CHAPTER LV

TWO MARTYRDOMS

‘... aut crucibus affixi, aut flammandi.’—Tac. Ann. xv. 44.

The Apostle Peter, whose friends were chiefly among the Jewish Christians, went to his humble quarters across the Tiber, where Miriam, a Jewish widow, had provided a lodging for him, his wife Plautilla, and his daughter Petronilla. If he had held his life dear unto himself, he would have left Rome without delay, or only have walked out at night and in secrecy. So long as he stayed in the Trastevere, it was not likely that the myrmidons of Tigellinus could find out his hiding-place. But this he would not do. The restless energy of his character rendered inaction impossible to him, and a voice ever rang in his ears from the lilied fields of Galilee, ‘I was hungry, and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; naked, and ye clothed me: sick and in prison, and ye visited me.... And inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto Me.’ He asked Miriam’s son to guide him to the prisons, and spent the whole day among his suffering brethren. Wherever he went, his presence was to them as the sunlight, and the most wavering could not but be confirmed by his calm wisdom, his genial tenderness, and the lessons which he so freely imparted to them from his personal memories of the Divine Example. It needed money to secure admission into their places of confinement, and Aliturus and Pomponia had seen that sufficient was provided for all his needs. But the inevitable result followed. The jailors noticed the tumult of joy which hailed his presence, and saw that he was some great leader among the Christians. Tigellinus had given orders that the ringleaders of the baleful superstition should be seized, and especially those whom they called Apostles. His emissaries, listening to the conversations of the Christians among themselves, were not long in ascertaining that this was Peter of Bethsaida, and that in securing him and John they would have seized two chief personages of the entire Christian community throughout the world, and two who had been personal friends and followers of the Crucified founder of the sect. Before evening the spies had ascertained the quarter of the city where Peter was lodged.

It was from Simon the Sorcerer that Tigellinus learnt who Peter was, and how important was the place which he filled in the new community. This miserable impostor—the father of all heresies—had won himself wealth and power, and something not far short of adoration, not only in Samaria, but in many kingdoms. It was owing to his detestable machinations that Drusilla, the sister of Agrippa, had been persuaded to desert her husband, King Azizus of Emesa, and to become the mistress of Felix, brother of Pallas, who, by his brother’s influence, had risen from a slave to be Procurator of Judæa, and the husband, or lover, of three queens. Simon had now come to Rome to push his fortunes, and his keen eye had caught sight of the Apostle in the streets. He had set a savage dog upon him, which instantly became gentle when the Apostle laid his hand upon its head. He was afraid of his counter-influence, and still remembered with burning wrath the old days when Peter, shaming him before his Samaritan votaries, had overwhelmed him with the apostrophe, ‘Thy money perish with thee!’ He gave immediate notice to Tigellinus that the leading Christian was in Rome. He felt more secure in his attempted miracles and professed inspiration, when Peter was in prison, and he was left unchecked to dupe the Emperor or the gullible women of the Roman aristocracy.

That evening there was a little meeting of Jewish Christians who had met together in the house of Rufus and Alexander, sons of Simon of Cyrene, to eat the Supper of the Lord. The meeting was surprised, and many were thrown into bonds. But Rufus, at the first sound of alarm, hurried the Apostle to his lodging by a path at the back of the house. Before they reached it, Miriam’s son, Nazarius, a bright and active boy, met them with the warning that his mother’s house had been seized; but that Plautilla and Petronilla, being unknown, had taken refuge in the house of the Samaritan Thallus. The weeping Christians entreated Peter to fly from Rome while there yet was time: for the brethren at Rome he could do nothing more; to stay among them meant death, and his life was sorely needed by the Church of God. Overcome by their entreaties, and those of his wife and daughter, he started at the grey dawn with the young Nazarius for his guide, and proceeded about two miles on the Appian Way. There, as Nazarius afterwards described the scene, a light seemed to shine round them; the Apostle stopped as if amazed, fell on his knees with uplifted hands, spoke earnest words, and then, with wet eyes, said, ‘We must return, my boy. It is the will of Christ.’ To him he said no more; but he afterwards told his fellow-Apostle that (near the spot where now stands the little church of ‘Domine quo vadis’?) he had seen a vision of Christ walking towards Rome, and bearing His Cross. ‘Whither goest thou, Lord?’ he asked, in amazement. ‘I go to Rome,’ He said, ‘to be crucified again.’ ‘Lord, I return,’ said the Apostle, ‘to be crucified with Thee.’ And the Vision smiled upon him, and vanished.

So Peter went back with the boy to the house of Thallus, and next day began to visit the prisons once more. Seeking for Miriam to console her, and tell her of the safety of her son, he found that she was a prisoner. He had hardly entered the first dungeon when he was roughly arrested, and carried off to the rock-hewn Tullianum. He was chained to the floor beside his brother-Apostle John, in that damp and dreary vault. There King Jugurtha, before he was strangled, had complained so bitterly of the cold; there the brave Gaulish patriot, Vercingetorix, had been led aside from Julius Cæsar’s triumph to pay the forfeit of his life; there the Catilinarian conspirators, Lentulus and Cethegus, had expiated their crimes. Fervently did the Apostles embrace one another, and between the two there blossomed up reminiscences of early days, infinitely tender and sacred. They talked of the summer hours when they had played in boyhood on the strip of silver sand beside the limpid lake at Bethsaida; of the fisherboats, and draughts of fish, and straining nets, in the years when they were partners together; of bright Capernaum, with its marble synagogue, throwing its white reflection on the waves lit with the rose of eventide; of the green hills beyond, with the naked demoniacs among the tombs. Then they spoke of the time when they had gone with Andrew and Nathanael to see the prophet of the wilderness, whose notes of warning had made the flinty echoes ring with the preaching of repentance. Then, with hushed voices, in regions of sacred thought where we may not follow them, they spoke of the days of the Son of Man.

They who looked down into that vault from the upper aperture would have seen a rocky chamber, lighted only by one iron lamp, bare of all but the merest necessaries. The prisoners had nothing but a water jar, and two wooden seats, and mats upon the rocky floor, on which at night they could stretch their cramped and wearied limbs, and which Pomponia had bribed the jailor for permission to supply. And in this cell would have been seen two men of Jewish aspect and poor clothing, of whom the elder had exceeded man’s threescore years and ten, and the younger was long past life’s prime. Chilly, and in chains, and fed only on bread and water, and the leaders of a cause on which the world poured its most passionate execration they yet felt perfect trust in God. With Emperor and mob alike arrayed against them, and with hundreds of their brethren in the same evil case, and with death in its ghastliest form striding visibly upon them, amid what looked like the extreme of uttermost failure—might not even their enemies have pitied them? Pity? Nay, Nero might have given all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them, and Seneca have bartered all his wisdom and his wealth, for one hour of their radiant serenity, of their unshaken peace!

In the evening the jailor, Martinianus—who had been so much touched by their bearing, and by all that he had heard from them as they talked, that he was already in heart almost a Christian—came full of sorrow, to tell them that on the morrow they should die. To his amazement a light as of heaven dawned upon their faces, and they turned and looked on each other with a smile. They asked him in what way they were to suffer. He either was uninformed or shrank from telling them, and they were content that the morrow should reveal it.

‘I knew it, my brother, I knew it,’ said Peter. ‘Again and again a Voice has repeated in my dreams, “Verily I say to thee, When thou wast young thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.” And I am not troubled that I know not yet by what death I shall glorify God. But thou, my brother, shalt not die yet.’

‘How that may be I know not,’ replied the other, deeply musing. ‘But to us to live is to die. Said He not, “He who is near Me is near the fire; he who is far from Me is far from the kingdom”?’

The jailer had told them truly. The execution of the Christians was to be hurried on with all speed, for Nero had on hand the weighty business of supervising the reconstruction of his capital and of his Golden House. He could only recover the popularity necessary for these undertakings by sacrificing a holocaust of victims to assuage the popular suspicions. And the most diabolic feature of this massacre of the innocent was to be that they were not only to be slain, but that their tortures were to subserve the amusement of the people. The solemn moment of each Christian’s death was to be the motive for delighted acclamations and shouts of laughter—in which, surely, all the demons joined! To any feelings less exalted, to any hope less fervent than theirs, it would have been the most intolerable aggravation to die amid pagan pageants and brutal idleness, insulted by bacchanalia of revelry and sanguinary pomp.

But the inventiveness of cruelty which Tigellinus and Nero studied and planned together amid the faint, unavailing remonstrances of Poppæa, had to be hastened, for the special reason that already their victims were beginning to escape them fast through the narrow gate of death. Owing to the suffocating atmosphere of over-peopled prisons in the malarious autumn air, a dangerous form of typhoid had broken out among the Christians. Not a few had died, robbed, as they feared, of the crown of martyrdom. It had required all the wisdom and tenderness of their fellows to persuade them that they had deserved no less than others the longed-for amaranth, and that they would not be losers by not surviving until that second coming which many of them were expecting from hour to hour. Tigellinus was not more anxious to bestow than they to receive the death of violence. All Nero’s aims would be frustrated, if, with so great a multitude of victims ready for them, the wild beasts of the amphitheatre, human as well as animal, were baulked of their infernal festival and their infernal joy.

Pending, therefore, the necessary preparations to deal with the rest in mass, bizarre and insulting forms of death were devised for the leaders on the following day. Notice was given that of the two Jewish ringleaders of the Christian sect, whom they called Apostles, one would be crucified head downwards by the obelisk in the Circus on the Mons Vaticanus, under the terebinth tree, and that the other would be flung into a caldron of boiling oil on the Latin Road.

And that night a great joy was permitted them. They had noticed that again and again Martinianus had not only shown them kindnesses to which the prisoners of the Tullianum were little accustomed, but also that he had humbly lingered in their presence, had asked permission to listen to them when they spake of Jesus, had put many questions to them, had evidently felt in his heart some stirrings of heavenly grace. That night he came to them, and, falling on his knees, said that they had taught him to believe in Christ, and begged baptism at their hands. The spring was there welling up, as it still does, from its native rock. Nothing hindered. Martinianus received baptism at the hands of the Apostles, and afterwards died a martyr.

The morning dawned sulphurously hot, and there seemed to be menace and meaning in the sky which glowed overhead like molten copper. At the entrance of the Tullian vault the Apostles enfolded one another in a long farewell embrace. They reminded each other, with faces which smiled through the tears of parting, of the blessings and words of Christ, and, being then rudely separated, were led in opposite directions by two decurions with their soldiers, amid accompanying throngs. The places of execution had been fixed in order that spectators might have their free choice of delightful horror, and that the division of the multitudes might enable all to have a good view.

A fresh trial awaited the elder Apostle. He had hardly been set free from his chains, that he might walk to the place of execution with his hands tied behind his back, when he saw his wife, who was also being led on her way to die. Brief, and free from all anguish, were the words that they interchanged.

‘Be of good cheer,’ he said, ‘true yokefellow. He will be with thee who raised thy mother from the great fever at Capernaum. I rejoice that thou, too, art going home.’

‘Farewell, my beloved,’ she replied, in a firm voice; ‘I am not afraid. In one short hour we shall be with Him where He is.’

He cast one long look upon her, and said in Hebrew, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.’ And when they were parted he still turned round to her once more, and said, ‘Oh, remember the Lord!’

Most of the spectators who accompanied the procession had seen the then common spectacle of crucifixion; but to see a man crucified head downwards was a novelty sufficient to have assembled all the dregs of the populace, but for the counter-attraction at what, for the sake of brevity, we will call the Latin Gate.101 In point of fact, Nero had read in Seneca’s ‘Consolation to Marcia’102 that tyrants had been known to adopt this grotesque form of cruelty, and he himself suggested it to Tigellinus, and said that he meant to witness it. When St. Peter was told what awaited him, he only smiled. He well knew that what had been intended for insult was overruled to him for mercy. He would be spared the long unspeakable pangs of lingering death. On the ordinary cross he might have lived for three days in complications of agony, but crucified head downwards, he knew that in a very short time he would pass from unconsciousness to death.

Nero, as he had promised, was present to see the new sight. While the cross was being prepared, Peter caught sight of the Emperor, and lifting the right hand, which for a moment the executioner had loosened, fixed his gaze on him till he shrank.

He spoke not, but one of the Christians, who had noticed the Emperor’s alarm, exclaimed—

‘O murderer of the saints, yet a little time hence, and thou, too, shalt be summoned before the bar of God.’

‘Crucify him!’ said Nero, passionately. ‘Stop his ill-omened and blaspheming mouth!’

But the speaker had shrunk back into the dense multitude.

They nailed St. Peter to the cross, and lifted it with his head downwards; but while the brutal heathen laughed, and the fear of death could not suppress the wail of the Christians, he said only—and they were the last words of the great Apostle—‘I rejoice that ye crucify me thus, for my Master’s sake. I am much unworthy to die in the same manner as He died.’

The old man passed speedily and almost painlessly away, and in the glimmering, flashing sky, over which, in the far distance, began to roll the chariot wheels of gathering storm, the brethren thought that they saw the wings of angels and shadows of the avengers.

The Christians always perplexed and irritated their pagan persecutors by behaving in a manner the very opposite to what was expected. After their first shuddering emotion at witnessing the martyrdom of their great Apostle, they seemed rather radiant than depressed. But the reason for this was that their young deacon, Clemens, speaking to them in Greek, said, ‘I see him, not head downwards, but upright on the cross, and the angels crown him with roses and lilies, and the Lord is putting a book into his hands from which he reads.’

It was natural that they should desire to keep his mortal remains. Marcellus, who had been a pupil of Simon Magus, but whom Peter had converted, obtained his body from the executioner for a great sum of money, bathed it in milk and wine, and had it embalmed. That night they conveyed it to a spot, secretly remembered, at the foot of the Vatican hill.

Marcellus watched by the grave that night; but as he watched he thought that the Apostle came to him in vision, and said, ‘Let the dead bury their dead. Preach thou the gospel of God.’ On that spot was reared the humble ‘trophy,’ or memorial cell, which the presbyter Gaius saw there in the second century. Thence, in due time, the relics were removed to that unequalled shrine, where the tomb which enclosed them is encircled by ever-burning lights, and visited century after century by the devotion of tens of thousands. Fools counted his life madness and his end to be without honour. How is he numbered among the children of God, and his lot is among the saints!

The procession which accompanied the Apostle John had taken longer to arrive at the scene of martyrdom. The awful heat of the morning, the more crowded parts of the city through which they had to pass, the greater throngs which accompanied them, had caused delay. The Apostle walked with firm step in the midst of the ten soldiers. Though his hands were tied behind his back, his appearance struck all beholders with involuntary dread. The high forehead, the long hair which streamed over his shoulders, the perfect self-possession, the beauty of holiness, gave to his movements an unconscious majesty. His face was mostly lifted heavenward in prayer, but whenever he turned on those around him his bright and searching glance their eyes fell before him. If any began to jeer at him and utter words of ribald blasphemy, he had but to look towards them, and in spite of themselves they stopped short. An unwonted hush fell on the throng which surged around the soldiers—a silence of which the multitudes themselves could give no account.

‘He is a sorcerer, that is certain,’ said Tullius Senecio as he looked down on the passing procession from a window in the house of Crispinilla.

‘He must be,’ she answered. ‘I never saw the crowd of the Forum so strangely quiet.’

‘Let me see the Christian,’ said a boy in the crowd. ‘Soldier, lift me up that I may see him.’

‘What, Gervasius? How camest thou here? But thou art a soldier’s son, and I will humour thee,’ said the decurio. ‘Thy father and I were comrades in Palestine, and it was once his lot to see a scene after which he never had one happy day.’

He lifted the boy in his arms, and he gazed long.

‘Is that the Christian?’ he said. ‘Yon man does not look like an enemy of the gods, or an eater of children’s flesh.’

The Apostle heard him, and turned towards him with a soft light of blessing in his eyes.

‘I should not mind being like thee,’ said the boy, ‘and I will not go to see thee killed.’

Fifty years later he remembered that gentle glance when in a later persecution he, too, was led out to die.

At the scene of execution a high scaffolding had been erected so that many thousands could be gratified by witnessing the new form of death. On the summit, on ten rows of bricks, had been kindled a fire, and over this was placed a huge caldron of iron, full of boiling oil. Not blenching in a single feature, with a step of perfect dignity, without assistance, without the slightest tremor, the Apostle mounted the wooden steps and stood in the sight of all, the fire flinging its red glare over him as the executioner tore off his outer robe.

But meanwhile the storm, gathering into its bosom the fierce heat of that day in late August, had begun to burst over Rome. The thunderclouds passed from threatening purple into midnight blackness, and roll after roll of thunder throbbed and crashed as though to menace the guilty city with the doom of its congregated iniquity. Then blazed forth the lightning, and filled the air, and ran along the ground. So tremendous were the explosions of sound, whose rending, cracking, and splitting outbursts settled into a long, continued roar, and so vivid were the flashes of forked lightning which gleamed like dazzling dagger-stabs aimed at an enemy who must at all costs be slain, that the soldiers and the executioners and the spectators grew livid with dread. Women shrieked and cowered, and clung to their husbands, and men looked round them uneasily, and some began to hurry away, and the hearts of all were benumbed as with some strange misgiving.

An exceptionally terrific crash of the artillery of heaven, a flash of levin which seemed to wrap them all in a white robe of dazzling flame, a shriek from hundreds of voices! And when the crash ended, the Christians were murmuring together in awestruck voices, Maranatha! Maranatha! and there arose scattered cries from the multitude. ‘He is a sorcerer! Stay the execution! We are all dead men! The wrath of the gods is upon us!’ The ancients, from ignorance combined with superstition, were far more terrified than the moderns by thunderstorms. It was evident that they were in the centre of the storm. The scaffold and the caldron formed its inmost focus, having attracted the electric fluid by their woodwork and iron. The decurion himself and his soldiers and the executioners were terrified. They dared not disobey their orders, yet amid the general terror they seemed paralysed into helplessness. Aliturus, hoping that he might in some way render some kindness, had asked to be one of those spectators, of higher position than the mob, who were allowed to stand on the scaffold. Seizing his opportunity, he hastily whispered, ‘The executioner has untied your hands. You have friends in the crowd. Escape! Fear not the lightning—this skin of a seal which I brought under my robe, expecting a thunderstorm, is an amulet against lightning.’

‘I thank thee, my son,’ said the Apostle; ‘unless the will of God be clearly manifested, I cannot fly. And if we trust in God we need no amulet, for neither the pestilence nor the arrow can hurt us.’

Again the thunder roared, again they were wrapped in a blinding flash. Hardly conscious what he did, the Apostle uplifted his right hand. It became the nucleus of the electric phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s fire, and at once appeared to burn like a torch with lambent flame. A cry of fresh terror rose from the heathen multitude. ‘Fly, fly!’ they exclaimed; ‘he is a sorcerer or a god. He lifts against us his flaming hand, tipped with the fire of Castor and Pollux. We shall all be killed by fire from heaven. The spot is accursed. It is a bidental.’103

A rush took place, and the crowd fled promiscuously in every direction. The soldiers could not resist the contagion. They leapt down and fled, and the decurio followed, shouting to them in vain. The executioners joined the soldiers in their flight. For a moment the Apostle and Aliturus stood alone on the scaffold, and then hurried down the steps. Scarcely had they reached the ground when the lightning struck the metal caldron and tore it from its chains. It fell with a mighty crash, and the oil streaming over the flame burst up in a fierce blaze which would very rapidly have reduced the whole scaffold to ashes had not the deluging rain begun to fall in cataracts, quenching the fire, but leaving a charred and shapeless ruin.

The news was brought to Nero and Tigellinus that evening by multitudes of witnesses when the storm had cleared and the heavens had resumed their azure sleep. They shared the superstition of the mob, and thought that, by magic powers unusually terrible, the Apostle had brought down the wrath of Heaven. At the same time this could have nothing to do with the Christians in general, for had not the execution of the other Apostle been carried out with perfect ease? They were officially informed that the Apostle, of his own free will, had thought it right to return to the door of the Tullianum and surrender himself as a prisoner. Such strange security deepened the impression that he could wield supernatural powers. Afraid to detain him in Rome, Nero ordered him to banishment in the rocky Ægean island of Patmos.104

Thither the Apostle was conveyed, and there, gazing on the sea that burned like glass in the sunlight, he wrote his Apocalypse. In that strange book we can still read the echo of the horror kindled in the heart of an eyewitness by an Emperor who had degenerated into a portent of iniquity, fighting with empoisoned breath and dragon-like fury against the saints of God. The Apocalypse is the ‘thundering reverberation’ of the Apostle’s mighty spirit, smitten into wrathful dissonance amid its heavenly music by the plectrum of the Neronian persecution. All the horrors of that frightful age of storms, and eruptions, and earthquakes, and falling meteors, and famine, and pestilence, and threatenings of Parthian invasion and imminent massacres of civil war, threw gigantic and blood-red shadows across the Apostle’s page. The air was being shattered by the trumpet-blasts of doom which would bury in flame and ruin alike the Harlot City on the seven hills which had made herself so drunken with the blood of the saints, and the Holy City which had become a den of murderers—which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt—where the Lord was crucified. When he wrote his vision, three or four years later, the souls of those who had been slain in the great Neronian tribulation for the Word of God and the testimony which they held were still under the altar, and cried, ‘How long, O Lord, how long dost thou not avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ But white robes were given them, and they were bidden to rest yet a little while till the number of their brethren was fulfilled. And afterwards one of the four-and-twenty elders who sat around the throne asked him, ‘Who are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?’ And he said unto him, ‘Sir, thou knowest.’ And the Elder answered, ‘These are they which came out of THE GREAT TRIBULATION, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’

CHAPTER LVI

LIVING TORCHES

Ὁ νειδισμοῖς τε καὶ θλίψεσι θεατριζόμενοι.—Hebr. x. 33.

The news of the Neronian persecution did not reach St. Paul at once. When he left the hospitable home of Philemon he first rejoined Timothy at Ephesus. He left him to arrange the affairs of the Church of Ephesus, and Onesimus took the place which had been filled by the son of Eunice in former years. He became the Apostle’s travelling companion, to lend him the affectionate attendance now necessary to his age and infirmities. It was not till they reached Corinth that they heard the heart-shaking intelligence that the Christian Church at Rome had been smitten by Antichrist as with red-hot thunderbolts. Though no accurate details reached them, Paul’s first impulse was to fly to the succour of his Roman brethren; but Titus of Corinth, who was with him, urged him to remember that two of his brother Apostles were at Rome; that the persecution was now certain to break out in nearly every Church of the Empire, and that his presence was more needed in Crete and in the Churches of Asia and Europe of which he had been the immediate founder. Anxious to confront the growth of subtle heresies, more perilous in his eyes than persecution, he reluctantly abandoned his wish to return to Italy, and sailed to Crete. It was some time before he learnt that St. Peter had sealed his testimony by martyrdom and that St. John was a prisoner at Patmos.

But Onesimus was distressed at heart by the perils which would befall the beloved daughter of Nereus, and he entreated the Apostle to let him be the bearer to Rome of his messages of consolation and encouragement. Receiving ready permission, he hurried to the capital by the earliest ship, and arrived on the very day of the storm which had witnessed the crucifixion of St. Peter and the miraculous deliverance of the Beloved Disciple.

With amazement he saw Rome lying in ruins and the Christian cause apparently destroyed forever. ‘Christian’ was now the synonym of incendiary and desperate malefactor. His heart sank within him as he went from house to house only to find that the Christian inhabitants had disappeared. So great a multitude had been arrested that for the time being the prisons were the only churches. He went to the palace of Aulus Plautius, thinking that there he was certain to receive information; but there, too, he found that scarcely one of the Christian slaves was left, and that Pomponia herself had caught the virulent typhoid which had broken out among the crowded sufferers, and lay unconscious and dangerously ill.

Risking everything, he visited the prisons, and in one of them he found Nereus, wasted and haggard, but still animated by a cheerful courage. From him he learnt, with a deep sense of relief, that at the first outbreak of danger he had sent Junia to the safe refuge of Aricia. Pudens, when he sailed for Britain, felt a prescient intuition of the days which were to come, and told the Christian members of his household that they might always find a place of shelter with Dromo in the little country farm. Thither Junia had gone with a few others, obedient to the wish and command of her father, though reluctant to leave him. There Onesimus found her, and carried to her the blessing and the messages of Nereus. Nereus sent her word that he was doomed to die, as they were all doomed to die, though by what form of death was as yet unknown to them. He bade her to stay at Aricia. She could do nothing for him, and to come to Rome would only be to throw away her life. In the few lines he was able to write to her he commended Onesimus. He confessed that in former days the youth had been altogether displeasing to him, but now he was a changed character. Paulus had won him back to the paths of holiness. He had been illuminated. He had tasted of the heavenly calling, and had devoted himself to the personal tendance of the aged Apostle. In Rome he had given proof of his courage and consistency by showing pity for the prisoners and not being ashamed of their chains. It was no time now to talk of marrying or giving in marriage, for surely the day of the Lord was very nigh at hand; yet, if Junia loved the youth, Nereus would not forbid their plighting troth to each other, and awaiting the day when the marriage might be possible. And this he granted the more readily, for he feared that very soon Junia would be left alone, a helpless and friendless Christian maiden in the midst of an evil world.

So the lovers met, but the interchange of their common vows were solemn and sacred, under the darkening skies of persecution, and as it were in the valley of the shadow of death. For Junia entreated Onesimus to return to Rome and do his utmost to watch over her father and to save him if by any means it were possible or lawful. He bade her farewell, and found time to pay one brief visit to the temple at Aricia that he might express his gratitude to the priest of Virbius for having spared his life. Alas, he was too late! A new Rex Nemorensis—the ex-gladiator Rutilus—reigned in Croto’s room. He had surprised and murdered him the evening before, and Onesimus saw the gaunt corpse of Croto outstretched upon its wooden bier awaiting burial in the plot assigned to the succession of murdered priests.

Sick at heart, Onesimus hurried from the dark precincts, and by the morning dawn he was in Rome.

On that day the terrible massacres began which were to baptise the infant Church in a river of blood, and to consecrate Rome in the memory of Christendom as the city of slaughtered saints. For there Paganism was to display herself, naked and not ashamed, a harlot holding in her hand the brimming goblet of her wickedness, drunken with the blood of the beloved of God. Mankind was to see exhibited a series of startling contrasts: human nature at its best and sweetest; human nature at its vilest and worst:—unchecked power smitten with fatal impotence; unarmed weakness clothed with irresistible strength:—pleasure and self-indulgence drowned in wretchedness; misery and martyrdom exulting with joy unspeakable, and full of glory. On the one side was the splendour and civilisation of the City of the Dragon revelling in brutal ferocity and lascivious pride; on the other side the down-trodden and the despised of the City of God rose to a height of nobleness which no philosophy had attained, and enriched with sovereign virtues the ideal of mankind. While the deified lord of the empire of darkness with his nobles and his myrmidons sank themselves below the level of the beasts, paupers and nameless slaves, young boys and feeble girls towered into tragic dignity, faced death with unflinching heroism, and showed that even amid satyrs and demons humanity may still be measured with the measure of a man—that is, of the angel.

Herein lay the secret of the victory of Christianity. In the Rome of Nero heathendom showed the worst that she could be, and the worst that she could do; and Christianity showed, coinstantaneously, that manhood can preserve its inherent grandeur when it seems to be trampled into the very mire under the hoofs of swine. The sweetness and the dignity with which the Christians suffered kindled not only amazement but admiration in many a pagan breast. It was seen that with the Church in its poverty and shame, not with the world in its gorgeous criminality, lay the secret of all man’s happiness and hope. Many a senator, as he looked on the saturnalia of lubricity and blood, felt that the Christian slave-girl, tied naked to a stake in the amphitheatre for the wild beasts to devour, was more blessed than the jewelled lady by his side, whom he knew to be steeped in baseness; and there were youths to whose taste the apples of the Dead Sea had already crumbled into dust, who in their secret hearts felt themselves nothing less than abject compared with those Christian boys who, with the light of heaven on their foreheads and the name of Jesus on their lips, faced without flinching the grotesque horror of their doom.

But Nero and Tigellinus, and those who advised with them, never wavered in their hideous policy of purchasing popularity by making the murder of thousands of the innocent subserve the brutal passions of the multitude. They thought to abase the Christians, and they kindled round their brows an aureole of light. They thought to flatter the people, but made them vile by a carnival which showed that their natures had become a mixture of the tiger and the ape.

The jubilee of massacre began with cruel flagellations, for the intention was to combine amusement with utility and to represent these unnumbered agonies as a festival of expiation. So low had the Romans sunk since the days when they had believed that the wrath of the gods had been kindled because before some public games a master had scourged his slave round the arena!

As they wished to add derision to torture, it did not suffice them that at these piacular displays men should merely fight with wild beasts who would soon be glutted with the multitude of victims. A novelty was devised for the delight of the spectators.

The first batch of martyrs were clad in the skins of wolves and leopards and torn to death by hordes of fierce and hungry dogs.

Others had to take part in mythologic operas. Among them was the soldier Urbanus. Clad in the guise of Hercules on Œta, he was burned alive upon a funeral pyre. Another martyr, Celsus, had to figure as Mucius Scævola, and to burn his hand to ashes in a flame upon an altar, with the promise that his life should be given him if, in carrying out his historic rôle, he would voluntarily consume his right hand, and not once shrink. Vitalis had to take his part in the favourite drama of Laureolus, in which character, after being made a laughing-stock, he was first crucified, and then, while yet living, devoured upon the cross by a bear. It was thought a favourable opportunity to try experiments. Simon Magus, after securing the arrest of Peter, had been admitted to an interview with Poppæa, whose superstitious turn of mind inclined her to consult every charlatan who visited the capital, and through her he gained admittance to the Emperor. He awakened Nero’s interest in a machine by which he pretended that he could enable men to fly. Nero determined to test the capabilities of the machine in corpore vili. The story of Dædalus and Icarus should be enacted, and as a slim and graceful youth was needed for the part of Icarus, poor Nazarius, the son of Miriam, was selected for this character. A lofty wooden tower was erected in the mimic scene. The wild beasts were roaming loose in the amphitheatre, and if either Dædalus or Icarus was not killed by a fall from the tower, he would be devoured in the arena. The martyr Amplias, who represented Dædalus, was precipitated at once, and killed by a lion. The broad wings of the machine upbore for a moment the light form of Nazarius as he sprang from the tower, but he fell on the very podium of the Emperor, and so close beside him that, to the horror of all, and with an omen of the worst import, he spattered the white robe of Nero with his blood.105

Unsated by these scenes the spectators demanded the sacrifice of the women victims. Hundreds of them were crowded in cells under the amphitheatre, and were informed that they were to appear in a series of pageants representing the torments of the dead. The spectacle was deemed impious by many, but it had been exhibited by Egyptians and Ethiopians in the days of Caligula. Fifty of these poor female martyrs were to be clothed in scarlet mantles as the daughters of Danaus, and, after undergoing nameless insults, were to be stabbed by an actor who personated Lynceus.106 To many of them it was an anguish worse than death that they should have to bear part in dramas which represented the idolatries of heathendom; but Prisca, the wife of Aquila, who had returned from Ephesus to Rome with her husband on matters connected with their trade, visited the sufferers in prison, and effectually consoled them. This Jewish matron, to whom with her husband had been granted the honour of no inconspicuous share in the founding of the three great churches of Rome, of Corinth, and of Ephesus, had not been arrested by any informer, owing to long residence in Achaia and Asia. She told the poor women that resistance was in vain, and that no insult inflicted on them by the heathen could dim the lustre of their martyr-crown. Cheered by her calm wisdom, they paced across the stage carrying vases on their shoulders, and bore their fate without a cry.

More terrible was the destiny of others. They were to enact the part of Dirce. One after another, in imitation of the much-admired statue now known as the Farnese Bull, which had recently been brought from Rhodes, they were tied by actors representing Amphion and Zethus, to the horns of furious oxen, and so were tossed or gored to death. They, too, were sustained by the presence of the Invisible, and the modesty of their bearing, even in such agonies, caused a pang in the hearts of all but the most hardened spectators.

At all these spectacles of shame Nero looked on. There he sat day after day in the podium, lolling on cushions of gold and purple, staring through the concave emerald which helped his short-sightedness, and finding new sensations in the spectacle of insulted innocence. He was never tired of wondering whence these wretches got their ‘blank callosity.’ And they, ere their eyes opened on that other land, where they knew they should gaze upon their King in His beauty, saw as their last glimpse of earth, this despicable Antichrist, with his face like that of a base overgrown boy, watching with greedily curious stare the agony of their immolation.

But there were too many martyrs to render it easy to dispose of them. After they had exhausted the inventiveness of cruelty, after they had heaped up the puticuli even to the danger of pestilence with crucified, charred, and mangled corpses, at least a thousand of the great multitude still rotted in the feverous prisons. Then an idea truly infernal presented itself to the mind of Nero. Were not these masses of human beings supposed to be expiating their crimes as incendiaries? But the proper and congruous punishment of incendiaries was the tunica molesta, or robe of pitch. He wondered that he had never thought of it before! It would, indeed, be somewhat tame merely to burn alive a certain number of people in succession. At first there might be an agreeable sense of curiosity in studying the faces of men and women in such circumstances, and in hearing their groans and cries. But after watching the first dozen or so, that pleasure would grow monotonous. He determined to prevent the danger of any satiety in the gratification by concentrating it all into one hour of multiplex and complicated agony.

He possessed magnificent gardens, stretching from the Vatican Hill to the Tiber. There was a circus, rich with gilding and marble, of which the meta was the obelisk, brought from Heliopolis, now standing in the piazza of St. Peter’s. He would throw open these gardens to the public, for one of the nightly spectacles of which he had copied the fashion from the mad Caligula. Every one should wander at will about the green copses, and the umbrageous retreats, and he would furnish them with an illumination unseen, unheard of, in the world’s history before or since. It should be the illumination of a thousand living torches, of which each should be a martyr in his shirt of flame!

And it was done. Martyrdoms inflicted by wild beasts, and dogs, and gibbets, had become tedious from repetition. Here should be a new and intense sensation for himself, and for all Rome, for he would be present in person and enjoy to the full his hateful popularity. At intervals, all along the paths, masts, strong and large, were driven deep into the ground. To each of these was tied a man or a woman, who were taken in throngs from the pestilential and now emptied prisons. Each was tied to the stake, and in front of each was put a smaller stake with a sharpened point, fixed under the chin, lest their heads should sink on their breasts and baulk the festal sightseers from gloating on the expression of their dying agonies. Hundreds of Nero’s slaves were at work, for the preparations had all to be begun many hours before the dusk fell. The last thing which had to be done was to saturate the robes of the martyrs with pitch and oil, and then to heap around the feet of each, as high as their waists, a mass of straw and brushwood and shavings. These balefires were not to be kindled till it was dark, in order that the world of Rome might have complete enjoyment of the pageant and look in each other’s rejoicing faces by the mighty blaze.

But Onesimus had determined to do his utmost to save Nereus, if nothing else was possible. Hanging about the gardens in the dress of a slave, he managed to gain admission by the connivance of a Prætorian whom he knew to be a secret Christian. Once inside the precincts, he could easily escape detection among the hundreds who were so busily employed. Carrying now a stake, and now a bucket of pitch, and now a heap of fuel, he hurried from place to place, at each convenient moment whispering some bright message of cheer such as St. Paul had taught him, and rewarded by grateful smiles from those who were so soon to undergo their awful fate. At last he saw Nereus, who, happily for the young man’s purpose, had been fastened to a stake at the end of one of the remoter alleys. Nereus, deep in prayer, and dead to the things of earth, did not recognise him, but started when he heard a voice whispering to him that he should attempt to secure his escape.

‘It is impossible,’ said Nereus. ‘I am more than ready to share the fate of my comrades, and to win their crown.’

‘Nay, father,’ said Onesimus, ‘think of Junia, who, if thou diest, will be left a helpless orphan in the world. I dare speak no more, but be ready to fly in one instant behind yonder shrine, if I am able to set thee free.’

Reconnoitring the ground, Onesimus observed that the green alley where Nereus was tied was close beside a wall. At no great distance beyond the wall he knew that there was one of the corpse-pits into which were thrown the bodies of the poor. Gliding about, he saw on the ground a basket containing a hammer and large nails. He snatched it up, and, hid from observation behind the tangled masses of rank foliage at the back of a shrine of Priapus, he drove the nails one over the other between the huge disjointed stones, so as to make it easy to climb the wall. Then he awaited his opportunity, which he knew would be when the crowd of more than a hundred thousand spectators pushed and crowded into the gardens, and the fires of death began.

He was right in all his calculations. A scene of tumultuous excitement, and the hoarse murmur of innumerable voices, greeted the almost simultaneous kindling of many of the stakes. At that very moment, before the executioners had reached the end of the alley, Onesimus, gliding behind Nereus, cut his thongs, slipped the chain over his head, tore off the pitchy outer robe, and hurrying the old man to the back of the shrine of Priapus, half dragged him up the wall, and took refuge in the dense gloom of a subterranean passage in the dreadful burial-place.

The executioners noticed, of course, that one of their victims had, by some strange unknown means, escaped; but it did not greatly concern them. One simply whispered to the other, ‘It will not be observed. Let the poor cacodæmon get off. What matters it to us?’

Meanwhile on every side the flames shot up around the stakes, and glared with hideous brightness, and sent up huge tongues of waving light, and each stake became a torch of hell, and black smoke swirled around them, and groans and cries of anguish arose which were drowned in bursts of music and laughter and ribald songs. And all the while the moon was silvering the rich foliage, and the stars shone down with peaceful rays over that revelry of hell, and the smoke and flame were to those poor sufferers as chariots of fire and horses of fire to bear their souls to heaven. And while the agony and madness and hilarity were at their height, and the statues of obscene gods and lascivious nymphs, which glimmered from beneath the trees, looked like demons over whose faces the red glow flickered in smiles of seeming ecstasy as they watched this triumph of demoniac wickedness—at this moment shouts of adulation arose, and Nero was seen, his face wreathed in smiles, in the dress of a charioteer. With some of his basest creatures round him, he mingled familiarly with the mob, exchanged jokes with them, and stood peering with them into the ghastly faces in which flickered longest the gleam of life.

‘What think you of these sarmenticii, these semaxii?’ he asked repeatedly of the plebeian throng.

‘Call us “faggot-birds,” and “stake-fellows,”’ said one of the martyrs, who calmly awaited the rekindling of his stake from which, by some chance, the flame had expired. ‘These faggots with which we are burned, these stakes to which we are bound, are our robes of victory, our triumphant chariot.’107

‘Child of the Devil,’ exclaimed another, before his robe had caught the flames, ‘I would not, even at this moment, change my lot with thine.’

‘Antichrist,’ murmured another, ‘thine hour is nigh.’

Nero shrank before the prophecy, but afterwards sprang upon his chariot, and seeking the applause which rose like a storm wherever he appeared, drove his four horses round every part of the circus, and the broad paths of the gardens, until the last human torch had flared out, and the multitude began to stream away.

It was an amazing thing that pagan fathers and mothers should have taken even their children to see such sights as these. But, inured as they were to blood and anguish by the harrowing homicides of the amphitheatre, their hearts in these matters were ‘brazed by damned custom.’ And so it happened that a Roman knight named Cornelius Tacitus had led his little son, a grave child of eight years old, to walk through the gardens of Nero on that awful night. He looked on the scene with an impulse of childish pity, and asked his father ‘whether these Christians had really set fire to Rome.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said his father.

‘Why, then, are they burnt alive?’ he asked.

‘They are criminals,’ said the knight; ‘and they hate the whole human race. They are akin to the Jews, and it would be no bad thing for the Empire if both of those accursed superstitions were destroyed.’

The young Tacitus remembered and recorded the remark more than thirty years later, when he had become a great historian. He was influenced, too, by the conversation which he then heard between his father and the friends who accompanied him. ‘These men,’ said one of them, ‘die every whit as bravely as the Stoics whom we so greatly admire.’ But the elder Tacitus would not admit the analogy. ‘In these Christians,’ he said, ‘the contempt of death is mere custom, or madness, or sheer obstinacy.’

Seneca, too, was in those gardens of the Vatican for a few moments, perplexed, horrified, miserable. The Emperor had commanded his presence, as though it would lend some sanction to the carnival of horror. The agonising deaths of such a multitude were indeed, to him, a repulsive sight, but it was not so wholly unfamiliar as to harrow his feelings to their depths. What struck him most, and what he has dwelt upon in his obvious allusions to this monstrous execution, was the inexplicable fortitude, the unflinching heroism, shown, not by nobles and philosophers, but by slaves, and women, and boys, and the very dregs of the populace. He pondered in vain over that disturbing problem.108

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Before an hour had passed, the stakes stood charred and black, and underneath them were horrible heaps of death, still keeping some awful semblance of humanity; and the smoke curled and writhed about them, and streams of the melted and bubbling pitch quivered with small blue flames, or left black furrows on the burnt grass or the trampled sand.

And thus amid foul laughter the martyrs had died whose lives alone were innocent, who alone loved one another and all mankind. And the moon still shed her soft lustre on the scene, and the stars looked down through the untroubled night, and lighted home the myriads whose consciences, seared as with hot iron, smote them in no wise for their share in that crime—the vilest in the long annals of the world’s vilest days.

The numerous and flourishing Church of Rome was all but destroyed; yet on that night the seed of her mighty power in the development of Christianity was sown afresh. Watered by the blood of the martyrs, that seed sprang into more vigorousT18 life, and rushing sunwards, spread forth arms laden with fruit and foliage, and grew into a giant bole, strong with the rings of a thousand summers, under whose shadows and ‘complicated glooms and cool impleachèd twilights,’ the hopes and fears of generations found their refuge—yea! and shall find it for evermore, unless it be severed from the root, and blighted into barrenness, and the axe be uplifted and the doom go forth, ‘Never fruit grow upon thee more!’

And the obelisk which witnessed that night of abomination, and which is now dedicated ‘To the Unknown Martyrs,’ still towers into the clear air, and on it is inscribed—

‘Christus regnat:
fugite partes adversæ.’

And over the ground with its groves and gardens where they perished—those nameless heroes, those nameless demigods—rose the vast cathedral to the honour of the Christ for whom they died; and round its dome is written in huge golden letters the name of the Apostle who fell first before the wild beast’s wrath:—‘I say unto thee, Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build My Church.’