THE MARBLE PORCH
It was the sound of a chariot, truly enough, that roused the dreamer from
his slumbers; but how different the scene on which his drowsy eyes
unclosed, from that which fancy had conjured up in the shadowy realms of
sleep!
A beautiful portico, supported on slender columns of smooth white marble,
protected him from the rays of the morning sun, already pouring down with
the intensity of Italian heat. Garlands of leaves and flowers, cool and
fresh in their contrast with the snowy surface of these dainty pillars,
were wreathed around their stems, and twined amongst the delicate carving
of their Corinthian capitals. Large stone vases, urn‐shaped and massive,
stood in long array at stated intervals, bearing the orange‐tree, the
myrtle, and other dark‐green flowering shrubs, which formed a fair
perspective of retirement and repose. Shapely statues filled the niches in
the wall, or stood out more prominently in the vacant spaces of the
colonnade. Here cowered a marble Venus, in the shamefaced consciousness of
unequalled beauty; there stood forth a bright Apollo, exulting in the
perfection of godlike symmetry and grace. Rome could not finger the chisel
like her instructress Greece, the mother of the Arts, but the hand that
firmly grasps the sword need never want for anything skill produces, or
genius creates, or gold can buy; so it is no marvel that the masterpieces
and treasures of the nations she subdued found their way to the Imperial
City, mistress of the world. Even where the sleeper lay reclined upon a
couch of curiously‐carved wood from the forests that clothe Mount
Hymettus, an owl so beautifully chiseled that its very breast‐plumage
seemed to ruffle in the breeze, looked down upon him from a niche where it
had been placed at a cost that might have bought a dozen such human
chattels as himself; for it had been brought from Athens as the most
successful effort of a sculptor, who had devoted it to the honour of
Minerva in his zeal. Refinement, luxury, nay, profusion, reigned paramount
even here outside the sumptuous dwelling of a Roman lady: and the very
ground in her porch over which she was borne, for she seldom touched it
with her feet, was fresh swept and sanded as often as it had been
disturbed by the tread of her litter‐bearers, or the wheels of her
chariot.
Many a time was this ceremony performed in the twenty‐four hours; for
Valeria was a woman of noble rank, great possessions, and the highest
fashion. Not a vanity of her sex, not a folly was there of her class, in
which she scrupled to indulge; and then, as now, ladies were prone to rush
into extremes, and frivolity, when it took the garb of a female, assumed
preposterous dimensions, and a thirst for amusement, incompatible with
reason or self‐control.
There is always a certain hush, and, as it were, a pompous stillness,
about the houses of the great, even long after inferior mortals are astir
in pursuit of their pleasure or their business. To‐day was Valeria’s
birthday, and as such was duly observed by the hanging of garlands on the
pillars of her porch; but after the completion of this graceful ceremony,
silence seemed to have sunk once more upon the household, and the slave
whose dream we have recorded, coming into her gates with an offering from
his lord, and finding no domestics in the way, had sat him down to wait in
the grateful shade, and, overcome with heat, might have slept on till noon
had he not been roused by the grinding chariot‐wheels, which mingled so
confusedly with his dream.
It was no plebeian vehicle that now rolled into the colonnade, driven at a
furious pace, and stopping so abruptly as to create considerable confusion
and insubordination amongst the noble animals that drew it. The car,
mounted on two wheels, was constructed of a highly‐polished wood, cut from
the wild fig‐tree, elaborately inlaid with ivory and gold; the very spokes
and felloes of the wheels were carved in patterns of vine‐leaves and
flowers, whilst the extremities of the pole, the axle, and the yoke, were
wrought into exquisite representations of the wolf’s head, an animal, from
historical reasons, ever dear to the fancy of the Roman. There was but one
person besides the driver in the carriage, and so light a draught might
indeed command any rate of speed, when whirled along by four such horses
as now plunged and reared and bit each other’s crests in the portico of
Valeria’s mansion. These were of a milky white, with dark muzzles, and a
bluish tinge under the coat, denoting its soft texture, and the Eastern
origin of the animals. Somewhat thick of neck and shoulders, with
semicircular jowl, it was the broad and tapering head, the small quivering
ear, the wide red nostril, that demonstrated the purity of their blood,
and argued extraordinary powers of speed and endurance; while their short,
round backs, prominent muscles, flat legs, and dainty feet, promised an
amount of strength and activity only to be attained by the production of
perfect symmetry. These beautiful animals were harnessed four abreast—the
inner pair, somewhat in the fashion of our modern curricle, being yoked to
the pole, of which the very fastening‐pins were steel overlaid with gold,
whilst the outer horses, drawing only from a trace attached respectively
on the inner side of each to the axle of the chariot, were free to wheel
their quarters outwards in every direction, and kick to their heart’s
content—a liberty of which, in the present instance, they seemed well
disposed to avail themselves.
The slave started to his feet as the nearest horse winced and swerved
aside from his unexpected figure, snorting the while in mingled wantonness
and fear. The axle grazed his tunic while it passed, and the driver,
irritated at his horses’ unsteadiness, or perhaps in the mere insolence of
a great man’s favourite, struck at him heavily with his whip as he went
by. The Briton’s blood boiled at the indignity; but his sinewy arm was up
like lightning to parry the blow, and as the lash curled round his wrist
he drew the weapon quickly from the driver’s hand, and would have returned
the insult with interest, had he not been deterred from his purpose by the
youthful, effeminate appearance of the aggressor.
“I cannot strike a girl!” exclaimed the slave contemptuously, throwing the
whip at the same time into the floor of the chariot, where it lit at the
feet of the other occupant, a sumptuously‐dressed nobleman, who enjoyed
the discomfiture of his charioteer, with the loud frank glee of a master
jeering a dependant.
“Well said, my hero!” laughed the patrician, adding in good‐humoured,
though haughty tones, “Not that I would give much for the chance of man or
woman in a grasp like yours. By Jupiter! you’ve got the arms and shoulders
of Antæus! Who owns you, my good fellow? and what do you here?”
“Nay, I would strike him again to some purpose if I were on the ground
with him,” interrupted the charioteer, a handsome, petulant youth of some
sixteen summers, whose long flowing curls and rich scarlet mantle denoted
a pampered and favourite slave. “Gently, Scipio! So‐ho, Jugurtha! The
horses will fret for an hour now they have been scared by his ugly face.”
“Better let him alone, Automedon!” observed his master, again shaking his
sides at the obvious discomfiture portrayed on the flushed face of his
favourite. “Through your life keep clear of a man when he shuts his mouth
like that, as you would of an ox with a wisp of hay on his horn. You silly
boy! why he would swallow such a slender frame as yours at a gulp: and
nobody but a fool ever strikes at a man unless he knows he can reach him,
ay, and punish him too, without hurting his own knuckles in return! But
what do you here, good fellow?” he repeated, addressing himself once more
to the slave, who stood erect, scanning his questioner with a fearless,
though respectful eye.
“My master is your friend,” was the outspoken answer. “You supped with him
only the night before last. But a man need not be in the household of
Licinius, not have spent his best years at Rome, to know the face of
Julius Placidus, the tribune.”
A smile of gratified vanity stole over the patrician’s countenance while
he listened; a smile that had the effect of imparting to its lineaments an
expression at once mocking, crafty, and malicious. In repose, and such was
its usual condition, the face was almost handsome, perfect in its
regularity, and of a fixed, sedate composure which bordered on vacuity,
but when disturbed, as it sometimes, though rarely, was, by a passing
emotion, the smile that passed over it like a lurid gleam, became truly
diabolical.
The slave was right. Amongst all the notorious personages who crowded and
jostled each other in the streets of Rome at that stormy period, none was
better known, none more courted, flattered, honoured, hated, and
mistrusted, than the occupant of the gilded chariot. It was no time for
men to wear their hearts in their hands—it was no time to make an
additional enemy, or to lose a possible friend. Since the death of
Tiberius, emperor had succeeded emperor with alarming rapidity. Nero had
indeed died by his own hand, to avoid the just retribution of unexampled
vices and crimes; but the poisoned mushroom had carried off his
predecessor, and the old man who succeeded him fell by the weapons of the
very guards he had enlisted to protect his grey head from violence. Since
then another suicide had indued Vitellius with the purple; but the throne
of the Cæsars was fast becoming synonymous with a scaffold, and the sword
of Damocles quivered more menacingly, and on a slenderer hair than ever,
over the diadem.
When great political convulsions agitate a State, already seething with
general vice and luxury, the moral scum seems, by a law of nature, to
float invariably to the surface—the characters most destitute of
principle, the readiest to obey the instincts of self‐aggrandisement and
expediency, achieve a kind of spurious fame, a doubtful and temporary
success. Under the rule of Nero, perhaps, there was but one path to Court
favour, and that lay in the disgraceful attempt to vie with this emperor’s
brutalities and crimes. The palace of Cæsar was then indeed a sink of foul
iniquity and utter degradation. The sycophant who could most readily
reduce himself to the level of a beast in gross sensuality, while he
boasted a demon’s refinement of cruelty, and morbid depravity of heart,
became the first favourite for the time with his imperial master. To be
fat, slothful, weak, gluttonous, and effeminate, while the brow was
crowned with roses, and the brain was drenched with wine, and the hands
were steeped in blood—this it was to be a friend and counsellor of Cæsar.
Men waited and wondered in stupefied awe when they marked the monster
reeling from a debauch to some fresh feast of horrors, some ingenious
exhibition of the complicated tortures that may be inflicted on a human
being, some devilish experiment of all the body can bear, ere the soul
takes wing from its ghastly, mutilated tenement, and this not on one, but
a thousand victims. They waited and wondered what the gods were about,
that divine vengeance should slumber through such provocations as these.
But retribution overtook him at last. The heart which a slaughtered
mother’s spectre could not soften, which remorse for a pregnant wife’s
fate, kicked to death by a brutal lord, failed to wring, quailed at the
approach of a few exasperated soldiers; and the tyrant who had so often
smiled to see blood flow like water in the amphitheatre, died by his own
hand—died as he had lived, a coward and a murderer to the last.
Since then, the Court was a sphere in which any bold unscrupulous man
might be pretty sure of attaining success. The present emperor was a good‐
humoured glutton, one whose faculties, originally vigorous, had been
warped and deadened by excess, just as his body had become bloated, his
eye dimmed, his strength palsied, and his courage destroyed by the same
course. The scheming statesman, the pliant courtier, the successful
soldier had but one passion now, one only object for the exercise of his
energies, both of mind and body—to eat enormously, to drink to excess, to
study every art by which fresh appetite could be stimulated when gorged to
repletion—and then—to eat and drink again.
With such a patron, any man who united to a tendency for the pleasures of
the table, a strong brain, a cool head, and an aptitude for business,
might be sure of considerable influence. The Emperor thoroughly
appreciated one who would take trouble off his hands, while at the same
time he encouraged his master, by precept and example, in his swinish
propensities. It was no slight service to Vitellius, to rise from a
debauch and give those necessary orders in an unforeseen emergency which
Cæsar’s sodden brain was powerless to originate or to understand.
Ere Placidus had been a month about the Court, he had insinuated himself
thoroughly into the good graces of the Emperor. This man’s had been a
strange and stirring history. Born of patrician rank, he had used his
family influence to advance him in the military service, and already,
whilst still in the flower of youth, had attained the grade of tribune in
Vespasian’s army, then occupying Judæa under that distinguished general.
Although no man yielded so willingly, or gave himself up so entirely to
the indolent enjoyments of Asiatic life, Placidus possessed many of the
qualities which are esteemed essential to the character of a soldier.
Personal bravery, or we should rather say, insensibility to danger, was
one of his peculiar advantages. Perhaps this is a quality inseparable from
such an organisation as his, in which, while the system seems to contain a
wealth of energy and vitality, the nerves are extremely callous to
irritation, and completely under control. The tribune never came out in
more favourable colours than when everyone about him was in a state of
alarm and confusion. On one occasion, at the siege of Jotapata, where the
Jews were defending themselves with the desperate energy of their race,
Placidus won golden opinions from Vespasian by the cool dexterity with
which he saved from destruction a whole company of soldiers and their
centurion, under the very eye of his general.
A maniple, or, in the military language of to‐day, a wing of the cohort
led by Placidus was advancing to the attack, and the first centurion, with
the company under his command, was already beneath the wall, bristling as
it was with defenders, who hurled down on their assailants darts,
javelins, huge stones, every description of weapon or missile, including
molten lead and boiling oil. Under cover of a movable pent‐house, which
protected them, the head of the column had advanced their battering‐ram to
the very wall, and were swinging the huge engine back, by the ropes and
pulleys which governed it, for an increased impulse of destruction, when
the Jews, who had been watching their opportunity, succeeded in balancing
an enormous mass of granite immediately above the pent‐house and the
materials of offence, animate and inanimate, which it contained. A Jewish
warrior clad in shining armour had taken a lever in his hand, and was in
the act of applying that instrument to the impending tottering mass; in
another instant it must have crashed down upon their heads, and buried the
whole band beneath its weight. At his appointed station by the eagle, the
tribune was watching the movements of his men with his usual air of
sleepy, indolent approval. And even in this critical moment his eye never
brightened, his colour never deepened a shade. The voice was calm, low,
and perfectly modulated in which he bade the trumpeter at his right hand
sound the recall; nor, though its business‐like rapidity could scarce have
been exceeded by the most practised archer, was the movement the least
hurried with which he snatched the bow from a dead Parthian auxiliary at
his feet and fitted an arrow to its string. In the twinkling of an eye,
while the granite vibrated on the very parapet, that arrow was quivering
between the joints of the warrior’s harness who held the lever, and he had
fallen with his head over the wall in the throes of death. Before another
of the defenders could take his place the assaulting party had retired,
bringing along with them, in their cool and rigid discipline, the
battering‐ram and wooden covering which protected it, while the tribune
quietly observed, as he replaced the bow into the fallen Parthian’s hand,
“A company saved is a hundred men gained. A dead barbarian is exactly
worth my tallest centurion, and the smartest troop I have in the maniple!”
Vespasian was not the man to forget such an instance of cool promptitude,
and Julius Placidus was marked out for promotion from that day forth. But
with its courage, the tribune possessed the cunning of the tiger, not
without something also of that fierce animal’s outward beauty, and much of
its watchful, pitiless, and untiring nature. A brave soldier should have
considered it a degradation, under any circumstances, to play a double
part; but with Placidus every step was esteemed honourable so long as it
was on the ascent. The successful winner had no scruple in deceiving all
about him at Rome, by the eagerness with which he assumed the character of
a mere man of pleasure, while he lost no opportunity the while of
ingratiating himself with the many desperate spirits who were to be found
in the Imperial City, ready and willing to assist in any enterprise which
should tend to anarchy and confusion. While he rushed into every
extravagance and pleasure of that luxurious Court—while he vied with Cæsar
himself in his profusion, and surpassed him in his orgies—he suffered no
symptoms to escape him of a higher ambition than that of excellence in
trifling—of deeper projects than those which affected the winecup, the
pageant, and the passing follies of the hour. Yet all the while, within
that dainty reveller’s brain, schemes were forming and thoughts burning
that should have withered the very roses on his brow. It might have been
the strain of Greek blood which filtered through his veins, that tempered
his Roman courage and endurance with the pliancy essential to conspiracy
and intrigue—a strain that was apparent in his sculptured regularity of
features, and general symmetry of form. His character has already been
compared to the tiger’s, and his movements had all the pliant ease and
stealthy freedom of that graceful animal. His stature was little above the
average of his countrymen, but his frame was cast in that mould of exact
proportion which promises the extreme of strength combined with agility
and endurance. Had he been caught like Milo, he would have writhed himself
out of the trap, with the sinuous persistency of a snake. There was
something snake‐like, too, in his small glittering eye, and the clear
smoothness of his skin. With all its brightness no woman worthy of the
name but would have winced with womanly instincts of aversion and
repugnance from his glance. With all its beauty no child would have looked
up frankly and confidingly in his face. Men turned, indeed, to scan him
approvingly as he passed; but the brave owned no sympathy with that smooth
set brow, that crafty and malicious smile, while the timid or the
superstitious shuddered and shrank away, averting their own gaze from what
they felt to be the influence of the evil eye. Yet, in his snowy tunic
bleached to dazzling white, in his collar of linked gold, his jewelled
belt, his embroidered sandals, and the ample folds of his deep violet
mantle, nearly approaching purple, Julius Placidus was no unworthy
representative of his time and his order, no mean specimen of the wealth,
and foppery, and extravagance of Rome.
Such was the man who now stood up in his gilded chariot at Valeria’s door,
masking with his usual expression of careless indolence, the real
impatience he felt for tidings of its mistress.