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

under whose fostering care Rome has grown up to her giant size—that they are fire-brands of discord and quarrel in Rome and throughout the world! Greater would my name be, could I extirpate this accursed tribe than it would be for triumphing over both the East and West, or though I gained the whole world.'

'Aurelian,' I replied, 'this is not the language I used to hear from your lips. Another spirit possesses you and it is not hard to tell whence it comes.'[Pg 294]

'You would say—from Fronto.'

'I would. There is the rank poison, that has turned the blood in the veins of one, whom justice and wisdom once ruled, into its own accursed substance.'

'I and Rome, Piso,' said Aurelian, 'owe much to Fronto. I confess that his spirit now possesses me. He has roused the latent piety into action and life, which I received with my mother's milk, but which, the gods forgive me! carried away by ambition, had well nigh gone quite out in my soul. My mother—dost thou know it?—was a priestess of Apollo, and never did god or goddess so work by unseen influence to gain a mortal's heart, as did she to fill mine with reverence of the deities of heaven—specially of the great god of light. I was early a wayward child. When a soldier in the legions I now command, my life was what a soldier's is—a life of action, hardship, peril, and blood. The deities of Heaven soon became to me as if they were not. And so it has been for well nigh all the years of my life. But, the gods be thanked, Fronto has redeemed me! and since I have worn this diadem have I toiled, Rome can testify with what zeal, to restore to her gods their lost honors—to purge her worship of the foul corruptions that were bringing it into contempt—and raise it higher than ever in the honor of the people, by the magnificence of the temples I have built; by the gifts I have lavished upon them; by the ample riches wherewith I have endowed the priesthood. And more than once, while this work has been achieving, has the form of my revered parent, beautiful in the dazzling robes of her office, stood by my bedside—whether in dream, or in vision, or in actual presence, I cannot tell—and blessed me for my[Pg 295] pious enterprise—"The gods be thanked," the lips have said, or seemed to say, "that thy youth lasts not always but that age has come, and with it second childhood in thy reverence of the gods, whose worship it was mine to put into thy infant heart. Go on thy way, my son! Build up the fallen altars, and lay low the aspiring fanes of the wicked. Finish what thou hast begun, and all time shall pronounce thee greatest of the great." Should I disobey the warning? The gods forbid! and save me from such impiety. I am now, Piso, doubly armed for the work I have taken in hand—first by the zeal of the pious Fronto, and second, by the manifest finger of Heaven pointing the way I should go. And, please the Almighty Ruler! I will enter upon it, and it shall not be for want of a determined will and of eyes too used to the shedding of blood to be frightened now though an ocean full were spilled before them, if this race be not utterly swept from the face of the earth, from the suckling to the silver head, from the beggar to the prince—and from Rome all around to the four winds, as far as her almighty arms can reach.'

My heart sunk within me as he spoke, and my knees trembled under me. I knew the power and spirit of the man, and I now saw that superstition had claimed him for her own; that he would go about his work of death and ruin, armed with his own cruel and bloody mind, and urged behind by the fiercer spirit still of Pagan bigotry. It seemed to me, in spite of what I had just said myself, and thought I believed, as if the death-note of Christianity had now been rung in my ear. The voice of Aurelian as he spoke had lost its usual sharpness,[Pg 296] and fallen into a lower tone full of meaning, and which said to me that his very inmost soul was pouring itself out, with the awful words he used. I felt utterly helpless and undone—like an ant in the pathway of a giant—incapable of resistance or escape. I suppose all this was visible in my countenance. I said nothing; and Aurelian, after pausing a moment, went on.

'Think me not, Piso, to be using the words of an idle braggart in what I have said. Who has known Aurelian, when once he has threatened death, to hold back his hand? But I will give thee earnest of my truth!'

'I require it not, Aurelian. I question not thy truth.'

'I will give it notwithstanding, Piso. What will you think—you will think as you ever have of me—if I should say that already, and upon one of my own house, infected with this hell-begotten atheism, has the axe already fallen!'

Hearing the horrible truth from his own lips, it seemed as if I had never heard it before. I hardly had believed it.

'Tyrant!' I exclaimed, 'it cannot be! What, Aurelia?'

'Yes, Aurelia! Keep thy young blood cool, Piso. Yes, Aurelia! Ere I struck at others, it behoved me to reprove my own. It was no easy service, as you may guess, but it must be done. And not only was Aurelia herself pertinaciously wedded to this fatal mischief, but she was subduing the manly mind of Mucapor too, who, had he been successfully wrought upon, were as good as dead to me and to Rome—and he is one whom our legions cannot spare. We have Christians more than enough already in our ranks: a Christian general was not to be borne. This was additional matter of accusation against Aurelia, and made it right that she should[Pg 297] die. But she had her free choice of life, honor, rank, riches, and, added to all, Mucapor, whose equal Rome does not hold, if she would but take them. One word spoken and they were all her own; with no small chance that she should one day be what Livia is. But that one word her obstinate superstition would not let her speak.'

'No, Aurelian; there is that in the Christian superstition that always forbids the uttering of that one word. Death to the Christian is but another word for life. Apostacy is the true death. You have destroyed the body of Aurelia, but her virtuous soul is already with God, and it is you who have girded upon her brow a garland that shall never fade. Of that much may you make your boast.'

'Piso, I bear with you, and shall; but there is no other in Rome who might say so much.'

'Nay, nay, Aurelian, there I believe you better than you make yourself. To him who is already the victim of the axe or the beasts do you never deny the liberty of the tongue,—such as it then is.'

'Upon Piso, and he the husband of Julia, I can inflict no evil, nor permit it done.'

'I would take shelter, Aurelian, neither behind my own name, my father's, nor my wife's. I am a Christian—and such fate as may befall the rest, I would share. Yet not willingly, for life and happiness are dear to me as to you—and they are dear to all these innocent multitudes whom you do now, in the exercise of despotic power, doom to a sudden and abhorred death. Bethink yourself, Aurelian, before it be too late—'

'I have bethought myself of it all,' he replied—'and were the suffering ten times more, and the blood to be[Pg 298] poured out a thousand times more, I would draw back not one step. The die has been cast; it has come up as it is, and so must be the game. I listen to no appeal.'

'Not from me,' I replied; 'but surely you will not deny a hearing to what these people may say in their own defence. That were neither just nor merciful; nor were it like Aurelian. There is much which by their proper organs they might say to place before you their faith in the light of truth. You have heard what you have received concerning it, chiefly from the lips of Fronto; and can he know what he has never learned? or tell it unperverted by prejudices black as night?'

'I have already said,' rejoined the Emperor, 'that I would hear them, and I will. But it can avail them no more than words uttered in the breath of the tempest that is raging up from the north. Hear them! This day have I already heard them—from one of those madmen of theirs who plague the streets of Rome. Passing early by the temple of Æsculapius—that one which stands not an arrow's flight from the column of Trajan—I came upon a dense crowd of all sorts of persons listening to a gaunt figure of a man who spoke to them. Soon as I came against him, and paused on my horse for the crowd to make way, the wild beast who was declaiming, shouted at me at the top of his voice, calling on me to 'hear the word of God which he would speak to me.' Knowing him by such jargon to be a Christian, I did as he desired, and there stood, while he, for my especial instruction, laid bare the iniquities and follies of the Roman worship; sent the priesthood and all who entered their temples to the infernal regions; and prophesied against Rome—which he termed Babylon[Pg 299]—that ere so many centuries were gone, her walls would lie even with the ground, her temples moulder in ruins, her language become extinct, and her people confounded with other nations and lost. And all this because, I, whom he now called, if I remember the names aright, Ahaz and now Nebuchadnezzar, oppressed the children of God and held them in captivity: while in the same breath he bid me come on with my chains, gibbets, beasts, crosses, and fires, for they were ready, and would rejoice to bear their testimony in the cause of Christ. As I turned to resume my way, his words were; 'Go on, thou man of pride and blood; go on thy way! The gates of hell swing open for thee! Already the arm of the Lord is bared against thee! the winged lightning struggles in his hand to smite thee! I hear thy cry for mercy which no one answers—' and more, till I was beyond the reach of his owl's voice. There was an appeal, Piso, from this people! What think you of it?'

'He whom you heard,' I replied, 'I know, and know him to be honest and true; as loyal a subject too as Rome holds. He is led away by his hot and hasty temper both to do and say what injures not only him, but all who are joined with him, and the cause he defends. He offends the Christians hardly less than others. Judge not all by him. He stands alone. If you would hear one whom all alike confide in, and who may fitly represent the feelings and principles of the whole body of Christians, summon Probus. From him may you learn without exaggeration or concealment, without reproach of others or undue boasting of themselves, what the Christians are in their doctrines and their lives, as citizens[Pg 300] of Rome and loyal subjects of Aurelian, and what, as citizens of heaven and loyal followers of Jesus Christ.'

The Emperor promised to consider it. He had no other reason to deny such favor, but the tedium of listening to what could profit neither him nor others.

We then turned toward the palace, where I saw Livia; now as silent and sad as, when in Palmyra, she was lively and gay. Not that Aurelian abates the least of his worship, but that the gloom which overshadows him imparts itself to her, and that knowing what has befallen Aurelia, she cannot but feel it to be a possible thing for the blow to fall elsewhere and nearer. Yet is there the same outward show as ever. The palace is still thronged, with not Rome only, but by strangers from all quarters of the empire, anxious to pay their homage at once to the Empress of Rome, to the most beautiful woman in the world—such is the language—and to a daughter of the far-famed Zenobia.

The city is now crowded with travelers