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

by F. W. Farrar

  CHAPTER XXXII

  _WANDERINGS OF AN OUTCAST_

  ‘Matrisque Deum chorus intrat, et ingens Semivir, obscæno facies reverenda minori,

  * * * * *

  Jam pridem cui rauca cohors, cui tympana cedunt Plebeia, et Phrygia vestitur bucca tiara.’

  JUV. _Sat._ vi. 511.

  Onesimus was still in evil case. Everywhere he was looked upon withsuspicious eyes. The mass of the population felt an aversion forfugitive slaves, and such, at the first glance, they conjectured himto be. His dress was a slave’s dress--he had no means of changingit--and his hand still bore the bruises of the manacle. There wasnothing for him to do but to beg his way, and he rarely got anythingbut scraps of food which barely sufficed to keep body and soultogether. In those days there had long been visible that sure signof national decadence,

  ‘Wealth, a monster gorged ‘Mid starving populations.’

  ‘Huge estates,’ says Pliny, ‘ruined Italy.’ Along the roads villaswere visible here and there, among umbrageous groves of elm andchestnut, and their owners, to whom belonged the land for milesaround, often did not visit these villas once in a year. Onesimuswould gladly have laboured, but labour was a drug in the market.The old honest race of Roman farmers, who ate their beans and baconin peace and plenty by fount and stream, and who each enlisted theservices of a few free labourers and their sons, had almost entirelydisappeared. The fields were tilled by gangs of slaves, whose onlyhome was often an ergastulum, and who worked in chains. Luxurysurrounded itself with hordes of superfluous and vicious ministers;but these were mainly purchased from foreign slave-markets, and aslave who had already been in service was regarded as a _veterator_,up to every trick and villany--for otherwise no master would haveparted with him. A good, honest, sober, well-behaved slave, on whosefidelity and love a master could trust, was regarded as a treasure;and happy were the nobles or wealthy knights and burghers whopossessed a few such slaves to rid them from the terror of beingsurrounded by thieves and secret foes. But how was Onesimus, now fora second time a fugitive, to find his way again into any honourablehousehold? As he thought of the fair lot which might have befallenhim, he sat down by the dusty road and wept. He was hungry, and inrags. Life lay wasted and disgraced behind him, while the prospectof the future was full of despair and shame. He was a prodigal amongthe swine in a far country, and no man gave him even the husks to eat.

  Misery after misery assailed him. One night as he slept under aplane tree in the open air the wolves came down from the neighbouringhills, and he only saved his life from their hungry rage by theagility with which he climbed the tree. One day as he came near avilla to beg for bread he was taken for a spy of bandits. The slavesset a fierce Molossian dog upon him, and he would have been torn topieces if he had not dropped on all fours, and confronted the dogwith such a shout that the Molossus started back, and Onesimus hadtime to dash a huge stone against his snarling teeth, which drove himhowling away.

  For one who thus wandered through the country there were abundantproofs of the wretchedness and wickedness of the lower classesof Pagan life. He observed one day the blackened ruins of a largefarm-house with its ricks and cattle-sheds, and not far from it hesaw the white skeleton of a man chained to the hollow trunk of anaged fig-tree. The spot seemed to be shunned by all human beings,as though the curse of God were upon it. Onesimus was wanderingcuriously about it, and trying to appease his hunger with a fewears of corn from one of the half-burnt ricks, when the shout of ashepherd on a distant hill attracted his attention. He went to theman, who shared with him some of his black barley-bread, and told himthat he had shouted to warn him from an ‘ill-omened and fatal place.’‘Why ill-omened and fatal?’ asked Onesimus. ‘The place belonged,’answered the peasant, ‘to a master who had entrusted the care of itto a head slave. This man, though married, deserted his wife for afree woman of foreign extraction, whom his master had brought to thevilla. The fury of his slave-wife turned into raging madness. Sheburnt all her husband’s accounts and possessions. She thrust a torchinto every rick and barn, and when she saw the flames mount high,tied herself to her little son, and precipitated herself with himinto a deep well. The master, furious at his losses, and shocked bysuch a tragedy, inflicted a terrible vengeance on the guilty slave.Stripping him naked, he chained him to the fig-tree, of which thehollow trunk had been the immemorial nest of swarms of bees. Hesmeared the wretch’s body with honey, and left him to perish.’ Thebleaching skeleton had become the terror of the neighbourhood. Noone dared to touch it, and the place, haunted with dark spirits ofcrime and retribution, was shunned far and wide as an accursed spot.

  Sickened with miseries, Onesimus gradually made his way to Pompeii.Every street and wall of the bright little Greek town bore witness tothe depths of degradation into which the inhabitants had fallen, andthe youth found that the radiant scene, under the shadow of Vesuviusand its glorious vineyards by that blue and sparkling sea, was agarden of God indeed, but, like that of the Cities of the Plain,awaiting the fire and brimstone which were to fall on it from heaven.He was specially disgusted because, alien as he was now from allChristian truth, he saw on the walls of a large assembly-room inthe Street of the Baths a mass of scribblings full of deadly insultstowards the Christians. One in particular offended him, for, by wayof coarse satire on some Christian teacher, it said:--

  ‘Mulus hic muscellas docuit.’ ‘Here a mule taught small flies.’

  It was evidently no place for any one who still loved Christianity.Hurrying from its fascination of corruption, to which he felt it onlytoo possible that he might succumb, he was for some time reduced tothe very brink of starvation, and was at last driven to live on suchfruits and berries as he could pluck from the trees and hedges. Once,while he was trying to reach some wild crab-apples in a place by theside of a little stream, which was overgrown with dense foliage, heslipped, and fell crashing through the brushwood into the deep andmuddy water which was hidden by the undergrowth. Too weak to rise andstruggle, he could only just support himself by clinging to a bough,when his cries were heard. A labourer came and rescued him, andleft him sitting in the sunlight to dry his soaking rags. And nowhe thought that there was nothing left him but to die, and seriouslymeditated whether it would not be best to fling himself into thegreen-covered sludge of black water from which he had been rescued,and so to end his miseries.

  A sound arrested him, and, lifting his head, he saw a group of theeunuch priests of the Syrian goddess approaching along the road, oneof whom shook the jingling sistrum which had attracted his attention.They were a company of seven, and were men taken from the dregs ofthe populace. With them was a stout youth, who rode an ass whichcarried their various properties, the chief of which were musicalinstruments, and the image of the goddess wrapped in an embroideredveil.

  As they passed they eyed him curiously, and stopped a few pacesbeyond him as though for a consultation.

  ‘A likely youth,’ he heard one of them say, ‘though now he looks thinand miserable. We have long wanted another servant. Would not he dofor us, Philebus?’

  ‘Probably a runaway slave,’ said another.

  ‘What does that matter to us?’ said Philebus. ‘We can say that hecalled himself free-born, and told us that he ran away from thecruelties of a step-mother--or anything else we choose to invent.I will go and question him.’

  Philebus was an old man with a wizened and wrinkled face. The top ofhis head was bald; the rest of his grey locks were trained to hanground his head in long curls.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

  Onesimus nodded.

  ‘Here is bread for you, and some flesh of kid, and some wine.’

  Onesimus ate and drank with ravenous eagerness, and the old man askedhim, ‘A fugitive slave?’

  ‘I was free born.’

  ‘Hum-m!’ muttered Philebus, incredulously. ‘Well, you are wet,hungry, ragged, miserable. Will you be ou
r servant?’

  ‘I am not going to be a priest of the Syrian goddess,’ said Onesimus,with horror.

  ‘No one asked you to be,’ answered Philebus, with a sneer. ‘You willhave light work, good pay, good food.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Only to help in tending the ass, and cooking our meals, and goinground with the bag for us when we perform.’

  The youth paused. Could he, once a Christian, accept this degradingservitude to the vilest of mankind? Yet, after all, what wasservitude? What was degradation? Could he be more miserable than hewas? To be a servant of the Galli was better than the suicide and thedimly imagined horrors of that unknown world which he had just beenabout to brave.

  ‘I will come,’ he said.

  The old man brought him a tunic in place of his soaked and torndress, gave him more wine and food, and taking him to the restcongratulated them on their new and handsome servant.

  Then began a mode of life which Onesimus could never recall in afteryears without a blush of shame and indignation--a life of squalor,mendacity[*10], and imposture, made more vile by the sanction ofabject superstition. In the morning, when the priests drew near toany place where a few spectators could be gathered together, they setout in motley array, dressed in many-coloured robes, and with yellowcaps of linen or woollen on their heads. They smeared their faceswith a dye, and painted their eyes with henna. Some of them put onwhite tunics, embroidered with stripes of purple, and fastened witha girdle, and on their feet they wore shoes dyed of a saffron colour.They placed on the back of the ass the image of their goddess inits silken covering, and then, with wild cries, began a dervish-likedance to the tones of the flute played by their youthful attendant.During this dance they bared their arms to the shoulder, andflourished aloft swords and axes. In this way they wandered throughvarious hamlets till they reached the villa of a wealthy landowner.Here they determined to exhibit the full extent of their mercenaryfanaticism. Looking on the ground, turning from side to side withvarious contortions, whirling themselves round and round till theirlong curls streamed from their heads, they bit their arms, and atlength cut some of their veins with the weapons which they carried.Then Philebus simulated a sort of epileptic fit. Falling to theground, with long sobs, which seemed to shake his whole body, herolled about, accusing himself of the deadliest crimes, like onepossessed. After this he seized a scourge, of which the long leathernthongs were studded with bones, and scourged himself with all theendurance of a fakir, till the soil was wet with the blood whichstreamed from his own wounds and the gashes of his comrades. Thecrowd looked on with a sort of stupor at the hideous spectacle,and when it ended it was the part of Onesimus, on the attraction ofwhose personal appearance the wretches relied, to go round with a bagfor the offerings of copper and silver coins which were abundantlybestowed on them by the distorted religionism of the spectators. TheGalli were further rewarded with gifts in kind. One peasant broughtthem milk, another bread, and corn, and cheeses, and barley; and afarmer gave them a cask of wine. All these were placed in sacks, sideby side with the image of the goddess, upon the ass, which, as theflute-player wittily remarked to Onesimus, ‘was now both a barn anda temple.’ In this way they made spoil of all the country side.

  Occasionally they were even more successful. If they found a farmerspecially credulous, they would tell him that their goddess wasthirsty, and needed the blood of a ram, promising him a prophecy ofthe future if he would provide one for sacrifice. The sacrificialvictim afforded them an excellent banquet, to which they would invitethe lowest scoundrels, and fearlessly reveal themselves in theirtrue colours. Once one of the country landowners, named Britinnus,awe-struck by their supposed sanctity, invited the whole company tothe hospitality of his farm. Their stay might have been prolongedbut for two accidents. The cook had been ordered to prepare a sideof venison for a feast, but this was stolen; and, while he was indespair at the punishment which would be inflicted on him for theloss, his wife suggested that they should secretly kill the ass ofthe priests, and cook part of it instead of the lost venison. Butwhen the cook came to the stable, the ass took fright, and rushedstraight through the house into the dining-room of the farmer,upsetting the table with a huge crash. The next day a boy burst in,with his face as white as a sheet, and told the terrified Britinnusthat a dog had gone mad, had sprung among the hounds, and had bittennot only some of them and some of the farm-cattle, but also Myrtilus,the muleteer, and Hephæstion, the cook, and Hypatius, the footman. Onthis Britinnus assumed that the Galli had brought him ill luck, andsent the whole troupe about their business.

  In the neighbourhood of one town they took to fortune-telling.Binding each person who consulted them to absolute secrecy, theyshowed their lack of invention by returning the same oracle to all.It was simplicity itself, consisting of the two lines--

  ‘The oxen plough the furrowed soil, And harvests rich repay their toil.’

  Whether they were asked about plans for a matrimonial alliance, orthe heirdom to an estate, or anything else, this oracle admitted ofany interpretation they chose to put upon it.

  Altogether sickened with his companions and with their way of living,Onesimus was further troubled by the insight into every hidden woundand portent of pagan wickedness which came to his ears, or which hewitnessed in these country wanderings. Long afterwards, when he wasan old man in Ephesus, he used to tell these stories to his friends,to urge them to yet more zealous effort for the healing of thatheathen wickedness of which the whole head was sick and the wholeheart faint.

  On one occasion, for instance, in his wanderings, the Galli had beenunable to collect an audience, because the entire population of thelittle town of Varia was absorbed in the interest of a trial whichaffected the family of one of their prominent residents. A wealthyburgher had been left a widower with an only son, a boy of modestcharacter, and devoted to his studies. Some years afterwards hemarried again, and another son was born to him. By the time thissecond boy was twelve years old his half-brother had grown intomanhood, and his step-mother, who hated him for his virtues,determined to poison him. Summoning a slave who was in herconfidence, she sent him to a physician to purchase poison, whichshe mixed in a cup of wine and placed ready for the youth at thenext meal. It happened, however, that her own boy, returning hot andthirsty from school, saw the wine on the table and drank it. He hadscarcely finished the draught, when he fell to the ground as dead.The slave who attended him filled the air with his clamour, and whenthe inmates of the house came flocking in, one accused another ofthe crime. The master of the house was out, and his wife sent toinform him that her boy had been poisoned, that her step-son wasthe murderer. The husband was crushed to the earth by the doublecalamity. His boy was dead; the elder son, of whom he had been soproud, was to be tried for murder. Scarcely were the boy’s obsequiesfinished when the hapless father, his grey hairs defiled withdust, hastened to the Forum, and there embraced the knees of themagistrates, and besought them to avenge him on the fratricide.The local Senate was assembled, and the herald summoned the accuser.Onesimus, who had nothing to do that day, was present at the trial.He heard the old man plead pathetically against the son who had beenthe pride of his life and home; he heard the youth, with all thecalm of innocence, deny the charge. There was no evidence against himbut the word of his step-mother and her confidential slave. This manstood up with a front of brass, and declared that the youth had beenactuated by jealousy of his brother, and had poisoned him. There wasnothing to rebut this evidence, and every jury-man was prepared todrop into the brazen urn the fatal ticket marked with the letter C,for _condemno_, which would have handed over the offender to be firstscourged until his bones were laid bare, and then to be sewed up ina sack with a cock, a dog, and a viper, and to be flung into the sea.The heart of Onesimus bled for the youth. With his instinctive powerof reading character, he felt convinced of his innocence. But whilewith palpitating heart he awaited the voting, an aged physicianarose, and, covering the orifice of the voting-urn wit
h his hand, hesaid: ‘Fathers, let me prevent the triumph of an infamous woman anda perjured slave. That wretch came to me as a physician, and offeredme a hundred gold pieces for a poison. I read crime in the man’sface, and put the gold in a purse, which I made him stamp with hisseal. Here is the bag. Seize his hand, take off his iron ring, andsee whether this be not his seal. If it is, clearly he, and not thepoor youth yonder, was the purchaser of the poison.’ Onesimus turnedhis eyes on the slave. His face had assumed a deadly pallor, and allhis limbs had burst into a cold sweat; but even when his seal wasrecognised, he continued to stammer protestations of his innocence.He was tortured, but would not confess. Then the physician rose witha mysterious smile. ‘Enough of tortures,’ he said. ‘The time has cometo unravel this web of villany. I sold to yonder wretch, not poison,but mandragora. If, indeed, the boy drank that draught, he does butsleep. About this time he will be awakening, and may be brought backto the light of day.’ The magistrates at once sent messengers to thesepulchre where the boy’s body had been laid. The father with his ownhands removed the cover of the tomb, and there lay the little lad,unchanged, and just beginning to awake, with intense astonishmentdepicted on his features. Striving in vain to express his joy inwords, the happy father--father once more of two dear sons, both ofwhom he thought that he had lost--folded the child to his heart in aclose embrace, and carried him as he was, with all his grave-clothesabout him, to the judgment seat. Terror-stricken by such a portent,the woman confessed her crime, and was sentenced to perpetualbanishment; the slave was crucified.[69]

  Next morning Onesimus, as he accompanied the priests and their ass,saw the criminal hanging naked on his cross. He was a man of fineproportions and in the prime of life, and his strength was slowlyebbing away in horrible and feverish torture. The Galli as theypassed spat on him, but Onesimus stayed behind. The wretch was notonly living, though in extreme agony, but would probably continueto live for two days more, unless the wolves got at him or themagistrates thought fit to send their lictors to end his life by twoblows of a ponderous mallet in order to save the trouble of havingthe cross watched. It was no base curiosity which made the Phrygianlinger by that spectacle of shame and anguish. It was rather an awfulpity--a heart-rending remembrance. Sunk, fallen, ruined, guilty as hehimself was, he yet could not see without horror this awful reminderof One who had perished, since his own birth, in Palestine, and inwhom he had not yet ceased to believe as a Saviour, though he hadfallen away from his heavenly calling.

  The man turned towards him his tortured face and glazing eyes. ‘Byall the infernal gods,’ he said, ‘give me something to quench mythirst.’

  ‘There are no infernal gods,’ Onesimus said, ‘but I will give thee;’and taking out from the bag which he carried a bottle of the common_posca_--sour wine which was the ordinary drink of the peasantry--hepoured a full draught into an earthenware cup and held it to thesufferer’s lips. This he could easily do, for the cross (as always)was raised but a little from the ground.

  ‘God help thee!’ he said, as he turned away. ‘He helped the robber onGolgotha,’ he murmured to himself; ‘who knows whether he may not findeven this poor wretch in his hour of agony--yea, and even me?’

  ‘My blessing would be a curse,’ moaned the crucified slave, ‘or Iwould say, “The gods bless _thee_ who canst pity such as I am.”’

  Onesimus left him there in the pathos and tragedy of his awfulhelplessness. The youth’s soul was appalled by the sense of themystery of human life and human agony, and it came home to him, asit had never done before, that the solution of the fearful riddle ofhuman wickedness could only lie, if anywhere, in the life and deathof Him in whom in some sense he believed, but whose peace he did notknow.

  Before he joined his base troupe of companions he looked back for amoment. There, in the blinding sunlight of the Italian noon, stoodthe cross, accursed of God and man, the gibbet of the malefactor,the infamy of the slave, confronting the eye of heaven with a sightwhich, no less than that of the Thyestean banquet, might have madethe sun itself turn dark; and there, upon it, a mass of living agony,conscious, and burning with thirst, and blinded with glare, andunpitied, and burdened with an awful load of guilt, hung the humanvictim who had once played an innocent child beside his mother’sknee. The soul of Onesimus was harrowed as he gazed on that awfulinsult to humanity. The existence of crucifixion showed how far theshadow had advanced on the dial-plate of Rome’s history. That formof punishment--so cynical, so ruthless, so abhorrent, which lessthan three centuries later was to be abolished by the indignation ofmankind--had been not indigenous in the Western world. It had onlybeen borrowed by Rome, in the days of her commencing corruption, fromthe dark and cruel East. That such a spectacle should be permitted tothe gaze of women and little children; that it should indurate stillfurther the callosity of hardened hearts, was in itself a token ofdegeneracy. The heart of Onesimus was full even to bursting as he sawthat fearful instrument of inhuman vengeance standing there by theroadside among the darting lizards and chirping cicalas and murmuringbees; and the goats stared at it with glassy eyes as they cropped theluxuriant grass at the very feet of the victim in whom the majesticideal of manhood was thus horribly laughed to scorn.

  Onesimus, as he finally turned away, felt it more degrading thanever to continue his present life. Its plenty and coarse comfort,accompanied as it was by the necessity of spending his days withthese sexless and lying vagabonds, filled him with a sense ofnameless humiliation. Yet what could he do? What other choice had hesave to starve or to commit suicide? For then he remembered with astart that he was twice a thief, twice a fugitive, almost a murderer;that he had betrayed the trust reposed in him by Acte; that by hismad drunkenness he had insulted the majesty of Nero. In every senseeven his fellow-slaves would have called him _furcifer_. And if hewere once detected, in spite of the dye with which he had stainedhis face, and the blond wig by which the Galli had tried at once toconceal his identity and to enhance his beauty, what awaited him? Washe, too, destined to feed the wild birds upon the cross?

  It seemed as if that would be better than to beg from the gulledthrongs of peasants, and dupe the credulity of farmers, and witnessday by day the stupid and loathly self-gashing and self-scourging ofthese deplorable eunuch priests. More than once he thought that hewould get up by night, seize the image of the Syrian goddess, andfling her into the greenest and slimiest pool he could find, amongthe efts and water-beetles and frogs; while he himself would plungeinto the pathless wastes until he should gain the sea-shore, workhis passage on board a ship to Troas or Ephesus, and so makinghis way back to quiet Colossæ, would fling himself at the feet ofPhilemon and implore the forgiveness which he felt sure would not belong withheld.

  But that ‘unseen Providence which men nickname chance’ came to rescuehim from his unhealthy bondage. As they were starting for one oftheir exhibitions in their usual motley and many-coloured gear, theGalli suddenly heard the sound of horses’ hoofs, and, before theyknew where to turn, a body of mounted soldiers came thunderingdown upon them, drew their swords, surrounded and seized the wholecompany, and, beating the wretched priests with their fists and theflat of their swords, called them thieves and all other opprobriousnames, and charged them with having stolen a golden beaker from aneighbouring temple of the Mother of the Gods. In vain the Galliprotested and swore their innocence and threatened the soldiers withthe vengeance of the Syrian goddess for this insult to her ministers.The soldiers silenced their curses with blows, and, tearing away thecovering of the image, found the golden beaker wrapped up within it.

  Detected in their theft, the priests were still unabashed. After anevening sacrifice they had watched their opportunity, concealed thesacred cup of Cybele, and at the grey dawn had made their way out ofthe pomœrium of the city, trusting to get sufficiently far to eludepursuit. The beaker was, however, ancient and valuable, and thepolice asked the mounted soldiers to help them in tracking thefugitives.

  ‘It was not a theft,’ said Philebus, who was _archigallu
s_. ‘TheMother of the Gods freely lent the beaker to her sister the Syriangoddess, who intended shortly to return it to her. You cannot escapeher wrath for this outrage.’

  The soldiers and their _decurio_ broke into loud laughter at thethreat, and without ceremony put gyves on the wrists of the sevenGalli. They consulted whether they should also arrest Onesimus andthe flute-player, but Onesimus said that he was ignorant of thetheft, that neither he nor his companion--who were acting as slavesof the priests--had ever been permitted to see the contents of thesilken veil. The soldiers believed him, and all the more because theydid not care to burden themselves with too many prisoners. They tookthe Galli to Naples, where Onesimus was afterwards told that they hadbeen scourged, imprisoned, and mulcted of all they possessed.

  Free once more, and not troubling himself about their fate, Onesimusasked the flute-player what he meant to do. Finding that he regardedhis present calling as too comfortable a berth to be given up,Onesimus left him and made his way disconsolately to Baiæ.