_WANDERINGS OF AN OUTCAST_
‘Matrisque Deum chorus intrat, et ingens
Semivir, obscæno facies reverenda minori,
* * * * *
Jam pridem cui rauca cohors, cui tympana cedunt
Plebeia, et Phrygia vestitur bucca tiara.’
JUV. _Sat._ vi. 511.
Onesimus was still in evil case. Everywhere he was looked upon with
suspicious eyes. The mass of the population felt an aversion for
fugitive slaves, and such, at the first glance, they conjectured him
to be. His dress was a slave’s dress--he had no means of changing
it--and his hand still bore the bruises of the manacle. There was
nothing for him to do but to beg his way, and he rarely got anything
but scraps of food which barely sufficed to keep body and soul
together. In those days there had long been visible that sure sign
of national decadence,
‘Wealth, a monster gorged
‘Mid starving populations.’
‘Huge estates,’ says Pliny, ‘ruined Italy.’ Along the roads villas
were visible here and there, among umbrageous groves of elm and
chestnut, and their owners, to whom belonged the land for miles
around, often did not visit these villas once in a year. Onesimus
would gladly have laboured, but labour was a drug in the market.
The old honest race of Roman farmers, who ate their beans and bacon
in peace and plenty by fount and stream, and who each enlisted the
services of a few free labourers and their sons, had almost entirely
disappeared. The fields were tilled by gangs of slaves, whose only
home was often an ergastulum, and who worked in chains. Luxury
surrounded itself with hordes of superfluous and vicious ministers;
but these were mainly purchased from foreign slave-markets, and a
slave who had already been in service was regarded as a _veterator_,
up to every trick and villany--for otherwise no master would have
parted with him. A good, honest, sober, well-behaved slave, on whose
fidelity and love a master could trust, was regarded as a treasure;
and happy were the nobles or wealthy knights and burghers who
possessed a few such slaves to rid them from the terror of being
surrounded by thieves and secret foes. But how was Onesimus, now for
a second time a fugitive, to find his way again into any honourable
household? As he thought of the fair lot which might have befallen
him, he sat down by the dusty road and wept. He was hungry, and in
rags. Life lay wasted and disgraced behind him, while the prospect
of the future was full of despair and shame. He was a prodigal among
the swine in a far country, and no man gave him even the husks to eat.
Misery after misery assailed him. One night as he slept under a
plane tree in the open air the wolves came down from the neighbouring
hills, and he only saved his life from their hungry rage by the
agility with which he climbed the tree. One day as he came near a
villa to beg for bread he was taken for a spy of bandits. The slaves
set a fierce Molossian dog upon him, and he would have been torn to
pieces if he had not dropped on all fours, and confronted the dog
with such a shout that the Molossus started back, and Onesimus had
time to dash a huge stone against his snarling teeth, which drove him
howling away.
For one who thus wandered through the country there were abundant
proofs of the wretchedness and wickedness of the lower classes
of Pagan life. He observed one day the blackened ruins of a large
farm-house with its ricks and cattle-sheds, and not far from it he
saw the white skeleton of a man chained to the hollow trunk of an
aged fig-tree. The spot seemed to be shunned by all human beings,
as though the curse of God were upon it. Onesimus was wandering
curiously about it, and trying to appease his hunger with a few
ears of corn from one of the half-burnt ricks, when the shout of a
shepherd on a distant hill attracted his attention. He went to the
man, who shared with him some of his black barley-bread, and told him
that he had shouted to warn him from an ‘ill-omened and fatal place.’
‘Why ill-omened and fatal?’ asked Onesimus. ‘The place belonged,’
answered the peasant, ‘to a master who had entrusted the care of it
to a head slave. This man, though married, deserted his wife for a
free woman of foreign extraction, whom his master had brought to the
villa. The fury of his slave-wife turned into raging madness. She
burnt all her husband’s accounts and possessions. She thrust a torch
into every rick and barn, and when she saw the flames mount high,
tied herself to her little son, and precipitated herself with him
into a deep well. The master, furious at his losses, and shocked by
such a tragedy, inflicted a terrible vengeance on the guilty slave.
Stripping him naked, he chained him to the fig-tree, of which the
hollow trunk had been the immemorial nest of swarms of bees. He
smeared the wretch’s body with honey, and left him to perish.’ The
bleaching skeleton had become the terror of the neighbourhood. No
one dared to touch it, and the place, haunted with dark spirits of
crime and retribution, was shunned far and wide as an accursed spot.
Sickened with miseries, Onesimus gradually made his way to Pompeii.
Every street and wall of the bright little Greek town bore witness to
the depths of degradation into which the inhabitants had fallen, and
the youth found that the radiant scene, under the shadow of Vesuvius
and its glorious vineyards by that blue and sparkling sea, was a
garden of God indeed, but, like that of the Cities of the Plain,
awaiting the fire and brimstone which were to fall on it from heaven.
He was specially disgusted because, alien as he was now from all
Christian truth, he saw on the walls of a large assembly-room in
the Street of the Baths a mass of scribblings full of deadly insults
towards the Christians. One in particular offended him, for, by way
of coarse satire on some Christian teacher, it said:--
‘Mulus hic muscellas docuit.’
‘Here a mule taught small flies.’
It was evidently no place for any one who still loved Christianity.
Hurrying from its fascination of corruption, to which he felt it only
too possible that he might succumb, he was for some time reduced to
the very brink of starvation, and was at last driven to live on such
fruits and berries as he could pluck from the trees and hedges. Once,
while he was trying to reach some wild crab-apples in a place by the
side of a little stream, which was overgrown with dense foliage, he
slipped, and fell crashing through the brushwood into the deep and
muddy water which was hidden by the undergrowth. Too weak to rise and
struggle, he could only just support himself by clinging to a bough,
when his cries were heard. A labourer came and rescued him, and
left him sitting in the sunlight to dry his soaking rags. And now
he thought that there was nothing left him but to die, and seriously
meditated whether it would not be best to fling himself into the
green-covered sludge of black water from which he had been rescued,
and so to end his miseries.
A sound arrested him, and, lifting his head, he saw a group of the
eunuch priests of the Syrian goddess approaching along the road, one
of whom shook the jingling sistrum which had attracted his attention.
They were a company of seven, and were men taken from the dregs of
the populace. With them was a stout youth, who rode an ass which
carried their various properties, the chief of which were musical
instruments, and the image of the goddess wrapped in an embroidered
veil.
As they passed they eyed him curiously, and stopped a few paces
beyond him as though for a consultation.
‘A likely youth,’ he heard one of them say, ‘though now he looks thin
and miserable. We have long wanted another servant. Would not he do
for us, Philebus?’
‘Probably a runaway slave,’ said another.
‘What does that matter to us?’ said Philebus. ‘We can say that he
called himself free-born, and told us that he ran away from the
cruelties of a step-mother--or anything else we choose to invent.
I will go and question him.’
Philebus was an old man with a wizened and wrinkled face. The top of
his head was bald; the rest of his grey locks were trained to hang
round his head in long curls.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.
Onesimus nodded.
‘Here is bread for you, and some flesh of kid, and some wine.’
Onesimus ate and drank with ravenous eagerness, and the old man asked
him, ‘A fugitive slave?’
‘I was free born.’
‘Hum-m!’ muttered Philebus, incredulously. ‘Well, you are wet,
hungry, ragged, miserable. Will you be our servant?’
‘I am not going to be a priest of the Syrian goddess,’ said Onesimus,
with horror.
‘No one asked you to be,’ answered Philebus, with a sneer. ‘You will
have light work, good pay, good food.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Only to help in tending the ass, and cooking our meals, and going
round with the bag for us when we perform.’
The youth paused. Could he, once a Christian, accept this degrading
servitude to the vilest of mankind? Yet, after all, what was
servitude? What was degradation? Could he be more miserable than he
was? To be a servant of the Galli was better than the suicide and the
dimly imagined horrors of that unknown world which he had just been
about to brave.
‘I will come,’ he said.
The old man brought him a tunic in place of his soaked and torn
dress, gave him more wine and food, and taking him to the rest
congratulated them on their new and handsome servant.
Then began a mode of life which Onesimus could never recall in after
years without a blush of shame and indignation--a life of squalor,
mendacity[*10], and imposture, made more vile by the sanction of
abject superstition. In the morning, when the priests drew near to
any place where a few spectators could be gathered together, they set
out in motley array, dressed in many-coloured robes, and with yellow
caps of linen or woollen on their heads. They smeared their faces
with a dye, and painted their eyes with henna. Some of them put on
white tunics, embroidered with stripes of purple, and fastened with
a girdle, and on their feet they wore shoes dyed of a saffron colour.
They placed on the back of the ass the image of their goddess in
its silken covering, and then, with wild cries, began a dervish-like
dance to the tones of the flute played by their youthful attendant.
During this dance they bared their arms to the shoulder, and
flourished aloft swords and axes. In this way they wandered through
various hamlets till they reached the villa of a wealthy landowner.
Here they determined to exhibit the full extent of their mercenary
fanaticism. Looking on the ground, turning from side to side with
various contortions, whirling themselves round and round till their
long curls streamed from their heads, they bit their arms, and at
length cut some of their veins with the weapons which they carried.
Then Philebus simulated a sort of epileptic fit. Falling to the
ground, with long sobs, which seemed to shake his whole body, he
rolled about, accusing himself of the deadliest crimes, like one
possessed. After this he seized a scourge, of which the long leathern
thongs were studded with bones, and scourged himself with all the
endurance of a fakir, till the soil was wet with the blood which
streamed from his own wounds and the gashes of his comrades. The
crowd looked on with a sort of stupor at the hideous spectacle,
and when it ended it was the part of Onesimus, on the attraction of
whose personal appearance the wretches relied, to go round with a bag
for the offerings of copper and silver coins which were abundantly
bestowed on them by the distorted religionism of the spectators. The
Galli were further rewarded with gifts in kind. One peasant brought
them milk, another bread, and corn, and cheeses, and barley; and a
farmer gave them a cask of wine. All these were placed in sacks, side
by side with the image of the goddess, upon the ass, which, as the
flute-player wittily remarked to Onesimus, ‘was now both a barn and
a temple.’ In this way they made spoil of all the country side.
Occasionally they were even more successful. If they found a farmer
specially credulous, they would tell him that their goddess was
thirsty, and needed the blood of a ram, promising him a prophecy of
the future if he would provide one for sacrifice. The sacrificial
victim afforded them an excellent banquet, to which they would invite
the lowest scoundrels, and fearlessly reveal themselves in their
true colours. Once one of the country landowners, named Britinnus,
awe-struck by their supposed sanctity, invited the whole company to
the hospitality of his farm. Their stay might have been prolonged
but for two accidents. The cook had been ordered to prepare a side
of venison for a feast, but this was stolen; and, while he was in
despair at the punishment which would be inflicted on him for the
loss, his wife suggested that they should secretly kill the ass of
the priests, and cook part of it instead of the lost venison. But
when the cook came to the stable, the ass took fright, and rushed
straight through the house into the dining-room of the farmer,
upsetting the table with a huge crash. The next day a boy burst in,
with his face as white as a sheet, and told the terrified Britinnus
that a dog had gone mad, had sprung among the hounds, and had bitten
not only some of them and some of the farm-cattle, but also Myrtilus,
the muleteer, and Hephæstion, the cook, and Hypatius, the footman. On
this Britinnus assumed that the Galli had brought him ill luck, and
sent the whole troupe about their business.
In the neighbourhood of one town they took to fortune-telling.
Binding each person who consulted them to absolute secrecy, they
showed their lack of invention by returning the same oracle to all.
It was simplicity itself, consisting of the two lines--
‘The oxen plough the furrowed soil,
And harvests rich repay their toil.’
Whether they were asked about plans for a matrimonial alliance, or
the heirdom to an estate, or anything else, this oracle admitted of
any interpretation they chose to put upon it.
Altogether sickened with his companions and with their way of living,
Onesimus was further troubled by the insight into every hidden wound
and portent of pagan wickedness which came to his ears, or which he
witnessed in these country wanderings. Long afterwards, when he was
an old man in Ephesus, he used to tell these stories to his friends,
to urge them to yet more zealous effort for the healing of that
heathen wickedness of which the whole head was sick and the whole
heart faint.
On one occasion, for instance, in his wanderings, the Galli had been
unable to collect an audience, because the entire population of the
little town of Varia was absorbed in the interest of a trial which
affected the family of one of their prominent residents. A wealthy
burgher had been left a widower with an only son, a boy of modest
character, and devoted to his studies. Some years afterwards he
married again, and another son was born to him. By the time this
second boy was twelve years old his half-brother had grown into
manhood, and his step-mother, who hated him for his virtues,
determined to poison him. Summoning a slave who was in her
confidence, she sent him to a physician to purchase poison, which
she mixed in a cup of wine and placed ready for the youth at the
next meal. It happened, however, that her own boy, returning hot and
thirsty from school, saw the wine on the table and drank it. He had
scarcely finished the draught, when he fell to the ground as dead.
The slave who attended him filled the air with his clamour, and when
the inmates of the house came flocking in, one accused another of
the crime. The master of the house was out, and his wife sent to
inform him that her boy had been poisoned, that her step-son was
the murderer. The husband was crushed to the earth by the double
calamity. His boy was dead; the elder son, of whom he had been so
proud, was to be tried for murder. Scarcely were the boy’s obsequies
finished when the hapless father, his grey hairs defiled with
dust, hastened to the Forum, and there embraced the knees of the
magistrates, and besought them to avenge him on the fratricide.
The local Senate was assembled, and the herald summoned the accuser.
Onesimus, who had nothing to do that day, was present at the trial.
He heard the old man plead pathetically against the son who had been
the pride of his life and home; he heard the youth, with all the
calm of innocence, deny the charge. There was no evidence against him
but the word of his step-mother and her confidential slave. This man
stood up with a front of brass, and declared that the youth had been
actuated by jealousy of his brother, and had poisoned him. There was
nothing to rebut this evidence, and every jury-man was prepared to
drop into the brazen urn the fatal ticket marked with the letter C,
for _condemno_, which would have handed over the offender to be first
scourged until his bones were laid bare, and then to be sewed up in
a sack with a cock, a dog, and a viper, and to be flung into the sea.
The heart of Onesimus bled for the youth. With his instinctive power
of reading character, he felt convinced of his innocence. But while
with palpitating heart he awaited the voting, an aged physician
arose, and, covering the orifice of the voting-urn with his hand, he
said: ‘Fathers, let me prevent the triumph of an infamous woman and
a perjured slave. That wretch came to me as a physician, and offered
me a hundred gold pieces for a poison. I read crime in the man’s
face, and put the gold in a purse, which I made him stamp with his
seal. Here is the bag. Seize his hand, take off his iron ring, and
see whether this be not his seal. If it is, clearly he, and not the
poor youth yonder, was the purchaser of the poison.’ Onesimus turned
his eyes on the slave. His face had assumed a deadly pallor, and all
his limbs had burst into a cold sweat; but even when his seal was
recognised, he continued to stammer protestations of his innocence.
He was tortured, but would not confess. Then the physician rose with
a mysterious smile. ‘Enough of tortures,’ he said. ‘The time has come
to unravel this web of villany. I sold to yonder wretch, not poison,
but mandragora. If, indeed, the boy drank that draught, he does but
sleep. About this time he will be awakening, and may be brought back
to the light of day.’ The magistrates at once sent messengers to the
sepulchre where the boy’s body had been laid. The father with his own
hands removed the cover of the tomb, and there lay the little lad,
unchanged, and just beginning to awake, with intense astonishment
depicted on his features. Striving in vain to express his joy in
words, the happy father--father once more of two dear sons, both of
whom he thought that he had lost--folded the child to his heart in a
close embrace, and carried him as he was, with all his grave-clothes
about him, to the judgment seat. Terror-stricken by such a portent,
the woman confessed her crime, and was sentenced to perpetual
banishment; the slave was crucified.[69]
Next morning Onesimus, as he accompanied the priests and their ass,
saw the criminal hanging naked on his cross. He was a man of fine
proportions and in the prime of life, and his strength was slowly
ebbing away in horrible and feverish torture. The Galli as they
passed spat on him, but Onesimus stayed behind. The wretch was not
only living, though in extreme agony, but would probably continue
to live for two days more, unless the wolves got at him or the
magistrates thought fit to send their lictors to end his life by two
blows of a ponderous mallet in order to save the trouble of having
the cross watched. It was no base curiosity which made the Phrygian
linger by that spectacle of shame and anguish. It was rather an awful
pity--a heart-rending remembrance. Sunk, fallen, ruined, guilty as he
himself was, he yet could not see without horror this awful reminder
of One who had perished, since his own birth, in Palestine, and in
whom he had not yet ceased to believe as a Saviour, though he had
fallen away from his heavenly calling.
The man turned towards him his tortured face and glazing eyes. ‘By
all the infernal gods,’ he said, ‘give me something to quench my
thirst.’
‘There are no infernal gods,’ Onesimus said, ‘but I will give thee;’
and taking out from the bag which he carried a bottle of the common
_posca_--sour wine which was the ordinary drink of the peasantry--he
poured a full draught into an earthenware cup and held it to the
sufferer’s lips. This he could easily do, for the cross (as always)
was raised but a little from the ground.
‘God help thee!’ he said, as he turned away. ‘He helped the robber on
Golgotha,’ he murmured to himself; ‘who knows whether he may not find
even this poor wretch in his hour of agony--yea, and even me?’
‘My blessing would be a curse,’ moaned the crucified slave, ‘or I
would say, “The gods bless _thee_ who canst pity such as I am.”’
Onesimus left him there in the pathos and tragedy of his awful
helplessness. The youth’s soul was appalled by the sense of the
mystery of human life and human agony, and it came home to him, as
it had never done before, that the solution of the fearful riddle of
human wickedness could only lie, if anywhere, in the life and death
of Him in whom in some sense he believed, but whose peace he did not
know.
Before he joined his base troupe of companions he looked back for a
moment. There, in the blinding sunlight of the Italian noon, stood
the cross, accursed of God and man, the gibbet of the malefactor,
the infamy of the slave, confronting the eye of heaven with a sight
which, no less than that of the Thyestean banquet, might have made
the sun itself turn dark; and there, upon it, a mass of living agony,
conscious, and burning with thirst, and blinded with glare, and
unpitied, and burdened with an awful load of guilt, hung the human
victim who had once played an innocent child beside his mother’s
knee. The soul of Onesimus was harrowed as he gazed on that awful
insult to humanity. The existence of crucifixion showed how far the
shadow had advanced on the dial-plate of Rome’s history. That form
of punishment--so cynical, so ruthless, so abhorrent, which less
than three centuries later was to be abolished by the indignation of
mankind--had been not indigenous in the Western world. It had only
been borrowed by Rome, in the days of her commencing corruption, from
the dark and cruel East. That such a spectacle should be permitted to
the gaze of women and little children; that it should indurate still
further the callosity of hardened hearts, was in itself a token of
degeneracy. The heart of Onesimus was full even to bursting as he saw
that fearful instrument of inhuman vengeance standing there by the
roadside among the darting lizards and chirping cicalas and murmuring
bees; and the goats stared at it with glassy eyes as they cropped the
luxuriant grass at the very feet of the victim in whom the majestic
ideal of manhood was thus horribly laughed to scorn.
Onesimus, as he finally turned away, felt it more degrading than
ever to continue his present life. Its plenty and coarse comfort,
accompanied as it was by the necessity of spending his days with
these sexless and lying vagabonds, filled him with a sense of
nameless humiliation. Yet what could he do? What other choice had he
save to starve or to commit suicide? For then he remembered with a
start that he was twice a thief, twice a fugitive, almost a murderer;
that he had betrayed the trust reposed in him by Acte; that by his
mad drunkenness he had insulted the majesty of Nero. In every sense
even his fellow-slaves would have called him _furcifer_. And if he
were once detected, in spite of the dye with which he had stained
his face, and the blond wig by which the Galli had tried at once to
conceal his identity and to enhance his beauty, what awaited him? Was
he, too, destined to feed the wild birds upon the cross?
It seemed as if that would be better than to beg from the gulled
throngs of peasants, and dupe the credulity of farmers, and witness
day by day the stupid and loathly self-gashing and self-scourging of
these deplorable eunuch priests. More than once he thought that he
would get up by night, seize the image of the Syrian goddess, and
fling her into the greenest and slimiest pool he could find, among
the efts and water-beetles and frogs; while he himself would plunge
into the pathless wastes until he should gain the sea-shore, work
his passage on board a ship to Troas or Ephesus, and so making
his way back to quiet Colossæ, would fling himself at the feet of
Philemon and implore the forgiveness which he felt sure would not be
long withheld.
But that ‘unseen Providence which men nickname chance’ came to rescue
him from his unhealthy bondage. As they were starting for one of
their exhibitions in their usual motley and many-coloured gear, the
Galli suddenly heard the sound of horses’ hoofs, and, before they
knew where to turn, a body of mounted soldiers came thundering
down upon them, drew their swords, surrounded and seized the whole
company, and, beating the wretched priests with their fists and the
flat of their swords, called them thieves and all other opprobrious
names, and charged them with having stolen a golden beaker from a
neighbouring temple of the Mother of the Gods. In vain the Galli
protested and swore their innocence and threatened the soldiers with
the vengeance of the Syrian goddess for this insult to her ministers.
The soldiers silenced their curses with blows, and, tearing away the
covering of the image, found the golden beaker wrapped up within it.
Detected in their theft, the priests were still unabashed. After an
evening sacrifice they had watched their opportunity, concealed the
sacred cup of Cybele, and at the grey dawn had made their way out of
the pomœrium of the city, trusting to get sufficiently far to elude
pursuit. The beaker was, however, ancient and valuable, and the
police asked the mounted soldiers to help them in tracking the
fugitives.
‘It was not a theft,’ said Philebus, who was _archigallus_. ‘The
Mother of the Gods freely lent the beaker to her sister the Syrian
goddess, who intended shortly to return it to her. You cannot escape
her wrath for this outrage.’
The soldiers and their _decurio_ broke into loud laughter at the
threat, and without ceremony put gyves on the wrists of the seven
Galli. They consulted whether they should also arrest Onesimus and
the flute-player, but Onesimus said that he was ignorant of the
theft, that neither he nor his companion--who were acting as slaves
of the priests--had ever been permitted to see the contents of the
silken veil. The soldiers believed him, and all the more because they
did not care to burden themselves with too many prisoners. They took
the Galli to Naples, where Onesimus was afterwards told that they had
been scourged, imprisoned, and mulcted of all they possessed.
Free once more, and not troubling himself about their fate, Onesimus
asked the flute-player what he meant to do. Finding that he regarded
his present calling as too comfortable a berth to be given up,
Onesimus left him and made his way disconsolately to Baiæ.