Callista : a Tale of the Third Century

Agellius is busily employed upon his farm. While the enemies of his faith are laying their toils for him and his brethren in the imperial city, in the proconsular _officium_, an...

For thirty-six hours Agellius had been confined in his underground receptacle, light being almost excluded, a bench and a rug being his means of repose, and a full measure of br...

Next morning, as Jucundus was dusting and polishing his statues and other articles of taste and devotion, supplying the gaps in their ranks, and grouping a number of new ones wh...

There were those, however, whom Callista could understand, and who could understand her; there were those who, while Aristo, Cornelius, Jucundus, and Polemo were moving in her b...

Jucundus was quite as much amused as provoked at the result of the delicate negotiation in which he had entangled his nephew. It was a gratification to him to find that its ill...

The sun had now descended for the last time before the solemn day which was charged with the fate of Callista, and what was the state of mind of one who excited such keen intere...

It is undeniably a solemn moment, under any circumstances, and requires a strong heart, when any one deliberately surrenders himself, soul and body, to the keeping of another wh...

How many hours passed while Cæcilius was thus employed, he did not know. The sun was declining when he was roused by a noise at the door. He hastily restored the sacred treasure...

A change had passed over the fair face of Nature, as seen from the cottage of Agellius, since that evening on which our story opened; and it is so painful to contemplate waste,...

Cornelius was full of his subject, and did not attend to the Greek. “The wild-beasts hunts,” he continued, “ah, those hunts during the games, Aristo! they were a spectacle for t...

In no province of the vast Roman empire, as it existed in the middle of the third century, did Nature wear a richer or a more joyous garb than she displayed in Proconsular Afric...

If there is a state of mind utterly forlorn, it is that in which we left the poor prisoner after Polemo had departed. She was neither a Christian, nor was she not. She was in th...

Aristo was not a fellow to have very long distresses; he never would have died of love or of envy, for honour or for loss of property; but his present calamity was one of the gr...

The house of Jucundus was closed for the night when Juba reached it, or you would see, were you his companion, that it was one of the most showy shops in Sicca. It was the image...

The day came which Agellius had fixed for paying his promised visit to Aristo. It is not to be denied that, in the interval, the difficulties of the business which occasioned hi...

Jucundus, then, set out to see how the land lay with his nephew, and to do what he could to prosper the tillage. His way led him by the temple of Mercury, which at that time sub...

The revellers went on their way; Agellius went on his, and made for his lowly and lonely cottage. He was the elder of the two sons of a Roman legionary of the Secunda Italica, w...

“O wretched minds of men! O blind hearts!” truly cries out a great heathen poet, but on grounds far other than the true ones. The true ground of such a lamentation is, that men...

The first stages of repentance are but a fever, in which there is restlessness and thirst, hot and cold fits, vague, dreary dreams, long darkness which seems destined never to h...

The plague of locusts, one of the most awful visitations to which the countries included in the Roman empire were exposed, extended from the Atlantic to Ethiopia, from Arabia to...

Were the origin of Juba’s madness (or whatever the world would call it) of a character which admitted of light writing about it, much might be said on the surprise of the clear-...

In the bosom of the woods which stretched for many miles from the immediate environs of Sicca, and placed on a gravel slope reaching down to a brook, which ran in a bottom close...

By the time that they had got round again to the unlucky baker’s, the mob had been swollen to a size which even the area of the Forum would not contain, and it filled the adjace...

The cry came from the keeper’s wife, whom we have described as kindly disposed to her. She was a Lybo-Phœnician, and spoke a broken Latin; but the language of sympathy is univer...

“Fear nothing for me, father,” she answered; “I am one of them. They know me. Alas, _I_ am no Christian! _I_ have not abjured their rites! but you, lose not a moment.”

This sort of intercourse, growing in frequency and fulness, went on for about a week, till Agellius was able to walk with support, and to leave the cottage. The priest and his o...

We have already had occasion to mention that there were many secret well-wishers, or at least protectors, of Christians, as in the world at large, so also in Sicca. There were m...

There was more of heart, less of effort, less of mechanical habit, in Agellius’s prayers that night, than there had been for a long while before. He got up, struck a light, and...

When his senses returned, his first impression was of something in him not himself. He felt it in his breathing; he tasted it in his mouth. The brook which ran by Gurta’s encamp...

The bier and its bearers, and its protectors, have reached the cave in safety, and pace down the gallery, preceded by its Christian hosts, with lighted tapers, singing psalms. T...

We will hope that the reader, as well as Agellius, is attracted by the word Callista, and wishes to know something about her fate; nay, perhaps finds fault with us as having suf...

The sun of Africa has passed over the heavens, but has not dared with one of his fierce rays to profane the sacred relics which lie out before him. The mists of evening rise up,...

The cottage for which Agellius was making, when last we had sight of him, was a small brick house consisting of one room, with a loft over it, and a kitchen on the side, not ver...

Had the imperial edict been acted on by the magistrates of Sicca, without a reference to Carthage, it is not easy to suppose that Callista would have persevered in her refusal t...

Callista had sighed for the bright and clear atmosphere of Greece, and she was thrown into the Robur and plunged into the Barathrum of Sicca. But in reality, though she called i...

When Jucundus rose next morning, and heard the news, he considered it to be more satisfactory than he could have supposed possible. He was a zealous imperialist, and a lover of...