“I agree,” said Cornelius; “certainly, to set up any new worship is treason; not a doubt of it. The gods keep us from such ingratitude! We have grown great by means of them, and they are part and parcel of the law of Rome. But there is no great chance of our forgetting this; Decius won’t; that’s a fact. You will see. Time will show; perhaps to-morrow, perhaps next day,” he added, mysteriously.
“Why in the world should you have this frantic dread of these poor scarecrows of Christians,” said Aristo, “all because they hold an opinion? Why are you not afraid of the bats and the moles? It’s an opinion: there have been other opinions before them, and there will be other opinions after. Let them alone and they’ll die away; make a hubbub about them and they’ll spread.”
“Spread?” cried Jucundus, who was under the twofold excitement of personal feeling and of wine, “spread, they’ll spread? yes, they’ll spread. Yes, grow, like scorpions, twenty at a birth. The country already swarms with them; they are as many as frogs or grasshoppers; they start up everywhere under one’s nose, when one least expects them. The air breeds them like plague-flies; the wind drifts them like locusts. No one’s safe; any one may be a Christian; it’s an epidemic. Great Jove! I may be a Christian before I know where I am. Heaven and earth! is it not monstrous?” he continued, with increasing fierceness. “Yes, Jucundus, my poor man, you may wake and find yourself a Christian, without knowing it, against your will. Ah! my friends, pity me! I may find myself a beast, and obliged to suck blood and live among the tombs as if I liked it, without power to tell you how I loathe it, all through their sorcery. By the genius of Rome something must be done. I say, no one is safe. You call on your friend; he is sitting in the dark, unwashed, uncombed, undressed. What is the matter? Ah! his son has turned Christian. Your wedding-day is fixed, you are expecting your bride; she does not come; why? she will not have you; she has become a Christian. Where’s young Nomentanus? Who has seen Nomentanus? in the forum, or the campus, in the circus, in the bath? Has he caught the plague or got a sunstroke? Nothing of the kind; the Christians have caught hold of him. Young and old, rich and poor, my lady in her litter and her slave, modest maid and Lydia at the Thermæ, nothing comes amiss to them. All confidence is gone; there’s no one we can reckon on. I go to my tailor’s: ‘Nergal,’ I say to him, ‘Nergal, I want a new tunic,’ The wretched hypocrite bows, and runs to and fro, and unpacks his stuffs and cloths, like another man. A word in your ear. The man’s a Christian, dressed up like a tailor. They have no dress of their own. If I were emperor, I’d make the sneaking curs wear a badge, I would; a dog’s collar, a fox’s tail, or a pair of ass’s ears. Then we should know friends from foes when we meet them.”
“We should think that dangerous,” said Cornelius; “however, you are taking it too much to heart; you are making too much of them, my good friend. They have not even got the present, and you are giving them the future, which is just what they want.”
“If Jucundus will listen to me,” said Aristo, “I could satisfy him that the Christians are actually falling off. They once were numerous in this very place; now there are hardly any. They have been declining for these fifty years; the danger from them is past. Do you want to know how to revive them? Put out an imperial edict, forbid them, denounce them. Do you want them to drop away like autumn leaves? Take no notice of them.”
“I can’t deny that in Italy they have grown,” said Cornelius; “they have grown in numbers and in wealth, and they intermarry with us. Thus the upper class becomes to a certain extent infected. We may find it necessary to repress them; but, as you would repress vermin, without fearing them.”
“The worshippers of the gods are the many, and the Christians are the few,” persisted Aristo; “if the two parties intermarry, the weaker will get the worst of it. You will find the statues of the gods gradually creeping back into the Christian chapel; and a man must be an honest fellow who buys our images, eh, Jucundus?”
“Well, Aristo,” said the paterfamilias, whose violence never lasted long, “if your sister’s bright eyes win back my poor Agellius you will have something more to say for yourself than, at present, I grant.”
“I see,” said Cornelius, gravely, “I begin to understand it. I could not make out why our good host had such great fear for the stability of Rome. But it is one of those things which the experience of life has taught me. I have often seen it in the imperial city itself. Whenever you find a man show special earnestness against these fanatics, depend on it there is something that touches him personally in the matter. There was a very great man, the present Flamen Dialis, for whom I have unbounded respect; for a long time I was at a loss to conceive why a person of his weight, sound, sensible, well-judging, should have such a fear of the Christians. One day he made an oration against them in the senate-house; he wanted to send them to the rack. But the secret came out; the good man was on the rack himself about his daughter, who persisted in calling herself a Christian, and refused to paint her face or go to the amphitheatre. To be sure, a most trying affair this for the old gentleman. The venerable Pater Patratus, too, what suppers he gave! a fine specimen of the Lucullus type; yet he was always advocating the lictor and the commentariensis in the instance of the Christian. No wonder; his wife and son were disgracing him in the eyes of the whole world by frequenting the meetings of these Christians. However, I agree with Decius, they must be put down. They are not formidable, but they are an eyesore.”
Here the rushing of the water-clock which measured time in the neighbouring square, ceased, signifying thereby that the night was getting on. Juba had already crept into the dark closet which served him for a sleeping-place; had taken off his sandals, and loosened his belt; had wrapt the serpent he had about him round his neck, and was breathing heavily. Jucundus made the parting libation, and Cornelius took his leave. Aristo rose too; and Jucundus, accompanying them to the entrance, paid the not uncommon penalty of his potations, for the wine mounted to his head, and he returned into the room, and sat him down again with an impression that Aristo was still at table.
“My dear boy,” he said, “Agellius is but a wet Christian; that’s all, not obstinate, like his brother there. ’Twas his father; the less we say about him the better; he’s gone. The Furies make his bed for him! an odious set! Their priests, little ugly men. I saw one when I was a boy at Carthage. So unlike your noble Roman Saliares, or your fine portly priest of Isis, clad in white, breathing odours like spring flowers; men who enjoyed this life, not like that sour hypocrite. He was as black as an Ethiopian, and as withered as a Saracen, and he never looked you in the face. And, after all, the fellow must die for his religion, rather than put a few grains of golden incense on the altar of great Jove. Jove’s the god for me; a glorious, handsome, curly god—but they are all good, all the gods are good. There’s Bacchus, he’s a good, comfortable god, though a sly, treacherous fellow—a treacherous fellow. There’s Ceres, too; Pomona; the Muses; Astarte, too, as they call her here; all good;—and Apollo, though he’s somewhat too hot in this season, and too free with his bow. He gave me a bad fever once. Ah! life’s precious, most precious; so I felt it then, when I was all but gone to Pluto. Life never returns, it’s like water spilt; you can’t gather it up. It is dispersed into the elements, to the four winds. Ah! there’s something more there than I can tell; more than all your philosophers can determine.”
He seemed to think awhile, and began again: “Enjoyment’s the great rule; ask yourself, ‘Have I made the most of things?’ that’s what I say to the rising generation. Many and many’s the time when I have not turned them to the best account. Oh, if I had now to begin life again, how many things should I correct! I might have done better this evening. Those abominable pears! I might have known they would not be worth the eating. Mutton, that was all well; doves, good again; crane, kid; well, I don’t see that I could have done much better.”
After a few minutes he got up half asleep, and put out all the lights but one small lamp, with which he made his way into his own bed-closet. “All is vanity,” he continued, with a slow, grave utterance, “all is vanity but eating and
