Chilo tempts Ursus to kill Glaucus

Chilo tempts Ursus to kill Glaucus by recasting a personal vendetta as a duty to defend the Christian community. He conceals Glaucus’s true history and invents an imminent betrayal, then invokes Christ and the authority of the Church to overcome Ursus’s scruples. The scheme turns Ursus’s strength and sincere faith into instruments of Chilo’s deception, while the laborer’s hesitation makes the conflict between Christian teaching and retaliatory violence impossible to ignore.

Chilo’s motive and the danger Glaucus represents

Chilo’s plan begins with a secret he has every reason to fear. He had known Glaucus before their arrival in Rome, betrayed him, sold him to robbers, deprived him of his family and property, and left him for dead near Minturnae. Glaucus survived, recovered from his wounds, and returned to Rome. When Chilo sees him in a Christian house of prayer, he is terrified and briefly considers abandoning his search for Lygia. But Vinicius’s demand presses him in the opposite direction: Chilo fears that refusing a powerful patrician—and Petronius, who may support him—would be more dangerous than facing Glaucus.

Chilo decides that Glaucus must be killed by other hands. The plan also serves his interest in concealing his own role in Glaucus’s past: a surviving victim who recognizes his betrayer could expose him. Chilo does not approach the Christians in the hope of finding justice or resolving a dispute. He sees them as a source of people he can manipulate, and judges that their trust in one another might make them more useful than the disreputable men he encounters in wine-shops. His scheme depends on borrowing the appearance of Christian devotion while keeping its actual purpose hidden.

Recruiting a strong Christian

Chilo first considers the people he encounters through Euricius and the young Quartus, but decides they are too old or too young for the task he has in mind. Quartus then directs him to a hired worker at the mills of Demas, near the Emporium. The man, Urban, is a Christian night laborer renowned for strength: Quartus says he has seen him lift stones that four men could not move. Chilo’s interest is explicitly practical. He is looking for someone physically capable of killing Glaucus, but he knows he cannot openly announce that intention or offer an ordinary paid murder without risking exposure.

Chilo meets Urban beside the river while the distant millstones continue to sound. He reads the laborer’s grave, kindly appearance as evidence that he may be easily led. Rather than disclose his real purpose, Chilo tests how Urban understands Christian duty. He asks about Judas and whether a Christian would avenge the suffering and death of Christ. Urban answers in the language of retaliation, and Chilo uses that opening to suggest that a new traitor has arisen among the believers. The conversation is not a genuine inquiry: Chilo is constructing the moral terms in which he wants Urban to interpret the act he is about to request.

A false charge framed as Christian duty

Chilo tells Urban that the supposed traitor pretends to be Christian, attends houses of prayer, and intends to inform Caesar that the Christians reject his divinity. He further claims that the man will accuse them of poisoning fountains, murdering children, and plotting to destroy the city. Chilo presents these fabricated charges as an approaching danger, asserting that the Praetorians will soon imprison and kill Christians, including old people, women, and children. By comparing the imagined informer to Judas, he makes a personal murder seem to Urban like the prevention of a betrayal that could endanger the whole community.

When Urban asks who the man is, Chilo does not at first name Glaucus. He tells a more elaborate story designed to make the accusation seem supported by his own access to Roman households. He claims to live in Corinth and to have come from Kos, and says that he teaches Christianity to Eunice, a serving woman in Petronius’s house. According to this invented account, Chilo overheard Glaucus undertake to betray the Christians and promise Vinicius that he would find a maiden for him among them. Chilo thereby links the false accusation to the ongoing search for Lygia, giving Urban a purported reason to see Glaucus as both a threat to the community and an agent of Vinicius.

The mention of Vinicius changes Urban’s response. His eyes blaze and his expression turns fiercely angry; when Chilo asks what has happened, Urban merely confirms that he will kill Glaucus the next day. The reaction shows that Chilo’s story has touched a personal stake, though the encounter does not yet establish the whole basis of Urban’s feeling. Chilo notices the sudden change and considers asking more, but his habitual caution prevails. He instead asks whether Urban received that name in baptism, continuing to steer the exchange toward the religious identity on which his manipulation depends.

Forgery of authority and Urban’s hesitation

Urban does not accept the proposed killing without conflict. He knows that Christ’s teaching forbids killing, and he is already burdened by remorse for earlier deaths he caused through his excessive strength, even though he regards them as unintended. His conscience therefore demands more than Chilo’s accusation: Urban asks whether Chilo himself will take responsibility for the deed and whether he has personally heard Glaucus betray the Christians. The question exposes the weakness at the heart of the plot. Chilo has no evidence that Glaucus is guilty; he must replace proof with an invented appeal to authority.

Chilo answers that there is no time for a trial because Glaucus might hurry from Ostrianum to Caesar at Antium or hide in a patrician’s house. He promises that if Urban shows a sign after Glaucus’s death, the bishop and the Great Apostle will bless the deed. To make this promise tangible, Chilo scratches a cross onto a small sestertius with his knife and gives the coin to Urban as though it were a sentence and a token of approval. The coin does not establish any real judgment by the Christian elders; it is Chilo’s counterfeit authorization, devised to quiet Urban’s fear that he may be committing a new sin.

Even this device depends on a further lie. Chilo claims that the bishop will forgive Urban’s killing because it was done in defense of the community, while Urban is still asking whether Glaucus is truly guilty. The episode thus turns on a clash between moral scruple and manufactured certainty: Urban wants a trustworthy basis for action, while Chilo supplies a fabricated emergency, a false witness, and a forged sign in place of an investigation.

Consequences and narrative significance

The encounter makes the difference between Christian forgiveness and vengeance central to the plot. Chilo exploits Urban’s belief that offenses against God cannot be forgiven by an individual, then redirects that belief toward an alleged offense that Chilo has invented. His rhetoric makes murder appear to be protection, and his counterfeit coin makes personal manipulation look like communal judgment. The scene’s irony lies in the gap between Chilo’s solemn religious language and his actual motive: he invokes the defense of Christ’s flock to remove the man who could reveal his own betrayal.

Urban’s hesitation preserves the ethical tension rather than reducing him to a tool. His strength makes him capable of carrying out the act, but his awareness of Christian teaching and his fear of harming an innocent man make him ask for proof and proper judgment. Chilo answers those concerns by claiming that there is no time and by impersonating the authority of the Church. The attempted conversion of moral responsibility into obedience is therefore part of the action itself: Chilo seeks not only a killer, but a man who will believe the killing has already been sanctioned.

The scheme also advances the search for Lygia while deepening its moral stakes. Chilo wants access to the Christian community and to Lygia, yet he tries to secure that access through a betrayal disguised as loyalty. His false report connects Glaucus to Vinicius’s pursuit of the maiden, while his appeal to a looming imperial crackdown turns private violence into an imagined act of collective defense. The episode shows how Roman political danger can be used as persuasive material even when the immediate threat has been invented.

The attempted enlistment does not settle Glaucus’s guilt; it reveals Chilo’s. The reader knows that Chilo betrayed Glaucus, and that this history—not any proven conspiracy by Glaucus—drives the plan. Against that concealed past, Urban’s demand for grounds and Chilo’s forged token expose the difference between a genuine ethical obligation and an order made to sound sacred. The episode is therefore a turning point in the conflict between the community’s teaching and the violence Chilo tries to smuggle into it under the name of faith.