CHAPTER LXIII

MUTTERING THUNDER

The insistency of Helius, and the alarming reports which reached Nero from all quarters, roused him at last from his intoxication of frivolous vanity and compelled him to cut short the ‘ignoble masquerade with which he had soiled Greece.’ But he would not reveal the least consciousness of alarm, and, indeed, in the madness of the moment, he did not realise it. What did it matter if he was deposed? ‘All the world,’ he used to say, ‘supports art,’ and he could easily gain his living as a favourite harpist or singer on the public stage. The glory of the actor, won by his own talents, should be more dazzling than the diadem of the Emperor, which was but the heritage of his race!

He first entered Naples, because there he had made his first stage appearance. He entered it as a hieronices, riding in a chariot drawn by four milk-white steeds, through a breach made in the walls. He made the same magnificent entry into Antium, dear to him as the place of his birth, and into Alba, the city where the Temple of Jupiter Latiaris was venerated by the entire Latin race. But he reserved for Rome the fullest magnificence of a triumph heretofore undreamed of, and such as might well cause every true Roman to blush for shame. He degraded to his ignoble purpose the chariot in which Augustus had triumphed after the battle of Actium. His robe was of purple; over it flowed a chlamys gleaming with golden stars; on his brow he wore the olive wreath of the Olympic victors; in his right hand he carried the laurel crown of Pythia. Seated in the chariot by his side was no brave soldier or noble statesman, but Diodorus the harpist! Before him went a long procession of heralds, each carrying some garland of victory, with tablets on which were inscribed the names of those whom he had conquered, and the songs or tragedies in which he had gained the prize. Thousands of the trained applauders whom he called Augustiani, followed his chariot proclaiming themselves the soldiers and comrades of his successes. An arch of the Circus Maximus had been broken down for him, and through it he made his way along the Velabrum and the Forum, not to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, or to that of Mars the Avenger, but to the Palace and the temple of his patron Apollo. The Senate had gone forth in festal robes to meet and greet him. As the champing steeds tossed their white manes and bore him slowly along, every door and window and roof and lattice was crowded with spectators, and the air was rent with shouts of ‘Hail, Olympic, hail, Pythic victor! Hail, sole periodonices!119 Augustus, Augustus! Hail, Nero-Hercules! Nero-Apollo! Hail, sacred voice! Happy are they who hear it!’ In street after street victims were immolated as he passed; showers of fragrant saffron were sprinkled down; the air was rich with the perfume of incense burning on hundreds of altars; birds and little ornaments, and jewels and flowers were scattered over him. It rained roses from the balconies full of matrons and maidens. Of his eighteen hundred and eight crowns he arranged the choicest in his own bedchamber and around his bed. The rest he sent in masses to adorn the great Egyptian obelisk which Augustus had reared to be the goal of the Circus Maximus.

Such men as the consuls of the year—the dull poet Silius Italicus and the orator Trachalus—might estimate highly the successes of a comedian, but the indignant shade of Thrasea might have rejoiced in its Elysian fields to have been spared the sight of such a triumph!

But so far from being ashamed, Nero henceforth made his celestial voice his chief concern. As it was too precious to be wasted in addressing crass Prætorians, he contented himself with sending messages to them, or having his addresses read aloud in his presence. What he had to say to the Senate was similarly read by one of the consuls. An attendant whom he called a phonascus stood constantly at his side to warn him to be careful of his throat, and to keep a handkerchief before his mouth. Whoever extolled his wretched voice was his friend; whoever praised it insufficiently was his enemy.

It is part of the subtle irony of history that the zenith of apparent prosperity is often the culminating moment of misfortune, and the scene of most splendid exaltation is that in which the fingers of a man’s hand steal forth and write on the palace-wall the flashing messages of doom. The triumph of the sole periodonices whom the world had ever seen was the last hour of his sham glory. The patience of God and man was exhausted, and ‘down rushed the thunderbolt.’

Romans might be too deeply abased to avenge the degradation of their name by the latest of those triumphs which seemed to cover with ridiculous parody the three hundred which had preceded it. But there was yet a Gaul brave enough to arouse the Empire from its fatal apathy.

His name was Julius Vindex, and he was the Proprætor of Gaul. He was rich, and he was a senator, as his father had been before him, for Claudius had granted this distinction to the descendant of the ancient kings of Aquitania. Nero envied his wealth, but Vindex, in order to make the greedy parasites of the Court think that he would soon die and leave them his possessions, drank cumin-water and made himself artificially pale. In Gaul he received constant news of Nero’s villanies both paltry and heinous, and his soul burned within him. He sounded the legionaries to discover whether they were as much ashamed and weary as himself of the tyranny of a comedian and a monster. He found them ripe for rebellion. He had no personal objects. He knew that a Gaul could hardly be Emperor, and he secretly offered the Empire to Galba. On March 16, A.D. 68, he gave, a little too prematurely, the signal of revolt. Nero had gone to Naples to refresh himself and to rest his precious voice, and there he received the news of the insurrection on March 19, the anniversary of the murder of his mother.

The idiotic frivolity with which he acted upon such serious intelligence astonished even his courtiers. He only laughed, and pretended to rejoice at the opportunity which would thus be afforded him of spoiling the wealthiest of the provinces. He went into the gymnasium, and watched with affected transport the contests of the athletes. At supper still more perilous tidings reached him, but he contented himself with saying, ‘Woe to the rebels!’ Meanwhile the walls of Rome were scrawled over with satirical inscriptions. Yet for eight days he took no step whatever, answered no letters, gave no orders, attempted to get over the peril by calmly ignoring it. His long impunity had made him a fatalist. Had not Britain been lost and recovered? Had not Armenia been lost and recovered? Whatever happened, was he not promised an Eastern kingdom, or could he not support himself by his voice and lyre?

A few days later came an edict of Vindex, in which he spoke of Nero as Ahenobarbus, which angered Nero as much as it angered Henry VII. to be described by Richard III. as ‘one Henry Tidder or Tudor.’ Vindex also described Nero as a wretched twangler on the harp. Now indeed he was furious. To call him a wretched twangler! Did any of his friends know of a better harpist than himself? Was not such a criticism a proof of ignorance and bad taste? Let the Senate rouse itself to avenge him! He would come in person, but that he felt a certain weakness in his throat.

Messenger after messenger came spurring to Naples, and Nero was compelled to hurry back in alarm to Rome. Vindex was by this time at the head of a hundred thousand men, yet Nero quite recovered his spirits when, on his road to Rome, he saw the statue of a Gaulish soldier subdued and dragged by the hair by a Roman knight. At the sight of it he leapt up for joy, and adored heaven. When he reached Rome, instead of summoning an assembly of the Senate and the people to meet him, he only invited a few leading men to the Palace, and after a brief consultation, spent the afternoon in showing them new kinds of hydraulic organs. ‘I intend to display them all on the stage,’ he said—with the affected afterthought ‘if Vindex will let me.’

When Galba first received the secret overtures of Vindex he temporised. He had only preserved his life under various tyrants by consummate care, and by affecting a policy of submission and indifference. Vindex implored him to constitute himself ‘the leader and avenger of the human race,’ but he took no step until he discovered that Nero had sent secret orders that he was to be murdered, and found that he had only escaped very narrowly and by the merest accident. Besides, as his officer T. Vinius reminded him, he had hesitated in his allegiance, and to hesitate was to be lost. He must either assume the purple or prepare to die.

The fresh intelligence that Galba and the two provinces of Spain had also revolted, struck Nero with panic. He swooned away, and remained for some time speechless and motionless. On recovering his senses he tore his robe, and beat his head, with the cry, ‘I am ruined!’ His nurse tried to console him with the remark that other Princes had suffered similar calamities. ‘Nay,’ he answered, ‘my fate is more unheard of than that of all others, for I lose the Empire while yet I live.’ Some steps were suggested to him. He recalled some troops from Illyria, and put Petronius Turpilianus at the head of such forces as he could secure. He set a price on the head of Vindex, and Vindex replied with the ‘sublime gasconade,’ ‘Nero promises ten million sesterces to any one who will bring him my head. I promise my head to any one who will bring me his.’ But scarcely a single plan occurred to Nero which was not puerile; not one measure which was not monstrous. He would execute the provincial governors, and appoint new ones. He would send round to the islands and kill all the exiles, for they might join the revolters. He would order a general massacre of all the Gauls in Rome, for they might favour their countrymen. He would give up the Gallic provinces to be plundered by the soldiers. He would invite the whole Senate to a banquet, and poison them. He deposed the two consuls, appointed himself sole consul, and as he left the banquet, leaning on the shoulders of his intimates, he declared that he would present himself before the legions unarmed and weeping; and, when he had melted their hearts by his tears, he would sing strains of victory to the rejoicing soldiers—which he must immediately compose. Above this ‘lugubrious buffoonery’ he could not rise!

His other preparations to meet the crisis—such as they were—bore the same stamp of infructuous folly. They were all tainted with vanity, imbecility, and corruption. In choosing vehicles for his expedition, his chief care was about those which were necessary for his stage properties. The women who were to accompany him had their hair cut short to make them look like Amazons, and were armed with axes and targets. In raising money he was very fastidious that the silver should be freshly minted and the gold fine. Many flatly refused to contribute, exclaiming that he ought to get back the sums with which the informers had been gorged to repletion. He was made daily to feel that his power was gone. When he summoned the city tribes to renew their oath of allegiance, and to enrol themselves as soldiers, the result was such a failure that he had to order each household to furnish a proportionate number of slaves. Among these he would only enrol the most approved, not even excepting stewards and secretaries.

But he had to submit to the agony of daily insults. The people were suffering from famine prices, and the arrival of an Alexandrian corn-vessel was announced. This always gave an occasion for rejoicing, but when it turned out that the vessel was only laden with a cargo of Nile sand to sprinkle over the arena, there was an outburst of rage and contumely. Scoffs at his chariot-racing and singing were heard everywhere. Burghers pretended to get up quarrels with their slaves at night, and then shouted Vindex! Vindex! as though they were merely appealing to the police. Nor was this all. He was tormented with dreams and portents of every description, which made his days and nights hideous. He dreamt that he was steering a ship, and that some one wrenched the helm out of his hand; that his murdered wife Octavia dragged him into the nethermost abyss; that he was covered over with a multitude of winged ants. There was a stateliness and tragic sense of condemnation in another of his dreams, in which the ideal statues of the nations at Pompey’s theatre sprang to life, surrounded him, and blocked his path. It was rumoured that on the first day of the year, the Lares had fallen down in the middle of a sacrifice, and that the great gates of the mausoleum of his family had opened spontaneously, while a voice came from their awful recesses which summoned him by name. When a solemn rite was to be performed at the Capitol, the keys were nowhere to be found. When his speech against Vindex was pronounced in the Senate, and he said that ‘criminals should soon meet the end they had deserved,’ the senators had joined in an ill-omened shout of approval. It was noticed, too, that the last tragedy which he had chanted in public was that of ‘Œdipus in Exile,’ and that the last verse which he had spoken was—

‘Wife, Mother, Father, join to bid me die.’

If, on receiving the news of the revolt of Vindex, he had put himself, like a true Roman Emperor, at the head of his legions, the terrible prestige of a Cæsar, the remembered failure of previous conspiracies, and the disunion of his enemies, might have secured his triumph. For the German legions of Verginius Rufus disdained to follow the initiative of the Gauls. Their own general refused the Empire, and declared for Galba; but an unhappy and accidental collision between the jealous cohorts led to a battle in which twenty thousand Gauls were left dead upon the field. Vindex, in despair, stabbed himself with his own sword. Galba, in scarcely less despair, meditated suicide at Clunia, hearing that the soldiers of Verginius were anything but favourable to his claims. If but one pulse of true blood of his brave patrician ancestors had stirred in the veins of Nero, if he could have shown but one momentary flash of their spirit, he would have been gloriously saved. But his abuse of passion, his disgraced manhood, his polluted mind, his enervated frame, stamped upon him the curse of nullity, and the infamous throng of contaminated courtiers who formed his band of intimates were as empty and effeminate as himself. No strength was left among them to evoke the ghost of a manly sentiment in that sty of transformed humanity in which they had long voluntarily wallowed. No heart was left them to do, or dare, or even nobly to die.

And so Nero, while sitting at dinner, received fresh letters, telling him that his sluggishness and ineptitude had alienated from him the last semblance of allegiance among the legions; Otho had declared against him in Lusitania; Clodius Macer, in Africa; Vespasian, more or less covertly, in Syria. The bitterness of death was come, if it was not passed. In petulant passion he tore the letters to pieces. Then, like a spoilt boy in a rage, he seized from the table two crystal cups, of priceless value, of which he was specially fond, and which were embossed with scenes from Homer, and dashed them to shivers on the marble floor.

More wild and wicked follies suggested themselves to his diseased and whirling brain. Why should he not again set fire to the city, and prevent all attempts to extinguish the flames, by sending to the vivaria of the amphitheatre, and letting loose all the wild beasts among the people? What a scene it would be! Lions, and tigers, and bears, and panthers, growling, leaping, roaring, amid the streets of a city bursting everywhere into conflagration, and—while themselves wild with terror—striking fresh terror into a screaming populace! Incapable of consecutive thought, he had not even considered what would come of this. Suffice it that it would be a magnificent excitement, a thrilling and supreme sensation! He did not repent of this design; he was not appalled by the stupendous and selfish wickedness; he was only deterred by the impossibility of carrying it out. It may be said that such schemes betray the madman; but Nero’s brain was undisturbed by any madness except that which consists in, and is the Nemesis of, a soul eaten away by conceit, selfishness, and lust. Caligula, it has been truly said, would, in modern days, have found his way to Bedlam; but Nero to Tyburn. His hour was come. He sent his most trusted freedman to Ostia to prepare the fleet. He sounded the tribunes and centurions of the Prætorian guard to see if they would share his flight. Some of them made excuses; some flatly refused; one of them even dared to quote to him the line: ‘Is it so very difficult to die?’ As for his Præfects—Tigellinus, whom he had laden with wealth and honours; Nymphidius, the son of a slave-woman—creatures who had crawled and sunned themselves in the noon of his prosperity, they shamelessly and without hesitation betrayed and abandoned him. The poisonous sunlight of his favour had bred no creature nobler than adders. What should he do? Should he array himself in his tragic robe and present himself as a suppliant before the Parthians, or before Galba, moving them to tears by his histrionic skill? But how could he get so far in safety? No; he would clothe himself in black garments, would go to the Forum, and there would weep before the Rostra, imploring pardon for the past, and begging the people—if only he succeeded in moving their minds—at least to allow him to be Præfect of Egypt in place of Tiberius Alexander! He even wrote the oration which he intended to deliver on the occasion, and it was found in his writing-desk after his death. His one dread was that, if he so much as ventured outside the gates of the Golden House, he would be torn to pieces before he could make his way to the Forum. He postponed the decision, and, summoning Locusta, obtained from her a poison which he placed in a golden box. Then he passed over to his favourite retreat in the Servilian gardens, and slept as well as he could his last wretched sleep on earth.

CHAPTER LXIV

AT THE THREE FOUNTAINS

‘For out of prison he cometh to reign.’—Eccl. iv. 14.

After his first defence, the Apostle Paul had lived on in his narrow prison, indomitably cheerful though death stood almost visibly beside him. Himself undaunted, he strove to kindle the same faith and courage in those whom he loved. He had heard that Timothy was sad and despondent, and had not got over the grief of being separated from him. The Apostle had a deep human yearning to see once again the dear companion of his earlier conflicts. He wrote to him the beautiful, pathetic letter which contains for us his last words. He exhorted him to strenuous cheerfulness, and urged him to face the shame of the Gospel at Rome, and to come and share his sufferings. ‘Come, my child’—such was the burden of his message—‘come before winter; come quickly; come, or it will be too late.’ And when he comes let him send to Carpus at Troas for the large cloak which Paul had left at his house in the hurry and tumult of his arrest, and the books, especially the parchments. It is often cold in his prison, and that old ‘dreadnought,’ which he had woven with his own hands out of the black goat’s-hair of his native province, old as it was, and often whitened with the dust of the long Roman roads, and drenched in the water-torrents of the Taurus, and stained with the brine of Adria, would yet be a comfort to him as he sat on the rocky floor. And the papyrus books and the parchments—few and worn as they were—would help to while away the monotonous hours, and were very dear to him. With some of them he had been familiar ever since he was a happy boy in the dear old Tarsian home. So when Timothy comes to shed the last rays of life’s sunshine on Paul’s prison, let him bring the old cloak and the books—poor inventory of a saint’s possessions after unequalled labours for mankind! And let him, if possible, bring Mark the Evangelist with him; for Peter, with whom Mark had travelled, had now sealed his testimony by martyrdom, and Mark’s knowledge of Latin might be serviceable, and his personal tendence would be very dear. The immediate danger of arrest would not be great, for the rage of the informers had now been glutted to repletion, and the State and the Emperor had more than enough to occupy their thoughts. Pudens and Claudia had written to him with all affection from their British home, and had sent to minister to his necessities. He gives to Timothy the greetings which they had sent supposing him to be at Rome. Linus had also sent greetings, in a letter dictated from his bed of death. As for himself, he was more than ready to die. He had finished his course; he had kept the faith; henceforth there was laid up for him the crown of righteousness. Thinking, perhaps, how Pætus Thrasea and Seneca had sprinkled their blood as a libation to Jupiter the Liberator, he wrote the striking words, ‘I am being already poured out in libation, and the time of my setting sail is close at hand.’ Was he heavy at the thought? Not so. He quotes a fragment of a fine early Christian hymn which had consoled many a martyrdom:—

And thus the old man’s soul was joyful in the Lord.

Did Mark, did Timothy come to him

Mark was at Alexandria, and Timothy did not see him. The Lycaonian hastened to Rome the moment he had received Paul’s letter, but he came too late—came to be himself imprisoned, though happily only for a time. The Apostle was not mistaken in saying that his death was imminent. During Nero’s absence in Greece he had been summoned before the two wretched freedmen, Helius and Polycletus, on the second ground of his indictment—that he was a Christian, and therefore the preacher of a forbidden religion. That cause needed no trial. The accused not only confessed, but gloried in the accusation. Defence, therefore, was superfluous, since no apology for Christianity could alter the now established law that its practice was prohibited on pain of death. He would have been put to death at once, but Nero in a letter from Greece had expressed some wish to see him, and to ask him some further questions about the Christians before he attached his sign manual to the order of execution.

The truth was that Nero was half mad with anxiety, and as all magic incantations had failed to give him the least inkling of the future, he desired to learn something from the Christians. Among the slaves in the Palace who had been denounced as Christians by the informers, Herodion only had been spared, not only because of his age and blameless fidelity, but also because, in a household where the buzz of incessant gossip made it impossible to keep anything secret, it had been generally rumoured that he possessed the gift of prophecy. Nero therefore summoned Herodion into his presence. But Herodion refused to speak, and Nero, in a transport of fury, unsheathed his dagger, and held it over the poor old slave with his uplifted hand. But Herodion’s countenance did not blench, and he said with perfect calmness—

‘O Cæsar, thou canst not kill me if thou wilt.’

‘How? canst not?’ said the Emperor, stooping to pick up the dagger, which had dropped from his astonished grasp. ‘Canst not? One step, one thrust, and thou art a dead man.’

‘Canst not,’ said Herodion, with unmoved serenity. ‘I shall die, indeed, but it is not thus, nor by thy hand, that I shall die.’

‘Lead him off to death,’ said Nero. ‘These fanatics are inexplicable.’

But his yearning to divine the future was only intensified, and Simon Magus persuaded him that he might learn it from the imprisoned Apostle, whom he represented as a powerful sorcerer.

Once more, therefore, the Apostle stood face to face with the Emperor, on one of the troubled tumultuous days which followed his hasty return from Naples, after he had received the news of the revolt of Vindex. It was an interview, not a judicial audience. The Emperor saw him in private, with no one about him except a few trusted freedmen, and one favourite slave, named Patroclus. Several amulets lay scattered round him to avert magic and the evil eye. For form’s sake he first asked the Apostle about the crimes with which Christians were charged, and heard once more the proofs of their righteousness, loyalty, and holiness. Then he offered Paul his freedom and pardon if he would reveal to him the future. Onesimus, who had been allowed to attend the Apostle, and who stood at the far end of the apartment among a group of slaves, used to say afterwards that if the Apostle would only have spoken a word of hope, or even some ambiguous promise which might be interpreted in almost any way, the chains would have been struck off his hands. But he answered that the secrets of the future were in the hands of God alone, and that he had no commission to reveal them. Nero was scanning his features with intense anxiety, and as the Apostle fixed on him his earnest, undaunted, pitying gaze, the Emperor—more than ever convinced that he could prophesy the unknown—told all the slaves except Phaon and Patroclus to withdraw. But Paul, weak with long imprisonment, and scarcely able to stand, begged that he might support his weary frame on the shoulder of Onesimus. Otherwise they were alone. The Emperor, who had no dignity at that hour of calamity, appealed to his prisoner. ‘They tell me,’ he said, ‘that thy God, or thy Chrestus, does enable thee to foretell events to come. I am in danger. The legions are revolting against me on all sides. The astrologers have promised me that I shall be King of Jerusalem. All is uncertain. See, I appeal to thee. I, the Emperor, ask thee, the doomed and wretched Jew, to tell me what will happen. Will Vindex conquer? Will Galba conquer? Will the guards be faithful? Shall I be murdered? Answer me these questions, and I will spare thy life, and send thee away with rich rewards.’

‘I answer,’ said the Apostle, ‘as a Prophet of the East answered a king before. If Nero should give me his house full of silver and gold, yet cannot I go beyond the word of the Lord; and the Lord has not bidden me to speak to thee. And what were wealth, and what were all the Empire to me? Thinkest thou, O Emperor, that I fear death? To us Christians to die is to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better; and Christ hath conquered death.’

‘Wilt thou not even tell me whether I shall be killed? I adjure thee by thy Christ, or thy Iao, or whatever thou holdest most sacred, tell me!’

The Emperor was trembling and weeping.

Another might have scorned his unmanliness, or rejoiced with malignant triumph over the disgrace of the enemy of all the good. But Paul knew too much of human weakness to indulge in scorn. He felt for him a sincere, a trembling, a yearning pity. He uplifted his eyes to heaven, paused for a moment, during which the Emperor’s eager and almost imploring gaze was fixed upon his face, and then solemnly replied—

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

‘Tell me more,’ said Nero passionately.

‘I may not tell thee more. Only,’ he continued, raising his chained hand, ‘I say to thee, repent! Repent of thy life of crime and infamy! Repent of thy many murders—the murder of thy brother, the murder of thy mother, of—’

‘Accursed Jew, darest thou revile me?’ said Nero, leaping up from his gilded chair, his face burning with fury.

The Apostle remained unmoved. Onesimus told afterwards that he had not felt the tremor of a single muscle as the storm of the Emperor’s rage burst over him. Nero stood amazed—his wrath stilled before so majestic an indifference.

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

‘Think, rather,’ said the Apostle, ‘that thy hour of judgment is nigh at hand—yea, it standeth at the door. The blood of the innocent, slain by thee, cries against thee from the ground. I pity thee—Paul the prisoner, Paul the aged, pities thee, and he will pray for thee if haply the thoughts of thy heart, and the shames of thy wickedness, may be forgiven.’

‘Dismiss this man,’ whispered Phaon to the Emperor, impatiently. ‘He is a Jew, evidently half insane with dreamings in prison. Were it otherwise, I would here and now chastise his insolence.’

‘Nay,’ said the boy Patroclus, in a voice of deep emotion. ‘Rather listen to him. O Nero, I will confess to thee that I have talked to Acte; I have talked to Christian slaves—once my fellow-slaves—in thy Palace and the household of Narcissus, and I know that the gods—or that God, if (as they say) there be but one God—is with them. Dismiss Paulus, I entreat thee; set him free. He tells the truth.’ And with these words the young cupbearer flung himself on his knees with a gesture of appeal.120

Nero had been startled—almost moved—by the solemn tones and inspired aspect of the Apostle; but the appeal of Patroclus and his mention of Acte produced a different effect from what the youth had intended. The Emperor was jealous that such potent influences should have been at work in his own Palace; that in spite of his persecution of the Saints, in spite of his having made Christianity an illegal religion, those who had been so near to his own person as Acte and Patroclus should reject his divinity, and own Jesus as their king.

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

And, unhappily, at that moment Gaditanian strains, accompanied by the words of a gay song, reached his ear from an adjoining room in which some of his light companions and favourites were sitting. The sound awoke all his heartless and incurable frivolity. Bursting into a forced laugh, he said, ‘I see there is no more to be got out of this Jew. Take him hence,’ he said to the Prætorian in attendance, ‘and see that he be led to death as soon as the day shall dawn.’

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

‘Yes,’ said the Emperor. ‘He has been tried and condemned. I will here countersign the condemnation which orders him to be beheaded.’

---

The Apostle spent that last night on earth in sleep as sweet as that of an innocent child. He rose in the morning smiling and refreshed, and Onesimus was early at the prison to help him in all his last arrangements and preparations. As the soldiers would allow Onesimus, and no one else, to accompany him, he bade an affecting farewell to Luke, who had been for so long a time his beloved physician, and started on his way.

His doom was secret and sudden. At that early morning hour the centurion and soldiers were not likely to be troubled with many spectators. One or two humble Christians from the poorest haunts of the Trastevere would fain have followed, but the soldiers, who were in savage humour from the perilous uncertainty of the times, suffered none of them to attach themselves to the little procession. Hence the death of the Apostle was so lonely and obscure that scarcely a breath of tradition survived to commemorate it to posterity. An ordinary faith might have been overwhelmed by the apparent utterness of failure which had crowned that life of unparalleled exertions for the cause of Christ and for the good of man. Deserted, abandoned, a pauper, a prisoner—the founder, indeed, of Churches, but of Churches some of which were already the prey of Judaisers and of alien heretics, and were cold to him—in the capital of the world, where he seemed to be but an insignificant atom, and where Jew and Pagan were united in irreconcilable hostility to the faith which he had preached—deserted by all them of Asia—no one with him but the poor emancipated slave—yet he was in no sense disillusioned, nor did his faith fail. It did not trouble him that the curtain was about to fall in darkness on one of the noblest and greatest of all human lives. That life seemed to him but as the life of a great sinner whom God had forgiven, whom Christ had saved. The winter of his trials was past, the eternal spring of the resurrection was breathing through the air its heavenly perfume.

Along the Appian road they passed, through the gate of Rome which still—nigh upon two thousand years afterwards—is called by his name. They passed the pyramid of Gaius Cestius, with all its statues. Only one incident occurred on his journey. Just as they were passing the pyramid of Cestius, a lady, young and deeply veiled, met the mournful procession, and stopped the centurion in command of the soldiers. ‘I am Plautilla,’ she said, ‘the daughter of Flavius Sabinus, the Præfect of the City, the relative of Aulus Plautius and Pomponia Græcina. Suffer me for a moment to speak to your prisoner.’

Impressed by the great names which she had mentioned, the centurion bade the soldiers stand aside for a moment, and Plautilla, kneeling on the grass, asked with tears for the Apostle’s blessing. He laid his chained hand on her head and blessed her, and she gave him from her kinswoman Pomponia a handkerchief with which to bind his eyes as he knelt for the blow of the executioner. He gratefully accepted it, and said, ‘I know the name of Pomponia. It is ever pronounced with the blessings of the saints of God.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘O Apostle, and my brother, the nephew of Vespasian, who is in command in Judæa—he too is a Christian.’

The Apostle upraised in thankfulness his fettered hands. ‘The night,’ he said, ‘is far spent. The day is at hand.’

The centurion beckoned to the soldiers to proceed, and Plautilla stood gazing after them under the shadow of the pyramid.

About three miles from the walls of Rome, on a green and level space amid low, undulating hills, was the spot then known as Aquæ Salviæ, and now as Tre Fontane. To this spot they marched in the early morning—the chained prisoner with the soldiers round him, and the centurion walking at their head. Onesimus followed close behind. The martyr scarcely spoke. His face was lit with an inward rapture; his lips moved incessantly in silent prayer. He had no fear. Lovely to him as the colours of the rainbow on the thundercloud gleamed the azure of his home. They reached the green level under the trees. The prisoner was bidden to kneel down. Onesimus helped him to take off his upper garment, received his last few words of prayer and encouragement and blessing, and the gentle pressure of his hand in farewell. He bound over the Apostle’s eyes Plautilla’s handkerchief, and then turned away, hiding his face in his hands, weeping as if his heart would break. Then he heard the word of command given. For one instant he looked up—in that instant the sword flashed, and the life of the greatest of the Apostles was shorn away.

The work of the soldiers was over. They had no further concern in the matter, except that the centurion had to certify to Nero that the execution had been carried out. They left the mortal body of the martyr on the green turf. When they were gone, the Christians, whom they had repelled but who had followed them afar off, came to weep over it and to bury it. Onesimus took his part in digging the nameless grave. But the site of it was kept in loving remembrance until in due time there rose over that spot the ‘trophy’ which existed, as we are told by Gaius the presbyter, as far back as the second century, where now stands in all the splendour of its many-coloured marbles the great church of San Paolo fuori le Mura.

And, as they sorrowfully left the scene of martyrdom, the grey light which had touched the eastern clouds began to flush into the rosy dawn, and the sun rose on the world’s new day.

CHAPTER LXV

IN THE CLUTCH OF NEMESIS

‘And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of the holy...: this also is vanity.’—Eccles. viii. 10.

It was on the evening of June 8 that Nymphidius Sabinus betrayed Nero, and, by the forged promise of an enormous donative, which was never paid, induced the Prætorians to embrace the cause of Galba. A worthless master makes worthless slaves. This man, whom Nero had lifted out of the dust as a reward for his crimes, sold his bad benefactor without a blush.

Nero heard the grim news before he retired to rest in the evening, and he was well aware that the morrow must decide his fate. At midnight he leapt from his troubled couch, and from that moment there began for him once more the long slow agony of an irremediably shameful death. The first thing he discovered was that all the soldiers who guarded the Palace, and whose barracks were in the Excubitorium, had deserted their posts. In utter despair, he sent for advice to those whom he deemed to be his friends. As he received from them no word of answer, he went to their houses, one by one, in the dead of night, with a few attendants. Inconceivably dreary was that walk through the dark streets, which, as he passed by the silent palaces, seemed to be haunted by the ghosts of the many whom he had slain. But he found every door closed against him. Not a single response was made to his appeals. Almost mad with misery, he returned to his splendid chamber in the Golden House, only to find that during his brief absence the attendants and slaves had fled, after plundering it of all its magnificence, even to the embroidered purple coverlets and the golden box which contained Locusta’s poison. Recalling the memory of his murdered mother, he sought everywhere for the amulet—the bracelet containing the serpent’s skin found near his cradle—which Agrippina had clasped upon his boyish arm. But he had once carelessly flung it away, in a fit of petulance, and now it could nowhere be seen. Then he sought for Spicillus, the mirmillo, to stab him; but neither he nor any one else could be found to fulfil the office. ‘So,’ he said, with one of the small smart epigrams which showed throughout these last scenes that the spirit of melodrama had not deserted him—’so, it seems, I have neither a friend nor an enemy!’

Upon this he set out to fling himself into the Tiber, and the back door by which he went led through a part of the circus which had witnessed his disgraceful triumphs. But when he was half way, his courage failed him, and he told his attendants that he wanted some quiet hiding-place in which to collect his thoughts. His freedman Phaon, one of the very few who, to their credit, remained true to him in the hour of his utmost shame, offered him his suburban villa. It was at the fourth milestone from the city, between the Salarian and Nomentan roads. It lay on a more remote path called the Patinarian Way, on the other side of the Anio. On that hot night of June Nero had gone out only in sandals and a tunic; so he threw over his shoulders an old washed-out cloak, covered his head with the hood, held up a handkerchief to conceal his face, and mounted the first sorry horse which could be obtained. Thus, in beggar’s guise, he left the gorgeous scene of his manifold iniquities. None were found to accompany him except his secretary Epaphroditus, his freedman Phaon, and Sporus his unhappy favourite. They started together before the first gleam of that most miserable day. The stories that, as he rode, he felt the shock of an earthquake, and saw a flash of lightning which gleamed on the ghostly faces of his victims rising to menace him from the abyss, are doubtless coloured by the agitation of the witnesses. But on his way he had to pass through the Colline gate, and there he heard the shouts of his Prætorians cheering for Galba and cursing Nero. There were but few stirring on the roads at that early hour, but from one group which they passed they heard the remark, ‘These men are in pursuit of Nero.’ ‘Any news about Nero?’ asked another traveller. This was disturbing; but it was a far more serious incident when Nero’s horse swerved at the stench of an unburied corpse which lay by the roadside, and the handkerchief fell from his face. For at that moment a discharged Prætorian chanced to pass, who not only recognised but saluted the Emperor, rendering it too certain that the pursuers would soon be on his track.

By this time it was light. It was the anniversary of the murder of his wife, Octavia!

When the fugitives reached the path that led to Phaon’s property, they let their horses run loose among the trees and brambles, and made their way to the back of the villa by a track through a bed of reeds where the oozy sludge was sometimes so deep that they had to fling a cloak over it to prevent their sinking in the mire. There was obvious peril in taking refuge here. A great price was sure to be set on Nero’s head, and how could the freedman trust his rustic slaves with so perilous a secret? He therefore urged Nero to hide himself in the deep cave of a neighbouring sandpit till something fresh could be devised. But Nero refused. ‘What!’ he exclaimed tragically, ‘go alive into the bowels of the earth?’ The only other course was to make an opening in the back of the villa, through which he could creep secretly, unknown to the household. While this was being done, he complained of thirst. There was nothing for him but some stagnant water in a pool. He drank a little from his hand, with the remark, ‘This, then, is Nero’s choice drink!’ He sat down ruefully in his tattered cloak, which had been torn to shreds by the briers through which he had forced his way; and when the hole in the wall was large enough, crawled through it on all fours into the empty cell of one of Phaon’s slaves. There he flung himself down on the mean straw pallet of the slave, with nothing to cover him except its old dirty coverlet. Hungry and thirsty as he was, it was difficult to procure him any food without arousing suspicion. They could only get him some black bread, at which his stomach revolted, but he drank a mouthful or two of tepid water.

It became evident to them that all hope of escape or concealment was impossible. The fatal recognition of Nero by the Prætorian betrayed the course he had taken. The numberless mounted pursuers would be sure to find the four horses which they had let loose; nor would it be possible for him to conceal the fact of his presence from Phaon’s slaves. His three companions therefore urged him, time after time, to save himself by suicide from the nameless contumelies which awaited him. Even Sporus entreated him again and again to show himself a man. It was in vain! In that coward and perverted nature every spark of manliness was quenched. ‘It is not time yet,’ he said. ‘The destined hour has not arrived. How cruel you are to me!’

‘Cruel?’ said Epaphroditus, indignantly; ‘do not we—alone of all your thousands of slaves—risk our lives for your sake? Since you must die, were it not better to die like an Emperor than like a whipped hound?’

‘Well, then,’ whimpered Nero, ‘can’t you at least dig me a grave, one of you? See, I will lie down to show you the right length.’

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

‘The grave is ready,’ said Phaon.

‘But can’t you find some bits of marble to adorn it? Surely there must be some lying about.’

They saw through his pusillanimous delays, but managed to pick up a few fragments of common marble, while he still kept whimpering, ‘Only to think that such an artist as I am must perish!’

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

‘Well, but you will have to burn my body,’ he said. ‘You must get some water to wash me, and some wood for the pyre.’

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

In the midst of these idle pretexts a runner came with a letter for Phaon. Nero snatched it out of his hand and read ‘that the Senate had pronounced him a public enemy, and decreed that he should be punished after the fashion of our ancestors.’

‘What punishment is that?’ he asked.

Is it possible that he did not know? He, who had so often heard it passed on others? he who, as men believed, had secretly wished that it should be inflicted on Antistius for libelling him? he who had suffered it to be pronounced against L. Vetus and the innocent Pollutia? Nevertheless Epaphroditus told him that it meant stripping him naked, thrusting his head into the opening of a forked gibbet, and then beating him to death with rods. Nero turned deadly pale. The thought of such agony and such outrage overwhelmed him. He plucked from their sheaths two daggers which he had brought with him, tried the edge of them, and then once more thrust them back with the threadbare tragic phrase, that ‘the destined hour had not yet come.’ Again the unhappy Sporus entreated him to remember that he was a man, a Roman, an Emperor.

‘There is time, boy,’ he said. ‘Sing my funeral song; raise a lamentation for me.’ And all the while he wept, and whimpered, ‘Such an artist! Such an artist to perish!’

Phaon and Epaphroditus rebuked his abject timidity.

‘Oh!’ he cried, ‘I cannot die. “Wife, father, mother, join to bid me die,” but I dare not. Will not one of you kill himself and show me how to die?’

They were amazed at such depths of abject selfishness, and, reading his condemnation in their faces, he groaned out, ‘Nero, Nero, this is infamy; come, rouse thyself; be a man!’

But how could the soul of this vicious, babyish, self-indulgent, overgrown, corrupted boy—this soul steeped through and through its every fibre with selfishness, vanity, and crime—how could it be thrilled with one virile impulse? The man within him was dead—only the cowardly animal survived.

The sound of horses’ hoofs was heard galloping along the rough road leading to the villa. It denoted the approach of horsemen who had been bidden at all hazards to seize him alive. Strange that even at such a moment he could not help being self-conscious and melodramatic.

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

he said, trembling—quoting a verse of Homer. But at last, when not one second was to be lost, he placed the dagger against his throat, and, seeing that he would be too much of a poltroon to inflict anything more than an ineffectual wound, Epaphroditus with one thrust drove it home.

Then in burst the centurion. Anxious to seize him alive, he cried, ‘Stay, stay, Nero! I have come to help you!’ and tried with his cloak to stanch the bleeding wound.

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

With these words he died, and the spectators were horror-stricken at the wild, staring look of his rigid eyes, which seemed to stand out of his head.

Fidelity! What fidelity had Nero himself shown to God, to human nature, to Rome, to his mother, his adoptive father, his wives, his brother, his tutors, his family, his friends, his slaves, his freedmen, his people, his own self? What more worthless life was ever disgraced by a more contemptible and abject death?

Forty-one princes and princesses of his race had perished since the beginning of the century, by the sword, by famine, or by poison; and the historian imagines the shades of those unhappy ones gathered round the miserable pallet on which—more miserably, more pusillanimously, more guiltily, more abjectly than any one of them—perished the last of a race whom heaven had been supposed to receive as gods, and whom earth rejected with disgust. And had their race ended in this manikin, in this cowardly and corrupted actor? ‘The first of the Cæsars,’ says the historian, ‘had married four times; the second thrice; the third twice; the fourth thrice again; the fifth six times; and lastly this sixth Cæsar thrice:—of these repeated unions a large number had borne offspring.’ Where were they all? Cut off for the most part by open murder, or secret suicide, or diseases mysterious and premature! And now the prophecy of the sibyl had been fulfilled—

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

How many of his fancied enemies, how many of the innocent, had he caused to be decapitated! How often had he allowed their heads to be the mockery of their enemies! How had he himself insulted the ghastly relics of Sulla and of Rubellius Plautus; and suffered his mother and his wife to insult the murdered remains of Lollia Paulina, and of the sad and innocent Octavia! His one dread was that his head should be similarly insulted; his one main entreaty to the companions of his flight had been that he should be burnt whole, and his head not be given to his enemies.

Fairer and kinder measure was dealt to him than he had dealt to others. Among those who hurried to the villa was Icelus, the powerful freedman of his rival Galba. Nero had thrown him into prison at the news of Galba’s revolt, but at Nero’s flight he had been set free. It was not the usual way with the Romans to make war with the dead, and Icelus gave permission that the body should be burnt. It was consumed in the white robe broidered with gold which he had worn at his ill-omened sacrifice on the first of January.

No hindrance was put in the way of his funeral. Two women who had nursed his infancy, and Acte, who had loved him in his youth, wept over his bier. No tear was shed besides. They laid his ashes in a porphyry sarcophagus, over which was raised an altar of the white marble of Luna, surrounded by a Thasian balustrade.

He was but thirty-one when he died; and he had crowded all that colossal criminality, all that mean rascality, all that insane degradation, extravagance, and lust, into a reign of fourteen years!

So great was the exultation over his fall of the people whom he had pampered, that the whole body of plebeians appeared in the streets wearing hats. A slave could only wear a hat after he had been manumitted, and the people wished to show that by his death they had been emancipated from slavery. Yet he and they had mutually corrupted each other, and the vicious populace had reacted on the vicious ruler. Nor was it long before those to whom vice was dear began to show their sympathy by adorning his tomb with spring and summer flowers. Every base and foul ruler who succeeded him—lascivious Otho, gluttonous Vitellius, savage Domitian, womanish Elagabalus, brutal Commodus—all who disgraced the name of Roman and of man—made him their ideal and their hero.

And since so very few had witnessed his death, the multitude in every land persisted in the belief that another body and not his had been burnt; that he had taken refuge among the Parthians; that he would return to take vengeance on his enemies. The fancy gilded the brief fortune and precipitated the miserable punishment of at least two impostors. Of these Perkin Warbecks and Lambert Simnels of antiquity, one was put to death in the reign of Otho, the other in the reign of Domitian; and for nearly three centuries the legend lingered on in the Christian Church that Nero was the wild beast, wounded to death, but whose deadly wound had been healed—the Antichrist who should return again.

And the people fancied that his restless, miserable ghost haunted for centuries the Collis Hortulorum, the Monte Pincio, where stood the monument of the Domitii; until in pity for their terrors it was exorcised in 1099 by Pope Pascal II., the superb successor of the humble Linus. The Church of Santa Maria del Popolo stands to this day as a witness of the changed fortunes of that Church which Nero well-nigh extinguished and exterminated when he made light more ghastly than the darkness by kindling those living torches in the gardens of the Mons Vaticanus. Over that desecrated spot, as I have said, now falls the shadow of the vast Christian basilica, and the obelisk of Heliopolis, which towered over Nero as he drove his chariot through lines of burning men, testifies by its triumphant inscriptions to the victory of the faith of Christ.