Roads from Rome

by Anne C. E. Allinson

He belonged to an ancient family, which had furnished a consul in the first Punic War, had left distinguished dead on the field of Cannæ and had borne on its roll the conqueror of Macedonia. Æmilius Paulus Macedonicus had rendered Rome the further and signal service of a public life as spotless as it was brilliant, and something of this statesman's scrupulous integrity had passed to the youngest son of the house, leading him to discriminate in his world also between shadows and realities. To Paulus the happiest age in the world's history was the age of Pericles, when the wedlock of life and learning issued in universal power. In Rome he would have been glad to have lived in the last years of the Republic, or under Augustus, when Lucretius and Catullus, Virgil and Horace, by submitting themselves in pupilage to the Greeks, became masters of new thoughts and new emotions among the masters of the world. How different was their discipleship from the imitative methods of modern literati! While it was the fashion to boast of refinement and learning, while libraries jostled each other and rhetoricians and philosophers swarmed in the city, Paulus was chiefly conscious that in the place of creative imagination a soulless erudition walked abroad. In the vestibule of the Palatine temple, waiting for the morning appearance of the Emperor, rhetoricians discussed the meaning of an adverb. In the baths they tested each other's knowledge of Sallust. Grammarians gathered in secondhand bookshops around rare copies of Varro's satires and Fabius's chronicles and hunted for copyist's errors. If one were tired of the streets and went to walk in Agrippa's park, he ran into men quarrelling over a vocative. Even on a holiday at Ostia he could not escape discussions between Stoics and Peripatetics. With all this activity, philosophy and literature grew only more anæmic.

Paulus, too limited to be himself a formative influence, was also too truth-loving to be satisfied in Rome with the only life he was fitted to lead. Indifferent to the persuasions of Aphrodite, he yet harboured in his temperament a certain warmth which made him eager to live with passion and abandon, to scorch his hands in the fires of the world rather than drearily to warm them at burnt out ashes. Hopeless in Rome, he determined to seek his fortune elsewhere. An intellectual life real enough to claim his spendthrift allegiance, this, concretely, was the prize for which he had set sail from Brindisi two months before.

The act gave him an outward resemblance to the horde of young bloods who were always swinging out on the high seas in search of sport and adventure. The most restless made for Britain and the shores of the Euxine or the Baltic, or for the interior of Syria and Persia. The larger number followed the beaten and luxurious paths to Egypt, where they plunged into the gaieties of Alexandria and, cursorily enough, saw the sights of Memphis and Thebes. Paulus also went to Egypt. But in spite of his introductions and his opportunities to experiment with modern life under the absolving witchery of Oriental conditions, he gave himself over to the subtler influences of the past. Pilgrim rather than tourist, he visited eagerly the pyramids and the Sphinx, the temples of Karnak and Thebes, the tombs of the Theban kings, the colossi of the desert. In the frightful course of the centuries, as they unrolled before him, he seized upon the guidance of Herodotus, to whom the monuments of Egypt had seemed as incalculably old as they did to him. The choice, however, had proved unfortunate for his sympathetic reading of Egyptian history. Dwelling on the radiant progress towards truth and beauty of a free race, bondsmen only to law and reason, younger brothers of bright gods, he became querulously critical of a race whose Pharaohs strangled life in the thought of death and eternity, prostrated themselves before gods in monstrous shapes, and produced art at the expense of human well-being.

The landscape of Egypt also seemed to Paulus as sinister as it was exquisite. Its beauty, whether of silver Nile or lilac mountains or tawny desert, enervated by its appeal to the love of easy delight, and bred mad, vagrant thoughts, precursors of moral disaster. He had slept in the desert one night. The enamelled turquoise of the daylight sky, the clear, red gold of the sunset, the ghostly amber of the afterglow gave way to moonlight. As he lay and watched the silver bloom spread over the sand dunes, he felt suddenly a great terror. The golden apples of his western labour, the hard-won fruits of his stern young virtue, were slipping out of his grasp. The white desert lay upon his spirit like mist upon the sea, obliterating the promised course. Desires, unknown before, crept in upon him over the waves of the sand. All that he had rejected claimed him. All that he had thought holy mocked him. The next day he hurried to Alexandria and, recoiling from the library he had planned to visit, took the first ship to Greece.

He had landed a week ago. To-day's excursion, offering a pleasant comradeship with those of his own race in a strange land, came almost opportunely, he fancied, to break an exalted mood. He had found himself roused to the uttermost by his first impressions of Athens. Put to flight by the seduction of river and desert, it was the influence of the landscape rather than of art and history to which he was here first made sensitive. Sea, mountains and plain were informed with a beauty which purged his memory of the evil loveliness of Egypt and restored gravity and dignity to his conception of human life. He was struck by what Plato would have called the Doric strain in the harmonies of outline and colour. Idyllic scenes he had already run across in his walks out from the city, scenes formed and reformed by the lovely occupations of farm and vineyard and pasture. But the lyric note so familiar to him in Italy seemed always overborne by a deeper. Whether it was because of the noble modelling of the fleshless mountains or because of an inner restraint in the minor elements of the landscape, the mood generated by the beauty of the Attic plain was always a grave one, delight swelling into reverence.

Now also, as his thoughts ceased whirling and he became conscious again of what lay around him, his irritation died. All that was trifling must be discarded when his eye could travel beyond wild hyacinth and myrtle, past pines and olive groves and cypresses, past the rosy soil of upturned fields, to the long, firm lines of Parnes's purple ridge and to the snowy summit, a midday beacon, high-uplifted, of distant Helicon.

To his relief, Paulus found that Gellius's monologue had given way to general conversation. As he listened his heart grew hot within him. These young men, of whom only Gellius and Servilianus had passed out of their twenties, had lived in Athens for a year or longer, and now, conscious of their approaching departure, they had fallen to talking of the past months. A strange power Athens seemed to have of exacting from aliens the intimate loyalty of sons. Here, Paulus felt, was no miserly counting up of gains, but an inner concern with art and history. Not as gluttonous travellers, but as those facing a long exile, they talked of a city richer than Rome or Alexandria or Antioch, richer than all the cities of the Empire taken together, in masterpieces of architect and sculptor and painter; of a country-side alive with memories of poets and thinkers and soldiers. Taking with a catholic enthusiasm the hot winds and driving white dust of summer, the deforming rains of winter, and the bright splendour of sky and earth at the advent of spring, they had tramped hither and yon, light-hearted in the vigour of youth, reverent in the impulse of pilgrimage. Mountain fastnesses where the clarion winds still trumpeted the victory of freedom and of Thrasybulus; upland caves where Plato had been taken as a child to worship Pan; long, white roads leading to the village homes of Euripides and Demosthenes; the wind in the pine trees on Pentelicon, reminding them of the wind in the groves of Tusculum; the autumn leaves on the plane trees by the Ilissus; the silver moon seen from the water's edge at Phaleron, swinging into the eastern void above the amethyst-dyed rocks of Hymettus; a sail on a summer star-lit night from Ægina to Piræus—all these things crept one by one into their conversation. Here, Paulus recognised, was a group of young men on fire with a real emotion, cleansed in the presence of beauty and of great memories, witnesses afresh to a procreative Hellas. When the party broke up he thanked his host for the happiest day he had spent in many months.

On the way home, after rounding the last foot hill, they saw the Acropolis across the plain. The sun fell on the red in the natural rock and intensified the white of the marbles. Against the sombre mountains the isolated citadel glowed inly, like a milk-white opal shot with rose. Paulus caught his breath. Was it here, his flame of life?

II

In the following weeks Paulus remembered some things in the conversation of this day, which at the time had made but slight impression on him. The stories of professors and teachers had meant little until he knew at first hand the lentil suppers and brilliant talking at the house of Taurus, the ethical discussions with Peregrinus in his hovel on the outskirts of the city, and, most of all, the generous and ennobling hospitality, in his city house and villas, of the millionaire rhetorician, Herodes Atticus. About Peregrinus Paulus could never make up his mind. Was he the helpful teacher Gellius thought him, or the blatant charlatan of Lucian's frequent attacks? At any rate, the stories that were abroad about his wild youth, his connection with the strange sect known as Christians, his excommunication by them for profaning one of their rites, his expulsion from Rome by the Prefect of the City for his anarchistic harangues made a picturesque background for his cynic garb and ascetic preaching. To Taurus and Atticus, on the other hand, Paulus could give himself with unreserved loyalty. His hardy will responded to the severe standards of thought and conduct set by the Platonic philosopher, while the wilder heart within him seemed to seek and understand the rhetorician's emotional nature and extravagant affections.