But Marcus thought of the Messias of the Jews and of the imminence of His manifestation. Was it possible that he, himself, would be alive on that momentous occasion? Excitement shone in his changeful eyes as he wondered.
“He is the Unknown God,” he said.
Archias shrugged. “Let us continue with what we know and not annoy God with our monkey inquisitiveness,” he said.
Eunice, who was permitted in the schoolroom by her master because he enjoyed looking at her beauty and was made tranquil by it, was sewing silently and apparently listening to this exchange. She lifted her large blue eyes, which shimmered with intrinsic innocence and foolishness, and said, “The gods do not like to be understood.”
Archias laughed and put his hand on her bare and rosy shoulder. “She has not the slightest idea of how subtle she is,” he said. “She has not understood our conversation in the least; therefore, she is wise also. There is something very silly, beyond the silliness of my poor Eunice, in the pronouncements of scholars and learned men. Let us hope that scholarly men, in their narrow view of life and entangled in their obtuse theories, and enmeshed in their unrealistic dreams, will never attain to power in government. If they do, then madness will seize mankind and the Jews’ Messias will find no sane creature to greet His arrival. But when I speak of scholars I do not mean the philosophers of whom Plato wrote.”
Despite Archias’ hopes Marcus did not become a true lyric poet. But he early began to write marvelous prose, and would read what he had written in a voice that enchanted his teacher, so powerful, so sure, and so eloquent was it. It had overtones of passion, but was never irrational or too filled with random emotion. Archias informed Tullius that the household harbored an embryo Demosthenes.
“I should prefer that you define your terms more closely, in the Socratic manner,” said Archias. “Nevertheless, Marcus, you bewitch me, and against my logic you convince me. Do not be sure, however, that evil is evil and virtue is virtue. The two embrace each other inextricably.”
Even as a child Marcus did not believe that. There was the iron of the old Romans in his character, though his nature was still buoyant and as airy as powdered gold.
CHAPTER FOUR
Archias, the city man, full of urban whims and urban appreciations, was dismayed when it was announced that the family would move to Rome.
He did not like Rome. He disliked Rome as a principled Greek. There was to be no dispute if a superior nation conquered an inferior, but to be conquered by Romans was intolerable. He complained of the move to Tullius, whom he bullied because Tullius could rarely bring himself to disagree with anyone even on such an abstract topic as a discussion of philosophy. “I love this island,” said the sophisticated Greek. “Permit me, Master, to quote Homer: ‘A rugged soil, yet nurse of hardy sons, no dearer land can e’er my eyes behold.’ Why must we go to Rome?”
“It is my health,” said Tullius with apology, as if his increasing frailty was his personal error. He hesitated. It was almost beyond him to hurt the feelings of anyone, and caused him pain when he had to do so. But Archias, ever alert, had fixed him, upon his hesitation, with his glowing black eye, and Tullius tried to smile as he said, “And my father believes that it would be best for Marcus to study in a school with other boys, as well as having private tutelage at home. The boy has no mates here but young slaves. He must meet others of at least the same family knighthood as ours.”
Archias had his own opinions of Romans and the Roman heritage. “Rome is vulgar,” he said. “It copies Greece slavishly. If one cannot have the original does it profit him to have a dull imitation?”
Tullius’ mild face flushed; for a moment his gentle eye sparkled with patriotism. “That is not entirely correct, Archias. Our architecture is our own, though it is true that in many instances we have borrowed some of the nobler aspects of Grecian architecture. Consider what we have done with the arch! Moreover, though you often speak of the glory of Greece, one must remember that at its height, when Athens numbered some quarter of a million people, only forty-seven thousand of them were free men. Such disproportion is not true of Rome, where for the smallest fee children of the most modest families can attend a school, even if they are sons of former slaves. Polybius, a hundred years ago, advocated free public schools; it is possible that they will be established soon for the children of all men in Rome.”
“The gods forbid,” said Archias, fervently. “Can a sane man envisage a nation educated by fixed theories of education, artificially established and uniform in all cases? There is nothing so dismaying and repugnant as an average mind which has been forced to acquire knowledge against its inherent capacity. It can never be wise, for all it may be able to quote the philosophers and repeat a canto from the Iliad and specify the age of Pericles. Knowledge should not be thrown away on those who cannot, by their nature, convert it to wisdom. It is like the unassimilated food in the belly of a slaughtered pig.”
“The Lady Helvia, though no Aspasia, is nevertheless a boon to this household because she was taught her mathematics,” said Tullius. “There are uses for education besides the acquisition of wisdom. Would you like to have a school of your own in Rome, Archias?”
The Greek considered this magnificent offer. Then he thought of the mediocre minds he would then be forced to encounter and teach, and he shuddered. He shook his head, but with gratitude. “If I be permitted to remain with this family, Master, I will be content.”
Tullius, who usually took men at their word and believed that most men preferred to speak the unequivocal truth rather than half-lies, was touched. In consequence, he immediately increased Archias’ fees, and embraced the teacher, grasping his upper arms in his narrow hands.
“We shall return to this island often, Archias,” he said, “for my heart is here though the winters are unbearable to me. We shall see each spring and summer in Arpinum.”
He is a good man, thought Archias, and has a tender heart and a heroic if gentle soul. How rare is a good man! The gods themselves are not more admirable, for it is almost impossible to be good in the face of mortality and the omnipresent evil of the world of men. You, Archias, are not a good man and it is very wrong of you. I am happy that you suppressed, almost from the beginning, any soft ridicule of Tullius’ piety. It may be sadly in error, but what a fine race men would become if they embraced such error—if it be indeed an error! I must think about it.
Marcus, now nine years old, was elated by the adventure of going to live in Rome. He said to his five-year-old brother, “Quintus! We are returning to the capital of our fathers, where we shall see wonders!”
Quintus, however, being a conservative soul like his mother, was opposed to change. “I am satisfied here,” he said. “My father does not like the climate, but my mother says it is his imagination that he is sick in the winters. Grandfather does not wish to go to Rome, where all men are very wicked and the streets are hot and filled with people and there are smells.”
He threw a ball to his brother, and the two boys raced over the warm summer grass. It was nearly autumn. When the leaves fell the family would leave for Rome. Marcus, holding the thrown ball in hands so like his father’s, was suddenly melancholy.
“Throw!” shouted Quintus, who was never depressed, and had his mother’s nature.
“I am tired,” said Marcus, and sat down on a sun-warmed stone and looked at the river nearby.
Quintus had never had an ailment and had never been tired. “You are not coughing, like my father,” he grumbled. If a person was ill he coughed; if he did not cough he was not ill. He waited impatiently, standing on his sturdy brown legs, his yellow tunic blowing back on his thick thighs, and he was as handsome as Helvia with his crisply curling black hair and his square and highly colored little face. Helvia’s eyes in Marcus were thoughtful but in Quintus they were quick and impatient. He threw himself on the grass at Marcus’ feet and began to chew a blade of grass and wriggle restlessly. He loved action; he delighted in physical movement and games.
He could swim far better than Marcus, who thought the water of the river too cold. He could climb far faster, for he did not have Marcus’ fear of heights; he could run easier and could outrace his brother. When he threw a ball he threw it surely and with strength. He loved to wrestle with an infant bull. Yet, even at his early age he considered these accomplishments as nothing before the accomplishments of his adored brother, whom he would have gladly followed into any danger. He looked at Marcus now, his eyes very brilliant, and he said, “I shall be a general in Rome.”
“Excellent,” said Marcus. “I shall be a lawyer, and perhaps a Consul.”
Quintus did not know what a lawyer or a Consul was, but he gazed at Marcus admiringly. “You shall be whatever you wish,” he said. Then he scowled fiercely and held up a brown fist to shake it. “And let that man beware who stands in your way!”
Marcus laughed and his melancholy left him, and he tugged at one of his brother’s curls with affection.
“There is nothing nobler than law,” said Marcus. “It distinguishes men from beasts, for beasts are ruled only by instinct and man is ruled by the law of his spirit and so is free.”
Quintus did not understand in the least. He jumped to his feet and began to climb the tree under which his brother sat. Bits of bark and twigs rained down on Marcus’ head as the energetic feet scampered along woody limbs. Then the bright face of his brother peered down at him, laughing, from the green leaves. “Catch me,” he said. Marcus, always obliging though he did not like climbing, rather awkwardly began the ascent, scraping his knees in the process. But he loved his brother, and Quintus had no playmate but himself. Rising as high as he could, he seized Quintus’ sandal and then his sturdy calf, and the boys laughed together.
Then Marcus slipped. Instantly and easily Quintus, feeling the grip loosen on his leg, reached down and seized his brother’s hand and held it strongly. Marcus was left dangling from the tree like a swinging fruit, held from falling only by Quintus’ vigorous grip. Marcus looked down at the formidable gulf below him and clenched his teeth; his wrist exploded in pain.
Then Quintus, who was always laughing, was very serious and very manly. “Do not be afraid, Marcus,” he said. “Grasp my hand with your fingers, very tightly, and I will climb down until you can drop safely.”
Marcus was too frightened to utter a sound. Then he felt himself being slowly lowered, inch by inch, as the strong child above him carefully descended, holding by only one hand to the branches of the tree. Within a few minutes Marcus was close enough to the ground to be dropped easily and without damage. He fell into the deep grass and rolled lithely as he had been taught by the slave who trained both boys in physical accomplishments. Instantly Quintus was on his knees beside him, full of anxiety. Marcus sat up and laughed. “You are a Hercules, Quintus,” he said, and kissed his brother.
For some reason in far later years he remembered that day vividly, and he thought his heart would break with the remembrance.
“I had the happiest of childhoods,” he would write in later years. “I had a father who was not only wise but was good and loving and tender. I had a grandfather who taught me never to compromise with evil, and whose shouts were harmless. I had a steadfast mother, who was always patient and calm. I had Archias, my dear teacher. And I had Quintus. My Quintus, my brother, my beloved!”*
Helvia considered it all nonsense that the family must move, for the winters at least, to Rome. Tullius merely pampered himself. He refused any longer to swallow the concoctions she brewed for his cough when the snow was high on the hills. If Tullius would only learn to enjoy the brisk cold winds and labor with them and shout with them his cough would disappear and his appetite would increase and there would be more flesh on his bones. With this the grandfather agreed. It was unfortunate that Tullius did not like hunting, and he a Roman. How had he endured the army?
“Will power,” said his son, with some grimness.
“Fine words for a Roman,” said the grandfather, scornfully. “I remember my own days with my legion. I enjoyed every hour I fought for the Republic.”
He found a good sound house, almost new, on the Carinae, the southwestern tip of the Esquiline hill. It was of a modern style, unique in Rome, and resembled the keel of a ship, as did its neighbors. Unfortunately, the neighborhood was no longer fashionable, as prospering families were moving nearer to or even on the Palatine hill, itself. This did not disturb the grandfather, because the price asked was modest for such a big and practically new house. The atrium was commodious, much larger than the one in the house at Arpinum, the family’s apartments pleasant with an agreeable view of the city, the slaves’ quarters more than adequate, the dining room well situated and airy, the garden as large as could be expected for a city house. Its mortar was an attractive Pompeian red, and it had a white tiled roof. The floors shone with bright mosaics and the columns were snowy. While the grandfather haggled over the price with the agents of the owner, Tullius wandered outside to gaze upon the city of his fathers from this height.
Tullius was not happy that his health demanded that he leave his beloved island for the winters. He shrank from turmoil, from heated streets, from noise, from stenches. But he understood that man cannot remain a recluse forever, that his interests steadily narrow during constant isolation, and that he loses the capacity to be a man. There were also his sons to be considered. They were not lonely peasants whose life would forever be circumscribed. Marcus’ gifts of rhetoric and prose and philosophy and learning should not be starved or abandoned among trees and grass, pleasant though they were and reposeful, nor should Quintus, the lively, passionate, and life-loving, be deprived of companions and variety. A man owed it to his world and his status as a man to share with his brothers those gifts with which he had been endowed, and every man in Tullius’ opinion had a unique gift whether he were noble or humble. There was a time for retirement and a time for the market place, a time to contemplate and a time to participate, a time for peace and a time to take up arms, a time to sleep and a time to work, a time to love and a time to refrain from loving. And a time to live and a time to die.
The summer was over and autumn lay on the gigantic and pulsing city below Tullius. The sunset stood over it, murky, brownish-red, lurid, dusky, the sun like an evil scarlet pupil between eyelids of crimson, brown, and dark gold. These colors were reflected on a city whose own colors, broken and chaotic, were ochre, Pompeian red, gray, light-brown, and yellow. A most vehement city! The steep and narrow streets, resembling canyons, shining with reddish light from the sunset, raced up and down the seven hills, surging with great crowds of hurrying and noisy Romans. The roar was constant, accented by the thick scurrying of vehicles axle to axle and front to back, and shouted oaths at the density of the traffic and loud threats from those who drove chariot or wagon or car. Tullius could see the Forum, teeming and restless with heads. Near and far distances were hazed over with a muddy mist, and the air was full of the smell of burning, the stenches of sewers, heated stone and brick and autumnal earth and dying vegetation. A pale and rising moon was just visible in the sepia west, shining faintly like a skull. Tullius could hear, behind him, his father’s bargaining voice as it quarreled with the agents who were becoming sullen and irascible, and the tinkle of two leaf-filled fountains in the walled garden. Uproarious though the city was, the gloomy light and threatening sky gave an air of melancholy to the scene. A wind blew, astringent, smoky, with an edge of warning in it. Now torches and lanterns began to glow redly in the murk, to move restlessly from street to street. The noise increased as Romans left their government offices, their shops, their places of business, their temples, for their homes in various parts of the city; the din of traffic rose like a harsh clatter over all.
Tullius sighed. He liked to think, while at Arpinum, of Rome as a polished city and not as a city of brick and dull stone. (He was not alive when Gaius Octavius, Caesar Augustus, was to make it a city of marble.) He looked about him at the small lawn before the house, which w
as not walled, the modernist architects having decided to make an “open” city where they could. He saw the small figure of a child watching him keenly on the lawn of the house next door.
Tullius was always intimidated by children, except Marcus. Even Quintus, the assertive and voluble and simple, intimidated him. He looked away from the little boy, who appeared to be about Quintus’ age, hoping the child had not noticed him. But the child came nearer, inspired by curiosity. “Greetings, Master,” he said in a high and piercing voice.
It was not customary nor polite for a child to address an adult first. Tullius wondered who was responsible for the child’s sad lack of manners. He tried to make his mild voice stern, and dismally failed. “Greetings,” he murmured. The child came nearer and Tullius could see his face more clearly, pointed, lively, somewhat overexpressive, with dancing black eyes and thin, smooth black hair, He gave the appearance of never being in repose, but imbued with restlessness beyond the mere animal restlessness of little Quintus. He seemed to move in every muscle though now he stood still a few feet from Tullius, and regarded him with deep interest. He was not overly tall.
A Pillar of Iron: A Novel of Ancient Rome Page 5
