CHAPTER LV TWO MARTYRDOMS

‘And as the Apostle, on the hill

Facing the Imperial town,

First gazed upon his fair domain,

Then on the Cross lay down:

So thou, from out the streets of Rome

Didst turn thy failing eye

Unto that mount of martyrdom,

Take leave of it, and die.’

Newman.

‘... aut crucibus affixi, aut flammandi.’—Tac. Ann. xv. 44.

The Apostle Peter, whose friends were chiefly among the Jewish Christians, went to his humble quarters across the Tiber, where Miriam, a Jewish widow, had provided a lodging for him, his wife Plautilla, and his daughter Petronilla. If he had held his life dear unto himself, he would have left Rome without delay, or only have walked out at night and in secrecy. So long as he stayed in the Trastevere, it was not likely that the myrmidons of Tigellinus could find out his hiding-place. But this he would not do. The restless energy of his character rendered inaction impossible to him, and a voice ever rang in his ears from the lilied fields of Galilee, ‘I was hungry, and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; naked, and ye clothed me: sick and in prison, and ye visited me.... And inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto Me.’ He asked Miriam’s son to guide him to the prisons, and spent the whole day among his suffering brethren. Wherever he went, his presence was to them as the sunlight, and the most wavering could not but be confirmed by his calm wisdom, his genial tenderness, and the lessons which he so freely imparted to them from his personal memories of the Divine Example. It needed money to secure admission into their places of confinement, and Aliturus and Pomponia had seen that sufficient was provided for all his needs. But the inevitable result followed. The jailors noticed the tumult of joy which hailed his presence, and saw that he was some great leader among the Christians. Tigellinus had given orders that the ringleaders of the baleful superstition should be seized, and especially those whom they called Apostles. His emissaries, listening to the conversations of the Christians among themselves, were not long in ascertaining that this was Peter of Bethsaida, and that in securing him and John they would have seized two chief personages of the entire Christian community throughout the world, and two who had been personal friends and followers of the Crucified founder of the sect. Before evening the spies had ascertained the quarter of the city where Peter was lodged.

It was from Simon the Sorcerer that Tigellinus learnt who Peter was, and how important was the place which he filled in the new community. This miserable impostor—the father of all heresies—had won himself wealth and power, and something not far short of adoration, not only in Samaria, but in many kingdoms. It was owing to his detestable machinations that Drusilla, the sister of Agrippa, had been persuaded to desert her husband, King Azizus of Emesa, and to become the mistress of Felix, brother of Pallas, who, by his brother’s influence, had risen from a slave to be Procurator of Judæa, and the husband, or lover, of three queens. Simon had now come to Rome to push his fortunes, and his keen eye had caught sight of the Apostle in the streets. He had set a savage dog upon him, which instantly became gentle when the Apostle laid his hand upon its head. He was afraid of his counter-influence, and still remembered with burning wrath the old days when Peter, shaming him before his Samaritan votaries, had overwhelmed him with the apostrophe, ‘Thy money perish with thee!’ He gave immediate notice to Tigellinus that the leading Christian was in Rome. He felt more secure in his attempted miracles and professed inspiration, when Peter was in prison, and he was left unchecked to dupe the Emperor or the gullible women of the Roman aristocracy.

That evening there was a little meeting of Jewish Christians who had met together in the house of Rufus and Alexander, sons of Simon of Cyrene, to eat the Supper of the Lord. The meeting was surprised, and many were thrown into bonds. But Rufus, at the first sound of alarm, hurried the Apostle to his lodging by a path at the back of the house. Before they reached it, Miriam’s son, Nazarius, a bright and active boy, met them with the warning that his mother’s house had been seized; but that Plautilla and Petronilla, being unknown, had taken refuge in the house of the Samaritan Thallus. The weeping Christians entreated Peter to fly from Rome while there yet was time: for the brethren at Rome he could do nothing more; to stay among them meant death, and his life was sorely needed by the Church of God. Overcome by their entreaties, and those of his wife and daughter, he started at the grey dawn with the young Nazarius for his guide, and proceeded about two miles on the Appian Way. There, as Nazarius afterwards described the scene, a light seemed to shine round them; the Apostle stopped as if amazed, fell on his knees with uplifted hands, spoke earnest words, and then, with wet eyes, said, ‘We must return, my boy. It is the will of Christ.’ To him he said no more; but he afterwards told his fellow-Apostle that (near the spot where now stands the little church of ‘Domine quo vadis’?) he had seen a vision of Christ walking towards Rome, and bearing His Cross. ‘Whither goest thou, Lord?’ he asked, in amazement. ‘I go to Rome,’ He said, ‘to be crucified again.’ ‘Lord, I return,’ said the Apostle, ‘to be crucified with Thee.’ And the Vision smiled upon him, and vanished.

So Peter went back with the boy to the house of Thallus, and next day began to visit the prisons once more. Seeking for Miriam to console her, and tell her of the safety of her son, he found that she was a prisoner. He had hardly entered the first dungeon when he was roughly arrested, and carried off to the rock-hewn Tullianum. He was chained to the floor beside his brother-Apostle John, in that damp and dreary vault. There King Jugurtha, before he was strangled, had complained so bitterly of the cold; there the brave Gaulish patriot, Vercingetorix, had been led aside from Julius Cæsar’s triumph to pay the forfeit of his life; there the Catilinarian conspirators, Lentulus and Cethegus, had expiated their crimes. Fervently did the Apostles embrace one another, and between the two there blossomed up reminiscences of early days, infinitely tender and sacred. They talked of the summer hours when they had played in boyhood on the strip of silver sand beside the limpid lake at Bethsaida; of the fisherboats, and draughts of fish, and straining nets, in the years when they were partners together; of bright Capernaum, with its marble synagogue, throwing its white reflection on the waves lit with the rose of eventide; of the green hills beyond, with the naked demoniacs among the tombs. Then they spoke of the time when they had gone with Andrew and Nathanael to see the prophet of the wilderness, whose notes of warning had made the flinty echoes ring with the preaching of repentance. Then, with hushed voices, in regions of sacred thought where we may not follow them, they spoke of the days of the Son of Man.

They who looked down into that vault from the upper aperture would have seen a rocky chamber, lighted only by one iron lamp, bare of all but the merest necessaries. The prisoners had nothing but a water jar, and two wooden seats, and mats upon the rocky floor, on which at night they could stretch their cramped and wearied limbs, and which Pomponia had bribed the jailor for permission to supply. And in this cell would have been seen two men of Jewish aspect and poor clothing, of whom the elder had exceeded man’s threescore years and ten, and the younger was long past life’s prime. Chilly, and in chains, and fed only on bread and water, and the leaders of a cause on which the world poured its most passionate execration they yet felt perfect trust in God. With Emperor and mob alike arrayed against them, and with hundreds of their brethren in the same evil case, and with death in its ghastliest form striding visibly upon them, amid what looked like the extreme of uttermost failure—might not even their enemies have pitied them? Pity? Nay, Nero might have given all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them, and Seneca have bartered all his wisdom and his wealth, for one hour of their radiant serenity, of their unshaken peace!

In the evening the jailor, Martinianus—who had been so much touched by their bearing, and by all that he had heard from them as they talked, that he was already in heart almost a Christian—came full of sorrow, to tell them that on the morrow they should die. To his amazement a light as of heaven dawned upon their faces, and they turned and looked on each other with a smile. They asked him in what way they were to suffer. He either was uninformed or shrank from telling them, and they were content that the morrow should reveal it.

‘I knew it, my brother, I knew it,’ said Peter. ‘Again and again a Voice has repeated in my dreams, “Verily I say to thee, When thou wast young thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.” And I am not troubled that I know not yet by what death I shall glorify God. But thou, my brother, shalt not die yet.’

‘How that may be I know not,’ replied the other, deeply musing. ‘But to us to live is to die. Said He not, “He who is near Me is near the fire; he who is far from Me is far from the kingdom”?’

The jailer had told them truly. The execution of the Christians was to be hurried on with all speed, for Nero had on hand the weighty business of supervising the reconstruction of his capital and of his Golden House. He could only recover the popularity necessary for these undertakings by sacrificing a holocaust of victims to assuage the popular suspicions. And the most diabolic feature of this massacre of the innocent was to be that they were not only to be slain, but that their tortures were to subserve the amusement of the people. The solemn moment of each Christian’s death was to be the motive for delighted acclamations and shouts of laughter—in which, surely, all the demons joined! To any feelings less exalted, to any hope less fervent than theirs, it would have been the most intolerable aggravation to die amid pagan pageants and brutal idleness, insulted by bacchanalia of revelry and sanguinary pomp.

But the inventiveness of cruelty which Tigellinus and Nero studied and planned together amid the faint, unavailing remonstrances of Poppæa, had to be hastened, for the special reason that already their victims were beginning to escape them fast through the narrow gate of death. Owing to the suffocating atmosphere of over-peopled prisons in the malarious autumn air, a dangerous form of typhoid had broken out among the Christians. Not a few had died, robbed, as they feared, of the crown of martyrdom. It had required all the wisdom and tenderness of their fellows to persuade them that they had deserved no less than others the longed-for amaranth, and that they would not be losers by not surviving until that second coming which many of them were expecting from hour to hour. Tigellinus was not more anxious to bestow than they to receive the death of violence. All Nero’s aims would be frustrated, if, with so great a multitude of victims ready for them, the wild beasts of the amphitheatre, human as well as animal, were baulked of their infernal festival and their infernal joy.

Pending, therefore, the necessary preparations to deal with the rest in mass, bizarre and insulting forms of death were devised for the leaders on the following day. Notice was given that of the two Jewish ringleaders of the Christian sect, whom they called Apostles, one would be crucified head downwards by the obelisk in the Circus on the Mons Vaticanus, under the terebinth tree, and that the other would be flung into a caldron of boiling oil on the Latin Road.

And that night a great joy was permitted them. They had noticed that again and again Martinianus had not only shown them kindnesses to which the prisoners of the Tullianum were little accustomed, but also that he had humbly lingered in their presence, had asked permission to listen to them when they spake of Jesus, had put many questions to them, had evidently felt in his heart some stirrings of heavenly grace. That night he came to them, and, falling on his knees, said that they had taught him to believe in Christ, and begged baptism at their hands. The spring was there welling up, as it still does, from its native rock. Nothing hindered. Martinianus received baptism at the hands of the Apostles, and afterwards died a martyr.

The morning dawned sulphurously hot, and there seemed to be menace and meaning in the sky which glowed overhead like molten copper. At the entrance of the Tullian vault the Apostles enfolded one another in a long farewell embrace. They reminded each other, with faces which smiled through the tears of parting, of the blessings and words of Christ, and, being then rudely separated, were led in opposite directions by two decurions with their soldiers, amid accompanying throngs. The places of execution had been fixed in order that spectators might have their free choice of delightful horror, and that the division of the multitudes might enable all to have a good view.

A fresh trial awaited the elder Apostle. He had hardly been set free from his chains, that he might walk to the place of execution with his hands tied behind his back, when he saw his wife, who was also being led on her way to die. Brief, and free from all anguish, were the words that they interchanged.

‘Be of good cheer,’ he said, ‘true yokefellow. He will be with thee who raised thy mother from the great fever at Capernaum. I rejoice that thou, too, art going home.’

‘Farewell, my beloved,’ she replied, in a firm voice; ‘I am not afraid. In one short hour we shall be with Him where He is.’

He cast one long look upon her, and said in Hebrew, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.’ And when they were parted he still turned round to her once more, and said, ‘Oh, remember the Lord!’

Most of the spectators who accompanied the procession had seen the then common spectacle of crucifixion; but to see a man crucified head downwards was a novelty sufficient to have assembled all the dregs of the populace, but for the counter-attraction at what, for the sake of brevity, we will call the Latin Gate.101 In point of fact, Nero had read in Seneca’s ‘Consolation to Marcia’102 that tyrants had been known to adopt this grotesque form of cruelty, and he himself suggested it to Tigellinus, and said that he meant to witness it. When St. Peter was told what awaited him, he only smiled. He well knew that what had been intended for insult was overruled to him for mercy. He would be spared the long unspeakable pangs of lingering death. On the ordinary cross he might have lived for three days in complications of agony, but crucified head downwards, he knew that in a very short time he would pass from unconsciousness to death.

Nero, as he had promised, was present to see the new sight. While the cross was being prepared, Peter caught sight of the Emperor, and lifting the right hand, which for a moment the executioner had loosened, fixed his gaze on him till he shrank.

He spoke not, but one of the Christians, who had noticed the Emperor’s alarm, exclaimed—

‘O murderer of the saints, yet a little time hence, and thou, too, shalt be summoned before the bar of God.’

‘Crucify him!’ said Nero, passionately. ‘Stop his ill-omened and blaspheming mouth!’

But the speaker had shrunk back into the dense multitude.

They nailed St. Peter to the cross, and lifted it with his head downwards; but while the brutal heathen laughed, and the fear of death could not suppress the wail of the Christians, he said only—and they were the last words of the great Apostle—‘I rejoice that ye crucify me thus, for my Master’s sake. I am much unworthy to die in the same manner as He died.’

The old man passed speedily and almost painlessly away, and in the glimmering, flashing sky, over which, in the far distance, began to roll the chariot wheels of gathering storm, the brethren thought that they saw the wings of angels and shadows of the avengers.

The Christians always perplexed and irritated their pagan persecutors by behaving in a manner the very opposite to what was expected. After their first shuddering emotion at witnessing the martyrdom of their great Apostle, they seemed rather radiant than depressed. But the reason for this was that their young deacon, Clemens, speaking to them in Greek, said, ‘I see him, not head downwards, but upright on the cross, and the angels crown him with roses and lilies, and the Lord is putting a book into his hands from which he reads.’

It was natural that they should desire to keep his mortal remains. Marcellus, who had been a pupil of Simon Magus, but whom Peter had converted, obtained his body from the executioner for a great sum of money, bathed it in milk and wine, and had it embalmed. That night they conveyed it to a spot, secretly remembered, at the foot of the Vatican hill.

Marcellus watched by the grave that night; but as he watched he thought that the Apostle came to him in vision, and said, ‘Let the dead bury their dead. Preach thou the gospel of God.’ On that spot was reared the humble ‘trophy,’ or memorial cell, which the presbyter Gaius saw there in the second century. Thence, in due time, the relics were removed to that unequalled shrine, where the tomb which enclosed them is encircled by ever-burning lights, and visited century after century by the devotion of tens of thousands. Fools counted his life madness and his end to be without honour. How is he numbered among the children of God, and his lot is among the saints!

The procession which accompanied the Apostle John had taken longer to arrive at the scene of martyrdom. The awful heat of the morning, the more crowded parts of the city through which they had to pass, the greater throngs which accompanied them, had caused delay. The Apostle walked with firm step in the midst of the ten soldiers. Though his hands were tied behind his back, his appearance struck all beholders with involuntary dread. The high forehead, the long hair which streamed over his shoulders, the perfect self-possession, the beauty of holiness, gave to his movements an unconscious majesty. His face was mostly lifted heavenward in prayer, but whenever he turned on those around him his bright and searching glance their eyes fell before him. If any began to jeer at him and utter words of ribald blasphemy, he had but to look towards them, and in spite of themselves they stopped short. An unwonted hush fell on the throng which surged around the soldiers—a silence of which the multitudes themselves could give no account.

‘He is a sorcerer, that is certain,’ said Tullius Senecio as he looked down on the passing procession from a window in the house of Crispinilla.

‘He must be,’ she answered. ‘I never saw the crowd of the Forum so strangely quiet.’

‘Let me see the Christian,’ said a boy in the crowd. ‘Soldier, lift me up that I may see him.’

‘What, Gervasius? How camest thou here? But thou art a soldier’s son, and I will humour thee,’ said the decurio. ‘Thy father and I were comrades in Palestine, and it was once his lot to see a scene after which he never had one happy day.’

He lifted the boy in his arms, and he gazed long.

‘Is that the Christian?’ he said. ‘Yon man does not look like an enemy of the gods, or an eater of children’s flesh.’

The Apostle heard him, and turned towards him with a soft light of blessing in his eyes.

‘I should not mind being like thee,’ said the boy, ‘and I will not go to see thee killed.’

Fifty years later he remembered that gentle glance when in a later persecution he, too, was led out to die.

At the scene of execution a high scaffolding had been erected so that many thousands could be gratified by witnessing the new form of death. On the summit, on ten rows of bricks, had been kindled a fire, and over this was placed a huge caldron of iron, full of boiling oil. Not blenching in a single feature, with a step of perfect dignity, without assistance, without the slightest tremor, the Apostle mounted the wooden steps and stood in the sight of all, the fire flinging its red glare over him as the executioner tore off his outer robe.

But meanwhile the storm, gathering into its bosom the fierce heat of that day in late August, had begun to burst over Rome. The thunderclouds passed from threatening purple into midnight blackness, and roll after roll of thunder throbbed and crashed as though to menace the guilty city with the doom of its congregated iniquity. Then blazed forth the lightning, and filled the air, and ran along the ground. So tremendous were the explosions of sound, whose rending, cracking, and splitting outbursts settled into a long, continued roar, and so vivid were the flashes of forked lightning which gleamed like dazzling dagger-stabs aimed at an enemy who must at all costs be slain, that the soldiers and the executioners and the spectators grew livid with dread. Women shrieked and cowered, and clung to their husbands, and men looked round them uneasily, and some began to hurry away, and the hearts of all were benumbed as with some strange misgiving.

An exceptionally terrific crash of the artillery of heaven, a flash of levin which seemed to wrap them all in a white robe of dazzling flame, a shriek from hundreds of voices! And when the crash ended, the Christians were murmuring together in awestruck voices, Maranatha! Maranatha! and there arose scattered cries from the multitude. ‘He is a sorcerer! Stay the execution! We are all dead men! The wrath of the gods is upon us!’ The ancients, from ignorance combined with superstition, were far more terrified than the moderns by thunderstorms. It was evident that they were in the centre of the storm. The scaffold and the caldron formed its inmost focus, having attracted the electric fluid by their woodwork and iron. The decurion himself and his soldiers and the executioners were terrified. They dared not disobey their orders, yet amid the general terror they seemed paralysed into helplessness. Aliturus, hoping that he might in some way render some kindness, had asked to be one of those spectators, of higher position than the mob, who were allowed to stand on the scaffold. Seizing his opportunity, he hastily whispered, ‘The executioner has untied your hands. You have friends in the crowd. Escape! Fear not the lightning—this skin of a seal which I brought under my robe, expecting a thunderstorm, is an amulet against lightning.’

‘I thank thee, my son,’ said the Apostle; ‘unless the will of God be clearly manifested, I cannot fly. And if we trust in God we need no amulet, for neither the pestilence nor the arrow can hurt us.’

Again the thunder roared, again they were wrapped in a blinding flash. Hardly conscious what he did, the Apostle uplifted his right hand. It became the nucleus of the electric phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s fire, and at once appeared to burn like a torch with lambent flame. A cry of fresh terror rose from the heathen multitude. ‘Fly, fly!’ they exclaimed; ‘he is a sorcerer or a god. He lifts against us his flaming hand, tipped with the fire of Castor and Pollux. We shall all be killed by fire from heaven. The spot is accursed. It is a bidental.’103

A rush took place, and the crowd fled promiscuously in every direction. The soldiers could not resist the contagion. They leapt down and fled, and the decurio followed, shouting to them in vain. The executioners joined the soldiers in their flight. For a moment the Apostle and Aliturus stood alone on the scaffold, and then hurried down the steps. Scarcely had they reached the ground when the lightning struck the metal caldron and tore it from its chains. It fell with a mighty crash, and the oil streaming over the flame burst up in a fierce blaze which would very rapidly have reduced the whole scaffold to ashes had not the deluging rain begun to fall in cataracts, quenching the fire, but leaving a charred and shapeless ruin.

The news was brought to Nero and Tigellinus that evening by multitudes of witnesses when the storm had cleared and the heavens had resumed their azure sleep. They shared the superstition of the mob, and thought that, by magic powers unusually terrible, the Apostle had brought down the wrath of Heaven. At the same time this could have nothing to do with the Christians in general, for had not the execution of the other Apostle been carried out with perfect ease? They were officially informed that the Apostle, of his own free will, had thought it right to return to the door of the Tullianum and surrender himself as a prisoner. Such strange security deepened the impression that he could wield supernatural powers. Afraid to detain him in Rome, Nero ordered him to banishment in the rocky Ægean island of Patmos.104

Thither the Apostle was conveyed, and there, gazing on the sea that burned like glass in the sunlight, he wrote his Apocalypse. In that strange book we can still read the echo of the horror kindled in the heart of an eyewitness by an Emperor who had degenerated into a portent of iniquity, fighting with empoisoned breath and dragon-like fury against the saints of God. The Apocalypse is the ‘thundering reverberation’ of the Apostle’s mighty spirit, smitten into wrathful dissonance amid its heavenly music by the plectrum of the Neronian persecution. All the horrors of that frightful age of storms, and eruptions, and earthquakes, and falling meteors, and famine, and pestilence, and threatenings of Parthian invasion and imminent massacres of civil war, threw gigantic and blood-red shadows across the Apostle’s page. The air was being shattered by the trumpet-blasts of doom which would bury in flame and ruin alike the Harlot City on the seven hills which had made herself so drunken with the blood of the saints, and the Holy City which had become a den of murderers—which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt—where the Lord was crucified. When he wrote his vision, three or four years later, the souls of those who had been slain in the great Neronian tribulation for the Word of God and the testimony which they held were still under the altar, and cried, ‘How long, O Lord, how long dost thou not avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ But white robes were given them, and they were bidden to rest yet a little while till the number of their brethren was fulfilled. And afterwards one of the four-and-twenty elders who sat around the throne asked him, ‘Who are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?’ And he said unto him, ‘Sir, thou knowest.’ And the Elder answered, ‘These are they which came out of THE GREAT TRIBULATION, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’