Balbilla and her companion, Publius Balbinus and other illustrious
Romans, Favorinus the sophist, and a numerous suite of chamberlains
and servants, were to accompany the Empress by water, while Hadrian
set forth on his land journey with a small escort to which he added a
splendid array of huntsmen. Before he reached Memphis, in crossing the
Libyan desert, through which his road lay, he had killed a few lions and
many other beasts of prey, and here he had once more found Antinous the
best of sporting companions. Cool headed in danger, indefatigable on
foot, content and serviceable in all circumstances, the young fellow
seemed to Hadrian to be a comrade created by the gods themselves for
his special delectation. When Hadrian was in the humor to brood and
be silent the whole day long, he never disturbed him by a word; but in
these moods the Emperor found his favorite’s society indispensable, for
the mere consciousness of his presence soothed him.
Antinous too, was happy on these occasions, for he felt that he was of
some use to his venerated master and could thus alleviate the burden
which had never ceased to weigh on his own soul ever since the crime
he had committed. Besides, he preferred dreaming to talking, and the
exercise in the open air preserved him from listless lassitude.
In Memphis Hadrian was detained a whole month, for there he was expected
to visit the Egyptian temples with Sabina, who had arrived before him,
and to submit to many ceremonials invested with the regalia of the
Pharaohs. Sabina often felt as if she must faint when, crowned with the
ponderous vulture-headed fillet of the Queens of Egypt, weighed down
with long robes and golden ornaments, she was conducted with her
husband, in procession, through all the rooms, over the roof and
finally into the holiest place of some vast sanctuary. What senseless
ceremonials they had to go through in the course of these long circuits,
and how many sacrifices had they to attend! When she returned from
these visitations she was utterly exhausted, and indeed, it was no
small exertion to undergo so many fumigations with incense and so many
aspersions, to listen to so many litanies and hymns, to parade through
such endless halls and while being elevated to the rank of celestial
beings, to be crowned with so many crowns in turn and decorated with all
kinds of fillets and symbolic adornments.
Her husband set her a good example, however; through all the ceremonials
he displayed the whole grave majesty of his nature, and among the
Egyptians behaved as one of themselves. He even took pleasure in
the mystical lore of the priests, with whom he often held long
conversations.
As at Memphis, so in all the principal temples of the great cities to
the southward, the Imperial pair accepted the homage of the hierarchy
and the honors due to divinity. Wherever Hadrian granted money for the
extension of a temple, he was required to perform the ceremony of laying
a stone with his own hand. But he always found time to hunt in
the desert, to manage the affairs of state, and to visit the most
interesting monuments of past times, and at Memphis especially, the city
of the dead, with the Pyramids, the great Sphinx, the Serapeum and the
tombs of the Apis.
Before quitting the city he and his companions consulted the oracle of
the sacred bull. The fairest future was promised to Balbilla; the bull
to whom she had to offer a cake, with her face averted, had approved
of her gift and had touched her hand with his moist muzzle. Hadrian was
left in ignorance as to the sentence of the priests of Apis, for it
was given to him in a sealed roll with an explanation of the signs it
contained; but he was solemnly adjured not to open them before at least
half a year had elapsed.
It was only in the cities that Hadrian met his wife, for he pursued
his journey by land and she hers by water. The boats almost invariably
reached their destination sooner than the land-travellers, and when they
at last arrived, there was always a grand festival to welcome them, in
which however Sabina but rarely took part. Balbilla proved herself all
the more eager to make their arrival pleasant by some kindly surprise.
She sincerely reverenced Hadrian, and his favorite’s beauty had an
irresistible charm for her artist’s soul. It was a delight to her only
to look at him; his absence troubled her, and when he returned she was
always the first to greet him. And yet the bright girl troubled herself
about him neither more nor less than the other ladies in Sabina’s train;
only Balbilla asked nothing of him but the pleasure of looking at him
and rejoicing in his beauty.
If he had dared to mistake her admiration for love and to have offered
her his, the poetess would have indignantly brought him to his bearings;
and yet she gave unqualified expression to her admiration of the
Bithynian’s splendid person, and indeed with rather remarkable
demonstrativeness.
When the travellers made their appearance again after a prolonged
absence Antinous would find in the room in the ship where he was to live
flowers, and choice fruits sent by her, and verses in which she had sung
his praises. He put it all aside with the rest and only esteemed the
donor the less; but the poetess knew nothing of these sentiments in
her beautiful idol, and indeed troubled herself very little about his
feelings. She had hitherto found no difficulty in keeping within the
limits of what was becoming. But lately there had been moments in
which she had owned to herself that she might be carried away into
overstepping these limits. But what did she care for the opinion
of those around her, or about the inner life of the Bithyman, whose
external perfection of form was all that pleased her. She did not shrink
from the possibility of arousing hopes in him which she never could nor
intended to fulfil, for the idea did not once enter her mind; still
she felt dissatisfied with herself, for there was one person who
might disapprove of her proceedings, one who had indeed in plain words
reprehended her fancy for doing honor to the handsome boy with offerings
of flowers, and the opinion of that one person weighed with her more
than that of all the rest of the men and women she knew, put together.
This one was Pontius the architect; and yet, strangely enough, it was
precisely her remembrance of him that urged her on from one folly to
another. She had often seen the architect in Alexandria, and when they
parted she had allowed him to promise to follow her and the Empress, and
to escort them at any rate for a part of their voyage up the Nile. But
he came not, nor had he sent any report of himself, though he was alive
and well, and every express that overtook them brought documents for
Caesar in his handwriting.
So he, on whose faithful devotion she had built as on a rock, was no
less self-seeking and fickle than other men. She thought of him every
day and every hour; and as soon as a vessel from the north cast anchor
within sight, she watched the voyagers as they disembarked to detect him
among them. She longed for Pontius as a traveller who has lost his way
sighs for a sight of the guide who has deserted him; and yet she
was angry with him, for he had betrayed by a thousand tokens that he
esteemed and cared for her, that she had a certain power over his strong
will--and now he had broken his word and did not come.
And she? She had not been unmoved by his devotion, and had been gentler
to this grandson of her father’s freed slave than to the best-born man
of her own rank. And in spite of it all Pontius could spoil all the
pleasure of her journey and stay in Alexandria instead of following
in her wake. He could easily have intrusted his building to other
architects--the great metropolis was swarming with them! Well, if he did
not trouble himself about her she certainly need care even less about
him. Perhaps at last, at the end of their travels he might yet come, and
then he should see how much she cared for his admonitions.
But she sighed impatiently for the hour when she might read him all the
verses she had addressed to Antinous, and ask him how he liked them. It
gave her a childish pleasure to add to the number of these little poems,
to finish them elaborately, and display in them all her knowledge and
ability. She gave the preference to artificial and massive metres; some
of the verses were in Latin, others in the Attic, and others again in
the Aeolian dialects of Greek, for she had now learnt to use this, and
all to punish Pontius--to vex Pontius--and at the same time to appear in
his eyes as brilliant as she could. She belauded Antinous, but she
wrote for Pontius, and for every flower she gave the lad she had sent
a thought to the architect, though with a curl on her lips of scornful
defiance.
But a young girl cannot be always praising the beauty of a youth in new
and varied forms with complete impunity, and thus there were hours when
Balbilla was inclined to believe that she really loved Antinous. Then
she would call herself his Sappho, and he seemed destined to be her
Phaon. During his long absences with the Emperor she would long to see
him--nay, even with tears; but, as soon as he was by her side again, and
she could look at his inanimate beauty and into his weary eyes, when she
heard the torpid “Yes” or “No” with which he replied to her questions,
the spell was entirely broken and she honestly confessed to herself that
she would as soon see him before her hewn in marble as clothed in flesh
and blood.
In such moments as these her memory of the architect was particularly
fresh, and once, when their ship was sailing through a mass of lotos
leaves, above which one splendid full-blown flower raised its head, her
apt imagination, which rapidly seized on everything noteworthy and gave
it poetic form, entwined the incident in a set of verses, in which she
designated Antinous as the lotos-flower which fulfils its destiny
simply by being beautiful, and comparing Pontius to the ship which, well
constructed and well guided, invited the traveller to new voyages in
distant lands.
The Nile voyage came to an end at Thebes of the hundred gates, and here
nothing that could attract the Roman travellers remained unvisited. The
tombs of the Pharaohs extending into the very heart of the rocky hills,
and the grand temples that stood to the west of the city of the dead,
shorn though they were of their ancient glory, filled the Emperor with
admiration. The Imperial travellers and their companions listened to
the famous colossus of Memnon, of which the upper portion had been
overthrown by an earthquake, and three times in the dawn they heard it
sound.
Balbilla described the incident in several long poems which Sabina
caused to be engraved on the stone of the colossus. The poetess imagined
herself as hearing the voice of Memnon singing to his mother Eos while
her tears, the fresh morning dew, fell upon the image of her son, fallen
before the walls of Troy. These verses she composed in the Aeolian
dialect, named herself as their writer and informed the readers--among
whom she included Pontius--that she was descended from a house no less
noble than that of King Antiochus.
The gigantic structures on each bank of the Nile fully equalled
Hadrian’s expectations, though they had suffered so much injury from
earthquakes and sieges, and the impoverished priesthood of Thebes were
no longer in a position to provide for their preservation even, much
less for their restoration. Balbilla accompanied Caesar on a visit to
the sanctuary of Ammon, on the eastern shore of the Nile. In the
great hall, the most vast and lofty pillared hall in the world, her
impressionable soul felt a peculiar exaltation, and as the Emperor
observed how, with a heightened color she now gazed upward, and then
again, leaning against a towering column, looked at the scene around
her, he asked her what she felt, standing in this really worthy abode of
the gods.
“One thing--above all things one thing!” cried the girl. “That
architecture is the sublimest of the arts! This temple is to me like
some grand epode, and the poet who composed it conceived it not in
feeble words but formed it out of almost immovable masses. Thousands
of parts are here combined to form a whole, and each is welded with
the rest into beautiful harmony and helps to give expression to the
stupendous idea which existed in the brain of the builder of this
hall. What other art is gifted with the power of creating a work so
imperishable and so far transcending all ordinary standards?”
“A poetess crowning the architect with laurels!” exclaimed the Emperor.
“But is not the poet’s realm the infinite, and can the architect ever
get beyond the finite and the limited?”
“Then is the nature of the divinity a measurable unit?” asked Balbilla.
“No, it is not; and yet this hall gives one the impression that the very
divinity might find space in it to dwell in.”
“Because it owes it existence to a master-mind, which while it conceived
it stood on the boundary line of eternity. But do you think this temple
will outlast the poems of Homer?”
“No; but the memory of it will no more fade away that of the wrath of
Achilles or the wanderings of the experienced Odysseus.”
“It is a pity that our friend Pontius cannot hear you,” said Hadrian.
“He has completed the plans for a work which is destined to outlive me
and him and all of us.
“I mean my own tomb. Besides that I intend him to erect gates, courts
and halls in the Egyptian style at Tibur, which may remind us of our
travels in this wonderful country. I expect him to-morrow.”
“To-morrow!” exclaimed Balbilla, and her face fired with a scarlet flush
to her very brow.