Roads from Rome

by Anne C. E. Allinson

I

The spring had come promptly this year and with it the usual invoice of young Romans to Athens. Some of them were planning to stay only a month or two to see the country and hear the more famous professors lecture. Others were settling down for a long period of serious study in rhetoric and philosophy. Scarcely to be classed among any of these was the young poet Julius Paulus,² who, as he put it to himself with the frank grandiosity of youth, was in search of the flame of life—studiosus ardoris vivendi. He had brought a letter to Aulus Gellius, and Gellius, dutifully responsive to all social claims, invited him on a day in early March to join him and a few friends for a country walk and an outdoor lunch in one of their favourite meeting places.

2 A poet Julius Paulus is mentioned once by Aulus Gellius in the Attic Nights, in terms which seem to suggest both his worldly prosperity and his cultivated tastes. But the suggestion for his character in this imaginary sketch has come, in reality, from generous and ardent young students of to-day, turning reluctantly from their life in Athens to patient achievement in the countries whose sons they are.

This place, an unfrequented precinct of Aphrodite, about two hours distant from the marketplace, lay below the rocky summit of Hymettus within the hollow of the foot hills. The walk was an easy one, but the forenoon sun was warm and the young pedestrians upon their arrival paused in grateful relief by a spring under a large plane tree which still bore its leaves of wintry gold. The clear water, a boon in arid Attica, completed their temperate lunch of bread and eggs, dried figs and native wine. After eating they climbed farther up the hillside and stretched themselves out in the soft grass that lurked among boulders in the shade of a beech tree. Aulus, with the air of performing an habitual action, produced a book. To-day it proved to be a choice old volume of Ovid, which he had secured at a bargain on the quay at Brindisi, convinced that it had belonged, fully one hundred and fifty years ago, to the poet himself. It had gone far, he said, toward consoling him for the loss of an original Second Book of the Æneid snatched up by a friend in the Image Market at Rome. The Ovid was for Paulus's edification. Aulus unrolled his treasure and read aloud "an accurate description of this very spot:"

Violet crests of Hymettus a-flower
Neighbour a fountain consecrate.
Yielding and green is the turf. In a bower
Trees low-growing meet and mate;
Arbutus shadeth the green grass kirtle,
Sweet the scent of rosemary;
Fragrant the bay and the bloom of the myrtle;
Nay, nor fail thee here to see
Tamarisks delicate, box-wood masses,
Lordly pine and clover low.
Legions of leaves and the top of the grasses
Stir with healing zephyrs slow.

The reader's indifference to what confronted his eyes, added to his dull regard for the verbal accuracy of ancient verses, shrivelled the modern poet's ardent humour. Was this an example of the intellectual enlightenment awaiting him, he had so fondly hoped, in Athens? With apprehension he remembered what his father's friend, a rich dilettante, one of the best liked men in Rome, had written him when he sent him the letter of introduction:

"You will find Gellius the best fellow in the world but not a fagot to kindle the fires of pleasure. I hear that he has called his book, a particoloured digest of information, Attic Nights, because he has spent his nights in Athens writing it—nights, mark you, when even in her own city Athena closes her grey eyes within her virgin shrine and leaves Pan to guard from his cave below the roysterings of youth. It is easy to let an allusion to my friend Lucian slip off the end of my stylus when I think of Athens. He and Gellius are scarcely the 'like pleasing like' of the proverb! Lucian, in fact, disposed of Gellius once by calling him an 'Infant Ignorance on the arm of Fashion.' This was after he had watched a peasant making holiday among the statues and temples on the Acropolis, carrying in his arms a three months old child who dozed in a colonnade of the Parthenon and sucked his thumb in front of Athena Promachus. The blinking baby, he said, made him think of Aulus, futilely carried about by the trend of the age among ideas and achievements beyond his understanding. But in fairness I must add that when this was repeated to Marcus Aurelius he retorted: 'Better a child than an iconoclast in the presence of beauty. I should call Gellius an honest errand boy in Athena's temple.' So there you have two ways of looking at your future host. If Lucian is the most enlightened wit of the day, Aurelius is the most Roman of us all and likely to rule over us when Antoninus rejoins the gods.

"On Gellius's return next year he is to be made a judge. He will study law painstakingly and apply it exactly. And Rome will never for him be one whit juster. However, your father will be delighted to have you make such a friend—a man of thirty whose idea of a debauch is to make a syllogism, who is a favourite student of great teachers and can introduce you to Herodes Atticus and to all the best life of Athens. Nor, indeed, do I marvel at Aurelius for trusting him. As a scholar or a jurist he will always be negligible, but as a man he is naïvely sincere and candid and with all the strength of his Roman will he is determined that both his work and his pleasures shall be such as befit a gentleman of honour and refinement. He may bore you, but, if I do not misread you, the pleasures that are within his gift will have a finer edge for you than those of the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus."

As Gellius droned on about some of the niceties of Ovid's language, fragmentary sentences of this letter recurred to Paulus and he wondered what his father's friend would think of him could he accurately read his desires for pleasure. Certainly the shows of the Amphitheatre seemed remote enough here under the cool, grey branches, tipped with early green, of the Attic beech tree, but scarcely, after all, more remote than they often seemed in Rome itself to a youth who found virile recreation by the sea at Ostia or in following the Anio over the hills of Tibur. No, he had not flung away from Rome to escape in the back waters of a smaller town the noisy vulgarities of the metropolis. Nor was he one of those who confused the contests of the Circus with the creative struggles of the Forum. His abstinence from political life was due to temperament rather than conviction, nature having shaped him for active citizenship in a world dissociated from public insignia. It was in this world that he found himself at twenty-five ill at ease. Without genius, his slender vein of talent was yet of pure gold. There was no danger of his overrating his own poetry. He saw it as it was, of the day and hour, wearing no immortal grace of thought or language. But in it he was at his best, more honest and more whole-hearted than he could be in any public service. This seemed to him, quite simply, to constitute a reason for being such a poet as he was.

He belonged to an ancient family, which had furnished a consul in the first Punic War, had left distinguished dead on the field of Cannæ and had borne on its roll the conqueror of Macedonia. Æmilius Paulus Macedonicus had rendered Rome the further and signal service of a public life as spotless as it was brilliant, and something of this statesman's scrupulous integrity had passed to the youngest son of the house, leading him to discriminate in his world also between shadows and realities. To Paulus the happiest age in the world's history was the age of Pericles, when the wedlock of life and learning issued in universal power. In Rome he would have been glad to have lived in the last years of the Republic, or under Augustus, when Lucretius and Catullus, Virgil and Horace, by submitting themselves in pupilage to the Greeks, became masters of new thoughts and new emotions among the masters of the world. How different was their discipleship from the imitative methods of modern literati! While it was the fashion to boast of refinement and learning, while libraries jostled each other and rhetoricians and philosophers swarmed in the city, Paulus was chiefly conscious that in the place of creative imagination a soulless erudition walked abroad. In the vestibule of the Palatine temple, waiting for the morning appearance of the Emperor, rhetoricians discussed the meaning of an adverb. In the baths they tested each other's knowledge of Sallust. Grammarians gathered in secondhand bookshops around rare copies of Varro's satires and Fabius's chronicles and hunted for copyist's errors. If one were tired of the streets and went to walk in Agrippa's park, he ran into men quarrelling over a vocative. Even on a holiday at Ostia he could not escape discussions between Stoics and Peripatetics. With all this activity, philosophy and literature grew only more anæmic.

Paulus, too limited to be himself a formative influence, was also too truth-loving to be satisfied in Rome with the only life he was fitted to lead. Indifferent to the persuasions of Aphrodite, he yet harboured in his temperament a certain warmth which made him eager to live with passion and abandon, to scorch his hands in the fires of the world rather than drearily to warm them at burnt out ashes. Hopeless in Rome, he determined to seek his fortune elsewhere. An intellectual life real enough to claim his spendthrift allegiance, this, concretely, was the prize for which he had set sail from Brindisi two months before.

The act gave him an outward resemblance to the horde of young bloods who were always swinging out on the high seas in search of sport and adventure. The most restless made for Britain and the shores of the Euxine or the Baltic, or for the interior of Syria and Persia. The larger number followed the beaten and luxurious paths to Egypt, where they plunged into the gaieties of Alexandria and, cursorily enough, saw the sights of Memphis and Thebes. Paulus also went to Egypt. But in spite of his introductions and his opportunities to experiment with modern life under the absolving witchery of Oriental conditions, he gave himself over to the subtler influences of the past. Pilgrim rather than tourist, he visited eagerly the pyramids and the Sphinx, the temples of Karnak and Thebes, the tombs of the Theban kings, the colossi of the desert. In the frightful course of the centuries, as they unrolled before him, he seized upon the guidance of Herodotus, to whom the monuments of Egypt had seemed as incalculably old as they did to him. The choice, however, had proved unfortunate for his sympathetic reading of Egyptian history. Dwelling on the radiant progress towards truth and beauty of a free race, bondsmen only to law and reason, younger brothers of bright gods, he became querulously critical of a race whose Pharaohs strangled life in the thought of death and eternity, prostrated themselves before gods in monstrous shapes, and produced art at the expense of human well-being.

The landscape of Egypt also seemed to Paulus as sinister as it was exquisite. Its beauty, whether of silver Nile or lilac mountains or tawny desert, enervated by its appeal to the love of easy delight, and bred mad, vagrant thoughts, precursors of moral disaster. He had slept in the desert one night. The enamelled turquoise of the daylight sky, the clear, red gold of the sunset, the ghostly amber of the afterglow gave way to moonlight. As he lay and watched the silver bloom spread over the sand dunes, he felt suddenly a great terror. The golden apples of his western labour, the hard-won fruits of his stern young virtue, were slipping out of his grasp. The white desert lay upon his spirit like mist upon the sea, obliterating the promised course. Desires, unknown before, crept in upon him over the waves of the sand. All that he had rejected claimed him. All that he had thought holy mocked him. The next day he hurried to Alexandria and, recoiling from the library he had planned to visit, took the first ship to Greece.

He had landed a week ago. To-day's excursion, offering a pleasant comradeship with those of his own race in a strange land, came almost opportunely, he fancied, to break an exalted mood. He had found himself roused to the uttermost by his first impressions of Athens. Put to flight by the seduction of river and desert, it was the influence of the landscape rather than of art and history to which he was here first made sensitive. Sea, mountains and plain were informed with a beauty which purged his memory of the evil loveliness of Egypt and restored gravity and dignity to his conception of human life. He was struck by what Plato would have called the Doric strain in the harmonies of outline and colour. Idyllic scenes he had already run across in his walks out from the city, scenes formed and reformed by the lovely occupations of farm and vineyard and pasture. But the lyric note so familiar to him in Italy seemed always overborne by a deeper. Whether it was because of the noble modelling of the fleshless mountains or because of an inner restraint in the minor elements of the landscape, the mood generated by the beauty of the Attic plain was always a grave one, delight swelling into reverence.

Now also, as his thoughts ceased whirling and he became conscious again of what lay around him, his irritation died. All that was trifling must be discarded when his eye could travel beyond wild hyacinth and myrtle, past pines and olive groves and cypresses, past the rosy soil of upturned fields, to the long, firm lines of Parnes's purple ridge and to the snowy summit, a midday beacon, high-uplifted, of distant Helicon.

To his relief, Paulus found that Gellius's monologue had given way to general conversation. As he listened his heart grew hot within him. These young men, of whom only Gellius and Servilianus had passed out of their twenties, had lived in Athens for a year or longer, and now, conscious of their approaching departure, they had fallen to talking of the past months. A strange power Athens seemed to have of exacting from aliens the intimate loyalty of sons. Here, Paulus felt, was no miserly counting up of gains, but an inner concern with art and history. Not as gluttonous travellers, but as those facing a long exile, they talked of a city richer than Rome or Alexandria or Antioch, richer than all the cities of the Empire taken together, in masterpieces of architect and sculptor and painter; of a country-side alive with memories of poets and thinkers and soldiers. Taking with a catholic enthusiasm the hot winds and driving white dust of summer, the deforming rains of winter, and the bright splendour of sky and earth at the advent of spring, they had tramped hither and yon, light-hearted in the vigour of youth, reverent in the impulse of pilgrimage. Mountain fastnesses where the clarion winds still trumpeted the victory of freedom and of Thrasybulus; upland caves where Plato had been taken as a child to worship Pan; long, white roads leading to the village homes of Euripides and Demosthenes; the wind in the pine trees on Pentelicon, reminding them of the wind in the groves of Tusculum; the autumn leaves on the plane trees by the Ilissus; the silver moon seen from the water's edge at Phaleron, swinging into the eastern void above the amethyst-dyed rocks of Hymettus; a sail on a summer star-lit night from Ægina to Piræus—all these things crept one by one into their conversation. Here, Paulus recognised, was a group of young men on fire with a real emotion, cleansed in the presence of beauty and of great memories, witnesses afresh to a procreative Hellas. When the party broke up he thanked his host for the happiest day he had spent in many months.

On the way home, after rounding the last foot hill, they saw the Acropolis across the plain. The sun fell on the red in the natural rock and intensified the white of the marbles. Against the sombre mountains the isolated citadel glowed inly, like a milk-white opal shot with rose. Paulus caught his breath. Was it here, his flame of life?