Roads from Rome Part 3

I have time to look abroad on life and to correct tears by wine and laughter while my hands are busy with the file and pumice-stone.

Before you know it, the billboards of the Sosii will announce the completed work, and the dedication shall show Rome who is responsible for my offending."

The look of anxious irritability faded from Maecenas's face, and in restored serenity he walked with Horace from the dining-room, through the s.p.a.cious, unroofed peristyle, where marble pillars and statues, flower-beds and fountains were blanched by the winter moon to one tone of silver, and through the magnificent atrium, where the images of n.o.ble ancestors kept their silent watch over the new generation. At the vestibule door a porter, somewhat befuddled by Saturnalian merry-making, was waiting sleepily. When he had opened the door into the street the two friends stood silent a moment in the outer portico, suddenly conscious, after the seclusion of the great house and their evening's talk, of the city life beyond,--hilarious, disordered, without subtlety in desire and regret, rich in the common pa.s.sions of humanity. At this moment a troop of revelers stumbled past with wagging torches in their drunken hands. Among them, conspicuous in the moonlight, the boy Propertius swayed unsteadily, and pushed back a torn garland from his forehead.

Horace turned to Maecenas.

"Cynthia's wine," he said. "Do you expect to extract from the lees an ode to Augustus?"

Maecenas shrugged his shoulders. "Probably," he said, "he will write me a charming poem to explain why he cannot do what I ask. I know the tricks of your tribe."

With a final laugh and a clasp of the hands the friends parted company.

Maecenas went back to his library to reread dispatches from Spain before seeking his few hours of sleep. Horace, finding that the wind had gone down, and tempted by the moonlight, turned toward the Subura to stroll for another hour among the Saturnalian crowds.

III

Propertius made his way past the slave at his own door, who was surprised only by his young master's arrival before daybreak, and stumbled to his bedroom, where the night-lamp was burning. The drinking at Cynthia's--he always thought of her by that name--had been fast and furious. She had been more beautiful than he had ever seen her. Her eyes had shone like stars, and the garlands had hung down over her face and trailed in her cup of yellow wine. And she had told him that he was the only true poet in Rome, and had read his poems aloud in a voice so sweet and clear that he had been nearly crazed with pride and delight. Capriciously she had driven him away early with the other guests, but to-morrow he would see her again, or, perhaps, he could get through her door again to-night--to-night--

His feverish reverie was broken in upon by the frightened and apologetic porter, bringing a letter which his mistress had told him to deliver as soon as the master came home. Propertius dismissed him angrily, and held the letter in an unwilling and shaking hand.

Perhaps he would not have read it at all if it had been written on an ordinary wax tablet. But the little parchment roll had an unusual and insistent look about it, and he finally unrolled it and, holding it out as steadily as he could under the small wick of his lamp, read what was written:--

"P. Virgilius Maro to his Propertius, greeting.

I hope you will allow me to congratulate you on your recent volume of verse. Your management of the elegiac metre, which my friend Gallus, before his tragic death, taught me to understand, seems to me enn.o.bling and enriching, and in both the fire and the pathos of many of your lines I recognise the true poet. Perhaps you will recognise the rustic in me when I add that I also welcomed a note of love for your Umbrian groves of beeches and pines and for water-meadows which you must have seen, perhaps by the banks of your c.l.i.tumnus, filled with white lilies and scarlet poppies. Most of all have I been moved by the candour of your idealism. It is rare indeed in this age to hear any scorn of the golden streams of Pactolus and the jewels of the Red Sea, of pictured tapestries and thresholds of Arabian onyx. The knowledge that things like these are as nothing to you, compared with love, stirs me to grat.i.tude.

"It was in these ways that I was thinking of you yesterday, when I put my own work aside and walked by the sh.o.r.e of the great bay here, looking toward Capri. And will you let a man who has lived nearly a quarter of a century longer than you have add that I wondered also whether before long you will not seek another mistress for your worship, one whose service shall transcend not only riches but all personal pa.s.sions?

"Like you, I have lain by the Tiber, and watched the skiffs hurrying by, and the slow barges towed along the yellow waves. And my thoughts also have been of the meanness of wealth and of the glory of love.

But it was to Rome herself that I made my vows, and in whose service I enlisted. Was there ever a time when she needed more the loyalty of us all? While she is fashioning that Empire which shall be without limit or end and raise us to the lordship of the earth, she runs the risks of attack from impalpable enemies who shall defile her highways and debauch her sons. Arrogance, luxury, violent ambition, false desires, are more to be dreaded than a Parthian victory. The subtle wickedness of the Orient may conquer us when the spears of Britain are of no avail. Antony and Gallus are not the only Romans from whom Egypt has sucked life and honour.

"Like you, again, I am no soldier. Your friends and my friends go l.u.s.tily to Ionia and Lydia and Gaul and Spain, co-workers, as you say, in a beloved government. Is not Rome, then, all the more left to our defence? You pleased me once by saying that you 'knew every line' of my _Georgics_. You know, then, that I have believed that the sickened minds of to-day could be healed, if men would but return to the intimacies of the soil and farm. Our great master, Lucretius, preached salvation through knowledge of the physical world. I have ventured to say that it could be found through the kindly help of the country G.o.ds. But now I am beginning to see deeper. In Rome herself lie the seeds of a new birth. When men see her as she is in her ancient greatness and her immortal future, will not greed and l.u.s.t depart from their hearts? I think it must have been at dawn, when the sea was first reddening under the early sun, that AEneas sailed up to the mouth of the Tiber, and found at last the heart of that Hesperia whose sh.o.r.es had seemed ever to recede as he drew near them. Now that our sky is blazing with the midday sun, shall we betray and make void those early hopes? Shall the sistrum of Isis drown our prayers to the G.o.ds of our country, native-born, who guard the Tiber and our Roman Palatine?

"I am seeking to write a poem which shall make men reverence their past and build for their future. Will you not help me to work for Rome's need? You have sincerity, pa.s.sion, talent. You have commended a beautiful woman to me. Will you not let me commend my Mistress to you? Farewell."

The letter slipped from the boy's fingers to the floor. The wonderful voice of Virgil, which made men forget his slight frame and awkward manners, seemed to echo in his ears. In that voice he had heard stately hexameters read until, shutting his eyes, he could have believed Apollo spoke from cloudy Olympus. And this voice condescended now to plead with him and to offer him a new love.

Cynthia's voice or his--or his. He tried to distinguish each in his clouded memory--Virgil's praising Rome, Cynthia's praising himself.

His head ached violently, and his ears rang. A blind rage seized him because he could not distinguish either voice clearly. The letter was to blame. He would destroy that, and one voice at least would cease its torment. He gathered up the loose roll, twisted it in his trembling fingers, and held it to the flame of the little lamp.

"To Venus--a hecatomb!" he shouted wildly.

As the parchment caught fire, the blaze of light illumined his flushed cheeks and burning eyes, and the boyish curve of his sullen lips.

It was in the spring, when the little marble Pan looked rosy in the warmer sunlight, and the white oxen must have been climbing the steeps of a.s.sisi, that the boy's mother let go her slight hold on life. In Rome the roses were in bloom, and Soracte was veiled in a soft, blue haze.

Tullus came to Maecenas to excuse Propertius from a dinner, and a slave led him into the famous garden where the prime minister often received his guests. Virgil was with him now, and they both cordially greeted the young official. As he gave his message, his face, moulded into firm, strong lines by his habits of thought, was softened as if by a personal regret. The three men stood in silence for a moment, and then Tullus turned impulsively to Maecenas.

"He chose between his mother and his mistress," he said. "When I talked with you in the winter you said that perhaps his mother would have to face death again to give birth to a poet, as she had already to give birth to a child. I have never understood what you meant."

"Ah, Tullus," Maecenas answered, laying his hand affectionately upon the shoulder of the younger man, "I spoke of a law not inscribed on the Twelve Tables, but cut deep in the bedrock of life--is it not, my Virgil?"

But the poet, toward whom he had quickly turned, did not hear him.

He stood withdrawn into his own thoughts. A shaft of sun, piercing through the ilex trees, laid upon his white toga a sudden sheen of gold, and Maecenas heard him say softly to himself, in a voice whose harmonies he felt he had never wholly gauged before,--

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

THE PHRASE-MAKER

Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit.--HORACE.

The sun still hung high over a neat little farm among the Sabine hills, although the midday heat had given way to the soft and comforting warmth of a September afternoon. Delicate shadows from dark-leaved ilexes, from tall pines and white poplars, fell waveringly across a secluded gra.s.s-plot which looked green and inviting even after the parching summer. The sound of water bickering down the winding way of a stream gave life and coolness to the warm silence. Thick among the tree-trunks on one side grew cornel bushes and sloes, making a solid ma.s.s of underbrush, while on the other side there was an opening through which one might catch sight of a long meadow, and arable fields beyond, and even of blue hills along the horizon.

But the master of this charming outlook evidently had his mind on something else. He was a man about fifty-five years old, short and stout, and with hair even greyer than his age warranted. As he leaned back among his cushions on a stone bench, so skilfully placed under an ilex tree that his face was protected while the sun fell across his body, he looked an unromantic figure enough, no better than any other Roman gentleman past his prime, seeking the sunshine and intent on physical comfort. Indeed, only a gracefully low forehead and eyes at once keen and genial saved his face from commonplaceness, and would have led a spectator to feel any curiosity about his meditations.

He had let fall into his lap a letter which had reached him that morning, and which he had just reread. It had travelled all the way from Gaul, and he had opened it eagerly, curious to know with what new idea his younger friend was coquetting, and hoping to hear some interesting literary gossip about their common acquaintances. But the letter had been chiefly filled with questions as to why he had not yet written, and, above all, why he did not send on some verses.

Horace still felt the irritation of the first reading, although he had had his lunch and his nap, and had reached the serenest hour of the day. When they said good-by in Rome he had told Florus that he should not write: he was too lazy in these later years to write very regularly to any one except Maecenas, the other part of his soul, and it was foolish of the younger man not to have accepted the situation. As for the request for verses, Horace felt ashamed of the anger it had aroused in him. One would think that he was twenty years old again, with black curls, lively legs, and a taste for iambs, to get so out of patience with poor Florus. But it certainly was annoying to be pressed for odes when he had long ago determined to spend the rest of his life in studying philosophy. To be sure, he had once made that vow too early and had been forced to tune his lyre again after he had thought to hang it in Apollo's temple. He had had a pride in the enthusiastic reception of his new odes, and in the proof that his hand had by no means lost its cunning; but Florus ought to understand that he had at that time yielded to the Emperor's request as equivalent to a command, and that he meant what he said when he declared that he wished to leave the lyric arena.

He had never been unreasonable in his demands on life, nor slow in the contribution of his share. It seemed only just that he should spend the years that were left to him as he chose. People talked about his tossing off an ode as if he could do it at dessert, and spend the solid part of the day in other pursuits. They little dreamed that the solid part of many days had often gone into one of his lyric trifles, and that Polyhymnia, she who had invented the lyre, and struck it herself in Lesbos, was among the most exacting of the Muses.

With the departure of his green youth and play-time had gone the inclination, as well as the courage, to set himself such tasks. He had always been interested in reading the moral philosophers, and, whatever his friends said, he meant to keep to his books, and to write, if he wrote at all, in a comfortable, contemplative style.

Besides (so his irritated thoughts ran on), how could Florus expect a man who lived in Rome to write imaginative poetry? How tiresome the days were there! Whenever he went out, some one wanted his help in a dull business matter or dragged him off to a public reading by some equally dull author. Even if he tried to visit his friends, one lived on the Quirinal and one on the Aventine, and the walk between lay through noisy streets filled with clumsy workmen, huge wagons, funeral processions, mad dogs, dirty pigs, and human bores. No notes from the lyre could make themselves heard amid such confusion.

Suddenly his feeling quickened: how good it was to be away just now in this autumnal season, when Rome laboured under leaden winds fraught with melancholy depression, and when his head always gave him trouble and he especially needed quiet and freedom! The afternoon sun enveloped him in a delicious warmth, the shadows on the gra.s.s danced gayly, as a faint breeze stirred the branches above his head, the merry little stream near by seemed to prattle of endless content.

The frown above Horace's eyes disappeared, and with it his inner annoyance. Florus was a dear fellow, after all, and although he intended to write him a piece of his mind, he would do it in hexameters, more for his amus.e.m.e.nt than for his edification. It would be a pretty task for the morning hours to-morrow. Now he meant to be still, and forget his writing tablets altogether. He was glad that his house was empty of guests, much as he had enjoyed the preceding week when a lively company had come over from Tibur, in whose retreat they were spending September, to hunt him out. They had had charming dinners together, falling easily into conversations that were worth while, and by tacit consent forgetting the inanities of town gossip. But at present he liked the quiet even better. He had been walking about his little place more regularly, laughing at his steward who often grew impatient over the tiny crops, and a.s.suring himself of the comfort of the few slaves who ran the farm. And on more extended walks he had felt once more, as he had so often in these long years, the charm of the village people near him, with their friendly manners, their patient devotion to work, and their childlike enjoyment of country holidays.

Certainly, as he grew older and his physical energy diminished (he had not been really well since he was a very young man, and now before his time he felt old), he appreciated more and more his good fortune in owning a corner of the earth so situated. He remembered with amus.e.m.e.nt that in earlier days he sometimes used to feel bored by the solitude of his farm, at the end of his journey from Rome, and wonder why he had left the lively city. But that was when he was young enough to enjoy the bustle of the streets, and, especially in the evenings, to join the crowds of pleasure-seekers and watch the fortune-tellers and their victims. That he could mingle inconspicuously with the populace he had always counted one of the chief rewards of an inconspicuous income. Now, the quiet of the country and the leisure for reading seemed so much more important.

He was not even as anxious as he used to be to go to fashionable Tibur or Tarentum or Baiae in search of refreshment. How pleased Virgil would have been with his rustic content!

The sudden thought brought a smile to his eyes and then a shadow.

Virgil had been dead more than ten years, but his loss seemed all at once a freshly grievous thing. So much that was valuable in his life was inextricably a.s.sociated with him. Horace's mind, usually sanely absorbed in present interests, began, because of a trick of memory, to turn more and more toward the past. Virgil had been one of the first to help him out of the bitterness that made him a rather gloomy young man when the Republic was defeated, and his own little property dissipated, and had introduced him to Maecenas, the source of all his material prosperity and of much of his happiness. And indeed he had justified Virgil's faith, Horace said to himself with a certain pride. He had begun as the obscure son of a freedman, and here he was now, after fifty, one of the most successful poets of Rome, a friend of Augustus, a person of importance in important circles, and withal a contented man.

This last achievement he knew to be the most difficult, as it was the most unusual. And there in the clarifying sunshine he said to himself that the rich treasure of his content had been bought by n.o.ble coin: by his temperance and good sense in a luxurious society, by his self-respecting independence in a circle of rich patrons, and perhaps, above all, by his austerely honest work among many temptations to debase the gift the Muses had bestowed upon him. He had had no Stoic contempt for the outward things of this world. Indeed, after he had frankly accepted the Empire he came to feel a pride in the glory of Augustus's reign, as he felt a deep, reconciling satisfaction in its peace, its efforts at restoring public morals, its genuine insistence on a renewed purity of national life. The outward tokens of increasing wealth charmed his eyes, and he took the keenest pleasure in the gorgeous marble pillars and porticoes of many of the houses he frequented, in the beautiful statues, the bronze figures, the tapestries, the gold and silver vessels owned by many of his friends, and in the rich appointments and the perfect service of their dining-rooms, where he was a familiar guest. But he had never wanted these things for himself, any more than he wished for a pedigree and the images of ancestors to adorn lofty halls. He came away from splendid houses more than willing to fall back into plainer ways. Neither had he ever been apologetic toward his friends.

If they wanted to come and dine with him on inexpensive vegetables, he would gladly himself superintend the polishing of his few pieces of silver and the setting of his cheap table. If they did not choose to accept his invitations, why, they knew how much their standards amused him. As for his more august friends, the Emperor himself, Maecenas, and Messala, and Pollio, he had always thought it a mere matter of justice and common courtesy to repay their many kindnesses by a cheerful adaptability when he was with them, and by a dignified grat.i.tude. But not even the Emperor could have compelled him to surrender his inner citadel.

Perhaps, after all, that was why Augustus had forced him back to the lyre, in support of his reforms and in praise of the triumphal campaigns of Tiberius and Drusus. An honest mind betokened honest workmanship, and upon such workmanship, rather than upon a subsidised flattery, the imperial intruder wished to stake his repute.

However lightly Horace may from time to time have taken other things, he never trifled with his literary purpose after it had once matured.

Even his first satiric efforts had been honestly made; and when he found his true mission of adapting the perfect Greek poetry to Latin measures, there was no airy grace of phrase, no gossamer-like slightness of theme, which did not rest upon the unseen structure of artistic sincerity. That was why in rare solemn moments he believed that his poetry would live, live beyond his own lifetime and his age, even, perhaps, as long as the Pontifex Maximus and the Vestal Virgin should ascend to the Capitol in public processional.

He had said laughingly of his published metrical letters that they might please Rome for a day, travel on to the provinces, and finally become exercise-books for school-boys in remote villages. But his odes were different. They were not prosaic facts and comments put into metre: they were poetry. If he were only a laborious bee compared with the soaring swans of Greek lyric, at least he had distilled pure honey from the Parna.s.sian thyme. Now that he had determined to touch the lyre no more, he felt more than ever sure that his lyre had served Rome well. How much better, indeed, than his sword could have served her, in spite of the military ambitions of his youth. What a fool he had been to believe that the Republic could be saved by blood, or that he could be a soldier!

All these things Horace was meditating beneath his ilex tree, being moved to evaluate his life by the chance appeal of his memory to that dead friend whose "white soul" had so often, when he was alive, proved a touchstone for those who knew him. He was sure that in the larger issues Virgil would have given him praise on this afternoon; and with that thought came another which was already familiar to him. It was less probing, perhaps, but more regretfully sad. If only his father could have lived to see his success! His mother he had not known at all, except in his halting, childish imagination when, one day in each year, he had been led by his father's hand to stand before the small, plain urn containing her ashes. But his father had been his perfect friend and comrade for twenty years. He had been able to talk to him about anything. Above all the reserves of maturer life, he could remember the confidence with which as a child he had been used to rush home, bursting with the gossip of the playground, or some childish annoyance, or some fresh delight. He could not remember that he was ever scolded during his little choleric outbursts or untempered enthusiasms, and yet, somehow, after a talk with his father he had so often found himself feeling much calmer or really happier. Anger in some way or other came to seem a foolish thing; and even if he had come in from an ecstasy of play, it was certainly pleasant to have the beating throbs in his head die away and to feel his cheeks grow cool again. In looking back, Horace knew that no philosophy had ever so deeply influenced him to self-control and to mental temperance as had the common, kindly, shrewd man who had once been a slave, and whose freedom had come to him only a few years before the birth of his son.

And how ambitious the freedman had been for the education of his son!

Horace could understand now the significance of two days in his life which at their occurrence had merely seemed full of a vivid excitement. One had come when he was ten years old, but no lapse of years could dull its colours. On the day before, he had been wondering how soon he would be allowed to enter the village school, and become one of the big boys whom he watched every morning with round eyes as they went past his house, their bags and tablets hanging from their arms. But on that great day his father had lifted him in his arms--he was a little fellow--and looking at him long and earnestly had said, "My boy, we are going to Rome next week, so that you may go to school.

I have made up my mind that you deserve as good an education as the son of any knight or senator." Horace had cried a little at first in nervous excitement, and in bewilderment at his father's unwonted gravity. But all that was soon forgotten in the important bustle of preparations for a journey to the Capital. The whole village had made them the centre of critical interest. Once a bald, thick-set centurion had met them on the street, and stopped them with an incredulous question. When he was informed that it was true that the boy was to be taken to Rome, he had laughed sneeringly and said, "How proud you will be of his city education when you find that he comes back to your little government position, and can make no more money than you have." Horace had looked wonderingly into his father's face, and found it unannoyed and smiling. And even as a child he had noticed the dignity with which he answered the village magnate: "Sir, I wish to educate my son to know what is best to know, and to be a good man.