“Multa tuæ, Sparte, miramur jura palæstræ,
Sed mage virginei, tot bona gymnasii,
Quod non infames exercet corpore ludos
Inter luctantes nuda puella viros?”
“Who is she?” asked Julian.
“I don’t know. I never wanted to know.”
“That is well! Hush!”
Now he gazed eagerly and without shame at the girl hurling the disk. Blushes were unworthy of a philosopher.
She retreated some steps, inclined her body forward, and advancing the left leg made a swift bounding movement, and shot the metal circle so high that it shone in the rising sun, and in falling struck the farthest pillar. It was like watching the motions of a statue by Phidias.
“That shot was the best,” said a little twelve-year-old damsel, clad in a rich tunic and standing near the column.
“Myrrha, give me the disk,” replied the player. “I can throw it higher than that, as you shall see. Meroë, get farther out of the way. I might hurt you, as Apollo hurt Hyacinthus.”
Meroë, an old Egyptian, to judge by her multi-coloured vestments and tanned visage, was preparing in alabaster jars perfumes for a bath. Julian understood that the mute slave of the gate and the white-horsed chariot outside must belong to these two votaries of the Laconian games.
After the disk-throwing the young girl took from Myrrha a bow and a quiver, and drew thence a long arrow. She aimed at a black circle at the opposite end of the ephebeion; the string hummed, the arrow flew whistling and stuck in the target: then a second, then a third.
“O huntress Artemis!” sighed Publius.
Suddenly a sunbeam slipping between two columns shot into the face and youthful breast of the young girl. Throwing bow and arrows aside in sudden bedazzlement, she hid her face in her hands.
Swallows, uttering their faint fine chirpings, undulated about the exercise-ground, and pursuing each other vanished into the blue of the sky.
She uncovered her face and raised her arms above her head.
Its fair hair, golden at its ends as honey in the sun, at its roots was auburn; her lips half opened in a happy smile, she suffered the sun to bathe her body, gliding lower and lower yet, till she stood clothed, as in the loveliest raiment, in pure light and beauty.
“Myrrha,” the girl murmured slowly and dreamily, “look at the sky! How beautiful it would be to bathe in it, like those birds! Do you remember our saying that men could not be happy because they had no wings? When I look at the birds I am consumed with envy. One should be light and bare as I am at this moment, and winging high up in the sky, and knowing that one could fly forever—that there should be nothing else but sky and sun about one’s light and free and naked body!”
Drawing herself up to her full height with out-stretched arms she sighed deeply, as at some remembered joy fled away for ever.
The burning caress of the sun now reached her waist. Suddenly she shivered and grew ashamed, as if some living and passionate being had approached her. With one hand she shielded her breast, with the other the abdomen, the immortal gesture of Aphrodite of Cnidos.
“Meroë, give me my clothes! quick, Meroë!” she exclaimed, with eyes wide open and startled.
Julian never remembered how he came forth from the wrestling-ground; his heart was on fire. The poet’s face was solemn as that of a man quitting a temple.
“You are not annoyed?” he asked Julian.
“No; why should I be?”
“Perhaps a Christian might find it a temptation?”
“There was nothing of temptation there for me. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly; that is what I thought.”
And again they found themselves on the dusty high road, where the sun was already hot, and bent their steps towards Athens.
Publius continued in an undertone, as it were talking to himself—
“Oh, how shameful, how deformed we are nowadays! Ashamed of our own morose and pitiful nakedness, we hide it because we feel ugly and impure. Whereas of old time.... Ah! there was a time when all was very different. Julian, the young girls of Sparta used to go out upon the wrestling-ground naked and haughty before all the people. Nobody feared temptation in those days. Folk were simple as children—as gods! And to think that nevermore shall that happen again; that the freedom, the cleanness, of that happy state shall be seen on earth no more!”
The poet’s chin fell on his breast, and he sighed drearily.
They came at last to the Street of Tripods, and hard by the Acropolis the friends separated and went their ways in silence.
Julian went into the shadow of the propylæa, through vast porches leading into temple-enclosures; but avoided the Decorated Porch, on which Parrhasius had chiselled the battles of Marathon and Salamis, and passing the little temple of the Wingless Victory ascended to the Parthenon.
He had but to shut his eyes to remember the superb body of Artemis the huntress. When he opened them the sun-bathed Parthenon marbles seemed golden and living as that divine body; and, despising Imperial spies and chances of death, he desired openly to worship and kiss the warm stones of that holy place.
Two black-robed young men of pale and severe countenance were standing near. They were Gregory of Nazianzen and Basil of Cæsarea. The Hellenists feared these two men as their most formidable foes. It was the hope of the Christians that the two friends would one day become fathers of the Church. They were now watching Julian.
“What’s the matter with him to-day?” said Gregory. “Is that the attitude of a monk? Are those the gestures of a monk? Do you see those closed eyes—that smile? Do you believe that his piety is genuine, Basil?”
“I have often watched him weeping and praying in church.”
“Mere hypocrisy!”
“If so, why does he come to us, seek our friendship, and argue over the Scriptures?”
“He’s deceiving himself; or perhaps he wishes to seduce the faithful. Never trust him! He is the tempter! Remember what I say, brother, the Roman Empire in fostering this young man is nursing an adder!”
The two friends went off, their eyes on the ground. The severe caryatids of the Erechtheum, the laughing blue of the sky, the white temple of the Wingless One, the Porches and the Parthenon, that wonder of the world, on them cast no spell. One thing alone did they desire: to lay all these haunts of demons in the dust. The long shadows of the monks fell on the Parthenon steps as they walked away.
“I must see her again,” Julian was thinking; “I must find out who she is.”
* * *
XIII
“The gods created mortals for one purpose only—polite conversation!”
“Charmingly said, Mamertinus! Say it again, I beg, before you’ve forgotten it! I’ll write that down with the other maxims,” declared Lampridius, the professor of eloquence, taking tablets from his pocket. His admired friend Mamertinus was a fashionable Athenian advocate.
“My dear fellow, I say,” repeated Mamertinus with the most delicate of smiles, “I merely say that men have been sent by the gods——”
“No, no, it didn’t run so, Mamertinus; you put it better. The gods created mortals——”
“Ah, yes; the gods created mortals for one purpose only—polite conversation!”
And the enthusiastic Lampridius scribbled down the words as if they had been the utterance of an oracle.
The scene was a friendly supper of men of letters given by the venerable Roman senator Hortensius, in the villa of his rich young ward Arsinoë, not far from the Piræus.
Mamertinus on that day had achieved a remarkable speech in defence of the banker Barnava. Nobody had the smallest doubt that Barnava was a complete scoundrel; but, besides measureless eloquence, the advocate possessed so telling a voice that one of the innumerable ladies who adored him avowed: “I never listen to what Mamertinus says; I have no wish to know what he’s talking about. I become intoxicated with the tones of his voice, and especially with the dying cadence at the end of his period
s. It is incredible! It is no longer a human voice, but nectar and ambrosia, the heavenly sighing of an Æolian harp!”
And so, while the populace labelled the money-lender Barnava “the blood-sucker,” the devourer of widows and orphans, the Athenian judges enthusiastically acquitted the client of Mamertinus.
From this client the advocate had received 50,000 sesterces, and therefore felt in no dissatisfied mood at the supper given by Hortensius in his honour. But it was his habit to affect the invalid, in order that he might be spoiled and petted the more.
“I am utterly done up to-day, my friends,” he murmured plaintively; “aching in every limb. Where is Arsinoë?”
“She will soon be here. Arsinoë has just received from the museum of Alexandria some new apparatus for experiments in physics; and she is entirely absorbed in them. But I will give an order to summon her,” suggested Hortensius.
“No, don’t do that,” responded the lawyer carelessly. “But what a ridiculous thing—a young girl at physics! What in the world has the one thing to do with the other? Your blue-stockings have been finely belaboured by Aristophanes and Euripides. Arsinoë is a whimsical creature, Hortensius! Really, if she wasn’t so attractive, what with her sculpture and her mathematics she would almost become——”
He did not finish the sentence, and gazed languidly out of the window.
“What am I to do?” replied Hortensius. “A spoiled child ... an orphan; no father, no mother! As her mere tutor, I can’t well deny her anything.”
“I see, I see.”
The lawyer was no longer listening; he was thinking about himself.
“My dear fellows, I feel——”
“What—what’s the matter?” asked several voices anxiously.
“I’m feeling—I fancy—a draught....”
“We’ll shut the shutters,” proposed the host.
“No, we should be stifled! But I’ve so worn out my voice to-day.... And I have to make another defence to-morrow. Give me a carpet under my feet, and my wrapper; I’m afraid of catching cold in the night chill.”
And Hephæstion, the friend of Publius and pupil of Lampridius, rushed away to get Mamertinus’ wrapper.
It was a piece of soft woollen stuff, daintily embroidered. The lawyer carried it everywhere to safeguard his precious throat from the faintest risk of cold.
Mamertinus nursed his own health like a lover, with so simple a grace, such a passion of self-solicitude, that his friends were instinctively constrained to think of nothing but nursing him too.
“This wrapper was embroidered for me by the venerable Fabiola,” he informed them with a smile.
“Wife of the senator?” asked Hortensius.
“Yes! I’ll tell you a little story about her. One day I wrote a note—a graceful trifle, but really a mere trifle—just five lines in Greek to another lady (also one of my admirers), who had sent me a basket of the most charming cherries. I thanked her in a frolicsome imitation of Pliny. But just imagine, my friends, Fabiola was seized with so violent a desire to read that letter and to copy it for her collection, that she sent two of her slaves to lie in wait for my messenger. So, brought to a halt in the middle of the night, not a soul in sight, he thought, of course, that brigands were about to strip him of lock, stock, and barrel. But they did him no harm, gave him money, and only took from him my letter, so that Fabiola might have the first reading of it. She actually learnt it by heart!”
“You don’t mean it? Ah, I know her! She is a most remarkable woman,” continued Lampridius. “I have seen myself that she keeps all your letters enclosed in a lemon-wood casket like so many jewels. She learns them by heart and declares that they are superior to any poetry. Fabiola argues, and argues rightly: ‘Since Alexander the Great used to keep the poems of Homer in a cedar-wood coffer, why shouldn’t I keep the letters of Mamertinus in a jewel-casket?’”
“This foie gras with saffron sauce is the height of perfection! I advise you to taste it.”
“Who made it, Hortensius?”
“My head-cook, Dædalus.”
“All honour to him!... he’s a poet.”
“Don’t let a goose’s liver run away with you, my dear Garguillus! A cook, a poet? You will offend the divine muses, our protectresses!”
“I affirm! and I shall always maintain! that cooking is an art as lofty as any other. It’s time to fling prejudices to the winds, Lampridius!”
Garguillus, the head of the Imperial chancery, was a man of enormous body, extremely fat, his triple chin scrupulously shaved and perfumed, and his grey hair closely cropped. His face was intelligent and noble; for many years he had been considered the indispensable guest at every supper of Athenian men of letters. Garguillus loved only two things in the world, a good table and a good style. Gastronomy and literature blended for him into a double bliss.
“Suppose now I take an oyster,” he was declaring while his delicate fingers, loaded with amethysts and rubies, brought the mollusc towards his mouth; “I take an oyster, and I swallow it"—and in fact he swallowed it, shutting his eyes, with a sucking and clucking noise of his upper lip, which was curiously greedy, and even rapacious, in its appearance. It was prominent, trussed into a point, oddly twisted, and vaguely resembled a small elephant’s trunk. When repeating a sonorous verse of Anacreon or Moschus he would move about this upper lip with as much sensuousness as when tasting at supper some sauce of nightingales’ tongues.
“I swallow it, and I am immediately aware,” went on Garguillus solemnly—"I am immediately aware that the oyster comes from the coast of Britain and not from the south or from Tarentum. Would you like me to prove it? Shall I close my eyes and say from what sea the fish comes?”
“But what in the world has that to do with poetry?” asked Mamertinus impatiently. He could not bear that any but himself should receive general attention.
“Imagine for yourselves, my dear friends,” continued the gastronomist imperturbably, “that for years I have not been to the shores of the ocean, which I love and am always regretting. I assure you that a good oyster has such a fresh and salty relish of the sea, that to swallow it is immediately to be a thousand miles hence on the immense seashore. I close my eyes, I see the waves, I see the rocks, I feel the breeze of ‘foggy ocean,’ as Homer calls it!... No! tell me frankly what verse of the Odyssey can wake in me as clearly the sense of sea poetry as the smell of a fresh oyster? Or when I divide a peach and inhale the odour of its juice, why, tell me, are the perfume of the violet and the rose more essentially poetical? Poets describe form, colour, sound. Why can taste be not perfect as these? All is stupid prejudice, my dear fellows! Taste is an immense and hitherto unexplored boon from the gods. The assemblage of tastes forms a harmony as fine as any orchestration of sounds. I affirm, therefore, that there is a tenth muse, the muse of Gastronomy!”
“Let oysters and peaches be admitted. But what harmony, what beauty can you discover in a goose liver dressed with saffron sauce?”
“You are ready to allow, Lampridius, that there is beauty not only in the idylls of Theocritus, but even in the coarsest comedies of Plautus?”
“I admit that.”
“Well, my friend, for me there is a gastronomic poesy in foie gras; in fact I am prepared to crown Dædalus with laurels for this dish, just as I would crown an Olympic ode of Pindar!”
Two new guests appeared on the threshold; they were Julian and the poet Publius. Hortensius yielded the place of honour to Julian, while Publius devoured the innumerable dishes with his eyes. To judge by his new chlamys the rich widow must have departed this life, and the happy heirs paid for the epitaph in no niggardly fashion.
The general conversation went on. Lampridius told a story of how one day, moved by curiosity, he had been to hear a Christian preacher thundering against pagan grammarians. “The grammarians,” assevered the preacher, “do not rank men for their worth, but for their literary style, thinking it less criminal to kill a man than to pronounce the word homo with a wrong aspir
ation!” Lampridius suspected that if these Christian preachers hated the style of the rhetoricians to such a degree, it was because, conscious that they themselves could write and speak only like barbarians, they made ignorance the badge of moral worth, so that for them a good speaker became a suspicious character.
“The day on which eloquence perishes will see the end of Hellas, the end of Rome! People will turn into dumb animals, and it is to make them so that Christian preachers use their barbarous jargon.”
“Who knows,” murmured Mamertinus pensively, “perhaps style is more important than virtue, since slaves, barbarians, and nincompoops can all be virtuous!”
Hephæstion meanwhile was explaining to his neighbour the exact meaning of Cicero’s advice—”Causam mendaciunculis adspergere.”
“Mendaciunculis, that’s to say, little lies. Cicero, in fact, advises you to sow little inventions all over your speech; he admits falsehood if decorative.”
Then followed a general discussion on the methods of beginning a speech: should the beginning be anapæstic or dactylic?
Julian became bored.
He confessed heartily that he had never considered the matter, and that in his opinion the speaker ought rather to preoccupy himself with the fundamental idea of his speech than with the making style out of a mosaic of peccadilloes.
Mamertinus—then Lampridius and Hephæstion—waxed wroth. According to them the subject of a speech was a matter of no moment. To an orator it should be absolutely indifferent whether he undertook to attack or to defend a case. Even meaning had no interest for him. The principal thing was the orchestration of verbal sounds—the melody, the musical assonance of letters—permitting even a barbarian, witless of Greek, to feel the sheer beauty of language.
“I’ll just give you an example, two Latin verses of Propertius,” said Garguillus. “Notice the power of the sounds and the emptiness of the meaning. Listen—
“‘Et Veneris dominæ volucres, mea turba columbæ, Tingunt Gorgonio punica rostra lacu.‘”
The Death of the Gods Page 10
