“What! the poet!” cried the Count, “the Virgil of these later days?”
The poet blushed with pleasure to hear the compliment, which, extravagant as it may seem to us, did not strike him as being anything out of the way. For had not his statue been set up in Trajan’s Forum at Rome, an honour which none of his predecessors had been thought worthy to receive?
“Ah! sir,” he replied, “you are too good. But it would have been well for me if I had contented myself with following Virgil; unfortunately I must also imitate Juvenal. Praise of the fallen may be for[pg 235]given, but there is no pardon for satire against those that succeed. Enmity lasts longer than friendship, and I have made enemies whom nothing can appease.”
Claudian’s Tale.
“But what of Stilicho?” said the Count. “Surely he has not ceased to be your friend. Doubtless you owe much to him, but he owes more, I venture to say, to you. He may have given you wealth, but you have given him immortality.”[48]
“Ah! sir,” said Claudian, “have you not then heard?”
“Heard!” cried the Count; “we hear nothing here. We always were cut off from the rest of the world; but for the last nine months we might as well have been living in the moon, for all that has reached us of what is going on elsewhere.”
“You did not know, then, that Stilicho was dead?”