It was indeed as Jucundus had hinted; a new policy, a new era was coming upon Christianity, together with the new emperor. Christians had hitherto been for the most part the objects of popular fury rather than of imperial jealousy. Nero, indeed, from his very love of cruelty, had taken pleasure in torturing them: but statesmen and philosophers, though at times perplexed and inconsistent, yet on the whole had despised them; and the superst.i.tion of priests and people, with their "Christianos ad leones,"
had been the most formidable enemy of the faith. Accordingly, atrocious as the persecution had been at times, it had been conducted on no plan, and had been local and fitful. But even this trial had been suspended, with but few interruptions, during the last thirty, nay, fifty years. So favourable a state of things had been more or less brought about by a succession of emperors, who had shown an actual leaning to Christianity.
While the vigorous rule of the five good emperors, as they are called, had had many pa.s.sages in its history of an adverse character, those who followed after, being untaught in the traditions, and strangers to the spirit of old Rome, foreigners, or adventurers, or sensualists, were protectors of the new religion. The favourite mistress of Commodus is even said to have been a Christian; so is the nurse of Caracalla. The wretched Heliogabalus, by his taste for Oriental superst.i.tions, both weakened the influence of the established hierarchy, and encouraged the toleration of a faith which came from Palestine. The virtuous Alexander, who followed him, was a philosopher more than a statesman; and, in pursuance of the syncretism which he had adopted, placed the images of Abraham and our Lord among the objects of devotion which his private chapel contained. What is told us of the Emperor Philip is still more to the point: the gravest authorities report that he was actually a Christian; and, since it cannot be doubted that Christians were persuaded of the fact, the leaning of his government must have been emphatically in their favour to account for such a belief. In consequence, Christians showed themselves without fear; they emerged from the catacombs, and built churches in public view; and, though in certain localities, as in the instance of Africa, they had suffered from the contact of the world, they spread far and wide, and faith became the instrument at least of political power, even where it was wanting in charity, or momentarily disowned by cowardice. In a word, though Celsus a hundred years before had p.r.o.nounced "a man weak who should hope to unite the three portions of the earth in a common religion," that common Catholic faith had been found, and a principle of empire was created which had never before existed. The phenomenon could not be mistaken; and the Roman statesman saw he had to deal with a rival. Nor must we suppose, because on the surface of the history we read so much of the vicissitudes of imperial power, and of the profligacy of its possessors, that the fabric of government was not sustained by traditions of the strongest temper, and by officials of the highest sagacity. It was the age of lawyers and politicians; and they saw more and more clearly that if Christianity was not to revolutionize the empire, they must follow out the line of action which Trajan and Antoninus had pointed out.
Decius then had scarcely a.s.sumed the purple, when he commenced that new policy against the Church which was reserved to Diocletian, fifty years later, to carry out to its own final refutation. He entered on his power at the end of the year 249; and on the January 20th following, the day on which the Church still celebrates the event, St. Fabian, Bishop of Rome, obtained the crown of martyrdom. He had been pope for the unusually long s.p.a.ce of fourteen years, having been elected in consequence of one of those remarkable interpositions of Divine Providence of which we now and then read in the first centuries of the Church. He had come up to Rome from the country, in order to be present at the election of a successor to Pope Anteros. A dove was seen to settle on his head, and the a.s.sembly rose up and forced him, to his surprise, upon the episcopal throne. After bringing back the relics of St. Pontian, his martyred predecessor, from Sardinia, and having become the apostle of great part of Gaul, he seemed destined to end his history in the same happy quiet and obscurity in which he had lived; but it did not become a pope of that primitive time to die upon his bed, and he was reserved at length to inaugurate in his own person, as chief pastor of the Church, a fresh company of martyrs.
Suddenly an edict appeared for the extermination of the name and religion of Christ. It was addressed to the proconsuls and other governors of provinces; and alleged or implied that the emperors, Decius and his son, being determined to give peace to their subjects, found the Christians alone an impediment to the fulfilment of their purpose; and that, by reason of the enmity which those sectaries entertained towards the G.o.ds of Rome,-an enmity which was bringing down upon the world multiplied misfortunes. Desirous, then, above all things, of appeasing the divine anger, they made an irrevocable ordinance that every Christian, without exception of rank, s.e.x, or age, should be obliged to sacrifice. Those who refused were to be thrown into prison, and in the first instance submitted to moderate punishments. If they conformed to the established religion, they were to be rewarded; if not, they were to be drowned, burned alive, exposed to the beasts, hung upon the trees, or otherwise put to death.
This edict was read in the camp of the praetorians, posted up in the Capitol, and sent over the empire by government couriers. The authorities in each province were themselves threatened with heavy penalties, if they did not succeed in frightening or tormenting the Christians into the profession of paganism.
St. Fabian, as we have said, was the first-fruits of the persecution, and eighteen months pa.s.sed before his successor could be appointed. In the course of the next two months St. Pionius was burned alive at Smyrna, and St. Nestor crucified in Pamphylia. At Carthage some perplexity and delay were occasioned by the absence of the proconsul. St. Cyprian, its bishop, took advantage of the delay, and retired into a place of concealment. The populace had joined with the imperial government in seeking his life, and had cried out furiously in the circus, demanding him "ad leonem," for the lion. A panic seized the Christian body, and for a while there were far more persons found to compromise their faith than to confess it. It seemed as if Aristo"s antic.i.p.ation was justified, that Christianity was losing its hold upon the mind of its subjects, and that nothing more was needed for those who had feared it, than to let it die a natural death. And at Sicca the Roman officials, as far as ever they dared, seemed to act on this view. Here Christians did no harm, they made no show, and there was little or nothing in the place to provoke the anger of the mob or to necessitate the interference of the magistrate. The proconsul"s absence from Carthage was both an encouragement and an excuse for delay; and hence it was that, though we are towards the middle of the year 250, and the edict was published at Rome at its commencement, the good people of Sicca had, as we have said, little knowledge of what was taking place in the political world, and whispered about vague presages of an intended measure, which had been in some places in operation for many months.
Communication with the seat of government was not so very frequent or rapid in those days, and public curiosity had not been stimulated by the facilities of gratifying it. And thus we must account for a phenomenon, which we uphold to be a fact in the instance of Sicca, in the early summer of A.D. 250, even though it prove unaccountable, and history has nothing to say about it, and in spite of the _Acta Diurna_.
The case, indeed, is different now. In these times, newspapers, railroads, and magnetic telegraphs make us independent of government messengers. The proceedings at Rome would have been generally and accurately known in a few seconds; and then, by way of urging forward the magistracy, a question of course would have been asked in the parliament of Carthage by the member for Sicca, or Laribus, or Thugga, or by some one of the pagani, or country party, whether the popular report was true, that an edict had been promulgated at Rome against the Christians, and what steps had been taken by the local authorities throughout the proconsulate to carry out its provisions. And then the "Colonia Siccensis" would have presented some good or bad reason for the delay: that it arose from the absence of the proconsul from the seat of government, or from the unaccountable loss of the despatch on its way from the coast; or, perhaps, on the other hand, the under-secretary would have maintained, amid the cheers of his supporters, that the edict had been promulgated and carried out at Sicca to the full, that crowds of Christians had at once sacrificed, and that, in short, there was no one to punish; a.s.sertions which at that moment were too likely to be verified by the event.
In truth, there were many reasons to make the magistrates, both Roman and native, unwilling to proceed in the matter, till they were obliged. No doubt they one and all detested Christianity, and would have put it down, if they could; but the question was, when they came to the point, _what_ they should put down. If, indeed, they could have got hold of the ringleaders, the bishops of the Church, they would have tortured and smashed them _con amore_, as you would kill a wasp; and with the greater warmth and satisfaction, just because it was so difficult to get at them.
Those bishops were a set of fellows as mischievous as they were cowardly; they would not come out and be killed, but they skulked in the desert, and hid in masquerade. But why should gentlemen in office, opulent and happy, set about worrying a handful of idiots, old, or poor, or boys, or women, or obscure, or amiable and well-meaning men, who were but a remnant of a former generation, and as little connected with the fanatics of Carthage, Alexandria, or Rome, as the English freemasons may seem to be with their namesakes on the continent? True, Christianity was a secret society, and an illegal religion; but would it cease to be so when those harmless or respectable inhabitants of the place had been mounted on the rack or the gibbet?
And then, too, it was a most dangerous thing to open the door to popular excitement;-who would be able to shut it? Once rouse the populace, and it was all over with the place. It could not be denied that the bigoted and ignorant majority, not only of the common people, but of the better cla.s.ses, was steeped in a bitter prejudice, and an intense, though latent, hatred of Christianity. Besides the antipathy which arose from the extremely different views of life and duty taken by pagans and Christians, which would give a natural impulse to persecution in the hearts of the former, there were the many persons who wished to curry favour at Rome with the government, and had an eye to preferment or reward. There was the pagan interest, extended and powerful, of that numerous cla.s.s which was attached to the established religions by habit, position, interest, or the prospect of advantage. There were all the great inst.i.tutions or establishments of the place; the law courts, the schools of grammar and rhetoric, the philosophic _exedrae_ and lecture-rooms, the theatre, the amphitheatre, the market-all were, for one reason or another, opposed to Christianity; and who could tell where they would stop in their onward course, if they were set in motion? "Quieta non movenda" was the motto of the local government, native and imperial, and that the more, because it was an age of revolutions, and they might be most unpleasantly compromised or embarra.s.sed by the direction which the movement took. Besides, Decius was not immortal; in the last twelve years eight emperors had been cut off, six of them in a few months; and who could tell but the successor of the present might revert to the policy of Philip, and feel no thanks to those who had suddenly left it for a policy of blood.
In this cautious course they would be powerfully supported by the influence of personal considerations. The Roman _officia_, the city magistrates, the heads of the established religions, the lawyers, and the philosophers, all would have punished the Christians, if they could; but they could not agree whom to punish. They would have agreed with great satisfaction, as we have said, to inflict condign and capital punishment upon the heads of the sect; and they would have had no objection, if driven to do something, to get hold of some strangers or slaves, who might be a sort of scapegoats for the rest; but it was impossible, when they once began to persecute, to make distinctions, and not a few of them had relations who were Christians, or at least were on that border-land which the mob might mistake for the domain of Christianity-Marcionites, Tertullianists, Montanists, or Gnostics. When once the cry of "the G.o.ds of Rome" was fairly up, it would apply to tolerated religions as well as to illicit, and an unhappy votary of Isis or Mithras might suffer, merely because there were few Christians forthcoming. A duumvir of the place had a daughter whom he had turned out of his house for receiving baptism, and who had taken refuge at Vacca. Several of the decurions, the _tabularius_ of the district, the _scriba_, one of the exactors, who lived in Sicca, various of the retired gentry, whom we spoke of in a former chapter, and various _attaches_ of the praetorium, were in not dissimilar circ.u.mstances.
Nay, the priest of Esculapius had a wife, whom he was very fond of, who, though she promised to keep quiet, if things continued as they were, nevertheless had the madness to vow that, if there were any severe proceedings inst.i.tuted against her people, she would at once come forward, confess herself a Christian, and throw water, instead of incense, upon the sacrificial flame. Not to speak of the venerable man"s tenderness for her, such an exposure would seriously compromise his respectability, and, as he was infirm and apoplectic, it was a question whether Esculapius himself could save him from the shock which would be the consequence.
The same sort of feeling operated with our good friend Jucundus. He was attached to his nephew; but, be it said without disrespect to him, he was more attached to his own reputation; and, while he would have been seriously annoyed at seeing Agellius exposed to one of the panthers of the neighbouring forest, or hung up by the feet, with the blood streaming from his nose and mouth, as one of the dogs or kids of the market, he would have disliked the _eclat_ of the thing still more. He felt both anger and alarm at the prospect; he was conscious he did not understand his nephew, or (to use a common phrase) know where to find him; he was aware that a great deal of tact was necessary to manage him; and he had an instinctive feeling that Juba was right in saying that it would not do to threaten him with the utmost severity of the law. He considered Callista"s hold on him was the most promising quarter of the horizon; so he came to a resolution to do as little as he could personally, but to hold Agellius"s head, as far as he could, steadily in the direction of that lady, and to see what came of it. As to Juba"s a.s.surance that Agellius was not a Christian at heart, it was too good news to be true; but still it might be only an antic.i.p.ation of what would be, when the sun of Greece shone out upon him, and dispersed the remaining mists of Oriental superst.i.tion.
In this state of mind the old gentleman determined one afternoon to leave his shop to the care of a slave, and to walk down to his nephew, to judge for himself of his state of mind; to bait his hook with Callista, and to see if Agellius bit. There was no time to be lost, for the publication of the edict might be made any day; and then disasters might ensue which no skill could remedy.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE NEW GENERATION.
Jucundus, then, set out to see how the land lay with his nephew, and to do what he could to prosper the tillage. His way led him by the temple of Mercury, which at that time subserved the purpose of a boy"s school, and was connected with some academical buildings, the property of the city, which lay beyond it. It cannot be said that our friend was any warm patron of literature or education, though he had not neglected the schooling of his nephews. Letters seemed to him in fact to unsettle the mind; and he had never known much good come of them. Rhetoricians and philosophers did not know where they stood, or what were their bearings. They did not know what they held, and what they did not. He knew his own position perfectly well, and, though the words "belief" or "knowledge" did not come into his religious vocabulary, he could at once, without hesitation, state what he professed and maintained. He stood upon the established order of things, on the traditions of Rome, and the laws of the empire; but as to Greek sophists and declaimers, he thought very much as old Cato did about them.
The Greeks were a very clever people, unrivalled in the fine arts; let them keep to their strong point; they were inimitable with the chisel, the brush, the trowel, and the fingers; but he was not prepared to think much of their _calamus_ or _stylus_, poetry excepted. What did they ever do but subvert received principles without subst.i.tuting any others? And then they were so likely to take some odd turn themselves; you never could be sure of them. Socrates, their patriarch, what was he after all but a culprit, a convict, who had been obliged to drink hemlock, dying under the hands of justice? Was this a reputable end, a respectable commencement of the philosophic family? It was very well for Plato or Xenophon to throw a veil of romance over the transaction, but this was the plain matter of fact.
Then Anaxagoras had been driven out of Athens for his revolutionary notions; and Diogenes had been accused, like the Christians, of atheism.
The case had been the same in more recent times. There had been that madman, Apollonius, roaming about the world; Apuleius, too, their neighbour, fifty years before, a man of respectable station, a gentleman, but a follower of the Greek philosophy, a dabbler in magic, and a pretender to miracles. And so, in fact, of letters generally; as in their own country Minucius, a contemporary of Apuleius, became a Christian.
Such, too, had been his friend Octavius; such Caecilius, who even became one of the priests of the sect, and seduced others from the religion he had left. One of them had been the public talk for several years, and he too originally a rhetorician, Thascius Cypria.n.u.s of Carthage. It was the one thing which gave him some misgiving about that little Callista, that she was a Greek.
As he pa.s.sed the temple, the metal plate was sounding as a signal for the termination of the school, and on looking towards the portico with an ill-natured curiosity, he saw a young acquaintance of his, a youth of about twenty, coming out of it, leading a boy of about half that age, with his satchel thrown over his shoulder.
"Well, Arn.o.bius,"(2) he cried, "how does rhetoric proceed? are we to take the law line, or turn professor? Who"s the boy? some younger brother?"
"I"ve taken pity on the little fool," answered Arn.o.bius; "these schoolmasters are a savage lot. I suffered enough from them myself, and "miseris succurrere disco." So I took him from under the roof of friend Rupilius, and he"s under my tutelage. How did he treat thee, boy?"
"He treated me like a slave or a Christian," answered he.
"He deserved it, I"ll warrant," said Jucundus; "a pert, forward imp. "Twas Gete against Briton. Much good comes of schooling! He"s a wicked one already. Ah, the new generation! I don"t know where the world"s going."
"Tell the gentleman," said Arn.o.bius, "what he did first to you, my boy."
"As the good gentleman says," answered the boy, "first I did something to him, and then he did something to me."
"I told you so," said Jucundus; "a sensible boy, after all; but the schoolmaster had the best of it, I"ll wager."
"First," answered he, "I grinned in his face, and he took off his wooden shoe, and knocked out one of my teeth."
"Good," said Jucundus, "the justice of Pythagoras. Zaleuchus could not have done better. The mouth sins, and the mouth suffers."
"Next," continued he, "I talked in school-time to my chum; and Rupilius put a gag in my jaws, and kept them open for an hour."
"The very Rhadamanthus of schoolmasters!" cried Jucundus: "and thereupon you struck up a chant, divine though inarticulate, like the statue of Memnon."
"Then," said the boy, "I could not say my Virgil, and he tore the shirt from off my back, and gave it me with the leather."
"Ay," answered Jucundus, " "arma virumque" branded on your hide."
"Afterwards I ate his dinner for him," continued the boy, "and then he screwed my head, and kept me without food for two days."
"Your throat, you mean," said Jucundus; "a cautious man! lest you should steal a draught or two of good strong air."
"And lastly," said he, "I did not bring my pence, and then he tied my hands to a gibbet, and hung me up _in terrorem_."
"There I came in," said Arn.o.bius; "he seemed a pretty boy, so I cut him down, paid his aera, and took him home."
"And now he is your pupil?" asked Jucundus.
"Not yet," answered Arn.o.bius; "he is still a day-scholar of the old wolf"s; one is like another; he could not change for the better: but I am his bully, and shall tutorize him some day. He"s a sharp lad, isn"t he, Firmian?" turning to the boy; "a great hand at composition for his years; better than I am, who never shall write Latin decently. Yet what can I do?
I must profess and teach, for Rome is the only place for the law, and these city professorships are not to be despised."
"Whom are you attending here?" asked Jucundus, drily.
"You are the only man in Sicca who needs to ask the question. What! not know the great Polemo of Rhodes, the friend of Plotinus, the pupil of Theagenes, the disciple of Thrasyllus, the hearer of Nicomachus, who was of the school of Secundus, the doctor of the new Pythagoreans? Not feel the presence in Sicca of Polemo, the most celebrated, the most intolerable of men? That, however, is not his t.i.tle, but the "G.o.dlike," or the "oracular," or the "portentous," or something else as impressive. Every one goes to him. He is the rage. I should not have a chance of success if I could not say that I had attended his lectures; though I"d be bound our little Firmian here would deliver as good. He"s the very cariophyllus of human nature. He comes to the schools in a litter of cedar, ornamented with silver and covered with a lion"s skin, slaves carrying him, and a crowd of friends attending, with the state of a proconsul. He is dressed in the most exact style; his pallium is of the finest wool, white, picked out with purple; his tresses flow with unguent, his fingers glitter with rings, and he smells like Idalium. As soon as he puts foot on earth, a great hubbub of congratulation and homage breaks forth. He takes no notice; his favourite pupils form a circle round him, and conduct him into one of the _exedrae_, till the dial shows the time for lecture. Here he sits in silence, looking at nothing, or at the wall opposite him, talking to himself, a hum of admiration filling the room. Presently one of his pupils, as if he were praeco to the duumvir, cries out, "Hush, gentlemen, hush! the G.o.dlike"-no, it is not that. I"ve not got it. What _is_ his t.i.tle? "the Bottomless," that"s it-"the Bottomless speaks." A dead silence ensues; a clear voice and a measured elocution are the sure token that it is the outpouring of the oracle. "Pray," says the little man, "pray, which existed first, the egg or the chick? Did the chick lay the egg, or the egg hatch the chick?" Then there ensues a whispering, a disputing, and after a while a dead silence. At the end of a quarter of an hour or so, our praeco speaks again, and this time to the oracle. "Bottomless man," he says, "I have to represent to you that no one of the present company finds himself equal to answer the question, which your condescension has proposed to our consideration!" On this there is a fresh silence, and at length a fresh _effatum_ from the hierophant: "Which comes first, the egg or the chick?
The egg comes first in relation to the causativity of the chick, and the chick comes first in relation to the causativity of the egg," on which there is a burst of applause; the ring of adorers is broken through, and the shrinking professor is carried in the arms or on the shoulders of the literary crowd to his chair in the lecture-room."
Much as there was in Arn.o.bius"s description which gratified Jucundus"s prejudices, he had suspicions of his young acquaintance, and was not in the humour to be pleased unreservedly with those who satirized anything whatever that was established, or was appointed by government, even affectation and pretence. He said something about the wisdom of ages, the reverence due to authority, the inst.i.tutions of Rome, and the magistrates of Sicca. "Do not go after novelties," he said to Arn.o.bius; "make a daily libation to Jove, the preserver, and to the genius of the emperor, and then let other things take their course."
"But you don"t mean I must believe all this man says, because the decurions have put him here?" cried Arn.o.bius. "Here is this Polemo saying that Proteus is matter, and that minerals and vegetables are his flock; that Proserpine is the vital influence, and Ceres the efficacy of the heavenly bodies; that there are mundane spirits, and supramundane; and then his doctrine about triads, monads, and progressions of the celestial G.o.ds?"
"Hm!" said Jucundus; "they did not say so when I went to school; but keep to my rule, my boy, and swear by the genius of Rome and the emperor."
"I don"t believe in G.o.d or G.o.ddess, emperor or Rome, or in any philosophy, or in any religion at all," said Arn.o.bius.
"What!" cried Jucundus, "you"re not going to desert the G.o.ds of your ancestors?"