ANACREONTIC
In the veins of the calix foams and glows
The blood of the mantling vine,
But oh! in the bowl of Youth there glows
A Lesbian, more divine!
Bright, bright,
As the liquid light,
Its waves through thine eyelids shine!
Fill up, fill up, to the sparkling brim,
The juice of the young Lyaeus;
The grape is the key that we owe to him
From the gaol of the world to free us.
Drink, drink!
What need to shrink,
When the lambs alone can see us?
Drink, drink, as I quaff from thine eyes
The wine of a softer tree;
Give the smiles to the god of the grape—thy sighs,
Beloved one, give to me.
Turn, turn,
My glances burn,
And thirst for a look from thee!
As the song ended, a group of three maidens, entwined with a chain of starred flowers, and who, while they imitated, might have shamed the Graces, advanced towards him in the gliding measures of the Ionian dance: such as the Nereids wreathed in moonlight on the yellow sands of the AEgean wave—such as Cytherea taught her handmaids in the marriage-feast of Psyche and her son.
Now approaching, they wreathed their chaplet round his head; now kneeling, the youngest of the three proffered him the bowl, from which the wine of Lesbos foamed and sparkled. The youth resisted no more, he grasped the intoxicating cup, the blood mantled fiercely through his veins. He sank upon the breast of the nymph who sat beside him, and turning with swimming eyes to seek for Arbaces, whom he had lost in the whirl of his emotions, he beheld him seated beneath a canopy at the upper end of the table, and gazing upon him with a smile that encouraged him to pleasure. He beheld him, but not as he had hitherto seen, with dark and sable garments, with a brooding and solemn brow: a robe that dazzled the sight, so studded was its whitest surface with gold and gems, blazed upon his majestic form; white roses, alternated with the emerald and the ruby, and shaped tiara-like, crowned his raven locks. He appeared, like Ulysses, to have gained the glory of a second youth—his features seemed to have exchanged thought for beauty, and he towered amidst the loveliness that surrounded him, in all the beaming and relaxing benignity of the Olympian god.
‘Drink, feast, love, my pupil!’ said he, ‘blush not that thou art passionate and young. That which thou art, thou feelest in thy veins: that which thou shalt be, survey!’
With this he pointed to a recess, and the eyes of Apaecides, following the gesture, beheld on a pedestal, placed between the statues of Bacchus and Idalia, the form of a skeleton.
‘Start not,’ resumed the Egyptian; ‘that friendly guest admonishes us but of the shortness of life. From its jaws I hear a voice that summons us to ENJOY.’
As he spoke, a group of nymphs surrounded the statue; they laid chaplets on its pedestal, and, while the cups were emptied and refilled at that glowing board, they sang the following strain:
BACCHIC HYMNS TO THE IMAGE OF DEATH
I
Thou art in the land of the shadowy Host,
Thou that didst drink and love:
By the Solemn River, a gliding ghost,
But thy thought is ours above!
If memory yet can fly,
Back to the golden sky,
And mourn the pleasures lost!
By the ruin’d hall these flowers we lay,
Where thy soul once held its palace;
When the rose to thy scent and sight was gay,
And the smile was in the chalice,
And the cithara’s voice
Could bid thy heart rejoice
When night eclipsed the day.
Here a new group advancing, turned the tide of the music into a quicker and more joyous strain.
II
Death, death is the gloomy shore
Where we all sail—
Soft, soft, thou gliding oar;
Blow soft, sweet gale!
Chain with bright wreaths the Hours;
Victims if all
Ever, ‘mid song and flowers,
Victims should fall!
Pausing for a moment, yet quicker and quicker danced the silver-footed music:
Since Life’s so short, we’ll live to laugh,
Ah! wherefore waste a minute!
If youth’s the cup we yet can quaff,
Be love the pearl within it!
A third band now approached with brimming cups, which they poured in libation upon that strange altar; and once more, slow and solemn, rose the changeful melody:
III
Thou art welcome, Guest of gloom,
From the far and fearful sea!
When the last rose sheds its bloom,
Our board shall be spread with thee!
All hail, dark Guest!
Who hath so fair a plea
Our welcome Guest to be,
As thou, whose solemn hall
At last shall feast us all
In the dim and dismal coast?
Long yet be we the Host!
And thou, Dead Shadow, thou,
All joyless though thy brow,
Thou—but our passing GUEST!
At this moment, she who sat beside Apaecides suddenly took up the song:
IV
Happy is yet our doom,
The earth and the sun are ours!
And far from the dreary tomb
Speed the wings of the rosy Hours—
Sweet is for thee the bowl,
Sweet are thy looks, my love;
I fly to thy tender soul,
As bird to its mated dove!
Take me, ah, take!
Clasp’d to thy guardian breast,
Soft let me sink to rest:
But wake me—ah, wake!
And tell me with words and sighs,
But more with thy melting eyes,
That my sun is not set—
That the Torch is not quench’d at the Urn
That we love, and we breathe, and burn,
Tell me—thou lov’st me yet!
Book The Second
* * *
Chapter I
* * *
A Flash House In Pompeii, And The Gentlemen Of The Classic Ring.
TO one of those parts of Pompeii, which were tenanted not by the lords of pleasure, but by its minions and its victims; the haunt of gladiators and prize-fighters; of the vicious and the penniless; of the savage and the obscene; the Alsatia of an ancient city—we are now transported.
It was a large room, that opened at once on the confined and crowded lane. Before the threshold was a group of men, whose iron and well-strung muscles, whose short and Herculean necks, whose hardy and reckless countenances, indicated the champions of the arena. On a shelf, without the shop, were ranged jars of wine and oil; and right over this was inserted in the wall a coarse painting, which exhibited gladiators drinking—so ancient and so venerable is the custom of signs! Within the room were placed several small tables, arranged somewhat in the modern fashion of ‘boxes’, and round these were seated several knots of men, some drinking, some playing at dice, some at that more skilful game called ‘duodecim scriptae’, which certain of the blundering learned have mistaken for chess, though it rather, perhaps, resembled backgammon of the two, and was usually, though not always, played by the assistance of dice. The hour was in the early forenoon, and nothing better, perhaps, than that unseasonable time itself denoted the habitual indolence of these tavern loungers.
Yet, despite the situation of the house and the character of its inmates, it indicated none of that sordid squalor which would have characterized a similar haunt in a modern city. The gay disposition of all the Pompeians, who sought, at least, to gratify the sense even where they neglected the mind, was typified by the gaudy colors which decorated the walls, and the shapes, fantastic but not inelegant, in which the lamps, the drinking-
cups, the commonest household utensils, were wrought.
‘By Pollux!’ said one of the gladiators, as he leaned against the wall of the threshold, ‘the wine thou sellest us, old Silenus’—and as he spoke he slapped a portly personage on the back—’is enough to thin the best blood in one’s veins.’
The man thus caressingly saluted, and whose bared arms, white apron, and keys and napkin tucked carelessly within his girdle, indicated him to be the host of the tavern, was already passed into the autumn of his years; but his form was still so robust and athletic, that he might have shamed even the sinewy shapes beside him, save that the muscles had seeded, as it were, into flesh, that the cheeks were swelled and bloated, and the increasing stomach threw into shade the vast and massive chest which rose above it.
‘None of thy scurrilous blusterings with me,’ growled the gigantic landlord, in the gentle semi-roar of an insulted tiger; ‘my wine is good enough for a carcass which shall so soon soak the dust of the spoliarium.’
‘Croakest thou thus, old raven!’ returned the gladiator, laughing scornfully; ‘thou shalt live to hang thyself with despite when thou seest me win the palm crown; and when I get the purse at the amphitheatre, as I certainly shall, my first vow to Hercules shall be to forswear thee and thy vile potations evermore.’
‘Hear to him—hear to this modest Pyrgopolinices! He has certainly served under Bombochides Cluninstaridysarchides,’ cried the host. ‘Sporus, Niger, Tetraides, he declares he shall win the purse from you. Why, by the gods! each of your muscles is strong enough to stifle all his body, or I know nothing of the arena!’
‘Ha!’ said the gladiator, coloring with rising fury, ‘our lanista would tell a different story.’
‘What story could he tell against me, vain Lydon?’ said Tetraides, frowning.
‘Or me, who have conquered in fifteen fights?’ said the gigantic Niger, stalking up to the gladiator.
‘Or me?’ grunted Sporus, with eyes of fire.
‘Tush!’ said Lydon, folding his arms, and regarding his rivals with a reckless air of defiance. ‘The time of trial will soon come; keep your valor till then.’
‘Ay, do,’ said the surly host; ‘and if I press down my thumb to save you, may the Fates cut my thread!’
‘Your rope, you mean,’ said Lydon, sneeringly: ‘here is a sesterce to buy one.’
The Titan wine-vender seized the hand extended to him, and griped it in so stern a vice that the blood spirted from the fingers’ ends over the garments of the bystanders.
They set up a savage laugh.
‘I will teach thee, young braggart, to play the Macedonian with me! I am no puny Persian, I warrant thee! What, man! have I not fought twenty years in the ring, and never lowered my arms once? And have I not received the rod from the editor’s own hand as a sign of victory, and as a grace to retirement on my laurels? And am I now to be lectured by a boy?’ So saying, he flung the hand from him in scorn.
Without changing a muscle, but with the same smiling face with which he had previously taunted mine host, did the gladiator brave the painful grasp he had undergone. But no sooner was his hand released, than, crouching for one moment as a wild cat crouches, you might see his hair bristle on his head and beard, and with a fierce and shrill yell he sprang on the throat of the giant, with an impetus that threw him, vast and sturdy as he was, from his balance—and down, with the crash of a falling rock, he fell—while over him fell also his ferocious foe.
Our host, perhaps, had had no need of the rope so kindly recommended to him by Lydon, had he remained three minutes longer in that position. But, summoned to his assistance by the noise of his fall, a woman, who had hitherto kept in an inner apartment, rushed to the scene of battle. This new ally was in herself a match for the gladiator; she was tall, lean, and with arms that could give other than soft embraces. In fact, the gentle helpmate of Burbo the wine-seller had, like himself, fought in the lists—nay under the emperor’s eye. And Burbo himself—Burbo, the unconquered in the field, according to report, now and then yielded the palm to his soft Stratonice. This sweet creature no sooner saw the imminent peril that awaited her worse half, than without other weapons than those with which Nature had provided her, she darted upon the incumbent gladiator, and, clasping him round the waist with her long and snakelike arms, lifted him by a sudden wrench from the body of her husband, leaving only his hands still clinging to the throat of his foe. So have we seen a dog snatched by the hind legs from the strife with a fallen rival in the arms of some envious groom; so have we seen one half of him high in air—passive and offenceless—while the other half, head, teeth, eyes, claws, seemed buried and engulfed in the mangled and prostrate enemy. Meanwhile, the gladiators, lapped, and pampered, and glutted upon blood, crowded delightedly round the combatants—their nostrils distended—their lips grinning—their eyes gloatingly fixed on the bloody throat of the one and the indented talons of the other.
‘Habet! (he has got it!) habet!’ cried they, with a sort of yell, rubbing their nervous hands.
‘Non habeo, ye liars; I have not got it!’ shouted the host, as with a mighty effort he wrenched himself from those deadly hands, and rose to his feet, breathless, panting, lacerated, bloody; and fronting, with reeling eyes, the glaring look and grinning teeth of his baffled foe, now struggling (but struggling with disdain) in the gripe of the sturdy amazon.
‘Fair play!’ cried the gladiators: ‘one to one’; and, crowding round Lydon and the woman, they separated our pleasing host from his courteous guest.
But Lydon, feeling ashamed at his present position, and endeavoring in vain to shake off the grasp of the virago, slipped his hand into his girdle, and drew forth a short knife. So menacing was his look, so brightly gleamed the blade, that Stratonice, who was used only to that fashion of battle which we moderns call the pugilistic, started back in alarm.
‘O gods!’ cried she, ‘the ruffian!—he has concealed weapons! Is that fair? Is that like a gentleman and a gladiator? No, indeed, I scorn such fellows.’ With that she contemptuously turned her back on the gladiator, and hastened to examine the condition of her husband.
But he, as much inured to the constitutional exercises as an English bull-dog is to a contest with a more gentle antagonist, had already recovered himself. The purple hues receded from the crimson surface of his cheek, the veins of the forehead retired into their wonted size. He shook himself with a complacent grunt, satisfied that he was still alive, and then looking at his foe from head to foot with an air of more approbation than he had ever bestowed upon him before:
‘By Castor!’ said he, ‘thou art a stronger fellow than I took thee for! I see thou art a man of merit and virtue; give me thy hand, my hero!’
‘Jolly old Burbo!’ cried the gladiators, applauding, ‘staunch to the backbone. Give him thy hand, Lydon.’
‘Oh, to be sure,’ said the gladiator: ‘but now I have tasted his blood, I long to lap the whole.’
‘By Hercules!’ returned the host, quite unmoved, ‘that is the true gladiator feeling. Pollux! to think what good training may make a man; why, a beast could not be fiercer!’
The Last Days of Pompeii Page 10
