CHAPTER XXX

A PRIVATE TRIAL

Pomponia had incidentally mentioned to Agrippina that she was threatened by a calamity, and it was indeed a serious one. It was strange that one so retired in her mode of life, and so entirely free from rancour and malice, should yet have been the butt of calumny. Yet such was the case. It was the tribute which vice paid to virtue. The base mob of Roman matrons avenged themselves on the chaste wife of the conqueror of Britain for the involuntary shame which they felt as they contrasted her life with theirs. Her constancy; her silence amid the universal buzz and roar of gossip and spite; her aloofness from the cliques and coteries of a scandalous society; her love of good works; her discountenance of their loose talk and complicated intrigues; her absence from the games and theatres; the simplicity of her dress, her home, her manners, her hospitality; the calmness of her temper, and even the sort of sacred beauty on which time seemed to make no impression, made her an object of hatred to the Calvia Crispinillas and the Ælia Catellas of the capital. Her presence among them was like a perpetual reproach, and they determined, if possible, to get rid of her. They would have said of her what the wicked say of the righteous in the Book of Wisdom, that they would lie in wait for her, because she was ‘clean contrary to their doings, and objected to their infamy.’

But how was it to be done? Would it not be easy to set an informer to work? Pomponia was wealthy, and since an informer got a grant of a fourth part of the property of any one who was condemned on his accusation, there were men who sat watching for their opportunity like a crowd of obscene and greedy vultures. Aulus Plautius was a person of distinction, and it might be dangerous to offend him; but if an informer of the front rank, like the eloquent Eprius Marcellus, could not be induced to undertake the risk, surely they might secure the services of a Veiento, a Messallinus, or a Regulus. And as for corroborative evidence of any charge, they thought that it could be obtained with the utmost ease among the herd of dehumanised slaves who thronged every considerable house. If they could not witness to facts, they were first-rate hands at inventing fictions. If the masters were a terror to their slaves, a slave might any day become a terror to an obnoxious master. It was personally disagreeable to tremble before beings who seemed so abject, but there was some convenience in having such agents at hand for the ruin of an enemy.

But what charge could be brought against a lady so blameless as Pomponia? To accuse her of conspiracy, or poisoning, or magic, would sound too preposterous; and it would be impossible to find against her the sort of evidence of evil manners which had amply sufficed in old and even in recent days to confound a lady who was disliked. The question was carefully discussed in a secret meeting of some of the worst beldames of social distinction, and as it was clear that Pomponia took no part in the public religious ceremonies, they agreed to get her charged with being guilty of ‘a foreign superstition.’

The wretches whose business it was to work up a case of this kind, and who were largely bribed to enable them to carry out their designs, began secretly to worm their way on various pretexts into the household of Plautius. Their success was smaller than their hopes. They found that there was some peculiar element in that familia. Many of the slaves and the few chief freedmen were Christians, but the secret was faithfully kept. Danger made them vigilant, and they had been carefully selected for worth and character. The female slaves, without exception, were devoted to a mistress who never addressed to them an unkind word, and who made their lives a paradise of happiness when compared with those who attended the toilettes of pagan ladies. The male slaves were no less faithful to the heads of a household in which they were treated with generosity and consideration. The spies of the informers could scarcely find a slave in the whole family whom they could tempt to drunkenness and indiscreet babbling. All that they could learn from the gossip of the least worthy was that Pomponia did not burn incense in the Lararium, or attend the temples. The informers had to content themselves with these meagre facts, trusting to perjury and invention to do the rest. Regulus undertook the case. The sound of his name was sufficient to strike a chill into an innocent and honest heart, and feeling certain of success, or, at the worst, of impunity, he laid before the Emperor a public information that Pomponia Græcina was the guilty votary of a foreign superstition.

The friends and relatives of Pomponia had heard rumours that some attack of the kind was in contemplation; but in the days of the Empire such rumours were rife, and they often came to nothing. When the charge was published they were filled with consternation. They knew that it mattered very little whether it was true or false. The result would turn on the influences which had been brought to bear on Nero. If Nero favoured the prosecution, Pomponia might be as innocent as a new-born child, yet it was certain that she would be condemned. One could commit no fault so slight but what Cæsar’s house might be mixed up with it. Had not Julius Græcinus been put to death under Gaius simply because he was too honest a man? Were not the wretched little islets of Gyara and Tremerus crowded with illustrious and innocent exiles? If beauty and wealth and imperial blood had not saved the two Julias, or the two Agrippinas, what should save a lady so alien from the common interests of Roman society as the wife of Plautius?

One thing saved her.

Nothing had been more remote from her mind than any thought of self-interest when she visited Agrippina. She had gone to see her chiefly because she knew that the threshold, once thronged with suitors and applicants, had now become so solitary, and because an habitual sense of pity drew her to the side of the unfortunate. Her sole object had been, if possible, to bring a little peace and consolation to a sister-woman, whose dejection and misery could only be measured by the height from which she had fallen. True that Agrippina was guilty. True that every law of the moral world must have been violated if impunity were granted her as the sequel of so many and such various crimes. But there was nothing Pharisaic in Pomponia’s heart. Familiar with sorrow, she was sensitive to the influence of compassion, and she had learnt from the lips of Christian teachers that there may be recovery and forgiveness even for the most fallen. She had gone to the Empress with no desire but to speak gentle and healing words.

Yet it was that little unnoticed impulse of natural kindness and Christian charity which saved her fortunes, perhaps even her life.

For Regulus was rich, eloquent, unscrupulous, formidable; and Nero was intensely timid and suspicious. The notion of a ‘foreign superstition’ was mixed up with that of magic; and magic was supposed to be chiefly practised for treasonable ends. If a panic were created in Nero’s mind, it was certain that the feeble Senate would interpose no barrier to his suggestions of punishment.

But at the moment of consternation in the heart of Pomponia’s friends, Agrippina did one of the few good deeds of her unhappy life. Availing herself of the momentary resuscitation of her influence, she no sooner heard of the information laid against Pomponia, than she wrote a letter to the Emperor strongly urging the innocence and goodness of the wife of Plautius, and entreating him not to stain with a deed of needless injustice the annals of his rule. Nero was struck with his mother’s letter, and with the fact that she should have taken the trouble to intercede for one who had never pretended to pay court to her, and whose character was the antithesis of her own. Octavia also ventured to say a few words of pleading earnestness for her friend. Nero had as yet no grudge, either against Pomponia, whose sombre robe was rarely visible in the Palace, or against her brave, loyal, and simple-minded husband. On the other hand, he did not like to check the activity of the informers. Domitian said in after years, ‘The prince who does not check informers, encourages them.’ Nero did not dream of checking them. Seneca, who was a friend of Plautius, and who had been grieved by the news of this attack upon one whom he and the ladies of his family highly esteemed, suggested to Nero a way out of the difficulty. ‘Follow,’ he said, ‘the ancient custom, and permit Pomponia to be tried at home by her husband, relatives, and friends.’

The Emperor accepted the suggestion, and the meeting of the domestic tribunal was fixed to take place on the next nundine. When Pomponia was told of the Emperor’s decision, she felt that her prayers had been heard, and that her pardon was secured, although it was not impossible that the trial might elicit painful secrets, which, for the sake of others, she thought it her duty to conceal.

She asked Seneca himself to undertake her defence, and he gladly assumed the task. Plautius sat in his own atrium, and had summoned only those of his family whom he could trust. The evidence on which the informers and their patrons relied was slight and negative, and Seneca had no difficulty in tearing it to pieces. To the intense relief and heartfelt gratitude of Pomponia, she was not definitely charged with being a Christian. Indeed, that specific charge could hardly be urged, because no proof was forthcoming. Regulus skilfully made the most of old precedents. He told how, nearly a hundred years ago, the Senate had decreed the destruction of the Temples of Isis and Serapis (B.C. 46), and how Æmilius Paulus had been the first to shatter the doors with an axe. He mentioned the stern dealings with the Bacchanalians (B.C. 186). He told how (B.C. 139) the priests of Sabazius had been driven from Rome. Referring to the days of the Empire, he mentioned the edict of Claudius against the Jews, and reminded Aulus that Tiberius had banished four thousand Jews to Sardinia. He appealed triumphantly to the old law of the Twelve Tables, ‘Let no one separately worship foreign gods.’ When the accusers had mentioned every unfavourable circumstance, and when, on the other hand, an abundance of testimony had been elicited to prove the habitual purity and blamelessness of Pomponia’s life, Seneca rose to argue for her honourable acquittal.

‘What was meant,’ he asked, ‘by a “foreign superstition”? Was the worship of Isis a foreign superstition? Was the worship of the Pessinuntian Cybele a foreign superstition? Was the worship of Iaô—if that were the secret name of the deity—by the Jews a foreign superstition? The State was entirely unconcerned with any of these private beliefs. When, indeed, the votaries of any strange cult were guilty of riotous, licentious, and dishonest conduct, they were justly punished. Referring to the precedents quoted by Regulus, he said that the priests of Isis had deserved the vengeance which fell upon them for having betrayed the stupid credulity of a Roman lady. The Jews, who had been guilty of cheating and embezzlement in the matter of purple hangings for the Temple, were rightly punished. Claudius had been justified in driving all the Jews from Rome when they made tumults at the instigation of one Chrestus; but on the other hand, Julius Cæsar had always been favourable to the Jews, and Augustus had by public edict protected their Sabbath. The priests of the Syrian goddess were for the most part worthless vagabonds, and no one was sorry when they were detected and executed for their nefarious practices. The State took no cognisance of opinions, but only of evil practices. A Roman matron, by way of supposed purification, had gone down to the wintry Tiber, had broken the ice, had plunged into the freezing waters, and had crawled across the Campus Martius with bleeding knees. In such acts we might see the workings of a foreign superstitionT8 but of no such act—of no secret visit to the base temple of Serapis—of no dealings with the mutilated priests of Cybele—of no lightings of lamps at Jewish festivals, had Pomponia been guilty. And who, he asked, can allege one immoral deed, one malefic practice against the noble wife of the conqueror of Britain? Is it to her discredit that she differs from so many of the noble ladies in Rome? Do we blame her or rather admire her, that she has never betrayed a friend, or changed a husband, or exposed an infant, or plundered a province, or ruined a reputation? Is it to be her destruction that her life has ever been simple, and her words sincere? Or is she to be banished because, through long years, she has continued to mourn for a friend, when so many forget their dearest relatives in less than a month? Cicero mourned the death of a slave, though he was half ashamed of his sensibility; Crassus wept for the death of a favourite lamprey. Is it a crime to cherish a beloved memory? What evidence is there against Pomponia? Have not her slaves, though Regulus has tampered with them, shown themselves entirely faithful? And what wonder? Most of us treat our slaves as though they were enemies—as though they could not claim the rights of human beings. She has treated her slaves as men and women like ourselves; as sharers of her home; as heirs with her of the common slavery of life and death. She has asked their aid; she has admitted them to festive tables; she has sought their love, and not their fear. She has lived, as we should all live, like a member of one great brotherhood, of which all are bound to mutual assistance. She has done good in secret. In the midst of wealth she has been as one who is poor. She has stretched her hand to the shipwrecked; shown his path to the wanderer; divided her bread with the hungry; and has been, as so few are, a friend to the distressed.

‘But she does not go to the theatre! Is that to be accounted a crime? Rather let us erect a statue to a virtue which can still blush for infamies at which so many women dare to be spectators. Is the licence of the Fescennines, and the grossness of the Atellan plays, acted by slaves whom the ancient laws branded with shame, a fit amusement for pure matrons? If these be deemed tolerable, what shall be said of the softer luxury, the subtler indecency, the more fascinating corruption of the modern mimes? Instead of blaming Pomponia for not patronising such spectacles, let us commend her example!

‘Or is it a sign of moroseness and alienation from the customs of her country, that she is never to be seen among the multitudes of every rank and age who gaze with frenzied delight at the gladiatorial shows? Nay, she is to be applauded for shunning scenes so fatal to true morality! It is shocking enough to see noble beasts ruthlessly mangled, and once, at least, a cry of compassion has risen from the dense throngs when they saw that frightful combat between five hundred Gætulians and twenty elephants. But their compassion was for the elephants!66 How much deeper is the compassion due to the unhappy human beings whose carcases encrimson the white sands of the amphitheatre! Augustus tried to check and limit this savagery. To see men torn by wild beasts in the morning, and hacking each other to pieces in the afternoon—and that as a mere amusement, to kill the time—is simply degrading, however much custom may sanction it. It is true that Cicero invented an excuse for his brutality of pleasure, this delirium of homicide, by the absurd plea that it stimulated courage. The courage of the tiger, which leaps with bare breast on the hunter’s steel, exists in the lowest of the human race, without the need for this bloody stimulus. Man should be to man a sacred thing; the only result of gazing at such scenes is to destroy this generous sense of a common humanity. It may be said that the gladiators, or those who fight the wild beasts, are often criminals. Be it so; but are we criminals also? If not, why should we condemn ourselves to the shame of gloating over the supreme agony and mystery of death?

‘But Pomponia is charged with speaking as though there were but one God. Well, do we not read even in the sacred poems of Orpheus—

‘“One God, one Hades, one Sun, and one Dionysus?”

Does not Varro, one of the most honoured of Roman writers, distinguish carefully between the mythology of poets, the religion of the commonwealth, and the beliefs of philosophers? It is true that he deprecated the revelation of these truths to the multitude, because there is no way to keep them in order but by illusions. Yet scarcely an old woman or beardless boy in Rome really believes in these fables; and it is a good thing that they do not. If they attached genuine credence to the supposed deeds of this rabble of gods, they would have patrons and examples of every lust and of every crime. But they are dimly aware that Stator, Liber, Hercules, Mercury, are but names or manifestations of one Divine Existence. The mysteries are divulged; the oracles are dumb; and as the wailing spirits cried to Epitherses thirty years ago as he sailed past the promontory of Paludes, “Great Pan is dead.”67

‘A person, then, who can regard it as criminal to reject the popular belief must be ignorant of all philosophy and all literature. Is any one bound to suppose that there really is such a god as Panic; or such goddesses as Muta, Febris, and Strenia? Are the Greek poets to be condemned who have repeatedly spoken of one God? God is everywhere. He is that without which nothing is. He comes to men; He comes into men. No one is good without God. Pomponia’s character alone is sufficient to prove that there is nothing harmful in her belief. To the God who is near us, to the sacred Spirit who dwells with us, the observer and guardian of all our evil and our good, she has been supremely true. The image of the gods cannot be formed with gold and silver, or such materials, but with the beauty and dignity of human souls. God is best worshipped, not by sacrifices of bulls, but by innocence and rectitude.

‘And you, O Aulus, you know what a wife Pomponia has been to you, how chaste, how gentle, how faithful! How often have you found her quietly spinning wool among her modest maidens, when other matrons are sitting at riotous banquets, or gazing at dishonourable scenes! How wisely and quietly has she managed your fortunes, and governed your family! How true and tender she was as a mother to the little boy whose immature death you wept, whose ashes are inurned in the tomb of your house! How purely has she trained your youthful Aulus! To whom save to her does he owe that beautiful mixture of manly courage and virginal modesty which distinguishes him among the youth of Rome? And will you, at the word of a vile informer actuated by base greed, and set on by female rancour—will you desecrate the shrine of your own household gods? Will you dishonour the fame of your ancestors? Will you sever a union which has been to you so fruitful of blessings? Remember how she smiled on you on the day that you walked in proud ovation with Cæsar by your side! Remember how she shared the toils, the hardships, the anxieties of your campaigns in that far-off Thule, which was subdued by your valour! Remember how by her sympathy she has diminished all your troubles, and intensified all your joys! And will you hand over such a wife, and such a mother—so gentle, so pure, so noble—to the fury of the executioner? Will you see the sword flash down upon a head which has often rested on your breast? Or will you coldly and sternly dismiss your innocent and well-loved wife to end her days on some dreary island-rock, amid the storms of Adria or the Tyrrhene Sea? Yours, O Aulus, yours and not hers, will be the infamy; yours, not hers, will be the loss! Not hers the shame—for no informer, and no unjust condemnation can fix a stain upon the guiltless; not hers the misery—for wherever she goes she will carry the God within her, since in each one of us, as our great poet says,

‘“Some god is dwelling, though we know not who.”

You may banish her to Pontia or Pandataria, but everywhere she will see the sunlight and the stars, and will feel that she is not abandoned. When we enter a dense forest, we are struck with awe at its huge tree-trunks, its spreading boughs, its dark shade, and we feel that the Divine is there; when we enter some cavern in the hills, we feel the presence of a Deity: but we feel it much more when we see a brave and pure soul rising superior to the menaces of calamity. Look at her, Aulus, where she sits. In her calmness, in her fortitude, in the serene and tranquil beauty of a countenance on which no vice has set its mark, see the living proof of her freedom from all blame! Proclaim to Cæsar, to Regulus, to the society of Rome, to all the world, that Pomponia has done or thought nothing unworthy of the immortal gods, nothing unworthy of her ancestors, of her husband, and of her home!’

Many a cry of applause had greeted Seneca, as he thus ventured to pour forth, in the secrecy of a domestic tribunal, the thoughts which he had often uttered to his friends, and even published in his writings. He sat down amid a murmur of admiration, during which not a few of the noblest of his auditors pressed round him with expressions of warmest congratulation, and Amplias, the Christian freedman of Pomponia, in a burst of enthusiasm, bent down and kissed his hand. He was deeply gratified by the impression he had made, for when there was nothing to arouse his fear or imperil his ambition, he felt a genuine happiness in doing deeds of kindness. But he raised his hands for silence while the assembly awaited the decision of those whom Plautius had asked to be his assessors in the judgment.

They consulted together for a few moments, and then, amid the deepest silence, Plautius rose. He was almost too much moved to speak. It required all his Roman firmness and dignity to force back the tears which were brimming in his eyes, and to control into steadiness the voice which seemed ready to break; but he succeeded. Rising with dignity, he said:

‘Friends and kinsmen, I have consulted with those who have shared with me the responsibility of judgment. We are agreed. The evidence is altogether worthless. Pomponia is innocent of anything hostile to religion, or forbidden by the laws of Rome. Friends and kinsmen, I thank you for your presence and your counsel, and I thank you most of all, illustrious Seneca. I thank the Emperor, that he has spared us the pain and anxiety of a public trial, and I shall announce to him, and to all Rome, that Aulus Plautius will thank the gods, even till death, that they have given him a wife so innocent, so noble, and so chaste.’

Pomponia raised her eyes and her clasped hands to heaven in a transport of gratitude, and as she did so a sudden burst of sunshine streamed through the window, and glorified her face. The lambent flame played over her hair, and lit up her features, and gave to her calm beauty a heavenly radiance. This was regarded as a complete justification of the sentence of acquittal, and a visible proof of the divine favour. The hall resounded with acclamations, and Claudia, who had been among the witnesses of the scene, flung herself into the arms of Pomponia, who tenderly folded the fair British maiden to her heart, while Pudens looked on with a happy smile.

And when Pomponia retired to her own room, she knelt down, and with bowed head, and clasped hands, and outstretched arms, poured out her thanks to Him who had been her protector in this most painful trial of her life. She was a confessor and a martyr, in will if not in deed; for though she had not been called upon to declare herself a Christian, she had been prepared to do so if the question had been put to her. When Plautius entered he found her praying, and as she rose at his entrance he saw upon her features a beauty even brighter than that which she had caught from the sunbeam which had shone upon her in the hall.

‘My wife,’ he said to her very tenderly, as he kissed her. ‘I know not what to think of thy beliefs. Thou hast not concealed from me that thou art of this new sect. I know that men call it despicable and execrated; but if it makes its votaries such as thou art, it is more blessed and more potent than the worship of the gods of Rome.’

‘My Aulus,’ she answered, ‘I know well that as yet thou canst not think with me. Yet thou, too, art dear to God, for thou hast felt after Him if happily thou mightest find Him. Our teachers say that He is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation he that seeketh Him and doeth righteousness, as thou dost, is accepted of Him. Fear not, my husband; in the next world, as in this, we shall be united, for thou art not far from the kingdom of heaven.’

CHAPTER XXXI

THE INTERIOR OF A SLAVE-PRISON

‘Magnam rem sine dubio fecerimus si servulum infelicem in ergastulum miserimus.’—Seneca, De Ira, iii. 32.

We left Onesimus in a prison cell among the substructions of the Palatine, his back sore with scourging, his soul torn with shame and indignation. He cursed his folly, without repenting of his faults. Once more he had thrown away every element of prosperity; and his manner of looking on life was so entirely selfish that the source of his self-reproach was rather the shipwreck of his chances than the moral instability which had led to it. No news reached him in his prison. It was not till his liberation that he learnt the fate of Britannicus—a fate which, if he had continued steadfast in duty, he might have averted or delayed.

He knew that he could not be restored to his trusted position as the servus a purpura of the Empress. He would lose that, and with it lose all the flattery and gain which accrued so easily to the higher slaves of Cæsar’s household. He doubted whether even Acte’s influence could screen him from the consequences of an offense so deadly as misconduct in the august presence of the imperial divinity. But he felt a desperate pride and a morbid shame which made him determine to conceal all traces of himself and his misdemeanour from Acte’s knowledge.

His behaviour in prison was refractory, for the jailer had taken a strong dislike to him, and delighted to humiliate this bird of finer feather than those who usually came under his charge. He was quite safe in doing so. There was little compassion in the breast of the steward who managed the slaves, and rarely, if ever, did he take the trouble to inquire how a prisoner was getting on, or whether he was alive or dead. Amid blows and insults the heavy days dragged on, and seemed interminable to the poor Phrygian youth. In the desperation of idleness he tried to find some amusement from scribbling with a nail on the plaster wall of his dungeon, and one day, thinking of the drunken bout which had reduced him to this level, he defiantly scrawled ‘When I am set free, I will drain every wine-jar in the house.’68

‘Will you?’ said the jailer, who had entered unobserved as he finished his scrawl. ‘You won’t have a chance just yet, my fine friend.’

He gave Onesimus a blow with his whip, which made him writhe with anguish, and said, ‘Thank Anubis, I shall be rid of you to-day. You are sent to the slave-prison (ergastulum).’

‘Who sends me?’ asked Onesimus shuddering.

‘What’s that to you, crucisalus?’ said the slave, dealing him another blow. ‘Oh you writhe, do you, my fine bird? What will you do when the bulls’ hides rattle the cottabus on your shoulders?’

What he said was true. That evening Onesimus was loaded with fetters and taken into the country.

The sight of slaves in chains being hurried off to punishment was far too familiar to excite much notice in the streets of Rome, but it was torture to Onesimus to be thus exposed to the gaze and jeers of idle passers-by. He felt a painful dread lest any of his friends—above all, lest Acte, or Pudens, or Titus, or Junia—should see him in this wretched and disgraceful guise. No one, however, saw him, and that evening he was safely lodged in the slave-jail attached to Nero’s villa at Antium.

The slave-jail was a perfect hell on earth. It presented the spectacle of human beings in their worst aspect, entirely dehumanised by despair and misery. The slaves who were imprisoned there were treated like wild beasts, and became no better than wild beasts, with less of rage but more of malice and foulness. They worked in chains, and were driven to work with scourges. Torture and starvation were the sole methods of government. They were a herd of wretches clothed in rags, ill-fed, untended, unpitied, passing their days and nights under filthy conditions and in pestilential air, hateful and hating one another. Some of them were men half mad and wholly untameable, who could not be depended upon except so far as they were coerced by violence. Others were pure barbarians, only speaking a few words of any intelligible language, and therefore useless in a town familia. Others were criminals only exempted from death because of the value of their labour. Some of them knew that there was little chance of their being taken thence, unless it were to be crucified, and that when death released them, their bodies would be carelessly flung to rot amid the seething abominations of the corpse-pits (puticuli) like that which Onesimus had once seen in Rome near the Esquiline hill.

The only slaves who retained any vestige of decency and self-respect in these seething masses of human misery and degradation, were those who found themselves denizens of an ergastulum for a short period, at the caprice of a master or mistress. The experience was so terrible that it cowed the most contumacious into trembling servility. A few came there for no real fault, who were far less guilty of any misdoing than the owners who subjected them to this dreaded punishment. Sometimes a page or favourite who had been tempted to speak pertly in consequence of too much petting, or a youth who had been goaded into rebellion by the intolerable tyranny of a freedman, or a slave whose blood had been turned into flame by some atrocious wrong, learnt forever the hopelessness of his condition, and the abjectness of his servitude, by being sent there for a week or even for a month. Emerging from that den of despair, a human being felt the conviction enter like iron into his soul, that slaves were not men, and had none of the rights of men; and that, unless they wished to throw away their lives altogether, no complaisance to an owner could be too abject, and nothing must be considered criminal which an owner required of his human chattel.

Oaths, and curses, and the lowest abysses of vileness in human conduct, and that blackness of darkness which follows the extinction of the last spark of humanity in the soul of man, and the clanking of fetters all day long, and the shrieks of the tortured, and the yelling of the scourged, and jests more horrible than weeping, and the manifold leprosies of all moral and physical disease—all this Onesimus had to witness, and had to endure, in the slave-jail at Antium. We have read what prisons were before the days of Howard; what penal settlements and convict ships were forty years ago; but men trained in the most rudimentary principles of Christianity could not, under the worst circumstances, sink quite so low, or be so wholly beyond the sphere of pity, as the offscourings of pagan slavery, the scum of the misery of all nations, huddled into these abodes of death.

It was soon whispered among the wretches there that the handsome Phrygian youth had been high in place among the attendants of Octavia, and had been favoured and promoted by Acte. In their baseness they exulted at his humiliation, and the extent to which his soul revolted from their malice happily helped to preserve him from the contamination which would have been involved in their friendliness. He lived from day to day in the sullen silence of an indomitable purpose. He did not know how long he would be kept there. He waited a month, sustained by fierce resolve, and then determined that, at the cost of life itself—even if it should end in feeding the crows upon a cross—he would attempt his escape. He knew that he had many foes among the struggling envies of Cæsar’s palace, and he suspected that Nero’s dispensator purposely intended to forget him, and to leave him there to rot.

After a few days he was left comparatively unmolested by his companions in misfortune, for there was no amusement to be got out of his savage taciturnity. Once, when one of the ruder denizens had tried to molest him, Onesimus struck him so furious a blow with his fettered hands that he was looked upon as dangerous. As he glanced round at the degraded ugliness of the majority of the prisoners, whose faces only varied in degrees of villany, he had less than no desire to join their society. He saw but one on whom he could look with any pleasure, or from whom he could hope for any sympathy. This was a young man of honest and pleasant countenance, whose name, he learnt, was Hermas, and who bore himself under his misfortunes with sweetness and dignity. Like Onesimus, he seemed to find his only relief in the strenuous performance of the tasks allotted to him by the ergastularius, and as Onesimus watched him he felt convinced that he was there for no crime, and also that he was a Christian.

His conjecture was turned into a certainty by an accident. One day, as Hermas was digging the stubborn soil, something dropped out of the fold of his dress. He snatched it up hastily and in confusion, and seemed relieved when he noticed that no one but Onesimus had seen him. But the quick eyes of the Phrygian had observed that what he dropped was a tiny fish rudely fashioned in glass, on which had been painted the one word CΩCΙC, ‘May’st thou save!’ They were not uncommon among Christians, and some of them have been found in the catacombs.

The fettered slaves were taken out in gangs every morning under the guardianship of armed drivers, whose whips enforced diligence, and whose swords protected them from assault. The refractory were soon reduced to discipline, but those who worked diligently were not often tormented. In the various works of tillage, Onesimus, hampered though he was by his intolerable manacles, found some outlet for his pent-up anguish and hard remorse. But no one can live without some human intercourse, and one day, when Hermas was working beside him, and none of the rest were near, Onesimus glanced up at him and said the one word Ἰχθὺς, ‘Fish.’

Quick as lightning came the whispered answer Ἰχθύδιον, ‘a little fish,’ by which Hermas meant to imply that he was a weak and humble Christian.

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Are you one of us?’

Onesimus sadly shook his head. ‘Perhaps I was, or might have been, a Christian once.’

‘Have you been illuminated and fallen away, unhappy one?’

‘Ask me no more,’ said Onesimus. ‘I am a lost wretch.’

‘The Good Shepherd,’ said Hermas, ‘came to seek and save the lost.’

‘ItT9 is vain to talk to me,’ said Onesimus. ‘Tell me of yourself. You are not a criminal, or a madman, or a barbarian, like these.’

‘Talk not of them with scorn,’ said Hermas. ‘Are they worse than the harlots and sinners whose friend Christ was?’

Onesimus would not talk of Christ. ‘I never saw you,’ he said, ‘in Cæsar’s household.’

‘No,’ said Hermas; ‘I was the slave of Pedanius Secundus, the city Præfect. He has no rustic prison, and, being a friend of Nero, he asked his freedman to get leave to send me here.’

‘But why?’

‘He bade me do what I could not do. Seeing that I was strong and vigorous, he wanted me to marry one of his slave-girls. The worshippers of the gods know nothing of what marriage means. I loved a Christian maiden; I refused the union with a girl of evil character, who, being beautiful, had been the victim of Pedanius already. He scourged me; he tortured me; he threatened to fling me into his fish-ponds; and, when I still held out, he sent me here.’

‘Is there no escape from this horrible place?’

‘When you go in again, look round you, and see how hopeless is the attempt. The ergastulum is half subterranean. Its windows are narrow, and high above our heads. If we attempted to escape, the least noise would wake the jailers, and some of these around us would be the first to curry favour by helping to defeat our plan.’

‘Is bribery useless?’

‘Even if I could get the money, I do not think it right to bribe.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think that Christ means us to endure all He sends. I trust in Him. If He sends me hunger, I bear it. If He casts me down, I believe that in due time He will lift me up. If He suffers me to be sent to prison, I try to turn the prison into His Temple. But I feel sure that He will deliver me—and that soon.’

Hermas was not wrong. His incarceration was short, because he was one of the few slaves in the family of Pedanius whom the Præfect could trust. Pedanius was a man whose cruel indifference and imperious temper made him more than usually obnoxious to his slaves. He lived in terror of them, and tried to avert danger by inspiring terror into them. He could not do without Hermas. He did not know that he was a Christian; but he knew that in other houses besides his own there had recently sprung up a class of slaves honest and faithful, and that Hermas was one of them. He married his slave-girl to another youth, and Hermas was set free.

And then Onesimus, seeing that every other method of escape was impossible, tried the effects of bribery. He had managed, though with infinite difficulty, to conceal the gold piece which Octavia had given him, and he had noted that one of the underlings of the prison-keeper seemed to be not unkindly disposed to him. He was a man named Croto, chosen for the office because his stalwart proportions and herculean strength would make him formidable to any unruly slave; but there was a certain rough honesty and kindliness in his face which made Onesimus think that he might move his compassion.

Seizing his opportunity one day, as Croto passed him in the field, he boldly whispered,

‘Croto, if I gave you an aureus, would you swear to let me have a chance to escape?’

Croto looked long and hard at his beautiful face, and walked on without a word. But as he returned from his rounds he touched him, and said,

‘Yes; I pity you. You are not like the rest of this herd of swine. Such things as an escape have happened ere now, and no one is the wiser. Masters don’t care to ask many questions.’

‘I will trust you,’ said Onesimus; and tearing the aureus from the hem of his dark serge dress, he slipped it into Croto’s hand.

‘Keep awake to-night. The two who guard the door shall be drunk. Get up a disturbance after midnight; be near the door, and when it opens— The plan may fail, but it is the only chance I can give you.’

Onesimus pointed in despair to the fetters on his feet.

‘When a slave has shown himself quiet and reasonable, they are sometimes removed; and yours shall be. But the manacles on your wrists must remain; they are never removed at night.’

Onesimus made his plans. At the dead of night, when the prison was plunged in darkness—for oil was much too dear to be wasted on chained slaves—he raised a great outcry, as though he had been suddenly attacked. The slaves sprang up from their pallets, heavy and confused with sleep. But Onesimus had all his senses on the alert, and by violently pushing one, jostling against another, and striking a third, he soon had the whole place in a tumultuous uproar of rage and panic, during which he quietly crouched down beside the door. It was opened by the sleepy and drunken guardians, to find the cause of the disturbance, and, before they could be reinforced by their more sober colleagues, Onesimus dashed the lamp out of the hand of one of them, tripped up the other, and ran to hide himself in the dark corner of an adjacent street, behind the Temple of Fortune. He succeeded, though with great pain, in forcing one hand free from the chain; and hiding the other, with the manacle which dangled from it, under his sleeve, he determined, at the first gleam of light, to try and find some assembly of Christians. He knew that it was their custom to meet at earliest dawn in secret places—generally, if possible, the secluded entrance to some sand-pit—to sing hymns to Christ as God, before the slumbering pagan population began to stir. He was fortunate, for soon, with senses preternaturally quickened by peril, he heard at no great distance the faint sound of a hymn. He made his way towards the spot, and concealed himself till the congregation should break up. He knew that the last to leave was generally the Presbyter; and, waiting for him, he called him as he passed.

The Presbyter started, and said, ‘Who goes there?’

Onesimus stepped out of his hiding-place, and said, ‘Oh, for the love of Christ, help me to get free from this chain!’

‘Thou usest the language of a Christian,’ said the Presbyter, ‘but thy chain would prove thee a fugitive or a criminal.’

‘I have erred,’ said Onesimus; ‘but I am not a criminal.’

The Presbyter fixed on him a long and troubled look.

‘Thou hast adjured me,’ he said, ‘in the name of Christ: I dare not refuse. But neither must I, for thy sake, imperil the brethren. Hide thyself again. I will send my son, Stephanus, to file thy chain, and then thou must depart. If thou hast erred, may Christ forgive thee!’

It was not many minutes before the young man came, and, without a word, filed the thinnest part of the manacle till Onesimus was free.

‘Peace be with thee, brother!’ said Stephanus. ‘Men begin to stir. Thou wilt be in danger. We dare not shelter thee. It were best to hide here till nightfall. Food shall be brought thee.’

Onesimus saw that the advice was good. Search might be made for him; but Antium was a large place, and the sand-pit might escape observation. It was so; bread and water were left near his hiding-place, and at night he made his way to Gaieta, which was twenty miles away from Antium.

CHAPTER XXXII

WANDERINGS OF AN OUTCAST

Onesimus was still in evil case. Everywhere he was looked upon with suspicious eyes. The mass of the population felt an aversion for fugitive slaves, and such, at the first glance, they conjectured him to be. His dress was a slave’s dress—he had no means of changing it—and his hand still bore the bruises of the manacle. There was nothing for him to do but to beg his way, and he rarely got anything but scraps of food which barely sufficed to keep body and soul together. In those days there had long been visible that sure sign of national decadence,

‘Huge estates,’ says Pliny, ‘ruined Italy.’ Along the roads villas were visible here and there, among umbrageous groves of elm and chestnut, and their owners, to whom belonged the land for miles around, often did not visit these villas once in a year. Onesimus would gladly have laboured, but labour was a drug in the market. The old honest race of Roman farmers, who ate their beans and bacon in peace and plenty by fount and stream, and who each enlisted the services of a few free labourers and their sons, had almost entirely disappeared. The fields were tilled by gangs of slaves, whose only home was often an ergastulum, and who worked in chains. Luxury surrounded itself with hordes of superfluous and vicious ministers; but these were mainly purchased from foreign slave-markets, and a slave who had already been in service was regarded as a veterator, up to every trick and villany—for otherwise no master would have parted with him. A good, honest, sober, well-behaved slave, on whose fidelity and love a master could trust, was regarded as a treasure; and happy were the nobles or wealthy knights and burghers who possessed a few such slaves to rid them from the terror of being surrounded by thieves and secret foes. But how was Onesimus, now for a second time a fugitive, to find his way again into any honourable household? As he thought of the fair lot which might have befallen him, he sat down by the dusty road and wept. He was hungry, and in rags. Life lay wasted and disgraced behind him, while the prospect of the future was full of despair and shame. He was a prodigal among the swine in a far country, and no man gave him even the husks to eat.

Misery after misery assailed him. One night as he slept under a plane tree in the open air the wolves came down from the neighbouring hills, and he only saved his life from their hungry rage by the agility with which he climbed the tree. One day as he came near a villa to beg for bread he was taken for a spy of bandits. The slaves set a fierce Molossian dog upon him, and he would have been torn to pieces if he had not dropped on all fours, and confronted the dog with such a shout that the Molossus started back, and Onesimus had time to dash a huge stone against his snarling teeth, which drove him howling away.

For one who thus wandered through the country there were abundant proofs of the wretchedness and wickedness of the lower classes of Pagan life. He observed one day the blackened ruins of a large farm-house with its ricks and cattle-sheds, and not far from it he saw the white skeleton of a man chained to the hollow trunk of an aged fig-tree. The spot seemed to be shunned by all human beings, as though the curse of God were upon it. Onesimus was wandering curiously about it, and trying to appease his hunger with a few ears of corn from one of the half-burnt ricks, when the shout of a shepherd on a distant hill attracted his attention. He went to the man, who shared with him some of his black barley-bread, and told him that he had shouted to warn him from an ‘ill-omened and fatal place.’ ‘Why ill-omened and fatal?’ asked Onesimus. ‘The place belonged,’ answered the peasant, ‘to a master who had entrusted the care of it to a head slave. This man, though married, deserted his wife for a free woman of foreign extraction, whom his master had brought to the villa. The fury of his slave-wife turned into raging madness. She burnt all her husband’s accounts and possessions. She thrust a torch into every rick and barn, and when she saw the flames mount high, tied herself to her little son, and precipitated herself with him into a deep well. The master, furious at his losses, and shocked by such a tragedy, inflicted a terrible vengeance on the guilty slave. Stripping him naked, he chained him to the fig-tree, of which the hollow trunk had been the immemorial nest of swarms of bees. He smeared the wretch’s body with honey, and left him to perish.’ The bleaching skeleton had become the terror of the neighbourhood. No one dared to touch it, and the place, haunted with dark spirits of crime and retribution, was shunned far and wide as an accursed spot.

Sickened with miseries, Onesimus gradually made his way to Pompeii. Every street and wall of the bright little Greek town bore witness to the depths of degradation into which the inhabitants had fallen, and the youth found that the radiant scene, under the shadow of Vesuvius and its glorious vineyards by that blue and sparkling sea, was a garden of God indeed, but, like that of the Cities of the Plain, awaiting the fire and brimstone which were to fall on it from heaven. He was specially disgusted because, alien as he was now from all Christian truth, he saw on the walls of a large assembly-room in the Street of the Baths a mass of scribblings full of deadly insults towards the Christians. One in particular offended him, for, by way of coarse satire on some Christian teacher, it said:—

It was evidently no place for any one who still loved Christianity. Hurrying from its fascination of corruption, to which he felt it only too possible that he might succumb, he was for some time reduced to the very brink of starvation, and was at last driven to live on such fruits and berries as he could pluck from the trees and hedges. Once, while he was trying to reach some wild crab-apples in a place by the side of a little stream, which was overgrown with dense foliage, he slipped, and fell crashing through the brushwood into the deep and muddy water which was hidden by the undergrowth. Too weak to rise and struggle, he could only just support himself by clinging to a bough, when his cries were heard. A labourer came and rescued him, and left him sitting in the sunlight to dry his soaking rags. And now he thought that there was nothing left him but to die, and seriously meditated whether it would not be best to fling himself into the green-covered sludge of black water from which he had been rescued, and so to end his miseries.

A sound arrested him, and, lifting his head, he saw a group of the eunuch priests of the Syrian goddess approaching along the road, one of whom shook the jingling sistrum which had attracted his attention. They were a company of seven, and were men taken from the dregs of the populace. With them was a stout youth, who rode an ass which carried their various properties, the chief of which were musical instruments, and the image of the goddess wrapped in an embroidered veil.

As they passed they eyed him curiously, and stopped a few paces beyond him as though for a consultation.

‘A likely youth,’ he heard one of them say, ‘though now he looks thin and miserable. We have long wanted another servant. Would not he do for us, Philebus?’

‘Probably a runaway slave,’ said another.

‘What does that matter to us?’ said Philebus. ‘We can say that he called himself free-born, and told us that he ran away from the cruelties of a step-mother—or anything else we choose to invent. I will go and question him.’

Philebus was an old man with a wizened and wrinkled face. The top of his head was bald; the rest of his grey locks were trained to hang round his head in long curls.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

Onesimus nodded.

‘Here is bread for you, and some flesh of kid, and some wine.’

Onesimus ate and drank with ravenous eagerness, and the old man asked him, ‘A fugitive slave?’

‘I was free born.’

‘Hum-m!’ muttered Philebus, incredulously. ‘Well, you are wet, hungry, ragged, miserable. Will you be our servant?’

‘I am not going to be a priest of the Syrian goddess,’ said Onesimus, with horror.

‘No one asked you to be,’ answered Philebus, with a sneer. ‘You will have light work, good pay, good food.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Only to help in tending the ass, and cooking our meals, and going round with the bag for us when we perform.’

The youth paused. Could he, once a Christian, accept this degrading servitude to the vilest of mankind? Yet, after all, what was servitude? What was degradation? Could he be more miserable than he was? To be a servant of the Galli was better than the suicide and the dimly imagined horrors of that unknown world which he had just been about to brave.

‘I will come,’ he said.

The old man brought him a tunic in place of his soaked and torn dress, gave him more wine and food, and taking him to the rest congratulated them on their new and handsome servant.

Then began a mode of life which Onesimus could never recall in after years without a blush of shame and indignation—a life of squalor, mendacity,T10 and imposture, made more vile by the sanction of abject superstition. In the morning, when the priests drew near to any place where a few spectators could be gathered together, they set out in motley array, dressed in many-coloured robes, and with yellow caps of linen or woollen on their heads. They smeared their faces with a dye, and painted their eyes with henna. Some of them put on white tunics, embroidered with stripes of purple, and fastened with a girdle, and on their feet they wore shoes dyed of a saffron colour. They placed on the back of the ass the image of their goddess in its silken covering, and then, with wild cries, began a dervish-like dance to the tones of the flute played by their youthful attendant. During this dance they bared their arms to the shoulder, and flourished aloft swords and axes. In this way they wandered through various hamlets till they reached the villa of a wealthy landowner. Here they determined to exhibit the full extent of their mercenary fanaticism. Looking on the ground, turning from side to side with various contortions, whirling themselves round and round till their long curls streamed from their heads, they bit their arms, and at length cut some of their veins with the weapons which they carried. Then Philebus simulated a sort of epileptic fit. Falling to the ground, with long sobs, which seemed to shake his whole body, he rolled about, accusing himself of the deadliest crimes, like one possessed. After this he seized a scourge, of which the long leathern thongs were studded with bones, and scourged himself with all the endurance of a fakir, till the soil was wet with the blood which streamed from his own wounds and the gashes of his comrades. The crowd looked on with a sort of stupor at the hideous spectacle, and when it ended it was the part of Onesimus, on the attraction of whose personal appearance the wretches relied, to go round with a bag for the offerings of copper and silver coins which were abundantly bestowed on them by the distorted religionism of the spectators. The Galli were further rewarded with gifts in kind. One peasant brought them milk, another bread, and corn, and cheeses, and barley; and a farmer gave them a cask of wine. All these were placed in sacks, side by side with the image of the goddess, upon the ass, which, as the flute-player wittily remarked to Onesimus, ‘was now both a barn and a temple.’ In this way they made spoil of all the country side.

Occasionally they were even more successful. If they found a farmer specially credulous, they would tell him that their goddess was thirsty, and needed the blood of a ram, promising him a prophecy of the future if he would provide one for sacrifice. The sacrificial victim afforded them an excellent banquet, to which they would invite the lowest scoundrels, and fearlessly reveal themselves in their true colours. Once one of the country landowners, named Britinnus, awe-struck by their supposed sanctity, invited the whole company to the hospitality of his farm. Their stay might have been prolonged but for two accidents. The cook had been ordered to prepare a side of venison for a feast, but this was stolen; and, while he was in despair at the punishment which would be inflicted on him for the loss, his wife suggested that they should secretly kill the ass of the priests, and cook part of it instead of the lost venison. But when the cook came to the stable, the ass took fright, and rushed straight through the house into the dining-room of the farmer, upsetting the table with a huge crash. The next day a boy burst in, with his face as white as a sheet, and told the terrified Britinnus that a dog had gone mad, had sprung among the hounds, and had bitten not only some of them and some of the farm-cattle, but also Myrtilus, the muleteer, and Hephæstion, the cook, and Hypatius, the footman. On this Britinnus assumed that the Galli had brought him ill luck, and sent the whole troupe about their business.

In the neighbourhood of one town they took to fortune-telling. Binding each person who consulted them to absolute secrecy, they showed their lack of invention by returning the same oracle to all. It was simplicity itself, consisting of the two lines—

Whether they were asked about plans for a matrimonial alliance, or the heirdom to an estate, or anything else, this oracle admitted of any interpretation they chose to put upon it.

Altogether sickened with his companions and with their way of living, Onesimus was further troubled by the insight into every hidden wound and portent of pagan wickedness which came to his ears, or which he witnessed in these country wanderings. Long afterwards, when he was an old man in Ephesus, he used to tell these stories to his friends, to urge them to yet more zealous effort for the healing of that heathen wickedness of which the whole head was sick and the whole heart faint.

On one occasion, for instance, in his wanderings, the Galli had been unable to collect an audience, because the entire population of the little town of Varia was absorbed in the interest of a trial which affected the family of one of their prominent residents. A wealthy burgher had been left a widower with an only son, a boy of modest character, and devoted to his studies. Some years afterwards he married again, and another son was born to him. By the time this second boy was twelve years old his half-brother had grown into manhood, and his step-mother, who hated him for his virtues, determined to poison him. Summoning a slave who was in her confidence, she sent him to a physician to purchase poison, which she mixed in a cup of wine and placed ready for the youth at the next meal. It happened, however, that her own boy, returning hot and thirsty from school, saw the wine on the table and drank it. He had scarcely finished the draught, when he fell to the ground as dead. The slave who attended him filled the air with his clamour, and when the inmates of the house came flocking in, one accused another of the crime. The master of the house was out, and his wife sent to inform him that her boy had been poisoned, that her step-son was the murderer. The husband was crushed to the earth by the double calamity. His boy was dead; the elder son, of whom he had been so proud, was to be tried for murder. Scarcely were the boy’s obsequies finished when the hapless father, his grey hairs defiled with dust, hastened to the Forum, and there embraced the knees of the magistrates, and besought them to avenge him on the fratricide. The local Senate was assembled, and the herald summoned the accuser. Onesimus, who had nothing to do that day, was present at the trial. He heard the old man plead pathetically against the son who had been the pride of his life and home; he heard the youth, with all the calm of innocence, deny the charge. There was no evidence against him but the word of his step-mother and her confidential slave. This man stood up with a front of brass, and declared that the youth had been actuated by jealousy of his brother, and had poisoned him. There was nothing to rebut this evidence, and every jury-man was prepared to drop into the brazen urn the fatal ticket marked with the letter C, for condemno, which would have handed over the offender to be first scourged until his bones were laid bare, and then to be sewed up in a sack with a cock, a dog, and a viper, and to be flung into the sea. The heart of Onesimus bled for the youth. With his instinctive power of reading character, he felt convinced of his innocence. But while with palpitating heart he awaited the voting, an aged physician arose, and, covering the orifice of the voting-urn with his hand, he said: ‘Fathers, let me prevent the triumph of an infamous woman and a perjured slave. That wretch came to me as a physician, and offered me a hundred gold pieces for a poison. I read crime in the man’s face, and put the gold in a purse, which I made him stamp with his seal. Here is the bag. Seize his hand, take off his iron ring, and see whether this be not his seal. If it is, clearly he, and not the poor youth yonder, was the purchaser of the poison.’ Onesimus turned his eyes on the slave. His face had assumed a deadly pallor, and all his limbs had burst into a cold sweat; but even when his seal was recognised, he continued to stammer protestations of his innocence. He was tortured, but would not confess. Then the physician rose with a mysterious smile. ‘Enough of tortures,’ he said. ‘The time has come to unravel this web of villany. I sold to yonder wretch, not poison, but mandragora. If, indeed, the boy drank that draught, he does but sleep. About this time he will be awakening, and may be brought back to the light of day.’ The magistrates at once sent messengers to the sepulchre where the boy’s body had been laid. The father with his own hands removed the cover of the tomb, and there lay the little lad, unchanged, and just beginning to awake, with intense astonishment depicted on his features. Striving in vain to express his joy in words, the happy father—father once more of two dear sons, both of whom he thought that he had lost—folded the child to his heart in a close embrace, and carried him as he was, with all his grave-clothes about him, to the judgment seat. Terror-stricken by such a portent, the woman confessed her crime, and was sentenced to perpetual banishment; the slave was crucified.69

Next morning Onesimus, as he accompanied the priests and their ass, saw the criminal hanging naked on his cross. He was a man of fine proportions and in the prime of life, and his strength was slowly ebbing away in horrible and feverish torture. The Galli as they passed spat on him, but Onesimus stayed behind. The wretch was not only living, though in extreme agony, but would probably continue to live for two days more, unless the wolves got at him or the magistrates thought fit to send their lictors to end his life by two blows of a ponderous mallet in order to save the trouble of having the cross watched. It was no base curiosity which made the Phrygian linger by that spectacle of shame and anguish. It was rather an awful pity—a heart-rending remembrance. Sunk, fallen, ruined, guilty as he himself was, he yet could not see without horror this awful reminder of One who had perished, since his own birth, in Palestine, and in whom he had not yet ceased to believe as a Saviour, though he had fallen away from his heavenly calling.

The man turned towards him his tortured face and glazing eyes. ‘By all the infernal gods,’ he said, ‘give me something to quench my thirst.’

‘There are no infernal gods,’ Onesimus said, ‘but I will give thee;’ and taking out from the bag which he carried a bottle of the common posca—sour wine which was the ordinary drink of the peasantry—he poured a full draught into an earthenware cup and held it to the sufferer’s lips. This he could easily do, for the cross (as always) was raised but a little from the ground.

‘God help thee!’ he said, as he turned away. ‘He helped the robber on Golgotha,’ he murmured to himself; ‘who knows whether he may not find even this poor wretch in his hour of agony—yea, and even me?’

‘My blessing would be a curse,’ moaned the crucified slave, ‘or I would say, “The gods bless thee who canst pity such as I am.”’

Onesimus left him there in the pathos and tragedy of his awful helplessness. The youth’s soul was appalled by the sense of the mystery of human life and human agony, and it came home to him, as it had never done before, that the solution of the fearful riddle of human wickedness could only lie, if anywhere, in the life and death of Him in whom in some sense he believed, but whose peace he did not know.

Before he joined his base troupe of companions he looked back for a moment. There, in the blinding sunlight of the Italian noon, stood the cross, accursed of God and man, the gibbet of the malefactor, the infamy of the slave, confronting the eye of heaven with a sight which, no less than that of the Thyestean banquet, might have made the sun itself turn dark; and there, upon it, a mass of living agony, conscious, and burning with thirst, and blinded with glare, and unpitied, and burdened with an awful load of guilt, hung the human victim who had once played an innocent child beside his mother’s knee. The soul of Onesimus was harrowed as he gazed on that awful insult to humanity. The existence of crucifixion showed how far the shadow had advanced on the dial-plate of Rome’s history. That form of punishment—so cynical, so ruthless, so abhorrent, which less than three centuries later was to be abolished by the indignation of mankind—had been not indigenous in the Western world. It had only been borrowed by Rome, in the days of her commencing corruption, from the dark and cruel East. That such a spectacle should be permitted to the gaze of women and little children; that it should indurate still further the callosity of hardened hearts, was in itself a token of degeneracy. The heart of Onesimus was full even to bursting as he saw that fearful instrument of inhuman vengeance standing there by the roadside among the darting lizards and chirping cicalas and murmuring bees; and the goats stared at it with glassy eyes as they cropped the luxuriant grass at the very feet of the victim in whom the majestic ideal of manhood was thus horribly laughed to scorn.

Onesimus, as he finally turned away, felt it more degrading than ever to continue his present life. Its plenty and coarse comfort, accompanied as it was by the necessity of spending his days with these sexless and lying vagabonds, filled him with a sense of nameless humiliation. Yet what could he do? What other choice had he save to starve or to commit suicide? For then he remembered with a start that he was twice a thief, twice a fugitive, almost a murderer; that he had betrayed the trust reposed in him by Acte; that by his mad drunkenness he had insulted the majesty of Nero. In every sense even his fellow-slaves would have called him furcifer. And if he were once detected, in spite of the dye with which he had stained his face, and the blond wig by which the Galli had tried at once to conceal his identity and to enhance his beauty, what awaited him? Was he, too, destined to feed the wild birds upon the cross?

It seemed as if that would be better than to beg from the gulled throngs of peasants, and dupe the credulity of farmers, and witness day by day the stupid and loathly self-gashing and self-scourging of these deplorable eunuch priests. More than once he thought that he would get up by night, seize the image of the Syrian goddess, and fling her into the greenest and slimiest pool he could find, among the efts and water-beetles and frogs; while he himself would plunge into the pathless wastes until he should gain the sea-shore, work his passage on board a ship to Troas or Ephesus, and so making his way back to quiet Colossæ, would fling himself at the feet of Philemon and implore the forgiveness which he felt sure would not be long withheld.

But that ‘unseen Providence which men nickname chance’ came to rescue him from his unhealthy bondage. As they were starting for one of their exhibitions in their usual motley and many-coloured gear, the Galli suddenly heard the sound of horses’ hoofs, and, before they knew where to turn, a body of mounted soldiers came thundering down upon them, drew their swords, surrounded and seized the whole company, and, beating the wretched priests with their fists and the flat of their swords, called them thieves and all other opprobrious names, and charged them with having stolen a golden beaker from a neighbouring temple of the Mother of the Gods. In vain the Galli protested and swore their innocence and threatened the soldiers with the vengeance of the Syrian goddess for this insult to her ministers. The soldiers silenced their curses with blows, and, tearing away the covering of the image, found the golden beaker wrapped up within it.

Detected in their theft, the priests were still unabashed. After an evening sacrifice they had watched their opportunity, concealed the sacred cup of Cybele, and at the grey dawn had made their way out of the pomœrium of the city, trusting to get sufficiently far to elude pursuit. The beaker was, however, ancient and valuable, and the police asked the mounted soldiers to help them in tracking the fugitives.

‘It was not a theft,’ said Philebus, who was archigallus. ‘The Mother of the Gods freely lent the beaker to her sister the Syrian goddess, who intended shortly to return it to her. You cannot escape her wrath for this outrage.’

The soldiers and their decurio broke into loud laughter at the threat, and without ceremony put gyves on the wrists of the seven Galli. They consulted whether they should also arrest Onesimus and the flute-player, but Onesimus said that he was ignorant of the theft, that neither he nor his companion—who were acting as slaves of the priests—had ever been permitted to see the contents of the silken veil. The soldiers believed him, and all the more because they did not care to burden themselves with too many prisoners. They took the Galli to Naples, where Onesimus was afterwards told that they had been scourged, imprisoned, and mulcted of all they possessed.

Free once more, and not troubling himself about their fate, Onesimus asked the flute-player what he meant to do. Finding that he regarded his present calling as too comfortable a berth to be given up, Onesimus left him and made his way disconsolately to Baiæ.