“As words once in use are antiquated to us, so is it with the names that were once on all men’s lips: Camillus, Volesus, Leonnatus: then, in a little while, Scipio and Cato, and then Augustus, and then Hadrian, and then Antoninus Pius. How many great physicians who lifted wise brows at other men’s sick-beds, have sickened and died! Those wise Chaldeans, who foretold, as a great matter, another man’s last hour, have themselves been taken by surprise. Ay! and all those others, in their pleasant places: those who doated on a Capreae like Tiberius, on their gardens, on the baths: Pythagoras and Socrates, who reasoned so closely upon immortality: Alexander, who used the lives of others as though his own should last for ever—he and his mule-driver alike now!—one upon another. Well-nigh the whole court of Antoninus is extinct. Panthea and Pergamus sit no longer beside the sepulchre of their lord. The watchers over Hadrian’s dust have slipped from his sepulchre.—It were jesting to stay longer. Did they sit there still, would the dead feel it? or feeling it, be glad? or glad, hold those watchers for ever? The time must come when they too shall be aged men and aged women, and decease, and fail from their places; and what shift were there then for imperial service? This too is but the breath of the tomb, and a skinful of dead men’s blood.
“Think again of those inscriptions, which belong not to one soul only, but to whole families: Eschatos tou idiou genous:+ He was the last of his race. Nay! of the burial of whole cities: Helice, Pompeii: of others, whose very burial place is unknown.
“Thou hast been a citizen in this wide city. Count not for how long, nor repine; since that which sends thee hence is no unrighteous judge, no tyrant, but Nature, who brought thee hither; as when a player leaves the stage at the bidding of the conductor who hired him. Sayest thou, ‘I have not played five acts’? True! but in human life, three acts only make sometimes an entire play. That is the composer’s business, not thine. Withdraw thyself with a good will; for that too hath, perchance, a good will which dismisseth thee from thy part.”
The discourse ended almost in darkness, the evening having set in somewhat suddenly, with a heavy fall of snow. The torches, made ready to do him a useless honour, were of real service now, as the emperor was solemnly conducted home; one man rapidly catching light from another—a long stream of moving lights across the white Forum, up the great stairs, to the palace. And, in effect, that night winter began, the hardest that had been known for a lifetime. The wolves came from the mountains; and, led by the carrion scent, devoured the dead bodies which had been hastily buried during the plague, and, emboldened by their meal, crept, before the short day was well past, over the walls of the farmyards of the Campagna. The eagles were seen driving the flocks of smaller birds across the dusky sky. Only, in the city itself the winter was all the brighter for the contrast, among those who could pay for light and warmth. The habit-makers made a great sale of the spoil of all such furry creatures as had escaped wolves and eagles, for presents at the Saturnalia; and at no time had the winter roses from Carthage seemed more lustrously yellow and red.
NOTES
188. +Spenser, Shepheardes Calendar, October, 61-66.
200. +Transliteration: Hôsper epigraphas chronôn kai holôn ethnôn. Pater’s Translation: “the sepulchral titles of ages and whole peoples.”
202. +Homer, Iliad VI.146-48.
202. +Transliteration: Earos epigignetai hôrê. Translation: “born in springtime.” Homer, Iliad VI.147.
210. +Transliteration: Eschatos tou idiou genous. Translation: “He was the last of his race.”