The Project Gutenberg EBook of Vergilius, by Irving Bacheller

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Title: Vergilius
A Tale of the Coming of Christ

Author: Irving Bacheller

Release Date: August 8, 2005 [EBook #16491]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Vergilius

A Tale of the Coming of Christ

By

Irving Bacheller

Author of

"Eben Holden" "D'ri and I" "Darrel of the Blessed Isles"

New York and London

Harper & Brothers Publishers

1904

Copyright, 1904, by IRVING BACHELLER.

All rights reserved.

Published August, 1904.

Vergilius

A Tale of the Coming of Christ

CHAPTER 1

Rome had passed the summits and stood looking into the dark valley of
fourteen hundred years. Behind her the graves of Caesar and Sallust
and Cicero and Catullus and Vergil and Horace; before her centuries of
madness and treading down; round about her a multitude sickening of
luxury, their houses filled with spoil, their mouths with folly, their
souls with discontent; above her only mystery and silence; in her
train, philosophers questioning if it were not better for a man had he
never been born--deeming life a misfortune and extinction the only
happiness; poets singing no more of "pleasantries and trifles," but
seeking favor with poor obscenities. Soon they were even to celebrate
the virtue of harlots, the integrity of thieves, the tenderness of
murderers, the justice of oppression. Leading the caravan were types
abhorrent and self-opposed--effeminate men, masculine women, cheerful
cynics, infidel priests, wealthy people with no credit, patricians,
honoring and yet despising the gods, hating and yet living on the
populace. Here was the spectacle of a republican empire, and an
emperor gathering power while he affected to disdain it.

The splendor of the capital had attracted from all nations the idle
rich, gamblers, speculators, voluptuaries, profligates, intriguers,
criminals. To such an extreme had luxury been carried that nothing was
too sacred, nothing too costly to be enjoyed. Digestion had become a
science, courtship an art,