The Last Days of Pompeii Part 67

GLAUCUS to his beloved Sall.u.s.t--greeting and health!--You request me to visit you at Rome--no, Sall.u.s.t, come rather to me at Athens! I have forsworn the Imperial City, its mighty tumult and hollow joys. In my own land henceforth I dwell for ever. The ghost of our departed greatness is dearer to me than the gaudy life of your loud prosperity.

There is a charm to me which no other spot can supply, in the porticoes hallowed still by holy and venerable shades. In the olive-groves of Ilyssus I still hear the voice of poetry--on the heights of Phyle, the clouds of twilight seem yet the shrouds of departed freedom--the heralds--the heralds--of the morrow that shall come! You smile at my enthusiasm, Sall.u.s.t!--better be hopeful in chains than resigned to their glitter. You tell me you are sure that I cannot enjoy life in these melancholy haunts of a fallen majesty. You dwell with rapture on the Roman splendors, and the luxuries of the imperial court. My Sall.u.s.t--"non sum qualis eram"--I am not what I was! The events of my life have sobered the bounding blood of my youth. My health has never quite recovered its wonted elasticity ere it felt the pangs of disease, and languished in the damps of a criminal's dungeon. My mind has never shaken off the dark shadow of the Last Day of Pompeii--the horror and the desolation of that awful ruin!--Our beloved, our remembered Nydia! I have reared a tomb to her shade, and I see it every day from the window of my study. It keeps alive in me a tender recollection--a not unpleasing sadness--which are but a fitting homage to her fidelity, and the mysteriousness of her early death. Ione gathers the flowers, but my own hand wreathes them daily around the tomb. She was worthy of a tomb in Athens!

'You speak of the growing sect of the Christians in Rome. Sall.u.s.t, to you I may confide my secret; I have pondered much over that faith--I have adopted it. After the destruction of Pompeii, I met once more with Olinthus--saved, alas! only for a day, and falling afterwards a martyr to the indomitable energy of his zeal. In my preservation from the lion and the earthquake he taught me to behold the hand of the unknown G.o.d!

I listened--believed--adored! My own, my more than ever beloved Ione, has also embraced the creed!--a creed, Sall.u.s.t, which, shedding light over this world, gathers its concentrated glory, like a sunset, over the next! We know that we are united in the soul, as in the flesh, for ever and for ever! Ages may roll on, our very dust be dissolved, the earth shrivelled like a scroll; but round and round the circle of eternity rolls the wheel of life--imperishable--unceasing! And as the earth from the sun, so immortality drinks happiness from virtue, which is the smile upon the face of G.o.d! Visit me, then, Sall.u.s.t; bring with you the learned scrolls of Epicurus, Pythagoras, Diogenes; arm yourself for defeat; and let us, amidst the groves of Academus, dispute, under a surer guide than any granted to our fathers, on the mighty problem of the true ends of life and the nature of the soul.

'Ione--at that name my heart yet beats!--Ione is by my side as I write: I lift my eyes, and meet her smile. The sunlight quivers over Hymettus: and along my garden I hear the hum of the summer bees. Am I happy, ask you? Oh, what can Rome give me equal to what I possess at Athens? Here, everything awakens the soul and inspires the affections--the trees, the waters, the hills, the skies, are those of Athens!--fair, though mourning-mother of the Poetry and the Wisdom of the World. In my hall I see the marble faces of my ancestors. In the Ceramicus, I survey their tombs! In the streets, I behold the hand of Phidias and the soul of Pericles. Harmodius, Aristogiton--they are everywhere--but in our hearts!--in mine, at least, they shall not perish! If anything can make me forget that I am an Athenian and not free, it is partly the soothing--the love--watchful, vivid, sleepless--of Ione--a love that has taken a new sentiment in our new creed--a love which none of our poets, beautiful though they be, had shadowed forth in description; for mingled with religion, it partakes of religion; it is blended with pure and unworldly thoughts; it is that which we may hope to carry through eternity, and keep, therefore, white and unsullied, that we may not blush to confess it to our G.o.d! This is the true type of the dark fable of our Grecian Eros and Psyche--it is, in truth, the soul asleep in the arms of love. And if this, our love, support me partly against the fever of the desire for freedom, my religion supports me more; for whenever I would grasp the sword and sound the sh.e.l.l, and rush to a new Marathon (but Marathon without victory), I feel my despair at the chilling thought of my country's impotence--the crushing weight of the Roman yoke, comforted, at least, by the thought that earth is but the beginning of life--that the glory of a few years matters little in the vast s.p.a.ce of eternity--that there is no perfect freedom till the chains of clay fall from the soul, and all s.p.a.ce, all time, become its heritage and domain. Yet, Sall.u.s.t, some mixture of the soft Greek blood still mingles with my faith. I can share not the zeal of those who see crime and eternal wrath in men who cannot believe as they. I shudder not at the creed of others. I dare not curse them--I pray the Great Father to convert. This lukewarmness exposes me to some suspicion amongst the Christians: but I forgive it; and, not offending openly the prejudices of the crowd, I am thus enabled to protect my brethren from the danger of the law, and the consequences of their own zeal. If moderation seem to me the natural creature of benevolence, it gives, also, the greatest scope to beneficence.

'Such, then, O Sall.u.s.t! is my life--such my opinions. In this manner I greet existence and await death. And thou, glad-hearted and kindly pupil of Epicurus, thou... But come hither, and see what enjoyments, what hopes are ours--and not the splendor of imperial banquets, nor the shouts of the crowded circus, nor the noisy forum, nor the glittering theatre, nor the luxuriant gardens, nor the voluptuous baths of Rome--shall seem to thee to const.i.tute a life of more vivid and uninterrupted happiness than that which thou so unreasonably pitiest as the career of Glaucus the Athenian!--Farewell!'

Nearly Seventeen Centuries had rolled away when the City of Pompeii was disinterred from its silent tomb, all vivid with undimmed hues; its walls fresh as if painted yesterday--not a hue faded on the rich mosaic of its floors--in its forum the half-finished columns as left by the workman's hand--in its gardens the sacrificial tripod--in its halls the chest of treasure--in its baths the strigil--in its theatres the counter of admission--in its saloons the furniture and the lamp--in its triclinia the fragments of the last feast--in its cubicula the perfumes and the rouge of faded beauty--and everywhere the bones and skeletons of those who once moved the springs of that minute yet gorgeous machine of luxury and of life! In the house of Diomed, in the subterranean vaults, twenty skeletons (one of a babe) were discovered in one spot by the door, covered by a fine ashen dust, that had evidently been wafted slowly through the apertures, until it had filled the whole s.p.a.ce.

There were jewels and coins, candelabra for unavailing light, and wine hardened in the amphorae for a prolongation of agonized life. The sand, consolidated by damps, had taken the forms of the skeletons as in a cast; and the traveler may yet see the impression of a female neck and bosom of young and round proportions--the trace of the fated Julia! It seems to the inquirer as if the air had been gradually changed into a sulphurous vapor; the inmates of the vaults had rushed to the door, to find it closed and blocked up by the scoria without, and in their attempts to force it, had been suffocated with the atmosphere.

In the garden was found a skeleton with a key by its bony hand, and near it a bag of coins. This is believed to have been the master of the house--the unfortunate Diomed, who had probably sought to escape by the garden, and been destroyed either by the vapors or some fragment of stone. Beside some silver vases lay another skeleton, probably of a slave.

The houses of Sall.u.s.t and of Pansa, the Temple of Isis, with the juggling concealments behind the statues--the lurking-place of its holy oracles--are now bared to the gaze of the curious. In one of the chambers of that temple was found a huge skeleton with an axe beside it: two walls had been pierced by the axe--the victim could penetrate no farther. In the midst of the city was found another skeleton, by the side of which was a heap of coins, and many of the mystic ornaments of the fane of Isis. Death had fallen upon him in his avarice, and Calenus perished simultaneously with Burbo! As the excavators cleared on through the ma.s.s of ruin, they found the skeleton of a man literally severed in two by a prostrate column; the skull was of so striking a conformation, so boldly marked in its intellectual as well as its worse physical developments, that it has excited the constant speculation of every itinerant believer in the theories of Spurzheim who has gazed upon that ruined palace of the mind. Still, after the lapse of ages, the traveler may survey that airy hall within whose cunning galleries and elaborate chambers once thought, reasoned, dreamed, and sinned, the soul of Arbaces the Egyptian.

Viewing the various witnesses of a social system which has pa.s.sed from the world for ever--a stranger, from that remote and barbarian Isle which the Imperial Roman shivered when he named, paused amidst the delights of the soft Campania and composed this history!