Eras and characters of history

Contents

Page

I. Nero and Paul 1

II. TnE Emperor Titus and tiie Apostle John ... 21

I. Nero And Paul

" I APPEAL unto Cresar." Such \vas the brief sentence uttered in Cicsarea, a sea-coast town of Palestine. The words became the occasion for transportini^ the man who uttered them to the Koraan metropolis, and placed the great Apostle of the Gentiles ultimately before that cruel despot who held for the time in his hands the destinies of tlic civilized world. Modern science sends its barks and its observers, armed with their instruments, round the globe, to watch the transit of a planet over the disk of the sun. It might have seemed to haughty priest among the Jews, and to the Roman governor of this Syrian province, a wild act of presumption for a preacher of this despised faith of the Nazarene to demand thus the transfer of his cause to the Emperor's own hearing. If Gallio, one of the provincial rulers, scorned to soil his hands with these paltry questions of the Hebrew law, as he deemed them, would the sovereign Caesar himself have more patience when this

2 JEBAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY.

setter -forth of a new doctrine presumed to ask heed to his complaints regarding a denial of justice in his o\Yn case, in one of the remote provinces of that broad empire ? If even vouchsafed an audience, Roman scorn might have augured a speedy occultation of this Hebrew luminary under the savage brightness of a Nero's glance. But the moral may in its greatness rival, or even outbulk, the hugest material interest. The judgment of later history is that, if there were eclipse here, it was the sovereign despot who underwent the occultation, as there stood before him the luminary of the New Faith that was to shine where Roman eagles had never flown — the messenger of the Christ whose final audit was to gather alike each Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander and Csesar of all the ages before his sovereign bar, there abiding his irreversible sentence.

The name of Nero has become to us of later times the brief embodiment of all cruelty and vileness, unequalled ferocity and indescribable wickedness. But it should be remembered that it was not always such. The first year of his imperial sway had been adduced by his preceptor, Seneca, as an example of sovereignty showing all clemency. Long after, one of the worthier emperors, Trajan, had wished that his own rule should equal in dignity the first five years of Nero — a term roore than one-third of the fourteen years during which Nero wielded the imperial sceptre. He had in him the blood of that Julius Caesar, greatest of the name, who, as statesman, orator, soldier, and conqueror, had written himself among the foremost names of the human race. Laying, by his victories and encroachments on the old republican liberties, the foundation of that imperial power which his kinsman Augustus first consoli

KERO AND PAUL. 3

dated into a regular dynasty, lie had shattered the Republic without himself perfecting and enjoying the despotism that ■svas to succeed it. Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius had in turn occupied the throne that Augustus had established. Great as were their crimes, such was the magnificence and vast stretch of the power thus set up, and such the promise to the nations of order to be enjoyed under its shadow, that Ca2sar's name has become almost a synonyme for the rule that shall best shut out the anarchy and excesses of an uncurbed democracy. In our own times one of the later Napoleons essayed to write the life of the great Julius Caesar and the story of his services to Rome, the old but outworn Republic, with the intent to show to France, after so many centuries had gone by, that if she wished regularity and peace in her borders she must, like ancient Rome, welcome and cherish the Casar who came to repair the shattered ruins and make the arts and commerce and literature all flourish. And there have been some Americans who, seeing how magnificently Caesars could adorn their capitals and hold down the proletariat, have whispered more or less audibly their wish that Order might thus glide into the saddle and slip over a docile nation the bridle of sternest repression upon Western shores. Indeed, some hold the name of the Czar of the Russias but a barbarous echo of the old Roman Ca3sar, the absolutism that shelters in long security the homes and workshops, the fields and cities, of a land. The immediate predecessor of Nero was Claudius, a man of feeble and dull character, but not without literary culture. Agrippina, the mother of Nero by an earlier marriage, was the niece of Claudius, and she aspired to become her uncle's fourth wife. The Roman people, accustomed to much moral recklessness, yet

4 EliAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY.

murmured in vain at the proposed unnatural union. Ag-rippina found Britannicus, the son of Claudius by his earlier wife, Messalina, the rightful heir and successor in expectancy of his father. But he was some three years younger than her own Nero, the step-son of her new husband. Nero she intended to bring in as the next occupant of the throne. Poison, ruthlessly administered in the guise of medicine, removed the husband. His death was kept a secret until means had been taken to present Nero to the populace as the true successor. Octavia, the sister of Britannicus, was given him as his wife, and the wise philosopher, Seneca, and Burrhus, an old, honest soldier, were given him as his guardians, while the more youthful Britannicus was held back.

Though of the Csesar blood by the female side, Nero's family name was Domitius, and his father had from the color of his hair been called Copper-beard (Ahenobarbus). The name had adhered to his son, the young prince ; and been used in jeer by Britannicus, in that boyish altercation to which lads of their age are prone, and had been resented by his step-brother, the elder of the two. Instead of it was given him the new name, Nero, coming down from the old Sabines of the earliest days of Roman history, and meaning, it is said, Strong. The name of the great city itself, Rome, meant strength ; and besides this, its daily and recognized designation, the metropolis had a secret name which it was regarded as treasonable to divulge. Many say that this mystic and hidden name was " Valentia." If so, it also dwelt upon and intensified the great thought of might or power, as the embodiment of Roman dignity and the talisman of wide and enduring domination. The iron strength of the Roman State, "as iron that breaketh in pieces and subductli all things," had been foreshadowed in the prophetic vision of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel, ii. 40), and explained in the divinely inspired comment of Daniel before the monarch upon that vision. Power, the power of Northern steel — compact, massive, and overwhelming — had been seemingly all concentred in the State, the metropolis, and the soverci^n. It was ruGfijed Prowess.

At the age of seventeen, with much of manly beauty, with tastes for art, aspiring and diversified, though not as successful as they were eager, Nero vaulted into the imperial throne about the time when Paul was, after writing his Epistles to the Thessalonians, leaving Corinth, passing to Jerusalem, and thence to Ephesus. In giving him Seneca as the philosophic guide of his early age Agrippina had seemed to care for his wise training. But when, by a poison administered to Britannicus — his young step-brother and the brother of his own consort, the young princess Octavia — at a banquet where the step-mother Agrippina and the sister Octavia were both present, Britannicus was flung down dead upon the pavement, the auguries were scant indeed that aught of right feeling or of just rule could be expected from a sovereign so commencing his reign. The death was reported as resulting from epilepsy ; the interment was hastened, and the corpse was painted to hide the marks of the potent poison and its rapid action. A rainstorm that came down washed off this disguise, and revealed the true character of the sudden removal. The mother had shared, the sister dared not protest against, the murder. In his own wild fashion Nero loved his keen-eyed, fierce-souled, beautiful, but most ruthless and unscrupulous, mother. The ■watchword to his troops on one evening in the early stage of

1*

Ms reign had been : " Best of Mothers." Nero had a keen relish for sculpture and painting, and music and the dance, and the drama and even poetry. A line of verse said to be of his framing, and j^et preserved, praises the shimmering hues that deck the pigeon's neck. If arts, as some suppose, necessarily reform and elevate, and win from the grovelling and the brutal, the young prince who found himself, with such artistic accomplishments and aspirations, in the possession of absolute power, and with the resources and armies and fleets of a wide empire at his disposal, should have developed himself into a benefactor and a pattern to his myriads of subjects.

Of Felix, one of his subordinate governors in Syria, before whom Paul had appeared and reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, it has been said by that mighty master of language, the Roman historian Tacitus, " that in all savageness and profligacy he wielded the power of a king with the temper of a lackey." The sentence stands yet an incomparable picture of the servile become the despotic. But Felix had been a slave and was but a freedman, though now, like many freedmen of the time, rising to vast influence and affluence. His brother Pallas, also a freedman, had become mighty with Claudius, and with Nero after him ; and the authority of Pallas, the brother, had shielded Felix at Rome when the complaints of the Jews followed him from Syria to the capital. Flunkeyism, to use a word that Charles Kingsley and Thackeray have made classical, is a fearful power when vaulting into the seat of sovereignty. It is to be feared that, though Nero had never been literally a slave, the tastes of the barber and the dancer, the flunkey comrades to whom his childhood had been committed, had imbued the boy with the worst

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traits of servile life. Tiic philosophy that Seneca, his instructor, afterward taught him was in some regards higher than that known to the Epicurean of the times of Horace or the Academe of Cicero. The name of Providence, unknown in the high and large sense to Cicero, that great moralist, appears on the pages of Seneca, and the recognition also of the brotherhood of man. These have seemed to many to imply that, through the widely diffused activities and the adventurous inculcation of the Gospel on the part of its first converts, the lessons of Christian faith were beginning to win, by percolation and moral infiltration, their quiet way into many layers of the Roman Commonwealth where the cvann-elist and the apostle were as yet personally unknown. But, be that as it may, Seneca with all his philosophic reputation was the apologist of some of Nero's earliest excesses, lie could sneer in one of his smaller pieces at the professed reception among the gods of the Emperor Claudius, ridiculing ruthlessly his personal infirmities of speech and aspect. Seneca's own brother, the Gallio before whom Paul had once appeared, and whom Seneca eulogizes as being, for his amiableness, universally and warmly loved, could also, like Seneca, jeer, when he must have known that the death of Claudius was a violent taking away on the part of a sanguinary, unprincipled wife, at the way in which the Emperor had been jerked up among the gods just as the bodies of malefactors in old Rome were tugged or dragged by hooks to be flung into the Tiber. The one brother, Seneca, could mock at the apotheosis of the old, unwieldy Emperor, swollen as a pumpkin, terming it the pumpkinization of the poor helpless imbecile ; and the other, Gallio, spite of his remarkable amiability, had a bitter laugh instead of sympathy

8 IJRAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY.

for the new god whom Rome had so summarily won, in losing an old master, as a poison-tipped feather was thrust down his throat. It was scarce philosophy of this tone and hue that could meet and remedy the terrible evils of Roman society. Impatient of his mother's control (for the wily, passionate Agrippina both threatened and plotted the displacement of the son whom she had exalted when he would not be controlled), she was first the object of a matricidal attempt on the part of her son to drown her. Escaping this, he sent emissaries to despatch her; and it was accomplished with circumstances of revolting atrocity. While Paul was as yet at Csesarea this murderer of a mother accomplished his design. It must have been in the gossip of the barracks among the soldiers who had Paul in charge. His young wife, Octavia, was afterward a victim, appealing vainly to her husband to spare her as a step-sister, if he did not regard her as a wife. This murder was probably after Paul had reached Rome, and when the apostle, yet detained in confinement in his own hired house, was writing to the Christians at Colosse, Philippi, and Ephesus, as to his friend Philemon in behalf of Onesimus.

The turpitudes of Nero's career cannot be stated fully in any Christian assembly. Murders, confiscations, profuse largesses to the multitude, sustained by the murder of proprietors and the seizure of their estates and treasures, were soon his settled policy. Yet he had his friends and favorites, such as they were. Sabina Poppsea, a w^man of reckless character but of great beauty, had been taken to his throne, and both Agrippina, his mother, and his step-sister wife, Octavia, had been sacrificed in her interest. But Poppa^a, as was not nncommon in that age of Roman history, leaned to the faith and rites of the Eastern people ; and Lad at least some favor for Jewish usages, Josephus terming her a devout woman. Before Paul's arrival there were Christian converts in the household establishment of Ca?sar. His salutations in the epistle to the Roman Christians, addressed to the household of Narcissus, are supposed to refer to slaves in the family of Narcissus, one of the powerful and affluent freedmen attached to the imperial court. The funeral places, recently brought to light, of some of these retainers of Narcissus show their Christian hopes and convictions.

If, in earlier times, when it was yet an age of political freedom and of domestic purity in the old Roman State, it had been accounted true nobleness not to despair of the Republic, in days of deepest political darkness, when the welfare of the nation seemed on the verge of utter ruin from an overmastering foreign invader, it certainly argued yet higher virtue, and it required more than human support, when there were found in the Roman Empire, so sodden with vice and so crushed by misrule and oppression, men and women, some of them but slaves, poorly housed, poorly fed, and hardly treated, who yet could hope for better days and, amid abounding and overwhelming social corruption, fear God and love their neighbor. They hoped, for they could pray to a Heaven ever open and always near; they could endure and overcome, because they trusted in a Saviour who had become himself as a servant, and endured the contradiction of sinners, and as the Propitiatory Lamb made atonement for the sins of the world, and as the Advocate on high made evermore intercession for the transgressors who in penitence sought his grace.

Seneca had been required, like multitudes of other victims, to commit suicide. Burrhus, the other guardian of Nero, had died peacefully. But the old soldier, seeiug his master on the stage — which was, according to old Roman notions, a vast social degradation — had been compelled by a regard for his own safety to applaud the imperial stage-player ; but tears streamed down the old soldier's cheeks as he applauded. When Nero visited Greece he contended as charioteer and in the other games of skill ; and was proud of the crowns which the Greeks were ready to lavish upon his assumed superiority — a superiority not very safely or eagerly to be contested.

It was said to Ananias of Damascus, in the weeks of Paul's first conversion, that Saul as a chosen vessel must bear Christ's name before Gentile kings and the children of Israel.'* It had been in a most strange fashion that this had been accomplished. With all manfulness Paul had gone down into the heart of Jerusalem and confronted its elders and its populace, announcing the Saviour at the peril of his own life and with the sacrifice of all his secular prospects. They had attempted his immediate massacre. Failing in this, forty of them had banded together for a second attempt. The Roman captain had despatched him to Caesarea under a military escort. lie meets the Roman governor. But the Jewish rulers made interest for the prisoner's return to Jerusalem, intending to repeat more successfully the attempt to quench in blood this missionary torch of the Gospel. He was compelled to appeal to Caesar.

To Gentile and to Jew he had with heroic persistence imparted his testimony. Now, when in the very centre of Jewish influence they had concerted his death, and these bloody

* Acts ix. 15.

NERO AXl) PAUL. H

fanatics had vowed to starve themselves till they succeeded, he, as a lioman citizen and as a Christian ambassador, turned anew from Hebrew to pai^an. Through what delay and wrecks lie reaches his audience at the Roman capital ! Mclita must be evangelized by the way. AVhcn Judaism thus flung him forth, he was hurled by the vengeance of his countrymen, and by the wonder-working providence of his Blessed Master, to the foot of the imperial throne. The catapult which the nation had shot for his extermination but speeded him on his mission to the hated pagan. It was not to muster there a party against the rulers of the Jewish people — he made it his first business in the capital to assemble his unbelieving countrymen there, and disavow such purpose — but there he must preach Christ in all fidelity. A man of mature years, and worn by profuse and incessant labors, he was to human judgment little adapted to confront and to attract the young sensualist, artist, and despot who filled the throne. Nero was but seventeen when he came to the purple ; but thirty-one when he died ; and probably somewhere about twenty-four years of age when Paul was arraigned at his tribunal. The New Testament makes no needless statement as to Paul's experience there. What power, with all its vast, incalculable resources; what art, with all its splendor and bewitching attractiveness; what philosophy, with all its multiform speculations, from the atheism of Lucretius and the Epicureanism of Horace to the academic elegance of Cicero and the stoical principles of Seneca, could not secure of hope, of alleviation for present evils, of remedy for innermost diseases, of recovery for the lost, of regeneration — free, sure, and abiding — by the blood of the One Oblation, and by the Spirit of God freely given to the suppliant — peace beyond the grave,

— brotherhood in sinless, endless blessedness before a throne compared to which Elysium -was a mere show — all this the born Hebrew, Roman freedman by birth, Greek scholar by culture, Pharisaic zealot by education, now as Christ's apostle proclaimed for a world-wide hearing and proffered as a free personal gift to each suppliant.

In Paul's first hearing he seems to have been, kindly or contemptuously, dismissed by Nero — delivered, as he phrases it, from the lion's mouth. His chronology is left by the silence of Scripture in some uncertainty. We suppose it the best sustained probability that he was liberated, and made the journey into Spain which he had long contemplated. We think of that land now as a distinct country from Italy. It was then pervaded by the Latin language, and formed a portion of the vast Roman Empire. The Seneca, Nero's philosophic tutor, and the Gallio named in the Acts, the brother of Seneca, and Lucan, the young poet of the Pharsalia, nephew of Seneca and rival and victim of Nero, were all of this same Spain. During his absence from the capital, probably, occurred the great fire at Rome, when so many habitations were swept away, and which Nero surveyed, likening it to the fall of Troy. That conflagration, some say of his own kindling, Nero attributed to the Christians ; and then began a fierce persecution. The victims, wrapped in pitched cloths, and with a sharp stake under the chin to keep the face erect, were burnt as torches, while, by the lurid light of the terrible ilkimination, Nero, robed as a charioteer, mingled with the mob, or urged his steeds — a proud competitor for the applause of the rabble on his skilled driving. Paul was afterward, probably on some fresh complaint of the heathen enemy, sent to Rome ; and this

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time it was to die. But in his Epistles to Timotliy and Titu3 it is the voice, as we read, of the brave and exultant champion nearing his goal, and eying his crown, " ready to be offered up," for the preceding Sacrifice on Calvary had taken from death its sting, and the true apostle was ready to go into the other world dauntlessly in the train of the Chief Apostle of his profession and of ours.

Meanwhile, according to British tradition and the notices of Roman history, Britain liad been subdued. Caractacus, or Caradoc, had been brought captive to Rome ; but by the dignity of his bearing won the respect of his conquerors. Old tradition makes him the convert of the Gospel, with some of liis family, in their Roman captivity. Scholars of no mean name have held the Claudia and Tudcns of Paul's Epistles converts connected with that family and history. Boadicea afterward rebelled, and was subdued. But the Roman IMautius, eminent in an earlier war against Britain, had a wife, Pomponia Griccina, who, according to the notices of Roman history, seems to have been a convert to the Gospel. Vespasian served under Plautius, and in this British campaign acquired the elements of the experience that fitted him to subdue Palestine, and trained him to be one of the successors of Nero. From quarters so various was Providence calling the avenger.

The people of the island, thus brought into connection with the Empire of Rome and the Gospel of Christ, wield now a dominion wider than that of any of the Cffisars. When Paul came back to suffer, the people and city and fane that had so passionately repelled Paul's message and Master, and hurled the apostle away upon Rome, little knew Vespasian's destined mission and the recoil of Christ's rejected Gospel on their own heads. If, as the chronology of Conybeare and Howson places it, Paul's second appearance at Rome, not this time before Nero himself, but probably before some of the assistant magistracy of the empire, was in the year 68 — such being Paul's date of death — in the same year, too, ended the earthly career of the monstrous Nero. He had by largesses bribed populace and soldiery ; but his unspeakable excesses and general tyranny made treason and plotting ever recurrent. They were soon successful. He would fain have resorted to suicide ; but shrunk, in craven terror, after trying the edge of two daggers. With a strange self-pity that would have been ludicrous if not so wretched, he compassionated the world for losing in himself so great an artist. lie wished he might travel in Egypt or elsewhere, as artist; for an artist, as he said, could everywhere find bread and home. Nor, much as we may despise and abhor the man, can we well forget the magnificence of some of his constructions and the wide range of some others that he had in purpose, but never executed. His Baths and Golden Palace were, according to all accounts, of great splendor and beauty. The " Apollo Belvidere " and the " Dying Gladiator" — statues which the world yet admires — came, it is said, from what seem to have been the ruins of Nero's edifices; and, if so, the eyes of the vile despot looked often on these masterpieces of sculpture. It had been his intention to dig a canal along the shore of Italy, where Paul landed — an approach for commerce ; and still another canal would he have dug across the Isthmus of Corinth, where Paul long labored. Had his projects been accomplished, the Emperor would have left his traces thus on land and sea, unconscious of their vicinity to stages in the apostle's career of toil. The scrawl of the

NERO AXD PAUL. 15

apostle's pen remains ; the despot's plans ended in cogitation. But artist and despot, when death neared, was glad to seek shelter in the proffered home of a frecdman some few miles from Rome ; crept on all-fours into the humble apartment where he might best be sheltered ; and had the aid of a freedman in giving himself the fatal stab, having meanwhile quoted verses of Homer on the sound of horses' feet, as he heard the tramp of the horsemen sent to seize him. They affected a wish to stanch his wounds. He said, "You come too late. Is this your fidelity ?'' and expired with horror staring from his eyes. Yet affection clung even to his name. It was long believed that he might yet return ; and some of the early Christians interpreted John's Apocalypse as presenting, in the antichrist, the image of this dreaded and detested persecutor yet to return for a new lease of hatred and devastation.

In his time lived a false Christ, such as the true Saviour warned his disciples against, in the Apollonius of Tyanea, whom Gibbon, in a sentence of studied impiety, has endeavored to place on the plane of equality with the Saviour of the world. Apollonius was a shrewd conjurer and trickster. His life, written long after, when despairing paganism would fain evoke a rival for the Christ, who was emptying its temples and subverting its most honored fanes, has been in recent times, in one of its translations, honored with an epistle said to have been composed by Voltaire's pupil, Frederick the Great of Prussia. The story is a very clumsy parody. He did not confront Nero as Paul did ; and the insipid utterances which his biographer records are never likely to replace the discourses of the man of Tarsus, or the Sermon on the Mount of the Man of Sorrows and the King of Glory.

But tbe story may well be recalled, to remind us how varied, on the one hand, were the forms of dominant evil with which a nascent Christianity, on the other hand, was called to contend — that evil intrenched in power, enshrined in art, commended by philosophy, and re-enforced by superstition and imposture. The Sufferer of Calvary assured his followers of an ultimate triumph ; but he told frankly upon what terms of fullest self-sacrifice it was to come. The men whom he enlisted had neither the patronage of the empire, nor the blandishments of art, nor the honors of a varied philosophy. But contrast what they surrendered with what they achieved. See them everywhere hunted, maligned, persecuted, tortured, and sacrificed. Yet certainly Nero's death, and Seneca's death, and Agrippina's death, and Octavia's death were of another temper than that which the new faith of the Nazarene inspired in myriads on myriads of its converts, trophies of either sex, and of every age, and of most varied condition.

Poor, homeless, and aged, in terms which he cites from his assailants, " in bodily presence weak, and in speech contemptible," what was, nevertheless, Paul's bearing? What is his present influence, widening with every Bible dropped from the polyglot presses? And where is Nero, and his art, and his influence?

Is the conflict between error and truth yet terminated? Has the nineteenth Christian century escaped all need of farther toil? He would be a rash and untrustworthy guide who should pronounce the long conflict finally and fully settled. The glare and blare of the Judgment Day, the trump that opens all the graves of the generations, and the glory of the Judge descending to confront his re-assembled subjects of all the centni'ies — these only -will bring the final arbitrament and solution. Meanwhile, man, as the fallible and the presumptuous and the wilful, will cavil, pervert, and rebel. Each individual will win or lose his soul apart; and the ancient tempter, who plotted in Eden, will be found having only the greater rage to mislead and instigate and marshal his dupes, in proportion as he finds the tether of his chain shortened, and the hour of his final exposure and overthrow impending. Under this skilful machination, the old heresies will yet pullulate in new forms ; and the enmities, for the time abashed and renounced as unsatisfactory, will emerge from the entombment of centuries, and re-assert themselves under new banners and with novel watchwords. But our faith in God's oracles, and in the purposes of his blessed dominion long since announced by prophet and apostle, may well gather fresh confidence from all the struggles and costly victories of the past, and in prospect of all the recommencing battles of the future. They who follow Paul's Master have first in their behalf the eternity and indestructibility of truth. As, with regard to the material world, all the turmoil on the face of our whirling planet has not altered, will not in the long-drawn future alter, the truth as to the laws by which that ball revolves, and the influences that bind its atoms together, and hold its mass in its due orbit as to other worlds in the system. Man may ignore, forget, and distort as to his statements concerning this truth in regard to the laws of physical being. But the cavil stirs not the world's axis, and shifts not its goal. And equally sure, but far more august, are the principles of that spiritual and divine truth which is the outgush of the Divine Nature. Bards sing and sages laud the indestructible, unconquerable energy of truth.