LETTERS

OF LUCIUS M. PISO, FROM ROME, TO FAUSTA, THE DAUGHTER OF GRACCHUS, AT PALMYRA.

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE PALMYRA LETTERS.'

LETTER FOUR.

I PROMISED YOU, Fausta, before the news should reach you in any other way, to relate the occurrences and describe the ceremonies of the day appointed for the dedication of the new Temple of the Sun. The day has now passed, not without incidents of even painful interest to ourselves, and therefore to you, and I sit down to fulfil my engagements.

Vast preparations had been making for the dedication, for many days or even months preceding, and the day arose upon a city full of expectation of the shows, ceremonies, and games, that were to reward their long and patient waiting. For the season of the year, the day was hot, unnaturally so; and the sky filled with those massive clouds, piled like mountains of snow one upon another, which, while they both please the eye by their forms, and veil the fierce splendors of the sun, as they now and then sail across his face, at the same time portend wind and storm. All Rome was early astir. It was ushered in by the criers traversing the streets, and proclaiming the rites and spectacles of the day, what they were, and where to be witnessed, followed by troops of boys, imitating in their grotesque way the pompous declarations of the men of authority, not unfrequently drawing down upon their heads the curses and the batons of the insulted dignitaries. A troop of this sort passed the windows of the room in which Julia and I were sitting at our morning meal. As the crier ended his proclamation, and the shouts of the applauding urchins died away, Milo, who is our attendant in preference to any other and all others, observed,

'That the fellow of a crier deserved to have his head beat about with his own rod, for coming round with his news not till after the greatest show of the day was over.'

'What mean you?' I asked. 'Explain.'

What should I mean,' he replied, but the morning sacrifice at the temple.'

'And what so wonderful,' said Julia, 'in a morning sacrifice? The temples are open every morning, are they not?'

'Yes, truly are they,' rejoined Milo; but not for so great a purpose. Curio wished me to have been there, and says nothing could have been more propitious. They died as the gods love to have them.'

'Was there no bellowing nor struggling, then?' said Julia.

"Neither, Curio assures me; but they met the knife of the priest

as they would the sword of an enemy on the field of battle.'

How say you?' said Julia, quickly, turning pale; 'do I hear aright, Milo, or are you mocking? God forbid that you should speak of a human sacrifice!'

'It is even so, mistress. And why should it not be so? If the favor of the gods, upon whom we all depend, as the priests tell us, is to be purchased so well in no other way, what is the life of one man or of many in such a cause? The great Gallienus, when his life had been less ordered than usual, after the rules of temperance and religion, used to make amends by a few captives slain to Jupiter; to which, doubtless, may be ascribed his prosperous reign. But, as I was saying, there was, as Curio informed me, at the market, not long afterwards, a sacrifice, on the private altar of the temple, of ten captives. Their blood flowed just as the great god of the temple showed himself in the horizon. It would have done you good, Curio said, to see with what a hearty and dexterous zeal Fronto struck the knife into their hearts for to no inferior minister would he delegate the sacred office.'

'Lucius,' cried Julia, 'I thought that such offerings were now no more. Is it so, that superstition yet delights itself in the blood of murdered men?'

'It is just so,' I was obliged to reply. With a people naturally more gentle and humane than we of Rome, this custom would long ago have fallen into disuse. They would have easily found a way, as all people do, to conform their religious doctrine and offerings to their feelings and instincts. But the Romans, by nature and long training, lovers of blood, their country built upon the ruins of others and cemented with blood the taste for it is not easily eradicated. There are temples where human sacrifices have never ceased. Laws have restrained their frequency—have forbidden them under heaviest penalties unless permitted by the state-but these laws ever have been, and are now evaded; and it is the settled purpose of Fronto and others of his stamp to restore to them their lost honors, and make them again, as they used to be, the chief rite in the worship of the gods. I am not sorry, Julia, that your doubts, though so painfully, have yet been so effectually removed.'

Julia had for some time blamed as over-ardent the zeal of the Christians. She had thought that the evil of the existing superstitions was over-estimated, and that it were wiser to pursue a course of more moderation; that a system that nourished such virtues as she found in Portia, in Tacitus, and others like them, could not be so corrupting in its power as the Christians were in the habit of representing it; that if we could succeed in substituting Christianity quietly, without alienating the affections or shocking too violently the prejudices of the believers in the prevailing superstitions, our gain would be double. To this mode of arguing I knew she was impelled by her love and almost reverence of Portia; and how could I blame it, springing from such a cause? I had, almost criminally, allowed her to blind herself in a way she never would have done had her strong mind acted, as on other subjects, untrammelled and free. I was not sorry that Milo had brought before her mind a fact which, however revolting in its horror to such a nature as hers, could not but heal while it wounded.

'Milo,' said Julia, as I ended, 'say now that you have been jesting; that this is a piece of wit with which you would begin in a suitable way an extraordinary day; this is one of your Gallienus fictions.'

VOL. XII.

6

'Before the gods, if never before,' replied Milo, 'I have told you the naked truth. But not the whole-for Curio left me not till he had shown how each had died. Of the ten, but three, he averred, resisted, or died unwillingly. The three were Germans from beyond the Danube - brothers, he said, who had long lain in prison till their bones were ready to start through the skin. Yet were they not ready to die. It seemed as if there was something they longed more even than for life or freedom -to say; but they might as well have been dumb and tongueless, for none understood their barbarous jargon. When they found that their words were in vain, they wrung their hands in their wo, and cried out aloud in their agony. Then, however, at the stern voice of Fronto warning them of the hour, they ceased embraced each other, and received the fatal blow; the others signified their pleasure at dying so rather than to be thrown to wild beasts or left to die by slow degrees within their dungeon's walls. Two rejoiced that it was their fate to pour out their blood upon the altar of a god, and knelt devoutly before the uplifted knife of Fronto. Never, said Curio, was there a more fortunate offering. Aurelian heard the report of it with lively joy, and said that 'now all would go well.' Curio is a good friend of mine; will it please you to hear these things from his own lips?'

'No,' said Julia; 'I would hear no more. I have heard more than enough. How needful, Lucius, if these things are so, that our Christian zeal abate not! I see that this stern and bloody superstition requires that they who would deal with it must carry their lives in their hand, ready to part with nothing so easily, if by so doing they can hew away one of the branches or tear up one of the roots of this ancient and pernicious error. I blame not Probus longer- no, nor the wild rage of Macer.'

'Two, lady, of the captives were of Palmyra; the queen's name and yours were last upon their lips.'

'Great God! how retribution, like a dark pursuing shadow, hangs upon the steps of guilt. Even here it seeks us. Alas, my mother! Heaven grant that these things fall not upon your ears!'

Julia was greatly moved, and sat a long time silent, her face buried in her hands, and weeping. I motioned to Milo to withdraw and say no more. Upon Julia, although so innocent of all wrong-guiltless as an infant of the blame, whatever it may be, which the world fixes upon Zenobia-yet upon her as heavily as upon her great mother fall the sorrows which sooner or later overtake those who for any purpose, in whatever degree selfish, have involved their fellow creatures in useless suffering. Being part of the royal house, Julia feels that she must bear her portion of its burdens. Time alone can cure this grief.

But you are waiting with a woman's impatient curiosity to hear of the dedication.

At the appointed hour we were at the palace of Aurelian on the Palatine, where a procession, pompous as art and rank and numbers could make it, was formed, to move thence by a winding and distant route to the temple near the foot of the Quirinal. Julia repaired with Portia to a place of observation near the temple-I to the palace to join the company of the emperor. Of the gorgeous magnificence of

the procession I shall tell you nothing. It was in extent and variety of pomp and costliness of decoration, a copy of that of the late triumph, and went even beyond the captivating splendor of the example. Roman music-which is not that of Palmyra - lent such charms as it could to our passage through the streets to the temple, from a thousand performers.

The

As we drew near to the lofty fabric, I thought that no scene of such various beauty and magnificence had ever met my eye. temple itself is a work of unrivalled art. In size it surpasses any other building of the same kind in Rome, and for the excellence of workmanship and purity of design, although it may fall below the standard of Hadrian's age, yet for a certain air of grandeur and luxuriance of invention in its details, and lavish profusion of embellishment in gold and silver, no temple nor other edifice of any preceding age ever perhaps resembled it. Its order is the Corinthian, of the Roman form, and the entire building is surrounded by its slender columns, each composed of a single piece of marble. Upon the front is wrought Apollo surrounded by the Hours. The western extremity is approached by a flight of steps of the same breadth as the temple itself. At the eastern there extends beyond the walls to a distance equal to the length of the building a marble platform, upon which stands the altar of sacrifice, and which is ascended by various flights of steps, some little more than a gently rising plain, up which the beasts are led that are destined for the altar.

When this vast extent of wall and column of the most dazzling brightness came into view, every where covered, together with the surrounding temples, palaces and theatres, with a dense mass of human beings, of all climes and regions, dressed out in their richest attire music from innumerable instruments filling the heavens with harmony-shouts of the proud and excited populace every few moments and from different points, as Aurelian advanced, shaking the air with its thrilling din the neighing of horses, the frequent blasts of the trumpet the whole made more solemnly imposing by the vast masses of cloud which swept over the sky, now suddenly unveiling and again eclipsing the sun, the great god of this idolatry, and from which few could withdraw their gaze; when at once this all broke upon my eye and ear, I was like a child who before had never seen aught but his own village and his own rural temple, in the effect wrought upon me, and the passiveness with which I abandoned myself to the sway of the senses. Not one there was more ravished by the outward circumstance and show. I thought of Rome's thousand years, of her power, her greatness and universal empire, and for a moment my step was not less proud than that of Aurelian. But after that moment - when the senses had had their fill, when the eye had seen the glory, and the ear had fed upon the harmony and the praise, then I thought and felt very differently; sorrow and compassion for these gay multitudes were at my heart; prophetic forebodings of disaster, danger, and ruin to those to whose sacred cause I had linked myself, made my tongue to falter in its speech, and my limbs to tremble. I thought that the superstition that was upheld by the wealth and the power, whose manifestations were before me, had its roots in the very centre of the earth far too deep down for a few

like myself ever to reach them. I was like one whose last hope of life and escape is suddenly struck away.

I was roused from these meditations by our arrival at the eastern front of the temple. Between the two central columns, on a throne of gold and ivory, sat the emperor of the world, surrounded by the senate, the colleges of augurs and haruspices, and by the priests of the various temples of the capital, in all their peculiar costume. Then Fronto, the priest of the temple, when the crier had proclaimed that the hour of worship and sacrifice had come, and had commanded silence to be observed standing at the altar, glittering in his white and golden robes like a messenger of light-bared his head, and lifting his face up toward the sun, offered in clear and sounding tones the prayer of dedication. As he came toward the close of his prayer, he, as is so usual, with loud and almost frantic cries and importunate repetition, called upon the god to hear him, and then with appropriate names and praises invoked the Father of gods and men to be present and hear. Just as he had thus solemnly invoked Jupiter by name, and was about to call upon other gods in the same manner, the clouds, which had been deepening, and darkening, suddenly obscured the sun; a distant peal of thunder rolled along the heavens, and at the same moment from the dark recesses of the temple a voice of preternatural power came forth, proclaiming so that the whole multitude heard the words, God is but one; the king eternal, immortal, invisible.' It is impossible to describe the horror that seized those multitudes. Many cried out with fear, and each seemed to shrink behind the other. Paleness sat upon every face. The priest paused as if struck by a power from above. Even the brazen Fronto was appalled. Aurelian leaped from his seat, and by his countenance, white and awe-struck, showed that to him it came as a voice from the gods. He spoke not, but stood gazing at the dark entrance into the temple from which the sound had come. Fronto hastily approached him, and whispering but one word as it were into his ear, the emperor started; the spell that bound him was dissolved; and recovering himself-making indeed as though a very different feeling had possessed him - cried out in fierce tones to his guards,

'Search the temple; some miscreant hid away among the columns profanes thus the worship and the place. Seize him and drag him forth to instant death!'

The guards of the emperor and the servants of the temple rushed in at that bidding, and searched in every part the interior of the building. They soon emerged, saying that the search was fruitless. The temple in all its aisles and apartments was empty.

The ceremonies, quiet being again restored, then went on. Twelve bulls, of purest white and of perfect forms, their horns bound about with fillets, were now led by the servants of the temple up the marble steps to the front of the altar, where stood the cultrarii and haruspices, ready to slay them and examine their entrails. The omens, as gathered by the eyes of all from the fierce strugglings and bellowings of the animals as they were led toward the place of sacrifice some even escaping from the hands of those who had the management of them and from the violent and convulsive throes of others