The History of Christianity - John S. C. Abbott (bookstand for reading .txt) 📗

Persia. He himself, in the mean time, repaired in person to the Danube to assail the barbarians there. But the irruption of these ferocious bands was like the resistless flood of the tide: it could not be arrested. In wave after wave of invasion, they swept over France and Spain. They even crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and entered Africa. An immense tribe came howling through the defiles of the Rhætian Alps, and swept over the plains of Lombardy.

Another vast army descended those then unexplored rivers flowing from the north into the Black Sea, ravaging all the coasts of Asia Minor, glutting themselves with plunder, massacring the old, and carrying off the young. With how little emotion we read such a narrative! and yet how awful must have been the desolation and misery which were inflicted by these wolfish barbarians upon the wretched inhabitants!

These wild beings, in boats made of the skins of beasts, floated down the Bosphorus and the Hellespont; and the illustrious men and beautiful women of Greece were captured by these demons in human form. The descendants of Demosthenes and of Aristides, of Plato and of Aspasia, were dragged into hopeless and endless slavery.

Five hundred years before this, a distinguished Grecian philosopher, Aristotle, had written a book to prove that slavery was right; that it was right for the more powerful nations to enslave the weaker ones. The wheel had now turned, though it had been five hundred years in turning. The barbarian Goths were the more powerful, and the intellectual and polished Greeks the less powerful. These shaggy monsters, as wild as the beasts whose skins they wore, were but carrying out the philosophy of Aristotle as they dragged the boys and girls of Greece into bondage.

Gloriously the religion of Jesus beams forth amidst all these horrors. “God hath made of one blood all nations.”176 “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”177 “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”178

The Emperor Valerian pressed on with his Roman legions to attack the barbarians in the Far East. He crossed the Euphrates, and encountered the Persian host, drawn up in defiant battle-array on the plains of Mesopotamia. A terrible battle was fought, and the Roman army cut to pieces. The conquerors took Valerian prisoner; and God, in awful retribution, compelled the captive emperor to drink to the dregs that bitter cup of slavery which the Roman emperors, for so many centuries, had forced to the lips of all the other nations.

Derisively the Persians robed the captive emperor in imperial purple. He was compelled to kneel upon his hands and his feet in the mud, that Sapor, his conqueror, might use him as a block, putting his foot upon his back as he mounted his horse. For seven years, Valerian was kept as a slave in Persia. He was exposed to every indignity which pride and revenge could heap upon him. At last, with demoniac barbarity, they put out his eyes, and skinned him alive. His skin, dyed red, was stuffed, and preserved for ages in commemoration of Persia’s triumph over imperial Rome.

Gallienus, upon the captivity of his father, was invested with the imperial sceptre. Appalled by the fate of Valerian, he dared not march to attack the barbarians. Sheltering himself in Rome, he endeavored to bribe the Goths and Vandals to cease their ravages. The barbarians accepted his bribes, despised his weakness, and continued their forrays.

The Roman empire was in hopeless ruin. There was no longer recognized government or recognized law. In all directions, ambitious generals were rising in struggles for the crown. In the course of twelve years, more than thirty of these claimants appeared. The whole empire was swept by the blood-red surges of civil war. In those twelve years, it is estimated that the Roman empire, by civil war and barbaric invasion, lost one-half of its population. The sword, famine, and pestilence swept off a hundred and fifty millions of the inhabitants.

These barbarians ravaged the empire in all directions, perpetrating horrors indescribable. Several times they flaunted their defiant flag within sight of the dome of the capitol at Rome. Aureolus, an insurgent general, marched upon Rome with an army from the Upper Danube. Gallienus advanced to meet him. In the tumult of a midnight battle, he was slain by one of his own soldiers. With his dying breath he named one of his most distinguished generals, Claudius, emperor. The senate accepted him.

Claudius captured Aureolus, and put him to death. The barbarians now, in armaments more formidable than ever before, were crossing the frontiers in a line fifteen hundred miles in length, extending from the German Ocean to the waves of the Euxine.

An immense army of Goths, numbering three hundred and twenty thousand men, in six thousand barges, descended the Dneister to the Black Sea. Hence, passing through the Bosphorus, they entered the Sea of Marmora, and swept resistlessly over all the provinces of ancient Greece. Claudius attacked them. In a momentary revival of the ancient Roman vigor, he drove them back to their forests. In the pursuit, Claudius died; and the sceptre passed to Aurelian, the son of a peasant, but one of Rome’s ablest generals. He pursued the Goths with astonishing energy, smiting them with a rod of iron. He drove them from France, Spain, and Britain, and then prepared to attack them in the Far East.

Among the many rivals for the imperial throne who at this time sprang up, there was one named Odenathus, at Palmyra, near the Euphrates. He maintained his sovereignty over many wide provinces there for twelve years. Dying, he transmitted his sceptre to his widow Zenobia. Her history was so wonderful as to merit particular notice.

Queen Zenobia was an extraordinary woman. She was as graceful in form as a sylph, marvellously beautiful in features, and endowed with the highest intelligence. She spoke fluently four languages,—Latin, Greek, Egyptian, and Syriac. What was still more wonderful for a woman in those days, she was an author, and had written an epitome of Oriental history. Her domain extended from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean. The celebrated Longinus, whose fame is known to every student, was her secretary.

Without assuming any hostility with the powers at Rome, Zenobia, for five years, maintained uncontrolled command over this eastern division of the empire. Aurelian marched against her. The witty satirists of Rome lampooned him for making war against a woman. Aurelian replied in a communication to the senate,—

“Some speak with contempt of war against a woman. They know not the character or the power of Zenobia. It is impossible to enumerate her warlike preparations, of stones, arrows, and every species of missile weapon. She has numerous and powerful military engines from which artificial fire is thrown. The dread of punishment has armed her with desperation. Yet I trust in the protecting deities of Rome.”

After several sanguinary battles, in which Zenobia was worsted, she retired to her citadel within the walls of Palmyra. As the Romans vigorously pressed the siege, she, conscious of the doom that awaited her should she be captured, attempted to escape on one of her fleetest dromedaries. She had reached the distance of sixty miles, when she was overtaken, and brought back, a captive, to Aurelian.

The Roman victor showed no mercy. Longinus, the illustrious scholar, was sent to the block. Palmyra was sacked, and nearly destroyed. All the aged men and women and the young children were put to the sword. Zenobia and a multitude of boys and girls were carried captive to Rome. Such a triumph the decaying city had not witnessed for years. It was the dying flickering of the lamp. Twenty elephants, four tigers, and two hundred of the most imposing animals of the East, led the pompous procession. The vast plunder of the Oriental cities was ostentatiously paraded.

An immense train of captives followed to give éclat to the triumph. Conspicuous among these slaves was Zenobia, radiant with pensive beauty. She was robed in the most gorgeous attire of the Orient. Fetters of gold bound her beautiful arms; and she tottered beneath the burden of jewelry and precious stones with which she was decorated. Her magnificent chariot was drawn by Arabian chargers richly caparisoned. The captive queen followed it on foot. All eyes were riveted upon her.

Aurelian rode in a triumphal car drawn by four stags. The Roman senate in flowing robes, the bannered army, and the countless populace, closed the procession. This was the last of Rome’s triumphs. The reign of anarchy commenced. Aurelian was cut down by assassins.

For two or three hundred years, but three or four Roman emperors had died a natural death. For eight months after the assassination of Aurelian, there was no emperor. No man seemed willing to accept the crown,—it was so sure to bring upon him the assassin’s dagger. The glory of Rome had departed forever.

Such was the condition of the world about the middle of the third century. Pagan Rome had fallen through her own corruption. Her polluted shrines were abandoned, and her idolatrous temples were mouldering to decay. Christianity was steadily undermining the proudest temples of pagan worship. The disciples of Jesus, purified by persecution, were preaching that pure faith which was dethroning idols, breaking fetters, educating the ignorant, and regenerating the wicked.

There was at this time in Rome a venerable old man, of vast wealth and singular purity of character, named Tacitus. He had been a kind friend to the poor. Weary of anarchy, the people gathered in tumultuous thousands around his mansion, demanding that he should be emperor. Earnestly he begged to be excused.

But, just at this time, tidings came that the barbarians from the East were crowding across the Euphrates and the Tigris. They were plundering, burning, and massacring in all directions. The soldiers were clamorous for an emperor to lead them to repel this invasion. This noble old man of seventy-five years was compelled to yield. He put himself at the head of the army, and had advanced to within a hundred and fifty miles of the Euphrates, when the soldiers rose in mutiny, and killed him.

Diocletian, who had been a slave, grasped the crown by the energies of his strong mind and his brawny arm. A few bloody conflicts ensued; but he was a resolute man, and opposition soon melted before him. As it was no longer possible to hold the empire together, assailed as it was in every quarter by the barbarians, Diocletian sagaciously divided it into four parts:—

1. France, Spain, and England were made one kingdom, and assigned to Constantius.

2. The German provinces on the Danube made another kingdom, which was allotted to Galerius.

3. A third realm was composed of Italy and Africa, where Maximian was invested with the sovereignty.

4. Diocletian took for himself the whole of Greece, Egypt, and Asia.

The Roman empire was thus divided into four kingdoms, which were in some respects independent; yet, as Diocletian had created them, and appointed their sovereigns, they were all in a degree under his energetic sway, and bound to support each other against the common foe. But Rome seemed to have filled up the measure of its iniquity. No human sagacity could avert its doom. For ages she had been gathering “wrath against the day of wrath.”

Soon the savage Britons rose in arms. German tribes, clad in skins and swinging gory clubs, blackened the banks of the Danube and the Rhine. The wild hordes of Africa, from the Nile to Mount Atlas, were in arms. Moorish nations, issuing from unknown fastnesses, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and swept like the sirocco of the desert over the Spanish peninsula; then, gathering upon the cliffs of the Pyrenees, they descended in an avalanche of destruction upon the plains of France. The Persian hordes, emerging from the steppes of Tartary in countless bands, were roused to new efforts to