In Bogotá, city of old churches, patrician pride, grave gray stone palaces, the room in which Silvá killed himself was found filled with books, in many tongues, collections of precious perfumes, and rare orchids.
How vastly learned was Tertullian! How eloquent! And how bronze muscled was his prose! As I read, I recall sharply old, resonant bronzes of Han, black and polished archaic pottery from fabulous dead cities upon the slopes of the Andes, in Peru, such as that fluent painter and distinguished scientist and explorer, A. Hyatt Verrill, discovered, where in the long black night of time forgotten civilizations flowered then disappeared, and tides of Spanish conquest and exploration rose and fell, the black marble of the Baiæan pleasure-palaces of Tiberius Caesar, and black pearls from the Indian Ocean.
In truth Tertullian’s prose is black and splendid. It glows with the magic light of poignant drowned moons in perished Egyptian midnights, and the pictured onyx pendants that chilled the cruel breasts of Herodias. It moves me tremendously. And what power to swing the great sentence, then make it humbly sinuous, simple, and supple! Hear him:
“O tardy messengers! O sleepy despatches, through whose fault Cybele had not an earlier knowledge of the Imperial decease, that the Christians might have no occasion to ridicule a goddess so unworthy!...”
“And yet the Romans have never done such homage to the Fates which gave them Carthage against the purpose and the will of Juno, as to the abandoned harlot Larentina. It is not undoubted that not a few of your gods have reigned on earth as men.”
“If from the beginning of the world the Milesians sheared sheep, and the Serians spun trees, and the Tyrians dyed, and the Phrygians embroidered with the needle and the Babylonians with the loom, and pearls gleamed and onyx-stones flashed, if gold had issued with the cupidity which accompanies it from the ground, if the mirror had license to lie so largely, Eve, expelled from Paradise, already dead, would have coveted these things!”
The preachments of Tertullian keep the interest of romance and the exciting, restless intrigue of the novel. It is not surprising that a few books could satisfy so well the elder world: It is because each of the few kept the power of many. In the confusing complexity of today, Tertullian and Procopius could take the place of many for me. The long breath of power was theirs.
The sentences of Procopius are packed richly with meaning. Each has meat for meditation. And it is that rare writing that I love, because I keep the illusion of it being chiseled upon metal. It is firm. And it keeps a gleam in my mind. The attack of the first lines of his chapters is frequently magnificent. Here is an example:
“The Taurus mountain range of Cilicia passes first Cappadocia and Armenia and the land of the so-called Persarmenians, then Albania and Iberia both independent or subject to Persia. It extends a great distance, and as one proceeds along its range, it spreads out to extraordinary breadth, rises to imposing height....”