Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit.--HORACE.
The sun still hung high over a neat little farm among the Sabine hills,
although the midday heat had given way to the soft and comforting
warmth of a September afternoon. Delicate shadows from dark-leaved
ilexes, from tall pines and white poplars, fell waveringly across
a secluded grass-plot which looked green and inviting even after the
parching summer. The sound of water bickering down the winding way
of a stream gave life and coolness to the warm silence. Thick among
the tree-trunks on one side grew cornel bushes and sloes, making a
solid mass of underbrush, while on the other side there was an opening
through which one might catch sight of a long meadow, and arable
fields beyond, and even of blue hills along the horizon.
But the master of this charming outlook evidently had his mind on
something else. He was a man about fifty-five years old, short and
stout, and with hair even greyer than his age warranted. As he leaned
back among his cushions on a stone bench, so skilfully placed under
an ilex tree that his face was protected while the sun fell across
his body, he looked an unromantic figure enough, no better than any
other Roman gentleman past his prime, seeking the sunshine and intent
on physical comfort. Indeed, only a gracefully low forehead and eyes
at once keen and genial saved his face from commonplaceness, and
would have led a spectator to feel any curiosity about his
meditations.
He had let fall into his lap a letter which had reached him that
morning, and which he had just reread. It had travelled all the way
from Gaul, and he had opened it eagerly, curious to know with what
new idea his younger friend was coquetting, and hoping to hear some
interesting literary gossip about their common acquaintances. But
the letter had been chiefly filled with questions as to why he had
not yet written, and, above all, why he did not send on some verses.
Horace still felt the irritation of the first reading, although he
had had his lunch and his nap, and had reached the serenest hour of
the day. When they said good-by in Rome he had told Florus that he
should not write: he was too lazy in these later years to write very
regularly to any one except Maecenas, the other part of his soul,
and it was foolish of the younger man not to have accepted the
situation. As for the request for verses, Horace felt ashamed of the
anger it had aroused in him. One would think that he was twenty years
old again, with black curls, lively legs, and a taste for iambs, to
get so out of patience with poor Florus. But it certainly was annoying
to be pressed for odes when he had long ago determined to spend the
rest of his life in studying philosophy. To be sure, he had once made
that vow too early and had been forced to tune his lyre again after
he had thought to hang it in Apollo's temple. He had had a pride in
the enthusiastic reception of his new odes, and in the proof that
his hand had by no means lost its cunning; but Florus ought to
understand that he had at that time yielded to the Emperor's request
as equivalent to a command, and that he meant what he said when he
declared that he wished to leave the lyric arena.
He had never been unreasonable in his demands on life, nor slow in
the contribution of his share. It seemed only just that he should
spend the years that were left to him as he chose. People talked about
his tossing off an ode as if he could do it at dessert, and spend
the solid part of the day in other pursuits. They little dreamed that
the solid part of many days had often gone into one of his lyric
trifles, and that Polyhymnia, she who had invented the lyre, and
struck it herself in Lesbos, was among the most exacting of the Muses.
With the departure of his green youth and play-time had gone the
inclination, as well as the courage, to set himself such tasks. He
had always been interested in reading the moral philosophers, and,
whatever his friends said, he meant to keep to his books, and to write,
if he wrote at all, in a comfortable, contemplative style.
Besides (so his irritated thoughts ran on), how could Florus expect
a man who lived in Rome to write imaginative poetry? How tiresome
the days were there! Whenever he went out, some one wanted his help
in a dull business matter or dragged him off to a public reading by
some equally dull author. Even if he tried to visit his friends, one
lived on the Quirinal and one on the Aventine, and the walk between
lay through noisy streets filled with clumsy workmen, huge wagons,
funeral processions, mad dogs, dirty pigs, and human bores. No notes
from the lyre could make themselves heard amid such confusion.
Suddenly his feeling quickened: how good it was to be away just now
in this autumnal season, when Rome laboured under leaden winds
fraught with melancholy depression, and when his head always gave
him trouble and he especially needed quiet and freedom! The afternoon
sun enveloped him in a delicious warmth, the shadows on the grass
danced gayly, as a faint breeze stirred the branches above his head,
the merry little stream near by seemed to prattle of endless content.
The frown above Horace's eyes disappeared, and with it his inner
annoyance. Florus was a dear fellow, after all, and although he
intended to write him a piece of his mind, he would do it in hexameters,
more for his amusement than for his edification. It would be a pretty
task for the morning hours to-morrow. Now he meant to be still, and
forget his writing tablets altogether. He was glad that his house
was empty of guests, much as he had enjoyed the preceding week when
a lively company had come over from Tibur, in whose retreat they were
spending September, to hunt him out. They had had charming dinners
together, falling easily into conversations that were worth while,
and by tacit consent forgetting the inanities of town gossip. But
at present he liked the quiet even better. He had been walking about
his little place more regularly, laughing at his steward who often
grew impatient over the tiny crops, and assuring himself of the
comfort of the few slaves who ran the farm. And on more extended walks
he had felt once more, as he had so often in these long years, the
charm of the village people near him, with their friendly manners,
their patient devotion to work, and their childlike enjoyment of
country holidays.
Certainly, as he grew older and his physical energy diminished (he
had not been really well since he was a very young man, and now before
his time he felt old), he appreciated more and more his good fortune
in owning a corner of the earth so situated. He remembered with
amusement that in earlier days he sometimes used to feel bored by
the solitude of his farm, at the end of his journey from Rome, and
wonder why he had left the lively city. But that was when he was young
enough to enjoy the bustle of the streets, and, especially in the
evenings, to join the crowds of pleasure-seekers and watch the
fortune-tellers and their victims. That he could mingle
inconspicuously with the populace he had always counted one of the
chief rewards of an inconspicuous income. Now, the quiet of the
country and the leisure for reading seemed so much more important.
He was not even as anxious as he used to be to go to fashionable Tibur
or Tarentum or Baiae in search of refreshment. How pleased Virgil
would have been with his rustic content!
The sudden thought brought a smile to his eyes and then a shadow.
Virgil had been dead more than ten years, but his loss seemed all
at once a freshly grievous thing. So much that was valuable in his
life was inextricably associated with him. Horace's mind, usually
sanely absorbed in present interests, began, because of a trick of
memory, to turn more and more toward the past. Virgil had been one
of the first to help him out of the bitterness that made him a rather
gloomy young man when the Republic was defeated, and his own little
property dissipated, and had introduced him to Maecenas, the source
of all his material prosperity and of much of his happiness. And
indeed he had justified Virgil's faith, Horace said to himself with
a certain pride. He had begun as the obscure son of a freedman, and
here he was now, after fifty, one of the most successful poets of
Rome, a friend of Augustus, a person of importance in important
circles, and withal a contented man.
This last achievement he knew to be the most difficult, as it was
the most unusual. And there in the clarifying sunshine he said to
himself that the rich treasure of his content had been bought by noble
coin: by his temperance and good sense in a luxurious society, by
his self-respecting independence in a circle of rich patrons, and
perhaps, above all, by his austerely honest work among many
temptations to debase the gift the Muses had bestowed upon him. He
had had no Stoic contempt for the outward things of this world. Indeed,
after he had frankly accepted the Empire he came to feel a pride in
the glory of Augustus's reign, as he felt a deep, reconciling
satisfaction in its peace, its efforts at restoring public morals,
its genuine insistence on a renewed purity of national life. The
outward tokens of increasing wealth charmed his eyes, and he took
the keenest pleasure in the gorgeous marble pillars and porticoes
of many of the houses he frequented, in the beautiful statues, the
bronze figures, the tapestries, the gold and silver vessels owned
by many of his friends, and in the rich appointments and the perfect
service of their dining-rooms, where he was a familiar guest. But
he had never wanted these things for himself, any more than he wished
for a pedigree and the images of ancestors to adorn lofty halls. He
came away from splendid houses more than willing to fall back into
plainer ways. Neither had he ever been apologetic toward his friends.
If they wanted to come and dine with him on inexpensive vegetables,
he would gladly himself superintend the polishing of his few pieces
of silver and the setting of his cheap table. If they did not choose
to accept his invitations, why, they knew how much their standards
amused him. As for his more august friends, the Emperor himself,
Maecenas, and Messala, and Pollio, he had always thought it a mere
matter of justice and common courtesy to repay their many kindnesses
by a cheerful adaptability when he was with them, and by a dignified
gratitude. But not even the Emperor could have compelled him to
surrender his inner citadel.
Perhaps, after all, that was why Augustus had forced him back to the
lyre, in support of his reforms and in praise of the triumphal
campaigns of Tiberius and Drusus. An honest mind betokened honest
workmanship, and upon such workmanship, rather than upon a
subsidised flattery, the imperial intruder wished to stake his
repute.
However lightly Horace may from time to time have taken other things,
he never trifled with his literary purpose after it had once matured.
Even his first satiric efforts had been honestly made; and when he
found his true mission of adapting the perfect Greek poetry to Latin
measures, there was no airy grace of phrase, no gossamer-like
slightness of theme, which did not rest upon the unseen structure
of artistic sincerity. That was why in rare solemn moments he
believed that his poetry would live, live beyond his own lifetime
and his age, even, perhaps, as long as the Pontifex Maximus and the
Vestal Virgin should ascend to the Capitol in public processional.
He had said laughingly of his published metrical letters that they
might please Rome for a day, travel on to the provinces, and finally
become exercise-books for school-boys in remote villages. But his
odes were different. They were not prosaic facts and comments put
into metre: they were poetry. If he were only a laborious bee compared
with the soaring swans of Greek lyric, at least he had distilled pure
honey from the Parnassian thyme. Now that he had determined to touch
the lyre no more, he felt more than ever sure that his lyre had served
Rome well. How much better, indeed, than his sword could have served
her, in spite of the military ambitions of his youth. What a fool
he had been to believe that the Republic could be saved by blood,
or that he could be a soldier!
All these things Horace was meditating beneath his ilex tree, being
moved to evaluate his life by the chance appeal of his memory to that
dead friend whose "white soul" had so often, when he was alive, proved
a touchstone for those who knew him. He was sure that in the larger
issues Virgil would have given him praise on this afternoon; and with
that thought came another which was already familiar to him. It was
less probing, perhaps, but more regretfully sad. If only his father
could have lived to see his success! His mother he had not known at
all, except in his halting, childish imagination when, one day in
each year, he had been led by his father's hand to stand before the
small, plain urn containing her ashes. But his father had been his
perfect friend and comrade for twenty years. He had been able to talk
to him about anything. Above all the reserves of maturer life, he
could remember the confidence with which as a child he had been used
to rush home, bursting with the gossip of the playground, or some
childish annoyance, or some fresh delight. He could not remember that
he was ever scolded during his little choleric outbursts or
untempered enthusiasms, and yet, somehow, after a talk with his
father he had so often found himself feeling much calmer or really
happier. Anger in some way or other came to seem a foolish thing;
and even if he had come in from an ecstasy of play, it was certainly
pleasant to have the beating throbs in his head die away and to feel
his cheeks grow cool again. In looking back, Horace knew that no
philosophy had ever so deeply influenced him to self-control and to
mental temperance as had the common, kindly, shrewd man who had once
been a slave, and whose freedom had come to him only a few years before
the birth of his son.
And how ambitious the freedman had been for the education of his son!
Horace could understand now the significance of two days in his life
which at their occurrence had merely seemed full of a vivid
excitement. One had come when he was ten years old, but no lapse of
years could dull its colours. On the day before, he had been wondering
how soon he would be allowed to enter the village school, and become
one of the big boys whom he watched every morning with round eyes
as they went past his house, their bags and tablets hanging from their
arms. But on that great day his father had lifted him in his arms--he
was a little fellow--and looking at him long and earnestly had said,
"My boy, we are going to Rome next week, so that you may go to school.
I have made up my mind that you deserve as good an education as the
son of any knight or senator." Horace had cried a little at first
in nervous excitement, and in bewilderment at his father's unwonted
gravity. But all that was soon forgotten in the important bustle of
preparations for a journey to the Capital. The whole village had made
them the centre of critical interest. Once a bald, thick-set
centurion had met them on the street, and stopped them with an
incredulous question. When he was informed that it was true that the
boy was to be taken to Rome, he had laughed sneeringly and said, "How
proud you will be of his city education when you find that he comes
back to your little government position, and can make no more money
than you have." Horace had looked wonderingly into his father's face,
and found it unannoyed and smiling. And even as a child he had noticed
the dignity with which he answered the village magnate: "Sir, I wish
to educate my son to know what is best to know, and to be a good man.
If in outward circumstances 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 classes,
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 class." 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
passions had come to him on that day when wind and tide seemed to
be hurrying him relentlessly away from the Italian shore, 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 ships, 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
anticipated 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 sungod 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 ship 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, shining 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 goddess, 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 anticipated. 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 passing 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 assented, 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 assassinated 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 partisanship, of a
personal loyalty, of a passionate 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 passed 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, furnishing 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 nobly
mistaken; of realising that Julius Caesar might have developed a more
rational freedom in Rome than one enshrined merely in republican
institutions. 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-worship, 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 shores 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 shipping of the harbour, and then sailed
straight for the shore of Salamis. When they passed 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 assurance. 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 Hellenes! On! Set free your native land!
Your children free, your wives, ancestral shrines of gods,
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 assumed a covering of deep purple or more
luminous amethyst. From the shore of the sea they had passed into
a wooded road, with a golden sky shining through the black branches.
Later the stars had come out in great clusters, 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 shines 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 gods 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 rushing 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 fashion 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 citizenship. But was there a vaster
significance in a noble death? Was there even a truer citizenship
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."