CHAPTER XVI

TALES BY THE WAY

King Richard II., iii. 2.

Apart from the fatigues of travel and the necessary uncertainty and anxiety, the journey of eight hundred miles towards Constantinople was as pleasant for Chrysostom as his captors could make it. The modern love for beautiful scenery was in those days but little developed; but John was one of the few who keenly enjoyed the beauties of Nature, and he could not be indifferent to the glorious scenes through which the journey lay. When they did not arrive at their station till after dusk he would often sit silent, gazing on the stars—’those eternal flowers of heaven,’ as St. Basil calls them—and musing on his own unknown future, and on the little lives of men. He was also deeply interested in seeing the home of St. Paul’s boyhood as they passed through Tarsus, and looked on the silver Cydnus, up which Cleopatra had rowed in her gilded barge.

Had the circumstances been less mysterious Philip would have been wild with delight as he galloped among the soldiery of the escort. He felt the exhilaration of change and exercise, and new glimpses of the great world; and he was naturally a favourite with the soldiers, who delighted in his witty Antiochene jokes and in his buoyant freshness of spirits, while they were struck with the genuine innocence and sweetness of his character. He did not share their rough quarters, but took his meals with Chrysostom and the two great officials, and slept at his master’s feet, or in an anteroom.

They reached Pessinus, the capital of Galatia, after 108 several days of almost unbroken travel. There Chrysostom and Philip looked with interest on the legend-haunted heights of Mount Dindymus, and saw the ancient temple of the mother of the gods, in which the Emperor Julian had recently paid his devotions.

Amantius and Aurelian had become more and more attached to their captive and his young companion; they no longer made any secret of the fact that they were conveying him to Constantinople. They pretended that it would be as much as their lives were worth to say why he was wanted; and he could not himself even form a guess, for he dismissed as preposterous the only conjecture which flitted across his mind. That he could have been elevated to the Patriarchate of Constantinople seemed to him an absurdity; and he would have shuddered at the prospect instead of being elated by it.

The sight of the Temple of Cybele, from which the heaven-fallen image had been carried to Rome six centuries earlier, naturally turned their thoughts to heathen idolatry, and as they rested in the evening Aurelian said:

‘Idolatry is, I suppose, nearly as ancient as mankind itself; but such is the epoch in which we live that I have myself seen it receive its deathblows.’

‘Do you refer to the edicts of Theodosius?’ asked Chrysostom, ‘or to Ambrose’s crushing answer to Symmachus, when he pleaded with Gratian to restore the altar of victory in the Senate-house of Rome?’

‘No. I refer to the destruction of the Temple of Serapis and the battle of Frigidus. I was present at both.’

‘Do tell us about the destruction of the Serapeum.’

‘It was an event of deep interest,’ said Aurelian, ‘but I wish I could regard it with unmixed approval. The Christians, especially the monks, after Theodosius had forbidden sacrifices in 386, had headed many furious assaults on temples. Heathens like Libanius say that they found their account in doing so. They did not always escape unpunished. Rustic populations were passionately devoted to ancient shrines, like this one as Pessinus, which were mixed up with all their memories and traditions. You have, no doubt, heard how Marcellus, the lame Bishop of Apamea, was killed in his attack on 109 the great Temple of Jupiter. But no temple was so famous as that of Serapis. It had been founded by the first Ptolemy, and Alexandria itself was called “The City of Serapis.” The temple stood on a mound which was ascended by a hundred marble steps. It was of enormous size, had a great library, and was full of exquisite statues and precious works of art. The very walls were covered with plates of silver and gold. The rising of the Nile, and therefore the prosperity and almost the existence of Egypt, was, by the mass of the population, believed to depend on the favour of Serapis. Libanius had unwisely taunted Theodosius with leaving untouched the great temples at Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria, while he allowed the smaller temples to be assaulted, destroyed, and, alas! plundered by the monks. Theophilus of Alexandria, saving his reverence a bold, bad man, at once sanguinary and avaricious——’

‘Hush!’ said Chrysostom, who never hesitated to rebuke even the greatest if he thought it a duty.

‘Well,’ said Aurelian, ‘he really is all I say, and worse; and the blessed Paul told the High Priest that he was a whited wall.’

‘Yes,’ answered Chrysostom, ‘but directly he knew that he was the High Priest he apologised, and said, “It is written, Thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of thy people.”’

‘I stand corrected, John,’ answered Aurelian with a smile, for he was a soldier, and admired straightforward courage. ‘But to continue. Theophilus had already profaned and dismantled a temple of Osiris, and the worshippers of Serapis, fearing the next step, garrisoned the Serapeum. The Christians assembled to attack it, and there would have been bloodshed, but the magistrates secured a truce till the Emperor could be consulted. Theodosius decided for the demolition of the temple, in revenge for the Christian prisoners whom the Pagans had tortured and killed. It was at once despoiled and demolished. But when the multitude entered the shrine where the huge gilded idol sat enthroned, with the basket on his head and the three-headed monster in his right hand, they paused in superstitious dread. Heaven and 110 earth would collapse, it was believed, if the majesty of the god were violated. But one of my rude soldiers had no such fear. He put a ladder against the statue, and ascended it, amid the breathless silence of the multitude, with a huge battle-axe in his hand. Then the audacious legionary dashed his axe on the face of the image with all his force, and smote off its cheek. The mob expected to see him struck dead or blind; but no lightning flashed, no cloud darkened the blue of heaven. He smote again and again, while the hall rang with the echo of his blows. In a minute or two the hollow head of the image rolled with a clang on the marble floor, and out sprang an immemorial colony of rats, whose home had been thus rudely invaded. No sooner did the mob see the black, voracious creatures leaping and scurrying off in every direction than superstition was changed into angry contempt. The protector of heaven and earth had not been even able to protect his own rats! The people broke into shouts of laughter, swarmed up the pedestal, tore down the image, tripudiated on its shattered fragments as they dragged them through the mire of the streets, and ultimately flung them into a huge bonfire. There was a little delay in the rising of the Nile, and when it did rise it threatened a deluge. “Serapis,” they murmured, “will avenge himself.” But no; the waters sank to the due fertilising height, and even in Alexandria Serapis will never be worshipped more!’

Chrysostom listened, and mused.

‘But, sir,’ said Philip, modestly, to Aurelian, ‘you said you had also witnessed the other deathblow to Paganism.’

‘Ah! I see,’ said Aurelian, ‘your youthful blood is all on fire to hear about battles. I have been in many. Believe me they are frightful things, even when we are victors. I remember only too well the massacre of Adrianople. I was near the person of the Emperor Valens on that awful August 9, 378. It was only by a moment’s delay that I was shut out of the cottage in which he was burnt to death with his followers, while the barbarians were massacring two-thirds of the Roman army, of which, but for the darkness, none would have escaped. Alas! it was the Nemesis of our crimes! If Valens admitted the Goths over the Danube to the hospitality of Roman territory, 111 he should not have suffered them to be insulted and starved. Yet, even after the retribution of Adrianople we were guilty, that very year, of the horrid butchery of all the deceived and unarmed Gothic youth, which I for one regard as the most frightful of all evil omens and hateful crimes.’

‘I would not ask you about those shocking scenes,’ said Philip; ‘but how did the battle of the Frigidus put an end to Paganism?’

‘I must answer you briefly,’ said Aurelian. ‘It was September 6, 394; Eugenius, the puppet-emperor of Arbogast the Gaul, had pretended to espouse the cause of the Pagans. In the mountainous passes he had placed statues of Jupiter, with his right hand uplifted as though to strike, and armed with golden thunderbolts. The battle was very risky, for Arbogast had posted his forces with great skill. The first day the enemy got the best of it. The Goths of Arbogast routed those under Gaïnas and slew 10,000 of them. Theodosius, pressed by many of his generals, would have retreated to a safer encampment, if he had not thought that this would look like a defeat of Christianity. “Our Labarum, which bears the cross on it,” he cried, “shall never retreat before the image of Heracles.”

‘There was among the allies one superb young Goth, named Alaric, who, if I am not much mistaken, will be heard of again; he, almost alone, urged the Emperor to renew the battle. The enemy spent the night in songs and revelries; Theodosius spent it in prayer. When he slept he saw two terrible figures on white horses, who told him that they were St. John and St. Philip come to fight for him. Next morning he dared not narrate the dream to his troops, lest they should think it a fiction, until a soldier said he had dreamt the very same thing. Then Theodosius told his vision. His robe was wet with tears, and when he took it off to don his cuirass he hung the wet purple garment on a tree, as though in silent appeal to Heaven. Our men were filled with wild enthusiasm; but even then I doubt whether we should have won if suddenly—may I say supernaturally?—the bora, the blinding, driving, sleet-laden whirlwind of these mountains, had not burst in the very faces of Arbogast’s troops. We 112 rushed upon them in the track of the storm, and utterly routed them. Theodosius charged into the thick of the fray, shouting, “Where is the Lord God of Theodosius?” Eugenius was not fighting, as Theodosius did, in the forefront of the battle, but his tent was pitched on a knoll at a safe distance, and he sat in the tent-door in his purple and his diadem. He was seized by soldiers who, he fancied, had come to drag Theodosius a captive into his presence. They tore off his purple and dragged him to the feet of his conqueror, where he prostrated himself, trembling. Theodosius upbraided him with the murder of the young Valentinian. While he was pleading for life one of the soldiers swept off his head with a sword, and put it on a pike. Then our men flung down the statues of Jupiter, and, seizing the golden thunderbolts, took them to Theodosius. “Keep them for yourselves,” said the Emperor, who was in one of his gayest moods. “Thank you, Emperor!” said the soldiers; “may we often be smitten by such thunderbolts!” Theodosius rolled in his saddle with laughter at their rough wit. They took up the laugh—and so Paganism perished, at Alexandria and at the Frigidus, in two shouts of mirth!’

‘How sad that Theodosius should have died so soon after his great victory!’ said Chrysostom. ‘But John, the Egyptian hermit, prophesied that it would be so.’

‘Yes! he exchanged the laurelled car for the coffin, and passed from triumph to the funeral. He has died just when he was most needed. You are hardly likely to have read the verses of a new and splendid Roman poet named Claudian, the eulogist of Stilico, but he makes the dying Theodosius say, and quite truly—you understand Latin?—

Res incompositas, fateor, tumidasque reliqui.’⁷⁷Claudian, De Bell. Gild., vi. 293.

‘Were you with him when he died?’

‘I was. I was on guard, and a wonderfully pretty and touching scene took place in his sick-room. Knowing that his last hour was near, he sent for his younger son, Honorius, then little more than a child. The Emperor 113 was so weak that he could not preside all day at the games of the circus given in honour of his victory; so in the afternoon the little boy Honorius took his place. To secure the allegiance of Stilico he married the boy to Maria, the daughter of Stilico and Serena, his niece, who had always had a great influence over him. The two lovely children knelt by his bedside—Honorius with his placid, regular features, and Maria with her rosy cheeks and long golden locks. Stilico was there, his white head nobly conspicuous as he towered over the rest of the courtiers. The beautiful Serena bent over her little daughter. She wore the superb necklace of pearls which she took, perhaps wrongly, from the neck of the statue of Rhea, the mother of the gods.’

‘Did not the old Vestal Virgin prophesy that one day she would be strangled with that very necklace?’ asked Amantius.

‘Ay,’ said Aurelian, ‘but I don’t think it likely that the prophecy will be fulfilled. I could tell you many more incidents. I witnessed, for instance, the murder of that bright youth, the Emperor Gratian. But we must now go to sleep, for we have a long ride before us to-morrow.’

At Nicæa, on the eastern shore of Lake Ascanius, Chrysostom visited with deep interest the church in which, seventy-two years earlier, the first Christian emperor had been present at the first great Œcumenical Council. From thence a day’s journey brought them to Nicomedia, the capital of Bithynia, the favourite residence of Diocletian before his

and he retired to find greater happiness in the cultivation of cabbages at Salona. As they passed the village of Ancyron the chariots were stayed for half an hour that Chrysostom might visit the house and the room in which the great Constantine had ended the splendid and troubled dream of his strange life.

He suggested that evening that Amantius should enliven their journey with some of his reminiscences.

‘I have been, naturally,’ said Amantius, with a sigh, ‘a 114 man of peace; yet I have seen one or two scenes which interested me in the East, as Aurelian has in the West. He has said something about the great Ambrose. I could tell you something about the great Basil and his brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and his friend, Gregory of Nazianzus; something, too, about the Emperor Julian and his ways.’

‘Tell us something about Basil of Cæsarea,’ said Chrysostom.

‘The only time I saw him,’ said Amantius, ‘was in the great cathedral of his metropolis. The Emperor Valens was not only an Arian, but a persecutor. He entered the densely thronged cathedral with his spear-bearers—it is nearly twenty years ago—to overawe Basil into communicating with the Arians. The people were pressing on each other like the waves of the sea, and were thundering forth the Psalms of the day. Behind the Holy Table, facing the people, stood the Archbishop, his crosier in his hand, the episcopal ring on his finger, the white pallium, embroidered with its four crosses, over his shoulder. He stood there tall, stately, immovable as a statue. His beard was long and white, his features thin but noble; his ardent gaze was fixed on the Holy Table; the presbyters stood round him, and the fervour of devotion and beauty of holiness which reigned through the church so struck the timid and conscientious, though cruel, Emperor, that when he came to present his offering he tottered, and would have fallen heavily to the ground if a presbyter had not caught him in his arms. But Valens inspired no respect. The mob of Constantinople openly jeered at him when he went to meet his fate, and from the walls of Chalcedon the people insulted him with shouts of ”Sabaiarius,” or “small-beer drinker.” If they had behaved in that way to his brother, Valentinian I., he would have flung them wholesale to his two bears, Golden-Flake and Innocence, which he kept in a den near his bedroom, and fed on human flesh.’

‘The brute!’ said Philip, sotto voce.

‘Basil was as great in the East as Ambrose in the West,’ said Chrysostom; ‘but Philip whispers to me that he is dying to know whether you witnessed the murder of Rufinus.’

‘Yes; and a grim sight it was. Rufinus did not feel a 115 doubt that on that very day Arcadius would nominate him Augustus. His purple, his diadem, his Court, his largesses, his banquets, his unequalled palace of “The Oak,” at Chalcedon, were all prepared; the oration of thanks was hovering on his lips. He had been baptised by Gregory of Nyssa. The holy Ammonius, one of the four “Tall Brothers” of Egypt, had stood sponsor for him. He was murdered in the Hebdomon, seven miles from Constantinople, just after the golden coffin of Theodosius had laid in state in the Church of the Apostles, with the livid face exposed. Rufinus was so eagerly impatient for the consummation of his ambition, which should turn the provincial cobbler’s son into an emperor, that he had the audacity to pull Arcadius by his purple robe to hurry him on. Then the chief Gaïnas and his Goths closed round him in threatening circle, and a soldier suddenly plunged his sword into his heart. The Emperor’s robe was stained in the blood of his Minister, and he fled in terror. They struck off the head of Rufinus and put it on a pole, fulfilling the prophecy he had received in the morning, “that he should came back that day with his head higher than all.” Then they hacked his body to pieces. One soldier had hewed off his hand, and managed to make the fingers open and shut by the severed tendons. He reaped quite a harvest of money in the streets by carrying round this hand, and crying, “Give an obol to the insatiable!” What a lesson it was of sudden Nemesis in the moment of overweening hopes!’

‘But have you no reminiscences to tell us, John?’ asked Aurelian.

‘Nay,’ answered Chrysostom; ‘what should a humble presbyter like me have to tell? You know all about the affair of the statues at Antioch, and you would hardly care for my trivial experiences in a lonely mountain cave. Yet—let me see—I can tell you one little anecdote. You know that Valens, who was intensely superstitious, was at one time in a paroxysm of alarm about magic.’

‘Why was that?’ asked Philip.

‘Because a group of foolish persons at Antioch had tried by Pagan sorcery to discover the name of his successor. They wrote the letters of the alphabet in a circle, 116 and held a ring by a hair in the middle of the circle after elaborate incantations. The ring vibrated till it had touched in succession the letters THEOD. But, besides this, it was afterwards declared that the letters magically chosen were in four heroic verses, which said that the successor of Valens would be a great prince; that they would be put to death for their curiosity, but that vengeance would fall on their murderers, who would perish by fire on the Plains of Mimas. No one knew what was meant by “the Plains of Mimas” till after Valens was burnt alive in the peasant’s cottage near Adrianople, when they found there an old tomb inscribed with the words, “Here lies Mimas, a Macedonian Captain.”

‘The result of the divination was whispered abroad. Filled with fury and jealousy, Valens began to take vengeance. Woe to the man whose name began with Theod! Many Theodoruses and Theodotuses were put to death, and many changed their names; but, after all, his real successor, Theodosius, escaped, for he was then living as a private gentleman on his Spanish farm. But the horrors of that day will not soon be forgotten. Spies and informers sprang up, and flourished like a crop of mushrooms on rotten wood. The punishments were frightful. I myself’—he said, with a shudder—’saw the philosopher Simonides burnt alive in the Forum of Antioch. He died laughing, saying “He fled from life as from a mad mistress.” One youth was executed for possessing a magic book, another for using a love-spell. An old woman perished for curing the daughter of a proconsul of fever by a crooning song, a boy for getting rid of a stomach-ache by muttering the vowels of the alphabet. The world went mad with silly superstition. Whole libraries were destroyed by the owners, lest they should be condemned to torture or death for being the unconscious possessors of a single book of sorcery. Many valuable works have thus perished for ever. Well, in those days of grotesque and horrible panic, when one was almost afraid to speak above a whisper, I was walking to the martyry of St. Babylas with my friend Theodore, now Bishop of Mopsuestia. He was in great danger, humble as he was, because of the fatal Theod in his name. We were walking 117 under the flowering groves on the banks of the Orontes, when we saw something white floating on the river. It looked like the leaves of a book, and, moved by curiosity, we fished it out of the water with our staves. What was our horror when a glance showed us that the papyrus was written all over with magic formulæ. A soldier was close at hand. We suspected that he was an informer, and had laid a trap for us. We wrapped a stone in the leaves and flung them into the middle of the river. For days afterwards we were in an agony of apprehension; but by the mercy of God nothing came of it. If the soldier had seen us we should have been lost. To this day I count it as my greatest deliverance from imminent peril.’

‘He was a poor creature—that Valens,’ said Aurelian.

The next evening they reached Chalcedon, and the waters of the sea shone before them like a sheet of gold. Across the narrow strait of the Bosporus they saw the gleaming walls and towers and palaces of Constantinople, the new Rome.