The life and work of St. Paul

ST. PAUL'S 80JOTJKN IN ROME. 585
There were, doubtless, many kind masters at Rome ;
but the system of slavery
was in itself irredeemably degrading, and we cannot wonder, but can only
rejoice, that, from Caesar's household downwards, there were many in this
condition who found in Christian teaching a light and peace from heaven.
However low their earthly lot, they thus attained to a faith so sure and so
consolatory that in the very catacombs they surrounded the grim memorials
of death with emblems of peace and beauty, and made the ill-spolt jargon of
their quaint illiterate epitaphs the expression of a radiant happiness and an
illimitable hope.
From the Roman aristocracy, then, Paul had little to expect and little to
fear; their whole life physical, moral, intellectual moved on a different
plane from his. It was among the masses of the populace that he mainly
hoped for converts from the Gentiles, and it was from the Jews, on the one
hand, and the Emperor, on the other, that he had most to dread. The first
terrible blow which was aimed at any Church among the Gentiles was dealt
by the Emperor, and the hand of the Emperor was not improbably guided by
the secret malice of the Jews. That blow, indeed the outburst of the
Neronian persecution St. Paul escaped for a time by the guiding Providence
which liberated him from his imprisonment just before the great fire of
Rome ; but since he escaped it for a time only, and since it fell on many
whom he had taught and loved, we will conclude this chapter by a glance at
these two forces of Antichrist in the imperial city.
1. The importance of the Jews at Rome began, as we have seen, with the
days of Pompeius. 1 Julius Csesar who, as Philo informs us, felt an
undisguised admiration for the manly independence with which they held
themselves aloof from that all but idolatrous adulation into which the
degenerate Romans were so ready to plunge allowed them to settle in a large
district beyond the Tiber, and yearly to send deputies and temple-tribute to
their holy city. From that time forward they were the incessant butt for the
half-scornful, half-alarmed wit and wrath of the Roman writers. The district
assigned to them being in the neighbourhood of the wharfs where the barges
from Ostia were accustomed to unlade was particularly suitable for the retail
trade in
2
which they were mainly occupied. They increased with almost
incredible rapidity. Their wisp of hay and the basket, which were their sole
belongings, and were adopted to secure them from the danger of unclean
meats, were known in every quarter. Martial describes how Jewish hawkers
broke his morning slumbers with their bawling, and Juvenal complains of the
way in which their gipsy-like women got themselves smuggled into the
boudoirs of rich and silly ladies to interpret their dreams. 3 Others of them,
with a supple versatility which would have done credit to the Greeks them-
1 Oio. pro Place. 28 ; Jos. c. Apion. i. 7 ; Tao. Ann. IL 85 ; Philo, Leg. ad Quium,
p. 568.
2
Jos. Antt. rvii. 11, 1 ; Tac. Ann. ii. 85. See on the whole subject Friedlander,
Sittcngesch. Roins, iii. 500 ; Hausratli, p. 474, seqq.
Mart. L 41, 3; x. 5, 3; Juv. iv. 116; v. 8; xiv. 134,
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