Roads from Rome

by Anne C. E. Allinson

An ardour not of Eros' lips.—WILLIAM WATSON.

I

The spring had come promptly this year and with it the usual invoice of young Romans to Athens. Some of them were planning to stay only a month or two to see the country and hear the more famous professors lecture. Others were settling down for a long period of serious study in rhetoric and philosophy. Scarcely to be classed among any of these was the young poet Julius Paulus,² who, as he put it to himself with the frank grandiosity of youth, was in search of the flame of life—studiosus ardoris vivendi. He had brought a letter to Aulus Gellius, and Gellius, dutifully responsive to all social claims, invited him on a day in early March to join him and a few friends for a country walk and an outdoor lunch in one of their favourite meeting places.

2 A poet Julius Paulus is mentioned once by Aulus Gellius in the Attic Nights, in terms which seem to suggest both his worldly prosperity and his cultivated tastes. But the suggestion for his character in this imaginary sketch has come, in reality, from generous and ardent young students of to-day, turning reluctantly from their life in Athens to patient achievement in the countries whose sons they are.

This place, an unfrequented precinct of Aphrodite, about two hours distant from the marketplace, lay below the rocky summit of Hymettus within the hollow of the foot hills. The walk was an easy one, but the forenoon sun was warm and the young pedestrians upon their arrival paused in grateful relief by a spring under a large plane tree which still bore its leaves of wintry gold. The clear water, a boon in arid Attica, completed their temperate lunch of bread and eggs, dried figs and native wine. After eating they climbed farther up the hillside and stretched themselves out in the soft grass that lurked among boulders in the shade of a beech tree. Aulus, with the air of performing an habitual action, produced a book. To-day it proved to be a choice old volume of Ovid, which he had secured at a bargain on the quay at Brindisi, convinced that it had belonged, fully one hundred and fifty years ago, to the poet himself. It had gone far, he said, toward consoling him for the loss of an original Second Book of the Æneid snatched up by a friend in the Image Market at Rome. The Ovid was for Paulus's edification. Aulus unrolled his treasure and read aloud "an accurate description of this very spot:"

Violet crests of Hymettus a-flower
Neighbour a fountain consecrate.
Yielding and green is the turf. In a bower
Trees low-growing meet and mate;
Arbutus shadeth the green grass kirtle,
Sweet the scent of rosemary;
Fragrant the bay and the bloom of the myrtle;
Nay, nor fail thee here to see
Tamarisks delicate, box-wood masses,
Lordly pine and clover low.
Legions of leaves and the top of the grasses
Stir with healing zephyrs slow.

The reader's indifference to what confronted his eyes, added to his dull regard for the verbal accuracy of ancient verses, shrivelled the modern poet's ardent humour. Was this an example of the intellectual enlightenment awaiting him, he had so fondly hoped, in Athens? With apprehension he remembered what his father's friend, a rich dilettante, one of the best liked men in Rome, had written him when he sent him the letter of introduction:

"You will find Gellius the best fellow in the world but not a fagot to kindle the fires of pleasure. I hear that he has called his book, a particoloured digest of information, Attic Nights, because he has spent his nights in Athens writing it—nights, mark you, when even in her own city Athena closes her grey eyes within her virgin shrine and leaves Pan to guard from his cave below the roysterings of youth. It is easy to let an allusion to my friend Lucian slip off the end of my stylus when I think of Athens. He and Gellius are scarcely the 'like pleasing like' of the proverb! Lucian, in fact, disposed of Gellius once by calling him an 'Infant Ignorance on the arm of Fashion.' This was after he had watched a peasant making holiday among the statues and temples on the Acropolis, carrying in his arms a three months old child who dozed in a colonnade of the Parthenon and sucked his thumb in front of Athena Promachus. The blinking baby, he said, made him think of Aulus, futilely carried about by the trend of the age among ideas and achievements beyond his understanding. But in fairness I must add that when this was repeated to Marcus Aurelius he retorted: 'Better a child than an iconoclast in the presence of beauty. I should call Gellius an honest errand boy in Athena's temple.' So there you have two ways of looking at your future host. If Lucian is the most enlightened wit of the day, Aurelius is the most Roman of us all and likely to rule over us when Antoninus rejoins the gods.

"On Gellius's return next year he is to be made a judge. He will study law painstakingly and apply it exactly. And Rome will never for him be one whit juster. However, your father will be delighted to have you make such a friend—a man of thirty whose idea of a debauch is to make a syllogism, who is a favourite student of great teachers and can introduce you to Herodes Atticus and to all the best life of Athens. Nor, indeed, do I marvel at Aurelius for trusting him. As a scholar or a jurist he will always be negligible, but as a man he is naïvely sincere and candid and with all the strength of his Roman will he is determined that both his work and his pleasures shall be such as befit a gentleman of honour and refinement. He may bore you, but, if I do not misread you, the pleasures that are within his gift will have a finer edge for you than those of the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus."

As Gellius droned on about some of the niceties of Ovid's language, fragmentary sentences of this letter recurred to Paulus and he wondered what his father's friend would think of him could he accurately read his desires for pleasure. Certainly the shows of the Amphitheatre seemed remote enough here under the cool, grey branches, tipped with early green, of the Attic beech tree, but scarcely, after all, more remote than they often seemed in Rome itself to a youth who found virile recreation by the sea at Ostia or in following the Anio over the hills of Tibur. No, he had not flung away from Rome to escape in the back waters of a smaller town the noisy vulgarities of the metropolis. Nor was he one of those who confused the contests of the Circus with the creative struggles of the Forum. His abstinence from political life was due to temperament rather than conviction, nature having shaped him for active citizenship in a world dissociated from public insignia. It was in this world that he found himself at twenty-five ill at ease. Without genius, his slender vein of talent was yet of pure gold. There was no danger of his overrating his own poetry. He saw it as it was, of the day and hour, wearing no immortal grace of thought or language. But in it he was at his best, more honest and more whole-hearted than he could be in any public service. This seemed to him, quite simply, to constitute a reason for being such a poet as he was.