“Hush!” cried Claudia, when Statia had reached this point in her story. “Tell us no more; it is more than my dear mother can bear.”
And indeed Pomponia had grown paler and paler as the story went on.
“Nay,” said Pomponia. “If our brethren actually endure these things, we may at least bear to hear them. Go on, my friend.”
“Well, my lady,” Statia resumed, “the poor creatures were not as much injured as one would have expected. Many of the dogs, when they found out that it was not real beasts that they were set to attack, left them alone; some were even quite friendly and gentle with them. ‘They seemed to me,’ says my husband, ‘a great deal better than their masters;’ and right he was, as you will say, when you hear what happened next. A herald came forward and cried, ‘Fathers, knights, and citizens of Rome, the Emperor invites you to the Circus to witness a chariot-race, and hopes that you will regard with indulgence any deficiency of skill that you may perceive in the charioteers.’ ‘They say that he is going [183] to drive one of the chariots himself, and Lateranus, who is to be Consul next year, the other,’�so my husband’s neighbour, who seemed to know all about the show, told him. Of course it was very condescending of him to amuse the people in this way, but it does not seem to me quite the right thing for an Emperor.
NERO AS VICTOR IN A CHARIOT RACE
“Well, by this time it was getting dark, and when my husband got outside the theatre, he found the gardens lighted up. All along the walks, on each of the lamp-posts, they had fastened a man,�yes, it is true as I am alive,�a man, dressed in a tunic steeped in pitch, and with an iron collar under the chin to keep the head up,�fastened them, and set them on fire. That was too much for my husband. He declared that he could stay no longer, and indeed, he was so poorly that his friend had to see him home, though he was sorry, he said, not to see the rest of the show. When they got back he and my husband had a great argument about it,�perhaps you may have heard them, my lady, for they talked very loud. My husband’s friend would have it that it was only right. They were Christians, he said, which was only another name for atheists, and richly deserved all they got. But my husband does not hold with such doings, and told his friend so pretty plainly. ‘After all, they’re men,’ he said, ‘and you must not treat them as you would not treat a beast.’ ‘What! ‘said the other,�and I will allow that this did shake [184] me a bit,�‘don’t you know that if these people had their way, there would be no more offerings in the temples, aye, and no more temples, either, for the matter of that, and where would you and I be then?’ But my good man stuck to his point for all that. ‘I reckon that the gods can take care of themselves,’ he said; ‘and that anyhow, they won’t thank us for helping them in this kind of way. It is not our Roman fashion to make show of men in this way. No, no! if a man has to be punished, there is the regular way of doing it; the cross for a slave, and the axe for the free man, with the scourge first, if he has done anything specially bad; but as for dressing men up like beasts, or turning them into torches, I don’t hold with it. Our fathers did not do it, and what was enough for them should be enough for us.’ That was what my good man said. I have never heard him make such a long speech ever since we were married, for he is not a man of many words. What do you think, my lady?”
The good woman had been quite carried away with her subject, for genuine as was her disgust at the Emperor’s cruelties, she had a certain pleasure, not uncommon in her class, in the telling of horrors, and she had not noticed how her narrative had affected one of her hearers. Pomponia had quietly fainted.
“Ah! poor lady,” cried Statia. “It has been too much for her. I am sure that she must feel for the poor things.”
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WHAT THE SOLDIERS THOUGHT
[185] THE temple servant was not the only one among the spectators who had crowded the gardens of Nero, that had viewed the sight there presented to his gaze with disgust and horror. The Pr?torians were particularly free and outspoken in the expressions of their feelings. Already they had begun to look upon themselves as the prop of the Imperial throne. It was to their camp that Nero had been carried almost before the breath had left the body of his predecessor Claudius; it was to them that the ambitious Agrippina had looked to give effect to the intrigue by which her son was preferred to the rightful heir; (Footnote: The rightful heir was Britannicus, the son of the Emperor Claudius. It is true that he was only a boy, not quite fourteen, as far as can be determined, when his father died; and an essentially military throne can hardly be occupied by a child; but then Nero was only in his seventeenth year.) it was by their voices that Nero had been proclaimed Emperor, the vote of the Senate only following and confirming their previous determination.
On the morning after the exhibition described in my last chapter a wine shop, which stood just outside the Pr?torian camp, and was a favourite resort [186] of the men, was crowded with soldiers taking their morning meal.
“Well, Sisenna,” cried a veteran, putting down his empty cup, after a hearty draught of his customary morning beverage of hot wine and water, sweetened with honey and flavoured with saxifrage, “what think you of last night’s entertainment?”
The soldier appealed to was a young man who had just been drafted into the Pr?torian force as a reward for some good service done on the Asiatic frontier. He did not answer at once, but looked round the room with the air of one who doubts whether he may safely express his thoughts.
“Ha! ha!” laughed the veteran, “you are cautious, I see. That’s the way among the legions, I am told, and quite right, too; but it’s all liberty here. Speak out, man; we are all friends here, and there is no one to call us to account for what we say. C?sar knows too well what our voices are worth to him to hinder our using them.”
“Well, Rufus,” said Sisenna after a pause, “I will say frankly that it did not please me. It was not Roman, it was barbarian, though I must say that I never heard even of barbarians doing things quite so horrible.”
“Who are these Christians?” asked a third speaker. “What have they done?”
“Didn’t you read the Emperor’s edict?” said a fourth soldier. “They set the city on fire, because [187] they hate their fellow-creatures, and wish to do them as much damage as they can.”
“Well,” said Sisenna, “that, anyhow, is not my experience of them. They may hate their fellow-creatures in general, but they are certainly very kind to some of them in particular. Let me tell you what I know about them of my own knowledge. I was very bad with fever when I was campaigning on the Euphrates, and had to be invalided to Antioch. There I was treated by an old Jew physician, who was one of them�there are a good many of these Christians, you must understand, in the city, and many of them are Jews. Well, I was a long time getting well; these marsh fevers are obstinate things; come back again and again when one thinks that one is quit of them. So I got to know the old man very well, and we had a great deal of talk together. He used to tell me about his Master, as he called him; Christus was the name he gave him,�that’s how these people came to be called Christians. Another of his names was Jesus; the old man told me what that meant, but I couldn’t understand it altogether. But, anyhow, this Master seemed to have been a very good man.”
“A good man!” interrupted one of his listeners. “Why, I have always heard that he was a turbulent Jew whom Claudius banished with a number of his countrymen from Rome. (Footnote: Suetonius, in his life of Claudius, says “He (Claudius) banished the Jews from Rome, as, under the influence of one Christus, they were in a perpetual state of turbulence.” Perhaps the reference is to differences such as we hear of in the Acts (xviii. 12) when the Jews that were hostile to the teaching of the new faith brought their Christianizing fellow-countrymen before the tribunal of the Roman Governor.)