Class £ Book GopyrightN COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 38p William 3Sttrnet Wvisfr CITIES OF PAUL: Beacons of the Past rekindled for the Present. i6mo, $1.10, net. Postage extra ANCIENT CITIES, FROM THE DAWN TO THE DAYLIGHT. i6mo, $1.25. THE WORLD TO COME. Sermons. i6mo, $1.25. MASTER AND MEN: The Sermon on the Moun- tain Practiced on the Plain. i6mo, $1.25. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, Boston and New York. CITIES OF PAUL CITIES OF PAUL 2£>eacon£ of tfje g^ajsft reftinttfeti for tfte $te$mt BY WILLIAM BURNET WRIGHT AUTHOR OF " ANCIENT CITIES, FROM THE DAWN TO THE DAYLIGHT" BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY (@bz ftitoergi&e pre$j, Cambridge 1905 fSvJY Copyngni tnirj ®3 4 M,if*s rfrt>7 ^ P**W COPYRIGHT I905 BY WILLIAM BURNET WRIGHT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published November iqoj TO MY CHILDREN TO THE READER The diseases which infected all and ruined most of the cities mentioned in this book are not strangers among us. Political rings more insolent and more rapacious than that which plundered Tarsus are objects familiar to most Americans. The greed that turned into bandits the merchants of Corinth has perverted into depredators upon the community some, at least, of those sol- diers without uniforms, whose legitimate business is to defend it from hunger and cold and nakedness. Roman contempt for the helpless slave has reappeared in that brutal indifference to the public wel- fare shown alike by syndicates of capital and combinations of labor ; upper and nether millstones grinding the rest of us between them. Many trustees of enor- mous revenues confided to their charge viii TO THE READER for use in visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction do not appear to have kept themselves unspotted from the world. The taint of the spirit which degraded Greek athletics is said to have touched even our universities. These, and other facts of which the effects are traced in these pages, appear, when illu- mined by the " Beacons of the Past," sufficiently alarming. But there are signs of better things to come. A general insurrection against the usurped authority of spoilsmen and the forces of organized injustice has begun. It is gaining strength. Shifty politicians who have led the people by the tinkle of party names as bell-wethers lead sheep are bewildered by a new spirit with which their experience has not taught them how to cope. In many places they have seen themselves dis- regarded, and their henchmen outvoted in favor of what they have despised TO THE READER ix as cc Sunday-school politics." The men whose popularity to-day eclipses all other reputations are those who have shown the disposition and ability which enabled Gideon to cast down the altar of corrup- tion that defiled his home, and to break the power of its ministers. Young men — in whom is the hope of the Republic — are enlisting with un- selfish enthusiasm and in constantly in- creasing numbers to fight the good fight. The corrupters are hard pressed. The only dangers honest men need fear are those which arise when enthusiasm grows weary in well doing. Against that temp- tation may this little book help to brace true patriots by leading them in hours of discouragement or apparent defeat to ponder the experiences of that preemi- nent reformer who, when he was weak, was strong because he felt that he could " do all things " through the One who strengthened him. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Tarsus, the City of Paul's Youth i II. Ephesus, the City of Superstitions 25 III. Philippi, the City of the Suicides 58 IV. Thessalonica, the City of the Sufferers 79 V. Old Corinth, the City of the Athletes 1 1 6 VI. New Corinth, the City of the Parvenus 140 VII. Colossae, the City of the Slave 163 VIII. Ancyra, the City of the Weathercocks 1 84 IX. Tyana, the Pagan Bethlehem 208 CITIES OF PAUL TARSUS . THE CITY OF PAUL'S YOUTH At the angle formed by the junction of the Syrian coast-line with that of Asia Minor the land is dented by a small thimble-shaped inlet tilting east of north. Upon its shore the Phoenicians built a city, after which it was called " the Gulf of Myriandros." The Greeks built an- other, which gave it the name of Issus. A third, founded by Alexander to com- memorate his conquest of Darius, caused it to be permanently designated cc the Gulf of Alexander." Even Celtic irreverence would scarcely venture to clip the august name at which the ancient world grew pale into " Sandy the Great." But "Iskander" is Turk- 2 CITIES OF PAUL ish for " Alexander/' There seems no harm in docking that. "Alexander's Gulf" has therefore come down to us in the undignified form of " Scandaroon." Stretching westward from this inlet for sixty miles and extending thirty in aver- age width, inclosed on the north and west by rugged mountains and on the south by the Mediterranean Sea, lies the Cilician plain. Sterile now, it was once a fertile prairie. No other equal portion of the earth's surface has been rendered so famous by the battles fought upon its breast or waged upon its borders. Near its western boundary and dominating the entire region so completely that we may venture to call the whole plain, as Jose- phus says "it was called of old/' " Tar- sus," stood the City of Paul's Youth. Three hundred and thirty-two years before the birth of Christ Persia was the one conspicuous nation in the world. For weight of influence she bore to other TARSUS 3 nations much the same relation which at present England bears to Egypt or France to Morocco. Those living at that time may have heard rumors of military preparations in the north of Greece. Compared with the kinglet who was mak- ing them, the Persian monarch appeared as the Russian Czar, before his prestige was destroyed, would have looked beside the King of Belgium. Had the kinglet been asked whither he was going, the reply might have been, "To Tarsus, for the conquest of the world ! " Had you lived forty-one years before the birth of Christ, you might have seen in the harbor of Egyptian Alexandria a vessel loading with purple and gold and pearls and perfumes. Had you asked its owner, "Whither shall it bear you? " the reply, spoken without an error or a trace of foreign accent in either one of seven languages, and spoken in a voice of such alluring sweetness that to resist its 4 CITIES OF PAUL enchantment seemed beyond the power of mortal man, might have been, " I am going to Tarsus to conquer the world !" A little later the Cilicians saw a gilded barge gliding up the Cydnus, propelled by sails of purple silk and oars of silver, which kept time to the music of flutes. Upon the deck beneath a canopy of cloth of gold reclined the Sorceress of the Nile. Lovely children winged as cupids clus- tered around her couch ; fair women adorned as graces handled the tackling of twisted gold and silver or flung upon the air the costliest of Arabian perfumes. At Tarsus the enchantress stepped upon the shore, entered the Agora, smiled upon Mark Antony, then the virtual sovereign of the earth, and led him a willing captive with her jeweled hand. Had you lived eleven centuries after the birth of Christ, you would have heard Europe clanging with arms. The ablest captain of his age, the devoutest of the TARSUS 5 German Caesars and — made so by that, I think — beyond comparison the most commanding of them all, was gather- ing into his army the ablest warriors of Christendom. The seventy winters which had changed his luxuriant beard from red to white had purified his am- bitions and increased his authority. Ask him whither he is going, and he will answer, " To Tarsus, to conquer the Orient for Christ ! " Near Tarsus you might have seen the same waters which attacked but spared the life of Alexander and floated the barge of Cleopatra stab to death with their icy chill the body of Barbarossa. Had you been alive when Christ was born, you might have seen a little boy playing in a garden at Tarsus. Had you asked him whither he was going, he could not have told you, but we can reply, " He was going from Tarsus to conquer the world ! " 6 CITIES OF PAUL The empire Alexander founded at Tarsus endured ten years. The sover- eignty Cleopatra established at Tarsus lasted a few months. The army of Frederick melted away when, near Tar- sus, its leader died. But for nineteen centuries the victories of the boy from Tarsus have multiplied with the years, and you, reader, whatever your creed may be, are, by reason of the civiliza- tion which has moulded you, a captive of his bow and of his spear. A visit to his birthplace and early home will help us to know him, because the impressions received in childhood are the chisels of character and make the " child the father of the man." Pass- ing many facts which justified the Apos- tle's civic pride and warranted him in calling his birthplace " no mean city," I ask your attention to those only which shed light upon himself. I. Paul was by inheritance a Roman TARSUS 7 citizen. His birth at Tarsus fostered in him a consciousness of that dignity more powerfully than birth in Rome itself would have done. For Tarsus, though in culture the rival of Athens and Alexandria, in commerce a metro- polis, and in importance to the imperial navy without a peer, was not one of those cities in which birth carried with it the rights of Roman citizenship. The few, therefore, in Tarsus who possessed that distinction would be more eminent among their neighbors than the many in Rome who possessed it would be among theirs, for the same reason which makes an Englishman more conspicuous in Calcutta than in London. Born the equal of any subject, he was bred where that inheritance was peculiarly signifi- cant. It is not strange, therefore, that he alone of the Apostles showed at all times a sense of high worldly station. His aristocratic consciousness was ingrained. 8 CITIES OF PAUL In boyhood it became a part of him- self. It was nourished by the deference showed everywhere to birth and breed- ing. It never left him. Witness the calm dignity of his address to the com- mander of Antonia ; the quiet author- ity with which he called to account the magistrates of Philippi whom other Jews in that city would have approached as Shylock approached Bassanio ; the unembarrassed mien with which he re- buked Agrippa and instructed Festus. Though a Roman he was also an Israel- ite, and an Israelite of the highest class. That he counted a greater honor than even Rome could confer. We shall gain a fairly accurate conception of his feelings toward Rome on the one hand and Jeru- salem on the other by thinking of Mon- tefiore or Disraeli, than whom no Jews were prouder of their Hebrew lineage and no Englishmen more loyal to their British birth. This twofold inheritance TARSUS 9 fitted Paul to become first an apostle, and secondly an apostle to the Gentiles. II. Another characteristic of St. Paul was his keen sense of civic responsibility. He alone of the Apostles — if we may judge from their writings — saw in the duties of citizenship a miniature of what Christians owe to the new Jerusalem. It is difficult to imagine John or James or Peter saying, " Our citizenship is in heaven ; . . . therefore, my brethren, so [i. e. as faithful citizens] stand fast in the Lord." But for some reason Paul had learned to think of the kingdom of God as a municipality in which every citizen was faithful to his civic obligations. 1 1 Excepting Hebrews viii, 1 1 , a quotation from one whose civic consciousness was exceedingly alert, the words " citizen,' ' " citizenship," and their cor- related verb occur, I believe, but eight times in the New Testament; five times in expressions attributed to Paul, twice in those assigned to Luke, Paul's companion, and perhaps his amanuensis, and once from the lips of a Roman officer. io CITIES OF PAUL This seems to be the reason. During the generation preceding his birth Tar- sus had been a prey to thieves like those who have robbed and, what is worse, come near to murdering the manhood of certain cities in the United States. The " Boss " of the putrid ring was named Boethus. Mark Antony promised Tar- sus a gymnasium, — probably a new one more magnificent than that which ap- pears to have been already standing on the left bank of the Cydnus, — and ap- pointed this well-known scoundrel super- intendent and custodian of the funds for its construction, for the scamp had flattered the general's vanity by writing a silly poem in praise of the victory at Philippi. When Antony reached Tar- sus certain civil service reformers who were not afraid to speak out plainly told him how plausible and slippery a knave Boethus was. Among other charges they proved that he had secreted for his own TARSUS ii pocket's profit even the gymnast's oil. The rascal made no attempt to deny the accusation. His sole defense was this : "O most noble Antony, as Homer sung the praises of Achilles and Agamemnon, so have I sung yours. Ought I to be brought before you on a charge like this ? " The reformers replied, " Homer never stole oil, and you have ! " To those who are not politicians the reply may appear adequate. But it did not satisfy the triumvir. Through his vanity the prosecution failed. Boethus, made more brazen by its failure, stole with increased effrontery. But the re- formers were in earnest. They were of a different type from those who shriek themselves hoarse over the corruptions of a ring and vote at the next election to continue it in power. They perse- vered, and the Providence who always helps such men helped them. 12 CITIES OF PAUL For a time Boethus treated them as Mr. Tweed treated the reformers of New York, — sneered, "What are you going to do about it ? " But the Power who, even to energetic and persistent patriots, sometimes seems dead but never is, in his own good time abolished Antony and put in his place an honest emperor, Augustus. Now there was a man of rare ability and per- fect integrity, a native of Tarsus, who had been the tutor of Augustus, and had earned that sovereign's entire confidence. His name was Athenodorus. When the cry of the reformers reached Rome, Au- gustus appointed this man governor of their city. Athenodorus broke up the ring, banished Boethus with his hench- men, pounded the " organization " into powder, and governed the city so well that upon his death the citizens voted him divine honors, and established an an- nual festival to commemorate his virtues. TARSUS 13 All this occurred in the last generation before Paul, and Paul was born before Athenodorus died. In his boyhood the Apostle must have witnessed many times, perhaps taken part in, the celebration of "Athenodorus' Day," as American boys are familiar with " Washington's Birthday." The mention in the Epistle to the Philippians of " citizenship in heaven " seems to me a window through which one may see the battle between Tarsus and the ring that disgraced it. Can poli- ticians who have fattened upon corrup- tion in modern cities be described more accurately than in these words which the memory of Boethus may well have sug- gested, " For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ ; whose end is de- struction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is their shame, who mind 14 CITIES OF PAUL earthly things. For our citizenship is in heaven, from whence also we look for the Saviour Jesus Christ." III. It will be remembered how often St. Paul refers to the Greek games, not only in writing to the Corinthians, where he could scarcely avoid doing so, but elsewhere. Foot-races, boxing, hitting the mark — words from these sources fall from his pen as if they belonged to his mother tongue. Dean Howson has counted in the Pauline Epistles thirty re- ferences to Greek athletic sports, and adds that he has not exhausted the list. This is remarkable for two reasons. Paul was a Jew, and the Jews hated these naked sports because they counted them ob- scene. He was a Christian, and the Chris- tians hated them because they thought them cruel. I do not remember any allusion to them by the other Apostles, though John and Peter must have been frequently brought in contact with them. TARSUS 15 What led Paul to make so much of them ? Is not this the explanation ? His boyhood was spent in Tarsus. There Greek manners prevailed. No boy could have breathed the atmosphere produced by the Greek passion for ath- letics without yielding in some degree to its influence. The gymnasium where the athletes trained and where the young men found a school more attractive than their famous university must have been for the youth of Tarsus a centre of in- terest. The games were to them more than football and boating are to the universities of England and America. Could the boy Paul altogether escape the infection ? One cannot imagine the Apostle as a spectator watching the con- tests at Isthmia, yet he shows a famili- arity with the minutest details of their management and practice which could have been obtained only by frequent observation. This is not surprising if in 1 6 CITIES OF PAUL later life he drew his illustrations from the recollections of his boyhood, as all men are prone to do. Of metaphors and illustrations drawn from Roman soldiers he has left us more than twelve. He seems to have liked military men and to have felt at home with them. I incline to think this, too, was owing to his birth at Tarsus. The mountains north of that city and only twenty miles away were infested by bri- gands who made themselves a terror to the whole Cilician plain until, not very long before the Apostle's birth, they were subdued by Cicero. Though I do not know that it was so, it seems likely that the soldiers sent to protect the city from further depredations dwelt at Tarsus, and that the citizens they protected learned to value them as friends. IV. Few passages in the Apostle's writings have been so much misunder- stood as those in which he appears to TARSUS 17 depreciate intellect and learning. " The wisdom of this age," he wrote, " is fool- ishness with God." Many have fancied that here and in similar passages he meant to disparage the spelling-book, and all that it stands for. The most un- lettered reader ought to be guarded from that delusion, by noticing that more than any other New Testament writer St. Paul honors the human intellect by appeals to its powers of reasoning and capabilities of knowledge. When he wrote " the wisdom of this age," he was thinking of such instruction as was given at the University of Tarsus, familiar to him from his youth. The uni- versities of Athens, Alexandria, and Tar- sus were then all and more than all that Oxford and Cambridge are to England or Harvard and Yale to America. There is no indication that the Apostle was fa- miliar with the great Greek thinkers. In the places those men had occupied three 1 8 CITIES OF PAUL centuries before, silly professors now rattled like dried peas in a pod. They were the prototypes of those mediaeval school-men who wasted their time de- bating how many angels could stand upon a needle's point. The problems they discussed were for the most part as trivial as they were insoluble. They cared nothing for facts. Their boast was that they could take any side of any question, and by tricks of logic prove that it was true. They were called " Sophists ,J or in English " wise men." It was to their pseudo-wisdom St. Paul referred. With the like of these foolish chatterers he was frequently confronted during his Gentile ministry. At Tarsus he had learned to understand them. They had filled its air with their silly twaddle. In his youth he had heard their harangues contrasted with the teaching of Moses and the Pro- phets. No wonder he despised them. Most readers would probably apprehend TARSUS 19 his meaning if his language were para- phrased into, " The sophistry of this age is foolishness with God ; n we may- add, " and with men too." V. In an age when the Jews had nearly lost all practical belief in a future life, and most of the Gentiles had lost it altogether, St. Paul wrote those words which have done more than the writings of all the other Apostles to bring men under the powers of the world to come. What qualified him to do that ? Several circumstances. Among them not the least was his birth in Tarsus. There he had become familiar with a me- morial which made him understand what comes to communities when they lose faith in a future life. A few miles from the city was the vil- lage of Anchiale. Tafel traced its foun- dation to the Sybarite king Sardanapalus, the Asshurbanipal of history. Here was a tomb supposed to be that of the As- 20 CITIES OF PAUL Syrian monarch. Over it stood a colos- sal stone statue snapping its fingers toward heaven, and bearing in Assyrian letters the inscription : " Sardanapalus the son of Anacyn- daraxes built in one day Anchiale and Tarsus. Eat, drink, and be merry. No- thing else is worth that (a finger snap) ! w We need search no farther for the origin of the quotation cc Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," or for the horror with which the Apostle repu- diates that creed. In Tarsus he had seen whither it leads. VI. iEgae was another village near Tarsus. Here was a famous temple of iEsculapius, doubtless, like others of its kind, furnished with dexterous devices for counterfeiting miracles. I have no question that here Paul gained the knowledge of jugglers' tricks which en- abled him at a glance to see through the pretensions of Elymas. TARSUS 21 VII. Two other important facts may now be mentioned. I pass the circumstance that Tarsus was the emporium for the Cilician goat's- hair tents, which it was the Apostle's trade to make, with this remark. One can scarcely doubt that the loveliest and most comforting illustration regarding death he ever used occurred to him while working at his craft. Was it not the goat-skins on his knees, as he sewed them together and reflected upon the use for which his hands were preparing them, and thought how soon they would wear out, that moved him to write, " We know that if our earthly house of this tent were dissolved, we have a build- ing of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." But all readers of the New Testament are aware of St. Paul's familiarity with commerce and ships. Tarsus was an ancient Chicago. Her 22 CITIES OF PAUL coins represent her as a woman seated among bales of merchandise. At the mouth of the Cydnus, twelve miles away, was the largest navy yard in the world. There, too, was the chief rendezvous, with the possible exception of Alexandria, of the Roman mercantile marine. Here were the shipyards to which galleys, men-of-war, and merchantmen — a ma- jority of which had been built of the timber from forests close by — returned for repairs. The place was a Wool- wich, a Liverpool, and one is tempted to add a Greenwich all in one. It was the pride of Tarsus. It is difficult to doubt that here in his boyhood Paul gained the familiarity with maritime affairs which made him at home on ship- board, and became conspicuous on the disastrous voyage to Puteoli. On that voyage, it will be remembered, his judg- ment was several times diametrically op- posed to that of professional seamen, TARSUS 23 and was in every instance proved to be correct. It seems as if the " Divinity that shapes our ends " had decreed that a man should be prepared to become the chief Apostle to the Gentiles. Therefore his youth must be spent where he will be- come familiar with all their ways. He shall stand before kings, there- fore he must be born and bred in a so- cial sphere that is not easily dazzled by the purple. He shall win a hearing from those who care for nothing but amusement, therefore his boyhood must be spent where an intimate acquaintance with their favorite amusements will enable him to clothe his message in illustrations that cannot fail to arrest their attention and arouse their interest. He shall confound the rhetoricians who have persuaded a bewildered age to mistake them for logicians, therefore 24 CITIES OF PAUL he must be placed where a perfect under- standing of their sophistries shall come to him as an inheritance. He shall teach two years at Ephesus, therefore he must understand the ways of politicians. He shall spend much time closeted with soldiers, therefore, for his own comfort, he must in boyhood learn to love them. He shall make many a voyage, and a knowledge of the sea is for him impera- tive, therefore he must be cradled among ships. He must understand the chief indus- tries of men, therefore in childhood he shall play among bales of merchandise. He shall be the world's most potent preacher of the resurrection, therefore the most impressive picture on his primer shall be an illustration of what it means to lose faith in immortality. For all these reasons he must be born at Tarsus. II EPHESUS THE CITY OF SUPERSTITIONS Beautiful for situation ; the metropolis and chief commercial mart of the pro- vince of Asia; preeminent in the Orient for the splendor of her buildings ; wor- shiping in a temple which was counted the most wonderful of the world's seven wonders, and to which troubled souls from Spain to India made pilgrimages to atone for their transgressions or sent for amulets to charm away their sorrow; mother of the church which inaugurated the worship of the Virgin and placed the Madonna of Christianity upon the throne which for centuries the Madonna of pa- gans had occupied ; cradle of Parrhasius, residence of Zeuxis, and home of Apelles, the greatest painter who ever lived; a 26 CITIES OF PAUL school of art which had no equal and but one superior in the ancient world ; birth- place of two of the most commanding intellectual conceptions yet given to man- kind, for here was formulated that doc- trine of " The Word " which dominates Christian creeds, and here Heracleitus announced the truth which, rediscovered by Charles Darwin, steers the science of to-day ; city in which Antony, " drunk with the caresses " of Cleopatra, cc madly flung a world away/' and in which Julian was led by juggling priests to waste a noble life in vain attempts to restore the ruined shrines of Olympus ; the city where Paul wrote that letter to Corinth which is still the manual of Christian churches ; home where Luke, " the be- loved physician," spent his declining years, and John founded the first semi- nary for the training of young men " be- cause they were strong ; ,: burial place, almost certainly, of that disciple " whom EPHESUS 27 Jesus loved/' as also of Luke and Tim- othy and probably of the Virgin Mary ; memorable for giving name to that Pauline epistle pronounced by Cole- ridge to be " the divinest composition of man ; " arena where the great Apostle " fought with wild beasts/' and where in later years bishops and deacons in "the Robber Council" trampled each other in the name of Christ with a malignity wild beasts are incapable of feeling ; — Ephesus, called by the whole Ionic race, as London was called by Englishmen, "The Good Old City" and named by Pliny " The Eye of Asia/' well deserves attention. More than to its material advantages, great as they were, its magnificence was due to the superstition which atmos- phered its site with the same kind of reverence that Christians feel for Beth- lehem. Ephesus was founded and fos- tered by the superstition of pagans. It 28 CITIES OF PAUL was long the world's chief nursery of those magical arts which superstition engenders. Its heart, the temple of Diana, was destroyed and the temple's foundations allowed to sink out of hu- man sight and memory by the supersti- tion of Christians. In view of these facts, it seems significant that whether the Epistle to the Ephesians was origi- nally addressed to those whose name it bears or not, it may be described cor- rectly as the inspired antidote to super- stition. For the controlling purpose of the epistle is to show the futility in religion of everything but affectionate obedience to God, while superstition consists solely in reliance upon some- thing other than such obedience. It is also significant that superstition is the danger against which the letter addressed to the church at Ephesus and preserved in the Apocalypse warns its readers. " I know thy works, . . . but I have this EPHESUS 29 against thee, that thou didst leave thy first love." To continue religious activities after the love that inspired them has departed, to fast three times a week only to ap- pease a power one fears, is useless drudgery. It perverts Christianity into another of those superstitions it was commissioned to destroy, and ends by making the name of Christ a fetich as impotent as a silver shrine of Diana. I. Few landmarks remain to give a correct conception of the ancient city. The streams which fertilized her fields have shifted their channels. Her coast- line is changed. The canal which made her harbor the Liverpool of Asia — the province of that name — has long been silted up. Of the famous temple outside her walls not even the grave is marked. No mound swells over its ruins which are hidden beneath twenty feet of soil. When Mr. Wood began his excavation, 30 CITIES OF PAUL the tobacco reserved for the sultan's use, the choicest raised in his dominions, grew above the streets where the people shouted in the ears of Paul " Great is Diana of the Ephesians ! " The city where John taught has vanished. Yet it is that city through which I shall try to lead you. Two rather steep hills, separated by a narrow valley : One of them, a ridge about thirteen hundred feet high, ran nearly east and west. From its shape and presumably also from the indentations which probably serrated its crest before they were leveled to accommodate a gar- rison, it was named " Prion," that is, the " Saw." The other hill, a little higher than Prion and north of its east end, was named " Coressus," or cc Lady's Hill." Tradition said that once when Diana lost her way, as the skillfulest hunters sometimes do, she ascended this ele- vation and inquired, (f Whose place is EPHESUS 31 this ? " whereupon some sharp-witted Raleigh replied, " Coressus," which meant, as nearly as one can get it into English, "Thine, my Lady!" Hence the name. A line drawn from the north base of Lady's Hill to the west base of " The Saw " would form the hypothenuse of a right triangle. 1 In the space inclosed by it was the great basin which formed the inner harbor of the city. This was sup- plied by water from the sea, which is now more than four miles distant, by a canal, partly natural, partly artificial, and easily navigable for the largest vessels then 1 These are Mr. Wood's identifications. Others, as Faulkner, call Mr. Wood's " Prion' * "Cores- sus," and his "Coressus" "Prion." In spite of Professor Ramsay's great authority, I believe Mr. Wood's identifications to be correct, because they harmonize best with known facts. The Austrian dis- coveries have not yet been published, but I do not see how they can affect this conclusion. In reading Faulkner or Professor Ramsay one must substitute " Prion " for Wood's " Coressus " and vice versa. 32 CITIES OF PAUL afloat, until it was silted up through the miscalculation of an engineer whose blunder helped to ossify this main artery of commerce and so to make the city perish of gangrene. Around the east front of this basin, — which is to-day a reedy marsh, — the most important buildings clustered. The north side of Mt. Prion and the west and north of Coressus, terraced to their tops, were occupied by residences. The walls circling along Mt. Prion, a little south of its crest and around the east and north base of Coressus, have been traced from a point on the south side of the canal west of the Great Basin to a point on the north side of the basin. They were more than ten feet thick ; some thirty-six thousand feet in extent ; were strengthened at intervals of a hun- dred feet by towers forty feet square, with sally ports between them, and inclosed about a thousand acres. EPHESUS 33 The city abounded in buildings which for strength and splendor and all but size equaled any and surpassed most of those in Rome itself. The population ex- tended far beyond the walls. This bird's- eye view will enable the reader to locate the few places to which I shall call his attention. West of Lady's Hill, between it and the basin, was the Great -Forum, and close to it the school of Tyrannus, in which Paul taught. Opening toward this Fo- rum and hewn into the base of Lady's Hill, was the great theatre. It was faced throughout with white marble, and seated nearly twenty-five thousand. It was used not only for spectacular displays but for religious and political assemblies, and seems to have served also as a bourse or meeting-place for the Board of Trade. Municipal decrees were inscribed upon the panels of its enormous stage. Many of these the spade has brought to light. 34 CITIES OF PAUL Here it was that the populace rejected Paul and chose Demetrius for pilot. The east side of Lady's Hill (Co- ressus) appears to have been a cemetery. Here, nearly opposite the great theatre, but somewhat north of it and higher on the incline, was the cave in which, as the legend ran, the seven sleepers enjoyed their long repose. It was a cleft in the hill artificially wrought — it is not known when — into a sort of temple. Mark this spot, for there is reason to suspect that something of world-wide interest, to be considered presently, occurred there. At its east end, where the valley be- tween the Saw and Lady's Hill broadens toward the plain, the discovery of a tomb, with the cross, the nimbus-crowned hu- man figure, and the symbolic ox, lends help to the tradition that Luke was buried here. From the great theatre an avenue ran eastward between the Saw (Prion) and Lady's Hill (Coressus), EPHESUS 35 curved around the latter to the north, and passing through the Magnesian Gate continued north-northwest to the Temple of Diana, a mile beyond. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that stupendous structure was supposed by modern scholars to have stood within the city walls. Mr. Wood, after search- ing six years in vain for its location, discovered in the great theatre an in- scription which showed him where to look, and digging twenty feet below a field of barley he found the true site. The avenue between the Magnesian Gate and the temple deserves attention. The gate itself, the only one of the six superb entrances to the city which con- cerns us, was a magnificent structure. It was flanked with strong towers, and offered two broad openings for vehi- cles, with one for pedestrians between them. Above these, I cannot tell pre- cisely where, was carved in high relief 36 CITIES OF PAUL the figure of Nemesis, with wings and wheels to indicate that she was equally at home on earth and in air. Beneath, the name of Vespasian in due time ap- peared. From this gate two chariot-ways, sep- arated by a footway, led to the temple. The footway was covered by a decorated roof resting on marble pillars. Both sides of the avenue were lined with statues carved by Greek sculptors, tab- lets dedicated to renowned Ephesians, and tombs in which it seems terra-cotta lamps were kept burning day and night. Conspicuous among these was the co- lossal bronze representing Androclus, the mythical William Tell of Ephesus, as an armed warrior holding, I believe but am not sure, a torch in place of a spear. The avenue seems to have been not only a thoroughfare, but to have had playgrounds for children, and it touches a tender chord to find, in digging to its EPHESUS 37 level, marbles such as our boys play with and hairpins of gold, silver, bone, and cheap metal, dropped perhaps by girls who romped here two thousand years ago. The avenue terminated at the great temple built on the site of that which was burned on the night of Alexander's birth. It was the work of the same ar- chitect who designed Alexandria. The grandeur of his conceptions was revealed, not only in the Pharos of that city, but even more impressively in his request for permission to hew Mt. Athos into a statue of Alexander which should repre- sent him holding in his right hand a city large enough for ten thousand in- habitants and in his left a lake into which all the streams of the mountain should be gathered and poured — a perpetual cataract — into the iEgean. There is hopeless uncertainty about the artist's name. Strabo calls him Cheiro- 38 CITIES OF PAUL crates ; Plutarch calls him Stasicrates ; another author calls him Deinocrates, and still another Chersiphron. No one knows which name to accept. It is sig- nificant of many things that if asked who destroyed the famous temple every schoolboy would reply, " Herostratos was that scamp/' x though no scholar living can tell who rebuilt it. That, too, in spite of the fact that because the in- cendiary fired the temple to make his name remembered by posterity, the city decreed that no one should speak his name under penalty of death. All men know that Cain was the first murderer. But who was the first physi- cian ? Let him who can reply. A glance at the temple revealed a forest of white marble columns surrounded by beautiful gardens. The shafts, each sixty feet in height and hewn from a single block, stood upon drums carved in high 1 De Quincey. EPHESUS 39 relief by the skillfulest Greek artists. The columns were the gifts of kings. The heart of this marble forest was the Shrine of Diana. In that shrine stood the image of the goddess in pure gold, and beside it, shaped into the semblance or rather the suggestion of a human figure, the meteor stone "which fell from heaven." But these were not the only treasures of the temple. It contained statues in gold and silver of Egyptian I sis, Phry- gian Cybele, Syrian Astarte, and the su- preme female deities of other nations, so that worshipers from far and near, find- ing within its precincts the objects they adored, were made to feel as a devout Roman Catholic feels before the shrine of the Madonna. The temple was also rich in works by Praxiteles and other sculptors inferior to him alone. It con- tained a gallery of paintings by Parrha- sius, Zeuxis, and Apelles. Here, among 40. CITIES OF PAUL several other portraits of Alexander by the last-named artist, hung that one of which the story ran that when Alexan- der declared it was not like him, and Bucephalus neighed in recognition be- fore it, the painter told the monarch that his horse was a better judge of art than its master. This was the picture which moved the Ephesians to say, " There are two Alexanders, one invincible, be- gotten by Philip ; the other inimitable, created by Apelles. ,, The temple furnished not only a Lady's chapel to every pagan cult and a British museum of art, but a savings bank for the poor, a bank of deposit and discount for the rich, a mont de pi'ete or pawn shop for the shiftless, and an asylum sanctuary for criminals. No cul- prit could be legally arrested within bow- shot of its bounds. Here, too, was the merchant's principal board of trade. Thus every department of Ephesian EPHESUS 41 life was so dominated by the Temple of Diana that we may say the atmosphere the Ephesians breathed was generated here. This fact should be kept in mind when we read the nineteenth chapter of Acts. II. Mr. Wood discovered in the great theatre an inscription which informs us that when the men who, " having seized Gaius and Aristarchus, Paul's compan- ions," " rushed into " that place, were boys, some of them may have dropped their marbles to run toward that same theatre after one of those processions which helped prepare the way for the victory of the peddler over the Apostle. It tells of a wealthy Roman gentleman named Salutarius who presented a num- ber of gold and silver images, each weigh- ing from three to seven pounds, which the city voted to Artemis. One of them represented Diana holding two stags ; another figured the city as a woman 42 CITIES OF PAUL wearing a mural crown. The munici- pality decreed that on the 25th of May, the birthday of the goddess, these im- ages should be carried from the tem- ple to the theatre and exhibited there. This decree, the name of the donor, the value of his gift, and the route to be taken by the procession Mr. Wood found inscribed upon an inner wall. It seems probable that the ceremony formed an aeolian attachment to that held every year on the same date in honor of Diana. The only reason for supposing it was not is that the images were to enter the city by the Magnesian and leave it by the Coressian ; and the latter, it has been held, intended solely for pedestrians, must have been too narrow for the pas- sage of chariots and cars. This objection, however, disappears before the reported discovery by the Austrian explorers of a broad street leading through it from the basin to the temple. EPHEgUS 43 If the images formed a part of the annual procession, its general appearance could scarcely have been widely different from the following. First comes a band of damsels clad in fawn skins, scattering flowers as they pass. Then priests in leopard skins, some preceding, some following a plat- form car drawn by white mules. On this the gifts of Salutarius are displayed. Next the car of the goddess, drawn by stags, and bearing, not the meteorite stone, but a golden image representing a woman with many breasts, gleaming with jewels, supported between two golden sceptres fastened to the floor of the car. Then follow musicians. After them a woman dressed as the divine huntress with bow and quiver. Then troops of animals, dogs, deer, lions, specimens led in leash of most beasts that hunt or are hunted. At the Magnesian Gate the pro- 44 CITIES OF PAUL cession is met by young men of the city in holiday attire, and by them con- ducted along the south side of Lady's Hill to the theatre where the gifts of Salutarius are placed for inspection. The terraces on both sides of the street are crowded with spectators, any of whom would be greatly if not dangerously con- spicuous unless he wore pendant from his neck or fastened on his bosom a gold or silver emblem, a tiny temple, shrine, or image, to mark him as one of those ready to shout " Great is Diana of the Ephesians ! ,: These trinkets were the " shrines " for which Demetrius bulled the market when it had been seriously depressed by the preaching of Paul, Twenty-five thousand persons crowd the theatre to hear speeches praising the generosity of Salutarius. When these have been spoken, the crowd rushes to the temple to see the most accomplished female dancers in the world — the Elsslers EPHESUS 45 and Taglionis of their day — perform, with clanging shields and flashing swords, the far-famed dance of the Amazons, which can be witnessed nowhere else. It seems likely that Demetrius selected for his attack on the Apostle some such occasion as this, as Cyril selected Lent for the assassination of Hypatia and Catherine a saint's day for the murder of Coligni. Demetrius was probably a large employer of labor. His was pre- sumably the chief manufactory of the images worn by the people. His trade had been damaged already, and was threat- ened with ruin by the new religion. Workingmen were alarmed by the fear of losing employment. Priests, the good ones, were excited by zeal for the honor of their deity ; the bad ones by anxiety for their trade. Unless this proclaimer of an " unknown God " " who dwelt not in temples, neither was worshiped with men's hands," can be suppressed, their 46 CITIES OF PAUL pockets will be depleted and their influ- ence curtailed. Thus avarice joined with hunger and superstition to prepare powder for the explosion, and a festival may have sup- plied the spark. Some one whispers that there is an atheist about who has per- suaded many to blaspheme by denying the deity of Diana. Another adds that through his influence trade has fallen off and workingmen are being discharged. Another adds that the atheist is a miser- able Jew whom even his despised coun- trymen have driven as a miscreant from Jerusalem. The whispers multiply as whispers do. They grow into outcries. " Where is the atheist ? " " Bring him into the theatre ! " The mob, now furious, rushes thither. They will drag Paul, if they can find him, into the place where all can see him, sure that he will not leave it alive. " Some shout one thing, some another/' snarl- EPHESUS 47 ing, howling, and foaming in a way the memory of which may have suggested the words, " I fought with wild beasts at Ephesus ! " III. On the east side of Lady's Hill, in an artificially enlarged cleft, are the signs of what seems to have been a temple, and in later times a church. It was the cave I have asked the reader to mark. Here, it was fabled, seven young men, brothers and Christians, con- demned to death during the persecution under Diocletian, fled for concealment. Miraculously protected, they fell asleep and slept two hundred years. On awak- ening they came forth and found the city converted to Christ. Thereupon after telling their story with great joy, they yielded up the ghost, and to com- memorate the wonder the cave was wrought into a Christian church. But something occurred at Ephesus — and though no one, I believe, has 48 CITIES OF PAUL ventured to say precisely where, there are reasons for thinking it may have been here — more important than the fiction of the Seven Sleepers. The " cave " was sacred to Arcadian Artemis. While Julian, still a youth, was waver- ing between the claims of the religion in which he had been bred and those of the Greek cult it had superseded, he left Athens for a surreptitious conference with Maximus at Ephesus. Maximus was an aged philosopher celebrated for wisdom and also for powers deemed supernatural. He was said to possess a voice of such exquisite sweetness that no one could hear him speak without being fascinated, as Ulysses had been by the songs of the sirens. Many thought his words oracular. There are reasons which make it seem probable to me that it was to this " cave," furnished with all appliances of the juggler's art, that the old man brought EPHESUS 49 the young Julian. Spectres of fire ap- peared in the darkness. They moved around him. Mysterious sounds reached his ears. A voice declared, "The gods have given you the soul of Alexander." Trembling with awe, the future em- peror made the sign of the Cross. In- stantly the spectres vanished and the sounds ceased. A moment followed of darkness and silence. Then the same voice was heard from afar saying, " That sign is impotent, but it marks a blas- phemer to whom the gods will not speak. " Then Julian fell upon his face and swore a great oath that he would replace the old gods upon their thrones or per- ish in the attempt. Faithfully he kept the oath, and it is to his lasting honor that he strove to accomplish it not by the arguments of force, but by the per- suasions of reason. When at last he was compelled to utter the confession which 50 CITIES OF PAUL Swinburne has paraphrased in the mem- orable lines, — "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean ! The world has grown grey with thy breath, We have drunken of things Lethean, And fed on the fulness of death," — no man could truthfully say that he had shed blood for the furtherance of his faith. The fiction of the Seven Sleep- ers started those fairy tales of the " Sleeping Beauty " and the like which have cultivated the imaginations and sweetened the tempers of our children ; but the waking vision of Julian in the cave — it may be where the fabled sleep- ers lay — helped to change for half a generation the official religion of the Ro- man Empire, to pervert into an enemy of Christianity one of the least unchrist- like of all the Caesars, and went far to confirm in him those misconceptions of duty which enabled him to count as a virtue his usurpation of imperial power. EPHESUS 51 IV. But the saddest form of super- stition that ever raged in Ephesus was manifested there in the year of our Lord 449. I do not refer to the worship of the Virgin Mother, which originated from the decree of a council held in that city a few years earlier. On the contrary, of all the dogmas which I disbelieve, that one which for centuries led men to see in Mary those divine qualities which theologians had made it impossible for them to see in the phantom they had substituted for her son, seems to me the sweetest, the tenderest, and the most beneficent. At a time when to most Christians the word " Christ " signified incarnate cruelty, the spirit of Christ under the name of his Mother softened the sorrows, kindled the aspirations, and when it could not extirpate restrained the wicked passions of untold millions. Far be it from me to brand as a pernicious superstition the faith which enabled 52 CITIES OF PAUL Jacopone to chant the Stabat Mater in the ears of an age which was soon to see, on every highway of Europe, flagellants frenzied by fear and dying in despair from the self-inflicted scourgings by which they strove to appease the wrath of the inexorable phantom they had been taught to call cc Christ." The superstition which clothed Ephe- sus with infamy was the same which has done more than all others to delay the coming of the Kingdom. It was the superstition which sired the Inquisition, burned Huss, kindled the fires of Smith- field, and painted Europe many times with blood. It murdered Bruno and tried to murder Luther, gathered the fagots for Servetus, and cursed humanity with Philip the Second. It was the su- perstition which the prophets of Israel fought without ceasing, which Paul's energies were strained to destroy, against which Christ was never through with EPHESUS 53 warning his disciples ; the superstition that creeds are more important than con- duct, and that to love God with all the heart and one's neighbor as one's self, is wholly insufficient for the salvation of the soul that holds erroneous opinions. In 449 a. d., the churches from Rome to Antioch and from Alexandria to Con- stantinople were fiercely excited over a point of theological dogma. What that dogma meant no mortal understood then and no mortal understands now. There were certain party catchwords concerning the two natures of Christ. The words had been emptied of their meaning, if indeed they ever had any meaning, as completely as the word " Tory " or " Kingsman " has been emptied of the meaning it carried in America to the sol- diers of Washington. The words stood for no clear conception, but for a vacuum of conception. They became mere party war-cries. 54 CITIES OF PAUL An Ecclesiastical Council, summoned by the emperor, convened at Ephesus. It was called to determine whether Eu- tyches, a teacher at Constantinople, used the orthodox war-cry. Dioscurus, Bishop of Alexandria, declared that he did. Fla- vian, Bishop of Constantinople, declared that he did not. One hundred and thirty- five, some say one hundred and fifty, bishops with their delegates assembled to try the case. Dioscurus, made presi- dent of the council, not by the vote of his peers, but by imperial decree, con- trolled an overwhelming majority of the members. The council met surrounded by soldiers who had been placed under his orders. Blank papers were given to the members of the council. These they were compelled at sword's edge to sign. Over the signatures thus obtained the opinion of the majority was written, and so the council speedily reached a " unanimous " decision. It was charged EPHESUS 55 at the opening of proceedings that one of the bishops in conference had com- mitted an atrocious crime, for which he ought to be disqualified. Dioscurus, the president, replied, " If you have a com- plaint against his orthodoxy we will re- ceive it, but we are not here to pass judgment upon unchastity." Before the " unanimous " verdict was declared, the majority filled the air (it was in the Church of Madonna Mary) with loud and angry denunciations of the minority. When the verdict had been given, the Bishop of Alexandria, backed by a retinue of soldiers and a rabble of monks, shouting " He who would divide the nature of Christ should himself be cut in two ; kill them ! kill them ! ,: knocked down his brother the Bishop of Constantinople, trampled the breath out of his body, and mangled it so that in three days he died of his wounds. The delegate from Rome, who represented the great Leo, saved 56 CITIES OF PAUL his life by flight, and the rest of the minority — some by lying, some by hid- ing in holes and cellars — escaped as best they could. All this occurred in the city to which every member of the council believed that Paul had written, " I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beseech you to walk worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called, with all lowliness and meek- ness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love." All this was done in the city where John had so often re- peated the Master's words, "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another." All this was done in the city where, according to a tradition which every one of the council ought to have known, and most of them prob- ably did know, that same disciple had preached until, grown too feeble to walk, he was carried into his pulpit, and there repeated day after day the same words, EPHESUS 57 adding no comment, "Little children, love one another," till wearied by the iteration his hearers asked him to say something more, and heard him reply, " No ! no ! Little children, there is nothing more ! " Ill PHILIPPI THE CITY OF THE SUICIDES " . . . Thou shalt meet me at Philippi." So, Shakespeare tells us, the spirit of Julius Caesar summoned Brutus from Asia to Macedonia. The scene is not a creation of the poet. To the minute details, — of place, tent near Sardis ; of time, past mid- night ; the solitude ; the sleeplessness ; the futile attempt to read ; the fading light, " how ill this taper burns," — it is copied from Plutarch. There is no valid reason for doubt- ing that amid precisely these circum- stances Brutus saw or thought he saw an apparition and heard or thought he heard it say, " I am thy evil genius. I will meet thee at Philippi." There is no PHILIPPI 59 doubt whatever that he went to Philippi, and that there, by his defeat and death, changed the history of the world. Paul also, alone, in Asia, at night, saw a vision. A man of Macedonia ap- peared and said to him, " Come over into Macedonia and help us." The Apostle obeyed the summons, and at Philippi inaugurated a change still more important. But Philippi claims attention not only because there the "last of the Romans" ended and the " first of the Apostles " began their work in Europe ; at Philippi, it may be said, the civilized world was conquered three times and in three different ways. Without the phalanx Alexander could not have overcome the Orient. But it was the thousand talents taken yearly by his father from the mines of Philippi which created the phalanx. At Philippi forty-two years before Christ the battle was fought which de- 60 CITIES OF PAUL cided that the Roman republic should be an empire. At Philippi it seems probable that Paul planted Christianity in Europe. For these reasons it seems scarcely an exaggeration to say that at Philippi deeds were done which have three times conquered the civilized world, — once by money, once by arms, and once by moral force. Only ruins, among which are traces of a theatre, cut in the solid rock of the hillside, and an ancient sarcophagus, which the peasants still believe to be the crib of Bucephalus, mark the site of the celebrated city, but it is possible, by combining hints from widely separated sources, to form a fairly accurate picture of the place. It was as purely as San Francisco a creation of gold mines. A certain mountain in Thrace was believed to be the favorite resort of Dionysus, the Greek Bacchus. Him, PHILIPPI 61 the Thracian mountaineers chiefly wor- shiped. The mountain was also rich in gold, which most men chiefly worship. At the foot of the mountain was a min- ing camp, — one can scarcely say "a settlement," — named, from the abun- dance of waters near it, " The Springs." Philip, a more far-sighted statesman than his more celebrated son, discerned the capabilities of the location. First he renamed it after himself. There were sev- eral springs, and he meant to claim them all. Each of them was therefore named "Philip," and the whole of them "The Philips." Thus the city got the plural name Philippi, not because there were many Philips, but many streams bearing the same man's name. Next, in order to secure an adequate supply of laborers, he declared the place, because it was near the sacred mountain, a sanctuary. This soon made it a sort of Botany Bay, a refuge for criminals 62 CITIES OF PAUL and fugitive slaves from all parts of Greece, for here the laws they had broken could not claim them. To keep such refuse at work, to pre- vent their cutting each other's throats and decamping with treasure, no less than to protect their operations from the fierce mountaineers, soldiers and fortifications were requisite. The astute monarch pro- vided both, and so arose Philippi, the treasury from which the gold that en- abled Alexander to conquer the world was drawn. We will visit the place in the year b. c. 42. Sailing westward across the iEgean Sea from near the site of Homer's Troy, we land at Neapolis, the port of Phil- ippi. Here close to the water runs the low range called, because it joins two lofty elevations, Symbalon, or the Link. It rises steeply. A mile and a half of the Egnation Road brings us to its sum- PHILIPPI 63 mit. Sixteen hundred feet below us on the west lies a fertile plain rimmed with mountains. Upon it, nine miles to the northwest, stood the city. The Egna- tion Road, dividing it into unequal parts, formed its main street. The north and smaller section, triangular in shape, was built upon a rounded hill of solid rock and called " High Town." The south and larger section formed a square drawn on the base of the triangle, was on level ground, and was called " Low Town." In High Town stood the Citadel. It was of prodigious strength, and was prob- ably the prison from which an earth- quake delivered Paul. Both sections were inclosed by two concentric walls strengthened by towers and ramparts, and leaving between them a broad space filled with gardens and statues. Enter- ing the main street from the east by the Neapolitan Gate, where, more than a cen- tury later, Claudius placed his magnificent 64 CITIES OF PAUL arch, we pass on the left a vast theatre, not built upon, but cut into the rocky hill. Walking the length of the main street and out through the " Spring Gate " or cc Gate of the Fountains " on the west, we pass, whether within or without both walls or between the two I am not sure, the " Aqueduct." Here the rivulets which gave name to the city were collected in a basin which supplied it with water, and discharged the surplus into the sinuous stream of the Gangas upon the banks of which Brutus cursed and Lydia prayed. The city was small. High Town and Low Town together included less than a mile north and south by half that dis- tance east and west. Long peace had made the walls seem needless, and the wealthy lived in suburbs which extended indefinitely south and east in a wilder- ness of lovely gardens adorned with statues and blooming with roses famed throughout the world for their beauty. PHILIPPI 65 On the plain south of the city, amid marshes and rivulets which except for a small part of the year have long been dry, the battle that destroyed the last hope of the republic was fought. Here by his own hand died the cc noblest Ro- man of them all," with the curse upon his lips, cc May the gods avenge upon the enemies of Rome these multiplied misfortunes ! " cc We must fly ! " cried some one. " Yes," answered Brutus, " but not with our feet, with our hands," and fell upon his sword. Cassius had already killed himself; and an almost incredible number of nobles, some moved by patriotic despair, some by selfish fears, followed the example of these leaders. Ninety-four years had passed when Paul, summoned thither as Brutus had been by a vision or an apparition, entered Philippi. To understand his experiences 66 CITIES OF PAUL there and the epistle written in view of them, one should keep in mind two facts. The first is that for some reason he felt more at home with the Philip- pian Christians than with those of other places ; wrote to them with less reserve, more as a pastor to his people or a father to his family. The second is that Philippi had become a military " Colo- nial Those born there had the rights of Roman citizenship. The cities en- joying that honor were few. There was probably no other in the world where it was prized so highly or guarded so jealously as here. When the magistrates learned that they had unwittingly tram- pled upon it, they were aware that they would probably be mobbed if the fact became known. This accounts for their terror and their eagerness to keep their blunder concealed when Paul, always alert to his surroundings and fully un- derstanding the dilemma in which they PHILIPPI 67 had placed themselves, informed them who he was. There seem to have been few Jews in the city, perhaps not enough for a syna- gogue. The children of Abraham who lived there met for worship in a " porch ,s outside the walls, and probably upon the banks of the stream which drank the blood of Brutus. There is a suggestiveness in the fact that the first Christian convert at Phil- ippi appears to have been a woman. The original cult of the region was the worship of Dionysus. His minis- ters were priestesses. Wild-eyed, loose- haired, they danced and rushed to and fro in riotous orgies ; and these Baccha- nalian revels, led always by women be- lieved to be inspired by the Deity, formed one of the most diabolical features of paganism. That this cult survived in the time of Paul is indicated by the fact that one such woman, supposed to be pos- 68 CITIES OF PAUL sessed by the god, a slave girl who by her " soothsaying brought much gain " to her owners, followed Paul about the streets declaring that he was the servant of the most High God. Ten or twelve years passed. The Apostle came to love the little church at Philippi as he loved no other. To it more than to others he looked for sympathy. It was the only one which never gave him cause to shed a tear. To it he wrote, and wrote amid circumstances which we should consider most depressing, the letter that may properly be called his "joy song," for none of his other writ- ings approaches it in gladness of heart. He is a prisoner at Rome. One can almost hear the clank of the chain bind- ing his right arm to the Pretorian as he draws it over the parchment in writing. And one can read between the lines re- miniscences of Philippi and revelations of Rome. PHILIPPI 69 I. The battle of Philippi was natu- rally counted by Augustus the most important ever fought. It established the empire and gave him his throne. He therefore dignified the city with su- preme honors and carved his name upon its monuments. Claudius adorned it with a triumphal arch commemorating the same victory. The incidents of the battle must have been familiar to every one who walked its streets in the first century, for inscriptions at each turn brought them to mind. Plutarch wrote only what was matter of common report when he attributed to Brutus this dis- quisition, " When I was young, Cas- sius ... I blamed Cato for killing him- self, thinking it an irreligious act and not a valiant one among men to try to evade the divine course of things and not fearlessly to receive and undergo the evil that shall happen, but to run away from it. But now in my own fortunes I 70 CITIES OF PAUL am of another mind ; for if Providence shall not dispose of what we now under- take according to our wishes, I resolve to put no further hopes or warlike pre- parations to the proof, but will die con- tented with my fortunes. For I have already given up my life to my country." Was there no remembrance of this when the Apostle wrote, " For me to live is Christ. ... I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ ; which is far better : never- theless to abide in the flesh is more need- ful for you." Therefore he will not imitate Brutus even in his wish to die. II. Once and once only Paul used the word erroneously translated in our re- ceived version " robbery." It is in the Epistle to the Philippians, and signifies "a thing to be snatched at." In less forceful but more dignified phrase the Revised Version renders it " a thing to be grasped." Christ thought equality PHILIPPI 71 with God a thing not to be snatched at, but certified as his by humility and re- nunciation. Where else on earth could that de- scription appear so forceful as in the city where the most important and the most familiar event in its history had been a battle in which the four most powerful men in the world fought, each trying to " snatch ,: for himself universal sover- eignty ? Where else would the contrast between the ways of Christ and those of human ambition appear so conspicu- ous as in the city where the victory of Caesar over Brutus was blazoned upon arches, inscribed upon the stage of the theatre, carved upon the Citadel, and kept constantly in mind by the divine honors which had been instituted to Octavius and continued to his successors ? III. Paul, remember, was at Rome. He was constantly in the company — for a considerable time at least — of one 72 CITIES OF PAUL of the Pretorian Guards. They were coarse men. Their vocation kept them near the emperor. They were idle and indolent and familiar with all the scan- dals of the palace. He must have heard their gossip. Indeed he implies that he did by the knowledge he shows of what was going on among them. I dare only hint at the foulness with which they reeked. Nero was emperor and Nero was their favorite. That is enough to say. They must have chattered about what they saw and heard. There was nothing else for them to talk of. Con- versations like this must have occurred in Paul's hearing, for if his friends were allowed to visit him, there can be little doubt that at a time when the Pretorians were emperor-makers and enjoyed bound- less license, no one of them would have submitted to the prohibition of visits from his cronies. " Yesterday all Rome was at the the- PHILIPPI 73 aire," I fancy one of them saying. " Lady Blank had on a purple gown. When the emperor saw it he flew into a fury, sent three of us to tear off her clothes. We did it, too, and she had to go home naked as she was born." " That 's nothing," ex- claims another; "his brother sang a song at court, and sang it so well that Nero, who sings like a frog and thinks him- self a nightingale, went crazy with envy and told the old witch Locusta to poison him at dinner. She tried to, but it did n't work. So Nero pounded her black and blue till she promised to try again. He would n't trust her alone, and made her try her poison on some pigs. It killed them in a flash. So he got his brother to dinner and fed him on the devil's mix- ture. That ended him, and yesterday Locusta was made a duchess by the old boy for doing it — the old hag ! " If I should describe the half of what was going on in the palace and among 74 CITIES OF PAUL the Pretorians around him, these words written by the Apostle to his beloved Philippians would seem the gasping of one in a sewer, smothering for fresh air. "Brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, what- soever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, . . . whatsoever things are of good report ; if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things." IV. There is a coincidence which may be mentioned by way of introduction to a more important matter, as it may pos- sibly have occurred to the Apostle. Two women of the church at Philippi, Euodia and Syntyche, were at odds, seriously so it seems, for Paul exhorts them to come to an agreement and " be- seeches" a friend to help them do so. We are somewhat at sea for accurate dates, but about this time the bitter ri- valry between two court ladies filled PHILIPPI 75 Rome with scandal. Their names were Octavia and Poppaea. They were fight- ing each other for the affections of Nero. The peculiarities of that emperor were such that in this contest Octavia was hopelessly handicapped by the fact that she was his wife. He therefore had her murdered in a particularly gruesome way, and her untimely fate excited the com- passion of the city. The incident was an al fresco painting of the miniature squabble at Philippi. But there is another passage in the epistle which has perplexed commenta- tors. It is the sharp and sudden and apparently uncalled-for reference, in the opening of the third chapter, to the in- fluence of the Jews. Dr. A. C. McGif- fert (page 388 of " The Apostolic Age ") has stated the difficulties of the passage with great force and suggested a way of escape from them. It seems to me that they vanish at 76 CITIES OF PAUL the name of Poppaea. That villain- ous woman, if she were not a Jewish proselyte, was certainly a partisan of the Jews. She was an intimate friend of a Jewish actor named Aliturius, VII COLOSSI THE CITY OF THE SLAVE Some ninety miles eastward from Ephe- sus the river Lycos joins the Meander on its way to the iEgean. Here high mountains approaching each other from the north and the south leave a narrow passage for the commingled waters, then retreat and come close together again ten miles farther east. The plain they inclose is the Lycos valley. In shape it resembles an obtuse-angled triangle. The moun- tains which rim it are rugged, and some of their peaks rise more than eight thou- sand feet above the sea. Upon this plain were three cities grouped by St. Paul almost as parts of a single metropolis. At the northwest angle of the valley upon the mountain-side was Hierapolis, 1 64 CITIES OF PAUL or in English the " Sacred City." It was celebrated for a cave of superb stalactites and a mephitic spring the vapors from which were believed to inspire priests and poison laymen. Here was a great tem- ple to Cybele which long before Paul's day had been a centre of Phrygian wor- ship. Here, too, in later times dwelt Bishop Papias, believed by some — though probably on insufficient grounds — to have been the amanuensis of " the disciple whom Jesus loved." Here, too, there is some reason to think that the four daughters of Philip the Evangelist " which did prophesy " spent their last days. What, however, gives the place its chief interest for us is an uncontroverted fact to be mentioned presently. Six miles south of Hierapolis, at the southwest angle of the plain, south also of the Lycos, was a city named originally " Jove's-town," but renamed after his wife, by one of the Seleucids, " Laodicea." COLOSSI 165 An emporium of trade, possessing a widely celebrated sanitarium or Temple of iEsculapius, the priests of which were believed to have the secret for manu- facturing an eye-salve of unequaled vir- tue, the wealthiest and most luxurious city between Ephesus and Antioch, Lao- dicea is remembered only on account of the caustic letter drawn from the author of the Apocalypse by the laxity of her Christians. At the southeast angle of the plain, ten miles east-southeast of Laodicea, was Colossae. It was perched upon a shelf or foothill where the Lycos had cut a gorge through the mountain ridge. The gorge, steep and narrow, bisected the city, and is said by Professor Ramsay to be two and a half miles long, varying in width between one hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty feet. The " Royal Road " which connected Smyrna and Ephesus with Persia ran through 1 66 CITIES OF PAUL the Lycos valley and gave importance to each of its three cities. For a long time Colossae was the most considerable of the three, but in the time of Paul Laodicea had taken precedence and Colossae was compara- tively insignificant. At that time it was the home of a certain good-for-nothing slave, a thief and a vagabond, and of his master, a refined Christian gentleman. This fact alone has given it distinction for all ages. Providence has used the insignificance of the place as art has employed the monotony of the Nile to emphasize the grandeur of the pyramids. Paul has brought it about that we must think of Colossae because the name is in the New Testament, and that in think- ing of Colossae nothing shall distract our attention from two facts more important for us to know than anything taught by the splendors of Ephesus. Those facts are: — COLOSSI 167 I. How the Christian church was cradled, fostered, and made the strongest power in the world. II. How it attacked and destroyed the most malignant social and political disease of antiquity, a disease which ap- peared to such men as Cicero, Epictetus, and Juvenal to be both deadly and in- curable. There are times when Christian pa- triots lose heart as they pause to take breath in their conflicts with the worship of Mammon. A glance backward should revive their faith. In the year a. d. 35 the wealth, the fashion, the intellectual life of the world, all its literature, all its science, all its art, all its philosophy, all its religions, all its business, all its soldiers, all its ships, both of commerce and of war, all its amuse- ments, all its statesmen, all its politi- cians, all its rulers, all its lawyers, and most important of all, its little children 1 68 CITIES OF PAUL were precisely as they would have been if no sermon had been preached on the mountain and no voice had prayed, " Father ! forgive them." Three centuries later all was changed* The powers of the state were nominally Christian ; the world's ships were steered by the pilots of Galilee, its buildings constructed by the carpenter of Naza- reth, its costliest marbles inscribed with his name. How did the change come to pass ? The two epistles sent by Paul to Colossae reveal the secret. St. Paul is a prisoner at Rome. Near three hundred thousand persons are in the great circus of that city. Some are swearing, some are betting, some are fighting. All are alert with excitement, for it is race day. The most admired men in Rome are the jockeys who will soon appear, one wearing a white, one a red, one a blue, but the favorite a green cap. It is some years before the advent COLOSSI 169 of the charioteer Diodes, whose skill as a whip brought him a fortune so great that he left his son a million and a quar- ter pounds sterling, but it is nearing the time when Juvenal declared a jockey could earn a hundred-fold more than a leading lawyer; the time of which he wrote, "The whole of Rome has flocked to the circus to-day, and the uproar of the crowd can be heard miles away." Caligula, by spending in the stables the time he should have passed in the Sen- ate, has made the society of jockeys more envied than that of Conscript Fathers, and Nero, though he began by pretend- ing to frown upon that scandal, has cast off disguises and taught the populace to regard his sceptre as a trifle compared with his whip. On the Aventine, overlooking the great circus and within sound of its tur- moil, was a small house where dwelt a man named Aquila with his wife Priscilla. 170 CITIES OF PAUL They had met Paul at Corinth a few years before, had been his hosts there, and to Ephesus the three had journeyed together. And now in their little parlor at Rome the man and his wife with a few friends, among whom probably are Pudens and his daughter Pudentia, are praying for their imprisoned friend and teacher. To human ears their prayers would seem to float on the roar of the circus as chips on the maelstrom. They are praying to Christ, and Rome does not know that they are there. But when the races are over they keep on praying. Others join them, one by one, until the little parlor is too small to hold their number. A partition is knocked out. In due time from this seed will grow what we call a church. It is already what Paul meant by that name. It is like the house of Pudens which, after being buried by the debris of centuries, will be excavated, COLOSSI 171 and on its floor a mosaic found of the Saviour holding a book upon which is written, " The Lord, defender of the house of Pudens." Could any vision appear to most of the contemporaries of Paul more fantas- tic than one declaring that the prayer- room of Aquila should supplant the circus of Nero ? While Paul in his prison was cheered by the prayers of these humble people, two visitors came to him. One was a well- known traveler from the East named Epaphras. He tells how a certain rich man, Philemon, an acquaintance of both, has, with his wife Apphia, established in his home at Colossae such another prayer- meeting as that of Aquila. " But," Epaphras seems to have said, " you had better write them a letter, for in spite of all you told them some of those breth- ren, influenced partly by the priests of Hierapolis and still more by the Jews 172 CITIES OF PAUL of Laodicea, are coming to think that Christ is a hard master, and that they can please him only by painful penances. Instead of enjoying the liberty you preached, they are acting as slaves of a cruel lord." So Paul wrote the Epistle to the Co- lossians, but before he had finished it, perhaps, another visitor appeared. He is in rags, half starved, and looks like a hunted hare. There may have been a conversation something like this : — " Who are you ? " cc My name is Onesimus. I am a slave. I belong to Philemon of Colossae. I robbed him and ran away. The police are after me. I don't know what to do." " Why have you come to me ? " " I was with my master in Ephesus, and heard what you said — and — and I have nowhere else to go." Some years ago my bell rang softly. I opened the door. There stood a little COLOSSI 173 girl. She was thinly clad and shivering, for it was winter. Hungry too. " Is this Minister Wright's house ? ,: asked the waif. "Yes!" " Are you Minister Wright ? " "Yes!" " Take me." She was cold and hungry, and, worse than either, a lost child. She had heard, perhaps in some mission school, that Jesus loved little children, and with swift childlike logic inferred that therefore Christ's ministers must take care of them. I named her my "Onesima," for she made me understand how Paul felt when he wrote that second letter to Colossae in behalf of the slave who knew only that he was lost, and that the Apostle was the minister of One who came to seek and to save that which was lost. These two epistles, sent, the one to Philemon and the other to the church 174 CITIES OF PAUL which was in his house, both of them full of affectionate greetings from the little Christian Endeavor Society in Rome, show how the early church, unre- garded and unnoticed by the conspicuous powers of the time, undermined and supplanted them all by quietly training fathers and mothers, masters and slaves and little children, poor men and rich men, in their homes and in their shops, to try to " do these sayings of mine." They show us how Christianity achieved that task, apparently the most hopeless ever set before men, the abolition of slavery. Outside of Palestine slavery was uni- versal. The work of city and country was done by slaves. They were not re- garded as human. For them the laws afforded no protection. Their enormous numbers inspired general apprehension, and many of the cruelties practiced upon them by their masters were caused by the COLOSSUS 175 conviction that they could be kept in subjection by fear alone. Thus, when a certain slave slew with a small spear, single-handed, a boar so fierce that the hunters dared not face it, and thereby saved the lives of some of them, his Ro- man master had him crucified for carry- ing a weapon, and Cicero remarked that perhaps the master had been a little harsh, but he would not venture an opinion. When a slave was cut into mince meat and thrown to the eels for dropping a glass goblet, no indignation was expressed by the guests at the banquet. Two incidents which probably oc- curred while Paul was a prisoner at Rome may serve to show what slavery in that city was. The first, cited by Cel- sus and accepted by Origen as true, was this. A slave boy born at Hierapolis, the city near Colossae, as we have seen, came into the possession of Epaphrodi- tus, who, himself a slave, had become a 176 CITIES OF PAUL freedman and was Nero's most trusted intimate. The child was weak and sickly, and his master hated him. I suppose his animosity was inspired by the inher- ent malignity felt by vice toward virtue. The master was amusing himself by tor- turing the slave when the little fellow said, " Master, you '11 break that leg if you twist it any more." Another wrench. The leg was broken. Without a cry or the change of a feature the child said : — " There, I told you you would break it!" The boy was Epictetus. Paul may have known of this, for it occurred in " Caesar's household." While Paul was a prisoner, a slave at Rome killed his master Pedanius. It was the law that all the slaves of the mur- dered man should be slaughtered. Pe- danius had four hundred, many of them women and children. It was proposed COLOSSiE 177 to make an exception by sparing the children. The proposal called forth an impassioned speech from one of the ablest senators, in which he said : — "We have in our service whole na- tions of slaves, the scum of mankind, collected from all quarters of the earth : a race of men who bring with them foreign rites and the religion of their country or no religion at all. In such a conflux if the laws are silent what pro- tection remains for the master ? " This protest was effectual. The law took its course. The four hundred — men, women, and children — were slaugh- tered. At this time — let it be remem- bered in honor of the Apostle — to give food or shelter, to conceal or in any way assist a fugitive slave was to incur the penalty of death. This Paul knew when Onesimus came to him. He did not justify the suppliant for robbing his mas- 178 CITIES OF PAUL ter or even for running away. He does not seem even to have been aware that slavery was wrong. He had just written the letter in which he said, cc Slaves, obey in all things your masters accord- ing to the flesh, not with eye service as men pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God," as if he thought slavery a divine institution. But he writes to Philemon, the slave's master, reminding him that the slave is a Christian, a brother therefore, and that we are all alike Christ's slaves and must treat our slaves as Christ treats his. He speaks of himself and Epaphras as ic slaves of Christ," but calls Onesimus " a brother beloved." To the slave he said in substance, " All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." To the master he said the same. Through obedience to such teach- ing, without help of human law, or even COLOSSI 179 protest against its iniquities, slavery dis- appeared. There is a bondage worse than that of Onesimus. The slavery of the ergas- tula was mild compared to that of the palace. Well might Caligula have en- vied Onesimus. That emperor, the son of Germanicus, was the idol of Rome. When he took the sceptre the Romans called him their " star," their " darling." They offered a hundred and sixty thou- sand victims upon their altars, to pur- chase blessings upon him from the gods in whom they believed. They thronged their temples, and scores of them offered their lives to the unseen powers as a ran- som for his. They inscribed his name upon a shield of gold, and decreed that upon an appointed day each year their priests, their senators, and their noblest young men and maidens should carry it to the Capitol with paeans for his virtues and prayers for his prosperity. When he 180 CITIES OF PAUL ordered the heads to be removed from the statues of the great gods and replaced by copies of his own, put a gold image of himself in the temple built for his worship, and had it clothed each day in robes like those he chose that day to wear, no protest checked his arrogance. His wealth was beyond computation. He could form no wish within the power of man to gratify which was not imme- diately performed. Yet within the com- pass of his empire there was probably no other slave so wretched as he. When it thunders this divine man wraps his head in his cloth of gold and creeps under the bed quaking for fear of the gods he has supplanted. He flies to Naples, and the smoke of Ve- suvius terrifies him into spasms. Three hours of the twenty-four are the most he ever hopes to sleep, and during them he is tortured by horrible dreams. In them he hears the sea roaring, sees it COLOSSI 181 draw nearer and nearer while he vainly attempts to fly, shrieks as he mistakes his own cold sweat of fear for its waters. He leaps from his bed and wanders through the gorgeous corridors of his palace. He dares not have them lighted, for to his tortured brain assassination seems to lurk behind every pillar, and light will show the dagger where to strike. He is not mad. De Quincey's attempt to prove him so proves only the insanity of vicious passions unrestrained. His crimes are his only chains. They are the furies which have built the prison from which he cannot escape. In vain he tries by superstitious rites to unlock the iron gates of his penitentiary. This terrified man is a colossal por- trait of those among the Christians of Colossae for whose help Paul wrote. Conscience, long entranced by heathen abominations, had been awakened by the vision of Christ. How to appease it 1 82 CITIES OF PAUL became the absorbing quest of the neo- phytes. Hierapolis had long been the centre of a cult which taught that the unseen powers could be propitiated by ascetic tortures and in no other way. In the whole circle of the Roman Em- pire there was no other religious system which called for self-torments and mu- tilations so unspeakable as those de- manded by Sabazius and Cybele. The contact of Christianity with paganism destroyed paganism, but it also modified Christianity. In conquering the Roman eagles it turned the dove of Bethabara into a bird of prey. Constantine placed the cross above the sword, but only to make it a more effective weapon of war. And when Liberius substituted Christ- mas for the Saturnalia, the rioters, driven from the cradle of Saturnus, reassembled around the manger of Christ. To such dangers Paul was unceasingly alert. There can be little doubt that it was COLOSSI 183 largely the influence of Hierapolis which opened the ears of Colossians to Juda- izing teachers, who substituted forms and penances for trust in the Father and made them deaf to the " Come unto me." The Epistle to Philemon was the un- conscious proclamation of liberty to the slave of circumstances. The Epistle to the Colossians was the conscious proclamation of liberty to the slave of self. The former was under- stood and obeyed centuries before Lu- ther re taught the world the meaning of the latter. VIII ANCYRA THE CITY OF THE WEATHERCOCKS Until quite recently the province of Central Asia Minor, marked on modern maps "Angora," was regarded without question as the Galatia of St. Paul. Cer- tain scholars of repute now think that it is not, and locate the " churches of Galatia " addressed by the Apostle in a region farther south. Those who care to examine the arguments for and against the new theory will find them stated with fairness and force in the Encyclopedia Biblica. I do not think they have over- thrown or even seriously undermined the long-accepted view. The correctness of that view seems to me confirmed by the facts which justify the title of this paper — facts which show clearly ANCYRA 185 that the contents of the Epistle to the Galatians answer to the known charac- teristics of the North Galatians as a screw fits into its matrix. Ancyra was their capital city. The word signifies an anchor. Tradition said that Midas found an anchor buried in the ground, built a city over it, and named the place after his find. To readers who recall the history of its people the name will seem like an oak in a cornfield, or like John the Baptist among reeds shaken by the wind. It is the business of an anchor to stand fast against all currents ; of a weathercock to move at the touch of every breeze. Yet with equal fidelity to facts we may call Ancyra an anchor or a weathercock, since it has for millenniums held a race to its place in history against forces work- ing with tremendous power to efface it from human sight and memory, yet has shown conspicuously the peculiar quali- 1 86 CITIES OF PAUL ties of that race which are correctly repre- sented by a weather vane. cf The prominent qualities of the Celtic race/' says Mommsen, quoting Thierry, cc were personal bravery, in which they excelled all nations ; an open, impetuous temperament accessible to every impres- sion ; much intelligence but at the same time extreme mobility, want of perse- verance, aversion to discipline and order ; ostentation and perpetual discord — the result of boundless vanity." " Such qualities," adds Mommsen, "those of good soldiers and bad citizens, explain the historic fact that the Celts have shaken all states and have founded none." Now the Epistle to the Galatians is a protest against these qualities, which may be summed up in the single word "fickle- ness." Notice a few of the Apostle's vari- ations upon that theme. " I marvel that ye are so soon removed ANCYRA 187 from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel." cc O foolish Galatians, who hath be- witched you, . . . before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you ? " Co. Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A. NOV 2 1995 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: June 2005 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (724) 779-21 1 1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 00DE33ai7ES