Callista: A Tale of the Third Century is a historical novel by John Henry Newman, set in the Roman province of Proconsular Africa during the persecution of Christians under the emperor Decius, around the middle of the third century. Its thirty-six chapters move from the pagan town of Sicca Veneria, through the shops and cottages of its inhabitants, to the courts, prisons, and martyrdom of the Decian persecution. Newman presents it as “a simple fiction from beginning to end,” written from a Catholic point of view, and populates it with a small cast of pagans, catechumens, lapsed believers, and confessors whose lives intersect in a provincial African town.
“Love thy God, and love Him only, An I thy breast will ne er be lonely.”
The novel’s action turns on the collision between the old religion of the empire and the new faith that has quietly spread through its towns. Decius’s edict demands that every Christian sacrifice to the gods and the emperor’s genius; refusal means imprisonment, torture, and death. Against this background, Newman traces the slow conversion of Callista, a Greek artist and the sister of the sculptor Aristo, who is drawn toward Christianity through a slave, through her suitor Agellius, and through the priest Caecilius, even as she insists she is not a Christian and cannot bring herself to sacrifice.
From Sicca Veneria to the Confessor’s Cell
The Front Matter and the Author’s Claims
The book opens with a publisher’s catalogue of Newman’s works, a title page bearing an epigraph from “De Vere” on loving God alone—”the deepest still is single”—and a dedication to Henry William Wilberforce, the one reader who has known the author long and loved him well. In the Advertisement, Newman calls the tale “a simple fiction from beginning to end,” claiming no antiquarian research, yet written “from a Catholic point of view” to express the Church’s position among the pagans of the third century. Postscripts dated 1881 and 1888 explain that parts of the early chapters and the sketch of Juba’s character were written in the spring of 1848, the work resumed only at the end of the previous July. He fears small antiquarian or geographical slips from confusing ancient histories with modern travels, and defends the imaginative filling of detail so long as acknowledged facts are not contravened, citing Scott’s Elizabeth and Claverhouse, the Savonarola of Romola, and Lockhart’s Valerius. He admits one anachronism concerning Arnobius and Lactantius, and answers the charge of untruth for attributing to mid-third-century Christians devotions to the Blessed Virgin found only in the fourth, appealing to his “Letter to Dr. Pusey.” A contents list gives thirty-six chapters, from “Sicca Veneria” to “Lux Perpetua Sanctis Tuis, Domine.”
Sicca Veneria and the House of Agellius
The story proper begins at Sicca Veneria in Proconsular Africa, a fertile plain watered by the Bagradas, crowded with temples to the Tyrian Hercules, Saturn, and Astarte. On a farm nearby the under-bailiff Agellius disputes vine-tending with the slave Sansar, then is reproached by the bailiff Vitricus for absenting himself from the Astarte festivities. Going home, he meets revellers who call him “Channibal,” a wizard, and a Christian, and pelt him. His father Strabo had been converted through guarding martyrs at Carthage, had an unhappy second marriage, and died about 236; the Church at Sicca, after long peace and relaxation, has fallen into decline. Agellius and his brother Juba are wards of their uncle Jucundus, an idol-seller. Agellius’s cottage holds a cross, images of the Blessed Virgin with Peter and Paul inscribed “Advocata,” and his books: the Psalms, St. Luke’s Gospel, and Romans.
The Loneliness of Agellius and the Mockery of Juba
Agellius feels a deep loneliness, caught between the ungodly turmoil he has escaped and the stillness he has entered, finding no repose out of doors and no rest within. He longs for sympathy, friends, advisers, kindred minds; he has never been to sacramental confession, though he has heard public homilies. He compares himself to Elias and John, wonders why he does not leave for Carthage, Hippo, or Cirta where Christians are numerous, then stops at a strange pang and settles into stagnation. The narrator addresses him directly, assuring him that One who cares for him watches over him, and that by the faith he has kept amid idolatry and by his purity God will remember him. Agellius smiles, signs himself with the cross, and begins evening prayer.
After prayer he lights a lamp and discovers his brother Juba, who had slipped in silently. Juba is tall, swarthy, wild-looking, and laughs strangely, mocking the praying as “unworthy”; he declares he will never practice a “bowing and scraping, crawling and cringing religion.” Agellius warns he will never find peace. Juba claims contentment with himself, questions the very notion of a Creator, and says he has been down to see “poor mother” and was delayed on his way to Jucundus by the Succoth-benoth in the grove. He says he went “to see the world,” calls the worshippers apes and swine, fools and idiots, yet defends seeking his own happiness. Agellius orders him out for blasphemy; Juba retorts that Agellius is not in earnest as a Christian and is “caught by those painted wares,” that his own religion was a passing fashion like the bloom on his face. He leaves, refusing straw wisps for scorpions, claiming amulets, and goes off singing a wild song about “the little black Moor.” A wild animal growls; Juba shows no surprise, presents a metal idol to it, and proceeds to his uncle’s dwelling near the temple of Astarte.
The Supper at Jucundus’s
The scene shifts to Jucundus’s image-store, closed for the night after a small supper-party. His guests are the young Greek Aristo, one of his principal artists, and Cornelius, son of a freedman of a distinguished Roman, lately placed in the proconsular officium. The narrator catalogues the exotic fare—grapes from Tacape, dates from Lake Tritonis, Getulian palm liquor, melilottis wine, mullet roes from Mauritania, lion cutlets, a dish of delicate puppy with tomatos. Cornelius holds forth on the Secular Games he attended the year before, praising Rome as eternal: the Campus Martius, the mausoleum of Augustus, the mound of Hadrian, the Pantheon, the baths of Alexander, the column of Antoninus, the city lit up at night, the sacrifices on the Tiber’s banks, the music and dancing. Aristo observes that Caracalla gave citizenship to all freemen, making them all Romans; Cornelius calls it a political act, and Aristo retorts it was done to tax them doubly. Cornelius describes the procession from Capitol to Circus—patrician youths, gladiators, satyrs, trumpeters, victims, images of the gods, the Carmen sung by twenty-seven noble youths and maidens. He mentions the emperor Philip, whom Jucundus calls “no bad riddance”; Cornelius says all emperors are good in their time, and Decius is good now. Jucundus praises Gordianus, patron of trade and arts, mourned by all Africa at his death thirteen years before; Aristo mocks this as “old world philosophy”—”all that is, is right; and all that was, is wrong.” Cornelius shows a medal struck at the games, inscribed “Novum sæculum” and “Æternitati,” arguing Rome outlasts her emperors; Aristo notes other states have been eternal before Rome and that ten centuries is a respectable eternity. Cornelius insists Rome is healthier than ever and will “cast her feathers to begin a fresh thousand”; Aristo cites Egypt’s ancient dynasties and nations beyond the Ganges.
The Weight of an Unequal Bond
The narrative pauses first to weigh the sheer magnitude of the marriage contract, in which one person hands over soul and body to another for life. Set against this, the Christian vow of a religious life is made to an all-perfect God and hedged about by provisos, regulations, and theology that guard the subject against a tyrannical superior. The mind recoils from making itself absolute property to a fallible being for a lifetime; such a bond demands religious sanction, or the possibility of dissolution, or sacramental strength to sustain it. Agellius, contemplating a superhuman engagement without superhuman assistance, finds his position worse still: public opinion supplies motives not for keeping such a promise but against it, and the woman he would bind himself to has given no sign that she understands what marriage means. The more he thinks, the less satisfactory his step appears, and the less able he feels to raise the subject with Aristo. He climbs the stairs to his friend’s lodging in distress, though thoughts of Callista’s beauty scatter his scruples. The narrator observes that in the third century such negotiations lacked the transcendental sentiments and magnificent ceremonial of later chivalry; the Christian had too much simplicity and the heathen too little real delicacy, so both parties will seem sadly matter-of-fact to votaries of European civilization.
Flowers for a Funeral Urn
Agellius enters to find Aristo pacing in discomposure. Aristo embraces him, congratulates him on his looks—”a new spirit is in you”—and hears that his friend has come to speak of his sister and has brought her flowers, the birth of the opening year. Aristo suggests offering them to Pallas Athene and would have led him to her niche; Agellius refuses, saying he is more serious and brings them as an offering to his sister. Aristo takes down his broad petasus, leaves Agellius to speak for himself, and departs for the harbor and Forum with a half-imploring, half-satirical look at Callista. Agellius lays the flowers on the table before her as she sits at work. She takes them with a mocking courtesy—”Fair and fragrant, like myself, are they?”—and names them one by one, the blushing rose, the stately lily, the royal carnation, the golden moly, the purple amaranth, the green bryon, the diosanthos, the sertula, the sweet modest saliunca, calling them fit emblems of Callista, and observing that in a few hours they will have faded and grown more and more like her.
Chione’s Dream
Callista then tells of a slave she once owned who belonged to Agellius’s religion, born in a Christian family, who cared for nothing yet was neither morose nor peevish nor hard-hearted, and died young in her service. Before her end the slave dreamed of a company of bright shades clothed in white and crowned with flowers, who said she ought to have a token too, and led her to a beautiful lady as stately as Juno and as sweet as Ariadne, so radiant that the shades looked like Ethiopians beside her. This lady said: “My dear, here is something for you from my Son. He sends you by me a red rose for your love, a white lily for your chastity, purple violets to strew your grave, and green palms to flourish over it.” Callista asks whether Agellius gives her flowers that she may rank with Chione, and whether this is their interpretation. He answers that it is his heart’s most fervent wish and vivid anticipation that the day may come when she will receive such a crown, nay a brighter one. She retorts that he has come to philosophize to her and put her in the way of dying like Chione, offering flowers not for a bridal wreath but for a funeral urn. He says it is no wonder the two wishes went together in his heart—that she might have the same Master in heaven as he, and the same service, aims, and home on earth. She accuses him of speaking one word for his Master and two for himself. He answers that by feeling how much she could be to him he was led to think how much his Master may be doing for her and how much she might do for Him, and begs her not to urge him with Greek subtlety but to listen calmly.
One Language Between Them
Callista signifies willingness, and Agellius says the one thing he knows is that since he first heard her converse there is between them a unity of thought so strange he should have deemed it impossible between any two persons, inexplicable despite their separation in opinion and habit and different upbringing. They disagree on the most important subjects, yet there is an unaccountable correspondence in their views, their impressions, the line in which their minds move, their judgment of great and little, and how objects affect their feelings. He does not understand his uncle or Aristo, and is solitary however much they talk, but finds between Callista and himself one language. He is led to refer this to one cause—that
The Priest and the Catechumen
Caecilius, a Christian priest, prays with the sick Agellius using the Lord’s Prayer and Psalms. Once Agellius can converse, he is struck by the priest’s manner—self-collected, serene, gentle, tender, unobtrusive, unstudied—which lets him say severe things without offending. Caecilius speaks little of himself, though details emerge: his name, and the fact that Asper kneels to kiss his sandal, which Caecilius usually prevents. Agellius, by contrast, finds relief in recounting his own history and feelings, half-soliloquizing. He suddenly asks whether a man can be baptized twice; told no, he concludes it would be best to delay baptism until death, a question that had long perplexed him. Caecilius counters that one cannot be sure of obtaining the sacrament at the last moment—water and administrator might come too late—nor that one would wish it, since the will is not simply in one’s power; he urges “Carpe diem.” Agellius says the benefit is so immense one would wish to enter the unseen world without losing its fullness, which cannot be if time elapses between baptism and death. Caecilius accuses him of wanting to cheat his Maker of His claim on his life while cheating the devil at the last moment, and of wanting to enjoy this world and inherit the next. Agellius, confused, says sin after baptism is awful since there is no second laver. Caecilius asks whether he would give up God as Father throughout life and live without God; Agellius, in tears, says “No.” Caecilius suggests he fears the fire of judgment and the prison rather than falling away; Agellius says he has never feared hell though he ought, trusting God would lead him on. Asked whether he would rather be without God here or suffer the fire there, Agellius says he takes God for his portion here and there, and that He will be in the fire with him.
The Report of Callista’s Arrest
Jucundus brings Agellius the news that Callista is in prison on suspicion of Christianity, and Agellius refuses to believe it. Jucundus offers his own theory: she is no Christian at all, but infatuated with Agellius, and has claimed the faith either to flatter him, to share his fate, or out of sheer contradiction. Agellius is bewildered and then terrified—if she is held as a Christian while not one, what becomes of her? Jucundus would stake his best shop image that she is no Christian, yet frets that she may perversely insist she is. At the image of “that sweet delicate child” in “that horrible hole,” Agellius shrieks aloud.
Jucundus hints that one person has influence enough to make her tell the truth; Agellius starts as if bitten by an asp, and Jucundus lets the poison work. Agellius vehemently denies that she loves him or that he has any power over her, and laments his own confinement. The thought that she may die though not a Christian—”without faith, without love”—done to death by a false report of accepting the very thing by which alone she could pass death unto life, collapses him in misery. Jucundus reassures him that her lodging is decent and that he shall see and console her.
Agellius resolves to go to her: if she is a Christian he ought to rejoice; if not, he ought to make her one. But he refuses Jucundus’s conditions—will not bid her swear by Jupiter to escape prison and death, will not play the heathen priest or infidel sophist, recalling Caecilius’s lessons. He will go free, willing to die himself for his Lord and glad to make her die for Him. Jucundus is surprised, then annoyed, then angry, then calm, convinced that any meeting of two young lovers must end in one way. The narrator notes that Agellius’s heroic resolve was never tested, for an unexpected event hours later obliged the story to take up another personage.
Gurta’s Hut and the Possession of Juba
In a hut in the woods near Sicca, the old crone Gurta talks with Juba, who reports that the sacristan was torn to pieces and that Casso’s slave died like a man. Gurta savors the cruelty; Juba says it is not his line. They turn to politics and Decius; Juba observes that Christians are few and suggests he might turn Christian to keep Callista company. Gurta forbids it—he must serve her master. Juba declares he will have no master and is a free man. She threatens him; he says he would prefer Agellius’s service to her friend’s. Gurta vows to ruin Agellius; Juba says no one shall touch him. He reveals that Callista is imprisoned as a Christian; Gurta insists she is one; Juba says she and Agellius are making a match. He boasts of having saved Cyprianus, singing verses about it, and Gurta is suffocated with passion. When Juba accuses her of torturing a little child—nailing it up, cutting it, examining its liver—she stays silent, whistles, and flings an uncouth beast at him. He walks off in a maze, then flees, hearing a voice say “You cannot escape from yourself!” and faints.
What follows is Juba’s possession. He plunges into the brook, tears his tunic, hears blasphemies uttered through his own organs, and gains a new and intense belief in God while feeling tyrannized by a mysterious power. Trees seem to look at him; owls, bats, ravens, snakes, and apes surround him. He gains preternatural strength, kills a beast of prey with a vine stump, and sucks its blood. At dawn a beautiful landscape—oleanders, fruit trees, palms, villas, flocks—draws from him envy and hatred “like Satan looking in upon Paradise,” and he is forced onward against his will. Dogs, beasts, birds, and reptiles flee him; laborers stop to watch. He laughs hideously, dances, enters a hovel, makes faces at children until one falls into convulsions, carries off another and flings it at pursuers, claims to be Pentheus king of Thebes, and spouts Greek he never learned. At evening he comes to a village feast of Pan, dances, crawls to the idol and laps up blood and dust, then breaks the god and flees. Next day he reaches Sicca, finds Agellius’s cottage wrecked, climbs into Jucundus’s house, rouses Agellius with the name “Callista,” throws his tunic and boots to him, leads him out, thrusts him into the street, bars the door, and falls asleep on the bed.
Callista Before the Magistrates
When Callista went out to stop the intruders she had reckoned without her host: the two Canaanite giants knew neither her nor Latin, seized her as booty, and carried her toward Sicca by a southern gate, escaping the massacre at the great gate. Jucundus and Aristo discuss madness—Jucundus calls Agellius’s brother horribly mad, blames the father, and laments a world gone mad, with the recent brutal riot over “one or two beggarly Christians.” He argues the ringleaders should be caught and made examples, since “the foxes escape, and our poor ganders suffer,” and predicts the empire is coming to pieces. Aristo weeps, caring only for Callista, and calls her worth all the gods. Cornelius arrives and is shocked to hear Agellius is a Christian. He states the case simply: let her swear by the Emperor’s genius and she is free; if she refuses, the law takes its course. Aristo begs him to use influence with the Proconsul for a respite, or to let them flee; Cornelius says Rome goes by facts—does she burn incense or not?—and promises to help both Agellius and Callista.
Callista’s mind, before her trial, has been drawn toward Christianity through Chione, Agellius, and Caecilius, and she has come to see religion as mutual love between God and the soul. Aristo escorts her to the court; she repels his caress and asks for a Christian priest, shocking him. The court is furnished with instruments of torture, and she nearly faints. Asked her name, she answers “Callista,” free, daughter of Orsilochus, lapidary, of Proconnesus. The charge is read: she is a Christian and refuses to sacrifice. She denies being a Christian but refuses to sacrifice to the genius of the Emperor, throwing away the incense. Aristo pleads that she is mad from the shock of the riot. The judges, fearing Rome and the mob, send to Carthage for instructions and leave her in her former lodging.
The Two Brothers and the Divided Heart
The novel’s moral center is Agellius, a young Christian landowner whose faith has gone slack. Newman is candid about his weakness: Agellius keeps the outward forms of religion but has formed no friendships among believers, and the solitude of his position leaves him hungry for sympathy and intellectual company. He finds both in the Greek siblings Aristo and Callista, and his attraction to Callista becomes the test of his divided heart. The narrator treats this inconsistency with unusual sympathy, noting that Agellius has as much right to inconsistency as any comfortable Christian, perhaps more to say for himself, since he has actually tasted the trial of solitude. His brother Juba is the darker counterpart—wild, mocking, contemptuous of prayer, and eventually possessed by a power he cannot name. The two brothers embody the novel’s argument that unbelief and belief are not merely opinions but conditions of the soul, and that grace can be resisted or received in ways that look, from outside, like temperament.
Callista and the God Who Woos the Soul
Callista is the book’s most fully realized figure, and her long resistance is the engine of its second half. She is a Greek of the old world, proud of her race and its art, unwilling to be transplanted, and honest enough to admit that she cannot do without what the priest calls sin. Newman gives her the strongest speeches in the book, and her objections are not straw positions: she argues that her happiness is bound up with her own land and genius, that the Christians are a secret society rather than an open school of philosophy, and that she cannot change what nature made her. Against her, Caecilius argues that the soul’s hunger for an inexhaustible object is itself evidence of that object, and that the Lover of souls has come into the world in human form to win her back. The novel’s central claim, stated most directly in the prison conversations, is that Christianity is not a doctrine to be accepted but a person to be loved, and that martyrdom is easy once that love takes hold. Callista’s eventual confession—”I am a Christian”—comes not as an intellectual conclusion but as the recognition of a voice she has been hearing all along.
The World of the Third Century
Newman’s paganism is not a caricature. Jucundus the image-seller is selfish, blustering, and commercially minded, yet he is also a faithful guardian to his nephews, genuinely distressed by Callista’s fate, and given some of the novel’s most memorable comic speeches about the wisdom of the hog and the vanity of all things but eating and drinking. Cornelius, the young Roman official, is pompous and shallow, but his long description of the Secular Games and his conviction that Rome is eternal give the pagan world a coherent self-understanding. Aristo, the Greek sculptor, is charming, irresponsible, and finally unable to bear the loss of his sister, ending in a theatrical suicide. The novel’s minor figures—the lapsed sacristan, the Tertullianist who breaks an idol and is torn apart, the widow betrayed by a man her husband had punished—sketch the social texture of a town where Christianity is neither triumphant nor negligible, and where the mob’s fury is as dangerous as the magistrate’s edict.
A Novel of Faith and Its Cost
Callista belongs to a nineteenth-century tradition of historical fiction that Newman himself defended in his Advertisement, citing Walter Scott and Romola as precedents for filling in the details of a documented past. Its interest for modern readers lies less in its plot than in its portrait of a mind in transition. Newman wrote parts of it in 1848 and finished it decades later, and the novel carries the marks of a long meditation on what it means to believe in an age that finds belief difficult. The martyrdom at the end—Callista racked and beheaded, her body carried to a cave where Cyprian says mass, the church at Sicca revived—is not a triumphalist ending but a quiet one, closing on the Latin words “Lux Perpetua Sanctis Tuis, Domine.” The novel’s lasting claim is that the third century is not so far from the nineteenth, or from any age: the choice between the visible world and the invisible one is made, as Callista makes it, in the privacy of a single soul.
