The Dream of Scipio

by Iain Pears

  It was not to counter his friend and rival’s ambition that Manlius left. It was because he knew, as his friend should have known, that Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely. For any army of barbarians marching under the Roman standard would accomplish nothing except looting, and the wrath of Euric would be the greater for the attempt to block him. In trying to save everything, everything would be lost.

  So Manlius reasoned, and in order to accomplish his aims he made haste, as much as the roads and baggage would allow. He rode on a donkey—or rather, he took a donkey with him so that he could transfer to it when they neared the Burgundian encampment. A little detail, but an important one nonetheless. He was going as a bishop, not as a politician or a landowner, and needed to make this clear.

  For the first time he gave a task to his adopted son when he left; it was time that his family assisted him, he considered. “Go into Vaison, Syagrius. Keep watch on the mood of the people there,” he said. “Do nothing but listen; find out who is the most afraid, who is most on my side. I will need this information when I return.”

  Syagrius nodded eagerly; he had been waiting for such a commission, was desperate to show his worth. But Manlius took no leave of him as a father should of a son. Instead, he turned, mounted his horse, and began talking to the estate manager. Then he wheeled the beast around and rode off.

  He talked little on the way; there was no one he wished to talk to. Of the thirty people traveling with him, not one had enough to say to tempt him out of his silence. Going through a valley toward the end of a day, after a hard drive that lasted ten hours, he saw the sunset, framed between the body of the hill and a decayed fruit orchard, long abandoned. The noise of wasps and bees gorging themselves on the fruit that had fallen unwanted to the ground was so loud they could hear it a full half hour before they passed by.

  A bittersweet reference to Hesiod would have begun an exchange with more cultivated travelers, the theme developing into a discussion of the idea of descent, from the age of gold into the brute age of iron. Could the process be reversed? Could the age of iron be made to give way to a new age of peace and prosperity? What a pleasure to have such a discussion, to swim in the comfort of shared ideas and shared memories, to prepare for the encounter to come. Manlius instead had to have the conversation in his head, and later wrote it down (in edited form) as what became ff23-25 of Olivier’s copy of The Dream of Scipio. He dwelt there on the divine and inevitability, a subtle (if inevitably sketchy) discussion of free will, pleased with himself for avoiding any reference whatsoever to the ponderous Christian contributions on the topic.

  Are we fated or not? Can we individually alter what is to come? Are civilizations as a whole, mankind as a race, doomed to rise, then decline, from gold to silver to the brutality of iron? Was he—for this was the essence of the conversation he never had—fighting against the gods in trying to fend off disaster?

  No, says Sophia. Polite but sure in her correctness, deriving the logic from Plato, but refined by near eight centuries of consideration into a form he would scarcely have recognized. You cannot change fate; even the gods (a reference here to Lucian, unspotted by Gersonides but picked up by Julien) are subject to the whim of Lachesis. She and her sister fates alone know what is to be, but they do not care.

  The question is a false one, for the concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. There is no reward for good behavior, as the Christians suppose, no judge to decide. The more nearly our soul resembles the divine, the closer it is able to approach the model from which it was formed and which it ceased resembling when it became tainted by the material on falling to earth. Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. Faith means nothing, for we are too corrupted to apprehend the truth.

  Rephrase the question, then: Can Manlius Hippomanes, trudging northward with his small entourage, reverse the decline and restore tranquillity to the land? Possibly not, nor does it matter. The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; success or failure is secondary. The good man, the philosopher—the terms to Manlius were the same—would strive to act rightly and discount the opinion of the world. Only other philosophers could judge a philosopher, for only they can grasp what lies beyond the world.

  DID MANLIUS DISPLAY a sense of humor in the Dream, of a sort utterly undetectable in any of his other writings? Certainly, there was a touch of the whimsical about it that added to the difficulty of its comprehension. For his Scipio was modeled in form but not in nature on the more famous work written nearly half a millennium previously by Cicero; the modifications look backward and forward simultaneously, bringing the past of Rome’s golden age into association with a future that was dark and uncertain.

  Cicero’s great work—much commented on for nearly two millennia—was a part of his Republica, a final survey of the problem of civic virtue conducted through the mouth of Scipio Africanus, the most noble Roman of them all. In it the younger Scipio dreams he meets the older one and is shown the marvels of the universe, and has explained to him the way in which the actions of great men in society are part of the universal harmony, required by the divine.

  Manlius re-angled the work and gave it a more melancholic, less optimistic twist. This time it is Manlius who is in reverie: The title refers to a dream about Scipio, not a dream by him, and it is occasioned by the prologue in which he discusses philosophy with Sophia. She mentions the famous remarks by Scipio when he sees Carthage ruined, and weeps lest the same fate befall Rome in its turn.

  A pregnant moment; the sentence also inspired Saint Augustine to write The City of God after the sack of 410 brought Scipio’s terrible vision to pass. Internal evidence suggests that Manlius must have read Augustine’s great work; his treatise was the last pagan response to it, before the unstoppable momentum of Christianity extinguished all dissent. In his hands the sack of Rome by Alaric becomes the symbol of the end of civilization, the final extinction of anything of value. Manlius begins his journey of exploration in darkness, and is only slowly led by Sophia to a new light. Not the light of Christianity, that barbarian religion; civilization cannot be destroyed so easily.

  Sophia takes him to the Capitoline and shows him Rome, burning and destroyed, and reassures him when he begins to weep: “Rome has fallen from its glory, yet in its decrepitude is still more magnificent than the mind of man can easily imagine. Stand on this sacred spot and turn around; see the city stretch before you, so vast you cannot see its end.” And suddenly, from his vantage point, Manlius can see the whole world in the finest detail, can see men of goodwill rebuilding, stone by stone. He sees libraries reconstructed, and men discussing philosophy once more, and walking in fine gardens. “Philosophy cannot be extinguished, though men will try,” she tells him. “The spirit seeks the light, that is its nature. It wishes to return to its origin, and must try forever to reach enlightenment.”

  “Most are unaware of the need,” Manlius objects. “They prefer the foolish belief and the passions of the earth. They believe the absurd and shrink from the truth.”

  “No, they do not. They are afraid, that is all. And they must remain on earth until they come to the way of leaving it.”

  “And how do they leave? How is the ascent made? Must one learn virtue?”

  Here she laughs. “You have read too much, and learned too little. Virtue is a road, not a destination. Man cannot be virtuous. Understanding is the goal. When that is achieved, the soul can take wing.”

  And so on; at every level, the Bishop of
Vaison, Saint Manlius, launches attack after attack on Christianity, contradicting it at every turn. The soul is general, not individual; eternal, not specific in time. The body is a prison, not something meriting resurrection. Faith is corruption, Hope is deception, Charity illusion; all must be surpassed.

  “But how must we live?” Manlius asks. “If man cannot be virtuous, can there be no good man?”

  “Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.”

  A remarkable sentence, which struck Julien when he read it, for Manlius completely overturns orthodoxy, whether Platonic or Christian. The point of civilization is to be civilized; the purpose of action is to perpetuate society, for only in society can philosophy truly take place. Only a man who realized civilization might not continue could have reformulated classical ideas in such a way; only a man contemplating drastic action could have penned such a self-justification. Only with such an aim could the pagan pretend to be a Christian, the friend abandon his friends.

  As a piece of philosophy, it was not of the highest order; Manlius abandoned the syllogistic form and scarcely argues at all. Through the mouth of Sophia, he instructs merely. His style was as elliptical as usual, perhaps because it was hastily written. References and allusions peppered the pages but appeared to have been inserted unconsciously; Julien had to summon all his knowledge to track down the quotations from Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, Alcinous, Proclus, references from lost works to which he could give only tentative attributions; then he had to analyze the mistakes and decide whether they were deliberate or accidental. And finally, he had to come to some conclusion—had Manlius made a genuine contribution to later Neoplatonism, or was it a semi-digested rehash of old ideas? Was the manuscript more use as philosophy or as a historical document?

  It was so much easier for Gersonides, and easier still for Olivier, for the rabbi was largely, the Christian totally, innocent of the scholarly apparatus that revealed the complexity of the document.

  Occasionally, when the solitude began to overwhelm even her, she would pack her bag and walk down the crumbly, slippery track to the village, to buy food or water, or sketch in the sun of the little square. She became, indeed, a figure of curiosity and some small suspicion; many were concerned at an outsider interfering with the shrine, and were fearful of her intentions. Within the first week of her discovery of it, she had numerous visitors—old women, young girls, shepherds—who just happened to find themselves nearby and came to investigate. Initially she was irritated by the waste of time, put off by the blank, dumb way they stood behind her as she worked, never asking questions, never showing any real interest that she could meet, never giving her a chance to explain herself.

  But slowly the power of place settled over her; she no more resented them than she resented the goats whose bells clanged noisily outside as they fed, or the occasional sheep that wandered in out of idle curiosity. And eventually she discovered that they were proud of this saint, eager to answer questions about her. She began to jot down the stories they told her in a notebook before the setting sun made it too dark to read anymore, and as the weeks passed, she also jotted down variants in the stories, grouping them into themes and categories, trying to distinguish the few kernels of truly old legend from recent accretions or borrowings. The saint’s reputation for curing poor sight was one constant theme, as was her prowess at giving good advice, but she also, it seemed, had other powers, particularly in curing all sorts of maladies. The affectionate way her limitations were recognized was also notable, and Julia first paid attention to this when the blacksmith’s wife, Elizabeth Duveau, came up to the chapel one day.

  She was working hard and didn’t notice that anyone had come in behind her. Eventually a slight rustling sound made her stop her work and turn round. Elizabeth was standing a few feet away from her, staring stonily at her back.

  “Oh, hello,” Julia said. Elizabeth nodded and continued to look at her. Eventually, Julia realized she was looking at her left hand; she followed the gaze to try to work out what she found so interesting.

  “No,” she said when she thought she’d worked it out. “No ring.”

  “You won’t be having children,” she commented.

  “I doubt it.”

  “You left it too late.”

  “Probably.”

  “Why was that?” came the question with that alarming directness she was slowly becoming used to.

  She put down her paper with a sigh, her concentration gone. “I don’t know. I’ve never met anyone I needed to live with until now.”

  Elizabeth wiped a bead of sweat from her nose. “Nor have I. But I’ve been married to Pierre for fifteen years. Her fault.”

  Julia looked perplexed. “Whose fault?”

  She gestured in the general direction of the altar. “Pierre proposed to me in 1925. September, it was. I didn’t love him, and I knew already he drank too much, but I was past twenty and laughed at as an old maid. I dreamed someone else might ask, but he didn’t and no one else was likely to come along. So what could I do? I could go to the town and work as a servant or stay where I was and marry Pierre, who had good money as a blacksmith. A catch, he was. So I asked Sophia. She’d given good advice when I’d asked before.

  “But not this time. She is not reliable in this area. Of course, she was never married herself, so perhaps that explains it. But she said I most certainly should marry him, and I took her advice.”

  At least it got the conversation off Julia’s own life. “How did she tell you this?”

  “The usual way. I dreamed that I was cold and hungry, living on the streets of Marseille, that no one would talk to me or give me work or food. So I took the warning, and stayed where I was, in the village, and married Pierre. And I have spent the last fifteen years wondering whether she was really trying hard enough.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “How long have you known Julien?”

  “Oh. Years. Fifteen years. Something like that.”

  Julia felt the dark, inquisitive eyes studying her. “I’ve known him since he was eight.” She said it in almost a proprietorial fashion, as though it gave her a superior claim of some sort.

  “Does everyone know she is not very good at this sort of advice?”

  She was thinking of something else, and Julia had to repeat the question before she came back. “Heavens, yes,” she said eventually. “Even children know it. When they see a girl walking out with an unsuitable boy, they say she must have been talking to Sophia.”

  “How do you know she wasn’t married?”

  Elizabeth paused to consider a question she found strange. “Why would she have spent her life up here if she’d had a man and a hearth to tend?” The practicality of the response was unanswerable. “No; she was alone, and came up here to live in prayer. And was a good person, which is why people came to ask her advice even before they knew she was a saint. There were many miracles after she died, which is a sign. Of course, there are old stories.”

  “Which ones?”

  She looked sheepish. “Old wives’ tales,” she said. “My mother used to tell me. But even she didn’t believe them.”

  “Please tell me.”

  “Oh, it’s about the blind man she cured. It is said that the first thing he saw when he began to see was Sophia’s face, and he cried out in delight and said that he had seen her face in his dreams many a time, and that he had loved her all his life. And that he asked her to marry him, but she refused because she was virginal and pure. And he pined away with sorrow until she talked to him and brought him to God. But he always loved her, and swore that he would wait for all eternity until he could be united with
her, and have her acknowledge his love. And she said she would wait until he understood what love was. It’s something old women say to daughters to make them go to sleep. That’s all.”

  She turned away to the altar, and Julia walked outside to leave her in peace. She sat on the steps in the sunshine, basking in the heat like one of the lizards that sat motionless all around her, looking down across the valley to the lavender fields beyond the woods. She fell asleep; must have done, for when she opened her eyes once more, the blacksmith’s wife was already far in the distance, slowly picking her way through the stones and weeds.

  Julia waved, but got no acknowledgment, then sat down for one of the best meals she had ever eaten, of bread and wine and salami. She felt entirely safe, and utterly happy.

  “Don’t you see, Julien, that there is no room here for your delicacies?” Marcel replied with a sigh. “That your fastidiousness is out of place? Selfish? We have to keep government going. Have to keep it in the hands of men of moderation. Don’t you see that?”

  Julien continued to look uneasy, unconvinced. “And you are a man of moderation?” he felt like asking, but he knew the answer. Yes, Marcel was indeed, in comparison to those others snapping at his heels.

  ONLY JULIA SUGGESTED a different course of action when he went back to what he now considered his real home to be with her. “You are doing things you dislike so that others won’t be able to do worse. Are you sure that is not the case for everyone? Isn’t that what your friend Marcel is doing? The policeman who arrests people in the night? The prime minister? Even Pétain himself? They are all doing things they would prefer not to in order to prevent worse. The evil committed by good men is the worst of all, because they know better and do it anyway. Isn’t that what that manuscript of yours says?”