Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 11 Critical Writings.djvu/18

xii mofher of Nero, well knowing the fate that else awaited him. Claudius, repudiating his own son, adopted Nero as his child and imperial heir. In less than two years Agrippina poisoned her husband, and by a coup d’etat put Nero on the throne, who, ere long, procured the murder of his own mother, Seneca the philosopher helping him in the plot, but also in due time to fall by the hand of the tyrant.

Eighteen centuries ago this very year, Nero, expecting to be emperor, married Octavia,—he sixteen years old, yet debauched already by premature licentiousness,—she but eleven, espoused to another who had already fallen by his own hand, bringing calculated odium on the imperial family; a yet sadder fate awaited the miserable maid thus bartered away in infancy.

This marriage of the Emperor's adopted son with his only daughter was doubtless thought a great event. Everybody knew of it : among the millions that swarmed in Rome, probably there was not a female slave but knew the deed. 'Historians in their gravity paused to record it ; poets, doubtless, with the customary flattery of that inconstant tribe, wrote odes on the occasion of this shameless marriage of a dissolute boy and an unfortunate girl.

The same year, fifty-three after the birth of Christ, according to the most ancient chronological canon which has come down to us, there came to Rome an obscure man, Saul by name, which he had altered to Paul; a sail-maker, as it seems, from the little city of Tarsus in Cilicia. Nobody took much notice of it. Nay, the time of his coming is quite uncertain and hard to ascertain; and it appears that the writer of this most ancient chronicle, though he lived sixteen or seventeen hundred years nearer the fact than we do, was mistaken, and that in the year fifty-three Paul went to Corinth for the first time and dwelt there; and eight years after, in the spring of the year, was brought a prisoner to Rome. These curiosities of chronology show how unimportant Paul's coming was thought at that time. The marriage of a dissolute boy, with an unfortunate girl, was set down as a great thing, while the coming of Paul was too slight a circumstance to deserve notice.

He came from a hated nation,—the Jews were thought the enemies of mankind,—he was a poor plebeian, a mechanic, and lived in an age when military power and riches had such