Chapter The Last
WHEREIN ALL THINGS CEASE LETTER FROM GLAUCUS TO SALLUST, TEN YEARS AFTERTHE DESTRUCTION OF POMPEII.
'Athens.
GLAUCUS to his beloved Sallust--greeting and health!--You request me tovisit you at Rome--no, Sallust, come rather to me at Athens! I haveforsworn the Imperial City, its mighty tumult and hollow joys. In myown land henceforth I dwell for ever. The ghost of our departedgreatness is dearer to me than the gaudy life of your loud prosperity.There is a charm to me which no other spot can supply, in the porticoeshallowed still by holy and venerable shades. In the olive-groves ofIlyssus I still hear the voice of poetry--on the heights of Phyle, theclouds of twilight seem yet the shrouds of departed freedom--theheralds--the heralds--of the morrow that shall come! You smile at myenthusiasm, Sallust!--better be hopeful in chains than resigned to theirglitter. You tell me you are sure that I cannot enjoy life in thesemelancholy haunts of a fallen majesty. You dwell with rapture on theRoman splendors, and the luxuries of the imperial court. MySallust--"non sum qualis eram"--I am not what I was! The events of mylife have sobered the bounding blood of my youth. My health has neverquite recovered its wonted elasticity ere it felt the pangs of disease,and languished in the damps of a criminal's dungeon. My mind has nevershaken off the dark shadow of the Last Day of Pompeii--the horror andthe desolation of that awful ruin!--Our beloved, our remembered Nydia! Ihave reared a tomb to her shade, and I see it every day from the windowof my study. It keeps alive in me a tender recollection--a notunpleasing sadness--which are but a fitting homage to her fidelity, andthe mysteriousness of her early death. Ione gathers the flowers, but myown hand wreathes them daily around the tomb. She was worthy of a tombin Athens!
'You speak of the growing sect of the Christians in Rome. Sallust, toyou I may confide my secret; I have pondered much over that faith--Ihave adopted it. After the destruction of Pompeii, I met once more withOlinthus--saved, alas! only for a day, and falling afterwards a martyrto the indomitable energy of his zeal. In my preservation from the lionand the earthquake he taught me to behold the hand of the unknown God!I listened--believed--adored! My own, my more than ever beloved Ione,has also embraced the creed!--a creed, Sallust, which, shedding lightover this world, gathers its concentrated glory, like a sunset, over thenext! We know that we are united in the soul, as in the flesh, for everand for ever! Ages may roll on, our very dust be dissolved, the earthshrivelled like a scroll; but round and round the circle of eternityrolls the wheel of life--imperishable--unceasing! And as the earth fromthe sun, so immortality drinks happiness from virtue, which is the smileupon the face of God! Visit me, then, Sallust; bring with you thelearned scrolls of Epicurus, Pythagoras, Diogenes; arm yourself fordefeat; and let us, amidst the groves of Academus, dispute, under asurer guide than any granted to our fathers, on the mighty problem ofthe true ends of life and the nature of the soul.
'Ione--at that name my heart yet beats!--Ione is by my side as I write:I lift my eyes, and meet her smile. The sunlight quivers over Hymettus:and along my garden I hear the hum of the summer bees. Am I happy, askyou? Oh, what can Rome give me equal to what I possess at Athens? Here,everything awakens the soul and inspires the affections--the trees, thewaters, the hills, the skies, are those of Athens!--fair, thoughmourning-mother of the Poetry and the Wisdom of the World. In my hall Isee the marble faces of my ancestors. In the Ceramicus, I survey theirtombs! In the streets, I behold the hand of Phidias and the soul ofPericles. Harmodius, Aristogiton--they are everywhere--but in ourhearts!--in mine, at least, they shall not perish! If anything can makeme forget that I am an Athenian and not free, it is partly thesoothing--the love--watchful, vivid, sleepless--of Ione--a love that hastaken a new sentiment in our new creed--a love which none of our poets,beautiful though they be, had shadowed forth in description; for mingledwith religion, it partakes of religion; it is blended with pure andunworldly thoughts; it is that which we may hope to carry througheternity, and keep, therefore, white and unsullied, that we may notblush to confess it to our God! This is the true type of the dark fableof our Grecian Eros and Psyche--it is, in truth, the soul asleep in thearms of love. And if this, our love, support me partly against thefever of the desire for freedom, my religion supports me more; forwhenever I would grasp the sword and sound the shell, and rush to a newMarathon (but Marathon without victory), I feel my despair at thechilling thought of my country's impotence--the crushing weight of theRoman yoke, comforted, at least, by the thought that earth is but thebeginning of life--that the glory of a few years matters little in thevast space of eternity--that there is no perfect freedom till the chainsof clay fall from the soul, and all space, all time, become its heritageand domain. Yet, Sallust, some mixture of the soft Greek blood stillmingles with my faith. I can share not the zeal of those who see crimeand eternal wrath in men who cannot believe as they. I shudder not atthe creed of others. I dare not curse them--I pray the Great Father toconvert. This lukewarmness exposes me to some suspicion amongst theChristians: but I forgive it; and, not offending openly the prejudicesof the crowd, I am thus enabled to protect my brethren from the dangerof the law, and the consequences of their own zeal. If moderation seemto me the natural creature of benevolence, it gives, also, the greatestscope to beneficence.
'Such, then, O Sallust! is my life--such my opinions. In this manner Igreet existence and await death. And thou, glad-hearted and kindlypupil of Epicurus, thou... But come hither, and see what enjoyments,what hopes are ours--and not the splendor of imperial banquets, nor theshouts of the crowded circus, nor the noisy forum, nor the glitteringtheatre, nor the luxuriant gardens, nor the voluptuous baths ofRome--shall seem to thee to constitute a life of more vivid anduninterrupted happiness than that which thou so unreasonably pitiest asthe career of Glaucus the Athenian!--Farewell!'
Nearly Seventeen Centuries had rolled away when the City of Pompeii wasdisinterred from its silent tomb, all vivid with undimmed hues; itswalls fresh as if painted yesterday--not a hue faded on the rich mosaicof its floors--in its forum the half-finished columns as left by theworkman's hand--in its gardens the sacrificial tripod--in its halls thechest of treasure--in its baths the strigil--in its theatres the counterof admission--in its saloons the furniture and the lamp--in itstriclinia the fragments of the last feast--in its cubicula the perfumesand the rouge of faded beauty--and everywhere the bones and skeletons ofthose who once moved the springs of that minute yet gorgeous machine ofluxury and of life! In the house of Diomed, in the subterranean vaults,twenty skeletons (one of a babe) were discovered in one spot by thedoor, covered by a fine ashen dust, that had evidently been waftedslowly through the apertures, until it had filled the whole space.There were jewels and coins, candelabra for unavailing light, and winehardened in the amphorae for a prolongation of agonized life. The sand,consolidated by damps, had taken the forms of the skeletons as in acast; and the traveler may yet see the impression of a female neck andbosom of young and round proportions--the trace of the fated Julia! Itseems to the inquirer as if the air had been gradually changed into asulphurous vapor; the inmates of the vaults had rushed to the door, tofind it closed and blocked up by the scoria without, and in theirattempts to force it, had been suffocated with the atmosphere.
In the garden was found a skeleton with a key by its bony hand, and nearit a bag of coins. This is believed to have been the master of thehouse--the unfortunate Diomed, who had probably sought to escape by thegarden, and been destroyed either by the vapors or some fragment ofstone. Beside some silver vases lay another skeleton, probably of aslave.
The houses of Sallust and of Pansa, the Temple of Isis, with thejuggling concealments behind the statues--the lurking-place of its holyoracles--are now bared to the gaze of the curious. In one of thechambers of that temple was found a huge skeleton with an axe beside it:two walls had been pierced by the axe--the victim could penetrate nofarther. In the midst of the city was found another skeleton, by theside of which was a heap of coins, and many of
the mystic ornaments ofthe fane of Isis. Death had fallen upon him in his avarice, and Calenusperished simultaneously with Burbo! As the excavators cleared onthrough the mass of ruin, they found the skeleton of a man literallysevered in two by a prostrate column; the skull was of so striking aconformation, so boldly marked in its intellectual as well as its worsephysical developments, that it has excited the constant speculation ofevery itinerant believer in the theories of Spurzheim who has gazed uponthat ruined palace of the mind. Still, after the lapse of ages, thetraveler may survey that airy hall within whose cunning galleries andelaborate chambers once thought, reasoned, dreamed, and sinned, the soulof Arbaces the Egyptian.
Viewing the various witnesses of a social system which has passed fromthe world for ever--a stranger, from that remote and barbarian Islewhich the Imperial Roman shivered when he named, paused amidst thedelights of the soft Campania and composed this history!
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