So the lovers met, but the interchange of their common vows were solemn and sacred, under the darkening skies of persecution, and as it were in the valley of the shadow of death. For Junia entreated Onesimus to return to Rome and do his utmost to watch over her father and to save him if by any means it were possible or lawful. He bade her farewell, and found time to pay one brief visit to the temple at Aricia that he might express his gratitude to the priest of Virbius for having spared his life. Alas, he was too late! A new Rex Nemorensis—the ex-gladiator Rutilus—reigned in Croto’s room. He had surprised and murdered him the evening before, and Onesimus saw the gaunt corpse of Croto outstretched upon its wooden bier awaiting burial in the plot assigned to the succession of murdered priests.
Sick at heart, Onesimus hurried from the dark precincts, and by the morning dawn he was in Rome.
On that day the terrible massacres began which were to baptise the infant Church in a river of blood, and to consecrate Rome in the memory of Christendom as the city of slaughtered saints. For there Paganism was to display herself, naked and not ashamed, a harlot holding in her hand the brimming goblet of her wickedness, drunken with the blood of the beloved of God. Mankind was to see exhibited a series of startling contrasts: human nature at its best and sweetest; human nature at its vilest and worst:—unchecked power smitten with fatal impotence; unarmed weakness clothed with irresistible strength:—pleasure and self-indulgence drowned in wretchedness; misery and martyrdom exulting with joy unspeakable, and full of glory. On the one side was the splendour and civilisation of the City of the Dragon revelling in brutal ferocity and lascivious pride; on the other side the down-trodden and the despised of the City of God rose to a height of nobleness which no philosophy had attained, and enriched with sovereign virtues the ideal of mankind. While the deified lord of the empire of darkness with his nobles and his myrmidons sank themselves below the level of the beasts, paupers and nameless slaves, young boys and feeble girls towered into tragic dignity, faced death with unflinching heroism, and showed that even amid satyrs and demons humanity may still be measured with the measure of a man—that is, of the angel.
Herein lay the secret of the victory of Christianity. In the Rome of Nero heathendom showed the worst that she could be, and the worst that she could do; and Christianity showed, coinstantaneously, that manhood can preserve its inherent grandeur when it seems to be trampled into the very mire under the hoofs of swine. The sweetness and the dignity with which the Christians suffered kindled not only amazement but admiration in many a pagan breast. It was seen that with the Church in its poverty and shame, not with the world in its gorgeous criminality, lay the secret of all man’s happiness and hope. Many a senator, as he looked on the saturnalia of lubricity and blood, felt that the Christian slave-girl, tied naked to a stake in the amphitheatre for the wild beasts to devour, was more blessed than the jewelled lady by his side, whom he knew to be steeped in baseness; and there were youths to whose taste the apples of the Dead Sea had already crumbled into dust, who in their secret hearts felt themselves nothing less than abject compared with those Christian boys who, with the light of heaven on their foreheads and the name of Jesus on their lips, faced without flinching the grotesque horror of their doom.
But Nero and Tigellinus, and those who advised with them, never wavered in their hideous policy of purchasing popularity by making the murder of thousands of the innocent subserve the brutal passions of the multitude. They thought to abase the Christians, and they kindled round their brows an aureole of light. They thought to flatter the people, but made them vile by a carnival which showed that their natures had become a mixture of the tiger and the ape.
The jubilee of massacre began with cruel flagellations, for the intention was to combine amusement with utility and to represent these unnumbered agonies as a festival of expiation. So low had the Romans sunk since the days when they had believed that the wrath of the gods had been kindled because before some public games a master had scourged his slave round the arena!
As they wished to add derision to torture, it did not suffice them that at these piacular displays men should merely fight with wild beasts who would soon be glutted with the multitude of victims. A novelty was devised for the delight of the spectators.
The first batch of martyrs were clad in the skins of wolves and leopards and torn to death by hordes of fierce and hungry dogs.
Others had to take part in mythologic operas. Among them was the soldier Urbanus. Clad in the guise of Hercules on Œta, he was burned alive upon a funeral pyre. Another martyr, Celsus, had to figure as Mucius Scævola, and to burn his hand to ashes in a flame upon an altar, with the promise that his life should be given him if, in carrying out his historic rôle, he would voluntarily consume his right hand, and not once shrink. Vitalis had to take his part in the favourite drama of Laureolus, in which character, after being made a laughing-stock, he was first crucified, and then, while yet living, devoured upon the cross by a bear. It was thought a favourable opportunity to try experiments. Simon Magus, after securing the arrest of Peter, had been admitted to an interview with Poppæa, whose superstitious turn of mind inclined her to consult every charlatan who visited the capital, and through her he gained admittance to the Emperor. He awakened Nero’s interest in a machine by which he pretended that he could enable men to fly. Nero determined to test the capabilities of the machine in corpore vili. The story of Dædalus and Icarus should be enacted, and as a slim and graceful youth was needed for the part of Icarus, poor Nazarius, the son of Miriam, was selected for this character. A lofty wooden tower was erected in the mimic scene. The wild beasts were roaming loose in the amphitheatre, and if either Dædalus or Icarus was not killed by a fall from the tower, he would be devoured in the arena. The martyr Amplias, who represented Dædalus, was precipitated at once, and killed by a lion.The broad wings of the machine upbore for a moment the light form of Nazarius as he sprang from the tower, but he fell on the very podium of the Emperor, and so close beside him that, to the horror of all, and with an omen of the worst import, he spattered the white robe of Nero with his blood.[105]
Unsated by these scenes the spectators demanded the sacrifice of the women victims. Hundreds of them were crowded in cells under the amphitheatre, and were informed that they were to appear in a series of pageants representing the torments of the dead. The spectacle was deemed impious by many, but it had been exhibited by Egyptians and Ethiopians in the days of Caligula.Fifty of these poor female martyrs were to be clothed in scarlet mantles as the daughters of Danaus, and, after undergoing nameless insults, were to be stabbed by an actor who personated Lynceus.[106] To many of them it was an anguish worse than death that they should have to bear part in dramas which represented the idolatries of heathendom; but Prisca, the wife of Aquila, who had returned from Ephesus to Rome with her husband on matters connected with their trade, visited the sufferers in prison, and effectually consoled them. This Jewish matron, to whom with her husband had been granted the honour of no inconspicuous share in the founding of the three great churches of Rome, of Corinth, and of Ephesus, had not been arrested by any informer, owing to long residence in Achaia and Asia. She told the poor women that resistance was in vain, and that no insult inflicted on them by the heathen could dim the lustre of their martyr-crown. Cheered by her calm wisdom, they paced across the stage carrying vases on their shoulders, and bore their fate without a cry.