The Roman Traitor: A True Tale of the Republic. Henry William Herbert
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Название: The Roman Traitor: A True Tale of the Republic
Автор: Henry William Herbert
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4064066380519
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On this dread sight Paul was still gazing in that motionless and painful silence, with which the boldest cannot fail to look upon the body of a fellow creature from which the immortal soul has been reluctantly and forcefully expelled, when a loud cry from Thrasea, who, having lagged a step or two behind, was later in discovering the corpse, aroused him from his melancholy stupor.
"Alas! alas! ah me!" cried the half-sobbing freedman, "my friend, my more than friend, my countryman, my kinsman, Medon!"
"Ha! dost thou recognize the features? didst thou know him who lies so coldly and inanimately here before us?" cried the excited youth, "whose slave was he? speak, Thrasea, on thy life! this shall be looked to straightway; and, by the Gods! avenged."
"As I would recognize mine own in the polished brass, as I do know my father's sister's son! for such was he, who lies thus foully slaughtered. Alas! alas! my countryman! wo! wo! for thee, my Medon! Many a day, alas! many a happy day have we two chased the elk and urus by the dark-wooded Danube; the same roof covered us; the same board fed; the same fire warmed us; nay! the same fatal battle-field robbed both of liberty and country. Yet were the great Gods merciful to the poor captives. Thy father did buy me, Arvina, and a few years of light and pleasant servitude restored the slave to freedom. Medon was purchased by the wise consul, Cicero, and was to have received his freedom at the next Saturnalia. Alas! and wo is me, he is now free forever from any toils on earth, from any mortal master."
"Nay! weep not so, my Thrasea," exclaimed the generous youth, laying his left hand with a friendly pressure on the freedman's shoulder, "thou shalt have all means to do all honor to his name; all that can now be done by mortals for the revered and sacred dead. Aid me now to remove the body, lest those who slew him may return, and carry off the evidences of their crime."
Thus speaking, he thrust the unlighted end of the torch into the ground, and lifting up the shoulders of the carcase, while Thrasea raised the feet, bore it away a hundred yards or better, and laying it within the open arch-way of an old tomb, covered the mouth with several boughs torn from a neighboring cypress.
Then satisfied that it would thus escape a nearer search than it was likely would be made by the murderers, when they should find that it had been removed, he walked away very rapidly toward his home.
Before he left the burial ground, however, he wiped the dagger carefully in the long grass, and hid it in the bosom of his tunic.
No more words were exchanged—the master buried in deep thought, the servant stupified with grief and terror—until they reached the house of Paullus, in a fair quarter of the town, near to the street of Carinæ, the noblest and most sumptuous in Rome.
A dozen slaves appeared within the hall, awaiting the return of their young lord, but he dismissed them all; and when they had departed, taking a small night lamp, and ordering Thrasea to waken him betimes to-morrow, that he might see the consul, he bade him be of good cheer, for that Medon's death should surely be avenged, since the gay dagger would prove a clue to the detection of his slayer. Then, passing into his own chamber, he soon lost all recollection of his hopes, joys, cares, in the sound sleep of innocence and youth.
CHAPTER IV
THE CONSUL.
Therefore let him be Consul; The Gods give
Him joy, and make him good friend to the people.
Coriolanus.
The morning was yet young, when Paullus Arvina, leaving his mansion on the Cælian hill by a postern door, so to avoid the crowd of clients who even at that early hour awaited his forth-coming in the hall, descended the gentle hill toward the splendid street called Carinæ, from some fanciful resemblance in its shape, lying in a curved hollow between the bases of the Esquiline, Cælian, and Palatine mounts, to the keel of a galley.
This quarter of the city was at that time unquestionably the most beautiful in Rome, although it still fell far short of the magnificence it afterward attained, when the favourite Mecænas had built his splendid palace, and laid out his unrivalled gardens, on the now woody Esquiline; and it would have been difficult indeed to conceive a view more sublime, than that which lay before the eyes of the young patrician, as he paused for a moment on the highest terrace of the hill, to inhale the breath of the pure autumnal morning.
The sun already risen, though not yet high in the east, was pouring a flood of mellow golden light, through the soft medium of the half misty atmosphere, over the varied surface of the great city, broken and diversified by many hills and hollows; and bringing out the innumerable columns, arches, and aqueducts, that adorned almost every street and square, in beautiful relief.
The point at which the young man stood, looking directly northward, was one which could not be excelled, if it indeed could be equalled for the view it commanded, embracing nearly the whole of Rome, which from its commanding height, inferior only to the capitol, and the Quirinal hill, it was enabled to overlook.
Before him, in the hollow at his feet, on which the morning rays dwelt lovingly, streaming in through the deep valley to the right over the city walls, lay the long street of the Carinæ, the noblest and most sumptuous of Rome, adorned with many residences of the patrician order, and among others, those of Pompey, Cæsar, and the great Latin orator. This broad and noble thoroughfare, from its great width, and the long rows of marble columns, which decked its palaces, all glittering in the misty sunbeams, shewed like a waving line of light among the crowded buildings of the narrower ways, that ran parallel to it along the valley and up the easy slope of the Cælian mount, with the Minervium, in which Arvina stood, leading directly downward to its centre. Beyond this sparkling line, rose the twin summits Oppius and Cispius, of the Esquiline hill, still decked with the dark foliage of the ancestral groves of oak and sweet-chesnut, said to derive their origin from Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome, and green with the long grass and towering cypresses of the plebeian cemetery, across which the young man had come home, from the villa of his lady-love, but a few hours before.
Beyond the double hill-tops, a heavy purple shadow indicated the deep basin through which ran the ill-famed Suburra, and the "Wicked-Street", so named from the tradition, that therein Tullia compelled her trembling charioteer to lash his reluctant steeds over the yet warm body of her murdered father. And beyond this again the lofty ridge of the Quirinal mount stood out in fair relief with all its gorgeous load of palaces and columns; and the great temple of the city's founder, the god Romulus Quirinus; and the stupendous range of walls and turrets, along its northern verge, flashing out splendidly to the new-risen sun.
So lofty was the post from which Paullus gazed, as he overlooked the mighty town, that his eye reached even beyond the city-walls on the Quirinal, and passing over the broad valley at its northern base, all glimmering with uncertain lights and misty shadows, rested upon the Collis Hortulorum, or mount of gardens, now called Monte Pincio, which was at that time covered, as its name indicates, with rich and fertile shrubberies. The glowing hues of these could be distinctly made out, even at this great distance, by the naked eye. For it must be remembered that there was in those days no sea-coal to send up its murky smoke-wreaths, blurring the bright skies with its inky pall; no factories with tall chimnies, vomiting forth, like mimic Etnas, their pestilential breath, fatal to vegetable life. Not a cloud СКАЧАТЬ