Chapter 12

Do not expect to be acknowledged for what you are, much less for what you would be; since no one can well measure a great man but upon the bier. There was a time when the most ardent friend to Alexander of Macedon would have embraced the partisan for his enthusiasm, who should have compared him with Alexander of Pherae. It must have been at a splendid feast, and late at it, when Scipio should have been raised to an equality with Romulus, or Cato with Curius. It has been whispered in my ear, after a speech of Cicero, 'If he goes on so, he will tread down the sandal of Marcus Antonius in the long run, and perhaps leave Hortensius behind.' Officers of mine, speaking about you, have exclaimed with admiration: 'He fights like Cinna.' Think, Caius Julius (for you have been instructed to think both as a poet and as a philosopher), that among the hundred hands of Ambition, to whom we may attribute them more properly than to Briareus, there is not one which holds anything firmly. In the precipitancy of her course, what appears great is small, and what appears small is great. Our estimate of men is apt to be as inaccurate and inexact as that of things, or more. Wishing to have all on our side, we often leave those we should keep by us, run after those we should avoid, and call importunately on others who sit quiet and will not come. We cannot at once catch the applause of the vulgar and expect the approbation of the wise. What are parties? Do men really great ever enter into them? Are they not ball-courts, where ragged adventurers strip and strive, and where dissolute youths abuse one another, and challenge and game and wager? If you and I cannot quite divest ourselves of infirmities and passions, let us think, however, that there is enough in us to be divided into two portions, and let us keep the upper undisturbed and pure. A part of Olympus itself lies in dreariness and in clouds, variable and stormy; but it is not the highest: there the gods govern. Your soul is large enough to embrace your country: all other affection is for less objects, and less men are capable of it. Abandon, O Caesar! such thoughts and wishes as now agitate and propel you: leave them to mere men of the marsh, to fat hearts and miry intellects. Fortunate may we call ourselves to have been born in an age so productive of eloquence, so rich in erudition. Neither of us would be excluded, or hooted at, on canvassing for these honours. He who can think dispassionately and deeply as I do, is great as I am; none other. But his opinions are at freedom to diverge from mine, as mine are from his; and indeed, on recollection, I never loved those most who thought with me, but those rather who deemed my sentiments worth discussion, and who corrected me with frankness and affability.

_Caesar._ Lucullus, you perhaps have taken the wiser and better part, certainly the pleasanter. I cannot argue with you: I would gladly hear one who could, but you again more gladly. I should think unworthily of you if I thought you capable of yielding or receding. I do not even ask you to keep our conversation long a secret, so greatly does it preponderate in your favour; so much more of gentleness, of eloquence, and of argument. I came hither with one soldier, avoiding the cities, and sleeping at the villa of a confidential friend. To-night I sleep in yours, and, if your dinner does not disturb me, shall sleep soundly. You go early to rest I know.

_Lucullus._ Not, however, by daylight. Be assured, Caius Julius, that greatly as your discourse afflicts me, no part of it shall escape my lips. If you approach the city with arms, with arms I meet you; then your denouncer and enemy, at present your host and confidant.

_Caesar._ I shall conquer you.

_Lucullus._ That smile would cease upon it: you sigh already.

_Caesar._ Yes, Lucullus, if I am oppressed I shall overcome my oppressor: I know my army and myself. A sigh escaped me, and many more will follow; but one transport will rise amid them, when, vanquisher of my enemies and avenger of my dignity, I press again the hand of Lucullus, mindful of this day.

EPICURUS, LEONTION, AND TERNISSA

* * * * *

_Ternissa._ The broad and billowy summits of yon monstrous trees, one would imagine, were made for the storms to rest upon when they are tired of raving. And what bark! It occurs to me, Epicurus, that I have rarely seen climbing plants attach themselves to these trees, as they do to the oak, the maple, the beech, and others.

_Leontion._ If your remark be true, perhaps the resinous are not embraced by them so frequently because they dislike the odour of the resin, or some other property of the juices; for they, too, have their affections and antipathies no less than countries and their climes.

_Ternissa._ For shame! what would you with me?

_Epicurus._ I would not interrupt you while you were speaking, nor while Leontion was replying; this is against my rules and practice. Having now ended, kiss me, Ternissa!

_Ternissa._ Impudent man! in the name of Pallas, why should I kiss you?

_Epicurus._ Because you expressed hatred.

_Ternissa._ Do we kiss when we hate?

_Epicurus._ There is no better end of hating. The sentiment should not exist one moment; and if the hater gives a kiss on being ordered to do it, even to a tree or a stone, that tree or stone becomes the monument of a fault extinct.

_Ternissa._ I promise you I never will hate a tree again.

_Epicurus._ I told you so.

_Leontion._ Nevertheless, I suspect, my Ternissa, you will often be surprised into it. I was very near saying, 'I hate these rude square stones!' Why did you leave them here, Epicurus?

_Epicurus._ It is true, they are the greater part square, and seem to have been cut out in ancient times for plinths and columns; they are also rude. Removing the smaller, that I might plant violets and cyclamens and convolvuluses and strawberries, and such other herbs as grow willingly in dry places, I left a few of these for seats, a few for tables and for couches.

_Leontion._ Delectable couches!

_Epicurus._ Laugh as you may, they will become so when they are covered with moss and ivy, and those other two sweet plants whose names I do not remember to have found in any ancient treatise, but which I fancy I have heard Theophrastus call 'Leontion' and 'Ternissa'.

_Ternissa._ The bold, insidious, false creature!

_Epicurus._ What is that volume, may I venture to ask, Leontion? Why do you blush?

_Leontion._ I do not blush about it.

_Epicurus._ You are offended, then, my dear girl.

_Leontion._ No, nor offended. I will tell you presently what it contains. Account to me first for your choice of so strange a place to walk in: a broad ridge, the summit and one side barren, the other a wood of rose-laurels impossible to penetrate. The worst of all is, we can see nothing of the city or the Parthenon, unless from the very top.

_Epicurus._ The place commands, in my opinion, a most perfect view.

_Leontion._ Of what, pray?

_Epicurus._ Of itself; seeming to indicate that we, Leontion, who philosophize, should do the same.

_Leontion._ Go on, go on! say what you please: I will not hate anything yet. Why have you torn up by the root all these little mountain ash-trees? This is the season of their beauty: come, Ternissa, let us make ourselves necklaces and armlets, such as may captivate old Sylvanus and Pan; you shall have your choice. But why have you torn them up?

_Epicurus._ On the contrary, they were brought hither this morning. Sosimenes is spending large sums of money on an olive-ground, and has uprooted some hundreds of them, of all ages and sizes. I shall cover the rougher part of the hill with them, setting the clematis and vine and honeysuckle against them, to unite them.

_Ternissa._ Oh, what a pleasant thing it is to walk in the green light of the vine trees, and to breathe the sweet odour of their invisible flowers!

_Epicurus._ The scent of them is so delicate that it requires a sigh to inhale it; and this, being accompanied and followed by enjoyment, renders the fragrance so exquisite. Ternissa, it is this, my sweet friend, that made you remember the green light of the foliage, and think of the invisible flowers as you would of some blessing from heaven.

_Ternissa._ I see feathers flying at certain distances just above the middle of the promontory: what can they mean?

_Epicurus._ Cannot you imagine them to be the feathers from the wings of Zethes and Caläis, who came hither out of Thrace to behold the favourite haunts of their mother Oreithyia? From the precipice that hangs over the sea a few paces from the pinasters she is reported to have been carried off by Boreas; and these remains of the primeval forest have always been held sacred on that belief.

_Leontion._ The story is an idle one.

_Ternissa._ Oh no, Leontion! the story is very true.

_Leontion._ Indeed!

_Ternissa._ I have heard not only odes, but sacred and most ancient hymns upon it; and the voice of Boreas is often audible here, and the screams of Oreithyia.

_Leontion._ The feathers, then, really may belong to Caläis and Zethes.

_Ternissa._ I don't believe it; the winds would have carried them away.

_Leontion._ The gods, to manifest their power, as they often do by miracles, could as easily fix a feather eternally on the most tempestuous promontory, as the mark of their feet upon the flint.

_Ternissa._ They could indeed; but we know the one to a certainty, and have no such authority for the other. I have seen these pinasters from the extremity of the Piraeus, and have heard mention of the altar raised to Boreas: where is it?

_Epicurus._ As it stands in the centre of the platform, we cannot see it from hence; there is the only piece of level ground in the place.

_Leontion._ Ternissa intends the altar to prove the truth of the story.

_Epicurus._ Ternissa is slow to admit that even the young can deceive, much less the old; the gay, much less the serious.

_Leontion._ It is as wise to moderate our belief as our desires.

_Epicurus._ Some minds require much belief, some thrive on little. Rather an exuberance of it is feminine and beautiful. It acts differently on different hearts; it troubles some, it consoles others; in the generous it is the nurse of tenderness and kindness, of heroism and self-devotion; in the ungenerous it fosters pride, impatience of contradiction and appeal, and, like some waters, what it finds a dry stick or hollow straw, it leaves a stone.

_Ternissa._ We want it chiefly to make the way of death an easy one.

_Epicurus._ There is no easy path leading out of life, and few are the easy ones that lie within it. I would adorn and smoothen the declivity, and make my residence as commodious as its situation and dimensions may allow; but principally I would cast under-foot the empty fear of death.

_Ternissa._ Oh, how can you?

_Epicurus._ By many arguments already laid down: then by thinking that some perhaps, in almost every age, have been timid and delicate as Ternissa; and yet have slept soundly, have felt no parent's or friend's tear upon their faces, no throb against their breasts: in short, have been in the calmest of all possible conditions, while those around were in the most deplorable and desperate.

_Ternissa._ It would pain me to die, if it were only at the idea that any one I love would grieve too much for me.

_Epicurus._ Let the loss of our friends be our only grief, and the apprehension of displeasing them our only fear.

_Leontion._ No apostrophes! no interjections! Your argument was unsound; your means futile.

_Epicurus._ Tell me, then, whether the horse of a rider on the road should not be spurred forward if he started at a shadow.

_Leontion._ Yes.

_Epicurus._ I thought so: it would, however, be better to guide him quietly up to it, and to show him that it was one. Death is less than a shadow: it represents nothing, even imperfectly.

_Leontion._ Then at the best what is it? why care about it, think about it, or remind us that it must befall us? Would you take the same trouble, when you see my hair entwined with ivy, to make me remember that, although the leaves are green and pliable, the stem is fragile and rough, and that before I go to bed I shall have many knots and entanglements to extricate? Let me have them; but let me not hear of them until the time is come.

_Epicurus._ I would never think of death as an embarrassment, but as a blessing.

_Ternissa._ How? a blessing?

_Epicurus._ What, if it makes our enemies cease to hate us? what, if it makes our friends love us the more?

_Leontion._ Us? According to your doctrine we shall not exist at all.

_Epicurus._ I spoke of that which is consolatory while we are here, and of that which in plain reason ought to render us contented to stay no longer. You, Leontion, would make others better; and better they certainly will be, when their hostilities languish in an empty field, and their rancour is tired with treading upon dust. The generous affections stir about us at the dreary hour of death, as the blossoms of the Median apple swell and diffuse their fragrance in the cold.

_Ternissa._ I cannot bear to think of passing the Styx, lest Charon should touch me; he is so old and wilful, so cross and ugly.

_Epicurus._ Ternissa! Ternissa! I would accompany you thither, and stand between. Would you not too, Leontion?

_Leontion._ I don't know.

_Ternissa._ Oh, that we could go together!

_Leontion._ Indeed!

_Ternissa._ All three, I mean--I said--or was going to say it. How ill-natured you are, Leontion, to misinterpret me; I could almost cry.

_Leontion._ Do not, do not, Ternissa! Should that tear drop from your eyelash you would look less beautiful.

_Epicurus._ If it is well to conquer a world, it is better to conquer two.

_Ternissa._ That is what Alexander of Macedon wept because he could not accomplish.

_Epicurus._ Ternissa! we three can accomplish it; or any one of us.

_Ternissa._ How? pray!

_Epicurus._ We can conquer this world and the next; for you will have another, and nothing should be refused you.

_Ternissa._ The next by piety: but this, in what manner?

_Epicurus._ By indifference to all who are indifferent to us; by taking joyfully the benefit that comes spontaneously; by wishing no more intensely for what is a hair's-breadth beyond our reach than for a draught of water from the Ganges; and by fearing nothing in another life.

_Ternissa._ This, O Epicurus! is the grand impossibility.

_Epicurus._ Do you believe the gods to be as benevolent and good as you are? or do you not?

_Ternissa._ Much kinder, much better in every way.

_Epicurus._ Would you kill or hurt the sparrow that you keep in your little dressing-room with a string around the leg, because he hath flown where you did not wish him to fly?

_Ternissa._ No! it would be cruel; the string about the leg of so little and weak a creature is enough.

_Epicurus._ You think so; I think so; God thinks so. This I may say confidently; for whenever there is a sentiment in which strict justice and pure benevolence unite, it must be His.

_Ternissa._ O Epicurus! when you speak thus--

_Leontion._ Well, Ternissa, what then?

_Ternissa._ When Epicurus teaches us such sentiments as these, I am grieved that he has not so great an authority with the Athenians as some others have.

_Leontion._ You will grieve more, I suspect, my Ternissa, when he possesses that authority.

_Ternissa._ What will he do?

_Leontion._ Why turn pale? I am not about to answer that he will forget or leave you. No; but the voice comes deepest from the sepulchre, and a great name hath its root in the dead body. If you invited a company to a feast, you might as well place round the table live sheep and oxen and vases of fish and cages of quails, as you would invite a company of friendly hearers to the philosopher who is yet living. One would imagine that the iris of our intellectual eye were lessened by the glory of his presence, and that, like eastern kings, he could be looked at near only when his limbs are stiff, by waxlight, in close curtains.

_Epicurus._ One of whom we know little leaves us a ring or other token of remembrance, and we express a sense of pleasure and of gratitude; one of whom we know nothing writes a book, the contents of which might (if we would let them) have done us more good and might have given us more pleasure, and we revile him for it. The book may do what the legacy cannot; it may be pleasurable and serviceable to others as well as ourselves: we would hinder this too. In fact, all other love is extinguished by self-love: beneficence, humanity, justice, philosophy, sink under it. While we insist that we are looking for Truth, we commit a falsehood. It never was the first object with any one, and with few the second.

Feed unto replenishment your quieter fancies, my sweetest little Ternissa! and let the gods, both youthful and aged, both gentle and boisterous, administer to them hourly on these sunny downs: what can they do better?

_Leontion._ But those feathers, Ternissa, what god's may they be? since you will not pick them up, nor restore them to Caläis nor to Zethes.

_Ternissa._ I do not think they belong to any god whatever; and shall never be persuaded of it unless Epicurus says it is so.

_Leontion._ O unbelieving creature! do you reason against the immortals?

_Ternissa._ It was yourself who doubted, or appeared to doubt, the flight of Oreithyia. By admitting too much we endanger our religion. Beside, I think I discern some upright stakes at equal distances, and am pretty sure the feathers are tied to them by long strings.

_Epicurus._ You have guessed the truth.

_Ternissa._ Of what use are they there?

_Epicurus._ If you have ever seen the foot of a statue broken off just below the ankle, you have then, Leontion and Ternissa, seen the form of the ground about us. The lower extremities of it are divided into small ridges, as you will perceive if you look around; and these are covered with corn, olives, and vines. At the upper part, where cultivation ceases, and where those sheep and goats are grazing, begins my purchase. The ground rises gradually unto near the summit, where it grows somewhat steep, and terminates in a precipice. Across the middle I have traced a line, denoted by those feathers, from one dingle to the other; the two terminations of my intended garden. The distance is nearly a thousand paces, and the path, perfectly on a level, will be two paces broad, so that I may walk between you; but another could not join us conveniently. From this there will be several circuitous and spiral, leading by the easiest ascent to the summit; and several more, to the road along the cultivation underneath: here will, however, be but one entrance. Among the projecting fragments and the massive stones yet standing of the boundary-wall, which old pomegranates imperfectly defend, and which my neighbour has guarded more effectively against invasion, there are hillocks of crumbling mould, covered in some places with a variety of moss; in others are elevated tufts, or dim labyrinths of eglantine.

_Ternissa._ Where will you place the statues? for undoubtedly you must have some.

_Epicurus._ I will have some models for statues. Pygmalion prayed the gods to give life to the image he adored: I will not pray them to give marble to mine. Never may I lay my wet cheek upon the foot under which is inscribed the name of Leontion or Ternissa!

_Leontion._ Do not make us melancholy; never let us think that the time can come when we shall lose our friends. Glory, literature, philosophy have this advantage over friendship: remove one object from them, and others fill the void; remove one from friendship, one only, and not the earth nor the universality of worlds, no, nor the intellect that soars above and comprehends them, can replace it!

_Epicurus._ Dear Leontion! always amiable, always graceful! How lovely do you now appear to me! what beauteous action accompanied your words!

_Leontion._ I used none whatever.

_Epicurus._ That white arm was then, as it is now, over the shoulder of Ternissa; and her breath imparted a fresh bloom to your cheek, a new music to your voice. No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for girl; no hatred so intense and immovable as that of woman for woman. In youth you love one above the others of your sex; in riper age you hate all, more or less, in proportion to similarity of accomplishments and pursuits--which sometimes (I wish it were oftener) are bonds of union to man. In us you more easily pardon faults than excellences in each other. _Your_ tempers are such, my beloved scholars, that even this truth does not ruffle them; and such is your affection, that I look with confidence to its unabated ardour at twenty.

_Leontion._ Oh, then I am to love Ternissa almost fifteen months!

_Ternissa._ And I am destined to survive the loss of it three months above four years!

_Epicurus._ Incomparable creatures! may it be eternal! In loving ye shall follow no example; ye shall step securely over the iron rule laid down for others by the Destinies, and _you_ for ever be Leontion, and _you_ Ternissa.

_Leontion._ Then indeed we should not want statues.

_Ternissa._ But men, who are vainer creatures, would be good for nothing without them: they must be flattered even by the stones.

_Epicurus._ Very true. Neither the higher arts nor the civic virtues can flourish extensively without the statues of illustrious men. But gardens are not the places for them. Sparrows, wooing on the general's truncheon (unless he be such a general as one of ours in the last war), and snails besliming the emblems of the poet, do not remind us worthily of their characters. Porticos are their proper situations, and those the most frequented. Even there they may lose all honour and distinction, whether from the thoughtlessness of magistrates or from the malignity of rivals. Our own city, the least exposed of any to the effects of either, presents us a disheartening example. When the Thebans in their jealousy condemned Pindar to the payment of a fine for having praised the Athenians too highly, our citizens erected a statue of bronze to him.

_Leontion._ Jealousy of Athens made the Thebans fine him; and jealousy of Thebes made the Athenians thus record it.

_Epicurus._ And jealousy of Pindar, I suspect, made some poet persuade the archons to render the distinction a vile and worthless one, by placing his effigy near a king's--one Evagoras of Cyprus.

_Ternissa._ Evagoras, I think I remember to have read in the inscription, was rewarded in this manner for his reception of Conon, defeated by the Lacedemonians.

_Epicurus._ Gratitude was due to him, and some such memorial to record it. External reverence should be paid unsparingly to the higher magistrates of every country who perform their offices exemplarily; yet they are not on this account to be placed in the same degree with men of primary genius. They never exalt the human race, and rarely benefit it; and their benefits are local and transitory, while those of a great writer are universal and eternal.

If the gods did indeed bestow on us a portion of their fire, they seem to have lighted it in sport and left it; the harder task and the nobler is performed by that genius who raises it clear and glowing from its embers, and makes it applicable to the purposes that dignify or delight our nature. I have ever said, 'Reverence the rulers.' Let, then, his image stand; but stand apart from Pindar's. Pallas and Jove! defend me from being carried down the stream of time among a shoal of royalets, and the rootless weeds they are hatched on!

_Ternissa._ So much piety would deserve the exemption, even though your writings did not hold out the decree.