extravagance--contemptible, indeed, but otherwise insignificant. To the
Jews, on the other hand, it was an object of hatred, which never stopped
short of bloodshed when it possessed or could usurp the power, and
which, though long suppressed by circumstances, displayed itself in all
the intensity of its virulence during the brief spasm of the
dictatorship of Barcochebas. Christianity was hateful to the Jews on
_every_ ground. It nullified their law. It liberated all Gentiles from
the heavy yoke of that law, without thereby putting them on a lower
level. It even tended to render those who were born Jews indifferent to
the institutions of Mosaism. It was, as it were, a fatal revolt and
schism from within, more dangerous than any assault from without. And,
worse than all, it was by the Gentiles confounded with the Judaism which
was its bitterest antagonist. While it sheltered its existence under the
mantle of Judaism, as a _religio licita_, it drew down upon the religion
from whose bosom it sprang all the scorn and hatred which were attached
by the world to its own special tenets, for however much the Greeks and
Romans despised the Jews, they despised still more the belief that the
Lord and Saviour of the world was a crucified malefactor who had risen
from the dead.
I see in the proselytism of Poppæa, guided by Jewish malice, the only
adequate explanation of the first Christian persecution. Hers was the
jealousy which had goaded Nero to matricide; hers not improbably was the
instigated fanaticism of a proselyte which urged him to imbrue his hands
in martyr blood. And she had her reward. A woman of whom Tacitus has not
a word of good to say and who seems to have been repulsive even to a
Suetonius, is handed down by the renegade Pharisee as "a devout
woman"--as a worshipper of God!
And, indeed, when once the Christians were pointed out to the popular
vengeance, many reasons would be adduced to prove their connection with
the conflagration. Temples had perished--and were they not notorious
enemies of the temples? Did not popular rumor charge them with nocturnal
orgies and Thyestæan feasts? Suspicions of incendiarism were sometimes
brought against Jews; but the Jews were not in the habit of talking, as
these sectaries were, about a fire which should consume the world, and
rejoicing in the prospect of that fiery consummation.[33] Nay, more,
when pagans had bewailed the destruction of the city and the loss of
the ancient monuments of Rome, had not these pernicious people used
ambiguous language, as though they joyously recognized in these events
the signs of a coming end? Even when they tried to suppress all outward
tokens of exultation, had they not listened to the fears and
lamentations of their fellow-citizens with some sparkle in the eyes, and
had they not answered with something of triumph in their tones? There
was a satanic plausibility which dictated the selection of these
particular victims. Because they hated the wickedness of the world, with
its ruthless games and hideous idolatries, they were accused of hatred
of the whole human race.
The charge of _incivisme_, so fatal in this reign of terror, was
sufficient to ruin a body of men who scorned the sacrifices of
heathendom and turned away with abhorrence from its banquets and
gayeties. The cultivated classes looked down upon the Christians with a
disdain which would hardly even mention them without an apology. The
_canaille_ of pagan cities insulted them with obscene inscriptions and
blasphemous pictures on the very walls of the places where they met.[34]
Nay, they were popularly known by nicknames, like _Sarmenticii_ and
_Semaxii_--untranslatable terms of opprobrium derived from the fagots
with which they were burned and the stakes to which they were chained.
Even the heroic courage which they displayed was described as being
sheer obstinacy and stupid fanaticism.
But in the method chosen for the punishment of these saintly innocents
Nero gave one more proof of the close connection between effeminate
æstheticism and sanguinary callousness. As in old days, "on that
opprobrious hill," the temple of Chemosh had stood close by that of
Moloch, so now we find the _spoliarium_ beside the _fornices_--Lust hard
by Hate. The _carnificina_ of Tiberius, at Capreæ, adjoined the
_sellariæ_. History has given many proofs that no man is more
systematically heartless than a corrupted debauchee. Like people, like
prince. In the then condition of Rome, Nero well knew that a nation,
"cruel, by their sports to blood inured," would be most likely to forget
their miseries and condone their suspicions by mixing games and gayety
with spectacles of refined and atrocious cruelty, of which, for eighteen
centuries, the most passing record has sufficed to make men's blood run
cold.
Tacitus tells us that "those who confessed were first seized, and then
on their evidence _a huge multitude_[35] were convicted, not so much on
the charge of incendiarism as for their hatred to mankind." Compressed
and obscure as the sentence is, Tacitus clearly means to imply by the
"confession" to which he alludes the confession of Christianity, and
though he is not sufficiently generous to acquit the Christians
absolutely of all complicity in the great crime, he distinctly says that
they were made the scapegoats of a general indignation. The phrase--"a
huge multitude"--is one of the few existing indications of the number of
martyrs in the first persecution, and of the number of Christians in the
Roman Church. When the historian says that they were convicted on the
charge of "hatred against mankind" he shows how completely he confounds
them with the Jews, against whom he elsewhere brings the accusation of
"hostile feelings toward all except themselves."
Then the historian adds one casual but frightful sentence--a sentence
which flings a dreadful light on the cruelty of Nero and the Roman mob.
He adds: "And various forms of mockery were added to enhance their dying
agonies. Covered with the skins of wild beasts, they were doomed to die
by the mangling of dogs, or by being nailed to crosses, or to be set on
fire and burned after twilight by way of nightly illumination. Nero
offered his own garden for this show, and gave a chariot race, mingling
with the mob in the dress of a charioteer, or actually driving about
among them. Hence, guilty as the victims were, and deserving of the
worst punishments, a feeling of compassion toward them began to rise, as
men felt that they were being immolated not for any advantage to the
Commonwealth, but to glut the savagery of a single man."
Imagine that awful scene, once witnessed by the silent obelisk in the
square before St. Peter's at Rome! Imagine it, that we may realize how
vast is the change which Christianity has wrought in the feelings of
mankind! There, where the vast dome now rises, were once the gardens of
Nero. They were thronged with gay crowds, among whom the Emperor moved
in his frivolous degradation--and on every side were men dying slowly on
their cross of shame. Along the paths of those gardens on the autumn
nights were ghastly torches, blackening the ground beneath them with
streams of sulphurous pitch, and each of those living torches was a
martyr in his shirt of fire. And in the amphitheatre hard by, in sight
of twenty thousand spectators, famished dogs were tearing to pieces some
of the best and purest of men and women, hideously disguised in the
skins of bears or wolves. Thus did Nero baptize in the blood of martyrs
the city which was to be for ages the capital of the world!
The specific atrocity of such spectacles--unknown to the earlier ages
which they called barbarous--was due to the cold-blooded selfishness,
the hideous realism of a refined, delicate, æsthetic age. To please
these "lisping hawthorn buds," these debauched and sanguinary dandies,
art, forsooth, must know nothing of morality; must accept and rejoice in
a "healthy animalism"; must estimate life by the number of its few
wildest pulsations; must reckon that life is worthless without the most
thrilling experiences of horror or delight! Comedy must be actual shame,
and tragedy genuine bloodshed. When the play of Afranius, called _The
Conflagration_, was put on the stage, a house must be really burned and
its furniture really plundered. In the mime called _Laureolus_ an actor
must really be crucified and mangled by a bear, and really fling himself
down and deluge the stage with blood. When the heroism of Mucius Scævola
was represented, a real criminal must thrust his hand without a groan
into the flame and stand motionless while it is being burned. Prometheus
must be really chained to his rock, and Dirce in very fact be tossed and
gored by the wild bull; and Orpheus be torn to pieces by a real bear;
and Icarus must really fly, even though he fall and be dashed to death;
and Hercules must ascend the funeral pyre and there be veritably burned
alive; and slaves and criminals must play their parts heroically in gold
and purple till the flames envelop them.
It was the ultimate romance of a degraded and brutalized society. The
Roman people, "victors once, now vile and base," could now only be
amused by sanguinary melodrama. Fables must be made realities, and the
criminal must gracefully transform his supreme agonies into amusements
for the multitude by becoming a gladiator or a tragedian. Such were the
spectacles at which Nero loved to gaze through his emerald eye-glass.
And worse things than these--things indescribable, unutterable. Infamous
mythologies were enacted, in which women must play their part in
torments of shamefulness more intolerable than death. A St. Peter must
hang upon the cross in the Pincian gardens, as a real Laureolus upon the
stage. A Christian boy must be the Icarus, and a Christian man the
Scævola or the Hercules or the Orpheus of the amphitheatre; and
Christian women, modest maidens, holy matrons, must be the Danaids or
the Proserpine or worse, and play their parts as priestesses of Saturn
and Ceres, and in blood-stained dramas of the dead. No wonder that Nero
became to Christian imagination the very incarnation of evil; the
antichrist; the Wild Beast from the abyss; the delegate of the great red
Dragon, with a diadem and a name of blasphemy upon his brow. No wonder
that he left a furrow of horror in the hearts of men, and that, ten
centuries after his death, the church of Sta. Maria del Popolo had to be
built by Pope Pascal II to exorcise from Christian Rome his restless and
miserable ghost!
And it struck them with deeper horror to see that the antichrist, so far
from being abhorred, was generally popular. He was popular because he
presented to the degraded populace their own image and similitude. The
frog-like unclean spirits which proceeded, as it were, out of his mouth
were potent with these dwellers in an atmosphere of pestilence. They had
lost all love for freedom and nobleness; they cared only for doles and
excitement. Even when the infamies of a Petronius had been superseded by
the murderous orgies of Tigellinus, Nero was still everywhere welcomed
with shouts as a god on earth and saluted on all coins as Apollo, as
Hercules, as "the savior of the world." The poets still assured him
that there was no deity in heaven who would not think it an honor to
concede to him his prerogatives; that if he did not place himself well
in the centre of Olympus, the equilibrium of the universe would be
destroyed. Victims were slain along his path, and altars raised for
him--for this wretch, whom an honest slave could not but despise and
loathe--as though he was too great for mere human honors. Nay, more, he
found adorers and imitators of his execrable example--an Otho, a
Vitellius, a Domitian, a Commodus, a Caracalla, a Heliogabalus--to
poison the air of the world. The lusts and hungers and furies of the
world lamented him, and cherished his memory, and longed for his return.
And yet, though all bad men--who were the majority--admired and even
loved him, he died the death of a dog. Tremendous as was the power of
imperialism, the Romans often treated their individual emperors as Nero
himself treated the Syrian goddess, whose image he first worshipped with
awful veneration and then subjected to the most grotesque indignities,
for retribution did not linger, and the vengeance fell at once on the
guilty Emperor and the guilty city.
"Careless _seems_ the Great Avenger: History's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt false systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."[36]
The air was full of prodigies. There were terrible storms; the plague
wrought fearful ravages. Rumors spread from lip to lip. Men spoke of
monstrous births; of deaths by lightning under strange circumstances; of
a brazen statue of Nero melted by the flash; of places struck by the
brand of heaven in fourteen regions of the city; of sudden darkenings of
the sun. A hurricane devastated Campania; comets blazed in the heavens;
earthquakes shook the ground. On all sides were the traces of deep
uneasiness and superstitious terror. To all these portents, which were
accepted as true by Christians as well as by pagans, the Christians
would give a specially terrible significance. They strengthened their
conviction that the coming of the Lord drew nigh. They convinced the
better sort of pagans that the hour of their deliverance from a tyranny
so monstrous and so disgraceful was near at hand.
In spite of the shocking servility with which alike the senate and the
people had welcomed him back to the city with shouts of triumph, Nero
felt that the air of Rome was heavy with curses against his name. He
withdrew to Naples, and was at supper there on March 19, A.D. 68, the
anniversary of his mother's murder, when he heard that the first note of
revolt had been sounded by the brave C. Julius Vindex, prefect of
Farther Gaul. He was so far from being disturbed by the news that he
showed a secret joy at the thought that he could now order Gaul to be
plundered. For eight days he took no notice of the matter. He was only
roused to send an address to the senate because Vindex wounded his
vanity by calling him _Ahenobarbus_[37] and "a bad singer." But when
messenger after messenger came from the provinces with tidings of
menace, he hurried back to Rome. At last, when he heard that Virginius
Rufus had also rebelled in Germany, and Galba in Spain, he became aware
of the desperate nature of his position.
On receiving this intelligence he fainted away, and remained for some
time unconscious. He continued, indeed, his grossness and frivolity, but
the wildest and fiercest schemes chased each other through his
melodramatic brain. He would slay all the exiles; he would give up all
the provinces to plunder; he would order all the Gauls in the city to be
butchered; he would have all the senators invited to banquets, and would
then poison them; he would have the city set on fire, and the wild
beasts of the Amphitheatre let loose among the people; he would depose
both the consuls and become sole consul himself, since legend said that
only by a consul could Gauls be conquered; he would go with an army to
the province, and when he got there would do nothing but weep, and when
he had thus moved the rebels to compassion would next day sing with them
at a great festival the ode of victory which he must at once compose.
Not a single manly resolution lent a moment's dignity to his miserable
fall.
Sometimes he talked of escaping to Ostia and arming the sailors; at
others of escaping to Alexandria and earning his bread by his "divine
voice." Meanwhile he was hourly subjected to the deadliest insults, and
terrified by dreams and omens so sombre that his faith in the
astrologers who had promised him the government of the East and the
kingdom of Jerusalem began to be rudely shaken. When he heard that not a
single army or general remained faithful to him, he kicked over the
table at which he was dining, dashed to pieces on the ground two
favorite goblets embossed with scenes from the Homeric poems, and placed
in a golden box some poison furnished to him by Locusta.
The last effort which he contemplated was to mount the Rostra, beg
pardon of the people for his crimes, ask them to try him again, and, at
the worst, to allow him the prefecture of Egypt. But this design he did
not dare to carry out, from fear that he would be torn to pieces before
he reached the Forum. Meanwhile he found that the palace had been
deserted by his guards, and that his attendants had robbed his chamber
even of the golden box in which he had stored his poison. Rushing out,
as though to drown himself in the Tiber, he changed his mind, and begged
for some quiet hiding-place in which to collect his thoughts. The
freedman Phaon offered him a lowly villa about four miles from the city.
Barefooted, and with a faded coat thrown over his tunic, he hid his head
and face in a kerchief and rode away with only four attendants. On the
road he heard the tumult of the prætorians cursing his name. Amid evil
omens and serious perils he reached the back of Phaon's villa, and,
creeping toward it through a muddy reed-bed, was secretly admitted into
one of its mean slave-chambers by an aperture through which he had to
crawl on his hands and feet.
There is no need to dwell on the miserable spectacle of his end, perhaps
the meanest and most pusillanimous which has ever been recorded. The
poor wretch who, without a pang, had caused so many brave Romans and so
many innocent Christians to be murdered could not summon up resolution
to die. He devised every operatic incident of which he could think. When
even his most degraded slaves urged him to have sufficient manliness to
save himself from the fearful infamies which otherwise awaited him, he
ordered his grave to be dug, and fragments of marble to be collected for
its adornment, and water and wood for his funeral pyre, perpetually
whining, "What an artist to perish!"
Meanwhile a courier arrived for Phaon. Nero snatched his despatches out
of his hand and read that the senate had decided that he should be
punished in the ancestral fashion as a public enemy. Asking what the
ancestral fashion was, he was informed that he would be stripped naked
and scourged to death with rods, with his head thrust into a fork.
Horrified at this, he seized two daggers, and, after theatrically trying
their edges, sheathed them again, with the excuse that the fatal moment
had not yet arrived! Then he bade Sporus begin to sing his funeral song,
and begged some one to show him how to die. Even his own intense shame
at his cowardice was an insufficient stimulus, and he whiled away the
time in vapid epigrams and pompous quotations. The sound of horses'
hoofs then broke on his ears, and, venting one more Greek quotation, he
held the dagger to his throat. It was driven home by Epaphroditus, one
of his literary slaves. At this moment the centurion who came to arrest
him rushed in. Nero was not yet dead, and under pretence of helping him
the centurion began to stanch the wound with his cloak. "Too late," he
said; "is this your fidelity?" So he died; and the bystanders were
horrified with the way in which his eyes seemed to be starting out of
his head in a rigid stare. He had begged that his body might be burned
without posthumous insults, and this was conceded by Icelus, the
freedman of Galbo.
So died the last of the Cæsars! And as Robespierre was lamented by his
landlady, so even Nero was tenderly buried by two nurses who had known
him in the exquisite beauty of his engaging childhood, and by Acte, who
had inspired his youth with a genuine love.
But his history does not end with his grave. He was to live on in the
expectation alike of Jews and Christians. The fifth head of the Wild
Beast of the Revelation was in some sort to reappear as the eighth; the
head with its diadem and its names of blasphemy had been wounded to
death, but in the Apocalyptic sense the deadly wound was to be healed.
The Roman world could not believe that the heir of the deified Julian
race could be cut off thus suddenly and obscurely and vanish like foam
upon the water. The Christians felt sure that it required something more
than an ordinary death stroke to destroy the antichrist, and to end the
vitality of the Wild Beast from the Abyss, who had been the first to set
himself in deadly antagonism against the Redeemer and to wage war upon
the saints of God.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] In his behavior at the burning of Rome.
[30] There can be little doubt that the name "Christian"--so curiously
hybrid, yet so richly expressive--was a nickname due to the wit of the
Antiochenes, which exercised itself quite fearlessly even on the Roman
emperors. They were not afraid to affix nicknames to Caracalla, and to
call Julian Cecrops and Victimarius, with keen satire of his beard. It
is clear that the sacred writers avoided the name, because it was
employed by their enemies, and by them mingled with terms of the vilest
opprobrium. It only became familiar when the virtues of Christians had
shed lustre upon it, and when alike in its true form, and in the
ignorant mispronunciation "Chrestians," it readily lent itself to
valuable allegorical meanings.
[31] According to John of Antioch and the _Chronicon Paschale_, Nero was
originally favorable to the Christians, and put Pilate to death, for
which the Jews plotted his murder. Poppæa's Judaism is inferred from her
refusing to be burned, and requesting to be embalmed; from her adopting
the custom of wearing a veil in the streets; from the favor which she
showed to Aliturus and Josephus; and from the fact that Josephus speaks
of her as a religious woman.
[32] Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of Philo, afterward procurator of
Judea, was a person of influence at Rome; but he was a renegade, and
would not be likely to hate the Christians. It is, however, remarkable
that legend attributed the anger of Nero to the conversion of his
mistress and a favorite slave.
[33] St. Peter--apparently thinking of the fire at Rome and its
consequences--calls the persecution from which the Christians were
suffering when he wrote his First Epistle a "conflagration."
[34] Tertullian mentions one of these coarse caricatures--a figure with
one foot hoofed, wearing a toga, carrying a book, and with long ass's
ears, under which was written, "The God of the Christians, Onokoites."
He says that Christians were actually charged with worshipping the head
of an ass. The same preposterous calumny, with many others, is alluded
to by Minucius Felix. The Christians were hence called _Asinarii_.
Analogous calumnies were aimed at the Jews.
[35] Tertullian says that "Nero was the first who raged with the sword
of Cæsar against this sect, which was then specially rising at Rome."
[36] James Russell Lowell: _The Present Crisis_.
[37] "Bronze-beard." Ahenobarbus was the name of a plebeian family to
which Nero belonged.
THE GREAT JEWISH REVOLT
SIEGE AND DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM
A.D. 70
JOSEPHUS
From A.D. 66 events of great moment occurred in Palestine. The Jews
were in the throes of revolt against the Roman Government. At the
same time the chief factions of the revolutionary party were
constantly fighting each other. One of these factions was led by
the famous John of Gischala, another by Simon bar Gioras, and a
third by Eleazar. These factions of a party which--since the
reduction of Judea to a Roman province soon after the death of
Herod--had resisted the oppression of the procurators, were now
stirred to revolt by the exactions of the procurator Gessius
Florus. The revolutionary party, called the Zealots, gained power,
and there were many outbreaks in Jerusalem. The counsel of the more
prudent spirits was disregarded. At last Roman blood was shed. The
nobility and priesthood played into the hands of the Zealots by
applying to Florus to put down the revolt. Florus marched against
Jerusalem and was badly beaten by the Zealots.
Open war henceforth existed. Josephus, a Jew of the lineage of
Aaron, trained according to the best discipline of his race, and
who had also been well received at Rome, was placed by his
countrymen in command of the province of Galilee. Afterward, as a
historian, he described the events of the war.