The specific atrocity of such spectacles — unknown to the earlier ages which they called barbarous — was due to the cold-blooded selfishness, the hideous realism of a refined, delicate, aesthetic age.
Continuing Nero Persecutes the Christians,
our selection from Frederic William Farrar. The selection is presented in easy 5 minute installments.
Previously in Nero Persecutes the Christians.
Time: 64-68 AD
Place: Rome
The specific atrocity of such spectacles — unknown to the earlier ages which they called barbarous — was due to the cold-blooded selfishness, the hideous realism of a refined, delicate, aesthetic age. To please these “lisping hawthorn buds,” these debauched and sanguinary dandies, art, forsooth, must know nothing of morality; must accept and rejoice in a “healthy animalism”; must estimate life by the number of its few wildest pulsations; must reckon that life is worthless without the most thrilling experiences of horror or delight! Comedy must be actual shame and tragedy genuine bloodshed. When the play of Afranius, called The Conflagration, was put on the stage, a house must be really burned and its furniture really plundered. In the mime called Laureolus an actor must really be crucified and mangled by a bear and really fling himself down and deluge the stage with blood. When the heroism of Mucius Scaevola was represented, a real criminal must thrust his hand without a groan into the flame and stand motionless while it is being burned. Prometheus must be really chained to his rock and Dirce in very fact be tossed and gored by the wild bull; and Orpheus be torn to pieces by a real bear; and Icarus must really fly, even though he fall and be dashed to death; and Hercules must ascend the funeral pyre and there be veritably burned alive; and slaves and criminals must play their parts heroically in gold and purple till the flames envelop them.
It was the ultimate romance of a degraded and brutalized society. The Roman people, “victors once, now vile and base,” could now only be amused by sanguinary melodrama. Fables must be made realities and the criminal must gracefully transform his supreme agonies into amusements for the multitude by becoming a gladiator or a tragedian. Such were the spectacles at which Nero loved to gaze through his emerald eye-glass. And worse things than these — things indescribable, unutterable. Infamous mythologies were enacted, in which women must play their part in torments of shamefulness more intolerable than death. A St. Peter must hang upon the cross in the Pincian gardens, as a real Laureolus upon the stage. A Christian boy must be the Icarus and a Christian man the Scaevola or the Hercules or the Orpheus of the amphitheatre; and Christian women, modest maidens, holy matrons, must be the Danaids or the Proserpine or worse and play their parts as priestesses of Saturn and Ceres and in blood-stained dramas of the dead. No wonder that Nero became to Christian imagination the very incarnation of evil; the antichrist; the Wild Beast from the abyss; the delegate of the great red Dragon, with a diadem and a name of blasphemy upon his brow. No wonder that he left a furrow of horror in the hearts of men and that, ten centuries after his death, the church of Sta. Maria del Popolo had to be built by Pope Pascal II to exorcise from Christian Rome his restless and miserable ghost!
And it struck them with deeper horror to see that the antichrist, so far from being abhorred, was generally popular. He was popular because he presented to the degraded populace their own image and similitude. The frog-like unclean spirits which proceeded, as it were, out of his mouth were potent with these dwellers in an atmosphere of pestilence. They had lost all love for freedom and nobleness; they cared only for doles and excitement. Even when the infamies of a Petronius had been superseded by the murderous orgies of Tigellinus, Nero was still everywhere welcomed with shouts as a god on earth and saluted on all coins as Apollo, as Hercules, as “the savior of the world.” The poets still assured him that there was no deity in heaven who would not think it an honor to concede to him his prerogatives; that if he did not place himself well in the center of Olympus, the equilibrium of the universe would be destroyed. Victims were slain along his path and altars raised for him — for this wretch, whom an honest slave could not but despise and loathe — as though he was too great for mere human honors. Nay, more, he found adorers and imitators of his execrable example — an Otho, a Vitellius, a Domitian, a Commodus, a Caracalla, a Heliogabalus — to poison the air of the world. The lusts and hungers and furies of the world lamented him and cherished his memory and longed for his return.
And yet, though all bad men — who were the majority — admired and even loved him, he died the death of a dog. Tremendous as was the power of imperialism, the Romans often treated their individual emperors as Nero himself treated the Syrian goddess, whose image he first worshipped with awful veneration and then subjected to the most grotesque indignities, for retribution did not linger and the vengeance fell at once on the guilty Emperor and the guilty city.
“Careless seems the Great Avenger: History’s pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt false systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”
[James Russell Lowell: The Present Crisis.]
The air was full of prodigies. There were terrible storms; the plague wrought fearful ravages. Rumors spread from lip to lip. Men spoke of monstrous births; of deaths by lightning under strange circumstances; of a brazen statue of Nero melted by the flash; of places struck by the brand of heaven in fourteen regions of the city; of sudden darkenings of the sun. A hurricane devastated Campania; comets blazed in the heavens; earthquakes shook the ground. On all sides were the traces of deep uneasiness and superstitious terror. To all these portents, which were accepted as true by Christians as well as by pagans, the Christians would give a specially terrible significance. They strengthened their conviction that the coming of the Lord drew nigh. They convinced the better sort of pagans that the hour of their deliverance from a tyranny so monstrous and so disgraceful was near at hand.
In spite of the shocking servility with which alike the senate and the people had welcomed him back to the city with shouts of triumph, Nero felt that the air of Rome was heavy with curses against his name. He withdrew to Naples and was at supper there on March 19, A.D. 68, the anniversary of his mother’s murder, when he heard that the first note of revolt had been sounded by the brave C. Julius Vindex, prefect of Farther Gaul. He was so far from being disturbed by the news that he showed a secret joy at the thought that he could now order Gaul to be plundered. For eight days he took no notice of the matter. He was only roused to send an address to the senate because Vindex wounded his vanity by calling him Ahenobarbus [1] and “a bad singer.” But when messenger after messenger came from the provinces with tidings of menace, he hurried back to Rome. At last, when he heard that Virginius Rufus had also rebelled in Germany and Galba in Spain, he became aware of the desperate nature of his position.
[1: “Bronze-beard.” Ahenobarbus was the name of a plebeian family to which Nero belonged.]
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