‘Oh, that you would give me your secret!’ said the Empress. ‘I can read character; I can detect the accents of sincerity. These words of yours are no pompous and hollow Stoic paradox.’
Pomponia hesitated. The woman before her was, as she well knew, steeped in crime from her childhood. Of what avail would it be, without any of the evangelic preparation, to tell her of Jesus and the Resurrection? Could there be the remotest possibility of exciting in her mind anything but contempt by telling her at that moment of the Cross which was to the Romans something between a horror and a jest?
‘Agrippina,’ she answered, ‘the day may come when I may tell you more of the strange secret. It is not mine only; it is meant for all the world. But it cannot be attained, it cannot be approached, without humility and repentance for wrong-doing, and the love of virtue, and of something higher than virtue, and the lifting to heaven of holy hands.’
‘Alas!’ said Agrippina; ‘you speak to me in a strange language. The Greek tragedians are always telling us that when blood has fallen to the ground it has fallen for ever. Can wrong be atoned for? Can guilt be washed away?’
‘It can,’ said Pomponia, gently; and she longed to speak the words which lingered in her memory from the letter of Peter of Bethsaida—‘Redeemed ... with precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ.’ But to Agrippina they would at that time have been simply meaningless.
‘I have heard of the mysteries,’ said the Empress, ‘and of the taurobolies. Would it be of any avail if I too were to crouch in a hollow, and let the blood of a bull which has been sacrificed to the gods drop over me?’
‘It would not,’ said Pomponia. ‘God does not require of us things so revolting, nor any mere external ceremonies and superstitions. What that sacred and supreme Majesty requires of us is innocence alone.[64] Can you not pray to Him, Augusta? You have read Homer, and you know how the old poet sings about Atè, and the Litai, the Prayers which follow in her path.’
‘Atè? Ah! I know that fearful deity,’ groaned Agrippina. ‘She is the Fury Megæra. I have seen her petrifying face turned towards me. She is the Harpy Celæno. I have often heard her in the banquet-halls of the Palatine, and thought of Phineus and his polluted feasts. But the Prayers—will you not repeat me the lines, Pomponia?’
Pomponia repeated the famous lines of the old bard of Chios:—
‘The gods (the only great and only wise)