CHAPTER XXVIII

INEVITABLE NEMESIS

The next morning was Sunday, and never—not even at the most sumptuous of Easter festivities—had so vast a congregation thronged the ample spaces of St. Sophia. Nave, tribunes, galleries, porticoes, were filled, till there was no standing-room—not so much by worshippers as by multitudes eager for new and powerful emotions. Virgins had quitted their chambers, women had left the Gynæceum empty, men had deserted the Forum and the Hippodrome. The Emperor and the Empress were present in the royal pew, in the centre of groups of betitled and bejewelled officials; scarcely a præfect, patrician, or illustris was absent; and soldiers in their glittering armour were mingled with the crowd.

After the service Chrysostom advanced to the ambo, and seated himself for his discourse. In the dead silence he perused for a moment the sea of upturned faces. Many of them were fixed on him in bitter anger because he had snatched their enemy from destruction. On other faces gleamed and flickered the vulgar joy of the base at the fall of the great into calamity. Others showed only the idle curiosity which makes dread disasters the sources of pleasurable sensation, provided only that they fall on their neighbours, not upon themselves.

It was just such a moment as that in Notre Dame when as vast a multitude watched Massillon mount the pulpit before which lay the coffin containing the mortal remains of Louis XIV., and when, after a pause, he began 219 his sermon and melted all to tears by the simple words, ’God alone is great.’

Chrysostom ordered the curtains of the presbytery to be thrown back, and there the assembled multitude beheld the man whom a single day had hurled from the summit of human eminence to the lowest deep of human misery. He was lying under the altar, a pitiable spectacle, pale as a corpse, clinging convulsively to one of its golden pillars. If he raised for a moment his miserable face, he saw the dense throng of soldiers who had formed part of his escort, of slaves to whom his nod was law, of citizens who had shouted applause to him for hours in public places. Higher up, in the gilded gallery, he saw the Empress whom he had elevated from insignificance, the Emperor whom he had treated like a tame animal. Then the voice of the sacred orator fell upon his ears, saying

‘” Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; vanity of vanities—all is vanity!“ True always, it never seemed more true than now. Where now is the splendour of the Consulate? Where the gleaming of lamps and torches, the acclamations, the dances, the festivities, the joyous assemblies? Where are the crowns and Tyrian tapestries? The flattering murmur of the city, the greetings of the Circus, the flatteries of thousands of spectators—where are they now? All that is past. The hurricane has swept down upon the tree, and not only scattered all its leaves, but upturned it by the roots, and whirled it to the earth. Where are the false friends, the swarms of parasites, the tables laden with viands, the goblets crowned with luscious wines and passing all day long from hand to hand, the delicacies of banquets, the soft murmurs of the slaves of power? What has become of it all? It has vanished like a dream when one awakes; it has faded like a flower of the spring under the sirocco; it has disappeared like a shadow. It is scattered like a vapour, bursten like a bubble, torn like a spider’s web. Say, then, say ever, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!” Write it on your walls, on your garments, in your Forum, in your streets, on your houses, on your windows, on your gates. Write it most of all on your consciences, that it may be ever present to your thoughts. Reiterate it at all your 220 banquets, and in worldly assemblies let each repeat it to his neighbour: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!”

‘And thou,’ he cried, turning to Eutropius, ‘said I not to thee incessantly that riches make to themselves wings and flee away, and thou wouldst not listen? Said I not to thee that popularity was vain as the smoke and lukewarm water of mouth-friends, caring only for their own interests? Thou wouldst not believe me. And now experience hath shown thee that wealth is not only a thankless but a murderous slave. I became thine enemy because I told thee the truth; but said I not, “I am a truer friend to thee than they that flatter thee”? Warned I thee not that faithful are the wounds of a friend, deceitful the kisses of an enemy? Hadst thou borne my wounds thou hadst not been destroyed by their kisses. My wounds were health, their kisses death. Where now are the songs which welcomed thee? Where the army of slaves who cleared the way before thine omnipotence? They have deserted to thy foes, they deny thy favours. But I, whom thou couldst barely endure, have not abandoned thee, and now in thy fall it is I alone who support and solace thee. Thou foughtest against the Church, and the Church has opened her arms to receive thee; thou favouredst the theatres, and they are shrieking for thy head. When I warned thee not to tread thus gaily the road to ruin, thou, with a shrug of disdain, wouldst fly to the Circus. Lo! the Circus multitude, enriched by thy lavishness, whets the sword to slay thee; the Church, troubled by thy rage, is running hither and thither to snatch thee from thy misfortunes!’

And then the thought seemed to strike the Archbishop that he had been too severe—that he had not sufficiently tempered his words with pity for the fallen. It was from no lack of tenderness and compassion; it was from the abstract impersonal light in which he regarded the whole scene. The poor fallen wretch had been the enemy of the Church, and he was no obscure criminal, to be either punished or pardoned, and then doomed to swift oblivion. He had played his part on the world’s most brilliant stage; he was a man whom God had smitten with His thunder, on whom in all his guilt God’s messenger was now ‘pronouncing 221 the humiliation of pardon.’ The Archbishop had often reproved Eutropius for avarice, rapacity, injustice. The Minister’s fall could not alter the mean estimate Chrysostom had formed of his character, and he almost forgot the personal feelings of the sufferer, almost ceased to regard him as one that suffered, in the strangeness of the spectacle, and in the desire to point to the frovolous multitude of nominal Christians—above all to guilty, grasping, luxurious nobles and officials, and to the wealthy classes in general—the terrible object-lesson which, from the speaker’s point of view, their Saviour Himself had brought before their eyes. No doubt a man less inflexible of character, less rigid in his unsparing righteousness—man with more knowledge of the world, and trained in the midst of political affairs rather than by monks and hermits—would have managed the occasion with finer adaptability. His enemies declared that he had been merciless to the unfortunate. It was, indeed, the last thing which he had intended, and in the simpleness of his integrity he doubtless imagined that he had sufficiently proved the sincerity of his compassion by the generous sacrifice—by the sacrifice even of life itself—which he had been ready to make to protect the Church’s suppliant. Still, as the thought crossed his mind that haply his language might have seemed harsh, he paused, and said:

‘Nay, think not that I desire for a moment to insult a fallen man; my aim is to forewarn those who stand, and to bid them take heed lest they fall. I stand not here to fret the sores of the wounded, but to preserve the health of those who have no wounds; not to roll the billows over the head of the shipwrecked, but to point out the hidden reefs to those whose sails are swelled by the favouring wind as their prow cleaves the gleaming sea. Who was ever so great as this man? What living man in all the world could rival him in wealth? Consul, Patrician, Præfect of the Sacred Chamber—what honour was lacking to his Eminence? He was the envy of all men, and now he is as naked as the slave, indigent as the beggar. Drawn swords, and pits, and tortures, and the path that leads to execution, are ever before his eyes. These are the things, not the pleasures which he has exhausted, which crowd 222 his vision. Why paint the picture which is before your very eyes? Behold him!

‘I say again I desire not to insult his misery, but to touch your hearts, to warn your consciences, to make of his misfortunes angels to speak trumpet-tongued to your carelessness. I know that there are some of you who reproach me for having sheltered him. Wherein am I to blame? He used, you say, to attack the Church. Yes! but now he has taken refuge there. Should we not thank God that the enemy of the Church has recognised her mercy and her power? Her power—for she has won the victory; her pity—for she has pardoned him, and folded over him the wings of her protection. Should not Jews and Pagans blush to see, in his presence here, the trophy of her greatness? He denied her privileges; he strove to deconsecrate her sanctuary. He has himself fled to that sanctuary, and, tenderly as a mother, she hides him under her inviolable veil from the resentment of the Emperor and the fury of the mob! Look at yonder Holy Table! It is adorned with gold and precious stones; but its richest ornament is the fugitive who crouches there.

‘An ornament? you cry. This man, so greedy, so rapacious, so unjust. How can this criminal adorn the altar which he strove to violate? Ah! silence! Should you not think of Him who suffered the harlot, out of whom he had cast seven devils, to wash His feet with her tears, and wipe them with the hairs of her head? Of Him Who, when brutal soldiers were nailing Him to the cross, still breathed the prayer, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Murmur not that the man who would fain have closed our asylum should avail himself of it, for by so doing he has established its sacredness. The Church is as a monarch, who is not greatest when he sits on his throne in purple, with the circle of sovereignty upon his brow, but when barbarians, their hands bound behind their backs, lie vanquished at his feet. Come, then, let us now celebrate the Holy Mysteries, and afterwards we will go in a body to the Emperor to implore for Eutropius his pity and his pardon, and to lay the golden ears of the harvest of our compassion before his feet!’

The scene was too memorably striking to be ever 223 forgotten by those who witnessed it, and the discourse of Chrysostom was too impassioned not to leave the deepest impression. But the courage of the Patriarch and the protection of the Church were all in vain. So long as Eutropius lay hidden in the sanctuary St. Sophia continued to be almost in a state of siege, and the Forum outside was the scene of incessant tumults. The eunuch himself grew weary of his incarceration. Death itself seemed hardly less intolerable than the blank and impotent existence—dishonoured, aimless, unoccupied—to which he was now reduced. The perpetual moaning in his ears of chants and litanies; the sight of no one but presbyters, deacons, and acolytes in the small dim chambers behind the apse; the voices which insulted him; the eyes which glared fiercely upon him, if he stepped into the sacrarium; the days so deadly with unbroken ennui; the nights haunted with ghastly visions; the perpetual sense of the presence of religion without any of its consolations became altogether too much for the miserable man. His overwhelming misfortune presented a contemptible spectacle, because it was unredeemed by one touch of the dignity which it would have derived from repentance or resignation. The sole thing left him was bare life, and he clung to bare life, but not under the dreary conditions which now dazed and stunned him. On the Wednesday, as he was sitting in the sacrarium in infinite despair, he saw Typhos, the brother of Aurelian, beckoning to him. He stepped within hearing distance, and Typhos promised him that if he would give himself up without tumult or resistance his life would be spared, and he should be sent to the island of Cyprus. ’Give me,’ said Eutropius, ‘the Emperor’s oath that I shall not be slain, and I will give myself up.’

Next day he received the Emperor’s sworn assurance, and in the dusk of evening, when the church was empty, he left the sanctuary. He was hurried in the darkness to a ship which lay by the quay in the Bosporus, and it at once spread sail for Cyprus.

But the moment the news was known it became manifest that his enemies would not be content with any such deportation. Is this, they said, a sufficient punishment for 224 his many crimes? and what guarantee have we that he may not creep back again, wind himself once more into the favour of the Emperor, and rule as he did before?

In vain did Arcadius publish a decree of unexampled severity against him, which was to be affixed to the walls in public planes in every city of the Empire. The document is too curious an illustration of the times to be omitted. It ran as follows:

’The Emperors Arcadius and Honorius to Aurelian, Prætorian Præfect.

‘We have confiscated to our Treasury all the property of Eutropius, formerly our Præfect of the Sacred Chamber, having stripped him of his splendour, and delivered the Consulate from the foul stain of his tenure, and from the recollection of his name, and the base filth thereof; so that, all his acts having been repealed, all time may be dumb concerning him; and that the blot of our age may not appear by the mention of him; and that those who by their valour and their wounds extend the Roman borders, or guard the same by equity, may not groan over the fact that the divine guerdon of the Consulship has been befouled and defiled by a filthy monster. Let him learn that he has been degraded from the Consulate and all other dignities which he stained with the obliquity of his character; that all statues, images, and pictures of him, of every material and colour, be abolished everywhere, that they may not pollute the gaze of beholders as a brand of infamy on our age. Let him be taken under escort of your faithful guards to Cyprus, where let your Sublimity know that he has been banished, so that, being there watchfully guarded, he may be unable to work confusion by his mad designs.

‘Dated January 17, at Constantinople, in the Consulship of Theodorus, a most illustrious man.’¹²¹²The date January 17 is obviously erroneous.

It was a strange thing that Arcadius should be blind to the fact that it was he, and he alone, who had made Eutropius Consul, and that all this talk about the filth and pollution of his mere name redounded to the utter discredit of 225 the Emperor, who was responsible for his entire career, and had until yesterday regarded him with boundless approval. But even this sanguinary proclamation did not suffice. Gaïnas and Tribigild refused to be satisfied with anything less than the head of Eutropius. The Western Empire still openly murmured that his punishment had been wholly inadequate to his crimes. True that the Emperor had pledged his oath that the eunuch’s life should be spared, but the oath must be got rid of by any chicanery. Arcadius was persuaded to salve his conscience with the unction that he had only promised him safety as long as he was in Constantinople, and that he could be executed on new charges, though not on the old ones. A ridiculous accusation was accordingly trumped up that Eutropius had sometimes placed insignia which were purely imperial among the ornaments of his consular dignity; and, still worse, that he had caused to be yoked to his own chariot the steeds of a peculiar breed and colour, called kosmoi, which were never used by anyone except the Emperor himself. On this trumpery pretext, which was probably an invention for the occasion, and may have had no existence except in the vengeful brain of the Empress Eudoxia and her intimates, the hapless eunuch was dragged back from Cyprus to Chalcedon, seeing on every side of him his own rent pictures and dismantled statues, and there, after the most hurried mockery of a trial, his head was placed under the axe, and a career was ended which, passing in full circle from nameless abjectness, through imperial splendour, to immeasurable degradation, is one of the most dramatically strange which History has ever recorded on her varied page.