Roads from Rome Part 8

"But I can see from your faces that this ill.u.s.tration does not convince you. To you the ca.n.a.l is even less important than a new facade for the well-house of Corinthian Peirene. Let me try again.

I have heard people say what a satisfaction it must be to me to play a conspicuous part in the life of our own generation. But what is the life of our generation--the life, I mean, in which I have any individual share? My contribution is in art and literature, not in politics or war. And in art and literature what are we doing, save recalling in vague echoes the greater voices of a dead past? Even Lucian here, who is the only original of us all in letters, even Ptolemy, who is a master in science, will agree with me. Our greatness is of the past.

"Look at the statues in the theatre! AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides surrounded by what a horde of little moderns! Menander standing cheek by jowl with a poetaster! The Emperors have dallied with us, wanting the gifts we bear to the Empire. The Roman Republic saw to it that we should bring no new gifts. The trees in Aristotle's Lyceum were cut down by Sulla to make his engines of war. When he turned these engines on the Acropolis, Athena's golden lamp went out.

"I was consul once at Rome, but few will remember it of me, for it was not the real I that did that work. But I was doing, I sometimes think, a more real thing than when I try to clothe Athens again with the glory of Pericles's age or seek in long lost quarries for my prose style. I envied divine Hadrian his faith in a restoration. His pride in Rome seemed really equalled by his pa.s.sionate sentiment for Athens and his determination to make her once more the nurse of the arts.

Commerce and wealth have swept by us to Egypt. Ships put in at Piraeus merely for repairs, and no longer, as in the great past, pay a part of their cargoes to Athens, a fee of harbourage. Learning, too, has swept eastward. Librarians and learned men dwell at Alexandria.

Hadrian asked me to help him reawaken in Athens Apollo and his Muses.

The restorer's buildings are round about you, his library and temples, in their new splendour typical of his hope. But wherein, after all, lies the greatness of the greatest of them? The Temple of Zeus imposes chiefly, I think, by its display of the world-wide power of Hadrian.

You see the statues of himself in and about it, raised by Rome and Carthage, by Corinth and Byzantium, by Miletus and Laodicea, by every city of the Empire, paying homage to an emperor who by some divine grace happened to prefer to be honoured by marble in Athens rather than to have gold sent to him in Rome. How different is the Parthenon, still, after six hundred years, the embodiment of a common impulse of a free people! Try as Hadrian would, he could not restore the art of the past."

Atticus looked at the Romans among the company and his voice became golden and persuasive as he continued:

"I have come to feel, my friends, that the restoration of an art that is not the outcome of a genuine national life is a futile thing. Rome cannot restore the glory of old Athens. She can only learn from Greece how to create a glory of her own. She must so govern her life, so train her sons, that out of their own impulses a new poetry, a new art will grow. Divine influences from the past, yes, they exist. In your own most creative times Cicero and Lucretius, Virgil and Horace, did more than restore. Seeking aliment from Greece, they nurtured their own genius. But you, what are you and your friends doing? Why are you over here? Tell me that. Are you here to learn to be better Romans, carrying on your own national life, creating at last out of the forces of your own time an architecture and sculpture, a painting and poetry commensurate with your powers? Sometimes I fear you make a cult of Athens, lose yourselves in remembering her as she once was.

You seem to spend your lives, as I have sometimes spent wakeful nights at Marathon, my birthplace, listening for the feet of heroes and the neighing of horses on the field where a great battle was once fought.

That may do for the night seasons, but with the sun are there not new conquests, and new shields?

"You scorn your own Romans who come over here and put up their names on old statues of Themistocles and Miltiades. You admire Cicero who, although he loved Athens and wished that he might leave here some gift from himself, scorned to pervert an ancient statue. And yet, I tell you, Cicero was a Roman first, a lover of Greek culture second.

All that he learned here he dedicated to the Republic. He studied Isocrates and Demosthenes in order that by his voice he might free Rome from traitors and persuade Justice to 'walk down her broad highways as Warder.' He read Plato that philosophy might soften the harsher temper of his own people. He partook of our refinement that the vigour of Rome might be used in the service of humanity.

"Take warning by me. Do not, indeed, forget our past. Stay here as long as you will. Touch lingeringly the hem of Athena's peplos. But when your minds are strengthened, when your powers are matured, go back to your own people and make them also, because you have dwelt for a time in the home of Plato, look 'to the pattern that is laid up in heaven for him who wills to see, and, seeing, so to plant his dwelling.' Work for Rome. Let the memory of Athens be no cup of eastern magic. Listen, rather, for her voice as worshippers at the salt well on the Acropolis listen, when the south wind blows, for the sound of the waves of the purging sea."

The rich, emotional voice ceased suddenly like the flood tide of Northern seas. Paulus was not prepared for the swift transformation of ardent speaker into observant host as Atticus turned with a whispered order to the slave who stood behind him. He was shocked, too, failing to perceive its note of defiant bitterness, by a laugh from Lucian and his careless, "My felicitations, Atticus, on your welding of dirge and exhortation into one epideictic oration!

Aulus," he added, looking across the table, "don't forget to make a note of the prepositions the master used in burying Greece."

The sneer fortunately was almost on the instant covered up by Ptolemy, who, as if awakened from a revery, turned toward his host. "Atticus,"

he said, "you have convinced me that I am right. Pedigree, wealth and art, nations and civilisations and the destiny of men bring you no happiness. I find myself at peace in the heavens. While you were speaking I rivalled Alpheus here and beat out an epigram:

That I am mortal and a day my span I know and own, Yet when the circling ebb and flow I scan Of stars thick-strewn, No longer brush the earth my feet, And I abide, While G.o.d's own food ambrosial doth replete, By Zeus's side."

Like a gust of wind, the unexpected poet might have swept the conversation into his own ether, if at this juncture the doors had not opened to admit a group of well known actors. There was a general exclamation of surprise, special entertainments being almost unknown at Atticus's dinners. The host turned smiling to his guests. "My friends," he said, "I know you share my pride in the rare event of Apuleius's presence. He is not as accustomed as we are to the grey monotone of our own thoughts. Shall he go back to Carthage or Rome to laugh at our village banquets? Ptolemy, you know Menander shared your regard for--

these majestic sights--the common sun, Water and clouds, the stars and fire.

Let him take you off now among our country folk out here near Parnes.

We still have the human comedy, played out under sun and stars. Love and deceit, troubles and rewards are as ageless as the heavens.

Gentlemen, this distinguished company has consented to give us to-night a presentation of _The Arbitrants_ equal to the famous one of the last Dionysia."

Apuleius's handsome face lit up with gaiety and good will. "I thank you, O wise host," he called out.

To-day's my joy and sorrow, Who knows what comes to-morrow?

Let us spend the moment we have in the merry company of a wise poet."

The play began. Moods of tragedy were forgotten. Only Paulus found himself unable to listen. His host's appeal, made apparently with such ready emotion, and so easily forgotten by the other men--he was the youngest of the company--had shaken his soul as a young tree on a mountain is shaken by the night wind. The comedy went on, punctuated by applause. In his mind met and struggled high desires. When Atticus had talked of Athens and of Rome he had remembered Virgil's great defence of his own people, the weapon of all patriots after him:

Others, I well believe, shall mould the bronze to breathe in softer form, from marble shall unveil the living countenance, shall plead with greater eloquence, and heaven's paths map out with rod in hand and tell the rising of the stars. Upon the tablets of thy memory, O Roman, it is laid to hold the peoples in thy sway. These are thy arts and shall be: To impose the ways of peace; to spare the vanquished and subject the proud.

Now there leaped into life within him a realisation of Rome's incommunicable greatness. He perceived at last the nature of the _pax romana_, that peace, compounded of power, which welded the continents together, made the seas into serviceable highways and held all men secure within the barriers of law and justice. Was it possible that a nation which had given birth to a force like this could also bring forth in due season a love of beauty, a thirst for truth? Could tameless genius and conquering will, could a pa.s.sion for ideas and a pa.s.sion for deeds dwell together until side by side men of one blood should add to the glory of worldly power the glory of spiritual conquest, should superimpose upon the beauty of just laws the beauty of wrought bronze and woven language?

And if this could be, what was the duty of each Roman whose pure desires lay with Poetry and her sisters? Paulus shuddered as he felt the question tearing its way through the peaceful plans he had been making for his life. He remembered the story of Menander refusing to leave the intellectual life of Athens for the luxuries of Ptolemy's court. Must he, on the contrary, for the sake of an idea, renounce this life, with its cherished poverty and philosophy, its peace and learned leisure, its freedom and candour and regard for beauty, to go back to Rome where, in terrifying coalition, power and pleasure, wealth and display, pa.s.sion and brutality were forever crowding in upon the city's honour? The irresponsibility of the insignificant a.s.sailed him. A Virgil, he supposed, might know that his presence would affect his country for good or evil. But what could he, Paulus, do? In Rome, in Athens, he was one of the little men.

Was he not, then, justified in living his own life in the best possible way, atoning for the meagreness of his talent by the honourableness of his quest?

But even as he said this to himself he remembered why Athens had achieved perfection. In the age of Pericles, geniuses, like flawless jewels cut out of a proper matrix, had been fashioned out of a large body of men, themselves not gifted, but able to understand and safeguard those who were. He had left Rome because she was no matrix for poets and artists and thinkers. Ought he now to return to her and live and work and die unknown, serving only as one more citizen ready to welcome the poets to be?

His panting desires put up one last defence. Was he not narrowing art within the borders of nationality? In the service of beauty was there either Greek or Roman? Alas! Atticus had beaten that down already. Art was no fungus, growing on a rotten stump of national life. Greeks had been artists only when they had been conquerors, soldiers, traders, rulers. The Romans now held the world. In them, the eagle's brood, lay the hope of a new birth of the spirit. With a certain n.o.ble unreason, he dismissed the idea that by living in Athens he might fight the battle for Rome. If he was to fight at all, it was to be where the enemy was fiercest and the hope of victory least. Upon any easier choice his ancestors within him laid their iron grasp. His ears caught the words of one of the actors:

"Well, do not then the G.o.ds look out for us?" you'll say.

To each of us they have allotted Character As garrison commander.

Gathering his forces in obedience to his garrison commander Paulus tried to decide to go back to Rome. Greece called to him insistently.

Confused and exhausted, he joined perfunctorily in the loud applause that closed the comedy, and in the speeches of grat.i.tude and farewell to the host.

The play had been long, and the autumn night, he found to his surprise, had pa.s.sed. Emerging from the house, he breasted the dawn. With curious suddenness the sense of conflict left him. The beauty of the Attic plain, born, unlike the beauty of the Roman Campagna, of light rather than of unshed tears, had often seemed to him to quicken the perception of truth. Certainly the dullest eyes must see at this hour, when, at the behest of the approaching sun, outlines were cleared of all that was shadowy and fanciful, and colours were touched to buoyant life. Greece called to him, but with what a message!

Imaginings, vain desires, regrets, were swept away from his mind, even as the receding shadows left bare the contours of the mountains.

He saw that his concern was with the battle, not with its issue. In this enlightening hour he understood that Rome would never become mother of the arts, until, in some unimagined future, through transforming national experiences, she should be made pregnant with ideas beyond the ken of his generation. Poets might again be born of her, but he and his like would long since have been lying among her forgotten children. And yet, the life of the future, however distant, would not be unaffected by the obscure work and faith of the present age. He himself would never see victory, but the struggle was his inalienable heritage. Revealed in light and joy he knew his purpose. Down from the crags of Parnes, great wings strong with the morning, swept an eagle--as if homeward--toward the western sea.

With it, like an arrow to its goal, alert with the vigour of dawn, aflame with the ardour of life, sped the heart of the young Roman.