CHAPTER XLIV A SUPPER AT VESPASIAN’S

‘You’ll have no scandal while you dine,

But honest talk and wholesome wine.’

Tennyson.

‘Arma quidem ultra

Littora Juvernæ promovimus, et modo captas

Orcadas et minima contentos nocte Britannos.

Sed quæ nunc populi fiunt victoris in urbe

Non faciunt illi quos vicimus.’

Juv. Sat. ii. 159-163.

The centurion Julius was genuinely pleased with the invitation of Titus, and duly presented himself at the modest house of Vespasian. The other guests were Aulus Plautius and Pomponia, King Caradoc, Pudens and Claudia, and Seneca, together with several members of the family, and among them Vespasian’s brother, Flavius Sabinus, who had just been appointed Præfect of the City, in the place of Pedanius Secundus. The fortunes of the Flavian house were rising rapidly; but Sabinus, an eminent soldier, with his blushing honours fresh upon him, was regarded as the head of the family.

Vespasian was poor, and was also fond of money. That he had not amassed a fortune in his various commands was much to his credit. His house, afterwards occupied by Josephus, was so unpretending as to excite the wonder of those who saw it after he had become Emperor, and his entertainments were usually marked by a more than Sabine simplicity.

On this occasion, however, since a king, a prime minister, and a consular—his old commander—who had enjoyed the honour of sharing an Emperor’s triumphs, were among his guests, Vespasian had donned the unwonted splendour of his ‘triumphal ornaments,’ a flowered tunic, over which flowed a purple robe, embroidered with palm branches in gold and silver thread. He was not half at ease in this splendid apparel, and told his wife Cænis that he was an old fool for his pains. The entertainment was sufficient, though Otho would have thought it hardly good enough for his freedmen. The board was graced with old Sabine and Etruscan ware of great antiquity and curious workmanship, as well as with objects of interest which Vespasian had bought when he was an officer in Thrace, Crete, and Cyrene.

But Vespasian himself, who was sturdily indifferent to fashion, and took pleasure in showing how little he regarded the criticisms of Roman dandyism, drank out of a little silver cup which had belonged to his grandmother, and which he would not have exchanged for the loveliest crystal on the table of Petronius. And Caradoc, as he sat there in his simple dress and golden torque, was far more happy at that modest entertainment than he would have been at the house of any other of the Roman nobles.

The party was, so to speak, a British party, for most of them were familiar with the storm-swept Northern island, which was regarded as the Ultima Thule of civilisation. That day Pudens had received an appointment to go to Britain and support as well as he could the wavering fortunes of Suetonius Paulinus. Caradoc was permitted to return with him and take up his abode at Noviomagus, the town of the Regni. They were to sail as early as possible from Ostia. More than this, Aulus Plautius, to whose powerful influence these appointments had been due, had secured for his young friend Titus the excellent position of a tribune of the soldiers to the army in Britain. It was a graceful recognition of the services which Vespasian had rendered to him twenty years before, when, as his legate of the legion, he had fought thirty battles, captured more than twenty towns, and reduced the Isle of Wight to subjection. It was in Britain, as Tacitus says, that Vespasian had first been ‘shown to the Fates.’ The whole party were in the highest spirits. The old king rejoiced to think that he should rest at last in the land of his fathers. Claudia longed to escape from the suffocating atmosphere of Roman luxury. Pudens knew that in Rome his Christian convictions might speedily bring him into peril, and that in far-off Britain he could breathe a freer and purer air. Vespasian had much to tell of the glories of the country. Lastly, Titus felt all the ardour of a young soldier entering on high command in new and deeply interesting fields of adventure, and in the company of the officer whom he most respected and loved.

It was natural, therefore, that the conversation should turn on Britain, and the tremendous events of which it had recently been the scene. Aulus Plautius had heard from Suetonius Paulinus himself the story how he had carried his soldiers on flat-bottomed boats across the Straits of Mona, while the horses swam behind; how the British women, with dishevelled hair, stood thick upon the shore in dark robes, and, with torches in their hands, ran to and fro among the soldiers like Furies; above all, how the Druids stood there conspicuous, their long white beards streaming to the winds, and, with hands uplifted to heaven, cursed the Romans; and how at last, ‘falling on the barbarous and lunatic rout, he had beaten them down, scorched and rolling in their own fires.’ But darker news had followed. Roman emissaries—‘and those bad young Romans are the curse of Rome,’ said the old commander, looking up from the tablets of Suetonius—had behaved with infamous cruelty to Boadicea, the heroic Queen of the Iceni, and she was burning to revenge her wrongs. Paulinus described her as ‘a woman big and tall, of visage grim and stern, harsh of voice, her hair of bright colour flowing down to her hips, who wore a plighted garment of divers colours, and a great golden chain under a large flowing mantle.’

‘He has sent me some fierce British verses, King,’ said Aulus, turning to Caradoc, ‘which one of his literary officers—Laureatus, of the island of Vectis—has translated from British into Latin galliambics, the metre which, he says, most resembles their tumultuous lilt. The translator must be a true poet, for not even the “Atys” of Catullus is more impassioned. I shall be half afraid to read them to you, for they will stir your blood like the sound of a trumpet, and you will fancy yourself charging us again at the head of your Silures.’

‘Ah!’ said the old warrior, sadly; ‘my fires have long sunk into white embers. A king who has been led in fetters through the capital of his enemies can fight no more for a free nation, however intolerably it may have been wronged.’

Claudia pressed her father’s hand, and tears shone in her blue eyes.

‘Nay, Claudia,’ said the king; ‘I did not wish to sadden thee. Thou and I have other and brighter hopes than once we had, and it will be like new life to us to tread once more by the broad rivers of Britain, and on her heathy hills. I am an exile and poor. My jewels and trappings were carried before me at the triumph of Claudius and Aulus;—though Cartismandua, who betrayed me, still has her golden corslet and her enamelled chariot. These things are, I know, as the gods decide, and sometimes they suffer wickedness to triumph. But let Aulus Plautius read us the verses.’

Aulus read the galliambics into which the poet of Vectis had translated the British war-song,87

‘They that scorn the tribes, and call us Britain’s barbarous populaces,

Shall I heed them in their anguish? Shall I brook to be supplicated?

Hear, Icenian, Catieuchlanian; hear, Coritanian, Trinobant!

Must their ever-ravening eagle’s beak and talon annihilate us?

Bark an answer, Britain’s raven! bark and blacken innumerable!

Hear it, gods! The gods have heard it, O Icenian, O Coritanian!

Doubt not ye the gods have answered, Catieuchlanian, Trinobant!

Lo! their precious Roman bantling, lo! the colony Camulodune,

Shall we teach it a Roman lesson? shall we care to be pitiful?

Shout, Icenian, Catieuchlanian; shout, Coritanian, Trinobant!

Bloodily, bloodily fall the battle-axe, unexhausted, inexorable!

Take the hoary Roman head, and shatter it, hold it abominable,

Cut the Roman boy in pieces in his lust and voluptuousness.

Fall the colony, city, and citadel, London, Verulam, Camulodune!’

‘Ye gods! What cannot a poet do?’ exclaimed Seneca, with enthusiasm. ‘Those lines would have made me die in battle, if I had been a Briton.’

‘They have caused eighty thousand to die in battle,’ said Aulus. ‘A later letter of Paulinus tells us that, after a fearful massacre of the Romans at the three colonies of Londinium, Verulamium, and Camulodunum, the Britons assembled two hundred and thirty thousand warriors, with whom he fought a tremendous battle near Verulamium. But how could those woad-painted fighters withstand the skill, the discipline, the heavy armour of our legionaries? We lost but four hundred, Paulinus says; and Boadicea, who, in a chariot with her two daughters, had raged through the battle like an angry lioness, has taken poison in despair.’

The wild passionate verses had produced strangely different effects on the little audience. The old king started up from his couch, his breast panting, his eyes full of fire, and then sank back again and hid his face in his mantle. For the lines recalled to him his own heroic struggles, and his great father, Cunobalin, and his noble brothers. Claudia mused in silence, thinking of the day when the Prince of Peace should come again—a thought which Pomponia divined as she laid her hand on the fair head of her friend. Vespasian looked grave, and thought it rather treasonous of a Roman poet to turn such verses into Latin. Pudens and Titus felt a pang of regret that, in combat with a free people, the name of Rome should be stained with the infamies of scamps and weaklings who had provoked that terrible revolt.

Seneca little knew that Aulus, in reading extracts from the letter of Suetonius, had suppressed a passage in which the general had indignantly stated as one cause of the insurrection, not only the wrongs of Boadicea, but the fact that Seneca himself had suddenly called in large sums of money which he had lent to the British at usurious interest, and that the demand for repayment had reduced the poor Iceni to bankruptcy and despair.

‘We have been talking about Britain all this time,’ said Titus; ‘but here is our friend Julius straight from Palestine, and he must have plenty of news to tell us about those odd fanatics, the Jews.’

‘How goes the world in Jerusalem?’ asked Vespasian. ‘The question is very interesting to an old soldier like me. We constantly hear of risings there. I am told that affairs are getting desperate, and who knows but what the Emperor may some day despatch me thither at the head of a legion?’

‘Nothing is more likely,’ said Julius.

‘Unless you snore while the Emperor is singing, father, as you did at Subiaco,’ said Titus, laughing, as did all the guests.

‘Impudent boy!’ said Vespasian, joining in the laugh. ‘Let Julius go on.’

Julius told them that ever since the days when Pontius Pilatus had half maddened the Jews by bringing the Roman ensigns into Jerusalem, and Caligula had reduced them to stupefaction by proposing to set up his own image in their Temple, they had been on the verge of sedition.

‘Felix,’ he added, ‘only got off their impeachment by the influence of his brother, Pallas. Festus had hard work with their bandits. At present they are raging in a first-rate quarrel with young King Agrippa.’

He proceeded to tell them how Agrippa, for the delectation of his friends, had built a dining-room at the top of his Palace, so that his guests as they lay at the banquet could enjoy the highly curious spectacle of all that was going on in the Temple precincts. Indignant at this encroachment, the Jews built up a blank wall of such a height as not only to exclude the view from the Asmonæan Palace of Agrippa, but also to shut out the surveillance of the Roman soldiers in the tower Antonia. Agrippa was furious, and Festus ordered them to demolish the wall. But they said that they would die rather than consent to do this. They appealed to Nero, and Festus allowed them to send their High Priest, Ishmael ben Phabi, with nine others, to plead their cause with the Emperor.

‘I suspect that this deputation was on board the vessel whose shipwreck I mentioned,’ said Julius.

‘Will this appeal be successful?’ asked Vespasian.

‘I believe it will,’ answered the centurion; ‘for Poppæa is very favourable to the Jews.’

‘Shall we really see a Jewish High Priest in Rome?’ asked Pomponia.

‘Yes, lady,’ answered Julius; ‘but a very unworthy one. He rules by terror. He robs and defrauds the inferior priests to such an extent that they die of starvation, and his blows have become proverbial. To the disgust of the Jews he wears silk gloves when he is offering sacrifice, in order to keep his hands clean. And yet, so scrupulous are these oddest of people, that they would not let his father perform the very greatest sacrifice in their whole year because of the most insignificant accident.’

‘What was it?’ asked Pomponia.

‘You will really hardly believe it. On the eve of the great festival which they call the Kippurim—a sort of day of expiation—the father of this High Priest was talking to Aretas, king of Arabia, and by an accident a speck of the Emir’s saliva fell on Ishmael’s beard. This made him “unclean,” in their opinion; and a deputy, whom they call the Sagan, had to perform its principal function!’

The guests laughed.

‘But tell us now,’ said Vespasian, ‘about these new Christians. I suppose they, and their Christus, are more turbulent even than the Jews?’

‘So we Romans are led to believe,’ said Julius. ‘It is exactly the reverse. The Christians are the most peaceful of men, and they reverence the Roman power.’

‘Have you seen much of them?’ asked Aulus.

‘I witnessed a remarkable scene,’ said Julius, ‘just before I left Jerusalem. Festus, as you are aware, died the other day, worn out with cares and worries. Pending the appointment of his successor, Agrippa appointed a new High Priest—Annas, son of the priest before whom Christus was tried. This Annas took upon himself unwonted authority. He summoned the head of the Christians—James, a brother of their Christus—before their Sanhedrin, and ordered him to be stoned to death. But this James was almost worshipped by the people, who called him “the Just.” To give him a chance of life, they asked him what he thought of Christus, and he called him a God. On hearing this answer they flung him down from the roof of the Temple. The fall did not kill him; he was able to rise to his knees and pray for them. It was a wonderful sight—that man of noble presence, with the long locks streaming over his shoulders, and his white robe stained with blood, kneeling in the Temple court among his furious enemies! One of the bystanders pleaded for him; but a fuller came up and dashed out his brains with a club.’

‘The cup of that nation’s iniquity is full,’ said Pomponia, who had listened with a shudder to this tale of martyrdom.

‘It is,’ said Julius. ‘Immediately after I had witnessed this sad scene, I was talking to a brilliant young priest in Jerusalem named Josephus, of whose abilities they think highly, and who evidently has a great future before him. He made the same remark.’

‘But tell us something about that wonderful prisoner whom you brought to Rome,’ said Titus.

Julius detailed to them his voyage, the storm when they drifted so long up and down Adria in the starless nights and sunless days; the strong influence of the Jewish prisoner over the whole crew; the spirit which he breathed into their despair; the practical wisdom of all his counsels; the intense gratitude which he had kindled in the Protos of Malta and in the barbarous inhabitants, by what they believed to be a miraculous healing. ‘His teaching,’ he added, ‘is the most wonderful thing I ever heard.’

‘What can a Jew really teach?’ asked Seneca, with some disdain.

‘He preaches that their Prophet whom Pilatus crucified, was God Himself,’ said Julius; ‘and no sane man can believe that. But there is a sort of supernatural spell about the goodness of this Paulus; and when I hear him speak to “the brethren,” as he calls the Christians, I am always reminded of Homer’s lines—

‘In thought profound

His modest eyes he fixed upon the ground;

But when he speaks, what elocution flows,

Soft as the fleeces of descending snows!

The copious accents fall with easy art,

Melting they fall, and sink into the heart.’

‘He may have the gift of speech,’ said Seneca; ‘many Orientals have. But it is monstrous to suppose that a fanatical Jew, with a senseless creed, should have anything to teach us.’

‘Has he written anything?’ asked Flavius Sabinus.

‘Yes; he has written some wonderful letters—a strange mixture (as friends in Palestine told me) of fantastic doctrine and perfect ethics.’

‘Has he taught a single moral truth which has not been taught for four centuries, since Aristotle and Plato and Chrysippus?’ asked Seneca.

‘I have not read his letters,’ said Julius. ‘They were difficult to get hold of, for the Christians are very shy about their writings. But he lives the truth he teaches.’

‘Ah!’ said Seneca; ‘if he has the secret of that—! As for us, too many of us are open to the reproach that we are only philosophers by wearing beards.’

‘Well,’ said Titus, ‘I have been to hear the lectures of Musonius Rufus, and I defy any mortal man to teach better truths than he and Cornutus do; for I must not speak of the illustrious Seneca in his presence. We have no need to consult barbarian Jews with insane new mythologies.’

Pomponia and Claudia and Pudens were of necessity silent in that mixed company; but they thought that the good soil of the Christian faith was the one thing lacking to Seneca, which might have made the roses of his moral teaching produce something better than mere perfume.

And if Titus had but laid aside the ignorant disdain which marked him in common with the mass of philosophic Pagans, his manly virtues might have shone forth with yet more beautiful lustre, and he might have been saved from the sins and errors wherewith he afterwards defiled a noble name.