Dear and Glorious Physician

by Taylor Caldwell

  He stood by his table clothed in his short military tunic and armor, his short broadsword buckled at his belt. His helmet lay on the table beside him, and it was evident that he was about to go to Antioch. There was an air of haste and abruptness about him, a cold militarism, a remoteness. And it was this air that made Iris stop suddenly on the threshold and held her against falling on her knees before him and kissing his hand. A sharp sense of calamity came to her, and the light passed from her face. This worn and leaner man, this haughty and formidable man, was not the Diodorus she knew. He was a stranger.

  “Greetings, noble Master,” she murmured, and the sense of calamity deepened in her. “I trust you had a pleasant journey home.”

  “Come in, Iris,” he said, and turned his eagle face in profile to her, and she saw its iron restraint. “I shall not keep you long. I have been told of the tender and maternal care you have given my son, for which mere gold will not suffice. But it is all I have to offer.”

  Iris looked at him with a heartbroken smile. “You owe me nothing, Master,” she said, faintly. “It was a joy to mother your son, who is like a young Mars, and full of merriment.” She stopped. Her throat and breast ached painfully.

  Searching his face hopelessly, she felt a deeper pang and a thrust of anxiety, forgetting herself. Was he ill? Why that expression of pent anguish, that pale harshness of lip, that bitter wrinkling of the forehead? She exclaimed with fear, “Master, all is not well with you! Were you ill of the fever of Rome?” She came to him then, her heart shaking with love and fright, and her blue eyes fastened themselves intently and searchingly on his profile. He would not look at her. His hand was on his helmet, the tendons rising in it. Diodorus! she cried inwardly. My soul’s beloved! Do you not know that I would joyously give my life for you? Tell me what troubles you.

  Diodorus still would not look at her. He dared not. He caught the fragrance of her flesh, warm and youthful and sweet as a flower. His hand clenched on the helmet in a spasm of acute agony.

  He spoke as if she had not spoken. “In my last letter to you, Iris, I asked if you would return to Rome with me when I go from this malignant place forever, in order to care for my son.” He paused. The grayish-brown flesh about his averted eyes tightened. “But now I cannot ask it of you. Your son leaves in three weeks for Alexandria. You will wish to be near him. As a gift, and a sign of my esteem for you, I am giving you Cusa, who will help to tutor Lucanus in Alexandria, and Calliope, who is now his wife, for a handmaiden to you. Moreover, I will deposit five thousand gold sesterces for you in order that you may live in comfort in some small house near the university, and each December the same amount will be delivered to you. I comprehend, of course, that all this is but a poor return for what you and your son have done for me, but it is all I have.”

  Terror, loss, and dismay seized Iris. She stared at Diodorus disbelievingly.

  “You are sending me away from you, Master — forever!” she cried, and pressed her hands against her breast. “Forever, Diodorus? I am so hateful in your eyes?” Tears began to flow down her white cheeks.

  “I am trying only to be just,” said Diodorus, in a stifled voice. “I thought that you would prefer to be near your son. I understand that it will be hard to part from Priscus, to whom you have been as a mother, as my own mother was to you. But life is all parting.” He had heard the torment in her voice, her incredulous torment and disbelief. “You must not think me ungrateful.”

  Then he turned his face swiftly to her, and it changed. “Do you think this easy for me?” he asked, roughly. “Nevertheless, this is my will, for there is no other way.”

  “Then, in some unpardonable fashion, I have most terribly displeased you,” faltered Iris. He no longer loves me, she thought, with abysmal and overwhelming despair and bereavement. He has found a lady in Rome to marry; I am now an inconvenience and embarrassment to him. He would forget I ever lived.

  She was weak with her suffering; she wanted to lie down on the floor and pass into merciful insensibility, or die. An aridity like the dust in the mouth of a moribund man dried her lips, her tongue, and her heart throbbed with a crushing pain. Let me go as the humblest slave in your household, she implored him silently. Let me not even enter your sight. But do not send me from you, in the name of all the gods! It will be enough just to lie under the same roof with you, to glimpse you from afar, to hear the echo of your voice. How can I live otherwise?

  “Iris,” he said, then stopped. He could not change his mind. He dared never see the young woman again. He thought of Aurelia, and it seemed to him that she regarded him sternly, demanding this awful sacrifice to assuage his guilt.

  He put his helmet on his head. He could not look at Iris again, for his arms felt powerless and empty, and he knew that he must flee from this room if he was to save himself. “You will want to prepare for your journey with your son,” he said, looking blindly at the floor. “Iris. We shall not see each other again. I have ordered my son returned to this house tomorrow morning, with his nurse.” He paused. “Iris, I wish you all the blessings of the gods, and all happiness.”

  She groped for a chair and sat down, her head on her breast, her arms fallen. Then she began to speak in a low voice, but very clear. “Master, I can take nothing from you. What I have done, if it is of any importance at all, was for love — for love — of Aurelia and the child. To take the smallest gift would be an insult to them. And to me.”

  Diodorus began to walk towards the door. Then he was overpowered with his mighty desolation and sorrow and longing. He stopped, his back to her. “Nevertheless,” he said, dimly, “I am a Roman, and must express my gratitude some way.”

  Iris lifted her head, and she looked at him as at an equal who had unforgivably offended her. He felt her force, and he involuntarily turned on his heel and faced her. She was like a noble statue sitting there, her white stola falling over her breast and her perfect thighs and lying on the high arches of her feet. And she was as colorless as marble. Dignity and pride encompassed her, and her pale lips curved with scorn.

  “Diodorus,” she said, and her voice was strong and angry. “There is something I must tell you. I am not a mere handmaiden to be dismissed and turned away. I have held a secret for a long time, because it was the wish of your mother, the Lady Antonia, for she thought it would offend you deeply — as a Roman! However, she gave me permission to tell you this secret when I thought it necessary, and I find it necessary now. After your father died, she legally adopted me, but in secret, as her daughter. The praetor so recorded it, in Rome, before you returned from Jerusalem. And in Rome there is much money waiting for me, which I have not yet used. My husband knew nothing of it. You stare at me as if I were lying! You have only to visit the praetor in Rome.”

  She rose slowly and gracefully, and she was like the statue of a goddess carved by Scopas. She filled the library with light and a stately power.

  “Do not think,” she said, bitterly, “that I will ever divulge this to anyone, to your humiliation! I will not intrude upon you in Rome, or elsewhere, demanding your acknowledgment as your sister. Never shall I say, ‘The noble tribune, Diodorus, is my adopted brother’, for I know your terrible pride! Your mother loved me, as dear as a daughter. Though you do not know it, she did not wish me to marry my poor Aeneas. But I knew you, Diodorus! I knew that you loved me then, and had always loved me, and that you as a Roman, however, would never consider marrying me, a former slave. To end forever your yearning, your internal struggles, I married Aeneas. I would have consented, before that adoption, to be your mistress, to be the lowliest, to carry wood for your bath. But I was now your mother’s daughter, and I could not offend her memory.”

  Diodorus stumbled back to the table, removed his helmet, then stood staring down at it. He was weak with shame. He moistened his lips, tried to speak, then was silent. He coughed dryly, and passed a hand over his forehead. “Let me speak,” he said, almost inaudibly. “And then let us part.” He continued to stare at the helmet. �
�Do you know what I suffer? Do you know how I love you, and have always loved you? Do you know that only your memory sustained me when I carried the ashes of my wife and my daughter to Rome? Do you know that the darkest nights were brightened by the vision of your face?” He paused, and coughed again. “But I have learned that Aurelia knew of my passion for you. I remember what she must have suffered because of that. I am guilty before her. I must do penance.”

  “Oh!” cried Iris, and she was weeping again, and her face was like the sun behind rain. “Oh, you Roman fool, you dear, beloved fool! Certainly Aurelia knew. She knew the very moment she entered your house. We loved you together, and she was content, for she was a lady of sense, and not a dolt-headed man! Not once was she disturbed. You were her husband, and you were an honorable man. Is your soul so small that you dare to insult the large and kindly soul of Aurelia, my friend? While she was bearing your son she had premonitions of death, and confided in me. And before she died she asked me to remain with you forever, and comfort you, and give you happiness. Yet you now insult her!”

  She was angered again. She took a step or two towards the door.

  Diodorus said, “Wait — my love. I have worse to tell you. While in Rome, I invented a false lineage for you, so that I could marry you with honor.”

  She stopped and regarded him with wide eyes, and then with tenderness, and then with a smile, and then with sudden sweet mirth. She ran to the door and called to the wet nurse who was waiting outside. “Bring in the child!” she exclaimed, and when the child was delivered to her she held him in her arms, and he crowed and nuzzled her.

  “Your son,” she said to Diodorus. “The son you neglected and would hardly see, because you believed he had caused his mother’s death. The darling boy, who is like both you and Aurelia. Look at him! He does not know you, you fierce Roman.”

  Then she thrust the child into his father’s arms and threw back her head and laughed like a girl. Priscus screeched happily, and tugged at Diodorus’ hair. The tribune looked at Iris, and all his delivered soul was in his eyes, and all his love.

  “No,” said Iris, and her rosy face dimpled. “You must kiss him first!

  Part Two

  “If a man looks with loving compassion on his suffering fellow men, and out of his bitterness inquires of the gods, ‘Why do you afflict my brothers?’ then surely he is gazed upon more tenderly by God than a man who congratulates Him on being merciful so that he flourishes happily, and has only words of adoration to offer. For the first prays out of love and pity, divine attributes, and so close to the heart of God, and the other speaks out of selfish complacency, a beastly attribute, which does not approach the circumambient light of the spirit of God.”

  — Horace

  Chapter Sixteen

  Iris wrote to her son, Lucanus:

  It is nearly four years since we last met, my dear and beloved son, and you have steadfastly invented excuses not to come to Rome, which I confess is not so beautiful as Syria. Nevertheless, we live quietly on our estates and enjoy the peace of the evening and the bright crystal of the morning. It is enough for me. Your sister, Aurelia, will soon be three years old, and she is the light of our souls, with her golden hair and eyes as brown and soft as the heart of a daisy. There is nothing she can demand, in her infant insistence, from Diodorus, her father, that he will not grant immediately, in spite of my protests. Your brother Priscus is Aurelia’s fondest playmate, and his tyrant, a state of affairs which he endures with the most affable merriment. Your new brother, Gaius Octavius, named for your father’s old comrade in arms, is almost a year old, and a very serious boy, with my blue eyes and his father’s sober expression. He laughs seldom, and prefers to crawl over the grass and inspect each blade intently. He is certainly a philosopher. If only my son, Lucanus, were with us, we should be the happiest of mortals. You shall not escape us! In three months you will be bereft of excuses, for you will have left Alexandria, a physician.

  In the past year Diodorus has become restless. He is a man of action as well as a man of thought. For a long time he was content with his library, his olive and palm groves, his garden, his fields, and his family. Philo visited us, the Jewish philosopher, who is much admired and esteemed in Rome, and the two talked to the dawn incessantly. Since then Diodorus has begun to brood, and to visit Rome at least every seven days, and returns in a most irascible temper, and with a fresh sense of outrage. It is not possible, I say to him, for a single man to save the world or set it aright, and this serves only to make him the more irritable. I often hear him cursing in his library, and once he hurled a quantity of books against the walls and stamped heavily up and down for hours. But he is as gentle as a dove to me, his wife, and to our children. Perhaps when you visit us — and I pray that you will remain with us — you will be able to lighten his gloomy expression and solace him.

  Her letter glowed with her gentle love and contentment, and her solicitude for her family. Lucanus could feel these things, and he moved restlessly in the great garden near the main marble colonnade. The floor of the colonnade was of dark yellow marble, but the double row of Ionic columns gleamed like fluted snow as they rose from the floor to the white roof. Two men paced up and down in the sunset, one a respectful tall student and the other the short and harpy-faced master of mathematics, Claudius Vesalius. The golden light brightened them as they paced between the columns. Sometimes Claudius Vesalius paused to gesticulate vehemently, and his shrill womanish voice disturbed the peaceful birds, and most especially disturbed Lucanus. The teacher liked none of his students; in particular he did not like Lucanus because the young man was the best mathematician in the university and yet obdurately insisted upon becoming a physician. Lucanus smiled slightly, thinking of this. Every teacher believed his own art to be the most important of all, and all others of minor significance, with the exception of Joseph ben Gamliel, who believed God the only Importance, and all art and science and knowledge, like the roads of omnipresent Rome, leading only to a greater understanding of God and to the City of God. But then Joseph ben Gamliel was a Jew.

  The university covered eight acres of land, an agora roughly square-shaped around immense tropical gardens, and all four sides were of colonnades such as the one now facing Lucanus. Each school had its particular doorway, entered from the gardens and the colonnades, and here were the schools of democracy, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, art, architecture, drama, science, epic, didactic and elegiac poetry, grammar, languages and philology, law, history and astronomy and literature. There was also a school of government for young Romans who aspired to public service, a museum guarded by vigilant Egyptian teachers, the world’s most famous library, an odeum or music hall, and beyond the agora itself a theater for hopeful young dramatists, and a pantheon. Each teacher believed his own stoa to house the most profound learning — and the most stupid of students, unworthy to be taught by such a master. Only Joseph ben Gamliel possessed humility, and his stoa of Oriental religion was the only peaceful place, unmarred by hectoring voices and imprecations against ass-headed students regularly consigned to Hades and advised to study brickmaking, or even lesser trades. It was nothing for the teachers to say, violently, “My idiot students and I resemble the Laocoon, and who will deliver me from the serpents!” But Joseph ben Gamliel would say gently, “Let us contemplate God together and try to discover His Most Holy designs.”

  Again, thinking of this teacher, Lucanus moved restlessly on his marble bench in the center of the gardens. He, alone, found no peace in the stoa of Joseph ben Gamliel. He often wondered, somberly, why the teacher frequently sought him out to talk with him in the gardens.

  The buildings of the school, behind the colonnades, hid the sea, but Lucanus could hear its eternally unquiet voice speaking to the golden light and to the skies. Why did not Claudius Vesalius, whose shrill voice whined continuously at the silent student, go away so that the gardens could bring Lucanus the only quietude he ever knew? The great gardens lay about him, musical with fountains,
brilliant with flower beds, rattling sweetly with palms, murmurous with the sea wind, harmoniously alive with the calls, songs, and sleepy chatter of birds. The dark-faced slaves who came to the fountains for water, carrying their terra-cotta jugs on their shoulders, or the slaves reaching for golden clusters of dates from the palms to put in their baskets, or the slaves raking up the red-earthed paths among the flower beds did not disturb Lucanus. They were part of the natural flora and fauna. Their dusky skins contrasted beautifully with the many tall statues of gods, goddesses, and scholars and philosophers which rose with white and powerful grace from bowers and looked upon the gardens with dignity and majesty. The perfume of roses, lilies and jasmine, and more pungent scents, lifted like unseen webs of fragrance in the early evening air. A parrot suddenly squawked fussily, and a slave laughed and held out a date to the bird, which flashed from a grove of trees to light in a flutter of scarlet and green and yellow on the slave’s shoulder. He ate daintily of the date, and with an air of tolerant politeness. “Rascal,” said the slave, in Egyptian. The bird cocked a wise and humorous eye at him, and that eye was alert, cynical, and bright in the golden air. Lucanus felt an impulse to laugh. As if the parrot felt that amusement, he uttered a single harsh sound that resembled an oath. He turned his head and glared at the young man on his marble bench, then soared off to practice his swearing on the branch of a tree.