At length the headlands of the noble bay of Tarentum rose above the horizon. While we were running with the speed of a lapwing, the captain, to our surprise, shortened sail. I soon discovered that no philosophy was perfect; that even the optimist thought that daylight might be worse than useless, and that a blot had been left on creation in the shape of a custom-house officer.
Night fell at last; the moon, to which our captain had taken a sudden aversion, was as cloudy as he could desire, and we rushed in between the glimmering watch-towers on the Iapygian and Lacinian promontories. The glow of light along the waters soon pointed out where the luxurious citizens of Tarentum were enjoying the banquet in their barges and villas. Next came the hum of the great city, whose popular boast was, like that of later times, that it had more festivals than days in the year.
Salathiel Lands
But the trierarch’s often-told delight at finding himself free to rove among the indulgences of his favorite shore had lost its poignancy; and with a firmness which set the Stoic in a rage, the Epicurean in a state of rebellion, and the whole tribe of our sages in a temper of mere mortal remonstrance, he resisted alike the remonstrance and the allurement, and sullenly cast anchor in the center of the bay.
It was not until song and feast had died, and all was hushed, that he stole with the slightest possible noise to the back of the mole, and sending us below, disburdened his conscience and the hold of the good ship Ganymede. I had no time to give to the glories of Tarentum. Nero’s approach hurried my departure. The centurion who had me in charge trembled at the idea of delay, and we rode through the midst of three hundred thousand sleepers in streets of marble and ranks of statues, as silently and swiftly as if we had been the ghosts of their ancestors.
When the day broke we found ourselves among the Lucanian hills, then no desert, but crowded with population and bright with the memorials of Italian opulence and taste. From the inn where we halted to change horses, the Tarentine gulf spread broad and bold before the eye.
The city of luxury and of power, once the ruler of Southern Italy, and mistress of the seas that sent out armies and fleets, worthy to contest the supremacy with Pyrrhus and the Carthaginian, was, from this spot, sunk like all the works of man, into littleness. But the gulf, like all the works of nature, grew in grandeur. Its circular shore edged with thirteen cities, the deep azure of its smooth waters inlaid with the flashes of sunrise, and traversed by fleets, diminished to toys, reminded me of one of the magnificent Roman shields, with its center of sanguine steel, the silver incrustation of the rim, and the storied sculpture. We passed at full speed through the Lucanian and Samnian provinces, fine sweeps of cultivated country, interspersed with the hunting-grounds of the great patricians; forests that had not felt the ax for centuries, and hills and valleys sheeted with the vine and rose.
In Rome
But on reaching the border of Latium, I was already in Rome; I traveled a day’s journey among streets and in the midst of a crowded and hurrying population. The whole was one huge suburb with occasional glimpses of a central mount, crowned with glittering and gilded structures.
“There!” said the centurion, with somewhat of religious reverence, “behold the eternal Capitol!”