‘They are criminals,’ said the knight; ‘and they hate the whole human race. They are akin to the Jews, and it would be no bad thing for the Empire if both of those accursed superstitions were destroyed.’
The young Tacitus remembered and recorded the remark more than thirty years later, when he had become a great historian. He was influenced, too, by the conversation which he then heard between his father and the friends who accompanied him. ‘These men,’ said one of them, ‘die every whit as bravely as the Stoics whom we so greatly admire.’ But the elder Tacitus would not admit the analogy. ‘In these Christians,’ he said, ‘the contempt of death is mere custom, or madness, or sheer obstinacy.’
Seneca, too, was in those gardens of the Vatican for a few moments, perplexed, horrified, miserable. The Emperor had commanded his presence, as though it would lend some sanction to the carnival of horror. The agonising deaths of such a multitude were indeed, to him, a repulsive sight, but it was not so wholly unfamiliar as to harrow his feelings to their depths. What struck him most, and what he has dwelt upon in his obvious allusions to this monstrous execution, was the inexplicable fortitude, the unflinching heroism, shown, not by nobles and philosophers, but by slaves, and women, and boys, and the very dregs of the populace.He pondered in vain over that disturbing problem.[108]
Before an hour had passed, the stakes stood charred and black, and underneath them were horrible heaps of death, still keeping some awful semblance of humanity; and the smoke curled and writhed about them, and streams of the melted and bubbling pitch quivered with small blue flames, or left black furrows on the burnt grass or the trampled sand.
And thus amid foul laughter the martyrs had died whose lives alone were innocent, who alone loved one another and all mankind. And the moon still shed her soft lustre on the scene, and the stars looked down through the untroubled night, and lighted home the myriads whose consciences, seared as with hot iron, smote them in no wise for their share in that crime—the vilest in the long annals of the world’s vilest days.
The numerous and flourishing Church of Rome was all but destroyed; yet on that night the seed of her mighty power in the development of Christianity was sown afresh. Watered by the blood of the martyrs, that seed sprang into more vigorous[T18] life, and rushing sunwards, spread forth arms laden with fruit and foliage, and grew into a giant bole, strong with the rings of a thousand summers, under whose shadows and ‘complicated glooms and cool impleachèd twilights,’ the hopes and fears of generations found their refuge—yea! and shall find it for evermore, unless it be severed from the root, and blighted into barrenness, and the axe be uplifted and the doom go forth, ‘Never fruit grow upon thee more!’
And the obelisk which witnessed that night of abomination, and which is now dedicated ‘To the Unknown Martyrs,’ still towers into the clear air, and on it is inscribed—
‘Christus regnat:
fugite partes adversæ.’
And over the ground with its groves and gardens where they perished—those nameless heroes, those nameless demigods—rose the vast cathedral to the honour of the Christ for whom they died; and round its dome is written in huge golden letters the name of the Apostle who fell first before the wild beast’s wrath:—‘I say unto thee, Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build My Church.’