Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 February 1886 — Life at Rome in St. Paul’s Day. [ARTICLE]

Life at Rome in St. Paul’s Day.

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 the 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 is no wonder that in writing to a church of which so many members were in this sad condition, St. Paul thought it necessary to warn them of the duty of obedience and honor toward the powers that be. The house of a wealthy Homan contained slaves of every rank, of every nation, and of every accomplishment, who could be 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 family, with their wives and children, however innocent, were put to death. The Roman lady looked lovely at the banquet, but the slave girl who arranged a curl wrong had already been branded with a hot iron. The triclinia of a banquet might gleam with jeweled 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 fish pond The senator and the knight might 101 l upon cushions in the amphitheater, 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. 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 downward, 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 illspelt jargon of their quaint illiterate epitaphs the expression of a radiant happiness and an illimitable hope.— Anon.