Chilo Infiltrates the Christian Community and Plots to Kill Glaucus is the episode in which Chilo uses the trust Christians place in him to enlist Urban in a murder plot. Afraid that Glaucus will expose his earlier betrayal, and pressured by the powerful Vinicius, Chilo disguises vengeance as religious duty. His scheme tests the difference between Christian faith and the false authority he claims to speak for, while placing Urban’s conscience at the center of the deception.

Causes and Background

Chilo’s fear begins when he encounters Glaucus among the Christians. He had once betrayed Glaucus, sold him to robbers, and left him for dead near Minturnae; he had not expected Glaucus to survive and come to Rome. Now Chilo fears that the man he wronged may reveal his past. Yet he is also afraid of Vinicius, who is searching for Lygia and can call on Petronius. Weighing Glaucus against those powerful men, Chilo decides that the danger must be removed through someone else’s hands.

The choice of accomplices reflects Chilo’s cynical calculation. He knows men in taverns and among the homeless who might accept payment, but expects that hired criminals could demand more money or threaten to expose him. He has also grown repelled by the rough figures around suspected houses in the Subura and the Trans-Tiber district. Because he believes Christians more reliable than ordinary hired men, he turns to their community and plans to make them act from religious conviction rather than for money.

Entering the Community Under False Pretenses

Chilo approaches Euricius, an older Christian whose son he had helped redeem. Euricius has since hired a small shop near the Circus Maximus, selling olives, beans, unleavened paste, and honeyed water to spectators. Chilo greets him in Christ’s name and presents his request as a defense of Christians from an approaching danger. He claims that he is poor, having given nearly all he owned to Euricius, but promises to pay two or three strong, courageous men if they will trust him and obey.

Euricius and his son Quartus take Chilo for a benefactor and a pious man. They offer to help because they assume that he would not ask anything contrary to Christ’s teaching. Chilo deliberately conceals what he intends to do: he wants people willing to act, but to hear about the deed only in a way that will make them keep it secret. The trust he has earned through apparent generosity becomes the means by which he attempts to recruit Christians into an act their faith forbids.

Turning Faith into a Call for Vengeance

Chilo’s most consequential appeal is to Urban, a powerful laborer. Speaking about Christ’s death, Chilo directs Urban’s grief toward anger at those who reviled Christ. He then asks whether a Christian would have a duty to avenge the Saviour if Judas had not punished himself. Urban responds that anyone would take revenge. Chilo exploits that answer by claiming that wrongs against God are not like wrongs against oneself: in his false account, Christians may forgive personal injuries but must punish a traitor who threatens the whole community.

He casts Glaucus as a second Judas, supposedly intent on betraying Christ’s followers to Caesar. Chilo claims that the informer would accuse Christians of refusing to recognize Caesar as a god, poisoning fountains, murdering children, and plotting to destroy the city. He predicts that the Praetorians will soon imprison and kill Christian men, women, and children, comparing their expected fate to the collective execution of Pedanius Secundus’s slaves. The threat he describes is not evidence of Glaucus’s actual guilt; it is the story Chilo invents to make Urban see violence as protection of the faithful.

When Urban finally asks what kind of traitor Chilo means, Chilo answers that the man pretends to be Christian while reporting the brotherhood to Caesar. Urban rises and promises to act. Chilo then gives him a direct order: find Glaucus among the Christians and kill him in Christ’s name. The plan has moved from Chilo’s concealed fear to a specific target and a recruit who believes the order is sacred.

Urban’s Conscience and Chilo’s False Proof

Urban is not untroubled by the command. He remembers that Christ forbids killing and that earlier deaths for which he felt responsible had already brought him to penitence. He has not killed for profit or in self-defense, and he fears committing a new sin if Glaucus is innocent. Though Chilo urges him forward, Urban wants Glaucus condemned first by the Christian elders, the bishop, or the Apostle. His hesitation exposes the moral boundary that Chilo must overcome: Urban will not simply mistake suspicion for proof without asking whether his community has judged the accused.

Chilo counters that there is no time for a trial. He claims Glaucus may go straight from Ostrianum to Caesar at Antium, or hide in the house of a patrician he serves. To give the order the appearance of authorization, Chilo takes a small coin, scratches the sign of the cross on it with a knife, and tells Urban that it is Glaucus’s sentence. He further promises that the bishop and the Great Apostle will bless the killing if Urban presents the coin after the deed. The coin is not a judgment from Christian leaders; it is a token Chilo has made himself, intended to stand in for the process Urban has asked for.

Urban asks Chilo directly whether he will take responsibility for the deed and whether he himself has heard Glaucus betray the Christians. Chilo answers by inventing a chain of testimony. He says that he came from Kos by way of Corinth, and that while instructing Eunice, a serving woman in Petronius’s household, he heard Glaucus had undertaken to betray all Christians. He also claims that Glaucus had promised Vinicius, another informer of Caesar, to find a particular girl among the Christians. These allegations connect the murder plot to the search for Lygia, but the evidence establishes them as Chilo’s claims, not as confirmed actions by Glaucus.

Significance of the Plot

The episode makes Chilo’s manipulation especially dangerous because it works through values the Christian characters take seriously. Urban is moved by compassion for Christ, yet remains concerned that killing an innocent man would violate his faith. Chilo tries to resolve that conflict by presenting vengeance as defense of God and by counterfeiting the appearance of church authority. The scene distinguishes Urban’s religious commitment from Chilo’s calculated use of religious language: the laborer asks for judgment and accountability, while Chilo presses for action before either can be obtained.

The threatened betrayal also reveals how vulnerable the Christians are to accusation and state power. Chilo’s invented report invokes the charge that they reject Caesar’s divinity and commits familiar slanders about crimes against the population, then makes those accusations the rationale for preemptively killing Glaucus. The plot thus joins Vinicius’s private pursuit of Lygia to a wider danger facing the community, while showing how fear of persecution can itself be exploited to produce injustice.