Aurelian or Rome in the Third Century Part 18

Several testified, as was desired, that this was he.

'This is all I wish to know,' said the prefect. 'The man is either without wits, or they are disordered, or else the pestilent faith he teaches has made the nuisance of him he is, as it does of all who meddle with it. It is scarcely right that he should be abroad. Yet has he committed no offence that condemns him either to scourging or the prison. Hearken therefore, fellow! I now dismiss thee without the scourging thou well deservest; but, if thou keep on thy wild and lawless way, racks and dungeons shall teach thee what there is in Roman justice.

Away with him!'

'Romans! Roman citizens!' cried Macer; 'are these your laws and this your judge?--'

'Away with him, I say!' cried the prefect; and the officers of the palace hurried him out of the hall.

As he went, a voice from the crowd shouted,

'Roman citizens, Macer, are long since dead. 'Tis a vain appeal.'

'I believe you,' replied Macer; 'tyrant and slave stand now for all who once bore the proud name of Roman.'

This violence and injustice on the part of Varus must be traced--for though capricious, and imperious, this is not his character--to the language of Macer in the shop of Publius, and to his apprehension lest the same references to his origin, which he would willingly have forgotten, should be made, and perhaps more offensively still, in the presence of the people. Probus, on the former occasion, lamented deeply that Macer should have been tempted to rehea.r.s.e in the way he did some of the circ.u.mstances of the prefect's history, as its only end could be to needlessly irritate the man of power, and raise up a bitterer enemy than we might otherwise have found in him.

Upon leaving the tribunal, I was curious to watch still further the movements of the Christian. The crowd about him increased rather than diminished, as he left the building and pa.s.sed into the street. At but a little distance from the hall of the prefect, stands the Temple of Peace, with its broad and lofty flights of steps. When Macer had reached it he paused, and looked round upon the motley crowd that had gathered about him.

'Go up! go up!' cried several voices. 'We will hear thee.'

'There is no prefect here,' cried another.

Macer needed no urging, but quickly strode up the steps, till he stood between the central columns of the temple and his audience had disposed themselves below him in every direction, when he turned and gazed upon the a.s.sembled people, who had now--by the addition of such as pa.s.sed along, and who had no more urgent business than to attend to that of any others whom they might chance to meet,--grown to a mult.i.tude. After looking upon them for a s.p.a.ce, as if studying their characters, and how he could best adapt his discourse to their occasions, he suddenly and abruptly broke out--

'You have asked me to come up here; and I am here; glad for once to be in such a place by invitation. And now I am here, and am about to speak, you will expect me to say something of the Christians.'

'Yes yes.'

'But I shall not--not yet. Perhaps by and by. In the meantime my theme shall be the prefect! the prefect Varus!'

'A subject full of matter,' cried one near Macer.

'Better send for him,' said another. 'Twere a pity he lost it.'

'Yes,' continued Macer, 'it is a subject full of matter, and I wish myself he were here to see himself in the mirror I would hold before him; he could not but grow pale with affright. You have just had a sample of Roman justice! How do you like it, Romans? I had gone there to seek justice; not for a Christian, but against a Christian. A Christian master had abused his slave with cruelty, I standing by; and when to my remonstrance--myself feeling the bitter stripes he laid on--he did but ply his thongs the more, I seized the hardened monster by the neck, and wrenching from his grasp the lash, I first plied it upon his own back, and then dragged him to the judgment-seat of Varus,--'

'O fool!'

'You say well--fool that I was, crying for justice! How I was dealt with, some of you have seen. There, I say, was a sample of Roman justice for you! So in these times does power sport itself with poverty. It was not so once in Rome. Were Cincinnatus or Regulus at the tribunal of Varus, they would fare like the soldier Macer. And who, Romans, is this Varus? and why is he here in the seat of authority? At the tribunal, Varus did not know me. But what if I were to tell you there was but a thin wall between the rooms where we were born, and that when we were boys we were ever at the same school!--not such schools as you are thinking of, where the young go for letters and for Greek, but the school where many of you have been and are now at, I dare say, the school of Roman vice, which you may find always open all along the streets, but especially where I and Varus were, in one of the sinks near the Flavian. Pollex, the gladiator, was father of Varus!--not worse, but just as bad, as savage, as beastly in his vices, as are all of that butcher tribe. My father--Macer too--I will not say more of him than that he was keeper of the Vivaria of the amphitheatre, and pa.s.sed his days in caging and uncaging the wild beasts of Asia and Africa; in feeding them when there were no games on foot, and starving them when there were. Varus, the prefect, Romans, and I, were at this school till I joined the legions under Valerian, and he, by a luckier fortune, as it would be deemed, found favor in the eyes of Gallienus, to whom, with his fair sister Fannia, he was sold by those demons Pollex and Caeicina. I say nothing of how it fared with him in that keeping. Fannia has long since found the grave. Is Varus one who should sit at the head of Rome?

He is a man of blood, of crime, of vice, such as you would not bear to be told of! I say not this as if he were answerable for his birth and early vice, but that, being such, this is not his place. He could not help it, nor I, that we were born and nurtured where we were; that the sight of blood and the smell of it, either of men or beasts, was never out of our eyes and nostrils, during all our boyhood and youth; that to him, and me, the sweetest pleasure of our young life was, when the games came on, and the beasts were let loose upon one another, and,--O the hardening of that life!--when, specially, there were prisoners or captives, on which to glut their raging hunger! Those were the days and hours marked whitest in our calendar. And, whitest of all, were the days of the Decian persecution, when the blood of thrice cursed Christians, as I was taught to name them, flowed like water. Every day then Varus and I had our sport; working up the beasts, by our torments, to an unnatural height of madness ere they were let loose, and then rus.h.i.+ng to the gratings, as the doors were thrown open, to see the fury with which they would spring upon their defenceless victims too, and tear them piecemeal. The Romans required such servants--and we were they. They require them now, and you may find any number of such about the theatres. But if there must be such there, why should they be taken thence and put upon the judgment-seat? save, for the reason, that they may have been thoroughly purged, as it were, by fire--which Varus has not been. What with him was necessary and forced when young, is now chosen and voluntary. Vice is now his by election. Now, I ask, why has the life of Varus been such? and why, being such, is he here? Because you are so! Yes, because you are all like him! It is you, Roman citizens, who rear the theatres, the circuses, and the thousand temples of vice, which crowd the streets of Rome,--'

'No, no! it is the emperors.'

'But who make the emperors? You Romans of these times, are a race of cowards and slaves, and it is therefore that tyrants rule over you. Were you freemen, with the souls of freemen in you, do you think you would bear as you do--and love and glory in the yoke--this rule of such creatures as Varus, and others whom it were not hard to name? I know what you are--for I have been one of you. I have not been, nor am I now, hermit, as you may think, being a Christian. A Christian is a man of the world--a man of action and of suffering--not of rest and sleep. I have ever been abroad among men, both before I was a Christian and since; and I know what you are. You are of the same stamp as Varus! nay, start not, nor threaten with your eyes,--I fear you not. If you are not so, why, I say, is Varus there? You know that I speak the truth. The people of Rome are corrupt as their rulers! How should it be much otherwise? You are fed by the largesses of the Emperor, you have your two loaves a day and your pork, and you need not and so do not work. You have no employment but idleness, and idleness is not so much a vice itself as the prolific mother of all vices. When I was one of you, it was so; and so it is now.

My father's labor was nothing; he was kept by the state. The Emperor was not more a man of pleasure than he, nor the princes, than I and Varus.

Was that a school of virtue? When I left the service of the amphitheatre I joined the Legions. In the army I had work, and I had fighting, but my pa.s.sions, in the early days of that service, raged like the sea; and during all the reign of Valerian's son there was no bridle upon them;--for I served under the general Carinus, and what Carinus was and is, most of you know. O the double horrors of those years! I was older, and yet worse and worse. G.o.d! I marvel that thou didst not interpose and strike me dead! But thy mercy spared me, and now the lowest, lowest h.e.l.l shall not be mine.' Tears, forced by these recollections, flowed down his cheeks, and for a time he was speechless.

'Such, Romans, was I once. What am I now? I am a changed man--through and through. There is not a thought of my mind, nor a fibre of my body, what they were once. You may possibly think the change has been for the worse, seeing me thus thrust forth from the tribunal of the prefect with dishonor, when I was once a soldier and an officer under Aurelian. I would rather a thousand times be what I am, a soldier of Jesus Christ.

And I would that, by anything I could do, you, any one of you, might be made to think so too; I would that Varus might, for I bear him no ill will.

'But what am I now? I am so different a man from what I once was, that I can hardly believe myself to be the same. The life which I once led, I would not lead again--no--not one day nor hour of it, though you would depose Aurelian to day and crown me Caesar to-morrow. I would no more return to that life, than I would consent to lose my nature and take a swine's, and find elysium where as a man I once did, in sinks and sties.

I would not renounce for the wealth of all the world, and its empire too, that belief in the faith of Christ, the head of the Christians, which has wrought so within me.

'And what has made me so--would make you so--if you would but hearken to it. And would it not be a good thing if the flood of vice, which pours all through the streets of Rome, were stayed? Would it not be a happy thing, if the misery which dwells beneath these vaulted roofs and these humbler ones equally, the misery which drunkenness and l.u.s.t, the l.u.s.t of money, and the love of place, and every evil pa.s.sion generates, were all wiped away, and we all lived together observant of the rights of one another, helping one another; not oppressing; loving, not hating; showing in our conduct as men, the virtues of little children? Would it not be happier if all this vast population were bound together by some common ties of kindred; if all held all as brethren; if the poor man felt himself to be the same as Aurelian himself, because he is a man like him and weighs just as much as he in the scales of G.o.d, and that it is the vice in the one or the other, and that only that sinks him lower?

Would it not be better, if you all could see in the presiding power of the universe, one great and good Being, who needs not to be propitiated by costly sacrifices of oxen or bulls, nor by cruel ones of men,--but is always kindly disposed towards you, and desires nothing so much as to see you living virtuously, and is never grieved as he is to see you ruining your own peace,--not harming him--by your vices? for you will bear witness with me that your vices are never a cause of happiness.

Would it not be better if you could behold such a G.o.d over you, in the place of those who are called G.o.ds, and whom you wors.h.i.+p, as I did once, because I feared to do otherwise, and yet sin on never the less: who are your patterns not so much in virtue as in all imaginable vice?'

'Away with the wicked!'--'Away with the fellow!' cried several voices; but others predominated, saying, 'Let him alone!'--'He speaks well! We will hear him!'--'We will defend him! go on, go on!'

'I have little or nothing more to say,' continued Macer. 'I will only ask you whether you must not judge that to be a very powerful principle of some kind that drew me up out of that foul pit into which I was fallen, and made me what I am now? Which of you now feels that he has motive strong enough to work out such a deliverance for him? What help in this way do you receive from your priests, if perchance you ever apply to them? What book of instructions concerning the will of the G.o.ds have you, to which you can go at any time and all times? Only believe as I do, Romans, and you will hate sin as I do. You cannot help it. Believe in the G.o.d that I do, and in the revealer of his will, the teacher whom he sent into the world to save us from our heathen errors and vices, and you will then be more than the Romans you once were. You are now, and you know it, infinitely less. Then you will be what the old Romans were and more. You will be as brave as they, and more just. You will be as generous and more gentle. You will love your own country as well, but you will love others too. You will be more ready to offer up your lives for your country, for it will be better worth dying for; every citizen will be a brother; every ruler a brother; it will be like dying for your own little household. If you would see Rome flourish, she must become more pure. She can stagger along not much longer under this mountain weight of iniquity that presses her into the dust. She needs a new Hercules to cleanse her foul chambers. Christ is he; and if you will invite him, he will come and sweep away these abominations, so that imperial Rome shall smell fragrantly as a garden of spices.'

Loud exclamations of approval here interrupted Macer. The great proportion of those who were present were now evidently with him, and interested in his communications.

'Tell us,' cried one, as soon as the noise subsided, 'how you became what you are? What is to be done?'

'Yes,' cried many voices, 'tell us.'

'I will tell you gladly,' answered Macer. 'I first heard the word of truth from the lips of Probus, a preacher of the Christians, whom you too may hear whenever you will, by seeking him out on the days when the Christians wors.h.i.+p. Probus was in early life a priest of the temple of Jupiter, and if any man in Rome can place the two religions side by side, and make the differences plain, it is he. Go to him such of you as can, and you will never repent it. But if you would all learn the first step toward Christian truth, and all truth, it is this; lay aside your prejudices, be willing to see, hear, and judge for yourselves. Take not rumor for truth. Do not believe without evidence both for and against.

You would not, without evidence and reason, charge Aurelian with the death of Aurelia, though ten thousand tongues report it. Charge not the Christians with worse things then, merely because the wicked and ill-disposed maliciously invent them and spread them. If you would know the whole truth and doctrine of Christians; if you would ascend to the fountain-head of all Christian wisdom, take to your homes our sacred books and read them. Some of you at least can obtain them. Let one purchase, and then twenty or fifty read. One thing before I cease.

Believe not the wicked aspersions of the prefect. He charges me as a brawler, a disturber of the peace and order of the city. Romans, believe me, I am a lover of peace, but I am a lover of freedom too. Because I am a lover of peace, and would promote it, do I labor to teach the doctrines of Christ, which are doctrines of peace and love, both at home and abroad, in the city and throughout the world; and because I am the friend of freedom, do I open my mouth at all times and in every place, wherever I can find those who, like you, are ready to hear the words of salvation. When in Rome I can no longer speak--no longer speak for the cause of what I deem truth, then will I no longer be a Roman. Then will I that day renounce my name and my country. Thanks to Aurelian, he has never chained up the tongue. I have fought and bled under him, and never was there a braver man, or who honored courage more in others. I do not believe he will ever do so cowardly a thing as to restrain the freedom of men's speech. Aurelian is some things, but he is not others. He is severe and cruel, but not mean. Cut Aurelian in two, and throw the worser half away, and t'other is as royal a man as ever the world saw.

'One thing more, good friends and citizens: If I am sometimes carried away by my pa.s.sions to do that which seems a disturbance of the common order, say that it is the soldier Macer that does it, not his Christian zeal--his human pa.s.sions, not his new-adopted faith. It is not at once and perfectly that a man pa.s.ses from one life to another; puts off one nature and takes another. Much that belonged to Macer of the amphitheatre, and Macer the soldier, cleaves to him now. But make not his religion amenable for that. You who would see the law of Christ written, not only on a book but in the character and life of a living man, go read the Christian Probus.'

As he said these words he began to descend the steps of the temple; but many crowded round him, a.s.sailing him, some with reproaches, and others with inquiries put by those who seemed anxious to know the truth. The voices of his opponents were the most violent and prevailed, and made me apprehensive that they would proceed to greater length than speech. But Macer stood firm, nothing daunted by the uproar. One, who signalized himself by the loudness and fierceness of his cries, exclaimed, 'that he was nothing else than an atheist like all the rest of the Christians; they have no G.o.ds; they deny the G.o.ds of Rome, and they give us nothing in their stead.'

'We deny the G.o.ds of Rome, I know,' replied Macer, 'and who would not, who had come to years of discretion? who had so much as left his nurse's lap? A fouler brotherhood than they the lords of Heaven, Rome does not contain. Am I to be called upon to wors.h.i.+p a set of wretches chargeable with all the crimes and vices to be found on earth? It is this accursed idolatry, O Romans, that has sunk you so low in sin! They are your lewd, and drunken, and savage deities, who have taught you all your refinement in wickedness; and never, till you renounce them, never till you repent you of your iniquities--never till you turn and wors.h.i.+p the true G.o.d will you rise out of the black Tartarean slough in which you are lying.

These two hundred years and more has G.o.d called to you by his Son, and you have turned away your ears; you have hardened your hearts; the prophets who have come to you in his name have you slain by the sword or hung upon the accursed tree. Awake out of your slumbers! These are the last days. G.o.d will not forbear forever. The days of vengeance will come; they are now at hand: I can hear the rus.h.i.+ng of that red right arm hot with wrath--'

'Away with him! away with him!' broke from an hundred voices!--'Down with the blasphemer!'--'Who is he to speak thus of the G.o.ds of Rome?'--'Seize the impious Gallilean, and away with him to the prefect'--These, and a thousand exclamations of the same kind, and more savage, were heard on every side; and, at the same moment, their denial and counter-exclamations, from as many more.

'He has spoken the truth!'--'He is a brave fellow!' 'He shall not be touched except we fall first!'--came from a resolute band who encompa.s.sed the preacher, and seemed resolved to make good their words by defending him against whatever a.s.sault might be made. Macer, himself a host in such an affray, neither spoke nor moved, standing upright and still as a statue; but any one might see the soldier in his kindling eye, and that a slight cause would bring him upon the a.s.sailants with a fury that would deal out wounds and death. He had told them that the old Legionary was not quite dead within him, and sometimes usurped the place of the Christian; this they seemed to remember, and after showering upon him vituperation and abuse in every form, one after another they withdrew and left him with those who had gathered immediately around him. These too soon took their leave of him, and Macer, unimpeded and alone, turned towards his home.

When I related to Probus afterwards what I had heard and witnessed, he said that I was fortunate in hearing what was so much more sober and calm than that which usually fell from him; that generally he devoted himself to an exposition of the absurdities of the heathen wors.h.i.+p, and the abominations of the mysteries, and the vices of the priesthood; and he rarely ended without filling with rage a great proportion of those who heard him. Many a time had he been a.s.saulted; and hardly had escaped with his life. You will easily perceive, Fausta, how serious an injury is inflicted upon us by rash and violent declaimers like Macer. There are others like him; he is by no means alone, though he is far the most conspicuous. Together they help to kindle the flame of active hostility, and infuse fresh bitterness into the Pagan heart. Should the Emperor carry into effect the purposes now ascribed to him, these men will be sure victims, and the first.

Upon my return after hearing Macer, I found Livia seated with Julia, to whom she often comes thus, and then together--I often accompanying--we visit Tibur. She had but just arrived. It was easy to see that the light-heartedness, which so manifested itself always in the beaming countenance and the elastic step, was gone; the usual signs of it at least were not visible. Her whole expression was serious and anxious; and upon her face were the traces of recent grief. For a long time, after the first salutations and inquiries were through, neither spoke.

At length Livia said,

'I am come now, Julia, to escape from what has become of late little other than a prison. The Fabrician dungeons are not more gloomy than the gardens of Sall.u.s.t are now. No more gaiety; no feasting by day and carousal by night; the gardens never illuminated; no dancing nor music.

It is a new life for me: and then the only creatures to be seen, that hideous Fronto and the smiling Varus; men very well in their place, but no inmates of palaces.'

'Well' said Julia; 'there is the greater reason why we should see more of each other and of Zen.o.bia. Aurelian is the same?'

'The same? There is the same form, and the same face, and the same voice; but the form is motionless, save when at the Hippodrome,--the face black as Styx, and his voice rougher than the raven's. That agreeable humor and sportiveness, which seemed native to him, though by reason of his thousand cares not often seen, is now wholly gone. He is observant as ever of all the forms of courtesy, and I am to him what I have ever been; but a dark cloud has settled over him and all the house, and I would willingly escape if I could. And worse than all, is this of Aurelia! Alas, poor girl!'

'And what, Livia, is the truth?' said Julia; 'the city is filled with rumors, but they are so at variance one with another, no one knows which to believe, or whether none.'