CHAPTER XIII THE ADVENTURES OF A RUNAWAY

Ἕκαστος δὲ πειράζεται ὑπὸ τῆς ἰδίας ἐπιθυμίας ἐξελκόμενος καὶ δελεαζόμενος.—S. Jac. Ep. i. 14.

Φρύγα οἰκέτην ἔχω πονηρόν.—Alciphr. Ep. iii. 38.

The real history of Onesimus was this. He had been born at Thyatira; his parents had once been in a respectable position, but his father had been unfortunate, and when the boy became an orphan he had sunk so low in the world that, to save him from the pangs of hunger, the creditors sold him as a slave to the purple-factory of which Lydia—who afterwards became St. Paul’s convert at Philippi—was part-owner. There he had learnt a great deal about the purple-trade and the best way of folding and keeping purple robes. But he was wild and careless and fond of pleasure, and the head workman, not finding him profitable or easy to manage, had again offered him for sale. He was a quick, good-looking boy, and Philemon, a gentleman of Colossæ, touched with his forlorn look as he stood on the slave-platform (catasta) with his feet chalked and a description (titulus) round his neck, had felt compassion for him and had bought him. Not long after this, Philemon, with his wife Apphia, his son Archippus, and several slaves of their household, had been converted by St. Paul. The Apostle had not, indeed, visited the strange Phrygian city, where the Lycus flows under its natural bridges of gleaming travertine; but Philemon and his party had gone down to witness the great Asian games at Ephesus, and to view the treasures of the famous Temple of Artemis, which was one of the wonders of the world. There they had heard Paul preach in the hall of the rhetorician Tyrannus, and, being of sweet and serious disposition, had been profoundly impressed by the message of the gospel. The grace of God had taken possession of their hearts. They exulted in the purity, the hope, and the gladness of Christianity, and under the fostering care of Epaphras, to whose charge St. Paul had entrusted the churches of the Lycian valley, they had finally been led to the full acceptance of the gospel, and had been baptised in the waters of their native river.

Onesimus had not been baptised with them, though he had learnt something of Christianity as a young catechumen. He had lived in daily contact with these good people from early boyhood, and they had treated him with a kindness and consideration which was in marked contrast to the brutal manner of most Pagans towards the human beings whom they regarded as chattels of which they were the indefeasible owners. But Colossæ was a sleepy and decaying city. It offered none of the pleasures and excitements which Onesimus had tasted at Thyatira and Ephesus. He longed to escape from the narrow valley of the dull town; to hear in the streets of Ephesus the shrill wail of the priests of Cybele; to gaze at the superb Artemisian processions; to sit palpitating with enthusiasm as he watched the chariots dash past him in wild career in the circus, or the gorgeous spectacles of the amphitheatre. Above all he sighed and yearned for Rome, for he had often heard of its glory, its magnificence, its unchecked indulgencies. He was only a slave—only one of those Phrygian slaves, who were the least esteemed; but he had been free born. The passions of the Asiatic Greek were strong in him. Other slaves had made their way—why should not he? He was strong, clever, good-looking—was he not certain to secure some fortune in the world?

The ‘tempting opportunity’ met the ‘susceptible disposition.’ Philemon was engaged in the wool-dyeing which formed the most prosperous industry of Colossæ, and on a certain day after the great fair of Laodicea considerable sums were paid to him. He had never had any reason to distrust Onesimus, and the youth knew where the money was kept. One day, when Philemon had been summoned by business to Hierapolis and was likely to be absent for a week, Onesimus abstracted some of the gold coins—enough, he thought, to take him safely to Rome if necessary—and absconded to Ephesus. There, for a few days, he enjoyed himself in visiting the marvels and amusements of the city. But a fair youth, in servile dress, alone, in a crowded town, could hardly escape falling among companions of the lowest type. Fain would they have plunged him into vice and dissipation; but though the runaway was not always truthful, and had fallen into dishonesty, he was far from being depraved. One who had breathed in a pure Christian household the dewy dawn of the Christian faith, and had watched its purple glow transfiguring the commonest elements of life, could hardly sink to the depths of Satan in the great weltering sea of heathen wickedness. Fallen as he was, he never wholly lost his self-respect, and when he had satisfied his first wild impulse he longed to return and plead for forgiveness. After all, how infinitely more happy had he been in sleepy Colossæ than in tumultuous Ephesus! But for a slave to abscond from a kind master, and in absconding to steal his master’s gold, was not only a heinous but a capital offence. He did not know but what Philemon, good and kind as he was, might still deem it right to uphold the laws of the State, and to hand him over to the magistrates. And then he shuddered to think of what awaited him: what blows, what brandings, what wearing of the furca, or thrusting into the stocks, or being made to work in the mines or the galleys, or among the chained wretches of some public slave-prison. The soft nature of the Eastern shrank from such horrors, and almost more from the intolerable sense of shame which would overwhelm him when he stood for the first time a convict-fugitive in his master’s house.

His ill-got money was soon ill-gone. A little of it was lost in gambling; some he had to squander on worthless companions, who tried to insinuate themselves into his favour, or to terrify him with their suspicions; the rest was stolen one night in the low lodging which he had been obliged to seek. Penniless, and sick at heart, he hurried down to the great quay of the city, and offered to work his passage to Italy in a galley. Landed in Italy he had begged his way to Rome, and in Rome he had sunk to the wretchedness in which we first saw him. No career seemed open to him but a career of vice; no possibility offered of earning his daily bread but by criminal courses. He sank back horrified from the rascality which he had witnessed on every side, among those who, being past feeling, and having their consciences seared as with a hot iron, wrought all uncleanness with greediness. He grew more and more emaciated, more and more wretched, sleeping under arches or porticoes, and depending for his scant supply of polenta on the chance of a farthing flung to him now and then in scornful alms. The accident which threw him in the path of Pudens came only just in time to save him from ruin and despair.

Nereus, the freedman of Pudens, was not unwilling to get for nothing an active youth who might turn out to be a useful slave; and in that household he once more found kindness and happiness. It is true that Pudens was not yet an open Christian, but several of his slaves were, as Onesimus soon discovered; and he had learnt by experience that, among Christian men and women, he was safe from a thousand miseries and a thousand temptations. The busy thronging, rushing life of Rome delighted his quick intelligence, and all the more from the contrast it presented to the silent streets of Colossæ, and the narrow valley of its strange white stream.

He had several adventures, and such principles of righteousness as were left to him were severely tried. Some of the young slaves whom he encountered took him to the theatres, and in the pantomimic displays and Atellan fables a cynical shamelessness reigned supreme. To witness the acting of a Paris or an Aliturus was to witness consummate human skill and beauty pandering to the lowest instincts of humanity. Yet Onesimus could not keep away from these scenes, though Stachys and Nereus and Junia and others of the Christian slaves of Pudens did their best, when the chance offered, to save him from the vortex of such perilous dissipation.

Still more brutalising, still more destructive of every element of pureness and kindness were the gladiatorial games. Of these he had no experience. In the provinces they were comparatively rare, and Philemon had forbidden his slaves ever to be present in the amphitheatre when they were exhibited. Onesimus, who had nothing cruel in his nature, had so far preserved a sort of respect for the wishes of Philemon, that he determined not to witness a gladiatorial show. When the great day came, all the slaves were talking of the prowess of Gallina and Syrus, two famous gladiators, and of the magnificent number of lions and tigers which were to be exhibited.

He could not help being interested in a topic which seemed so absorbing, but he still meant to keep away. Some of his comrades, however, thought that scruples which might suit a Cicero and a Seneca were quite out of place in a Phrygian foot-boy, and seized him in the street and said, ‘We are going to take you to the amphitheatre by force.’

‘It is of no use to take me,’ said Onesimus, repeating a sentiment which he had heard from Philemon. ‘I am not going to see fine fellows—fine Dacians and Britons—hack one another to pieces to please a multitude of whom the majority deserve life much less than the gladiators themselves.’

‘Di magni, salaputium disertum!’ exclaimed Lygdus, one of the gay and festal company who belonged to Cæsar’s household. ‘I heard Epictetus say something of the kind, and we all know that the poor little fellow is only a small echo of Musonius. But you, Onesimus, cannot pretend to be a philosopher, and instead of talking seditious nonsense against the majesty of the Roman people, go you shall.’

‘Well then, you will have to drag me there by force,’ said Onesimus.

‘Never mind; go you shall,’ said Lygdus; and, seizing him by the neck and arms, they hurried him along with them into the top seats set apart for slaves and the proletariat.

When once there, Onesimus had not the wisdom to behave as young Alypius did three centuries later, and to close his eyes. On the contrary, he caught fire, almost from the first moment, with the wild excitement, and returned home paganised in every fibre of his being by the horrid voluptuous maddening scene which he had witnessed—in which he had taken part. All that was sweet and pure and tender in the lessons which he had learnt in the house of Philemon seemed to have been swept away for the time in that crimson tide of blood, in that demoniac spectacle of strong men sacrificed as on a Moloch-altar for the amusement of the idle populace. The more splendid the agility of the nets-man, the more brawny the muscles of the Samnite, the more dazzling the sweep of the mirmillo’s steel, the more vivid was the excitement of watching the glazing eye and ebbing life. It was thrilling to see the supreme moments and most unfathomed mysteries of existence turned into the spectacle of a holiday; and even to help in deciding by the movement of a thumb whether some blue-eyed German from the Teutobergian forests should live or die. What wonder was it that waves of emotion swept over the assembled multitude as the gusts of a summer tempest sweep over the waving corn? What wonder that the hearts of thousands, as though they were the heart of one man, throbbed together in fierce sympathy, and became like a wild Æolian harp, of which the strings were beaten into murmurs or shrieks or sobs by some intermittent hurricane? In the concentrated passion of those hours, when every pulse leapt and tingled with excitement, the youth seemed to live through years in moments; his whole being palpitated with a delicious horror, which annihilated all the ordinary interests of life. Here, for the mere dissipation of time, the most consummate tragedies were enacted as part of a scenic display. The spasms of anguish and the heroism of endurance were but the passing incidents of a gymnastic show.

When Onesimus returned to his cell that night he was a changed being. For a long time he could not sleep, and when he did sleep the tumult of the arena still rolled through his troubled dreams. His fellow-slaves, long familiar with such games, were amused to hear him start up from his pallet with shouts of Habet! Occide! Verbera! and all the wild cries of the amphitheatre, and from these bloodshot dreams he would awake panting as from a nightmare, while the chant of the gladiators, Ave, Cæsar! Morituri te salutamus, still woke its solemn echoes in his ears.

All life looked stale and dull to the Phrygian slave when the glow of an Italian morning entering his cell aroused him to the duties of the day. Slaves, even in a humble home like that of Pudens, were so numerous as to make those duties inconceivably light. For the greater part of the day his time was his own, for all he had to do was to wait on Pudens when he went out, carrying anything which his master might require. But henceforth his thoughts were day-dreams, and, when not engaged in work, he found nothing to do but to join in the gossip of his fellow-slaves. Their talk turned usually on three subjects—their masters, and all the low society slanders of the city; the delights of the taverns; the merits of rival gladiators and charioteers, whose names were on every lip. Such conversation led of course to incessant betting, and many a slave lost the whole amount of his savings again and again by backing the merits of a Pacideianus or a Spicillus; or by running up too long scores at the cook-shop (popina) to which his fellow-slaves resorted; or by trying to win the affections of some favourite female flute-player from Syria or Spain.

Gambling, too, was the incessant diversion of these idle hordes. The familia of Pudens only consisted of the modest number of thirty, but the slave population of Rome was of colossal magnitude, and there was a terrible free-masonry among the members of this wretched and corrupted class. The companions of Onesimus were not chiefly to be found in the household to which he belonged, but among the lewd idlers whom he picked up as acquaintances in every street. With these he played at dice, and sauntered about, and jested, and drank, and squabbled, and betted, until he was on the high road towards being as low a specimen of the slave-world as any of them all—a beautiful human soul caught in the snare of the devil, lured by the glittering bait of vice, to be dragged forth soon to die lacerated and gasping upon the shore.

Hitherto a very little had sufficed him, but now he began to need money—money for gambling, money for the taverns, money to spend in the same sins and follies in which the slaves about him spent their days. He could indeed have gained it, had he sunk so low, in a thousand nefarious ways; and, gifted as he was with a quick and supple intelligence, as well as with no small share of the beauty of his race, he might have run away once more, or have secured his purchase into many a pagan household, where he might have become the pampered favourite of some luxurious master. Such, in such a city as Rome, would have been the certain fate of any youth like him, had it not been for the truths which he had heard from Epaphras in the house of Philemon. When he was most willing to forget those holy lessons they still hung about him and gave him checks. The grace of God still lived as a faint spark, not wholly quenched, under the whitening embers of his life. He could not forget that what were now his pleasures had once been pains, and sometimes amid the stifling atmosphere of a dissipation which rapidly tended to become pleasureless, his soul seemed to ‘gasp among the shallows,’ sore athirst for purer air.

But he resisted these retarding influences, and by fiercer draughts of excitement strove to dispel the pleadings of the still small voice.

It was not long before he felt hard pressed, for he had gambled away the little he had earned.

He had stolen before—he would steal again.

The slaves of Pudens were mostly of a simpler and more faithful class than those of the more luxurious houses. There was no need for Pudens to take great precautions about the safety of his money. Most of it was safe in the hands of his banker (mensarius), but sums which to a slave would seem considerable were locked up in a chest under the charge of Nereus. Nereus, as we have already mentioned, was a Christian, and Onesimus, until he had begun to degenerate, had felt warmly drawn towards his daughter Junia. He thought, too, that the simple maiden was not wholly indifferent to him. But Nereus had watched his career, and as it became too probable that the Phrygian would sink into worthlessness, he had taken care that Onesimus and his daughter should scarcely ever meet.

But when, as in every Roman house, a multitude live in a confined space, the whole ways of the house become known to all, and Onesimus knew the place where Nereus kept the ready money of his master. He watched his opportunity when all but a few members of the household were absent to witness a festival, from which he had purposely absented himself on a plea of sickness. The only persons left at home were Nereus and others who, being Christians, avoided giving the smallest sanction to pagan ceremonies. The house was still as the grave in the noontide, when the youth glided into the cell of the sleeping Nereus, and deftly abstracted from his tunic the key which he wanted. Armed with this, he slipped into the tablinum, or private room, of Pudens—whom he knew to be on duty at the Palace—and had already opened the casket in which he kept his money, when he was startled by a low voice and a gliding footstep.

He had not been unobserved. Nereus was too faithful, and too much aware of the dishonesty of the unhappy class to which he belonged, to leave his master’s interests unprotected. He had directed his daughter always to be watchful at the hour when he knew that a theft was most feasible. Junia, from the apartments of the female slaves, on the other side of the house, had heard some one moving stealthily along the passage. Hidden behind a statue, she had observed a slave stealing into her father’s cell, had followed lightly, and with a pang of shame had seen the youth of whom she had thought as a lover make his way noiselessly to the room of his master.

She followed him to the entrance; she saw him open the casket; and she grew almost sick with terror when she thought of the frightful punishment—possibly even crucifixion itself—which might follow the crime he was on the eve of committing. She would fain have stopped him, but did not dare to enter the chamber; and, meanwhile, for some reason the youth was lingering.

He was lingering because there rang in his ear a voiceless memory of words which Epaphras had quoted as a message of Paul of Tarsus. The still voice said to him: ‘Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands.’

He was trying to suppress the mutiny of ‘the blushing shamefast spirit’ within him, as he thought of the games and the dice-box and the Subura, when he was thrilled through and through by a terrified and scarcely audible whisper of his name—

‘Onesimus!’

He turned round, and with nervous haste relocking the casket, hurried into the passage. There, with head bowed over her hands, he saw the figure of a young girl. For one instant she raised her face as he came out, and he exclaimed—‘Junia!’

She raised her hand with a warning gesture, put her finger to her lips, and vanished. She fled towards the garden behind the farthest precincts of the house, and he overtook her in a walk sheltered from view by a trellis covered with the leaves of a spreading vine.

‘Junia,’ he said, flinging himself on his knees, ‘will you betray me?’

The girl stood pale and trembling. ‘Onesimus,’ she said, ‘I conceal nothing from my father.’

‘From your father? Oh, Junia, he would drag me before Pudens. Would you see me beaten, perhaps to death, with the leaded thongs? Would you hear me shriek under the horrible scutica? Could you bear to see the crows tearing my flesh as I hung on the cross?’

‘Pudens is just and kind,’ she said, faintly, ‘he never inflicts upon his slaves such horrors as these.’

‘No,’ answered Onesimus, bitterly; ‘it would suffice to send me, chained, to work in some sunless pit to the music of clanking fetters. It would suffice to brand three letters on my forehead, and turn me into the world to starve as a spectacle of shame.’

‘Onesimus,’ she said, ‘would God I could—’ She stopped, confused and terrified, for she did not know that Onesimus had ever heard the truths of Christianity.

‘Junia,’ he exclaimed, ‘you are a Christian; so am I’—and he marked on the gravel the monogram of Christ.

‘Alas!’ she answered, ‘a Christian you cannot be. It seems that you have heard of Jesus; but Christians cannot steal, and cannot live as you have been living. Christians are innocent.’

‘Then you will betray me? Ah! but if you do, you are in my power. Christianity is a foreign superstition. The City Prætor—’

‘Base,’ she answered, ‘and baser than I thought. Know you not’—and a light came into her eye, and a glow over all her face—‘that a Christian can suffer? that even a Christian slave-girl does not fear at all to die?’

He thought that she had never looked so beautiful—so like one of the angels of whom he had heard in the gatherings at Colossæ. But the sight of the gladiators hacking each other to pieces had inured him to cruelty and blood—had filled him with fierce egotism, and indifference to human life. A horrible thought suddenly leapt upon him as with a tiger’s leap. Why not get rid of the sole witness of his crime?

‘Then you will betray me to chains, to branding, to the scourge, to the cross?’ he asked, fiercely.

Weeping, hiding her face in her hands, she said: ‘What duty tells me, I must do. I must tell my father.’

In an instant the devil had Onesimus in his grip. He thrust his right hand into his bosom, where he had purposely concealed a dagger.

‘Then die!’ he exclaimed, seizing her with his left hand, while the steel gleamed in the sun.

The girl moved not; but his own shriek startled the air, as he felt a hand come down on his shoulder with the grasp of a vice. The dagger was wrenched out of his hand; he was whirled round, the blow of a powerful fist stretched him on the path, and a foot which seemed as if it would crush out his life was placed upon his breast.

‘Oh, father, spare him!’ said Junia.

Nereus still kept his foot on the prostrate youth, still held the dagger in his hand; his eyes still flashed, his whole frame was dilated with righteous indignation. He had misunderstood the meaning of the scene.

‘Explain!’ he said. ‘Junia! You here alone with Onesimus in the vine-walk, at the lonely noon! How did he inveigle you here? Did he dare to insult you?’

The girl had risen; and while Onesimus lay on the ground, stunned with the violence of his fall, she told her father all that had happened.

Nereus spurned the youth with his foot.

‘And I once thought,’ he said, ‘that he was a secret Christian! I once thought that some day he might be worthy to be the husband of my Junia! A thief! a would-be murderer! This comes of harbouring a strange Phrygian in an honest household.’

‘Father, forgive him!’ said Junia. ‘Are not we forgiven?’

‘The wrong to me—the threat against the life of the child I love—yes, that might be forgiven,’ said Nereus; ‘forgiven if repented of. But how can I do otherwise than tell Pudens? How can I keep this youth a member of the household?’

And again, moved by strong passion, he spurned him with his foot.

‘Is there one house in Rome, father,’ she said, ‘in which there are not thieves? in which there are not men—aye, and women too—who steal, and would murder if they could? Is he worse than thousands whom yet we do not see chained in the prisons or rotting on the crosses? And have we not all sinned? and did not Jesus say, “Forgive one another your trespasses”?’

A half-suppressed groan from Onesimus stopped the conversation.

‘I know not what to do,’ said Nereus. ‘Go back, my child, to your cell and to your distaff. I will see you soon. And you,’ he said, ‘thrice-wretched boy, come with me.’

He dragged Onesimus from the ground, and was in such a transport of wrath that he could not refrain from shaking him by the shoulders with the roughest and most contemptuous violence, before he thrust him into the house, and into the cell which had been assigned to him. Then, calling two of his fellow-slaves, Stachys and Amplias, Christians like himself, whom he could implicitly trust, he bade them bind Onesimus hand and foot, and leave him, not unwatched, till he should have time to consider his case.