The executioners noticed, of course, that one of their victims had, by some strange unknown means, escaped; but it did not greatly concern them. One simply whispered to the other, ‘It will not be observed. Let the poor cacodæmon get off. What matters it to us?’
Meanwhile on every side the flames shot up around the stakes, and glared with hideous brightness, and sent up huge tongues of waving light, and each stake became a torch of hell, and black smoke swirled around them, and groans and cries of anguish arose which were drowned in bursts of music and laughter and ribald songs. And all the while the moon was silvering the rich foliage, and the stars shone down with peaceful rays over that revelry of hell, and the smoke and flame were to those poor sufferers as chariots of fire and horses of fire to bear their souls to heaven. And while the agony and madness and hilarity were at their height, and the statues of obscene gods and lascivious nymphs, which glimmered from beneath the trees, looked like demons over whose faces the red glow flickered in smiles of seeming ecstasy as they watched this triumph of demoniac wickedness—at this moment shouts of adulation arose, and Nero was seen, his face wreathed in smiles, in the dress of a charioteer. With some of his basest creatures round him, he mingled familiarly with the mob, exchanged jokes with them, and stood peering with them into the ghastly faces in which flickered longest the gleam of life.
‘What think you of these sarmenticii, these semaxii?’ he asked repeatedly of the plebeian throng.
‘Call us “faggot-birds,” and “stake-fellows,”’ said one of the martyrs, who calmly awaited the rekindling of his stake from which, by some chance, the flame had expired.‘These faggots with which we are burned, these stakes to which we are bound, are our robes of victory, our triumphant chariot.’[107]
‘Child of the Devil,’ exclaimed another, before his robe had caught the flames, ‘I would not, even at this moment, change my lot with thine.’
‘Antichrist,’ murmured another, ‘thine hour is nigh.’
Nero shrank before the prophecy, but afterwards sprang upon his chariot, and seeking the applause which rose like a storm wherever he appeared, drove his four horses round every part of the circus, and the broad paths of the gardens, until the last human torch had flared out, and the multitude began to stream away.
It was an amazing thing that pagan fathers and mothers should have taken even their children to see such sights as these. But, inured as they were to blood and anguish by the harrowing homicides of the amphitheatre, their hearts in these matters were ‘brazed by damned custom.’ And so it happened that a Roman knight named Cornelius Tacitus had led his little son, a grave child of eight years old, to walk through the gardens of Nero on that awful night. He looked on the scene with an impulse of childish pity, and asked his father ‘whether these Christians had really set fire to Rome.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said his father.
‘Why, then, are they burnt alive?’ he asked.