Roads from Rome

by Anne C. E. Allinson

"I lost at the dice last night," she had written. "The dancers from Cadiz had thick ankles. The oysters were not above suspicion and the sows'-bellies were unseasoned. We have exhausted the love affairs and debts of our neighbours, and made each other's wills. (I am to leave my money—I rely on you to tell Quadratus—to a curled darling here who hums Alexandrian dance tunes divinely). And we have discussed ad nauseam the rainfall in Upper Egypt, the number of legions on the Rhine and the ships in from Africa. That clever Spanish friend of yours—what was his name?—Martial—was quite right about our conversations. It is a pity he had to pay out his obol for the longer journey before he could get back to Rome.

"My digestion demands fresh eggs and lettuce to the rhythm of hexameters. Or is it sapphics to which we eat this year? I must know what the next crop of the stylus is to be. I cannot sleep at night for wondering who is to teach in your new school. Will he be as merry a guide as your Quintilian was? And will the Como boys become sparkling little Plinies?

"I must see the grown-up Pliny's noble brow and my Calpurnia's eyes—and the Tartarean frown of Tacitus, who, I hear, is with you. Quadratus says you are at the smallest of your Como villas. The mood suits me. At Tusculum or Tibur or Praeneste or Laurentum you might have longed for me in vain. In your Arcadian retreat expect me on the tenth day."

The hale old woman took a terrible advantage of her years and her tongue to do as she chose among her acquaintances. And Pliny was more or less at her mercy, because his mother and she had been friends in their girlhood, and because her grandson, Quadratus, was among the closest of his own younger friends. Unluckily, too, she had taken a violent fancy to Calpurnia. She spared her none of her flings, but evidently in some strange way the exquisite breeding and candid goodness of the younger woman appealed to her antipodal nature. She had lived riotously through seven imperial reigns, gambling, owning and exhibiting pantomimes, nourishing all manner of luxurious whims, whether the state lay gasping under a Nero or Domitian, or breathed once more in the smile of Trajan. Her liking for Calpurnia was of a piece, her acquaintances thought, with her bringing up of her grandson. No boy in Rome had had an austerer training. He was never allowed to mingle with her coarser companions, and when the dice were brought in she always sent him out of the room—"back to his books." No breath of scandal had ever touched his good name, and his tastes could not have been more prudent, his grandmother used to say, with uplifted eyebrows, had he had the "inestimable advantage of being brought up by Pliny's uncle."

After a winter and spring of varied activities the friends gathered at Pliny's villa had eagerly looked forward to a brief peace. Pliny's law business had been unusually exacting. He had worked early and late, and made a series of crucial speeches, and when spring came on he had allowed neither work nor social demands to interfere with his attendance at the almost numberless literary readings. His "conscientious and undiscriminating concern for dead matter," Quadratilla once said, "rivalled Charon's." Calpurnia, never strong, but always supplementing at every turn her husband's work, had felt especially this year the strain of Roman life. Tacitus, already a figure in the literary world through his Agricola and Germania, had made a beginning on his more elaborate Histories and been enslaved to his genius. Pompeius Saturninus and his clever wife, Cornelia, were hoping for a little rustic idleness before beginning the summer entertaining at their place in Tuscany. The group under Pliny's roof was completed by Calpurnia's lovely aunt, Hispulla, and Fannia, whose famous ancestry was accentuated in her own distinguished character. Pliny's old schoolfellow, Caninus Rufus, had come to his adjacent villa, bringing with him their common friend, Voconius Romanus. These friends had entered upon one of the holiday seasons rarely granted to people of importance. Their debts to the worlds of business or society or literature held in abeyance, they were lightly devoting their days to fishing and hunting, sailing and riding, while the keenness of their intellectual interests—they belonged to a very different set from Quadratilla's—was restfully tempered and the sincerity of them deepened by a thorough-going intimacy.

Upon the second fortnight of this life Quadratilla broke like a thunder-squall. Whatever feelings had prompted her to leave her fashionable resort, her mood after she arrived was characteristically Bacchanal. She had a genius for making the tenderest feeling or the deepest conviction seem absurd. Rufus did not know whether to be more angry at her open hint to Pliny that his childlessness was like that of so many millionaires of the day, a voluntary lure for the attention of legacy hunters, or at her sardonic inquiries after Tacitus's dyspepsia. His best friends knew that his gloom issued from the travail of a mind which had sickened mortally under Domitian and could not find in the present tranquillity more than a brief interruption to the madness of men and the wrath of gods. It was not that Quadratilla failed to perceive the massive intellectual force of Tacitus. On the contrary, she enraged Rufus and the others still further by a covert irony about Pliny's classing himself as a man of letters with the historian, an innocent vanity which endeared him only the more to those whose experience of his loyal and generous heart left no room for critical appraisement of his mental calibre.

The day in question had been full of small annoyances. Calpurnia, wishing, on the Feast of Fors Fortuna, to excuse the dining-room servants from a noonday attendance, had had a luncheon served in the grotto of the tidal spring. Unluckily, while they were testing the ebb and flow by putting rings and other small objects on a dry spot and watching the water cover them, Quadratilla lost out of one of her rings a very valuable emerald. From that moment until the stone was returned by Marcus everybody's patience had been strained to the breaking point by the old lady's peevish temper. After dinner, when they were sitting in the loggia overlooking the lake, which lay dark and still beneath the June stars, they all united in a tacit effort to divert her attention. Pliny told a story of some neighbours to illustrate that the same kind of courage existed in the middle class as in the aristocracy. A wife, finding that her husband was wasting away with an incurable disease, not only urged him to end his life, but joined him in the brave adventure, fastening his weakened body to hers and then leaping with him from a window overlooking the lake.

Fannia agreed enthusiastically that the deed was as brave as the one by which her famous grandmother had shown her husband the way to meet an emperor's command to die; and she went on to say that she and Pliny had decided once that some of the unknown hours of Arria's life were as courageous as the final one of death. "Mother has told me all kinds of things about her," she said. "Once her husband and son were both desperately ill, and the son died. It wasn't safe to tell grandfather, and grandmother went through it all, even the funeral, without his knowing it. She would go into his room and answer questions about the boy, saying he had slept well and eaten more. When she couldn't bear it any longer she would go to her own room and give way, and come back again, calm and serene, to nurse her husband."

"I wonder," said Cornelia, "if blood counted more in that apparently simpler thing. Do you think a middle-class woman could have controlled herself so finely?" Voconius broke in with a quick answer: "It is nothing against Arria, whose memory we all reverence, if I say I think she might. It seems to me that the kind of thing that only an aristocrat could do was done by Corellius Rufus. It isn't a matter of courage but of humour. Tell the story, Pliny. I haven't heard it since the year he died—let me see, seven years ago, that was. It's time we heard it again."

Tacitus leaned forward to listen as Pliny willingly complied: "Corellius was, you know, a Stoic of the Stoics, believing in suicide. When the doctors had assured him that he could never be cured of a most dreadful disease, all his reasons for living, his wealth and position and fame, his wife and daughter and grandchildren and sisters and friends, became secondary to his reasons for dying. He had held the disease in check, while he was younger, by the most temperate living. But in old age it gained on him; he was bedridden and had only weakening torments to face. I went to see him one day while Domitian was still living. His wife went out of the room, for, although she had his full confidence, she was tactful enough to leave him alone with his friends. He turned his eyes to me and said: 'Why do you think I have endured this pain so long? It is because I want to survive our Hangman at least one day.' As soon as we were rid of Domitian he began to starve himself to death. I agree with Voconius that only an aristocrat could have thought of outwitting a tyrant by outliving him."