It was at Athens that Julian was about to take his vows and finally become a monk. One fresh spring morning, before the sun was up, Julian, issuing from the church where he had officiated at matins, followed for a few miles the banks of the Ilissus, in the shadow of plane-trees and wild vine. Not far from Athens he had lighted upon a solitary place, on the edge of a torrent which poured, like a scarf of silver, upon a sandy bottom. Thence he used often to gaze with wonder through the mists at the ruddy cliff of the Acropolis and the haughty lines of the Parthenon, half-illumined by the dawn.
On this particular morning Julian took off his shoes and walked along the reaches of the Ilissus barefoot. The air was full of the smell of flowers and of the rich-scented muscat grape—that aroma in which there is a foretaste of wine, faint as the promise of first love, stealing into the soul of youth.
Julian, with feet in the water, sat down upon a platan-root, opened thePhædrusand began to read at the passage in the dialogue in which Socrates says to Phædrus: "Let us go this way, and follow the course of the Ilissus; we will choose a solitary place and there sit down.
"Phædrus: Luckily, I'm unshod this morning, and as for you, Socrates, you always go barefoot. We'll walk in the bed of the river. Look, how smiling and pellucid the water is!
"Socrates: By Pallas! here's a wonderful nook; it must be sacred to the nymphs and to the god Acheloüs—to judge by these little statues. Doesn't it seem to you as if here the breeze were softer and of sweeter odour? Here, even in the hum of the crickets there's something of the sweetness of summer. But what I love best of all is this deep grass!"
Julian turned from the book with a smile. All was as it had been eight centuries before. Even the crickets set up their song.
"Socrates actually touched this ground with his feet!" he thought, and burying his head among the reeds he kissed the spot with adoration.
"Good-day, Julian! you've chosen a lovely corner there to read in. May I sit down near you?"
"Sit, sit; I shall be delighted. Poets never violate a solitude."
Julian looked up at a meagre personage, draped in an enormously long cloak (it was the poet Publius Porphyrius), thinking to himself—
"He's so small and frail that I believe he'll soon turn into a grasshopper, as Plato fancied the poets do."
Publius, like the grasshoppers, could almost live upon air, but the gods had not granted him complete immunity from appetite; and his shaven cadaverous face and discoloured lips were stamped with insatiable hunger.
"Why are you wearing such a long cloak, Publius?" Julian asked.
"It isn't mine," answered the other philosophically. "I share a room with a young man, Hephæstion, who has come to Athens to learn eloquence. He will be a famous lawyer one day. Meanwhile he's as poor asI am, poor as a lyric poet—I need say no more! Why, we've pledged our clothes, our furniture, even the inkstand; but we still have a cloak between us. In the morning I go out, and Hephæstion studies Demosthenes; in the evening he puts on the chlamys, and I write verses. Unfortunately we're not the same height—but what does that matter? I take my walks along the streets 'long-robed,' like the ancient Trojan ladies."
Publius laughed heartily; the cadaverous face took on the expression of a mourner who has incautiously cheered up.
"You see, Julian," continued the poet, "I'm counting on the death of the widow of a very rich Roman landowner. The happy heirs will order an epitaph from me, and are going to pay for it generously. Unfortunately the widow, in spite of everything that doctors and heirs can do, persists in not giving up the ghost. But for that, my boy, I should have bought myself a cloak long ago. Listen, Julian, get up and come with me at once!"
"Whither?"
"Trust me—you'll thank me for it."
"What's the mystery?"
"Ask no questions; get up and come! The poet brings no harm to the poet's friend. You'll see a goddess."
"What goddess?"
"Artemis, the huntress."
"A picture? Statue?"
"Much better than that. If you love beauty, take your cloak and follow me."
Publius assumed so seductive and mysterious an air that Julian was bitten by curiosity.
"There's but one condition. Say nothing, and marvel at nothing we do. Otherwise the spell will break. In the name of Calliope and Erato, just trust me! We're only two yards from the place, and to shorten the road for you I'll read you the beginning of my epitaph on the widow."
They issued on the dusty high-road. Under the first rays of the sun the steel shield of Pallas Athene darted lightnings from the rose-hued Acropolis. Along the stone walls, hiding brooks humming along under the fig-trees, the grasshoppers were singing shrilly, vieing with the hoarse voice of the poet as he recited the epitaph.
Publius Porphyrius was a man not destitute of talent. His career had been a curious one. Several years previously he had possessed a pretty little house, a veritable temple of Hermes, at Constantinople, not far from the Chalcedonian suburb. His father, an oil merchant, had bequeathed him a little fortune which should have permitted him to live without cares. But Publius was a worshipper of antique Hellenism, and rebelled against what he called the triumph of Christian servitude. He wrote a liberal poem which displeased the Emperor Constantius, who was therein alluded to unfavourably. This allusion cost the author dear. Chastisement fell upon him; his house and goods were confiscated, and he himself banished to an islet in the archipelago, inhabited only by rocks, goats, and fevers. This trial was more than Publius could stand. He cursed liberal opinions, and determined to blot out his misdeeds at any price. Shaking with fever, he composed during his sleepless nights, by means of sentences culled from Virgil, a poem glorifying the Emperor; the verses of the ancient poet being grouped in such afashion that they formed a new work. This ingenious puzzle tickled the palate of the Court. Publius had divined the taste of the century.
Straightway he ventured on feats more astonishing still. He wrote a dithyrambic, or Bacchic ode in free stanzas, and addressed it to Constantius. It consisted of verses of different lengths, designed so that they formed complete figures, such as a Pan's flute, a water-organ, or a sacrificial altar on which the smoke was represented by uneven phrases. But by a marvel of skilfulness the poem was so contrived as to make a decorative oblong twenty hexameters wide and forty hexameters long. Certain lines were traced in red ink and, read together, became transformed into a monogram of Christ, or into a flower of arabesques, but always, in whatever shape, made new lines composed of new compliments. Finally the four last hexameters of the book could be read in eighteen different orders: from the end backwards, from the beginning, from the side, from the middle, from above, from below, etc., and, read in what manner you please, formed a eulogy to the Emperor.
In executing this work the poor poet nearly lost his wits. But his victory was complete, and Constantius more than charmed. He believed that Publius had surpassed all the poets of antiquity; he wrote the author a letter with his own hand, assuring him of protection and ending thus: "In our age My bounty, like the calm breath of the zephyrs, is breathed upon all who write verses."
Nevertheless his confiscated property was not restored to the poet; he was simply given money and authorised to quit his desert island for Athens.
There he led a melancholy existence. The ostler inthe stables of the circus, in comparison with Publius, lived in luxury.
In the company of gravediggers, shady speculators, furnishers of nuptial feasts, he passed whole days in the antechambers of the illiterate great, in order to obtain orders for a marriage ode, an epitaph, or a love-letter. At this trade he gained little, but never lost heart, hoping to offer to the Emperor one day a poem which would win him complete pardon.
Julian felt that in spite of this outward abasement Porphyrius bore at heart a deep love for Hellas. He was a fine critic of Greek poetry and Julian enjoyed his conversation.
They left the high-road and approached the high wall of an enclosure like somepalæstraor exercise-ground. Round about all was solitary; two black lambs were cropping the grass; near the closed door, in the chinks of which poppies and white daisies were growing, there stood a chariot and two white horses. Their manes were close-cut like those of the horses in the bas-reliefs. By them stood an old slave, a deaf-mute, but evidently of an affable disposition, for he immediately recognised Publius and nodded to him in friendly fashion, pointing to the closed gate of the wrestling ground.
"Lend me your purse a moment," said Publius to Julian. "I'll take out one or two pence for this poor old fool."
He threw the coins, and the mute, with servile grimaces and pleased grunts, opened the door.
They entered under a long and dark covered gallery. Between rows of columns ran other galleries laid out for the exercise of athletes. The spaces in their midst were now widths of grass instead of sand. The two friends penetrated a large inner portico. Julian'scuriosity became keener at every step, the mysterious Publius leading him on by the hand without a word. Doors ofexedræ, or academic halls where orators used to meet, opened into the second portico, and the grasshoppers were humming now where eloquent discourses of Athenian sages had in old time resounded. Above the deep grass bees were whirling: silence and melancholy pervaded all. Suddenly, a woman's voice was heard, and the noise of a disk striking the marble, followed by a merry burst of laughter.
Stealing in like robbers, the pair hid themselves in the outer shadow of the columns of theelaiothesion, or place where the ancient wrestlers used to rub themselves over with oil.
From behind these columns could be seen theephebeion, a quadrangular space open to the sky, originally laid out for disk-throwing, and now newly strown with fresh sand.
Julian looked in, and started back.
At twenty paces from him stood a young girl entirely naked. His eyes swept over her wonderful body. She was holding a discus in her hand.
Julian longed instinctively to beat a retreat; but turning, he saw in the eyes of Publius and upon the whole of that lean tawny face such a look of admiration, that he understood that the adorer of Hellas, in bringing him to the place, had been moved by no shameful thought; that enthusiasm was wholly sacred.
Publius, seizing the hand of Julian, murmured:
"Look! We are now nine centuries back, in ancient Laconia. Do you remember the verses of Propertius—
"Multa tuæ, Sparte, miramur jura palæstræ,Sed mage virginei, tot bona gymnasii,Quod non infames exercet corpore ludosInter luctantes nuda puella viros?"
"Multa tuæ, Sparte, miramur jura palæstræ,Sed mage virginei, tot bona gymnasii,Quod non infames exercet corpore ludosInter luctantes nuda puella viros?"
"Who is she?" asked Julian.
"I don't know. I never wanted to know."
"That is well! Hush!"
Now he gazed eagerly and without shame at the girl hurling the disk. Blushes were unworthy of a philosopher.
She retreated some steps, inclined her body forward, and advancing the left leg made a swift bounding movement, and shot the metal circle so high that it shone in the rising sun, and in falling struck the farthest pillar. It was like watching the motions of a statue by Phidias.
"That shot was the best," said a little twelve-year-old damsel, clad in a rich tunic and standing near the column.
"Myrrha, give me the disk," replied the player. "I can throw it higher than that, as you shall see. Meroë, get farther out of the way. I might hurt you, as Apollo hurt Hyacinthus."
Meroë, an old Egyptian, to judge by her multi-coloured vestments and tanned visage, was preparing in alabaster jars perfumes for a bath. Julian understood that the mute slave of the gate and the white-horsed chariot outside must belong to these two votaries of the Laconian games.
After the disk-throwing the young girl took from Myrrha a bow and a quiver, and drew thence a long arrow. She aimed at a black circle at the opposite end of theephebeion; the string hummed, the arrow flew whistling and stuck in the target: then a second, then a third.
"O huntress Artemis!" sighed Publius.
Suddenly a sunbeam slipping between two columns shot into the face and youthful breast of the young girl. Throwing bow and arrows aside in sudden bedazzlement, she hid her face in her hands.
Swallows, uttering their faint fine chirpings, undulated about the exercise-ground, and pursuing each other vanished into the blue of the sky.
She uncovered her face and raised her arms above her head.
Its fair hair, golden at its ends as honey in the sun, at its roots was auburn; her lips half opened in a happy smile, she suffered the sun to bathe her body, gliding lower and lower yet, till she stood clothed, as in the loveliest raiment, in pure light and beauty.
"Myrrha," the girl murmured slowly and dreamily, "look at the sky! How beautiful it would be to bathe in it, like those birds! Do you remember our saying that men could not be happy because they had no wings? When I look at the birds I am consumed with envy. One should be light and bare as I am at this moment, and winging high up in the sky, and knowing that one could fly forever—that there should be nothing else but sky and sun about one's light and free and naked body!"
Drawing herself up to her full height with out-stretched arms she sighed deeply, as at some remembered joy fled away for ever.
The burning caress of the sun now reached her waist. Suddenly she shivered and grew ashamed, as if some living and passionate being had approached her. With one hand she shielded her breast, with the other the abdomen, the immortal gesture of Aphrodite of Cnidos.
"Meroë, give me my clothes! quick, Meroë!" she exclaimed, with eyes wide open and startled.
Julian never remembered how he came forth from the wrestling-ground; his heart was on fire. The poet's face was solemn as that of a man quitting a temple.
"You are not annoyed?" he asked Julian.
"No; why should I be?"
"Perhaps a Christian might find it a temptation?"
"There was nothing of temptation there for me. Do you understand?"
"Perfectly; that is what I thought."
And again they found themselves on the dusty high road, where the sun was already hot, and bent their steps towards Athens.
Publius continued in an undertone, as it were talking to himself—
"Oh, how shameful, how deformed we are nowadays! Ashamed of our own morose and pitiful nakedness, we hide it because we feel ugly and impure. Whereas of old time.... Ah! there was a time when all was very different. Julian, the young girls of Sparta used to go out upon the wrestling-ground naked and haughty before all the people. Nobody feared temptation in those days. Folk were simple as children—as gods! And to think that nevermore shall that happen again; that the freedom, the cleanness, of that happy state shall be seen on earth no more!"
The poet's chin fell on his breast, and he sighed drearily.
They came at last to the Street of Tripods, and hard by the Acropolis the friends separated and went their ways in silence.
Julian went into the shadow of the propylæa,through vast porches leading into temple-enclosures; but avoided the Decorated Porch, on which Parrhasius had chiselled the battles of Marathon and Salamis, and passing the little temple of the Wingless Victory ascended to the Parthenon.
He had but to shut his eyes to remember the superb body of Artemis the huntress. When he opened them the sun-bathed Parthenon marbles seemed golden and living as that divine body; and, despising Imperial spies and chances of death, he desired openly to worship and kiss the warm stones of that holy place.
Two black-robed young men of pale and severe countenance were standing near. They were Gregory of Nazianzen and Basil of Cæsarea. The Hellenists feared these two men as their most formidable foes. It was the hope of the Christians that the two friends would one day become fathers of the Church. They were now watching Julian.
"What's the matter with him to-day?" said Gregory. "Is that the attitude of a monk? Are those the gestures of a monk? Do you see those closed eyes—that smile? Do you believe that his piety is genuine, Basil?"
"I have often watched him weeping and praying in church."
"Mere hypocrisy!"
"If so, why does he come to us, seek our friendship, and argue over the Scriptures?"
"He's deceiving himself; or perhaps he wishes to seduce the faithful. Never trust him! He is the tempter! Remember what I say, brother, the Roman Empire in fostering this young man is nursing an adder!"
The two friends went off, their eyes on the ground.The severe caryatids of the Erechtheum, the laughing blue of the sky, the white temple of the Wingless One, the Porches and the Parthenon, that wonder of the world, on them cast no spell. One thing alone did they desire: to lay all these haunts of demons in the dust. The long shadows of the monks fell on the Parthenon steps as they walked away.
"I must see her again," Julian was thinking; "I must find out who she is."