"The gods created mortals for one purpose only--polite conversation!"
"Charmingly said, Mamertinus! Say it again, I beg, before you've
forgotten it! I'll write that down with the other maxims," declared
Lampridius, the professor of eloquence, taking tablets from his
pocket. His admired friend Mamertinus was a fashionable Athenian
advocate.
"My dear fellow, I say," repeated Mamertinus with the most delicate of
smiles, "I merely say that men have been sent by the gods----"
"No, no, it didn't run so, Mamertinus; you put it better. The gods
created mortals----"
"Ah, yes; the gods created mortals for one purpose only--polite
conversation!"
And the enthusiastic Lampridius scribbled down the words as if they
had been the utterance of an oracle.
The scene was a friendly supper of men of letters given by the
venerable Roman senator Hortensius, in the villa of his rich young
ward Arsinoë, not far from the Piræus.
Mamertinus on that day had achieved a remarkable speech in defence of
the banker Barnava. Nobody had the smallest doubt that Barnava was a
complete scoundrel; but, besides measureless eloquence, the advocate
possessed so telling a voice that one of the innumerable ladies who
adored him avowed: "I never listen to what Mamertinus says; I have no
wish to know what he's talking about. I become intoxicated with the
tones of his voice, and especially with the dying cadence at the end
of his periods. It is incredible! It is no longer a human voice, but
nectar and ambrosia, the heavenly sighing of an Æolian harp!"
And so, while the populace labelled the money-lender Barnava "the
blood-sucker," the devourer of widows and orphans, the Athenian judges
enthusiastically acquitted the client of Mamertinus.
From this client the advocate had received 50,000 sesterces, and
therefore felt in no dissatisfied mood at the supper given by
Hortensius in his honour. But it was his habit to affect the invalid,
in order that he might be spoiled and petted the more.
"I am utterly done up to-day, my friends," he murmured plaintively;
"aching in every limb. Where is Arsinoë?"
"She will soon be here. Arsinoë has just received from the museum of
Alexandria some new apparatus for experiments in physics; and she is
entirely absorbed in them. But I will give an order to summon her,"
suggested Hortensius.
"No, don't do that," responded the lawyer carelessly. "But what a
ridiculous thing--a young girl at physics! What in the world has the
one thing to do with the other? Your blue-stockings have been finely
belaboured by Aristophanes and Euripides. Arsinoë is a whimsical
creature, Hortensius! Really, if she wasn't so attractive, what with
her sculpture and her mathematics she would almost become----"
He did not finish the sentence, and gazed languidly out of the window.
"What am I to do?" replied Hortensius. "A spoiled child ... an
orphan; no father, no mother! As her mere tutor, I can't well deny her
anything."
"I see, I see."
The lawyer was no longer listening; he was thinking about himself.
"My dear fellows, I feel----"
"What--what's the matter?" asked several voices anxiously.
"I'm feeling--I fancy--a draught...."
"We'll shut the shutters," proposed the host.
"No, we should be stifled! But I've so worn out my voice to-day....
And I have to make another defence to-morrow. Give me a carpet under
my feet, and my wrapper; I'm afraid of catching cold in the night
chill."
And Hephæstion, the friend of Publius and pupil of Lampridius, rushed
away to get Mamertinus' wrapper.
It was a piece of soft woollen stuff, daintily embroidered. The lawyer
carried it everywhere to safeguard his precious throat from the
faintest risk of cold.
Mamertinus nursed his own health like a lover, with so simple a grace,
such a passion of self-solicitude, that his friends were instinctively
constrained to think of nothing but nursing him too.
"This wrapper was embroidered for me by the venerable Fabiola," he
informed them with a smile.
"Wife of the senator?" asked Hortensius.
"Yes! I'll tell you a little story about her. One day I wrote a
note--a graceful trifle, but really a mere trifle--just five lines in
Greek to another lady (also one of my admirers), who had sent me a
basket of the most charming cherries. I thanked her in a frolicsome
imitation of Pliny. But just imagine, my friends, Fabiola was seized
with so violent a desire to read that letter and to copy it for her
collection, that she sent two of her slaves to lie in wait for my
messenger. So, brought to a halt in the middle of the night, not a
soul in sight, he thought, of course, that brigands were about to
strip him of lock, stock, and barrel. But they did him no harm, gave
him money, and only took from him my letter, so that Fabiola might
have the first reading of it. She actually learnt it by heart!"
"You don't mean it? Ah, I know her! She is a most remarkable woman,"
continued Lampridius. "I have seen myself that she keeps all your
letters enclosed in a lemon-wood casket like so many jewels. She
learns them by heart and declares that they are superior to any
poetry. Fabiola argues, and argues rightly: 'Since Alexander the Great
used to keep the poems of Homer in a cedar-wood coffer, why shouldn't
I keep the letters of Mamertinus in a jewel-casket?'"
"This _foie gras_ with saffron sauce is the height of perfection! I
advise you to taste it."
"Who made it, Hortensius?"
"My head-cook, Dædalus."
"All honour to him!... he's a poet."
"Don't let a goose's liver run away with you, my dear Garguillus! A
cook, a poet? You will offend the divine muses, our protectresses!"
"I affirm! and I shall always maintain! that cooking is an art as
lofty as any other. It's time to fling prejudices to the winds,
Lampridius!"
Garguillus, the head of the Imperial chancery, was a man of enormous
body, extremely fat, his triple chin scrupulously shaved and perfumed,
and his grey hair closely cropped. His face was intelligent and noble;
for many years he had been considered the indispensable guest at every
supper of Athenian men of letters. Garguillus loved only two things
in the world, a good table and a good style. Gastronomy and literature
blended for him into a double bliss.
"Suppose now I take an oyster," he was declaring while his delicate
fingers, loaded with amethysts and rubies, brought the mollusc towards
his mouth; "I take an oyster, and I swallow it"--and in fact he
swallowed it, shutting his eyes, with a sucking and clucking noise of
his upper lip, which was curiously greedy, and even rapacious, in its
appearance. It was prominent, trussed into a point, oddly twisted, and
vaguely resembled a small elephant's trunk. When repeating a sonorous
verse of Anacreon or Moschus he would move about this upper lip with
as much sensuousness as when tasting at supper some sauce of
nightingales' tongues.
"I swallow it, and I am immediately aware," went on Garguillus
solemnly--"I am immediately aware that the oyster comes from the coast
of Britain and not from the south or from Tarentum. Would you like me
to prove it? Shall I close my eyes and say from what sea the fish
comes?"
"But what in the world has that to do with poetry?" asked Mamertinus
impatiently. He could not bear that any but himself should receive
general attention.
"Imagine for yourselves, my dear friends," continued the gastronomist
imperturbably, "that for years I have not been to the shores of the
ocean, which I love and am always regretting. I assure you that a good
oyster has such a fresh and salty relish of the sea, that to swallow
it is immediately to be a thousand miles hence on the immense
seashore. I close my eyes, I see the waves, I see the rocks, I feel
the breeze of 'foggy ocean,' as Homer calls it!... No! tell me
frankly what verse of the Odyssey can wake in me as clearly the sense
of sea poetry as the smell of a fresh oyster? Or when I divide a peach
and inhale the odour of its juice, why, tell me, are the perfume of
the violet and the rose more essentially poetical? Poets describe
form, colour, sound. Why can taste be not perfect as these? All is
stupid prejudice, my dear fellows! Taste is an immense and hitherto
unexplored boon from the gods. The assemblage of tastes forms a
harmony as fine as any orchestration of sounds. I affirm, therefore,
that there is a tenth muse, the muse of Gastronomy!"
"Let oysters and peaches be admitted. But what harmony, what beauty
can you discover in a goose liver dressed with saffron sauce?"
"You are ready to allow, Lampridius, that there is beauty not only in
the idylls of Theocritus, but even in the coarsest comedies of
Plautus?"
"I admit that."
"Well, my friend, for me there is a gastronomic poesy in _foie gras_;
in fact I am prepared to crown Dædalus with laurels for this dish,
just as I would crown an Olympic ode of Pindar!"
Two new guests appeared on the threshold; they were Julian and the
poet Publius. Hortensius yielded the place of honour to Julian, while
Publius devoured the innumerable dishes with his eyes. To judge by his
new chlamys the rich widow must have departed this life, and the happy
heirs paid for the epitaph in no niggardly fashion.
The general conversation went on. Lampridius told a story of how one
day, moved by curiosity, he had been to hear a Christian preacher
thundering against pagan grammarians. "The grammarians," assevered
the preacher, "do not rank men for their worth, but for their literary
style, thinking it less criminal to kill a man than to pronounce the
word _homo_ with a wrong aspiration!" Lampridius suspected that if
these Christian preachers hated the style of the rhetoricians to such
a degree, it was because, conscious that they themselves could write
and speak only like barbarians, they made ignorance the badge of moral
worth, so that for them a good speaker became a suspicious character.
"The day on which eloquence perishes will see the end of Hellas, the
end of Rome! People will turn into dumb animals, and it is to make
them so that Christian preachers use their barbarous jargon."
"Who knows," murmured Mamertinus pensively, "perhaps style _is_ more
important than virtue, since slaves, barbarians, and nincompoops can
all be virtuous!"
Hephæstion meanwhile was explaining to his neighbour the exact meaning
of Cicero's advice--"_Causam mendaciunculis adspergere_."
"_Mendaciunculis_, that's to say, little lies. Cicero, in fact,
advises you to sow little inventions all over your speech; he admits
falsehood if decorative."
Then followed a general discussion on the methods of beginning a
speech: should the beginning be anapæstic or dactylic?
Julian became bored.
He confessed heartily that he had never considered the matter, and
that in his opinion the speaker ought rather to preoccupy himself with
the fundamental idea of his speech than with the making style out of a
mosaic of peccadilloes.
Mamertinus--then Lampridius and Hephæstion--waxed wroth. According to
them the subject of a speech was a matter of no moment. To an orator
it should be absolutely indifferent whether he undertook to attack or
to defend a case. Even meaning had no interest for him. The principal
thing was the orchestration of verbal sounds--the melody, the musical
assonance of letters--permitting even a barbarian, witless of Greek,
to feel the sheer beauty of language.
"I'll just give you an example, two Latin verses of Propertius," said
Garguillus. "Notice the power of the sounds and the emptiness of the
meaning. Listen--
"'_Et Veneris dominæ volucres, mea turba columbæ, Tingunt Gorgonio
punica rostra lacu._'"
What pure delight! Every letter sings! What does the meaning matter?
All the beauty consists in the sound, in the assemblage of vowels and
consonants. For that utterance I would give all the civic virtue of
Juvenal and the philosophy of Lucretius! No! Just hear again! What
sweetness there is in that murmur--
"'_Et Veneris dominæ volucres, mea turba columbæ!_'"
and he wagged that upper lip with a smack of delight.
Everybody repeated the lines of Propertius, unwearying of their charm,
and embarking on a veritable orgy of quotation.
"Just listen," murmured Mamertinus in his Æolian voice--
"'_Tingunt Gorgonio..._'"
"_Tingunt Gorgonio_," repeated the master of chancery. "By
Pallas!--why, it delights one's very palate. It's like swallowing a
warm mouthful of wine mingled with Attic honey--
"'_Tingunt Gorgonio..._'"