The life and work of St. Paul

ST. PAUL'S ARRIVAL AT ROMB. 577
How many a look of contemptuous curiosity would bo darted at the chained
prisoner and his Jewish friends as they passed along with their escort of
soldiers ! But Paul could bear all this while ho felt that he would not be
utterly lonely amid the vast and densely-crowded wilderness of human habitations,
of which he first caught sight as he mounted the slope of the Alban
hills.
Perhaps as they left the Alban hills on the right, the brethren would tell
the Apostle the grim annals of the little temple which had been built
beside
" that dim lake which sleeps
Beneath Aricia's trees,
The trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer
And shall himself be slain."
And so through ever-lengthening rows of suburban villas, and ever-thickening
throngs of people, they would reach the actual precincts of the city, catch
sight of the Capitol and the imperial palace, pass through the grove and by
the fountain of Egeria, with its colony of begging Jews, 1 march past the
pyramid of 0. Cestius, under the arch of Drusns, through the dripping
Capenian gate, 1 leave the Circus Maximus on the left, and pass on amid
temples, and statues, and triumphal arches, till they reached the Excubito*
rium, or barracks of that section of the Praetorian cohorts whose turn it was
to keep immediate guard over the person of the Emperor. It was thus that,
;
the dream of Paul's life was accomplished, and thus that in March, A.D. 61,
in the seventh year of the reign of Nero, under the consulship of Csesennius
Paetus and Petronius Turpilianus, he entered Home.
Here the charge of the centurion Julius ended, though we can hardly suppose
that he would entirely forget and neglect henceforth his noble prisoner, to whom
in God's providence he owed his own life and the safety of the other prisoners
entrusted to him. Officially, however, his connexion with them was closed
when he had handed them over to the charge of the Prefect of the Praetorian
guards. From this time forward, and indeed previously, there had always
been two Praefecti Praetorio, but during this year a single person held the
power of that great office, the honest and soldierly Afranius Burrus. 5 So far,
Paul was fortunate, for Burrus, as an upright and humane officer, was not
likely to treat with needless severity a prisoner who was accused of no comprehensible
charge of none at any rate which a Roman would consider worth
mentioning and who had won golden opinions both from the Procurators of
Judsea and from the centurion who had conducted him from Jerusalem. A
vulgar and careless tyrant might have jumped to the conclusion that he was
some fanatical Sicarius, such as at that time swarmed throughout Judaea, and
so have thrust him into a hopeless and intolerable captivity. But the good
1 Juv. Sat. iii. 12.
* Porta di S. Sebastiano.
8 Acts xxviii. 16, ry xa- Trajan op. Plin. Epp. x. 65,
praefectos praetorii mei debet."
"Vinctrui mitti ad