When Iamblicus and Julian, returning from their walk, were crossing Panormos, the crowded harbour-quarter of Ephesus, they noticed an unusual tumult; folk running hither and thither, waving torches and shouting—
"The Christians are destroying the temples! Woe be on us!" and others: "Death to the Olympian gods! Astarte is vanquished by Christ!"
Iamblicus attempted a detour through less frequented streets, but the howling mob caught and swept them in its course towards the temple of the Ephesian Artemis. The superb temple, built by Dynocrates, stood out sharply, dark and austere, against the starry sky. The gleam of the torches flickered up gigantic colonnades, pedestalled on beautiful little groups of caryatids. Up to this period, not only the Romans, but all tribes in the country had adored this goddess. Someone in the crowd cried out in a quavering voice—
"Hail to the divine Diana of the Ephesians!"
Hundreds of voices responded—
"Death to the Olympians and to your Diana!"
Above the Arsenal and its towering monument rose a blood-red light. Julian glanced at his divine master, and scarcely recognised him. Iamblicus was transformed back into a sickly and timid old man. He complained of headache, expressed his fear of an attack of rheumatism, and doubted whether his servant had not forgotten to prepare his fomentations. Julian lenthim his own cloak; but he remained chilly, and stopped his ears, with a dolorous grimace, against the shouts and laughter of the crowd, which he dreaded. Iamblicus used to say there was nothing more stupid and disgusting than the spirit of the people. He pointed out to his pupil the faces hurrying past—
"Look at the monstrous vice in that expression! What hopeless triviality! what self-confident assertion!... Does it not make one ashamed of being human, to share human form with mud like that!"
An old Christian woman hobbled along, telling a story—
"And my grandson, he says to me, 'Grandmother, make me some meat-broth.' Well, I tell him, 'Yes, darling, I'll go to the market soon,' and to myself I'm thinking meat is nowadays cheaper than bread. So I buy some meat for five obols and have it cooked. And in comes a neighbour and screams at me, 'What are you cooking there? Don't you know that the meat of the market is not fit to touch to-day?'
"'Why so?'
"'The priests of the goddess have sprinkled the whole market with water from the sacrifices! There's not a Christian in the town eating the meat so spoiled. And they're going to kill the sacrificers, and pull down the devilish temple!'
"I threw the broth to the dogs; just think! five obols, all wasted!—more than a day's wage thrown away—but all the same I wouldn't make my own grandson unclean!"
Others were telling how, in the previous year, some miserly Christian had eaten of the impure meat, which had so rotted his intestines that his very relatives had had to abandon him, on account of the contagion.
In the public square rose a beautiful little temple to Diana-Selene-Phœbe-Astarte—the triple goddess Hecate, mother of the gods. Like enormous wasps greedily intent upon a honeycomb, monks had surrounded the temple on all sides, crawling along the lovely white cornice, clambering up ladders, and to the chant of psalms, smashing the statues and bas-reliefs.
The columns were trembling on their bases, fragments of marble flying in all directions. The delicate edifice seemed to wince like a living creature. Finally an attempt was made to set the temple on fire; but as it was wholly built of marble, all efforts in this direction were fruitless.
Suddenly a strange noise rang out from the interior, a deafening and resonant series of shocks, while triumphant howls of the crowd rose to the sky.
"Bring ropes, ropes! Hide her immodest limbs!"
In a hubbub of hymns and wild laughter the mob, by means of ropes, dragged out of the temple the superb silver body of the goddess, which had been moulded by Scopas. Step by step, it came thundering down.
"Cast her in the fire! in the fire!"
The figure was dragged into the muddy market-place. There a monk was declaiming a passage from the celebrated edict of Constantine II, the brother of Constantius—
"'Let there be an end of superstition, and let sacrifices be abolished' (Cesset superstitio sacrificiorum, aboleatur insania!).
"Fear nothing; break, sack, plunder everything in that temple of demons!" Another was reading by torchlight from a parchment scroll the following words from the bookDe errore profanarum religionum, by Firmicus Maternus—
"Divine Emperors! Come! succour the unfortunate heathen. Let us snatch them by force from hell rather than leave them to perish. Seize the temple-ornaments and let their riches feed your treasury. Let him who sacrifices to idols be torn from the earth, root and branch (Sacrificans diis eradicabitur). Thou shalt deliver him to death; thou shalt stone him with stones, were that offender thy son, thy brother, or the wife that sleeps upon thy heart!"
And over the crowd swept the exultant shout—
"Death! Death to the gods of Olympus!"
An Arian monk of gigantic stature, his lank black hair plastered to his sweaty face, heaved an axe above the goddess, seeking where to strike.
A voice advised—
"In the belly! In her abominable belly!"
The great silver body rolled over mutilated; the blows rang pitiless, leaving gaps bitten in the metal.
An old pagan stood by and veiled his face from the sacrilege. He was secretly weeping at the thought that now the end of the world, the end of everything, was come, for the earth would no longer bring forth a blade of corn.
A hermit from the deserts of Mesopotamia, clothed in sheepskin, wearing coarse sandals and an empty gourd slung from his shoulder, stood over the statue, sheep-crook in hand—
"This forty years I have never washed, that I might not see my nakedness, nor fall into temptation. And yet coming into cities, straight one perceives these accursed gods without a rag upon them. How long must we endure these devilish temptations! At the hearth, in the street, on the roof, in the baths, these idols everywhere above one's head?... Faugh!Faugh! Faugh! How can I spit enough disgust on things like these?"
The old man spurned the prostrate woman's form with his sandal in energetic horror; stamped on the bare breast as if it were alive, and kept scoring it with the sharp nails of his sandals, stuttering with rage—
"Take that, and that—and that, O foul immodesty!"
The lips of the goddess lay with their calm smile under the soles of his feet.
The crowd began to haul the statue upright in order to tilt it into the bonfire. Drunken garlic-smelling apprentices spat in the metal face. An enormous blaze, built of the massed wreckage of market-booths, quickly arose. The statue was dropped into the flames to be melted into silver bullion.
"There are five talents' worth! think—thirty thousand pieces of silver! We'll send half to the Emperor to pay the army, and take the other half for famished folk here. Cybele will bring solace to mankind at last, anyhow! Thirty thousand pieces of silver for the soldiers and the poor!"
"Bring fuel, more wood!" The flame mounted still more fiercely; the mob burst into laughter.
"We'll see whether the devil flies out of her! There's a demon in every idol, you know, and two or three inside goddesses!"
"When she begins to melt it'll get too hot for the devil, and he'll come wriggling out of her mouth like a red serpent!"
"No! you must make the sign of the cross beforehand. If you don't, he can glide into the earth. Last year, when we pulled down the temple of Aphrodite, someone sprinkled her with holy water and—can you believe it?—a whole flight of devilets scampered awayfrom underneath the statue—I saw them myself—green and black and hairy all over! And when the head was broken open the big devil came out of her neck, with great horns and a tail as bald as a mangy dog!"
At this moment Iamblicus, half dead with terror, seized Julian by the hand and dragged him away—
"Look! Do you see those two men? They are spies sent by Constantius. Your brother Gallus has been taken under escort to Constantinople. Be careful; this very day there will be a report sent in as to how you bear yourself."
"But what is there to be done, Master? I am well accustomed to it; for years they have kept spies about me."
"For years! Why have you said nothing of it to me?"
The hand of Iamblicus shook within that of Julian.
"Why are those two whispering together? Look at them—they must be pagans.... Now then old man, hurry up, bring wood!" cried out a ragged rascal in a triumphant tone.
Iamblicus whispered into Julian's ear—
"Let us despise it all, and in contempt resign ourselves. Human stupidity can never hurt the gods!"
So saying the "Divine" Iamblicus took an enormous faggot from the hands of the Christian and cast it into the fire. At first Julian could scarcely believe his eyes. The now-smiling spies stared at him, with a curious fixity.
Then weakness, and his own habitual hypocrisy for his own sake and for the sake of others, won the day. He went to the heap of wood, chose the largest log, and, after Iamblicus, threw it into the blaze in whichthe mutilated body of the goddess was already melting. He clearly saw drops of silver rolling on her face as in a death-sweat, and the lips still keeping their invincible smile.