CHAPTER VI.
The inn, it is well ascertained, never became a common institution in classic antiquity. It was utterly unknown in any thing like its modern shape among the Greeks; one cause being that the literary Greeks gave less care to their roads and communications than the administrating, fighting, conquering, and colonizing Romans always did. Even among the Romans the army trusted to its city-like encampments from stage to stage. Centuries passed away, during which the private traveller found few indeed, and far between, any better public resting-houses along the magnificent and stupendous highways, whose remains we still behold indestructible, from England to Asia Minor, than the half-day relay-posts, or mutationes. At these the wayfarer, by producing[28] his diploma from the proper authorities, obtained a change of horses.
Travelling, in short, was a thousand-fold less practised than it is among us; and those who did travel, or who deemed it likely they ever should, trusted to that hospitality which necessity had made universal, and the poetry of daily life had raised by repute into one of the greatest virtues. Years before any member of your family, supposing you to belong to the age through which the events of this narrative are carrying and to carry us, years before any of your circle quitted your roof, you knew to what house, to what smoky hearth in each foreign land, to what threshold in Spain, Gaul, Syria, Egypt, Greece, the wanderer would eventually resort. A certain family in each of these and other lands was your hospes, and you were theirs; and very often you carried round your neck, attached to a gold or silver chain, a bit of elder or oak (robur) notched and marked by the natural breakage, the corresponding half of which hung day and night round the neck of some friend living thousands of miles away, beyond rivers, mountains, wild forests, and raging seas. These tokens were the cheap lodging-money of friendship. Very often they were interchanged and put on in boyhood, and not presented till advanced age. He who had thrown the sacred symbol round the curly head of his playmate on the banks of the Tiber, saw an old man with scanty white hair approach him, half a century afterward, at Alexandria, or Numantia, or Athens, and offer him a little bit of wood, the fracture? of which were found to fit into those of a similar piece worn upon his own bosom. Or the son brought the father's token; or a son received what a father had given. And the stranger was forthwith joyfully made welcome, and took rank among dear friends. Forthwith the bath and the supper introduced him to his remote home amid foreign faces. To be once unfaithful to these pledges, was to become irreparably infamous. The caitiff who thus sundered the lies of traditionary and necessity-caused and world-wide kindness, became an object of scorn and reprobation to all. It was enough to mention of him,[29] tesseram confregit hospitalem, ("that man has broken his token-word of hospitality;") with that all was said. Traces of this touching custom appear to survive in some of the ceremonials of rustic love, amid many a population ignorant that the ancient Romans ever reigned over Europe.
But if inns, in year eleven, were not what they have been in mediæval and modern Europe, nevertheless a few existed even then, (cauponæ;) and a more notable establishment of this kind never flourished in any part of the Roman empire than that to which our story has now brought us. It was the exception to manners then prevalent, and the presage of manners to come long afterward. It used to be commonly called the Post-House of the Hundredth Milestone, or, more briefly, Crispus's Inn.
The public room of this place of entertainment was not unlike the coffee-room of a good modern inn, except that it was necessarily far more full of incident and interest, because the ancients were beyond comparison more addicted to living in public than any modern nation has ever been.
An Englishman who makes a similar remark of the French, in comparison with his own countrymen, has only to remember that the modern French as much excel the ancient Romans in fondness for retirement and privacy and domestic life as the English believe themselves to excel the French in the same particular.
An inn did not trouble itself much with the triclinium, a chamber seldom used by its frequenters. Even the manners of the triclinium were out of vogue here.
In Crispus's public room, for instance, there was one and only one table arranged with couches around it, upon which some three or four customers, while eating and drinking, could recline according to the fashion adopted in the private houses of the rich and noble. All the other tables stood round the walls of the apartment, with benches and settees on each side, offering seats for the guests. The inner seats at these tables were generally preferred, for two reasons; the occupants saw all that passed in the room, and besides, had the wall, against which they could lean back.
When Velleius Paterculus, having left Tiberius and Sejanus in the meadows near the Liris, took charge of the prætorian squadrons and of Paulus, he directed a Batavian trooper to dismount and give his horse to the prisoner. Paulus willingly sprung upon the big Flemish beast, and rode by the side of the obliging officer who had given him that conveyance. Thus they proceeded at an easy amble until they reached the post-house, to the porch of which the noise of four thousand hoofs, suddenly approaching along the paved road, had brought a group of curious gazers. Among these was the landlord, Crispus himself.
A halt, as the reader must have inferred from a former incident, was occasioned at the door by the intimation conveyed to Paterculus that Paulus's sister had fainted, that she and her mother intended to seek a lodging at the inn, and that the mother and brother of the invalid would both feel grateful to the commanding officer if he could permit Paulus, upon pledging his word not to make any attempt to escape, to remain there with them.
"As to the ladies," said the urbane literary soldier, "I have neither the wish nor any orders to interfere with their movements. But you, young sir, what say you? Will you give me your word to regard yourself as being in my custody till I expressly release you? Will you promise not to abire, evadere, excedere, or erumpere, as our friend Tully said?"
"Tully! Who is that?" asked our hero.
"What, you a half Greek and not know who Tully was! Is this the manner in which Greek youths, or at least youths in Greece, are educated! Is it thus they are taught in Greece, to which we go ourselves for education! In that Greece which has forbidden gladiatorial shows, and diminished the training of the body to have more time for that of the intellect!"
Paulus blushed, seeing he must have betrayed some gross degree of rusticity, and answered,
"I know I am ignorant: I have been so much occupied in athletic sports. But I will give you the promise you ask, and keep it most truly and faithfully."
"I will trust you, then. Go a little, my friend, into the athletic sports of the mind, which are precisely those Greece most cultivates. You are of a great family now fallen down. The muscles of the arm, the strength of the body, a blow from a cestus, never yet raised that kind of burden off the ground. You fence astonishingly well—I noted your parry just now; but the fence of the mind is every thing, believe me. By the way, I see the excellent Piso, whom you hammered down after the parry, as one puts a full stop to a pretty sentence, is being carried into this same post-house."
"By your leave, illustrious sir," interposed the innkeeper, rather nervously, "it is scarcely the custom, is it, to drop guests at Crispus's door, without first asking Crispus has he room for them? The expected visit of the divine Augustus to the neighboring palace of the most excellent and valiant knight Mamurra, in Formiæ, has choked and strangled this poor house. There is no place where the multitude of guests can lodge in the town, so they come hither, as to a spot at a convenient distance. Troops of players, troops of gladiators, troops of fortune-tellers, troops of geese, pigs, beeves, attagens, alive and dead, night and day, for the last week, with mighty personages from a distance, make the road noisy, I assure you, even after my house is full. I believe they would wish me to put up the very oxen intended for sacrifice."
"Have you no chambers whatever vacant?" asked Velleius.
"I did not say that, most excellent sir; vacant is one thing, disengaged is another. I have received an express letter from Brundusium, to say that a certain queen out of the East, with her son and her train, are coming to pay their homage to the emperor: and here we have already the servants of that Jew king, as they say, one King Alexander, who wants his cause to be heard and his title settled by Augustus himself, and I am obliged to listen to loud outcries that he, too, must have apartments."
At this moment, the travelling carriage carrying poor Agatha and her mother had been drawn nearly opposite to the porch, but a little in rear of the tribune, so as not to intercept his conversation with the innkeeper. Paterculus threw a quick glance at the beautiful pallid face of the girl, and the anxious and frightened look of her mother.
"By what you tell me, worthy Crispus," he replied, "you are so far from having your justly celebrated house full, that you are keeping two sets of apartments still vacant, in expectation, first, of some queen from the east, with her son and train, and secondly, of this Jewish king, one Alexander. Worthy Libertinus,[30] the fair damsel whom you see so pale, is very sick, and has just swooned away from sheer fatigue. Will you turn such a daughter in such health, with her noble mother, from your door? A queen can take care of herself, it seems to me. But what will become of these excellent Roman ladies, (your own countrywomen,) if you now bid them begone from your threshold? You have assured me that they can obtain no shelter at all in Formiæ. Look at the child! She seems likely to faint again. Are you to let this daughter of a Roman knight die in the fields, in order that you may have room for a barbarian queen? You have a daughter of your own, I am told."
"Die!" groaned the innkeeper: "all this did not come into my mind, most illustrious tribune and quæstor. Come, little lady, let me help you down. This lady and her daughter, sir, shall have the queen's own apartments—may all the gods destroy me otherwise! Here, Crispina."
Velleius Paterculus smiled, and having whispered some order to a centurion, who remained behind in watch for Sejanus, the tribune waved his hand, crying out vale to whom it might concern, and rode forward with the prætorians at a much smarter pace than they had come.