Count Belisarius Page 5
Malthus’s duty is to see that every man’s cup is filled and to regulate the proportion of wine to water: it is a duty that he has often performed for Modestus. He can be trusted to whisper to the man with the wine-jar and water-pot ‘More wine’, when conversation is formal and frigid, and ‘More water’ when the conversation is becoming too free or quarrelsome and spirits need cooling. A hired dancing-girl supplied by the Theatre at Constantinople, with a wreath of roses on her head, bare legs, and a very short tunic, hands the cups around, making pretty jokes as she does so.
Now Simeon the burgess says something in a low tone to Palaeologus (who is reclining on his left), indicating the frieze with a critical inclination of his head. Palaeologus replies with a warning frown, and Modestus calls out: ‘Hey, Sirs, is this proper banquet comradeship? Did not Petronius the Arbiter lay down hundreds of years ago in his famous satirical novel that at a courteous table all offensive comments should be made aloud? Come, let us have it! What do you find amiss with my frieze? It is a reproduction by a gifted contemporary copyist of a major work of Gorgasus the mural painter. The original was at Corinth, but is now destroyed, which makes this doubly precious to me and to all connoisseurs.’
Then he goes on, in a chanting voice: ‘Observe how Bacchus, having ravaged India, the land where the sages, called fakirs, nude but for a loin-cloth, sleep (praying to their gods) supported by nothingness three feet above the parched serpent-haunted ground – how great Bacchus, ever youthful, is harnessing the tigers to his triumphal chariot, wreathed with vine-clusters, with vines for bridles! From his curly head sprout golden horns, symbol of valour, which themselves sprout lightning – that very lightning in which Jove begat him on astonished Semele. His smooth temples, you will notice, are adorned with poppies…’
‘If I may be pardoned such a rude interruption of your charming and eloquent speech,’ Malthus puts in – he sees that the guests, having drunk little so far, are growing restless at the prospect of a long, dismal, classical recital, and he knows the only way to silence Modestus – ‘those are not poppies, they are intended for asphodel. Poppies are proper to Morpheus and to Ceres and to Persephone; but asphodel to Bacchus, Gorgasus was too well-informed an artist to make such an error in floral attributes.’ Then, hastily to the servant: ‘Boy, pour again, and let it be all wine!’
Modestus apologizes: he meant asphodel, of course – ‘A slip of the tongue, ha, ha!’ But his confidence is shaken; he hesitates to resume his recital.
Simeon considers that the half-clothed women of the frieze, in attendance on Bacchus, are not proper ornaments for a Christian dining-room. Looking up at them, one might imagine oneself inside a brothel at Tyre or Sidon or one of those heathen places, he complains.
‘I was never a customer at any such haunt,’ says Modestus sharply, ‘but perhaps you know best. At the same time let me tell you that I regard the attitude to nudity as one of the tests of civilization. The barbarians hate the sight of their own unclothed bodies: just as the singing, illiterate, savage fraternities of monks do.’
Nobody takes up the challenge on behalf of the monks, not even Simeon, but Bessas answers stiffly: ‘We Goths regard the sight of a person unclothed as ridiculous – just as you, Modestus, laugh at a person who cannot sign his own name – as many a noble Goth cannot do, I among them.’
Modestus, in spite of his crotchets, is a good-humoured man and does not want to pick a quarrel with a guest. He assures Bessas that he is surprised that a man with so noble a name cannot record it on paper or parchment.
‘For what were Greek secretaries created?’ laughs Bessas, ready to be appeased.
Next, Modestus tells his Thracian guests how proud he is, though a Roman of exalted rank, to be resident in Thrace, once the home of great Orpheus, the musician, and the cradle of the noble cult of Bacchus. ‘Those naked women, Simeon, are your own ancestresses, the Thracian women who piously tore King Pentheus in pieces because he spurned the God’s gift of wine.’
‘My ancestresses all wore long, thick, decent gowns!’ Simeon exclaims; and his indignation raises a general laugh.
While the appetizers are being cleared away, the dancing-girl gives a clever performance of acrobatic dancing. As a climax to her hops and skips, she walks about on her hands and then, curving her body into a bow and arching her legs right over her head, picks up an apple from the floor with her feet. Continuing to walk on her hands, and even slapping the floor with them in time to the apple-song she is singing, she pretends to debate with herself as to who shall be awarded the fruit. But her mind has long been made up: she lays the apple on the table beside young Belisarius, who blushes and hides it away in the bosom of his tunic.
Simeon quotes a text from Genesis, how Adam says: ‘The woman gave me the apple and I did eat’; and Modestus a text from the poet Horace: ‘Galatea, wanton girl, Aim an apple at me,’ and everyone is surprised at the unanimity of sacred and profane literature. But the dancing-girl (who was my mistress Antonina) surprises herself by the sudden liking she feels for this tall, handsome youth, who looks at her with such fresh admiration as Adam is credited with having felt at the first sight of Eve.
Now, this liking came, I think, very close to love, an emotion of which my mistress’s mother had always warned her to beware, as a hindrance to her profession. Antonina was nearly fifteen years old then, a year older than Belisarius, and had already lived a promiscuous life for three years, as public entertainers cannot avoid doing. Being a healthy, vivacious girl, she had thoroughly enjoyed herself and suffered no ill-effects. But amusement with men is an altogether different thing from love for a man, and the result of the look that Belisarius gave her was to make her feel not exactly penitent for the life she had been living – penitence is a declaration of having been in the wrong, and that was never Antonina’s way – but suddenly modest, as if to match Belisarius’s modesty, and at the same time proud of herself.
I was squatting on the floor in the background all this time, in attendance on my mistress; providing her, when she clapped her hands, with garments or objects from her property-bag.
Modestus resumed his painfully fanciful description of the meaning of the frieze… ‘There, you will observe, captive to the jolly Deity of Wine, goes the river-god Ganges with green watery looks and cheeks bedewed with tears that mightily swell his heat-shrunk stream, and behind him a company of inky prisoners carrying trays loaded with varied treasure of ivory and ebony and gold and glittering gems (sapphire, beryl, sardonyx) snatched from jet-black bosoms….’ So my mistress Antonina earned the gratitude of all present by calling for her lute.
She sang a love-song, the work of the Syrian poet Meleager, to a slow, solemn-ringing accompaniment. At the close, not having turned once in Belisarius’s direction, she looked sharply towards him and quickly away; and he blushed again, face and neck, and when the blush had gone he turned pale. Never in her life did she ever sing better, I believe, and there was a great rattling of cups in her praise – even Simeon contributed a ‘bravo’, though he did not greatly care for pagan music and had tried to look indifferent while she was dancing. Symmachus the philosopher congratulated Modestus, exclaiming: ‘Now really you have provided us with a rare phenomenon: a singing girl who keeps both her instrument and her voice in key, accentuates her words correctly, prefers Meleager to the nonsensical ballads of the streets, is beautiful. I have not heard or seen better at Athens itself. Here, girl, let a grateful old man embrace you!’
If the invitation had come from Belisarius, my mistress would have been on his lap with a single bound, twining her arms about his neck. But on lean, snuffling, pedantic old Symmachus she had no favours to bestow: she cast her eyes down. For the rest of the meal, though she sang and danced and joked beyond her usual best, she allowed nobody to take any liberties with her – not even Bessas, though he was a man of the world and good-looking and strong, in fact just the sort whom she would otherwise have marked down as a worthy lover to spend the night with. She behaved m
odestly; and this was not altogether an affectation, for she did not feel her usual bold self.
When the principal meats are brought in, served on dishes of massive ancient silver – a roast lamb, a goose, a ham, fish-cakes – Modestus glows with satisfaction. He begins a long, involved speech, recommending his nephew Belisarius to Bessas as a young man who intends to take up the profession of arms, and who will, he hopes, restore the old lustre to the Roman military name. ‘It is long years since a soldier with true Roman blood in his veins led any of the armies of the Emperor. Nowadays all the higher commands have somehow fallen into the hands of hired barbarians – Goths, Vandals, Gepids, Huns, Arabians – and the result is that the old Roman military system, which once built up the greatest empire that the world has ever known, has lately degenerated beyond all recognition.’
Palaeologus, who is reclining next to Bessas, feels obliged to pluck at the striped tunic and whisper: ‘Most generous of men, please take no notice whatsoever of what our host is saying. He is drunk and confused and so old-fashioned in his ways of thinking as to be almost demented. He is not purposely insulting you.’
Bessas chuckles: ‘Have no fear, old beard. He is my host, and the wine is good, and this is excellent lamb. We barbarians can afford to let the Romans complain a little of our successes. I do not understand one-quarter of his jargon; but that he is complaining, that much at least I understand.’
Modestus goes on, inconsequently, to point the close resemblance – has Malthus noted it?–between this villa and the favourite villa of the celebrated author, Pliny. ‘The entrance hall, plain but not mean, leading to a D-shaped portico with the same glazed windows and overhanging eaves as Pliny’s, thence to the inner hall and the dining-room with windows and folding doors on three sides. The same view of wooded hills to the south-east; but south-west, instead of the view to the sea which Pliny had – in rough weather the breakers used to drive up to the very dining-room, which must have been both alarming and inconvenient – the river valley of Hebrus, and the fertile Thracian plain beloved of the drunken devotees of the Wine-God, who ran with their breasts uncovered, their loose hair speed-tossed, and carrying in their passionate hands wands ivy-wreathed and tipped with pine-cones – why, observe, there they are so in the frieze just above the window; beloved also of Orpheus, pictured with his lute, who made rocks dance that should have stood still, and waters stand still that should have danced – the waters of the very River Hebrus that rolls yonder. Such stilling of waters was a feat that no other man has ever performed before or since….’
‘Who divided the Red Sea?’ Simeon breaks in, indignantly. ‘Or who in later times passed dry-shod over Jordan? As for dancing rocks, does not David the psalmist write: “Why hop ye so, ye high hills?” surprised at the power of his own sacred melody?’
‘The Thracian plain,’ resumes Modestus with a grimace of contempt, ‘first bloodlessly annexed to Rome by that scholarly Emperor who conquered foggy Britain and added Morocco to the Empire Claudius, his name – ah, you Greek-speaking inhabitants of the Eastern half of our Empire, you mixed multitude, do not forget that it was we Romans, not half-breed Greeks, who first won for you the dominions in which you now boast yourselves – it was our native-born Mummius, Paullus, Pompey, Agrippa, Titus, Trajan…’
‘A most unselfish set of gentlemen, I am sure,’ puts in the burgess Milo, a Thracian, drily; and he, too, feels it his duty to propitiate Bessas, muttering something behind his hand.
‘Drink up, Sir!’ orders Malthus. ‘A new round of wine is about to begin. Let us all pledge the name of Rome, our common mother!’
Simeon agrees recklessly: ‘I am ready, Schoolmaster. That wine which was poured during the marriage-feast at Cana of Galilee would not yield in quantity and quality to this; and as for these fish-cakes, why, the miraculous draught of fishes itself could never…’
So unpleasantness is once more avoided, but Modestus cannot resist continuing on the topic of the unconquerable Roman soldiery. ‘Now tell me, my learned friends at that end of the table, and my gallant friends at this–what was the secret of the Roman soldiers’ unexampled success? Tell me that! Why did they win battle after battle in Southern sands, in Northen snows, or against the painted Briton and the gilded Persian? Why was it that Rome, the capital of the world, had no need of walls and that almost the only fortresses in the whole Empire were block-houses on the remote frontiers? Why? Let me tell you, my gallant and learned friends. There were three reasons. The first: these Romans trusted to their own visible tutelary gods, the golden Eagles of their legions, who guarded them and whom they themselves guarded, and to no hypothetic divinity in Heaven above the clouds. The second: they trusted to their own powerful right arms for hurling missiles – sharp javelins – not to the adventitious bowstring; and in these right arms wielded the short, stabbing sword, the weapon of the courageous, civilized man, not the cowardly lance or the hurtling, barbaric battle-axe. The third: they trusted to their own steadfast legs, not to the timorous legs of horses.’
‘Ho, ho, ho,’ laughs Bessas. ‘My worthy host, Distinguished Lord Modestus, will you forgive my frankness if I tell you that you are talking a great deal of nonsense? I shall leave the more religious-minded of the company to dispute your account of the power of the Eagles as gods, which I certainly think, though I am not an expert in such matters, is not only blasphemous but an exaggeration of fact; but I will take you up most strongly on the other points. In the first place, I understand you to despise the bow as a weapon of no account…’
‘Have I not the authority of Homer for doing so, who presents his noblest heroes as fighting at Troy (dismounted from their chariots) hand to hand, with javelin and sword? The bow at Troy was the weapon of the effeminate and treacherous Paris, and of Salaminian Teucer, who skulked behind his brother Ajax’s shield, and who later was refused permission to return honourably home to his violet-scented island city, because he had not avenged his brother Ajax’s death as any decent shield-and-sword fighter would have done. In the only passage indeed where the word “archer” occurs in all the divine works of blind Homer, it is used as a term of ridicule. Diomede named Paris, in the Eleventh Book, “An archer, a jokester, a dandy with a lovelock, who gapes after girls”; and “archer” was the hardest name of all. The archer in Homer’s poems skulks behind a comrade’s shield, I repeat, or behind a mound, or a pillar, or a gravestone, and the shield-and-sword man resents his existence, as stealing from the battle (which he never enters) something which is not his. Is this not the truth, you scholars? Malthus, Symmachus, Palaeologus, I appeal to you.’
They acknowledge that Modestus has neither misquoted nor misinterpreted Homer.
But Bessas snorts and asks to hear more. ‘Tell us about the Roman warriors of your golden age. They trusted to their legs, did they? Was it perhaps because they were such unskilful horsemen?’
Modestus’s eye kindles. ‘The infantryman is the acknowledged king of the battle-field. Horses are useful for mounting scouts upon, and for conveying generals and their staff quickly from one point of the battle to another, and for pulling wagons and siege-engines, and – yes, I grant you this — we may allow a small proportion of cavalry to every large body of infantry, in order to disperse the skirmishers of the enemy who, from a flank, may annoy the steadily advancing ranks of our foot-sure legions. But the Romans of old so disdained cavalry-service that, as soon as their conquests permitted them, they compelled subject nations to undertake that menial task for them – as they also ceased to drive the plough themselves or to plant cabbages, entrusting such employment to slaves and men of inferior race. Is that not so, Malthus, Symmachus, Palaeologus?’
They agree that the Romans early came to depend on allied cavalry. But Malthus, in historical honesty and fairness to Bessas, adds: ‘Yet I think that no nation disdains what it excels in. The Roman cavalry were never very skilful. In Spain, on the last occasion that they were employed as a field-force they made a sorry exhibition of themselves; or so we r
ead. Similarly, neither the Greeks nor the Trojans of Homer’s day seem to have been capable archers, according to modern standards. They drew the bowstring back only to their breasts (not to the ear, as the Huns do, or the Persians), and the penetrative effect of their arrows seems only to have been slight. Ulysses was more successful, I grant you; but his archery against the suitors was at close range, and against unarmoured, unsuspecting men.’
Then Bessas has his say. He speaks slowly and judiciously, being the sort of man whom wine makes cautious, not rash. ‘Modestus, my generous host, you live in a world long dead, shut in that book-cupboard yonder. You have no conception of the nature of modern fighting. In every age there are improvements. In this age we Goths have hit upon a perfected mode of fighting. Now I do not wish to denigrate the successes of the Romans, your ancestors, in olden times – they are undeniable. It is clear that they made a virtue of their deficiency as horsemen by perfecting the discipline of their foot. But clearly their battles were won in spite of their mistrust of horses, not because of it. Had they been natural horsemen and applied their courage and good sense to the evolution of the cavalry arm, they might well have conquered not merely the whole Western world, but India, I believe, and Bactria, and even China, which lies, by land, a year’s travel away. But instead they relied on their infantry, and at last their armies were matched against a brave nation that was also a nation of horsemen – a nation, moreover, that obeyed its chiefs – the Gothic nation – my nation. That was the end of the Roman legions. These Thracian plains, Distinguished Modestus, have seen sterner sights than drunken women and dancing rocks. Simeon, Milo, Theudas’ (this was the other Thracian, a land-owner) ‘and you boys too, as soldiers to be, am I telling the truth, or am I not?’
They acknowledge that he is telling the truth, and Theudas adds: ‘Indeed, Bessas, you are right, it must have been a terrible slaughter. Forty thousand Roman infantry butchered, with all their officers, and the Emperor Valens himself at their head. It was on fields now owned by me about eight miles to the northward of this city that the battle was fought. The thirty-acre plough-land is still full of bones, skulls, and fragments of armour, and arrow and javelin heads, and shield bosses, and gold and silver coins: every spring we turn them up.’