Indeed, as the spring passed into summer, all the elements in Paulus's life seemed to confirm the glory of that day on the slopes of Hymettus when he had first felt sure of the significance Greece held for him. The cumulative effect of his association with older men, his young friendships, his work toward his chosen goal, his grave but piercing pleasures, was to make him at home in Athens as he had never been at home in Rome. He rested in the charm of the smaller, simpler city, where among all classes and all ways of life mental refinement took precedence of crass display. Here, he felt, he could live and work, unknown to fame indeed, but with all that was best in him dedicated in freedom and integrity to the life of the spirit. The memory of Egypt, where all effort lost itself in the mockery of the desert, and the thought of Rome, where in these later years all fruitful effort was military, political, commercial, became almost equally abhorrent to him. Greece, set within her stainless seas, was like a holy temple set apart, a place of refuge from shams and error and confusion.
This worshipful attitude towards Athens was crystallized in the young poet at the time of the Panathenaic festival, in July. The festival was still a brilliant one, a brief radiance falling upon city and citizens. Unlike a holiday season at Rome, here were no shows of gladiators or beasts, no procession of captors and captives, no array of Arabian gold or Chinese silk or Indian embroideries. The Athenians, seeking novelty, found it in their own renewed appreciation of the physical skill of athletes, of music and drama, of observances still hallowed by religion and patriotism. On the Acropolis Paulus watched the arrival of the procession bringing this year's peplos to Athena. After centuries of shame in the political life of her city the gold-ivory statue of the Guardian Goddess shone undefiled in a temple whose beauty was a denial of time. The pageant also, once more paying tribute to Wisdom, was noble and beautiful as in the days of Phidias. The gifts of Greece were beyond the reach of conqueror or destroyer. Paulus entered the inner shrine and looked up at the winged Victory borne upon the hand of the goddess. To dwell in Athens seemed a sacred purpose. Involuntarily, in self-dedication, he found himself using the familiar prayer of the theatre:
O majestical Victory, shelter my life
Neath thy covert of wings,
Aye, cease not to grant me thy crowning.
III
The answer to this prayer, the grant of victory, came, as it happened, in strange guise. The sensitive Roman youth, still in the potter's hands, had reckoned without the final Greek experience which lay ahead of him, the issue of one night in the early autumn. During the season of the full moon in September all lectures were suspended and most of the Roman students joined the crowd of travellers to Elis to see the Olympic games. Paulus had had a touch of malaria and his physician had urged him not to expose himself to the dangers of outdoor camping in a low country. He consented lightly, thinking to himself that since he was to live in Greece he could afford to postpone for a few years the arduous pleasures of the great festival. Herodes Atticus had gone this year, and upon his return brought with him for a visit a group of very distinguished men, including Lucian and Apuleius and the Alexandrian astronomer, Ptolemy. Paulus was astonished and proud to receive, with Gellius, an invitation to a dinner in their honour given at Cephisia.
The weather was still extremely hot and the dinner hour was set late. Even when Paulus and Gellius left the city the air was heavy and exhausting and never had the villa seemed to them more beautiful. The great groves of cypresses and pines, of poplars and plane trees, were dark with the shadow of the moonless night. In the broad pools the stars were reflected. The birds were hushed, but the sound of cool, running water rang sweet in urban ears. Within the dining-room an unhampered taste had done all that was possible to obliterate the memory of the scorching day. A certain restraint in all the appointments perfected the sense of well-being. As Paulus yielded to it and looked at his fellow guests, he drew a long breath of contentment. How exquisite, he thought, was Greek life, how vivid the inspiration of this hour!
Conversation naturally turned at first to episodes of the Games and the successes of the victors; then by easy stages drifted to the discussion of the nature of success of any kind.
Alpheus of Mytilene, hailing, by how long an interval, from the city and the craft of the Lesbian Muse, turned to the host. "Atticus," he said, "here is an easy question for you. Tell us how to succeed." All the guests paused expectantly, knowing that a chance question would sometimes lead Atticus into one of the vivid displays of extemporaneous oratory for which he was famous. Nor were they disappointed now. He looked at the company before him, men, for the most part, younger than himself. A strange glow, as if from smouldering fires freshly stirred, brightened in his dark eyes, and he began to speak, impetuously. His voice, low in its first haste, rose shrill with the tide of emotion, as he passed headlong over the barriers of logic and of form.
"You ask me about success because you think I have succeeded. Do you know what the characteristic moment of my life was? It was when, almost forty years ago, I failed in my first speech before divine Hadrian and sickened with chagrin. Most of you are young and will not wonder, as I might now wonder at myself, that I stood by the Danube that night and nearly threw myself into the oblivious water. Concrete failure is as palpable a thing as concrete success. The one is like a golden cup which you turn in your hands and lift in the sunlight before you test at your lips the wine it holds. The other is wormwood forced into your mouth. Like wormwood, it may be cleansing. My 'success' in my chosen profession, the fact that I have made great speeches, held high positions, acquired fame, is due to the inner sickness that night by the river. You will find that the name of many a man of my age is in men's mouths because at the outset Defeat became his trophy, the Gorgon's head, despoiled by his first sword of hiss and venom. So there, my friends, you have the rule you ask for—fail once so ignominiously that you wish to die, and you may wrest from fate a brief name and the cloak of success.
"But beneath the cloak what is there? What, I mean, has there been for me? If it is true that success is to be measured by the fulfilment of desires, then through all these years I have but stood by the bank of the Danube. You know that I am an exemplar, fit for a schoolboy's rhetorical exercise, of the old lesson of life, that wealth and power do not bring fruition in the intimate affections and hopes. My son, my daughter, have died.³ The only son left to me is a daily torture to my pride. The disciples I took into their places have died. The statues of them which I set up at Marathon no longer comfort me. Like Menelaus, I have learned to hate the empty hollows of their eyes where 'Love lies dead.'