SENECA AND ST.

PAUL.
In the spring of the year 61, not long after the time when the murder of Agrippina, and Seneca's justifications of it, had been absorbing the attention of the Roman world, there disembarked at Puteoli a troop of prisoners, whom the Procurator of Judaea had sent to Rome under the charge of a centurion.

Walking among them, chained and weary, but affectionately tended by two younger companions,[38] and treated with profound respect by little deputations of friends who met him at Appii Forum and the Three Taverns, was a man of mean presence and weather-beaten aspect, who was handed over like the rest to the charge of Burrus, the Praefect of the Praetorian Guards.

Learning from the letters of the Jewish Procurator that the prisoner had been guilty of no serious offence,[39] but had used his privilege of Roman citizenship to appeal to Caesar for protection against the infuriated malice of his co-religionists--possibly also having heard from the centurion Julius some remarkable facts about his behaviour and history--Burrus allowed him, pending the hearing of his appeal, to live in his own hired apartments.[40] This lodging was in all probability in that quarter of the city opposite the island in the Tiber, which corresponds to the modern Trastevere.

It was the resort of the very lowest and meanest of the populace--that promiscuous jumble of all nations which makes Tacitus call Rome at this time "the sewer of the universe." It was here especially that the Jews exercised some of the meanest trades in Rome, selling matches, and old clothes, and broken glass, or begging and fortune-telling on the Cestian or Fabrican bridges.[41] In one of these narrow, dark, and dirty streets, thronged by the dregs of the Roman populace, St.Mark and St.Peter had in all probability lived when they founded the little Christian Church at Rome.