A ROAD TO ROME

  An ardour not of Eros’ lips.—­WILLIAM WATSON.

I

The spring had come promptly this year and with it the usual invoice of young Romans to Athens.  Some of them were planning to stay only a month or two to see the country and hear the more famous professors lecture.  Others were settling down for a long period of serious study in rhetoric and philosophy.  Scarcely to be classed among any of these was the young poet Julius Paulus,[2] who, as he put it to himself with the frank grandiosity of youth, was in search of the flame of life—­studiosus ardoris vivendi.  He had brought a letter to Aulus Gellius, and Gellius, dutifully responsive to all social claims, invited him on a day in early March to join him and a few friends for a country walk and an outdoor lunch in one of their favourite meeting places.

[Footnote 2:  A poet Julius Paulus is mentioned once by Aulus Gellius in the Attic Nights, in terms which seem to suggest both his worldly prosperity and his cultivated tastes.  But the suggestion for his character in this imaginary sketch has come, in reality, from generous and ardent young students of to-day, turning reluctantly from their life in Athens to patient achievement in the countries whose sons they are.]

This place, an unfrequented precinct of Aphrodite, about two hours distant from the marketplace, lay below the rocky summit of Hymettus within the hollow of the foot hills.  The walk was an easy one, but the forenoon sun was warm and the young pedestrians upon their arrival paused in grateful relief by a spring under a large plane tree which still bore its leaves of wintry gold.  The clear water, a boon in arid Attica, completed their temperate lunch of bread and eggs, dried figs and native wine.  After eating they climbed farther up the hillside and stretched themselves out in the soft grass that lurked among boulders in the shade of a beech tree.  Aulus, with the air of performing an habitual action, produced a book.  To-day it proved to be a choice old volume of Ovid, which he had secured at a bargain on the quay at Brindisi, convinced that it had belonged, fully one hundred and fifty years ago, to the poet himself.  It had gone far, he said, toward consoling him for the loss of an original Second Book of the AEneid snatched up by a friend in the Image Market at Rome.  The Ovid was for Paulus’s edification.  Aulus unrolled his treasure and read aloud “an accurate description of this very spot:” 

  Violet crests of Hymettus a-flower
    Neighbour a fountain consecrate. 
  Yielding and green is the turf.  In a bower
    Trees low-growing meet and mate;
  Arbutus shadeth the green grass kirtle,
    Sweet the scent of rosemary;
  Fragrant the bay and the bloom of the myrtle;
    Nay, nor fail thee here to see
  Tamarisks delicate, box-wood masses,
    Lordly pine and clover low. 
  Legions of leaves and the top of the grasses
    Stir with healing zephyrs slow.