Roads from Rome

by Anne C. E. Allinson

Let us spend the moment we have in the merry company of a wise poet."

The play began. Moods of tragedy were forgotten. Only Paulus found himself unable to listen. His host's appeal, made apparently with such ready emotion, and so easily forgotten by the other men—he was the youngest of the company—had shaken his soul as a young tree on a mountain is shaken by the night wind. The comedy went on, punctuated by applause. In his mind met and struggled high desires. When Atticus had talked of Athens and of Rome he had remembered Virgil's great defence of his own people, the weapon of all patriots after him:

Others, I well believe, shall mould the bronze to breathe in softer form, from marble shall unveil the living countenance, shall plead with greater eloquence, and heaven's paths map out with rod in hand and tell the rising of the stars. Upon the tablets of thy memory, O Roman, it is laid to hold the peoples in thy sway. These are thy arts and shall be: To impose the ways of peace; to spare the vanquished and subject the proud.

Now there leaped into life within him a realisation of Rome's incommunicable greatness. He perceived at last the nature of the pax romana, that peace, compounded of power, which welded the continents together, made the seas into serviceable highways and held all men secure within the barriers of law and justice. Was it possible that a nation which had given birth to a force like this could also bring forth in due season a love of beauty, a thirst for truth? Could tameless genius and conquering will, could a passion for ideas and a passion for deeds dwell together until side by side men of one blood should add to the glory of worldly power the glory of spiritual conquest, should superimpose upon the beauty of just laws the beauty of wrought bronze and woven language?

And if this could be, what was the duty of each Roman whose pure desires lay with Poetry and her sisters? Paulus shuddered as he felt the question tearing its way through the peaceful plans he had been making for his life. He remembered the story of Menander refusing to leave the intellectual life of Athens for the luxuries of Ptolemy's court. Must he, on the contrary, for the sake of an idea, renounce this life, with its cherished poverty and philosophy, its peace and learned leisure, its freedom and candour and regard for beauty, to go back to Rome where, in terrifying coalition, power and pleasure, wealth and display, passion and brutality were forever crowding in upon the city's honour? The irresponsibility of the insignificant assailed him. A Virgil, he supposed, might know that his presence would affect his country for good or evil. But what could he, Paulus, do? In Rome, in Athens, he was one of the little men. Was he not, then, justified in living his own life in the best possible way, atoning for the meagreness of his talent by the honourableness of his quest?

But even as he said this to himself he remembered why Athens had achieved perfection. In the age of Pericles, geniuses, like flawless jewels cut out of a proper matrix, had been fashioned out of a large body of men, themselves not gifted, but able to understand and safeguard those who were. He had left Rome because she was no matrix for poets and artists and thinkers. Ought he now to return to her and live and work and die unknown, serving only as one more citizen ready to welcome the poets to be?

His panting desires put up one last defence. Was he not narrowing art within the borders of nationality? In the service of beauty was there either Greek or Roman? Alas! Atticus had beaten that down already. Art was no fungus, growing on a rotten stump of national life. Greeks had been artists only when they had been conquerors, soldiers, traders, rulers. The Romans now held the world. In them, the eagle's brood, lay the hope of a new birth of the spirit. With a certain noble unreason, he dismissed the idea that by living in Athens he might fight the battle for Rome. If he was to fight at all, it was to be where the enemy was fiercest and the hope of victory least. Upon any easier choice his ancestors within him laid their iron grasp. His ears caught the words of one of the actors:

"Well, do not then the gods look out for us?" you'll say.
To each of us they have allotted Character
As garrison commander.

Gathering his forces in obedience to his garrison commander Paulus tried to decide to go back to Rome. Greece called to him insistently. Confused and exhausted, he joined perfunctorily in the loud applause that closed the comedy, and in the speeches of gratitude and farewell to the host.

The play had been long, and the autumn night, he found to his surprise, had passed. Emerging from the house, he breasted the dawn. With curious suddenness the sense of conflict left him. The beauty of the Attic plain, born, unlike the beauty of the Roman Campagna, of light rather than of unshed tears, had often seemed to him to quicken the perception of truth. Certainly the dullest eyes must see at this hour, when, at the behest of the approaching sun, outlines were cleared of all that was shadowy and fanciful, and colours were touched to buoyant life. Greece called to him, but with what a message! Imaginings, vain desires, regrets, were swept away from his mind, even as the receding shadows left bare the contours of the mountains. He saw that his concern was with the battle, not with its issue. In this enlightening hour he understood that Rome would never become mother of the arts, until, in some unimagined future, through transforming national experiences, she should be made pregnant with ideas beyond the ken of his generation. Poets might again be born of her, but he and his like would long since have been lying among her forgotten children. And yet, the life of the future, however distant, would not be unaffected by the obscure work and faith of the present age. He himself would never see victory, but the struggle was his inalienable heritage. Revealed in light and joy he knew his purpose. Down from the crags of Parnes, great wings strong with the morning, swept an eagle—as if homeward—toward the western sea. With it, like an arrow to its goal, alert with the vigour of dawn, aflame with the ardour of life, sped the heart of the young Roman.