Muckraking in Old Pompeii
It now devolves on me as a painful yet necessary duty to topple from
its pedestal one of the most popular idols of legendary lore. I refer, I
regret to say, to the widely famous Roman sentry of old Pompeii.
Personally I think there has been entirely too much of this sort of
thing going on lately. Muckrakers, prying into the storied past, have
destroyed one after another many of the pet characters in history.
Thanks to their meddlesome activities we know that Paul Revere did not
take any midnight ride. On the night in question he was laid up in bed
with inflammatory rheumatism. What happened was that he told the news to
Mrs. Revere as a secret, and she in strict confidence imparted it to the
lady living next door; and from that point on the word traveled with the
rapidity of wildfire.
Horatius never held the bridge; he just let the blamed thing go. The boy
did not stand on the burning deck, whence all but him had fled; he was
among the first in the lifeboats. That other boy--the Spartan youth--did
not have his vitals gnawed by a fox; the Spartan youth had been eating
wild grapes and washing them down with spring water. Hence that gnawing
sensation of which so much mention has been made. Nobody hit Billy
Patterson. He acquired his black eye in the same way in which all
married men acquire a black eye--by running against a doorjamb while
trying to find the ice-water pitcher in the dark. He said so himself the
next day.
Even Barbara Frietchie is an exploded myth. She did not nail her
country's flag to the window casement. Being a female, she could not
nail a flag or anything else to a window. In the first place, she would
have used a wad of chewing gum and a couple of hairpins. In the second
place, had she recklessly undertaken to nail up a flag with hammer and
nails, she would never have been on hand at the psychological moment
to invite Stonewall Jackson to shoot her old gray head. When General
Jackson passed the house she would have been in the bathroom bathing her
left thumb in witch-hazel.
Furthermore, she did not have any old gray head. At the time of the
Confederate invasion of Maryland she was only seventeen years old--some
authorities say only seven--and a pronounced blonde. Also, she did not
live in Frederick; and even if she did live there, on the occasion when
the troops went through she was in Baltimore visiting a school friend.
Finally, Frederick does not stand where it stood in the sixties. The
cyclone of 1884 moved it three miles back into the country and
twisted the streets round in such a manner as to confuse even lifelong
residents. These facts have repeatedly been proved by volunteer
investigators and are not to be gainsaid.
I repeat that there has been too much of this. If the craze for smashing
all our romantic fixtures persists, after a while we shall have no
glorious traditions left with which to fire the youthful heart at
high-school commencements. But in the interests of truth, and also
because I made the discovery myself, I feel it to be my solemn duty to
expose the Roman sentry, stationed at the gate of Pompeii looking toward
the sea, who died because he would not quit his post without orders and
had no orders to quit.
Until now this party has stood the acid test of centuries. Everybody
who ever wrote about the fall of Pompeii, from Plutarch and Pliny the
Younger clear down to Bulwer Lytton and Burton Holmes, had something to
say about him. The lines on this subject by the Greek poet Laryngitis
are familiar to all lovers of that great master of classic verse, and I
shall not undertake to quote from them here.
Suffice it to say that the Roman sentry, perishing at his post, has
ever been a favorite subject for historic and romantic writers. I myself
often read of him--how on that dread day when the devil's stew came to
a boil and spewed over the sides of Vesuvius, and death and destruction
poured down to blight the land, he, typifying fortitude and discipline
and unfaltering devotion, stood firm and stayed fast while all about
him chaos reigned and fathers forgot their children and husbands forgot
their wives, and vice versa, though probably not to the same extent; and
how finally the drifting ashes and the choking dust fell thicker upon
him and mounted higher about him, until he died and in time turned to
ashes himself, leaving only a void in the solidified slag. I had always
admired that soldier--not his judgment, which was faulty, but his
heroism, which was immense. To myself I used to say:
"That unknown common soldier, nameless though he was, deserves to live
forever in the memory of mankind. He lacked imagination, it is true,
but he was game. It was a glorious death to die--painful, yet splendid.
Those four poor wretches whose shells were found in the prison under the
gladiators' school, with their ankles fast in the iron stocks--I know
why they stayed. Their feet were too large for their own good. But no
bonds except his dauntless will bound him at the portals of the doomed
city. Duty was the only chain that held him.
"And to think that centuries and centuries afterward they should find
his monument--a vacant, empty mold in the piled-up pumice! Had I been
in his place I should have created my vacancy much sooner--say, about
thirty seconds after the first alarm went in. But he was one who chose
rather that men should say, 'How natural he looks!' than 'Yonder he
goes!' And he has my sincere admiration. When I go to Pompeii--if ever
I do go there--I shall seek out the spot where he made the supremest
sacrifice to authority that ever any man could make, and I shall tarry a
while in those hallowed precincts!"
That was what I said I would do and that was what I did do that
afternoon at Pompeii. I found the gate looking toward the sea and I
found all the other gates, or the sites of them; but I did not find the
Roman sentry nor any trace of him, nor any authentic record of him. I
questioned the guides and, through an interpreter, the curator of the
Museum, and from them I learned the lamentably disillusioning facts in
this case. There is no trace of him because he neglected to leave any
trace.
Doubtless there was a sentry on guard at the gate when the volcano
belched forth, and the skin of the earth flinched and shivered and split
asunder; but he did not remain for the finish. He said to himself that
this was no place for a minister's son; and so he girded up his loins
and he went away from there.
He went away hurriedly--even as you and I.