Roads from Rome

by Anne C. E. Allinson

... Aye, undismayed
And deep the mood inspired,
A light for man to trust, a star
Of guidance sure, that shines afar.
If he that hath it can the sequel know,
How from the guilty here, forthwith below
A quittance is required.
But in sunlight undimmed by night and by day
Toil-free is the life of the good—for they
Nor vex earth's soil with the labour of hand,
Nor the waters of Ocean in that far land—
Nay, whoever in keeping of oaths were fearless
With the honoured of gods share life that is tearless.

That night-ride had come back to Horace several years ago when he was writing his ode on Pindar, but to-day's memory seemed strangely different. Then he had remembered what a revelation Pindar's lyric art had been to him amid the severe and lofty beauty of Greek scenery. Now he caught a haunting echo also of how, when he was twenty-one, these lines of the artist had seemed to him a fitting explanation of the mound of earth heaped over the dead at Marathon. He had long ago learned to laugh at the fervour of youth's first grappling with ideas, and had come to see that the part of a sensible man was to select judiciously here and there, from all the schools, enough reasonable tenets to enable him to preserve a straight course of personal conduct. As for understanding first causes, the human race never had and never could; and as for a belief in heavenly revelations or in divine influences, all such tendencies ended in philosophic absurdity. Why, then, at this late day, should he remember that night, on the road from Marathon to Athens, when the ancient struggle for liberty had stirred in his own heart "a mood deep and undismayed," and when an impalpable ideal, under the power of a rushing torrent of melody, had come to seem a "light for man to trust?"

Was it, indeed, days like these that had made Brutus's work so easy when he began to collect his young company about him? And what if Brutus had been "mistaken?" Was there not a higher wisdom than that which could fashion nations? Horace had seen his dead face at Philippi. Had he done right ever afterwards, however reverently, to attribute a blunder to that mighty spirit which had left upon the lifeless body such an imprint of majesty and repose? Surely common sense, temperance, honest work, honourableness, fidelity, were good fruits of human life and of useful citizenship. But was there a vaster significance in a noble death? Was there even a truer citizenship in the prodigal and voluntary pouring out of life, on a field of defeat, amid alien and awful desolation?

The sun was hurrying toward the west, and Horace realised, with a quick chill, that he was entirely in the shadow. Beyond the meadow he could see a team of oxen turn wearily, with a heavily loaded wagon, toward their little stable. The driver walked with a weary limp. Even the little boy by his side forgot to play and scamper, and rather listlessly put the last touches to a wreath of autumn flowers which he meant to hang about the neck of the marble Faunus at the edge of the garden.

Where could Davus be? Ah, there he came, half-running already as if he knew his master wanted him.

"Davus," he called out, "make haste. I have had a visit from the shades, and it has been as unpleasant as those cold baths the doctor makes me take." Then, as he saw the look of fright on the wrinkled face of the old slave who had been with his father when he died, he broke into a laugh and put his hand on his shoulder. "Calm yourself, my good fellow," he said, "we shall all be shades some day, and to-day I feel nearer than usual to that charming state. But in the meantime there is a chance for Bacchus and the Muses. Tell them to get out a jar of Falernian to-night, and do you unroll Menander. The counsels of the divine Plato are too eternal for my little mind. And, Davus," he added thoughtfully, as he rose and leaned on the slave's willing arm, "as soon as we get to the house, write down, 'Greece took her captors captive.' That has the making of a good phrase in it—a good phrase. I shall polish it up and use it some day."

[A ROMAN CITIZEN]

I

"Look at him—a subject for his own verses—a grandfather metamorphosed into an infant Bacchus! Will he be a Mercury in swaddling clothes by next year? O, father, father, the gods certainly laid their own youth in your cradle fifty-two years ago!"

The speaker, a young matron, smiled into her father's eyes, which were as brilliant and tender as her own. Ovid and his daughter were singularly alike in a certain blitheness of demeanour, and in Fabia's eyes they made a charming picture now, both of them in festal white against the March green of the slender poplars. Perilla's little boy had climbed into his grandfather's lap and laid carefully upon his hair, still thick and black, a wreath of grape leaves picked from early vines in a sunny corner. Fabia and Perilla's husband, Fidus Cornelius, smiled at each other in mutual appreciation of a youth shared equally, it seemed to them, by the other three with the new-born spring.