Darkness and Dawn; Or, Scenes in the Days of Nero. An Historic Tale

by F. W. Farrar

On one occasion, for instance, in his wanderings, the Galli had been unable to collect an audience, because the entire population of the little town of Varia was absorbed in the interest of a trial which affected the family of one of their prominent residents. A wealthy burgher had been left a widower with an only son, a boy of modest character, and devoted to his studies. Some years afterwards he married again, and another son was born to him. By the time this second boy was twelve years old his half-brother had grown into manhood, and his step-mother, who hated him for his virtues, determined to poison him. Summoning a slave who was in her confidence, she sent him to a physician to purchase poison, which she mixed in a cup of wine and placed ready for the youth at the next meal. It happened, however, that her own boy, returning hot and thirsty from school, saw the wine on the table and drank it. He had scarcely finished the draught, when he fell to the ground as dead. The slave who attended him filled the air with his clamour, and when the inmates of the house came flocking in, one accused another of the crime. The master of the house was out, and his wife sent to inform him that her boy had been poisoned, that her step-son was the murderer. The husband was crushed to the earth by the double calamity. His boy was dead; the elder son, of whom he had been so proud, was to be tried for murder. Scarcely were the boy’s obsequies finished when the hapless father, his grey hairs defiled with dust, hastened to the Forum, and there embraced the knees of the magistrates, and besought them to avenge him on the fratricide. The local Senate was assembled, and the herald summoned the accuser. Onesimus, who had nothing to do that day, was present at the trial. He heard the old man plead pathetically against the son who had been the pride of his life and home; he heard the youth, with all the calm of innocence, deny the charge. There was no evidence against him but the word of his step-mother and her confidential slave. This man stood up with a front of brass, and declared that the youth had been actuated by jealousy of his brother, and had poisoned him. There was nothing to rebut this evidence, and every jury-man was prepared to drop into the brazen urn the fatal ticket marked with the letter C, for condemno, which would have handed over the offender to be first scourged until his bones were laid bare, and then to be sewed up in a sack with a cock, a dog, and a viper, and to be flung into the sea. The heart of Onesimus bled for the youth. With his instinctive power of reading character, he felt convinced of his innocence. But while with palpitating heart he awaited the voting, an aged physician arose, and, covering the orifice of the voting-urn with his hand, he said: ‘Fathers, let me prevent the triumph of an infamous woman and a perjured slave. That wretch came to me as a physician, and offered me a hundred gold pieces for a poison. I read crime in the man’s face, and put the gold in a purse, which I made him stamp with his seal. Here is the bag. Seize his hand, take off his iron ring, and see whether this be not his seal. If it is, clearly he, and not the poor youth yonder, was the purchaser of the poison.’ Onesimus turned his eyes on the slave. His face had assumed a deadly pallor, and all his limbs had burst into a cold sweat; but even when his seal was recognised, he continued to stammer protestations of his innocence. He was tortured, but would not confess. Then the physician rose with a mysterious smile. ‘Enough of tortures,’ he said. ‘The time has come to unravel this web of villany. I sold to yonder wretch, not poison, but mandragora. If, indeed, the boy drank that draught, he does but sleep. About this time he will be awakening, and may be brought back to the light of day.’ The magistrates at once sent messengers to the sepulchre where the boy’s body had been laid. The father with his own hands removed the cover of the tomb, and there lay the little lad, unchanged, and just beginning to awake, with intense astonishment depicted on his features. Striving in vain to express his joy in words, the happy father—father once more of two dear sons, both of whom he thought that he had lost—folded the child to his heart in a close embrace, and carried him as he was, with all his grave-clothes about him, to the judgment seat.Terror-stricken by such a portent, the woman confessed her crime, and was sentenced to perpetual banishment; the slave was crucified.[69]

Next morning Onesimus, as he accompanied the priests and their ass, saw the criminal hanging naked on his cross. He was a man of fine proportions and in the prime of life, and his strength was slowly ebbing away in horrible and feverish torture. The Galli as they passed spat on him, but Onesimus stayed behind. The wretch was not only living, though in extreme agony, but would probably continue to live for two days more, unless the wolves got at him or the magistrates thought fit to send their lictors to end his life by two blows of a ponderous mallet in order to save the trouble of having the cross watched. It was no base curiosity which made the Phrygian linger by that spectacle of shame and anguish. It was rather an awful pity—a heart-rending remembrance. Sunk, fallen, ruined, guilty as he himself was, he yet could not see without horror this awful reminder of One who had perished, since his own birth, in Palestine, and in whom he had not yet ceased to believe as a Saviour, though he had fallen away from his heavenly calling.

The man turned towards him his tortured face and glazing eyes. ‘By all the infernal gods,’ he said, ‘give me something to quench my thirst.’

‘There are no infernal gods,’ Onesimus said, ‘but I will give thee;’ and taking out from the bag which he carried a bottle of the common posca—sour wine which was the ordinary drink of the peasantry—he poured a full draught into an earthenware cup and held it to the sufferer’s lips. This he could easily do, for the cross (as always) was raised but a little from the ground.

‘God help thee!’ he said, as he turned away. ‘He helped the robber on Golgotha,’ he murmured to himself; ‘who knows whether he may not find even this poor wretch in his hour of agony—yea, and even me?’

‘My blessing would be a curse,’ moaned the crucified slave, ‘or I would say, “The gods bless thee who canst pity such as I am.”’

Onesimus left him there in the pathos and tragedy of his awful helplessness. The youth’s soul was appalled by the sense of the mystery of human life and human agony, and it came home to him, as it had never done before, that the solution of the fearful riddle of human wickedness could only lie, if anywhere, in the life and death of Him in whom in some sense he believed, but whose peace he did not know.

Before he joined his base troupe of companions he looked back for a moment. There, in the blinding sunlight of the Italian noon, stood the cross, accursed of God and man, the gibbet of the malefactor, the infamy of the slave, confronting the eye of heaven with a sight which, no less than that of the Thyestean banquet, might have made the sun itself turn dark; and there, upon it, a mass of living agony, conscious, and burning with thirst, and blinded with glare, and unpitied, and burdened with an awful load of guilt, hung the human victim who had once played an innocent child beside his mother’s knee. The soul of Onesimus was harrowed as he gazed on that awful insult to humanity. The existence of crucifixion showed how far the shadow had advanced on the dial-plate of Rome’s history. That form of punishment—so cynical, so ruthless, so abhorrent, which less than three centuries later was to be abolished by the indignation of mankind—had been not indigenous in the Western world. It had only been borrowed by Rome, in the days of her commencing corruption, from the dark and cruel East. That such a spectacle should be permitted to the gaze of women and little children; that it should indurate still further the callosity of hardened hearts, was in itself a token of degeneracy. The heart of Onesimus was full even to bursting as he saw that fearful instrument of inhuman vengeance standing there by the roadside among the darting lizards and chirping cicalas and murmuring bees; and the goats stared at it with glassy eyes as they cropped the luxuriant grass at the very feet of the victim in whom the majestic ideal of manhood was thus horribly laughed to scorn.

Onesimus, as he finally turned away, felt it more degrading than ever to continue his present life. Its plenty and coarse comfort, accompanied as it was by the necessity of spending his days with these sexless and lying vagabonds, filled him with a sense of nameless humiliation. Yet what could he do? What other choice had he save to starve or to commit suicide? For then he remembered with a start that he was twice a thief, twice a fugitive, almost a murderer; that he had betrayed the trust reposed in him by Acte; that by his mad drunkenness he had insulted the majesty of Nero. In every sense even his fellow-slaves would have called him furcifer. And if he were once detected, in spite of the dye with which he had stained his face, and the blond wig by which the Galli had tried at once to conceal his identity and to enhance his beauty, what awaited him? Was he, too, destined to feed the wild birds upon the cross?

It seemed as if that would be better than to beg from the gulled throngs of peasants, and dupe the credulity of farmers, and witness day by day the stupid and loathly self-gashing and self-scourging of these deplorable eunuch priests. More than once he thought that he would get up by night, seize the image of the Syrian goddess, and fling her into the greenest and slimiest pool he could find, among the efts and water-beetles and frogs; while he himself would plunge into the pathless wastes until he should gain the sea-shore, work his passage on board a ship to Troas or Ephesus, and so making his way back to quiet Colossæ, would fling himself at the feet of Philemon and implore the forgiveness which he felt sure would not be long withheld.