Roads from Rome Part 4

If in outward circ.u.mstances he becomes only an honest tax-collector, he will not for that reason have studied amiss, nor shall I be discontented."

The next day they had started for Rome, and soon the boy was rioting in the inexpressible glories of his first impressions of the great city. Even the ordeal of going to a strange school had its compensations in the two slaves who went behind him to carry his books.

The centurions' sons at home had carried their own, and Horace felt a harmless, boyish pleasure (without in the least understanding the years of economy on his father's part that made it possible) in the fact that here in Rome he had what his schoolmates had, and appeared at school in the same state. One thing he had that was better than theirs, and he felt very sorry for them. A special servant went about with each of the other boys, to see that he attended his cla.s.ses, was polite to his teachers, and did his work. But Horace had his own father to look after him, a thousand times better than any carping _paedagogus_. His father had explained to him that the other fathers were busy men, that they were the ones who carried on the great government, and ruled this splendid Rome; they could not spend hours going to school with their little sons. But Horace thought it was a great pity, and was sure that he was the luckiest boy in school.

How good it had been to have his father learn directly from the grim Orbilius of his first success, to see him with a quick flush on his face take from the teacher's hands the wax tablet on which his son had written "the best exercise in the cla.s.s." His father had not spoken directly of the matter, but in some way Horace had felt that the extra sweet-meats they had had that night at supper were a mark of his special pleasure. And many years afterwards, when he was looking through a chest that had always been locked in his father's lifetime, he had found the little wax tablet still showing the imprint of his childish stylus.

For ten years Horace's school life had continued, and then the second great day had come. He was familiar with early Latin literature and with Homer. He had studied philosophy and rhetoric with eager industry. The end was near, and he had begun to wonder what lay before him. Some of his friends hoped to get into political life at once, and perhaps obtain positions in the provinces. Others had literary ambitions. A few--the most enviable--were planning to go to Greece for further study in the great philosophical schools. Horace wondered whether his father would want to go back to his old home in the country, and whether outside of Rome he himself could find the stimulus to make something out of such abilities as he had. And then the miracle happened. His father came to his room one night and said, in a voice which was not as steady as he tried to make it, "My boy,"--the old familiar preface to all the best gifts of his early life--"My boy, would you like to go to Athens?"

That sudden question had changed the course of Horace's life. But his father had not lived to see the fruits of his sacrifice. The last time Horace saw him had been on the beach at Brindisi, just as his vessel cast off from its moorings, and the wind began to fill the widespread sails. Horace had always realised that the most poignant emotion of a life which had been singularly free from despotic pa.s.sions had come to him on that day when wind and tide seemed to be hurrying him relentlessly away from the Italian sh.o.r.e, and on its edge, at the last, he saw a figure grown suddenly old and tired.

The journey itself across the Ionian Sea had not helped to increase his cheerfulness. There had been a heavy storm, and then long days of leaden sky and sea, and a cold mist through which one could descry only at rare intervals ghostly sails of other s.h.i.+ps, to remind one that here was the beaten track of commerce from the Orient. Even as they approached the Piraeus, and beat slowly and carefully up the bay, the desolate mist continued, settling down over the long antic.i.p.ated coast-line, and putting an end to all the colour and light of Greece. But afterwards Horace realised that the unpropitious arrival had but served as a background for the later revelation. The sunG.o.d did grant him a glorious epiphany on that first day, springing, as it were, full panoplied out of a gulf of darkness. His friend Pompeius, who had gone to Athens a month earlier, had by some fortunate chance chosen the afternoon of his arrival to make one of his frequent visits to the shops and taverns of the harbour town. Drawn to the dock by the news that a s.h.i.+p from Italy was approaching, he met Horace with open arms, and afterwards accompanied him to the city along the Phaleron road.

During the hour's walk the mist had gradually lifted, and the sky grew more luminous. By the time they reached the ancient but still unfinished temple to Zeus, some of whose Corinthian columns they had often seen in Rome, built into their own Capitoline temple, the setting sun had burst through all obstructions, and was irradiating the surrounding landscape. The hills turned violet and amethyst, the sea lighted into a splendid, s.h.i.+ning waterway, the sky near the horizon cleared into a deep greenish-blue, and flared into a vast expanse of gold above. The Corinthian pillars near them changed into burnished gold. Purple shadows fell on the brown rock of the Acropolis, while, above, the temple of Athena was outlined against the golden sky, and the Sun tipped as with gleaming fire the spear and the helmet of his sister G.o.ddess, the bronze Athena herself, as she stood a little beyond her temple, austere guardian of her city.

On this soft autumn afternoon among the Italian hills Horace could still remember his startled amazement when he first saw the radiance of Greek colouring. He had not realised that the physical aspect of mountains and sky would be so different from the landscape about Rome, and he had never lost his delight in the fresh transparency of the Athenian air. One of his earliest experiments in translation had been with Euripides's choral description of the "blest children of Erechtheus going on their way, daintily enfolded in the bright, bright air."

His student life in the old home of learning had also proved to be more charming than he could have antic.i.p.ated. There had been the dual claims of literature and philosophy to stir his mind, and memories of the ancient masters of Greece to make honoured and venerable the gardens and the gymnasiums where he listened to his modern lectures, to enhance the beauty of the incomparable marble temples, to throw a glamour even over the streets of Athens, and so to minimise his Roman contempt for the weakness of her public life. And then there were the pleasures of youth, the breaks in the long days, when he and his comrades would toss lecture notes, and even the poets, to the winds, buy sweet-smelling ointments for their hair in some Oriental shop in the lively market-place, pick out a better wine than usual, and let Dionysus and Aphrodite control the fleeting hours.

On the morrow Apollo and Athena would once more hold their proper place.

Of Roman affairs they knew little and thought less, in their charmingly egotistic absorption in student life. But a violent shock was finally to shatter this serene oblivion. Horace could remember the smallest details about that day. It was in the spring. The March sun had risen brightly over Hymettus, and the sky was cloudless.

Marcus, meeting him at a morning lecture of Cratippus, had surprised him by asking him to take his afternoon walk with him. "My father,"

he explained, "has written me about a walk that he and my uncle Quintus took to the Academy when they were students. They felt that Plato was still alive there, and in pa.s.sing the hill of Colonus they thought of Sophocles. He wants me to take the same walk, and I wish you would come along, too, and tell me some Sophocles and Plato to spout back; my father will be sure to expect a rhapsody." Horace had joyfully a.s.sented, for Marcus was always an entertaining fellow, and might he not write to Cicero about his new acquaintance, and might that not lead to his some day meeting the great man, and hearing him talk about Greek philosophy and poetry?

In the cool of the late afternoon the two young men had found the lovely grove of the Academy almost deserted, and even Marcus had grown silent under the spell of its memories. As they turned homeward the violet mantle had once more been let fall by the setting sun over Athens and the western hills. Only the sound of their own footsteps could be heard along the quiet road. But at the Dipylon Gate an end was put to their converse with the past. The whole Roman colony of students was there to meet them, and it was evident that the crowd was mastered by some unprecedented emotion. Marcus darted forward, and it was he who turned to Horace with whitened face, and said in a curiously dull voice, "Julius Caesar was a.s.sa.s.sinated on the Ides."

The news had come directly from the governor, Sulpicius, one of whose staff had happened to meet a student an hour after the arrival of the official packet from Rome. Marcus hurried off to the governor's house, thinking that so good a friend of his father would be willing to see him and tell him details. Horace could see that the boy was sick with fear for his father's safety.

For several weeks the students could think or talk of nothing else, their discussions taking a fresh impetus from any letters that arrived from Rome. Gradually, however, they settled back again into their studies and pleasures, feeling remote and irresponsible. But with the advent of the autumn a new force entered into their lives.

Brutus came to Athens, and, while he was awaiting the development of political events at home, began to attend the lectures of the philosophers.

Horace was among the first of the young Romans to yield to the extraordinary spell exercised by this grave, thin-faced, scholarly man, whose profound integrity of character was as obvious to his enemies as to his friends, and as commanding among the populace as among his peers. Before he came Horace had been moderately glad that the Republic had struck at tyranny and meted out to the dictator his deserts. Now he was conscious of an intense partisans.h.i.+p, of a personal loyalty, of a pa.s.sionate wish to spend his life, too, in fighting for Roman freedom. And so, when this wonderful man asked him, who was merely a boy with a taste for moral philosophy, and a knack at translating Alcaeus and Sappho, to become one of his tribunes, and to go with him to meet the forces of Caesar's arrogant young nephew in one final conflict, it was no wonder he turned his back upon the schools and the Muses, and with fierce pride followed his commander. He could remember how stirred he had been that last morning when, on riding out of the city, he had pa.s.sed the famous old statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. In immortal youth they stood there to prove that in Athens a tyrant had been slain by her sons. The ancient popular song that he had so often heard sung by modern Greek students over their cups seemed to be beaten out by his horse's hoofs as, in the pale dawn, they clattered out of the city gate:--

In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive, Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave, Who, striking the tyrant down, Made Athens a freeman's town.

Harmodius, our darling, thou art not dead!

Thou liv'st in the isles of the blest, 'tis said, With Achilles, first in speed, And Tydides Diomede.

In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive, Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave, When the twain on Athena's day Did the tyrant Hipparchus slay.[1]

[Footnote 1: Translated by John Conington.]

Even now, more than thirty years later, the breeze in the Sabine ilex seemed to be playing a wraith of the same tune. And suddenly there began to follow, creeping out of long closed fastnesses, a spectral troop of loftier reminders. Horace stirred a little uneasily. Was it only hot youth and Brutus that had carried him off on that foolhardy expedition? Was it possible that Athens herself had driven him forth, furnis.h.i.+ng him as wings superb impulses born of the glory of her past? For many years now he had been accustomed to feel that he owed to Greece a quickening and a sane training of his artistic abilities; a salvation from Alexandrian pedantry, through a detailed knowledge of the original and masterly epochs of Greek literature; a wholesome fear of Roman grandiosity in any form, engendered by a sojourn among perfect exemplars of architecture and sculpture. For many years, too, he had been in the habit of regarding Brutus as n.o.bly mistaken; of realising that Julius Caesar might have developed a more rational freedom in Rome than one enshrined merely in republican inst.i.tutions. Even great men like Brutus and Cicero, although they were above the private meanness and jealousy that in so many cases adulterated the pure love of liberty, had not seen far enough. What could a theory of freedom give the country better than the peace and the prosperity brought about by the magnanimous Emperor? Horace's part in the battle of Philippi had long since become to him a laughable episode of youth. He had even made a merry verse about it, casting the unashamed story of his flight in the words of Archilochus and Alcaeus, as if the chief result for him had been a bit of literary experiment.

But now, like the phantom in Brutus's tent at Philippi, a grim question stole upon him out of the shadows of his memory. Was it possible that his fight on that field of defeat had been, not a folly, but the golden moment of his life? Had Athens taught him something even profounder than the art which had made him Rome's best lyric poet? He had forgotten much of her humiliation, and of his own Roman pride in her subjection during those days when he had lived, in youthful hero-wors.h.i.+p, with the spirits of her great past. Had she, after all, not only taught the sons of her masters philosophy and the arts, but taken them captive, as well, by the imperious ideals of her own youth, by her love of freedom and of truth?

Horace remembered a day when he and Messala had hired at the Piraeus a boat rigged with bright canvas, and sped before the wind to Salamis, their readiness for any holiday guided by a recent reading of Herodotus and AEschylus, and by a desire to see the actual waters and sh.o.r.es where brute force had been compelled to put its neck beneath wisdom and courage. The day had been a radiant one, the sky fresh and blue, although flecked here and there by clouds, and the sea and the hills and the islands rich in brilliant colour. They had worked their way through the s.h.i.+pping of the harbour, and then sailed straight for the sh.o.r.e of Salamis. When they pa.s.sed the island of Psyttaleia, where the "dance-loving Pan had once walked up and down,"

they had been able to see very plainly how the Persian and Greek fleets lay of old, to imagine the narrow strait once more choked with upturned keels, and fighting or flying triremes, to picture Greeks leaping into the sea in full armour to swim to Psyttaleia and grapple with the Persians who paced the beach in insolent a.s.surance. The wind whistled in their ears, freighted, as it seemed to them, with the full-throated shout which, according to the AEschylean story, rang through the battle:--

Sons of the h.e.l.lenes! On! Set free your native land!

Your children free, your wives, ancestral shrines of G.o.ds, And tombs of fathers' fathers! Now for all we strive!

A thunder-storm had arisen before they left Salamis, and their homeward sail had satisfied their love for adventure. Clouds and sun had battled vehemently, and as they finally walked back to the city from the harbour, they had seen the Parthenon rising in grave splendour against the warring sky, a living symbol of an ancient victory.

At another time, the same group of friends had chosen a hot day of midsummer to ride on mules along the stretch of Attic road to Marathon.

The magnificent hills girdling the horizon had freshly impressed them as more sculpturesque in outline than the familiar ones about their own Rome, and the very shape of the olive trees in a large orchard by the roadside had seemed un-Italian and strange. They had already become attuned to a Greek mood when the blue sea opened before them and they reached the large plain, stretching from the foot-hills of Pentelicon to the water's edge. The heat had stilled all life in the neighbourhood, and Marathon seemed hushed, after all these five hundred years, in reverence before the spirit of liberty. Their ride home had been taken in the cool of the day, so that the hills which rose from the sea had a.s.sumed a covering of deep purple or more luminous amethyst. From the sh.o.r.e of the sea they had pa.s.sed into a wooded road, with a golden sky s.h.i.+ning through the black branches.

Later the stars had come out in great cl.u.s.ters, and Messala, who now and then betrayed a knowledge of poetry and a gravity of thought that surprised his friends, had recited Pindar's lines:--

... Aye, undismayed And deep the mood inspired, A light for man to trust, a star Of guidance sure, that s.h.i.+nes afar.

If he that hath it can the sequel know, How from the guilty here, forthwith below A quittance is required.

But in sunlight undimmed by night and by day Toil-free is the life of the good--for they Nor vex earth's soil with the labour of hand, Nor the waters of Ocean in that far land-- Nay, whoever in keeping of oaths were fearless With the honoured of G.o.ds share life that is tearless.

That night-ride had come back to Horace several years ago when he was writing his ode on Pindar, but to-day's memory seemed strangely different. Then he had remembered what a revelation Pindar's lyric art had been to him amid the severe and lofty beauty of Greek scenery.

Now he caught a haunting echo also of how, when he was twenty-one, these lines of the artist had seemed to him a fitting explanation of the mound of earth heaped over the dead at Marathon. He had long ago learned to laugh at the fervour of youth's first grappling with ideas, and had come to see that the part of a sensible man was to select judiciously here and there, from all the schools, enough reasonable tenets to enable him to preserve a straight course of personal conduct. As for understanding first causes, the human race never had and never could; and as for a belief in heavenly revelations or in divine influences, all such tendencies ended in philosophic absurdity. Why, then, at this late day, should he remember that night, on the road from Marathon to Athens, when the ancient struggle for liberty had stirred in his own heart "a mood deep and undismayed,"

and when an impalpable ideal, under the power of a rus.h.i.+ng torrent of melody, had come to seem a "light for man to trust?"

Was it, indeed, days like these that had made Brutus's work so easy when he began to collect his young company about him? And what if Brutus had been "mistaken?" Was there not a higher wisdom than that which could fas.h.i.+on nations? Horace had seen his dead face at Philippi. Had he done right ever afterwards, however reverently, to attribute a blunder to that mighty spirit which had left upon the lifeless body such an imprint of majesty and repose? Surely common sense, temperance, honest work, honourableness, fidelity, were good fruits of human life and of useful citizens.h.i.+p. But was there a vaster significance in a n.o.ble death? Was there even a truer citizens.h.i.+p in the prodigal and voluntary pouring out of life, on a field of defeat, amid alien and awful desolation?

The sun was hurrying toward the west, and Horace realised, with a quick chill, that he was entirely in the shadow. Beyond the meadow he could see a team of oxen turn wearily, with a heavily loaded wagon, toward their little stable. The driver walked with a weary limp. Even the little boy by his side forgot to play and scamper, and rather listlessly put the last touches to a wreath of autumn flowers which he meant to hang about the neck of the marble Faunus at the edge of the garden.

Where could Davus be? Ah, there he came, half-running already as if he knew his master wanted him.

"Davus," he called out, "make haste. I have had a visit from the shades, and it has been as unpleasant as those cold baths the doctor makes me take." Then, as he saw the look of fright on the wrinkled face of the old slave who had been with his father when he died, he broke into a laugh and put his hand on his shoulder. "Calm yourself, my good fellow," he said, "we shall all be shades some day, and to-day I feel nearer than usual to that charming state. But in the meantime there is a chance for Bacchus and the Muses. Tell them to get out a jar of Falernian to-night, and do you unroll Menander. The counsels of the divine Plato are too eternal for my little mind. And, Davus,"

he added thoughtfully, as he rose and leaned on the slave's willing arm, "as soon as we get to the house, write down, 'Greece took her captors captive.' That has the making of a good phrase in it--a good phrase. I shall polish it up and use it some day."

A ROMAN CITIZEN

I

"Look at him--a subject for his own verses--a grandfather metamorphosed into an infant Bacchus! Will he be a Mercury in swaddling clothes by next year? O, father, father, the G.o.ds certainly laid their own youth in your cradle fifty-two years ago!"

The speaker, a young matron, smiled into her father's eyes, which were as brilliant and tender as her own. Ovid and his daughter were singularly alike in a certain blitheness of demeanour, and in Fabia's eyes they made a charming picture now, both of them in festal white against the March green of the slender poplars. Perilla's little boy had climbed into his grandfather's lap and laid carefully upon his hair, still thick and black, a wreath of grape leaves picked from early vines in a sunny corner. Fabia and Perilla's husband, Fidus Cornelius, smiled at each other in mutual appreciation of a youth shared equally, it seemed to them, by the other three with the new-born spring.

It was Ovid's birthday and they were celebrating it in their country place at the juncture of the Flaminian and Clodian roads. The poet had a special liking for his gardens here, and he had preferred to hold his fete away from the city, in family seclusion, because Fidus was about to take Perilla off to Africa, where he was to be proconsul.

The shadow of the parting had thrown into high relief the happiness of the day. Perilla had always said that it was worth while to pay attention to her father's birthday, because he could accept family incense without strutting like a G.o.d and was never so charming as when he was being spoiled. To-day they had spared no pains, and his manner in return had fused with the tenderness kept for them alone the gallantry, at once that of worldling and of poet, which made him the most popular man in Roman society. Now, as the afternoon grew older and his grandson curled comfortably into his arms, the conversation turned naturally to personal things. Perilla's jest led her father to talk of his years, and to wonder whether he was to have as long a life as his father, who had died only two or three years before at ninety.

"At least, having no sons," he went on, "I shall be spared some of his disappointments. It was cruel that my brother, who could have satisfied him by going into public life, should have died. Father had no use for literature. He used to point out to me that not even Homer made money, so what could I expect? But I believe that even he saw that my student speeches sounded like metreless verse, and later on he accepted the bad bargain with some grace. He had sniffed at what I considered my youthful successes. I was immensely proud over seeing Virgil once in the same room as myself, and when I came to know Horace and Propertius fairly intimately I felt myself quite a figure in Rome. But father had little or no respect for them--except when Horace turned preacher--and no patience at all with what I wrote.

Before he died, however, when these greater men had pa.s.sed off the stage and he saw young men look up to me as I had looked up to them, and found I could sell my wares, he began to grant that I had, after all, done something with my time."

"I never can realise," Perilla exclaimed, "that you are old enough to have seen Virgil! Why, I wasn't even born when he died! I suppose those times, when Augustus was young, were very fiery and inspiring, but I am so glad I live in this very year. I would rather have you the chief poet of Rome than a hundred solemn Virgils, and surely life can never have been as lovely as it is now. Isn't Rome much finer and more finished?"

Fidus smiled. "You are your father's own child," he said. "We certainly are getting the rustic accent out of our mouths and the rustic scruples out of our morals. In the meantime"--he added lightly--"some of us have to plod along with our old habits, or where would the Empire be? I don't expect to improve much on the proconsuls.h.i.+p of my father."

Ovid's eyes rested whimsically on the young man, and after a pause he said: "Art is one thing and conduct is another. I trust Perilla to you but with no firmer a.s.surance of her happiness than I have of Fabia's entrusted to me. Soldiering and proconsuling have their place, but so has the service of the Muses. While you are looking after taxes in Africa, we will make Rome a place to come back to from the ends of the earth. After all, to live is the object of life, and where can you live more richly, more exquisitely than here? You will find you cannot stay away long. Rome is the breath we breathe. I like to believe that will prove true of you. I cannot give up Perilla long, even with this young Roman as a hostage." The child had fallen asleep, and with a light kiss on his tousled curls the grandfather turned him over to his mother's arms. "Let us leave these connoisseurs to discuss his dimples," he said to his son-in-law, "drag our other boy out of his bee-hives and have one more game of ball before I get too old."

Perilla watched the two men as they walked off toward the apiary, and when she turned to her stepmother her eyes were wet with sudden tears. "Fidus was almost impertinent to father, wasn't he? And father was so perfect to him! That is what I tell Fidus, when he talks like grandfather and says we are all going to the dogs--I tell him that at least we are keeping our manners as we go, which is more than can be said of the reformers. I am always nervous when he and father get on to social questions, they feel so differently. Fidus was quite angry with me the other day because I said I was thankful that we had learned to have some appreciation of taste and good form and elegance and that we should never go back to being boors and prudes.