What the unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.’
Samson Agonistes.
But little remains to be said; for, unless the writer has entirely failed of his purpose, the history of the preceding pages has told, and the fiction has illustrated, the truths which it was his object to set forth. We have seen something of what Paganism had become in the days of the Empire, and of what Christianity was in its life, and motives, and purposes. The contrast between the two gives us the secret why Christianity was destined to grow from that tiny grain of mustard-seed to a great tree, under whose shadow the nations of the world should rest.
But the reader may perhaps care to learn what was the future of those who played their little hour on the stage of life and have appeared in these pages. It is characteristic of that age of trouble and rebuke and blasphemy, in which the sun and the moon were darkened and the stars of heaven shaken, that many of the great and mighty and rich hardly looked for any other death than the steep declivities of murder and suicide. Heathendom had grown to a monster which, like the decrepit Saturn, devoured its own offspring. Those whom we ushered into the reader’s presence at the beginning of this book had nearly all been swept away by violent deaths before the period at which it closes. We have seen the murders of Claudius, of Agrippina, of Britannicus, of Octavia, in that Palace thronged with the ghosts of crime. We have stood by the dreary deathbed of the honest and manly Burrus, and by Corbulo when he fell on his own sword, and by Poppæa when she passed away in agony, her husband’s victim. We have seen the shameful end of Lucan and of Mela; the terrible disillusionment and suicides of Gallio and of Seneca. We know how Pætus Thrasea died, and how the great nobles—the Silani, and Sulla, and Rubellius Plautus, and Antistius Vetus, and Ostorius Scapula, and Piso, and that host of conspirators—met their doom. Vice, and the favour of the Emperor, proved no protection to such gay courtiers as Tullius Senecio and Cæcina Tuscus; nor genius and refined Epicureanism to Petronius Arbiter; nor beauty and talent to poor handsome Paris. The vicious as well as the virtuous were often mingled in indiscriminate ruin. Of the guests whom we saw assembled at the Villa Castor, and to whose conversation we have listened as they gathered round the citron tables of Nero and Otho, the majority met with a miserable doom. With the exception of the family of Seneca, the literary men escaped fairly well. Persius died young, and by a natural death. The elder Pliny, who was a successor of Anicetus in the office of Admiral at Misenum, perished of the scientific curiosity which led him to watch too closely from the Liburnian galleys of his fleet the great eruption of Vesuvius, which destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii in A.D. 79. Martial grew up to disgrace himself by shameful epigrams, to practise the arts of a fawning parasite to ‘his lord and his god,’ the vile Domitian, and at last to marry a rich wife, and retire to Spain with the memories of talents wasted, for the most part, over things vain and vile.
The philosophers were scattered and banished. Musonius Rufus, whom Demetrius the Cynic saw at work as a common labourer on the Isthmus of Corinth, was recalled by Galba, and honoured by Vespasian. He had the satisfaction of bringing to justice the infamous Publius Egnatius Celer, who had caused the murder of Barea Soranus and his daughter. Cornutus, who carried to the grave his sorrow for his bright young pupil, Persius, was banished in the last year of Nero’s reign, and we hear of him no more. Demetrius the Cynic was banished by Vespasian. The Emperor passed him after his condemnation, and Demetrius, deigning neither to rise nor salute him, broke into open abuse; but Vespasian was not cruel, and took no further revenge than to utter the one word ‘Dog!’
The freedmen, too, were swept away one after another, Narcissus was poisoned by the order of Agrippina; Pallas and Doryphorus by the order of Nero. Epaphroditus was put to death by Domitian for having helped Nero to drive into his own throat the fatal dagger-thrust. Sporus—miserable victim of an evil age—had urged Nero to show one touch of manliness, and dare to die. Not long afterwards he, too, died by his own hands, rather than submit to that degradation of appearing on the stage which Nero had so often done and so eagerly desired to do. Helius, Polycletus, Patrobius, and others, were condemned and put to death by Galba, after having been led through the streets in chains. Spicillus, the favourite gladiator of Nero, was tied to one of his statues and crushed to death by it; Locusta died a death of infamy amid intense and universal rejoicing.
The informers met, for the most part, the fate that they deserved. Under previous emperors they had been—it is the comparison used by Seneca—like dogs whom their patrons fed with human flesh.[122] They cut men’s throats with a whisper. A joke, a sarcasm, the babble of a drunkard, the confidential remark of private intercourse, the most casual and unpremeditated reflection—nay, even a careless gesture before the dumb image of the Emperor—might become, in their hands, an engine of destruction. They could earn one-fourth of the spoils by accusing a man either for something which he did, or for something which he did not do. Upon this evil gang of scoundrels, the worst curse of that day, Titus laid his heavy hand. He ordered the vilest of them to be beaten with rods in the Forum, to be dragged round the Amphitheatre, to be sold as slaves, to be deported to the rockiest and most desolate islands.
Epictetus, who had been sold as an infant from his cradle in Hierapolis, and whom we have heard talking to Titus and Britannicus in the days when he was the little slave of Epaphroditus, lived to bequeath to the world the legacy of thoughts purer and sweeter than any which we have received from classical antiquity, with the exception of those uttered by Marcus Aurelius, that ‘bright consummate flower’ of pagan morality.Those thoughts seem to absorb and to reflect the auroral glow of Christianity[T19] and could never have been attained by a Pagan if Christianity had not been in the air. Epictetus was so poor that his sole possession was a small lamp—and even that was stolen from him! His virtue and political insignificance, his plain living and high thinking, did not save him from banishment. He retired to Nicopolis (where the Apostle Paul had spent his last winter), and there