CHAPTER XLIII A NOTABLE PRISONER

‘He that hath light within his own clear breast,

May sit i’ the centre, and enjoy bright day;

But he that hath a dark soul, and foul thoughts,

Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;

Himself is his own dungeon.’

Milton, Comus.

A Roman centurion, whose armour gleamed in the sun, was walking at the head of the decuria of soldiers, several of whom were attached by a loose coupling chain to the arms of various prisoners. The spectacle was common enough, and in the varied turmoil of the principal thoroughfare, with the stream of travellers which swept to and fro about the capital of the world, there was nothing in it to attract notice. But the interest felt in one of the prisoners had induced a throng of people—mostly foreigners, slaves, and artisans—to go and meet him.

Titus recognised in the centurion an old friend. ‘Ha, Julius!’ he cried; ‘so you have returned from Cæsarea. You will have long stories to tell us about those curious and turbulent Jews. Will you sup with my father to-night? You will be welcome.’

‘Yes!’ said Julius, ‘gladly, for I am tired with a long day’s march.’

‘You know our frugal ways. You will have to recline on couches made only by Archias, and sup mainly on vegetables off earthenware plates,’ said Titus laughing, and quoting Horace.

‘It will be a supper of the gods after our fare in the nights and days of storm on the Adramyttian ship off Clauda and Malta,’ said Julius. ‘But I must hurry on now to hand over my prisoners to the Prætorian Præfect.’

‘Who are your prisoners?’

‘They are of the ordinary sort except one. He is the strangest, bravest, wisest man I ever met; and yet he is a fanatical Jew—one of this new sect which the mob calls Christians.’

‘Which is he?’

Julius pointed to a prisoner chained to the foremost soldier, on either side of whom nearly all the visitors were grouped, listening eagerly to every word he uttered, and showing him every sign of love and reverence. He was a man with the aquiline nose and features of his race, somewhat bent, somewhat short of stature, evidently from his gestures a man of nervous and emotional temperament. His hair had grown grey in long years of hardship. Many a care and peril and anxiety had driven its ploughshare across his brow. His cheeks were sunken, and the eyes, though bright, were disfigured by ophthalmia. He was evidently short-sighted, but as he turned his fixed and earnest look now on one, now on another of his companions, the expression of his deeply-marked face was so translucent with some divine light within, that those who once saw him felt compelled to look long on a countenance of no ordinary type of nobleness.

Titus gazed at him. Nothing could be more unlike the worn and weary Jew who had been buffeted by so many storms and escaped from so many terrific perils, than was the athletic young Roman, with his short fair hair which curled round a face ruddy in its prime of youth and health. In the prisoner’s aspect there was none of the Roman dignity which marked the look and bearing of Pætus Thrasea; none of the manly independence which looked the whole world in the face from the eyes of Cornutus or Musonius Rufus; none certainly of the rich Eastern beauty which marked Aliturus or the Herodian princes. Yet Titus as he watched him was, for a moment, too much astonished to speak.

‘He looks all you say of him,’ he murmured. ‘Who is he?’

‘His name is Paulus of Tarsus. He is evidently a great leader among these Christians.’

Hitherto Onesimus, absorbed in his own sad reflections, had neither heeded the throng, nor attended to the conversation between Titus and Julius. But suddenly he caught the name, and looked up with a hasty glance.

He saw before him not a few of the Christian community of Rome. Many of them were known to him. Nereus was there and Junia; and from the household of Cæsar he recognised Tryphæna and Tryphosa and Herodion; and there were Linus, and Cletus, and the soldiers Urban and Celsus, and Claudia Dicæosyne, wife of a freedman of Narcissus, and Andronicus, and Alexander, and Rufus, sons of Simon of Cyrene who had borne Christ’s cross, and many more.

In a single glance he took in the presence of these, and a sense of danger flashed across him, lest any one of them, perhaps a false brother, should penetrate his disguise as Titus had done. But it was not at them that he looked. His whole being was absorbed in the gaze which he fixed on him whom he had always heard spoken of as the Apostle Paulus.

Yes, there he stood; his face thinner and more worn than of old, his hair now almost white with an age which was reckoned less by years than by labours and sorrows; but otherwise just as he was when Philemon had gone from Colossæ and taken with him his boy-slave to listen to the words of impassioned reasoning and burning inspiration which Paul poured forth at Ephesus in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. What a flood of memories surged over the young Phrygian’s soul as he saw him! As though his life, since then, had been written in lightning, he thought in one instant of that long tale of shame and sorrow—from the theft at Colossæ to the wanderings with the priests of the Syrian goddess, the gladiators’ school, the attempted murder at Aricia. It all flashed upon his recollection, and he felt as if he could sink to the earth for shame. His first impulse was to spring forward and cast himself at the Apostle’s feet. But he heard Julius say that they had halted too long, and that he must press forward with his charge. The word ‘Forward, soldiers!’ was given, and Onesimus hid himself behind a tomb, only rejoining Titus when the Christians had passed by. Titus seemed lost in thought, but as they were near Pomponia’s house, he said:

‘Onesimus, did you see that prisoner?’

‘Yes. And I saw him when I was a boy in Ephesus.’

‘I know men when I see them,’ said Titus. ‘He is a man,’ and then he repeated the Greek line—

‘How gracious a thing is a man, if he be but a man.’86

‘He is a Jew; he is small and bent; he is ugly; yet somehow his ugliness is more beautiful tenfold than the beauty of Paris or Tigellinus.’

‘You should hear him speak!’ said Onesimus.

Titus shrugged his shoulders. ‘A Christian!’ he said; ‘a worshipper of a Jew whom they tell me Pilatus crucified! And yet,’ he added, ‘there is something more in these Christians than I can fathom. Britannicus was very much struck by them, and I believe Pomponia is a Christian. She told me once that “no weapon forged against these Christians prospers.” Pilatus, they say, came to a bad end.’

‘What happened to him?’ asked Onesimus.

‘They say he became a haunted man. His wife Claudia Procula turned Christian. He was banished to Helvetia and there committed suicide; and his ghost haunts a bare mountain, and is forever wringing and washing its hands. But I believe it is all nonsense,’ said Titus; ‘and here we are at Pomponia’s house.’

They found the gracious noble lady with her boy by her side in the peristyle tending her flowers among her doves, which were so tame that they would perch on her head and shoulder, and coo softly, as they suffered both her and the young Aulus to smooth their plumage.

‘Bathed in such hues as when the peacock’s neck

Assumes its brightest tint of amethyst

Embathed in emerald glory.’

The heart of Pomponia was open to every kind impulse, and as there was little difficulty in finding room for another slave in the ample palace of a Roman noble like Aulus Plautius, Onesimus, saved once more from ruin and destitution, slept that night in the cell of a new master.

Meanwhile Julius and his prisoner had proceeded on their way. Leaving the Circus Maximus on their left, and going along the Vicus Tuscus, amid temples and statues and arches of triumph, they passed the Prætorian Camp, built by Sejanus, near the Nomentan Road, and reached the Excubitorium and the barracks of that section of the Prætorians whose turn it was to keep guard over the person of the Emperor. Here the centurion found Burrus, and in consigning to his charge the prisoner who had appealed unto Cæsar, handed to him at the same time some letters respecting him from Felix Festus, and King Agrippa. Burrus read them with interest.

‘This is a remarkable prisoner,’ he said. ‘The Jews accuse him of sedition and profanity; but they have sent neither evidence nor witnesses.’

‘We passed through a fearful storm off Crete,’ said Julius, ‘and were shipwrecked at Malta. I hear rumours that another large vessel, which sailed soon after us from Cæsarea, with many Jews on board, foundered at sea. I expect that some of the accusers of Paulus perished with her.’

‘Well, if so, his case will be delayed. He is innocent, I suppose?’

‘Perfectly innocent, I am certain. Christian as he is, it is such men whom the gods love. We all of us should have perished at sea but for his wisdom and good sense, and if we had listened to his advice we should not have been wrecked at all.’

‘Ha!’ said Burrus; ‘he shall be well treated.’ He called to a Prætorian and said: ‘The prisoner in the outer room may hire a lodging for himself. He will, of course, be in custody. The men must take their turns to be chained to him; but mark—choose out the kindest and most honest men for the work, and let them understand that I order him to be as gently dealt with as can be, consistently with his security.’

That night the dream of the life of Paul of Tarsus was accomplished; he was sleeping in Rome. He was an ambassador, though an ambassador in bonds.