Πόλιν ἐπιτομὴν τῆς οἰκουμένης.—ATHEN. Deipnos, 1120.
Fumum et opes strepitunque Romae.—HOE.
ST. PAUL’S arrival at Rome was in many respects the culminating point of his Apostolic career, and as he continued to work there for so long a time, it is both important and interesting to ascertain the state of things with which he came in contact during that long stay.
Of the city itself it is probable that he saw little or nothing until he was liberated, except such a glimpse of it as he may have caught on his way to his place of confinement. Although his friends had free access to him, he was not permitted to visit them, nor could a chained Jewish prisoner walk about with his guarding soldier. Yet on his way to the Prætorian barracks he must have seen something of the narrow and tortuous streets, as well as of the great open spaces of ancient Rome; something of the splendour of its public edifices, and the meanness of its lower purlieus; something of its appalling contrast between the ostentatious luxury of inexhaustible wealth, and the painful squalor of chronic pauperism.1 And during his stay he must have seen or heard much of the dangers which beset those densely–crowded masses of human beings;2 of men injured by the clumsy carrucae rumbling along with huge stones or swaying pieces of timber;3 of the crashing fall of houses raised on weak foundations to storey after storey of dangerous height;4 of women and children trampled down amid the rush of an idle populace to witness the horrid butcheries of the amphitheatre; of the violence of nightly marauders; of the irresistible fury of the many conflagrations.5 It is obvious that he would not have been allowed to seek a lodging in the Jewish quarter beyond the Tiber, since he would be obliged to consult the convenience of the successions of soldiers whose duty it was to keep guard over him. It is indeed possible that he might have been located near the Excubitorium, but it seems more likely that the Prætorians who were settled there were too much occupied with the duties thrown on them by their attendance at the palace to leave them leisure to guard an indefinite number of prisoners. We infer, therefore, that Paul’s “hired apartment” was within close range of the Prætorian camp. Among the prisoners there confined he might have seen the Jewish priests who had been sent to Rome by Felix, and who won from their nation so much approval by the abstinence which they endured in the determination that they would not be defiled by any form of unclean meat.6 Here, too, he may have seen Caradoc, the British prince whose heroic resistance and simple dignity extorted praise even from Roman enemies.7 The fact that he was not in the crowded city precincts would enable him at less cost to get a better room than the stifling garrets which Juvenal so feelingly describes as at once ruinously expensive and distressingly inconvenient. Considering that he was a prisoner, his life was not dull. If he had to suffer from deep discouragements, he could also thank God for many a happy alleviation of his lot. He had indeed to bear the sickness of hope deferred, and put up with the bitterness of “the law’s delays.” His trial was indefinitely postponed—perhaps by the loss, during shipwreck, of the elogiumof Festus; by the non–appearance of his accusers; by their plea for time to procure the necessary witnesses; or by the frivolous and inhuman carelessness of the miserable youth who was then the emperor of the world. He was saddened at the rejection of his teaching by his unconverted countrymen, and by the dislike and suspicion of Judaising Christians. He could not but feel disheartened that some should be preaching Christ with the base and contentious motive of adding affliction to his bonds.8 His heart must have been sometimes dismayed by the growth of subtle heresies in the infant Church.9 But, on the other hand, he was safe for the present from the incessant perils and tumults of the past twenty years; and he was deprived of the possibility, and therefore exempt from the hard necessity, of earning by incessant toil his daily bread. And again, if he was neglected by Jews and Judaisers, he was acceptable to many of the Gentiles; if his Gospel was mutilated by unworthy preachers, still Christ was preached; if his bonds were irksome, they inspired others with zeal and courage; if one form of activity had by God’s will been restrained, others were still open to him, and while he was strengthening distant Churches by his letters and emissaries, he was making God’s message known more and more widely in imperial Rome. He had preached with but small success in Athens, which had been pre–eminently the home of intellect; but he was daily reaping the fruit of his labours in the city of empire—the city which had snatched the sceptre from the decrepit hands of her elder sister—the capital of that race which represented the law, the order, and the grandeur of the world.
That many of the great or the noble resorted to his teaching is wholly improbable, nor is there a particle of truth in the tradition which, by the aid of spurious letters, endeavoured to represent the philosopher Seneca as one of his friends and correspondents. We have seen that Gallio prided himself on ignoring his very existence; and it is certain that Seneca would have shared, in this as in all other respects, the sentiments of his brother. In his voluminous writings he never so much as alludes to the Christians, and if he had done so he would have used exactly the same language as that so freely adopted many years later—and, therefore, when there was far less excuse for it—even by such enlightened spirits as Pliny, Tacitus, Epictetus, and M. Aurelius. Nothing can less resemble the inner spirit of Christianity than the pompocus and empty vaunt of that dilettante Stoicism which Seneca professed in every letter and treatise, and which he belied by the whole tenor of his life. There were, indeed, some great moral principles which he was enabled to see, and to which he gave eloquent expression, but they belonged to the spirit of an age when Christianity was in the air, and when the loftiest natures, sick with disgust or with satiety of the universal vice, took refuge in the gathered experiences of the wise of every age. It is doubtful whether Seneca ever heard more than the mere name of the Christian; and of the Jews he only speaks with incurable disdain. The ordinary life of the wealthy and noble Roman of St. Paul’s day was too much divided between abject terror and unspeakable depravity to be reached by anything short of a miraculous awakening.
“On that hard Pagan world disgust
And secret loathing fell;
Deep weariness and sated lust
Made human life a hell.
In his cool hall, with haggard eyes,
The Roman noble lay;
He drove abroad in furious guise
Along the Appian Way.
He made a feast, drank fast and fierce,
And crowned his hair with flowers—
No easier nor no quicker passed
The impracticable hours.”
The condition of the lower classes rendered them more hopeful subjects for the ennobling influences of the faith of Christ. It is true that they also lived in the midst of abominations. But to them vice stood forth in all its bare and revolting hideousness, and there was no wealth to gild its anguishing reactions. Life and its temptations wore a very different aspect to the master who could lord it over the souls and bodies of a thousand helpless minions, and to the wretched slave who was the victim of his caprice and tyranny. As in every city where the slaves far outnumbered the free population, they had to be kept in subjection by laws of terrible severity. It is no wonder that in writing to a Church of which so many members were in this sad condition, St. Paul had thought it necessary to warn them of the duty of obedience and honour towards the powers that be.10 The house of a wealthy Roman contained slaves of every rank, of every nation, and of every accomplishment, who could be numbered not by scores, but by hundreds. The master might kill or torture his slaves with impunity, but if one of them, goaded to passionate revenge by intolerable wrong, ventured to raise a hand against his owner, the whole familia, with their wives and children, however innocent, were put to death.11 The Roman lady looked lovely at the banquet, but the slave girl who arranged a curl wrong had been already branded with a hot iron.12 The tricliniaof the banquet might gleam with jewelled and myrrhine cups, but if a slave did but drop by accident one crystal vase he might be flung then and there to feed the lampreys in his master’s fishpond. The senator and the knight might loll upon cushions in the amphitheatre, and look on luxuriously at the mad struggles of the gladiators, but to the gladiator this meant the endurance of all the detestable savagery of the lanista, and the taking of a horrible oath that, “like a genuine gladiator,” he would allow himself to be bound, burned, beaten, or killed at his owner’s will.13 There were, doubtless, many kind masters at Rome; but the system of slavery was in itself irredeemably degrading, and we cannot wonder, but can only rejoice, that, from Cæsar’s household downwards, there were many in this condition who found in Christian teaching a light and peace from heaven. However low their earthly lot, they thus attained to a faith so sure and so consolatory that in the very catacombs they surrounded the grim memorials of death with emblems of peace and beauty, and made the ill–spelt jargon of their quaint illiterate epitaphs the expression of a radiant happiness and an illimitable hope.
From the Roman aristocracy, then, Paul had little to expect and little to fear; their whole life—physical, moral, intellectual—moved on a different plane from his. It was among the masses of the populace that he mainly hoped for converts from the Gentiles, and it was from the Jews, on the one hand, and the Emperor, on the other, that he had most to dread. The first terrible blow which was aimed at any Church among the Gentiles was dealt by the Emperor, and the hand of the Emperor was not improbably guided by the secret malice of the Jews. That blow, indeed—the outburst of the Neronian persecution—St. Paul escaped for a time by the guiding Providence which liberated him from his imprisonment just before the great fire of Rome; but since he escaped it for a time only, and since it fell on many whom he had taught and loved, we will conclude this chapter by a glance at these two forces of Antichrist in the imperial city.
1. The importance of the Jews at Rome began, as we have seen, with the days of Pompeius.14 Julius Cæsar—who, as Philo informs us, felt an undisguised admiration for the manly independence with which they held themselves aloof from that all but idolatrous adulation into which the degenerate Romans were so ready to plunge—allowed them to settle in a large district beyond the Tiber, and yearly to send deputies and temple–tribute to their holy city. From that time forward they were the incessant butt for the half–scornful, half–alarmed wit and wrath of the Roman writers. The district assigned to them, being in the neighbourhood of the wharfs where the barges from Ostia were accustomed to unlade, was particularly suitable for the retail trade in which they were mainly occupied.15 They increased with almost incredible rapidity. Their wisp of hay and the basket, which were their sole belongings, and were adopted to secure them from the danger of unclean meats, were known in every quarter. Martial describes how Jewish hawkers broke his morning slumbers with their bawling, and Juvenal complains of the way in which their gipsy–like women got themselves smuggled into the boudoirs of rich and silly ladies to interpret their dreams.16 Others of them, with a supple versatility which would have done credit to the Greeks themselves, thrust themselves into every house and every profession, flung themselves with perfect shamelessness into the heathen vices, and became the useful tools of wealthy rascality, and the unscrupulous confidants of the “gilded youth.”17 Some became the favourites of the palace, and made nominal proselytes of noble ladies, who, like Poppæa, had every gift except that of virtue.18 But whatever their condition, they were equally detested by the mass of the population. If they were false to their religion they were flouted as renegades; if they were true to it, their Sabbaths, and their circumcision, and their hatred of pork, their form of oath, their lamp–lightings, and their solemn festivals were held up to angry ridicule,19 as signs of the most abject superstition. If a Roman saw a knot of Jew beggars, he turned from them with a shudder of disgust; if he noticed the statue of a Jewish king or Alabarch, he frowned at it as a proof of the degradation of the age. Whether successful or unsuccessful—whether he was an Herodian prince or a match–selling pedlar—the Jew was to the Latin races an object of abhorrence and disdain. They were regarded with the same feelings as those with which a citizen of San Francisco looks on the Chinese immigrant— as intruders, whose competition was dangerous—as aliens, whose customs were offensive. And yet they made their presence tremendously felt. Rome, so tolerant and so indifferent in her own religious beliefs, was sometimes startled into amazement by the raging violence of their internal disputes. Cicero, one hundred and twenty years before this period, prided himself on his courage in defending Flaccus against their charges, and was obliged to deliver his speech in a low tone of voice, for fear of exciting a riot among the thousands of them who besieged the court to denounce their enemy. Sober Quirites had listened with astonishment to their wild wailing round the funeral pile of their patron, Julius Cæsar.20 Even poets and satirists imply that those who were attracted by feelings of superstition to adopt some of their customs were neither few in number nor insignificant in position.21
Under Augustus their condition was not materially altered. Tiberius, recognising them as a dangerous element in the population, made a ruthless attempt to keep down their numbers by conscriptions and deportations. Gaius, on the other hand, grossly as he behaved to their most venerable ambassadors, was so much attached to the elder Agrippa that he respected their religious and political immunities. The position of the Herodian princes in the imperial court was sufficient to protect them during the greater part of the reign of Claudius. During the reign of Nero, and therefore at the very time of St. Paul’s Roman imprisonment, they enjoyed a secret influence of the most formidable kind, since Poppæa never hesitated to intercede for them, and had even given orders that after her death her bodv was—in accordance with the Jewish practice—to be buried and not burnt.
2. If Paul had little to hope from the Jewish community at Rome, he had still less reason to place any confidence in the justice, or mercy, or even the ordinary discernment of the Cæsar to whom he had appealed. The first three Cæsars had been statesmen and men of genius. For Gaius might have been urged the mitigating plea of congenital madness. Claudius was redeemed from contempt by a certain amount of learning and good nature. But Nero was in some respects worse than any who had preceded him. Incurably vicious, incurably frivolous, with no result of all his education beyond a smattering of ridiculous or unworthy accomplishments, his selfishness had been so inflamed by unlimited autocracy that there was not a single crime of which he was incapable, or a single degradation to which he could not sink. The world never entrusted its imperial absolutism to a more despicable specimen of humanity. He was a tenth–rate actor entrusted with irresponsible power. In every noble mind he inspired a horror only alleviated by contempt. The first five years of his reign—that “golden quinquennium” which was regarded as an ideal of happy government—were a mere illusion.22 Their external success and happiness had been exclusively due to the wise counsels of Burrus and Seneca, which Nero—who was but seventeen when his stepfather Claudius had been poisoned by his mother Agrippina—was too ignorant, too careless, and too bent on personal pleasure to dispute. Yet in all that concernedd the personal conduct of himself and of Agrippina even those five years had been thickly sown with atrocities and infamies, of which the worst are too atrocious and too infamous to be told. His very first year was marked not only by open ingratitude to his friends, but also by the assassination of Junius Silanus, and the poisoning of the young son of Claudius—Britannicus, a boy of fourteen, from whom he had usurped the throne. The second year was marked by the cowardly folly of his disguised nightly marauding among his peaceful subjects, after the fashion of the Mohawks in the reign of Queen Anne. From these he had descended, through every abyss of vice and crime, to the murder of his mother, his public displays in the theatre,23 the flight from place to place in the restless terrors of a haunted conscience, and finally to the most abandoned wickedness when he found that even such crimes as his had failed to sicken the adulation or to shake the allegiance of his people. He was further encouraged by this discovery to throw off all shadow of control. Shortly after Paul’s arrival Burrus had died, not without suspicion of being poisoned by his imperial master. Nero seized this opportunity to disgrace Seneca from his high position. To fill up the vacancy created by the death of Burrus, he returned to the old plan of appointing two Prætorian Præfects. These were Fenius Rufus, a man of no personal weight, but popular from his benevolent disposition,24 and Sofonius Tigellinus, one of the worst characters of that bad age. Tigellinus was dear to Nero from the exceptional cruelty and infamy of his nature, and to him was practically entrusted the entire power.25 The banishment and subsequent murder of Nero’s wife Octavia, the unhappy daughter of Claudius, took place within a year of St. Paul’s arrival at Rome.
Such are some of the events which must have been whispered to the Apostle from time to time by the Prætorians who guarded him; and if his condition was rendered less tolerable by the promotion of such a wretch as Tigellinus, he must also have felt that his hopes for the future had been rendered more precarious by the downfall of Seneca, and the now unchecked tyranny of the incestuous matricide before whose tribunal his appeal must soon be tried. But if deep fears as to the result of that appeal alternated with passing hopes, neither his natural fears nor his earthly hopes disturbed the serenity of his soul. He quietly continued the discharge of every duty which was still possible to him in his captivity, and for the rest he knew that his times were in God’s hands, and that, whether life awaited him or death, all things were his, whether things present or things to come, and he was Christ’s, and Christ was God’s. Alike on the stage of stormy publicity and in the solitude of his sad imprisonment, his life was hid with Christ in God.