I have seen gladiators return to their quarters from the arena, covered with sweat and dust and blood, and weep like women over some small thing-the death of a pet falcon, an unkind note from a lover, the loss of a favorite cloak. And in the stands I have seen the most respectable of matrons, her face distorted as she shouted for the blood of a hapless fighter, later in the quietness of her home care for her children and her servants with the utmost gentleness and affection.
Thus if there runs in the blood of the most worldly Roman the rustic blood of his peasant ancestor, there runs also the wild blood of the most untamed northern barbarian; and both are ill-concealed behind the facade he has erected not so much to disguise himself from another as to mask himself against his own recognition.
It occurs to me, as we drift slowly southward, that without my having to tell them to do so, the crew, since they are under no compulsion to make haste, have instinctively kept always in sight of land, though as the wind has changed we have had to go to some trouble to make corrections to follow the irregular line of the coast. There is something deep within the Italian heart that does not like the sea, a dislike that has seemed to some so intense as to be nearly abnormal. It is more than fear, and it is more than the natural propensity of the peasant to husband his land, and to avoid that which is so unlike it. Thus the eagerness of your friend Strabo to sail blithely upon unknown seas, in search of strangeness, would bewilder the ordinary Roman, who ventures beyond the sight of land only upon the occasion of such a necessity as war. And yet under Marcus Agrippa the Roman navy has become the most powerful in the history of the world, and the battles that saved Rome from its enemies were fought upon the sea. Nevertheless, the dislike remains. It is a part of the Italian character.
It is a dislike of which the poets have been aware. You know that little poem of Horace's addressed to the ship that was bearing his friend Vergil to Athens? He advanced the conceit that the gods had separated land from land by the unimaginable depths of ocean so that the peoples in those lands might be distinct, and man in his foolhardiness launches his frail bark upon an element that ought not to be touched. And Vergil himself, in his great poem upon the founding of Rome, never speaks of the sea except in the most ominous of terms: Aeolus sends his thunder and winds upon the deep, waves are lifted so high that they obscure the stars, timbers are broken, and men see nothing. And even now, after so many years and so many readings of the poem, I am still moved nearly to tears by the thought of Palinurus, the helmsman, betrayed by the god of sleep into the depths of the ocean, where he drowns, and for whom Aeneas mourns, thinking of him as too trustful in the calm of sea and sky, lying naked on an unknown shore.
Of the many services that Maecenas performed for me, the most important seems to me now to be this: He allowed me to know the poets to whom he gave his friendship. They were among the most remarkable men I have ever known; and if the Roman, as he often did, treated them with as much disdain as he dared, it was a disdain that masked a fear perhaps not wholly unlike that feeling he had about the sea. A few years ago it became necessary for me to banish the poet Ovid from Rome because of his involvement in an intrigue that threatened to disturb the order of the state; since his part in the intrigue was more nearly mischievous and social than malevolent and political, I made the banishment as light as possible; I shall lift the banishment soon, and allow him to return from the cold north to the more temperate and pleasing climate of Rome. Yet even in his place of banishment, that half-barbaric little town of Tomis that huddles near the mouth of the Danube, he continues to write his poems. We correspond occasionally, and are on friendly enough terms; and though he misses the pleasures of Rome, he does not despair of his condition. But of the several poets that I have known, Ovid is the only one whom I could not fully trust. And yet I was fond of him, and remain so.
I could trust the poets because I was unable to give them what they wanted. An Emperor may give to an ordinary man the means to a wealth that would confound the most extraordinary taste for luxury; he may bequeath such power that few men dare to oppose it; he may confer such honor and glory upon a freedman that even a consul might feel constrained to behave toward him with some deference. Once I offered to Horace the position of my private secretary; it would have made him one of the most influential men in Rome, and, had he been even discreetly corrupt, one of the richest. He replied that, alas, the state of his health precluded his acceptance of a post fraught with such responsibilities. We both knew that the post was more nearly ceremonial than laborious, and that his health was excellent. I could not be offended; he had the little farm that Maecenas had given him, a few servants, his grape arbors, and enough income to import an excellent wine.
I suspect that I have admired the poets because they seemed to me the freest and therefore the most affectionate of men, and I have felt a closeness to them because I have seen in the tasks that they set for themselves a certain similarity to the task that long ago I set for myself.
The poet contemplates the chaos of experience, the confusion of accident, and the incomprehensible realms of possibility -which is to say the world in which we all so intimately live that few of us take the trouble to examine it. The fruits ofthat contemplation are the discovery, or the invention, of some small principle of harmony and order that may be isolated from that disorder which obscures it, and the subjection ofthat discovery to those poetic laws which at last make it possible. No general ever more carefully exercises his troops in their intricate formations than does the poet dispose his words to the rigorous necessity of meter; no consul more shrewdly aligns this faction against that in order to achieve his end than the poet who balances one line with another in order to display his truth; and no Emperor ever so carefully organizes the disparate parts of the world that he rules so that they will constitute a whole than does the poet dispose the details of his poem so that another world, perhaps more real than the one that we so precariously inhabit, will spin in the universe of men's minds.
It was my destiny to change the world, I said earlier. Perhaps I should have said that the world was my poem, that I undertook the task of ordering its parts into a whole, subordinating this faction to that, and adorning it with those graces appropriate to its worth. And yet if it is a poem that I have fashioned, it is one that will not for very long outlive its time. When Vergil died, he earnestly beseeched me to destroy his great poem; it was not complete, he said, and imperfect. Like a general who sees a legion destroyed and does not know that two others have triumphed, he thought himself to be a failure; and yet his poem upon the founding of Rome will no doubt outlast Rome itself, and certainly it will outlast the poor thing that I have put together. I did not destroy the poem; I do not believe that Vergil thought I would. Time will destroy Rome.
My fever has not abated. An hour ago, I had a sudden attack of dizziness and a sharp pain in my left side, followed by a numbness. I discover that my left leg, always a little weak, is now hardly capable of movement. It will still support my weight, but it drags beneath me uselessly; and when I prick it with my stylus there is the merest ghost of a pain.