Under Cæsars' Shadow

Like ruler, like people! Kings and emperors are conspicuous specimens of the character of their times. They are centers around which revolve the prevailing tastes and passions of men. They also influence and control the minds of their subjects. If we would know the spirit of any period of history, we need only to fix our gaze upon the individuals in power at that time. If we would ascertain, therefore, what sort of a world it was into which Jesus Christ came; how impossible it was that He should be its natural and merely human product; against what a dark background of selfishness and tyranny, immorality, and vice His heavenly purity and self-sacrificing love shone forth; what cynical materialism and infidel philosophy, what coarse stolidity and bitter malice He had to meet, and what hindrances and persecutions His cause, in the persons of His early followers, had to contend with, we cannot do better than to study the lives of the Roman emperors of the first century. This is the reason for presenting here some sketches of the careers of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, and for asking what relics can still be found of their times and of their work. To contemplate some material object that they respectively touched or planned or builded,—some hoary ruin or crumbling fragment of temple, palace, aqueduct, or sepulcher,—seems to bring us into closer relation with them and to make more real to us those great dramatic figures, which would otherwise be but dim shadows of the past.