The two men stopped a moment and turned their heads to look at the Roman liburna, which could barely be distinguished near the tower in the port, wrapped in the shadows of evening. Then they walked slowly onward, as if in deep thought.
"You know," continued one of them, "that I am only a shoemaker who has his shop near the Forum and has been able to save a sack of silver victoriati in order to live at ease in his old age, and to spend the afternoons at the port, rod in hand. I do not know as much as those rhetoricians who stroll up and down outside the city wall disputing and shouting like Furies, nor do I worry my brain as do the philosophers who gather on the porticos of the Forum to quarrel amid the jests of the merchants as to whether this or that one of the men who occupy themselves there in Athens with such matters is in the right. But, with all my ignorance, I ask myself, neighbor, why this strife between us men who live in the same city who should deal with one another like good brothers? Why?"
The shoemaker's comrade replied with vigorous nods of assent.
"I understand," continued the artisan, "that from time to time we shall be at war with our neighbors the Turdetani. Sometimes on account of a question of irrigation, again on account of pasture-grounds, but mainly because of boundary lines, and to keep them from enjoying this beautiful port, I understand that the citizens take up arms and seek battle, going out to destroy their fields and burn their huts. But those people are not of our race, and that is how a great city makes itself respected. Besides, war yields slaves, which often are scarce, and what would we men, we citizens, do without slaves?"
"I am poorer than you, neighbor," said the other fisherman. "I do not earn as much making saddles as you do making shoes; but in spite of my poverty I can afford to have a Turdetan slave, who helps me very much, and I desire war, because it brings in considerably more work."
"War with our neighbors—that is welcome. The young men are restless, and seek ways of distinguishing themselves, the Republic acquires importance in consequence, and, after tramping through valleys and mountains, all will buy shoes and have their saddles mended. Very well; that enlivens business. But why have we been at work for over a year converting the Forum into a battlefield and turning every street into a fortress? At best you are in your shop extolling to a citizeness the elegance of a pair of papyrus sandals of Asiatic fashion, or of Greek buskins of great majesty, when you hear in the nearest plaza the clash of arms, shouts, death cries, and you rush to shut the door so that a stray missile will not nail you to your seat! And why? What reason is there for living like cats and dogs in the bosom of this Zacynthus, which used to be so tranquil and so industrious?"
"The pride and riches of the Greeks"——began his companion.
"Yes, I know that reason. The hatred between Iberians and Greeks; the belief that the latter, by their riches and wisdom, dominate and exploit the former—as if in the city there actually existed Iberians and Greeks! Iberians are those who are behind those mountains which mark off our horizon; a Greek is he whom we have seen disembark, and who is following our footsteps; but we are only sons of Zacynthus or of Saguntum, as they wish to call our city. We are the product of a thousand encounters by land and by sea, and Jupiter himself would be driven into a corner to tell who our grandparents were. Who can enumerate the people that have come here and have remained, in spite of others having come afterward to wrest from them the dominion of these lands and mines, since Zacynthus was bitten by the serpent in these fields, and our father Hercules raised the great walls of the Acropolis? Hither came the peoples of Tyre with their red sailed ships for the silver from the interior; the mariners from Zante fleeing with their families from the tyrants of their country; the Rutulian race from Ardea, people from Italy, who were powerful in the times when Rome did not as yet exist; Carthaginians of the epoch in which they thought more of commerce than of arms—and how do I know how many other peoples? You should hear the pedagogues when they explain our history on the portico of the temple of Diana! And I, do I know, perchance whether I am Greek or Iberian? My grandfather was a freedman from Sicily who came to take charge of a pottery and married a Celtiberian from the interior. My mother was a Lusitanian who came here on an expedition to sell gold dust to merchants from Alexandria. I call myself a Saguntine like all the rest. Those who consider themselves Iberians in Saguntum believe in the gods of the Greeks; the Greeks unconsciously adopt many Iberian customs; they think themselves different because they have divided the city in half and live separate; but their feasts are the same, and in the next Panathenæa you will see, together with the daughters of the Hellenic merchants, those of the citizens who cultivate the earth and who dress in coarse cloth and let their beards grow to more closely resemble the tribes of the interior."
"Yes, but the Greeks dominate everywhere, they are masters of everything, they have taken possession of the life of the city."
"They are the wisest, the bravest; they have something almost divine about them," said the shoemaker sententiously. "See if that is not true of the one who is following us. He is poorly dressed; perhaps he has not an obolus in his pocket for supper; perhaps he will sleep beneath the open sky, and yet, it seems as if Zeus had come down from the heavens in disguise to visit us."