Roads from Rome

by Anne C. E. Allinson

For several weeks the students could think or talk of nothing else, their discussions taking a fresh impetus from any letters that arrived from Rome. Gradually, however, they settled back again into their studies and pleasures, feeling remote and irresponsible. But with the advent of the autumn a new force entered into their lives. Brutus came to Athens, and, while he was awaiting the development of political events at home, began to attend the lectures of the philosophers.

Horace was among the first of the young Romans to yield to the extraordinary spell exercised by this grave, thin-faced, scholarly man, whose profound integrity of character was as obvious to his enemies as to his friends, and as commanding among the populace as among his peers. Before he came Horace had been moderately glad that the Republic had struck at tyranny and meted out to the dictator his deserts. Now he was conscious of an intense partisanship, of a personal loyalty, of a passionate wish to spend his life, too, in fighting for Roman freedom. And so, when this wonderful man asked him, who was merely a boy with a taste for moral philosophy, and a knack at translating Alcæus and Sappho, to become one of his tribunes, and to go with him to meet the forces of Cæsar's arrogant young nephew in one final conflict, it was no wonder he turned his back upon the schools and the Muses, and with fierce pride followed his commander. He could remember how stirred he had been that last morning when, on riding out of the city, he had passed the famous old statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. In immortal youth they stood there to prove that in Athens a tyrant had been slain by her sons. The ancient popular song that he had so often heard sung by modern Greek students over their cups seemed to be beaten out by his horse's hoofs as, in the pale dawn, they clattered out of the city gate:—

In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive,
Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,
Who, striking the tyrant down,
Made Athens a freeman's town.
Harmodius, our darling, thou art not dead!
Thou liv'st in the isles of the blest, 'tis said,
With Achilles, first in speed,
And Tydides Diomede.
In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive,
Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,
When the twain on Athena's day
Did the tyrant Hipparchus slay.¹

1 Translated by John Conington.

Even now, more than thirty years later, the breeze in the Sabine ilex seemed to be playing a wraith of the same tune. And suddenly there began to follow, creeping out of long closed fastnesses, a spectral troop of loftier reminders. Horace stirred a little uneasily. Was it only hot youth and Brutus that had carried him off on that foolhardy expedition? Was it possible that Athens herself had driven him forth, furnishing him as wings superb impulses born of the glory of her past? For many years now he had been accustomed to feel that he owed to Greece a quickening and a sane training of his artistic abilities; a salvation from Alexandrian pedantry, through a detailed knowledge of the original and masterly epochs of Greek literature; a wholesome fear of Roman grandiosity in any form, engendered by a sojourn among perfect exemplars of architecture and sculpture. For many years, too, he had been in the habit of regarding Brutus as nobly mistaken; of realising that Julius Cæsar might have developed a more rational freedom in Rome than one enshrined merely in republican institutions. Even great men like Brutus and Cicero, although they were above the private meanness and jealousy that in so many cases adulterated the pure love of liberty, had not seen far enough. What could a theory of freedom give the country better than the peace and the prosperity brought about by the magnanimous Emperor? Horace's part in the battle of Philippi had long since become to him a laughable episode of youth. He had even made a merry verse about it, casting the unashamed story of his flight in the words of Archilochus and Alcæus, as if the chief result for him had been a bit of literary experiment.

But now, like the phantom in Brutus's tent at Philippi, a grim question stole upon him out of the shadows of his memory. Was it possible that his fight on that field of defeat had been, not a folly, but the golden moment of his life? Had Athens taught him something even profounder than the art which had made him Rome's best lyric poet? He had forgotten much of her humiliation, and of his own Roman pride in her subjection during those days when he had lived, in youthful hero-worship, with the spirits of her great past. Had she, after all, not only taught the sons of her masters philosophy and the arts, but taken them captive, as well, by the imperious ideals of her own youth, by her love of freedom and of truth?

Horace remembered a day when he and Messala had hired at the Piræus a boat rigged with bright canvas, and sped before the wind to Salamis, their readiness for any holiday guided by a recent reading of Herodotus and Æschylus, and by a desire to see the actual waters and shores where brute force had been compelled to put its neck beneath wisdom and courage. The day had been a radiant one, the sky fresh and blue, although flecked here and there by clouds, and the sea and the hills and the islands rich in brilliant colour. They had worked their way through the shipping of the harbour, and then sailed straight for the shore of Salamis. When they passed the island of Psyttaleia, where the "dance-loving Pan had once walked up and down," they had been able to see very plainly how the Persian and Greek fleets lay of old, to imagine the narrow strait once more choked with upturned keels, and fighting or flying triremes, to picture Greeks leaping into the sea in full armour to swim to Psyttaleia and grapple with the Persians who paced the beach in insolent assurance. The wind whistled in their ears, freighted, as it seemed to them, with the full-throated shout which, according to the Æschylean story, rang through the battle:—

Sons of the Hellenes! On! Set free your native land!
Your children free, your wives, ancestral shrines of gods,
And tombs of fathers' fathers! Now for all we strive!

A thunder-storm had arisen before they left Salamis, and their homeward sail had satisfied their love for adventure. Clouds and sun had battled vehemently, and as they finally walked back to the city from the harbour, they had seen the Parthenon rising in grave splendour against the warring sky, a living symbol of an ancient victory.

At another time, the same group of friends had chosen a hot day of midsummer to ride on mules along the stretch of Attic road to Marathon. The magnificent hills girdling the horizon had freshly impressed them as more sculpturesque in outline than the familiar ones about their own Rome, and the very shape of the olive trees in a large orchard by the roadside had seemed un-Italian and strange. They had already become attuned to a Greek mood when the blue sea opened before them and they reached the large plain, stretching from the foot-hills of Pentelicon to the water's edge. The heat had stilled all life in the neighbourhood, and Marathon seemed hushed, after all these five hundred years, in reverence before the spirit of liberty. Their ride home had been taken in the cool of the day, so that the hills which rose from the sea had assumed a covering of deep purple or more luminous amethyst. From the shore of the sea they had passed into a wooded road, with a golden sky shining through the black branches. Later the stars had come out in great clusters, and Messala, who now and then betrayed a knowledge of poetry and a gravity of thought that surprised his friends, had recited Pindar's lines:—