The life and work of St. Paul

584 THE LIFE AND WOES OF ST. PATTIi.
" On that hard Pagan world disgust
And secret loathing fell ;
Deep weariness and sated lust
Made human life a hell.
" In his cool hall, with haggard eyes,
The Roman noble lay ;
He drove abroad in furious guise
Along the Appian Way.
** He made a feast, drank fast and fierce,
And crowned his hair with flowers
No easier nor no quicker passed
The impracticable hours. "
The condition of the lower classes rendered them more hopeful subjects
for the ennobling influences of the faith of Christ. It is true that they also
lived in the midst of abominations. But to them vice stood forth in all its
bare and revolting hideousness, and there was no wealth to gild its anguishing
reactions. Life and its temptations wore a very different aspect to tho
master who could lord it over the souls and bodies of a thousand helpless
minions, and to the wretched slave who was the victim of his caprice and
tyranny. As in every city where the slaves far outnumbered the free
population, they had to be kept in subjection by laws of terrible severity. It
it is no wonder that in writing to a Church of which so many members were
in this sad condition, St. Paul had thought it necessary to warn them of the
duty of obedience and honour towards the powers that be.1 The house of a
wealthy Roman contained slaves of every rank, of every nation, and of every
accomplishment, who could bo numbered not by scores, but by hundreds. The
master might kill or torture his slaves with impunity, but if one of them,
goaded to passionate revenge by intolerable wrong, ventured to raise a hand
against his owner, the whole familia, with their wives and children, however
innocent, were put to death. 2 The Roman lady looked lovely at the banquet,
but the slave girl who arranged a curl wrong had been already branded with
a hot iron. 3 The triclinia of a banquet might gleam with jewelled and
myrrhine cups, but if a slave did but drop by accident one crystal vase he
might be flung then and there to feed the lampreys in his master's fishpond.
The senator and the knight might loll upon cushions in the amphitheatre,
and look on luxuriously at the mad struggles of the gladiators, but to the
gladiator this meant the endurance of all the detestable savagery of the
lanista, and the taking of a horrible oath that, " like a genuine gladiator," he
would allow himself to be bound, burned, beaten, or killed at his owner's will.*
1 Bom. xiii., xiv.
2 The necessity for this law had been openly argued in the Senate, and it was put in
force during this very year, A.D. 61, when Pedanius Secundus, the prefect of the city,
was murdered by one of his slaves (Tac. Ann. xiv. 42). In consequence of that murder
itself caused by dreadful depravities no less than four hundred slaves had been executed,
and it ia far from impossible that there may have been some Christians among them. On
their numbers see Juv. iii. 141 ; viii. 180 ; xiv. 305. Mancipiorum legiones, Plin. H. 2V,
xxxiii. 6, 26.
Juv. xiv. 24 ; Becker, Charides, ii. 53 ; Gallus, ii. 124,
4 Fetron. Satyr., p. 117 (Sen.- Ep. 7J.