Roads from Rome

by Anne C. E. Allinson

In view of the impending handicaps Clodia was especially anxious that a dinner she was to give immediately on her return from Baiæ in mid-October should be a conspicuous success. During her husband's consulship two years ago she had won great repute for inducing men of all parties, officials, artists and writers, to meet in her house. Last year, owing to Metellus's sickness and death, she had not done anything on a large scale. This autumn she had come back determined to reassume her position. She was unaffected by the old-fashioned prejudice against widows entertaining and she had nothing to fear from the social skill of this year's consuls.

Her invitations had been hurried out, and now in her private sitting room, known as the Venus Room from its choicest ornament, a life-sized statue of Venus the Plunderer, she was looking over the answers which had been sorted for her by her secretary. The Greek, waiting for further orders, looked at her with admiring, if disillusioned, eyes. Large and robust, her magnificent figure could display no ungraceful lines as she sat on the low carved chair in front of a curtain of golden Chinese silk. Her dress was of a strange sea-green and emeralds shone in her ears and her heavy, black hair. An orange-coloured cat with gleaming, yellow eyes curved its tail across her feet. Above her right shoulder hung a silver cage containing a little bird which chirped and twittered in silly ignorance of its mistress's mood. Anger disfigured her beautiful mouth and eyes. The list of regrets stretched out to sinister length and included such pillars of society as Brutus and Sempronia, Bibulus and Portia. A cynical smile relieved Clodia's sullen lips. Did these braggarts imagine her blind to the fact that if lively Sempronia and stupid Bibulus could conveniently die, Brutus and Portia, who were wiping her off their visiting lists because her feet had strayed beyond the marriage paddock, would make short work of their mourning?

Aurelia's declination she had expected. Her inordinate pride in being Cæsar's mother had not modified her arrogant, old-time severity toward the freedom of modern life. But that Calpurnia should plead her husband's absence as an excuse was ominous. Everyone knew that he dictated her social relations. Terentia had been implacable since that amusing winter when Clodia had spread a net for Cicero. For her own sex Clodia had the hawk's contempt for sparrows, but if Cæsar as well as Cicero were to withdraw from her arena, she might as well prepare herself for the inverted thumbs of Rome.

On her list of acceptances, outside of her own sisters, who had won intellectual freedom in the divorce courts, she found the names of only two women—virtuous Hortensia, who was proud of her emancipated ideas, and Marcia, who was enjoying her husband's Cyprian business as much as the rest of the world. Men, on the other hand, bachelors and divorcés, abounded. Catullus, luckily, was still in Verona, nursing his dull grief for that impossible brother. But she was glad to be assured that his friend, Rufus Cælius, would come. If Terentia and Tullia had tried to poison the mind of Cicero's protégé against her, obviously they had not succeeded. He was worth cultivating. His years in Asia Minor had made a man of the world out of a charming Veronese boy and he was already becoming known for brilliant work at the bar. The house he had just bought faced the southern end of her own garden and gave evidence alike of his money and his taste.

And yet, in spite of Cælius's connections, he was still too young to wield social power, and it was with intense chagrin that Clodia realised that his was the most distinguished name upon her dinner list. Indifferent to the opinion of the world as long as she could keep her shapely foot upon its neck, she dreaded more than anything else a loss of the social prestige which enabled her to seek pleasure where she chose. Was this fear at last overtaking her swiftest pace? Her secretary, watching her, prepared himself for one of the violent storms with which all her servants were familiar. But at this moment a house slave came in to ask if she would see Lucretius. "Him and no one else," she answered curtly, and the Greekling slipped thankfully out as the curtains were drawn aside to admit a man, about thirty-five years old, whose face and bearing brought suddenly into the fretful room a consciousness of a larger world, a more difficult arena. Clodia smiled, and her beauty emerged like the argent moon from sullen clouds. An extraordinary friendship existed between this woman who was the bawd of every tongue in Rome, from Palatine to Subura, and this man whose very name was unknown to nine-tenths of his fellow-citizens and who could have passed unrecognised among most of the aristocrats who knew his family or of the literary men who had it from Cicero that he was at work on a magnum opus. Cicero was Lucretius's only close friend, and supposed he had also read every page of Clodia's life, but not even he guessed that a chance conversation had originated a friendship which Clodia found unique because it was sexless, and Lucretius because, within its barriers, he dared display some of his vacillations of purpose. The woman who was a prey of moods seemed to understand that when he chose science as his mistress he had strangled a passion for poetry; and that when he had determined to withdraw from the life of his day and generation and to pursue, for humanity's sake, that Truth which alone is immortal beyond the waxing and waning of nations, he had violated a craving to consecrate his time to the immediate service of Rome. And he, in his turn, who could penetrate beyond the flaming ramparts of the world in his search for causes, had somehow discovered beyond this woman's deadly fires a cold retreat of thought, where all things were stripped naked of pretence.

Their intercourse was fitful and unconventional. Clodia was accustomed to Lucretius's coming at unexpected hours with unexpected demands upon her understanding. He even came, now and then, in those strange moods which Cicero said made him wonder whether the gods had confused neighbouring brews and ladled out madness when they meant to dip from the vat of genius. At such times he might go as abruptly as he came, leaving some wild sentence reëchoing behind him. But at all times they were amazingly frank with each other. So now Clodia's eyes met his calmly enough as he said without any preface: "I have come to answer your note. I prefer that my wife should keep out of your circle. You used to have doves about you, who could protect a wren, but they are fluttering away now and your own plumage is appalling." With the phrase his eyes became conscious of her emeralds and her shimmering Cean silks and then travelled to the nude grace of Venus the Plunderer. He faced her violently. "Clodia," he said, slaying a sentence on her lips, "Clodia, do you know that hell is here on this earth and that such as you help to people it? There is no Tityus, his heart eaten out by vultures, save the victim of passion. And what passion is more devouring than that frenzy of the lover which is never satisfied? Venus's garlanded hours are followed by misery. She plunders men of their money, of their liberty, of their character. Duties give way to cups and perfumes and garlands. And yet, amid the very flowers pain dwells. The lover fails to understand and sickness creeps upon him, as men sicken of hidden poison. Tell me," he added brutally, leaning toward her, "for who should know better than you? does not the sweetest hour of love hold a drop of bitter? Why do you not restore your lovers to their reason, to the service of the state, to a knowledge of nature?"

His eyes were hot with pity for the world's pain. Hers grew cold. "Jove," she sneered, "rules the world and kisses Juno between the thunderbolts. Men have been known to conquer the Helvetii with their right hands and bring roses to Venus with their left. Your 'poison' is but the spicy sauce for a strong man's meat, your 'plundering' but the stealing of a napkin from a loaded table. Look for your denizens of hell not among lovers of women, but among lovers of money and of power and of fame. Their dreams are the futile frenzies."

"Dreams!" Lucretius interrupted. Clodia shrank a little from the strange look in his eyes. "Do you, too, dream at night? I worked late last night, struggling to fit into Latin words ideas no Latin mind ever had. Toward morning I fell asleep and then I seemed to be borne over strange seas and rivers and mountains and to be crossing plains on foot and to hear strange noises. These waked me at last and I sprang up and walked out into the Campagna where the dawn was fresh and cool. But all day I have scarcely felt at home. And I may dream again to-night. This time my dead may appear to me. They often do." He walked toward her suddenly and his eyes seemed to bore into hers. "Do you ever dream of your dead?" A horrible fright took possession of her. She fell back against the Venus, her sea-green dress rippling upon the white marble, and covered her eyes with her hands. When she looked again, Lucretius was gone.

How terrible he had been to-day! Dream of the dead, he had said, the dead! And why had he talked of a hidden poison of which men might sicken and die? She felt a silly desire to shriek, to strike her head against the painted wall, to tear the jewels from her ears. The orange cat arched its back and rubbed its head against her. She kicked it fiercely, and its snarl of pain seemed to bring her to her senses. She picked the creature up and stroked it. The bird in the cage broke into a mad little melody. How morbid she was growing! She had been depressed by her ridiculous dinner and Lucretius had been most unpleasant. He was such a fool, too, in his idea of love. The brevity of the heated hours was the flame's best fuel. Venus the Plunderer seemed to smile, and there quickened within her the desire for excitement, for the exercise of power, for the obliterating ecstasies of a fresh amour. She had not had a lover since she accepted Catullus. How the thought of that boy sickened her! He had been so absurd that first day when she went to him at Allius's. After writing her that his heart was an Ætna of imprisoned fire, in the first moment he had reminded her of ice-cold Alps. He had knelt and kissed her foot and then had kissed her lips—her lips!—as coolly as a father might kiss a child. The unleashed passion, the lordly love-making which followed had won her. But that first caress and its fellow at later meetings was like crystal water in strong wine—she preferred hers unmixed. Of a poet she had had enough for one while; if she ever wanted him back she need only say so.

In the mean time it would be a relief to play the game with a man who understood it. Youth she enjoyed, if it were not too inexperienced. Cælius's smile, for instance, boyish and inviting, had seemed to her full of promise. He was worth the winning and was close at hand. Catullus had introduced him, which would add piquancy to her letting the din of the Forum succeed the babbling of Heliconian streams. Suddenly she laughed aloud, cruelly, as another thought struck her. How furious and how impotent Cicero would be! If she could play with this disciple of his, and then divest him of every shred of reputation, she might feel that at last she was avenged on the man whom she had meant to marry (after they had sloughed off Metellus and Terentia) and who had escaped her. Calling back her secretary she ordered writing materials and with her own hand wrote the following note: