CHAPTER XLVII A FETTERED AMBASSADOR

Ὥστε τοὺς δεσμοὺς μου φανεροὺς ἐν Χριστῷ γενέσθαι ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ Πραιτωρίῳ καὶ τοῖς λοιποῖς μᾶσι.—Ep. S. Paul, ad Phil. i. 13.

There was one spot in Rome which was calm amid all tumults, happy amid all calamities, though it was the last place where any of the Roman world would have deemed it possible for happiness to dwell. It was the narrow room which served as a prison to Paul of Tarsus.

As long as Burrus was Præfect of the Prætorians the prisoner’s lot had been made as easy as the strictness of Roman discipline allowed. He had been allowed to hire a lodging of his own, and no hindrance was placed on the visits or kindly offices of his friends. He was, indeed, compelled to submit to the one intolerable condition of being fastened night and day by a coupling-chain to the wrist of a Roman soldier; but Julius and others had spoken to Burrus about him in such warm terms that, as in the case of Agrippa I., care was taken that he should be consigned to the charge of a kind centurion, and that the Prætorians to whom in turn he was chained should, as far as possible, be good-tempered and reasonable men.

There was no service which the soldiers more hated than this of guarding prisoners. Each soldier was for the time as much a prisoner as the prisoner to whom he was chained. To be chained to a Jew was regarded by most of the Prætorians as an intolerable humiliation. If indeed the Jew happened to be a handsome and cosmopolitan young prince like Agrippa, the duty had its alleviations; but at the present time the soldiers had in charge some Jewish priests sent to Rome by Festus, who shuddered to be brought into contact with them. To be chained to these haughty hierarchs, who did not conceal their disdain for their gentile guards, was a cause of incessant annoyance, and there was not a Prætorian who did not groan when it was rumored that Julius had consigned to them another Jew, of weak bodily presence, and with health enfeebled by toil and hardship.

But the soldiers to whose lot it first fell to be coupled to the new prisoner soon spread a favourable report of him. They told their comrades that though he was not only a Jew, but a Christian, he was yet so sweetly reasonable, so generously considerate, so anxious to alleviate the necessary tedium of their duty, that it was a pleasure, and not a misery, to take a turn in guarding him. Unlike the priests, he seemed to take a human interest in everything human. He would talk freely with them on gentile subjects. He listened earnestly to all they had to tell him of Rome, its daily incidents and accidents, its senatorial debates, its foreign campaigns, the edicts of the Emperor, and the fortunes of the imperial family. It was whispered that everything which he did and said was worthy and noble, and the centurions observed a marked change for the better in some of the men who had been brought into contact with him. The Jews, it was noticed, looked on him with hatred as a renegade, and even of the Jewish Christians there were few who visited him. But some Christian was almost always with him, and these friends of his, particularly the modest and engaging Timotheus, deepened the favourable impression which the prisoner himself had made.

In truth, this was not the least happy period of Paul’s career. He was freed from the fret of endless anxiety and embittered opposition; he was no longer harassed by the multiform and terrible perils by which for so many years his life had been assailed. To many the forced cessation of the great work of their careers would have seemed an intolerable trial, and faith would have been weakened by the semblance of God’s desertion. It was not so with Paul. He knew that he was where God meant him to be, and that he was still an ambassador, though, as he playfully said to his friends, an ambassador in a coupling-chain.

He ought in justice to have been brought to speedy trial, seeing that he had already been imprisoned for two years at Cæsarea on a charge wholly without foundation. But in his shipwreck the documents sent by Felix and Festus had been lost, and when fresh documents came Nero’s capricious idleness put off the trial from month to month. So Paul continued in prison, and became a missionary to the Prætorium, and to many Romans. His imprisonment was not lacking in elements of interest. Linus and many of the Roman Christians sought his lodging, and showed him every mark of affection. Luke was constantly with him, consulted with him about every detail of his Gospel, and took charge of his health. He was in frequent correspondence with his friends and with the converts of the churches which he had founded. Timotheus, who was the child of his heart, treated him with all the tenderness of a son. Tychicus and Epaphras came from Asia, and brought him news of the Church of Ephesus and of the valleys of the Lycus. Mark, the cousin of his first companion, Barnabas, came to cheer him with news of Peter and of Jerusalem, and of his travels in many lands. Epaphroditus ministered to his necessities by bringing him a gift from his beloved and generous Philippians. The soldiers heard the letters which he dictated to his converts, and heard what Luke read to him of his Gospel. Many of them were deeply influenced by the new world of thought and holiness which was thus revealed to them. Some were converted and baptised, and found that the lodging of the Jewish prisoner was to them the vestibule of the house of God.

And when the soldier on guard was a brother, the intercourse which the prisoner could hold with any who came to visit him was unconstrained. Most of all was this the case when the Prætorian Celsus was chained to him, and the veteran soldier was so happy in the charge that he was ready to relieve any Prætorian by taking his turn in addition to his own. It was the armour of Celsus, as it lay beside him on the floor, dinted with the blows of many a battle, which suggested to Paul his beautiful description of the Christian panoply.

One day there came to the Apostle a lady deeply veiled attended by a Christian freedwoman. She was so agitated that, when she had sunk on one of the humble seats, she could scarcely find words in which to pour forth her anguish. When she grew a little calmer, she lifted her veil, and Celsus rose and made her a respectful salutation, for he recognised the mourning robes and sad but beautiful face of the wife of Aulus Plautius.

‘The Lady Pomponia,’ he said, ‘may speak freely, and fear not. I will unloose the coupling-chain, and go into the outer room,’

Pomponia thanked him, and told the Apostle that she had long been a baptised sister, and had read his letters to Rome and other churches, and had now come to him for consolation in unutterable distress of heart. She had but one son—the young and beautiful Aulus, the heir and the hope of their great house. But Nero had begun to hate her husband and herself, and was jealous lest some day the army should prefer the Conqueror of Britain to the tenth-rate actor and singer. For Agrippina, in one of her fits of rage, had, before her death, unwisely and unkindly mentioned the youthful Aulus as a virtuous boy who might one day wear the purple more worthily than Nero, who disgraced it; and Nero, wounded in his vanity, had determined on revenge. With a wicked cruelty which would have been infamous even in a Tiberius or a Caligula, he had invited the boy to the Palace, had subjected him to the deadliest insults, and had then ordered him to be slain, accompanying the order with a brutal jest against his mother Agrippina. And the people knew of the crime, and hardly did more than laugh and shrug their shoulders; and the Senate knew of the crime, and did not cease for a single day from its adulation to the tyrant; and the army knew of the crime, and not one sword flashed from its scabbard; and the philosophers and the poets knew of the crime, and not one denunciation scathed that deed of hell.

Pomponia’s heart was broken. Did God deal thus with His servants? Was the Christ far away in His blue heaven, and heeded not these things? And was it not lawful, was it not a duty, for Christians to help to sweep away from the earth such a monster of iniquity? Might she not rouse her husband, Aulus Plautius—not to avenge the individual wrong which was breaking his heart, and bringing him down to the gates of the grave—but to rid mankind from the incubus of an intolerable curse?

The Apostle saw that his task was difficult. For a moment he bowed his head, and clasped his hands in prayer. He needed threefold wisdom—to console the mother’s anguish; to avert the thought of vengeance; to strengthen the faith which had been assailed by sore perplexity. And the grace came to him. He banished from Pomponia’s heart the dread that because her Aulus had died unbaptised, he was doomed to perish: he told her not to dream that the boy, who had thus gone home, had departed unloved by his Heavenly Father. Fearful times were coming on the earth, and her beloved son, in whom the signs of virtue had not been wanting, might have been taken only to save him from the furnace of moral temptation and the wrath to come. Then taking from the hand of Luke the scroll in which he had been writing the great discourse on the Mount of Olives, he read to her the words of Jesus: ‘Ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake. And yet a hair from your head shall not perish. In your endurance ye shall acquire your souls.’

‘Alas!’ she cried, ‘how may I interpret this promise that a hair of our heads shall not fall, when my very heart is cleft in twain?’

He answered that the Lord spake not of earthly things. He warned us that in the world we should have tribulation; but He has overcome the world. And he prayed her not to dream of hastening the tyrant’s punishment. ‘Leave him in God’s hands. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”’

When his voice ceased, the passion of Pomponia’s grief had sunk to rest. The tears which still coursed down her cheeks were but the natural tears of a mother’s bereavement. Her beautiful soul was prepared for consolation, and her faith had but bowed for a moment like the upper foliage of a tree under the stress of some mighty storm. To calm her yet further, the Beloved Physician began to read aloud a passage here and there from the Evangel which occupied his daily thoughts. He read of the love of Jesus for children; he read the beatitudes; he read the story of the Cross. The music of the words and thoughts, borne on the music of his sweet and solemn voice, sank into Pomponia’s soul. She thanked the Evangelist, and, asking for the blessing of the Apostle, dropped her veil and departed to her desolate home.

The Heavenly Father who had suffered anguish to fall upon her had also sent medicine and a physician of the soul to heal her sickness. When she reached her palace on the Aventine, she was able to devote her whole strength to save her husband from succumbing to a sorrow which for him was beyond the reach of consolation. He had chosen for the epitaph of his boy’s tomb the defiant words, ‘I Aulus, the son of Aulus Plautius, uplift my hands against the gods, who took me hence in my innocence, at the age of fifteen years.’91 But she dissuaded him. ‘Why complain,’ she said, ‘against the decree of Heaven? It may be good, and even the best, did we but know it. Nay, my Aulus, carve rather on his tomb a green leaf, and the two words, “In peace,” and add, if thou wilt, the line of Euripides,

‘“Who knows if life be death, and death be life?”’