F. W. Farrar

“ On all sides, in the Roman amphitheatre and in the Roman streets, you saw faces which were cruel, and proud, and seamed with every evil passion; faces cunning, and sly, and leering, and degraded; the slavish faces of those who were slaves in soul, and the ignoble faces of those whom an ignoble society had cowed by its terror and degraded by its vice. Even in the Senate you saw noble lineaments on which servility, and care, and a life spent under tyrants and in households where every slave might be a potential enemy, had impressed the stamp of gloom and fear. ”

“ That design was the elevation of her Nero, at the first possible moment, to the throne whose dizzy steps were so slippery with blood.
In the achievement of her purpose no question of right and wrong for a moment troubled her. Guilt hid no horror for that fair woman. She had long determined that neither the stings of conscience nor the fear of peril should stop her haughty course. To her, as to most of the women of high rank in the Rome of the Empire, crime was nothing from which to shrink, and virtue was but an empty name. Philosophers she knew talked of virtue. ”

“ The fountains were plashing musically into marble and alabaster basins. Between rows of statues, the work of famed artificers, were crowded the glad and obsequious throngs of the rejoicing house.
Agrippina was seated on a gilded chair of state at the farther end of the hall, her arms resting on the wings of the two sphinxes by which it was supported. She was dressed in the chlamys, woven of cloth of gold, in which Pliny saw her when she had dazzled the spectators as she sat by the side of Claudius in the great festival at the opening of the Emissarium of the Fucine Lake. ”

“ He felt a painful dread lest any of his friends—above all, lest Acte, or Pudens, or Titus, or Junia—should see him in this wretched and disgraceful guise. No one, however, saw him, and that evening he was safely lodged in the slave-jail attached to Nero’s villa at Antium.
The slave-jail was a perfect hell on earth. It presented the spectacle of human beings in their worst aspect, entirely dehumanised by despair and misery. The slaves who were imprisoned there were treated like wild beasts, and became no better than wild beasts, with less of rage but more of malice and foulness. ”

“ No one is jealous of you. When I see you on the stage, moving the people at your will to tears or to laughter, or kindling them to the most delicious emotions—when I hear the roar of applause which greets you as you stand forth in all your grace, and make the huge theatre ring with your fine penetrating voice, I often wish we could change our parts, and I be the actor, and you the Emperor.’
‘You mock a poor mummer, Cæsar,’ said Paris; ‘but if I am to amuse you after the banquet to-night you must let me go and arrange something with Aliturus.’
Nero was left alone with Tigellinus. ”

“ Was it the people who had broken into sedition? Not at all. It was only the clientage and varletry of Octavia who had dared to assume the people’s name. If they had but found a leader, who could say whether Nero might not by this time have been a fugitive or a mangled corpse?
‘The tumult has been aimed at you,’ she cried, ‘not at me. What harm have I done to any one, that they should hate me? Do they hate me because I shall give Cæsar a genuine heir? Do they prefer the offspring of Octavia and some Egyptian flute-player? Be a man, Nero! ”

“ A tall fine fellow like you is just the gladiator whom the Roman ladies like to look at, and they won’t have you killed in your first fight. But as for me—a mere Phrygian slave!—Yes, Glanydon, to-morrow your short sword will perhaps be red with my blood.’
‘Never!’ said Glanydon. ‘I will fight because I must, and will do my best; and when my blood is up I might kill you or any other opponent in the blind heat of the combat; but as for slaughtering in cold blood I could not do it—least of all could I murder the friend I love.’
‘You won’t be able to help yourself, Glanydon. ”

“ How unlike was that ghastly relic to the head whose dark locks had been wreathed with emeralds!
And Domitia Lepida, her sister-in-law, the mother of the Empress Messalina, the aunt of her son Nero, the former wife of her own husband, Crispus Passienus? She was wealthy as herself, beautiful as herself, noble as herself, unscrupulous as herself. She might have been a powerful ally, but how dared she to compete for the affections of Nero? How dared she to be indulgent when Agrippina was severe? The boy had been brought up in her house when his father was dead and his mother an exile. ”

“ The soul of Onesimus was harrowed as he gazed on that awful insult to humanity. The existence of crucifixion showed how far the shadow had advanced on the dial-plate of Rome’s history. That form of punishment—so cynical, so ruthless, so abhorrent, which less than three centuries later was to be abolished by the indignation of mankind—had been not indigenous in the Western world. It had only been borrowed by Rome, in the days of her commencing corruption, from the dark and cruel East. That such a spectacle should be permitted to the gaze of women and little children ”

“ She upbraided him with his unmanliness; she contrasted him unfavourably with Britannicus; she told him that he was more fit to be an actor of melodrama, or a tenth-rate charioteer, or a fiftieth-rate singer, than to be the Emperor of Rome.
‘To think,’ she said, raising her voice almost to a scream, as he sat before her in sullen silence—‘to think that the blood of the Domitii and of the Neros and of the Cæsars is in your veins! You an emperor! Yes; an emperor of pantomime! You have nothing of the Roman, much less of the ruler, nay, not even of the man, in you. Who made you Emperor? ”

“ There were points in it which might perhaps have touched the heart of Nero if Poppæa and Tigellinus had not been at his elbow as the evil genii of his degradation. But, when the tablets of Octavia came, Nero was sitting with the enchantress. Taking them out of his hands, she turned the letter into such ridicule, and laughed over it so sweetly and so immoderately, and mixed her silvery laughter with so many acts of fascination, that the fear of her ridicule—to which, like all vain persons, Nero was inordinately sensitive—quenched in his heart all thoughts of mercy. ”

“ Others in raging defiance, seeing themselves reduced to penury by the loss of all they possessed, or with hearts lacerated by the death of their beloved, leapt madly into the flames. Rome during all that week was a pandemonium of horror, in which, amid shrieks and yells and every sound of ruin, were witnessed the wrath of the elements, the passions of devils, and tragedies of despair, and anguish which no heart can conceive, no tongue describe.
At the first news that Rome was in flames, and that they were already approaching his Domus Transitoria, Nero hurried back from Antium. ”

“ We pass over many a tragic scene in silence, but we cannot escape from this long death-agony of a Paganism which poisoned the world with its dying breath before its corpse was swept aside by Christianity. The wild beast who had dipped his foot in the blood of the saints, and made the tongue of his dogs red through the same, was now bathing in the noblest blood of Rome. The world was in a condition truly horrible, and there were all kinds of portents and physical disasters, as though Nature sympathised with the birth-throes of the coming age. ”

“ There are those for whom death is more merciful than life, and I did not come here to bewail my own bereavements.’
‘I pleaded for your boy, Pomponia—indeed, I did. I deigned to prostrate myself before Nero that he would not injure him, that he would not have him slain. Would you believe that I—I, the Empress,—have fears lest something evil should be done to my young Rufius?’
‘May Heaven protect his youth!’ said Pomponia. ‘If it will be any comfort to you I will see him, and ask him to our palace. My husband is kind to all the young, and will love him for the sake of his own lost boy. ”

“ I cannot bear to enter a friend’s house and hear it clanking with chains and ringing with yells, like an ergastulum.’
‘Petronius is the soul of good nature,’ said Cassius Longinus; ‘but I pity Rome if those maudlin views prevail.’
‘Yes,’ echoed the fierce Cingonius Varro; ‘so many slaves so many foes. We nobles live all our lives in a sort of beleaguered garrison. If the Senate does not do its duty, I shall emigrate.’
‘Who makes our slaves our foes?’ answered Seneca. ‘Mine are not. Most of them are faithful to me. They are my humble friends. I believe they love me. ”

“ Wandering down the rocky bed of the stream sacred to Egeria, Onesimus had seen the shrine, and had wondered why the trees around it were hung with so many gay woollen streamers, and so many votive tablets; and why women came to it from Rome with garlands on their heads and torches in their hands; and why they treated the priest with so much reverence.
Surely the man’s life was a ghastly one, with a murder on his conscience and a murderer on his track! Yet a terrible purpose gradually fixed itself in the mind of Onesimus. He persuaded himself that he was utterly God-forsaken ”

“ Nero was more than three years his senior, and in superficial qualities and graces outshone him; but keen observers whispered that though Britannicus could not sing or paint or drive a chariot like his stepbrother, and was less fascinating in manner and appearance, he would far surpass Nero in all manly and Roman virtues. The heart of Octavia was full of unspeakable misgivings. Motherless, unloved, neglected, she had known no aspect of life except its tragedy, and none had as yet taught her any possible region in which to look for comfort under the burden of the intolerable mystery. ”

“ But, Octavia, something—some voice like that of a god within me—tells me that it will be happier to die than to live.’
That evening, when Tigellinus left him, Nero first realised, with a start of horror, that he was on the eve of a fearful crime. By a rare accident he was alone. One of the reasons why he knew so little of himself was that he scarcely ever endured a moment’s solitude. From the time that he awoke in the morning till the latest hour of his nightly revels, he was surrounded by flatterers and favourites, by dissolute young nobles or adoring slaves. ”

“ For Paul did not in the least fear him, and Paul’s courage was so marvellous to those who were accustomed to the pusillanimity of senators, who went away and committed suicide if Nero did but frown at them, that the courtiers and soldiers turned their eyes from the purple of the world’s master to gaze upon the rags of this sick prisoner who stood there with his pale countenance, his stooping figure and thin sable-silvered hair, more dauntless in chains, and under the axe of doom, than the Emperor amid his guards. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ To be an actor, to be a public singer—that seemed to him to be the culmination of earthly bliss. Nothing would satisfy his burning caprice but to appear before the multitude as Paris and Aliturus did. But he dared not as yet insult the majesty of Rome with the spectacle of a stage Augustus, and therefore determined to sing first before an enchanted provincial audience, and thence to proceed to Greece, not displaying himself in the theatre of the capital till he could return as a victor in the Olympic and Pythian games. ”

“ And Nereus came not to see him. He distrusted him, as he thought of all the crimes through which he must have fallen, from the position of a Christian brother, into such a sink of degradation as a gladiators’ school.
Lonely, disgraced, abandoned, in deadly peril of his life from a hundred sources if once he should be recognised, prostrated by weakness, often suffering torments from the pain of wounds which as yet were but half healed, Onesimus sank deeper and deeper into despair. Repentance and the love of God may often grow in the midst of adversity, like some Alpine gentian amid the snows ”

“ But Pomponia is a Christian, and Claudia, the fairest maiden in Rome. Whether they hold truth or falsehood I know not, but if religion has anything to do with goodness there seems to be no religion like theirs.’
‘Britannicus,’ she answered, ‘like you, I am deeply interested in all that Pomponia has told me; but I will tell you what has struck me most. Nero, and Seneca, and Agrippina, and all the rest of them, are full of misery and despair, though they are rich, and praised, and powerful; but these Christians, on the other hand, are paupers, hated, persecuted—and yet happy. ”