XIII

"The gods created mortals for one purpose only—polite conversation!"

"Charmingly said, Mamertinus! Say it again, I beg, before you've forgotten it! I'll write that down with the other maxims," declared Lampridius, the professor of eloquence, taking tablets from his pocket. His admired friend Mamertinus was a fashionable Athenian advocate.

"My dear fellow, I say," repeated Mamertinus with the most delicate of smiles, "I merely say that men have been sent by the gods——"

"No, no, it didn't run so, Mamertinus; you put it better. The gods created mortals——"

"Ah, yes; the gods created mortals for one purpose only—polite conversation!"

And the enthusiastic Lampridius scribbled down the words as if they had been the utterance of an oracle.

The scene was a friendly supper of men of letters given by the venerable Roman senator Hortensius, in the villa of his rich young ward Arsinoë, not far from the Piræus.

Mamertinus on that day had achieved a remarkable speech in defence of the banker Barnava. Nobody had the smallest doubt that Barnava was a complete scoundrel; but, besides measureless eloquence, the advocate possessed so telling a voice that one of the innumerable ladies who adored him avowed: "I never listen towhat Mamertinus says; I have no wish to know what he's talking about. I become intoxicated with the tones of his voice, and especially with the dying cadence at the end of his periods. It is incredible! It is no longer a human voice, but nectar and ambrosia, the heavenly sighing of an Æolian harp!"

And so, while the populace labelled the money-lender Barnava "the blood-sucker," the devourer of widows and orphans, the Athenian judges enthusiastically acquitted the client of Mamertinus.

From this client the advocate had received 50,000 sesterces, and therefore felt in no dissatisfied mood at the supper given by Hortensius in his honour. But it was his habit to affect the invalid, in order that he might be spoiled and petted the more.

"I am utterly done up to-day, my friends," he murmured plaintively; "aching in every limb. Where is Arsinoë?"

"She will soon be here. Arsinoë has just received from the museum of Alexandria some new apparatus for experiments in physics; and she is entirely absorbed in them. But I will give an order to summon her," suggested Hortensius.

"No, don't do that," responded the lawyer carelessly. "But what a ridiculous thing—a young girl at physics! What in the world has the one thing to do with the other? Your blue-stockings have been finely belaboured by Aristophanes and Euripides. Arsinoë is a whimsical creature, Hortensius! Really, if she wasn't so attractive, what with her sculpture and her mathematics she would almost become——"

He did not finish the sentence, and gazed languidly out of the window.

"What am I to do?" replied Hortensius. "Aspoiled child ... an orphan; no father, no mother! As her mere tutor, I can't well deny her anything."

"I see, I see."

The lawyer was no longer listening; he was thinking about himself.

"My dear fellows, I feel——"

"What—what's the matter?" asked several voices anxiously.

"I'm feeling—I fancy—a draught...."

"We'll shut the shutters," proposed the host.

"No, we should be stifled! But I've so worn out my voice to-day.... And I have to make another defence to-morrow. Give me a carpet under my feet, and my wrapper; I'm afraid of catching cold in the night chill."

And Hephæstion, the friend of Publius and pupil of Lampridius, rushed away to get Mamertinus' wrapper.

It was a piece of soft woollen stuff, daintily embroidered. The lawyer carried it everywhere to safeguard his precious throat from the faintest risk of cold.

Mamertinus nursed his own health like a lover, with so simple a grace, such a passion of self-solicitude, that his friends were instinctively constrained to think of nothing but nursing him too.

"This wrapper was embroidered for me by the venerable Fabiola," he informed them with a smile.

"Wife of the senator?" asked Hortensius.

"Yes! I'll tell you a little story about her. One day I wrote a note—a graceful trifle, but really a mere trifle—just five lines in Greek to another lady (also one of my admirers), who had sent me a basket of the most charming cherries. I thanked her in a frolicsome imitation of Pliny. But just imagine, my friends, Fabiola was seized with so violent a desire to read thatletter and to copy it for her collection, that she sent two of her slaves to lie in wait for my messenger. So, brought to a halt in the middle of the night, not a soul in sight, he thought, of course, that brigands were about to strip him of lock, stock, and barrel. But they did him no harm, gave him money, and only took from him my letter, so that Fabiola might have the first reading of it. She actually learnt it by heart!"

"You don't mean it? Ah, I know her! She is a most remarkable woman," continued Lampridius. "I have seen myself that she keeps all your letters enclosed in a lemon-wood casket like so many jewels. She learns them by heart and declares that they are superior to any poetry. Fabiola argues, and argues rightly: 'Since Alexander the Great used to keep the poems of Homer in a cedar-wood coffer, why shouldn't I keep the letters of Mamertinus in a jewel-casket?'"

"Thisfoie graswith saffron sauce is the height of perfection! I advise you to taste it."

"Who made it, Hortensius?"

"My head-cook, Dædalus."

"All honour to him!... he's a poet."

"Don't let a goose's liver run away with you, my dear Garguillus! A cook, a poet? You will offend the divine muses, our protectresses!"

"I affirm! and I shall always maintain! that cooking is an art as lofty as any other. It's time to fling prejudices to the winds, Lampridius!"

Garguillus, the head of the Imperial chancery, was a man of enormous body, extremely fat, his triple chin scrupulously shaved and perfumed, and his grey hair closely cropped. His face was intelligent and noble; for many years he had been considered the indispensable guest at every supper of Athenian men of letters.Garguillus loved only two things in the world, a good table and a good style. Gastronomy and literature blended for him into a double bliss.

"Suppose now I take an oyster," he was declaring while his delicate fingers, loaded with amethysts and rubies, brought the mollusc towards his mouth; "I take an oyster, and I swallow it"—and in fact he swallowed it, shutting his eyes, with a sucking and clucking noise of his upper lip, which was curiously greedy, and even rapacious, in its appearance. It was prominent, trussed into a point, oddly twisted, and vaguely resembled a small elephant's trunk. When repeating a sonorous verse of Anacreon or Moschus he would move about this upper lip with as much sensuousness as when tasting at supper some sauce of nightingales' tongues.

"I swallow it, and I am immediately aware," went on Garguillus solemnly—"I am immediately aware that the oyster comes from the coast of Britain and not from the south or from Tarentum. Would you like me to prove it? Shall I close my eyes and say from what sea the fish comes?"

"But what in the world has that to do with poetry?" asked Mamertinus impatiently. He could not bear that any but himself should receive general attention.

"Imagine for yourselves, my dear friends," continued the gastronomist imperturbably, "that for years I have not been to the shores of the ocean, which I love and am always regretting. I assure you that a good oyster has such a fresh and salty relish of the sea, that to swallow it is immediately to be a thousand miles hence on the immense seashore. I close my eyes, I see the waves, I see the rocks, I feel the breeze of 'foggy ocean,' as Homer calls it!... No! tell me franklywhat verse of the Odyssey can wake in me as clearly the sense of sea poetry as the smell of a fresh oyster? Or when I divide a peach and inhale the odour of its juice, why, tell me, are the perfume of the violet and the rose more essentially poetical? Poets describe form, colour, sound. Why can taste be not perfect as these? All is stupid prejudice, my dear fellows! Taste is an immense and hitherto unexplored boon from the gods. The assemblage of tastes forms a harmony as fine as any orchestration of sounds. I affirm, therefore, that there is a tenth muse, the muse of Gastronomy!"

"Let oysters and peaches be admitted. But what harmony, what beauty can you discover in a goose liver dressed with saffron sauce?"

"You are ready to allow, Lampridius, that there is beauty not only in the idylls of Theocritus, but even in the coarsest comedies of Plautus?"

"I admit that."

"Well, my friend, for me there is a gastronomic poesy infoie gras; in fact I am prepared to crown Dædalus with laurels for this dish, just as I would crown an Olympic ode of Pindar!"

Two new guests appeared on the threshold; they were Julian and the poet Publius. Hortensius yielded the place of honour to Julian, while Publius devoured the innumerable dishes with his eyes. To judge by his new chlamys the rich widow must have departed this life, and the happy heirs paid for the epitaph in no niggardly fashion.

The general conversation went on. Lampridius told a story of how one day, moved by curiosity, he had been to hear a Christian preacher thundering against pagan grammarians. "The grammarians," asseveredthe preacher, "do not rank men for their worth, but for their literary style, thinking it less criminal to kill a man than to pronounce the wordhomowith a wrong aspiration!" Lampridius suspected that if these Christian preachers hated the style of the rhetoricians to such a degree, it was because, conscious that they themselves could write and speak only like barbarians, they made ignorance the badge of moral worth, so that for them a good speaker became a suspicious character.

"The day on which eloquence perishes will see the end of Hellas, the end of Rome! People will turn into dumb animals, and it is to make them so that Christian preachers use their barbarous jargon."

"Who knows," murmured Mamertinus pensively, "perhaps styleismore important than virtue, since slaves, barbarians, and nincompoops can all be virtuous!"

Hephæstion meanwhile was explaining to his neighbour the exact meaning of Cicero's advice—"Causam mendaciunculis adspergere."

"Mendaciunculis, that's to say, little lies. Cicero, in fact, advises you to sow little inventions all over your speech; he admits falsehood if decorative."

Then followed a general discussion on the methods of beginning a speech: should the beginning be anapæstic or dactylic?

Julian became bored.

He confessed heartily that he had never considered the matter, and that in his opinion the speaker ought rather to preoccupy himself with the fundamental idea of his speech than with the making style out of a mosaic of peccadilloes.

Mamertinus—then Lampridius and Hephæstion—waxedwroth. According to them the subject of a speech was a matter of no moment. To an orator it should be absolutely indifferent whether he undertook to attack or to defend a case. Even meaning had no interest for him. The principal thing was the orchestration of verbal sounds—the melody, the musical assonance of letters—permitting even a barbarian, witless of Greek, to feel the sheer beauty of language.

"I'll just give you an example, two Latin verses of Propertius," said Garguillus. "Notice the power of the sounds and the emptiness of the meaning. Listen—

"'Et Veneris dominæ volucres, mea turba columbæ, Tingunt Gorgonio punica rostra lacu.'"

What pure delight! Every letter sings! What does the meaning matter? All the beauty consists in the sound, in the assemblage of vowels and consonants. For that utterance I would give all the civic virtue of Juvenal and the philosophy of Lucretius! No! Just hear again! What sweetness there is in that murmur—

"'Et Veneris dominæ volucres, mea turba columbæ!'"

and he wagged that upper lip with a smack of delight.

Everybody repeated the lines of Propertius, unwearying of their charm, and embarking on a veritable orgy of quotation.

"Just listen," murmured Mamertinus in his Æolian voice—

"'Tingunt Gorgonio...'"

"Tingunt Gorgonio," repeated the master of chancery. "By Pallas!—why, it delights one's very palate. It's like swallowing a warm mouthful of wine mingled with Attic honey—

"'Tingunt Gorgonio...'"

Note how the 'g's' follow each other, and then farther on—

"'...punica rostra lacu.'"

"Astounding! inimitable!" murmured Lampridius, shutting his eyes.

Julian was ashamed and amused at this verbal intoxication.

"Words should be, to a certain extent, devoid of meaning," continued Lampridius gravely; "they should flow, roar, chant, without ever bringing up short either the ear or the emotion. Then only real enjoyment of their beauty is possible."

On the threshold of the door, from which the gaze of Julian had seldom departed, there now appeared, quietly as a shadow, a white and haughty figure.

The open shutters allowed the moonlight to fall in, mingling with the ruddy shine of torches on the mosaic of the mirror-smooth floor, and on the wall frescoes, portraying Endymion asleep under the caresses of Selene. The apparition kept still as a statue. The antique Greek peplum of soft white wool fell in long folds, cinctured high under the breast. Moonlight illumined the robe, but the face remained in shadow. The new-comer looked at Julian and Julian looked at her. They smiled at each other, knowing that nobody observed them, and finger on lip she listened to the anecdotes of the guests.

Suddenly Mamertinus, who was discussing with Lampridius grammatical peculiarities of the first and second aorist, exclaimed—

"Arsinoë! At last! So you've made up your mind to abandon physics and modelling for our company?"

She came in and deigned a smile to everyone.

She was the same disk-thrower whom a month before Julian had seen in the abandoned wrestling-ground. The poet Publius, knowing everybody and everything in Athens, had sought the acquaintance of Hortensius and Arsinoë, and had introduced Julian to the house.

Arsinoë's father, an old Roman senator, Helvidius Priscus, had died during the last years of Constantine the Great, bequeathing Arsinoë and Myrrha, his two daughters by a Goth woman-prisoner, to Hortensius, whom he respected on account of his love for antique Rome and hatred for Christianity. A distant relative of Arsinoë, owner of factories of purple at Sidon, had left his incalculable wealth to the young girl.

To Arsinoë, Christian virtues and the patriarchal customs of Rome seemed equally contemptible. The figures of independent women, Aspasia, Cleopatra, and Sappho, alone captivated her girlish imagination. Had she not declared naïvely one day, to the horror of Hortensius, that she would rather become a beautiful and free courtesan, than be transformed into the mother of a family, slave of a husband, "like everybody else"? Those three words, "like everybody else," filled her with melancholy disgust. At one time Arsinoë was attracted by natural science, and had worked with illustrious men of science at the museum in Alexandria. Then the atomic theories of Epicurus, Democrates, and Lucretius had enthralled her. She loved a study which should deliver her soul from the "terror of the gods."

With the same almost morbid intensity, she had afterwards applied herself to sculpture, and had come to Athens in order to study the best works, the masterpieces of Phidias, Scopas, and Praxiteles.

"You are still discussing grammar?" asked the daughter of Helvidius Priscus of the guests, as she came into the dining-hall. She continued ironically: "Don't trouble yourselves; go on. I won't argue or complain, because I'm too hungry after my day's work. Slave, some wine!..."

"My friends," continued Arsinoë when seated, "you'll ruin your minds with quotations from Demosthenes and your rules from Quintilian!... Take care! Rhetoric will ruin you.... I want to see a man who doesn't care a fig for Homer or for Cicero, who speaks without thinking of the aspirates, of syntax, or of the conjunction of letters. Julian, let us go down to the beach after supper; I am disinclined for discussions on dactyls and anapæsts."

"Precisely my own mood, Arsinoë," stammered Garguillus, who had eaten too muchfoie grasand who almost always, at the end of dinner, felt an aversion for literature proportionate to the weight upon his stomach.

"Litterarum intemperantia laboramus," as Seneca used to say. "We are suffering from literary indigestion. We are simply poisoning ourselves!" and he thoughtfully took a tooth-pick from a pocket. His large face expressed weariness and disgust.

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