Chapter XXV Calm After Storm
I
Like all human things, the war ended. The Alexandrians might rage and dash their numbers against the palace walls. Ganymed and young Ptolemæus, who had gone out to him, pressed the siege, but all in vain. And help came to the hard-pressed Romans at last. Mithridates, a faithful vassal king, advanced his army over Syria, and came down into the Delta, sweeping all before him. Then Cæsar effected a junction with the forces of his ally, and there was one pitched battle on the banks of the Nile, where Ptolemæus was defeated, and drowned in his flight. Less than a month later Alexandria capitulated, and saw the hated consular insignia again within her gates. There was work to do in Egypt, and Cæsar—just named dictator at Rome and consul for five years—devoted himself to the task of reform and reorganization. Cleopatra was to be set back upon her throne, and her younger brother, another Ptolemæus, was to be her colleague. So out of war came peace, and the great Imperator gave laws to yet another kingdom.
But before Cæsar sailed away to chastise Pharnaces of Pontus, and close up his work in the East, ere returning to break down the stand of the desperate Pompeians in Africa, there was joy and high festival in the palace of Alexandria; and all the noble and great of the capital were at the feast,—the wedding feast of Cornelia and the favourite staff officer of the Imperator. The soft warm air of the Egyptian springtime blew over the festoons of flowers and over the carpets of blossoms; never before was the music more sweet and joyous. And overhead hung the great light-laden dome of the glowing azure, where the storks were drifting northward with the northward march of the sun.
And they sang the bridal hymns, both Greek and Latin, and cried “Hymen” and “Talasio”; and when evening came,
“The torches tossed their tresses of flame,”
as said the marriage song of Catullus; and underneath the yellow veil of the bride gleamed forth the great diamond necklace, the gift of Cleopatra, which once had been the joy of some Persian princess before the Greeks took the hoard at Persepolis.
Agias was there; and Cleomenes and his daughters; and Demetrius, with Artemisia, the most beautiful of girls,—as Cornelia was the fairest of women,—clinging fondly to her father’s side. So there was joy that day and night at the Alexandrian palace. And on the next morning the fleet trireme was ready which Demetrius had provided to bear Drusus and Cornelia and Fabia back to Italy. Many were the partings at the royal quay, and Agias wept when he said farewell to his late patron and patroness; but he had some comfort, for his cousin (who had arranged with Cleomenes that, since his freebooting days were happily over, the two should join in a partnership for the India trade) had made him a promise to be fulfilled in due course of time—for Artemisia was still very young.
“You are no Ichomachus, Xenophon’s perfect wife-educator,” the ex-pirate had said to his importunate cousin; “wait a few years.”
And Agias was fain to be content, with this hope before him.
There were other partings than his; but at last the adieus were over, and all save Cæsar went back upon the quay. The Imperator alone tarried on the poop of the vessel for an instant. His features were half wistful as he held Drusus by the hand, but his eyes were kindly as ever to the young man.
“Ah, amice!” he said, “we who play at philosophy may not know all the time that there are gods, but at all times we know that there is the most godlike of divine attributes—love undefiled. Therefore let us hope, for we see little, and the cosmos is past finding out.”
He sprang back on to the quay. The musicians on the bow struck up with pipe and lyre; the friends on the pier flung aboard the last garlands of rose and lily and scented thyme; the rowers bent to their task; the one hundred and seventy blades—pumiced white—smote the yellow waves of the harbour, and the ship sped away. Cornelia, Fabia, and Drusus stood on the poop gazing toward the receding quay. Long after they had ceased to recognize forms and faces they stared backward, until the pier itself was a speck, and the great buildings of the city grew dim. Then they passed the Pharos, and the land dwindled more and more into a narrow, dark ribbon betwixt blue water and bluer sky. The long swells of the open sea caught the trireme, and she rode gallantly over them—while the music still played, and her hardy crew, pirates no longer, but pardoned men,—seamen, employees of the honest merchant Demetrius,—sent the good ship bounding faster and faster, as they pressed their strength against the springing oars. Higher and higher rose the column of foam around the cutwater; louder and louder sang the foam under the stern, as they swept it past. The distant land faded to a thread, to a line, was gone; and to north and south and east and west were but the water and the cloudless ether. Fabia, Cornelia, and Drusus said little for a long time. Their eyes wandered, sometimes, over the track of the foam, and in their minds they saw again the water-birds plashing among lotus plants, and heard the ancient Egyptian litanies softly chanted behind the propylons of a temple built by some king two thousand years departed. But oftener their eyes ran ahead over the prow, and they walked again across the Forum of the city of their fathers, and drove across the Latin plain-land, and spoke their own dear, sonorous, yet half-polished native tongue.
At last came evening; the sun sank lower and lower; now his broad red disk hung over the crest of the western waves; now it touched them; now it was gone, and only the lines of dying fire streamed behind him—the last runners in his chariot train. Up from the cabin below came the voice of the ship’s steward, “Would their excellencies take any refreshment?” But they did not go at once. They watched the fire grow dimmer and dimmer, the pure light change to red gold, the red gold to crimson, and the crimson sink away.
“Ah, carissima!” cried Drusus, “would that when the orbs of our lives go down to their setting, they might go down like the sunlight, more beautiful in each act of the very dying, as they approach the final goal!”
“Yes, surely,” replied Cornelia, touching her hands upon his head; “but who knows but that Catullus the poet is wrong when he says the sun of life will never rise save once; who knows but that, if our sun set in beauty, it will rise again in grandeur even more?”
“My children,” said Fabia, gently, “the future lies in the knowledge of the gods; but out of the present we must shape our own future.”
“No, delectissima,” replied her nephew, “to do that we are all too weak; except it be true, as Aratus the poet has said, ‘that we men are also the offspring of gods,’ in which case Heaven itself must stoop to give us aid.”
But Cornelia’s eyes had wandered down into the foam, still gleaming as snow in the failing light.
“Ah!” she said, “the ages are long; if there be gods, their days are our lifetimes, and we but see a little and know not what to think. But to live a noble life will always be the fairest thing, whether death be an unending sleep or the threshold to Pindar’s Elysium.”
And what more of grave wisdom might have dropped from her lips none may relate, for her husband had shaken off the spell, and laughed aloud in the joy of his strong life and buoyant hopes. Then they all three laughed, and thought no more of sober things. They went down into the cabin just as the last bars of light flickered out in the west, and only the starlight broke the darkness that spread out over the face of the sea.
II
Drusus, as he himself had predicted, never wrote a great treatise on philosophy, and never drew up a cosmology that set at rest all the problems of the universe; nor did Cornelia become a Latin Sappho or Corinna, and her wise lore never went further than to make her friends afraid to affect a shammed learning in her presence. But they both did the tasks that fell to them better because they had “tasted the well of Parnassus” and “walked in the grove with the sages.” And Drusus, through an active life, played an honourable part as a soldier and a statesman: with his beloved Imperator in the battles of Thapsus and Munda, when the last of the oligarchs were beaten down; then, after the great crime of murder, with his friend Marcus Antonius; and then, when Cleopatra’s evil star lured both her and Antonius to their ruin, he turned to the only man whose wisdom and firmness promised safety to the state—and he joined himself to the rising fortunes of Octavius, the great Augustus, and fought with him to the end, until there was no longer a foreign or civil enemy, and the “Pax Romana” gave quiet to a subject world.
So Drusus had share with Mæcenas and Agrippa and the other imperial statesmen in shaping the fabric of the mighty Roman Empire. Not in his day did he or Cornelia know that it was wrong to buy slaves like cattle, or to harbour an implacable hate. They were but pagans. To them the truth was but seen in a glass darkly; enough if they lived up to such truth as was vouchsafed. But in their children’s day the brightness arose in the East, and spread westward, and ever westward, until the Capitoline Jupiter was nigh forgotten, the glories of the Roman eagles became a tradition, the splendour of the imperial city a dream. For there came to the world a better Deity, a diviner glory, a more heavenly city. The greater grew out of the less. Out of the world-fabric prepared by Julius Cæsar grew the fabric of the Christian Church, and out of the Christian Church shall rise a yet nobler spiritual edifice when the stars have all grown cold.
The End
Footnotes1
Water columbarium.
2 The Phoenician god, also worshipped in North Africa, in whose idol was built a fire to consume human sacrifices.
3 A few years at the philosophy schools of that famous city were almost as common to Roman students and men of culture as “studying in Germany” to their American successors.
4 Master, “Lord” of slaves and freedmen.
5 Rheda.
6 Most wealthy Romans had such a major domo, whose position was often one of honour and trust.
7 Pænula.
8 The second order of the Roman nobility.
9 A Greek gold piece worth about $3.60 at the time of the story. At this time Rome coined little gold.
10 Good! Good! Hurrah!
11 Ergastulum.
12 Slave household.
13 Every Roman had a prænomen, or “Christian name”; also a gentile name of the gens or clan to which he belonged; and commonly in addition a cognomen, usually an epithet descriptive of some personal peculiarity of an ancestor, which had fastened itself upon the immediate descendants of that ancestor. The Livii Drusi were among the noblest of the Roman houses.
14 Died in 91 B.C.
15 In 54 B.C.
16 The two Roman consuls were magistrates of the highest rank, and were chosen each year by the people.
17 The famous watering-place on the Bay of Naples.
18 An ex-consul was known by this title.
19 Built by Pompeius the Great, in 55-54 B.C.
20 A member of the band who with Catiline conspired in 63 B.C. to overthrow the Roman government.
21 The Roman millionaire who had just been slain in Parthia.
22 Domina, mistress.
23 By Hercules.
24 The right of kissing kinsfolk within the sixth degree.
25 No teaming was allowed in Rome by day.
26 Greek outer mantle.
27 Greek under garment.
28 At an age when respectable men were almost invariably smooth shaven, the philosophers wore flowing beards, as a sort of professional badge.
29 A “fad” of this time. Such tables often cost $20,000.
30 The ten tribunes had power to convene the people and Senate, propose laws and “veto” the actions of other magistrates.
31 Sequestres.
32 Interpres.
33 Assembly of the Roman tribes for election.
34 Suet., “Nero,” 51.
35 An inner private court back of the atrium.
36 The opponents of the Epicureans; they nobly antagonized the mere pursuit of pleasure held out as the one end of life by the Epicurean, and glorified duty.
37 Cubicularius.
38 To let out the ointment. Capua was a famed emporium for perfumes and like wares.
39 Born 180 B.C.
40 Ornatrices.
41 Demeter and Persephone, a Greek woman’s oath.
42 A costly substance, probably porcelain agate.
43 Whipper; many Roman houses had such a functionary, and he does not seem to have lacked employment.
44 Flagellum.
45 Furca-bearer, a coarse epithet.
46 Thief. Branding was a common punishment for slaves.
47 I.e. $2,400,000; a sesterce was about 4 cents.
48 Senior Vestals.
49 A diminutive of endearment.
50 Infula.
51 A coarse epithet.
52 Comitium, assembly-place round the Rostra.
53 Great men, and candidates for office who wished to “know” everybody, kept smart slaves at their elbow to whisper strangers’ names in their ears. Sometimes the slaves themselves were at fault.
54 Dining room with couch seats for nine, the regular size.
55 The ne plus ultra of Roman gastronomy at the time.
56 Porter—Insularius.
57 From Cadiz, Spain.
58 Commercial adviser required for young men under five-and-twenty.
59 Born about 470 B.C.
60 Four sesterces, 16 cents.
61 Keeper of a school of gladiators.
62 Gladiators equipped as Gaulish warriors.
63 Buckler men.
64 Sicarius.
65 The Gallic sun-god.
66 See Plato’s “Theætetus,” 174.
67 A Lydian king whose wealth was placed on a par with that of the better known Croesus.
68 Such alterations were actually made in Rome.
69 To whose mysteries only women were admitted.
70 Cattle-market.
71 She was a sister of Clodius, a famous demagogue, and was a brilliant though abandoned woman.
72 Without the imperium—so long as a Roman official held this he was above prosecution.
73 Contemptuous diminutive for Greek.
74 The heavy short javelin carried by the Roman legionary, only about six feet long. In practised hands it was a terrible weapon, and won many a Roman victory.
75 The “rosy-fingered Dawn” of Homer; Tithonos was her consort.
76 Milman, translator.
77 Sallust, the well-known historian.
78 A distinguished poet and orator—a friend of Catullus.
79 A long tunic worn by Roman ladies.
80 A shawl worn over the stola.
81 The party in opposition, since the time of Tiberius Gracchus, to the Senate party—Optimates; at this time the Populares were practically all Cæsarians.
82 Ara Maxima.
83 “Strange! Marvellous!”
84 Cithara.
85 Itinerant pipers have existed in Italy from earliest times; they still survive, albeit in alien lands and with less tuneful instruments.
86 Mimæ.
87 A common diversion for “young men of spirit.”
88 Acta Diurna, prepared officially.
89 “Chaldean” astrologers played an almost incredibly important part among even the highest-class Romans of the period.
90 Babylonian temple towers.
91 Popinæ.
92 A poet at that time of some little reputation.
93 Women sat at Roman banquets, unless the company was of a questionable character.
94 Most beautiful.
95 Sons remained under the legal control of a father until the latter’s death, unless the tie was dissolved by elaborate ceremonies.
96 Cato Minor’s sister Portia was the wife of Lucius Domitius. Cato was also connected with the Drusi through Marcus Livius Drusus, the murdered reformer, who was the maternal uncle of Cato and Portia. Lucius Ahenobarbus and Quintus Drusus were thus third cousins.
97 About one-twelfth pint.
98 Calverly’s translation.
99 The Egyptian judge of the dead.
100 At this period the great slave emporium of the world.
101 The spiritual double which belonged to every man according to the Egyptian ideas.
102 Such establishments were common near the gates, and the Vestals often had their horses at such places.
103 Equarius.
104 Inns were known by such signs.
105 Four-sided dice.
106 Terence, “Adelphoe,” 467 and 471.
107 Ostium.
108 The “dinner coat” of the Romans.
109 College of chief priests.
110 This was the law, that the tribunes might always be ready to render help (auxilium) to the distressed.
111 Farm steward.
112 Puls, the primitive Italian food.
113 About 606-3/4 English feet.
114 The great battle won in 207 B.C. over Hasdrubal.
115 The Gallic thunder-god.
116 A Germanic war-god.
117 About $400.
118 Local municipal magistrates.
119 Prandium.
120 Black shoes were worn as a sort of badge by equites.
121 Expounders of the Roman law.
122 Translated in the collection “Sales Attici.”
123 The ancient curtain (aulæum) had its roller at the bottom.
124 Cæsar had given the magistrates of towns of the north of Italy the Roman franchise: no Roman citizens could be lawfully flogged. By his action Marcellus denied Cæsar’s right to confer the franchise.
125 Marius had made young Cæsar, Flamen Dialis: priest of Jupiter.
126 Translated by Shelley.
127 $24,000.
128 Blessed dear.
129 Duodecim scripta.
130 One of their functions made these officers practically chiefs of police.
131 A part of these public officers performed police duty.
132 A sort of mantle held on the shoulders by a clasp.
133 Latrunculi.
134 Si vales bene est ego valeo, written commonly simply S. V. B. E. E. V.
135 Optimus maximus.
136 Ex-prætors and ex-ædiles.
137 Subsellium.
138 Trabea.
139 Lituus.
140 Silentium esse videtur.
141 Princeps senatus.
142 Assembly-place in the Forum Romanum.
143 Manumissio inter amicos was less formal than the regular ceremony before the prætor.
144 The Ædes Martis of the Campus Martius.
145 Pompeius was not allowed by law to attend sessions of the Senate (so long as he was proconsul of Spain) when held inside the old city limits; but the Curia which he himself built was outside the walls in the Campus Martius. This meeting seems to have been convened there especially that he might attend it.
146 Sagum.
147 Slaves were always close clipped.
148 Horreæ.
149 Adjutant, subordinate to a centurion.
150 Squadron of 30 horse.
151 Slave who looked after the welfare and conduct of a schoolboy.
152 President of the games.
153 Buckler and cutlass men.
154 Net and trident men.
155 General’s body-guard of picked veterans.
156 A finger-guessing game.
157 He has got to die.
158 A celox of one bank of oars, a small ship much used by the pirates.
159 Wine-mixing bowl.
160 The Romans divided the night into 12 hours (from sunrise to sunset); thus the length of the hour varied with the seasons: but at the time here mentioned the “second hour” was about 8 P.M. The water-clocks could show only regular, not solar, time.
161 The official residence of the Pontifex Maximus.
162 Riches and strength.
163 Elton, translator.
164 Dearest one.
165 Very distinguished sir.
166 Master.
167 Ō-op—avast there.
168 Missile-throwing engines.
169 Tibiæ.
170 Your Highness.
171 These were real affectations of the Cilician pirates.
172 A high order of Egyptian nobility.
173 The official title of Alexandrian Greek citizens.
174 A mixture of myrrh, frankincense, and other aromatic materials.
175 Elton, translator.
176 A drink of vinegar and water very common among the soldiers.
177 Elton, translator.
178 Midnight.
179 The military oath of obedience.
180 Macedonian it is needless to say was a mere name. The Græco-Egyptian soldiery and citizen body of Alexandria probably had hardly a drop of Macedonian blood in their veins.
181 As, for instance, the repeated wedlock of brothers and sisters among the Ptolemies.
182 Commanders of the body-guard.
183 “Black” because of the black fertile mud deposited by the inundation.
184 A company of about one hundred men.
185 Lorica.
186 Ceylon.
187 Malay Peninsula.