The Blood of the Martyrs Read Online Free PDF

they’re slack about religious observations. Don’t insist on all this nonsense about special food.’
    â€˜I told you so,’ said Balbus. ‘Atheists! Even the Jews think so. Sometimes I wonder, Gallio, whether it isn’t the worst of a career like yours—and a damned fine career, too—that in Provincial administration you’re having to deal all the time with inferior races, Jews and Greeks and that class of person. It must have been intolerably tedious.’
    Gallio looked at him and scratched in his beard a moment. ‘Sure they are inferior?’ he said.
    â€˜Well,’—Balbus was almost shocked—‘naturally!’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Gallio said, ‘seems different when you’re not in Rome. There was one Jew at Corinth. A little dark man. Queer way of looking at you—that’s why I remember him. Paul or some such name. Yes, Marcus Antonius Paulus. Curious how they remember Anthony still in the East. Kind of immortality, that.’
    â€˜What had this Paul done?’
    â€˜Nothing. Made some rather good tents. As a matter of fact, I bought some from him. But the other Jews wanted his blood. He’d put their backs up somehow.’
    â€˜But was he one of these Christians?’
    â€˜Don’t know. He seemed perfectly respectable. I let him go, of course. He didn’t strike me as inferior.’
    â€˜All the same, these Levantines …’
    â€˜There seem to be so many of them,’ Crispus said. ‘Now this fellow Erasixenos, I wouldn’t have asked him two or three years ago. But now…’ He shrugged his shoulders.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Balbus, ‘our Divine Nero admires their taste so much! And the rest of us have to ask them to dinner.’

    Crispus looked round; two or three of the slaves were still there. ‘Boys, you may go,’ he said quickly, ‘all of you.’
    â€˜Ah, thanks,’ said Balbus, ‘though I wasn’t going to say anything treasonable! Only that Tigellinus makes me sick. To see the way he looked at your daughter!’
    â€˜We’re old-fashioned, I’m afraid. Perhaps he isn’t as bad as he seems. I can’t believe everything I hear about the Emperor.’
    â€˜You’d better start practising, then,’ said Gallio, and laughed shortly.
    But Crispus went rambling on with his regrets. The wine made him reminiscent and long winded. But there was no hurry. No hurry for any of them. Nothing left for three old men, all more or less retired from public life, to do or change. So they could go on talking. ‘It was so different those first five years, Gallio,’ he said, ‘when your brother Seneca was Nero’s tutor. We all thought he might be going to be the philosopher-king at last: the old dream. Yes, yes. But it was only because things had got so bad just before, with all the informers and murders and confiscations and scandals, and women and slaves in high places. But, you know, Balbus, it seemed like a fresh start with every Emperor, and then …’ He shook his head and emptied his wine-cup.
    â€˜I was only a child when the Divine Augustus died,’ said Balbus, reminiscent too, ‘but I can remember the grief there was in all classes. And I remember, too, my father saying that we’d got a scholar and philosopher in Tiberius, a true Roman, hard-working, modest—well, there, we all know what came of it, and my poor father knew, too, to his cost, before the end.’
    â€˜I was out of Rome those last five years of Tiberius,’ said Crispus, ‘a young man on my first job in the Provinces. It wasn’t till I came back that I realised how things were at home.’
    â€˜It was the gloom, the blackness on everything—wasn’t it, Gallio?’ Balbus said. ‘You couldn’t enjoy yourself nor feel secure. There was that unhappy madman, betrayed by his wife and his friends, and at