Once more, therefore, the Apostle stood face to face with the

Emperor, on one of the troubled tumultuous days which followed his

hasty return from Naples, after he had received the news of the

revolt of Vindex. It was an interview, not a judicial audience.

The Emperor saw him in private, with no one about him except a few

trusted freedmen, and one favourite slave, named Patroclus. Several

amulets lay scattered round him to avert magic and the evil eye. For

form’s sake he first asked the Apostle about the crimes with which

Christians were charged, and heard once more the proofs of their

righteousness, loyalty, and holiness. Then he offered Paul his

freedom and pardon if he would reveal to him the future. Onesimus,

who had been allowed to attend the Apostle, and who stood at the far

end of the apartment among a group of slaves, used to say afterwards

that if the Apostle would only have spoken a word of hope, or even

some ambiguous promise which might be interpreted in almost any way,

the chains would have been struck off his hands. But he answered that

the secrets of the future were in the hands of God alone, and that

he had no commission to reveal them. Nero was scanning his features

with intense anxiety, and as the Apostle fixed on him his earnest,

undaunted, pitying gaze, the Emperor--more than ever convinced that

he could prophesy the unknown--told all the slaves except Phaon and

Patroclus to withdraw. But Paul, weak with long imprisonment, and

scarcely able to stand, begged that he might support his weary frame

on the shoulder of Onesimus. Otherwise they were alone. The Emperor,

who had no dignity at that hour of calamity, appealed to his

prisoner. ‘They tell me,’ he said, ‘that thy God, or thy Chrestus,

_does_ enable thee to foretell events to come. I am in danger. The

legions are revolting against me on all sides. The astrologers have

promised me that I shall be King of Jerusalem. All is uncertain. See,

I appeal to thee. I, the Emperor, ask thee, the doomed and wretched

Jew, to tell me what will happen. Will Vindex conquer? Will Galba

conquer? Will the guards be faithful? Shall I be murdered? Answer me

these questions, and I will spare thy life, and send thee away with

rich rewards.’

‘I answer,’ said the Apostle, ‘as a Prophet of the East answered

a king before. If Nero should give me his house full of silver and

gold, yet cannot I go beyond the word of the Lord; and the Lord has

not bidden me to speak to thee. And what were wealth, and what were

all the Empire to me? Thinkest thou, O Emperor, that I fear death?

To us Christians to die is to depart and to be with Christ, which is

far better; and Christ hath conquered death.’

‘Wilt thou not even tell me whether I shall be killed? I adjure thee

by thy Christ, or thy Iao, or whatever thou holdest most sacred, tell

me!’

The Emperor was trembling and weeping.

Another might have scorned his unmanliness, or rejoiced with

malignant triumph over the disgrace of the enemy of all the good.

But Paul knew too much of human weakness to indulge in scorn. He felt

for him a sincere, a trembling, a yearning pity. He uplifted his eyes

to heaven, paused for a moment, during which the Emperor’s eager and

almost imploring gaze was fixed upon his face, and then solemnly

replied--

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

‘Tell me more,’ said Nero passionately.

‘I may not tell thee more. Only,’ he continued, raising his chained

hand, ‘I say to thee, repent! Repent of thy life of crime and infamy!

Repent of thy many murders--the murder of thy brother, the murder of

thy mother, of--’

‘Accursed Jew, darest thou revile me?’ said Nero, leaping up from his

gilded chair, his face burning with fury.

The Apostle remained unmoved. Onesimus told afterwards that he had

not felt the tremor of a single muscle as the storm of the Emperor’s

rage burst over him. Nero stood amazed--his wrath stilled before so

majestic an indifference.

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

‘Think, rather,’ said the Apostle, ‘that thy hour of judgment is nigh

at hand--yea, it standeth at the door. The blood of the innocent,

slain by thee, cries against thee from the ground. I pity thee--Paul

the prisoner, Paul the aged, pities thee, and he will pray for thee

if haply the thoughts of thy heart, and the shames of thy wickedness,

may be forgiven.’

‘Dismiss this man,’ whispered Phaon to the Emperor, impatiently.

‘He is a Jew, evidently half insane with dreamings in prison. Were

it otherwise, I would here and now chastise his insolence.’

‘Nay,’ said the boy Patroclus, in a voice of deep emotion. ‘Rather

listen to him. O Nero, I will confess to thee that I have talked to

Acte; I have talked to Christian slaves--once my fellow-slaves--in

thy Palace and the household of Narcissus, and I know that the

gods--or that God, if (as they say) there be but one God--is with

them. Dismiss Paulus, I entreat thee; set him free. He tells the

truth.’ And with these words the young cupbearer flung himself on

his knees with a gesture of appeal.[120]

Nero had been startled--almost moved--by the solemn tones and

inspired aspect of the Apostle; but the appeal of Patroclus and his

mention of Acte produced a different effect from what the youth had

intended. The Emperor was jealous that such potent influences should

have been at work in his own Palace; that in spite of his persecution

of the Saints, in spite of his having made Christianity an illegal

religion, those who had been so near to his own person as Acte and

Patroclus should reject his divinity, and own Jesus as their king.

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

aside.

And, unhappily, at that moment Gaditanian strains, accompanied by the

words of a gay song, reached his ear from an adjoining room in which

some of his light companions and favourites were sitting. The sound

awoke all his heartless and incurable frivolity. Bursting into a

forced laugh, he said, ‘I see there is no more to be got out of

this Jew. Take him hence,’ he said to the Prætorian in attendance,

‘and see that he be led to death as soon as the day shall dawn.’

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

‘Yes,’ said the Emperor. ‘He has been tried and condemned. I will

here countersign the condemnation which orders him to be beheaded.’

* * * * *

The Apostle spent that last night on earth in sleep as sweet as that

of an innocent child. He rose in the morning smiling and refreshed,

and Onesimus was early at the prison to help him in all his last

arrangements and preparations. As the soldiers would allow Onesimus,

and no one else, to accompany him, he bade an affecting farewell

to Luke, who had been for so long a time his beloved physician, and

started on his way.

His doom was secret and sudden. At that early morning hour the

centurion and soldiers were not likely to be troubled with many

spectators. One or two humble Christians from the poorest haunts of

the Trastevere would fain have followed, but the soldiers, who were

in savage humour from the perilous uncertainty of the times, suffered

none of them to attach themselves to the little procession. Hence the

death of the Apostle was so lonely and obscure that scarcely a breath

of tradition survived to commemorate it to posterity. An ordinary

faith might have been overwhelmed by the apparent utterness of

failure which had crowned that life of unparalleled exertions for

the cause of Christ and for the good of man. Deserted, abandoned, a

pauper, a prisoner--the founder, indeed, of Churches, but of Churches

some of which were already the prey of Judaisers and of alien

heretics, and were cold to him--in the capital of the world, where

he seemed to be but an insignificant atom, and where Jew and Pagan

were united in irreconcilable hostility to the faith which he had

preached--deserted by all them of Asia--no one with him but the poor

emancipated slave--yet he was in no sense disillusioned, nor did his

faith fail. It did not trouble him that the curtain was about to fall

in darkness on one of the noblest and greatest of all human lives.

That life seemed to him but as the life of a great sinner whom God

had forgiven, whom Christ had saved. The winter of his trials was

past, the eternal spring of the resurrection was breathing through

the air its heavenly perfume.

Along the Appian road they passed, through the gate of Rome which

still--nigh upon two thousand years afterwards--is called by his

name. They passed the pyramid of Gaius Cestius, with all its statues.

Only one incident occurred on his journey. Just as they were passing

the pyramid of Cestius, a lady, young and deeply veiled, met the

mournful procession, and stopped the centurion in command of the

soldiers. ‘I am Plautilla,’ she said, ‘the daughter of Flavius

Sabinus, the Præfect of the City, the relative of Aulus Plautius

and Pomponia Græcina. Suffer me for a moment to speak to your

prisoner.’

Impressed by the great names which she had mentioned, the centurion

bade the soldiers stand aside for a moment, and Plautilla, kneeling

on the grass, asked with tears for the Apostle’s blessing. He laid

his chained hand on her head and blessed her, and she gave him from

her kinswoman Pomponia a handkerchief with which to bind his eyes as

he knelt for the blow of the executioner. He gratefully accepted it,

and said, ‘I know the name of Pomponia. It is ever pronounced with

the blessings of the saints of God.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘O Apostle, and my brother, the nephew of Vespasian,

who is in command in Judæa--he too is a Christian.’

The Apostle upraised in thankfulness his fettered hands. ‘The night,’

he said, ‘is far spent. The day is at hand.’

The centurion beckoned to the soldiers to proceed, and Plautilla

stood gazing after them under the shadow of the pyramid.

About three miles from the walls of Rome, on a green and level space

amid low, undulating hills, was the spot then known as Aquæ Salviæ,

and now as Tre Fontane. To this spot they marched in the early

morning--the chained prisoner with the soldiers round him, and the

centurion walking at their head. Onesimus followed close behind. The

martyr scarcely spoke. His face was lit with an inward rapture; his

lips moved incessantly in silent prayer. He had no fear. Lovely to

him as the colours of the rainbow on the thundercloud gleamed the

azure of his home. They reached the green level under the trees.

The prisoner was bidden to kneel down. Onesimus helped him to take

off his upper garment, received his last few words of prayer and

encouragement and blessing, and the gentle pressure of his hand in

farewell. He bound over the Apostle’s eyes Plautilla’s handkerchief,

and then turned away, hiding his face in his hands, weeping as if

his heart would break. Then he heard the word of command given. For

one instant he looked up--in that instant the sword flashed, and the

life of the greatest of the Apostles was shorn away.

The work of the soldiers was over. They had no further concern in

the matter, except that the centurion had to certify to Nero that

the execution had been carried out. They left the mortal body of

the martyr on the green turf. When they were gone, the Christians,

whom they had repelled but who had followed them afar off, came to

weep over it and to bury it. Onesimus took his part in digging the

nameless grave. But the site of it was kept in loving remembrance

until in due time there rose over that spot the ‘trophy’ which

existed, as we are told by Gaius the presbyter, as far back as

the second century, where now stands in all the splendour of its

many-coloured marbles the great church of San Paolo fuori le Mura.

And, as they sorrowfully left the scene of martyrdom, the grey light

which had touched the eastern clouds began to flush into the rosy

dawn, and the sun rose on the world’s new day.

CHAPTER LXV

_IN THE CLUTCH OF NEMESIS_

‘I’ll find him out,

* * * * *

Or drag him by the curls to a foul death,

Cursed as his life.’

MILTON, _Comus_.

‘And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the

place of the holy...: this also is vanity.’--Eccles. viii. 10.

It was on the evening of June 8 that Nymphidius Sabinus betrayed

Nero, and, by the forged promise of an enormous donative, which was

never paid, induced the Prætorians to embrace the cause of Galba.

A worthless master makes worthless slaves. This man, whom Nero had

lifted out of the dust as a reward for his crimes, sold his bad

benefactor without a blush.

Nero heard the grim news before he retired to rest in the evening,

and he was well aware that the morrow must decide his fate. At

midnight he leapt from his troubled couch, and from that moment

there began for him once more the long slow agony of an irremediably

shameful death. The first thing he discovered was that all the

soldiers who guarded the Palace, and whose barracks were in the

Excubitorium, had deserted their posts. In utter despair, he sent

for advice to those whom he deemed to be his friends. As he received

from them no word of answer, he went to their houses, one by one, in

the dead of night, with a few attendants. Inconceivably dreary was

that walk through the dark streets, which, as he passed by the silent

palaces, seemed to be haunted by the ghosts of the many whom he

had slain. But he found every door closed against him. Not a single

response was made to his appeals. Almost mad with misery, he returned

to his splendid chamber in the Golden House, only to find that

during his brief absence the attendants and slaves had fled, after

plundering it of all its magnificence, even to the embroidered

purple coverlets and the golden box which contained Locusta’s poison.

Recalling the memory of his murdered mother, he sought everywhere for

the amulet--the bracelet containing the serpent’s skin found near his

cradle--which Agrippina had clasped upon his boyish arm. But he had

once carelessly flung it away, in a fit of petulance, and now it

could nowhere be seen. Then he sought for Spicillus, the mirmillo,

to stab him; but neither he nor any one else could be found to fulfil

the office. ‘So,’ he said, with one of the small smart epigrams which

showed throughout these last scenes that the spirit of melodrama

had not deserted him--’so, it seems, I have neither a friend nor an

enemy!’

Upon this he set out to fling himself into the Tiber, and the back

door by which he went led through a part of the circus which had

witnessed his disgraceful triumphs. But when he was half way, his

courage failed him, and he told his attendants that he wanted some

quiet hiding-place in which to collect his thoughts. His freedman

Phaon, one of the very few who, to their credit, remained true to him

in the hour of his utmost shame, offered him his suburban villa. It

was at the fourth milestone from the city, between the Salarian and

Nomentan roads. It lay on a more remote path called the Patinarian

Way, on the other side of the Anio. On that hot night of June Nero

had gone out only in sandals and a tunic; so he threw over his

shoulders an old washed-out cloak, covered his head with the hood,

held up a handkerchief to conceal his face, and mounted the first

sorry horse which could be obtained. Thus, in beggar’s guise, he left

the gorgeous scene of his manifold iniquities. None were found to

accompany him except his secretary Epaphroditus, his freedman Phaon,

and Sporus his unhappy favourite. They started together before the

first gleam of that most miserable day. The stories that, as he rode,

he felt the shock of an earthquake, and saw a flash of lightning

which gleamed on the ghostly faces of his victims rising to menace

him from the abyss, are doubtless coloured by the agitation of the

witnesses. But on his way he had to pass through the Colline gate,

and there he heard the shouts of his Prætorians cheering for Galba

and cursing Nero. There were but few stirring on the roads at that

early hour, but from one group which they passed they heard the

remark, ‘These men are in pursuit of Nero.’ ‘Any news about Nero?’

asked another traveller. This was disturbing; but it was a far

more serious incident when Nero’s horse swerved at the stench of an

unburied corpse which lay by the roadside, and the handkerchief fell

from his face. For at that moment a discharged Prætorian chanced to

pass, who not only recognised but saluted the Emperor, rendering it

too certain that the pursuers would soon be on his track.

By this time it was light. It was the anniversary of the murder of

his wife, Octavia!

When the fugitives reached the path that led to Phaon’s property,

they let their horses run loose among the trees and brambles, and

made their way to the back of the villa by a track through a bed of

reeds where the oozy sludge was sometimes so deep that they had to

fling a cloak over it to prevent their sinking in the mire. There was

obvious peril in taking refuge here. A great price was sure to be set

on Nero’s head, and how could the freedman trust his rustic slaves

with so perilous a secret? He therefore urged Nero to hide himself in

the deep cave of a neighbouring sandpit till something fresh could be

devised. But Nero refused. ‘What!’ he exclaimed tragically, ‘go alive

into the bowels of the earth?’ The only other course was to make

an opening in the back of the villa, through which he could creep

secretly, unknown to the household. While this was being done, he

complained of thirst. There was nothing for him but some stagnant

water in a pool. He drank a little from his hand, with the remark,

‘This, then, is Nero’s choice drink!’ He sat down ruefully in his

tattered cloak, which had been torn to shreds by the briers through

which he had forced his way; and when the hole in the wall was large

enough, crawled through it on all fours into the empty cell of one of

Phaon’s slaves. There he flung himself down on the mean straw pallet

of the slave, with nothing to cover him except its old dirty coverlet.

Hungry and thirsty as he was, it was difficult to procure him any

food without arousing suspicion. They could only get him some black

bread, at which his stomach revolted, but he drank a mouthful or two

of tepid water.

It became evident to them that all hope of escape or concealment was

impossible. The fatal recognition of Nero by the Prætorian betrayed

the course he had taken. The numberless mounted pursuers would be

sure to find the four horses which they had let loose; nor would it

be possible for him to conceal the fact of his presence from Phaon’s

slaves. His three companions therefore urged him, time after time, to

save himself by suicide from the nameless contumelies which awaited

him. Even Sporus entreated him again and again to show himself a man.

It was in vain! In that coward and perverted nature every spark of

manliness was quenched. ‘It is not time yet,’ he said. ‘The destined

hour has not arrived. How cruel you are to me!’

‘Cruel?’ said Epaphroditus, indignantly; ‘do not we--alone of all

your thousands of slaves--risk our lives for your sake? Since you

must die, were it not better to die like an Emperor than like a

whipped hound?’

‘Well, then,’ whimpered Nero, ‘can’t you at least dig me a grave, one

of you? See, I will lie down to show you the right length.’

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

to perish! What an artist to perish!’

‘The grave is ready,’ said Phaon.

‘But can’t you find some bits of marble to adorn it? Surely there

must be some lying about.’

They saw through his pusillanimous delays, but managed to pick up a

few fragments of common marble, while he still kept whimpering, ‘Only

to think that such an artist as I am must perish!’

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

‘Well, but you will have to burn my body,’ he said. ‘You must get

some water to wash me, and some wood for the pyre.’

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

In the midst of these idle pretexts a runner came with a letter for

Phaon. Nero snatched it out of his hand and read ‘that the Senate had

pronounced him a public enemy, and decreed that he should be punished

after the fashion of our ancestors.’

‘What punishment is that?’ he asked.

Is it possible that he did not know? He, who had so often heard it

passed on others? he who, as men believed, had secretly wished that

it should be inflicted on Antistius for libelling him? he who had

suffered it to be pronounced against L. Vetus and the innocent

Pollutia? Nevertheless Epaphroditus told him that it meant stripping

him naked, thrusting his head into the opening of a forked gibbet,

and then beating him to death with rods. Nero turned deadly pale. The

thought of such agony and such outrage overwhelmed him. He plucked

from their sheaths two daggers which he had brought with him, tried

the edge of them, and then once more thrust them back with the

threadbare tragic phrase, that ‘the destined hour had not yet come.’

Again the unhappy Sporus entreated him to remember that he was a man,

a Roman, an Emperor.

‘There is time, boy,’ he said. ‘Sing my funeral song; raise a

lamentation for me.’ And all the while he wept, and whimpered,

‘Such an artist! Such an artist to perish!’

Phaon and Epaphroditus rebuked his abject timidity.

‘Oh!’ he cried, ‘I cannot die. “Wife, father, mother, join to bid me

die,” but I dare not. Will not one of you kill himself and show me

how to die?’

They were amazed at such depths of abject selfishness, and, reading

his condemnation in their faces, he groaned out, ‘Nero, Nero, this is

infamy; come, rouse thyself; be a man!’

But how could the soul of this vicious, babyish, self-indulgent,

overgrown, corrupted boy--this soul steeped through and through its

every fibre with selfishness, vanity, and crime--how could it be

thrilled with one virile impulse? The man within him was dead--only

the cowardly animal survived.

The sound of horses’ hoofs was heard galloping along the rough road

leading to the villa. It denoted the approach of horsemen who had

been bidden at all hazards to seize him alive. Strange that even at

such a moment he could not help being self-conscious and melodramatic.

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

he said, trembling--quoting a verse of Homer. But at last, when not

one second was to be lost, he placed the dagger against his throat,

and, seeing that he would be too much of a poltroon to inflict

anything more than an ineffectual wound, Epaphroditus with one

thrust drove it home.

Then in burst the centurion. Anxious to seize him alive, he cried,

‘Stay, stay, Nero! I have come to help you!’ and tried with his cloak

to stanch the bleeding wound.

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

With these words he died, and the spectators were horror-stricken at

the wild, staring look of his rigid eyes, which seemed to stand out

of his head.

Fidelity! What fidelity had Nero himself shown to God, to human

nature, to Rome, to his mother, his adoptive father, his wives,

his brother, his tutors, his family, his friends, his slaves, his

freedmen, his people, his own self? What more worthless life was

ever disgraced by a more contemptible and abject death?

Forty-one princes and princesses of his race had perished since

the beginning of the century, by the sword, by famine, or by

poison; and the historian imagines the shades of those unhappy

ones gathered round the miserable pallet on which--more miserably,

more pusillanimously, more guiltily, more abjectly than any one of

them--perished the last of a race whom heaven had been supposed to

receive as gods, and whom earth rejected with disgust. And had their

race ended in this manikin, in this cowardly and corrupted actor?

‘The first of the Cæsars,’ says the historian, ‘had married four

times; the second thrice; the third twice; the fourth thrice again;

the fifth six times; and lastly this sixth Cæsar thrice:--of these

repeated unions a large number had borne offspring.’ Where were they

all? Cut off for the most part by open murder, or secret suicide, or

diseases mysterious and premature! And now the prophecy of the sibyl

had been fulfilled--

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

How many of his fancied enemies, how many of the innocent, had he

caused to be decapitated! How often had he allowed their heads to be

the mockery of their enemies! How had he himself insulted the ghastly

relics of Sulla and of Rubellius Plautus; and suffered his mother and

his wife to insult the murdered remains of Lollia Paulina, and of the

sad and innocent Octavia! His one dread was that his head should be

similarly insulted; his one main entreaty to the companions of his

flight had been that he should be burnt whole, and his head not be

given to his enemies.

Fairer and kinder measure was dealt to him than he had dealt to

others. Among those who hurried to the villa was Icelus, the powerful

freedman of his rival Galba. Nero had thrown him into prison at the

news of Galba’s revolt, but at Nero’s flight he had been set free. It

was not the usual way with the Romans to make war with the dead, and

Icelus gave permission that the body should be burnt. It was consumed

in the white robe broidered with gold which he had worn at his

ill-omened sacrifice on the first of January.

No hindrance was put in the way of his funeral. Two women who had

nursed his infancy, and Acte, who had loved him in his youth, wept

over his bier. No tear was shed besides. They laid his ashes in a

porphyry sarcophagus, over which was raised an altar of the white

marble of Luna, surrounded by a Thasian balustrade.

He was but thirty-one when he died; and he had crowded all that

colossal criminality, all that mean rascality, all that insane

degradation, extravagance, and lust, into a reign of fourteen years!

So great was the exultation over his fall of the people whom he had

pampered, that the whole body of plebeians appeared in the streets

wearing hats. A slave could only wear a hat after he had been

manumitted, and the people wished to show that by his death they had

been emancipated from slavery. Yet he and they had mutually corrupted

each other, and the vicious populace had reacted on the vicious

ruler. Nor was it long before those to whom vice was dear began

to show their sympathy by adorning his tomb with spring and summer

flowers. Every base and foul ruler who succeeded him--lascivious

Otho, gluttonous Vitellius, savage Domitian, womanish Elagabalus,

brutal Commodus--all who disgraced the name of Roman and of man--made

him their ideal and their hero.

And since so very few had witnessed his death, the multitude in every

land persisted in the belief that another body and not his had been

burnt; that he had taken refuge among the Parthians; that he would

return to take vengeance on his enemies. The fancy gilded the brief

fortune and precipitated the miserable punishment of at least two

impostors. Of these Perkin Warbecks and Lambert Simnels of antiquity,

one was put to death in the reign of Otho, the other in the reign of

Domitian; and for nearly three centuries the legend lingered on in

the Christian Church that Nero was the wild beast, wounded to death,

but whose deadly wound had been healed--the Antichrist who should

return again.

And the people fancied that his restless, miserable ghost haunted

for centuries the _Collis Hortulorum_, the Monte Pincio, where stood

the monument of the Domitii; until in pity for their terrors it was

exorcised in 1099 by Pope Pascal II., the superb successor of the

humble Linus. The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo stands to this

day as a witness of the changed fortunes of that Church which Nero

well-nigh extinguished and exterminated when he made light more

ghastly than the darkness by kindling those living torches in the

gardens of the Mons Vaticanus. Over that desecrated spot, as I

have said, now falls the shadow of the vast Christian basilica, and

the obelisk of Heliopolis, which towered over Nero as he drove his

chariot through lines of burning men, testifies by its triumphant

inscriptions to the victory of the faith of Christ.

CHAPTER LXVI

_L’ENVOI_

‘Many kings have sat down upon the ground, and one that was

never thought of hath worn the crown.’--Ecclus. xi. 5.

‘All is best, though we oft doubt

What the unsearchable dispose

Of highest wisdom brings about,

And ever best found in the close.’

_Samson Agonistes._

But little remains to be said; for, unless the writer has entirely

failed of his purpose, the history of the preceding pages has told,

and the fiction has illustrated, the truths which it was his object

to set forth. We have seen something of what Paganism had become in

the days of the Empire, and of what Christianity was in its life,

and motives, and purposes. The contrast between the two gives us the

secret why Christianity was destined to grow from that tiny grain of

mustard-seed to a great tree, under whose shadow the nations of the

world should rest.

But the reader may perhaps care to learn what was the future of those

who played their little hour on the stage of life and have appeared

in these pages. It is characteristic of that age of trouble and

rebuke and blasphemy, in which the sun and the moon were darkened

and the stars of heaven shaken, that many of the great and mighty and

rich hardly looked for any other death than the steep declivities of

murder and suicide. Heathendom had grown to a monster which, like the

decrepit Saturn, devoured its own offspring. Those whom we ushered

into the reader’s presence at the beginning of this book had nearly

all been swept away by violent deaths before the period at which

it closes. We have seen the murders of Claudius, of Agrippina, of

Britannicus, of Octavia, in that Palace thronged with the ghosts of

crime. We have stood by the dreary deathbed of the honest and manly

Burrus, and by Corbulo when he fell on his own sword, and by Poppæa

when she passed away in agony, her husband’s victim. We have seen the

shameful end of Lucan and of Mela; the terrible disillusionment and

suicides of Gallio and of Seneca. We know how Pætus Thrasea died, and

how the great nobles--the Silani, and Sulla, and Rubellius Plautus,

and Antistius Vetus, and Ostorius Scapula, and Piso, and that host

of conspirators--met their doom. Vice, and the favour of the Emperor,

proved no protection to such gay courtiers as Tullius Senecio and

Cæcina Tuscus; nor genius and refined Epicureanism to Petronius

Arbiter; nor beauty and talent to poor handsome Paris. The vicious

as well as the virtuous were often mingled in indiscriminate ruin.

Of the guests whom we saw assembled at the Villa Castor, and to

whose conversation we have listened as they gathered round the citron

tables of Nero and Otho, the majority met with a miserable doom.

With the exception of the family of Seneca, the literary men escaped

fairly well. Persius died young, and by a natural death. The elder

Pliny, who was a successor of Anicetus in the office of Admiral

at Misenum, perished of the scientific curiosity which led him to

watch too closely from the Liburnian galleys of his fleet the great

eruption of Vesuvius, which destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii in

A.D. 79. Martial grew up to disgrace himself by shameful epigrams,

to practise the arts of a fawning parasite to ‘his lord and his god,’

the vile Domitian, and at last to marry a rich wife, and retire to

Spain with the memories of talents wasted, for the most part, over

things vain and vile.

The philosophers were scattered and banished. Musonius Rufus, whom

Demetrius the Cynic saw at work as a common labourer on the Isthmus

of Corinth, was recalled by Galba, and honoured by Vespasian. He had

the satisfaction of bringing to justice the infamous Publius Egnatius

Celer, who had caused the murder of Barea Soranus and his daughter.

Cornutus, who carried to the grave his sorrow for his bright young

pupil, Persius, was banished in the last year of Nero’s reign, and we

hear of him no more. Demetrius the Cynic was banished by Vespasian.

The Emperor passed him after his condemnation, and Demetrius,

deigning neither to rise nor salute him, broke into open abuse; but

Vespasian was not cruel, and took no further revenge than to utter

the one word ‘Dog!’

The freedmen, too, were swept away one after another, Narcissus was

poisoned by the order of Agrippina; Pallas and Doryphorus by the

order of Nero. Epaphroditus was put to death by Domitian for having

helped Nero to drive into his own throat the fatal dagger-thrust.

Sporus--miserable victim of an evil age--had urged Nero to show one

touch of manliness, and dare to die. Not long afterwards he, too,

died by his own hands, rather than submit to that degradation of

appearing on the stage which Nero had so often done and so eagerly

desired to do. Helius, Polycletus, Patrobius, and others, were

condemned and put to death by Galba, after having been led through

the streets in chains. Spicillus, the favourite gladiator of Nero,

was tied to one of his statues and crushed to death by it; Locusta

died a death of infamy amid intense and universal rejoicing.

The informers met, for the most part, the fate that they deserved.

Under previous emperors they had been--it is the comparison used by

Seneca--like dogs whom their patrons fed with human flesh.[122] They

cut men’s throats with a whisper. A joke, a sarcasm, the babble of

a drunkard, the confidential remark of private intercourse, the most

casual and unpremeditated reflection--nay, even a careless gesture

before the dumb image of the Emperor--might become, in their hands,

an engine of destruction. They could earn one-fourth of the spoils

by accusing a man either for something which he did, or for something

which he did not do. Upon this evil gang of scoundrels, the worst

curse of that day, Titus laid his heavy hand. He ordered the vilest

of them to be beaten with rods in the Forum, to be dragged round the

Amphitheatre, to be sold as slaves, to be deported to the rockiest

and most desolate islands.

EPICTETUS, who had been sold as an infant from his cradle in

Hierapolis, and whom we have heard talking to Titus and Britannicus

in the days when he was the little slave of Epaphroditus, lived

to bequeath to the world the legacy of thoughts purer and sweeter

than any which we have received from classical antiquity, with

the exception of those uttered by Marcus Aurelius, that ‘bright

consummate flower’ of pagan morality. Those thoughts seem to absorb

and to reflect the auroral glow of Christianity,[*19] and could never

have been attained by a Pagan if Christianity had not been in the

air. Epictetus was so poor that his sole possession was a small

lamp--and even that was stolen from him! His virtue and political

insignificance, his plain living and high thinking, did not save him

from banishment. He retired to Nicopolis (where the Apostle Paul had

spent his last winter), and there

‘taught Arrian, when Vespasian’s brutal son

Cleared Rome of what most shamed him.’

And when he ended his peaceful life of obscurity and self-denial in

extreme old age, he deserved the epitaph, ‘I, Epictetus, was a slave,

and lame, and a pauper, and dear to the Immortals.’

And did vengeance suffer such wretches as Nymphidius Sabinus and

TIGELLINUS to escape? After crimes so many and so heinous, did

they come to a good end? The traitor Nymphidius, after a futile

and impudent attempt to secure the Empire for himself, was murdered

by his own Prætorians. He dragged down with him to destruction the

fierce Cingonius Varro, who had written an oration which Nymphidius

was to pronounce to the soldiers. Tigellinus, indeed, was strangely

protected by Nero’s old and miserly successor when the clamour of

the people demanded his life as an expiation for his crimes. He

escaped by giving enormous bribes to Titus Vinius, Galba’s legate,

and priceless gems to his daughter Crispina. But to him also as

to all, ‘punishment was but another name for guilt, taken a little

lower down the stream,’ and vengeance in due time fell upon him,

and suffered him not to live. After a vain attempt to bribe his

executioners, he committed suicide at Sinuessa amid a coarse

and brutal orgy, which reads like a parody upon the death of

Petronius Arbiter. It was a death exceptionally squalid, vile,

and agonising--fit end for a traitor, a coward, a villain of the

deepest dye.

As for the succeeding Emperors, the spasm of their brief elevation

was marked by universal horrors--wars, and rumours of wars, and

massacres, and civil conflicts; nation rising against nation, kingdom

against kingdom, plagues and famines and earthquakes in divers

places. There was, as Christ had warned His disciples, great

tribulation, such as had not been since the beginning of the earth,

no nor shall be. These things were the beginning of troubles. The

epoch is so described on the sacred page, and the best comment on

those Christian prophesies is furnished by the dreary summary of the

greatest of pagan historians.

And amid all these calamities and this unbelief, as the lightning

cometh from the east and shineth even to the west, the sign was

seen in heaven of the Son of Man coming in power and great glory.

Against the old dispensation and the old world the doom visibly went

forth. The abomination of desolation--the desolating wing of Rome’s

abominable eagle--was seen in the Holy Place. The marble floors of

the Temple of Jerusalem swam in blood. Zealots laid their gory and

brutal hands on the holiest things. Priests, gaunt with famine, were

seen leaping madly into the flames kindled upon the altars. The gold

which overlaid the cedarwork ran molten through the hissing stream of

the carnage of its defenders, and the Holiest Place sank into heaps

of ghastly ruin to have its site defiled with swinish offerings and

pagan shrines. The Temple was doomed to annihilation, because it was

the centre and type of an inferior and abrogated worship. And the

same year which saw this visible abrogation of Judaism and all its

pompous ineffectuality of ceremonies and sacrifices, saw also the

great temple of the Capitoline Jupiter reduced to ashes in the fierce

faction-fight between Sabinus, the elder brother of Vespasian, and

the partisans of Vitellius. Thus, within a few months, the chief

shrines of the Jew and the Pagan were polluted with massacre, and

flung high into the air their flaming signals of the new faith which

was to dominate the world. Their destruction was a beacon-light

of the coming fulfilment of the old and awful prophecy, ‘I will

overturn, overturn, overturn, saith the Lord, till He come whose

right it is.’

The three shadowy Emperors who followed Nero passed away within a

few months, like phantoms, in defeat and shame. GALBA--old, prosaic,

unattractive, niggardly, with his feet so gouty that he could

not wear a shoe, and his hands so gouty that he could not hold

up a book--had disgusted Rome before six months were over, and was

butchered in the streets. His body was left lying where it fell till

a common soldier, returning from harvesting, flung down his corn,

cut off Galba’s head, and, since there was no hair to hold it by,

first hid it in his bosom, and then brought it to Otho with horrible

indignities. OTHO, hurried to imperial dignity by his freedman and

a score of soldiers, was Emperor for ninety-five days, and then was

totally defeated by the German legions of Vitellius at the bloody

battle of Bedriacum. It happened that one of the legionaries had

brought evil tidings, and, being treated partly as a liar and partly

as a coward who had fled from battle[*20] drew his sword, and,

stabbing himself, fell dead at Otho’s feet. Otho shuddered and

recoiled at the sight. ‘Men so brave, men so well-deserving,’ he

exclaimed, ‘shall not be further imperilled on my account.’ He might

still have held out; he might still have been victorious; but at the

age of thirty-seven he had seen enough of life. He had drained to

the dregs the cup of its unsatisfying pleasures; he had discounted

its hopes and fears. He wrote some kindly letters; divided among his

servants what he had at hand; pardoned some deserters; saw any one

who wished to see him; and then, hiding a dagger under his pillow,

closed the doors and fell fast asleep. He awoke at dawn, and with one

blow drove the dagger into his heart. He felt his own total unfitness

for Empire. Τί γάρ μοι καὶ μακροῖς αὐλοῖς; ‘_What have I to do with

long flutes?_’ he was often heard to murmur to himself. Voluptuous,

unheroic, this ‘sweet and impudent creature’ had, at one time, been

more at home in the rites of the Bona Dea than among the banners of

the legions. He was half inclined to fancy that he was one of those

who are raised to power by a jest of fortune;--but he had been

sobered a little by responsibility, and there was a touch of grace

in the courage of his end.

His successor, VITELLIUS, the yet more infamous son of an infamous

father, after a reign of seven months, chiefly noticeable for its

drunkenness and voracity, was murdered in the streets with every

expression of contumely. His body, pierced with multitudes of slight

wounds, was first flung down the Gemonian steps, and then dragged

through the streets by a hook, and flung into the Tiber.

The good plebeian, VESPASIAN, inaugurated a respite of simpler

manners and better days, in which Rome and its society returned

to decency and good sense. A man of robust commonplace and kindly

instincts, he won the Romans by his honesty and rough wit. When the

Consular Menstrius Florus corrected his pronunciation (as Kemble did

that of George III.) and told him that he ought not to say _plostra_

(wagons) but _plaustra_, he only resented the impertinence when

he met him the next day by addressing him, not as _Florus_, but as

_Flaurus_ (φλαῦρος), or ‘not worth much.’ When a youth came, reeking

with perfume, to thank him for an appointment to the Prætorship,

Vespasian, with a frown of disgust, said, ‘I would have preferred

that you smelt of garlic,’ and cancelled the dandy’s office. Tolerant

and fearless, he resented no injuries, and ruled for ten years

without making an enemy. Too sensible, and with a conscience too much

at ease, for superstitious fears, when a comet was pointed out to

him as portentous, he said--alluding to the Roman expression ‘a hairy

star’--that, ‘it could not refer to a bald person like himself, but

to the King of the Parthians, who had long hair!’ When he felt the

first touch of mortal illness, he observed, with a jest at the folly

of senatorial _apotheosis_, ‘I think I am becoming a god.’ He was

charged, indeed, with avarice, and the story was told that, when

informed of a colossal statue which was to be reared to him at

the public expense, he held out the hollow of his hand as though

for the money, and said, ‘The pedestal is ready.’ But, if he was

parsimonious, it was for the public good, and he returned from

the proconsulate of Africa so poor that he had to mortgage all his

possessions to his brother Sabinus. A thorough man of business, he

was indifferent to parade and pomp. Napoleon I. was probably but half

sincere when, on his return from the magnificences of his coronation,

he flung his gorgeous robes into the corner, and said that ‘he had

never spent so tedious a day in his life;’ but Vespasian was quite

in earnest when, on the day of his great Judæan triumph, he found

the procession so tardy and tedious that he called himself ‘an old

fool who had been deservedly punished for his silly vanity.’

And what shall we say of TITUS, who has played a considerable part

in our earlier pages? A Marcus Aurelius he was not; nor did he knock

at the door of truth so earnestly or sit at the feet of virtue so

humbly as did that saintly heathen. Yet there was an infinite charm

about him. He was a man of fine presence, of dignified yet winning

demeanour, endowed with great personal strength and tenacious memory,

eloquent, poetic, accomplished, a splendid rider, a fine swordsman,

a patient and skilful general, a soldier of unflinching personal

bravery. Josephus is constantly telling us of his firmness, his

pity, his stern discipline, his splendid bravery. Again and again he

exposed his person as freely as the commonest soldier in his ranks.

Again and again he extricated himself from personal peril, and his

legions from imminent defeat, with a strength which was unequalled,

and a prowess which was contagious. At the siege of Jerusalem he

constantly rode near the walls, and on one occasion shot down twelve

of its defenders with twelve consecutive arrows. Amid all his heroic

labours and anxious responsibilities he lost none of the fascination

of his youth. When he left the Province to visit his father,

the soldiers, who had already saluted him Emperor, demanded with

supplications, and almost with threats, that he would either stay

or take them with him. Unjustly suspected of a disloyal intention

to found for himself an Eastern kingdom, he hurried to Rhegium, and

thence to Puteoli with the utmost possible speed; and when he reached

Rome, bursting into his father’s presence, as though to confute the

calumny, he embraced him with the touching cry, ‘_I have come, my

father, I have come_!’ He did not escape the sins and temptations

of his youth, and his passionate love for Berenice, which she as

passionately returned, involved him in discredit. But while he was

still the support of his father’s throne, he gave proofs of his

faithfulness and self-control, and if he had been guilty of the

faults which scandal charges upon him, the change which came over him

when he was summoned to the purple was greater than the traditional

change of our own hero-king, Henry V. As an Emperor, no vice was

visible in him, but many supreme virtues. Deeply as he was attached

to Berenice, he dismissed her from the city because Rome condemned

an amour which would have been held venial and almost innocent in

a Nero or a Domitian. He became chaste and self-controlled, full of

munificence, entirely free from avarice. Gracious and generous to

all, he acted on the rule ‘_that no one should leave the Emperor’s

presence with a gloomy brow_.’ His famous saying, ‘_Friends, I have

lost a day_,’ was spoken when, at supper-time, he was unable to

recall a favour conferred on any one since morning. He courted the

goodwill of the people, but without base concessions. Desirous as

Pontifex Maximus to keep his hands unstained by the blood of the

innocent, he declared ‘that he would rather perish than destroy.’

Nothing was more touching than the forgiving lenity with which he

tolerated the plots and hatred of his execrable brother, Domitian.

Aware of his wicked designs, he only took him aside secretly, and

begged him with tears to act as a brother should. A deep misgiving

oppressed his soul. At the end of the games which he had displayed to

the people, he wept abundantly, and, oppressed by evil omens, started

for his Sabine farm, full of grief. Stricken down with fever before

he reached his home, he drew back the curtains of his litter, and

looking heavenwards, he murmured, ‘I do not deserve that my life

should be thus cut short, nor have I done any deed to be repented

of, except one.’ What that one sin was he did not reveal, and no one

could conjecture. He died in the same homely villa as his father,

and, though he had only reigned two years and three months, in that

brief time he had earned an affection which expressed itself in a

genuine outburst of eulogy and regret, and which won for him the

title of ‘the darling of the human race.’ But how vain a thing is

glory! On the Arch of Titus the hero is represented being borne

heavenward by an eagle with outspread wings. Vain triumphs! Vain

and profane apotheosis! Little did it avail him to have won the

passionate affection of his subjects! There is something infinitely

sad in his shortened days and his brief tenure of power. It is

only too probable that he fell a victim to the machinations of his

brother, and died by poison secretly administered. And Destiny--

let us say rather the will of God, of which he was the instrument--

forced him, against his own wish, to be the exterminator of the

city and--had extermination been possible--of the nationality of

the chosen people. To them the darling of the human race is Titus

_ha-Rashang_, ‘Titus the Wicked.’ They fable how, when he boasted

that he had escaped vengeance, after escaping from a storm at sea,

God sent a tiny gnat, which crept up his nostril into his brain. On

his brain it fed, and caused him, day and night excruciating agonies.

Finding once that it ceased to gnaw for an instant on hearing the

banging of an anvil, he had an anvil constantly banged with a huge

hammer at his side. But the creature soon became accustomed to the

sound! When Titus died, it was taken out of his brain, and found to

be of the size of a bird, and to be furnished with a beak and claws

of iron. Such is the torment which hatred devised for the best of

the Twelve Cæsars, and the best but one or two of all the Emperors

for three hundred years. But the sad truth is that, apart from such

frenetic imaginations, the last years of the life of Titus were full

of anxiety and disquietude, for which he did not find in a sounding

philosophy the alleviation which he would have found abundantly in a

humble faith.

With DOMITIAN we have happily been less concerned. How such a mixture

of depravity and savageness, of falsity and ingratitude can have

sprung from the virtuous union which also produced a Titus, is a

mystery of atavism. But at last the dagger of Stephanus struck him

down, and a better phase of the Empire was renewed. Rome gauged his

character right when she nicknamed him ‘the bald Nero.’

Of the Jews whom we have introduced, ISHMAEL BEN PHABI vanishes into

obscurity. He lives, however, in the energetic curse which the Talmud

pronounces upon family after family of the priests of that epoch. He

occurs in the line which denounces the violence of himself and his

sons: ‘Woe to the family of Ishmael Ben Phabi! woe to their fists!...

Their servants strike the people with their rods!’

JOSEPHUS became the devoted creature of the Flavian dynasty. By

timely prophecies he managed to secure the favour of Vespasian and

Titus, as he had won their admiration by his genius and courage. He

played his difficult part with consummate astuteness, and secured

his safety in spite of the execration of the Jews and the suspicion

of the Romans. But what shall we say of a man who, in spite of his

boasted patriotism, could, after being an eyewitness of the long,

slow agony of his country’s dissolution, be a guest of the Romans

during the games in which hundreds of his miserable fellow-countrymen

perished in the amphitheatre?--of a man who could commemorate

without a pang the unequalled splendour of the triumph at Rome,

when Vespasian and Titus, robed in purple and silk and crowned

with laurel, sat in their chariots amid rivers of splendid spoils,

and Domitian rode a gallant war-horse by their side, and Simon

Bar-Gioras, after cruel insults, was led aside at the foot of the

Capitol to be strangled in the Tullian Vault? Judæa Captiva wept

under her palm-tree, desolate, broken-hearted, with her hair about

her ears, and the famous Arch of Triumph was built which still

shows the golden candlestick, and table of shewbread, and vessels of

incense--beneath which it is said that no Jew will walk, because even

in a strange land they remember thee, O Zion! But the sleek priest

and warrior who had been selected as one of the defenders of his

country, accepted an assignment of land from devastated territories

of his native country; inhabited a suite of rooms in Vespasian’s

own house; and continued to live in the sunlight of court favour,

not only under Titus, but also under Domitian. And then, not by

martyrdom, not as a patriot, but as the pensioned favourite of those

who had massacred his countrymen and destroyed the tombs and city of

his fathers, he died, and went to his own place, leaving behind him,

even in the light of his own falsified records, an ignoble and

dishonoured name.

KING AGRIPPA II., after a considerable portion of his domains had

been reduced to a desert, lived also in Rome, as a titular king, and

died, at the age of seventy, in the reign of Trajan--the last prince

of the House of Herod. Happy had it been for him if St. Paul had, not

almost, but altogether persuaded him to be a Christian. He languished

on, wealthy and despised, with Josephus as his bosom friend. It might

have been said of him, in the language of the Prophet: ‘All the kings

of the nations, all of them, sleep in glory, every one in his own

house. But thou art cast away from thy sepulchre, like an abominable

branch.... Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou

hast destroyed thy land, thou hast slain thy people.’

BERENICE, the widow of two kings, was no longer young when she won

Vespasian by her splendid presents, and Titus by her Eastern beauty

and fascination. But he listened to the voice of duty when he

dismissed her from Rome, and when she returned he avoided seeing

her. She, too, vanished into the darkness, and died we know not when.

ALITURUS, no longer the apostate Jew, but the humble Christian,

found it, of course, impossible to play any longer the part of

the favourite pantomime of the Roman stage. He loathed the thought

of ever again wearing his motley before the grinning and degraded

populace. He would fain have aided the struggling Church of Rome,

but there was nothing that he could do; and the presence of one

whose person was so well known would only imperil the gatherings of

that handful of slaves and artisans in the catacombs. The Christians

themselves advised him to leave the city, which he could not

dissociate from his dead past. He sold his house in Rome, and his

villa in the suburbs, and, leaving a large sum in the hands of Cletus

to help his flock, he sailed for Palestine, receiving before he

started the blessing of Paul the prisoner, and carrying with him

letters of commendation from the Beloved Disciple to Simeon and

others of the Desposyni, or ‘relations of the Lord.’ These letters

neither revealed his real name, which he had changed to Amandus, nor

his past history, which might have created an invincible prejudice;

but certified that he had been converted to the faith, and was now

a brother, faithful and beloved. He freely gave of his wealth to the

destitute, and was of great service to a church pre-eminently poor.

And, remaining in Jerusalem, he was an eye-witness of all that horrid

siege, in which a nation overwhelmed with unutterable calamities,

intensified by their own unutterable guilt, sighed in vain to see one

of the days of the Son of Man. Joining the moderate party, he did his

little best to counteract the overweening tyranny of John of Giscala.

He witnessed the slaughter committed by the Idumeans, when they had

been invited into the city. He saw the insults heaped on the corpse

of the murdered High Priest Hanan; and the martyrdom of Zechariah,

the son of Baruch, in the middle of the Temple; and the High Priest

Matthias murdered by Simon Bar-Gioras, after his three sons had been

slain before his eyes. He heard the roar of internecine conflict,

when three sections of fanatics fought furiously against each other.

Day by day he was agonised by the inconceivable miseries of the

starving and maddened people. He saw the granaries madly burnt in

civil discords; the marble floor of the sanctuary wet with footsteps

dipped in blood; the gore of worshippers slain by the hurtling

engines of zealots, mingling with the blood of the sacrifices; the

deserters sent back with their hands cut off, or ripped open to

search for the gold which they had swallowed, or crucified outside

the city-walls, till wood failed for the crosses, and crosses for

the bodies; the streets and houses full only of the corpses of

those whom famine had slain; the horrible disorders of rampant

licentiousness, which were the expression of blasphemous despair.

He saw Martha, the daughter of the wealthy Gamaliel, trying to pick

grains for food from the ordure of the streets; he saw the miserable

mother who, in the pangs of hunger, roasted and devoured her own

child. He heard the incessant thunder of the battering-rams upon

the walls, and the whizz of the dazzling stones hurled from the

catapults, and the monotonous cry of the poor scourged maniac

wandering about day and night with the wail: ‘_A voice from the

East, a voice from the West, a voice from the four winds! Woe, woe

to Jerusalem, and to the people, and to the Holy House!_’ He heard

Josephus and Titus pleading with the frantic people, and the false

prophets deluding them. He heard the crash of the falling cloister

which buried six thousand men, women, and children under its ruins,

and the roaring of the flames, and the groans of the wounded, and

the shout of the victors, and the despairing yell of the defeated. He

saw the priests tearing the gilded spikes from the Temple roof, and

hurling them down upon the Romans. In spite of the strong efforts

of Titus--under the urgent entreaties of Agrippa and Josephus--to

spare the Temple, he saw a Roman soldier, as though inspired by some

divine fury, snatch up a burning brand, and spring upon the back of

a comrade, and hurl his torch through the golden window of one of

the chambers which surrounded the Holiest Place; and then, when the

flames burst out on every side, he saw the whole Temple hill assume

the aspect of a great bellowing volcano stored with fire, while amid

the upheaped corpses the blood, streaming in rivers from fresh wounds,

hissed and bubbled as though it would almost have quenched the flames.

He saw something of that awfully desperate struggle of madness and

fury,

‘When through the cedarn courts, and gates of gold,

The trampled ranks in miry carnage rolled.

To save their Temple every hand essayed,

And with cold fingers clutched the feeble blade;

Through their torn veins reviving fury ran,

And life’s last anger warmed the dying man.’

And how his life was preserved--famine-stricken, wounded, horrified,

daily imperilled as he was in that circle of fire in which the

scorpions of religious faction madly stung each other to death--he

never knew. From April 10, A.D. 70, when Titus pitched his camp near

Jerusalem, till July 17, when, for the first time, the perpetual

sacrifice ceased, for lack of priests to offer it--and on till August

10, when the Holiest sank in flames, and the Roman soldiers adored

their idolatrous ensigns in its blackened area--and onwards till

September 8, when all resistance ended, Aliturus had scarcely

known one day which was not full of terror and misery. In the final

indiscriminate slaughter of the captured city he was selected as one

of the seven hundred youths, conspicuous for size and beauty, who

were destined to grace the triumph of Vespasian and Titus. But he

sought an interview with Josephus and the astonished Titus, and when

he revealed to them his identity[*21] and convinced them that his one

desire had been to win the Jews to counsels of moderation, and to do

good works among the miserable, he was set free, and large presents

were given to him, and he was suffered to go whither he would.

He could not return to Jerusalem, for Jerusalem was no more, and on

the Jews had fallen their own awful imprecation--‘His blood be on

us and on our children!’ He went to Pella, whither the Church of

Jerusalem had, so to speak, fled into the wilderness. With the

Christians there he abode for some time, and then he visited

St. John at Ephesus, and Onesimus at Hierapolis. The memories of his

own country had been too striking and oppressive, and the brilliant

favourite of the Roman populace died at Hierapolis, a beloved but

obscure presbyter of its happy church.

The persecutions of the Christians continued intermittently for three

centuries, and the rhythmic cry--the double _antispastus, Chrīstĭānōs

ād lĕōnēs_--rang through the amphitheatre of many a pagan city.

But the church grew and flourished and shone in the world like that

Vision of the Apocalypse--a woman clothed with the sun, the moon

beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars upon her head. The

Church of Rome rose from her ashes, and in many a seven-times-heated

flame of affliction there stood beside her One like unto the Son of

Man.

When LINUS died, Cletus succeeded him as the third ‘Pope’ of Rome--

although that title was not given to the humble presbyter-bishops

of the struggling community for more than two centuries, and not

formally adopted by them till about A.D. 400. Cletus was succeeded by

Clement. Of the first thirty Popes it is said by Christian tradition

that all but two were martyrs. The blood of those martyrs was the

seed of the Church. That Church had been consumed to ashes, and,

rising from her ashes, soared heavenwards, first waveringly, then

steadily, at last with supreme dominion, ‘reflecting the sunlight

from every glancing plume.’

HERMAS, having been made a freedman by Octavia, set up in trade, and

married. But he was unfortunate. In one of the later persecutions

under Domitian he was betrayed to the informers by his own sons.

He escaped with his life; and in the reign of Nerva he, with other

victims of the cruel Flavian Emperor, received lands in lieu of the

goods of which he had been despoiled. He cultivated his little farm

in peace, and lived to write the celebrated ‘Shepherd,’ which some

have described as ‘a fusionless screed of dry morality,’ and some as

a dull novel, but which may be called ‘the “Pilgrim’s Progress” of

the Early Church.’ Simple as it is, it was so well suited to the days

in which it was written that it was read in the churches, and almost

attained the dignity of Scripture.

PUDENS and CLAUDIA made their permanent home in Britain. They found

it a more congenial residence for Christians than bloodstained Rome,

and by the beauty of their lives, as well as by their teaching, they

escaped the hostility of the Druids, and founded a Church in their

house, and in the city of Noviomagus, where they chiefly lived. They

acquired a deep affection for ‘the isle of blossoming woodlands, isle

of silvery parapets,’ which they adopted as their own, in spite of

the courteous invitation of Titus, who urged them to return to Rome.

And sometimes Pudens thought that there must be a prescience in

the British prophecy which their friend Laureatus, the Latin poet of

Vectis, had turned into galliambics from the wild songs which fired

the patriotism of the host of Boadicea, and which said--

‘Though the Roman eagle shadow thee, though the gathering

enemy harrow thee,

Thou shalt wax and he shall dwindle, thou shalt be the mighty

one yet;

Thine the liberty, thine the glory, thine the deeds to be

celebrated;

Thine the myriad-rolling ocean, light and shadow illimitable,

Thine the lands of lasting summer, many-blossoming Paradises,

Thine the North, and thine the South, and thine the

battle-thunder of God.’

The old king CARADOC lived with them for a time in the charming

villa which they had built. He had fancied at first that, after

the disgrace of defeat and betrayal, he would never be able to show

his face among the warlike Silures whom he had led to victory. But

Christianity softened his soul. He received a warm welcome from many

of his friends and former subjects, and it was no little due to his

conversion and his teaching that Christianity secured a footing among

the Cymry long before its truths had been accepted in other portions

of the British Isles.

POMPONIA crowned a life of love and gracious kindness with a death

of perfect peace. She recovered from the virulent fever which she

had caught in the prisons, and consoled the drooping years of her

husband, Aulus Plautius. He died in the reign of Titus, and she did

not long survive him. She was happily spared the spectacle of the

reign of Domitian and the martyrdom of Flavius Clemens. All who were

in sorrow sought her for consolation. Even the imperial Titus came

gladly to her when his dark hour was upon him, and his heart was

broken by the cruel ingratitude of his brother. She heard often from

Pudens and Claudia, and from all whom she had loved. She fostered by

every means in her power the struggling community of the catacombs,

and when she lay upon her deathbed St. Clement, the fourth Bishop

of Rome, administered to her the last sacrament. Her example had

been of high benefit even to the Pagans of Roman society. It was

her influence which told in the improved manners of the reign of

Vespasian, and no vestal was more honoured for her official sanctity

than Pomponia Græcina for her Christian holiness. When the ear heard

her it blessed her, and when the eye saw her it gave witness to her.

The blessings of those that were ready to perish came upon her, and

she caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy.

The close of the life of ONESIMUS was as peaceful as its youthful

years had been full of trouble and storm. After the martyrdom of

the Apostle Paul, and the all-but-extinction of the Church in Rome,

he proposed that Nereus, and Junia, who was now united to him in

holy wedlock, should leave Aricia, and, with the means which they

possessed, should establish a new home in his native Thyatira,

or in Hierapolis, or in Ephesus. Nereus gladly consented, for the

gloom and loneliness of Aricia weighed upon his spirits, and he was

haunted by the thoughts of the agonies which he had witnessed in the

imprisonment and death of his brethren at Rome. Before they started,

Onesimus sought a secret interview with his cousin and foster-sister

ACTE. He found her still living in the Golden House, but profoundly

uncertain about the future. She had bathed the mangled corpse of

Nero with her tears; she had adorned his grave with flowers; she had

ventured even to pray for his soul. To her he was not the monster

into which he developed, but still the youth who had loved her, and

whom she had loved. But now, amid the terrible scenes which Rome was

witnessing, and seemed likely long to witness in the fierce struggles

of rival generals for power, her life was anxious. Apart from the

obvious perils which might befall her in the hands of such wretches

as Nymphidius and Tigellinus, she had long desired to escape

from that city of Circean splendour. Eagerly she offered Onesimus

to accompany him, and told him that now she, like himself, was a

baptised Christian. She resumed her old name of Eunice, which she

had borne as a child before the evil days of Rome, and she had wealth

sufficient to maintain them all.

Her preparations were made secretly, with the aid of the Christian

slaves in Cæsar’s household. She sold her jewels, and, taking much of

her property with her, sailed with Onesimus and his wife and Nereus

to Ephesus. They fixed their home at Hierapolis, where they could

enjoy the teaching of the Deacon Philip, and where ACTE, gladly

serving as a deaconess of the little Church, gave all her goods to

the poor, and lived in happy friendship with the virgin daughters

of the Evangelist. The children of Onesimus and Junia owed much to

her kindly nurture and teaching. In due time Onesimus himself was

ordained to the ministry, and became in later years a bishop of the

Church of Ephesus. There, when he was quite an old man, in the year

A.D. 107, he met the martyr Ignatius of Antioch, when he was being

conducted to his martyrdom in the Colosseum by the decuria of

soldiers whom he calls ‘his ten leopards.’ He showed the greatest

kindness to the holy martyr, who, in his letter to the Ephesians,

gratefully commemorates the ‘inexpressible love’ which Onesimus had

manifested towards him. Some say that he, too, suffered martyrdom at

Ephesus, after a long life and many happy years.

* * * * *

And now that Judaism had been utterly crushed, Paganism again and

again wrestled with Christianity, and put forth all its force. It

strove to rival the new faith by ritual splendour and orgiastic

rites, and ‘the extreme sensuality of superstition.’[*22] It strove

to put forth Pythagoras, or Socrates, or Apollonius of Tyana as

parallels to Christ; and Stoicism and Neo-Platonism as substitutes

for the truths of the Gospel. It kindled its expiring lamps with

‘sparks from the incorruptible fountain of wisdom,’ and turned its

back on the Sun of Righteousness, from which they were derived. It

tried all that sneers and banter could do in the writings of the

Pseudo-Lucian, and all the power and passion of argument in the books

of Porphyry, Hierocles, and Celsus. Waging deadly war against all who

called themselves Christians, it tried to burn them at its stakes,

to crucify them on its countless gibbets, to devour them by its herds

of wild beasts, at least to daunt them by its horrible tortures. On

every field Christians met and conquered them with the two sacred

and invincible weapons of martyrdom and innocence. The Church

escaped from and soared out of their reach on ‘the two great wings of

pureness and kindness,’ and so ‘by the unresistable might of weakness

shook the world.’ The Christians refuted the arguments urged against

them; they turned the edge of the jeers; they exposed the feebleness

of the philosophers who wrote to denounce them. Meekly enduring the

tortures devised against them ‘they stood safe’ (as said their martyr

Cyprian); ‘stronger than their conquerors, the beaten and lacerated

members conquered the beating and lacerating hooks.’ These obscure

Sectaries--barbarians, Orientals, Jews, slaves, artisans--fought

against the indignant world, and won. And when they had won, and

in proportion as they won, they ennobled and purified the world.

Wrestling with the pagan curse of corruption they made pure the

homes, and the conversation, and the amusements, and the literature,

and the inmost hearts of all who faithfully accepted the truths

they preached. Wrestling with the curse of cruelty they suppressed

infanticide, they sanctified compassion, they put down the cruel

and ghastly scenes of human slaughter in the amphitheatre, they made

the wretched and the sick and the outcast their special care, ‘they

encircled the brow of sorrow with the aureole of sanctity.’ Wrestling

with the curses of slavery and selfish exclusiveness they taught

the inalienable rights of humanity, they confronted tyranny, they

inspired nations with the spirit of liberty, they flung over the

oppressed a shield of adamant, they taught that all men are the

children of God. Intellectually, socially, politically, in national

life and in individual life, in art and in literature, Christianity

has inspired all that the world has seen of best and noblest, and

still offers to the soul of every man the purest hope, the divinest

comfort, the loftiest aspirations. To talk of ‘the crimes of

Christianity’ is a preposterous paradox. There is not one evil

thought that can be thought, not one evil deed that can be done,

which is not utterly alien from its true spirit. Crimes, indeed,

without number have been committed in its name. Kings, and

priests, and peoples have misinterpreted its documents, forged its

commissions, falsified the image and superscription of its current

coins, while ‘swarms of vile creatures have made it an inexhaustible

prey.’ But ‘it has lived through all, and has suffered that which

would have been tenfold death to aught less than Divine.’ And even

yet, after nearly nineteen centuries have sped since its Dawn began,

and its Sun of Righteousness arose with healing in His wings, this

faith alone sets before mankind the Divine Example of a Perfect and

a Sinless Man, and alone offers the sure promises of pardon and of

peace. All the best wisdom of the world lies in the brief Book of

its New Covenant, and all the hopes of the world lie centred in the

faithful acceptance of its Law and of its Life.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Note 1.--Palace of the Cæsars. (See Lanciani’s _Ancient

Rome in the light of Modern Discoveries_, pp. 107-133.)

--_For Notes see section following FOOTNOTES._

[2] Note 2.--Lollia Paulina’s jewels.

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

[4] Note 4.--Nero’s Genealogy.

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

[6] Note 6.--The Bacchanalians.

[7] Note 7.--Nero’s poetry.

[8] ‘Sub terris tonuisse putes.’

[9] PLINY, _N. H._ vii. 6.

[10] Note 8.

[11] Note 9.

[12] See Nisard: _Poëtes de la Décadence_, i. 91.

[13] Mart. iv. 59.

[14] Note 10.

[15] Note 11.

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

[17] Note 12.--Slaves.

[18] Note 13.--Onokoites.

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

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

[21] For these and similar passages of Seneca, see _Epp._

31, 41, 73; _De Benef._, i. 6; &c.

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

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

[24] Note 16.--Cyzicene room.

[25] Plat. _Politicus_, § 16; comp. _Phædo_, § 78.

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

[27] Note 18.

[28] Juv. _Sat._ iii. 60-65.

[29] _Sparteoli_, ‘bucket-men,’ was the slang term for the

police, perhaps from the _spartum_, or rope-basket

covered with pitch, in which they carried water as

firemen.

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

[31] _Equuleus_ was an instrument of torture.

[32] _Salaputium_, ‘hop-o’-my-thumb.’

[33] To offer the ears to be touched was a sign of willingness

to give witness. See Hor. _Sat._ ix. 77; and for the

reason of the custom, Pliny, _N. H._ xi. 103.

[34] Ὀνήσιμος, ‘profitable.’ St. Paul plays on the meaning

of the name in Philemon, 10, 11.

[35] Cic. _Pro Flacco_, 27: ‘Phrygium plagis solere fieri

meliorem.’

[36] Note 20.--Agrippas.

[37] Note 21.--Ancient dancing.

[38] ‘DE PANTOMIMO.

‘Pugnat, ludit, amat, bacchatur, vertitur, astat,

Illustrat verum, cuncta decore replet;

Tot linguæ, tot membra viro: mirabilis ars est

Quæ facit articulos, ore silente, loqui.’

[39] Note 22.--Lucan’s flatteries.

[40] Sen. _Ep._ 21.

[41] Sen. _Nat. Quæst._ i. 5: ‘Colla Cytheriacæ splendent

agitata Columbæ. Ut ait Nero Cæsar disertissime.’

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

[43] Pind. _Ol._ ii. 119.

[44] Note 23.--The _Stemma Cæsarum_.

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

[46] Virg. _Georg._ ii. 458.

[47] A period of seventeen days.

[48] Note 24.--Otho’s banquet.

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

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

[51] A coin of Teos with this inscription is still extant.--

Mionnet, iv. 123.

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

[53] Note 27.--Making gods.

[54] Note 28.--Greek epigram.

[55] Note 29.--Epitaph.

[56] Note 30.

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

[58] Pliny, _N. H._ xxxiv. 8.

[59] Plutarch, _Sympos._ i.

[60] Note 32.

[61] _De Const. Sap._ 14.

[62] Sen. _De Benef._ iii. 16.

[63] Pliny, _N. H._ xxxvii. 16.

[64] Lactantius.

[65] _Il._ ix. 502 (Pope).

[66] Pliny, _N. H._ viii. 7.

[67] Plutarch, _De Defect. Orac._ p. 419, _b_.

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

[69] Note 33.

[70] _Sen. De Tranq. An._ xiv. 7.

[71] Sen. _Ep._ liv.: ‘Mors est non esse.’ _Troades_, v. 393:

‘Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque Mors nihil.’

[72] Pliny, _N. H._ xi. 54: ‘Oculos cum osculamur, _animum

ipsum videmur attingere_.’

[73] Note 34.

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

[75] Note 36.--The Gladiator’s Oath.

[76] For _Spectatus_--a gladiator who had made his _début_

in the arena.

[77] _Mart._ ii. 75.

[78] Note 37.--Gladiatorial Games.

[79] See Isidor. _Orig._ xviii. 53.

[80] Pliny, _N. H._ x. 34.

[81] Note 38.--Dead Gladiators.

[82] Sen. _Ep._ xciii. 12; Quinct. _Decl._ 7.

[83] Pliny, _N. H._ xxiii. 63 and _passim_.

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

[85] Petron. _Sat._ 47; Juv. _Sat._ iii. 9.

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

[87] The author has the kind permission of the illustrious

Laureatus of Vectis to make this use of his lines.

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

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

[90] Note 41.--Christian Fortitude.

[91] A real pagan epitaph.

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

[93] Renan, _L’Antéchrist_, p. 152.

[94] Note 43.

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

[96] Note 44.

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

[98] Note 45.

[99] Sen. _Thyest._ 446.

[100] Tac. _Ann._ xv. 45.

[101] The Latin Gate did not at this time exist. It was in

the wall of Aurelian, of which the date is A.D. 271.

But it is possible that tradition may have had reason

for fixing on this locality.

[102] Sen. _Consol. ad Marc._ 20.

[103] Note 46.

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

[105] Note 48.--Icarus.

[106] Note 49.--Danaides.

[107] Tert. _Apol._ 50. Note 50.

[108] Sen. _Ep._ 15, 78.

[109] Pliny, xxxv. 33.

[110] _Pharsal._ ix. 601.

[111] _Pharsal._ vii. 455-459.

[112] _Pharsal._ ix. 211.

[113] Tac. _Ann._ xvi. 16.

[114] _Dial. de Orat._ 12.

[115]

‘Stoicus occidit Baream, delator amicum,

Discipulumque senex, ripa nutritus in illa

Ad quam Gorgonei delapsa est pinna caballi.’

JUV. _Sat._ iii. 116.

[116] Sen. _De Ira_, iii. 15.

[117] Sen. _Quæst. Nat._ ii. 26, vi. 21.

[118] Note 51.

[119] ‘Conqueror in all the games.’

[120] Note 52.

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

[122] ‘Acerrimi canes, quos ille, ut sibi uni mansuetos ...

sanguine humano pascebat.’--Sen. _Consol. ad Marc._

xxii. 3; comp. _De Benef._ iii. 26.

NOTES

NOTE 1. PAGE 3.

_The Palace of the Cæsars._--In this description of the

Palace of the Cæsars, I chiefly follow Lanciani and Burn’s

_Rome and the Campagna_, ch. viii. See, too, Statius, _Sylv._

iv. 26-31; Claudian, _De VI. Cons. Hon._ 39-41.

NOTE 2. PAGE 10.

_Lollia Paulina’s jewels._--See Pliny, _N. H._ ix. 58.

NOTE 3. PAGE 14.

_Agrippina’s talking thrush._--‘Agrippina, Claudii Principis,

turdum habuit, quod nunquam ante, imitantem sermones humanos,

cum hæc proderem. Habebant et Cæsares juvenes [_i. e._ Nero

and Britannicus] sturnum, item luscinias, Græco et Latino

sermone dociles, præterea ... loquentes longiore etiam

contextu.’--Pliny, _N. H._ x. 59.

NOTE 4. PAGE 14.

_Nero’s genealogy._--Nero was, in the female line, _abnepos_

--great-great-grandson--of Augustus. Britannicus was only

the _pronepos_--great-grandson--of Octavia (the sister of

Augustus), and great-nephew of Tiberius:--

Augustus＝＝Scribonia

|

Julia＝＝Agrippa

|

Agrippina I.＝＝Germanicus

|

Agrippina II.＝＝Claudius

|

Nero

Octavia＝＝Mark Antony

|

Antonia Minor＝＝Drusus, Brother of Tiberius

|

------+------

| |

Germanicus Claudius＝＝Messalina

|

Britannicus

NOTE 5. PAGE 31.

_Agrippina’s white nightingale._--Pliny says it cost more

than 40_l_ _N. H._ x. 43.

NOTE 6. PAGE 43.

_The Bacchanalians._--The orgies of this pseudo-religious

body had been denounced and suppressed in B.C. 186.--See

Livy, xxxix. 9-14.

NOTE 7. PAGE 44.

_Nero’s poetry._--The lines of Persius, _Sat._ i. 92-105,

have been supposed to contain these quotations from Nero’s

poems.

NOTE 8. PAGE 51.

_Seneca’s flatteries._--The opening of Seneca’s _De

Clementia_ abounds in this fulsome and impolitic flattery.

NOTE 9. PAGE 52.

For these self-criticisms of Seneca, see _Ep._ xlv. lxxx.

&c.; _De Vit. Beat._ 3.

NOTE 10. PAGE 60.

Nero really made this jest.--Tac. _Ann._ xiv. 14.

NOTE 11. PAGE 63.

_Epictetus._--No date in the life of Epictetus is certain;

but as he was certainly the slave of Epaphroditus, Nero’s

secretary, I take no violent liberty in introducing him here.

NOTE 12. PAGE 64.

_Slaves were not held culpable for what their masters

ordered._--The sentiment which Petronius puts into the mouth

of Trimalchio--‘Nec turpe est quod dominus jubet’--is echoed

by Seneca, ‘Impudicitia ... in servo necessitas est.’

NOTE 13. PAGE 67.

_The ass-headed god._--One of the ancient calumnies against

the Christians is that they worshipped a god with an

ass’s head named _Onokoites_. See the writer’s _Lives of

the Fathers_, i. § v. Hence the Christians were called

_Asinarii_, and the ancients thought that Jews also

worshipped the ass. See Tac. _Hist._ v. 4; Plut. _Sympos._

iv. 5, § 2; Diod. Sic. xxxiv. Fragm.; Jos. _C. Apion._

ii. 7. For the slander as regards Christians, see Min. Fel.

_Octav._ ix. 28; Tert. _Ad Natt._ i. 14, _Apol._ 16. The

celebrated _graffito_ of ‘Alexamenos adoring his god,’

known by the Germans as the _Spott-Crucifix_, is now

in the Library of the Collegio Romano at Rome, in the

_Museo Kircheriano_. It was really found in the Gelotian

_Pædagogium_, but is probably of much later date than the

reign of Nero.

NOTE 14. PAGE 68.

Duc me, Parens, celsique Dominator poli,

Quocumque placuit; nulla parendi mora est.

Adsum impiger. Fac nolle, comitabor tamen.

Cleanthes _apud_ Senecam.

NOTE 15. PAGE 69.

_Ancient wall-scribblings._--For the _Graffito_ alluded to

see note 13. The playful distich attributed to Britannicus

is really scrawled on a wall at Pompeii:--

‘Admiror, paries, te non cecidisse ruina

Qui tot stultorum tædia sustineas.’

The _graffiti_ ascribed to Titus are on the walls of the

_Domus Gelotiana_, but are becoming fast obliterated. They

were discovered in 1857.--See Lanciani’s _Rome_, p. 121.

NOTE 16. PAGE 74.

The ‘Cyzicene room’ of a luxurious Roman house or villa

faced the north, and opened by folding doors on the garden.

The younger Pliny had such rooms in his villa. They were

built for warmth and sunlight.

NOTE 17. PAGE 75.

For a remarkable ‘_unconscious prophecy of heathendom_,’

see Æsch. _Prom. Vinct._ 1026-1029. Seneca’s words are:--

‘Nemo per se satis valet ut emergat. Oportet manum aliquis

porrigat, aliquis educat.’ Sen. _Ep._ 52.

NOTE 18. PAGE 77.

_The Fish._--The initial letters of ΙΧΘΥΣ, ‘fish,’ stood for

Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Υἱὸς Σωτήρ, ‘Jesus Christ, the Son of

God, the Saviour.’ It was the commonest of ancient Christian

symbols. See Tert. _De Bapt._ i.; Jer. _Ep._ 43; Aug.

_De Civ. Dei_, xviii. 23; and the writer’s _Lives of the

Fathers_, i. § xvi.

NOTE 19. PAGE 81.

_Arrest of Onesimus._--Some readers will recognise an

incident which really occurred in the life of Alypius, the

friend of St. Augustine, which the English reader may see

narrated in my _Lives of the Fathers_, ii. 313.

NOTE 20. PAGE 101.

_Agrippas._--Children born feet-first were called

_agrippas_, and to be so born was regarded as a certain

augury of misfortune.--Pliny, _N. H._ vii. 6.

NOTE 21. PAGE 114.

_Ancient dancing._--The allusions to the dancing of

the pantomimic actors may all be found in Lucan’s _De

Saltatione_; Vell. Paterc. ii. 83; Athen. xiv. 627-630;

and other ancient writers.

NOTE 22. PAGE 124.

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

NOTE 23. PAGE 137.

_The Stemma Cæsarum._--For further facts and details about

the Cæsarian family, See Champagny, _Les Césars_, ii. 77,

and _passim_.

NOTE 24. PAGE 145.

_Otho’s banquet._--The details here described are derived

in every particular from Pliny, Suetonius, Seneca, and

other ancient writers.

NOTE 25. PAGE 152.

_Tossing in a blanket._ _Sagatio._--Suet. _Otho_, 2;

Mart. i. 4. A case is mentioned in Ulpian of a boy who

was killed by it. Greek, παλμός.

NOTE 26. PAGE 157.

_Age of Britannicus._--There is some historic uncertainty

about the age of Britannicus. The proper date for assuming

the _toga virilis_ was the _end_ of the fifteenth year, but

Nero had been allowed to assume it soon after his fourteenth

birthday (Tac. _Ann._ xii. 41). In _Ann._ xii. 25 Tacitus

says that Nero was _two_ years older (_biennio_ majorem)

than Britannicus; but from xiii. 6 and 15, where we are told

that Nero was barely seventeen at the beginning of his reign,

and that Britannicus was nearly fifteen when he was murdered,

it seems clear that _triennio_ would be nearer the truth than

_biennio_. Eckhel, in his _Doctr. Num._ vi. 260, comes to the

conclusion that Nero was _three years and two months_ older

than Britannicus; and other circumstances seem to make this

probable. Suetonius also (_Claud._ 27) makes some admitted

blunders. It seems likely that Nero was born on Dec. 15,

A.D. 37, and Britannicus on Feb. 12 or 13, A.D. 41, on the

twentieth day of his father’s reign. On this subject I must

refer to Nipperdey on Tac. _Ann._ xii. 25; Orelli on Tac.

_Ann._ xii. 25, 41, xiii. 6, 15; H. Schiller, _Gesch. d.

Römischen Kaiserreichs_, pp. 71, &c.

NOTE 27. PAGE 171.

_Making gods._--Nero makes the remark in the text to Seneca

in the tragedy of _Octavia_:--

‘Stulte verebor, ipse quum faciam, Deos.’

_Octav._ Act. ii. 450

NOTE 28. PAGE 174.

Χρυσὸν ἀνὴρ εὑρὼν ἔλιπε βρόχον, αὐτὰρ ὁ χρυσὸν

Ὂν λίπεν οὐχ εὑρὼν, ἥψεν ὃν εὗρε βρόχον.

This epigram was once quoted to Coleridge as proof of the

condensation possible in Greek. He at once rendered it in

the two English lines:--

‘Jack, finding some gold, left a rope on the ground,

Tom, missing his gold, used the rope which he found.’

NOTE 29. PAGE 175.

_Pagan epitaphs._--For those quoted see _Nov. Fiorentini_,

xxxiii. (ap. Döllinger, _Judaism_, &c. ii. 147; and Muratori,

p. 1677).

NOTE 30. PAGE 176.

The magnificent verses sung by Britannicus are preserved by

Cicero (_Tusc. Disp._ iii. 19), and were deservedly admired

for their force and rhythm. They end thus, with a striking

specimen of ancient rhyme:--

‘Hæc omnia vidi inflammari,

Priamo vitam vi evitari,

Jovis aram sanguine turpari.’

NOTE 31. PAGE 200.

This ancient hymn is preserved for us at the end of the

_Pædagogus_ of St. Clement of Alexandria. I avail myself

of the translation by my friend the late Dean of Wells

(_Lazarus, and other Poems_).

NOTE 32. PAGE 213.

_An imperial banquet._--See Sen. _Ep._ xc. 15, cxv. 9. The

_menu_ of a banquet of luxurious Salian priests is preserved

in Macrobius, _Saturn._ iii. 13.

NOTE 33. PAGE 273.

The classical reader will recognise that I have not invented

these stories of rural pagan life. They are found in Apuleius.

NOTE 34. PAGE 318.

_The Lemuralia._--See this expiatory rite described in Ovid,

_Fasti_, v. 421-444; and compare Latour St.-Ybars, _Néron_,

pp. 213, 214. The custom is also alluded to in Varro, _Vit.

Pop. Rom._ Fr. 241; Servius _ad Æn._ i. 276.

NOTE 35. PAGE 323.

_Gladiators’ School._--‘Alebat devotum corpus pravior omni

fauce sagina.’--Quinct. ‘Qui dabit immundæ venalia fata

saginæ.’--Propert. iv. 8. 25. Δεῖ σε εὐτακτεῖν, ἀναγκοφαγεῖν,

ἀπέχεσθαι πεμμάτων, μὴ ψυχρὸν πίνειν.--Epict. _Dissert._

iii. 15, § 3.

NOTE 36. PAGE 325.

_The gladiator’s oath_ was comprehensively horrible. ‘In

verba Eumolpi sacramentum juravimus _uri_, _vinciri_,

_verberari_, _ferroque necari_, et quicquid aliud Eumolpus

jussisset; _tamquam legitimi gladiatores domino corpora

animosque religiosissime addicimus_.’--Petronius.

NOTE 37. PAGE 330.

_Gladiatorial games._--Not one incident is here described

which does not find its authority in Martial _De

Spectaculis_, and other epigrams, or in one or other

of the many contemporary or later writers of the Empire.

See Lipsius, _De Gladiatoribus_ in his _Saturnalia_.

NOTE 38. PAGE 334.

_Dead gladiators._--‘Quinetiam percussos jacentesque repeti

jubent, et cadavera ictibus dissipari, ne quis illos simulata

morte deludat’ (Lactantius).

NOTE 39. PAGE 351.

_The Rex Nemorensis._--See Ovid, _Fasti_, iii. 263-277;

Propert. iii. 24. 9; Stat. _Sylv._ iii. 1. 32; and

Mr. Fraser’s _Golden Bough_.

The appearance and cautious terror of the priest are

described by Strabo (v. 3. 12):--ξιφήρης οὖν ἐστιν, ἀεὶ

περισκοπῶν, τὰς ἐπιθέσεις ἕτοιμος ἀμύνεσθαι.

NOTE 40. PAGE 398.

_Age of Octavia._--Nothing certain can be ascertained as to

the _exact_ age of Octavia at her death. Tillemont, _Néron_,

Art. xv., thinks that she was twenty-two; and Nipperdey on

Tac. _Ann._ xiv. 64 conjectures that the true reading is

‘II et vicesimo.’ See Stahr, _Agrippina_, p. 54; Lehmann,

132; Sievers, _Studien zur Gesch. des Röm. Kaiser._, 129;

H. Schiller, _Gesch. des Röm. Kaiserreichs_, 67. When she

married Nero she was apparently thirteen, and he fifteen;

Schiller, _l. c._ 83.

NOTE 41. PAGE 401.

_Christian fortitude._--These are the explanations given by

Pagans of the calmness of Christians under martyrdom. Marc.

Aurelius says that men should die calmly, yet not διὰ ψιλὴν

παράταξιν ὡς οἱ Χριστιανοί, _Medit._ xi. 3; ὑπὸ μανίας, ὑπὸ

ἔθους, ὡς οἱ Γαλιλαῖοι, says Epictetus, _Dissert._ iv. 7.

NOTE 42. PAGE 416.

_Ishmael ben Phabi._--An Ishmael ben Phabi was made high

priest by Valerius Gratus; and another, or the same at a

later age, by Festus. The younger is here intended.

NOTE 43. PAGE 434.

_Anchialus_ is a dubious word found in Martial, _Ep._ xi.

94, and very variously explained. The famous oracle quoted

by Josephus is found in Macrobius, _Saturn._ i. 18.

NOTE 44. PAGE 439.

Esther, in her epitaph, charges Arescusus not to put

‘D. M.’ or any other pagan symbol on her tomb. The name of

Primitivus, a _Curator Spoliarii_ in Nero’s time (mentioned

in the next paragraph), has been preserved in an inscription

found in the Columbaria.

NOTE 45. PAGE 448.

I borrow this ancient hymn from the conclusion of the

_Pædagogus_ of Clement of Alexandria. The translation is by

my friend the late Dean of Wells.

NOTE 46. PAGE 477.

What we call St. Elmo’s fire was known to the ancients

as ‘the fires of Castor and Pollux.’ A _bidental_ was

an enclosure round a place struck by lightning. For such

legends of St. John as I have here adopted I may refer to

Tert._ De Præscr. Hær._ 36; Jer. _C. Jovin._ i. 26; and

_In Matt._ xx. 23, Orig. _In Matt._ Hom. xii; Zahn, _Acta

Johannis_, cxvii.-cxxii.

NOTE 47. PAGE 478.

I have elsewhere given strong reasons for the belief that

St. John was banished to Patmos by Nero, _not_ by Domitian.

See _Early Days of Christianity_, ii. 147, 184 _sqq._

NOTE 48. PAGE 485.

_Icarus._--See Sueton, _Nero_, 12; Dio Chrysost. _Orat._

xxi. 9. There seems to be an echo of this incident in the

legend about the attempted flight of Simon Magus. Cyril

Hierosol. _Catech._ vi. 15; Arnob. _C. Gentes_, ii. 12.

See Lipsius, _Petrus-Sage_, and Fabricius, _Cod. Apocr.

N. T._ iii. 632.

NOTE 49. PAGE 485.

See Clem. Rom. _Ad Cor._ i. 6. Διὰ ζῆλος διωχθεῖσαι γυναῖκες

Δαναΐδες καὶ Δίρκαι αἰκίσματα δεινὰ καὶ ἀνόσια παθοῦσαι· ἐπὶ

τὸν τῆς πίστεως βέβαιον δρόμον κατήντησαν καὶ ἔλαβον γέρας

γενναῖον αἱ ἀσθενεῖς τῷ σώματι. I do not see any reason

to accept any alterations of the reading. See, too, Renan,

_L’Antéchrist_, p. 167. The Dirce-statue, known as the

Farnese Bull, is now in the Museo Borbonico at Naples.

NOTE 50. PAGE 489.

I am indebted for one slight touch in this scene to the

otherwise absurd sketch in Latour St.-Ybars’ _Néron_.

NOTE 51. PAGE 540.

Dion Cassius tells the fate of Corbulo in three energetic

words: παίων ἔλεγεν Ἄξιος (lxiii. 17).

NOTE 52. PAGE 556.

The reader who is familiar with the cycles of early

Christian legend will recognise that I borrow the character

of Patroclus and various incidents of these scenes from

the _Acts of Linus_. They are printed in De la Bigne, _Bibl.

Patr. Max._ ii. 67; and some account of them is given by

Dr. Salmon, in _Dict. Christ. Biog._ iii. 726. See, too,

the allusion of St. Chrysostom, _Hom. xlvi. in Actt. App._

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

The following corrections have been made in the text:

[1] Chapter 1 paragraph 1

- ‘incrusted’ replaced with ‘encrusted’

(the great bronze valves were encrusted)

[2] Chapter 8 paragraph 8

- ‘Octavio’ replaced with ‘Octavia’

(a desire to divorce Octavia)

[3] Chapter 17 paragraph 3

- ‘Apocolokyntosis’ replaced with ‘Apokolokyntosis’

[4] Chapter 17 paragraph 67

- ‘similiar’ replaced with ‘similar’

(Tigellinus follow a similar)

[5] Chapter 18 paragraph 8

- ‘matyrdom’ replaced with ‘martyrdom’

(did not share her husband’s martyrdom)

[6] Chapter 20 paragraph 2

- ‘or’ replaced with ‘of’

(saw a copy of)

[7] Chapter 26 paragraph 27

- ‘Gallia’ replaced with ‘Gallio’

(‘Antistia,’ said Gallio)

[8] Chapter 30 paragraph 13

- ‘superstitution’ replaced with ‘superstition’

(workings of a foreign superstition)

[9] Chapter 31 paragraph 23

- ‘Is’ replaced with ‘It’

(It is vain to talk to me)

[10] Chapter 32 paragraph 24

- ‘mendicity’ replaced with ‘mendacity’

(a life of squalor, mendacity, and imposture)

[11] Chapter 35 paragraph 21

- ‘wonnd’ replaced with ‘wound’

(with blood from the wound)

[12] Chapter 42 paragraph 45

- ‘familar’ replaced with ‘familiar’

(and was thus familiar)

[13] Chapter 49 paragraph 24

- ‘neighboring’ replaced with ‘neighbouring’

(Many of the neighbouring houses)

[14] Chapter 50 paragraph 4

- ‘tempestous’ replaced with ‘tempestuous’

(on a storm of tempestuous agony)

[15] Chapter 50 paragraph 7

- ‘disemcumbered’ replaced with ‘disencumbered’

(which might be disencumbered)

[16] Chapter 52 paragraph 12

- ‘gayety’ replaced with ‘gaiety’

(usual aspect of easy gaiety)

[17] Chapter 54 paragraph 74

- ‘exlaimed’ replaced with ‘exclaimed’

(he exclaimed hoarsely)

[18] Chapter 56 paragraph 40

- ‘vigourous’ replaced with ‘vigorous’

(sprang into more vigorous life)

[19] Chapter 66 paragraph 6

- ‘Christanity’ replaced with ‘Christianity’

(the auroral glow of Christianity)

[20] Chapter 66 paragraph 10

- ‘batttle’ replaced with ‘battle’

(who had fled from battle)

[21] Chapter 66 paragraph 20

- ‘indentity’ replaced with ‘identity’

(revealed to them his identity)

[22] Chapter 66 paragraph 30

- ending quote missing from text

(‘the extreme sensuality of superstition.’)