Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection
rise amid abject aspirations. Gods 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 lustration 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?
_Lucullus._ The Adriatic itself. Turn round and you may descry the
Tuscan Sea. Our situation is reported to be among the highest of the
Apennines. Marcipor has made the sign to me that dinner is ready. Pass
this way.
_Caesar._ What a library is here! Ah, Marcus Tullius! I salute thy
image. Why frownest thou upon me--collecting the consular robe and
uplifting the right arm, as when Rome stood firm again, and Catiline
fled before thee?
_Lucullus._ Just so; such was the action the statuary chose, as adding
a new endearment to the memory of my absent friend.
_Caesar._ Sylla, who honoured you above all men, is not here.
_Lucullus._ I have his _Commentaries_: he inscribed them, as you know,
to me. Something even of our benefactors may be forgotten, and
gratitude be unreproved.
_Caesar._ The impression on that couch, and the two fresh honeysuckles
in the leaves of those two books, would show, even to a stranger, that
this room is peculiarly the master's. Are they sacred?
_Lucullus._ To me and Caesar.
_Caesar._ I would have asked permission----
_Lucullus._ Caius Julius, you have nothing to ask of Polybius and
Thucydides; nor of Xenophon, the next to them on the table.
_Caesar._ Thucydides! the most generous, the most unprejudiced, the
most sagacious, of historians. Now, Lucullus, you whose judgment in
style is more accurate than any other Roman's, do tell me whether a
commander, desirous of writing his _Commentaries_, could take to
himself a more perfect model than Thucydides?
_Lucullus._ Nothing is more perfect, nor ever will be: the scholar of
Pericles, the master of Demosthenes, the equal of the one in military
science, and of the other not the inferior in civil and forensic; the
calm dispassionate judge of the general by whom he was defeated, his
defender, his encomiast. To talk of such men is conducive not only to
virtue but to health.
* * * * *
This other is my dining-room. You expect the dishes.
_Caesar._ I misunderstood--I fancied----
_Lucullus._ Repose yourself, and touch with the ebony wand, beside
you, the sphinx on either of those obelisks, right or left.
_Caesar._ Let me look at them first.
_Lucullus._ The contrivance was intended for one person, or two at
most, desirous of privacy and quiet. The blocks of jasper in my pair,
and of porphyry in yours, easily yield in their grooves, each forming
one partition. There are four, containing four platforms. The lower
holds four dishes, such as sucking forest-boars, venison, hares,
tunnies, sturgeons, which you will find within; the upper three, eight
each, but diminutive. The confectionery is brought separately, for the
steam would spoil it, if any should escape. The melons are in the
snow, thirty feet under us: they came early this morning from a place
in the vicinity of Luni, travelling by night.
_Caesar._ I wonder not at anything of refined elegance in Lucullus;
but really here Antiochia and Alexandria seem to have cooked for us,
and magicians to be our attendants.
_Lucullus._ The absence of slaves from our repast is the luxury, for
Marcipor alone enters, and he only when I press a spring with my foot
or wand. When you desire his appearance, touch that chalcedony just
before you.
_Caesar._ I eat quick and rather plentifully; yet the valetudinarian
(excuse my rusticity, for I rejoice at seeing it) appears to equal the
traveller in appetite, and to be contented with one dish.
_Lucullus._ It is milk: such, with strawberries, which ripen on the
Apennines many months in continuance, and some other berries of sharp
and grateful flavour, has been my only diet since my first residence
here. The state of my health requires it; and the habitude of nearly
three months renders this food not only more commodious to my studies
and more conducive to my sleep, but also more agreeable to my palate
than any other.
_Caesar._ Returning to Rome or Baiae, you must domesticate and tame
them. The cherries you introduced from Pontus are now growing in
Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul; and the largest and best in the
world, perhaps, are upon the more sterile side of Lake Larius.
_Lucullus._ There are some fruits, and some virtues, which require a
harsh soil and bleak exposure for their perfection.
_Caesar._ In such a profusion of viands, and so savoury, I perceive no
odour.
_Lucullus._ A flue conducts heat through the compartments of the
obelisks; and, if you look up, you may observe that those gilt roses,
between the astragals in the cornice, are prominent from it half a
span. Here is an aperture in the wall, between which and the outer is
a perpetual current of air. We are now in the dog-days; and I have
never felt in the whole summer more heat than at Rome in many days of
March.
_Caesar._ Usually you are attended by troops of domestics and of
dinner-friends, not to mention the learned and scientific, nor your
own family, your attachment to which, from youth upward, is one of the
higher graces in your character. Your brother was seldom absent from
you.
_Lucullus._ Marcus was coming; but the vehement heats along the Arno,
in which valley he has a property he never saw before, inflamed his
blood, and he now is resting for a few days at Faesulae, a little town
destroyed by Sylla within our memory, who left it only air and water,
the best in Tuscany. The health of Marcus, like mine, has been
declining for several months: we are running our last race against
each other, and never was I, in youth along the Tiber, so anxious of
first reaching the goal. I would not outlive him: I should reflect too
painfully on earlier days, and look forward too despondently on
future. As for friends, lampreys and turbots beget them, and they
spawn not amid the solitude of the Apennines. To dine in company with
more than two is a Gaulish and German thing. I can hardly bring myself
to believe that I have eaten in concert with twenty; so barbarous and
herdlike a practice does not now appeal to me--such an incentive to
drink much and talk loosely; not to add, such a necessity to speak
loud, which is clownish and odious in the extreme. On this mountain
summit I hear no noises, no voices, not even of salutation; we have no
flies about us, and scarcely an insect or reptile.
_Caesar._ Your amiable son is probably with his uncle: is he well?
_Lucullus._ Perfectly. He was indeed with my brother in his intended
visit to me; but Marcus, unable to accompany him hither, or
superintend his studies in the present state of his health, sent him
directly to his Uncle Cato at Tusculum--a man fitter than either of us
to direct his education, and preferable to any, excepting yourself and
Marcus Tullius, in eloquence and urbanity.
_Caesar._ Cato is so great, that whoever is greater must be the
happiest and first of men.
_Lucullus._ That any such be still existing, O Julius, ought to excite
no groan from the breast of a Roman citizen. But perhaps I wrong you;
perhaps your mind was forced reluctantly back again, on your past
animosities and contests in the Senate.
_Caesar._ I revere him, but cannot love him.
_Lucullus._ Then, Caius Julius, you groaned with reason; and I would
pity rather than reprove you.
On the ceiling at which you are looking, there is no gilding, and
little painting--a mere trellis of vines bearing grapes, and the
heads, shoulders, and arms rising from the cornice only, of boys and
girls climbing up to steal them, and scrambling for them: nothing
overhead; no giants tumbling down, no Jupiter thundering, no Mars and
Venus caught at mid-day, no river-gods pouring out their urns upon us;
for, as I think nothing so insipid as a flat ceiling, I think nothing
so absurd as a storied one. Before I was aware, and without my
participation, the painter had adorned that of my bedchamber with a
golden shower, bursting from varied and irradiated clouds. On my
expostulation, his excuse was that he knew the Danae of Scopas, in a
recumbent posture, was to occupy the centre of the room. The walls,
behind the tapestry and pictures, are quite rough. In forty-three days
the whole fabric was put together and habitable.
The wine has probably lost its freshness: will you try some other?
_Caesar._ Its temperature is exact; its flavour exquisite. Latterly I
have never sat long after dinner, and am curious to pass through the
other apartments, if you will trust me.
_Lucullus._ I attend you.
_Caesar._ Lucullus, who is here? What figure is that on the poop of
the vessel? Can it be----
_Lucullus._ The subject was dictated by myself; you gave it.
_Caesar._ Oh, how beautifully is the water painted! How vividly the
sun strikes against the snows on Taurus! The grey temples and pierhead
of Tarsus catch it differently, and the monumental mound on the left
is half in shade. In the countenance of those pirates I did not
observe such diversity, nor that any boy pulled his father back: I did
not indeed mark them or notice them at all.
_Lucullus._ The painter in this fresco, the last work finished, had
dissatisfied me in one particular. 'That beautiful young face,' said
I, 'appears not to threaten death.'
'Lucius,' he replied, 'if one muscle were moved it were not Caesar's:
beside, he said it jokingly, though resolved.'
'I am contented with your apology, Antipho; but what are you doing
now? for you never lay down or suspend your pencil, let who will talk
and argue. The lines of that smaller face in the distance are the
same.'
'Not the same,' replied he, 'nor very different: it smiles, as surely
the goddess must have done at the first heroic act of her descendant.'
_Caesar._ In her exultation and impatience to press forward she seems
to forget that she is standing at the extremity of the shell, which
rises up behind out of the water; and she takes no notice of the
terror on the countenance of this Cupid who would detain her, nor of
this who is flying off and looking back. The reflection of the shell