Such As The Woman Actors In This Brief Scene Were
Some Early Christians Might Have Been, And It Must Have Been The
Stubborn Old Pagan Spirit I Saw Surviving In The Husband And Father.
He
was probably such a vessel of wrath as, being filled with Bacchus, would
have lent itself to the persecuting rage of Domitian and helped drive
the emperor's gentle cousin Domatilla into the exile whence she returned
to found a Christian cemetery in her villa.
One understands, of course,
under the villa; for the catacombs in some places reach as many as five
levels below the surface. I will not follow the reader with that kind
guide who will cheer his wanderings through those sunless corridors of
death, where many of the sleepers still lie sealed within their tombs on
either hand, and show him by the smoky taper's light the frescos which
adorn the cramped chapels. I prefer to stand at the top of the entrance
and ask him if he noticed how the artist sometimes seemed not to know
whether he was pagan or Christian, and did not mind, for instance,
putting a Mercury at the heads of the horses in an Ascent of Elijah.
Perhaps the artist was really a pagan and thought a Greek god as good as
a Hebrew prophet any day; art was probably one of the last things to be
converted, having a presentiment of the dark and bloody themes the new
religion would give it to deal with.
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