The object in kidnapping a beautiful slave can be found in the four lives that have been written of Apollonius. We sometimes despair of the world because religion seems to have done so little to change men. The despair is the voice of unbelief. Read the old records. The tortures of Thecla were mild compared to the martyrdom of many a Christian in the pleasure gardens of Nero, where the victims were dipped in oil and then tied to stakes, as torches, in ridicule of the claim that they were the torch bearers of light and glad news.
Rome standing for irresistible brute power, was ever jealous of the cultured Greeks; and the Greeks returned scorn for scorn—which would explain why Onesimus, a Greek runaway, was friendless in Rome.
By the time of Paul’s first imprisonment, 63-64 A.D., Nero’s madness was acknowledged in Rome. The great fire, of which Paul and Seneca corresponded, took place in 64 A.D., but Rome, rolling in wealth and luxury, did not want to upset prosperity by destroying good times; and only after Nero’s suicide and three years of turbulence, when the Army loomed as a terrible menace, was Vespasian, the strong general, called to become Emperor.
Regarding the Three Taverns, all through the Empire at this time, the keepers of the wine shops were women; and in the East, they were called Rahabs—a name with evil import to us to-day; but all the Rahabs were not harpies—as witness the Rahab of Jericho in Joshua’s day.
Fuller details of the equinoctial gales at Crete will be given on the chapter on Apollos and John.
In Malta, or Melita, is St. Paul’s Bay, to this day commemorating the site of his landing and shipwreck, just as Lud gave London its name, and the myth of Lud points back to a personality behind the myth.
The songs of the Arabs are the same to-day as in Paul’s time and can be found in Newman’s Babylon and Nineveh.
The whole story of the gladiatorial combat in Cæsarea, to which old Julius refers, will be found in Josephus. Both sides fought till the arena swam in blood to the ankles, and of one side not a man was left alive. Other victor slaves were given their freedom.
Felix, like Herod the Great, tried to clean out the robber bands from the caves of Galilee; but Felix was charged with selling the rescued victims as slaves to accumulate a fortune for himself, though he had, himself, been slave. This can all be found in Josephus with the full story of the Herod family and their perplexing intermarriages and repudiations of marriages. Bernice’s flight from her old husband was by pretense a religious vow, but openly in the theater of Rome, she was twitted with taking the vow to escape her spouse.