Chapter V: Part I: I (4)

"_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 as I 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 a fashion 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 in the 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 some _palæstra_ or 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's curiosity became keener at every step, the mysterious Publius leading him on by the hand without a word. Doors of _exedræ_, 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 the _elaiothesion_, or place where the ancient wrestlers used to rub themselves over with oil.

From behind these columns could be seen the _ephebeion_, 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 ludos Inter
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 the _ephebeion_; 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 outstretched 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."

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 to what 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. "A spoiled 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 that letter 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?'"

"This _foie gras_ with 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 frankly what 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 in _foie 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," assevered the 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 word _homo_ with 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 style _is_ more 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--waxed wroth. 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 much _foie gras_ and 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.

XIV

Together the pair went down the alley of cypresses leading to the sea. The moon-path of sensitive silver on the waters ran up to the horizon, and waves were breaking against a chalk cliff. At the end of the alley there was a semicircular seat. Above it the huntress Artemis, in short tunic, with crescented hair, quiver on shoulder, and two deer-hounds at her feet, looked down on the two young people.

They sat down together. Arsinoë pointed out the hill of the Acropolis, so distant that the columns of the Parthenon could hardly be distinguished; and took up the thread of conversations started at their former meetings--

"See how beautiful it is!... And you would destroy that, Julian?"

Making no reply, he stared on the ground.

"I have thought much over what you said to me the last time we met, concerning this humility of yours," continued Arsinoë gently. "Was Alexander son of Philip of Macedon humble? And nevertheless is he not great and splendid?"

Julian said nothing.

"And Brutus, Brutus the stabber of Cæsar! Had Brutus turned the left cheek when struck on the right, do you think he would have been more sublime? Or, indeed, perhaps you consider him a criminal, you Galileans? Why can I not help thinking sometimes, Julian, that you are a hypocrite; and that these black habiliments are not your body's true raiment?"

She turned brusquely towards his moon-lit face and regarded him steadfastly.

"Arsinoë, what do you want of me?" murmured Julian, whose cheek was very pale.

"I want you to be frankly my foe!" exclaimed the young girl. "You must not pass by like this, without telling me what you are. Sometimes I dream that it would be better if Rome and Athens were utterly ruined! Better burn a corpse than leave it unburied! And all our friends here--grammarians, rhetoricians--poets who write Imperial eulogies--all these are the rotting body of Greece and Rome. In their company one grows afraid, as among the shroudless dead.... Oh, you may triumph, Galileans! Soon corpses and ruins are all that will remain on earth!... And you, Julian.... But no!... It is impossible! I do not believe that you are with them and against Hellas--against me!..."

Julian sprang up before her, pale and mute, longing to burst away. She held him back.

"Tell me that you are my enemy," she said with heart-broken challenge in her voice.

"Arsinoë!... Why----"

"Tell me all!... I must know. Do you not feel how near we are? Or are you indeed afraid to speak?"

"In two days I leave Athens," murmured Julian.

"Why?--Where are you going?"

"The Emperor has recalled me to Court--to die perhaps. I may now be looking at you for the last time."

"Julian, you do not believe in Him?" cried Arsinoë, seeking to read the eyes of the monk.

"Speak lower!"

He rose, and striding round cautiously explored the dusty road silvered by the moon, the bushes, and even the sea, as if afraid to see sudden-rising spies from the Emperor. Reassured, he returned and sat down. Leaning one hand heavily on the marble he brought his lips close to the ear of Arsinoë--so near that she felt his warm breath--muttering rapidly--

"Believe in _Him_?... Listen, girl! I say to you now what I have never dared to say even to myself. I hate the Galilean!... But I have lied as long as I can remember. Lying has soaked into my soul, or clung to it, as this black vestment clings to my body. You remember the poisoned shirt of Nessus; Hercules snatched it off with pieces of his own flesh and it slew him, all the same. I--I too shall perish wearing this Galilean lie!"

He pronounced each word with painful effort. Arsinoë gazed at him. His face, changed by suffering and hatred, became the face of a stranger.

"Be calm, friend!" she murmured. "Tell me all. I shall understand you better than anyone else."

"I should like to be able to speak, but speech is a power I have lost," sneered Julian. "I have kept silence too long. Do you understand, Arsinoë? It is all over with him who has once fallen into their clutches! These good and humble men deform him to such a degree--teach him so thoroughly to lie and to dissimulate--that it becomes impossible ever to stand erect and manful again!"

The blood rushed to his forehead, swelling the veins, and through clenched teeth he muttered--

"Cowardice! Foul Galilean cowardice! this--to hate your enemy as I hate Constantius, and to pardon him, to crouch at his feet, cringe like a serpent, to supplicate him in the humble Christian manner: 'A year, grant your weak-witted slave, Julian, another year; and then do with him as it may please you and your counsellors, O well-beloved of God!' What baseness!"

"No, Julian," protested Arsinoë, "you will conquer! Deception is your strength.... Julian, do you remember Æsop's fable, The Ass in the Lion's Skin? In this affair of yours the story is reversed; the lion is in the ass's skin, and the hero in a monkish habit! And how they will shrink affrighted when you suddenly show your talons! What joy and what terror! Tell me, you long for power?"

"Power!" cried Julian, intoxicated at the sound of the word and inhaling with deep breaths the fresh air of night--"power!... oh, only for a year, a few months, a few days! And I would teach them, I would teach all these crawling and venomous creatures what means their Master's word, 'Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's'; I swear by the Sun-god they should render to Cæsar what is his!"

He raised his head, his eyes flashing with rage and pride and renewed youth. Arsinoë gazed on him with a smile. But his head soon fell. He sank back on the bench and crossing his arms on his breast in monkish fashion he faltered--

"No, no; why nurse empty dreams? That can never be. I shall perish. Anger will stifle me. Listen; every night after passing the day on my knees in churches, bowed over relics, I go home broken with fatigue; I fling myself on the bed and sob; yes, bite my own flesh, to avoid crying out with pain. Oh, you cannot know yet, Arsinoë, this Galilean horror and infection in which I have agonised for twenty years without escaping by death. We Christians take a deal of killing,--worms that live on even when cut in pieces! At first I used to seek consolation in the teachings of the diviners and philosophers. It was hopeless. I follow neither the one nor the other. I am wicked and I wish to be wickeder still. To be strong and terrible as the Demon, my only brother.... But why, why can I not forget that there is beauty in the world; why, O cruel one, did you dawn upon my life?"

With a quick spontaneous movement Arsinoë flung her bare arms round Julian's neck, drew him to her so strongly, so closely, that he felt the whole freshness of her body, murmuring--

"And if I did come towards you, O young man, what if it were as a sibyl to prophesy you glory? You alone are alive among the dead! Splendour is yours! What matters it to me that your wings are no swan's wings, but wings of the black and lost, your talons, talons of a bird of prey? My love is for all the revolted, the reprobate, the rejected--you understand me, Julian? I love the proud and solitary eagles better than any stainless swan. Only ... be prouder yet, be wickeder yet! Dare up to the height of your ambition! Lie without shame; better lie than be humiliated. Fear not hate; it is the impetus of your wings. Come, shall we make an alliance? You shall give me power, I will give you beauty. Are you willing, Julian?"

Again through the light folds of her antique peplum, as once in the _palæstra_, he saw the breathing image of the huntress Artemis; it seemed that divine body shone through, golden and tender.

His head reeled in the lunar shadow enveloping them. Those haughty lips laughingly approached his own.

For the last time he mused. "I must tear myself away. She does not love me. She will never love me. Her love is only for power."

But immediately he added to himself, with a faint smile: "Well, let it be so! I consent to be duped!"

The chill of the strange and insatiate kiss of Arsinoë shot to his heart like the chill of death. It seemed as if Artemis herself, in the translucence of the moon, had descended towards him, embraced him, and mocked him, and like a beam of moonlight fled away.

* * * * *

On the following morning Basil of Cæsarea and Gregory of Nazianzen came across Julian in a basilica in Athens. He was kneeling in prayer. The two friends gazed at him, surprised. Never had they seen upon his features such an expression of rapt serenity.

"Brother," murmured Basil to Gregory, "we have sinned; he whom we inwardly accused is a righteous man."

Gregory shook his head.

"May the Lord pardon me if I am deceived," he said slowly, his piercing eye still on Julian. "But remember, Basil, how often the Devil himself, the father of lying, has appeared to men in guise of an angel!"

XV

On the base of a dolphin-shaped lamp were ranged the curling irons of a barber. The lamp-light was growing pale, for rays of morning, falling through silken window-curtains, were gradually filling the sleeping chamber with deep violet hues. The curtains were dyed in the richest hyacinthine purple of Tyre.

"'Hypostasis,' 'hypostasis'? What is the meaning of the divine hypostasis, or essence, or personality, of the Trinity? No human being can form any conception. I myself haven't slept a wink in thinking over it the whole night. I arrived at no conclusion but an atrocious headache. Boy, give me towels and soap!"

So spoke a personage with a tall headdress like a mitre and the pontifical aspect of a high-priest or Asiatic tyrant. He was chief barber and wig-maker in attendance on the sacred person of Constantius. The razor in his skilful hands was flitting, with an incomparable grace and lightness, over the Imperial chin. He was engaged upon a sacred mystery. In attendance on each side were innumerable _cubicularii_, slaves holding vases, essences, oils, and napkins, and two youths bearing fans. Supervising all these, Eusebius, grand chamberlain of the private apartments, stood by. He was the most powerful man in the Empire.

During the ceremony of barbification, as an emperor's shaving must be called, the two youths refreshed the illustrious patient by means of great fans, each six-winged like the seraphim, or the _ripides_ with which deacons fan away flies from a sacramental chalice, during the intoning of the liturgy. The barber had scarcely finished the Emperor's right cheek and was beginning the left, which had been anointed with an Arabian essence named "the foam of Aphrodite." Leaning to the ear of Constantius he whispered cautiously:

"Ah! Well-beloved of God, your universal intelligence alone can determine what this hypostasis, this mysterious personality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost may mean. Don't listen to the bishops! Act as pleases yourself, and not as it may please them. But Athanasius, that patriarch of Alexandria, must be punished as a blasphemous rebel. Almighty God, the Creator Himself, will instruct your Holiness as to what, and in what manner, your subjects ought to believe. In my humble opinion the Arians are perfectly right in asserting that there was a time when the 'Son' did not exist. And so consubstantiality...."

But at this moment Constantius was staring at himself in the great polished silver mirror, and rubbing his hand over the silky new shaven region on his right cheek. He interrupted--

"I don't think that's very smooth!--eh! I think you might go over it again. What were you saying to me about consubstantiality?"

The barber, who had received a talent of gold from the Court bishops Ursatius and Valentine to prepare the Emperor for the new profession of faith, was murmuring insinuatingly in the ear of Constantius and wielding his razor with the most persuasive delicacy, when at this moment the chief of the _silentiarii_, Paul, surnamed Catena, approached the Emperor.

He was so called because his infamous system of reports enwound any chosen victim in chains well-nigh indissoluble. His effeminate face was beardless and handsome, and judged by externals he seemed the angel of humility. His dark eyes were full of languor; his walk, a noiselessly graceful feline motion. He wore crosswise over the shoulder a wide dark blue ribbon--sign of special Imperial favour.

Paul Catena with a subtle and authoritative gesture waved the barber away, and whispered in the ear of Constantius--

"A letter from Julian! Intercepted to-night. Deign to read it."

Constantius greedily snatched the letter from the hands of Paul, opened it, and read. Disappointed, he muttered--

"Mere trash--trifles; he sends a present of a hundred grapes to a sophist and writes the praises of the fruit and of the number 'a hundred.'"

"Ah! a ruse!" said Catena.

"Really?" asked Constantius; "what proofs are there?"

"None."

"Then he's either exceedingly cunning or indeed----"

"What does your Eternity mean?"

"Or, in fact, he is innocent."

"As your Majesty pleases," stammered Paul.

"_As I please?_ I desire to be just, simply just. Are you not aware of that? I must have proofs...."

"Wait; we shall find them."

Another informer came near, a young Persian named Mercurius, court-pantler, little more than a lad. He was feared not less than Paul Catena and had been pleasantly nicknamed "Chief Diviner of Dreams." If the prophetic dream could be twisted into any meaning even remotely unfavourable for the person of the Emperor, Mercurius would make careful notes of it and hasten to make a report. Many a victim had paid with their goods and their prospects for the imprudence of dreaming what they had no business to dream; and, aware of this, prudent courtiers would declare themselves martyrs to insomnia, enviers of the legendary dwellers in Atlantis, who, according to Plato, are lapt in slumber without visions. The Persian signed to a distance two Ethiopian eunuchs who were knotting the laces of the Emperor's green and gilt shoes. He kissed the feet of the sovereign, and as it were basked a moment in his eyes, like a dog who affectionately gazes up for his master's orders.

"May your Eternity forgive me," whispered little Mercury, "I could not refrain from running to your presence. Gaudentius has had a bad dream! You appeared to him in a torn chlamys and crowned with blasted ears of corn...."

"What does that mean?"

"The blasted ears announce famine, and the torn chlamys ... I dare not...."

"Sickness?"

"Worse still, I'm afraid, if possible. Gaudentius' wife confessed to me that he had consulted the augurs. God knows what they told him!"

"Well, well! We will discuss it. Come again this evening."

"No! I will come this afternoon. Permit me to mention a slight matter, something not so grievous.... There is also the matter of the table-cloths...."

"What table-cloths?"

"Have you forgotten? At a supper in Aquitaine the table was spread with two table-covers with purple borders--borders as wide as those on the Imperial chlamys!"

"Do you mean to say they were more than two fingers wide? Remember, I've authorised the width of two fingers."

"Ah, much, much wider I fear! It was a regular Imperial chlamys. Can such sacrilege be permitted?"

Mercury did not succeed however in reciting all his reports:

"At Delphi a monster has been born--four ears, four eyes, two snouts, all covered with hair. The augurs say it is a bad omen--that the Holy Empire will be split up...."

"We shall see! we shall see! Write it all down in due order and submit it to me."

The Emperor went on with his morning toilet. He consulted his mirror again, and with a fine camel's-hair brush took up a morsel of rouge from the casket of filigree silver, shaped like a reliquary and crowned by a little cross, at his elbow. Constantius was devoutly religious; enamelled crosses and the monogram of Christ adorned every trinket in his private rooms. Exquisite and expensive paint called _purpurissima_, extracted from the scum on the purple mollusc while in a state of ebullition, was specially prepared for him. Constantius adroitly spread a faint flush of this over his withered brown cheek. From the room called Porphyria, where the regal vestments were kept in a pentagonal wardrobe, eunuchs bore forth the Imperial dalmatic. It was stiff, heavy with gold, encrusted with precious stones, and with lions and dragons embroidered on its amethystine purples.

In the main hall of the palace on that day was to be held the great Arian council. The Emperor slowly took his way thither along a gallery of pierced and fretted marble. Palace guards, or palatines, two-deep formed a long lane, mute as statues and holding lances fourteen cubits long crossed above the head of their master, as he paced in state between them. Constantine's banner of cloth of gold, the _Labarum_, surmounted by the monogram of Christ, shone rustling behind, borne by the officer of the Imperial largesses (_comes sacrarum largitionum_). Mute body-guards (_silentiarii_) heralded the procession, imposing silence on everyone they met.

In the gallery the Emperor encountered the Empress Eusebia Aurelia. She was a mature woman with a pale and weary face, delicate and noble features, a mischievous raillery sometimes kindling her keen eyes. Crossing her hands on the _omophorium_ covered with sapphires and heart-shaped rubies, the Empress bowed profoundly and pronounced the habitual morning salutation:

"I am come for the joy of beholding you, O spouse well-beloved of the Lord! How has your Holiness deigned to sleep?"

Then, at a sign from her, the attendant maids of honour drew to a distance and she murmured sweetly, in a simpler and sincerer tone--

"Julian is to be received by you to-day. Receive him kindly! Don't believe these spying reports. He is a poor innocent boy. God will repay you, sire, if you grant him favour."

"You ask favour to him as a favour to yourself?"

The husband and wife exchanged a rapid glance.

"I know," she said, "you always have confidence in me; let it be so now. Julian is a faithful slave. Don't refuse me.... Be kind to him...."

And she gratified him with one of those smiles which hitherto had wielded irresistible power over the heart of Constantius.

In the portico, which was separated from the great hall by hangings (behind which the Emperor used to ensconce himself to hear what was going on at the councils), a monk, wearing a cruciform tonsure and in a hooded robe of coarsest drugget, came near. It was Julian.

"I salute my benefactor, the triumphant and glorious Emperor Augustus Constantius. May your Holiness pardon me!"

"We are happy to receive you, my son."

Julian's cousin magnanimously extended his hand to Julian's lips. Julian kissed the hand dyed with the blood of his father, of his brother, of all his relatives. Then he rose erect, pale and with sparkling eyes fixed upon his enemy. He gripped the handle of a poniard hidden under his robe. The grey eyes of the Emperor lighted with pride and cautious malice, seldom dropping their scrutiny. He was a head shorter than Julian, large-shouldered, solidly-built, and bandy-legged like an old cavalry soldier. The tight brown skin over his temples was disagreeably glossy. The thin lips were severely closed with the expression of folk that set order and punctuality above all other virtues--the expression of a pedant and a schoolmaster.

To Julian he appeared detestable. He felt an animal fury getting the better of him, and, unable to utter a word, his eyes fell and he breathed with difficulty.

Constantius smiled, imagining the young monk unable to bear the superhuman majesty of the Imperial glance. With ostentatious benevolence he continued--

"Fear nothing! Go in peace! Our kindness shall bring no danger upon you. On the contrary we shall from this day forth heap bounties on our cousin who is an orphan."

Julian bowed and proceeded into the hall of council; and the Emperor, hidden behind draperies, lent an ironic and attentive ear to the debate beginning within.