Less Than Perfect Ending

By the time Thursday rolled around, I think we were both just too tired. We went to Yorktown, which, like Jamestown, is divided into two parts. Yorktown Victory Center has a museum with artifacts from the time period of the battle, as well as a movie. They also have a re-creation of part of the camp so we could see the little tents with hay on the floors that the soldiers had to sleep in. There is also a working farm there in the style of the 18th century, so that was pretty interesting. The second part is part of the national park system and includes the actual battlefield, which still has the siege mounds from back then. There are also a lot of plaques around the place.

In both places, we more or less sleepwalked through it. It would be something that I would have to do again sometime if I wanted to really get anything out of it.

The real problems came on Friday, when we tried to come home. There was some kind of accident on I-64 that came into play shortly after we left that left us mostly sitting for nearly two hours. Along with a few other things that caused problems, particularly at a service plaza in Pennsylvania, where they didn't have a Cinnabon place like we expected (this made Kim cranky because she had sort of promised Kelly) and problems with the gas pump where no attendant is on duty, which made me have to go find someone (this made me cranky), I then drove straight home without stopping to eat, which made both of us crankier.

I promise, though, that it will not ruin the memory of a good vacation.

Williamsburg Part II

Tuesday and Wednesday we spent walking around Colonial Williamsburg. It was the capital of Virginia during colonial times. The re-created village is built on the ruins of the original town, so it's pretty authentic. The visitor's center is about half a mile away where you park and take a shuttle bus (or walk) around the village. Many of the places to visit are shops where people in costume do make things like shoes, clothing, and newspapers, the same way they were made back then. Additionally, there are actors in the streets that act out the parts of various characters that lived back then, as well as stage performances at different places. My favorite was of Lafayette giving a speech outside the governor's palace of the "recent" arrival of General Washington's troops to prepare for the battle of Yorktown. He was really entertaining.

At the other end of town there was a performance outside the old Capitol Building where the Declaration of Independence was read from the balcony, aided by other characters standing in front of the building. Characters scattered through the crowd would shout "Huzzah" at appropriate times, and it was just so easy to picture the real thing.

If was very tiring spending two days walking throughout the village visiting the shops and stores. It's not a really huge area, maybe a mile from one end to the other, and less than half a mile wide. But some of the museums are rather large, and I'm not as young as I used to be.

But really, the only negative experience I had was looking at price tags of things that were for sale. I know and fully expect to pay high prices at tourist traps, but I don't think I've ever been anywhere with prices as high as these. A simple hand-made girls shawl is $150, and a ceramic cup goes for $40. Even a boys size tri-cornered hat was $25. Fortunately, I'm not easily swayed.

All in all, it's been a great visit. My only regret is not realizing how much there is to do here. I thought visiting the triangle would be a part of our vacation in between doing other things at the resort. Instead it has sort of become the vacation. Maybe we should just plan on coming back again someday.

Williamsburg Part 1

We arrived in Williamsburg on Friday for our 7 night $250 vacation. On Saturday morning we sat through the 2 hour time share sales pitch to get an $80 voucher for dinner at Opus 9 and 2 movie tickets. We could have just gotten a $75 gift card for anywhere, but decided this would be a good opportunity to go to the type of restaurant we normally can't afford, and considered the movie tickets as sort of a bonus.

Good choice! The steaks were great! In fact, everything about the place is superb, including the service. Of course, the prices reflect it. So for just two of us, with an appetizer, two steak dinners and no desert, we still paid out $40 besides the $80 voucher and a 10% off coupon. I was generous with the tip, even for me, but still!

We spent two hours after we got back to the resort trying to find a church to go to on the internet, but had no luck. Should have researched this sooner.

Sunday afternoon turned out to be so beautiful and so warm for this time of year that we drove over to Norfolk where the nearest beach is, and just walked up and down the beach. It wasn't a clean beach, and I've never cared much for the Atlantic coast anyway. But we ignored that part and just enjoyed the warmth. We'll be back in Ohio soon enough.

Monday was Jamestown day. There are two parts to a Jamestown visit, which require separate admission prices. First, you go to Jamestown Settlement, which is about a mile from the actual site of the original Jamestown. There is a rather large museum there which goes into a lot of detail about the period from 1607-1700. In fact, there is a separate section for each decade. It's a typical musuem, with artifacts, models, re-creations, and movies about various aspects of the colony. Outside the museum, there are authentic re-creations of the original fort and of the Powhatan village, as well as of some of the ships that brought settlers over. All re-creations are based on solid evidence from the time as to what different things looked like, and in most cases where they couldn't be sure, they just don't include it.

The second part of a Jamestown visit is to drive about a mile to the national park that includes the site of the original Jamestown. There's a smaller Welcome Center there, and you walk from there down to the archaelogical dig site where the original fort stood. Up until 1994, it was thought that the site of the original fort had eroded into the James River, but that year archaeologists discovered otherwise. It turns out that only the site of one corner of the triangular fort was underwater. Ever since then they've been digging it up a litle at a time, removing whatever artifacts they find, then back fill it and then mark the places where original walls stood. As time goes on, they get more and more of a feel for the sizes and locations of everything in the fort.

All in all, I think the visits were well worth the price.

Almost forgot. Included with the visit to the Jamestown site is a short drive to a glass blowing shop where you can watch them make glass things. You can also buy them if your name is Rockefeller. The modern plant is about 100 feet from where the original plant stood in the 1600s. It's considered to be the first industrial enterprise in America.

21 - The Meeting of the Ways

In the midst of a wall of shields, the two apostles walked, hand in hand, chained to a soldier on either side. As they walked, they continuously murmured, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. . .”

The centurion in command, who had lately felt a certain friendliness toward the Christians, had allowed them to go together, saying to his men, “Let them go together as far as the Porta Ostiensis. But they must be separated there. The old man goes to the Trans-Tiber and to the Vaticanum to be crucified. But this one is a Roman citizen and must be taken to the Cesti Pyramid and beheaded."

Before they were led away, Paul had bent down over the opening in the ground, and called out to the prisoners in the dungeons, “The grace of our lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit! Amen!”

After him Peter called down, “Peace be with you who are in the lord Messiah! Amen!”

A chorus of voices floated up from the depths below from the strong, the weak, the firm and the tremulous, “Peter and Paul! Pray for our souls!”

And for the first time the two names were intertwined in a single cord of salvation.

When they reached the Porta Ostiensis, they embraced one last time.

“Peace be with you, brother Paul!”
“Peace be with you, brother Peter! I bow to you who lived with our lord.”
“And I bow to you who carried the gospel to all the world.”

As they were led away from each other they turned their heads back.

“I will see you soon in the lord’s presence,” cried Peter.
“Pray for me, apostle to the Jews.”

Old Simon, with his bloody feet, was led uphill. Beyond the Porta Trigemina lay the Sublicius Bridge. How often the faithful had led him this way to the assemblies in Priscilla’s house on the Aventine hill! Simon looked up the slope, where a few passersby stopped and paused. Their lips moved unmistakably in prayer, and Simon recognized them. And as the procession drew through the narrow streets of the Jewish quarter the cortege grew. A proclamation seemed to run ahead, for heads appeared at the windows of the high houses.

“They’re leading the apostle to the cross,” was heard.

Simon saw a multitude of sad faces. He smiled at them and they tried to draw enough courage to smile back.

“Don’t cry. I’ll be with the lord soon to live with him forever. And you too will one day be with him as well. I promise you this in the name of our Father in heaven, who is the God of all grace. Peace to you all.”

After passing through the Jewish quarter, he began the climb to the place of execution, where his cross waited for him. But before they nailed him to the cross, the law required that he be scourged first. They bound him to a wooden block, and two soldiers wielded the lead-loaded whip over him. His blood gushed out under the lashes, but no sound came from the old man. His lips moved silently in prayer of thanksgiving for the privilege of suffering like his lord.

Suffer like his lord? Who was he to compare himself with the lord? How often he’d denied him, how often he’d fled from the cup again and again. How could he possibly say that he was dying the death of his lord?

They unbound him from the block and half led, half carried him, toward the cross. They asked him if he wanted a cup of sour wine, for even a slave was allowed this.

No, but he did have a last request. In the broken Greek he’d picked up in the years of his wandering, he asked them to nail him to the cross head down.

The executioners thought maybe they misunderstood his broken Greek.

“Head down?”

The old man nodded and feebly moved his hands to indicate his meaning.

“Head down. Nail me to the cross head down.”

As strange as this request was, they accommodated him, nailing his two feet to the arms of the cross, and his hands to the upright.

Two naked feet looked down from the crosspiece, the toes twisted and broken, like the roots of an old olive tree. But they were mighty limbs, broad boned, and gnarled like tree trunks. Blood ran from his wounds, which were like open mouths. And as the bleeding feet looked heavenward, the gray, mighty head with its short, tangled beard, hung earthward. And still the eyes smiled, seeking the little group of men and women who stood at a distance, and still the lips moved in prayer and greeting.

After a time his voice was heard clearly, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”

Men and women lifted their faces heavenward and repeated, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”

There was silence as blood descended, pulse-by-pulse, into his head. His feet were now as white as snow, but his face was crimson, like a flame. And now the old man pulled his head violently away from the cross. His bloodshot eyes were wide open. In a hoarse, joyous voice, he called out, “My Rabbi! My Rabbi!”

His head fell back on the cross, and was motionless.

* * * * *

At the same time that the apostle to the Jews was being nailed to a cross at one end of Rome, the apostle to the Gentiles was being dealt with at the other end. A small group of faithful also accompanied him on his last earthly journey, walking behind at a discreet distance. Luke the physician and Eubulus the soldier were among them. Pudens and Linus plus two or three women were there also, and Paul greeted them with his last looks and commended them to God with his last thoughts.

He had no fear now for the future of the congregations. He’d planted their roots deep, and the storm would only drive those roots deeper. He’d done his work well and there were strong hands to continue it.

“I have fought a good fight,” he said to himself as he stood at the execution place.

In his final moments he once again reviewed the years that linked Saul with Paul. There was nothing he would change. The errors and sins he committed when he was Saul were brought to nothing. He’d cleansed them with his blood, sweat, and sorrows. And Saul too had sought God, in his own way, according to the light he’d been given. Everything had been as it had to be, according to its own time. He’d always done what he understood to be right in the eyes of God, and he’d never done anything with a view to his own advantage. His life had been a sacrifice laid on God’s altar.

Even that part of his life that had been without Christ, and even against Christ, had been consecrated to God. It had been one long pursuit of the divinity.

Now the pursuit was over, and he was at the end of his course. His life was whole; his death was just the next part of his mission. Everything was as it should be. He had discharged his obligations, and now a crown of righteousness was laid up for him.

Firm in the bond of peace between him and the Lord of the world, he approached the block on which his head would be severed from his body with unfaltering steps.

As a Roman citizen, he was spared the final humiliation and torture of the lash. A soldier approached him, to bind his eyes.

“Must this be done?” he asked.

“It’s the law,” said the soldier, and Paul submitted, for his respect for the law did not abandon him even then.

As he knelt and placed his head on the block, Paul spoke one last time.

“The grace of our lord, Jesus Christ, be with you all.”

In those final seconds, Paul saw the vision once again of the white, radiant angel, his body steeped in stones, his arms lifted up for flight. And now Paul felt himself transformed into the angel. He felt himself being lifted up, he was in flight, the world was below him.

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”

These were the last words of the apostle to the Gentiles.

* * * * *

A few days later, word came from Jerusalem that the long awaited storm in Judea against the might of Rome had finally broken out. The Jews had risen in rebellion and had defeated the troops of the Procurator Festus. Once again, after so many years, Jerusalem was in Jewish hands. Jerusalem was free!

The Jewish congregation in Rome received the news with mixed feelings. There was joy, certainly, but there was also uncertainty and fear. They trembled not only for themselves, but even more for the fate of the Temple. They trembled for the ultimate symbol of Jewish unity, more important in their eyes even than national independence.

But on the following Sabbath at the crowded Augustus Synagogue in the Trans-Tiber, they talked of another portentous event, the execution of the two apostles. The martyrdom of Christians had served to heal the breach between the two sections of the congregation even before the apostles’ deaths, and if any bitterness survived the common sorrow of the long persecutions, it was wiped away now. The uprising in Jerusalem and the martyrdom of the apostles became connected in the worshippers’ minds.

Zadoc, the old rabbi of the congregation, sought to restore calm in his sermon that morning.

“We don’t know whether the hand of Israel can overcome the sword of Rome. Certainly all things are possible with God, but what is the earthly power of Israel against the earthly power of Rome? Isn’t it like a thorn against a mighty forest?

“But I say to you that the spirit of God has already overcome the power of Rome, right here in the city of Rome.”

The congregation looked at the preacher in wonder.

“All things are possible with God!” cried a voice.

“All things are possible with God!” repeated Zadoc. “I say to you that Rome has already been overthrown!”

“What do you mean, rabbi?” someone asked.

“Do you see what is happening in Rome? The more they burn the believers in Christ, the more they throw them to the beasts, the mightier grow their numbers. Behold! Rome went forth against Jerusalem with the sword, and Jerusalem went forth against Rome with the spirit.

“The sword conquers for a while, but the spirit conquers forever!”



THE END

20 - The Grace of the Lord Be With You

The word “Tullianum” filled every Roman with dread. The dungeon prison was carved out of solid rock in the Capitoline Hill on the steep side overlooking the Forum Romanum. This was one place from which there was no escape. Prisoners were lowered by ropes into its lightless depths, and high above them, around the “entrance” they could never reach without outside help, a strong guard was kept day and night.

As a rule prisoners who were lowered into the Tillianum never again saw the light of day. They weren’t starved to death so much as they were eaten alive. Food of some kind was given to them, but they in turn became food for the monstrous rats and crawling things that bred in countless numbers in the foulness of the cells and corridors.

The prisoners were chained, either to rings in the walls or to great, immovable blocks of wood. The floors were littered were human offal, moldering bodies and bones gnawed clean. The poisonous air ate into the lungs and skin. Thick ooze dripped from the walls, and dampness caused the bones and flesh to swell painfully. The prisoners’ limbs, often immovable in their chains, rotted, and became gangrenous masses. The diet of bread and water quickly undermined whatever health the prisoners brought with them. When a prisoner died, the warders unchained the carcass and rolled it over toward the nearest heap of offal, so the chains would be ready for the next one.

Simon Peter, the old fisherman from Galilee, spent his last months in the Tullianum.

He was thrown into the underground dungeon with other Christians taken at the last service in the Jewish catacombs. His name was well enough known that even Caesar himself had heard that he was one of the leaders along with the man named Paul. But at the time of Peter’s arrest, Nero wasn’t in Rome. He was in Athens looking for a sympathetic audience for his poetical and musical compositions, and officials were waiting for his return before carrying out the execution of the important prisoner.

Those months of imprisonment were like a living hell. The aged apostle was chained by both legs to a ring in the wall, and he would often awaken from a fitful sleep to feel rats gnawing at his feet. The odor of decaying flesh, living and dead, assailed his nostrils from out of the darkness. No light ever broke into the prison. Yet he endured.

He endured because he knew that his savior might come at any moment. All around him he heard the moaning of his brothers in the faith, but he couldn’t see them. They constantly called on the name of Christ, begging him to hurry. But he didn’t hurry, and some of them began to fall away from the faith in the horrors of the dungeon.

From his plot of darkness, the apostle spoke words of comfort to the dying, assuring them that Messiah waited for them beyond the portals of death. He was calling them to his cross, that they might share his sufferings and eternal life. But between these ministrations, Peter himself pressed his face against the damp stone in despair.

At other times he chanted Psalms. The warders would sometimes beat him for his interminable praying. Criminals, murderers, and thieves, who were thrown in with the Christians, if they were near enough, would reach over and strike him in the darkness. His hair and beard were sticky with blood, and if his skull weren’t so hard, it probably would have cracked when a wild hand threw it at random against the rock wall.

Gabelus, the old soldier, was one of the ones whose faith began to fail, and the apostle wept when he heard him, like the others, yielding to despair.

“Come, lord,” prayed Peter in his heart, “come and help me, for the waters have come up to my lips.”


A day came when a prisoner was lowered into the hole in the ground. Two warders fastened the newcomer to a ring in the wall opposite Peter. When they left the prisoner called out, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, Amen!”

Peter couldn’t see the prisoner’s face, but he certainly knew that voice. In sudden joy he cried out, “Is that you, brother Paul?”

The Christians, languishing in their corners, feeling the last embers of their faith dying out, started up when they heard that name. Feebly they cried out, “Paul the apostle is with us!”

“Yes, I am your brother Paul, a servant of God. I’ve come to bring you the hope of Israel in Jesus Christ. Christ calls you to share his suffering. The grace of our lord be with you all, amen!”

“It is Paul!” whispered several voices. “That’s the greeting he uses in his letters!”

All Peter could say was, “Paul, my beloved brother, Paul.”

“Yes, Peter, it is I. I’ve come to share your chains in Christ!”

“My beloved brother!” wept Peter. The tears coursing down his cheeks seemed to soften the pains in his body. “Where are you?”

From opposite walls in the narrow cell they reached across to each other with their free hands and intertwined their fingers. It was like they could feel their whole bodies through the contact, and they embraced and kissed each other in the touch of their fingers.

And as if from an inner signal, they both began to chant together, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me!”

Instantly the black chamber resounded with the song of hope, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me!”

Paul felt someone crawling at his feet. He reached out and touched a face, a beard, warm flesh.

“Paul, the bringer of salvation!”

“Gabelus, is that you?” cried Paul. “Praise be to God for giving you a share in Christ’s sufferings.”

“Praise be to God for finding me worthy to be one of his soldiers,” answered Gabelus.

“Brothers in the faith!” said Paul into the darkness. “May God, our eternal help, accept our suffering as a sacrifice! Rejoice in your sufferings, for they bring you nearer to Christ. Come, brothers, let us sing a great song. God has chosen us to suffer with Christ! Let the Name of God be praised from now on and evermore.”

From the cells along the invisible corridors, across the heaps of refuse, decaying flesh, and skeletons, through halls of death and darkness, there came a sound of voices. It was like the wind stirring through the valley of withered bones in Ezekial’s vision. The voices rose, took on power and self-assurance, and shook off the weakness of the flesh.

“God has chosen us to suffer with Christ! Let the Name of God be praised from now on and evermore.”

As they spoke the words, their voices rang louder and louder, repeating after Paul the verses of the Psalms in Greek. The Jews among the prisoners recalled the original Hebrew version, as it was sung on the Temple steps in Jerusalem, and they took up the chorus in Hebrew.

“Hallelujah! Praise the Lord, praise all you servants of the Lord. Praise the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endures forever.”

They repeated the Hallel, as was done on the day of a great festival amid the glory of the Temple courts. The Greek mixed with the Hebrew, the two melodies rose side by side, like double fountains of joy. The flood of strength and renewal filled the whole underground prison. Health, liberation, and hope were found again, as if a flood of sunlight had shattered the prison and the glory of the heavens had burst on the prisoners.

The criminals in the prison and the warders outside listened stupefied to this song of exaltation coming from these half dead Christians. It was utterly incomprehensible to them. And the wonder grew daily. Ever since the new prisoner was lowered into the deeps, it was like a wind of life passed through the decaying bodies and withered bones chained to the walls and blocks. It was clear that in their singing the Christian prisoners were transported to another world.

They asked each other, “Who is this man? What does he say? He shows them something we can’t see. He makes them hear something we can’t hear.”

“Enter with us!” cried Paul. “The door is open for everyone! Come to the arms of the lord, his love waits for you too!”

“Are you crazy? We’re the ones who tormented you!”

“God’s grace is boundless. For Him there is neither stranger nor kin. Those who believe in Him will not be ashamed. The Scripture says that He is the same Lord for all. Whoever calls on Him will be saved. All of you, come, the door stands wide open!”

The hell of that prison, where the darkness of despair had been secure, was transformed into a radiant threshold on which white-robed souls waited for admittance to the innermost sanctuary of God’s eternal presence. And those whose eyes were closed to the radiance were filled with deepest envy. It wasn’t just the condemned criminals who drew close, but the warders too came with wonder and desire to those whom they had tortured just yesterday.

There was a new spirit in the Tullianum. What little water and dry bread they were brought became their common meal, and in the darkness, heavy with death, the banquet of the living faith was spread.


So the lifeline of Christ was thrown out, not just to those for whom death was already prepared, but to those who watched them, the soldiers and the warders on the upper levels of the prison. Gabelus’ faith, which had been flickering toward extinction, was rekindled, and he set about the task of winning those whose comrade-in-arms he’d once been. Old Gabelus, who once led the cohorts of Caesar to victory in the battlefield, now led the soldiers of Caesar stationed in the Tullianum to victory on the field of faith.

19 - I Have Kept the Faith

A heavy guard conducted Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, in chains across the ruined streets of Rome, where thousands of slaves were at work. No deputation greeted him on the Via Appia this time, and no one waited for him in the city. Luke was his only companion and he walked a distance behind so as not to be seen by the guard.

Where had the apostle been during the days that led up to the frightful slaughters in Rome? It would be easier to ask where he hadn’t been. From Rome he hurried to Ephesus and its neighboring cities, where he visited new congregations he’d never been to before. He went to Colosse, Nicopolis and Berea. He visited his beloved Philippi in Macedonia, and went to Crete with Titus, where he’d been considered a holy man ever since the shipwreck. He was in Naples for a time, and from there he went to Troas, where he stayed in the house of a man named Carpus.

It was while he was in Troas that he was arrested on the charge of being a Christian and spreading pernicious and forbidden doctrine among Romans and slaves. Now he was being led to the Praetorian guardhouse until he could be brought to trial in one of the basilicas on the Forum Romanum.

So quickly had he been seized that he left most of his belongings, a mantle and a few parched documents, with Carpus. In the damp prison, he greatly needed his mantle, but he sorely missed the parchment rolls with their sacred messages.

Paul felt like a man forlorn and abandoned. All his companions were gone. Some of them he’d sent out on missions or left behind to complete his work. Crispus was in Galatia, Titus had gone to Crete and Macedonia, and Timothy was in Ephesus. And when the persecutions came about, some of his companions abandoned him. Demas, who'd served him throughout his first imprisonment in Rome, left him and returned to Thessalonica, “because he loved this world.” Trophimus fell sick in Miletus and stayed there. A certain coppersmith, Alexander, did him “much evil.” Aristarchus, his faithful servant, was taken with many other Christians at Troas, to be tried before the local courts.

Luke’s completely Greek appearance and bearing kept him from being taken. He accompanied Paul when, as a Roman citizen, the latter was called to be tried in Rome.

Paul was closely guarded in the prison this time, and it didn’t matter that he was a Roman citizen. The crime of Christianity obliterated almost all distinctions.

And yet the persecutions did not destroy all his communications with the world of believers. After a while he found a way to exchange messages with friends.

Some of the soldiers taking turns guarding him were members of Gabelus’ cohort. Gabelus himself had been arrested in the Jewish catacomb, but the Christian thread was not broken, for the gentle and noble-spirited Eubulus took Gabelus’ place. When these men were on guard, they carried messages to and from Paul and his friends. They also allowed Luke to attend the apostle, and what was of the most importance, they smuggled in writing materials to allow him to send letters to the communities.

Even at noon the cell in which he was confined was dim. By afternoon it was pitch black and remained so until morning. But Paul sat steeped in light, as though the walls around him had dissolved and the heavens were shining on him freely. He was more aware than ever of the eternal light that is kindled in us when we conquer death. “In faith there is no death, there is only eternal life,” he had taught. This made him quite incapable of understanding, let alone sympathizing with, any manifestation of panic. He expected everyone, without exception, to continue to work as diligently as before and not to withhold a single act of service out of fear of death. He was filled with contempt for those believers who fled before persecution or who refused to renew contact with him for fear of discovery. Weakness and timidity cannot be associated with faith.

Not that he lacked compassion, for he interpreted defection as the loss of a great treasure. To those who’d avoided him during his first trial in Rome, he said, “Be not ashamed of risking danger for the lord, and be not ashamed of me, his prisoner.”

Paul knew the time had come to take an accounting of himself. He looked back on the course of his life and felt that everything was as it should be. He could leave the world no man’s debtor. He even owed nothing to himself.

Faith was a great peacemaker between him and the world. For there was no death; there was only one great life that passed from this world to the next, and wherever God wanted him, well, there God would find him! Those who were afraid of death were the ones who were bringing death into life.

Ah, how he longed to plant this ultimate truth of faith into the hearts of the believers! Then there would be no timidities and no defections. Then they would reach the highest perception of Christ, and the passage through death would be nothing more than a stepping-stone across a narrow threshold.


The door of the cell swings open and daylight is diffused toward the dim corner where the apostle, seated in chains, is steeped in his own inward light. Good Eubulus leads a man in. Paul looks up to see a tall, stately, black-bearded stranger. Eubulus pulls the door to, and the stranger speaks in the darkness.

“I am Onesiphorus of Ephesus. I have come to pay my respects to the apostle to the Gentiles.”

Joyously Paul asks, “You come to greet me here, in Rome? Weren’t you afraid? Weren’t you ashamed of my chains?”

“Afraid to come to you? Ashamed of the chains Christ has given you?”

The tall stranger falls on his knees before Paul, and kisses the chains.

“These,” he says, “are the ornaments of the faithful.”
“Are there many like you?” asks Paul, eagerly.
“Everywhere the faithful encounter death with a song on their lips.”
“Don’t say death,” cries Paul. “Rather say eternal life.”

He struggles to his knees.

“Oh, praise be to Christ, who has destroyed death and revealed eternal life!”


It was under the inspiration of this visit that he wrote his farewell letter to his beloved son, Timothy. That day Eubulus smuggled in pen, ink, papyrus, and a lamp. Paul wrote laboriously by the dim flame, adjusting himself to the heavy manacles.


Paul’s condition is very different now than it was during his first imprisonment. Then he was in his own house. Now he’s in the dread Praetorium prison. Then his guards, even if not Christian, were more easily moved to friendliness. The horror of the Christian accusation hadn’t yet seized the city. Now only a Christian legionary permits himself to be friendly with the apostle, and that only when another Christian is stationed outside the cell. For even the inclination to pity the “enemies of mankind” would be regarded as a sign of that infection for which the only cure is the arena. The longest record of faithfulness in service to Caesar would mean nothing. Witness old Gabelus, awaiting his trial along with the rest. Paul’s Roman citizenship performs only one service for him. He doesn’t have to wear the frightful collar or neck manacles that are put on the arrested slaves. But one hand is chained to his jailor and one foot is chained to the wall of the cell.

A letter can be written only when the guard in the cell and the guard outside the cell are both Christians. But it must be written at one sitting, for neither the papyrus nor any of the other writing materials can be left in the cell overnight. Both guards will be changed in the morning, and neither of them may be Christians. If the letter is discovered, it is death for the guards, and death for the men and women who are mentioned in it.

And yet Paul does name names. He sends greetings from Eubulus and Pudens and Linus, and he sends greetings to Priscilla and Aquila.

He must write fast. He can’t say all that is in his heart, but he must indicate his thoughts. He knows the end is near, and yet he doesn’t seem to give up hope.

“I am ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is near at hand.” And, “If we die with him, so shall we rule with him; and if we deny him, so will he deny us.”

He remembers that no one came forward to defend him at his first trial, “Nevertheless, the Lord stood with me and strengthened me, that by me the preaching might be fully known, and I was delivered out of the lion’s mouth. And the Lord will deliver me from every evil work and preserve me until His heavenly kingdom.”

He also says about them, “I pray God that it not be charged against them.”

With incredible obstinacy the apostle makes no mention of the bloody calamities that have befallen the Christians, or of the persecutions they suffer, in this last letter to his beloved son. Is this because of his hope, or is it the same obstinacy that forbids him to mention his impending death?

He calls on Timothy to come to Rome at once, even though he knows he’s asking him to put his head in the “lion’s mouth.” “Hurry to get here before winter!” he writes.

And as if to deny his own premonitions, he asks Timothy to bring the mantle and the manuscripts he left behind with Carpus.

Life and death are mixed in the letter, as though the two are one and have become indistinguishable in his eyes. One instant he lays down plans for the future, and the next he bids a father’s farewell to his son. No matter what happens, Paul will accept it, not with stoical indifference, but with the love of faith. It is Paul’s last letter, and it pulses with the sensitiveness of his soul.

This last letter to Timothy, the one joy he has allowed himself in life, expresses a tender sentimentality that would be searched for in vain in any of his other letters.

“I greatly desire to see you, remembering your tears and the real faith that is in you, which was first found in your grandmother Lois and in your mother, Eunice.”

Timothy was the only person who awakened the instincts of family and fatherhood in Paul. Thus the peculiar touch of tenderness and the intimate recollection of his sufferings, which are not so much a complaint as an expression of closeness, a loving father-son relationship.

“Persecutions and afflictions came to me at Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, but the Lord delivered me out of them all.”

He can’t help these allusions. But he doesn’t close the letter with them. He learned from Rabbi Gamaliel that “the words of parting between rabbi and disciple shall be words of the Torah. The father parting from the son shall leave him with words of wisdom to take along on the path of life.”

Therefore he turns from the personal to the admonitory, “God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power. . . hold fast the form of sound words that you have heard from me, in faith and love that is in Jesus Christ.”

In feverish haste he sets down the leading principles of his son’s mission. “Preach the word. Be instant in season and out of season. . .watch in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of your ministry.”

And it is here that the words slip from him, “For I am now ready to be offered.”

Looking back over the long years of his life, he sees the devious routes, the detours, the returns, and he knows that in the end his feet are on the straight path. He sees that the sum of it all is just, and he adds, in complete assurance, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course. I have kept the faith.”

He will wear a crown of righteousness, hard won by a life of labor. For all his life was given to bringing men under the sign of righteousness.

He’s never gone easy on himself; never shrunk from suffering; doesn’t shrink from death. And he imposes this same discipline on others, even on his beloved son. Just a few moments ago he wrote him with infinite gentleness. Now he bids him come to Rome! Bids him too to bring Mark with him, “for he is useful to me in the ministry.”

It’s an invitation to share his fate and the fate of the believers of Rome, both to his own son, and to the nephew of his beloved boyhood friend, Barnabas. For when the moment of personal tenderness has passed, he is back in the spirit of his service, and faith reminds him that there is no break for those who serve Christ.

The light trembles on the papyrus as he hurries through the last lines of his letter. He is motionless. His yellow, wrinkled face, his lofty forehead, shine in the half darkness. His eyes are fixed on the distance, beyond the heavy walls that imprison him. In his heart is the peace of fulfillment. He has reached the point where joy and sorrow are one. Everything that was to be done has been done, and everything that was to be said has been said. He is now ready to abandon the earthly instrument that has served him so long and so painfully.

* * * * *

The end came soon. Two days after his letter to Timothy was smuggled out of the Praetorium, Paul was brought before the Tribunal. The investigation was short. He identified himself with the words, “I am a Christian;” he refused to offer incense to the image of Caesar; he made no appeal to his Roman citizenship.

He was taken to the prison reserved for those already condemned to death, where he found Simon Peter, Gabellus, and many others he’d personally led to faith in Christ.

18 - In the Catacombs

Crives Fastanus was a gladiator who was pardoned and set free by Claudius Caesar. Sometime later he was given a position as an attendant in Nero’s circus on the Vaticanum. Now in his mid-fifties, he looked back on a life that consisted mostly of mortal struggles with four-footed and two-footed beasts and that he had persevered only because his astounding physique had endured far beyond the age at which gladiators were expected to make a good showing in the arena. But for every victorious combat, there was a sign on his body, a memento he would carry to his grave.

Indeed his body was a record, for it was covered with a network of scars, old sword wounds and the marks of teeth and claws. His nose was flat, one eye was slit and the other was missing. There was a hole in one cheek, constantly whimpering. In preserving his own life, he’d taken many others, slashed so many bodies that he lost all feeling with regard to the death of a human being. The sight of a man in his last agonies moved him about as much as the sight of a dying insect.

Yet, here was Crives Fastanus walking anxiously through the alleys of the Trans-Tiber, asking every coppersmith and sandal sewer, in a low, gentle voice, “Can you tell me where I can find Miriam the perfume mixer?”

The men he asked invariably started back from him. His vast, naked breast was like a ruined battlefield, his mighty arms were like battering rams, and his one eye emitted a dull, heavy light. His helmet showed him to be a gladiator, and the bronze tablet proclaimed him a servant in the imperial household, an attendant in Nero’s circus. And every Jew in the Trans-Tiber knew that regular meetings of Jewish Christians occurred in Miriam’s house.

Therefore every man who answered him told him no.

The Jews weren’t really sure why Miriam hadn’t been arrested, for her house was as well known among the Christians of Rome as that of Priscilla and Aquila had been in the past. So they thought this might be a belated attempt to take her. But that made no sense since a lone man would not set out to make arrests. Besides, there was something in this giant elderly man’s bearing. His voice was rough, but low and pleading.

Finally he found someone who would talk with him. Mordecai, a Christian, sold pots from a stall on the Tiber banks.

“How do you know that name?” Mordecai asked cautiously.
“One of the Christians gave it to me before he was driven into the arena.”
“Why would a Christian betray one of his kind to you?”
“I begged him for it, do you hear? I want to be one of them.”
“You want to be a Christian?”

Mordecai shrank away from the old gladiator.

“You heard me.”
“But don’t you see,” asked Mordecai, lowering his voice, “what they do to them?”
“I would rather die with you than live as I have lived till now.”

The pottery merchant remained silent, turning this over in his mind. Was this the trick of a spy? It couldn’t be. The man’s face might be brutal, but it was utterly devoid of cunning. And even the brutality was softened by something shining from within.

“You say a Christian gave you the name.”

“Yes. I was among those who drove him into the arena with the whip, and I envied him. I’ve seen many men die in pain in the arena over the years. But I’ve never seen men die as these men and women died, with a song on their lips and joy in their eyes. I want to be one of them, you hear me? I asked this Christian to give me the name of one to whom I could turn, who would take me into the company of Christians.”

Quickly Mordecai made up his mind. He turned his stall over to a neighbor and led Crives Fastanus to Miriam’s house.


A gathering of the faithful met in the little apartment on the top floor of the old house, and their clothes were torn in mourning for those who would never again break bread in this place. Miriam and her visitors sat on the floor, according to custom, for it was less than a week since her two sons and their wives had been put to death.

The few leaders who remained were there also. There was Rufus, one of the founders of the congregation, and his mother, an old woman with sorrowful eyes. She came from Jerusalem, and it had been her lifelong dream to return to the Holy City. There was Linus, a middle-aged man with a stern, strong face set in a black beard. He’d begun to reorganize the remnants of the congregation on the very day following the dread slaughter in the circus. Eubulus and Pudens helped him. There were others, too, and they sat barefoot on the ground with Miriam.

Their voices were low, and they didn’t talk about the martyrs or the past, but about the congregation and the future. After the slaughter they feared that there would be a great falling off of converts. The congregation would remain a tiny group, perhaps even scattered abroad, as in the days of Claudius. They discussed plans for bringing together those who remained alive and taking them to the Via Appia quarter, where Simon Peter was hiding. Perhaps he could comfort them.

As they sat thus talking, there was a knock at the door. Mordecai, the Jew, who was one of them, entered leading Crives Fastanus, who’d been whipping Christian prisoners just a few days before.

Many of the lives lost had been due to spies, so the group was not easily convinced that the old gladiator had pure intentions. But Crives Fastanus lay at their feet with his face turned to the floor, and begged them in a broken voice to believe him.

“I come,” he cried, “from the lovely land of Galatia. It’s a green land where the moss on the stones makes you think of spring. I was just a child when they snatched me from my mother’s side, and from that day on I’ve lived in the midst of blood. They taught me to fight and to preserve my life by taking the lives of others. Indeed, I lived only to take the lives of others. I believed that the greatest happiness was to be alive and that nothing mattered but whatever helped me to stay alive.

“I believed this until I saw your men and women dying with songs on their lips and joy in their hearts. And then I knew my belief had been a false one, and there is greater happiness than life. There is eternal happiness. I beg you, take me back to the springtime of my childhood, to the heavenly fields where the good shepherd, Jesus Christ, feeds his flock. I want to be one of his sheep.”

“When did you hear them speak this way?”

“During their imprisonment and in the hour of their death. I heard them sing of green pastures by still waters, and of the shepherd. All my life I’ve sent men to their death, but I never heard one go with a song on his lips. And before the last of them were driven into the arena, I begged them to take compassion on me and tell me who could make me one of them. There was a man who believed me, and he gave me the name of a woman I could talk to. Please don’t turn your faces from me, but lead me to the good shepherd, Jesus Christ, whose name I’ve learned to call on.”

The believers looked at each other, and one said, “Surely God has sent the tormentors to take the places of the martyrs in the congregation. Blessed be the Name of God!”

They received the gladiator into the faith that day and taught him all the signs of the faithful.

* * * * *

As it was with Crives Fastanus, so it was with many others who’d witnessed the deaths in the arena by day and on the campus at night. It was the first time masses of Romans heard the song of hope and triumph from those entering the shadows of the underworld, and many of them were seized with an irresistible desire to learn the secret of the faith that transformed the darkness of the underworld into the light of everlasting life.


Figures came stealing through the streets while Rome slept. They came from rich homes and they came from crowded shelters where the homeless lived. There were Jews and Gentiles, freedmen and slaves. They exchanged the secret signs of the faith, drawing the symbol of a fish in the air, or an anchor on the ground, and they whispered instructions to each other. The gathering was to take place on the Via Appia where they would break bread, eat the common meal, and hear words of comfort from Simon Peter.

And so it was that the fears of the congregational leaders were proved false; for the torment visited on the believers only strengthened the growth of the faith. It was as if a competition had set in tacitly between the two powers, the cruelty of Nero and the love of Christ over the heart of man. It turned out that the greater the danger to the Christian congregation, the larger were the numbers that were drawn to it.

Among the non-Christian Jews the deaths of the Christians created a profound impression. Martyrdom itself was part of the Jewish tradition, so the newcomers, who died as Jewish martyrs had died from time immemorial, came to be regarded as brothers.

The Jewish synagogue, legal by Roman law, became the cover to the Christian faith. It was to a Jewish synagogue in the catacombs that the Christians were now hurrying. They slipped through the darkness across the Sublicius bridge, down from the Aventine hill, and even from the slopes of the Palatine toward the Porta Capena and the Via Appia.

Now these particular catacombs were new and not yet known to Tigellinus’ spies and so provided a second layer of protection to the believers’ secret meetings. There was a large subterranean hall at the center of the catacombs, from which extended the labyrinthine corridors. Funeral services were held here, as were congregational assemblies and anniversary services for the dead. The walls were decorated with sacred designs, candelabra, citrus fruits, grapes and palm branches. Images of the ram’s horn, the shofar, appeared here and there. It was the symbol of the resurrection that would come with Christ. There were drawings of Abraham and Isaac, representing the sacrifice, and of Jonah in the belly of the fish. Here the Christians found refuge and a place of worship under the light of oil lamps.

On this first re-assembly of Christians after the great calamity, there were strange and moving encounters. Servants and masters who had no idea that the other was of the faith came face to face as brothers. Men and women who’d hidden their inner lives from each other out of fear of betrayal embraced and wept with joy. The blood Nero shed, the sword he still held over the community, drew the Christians together in a bond that was stronger than ever. More than brothers and sisters of one family, they were more like members of one body. No one knew when he would be called on to testify for Christ, but they all knew that sooner or later death would be their common portion. And beyond death, which was but a gate, rebirth and everlasting life would be their common portion.

When the believers had taken their places, Simon Peter was brought in from his hiding place. They crowded around him as he spoke. He said a prayer and then observed a time of silence with all the others, on their knees with faces buried on the ground. After a long pause, bread was broken and distributed and the cup of wine was passed from hand to hand. They all felt they were sanctified and united in Christ and in his sufferings.

* * * * *

One night the hall of the catacombs was surrounded by a band of legionaries. Tigellinus’ spies had discovered the secret meeting place of the Christians. There was no cry of terror, or sign of panic, when the soldiers broke into the service. The worshippers remained where they were, their faces pressed against the cold stone, their thoughts stubbornly given to Christ. And even when they were chained and dragged out into the night, they said not a word, but meditated on their faith.

Among the prisoners were the disciple Simon Peter and the one-time gladiator Crives Fastanus.

17 - Kaddish

Late that evening the Jews assembled in the great synagogue received the message of the account of the slaughter in the arena and of the fiery sacrifice at nightfall. The worshippers who’d been fasting and praying all day under Zadoc’s leadership now learned that the souls for which they’d been praying had departed in all purity, with forgiveness on their lips.

Zadoc rose and said, “My brothers in Israel, blessed is he that has drawn so many souls into the shelter of the divine wings.

“This is a great day for Israel. Many souls have been born to our father Abraham this day. God’s Name has been sanctified throughout the world, and it will be sanctified wherever the name of the martyrs is carried, from now on forevermore. Sanctified be all those who have perished in Him, and whether they be Jews or Gentiles, from this day forth, they are our brothers.

“Therefore let us rise and bless their memory. Let us say a great Kaddish for their souls to the one living God of Israel.”

Then the rabbi stood before the scrolls and cried out, “Judge of the world, Father of all living, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, accept the blood of your servants that has been poured out before You like water. It is for You alone that this sacrifice was made. Therefore let it be acceptable in Your sight. Assemble the martyred souls under the wings of Your glory and bind them in the bond of eternal life.

“Let not the blood of Your servants be shed in vain, but let it be a pillar of fire to be a guide to Your people in the wilderness, and let Your Name be spread in all the corners of the earth, so that every knee may come and bow before You, for Yours alone is the glory and the praise. Let all people make a bond to serve You in utter trust. Let Your justice be unfolded over the earth, so that evil may cease and the reign of Messiah begin, for we can wait no longer.

“Look on our pain and our wretchedness, have mercy on Your creatures, eternal God of Israel!”

The rabbi could no longer hold back the tears. His voice shook as he began to intone the Kaddish for the martyrs, “Magnified and sanctified be the Name of God.”

The whole congregation of widows, orphans, brothers, and sisters of the martyrs repeated the Kaddish in tears, “Magnified and sanctified be the Name of God.”

* * * * *

Late that night groups of Jews stole out of the pent alleys of the Trans-Tiber, carrying little oil lamps. Quietly they wound their way through the streets and open places and crossed the Janiculum to the Vaticanum. A few crosses still stood smoldering there, but most of them had fallen into ashes, and in the ashes lay the bones of the martyrs. The silent group went from cross to cross, gathering up the bones and wrapping them in cloth. The sleepy soldiers on the campus didn’t interfere, for the Jews were within their rights. In addition to the crosses, there was a great heap of garbage that had been carried out from the circus, and the Jews searched it for human remains. Carefully and lovingly they gathered up bodies, limbs, bloody fragments, and wrapped them in cloth.

When they’d collected everything that appeared to have belonged to a human body, they went in procession to the Jewish burial place, which was a cave far out in the Trans-Tiber. A great weeping broke out there. But the leaders of the Jewish community and the leaders of the new faith, who accompanied them in the task of giving Jewish burial to the remains of the martyrs, said that it wasn’t fitting at this moment to weep for the martyrs. It was fitting, rather, to sanctify the Name of God, even as the martyrs had done.

So the orphan sons were led forward and ranged about the large common grave, and the whole people accompanied them in the saying of the Kaddish.

“Magnified and sanctified be the Name of God.”

16 - In Green Pastures

A single cry of mourning and desolation went up from the Trans-Tiber for every single Jewish home had at least one person missing. In fact, some families rejoiced if only one of its members had been dragged off to Nero’s circus on the Vatican. The congregation gathered in the synagogue from early morning till late at night praying and chanting psalms for the martyrs agonizing in the cellars and crypts of the arena.

A ring of Jewish wives, daughter, mothers, and sisters lingered by the walls of the circus. Their grief broke out in passionate gestures and in a high wailing that tore its way through constricted throats and quivering lips. Hands were lifted frantically to heaven, imploring the compassion of the Almighty. Some women tore their clothing and threw ashes on their heads. Others beat their breasts with clenched fists.

In a wider ring around them the Roman masses, dressed in festive attire with garlands on their heads, enjoyed these preliminaries to the great entertainment to come.

Meanwhile the circus was filling with people, aristocrats as well as commoners. They all brought plenty of food and wine, either from home or from the many booths set up on the Vatican, for it would be a long and thrilling spectacle. One day wouldn’t be enough for all the blood and victims needed to compensate Rome for its calamity.

Never before had so many human victims been prepared for a single spectacle. The crypts were jammed with “Christians” to provide a wide variety of entertainments. The Roman mob licked its chops in anticipation of seeing tender children who could offer no resistance, and strong men making frantic and futile efforts to escape or to defend themselves. There would be old people shrinking from the jaws and fangs of the animals.

The latecomers lamented that they would have to sit in the outer ring and wouldn’t be able to hear the bones crunch.

The women were no less feverish than the men, pushing through the crowd just as furiously and threatening to scratch out the eyes of the men and women who jammed the entrances. The ushers could not maintain order. The struggle carried the mob right up to the very walls of Caesar’s loge. Some scuffles took place as patrician slaves cracked skulls right and left to clear a path for the litters.

At last the gigantic circus was so filled that the gates had to be closed leaving only those who were too late to get in and the ring of wailing Jewish women outside.

Once the movement ceased, some sort of order was restored, and the spectators settled as best they could into their places, a sea of white togas, garlanded heads, and half naked bodies. Caesar lolled on his throne surrounded by his intimates, while Poppea, swollen with pregnancy and shamelessly uncovered, sat at his side. A squad of Praetorians, resplendent in silver breastplates and horned helmets, guarded the imperial loge, under Tigellinus’ command.

Because of the heat Nero had dropped his toga and sat comfortably in his light tunic, which was considered an act of disrespect toward the people. But Nero didn’t have the discipline to submit to physical discomfort even if he was trying to woo them. His wreath, so carefully arranged by his slave, had already slipped to one side of his head, as though he were already drunk. The smell of sweaty flesh rising from the imperial loge was as heavy and sickening as that which rose from the masses jammed into the tiers.

In another disappointment Nero did not stage any formal demonstration. He just sat slumped on his throne like a resting butcher. He did lean over now and then to whisper something to a member of his suite and he threw kisses to people in other loges. Only Poppea, half-naked though she was, seemed disturbed by this utter lack of dignity.

The procession of victims that always preceded a spectacle of this kind to whet the appetites of the spectators, also fell short of expectations. The men, women and children who were driven into the arena at the point of a spear came out wailing and lamenting. Only Jew-Christians would have the nerve to spoil such a great festival in this way. Even the men made no effort to display the courage proper to those who were about to die in the presence of Caesar. The highly disgusted Romans saw only a pitiful mob of miserable Jew-peddlers who refused to play up the occasion.

The ones who’d been dressed up in animal skins, such as lions, foxes and sheep, wouldn’t even respond with the expected behavior. In short, the sacrificial procession was a miserable failure, due to the lack of public spirit by the Jews. Only the women made a certain contribution, for having been stripped naked, they struck a most amusing pose as they tried to cover their private parts with their hair or their hands.

And when these half-crippled tatterdemalions were driven past the imperial loge, they didn’t even have the respect to look up at Caesar. Instead, they just muttered to themselves words that the mob couldn’t make out due to their own uproar.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” they said, their voices becoming firmer as they went along. “He makes me lie down in green pastures.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.”

This was the armor they wore as they advanced into the place of death, and it worked wonders for them. They saw tranquil meadows beyond the abyss of death. And on the meadows they saw one with open arms, saying, “Come to me, all you who suffer and are heavily burdened.”

The murmur grew stronger and it swelled into a chant that became audible over the obscene uproar of the circus.

“I hope for you, O God. I commit my spirit into Your hands.”

Tigellinus, sitting in Nero’s loge, bit his lips. The filthy Christians had spoiled the parade. He just knew that they’d deliberately done this to disgrace him. So he signaled the overseers in the arena, and they drove the victims back into the vaults.

Lucan said, “A flock of sheep would have shown more courage, O Caesar.”

But on the other side Petronius said, “No, the trouble is they show too much courage. They have the courage to ignore even you, O Caesar.”

In any case, it was time to get down to the day’s business. Caesar gave the sign, the trumpets blew a fanfare, and the cage doors holding the wild beasts were opened.

The first to be released were a herd of wild oxen. As they moved out from the shadow of the circus wall, they were bewildered, blinded by the sudden light, and irritated by the tumult. The audience gasped in delight, however, for they saw that a woman had been loosely tied to the horns of each ox. Their white bodies flashed as the sunlight struck them. And even in this extreme danger, the women were still contorting themselves in shame, trying to cover their nakedness with their hands.

The beasts were roused from their stupor as the women’s hair fell across their eyes. They started rearing, stamping, and flinging themselves about wildly trying to rid themselves of their human cargo. One by one, the women were thrown into the air. A scream, an unintelligible outcry, and the body was lifted into the air again, but this time on, not between, the horns of the ox. The body quivered, and the blood spurted. The smell of fresh blood sent the beasts into a frenzy, so that they pranced and circled with their impaled victims, snuffing the hot steaming air. Again the bodies were thrown down on the sand and lifted up, and what had been, just a few moments ago, a human being, was now a mass of ripped and trampled flesh, covered with splashes of red.

The audience rose to its feet, applauding wildly, and a great roar of salute to Caesar rolled across the arena.

A few moments later the attendants charged in and herded the oxen back to their cages. Half a dozen carts were rolled in, and the bodies were thrown into them pell-mell. Fresh sand was scattered over the red patches, and the second spectacle began.

The doors to the prison vaults were opened and a gang of slaves drove out a group of men, women, and children covered with animal skins fastened around the shoulders tightly enough that they couldn’t be thrown off. Some were standing; others were forced to crawl. Some of the women held infants to their breasts. The horrible, motley group shrank back, but the whips fell on them and they moved forward in a confused mass.

Again no face was turned toward Caesar. Again the strange infuriating chant rose from the assembly, “Though I walk through the valley. . .” The slave attendants tried in vain to scatter them apart by lashing their faces, but they would not scatter, nor would they approach the imperial loge. They clung together, a compact mass, chanting psalms.

Who can fathom the secret of such souls? Who can penetrate to the mystery wrought by God in His elect at that moment? Only one who has been touched by God’s grace and who has rested in the shadow of His love can understand how God lifted His chosen ones to Himself and in that moment transformed their earthly anguish into heavenly glory. For they no longer saw with the eyes of flesh, they no longer knew what was taking place around them. Translated into spheres inaccessible to us, they were beyond the reach of mortal evil.

Successful in this last test, they walked out into the arena to see Christ even before their eyes closed in death. He came to them and stood before them with open arms; he drew them up to him on the cross, so that their sufferings might mix with his and they might become one with him.

Though their bodies shrank from death, their souls were filled with bliss.

“I rejoiced when they said to me, Come let us go to the house of the Lord.”
“Hallelujah! Praise the Lord, praise Him all servants of the Lord!”

The gates of the cages were pulled back, and a pack of wild bloodhounds emerged. They’d been starved over the last few days and they bounded toward the human group huddled at the center of the arena and then paused for a moment, a few steps away. They lifted their muzzles, sniffed, and emitted a long howl.

That was the moment the men and women clinging together saw Christ distinctly and unmistakably in front of them.

“Christ is with us!” one cried. “I see him!”
At once a dozen voices rose around her, “I see him too!”
“Lord, lord, take us to you!”

This burst of excitement startled the bloodhounds. Their throats moaned and they paused. The spectators rose in one mass, astounded by the picture. Men, women and children were singing and the beasts were hesitant in front of their prey. Then one of the bloodhounds crept forward, sniffed, and closed its jaws suddenly on a piece of goatskin covering a child. It’s nostrils quivered at the smell of the uncovered human flesh and, as if stung by an arrow, it reared and flung itself with fangs and claws on the little one.

That was the signal; in an instant the spell was snapped. The howling, baying pack dashed forward, the skins were ripped down, and wild canine jaws closed on human flesh. The victims did not struggle. Their flesh was ripped, blood burst forth, and all that was heard were those strange words so terrible in Roman ears.

“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
“O Lord, take us to you.”

During the blood bath, something happened that took the crowd’s breath away. As the bloodhounds tore the victims apart, a man was putting up a fight! But he wasn’t fighting for himself. Kneeling on all fours, he was shielding a little child with his ripped flesh. He held the child with one hand, and with the other, as well as with a foot, he was trying to beat off the bloodhound’s attack, while edging his way toward the side of the arena. But strangely, the bloodhound seemed intent on the child rather than on the protecting adult. It kept pushing its muzzle under the man’s belly, to get at the white flesh of the little one. The man somehow managed to twist and squirm and push so as to keep himself between and beast and the victim.

This spectacle aroused a mixture of emotions in the Romans. There was suspense as to the outcome, of course, but there was also a strange feeling of pity, utterly out of keeping with the event. The bloodhound finally fastened it jaws on the man’s leg and began to drag him backwards. When they reached Caesar’s loge, the dog stopped and the eyes of tens of thousands of spectators were riveted to the scene. The man was ripped from head to foot and the blood streamed from a hundred wounds. But with a last conscious effort he was still shielding the infant.

A mother offering this mad and hopeless resistance to the inevitable probably wouldn’t have drawn as much attention. But that a father should display this desperate love, this tenderness at the gates of death, was strange and somehow moving.

And the spectators lifted their thumbs, and shouted to Caesar, “Let him be!”

But Caesar didn’t give the signal of the upturned thumb, and the man in the arena came to the end of his strength. With bloody claws and dripping fangs the dog thrust and snapped at the infant, ripping the man’s limbs. One last snap of the jaws overturned the man, and the dead child rolled into the sand. The bloodhound dragged it off.

The man lay motionless and was taken for dead. But suddenly he stirred, and stemmed his gashed elbows against the ground. He couldn’t struggle to his knees. He only managed to lift his head, and to make a signal toward Caesar’s loge with one hand.

Then, in a loud, clear voice, he called out, “Tigellinus! The child you rejected is now with the lord!”

Tigellinus recognized Antonius, his slave.

Then he dropped into the sand again, murmuring, “Lord, take me to you!”

Attendants cleared the hounds from the arena, carried out the remnants of the dead bodies, and sprinkled new sand on the ground to make ready for the third spectacle.


And so it went throughout the day. Group after group of human beings, pack after pack of wild beasts, until the mob became bored. It was always the same, men, women, children, blood, prayers, roaring, claws, fangs. The hot sun beat down, and the stink of dead meat and of living perspiring flesh hung in the air. It was just too much.

But then all of Nero’s enterprises went this way, lacking proportion and producing the opposite of the intended effect. Besides, the Christians wouldn’t fight. They just prayed and let themselves be eaten. The spectators might as well have been watching a group of butchers at work. People were nodding off and many would have gladly slipped away, but they were afraid of the countless spies scattered throughout the circus. It wasn’t safe to be lacking in the proper enthusiasm at a great spectacle generously arranged for the Roman masses by Caesar. But after each spectacle the applause became lighter; no roars of salutation rolled toward the imperial loge.

Even Nero himself was bored. He didn’t move though. He just lay there perspiring, his thick flesh oozing out of his tunic. Petronius had used up all his prepared jests, trying to keep up Caesar’s interest, and he was racking his brain for something to say. In his soul he cursed Nero for this interminable, monotonous, unimaginative slaughtering of Jews. Even Poppea, for all her cold, insolent bearing, was weary to the soul. Her attendants kept pouring perfumes on her to drive away the stink of blood and perspiration. But most disgusting to her was the nearness of the imperial carcass. And Nero himself would have been glad to call a halt, but he felt obscurely that the longer he sat there, the more he suffered the dreary, bloody spectacle, the more completely he would erase from the Roman minds their original suspicion of his guilt.

Once again his gross and stupid strategy miscarried. For as the masses became over sated with the slaughter and their restlessness increased with the long day, their attention and resentment swung from the arena to the emperor. There was nothing left to hate in the miserable Christians for even the dulled, brutish hearts of the Romans were touched by the spectacle of so many women and children being fed to the wild beasts.

Some even dared to whisper to their neighbors, “Is this how criminals die? Could these kind of people set fire to a city?”

If not for the presence of Tigellinus’ men, such remarks would have been made more loudly and grown into a demonstration. But his men were everywhere. So the people feigned enthusiasm, and in their hearts they wished that Nero and Tigellinus were the ones in the arena instead of the Christians.

The signal finally came to stop the spectacle. The mob dashed out of the circus as furiously as it had dashed into it, stopping at the food booths to snatch up the reeking sausages and stuff them into their mouths, washing them down with gulps of sour wine. And here came Nero moving through the crowd with his suite, determined to show the Romans that he was with them on this day. Petronius, who’d been cursing him in his heart for the hideous and revolting show in the arena, cursed him even more heartily for being compelled to take part in this demonstration of democratic sentiment.


This was by no means the end of the great punishment, for a double row of crosses stretched along the middle of the campus on the Vatican hill, and a human form was nailed to each one. The bloody limbs of the victims were steeped in oil, and the crosses were heavily overlaid with wax. The crucified ones had already been suffering on them throughout the day, but death was not to be granted to them until nightfall.

At dusk the human torches were kindled. Then, at one end of the alley of blazing bodies, Nero appeared in his chariot, wearing a red tunic, the symbol of Jupiter. An attendant at his side held up the imperial eagle of Rome. Tigellinus, dressed in green, Nero’s color in the races, flashed a white cloth, and Nero tugged at the reins.

The white horses started forward, and the imperial chariot sped down the alley between the blazing crosses. A wail of pain accompanied him down the flickering alley.

An old Jew, hanging on one of the first crosses, cried out, “Father in heaven, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”

And down the long course of fiery crosses the cry was repeated, “Father in heaven, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”

The old Jew gathered enough strength to raise his voice again, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!”

And again down the double line of torches the cry rang out, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!’


Even this last spectacle failed to cleanse Nero from the suspicion that he had set fire to Rome. The impression left on the masses had nothing to do with the guilt of the Christians. It centered, instead, on the picture of a man crawling around the arena on all fours, keeping his body between the fangs of the bloodhound and the infant he protected.

And the exhausted Romans asked, “Did infants also set fire to Rome?”

“What do you think, Petronius,” asked Lucan, “did infants too set fire to Rome?”

“The children suffer for the sins of the fathers,” answered Petronius.

“I don’t understand.”

“Didn’t you hear what the slave called out to Tigellinus? And didn’t you get the meaning? Tigellinus set fire to Rome, and his child was therefore thrown to the beasts.”

This bitter witticism was repeated and became very fashionable in Rome.

“What? Infants too set fire to Rome?”
“The children suffer for the sins of the fathers.”

And everyone knew who and what was meant.

15 - The Great Trial

Antonius, the stable boy slave of Tigellinus, endured every form of torture the ingenuity of the Romans had devised. The bones in his hands, arms, and legs were cracked one by one between the claws of iron pincers. His skin was torn, strip-by-strip, from his quivering flesh. His fingernails were pulled out from the roots one by one, and his flayed feet were held over a slow fire. He no longer looked human but was reduced to a bundle of raw, blistered flesh.

And yet for all that, he still wouldn’t reveal what he’d done with his master’s child. A fellow slave had betrayed him under similar torture, and now Tigellinus himself directed and witnessed the torturing of Antonius, while two physicians ensured that he remained alive and sensitive to pain. When he fainted, the torture was relaxed and he was nursed back to consciousness with drinks and unguents. He was promised his freedom if he would confess that he’d turned the child over to the Christians to use its blood for their mystic rituals. But Antonius kept his eyes and his lips closed.

In the fiery ring that rotated around his head, Antonius saw a great stairway rising from earth to heaven. At the top Christ floated in the midst of luminous blue clouds, his arms stretched out to the slave, who was rising heavenward with agonizing steps. Antonius was seeing the reality of what everyone had been telling him, that “Christ waits for all who suffer for him.” Every pang was now dear to him. The deeper the claws of iron crushed into his flesh, the hotter the flames under his crippled feet, the nearer he knew himself to be to glory.

Antonius could feel the cool touch of the marble steps, which then softened and became blue clouds that wafted him toward the outstretched arms. He floated higher and higher and the radiant figure drew nearer and nearer. Now he was in the very middle of the inmost blue that surrounded his savior, a bright fiery blue that did not burn but soothed and healed and filled him with bliss.

Antonius lifted his arms, and all his being was filled with one desire, one thirst, one cry, “Take me, lord, take me to you!”

Tigellinus was stupefied as he looked at the ripped carcass of the slave. His attendants were equally amazed. They couldn’t understand what they’d never seen before, that a slave could endure such tortures and not betray his kind.


The comfort of death was not granted to Antonius on this day. Instead he was saved for the arena.

Other slaves, of course, did not show the same fortitude. Some needed only to see the flagrum and they recanted in terror, confessed their association with the Christians, or anything else that their tormentors wanted to hear. They “revealed” that there was a day of judgment coming when a rain of fire would pour down from heaven, to sweep away the sins of mankind.

Aha! So the believers in Christ had set fire to Rome to fulfill the prophecies.

Some slaves told of secret meetings of Christians, where unity with the godhead was achieved by “eating his flesh and drinking his blood.” What else could this mean but that Christians truly did eat human flesh and drink human blood?

The same scenes took place in other households. Torture was applied to any slave suspected of association with the Christians; the same “proofs” of Christian guilt in the burning of Rome were obtained everywhere.

The Roman masters planted suspicion widely and nourished it skillfully, so that the cry to condemn the Christians would come from the people rather than from the rulers. Agitators even visited the homeless. They said that they themselves had heard Christian fiends confessing to the torching. They said that the torch carriers seen on the first night of the fire had been identified as black-bearded Jews. Slowly the widening ring of accusation spread.

“You see how the fire began at the Porta Capena, where the Jews have lately settled, and ended at the Tiber, where they have their old settlement? The Jewish quarters alone were untouched by the fire!”

Thus were the Christians linked with the Jews. Day by day the tide of popular resentment set in toward both. The people cried out for vengeance. Only blood could wipe out the unspeakable guilt. Only the wild beasts of the arena could carry out the punishment.

Then when the temper of the masses had been roused to the right pitch and turned in the right direction, the first public measures were taken.


The Jews could see the darkening storm clouds. Their good fortune at escaping the fire now turned out to be an immeasurable calamity. And as they watched the inevitable approach of the day of wrath, they did what Jews have always done in times of great trial; they assembled in their synagogues, they fasted, and they recited psalms.

* * * * *

Even though assembling together increased the danger of detection, the Christians gathered in their usual places of prayer, in the synagogue courts and in homes. They also chanted the Jewish prayers from the Psalms.

Now, more than ever, they all felt the imminence of judgment day. The signs of prophecies spoken by Peter and Paul had been fulfilled. The heavens had rained down fire, Rome-Babylon, the city of sin, was leveled with the dust, and above its ruins Messiah/Christ would shortly appear.

Many Christians claimed to see special signs in the heavens: new stars blazing up in the night sky, a fiery sword suspended above the city and great comets appearing, pointing toward Rome. Some claimed they saw the clouds opened, revealing the heavenly sanctuary and hosts of angels gathered around Christ.

The lord was coming; the long awaited event was about to happen!


Two conflicting moods appeared among Jews and Christians. There was panic and hope, terror of death and expectation of salvation, the judgment of Nero and the judgment of the lord. Some saw a ravening beast coming from its cage in the arena, while some saw the savior descending from heaven. Some felt they were sinking as the ground gave way under their feet. Others were being lifted to the glory of heaven.

But in all this confusion and vacillation they were aware of one single desire. “Whatever happens let it happen soon!”

They were also aware that the two extremes did meet at a certain point. The terror of death was the portal to eternal life. The last evil on earth heralded the beginning of the reign of eternal justice. Therefore they didn’t hide themselves but met together to confront the danger and the hope.


In the chapel that adjoined the synagogue court in the Trans-Tiber, the Christians gathered in the evening and lit their lamps. The women brought cakes of bread, and Peter sat down and broke bread with them. The cup was filled and passed around, and when all had drunk, Peter lifted his hands and spoke.

This time he didn’t tell them of the life and death of the lord, as he normally did. Instead he recited a chapter of the Psalms in Hebrew, and after each verse the congregation repeated it in Greek.

“As the hart pants after the living streams,
So my soul pants after You, O God!
My soul thirsts for the living God.
How long before I see the face of my God?”

As the responsive murmur rose from the chapel, a band of soldiers, led by a centurion, appeared. The men were armed. Their shields and helmets shone in the night, their swords swung at their sides. No one turned to greet them. The murmur of prayer continued without interruption.

The centurion strode forward, and the worshippers, lifting their eyes, saw that it was old Gabelus, of the Praetorian Guard.

“Come with us,” Gabelus said to Peter. “It’s time.”

Peter rose, not sure what to do.

“Tonight,” said Gabelus, “they will come for all of you. The command has been issued to arrest the Christians.”

The elder Andronicus addressed Peter, “You must go, Simon. The congregation needs you. Go with them.”

Peter accepted the decision.

“I leave the congregation in your hands, Andronicus. Lead them to the cross, where he waits for them. It’s his desire that we have our part in his pain and that our blood be mixed with his, in order that we may be one with him.”

“For his sake we will endure everything,” answered the congregation, and the prayers were resumed under the leadership of Andronicus.

Gabelus and his men led Peter across the bridge and through the city to the district of the Via Appia. They hid him there in the house of Hermas, near the catacombs.

* * * * *

The command had indeed been issued to the police and the Praetorians to arrest all Christians, whether they were Jews or non-Jews in whatever household they might be found. But the line between Jew and Christian was so faint that no one was sure where one ended and the other began. Among non-Jews the task was simple. If a slave admitted to being a Christian, he was immediately taken. But the Christian Jews looked like any other Jews. They spoke the same language, worked side by side, and observed the same Sabbath ritual. The same books could be found in all Jewish homes.

Now a non-Jewish Christian could easily clear himself of the charge by calling on the names of Jupiter and Apollo and throwing a pinch of incense on their altars, or on those of the deified Caesars. But all Jews, Christian and non-Christian, refused to call on the names of their gods, or to offer incense on their altars. The police and the military therefore arrested them indiscriminately, on the assumption that anyone who denied the gods of Rome must be of the hated sect.

* * * * *

The Roman courts were always heavily overloaded even in normal times. But with the mass arrest of “Christians” anything like an orderly judicial procedure became utterly impossible. The judges had neither the time nor the informational background needed to question each individual intelligently. Nor was the public mood one that encouraged such care and discrimination. All day long the judges sat in the basilicas on the Forum, and hour after hour new batches of prisoners were brought in. There were men and women, Jews and non-Jews, young and old, dragged from the homes of patricians or from the Trans-Tiber and Via Appia quarters.

The procedure became automatic.

“Who are you?”
“I’m a Christian,” was the answer in most cases.

This was equivalent to a confession of complicity in setting fire to the city.

Occasionally a case might take a few minutes.

A young man of noble appearance was brought in, having been taken in a raid on a Christian chapel. The young man wore a toga, so he was a freeman and probably from a patrician family.

“Who are you?” asked the judge.
“I’m a Christian.”
“Who are your parents?”
“I have no parents. My father is the Lord of the world, my faith is my mother.”
“What is your occupation?”
“I am a slave of Christ.”
“What land do you come from?”
“I’m a stranger on this earth, a wanderer, until I go to my heavenly homeland.”

A mother and child were brought before the judge and answered similarly.

An elderly Jew who’d been dragged out of his home appeared before the judge.

“Do you believe in Christ?”
“I believe in a Messiah whom God will send to free us and all the world.”
“A Christian, like the rest,” said the judge, curtly.
“But I’m a Hebrew, and my faith is sanctioned by the law,” protested the Jew.
“Throw incense on the altar of the divine Augustus!” commanded the judge.
“I do not recognize Caesar as a god. My God is the one only God of Israel, and Him alone I worship.”
“A Christian, like all the others!” repeated the judge, impatiently.

Slaves weren’t even brought to court. Their “trials” took place in the slaves’ quarters, and their purpose was not to obtain a confession, since suspicion itself was tantamount to guilt, but the names of other Christians. And whether the torture yielded the desired result or not, the trial ended in one of two ways. Either the slave died under the torture, or else he was carried off and thrown into the cellars of Nero’s private circus on the Vatican hill.

In this way Nero prepared a spectacle for the masses such as Rome had never seen before. It would be a gigantic bloodbath that he hoped would be remembered through the ages.

14 - In Search of a Scapegoat

Nero was content. For once his beastly nature was sated. Rome had served as the model for his great ode. Now Rome lay at his feet like a ravaged, brutalized woman. He set about at once to save what was left of her, or more accurately, to deflect suspicion from himself. He was seen everywhere, taking personal command of the legionaries who demolished rows of houses in the immediate path of the fire with battering rams. The order was finally given to open the sluices of the aqueducts, which had remained shut during the conflagration for some mysterious reason. The destruction was finally halted.

For nine days the fire had raged, and a vast part of Rome had been converted into a glowing pit. Only those quarters on the outer ring were completely unscathed, including the Via Appia and the Trans-Tiber, where most of the Jews lived. The Tiber acted as a barrier and not a single house was touched. Also the precincts containing the great empty palaces of the Campus Martius and the Forum were untouched. Four precincts in the heart of the city, the most densely populated, were completely gutted, while six were partially demolished when the fire brigades tried to clear a wide space around the flames.

The heart of the city was a vast, glowing oven, covered with the ruins of fallen walls and roofs, which buried whatever and whoever remained behind. The people who had managed to escape crowded the streets of the other precincts, making passage and communication all but impossible.

And here comes Caesar as the tenderhearted father of his people. He had the great Campus Martius, with its baths, gardens and temples, opened to the homeless. He even placed his own gardens, palace, and circus on the Vatican heights across the Tiber, at the service of the city. As soon as they could enter, tens of thousands of slaves were set to work clearing the ruins, and carrying the ashes and rubbish in sacks, baskets and carts to the banks of the Tiber. All available ships were mobilized to bring stores of grain and olives up the river from the port of Ostia and then remove the huge heaps of refuse to be dumped into the open sea. Each day Nero visited the people, who wandered among the ruins of their former homes hoping to save some remnant of their possessions, or to identify the charred bones of their loved ones. He called up a profusion of tears over the misfortunes of his people. He even went so far as to lift homeless orphans in his arms, so that Rome might see to what depths Caesar had been moved by the universal calamity.

Nero promised the people a new city the like of which no ruler in the history of the world had ever bestowed on his subjects. It would be a city of glorious, wide streets, of great, regular houses of a certain, limited height, with wide facades, and in every house there would be a supply of fire-fighting equipment. As the first token of his intentions, Caesar ordered his treasury to extend credit to every citizen who was prepared to start rebuilding his home, and a tax was laid on every province of the empire to finance the reconstruction. Engineers and architects were called in, and great quantities of fire-resistant stone were brought in. Nero promised to build a vast ring of colonnades, baths, theaters and circuses.

And of course, there was his “Golden House” that would stretch all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, combining his palaces on the two hills.

Nero worked feverishly with the architects and engineers. Hundreds of thousands of slaves were rounded up and set to work and order was gradually restored.

But there was a problem.

The Roman populace was mournful and unresponsive. They no longer cared to watch the antics of their ruler with gross good humor. They no longer acted content with “bread and circuses,” and they openly applauded the mimes and rhymesters who mocked the imperial criminal. Rome was no longer what it had been.

Oh they listened to the words Nero offered and they accepted the gifts he gave, but they said nothing. Everywhere Caesar was, the people looked away. He shed his tears in vain. Even his promise to arrange a performance of the mighty poem “The Destruction of Troy,” in which he’d immortalized the catastrophe, failed to move them.

The people refused to be whipped into a mood of enthusiasm, for they were certain that it was Caesar, and Caesar alone, who was responsible for Rome’s destruction. It was no secret that Caesar had always dreamed of a new Rome, and of a “Golden House” to immortalize his name, and hundreds of people had seen and now testified of the men running around the city throwing lighted torches into the stores of the Circus Maximus on the eve of the fire’s outbreak. And word soon got around that Nero had posted himself on the summit of a tower on the Esquiline and chanted his ode.

And so the Romans turned to the gods. The corrupt and cynical masses underwent a religious revival, and the temples were suddenly filled with worshippers, especially the Vulcan temples. The Sybilline books were consulted for the significance of the disaster, and Roman matrons renewed the practice of bringing offerings to the Capitoline Jupiter and to the other gods. It was clear that Rome had averted its face from Caesar and turned it toward the gods.


Nero couldn’t hide from the truth; something had happened to the soul of the Roman people. Words and gifts alone wouldn’t take away the memory of the nine days of horror. The screams of dying children still rang in the people’s ears, and the nights were haunted by memories of themselves and their dear ones running back and forth in panic between the blazing ends of narrow streets.

A scapegoat was needed.

And where better to find a scapegoat than among that element of the Roman population that was the weakest, the most alien, and the most despised?

“The Jews, who blaspheme our gods, and refuse to take part in our religious festivals!” said the poet Lucan, a long time enemy of the Jews. “They despise us and refuse to worship Caesar. They have a horrible and mysterious religion, a god who nobody sees, and who demands they sacrifice their happiness, and even their lives, to him. They let themselves be sacrificed like sheep for the sake of their god. Would it be any wonder if their god commanded them to destroy the city of their enemies?

“Have you noticed how many candles they light on the seventh day? Doesn’t that prove their god is a lover of fire? And how about the fact that not a single Jewish home was destroyed by the fire, but stopped dead on the banks of the Tiber? Not only that, it didn’t even go in the other direction, along the Via Appia, where the Jews have settled recently. The people of Rome will easily understand that these aliens are the only ones capable of committing such a crime.

“And what about their talk of a certain ‘Christ,’ who has supposedly appeared as their liberator? Who is this ‘Christ,’ and what does he threaten?”

Lucan pointed to the number of Roman temples destroyed in the fire as additional proof that only the godless Jews could have perpetrated the crime.

* * * * *

When Nero called together the council of his intimates to discuss the question of finding a scapegoat, he also invited old Seneca.

Ever since Nero freed him from the consular office, Seneca had clung to his private life, spending his days either in his city home or at his country estate. He gave himself completely to his studies, and was engaged in a final, desperate search for the essence of the divinity he’d never been able to find among the gods, but that he believed could be found in the laws of nature. He was working on a thesis in which he compared the laws of nature with the laws of ethics. He discovered that there is not only an imperative logic of cause and effect in natural law, but also a higher logic that provides a counterpoise to evil. This brought him to the threshold of that faith he never entered.

“We believe,” he wrote, “that we are in the temple of nature; but the truth is we still linger in her corridors.”

Though he never crossed the threshold, his new perceptions did influence his character. Near the end of his life, he actually began to live in closer accord with the principles he’d so long proclaimed in his letters. He overcame his lust for worldly possessions, he abandoned the pursuit of wealth, and he lived the life of a Nazarite, eating only bread and water. His only wish was to be forgotten by Nero and by Nero’s shameful world, so that he might dedicate himself to his studies without interruption. In this he was disappointed, for Nero demanded his presence in the council on important occasions.

At the secret council that discussed the question of the scapegoat, Nero asked Seneca for his opinion.

“I consider,” said Seneca, “that the Jewish faith in an invisible god, and their blind devotion to him, is something fit for slaves, but unworthy of freedmen. Nevertheless, their faith is legal and has had the sanction of all the greatest Caesars. They’ve lived in Rome since time immemorial, and can be found in every part of the empire. The people are in daily contact with them in a hundred ways. And though it’s true that people make fun of them, it’s also true that many have begun to imitate them and visit their synagogues, both here and in the provinces.

“It won’t be easy to convince the Romans that people whose shops and stores are in the rich streets of the Campus Martius, and on the Via Sacra, and who are spread in all precincts of the city, would set fire to Rome in an act of self-destruction. Besides, persecuting the Jews here might start a rebellion in Judea, and riots in other parts of the empire. Nor would it be off the mark for me to say that one cannot wipe out the evil deeds of others by committing evil deeds oneself.

“Nor, Caesar, can one cleanse oneself of guilt by accusing the innocent. It is only by good deeds that we can cleanse ourselves of our own guilt. Therefore I relinquish the greater part of my possessions to rebuild Rome. And it is my advice that all present do likewise.”

The old philosopher looked calmly at Nero as he uttered these words.

Caesar was dumbstruck. He tried to speak, but all that came from his mouth was the tip of his tongue. His short, fleshy neck expanded, until it resembled a huge goiter.

But Seneca was at peace. A patient smile settled on his hard, granitelike features. His eyes were filled with a fresh, steady light. For the first time, he overcame the fear of death and said what was in his heart rather than what Nero wanted to hear.

“Tigellinus!” exclaimed Nero, his voice hoarse with rage. This told the courtiers that Seneca’s end had not yet come, for if it had, Nero would have smiled softly instead of showing anger.

Tigellinus began in a pious, restrained voice, “The calamity fallen on the city of our gods is so great that only you, O Caesar, were able to fittingly lament it in your immortal ode. The gods are aghast at the destruction of their temples, and they cannot be placated, O Caesar, by prayer and sacrifice alone. Who knows what greater calamity awaits us if we do not placate them with the act of vengeance they want?

“Rome is sick and angry. Rome is thirsty for the blood of those who have reduced her city to ashes. This act of horror can be atoned for only by a greater act of horror. The only way to win back the favor of the gods is to find the guilty and visit on them such punishment as will satisfy the gods. The Romans must see torn flesh, bleeding and burning in an act of retribution.

“You, O Caesar, must show honest Romans that you will not stand by indifferently when they clamor for revenge. You must appease Rome and the gods by a judgment that no Caesar before you has ever carried out. There must be great spectacles, at which all the punishments rained by Pluto on the daughters of Danaus are rained down on those who are guilty of Rome’s destruction.

“And who are the guilty? Surely not all the Jews. I agree with Seneca. We can’t take an entire people and throw it to the beasts. We can’t ascribe guilt on a religion sanctioned and legalized by a line of Caesars. That could indeed cause riots.

“But who says all Jews are guilty of burning Rome? Certainly the rich merchant of the Campus Martius or the Via Sacra wouldn’t give his own shop to the flames. There are certainly decent Jews, who’ve adopted our manners and our civilization.

“But there are masses of poor Jews on the other side of the Tiber who are called ‘Christians,’ after a certain criminal, Christ, whom Pontius Pilate put to death. Do you know what the name ‘Christ’ means? It means ‘the anointed one.’ The fanatical Jews believe that this Christ is a king and Caesar. They believe that he rose from the dead, and that he will soon return and ascend a throne of judgment. And do you know who he will judge? You, Nero. He will judge you and me, and anyone who doesn’t believe in him!”

A burst of laughter came from the assembly, partly of derision and partly of relief. Tigellinus waited, then continued, “This Christ is their Caesar, O Nero, not you. And as if that criminal fanaticism weren’t enough, they try to bring others down to their level. Roman slaves are infected with this disease, including some of my own. They don’t think of themselves as slaves. They insist on knowing their own children and creating their own families. They avoid work on the Jewish Sabbath, and they disobey any commands that are contrary to their ritual. They have only one Dominus, Christ.

“Search well, all of you. You will find the pestilence among your own slaves. Worse, I’ve heard that there are Roman matrons, wives of patricians, who are tainted with the criminal superstition. I have reason to believe that the wife of a certain senator, who shall remain nameless, has accepted their faith. And that’s not all! The legionaries have also been corrupted. There are slaves, freedmen, and legionaries in your house, Nero, who worship Christ rather than you. They meet secretly at night and celebrate mystic rites. They bow before an ass’s head and eat human flesh. They drink the blood of slaughtered infants. I have this on the authority of my own spies.

“It is they who set fire to Rome at the command of their god. They are to blame if our gods have withdrawn their favor from us. I’ve already ordered that my Christian slaves be put to the torture, so they may reveal the names of their fellow conspirators. The courts will do the rest.

“Rome demands revenge, O Caesar. The gods demand revenge! The whole world demands revenge against the enemies of mankind! And your hand, O Caesar, shall be uplifted to give the gods, and Rome, and the world, that which they demand!”

Nero rose from his chair, went over to Tigellinus, and kissed him resoundingly on the mouth.