 Section 8 of Volume 1 of a Popular History of France from the Earliest Times. Here Vespasian nor his sons Titus and Domitian visited Gaul as their predecessors had. Domitian alone put in a short appearance. The eastern provinces of the Empire and the wars on the frontier of the Danube, towards which the invasions of the Germans were at that time beginning to be directed, absorbed the attention of the new emperors. Gaul was far, however, from remaining docile and peaceful at this epic. After the vacancy that occurred after Nero and amid the claims of various pretenders, the authority of the Roman name and the pressure of the imperial power diminished rapidly, and the memory and desire of independence were reawakened. In Belgica the German peoples, who had been allowed to settle on the left bank of the Rhine, were very imperfectly subdued, and kept up close communication with the independent peoples of the right bank. The eight Roman legions cantoned in that province were themselves much changed. Many barbarians had been enlisted amongst them and did gallant service, but they were indifferent and always ready for a new master in a new country. There were not wanting symptoms soon followed by opportunities for action of this change in sentiment and fact. In the very center of Gaul between the Loire and the Allier, a peasant who has kept in history his Gallic name of Marie or Maricus, formed a band and scoured the country, proclaiming national independence. He was arrested by the local authorities and handed over to Vitellius, who had him thrown to the beasts. But in the northern part of Belgica, towards the mouth of the Rhine, where a Batavian people lived, a man of note amongst his compatriots and in the service of the Romans, amongst whom he had received the name of Claudius Civilus, embraced first secretly and afterwards openly the cause of insurrection. He had vengeance to take for Nero's treatment, who had caused his brother, Julius Paulus, to be beheaded and himself to be put in prison once he had been liberated by Galba. He made a vow to let his hair grow until he was revenged. He had but one eye and gloried in the fact, saying that it had been so with Hannibal and with Sartorius, and that his highest aspiration was to be like them. He pronounced first for Vitellius against Otho, then for Vespasian against Vitellius, and then for the complete independence of his nation against Vespasian. He soon had, amongst the Germans on the two banks of the Rhine and amongst the Gauls themselves, secret or declared allies. He was joined by a young Gaul from the district of Longres, Julius Sabines, who boasted that, during the Great War with the Gauls, his great grandmother had taken the fancy of Julius Caesar, and that he owed his name to him. News had just reached Gaul of the Burning Down for the second time of the capital, during the disturbances at Rome on the death of Nero. The druids came forth from the retreats where they had hidden since Claudius's prescription, and reappeared in the towns and country places, proclaiming that the Roman Empire was at an end, that the Gaulic Empire was beginning, and that the day had come when the possession of all the world should pass into the hands of the Transalpine nations. The insurgents rose in the name of the Gaulic Empire, and Julius Sabines assumed the title of Caesar. War commenced. Confusion, hesitation, and actual desertion reached the colonies, and extended positively to the Roman legions. Several towns, even troves and cologne, submitted or fell into the hands of the insurgents. Several legions, yielding to bribery, persuasion, or intimidation, went over to them, some with a bad grace, others with the blood of their officers on their hands. The gravity of the situation was not misunderstood at Rome. Petelius Serialis, a commander of renown for his campaigns on the Rhine, was sent off to Belgica with seven fresh legions. He was as skillful in negotiation and persuasion as he was in battle. The struggle that ensued was fierce, but brief, and nearly all the towns and legions that had been guilty of defection returned to their Roman legions. Sevilleus, though not more than half vanquished, himself asked leave to surrender. The Batavian might, as was said at the time, have inundated the country and drowned the Roman armies. Vespasian, therefore, not being inclined to drive men or matters to extremity, gave Sevilleus leave to go into retirement and live in peace amongst the marshes of his own land. The Gaulic chieftains alone, the projectors of a Gaulic Empire, were rigorously pursued and chastened. There was especially one, Julius Subinus, the pretended descendant of Julius Caesar, whose capture was heartily desired. After the ruin of his hopes he took refuge in some vaults connected with one of his country-houses. The way in was known only to two devoted freedmen of his who set fire to the buildings and spread a report that Subinus had poisoned himself and that his dead body had been devoured by the flames. He had a wife, a young Gaul named Eponina, who was in frantic despair at the rumour, but he had her informed by the mouth of one of his freedmen of his place of concealment, begging her at the same time to keep up a show of widowhood and mourning in order to confirm the report already in circulation. Well did she play her part, to use Plutarch's expression, in her tragedy of woe. She went at night to visit her husband in his retreat and departed at break of day, and at last would not depart at all. At the end of seven months, hearing great talk of Aspecian's clemency, she set out for Rome, taking with her her husband, disguised as a slave, with shaven head and a dress that made him unrecognisable. But the friends who were in their confidence advised them not to risk as yet the chance of imperial clemency and to return to their secret asylum. There they lived for nine years, during which, as a lioness in her den, neither more nor less, says Plutarch, Eponina gave birth to two young whelps, and suckled them herself at her teat. At last they were discovered and brought before Vispecian at Rome. Caesar, said Eponina, showing him her children, I conceived them and suckled them in a tomb, that there might be more of us to ask thy mercy. But Vispecian was merciful only from prudence, and not by nature or from magnanimity, and he sent subvenice to execution. Eponina asked that she might die with her husband, saying, Caesar, do me this grace, for I have lived more happily beneath the earth and in the darkness than thou in the splendor of thy empire. Vispecian fulfilled her desire by sending her also to execution, and Plutarch, their contemporary, undoubtedly expressed the general feeling, when he ended his tale with the words, In all the long reign of this emperor there was no deed so cruel or so piteous to see, and he was afterwards punished for it, for in a short time all his posterity was extinct. In fact the Caesars and the Flavinians met the same fate, the two lines began and ended alike, the former with Augustus and Nero, the latter with Vispecian and Domitian, first a despot, able, cold, and as capable of cruelty as of moderation, then a tyrant, atrocious and detested, and both were extinguished without a descendant. Then a rare piece of good fortune befell the Roman world. Domitian, two years before he was assassinated by some of his servants whom he was about to put to death, grew suspicious of an aged and honourable senator, Cosius Nerva, who had been twice consul, and whom he had sent into exile, first to Tarenturn, and then in Gaul, preparatory probably to a worse fate. To this victim a prescription application was made by the conspirators who had just got rid of Domitian, and had to get another emperor. Nerva accepted, but not without hesitation, for he was sixty-four years old, he had witnessed the violent death of six emperors, and his grandfather, a celebrated jurist, and for a long while the friend of Tiberius, had killed himself, it is said, for grief at the iniquitous and cruel government of his friend. The short reign of Nerva was a wise, a just, and a humane, but a sad one, not for the people but for himself. He maintained peace in order, recalled exiles, suppressed informers, re-established respect for laws and morals, turned a deaf ear to self-interested suggestions of vengeance, spoilation, and injustice, proceeding at one time from these who had made him emperor, and at another from the Praetorian soldiers and the Roman mob, who regretted Domitian just as they had Nero. But Nerva did not succeed in putting a stop to mob violence or murders prompted by cupidity or hatred. During his authority insulted and his life threatened, he formed a resolution which has been described and explained by a learned and temperate historian of the last century, L'Anne de Télément, histoire des emperors, page 59, with so much justice and precision that it is a pleasure to quote his own words. Seeing, says he, that his age was despised, and that the empire required someone who combined strength of mind and body, Nerva, being free from that blindness which prevents one from discussing and measuring one's own powers, and from that thirst for dominion which often prevails over even those who are nearest to the grave, resolved to take a partner in the sovereign power, and showed his wisdom by making choice of Trajan. By this choice indeed Nerva commenced and inaugurated the finest period of the Roman Empire, the period that contemporaries entitled the Golden Age, and that history has named the age of the Antonines. It is desirable to become acquainted with the real character of this period, or to it belong the two greatest historical events, the dissolution of ancient pagan and the birth of modern Christian society. Five notable sovereigns, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius swayed the Roman Empire during this period, AD 96-150. What Nerva was has just been described, and he made no mistake in adopting Trajan as his successor. Trajan, connected by origin, as Nerva also had been, with old Rome, was born in Spain, near Sevilla, and by military service in the East had made his first steps towards fortune and renown. He was essentially a soldier, a moral and modest soldier, a friend to justice and to the public wheel. Grand, in what he undertook for the Empire he governed, simple and modest on his own score, respectful towards the civil authority and the laws, untiring and equitable in the work of provincial administration, without any philosophical system or pretensions, full of energy and boldness, honesty and good sense. He stoutly defended the Empire against the Germans on the banks of the Danube, one for it the province of Dacia, and, being more taken up with the East than the West, made many Asiatic conquests, of which his successor, Hadrian, lost no time in abandoning, wisely no doubt, a portion. Hadrian, adopted by Trajan and a Spaniard too, was intellectually superior and morally very inferior to him. He was full of ambition, vanity, invention and restlessness, he was skeptical in thought and cynical in manners, and he was overflowing with political, philosophical and literary views and pretensions. He passed the twenty-one years of his reign chiefly in traveling about the Empire, in Asia, Africa, Greece, Spain, Gaul and Great Britain, opening roads, raising ramparts and monuments, surrounding schools of learning and museums, and encouraging among provinces, as well as at Rome, the march of administration, legislation and intellect, more for his own pleasure and his own glorification than in the interest of his country and of society. At the close of this active career, when he was ill and felt that he was dying, he did the best deed of his life. He had proved, in the discharge of high offices, the calm and clear-sided wisdom of Titus Antoninas, a Gaul whose family came originally from Nîm. He had seen him one day coming to the Senate and respectfully supporting the tottering steps of his aged father, or father-in-law, according to Aurelius Victor, and he adopted him as his successor. Antoninas Pius, as a civilian, was just what Trajan had been as a warrior, moral and modest, just and frugal, attentive to the public wheel, gentle towards individuals, full of respect for laws and rights, scrupulous in justifying his deeds before the Senate and making them known to the population by carefully posted edicts, and more anxious to do no wrong or harm to anybody than to gain luster from brilliant or popular deeds. He surpasses all men in goodness, said his contemporaries, and he conferred on the empire the best of gifts, for he gave it Marcus Aurelius for its leader. It has been said that Marcus Aurelius was philosophy enthroned. Without any desire to contest or detract from that compliment, let it be added that he was conscientiousness enthroned. It is his grand and original characteristic that he governed the Roman Empire and himself with a constant moral solicitude, ever anxious to realize that ideal of personal virtue and general justice which he had conceived, and to which he aspired. His conception, indeed, of virtue and justice was incomplete, and even false in certain cases, and in more than one instance, such as the persecution of the Christians, he committed acts quite contrary to the moral law which he intended to put in practice towards all men, but his respect for the moral law was profound, and his intention to shape his acts according to it serious and sincere. Let us cull a few phrases from that collection of his private thoughts, which he entitled For Self, and which is really the most faithful picture man ever left of himself and the pains he took with himself. There is, says he, relationship between all beings endowed with reason. The world is like a superior city within which the other cities are but families. I have conceived the idea of a government founded on laws of general and equal application. Beware, lest thou sezars thyself, for it is what happens only too often. Keep thyself simple, good, unaltered, worthy, grave, a friend to justice, pious, kindly disposed, courageous enough for any duty. Revenge the gods, preserve mankind. Life is short. The only possible good fruit of our earthly existence is holiness of intention and deeds that tend to the common will. My soul be thou covered with shame. Thy life is well nigh gone, and thou has not yet learned how to live. Amongst men who have ruled great states, it is not easy to mention more than two, Marcus Aurelius and San Louis, who have been thus passionately concerned about the moral condition of their souls and the moral conduct of their lives. The mind of Marcus Aurelius was superior to that of Saint Louis, but Saint Louis was a Christian, and his moral ideal was more pure, more complete, more satisfying, and more strengthening for the soul than the philosophical ideal of Marcus Aurelius. And so Saint Louis was serene and confident as to his fate and that of the human race, whilst Marcus Aurelius was disquieted and sad, sad for himself and also for humanity, his country and for his times. Oh, my soul, was his cry. Wherefore art thou troubled, and why am I so vexed? We are here brought closer to the fact which has already been foreshadowed, and which characterizes the moral and social condition of the Roman world at this period. It would be a great error to take the five emperors just spoken of, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, as representative of the society amidst which they lived, and as giving in a certain degree the measure of its enlightenment, its morality, its prosperity, its disposition, and condition in general. Those five princes were not only picked men, superior in mind and character to the majority of their contemporaries, but they were men almost isolated in their generation, and in them there was a resumption of all that had been acquired by Greek and Roman antiquity of enlightenment and virtue, practical wisdom and philosophical morality. They were the heirs and the survivors of the great minds and the great politicians of Athens and Rome, of the Aeropagus and the Senate. They were not in intellectual and moral harmony with the society they governed, and their action upon it served hardly to preserve it partially and temporarily from the evils to which it was committed by its own vices and to break its fall. When they were thoughtful and modest as Marcus Aurelius was, they were gloomy and disposed to discouragement, for they had a secret foreboding of the uselessness of their efforts. Nor was their gloom groundless, in spite of their honest plans and a brilliant appearance, the degradation, material as well as moral, of Roman society went on increasing. The wars, the luxury, the dilapidations, and the disturbances of the empire always raised its expenses much above its receipts. The rough miserliness of Vespasian and the wise economy of Antoninus Pius were far from sufficient to restore the balance. The aggravation of imposts was incessant, and the population, especially the agricultural population, dwindled away more and more, in Italy itself, the center of the state. This evil disquieted the emperors when they were neither idiots nor madmen. Claudius, Vespasian, Nerva and Trajan labored to supply a remedy, and Augustus himself had set them the example. They established in Italy colonies of veterans to whom they assigned lands. They made gifts thereof to indigent Roman citizens. They attracted by the title of senator rich citizens from the provinces. And when they had once installed them as landholders in Italy, they did not permit them to depart without authorization. Trajan decreed that every candidate for the Roman magistracies should be bound to have a third of his fortune invested in Italian land. In order, says Pliny the Younger, that those who sought the public dignities should regard Rome and Italy not as an inn to put up at in traveling but as their home. And Pliny the Elder, going as a philosophical observer to the very root of the evil, says in his pompous manner, in former times our generals tilled their fields with their own hands, the earth, we may suppose, opened graciously beneath a plow crowned with laurels, and held by triumphal hands. Maybe because those great men gave to tillage the same care they gave to war, and that they sowed seed with the same attention with which they pitched a camp. Or maybe also because everything fructifies best in honorable hands, because everything is done with the most scrupulous exactitude. Nowadays these same fields are given over to slaves in chains, to malifactors who are condemned to penal servitude, and on whose brother is a brand. Earth is not deaf to our prayers. We give her the name of mother. Culture is what we call the pains we bestow on her. But can we be surprised if she render not to slaves the recompense she paid to generals? What must have been the decay of population and of agriculture in the provinces, when even in Italy there was need of such strong protective efforts, which were nevertheless so slightly successful? Pliny had seen what was the fatal canker of the Roman Empire in the country as well as in the towns, slavery or semi-slavery. Landed property was overwhelmed with taxes, was subject to conditions which branded it with a sort of servitude, and was cultivated by a servile population, in whose hands it became almost barren. The large holders were thus disgusted, and the small ruined or reduced to a condition more and more degraded. Add to this the state of things in the civil department, a complete absence of freedom and vitality in the political, no elections, no discussion, no public responsibility, characters weakened by indolence and silence, or destroyed by despotic power, or corrupted by the intrigues of court or army. Take a step farther, cast a glance over the moral department, no religious creeds and nothing left of even paganism but its festivals and frivolous or shameful superstitions. The philosophy of Greece and the old Roman manner of life had raised up, it is true, in the higher ranks of society, stoics and jurists, the former the last champions of morality and the dignity of human nature, the latter the last enlightened servants of the civil community. But neither the doctrines of the stoics, nor the science and able reasoning of the jurists, were lights and guides within the reach and for the use of the populace, who remained a prey to the vices and the miseries of servitude or public disorders, oscillating between the weary simness of barren ignorance and the corruptness of a life of adventure. All the causes of decay were at this time spreading throughout Roman society. Not a single preservative or regenerative principle of national life was in any force or any esteem. After the death of Marcus Aurelius the decay manifested and developed itself almost without interruption for the space of a century, the outward invisible sign of it being the disorganization and repeated falls of the government itself. This series of emperors given to the Roman world by airship or adoption, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, was succeeded by what may be termed an imperial anarchy in the course of one hundred and thirty-two years the scepter passed into the hands of thirty-nine sovereigns with the title of Emperor, Augustus, and was clutched at by thirty-one pretenders, whom history has dubbed tyrants, without other claim than their fiery ambition and their trials of strength, supported at one time in such and such a province of the empire by certain legions or some local uprising, at another, and most frequently in Italy itself, by the Praetorian guards, who had at their disposal the name of Rome in the shadow of a senate. There were Italians, Africans, Spaniards, Gauls, Britons, Illyrians, and Asiatics, and amongst the number were to be met with some cases of eminence in war and politics, and some even of rare virtue and patriotism, such as Pertenax, Septimus Severus, Alexander Severus, Dias, Claudius Gothicus, Aurelian, Tacitus, and Probus. They made great efforts some to protect the empire against the barbarians, growing day by day more aggressive, others to reestablish within it some sort of order, and to restore to the laws some sort of force. All failed, and nearly all died of violent death, after a short-lived guardianship of a fabric that was crumbling to pieces in every part, but still under the grand name of Roman Empire. Gaul had her share in this series of ephemeral emperors and tyrants, one of the most wicked and most insane, though issue of one of the most valorous and able, Caracalla, son of Septimus Severus, was born at Lyon, four years after the death of Marcus Aurelius. A hundred years later Narbonne gave in two years to the Roman world three emperors, Charus and his two sons, Carinus and Numerian. Amongst the thirty-one tyrants who did not attain to the title of Augustus, six were Gauls, and the last two, Amandus and Elinus, were AD 285, the chiefs of that great insurrection of peasants, slaves or half-slaves, who under the name of Bagunians, signifying, according to Ducanj, a wandering troop of insurgents from field and forest, spread themselves over the north of Gaul, between the Rhine and the Loire, pillaging and ravaging in all directions, after having themselves endured the pillaging and ravages of the fiscal agents and soldiers of the Empire. A contemporary witness, Lacentius, describes the causes of this popular outbreak in the following words. So enormous had the impulse become that the tiller's strength was exhausted, fields became deserts and farms were changed into forests. The fiscal agents measured the land by the clod, trees, vine-stocks were all counted. The cattle were marked, the people registered. Old age or sickness was no excuse, the sick and the infirm were brought up, everyone's age was put down, a few years were added on to the children's and taken off from the old men's. Meanwhile the cattle decreased, the people died and there was no deduction made for the dead. It is said that to excite the confidence and zeal of their bands the two chiefs of the Baganians had metal struck, and one that exhibited the head of Amandus, Emperor, Caesar, Augustus, Pius and Prosperus, with a word hope on the other side. When public evils have reached such a pitch, and nevertheless the day has not yet arrived when the entire disappearance of the system that causes them, there arises nearly always a new power which, in the name of necessity, applies some reverty to an intolerable condition. A legion cantoned amongst the Tungrians, Tongres, in Belgica, had on its muster row a Dalmatian named Diocletian, not yet very high in rank, but already much looked up to by his comrades on account of his intelligence and his bravery. Who was, they said, a Druidess, and had the prophetic faculty. One day when he was settling his account with her she complained of his extreme parsimony. Thou art too stingy, Diocletian, said she, and he answered, laughing, I'll be prodigal when I'm Emperor. Laugh not, rejoined sea, thou be Emperor when thou hast slain a wild boar, Aper. The conversation got about amongst Diocletian's comrades. He made his way in the army, showing continual ability and valor, and several times during his changes of quarters and frequent hunting expeditions he found occasion to kill wild boars, but he did not immediately become Emperor, and several of his contemporaries, Aurelian, Tacitus, Probus, Carus, and Numerian, reached the goal before him. I kill the wild boars, said he to one of his friends, and another eats them. The last mention of these ephemeral emperors, Numerian, had for his father-in-law an inseparable comrade a praetorian prefect named Aris Aper. During a campaign in Mesopotamia Numerian was assassinated, and the voice of the army pronounced Aper guilty. The legions assembled to deliberate about Numerian's death and to choose his successor. Aper was brought before the assembly under regard of soldiers. Through the exertions of Zell's friends the candidature of Diocletian found great favor. At the first words pronounced by him from a raised platform in the presence of the troops, cries of Diocletian Augustus were raised in every quarter. Other voices called on him to express his feelings about Numerian's murderers. Drawing his sword, Diocletian declared on oath that he was innocent of the emperor's death, but that he knew who was guilty and would find means to punish him. Descending suddenly from the platform he made straight for the praetorian prefect, and saying, Aper, be comforted, thou shalt not die by vulgar hands. By the right hand of great Aeneas thou fallest, he gave him his death wound. I have killed the prophetic wild boar, said he in the evening to his confidence, and soon afterwards, in spite of the efforts of certain rivals, he was emperor. Nothing is more difficult than to govern, was a remark his comrades had often heard made by him amidst so many imperial catastrophes. Emperor in his turn, Diocletian treasured up this profound idea of the difficulty of government, and he set to work, ably if not successfully, to master it. Convinced that the empire was too vast and that a single man did not suffice to make head against two evils that were destroying it, war against barbarians on the frontiers and anarchy within, he divided the Roman world into two portions, gave the West to Maximilian, one of his comrades, a coarse but valiant soldier, and kept the East himself. To the anarchy that reigned within he opposed a general despotic administrative organization, a vast hierarchy of civil and military agents everywhere present, everywhere masters, and dependent upon the emperor alone. By his incontestable and admitted superiority, Diocletian remained the soul of these two bodies. At the end of eight years he saw that the two empires were still too vast, and to each Augustus he added a Caesar, Galerius and Constantius Chlorus, who save a nominal rather than real subordination to the two emperors, had each in his own state the imperial power with the same administrative system. In this partition of the Roman world, Gaul had the best of it. She had for master, Constantius Chlorus, a tried warrior, but just, gentle, and disposed to temper the exercise of absolute power with moderation and equity. He had a son, Constantine, at this time eighteen years of age, whom he was educating carefully for government as well as for war. This system of the Roman empire, thus divided between four masters, lasted thirteen years, still fruitful in wars and in troubles at home, but without victories and with somewhat less of anarchy. In spite of this appearance of success and durability, absolute power failed to perform its task, and weary of his burden and disgusted with the imperfection of his work, Diocletian abdicated AD 303. No event, no solicitations of his old comrades in arms and empire could draw him from his retreat on his native soy of Solana in Dalmatia. If you could see the vegetables planted by these hands, said he, to Maximian and Galerius, you would not make the attempt. He had persuaded, or rather dragged, his first colleague, Maximian, into abdication after him, and so Galerius in the east, and Constantius Chlorus in the west, remained sole emperors. After the retirement of Diocletian, ambitions, rivalries, and intrigues were not slow to make ahead. Maximian reappeared on the scene of empire, but only to speedily disappear AD 310, leaving in his place his son, Maxentius. Constantius Chlorus had died AD 306, and his son, Constantine, had immediately been proclaimed by his army Caesar and Augustus. Galerius died AD 311, and Constantine remained to dispute the mastery with Maxentius in the west, and in the east with Maximinus and Lucanus, the last colleagues taken by Diocletian and Galerius. On the 29th of October, AD 312, after having gained several battles against Maxentius in Italy at Milan, Brescia, and Verona, Constantine pursued and defeated him before Rome, on the borders of the Tiber, at the foot of the Milvian bridge, and the son of Maximian, drowned in the Tiber, left to the son of Constantine's Chlorus the Empire of the west, to which that of the east was destined to be in a few years added by the defeat and death of Lucenius. Constantine, more clear-sided and more fortunate than any of his predecessors, had understood his era and opened his eyes to the new light which was rising upon the world. Far from persecuting the Christians, as Diocletian and Galerius had done, he had given them protection, countenance, and audience, and towards him turned all their hopes. He had even, it is said, in his last battle with Maxentius, displayed the Christian banner, the cross with this inscription, Hux signal Vincens, with this device thou shalt conquer. There is no knowing what was at that time the state of his soul, and to what extent it was penetrated by the first rays of Christian faith, but it is certain that he was the first amongst the masters of the Roman world to perceive and accept its influence. With him paganism fell, and Christianity mounted the throne. With him the decay of Roman society stops, and the era of modern society commences. CHAPTER VI. When Christianity began to penetrate into Gaul, it encountered their two religions very different, one from the other, and infinitely more different from the Christian religion. These were druidism and paganism, hostile one to the other, but with a hostility political only, and unconnected with those really religious questions that Christianity was coming to raise. Druidism, considered as a religion, was a mass of confusion, wherein the instinctive notions of the human race concerning the origin and destiny of the world and of mankind were mingled with the oriental dreams of metempsychosis, that pretended transmigration at successive periods of immortal souls into diverse creatures. This confusion was worse confounded by traditions borrowed from the mythologies of the East and the North, by shadowy remnants of a symbolical worship paid to the material forces of nature, and by barbaric practices, such as human sacrifices in honor of the gods or of the dead. People who are without the scientific development of language and the art of writing do not attain to systematic and productive religious creeds. There is nothing to show that, from the first appearance of the Gauls in history to their struggle with victorious Rome, the religious influence of druidism had caused any notable progress to be made in Gaulic manners and civilization. A general and strong but vague and incoherent belief in the immortality of the soul was its noblest characteristic. But with the religious elements, at the same time chorus and mystical, were united two facts of importance. The druids formed a veritable ecclesiastical corporation, which had, throughout Gaulic society, fixed attributes, special manners and customs, and existence at the same time distinct and national. And in the wars with Rome this corporation became the most faithful representatives and the most persistent defenders of Gaulic independence and nationality. The druids were far more a clergy than druidism was a religion, but it was an organized and a patriotic clergy. It was especially on this account that they exercised in Gaul an influence which was still existent, particularly in north western Gaul, at the time when Christianity reached the Gaulic provinces of the south and center. The Greco-Roman paganism was, at this time, far more powerful than druidism in Gaul, and yet more lukewarm and destitute of all religious vitality. It was the religion of the conquerors and of the state, and was invested in that quality with real power, but beyond that it had but the power derived from popular customs and superstitions. As a religious creed the Latin paganism was at bottom empty, indifferent, and inclined to tolerate all religions in the state, hinted only that they and their turn were indifferent at any rate towards itself, and that they did not come troubling the state, either by disobeying her rulers or by attacking her old deities, dead and buried beneath their own still-standing altars. Such were the two religions with which, in Gaul, nascent Christianity had to contend. Compared with them it was, to all appearance, very small and very weak, but it was provided with the most efficient weapons for fighting and beating them, for it had exactly the moral forces which they lacked. Christianity, instead of being like Druidism, a religion exclusively national and hostile to all that was foreign, proclaimed a universal religion free from all local and national partiality, addressing itself to all men in the name of the same God, and offering to all the same salvation. It is one of the strangest and most significant facts in history that the religion most universally human, most dissociated from every consideration but that of the rights and well-being of the human race in its entirety, that such a religion, be it repeated, should have come forth from the womb of the most exclusive, most rigorously and obstinately national religion that ever appeared in the world, that is, Judaism. Such nevertheless was the birth of Christianity, and this wonderful contrast between the essence and the earthly origin of Christianity was without doubt one of its most powerful attractions and most efficacious means of success. Against paganism Christianity was armed with moral forces not a whit less great. Confronting mythological traditions and poetical or philosophical allegories appeared a religion truly religious, concerning solely with the relations of mankind to God with their eternal future. To the pagan indifference of the Roman world the Christians opposed the profound conviction of their faith, and not only their firmness in defending it against all powers and all dangers, but also their ardent passion for propagating it without any motive, but the yearning to make their fellows share in its benefits and its hopes. They confronted, nay, they welcomed martyrdom, at one time to maintain their own Christianity, at another to make others Christians around them. Propagandism was for them a duty almost imperative as fidelity. And it was not in memory of old and obsolete mythologies, but in the name of recent deeds and persons, in obedience to laws proceeding from God, one and universal, in fulfillment and continuation of a contemporary and superhuman history, that of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man, that the Christians of the first two centuries labored to convert their faith to the whole Roman world. Marcus Aurelius was contemptuously astonished at what he called the obstinacy of the Christians. He knew not from what source these nameless heroes drew a strength superior to his own, though he was at the same time emperor and sage. It is impossible to assign with exactness the date of the first footprints and first labors of Christianity in Gaul. It was not, however, from Italy, nor in the Latin tongue and through Latin writers, but from the East and through the Greeks, that it first came and began to spread. Marseille and the different Greek colonies, originally from Asia Minor and settled upon the shores of the Mediterranean or along the Rhone, marked the route and were the places whither the first Christian missionaries carried their teaching. On this point the letters of the apostles and the writings of the first two generations of their disciples are clear and abiding proof. In the West of the Empire, especially in Italy, the Christians at their first appearance were confounded with the Jews, and comprehended under the same name, the Emperor Claudius, says Suetonius, drove from Rome, AD 52, the Jews who, at the instigation of Christus, were in continual commotion. Under the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, AD 71, the Jews, Christian or not, dispersed throughout the Empire, but the Christians were not slow to signalize themselves by their religious fervor, and to come forward everywhere under their own true name. Lyon became the chief center of Christian preaching and association in Gaul. As early as the first half of the second century there existed there a Christian congregation, regularly organized as a church, and already sufficiently important to be in intimate and frequent communication with the Christian churches of the East and West. There is a tradition, generally admitted, that St. Pothinus, the first Bishop of Lyon, was sent thither from the East by the Bishop of Smyrna, St. Polycarp, himself a disciple of St. John. One thing is certain that the Christian church of Lyon produced Gaul's first martyrs, amongst whom was the Bishop, St. Pothinus. It was under Marcus Aurelius, the most philosophical and most conscientious of the emperors, that there was enacted for the first time in Gaul, against nation Christianity, that scene of tyranny and barbarity, which was to be renewed so often and during so many centuries in the midst of Christendom itself. In the eastern provinces of the Empire and in Italy, the Christians had already been several times persecuted, now with cold-blooded cruelty, now with some slight hesitation and irresolution. Pedro had caused them to be burned in the streets of Rome, accusing them of the conflagration himself had kindled, and a few months before his fall St. Peter and St. Paul had undergone martyrdom at Rome. Domitian had persecuted and put to death Christians even in his own family, and though invested with the honors of the Consulate. Righteous Trajan, when consulted by Pliny the Younger on the conduct he should adopt in Bithynia towards the Christians, had answered, It is impossible, in this sort of matter, to establish any certain general rule. There must be no quest set on foot against them, and no unsigned indictment must be accepted. But if they be accused and convicted they must be punished. To be punished it suffice that they were convicted of being Christians, and it was Trajan himself who condemned St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, to be brought to Rome and thrown to the beasts, for the simple reason that he was highly Christian. Not only by virtue of his philosophical conscientiousness, but by reason of an incident in his history seemed bound to be farther than any other from persecuting the Christians. During one of his campaigns on the Danube, AD 174, his army was suffering cruelly from fatigue and thirst, and at the very moment when they were on the point of engaging in a great battle against the barbarians, the rain fell in abundance, refreshed the Roman soldiers, and conduced to their victory. There was in the Roman army a legion, the twelfth, called the Melatine or the thundering, which bore on its role many Christian soldiers. They gave thanks for the rain and the victory to the one omnipotent God who had heard their prayers, whilst the Pagans rendered like honor to Jupiter, the rain giver and the thunderer. The report about these Christians got spread about and gained credit in the empire, so much so that there was attributed to Marcus Aurelius a letter, in which, by reason no doubt of this incident, he forbade persecution of the Christians. Tertullian, a contemporary witness, speaks of this letter in perfect confidence, and the Christian writers of the following century did not hesitate to regard it as authentic. Nowadays, a strict examination of its existing text does not allow such a character to be attributed to it. At any rate the persecutions of the Christians were not forbidden, for in the year 177, that is, only three years after the victory of Marcus Aurelius over the Germans, there took place, undoubtedly by his orders, the persecution which caused at Lyon the first Gallic martyrdom. This was the fourth, or, according to others, the fifth great imperial persecution of the Christians. Most tales of the martyrs were written long after the event, and came to be nothing more than legends laden with details, and utterly purile or devoid of proof. The martyrs of Lyon, in the second century, wrote, so to speak, their own history, for it was their comrades, eyewitnesses of their sufferings and their virtue, who gave an account of them in a long letter addressed to their friends in Asia Minor, and written with passionate sympathy and pious prolixity, but bearing all the characteristics of truth. It seems desirable to submit for Perusul that document, which has been preserved almost entire in the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in the third century, and which will exhibit, better than any modern representations, the state of facts and of souls in the midst of the imperial persecutions, and the mighty faith, devotion, and courage with which the early Christians faced the most cruel trials. The servants of Christ, dwelling at Vien and Lyon in Gall, to the brethren settled in Asia and Virgia, who have the same faith and hope of redemption that we have, peace, grace, and glory from God the Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. None can tell to you in speech or fully set forth to you in writing the weight of our misery, the madness and rage of the Gentiles against the saints, and all that hath been suffered by the blessed martyrs. Our enemy doth rush upon us with all the fury of his powers, and already giveth us a foretaste and the first fruits of all the license with which he doth intend to set upon us. He hath omitted nothing for the training of his agents against us, and he doth exercise them in a sort of preparatory work against the servants of the Lord. Not only are we driven from the public buildings, from the baths, and from the forum, but it is forbidden to all our people to appear publicly in any place whatsoever. The grace of God hath striven for us against the devil, at the same time that it hath sustained the weak, it hath opposed to the evil one, as it were, pillars of strength, men strong and valiant, ready to draw on themselves all his attacks. They have had to bear all manner of insult, they have deemed but a small matter that which others find hard and terrible, and they have thought only of going to Christ, proving, by their example, that the sufferings of this world are not worthy to be put in the balance with the glory which is to be manifested in us. They have endured in the first place all the outrages that could be heaped upon them by the multitude, outcries, blows, thefts, spoilation, stoning, imprisonment, all that the fury of the people could devise against the hated enemies. Then dragged to the forum by the military tribune and the magistrates of the city, they have been questioned before the people and cast into prison until the coming of the governor. He, from the moment our people appeared before him, committed all manner of violence against them. Then stood forth one of our brethren, Vettius Apacathus, full of love towards God and his neighbor, living a life so pure and strict that young as he was, men held him to be the equal of the aged Zacharias. He could not bear that judgment so unjust should go forth against us, and moved with indignation he asked leave to defend his brethren and to prove that there was in them no kind of irreligion or impiety. The first present at the tribunal, amongst whom he was known and celebrated, cried out against him, and the governor himself, enraged it so just a demand, asked him no more than this question, Art thou a Christian? Straightway with loud voice he declared himself a Christian, and was placed amongst the number of the martyrs. Afterwards the rest began to be examined and classed. The first, firm and well-prepared, made hearty and solemn confession of their faith. This ill-prepared and with little firmness showed that they lacked strength for such a fight. About ten of them fell away, which caused us incredible pain in mourning. Their example broke down the courage of others, who, not yet being in bonds, though they had already much to suffer, kept close to the martyrs, and withdrew not out of their sight. Then were we all stricken with dread for the issue of the trial, not that we had great fear of the torments inflicted, but because prophesying the result according to the degree of courage of the accused, we feared much falling away. They took, day by day, those of our brethren who were worthy to replace the weak, so that all the best of the two churches, those whose care and zeal had founded them, were taken and confined. They took likewise some of our slaves, for the governor had ordered that they should all be summoned to attend in public, and they, fearing the torments they saw the saints undergo, instigated by the soldiers, accused us falsely of odious deeds, such as the banquets of Theistus, the incest of Oedipus, and other crimes which must not be named or even thought of, and which we cannot bring ourselves to believe that men were ever guilty of. These reports, having once spread amongst the people, even those persons who had hitherto, by reason perhaps of relationship, shown moderation towards us, burst forth into bitter indignation against our people. Maturus was fulfilled that which had been prophesied by the Lord, the time cometh when whosoever shall kill you shall think that he doeth God's service. Since that day the holy martyrs have suffered tortures that no words can express. The fury of the multitude of the governor and of the soldiers fell chiefly upon Sanctus, a dean of Vien, upon Maturus, a neophyte still, but already a valiant champion of Christ, upon Attalus also, born at Pergamus, but who hath ever been one of the pillars of our Church. Upon Blandina, lastly, in whom Christ hath made it appear that persons who seem vile and despised of men are just those whom God holds in the highest honour, by reason of the excellent love they bear him, which is manifested in their firm virtue and not in vain show. All of us, and even Blandina's mistress here below, who fought valiantly with the other martyrs, feared that this poor slave, so weak of body, would not be in a condition to freely confess her faith. But she was sustained by such vigor of soul that the executioners, who from mourn till eve put her to all manner of torture, failed in their efforts, and declared themselves beaten, not knowing what further punishment to inflict, and marveling that she still lived, with her body pierced through and through, and torn piecemeal by so many tortures, of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her. With that blessed saint, like a valiant athlete, took fresh courage and strength from the confession of her faith, all feeling of pain vanished, and ease returned to her at the mere utterance of the words, I am a Christian, and no evil is wrought amongst us. As for Sanctus, the executioners hoped that in the midst of the tortures inflicted upon him, the most atrocious which man could devise, they would hear him say something unseemly or unlawful, but so firmly did he resist them, that without even saying his name or that of his nation or city, or whether he was bond or free, he only replied in the Roman tongue to all questions, I am a Christian. Therein was for him his name, his country, his condition, his whole being, and never could the Gentiles rest from him another word. The fury of the governor and executioners was redoubled against him, and not knowing how to torment him further, they applied to his most tender members bars of red-hot iron. His members burned, but he, upright and immovable, persisted in his profession of faith, as if living waters from the bosom of Christ flowed over him and refreshed him. Some days after, these infidels began again to torture him, believing that if they inflicted upon his blistering wounds the same agonies they would triumph over him, who seemed unable to bear the mere touch of their hands, and they hoped also that the sight of this torturing alive would terrify his comrades. But contrary to general expectation, the body of Sanctus, rising suddenly up, stood erect and firm amidst these repeated torments, and recovered its old appearance and the use of its members, as if by divine grace this second laceration of his flesh had caused healing rather than suffering. When the tyrants had thus expended and exhausted their tortures against the firmness of the martyrs sustained by Christ, the devil devised other contrivances. They were cast into the darkest and most unendurable place in their prison. Their feet were dragged out and compressed to the utmost tension of the muscles. The jailers, as if instigated by a demon, tried every sort of torture, in so much that several of them, for whom God willed such an end, died of suffocation in prison. Others who had been tortured in such a matter that it was thought impossible they should long survive, deprived as they were of every remedy and aid from men, but supported nevertheless by the grace of God, remained sound and strong in body as in soul, and comforted and reanimated their brethren. The blessed Pothanus, who held at that time the bishopric of Lyon, being upwards of ninety and so weak in body that he could hardly breathe, was himself brought before the tribunal, so worn with old age and sickness that he seemed nigh to extinction, but he still possessed his soul, wherewith to subserve the triumph of Christ. Being brought by the soldiers before the tribunal, whether he was accompanied by all the magistrates of the city and the whole populace, that pursued him with hootings, he offered, as if he had been the very Christ, the most glorious testimony. A question from the Governor, who asked what the God of the Christians was, he answered, If thou be worthy, thou shalt know. He was immediately raised up, without any respect or humanity, and blows were showered upon him. Those who happened to be nearest to him assaulted him grievously with foot and fist, without the slightest regard for his age. Those who were farther off casted him whatever was to their hand. They would all have thought themselves guilty of the greatest default if they had not done their best, each on his own score, to insult him brutally. They believed they were avenging the wrongs of their gods. Pothanus, still breathing, was cast again into prison, and two days after yielded up his spirit. Men were manifested a singular dispensation of God in the immeasurable compassion of Jesus Christ, an example rare amongst brethren, but in accord with the intentions and the justice of the Lord. All those who, at their first arrest, had denied their faith were themselves cast into prison and given over to the same sufferings as the other martyrs, for their denial did not serve them at all. Those who had made profession of being what they really were, that is, Christians, were imprisoned without being accused of other crimes. The former, on the contrary, were confined as homicides and wretches, thus suffering a double punishment. The one sort found repose in the honourable joys of martyrdom, in the hope of promised blessedness, in the love of Christ, and in the spirit of God the Father. The other were a prey to the reproaches of conscience. It was easy to distinguish the one from the other by their looks. The one walked joyously, bearing on their faces a majesty mingled with sweetness, and their very bonds seemed unto them an ornament, even as a broodry that decks a bride. The other, with downcast eyes and humble and dejected air, were an object of contempt to the Gentiles themselves, who regarded them as cowards who had forfeited the glorious and saving name of Christians. And so they who were present at this double spectacle were thereby signally strengthened, and whoever amongst them chanced to be arrested confessed the faith without doubt or hesitation. Since having come to this pass different kinds of death were inflicted on the martyrs, and they offered to God a crown of diverse flowers. It was but right that the most valiant champions, those who had sustained a double assault and gained a signal victory, should receive a splendid crown of immortality. The neophyte Maturus and the deacon Sanctus, with Blandina and Attalus then, were led into the amphitheatre and thrown to the beasts, a sight to please the inhumanity of the Gentiles. Sanctus and Sanctus there underwent all kinds of tortures, as if they had hitherto suffered nothing. Or rather like athletes who had already been several times victorious, and were contending for the crown of crowns, they braved the stripes with which they were beaten, the bites of the beasts that dragged them to and fro, and all that was demanded by the outcries of an insensate mob, so much the more furious because it could by no means overcome the firmness of the martyrs, or extort from Sanctus any other speech than that which, from the first day he had uttered, I am a Christian. After this fearful contest, as life was not extinct, their throats were at last cut, when they alone had thus been offered as a spectacle to the public instead of the variety displayed in the combat of gladiators. Blandina, in her turn, tied to a stake, was given to the beasts. She was seen hanging, as it were, on a sort of cross, calling upon God with trustful fervor, and the brethren present were reminded, in the person of a sister, of him who had been crucified for their salvation. As none of the beasts would touch the body of Blandina, she was released from the stake, taken back to prison, and reserved for another occasion. Attalus, whose execution, seeing that he was a man of mark, was furiously demanded by the people, came forward ready to brave everything, as a man deriving confidence from the memory of his life, for he had courageously trained himself to discipline, and had always amongst us born witness for the truth. He was led all round the amphitheater, preceded by a board bearing this inscription in Latin. This is Attalus the Christian. The people pursued him with the most furious hootings, but the governor, having learnt that he was a Roman citizen, had him taken back to prison with the rest. Having subsequently written to Caesar, he waited for his decision as to those who were thus detained. This delay was neither useless nor unprofitable, for then shown forth the boundless compassion of Christ. Those of the brethren who had been but dead members of the church were recalled to life by the pains and help of the living. The martyrs obtained grace for those who had fallen away, and great was the joy in the church, at the same time virgin and mother, for she once more found living those whom she had given up for dead. Thus revived and strengthened by the goodness of God, who willeth not the death of the sinner, but rather invited him to repentance, they presented themselves before the tribunal to be questioned afresh by the governor. Caesar had replied that they who confess themselves to be Christians should be put to the sword, and they who denied sent away safe and sound. When the time for the great market had finally come, they assembled a numerous multitude from every nation and every province. The governor had the blessed martyrs brought up before his judgment seat, showing them before the people with all the pomp of a theatre. He questioned them afresh, and those who were discovered to be Roman citizens were beheaded, the rest were thrown to the beasts. Great glory was gained for Christ by means of those who had at first denied their faith, and who now confessed it contrary to the expectation of the Gentiles. Those who, having been privately questioned, declared themselves Christians were added to the number of the martyrs. Those in whom appeared no vestige of faith and no fear of God remained without the pale of the church. When they were dealing with those who had been reunited to it, one Alexander, a Fiercian by nation, a physician by profession, who had for many years been dwelling in Gaul, a man well known to all for his love of God and open preaching of the faith, took his place in the Hall of Judgment, extorting by signs all who filled it to confess their faith, even as if he had been called to deliver them of it. The multitude, enraged to see that those who had at first denied, turned round and proclaimed their faith, cried out against Alexander, whom they accused of the conversion. The Governor forthwith asked him what he was, and at the answer, I am a Christian, condemned him to the beasts. On the morrow Alexander was again brought up, together with Attalus, whom the Governor, to please the people, had once more condemned to the beasts. After they had both suffered in the amphitheater all the torments that could be devised, they were put to the sword. Alexander uttered not a complaint, not a word. He had the air of one who was talking inwardly with God. Attalus, seated on an iron seat, and waiting for the fire to consume his body, said in Latin to the people, See what ye are doing! It is in truth devouring men, as for us, we devour not men, and we do no evil at all. He was asked what was the name of God. God said he is not like us mortals. He hath no name. After all these martyrs on the last day of the shows Blandina was again brought up, together with a young lad named Ponticus, about fifteen years old. They had been brought up every day before that they might see the tortures of their brethren. When they were called upon to swear by the altars of the Gentiles, they remained firm in their faith, making no account of those pretended gods, and so great was the fury of the multitude against them that no pity was shown for the age of the child or the sex of the woman. Tortures were heaped upon them, they were made to pass through every kind of torment, but the desired end was not gained. Supported by the exhortations of his sister, who was seen and heard by the Gentiles, Ponticus, after having endured all magnanimously, gave up the ghost. Blandina, last of all, like a noble mother that hath roused the courage of her sons for the fight, and sent them forth to conquer for their king, passed once more through all the tortures they had suffered, anxious to go and rejoin them, and rejoicing at each step towards death. At length, after she had undergone fire, the talons of beasts, and agonizing aspersion, she was wrapped in a network and thrown to a bull that tossed her in the air. She was already unconscious of all that befell her, and seemed altogether taken up with watching for the blessings that Christ had in store for her. Even the Gentiles allowed that never a woman had suffered so much or so long. Still their fury and their cruelty towards the saints were not appeased. They devised another way of raging against them. They cast to the dogs the bodies of those who had died of suffocation in prison, and watched night and day that none of our brethren might come and bury them. As for what remained of the martyrs half-mingled or devoured corpses, they left them exposed under a guard of soldiers, going to look on them with insulting eyes and saying, Where now is their God? of what use to them was this religion for which they laid down their lives. We were overcome with grief that we were not able to bury these poor corpses, nor the darkness of night, nor gold, nor prayers could help us to succeed therein. After being thus exposed for six days in the open air, given over to all manner of outrage, the corpses of the martyrs were at last burned, reduced to ashes, and cast hither and thither by the infidels upon the waters of the Rhone, that there might be left no trace of them on earth. They acted as if they had been more mighty than God, and could rob our brethren of their resurrection. "'Tis in that hope,' said they, that these folk bring amongst us a new and strange religion, that they set it not the most painful torments, and that they go joyfully to face death. Let us see if they will rise again, if their God will come to their aid and will be able to tear them from our hands. It is not without a painful effort that, even after so many centuries, we can resign ourselves to be witnesses in imagination only of such a spectacle. We can scarcely believe that amongst men of the same period and the same city, so much ferocity could be displayed in opposition to so much courage, the passion for barbarity against the passion for virtue. Nevertheless, such is history, and it should be represented as it really was. First of all, for truth's sake, then for the due appreciation of virtue and all it costs of effort and sacrifice. And lastly, for the purpose of showing what obstacles have to be surmounted, what struggles endured, and what sufferings borne, when the question is the accomplishment of great moral and social reforms. Marcus Aurelius was, without doubt, a virtuous ruler, and one who had it in his heart to be just and humane, but he was an absolute ruler, that is to say, one fed entirely on his own ideas, very ill-informed about the facts on which he had to decide, and without a free public to warn him of the errors of his ideas or the practical results of his decrees. He ordered the persecution of the Christians without knowing what the Christians were, or what the persecution would be, and this conscientious philosopher let loose at Lyon against the most conscientious of his subjects, the zealous servility of his agents and the atrocious passions of the mob. The persecution of the Christians did not stop at Lyon, or with Marcus Aurelius. It became during the third century the common practice of the emperors in all parts of the empire, from AD 202 to 312, under the reigns of Septimus Severus, Maximinius I, Deceus, Valerian, Aurelian, Diocletian, Maximian, and Galerius. There are reckoned six great general persecutions without counting others more circumscribed or less severe. The emperors Alexander Severans, Philip the Arabian, and Constantius Chlorus were almost the only exceptions to this cruel system, and nearly always, whenever it was enforced, the pagan mob, in its brutality or fanatical superstition, added to imperial rigor its own atrocious and cynical excesses. But Christian zeal was superior in perseverance and efficacy to pagan persecution. St. Pathanus the martyr was succeeded as bishop at Lyon by St. Irenaeus, the most learned, most judicious, and most illustrious of the early heads of the church in Gal. Originally from Asia Minor, probably from Smyrna, he had migrated to Gal, at what particular date is not known, and had settled as a simple priest in the Diocese of Lyon, where it was not long before he exercised vast influence, as well on the spot as also during certain missions entrusted to him, and amongst them, one they say, to the Pope St. Illytherias at Rome. Whilst Bishop of Lyon, from AD 177 to 202, he employed the five and twenty years in propagating the Christian faith in Gal, and in defending, by his writings, the Christian doctrines against the discord to which they had already been subjected in the East, and which was beginning to penetrate to the West. In 202, during the persecution instituted by Septimus Severus, St. Irenaeus crowned by martyrdom his active and influential life. It was in his episcopate that there began what may be called the swarm of Christian missionaries who, towards the end of the second and during the third centuries, spread over the whole of Gal, preaching the faith and forming churches. Some went from Lyon at the instigation of St. Irenaeus, others from Rome, especially under the pontifican of Pope St. Fabian, who himself martyred in 219, St. Felix and St. Fortunatis to Valence, St. Virial to Besencon, St. Marcellus to Chalens-sur-Saint, St. Beninus to Dijon, St. Trofimus to Arles, St. Paul to Narbonne, St. Saturninus to Toulouse, St. Marshall to Limoges, St. Andiol and St. Privatis to the Sevent, St. Astromoine to Clermont-Ferrand, St. Gashen to Tour, St. Denis to Paris, and so many others that their names are scarcely known beyond the pages of erudite historians, or the very spots where they preached, struggled and conquered, often at the price of their lives. Such were the founders of the faith of the Christian church in France. At the commencement of the fourth century their work was, if not accomplished, at any rate triumphant, and when in AD 312 Constantine declared himself a Christian, he confirmed the fact of the conquest of the Roman world, and of Gaul in particular by Christianity. No doubt the majority of the inhabitants were not as yet Christians, but it was clear that the Christians were in the Ascendant and had command of the future. Of the two grand elements which were to meet together, on the ruins of Roman society, for the formation of modern society, the moral element, the Christian religion, had already taken possession of souls. The devastated territory awaited the coming of new peoples, known to history under the general name of Germans, whom the Romans called the Barbarians. CHAPTER VII. THE GERMANS IN Gaul, THE FRANKS AND CLOVUS About AD 241 or 242, the sixth Roman legion, commanded by Aurelian, at that time military tribune, and thirty years later emperor, had just finished a campaign on the Rhine, undertaken for the purpose of driving the Germans from Gaul, and was preparing for eastern service to make war on the Persians. The soldiers sang, We have slain a thousand Franks and a thousand Cermatians. We want a thousand, thousand, thousand Persians. That was apparently a popular burden at the time. At Rome and in Gaul, the children sang as they danced. We have cut off the heads of a thousand, thousand, thousand. One man hath cut off the heads of a thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand. May he live a thousand, thousand years, he who hath slain a thousand, thousand. Nobody hath so much of wine as he hath of blood poured out. Aurelian, the hero of these ditties, was indeed much given to the pouring out of blood, for at the approach of a fresh war he wrote to the senate, I marvel, conscript fathers, that ye have so much misgiving about opening the Sibylene books, as if ye were deliberating in an assembly of Christians, and not in the temple of all the gods. Let inquiry be made of the sacred books, and let celebration take place of the ceremonies that ought to be fulfilled. Far from refusing, I offer with zeal to satisfy all expenditure required, with captives of every nationality, victims of royal rank. It is no shame to conquer with the aid of the gods. It is thus that our ancestors began and ended many a war. Human sacrifices, then, were not yet foreign to pagan festivals, and probably the blood of more than one Frankish captive on that occasion flowed in the temple of all the gods. It is the first time the name of Franks appears in history, and it indicated no particular single people, but a confederation of Germanic peplets settled or roving on the right bank of the Rhine, from the main to the ocean. The number and the names of the tribes united in this confederation are uncertain. A chart of the Roman Empire prepared apparently at the end of the fourth century in the reign of the Emperor Anorius, which chart, called Tabula Putingeri, was found amongst the ancient manuscripts collected by Conrad Putinger, a learned German philosopher in the fifteenth century, bears over a large territory on the right bank of the Rhine, the word Frankia, and the following enumeration. The Chossians, the Ampsarians, the Churiscans, and the Chamevians, who are also called Franks, and to these tribes diverse chroniclers added several others, the Aetorians, the Bructarians, the Cateans, and the Cicambrians. Whatever may have been the specific names of these peplets, they were all of German race, called themselves Franks, that is, freemen, and made, sometimes separately, sometimes collectively, continued incursions into Gaul, especially Belgica and the northern portions of Leones, at one time plundering and ravaging, at another occupying forcibly, or demanding of the Roman emperor's lands were on to settle. From the middle of the third to the beginning of the fifth century, the history of the Western Empire presents an almost uninterrupted series of these invasions on the part of the Franks, together with the different relationships established between them and the imperial government. At one time whole tribes settled on Roman soil, submitted to the emperors, entered their service, and fought for them, even against their own German compatriots. At another, isolated individuals, such and such warriors of German race, put themselves at the command of the emperors, and became of importance. At the middle of the third century, the emperor Valerian, on committing a command to Aurelian, wrote, Thou wilt have with thee Hartmund, Haldegast, Hildemund, and Carioviscus. Some Frankish tribes allied themselves more or less fleetingly with the imperial government, at the same time that they preserved their independence. Others pursued, throughout the empire, their life of incursion and adventure. From AD 260 to 268, under the reign of Galeanus, a band of Franks through itself upon Gaul, scoured it from northeast to southeast, plundering and devastating on its way. Then it passed from Aquitania into Spain, took and burned Tarragona, gained possession of certain vessels, sailed away and disappeared in Africa, after having wandered about for twelve years at its own will and pleasure. There was no lack of valiant emperors, precarious and ephemeral as their power may have been, to defend the empire, and especially Gaul against those enemies, themselves ephemeral but forever recurring, Diceus, Valerian, Galeanus, Claudius Gothicus, Aurelian, and Probus gallantly withstood these repeated attacks of German hordes. Sometimes they flattered themselves that they had gained a definitive victory, and then the old Roman pride exhibited itself in their patriotic confidence. In about AD 278, the emperor, Probus, after gaining several victories in Gaul over the Franks, wrote to the Senate, I render thanks to the immortal gods, conscript fathers, for that they have confirmed your judgment as regards me. Germany is subdued throughout its whole extent. Nine kings of different nations have come and cast themselves at my feet, or rather at yours, as suppliants, with their foreheads in the dust. Already all those barbarians are tilling for you, sowing for you, and fighting for you against the most distant nations. Order ye therefore according to your custom, prayers of thanksgiving, for we have slain four thousand of the enemy. We have had offered to us sixteen thousand men ready armed, and we have rested from the enemy the seventy most important towns. The Gauls, in fact, are completely delivered. The crowns offered to me by all cities of Gaul I have submitted, conscript fathers, to your grace. Dedicate ye them with your own hands to Jupiter, all bountiful, all powerful, and to the other immortal gods and goddesses. All the booty is retaken, and further we have made fresh captures, more considerable than our first losses. The fields of Gaul are tilled by the oxen of the barbarians, and German teams bend their necks in slavery to our husbandmen. Diverse nations raise cattle for our consumption, and horses to remount our cavalry. Our stores are full of the corn of the barbarians. In one word we have left to the vanquish not but the soil. All their other possessions are ours. We had at first thought it necessary, conscript fathers, to appoint a new governor of Germany, but we have put off this measure to the time when our ambition shall be more completely satisfied, which will be, as it seems to us, when it shall have pleased divine providence to increase and multiply the forces of our armies. Probus had good reason to wish that divine providence might be pleased to increase the forces of the Roman armies, for even after his victories, exaggerated as they probably were, they did not suffice for their task, and it was not long before the vanquished, recommenced war. He had dispersed over the territory of the Empire the majority of the prisoners he had taken. A band of Franks who had been transported and established as a military colony on the European shore of the Black Sea, could not make up their minds to remain there. They obtained possession of some vessels, traversed the propontus, the helspont, and the archipelago, ravaged the coasts of Greece, Asia Minor, and Africa, plundered Syracuse, scoured the whole of the Mediterranean, entered the ocean by the Straits of Gibraltar, and making their way up again along the coasts of Gaul, arrived at last at the mouths of the Rhine, where they once more found themselves at home amongst the vines which probus, in his victorious progress, had been the first to have planted, and with probably their old taste for adventure and plunder. After the commencement of the fifth century, from AD 406 to 409, it was no longer by incursions limited to certain points, and sometimes repelled with success, that the Germans harassed the Roman provinces. A veritable deluge of diverse nations forced one upon another, from Asia into Europe, by wars and migration en masse, inundated the empire and gave the decisive signal for its fall. Saint Jerome did not exaggerate when he wrote to Eurygia, nations, countless in number and exceeding fierce, have occupied all the Gauls, Quadians, Vandals, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians, Herulians, Saxons, Burgundians, Alemanians, Pannonians, and even Assyrians have laid waste, all that there is between the Alps and the Pyrenees, the Ocean and the Rhine, sad destiny of the Commonwealth. Mayance, once a noble city, hath been taken and destroyed, thousands of men were slaughtered in the church. Lerms hath fallen after a long siege. The inhabitants of Rem, a powerful city, and those of Amiens, Arras, Terun, at the extremity of Gaul, Tornay, Spears, and Strasbourg have been carried away into Germany. All hath been ravaged in Aquitania, Novum, Populania, Lyones, and Narbonnes. The towns, save a few, are dispeopled, the sword pursueth them abroad and famine at home. I cannot speak without tears of Toulouse, if she be not reduced to equal ruin, it is to the merits of her holy bishop ex-Upris that she oweeth it. Then took place throughout the Roman Empire, in the East as well as in the West, in Asia and Africa as well as in Europe, the last grand struggle between the Roman armies and the barbaric nations. Armies is the proper term, for to tell the truth there was no longer a Roman nation, and very seldom a Roman emperor with some little capacity for government or war. The long continuance of despotism and slavery had innervated equally the ruling powers and the people. Everything depended on the soldiers and their generals. It was in Gaul that the struggle was most obstinate and most promptly brought to a decisive issue, and the confusion there was as great as the obstinacy. Barbaric peopleates served in the ranks and barbaric leaders held the command of the Roman armies. Stilejo was a goth. Arbaugastes and Melobodes were Franks. Rissamer was a Suvian. The Roman generals, Bonifaceus, Aetius, Agedius, Seagrius, at one time fought the barbarians, at another negotiated with such and such of them, either to entice them to take service against other barbarians, or to promote the objects of personal ambition. For the Roman generals also, under the titles of patrician, consul, or proconsul, aspire to and attain a sort of political independence, and contributed to the dismemberment of the empire in the very act of defending it. No later than A.D. 412, two German nations, the Visigoths and the Burgundians, took their stand definitively in Gaul, and founded their two new kingdoms. The Visigoths, under their kings, Atulf and Wallia, and Aquitania and Arbonnes, the Burgundians, under their kings, Gwendoche, and Gundiach, in Lyones, from the southern point of Alsatia right into the province, along the two banks of the Seon, and the left bank of the Rhone, and also in Switzerland. In 451 the arrival in Gaul of the Huns and their king Attila, already famous, both king and nation, for their wild habits, their fierce valor, and their successes against the eastern empire, gravely complicated the situation. The common interest of resistance against the most barbarous of barbarians, and the renown and energy of Aetius, united for the moment the old and new masters of Gaul. Romans, Gauls, Visigoths, Burgundians, Branks, Alans, Saxons, and Britons formed the army led by Aetius against that of Attila, who also had in his ranks Goths, Burgundians, Gepedians, Alans, and beyond Rhine, Franks, gathered together and enlisted on his road. It was a chaos and a conflict of barbarians, of every name and race, disputing one with another, Pel, Mel, the remnants of the Roman empire torn asunder and into solution. Attila had already arrived before Orléans, and was laying siege to it. The bishop, Saint Ananias, sustained a while the courage of the besieged by promising them aid from Aetius and his allies. The aid was slow to come, and the bishop sent to Aetius a message. If thou be not here this very day, my son, it will be too late. Still, Aetius came not. The people of Orléans determined to surrender, the gates flew open, the Huns entered, the plundering began without much disorder, wagons were stationed to receive the booty as it was taken from the houses, and the captives, arranged in groups, were divided by lot between the victorious chieftains. Suddenly a shout re-echoed through the streets. It was Aetius, Theodoric, and Thorismund, his son, who were coming with the eagles of the Roman legions and with the banners of the Visigoths. A fight took place between them and the Huns, at first on the banks of the Loire, and then in the streets of the city. The people of Orléans joined their liberators, the danger was great for the Huns, and Attila ordered a retreat. It was the 14th of June, 451, and that day was for a long while celebrated in the Church of Orléans as the date of a signal deliverance. The Huns retired towards Champagne, which they had already crossed at their coming into Gaul, and when they were before Troy's, the Bishop, St. Lupus, repaired to Attila's camp, and besought him to spare a defenseless city which had neither walls nor garrison. So be it, answered Attila, but thou shalt come with me and see the Rhine, I promise then to send thee back again. With mingled prudence and superstition the barbarian meant to keep the holy man as a hostage. The Huns arrived at the plain hard by Chalon Sermon, Atius and all his allies had followed them, and Attila, perceiving that a battle was inevitable, halted in a position for delivering it. The Gothic historian, Jornandes, says that he consulted his priests, who answered that the Huns would be beaten, but that the general of the enemy would fall in the fight. In this prophecy Attila saw predicted the death of Atius, his most formidable enemy, and the struggle commenced. There is no precise information about the date, but it was, says Jornandes, a battle which for atrocity, multitude, horror, and stubbornness has not the like in the records of antiquity. Historians vary in their exaggerations of the numbers engaged and killed. According to some, three hundred thousand, according to others, one hundred and sixty-two thousand were left on the field of battle. Theodoric King of the Visigoths was killed. Some chroniclers named Merovis as King of the Franks settled in Belgica, near Tongres, who formed a part of the army of Atius. They even attribute to him a brilliant attack made on the eve of the battle upon the Gepidians, allies of the Huns, when ninety thousand men fell, according to some, and only fifteen thousand according to others. The numbers are purely imaginary, and even the fact is doubtful. However, the battle of Chalon drove the Huns out of Gaul, and was the last victory in Gaul, gained still in the name of the Roman Empire, but in reality for the advantage of the German nations which had already conquered it. Twenty-four years afterwards the very name of Roman Empire disappeared, with Augustus, the last of the emperors of the West. Thirty years after the battle of Chalon, the Franks settled in Gaul were not yet united as one nation. Several tribes with this name, independent one of another, were planted between the Rhine and the Somme. There were some in the environs of Chalon, Calais, Cambrai, even beyond the Seine and as far as Le Mans, on the confines of the Britons. This is one of the reason of the confusion that prevails in the ancient chronicles about the chieftains or kings of these tribes, their names and dates, and the extent and sight of their possessions. Faramon, Chlodion, Merovius, and Childeric cannot be considered as kings of France, and placed at the beginning of her history. If they are met in connection with historical facts, fabulous legends or fanciful traditions are mingled with them. Priam appears as a predecessor of Faramon. Chlodion, who passes for having been the first to bear and transmit to the Frankish kings the title of Long Haired, is represented as the son, at one time of Faramon, at another of a chieftain named Theodemer. Romantic adventures, spoiled by geographical mistakes, adorn the life of children. All that can be distinctly affirmed is that from A.D. 450 to A.D. 480 the two principal Frankish tribes were those of Sallion Franks and the Rupurian Franks, settled the latter in the east of Belgica, on the banks of the Moselle and the Rhine, the former towards the west, between the Mus, the Ocean, and the Somme. Merovius, whose name was perpetuated in his line, was one of the principal chieftains of the Sallion Franks, and his son Chloduric, who resided at Tornay, where his tomb was discovered in 1655, was the father of Clovis, who succeeded him in 481, and with whom really commenced the kingdom and history of France. Clovis was fifteen or sixteen years old when he became king of the Sallion Franks of Tornay. Five years afterwards his ruling passion, ambition, exhibited itself, together with that mixture of boldness and craft which was to characterize his whole life. He had two neighbors, one hostile to the Franks, the Roman patrician, Cegrius, who was left master at Soissant after the death of his father, Agedius, and whom Gregory of Tours calls king of the Romans. The other, a Sallion Frankish chieftain, just as Clovis was, and related to him, Ragnacar, who was settled at Cambrai. Clovis induced Ragnacar to join him in a campaign against Cyagrius. They fought, and Cyagrius was driven to take refuge in southern Gaul with Euleric, king of the Visigoths. Clovis, not content with taking possession of Soissant, and anxious to prevent any troublesome return, demanded of Euleric to send Cyagrius back to him, threatening war if the request were refused. The Goth, less bellicose than the Frank, delivered up Cyagrius to the envoys of Clovis, who immediately had him secretly put to death, settled himself at Soissant, and from thence set on foot in the country between the Asni and the Loire, plundering and subjugating expeditions which speedily increased his domains in his wealth, and extended far and wide his fame as well as his ambition. The Franks who accompanied him were not long before they also felt the growth of his power. Like him they were pagans, and the treasures of the Christian churches counted for a great deal in the booty they had to divide. On one of their expeditions they had taken in the Church of Rem, amongst other things, a vase of marvellous size and beauty. The Bishop of Rem, St. Remy, was not quite a stranger to Clovis. Some years before, when he had heard that the son of Childeric had become King of the Franks of Tornay, he had written to congratulate him. We are informed, said he, that thou hath undertaken the conduct of affairs. It is no marvel that thou beginnest to be what thy fathers ever were. And, whilst taking care to put himself on good terms with the young pagan chieftain, the Bishop added to his felicitations some pious Christian counsel, without letting any attempted conversion be mixed up with his moral exhortations. The Bishop, informed of the removal of the vase, sent to Clovis a messenger begging the return, if not of all his church's ornaments, at any rate of that. Follow us as far as Soissant, said Clovis to the messenger. It is there the partition is to take place of what we have captured. When the lot shall have given me the vase, I will do what the Bishop demands. When Soissant was reached, and all the booty had been placed in the midst of the host, the King said, Valiant warriors, I pray you not to refuse me, over and above my share, this vase here. At these words of the King, those who were of sound mind amongst the assembly answered, Glorious King, everything we see here is thine, and we ourselves are submissive to thy commands. Do thou, as Seameth good to thee, for there is none that can resist thy power. When they had spoken thus a certain frank, light-minded, jealous, and vain, cried out aloud as he struck the vase with his battle-axe, Thou shalt have not of all this safe what the lot shall truly give thee. At these words all were astounded, but the King bore the insult with sweet patience, and accepting the vase he gave it to the messenger, hiding his wound in the recesses of his heart. At the end of a year he ordered all his hosts to assemble fully equipped at the march parade to have their arms inspected. After passing in review all the other warriors, he came to him who had struck the vase. None, said he, hath brought hither arms so ill kept as thine, nor lance, nor sword, nor battle-axe are in condition for service. And resting from him his axe he flung it on the ground. The man stooped down a little to pick it up, and forthwith the King, raising with both hands his own battle-axe, drove it into his skull, saying, Thus didst thou to the vase of Soison. On the death of this fellow he bade the rest be gone, and by this act made himself greatly feared. A bold and unexpected deed has always a great effect on men. With his Frankish warriors, as well as with his Roman and Gothic foes, Clovis had at command the instincts of patience and brutality in turn. He could bear a mortification and take vengeance in due season. Whilst prosecuting his course of plunder and war in eastern Belgica, on the banks of Amuse, Clovis was inspired with a wish to get married. He had heard tell of a young girl, like himself, of the Germanic royal line, Clotilde, niece of Gunabad, at that time king of the Burgundians. She was dubbed beautiful, wise, and well informed, but her situation was melancholy and perilous. Ambition and fraternal hatred had devastated her family. Her father, Chilperick, and her two brothers had been put to death by her uncle Gunabad, who had caused her mother Agrippina to be thrown into the Rhône with a stone round her neck and drowned. Two sisters alone had survived this slaughter. The elder, Crona, had taken religious vows. The other, Clotilde, was living almost in exile at Geneva, absorbed in works of piety and charity. The principal historian of this epic, Gregory of Tour, and almost contemporary authority, for he was elected bishop sixty-two years after the death of Clovis, says simply, Clovis at once sent a deputation to Gunabad to ask Clotilde in marriage. Gunabad, not daring to refuse, put her into the hands of the envoys, who took her promptly to the king. Clovis at side of her was transported with joy and married her. But to this short account other chroniclers, amongst them Fredegar, who wrote a commentary upon and a continuation of Gregory of Tour's work, added details which deserve reproduction, first as a picture of manners, next for the better understanding of history. As he was not allowed to see Clotilde, says Fredegar, Clovis charged a certain Roman, named Aurelian, to use all his wit to come nigh to her. Aurelian repaired alone to the spot, clothed in rags and with his wallet upon his back, like a mendicant. To ensure confidence in himself he took with him the ring of Clovis. On his arrival at Geneva, Clotilde received him as a pilgrim charitably, and while she was washing his feet, Aurelian, bending towards her, said under his breath, Lady, I have great matters to announce to thee, if thou deign to permit me secret revelation. She consenting replied, Say on! Clovis, king of the Franks, said he, hath sent me to thee. If it be the will of God, he would feign raise thee to his high rank by marriage, and that thou mayest be certified thereof, he sendeth thee this ring. She accepted the ring with great joy, and said to Aurelian, Take for recompense of thy pains these hundreds soosing gold and this ring of mine. Return promptly to thy Lord, if he would feign unite me to him by marriage, let him send without delay messengers to demand me of my Uncle Gundabad, and let the messengers who shall come to take me away in haste, so soon as they shall have obtained permission, if they haste not, I fear lest a certain sage, one Aridius, may return from Constantinople, and if he arrived beforehand all this matter will by his counsel come to naught. Aurelian returned in the same disguise under which he had come. On approaching the territory of Orléans, and at no great distance from his house, he had taken as traveling companion a certain poor mendicant, by whom he, having fallen asleep from sheer fatigue, and thinking himself safe, was robbed of his wallet and the hundreds soose in gold that it contained. On awakening Aurelian was sorely vexed, ran swiftly home, and sent his servants in all directions in certs of the mendicant who had stolen his wallet. He was found and brought to Aurelian, who after drubbing him soundly for three days, let him go his way. He afterwards told Clovis all that had passed and what Clotilde suggested. Clovis, pleased with his success and with Clotilde's notion, at once sent a deputation to Gundobod to demand his niece in marriage. Gundobod, not daring to refuse, and flattered at the idea of making a friend of Clovis, promised to give her to him. Then the deputation, having offered the denier and the sue, according to the custom of the Franks, espoused Clotilde in the name of Clovis, and demanded that she be given up to them to be freed. Without any delay the council was assembled at Chalon, and preparations made for the nuptials. The Franks, having arrived with all speed, received her from the hands of Gundobod, put her into a covered carriage, and escorted her to Clovis, together with much treasure. She, however, having already learned that Iridius was on his way back, said to the Frankish lords, If you would take me into the presence of your lord, let me descend from this carriage, mount me on horseback, and get you hence as fast as you may, for never in this carriage shall I reach the presence of your lord. Iridius, in fact, returned very speedily from Marseille, and Gundobod, on seeing him, said to him, Thou knowest that we have made friends with the Franks, and that I have given my niece to Clovis to wife. This, answered Iridius, is no bond of friendship but the beginning of perpetual strife. Thou should have remembered, my lord, that thou didst slay Clotilde's father, thy brother Chilporic, that thou didst drown her mother, and that thou didst cut off her brother's heads and cast their bodies into a well. If Clotilde become powerful she will avenge the wrongs of her relatives, send forthwith a troop in chase, and have her brought back to thee. It will be easier for thee to bear the wrath of one person than to be perpetually at strife, thyself and thine, with all the Franks. And Gundobod did send forthwith a troop in chase to fetch back Clotilde with the carriage and all the treasure. But she, on approaching Villiers, where Clovis was waiting for her, in the territory of Troy's, and before passing the Burgundian frontier, urged them who escorted her to disperse right and left over a space of twelve leagues in the country when she was departing, to plunder and burn, and that having been done with the permission of Clovis she cried aloud, I thank thee, God omnipotent, for that I see the commencement of vengeance for my parents and my brethren.