Darkness and Dawn; Or, Scenes in the Days of Nero. An Historic Tale

by F. W. Farrar

  CHAPTER LV

  _TWO MARTYRDOMS_

  ‘And as the Apostle, on the hill Facing the Imperial town, First gazed upon his fair domain, Then on the Cross lay down:

  So thou, from out the streets of Rome Didst turn thy failing eye Unto that mount of martyrdom, Take leave of it, and die.’

  NEWMAN.

  ‘... aut crucibus affixi, aut flammandi.’--TAC. _Ann._ xv. 44.

  The Apostle Peter, whose friends were chiefly among the JewishChristians, went to his humble quarters across the Tiber, whereMiriam, a Jewish widow, had provided a lodging for him, his wifePlautilla, and his daughter Petronilla. If he had held his life dearunto himself, he would have left Rome without delay, or only havewalked out at night and in secrecy. So long as he stayed in theTrastevere, it was not likely that the myrmidons of Tigellinus couldfind out his hiding-place. But this he would not do. The restlessenergy of his character rendered inaction impossible to him, and avoice ever rang in his ears from the lilied fields of Galilee, ‘Iwas hungry, and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink;naked, and ye clothed me: sick and in prison, and ye visited me....And inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these my brethren, ye didit unto Me.’ He asked Miriam’s son to guide him to the prisons, andspent the whole day among his suffering brethren. Wherever he went,his presence was to them as the sunlight, and the most wavering couldnot but be confirmed by his calm wisdom, his genial tenderness, andthe lessons which he so freely imparted to them from his personalmemories of the Divine Example. It needed money to secure admissioninto their places of confinement, and Aliturus and Pomponia had seenthat sufficient was provided for all his needs. But the inevitableresult followed. The jailors noticed the tumult of joy whichhailed his presence, and saw that he was some great leader amongthe Christians. Tigellinus had given orders that the ringleaders ofthe baleful superstition should be seized, and especially those whomthey called Apostles. His emissaries, listening to the conversationsof the Christians among themselves, were not long in ascertainingthat this was Peter of Bethsaida, and that in securing him and Johnthey would have seized two chief personages of the entire Christiancommunity throughout the world, and two who had been personal friendsand followers of the Crucified founder of the sect. Before eveningthe spies had ascertained the quarter of the city where Peter waslodged.

  It was from Simon the Sorcerer that Tigellinus learnt who Peter was,and how important was the place which he filled in the new community.This miserable impostor--the father of all heresies--had won himselfwealth and power, and something not far short of adoration, notonly in Samaria, but in many kingdoms. It was owing to his detestablemachinations that Drusilla, the sister of Agrippa, had been persuadedto desert her husband, King Azizus of Emesa, and to become themistress of Felix, brother of Pallas, who, by his brother’sinfluence, had risen from a slave to be Procurator of Judæa, andthe husband, or lover, of three queens. Simon had now come to Rometo push his fortunes, and his keen eye had caught sight of theApostle in the streets. He had set a savage dog upon him, whichinstantly became gentle when the Apostle laid his hand upon itshead. He was afraid of his counter-influence, and still rememberedwith burning wrath the old days when Peter, shaming him before hisSamaritan votaries, had overwhelmed him with the apostrophe, ‘Thymoney perish with thee!’ He gave immediate notice to Tigellinusthat the leading Christian was in Rome. He felt more secure in hisattempted miracles and professed inspiration, when Peter was inprison, and he was left unchecked to dupe the Emperor or the gulliblewomen of the Roman aristocracy.

  That evening there was a little meeting of Jewish Christians who hadmet together in the house of Rufus and Alexander, sons of Simon ofCyrene, to eat the Supper of the Lord. The meeting was surprised, andmany were thrown into bonds. But Rufus, at the first sound of alarm,hurried the Apostle to his lodging by a path at the back of thehouse. Before they reached it, Miriam’s son, Nazarius, a brightand active boy, met them with the warning that his mother’s househad been seized; but that Plautilla and Petronilla, being unknown,had taken refuge in the house of the Samaritan Thallus. The weepingChristians entreated Peter to fly from Rome while there yet was time:for the brethren at Rome he could do nothing more; to stay amongthem meant death, and his life was sorely needed by the Churchof God. Overcome by their entreaties, and those of his wife anddaughter, he started at the grey dawn with the young Nazarius forhis guide, and proceeded about two miles on the Appian Way. There,as Nazarius afterwards described the scene, a light seemed to shineround them; the Apostle stopped as if amazed, fell on his knees withuplifted hands, spoke earnest words, and then, with wet eyes, said,‘We must return, my boy. It is the will of Christ.’ To him he said nomore; but he afterwards told his fellow-Apostle that (near the spotwhere now stands the little church of ‘_Domine quo vadis_’?) he hadseen a vision of Christ walking towards Rome, and bearing His Cross.‘Whither goest thou, Lord?’ he asked, in amazement. ‘I go to Rome,’He said, ‘to be crucified again.’ ‘Lord, I return,’ said the Apostle,‘to be crucified with Thee.’ And the Vision smiled upon him, andvanished.

  So Peter went back with the boy to the house of Thallus, and next daybegan to visit the prisons once more. Seeking for Miriam to consoleher, and tell her of the safety of her son, he found that she was aprisoner. He had hardly entered the first dungeon when he was roughlyarrested, and carried off to the rock-hewn Tullianum. He was chainedto the floor beside his brother-Apostle John, in that damp anddreary vault. There King Jugurtha, before he was strangled, hadcomplained so bitterly of the cold; there the brave Gaulish patriot,Vercingetorix, had been led aside from Julius Cæsar’s triumph topay the forfeit of his life; there the Catilinarian conspirators,Lentulus and Cethegus, had expiated their crimes. Fervently did theApostles embrace one another, and between the two there blossomedup reminiscences of early days, infinitely tender and sacred. Theytalked of the summer hours when they had played in boyhood on thestrip of silver sand beside the limpid lake at Bethsaida; of thefisherboats, and draughts of fish, and straining nets, in the yearswhen they were partners together; of bright Capernaum, with itsmarble synagogue, throwing its white reflection on the waves litwith the rose of eventide; of the green hills beyond, with the nakeddemoniacs among the tombs. Then they spoke of the time when they hadgone with Andrew and Nathanael to see the prophet of the wilderness,whose notes of warning had made the flinty echoes ring with thepreaching of repentance. Then, with hushed voices, in regions ofsacred thought where we may not follow them, they spoke of the daysof the Son of Man.

  They who looked down into that vault from the upper aperture wouldhave seen a rocky chamber, lighted only by one iron lamp, bare ofall but the merest necessaries. The prisoners had nothing but a waterjar, and two wooden seats, and mats upon the rocky floor, on which atnight they could stretch their cramped and wearied limbs, and whichPomponia had bribed the jailor for permission to supply. And in thiscell would have been seen two men of Jewish aspect and poor clothing,of whom the elder had exceeded man’s threescore years and ten, andthe younger was long past life’s prime. Chilly, and in chains, andfed only on bread and water, and the leaders of a cause on which theworld poured its most passionate execration they yet felt perfecttrust in God. With Emperor and mob alike arrayed against them, andwith hundreds of their brethren in the same evil case, and with deathin its ghastliest form striding visibly upon them, amid what lookedlike the extreme of uttermost failure--might not even their enemieshave pitied them? Pity? Nay, Nero might have given all the kingdomsof the earth and the glory of them, and Seneca have bartered all hiswisdom and his wealth, for one hour of their radiant serenity, oftheir unshaken peace!

  In the evening the jailor, Martinianus--who had been so much touchedby their bearing, and by all that he had heard from them as theytalked, that he was already in heart almost a Christian--came fullof sorrow, to tell them that on the morrow they should die. To hisamazement a light as of heaven dawned upon their faces, and theyturned and looked
on each other with a smile. They asked him in whatway they were to suffer. He either was uninformed or shrank fromtelling them, and they were content that the morrow should reveal it.

  ‘I knew it, my brother, I knew it,’ said Peter. ‘Again and again aVoice has repeated in my dreams, “Verily I say to thee, When thouwast young thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest;but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, andanother shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.”And I am not troubled that I know not yet by what death I shallglorify God. But thou, my brother, shalt not die yet.’

  ‘How that may be I know not,’ replied the other, deeply musing. ‘Butto us to live is to die. Said He not, “He who is near Me is near thefire; he who is far from Me is far from the kingdom”?’

  The jailer had told them truly. The execution of the Christians wasto be hurried on with all speed, for Nero had on hand the weightybusiness of supervising the reconstruction of his capital and ofhis Golden House. He could only recover the popularity necessary forthese undertakings by sacrificing a holocaust of victims to assuagethe popular suspicions. And the most diabolic feature of thismassacre of the innocent was to be that they were not only to beslain, but that their tortures were to subserve the amusement of thepeople. The solemn moment of each Christian’s death was to be themotive for delighted acclamations and shouts of laughter--in which,surely, all the demons joined! To any feelings less exalted, toany hope less fervent than theirs, it would have been the mostintolerable aggravation to die amid pagan pageants and brutalidleness, insulted by bacchanalia of revelry and sanguinary pomp.

  But the inventiveness of cruelty which Tigellinus and Nero studiedand planned together amid the faint, unavailing remonstrances ofPoppæa, had to be hastened, for the special reason that already theirvictims were beginning to escape them fast through the narrow gateof death. Owing to the suffocating atmosphere of over-peopled prisonsin the malarious autumn air, a dangerous form of typhoid had brokenout among the Christians. Not a few had died, robbed, as theyfeared, of the crown of martyrdom. It had required all the wisdomand tenderness of their fellows to persuade them that they haddeserved no less than others the longed-for amaranth, and that theywould not be losers by not surviving until that second coming whichmany of them were expecting from hour to hour. Tigellinus was notmore anxious to bestow than they to receive the death of violence.All Nero’s aims would be frustrated, if, with so great a multitudeof victims ready for them, the wild beasts of the amphitheatre, humanas well as animal, were baulked of their infernal festival and theirinfernal joy.

  Pending, therefore, the necessary preparations to deal with the restin mass, bizarre and insulting forms of death were devised for theleaders on the following day. Notice was given that of the two Jewishringleaders of the Christian sect, whom they called Apostles, onewould be crucified head downwards by the obelisk in the Circus on theMons Vaticanus, under the terebinth tree, and that the other would beflung into a caldron of boiling oil on the Latin Road.

  And that night a great joy was permitted them. They had noticed thatagain and again Martinianus had not only shown them kindnesses towhich the prisoners of the Tullianum were little accustomed, but alsothat he had humbly lingered in their presence, had asked permissionto listen to them when they spake of Jesus, had put many questionsto them, had evidently felt in his heart some stirrings of heavenlygrace. That night he came to them, and, falling on his knees, saidthat they had taught him to believe in Christ, and begged baptism attheir hands. The spring was there welling up, as it still does, fromits native rock. Nothing hindered. Martinianus received baptism atthe hands of the Apostles, and afterwards died a martyr.

  The morning dawned sulphurously hot, and there seemed to be menaceand meaning in the sky which glowed overhead like molten copper. Atthe entrance of the Tullian vault the Apostles enfolded one anotherin a long farewell embrace. They reminded each other, with faceswhich smiled through the tears of parting, of the blessings and wordsof Christ, and, being then rudely separated, were led in oppositedirections by two decurions with their soldiers, amid accompanyingthrongs. The places of execution had been fixed in order thatspectators might have their free choice of delightful horror, andthat the division of the multitudes might enable all to have a goodview.

  A fresh trial awaited the elder Apostle. He had hardly been set freefrom his chains, that he might walk to the place of execution withhis hands tied behind his back, when he saw his wife, who was alsobeing led on her way to die. Brief, and free from all anguish, werethe words that they interchanged.

  ‘Be of good cheer,’ he said, ‘true yokefellow. He will be with theewho raised thy mother from the great fever at Capernaum. I rejoicethat thou, too, art going home.’

  ‘Farewell, my beloved,’ she replied, in a firm voice; ‘I am notafraid. In one short hour we shall be with Him where He is.’

  He cast one long look upon her, and said in Hebrew, ‘Yea, though Iwalk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil,for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.’ Andwhen they were parted he still turned round to her once more, andsaid, ‘Oh, remember the Lord!’

  Most of the spectators who accompanied the procession had seen thethen common spectacle of crucifixion; but to see a man crucified headdownwards was a novelty sufficient to have assembled all the dregsof the populace, but for the counter-attraction at what, for the sakeof brevity, we will call the Latin Gate.[101] In point of fact, Nerohad read in Seneca’s ‘Consolation to Marcia’[102] that tyrants hadbeen known to adopt this grotesque form of cruelty, and he himselfsuggested it to Tigellinus, and said that he meant to witness it.When St. Peter was told what awaited him, he only smiled. He wellknew that what had been intended for insult was overruled to him formercy. He would be spared the long unspeakable pangs of lingeringdeath. On the ordinary cross he might have lived for three days incomplications of agony, but crucified head downwards, he knew thatin a very short time he would pass from unconsciousness to death.

  Nero, as he had promised, was present to see the new sight. Whilethe cross was being prepared, Peter caught sight of the Emperor,and lifting the right hand, which for a moment the executioner hadloosened, fixed his gaze on him till he shrank.

  He spoke not, but one of the Christians, who had noticed theEmperor’s alarm, exclaimed--

  ‘O murderer of the saints, yet a little time hence, and thou, too,shalt be summoned before the bar of God.’

  ‘Crucify him!’ said Nero, passionately. ‘Stop his ill-omened andblaspheming mouth!’

  But the speaker had shrunk back into the dense multitude.

  They nailed St. Peter to the cross, and lifted it with his headdownwards; but while the brutal heathen laughed, and the fearof death could not suppress the wail of the Christians, he saidonly--and they were the last words of the great Apostle--‘I rejoicethat ye crucify me thus, for my Master’s sake. I am much unworthy todie in the same manner as He died.’

  The old man passed speedily and almost painlessly away, and in theglimmering, flashing sky, over which, in the far distance, began toroll the chariot wheels of gathering storm, the brethren thought thatthey saw the wings of angels and shadows of the avengers.

  The Christians always perplexed and irritated their pagan persecutorsby behaving in a manner the very opposite to what was expected. Aftertheir first shuddering emotion at witnessing the martyrdom of theirgreat Apostle, they seemed rather radiant than depressed. But thereason for this was that their young deacon, Clemens, speaking tothem in Greek, said, ‘I see him, not head downwards, but upright onthe cross, and the angels crown him with roses and lilies, and theLord is putting a book into his hands from which he reads.’

  It was natural that they should desire to keep his mortal remains.Marcellus, who had been a pupil of Simon Magus, but whom Peter hadconverted, obtained his body from the executioner for a great sum ofmoney, bathed it in milk and wine, and had it embalmed. That nightthey conveyed it to a spot, secretly remembered, at
the foot of theVatican hill.

  Marcellus watched by the grave that night; but as he watched hethought that the Apostle came to him in vision, and said, ‘Let thedead bury their dead. Preach thou the gospel of God.’ On that spotwas reared the humble ‘trophy,’ or memorial cell, which the presbyterGaius saw there in the second century. Thence, in due time, therelics were removed to that unequalled shrine, where the tomb whichenclosed them is encircled by ever-burning lights, and visitedcentury after century by the devotion of tens of thousands. Foolscounted his life madness and his end to be without honour. How is henumbered among the children of God, and his lot is among the saints!

  The procession which accompanied the Apostle John had taken longerto arrive at the scene of martyrdom. The awful heat of the morning,the more crowded parts of the city through which they had to pass,the greater throngs which accompanied them, had caused delay. TheApostle walked with firm step in the midst of the ten soldiers.Though his hands were tied behind his back, his appearance struckall beholders with involuntary dread. The high forehead, the longhair which streamed over his shoulders, the perfect self-possession,the beauty of holiness, gave to his movements an unconscious majesty.His face was mostly lifted heavenward in prayer, but whenever heturned on those around him his bright and searching glance theireyes fell before him. If any began to jeer at him and utter words ofribald blasphemy, he had but to look towards them, and in spite ofthemselves they stopped short. An unwonted hush fell on the throngwhich surged around the soldiers--a silence of which the multitudesthemselves could give no account.

  ‘He is a sorcerer, that is certain,’ said Tullius Senecio as helooked down on the passing procession from a window in the house ofCrispinilla.

  ‘He must be,’ she answered. ‘I never saw the crowd of the Forum sostrangely quiet.’

  ‘Let me see the Christian,’ said a boy in the crowd. ‘Soldier, liftme up that I may see him.’

  ‘What, Gervasius? How camest thou here? But thou art a soldier’s son,and I will humour thee,’ said the decurio. ‘Thy father and I werecomrades in Palestine, and it was once his lot to see a scene afterwhich he never had one happy day.’

  He lifted the boy in his arms, and he gazed long.

  ‘Is that the Christian?’ he said. ‘Yon man does not look like anenemy of the gods, or an eater of children’s flesh.’

  The Apostle heard him, and turned towards him with a soft light ofblessing in his eyes.

  ‘I should not mind being like thee,’ said the boy, ‘and I will not goto see thee killed.’

  Fifty years later he remembered that gentle glance when in a laterpersecution he, too, was led out to die.

  At the scene of execution a high scaffolding had been erected sothat many thousands could be gratified by witnessing the new form ofdeath. On the summit, on ten rows of bricks, had been kindled a fire,and over this was placed a huge caldron of iron, full of boiling oil.Not blenching in a single feature, with a step of perfect dignity,without assistance, without the slightest tremor, the Apostle mountedthe wooden steps and stood in the sight of all, the fire flinging itsred glare over him as the executioner tore off his outer robe.

  But meanwhile the storm, gathering into its bosom the fierce heatof that day in late August, had begun to burst over Rome. Thethunderclouds passed from threatening purple into midnight blackness,and roll after roll of thunder throbbed and crashed as though tomenace the guilty city with the doom of its congregated iniquity.Then blazed forth the lightning, and filled the air, and ran alongthe ground. So tremendous were the explosions of sound, whoserending, cracking, and splitting outbursts settled into a long,continued roar, and so vivid were the flashes of forked lightningwhich gleamed like dazzling dagger-stabs aimed at an enemy who mustat all costs be slain, that the soldiers and the executioners andthe spectators grew livid with dread. Women shrieked and cowered, andclung to their husbands, and men looked round them uneasily, and somebegan to hurry away, and the hearts of all were benumbed as with somestrange misgiving.

  An exceptionally terrific crash of the artillery of heaven, a flashof levin which seemed to wrap them all in a white robe of dazzlingflame, a shriek from hundreds of voices! And when the crashended, the Christians were murmuring together in awestruck voices,_Maranatha! Maranatha!_ and there arose scattered cries from themultitude. ‘He is a sorcerer! Stay the execution! We are all deadmen! The wrath of the gods is upon us!’ The ancients, from ignorancecombined with superstition, were far more terrified than the modernsby thunderstorms. It was evident that they were in the centre of thestorm. The scaffold and the caldron formed its inmost focus, havingattracted the electric fluid by their woodwork and iron. The decurionhimself and his soldiers and the executioners were terrified. Theydared not disobey their orders, yet amid the general terror theyseemed paralysed into helplessness. Aliturus, hoping that he mightin some way render some kindness, had asked to be one of thosespectators, of higher position than the mob, who were allowed tostand on the scaffold. Seizing his opportunity, he hastily whispered,‘The executioner has untied your hands. You have friends in thecrowd. Escape! Fear not the lightning--this skin of a seal which Ibrought under my robe, expecting a thunderstorm, is an amulet againstlightning.’

  ‘I thank thee, my son,’ said the Apostle; ‘unless the will of God beclearly manifested, I cannot fly. And if we trust in God we need noamulet, for neither the pestilence nor the arrow can hurt us.’

  Again the thunder roared, again they were wrapped in a blindingflash. Hardly conscious what he did, the Apostle uplifted his righthand. It became the nucleus of the electric phenomenon known as St.Elmo’s fire, and at once appeared to burn like a torch with lambentflame. A cry of fresh terror rose from the heathen multitude. ‘Fly,fly!’ they exclaimed; ‘he is a sorcerer or a god. He lifts againstus his flaming hand, tipped with the fire of Castor and Pollux. Weshall all be killed by fire from heaven. The spot is accursed. Itis a _bidental_.’[103]

  A rush took place, and the crowd fled promiscuously in everydirection. The soldiers could not resist the contagion. They leaptdown and fled, and the decurio followed, shouting to them in vain.The executioners joined the soldiers in their flight. For a momentthe Apostle and Aliturus stood alone on the scaffold, and thenhurried down the steps. Scarcely had they reached the ground whenthe lightning struck the metal caldron and tore it from its chains.It fell with a mighty crash, and the oil streaming over the flameburst up in a fierce blaze which would very rapidly have reduced thewhole scaffold to ashes had not the deluging rain begun to fall incataracts, quenching the fire, but leaving a charred and shapelessruin.

  The news was brought to Nero and Tigellinus that evening bymultitudes of witnesses when the storm had cleared and the heavenshad resumed their azure sleep. They shared the superstition ofthe mob, and thought that, by magic powers unusually terrible, theApostle had brought down the wrath of Heaven. At the same time thiscould have nothing to do with the Christians in general, for hadnot the execution of the other Apostle been carried out with perfectease? They were officially informed that the Apostle, of his own freewill, had thought it right to return to the door of the Tullianum andsurrender himself as a prisoner. Such strange security deepened theimpression that he could wield supernatural powers. Afraid to detainhim in Rome, Nero ordered him to banishment in the rocky Ægean islandof Patmos.[104]

  Thither the Apostle was conveyed, and there, gazing on the sea thatburned like glass in the sunlight, he wrote his Apocalypse. In thatstrange book we can still read the echo of the horror kindled inthe heart of an eyewitness by an Emperor who had degenerated into aportent of iniquity, fighting with empoisoned breath and dragon-likefury against the saints of God. The Apocalypse is the ‘thunderingreverberation’ of the Apostle’s mighty spirit, smitten into wrathfuldissonance amid its heavenly music by the plectrum of the Neronianpersecution. All the horrors of that frightful age of storms, anderuptions, and earthquakes, and falling meteors, and famine, andpestilence, and threatenings of Parthian invasion and imminentmassacres of civil war,
threw gigantic and blood-red shadows acrossthe Apostle’s page. The air was being shattered by the trumpet-blastsof doom which would bury in flame and ruin alike the Harlot City onthe seven hills which had made herself so drunken with the blood ofthe saints, and the Holy City which had become a den of murderers--which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt--where the Lord wascrucified. When he wrote his vision, three or four years later, thesouls of those who had been slain in the great Neronian tribulationfor the Word of God and the testimony which they held were stillunder the altar, and cried, ‘How long, O Lord, how long dost thounot avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ But whiterobes were given them, and they were bidden to rest yet a littlewhile till the number of their brethren was fulfilled. And afterwardsone of the four-and-twenty elders who sat around the throne askedhim, ‘Who are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whencecame they?’ And he said unto him, ‘Sir, thou knowest.’ And the Elderanswered, ‘These are they which came out of THE GREAT TRIBULATION,and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of theLamb.’