Part 8 (2/2)

LYDIE.

Tant que tu n'as aime personne plus que moi, Quand Chloe n'etait pas preferee a Lydie, J'ai vecu plus ill.u.s.tre et plus fiere qu'Ilie.

HORACE.

J'appartiens maintenant a la blonde Chloe, Qui plait par sa voix douce et son luth enjoue.

Je suis pret a mourir pour prolonger sa vie.

LYDIE.

Calais maintenant tient mon ame a.s.servie, Nous brulons tous les deux de mutuels amours, Et je mourrais deux fois pour prolonger ses jours.

HORACE.

Mais quoi! Si j'ai regret de ma premiere chaine?

Si Venus de retour sous son joug me ramene?

Si je refuse a l'autre, et te rends mon amour?

LYDIE.

Encor que Calais soit beau comme le jour, Et toi plus inconstant que la feuille inconstante, Avec toi je vivrais et je mourrais contente.

Horace was the poet of ease, Catullus of love, Propertius of pa.s.sion, Tibullus of sentiment. Ovid was the poet of pleasure. A man of means, of fas.h.i.+on, of the world, what to-day would be called a gentleman, he might have been laureate of the Empire. Corinna interfered. Corinna was his figurative muse. Whether she were one or many is uncertain, but nominally at least it was for her that he wrote the suite of feverish fancies ent.i.tled the ”Art of Love” and which were better ent.i.tled the ”Art of not Loving at all.” Subsequently, he planned a great Homeric epic. But, if Corinna inspired masterpieces, she gave him no time to complete them. She wanted her poet to herself. She refused to share him even with the G.o.ds.

It is supposed that Corinna was Julia, daughter of Augustus. Because of her eyes, more exactly because of her father's, Ovid was banished among barbarian brutes. It was rather a frightful penalty for partic.i.p.ating in the indiscretions of a woman who had always been the reverse of discreet.

Corinna, as described by Ovid, was a monster of perversity. Julia, as described by Tacitus, yielded to her nothing in that respect.

The epoch itself was strange, curiously fecund in curious things that became more curious still. Rome then, thoroughly h.e.l.lenized, had become very fair. There were green terraces and porphyry porticoes that leaned to a river on which red galleys pa.s.sed, there were bronze doors and garden roofs, glancing villas and temples more brilliant still. There were s.p.a.cious streets, a Forum curtained with silk, the glint and evocations of triumphal war. There were theatres in which a mult.i.tude could jeer at an emperor, and arenas in which an emperor could watch a mult.i.tude die. On the stage, there were tragedies, pantomime, farce. There were races in the circus and in the sacred groves, girls with the Orient in their eyes and slim waists that swayed to the crotals. Into the arenas patricians descended, in the amphitheatre were criminals from Gaul, in the Forum, philosophers from Greece. For Rome's entertainment the mountains sent lions; the deserts giraffes; there were boas from the jungles, bulls from the plains, hippopotami from the rushes of the Nile, and, above them, beasts greater than they--the Caesars.

There had been the first, memory of whose grandiose figure lingered still.

Rome recalled the unforgettable, and recalled, too, his face which incessant debauches had blanched. After him had come Augustus, a pigmy by comparison, yet otherwise more depraved. He gone, there was the spectacle of Tiberius devising infamies so monstrous that to describe them new words were coined. That being insufficient, there followed Caligula, without whom Nero, Claud, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus could never have been. It was he who gave them both inspiration and incentive.

It was he who built the Cloacus Maximus in which all Rome rolled.

Augustus had done a little digging for it himself, but hypocritically as he did everything, devising ethical laws as a cloak for turpitudes of his own. Mecaenas, his minister and lackey, divorced and remarried twenty times. Augustus repudiated his own marriages, those of his kin as well.

Suetonius said of Caligula that it was uncertain which were viler, the unions he contracted, their brevity, or their cause. With such examples, it was inevitable that commoner people united but to part, and that, insensibly, the law annulled as a caprice a clause that defined marriage as the inseparable life.[22]

Under the Caesars marriage became a temporary arrangement, abandoned and re-established as often as one liked. Seneca said that women of rank counted their years by their husbands. Juvenal said that it was in that fas.h.i.+on that they counted their days. Tertullian added that divorce was the result of marriage. Divorce, however, was not obligatory. Matrimony was. According to the Lex Pappea Poppoea, whoso at twenty-five was not married, whoso, divorced or widowed, did not remarry, whoso, though married, was childless, _ipso facto_ became a public enemy, incapable of inheriting or of serving the State. To this law--an Augustan hypocrisy--only a technical attention was paid. Men married just enough to gain a position or inherit a legacy. The next day they got a divorce. At the moment of need a child was adopted. The moment pa.s.sed the brat was disowned. As with men so with women. The univira became the many-husbanded wife, occasionally a matron with no husband at all, one who, to escape the consequences of the lex Pappea Poppoea, hired a man to loan her his name, and who, with an establishment of her own, was free to do as she liked, to imitate men at their worst, to fight like them and with them for power, to dabble in the b.l.o.o.d.y dramas of State, to climb on the throne and kill there or be killed; perhaps, less ambitiously, whipping her slaves, summoning the headsman to them, quieting her nerves with drink, appearing on the stage, in the arena even, contending as a gladiator there, and remaining a patrician meanwhile.

In those days a sin was a prayer, and a prayer, Perseus said, was an invocation at which a meretrix would blush to hear p.r.o.nounced aloud.

Religion sanctioned anything. The primal G.o.ds, supplemented with the lords and queens of other skies, had made Rome an abridgment of every superst.i.tion, the temple of every crime. Asiatic monsters, which h.e.l.lenic poetry had deodorized, landed there straight from the Orient, their native hideousness unchanged. It was only the graceful Greek myths that Rome transformed. Eros, who in Arcady seemed atiptoe, so delicately did he tread upon the tender places of the soul, acquired, behind the mask of Cupid, a maliciousness that was simian. Aphrodite, whose eyes had been lifted to the north and south, and who in Attica was draped with light, obtained as Venus the leer of the Lampsacene. Long since from Syria Astarte had arrived, as already, torn by Cilician pirates from Persia, Mithra had come, while, from Egypt, had strayed Apis from whose mouth two phalluses issued horizontally.

These were Rome's G.o.ds, the divinities about whom men and maidens a.s.sembled, and to whom pledges were made. There were others, so many, in such hordes had they come, that Petronius said they outnumbered the population. The lettered believed in them no more than we do. But, like the Athenians, they lived among a people that did. Moreover, the lettered were few. Rome, brutal at heart, sanguinary and voluptuous, fought, she did not read. She could applaud, but not create. Her literature, like her G.o.ds, her art, her corruption, had come from afar. Her own b.r.e.a.s.t.s were sterile. When she gave birth, it was to a litter of monsters, by accident to a genius, again to a poet, to Caesar and to Lucretius, the only men of letters ever born within her walls.

Meanwhile, though the Pantheon was obviously but a lupanar, the people clung piously to creeds that justified every disorder, tenaciously to G.o.ds that sanctified every vice, and fervently to Caesars that incarnated them all.

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