The mask was then dropped. Round the palace where Gallus slept armed sentinels were placed as round a prison. In the evening the prefect Barbatio, making his way in, without any pretence at ceremony, ordered him to take off the chlamys of a Cæsar and don the simple tunic and paludamentum, or ordinary cloak, of a common soldier.
On the following morning the prisoner was ordered to get into a karpenta, a little two-wheeled cart without a hood employed by minor officials on official journeys. A cold wind was blowing intermittently. Scuda according to his custom put one arm round Gallus, and with the disengaged hand gently fingered the new garment.
“Sound cloak, this—soft and warm! Better than the purple, which is a chilly affair! Why, they’ve lined this tunic with double wool!” And pushing his investigations further, Scuda slid a hand under the paludamentum, then under the tunic, and suddenly, with a laugh, drew forth the blade of a poniard, which Gallus had succeeded in concealing.
“Now that’s a mistake!” said Scuda. “Why, you might through carelessness stab yourself! What a boy you are!”
And he threw the dagger out on the road. An infinite weariness seized Gallus. He closed his eyes and felt the endearing grip of Scuda inside his arm. Was it all a nightmare?
They halted at the fortress of Pola in Istria, on the shores of the Adriatic. Some years formerly this town had been the scene of the murder of Priscus, the heroic young son of Constantine the Great.
The gloomy town was thronged with soldiers. Interminable barracks in the style of Diocletian had replaced the houses of civilians. Snow lay thickly on the roofs, the wind was moaning in deserted streets, and the sea lay rumbling below.
Gallus was led into one of these barracks and given a seat fronting the window, so that the full daylight fell upon his face. One of the Emperor’s most skilful police officers—Eustaphius,—a little wrinkled and amiable old man with the wheedling and penetrating voice of a confessor, rubbed his blue and chilly hands and began the cross-examination. Gallus, who was mortally fatigued, said everything that Eustaphius suggested he should say, but at the words “treason to the empire,” paled, and started to his feet.
“It was no doing of mine—nothing to do with me!” he stammered in dismay. “Constantia planned it all! It was she who exacted the death of Theophilus, of Clement, Domitian, and the rest! Before God, it was not I. She said nothing to me about it. I was utterly ignorant!”
Eustaphius looked at him smilingly.
“Very well,” he said, “I will duly inform the Emperor that his own sister Constantia, spouse of the late Cæsar of the East, alone is culpable.”
And turning towards the legionaries he ordered—
“The interrogatory is finished. Take him away.”
Shortly afterwards arrived the sentence of death decreed by the Emperor Constantius, who had looked on the accusation brought against his lamented sister in the light of a personal insult.
On hearing the sentence read out, Gallus lost consciousness and fell into the arms of the soldiers. Up to the last moment the poor fellow had hoped against hope. And, even now, he expected that they would at least grant him the reprieve of a few days, or hours, in which to prepare for death. But a rumour had gone round that the soldiers of the “Steadfast Sixteenth Flavian” legion were insubordinate, and planning to free Gallus; so he was dragged off incontinently to execution.
It was the early dawn. The snow, fallen during the night, had covered the foul mud, and lay glittering in chilly sunshine, its dazzling reflection lighting up the ceiling of the small room whither Gallus had been conducted.
The authorities distrusted the soldiery, who almost all liked and pitied the disgraced Cæsar; so for executioner they had chosen a butcher, who sometimes officiated in disposing of the thieves and brigands of the neighbourhood. This barbarian, unused to a Roman sword, had brought to the block a great double-edged axe which served him in the slaughter-yard. The butcher was a stupid, handsome, and sleepy slave. The name of the condemned man had been concealed from him and he believed he was only to behead a common thief. Before the last scene, Gallus became calm and humble, allowing his gaolers to do what they listed. Like a child, he wept and struggled when about to be placed by force in a bath, but once in he found the water pleasant.
But at sight of the butcher sharpening his axe he shivered in all his limbs. A barber then carefully shaved off the fine golden hair, always the beauty and pride of the young Cæsar. In returning from the barber’s room Gallus, finding himself alone for a moment with the tribune Scuda, unexpectedly dropped on his knees before the cruellest of his foes.
“Save me, Scuda! I know you can do it! Tonight I have received a message from the Flavian legion. Let me get a word with them. They will deliver me! I have thirty talents hidden in the temple at Mycenæ. Nobody knows it. I’ll give them to you,—and more, much more! The soldiers love me. I’ll make you my friend, my brother, my co-regent ... fellow-Cæsar!”
Mad with hope, he embraced the tribune’s knees, and Scuda, shuddering, felt the lips of the Cæsar on his hands. He made no answer, and, smiling, slowly freed himself from the embrace. Gallus was ordered to undress. He objected to take off his sandals, his feet being unclean. When he was almost naked the butcher began to bind his hands behind his back, thief-fashion, and Scuda hastened to help him. When Gallus felt the touch of the tribune’s fingers, in a fit of fury he escaped from the grasp of the headsman, seized Scuda by the throat, and endeavoured to strangle him. In his naked activity he seemed suddenly transformed into some sinewy and terrible young tiger.
The choking tribune was snatched from the grapple, and the prisoner’s feet and hands were securely bound. At this moment in the barrack court resounded the shouts of the Flavian soldiers—"Long live Cæsar Gallus!” and the murderers hurried on with their job. A great section of a tree-trunk was rolled in for a block, and Gallus thrust down on his knees in front of it. Barbatio, Baïnobadois, and Apodemus gripped him by the shoulders, hands, and feet; and Scuda bowed the head against the block, weighing down that vainly resisting skull with all his might. Chilled by emotion, his fingers felt the newly-shorn pate still moist with soap. The butcher proved an unskilful headsman. His axe slashed the neck, but the blow fell awry. He raised the hatchet a second time, crying to Scuda—
“More to the right! Hold the head more to the right!”
Gallus struggled and roared like a half-stunned bull. Nearer and nearer the cries of the soldiery resounded:
“Long live Gallus Cæsar!”
The butcher heaved his handle high and smote. A stream of blood gushed over the hands of Scuda; the head fell with a thud, and rolled away over the stone flags.
At that moment the legionaries burst into the hall. Barbatio, Apodemus, and Scuda hurried to the opposite door, the headsman remaining at a loss; but Scuda muttered in his ear—
“Take Cæsar’s head, so that the legionaries may not recognise the body. It’s a question of life or death for us all!”
“He was not a thief then?” faltered the executioner, in amazement.
He found it difficult to carry this shaven head; at first he slid it under an arm, but it became uncomfortable; then, slipping his hooked thumb into the mouth, he managed to bear off the skull of him before whom so many heads had once bowed down.
* * *
Julian, on learning the death of his brother, said quietly to himself—
“Now comes my turn!”
* * *
XII
It was at Athens that Julian was about to take his vows and finally become a monk. One fresh spring morning, before the sun was up, Julian, issuing from the church where he had officiated at matins, followed for a few miles the banks of the Ilissus, in the shadow of plane-trees and wild vine. Not far from Athens he had lighted upon a solitary place, on the edge of a torrent which poured, like a scarf of silver, upon a sandy bottom. Thence he used often to gaze with wonder through the mists at the ruddy cliff of the Acropolis and the haughty lines of the Parthenon,
half-illumined by the dawn.
On this particular morning Julian took off his shoes and walked along the reaches of the Ilissus barefoot. The air was full of the smell of flowers and of the rich-scented muscat grape—that aroma in which there is a foretaste of wine, faint as the promise of first love, stealing into the soul of youth.
Julian, with feet in the water, sat down upon a platan-root, opened the Phædrus and began to read at the passage in the dialogue in which Socrates says to Phædrus: “Let us go this way, and follow the course of the Ilissus; we will choose a solitary place and there sit down.
“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—
The Death of the Gods Page 9