how his life was preserved--famine-stricken, wounded, horrified, daily imperilled as he was in that circle of fire in which the scorpions of religious faction madly stung each other to death--he never knew. From April 10, A.D. 70, when Titus pitched his camp near Jerusalem, till July 17, when, for the first time, the perpetual sacrifice ceased, for lack of priests to offer it--and on till August 10, when the Holiest sank in flames, and the Roman soldiers adored their idolatrous ensigns in its blackened area--and onwards till September 8, when all resistance ended, Aliturus had scarcely known one day which was not full of terror and misery. In the final indiscriminate slaughter of the captured city he was selected as one of the seven hundred youths, conspicuous for size and beauty, who were destined to grace the triumph of Vespasian and Titus. But he sought an interview with Josephus and the astonished Titus, and when he revealed to them his identity[*21] and convinced them that his one desire had been to win the Jews to counsels of moderation, and to do good works among the miserable, he was set free, and large presents were given to him, and he was suffered to go whither he would.

He could not return to Jerusalem, for Jerusalem was no more, and on the Jews had fallen their own awful imprecation--‘His blood be on us and on our children!’ He went to Pella, whither the Church of Jerusalem had, so to speak, fled into the wilderness. With the Christians there he abode for some time, and then he visited St. John at Ephesus, and Onesimus at Hierapolis. The memories of his own country had been too striking and oppressive, and the brilliant favourite of the Roman populace died at Hierapolis, a beloved but obscure presbyter of its happy church.

The persecutions of the Christians continued intermittently for three centuries, and the rhythmic cry--the double antispastus, Chrīstĭānōs ād lĕōnēs--rang through the amphitheatre of many a pagan city. But the church grew and flourished and shone in the world like that Vision of the Apocalypse--a woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars upon her head. The Church of Rome rose from her ashes, and in many a seven-times-heated flame of affliction there stood beside her One like unto the Son of Man.

When LINUS died, Cletus succeeded him as the third ‘Pope’ of Rome-- although that title was not given to the humble presbyter-bishops of the struggling community for more than two centuries, and not formally adopted by them till about A.D. 400. Cletus was succeeded by Clement. Of the first thirty Popes it is said by Christian tradition that all but two were martyrs. The blood of those martyrs was the seed of the Church. That Church had been consumed to ashes, and, rising from her ashes, soared heavenwards, first waveringly, then steadily, at last with supreme dominion, ‘reflecting the sunlight from every glancing plume.’

HERMAS, having been made a freedman by Octavia, set up in trade, and married. But he was unfortunate. In one of the later persecutions under Domitian he was betrayed to the informers by his own sons. He escaped with his life; and in the reign of Nerva he, with other victims of the cruel Flavian Emperor, received lands in lieu of the goods of which he had been despoiled. He cultivated his little farm in peace, and lived to write the celebrated ‘Shepherd,’ which some have described as ‘a fusionless screed of dry morality,’ and some as a dull novel, but which may be called ‘the “Pilgrim’s Progress” of the Early Church.’ Simple as it is, it was so well suited to the days in which it was written that it was read in the churches, and almost attained the dignity of Scripture.

PUDENS and CLAUDIA made their permanent home in Britain. They found it a more congenial residence for Christians than bloodstained Rome, and by the beauty of their lives, as well as by their teaching, they escaped the hostility of the Druids, and founded a Church in their house, and in the city of Noviomagus, where they chiefly lived. They acquired a deep affection for ‘the isle of blossoming woodlands, isle of silvery parapets,’ which they adopted as their own, in spite of the courteous invitation of Titus, who urged them to return to Rome. And sometimes Pudens thought that there must be a prescience in the British prophecy which their friend Laureatus, the Latin poet of Vectis, had turned into galliambics from the wild songs which fired the patriotism of the host of Boadicea, and which said--

‘Though the Roman eagle shadow thee, though the gathering enemy harrow thee, Thou shalt wax and he shall dwindle, thou shalt be the mighty one yet; Thine the liberty, thine the glory, thine the deeds to be celebrated; Thine the myriad-rolling ocean, light and shadow illimitable, Thine the lands of lasting summer, many-blossoming Paradises, Thine the North, and thine the South, and thine the battle-thunder of God.’

The old king CARADOC lived with them for a time in the charming villa which they had built. He had fancied at first that, after the disgrace of defeat and betrayal, he would never be able to show his face among the warlike Silures whom he had led to victory. But Christianity softened his soul. He received a warm welcome from many of his friends and former subjects, and it was no little due to his conversion and his teaching that Christianity secured a footing among the Cymry long before its truths had been accepted in other portions of the British Isles.

POMPONIA crowned a life of love and gracious kindness with a death of perfect peace. She recovered from the virulent fever which she had caught in the prisons, and consoled the drooping years of her husband, Aulus Plautius. He died in the reign of Titus, and she did not long survive him. She was happily spared the spectacle of the reign of Domitian and the martyrdom of Flavius Clemens. All who were in sorrow sought her for consolation. Even the imperial Titus came gladly to her when his dark hour was upon him, and his heart was broken by the cruel ingratitude of his brother. She heard often from Pudens and Claudia, and from all whom she had loved. She fostered by every means in her power the struggling community of the catacombs, and when she lay upon her deathbed St. Clement, the fourth Bishop of Rome, administered to her the last sacrament. Her example had been of high benefit even to the Pagans of Roman society. It was her influence which told in the improved manners of the reign of Vespasian, and no vestal was more honoured for her official sanctity than Pomponia Græcina for her Christian holiness. When the ear heard her it blessed her, and when the eye saw her it gave witness to her. The blessings of those that were ready to perish came upon her, and she caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy.

The close of the life of ONESIMUS was as peaceful as its youthful years had been full of trouble and storm. After the martyrdom of the Apostle Paul, and the all-but-extinction of the Church in Rome, he proposed that Nereus, and Junia, who was now united to him in holy wedlock, should leave Aricia, and, with the means which they possessed, should establish a new home in his native Thyatira, or in Hierapolis, or in Ephesus. Nereus gladly consented, for the gloom and loneliness of Aricia weighed upon his spirits, and he was haunted by the thoughts of the agonies which he had witnessed in the imprisonment and death of his brethren at Rome. Before they started, Onesimus sought a secret interview with his cousin and foster-sister ACTE. He found her still living in the Golden House, but profoundly uncertain about the future. She had bathed the mangled corpse of Nero with her tears; she had adorned his grave with flowers; she had ventured even to pray for his soul. To her he was not the monster into which he developed, but still the youth who had loved her, and whom she had loved. But now, amid the terrible scenes which Rome was witnessing, and seemed likely long to witness in the fierce struggles of rival generals for power, her life was anxious. Apart from the obvious perils which might befall her in the hands of such wretches as Nymphidius and Tigellinus, she had long desired to escape from that city of Circean splendour. Eagerly she offered Onesimus to accompany him, and told him that now she, like himself, was a baptised Christian. She resumed her old name of Eunice, which she had borne as a child before the evil days of Rome, and she had wealth sufficient to maintain them all.

Her preparations were made secretly, with the aid of the Christian slaves in Cæsar’s household. She sold her jewels, and, taking much of her property with her, sailed with Onesimus and his wife and Nereus to Ephesus. They fixed their home at Hierapolis, where they could enjoy the teaching of the Deacon Philip, and where ACTE, gladly serving as a deaconess of the little Church, gave all her goods to the poor, and lived in happy friendship with the virgin daughters of the Evangelist. The children of Onesimus and Junia owed much to her kindly nurture and teaching. In due time Onesimus himself was ordained to the ministry, and became in later years a bishop of the Church of Ephesus. There, when he was quite an old man, in the year A.D. 107, he met the martyr Ignatius of Antioch, when he was being conducted to his martyrdom in the Colosseum by the decuria of soldiers whom he calls ‘his ten leopards.’ He showed the greatest kindness to the holy martyr, who, in his letter to the Ephesians, gratefully commemorates the ‘inexpressible love’ which Onesimus had manifested towards him. Some say that he, too, suffered martyrdom at Ephesus, after a long life and many happy years.

* * * * *

And now that Judaism had been utterly crushed, Paganism again and again wrestled with Christianity, and put forth all its force. It strove to rival the new faith by ritual splendour and orgiastic rites, and ‘the extreme sensuality of superstition.’[*22] It strove to put forth Pythagoras, or Socrates, or Apollonius of Tyana as parallels to Christ; and Stoicism and Neo-Platonism as substitutes for the truths of the Gospel. It kindled its expiring lamps with ‘sparks from the incorruptible fountain of wisdom,’ and turned its back on the Sun of Righteousness, from which they were derived. It tried all that sneers and banter could do in the writings of the Pseudo-Lucian, and all the power and passion of argument in the books of Porphyry, Hierocles, and Celsus. Waging deadly war against all who called themselves Christians, it tried to burn them at its stakes, to crucify them on its countless gibbets, to devour them by its herds of wild beasts, at least to daunt them by its horrible tortures. On every field Christians met and conquered them with the two sacred and invincible weapons of martyrdom and innocence. The Church escaped from and soared out of their reach on ‘the two great wings of pureness and kindness,’ and so ‘by the unresistable might of weakness shook the world.’ The Christians refuted the arguments urged against them; they turned the edge of the jeers; they exposed the feebleness of the philosophers who wrote to denounce them. Meekly enduring the tortures devised against them ‘they stood safe’ (as said their martyr Cyprian); ‘stronger than their conquerors, the beaten and lacerated members conquered the beating and lacerating hooks.’ These obscure Sectaries--barbarians, Orientals, Jews, slaves, artisans--fought against the indignant world, and won. And when they had won, and in proportion as they won, they ennobled and purified the world. Wrestling with the pagan curse of corruption they made pure the homes, and the conversation, and the amusements, and the literature, and the inmost hearts of all who faithfully accepted the truths they preached. Wrestling with the curse of cruelty they suppressed infanticide, they sanctified compassion, they put down the cruel and ghastly scenes of human slaughter in the amphitheatre, they made the wretched and the sick and the outcast their special care, ‘they encircled the brow of sorrow with the aureole of sanctity.’ Wrestling with the curses of slavery and selfish exclusiveness they taught the inalienable rights of humanity, they confronted tyranny, they inspired nations with the spirit of liberty, they flung over the oppressed a shield of adamant, they taught that all men are the children of God. Intellectually, socially, politically, in national life and in individual life, in art and in literature, Christianity has inspired all that the world has seen of best and noblest, and still offers to the soul of every man the purest hope, the divinest comfort, the loftiest aspirations. To talk of ‘the crimes of Christianity’ is a preposterous paradox. There is not one evil thought that can be thought, not one evil deed that can be done, which is not utterly alien from its true spirit. Crimes, indeed, without number have been committed in its name. Kings, and priests, and peoples have misinterpreted its documents, forged its commissions, falsified the image and superscription of its current coins, while ‘swarms of vile creatures have made it an inexhaustible prey.’ But ‘it has lived through all, and has suffered that which would have been tenfold death to aught less than Divine.’ And even yet, after nearly nineteen centuries have sped since its Dawn began, and its Sun of Righteousness arose with healing in His wings, this faith alone sets before mankind the Divine Example of a Perfect and a Sinless Man, and alone offers the sure promises of pardon and of peace. All the best wisdom of the world lies in the brief Book of its New Covenant, and all the hopes of the world lie centred in the faithful acceptance of its Law and of its Life.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

FOOTNOTES

[1] Note 1.--Palace of the Cæsars. (See Lanciani’s Ancient Rome in the light of Modern Discoveries, pp. 107-133.) --For Notes see section following FOOTNOTES.

[2] Note 2.--Lollia Paulina’s jewels.

[3] Note 3.--Agrippina’s talking thrush.

[4] Note 4.--Nero’s Genealogy.

[5] Note 5.--Agrippina’s white nightingale.

[6] Note 6.--The Bacchanalians.

[7] Note 7.--Nero’s poetry.

[8] ‘Sub terris tonuisse putes.’

[9] PLINY, N. H. vii. 6.

[10] Note 8.

[11] Note 9.

[12] See Nisard: Poëtes de la Décadence, i. 91.

[13] Mart. iv. 59.

[14] Note 10.

[15] Note 11.

[16] A slave who carried boys’ books to school.

[17] Note 12.--Slaves.

[18] Note 13.--Onokoites.

[19] Note 14.--Lines of Cleanthes.

[20] Note 15.--Ancient wall-scribblings.

[21] For these and similar passages of Seneca, see Epp. 31, 41, 73; De Benef., i. 6; &c.

[22] 1 Thess. iv. 1-8.

[23] 1 Thess. v. 1-11.

[24] Note 16.--Cyzicene room.

[25] Plat. Politicus, § 16; comp. Phædo, § 78.

[26] Note 17.--The unconscious prophecies of heathendom.

[27] Note 18.

[28] Juv. Sat. iii. 60-65.

[29] Sparteoli, ‘bucket-men,’ was the slang term for the police, perhaps from the spartum, or rope-basket covered with pitch, in which they carried water as firemen.

[30] Note 19.--Arrest of Onesimus.

[31] Equuleus was an instrument of torture.

[32] Salaputium, ‘hop-o’-my-thumb.’

[33] To offer the ears to be touched was a sign of willingness to give witness. See Hor. Sat. ix. 77; and for the reason of the custom, Pliny, N. H. xi. 103.

[34] Ὀνήσιμος, ‘profitable.’ St. Paul plays on the meaning of the name in Philemon, 10, 11.

[35] Cic. Pro Flacco, 27: ‘Phrygium plagis solere fieri meliorem.’

[36] Note 20.--Agrippas.

[37] Note 21.--Ancient dancing.

[38] ‘DE PANTOMIMO.

‘Pugnat, ludit, amat, bacchatur, vertitur, astat, Illustrat verum, cuncta decore replet; Tot linguæ, tot membra viro: mirabilis ars est Quæ facit articulos, ore silente, loqui.’

[39] Note 22.--Lucan’s flatteries.

[40] Sen. Ep. 21.

[41] Sen. Nat. Quæst. i. 5: ‘Colla Cytheriacæ splendent agitata Columbæ. Ut ait Nero Cæsar disertissime.’

[42] Petron. Sat. 1, ‘Melliti verborum globuli.’

[43] Pind. Ol. ii. 119.

[44] Note 23.--The Stemma Cæsarum.

[45] Hor. Epod. ii. 1; Lord Lytton’s version.

[46] Virg. Georg. ii. 458.

[47] A period of seventeen days.

[48] Note 24.--Otho’s banquet.

[49] See Note 25.--Tossing in a blanket.

[50] Note 26.--Age of Britannicus.

[51] A coin of Teos with this inscription is still extant.-- Mionnet, iv. 123.

[52] Eph. v. 14 (apparently the fragment of a hymn).

[53] Note 27.--Making gods.

[54] Note 28.--Greek epigram.

[55] Note 29.--Epitaph.

[56] Note 30.

[57] Note 31.--Early Christian hymns.

[58] Pliny, N. H. xxxiv. 8.

[59] Plutarch, Sympos. i.

[60] Note 32.

[61] De Const. Sap. 14.

[62] Sen. De Benef. iii. 16.

[63] Pliny, N. H. xxxvii. 16.

[64] Lactantius.

[65] Il. ix. 502 (Pope).

[66] Pliny, N. H. viii. 7.

[67] Plutarch, De Defect. Orac. p. 419, b.

[68] An actual ancient graffito of some imprisoned slave.

[69] Note 33.

[70] Sen. De Tranq. An. xiv. 7.

[71] Sen. Ep. liv.: ‘Mors est non esse.’ Troades, v. 393: ‘Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque Mors nihil.’

[72] Pliny, N. H. xi. 54: ‘Oculos cum osculamur, _animum ipsum videmur attingere_.’

[73] Note 34.

[74] Note 35.--The Gladiators’ School.

[75] Note 36.--The Gladiator’s Oath.

[76] For Spectatus--a gladiator who had made his début in the arena.

[77] Mart. ii. 75.

[78] Note 37.--Gladiatorial Games.

[79] See Isidor. Orig. xviii. 53.

[80] Pliny, N. H. x. 34.

[81] Note 38.--Dead Gladiators.

[82] Sen. Ep. xciii. 12; Quinct. Decl. 7.

[83] Pliny, N. H. xxiii. 63 and passim.

[84] Note 39.--The King of the Grove.

[85] Petron. Sat. 47; Juv. Sat. iii. 9.

[86] Ὡς χαριέν ἐστ’ ἄνθρωπος ἤν ἄνθρωπος ᾗ.

[87] The author has the kind permission of the illustrious Laureatus of Vectis to make this use of his lines.

[88] The insulæ were large, isolated lodging-houses.

[89] Note 40.--Age of Octavia.

[90] Note 41.--Christian Fortitude.

[91] A real pagan epitaph.

[92] Note 42.--Ishmael ben Phabi.

[93] Renan, L’Antéchrist, p. 152.

[94] Note 43.

[95] Φράζεο τὸν πάντων ὕπατον θεὸν ἔμμεν’ ἸΑΩ.

[96] Note 44.

[97] Sen. Controv. iii. 12 (Boissier, p. 80).

[98] Note 45.

[99] Sen. Thyest. 446.

[100] Tac. Ann. xv. 45.

[101] The Latin Gate did not at this time exist. It was in the wall of Aurelian, of which the date is A.D. 271. But it is possible that tradition may have had reason for fixing on this locality.

[102] Sen. Consol. ad Marc. 20.

[103] Note 46.

[104] Note 47.--St. John banished by Nero.

[105] Note 48.--Icarus.

[106] Note 49.--Danaides.

[107] Tert. Apol. 50. Note 50.

[108] Sen. Ep. 15, 78.

[109] Pliny, xxxv. 33.

[110] Pharsal. ix. 601.

[111] Pharsal. vii. 455-459.

[112] Pharsal. ix. 211.

[113] Tac. Ann. xvi. 16.

[114] Dial. de Orat. 12.

[115] ‘Stoicus occidit Baream, delator amicum, Discipulumque senex, ripa nutritus in illa Ad quam Gorgonei delapsa est pinna caballi.’

JUV. Sat. iii. 116.

[116] Sen. De Ira, iii. 15.

[117] Sen. Quæst. Nat. ii. 26, vi. 21.

[118] Note 51.

[119] ‘Conqueror in all the games.’

[120] Note 52.

[121] ἵππων μ’ ὠκυπόδων ἀπφὶ κτύπος οὔατα βάλλει.

[122] ‘Acerrimi canes, quos ille, ut sibi uni mansuetos ... sanguine humano pascebat.’--Sen. Consol. ad Marc. xxii. 3; comp. De Benef. iii. 26.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

NOTES

NOTE 1. PAGE 3.

The Palace of the Cæsars.--In this description of the Palace of the Cæsars, I chiefly follow Lanciani and Burn’s Rome and the Campagna, ch. viii. See, too, Statius, Sylv. iv. 26-31; Claudian, De VI. Cons. Hon. 39-41.

NOTE 2. PAGE 10.

Lollia Paulina’s jewels.--See Pliny, N. H. ix. 58.

NOTE 3. PAGE 14.

Agrippina’s talking thrush.--‘Agrippina, Claudii Principis, turdum habuit, quod nunquam ante, imitantem sermones humanos, cum hæc proderem. Habebant et Cæsares juvenes [i. e. Nero and Britannicus] sturnum, item luscinias, Græco et Latino sermone dociles, præterea ... loquentes longiore etiam contextu.’--Pliny, N. H. x. 59.

NOTE 4. PAGE 14.

Nero’s genealogy.--Nero was, in the female line, abnepos --great-great-grandson--of Augustus. Britannicus was only the pronepos--great-grandson--of Octavia (the sister of Augustus), and great-nephew of Tiberius:--

Augustus＝＝Scribonia | Julia＝＝Agrippa | Agrippina I.＝＝Germanicus | Agrippina II.＝＝Claudius | Nero

Octavia＝＝Mark Antony | Antonia Minor＝＝Drusus, Brother of Tiberius | ------+------ | | Germanicus Claudius＝＝Messalina | Britannicus

NOTE 5. PAGE 31.

Agrippina’s white nightingale.--Pliny says it cost more than 40_l_ N. H. x. 43.

NOTE 6. PAGE 43.

The Bacchanalians.--The orgies of this pseudo-religious body had been denounced and suppressed in B.C. 186.--See Livy, xxxix. 9-14.

NOTE 7. PAGE 44.

Nero’s poetry.--The lines of Persius, Sat. i. 92-105, have been supposed to contain these quotations from Nero’s poems.

NOTE 8. PAGE 51.

Seneca’s flatteries.--The opening of Seneca’s _De Clementia_ abounds in this fulsome and impolitic flattery.

NOTE 9. PAGE 52.

For these self-criticisms of Seneca, see Ep. xlv. lxxx. &c.; De Vit. Beat. 3.

NOTE 10. PAGE 60.

Nero really made this jest.--Tac. Ann. xiv. 14.

NOTE 11. PAGE 63.

Epictetus.--No date in the life of Epictetus is certain; but as he was certainly the slave of Epaphroditus, Nero’s secretary, I take no violent liberty in introducing him here.

NOTE 12. PAGE 64.

Slaves were not held culpable for what their masters ordered.--The sentiment which Petronius puts into the mouth of Trimalchio--‘Nec turpe est quod dominus jubet’--is echoed by Seneca, ‘Impudicitia ... in servo necessitas est.’

NOTE 13. PAGE 67.

The ass-headed god.--One of the ancient calumnies against the Christians is that they worshipped a god with an ass’s head named Onokoites. See the writer’s Lives of the Fathers, i. § v. Hence the Christians were called Asinarii, and the ancients thought that Jews also worshipped the ass. See Tac. Hist. v. 4; Plut. Sympos. iv. 5, § 2; Diod. Sic. xxxiv. Fragm.; Jos. C. Apion. ii. 7. For the slander as regards Christians, see Min. Fel. Octav. ix. 28; Tert. Ad Natt. i. 14, Apol. 16. The celebrated graffito of ‘Alexamenos adoring his god,’ known by the Germans as the Spott-Crucifix, is now in the Library of the Collegio Romano at Rome, in the Museo Kircheriano. It was really found in the Gelotian Pædagogium, but is probably of much later date than the reign of Nero.

NOTE 14. PAGE 68.

Duc me, Parens, celsique Dominator poli, Quocumque placuit; nulla parendi mora est. Adsum impiger. Fac nolle, comitabor tamen.

Cleanthes apud Senecam.

NOTE 15. PAGE 69.

Ancient wall-scribblings.--For the Graffito alluded to see note 13. The playful distich attributed to Britannicus is really scrawled on a wall at Pompeii:--

‘Admiror, paries, te non cecidisse ruina Qui tot stultorum tædia sustineas.’

The graffiti ascribed to Titus are on the walls of the Domus Gelotiana, but are becoming fast obliterated. They were discovered in 1857.--See Lanciani’s Rome, p. 121.

NOTE 16. PAGE 74.

The ‘Cyzicene room’ of a luxurious Roman house or villa faced the north, and opened by folding doors on the garden. The younger Pliny had such rooms in his villa. They were built for warmth and sunlight.

NOTE 17. PAGE 75.

For a remarkable ‘unconscious prophecy of heathendom,’ see Æsch. Prom. Vinct. 1026-1029. Seneca’s words are:-- ‘Nemo per se satis valet ut emergat. Oportet manum aliquis porrigat, aliquis educat.’ Sen. Ep. 52.

NOTE 18. PAGE 77.

The Fish.--The initial letters of ΙΧΘΥΣ, ‘fish,’ stood for Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Υἱὸς Σωτήρ, ‘Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour.’ It was the commonest of ancient Christian symbols. See Tert. De Bapt. i.; Jer. Ep. 43; Aug. De Civ. Dei, xviii. 23; and the writer’s Lives of the Fathers, i. § xvi.

NOTE 19. PAGE 81.

Arrest of Onesimus.--Some readers will recognise an incident which really occurred in the life of Alypius, the friend of St. Augustine, which the English reader may see narrated in my Lives of the Fathers, ii. 313.

NOTE 20. PAGE 101.

Agrippas.--Children born feet-first were called agrippas, and to be so born was regarded as a certain augury of misfortune.--Pliny, N. H. vii. 6.

NOTE 21. PAGE 114.

Ancient dancing.--The allusions to the dancing of the pantomimic actors may all be found in Lucan’s De Saltatione; Vell. Paterc. ii. 83; Athen. xiv. 627-630; and other ancient writers.

NOTE 22. PAGE 124.

Lucan’s daring flatteries may be read in Pharsal. i. 33-66.

NOTE 23. PAGE 137.

The Stemma Cæsarum.--For further facts and details about the Cæsarian family, See Champagny, Les Césars, ii. 77, and passim.

NOTE 24. PAGE 145.

Otho’s banquet.--The details here described are derived in every particular from Pliny, Suetonius, Seneca, and other ancient writers.

NOTE 25. PAGE 152.

Tossing in a blanket. Sagatio.--Suet. Otho, 2; Mart. i. 4. A case is mentioned in Ulpian of a boy who was killed by it. Greek, παλμός.

NOTE 26. PAGE 157.

Age of Britannicus.--There is some historic uncertainty about the age of Britannicus. The proper date for assuming the toga virilis was the end of the fifteenth year, but Nero had been allowed to assume it soon after his fourteenth birthday (Tac. Ann. xii. 41). In Ann. xii. 25 Tacitus says that Nero was two years older (biennio majorem) than Britannicus; but from xiii. 6 and 15, where we are told that Nero was barely seventeen at the beginning of his reign, and that Britannicus was nearly fifteen when he was murdered, it seems clear that triennio would be nearer the truth than biennio. Eckhel, in his Doctr. Num. vi. 260, comes to the conclusion that Nero was three years and two months older than Britannicus; and other circumstances seem to make this probable. Suetonius also (Claud. 27) makes some admitted blunders. It seems likely that Nero was born on Dec. 15, A.D. 37, and Britannicus on Feb. 12 or 13, A.D. 41, on the twentieth day of his father’s reign. On this subject I must refer to Nipperdey on Tac. Ann. xii. 25; Orelli on Tac. Ann. xii. 25, 41, xiii. 6, 15; H. Schiller, Gesch. d. Römischen Kaiserreichs, pp. 71, &c.

NOTE 27. PAGE 171.

Making gods.--Nero makes the remark in the text to Seneca in the tragedy of Octavia:--

‘Stulte verebor, ipse quum faciam, Deos.’

Octav. Act. ii. 450

NOTE 28. PAGE 174.

Χρυσὸν ἀνὴρ εὑρὼν ἔλιπε βρόχον, αὐτὰρ ὁ χρυσὸν Ὂν λίπεν οὐχ εὑρὼν, ἥψεν ὃν εὗρε βρόχον.

This epigram was once quoted to Coleridge as proof of the condensation possible in Greek. He at once rendered it in the two English lines:--

‘Jack, finding some gold, left a rope on the ground, Tom, missing his gold, used the rope which he found.’

NOTE 29. PAGE 175.

Pagan epitaphs.--For those quoted see Nov. Fiorentini, xxxiii. (ap. Döllinger, Judaism, &c. ii. 147; and Muratori, p. 1677).

NOTE 30. PAGE 176.

The magnificent verses sung by Britannicus are preserved by Cicero (Tusc. Disp. iii. 19), and were deservedly admired for their force and rhythm. They end thus, with a striking specimen of ancient rhyme:--

‘Hæc omnia vidi inflammari, Priamo vitam vi evitari, Jovis aram sanguine turpari.’

NOTE 31. PAGE 200.

This ancient hymn is preserved for us at the end of the Pædagogus of St. Clement of Alexandria. I avail myself of the translation by my friend the late Dean of Wells (Lazarus, and other Poems).

NOTE 32. PAGE 213.

An imperial banquet.--See Sen. Ep. xc. 15, cxv. 9. The menu of a banquet of luxurious Salian priests is preserved in Macrobius, Saturn. iii. 13.

NOTE 33. PAGE 273.

The classical reader will recognise that I have not invented these stories of rural pagan life. They are found in Apuleius.

NOTE 34. PAGE 318.

The Lemuralia.--See this expiatory rite described in Ovid, Fasti, v. 421-444; and compare Latour St.-Ybars, Néron, pp. 213, 214. The custom is also alluded to in Varro, Vit. Pop. Rom. Fr. 241; Servius ad Æn. i. 276.

NOTE 35. PAGE 323.

Gladiators’ School.--‘Alebat devotum corpus pravior omni fauce sagina.’--Quinct. ‘Qui dabit immundæ venalia fata saginæ.’--Propert. iv. 8. 25. Δεῖ σε εὐτακτεῖν, ἀναγκοφαγεῖν, ἀπέχεσθαι πεμμάτων, μὴ ψυχρὸν πίνειν.--Epict. Dissert. iii. 15, § 3.

NOTE 36. PAGE 325.

The gladiator’s oath was comprehensively horrible. ‘In verba Eumolpi sacramentum juravimus uri, vinciri, verberari, ferroque necari, et quicquid aliud Eumolpus jussisset; tamquam legitimi gladiatores domino corpora animosque religiosissime addicimus.’--Petronius.

NOTE 37. PAGE 330.

Gladiatorial games.--Not one incident is here described which does not find its authority in Martial De Spectaculis, and other epigrams, or in one or other of the many contemporary or later writers of the Empire. See Lipsius, De Gladiatoribus in his Saturnalia.

NOTE 38. PAGE 334.

Dead gladiators.--‘Quinetiam percussos jacentesque repeti jubent, et cadavera ictibus dissipari, ne quis illos simulata morte deludat’ (Lactantius).

NOTE 39. PAGE 351.

The Rex Nemorensis.--See Ovid, Fasti, iii. 263-277; Propert. iii. 24. 9; Stat. Sylv. iii. 1. 32; and Mr. Fraser’s Golden Bough.

The appearance and cautious terror of the priest are described by Strabo (v. 3. 12):--ξιφήρης οὖν ἐστιν, ἀεὶ περισκοπῶν, τὰς ἐπιθέσεις ἕτοιμος ἀμύνεσθαι.

NOTE 40. PAGE 398.

Age of Octavia.--Nothing certain can be ascertained as to the exact age of Octavia at her death. Tillemont, Néron, Art. xv., thinks that she was twenty-two; and Nipperdey on Tac. Ann. xiv. 64 conjectures that the true reading is ‘II et vicesimo.’ See Stahr, Agrippina, p. 54; Lehmann, 132; Sievers, Studien zur Gesch. des Röm. Kaiser., 129; H. Schiller, Gesch. des Röm. Kaiserreichs, 67. When she married Nero she was apparently thirteen, and he fifteen; Schiller, l. c. 83.

NOTE 41. PAGE 401.

Christian fortitude.--These are the explanations given by Pagans of the calmness of Christians under martyrdom. Marc. Aurelius says that men should die calmly, yet not διὰ ψιλὴν παράταξιν ὡς οἱ Χριστιανοί, Medit. xi. 3; ὑπὸ μανίας, ὑπὸ ἔθους, ὡς οἱ Γαλιλαῖοι, says Epictetus, Dissert. iv. 7.

NOTE 42. PAGE 416.

Ishmael ben Phabi.--An Ishmael ben Phabi was made high priest by Valerius Gratus; and another, or the same at a later age, by Festus. The younger is here intended.

NOTE 43. PAGE 434.

Anchialus is a dubious word found in Martial, Ep. xi. 94, and very variously explained. The famous oracle quoted by Josephus is found in Macrobius, Saturn. i. 18.

NOTE 44. PAGE 439.

Esther, in her epitaph, charges Arescusus not to put ‘D. M.’ or any other pagan symbol on her tomb. The name of Primitivus, a Curator Spoliarii in Nero’s time (mentioned in the next paragraph), has been preserved in an inscription found in the Columbaria.

NOTE 45. PAGE 448.

I borrow this ancient hymn from the conclusion of the Pædagogus of Clement of Alexandria. The translation is by my friend the late Dean of Wells.

NOTE 46. PAGE 477.

What we call St. Elmo’s fire was known to the ancients as ‘the fires of Castor and Pollux.’ A bidental was an enclosure round a place struck by lightning. For such legends of St. John as I have here adopted I may refer to Tert. De Præscr. Hær. 36; Jer. C. Jovin. i. 26; and In Matt. xx. 23, Orig. In Matt. Hom. xii; Zahn, Acta Johannis, cxvii.-cxxii.

NOTE 47. PAGE 478.

I have elsewhere given strong reasons for the belief that St. John was banished to Patmos by Nero, not by Domitian. See Early Days of Christianity, ii. 147, 184 sqq.

NOTE 48. PAGE 485.

Icarus.--See Sueton, Nero, 12; Dio Chrysost. Orat. xxi. 9. There seems to be an echo of this incident in the legend about the attempted flight of Simon Magus. Cyril Hierosol. Catech. vi. 15; Arnob. C. Gentes, ii. 12. See Lipsius, Petrus-Sage, and Fabricius, Cod. Apocr. N. T. iii. 632.

NOTE 49. PAGE 485.

See Clem. Rom. Ad Cor. i. 6. Διὰ ζῆλος διωχθεῖσαι γυναῖκες Δαναΐδες καὶ Δίρκαι αἰκίσματα δεινὰ καὶ ἀνόσια παθοῦσαι· ἐπὶ τὸν τῆς πίστεως βέβαιον δρόμον κατήντησαν καὶ ἔλαβον γέρας γενναῖον αἱ ἀσθενεῖς τῷ σώματι. I do not see any reason to accept any alterations of the reading. See, too, Renan, L’Antéchrist, p. 167. The Dirce-statue, known as the Farnese Bull, is now in the Museo Borbonico at Naples.

NOTE 50. PAGE 489.

I am indebted for one slight touch in this scene to the otherwise absurd sketch in Latour St.-Ybars’ Néron.

NOTE 51. PAGE 540.

Dion Cassius tells the fate of Corbulo in three energetic words: παίων ἔλεγεν Ἄξιος (lxiii. 17).

NOTE 52. PAGE 556.

The reader who is familiar with the cycles of early Christian legend will recognise that I borrow the character of Patroclus and various incidents of these scenes from the Acts of Linus. They are printed in De la Bigne, Bibl. Patr. Max. ii. 67; and some account of them is given by Dr. Salmon, in Dict. Christ. Biog. iii. 726. See, too, the allusion of St. Chrysostom, Hom. xlvi. in Actt. App.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

The following corrections have been made in the text:

[1] Chapter 1 paragraph 1 - ‘incrusted’ replaced with ‘encrusted’ (the great bronze valves were encrusted)

[2] Chapter 8 paragraph 8 - ‘Octavio’ replaced with ‘Octavia’ (a desire to divorce Octavia)

[3] Chapter 17 paragraph 3 - ‘Apocolokyntosis’ replaced with ‘Apokolokyntosis’

[4] Chapter 17 paragraph 67 - ‘similiar’ replaced with ‘similar’ (Tigellinus follow a similar)

[5] Chapter 18 paragraph 8 - ‘matyrdom’ replaced with ‘martyrdom’ (did not share her husband’s martyrdom)

[6] Chapter 20 paragraph 2 - ‘or’ replaced with ‘of’ (saw a copy of)

[7] Chapter 26 paragraph 27 - ‘Gallia’ replaced with ‘Gallio’ (‘Antistia,’ said Gallio)

[8] Chapter 30 paragraph 13 - ‘superstitution’ replaced with ‘superstition’ (workings of a foreign superstition)

[9] Chapter 31 paragraph 23 - ‘Is’ replaced with ‘It’ (It is vain to talk to me)

[10] Chapter 32 paragraph 24 - ‘mendicity’ replaced with ‘mendacity’ (a life of squalor, mendacity, and imposture)

[11] Chapter 35 paragraph 21 - ‘wonnd’ replaced with ‘wound’ (with blood from the wound)

[12] Chapter 42 paragraph 45 - ‘familar’ replaced with ‘familiar’ (and was thus familiar)

[13] Chapter 49 paragraph 24 - ‘neighboring’ replaced with ‘neighbouring’ (Many of the neighbouring houses)

[14] Chapter 50 paragraph 4 - ‘tempestous’ replaced with ‘tempestuous’ (on a storm of tempestuous agony)

[15] Chapter 50 paragraph 7 - ‘disemcumbered’ replaced with ‘disencumbered’ (which might be disencumbered)

[16] Chapter 52 paragraph 12 - ‘gayety’ replaced with ‘gaiety’ (usual aspect of easy gaiety)

[17] Chapter 54 paragraph 74 - ‘exlaimed’ replaced with ‘exclaimed’ (he exclaimed hoarsely)

[18] Chapter 56 paragraph 40 - ‘vigourous’ replaced with ‘vigorous’ (sprang into more vigorous life)

[19] Chapter 66 paragraph 6 - ‘Christanity’ replaced with ‘Christianity’ (the auroral glow of Christianity)

[20] Chapter 66 paragraph 10 - ‘batttle’ replaced with ‘battle’ (who had fled from battle)

[21] Chapter 66 paragraph 20 - ‘indentity’ replaced with ‘identity’ (revealed to them his identity)

[22] Chapter 66 paragraph 30 - ending quote missing from text (‘the extreme sensuality of superstition.’)

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us