Anne C. E. Allinson

“ 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. ”

“ A battle rages in the plain. The earth is shaken with the violent charges of the cavalry and with the tramping feet of men. Cruel weapons gleam in the sun. But to one afar off upon a hill the army is but a bright spot in the valley, adding beauty, it may well be, to a sombre scene. And so, ascending into the serene citadel of Knowledge and looking down upon our noisy griefs, we may find them to be but high lights, ennobling life's monotonous plain. My friend, come to Nature and learn of her. Surely Valerius would have wished you peace."
"Peace, peace!" Catullus groaned aloud. ”

“ A smile, both bitter and wistful, came upon Catullus's lips as he remembered a letter he had had yesterday from Lucretius, bidding him listen to the voice of Nature who would bring him peace. "What is so bitter," his friend had urged, "if it comes in the end to sleep? The wretched cannot want more of life, and the happy men, men like Valerius, go unreluctantly, like well-fed guests from a banquet, to enter upon untroubled rest. Nor is his death outside of law. From all eternity life and death have been at war with each other. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They cast greedy eyes on Britain and make much ado about ruling Gaul and Asia and Greece and Egypt. And they think that I am one of them. But the Etruscan ghosts within me stir strangely at times, and walk abroad through the citadel of my soul. Then I know that the idlest dream of a dreamer may have form when our civilisation shall have crumbled, and that the verse of a poet, even of this boy Propertius, will outlast the toil of my nights. You and Virgil often tell me that you owe your fortunes to me,—your lives, you sometimes say with generous exaggeration. ”

“ Was it possible that Athens herself had driven him forth, furnishing him as wings superb impulses born of the glory of her past? For many years now he had been accustomed to feel that he owed to Greece a quickening and a sane training of his artistic abilities; a salvation from Alexandrian pedantry, through a detailed knowledge of the original and masterly epochs of Greek literature; a wholesome fear of Roman grandiosity in any form, engendered by a sojourn among perfect exemplars of architecture and sculpture. For many years, too, he had been in the habit of regarding Brutus as nobly mistaken ”

“ That he loved Rome she had never doubted. He loved the external city because it was fair to the eye. He loved Roman life because it was free from all that was rustic, because it gave the prizes to wit and imagination and refinement. The culture of Athens had at last become domiciled in the capital of a world-empire. Ovid's idea of citizenship, Fabia said to herself, was to live, amid the beauties of this capital and in the warmth of imperial and popular favour, freely, easily, joyfully. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ Julia and with her Roman society have defied Cæsar's desires, just as her mother and her set defied them ten years ago. Imagine the grief and despair of our old Emperor! He must do something savage, drastic, irrevocable, to save his state. My heart breaks for him, and yet I cannot help pitying our imperial lady. With her light grace, her audacious humour, among our stern old standards, she has often made me think of a Dryad moving with rosy feet and gleaming shoulders in a black forest. All our family, Fabia, have been like the trees. But perhaps Rome needs the Dryads too. What is moral truth? ”

“ The man of fifty who had spent his youth in writing love poetry and who through all his life had had an eye for Venus in the temple of Mars must wear a sword and helmet, and dream at night of poisoned arrows and of fetters upon his wrists. The son of the Italian soil, bred in warmth, his eye accustomed to flowers and brooks and fertile meadows, must shiver most of the year under bitter north winds sweeping over the fields of snow which melted under neither sun nor rain ”

“ 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? ”

“ Perilla exclaimed, "that you are old enough to have seen Virgil! Why, I wasn't even born when he died! I suppose those times, when Augustus was young, were very fiery and inspiring, but I am so glad I live in this very year. I would rather have you the chief poet of Rome than a hundred solemn Virgils, and surely life can never have been as lovely as it is now. Isn't Rome much finer and more finished?" ”

“ On the morrow Apollo and Athena would once more hold their proper place.
Of Roman affairs they knew little and thought less, in their charmingly egotistic absorption in student life. But a violent shock was finally to shatter this serene oblivion. Horace could remember the smallest details about that day. It was in the spring. The March sun had risen brightly over Hymettus, and the sky was cloudless. Marcus, meeting him at a morning lecture of Cratippus, had surprised him by asking him to take his afternoon walk with him. ”

“ He faced her violently. "Clodia," he said, slaying a sentence on her lips, "Clodia, do you know that hell is here on this earth and that such as you help to people it? There is no Tityus, his heart eaten out by vultures, save the victim of passion. And what passion is more devouring than that frenzy of the lover which is never satisfied? Venus's garlanded hours are followed by misery. She plunders men of their money, of their liberty, of their character. Duties give way to cups and perfumes and garlands. ”

“ Horace remembered a day when he and Messala had hired at the Piræus a boat rigged with bright canvas, and sped before the wind to Salamis, their readiness for any holiday guided by a recent reading of Herodotus and Æschylus, and by a desire to see the actual waters and shores where brute force had been compelled to put its neck beneath wisdom and courage. The day had been a radiant one, the sky fresh and blue, although flecked here and there by clouds, and the sea and the hills and the islands rich in brilliant colour. ”

“ In this moment Fabia's self-control, like a dam too long under pressure, gave way. Except on ceremonial occasions she had never heard her husband pray. Now, he who had had the heart of a child for Rome and for her was cast out by Rome and was beyond her help. From her breast he must turn to the indifferent gods in heaven. She broke into hard, terrible sobs and threw herself down before the hearth, kissing the grey ashes. Unregardful of those about her, she prayed wildly to the lesser gods of home, her gods. From the temple on the Capitoline, from the Penates came no answer. ”

“ 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 naïvely 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Perilla rose impulsively and, tucking her sleeping child in among the cushions of a neighbouring bench, threw herself on the grass by the older woman. Her forty-five years sat lightly upon Fabia, leaving her still lovely in the sensitive eyes of her husband and stepdaughter. A temperamental equableness and a disciplined character gave to her finely modelled face an inward tranquillity which was a refuge to their ardent natures. She only smiled now, as Perilla's lively tongue began again: "How happy you make father all the time! It keeps me from feeling too dreadfully about going off to Africa. ”

“ His Latin is limpid and direct, his metre is finished, and his emotion as a lover is properly subordinated to his work as a poet."
"Ah," said Mæcenas quickly, "but just there you betray yourself." He hesitated a moment and then went on as if the words were welling up from reluctant depths in his own experience. "Flaccus, you have never loved a woman, have you?"
Horace smiled whimsically. "Not to the extent of surrendering my standards," he said. "So far Mercury has always rescued me in time from both Mars and Venus." ”

“ 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! ”