As Gellius droned on about some of the niceties of Ovid’s language, fragmentary sentences of this letter recurred to Paulus and he wondered what his father’s friend would think of him could he accurately read his desires for pleasure.  Certainly the shows of the Amphitheatre seemed remote enough here under the cool, grey branches, tipped with early green, of the Attic beech tree, but scarcely, after all, more remote than they often seemed in Rome itself to a youth who found virile recreation by the sea at Ostia or in following the Anio over the hills of Tibur.  No, he had not flung away from Rome to escape in the back waters of a smaller town the noisy vulgarities of the metropolis.  Nor was he one of those who confused the contests of the Circus with the creative struggles of the Forum.  His abstinence from political life was due to temperament rather than conviction, nature having shaped him for active citizenship in a world dissociated from public insignia.  It was in this world that he found himself at twenty-five ill at ease.  Without genius, his slender vein of talent was yet of pure gold.  There was no danger of his overrating his own poetry.  He saw it as it was, of the day and hour, wearing no immortal grace of thought or language.  But in it he was at his best, more honest and more whole-hearted than he could be in any public service.  This seemed to him, quite simply, to constitute a reason for being such a poet as he was.

He belonged to an ancient family, which had furnished a consul in the first Punic War, had left distinguished dead on the field of Cannae and had borne on its roll the conqueror of Macedonia.  AEmilius Paulus Macedonicus had rendered Rome the further and signal service of a public life as spotless as it was brilliant, and something of this statesman’s scrupulous integrity had passed to the youngest son of the house, leading him to discriminate in his world also between shadows and realities.  To Paulus the happiest age in the world’s history was the age of Pericles, when the wedlock of life and learning issued in universal power.  In Rome he would have been glad to have lived in the last years of the Republic, or under Augustus, when Lucretius and Catullus, Virgil and Horace, by submitting themselves in pupilage to the Greeks, became masters of new thoughts and new emotions among the masters of the world.  How different was their discipleship from the imitative methods of modern literati!  While it was the fashion to boast of refinement and learning, while libraries jostled each other and rhetoricians and philosophers swarmed in the city, Paulus was chiefly conscious that in the place of creative imagination a soulless erudition walked abroad.  In the vestibule of the Palatine temple, waiting for the morning appearance of the Emperor, rhetoricians discussed the meaning of an adverb.  In the baths they tested each other’s knowledge of Sallust.  Grammarians gathered in secondhand bookshops around rare copies of Varro’s satires and Fabius’s chronicles and hunted for copyist’s errors.  If one were tired of the streets and went to walk in Agrippa’s park, he ran into men quarrelling over a vocative.  Even on a holiday at Ostia he could not escape discussions between Stoics and Peripatetics.  With all this activity, philosophy and literature grew only more anaemic.