The life and work of St. Paul

562 THE LIFE AJSD WOBX OF ST.
to give ecZaf to the arrival of Festus in one of the Avealthiesi but raost dis-
affected of imperial provinces. 1
If this wore the case, Julius may very well
have been that Julius Priecns who afterwards rose to the splendid position
of one of the two Praefects of the Praetorians, and committed suicide on the
disgraceful overthrow of his patron.* We see enough of him daring this
voyage to lead us to believe that he was a sensible, honourable, and kindly man.
Roman soldiers were responsible with their own lives for the security of
their prisoners, and this had originated the custom so painful to the prisoners,
and all the more painful because so necessarily irritating to the legionaries
of keeping the prisoners safe by chaining them with a long light chain by
the right wrist to the left wrist of soldiers, who relieved each other in turn.
It may be imagined how frightfully trying it must have been to have no
moment and no movement free, and to be fettered in such liorriblfl proximity
to a man who would certainly have been an uneducated specimen of the lowest
classes, and who, surrounded from boyhood upwards by rough and demoralising
companionships, might be a coarse and loose provincial, or a morose and
brutal peasant from the dregs of the Italian population. It is tolerably certain
that ashore prisoners were not allowed to go anywhere without tills galling
protection, but we may hope that they were not always subject to it in the
narrow fetid cribs and hatchways of the huge, rolling, unwieldy merchantmen
in which their compulsory voyages had to bo performed.
Since Festus had arrived in Palestine towards the end of June, it must
now have been late in August, and the time was rapidly drawing on in which
ancient navigation was closed for the year. Every day made the weather
more uncertain and the voyage more perilous, and since time was pressing,
Julius, to whom the commission was entrusted, embarked his prisoners on
board a coasting merchantman of the Mysian town of Adramyttium. As tha
vessel would touch at the chief ports on the west of Asia, thoro was every
possibility of their finding a ship at Ephosus, or at some nearer port,
ii> -which
they could perform the rest of their voyage j but if not. Julius might, as a
last resource, march his soldiers and their prisoners from Adramyttiam to
Troaa, and thence sail to Neapolis, whence he could proceed along the great
Egnatian Road, already so familiar to St. Paul, through Philippi and Thessalonica
to Dyrrhachium. Dyrrhachium and Brundusium were to the Romans
what Calais and Dover are to the English; and after crossing the ^Egean,
Julius would march along the Appian Road in a reverse order through the
scenes described with such lively humour by Horace in his Her ad Brundusium.
till his journey ended at Rome. This was the route traversed by St. Ignatius
and his "ten leopards" who conducted him to his martyrdom, and in his disagreeable
connexion with whom he says that ho fought with wild beasts all
the way. It is, however, most unlikely that a hind journey entered into the
immediate plans of Julius. As he had several prisoners under his charge,
each of whom would require ten soldiers to relieve guard, such a journey
1 More strictly Procuratorships. St. Luke, however, uses the general word
' Tao. Hist. ii. 92 ; iv. 11.
" Pudoro magis quam necessitate."