CHAPTER LX

THE DOOM OF VIRTUE

Nero went on, unchecked, from folly to folly, from crime to crime. One of his earliest objects was to secure another Empress. He paid his addresses to Antonia, the only surviving child of Claudius, the half-sister of Octavia and Britannicus. She spurned his odious offer of marriage, and paid the forfeit with her life. In adopting Nero the unhappy Claudius had caused the murder of all his race. The Emperor then married Statilia Messalina, wife of the consul Vestinus, whom he had already killed.

In reading the affairs of Rome at this period we seem to be suffering from nightmare. The whole of the sixteenth book of the ‘Annals’ of Tacitus is one tragedy of continuous murders. Whenever Nero wanted to terrify a noble Roman by the presage of death, he inflicted on him a public insult. The world understood what was meant when Caius Cassius, the great lawyer, whose speech about the slaves of Pedanius we have already recorded, was forbidden to attend the funeral of Poppæa. The real cause of Nero’s hatred was that he was a man of wealth, of ancient family, of moral dignity; but the charges brought against him were that he had a likeness of Cassius, the murderer of Cæsar, among the waxen masks of his ancestors, and that he had taken an interest in Lucius Silanus, a noble youth, the great-great-great-grandson of Augustus. The youth’s father, Marcus Silanus (the ‘golden sheep’ of Caligula), had already been poisoned by Agrippina, and his uncle been driven to suicide. It seemed a good opportunity to destroy the nephew also. He was attacked with false charges of magic, and was banished to Bari. Cassius, being an old man, was relegated to Sardinia, and Nero was content to wait for his death; but Silanus was young, and a centurion was sent to bid him open his veins. The youth refused to kill himself with the sheeplike docility of so many of his contemporaries. When the centurion ordered his soldiers to attack and slay him, he fought for his life with his unarmed hands, and was hewn down as though in battle.

At this point the historian Tacitus grew so sick and tired of his task in recording events so dismal, that he pauses to apologise to his reader, and to say a word for all these great nobles who, at the command of a Nero, committed suicide one after another so tamely. He begs the reader not to suspect his motives in detailing their slavish patience and pusillanimous acquiescence.113 All that he can say is that it was destiny—it was the wrath of heaven against the crimes of Rome.

We pass over many a tragic scene in silence, but we cannot escape from this long death-agony of a Paganism which poisoned the world with its dying breath before its corpse was swept aside by Christianity. The wild beast who had dipped his foot in the blood of the saints, and made the tongue of his dogs red through the same, was now bathing in the noblest blood of Rome. The world was in a condition truly horrible, and there were all kinds of portents and physical disasters, as though Nature sympathised with the birth-throes of the coming age. There were earthquakes in divers places, shaking down city after city in Asia Minor, and volcanic phenomena, and irruptions of the sea, and rains of meteors as though the stars fell from heaven, and comets, and eclipses, and monstrous births—which all afflicted the guilty conscience of Paganism as signs of the anger of the gods at the degree of wickedness at which it had arrived. The year 65 marked by the many atrocities which we have narrated, was foul with storm and pestilence, which caused untold misery. A whirlwind swept over Campania, wrecking villas and orchards and harvests in its ruthless course, and leaving famine and destitution in its rear. A pestilence broke out with fearful malignity. It spared neither young nor old, neither rich nor poor, neither slave nor master. The houses were filled with corpses, the roads with funerals. Streets in the infected quarters became little more than dwellings of the dead. The dead among the poor were flung into common pits, whither their bearers had often to be flung after them; and while the wives and children of the rich sat wailing round the funeral pyres, they were often swept off by the same disease, and burnt in the same flames. Senators and knights fell victims to the plague no less than paupers; but their fate was less pitied, for it seemed less sad to pay the common debt of mortality than to perish by imperial cruelty. In that pestilence thirty thousand perished in Rome alone.

Nero was safe enough, for he could escape the infection in his distant delicious villas at Antium, or Baiæ, or Naples, or Subiaco, and could live in the midst of his dissolute enormities undisturbed. He was turning the world giddy with his senseless vanities, his Golden House, his prurient art, his insane ostentations, his statues and portraits a hundred and twenty feet high. Yet he had his own dread warnings that, though the sword of Heaven was not in haste to strike, it was not thrust back into the scabbard. There were hours when the voice of flattery was hushed perforce, when the incense of adulation grew sickening, when pleasure became loathsome, and when in the dark and silent hours the torturing mind shook its scourge over him. Not even at Subiaco was he safe from conspirators; he never knew what slave, what soldier, what minion might stab his heart or poison his wine. Of the society which had thronged that villa in his earlier days of empire, there was scarcely one whom he had not killed. Britannicus and Octavia, Seneca and Burrus, Lucan and Vestinus, even Petronius, had been in turns his victims; and poor, handsome Paris did not long escape. Pale faces, dyed with blood, looked in upon him from dim recesses, or started to meet him from the bushy garden-dells. Tigellinus was with him, and his new colleague in the Prætorian Præfectship, the big, brutal Nymphidius, a man of base origin, who boasted that he was a natural son of Caligula, but was probably the son of a gladiator. But these men had nothing wherewith to amuse him—no wit, no learning—nothing but the coarse satieties of adulation, debauchery, and blood. No poet, no artist, no great writer now graced the board which was polluted by parasites, and poisoners, and effeminate slaves. And to add to his secret misery and terror, one day, as he was feasting at Subiaco in such society, a storm came on, and rolled among the mountains with reverberating echoes; and, as though he were the sole mark for the thunderbolts of heaven, the lightning dashed out of his hand the golden goblet which he was lifting to his lips, and split the citron table at which he sat. He fell back screaming upon his couch, and for some time grovelled there—a heap of abject terror. But the cup of his iniquity had yet to overflow the brim, as this and every other warning was sent in vain.

Indeed, he sometimes imagined that he was elevated above the reach of all human destiny, and that the gods were weary of opposing his prosperity. When some of his precious effects had been lost in a shipwreck, he told his friends that the fishes would bring them back to him. For now an event happened which powerfully magnetised the imagination of the Romans, and elevated Nero to a splendour which Augustus might have envied. Tiridates, the Parthian, the descendant of the Arsacids, was journeying all the way to Rome, to receive from Nero’s hand as a vassal the crown of Armenia. Being a Magian, he would not pollute the sacredness of the sea, and therefore came all the way by land, and on horseback, only crossing the Hellespont. He was accompanied by his harem and family, and by three thousand horsemen. The journey occupied nine months, and when he reached Italy he did not stop at Rome, but went to Naples to visit Nero. The scene of the Parthian’s investment with the diadem of Armenia was the most magnificent which Rome had ever beheld. Armed cohorts were ranged through all the temples round the Forum. Nero sat on the Rostra, among the standards and ensigns of the army, robed in triumphal insignia. Tiridates, mounting the steps, knelt before him. Nero raised him by the right hand, and embraced him. The king then begged that he might receive a diadem from the Emperor, and his petition was repeated to the people by a Prætorian interpreter. Nero placed the diadem—a band of purple silk woven with pearls—upon the head of Tiridates, and he was conducted to the Theatre of Pompey. It had been redecorated for the occasion, and was so enriched with gilding that the day was known as ‘the gilded day.’ The purple awning over the theatre was richly broidered with a picture of Nero in the costume of Apollo, driving his chariot among the stars. On this occasion Nero sang and drove his chariot in public, and won the hearty contempt of the wily Parthian, who, struck with his weakness in comparison with the manly valour of his general, Corbulo, remarked to him that ‘in Corbulo he had a good slave.’

The sums which Nero lavished on the Parthian by way of largesse before his departure were almost incredible. It was believed that one motive for urging the visit had been the Emperor’s desire to be initiated into the secrets of necromancy by the Persian Magi, in order to appease the angry manes of his mother. Attempts were made, and it was whispered that human blood had not been lacking as one of the ingredients of the incantation. But the initiation was futile, and the Magians secretly averred that the failure was due to the unworthiness of the novice. The Armenian king vanished like a gorgeous cloud, leaving Nero more than ever in need of funds and more than ever reckless in the wicked means by which they might be amassed, though he dedicated a laurel wreath in the Capitol, and closed, as Augustus had done, the Temple of Janus.

But the time when the whole attention of the populace was absorbed in the pomp of this reception was purposely selected for the commission of further crimes. Nero had tried to obliterate on false charges the innocent Christians; he had swept away all the noblest of the aristocracy; he had banished or killed the philosophers; he now ventured to strike a blow at Pætus Thrasea and Barea Soranus, the two most honoured and virtuous of the Roman senators; and in doing so, as Tacitus says, to exterminate virtue itself.

The question arose whether Thrasea should defend himself, or treat the accusation with disdain, and die. The braver spirits longed to hear him speaking in the senate and rising above the sluggish acquiescence with which so many had obeyed the tyrant, and bled themselves to death in their private baths. His feebler friends advised him not to undergo the insults, the contumelious speeches, possibly even the personal violence, which might await him in that degraded assembly of the timid and the servile, in which even the good would be sure to be cowed into base concessions. His defence would assuredly be in vain, and it might involve the ruin of his wife, his family, and all whom he loved. The young tribune Rusticus Arulenus went so far as to promise that he would exercise his ancient tribunician privilege, and veto a decree of condemnation. But Thrasea decided to follow the ordinary course. He forbade the generous tribune to plunge himself into futile peril. His life and his career were over; those of Arulenus were only beginning. He decided to await the decision, and not to appear in his own defence. When his friends remonstrated, he quoted to them with a smile a line from the ‘Œdipus’ of Seneca—

‘Let Nero,’ he said, ‘at least accord me the privilege of holding my tongue.’ We can only regret that he did not rise to an energy which might have startled the degenerate nobles from the pusillanimity which yielded everything in despair of striking a blow. Thrasea might, indeed, have been murdered in the Senate-house, but such a murder would have aroused a reaction and precipitated a beneficent revolution. Daring is contagious, and one dauntless spirit may flash nobleness into a host of slaves.

The Senate was summoned to meet next morning in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, and found the temple beset by two Prætorian cohorts, who, in insolent defiance of the law, did not hesitate to display to the assembling senators their menacing swords. The Emperor’s complaints were read by a quæstor. Without naming any one, he inveighed against senators who set a slothful and pernicious example by neglecting their legislative duties. Then Capito sprang to his feet, and used this charge like a fatal weapon. But though he was animated by personal hatred of Thrasea, the speech of the orator Marcellus Eprius was still more passionate and envenomed. With frowning brow, with threatening gestures, with his eyes, his face, his words blazing with fury, he charged Thrasea with encouraging the spirit of sedition by impotent disdain for his clear duties. But if the senate was terrified by this lucrosa et sanguinans eloquentia,114 it was terrified still more by the crowd of soldiers and the gleam of arms. Thrasea was condemned to death; his son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus, was banished from Italy.

It was evening, and Thrasea was in his gardens among a throng of illustrious men and women. They were listening to his conversation with the Cynic Demetrius on the nature of the soul, when a messenger came to tell Thrasea of his condemnation. He urged all his friends to leave him immediately, and not to imperil themselves by association with one who had been condemned. In those days compassion was dangerous; the kindly bonds of human relationship had been snapped by fear.

He was only allowed an hour in which to die. His wife, Arria, wished to die with him. Her mother, the elder Arria, when her husband, Cæcina Pætus, had been condemned under Claudius, plunged a dagger into her own breast, and plucking it from the wound, put it into the hand of her husband with the words, ‘My Pætus, it does not hurt.’ The daughter would fain have emulated her mother. But Thrasea would not let her open her veins. He bade her to live for the sake of their child, Fannia. In the porch he met the quæstor, and seemed more cheerful at the thought that Helvidius had been spared than grieved that he himself had been condemned. ‘Nero may slay me,’ he said, ‘but destroy me he cannot. He can kill me, but he cannot make me do wrong.’

He took Helvidius and Demetrius with him into his chamber. The indomitable spirit of the latter was well adapted to confirm his resolution. Demetrius had reduced life to its simplest elements, and Seneca, who greatly admired him, said that he delighted to leave courtiers arrayed in purple and to talk with this half-clad philosopher, to whom nothing was lacking because he desired nothing. On one occasion, when Nero threatened Demetrius with death, he calmly replied, ‘You denounce death to me, and Nature denounces it to you.’

Thrasea sat down, and extended both arms to the physician. When his blood began to flow he sprinkled some of it on the ground, and exclaimed, as Seneca had done, ‘I pour a libation to Jupiter the Liberator.’ Then calling the quæstor nearer to him, he said, ‘Look, young man. May Heaven avert the omen from you, but you are born to times in which it is well to fortify your mind by examples of constancy.’

They are his last recorded words. His funeral was humble. His pyre burned silently in the gardens of his deserted house, and when they had gathered his ashes his wife and daughter had yet to endure the anguish of parting with Helvidius. The hours of their heart-breaking sorrow were insulted by shouts of rapture with which the people greeted the Parthian Tiridates and the murderer of their beloved.

During the condemnation of Thrasea and Helvidius the Temple of Venus Genetrix had been the scene of a tragedy still more pathetic—of a tragedy perhaps the most pathetic ever witnessed in that assembly of woe. Barea Soranus, like Thrasea, was a Stoic. He had been the Proconsul of Asia, and was charged with the double crime of friendship for Rubellius Plautius and of having administered his province rather with a view to his own glory than for the public good. This was an allusion to his honourable conduct in having supported the people of Pergamus in their opposition to the greedy robbery of their statues by Acratus, the freedman of Nero. These were old charges, but to them was added the new and deadly one that his daughter, Servilia, had practised arts of sorcery and given money to the diviners of horoscopes.

The hapless Servilia was little more than a girl, yet she was practically a widow. Her husband, Annius Pollio, had been driven into exile, as an accomplice in the Pisonian conspiracy, though no evidence had been brought against him. The poor young widow—she was not yet twenty years old—was falling sick with the intensity of her anxiety for the father whom she tenderly loved. She had merely consulted the Chaldeans, in the anguish of her heart and the inexperience of her youth, to know whether Nero would be placable, and Soranus be able to refute the charges brought against him, or, at any rate, to escape with his life. The impostors, after accepting large sums and exhausting her resources, had basely betrayed her.

On opposite sides of the tribunal where Nero sat between the two consuls stood the hapless prisoners—the father grey with age, the young daughter not even venturing to lift up her eyes to his face, because in her rash affection she had increased his perils.

The accuser was a knight named Ostorius Sabinus. ‘Did you not,’ he asked the trembling girl, ‘sacrifice the revenues of your dower, did you not even sell the necklace off your neck, to get funds for your magic incantations?’

Servilia prostrated herself upon the ground, and for some time could find no voice to speak; then rising, and embracing the altar of Venus Genetrix, ‘I invoked,’ she exclaimed, ‘no infernal deities; I uttered no prayers of imprecation. The sole object of my ill-omened supplications was that thou, O Cæsar, that ye, O senators, might preserve to me this the best of fathers. I gave the Chaldeans my gems, my robes, the adornment of my matronly dignity; I would have given them, had they demanded it, my blood, my life. Let them look to it; their very existence and the nature of their arts were hitherto unknown to me. I never mentioned the name of the Emperor, except among the deities. And of all that I did my father knew nothing. If what I have done be a crime, I have sinned alone.’

‘Senators!’ exclaimed her father, Soranus, ‘let her be at once acquitted. She is free from all the charges urged against me. She did not accompany me to my province; she was too young to have known Rubellius Plautus; she was in no way implicated in the accusations against her husband. Her sole error has been her filial affection. Separate her case from mine. She is still in early youth. Let one victim suffice you. I am prepared to undergo whatever fate you inflict upon me, but spare my child!’

At those tender words he opened his arms, and his daughter sprang to his embrace, but the lictors lowered their cruel fasces, and interposed between them.

Then the witnesses were called, and a murmur of contempt and indignation broke out even among those abject senators when Publius Egnatius Celer stepped out first among them. The lip of Soranus curled in strong disdain, and he muttered the one word ‘Traitor!’ For Egnatius was a professed Stoic; he was a client of Soranus; he had been his teacher in philosophy; he was old, and Soranus young; he had received from his hands unnumbered kindnesses; he had himself encouraged Servilia to consult the astrologers. He wore the dress of a philosopher; he had trained his features to assume the aspect of Stoic dignity. But on this day he tore the mask off his own face, and revealed himself as what he was—a lecherous, treacherous, avaricious, hypocritic villain, who, having concealed his leprous character under the guise of honour, did not hesitate for a moment to sell his friend for money in the hour of calamity, and thereby dishonoured his grey hairs, and earned for himself the execration of all time.115 The wretch lived on in deserved and general infamy. In better days he was accused by Musonius Rufus and himself condemned. But to Soranus and Servilia were meted out such justice as could alone be expected from such judges. The only mercy extended to them was the permission to choose their mode of death.

Such was the state of things in the days of Nero. The aristocracy were like men who live in an unknown land, glancing on every side at the slightest sound. Seneca, who had lived through that reign of terror, most truly depicts it. His sole remedy is stubborn resignation. Even abstinence from action requires prudence, for you may be condemned for what you do not do. Above all must men shun the Court, ‘that sad prison of slaves.’ But, after every precaution, no one could be safe, and therefore, Stoic-fashion, men must accustom themselves to regard all calamities as matters of indifference. ‘Above all, is not suicide always possible?’ Seneca asks; ‘and is not that the best antidote to tyranny? The path of escape is open everywhere. Do you see this precipice? It is the descent to Liberty! Do you see this sea, this well, this river? Liberty lies hidden in their depths! Do you see this little barren, distorted tree? Liberty hangs from its branches!’116 The historian is reminded of the picture of Pascal. ‘Imagine a number of men in chains, all condemned to death, some of whom have their throats cut daily in sight of the rest, while the survivors see in their fate their own condition, and gaze one on another with sorrow, and without hope.’

CHAPTER LXI

BEFORE THE LION

When Onesimus had succeeded in rescuing Nereus from the pitchy tunic on the dreadful-glorious night of the Church’s martyrdom, the two made their way through the darkness to Aricia, which they reached at the earliest dawn. Old Dromo welcomed them, and Junia received her father with transports of love and gratitude. Onesimus hung modestly back during their meeting, but when the girl had ceased to weep on her father’s neck, she turned to his deliverer, and thanked him from her heart as one to whose courage and devotion she owed his preservation from that death of agony.

During that day they arranged their plans. In the little farm and vineyard of Pudens there was ample room for free labour, and it was settled that Nereus and Junia should stay there for the present, Nereus working in the vineyard, and Junia helping in the care of the flocks and fowls, and in the management of the household. Among those groves, in that remote and humble homestead, they were safe in their obscurity, and there they could abide until some other opportunity offered, or happier times came round.

Onesimus thought it his duty to return to the Apostle, to whose service he had devoted his life. The generosity of Octavia had left him with sufficient funds for his simple needs, and he prepared to make his way to Crete, where he expected to find St. Paul. But before he started he asked Nereus to sanction his marriage with Junia. Both of them were baptised Christians, and Onesimus had now sufficiently proved the sincerity of his faith, and the depth of his repentance for former errors.

‘I am grateful to thee, youth,’ said the old man, ‘and I know that thou art a brand plucked from the burning. But the coming of the Lord draweth nigh, and the sky is red and lowering, and Antichrist is striving to destroy the Church of God. Is it a time to marry and give in marriage? Is it not rather a time for them who have wives to be as though they had none, and for the unmarried to abide as virgins because of the present necessity?’

‘I know it, my father,’ said Onesimus; ‘but thou mayst die, and Junia be left an orphan in these evil days. Let us be married, and she will have an earthly arm to defend her and toil for her. We will marry, and will separate to-day. I will seek the Apostle, and if it be God’s will He will make our way plain before our face.’

Nereus consented. At a little distance from Rome, in the loneliness of the Campagna, the fossors had already begun to construct the catacomb now known as that of St. Callistus, and there in a small subterranean chapel in one of those dim galleries, the Christians began to hold their evening or early morning assemblies. Thither after sunset Nereus, Onesimus, and Junia made their way. They found but a handful of Christians who had escaped the fury of the persecution, and though these were, in one sense, deeply discouraged by the shattering blow which had destroyed their Church, and almost heartbroken at the agonising loss of their loved brethren, in another sense they were full of hope and exalted courage, and uttered to one another their watchword Maranatha, with more intense conviction. And among them was Cletus, who had escaped as by miracle. His name had been denounced, but being young and active, he had succeeded in hiding himself and eluding research. He was now the humble bishop of the ruined community. He it was who joined the hands of Onesimus and Junia in the holy bond, and he it was who blessed the bread and wine of which the little band of brethren partook in humble communion. Marriage gladness, marriage festivities there were none. The Phrygian freedman and the Roman maiden pledged their faith to each other under the shadow of the Cross.

Before the dawn was red, Onesimus was making his way to Rhegium, whence he purposed to get to Messana, and so by ship to Lasæa on the stormy shores of Crete. On his arrival he found only Titus of Corinth, whom St. Paul had left in charge of the young and struggling Churches. He sailed in search of the Apostle, and his ship stopped for a day at Patmos, where he found the Beloved Disciple in his exile. The ascendency of St. John’s personality had overawed the inhabitants of that rocky islet, and he was suffered to spend his time in freedom. Onesimus sat with him under a grey olive tree, on the grassy summit of a rock, the highest point of the island, and discoursed with him for hours. The scene was lovely. The brilliant sapphire of the sea lay beneath them in unbroken calm, rippled here and there by the white wings of the beautiful seabirds. The crags glowed a deep rich red, except when they were covered with grass, on which the pink sea-thrift had already faded into white. On every side the sea-line was broken by the fantastic contour of isles and islets. Eastward on the Ionian shore, so rich in heroic and philosophic memories, they saw the historic summit of Mount Mycale, and northwards the island of Thera. A burning mountain, cast into the midst of the sea, and at that time in a crisis of violent eruption, it vomited, as though from the depths of the abyss, its volumes of turbid smoke which hung like a cloud at one spot of the far horizon.117 It was here that St. John heard from Onesimus the scenes which had followed his providential deliverance from the boiling oil, the illumination of Nero’s gardens with living torches, the orgies of the wild beast from the sea of nations as he wallowed in the blood of the saints. His whole soul was already brooding on the awful manifesto in which he answered the fury of the world, and spoke of the impending destruction of the two great cities of antiquity—Jerusalem, the metropolis of God’s olden Temple; Rome, the metropolis of the dragon and the Antichrist. Here, too, he entrusted to Onesimus—in whose youth, prudence, and courage he was interested—some of the keys to that strange cryptogram of the Apocalypse, which, if it had been written otherwise than in symbols, might have involved the ruin of whole communities. Among other things he told him that, by the cabbalistic system of Gematria, which the Greeks called isopsephism, ‘Nero Cæsar’ in Hebrew letters gave that which he had called the number of the Beast, 666. It was necessary that such secrets should be kept with care, for in the hands of an informer they might lead to overwhelming disasters; yet Onesimus did not wholly throw into the Mæander the key to the secret; but in due time revealed enough to guide the guesses which Irenæus and others of the ancient Christian Fathers had heard through the martyr Polycarp.

From Patmos Onesimus sailed to Ephesus, but did not overtake the Apostle Paul till he had followed him to Nicopolis, in Epirus. After a restful winter there St. Paul went through Macedonia to Troas. There, in the hospitable house of Carpus, he was suddenly arrested at the instance of Alexander the coppersmith, who was animated by trade grudges, because that part of his work which was connected with small images of Diana of the Ephesians had suffered from Paul’s preaching. Paul was seized by night, and so suddenly that he had no time to take with him his few precious books and documents and his large cloak. He was hurried to Ephesus, and tried before the proconsul; but, knowing that there he was little likely to obtain justice, he again appealed to Cæsar. During his imprisonment at Ephesus he had been cheered by Onesiphorus, and by the son of his heart Timotheus, who had shared with him for so many years in the life of a despised and hunted missionary. They parted with streaming tears which Paul long remembered. With Onesimus as his attendant, and Luke, Demas, Tychicus, Trophimus, and Erastus as his fellow-helpers, the glorious prisoner set forth on his last journey. Trophimus fell ill at Miletus; Erastus stayed at Corinth, of which city he had been chamberlain. They went over the Diolkos to Lechæum, along the Gulf of Corinth, and across the Adriatic to Brundisium. Thence they made their dreary way to Rome. This time there were no rejoicing crowds of Christians to meet them at Appii Forum or the Three Taverns, at sight of whom he could thank God and take courage. He found the Church of Rome in its ashes. No one could visit him without peril; and indeed no Christian of rank was left at Rome. Clemens and his family shared the disgrace into which Vespasian had fallen, and were living at the Sabine farm. Pomponia, after her visit to Poppæa, had suffered a severe relapse, and had been moved to a distant villa in the Apennines. Every leader of the Christian Church except Cletus and Hermas had perished in the persecution. Pudens was in Britain with Caractacus and Claudia. In later days the devotion of Christians to their imprisoned brethren struck Pagans with curious amazement, but Paul himself discouraged visits which might so easily bring death to the visitors. He was left, therefore, in painful loneliness, except for the loving care of Luke and Onesimus. Of his companions, Demas had forsaken him, and the presence of others had been necessary in various Churches. He was imprisoned, as his brother Apostles had been, in the Tullianum, and it was difficult to find out where he was. The Ephesian Onesiphorus, who came to Rome for the purpose, cheered his heart by fearlessly seeking him, and, unashamed of his chain, refreshed him in this his seventh imprisonment with that sense of human sympathy which he most required. But this one gleam of light was speedily quenched, for Onesiphorus caught the prison fever, and died at Rome.

Nero himself presided at the first trial of the Apostle. The crime which the Emperor had committed against the Christians was so enormous that the recollection of it haunted him, and intensified his hatred. He would not lose the opportunity of condemning the greatest of the Christian leaders. Paul was conducted to the basilica in the Golden House. It was a hall of the utmost splendour. The floor was of mosaic, in which porphyry, and serpentine, and giallo antico blended their soft lustres in patterns of wonderful variety and grace. The pillars were of light-green cipollino, the walls were inlaid with pavonazzetto from the Apennines near Pisa, and their cornices of alabaster were sculptured with animals and dolphins, and winged figures. The Emperor sat in the centre of the apse, which was divided from the body of the hall by a balustrade of white marble. His gilded and ivory chair was elevated on an inlaid pavement, approached by steps of porphyry. Round him stood a group of Prætorians with their silver eagles and other military ensigns. The lictors with their axed fasces stood at the back of his chair, and near him on lower seats sat Tigellinus, Eprius Marcellus, Cossutianus Capito, and other informers who had recently been enriched with the spoils of the innocent. Not far from these were some of the leading Jews, and conspicuous among them were the High Priest Ishmael, the alabarch Tiberius Alexander the unworthy nephew of Philo, and the foxy features of that arch-impostor, the magician Simon.

The great prisoner was made to stand in front of the balustrade on the spot marked by a circle of giallo antico on the floor. His hands were fastened together with a long coupling chain. The two chief Ephesian accusers, Alexander the coppersmith, and Demetrius the silversmith, were animated with the keenest hatred. And Paul was left absolutely alone. Onesimus and Luke accompanied him to the entrance, but they were both ‘suspects,’ and were not permitted to enter. But there were Gentiles and soldiers who might have helped him had they chosen, and the Apostle would not have been human if he had not felt the bitterness of desertion. ‘At my first trial,’ he wrote to Timothy, ‘no man took his place at my side. All abandoned me. God forgive them!’ In all that city, where his previous bonds had made the Gospel known alike in the Palace and the camp; in that world, for which he had sacrificed his life in loftiest services, there was no patron to protect, no advocate to support him, no favourable witness to plead extenuation. But he felt and said that One more powerful than many legions stood by him—even the Lord whom he had served.

Nero was in his most savage mood, and Tigellinus as always, added fuel to his rage. He insulted Paul, he glared upon him, he roared at him, he attempted to browbeat him, with utter violation of every principle of justice. Paul was a man the very sight of whom naturally inspired Nero with ferocity. For Nero, whom all the world knew to be a robber, a poisoner, a murderer, a matricide—a sensualist, effeminate, degraded, and unutterably depraved—had become aware that these Christians lived lives of purity and holiness, the possibility of which he affected to deny. And his guilty splendour and luxurious misery were forced at last to blush and tremble before the irresistible weakness of that despised, ragged, fettered prisoner. For Paul did not in the least fear him, and Paul’s courage was so marvellous to those who were accustomed to the pusillanimity of senators, who went away and committed suicide if Nero did but frown at them, that the courtiers and soldiers turned their eyes from the purple of the world’s master to gaze upon the rags of this sick prisoner who stood there with his pale countenance, his stooping figure and thin sable-silvered hair, more dauntless in chains, and under the axe of doom, than the Emperor amid his guards.

The first trial turned on Ephesian accusations of riot and disorder, and Paul, producing the diploma of his franchise, stood on his rights as a Roman citizen. He demanded to answer for himself, and, in the manly speech which he made, the chained ambassador of Christ struck a feeling akin to terror into the heart of the deified autocrat of heathendom. He was able to prove by the written evidence of the Recorder of Ephesus, and of friendly Asiarchs, that the testimony of the metal-workers was false, and that he had ever behaved as a peaceable citizen. The calm dignity of his defence, and the perfect courtesy and fearlessness which he had shown in his desperate position, left a deep impression on the jurors. Eprius Marcellus tried to cow him with that Hercules-Furens style of oratory which had so often driven the blood from the cheeks of consulars and generals. But when Paul turned on him his quiet glance, Eprius Marcellus stopped short, stammered in the middle of a sentence, and ignominiously sat down, muttering something about ‘the evil eye.’

In spite of Nero’s scorn and anger, the jurors voted in accordance with their convictions. When the votes were counted in the urn there were a few C.s for Condemno dropped by Court sycophants, but most of the tablets were A. for Absolvo and N. L. for Non Liquet, ‘not proven.’ To the astonishment of all, this first offence ended in acquittal on the first capital charge, and ampliatio—the postponement of the trial—for the examination of the second count. The second count was that Paul was a Christian, and, as such, the adherent of an illegal religion. On this he knew that he could not escape; but of the result of the first trial he wrote to Timothy with heartfelt gratitude that ‘God had saved him out of the mouth of the lion.’

There was nothing to cheer his cold and rocky prison except the light within his soul, and that human tenderness which, when all others had deserted him, was still lavished upon him by Onesimus and Luke. The Evangelist did all that was in his power to keep alive in Rome the flickering flame which the violence of persecution had overwhelmed. In this way Onesimus could do but little. He regarded it as the present work of his life to console and tend the Apostle, and he devoted himself to this work with all the more thoroughness because, when he was able to visit Aricia, Junia impressed him with its necessity and sacredness. He had his reward; for day by day he himself advanced in righteousness and knowledge, as he listened to words which have helped forward the regeneration of the world.

CHAPTER LXII

NERO IN GREECE

Nero grew weary of Rome. While he was there he could not wholly exclude the voice of the conscience of mankind which awoke echoes in his own. With art, and æsthetics, and the race-course, and the theatre, he tried to create around him the elements of a sham and shadowy world. It was a world filled with the ghosts of crime and weird with insensate projects and monstrous revellings. He had attempted everything, abused everything, polluted everything, and ‘the scoriac river of passion accursed,’ of which he drank so freely, did but consume and burn up his powers. He had become like a dead thing in a wilderness of dead capacities, inspired at once by ‘insatiable desires and incurable disgusts.’ While he played the god he sank lower than Christian eye can follow him, into the beast. With Domitian, Tiberius, Caligula, and Helagabalus—with Vitellius, Commodus, and Maximin—he was one of a group of Cæsars who have been set forth last on the stage of history, a spectacle to angels and to men to show that human nature can sink into ‘half beast and half devil’ when there are no restraints to save men from all that is most abject. They became, as St. Paul said, inventors of evil; not only doers of whatsoever things are vile, whatsoever things are infamous, whatsoever things are of ill report, but also delighters in those that do them.

But at Rome, even in his beloved theatre, Nero was not safe from insults. They scorched him as with the touch of flame, and yet were so impalpable that he could not avenge them unless he put a whole population to death. Opposite his Palace, or on the outer circus, were written, in chalk or coal, denunciations so stinging as to show that if blank walls are the paper of fools they may also be the avengers of tyrants. One of these pasquinades hailed him as the true descendant of Æneas, since Æneas ‘took off’ his father, Nero his mother. Another criticised the over-grown space of the Golden House, and bade the Quirites to emigrate to Veii, if the House did not forestall them by extending so far. Yet another reminded him that the Parthian could be an Apollo with his arrows no less than Nero with his harp.

He pretended indifference to these things, but he felt them, and longed to find a fresh scene for display. At Rome he considered that his musical talent, though he had exhibited it to the promiscuous populace, was yet a flower which blushed unseen. The astute and adulatory Greeks had sent him the crowns of all their citharœdic contests. He was delighted, and asked their delegates to supper. When they begged him to give them a specimen of his powers, they went into such ecstasies over his performance that he said the Greeks were the only connoisseurs who were worthy of his proficiency.

To Greece, therefore, he set forth with a retinue which would have sufficed for the conquest of India, only that they were more concerned with masks and robes and musical instruments than with arms. He was accompanied, too, by all his train of minions, as well as by an army of claqueurs. When he appeared at Naples he was so enchanted by the ‘Kentish fire’ of some Alexandrians who were present—a mode of applause which was new to him—that he took a number of these Egyptians into his service. He had also trained a band of youths of equestrian rank, and more than five thousand of the lustiest plebeians to act together in bands and learn certain modes of cheering, which were called ‘buzzings,’ ‘tiles,’ and ‘jars.’ They were mostly boys, and were arrayed in fine dresses, with their thick hair shining with perfumes, and with rings on their left hands.

With such accompaniments he might feel tolerably secure of victory, yet when he appeared at a contest he always felt or pretended a girlish timidity. The Emperor of Rome might be seen on the stage of Greek towns bending his knee before the mob, humbly adoring them with his hands, assuring the judges that he had done his little best, tremblingly solicitous to observe the slightest rules, and perspiring with anxiety if he made the smallest mistake. Besides this, he debased himself with all the pettiest intrigues of tenth-rate theatrical life. He defamed his competitors, or bribed them not to do their best, or cajoled them to cede the victory to him. When an Epirot, with a fine voice, refused to cede the prize unless Nero paid him ten talents, he was pushed against a column by Nero’s clique and stabbed to death. It required the power of the Emperor to secure the rewards of the comedian.

Without believing, or even alluding to, the deeds recorded of him by Dion Cassius, it is clear that his plunderings, and crimes, and secret orgies continued unabated. From the Thespians he stole the Cupid of Praxiteles in Pentelic marble; from the Pisatans of Olympia the statue of Ulysses among the Greek chiefs drawing lots to answer the challenge of Hector. Rich men were proscribed in consequence of secret delations, which often sprang from the greed of the detestable Calvia Crispinilla, who was now the keeper of the wardrobe of Sporus. They were struck down, unheard, and their possessions were divided. Rome had been left under the government of two ex-slaves, Helius and Polycletus, who were so rapacious that the people complained of being under two Neros instead of one.

Amid such crimes little was thought of the fate of Paris. The poor pantomime, whose beauty, grace, and skill had been the delight of Rome, had excited the jealousy of Nero because he could not teach him how to dance. Paris, like Aliturus, had been no better than a slave, and we cannot blame him too severely if, in such an age and such surroundings, he had been stained by the vices in the midst of which he lived, and his nature, not originally ignoble, had been

But his death, like that of Roscius, ‘eclipsed the gaiety of nations,’ and gave one warning more—had it been needed—to Aliturus, that the friendship of tyrants means death.

But the worst of these Grecian enormities—many of which cannot be narrated—involved the acme of treachery and ingratitude. No man had shed a purer lustre over the age of Nero than the brave and honest Corbulo. His life had been devoted to the service of the Empire. To him had been due those splendid victories which kept the Parthians in check, and induced Tiridates to put the colophon on Nero’s glory by coming to receive at his hands before the Roman people the diadem of Armenia. Well might the Arsacid tell Nero that in Corbulo he had a good slave. The great victorious general had spent his life in foreign service. He had never come near the Court; had received no civil honours; had never returned to enjoy a triumph or an ovation. He had been content to keep himself away from those scenes of gilded slavery and miserable splendour, and perhaps anticipated the sole reward which tyrants can give to true greatness. Now, however, that Nero was in Greece, he wrote to Corbulo a letter of almost filial reverence, and invited him to come and receive proofs of his gratitude. To refuse would have been tantamount to rebellion, and Corbulo had always been stainlessly loyal to his worthless master. But good men invariably have their slanderers, and one of his officers, Arrius Varus, had been whispering suspicions about him into the Emperor’s ear. He was not granted so much as an audience. No sooner had he landed at Cenchreæ than Nero sent him the command to die. Corbulo wasted no words on execration or complaint. For a moment, perhaps, it flashed across him that he would have been wiser to listen to the voice of Rome and of the East, which had invited him to be their liberator. But it was too late to repent of the fault of putting trust in a monster. He drew his sword and stabbed himself with the single word ‘Deserved!’118

We cannot wonder that Nero did not visit Sparta, because every tradition of Sparta would have cried shame on his histrionic effeminacy. He did not visit Athens, because Athens did not deign to invite him, and because he shrank from eliciting a keenness of wit which had not spared the bloodstained Sylla. But his chief reason for avoiding ‘the Eye of Greece’ was because he dreaded the Temple of the Furies, who had avenged the less guilty and more expiable matricide of Orestes. Nor did he dare to visit Eleusis, because the voice of the herald forbade the profane to be initiated into its mysteries. He did not even venture to present himself to the hierophants of the little mysteries of Agra on the banks of the Ilissus. Visits opened to the humblest, and mysteries revealed to the simplest of the pure, were barred to him.

And before his journey was over, amid his sham triumphs, he began to be disturbed by disquieting rumours.

Judæa was in a state of violent revolt, and the presence of an able general was urgently needed. Nero therefore appointed Vespasian to the command. The old general was expiating in seclusion and obscurity the crime of having snored while Nero sang. One day an Imperial messenger was announced at his humble home. His blood ran cold, for he made sure that the soldier brought him an order to die. Instead of that he brought a nomination to the government of Judæa and the command of the army. To these high offices Nero appointed him because a man of valour and military ability was wanted. Nero overlooked what he called his want of taste because, though eminent as a soldier, he was a man of such humble name and origin that he could not possibly be regarded as dangerous. But the revolt of the Jews, though it was a serious matter, was far less alarming than the other news which now reached Nero.

Helius wrote to say that affairs in the city urgently required his presence. ‘You summon me back,’ he wrote in reply; ‘your wish ought rather to be that I should return worthy of Nero.’ But the menace of disaster was too grave to admit of its being neglected for a verbal pomposity, and Helius hurried to Corinth in person to rouse the Emperor from his insensate frivolity. The weather was so stormy that his enemies fondly hoped for his shipwreck if he sailed. Delay, however, was impossible. His day of doom was close at hand.