CHAPTER XI ‘A FOREIGN SUPERSTITION’

‘Quos, per flagitia invisos, vulgus Christianos appellabat.’—Tacitus, Ann. xv. 44.

The young son of Claudius, burdened as he was by a sense of wrong, was not only cheered by the kindness of the conqueror of Britain, but had been deeply interested in all that he had heard from his high-minded wife. Pomponia had warned him that to mention the subject of their conversation might needlessly imperil her life, and to no one did he venture to say a word on the subject except to Pudens. It struck him that in the words and bearing of the handsome young soldier there was something not unlike the moral sincerity which he admired and loved in Pomponia Græcina.

‘Pudens,’ he said to him the next morning, when Titus was absent, ‘what do you think of the Christians?’

Pudens started; but, recovering himself, he said, coldly, ‘The Christians in Rome are humble and persecuted. Most persons confuse them with the Jews, but many Jews are nobler specimens than the beggars on the bridges, and many Christians are not Jews at all.’

‘Are they such wretches as men say?’

‘No, Britannicus, they are not. A man may call himself a Christian, and be a bad man; but it is so perilous to be a Christian that most of them are perfectly sincere. They preach innocence, and they practise it. You know well enough that the air is full of lies, and certainly not one-tenth part of what is said of the Christians has in it the least truth.’

The time had not yet come for Pudens to avow that his Claudia had been secretly baptised by an early missionary in Britain, as Pomponia had been in Gaul; and that he himself was beginning seriously to study the doctrines of the hated sect.

But the next time Britannicus was able to visit Pomponia, he asked her if there were any Christian books which he might read.

‘There are the old Jewish books,’ said Pomponia, ‘which Christians regard as sacred, and which a few Romans have read out of curiosity, for they were translated into Greek nearly four hundred years ago. But they are rare, and it is not easy to get them. And even if you read them, there is much in them which we Romans cannot understand.’

‘But has no Christian written anything?’

‘Scarcely anything,’ she said. ‘You know the Christians are mostly very poor, and some of them quite illiterate. But there is a great Christian teacher named Paulus of Tarsus, and many who have heard him preach in Ephesus and in Philippi, and even in Athens and Corinth, say that his words are like things of life. My friend Sergius Paulus, the late Proconsul of Cyprus, has met him, and spoke of him with enthusiastic reverence. He has written nothing as yet except two short letters to the Christians in Thessalonica. They are only casual letters, and do not enter into the life of Jesus the Christ, or the general belief of Christians. But I have them here, and will read parts of them to you if you like.’

She read to him the opening salutation, and on his expressing astonishment that he could join ‘much affliction’ with ‘joy,’ she explained to him that this was the divine paradox of all Christianity, in which sorrow never destroyed joy, but sometimes brought out a deeper joy, even as there are flowers which pour forth their sweetest perfumes in the midnight.

Then she read him the exhortations to purity and holiness,22 and asked him ‘whether that sounded like the teaching of men who practised the evil deeds of which the Christians were accused by the popular voice.’

He sat silent, and she read him the passage about the coming day of the Lord, and the sons of light, and the armour of righteousness.23 Lastly, she read him the concluding part of the Second Letter, with its exhortations to diligence and order.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘that in one passage Paulus may perhaps refer in a mysterious way to your father, the late Emperor. He is speaking of the coming of some lawless tyrant and enemy of God before the day of the Lord; and he adds, “only he who letteth will let, until he be taken away.”’

‘The Greek words ὁ κατέχων,’ she said, ‘might be rendered in Latin qui claudit. The Christians are so surrounded by enemies that they are sometimes obliged to express themselves in cryptograms, and Linus tells me that some Christians see in the words qui claudit an allusion to your father, Claudius. If so, Paulus seems to think that the day of the Lord’s return is very near.’

The young prince, though he had but a dim sense of what some of the phrases meant, was struck with what he had heard. There was something in the morality more vivid and more searching than anything which Epictetus had reported, or than Sosibius had read to him out of Zeno and Chrysippus. And besides the high morality there were tones which caused a more thrilling chord to vibrate within him than anything of which he had yet dreamed. The morality seemed to be elevated to a purer region of life and hope, and, in spite of the strange style, to be transfused through and through with a divine emotion.

‘And these,’ he said, ‘are the men whom they charge with every kind of atrocity! Surely, Pomponia, the world is rife with lies! Would it be too dangerous for you to let me see and speak to some of the Christian teachers? You might disguise me; it is quite easy. Even Pudens need not know; he never feels dull,’ he added with a smile, ‘if he may talk to Claudia, who is staying with you now.’

‘There was an excellent Jewish workman here named Aquila of Pontus,’ she said. ‘You might have talked to him, but he left Rome when the Jews were banished in your father’s days. He used to mend the awning over the viridarium, and those which kept the sun from blazing too hotly into our Cyzicene room.24 He sometimes brought with him his still more excellent wife, Prisca. They knew Paulus, and said that he had promised some day to come to Rome. I am obliged to be very careful; but perhaps you can speak to Linus, who is the Elder of the Christians in Rome.’

‘But, Pomponia, the Christians believe, you tell me, in a leader named Jesus; is he the same as Christus or Chrestos?’

‘He is.’

‘Is there any one in Rome who has seen him?’

‘He was put to death,’ said Pomponia, bowing her head, ‘more than twenty years ago, when Tiberius was Emperor. But His disciples, who lived with Him, whom He called Apostles or messengers, were many of them young men, and they are living still.’

‘Had Paulus of Tarsus ever seen him?’

‘In heavenly vision, yes; but not when He was teaching in Palestine. But there was one disciple whom He loved very dearly, and who is now living in Jerusalem, though Agrippa I. beheaded his elder brother. Perhaps he may some day come to Rome.’

‘But you, Pomponia, must have heard much about Christus. Tell me, then, something about him. How could a Judæan peasant be, as you say Jesus was, divine?’

‘Self-sacrifice for the sake of others is always divine,’ said Pomponia. ‘Even in Greek mythology the gods assume the likeness of men in order to help and deliver them. Does not the poet tell us how Apollo once kept, as a slave, the oxen of Admetus? how Hercules was the servant of Eurystheus? how Jupiter came to visit Baucis and Philemon? Is it so strange that the God of all should reveal Himself to man as man? Doubtless you have read with your tutor the grandest play of Æschylus—the “Prometheus Bound.” Does not the poet there sing that Prometheus, who is the type of humanity, can never be delivered until some god descends for him into the black depths of Tartarus? And does not Plato say that man will never know God until He has revealed Himself in the guise of suffering man; and that “when all is on the verge of destruction, God sees the distress of the universe, and, placing himself at the rudder, restores it to order”?25 And does not Seneca teach that man cannot save himself?26 Seneca even says, “Do you wonder that men go to the gods? God comes to men—yea, even into men.” No one laughs at such thoughts in the most popular of our philosophers; why should they laugh at Christians for believing them?’

‘But what made his disciples believe that Christus was a Son of God?’ he asked.

Sitting quietly there, she told him, that day, of the Jews as the people who had kept alive for centuries the knowledge of the one true God; of their age-long hopes of a Deliverer; of their prophecies; and of the coming of the Baptist. On his next visit she told him of Jesus, and read to him parts of one of the old sketches of His ministry which were current, in the form of notes and fragments, among Christians who had heard the preaching of Peter or other Apostles. Lastly, she told him some of His miracles, and the story of His death and resurrection. ‘He spake,’ she said, ‘as never man spake. He did what man never did. Above all, He rose from the dead the third day. Even the centurion who watched the crucifixion returned to Jerusalem and said, “Truly this was a Son of God!”’

Britannicus felt almost stunned by the rush of new emotions. His mind, like that of most boys of his age at Rome, was almost a blank as regards any belief in the old mythology. In Stoicism he had found some half-truths which attracted his Roman nature; but its doctrines were stern, and proud, and harshly repressive of feelings which he felt to be natural and not ignoble. Here, at last, in Christianity, he heard truths which, while they elevated the character of man even to heaven—while they kindled his aspirations and fortified his endurance—were suited also to soothe, to calm, to console. He had heard them to the best advantage. They had been told him, not by lips of untaught slaves and humble workmen, but by the noblest of Roman matrons. She spoke in Latin worthy of the best days of Cicero, and adorned all she said not only by the sweetness of her voice and the grace of her language, but also by her broad sympathies and her cultivated intelligence. Most of all, her words came weighty with the consistency of a life which, in comparison with that of the women around her, shone like a star in the darkness. It was this beauty of holiness which won him first and most. He saw it in Pudens, whom he suspected of stronger Christian leanings than he had acknowledged. He saw it conspicuously in Claudia,

‘A flower of meekness on a stem of grace,’

before whose beautiful personality the tinsel compliments of her many admirers seemed to sink into shamed silence. The precocious maidens of the great consular families hated Claudia because, in her white and simple dress, and her long natural fair hair, unadorned by a single flower or gem, she outshone their elaborate beauty. Yet they saw, and were astonished to see, that no youth—not even an Otho or a Petronius or any of the most hardened libertines—dared to speak a light word to one who looked as chaste as ‘the consecrated snow on Dian’s lap.’

Britannicus did not venture to breathe a word to Titus of a secret which was not his own; but there was one person from whom he could have no secret, and that was the young Empress, his sister Octavia. When he could be secure that no spy was at hand, that no ear was listening at the door, that no eye was secretly watching him, he would talk to her with wonder and admiration of all that he had heard. She was no less impressed than he, and without venturing to embrace the new faith, both sister and brother found a vague source of hope and strength in what they had learnt from Pomponia. To them it was like a faint rose of dawn, seen from a dark valley, shining far off upon the summit of icy hills. And as they learnt more of what the Gospel meant, and learnt even to pour forth dim prayer into the unknown, they were able to discover, by certain signs, that not a few of the slaves in the household of Cæsar—Patrobas, Eubulus, Philologus, Tryphæna, and others—were secret Christians. The manner in which they discovered that these slaves were Christians was very simple. Pomponia, implicitly trusting the young Cæsar, had ventured to teach him the Greek Christian watchword, Ἰχθύς, ‘fish.’27 The brother and sister found that if, in the presence of several slaves, they brought in this word in any unusual manner, a slave who was a Christian would at once, if only for a second, glance quickly up at them. When they had thus assured themselves of the religion of a few of their attendants, whom they invariably found to be the most upright and trustworthy, they would repeat the word again, in a lower voice and a more marked manner, when they passed them; and if the slave in reply murmured low the word ἰχθύδιον or pisciculus (i. e. little fish), they no longer felt in doubt. The use which they made of their knowledge was absolutely innocent. Often they did not say a word more on the subject to their slaves and freedmen. Only they knew that, among the base instruments of a wicked tyranny by whom they were on every side surrounded, there was at least a presumption that these would be guilty of no treacherous or dishonourable deed.

And thus, while Agrippina was growing daily more furious and discontented; while Seneca and Burrus were plunged into deeper and deeper anxieties; while Pætus Thrasea, and Musonius, and Cornutus found it more and more necessary to entrench themselves in the armour of a despairing fortitude; while Nero was sinking lower and lower into the slough of vice—Octavia and Britannicus began to draw nearer to the Unknown God, and found that when the sea of calamity does not mingle its bitter waters with the sea of guilt, calamity itself might be full of divine alleviations. Agrippina and Nero were provoked by their appearance and bearing. The last thing which they would have suspected was that the Christianity which, in common with all Rome, they regarded as an execrable superstition, should have found its way into patrician circles—should even have met with favourable acceptance under the roof of the Cæsars. When they saw the disinherited Britannicus playing ball in the tennis-court, or beating his young fellow-pupils in races in the gardens, or wrestling not unsuccessfully with the sturdy and ruddy Titus, they were astonished to think that a boy who had been robbed of all his rights should be poor spirited enough to throw himself into enjoyments in which his merry and musical laugh often rang out louder than that of any of his companions. What hope or what consolation could sustain him? They jealously fancied that some plot must be afoot; but suspicion was disarmed by the boy’s transparent frankness and innocence of manner. And Octavia—they treated her as a nullity; they permitted themselves to indulge in every sneer and slight which they could devise. More than once Nero, fresh from some revel and lost to shame, had seized her by her long, dark tresses, or struck her with his brutal hand. Yet no passionate murmur had betrayed her resentment. What could be the secret of a beatitude which no misfortunes seemed wholly able to destroy?