The Death of the Gods

by Dmitry Merezhkovsky

The young girl, with a charming movement of her bare arm, threw back her mauve tunic and in her turn flung the liquid. The little cup of the kottabos rang upon the statuette. Amaryllis began laughing and clapping her hands. Suddenly, on the threshold they saw Julian, and both rushed to welcome him. Amaryllis cried—

  “Diophane! where art thou? Come and see what guest we’ve got to-day. Quick, quick!”

  Diophane ran from the kitchen.

  “Julian, my darling child!... Don’t you think he is grown thinner? How long it is since we have seen you!...”

  And she added, radiant with good humour—

  “You may well be merry, children, for this evening we shall have a real feast. I’m going to prepare crowns of fresh roses; I shall fry three perch, and make you cakes of gingerbread!”

  At this moment a young slave accosted Olympiodorus and whispered in his ear that a rich patrician lady of Cæsarea wished to see him, having something to discuss with the priest of Aphrodite.

  Olympiodorus followed the slave. Julian and Amaryllis went on with the game of kottabos. Presently a little twelve-year-old girl came shyly up to them. It was Psyche, the pale fair-haired and youngest child of Olympiodorus. She had great sad blue eyes, and, alone in the house, seemed a stranger to the cult of Aphrodite, and apart from the general gaiety. Keeping aloof from the rest, she would remain musing while others were laughing, and nobody knew what made her sad, or what gave her pleasure. Her father pitied her as one incurably sick, ruined by the evil eye or by the witchcrafts of his eternal enemies the Galileans, who had carried off the soul of his child in revenge.

  The dark Amaryllis was the favourite daughter of Olympiodorus: but the mother secretly spoiled Psyche, and loved with jealous passion the delicate child whose inner life was hidden from her. Psyche, unknown to her father, and in despite of the caresses, prayers, and even the threats of her mother, used to attend the basilican church of St. Maurice. Anguished on discovering this, the priest of Venus had renounced Psyche; and when her name was mentioned, his brow would cloud over with a bitter expression. He was sure that it was by reason of the impiety of his child that the vine, once blessed by Aphrodite, produced fewer fruits than of yore; he believed that the little golden crucifix worn on the child’s neck had profaned the temple of the indignant goddess.

  “Why do you go to that church?” Julian asked her one day.

  “I don’t know; it is comfortable there. Have you seen the Good Shepherd?”

  “Yes, the Galilean! How did you know about Him?”

  “Old Theodula told me. Ever since then I have gone to church; and, tell me, Julian, why do they all hate the Good Shepherd?”

  At this moment Olympiodorus returned in triumph and narrated his interview with the patrician lady, a young girl whom her betrothed had abandoned. She believed him bewitched by the amulets of a rival. Many a time had she gone to the Christian church and besought St. Mamas with an aching heart, but neither fasts nor prostrations had snapped the evil charm.

  “As if the Christians could console her!” Olympiodorus contemptuously concluded, throwing a keen glance at the attentive Psyche. “This Christian girl has now sought my help, and Aphrodite will heal her!”

  He produced the two white pigeons, bound together, which the Christian had begged him to offer as a sacrifice to the goddess of love. Amaryllis took the little creatures in her hand, and kissed their rosy beaks, declaring that it would be a thousand pities to kill them.

  “Father, we will offer them to the goddess without spilling a drop of blood!”

  “How? There can be no sacrifice without bloodshed.”

  “We will give them liberty. They shall fly away clean into heaven, straight to the footstool of Aphrodite. Is she not in the sky? She will accept them. Let me do this, darling father, I beg of you!”

  Olympiodorus had not the heart to deny this entreaty; and the young girl, unbinding the pigeons tossed them back to liberty. They fled away into the sky with a delirious beating of white wings, making for the footstool of Aphrodite. Shading his eyes with his hands the priest watched the offering of the convert disappear into the clouds, while Amaryllis danced with joy, crying—

  “Aphrodite, Aphrodite, receive the gift!”

  Olympiodorus went out. Julian, solemn-faced and timorous, approached Amaryllis; his cheeks grew red, and his voice trembled as he pronounced the name of the young girl.

  “Amaryllis, I have brought you——”

  “Ah! I have long been going to ask you what it could be.”

  “It is a galley with three banks of oars!”

  “A galley! What do you mean?”

  “A real Liburnian galley.”

  He immediately began to unroll his present, but suddenly aware that Amaryllis was watching him, he felt ineffable shame, became confused, and with an imploring look at the damsel, slid the ship into the basin of the fountain.

  “You see, Amaryllis ... it is a trireme ... a real trireme, with—with—sails ... and ... its rudder.... Look how well it gets under way!”

  But Amaryllis laughed heartily.

  “What an odd boy you are! What in the world should I do with your trireme? I fear it wouldn’t take me very far. It’s a ship for mice and flies. Make a present of it to Psyche; she will be delighted with it.”

  Julian, though deeply hurt, assumed indifference, while tears choked his speech. Controlling himself, he said disdainfully, but with trembling lips—

  “I see that you don’t understand anything ... about art.”

  Amaryllis laughed yet more heartily. To add insult to injury, a summons came for her to receive her betrothed, a rich merchant from Samos, who dressed badly, perfumed his person, and spoke vile grammar. Julian hated him, and when he learnt of the arrival of the Samian, the charm of the house vanished so far as he was concerned.

  From the neighbouring room he could hear the distracting chatter of Amaryllis and the voice of her lover.

  Without uttering a word, and filled with cold hatred, Julian seized his cherished trireme—the real Liburnian trireme which had cost him such endless pains—and before the startled eyes of Psyche, snapped the mast, tore down the sails, tangled the rigging, and stamped the toy into atoms with his feet.

  Amaryllis returned. Her face bore traces of a strange happiness, of that superfluity of life and love-joy which awakens in young girls an imperious need to embrace and to kiss those near them.

  “Julian ... forgive me ... I have pained you. Forgive me, dear! you know well that I love you.”

  And before he had time to make up his mind, Amaryllis, throwing back her tunic, imprisoned his head in her fresh bare arms. A delightful dread stopped the beating of Julian’s heart; he saw her great dark dewy eyes so close to him, the sweet odour of her body so overwhelmed him, and she locked him so close against her breast, that the boy grew giddy. He closed his eyes and felt a kiss long, too long, pressed upon his lips.

  The voice of the Samian broke the enchantment—

  “Amaryllis, Amaryllis! where art thou?”

  Julian putting forth all his strength pushed the girl away, his heart overflowed with pain and hatred, and crying, “Let me go, let me go!” snatched himself free and fled.

  Deaf and heedless he escaped from the house through the vineyards and the cypress wood; nor halted till he reached the temple of Aphrodite. Now and again he heard his name called, and the gay voice of Diophane, announcing that the cakes of gingerbread were ready; but he made no reply. Search was made for him. He lay in hiding in the thicket of laurels at the feet of Eros. Accustomed to his fits of moroseness, they gave up the search, satisfied that he had returned to Macellum.

  When all around was restored again to silence, Julian came out from his hiding-place and gazed at the temple of the goddess of love, lodged upon a gentle hill, and bare to view on all sides. The Ionic marble columns, flooded with sunshine, were softly steeped in the warmth of azure, receiving its ardent embraces with the cold purity of snow.

  Each corner of the fa�
�ade was surmounted by pedestalled griffins, with lifted talons, beaks gaping, and woman-shaped breasts, standing out, proud and austere, against the deep blue of the sky.

  Julian went up the steps into the portico, pushed open the bronze doors and penetrated the interior of the temple up to the very shrine, the naos.

  Silence and coolness surrounded him. The setting sun overhead still fell on the capitals of the columns, and their fine illumined scroll-work, contrasted with the penumbral shadow on the floor of the temple, seemed soft and bright as tresses of gold. A tripod, still burning, diffused the odour of myrrh.

  Julian, leaning against the wall, lifted his eyes in fear, restraining his breath till it almost died upon his lips.

  She, the goddess herself, was before him. Under the open sky, in the midst of the temple, stood, cold and white, new-born of the sea-foam, Aphrodite Anadyomene. With a smile she contemplated the heavens and the sea, wondering at their charm; as if unwitting still that their beauty was her own beauty, glassed in the eternal mirrors of the azure and the waters. No raiment profaned her divine body. Naked and chaste she rose, as the clear sky soaring above her.

  Julian gazed on with an insatiate gaze, and felt quick thrills of adoration sweep over his frame. The child, in his black monkish habit, knelt before Aphrodite, his face upturned, his hands pressed to his palpitating little heart.

  Then still aloof, still timorous, he sat at the foot of the column. He leant his cheek against the marble. Peace sank slowly into his soul. He fell asleep.

  But, even through that slumber, he was conscious of her presence.

  She came down towards him, nearer, nearer.... Her delicate white hands stole round his neck. The boy with a smile submitted to these passionless endearments; the cold of the marble chilled his very heart. That divine embrace bore no likeness to the wild clasp of Amaryllis. The soul of Julian, freeing itself from earthly love, entered depths of repose, as into some ambrosial night of Homer, or the sweet rest of the dead.

  * * *

  When Julian awoke it was night. Over the roofless quadrilateral stars were shining, and the crescent moon shedding her silver upon the head of the statue. Julian arose. Olympiodorus must have meanwhile been tending the temple, although he had either not observed or had refrained from waking the child; for now, on the bronze tripod, fresh charcoal was glowing, and a fillet of odorous smoke arising towards the goddess.

  Julian smiling approached, and from the chrysolite cup, between the feet of the tripod, took a few grains of incense and flung them on the coals. Smoke rose more thickly, and the ruddy glow of the fire, like a pale flush of life, came over the face of the statue, contending with the soft new-born shine of the moon.

  Julian bowed down and kissed the marble feet, and watered them with his tears, exclaiming—

  “Aphrodite! Aphrodite! thou shalt be my everlasting love!”

  * * *

  VI

  In one of the foul and dirty quarters of the Syrian Seleucia, the port for Antioch on the shores of the Inner Sea, narrow and tortuous alleys debouched into a market-place lying along the quays. The sea-horizon was invisible, so thick was the throng of masts and the tangle of rigging. The houses were a mass of miserable little shells, whitewashed within and encumbered with furniture. Their fronts were garnished with tattered carpets, dirty fragments of cloth, and ravelled matting. In every nook and hovel and crowded court, along kennels and gutters of dirty fever-stricken water from laundries and baths of the poor, there lay seething in its penury and hunger a populace strangely cosmopolitan.

  The sun, after thoroughly baking the earth, had just descended below the horizon; wide-winged twilight was settling slowly down; a stifling heat of dust and fog still weighed on the spirits of the city. From the market square breathed a suffocating atmosphere of flesh and vegetables, becoming rotten through lying all day in the blaze of the sun. Half-naked slaves were carrying bales of merchandise from the ships. Their heads were close-shaven; through their rags could be seen horrible blotches on the skin; and the greater number bore on their faces, in brandings by red-hot iron, the Latin letters C. F., that is to say Cave Furem (’ware thief!).

  Braziers were being slowly lighted. But notwithstanding the approach of night, traffic and discussion gave no sign of ceasing in the network of alleys. From a neighbouring forge piercing blows of the hammer resounded on bars of iron, and flames shot up the sooty draught-hole. Hard by, slaves of a bakery, naked, covered from head to foot in flour-dust, and with eyelids inflamed by heat, were putting loaves into an oven. A shoemaker sat in his open-air stall, amid an insupportable smell of cobbler’s glue and leather, stitching shoes by the light of a smoky lamp. He was squatting on his heels, and chanting desert songs at the top of his voice. Two old hags like witches, with hair streaming in the wind, were slowly passing across the little square in front of a row of hovels. They were yelling at each other, wrangling and threatening each other with fists and stones. The subject of dispute was the ownership of a cord on which to dry linen. A huckster, from a distant village, was hurrying along to be in time for the morning market. He was mounted on an old mare, flanked with wicker paniers, each heaped with rotting fish; the fetid smell of his load made passers-by edge off to a distance. A loutish urchin, with red hair and skin, was solacing his soul by beating on a great pan, while other children, a sickly multitude coming into the world and leaving it by hundreds daily, marched amidst this scene of poverty, grunting like pigs, round the pools of the quay. The water was full of orange-peel and egg-shells. In yet more villainous passages, inhabited by thieves, the smell of sour wine came from wine-shops, and sailors from every beach of the world marched along arm in arm, shouting drunken songs.

  Surrounding all that noise, that filth and spilth of human misery, there murmured, sighed, and grumbled, the infinite, distant, and invisible sea.

  Directly over against the subterranean kitchen windows of a Phœnician dealer, ragged gamblers were playing at knuckle-bones, and gossiping. From the kitchen warm gusts of boiling gravy, game, and spices ascended, greedily snuffed-up, with closed eyes, by the hungry gamesters.

  A certain Christian, a dyer of purple, dismissed for theft from a rich factory at Tyre, was murmuring, as he hungrily sucked a mallow-leaf thrown away by the cook,—

  “And at Antioch, my friends, what’s going on there makes one shiver at nights, just to think of it. Why, a few days ago the hungry folk tore in pieces the Prefect Theophilus—and for what reason? Nobody knows! When the thing was done they remembered too late that the poor wretch was a good sort of fellow and a respectable man. I suggested that perhaps the Emperor had pointed him out for punishment.”

  A consumptive old man, a very skilful cardsharper, replied—

  “I have seen the Cæsar, and I like him. Quite young, fair as flax, with a good-natured, fat face. But, as you say, what crimes are committed nowadays! what crimes indeed! Why one can’t put one’s nose outside the door without danger.”

  “Ah, that’s nothing to do with Cæsar! it’s his wife, Constantia, the old witch, that does it!”

  But strange personages came near the knot of talkers and thrust themselves forward, as if desiring to take part in the conversation.

  If the kitchen firelight had been brighter, it would have been noticed that their faces were begrimed and their clothes fouled and torn like those of stage-beggars; and notwithstanding their raggedness the hands of these persons were fine and white, and their nails pared and crimsoned. One of them whispered in his comrade’s ear—

  “Listen, Agamemnon; here also they’re talking about Cæsar.”

  He whom they called Agamemnon appeared to be drunk. He wore a beard, which was too thick and long to be natural, and gave him the aspect of a fantastic brigand. His eyes were debonair, almost boyish, and of a bright blue. His friends frequently pulled him back, muttering—

  “Now then be careful!”

  The consumptive old man went on in a whining tone—

  “Now tell me plainly,
my friends, is it just? The price of bread is going up every day. People dying like flies. And, suddenly, guess what happens? Lately a great ship came from Egypt; everybody’s happy, thinking that it brings bread. The word goes round that Cæsar has made the ship come to feed the people. And what do you think it was, my friends? Powder, Alexandrian powder, if you please! a special pink Libyan powder to rub down the wrestlers!—powder for the Emperor’s gladiators—powder instead of bread!... Eh?... Now is that justice?”

  Agamemnon nudged his companion’s elbow.

  “Ask his name, quick—ask!”

  “Gently, wait a bit....”

  A leather dresser remarked—

  “Here in Seleucia the town is quiet, but up at Antioch there are nothing but traitors, spies, and informers.”

  The dyer, licking the mallow-leaf for the last time, growled and mumbled—

  “Yes, unless God comes down to help us, soon flesh and blood will be going a deal cheaper than bread and wine!”

  The currier, a philosophic tippler, sighed—

  “Ah! ah! ah! we’re all poor creatures! The gods of Olympus play at ball with us! Men weep and the gods laugh!”

  The companion of Agamemnon meanwhile had succeeded in joining the conversation, and with nonchalant adroitness acertained the names of the talkers. He had intercepted the news, conveyed by the cobbler to the leather-dresser, about a plot hatched against Cæsar’s life by the soldiers of the Pretorian guard. Then, strolling on a few paces, he had written down the names of the talkers with a jewelled stilus on tablets of soft wax, where many other names were inscribed already. At this moment hoarse sounds like the roarings of some subterranean monster came from the market square. They were the notes, now plaintive, now lively, of a hydraulic organ.

  At the entrance to a showman’s travelling booth, a blind slave, for four obols a day, was pumping up the water which produced this extraordinary harmony.

  Agamemnon dragged his companion towards the booth, a great tent with blue awnings sprinkled with silver tinsel. A lantern lighted the black-board on which the order of the programme was chalked up, in Syriac and Greek. An oppressive atmosphere of garlic and lamp-oil prevailed inside, where, beside the organ, there struck up the wailing of two harsh flutes, while a negro, rolling the whites of his eyes, thrummed on an Arab drum. A dancer was skipping to and fro on a tight-rope, keeping time to the music with his hands, and singing the latest street song: