The answer to this prayer, the grant of victory, came, as it happened,
in strange guise. The sensitive Roman youth, still in the potter's
hands, had reckoned without the final Greek experience which lay
ahead of him, the issue of one night in the early autumn. During the
season of the full moon in September all lectures were suspended and
most of the Roman students joined the crowd of travellers to Elis
to see the Olympic games. Paulus had had a touch of malaria and his
physician had urged him not to expose himself to the dangers of
outdoor camping in a low country. He consented lightly, thinking to
himself that since he was to live in Greece he could afford to
postpone for a few years the arduous pleasures of the great festival.
Herodes Atticus had gone this year, and upon his return brought with
him for a visit a group of very distinguished men, including Lucian
and Apuleius and the Alexandrian astronomer, Ptolemy. Paulus was
astonished and proud to receive, with Gellius, an invitation to a
dinner in their honour given at Cephisia.
The weather was still extremely hot and the dinner hour was set late.
Even when Paulus and Gellius left the city the air was heavy and
exhausting and never had the villa seemed to them more beautiful.
The great groves of cypresses and pines, of poplars and plane trees,
were dark with the shadow of the moonless night. In the broad pools
the stars were reflected. The birds were hushed, but the sound of
cool, running water rang sweet in urban ears. Within the dining-room
an unhampered taste had done all that was possible to obliterate the
memory of the scorching day. A certain restraint in all the
appointments perfected the sense of well-being. As Paulus yielded
to it and looked at his fellow guests, he drew a long breath of
contentment. How exquisite, he thought, was Greek life, how vivid
the inspiration of this hour!
Conversation naturally turned at first to episodes of the Games and
the successes of the victors; then by easy stages drifted to the
discussion of the nature of success of any kind.
Alpheus of Mytilene, hailing, by how long an interval, from the city
and the craft of the Lesbian Muse, turned to the host. "Atticus,"
he said, "here is an easy question for you. Tell us how to succeed."
All the guests paused expectantly, knowing that a chance question
would sometimes lead Atticus into one of the vivid displays of
extemporaneous oratory for which he was famous. Nor were they
disappointed now. He looked at the company before him, men, for the
most part, younger than himself. A strange glow, as if from
smouldering fires freshly stirred, brightened in his dark eyes, and
he began to speak, impetuously. His voice, low in its first haste,
rose shrill with the tide of emotion, as he passed headlong over the
barriers of logic and of form.
"You ask me about success because you think I have succeeded. Do you
know what the characteristic moment of my life was? It was when,
almost forty years ago, I failed in my first speech before divine
Hadrian and sickened with chagrin. Most of you are young and will
not wonder, as I might now wonder at myself, that I stood by the Danube
that night and nearly threw myself into the oblivious water. Concrete
failure is as palpable a thing as concrete success. The one is like
a golden cup which you turn in your hands and lift in the sunlight
before you test at your lips the wine it holds. The other is wormwood
forced into your mouth. Like wormwood, it may be cleansing. My
'success' in my chosen profession, the fact that I have made great
speeches, held high positions, acquired fame, is due to the inner
sickness that night by the river. You will find that the name of many
a man of my age is in men's mouths because at the outset Defeat became
his trophy, the Gorgon's head, despoiled by his first sword of hiss
and venom. So there, my friends, you have the rule you ask for--fail
once so ignominiously that you wish to die, and you may wrest from
fate a brief name and the cloak of success.
"But beneath the cloak what is there? What, I mean, has there been
for me? If it is true that success is to be measured by the fulfilment
of desires, then through all these years I have but stood by the bank
of the Danube. You know that I am an exemplar, fit for a schoolboy's
rhetorical exercise, of the old lesson of life, that wealth and power
do not bring fruition in the intimate affections and hopes. My son,
my daughter, have died.[3] The only son left to me is a daily torture
to my pride. The disciples I took into their places have died. The
statues of them which I set up at Marathon no longer comfort me. Like
Menelaus, I have learned to hate the empty hollows of their eyes where
'Love lies dead.'
[Footnote 3: It was after the date assumed for this dinner that
Regilla, the Roman wife of Herodes Atticus, died under peculiarly
tragic circumstances. In commemoration of her he built his famous
Odeum on the south slope of the Acropolis.]
"All these things you have been taught by history to discount.
Barrenness in the personal life is the price many a man has paid for
public honours. Fortune must preserve an equilibrium among us. No
man is blessed in everything. That you know from the Horace of your
own school days. But, seldom hearing men speak the truth, you may
not know that to some of us, at least, there is no return for the
price we pay. When we give up juggling with facts for the sake of
performing the work of the world, we know that, instead of
achievement,
Mournful phantoms of dreams are there,
Fancies as vain as the joys they bear,
Vain--for think we that good has neared,
It slips through the hand or e'er 't has appeared,
And the vision has vanished on wings that keep
Company on the paths of sleep.
"I can make you see this in my own life by an illustration which may
surprise you. Some of you have envied me my power to enrich and
beautify Greece. You imagine that I myself find some satisfaction
in the white marble over the Stadion in Athens, in the water works
in Olympia, where we no longer drink in fevers, in the embellishments
at Delphi, in the theatre at Corinth. You think it a great thing that
I can, by turning to my money, create memorials to myself in the
greater comfort of cities of Asia Minor and of Italy. But I tell you
that all these things are nothing to me because the only thing I want
to do for my country is to connect the two seas at Corinth by a canal
cut through the solid earth. What is all the rest? A playing with
perishable materials, an erecting of 'memorials' which you and I find
beautiful and serviceable, which in another hundred years may serve
but to mark the transitoriness of our civilisation, and of which in
five hundred years only traces will remain to be pointed out as
Mycenae was pointed out to you, Alpheus, by a goatherd, driving his
flocks where once was a city of gold. My 'success' is of the moment.
My desire is for the conquest of nature herself, to bind her for all
time to the service of man. The idea of a canal teased Julius Caesar,
and Nero, with purple pomp, began to cut the rock; and yet the land
still stands between the eastern and the western seas, limiting
commerce, exhausting energies. When Panathenaic games are no longer
held in the Stadion, when Apollo speaks clearest from other oracles
than Delphi, Greeks will be building ships; Asia Minor, Egypt and
India will be sending their treasures to Italy; the passage from east
to west will be utilised. I should have done a thing for all time,
not for ourselves."
The speaker paused as his hot eyes swept over his guests. Then he
rushed on again:
"But I can see from your faces that this illustration does not
convince you. To you the canal is even less important than a new
facade for the well-house of Corinthian Peirene. Let me try again.
I have heard people say what a satisfaction it must be to me to play
a conspicuous part in the life of our own generation. But what is
the life of our generation--the life, I mean, in which I have any
individual share? My contribution is in art and literature, not in
politics or war. And in art and literature what are we doing, save
recalling in vague echoes the greater voices of a dead past? Even
Lucian here, who is the only original of us all in letters, even
Ptolemy, who is a master in science, will agree with me. Our greatness
is of the past.
"Look at the statues in the theatre! AEschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides surrounded by what a horde of little moderns! Menander
standing cheek by jowl with a poetaster! The Emperors have dallied
with us, wanting the gifts we bear to the Empire. The Roman Republic
saw to it that we should bring no new gifts. The trees in Aristotle's
Lyceum were cut down by Sulla to make his engines of war. When he
turned these engines on the Acropolis, Athena's golden lamp went out.
"I was consul once at Rome, but few will remember it of me, for it
was not the real I that did that work. But I was doing, I sometimes
think, a more real thing than when I try to clothe Athens again with
the glory of Pericles's age or seek in long lost quarries for my prose
style. I envied divine Hadrian his faith in a restoration. His pride
in Rome seemed really equalled by his passionate sentiment for Athens
and his determination to make her once more the nurse of the arts.
Commerce and wealth have swept by us to Egypt. Ships put in at Piraeus
merely for repairs, and no longer, as in the great past, pay a part
of their cargoes to Athens, a fee of harbourage. Learning, too, has
swept eastward. Librarians and learned men dwell at Alexandria.
Hadrian asked me to help him reawaken in Athens Apollo and his Muses.
The restorer's buildings are round about you, his library and temples,
in their new splendour typical of his hope. But wherein, after all,
lies the greatness of the greatest of them? The Temple of Zeus imposes
chiefly, I think, by its display of the world-wide power of Hadrian.
You see the statues of himself in and about it, raised by Rome and
Carthage, by Corinth and Byzantium, by Miletus and Laodicea, by every
city of the Empire, paying homage to an emperor who by some divine
grace happened to prefer to be honoured by marble in Athens rather
than to have gold sent to him in Rome. How different is the Parthenon,
still, after six hundred years, the embodiment of a common impulse
of a free people! Try as Hadrian would, he could not restore the art
of the past."
Atticus looked at the Romans among the company and his voice became
golden and persuasive as he continued:
"I have come to feel, my friends, that the restoration of an art that
is not the outcome of a genuine national life is a futile thing. Rome
cannot restore the glory of old Athens. She can only learn from Greece
how to create a glory of her own. She must so govern her life, so
train her sons, that out of their own impulses a new poetry, a new
art will grow. Divine influences from the past, yes, they exist. In
your own most creative times Cicero and Lucretius, Virgil and Horace,
did more than restore. Seeking aliment from Greece, they nurtured
their own genius. But you, what are you and your friends doing? Why
are you over here? Tell me that. Are you here to learn to be better
Romans, carrying on your own national life, creating at last out of
the forces of your own time an architecture and sculpture, a painting
and poetry commensurate with your powers? Sometimes I fear you make
a cult of Athens, lose yourselves in remembering her as she once was.
You seem to spend your lives, as I have sometimes spent wakeful nights
at Marathon, my birthplace, listening for the feet of heroes and the
neighing of horses on the field where a great battle was once fought.
That may do for the night seasons, but with the sun are there not
new conquests, and new shields?
"You scorn your own Romans who come over here and put up their names
on old statues of Themistocles and Miltiades. You admire Cicero who,
although he loved Athens and wished that he might leave here some
gift from himself, scorned to pervert an ancient statue. And yet,
I tell you, Cicero was a Roman first, a lover of Greek culture second.
All that he learned here he dedicated to the Republic. He studied
Isocrates and Demosthenes in order that by his voice he might free
Rome from traitors and persuade Justice to 'walk down her broad
highways as Warder.' He read Plato that philosophy might soften the
harsher temper of his own people. He partook of our refinement that
the vigour of Rome might be used in the service of humanity.
"Take warning by me. Do not, indeed, forget our past. Stay here as
long as you will. Touch lingeringly the hem of Athena's peplos. But
when your minds are strengthened, when your powers are matured, go
back to your own people and make them also, because you have dwelt
for a time in the home of Plato, look 'to the pattern that is laid
up in heaven for him who wills to see, and, seeing, so to plant his
dwelling.' Work for Rome. Let the memory of Athens be no cup of
eastern magic. Listen, rather, for her voice as worshippers at the
salt well on the Acropolis listen, when the south wind blows, for
the sound of the waves of the purging sea."
The rich, emotional voice ceased suddenly like the flood tide of
Northern seas. Paulus was not prepared for the swift transformation
of ardent speaker into observant host as Atticus turned with a
whispered order to the slave who stood behind him. He was shocked,
too, failing to perceive its note of defiant bitterness, by a laugh
from Lucian and his careless, "My felicitations, Atticus, on your
welding of dirge and exhortation into one epideictic oration!
Aulus," he added, looking across the table, "don't forget to make
a note of the prepositions the master used in burying Greece."
The sneer fortunately was almost on the instant covered up by Ptolemy,
who, as if awakened from a revery, turned toward his host. "Atticus,"
he said, "you have convinced me that I am right. Pedigree, wealth
and art, nations and civilisations and the destiny of men bring you
no happiness. I find myself at peace in the heavens. While you were
speaking I rivalled Alpheus here and beat out an epigram:
That I am mortal and a day my span
I know and own,
Yet when the circling ebb and flow I scan
Of stars thick-strewn,
No longer brush the earth my feet,
And I abide,
While God's own food ambrosial doth replete,
By Zeus's side."
Like a gust of wind, the unexpected poet might have swept the
conversation into his own ether, if at this juncture the doors had
not opened to admit a group of well known actors. There was a general
exclamation of surprise, special entertainments being almost unknown
at Atticus's dinners. The host turned smiling to his guests. "My
friends," he said, "I know you share my pride in the rare event of
Apuleius's presence. He is not as accustomed as we are to the grey
monotone of our own thoughts. Shall he go back to Carthage or Rome
to laugh at our village banquets? Ptolemy, you know Menander shared
your regard for--
these majestic sights--the common sun,
Water and clouds, the stars and fire.
Let him take you off now among our country folk out here near Parnes.
We still have the human comedy, played out under sun and stars. Love
and deceit, troubles and rewards are as ageless as the heavens.
Gentlemen, this distinguished company has consented to give us
to-night a presentation of _The Arbitrants_ equal to the famous one
of the last Dionysia."
Apuleius's handsome face lit up with gaiety and good will. "I thank
you, O wise host," he called out.
To-day's my joy and sorrow,
Who knows what comes to-morrow?