The life and work of St. Paul

ST. PAUL'S ABRIVAL AT KOME. 575
favourable impression, and was surrounded on all sides with respectful demon-
strations. In the shipwreck the crew must hare lost all, except what little
money they could carry on their own persons ; they were therefore in deep
aeed 1 of assistance, and this they received abundantly from the love and
gratitude of the islanders to whom their stay had caused so many benefits.
Another Alexandrian corn-ship, the Castor and Pollux more fortun.-ite
than her shattered consort had wintered in the harbour of Valetta; and
when navigation waa again possible, Julius and his soldiers embarked on
board of her with their prisoners, and weighed anchor for Syracuse. It was
but eighty miles distant, and during that day's voyage St. Paul would gazo
for the first time on the giant cone of Etna, the first active volcano ho had
ever soon. At Syracuse they waited three days for a more favourable wind.
Since it did not come, they made a circuitous tack, 2 which brought them to
Rhegiurn. Hero again they waited for a single day, and as a south wind
then sprang up, which was exactly what they most desired, they sped swiftly
through tha Straits of Messina, between the chains of snow-clad hills, and
after passing on their left tho huge and ever-Sashing cone of Str?*nboli,
anchored the next day, after a splendid rnn of 180 miles, in the lovely Bay
of Puteoli. The unfurled topsail which marked the Alexandrian corn-ship
would give notice of her arrival to the idlers of the gay watering-place, who
gathered in hundreds on the mole to welcome with their shouts the vessels
which brought the ataS of life to the granaries of Boms. Hero Paul had the
unexpected happiness to find a little Christian Church, and the brethren bogged
him to stay with them seven days. This enabled them to spend together a
Sabbath and a Sunday, and the privilege was granted by the kindly and grateful
Julius. Here, then, they rested, in one of the loveliest of earthly scenes,
when Vesuvius was still a slumbering volcano, clad to its green summit with
vines and gardens. Paul could not have looked unmoved on the luxury and
magnificence of the neighbouring towns. There was Baise, where, to the
indignation of Horace, the Roman nobles built out their palaces into the sea ;
and where the Caesar before whose judgment-seat he was going to stand had
enacted tha hideous tragedy of his mother's murder, and had fled, pursued
by her Furies, from place to place along the shore. 3 In sight was Pandataria,
and the other distant rocky islets, dense with exiles of the noblest rank, whore
Agrippa Postumus, the hist of the genuine Csesara, had tried to stop the pangs
of famine by gnawing the stuffing of his own mattress, and where the daughter
of the great Augustus had ended, in unutterable wretchedness, her life of
infamy. Close by was Cumse, with its Sibylline fame, and Pausilypus, with
Yirgii's tomb, and Caprese, where twenty-three years before Tiberius had
dragged to the grave his miserable old age. And within easy distance were
tho little towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, little dreaming as yet, in their
1
TinaTs. Cf. Ecclus. ixxviii. 1 ; "hones," Cic. ad Diw. rri. 9.
* "
xxviii. 13. ir*ptA9ovT