Calm after Storm
I
Like all human things, the war ended. The Alexandrians might rage and
dash their numbers against the palace walls. Ganymed and young
Ptolemaeus, who had gone out to him, pressed the siege, but all in
vain. And help came to the hard-pressed Romans at last. Mithridates, a
faithful vassal king, advanced his army over Syria, and came down into
the Delta, sweeping all before him. Then Caesar effected a junction
with the forces of his ally, and there was one pitched battle on the
banks of the Nile, where Ptolemaeus was defeated, and drowned in his
flight. Less than a month later Alexandria capitulated, and saw the
hated consular insignia again within her gates. There was work to do
in Egypt, and Caesar--just named dictator at Rome and consul for five
years--devoted himself to the task of reform and reorganization.
Cleopatra was to be set back upon her throne, and her younger brother,
another Ptolemaeus, was to be her colleague. So out of war came peace,
and the great Imperator gave laws to yet another kingdom.
But before Caesar sailed away to chastise Pharnaces of Pontus, and
close up his work in the East, ere returning to break down the stand
of the desperate Pompeians in Africa, there was joy and high festival
in the palace of Alexandria; and all the noble and great of the
capital were at the feast,--the wedding feast of Cornelia and the
favourite staff officer of the Imperator. The soft warm air of the
Egyptian springtime blew over the festoons of flowers and over the
carpets of blossoms; never before was the music more sweet and joyous.
And overhead hung the great light-laden dome of the glowing azure,
where the storks were drifting northward with the northward march of
the sun.
And they sang the bridal hymns, both Greek and Latin, and cried
"Hymen" and "Talasio"; and when evening came,
"The torches tossed their tresses of flame,"
as said the marriage song of Catullus; and underneath the yellow veil
of the bride gleamed forth the great diamond necklace, the gift of
Cleopatra, which once had been the joy of some Persian princess before
the Greeks took the hoard at Persepolis.
Agias was there; and Cleomenes and his daughters; and Demetrius, with
Artemisia, the most beautiful of girls,--as Cornelia was the fairest
of women,--clinging fondly to her father's side. So there was joy that
day and night at the Alexandrian palace. And on the next morning the
fleet trireme was ready which Demetrius had provided to bear Drusus
and Cornelia and Fabia back to Italy. Many were the partings at the
royal quay, and Agias wept when he said farewell to his late patron
and patroness; but he had some comfort, for his cousin (who had
arranged with Cleomenes that, since his freebooting days were happily
over, the two should join in a partnership for the India trade) had
made him a promise to be fulfilled in due course of time--for
Artemisia was still very young.
"You are no Ichomachus, Xenophon's perfect wife-educator," the
ex-pirate had said to his importunate cousin; "wait a few years."
And Agias was fain to be content, with this hope before him.
There were other partings than his; but at last the adieus were over,
and all save Caesar went back upon the quay. The Imperator alone
tarried on the poop of the vessel for an instant. His features were
half wistful as he held Drusus by the hand, but his eyes were kindly
as ever to the young man.
"Ah, amice!" he said, "we who play at philosophy may not know all the
time that there are gods, but at all times we know that there is the
most godlike of divine attributes--love undefiled. Therefore let us
hope, for we see little, and the cosmos is past finding out."
He sprang back on to the quay. The musicians on the bow struck up with
pipe and lyre; the friends on the pier flung aboard the last garlands
of rose and lily and scented thyme; the rowers bent to their task; the
one hundred and seventy blades--pumiced white--smote the yellow waves
of the harbour, and the ship sped away. Cornelia, Fabia, and Drusus
stood on the poop gazing toward the receding quay. Long after they had
ceased to recognize forms and faces they stared backward, until the
pier itself was a speck, and the great buildings of the city grew dim.
Then they passed the Pharos, and the land dwindled more and more into
a narrow, dark ribbon betwixt blue water and bluer sky. The long
swells of the open sea caught the trireme, and she rode gallantly over
them--while the music still played, and her hardy crew, pirates no
longer, but pardoned men,--seamen, employees of the honest merchant
Demetrius,--sent the good ship bounding faster and faster, as they
pressed their strength against the springing oars. Higher and higher
rose the column of foam around the cutwater; louder and louder sang
the foam under the stern, as they swept it past. The distant land
faded to a thread, to a line, was gone; and to north and south and
east and west were but the water and the cloudless ether. Fabia,
Cornelia, and Drusus said little for a long time. Their eyes wandered,
sometimes, over the track of the foam, and in their minds they saw
again the water-birds plashing among lotus plants, and heard the
ancient Egyptian litanies softly chanted behind the propylons of a
temple built by some king two thousand years departed. But oftener
their eyes ran ahead over the prow, and they walked again across the
Forum of the city of their fathers, and drove across the Latin
plain-land, and spoke their own dear, sonorous, yet half-polished
native tongue.
At last came evening; the sun sank lower and lower; now his broad red
disk hung over the crest of the western waves; now it touched them;
now it was gone, and only the lines of dying fire streamed behind
him--the last runners in his chariot train. Up from the cabin below
came the voice of the ship's steward, "Would their excellencies take
any refreshment?" But they did not go at once. They watched the fire
grow dimmer and dimmer, the pure light change to red gold, the red
gold to crimson, and the crimson sink away.
"Ah, carissima!" cried Drusus, "would that when the orbs of our lives
go down to their setting, they might go down like the sunlight, more
beautiful in each act of the very dying, as they approach the final
goal!"
"Yes, surely," replied Cornelia, touching her hands upon his head;
"but who knows but that Catullus the poet is wrong when he says the
sun of life will never rise save once; who knows but that, if our sun
set in beauty, it will rise again in grandeur even more?"
"My children," said Fabia, gently, "the future lies in the knowledge
of the gods; but out of the present we must shape our own future."
"No, delectissima," replied her nephew, "to do that we are all too
weak; except it be true, as Aratus the poet has said, 'that we men are
also the offspring of gods,' in which case Heaven itself must stoop to
give us aid."
But Cornelia's eyes had wandered down into the foam, still gleaming as
snow in the failing light.
"Ah!" she said, "the ages are long; if there be gods, their days are
our lifetimes, and we but see a little and know not what to think. But
to live a noble life will always be the fairest thing, whether death
be an unending sleep or the threshold to Pindar's Elysium."
And what more of grave wisdom might have dropped from her lips none
may relate, for her husband had shaken off the spell, and laughed
aloud in the joy of his strong life and buoyant hopes. Then they all
three laughed, and thought no more of sober things. They went down
into the cabin just as the last bars of light flickered out in the
west, and only the starlight broke the darkness that spread out over
the face of the sea.
II
Drusus, as he himself had predicted, never wrote a great treatise on
philosophy, and never drew up a cosmology that set at rest all the
problems of the universe; nor did Cornelia become a Latin Sappho or
Corinna, and her wise lore never went further than to make her friends
afraid to affect a shammed learning in her presence. But they both did
the tasks that fell to them better because they had "tasted the well
of Parnassus" and "walked in the grove with the sages." And Drusus,
through an active life, played an honourable part as a soldier and a
statesman: with his beloved Imperator in the battles of Thapsus and
Munda, when the last of the oligarchs were beaten down; then, after
the great crime of murder, with his friend Marcus Antonius; and then,
when Cleopatra's evil star lured both her and Antonius to their ruin,
he turned to the only man whose wisdom and firmness promised safety to
the state--and he joined himself to the rising fortunes of Octavius,
the great Augustus, and fought with him to the end, until there was no
longer a foreign or civil enemy, and the "Pax Romana" gave quiet to a
subject world.
So Drusus had share with Maecenas and Agrippa and the other imperial
statesmen in shaping the fabric of the mighty Roman Empire. Not in his
day did he or Cornelia know that it was wrong to buy slaves like
cattle, or to harbour an implacable hate. They were but pagans. To
them the truth was but seen in a glass darkly; enough if they lived up
to such truth as was vouchsafed. But in their children's day the
brightness arose in the East, and spread westward, and ever westward,
until the Capitoline Jupiter was nigh forgotten, the glories of the
Roman eagles became a tradition, the splendour of the imperial city a
dream. For there came to the world a better Deity, a diviner glory, a
more heavenly city. The greater grew out of the less. Out of the
world-fabric prepared by Julius Caesar grew the fabric of the Christian
Church, and out of the Christian Church shall rise a yet nobler
spiritual edifice when the stars have all grown cold.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's A Friend of Caesar, by William Stearns Davis