The Hermits | Page 9

of a whole new world, for good and evil. The old Roman soul was dead within, the body of it dead without. Patriotism, duty, purpose of life, save pleasure, money, and intrigue, had perished. The young Roman officer had nothing left for which to fight; the young Roman gentleman nothing left for which to be a citizen and an owner of lands. Even the old Roman longing (which was also a sacred duty) of leaving an heir to perpetuate his name, and serve the state as his fathers had before him--even that was gone. Nothing was left, with the many, but selfishness, which could rise at best into the desire of saving every man his own soul, and so transform worldliness into other-worldliness. The old empire could do nothing more for man; and knew that it could do nothing; and lay down in the hermit's cell to die.
Treves was then "the second metropolis of the empire," boasting, perhaps, even then, as it boasts still, that it was standing thirteen hundred years before Rome was built. Amid the low hills, pierced by rocky dells, and on a strath of richest soil, it had grown, from the mud-hut town of the Treviri, into a noble city of palaces, theatres, baths, triumphal-arches, on either side the broad and clear Moselle. The bridge which Augustus had thrown across the river, four hundred years before the times of hermits and of saints, stood like a cliff through all barbarian invasions, through all the battles and sieges of the Middle Age, till it was blown up by the French in the wars of Louis XIV., and nought remains save the huge piers of black lava stemming the blue stream; while up and down the dwindled city, the colossal fragments of Roman work--the Black Gate, the Heidenthurm, the baths, the Basilica or Hall of Justice, now a Lutheran church--stand out half ruined, like the fossil bones of giants amid the works of weaker, though of happier times; while the amphitheatre was till late years planted thick with vines, fattening in soil drenched with the blood of thousands. Treves had been the haunt of emperor after emperor, men wise and strong, cruel and terrible;--of Constantius, Constantine the Great, Julian, Valentinian, Valens; and lastly, when Potitianus's friends found those poor monks in the garden {27} of Gratian, the gentle hunter who thought day and night on sport, till his arrows were said to be instinct with life, was holding his military court within the walls of Treves, or at that hunting palace on the northern downs, where still on the bath-floors lie the mosaics of hare and deer, and boar and hound, on which the feet of Emperors trod full fifteen hundred years ago.
Still glorious outwardly, like the Roman empire itself, was that great city of Treves; but inwardly it was full of rottenness and weakness. The Roman empire had been, in spite of all its crimes, for four hundred years the salt of the earth: but now the salt had lost its savour; and in one generation more it would be trodden under foot and cast upon the dunghill, and another empire would take its place,--the empire, not of brute strength and self-indulgence, but of sympathy and self-denial,--an empire, not of Caesars, but of hermits. Already was Gratian the friend and pupil of St. Ambrose of Milan; already, too, was he persecuting, though not to the death, heretics and heathens. Nay, some fifty years before (if the legend can be in the least trusted) had St. Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, returned from Palestine, bearing with her--so men believed--not only the miraculously discovered cross of Christ, but the seamless coat which he had worn; and, turning her palace into a church, deposited the holy coat therein: where--so some believe--it remains until this day. Men felt that a change was coming, but whence it would come, or how terrible it would be, they could not tell. It was to be, as the prophet says, "like the bulging out of a great wall, which bursteth suddenly in an instant." In the very amphitheatre where Gratian sat that afternoon, with all the folk of Treves about him, watching, it may be, lions and antelopes from Africa slaughtered--it may be criminals tortured to death--another and an uglier sight had been twice seen some seventy years before. Constantine, so-called the Great, had there exhibited his "Frankish sports," the "magnificent spectacle," the "famous punishments," as his flattering court-historians called them: thousands of Frank prisoners, many of them of noble, and even of royal blood, torn to pieces by wild beasts, while they stood fearless, smiling with folded arms; and when the wild beasts were gorged, and slew no more, weapons were put into the hands of the survivors, and they were bidden