Part 21 (2/2)
_Lucullus._ Marcipor, let me never see that cup again! No answer, I desire. My guest pardons heavier faults. Mind that dinner be prepared for us shortly.
_Caesar._ In the meantime, Lucullus, if your health permits it, shall we walk a few paces round the villa? for I have not seen anything of the kind before.
_Lucullus._ The walls are double; the s.p.a.ce between them two feet: the materials for the most part earth and straw. Two hundred slaves, and about as many mules and oxen, brought the beams and rafters up the mountain; my architects fixed them at once in their places: every part was ready, even the wooden nails. The roof is thatched, you see.
_Caesar._ Is there no danger that so light a material should be carried off by the winds, on such an eminence?
_Lucullus._ None resists them equally well.
_Caesar._ On this immensely high mountain, I should be apprehensive of the lightning, which the poets, and I think the philosophers too, have told us strikes the highest.
_Lucullus._ The poets are right; for whatever is received as truth is truth in poetry; and a fable may ill.u.s.trate like a fact. But the philosophers are wrong, as they generally are, even in the commonest things; because they seldom look beyond their own tenets, unless through captiousness, and because they argue more than they meditate, and display more than they examine. Archimedes and Euclid are, in my opinion, after our Epicurus, the worthiest of the name, having kept apart to the demonstrable, the practical, and the useful. Many of the rest are good writers and good disputants; but unfaithful suitors of simple science, boasters of their acquaintance with G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, plagiarists and impostors. I had forgotten my roof, although it is composed of much the same materials as the philosophers'. Let the lightning fall: one handful of silver, or less, repairs the damage.
_Caesar._ Impossible! nor indeed one thousand, nor twenty, if those tapestries and pictures are consumed.
_Lucullus._ True; but only the thatch would burn. For, before the baths were tessellated, I filled the area with alum and water, and soaked the timbers and laths for many months, and covered them afterward with alum in powder, by means of liquid glue. Mithridates taught me this. Having in vain attacked with combustibles a wooden tower, I took it by stratagem, and found within it a ma.s.s of alum, which, if a great hurry had not been observed by us among the enemy in the attempt to conceal it, would have escaped our notice. I never scrupled to extort the truth from my prisoners; but my instruments were purple robes and plate, and the only wheel in my armoury destined to such purposes was the wheel of Fortune.
_Caesar._ I wish, in my campaigns, I could have equalled your clemency and humanity; but the Gauls are more uncertain, fierce, and perfidious than the wildest tribes of Caucasus; and our policy cannot be carried with us, it must be formed upon the spot. They love you, not for abstaining from hurting them, but for ceasing; and they embrace you only at two seasons--when stripes are fresh, or when stripes are imminent. Elsewhere, I hope to become the rival of Lucullus in this admirable part of virtue.
I shall never build villas, because--but what are your proportions?
Surely the edifice is extremely low.
_Lucullus._ There is only one floor; the height of the apartments is twenty feet to the cornice, five above it; the breadth is twenty-five, the length forty. The building, as you perceive, is quadrangular: three sides contain four rooms each; the other has many part.i.tions and two stories, for domestics and offices. Here is my salt-bath.
_Caesar._ A bath, indeed, for all the Nereids named by Hesiod, with room enough for the Tritons and their herds and horses.
_Lucullus._ Here stand my two cows. Their milk is brought to me with its warmth and froth; for it loses its salubrity both by repose and by motion. Pardon me, Caesar: I shall appear to you to have forgotten that I am not conducting Marcus Varro.
_Caesar._ You would convert him into Cacus: he would drive them off.
What beautiful beasts! how sleek and white and cleanly! I never saw any like them, excepting when we sacrifice to Jupiter the stately leader from the pastures of the c.l.i.tumnus.
_Lucullus._ Often do I make a visit to these quiet creatures, and with no less pleasure than in former days to my horses. Nor indeed can I much wonder that whole nations have been consentaneous in treating them as objects of devotion: the only thing wonderful is that grat.i.tude seems to have acted as powerfully and extensively as fear; indeed, more extensively, for no object of wors.h.i.+p whatever has attracted so many wors.h.i.+ppers. Where Jupiter has one, the cow has ten: she was venerated before he was born, and will be when even the carvers have forgotten him.
_Caesar._ Unwillingly should I see it; for the character of our G.o.ds hath formed the character of our nation. Serapis and Isis have stolen in among them within our memory, and others will follow, until at last Saturn will not be the only one emasculated by his successor. What can be more august than our rites? The first dignitaries of the republic are emulous to administer them: nothing of low or venal has any place in them; nothing pusillanimous, nothing unsocial and austere. I speak of them as they were; before Superst.i.tion woke up again from her slumber, and caught to her bosom with maternal love the alluvial monsters of the Nile. Philosophy, never fit for the people, had entered the best houses, and the image of Epicurus had taken the place of the Lemures. But men cannot bear to be deprived long together of anything they are used to, not even of their fears; and, by a reaction of the mind appertaining to our nature, new stimulants were looked for, not on the side of pleasure, where nothing new could be expected or imagined, but on the opposite. Irreligion is followed by fanaticism, and fanaticism by irreligion, alternately and perpetually.
_Lucullus._ The religion of our country, as you observe, is well adapted to its inhabitants. Our progenitor, Mars, hath Venus rec.u.mbent on his breast and looking up to him, teaching us that pleasure is to be sought in the bosom of valour and by the means of war. No great alteration, I think, will ever be made in our rites and ceremonies--the best and most imposing that could be collected from all nations, and uniting them to us by our complacence in adopting them. The G.o.ds themselves may change names, to flatter new power: and, indeed, as we degenerate, Religion will accommodate herself to our propensities and desires. Our heaven is now popular: it will become monarchal; not without a crowded court, as befits it, of apparitors and satellites and minions of both s.e.xes, paid and caressed for carrying to their stern, dark-bearded master prayers and supplications. Altars must be strown with broken minds, and incense rise amid abject aspirations. G.o.ds will be found unfit for their places; and it is not impossible that, in the ruin imminent from our contentions for power, and in the necessary extinction both of ancient families and of generous sentiments, our consular fasces may become the water-sprinklers of some upstart priesthood, and that my son may apply for l.u.s.tration to the son of my groom. The interest of such men requires that the spirit of arms and of arts be extinguished. They will predicate peace, that the people may be tractable to them; but a religion altogether pacific is the fomenter of wars and the nurse of crimes, alluring Sloth from within and Violence from afar. If ever it should prevail among the Romans, it must prevail alone: for nations more vigorous and energetic will invade them, close upon them, trample them under foot; and the name of Roman, which is now the most glorious, will become the most opprobrious upon earth.
_Caesar._ The time, I hope, may be distant; for next to my own name I hold my country's.
_Lucullus._ Mine, not coming from Troy or Ida, is lower in my estimation: I place my country's first.
You are surveying the little lake beside us. It contains no fish, birds never alight on it, the water is extremely pure and cold; the walk round is pleasant, not only because there is always a gentle breeze from it, but because the turf is fine and the surface of the mountain on this summit is perfectly on a level to a great extent in length--not a trifling advantage to me, who walk often and am weak. I have no alley, no garden, no enclosure; the park is in the vale below, where a brook supplies the ponds, and where my servants are lodged; for here I have only twelve in attendance.
_Caesar._ What is that so white, towards the Adriatic?
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