The Portable Roman Reader (Portable Library) (70 page)

Farewell; and when, like me, o‘erwhelm’d with care.
You to your own
Aquinum
shall repair,
To take a mouthful of sweet Country air,
Be mindful of your Friend; and send me word,
What Joys your Fountains and cool Shades afford:
Then, to assist your Satyrs, I will come;
And add new Venom, when you write of
Rome.

(130 A.D.—524 A.D.)

EDITOR’S NOTE

 

 

 

 

T
HE causes of the slow decline of the Roman Empire are beyond the province of the purely literary historian; but its effects are plain in a kind of listlessness. In an attempt to stop the economic rot, imperial edicts bound the subjects of the Empire to follow in their fathers’ callings; the Empire became one great, stratified serfdom. Under the early Empire, Tacitus had put into the mouth of a barbarian the great challenge to the boast of the
PaxRomana
:
“Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant”
—“They make a desert and call it peace.” Now it might be said that Rome made a prison and called it peace. Slavery is fatal to inventiveness, because it is so easy to let the slaves do the work; for instance, the Romans never learned to tack a ship, and they never made much use even of the water mill, which had been invented by the Alexandrine Greeks. The only expedient that Rome was able to invent was more servitude. The desperate expedient worked, for a time; bureaucracy and serfdom kept the wheels turning slowly. As one watches the Empire creak downhill, one is reminded of E. M. Forster’s fantasy, “The Machine Stops,” a beehive society where all wants were supplied by one vast machine; when the machine began to break down here and there, nobody knew what to do about it.

A few works of the declining Empire suggest a kind of too early spring, a budding of the romanticism which was to flower in the Middle Ages.
The Golden Ass
of Apuleius, with its witches and enchantments, has the real romantic feeling. The episode of Cupid and Psyche —which means Love and the Soul—is a foreshadowing of allegory, especially the allegory of Love, which was one of the dominant forms of the Middle Ages; while the underlying idea, that the Soul betrays Love and regains him through suffering, is one which (though Apuleius would have rejected this indignantly) could hardly have occurred to a pagan before the coming of Christianity.

Then there is that haunting poem, the “Pervigilium Veneris,” or “The Vigil of Venus.” In form it marks the beginning of the re-emergence of the old native accentual rhythm. It is written in a long trochaic line, in which the normal stress accent coincides with the verse beat much oftener than in the hexameter and other meters employed by the classic poets; some lines, like “
Ipsa gemmis purpurantem pingit annum floridis,”
might be scanned by accent alone. The next step in this direction was taken by Venantius Fortunatus, who used the same measure for the earliest hymns of the Church but scanned it entirely by accent: “
Pange
,
lingua, gloriosi prœlium certaminis”—“Speak,
my tongue, and tell the battle, tell the glory of the strife.” The next step would be rhyme, but that does not appear until the Middle Ages. In spirit, the “Pervigilium Veneris” is altogether romantic. One translator has boldly rendered the title “The Eve of Saint Venus”; perhaps too boldly, for the Venus of the poem is certainly still the pagan goddess of earthly love. And yet her paganness, bound up as it is with the wildwood in springtime, is less like the Mother of Rome in Lucretius or Virgil than like the enchantress of the Tannhäuser legend. At the end the poet suddenly abandons his theme, in a manner that no classical poet would have allowed himself, to cry out in his own person and lament the loss of his gift of song. Coming where they do, those lines are one of those historic accidents that seem too perfectly symbolic to be accidental. They are like the story of the ship, at the time of the crucifixion of Christ in Jerusalem, that approached an unfamiliar shore and heard the people wailing, “Great Pan is dead!” We can guess with certainty that it was the local festival for one of the innumerable gods who died and were reborn; and yet to us, as to the sailors, it seems a lamentation for the death of God, who is All. So, in the last lines of her last great poem, we hear the voice of Rome herself crying out because the god of song has forsaken her. The romantic spirit was putting out its first buds; but there was soon to come the long, hard frost of the Dark Ages.

Christianity added little to literature, as distinct from theology. Its preoccupation with the state of the soul led to a kind of introspectiveness exemplified in the
Confessions
of Saint Augustine, which may be called the beginning of the modern novel and indeed of modern psychology; but it cannot be said that either the Church Fathers or the early writers of unrhymed hymns have much to offer apart from edification.

As was fitting, the last work of the ancient world was written by a Christian, and might have been written by a pagan, if the pagan was a Neoplatonist. Rome had fallen at last. Theodoric the Ostrogoth ruled in the city. Anicius Boëthius, who has been called the last of the Romans and the first of the Scholastics, had been a consul under King Theodoric—the names of the Republican offices persisted even yet. He was accused of conspiring with Justin, the still ruling emperor in the East, “to maintain the integrity of the Senate and restore Rome to liberty”—how familiar it sounds! He was imprisoned and ultimately put to death. While in prison he wrote his
De Consolatione Philosophiæ
, an eloquent and deeply thought consideration of good and evil in the form of a dialogue between the prisoner Boëthius and Philosophy, who comes to instruct and console him. One passage in it, concerned with the problem of man’s free will and God’s foreknowledge, contains speculations about the nature of time which are an anticipation of some of the most modern theories. Boëthius was a Christian, but he limited himself to “natural theology,” to the ideas which reason alone put within the reach of any man, Christian or pagan; the God of whom he writes might have been conceived by any of the followers of Plato who had learned to look for the One behind the many. So, as the lights go out all over the Western world, the last of the Romans tells us that among the ancients there is still to be found the consolation of philosophy.

(born 125? A.D.)

 

 

I
N A CERTAIN city lived a king and queen who had three daughters exceeding fair. But the beauty of the elder sisters, though pleasant to behold, yet passed not the measure of human praise, while such was the loveliness of the youngest that men’s speech was too poor to commend it worthily and could express it not at all. Many of the citizens and of strangers, whom the fame of this excellent vision had gathered thither, confounded by that matchless beauty, could but kiss the finger-tips of their right hands at sight of her, as in adoration to the goddess Venus herself. And soon a rumor passed through the country that she whom the blue deep had borne, forbearing her divine dignity, was even then moving among men, or that by some fresh germination from the stars, not the sea now, but the earth, had put forth a new Venus, endued with the flower of virginity.

This belief, with the fame of the maiden’s loveliness, went daily further into distant lands, so that many people were drawn together to behold that glorious model of the age. Men sailed no longer to Paphos, to Cnidus or Cythera, to the presence of the goddess Venus: her sacred rites were neglected, her images stood uncrowned, the cold ashes were left to disfigure her forsaken altars. It was to a maiden that men’s prayers were offered, to a human countenance they looked, in propitiating so great a godhead: when the girl went forth in the morning they strewed flowers on her way, and the victims proper to that unseen goddess were presented as she passed along. This conveyance of divine worship to a mortal kindled meantime the anger of the true Venus. “Lo! now the ancient parent of nature,” she cried, “the fountain of all elements! Behold me, Venus, benign mother of the world, sharing my honours with a mortal maiden, while my name, built up in heaven, is profaned by the mean things of earth! Shall a perishable woman bear my image about with her? In vain did the shepherd of Ida prefer me! Yet shall she have little joy, whosoever she be, of her usurped and unlawful loveliness!” Thereupon she called to her that winged, bold boy, of evil ways, who wanders armed by night through men’s houses, spoiling their marriages; and stirring yet more by her speech his inborn wantonness, she led him to the city, and showed him Psyche as she walked.

“I pray thee,” she said, “give thy mother a full revenge. Let this maid become the slave of an unworthy love.” Then, embracing him closely, she departed to the shore and took her throne upon the crest of the wave. And lo! at her unuttered will, her ocean-servants are in waiting: the daughters of Nereus are there singing their song, and Portunus, and Salacia, and the tiny charioteer of the dolphin, with a host of Tritons leaping through the billows. And one blows softly his sounding sea-shell, another spreads a silken web against the sun, a third presents the mirror to the eyes of his mistress, while the others swim side by side below, drawing her chariot. Such was the escort of Venus as she went upon the sea.

Psyche meantime, aware of her loveliness, had no fruit thereof. All people regarded and admired, but none sought her in marriage. It was but as upon the finished work of the craftsman that they gazed upon that divine likeness. Her sisters, less fair than she, were happily wedded. She, even as a widow, sitting at home, wept over her desolation, hating in her heart the beauty in which all men were pleased.

And the king, supposing that the gods were angry, inquired of the oracle of Apollo, and Apollo answered him thus: “Let the damsel be placed on the top of a certain mountain, adorned as for the bed of marriage and of death. Look not for a son-in-law of mortal birth; but for that evil serpent-thing, by reason of whom even the gods tremble and the shadows of Styx are afraid.”