According to the proposal of Fausta, we were again, soon as evening had come, assembled around the table of the princely Gracchus.
When we had partaken of the luxuries of the feast, and various lighter discourse had caused the time to pass by in an agreeable manner, I said thus, turning to my brother:
'I would, Calpurnius, that the temper of one's mind could as easily be changed as one's garments. You now seem to me, having put off your Persian robes, far more like Piso than before. Your dress, though but in part Roman and part Palmyrene, still brings you nearer. Were it wholly Roman it were better. Is nothing of the Persian really put off, and nothing of the Roman put on, by this change?'
'Whatever of the Persian there was about me,' replied Calpurnius, 'I am free to say I have laid aside with my Persian attire. I was a Persian not by choice and preference, I need scarcely assure you, but by a sort of necessity, just as it was with my costume. I could not procure Roman clothes if I would. I could not help too putting off the Roman--seeing how I was dealt by--and putting on the Persian. Yet I part with whatever of the Persian has cleaved to me without reluctance--would it were so that I could again assume the Roman--but that can never be. But Isaac has already told you all.'
'Isaac has indeed informed me in his letter from Ecbatana, that you had renounced your country, and that it was the expectation of war with Rome that alone had power to draw you from your captivity. But I have not believed that you would stand by that determination. The days of republican patriotism I know are passed, but even now under the empire our country has claims and her children owe her duties.'
'The figure is a common one,' Calpurnius answered, 'by which our country is termed a parent, and we her children. Allow it just. Do I owe obedience to an unjust or tyrannical parent? to one who has abandoned me in helplessness or exposed me in infancy? Are not the natural ties then sundered?'
'I think not,' I replied; 'no provocation nor injury can justify a parricidal blow. Our parent is our creator--in some sense a God to us. The tie that binds us to him is like no other tie; to do it violence, is not only a wrong, but an impiety.'
'I cannot think so,' he rejoined. 'A parent is our creator, not so much for our good as his own pleasure. In the case of the gods this is reversed: they have given us being for our advantage, not theirs. We lie under obligation to a parent then, only as he fulfils the proper duties of one. When he ceases to be virtuous, the child must cease to respect. When he ceases to be just, or careful, or kind, the child must cease to love. And from whomsoever else then the child receives the treatment, becoming a parent, that person is to him the true parent. It is idle to be governed by names rather than things; it is more, it is mischievous and injurious.'
'I still am of opinion,' I replied, 'that nature has ordained what I have asserted to be an everlasting and universal truth, by the instincts which she has implanted. All men, of all tribes, have united in expressions of horror against him who does violence to his parents. And have not the poets truly painted, when they have set before us the parricide, forever after the guilty act, pursued by the Furies, and delivered over to their judicial torments?'
'All instincts,' he replied, 'are not to be defended: some animals devour their own young as soon as born. Vice is instinctive. If it be instinctive to honor, and love, and obey a vicious parent, to be unresisting under the most galling oppression, then I say, the sooner reason usurps the place of instinct the safer for mankind. No error can be more gross or hurtful, than to respect vice because of the person in whom it is embodied, even though that person be a parent. Vice is vice, injustice is injustice, wrong is wrong, wheresoever they are found; and are to be detested and withstood. But I might admit that I am in an error here; and still maintain my cause by denying the justice of the figure by which our country is made our parent, and our obligations to her made to rest on the same ground. It is mere fancy, it is a nullity, unless it be true, as I think it is, that it has been the source of great mischiefs to the world, in which case it cannot be termed a nullity, but something positively pernicious. What age of the world can be named when an insane devotion to one's country has not been the mother of war upon war, evil upon evil, beyond the power of memory to recount? Patriotism, standing for this instinctive slavery of the will, has cursed as much as it has blessed mankind. Men have not reasoned, they have only felt: they have not inquired, is the cause of my country just--but is it her cause? That has ever been the cry in Rome. "Our country! our country!--right or wrong--our country!" It is a maxim good for conquest and despotism; bad, for peace and justice. It has made Rome mistress of the world, and at the same time the scourge of the world, and trodden down into their own blood-stained soil the people of many a clime, who had else dwelt in freedom. I am no Roman in this sense, and ought never to have been. Admit that I am not justified in raising my hand against the life of a parent--though if I could defend myself against violence no otherwise, I should raise that hand--I will never allow that I am to approve and second with my best blood all the acts of my country; but when she errs am bound, on the other hand, to blame, and if need be oppose. Why not? What is this country? Men like myself. Who enact the decrees by which I am to be thus bound? Senators, no more profoundly wise perhaps, and no more irreproachably virtuous, than myself. And do I owe their judgments, which I esteem false, a dearer allegiance than I do to my own, which I esteem right and true? Never: such patriotism is a degradation and a vice. Rome, Lucius, I think to have dealt by me and the miserable men who, with me, fell into the hands of Sapor, after the manner of a selfish, cold-hearted, unnatural parent, and I renounce her, and all allegiance to her. I am from this hour a Palmyrene, Zenobia is my mother, Palmyra my country.'