"What you call my spirit of irony and what seems to me melancholy
madness."
His finely cut delicate features expressed extreme fatigue. Sometimes
he would awake as from a sleep, undertake a wild excursion with
fishermen in a hurricane in the open sea, or set off to hunt wild boar
and bear, or contemplate hatching a plot against the life of Cæsar, or
seek initiation into the terrible mysteries of Mithra and Adonis. On
such occasions he was capable of astonishing by his rashness and
audacity even those persons who were ignorant of his ordinary way of
living.
But the excitement once evaporated he would return to listlessness and
lassitude, still more sleepy, still more cynical and sad.
"Nothing can be done with you, Anatolius," Arsinoë used to say to him;
"you are so soft that people might think you had no bones."
But she felt a kind of Hellenic grace in this last of the Epicureans;
liked to read in his weary eyes their melancholy mockery of himself
and everything else. He would say--
"The sage can extract enjoyment from the blackest melancholy, as bees
of Hymettus make their best honey with the juice of bitterest plants!"
and his gossip soothed Arsinoë, who smilingly used to call Anatolius
her physician.
In reality she became stronger, but never returned to her studio. The
sight of chips of marble filled her with painful memories.
Meanwhile, at the time of which we are speaking Hortensius was
preparing wonderful public games in the Flavian Theatre, in honour of
his arrival in Rome. He was continually travelling, and busy receiving
horses, lions, bears, Scots wolf-dogs, crocodiles from the tropics,
and with these, flocks of intrepid hunters, skilled riders, comedians,
and gladiators.
The date of the performance was approaching, and the lions had not
arrived from Tarentum, where they had disembarked. The bears had grown
thin, famished, timid as lambs.
Hortensius became sleepless with anxiety.
Two days before the festival, the gladiators, Saxon prisoners, proud
and fearless men for whom he had paid a colossal sum, considering it a
disgrace to serve as a sport for the Roman populace, committed suicide
by cutting their own throats at night in their prison.
Hortensius, at that unexpected news, nearly went out of his mind. Now
all hope concentrated itself on the crocodiles, which excited the
special curiosity of the mob.
"Have you tried giving them newly-killed hogs' flesh?" demanded the
senator of the slave entrusted with the supervision of these precious
beasts.
"Yes; but they won't eat it."
"Have you tried veal?"
"They won't touch that, either."
"And wheaten bread soaked in cream?"
"They turn away from it and go to sleep."
"They must be ill or too fatigued."
"We've even opened their jaws and shoved the food down their throats.
They cough it up again."
"Ah! by Jupiter, those foul beasts will be the death of me! We must
release them after the first day in the arena or else they will die of
hunger," groaned Hortensius falling into a chair.
Arsinoë contemplated him with envy. He at least was not tired of life.
She passed into an isolated chamber whence the windows looked down on
the garden. There in the calm moonlight her young sister Myrrha, who
was now about sixteen years old, was softly touching the strings of a
harp, and the notes were falling like tears. Arsinoë kissed Myrrha,
who answered her by a smile without ceasing to play. A loud whistle
sounded behind the garden wall:
"It is he," said Myrrha, rising. "Come quickly!"
She grasped Arsinoë's hand tightly. The two young girls threw black
cloaks over their shoulders and went out. The wind was chasing the
clouds along, and the moon, sometimes hidden, sometimes shone out
brightly. Arsinoë opened a door in the outer wall of the house. A
young man wrapped in a monk's hooded mantle was awaiting them.
"We are not late, Juventinus?" asked Myrrha.
"I was afraid that you were not coming!"
They walked long and rapidly down narrow lanes, then out among the
vineyards, issuing at length into the Roman plain. In the distance the
brick-built aqueduct of Servius Tullius was outlined against the sky.
Juventinus turned round and said--
"Somebody is following us!"
The two young girls turned round also. A flood of moonlight fell upon
them, and the individual following them exclaimed cheerfully--
"Arsinoë! Myrrha!... And so I have found you again! Where are you
going?"
"We're going among the Christians," answered Arsinoë. "Come with us,
Anatolius; you will see some curious things."
"What do I hear? Among the Christians?--You have always been their
enemy!" wondered the centurion.
"With age, my friend, one grows better and more tolerant, or
indifferent, if you like to call it so. This is a superstition
neither better nor worse than other superstitions. And then one is
capable of a good deal when bored. I am going among them for Myrrha's
sake; it pleases her...."
"Where is the church? We're out in the plain," murmured Anatolius.
"The churches are destroyed or profaned by their fellow-Christians,
the Arians, who believe in Christ otherwise than they do. You must
have heard the debates about it at Court. So now the adversaries of
the Arians are wont to pray in secret in subterranean vaults, as in
the time of the first persecutions."
Myrrha and Juventinus had lingered a little behind the others; Arsinoë
and Anatolius could talk freely.
"Who is he?" asked the centurion with a nod towards Juventinus.
"The last scion of the ancient patrician family of the Furii,"
answered Arsinoë. "The mother wishes to make a consul of him. His only
dream is to flee into some Thebaïd, or monkish community in the
desert, to spend his days in prayer. He loves his mother and hides
himself from her as from an enemy."
"The descendants of the Furii, monks?... 'T is a queer age," sighed
the Epicurean.
They approached the _arenarium_, old excavations in crumbling tufa,
and went down narrow steps to the bottom of the quarry. The volcanic
blocks of red earth looked strange-hued in the moonlight. Juventinus
took a little clay lamp from a dark niche, and lighted it; the long
flame flickered feebly in its narrow gullet.
They entered the darkness of the side galleries of the _arenarium_.
Hollowed by the ancient Romans, the quarry was large and spacious and
descended in steep slopes. It was therefore pierced by numerous
galleries, for the use of workmen in transporting the tufa. Juventinus
led his companions through the labyrinth and halted at last in front
of a shaft from which he lifted the coverlid of wood; the party went
cautiously down the damp and slippery steps; at the bottom was a
narrow door; Juventinus knocked; the door opened, and a grey-headed
monk introduced them into a passage hollowed in harder tufa. The walls
on both sides from floor to vaulting were covered with slabs of
marble, the seals of tombs in which coffins (_loculi_) were ranged.
At every step folk carrying lamps came to meet them. By the flickering
light Anatolius read with curiosity on one of these stone flags:
"Dorotheus, son of Felix, in this place of coolness, light, and peace,
reposes" ("_requiescit in loco refrigii, luminis, pacis_"). On
another: "Brethren, disturb not my deep slumber."
The style of the inscriptions was radiant and happy: "Sophronia,
beloved, thou art alive for ever in God" ("_Sophronia, dulcis, semper
vivis Deo_"). And a little farther on: "_Sophronia vivis!_"
("Sophronia, thou livest!") as if he who had written these words had
at length realised that there was no more death.
Nowhere was it written "He is buried here," but only "Here is laid for
a certain time" (_depositus_). It seemed as if millions of people,
generation upon generation, were lying in this place, not dead, but
fallen asleep, all full of mysterious expectation. In the niches lamps
were placed. They burned in the close atmosphere with a long steady
flame and graceful vases exhaled penetrating odours. Nothing but the
faint smell of putrefying bones, which escaped by fissures in the
coffins, gave any hint of death.
The passages went down lower and lower, curved as round an
amphitheatre; and here and there in the ceiling a large aperture gave
light from _luminaria_ opening on the country without.
Sometimes a weak moon-ray passing down the _luminaria_ would strike at
the bottom on a slab of marble covered with inscriptions.
At the end of one of these passages they saw a sexton who, chanting
gaily, was hollowing the ground with heavy blows of his pick. Several
Christians were standing near the principal inspector of the tombs,
the _fossor_. He was very well dressed and had a fat cunning face. The
_fossor_ had inherited a right freely to dispose of a gallery of
catacombs, and to sell unoccupied sites in his gallery, which was all
the more appreciated because in it were buried the relics of St.
Laurence. Although rich, the _fossor_ was keenly bargaining, as they
came up, with a wealthy and miserly leather-merchant. Arsinoë stopped
a moment to hear the discussion.
"And my tomb will be far away from the relics?" the leather-dresser
was asking mistrustfully, thinking of the big sum exacted by the
_fossor_.
"No, just six cubits away."
"Above or beneath?"
"On the right-hand side, sloping down a little. It's an excellent
position; I don't ask a penny too much. Though you be as sinful as you
please, everything will be forgiven. You will go straight into the
heavenly kingdom."
With an expert hand the gravedigger took the measurements for the tomb
as a tailor measures for a coat, the leather-dresser insisting that he
should have as much room as possible in order to lie in comfort.
An old woman approached the sexton.
"What do you want, mother?"
"Here's the money--the extra payment!"
"What extra payment?"
"For the right-hand tomb."
"Ah, I see; you don't want the crooked one?"
"No; my old bones crack at the very idea of the crooked one."
In the catacombs, and especially near the relics, so much value was
set upon grave-sites that it was necessary to contrive slanting tombs
which were leased to the poor.
"God knows how long one will have to wait for the resurrection," the
old woman was explaining; "and if I took a tomb on the slant it would
be all very well to begin with, but when I got tired it wouldn't do at
all."
Anatolius listened in astonishment.
"It is much more curious than the mysteries of Mithra," he observed to
Arsinoë with a languid smile. "Pity that I didn't know it sooner. I've
never seen such an amusing cemetery."
They went on into a rather large chamber called the _cubicula of
consolation_. A multitude of small lamps were burning on the walls.
The priest was at the evening office, the stone lid of a martyr's tomb
placed under an arched vault (_arcosolium_) serving as altar. There
were many of the faithful in long white robes, every face serenely
happy. Myrrha, kneeling with eyes full of love, was gazing at the Good
Shepherd pictured on the ceiling of the chamber. In the catacombs
early Christian customs had been revived, so that after the liturgy
all present, looking on themselves as brothers and sisters, gave each
other the kiss of peace. Arsinoë following the general example with a
smile kissed Anatolius.
Then all four climbed again toward the upper storeys, whence they
could take their way to the secret retreat of Juventinus, an old pagan
tomb, a _columbarium_, lying at some distance from the Appian Way.
There, while waiting for the ship which was to take him to Egypt, the
land of holy anchorites, he was living hidden from the searches of his
mother and of government officials. He lodged with Didimus, a good old
man from the Lower Thebaïd, to whom Juventinus gave blind and
unquestioning obedience.
Here they found Didimus squatting on his heels, weaving basket-work.
The moon-rays, filtering through a narrow opening, glinted on his
white hair and long beard. From top to bottom of the walls of the
_columbarium_ were little niches like pigeons' nests, and each of
these contained a mortuary urn.
Myrrha, of whom the old man was very fond, kissed his withered hand
respectfully, and prayed him to tell her some story about the hermit
fathers of the desert. Nothing pleased her better than these wonderful
and terrible tales by Didimus.
The company grouped themselves round the white-headed old man, Myrrha
watching him with feverish eyes and feeble hands clasped to her
heaving breast. Nothing was heard save his voice and the distant hum
of Rome, when suddenly, at the inner door communicating with the
catacomb, a knock was heard.