CHAPTER IX.
Directly after, Ausonius and Saturninus entered the Praefectorian tentfrom the _Via Principalis_, while Herculanus, coming from the rear,passed in with them. The host shared his seat on the couch with his twoguests.
He was a man of fifty-two, but his stately figure showed few signs ofapproaching age, and his noble face lacked none of the characteristicsof the patrician Roman in the modelling of the forehead, nose, andfinely arched brows.
But the mouth had smiled so often--probably far too often in selfcomplacency--that it had forgotten how to close with firm decision; itwas much too weak for a man. And the light-brown eyes, so pleasant andkindly, so content with everything and everybody--and not least withAusonius--betrayed more plainly than any other feature the approach ofage; their glance had lost the fire of youth. They seemed weary, not oflife but of reading; for Ausonius had been professor, rhetorician,tutor of princes, and poet. In those days that meant a man who read animmense amount and, in default of elevating thoughts of his own,extracted with the industry of a bee the ideas of the writers of fourcenturies, tore them asunder, and put them together again in such tinyfragments that his readers and himself believed them to be new ones ofhis own and would have found it very difficult to separate the mosaicinto its borrowed portions. Passions had never furrowed this smoothface: the lines around the eyes were not graven by pain, but by thepassage of the years.
This kindly natured man, who himself saw everything on its best side,thought the whole world most admirably arranged. He believed seriouslythat all men who had not committed great crimes, and therefore deservedpunishment, fared just as well as the very, very wealthy, benevolent,and much praised Decimus Magnus Ausonius of Burdigala (Bordeaux), thedelightful city of villas; that they fared as well as Ausonius, who waspetted by all who surrounded him, and who in the opinion of hiscontemporaries--and especially his own--was the greatest poet of hisage. Even had this been true, it certainly would not have meant much.
This really amiable, kindly man, whose only fault was a little undueself-satisfaction, was now playing the part which best suited him,--farbetter than that of poet or statesman,--the part of the host who,comfortable himself, desires to make all his guests equally so. Hispleasant, cheery, friendly kindness of heart, which would fain seeeverybody happy, though of course without too much self-sacrifice,found in this _role_ its fullest expression.
"There! now go, slaves." He waved his hand to those who had againentered. "Look after yourselves--as we are doing. Go, too, my faithfulProsper: take for yourself--and give to the others--the better winefrom Rhodanus; you know it. I saw how hard it was to drag the skins upthe steep hill. Go: we will serve ourselves." He stretched himselfcomfortably on the lectus, thrusting under his head a soft downy pillowfilled with the feathers of German geese. "Give yonder amethyst gobletto the Tribune, my dear nephew, for our Illyrian Hercules must drinkdeeply! No, Saturninus, don't take the mixing vessel! The firstcup--unmixed. To the genius of the Emperor Gratianus!"
"It's lucky that the Emperor himself doesn't hear you," cried theTribune, laughing, as he put down the empty goblet. "I am neitherChristian nor pagan, only a soldier, and nobody asks about my faith.But you! Gratianus's teacher! The Emperor is zealous in the truereligion. And you drink to his genius, as though we were living in thereign of Diocletian! Are you a pagan, Prefect of Gaul?"
Ausonius glanced around to see that no slave was within hearing. Thenhe smiled. "If I were a pagan, that is, if I had not been baptized, Icertainly should not be Prefect of Gaul. The dignity is probably wortha few drops of water. They did not penetrate my skin. How could a poetforget the old gods?"
"Yes, yes, if the learned mythological allusions should be effaced fromyour verses, the brightest of the borrowed foreign feathers would beplucked from Ausonius's raven."
"Tribune!" cried the nephew angrily,--he shouted much louder than wasnecessary,--"you are speaking of the greatest Roman writer!"
"No, no," said the man thus lauded, very seriously, "there are probablytwo or three greater ones."
"Forgive me, Ausonius," said Saturninus. "I understand battles, notverses. Probably it is my own fault that yours don't suit me."
"You know too few of them," replied Herculanus reprovingly.
"I'm not of your opinion!" retorted the Illyrian, laughing. "I've neverhad much time for reading. But I sometimes ride beside your unclethrough the olive woods of Aquitania, the vineyards of the Mosella, orthe marshy forests of the Alemanni: he has an inexhaustible memory andcan repeat his verses for miles."
"Yes," the poet assented complacently, "my memory must supply the placeof imagination."
"Wouldn't it be better if you had imagination, and your readers tookpleasure in remembering what it created?" asked the soldier.
"My uncle can repeat the whole of Virgil."
"Yes, that is evident--in his verses! The reader often doesn't knowwhere Virgil and Ovid end and Ausonius begins. But Ausonius prefers torecite his own poetry."
The latter nodded pleasantly.
"That's the best thing about you. Prefect; though a little vain, likeall verse-writers, your heart is in the right place: a warm, kind heartwhich never takes offence at a friend's jest."
"I should be both stupid and contemptible if I did that."
"As a reward I'll tell you now that I owe an exquisite night to one ofyour poems--or a portion of it."
The poet, much pleased, raised himself on the lectus: "What poem?"
"Your 'Mosella.'"
"Yes, yes," replied Ausonius smiling, "I like it very much, too."
"It is divine!" Herculanus protested.
"I'm no theologian," said Saturninus, laughing, "to understand divinethings. But the most beautiful part of the poem is the description ofthe various kinds of fish in the river."
"Yes, yes," observed the author, smiling as he slowly sipped his wine,"verses eighty-two to one hundred and forty-nine: they are very pretty,especially the euphony."
"Oh, never mind the euphony. I read it in the evening, and fellasleep."
"Barbarian!" exclaimed the poet. "But in my dreams I saw before me themost delicious fish; the salm--"
"'Thee, too, I praise, O salmon, with thy roseate flesh!'"
Ausonius quoted.
"The trout."
"'Then the trout, its back besprinkled with tiny crimson stars.'
"That's what I call a fine line."
"The grayling."
"'And the swift grayling, escaping from the eye with rapid leaps!'"
"Yes, but not as you describe them, alive in the Mosella--there isnothing I enjoy eating more than a fine fish! No, I saw them before meon silver dishes, baked, broiled, and in dainty stews; and in my dreamI tasted them all. When I woke, I licked my lips and blessed Ausonius:no poet has ever given me so much pleasure."
He laughed and drained his goblet.