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'See those fellows!' cried one; 'they are the waiters at our feast, and
they mock us to our faces! Down with the filthy kitchen thieves!'

'Excellently well said, Davus!--but who is to approach them? They stink
at this distance!'

'The rotten-bodied knaves have the noses of dogs and the carcases of
goats.'

Then came a chorus of voices--'Down with them! Down with them!' In the
midst of which an indignant freedman advanced to rebuke the mob,
receiving, as the reward of his temerity, a shower of missiles and a
volley of curses; after which he was thus addressed by a huge, greasy
butcher, hoisted on his companions' shoulders:--

'By the soul of the emperor, could I get near you, you rogue, I would
quarter you with my fingers alone!--A grinning scoundrel that jeers at
others! A filthy flatterer that dirts the very ground he walks on! By
the blood of the martyrs, should I fling the sweepings of the slaughter-
house at him, he knows not where to get himself dried!'

'Thou rag of a man,' roared a neighbour of the indignant butcher's,
'dost thou frown upon the guests of thy master, the very scrapings of
whose skin are worth more than thy whole carcase! It is easier to make a
drinking-vessel of the skull of a flea than to make an honest man of
such a villainous night-walker as thou art!'

'Health and prosperity to our noble entertainer!' shouted one section of
the grateful crowd as the last speaker paused for breath.

'Death to all knaves of parasites!' chimed in another.

'Honour to the citizens of Rome!' roared a third party with modest
enthusiasm.

'Give that freedman our bones to pick!' screamed an urchin from the
outskirts of the crowd.

This ingenious piece of advice was immediately followed; and the
populace gave vent to a shout of triumph as the unfortunate freedman,
scared by a new volley of missiles, retreated with ignominious
expedition to the shelter of his patron's halls.

In the slight and purified specimen of the 'table talk' of a Roman mob
which we have here ventured to exhibit, the reader will perceive that
extraordinary mixture of servility and insolence which characterised not
only the conversation but the actions of the lower orders of society at
the period of which we write. Oppressed and degraded, on the one hand,
to a point of misery scarcely conceivable to the public of the present
day, the poorer classes in Rome were, on the other, invested with such a
degree of moral license, and permitted such an extent of political
privilege, as flattered their vanity into blinding their sense of
indignation. Slaves in their season of servitude, masters in their hours
of recreation, they presented, as a class, one of the most amazing
social anomalies ever existing in any nation; and formed, in their
dangerous and artificial position, one of the most important of the
internal causes of the downfall of Rome.

The steps of the public baths were almost as crowded as the space before
the neighbouring building. Incessant streams of people, either entering
or departing, poured over the broad flagstones of its marble colonnades.
This concourse, although composed in some parts of the same class of
people as that assembled before the palace, presented a certain
appearance of respectability. Here and there--chequering the dusky
monotony of masses of dirty tunics--might be discerned the refreshing
vision of a clean robe, or the grateful indication of a handsome person.
Little groups, removed as far as possible from the neighbourhood of the
noisy plebeians, were scattered about, either engaged in animated
conversation, or listlessly succumbing to the lassitude induced by a
recent bath. An instant's attention to the subject of discourse among
the more active of these individuals will aid us in pursuing our social
revelations.

The loudest voice among the speakers at this particular moment proceeded
from a tall, thin, sinister-looking man, who was haranguing a little
group of listeners with great vehemence and fluency.

'I tell you, Socius,' said he, turning suddenly upon one of his
companions, 'that, unless new slave-laws are made, my calling is at an
end. My patron's estate requires incessant supplies of these wretches.
I do my best to satisfy the demand, and the only result of my labour is,
that the miscreants either endanger my life, or fly with impunity to
join the gangs of robbers infesting our woods.'

'Truly I am sorry for you; but what alteration would you have made in
the slave-laws?'

'I would empower bailiffs to slay upon the spot all slaves whom they
thought disorderly, as an example to the rest!'

'What would such a permission avail you? These creatures are necessary,
and such a law would exterminate them in a few months. Can you not
break their spirit with labour, bind their strength with chains, and
vanquish their obstinacy with dungeons?'

'All this I have done, but they die under the discipline, or escape from
their prisons. I have now three hundred slaves on my patron's estates.
Against those born on our lands I have little to urge. Many of them, it
is true, begin the day with weeping and end it with death; but for the
most part, thanks to their diurnal allowance of stripes, they are
tolerably submissive. It is with the wretches that I have been obliged
to purchase from prisoners of war and the people of revolted towns that
I am so dissatisfied. Punishments have no effect on them, they are
incessantly indolent, sulky, desperate. It was but the other day that
ten of them poisoned themselves while at work in the fields, and fifty
more, after setting fire to a farm-house while my back was turned,
escaped to join a gang of their companions, who are now robbers in the
woods. These fellows, however, are the last of the troop who will
perpetrate such offences. With the concurrence of my patron, I have
adopted a plan that will henceforth tame them efficiently!'

'Are you at liberty to communicate it?'

'By the keys of St. Peter, I wish I could see it practised on every
estate in the land! It is this:--Near a sulphur lake at some distance
from my farm-house is a tract of marshy ground, overspread here and
there by the ruins of an ancient slaughter-house. I propose to dig in
this place several subterranean caverns, each of which shall be capable
of holding twenty men. Here my mutinous slaves shall sleep after their
day's labour. The entrances shall be closed until morning with a large
stone, on which I will have engraven this inscription: 'These are the
dormitories invented by Gordian, bailiff of Saturninus, a nobleman, for
the reception of refractory slaves.'

'Your plan is ingenious; but I suspect your slaves (so insensible to
hardships are the brutal herd) will sleep as unconcernedly in their new
dormitories as in their old.'

'Sleep! It will be a most original species of repose that they will
taste there! The stench of the sulphur lake will breathe Sabian odours
for them over a couch of mud! Their anointing oil will be the slime of
attendant reptiles! Their liquid perfumes will be the stagnant oozings
from their chamber roof! Their music will be the croaking of frogs and
the humming of gnats; and as for their adornments, why, they will be
decked forth with head-garlands of twining worms, and movable brooches
of cockchafers and toads! Tell me now, most sagacious Socius, do you
still think that amidst such luxuries as these my slaves will sleep?'

'No; they will die.'

'You are again wrong. They will curse and rave perhaps, but that is of
no consequence. They will work the longer above ground to shorten the
term of their repose beneath. They will wake at an instant's notice,
and come forth at a moment's signal. I have no fear of their dying!'

'Do you leave Rome soon?'

'I go this evening, taking with me such a supply of trustworthy
assistants as will enable me to execute my plan without delay.
Farewell, Socius!'

'Most ingenious of bailiffs, I bid you farewell!'

As the worthy Gordian stalked off, big with the dignity of his new
projects, the gestures and tones of a man who formed one of a little
group collected in a remote part of the portico he was about to quit
attracted his attention. Curiosity formed as conspicuous an ingredient
in this man's character as cruelty. He stole behind the base of a
neighbouring pillar; and, as the frequent repetition of the word 'Goths'
struck his ear (the report of that nation's impending invasion having by
this time reached Rome), he carefully disposed himself to listen with
the most implicit attention to the speaker's voice.

'Goths!' cried the man, in the stern, concentrated accents of despair.
'Is there one among us to whom this report of their advance upon Rome
does not speak of hope rather than of dread? Have we a chance of rising
from the degradation forced on us by our superiors until this den of
heartless triflers and shameless cowards is swept from the very earth
that it pollutes!'

'Your sentiments on the evils of our condition are undoubtedly most
just,' observed a fat, pompous man, to whom the preceding remarks had
been addressed, 'but I cannot desire the reform you so ardently hope
for. Think of the degradation of being conquered by barbarians!'

'I am the exile of my country's privileges. What interest have I in
upholding her honour--if honour she really has!' replied the first
speaker.

'Nay! Your expressions are too severe. You are too discontented to be
just.'

'Am I! Hear me for a moment, and you will change your opinion. You see
me now by my bearing and appearance superior to yonder plebeian herd.
You doubtless think that I live at my ease in the world, that I can feel
no anxiety for the future about my bodily necessities. What would you
say were I to tell you that if I want another meal, a lodging for to-
night, a fresh robe for tomorrow, I must rob or flatter some great man
to gain them? Yet so it is. I am hopeless, friendless, destitute. In
the whole of the Empire there is not an honest calling in which I can
take refuge. I must become a pander or a parasite--a hired tyrant over
slaves, or a chartered groveller beneath nobles--if I would not starve
miserably in the streets, or rob openly in the woods! This is what I
am. Now listen to what I was. I was born free. I inherited from my
father a farm which he had successfully defended from the encroachments
of the rich, at the expense of his comfort, his health, and his life.
When I succeeded to his lands, I determined to protect them in my time
as studiously as he had defended them in his. I worked
unintermittingly: I enlarged my house, I improved my fields, I
increased my flocks. One after another I despised the threats and
defeated the wiles of my noble neighbours, who desired possession of my
estate to swell their own territorial grandeur. In process of time I
married and had a child. I believed that I was picked out from my race
as a fortunate man--when one night I was attacked by robbers: slaves
made desperate by the cruelty of their wealthy masters. They ravaged my
cornfields, they deprived me of my flocks. When I demanded redress, I
was told to sell my lands to those who could defend them--to those rich
nobles whose tyranny had organised the band of wretches who had spoiled
me of my possessions, and to whose fraud-gotten treasures the government
were well pleased to grant that protection which they had denied to my
honest hoards. In my pride I determined that I would still be
independent. I planted new crops. With the little remnant of my money
I hired fresh servants and bought more flocks. I had just recovered
from my first disaster when I became the victim of a second. I was again
attacked. This time we had arms, and we attempted to defend ourselves.
My wife was slain before my eyes; my house was burnt to the ground; I
myself only escaped, mutilated with wounds; my child soon afterwards
pined and died. I had no wife, no offspring, no house, no money. My
fields still stretched round me, but I had none to cultivate them. My
walls still tottered at my feet, but I had none to rear them again, none
to inhabit them if they were reared. My father's lands were now become
a wilderness to me. I was too proud to sell them to my rich neighbour;
I preferred to leave them before I saw them the prey of a tyrant, whose
rank had triumphed over my industry, and who is now able to boast that
he can travel over ten leagues of senatorial property untainted by the
propinquity of a husbandman's farm. Houseless, homeless, friendless, I
have come to Rome alone in my affliction, helpless in my degradation!
Do you wonder now that I am careless about the honour of my country? I
would have served her with my life and my possessions when she was
worthy of my service; but she has cast me off, and I care not who
conquers her. I say to the Goths--with thousands who suffer the same
tribulation that I now undergo--"Enter our gates! Level our palaces to
the ground! Confound, if you will, in one common slaughter, we that are
victims with those that are tyrants! Your invasion will bring new lords
to the land. They cannot crush it more--they may oppress it less. Our
posterity may gain their rights by the sacrifice of lives that our
country has made worthless. Romans though we are, we are ready to
suffer and submit!"'

He stopped; for by this time he had lashed himself into fury. His eyes
glared, his cheeks flushed, his voice rose. Could he then have seen the
faintest vision of the destiny that future ages had in store for the
posterity of the race that now suffered throughout civilised Europe,
like him--could he have imagined how, in after years, the 'middle
class', despised in his day, was to rise to privilege and power; to hold
in its just hands the balance of the prosperity of nations; to crush
oppression and regulate rule; to soar in its mighty flight above thrones
and principalities, and rank and riches, apparently obedient, but really
commanding;--could he but have foreboded this, what a light must have
burst upon his gloom, what a hope must have soothed him in his despair!

To what further extremities his anger might have carried him, to what
proceedings the indignant Gordian, who still listened from his
concealment, might have had recourse, it is difficult to say; for the
complaints of the ill-fated landholder and the cogitations of the
authoritative bailiff were alike suddenly suspended by an uproar raging
at this moment round a carriage which had just emerged from the palace
we have elsewhere described.

This vehicle looked one mass of silver. Embroidered silk curtains
fluttered all around it, gold ornaments studded its polished sides, and
it held no less a person than the nobleman who had feasted the people
with baskets of meat. This fact had become known to the rabble before
the palace gates. Such an opportunity of showing their exultation in
their bondage, their real servility in their imaginary independence, was
not to be lost; and accordingly they let loose such a torrent of
clamorous gratitude on their entertainer's appearance, that a stranger
in Rome would have thought the city in revolt. They leapt, they ran,
they danced round the prancing horses, they flung their empty baskets
into the air, and patted approvingly their 'fair round bellies'. From
every side, as the carriage moved on, they gained fresh recruits and
acquired new importance. The timid fled before them, the noisy shouted
with them, the bold plunged into their ranks; and the constant burden of
their rejoicing chorus was--'Health to the noble Pomponius! Prosperity
to the senators of Rome, who feast us with their food and give us the
freedom of their theatres! Glory to Pomponius! Glory to the senators!'

Fate seemed on this day to take pleasure in pampering the insatiable
curiosity of Gordian, the bailiff. The cries of the multitude had
scarcely died away in the distance, as they followed the departing
carriage, when the voices of two men, pitched to a low, confidential
tone, reached his ear from the opposite side of the pillar. He peeped
cautiously round, and saw that they were priests.

'What an eternal jester is that Pomponius!' said one voice. 'He is
going to receive absolution, and he journeys in his chariot of state, as
if he were preparing to celebrate his triumph, instead of to confess his
sins!'

'Has he committed, then, a fresh imprudence?'

'Alas, yes! For a senator he is dreadfully wanting in caution! A few
days since, in a fit of passion, he flung a drinking-cup at one of his
female slaves. The girl died on the spot, and her brother, who is also
in his service, threatened immediate vengeance. To prevent disagreeable
consequences to his body, Pomponius has sent the fellow to his estates
in Egypt; and now, from the same precaution for the welfare of his soul,
he goes to demand absolution from our holy and beneficent Church.'

'I am afraid these incessant absolutions, granted to men who are too
careless even to make a show of repentance for their crimes, will
prejudice us with the people at large.'

'Of what consequence are the sentiments of the people while we have
their rulers on our side! Absolution is the sorcery that binds these
libertines of Rome to our will. We know what converted Constantine--
politic flattery and ready absolution; the people will tell you it was
the sign of the Cross.'

'It is true this Pomponius is rich, and may increase our revenues, but
still I fear the indignation of the people.'

'Fear nothing: think how long their old institutions imposed on them,
and then doubt, if you can, that we may shape them to our wishes as we
will. Any deceptions will be successful with a mob, if the instrument
employed to forward them be a religion.'

The voices ceased. Gordian, who still cherished a vague intention of
denouncing the fugitive landholder to the senatorial authorities,
employed the liberty afforded to his attention by the silence of the
priests in turning to look after his intended victim. To his surprise
he saw that the man had left the auditors to whom he had before
addressed himself, and was engaged in earnest conversation in another
part of the portico, with an individual who seemed to have recently
joined him, and whose appearance was so remarkable that the bailiff had
moved a few steps forwards to gain a nearer view of him, when he was
once more arrested by the voices of the priests.

Irresolute for an instant to which party to devote his unscrupulous
attention, he returned mechanically to his old position. Ere long,
however, his anxiety to hear the mysterious communications proceeding
between the landholder and his friend overbalanced his delight in
penetrating the theological secrets of the priests. He turned once
more, but to his astonishment the objects of his curiosity had
disappeared. He stepped to the outside of the portico and looked for
them in every direction, but they were nowhere to be seen. Peevish and
disappointed, he returned as a last resource to the pillar where he had
left the priests, but the time consumed in his investigations after one
party had been fatal to his reunion with the other. The churchmen were
gone.

Sufficiently punished for his curiosity by his disappointment, the
bailiff walked doggedly off towards the Pincian Hill. Had he turned in
the contrary direction, towards the Basilica of St. Peter, he would have
found himself once more in the neighbourhood of the landholder and his
remarkable friend, and would have gained that acquaintance with the
subjects of their conversation, which we intend that the reader shall
acquire in the course of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 4. THE CHURCH.

In the year 324, on the locality assigned by rumour to the martyrdom of
St. Peter, and over the ruins of the Circus of Nero, Constantine erected
the church called the Basilica of St. Peter.

For twelve centuries, this building, raised by a man infamous for his
murders and his tyrannies, stood uninjured amid the shocks which during
that long period devastated the rest of the city. After that time it was
removed, tottering to its base from its own reverend and illustrious
age, by Pope Julius II, to make way for the foundations of the modern
church.

It is towards this structure of twelve hundred years' duration, erected
by hands stained with blood, and yet preserved as a star of peace in the
midst of stormy centuries of war, that we would direct the reader's
attention. What art has done for the modern church, time has effected
for the ancient. If the one is majestic to the eye by its grandeur, the
other is hallowed to the memory by its age.

As this church by its rise commemorated the triumphant establishment of
Christianity as the religion of Rome, so in its progress it reflected
every change wrought in the spirit of the new worship by the ambition,
the prodigality, or the frivolity of the priests. At first it stood
awful and imposing, beautiful in all its parts as the religion for whose
glory it was built. Vast porphyry colonnades decorated its approaches,
and surrounded a fountain whose waters issued from the representation of
a gigantic pine-tree in bronze. Its double rows of aisles were each
supported by forty-eight columns of precious marble. Its flat ceiling
was adorned with beams of gilt metal, rescued from the pollution of
heathen temples. Its walls were decorated with large paintings of
religious subjects, and its tribunal was studded with elegant mosaics.
Thus it rose, simple and yet sublime, awful and yet alluring; in this
its beginning, a type of the dawn of the worship which it was elevated
to represent. But when, flushed with success, the priests seized on
Christianity as their path to politics and their introduction to power,
the aspect of the church gradually began to change. As, slowly and
insensibly, ambitious man heaped the garbage of his mysteries, his
doctrines, and his disputes, about the pristine purity of the structure
given him by God, so, one by one, gaudy adornments and meretricious
alterations arose to sully the once majestic basilica, until the
threatening and reproving apparition of the pagan Julian, when both
Church and churchmen received in their corrupt progress a sudden and
impressive check.

The short period of the revival of idolatry once passed over, the
priests, unmoved by the warning they had received, returned with renewed
vigour to confuse that which both in their Gospel and their Church had
been once simple. Day by day they put forth fresh treatises, aroused
fierce controversies, subsided into new sects; and day by day they
altered more and more the once noble aspect of the ancient basilica.
They hung their nauseous relics on its mighty walls, they stuck their
tiny tapers about its glorious pillars, they wreathed their tawdry
fringes around its massive altars. Here they polished, there they
embroidered. Wherever there was a window, they curtained it with gaudy
cloths; wherever there was a statue, they bedizened it with artificial
flowers; wherever there was a solemn recess, they outraged its religious
gloom with intruding light; until (arriving at the period we write of)
they succeeded so completely in changing the aspect of the building,
that it looked, within, more like a vast pagan toyshop than a Christian
church. Here and there, it is true, a pillar or an altar rose
unencumbered as of old, appearing as much at variance with the frippery
that surrounded it as a text of Scripture quoted in a sermon of the
time. But as regarded the general aspect of the basilica, the decent
glories of its earlier days seemed irrevocably departed and destroyed.

After what has been said of the edifice, the reader will have little
difficulty in imagining that the square in which it stood lost whatever
elevation of character it might once have possessed, with even greater
rapidity than the church itself. If the cathedral now looked like an
immense toyshop, assuredly its attendant colonnades had the appearance
of the booths of an enormous fair.

The day, whose decline we have hinted at in the preceding chapter, was
fast verging towards its close, as the inhabitants of the streets on the
western bank of the Tiber prepared to join the crowds that they beheld
passing by their windows in the direction of the Basilica of St. Peter.
The cause of this sudden confluence of the popular current in once
common direction was made sufficiently apparent to all inquirers who
happened to be near a church or a public building, by the appearance in
such situations of a large sheet of vellum elaborately illuminated,
raised on a high pole, and guarded from contact with the inquisitive
rabble by two armed soldiers. The announcements set forth in these
strange placards were all of the same nature and directed to the same
end. In each of them the Bishop of Rome informed his 'pious and
honourable brethren', the inhabitants of the city, that, as the next
days was the anniversary of the Martyrdom of St. Luke, the vigil would
necessarily be held on that evening in the Basilica of St. Peter; and
that, in consideration of the importance of the occasion, there would be
exhibited, before the commencement of the ceremony, those precious
relics connected with the death of the saint, which had become the
inestimable inheritance of the Church; and which consisted of a branch
of the olive-tree to which St. Luke was hung, a piece of the noose--
including the knot--which had been passed round his neck, and a picture
of the Apotheosis of the Virgin painted by his own hand. After some
sentences expressive of lamentation for the sufferings of the saint,
which nobody read, and which it is unnecessary to reproduce here, the
proclamation went on to state that a sermon would be preached in the
course of the vigil, and that at a later hour the great chandelier,
containing two thousand four hundred lamps, would be lit to illuminate
the church. Finally, the worthy bishop called upon all members of his
flock, in consideration of the solemnity of the day, to abstain from
sensual pleasures, in order that they might the more piously and
worthily contemplate the sacred objects submitted to their view, and
digest the spiritual nourishment to be offered to their understandings.

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