No one has ever successfully defined romance. It may, perhaps, be that indefinable something in thought, word, and deed, and in the monuments that recall both deeds and thoughts, which makes us feel akin with the hero, the poet and the saint; that something which produces in the reader of history or fiction the intoxicating illusion that identifies him with the chief actor in the story, which makes the traveller pause upon the spot where some great fight was fought ages ago by men of his race, and wish with a longing which he can neither understand nor control, that he too might have lived then to strike a blow in their good cause, to shed his blood with theirs, to fall where they so memorably fell. It is that something which seizes upon a whole audience that witnesses in a play the conflict of its own passions — that something which no audience, however cultivated, however trained in classic thought, ever quite feels for a Greek play like ‘Oedipus Tyrannus,’ though it be played in a modern language, by the greatest actors of modern times, though its theatrical form is so perfect that every modern writer would imitate it if he could, and though its story is full of the most breathless and unflagging interest.
We do not readily realize how much Christianity has had to do with our conception of manly honour. It has influenced also our feeling for the romantic much more than we may be inclined to admit. Aesthetically speaking, as well as socially, Christianity is the link that connects us with the ancients, and the connexion has been through Rome and Italy, not through Greeks or Asiatics. With Eastern Christians, the contrary has taken place, and one need only look at the difference between us and them, with regard to social honour, to understand that our standard is Roman, and theirs Greek, that we feel sympathy for Regulus, while they find their ideal in Pericles, if not in Alcibiades; and that this difference is fundamental, lasting, almost unvarying. For us, the high-water mark of romance is in the middle ages, somewhere between the first and last Crusades, but somehow we feel that the romantic began in that sort of prevision of Christian honour and self-sacrifice, sometimes found among Romans, but never, I think, among Greeks, — the idea of honour that made Virginius stab his daughter in the Forum, that prompted Curtius to spring armed into the gulf, and sent Regulus back to certain death for the sake of the plighted word. This connexion of the thought of honour with Rome is one of those matters, more of sentiment than of history, or of instinctive feeling than of demonstrable fact, concerning which it is not good to argue too much, lest one be led away into finding specious reasons, where the true reason eludes the thinker. The undeniable and evident corollary, however, is that Christianity is, in some way or other, the bridge over which we lead our thoughts back to the ancient world.
This link or bridge connects the reign of Augustus and the Augustan age with the times of Constantine, and includes a period which is fraught with legends of good men and bad, during which the south has no political history worth recording, but during which its whole nature and appearance were inwardly and outwardly changed by the preaching Christianity, by the examples of the many martyrs, and by the steady growth of a new morality which, from small beginnings and in opposition to what seemed overwhelming odds, gradually encroached upon the ancient system, threw it into confusion, and finally drove it out altogether. That period is a sort of long miracle play, in which devoted men appear as the chief characters; apostles, missionary bishops, and saintly presbyters on the one side, and, on the other, emperors, praetors, proconsuls, and luxurious Romans, the enslaved multitude of the nameless poor ranged with the first, against the dimly splendid power of Rome. In such a conflict history becomes personal narrative, and the individual leader stands out from the confusion of the struggle, the centre of action, of interest, and of glory, the natural type and predestined type of the Christian man, the champion and protagonist of Christian freedom against heathen slavery. So, too, in Homeric times, the leaders stood out before the hosts on each side and challenged one another, and the story of war was the record of their deeds; while the ranks of Greeks and Trojans, unnoticed and unsung, fought obscure battles for life and death, and made the history which their chiefs adorned.
First came the rumour of Christianity from Palestine, travelling westward, as all new things travel, away from unchanging Asia, towards all change and progress and advancing thought. For the most it came by slaves, who told each other tales of wonder, tugging in chains at the galley oar, in the foul air between decks, or working in irons in the southern fields; tales that sounded like fairy stories of a time that never was and never could be, in which all men were to be set free, but not by force, nor in violent insurrection, nor by blood-shedding; and with the stories came the greater truth, for which the poor longed vaguely without understanding it, the truth of immortality and of a larger freedom among the dead, but altogether beyond death. A few of these rumours reached educated men also. A French writer of great talent has told an imaginary anecdote of Pontius Pilate, coming back to Italy when deposed from his procuratorship, full of care and trouble and tormented by political questions that were to him of vital importance. Near Baiae, I think, he met an old friend, a reader and philosopher, and after some conversation this man asked him about Jesus, and about his condemnation to death. But Pilate’s look was vague, he could not remember. ‘Jesus?’ he asked. ‘I do not recollect the name.’
The story is the fiction of a gifted writer, designed to show how small an impression the greatest event in the world’s history made upon the mind of a prosaic Roman official, preoccupied for his own reputation which was at stake; but there is a typical truth in it which makes it seem possible at first sight.
The story of the introduction of Christianity into Sicily and the south is an inextricable confusion of truth and legend. Some say that the Apostle Peter, having founded the commonwealth of Antioch, sent out two bishops as missionaries to Sicily; and that one, who was called Pancras, came to Taormina and landed upon the beach where the first Greek colonists had drawn up their ships eight hundred years earlier. Whether this be so or not, there is little evidence and no proof; but it has been believed by many and the statue of the holy man stands upon the beach to this day. To shelter it from wind and weather, it has been moved a little inward and placed by the wall of the small church. The inscription says that it was set up in 1691 in honour of the first bishop of all Sicily, ordained by Saint Peter in the fortieth year of our Lord. The second bishop who was sent out was Martian, also saint and martyr, and he came to Syracuse and overthrew temples and built a church and wrought many wonders. In the first place he gathered together his converts in a great subterranean chamber which is beneath the church of San Giovanni near the walls of Achradina, not far from the baths of Venus, where the marvellous statue of the goddess which is in the museum of Syracuse was found among the fragments of forty-two marble columns, a hundred years ago; near the place, too, was the synagogue of the Jews; and it is said that Saint Martian chose this spot as a convenient one from which to preach the gospel to Jews and Gentiles alike. It is indeed a place of many holy memories, for Saint Paul came hither after his shipwreck in Malta and dwelt here three days, and hither it was said that Saint Peter himself came, on his way to Rome.
Here, too, is the burial-place of the very early Christians, and it is not now thought that it had been previously used by the Greeks. There is no city of the dead in all the world more solemn, more silent, or more suggestive of that peace which especially distinguishes Christian burial-places from all others. The Parsees’ Tower of Silence, built up to represent the loneliness of the hill summit whereon the elements of man should be dissolved into the elements of the universe, is horrible with death within, and is made hideous without by flocks of vultures and loathsome birds of prey. The tombs of the Romans and the Greeks were places of gay resort upon the public way, the urns within them held a handful of ashes and a few pinches of dry dust, flowers were trained round the walls, and in the miniature gardens were set up three couches and a table for the feasts anniversary of death. Below, the road, the crowd, the chariot of th
e rich, the cry of the fruit-seller, the tramp of the soldier, the laughter of boys and girls. There was no peace there; there was only the evident and determined will to hide from the living the conditions of death. What Swinburne has called ‘the lordly repose of the dead,’ the peace of the body on earth, the departure of the soul to a place of refreshment, light, and peace in heaven, is a solely Christian concept. Nowhere perhaps can one so well understand what it means, as in the catacombs of Rome or Sicily, and those of Syracuse are nobler, more permanent, and, strange to say, of far greater extent.
Corridor and chamber follow each other indefinitely, each vaulted hall surrounded by deep niches, within which graves deeper still have been hollowed in the living rock. It is not the crumbling tufa of the Roman Campagna, it is the same splendid rock in which the Greeks carved the tiers of their great theatre, and in which the Romans hewed the rough tombs that border the highway above it. Here, below the surface of the earth, it is a strange sensation to be in what one may well call a city, carved in one piece out of one stone. Here and there, at first, a bright light falls through apertures in the larger chambers, each separated from the next by a dark passage lined with graves. There are graves in the rocky floor, and to the right and left, and one above another in tiers to the spring of the solid vault; and one may go on and on, without end, mile after mile, through the unexplored silence, and many believe that the passages reach even to Catania, more than thirty miles away.
Here Saint Martian lived and preached, and by the sea-shore, not far away, it is said that he was put to death, not by heathens, but by the Jews; and that in the first place they laid him bound in a boat and set fire to it, and pushed it from the shore, but that, when they had seen that the fire had no power over him, they brought him to the beach again and strangled him.
In Taormina, Saint Pancras, says the tale, destroyed a temple by the sign of the cross, and silenced an oracle by fastening a letter upon the neck of the god’s statue; and he made many converts, including the prefect of the city, and lived many years from the year 40 A.D., in which he was ordained by Saint Peter, until the year about 100, when he was martyred in the reign of Trajan.
Next after the first two missionary bishops and Saint Luke the evangelist, comes the story of Saint Paul, authentic beyond all doubt and now known to be accurate beyond all dispute. The greatest authority on navigation who has lived in this century, the late Professor Breusing, devoted much space in his work on the navigation of the ancients to a careful study of Saint Paul’s voyage as described by the Apostle. The fact that Breusing was an eminent philologist as well as a mathematician and a navigator, gives great weight to his opinions and conclusions. He has demonstrated to the complete satisfaction of all mariners that Saint Paul’s story is as accurate an account of what happened to the ship on which he sailed, as could be put together from the log and dead reckoning of a modern sailing vessel on a stormy voyage. This being the case, we are obliged to admit that the Apostle’s extraordinary technical correctness must have extended to other matters spoken of in his account, and the most sceptical unbeliever cannot have the smallest ground for doubting that Saint Paul must have spent three days in Syracuse as he himself states. With Breusing’s book in hand I have visited the little bay at the western end of Malta, ‘where two seas met,’ that is to say, close to the channel between Malta and Gozo, where the ship was run aground ‘and the fore part stuck fast and remained unmovable, but the hinder part was broken with the violence of the waves. And the soldiers’ counsel was to kill the prisoners lest any of them should swim out and escape, but the centurion, willing to save Paul, kept them from their purpose; and commanded that they which could swim should cast themselves first into the sea, and get to land: and the rest, some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship. And so it came to pass, that they escaped all safe to land.’ Thence it was that, after spending three months in Malta, Saint Paul came to Syracuse in the Castor and Pollux, a ship of Alexandria that had wintered on the island.
The little Maltese cove is unchanged, and on the islet before it stands a colossal statue of the Apostle. The prudent English administration has fastened to the pedestal a notice warning visitors not to molest the rabbits. All round about, the wild ‘ecballion’ blooms under the summer sun, its healing root sucking the scant nourishment it needs from the stony soil, and the ceaseless breeze fans the short wild grass that here and there can find a hold. A few fishermen land on the rock below. It is a very lonely, quiet place, bathed in the most intense light, and as one pauses in the shadow of the great statue it is hard to fancy it as it must have been on that wild night so long ago, when the surf pounded upon the beach in the cove and the spray flew in sheets over the islet, and the Apostle, whose grotesque image is a landmark now, was in danger of being slain by the Roman soldiers lest he should swim ashore and escape; it is hard to think that it can ever have been so cold that the shipwrecked saint and the prisoners were very grateful to the fisher folk for building them a fire, before which they dried their garments and warmed themselves. But the blazing island can look black enough in winter, and most seamen would rather face the ocean in any mood than the Malta Channel in a southwest gale. Half the charm of the south is in its quick changes from wealth to poverty, from blooming garden to sun-bleached desolation, from languorous calm to sudden and destroying fury.
We must take for granted, from the results, much that concerns the spreading of Christianity in the early centuries, and which can never be known in detail. It seems certain that the new faith found very favourable ground in Sicily, and if, as some suppose, the ultimate conversion of the island proceeded rather from Rome than directly from the East, it is nevertheless certain that Sicily was one of the first places where the influence was felt. The reason for the rapid growth of the religion in the island is not far to seek. The objection of Rome to Christianity was political, not ethic. Rome was ruled by a despotism, and Christianity was distinctly socialistic. In Rome, religion and state were very closely allied; the Romans were extremely tolerant of all forms of polytheism and theism in which they could detect a resemblance to their own religious practices and beliefs, in which a visible sacrifice was offered before the visible image of a god, and which, though not agreeing closely with their own, did not offend them. Even the Jews offered sacrifices and had a ceremonial upon which the Roman could put an interpretation, though it was a false one; and the Jews never made the smallest attempt to convert heathens to Judaism. But the Christians met in secret places, they slew no victims on their altars, they regarded all heathen sacrifices with abhorrence, they worshipped a man who had died the death of a criminal, under accusation of stirring up revolt and of blaspheming the deities of existing religions, and they whispered that all men were born free and should be equal hereafter, a tenet which seemed monstrous alike to the despot and his subjects. Looking at the matter with such fictitious indifference as a believer can assume for the sake of argument, it is certainly not strange that the Christians should have been persecuted by the government of the Emperors. For that government had the most to fear from a general socialistic movement of the slaves and the poor. The Romans believed, or chose to believe, that the Christians had no religion at all, but had formed a vast conspiracy for the purpose of overthrowing the government; and it is natural that this impression should have been created by men who met secretly, who used expressions that had no meaning to Roman ears, who had passwords and signs by which they recognized each other even at a distance. It cannot be supposed that an ordinary Roman of the early times could understand what a man meant by touching his forehead, his breast, his left shoulder and his right, in a word, by crossing himself. The gesture was a secret means of recognition; it did not suggest the cross to those who saw it, and if any heathens knew what it meant, it cannot have suggested anything but an adherence to the revolutionary principles they attributed to Christ, and a readiness to die the same death rather than submit to existing law and authority. Christianity, therefore, suffered muc
h more as a secret society, suspected of being an extensive conspiracy against imperial and despotic government, than on account of the beliefs which it really inculcated; and the persecutions by which it was sought to repress it from time to time, as it grew more powerful, proceeded from a political conviction that it had a tendency to undermine authority, and not in the least from any prejudice on the part of the Romans against a religion different from their own. Violent and cruel means were usually taken for putting down any insurrection or mutiny. When the soldiers of Mummius ran away in the battle with the gladiators under Spartacus, the general who next commanded them paraded them all on a meadow and ordered every tenth man to be beheaded on the spot. At the termination of the same war, when Pompey boasted that he finally crushed out the great rebellion, he impaled six thousand prisoners on stakes planted along the Appian way at regular intervals. After the second slave war in Sicily many of the survivors were condemned to fight with wild beasts in the circus, though they had surrendered on condition that their lives should be spared. They slew each other, and their leader took his own life, rather than submit to what seemed an ignominious death. It would be easy to multiply instances of cruelties as great as any inflicted upon the Christians, all of which appeared necessary to the Roman government on purely political grounds. The fact that the performance of a sacrifice was the usual test in the case of the Christians, and that they were in actual fact put to death for refusing to take part in such a religious ceremony, does not affect the argument in the least. The martyrs indeed refused to sacrifice on purely religious grounds, but the Romans condemned them to death with a purely political purpose. The fact of the refusal had no religious significance in the eyes of the judges; it was merely an irrefragable proof that the accused really and truly belonged to a great organization, of which all the members were supposed to be by the most solemn oaths to die rather than to submit to authority in that shape. An almost exactly parallel case has happened in Russia, in our times, when a Christian sect bound itself not long ago to refuse any military service whatsoever, because all war, for which all military service is intended, is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. The Russian government naturally refused to regard the matter in the same light, and severe penalties were inflicted upon men who were convinced that they were suffering something like martyrdom for a religious cause, by a government which was equally persuaded that they wished to defy its authority. The logic of these facts, while it demonstrates that a very unfair amount of odium has fallen upon the imperial government of Rome for its action with regard to Christianity, does not in the least detract from the glory of those who suffered. Moreover, as has doubtless occurred in almost every country where it has been thought necessary to enforce unusual and rigorous measures, it often happened that the officials who were designated to execute them made use of their power to satisfy their lust, their greed, or their desire for vengeance, and that those whom they condemned became the victims not only of their own devotion to their faith, as well as of political necessity, but also of the passions that individually animated their unscrupulous judges. It may well be doubted whether the most enlightened government would tolerate the existence of a secret organization of such dimensions and importance as were attained by Christianity in the early centuries of the Empire, if that organization manifested its beliefs by refusing to conform with some generally accepted regulation or practice.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1427
