ON THE WAY
Mirum est ut animus agitatione motuque corporis excitetur.
Pliny’s Letters.
Many points in that train of thought, its harder and more energetic
practical details especially, at first surmised but vaguely in the
intervals of his visits to the tomb of Flavian, attained the coherence
of formal principle amid the stirring incidents of the journey, which
took him, still in all the buoyancy of his nineteen years and greatly
expectant, to Rome. That summons had come from one of the former
friends of his father in the capital, who had kept himself acquainted
with the lad’s progress, and, assured of his parts, his courtly ways,
above all of his beautiful penmanship, now offered him a place,
virtually that of an amanuensis, near the person of the philosophic
emperor. The old town-house of his family on the Caelian hill, so long
neglected, might well require his personal care; and Marius, relieved a
little by his preparations for travelling from a certain over-tension
of spirit in which he had lived of late, was presently on his way, to
await introduction to Aurelius, on his expected return home, after a
first success, illusive enough as it was soon to appear, against the
invaders from beyond the Danube.
The opening stage of his journey, through the firm, golden weather, for
which he had lingered three days beyond the appointed time of
starting—days brown with the first rains of autumn—brought him, by the
byways among the lower slopes of the Apennines of Luna, to the town of
Luca, a station on the Cassian Way; travelling so far mainly on foot,
while the baggage followed under the care of his attendants. He wore a
broad felt hat, in fashion not unlike a more modern pilgrim’s, the neat
head projecting from the collar of his gray paenula, or travelling
mantle, sewed closely together over the breast, but with its two sides
folded up upon the shoulders, to leave the arms free in walking, and
was altogether so trim and fresh, that, as he climbed the hill from
Pisa, by the long steep lane through the olive-yards, and turned to
gaze where he could just discern the cypresses of the old school
garden, like two black lines down the yellow walls, a little child took
possession of his hand, and, looking up at him with entire confidence,
paced on bravely at his side, for the mere pleasure of his company, to
the spot where the road declined again into the valley beyond. From
this point, leaving the servants behind, he surrendered himself, a
willing subject, as he walked, to the impressions of the road, and was
almost surprised, both at the suddenness with which evening came on,
and the distance from his old home at which it found him.
And at the little town of Luca, he felt that indescribable sense of a
welcoming in the mere outward appearance of things, which seems to mark
out certain places for the special purpose of evening rest, and gives
them always a peculiar amiability in retrospect. Under the deepening
twilight, the rough-tiled roofs seem to huddle together side by side,
like one continuous shelter over the whole township, spread low and
broad above the snug sleeping-rooms within; and the place one sees for
the first time, and must tarry in but for a night, breathes the very
spirit of home. The cottagers lingered at their doors for a few minutes
as the shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was
still a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the
birds were still awake about the crumbling gray heights of an old
temple. So quiet and air-swept was the place, you could hardly tell
where the country left off in it, and the field-paths became its
streets. Next morning he must needs change the manner of his journey.
The light baggage-wagon returned, and he proceeded now more quickly,
travelling a stage or two by post, along the Cassian Way, where the
figures and incidents of the great high-road seemed already to tell of
the capital, the one centre to which all were hastening, or had lately
bidden adieu. That Way lay through the heart of the old, mysterious and
visionary country of Etruria; and what he knew of its strange religion
of the dead, reinforced by the actual sight of the funeral houses
scattered so plentifully among the dwelling-places of the living,
revived in him for a while, in all its strength, his old instinctive
yearning towards those inhabitants of the shadowy land he had known in
life. It seemed to him that he could half divine how time passed in
those painted houses on the hillsides, among the gold and silver
ornaments, the wrought armour and vestments, the drowsy and dead
attendants; and the close consciousness of that vast population gave
him no fear, but rather a sense of companionship, as he climbed the
hills on foot behind the horses, through the genial afternoon.
The road, next day, passed below a town not less primitive, it might
seem, than its rocky perch—white rocks, that had long been glistening
before him in the distance. Down the dewy paths the people were
descending from it, to keep a holiday, high and low alike in rough,
white-linen smocks. A homely old play was just begun in an open-air
theatre, with seats hollowed out of the turf-grown slope. Marius caught
the terrified expression of a child in its mother’s arms, as it turned
from the yawning mouth of a great mask, for refuge in her bosom. The
way mounted, and descended again, down the steep street of another
place, all resounding with the noise of metal under the hammer; for
every house had its brazier’s workshop, the bright objects of brass and
copper gleaming, like lights in a cave, out of their dark roofs and
corners. Around the anvils the children were watching the work, or ran
to fetch water to the hissing, red-hot metal; and Marius too watched,
as he took his hasty mid-day refreshment, a mess of chestnut-meal and
cheese, while the swelling surface of a great copper water-vessel grew
flowered all over with tiny petals under the skilful strokes. Towards
dusk, a frantic woman at the roadside, stood and cried out the words of
some philter, or malison, in verse, with weird motion of her hands, as
the travellers passed, like a wild picture drawn from Virgil.
But all along, accompanying the superficial grace of these incidents of
the way, Marius noted, more and more as he drew nearer to Rome, marks
of the great plague. Under Hadrian and his successors, there had been
many enactments to improve the condition of the slave. The ergastula+
were abolished. But no system of free labour had as yet succeeded. A
whole mendicant population, artfully exaggerating every symptom and
circumstance of misery, still hung around, or sheltered themselves
within, the vast walls of their old, half-ruined task-houses. And for
the most part they had been variously stricken by the pestilence. For
once, the heroic level had been reached in rags, squints, scars—every
caricature of the human type—ravaged beyond what could have been
thought possible if it were to survive at all. Meantime, the farms were
less carefully tended than of old: here and there they were lapsing
into their natural wildness: some villas also were partly fallen into
ruin. The picturesque, romantic Italy of a later time—the Italy of
Claude and Salvator Rosa—was already forming, for the delight of the
modern romantic traveller.
And again Marius was aware of a real change in things, on crossing the
Tiber, as if some magic effect lay in that; though here, in truth, the
Tiber was but a modest enough stream of turbid water. Nature, under the
richer sky, seemed readier and more affluent, and man fitter to the
conditions around him: even in people hard at work there appeared to be
a less burdensome sense of the mere business of life. How dreamily the
women were passing up through the broad light and shadow of the steep
streets with the great water-pots resting on their heads, like women of
Caryae, set free from slavery in old Greek temples. With what a fresh,
primeval poetry was daily existence here impressed—all the details of
the threshing-floor and the vineyard; the common farm-life even; the
great bakers’ fires aglow upon the road in the evening. In the presence
of all this Marius felt for a moment like those old, early, unconscious
poets, who created the famous Greek myths of Dionysus, and the Great
Mother, out of the imagery of the wine-press and the ploughshare. And
still the motion of the journey was bringing his thoughts to systematic
form. He seemed to have grown to the fulness of intellectual manhood,
on his way hither. The formative and literary stimulus, so to call it,
of peaceful exercise which he had always observed in himself, doing its
utmost now, the form and the matter of thought alike detached
themselves clearly and with readiness from the healthfully excited
brain.—“It is wonderful,” says Pliny, “how the mind is stirred to
activity by brisk bodily exercise.” The presentable aspects of inmost
thought and feeling became evident to him: the structure of all he
meant, its order and outline, defined itself: his general sense of a
fitness and beauty in words became effective in daintily pliant
sentences, with all sorts of felicitous linking of figure to
abstraction. It seemed just then as if the desire of the artist in
him—that old longing to produce—might be satisfied by the exact and
literal transcript of what was then passing around him, in simple
prose, arresting the desirable moment as it passed, and prolonging its
life a little.—To live in the concrete! To be sure, at least, of one’s
hold upon that!—Again, his philosophic scheme was but the reflection of
the data of sense, and chiefly of sight, a reduction to the abstract,
of the brilliant road he travelled on, through the sunshine.
But on the seventh evening there came a reaction in the cheerful flow
of our traveller’s thoughts, a reaction with which mere bodily fatigue,
asserting itself at last over his curiosity, had much to do; and he
fell into a mood, known to all passably sentimental wayfarers, as night
deepens again and again over their path, in which all journeying, from
the known to the unknown, comes suddenly to figure as a mere foolish
truancy—like a child’s running away from home—with the feeling that one
had best return at once, even through the darkness. He had chosen to
climb on foot, at his leisure, the long windings by which the road
ascended to the place where that day’s stage was to end, and found
himself alone in the twilight, far behind the rest of his
travelling-companions. Would the last zigzag, round and round those
dark masses, half natural rock, half artificial substructure, ever
bring him within the circuit of the walls above? It was now that a
startling incident turned those misgivings almost into actual fear.
From the steep slope a heavy mass of stone was detached, after some
whisperings among the trees above his head, and rushing down through
the stillness fell to pieces in a cloud of dust across the road just
behind him, so that he felt the touch upon his heel. That was
sufficient, just then, to rouse out of its hiding-place his old vague
fear of evil—of one’s “enemies”—a distress, so much a matter of
constitution with him, that at times it would seem that the best
pleasures of life could but be snatched, as it were hastily, in one
moment’s forgetfulness of its dark, besetting influence. A sudden
suspicion of hatred against him, of the nearness of “enemies,” seemed
all at once to alter the visible form of things, as with the child’s
hero, when he found the footprint on the sand of his peaceful, dreamy
island. His elaborate philosophy had not put beneath his feet the
terror of mere bodily evil; much less of “inexorable fate, and the
noise of greedy Acheron.”
The resting-place to which he presently came, in the keen, wholesome
air of the market-place of the little hill-town, was a pleasant
contrast to that last effort of his journey. The room in which he sat
down to supper, unlike the ordinary Roman inns at that day, was trim
and sweet. The firelight danced cheerfully upon the polished,
three-wicked lucernae burning cleanly with the best oil, upon the
white-washed walls, and the bunches of scarlet carnations set in glass
goblets. The white wine of the place put before him, of the true colour
and flavour of the grape, and with a ring of delicate foam as it
mounted in the cup, had a reviving edge or freshness he had found in no
other wine. These things had relieved a little the melancholy of the
hour before; and it was just then that he heard the voice of one, newly
arrived at the inn, making his way to the upper floor—a youthful voice,
with a reassuring clearness of note, which completed his cure.
He seemed to hear that voice again in dreams, uttering his name: then,
awake in the full morning light and gazing from the window, saw the
guest of the night before, a very honourable-looking youth, in the rich
habit of a military knight, standing beside his horse, and already
making preparations to depart. It happened that Marius, too, was to
take that day’s journey on horseback. Riding presently from the inn, he
overtook Cornelius—of the Twelfth Legion—advancing carefully down the
steep street; and before they had issued from the gates of Urbs-vetus,
the two young men had broken into talk together. They were passing
along the street of the goldsmiths; and Cornelius must needs enter one
of the workshops for the repair of some button or link of his knightly
trappings. Standing in the doorway, Marius watched the work, as he had
watched the brazier’s business a few days before, wondering most at the
simplicity of its processes, a simplicity, however, on which only
genius in that craft could have lighted.—By what unguessed-at stroke of
hand, for instance, had the grains of precious metal associated
themselves with so daintily regular a roughness, over the surface of
the little casket yonder? And the conversation which followed, hence
arising, left the two travellers with sufficient interest in each other
to insure an easy companionship for the remainder of their journey. In
time to come, Marius was to depend very much on the preferences, the
personal judgments, of the comrade who now laid his hand so brotherly
on his shoulder, as they left the workshop.
Itineris matutini gratiam capimus,+—observes one of our scholarly
travellers; and their road that day lay through a country, well-fitted,
by the peculiarity of its landscape, to ripen a first acquaintance into
intimacy; its superficial ugliness throwing the wayfarers back upon
each other’s entertainment in a real exchange of ideas, the tension of
which, however, it would relieve, ever and anon, by the unexpected
assertion of something singularly attractive. The immediate aspect of
the land was, indeed, in spite of abundant olive and ilex, unpleasing
enough. A river of clay seemed, “in some old night of time,” to have
burst up over valley and hill, and hardened there into fantastic
shelves and slides and angles of cadaverous rock, up and down among the
contorted vegetation; the hoary roots and trunks seeming to confess
some weird kinship with them. But that was long ago; and these pallid
hillsides needed only the declining sun, touching the rock with purple,
and throwing deeper shadow into the immemorial foliage, to put on a
peculiar, because a very grave and austere, kind of beauty; while the
graceful outlines common to volcanic hills asserted themselves in the
broader prospect. And, for sentimental Marius, all this was associated,
by some perhaps fantastic affinity, with a peculiar trait of severity,
beyond his guesses as to the secret of it, which mingled with the
blitheness of his new companion. Concurring, indeed, with the condition
of a Roman soldier, it was certainly something far more than the
expression of military hardness, or ascêsis; and what was earnest, or
even austere, in the landscape they had traversed together, seemed to
have been waiting for the passage of this figure to interpret or inform
it. Again, as in his early days with Flavian, a vivid personal presence
broke through the dreamy idealism, which had almost come to doubt of
other men’s reality: reassuringly, indeed, yet not without some sense
of a constraining tyranny over him from without.
For Cornelius, returning from the campaign, to take up his quarters on
the Palatine, in the imperial guard, seemed to carry about with him, in
that privileged world of comely usage to which he belonged, the
atmosphere of some still more jealously exclusive circle. They halted
on the morrow at noon, not at an inn, but at the house of one of the
young soldier’s friends, whom they found absent, indeed, in consequence
of the plague in those parts, so that after a mid-day rest only, they
proceeded again on their journey. The great room of the villa, to which
they were admitted, had lain long untouched; and the dust rose, as they
entered, into the slanting bars of sunlight, that fell through the
half-closed shutters. It was here, to while away the time, that
Cornelius bethought himself of displaying to his new friend the various
articles and ornaments of his knightly array—the breastplate, the
sandals and cuirass, lacing them on, one by one, with the assistance of
Marius, and finally the great golden bracelet on the right arm,
conferred on him by his general for an act of valour. And as he gleamed
there, amid that odd interchange of light and shade, with the staff of
a silken standard firm in his hand, Marius felt as if he were face to
face, for the first time, with some new knighthood or chivalry, just
then coming into the world.
It was soon after they left this place, journeying now by carriage,
that Rome was seen at last, with much excitement on the part of our
travellers; Cornelius, and some others of whom the party then
consisted, agreeing, chiefly for the sake of Marius, to hasten forward,
that it might be reached by daylight, with a cheerful noise of rapid
wheels as they passed over the flagstones. But the highest light upon
the mausoleum of Hadrian was quite gone out, and it was dark, before
they reached the Flaminian Gate. The abundant sound of water was the
one thing that impressed Marius, as they passed down a long street,
with many open spaces on either hand: Cornelius to his military
quarters, and Marius to the old dwelling-place of his fathers.
NOTES
162. +E-text editor’s note: ergastula were the Roman agrarian
equivalent of prison-workhouses.
168. +Apuleius, The Golden Ass, I.17.