Even with her many tasks the summer day seemed unending to her. Finally, as the shadows lengthened, she could no longer endure to wait and started out to meet Marcus. Across a green meadow she saw him coming, walking soberly and wearily in front of his herded flock. As he saw her, his listlessness fell from him and he ran forward anxiously. But when he reached her and saw her eyes, his heart almost stopped beating in glad amazement. And she held out her hands, while the dog jumped up on them both in an ecstasy, and said to him, "My son, Fors Fortuna, your Lady of the Spring, has blessed us. You are to go to school."

Later in the evening, when the wonderful supper from the hamper had been eaten and cleared away, and the grandfather had fallen peacefully asleep, and the sheep and goats and hens had been tended for the night, Marcus and his mother sat in the doorway beside the red rosebush and dreamed dreams together of a time when house and courtyard, renewed, should once more exercise a happy sovereignty over fruitful acres. The world seemed Marcus's because he was to go to school, this very year, in their own Como. They had not known before that Pliny had offered to share with the citizens the expense of a school of their own, so that boys need not go as far as Milan. Marcus was awed into speechlessness when his mother told him that the great man was personally to see to his registration and fees and clothes and books. The evening wore on, and the boy's head, heavy with visions, fell sleepily against his mother's breast. As she held him to her, her thoughts wandered from him to the radiant lady who had brought such light into their darkness. Could Fors Fortuna herself, she wondered, be any happier, laden with beauty and riches and power, and making of them a saving gift for mortals?

At the villa dinner had passed off successfully, Quadratilla having been entertaining oftener than outrageous and the others having been in a compliant mood because she was to leave the next day. After dinner, in the cool atrium, Calpurnia had sung some of her husband's verses, which she had herself charmingly adapted to the lyre. Later Quadratilla challenged the younger people to the dice, while Hispulla retired to the library. Calpurnia slipped into the garden. There Pliny, never contented when she was out of his sight, found her leaning against a marble balustrade among the ghostly flowerbeds, where in the night deep pink azaleas and crimson and amber roses became one with tall white lilies. Nightingales were singing and the darkness was sparkling with fireflies. Her fragile face shone out upon him like a flower. If about Pliny the public official there was anything a little amusing, a little pompous, it was not to be found in Pliny the married lover. Immemorial tendernesses were in his voice as he spoke to his wife: "My sweet, what are you thinking of, withdrawn so far from me?" Calpurnia smiled bravely into his face, as she answered: "Of the mothers who have little sons to send to school."



A ROAD TO ROME

An ardour not of Eros' lips.—WILLIAM WATSON.

I

The spring had come promptly this year and with it the usual invoice of young Romans to Athens. Some of them were planning to stay only a month or two to see the country and hear the more famous professors lecture. Others were settling down for a long period of serious study in rhetoric and philosophy. Scarcely to be classed among any of these was the young poet Julius Paulus,[2] who, as he put it to himself with the frank grandiosity of youth, was in search of the flame of life—studiosus ardoris vivendi. He had brought a letter to Aulus Gellius, and Gellius, dutifully responsive to all social claims, invited him on a day in early March to join him and a few friends for a country walk and an outdoor lunch in one of their favourite meeting places.

[Footnote 2: A poet Julius Paulus is mentioned once by Aulus Gellius in the Attic Nights, in terms which seem to suggest both his worldly prosperity and his cultivated tastes. But the suggestion for his character in this imaginary sketch has come, in reality, from generous and ardent young students of to-day, turning reluctantly from their life in Athens to patient achievement in the countries whose sons they are.]

This place, an unfrequented precinct of Aphrodite, about two hours distant from the marketplace, lay below the rocky summit of Hymettus within the hollow of the foot hills. The walk was an easy one, but the forenoon sun was warm and the young pedestrians upon their arrival paused in grateful relief by a spring under a large plane tree which still bore its leaves of wintry gold. The clear water, a boon in arid Attica, completed their temperate lunch of bread and eggs, dried figs and native wine. After eating they climbed farther up the hillside and stretched themselves out in the soft grass that lurked among boulders in the shade of a beech tree. Aulus, with the air of performing an habitual action, produced a book. To-day it proved to be a choice old volume of Ovid, which he had secured at a bargain on the quay at Brindisi, convinced that it had belonged, fully one hundred and fifty years ago, to the poet himself. It had gone far, he said, toward consoling him for the loss of an original Second Book of the AEneid snatched up by a friend in the Image Market at Rome. The Ovid was for Paulus's edification. Aulus unrolled his treasure and read aloud "an accurate description of this very spot:"

Violet crests of Hymettus a-flower Neighbour a fountain consecrate. Yielding and green is the turf. In a bower Trees low-growing meet and mate; Arbutus shadeth the green grass kirtle, Sweet the scent of rosemary; Fragrant the bay and the bloom of the myrtle; Nay, nor fail thee here to see Tamarisks delicate, box-wood masses, Lordly pine and clover low. Legions of leaves and the top of the grasses Stir with healing zephyrs slow.

The reader's indifference to what confronted his eyes, added to his dull regard for the verbal accuracy of ancient verses, shrivelled the modern poet's ardent humour. Was this an example of the intellectual enlightenment awaiting him, he had so fondly hoped, in Athens? With apprehension he remembered what his father's friend, a rich dilettante, one of the best liked men in Rome, had written him when he sent him the letter of introduction:

"You will find Gellius the best fellow in the world but not a fagot to kindle the fires of pleasure. I hear that he has called his book, a particoloured digest of information, Attic Nights, because he has spent his nights in Athens writing it—nights, mark you, when even in her own city Athena closes her grey eyes within her virgin shrine and leaves Pan to guard from his cave below the roysterings of youth. It is easy to let an allusion to my friend Lucian slip off the end of my stylus when I think of Athens. He and Gellius are scarcely the 'like pleasing like' of the proverb! Lucian, in fact, disposed of Gellius once by calling him an 'Infant Ignorance on the arm of Fashion.' This was after he had watched a peasant making holiday among the statues and temples on the Acropolis, carrying in his arms a three months old child who dozed in a colonnade of the Parthenon and sucked his thumb in front of Athena Promachus. The blinking baby, he said, made him think of Aulus, futilely carried about by the trend of the age among ideas and achievements beyond his understanding. But in fairness I must add that when this was repeated to Marcus Aurelius he retorted: 'Better a child than an iconoclast in the presence of beauty. I should call Gellius an honest errand boy in Athena's temple.' So there you have two ways of looking at your future host. If Lucian is the most enlightened wit of the day, Aurelius is the most Roman of us all and likely to rule over us when Antoninus rejoins the gods.

"On Gellius's return next year he is to be made a judge. He will study law painstakingly and apply it exactly. And Rome will never for him be one whit juster. However, your father will be delighted to have you make such a friend—a man of thirty whose idea of a debauch is to make a syllogism, who is a favourite student of great teachers and can introduce you to Herodes Atticus and to all the best life of Athens. Nor, indeed, do I marvel at Aurelius for trusting him. As a scholar or a jurist he will always be negligible, but as a man he is naively sincere and candid and with all the strength of his Roman will he is determined that both his work and his pleasures shall be such as befit a gentleman of honour and refinement. He may bore you, but, if I do not misread you, the pleasures that are within his gift will have a finer edge for you than those of the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus."

As Gellius droned on about some of the niceties of Ovid's language, fragmentary sentences of this letter recurred to Paulus and he wondered what his father's friend would think of him could he accurately read his desires for pleasure. Certainly the shows of the Amphitheatre seemed remote enough here under the cool, grey branches, tipped with early green, of the Attic beech tree, but scarcely, after all, more remote than they often seemed in Rome itself to a youth who found virile recreation by the sea at Ostia or in following the Anio over the hills of Tibur. No, he had not flung away from Rome to escape in the back waters of a smaller town the noisy vulgarities of the metropolis. Nor was he one of those who confused the contests of the Circus with the creative struggles of the Forum. His abstinence from political life was due to temperament rather than conviction, nature having shaped him for active citizenship in a world dissociated from public insignia. It was in this world that he found himself at twenty-five ill at ease. Without genius, his slender vein of talent was yet of pure gold. There was no danger of his overrating his own poetry. He saw it as it was, of the day and hour, wearing no immortal grace of thought or language. But in it he was at his best, more honest and more whole-hearted than he could be in any public service. This seemed to him, quite simply, to constitute a reason for being such a poet as he was.

He belonged to an ancient family, which had furnished a consul in the first Punic War, had left distinguished dead on the field of Cannae and had borne on its roll the conqueror of Macedonia. AEmilius Paulus Macedonicus had rendered Rome the further and signal service of a public life as spotless as it was brilliant, and something of this statesman's scrupulous integrity had passed to the youngest son of the house, leading him to discriminate in his world also between shadows and realities. To Paulus the happiest age in the world's history was the age of Pericles, when the wedlock of life and learning issued in universal power. In Rome he would have been glad to have lived in the last years of the Republic, or under Augustus, when Lucretius and Catullus, Virgil and Horace, by submitting themselves in pupilage to the Greeks, became masters of new thoughts and new emotions among the masters of the world. How different was their discipleship from the imitative methods of modern literati! While it was the fashion to boast of refinement and learning, while libraries jostled each other and rhetoricians and philosophers swarmed in the city, Paulus was chiefly conscious that in the place of creative imagination a soulless erudition walked abroad. In the vestibule of the Palatine temple, waiting for the morning appearance of the Emperor, rhetoricians discussed the meaning of an adverb. In the baths they tested each other's knowledge of Sallust. Grammarians gathered in secondhand bookshops around rare copies of Varro's satires and Fabius's chronicles and hunted for copyist's errors. If one were tired of the streets and went to walk in Agrippa's park, he ran into men quarrelling over a vocative. Even on a holiday at Ostia he could not escape discussions between Stoics and Peripatetics. With all this activity, philosophy and literature grew only more anaemic.

Paulus, too limited to be himself a formative influence, was also too truth-loving to be satisfied in Rome with the only life he was fitted to lead. Indifferent to the persuasions of Aphrodite, he yet harboured in his temperament a certain warmth which made him eager to live with passion and abandon, to scorch his hands in the fires of the world rather than drearily to warm them at burnt out ashes. Hopeless in Rome, he determined to seek his fortune elsewhere. An intellectual life real enough to claim his spendthrift allegiance, this, concretely, was the prize for which he had set sail from Brindisi two months before.

The act gave him an outward resemblance to the horde of young bloods who were always swinging out on the high seas in search of sport and adventure. The most restless made for Britain and the shores of the Euxine or the Baltic, or for the interior of Syria and Persia. The larger number followed the beaten and luxurious paths to Egypt, where they plunged into the gaieties of Alexandria and, cursorily enough, saw the sights of Memphis and Thebes. Paulus also went to Egypt. But in spite of his introductions and his opportunities to experiment with modern life under the absolving witchery of Oriental conditions, he gave himself over to the subtler influences of the past. Pilgrim rather than tourist, he visited eagerly the pyramids and the Sphinx, the temples of Karnak and Thebes, the tombs of the Theban kings, the colossi of the desert. In the frightful course of the centuries, as they unrolled before him, he seized upon the guidance of Herodotus, to whom the monuments of Egypt had seemed as incalculably old as they did to him. The choice, however, had proved unfortunate for his sympathetic reading of Egyptian history. Dwelling on the radiant progress towards truth and beauty of a free race, bondsmen only to law and reason, younger brothers of bright gods, he became querulously critical of a race whose Pharaohs strangled life in the thought of death and eternity, prostrated themselves before gods in monstrous shapes, and produced art at the expense of human well-being.

The landscape of Egypt also seemed to Paulus as sinister as it was exquisite. Its beauty, whether of silver Nile or lilac mountains or tawny desert, enervated by its appeal to the love of easy delight, and bred mad, vagrant thoughts, precursors of moral disaster. He had slept in the desert one night. The enamelled turquoise of the daylight sky, the clear, red gold of the sunset, the ghostly amber of the afterglow gave way to moonlight. As he lay and watched the silver bloom spread over the sand dunes, he felt suddenly a great terror. The golden apples of his western labour, the hard-won fruits of his stern young virtue, were slipping out of his grasp. The white desert lay upon his spirit like mist upon the sea, obliterating the promised course. Desires, unknown before, crept in upon him over the waves of the sand. All that he had rejected claimed him. All that he had thought holy mocked him. The next day he hurried to Alexandria and, recoiling from the library he had planned to visit, took the first ship to Greece.

He had landed a week ago. To-day's excursion, offering a pleasant comradeship with those of his own race in a strange land, came almost opportunely, he fancied, to break an exalted mood. He had found himself roused to the uttermost by his first impressions of Athens. Put to flight by the seduction of river and desert, it was the influence of the landscape rather than of art and history to which he was here first made sensitive. Sea, mountains and plain were informed with a beauty which purged his memory of the evil loveliness of Egypt and restored gravity and dignity to his conception of human life. He was struck by what Plato would have called the Doric strain in the harmonies of outline and colour. Idyllic scenes he had already run across in his walks out from the city, scenes formed and reformed by the lovely occupations of farm and vineyard and pasture. But the lyric note so familiar to him in Italy seemed always overborne by a deeper. Whether it was because of the noble modelling of the fleshless mountains or because of an inner restraint in the minor elements of the landscape, the mood generated by the beauty of the Attic plain was always a grave one, delight swelling into reverence.

Now also, as his thoughts ceased whirling and he became conscious again of what lay around him, his irritation died. All that was trifling must be discarded when his eye could travel beyond wild hyacinth and myrtle, past pines and olive groves and cypresses, past the rosy soil of upturned fields, to the long, firm lines of Parnes's purple ridge and to the snowy summit, a midday beacon, high-uplifted, of distant Helicon.

To his relief, Paulus found that Gellius's monologue had given way to general conversation. As he listened his heart grew hot within him. These young men, of whom only Gellius and Servilianus had passed out of their twenties, had lived in Athens for a year or longer, and now, conscious of their approaching departure, they had fallen to talking of the past months. A strange power Athens seemed to have of exacting from aliens the intimate loyalty of sons. Here, Paulus felt, was no miserly counting up of gains, but an inner concern with art and history. Not as gluttonous travellers, but as those facing a long exile, they talked of a city richer than Rome or Alexandria or Antioch, richer than all the cities of the Empire taken together, in masterpieces of architect and sculptor and painter; of a country-side alive with memories of poets and thinkers and soldiers. Taking with a catholic enthusiasm the hot winds and driving white dust of summer, the deforming rains of winter, and the bright splendour of sky and earth at the advent of spring, they had tramped hither and yon, light-hearted in the vigour of youth, reverent in the impulse of pilgrimage. Mountain fastnesses where the clarion winds still trumpeted the victory of freedom and of Thrasybulus; upland caves where Plato had been taken as a child to worship Pan; long, white roads leading to the village homes of Euripides and Demosthenes; the wind in the pine trees on Pentelicon, reminding them of the wind in the groves of Tusculum; the autumn leaves on the plane trees by the Ilissus; the silver moon seen from the water's edge at Phaleron, swinging into the eastern void above the amethyst-dyed rocks of Hymettus; a sail on a summer star-lit night from AEgina to Piraeus—all these things crept one by one into their conversation. Here, Paulus recognised, was a group of young men on fire with a real emotion, cleansed in the presence of beauty and of great memories, witnesses afresh to a procreative Hellas. When the party broke up he thanked his host for the happiest day he had spent in many months.

On the way home, after rounding the last foot hill, they saw the Acropolis across the plain. The sun fell on the red in the natural rock and intensified the white of the marbles. Against the sombre mountains the isolated citadel glowed inly, like a milk-white opal shot with rose. Paulus caught his breath. Was it here, his flame of life?

II

In the following weeks Paulus remembered some things in the conversation of this day, which at the time had made but slight impression on him. The stories of professors and teachers had meant little until he knew at first hand the lentil suppers and brilliant talking at the house of Taurus, the ethical discussions with Peregrinus in his hovel on the outskirts of the city, and, most of all, the generous and ennobling hospitality, in his city house and villas, of the millionaire rhetorician, Herodes Atticus. About Peregrinus Paulus could never make up his mind. Was he the helpful teacher Gellius thought him, or the blatant charlatan of Lucian's frequent attacks? At any rate, the stories that were abroad about his wild youth, his connection with the strange sect known as Christians, his excommunication by them for profaning one of their rites, his expulsion from Rome by the Prefect of the City for his anarchistic harangues made a picturesque background for his cynic garb and ascetic preaching. To Taurus and Atticus, on the other hand, Paulus could give himself with unreserved loyalty. His hardy will responded to the severe standards of thought and conduct set by the Platonic philosopher, while the wilder heart within him seemed to seek and understand the rhetorician's emotional nature and extravagant affections.

Indeed, as the spring passed into summer, all the elements in Paulus's life seemed to confirm the glory of that day on the slopes of Hymettus when he had first felt sure of the significance Greece held for him. The cumulative effect of his association with older men, his young friendships, his work toward his chosen goal, his grave but piercing pleasures, was to make him at home in Athens as he had never been at home in Rome. He rested in the charm of the smaller, simpler city, where among all classes and all ways of life mental refinement took precedence of crass display. Here, he felt, he could live and work, unknown to fame indeed, but with all that was best in him dedicated in freedom and integrity to the life of the spirit. The memory of Egypt, where all effort lost itself in the mockery of the desert, and the thought of Rome, where in these later years all fruitful effort was military, political, commercial, became almost equally abhorrent to him. Greece, set within her stainless seas, was like a holy temple set apart, a place of refuge from shams and error and confusion.

This worshipful attitude towards Athens was crystallized in the young poet at the time of the Panathenaic festival, in July. The festival was still a brilliant one, a brief radiance falling upon city and citizens. Unlike a holiday season at Rome, here were no shows of gladiators or beasts, no procession of captors and captives, no array of Arabian gold or Chinese silk or Indian embroideries. The Athenians, seeking novelty, found it in their own renewed appreciation of the physical skill of athletes, of music and drama, of observances still hallowed by religion and patriotism. On the Acropolis Paulus watched the arrival of the procession bringing this year's peplos to Athena. After centuries of shame in the political life of her city the gold-ivory statue of the Guardian Goddess shone undefiled in a temple whose beauty was a denial of time. The pageant also, once more paying tribute to Wisdom, was noble and beautiful as in the days of Phidias. The gifts of Greece were beyond the reach of conqueror or destroyer. Paulus entered the inner shrine and looked up at the winged Victory borne upon the hand of the goddess. To dwell in Athens seemed a sacred purpose. Involuntarily, in self-dedication, he found himself using the familiar prayer of the theatre:

O majestical Victory, shelter my life Neath thy covert of wings, Aye, cease not to grant me thy crowning.

III

The answer to this prayer, the grant of victory, came, as it happened, in strange guise. The sensitive Roman youth, still in the potter's hands, had reckoned without the final Greek experience which lay ahead of him, the issue of one night in the early autumn. During the season of the full moon in September all lectures were suspended and most of the Roman students joined the crowd of travellers to Elis to see the Olympic games. Paulus had had a touch of malaria and his physician had urged him not to expose himself to the dangers of outdoor camping in a low country. He consented lightly, thinking to himself that since he was to live in Greece he could afford to postpone for a few years the arduous pleasures of the great festival. Herodes Atticus had gone this year, and upon his return brought with him for a visit a group of very distinguished men, including Lucian and Apuleius and the Alexandrian astronomer, Ptolemy. Paulus was astonished and proud to receive, with Gellius, an invitation to a dinner in their honour given at Cephisia.

The weather was still extremely hot and the dinner hour was set late. Even when Paulus and Gellius left the city the air was heavy and exhausting and never had the villa seemed to them more beautiful. The great groves of cypresses and pines, of poplars and plane trees, were dark with the shadow of the moonless night. In the broad pools the stars were reflected. The birds were hushed, but the sound of cool, running water rang sweet in urban ears. Within the dining-room an unhampered taste had done all that was possible to obliterate the memory of the scorching day. A certain restraint in all the appointments perfected the sense of well-being. As Paulus yielded to it and looked at his fellow guests, he drew a long breath of contentment. How exquisite, he thought, was Greek life, how vivid the inspiration of this hour!

Conversation naturally turned at first to episodes of the Games and the successes of the victors; then by easy stages drifted to the discussion of the nature of success of any kind.

Alpheus of Mytilene, hailing, by how long an interval, from the city and the craft of the Lesbian Muse, turned to the host. "Atticus," he said, "here is an easy question for you. Tell us how to succeed." All the guests paused expectantly, knowing that a chance question would sometimes lead Atticus into one of the vivid displays of extemporaneous oratory for which he was famous. Nor were they disappointed now. He looked at the company before him, men, for the most part, younger than himself. A strange glow, as if from smouldering fires freshly stirred, brightened in his dark eyes, and he began to speak, impetuously. His voice, low in its first haste, rose shrill with the tide of emotion, as he passed headlong over the barriers of logic and of form.

"You ask me about success because you think I have succeeded. Do you know what the characteristic moment of my life was? It was when, almost forty years ago, I failed in my first speech before divine Hadrian and sickened with chagrin. Most of you are young and will not wonder, as I might now wonder at myself, that I stood by the Danube that night and nearly threw myself into the oblivious water. Concrete failure is as palpable a thing as concrete success. The one is like a golden cup which you turn in your hands and lift in the sunlight before you test at your lips the wine it holds. The other is wormwood forced into your mouth. Like wormwood, it may be cleansing. My 'success' in my chosen profession, the fact that I have made great speeches, held high positions, acquired fame, is due to the inner sickness that night by the river. You will find that the name of many a man of my age is in men's mouths because at the outset Defeat became his trophy, the Gorgon's head, despoiled by his first sword of hiss and venom. So there, my friends, you have the rule you ask for—fail once so ignominiously that you wish to die, and you may wrest from fate a brief name and the cloak of success.

"But beneath the cloak what is there? What, I mean, has there been for me? If it is true that success is to be measured by the fulfilment of desires, then through all these years I have but stood by the bank of the Danube. You know that I am an exemplar, fit for a schoolboy's rhetorical exercise, of the old lesson of life, that wealth and power do not bring fruition in the intimate affections and hopes. My son, my daughter, have died.[3] The only son left to me is a daily torture to my pride. The disciples I took into their places have died. The statues of them which I set up at Marathon no longer comfort me. Like Menelaus, I have learned to hate the empty hollows of their eyes where 'Love lies dead.'

[Footnote 3: It was after the date assumed for this dinner that Regilla, the Roman wife of Herodes Atticus, died under peculiarly tragic circumstances. In commemoration of her he built his famous Odeum on the south slope of the Acropolis.]

"All these things you have been taught by history to discount. Barrenness in the personal life is the price many a man has paid for public honours. Fortune must preserve an equilibrium among us. No man is blessed in everything. That you know from the Horace of your own school days. But, seldom hearing men speak the truth, you may not know that to some of us, at least, there is no return for the price we pay. When we give up juggling with facts for the sake of performing the work of the world, we know that, instead of achievement,

Mournful phantoms of dreams are there, Fancies as vain as the joys they bear, Vain—for think we that good has neared, It slips through the hand or e'er 't has appeared, And the vision has vanished on wings that keep Company on the paths of sleep.

"I can make you see this in my own life by an illustration which may surprise you. Some of you have envied me my power to enrich and beautify Greece. You imagine that I myself find some satisfaction in the white marble over the Stadion in Athens, in the water works in Olympia, where we no longer drink in fevers, in the embellishments at Delphi, in the theatre at Corinth. You think it a great thing that I can, by turning to my money, create memorials to myself in the greater comfort of cities of Asia Minor and of Italy. But I tell you that all these things are nothing to me because the only thing I want to do for my country is to connect the two seas at Corinth by a canal cut through the solid earth. What is all the rest? A playing with perishable materials, an erecting of 'memorials' which you and I find beautiful and serviceable, which in another hundred years may serve but to mark the transitoriness of our civilisation, and of which in five hundred years only traces will remain to be pointed out as Mycenae was pointed out to you, Alpheus, by a goatherd, driving his flocks where once was a city of gold. My 'success' is of the moment. My desire is for the conquest of nature herself, to bind her for all time to the service of man. The idea of a canal teased Julius Caesar, and Nero, with purple pomp, began to cut the rock; and yet the land still stands between the eastern and the western seas, limiting commerce, exhausting energies. When Panathenaic games are no longer held in the Stadion, when Apollo speaks clearest from other oracles than Delphi, Greeks will be building ships; Asia Minor, Egypt and India will be sending their treasures to Italy; the passage from east to west will be utilised. I should have done a thing for all time, not for ourselves."

The speaker paused as his hot eyes swept over his guests. Then he rushed on again:

"But I can see from your faces that this illustration does not convince you. To you the canal is even less important than a new facade for the well-house of Corinthian Peirene. Let me try again. I have heard people say what a satisfaction it must be to me to play a conspicuous part in the life of our own generation. But what is the life of our generation—the life, I mean, in which I have any individual share? My contribution is in art and literature, not in politics or war. And in art and literature what are we doing, save recalling in vague echoes the greater voices of a dead past? Even Lucian here, who is the only original of us all in letters, even Ptolemy, who is a master in science, will agree with me. Our greatness is of the past.

"Look at the statues in the theatre! AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides surrounded by what a horde of little moderns! Menander standing cheek by jowl with a poetaster! The Emperors have dallied with us, wanting the gifts we bear to the Empire. The Roman Republic saw to it that we should bring no new gifts. The trees in Aristotle's Lyceum were cut down by Sulla to make his engines of war. When he turned these engines on the Acropolis, Athena's golden lamp went out.

"I was consul once at Rome, but few will remember it of me, for it was not the real I that did that work. But I was doing, I sometimes think, a more real thing than when I try to clothe Athens again with the glory of Pericles's age or seek in long lost quarries for my prose style. I envied divine Hadrian his faith in a restoration. His pride in Rome seemed really equalled by his passionate sentiment for Athens and his determination to make her once more the nurse of the arts. Commerce and wealth have swept by us to Egypt. Ships put in at Piraeus merely for repairs, and no longer, as in the great past, pay a part of their cargoes to Athens, a fee of harbourage. Learning, too, has swept eastward. Librarians and learned men dwell at Alexandria. Hadrian asked me to help him reawaken in Athens Apollo and his Muses. The restorer's buildings are round about you, his library and temples, in their new splendour typical of his hope. But wherein, after all, lies the greatness of the greatest of them? The Temple of Zeus imposes chiefly, I think, by its display of the world-wide power of Hadrian. You see the statues of himself in and about it, raised by Rome and Carthage, by Corinth and Byzantium, by Miletus and Laodicea, by every city of the Empire, paying homage to an emperor who by some divine grace happened to prefer to be honoured by marble in Athens rather than to have gold sent to him in Rome. How different is the Parthenon, still, after six hundred years, the embodiment of a common impulse of a free people! Try as Hadrian would, he could not restore the art of the past."

Atticus looked at the Romans among the company and his voice became golden and persuasive as he continued:

"I have come to feel, my friends, that the restoration of an art that is not the outcome of a genuine national life is a futile thing. Rome cannot restore the glory of old Athens. She can only learn from Greece how to create a glory of her own. She must so govern her life, so train her sons, that out of their own impulses a new poetry, a new art will grow. Divine influences from the past, yes, they exist. In your own most creative times Cicero and Lucretius, Virgil and Horace, did more than restore. Seeking aliment from Greece, they nurtured their own genius. But you, what are you and your friends doing? Why are you over here? Tell me that. Are you here to learn to be better Romans, carrying on your own national life, creating at last out of the forces of your own time an architecture and sculpture, a painting and poetry commensurate with your powers? Sometimes I fear you make a cult of Athens, lose yourselves in remembering her as she once was. You seem to spend your lives, as I have sometimes spent wakeful nights at Marathon, my birthplace, listening for the feet of heroes and the neighing of horses on the field where a great battle was once fought. That may do for the night seasons, but with the sun are there not new conquests, and new shields?

"You scorn your own Romans who come over here and put up their names on old statues of Themistocles and Miltiades. You admire Cicero who, although he loved Athens and wished that he might leave here some gift from himself, scorned to pervert an ancient statue. And yet, I tell you, Cicero was a Roman first, a lover of Greek culture second. All that he learned here he dedicated to the Republic. He studied Isocrates and Demosthenes in order that by his voice he might free Rome from traitors and persuade Justice to 'walk down her broad highways as Warder.' He read Plato that philosophy might soften the harsher temper of his own people. He partook of our refinement that the vigour of Rome might be used in the service of humanity.

"Take warning by me. Do not, indeed, forget our past. Stay here as long as you will. Touch lingeringly the hem of Athena's peplos. But when your minds are strengthened, when your powers are matured, go back to your own people and make them also, because you have dwelt for a time in the home of Plato, look 'to the pattern that is laid up in heaven for him who wills to see, and, seeing, so to plant his dwelling.' Work for Rome. Let the memory of Athens be no cup of eastern magic. Listen, rather, for her voice as worshippers at the salt well on the Acropolis listen, when the south wind blows, for the sound of the waves of the purging sea."

The rich, emotional voice ceased suddenly like the flood tide of Northern seas. Paulus was not prepared for the swift transformation of ardent speaker into observant host as Atticus turned with a whispered order to the slave who stood behind him. He was shocked, too, failing to perceive its note of defiant bitterness, by a laugh from Lucian and his careless, "My felicitations, Atticus, on your welding of dirge and exhortation into one epideictic oration! Aulus," he added, looking across the table, "don't forget to make a note of the prepositions the master used in burying Greece."

The sneer fortunately was almost on the instant covered up by Ptolemy, who, as if awakened from a revery, turned toward his host. "Atticus," he said, "you have convinced me that I am right. Pedigree, wealth and art, nations and civilisations and the destiny of men bring you no happiness. I find myself at peace in the heavens. While you were speaking I rivalled Alpheus here and beat out an epigram:

That I am mortal and a day my span I know and own, Yet when the circling ebb and flow I scan Of stars thick-strewn, No longer brush the earth my feet, And I abide, While God's own food ambrosial doth replete, By Zeus's side."

Like a gust of wind, the unexpected poet might have swept the conversation into his own ether, if at this juncture the doors had not opened to admit a group of well known actors. There was a general exclamation of surprise, special entertainments being almost unknown at Atticus's dinners. The host turned smiling to his guests. "My friends," he said, "I know you share my pride in the rare event of Apuleius's presence. He is not as accustomed as we are to the grey monotone of our own thoughts. Shall he go back to Carthage or Rome to laugh at our village banquets? Ptolemy, you know Menander shared your regard for—

these majestic sights—the common sun, Water and clouds, the stars and fire.

Let him take you off now among our country folk out here near Parnes. We still have the human comedy, played out under sun and stars. Love and deceit, troubles and rewards are as ageless as the heavens. Gentlemen, this distinguished company has consented to give us to-night a presentation of The Arbitrants equal to the famous one of the last Dionysia."

Apuleius's handsome face lit up with gaiety and good will. "I thank you, O wise host," he called out.

To-day's my joy and sorrow, Who knows what comes to-morrow?

Let us spend the moment we have in the merry company of a wise poet."

The play began. Moods of tragedy were forgotten. Only Paulus found himself unable to listen. His host's appeal, made apparently with such ready emotion, and so easily forgotten by the other men—he was the youngest of the company—had shaken his soul as a young tree on a mountain is shaken by the night wind. The comedy went on, punctuated by applause. In his mind met and struggled high desires. When Atticus had talked of Athens and of Rome he had remembered Virgil's great defence of his own people, the weapon of all patriots after him:

Others, I well believe, shall mould the bronze to breathe in softer form, from marble shall unveil the living countenance, shall plead with greater eloquence, and heaven's paths map out with rod in hand and tell the rising of the stars. Upon the tablets of thy memory, O Roman, it is laid to hold the peoples in thy sway. These are thy arts and shall be: To impose the ways of peace; to spare the vanquished and subject the proud.

Now there leaped into life within him a realisation of Rome's incommunicable greatness. He perceived at last the nature of the pax romana, that peace, compounded of power, which welded the continents together, made the seas into serviceable highways and held all men secure within the barriers of law and justice. Was it possible that a nation which had given birth to a force like this could also bring forth in due season a love of beauty, a thirst for truth? Could tameless genius and conquering will, could a passion for ideas and a passion for deeds dwell together until side by side men of one blood should add to the glory of worldly power the glory of spiritual conquest, should superimpose upon the beauty of just laws the beauty of wrought bronze and woven language?

And if this could be, what was the duty of each Roman whose pure desires lay with Poetry and her sisters? Paulus shuddered as he felt the question tearing its way through the peaceful plans he had been making for his life. He remembered the story of Menander refusing to leave the intellectual life of Athens for the luxuries of Ptolemy's court. Must he, on the contrary, for the sake of an idea, renounce this life, with its cherished poverty and philosophy, its peace and learned leisure, its freedom and candour and regard for beauty, to go back to Rome where, in terrifying coalition, power and pleasure, wealth and display, passion and brutality were forever crowding in upon the city's honour? The irresponsibility of the insignificant assailed him. A Virgil, he supposed, might know that his presence would affect his country for good or evil. But what could he, Paulus, do? In Rome, in Athens, he was one of the little men. Was he not, then, justified in living his own life in the best possible way, atoning for the meagreness of his talent by the honourableness of his quest?

But even as he said this to himself he remembered why Athens had achieved perfection. In the age of Pericles, geniuses, like flawless jewels cut out of a proper matrix, had been fashioned out of a large body of men, themselves not gifted, but able to understand and safeguard those who were. He had left Rome because she was no matrix for poets and artists and thinkers. Ought he now to return to her and live and work and die unknown, serving only as one more citizen ready to welcome the poets to be?

His panting desires put up one last defence. Was he not narrowing art within the borders of nationality? In the service of beauty was there either Greek or Roman? Alas! Atticus had beaten that down already. Art was no fungus, growing on a rotten stump of national life. Greeks had been artists only when they had been conquerors, soldiers, traders, rulers. The Romans now held the world. In them, the eagle's brood, lay the hope of a new birth of the spirit. With a certain noble unreason, he dismissed the idea that by living in Athens he might fight the battle for Rome. If he was to fight at all, it was to be where the enemy was fiercest and the hope of victory least. Upon any easier choice his ancestors within him laid their iron grasp. His ears caught the words of one of the actors:

"Well, do not then the gods look out for us?" you'll say. To each of us they have allotted Character As garrison commander.

Gathering his forces in obedience to his garrison commander Paulus tried to decide to go back to Rome. Greece called to him insistently. Confused and exhausted, he joined perfunctorily in the loud applause that closed the comedy, and in the speeches of gratitude and farewell to the host.

The play had been long, and the autumn night, he found to his surprise, had passed. Emerging from the house, he breasted the dawn. With curious suddenness the sense of conflict left him. The beauty of the Attic plain, born, unlike the beauty of the Roman Campagna, of light rather than of unshed tears, had often seemed to him to quicken the perception of truth. Certainly the dullest eyes must see at this hour, when, at the behest of the approaching sun, outlines were cleared of all that was shadowy and fanciful, and colours were touched to buoyant life. Greece called to him, but with what a message! Imaginings, vain desires, regrets, were swept away from his mind, even as the receding shadows left bare the contours of the mountains. He saw that his concern was with the battle, not with its issue. In this enlightening hour he understood that Rome would never become mother of the arts, until, in some unimagined future, through transforming national experiences, she should be made pregnant with ideas beyond the ken of his generation. Poets might again be born of her, but he and his like would long since have been lying among her forgotten children. And yet, the life of the future, however distant, would not be unaffected by the obscure work and faith of the present age. He himself would never see victory, but the struggle was his inalienable heritage. Revealed in light and joy he knew his purpose. Down from the crags of Parnes, great wings strong with the morning, swept an eagle—as if homeward—toward the western sea. With it, like an arrow to its goal, alert with the vigour of dawn, aflame with the ardour of life, sped the heart of the young Roman.

THE END