Aurelian; or, Rome in the Third Century by William Ware (best color ebook reader .txt) 📖

of the temple, or to the best stalls of the market, or to the selectest retreats of the suburra, would scarce show the way to heaven. I affront but the corruptions of religion, Aurelian. Sincerity I honor everywhere. Hypocrisy nowhere.' I thought Fronto would have torn me with his teeth and nails. His white face grew whiter, but he stood still.

'Say on,' said the Emperor, 'though your bluntness be more even than Roman.'

'I think,' I continued, 'the Christians a benefit to the state, for this reason; not that their religion is what they pretend, a heaven-descended one, but that, by its greater strictness, it serves to rebuke the common faith and those who hold it, and infuse into it something of its own spirit. All new systems, as I take it, in their first beginning are strict and severe. It is thus by this quality they supersede older and degenerate ones; not because they are truer, but because they are purer. There is a prejudice among men, that the gods, whoever they may be, and whatever they may be, love virtue[Pg 171] in men, and for that accept them. When, therefore, a religion fails to recommend and enforce virtue, it fails to meet the judgment of men concerning the true character and office of a religion, and so with the exception of such beasts, and such there always are, who esteem a faith in proportion to its corruptions, they look with favor upon any new one which promises to be what they want. It is for this reason that this religion from Judea has made its way so far and so soon. But, it will, by and by, degenerate from its high estate, just as others have done, and be succeeded by another that shall raise still higher expectations. In the meantime, it serves the state well, both by the virtue which it enjoins upon its own subjects, and the influence it exerts, by indirection, upon those of the prevalent faiths, and upon the general manners and morals.'

'What you say,' observed Aurelian musingly, 'has some show of sense. So much, at least, may be said for this religion.'

'Yet a lie,' said Fronto, 'can be none the less hateful to the gods, because it sometime plays the part of truth. It is a lie still.'

'Hold,' said Aurelian, 'let us hear the Greek. What else?'

'I little thought,' I replied, 'as I rode toward the city this morning, that I should at this hour be standing in the presence of the Emperor of Rome, a defender of the Christians. I am in no manner whatever fitted for the task. My knowledge is nothing; my opinions, therefore, worth but little, grounded as they are upon the loose reports which reach my ear concerning the character and doctrines of this sect, or upon what little ob[Pg 172]servation I have made upon those whom I have known of that persuasion. Still, I honor and esteem them, and such aid as I can bring them in their straits, shall be very gladly theirs. I will, however, add one thing more to what I have said in answer to Fronto, who represents the gods as more concerned to destroy the Christians than to reform the common religion and the public morals. I cannot think that. Am I to believe that the gods, the supreme directors of human affairs, whose aim must be man's highest well-being, regard with more abhorrence an error than a vice?—an error too that acts more beneficently than most truth, and is the very seed of the purest virtues? I can by no means believe it. So that if I were interpreter of the late omens, I should rather see them pointed at the vices which prevail; at the corruptions of the public morals, which are fouler than aught I had so much as dreamed of before I was myself a witness of them, and may well be supposed to startle the gods from their rest, and draw down their hottest thunderbolts. But I will not say more, when there must be so many able to do so much better in behalf of what I must still believe to be a good cause. Let me entreat the Emperor, before he condemns, to hear. There are those in Rome, of warm hearts, sound heads, and honest souls, from whom, if from any on earth, truth may be heard, and who will set in its just light a doctrine too excellent to suffer, as it must, in my hands.'

'They shall be heard, Nicomachus. Not even a Jew or a Christian shall suffer without that grace; though I see not how it can avail.'

'If it should not avail to plant in your mind so good[Pg 173] an opinion of their way as exists in mine,' I resumed, 'it might yet to soften it, and dispose it to a more lenient conduct; and so many are the miseries of life in the natural order of events, that the humane heart must desire to diminish, not increase them. Has Aurelian ever heard the name of Probus the Christian?'

The Emperor turned toward Fronto with a look of inquiry.

'Yes,' said the priest, 'you have heard his name. But that of Felix, the bishop of the Christians, as he is called, is more familiar to you.'

'Felix, Felix, that is the name I have heard most, but Probus too, if I err not.'

'He has been named to you, I am certain,' added Fronto. 'He is the real head of the Nazarenes,—the bishop, but a painted one.'

'Probus is he who turned young Piso's head. Is it not so?'

'The very same; and beside his, the lady Julia's.'

'No, that was by another, one Paul of Antioch, also a bishop and a fast friend of the Queen. The Christians themselves have of late set upon him, as they were so many blood-hounds, being bent upon expelling him from Antioch. It is not long since, in accordance with the decree of some assembled bishops there, I issued a rescript dislodging him from his post, and planting in his place one Domnus. If our purposes prosper, the ejected and dishonored priest may find himself at least safer if humbler. Probus,—I shall remember him. The name leads my thoughts to Thrace, where our greater Probus waits for me.'[Pg 174]

'From Probus the Christian,' I said, 'you will receive,' whenever you shall admit him to your presence, a true account of the nature of the Christians' faith and of the actual condition of their community—all which, can be had only from a member of it.'

But little more was said, when I departed, and took my way again towards Tibur.

It seemed to me, from the manner of the Emperor more than from what he said, that he was settled and bound up to the bad work of an assault upon the Christians. To what extent it was in his mind to go, I could not judge; for his language was ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory. But that the darkest designs were harbored by him, over which he was brooding with a mind naturally superstitious, but now almost in a state of exasperation, from the late events, was most evident.[Pg 175]

LETTER VI. FROM PISO TO FAUSTA.

Having confined myself, in my last letter, to the affairs of Marcus and Lucilia, I now, Fausta, turn to those which concern us and Rome.

I found, on my return to the city, that the general anxiety concerning the designs of Aurelian had greatly increased. Many rumors were current of dark sayings of his, which, whether founded in truth or not, contributed to alarm even the most hopeful, and raise serious apprehensions for the fate of this much and long-suffering religion. Julia herself partakes—I cannot say of the alarm—but of the anxiety. She has less confidence than I have in the humanity of the Emperor. In the honours heaped upon Zenobia, and the favors shown herself and Vabalathus, she sees, not so much the outpouring of benevolent feeling, as a rather ostentatious display of imperial generosity, and, what is called, Roman magnanimity. For the true character of the man she looks into the graves of Palmyra, upon her smoking ruins, and upon the blood, yet hardly dry, that stains the pavements of the Cœlian. Julia may be right, though I am unwilling to believe it. Her judgment is entitled to the more weight in this severe decision, that it is ever inclined to the side of a too favorable opinion of character and motive. You know her nature too well, to believe her capable of exaggerating the faults of even[Pg 176] the humblest. Yet, though such are her apprehensions, she manifests the same calm and even carriage as on the approach of more serious troubles in Palmyra. She is full of deepest interest in the affairs of the Christians, and by many families of the poorer sort is resorted to continually for aid, for counsel, or sympathy. Not one in the whole community is a more frequent and devout attendant upon the services of the church; and, I need not add, that I am her constant companion. The performance of this duty gives a value to life in Rome such as it never had before. Every seventh day, as with the Jews, only upon a different day of the week, do the Christians assemble for the purposes of religious worship. And, I can assure you, it is with no trifling accession of strength for patient doing and patient bearing, that we return to our every-day affairs, after having listened to the prayers, the reasonings, or exhortations of Probus.

So great is the difference in my feelings and opinions from what they were before I left Rome for Palmyra, that it is with difficulty I persuade myself that I am the same person. Between Piso the Pyrronist and Piso the Christian, the distance seems immeasurable—yet in how short a time has it been past. I cannot say that I did not enjoy existence and value it in my former state, but I can say that my enjoyment of it is infinitely heightened as a Christian, and the rate at which I value it infinitely raised. Born and nurtured as I was, with Portia for my mother, a palace for my home, Rome for my country and capital, offering all the luxuries of the earth, and affording all the means I could desire for carrying on researches in study of every kind, surrounded[Pg 177] by friends of the noblest and best families in the city,—I could not but enjoy life in some very important sense. While mere youth lasted, and my thoughts never wandered beyond the glittering forms of things, no one could be happier or more contented. All was fair and beautiful around me—what could I ask for more? I was satisfied and filled. But, by and by, my dream of life was disturbed—my sleep broken. Natural questions began to propose themselves for my solution, such, I suppose, as, sooner or later, spring up in every bosom. I began to speculate about myself—about the very self that had been so long, so busy, about everything else beside itself. I wished to know something of myself—of my origin, my nature, my present condition, my ultimate fate. It seemed to me I was too rare and curious a piece of work to go to ruin, final and inevitable—perhaps to-morrow—at all events in a very few years. Of futurity I had heard—and of Elysium—just as I had heard of Jupiter, greatest and best, but, with my earliest youth, these things had faded from my mind, or had already taken upon themselves the character of fable. My Virgil, in which I early received my lessons of language, at once divested them of all their air of reality, and left them naked fiction. The other poets, Livy helping them, continued the same work and completed it. But, bent with most serious and earnest desires toward truth on what seemed to me the greatest theme, I could not remain where I was, and turned with highest expectations to the philosophers. I not only read, but I studied and pondered them with diligence, and with as sincere a desire of arriving at truth as ever scholar sat at the feet of his instructer. The result was anything but satisfying, I[Pg 178] ended a universal sceptic, so far as human systems of philosophy were concerned, so far as they pretended to solve the enigma of God and man, of life and death; but with a heart, nevertheless, yearning after truth; and even full of faith, if that may be called faith which would instinctively lay hold upon a God and a hope of immortality; and, though beaten back once and again, by every form which the syllogism could