At Athens, in one of the most frequented cross-roads, a statue modelled by Arsinoë—The victorious Octavius holding up the head of Brutus—was exhibited to the people, and the Athenians welcomed in the daughter of the senator Helvidius Priscus a renewer of the art of their golden age. But the special dignitaries whose business was to keep watch on the public temper, officers strangely but rightly nicknamed "Inquisitors," reported to the proper quarters that the statue might arouse liberal sentiments in the people. A resemblance to Julian was discovered in the face of Brutus, and in the work as a whole a criminal allusion to the recent punishment of Gallus. Attempts were made to discover in Octavius some analogy to the Emperor Constantius. The affair took the proportions of an act of treason, and almost fell into the hands of Paul Catena. Luckily the Imperial chanceries sent direct a severe order to the local magistrate, that not only should the statue disappear from the cross-roads, but that it should be broken to pieces under the eyes of government officials.
Arsinoë wished to hide the statue, but Hortensius was in such mortal affright that he threatened to give up his ward herself to the informers.
In deep disgust at the degradation of the public, Arsinoë allowed them to do with her work everything that Hortensius desired, and masons broke up the figure.
Arsinoë hastily left Athens, her guardian havingpersuaded her to follow him to Rome, where friends had long promised him the office of Imperial quæstor. They installed themselves in a house not far from the Palatine Hill.
Days flowed by in inactivity, Arsinoë realising that there was no longer scope for the greatness and freedom of antique art. She bore in mind her conversation with Julian at Athens; and it was the only link which restrained her from suicide. The long suspense of inaction seemed to her intolerable. In moments of discouragement she longed to have done with it all, to leave all, to set out for the Gallic battlefield and at the side of the young Cæsar attain power, or perish.
But she fell seriously ill. In the long and calm days of convalescence she found a devoted consoler in her most faithful adorer, Anatolius, a centurion of the Imperial cavalry, son of a rich merchant of Rhodes.
He was a Roman centurion, as he used to say himself, merely as the result of a mistake, having only taken to the military career to satisfy the empty-headed ambition of his father, who desired as the summit of earthly honour to see his son clothed in gilt armour.
Evading discipline by generous gifts, Anatolius passed his life in luxurious idleness, amidst works of art and books, in feastings and indolent and costly travel. The profound lucidity of soul which had characterised ancient Epicureans was not possessed by this modern. He complained to his friends—
"I suffer from a mortal malady...."
They would ask him dubiously—
"What malady?"
And he would say—
"What you call my spirit of irony and what seems to me melancholy madness."
His finely cut delicate features expressed extreme fatigue. Sometimes he would awake as from a sleep, undertake a wild excursion with fishermen in a hurricane in the open sea, or set off to hunt wild boar and bear, or contemplate hatching a plot against the life of Cæsar, or seek initiation into the terrible mysteries of Mithra and Adonis. On such occasions he was capable of astonishing by his rashness and audacity even those persons who were ignorant of his ordinary way of living.
But the excitement once evaporated he would return to listlessness and lassitude, still more sleepy, still more cynical and sad.
"Nothing can be done with you, Anatolius," Arsinoë used to say to him; "you are so soft that people might think you had no bones."
But she felt a kind of Hellenic grace in this last of the Epicureans; liked to read in his weary eyes their melancholy mockery of himself and everything else. He would say—
"The sage can extract enjoyment from the blackest melancholy, as bees of Hymettus make their best honey with the juice of bitterest plants!" and his gossip soothed Arsinoë, who smilingly used to call Anatolius her physician.
In reality she became stronger, but never returned to her studio. The sight of chips of marble filled her with painful memories.
Meanwhile, at the time of which we are speaking Hortensius was preparing wonderful public games in the Flavian Theatre, in honour of his arrival in Rome. He was continually travelling, and busy receiving horses, lions, bears, Scots wolf-dogs, crocodiles from the tropics, and with these, flocks of intrepid hunters, skilled riders, comedians, and gladiators.
The date of the performance was approaching, and the lions had not arrived from Tarentum, where they had disembarked. The bears had grown thin, famished, timid as lambs.
Hortensius became sleepless with anxiety.
Two days before the festival, the gladiators, Saxon prisoners, proud and fearless men for whom he had paid a colossal sum, considering it a disgrace to serve as a sport for the Roman populace, committed suicide by cutting their own throats at night in their prison.
Hortensius, at that unexpected news, nearly went out of his mind. Now all hope concentrated itself on the crocodiles, which excited the special curiosity of the mob.
"Have you tried giving them newly-killed hogs' flesh?" demanded the senator of the slave entrusted with the supervision of these precious beasts.
"Yes; but they won't eat it."
"Have you tried veal?"
"They won't touch that, either."
"And wheaten bread soaked in cream?"
"They turn away from it and go to sleep."
"They must be ill or too fatigued."
"We've even opened their jaws and shoved the food down their throats. They cough it up again."
"Ah! by Jupiter, those foul beasts will be the death of me! We must release them after the first day in the arena or else they will die of hunger," groaned Hortensius falling into a chair.
Arsinoë contemplated him with envy. He at least was not tired of life.
She passed into an isolated chamber whence the windows looked down on the garden. There in the calm moonlight her young sister Myrrha, who was nowabout sixteen years old, was softly touching the strings of a harp, and the notes were falling like tears. Arsinoë kissed Myrrha, who answered her by a smile without ceasing to play. A loud whistle sounded behind the garden wall:
"It is he," said Myrrha, rising. "Come quickly!"
She grasped Arsinoë's hand tightly. The two young girls threw black cloaks over their shoulders and went out. The wind was chasing the clouds along, and the moon, sometimes hidden, sometimes shone out brightly. Arsinoë opened a door in the outer wall of the house. A young man wrapped in a monk's hooded mantle was awaiting them.
"We are not late, Juventinus?" asked Myrrha.
"I was afraid that you were not coming!"
They walked long and rapidly down narrow lanes, then out among the vineyards, issuing at length into the Roman plain. In the distance the brick-built aqueduct of Servius Tullius was outlined against the sky. Juventinus turned round and said—
"Somebody is following us!"
The two young girls turned round also. A flood of moonlight fell upon them, and the individual following them exclaimed cheerfully—
"Arsinoë! Myrrha!... And so I have found you again! Where are you going?"
"We're going among the Christians," answered Arsinoë. "Come with us, Anatolius; you will see some curious things."
"What do I hear? Among the Christians?—You have always been their enemy!" wondered the centurion.
"With age, my friend, one grows better and more tolerant, or indifferent, if you like to call it so. Thisis a superstition neither better nor worse than other superstitions. And then one is capable of a good deal when bored. I am going among them for Myrrha's sake; it pleases her...."
"Where is the church? We're out in the plain," murmured Anatolius.
"The churches are destroyed or profaned by their fellow-Christians, the Arians, who believe in Christ otherwise than they do. You must have heard the debates about it at Court. So now the adversaries of the Arians are wont to pray in secret in subterranean vaults, as in the time of the first persecutions."
Myrrha and Juventinus had lingered a little behind the others; Arsinoë and Anatolius could talk freely.
"Who is he?" asked the centurion with a nod towards Juventinus.
"The last scion of the ancient patrician family of the Furii," answered Arsinoë. "The mother wishes to make a consul of him. His only dream is to flee into some Thebaïd, or monkish community in the desert, to spend his days in prayer. He loves his mother and hides himself from her as from an enemy."
"The descendants of the Furii, monks?... 'T is a queer age," sighed the Epicurean.
They approached thearenarium, old excavations in crumbling tufa, and went down narrow steps to the bottom of the quarry. The volcanic blocks of red earth looked strange-hued in the moonlight. Juventinus took a little clay lamp from a dark niche, and lighted it; the long flame flickered feebly in its narrow gullet.
They entered the darkness of the side galleries of thearenarium. Hollowed by the ancient Romans, the quarry was large and spacious and descended in steepslopes. It was therefore pierced by numerous galleries, for the use of workmen in transporting the tufa. Juventinus led his companions through the labyrinth and halted at last in front of a shaft from which he lifted the coverlid of wood; the party went cautiously down the damp and slippery steps; at the bottom was a narrow door; Juventinus knocked; the door opened, and a grey-headed monk introduced them into a passage hollowed in harder tufa. The walls on both sides from floor to vaulting were covered with slabs of marble, the seals of tombs in which coffins (loculi) were ranged.
At every step folk carrying lamps came to meet them. By the flickering light Anatolius read with curiosity on one of these stone flags: "Dorotheus, son of Felix, in this place of coolness, light, and peace, reposes" ("requiescit in loco refrigii, luminis, pacis"). On another: "Brethren, disturb not my deep slumber."
The style of the inscriptions was radiant and happy: "Sophronia, beloved, thou art alive for ever in God" ("Sophronia, dulcis, semper vivis Deo"). And a little farther on: "Sophronia vivis!" ("Sophronia, thou livest!") as if he who had written these words had at length realised that there was no more death.
Nowhere was it written "He is buried here," but only "Here is laid for a certain time" (depositus). It seemed as if millions of people, generation upon generation, were lying in this place, not dead, but fallen asleep, all full of mysterious expectation. In the niches lamps were placed. They burned in the close atmosphere with a long steady flame and graceful vases exhaled penetrating odours. Nothing but the faint smell of putrefying bones, which escaped by fissures in the coffins, gave any hint of death.
The passages went down lower and lower, curved as round an amphitheatre; and here and there in the ceiling a large aperture gave light fromluminariaopening on the country without.
Sometimes a weak moon-ray passing down theluminariawould strike at the bottom on a slab of marble covered with inscriptions.
At the end of one of these passages they saw a sexton who, chanting gaily, was hollowing the ground with heavy blows of his pick. Several Christians were standing near the principal inspector of the tombs, thefossor. He was very well dressed and had a fat cunning face. Thefossorhad inherited a right freely to dispose of a gallery of catacombs, and to sell unoccupied sites in his gallery, which was all the more appreciated because in it were buried the relics of St. Laurence. Although rich, thefossorwas keenly bargaining, as they came up, with a wealthy and miserly leather-merchant. Arsinoë stopped a moment to hear the discussion.
"And my tomb will be far away from the relics?" the leather-dresser was asking mistrustfully, thinking of the big sum exacted by thefossor.
"No, just six cubits away."
"Above or beneath?"
"On the right-hand side, sloping down a little. It's an excellent position; I don't ask a penny too much. Though you be as sinful as you please, everything will be forgiven. You will go straight into the heavenly kingdom."
With an expert hand the gravedigger took the measurements for the tomb as a tailor measures for a coat, the leather-dresser insisting that he should have as much room as possible in order to lie in comfort.
An old woman approached the sexton.
"What do you want, mother?"
"Here's the money—the extra payment!"
"What extra payment?"
"For the right-hand tomb."
"Ah, I see; you don't want the crooked one?"
"No; my old bones crack at the very idea of the crooked one."
In the catacombs, and especially near the relics, so much value was set upon grave-sites that it was necessary to contrive slanting tombs which were leased to the poor.
"God knows how long one will have to wait for the resurrection," the old woman was explaining; "and if I took a tomb on the slant it would be all very well to begin with, but when I got tired it wouldn't do at all."
Anatolius listened in astonishment.
"It is much more curious than the mysteries of Mithra," he observed to Arsinoë with a languid smile. "Pity that I didn't know it sooner. I've never seen such an amusing cemetery."
They went on into a rather large chamber called thecubicula of consolation. A multitude of small lamps were burning on the walls. The priest was at the evening office, the stone lid of a martyr's tomb placed under an arched vault (arcosolium) serving as altar. There were many of the faithful in long white robes, every face serenely happy. Myrrha, kneeling with eyes full of love, was gazing at the Good Shepherd pictured on the ceiling of the chamber. In the catacombs early Christian customs had been revived, so that after the liturgy all present, looking on themselves as brothers and sisters, gave each other the kiss ofpeace. Arsinoë following the general example with a smile kissed Anatolius.
Then all four climbed again toward the upper storeys, whence they could take their way to the secret retreat of Juventinus, an old pagan tomb, acolumbarium, lying at some distance from the Appian Way. There, while waiting for the ship which was to take him to Egypt, the land of holy anchorites, he was living hidden from the searches of his mother and of government officials. He lodged with Didimus, a good old man from the Lower Thebaïd, to whom Juventinus gave blind and unquestioning obedience.
Here they found Didimus squatting on his heels, weaving basket-work. The moon-rays, filtering through a narrow opening, glinted on his white hair and long beard. From top to bottom of the walls of thecolumbariumwere little niches like pigeons' nests, and each of these contained a mortuary urn.
Myrrha, of whom the old man was very fond, kissed his withered hand respectfully, and prayed him to tell her some story about the hermit fathers of the desert. Nothing pleased her better than these wonderful and terrible tales by Didimus.
The company grouped themselves round the white-headed old man, Myrrha watching him with feverish eyes and feeble hands clasped to her heaving breast. Nothing was heard save his voice and the distant hum of Rome, when suddenly, at the inner door communicating with the catacomb, a knock was heard.
Juventinus rose, went to the door and asked, without opening it—
"Who is there?"
No answer came, but a still gentler knock as of entreaty.
With great precaution Juventinus held the door ajar, shuddered and recoiled. A woman of tall stature came into thecolumbarium. Long white vestments enveloped her and a veil hid her face. Her gait was that of one recovering from an illness or of a very old woman. With a sudden movement she raised the veil and Juventinus cried—
"My mother!"
Didimus rose, a severe expression on his countenance.
The woman threw herself at the feet of her son and kissed them, grey tresses falling dishevelled over her lean and haggard face, which bore traces of high patrician beauty. Juventinus took the head of his mother between his hands and kissed it.
"Juventinus!" the old man called.
The young man made no response.
His mother, as if they had been completely alone, murmured hastily and joyously—
"O my son, I thought I should never see you again; I would have set out for Alexandria—O I would have found you even in the desert! But now all is over, is it not? Tell me that you will not go! Wait until I die! Afterwards do what you will...."
The old man resumed—
"Do you hear me, Juventinus?"
"Old man," answered the patrician mother, "you will not carry off a son from her that bore him!... Listen, if it must be so, I will deny the faith of my fathers; I will believe in the Crucified!... I will become a nun!"
"Ah, pagan! thou canst not understand the law of Christ. A mother cannot be a nun, nor can a nun be still a mother."
"I have borne him in anguish; he is mine!"
"It is not the soul, but the body, that you love."
The patrician woman cast at Didimus a look full of hatred.
"Be then accursed for your lying speeches," she exclaimed; "accursed, you stealers of children—tempters of the guileless! ye black-robed fearers of the celestial light—slaves of the Crucified! destroyers of all beauty and joy!"
Her face changed; she drew her son yet closer, and said chokingly—
"I know thee, my son! thou wilt not go ... thou canst not...."
Old Didimus, cross in hand, stood at the open door leading to the catacombs. He said solemnly—
"For the last time, and in the name of God, I order you, my son, to follow me and to leave her."
Then the patrician relaxed her hold of Juventinus, and faltered—
"Then go! Let it be so.... Leave me, if thou canst!"
Tears flowed no longer down her furrowed cheeks; her arms fell rigid, with a heart-broken gesture, to her sides. She waited. All were silent.
"O Lord, help me ... inspire me!" Juventinus prayed in terrible distress.
"He who will follow Me, and will not hate father and mother, wife and children, brother and sister, and even his own life, can never be My disciple!"
These words were recited by Didimus, turning for the last time towards Juventinus—
"Remain in the world! Thou hast rejected Christ! Be accursed in this age and in the age to come!"
"No, no! Cast me not out, father! I am on yourside. Lord, here am I," exclaimed Juventinus following his master.
His mother made no arresting movement; not a muscle of her face stirred; but when the noise of his footsteps died away a hoarse sob heaved her breast and she fell into a swoon.
"Open—in the name of the most holy Emperor Constantius!"
It was the summons of soldiery sent by the prefect to hunt the Sabæan rebels, on the denunciation of the patrician mother of Juventinus.
With a powerful lever the soldiers attempted to prise open the door of thecolumbarium, shaking the edifice on its foundations. The little silver urns vibrated plaintively under the blows. Half of the door gave way.
Anatolius, Myrrha, and Arsinoë rushed into the inner gallery. The Christians hurried along the narrow passages like ants disturbed in their mound, making for all the secret outlets communicating with the quarry. But Arsinoë and Myrrha, unfamiliar with the exact situation of the galleries, lost their way in the labyrinth and at last reached the lowest floor of all at a depth of fifty cubits under ground. It became difficult to breathe; muddy water lay under foot. The flame of the lamps became dim and almost blew out. Putrid miasmas filled the air. Myrrha felt her head swim and gradually lost consciousness.
Anatolius took her in his arms. At every step they feared to encounter the legionaries; all the outlets might be blocked and sealed up; they were running the risk of being buried alive.
At last they heard the voice of Juventinus calling—
"Here! here!"
Bent double, he was carrying the old Didimus on his back.
At the end of a few minutes they reached a secret door opening on the Campagna.
On returning to the house, Arsinoë quickly undressed Myrrha and put her to bed, still in a dead faint. Kneeling by her side the elder sister long kissed and chafed the thin, yellow, and inert hands. A pang of agonising presentiment shot through her heart.
The face of the sleeper bore a strange expression. Never had it reflected so bodiless a charm. All the little body seemed transparent and frail as the sides of an alabaster jar illumined by an inner fire.