Aurelian; or, Rome in the Third Century
Nevertheless, I will try.'
'Moreover,' I continued, 'in every time of persecution, there are
those--sincere believers, but timid--who dare not meet the threatened
horrors. These deny not their faith, but they shrink from sight; they
for a season disappear; their hearts worship as ever, but their tongues
are silent; and search as they may, your emissaries of blood cannot find
them. But soon as the storm is over-past, then do they come forth again,
as insects from the leaves that sheltered them from the storm, and fill
again the forsaken churches.'
'Nevertheless I will try for them.'
'Then will you be, Aurelian, as one that sheds blood, because he will
shed it--seeing that the end at which you aim cannot in such way be
reached. Confiscation, imprisonment, scourging, fires, torture, and
death, will all be in vain; and with no more prospect that by such
oppression Christianity can be annihilated, than there would be of
rooting out poppies from your fields when as you struck off the heads or
tore up the old roots, the ripe seeds were scattered abroad over the
soil, a thousand for every parent stalk that fell. You will drench
yourself in the blood of the innocent, only that you may do it--while no
effect shall follow.'
'Let it be so then; even so. Still I will not forbear. But this I know,
Piso, that when a disaffection has broken out in a legion, and I have
caused the half thereof, or its tenth, to be drawn forth and cut to
pieces by the other part, the danger has disappeared. The physic has
been bitter, but it has cured the patient! I am a good surgeon; and well
used to letting blood. I know the wonders it works and shall try it now,
not doubting to see some good effects. When poison is in the veins, let
out the blood, and the new that comes in is wholesome. Rome is
poisoned!'
'Great Emperor,' I replied, 'you know nothing, allow me to say, whereof
you affirm. You know not the Christians, and how can you deem them
poison to the state? A purer brotherhood never has the world seen. I am
but of late one among them, and it is but a few months since I thought
of them as you now do. But I knew nothing of them. Now I know them. And
knowledge has placed them before me in another light. If, Aurelian--'
'I know nothing of them, Piso, it is true; and I wish to know
nothing--nothing more, than that they are Christians! that they deny the
good gods! that they aim at the overthrow of the religion of the
state--that religion 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.'
'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 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, 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
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 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
AEsculapius--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--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