Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600 -- Fiction
There he had gained the first glimpse of the Princess’s favor toward
himself. She had been driving with her royal young brother in one of the
trials for the chariot races. The snowy steeds of the young King’s
chariot were given precedence of all others, the Festus’s wild Arab
horses were champing the bits to pass, and the Roman had great ado to
hold them behind Agrippa. A dozen other prancing teams were surging
behind. She had worn a silver bangle round her brow to hold back her
hair. On her brow hung a jade-stone ornament from Arabia with the
swastika cross of luck beaded in gold. In the wild charge of the racers
the jade pendant had bounced from its setting in the sand. Leaping in
front of the other racers, the boy had rescued the emblem of good luck
from trampling; and all the people in the seats of the great hippodrome
had cheered his pluck. Fortune had come to him in the little jewel with
the odd cross.
When the charioteers came round the course again, King Agrippa himself
had stooped to receive the restored jewel; and the people had cheered
again; and when Agrippa and Bernice had gone up to Daphne’s Gardens at
Antioch, for the wild, lawless pleasures there, then had followed
another golden dream of awakening youth. The boy did not know, when he
had been with the royal lovers in Daphne’s Gardens, that only a few
miles away was the Prophet, with the Christians of Antioch; and here
they were, both thrown together in the evil snares of Rome.[1] Amid the
roses and the palms and the love temples and the fountains of the
gardens were artificial lakes, where plied boats with silken awnings
rowed by Naiads in silver-and-golden nets to the music of zither and
harp under the Moon Goddess.
[1] This is the only point in the boy’s story where there is any
discrepancy between his experiences as told by himself and the sacred
and profane writers of the period. It does not appear among the sacred
writers whether the corn ships carrying the Prophet at the various ports
of call delayed long enough for the prisoners to have gone in to
Antioch, as they did at all the other ports where Christians dwelt; but
in the profane writers of Rome and Greece at the period ’61 A.D. to ’68
A.D., are abundant proofs of all the youth’s adventures in Daphne’s
Gardens; and Bernice’s record became an infamy in Rome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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