Part 18 (1/2)

Several testified, as was desired, that this was he.

'This is all I wish to know,' said the prefect. 'The man is either without wits, or they are disordered, or else the pestilent faith he teaches has made the nuisance of him he is, as it does of all who meddle with it. It is scarcely right that he should be abroad. Yet has he committed no offence that condemns him either to scourging or the prison. Hearken therefore, fellow! I now dismiss thee without the scourging thou well deservest; but, if thou keep on thy wild and lawless way, racks and dungeons shall teach thee what there is in Roman justice.

Away with him!'

'Romans! Roman citizens!' cried Macer; 'are these your laws and this your judge?--'

'Away with him, I say!' cried the prefect; and the officers of the palace hurried him out of the hall.

As he went, a voice from the crowd shouted,

'Roman citizens, Macer, are long since dead. 'Tis a vain appeal.'

'I believe you,' replied Macer; 'tyrant and slave stand now for all who once bore the proud name of Roman.'

This violence and injustice on the part of Varus must be traced--for though capricious, and imperious, this is not his character--to the language of Macer in the shop of Publius, and to his apprehension lest the same references to his origin, which he would willingly have forgotten, should be made, and perhaps more offensively still, in the presence of the people. Probus, on the former occasion, lamented deeply that Macer should have been tempted to rehea.r.s.e in the way he did some of the circ.u.mstances of the prefect's history, as its only end could be to needlessly irritate the man of power, and raise up a bitterer enemy than we might otherwise have found in him.

Upon leaving the tribunal, I was curious to watch still further the movements of the Christian. The crowd about him increased rather than diminished, as he left the building and pa.s.sed into the street. At but a little distance from the hall of the prefect, stands the Temple of Peace, with its broad and lofty flights of steps. When Macer had reached it he paused, and looked round upon the motley crowd that had gathered about him.

'Go up! go up!' cried several voices. 'We will hear thee.'

'There is no prefect here,' cried another.

Macer needed no urging, but quickly strode up the steps, till he stood between the central columns of the temple and his audience had disposed themselves below him in every direction, when he turned and gazed upon the a.s.sembled people, who had now--by the addition of such as pa.s.sed along, and who had no more urgent business than to attend to that of any others whom they might chance to meet,--grown to a mult.i.tude. After looking upon them for a s.p.a.ce, as if studying their characters, and how he could best adapt his discourse to their occasions, he suddenly and abruptly broke out--

'You have asked me to come up here; and I am here; glad for once to be in such a place by invitation. And now I am here, and am about to speak, you will expect me to say something of the Christians.'

'Yes yes.'

'But I shall not--not yet. Perhaps by and by. In the meantime my theme shall be the prefect! the prefect Varus!'

'A subject full of matter,' cried one near Macer.

'Better send for him,' said another. 'Twere a pity he lost it.'

'Yes,' continued Macer, 'it is a subject full of matter, and I wish myself he were here to see himself in the mirror I would hold before him; he could not but grow pale with affright. You have just had a sample of Roman justice! How do you like it, Romans? I had gone there to seek justice; not for a Christian, but against a Christian. A Christian master had abused his slave with cruelty, I standing by; and when to my remonstrance--myself feeling the bitter stripes he laid on--he did but ply his thongs the more, I seized the hardened monster by the neck, and wrenching from his grasp the lash, I first plied it upon his own back, and then dragged him to the judgment-seat of Varus,--'

'O fool!'

'You say well--fool that I was, crying for justice! How I was dealt with, some of you have seen. There, I say, was a sample of Roman justice for you! So in these times does power sport itself with poverty. It was not so once in Rome. Were Cincinnatus or Regulus at the tribunal of Varus, they would fare like the soldier Macer. And who, Romans, is this Varus? and why is he here in the seat of authority? At the tribunal, Varus did not know me. But what if I were to tell you there was but a thin wall between the rooms where we were born, and that when we were boys we were ever at the same school!--not such schools as you are thinking of, where the young go for letters and for Greek, but the school where many of you have been and are now at, I dare say, the school of Roman vice, which you may find always open all along the streets, but especially where I and Varus were, in one of the sinks near the Flavian. Pollex, the gladiator, was father of Varus!--not worse, but just as bad, as savage, as beastly in his vices, as are all of that butcher tribe. My father--Macer too--I will not say more of him than that he was keeper of the Vivaria of the amphitheatre, and pa.s.sed his days in caging and uncaging the wild beasts of Asia and Africa; in feeding them when there were no games on foot, and starving them when there were. Varus, the prefect, Romans, and I, were at this school till I joined the legions under Valerian, and he, by a luckier fortune, as it would be deemed, found favor in the eyes of Gallienus, to whom, with his fair sister Fannia, he was sold by those demons Pollex and Caeicina. I say nothing of how it fared with him in that keeping. Fannia has long since found the grave. Is Varus one who should sit at the head of Rome?

He is a man of blood, of crime, of vice, such as you would not bear to be told of! I say not this as if he were answerable for his birth and early vice, but that, being such, this is not his place. He could not help it, nor I, that we were born and nurtured where we were; that the sight of blood and the smell of it, either of men or beasts, was never out of our eyes and nostrils, during all our boyhood and youth; that to him, and me, the sweetest pleasure of our young life was, when the games came on, and the beasts were let loose upon one another, and,--O the hardening of that life!--when, specially, there were prisoners or captives, on which to glut their raging hunger! Those were the days and hours marked whitest in our calendar. And, whitest of all, were the days of the Decian persecution, when the blood of thrice cursed Christians, as I was taught to name them, flowed like water. Every day then Varus and I had our sport; working up the beasts, by our torments, to an unnatural height of madness ere they were let loose, and then rus.h.i.+ng to the gratings, as the doors were thrown open, to see the fury with which they would spring upon their defenceless victims too, and tear them piecemeal. The Romans required such servants--and we were they. They require them now, and you may find any number of such about the theatres. But if there must be such there, why should they be taken thence and put upon the judgment-seat? save, for the reason, that they may have been thoroughly purged, as it were, by fire--which Varus has not been. What with him was necessary and forced when young, is now chosen and voluntary. Vice is now his by election. Now, I ask, why has the life of Varus been such? and why, being such, is he here? Because you are so! Yes, because you are all like him! It is you, Roman citizens, who rear the theatres, the circuses, and the thousand temples of vice, which crowd the streets of Rome,--'

'No, no! it is the emperors.'

'But who make the emperors? You Romans of these times, are a race of cowards and slaves, and it is therefore that tyrants rule over you. Were you freemen, with the souls of freemen in you, do you think you would bear as you do--and love and glory in the yoke--this rule of such creatures as Varus, and others whom it were not hard to name? I know what you are--for I have been one of you. I have not been, nor am I now, hermit, as you may think, being a Christian. A Christian is a man of the world--a man of action and of suffering--not of rest and sleep. I have ever been abroad among men, both before I was a Christian and since; and I know what you are. You are of the same stamp as Varus! nay, start not, nor threaten with your eyes,--I fear you not. If you are not so, why, I say, is Varus there? You know that I speak the truth. The people of Rome are corrupt as their rulers! How should it be much otherwise? You are fed by the largesses of the Emperor, you have your two loaves a day and your pork, and you need not and so do not work. You have no employment but idleness, and idleness is not so much a vice itself as the prolific mother of all vices. When I was one of you, it was so; and so it is now.

My father's labor was nothing; he was kept by the state. The Emperor was not more a man of pleasure than he, nor the princes, than I and Varus.

Was that a school of virtue? When I left the service of the amphitheatre I joined the Legions. In the army I had work, and I had fighting, but my pa.s.sions, in the early days of that service, raged like the sea; and during all the reign of Valerian's son there was no bridle upon them;--for I served under the general Carinus, and what Carinus was and is, most of you know. O the double horrors of those years! I was older, and yet worse and worse. G.o.d! I marvel that thou didst not interpose and strike me dead! But thy mercy spared me, and now the lowest, lowest h.e.l.l shall not be mine.' Tears, forced by these recollections, flowed down his cheeks, and for a time he was speechless.

'Such, Romans, was I once. What am I now? I am a changed man--through and through. There is not a thought of my mind, nor a fibre of my body, what they were once. You may possibly think the change has been for the worse, seeing me thus thrust forth from the tribunal of the prefect with dishonor, when I was once a soldier and an officer under Aurelian. I would rather a thousand times be what I am, a soldier of Jesus Christ.

And I would that, by anything I could do, you, any one of you, might be made to think so too; I would that Varus might, for I bear him no ill will.