“Did you know him?” I never accepted, literally, Clarissa’s unique age: two thousand years is an unlikely span of life even for a woman of her sturdy unimaginativeness; yet there was no ignoring the fact that she seemed to have lived that long, and that her references to obscure episodes, where ascertainable, were nearly always right and, more convincing still, where they differed from history’s records, differed on the side of plausibility ... the work of a memory or a mind completely unsuperstitious and unenthusiastic: (she was literal; she was, excepting always her central fantasy, matter-of-fact. To her the death or Caesar was the logical outcome of a system of taxation which has not been preserved for us except in quaintly obscure references; while the virtue of the Roman republic and the ambitions of celebrated politicians, she set aside as being of only minor importance: currency and taxation were her forte and she managed to reduce all the martial splendor of ancient days to an economic level).
She had one other obsession, however, and my reference to Ammianus reminded her of it.
“The Christians!” she exclaimed significantly; then she paused; I waited. Her conversation at times resembled chapter-headings chosen haphazardly from an assortment of Victorial novels. “They hated him.”
“Ammianus?”
“No, your man Julian. It is the Emperor Julian you are writing about.”
“Reading about.”
“Ah, you will write about him,” she said with an abstracted pythoness stare which suggested that I was indefatigable in my eccentric purpose which, for some years, had been the study of history in a minor key.
“Of course they hated him. As well they should have ... that’s the whole point to my work.”
“Unreliable, the lot of them. There is no decent history from the time they came to Rome up until that fat little Englishman ... you know, the one who lived in Switzerland ... with rather staring eyes.”
“Gibbon.”