Valeria

"Entrance To A Catacomb."

On a bright spring morning in the year of our Lord 303-it was in the "Ides of March," about the middle of the month, but the air was balmy as that of June in our northern clime-two note-worthy-looking men were riding along the famous Appian Way, near the city of Rome The elder of the two, a man of large size and of mighty thews and sinews, was mounted on a strong and richly-caparisoned horse. He wore the armour of a Roman centurion-a lorica or cuirass, made of plates of bronze, fastened to a flexible body of leather; and cothurni, or a sort of laced boots, leaching to mid-leg. On his back hung his round embossed shield; by his side, in its sheath, his short, straight sword, and on his head was a burnished helmet, with a sweeping horsehair crest. His face was bronzed with the sun of many climes. But when, for a moment, he removed his helmet to cool his brow, one saw that his forehead was high and white. His hair curled close to his head, except where it was worn bare at his temples by the chafing of his helmet, and was already streaked with grey, although he looked not more than five-and forty years of age. Yet the eagle glance of his eye was undimmed, and his firm-set muscles, the haughty expression of his countenance, and the high courage of his bearing, gave evidence that his natural strength was not abated.

His companion contrasted strongly in every respect. He had a slender, graceful figure, a mobile and expressive face, a mouth of almost feminine softness and beauty, dark and languishing eyes, and long, flowing hair. He wore a snowy toga, with a brilliant scarlet border of what is still known as "Greek fret;" and over this, fastened by a brooch at his throat, a flowing cloak. On his head sat jauntily a soft felt hat, not unlike those still worn by the Italian peasantry, and on his feet were low-laced shoes or sandals. Instead of a sword, he wore at his side a metal case for his reed-pen and for a scroll of papyrus. He was in the bloom and beauty of youth, apparently not more than twenty years of age.

The elder of the two was the Roman officer Flaccus Sertorius, a centurion of the 12th Legion, returning with his Greek secretary, Isidorus, from the town of Albano, about seventeen miles from Rome, whither he had been sent on business of state.

"This new edict of the Emperor's," remarked Sertorius to his secretary, with an air of affable condescension, "is likely to give us both work enough to do before long."

"Your Excellency forgets," replied Isidorus, with an obsequious inclination of the head, "that your humble secretary has not the same means of learning affairs of state as his noble master."

"Oh, you Greeks learn everything!" said the centurion, with a rather contemptuous laugh. "Trust you for that."

"We try to make ourselves useful to our patrons," replied the young man, "and it seems to be a sort of hereditary habit, for my Athenian ancestors were proverbial for seeking to know some new thing."

"Yes, new manners, new customs, new religions; why, your very name indicates your adherence to the new-fangled worship of Isis."

"I hold not altogether that way," replied the youth. "I belong rather to the eclectic school. My father, Apollodorus, was a priest of Phoebus, and named me, like himself, from the sungod, whom he worshipped; but I found the party of Isis fashionable at court, so I even changed my name and colours to the winning side. When one is at Rome, you know, he must do as the Romans do."

"Yes, like the degenerate Romans, who forsake the old gods, under whom the State was great and virtuous and strong," said the soldier, with an angry gesture. "The more gods, the worse the world becomes. But this new edict will make short work of some of them."

"With the Christians you mean," said the supple Greek. "A most pernicious sect, that deserve extermination with fire and sword."

"I know little about them," replied Sertorius, with a sneer, "save that they have increased prodigiously of late. Even in the army and the palace are those known to favour their obscene and contemptible doctrines."

"'Tis whispered that even their sacred highnesses the Empresses Prisca and Valeria are infected with their grovelling superstition," said the Greek secretary. "Certain it is, they seem to avoid being present at the public sacrifices, as they used to be. But the evil sect has its followers chiefly among the slaves and vile plebs of the poorest Transtiberine region of Rome."

"What do they worship, anyhow?" asked the centurion, with an air of languid curiosity. "They seem to have no temples, nor altars, nor sacrifices."

"They have dark and secret and abominable rites," replied the fawning Greek, eager to gratify the curiosity of his patron with popular slanders against the Christians. "'Tis said they worship a low-born peasant, who was crucified for sedition. Some say he had an ass's head,[1] but that, I doubt not, is a vulgar superstition; and one of our poets, the admirable Lucian, remarks that their doctrine was brought to Rome by a little hook-nosed Jew, named Paulus, who was beheaded by the divine Nero over yonder near the Ostian gate, beside the pyramid of Cestius, which you may see amongst the cypresses. They have many strange usages. Their funeral customs, especially, differ very widely from the Greek or Roman ones. They bury the body, with many mysterious rites, in vaults or chambers underground, instead of burning it on a funeral pyre. They are rank atheists, refusing to worship the gods, or even to throw so much as a grain of incense on their altar, or place a garland of flowers before their shrines, or even have their images in their houses. They are a morose, sullen, and dangerous people, and are said to hold hideous orgies at their secret assemblies underground, where they banquet on the body of a newly-slain child.[2] See yonder," he continued, pointing to a low-browed arch almost concealed by trees in a neighbouring garden, "is the entrance to one of their secret crypts, where they gather to celebrate their abominable rites, surrounded by the bones and ashes of the dead. A vile and craven set of wretches; they are not fit to live.

"They are not all cravens; to that I can bear witness," interrupted Sertorius. "I knew a fellow in my own company-Lannus was his name-who, his comrades said, was a Christian. He was the bravest and steadiest fellow in the legion; -saved my life once in Libya;-rushed between me and a lion, which sprang from a thicket as I stopped to let my horse drink at a stream-as it might be the Anio, there. The lion's fangs met in his arm, but he never winced. He may believe what he pleases for me. I like not this blood-hound business of hunting down honest men because they worship gods of their own. But the Emperor's edict is written, as you may say, with the point of a dagger-'The Christian religion must everywhere be destroyed.'"

"And quite right, too, your Excellency," said the soft-smiling Greek. "They are seditious conspirators, the enemies of C?sar and of Rome."

"A Roman soldier does not need to learn of thee, hungry Greekling,"[3] exclaimed the centurion, haughtily, "what is his duty to his country!"

"True, most noble sir," faltered the discomfited secretary, yet with a vindictive glance from his treacherous eyes. "Your Excellency is always right."

For a time they rode on in silence, the secretary falling obsequiously a little to the rear. It was now high noon, and the crowd and bustle on the Appian Way redoubled. This Queen of Roads[4] ran straight as an arrow up-hill and down from Rome to Capua and Brundisium, a distance of over three hundred miles. Though then nearly six hundred years old, it was as firm as the day it was laid, and after the lapse of fifteen hundred years more, during which "the Goth, the Christian, Time, War, Flood and Fire," have devastated the land, its firm lava pavement of broad basaltic slabs seems as enduring as ever. On every side rolled the undulating Campagna, now a scene of melancholy desolation, then cultivated like a garden, abounding in villas and mansions whose marble columns gleamed snowy white through the luxuriant foliage of their embosoming myrtle and laurel groves. On either side of the road were the stately tombs of Rome's mighty dead-her pr?tors, proconsuls, and senators some, like the mausoleum of C?cilia Metella,[5] rising like a solid fortress; others were like little wayside altars, but all were surrounded by an elegantly kept green sward, adorned with parterres of flowers. Their ruins now rise like stranded wrecks above the sea of verdure of the tomb-abounding plain. On every side are tombs -tombs above and tombs below-the graves of contending races, the sepulchres of vanished generations. Across the vast field of view stretched, supported high in air on hundreds of arches, like a Titan procession, the Marcian Aqueduct, erected B.C. 146, which after two thousand years brings to the city of Rome an abundant supply of the purest water from the far distant Alban Mountains, which present to our gaze to-day the same serrated outline and lovely play of colour that delighted the eyes of Horace and Cicero.

As they drew nearer the gates of the city, it became difficult to thread their way through the throngs of eager travellers-gay lectic? or silken-curtained carriages and flashing chariots, conveying fashionable ladies and the gilded gallants of the city to the elegant villas without the walls -processions of consuls and proconsuls with their guards, and crowds of peasants bringing in the panniers of their patient donkeys fruits, vegetables, and even snow from the distant Soracte, protected from the heat by a straw matting-just as they do in Italy to-day. The busy scene is vividly described in the graphic lines of Milton:

"What conflux issuing forth or entering in;

Pr?tors, proconsuls to their provinces

Hasting, or on return, in robes of state;

Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power,

Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings;

Or embassies from regions far remote,

In various habits on the Appian Road."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I have myself seen in the museum of the Collegio Romano at Rome, a rude caricature which had been scratched upon the wall of the barracks of Nero's palace, representing a man with an ass's head upon a cross, and beneath it the inscription, "Alexomenos sebete Theon" "Alexomenos worships his God." Evidently some Roman soldier had scratched this in an idle hour in derision of the worship of our Lord by his Christian fellow-soldier. Tertullian also refers to the same calumny; and Lucian, a pagan writer, speaks of our Lord as "a crucified impostor." It is almost impossible for us to conceive the contempt and detestation in which crucifixion was held by the Romans. It was a punishment reserved for the worst of felons, or the vilest of slaves.-ED.

[2] All these calumnies, and others still worse, are recorded by pagan writers concerning the early Christians. Their celebration of the Lord's Supper in the private meetings became the ground of the last-mentioned distorted accusation.-ED.

[3] "Graeculus esuriens," the term applied by Juvenal to those foreign adventurers who sought to worm their way into the employment and confidence of great Roman houses.

[4] Regina Viarum, as the Romans called it.

[5] It is a circular structure sixty-five feet in diameter, built upon a square base of still larger size. After two thousand years it still defies the gnawing tooth of Time.

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