At the close of his address, young men, clad in white, of modest

demeanour, went round among the worshippers and received in earthen

vessels the humble contributions of men and women, of whom not a

few were themselves in deep poverty. Aliturus, moved to an extent of

which he could give no account, dropped into the vessel every piece

of gold which he had with him, and amazed those who afterwards

counted the offerings. With uplifted arms and solemn voice, Linus

pronounced the benediction. Lanterns and torches were rekindled, and

silently, in twos and threes, by the same secret paths, the multitude

melted away.

But as he made his way home with the attendant slave, the heart of

Aliturus burned within him. He had come to curse and to betray; he

went back blessing these Christians altogether. How unlike was the

reality to the lies which he had confidently believed! These men and

women, whose name was the synonym of malefactor--those of whom the

scum of the Forum spoke as incestuous cannibals--they were innocent,

they were holy! they alone were innocent, they alone were holy!

Aliturus had heard the philosophers talking together. How hard and

unnatural were their doctrines; how inconsistent their lives; how

hopeless their aspirations; how hollow their vaunts of blessedness

compared with those of these men! Among these was happiness, or

it was nowhere. He had seen palaces--their gilded misery, their

monotonous weariness, their reckless guilt--he had experienced the

emptiness of that intoxicating fame which shouted in the voice of

innumerable spectators. Alas, alas! what a bubble was the life of

the gentile world, and what spectres followed those who chased it!

His thoughts went back to the days of a childhood spent in Hebron

under the rustling boughs of the oak of Mamre. Happier for him

had he lived and died in his native Palestine, unknown, innocent,

faithful to the religion of his people. But his grandfather had been

implicated in the tearing down of the golden eagle, instigated by the

two bold young Rabbis Judas and Matthias, in the days of Herod the

Great, and had been put to death. His father had struggled in vain

against adversity, and his widowed mother, left in utter destitution,

had died of a broken heart. Penniless and an orphan, the boy had been

carried down to Gaza by a villanous agent of Herod, and had been sold

to a Roman slave-dealer. This trader in human flesh had seen in him

the promise of extraordinary beauty, which would enable him to repay

himself in a few years a hundred times over the paltry sum which he

had paid for the Jewish orphan. He kept him with care, fed him well,

had him taught Greek, and gave him an artistic education--not from

any feelings of kindness, but solely with a view to ultimate gain. He

kept him apart from the other slave-boys of his shop, who were meant

for less luxurious destinies, and would only command moderate prices

as grooms or foot-boys. They, with chalked feet, were exposed for

sale on the public _catasta_ in sight of every passer-by, and could

be purchased for little more than five hundred sesterces; but those

who wished to see the brilliant Aliturus must be persons of wealth

and distinction, who were admitted into the inner apartments, and

who would be willing to pay at least eight thousand sesterces. He had

been purchased by the wealthy and luxurious Sulla, who, charmed by

his vivacity, grace, and genius, saw a means of enriching himself by

having him trained as a pantomime. During these years Aliturus had

not only seen the darkest side of pagan life, but had grown familiar

with its viciousness in every form. Abandoning the religion of Moses,

he had found no other in its place, and lived only for the present.

On the stage he had rapidly surpassed all competitors, with the

exception of Paris, who shared with him the position of a favourite

of the Roman people. The large sums of money which he amassed by his

art enabled him to purchase his freedom before he was twenty-three;

and, in a career of unchecked outward prosperity he had become a

familiar inmate of the noblest patrician houses, and even of the

imperial circle. For some years he had been the favourite of all the

gilded youth, the darling of the Roman ladies. But the faith of his

childhood still hung about him. Amid the giddiest whirl of vice and

pleasure, he still felt in his heart an aching void; and the events

of this evening had revealed to him not only how aching the void was,

but also the misery and failure in which his life would end, with no

vista beyond it save the darkness of the grave. Often before, in his

lonelier moments, he had seen virtue and pined for its loss; but now

that pure ideal shone before him with a more heavenly lustre, and

remorse pierced him like a sword.

He awaited the next gathering of the Christians with feverish

impatience--not with his first purpose of accumulating evidence for

their extirpation, but rather for the sake of his own soul and that

he might leave no stone unturned to save them. He was also deeply

anxious to see him whom Cletus had described as ‘John the beloved.’

He longed to hear more of the Master whom the Christians worshipped

with such passionate devotion, and to know wherein lay the secrets of

the hope which He had kindled, of the peace which He had bequeathed,

of the righteousness which He had placed within reach of attainment,

not only by the noble and the learned, but by the despised and by

paupers and by slaves.

It was to him a time of anxiety and trial. He had to act that week

one of his favourite, most exciting, and most unworthy parts. He

was pledged to it; myriads were expecting to see him in it; he

had already received for it a large sum of money from Varro, the

president of the games, and he had neither the courage to withdraw

from it nor any appreciable excuse for doing so. He acted it with

all his accustomed supremacy of skill, but he acted it mechanically

and with a wounded conscience; and he listened to the thunders of

applause which his grace evoked with loathing for himself and for

his degraded audience. He returned to his house physically weary,

but even more mentally prostrate, and, flinging himself on a couch,

turned his face to the wall and wept. A summons from the Palace

forced him to rouse himself, to put on a court dress, and assume

his usual aspect of easy gaiety.[*16] Nero asked him with feverish

eagerness whether he had succeeded in tracking the Christians to

their haunts, and what evidence he had been able to collect against

them.

‘Give me time, Cæsar,’ he said. ‘I went three days ago to their

assembly and I heard nothing which could be construed into sedition,

and I saw nothing to their discredit. I am driven to disbelieve what

I told you about them.’

‘They are sly foxes,’ said Nero. ‘Poppæa has heard more about them

from the Jew Josephus. You are not initiated into their mysteries,

so that you did not really see what they are.’

‘And what matters it what they are?’ said Tigellinus. ‘We must have

_some_ criminals to accuse of having caused the fire; and who so

handy as this secret, morose, man-hating, child-killing, flesh-eating

sect of darkness, whom the people detest, and whom in any case it

would be a merit to exterminate?’

‘Poor wretches!’ said Aliturus. ‘I should be sorry to do them more

harm than I have done already; but after the next nundine I may have

more to tell you.’

‘That man is wavering,’ said Tigellinus, when Aliturus had gone. ‘He

is a Jew, and he is not so much in earnest as he was. He seems to be

touched by the squeamish effeminacy of pity.’

‘Poppæa says that the Jews hate these Christians even more than we

do,’ answered Nero.

‘Nevertheless, Cæsar, you may be certain that the two superstitions

spring from the same root. I will find out the Christian haunts for

myself. It is high time to strike a blow.’

CHAPTER LIII

‘_HE WHO SAW THE APOCALYPSE_’

‘Questi è colui, che giacque sopra ‘l petto

Del nostro Pellicano; e questi fue

Di su la croce al grande ufficio eletto.’

DANTE, _Paradiso_, xxv. 112-114.

The slave Philetus came to the house of Aliturus on the next Sunday

evening, and told him that the Christians now knew themselves to be

menaced by imminent peril. They had consequently changed their place

of meeting to another sand-pit near the Appian road, where they would

be assembled in unusual numbers, expecting the presence of John,

one of the twelve companions of Jesus whom they called Apostles.

Aliturus, seeing the character of the man, who was one of those who

are ever ready to sell their souls for gain, said as little to him

as possible; but while he donned his Ephesian disguise he determined

to do his utmost to warn the Christians secretly of the toils which,

before he knew their true character, he himself had designed to

spread for them.

The worship of the congregation resembled that on the previous

First-day evening, except that the impression of solemn expectation

was even more thrilling and intense. Aliturus was at a distance from

the Apostle, whom his fellow-Christians surrounded with a reverence

akin to awe, and whose bearing, though full of love and humility, was

yet more full of natural dignity than Aliturus had ever observed in

Consul or Emperor. During the day the Apostle had walked through the

areas of encumbered ruin and blackened waste, which in ten regions

of the city were all that was left of Rome. He had walked along the

lines of temporary huts in the Campus Martius, and heard the wail of

men and women who refused to be comforted for the loss of all. He had

stood behind the base of a half-calcined pillar on the Aventine when

Nero had been carried past him in an open litter of silver, in which

he lolled on purple cushions. He was discinctured and clad in a

light Coan _synthesis_, looking the picture of cruel and dissolute

effeminacy. A young Greek slave shared his litter, and some of his

worst associates laughed and jested by his side. The sight of the

Antichrist had stirred the heart of John to uttermost indignation,

and as he now rose in the assembly, the mystic golden _petalon_ of

priesthood upon his forehead flashing under the light of the lamps

in the far recess of the sand-pit, his whole figure seemed to burn

and dilate with inspired passion. He spoke at times with something

of the holy frenzy of a Hebrew prophet, in language purposely couched

in Eastern metaphors. To those who were unfamiliar with the style

of Jewish Apocalypses, much of what he said might have seemed wholly

unintelligible; but most of those who heard him had a clue to his

utterances, either from their Jewish birth or from familiarity with

sacred books of the Hebrews. Among these was Aliturus. Knowing the

high authority of the speaker, the whole assembly listened with

beating hearts to the tones of a voice which throbbed with fire

and life, and sometimes rose to awful power.

In imagery afterwards embodied in his Apocalypse he spoke of a

wild beast, rising out of the sea with a name of blasphemy on his

forehead. And men worshipped the beast, and said, ‘Who is like the

wild beast?’ and ‘Who can fight against him?’ Those who had heard of

Nero in his disguise at the infamous banquet on the Lake of Agrippa

knew that by the wild beast he meant the Emperor, and by the sea

the sea of nations, and by the name of blasphemy the divine title

Augustus, and by his superhuman exaltation the adoring flattery of

his votaries. He described the misery of the people as of men gnawing

their tongues for pain; and he spoke of a war of the wild beast

against the saints, and of blood rolling in a great river; and of the

vengeance which should follow, and of the vain rage of the nations

against Him which is, and was, and is to come.

His voice ceased. He sat down, and an awful hush fell over the

listeners. And then the whole assembly knelt down as with one great

sob, and Aliturus sobbed with them. Pitying their emotion, the

Beloved arose once more, and said: ‘Nay, brethren, you must not

return thus with broken hearts to your homes. It is given unto me to

foresee that ye must resist unto blood. Many of you must be tortured,

many slain. At this moment there is a traitor among you, and it is no

longer possible to escape. And there is another, not a traitor, but

who meant to be an open enemy.’ The speaker paused, and the heart

of Aliturus became chill as a stone within him. ‘But,’ continued

the Apostle, ‘the grace of God hath called this one to repentance,

and he shall be saved, though through much tribulation. And now, my

children, give your customary gifts to God and to the suffering ones,

for many are now in depths of affliction, and there are not a few of

you whose children shall be fatherless and their wives widows, who

must be the care of the Church hereafter. But I say to you all,

as our Lord said the night that He was betrayed, “Fear not, little

flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

And as my last words, take this His new commandment: “Little children,

love one another.”’

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

sang:--

‘Curb for the stubborn steed,

Making its will give heed;

Wing that directest right

The wild bird’s wandering flight;

Helm for the ships that keep

Their pathway on the deep;

Our stay when cares annoy,

Giver of endless joy,

O Jesus, hear!

‘Thine infant children seek,

With baby lips all weak,

Filled with the Spirit’s dew

From that dear bosom true,

Thy praises pure to sing,

Hymns meet for Thee, their King;

O Jesus, hear!

‘We, heirs of peace unpriced,

We, who are born in Christ,

A people pure from stain,

Praise we our God again!

O Jesus, hear!’[98]

The deacons went round among the worshippers, and collected the

alms. Aliturus, more deeply moved than ever in his life, flung into

the offering the large sum of gold which he had received for his

unhallowed dance. Linus rose and said, ‘Beloved, the times are

perilous. We know not when or where the cloud will burst. Let us

meet again on the third day hence, and hear the word of exhortation.’

Then the Apostle committed them to God’s gracious mercy and

protection, and to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the

communion of the Holy Spirit; and once more, like phantoms, that

great throng melted into the darkness.

But Aliturus, telling Philetus that it would be better for them

to separate, dismissed him, and waited for the presbyters who were

conducting John to the house of Linus.

‘I would speak to thee,’ he said, addressing the Apostle in Hebrew,

which he had not entirely forgotten since the day when he learnt it

at his brave father’s knee. ‘I am--’

‘I know thee who thou art, my son,’ answered the Apostle, in the

same language. ‘Thou wast born a child of Abraham; thou hast become

a firstborn of Satan. Yea, weep, for thy sins have been many; yet

rejoice, for thou shalt be snatched as a brand out of the burning.’

‘I have never been a Christian, O Apostle,’ said Aliturus; ‘I have

never heard the name of Christ except in mockery; but now, convinced

of all, judged of all, I see that the secret of God is with you. I

have led you into peril, but I did it ignorantly, and now, if thou

wouldst direct me, I fain would do my utmost to save you all.’

‘Thou shalt be forgiven, my son, because (as thou sayest) thou didst

it ignorantly: but save us thou canst not. Nevertheless, do what thou

canst, and may God be with thee!’

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

breaking.’

‘My son,’ said the Apostle, laying his hand on the bowed head of the

actor; ‘the blessing of God is with them that repent, and the Lord

rejecteth none who come to Him.’

They parted in the darkness, and the next day Aliturus sought an

audience with the Emperor alone. He had been so great a favourite

that Nero always rejoiced to see him, and to while away an hour under

the spell of his natural brightness. But, to his surprise, Aliturus

had no sooner kissed his hand than he flung himself at his feet and

craved his indulgence.

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

these Christians?’

‘It is,’ said the actor. ‘Spare them, Emperor. Spare them, I entreat

you. I have ascertained that they are perfectly innocent. Cæsar has

no more virtuous subjects.’

‘Virtue?’ said Nero. ‘It is three-fourths humbug, and the other

fourth hypocrisy. Give me pleasure; give me art. These fanatics

would quench all joy in the world. They would kill Venus and starve

Bacchus. I hate them.’

‘Would Cæsar slay the innocent?’

‘Innocent? They are anything but innocent. They are conspirators, and

sorcerers, and murderers, and haters of mankind.’

‘Oh, Cæsar,’ exclaimed the actor, in despair. ‘I, too, believed this;

but these are only the lies of the multitude.’

‘At any rate, they are gloomy and pestilent fanatics. Why should

Aliturus care for the wretches who worship a man whom Pilatus

crucified? What is their execrable superstition to Rome’s favourite

pantomime? I am to be king of the East, and these Galileans set up

another king, whom they call Christus. It is flat sedition! Besides,

how am I to appease the populace, if I do not find them some victims?’

‘You may yet find the true criminals, Cæsar; it may be that they are

nearer your own person than these poor Christians.’

‘Don’t let Tigellinus hear you say that, or you may yet know what the

_tunica molesta_ is like, and may leave a trail of burning pitch on

the sand of the amphitheatre! Come, Aliturus, this is tedious. Enough

of it. I prefer your dancing.’

At this moment Poppæa entered, and the young man withdrew. As he

passed down the corridor the slaves were surprised to see the bright

darling of the populace wringing his hands and muttering ‘Too late!

too late!’

On one point he was determined. No word, no sign of his should do

any further injury to the Christians. He would not reveal their

meeting-place, nor help their enemies.

Alas! his aid was no longer needed. We can abstain from evil deeds,

but when we have done them their consequences are beyond us, nor can

we escape their punishment. Tigellinus, by his spies, had put himself

in communication with Philetus; he knew enough to palliate in the

eyes of the people the arrest of a community which they regarded

with detestation. His nets were spread in every direction. Unless

the Christians abandoned all attempt at meeting together, it was

impossible that they could escape the agents of the tyranny which

had determined to destroy them as the scapegoat of its own crimes.

To warn them would in any case have been in vain, and Aliturus was

unable to warn them, for Tigellinus did not make him a confidant of

his intentions.

Unaccompanied by Philetus, the actor went to the meeting which Linus

had announced, and found the Christians gathered in undiminished

numbers, anxious to hear once more the words of him who at the Last

Supper had leaned his head on the bosom of their Lord.

Again--lest in the presence of traitors and enemies he should use

language which might be turned into an engine of condemnation against

the brethren--the Apostle addressed them in allegoric terms. The

Christians understood his words, and the rich comfort which lay

beneath their poetic imagery. But he had not been speaking long,

when from the narrow entrance which led into the sandpit--for

the Christians had barricaded every approach but one--there arose

first a cry of surprise, then a sound of struggling, and a clash

of arms, and a tramp of feet. The youths to whom was entrusted

the guardianship of the approach were borne back by numbers, and

flying into the assembly raised a shout of ‘Fly, brethren, fly!

the Prætorians are upon us.’ The lamps flashed on the gilded armour

of a centurion, who leapt, sword in hand, into the midst of the

worshippers. In a moment every lamp was extinguished, and by the

straggling starlight might be caught glimpses of a scene of wild

confusion, as men and shrieking women sprang in vain to the egress,

and, driven back on each other by the swords of the soldiers,

struggled in mad panic towards the various subterranean hiding-places

and passages, which branched out of the sandpit, and were the

beginning of the catacombs. Many made their escape in the tumult,

for they were more familiar than the soldiers with the exits and

winding ways. Except that one or two Christians were struck to

earth and trampled upon in the obscurity, no blood was shed; for the

principles of the Christians forbade them to resist lawful authority.

The centurion, the moment he entered, strode straight towards the

group of presbyters, and arrested Linus, who sat in the seat of the

bishop. Another officer laid his hand on the robe of the Apostle,

but while Aliturus involuntarily sprang forward to make him release

his hold, a gigantic _fossor_--whose trade it was to hew graves in

the tufa for all the brethren--flung his arms round the officer,

and pinned them to his side, while Cletus, seizing the hand of John,

hurried him along a tortuous and half-subterranean path by which they

emerged into the upper air. They lay concealed among the thick leaves

of a vineyard, until they heard the tramp of the soldiers who marched

off with about a hundred prisoners, whose arms they had tied behind

their backs. Aliturus was in no personal danger, but he had followed

the escaping steps of Cletus and the Apostle, and he lay hidden with

them in the vineyard till the sound of footsteps had died away in the

echoing gloom.

‘Alas, father, what can I do?’ exclaimed the presbyter. ‘I am but a

freedman in the house of the senator Nerva. I have no home, no refuge

to offer thee which would not be full of hardship and the peril of

certain death.’

‘Come to my house,’ exclaimed Aliturus to the Apostle, eagerly. ‘I

am not a Christian--I am but a pantomime. But, if thou wilt trust me,

thy life will be safer with me than in any house in Rome, till

opportunity enables thee to escape to Asia.’

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

That night the son of Zebedee was sheltered in the house of the

actor, who told his most confidential slaves to treat with all

honour a friend of Jewish race who had come from Palestine. But all

night long the Apostle was on his knees, praying for his brethren.

For the Great Tribulation--the first of the ten great Christian

persecutions--had begun.

CHAPTER LIV

_IN THE BURNING FIERY FURNACE_

Ἀγαπητοὶ μὴ ξενίζεσθε τῇ ἐν ὑμῖν πυρώσει πρὸς πειρασμὸν

ὑμὶν γινομένῃ.--1 Pet. iv. 12.

‘Christianus etiam extra carcerem sæculo renuntiavit, in

carcere autem etiam carceri.’--TERT. _Ad Mart._ 2.

The prisoners, men and women alike, were hurried into promiscuous

dungeons, in a suffocating confinement which was itself an

anticipated death. Next day an edict was published by the Emperor,

saying that the Christians were the incendiaries of Rome, and would

be set apart for exemplary punishment. He characterised the whole

sect as public enemies, enemies of the gods, and of the human race,

whom he should make it his duty as far as possible to exterminate.

The edict was well received. It was at first supposed that its

allegations were true, and that the Emperor had really succeeded

in lifting from his rule the vast weight of indignation which had

threatened to endanger it.

Next day, half suffocated and half starved, and altogether in

miserable plight, a number of the prisoners were put to the torture,

to enforce confession and a betrayal of their accomplices. Tigellinus

personally presided, and gloated over their torments. It had become

known that Linus was their leader, and he was the first to suffer.

The old man remained nobly constant. Urged to confess his crime,

he said, ‘I am a Christian; but to be a Christian is not a crime.’

Charged with complicity in the deeds of darkness which were

attributed to Christians, he indignantly repudiated them, and said

that the laws of Christians branded not only such deeds with infamy,

but even those vices which the heathen regarded as indifferent or

venial. Bidden to give up the names of his fellow-Christians, he said

that they were many, but that he would rather die than betray them.

No added intensity of torment could wring from him anything further,

and he was carried back to prison, a pitiable sufferer, dislocated

in every limb. Indeed, so nigh was he unto death, that the jailors,

burdened by the crowded and horrible condition of the prisoners,

accepted a bribe from the Christians to allow him to be removed. He

was taken, by Pomponia’s kindness, into her own house, and there was

lovingly tended many days. He lived to send a greeting to Timotheus

by St. Paul some years later; but he was never again able to resume

his functions as the bishop of the little community. Stricken to the

heart by the anguish of witnessing the apparent destruction of the

Church, and hopelessly maimed by torture, he was removed in secrecy

to one of the country villas of Aulus Plautius, and after being

long confined to his bed, he died no less a martyr of the Neronian

persecution than any of his brethren.

Others showed equal fortitude. Foiled and savage, Tigellinus noticed

among the prisoners a timid, shrinking boy, and ordered him to be

stripped and laid upon the rack, confident that anything might be

wrung from him. But the poor boy could only keep repeating,

‘I am a Christian! I am a Christian! but we are innocent. We do no

wrong. The crimes you charge us with are false.’

‘Give up the names of your accomplices, jail-bird,’ said Tigellinus,

striking him fiercely on the cheek.

‘I am no jail-bird,’ said the boy; ‘I am free-born. Oh, set me free

from this anguish! I have done no wrong.’

‘You shall try another turn or two of the rack first, _crucisalus_,’

said Tigellinus. ‘Confess, and you shall not only be set free, but

rewarded.’

His limbs were stretched still further. A groan of agony burst from

his lips, and the sweat stood in thick dews over the face which had

become pale as death; but he spoke not, and fainted. When they were

taken back to prison, the Christians did their utmost to tend and

console the glorious young confessor.

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

‘When all was at the worst,’ he said, ‘it seemed to me that music

sounded in my ears, and a fair youth with wings stood by me who wiped

the perspiration from my forehead. And seeing him I felt that I could

hold out even to death.’

‘Try a woman this time,’ said Tigellinus.

The executioners seized the deaconess Phœbe, who, since she left

Cenchreæ with the Epistle to the Romans, had stayed and worked

in Rome; and with her they seized two other virgins who were also

deaconesses.

But the constancy of womanhood also remained unshaken, and the

Præfect began to fear that the attempt to secure evidence would fail

as completely as in his plot against Octavia. He stamped, and cursed

the Christians by all his gods, and raved impotently against their

brutal obstinacy, as effort after effort failed. Then he ran his

experienced eyes over the throng, and fixed them on one man whose

abject face seemed to promise good effects from the application of

terror. His name was Phygellus.

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

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

indeed, a Christian.’

The other Christians turned their eyes upon him with a look of

reproach, and he trembled; but he continued to asseverate, ‘I am

not a Christian.’

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

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

‘Then throw these grains of frankincense on the fire in honour of

Jupiter, and worship the Genius of the Emperor.’

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

him--

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

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

Phygellus hesitated. He had been ready to save himself; but he had

not contemplated the destruction of his fellows.

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

The man was laid shrieking on the instrument of torture, but the

moment the screw was turned, he cried,

‘I will confess; I will confess.’

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

‘No.’

‘Do you persist in that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Try the rack again.’

‘Spare me! spare me!’ he cried. ‘If you torture me, I shall say

anything--any lie you ask me; but these stories about the Christians

are not true.’

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

‘I will.’

‘Did the Christians set fire to Rome?’

‘I did not see them doing it; but they were always talking about

Christ being manifested in flaming fire, and about the burning of

the world.’

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

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

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

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

‘On to the rack with him,’ said Tigellinus, furiously. ‘He trifles

with us and wastes our time.’

‘No, no,’ moaned the coward; ‘I will tell you. There is Linus the

bishop, and Cletus the presbyter, and Prisca, and Aquila.’

‘Who are they?’

They are Jewish tent-makers, and they live on the Aventine; but they

left Rome recently. And Amplias, Claudia, Stachys, Apelles, of the

household of Narcissus; Persis, a freedwoman of Pomponia Græcina;

Asyncritus, Patrobas, slaves of Flavius Clemens; and Nereus and his

daughter Junia, manumitted by the centurion Pudens.’

‘We want more names still.’

‘There are Marcus, Felicitas, Phœbe, Helpis, in the house of Aulus

Plautius; and there are Tryphæna, Tryphosa, Stephanus, Crescens,

Thallus, Herodion, and Artemas, of Cæsar’s household.’

‘None but slaves and freedmen?’

‘There is Aristobulus, the auctioneer, who has a house in the Subura.

He and all his family are Christians. And Andronicus, and Junius--

they are merchants who import goats’ hair from Cilicia, and are

relations of Paulus of Tarsus, whom they call an Apostle.’

‘Come, this is to the purpose,’ said Tigellinus, rubbing his hands.

‘Are there any soldiers?’

‘Yes; Vitalis and Celsus, the Prætorians, and, I think, Pudens the

centurion, who has gone to Britain and--’

He stopped suddenly, and his face assumed a look of terror. For the

soldier Urbanus who stood behind the chair of Tigellinus was one who,

though not yet a Christian, had been among those who had been chained

to Paul, and had acquired a kindly feeling towards the persecuted

brethren. Fixing his eyes on the apostate, he made so menacing a

gesture with his hand on his dagger, that Phygellus began to stammer.

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

‘Are there any persons of rank?’

Fortunately Phygellus had never found much favour among the

Christians. Their leaders had not entrusted to him their secrets.

He was unaware that Pomponia was a Christian, and had not heard of

the conversion of Flavius Clemens and Domitilla. But he ventured at

haphazard to mention Aliturus, whom he had seen in the tumult.

But Tigellinus knew that it was not yet time to interfere with such a

man as Aliturus. He laughed aloud.

‘What!’ he said; ‘do you think that on the evidence of such scum as

you we are going to arrest the delight of the populace--the gayest

and fairest pantomime in Rome? There, we have had enough of you.’

And, spurning him with his foot, he bade the lictors to keep him safe

till more evidence was required.

There were a few others--chiefly neophytes and catechumens of

unformed character--who, either from indifference and insincerity,

or to escape for the moment from the tormentors, gave evidence

sufficient for the nefarious purpose of the Præfect. The consequence

was a wholesale series of arrests, till every prison in Rome was

crowded to deadliness with innocent confessors, who, while they

denied all crime, admitted themselves to be Christians, and were

ready, if God so willed, to die for their faith.

Tigellinus savagely recommended to Nero that they should be executed

in a mass.

‘Rome,’ he said, ‘is too crowded. As it is, Cæsar, you are

maintaining many thousands of the destitute, and among them hundreds

of these Christians, whose lodgings have been burnt. Why not get rid

of such criminal wretches?’

‘All the people hate them,’ said Poppæa, ‘as despisers of the gods,

and all the Jews hate them. From Josephus, and the High Priest, and

Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of their great writer Philo, who once

headed a deputation to the Emperor Gaius, I hear nothing of them but

evil.’

‘Their arrest has made a wonderful difference already,’ said

Tigellinus, ‘and has silenced many inconvenient rumours. Publish

another edict, Emperor, saying that you have now the amplest evidence

of their guilt, and that they shall be executed when you have decided

the method of their death.’

‘I will reserve some of their ringleaders for more conspicuous

punishment,’ said Nero. ‘The common herd can be dealt with

afterwards.’

‘We have got the man they call their bishop,’ said the Præfect. ‘He

is an artisan named Linus. He has been tortured, and is said to be

dying. But we can strike a deadlier blow yet. My spies tell me that

one of the Twelve they call Apostles, whose name is John, is in Rome,

and that another is on his way whose name is Peter. They were friends

of him whom they call Christus. We have lost sight of John for the

moment; but we shall make sure of having them both soon.’

* * * * *

The Church in Rome was smitten to the very dust by the terrible blow

which had befallen her, and it was necessary that the brethren should

take the utmost precautions, and meet only in the deepest secrecy.

In this they were aided by Aliturus. He had a villa a short distance

from Rome on the Salarian road, the grounds of which could be

approached by country paths known to few but shepherds and goatherds.

To this villa he took the Apostle John for safety, and there he

received from him such wise and loving instruction that he became

a catechumen. Meanwhile he freely used the wealth which he had

acquired, to alleviate the sufferings of the brethren. The visiting

of those in prison was regarded as one of the primary duties of

the Christian’s life, and no considerations of personal safety were

allowed to interfere with it. The Apostle went from prison to prison

breaking bread, and entrusting to the officers of the Church, or to

those who had been longest in the faith, the money which was supplied

to him by Pomponia and by the actor. In this way he and others, who

were as yet unmolested, were enabled to minister to the necessities

of the captives, and also to speak to them such words of hope as fell

upon their souls like dew from heaven. It was inevitable that his

noble and venerable figure should soon be recognised. The spies of

the Præfect were everywhere, and, noticing the profound reverence

with which the Elder was received, they were soon able to identify

him. He had prepared Aliturus to expect that if on any day he did not

return to the villa it would be because he was lodged in prison. The

ordinary dungeons were so full that the Apostle was confined in the

wet and rocky vault of the Mamertine.

In that prison he was visited by Pomponia, who contributed by every

means in her power to mitigate his hardships, and received his

counsel and his apostolic blessing. She no longer hesitated to go

in person to console the confessors. She found, indeed, that they

needed but little consolation. The majority of them were in a

state of spiritual exaltation which made their faces radiant and

transformed their hard fare into manna which was angels’ food. They

turned their prisons into minsters, and the coarse pagan jailors

and German guards were amazed when they heard those abodes of misery

ringing with sweet voices and the holy melodies of unknown songs. In

each place of confinement they held their daily worship, conducted by

presbyter, or deacon, or reader, and broke with one another the bread

of Holy Communion. They knew that death awaited them, but death was

to be a martyrdom, and they looked to it, not as a curse, but as a

coronation. Pomponia, sharing all their feelings, found that it was

only to their bodily wants that she had need to minister.

She did not shrink from personal danger: if arrested, she would have

at once avowed that she was a Christian. But her name had not been

mentioned by those who gave evidence. Having once been tried on

the charge of holding a foreign superstition and acquitted, it was

contrary to the principle of the Roman law that she should again

be accused. The deadly wrong which Nero’s wickedness had already

inflicted on Aulus Plautius had excited an indignation among all the

best elements of Roman society, which, though it was voiceless, had

made itself felt; and among the populace Pomponia was half worshipped

for her abounding kindness and large-handed charities. Her visiting

of the prisons was set down to the same strange but harmless

eccentricity which made her eschew jewels and wear robes of such

sombre hue.

One day, during a visit to the largest prison, she encountered

Tigellinus, who was going his rounds with an escort of Prætorians to

exult over the multitudes of his victims. He inspired such dread that

the noblest senators cringed to him, and Pomponia had reason to know

that he hated her with all the energy of wickedness which is reproved

by the spectacle of virtue.

He made her a low obeisance of mock respect, which she scarcely

noticed by the slightest inclination of her head.

‘The fair Pomponia is fond of prisons,’ he said, with a sneer, ‘but

she despises the poor Præfect of the Prætorians.’

‘Pomponia,’ she replied, ‘is not accustomed to the language of

insincere and empty compliment. She despises none; but, if the

Præfect desires her opinion, there are some of his humblest soldiers

whom she respects more than him.’

Tigellinus cast on her a glance of savage hatred. He quailed before

her queenly dignity of goodness, but could not bear to be foiled in

the hearing of his escort, whose smiles had scarcely been suppressed.

‘Let Pomponia take care that she does not herself become the denizen

of a prison. Some have whispered that she is as much a Christian as

these whom she visits, and deserves the same fate.’

‘I deserve it,’ she says, ‘as much and as little as these do, for

none knows better than Tigellinus that they are perfectly innocent.’

Tigellinus lost all self-control. ‘Do you not know, woman,’ he

exclaimed[*17] hoarsely, ‘that your life is in my power?’

‘Man!’ she answered, with the calmest disdain, ‘you are addressing

the wife of Aulus Plautius. My life is not in your power, but in the

power of Him who gave it. I leave you, and shall continue to tend

these hapless prisoners.’

She passed by him and he dared not meet her glance. To beard

Tigellinus required a courage of which scarcely one person was

capable. But Pomponia thought it her duty to attempt a yet more

dangerous effort, and, if possible, to have an appeal made to the

Emperor on behalf of the doomed Christians. She went to Seneca

in his retirement. She found him anxious and miserable, full

of disappointment and self-disgust. He did not respond to her

entreaties. ‘I have no sympathy,’ he said, ‘with the Christians.

They are only a sect of the Jews, and I should like to see their

whole superstition eradicated.’

‘You call it their superstition,’ said Pomponia. ‘Is it more of a

superstition than the worship of what you have called “our ignoble

crowd of gods”?’

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

and philosophy is another.’

‘Would you, then, be content to see the mass of the pagan population

unjustly tortured, unjustly slain, because their religion is a

noxious superstition?’

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

‘Nor do these poor Christians. I know their tenets. Their moral

teaching again and again reminds me of your own, which it sometimes

resembles almost to verbal identity.’

‘I have heard,’ said Seneca, ‘that their Paulus of Tarsus has

genius and style; but it is to me incredible. What can he know of

philosophy?’

‘Pardon me, dear friend,’ replied Pomponia, ‘he knows a philosophy

far diviner than that of the Porch, far nobler than that of the

Garden or the Lyceum. It is a philosophy which may not puff up the

pride of intellect, but can sway the motives of the life. You may

perhaps find in Rome--though I doubt it--ten philosophers who live

purely and simply, but I could find you many hundreds of Christians.’

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

‘Are they not our fellow-men? Did not one God make them and us? Did

He mean only a handful to be blessed, and the rest to perish? Have

you no pity for them? Have not you yourself said, “Man is a sacred

thing to man”?’

‘Why should I waste my life in an unavailing pity? Pity is a weakness

which the true philosopher should suppress.’

‘Ah!’ replied Pomponia, ‘I see the secret why Stoicism fails. It

talks of following nature, and it flings away its sweetest elements.’

‘I could do nothing for you, Pomponia, even if I would,’ said Seneca,

wearily; ‘I live a daily death.’

‘A daily death?’ she replied--‘in this splendid palace, with every

resource of wealth, with slaves, with villas, with books, with

gardens, with boundless fame, with a wife faithful and beloved,

with a host of friends?’

‘What avail such things,’ said Seneca, ‘with the sword of Damocles

trembling over my neck? My only safety is the life which I describe

in my little tragedy of “Thyestes”--a life which causes neither

jealousy nor fear, and where one does not dread to drink poison in

golden goblets.[99] If I am alive at this moment, I believe I owe it

to the fact that my freed man Cleonicus, whom Nero bribed to poison

me, failed to do so because I only eat fruits from the tree, and

drink nothing but running water.[100] Yet I am wretched. Sometimes

I all but accept the view that, after all, men are no better than a

laughing-stock of the gods, whatever gods there be.’

‘And are you so miserable, Seneca,’ she said, ‘and so hopeless? Come

with me to the prisons of the poor Christians, and I will show you

men who are poor and yet happy; ground to the dust by daily hatred

and cruelty, in hunger, and nakedness, and prison, and yet happy;

with torture and the vilest deaths immediately awaiting them, and

yet happy. Shall I tell you how Paulus of Tarsus describes himself

and them? “We are troubled on every side,” he wrote to Corinth, “yet

not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not

forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.”’

‘That is very eloquent,’ said Seneca. ‘I should like to read more

that this Christian has written.’

‘You shall,’ she answered; ‘and you will find in his letters

something better than eloquence of style. But will you despise, will

you do nothing to assist, the men and women whose faith enables them

not only to _write_ thus, but thus to live?’

Seneca sighed deeply. ‘My power with the Emperor is gone, and I am

menaced with death and confiscation. But I am rich still, Pomponia.

Take the sum of gold in this purse. It may at least help to relieve

the sufferings of these poor creatures, perhaps even to secure by

bribes the escape of some of them. It is all that I can do.’

Pomponia did not refuse it, and bade him a kindly farewell. But

she never visited the philosopher without feeling, in spite of her

affection for him and her gratitude to him, how ineffectual were his

half-truths, how vain the pomp of declamatory epigram in which they

were enshrined. The same ineffectualness, having its roots in an

insincerity so insincere as to be habitual and unconscious, marked

the whole of the contemporary morality. It ended, and was understood

to end, in self-deceiving words.

But, having failed with Seneca, Pomponia hardly knew what to do. To

the Emperor himself she would not go. His mere presence, since his

foul murder of her young Aulus, made her tremble with loathing as

though she stood before an incarnate demon. His leering sensuous

looks, his slothful obesity, his face deformed by an eczema caused

by gluttony, intemperance, and uncleanness, filled her with such

repulsion that she could not speak to him. But she had sometimes

met Poppæa in her least guilty days, when she was the wife of Rufius

Crispinus, and she hoped that there might remain some spot in the

heart of the lovely Empress which was not wholly callous to the

appeal of pity.

To her surprise she found Poppæa bathed in tears, and gently asked

her why she wept. There was something about Pomponia which seemed at

once to awaken confidence. She had that temperament which in modern

times would be called magnetic, and she always called out the

best feelings of those with whom she spoke. The haughty, beautiful,

triumphant wife of Nero would not have dreamed of suffering any one

to be admitted to her in a moment of sorrow and weakness, except

the wife of Aulus Plautius. To others she never appeared except in

dresses such as the world could not parallel, surrounded by luxury,

and breathing of the most delicate perfumes. But as Pomponia entered

she did not even attempt to remove the stain of tears from her

glowing cheeks, or to arrange the disordered tresses of her gleaming

hair.

‘Pomponia is welcome,’ she said. ‘She does not often deign to visit

the poor Empress. She should have been a vestal virgin, and moved

about surrounded by sanctities. But we wicked people have our sorrows

too. I was thinking of my boy Rufius. I love him more than anything

on earth, and Nero hates to see him, and will not let him visit me.

The poor boy might just as well have no mother.’

Pomponia paused before she spoke, and had to gulp down a choking sob.

‘I can sympathise with you, Empress. My son Aulus was a little older

than your charming Rufius. He was manly; he was beautiful; he gave

promise of all his father’s virtues.’

‘I know, I know,’ said Poppæa, turning away her face, on which rose,

in spite of herself, a burning blush. ‘He offended Nero in some way,

and he is dead.’

‘He offended him not,’ said Pomponia. ‘How could an innocent lad like

my Aulus have been guilty of treason? Let us speak no more of him.

There are those for whom death is more merciful than life, and I did

not come here to bewail my own bereavements.’

‘I pleaded for your boy, Pomponia--indeed, I did. I deigned to

prostrate myself before Nero that he would not injure him, that he

would not have him slain. Would you believe that I--I, the Empress,

--have fears lest something evil should be done to my young Rufius?’

‘May Heaven protect his youth!’ said Pomponia. ‘If it will be any

comfort to you I will see him, and ask him to our palace. My husband

is kind to all the young, and will love him for the sake of his own

lost boy. And I will take your messages to him.’

‘Thanks, Pomponia, thanks,’ said the Empress. ‘Nowhere could he be

better than in your virtuous home. But why have you sought me--you

to whom the Palace is justly hateful?’

‘I come,’ answered Pomponia, ‘to plead for your pity. There is not

a prison in Rome which is not full of innocent men and women, called

Christians. They are charged with having set fire to Rome, and with

many other atrocities. Empress, they are innocent! Will you not use

your influence for them? If you have ever done evil--forgive me,

Poppæa, but I know not the language of falsehood, or of flattery--

will you not now try to do a great deed of good?’

‘Your kindness deceives you,’ answered the Empress. ‘From all that I

have heard they thoroughly deserve their fate.’

‘Your mind has been poisoned against them by their enemies the Jews.

Believe me, Poppæa--for I know them well--their lives are almost the

only beautiful lives spent in this wicked city.’

‘Anything I could say for them would be in vain, Pomponia. I am not

as you are--would that I were!--but let me tell you what no other

living being should hear from me. Since our child Claudia died, I

am no longer all-powerful with Nero. I can stimulate his course in

evil--a touch will do that; but I cannot turn him from any wrong on

which he and Tigellinus have agreed.’

Seeing that her efforts were useless, Pomponia left her, and would

have kissed her hand; but the Empress kissed her on the cheek, and

said, ‘Oh, Pomponia, deign to be the friend of the hapless Poppæa.

The work of her ambitious guilty dreams is already crumbling into

ruins. She needs to have one friend who is not wicked.’

* * * * *

In times so oppressive the Christians who were still free could not

forego the duty and support of common prayer and Holy Communion,

however great might be the risk. Accustomed to hatred and

persecution, they were also accustomed to precautions and secret

signs, and by ways of communicating with each other unobserved and

unexpected they made it known that on the next Sunday, deep in the

night, they would meet in a secluded vineyard at the back of the

villa of Aliturus, and that Peter of Bethsaida, the Apostle of

Christ, had arrived in Rome, and would be present.

By far routes, under the curtain of darkness, they met in the

vineyard, a deeply sorrowing and diminished band. But they felt

reasonably secure. Aliturus was beloved by his slaves, to whom he was

always generous, and he had trusted those in whom he most confided

to watch on every side, and give signals by waving a torch at the

slightest approach of danger. He himself went to the assembly, and,

though as a catechumen he could not receive the holy mysteries, he

joined in the prayers, and received the blessing of Peter, as he

had received the blessing of John. Nothing could have been more

comforting than the brief words of the great Apostle. His gray hair

added to the venerable aspect of his advancing years; but his eye

was undimmed, his cheek still ruddy with the long years of the winds

of Galilee, and holy courage shone in his weather-beaten features.

There was a certain fire and force in all he said which gave it

an impressiveness beyond that which was contained in the words

themselves. Plain and practical as was ‘the pilot of the Galilean

Lake,’ there hung about him a reflection of something which elevated

him above himself--as though the sunlight of Gennesareth still played

around him, and the glory of Hermon shone upon his face. Everywhere

among the good he commanded the deep reverence which his simplicity

did not seek; and everywhere among the evil, he inspired the awe

which his humble manliness might seem to deprecate. He told the

Christians that he had hastened his journey to Rome, when he had

heard at Corinth the frightful perils with which his beloved brethren

were surrounded. Were they suffering as Christians? Then happy were

they! Had not Jesus said, ‘Ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s

sake; but he that endureth to the end shall be saved’? Only let them

give no ground for the enemy to blaspheme. ‘It is the will of God,

brethren,’ he said--and every syllable came home to their hearts

in the deep stillness--‘that by well-doing ye put to silence the

ignorance of foolish men; as free, yet not using your freedom as a

pretext for vice, but as the servants of God. Christ suffered for us;

let us be ready to suffer for Him. Be united, then, brethren; have

compassion one for another in this dread crisis; be not afraid of

their faces; be not afraid of their words; be not afraid of their

terror; neither be troubled, but sanctify the Lord God, and the peace

which passeth understanding shall stand sentry over your hearts.’

The Apostle ceased, and Cletus, who during the desperate illness

of Linus was the leading presbyter, told the brethren that, from

information which had reached him, a fresh edict would be immediately

proclaimed, which declared Christianity to be an unlawful religion,

and threatened with the worst forms of death any one who was

convicted of it. Under these circumstances they could not find a

securer place of meeting than the present, but they were surrounded

by spies, and in spite of all caution must be prepared for the worst.

And John the Beloved, from the vault of the Tullianum, had sent them

his blessing, and messages of peace.

CHAPTER LV

_TWO MARTYRDOMS_

‘And as the Apostle, on the hill

Facing the Imperial town,

First gazed upon his fair domain,

Then on the Cross lay down:

So thou, from out the streets of Rome

Didst turn thy failing eye

Unto that mount of martyrdom,

Take leave of it, and die.’

NEWMAN.

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

The Apostle Peter, whose friends were chiefly among the Jewish

Christians, went to his humble quarters across the Tiber, where

Miriam, a Jewish widow, had provided a lodging for him, his wife

Plautilla, and his daughter Petronilla. If he had held his life dear

unto himself, he would have left Rome without delay, or only have

walked out at night and in secrecy. So long as he stayed in the

Trastevere, it was not likely that the myrmidons of Tigellinus could

find out his hiding-place. But this he would not do. The restless

energy of his character rendered inaction impossible to him, and a

voice ever rang in his ears from the lilied fields of Galilee, ‘I

was hungry, and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink;

naked, and ye clothed me: sick and in prison, and ye visited me....

And inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these my brethren, ye did

it unto Me.’ He asked Miriam’s son to guide him to the prisons, and

spent the whole day among his suffering brethren. Wherever he went,

his presence was to them as the sunlight, and the most wavering could

not but be confirmed by his calm wisdom, his genial tenderness, and

the lessons which he so freely imparted to them from his personal

memories of the Divine Example. It needed money to secure admission

into their places of confinement, and Aliturus and Pomponia had seen

that sufficient was provided for all his needs. But the inevitable

result followed. The jailors noticed the tumult of joy which

hailed his presence, and saw that he was some great leader among

the Christians. Tigellinus had given orders that the ringleaders of

the baleful superstition should be seized, and especially those whom

they called Apostles. His emissaries, listening to the conversations

of the Christians among themselves, were not long in ascertaining

that this was Peter of Bethsaida, and that in securing him and John

they would have seized two chief personages of the entire Christian

community throughout the world, and two who had been personal friends

and followers of the Crucified founder of the sect. Before evening

the spies had ascertained the quarter of the city where Peter was

lodged.

It was from Simon the Sorcerer that Tigellinus learnt who Peter was,

and how important was the place which he filled in the new community.

This miserable impostor--the father of all heresies--had won himself

wealth and power, and something not far short of adoration, not

only in Samaria, but in many kingdoms. It was owing to his detestable

machinations that Drusilla, the sister of Agrippa, had been persuaded

to desert her husband, King Azizus of Emesa, and to become the

mistress of Felix, brother of Pallas, who, by his brother’s

influence, had risen from a slave to be Procurator of Judæa, and

the husband, or lover, of three queens. Simon had now come to Rome

to push his fortunes, and his keen eye had caught sight of the

Apostle in the streets. He had set a savage dog upon him, which

instantly became gentle when the Apostle laid his hand upon its

head. He was afraid of his counter-influence, and still remembered

with burning wrath the old days when Peter, shaming him before his

Samaritan votaries, had overwhelmed him with the apostrophe, ‘Thy

money perish with thee!’ He gave immediate notice to Tigellinus

that the leading Christian was in Rome. He felt more secure in his

attempted miracles and professed inspiration, when Peter was in

prison, and he was left unchecked to dupe the Emperor or the gullible

women of the Roman aristocracy.

That evening there was a little meeting of Jewish Christians who had

met together in the house of Rufus and Alexander, sons of Simon of

Cyrene, to eat the Supper of the Lord. The meeting was surprised, and

many were thrown into bonds. But Rufus, at the first sound of alarm,

hurried the Apostle to his lodging by a path at the back of the

house. Before they reached it, Miriam’s son, Nazarius, a bright

and active boy, met them with the warning that his mother’s house

had been seized; but that Plautilla and Petronilla, being unknown,

had taken refuge in the house of the Samaritan Thallus. The weeping

Christians entreated Peter to fly from Rome while there yet was time:

for the brethren at Rome he could do nothing more; to stay among

them meant death, and his life was sorely needed by the Church

of God. Overcome by their entreaties, and those of his wife and

daughter, he started at the grey dawn with the young Nazarius for

his guide, and proceeded about two miles on the Appian Way. There,

as Nazarius afterwards described the scene, a light seemed to shine

round them; the Apostle stopped as if amazed, fell on his knees with

uplifted hands, spoke earnest words, and then, with wet eyes, said,

‘We must return, my boy. It is the will of Christ.’ To him he said no

more; but he afterwards told his fellow-Apostle that (near the spot

where now stands the little church of ‘_Domine quo vadis_’?) he had

seen a vision of Christ walking towards Rome, and bearing His Cross.

‘Whither goest thou, Lord?’ he asked, in amazement. ‘I go to Rome,’

He said, ‘to be crucified again.’ ‘Lord, I return,’ said the Apostle,

‘to be crucified with Thee.’ And the Vision smiled upon him, and

vanished.

So Peter went back with the boy to the house of Thallus, and next day

began to visit the prisons once more. Seeking for Miriam to console

her, and tell her of the safety of her son, he found that she was a

prisoner. He had hardly entered the first dungeon when he was roughly

arrested, and carried off to the rock-hewn Tullianum. He was chained

to the floor beside his brother-Apostle John, in that damp and

dreary vault. There King Jugurtha, before he was strangled, had

complained so bitterly of the cold; there the brave Gaulish patriot,

Vercingetorix, had been led aside from Julius Cæsar’s triumph to

pay the forfeit of his life; there the Catilinarian conspirators,

Lentulus and Cethegus, had expiated their crimes. Fervently did the

Apostles embrace one another, and between the two there blossomed

up reminiscences of early days, infinitely tender and sacred. They

talked of the summer hours when they had played in boyhood on the

strip of silver sand beside the limpid lake at Bethsaida; of the

fisherboats, and draughts of fish, and straining nets, in the years

when they were partners together; of bright Capernaum, with its

marble synagogue, throwing its white reflection on the waves lit

with the rose of eventide; of the green hills beyond, with the naked

demoniacs among the tombs. Then they spoke of the time when they had

gone with Andrew and Nathanael to see the prophet of the wilderness,

whose notes of warning had made the flinty echoes ring with the

preaching of repentance. Then, with hushed voices, in regions of

sacred thought where we may not follow them, they spoke of the days

of the Son of Man.

They who looked down into that vault from the upper aperture would

have seen a rocky chamber, lighted only by one iron lamp, bare of

all but the merest necessaries. The prisoners had nothing but a water

jar, and two wooden seats, and mats upon the rocky floor, on which at

night they could stretch their cramped and wearied limbs, and which

Pomponia had bribed the jailor for permission to supply. And in this

cell would have been seen two men of Jewish aspect and poor clothing,

of whom the elder had exceeded man’s threescore years and ten, and

the younger was long past life’s prime. Chilly, and in chains, and

fed only on bread and water, and the leaders of a cause on which the

world poured its most passionate execration they yet felt perfect

trust in God. With Emperor and mob alike arrayed against them, and

with hundreds of their brethren in the same evil case, and with death

in its ghastliest form striding visibly upon them, amid what looked

like the extreme of uttermost failure--might not even their enemies

have pitied them? Pity? Nay, Nero might have given all the kingdoms

of the earth and the glory of them, and Seneca have bartered all his

wisdom and his wealth, for one hour of their radiant serenity, of

their unshaken peace!

In the evening the jailor, Martinianus--who had been so much touched

by their bearing, and by all that he had heard from them as they

talked, that he was already in heart almost a Christian--came full

of sorrow, to tell them that on the morrow they should die. To his

amazement a light as of heaven dawned upon their faces, and they

turned and looked on each other with a smile. They asked him in what

way they were to suffer. He either was uninformed or shrank from

telling them, and they were content that the morrow should reveal it.

‘I knew it, my brother, I knew it,’ said Peter. ‘Again and again a

Voice has repeated in my dreams, “Verily I say to thee, When thou

wast young thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest;

but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and

another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.”

And I am not troubled that I know not yet by what death I shall

glorify God. But thou, my brother, shalt not die yet.’

‘How that may be I know not,’ replied the other, deeply musing. ‘But

to us to live is to die. Said He not, “He who is near Me is near the

fire; he who is far from Me is far from the kingdom”?’

The jailer had told them truly. The execution of the Christians was

to be hurried on with all speed, for Nero had on hand the weighty

business of supervising the reconstruction of his capital and of

his Golden House. He could only recover the popularity necessary for

these undertakings by sacrificing a holocaust of victims to assuage

the popular suspicions. And the most diabolic feature of this

massacre of the innocent was to be that they were not only to be

slain, but that their tortures were to subserve the amusement of the

people. The solemn moment of each Christian’s death was to be the

motive for delighted acclamations and shouts of laughter--in which,

surely, all the demons joined! To any feelings less exalted, to

any hope less fervent than theirs, it would have been the most

intolerable aggravation to die amid pagan pageants and brutal

idleness, insulted by bacchanalia of revelry and sanguinary pomp.

But the inventiveness of cruelty which Tigellinus and Nero studied

and planned together amid the faint, unavailing remonstrances of

Poppæa, had to be hastened, for the special reason that already their

victims were beginning to escape them fast through the narrow gate

of death. Owing to the suffocating atmosphere of over-peopled prisons

in the malarious autumn air, a dangerous form of typhoid had broken

out among the Christians. Not a few had died, robbed, as they

feared, of the crown of martyrdom. It had required all the wisdom

and tenderness of their fellows to persuade them that they had

deserved no less than others the longed-for amaranth, and that they

would not be losers by not surviving until that second coming which

many of them were expecting from hour to hour. Tigellinus was not

more anxious to bestow than they to receive the death of violence.

All Nero’s aims would be frustrated, if, with so great a multitude

of victims ready for them, the wild beasts of the amphitheatre, human

as well as animal, were baulked of their infernal festival and their

infernal joy.

Pending, therefore, the necessary preparations to deal with the rest

in mass, bizarre and insulting forms of death were devised for the

leaders on the following day. Notice was given that of the two Jewish

ringleaders of the Christian sect, whom they called Apostles, one

would be crucified head downwards by the obelisk in the Circus on the

Mons Vaticanus, under the terebinth tree, and that the other would be

flung into a caldron of boiling oil on the Latin Road.

And that night a great joy was permitted them. They had noticed that

again and again Martinianus had not only shown them kindnesses to

which the prisoners of the Tullianum were little accustomed, but also

that he had humbly lingered in their presence, had asked permission

to listen to them when they spake of Jesus, had put many questions

to them, had evidently felt in his heart some stirrings of heavenly

grace. That night he came to them, and, falling on his knees, said

that they had taught him to believe in Christ, and begged baptism at

their hands. The spring was there welling up, as it still does, from

its native rock. Nothing hindered. Martinianus received baptism at

the hands of the Apostles, and afterwards died a martyr.

The morning dawned sulphurously hot, and there seemed to be menace

and meaning in the sky which glowed overhead like molten copper. At

the entrance of the Tullian vault the Apostles enfolded one another

in a long farewell embrace. They reminded each other, with faces

which smiled through the tears of parting, of the blessings and words

of Christ, and, being then rudely separated, were led in opposite

directions by two decurions with their soldiers, amid accompanying

throngs. The places of execution had been fixed in order that

spectators might have their free choice of delightful horror, and

that the division of the multitudes might enable all to have a good

view.

A fresh trial awaited the elder Apostle. He had hardly been set free

from his chains, that he might walk to the place of execution with

his hands tied behind his back, when he saw his wife, who was also

being led on her way to die. Brief, and free from all anguish, were

the words that they interchanged.

‘Be of good cheer,’ he said, ‘true yokefellow. He will be with thee

who raised thy mother from the great fever at Capernaum. I rejoice

that thou, too, art going home.’

‘Farewell, my beloved,’ she replied, in a firm voice; ‘I am not

afraid. In one short hour we shall be with Him where He is.’

He cast one long look upon her, and said in Hebrew, ‘Yea, though I

walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil,

for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.’ And

when they were parted he still turned round to her once more, and

said, ‘Oh, remember the Lord!’

Most of the spectators who accompanied the procession had seen the

then common spectacle of crucifixion; but to see a man crucified head

downwards was a novelty sufficient to have assembled all the dregs

of the populace, but for the counter-attraction at what, for the sake

of brevity, we will call the Latin Gate.[101] In point of fact, Nero

had read in Seneca’s ‘Consolation to Marcia’[102] that tyrants had

been known to adopt this grotesque form of cruelty, and he himself

suggested it to Tigellinus, and said that he meant to witness it.

When St. Peter was told what awaited him, he only smiled. He well

knew that what had been intended for insult was overruled to him for

mercy. He would be spared the long unspeakable pangs of lingering

death. On the ordinary cross he might have lived for three days in

complications of agony, but crucified head downwards, he knew that

in a very short time he would pass from unconsciousness to death.

Nero, as he had promised, was present to see the new sight. While

the cross was being prepared, Peter caught sight of the Emperor,

and lifting the right hand, which for a moment the executioner had

loosened, fixed his gaze on him till he shrank.

He spoke not, but one of the Christians, who had noticed the

Emperor’s alarm, exclaimed--

‘O murderer of the saints, yet a little time hence, and thou, too,

shalt be summoned before the bar of God.’

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

blaspheming mouth!’

But the speaker had shrunk back into the dense multitude.

They nailed St. Peter to the cross, and lifted it with his head

downwards; but while the brutal heathen laughed, and the fear

of death could not suppress the wail of the Christians, he said

only--and they were the last words of the great Apostle--‘I rejoice

that ye crucify me thus, for my Master’s sake. I am much unworthy to

die in the same manner as He died.’

The old man passed speedily and almost painlessly away, and in the

glimmering, flashing sky, over which, in the far distance, began to

roll the chariot wheels of gathering storm, the brethren thought that

they saw the wings of angels and shadows of the avengers.

The Christians always perplexed and irritated their pagan persecutors

by behaving in a manner the very opposite to what was expected. After

their first shuddering emotion at witnessing the martyrdom of their

great Apostle, they seemed rather radiant than depressed. But the

reason for this was that their young deacon, Clemens, speaking to

them in Greek, said, ‘I see him, not head downwards, but upright on

the cross, and the angels crown him with roses and lilies, and the

Lord is putting a book into his hands from which he reads.’

It was natural that they should desire to keep his mortal remains.

Marcellus, who had been a pupil of Simon Magus, but whom Peter had

converted, obtained his body from the executioner for a great sum of

money, bathed it in milk and wine, and had it embalmed. That night

they conveyed it to a spot, secretly remembered, at the foot of the

Vatican hill.

Marcellus watched by the grave that night; but as he watched he

thought that the Apostle came to him in vision, and said, ‘Let the

dead bury their dead. Preach thou the gospel of God.’ On that spot

was reared the humble ‘trophy,’ or memorial cell, which the presbyter

Gaius saw there in the second century. Thence, in due time, the

relics were removed to that unequalled shrine, where the tomb which

enclosed them is encircled by ever-burning lights, and visited

century after century by the devotion of tens of thousands. Fools

counted his life madness and his end to be without honour. How is he

numbered among the children of God, and his lot is among the saints!

The procession which accompanied the Apostle John had taken longer

to arrive at the scene of martyrdom. The awful heat of the morning,

the more crowded parts of the city through which they had to pass,

the greater throngs which accompanied them, had caused delay. The

Apostle walked with firm step in the midst of the ten soldiers.

Though his hands were tied behind his back, his appearance struck

all beholders with involuntary dread. The high forehead, the long

hair which streamed over his shoulders, the perfect self-possession,

the beauty of holiness, gave to his movements an unconscious majesty.

His face was mostly lifted heavenward in prayer, but whenever he

turned on those around him his bright and searching glance their

eyes fell before him. If any began to jeer at him and utter words of

ribald blasphemy, he had but to look towards them, and in spite of

themselves they stopped short. An unwonted hush fell on the throng

which surged around the soldiers--a silence of which the multitudes

themselves could give no account.

‘He is a sorcerer, that is certain,’ said Tullius Senecio as he

looked down on the passing procession from a window in the house of

Crispinilla.

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

strangely quiet.’

‘Let me see the Christian,’ said a boy in the crowd. ‘Soldier, lift

me up that I may see him.’

‘What, Gervasius? How camest thou here? But thou art a soldier’s son,

and I will humour thee,’ said the decurio. ‘Thy father and I were

comrades in Palestine, and it was once his lot to see a scene after

which he never had one happy day.’

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

‘Is that the Christian?’ he said. ‘Yon man does not look like an

enemy of the gods, or an eater of children’s flesh.’

The Apostle heard him, and turned towards him with a soft light of

blessing in his eyes.

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

to see thee killed.’

Fifty years later he remembered that gentle glance when in a later

persecution he, too, was led out to die.

At the scene of execution a high scaffolding had been erected so

that many thousands could be gratified by witnessing the new form of

death. On the summit, on ten rows of bricks, had been kindled a fire,

and over this was placed a huge caldron of iron, full of boiling oil.

Not blenching in a single feature, with a step of perfect dignity,

without assistance, without the slightest tremor, the Apostle mounted

the wooden steps and stood in the sight of all, the fire flinging its

red glare over him as the executioner tore off his outer robe.

But meanwhile the storm, gathering into its bosom the fierce heat

of that day in late August, had begun to burst over Rome. The

thunderclouds passed from threatening purple into midnight blackness,

and roll after roll of thunder throbbed and crashed as though to

menace the guilty city with the doom of its congregated iniquity.

Then blazed forth the lightning, and filled the air, and ran along

the ground. So tremendous were the explosions of sound, whose

rending, cracking, and splitting outbursts settled into a long,

continued roar, and so vivid were the flashes of forked lightning

which gleamed like dazzling dagger-stabs aimed at an enemy who must

at all costs be slain, that the soldiers and the executioners and

the spectators grew livid with dread. Women shrieked and cowered, and

clung to their husbands, and men looked round them uneasily, and some

began to hurry away, and the hearts of all were benumbed as with some

strange misgiving.

An exceptionally terrific crash of the artillery of heaven, a flash

of levin which seemed to wrap them all in a white robe of dazzling

flame, a shriek from hundreds of voices! And when the crash

ended, the Christians were murmuring together in awestruck voices,

_Maranatha! Maranatha!_ and there arose scattered cries from the

multitude. ‘He is a sorcerer! Stay the execution! We are all dead

men! The wrath of the gods is upon us!’ The ancients, from ignorance

combined with superstition, were far more terrified than the moderns

by thunderstorms. It was evident that they were in the centre of the

storm. The scaffold and the caldron formed its inmost focus, having

attracted the electric fluid by their woodwork and iron. The decurion

himself and his soldiers and the executioners were terrified. They

dared not disobey their orders, yet amid the general terror they

seemed paralysed into helplessness. Aliturus, hoping that he might

in some way render some kindness, had asked to be one of those

spectators, of higher position than the mob, who were allowed to

stand on the scaffold. Seizing his opportunity, he hastily whispered,

‘The executioner has untied your hands. You have friends in the

crowd. Escape! Fear not the lightning--this skin of a seal which I

brought under my robe, expecting a thunderstorm, is an amulet against

lightning.’

‘I thank thee, my son,’ said the Apostle; ‘unless the will of God be

clearly manifested, I cannot fly. And if we trust in God we need no

amulet, for neither the pestilence nor the arrow can hurt us.’

Again the thunder roared, again they were wrapped in a blinding

flash. Hardly conscious what he did, the Apostle uplifted his right

hand. It became the nucleus of the electric phenomenon known as St.

Elmo’s fire, and at once appeared to burn like a torch with lambent

flame. A cry of fresh terror rose from the heathen multitude. ‘Fly,

fly!’ they exclaimed; ‘he is a sorcerer or a god. He lifts against

us his flaming hand, tipped with the fire of Castor and Pollux. We

shall all be killed by fire from heaven. The spot is accursed. It

is a _bidental_.’[103]

A rush took place, and the crowd fled promiscuously in every

direction. The soldiers could not resist the contagion. They leapt

down and fled, and the decurio followed, shouting to them in vain.

The executioners joined the soldiers in their flight. For a moment

the Apostle and Aliturus stood alone on the scaffold, and then

hurried down the steps. Scarcely had they reached the ground when

the lightning struck the metal caldron and tore it from its chains.

It fell with a mighty crash, and the oil streaming over the flame

burst up in a fierce blaze which would very rapidly have reduced the

whole scaffold to ashes had not the deluging rain begun to fall in

cataracts, quenching the fire, but leaving a charred and shapeless

ruin.

The news was brought to Nero and Tigellinus that evening by

multitudes of witnesses when the storm had cleared and the heavens

had resumed their azure sleep. They shared the superstition of

the mob, and thought that, by magic powers unusually terrible, the

Apostle had brought down the wrath of Heaven. At the same time this

could have nothing to do with the Christians in general, for had

not the execution of the other Apostle been carried out with perfect

ease? They were officially informed that the Apostle, of his own free

will, had thought it right to return to the door of the Tullianum and

surrender himself as a prisoner. Such strange security deepened the

impression that he could wield supernatural powers. Afraid to detain

him in Rome, Nero ordered him to banishment in the rocky Ægean island

of Patmos.[104]

Thither the Apostle was conveyed, and there, gazing on the sea that

burned like glass in the sunlight, he wrote his Apocalypse. In that

strange book we can still read the echo of the horror kindled in

the heart of an eyewitness by an Emperor who had degenerated into a

portent of iniquity, fighting with empoisoned breath and dragon-like

fury against the saints of God. The Apocalypse is the ‘thundering

reverberation’ of the Apostle’s mighty spirit, smitten into wrathful

dissonance amid its heavenly music by the plectrum of the Neronian

persecution. All the horrors of that frightful age of storms, and

eruptions, and earthquakes, and falling meteors, and famine, and

pestilence, and threatenings of Parthian invasion and imminent

massacres of civil war, threw gigantic and blood-red shadows across

the Apostle’s page. The air was being shattered by the trumpet-blasts

of doom which would bury in flame and ruin alike the Harlot City on

the seven hills which had made herself so drunken with the blood of

the saints, and the Holy City which had become a den of murderers--

which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt--where the Lord was

crucified. When he wrote his vision, three or four years later, the

souls of those who had been slain in the great Neronian tribulation

for the Word of God and the testimony which they held were still

under the altar, and cried, ‘How long, O Lord, how long dost thou

not avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ But white

robes were given them, and they were bidden to rest yet a little

while till the number of their brethren was fulfilled. And afterwards

one of the four-and-twenty elders who sat around the throne asked

him, ‘Who are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence

came they?’ And he said unto him, ‘Sir, thou knowest.’ And the Elder

answered, ‘These are they which came out of THE GREAT TRIBULATION,

and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the

Lamb.’

CHAPTER LVI

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

‘SEC. BR. O night and shades!

How are ye joined with hell in triple knot.

* * * * *

Is this the confidence

You gave me, brother?

ELD. BR. Yes, and keep it still.

* * * * *

If this fail

The pillared firmament is rottenness,

And earth’s base built on stubble.’

MILTON, _Comus_.

The news of the Neronian persecution did not reach St. Paul at

once. When he left the hospitable home of Philemon he first rejoined

Timothy at Ephesus. He left him to arrange the affairs of the Church

of Ephesus, and Onesimus took the place which had been filled by the

son of Eunice in former years. He became the Apostle’s travelling

companion, to lend him the affectionate attendance now necessary to

his age and infirmities. It was not till they reached Corinth that

they heard the heart-shaking intelligence that the Christian Church

at Rome had been smitten by Antichrist as with red-hot thunderbolts.

Though no accurate details reached them, Paul’s first impulse was to

fly to the succour of his Roman brethren; but Titus of Corinth, who

was with him, urged him to remember that two of his brother Apostles

were at Rome; that the persecution was now certain to break out in

nearly every Church of the Empire, and that his presence was more

needed in Crete and in the Churches of Asia and Europe of which he

had been the immediate founder. Anxious to confront the growth of

subtle heresies, more perilous in his eyes than persecution, he

reluctantly abandoned his wish to return to Italy, and sailed to

Crete. It was some time before he learnt that St. Peter had sealed

his testimony by martyrdom and that St. John was a prisoner at Patmos.

But Onesimus was distressed at heart by the perils which would

befall the beloved daughter of Nereus, and he entreated the Apostle

to let him be the bearer to Rome of his messages of consolation and

encouragement. Receiving ready permission, he hurried to the capital

by the earliest ship, and arrived on the very day of the storm

which had witnessed the crucifixion of St. Peter and the miraculous

deliverance of the Beloved Disciple.

With amazement he saw Rome lying in ruins and the Christian cause

apparently destroyed forever. ‘Christian’ was now the synonym of

incendiary and desperate malefactor. His heart sank within him as he

went from house to house only to find that the Christian inhabitants

had disappeared. So great a multitude had been arrested that for the

time being the prisons were the only churches. He went to the palace

of Aulus Plautius, thinking that there he was certain to receive

information; but there, too, he found that scarcely one of the

Christian slaves was left, and that Pomponia herself had caught the

virulent typhoid which had broken out among the crowded sufferers,

and lay unconscious and dangerously ill.

Risking everything, he visited the prisons, and in one of them he

found Nereus, wasted and haggard, but still animated by a cheerful

courage. From him he learnt, with a deep sense of relief, that at

the first outbreak of danger he had sent Junia to the safe refuge

of Aricia. Pudens, when he sailed for Britain, felt a prescient

intuition of the days which were to come, and told the Christian

members of his household that they might always find a place of

shelter with Dromo in the little country farm. Thither Junia had gone

with a few others, obedient to the wish and command of her father,

though reluctant to leave him. There Onesimus found her, and carried

to her the blessing and the messages of Nereus. Nereus sent her word

that he was doomed to die, as they were all doomed to die, though by

what form of death was as yet unknown to them. He bade her to stay at

Aricia. She could do nothing for him, and to come to Rome would only

be to throw away her life. In the few lines he was able to write

to her he commended Onesimus. He confessed that in former days

the youth had been altogether displeasing to him, but now he was a

changed character. Paulus had won him back to the paths of holiness.

He had been illuminated. He had tasted of the heavenly calling, and

had devoted himself to the personal tendance of the aged Apostle.

In Rome he had given proof of his courage and consistency by showing

pity for the prisoners and not being ashamed of their chains. It was

no time now to talk of marrying or giving in marriage, for surely the

day of the Lord was very nigh at hand; yet, if Junia loved the youth,

Nereus would not forbid their plighting troth to each other, and

awaiting the day when the marriage might be possible. And this he

granted the more readily, for he feared that very soon Junia would be

left alone, a helpless and friendless Christian maiden in the midst

of an evil world.

So the lovers met, but the interchange of their common vows were

solemn and sacred, under the darkening skies of persecution, and as

it were in the valley of the shadow of death. For Junia entreated

Onesimus to return to Rome and do his utmost to watch over her father

and to save him if by any means it were possible or lawful. He bade

her farewell, and found time to pay one brief visit to the temple

at Aricia that he might express his gratitude to the priest of

Virbius for having spared his life. Alas, he was too late! A new

Rex Nemorensis--the ex-gladiator Rutilus--reigned in Croto’s room.

He had surprised and murdered him the evening before, and Onesimus

saw the gaunt corpse of Croto outstretched upon its wooden bier

awaiting burial in the plot assigned to the succession of murdered

priests.

Sick at heart, Onesimus hurried from the dark precincts, and by the

morning dawn he was in Rome.

On that day the terrible massacres began which were to baptise the

infant Church in a river of blood, and to consecrate Rome in the

memory of Christendom as the city of slaughtered saints. For there

Paganism was to display herself, naked and not ashamed, a harlot

holding in her hand the brimming goblet of her wickedness, drunken

with the blood of the beloved of God. Mankind was to see exhibited a

series of startling contrasts: human nature at its best and sweetest;

human nature at its vilest and worst:--unchecked power smitten with

fatal impotence; unarmed weakness clothed with irresistible strength:

--pleasure and self-indulgence drowned in wretchedness; misery and

martyrdom exulting with joy unspeakable, and full of glory. On the

one side was the splendour and civilisation of the City of the Dragon

revelling in brutal ferocity and lascivious pride; on the other side

the down-trodden and the despised of the City of God rose to a height

of nobleness which no philosophy had attained, and enriched with

sovereign virtues the ideal of mankind. While the deified lord of the

empire of darkness with his nobles and his myrmidons sank themselves

below the level of the beasts, paupers and nameless slaves, young

boys and feeble girls towered into tragic dignity, faced death with

unflinching heroism, and showed that even amid satyrs and demons

humanity may still be measured with the measure of a man--that is,

of the angel.

Herein lay the secret of the victory of Christianity. In the Rome of

Nero heathendom showed the worst that she could _be_, and the worst

that she could _do_; and Christianity showed, coinstantaneously,

that manhood can preserve its inherent grandeur when it seems to be

trampled into the very mire under the hoofs of swine. The sweetness

and the dignity with which the Christians suffered kindled not only

amazement but admiration in many a pagan breast. It was seen that

with the Church in its poverty and shame, not with the world in

its gorgeous criminality, lay the secret of all man’s happiness and

hope. Many a senator, as he looked on the saturnalia of lubricity

and blood, felt that the Christian slave-girl, tied naked to a stake

in the amphitheatre for the wild beasts to devour, was more blessed

than the jewelled lady by his side, whom he knew to be steeped in

baseness; and there were youths to whose taste the apples of the Dead

Sea had already crumbled into dust, who in their secret hearts felt

themselves nothing less than abject compared with those Christian

boys who, with the light of heaven on their foreheads and the name

of Jesus on their lips, faced without flinching the grotesque horror

of their doom.

But Nero and Tigellinus, and those who advised with them, never

wavered in their hideous policy of purchasing popularity by making

the murder of thousands of the innocent subserve the brutal passions

of the multitude. They thought to abase the Christians, and they

kindled round their brows an aureole of light. They thought to

flatter the people, but made them vile by a carnival which showed

that their natures had become a mixture of the tiger and the ape.

The jubilee of massacre began with cruel flagellations, for the

intention was to combine amusement with utility and to represent

these unnumbered agonies as a festival of expiation. So low had the

Romans sunk since the days when they had believed that the wrath of

the gods had been kindled because before some public games a master

had scourged his slave round the arena!

As they wished to add derision to torture, it did not suffice them

that at these piacular displays men should merely fight with wild

beasts who would soon be glutted with the multitude of victims. A

novelty was devised for the delight of the spectators.

The first batch of martyrs were clad in the skins of wolves and

leopards and torn to death by hordes of fierce and hungry dogs.

Others had to take part in mythologic operas. Among them was the

soldier Urbanus. Clad in the guise of Hercules on Œta, he was burned

alive upon a funeral pyre. Another martyr, Celsus, had to figure

as Mucius Scævola, and to burn his hand to ashes in a flame upon

an altar, with the promise that his life should be given him if,

in carrying out his historic rôle, he would voluntarily consume his

right hand, and not once shrink. Vitalis had to take his part in

the favourite drama of Laureolus, in which character, after being

made a laughing-stock, he was first crucified, and then, while

yet living, devoured upon the cross by a bear. It was thought a

favourable opportunity to try experiments. Simon Magus, after

securing the arrest of Peter, had been admitted to an interview

with Poppæa, whose superstitious turn of mind inclined her to

consult every charlatan who visited the capital, and through her he

gained admittance to the Emperor. He awakened Nero’s interest in a

machine by which he pretended that he could enable men to fly. Nero

determined to test the capabilities of the machine _in corpore vili_.

The story of Dædalus and Icarus should be enacted, and as a slim and

graceful youth was needed for the part of Icarus, poor Nazarius, the

son of Miriam, was selected for this character. A lofty wooden tower

was erected in the mimic scene. The wild beasts were roaming loose in

the amphitheatre, and if either Dædalus or Icarus was not killed by

a fall from the tower, he would be devoured in the arena. The martyr

Amplias, who represented Dædalus, was precipitated at once, and

killed by a lion. The broad wings of the machine upbore for a moment

the light form of Nazarius as he sprang from the tower, but he fell

on the very podium of the Emperor, and so close beside him that, to

the horror of all, and with an omen of the worst import, he spattered

the white robe of Nero with his blood.[105]

Unsated by these scenes the spectators demanded the sacrifice of

the women victims. Hundreds of them were crowded in cells under the

amphitheatre, and were informed that they were to appear in a series

of pageants representing the torments of the dead. The spectacle

was deemed impious by many, but it had been exhibited by Egyptians

and Ethiopians in the days of Caligula. Fifty of these poor female

martyrs were to be clothed in scarlet mantles as the daughters of

Danaus, and, after undergoing nameless insults, were to be stabbed

by an actor who personated Lynceus.[106] To many of them it was an

anguish worse than death that they should have to bear part in dramas

which represented the idolatries of heathendom; but Prisca, the wife

of Aquila, who had returned from Ephesus to Rome with her husband on

matters connected with their trade, visited the sufferers in prison,

and effectually consoled them. This Jewish matron, to whom with her

husband had been granted the honour of no inconspicuous share in

the founding of the three great churches of Rome, of Corinth, and

of Ephesus, had not been arrested by any informer, owing to long

residence in Achaia and Asia. She told the poor women that resistance

was in vain, and that no insult inflicted on them by the heathen

could dim the lustre of their martyr-crown. Cheered by her calm

wisdom, they paced across the stage carrying vases on their

shoulders, and bore their fate without a cry.

More terrible was the destiny of others. They were to enact the part

of Dirce. One after another, in imitation of the much-admired statue

now known as the Farnese Bull, which had recently been brought from

Rhodes, they were tied by actors representing Amphion and Zethus,

to the horns of furious oxen, and so were tossed or gored to death.

They, too, were sustained by the presence of the Invisible, and the

modesty of their bearing, even in such agonies, caused a pang in the

hearts of all but the most hardened spectators.

At all these spectacles of shame Nero looked on. There he sat

day after day in the podium, lolling on cushions of gold and

purple, staring through the concave emerald which helped his

short-sightedness, and finding new sensations in the spectacle of

insulted innocence. He was never tired of wondering whence these

wretches got their ‘blank callosity.’ And they, ere their eyes opened

on that other land, where they knew they should gaze upon their King

in His beauty, saw as their last glimpse of earth, this despicable

Antichrist, with his face like that of a base overgrown boy, watching

with greedily curious stare the agony of their immolation.

But there were too many martyrs to render it easy to dispose of them.

After they had exhausted the inventiveness of cruelty, after they

had heaped up the _puticuli_ even to the danger of pestilence with

crucified, charred, and mangled corpses, at least a thousand of the

great multitude still rotted in the feverous prisons. Then an idea

truly infernal presented itself to the mind of Nero. Were not these

masses of human beings supposed to be expiating their crimes as

incendiaries? But the proper and congruous punishment of incendiaries

was the _tunica molesta_, or robe of pitch. He wondered that he had

never thought of it before! It would, indeed, be somewhat tame merely

to burn alive a certain number of people in succession. At first

there might be an agreeable sense of curiosity in studying the faces

of men and women in such circumstances, and in hearing their groans

and cries. But after watching the first dozen or so, that pleasure

would grow monotonous. He determined to prevent the danger of any

satiety in the gratification by concentrating it all into one hour

of multiplex and complicated agony.

He possessed magnificent gardens, stretching from the Vatican Hill to

the Tiber. There was a circus, rich with gilding and marble, of which

the _meta_ was the obelisk, brought from Heliopolis, now standing in

the piazza of St. Peter’s. He would throw open these gardens to the

public, for one of the nightly spectacles of which he had copied the

fashion from the mad Caligula. Every one should wander at will about

the green copses, and the umbrageous retreats, and he would furnish

them with an illumination unseen, unheard of, in the world’s history

before or since. It should be the illumination of a thousand living

torches, of which each should be a martyr in his shirt of flame!

And it was done. Martyrdoms inflicted by wild beasts, and dogs, and

gibbets, had become tedious from repetition. Here should be a new

and intense sensation for himself, and for all Rome, for he would be

present in person and enjoy to the full his hateful popularity. At

intervals, all along the paths, masts, strong and large, were driven

deep into the ground. To each of these was tied a man or a woman, who

were taken in throngs from the pestilential and now emptied prisons.

Each was tied to the stake, and in front of each was put a smaller

stake with a sharpened point, fixed under the chin, lest their heads

should sink on their breasts and baulk the festal sightseers from

gloating on the expression of their dying agonies. Hundreds of Nero’s

slaves were at work, for the preparations had all to be begun many

hours before the dusk fell. The last thing which had to be done was

to saturate the robes of the martyrs with pitch and oil, and then

to heap around the feet of each, as high as their waists, a mass

of straw and brushwood and shavings. These balefires were not to be

kindled till it was dark, in order that the world of Rome might have

complete enjoyment of the pageant and look in each other’s rejoicing

faces by the mighty blaze.

But Onesimus had determined to do his utmost to save Nereus, if

nothing else was possible. Hanging about the gardens in the dress

of a slave, he managed to gain admission by the connivance of a

Prætorian whom he knew to be a secret Christian. Once inside the

precincts, he could easily escape detection among the hundreds who

were so busily employed. Carrying now a stake, and now a bucket of

pitch, and now a heap of fuel, he hurried from place to place, at

each convenient moment whispering some bright message of cheer such

as St. Paul had taught him, and rewarded by grateful smiles from

those who were so soon to undergo their awful fate. At last he saw

Nereus, who, happily for the young man’s purpose, had been fastened

to a stake at the end of one of the remoter alleys. Nereus, deep

in prayer, and dead to the things of earth, did not recognise him,

but started when he heard a voice whispering to him that he should

attempt to secure his escape.

‘It is impossible,’ said Nereus. ‘I am more than ready to share the

fate of my comrades, and to win their crown.’

‘Nay, father,’ said Onesimus, ‘think of Junia, who, if thou diest,

will be left a helpless orphan in the world. I dare speak no more,

but be ready to fly in one instant behind yonder shrine, if I am able

to set thee free.’

Reconnoitring the ground, Onesimus observed that the green alley

where Nereus was tied was close beside a wall. At no great distance

beyond the wall he knew that there was one of the corpse-pits into

which were thrown the bodies of the poor. Gliding about, he saw on

the ground a basket containing a hammer and large nails. He snatched

it up, and, hid from observation behind the tangled masses of rank

foliage at the back of a shrine of Priapus, he drove the nails one

over the other between the huge disjointed stones, so as to make

it easy to climb the wall. Then he awaited his opportunity, which

he knew would be when the crowd of more than a hundred thousand

spectators pushed and crowded into the gardens, and the fires of

death began.

He was right in all his calculations. A scene of tumultuous

excitement, and the hoarse murmur of innumerable voices, greeted

the almost simultaneous kindling of many of the stakes. At that very

moment, before the executioners had reached the end of the alley,

Onesimus, gliding behind Nereus, cut his thongs, slipped the chain

over his head, tore off the pitchy outer robe, and hurrying the old

man to the back of the shrine of Priapus, half dragged him up the

wall, and took refuge in the dense gloom of a subterranean passage

in the dreadful burial-place.

The executioners noticed, of course, that one of their victims

had, by some strange unknown means, escaped; but it did not greatly

concern them. One simply whispered to the other, ‘It will not be

observed. Let the poor cacodæmon get off. What matters it to us?’

Meanwhile on every side the flames shot up around the stakes, and

glared with hideous brightness, and sent up huge tongues of waving

light, and each stake became a torch of hell, and black smoke swirled

around them, and groans and cries of anguish arose which were drowned

in bursts of music and laughter and ribald songs. And all the while

the moon was silvering the rich foliage, and the stars shone down

with peaceful rays over that revelry of hell, and the smoke and flame

were to those poor sufferers as chariots of fire and horses of fire

to bear their souls to heaven. And while the agony and madness and

hilarity were at their height, and the statues of obscene gods and

lascivious nymphs, which glimmered from beneath the trees, looked

like demons over whose faces the red glow flickered in smiles of

seeming ecstasy as they watched this triumph of demoniac wickedness

--at this moment shouts of adulation arose, and Nero was seen, his

face wreathed in smiles, in the dress of a charioteer. With some of

his basest creatures round him, he mingled familiarly with the mob,

exchanged jokes with them, and stood peering with them into the

ghastly faces in which flickered longest the gleam of life.

‘What think you of these _sarmenticii_, these _semaxii_?’ he asked

repeatedly of the plebeian throng.

‘Call us “faggot-birds,” and “stake-fellows,”’ said one of the

martyrs, who calmly awaited the rekindling of his stake from which,

by some chance, the flame had expired. ‘These faggots with which

we are burned, these stakes to which we are bound, are our robes

of victory, our triumphant chariot.’[107]

‘Child of the Devil,’ exclaimed another, before his robe had caught

the flames, ‘I would not, even at this moment, change my lot with

thine.’

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

Nero shrank before the prophecy, but afterwards sprang upon his

chariot, and seeking the applause which rose like a storm wherever

he appeared, drove his four horses round every part of the circus,

and the broad paths of the gardens, until the last human torch had

flared out, and the multitude began to stream away.

It was an amazing thing that pagan fathers and mothers should have

taken even their children to see such sights as these. But, inured

as they were to blood and anguish by the harrowing homicides of the

amphitheatre, their hearts in these matters were ‘brazed by damned

custom.’ And so it happened that a Roman knight named Cornelius

Tacitus had led his little son, a grave child of eight years old,

to walk through the gardens of Nero on that awful night. He looked

on the scene with an impulse of childish pity, and asked his father

‘whether these Christians had really set fire to Rome.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said his father.

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

‘They are criminals,’ said the knight; ‘and they hate the whole human

race. They are akin to the Jews, and it would be no bad thing for the

Empire if both of those accursed superstitions were destroyed.’

The young Tacitus remembered and recorded the remark more than thirty

years later, when he had become a great historian. He was influenced,

too, by the conversation which he then heard between his father and

the friends who accompanied him. ‘These men,’ said one of them, ‘die

every whit as bravely as the Stoics whom we so greatly admire.’ But

the elder Tacitus would not admit the analogy. ‘In these Christians,’

he said, ‘the contempt of death is mere custom, or madness, or sheer

obstinacy.’

Seneca, too, was in those gardens of the Vatican for a few moments,

perplexed, horrified, miserable. The Emperor had commanded his

presence, as though it would lend some sanction to the carnival of

horror. The agonising deaths of such a multitude were indeed, to him,

a repulsive sight, but it was not so wholly unfamiliar as to harrow

his feelings to their depths. What struck him most, and what he has

dwelt upon in his obvious allusions to this monstrous execution, was

the inexplicable fortitude, the unflinching heroism, shown, not by

nobles and philosophers, but by slaves, and women, and boys, and the

very dregs of the populace. He pondered in vain over that disturbing

problem.[108]

* * * * *

Before an hour had passed, the stakes stood charred and black, and

underneath them were horrible heaps of death, still keeping some

awful semblance of humanity; and the smoke curled and writhed about

them, and streams of the melted and bubbling pitch quivered with

small blue flames, or left black furrows on the burnt grass or the

trampled sand.

And thus amid foul laughter the martyrs had died whose lives alone

were innocent, who alone loved one another and all mankind. And the

moon still shed her soft lustre on the scene, and the stars looked

down through the untroubled night, and lighted home the myriads whose

consciences, seared as with hot iron, smote them in no wise for their

share in that crime--the vilest in the long annals of the world’s

vilest days.

The numerous and flourishing Church of Rome was all but destroyed;

yet on that night the seed of her mighty power in the development

of Christianity was sown afresh. Watered by the blood of the martyrs,

that seed sprang into more vigorous[*18] life, and rushing sunwards,

spread forth arms laden with fruit and foliage, and grew into a

giant bole, strong with the rings of a thousand summers, under whose

shadows and ‘complicated glooms and cool impleachèd twilights,’

the hopes and fears of generations found their refuge--yea! and

shall find it for evermore, unless it be severed from the root, and

blighted into barrenness, and the axe be uplifted and the doom go

forth, ‘Never fruit grow upon thee more!’

And the obelisk which witnessed that night of abomination, and which

is now dedicated ‘To the Unknown Martyrs,’ still towers into the

clear air, and on it is inscribed--

‘CHRISTUS REGNAT:

FUGITE PARTES ADVERSÆ.’

And over the ground with its groves and gardens where they perished

--those nameless heroes, those nameless demigods--rose the vast

cathedral to the honour of the Christ for whom they died; and round

its dome is written in huge golden letters the name of the Apostle

who fell first before the wild beast’s wrath:--‘I say unto thee, Thou

art PETER, and on this rock will I build My Church.’

CHAPTER LVII

_A CONSPIRACY AND ITS COLLAPSE_

‘Ma cruauté se lasse, et ne peut s’arrêter,

Je veux me faire craindre, et ne fais qu’irriter,

Et le sang répandu de mille conjurés

Rend mes jours plus maudits et non plus assurés.’

CORNEILLE, _Cinna_, iv. 2.

‘Our emperor is a tyrant, fear’d and hated;

I scarce remember in his reign one day

Pass guiltless o’er his execrable head.

He thinks the sun is lost that sees not blood,

When none is shed, we count it holiday;

We who are most in favour, cannot call

This our own.’

DRYDEN, _The Cruelty of Tyranny_, v. 15-16.

The persecution of the Christians, once begun, did not cease, but

broke out again and again, in various parts of the Empire, like a

conflagration which only pauses from the exhaustion of materials

which it can devour. But a few more sporadic executions could

furnish no further excitement to Nero, after he had supped so full

of horrors. The jaded ‘old man of thirty’ therefore turned his whole

attention to the building and embellishment of the Palace, which

was not only to cover the vast area of the Domus Transitoria, but

also the additional room which he had snatched from the ruins.

It extended over a space equal to that covered by the Louvre and

Tuileries together. It was called the Golden House, and exceeded in

sumptuosity everything which the world had hitherto seen. It showed

the degeneracy of taste which marked that age, by its tendency

to hugeness of size and strangeness of material. Nothing but the

grotesque and the enormous suited the diseased appetite of Nero. At

the entrance stood a colossus of himself, of which the base is still

visible, beside the Colosseum. It was a hundred and twenty feet high,

and was the work of Zenodorus. Inside the hall was also a picture

of Nero, a hundred and twenty feet high, painted on linen, which was

afterwards burnt up by lightning.[109] The famous architects Severus

and Celer were set to work, with all the power of the Empire to

back them, and all the treasures of the world at command. Triple

colonnades of marble pillars led to the Palace from the vestibule,

and the outer spaces of the columns were filled with statues and

flowers. At the four corners of the hall, on tables of citron, of

which the veins looked like curled tresses, stood huge vases of

silver, embossed by Acragas, with scenes of the chase derived from

the ‘Cynegetica’ of Xenophon. The painter Fabullus, who stood at the

head of the artists of the age, was bidden to enrich the halls of

audience with scenes of history and mythology. One of his paintings

was a Pallas, which to the astonishment of the spectators seemed

always to follow them with her eyes. The most distinguished

pupils of the schools of landscape, founded by Ludius, and of the

rhyparographer Pyroeicus, were set to adorn the private chambers. A

thousand statues of bronze, alabaster, gold, silver, and delicately

tinted marble were ranged about the building, and in porticoes a

thousand feet long. Not only were the old temples of Rome plundered

of their treasures, but Acratus the freedman and Carinas the Greek

philosopher were sent to Greece to seize whatever was most precious

in her ancient cities. So shameless was the rapacity with which they

served the Emperor’s greed, that at Delphi--from which he carried

off five hundred statues of bronze--the population rose in arms to

protect the images and bas-reliefs of their temples.

The baths of alabaster, inlaid with lapis lazuli, were supplied

from the Aqua Virgo, and from the sea, and from the pale

sulphur-impregnated waters of the river Albula. The vaulted roof

of one banquet-room was made to represent the heavens, and to revolve

in imitation of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars. The roof

of another, fretted with gold and ivory, was so constructed as to

shower roses on the guests, or to sprinkle them with the fine dew

of fragrant essences.

Nero’s own bedroom was a prodigy of gorgeousness. It contained the

golden statue of Victory, which spread her wings in sign of good omen

over the slumbers of successive Cæsars. On a slab of agate stood the

statuette of Nero, five inches high, armed in a corslet which had

been carved with infinite labour out of hard jasper. A debased

art--which did not rely for its triumph on the genius of the

artist or the beauty of the result, but stimulated the languors of

imagination by the conquest of apparent impossibilities--was further

illustrated by other minute images cut out of emerald or topaz, like

those described by Pliny. On abaci of carved ivory stood myrrhine

vases--the most precious known to antiquity--red, veined, lustrous,

of a value which could hardly be expressed in terms of purchase.

Besides such treasures there was a little gem of sculpture, the

Amazon of Strongylion, known as Eucnemos, from its exquisite

proportions, which Nero took with him wherever he went. A place of

special honour was assigned to Nero’s harp of gold, adorned with

precious stones.