Until now this party has stood the acid test of centuries. Everybody who ever wrote about the fall of Pompeii, from Plutarch and Pliny the Younger clear down to Bulwer Lytton and Burton Holmes, had something to say about him. The lines on this subject by the Greek poet Laryngitis are familiar to all lovers of that great master of classic verse, and I shall not undertake to quote from them here.
Suffice it to say that the Roman sentry, perishing at his post, has ever been a favorite subject for historic and romantic writers. I myself often read of him—how on that dread day when the devil's stew came to a boil and spewed over the sides of Vesuvius, and death and destruction poured down to blight the land, he, typifying fortitude and discipline and unfaltering devotion, stood firm and stayed fast while all about him chaos reigned and fathers forgot their children and husbands forgot their wives, and vice versa, though probably not to the same extent; and how finally the drifting ashes and the choking dust fell thicker upon him and mounted higher about him, until he died and in time turned to ashes himself, leaving only a void in the solidified slag. I had always admired that soldier—not his judgment, which was faulty, but his heroism, which was immense. To myself I used to say:
"That unknown common soldier, nameless though he was, deserves to live forever in the memory of mankind. He lacked imagination, it is true, but he was game. It was a glorious death to die—painful, yet splendid. Those four poor wretches whose shells were found in the prison under the gladiators' school, with their ankles fast in the iron stocks—I know why they stayed. Their feet were too large for their own good. But no bonds except his dauntless will bound him at the portals of the doomed city. Duty was the only chain that held him.
"And to think that centuries and centuries afterward they should find his monument—a vacant, empty mold in the piled-up pumice! Had I been in his place I should have created my vacancy much sooner—say, about thirty seconds after the first alarm went in. But he was one who chose rather that men should say, 'How natural he looks!' than 'Yonder he goes!' And he has my sincere admiration. When I go to Pompeii—if ever I do go there—I shall seek out the spot where he made the supremest sacrifice to authority that ever any man could make, and I shall tarry a while in those hallowed precincts!"
That was what I said I would do and that was what I did do that afternoon at Pompeii. I found the gate looking toward the sea and I found all the other gates, or the sites of them; but I did not find the Roman sentry nor any trace of him, nor any authentic record of him. I questioned the guides and, through an interpreter, the curator of the Museum, and from them I learned the lamentably disillusioning facts in this case. There is no trace of him because he neglected to leave any trace.
Doubtless there was a sentry on guard at the gate when the volcano belched forth, and the skin of the earth flinched and shivered and split asunder; but he did not remain for the finish. He said to himself that this was no place for a minister's son; and so he girded up his loins and he went away from there.
He went away hurriedly—even as you and I.