An ardour not of Eros' lips.--WILLIAM WATSON.
I
The spring had come promptly this year and with it the usual invoice
of young Romans to Athens. Some of them were planning to stay only
a month or two to see the country and hear the more famous professors
lecture. Others were settling down for a long period of serious study
in rhetoric and philosophy. Scarcely to be classed among any of these
was the young poet Julius Paulus,[2] who, as he put it to himself
with the frank grandiosity of youth, was in search of the flame of
life--_studiosus ardoris vivendi_. He had brought a letter to Aulus
Gellius, and Gellius, dutifully responsive to all social claims,
invited him on a day in early March to join him and a few friends
for a country walk and an outdoor lunch in one of their favourite
meeting places.
[Footnote 2: A poet Julius Paulus is mentioned once by Aulus Gellius
in the _Attic Nights_, in terms which seem to suggest both his worldly
prosperity and his cultivated tastes. But the suggestion for his
character in this imaginary sketch has come, in reality, from
generous and ardent young students of to-day, turning reluctantly
from their life in Athens to patient achievement in the countries
whose sons they are.]
This place, an unfrequented precinct of Aphrodite, about two hours
distant from the marketplace, lay below the rocky summit of Hymettus
within the hollow of the foot hills. The walk was an easy one, but
the forenoon sun was warm and the young pedestrians upon their
arrival paused in grateful relief by a spring under a large plane
tree which still bore its leaves of wintry gold. The clear water,
a boon in arid Attica, completed their temperate lunch of bread and
eggs, dried figs and native wine. After eating they climbed farther
up the hillside and stretched themselves out in the soft grass that
lurked among boulders in the shade of a beech tree. Aulus, with the
air of performing an habitual action, produced a book. To-day it
proved to be a choice old volume of Ovid, which he had secured at
a bargain on the quay at Brindisi, convinced that it had belonged,
fully one hundred and fifty years ago, to the poet himself. It had
gone far, he said, toward consoling him for the loss of an original
Second Book of the _AEneid_ snatched up by a friend in the Image
Market at Rome. The Ovid was for Paulus's edification. Aulus unrolled
his treasure and read aloud "an accurate description of this very
spot:"
Violet crests of Hymettus a-flower
Neighbour a fountain consecrate.
Yielding and green is the turf. In a bower
Trees low-growing meet and mate;
Arbutus shadeth the green grass kirtle,
Sweet the scent of rosemary;
Fragrant the bay and the bloom of the myrtle;
Nay, nor fail thee here to see
Tamarisks delicate, box-wood masses,
Lordly pine and clover low.
Legions of leaves and the top of the grasses
Stir with healing zephyrs slow.
The reader's indifference to what confronted his eyes, added to his
dull regard for the verbal accuracy of ancient verses, shrivelled
the modern poet's ardent humour. Was this an example of the
intellectual enlightenment awaiting him, he had so fondly hoped, in
Athens? With apprehension he remembered what his father's friend,
a rich dilettante, one of the best liked men in Rome, had written
him when he sent him the letter of introduction:
"You will find Gellius the best fellow in the world but not a fagot
to kindle the fires of pleasure. I hear that he has called his book,
a particoloured digest of information, _Attic Nights_, because he
has spent his nights in Athens writing it--nights, mark you, when
even in her own city Athena closes her grey eyes within her virgin
shrine and leaves Pan to guard from his cave below the roysterings
of youth. It is easy to let an allusion to my friend Lucian slip off
the end of my stylus when I think of Athens. He and Gellius are
scarcely the 'like pleasing like' of the proverb! Lucian, in fact,
disposed of Gellius once by calling him an 'Infant Ignorance on the
arm of Fashion.' This was after he had watched a peasant making
holiday among the statues and temples on the Acropolis, carrying in
his arms a three months old child who dozed in a colonnade of the
Parthenon and sucked his thumb in front of Athena Promachus. The
blinking baby, he said, made him think of Aulus, futilely carried
about by the trend of the age among ideas and achievements beyond
his understanding. But in fairness I must add that when this was
repeated to Marcus Aurelius he retorted: 'Better a child than an
iconoclast in the presence of beauty. I should call Gellius an honest
errand boy in Athena's temple.' So there you have two ways of looking
at your future host. If Lucian is the most enlightened wit of the
day, Aurelius is the most Roman of us all and likely to rule over
us when Antoninus rejoins the gods.
"On Gellius's return next year he is to be made a judge. He will study
law painstakingly and apply it exactly. And Rome will never for him
be one whit juster. However, your father will be delighted to have
you make such a friend--a man of thirty whose idea of a debauch is
to make a syllogism, who is a favourite student of great teachers
and can introduce you to Herodes Atticus and to all the best life
of Athens. Nor, indeed, do I marvel at Aurelius for trusting him.
As a scholar or a jurist he will always be negligible, but as a man
he is naively sincere and candid and with all the strength of his
Roman will he is determined that both his work and his pleasures shall
be such as befit a gentleman of honour and refinement. He may bore
you, but, if I do not misread you, the pleasures that are within his
gift will have a finer edge for you than those of the Colosseum and
the Circus Maximus."
As Gellius droned on about some of the niceties of Ovid's language,
fragmentary sentences of this letter recurred to Paulus and he
wondered what his father's friend would think of him could he
accurately read his desires for pleasure. Certainly the shows of the
Amphitheatre seemed remote enough here under the cool, grey branches,
tipped with early green, of the Attic beech tree, but scarcely, after
all, more remote than they often seemed in Rome itself to a youth
who found virile recreation by the sea at Ostia or in following the
Anio over the hills of Tibur. No, he had not flung away from Rome
to escape in the back waters of a smaller town the noisy vulgarities
of the metropolis. Nor was he one of those who confused the contests
of the Circus with the creative struggles of the Forum. His
abstinence from political life was due to temperament rather than
conviction, nature having shaped him for active citizenship in a
world dissociated from public insignia. It was in this world that
he found himself at twenty-five ill at ease. Without genius, his
slender vein of talent was yet of pure gold. There was no danger of
his overrating his own poetry. He saw it as it was, of the day and
hour, wearing no immortal grace of thought or language. But in it
he was at his best, more honest and more whole-hearted than he could
be in any public service. This seemed to him, quite simply, to
constitute a reason for being such a poet as he was.
He belonged to an ancient family, which had furnished a consul in
the first Punic War, had left distinguished dead on the field of
Cannae and had borne on its roll the conqueror of Macedonia. AEmilius
Paulus Macedonicus had rendered Rome the further and signal service
of a public life as spotless as it was brilliant, and something of
this statesman's scrupulous integrity had passed to the youngest son
of the house, leading him to discriminate in his world also between
shadows and realities. To Paulus the happiest age in the world's
history was the age of Pericles, when the wedlock of life and learning
issued in universal power. In Rome he would have been glad to have
lived in the last years of the Republic, or under Augustus, when
Lucretius and Catullus, Virgil and Horace, by submitting themselves
in pupilage to the Greeks, became masters of new thoughts and new
emotions among the masters of the world. How different was their
discipleship from the imitative methods of modern literati! While
it was the fashion to boast of refinement and learning, while
libraries jostled each other and rhetoricians and philosophers
swarmed in the city, Paulus was chiefly conscious that in the place
of creative imagination a soulless erudition walked abroad. In the
vestibule of the Palatine temple, waiting for the morning appearance
of the Emperor, rhetoricians discussed the meaning of an adverb. In
the baths they tested each other's knowledge of Sallust. Grammarians
gathered in secondhand bookshops around rare copies of Varro's
satires and Fabius's chronicles and hunted for copyist's errors. If
one were tired of the streets and went to walk in Agrippa's park,
he ran into men quarrelling over a vocative. Even on a holiday at
Ostia he could not escape discussions between Stoics and
Peripatetics. With all this activity, philosophy and literature grew
only more anaemic.
Paulus, too limited to be himself a formative influence, was also
too truth-loving to be satisfied in Rome with the only life he was
fitted to lead. Indifferent to the persuasions of Aphrodite, he yet
harboured in his temperament a certain warmth which made him eager
to live with passion and abandon, to scorch his hands in the fires
of the world rather than drearily to warm them at burnt out ashes.
Hopeless in Rome, he determined to seek his fortune elsewhere. An
intellectual life real enough to claim his spendthrift allegiance,
this, concretely, was the prize for which he had set sail from
Brindisi two months before.
The act gave him an outward resemblance to the horde of young bloods
who were always swinging out on the high seas in search of sport and
adventure. The most restless made for Britain and the shores of the
Euxine or the Baltic, or for the interior of Syria and Persia. The
larger number followed the beaten and luxurious paths to Egypt, where
they plunged into the gaieties of Alexandria and, cursorily enough,
saw the sights of Memphis and Thebes. Paulus also went to Egypt. But
in spite of his introductions and his opportunities to experiment
with modern life under the absolving witchery of Oriental conditions,
he gave himself over to the subtler influences of the past. Pilgrim
rather than tourist, he visited eagerly the pyramids and the Sphinx,
the temples of Karnak and Thebes, the tombs of the Theban kings, the
colossi of the desert. In the frightful course of the centuries, as
they unrolled before him, he seized upon the guidance of Herodotus,
to whom the monuments of Egypt had seemed as incalculably old as they
did to him. The choice, however, had proved unfortunate for his
sympathetic reading of Egyptian history. Dwelling on the radiant
progress towards truth and beauty of a free race, bondsmen only to
law and reason, younger brothers of bright gods, he became
querulously critical of a race whose Pharaohs strangled life in the
thought of death and eternity, prostrated themselves before gods in
monstrous shapes, and produced art at the expense of human
well-being.
The landscape of Egypt also seemed to Paulus as sinister as it was
exquisite. Its beauty, whether of silver Nile or lilac mountains or
tawny desert, enervated by its appeal to the love of easy delight,
and bred mad, vagrant thoughts, precursors of moral disaster. He had
slept in the desert one night. The enamelled turquoise of the
daylight sky, the clear, red gold of the sunset, the ghostly amber
of the afterglow gave way to moonlight. As he lay and watched the
silver bloom spread over the sand dunes, he felt suddenly a great
terror. The golden apples of his western labour, the hard-won fruits
of his stern young virtue, were slipping out of his grasp. The white
desert lay upon his spirit like mist upon the sea, obliterating the
promised course. Desires, unknown before, crept in upon him over the
waves of the sand. All that he had rejected claimed him. All that
he had thought holy mocked him. The next day he hurried to Alexandria
and, recoiling from the library he had planned to visit, took the
first ship to Greece.
He had landed a week ago. To-day's excursion, offering a pleasant
comradeship with those of his own race in a strange land, came almost
opportunely, he fancied, to break an exalted mood. He had found
himself roused to the uttermost by his first impressions of Athens.
Put to flight by the seduction of river and desert, it was the
influence of the landscape rather than of art and history to which
he was here first made sensitive. Sea, mountains and plain were
informed with a beauty which purged his memory of the evil loveliness
of Egypt and restored gravity and dignity to his conception of human
life. He was struck by what Plato would have called the Doric strain
in the harmonies of outline and colour. Idyllic scenes he had already
run across in his walks out from the city, scenes formed and reformed
by the lovely occupations of farm and vineyard and pasture. But the
lyric note so familiar to him in Italy seemed always overborne by
a deeper. Whether it was because of the noble modelling of the
fleshless mountains or because of an inner restraint in the minor
elements of the landscape, the mood generated by the beauty of the
Attic plain was always a grave one, delight swelling into reverence.
Now also, as his thoughts ceased whirling and he became conscious
again of what lay around him, his irritation died. All that was
trifling must be discarded when his eye could travel beyond wild
hyacinth and myrtle, past pines and olive groves and cypresses, past
the rosy soil of upturned fields, to the long, firm lines of Parnes's
purple ridge and to the snowy summit, a midday beacon, high-uplifted,
of distant Helicon.
To his relief, Paulus found that Gellius's monologue had given way
to general conversation. As he listened his heart grew hot within
him. These young men, of whom only Gellius and Servilianus had passed
out of their twenties, had lived in Athens for a year or longer, and
now, conscious of their approaching departure, they had fallen to
talking of the past months. A strange power Athens seemed to have
of exacting from aliens the intimate loyalty of sons. Here, Paulus
felt, was no miserly counting up of gains, but an inner concern with
art and history. Not as gluttonous travellers, but as those facing
a long exile, they talked of a city richer than Rome or Alexandria
or Antioch, richer than all the cities of the Empire taken together,
in masterpieces of architect and sculptor and painter; of a
country-side alive with memories of poets and thinkers and soldiers.
Taking with a catholic enthusiasm the hot winds and driving white
dust of summer, the deforming rains of winter, and the bright
splendour of sky and earth at the advent of spring, they had tramped
hither and yon, light-hearted in the vigour of youth, reverent in
the impulse of pilgrimage. Mountain fastnesses where the clarion
winds still trumpeted the victory of freedom and of Thrasybulus;
upland caves where Plato had been taken as a child to worship Pan;
long, white roads leading to the village homes of Euripides and
Demosthenes; the wind in the pine trees on Pentelicon, reminding them
of the wind in the groves of Tusculum; the autumn leaves on the plane
trees by the Ilissus; the silver moon seen from the water's edge at
Phaleron, swinging into the eastern void above the amethyst-dyed
rocks of Hymettus; a sail on a summer star-lit night from AEgina to
Piraeus--all these things crept one by one into their conversation.
Here, Paulus recognised, was a group of young men on fire with a real
emotion, cleansed in the presence of beauty and of great memories,
witnesses afresh to a procreative Hellas. When the party broke up
he thanked his host for the happiest day he had spent in many months.
On the way home, after rounding the last foot hill, they saw the
Acropolis across the plain. The sun fell on the red in the natural
rock and intensified the white of the marbles. Against the sombre
mountains the isolated citadel glowed inly, like a milk-white opal
shot with rose. Paulus caught his breath. Was it here, his flame of
life?