“Well, Cleon, you will allow that our little show to-day has been fairly successful. We are but novices, you know; barbarians, I am afraid you will call us. But we hope to improve. You Greeks are wonderful teachers. You can give in a very short time a quite marvellous appearance of refinement to the merest savages. And we are not that; you would not call us savages, my dear friend.”
“Savages! The gods forbid that such insolent folly should ever come from my tongue! You have a most elegant taste in art, my dear Jason. Our own Callias—he is our first connoisseur at Athens; you must have heard me mention him—would not disdain to have some of the little things which you have about you here in his own apartment.”
And, as he spoke, Cleon looked round the room, which, indeed, was very handsomely furnished in the latest Greek taste. The walls were covered with tapestry, showing on a purple ground a design, worked in silver and gold, which represented the triumphant return of the Wine-god from his Eastern campaigns. At one end of the room stood a sumptuously-carved bookcase, filled with volumes adorned by the most skilful binders of Alexandria. The bookcase was flanked on either side by a pedestal statue, one displaying the head of Hermes, the other the head of Athené. On a sideboard were ranged twelve silver goblets, on which had been worked in high relief the labours of Hercules. But probably the most precious object in the room—at least in its master’s estimation—was a replica, about half the size of life, of the statue that we know as the “Dying Gladiator.” It was the work of a sculptor of Pergamum, a special favourite of the art-loving dynasty of the Attali. It had been purchased for the enormous sum of half a talent of gold;[1] and Jason had thought himself especially fortunate in being allowed to secure it on any terms. The Pergamene artist was bound, in consideration of the handsome payment which he received from his royal patron, not to execute commissions for strangers, and it was only as a special favour, and not till a heavy bribe had been [pg 4]paid to some influential personage in the court, that the rule had been relaxed in favour of Jason.
And who, it may be asked, was Jason?
Jason was the Jewish high priest, the successor of Aaron, of Eleazar, of Jehoiada, of Hilkiah, and as unlike these worthies of the past in appearance, in speech, in ways of thinking, as it is possible to conceive. His costume, in the first place, was that of a Greek exquisite. He wore a purple tunic, showing at the neck a crimson under-shirt, and gathered up at the waist with a belt of the finest leather, clasped with a design in silver, which showed a dog laying hold of a fawn. His knees were bare, but the shins were covered with silk leggings of the same colour as the tunic, against which the gold fastenings of the sandals showed in gay relief. His hair was elaborately curled, and almost dripping with the richest of Syrian perfumes. The forefinger of the left hand showed the head of Zeus finely carved on an amethyst, that of the right was circled by a sapphire ring with the likeness of Apollo.
His speech was Greek. Hebrew of course he knew, both in its classical and its conversational forms; but he was as careful to conceal his knowledge as an old-fashioned Roman of his time would have been careful to hide the fact, if he had happened to know any language besides his own. His very name, it will have been observed, had been changed to suit the new fashion which he was endeavouring [pg 5]to set to his countrymen. Really it was Joshua—no dishonourable appellation, one would think, seeing that it had been borne by the conqueror of Canaan, and by the most distinguished of the later high priests. But it did not please him, and he had changed it to Jason.
As for his ways of thinking, these will become evident enough if we listen to a little more of his conversation.
“And you think, Cleon,” he went on—Cleon was a Greek adventurer who gave himself out as an Athenian, but who was shrewdly suspected of coming from one of the smaller islands of the Ægean—“you think that our games went pretty well?”
“Admirably, my dear Jason,” answered the Greek, who really had thought them a deplorable failure, but who valued too much his free quarters in the high priest’s sumptuous palace to give a candid expression of his opinion.
“You see we had great difficulties to contend with. You can hardly imagine, for instance, how hard I found it to persuade our young men to run and wrestle naked. They quoted some ridiculous nonsense from the Law, as if we could be bound nowadays by some obsolete old rules that no sensible person would think for a moment of observing.[2] You saw, I dare say, to-day that I was [pg 6]obliged to allow some of them to wear a loin-cloth. They positively refused to come into the arena without it. Well, we shall educate them in time. They must learn to admire the beauty of the human form, unspoilt by any of the trappings with which, for convenience sake, we are accustomed to conceal it. I don’t despair of our having a school of art here some day—not rivals, my dear Lysias, of your glorious Phidias and Praxiteles, but imitators, humble imitators, whom yet you won’t disdain to acknowledge.”