men of the city were also present.  It was the most splendid audience that Paul had ever addressed.  He was equal to the occasion, and delivered a discourse on his familiar topics,—­his own miraculous conversion and his mission to the Gentiles to preach the crucified and risen Christ,—­things new to Festus, who thought that Paul was visionary, and had lost his balance from excess of learning.  Agrippa, however, familiar with Jewish law and the prophecies concerning the Messiah, was much impressed with Paul’s eloquence, and exclaimed:  “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian!” When the assembly broke up, Agrippa said, “This man might have been set at liberty, if he had not appealed unto Caesar.”  Paul, however, did not wish to be set at liberty among bitter and howling enemies; he preferred to go to Rome, and would not withdraw his appeal.  So in due time he embarked for Italy under the charge of a centurion, accompanied with other prisoners and his friends Timothy, Luke, and Aristarchus of Thessalonica.

The voyage from Caesarea to Italy was a long one, and in the autumn was a dangerous one, as in Paul’s case it unfortunately proved.

The following spring, however, after shipwreck and divers perils and manifold fatigues, Paul arrived at Rome, in the year 61 A.D., in the seventh year of the Emperor Nero.  Here the centurion handed Paul over to the prefect of the praetorian guards, by whom he was subjected to a merely nominal custody, although, according to Roman custom, he was chained to a soldier.  But he was treated with great lenity, was allowed to have lodgings, to receive his friends freely, and to hold Christian meetings in his own house; and no one molested him.  For two years Paul remained at Rome, a fettered prisoner it is true, but cheered by friendly visits, and attended by Luke, his “beloved physician” and biographer, by Timothy and other devoted disciples.  During this second imprisonment Paul could see very little outside the praetorian barracks, but his friends brought him the news, and he had ample time to write letters.  He had no intercourse with gifted and fortunate Romans; his acquaintance was probably confined to the praetorian soldiers, and some of the humbler classes who sought Christian instruction.  But from this period we date many of his epistles, on which his fame and influence largely rest as a theologian and man of genius.  Among those which he wrote from Rome were the Epistles to the Colossians, the Ephesians, and many pastoral letters like those written to Philemon, Titus, and Timothy.  We know but little of the life of Paul after his arrival at Rome, for at this point Saint Luke closes his narrative, and all after this is conjecture and tradition.[4] But the main part of Paul’s work was accomplished when he was first sent to Rome as a prisoner to be tried in the imperial courts; and there is but little doubt that he finally met the death he so heroically contemplated, at the hands of the monster Nero, who martyred such a vast multitude of Paul’s fellow-Christians.