CHAPTER LVI LIVING TORCHES

Ὁ νειδισμοῖς τε καὶ θλίψεσι θεατριζόμενοι.—Hebr. x. 33.

‘Sec. Br. O night and shades!

How are ye joined with hell in triple knot.

Is this the confidence

You gave me, brother?

Eld. Br. Yes, and keep it still.

If this fail

The pillared firmament is rottenness,

And earth’s base built on stubble.’

Milton, Comus.

The news of the Neronian persecution did not reach St. Paul at once. When he left the hospitable home of Philemon he first rejoined Timothy at Ephesus. He left him to arrange the affairs of the Church of Ephesus, and Onesimus took the place which had been filled by the son of Eunice in former years. He became the Apostle’s travelling companion, to lend him the affectionate attendance now necessary to his age and infirmities. It was not till they reached Corinth that they heard the heart-shaking intelligence that the Christian Church at Rome had been smitten by Antichrist as with red-hot thunderbolts. Though no accurate details reached them, Paul’s first impulse was to fly to the succour of his Roman brethren; but Titus of Corinth, who was with him, urged him to remember that two of his brother Apostles were at Rome; that the persecution was now certain to break out in nearly every Church of the Empire, and that his presence was more needed in Crete and in the Churches of Asia and Europe of which he had been the immediate founder. Anxious to confront the growth of subtle heresies, more perilous in his eyes than persecution, he reluctantly abandoned his wish to return to Italy, and sailed to Crete. It was some time before he learnt that St. Peter had sealed his testimony by martyrdom and that St. John was a prisoner at Patmos.

But Onesimus was distressed at heart by the perils which would befall the beloved daughter of Nereus, and he entreated the Apostle to let him be the bearer to Rome of his messages of consolation and encouragement. Receiving ready permission, he hurried to the capital by the earliest ship, and arrived on the very day of the storm which had witnessed the crucifixion of St. Peter and the miraculous deliverance of the Beloved Disciple.

With amazement he saw Rome lying in ruins and the Christian cause apparently destroyed forever. ‘Christian’ was now the synonym of incendiary and desperate malefactor. His heart sank within him as he went from house to house only to find that the Christian inhabitants had disappeared. So great a multitude had been arrested that for the time being the prisons were the only churches. He went to the palace of Aulus Plautius, thinking that there he was certain to receive information; but there, too, he found that scarcely one of the Christian slaves was left, and that Pomponia herself had caught the virulent typhoid which had broken out among the crowded sufferers, and lay unconscious and dangerously ill.

Risking everything, he visited the prisons, and in one of them he found Nereus, wasted and haggard, but still animated by a cheerful courage. From him he learnt, with a deep sense of relief, that at the first outbreak of danger he had sent Junia to the safe refuge of Aricia. Pudens, when he sailed for Britain, felt a prescient intuition of the days which were to come, and told the Christian members of his household that they might always find a place of shelter with Dromo in the little country farm. Thither Junia had gone with a few others, obedient to the wish and command of her father, though reluctant to leave him. There Onesimus found her, and carried to her the blessing and the messages of Nereus. Nereus sent her word that he was doomed to die, as they were all doomed to die, though by what form of death was as yet unknown to them. He bade her to stay at Aricia. She could do nothing for him, and to come to Rome would only be to throw away her life. In the few lines he was able to write to her he commended Onesimus. He confessed that in former days the youth had been altogether displeasing to him, but now he was a changed character. Paulus had won him back to the paths of holiness. He had been illuminated. He had tasted of the heavenly calling, and had devoted himself to the personal tendance of the aged Apostle. In Rome he had given proof of his courage and consistency by showing pity for the prisoners and not being ashamed of their chains. It was no time now to talk of marrying or giving in marriage, for surely the day of the Lord was very nigh at hand; yet, if Junia loved the youth, Nereus would not forbid their plighting troth to each other, and awaiting the day when the marriage might be possible. And this he granted the more readily, for he feared that very soon Junia would be left alone, a helpless and friendless Christian maiden in the midst of an evil world.

So the lovers met, but the interchange of their common vows were solemn and sacred, under the darkening skies of persecution, and as it were in the valley of the shadow of death. For Junia entreated Onesimus to return to Rome and do his utmost to watch over her father and to save him if by any means it were possible or lawful. He bade her farewell, and found time to pay one brief visit to the temple at Aricia that he might express his gratitude to the priest of Virbius for having spared his life. Alas, he was too late! A new Rex Nemorensis—the ex-gladiator Rutilus—reigned in Croto’s room. He had surprised and murdered him the evening before, and Onesimus saw the gaunt corpse of Croto outstretched upon its wooden bier awaiting burial in the plot assigned to the succession of murdered priests.

Sick at heart, Onesimus hurried from the dark precincts, and by the morning dawn he was in Rome.

On that day the terrible massacres began which were to baptise the infant Church in a river of blood, and to consecrate Rome in the memory of Christendom as the city of slaughtered saints. For there Paganism was to display herself, naked and not ashamed, a harlot holding in her hand the brimming goblet of her wickedness, drunken with the blood of the beloved of God. Mankind was to see exhibited a series of startling contrasts: human nature at its best and sweetest; human nature at its vilest and worst:—unchecked power smitten with fatal impotence; unarmed weakness clothed with irresistible strength:—pleasure and self-indulgence drowned in wretchedness; misery and martyrdom exulting with joy unspeakable, and full of glory. On the one side was the splendour and civilisation of the City of the Dragon revelling in brutal ferocity and lascivious pride; on the other side the down-trodden and the despised of the City of God rose to a height of nobleness which no philosophy had attained, and enriched with sovereign virtues the ideal of mankind. While the deified lord of the empire of darkness with his nobles and his myrmidons sank themselves below the level of the beasts, paupers and nameless slaves, young boys and feeble girls towered into tragic dignity, faced death with unflinching heroism, and showed that even amid satyrs and demons humanity may still be measured with the measure of a man—that is, of the angel.

Herein lay the secret of the victory of Christianity. In the Rome of Nero heathendom showed the worst that she could be, and the worst that she could do; and Christianity showed, coinstantaneously, that manhood can preserve its inherent grandeur when it seems to be trampled into the very mire under the hoofs of swine. The sweetness and the dignity with which the Christians suffered kindled not only amazement but admiration in many a pagan breast. It was seen that with the Church in its poverty and shame, not with the world in its gorgeous criminality, lay the secret of all man’s happiness and hope. Many a senator, as he looked on the saturnalia of lubricity and blood, felt that the Christian slave-girl, tied naked to a stake in the amphitheatre for the wild beasts to devour, was more blessed than the jewelled lady by his side, whom he knew to be steeped in baseness; and there were youths to whose taste the apples of the Dead Sea had already crumbled into dust, who in their secret hearts felt themselves nothing less than abject compared with those Christian boys who, with the light of heaven on their foreheads and the name of Jesus on their lips, faced without flinching the grotesque horror of their doom.

But Nero and Tigellinus, and those who advised with them, never wavered in their hideous policy of purchasing popularity by making the murder of thousands of the innocent subserve the brutal passions of the multitude. They thought to abase the Christians, and they kindled round their brows an aureole of light. They thought to flatter the people, but made them vile by a carnival which showed that their natures had become a mixture of the tiger and the ape.

The jubilee of massacre began with cruel flagellations, for the intention was to combine amusement with utility and to represent these unnumbered agonies as a festival of expiation. So low had the Romans sunk since the days when they had believed that the wrath of the gods had been kindled because before some public games a master had scourged his slave round the arena!

As they wished to add derision to torture, it did not suffice them that at these piacular displays men should merely fight with wild beasts who would soon be glutted with the multitude of victims. A novelty was devised for the delight of the spectators.

The first batch of martyrs were clad in the skins of wolves and leopards and torn to death by hordes of fierce and hungry dogs.

Others had to take part in mythologic operas. Among them was the soldier Urbanus. Clad in the guise of Hercules on Œta, he was burned alive upon a funeral pyre. Another martyr, Celsus, had to figure as Mucius Scævola, and to burn his hand to ashes in a flame upon an altar, with the promise that his life should be given him if, in carrying out his historic rôle, he would voluntarily consume his right hand, and not once shrink. Vitalis had to take his part in the favourite drama of Laureolus, in which character, after being made a laughing-stock, he was first crucified, and then, while yet living, devoured upon the cross by a bear. It was thought a favourable opportunity to try experiments. Simon Magus, after securing the arrest of Peter, had been admitted to an interview with Poppæa, whose superstitious turn of mind inclined her to consult every charlatan who visited the capital, and through her he gained admittance to the Emperor. He awakened Nero’s interest in a machine by which he pretended that he could enable men to fly. Nero determined to test the capabilities of the machine in corpore vili. The story of Dædalus and Icarus should be enacted, and as a slim and graceful youth was needed for the part of Icarus, poor Nazarius, the son of Miriam, was selected for this character. A lofty wooden tower was erected in the mimic scene. The wild beasts were roaming loose in the amphitheatre, and if either Dædalus or Icarus was not killed by a fall from the tower, he would be devoured in the arena. The martyr Amplias, who represented Dædalus, was precipitated at once, and killed by a lion. The broad wings of the machine upbore for a moment the light form of Nazarius as he sprang from the tower, but he fell on the very podium of the Emperor, and so close beside him that, to the horror of all, and with an omen of the worst import, he spattered the white robe of Nero with his blood.105

Unsated by these scenes the spectators demanded the sacrifice of the women victims. Hundreds of them were crowded in cells under the amphitheatre, and were informed that they were to appear in a series of pageants representing the torments of the dead. The spectacle was deemed impious by many, but it had been exhibited by Egyptians and Ethiopians in the days of Caligula. Fifty of these poor female martyrs were to be clothed in scarlet mantles as the daughters of Danaus, and, after undergoing nameless insults, were to be stabbed by an actor who personated Lynceus.106 To many of them it was an anguish worse than death that they should have to bear part in dramas which represented the idolatries of heathendom; but Prisca, the wife of Aquila, who had returned from Ephesus to Rome with her husband on matters connected with their trade, visited the sufferers in prison, and effectually consoled them. This Jewish matron, to whom with her husband had been granted the honour of no inconspicuous share in the founding of the three great churches of Rome, of Corinth, and of Ephesus, had not been arrested by any informer, owing to long residence in Achaia and Asia. She told the poor women that resistance was in vain, and that no insult inflicted on them by the heathen could dim the lustre of their martyr-crown. Cheered by her calm wisdom, they paced across the stage carrying vases on their shoulders, and bore their fate without a cry.

More terrible was the destiny of others. They were to enact the part of Dirce. One after another, in imitation of the much-admired statue now known as the Farnese Bull, which had recently been brought from Rhodes, they were tied by actors representing Amphion and Zethus, to the horns of furious oxen, and so were tossed or gored to death. They, too, were sustained by the presence of the Invisible, and the modesty of their bearing, even in such agonies, caused a pang in the hearts of all but the most hardened spectators.

At all these spectacles of shame Nero looked on. There he sat day after day in the podium, lolling on cushions of gold and purple, staring through the concave emerald which helped his short-sightedness, and finding new sensations in the spectacle of insulted innocence. He was never tired of wondering whence these wretches got their ‘blank callosity.’ And they, ere their eyes opened on that other land, where they knew they should gaze upon their King in His beauty, saw as their last glimpse of earth, this despicable Antichrist, with his face like that of a base overgrown boy, watching with greedily curious stare the agony of their immolation.

But there were too many martyrs to render it easy to dispose of them. After they had exhausted the inventiveness of cruelty, after they had heaped up the puticuli even to the danger of pestilence with crucified, charred, and mangled corpses, at least a thousand of the great multitude still rotted in the feverous prisons. Then an idea truly infernal presented itself to the mind of Nero. Were not these masses of human beings supposed to be expiating their crimes as incendiaries? But the proper and congruous punishment of incendiaries was the tunica molesta, or robe of pitch. He wondered that he had never thought of it before! It would, indeed, be somewhat tame merely to burn alive a certain number of people in succession. At first there might be an agreeable sense of curiosity in studying the faces of men and women in such circumstances, and in hearing their groans and cries. But after watching the first dozen or so, that pleasure would grow monotonous. He determined to prevent the danger of any satiety in the gratification by concentrating it all into one hour of multiplex and complicated agony.

He possessed magnificent gardens, stretching from the Vatican Hill to the Tiber. There was a circus, rich with gilding and marble, of which the meta was the obelisk, brought from Heliopolis, now standing in the piazza of St. Peter’s. He would throw open these gardens to the public, for one of the nightly spectacles of which he had copied the fashion from the mad Caligula. Every one should wander at will about the green copses, and the umbrageous retreats, and he would furnish them with an illumination unseen, unheard of, in the world’s history before or since. It should be the illumination of a thousand living torches, of which each should be a martyr in his shirt of flame!

And it was done. Martyrdoms inflicted by wild beasts, and dogs, and gibbets, had become tedious from repetition. Here should be a new and intense sensation for himself, and for all Rome, for he would be present in person and enjoy to the full his hateful popularity. At intervals, all along the paths, masts, strong and large, were driven deep into the ground. To each of these was tied a man or a woman, who were taken in throngs from the pestilential and now emptied prisons. Each was tied to the stake, and in front of each was put a smaller stake with a sharpened point, fixed under the chin, lest their heads should sink on their breasts and baulk the festal sightseers from gloating on the expression of their dying agonies. Hundreds of Nero’s slaves were at work, for the preparations had all to be begun many hours before the dusk fell. The last thing which had to be done was to saturate the robes of the martyrs with pitch and oil, and then to heap around the feet of each, as high as their waists, a mass of straw and brushwood and shavings. These balefires were not to be kindled till it was dark, in order that the world of Rome might have complete enjoyment of the pageant and look in each other’s rejoicing faces by the mighty blaze.

But Onesimus had determined to do his utmost to save Nereus, if nothing else was possible. Hanging about the gardens in the dress of a slave, he managed to gain admission by the connivance of a Prætorian whom he knew to be a secret Christian. Once inside the precincts, he could easily escape detection among the hundreds who were so busily employed. Carrying now a stake, and now a bucket of pitch, and now a heap of fuel, he hurried from place to place, at each convenient moment whispering some bright message of cheer such as St. Paul had taught him, and rewarded by grateful smiles from those who were so soon to undergo their awful fate. At last he saw Nereus, who, happily for the young man’s purpose, had been fastened to a stake at the end of one of the remoter alleys. Nereus, deep in prayer, and dead to the things of earth, did not recognise him, but started when he heard a voice whispering to him that he should attempt to secure his escape.

‘It is impossible,’ said Nereus. ‘I am more than ready to share the fate of my comrades, and to win their crown.’

‘Nay, father,’ said Onesimus, ‘think of Junia, who, if thou diest, will be left a helpless orphan in the world. I dare speak no more, but be ready to fly in one instant behind yonder shrine, if I am able to set thee free.’

Reconnoitring the ground, Onesimus observed that the green alley where Nereus was tied was close beside a wall. At no great distance beyond the wall he knew that there was one of the corpse-pits into which were thrown the bodies of the poor. Gliding about, he saw on the ground a basket containing a hammer and large nails. He snatched it up, and, hid from observation behind the tangled masses of rank foliage at the back of a shrine of Priapus, he drove the nails one over the other between the huge disjointed stones, so as to make it easy to climb the wall. Then he awaited his opportunity, which he knew would be when the crowd of more than a hundred thousand spectators pushed and crowded into the gardens, and the fires of death began.

He was right in all his calculations. A scene of tumultuous excitement, and the hoarse murmur of innumerable voices, greeted the almost simultaneous kindling of many of the stakes. At that very moment, before the executioners had reached the end of the alley, Onesimus, gliding behind Nereus, cut his thongs, slipped the chain over his head, tore off the pitchy outer robe, and hurrying the old man to the back of the shrine of Priapus, half dragged him up the wall, and took refuge in the dense gloom of a subterranean passage in the dreadful burial-place.

The executioners noticed, of course, that one of their victims had, by some strange unknown means, escaped; but it did not greatly concern them. One simply whispered to the other, ‘It will not be observed. Let the poor cacodæmon get off. What matters it to us?’

Meanwhile on every side the flames shot up around the stakes, and glared with hideous brightness, and sent up huge tongues of waving light, and each stake became a torch of hell, and black smoke swirled around them, and groans and cries of anguish arose which were drowned in bursts of music and laughter and ribald songs. And all the while the moon was silvering the rich foliage, and the stars shone down with peaceful rays over that revelry of hell, and the smoke and flame were to those poor sufferers as chariots of fire and horses of fire to bear their souls to heaven. And while the agony and madness and hilarity were at their height, and the statues of obscene gods and lascivious nymphs, which glimmered from beneath the trees, looked like demons over whose faces the red glow flickered in smiles of seeming ecstasy as they watched this triumph of demoniac wickedness—at this moment shouts of adulation arose, and Nero was seen, his face wreathed in smiles, in the dress of a charioteer. With some of his basest creatures round him, he mingled familiarly with the mob, exchanged jokes with them, and stood peering with them into the ghastly faces in which flickered longest the gleam of life.

‘What think you of these sarmenticii, these semaxii?’ he asked repeatedly of the plebeian throng.

‘Call us “faggot-birds,” and “stake-fellows,”’ said one of the martyrs, who calmly awaited the rekindling of his stake from which, by some chance, the flame had expired. ‘These faggots with which we are burned, these stakes to which we are bound, are our robes of victory, our triumphant chariot.’107

‘Child of the Devil,’ exclaimed another, before his robe had caught the flames, ‘I would not, even at this moment, change my lot with thine.’

‘Antichrist,’ murmured another, ‘thine hour is nigh.’

Nero shrank before the prophecy, but afterwards sprang upon his chariot, and seeking the applause which rose like a storm wherever he appeared, drove his four horses round every part of the circus, and the broad paths of the gardens, until the last human torch had flared out, and the multitude began to stream away.

It was an amazing thing that pagan fathers and mothers should have taken even their children to see such sights as these. But, inured as they were to blood and anguish by the harrowing homicides of the amphitheatre, their hearts in these matters were ‘brazed by damned custom.’ And so it happened that a Roman knight named Cornelius Tacitus had led his little son, a grave child of eight years old, to walk through the gardens of Nero on that awful night. He looked on the scene with an impulse of childish pity, and asked his father ‘whether these Christians had really set fire to Rome.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said his father.

‘Why, then, are they burnt alive?’ he asked.

‘They are criminals,’ said the knight; ‘and they hate the whole human race. They are akin to the Jews, and it would be no bad thing for the Empire if both of those accursed superstitions were destroyed.’

The young Tacitus remembered and recorded the remark more than thirty years later, when he had become a great historian. He was influenced, too, by the conversation which he then heard between his father and the friends who accompanied him. ‘These men,’ said one of them, ‘die every whit as bravely as the Stoics whom we so greatly admire.’ But the elder Tacitus would not admit the analogy. ‘In these Christians,’ he said, ‘the contempt of death is mere custom, or madness, or sheer obstinacy.’

Seneca, too, was in those gardens of the Vatican for a few moments, perplexed, horrified, miserable. The Emperor had commanded his presence, as though it would lend some sanction to the carnival of horror. The agonising deaths of such a multitude were indeed, to him, a repulsive sight, but it was not so wholly unfamiliar as to harrow his feelings to their depths. What struck him most, and what he has dwelt upon in his obvious allusions to this monstrous execution, was the inexplicable fortitude, the unflinching heroism, shown, not by nobles and philosophers, but by slaves, and women, and boys, and the very dregs of the populace. He pondered in vain over that disturbing problem.108

Before an hour had passed, the stakes stood charred and black, and underneath them were horrible heaps of death, still keeping some awful semblance of humanity; and the smoke curled and writhed about them, and streams of the melted and bubbling pitch quivered with small blue flames, or left black furrows on the burnt grass or the trampled sand.

And thus amid foul laughter the martyrs had died whose lives alone were innocent, who alone loved one another and all mankind. And the moon still shed her soft lustre on the scene, and the stars looked down through the untroubled night, and lighted home the myriads whose consciences, seared as with hot iron, smote them in no wise for their share in that crime—the vilest in the long annals of the world’s vilest days.

The numerous and flourishing Church of Rome was all but destroyed; yet on that night the seed of her mighty power in the development of Christianity was sown afresh. Watered by the blood of the martyrs, that seed sprang into more vigorousT18 life, and rushing sunwards, spread forth arms laden with fruit and foliage, and grew into a giant bole, strong with the rings of a thousand summers, under whose shadows and ‘complicated glooms and cool impleachèd twilights,’ the hopes and fears of generations found their refuge—yea! and shall find it for evermore, unless it be severed from the root, and blighted into barrenness, and the axe be uplifted and the doom go forth, ‘Never fruit grow upon thee more!’

And the obelisk which witnessed that night of abomination, and which is now dedicated ‘To the Unknown Martyrs,’ still towers into the clear air, and on it is inscribed—

‘Christus regnat:
fugite partes adversæ.’

And over the ground with its groves and gardens where they perished—those nameless heroes, those nameless demigods—rose the vast cathedral to the honour of the Christ for whom they died; and round its dome is written in huge golden letters the name of the Apostle who fell first before the wild beast’s wrath:—‘I say unto thee, Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build My Church.’