Of course, among these professors, the discoverer of gold was the most moneyless; the maker of amulets against misfortune the most miserable; and the Stoic the most impatient. The Epicurean alone adhered to the spirit of his profession.
But the unstable elements round us were a severe trial for any human philosophy but that of a thorough optimist. Wind and water, the two most imperious of all things, were our masters; and a calm, a breeze, or even a billow, often tried our reasoners too roughly for the honor of tempers so saturated with wisdom. On those occasions the Platonist defended the antiquity of Egypt with double pertinacity; the Chaldee derided its novelty by the addition of a hundred thousand years to his chronology of Babylon; the Indian with increased scorn, wrinkling his brown visage, told them that both Babylon and Egypt were baubles of yesterday compared with the million years of India.
The dagger would have silenced many a discussion on the chief good, the origin of benevolence, and the beauty of virtue, but for the voice of the captain, which like thunder cleared the air. He, I will allow, was the truest philosopher of us all. The trierarch was an unconscious optimist; nothing could touch him in the shape of misfortune, for to him it had no existence. If the storm rose, “we should get the more rapidly into port”; if the calm came to fix us scorching on the face of the waters, “nothing could be safer.” If our provisions fell short, “abstemiousness now and then was worth a generation of doctors.” If the sun burned above us with the fire of a ball of red-hot iron, “it was the test of fair weather”; if the sky was a mass of vapor, “we escaped being roasted alive.”
His maxims on higher subjects were equally consoling. “If man had to struggle through life, struggle was the nursing-mother of greatness; if he were opulent, he had gained the end without the trouble. If he had disease, he learned patience, essential for sailor, soldier, and philosopher alike; if he enjoyed health, who could doubt the blessing? If he lived long, he had time for pleasure; if he died early, he escaped the chances of the tables’ turning.” The optimist applied his principle to me, by gravely informing me that “though it depended on the Emperor’s state of digestion whether I should or should not carry back my head from his presence, yet if I lived, I should see the games of the Circus, and if I did not, I should in all probability care but little about the matter.”
Nothing in the variety of later Europe gives me a parallel to the distinctions of rank and profession, style of subsistence, and physiognomy of society in the ancient world. Human nature was classed in every kingdom, province, and city almost as rigidly as the different races of mankind. The divisions of the slave, the freedman, the citizen, the artist, the priest, the man of literature, and the man of public life were cut with a plowshare whose furrows were never filled up. Life had the curious mixture of costume, the palpable diversity of purpose, and the studied intricacy of a drama.
Our voyage was rapid, but even a lingering transit would have been cheered by the innumerable objects of beauty and memory which rise on every side in the passage through a Grecian sea. The islands were then untouched by the spoiler; the opulence of Rome had been added to Attic taste; and temples, theaters, and palaces, starting from groves, or studding the sides of the stately hills, and reflected in the mirror of bays, smooth and bright as polished steel, held the eye a continual captive. On the sea, nights of vessels, steering in all directions, glittering with the emblems of their nations, the colored pennants, the painted prows, and gilded images of their protecting deities, covered the horizon with life. We had reached the southern cape of Greece, and were, with a boldness unusual to ancient navigation, stretching across in a starless night for the coast of Italy, when we caught a sound of distant music that recalled the poetic dreams of nymphs and tritons. The sound swelled and sank on the wind, as if it came from the depths of the sea or the bosom of the clouds. As we parted from the land, it swelled higher until it filled the midnight with pompous harmony. To sleep was profanation, and we all gathered on the deck, exhausting nature and art in conjectures of the cause.
The harmony approached and receded at intervals, grew in volume and richness, then stole away in wild murmurs, to revive with still more luxuriant sweetness. Night passed in delight and conjecture. Morning alone brought the solution.
Full in the blaze of sunrise steered the imperial fleet, returning in triumph from the Olympic games, with the Emperor on board. We had unconsciously approached it during the darkness.
The whole scene wore the aspect of a vision summoned by the hand of an enchanter. The sea was covered with the fleet in order of battle. Some of the galleys were of vast size, and all were gleaming with gold and decorations; silken sails, garlands on the masts, trophies hung over the sides, and embroidered streamers of every shape and hue, met the morning light. We passed the wing of the fleet, close enough to see the sacrificial fires on the poop of the imperial quinquereme. A crowd in purple and military habits was standing round a throne, above which proudly waved the scarlet flag of command. A figure advanced; all foreheads were bowed, acclamations rent the air, the trumpets of the fleet flourished, and the lofty harmonies that had charmed us in the night again swelled upon the wind and followed us, long after the whole floating splendor had dissolved into the distant blue.
At length the headlands of the noble bay of Tarentum rose above the horizon. While we were running with the speed of a lapwing, the captain, to our surprise, shortened sail. I soon discovered that no philosophy was perfect; that even the optimist thought that daylight might be worse than useless, and that a blot had been left on creation in the shape of a custom-house officer.
Night fell at last; the moon, to which our captain had taken a sudden aversion, was as cloudy as he could desire, and we rushed in between the glimmering watch-towers on the Iapygian and Lacinian promontories. The glow of light along the waters soon pointed out where the luxurious citizens of Tarentum were enjoying the banquet in their barges and villas. Next came the hum of the great city, whose popular boast was, like that of later times, that it had more festivals than days in the year.
But the trierarch’s often-told delight at finding himself free to rove among the indulgences of his favorite shore had lost its poignancy; and with a firmness which set the Stoic in a rage, the Epicurean in a state of rebellion, and the whole tribe of our sages in a temper of mere mortal remonstrance, he resisted alike the remonstrance and the allurement, and sullenly cast anchor in the center of the bay.
It was not until song and feast had died, and all was hushed, that he stole with the slightest possible noise to the back of the mole, and sending us below, disburdened his conscience and the hold of the good ship Ganymede. I had no time to give to the glories of Tarentum. Nero’s approach hurried my departure. The centurion who had me in charge trembled at the idea of delay, and we rode through the midst of three hundred thousand sleepers in streets of marble and ranks of statues, as silently and swiftly as if we had been the ghosts of their ancestors.
When the day broke we found ourselves among the Lucanian hills, then no desert, but crowded with population and bright with the memorials of Italian opulence and taste. From the inn where we halted to change horses, the Tarentine gulf spread broad and bold before the eye.
The city of luxury and of power, once the ruler of Southern Italy, and mistress of the seas that sent out armies and fleets, worthy to contest the supremacy with Pyrrhus and the Carthaginian, was, from this spot, sunk like all the works of man, into littleness. But the gulf, like all the works of nature, grew in grandeur. Its circular shore edged with thirteen cities, the deep azure of its smooth waters inlaid with the flashes of sunrise, and traversed by fleets, diminished to toys, reminded me of one of the magnificent Roman shields, with its center of sanguine steel, the silver incrustation of the rim, and the storied sculpture. We passed at full speed through the Lucanian and Samnian provinces, fine sweeps of cultivated country, interspersed with the hunting-grounds of the great patricians; forests that had not felt the ax for centuries, and hills and valleys sheeted with the vine and rose.
But on reaching the border of Latium, I was already in Rome; I traveled a day’s journey among streets and in the midst of a crowded and hurrying population. The whole was one huge suburb with occasional glimpses of a central mount, crowned with glittering and gilded structures.
“There!” said the centurion, with somewhat of religious reverence, “behold the eternal Capitol!”
I entered Rome at night, passing through an endless number of narrow and intricate streets where hovels, the very abode of want, were mingled with palaces blazing with lights and echoing with festivity. The centurion’s house was at length reached. He showed me to an apartment, and left me, saying, “that I must prepare to be brought before the Emperor immediately on his arrival.”
I am now, thought I, in the heart of the heart of the world; in the midst of that place of power from which the destiny of nations issues; in the great treasure-house to which men come from the ends of the earth for knowledge, for justice, for wealth, honor, thrones! And what am I?—a solitary slave!
With the original mixture of Ionian and northern blood in his veins, the character of the Roman was at once tasteful and barbarian. Like the Asiatic, delighting in luxury, like the Tatar, delighting in gore, he turned the elegance of the Greek games into the combat of gladiators. He was a voluptuary, but the gravest of all voluptuaries. Of all nations the Roman bore the strongest resemblance to that people of conquerors who at length swept its name from Byzantium; superb, but slavish; fierce, but sensual; brave as the lion, but base in its appetites as the jackal; a people made for the possession of empire and for its corruption.[26]
Of all men he had the least resemblance to his successor. Haughty, sagacious, and solemn, tho ravening for rapine, and merciless in his revenge, he bequeathed nothing to that miscellany of mankind which has followed him, but his passion for shows.
Rome was all shows. Its innumerable public events were all thrown into the shape of pageantry. Its worship, elections, the departure and return of governors and consuls, every operation of public life, was modeled into a pomp, and in the boundless extent of the empire those operations were crowding on one another every day. The multitude that can still be set in motion by a wooden saint was then summoned by the stirring ceremonial of empire, the actual sovereignty of the globe. What must have been the strong excitement, the perpetual concourse, the living and various activity of a city from which flowed the stream of power through the world, to return to it loaded with all that the opulence, skill, and splendor of the world could give.
Triumphs to whose grandeur and singularity the pomps of later days are but as the attempts of paupers and children; rites on which the very existence of the state was to depend; the levy and march of armies which were to carry fate to the remotest corners of the earth; the kings of the East and West coming to solicit diadems or to deprecate the irresistible wrath of Rome; vast theaters; public games that tasked the whole fertility of Roman talent, and the most prodigal lavishness of imperial luxury, were the movers that among the four millions of Rome made life a hurricane.
I saw it in its full and grand commotion; I saw it in its desperate agony; I saw it in its frivolous revival, and I shall see it in an hour, wilder, weaker, and more terrible than all. I remained under the charge of the centurion. No man could be better fitted for a state jailer. Civility sat on his lips, but caution the most profound sat beside her. He professed to have the deepest dependence on my honor, yet he never let me move beyond his eye. But I had no desire to escape. The crisis must come, and I was as well inclined to meet it then as to have it lingering over me.
Intelligence in a few days arrived from Brundusium of the Emperor’s landing, and of his intention to remain at Antium until his triumphal entry should be prepared. My fate now hung in the balance. I was ordered to attend the imperial presence. At the vestibule of the Antian palace my careful centurion deposited me in the hands of a senator.
As I followed him through the halls, a young female richly attired, and of the most beautiful face and form, crossed us, light and graceful as a dancing nymph. The senator bowed profoundly. She beckoned to him and they exchanged a few words. I was probably the subject, for her countenance, sparkling with the animation of youth and loveliness, grew pale at once; she clasped both her hands upon her eyes and rushed into an inner chamber. She knew Nero well; and dearly she was yet to pay for her knowledge.
The senator, to my inquiring glance, answered in a whisper, “The Empress Poppæa.”
A few steps onward and I stood in the presence of the most formidable being on earth. Yet whatever might have been my natural agitation at the time, I could scarcely restrain a smile at the first sight of Nero.[27]
I saw a pale, undersized, light-haired young man, sitting before a table with a lyre on it, and a parrot’s cage, to whose inmate he was teaching Greek with great assiduity. But for the regal furniture of the cabinet I should have supposed myself led by mistake into an interview with some struggling poet. He shot round one quick glance on the opening of the door, and then proceeded to give lessons to his bird. I had leisure to gaze on the tyrant and parricide.
Physiognomy is a true science. The man of profound thought, the man of active ability, and, above all, the man of genius has his character stamped on his countenance by nature; the man of violent passions and the voluptuary have it stamped by habit. But the science has its limits: it has no stamp for mere cruelty. The features of the human monster before me were mild and almost handsome; a heavy eye and a figure tending to fulness gave the impression of a quiet mind, and but for an occasional restlessness of brow and a brief glance from under it, in which the leaden eye darted suspicion, I should have pronounced Nero one of the most indolently harmless of mankind.
He now remanded his pupil to its perch, took up the lyre, and throwing a not unskilful hand over the strings in the intervals of his performance, languidly addressed a broken sentence to me.
“You have come, I understand, from Judea; they tell me that you have been, or are to be, a general of the insurrection. You must be put to death; your countrymen give me a great deal of trouble, and I always regret to be troubled with them. But to send you back would be only an encouragement to them, and to keep you here among strangers would be only a cruelty to you. I am charged with cruelty; you see the charge is not true. I am lampooned every day; I know the scribblers, but they must lampoon or starve and I leave them to do both. Have you brought any news from Judea? They have not had a true prince there since the first Herod and he was quite a Greek, a cut-throat and a man of taste. He understood the arts. I sent for you to see what sort of animal a Jewish rebel was. Your dress is handsome, but too light for our winters. You can not die before sunset, as until then I am engaged with my music-master. We all must die when our time comes. Farewell—till sunset may Jupiter protect you!”
I retired to execution, and before the door closed heard this accomplished disposer of life and death preluding upon his lyre with increased energy. I was conducted to a turret until the period in which the Emperor’s engagement with his music-master should leave him at leisure to see me die!
Yet there was kindness even under the roof of Nero, and a liberal hand had covered the table in my cell. The hours passed heavily along, but they passed; and I was watching the last rays of my last sun when I suddenly perceived a cloud rise in the direction of Rome. It grew broader, deeper, darker as I gazed; its center was suddenly tinged with red; the tinge spread; the whole mass of cloud became crimson; the sun went down, and another sun seemed to have risen in its stead. I heard the clattering of horses’ feet in the courtyards below; trumpets sounded; there was evident confusion in the palace; the troops hurried under arms, and I saw a squadron of cavalry set off at full speed.
As I was gazing on the spectacle before me, which perpetually became more menacing, the door of my cell slowly opened, and a masked figure stood upon the threshold. I had made up my mind, and demanding if he were the executioner, told him “I was ready.” The figure paused, listened to the sounds below, and after looking for a while on the troops in the courtyard, signified by signs that I had a chance of saving my life.
The love of existence rushed back upon me; I eagerly inquired what was to be done. He drew from under his cloak the dress of a Roman slave, which I put on, and noiselessly followed his steps through a long succession of small and strangely intricate passages. We found no difficulty from guards or domestics. The whole palace was in a state of extraordinary alarm. Every human being was packing up something or other; rich vases, myrrhine cups, gold services, were lying in heaps on the floors; books, costly dresses, instruments of music, all the appendages of luxury, were flung loose in every direction—signs of the sudden breaking up of the court. I might have plundered the value of a province with impunity. Still we wound our hurried way. In passing along one of the corridors, the voice of sorrow struck the ear; my mysterious guide hesitated; I glanced through the slab of crystal that showed the chamber within.
It was the one in which I had seen the Emperor, but his place was now filled by the form of youth and beauty which had crossed me on my arrival. She was weeping bitterly,[28] and reading with passionate indignation a long list of names, probably one of those rolls in which Nero registered his intended victims, and which in the haste of departure he had left open. A second glance saw her tear the paper into a thousand fragments and scatter them in the fountain that gushed upon the floor. I left this lovely and unhappy creature, this dove in the vulture’s talons, with almost a pang. A few steps more brought us into the open air, but among bowers that covered our path with darkness. At the extremity of the gardens my guide struck with his dagger upon a door; it was opened; we found horses outside; he sprang on one; I sprang on its fellow, and palace, guards, and death were left far behind.
He galloped so furiously that I found it impossible to speak, and it was not till we had reached an eminence a few miles from Rome, where we breathed our horses, that I could ask to whom I had been indebted for my escape. But I could not extract a word from him. He made signs of silence and pointed with wild anxiety to the scene that spread below. It was of a grandeur and terror indescribable. Rome was an ocean of flame! Height and depth were covered with red surges that rolled before the blast like an endless tide. The flames burst up the sides of the hills, which they turned into instant volcanoes, exploding volumes of smoke and fire; then plunged into the depths in a hundred glowing cataracts; then climbed and consumed again. The distant sound of the great city in her convulsion went to the soul. The air was filled with the steady roar of the advancing blaze, the crash of falling houses, and the hideous outcry of the myriads flying through the streets, or surrounded and perishing in the conflagration.
Hostile to Rome as I was, I could not restrain the exclamation: “There goes the fruit of conquest, the glory of ages, the purchase of the blood of millions! Was vanity made for man?” My guide continued looking forward with intense earnestness, as if he were perplexed by what avenue to enter the burning city. I demanded who he was, and whither he would lead me. He returned no answer. A long spire of flame that shot up from a hitherto-untouched quarter engrossed all his senses. He struck in the spur, and making a wild gesture to me to follow, darted down the hill.
I pursued; we found the Appian choked with wagons, baggage of every kind, and terrified crowds hurrying into the open country. To force a way through them was impossible. All was clamor, violent struggle, and helpless death. Men and women of the highest rank were hurrying on foot, or trampled by the rabble that had then lost all respect of condition. One dense mass of miserable life, irresistible from its weight, crushed by the narrow streets and scorched by the flames over their heads, continued to roll through the gates like an endless stream of black lava.
We now turned back and attempted an entrance through the gardens of some of the villas that skirted the city wall near the Palatine. All were deserted, and after some dangerous bounds over the burning ruins we found ourselves in the streets. The fire had originally broken out on the Palatine, and hot smoke that wrapped and half-blinded us hung thick as night upon the wrecks of pavilions and palaces; but the dexterity and knowledge of my inexplicable guide carried us on. It was in vain that I insisted upon knowing the purpose of this terrible traverse. He pressed his hand on his heart in reassurance of his fidelity, and still spurred on.
We now passed under the shade of an immense range of lofty buildings, whose gloomy and solid strength seemed to bid defiance to chance and time. A sudden scream appalled me.
A ring of fire swept round its summit; burning cordage, sheets of canvas, and a shower of all things combustible flew into the air above our heads. An uproar followed, unlike all that I had ever heard, a hideous mixture of howls, shrieks, and groans. The flames rolled down the narrow street before us and made the passage next to impossible. While we hesitated, a huge fragment of the building heaved, as if in an earthquake, and fortunately for us fell inward. The whole scene of terror was then open.
The great amphitheater of Statilius Taurus had caught fire; the stage with its inflammable furniture was blazing below. The flames were wheeling up, circle above circle, through the seventy thousand seats that rose from the ground to the roof. I stood in unspeakable awe and wonder on the side of this colossal cavern, this mighty temple of the city of fire. At length a descending blast cleared away the smoke that covered the arena. The cause of those horrid cries was now visible. The wild beasts kept for the games had broken from their dens. Maddened by affright and pain, lions, tigers, panthers, wolves, whole herds of the monsters of India and Africa, were enclosed in an impassable barrier of fire. They bounded, they fought, they screamed, they tore; they ran howling round and round the circle; they made desperate leaps upward through the blaze; when flung back, they fell, only to fasten their fangs in each other, and with their parching jaws bathed in blood, die raging.
I looked anxiously to see whether any human being was involved in this fearful catastrophe; but to my relief, I could see none. The keepers and attendants had obviously escaped. As I expressed my gladness I was startled by a loud cry from my guide, the first sound that I had heard him utter. He pointed to the opposite side of the amphitheater. There indeed sat an object of melancholy interest—a man who had either been unable to escape or had determined to die. Escape was now impossible. He sat in desperate calmness on his funeral pile. He was a gigantic Ethiopian slave, entirely naked. He had chosen his place, as if in mockery, on the imperial throne; the fire was above him and around him, and under this tremendous canopy he gazed without the movement of a muscle on the combat of the wild beasts below, a solitary sovereign, with the whole tremendous game played for himself, and inaccessible to the power of man.
I was forced away from this absorbing spectacle, and we once more threaded the long and intricate streets of Rome. As we approached the end of one of those bewildering passages, scarcely wide enough for us to ride abreast, I was startled by the sudden illumination of the sky immediately above, and, rendered cautious by the experience of our hazards, called to my companion to return. He pointed behind me and showed the fire breaking out in the houses by which we had just galloped. I followed on. A crowd that poured from the adjoining streets cut off our retreat. Hundreds rapidly mounted on the houses in front, in the hope by throwing them down to check the conflagration. The obstacle once removed, we saw the source of the light—spectacle of horror! The great prison of Rome, the Mamartine, was on fire.
Never can I forget the sights and sounds—the dismay—the hopeless agony—the fury and frenzy that then overwhelmed all hearts. The jailers had been forced to fly before they could loose the fetters or open the cells of the prisoners. We saw those gaunt and wo-begone wretches crowding to their casements, and imploring impossible help; clinging to the heated bars; toiling with their impotent grasp to tear out the massive stones; some hopelessly wringing their hands; some calling on the terrified spectators, by every name of humanity, to save them; some venting their despair in execrations and blasphemies that made the blood run cold; others, after many a wild effort to break loose, dashing their heads against the walls or stabbing themselves. The people gave them outcry for outcry, but the flame forbade approach. Before I could extricate myself from the multitude, a whirl of fiery ashes shot upward from the falling roof; the walls burst into a thousand fragments, and the huge prison, with all its miserable inmates, was a heap of embers!
Exhausted as I was by this endless fatigue and yet more by the melancholy sights that surrounded every step, no fatigue seemed to be felt by the singular being who governed my movements. He sprang through the burning ruins; he plunged into the sulfurous smoke; he never lost the direction that he had first taken; and tho baffled and forced to turn back a hundred times, he again rushed on his track with the directness of an arrow. For me to make my way back to the gates would be even more difficult than to push forward. My ultimate safety might be in following, and I followed. To stand still and to move seemed equally perilous.
The streets, even with the improvements of Augustus, were still scarcely wider than the breadth of the little Volscian carts that crowded them. They were crooked, long, and obstructed by every impediment of a city built in haste after the burning by the Gauls, and with no other plan than the caprice of its hurried tenantry. The houses were of immense height, chiefly wood, many roofed with thatch, and all covered or cemented with pitch. The true surprise is that it had not been burned once a year from the time of its building. Nero, that hereditary concentration of vice, of whose ancestor’s yellow beard the Roman orator said, “No wonder that his beard was brass, when his mouth was iron and his heart lead,” the parricide and the poisoner, might plausibly exonerate himself of an act which might have been the deed of a drunken mendicant in any of the fifty thousand hovels of this gigantic aggregate of everything that could turn to flame.
We passed along through all the horrid varieties of misery, guilt, and riot that could find their place in a great public calamity; groups gazing in wo on the wreck of their fortunes in vapor and fire; groups plundering in the midst of the flame; crowds of rioters, escaped felons, and murderers, exulting in the public ruin, and dancing and drinking with Bacchanalian uproar; gangs of robbers stabbing the fugitives, to strip them; revenge, avarice, despair, profligacy, let loose naked; undisguised demons, to swell the wretchedness of this tremendous infliction upon a blood-covered empire.
Still we spurred on, but our jaded horses at length sank under us; and leaving them to find their way into the fields, we struggled forward on foot. The air had hitherto been calm, but now gusts began to rise, thunder growled, and the signs of tempest increased. We had gained an untouched quarter of the city, and had pushed our weary passage up to the gates of a large patrician palace, when we were startled by a broad sheet of flame rushing through the sky. The storm had come in its rage.
The range of public magazines of wood, cordage, tar, and oil, in the valley between the Cœlian and Palatine hills, had at length been involved in the conflagration. All that we had seen before was darkness to the fierce splendor of this burning. The tempest tore off the roofs and swept them like floating islands of fire through the sky. The most distant quarters on which they fell were instantly wrapped in flame. One broad mass, whirling from an immense height, broke upon the palace before us. A cry of terror was heard within. The gates were flung open, and a crowd of domestics and persons of both sexes, attired for a banquet, poured into the streets. The palace was wrapped in flame.
My guide then for the first time lost his self-possession. He staggered toward me with the appearance of a man who had received a spear-head in his bosom. I caught him before he fell, but his head sank, his knees bent under him, and his white lips quivered with unintelligible sounds. I could distinguish only the words—“Gone, gone forever!”
The flames had already seized upon the principal floors of the palace, and the volumes of smoke that poured through every window and entrance rendered the attempt to save those still within a work of extreme hazard. But ladders were rapidly placed, ropes were flung, and the activity of the attendants and retainers was boldly exerted, until all were presumed to have been saved and the building was left to burn. My overwhelmed guide was lying on the ground when a sudden scream was heard, and a figure in the robes and with the rosy crown of a banquet—strange contrast to her fearful situation—was seen flying from window to window in the upper part of the mansion. It was supposed that she had fainted in the first terror and been forgotten. The height, the fierceness of the flame, which now completely mastered resistance, the volumes of smoke that suffocated every man who approached, made the chance of saving this unfortunate being utterly desperate in the opinion of the multitude.
I shuddered at the horrors of this desertion. I looked round at my companion; he was kneeling in helpless agony, with his hands lifted up to heaven. Another scream, wilder than ever, pierced my senses. I seized an ax from one of the domestics, caught a ladder from another, and in a paroxysm of hope, fear, and pity scaled the burning wall. A shout from below followed me.
I entered at the first window that I could reach. All before me was cloud. I rushed on, struggled, stumbled over furniture and fragments of all kinds; fell, rose again, found myself trampling upon precious things, plate and crystal; and still, ax in hand, forced my way. I at length reached the apartment where I had seen the figure. It had vanished!
A strange superstition of childhood, a thought that I might have been lured by some spirit of evil into this place of ruin, suddenly came over me. I stopped to gather my faculties. I leaned against one of the pillars—it was hot; the floor shook and cracked under my tread; the walls heaved, the flame hissed below, while overhead roared the whirlwind and burst the thunder-peal.
My brain was fevered by agitation and fatigue. The golden lamps still burning; the long tables disordered, yet glittering with the ornaments of patrician luxury; the Tyrian couches; the scarlet canopy that covered the whole range of the tables, and gave the hall the aspect of an imperial pavilion, partially torn down in the confusion of the flight, all assumed to me a horrid and bewildering splendor. The smoke was already rising through the crevices of the floor; a huge volume of yellow vapor slowly wreathed and arched round the chair at the head of the banquet-table. I could have imaged a fearful lord of the feast under that cloudy veil. Everything round me was marked with preternatural fear, magnificence, and ruin.
A low groan broke my reverie. I heard the broken words:
“Oh, bitter fruit of disobedience! Oh, my father! oh, my mother! shall I never see you again? For one crime I am doomed. Eternal mercy, let my crime be washed away! Let my spirit ascend pure! Farewell, mother, sister, father, husband!”
With the last word I heard a fall, as if the spirit had left the body.
I sprang toward the sound—I met but the solid wall.
“Horrible illusion!” I cried. “Am I mad, or the victim of the powers of darkness?”
I tore away the hangings—a door was before me. I burst it through with a blow of the ax, and saw stretched on the floor, and insensible—Salome!
I caught my child in my arms; I bathed her forehead with my tears; I besought her to look up, to give some sign of life, to hear the full forgiveness of my breaking heart. She looked not, answered not, breathed not. To make a last effort for her life, I carried her into the banquet-room. But the fire had forced its way there; the storm had carried the flame through the long galleries, and spires of lurid light already darting through the doors, gave fearful evidence that the last stone of the palace must soon go down.
I bore my unhappy daughter toward the window, but the height was deadly; no gesture could be seen through the piles of smoke; the help of man was in vain. To my increased misery, the current of air revived Salome at the instant when I hoped that by insensibility she would escape the final pang. She breathed, stood and opening her eyes, fixed on me the vacant stare of one scarcely roused from sleep. Still clasped in my arms she gazed again, but my wild face, covered with dust, my half-burned hair, the ax gleaming in my hand, terrified her; she uttered a scream and darted away from me, headlong into the center of the burning. I rushed after her, calling on her name. A column of fire shot up between us; I felt the floor sink; all was then suffocation—I struggled and fell.
I awoke with a sensation of pain in every limb. A female voice was singing a faint song near me. But the past was like a dream. I involuntarily looked down for the gulf on which I had trod; I looked upward for the burning rafters. I saw nothing but an earthen floor and a low roof hung with dried grapes and herbs. I uttered a cry. The singer approached me. There was nothing in her aspect to nurture a diseased imagination; she was an old and emaciated creature who yet rejoiced in my restoration. She in turn called her husband, a venerable Jew, whose first act was to offer thanksgiving to the God of Israel for the safety of a chief of His nation. But to my inquiries for the fate of my child, he could give no answer; he had discovered me among the ruins of the palace of the Æmilii, to which he, with many of his countrymen, had been attracted, with the object of collecting whatever remnants of furniture might be left by the flames. I had fallen by the edge of a fountain which extinguished the fire in its vicinage, and I was found breathing. During three days I had lain insensible. The Jew now went out and brought back with him some of the elders of our people, who, notwithstanding the decree of the Emperor Claudius, had remained in Rome, tho in increased privacy. I was carried to their house of assemblage, concealed among groves and vineyards beyond the gates, and attended to with a care which might cure all things but the wounds of the mind. On the great object of my solicitude, the fate of my Salome, I could obtain no relief. I wandered over the site of the palace; it was now a mass of ashes and charcoal; its ruins had been probed by hundreds; but search for even a trace of what would have been to me dearer than a mountain of gold, was in vain.
The conflagration continued for six days, and every day of the number gave birth to some monstrous report of its origin. Of the fourteen districts of Rome, but four remained. Thousands had lost their lives, tens of thousands were utterly undone; the whole empire shook under the blow. Then came the still deeper horror.
Fear makes the individual feeble, but it makes the multitude ferocious. A universal cry arose for revenge. Great public misfortunes give the opportunity that the passions of men and sects love, and the fiercest crimes of selfishness are justified under the name of retribution.
But the full calamity burst on the Christians, then too new to have fortified themselves in the national prejudices, if they would have suffered the alliance; too poor to reckon on any powerful protectors; and too uncompromising to palliate their scorn of the whole public system of morals, philosophy, and religion. The Emperor, the priesthood, and the populace conspired against them, and they were ordered to the slaughter.
I too had my stimulants to hatred. Where was I? In exile, in desperate hazard; I had been torn from home, robbed of my child, made miserable by the fear of apostasy in my house; and by whom was this comprehensive evil done? The name of Christian was gall to me. I heard of the popular vengeance, and called it justice; I saw the distant fires in which the Christians were being consumed, and calculated how many each night of those horrors would subtract from the guilty number. Man becomes cruel by the sight of cruelty, and when thousands and hundreds of thousands were shouting for vengeance; when every face looked fury, and every tongue was wild with some new accusation; when the great and the little, the philosopher and the ignorant, raised up one roar of reprobation against the Christian, was the solitary man of mercy to be looked for in one bleeding from head to foot with wrongs irreparable?
On one of those dreadful nights, I was gazing from the housetop on the fire forcing its way through the remaining quarters, the melancholy gleams through the country showing the extent of the flight, and in the midst of the blackened and dreary wastes of Rome, the spots of livid flame where the Christians were perishing at the pile, when I was summoned to a consultation below.
A Jew had just brought an imperial edict proclaiming pardon of all offenses to the discoverer of Christians. I would not have purchased my life by the life of a dog. But my safety was important to the Jewish cause, and I was pressed on every side by arguments on the wisdom, nay, the public duty, of accepting freedom on any terms. And what was to be the price?—the life of criminals long obnoxious to the laws and now stained beyond mercy. I loathed delay; I loathed Rome; I was wild to return to the great cause of my country, which never could have a fairer hope than now. An emissary was sent out; money soon effected the discovery of a Christian assemblage; I appeared before the prætor with my documents, and brought back in my hand the imperial pardon, given with the greater good will as the assemblage chanced to comprehend the chiefs of the heresy. They were seized, ordered forthwith to the pile, and I was commanded to be present at this completion of my national service.
The executions were in the gardens of the imperial palace, which had been thrown open by Nero for the double purpose of popularity and of indulging himself with the display of death at the slightest personal inconvenience. The crowd was prodigious, and to gratify the greatest possible number at once, those murders were carried on in different parts of the gardens. In the vineyard, a certain portion were to be crucified; in the orangery, another portion were to be burned; in the pleasure-ground, another portion were to be torn by lions and tigers; gladiators were to be let loose, and when the dusk came on, the whole of the space was to be lighted by human torches, Christians wrapped in folds of linen covered with pitch and bitumen, and thus burning down from the head to the ground.
I was horror-struck, but escape was now impossible, and I must go through the whole hideous round. With my flesh quivering, my ears ringing, my eyes dim, I was forced to see miserable beings, men—nay women, nay infants—sewed up in skins of beasts, and hunted and torn to pieces by dogs; old men, whose hoary hairs might have demanded reverence of savages, scourged, racked, and nailed to the trees to die; lovely young females, creatures of guileless hearts and innocent beauty, flung on flaming scaffolds. And this was the work of man, civilized man, in the highest civilization of the arts, the manners, and the learning of the pagan world!
But the grand display was prepared for the time when those Christians who had been denounced on my discovery were to be executed; an exhibition at which the Emperor himself announced his intention to be present. The great Circus was no more, but a temporary amphitheater had been erected, in which the usual games were exhibited during the early part of the day. At the hour of my arrival, the low bank circling this immense enclosure was filled with the first names of Rome—knights, patricians, senators, military tribunes, consuls; the Emperor alone was wanting to complete the representative majesty of the empire. I was to form a part of the ceremony, and the guard who had me in charge cleared the way to a conspicuous place, where my national dress fixed every eye on me. Several Christians had perished before my arrival. Their remains lay on the ground, and in their midst stood the man who was to be the next victim.[29] By what influence I know not, but never did I see a human being who made on me so deep an impression. I have him before me at this instant.
The victims had been generally offered life for recantation, and this man was giving his reply. I see the figure: low, yet with an air of nobleness; stooped a little with venerable age, but the countenance full of life, and marked with all the traits of intellectual power; the strongly aquiline nose, the bold lip, the large and rapid eye; the whole man conveying the idea of an extraordinary permanence of early vigor under the weight of labor or of years. Even the hair was thick and black, with scarcely a touch of silver. If the place and time were Athens and the era of Demosthenes, I should have said that Demosthenes stood before me. The vivid action; the flashing rapidity with which he seized a new idea, and compressed it to his purpose; the impetuous argument that, throwing off the formality of logic, smote with the strength of a new fact, were Demosthenic. Even a certain infirmity of utterance, and an occasional slight difficulty of words, added to the likeness; but there was a hallowed glance and a solemn yet tender reach of thought interposed among those intense appeals that asserted the sacred superiority of the subject and the man. He was already speaking when I reached the scene of terrors. I can give but an outline of his language.