CHAPTER XII - THE DIVINITY THAT DOTH HEDGE A KING

Marius the Epicurean - Volume 1

by Walter Pater

CHAPTER XII - THE DIVINITY THAT DOTH HEDGE A KING, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - VOLUME 1 by Walter Pater

But ah! Maecenas is yclad in claye,
And great Augustus long ygoe is dead,
And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead,
That matter made for poets on to playe.+

[188] MARCUS AURELIUS who, though he had little relish for them
himself, had ever been willing to humour the taste of his people for
magnificent spectacles, was received back to Rome with the lesser
honours of the Ovation, conceded by the Senate (so great was the
public sense of deliverance) with even more than the laxity which had
become its habit under imperial rule, for there had been no actual
bloodshed in the late achievement. Clad in the civic dress of the
chief Roman magistrate, and with a crown of myrtle upon his head, his
colleague similarly attired walking beside him, he passed up to the
Capitol on foot, though in solemn procession along the Sacred Way, to
offer sacrifice to the national gods. The victim, a goodly sheep,
whose image we may still see between the pig and the ox of the [189]
Suovetaurilia, filleted and stoled almost like some ancient canon of
the church, on a sculptured fragment in the Forum, was conducted by
the priests, clad in rich white vestments, and bearing their sacred
utensils of massive gold, immediately behind a company of flute-
players, led by the great choir-master, or conductor, of the day,
visibly tetchy or delighted, according as the instruments he ruled
with his tuning-rod, rose, more or less adequately amid the
difficulties of the way, to the dream of perfect music in the soul
within him. The vast crowd, including the soldiers of the triumphant
army, now restored to wives and children, all alike in holiday
whiteness, had left their houses early in the fine, dry morning, in a
real affection for "the father of his country," to await the
procession, the two princes having spent the preceding night outside
the walls, at the old Villa of the Republic. Marius, full of
curiosity, had taken his position with much care; and stood to see
the world's masters pass by, at an angle from which he could command
the view of a great part of the processional route, sprinkled with
fine yellow sand, and punctiliously guarded from profane footsteps.

The coming of the pageant was announced by the clear sound of the
flutes, heard at length above the acclamations of the people--Salve
Imperator!--Dii te servent!--shouted in regular time, over the hills.
It was on the central [190] figure, of course, that the whole
attention of Marius was fixed from the moment when the procession
came in sight, preceded by the lictors with gilded fasces, the
imperial image-bearers, and the pages carrying lighted torches; a
band of knights, among whom was Cornelius in complete military,
array, following. Amply swathed about in the folds of a richly
worked toga, after a manner now long since become obsolete with
meaner persons, Marius beheld a man of about five-and-forty years of
age, with prominent eyes--eyes, which although demurely downcast
during this essentially religious ceremony, were by nature broadly
and benignantly observant. He was still, in the main, as we see him
in the busts which represent his gracious and courtly youth, when
Hadrian had playfully called him, not Verus, after the name of his
father, but Verissimus, for his candour of gaze, and the bland
capacity of the brow, which, below the brown hair, clustering thickly
as of old, shone out low, broad, and clear, and still without a trace
of the trouble of his lips. You saw the brow of one who, amid the
blindness or perplexity of the people about him, understood all
things clearly; the dilemma, to which his experience so far had
brought him, between Chance with meek resignation, and a Providence
with boundless possibilities and hope, being for him at least
distinctly defined.

That outward serenity, which he valued so [191] highly as a point of
manner or expression not unworthy the care of a public minister--
outward symbol, it might be thought, of the inward religious serenity
it had been his constant purpose to maintain--was increased to-day by
his sense of the gratitude of his people; that his life had been one
of such gifts and blessings as made his person seem in very deed
divine to them. Yet the cloud of some reserved internal sorrow,
passing from time to time into an expression of fatigue and effort,
of loneliness amid the shouting multitude, might have been detected
there by the more observant--as if the sagacious hint of one of his
officers, "The soldiers can't understand you, they don't know Greek,"
were applicable always to his relationships with other people. The
nostrils and mouth seemed capable almost of peevishness; and Marius
noted in them, as in the hands, and in the spare body generally, what
was new to his experience--something of asceticism, as we say, of a
bodily gymnastic, by which, although it told pleasantly in the clear
blue humours of the eye, the flesh had scarcely been an equal gainer
with the spirit. It was hardly the expression of "the healthy mind
in the healthy body," but rather of a sacrifice of the body to the
soul, its needs and aspirations, that Marius seemed to divine in this
assiduous student of the Greek sages--a sacrifice, in truth, far
beyond the demands of their very saddest philosophy of life.

[192] Dignify thyself with modesty and simplicity for thine
ornaments!--had been ever a maxim with this dainty and high-bred
Stoic, who still thought manners a true part of morals, according to
the old sense of the term, and who regrets now and again that he
cannot control his thoughts equally well with his countenance. That
outward composure was deepened during the solemnities of this day by
an air of pontifical abstraction; which, though very far from being
pride--nay, a sort of humility rather--yet gave, to himself, an air
of unapproachableness, and to his whole proceeding, in which every
minutest act was considered, the character of a ritual. Certainly,
there was no haughtiness, social, moral, or even philosophic, in
Aurelius, who had realised, under more trying conditions perhaps than
any one before, that no element of humanity could be alien from him.
Yet, as he walked to-day, the centre of ten thousand observers, with
eyes discreetly fixed on the ground, veiling his head at times and
muttering very rapidly the words of the "supplications," there was
something many spectators may have noted as a thing new in their
experience, for Aurelius, unlike his predecessors, took all this with
absolute seriousness. The doctrine of the sanctity of kings, that,
in the words of Tacitus, Princes are as Gods--Principes instar deorum
esse--seemed to have taken a novel, because a literal, sense. For
Aurelius, indeed, the old legend of his descent from Numa, from [193]
Numa who had talked with the gods, meant much. Attached in very
early years to the service of the altars, like many another noble
youth, he was "observed to perform all his sacerdotal functions with
a constancy and exactness unusual at that age; was soon a master of
the sacred music; and had all the forms and ceremonies by heart."
And now, as the emperor, who had not only a vague divinity about his
person, but was actually the chief religious functionary of the
state, recited from time to time the forms of invocation, he needed
not the help of the prompter, or ceremoniarius, who then approached,
to assist him by whispering the appointed words in his ear. It was
that pontifical abstraction which then impressed itself on Marius as
the leading outward characteristic of Aurelius; though to him alone,
perhaps, in that vast crowd of observers, it was no strange thing,
but a matter he had understood from of old.

Some fanciful writers have assigned the origin of these triumphal
processions to the mythic pomps of Dionysus, after his conquests in
the East; the very word Triumph being, according to this supposition,
only Thriambos-the Dionysiac Hymn. And certainly the younger of the
two imperial "brothers," who, with the effect of a strong contrast,
walked beside Aurelius, and shared the honours of the day, might well
have reminded people of the delicate Greek god of flowers and wine.
This [194] new conqueror of the East was now about thirty-six years
old, but with his scrupulous care for all the advantages of his
person, and a soft curling beard powdered with gold, looked many
years younger. One result of the more genial element in the wisdom
of Aurelius had been that, amid most difficult circumstances, he had
known throughout life how to act in union with persons of character
very alien from his own; to be more than loyal to the colleague, the
younger brother in empire, he had too lightly taken to himself, five
years before, then an uncorrupt youth, "skilled in manly exercises
and fitted for war." When Aurelius thanks the gods that a brother
had fallen to his lot, whose character was a stimulus to the proper
care of his own, one sees that this could only have happened in the
way of an example, putting him on his guard against insidious faults.
But it is with sincere amiability that the imperial writer, who was
indeed little used to be ironical, adds that the lively respect and
affection of the junior had often "gladdened" him. To be able to
make his use of the flower, when the fruit perhaps was useless or
poisonous:--that was one of the practical successes of his
philosophy; and his people noted, with a blessing, "the concord of
the two Augusti."

The younger, certainly, possessed in full measure that charm of a
constitutional freshness of aspect which may defy for a long time
extravagant or erring habits of life; a physiognomy, [195] healthy-
looking, cleanly, and firm, which seemed unassociable with any form
of self-torment, and made one think of the muzzle of some young hound
or roe, such as human beings invariably like to stroke--a
physiognomy, in effect, with all the goodliness of animalism of the
finer sort, though still wholly animal. The charm was that of the
blond head, the unshrinking gaze, the warm tints: neither more nor
less than one may see every English summer, in youth, manly enough,
and with the stuff which makes brave soldiers, in spite of the
natural kinship it seems to have with playthings and gay flowers.
But innate in Lucius Verus there was that more than womanly fondness
for fond things, which had made the atmosphere of the old city of
Antioch, heavy with centuries of voluptuousness, a poison to him: he
had come to love his delicacies best out of season, and would have
gilded the very flowers. But with a wonderful power of self-
obliteration, the elder brother at the capital had directed his
procedure successfully, and allowed him, become now also the husband
of his daughter Lucilla, the credit of a "Conquest," though Verus had
certainly not returned a conqueror over himself. He had returned, as
we know, with the plague in his company, along with many another
strange creature of his folly; and when the people saw him publicly
feeding his favourite horse Fleet with almonds and sweet grapes,
wearing the animal's image in gold, and [196] finally building it a
tomb, they felt, with some un-sentimental misgiving, that he might
revive the manners of Nero.--What if, in the chances of war, he
should survive the protecting genius of that elder brother?

He was all himself to-day: and it was with much wistful curiosity
that Marius regarded him. For Lucius Verus was, indeed, but the
highly expressive type of a class,--the true son of his father,
adopted by Hadrian. Lucius Verus the elder, also, had had the like
strange capacity for misusing the adornments of life, with a masterly
grace; as if such misusing were, in truth, the quite adequate
occupation of an intelligence, powerful, but distorted by cynical
philosophy or some disappointment of the heart. It was almost a sort
of genius, of which there had been instances in the imperial purple:
it was to ascend the throne, a few years later, in the person of one,
now a hopeful little lad at home in the palace; and it had its
following, of course, among the wealthy youth at Rome, who
concentrated no inconsiderable force of shrewdness and tact upon
minute details of attire and manner, as upon the one thing needful.
Certainly, flowers were pleasant to the eye. Such things had even
their sober use, as making the outside of human life superficially
attractive, and thereby promoting the first steps towards friendship
and social amity. But what precise place could there be for Verus
and his peculiar charm, [197] in that Wisdom, that Order of divine
Reason "reaching from end to end, strongly and sweetly disposing all
things," from the vision of which Aurelius came down, so tolerant of
persons like him? Into such vision Marius too was certainly well-
fitted to enter, yet, noting the actual perfection of Lucius Verus
after his kind, his undeniable achievement of the select, in all
minor things, felt, though with some suspicion of himself, that he
entered into, and could understand, this other so dubious sort of
character also. There was a voice in the theory he had brought to
Rome with him which whispered "nothing is either great nor small;" as
there were times when he could have thought that, as the
"grammarian's" or the artist's ardour of soul may be satisfied by the
perfecting of the theory of a sentence, or the adjustment of two
colours, so his own life also might have been fulfilled by an
enthusiastic quest after perfection--say, in the flowering and
folding of a toga.

The emperors had burned incense before the image of Jupiter, arrayed
in its most gorgeous apparel, amid sudden shouts from the people of
Salve Imperator! turned now from the living princes to the deity, as
they discerned his countenance through the great open doors. The
imperial brothers had deposited their crowns of myrtle on the richly
embroidered lapcloth of the god; and, with their chosen guests, sat
down to a public feast in the temple [198] itself. There followed
what was, after all, the great event of the day:--an appropriate
discourse, a discourse almost wholly de contemptu mundi, delivered in
the presence of the assembled Senate, by the emperor Aurelius, who
had thus, on certain rare occasions, condescended to instruct his
people, with the double authority of a chief pontiff and a laborious
student of philosophy. In those lesser honours of the ovation, there
had been no attendant slave behind the emperors, to make mock of
their effulgence as they went; and it was as if with the discretion
proper to a philosopher, and in fear of a jealous Nemesis, he had
determined himself to protest in time against the vanity of all
outward success.

The Senate was assembled to hear the emperor's discourse in the vast
hall of the Curia Julia. A crowd of high-bred youths idled around,
or on the steps before the doors, with the marvellous toilets Marius
had noticed in the Via Nova; in attendance, as usual, to learn by
observation the minute points of senatorial procedure. Marius had
already some acquaintance with them, and passing on found himself
suddenly in the presence of what was still the most august assembly
the world had seen. Under Aurelius, ever full of veneration for this
ancient traditional guardian of public religion, the Senate had
recovered all its old dignity and independence. Among its members
many [199] hundreds in number, visibly the most distinguished of them
all, Marius noted the great sophists or rhetoricians of the day, in
all their magnificence. The antique character of their attire, and
the ancient mode of wearing it, still surviving with them, added to
the imposing character of their persons, while they sat, with their
staves of ivory in their hands, on their curule chairs--almost the
exact pattern of the chair still in use in the Roman church when a
Bishop pontificates at the divine offices--"tranquil and unmoved,
with a majesty that seemed divine," as Marius thought, like the old
Gaul of the Invasion. The rays of the early November sunset slanted
full upon the audience, and made it necessary for the officers of the
Court to draw the purple curtains over the windows, adding to the
solemnity of the scene. In the depth of those warm shadows,
surrounded by her ladies, the empress Faustina was seated to listen.
The beautiful Greek statue of Victory, which since the days of
Augustus had presided over the assemblies of the Senate, had been
brought into the hall, and placed near the chair of the emperor; who,
after rising to perform a brief sacrificial service in its honour,
bowing reverently to the assembled fathers left and right, took his
seat and began to speak.

There was a certain melancholy grandeur in the very simplicity or
triteness of the theme: as it were the very quintessence of all the
old [200] Roman epitaphs, of all that was monumental in that city of
tombs, layer upon layer of dead things and people. As if in the very
fervour of disillusion, he seemed to be composing--Hôsper epigraphas
chronôn kai holôn ethnôn+--the sepulchral titles of ages and whole
peoples; nay! the very epitaph of the living Rome itself. The
grandeur of the ruins of Rome,--heroism in ruin: it was under the
influence of an imaginative anticipation of this, that he appeared to
be speaking. And though the impression of the actual greatness of
Rome on that day was but enhanced by the strain of contempt, falling
with an accent of pathetic conviction from the emperor himself, and
gaining from his pontifical pretensions the authority of a religious
intimation, yet the curious interest of the discourse lay in this,
that Marius, for one, as he listened, seemed to forsee a grass-grown
Forum, the broken ways of the Capitol, and the Palatine hill itself
in humble occupation. That impression connected itself with what he
had already noted of an actual change even then coming over Italian
scenery. Throughout, he could trace something of a humour into which
Stoicism at all times tends to fall, the tendency to cry, Abase
yourselves! There was here the almost inhuman impassibility of one
who had thought too closely on the paradoxical aspect of the love of
posthumous fame. With the ascetic pride which lurks under all
Platonism, [201] resultant from its opposition of the seen to the
unseen, as falsehood to truth--the imperial Stoic, like his true
descendant, the hermit of the middle age, was ready, in no friendly
humour, to mock, there in its narrow bed, the corpse which had made
so much of itself in life. Marius could but contrast all that with
his own Cyrenaic eagerness, just then, to taste and see and touch;
reflecting on the opposite issues deducible from the same text. "The
world, within me and without, flows away like a river," he had said;
"therefore let me make the most of what is here and now."--"The world
and the thinker upon it, are consumed like a flame," said Aurelius,
"therefore will I turn away my eyes from vanity: renounce: withdraw
myself alike from all affections." He seemed tacitly to claim as a
sort of personal dignity, that he was very familiarly versed in this
view of things, and could discern a death's-head everywhere. Now and
again Marius was reminded of the saying that "with the Stoics all
people are the vulgar save themselves;" and at times the orator
seemed to have forgotten his audience, and to be speaking only to
himself.

"Art thou in love with men's praises, get thee into the very soul of
them, and see!--see what judges they be, even in those matters which
concern themselves. Wouldst thou have their praise after death,
bethink thee, that they who shall come hereafter, and with whom thou
[202] wouldst survive by thy great name, will be but as these, whom
here thou hast found so hard to live with. For of a truth, the soul
of him who is aflutter upon renown after death, presents not this
aright to itself, that of all whose memory he would have each one
will likewise very quickly depart, until memory herself be put out,
as she journeys on by means of such as are themselves on the wing but
for a while, and are extinguished in their turn.--Making so much of
those thou wilt never see! It is as if thou wouldst have had those
who were before thee discourse fair things concerning thee.

"To him, indeed, whose wit hath been whetted by true doctrine, that
well-worn sentence of Homer sufficeth, to guard him against regret
and fear.--

Like the race of leaves
The race of man is:--

The wind in autumn strows
The earth with old leaves: then the spring
the woods with new endows.+

Leaves! little leaves!--thy children, thy flatterers, thine enemies!
Leaves in the wind, those who would devote thee to darkness, who
scorn or miscall thee here, even as they also whose great fame shall
outlast them. For all these, and the like of them, are born indeed
in the spring season--Earos epigignetai hôrê+: and soon a wind hath
scattered them, and thereafter the [203] wood peopleth itself again
with another generation of leaves. And what is common to all of them
is but the littleness of their lives: and yet wouldst thou love and
hate, as if these things should continue for ever. In a little while
thine eyes also will be closed, and he on whom thou perchance hast
leaned thyself be himself a burden upon another.

"Bethink thee often of the swiftness with which the things that are,
or are even now coming to be, are swept past thee: that the very
substance of them is but the perpetual motion of water: that there is
almost nothing which continueth: of that bottomless depth of time, so
close at thy side. Folly! to be lifted up, or sorrowful, or anxious,
by reason of things like these! Think of infinite matter, and thy
portion--how tiny a particle, of it! of infinite time, and thine own
brief point there; of destiny, and the jot thou art in it; and yield
thyself readily to the wheel of Clotho, to spin of thee what web she
will.

"As one casting a ball from his hand, the nature of things hath had
its aim with every man, not as to the ending only, but the first
beginning of his course, and passage thither. And hath the ball any
profit of its rising, or loss as it descendeth again, or in its fall?
or the bubble, as it groweth or breaketh on the air? or the flame of
the lamp, from the beginning to the end of its brief story?

[204] "All but at this present that future is, in which nature, who
disposeth all things in order, will transform whatsoever thou now
seest, fashioning from its substance somewhat else, and therefrom
somewhat else in its turn, lest the world grow old. We are such
stuff as dreams are made of--disturbing dreams. Awake, then! and see
thy dream as it is, in comparison with that erewhile it seemed to
thee.

"And for me, especially, it were well to mind those many mutations of
empire in time past; therein peeping also upon the future, which must
needs be of like species with what hath been, continuing ever within
the rhythm and number of things which really are; so that in forty
years one may note of man and of his ways little less than in a
thousand. Ah! from this higher place, look we down upon the ship-
wrecks and the calm! Consider, for example, how the world went,
under the emperor Vespasian. They are married and given in marriage,
they breed children; love hath its way with them; they heap up riches
for others or for themselves; they are murmuring at things as then
they are; they are seeking for great place; crafty, flattering,
suspicious, waiting upon the death of others:--festivals, business,
war, sickness, dissolution: and now their whole life is no longer
anywhere at all. Pass on to the reign of Trajan: all things continue
the same: and that life also is no longer anywhere at all. [205] Ah!
but look again, and consider, one after another, as it were the
sepulchral inscriptions of all peoples and times, according to one
pattern.--What multitudes, after their utmost striving--a little
afterwards! were dissolved again into their dust.

"Think again of life as it was far off in the ancient world; as it
must be when we shall be gone; as it is now among the wild heathen.
How many have never heard your names and mine, or will soon forget
them! How soon may those who shout my name to-day begin to revile
it, because glory, and the memory of men, and all things beside, are
but vanity--a sand-heap under the senseless wind, the barking of
dogs, the quarrelling of children, weeping incontinently upon their
laughter.

"This hasteth to be; that other to have been: of that which now
cometh to be, even now somewhat hath been extinguished. And wilt
thou make thy treasure of any one of these things? It were as if one
set his love upon the swallow, as it passeth out of sight through the
air!

"Bethink thee often, in all contentions public and private, of those
whom men have remembered by reason of their anger and vehement
spirit--those famous rages, and the occasions of them--the great
fortunes, and misfortunes, of men's strife of old. What are they all
now, and the dust of their battles? Dust [206] and ashes indeed; a
fable, a mythus, or not so much as that. Yes! keep those before
thine eyes who took this or that, the like of which happeneth to
thee, so hardly; were so querulous, so agitated. And where again are
they? Wouldst thou have it not otherwise with thee?

Consider how quickly all things vanish away--their bodily structure
into the general substance; the very memory of them into that great
gulf and abysm of past thoughts. Ah! 'tis on a tiny space of earth
thou art creeping through life--a pigmy soul carrying a dead body to
its grave.

"Let death put thee upon the consideration both of thy body and thy
soul: what an atom of all matter hath been distributed to thee; what
a little particle of the universal mind. Turn thy body about, and
consider what thing it is, and that which old age, and lust, and the
languor of disease can make of it. Or come to its substantial and
causal qualities, its very type: contemplate that in itself, apart
from the accidents of matter, and then measure also the span of time
for which the nature of things, at the longest, will maintain that
special type. Nay! in the very principles and first constituents of
things corruption hath its part--so much dust, humour, stench, and
scraps of bone! Consider that thy marbles are but the earth's
callosities, thy gold and silver its faeces; this silken robe but a
worm's bedding, and thy [207] purple an unclean fish. Ah! and thy
life's breath is not otherwise, as it passeth out of matters like
these, into the like of them again.

"For the one soul in things, taking matter like wax in the hands,
moulds and remoulds--how hastily!--beast, and plant, and the babe, in
turn: and that which dieth hath not slipped out of the order of
nature, but, remaining therein, hath also its changes there,
disparting into those elements of which nature herself, and thou too,
art compacted. She changes without murmuring. The oaken chest falls
to pieces with no more complaining than when the carpenter fitted it
together. If one told thee certainly that on the morrow thou
shouldst die, or at the furthest on the day after, it would be no
great matter to thee to die on the day after to-morrow, rather than
to-morrow. Strive to think it a thing no greater that thou wilt die-
-not to-morrow, but a year, or two years, or ten years from to-day.

"I find that all things are now as they were in the days of our
buried ancestors--all things sordid in their elements, trite by long
usage, and yet ephemeral. How ridiculous, then, how like a
countryman in town, is he, who wonders at aught. Doth the sameness,
the repetition of the public shows, weary thee? Even so doth that
likeness of events in the spectacle of the world. And so must it be
with thee to the end. For the wheel of the world hath ever the same
[208] motion, upward and downward, from generation to generation.
When, when, shall time give place to eternity?

"If there be things which trouble thee thou canst put them away,
inasmuch as they have their being but in thine own notion concerning
them. Consider what death is, and how, if one does but detach from
it the appearances, the notions, that hang about it, resting the eye
upon it as in itself it really is, it must be thought of but as an
effect of nature, and that man but a child whom an effect of nature
shall affright. Nay! not function and effect of nature, only; but a
thing profitable also to herself.

"To cease from action--the ending of thine effort to think and do:
there is no evil in that. Turn thy thought to the ages of man's
life, boyhood, youth, maturity, old age: the change in every one of
these also is a dying, but evil nowhere. Thou climbedst into the
ship, thou hast made thy voyage and touched the shore. Go forth now!
Be it into some other life: the divine breath is everywhere, even
there. Be it into forgetfulness for ever; at least thou wilt rest
from the beating of sensible images upon thee, from the passions
which pluck thee this way and that like an unfeeling toy, from those
long marches of the intellect, from thy toilsome ministry to the
flesh.

"Art thou yet more than dust and ashes and bare bone--a name only, or
not so much as [209] that, which, also, is but whispering and a
resonance, kept alive from mouth to mouth of dying abjects who have
hardly known themselves; how much less thee, dead so long ago!

"When thou lookest upon a wise man, a lawyer, a captain of war, think
upon another gone. When thou seest thine own face in the glass, call
up there before thee one of thine ancestors--one of those old
Caesars. Lo! everywhere, thy double before thee! Thereon, let the
thought occur to thee: And where are they? anywhere at all, for ever?
And thou, thyself--how long? Art thou blind to that thou art--thy
matter, how temporal; and thy function, the nature of thy business?
Yet tarry, at least, till thou hast assimilated even these things to
thine own proper essence, as a quick fire turneth into heat and light
whatsoever be cast upon it.

"As words once in use are antiquated to us, so is it with the names
that were once on all men's lips: Camillus, Volesus, Leonnatus: then,
in a little while, Scipio and Cato, and then Augustus, and then
Hadrian, and then Antoninus Pius. How many great physicians who
lifted wise brows at other men's sick-beds, have sickened and died!
Those wise Chaldeans, who foretold, as a great matter, another man's
last hour, have themselves been taken by surprise. Ay! and all those
others, in their pleasant places: those who doated on a Capreae like
[210] Tiberius, on their gardens, on the baths: Pythagoras and
Socrates, who reasoned so closely upon immortality: Alexander, who
used the lives of others as though his own should last for ever--he
and his mule-driver alike now!--one upon another. Well-nigh the
whole court of Antoninus is extinct. Panthea and Pergamus sit no
longer beside the sepulchre of their lord. The watchers over
Hadrian's dust have slipped from his sepulchre.--It were jesting to
stay longer. Did they sit there still, would the dead feel it? or
feeling it, be glad? or glad, hold those watchers for ever? The time
must come when they too shall be aged men and aged women, and
decease, and fail from their places; and what shift were there then
for imperial service? This too is but the breath of the tomb, and a
skinful of dead men's blood.

"Think again of those inscriptions, which belong not to one soul
only, but to whole families: Eschatos tou idiou genous:+ He was the last
of his race. Nay! of the burial of whole cities: Helice, Pompeii: of
others, whose very burial place is unknown.

"Thou hast been a citizen in this wide city. Count not for how long,
nor repine; since that which sends thee hence is no unrighteous
judge, no tyrant, but Nature, who brought thee hither; as when a
player leaves the stage at the bidding of the conductor who hired
him. Sayest thou, 'I have not played five acts'? True! but in [211]
human life, three acts only make sometimes an entire play. That is
the composer's business, not thine. Withdraw thyself with a good
will; for that too hath, perchance, a good will which dismisseth thee
from thy part."

The discourse ended almost in darkness, the evening having set in
somewhat suddenly, with a heavy fall of snow. The torches, made
ready to do him a useless honour, were of real service now, as the
emperor was solemnly conducted home; one man rapidly catching light
from another--a long stream of moving lights across the white Forum,
up the great stairs, to the palace. And, in effect, that night
winter began, the hardest that had been known for a lifetime. The
wolves came from the mountains; and, led by the carrion scent,
devoured the dead bodies which had been hastily buried during the
plague, and, emboldened by their meal, crept, before the short day
was well past, over the walls of the farmyards of the Campagna. The
eagles were seen driving the flocks of smaller birds across the dusky
sky. Only, in the city itself the winter was all the brighter for
the contrast, among those who could pay for light and warmth. The
habit-makers made a great sale of the spoil of all such furry
creatures as had escaped wolves and eagles, for presents at the
Saturnalia; and at no time had the winter roses from Carthage seemed
more lustrously yellow and red.

NOTES

188. +Spenser, Shepheardes Calendar, October, 61-66.

200. +Transliteration: Hôsper epigraphas chronôn kai holôn ethnôn.
Pater's Translation: "the sepulchral titles of ages and whole
peoples."

202. +Homer, Iliad VI.146-48.

202. +Transliteration: Earos epigignetai hôrê. Translation: "born in
springtime." Homer, Iliad VI.147.

210. +Transliteration: Eschatos tou idiou genous. Translation: "He
was the last of his race."