CHAPTER XIX

_On Board a Trireme_

[Sidenote: The Captain of the Trireme]

Our trireme flew before the wind. By daybreak the coast was only a pale line along the waters; but Carmel still towered proudly eminent, and with its top alternately clouded and glittering in the sun might have been taken for a gigantic beacon throwing up alternate smoke and flame. With what eyes did I continue to look, until the mighty hill, too, sank in the waters! But thought still lingered on the shore. I saw, with a keenness more than of the eye, the family circle; through many an hour of gazing on the waters, I was all but standing in the midst of those walls which I might never more see; listening to the uncomplaining sighs of Miriam, the impassioned remonstrances of my sole remaining child, and busied in the still harder task of finding out some defense against the self-accusation that laid the charge of rashness and cruelty heavy upon my soul.

But the scene round me was the very reverse of moody meditation. The captain was a thorough Italian trierarch, ostentatious, gay, given to superstition, and occasionally a little of a free thinker. His ship was to him child, wife, and world; and at every maneuver he claimed from us such tribute as a father might for the virtues of his favorite offspring; perpetual luck was in everything that she did; she knew every headland from Cyprus to Ostia; a pilot was a mere supernumerary; she could run the whole course without the helm, if she pleased. She beat the _Liburnian_ for speed; the _Cypriot_ for comfort; the _Sicilian_ for safety; and every other vessel on the seas for every other quality. All he asked was to live in her, while he lived at all, and to go down in her when the Fates were at last to cut his thread, as they did those of all captains, whether on sea or land.

[Sidenote: A Motley Crowd]

The panegyric of the good ship _Ganymede_ was in some degree merited; she carried us on boldly. For a sea in which the winds are constant when they come, but in which the calms are as constant as the winds, nothing could have been more perfectly adapted than the ancient galley. If the gale arose, the ship shot along like the eagle that bore her Trojan namesake—light, strong, with her white sails full of the breeze, and cleaving the surge with the rapidity of an arrow. If the wind fell we floated in a pavilion, screened from the sun, refreshed with perfumes burning on poop, brow, and masts, surrounded with gilding and, the carvings and paintings of the Greek artists, drinking delicious wines, listening to song and story, and in all this enjoyment gliding insensibly along on a lake of absolute sapphire encircled and varied by the most picturesque and lovely islands in the world.

The _Ganymede_ had been under especial orders from Rome for my transmission; but the captain felt too much respect for the procurator not to trespass on the letter of the law so far as to fill up the vacancies of his hold with merchandise, in which Florus drove a steady contraband trade. Having done so much to gratify the governor’s distinguishing propensity, he next provided for his own; and loaded his gallant vessel mercilessly with passengers, as much prohibited as his merchandise. While we were yet in sight of land, I walked a lonely deck; but when the salutary fear of the galleys on the station was passed, every corner of the _Ganymede_ let loose a living cargo.

For the Jewish chieftain going from Florus on a mission to the Emperor, as the captain conceived me and my purpose to be, a separate portion of the deck was kept sacred. But I mingled from time to time with the crowd, and thus contrived to preserve at once my respect and my popularity. Never was there a more miscellaneous collection. We transported into Europe a Chaldee sorcerer, an Indian gymnosophist, an Arab teacher of astrology, a Magian from Persepolis, and a Platonist from Alexandria. Such were our contributions to Oriental science.

We had, besides, a dealer in sleight-of-hand from Damascus; an Egyptian with tame monkeys and a model of a pyramid; a Syrian serpent-teacher; an Idumean maker of amulets against storm and calm, thirst and hunger, and every other disturbance and distress of life; an Armenian discoverer of the stone by which gold-mines were to be found; a Byzantine inventor of the true Oriental pearls; a dealer from the Caspian in gums superseding all that Arabia ever wept; an Epicurean philosopher who professed indolence, and who, to do him justice, was a striking example of his doctrine; and a Stoic who, having gone his rounds of the Roman garrisons as a teacher of dancing, a curer of wines, and a flute-player, had now risen into the easier vocation of a philosopher.

[Sidenote: Differences of Opinion]

Of course, among these professors, the discoverer of gold was the most moneyless; the maker of amulets against misfortune the most miserable; and the Stoic the most impatient. The Epicurean alone adhered to the spirit of his profession.

But the unstable elements round us were a severe trial for any human philosophy but that of a thorough optimist. Wind and water, the two most imperious of all things, were our masters; and a calm, a breeze, or even a billow, often tried our reasoners too roughly for the honor of tempers so saturated with wisdom. On those occasions the Platonist defended the antiquity of Egypt with double pertinacity; the Chaldee derided its novelty by the addition of a hundred thousand years to his chronology of Babylon; the Indian with increased scorn, wrinkling his brown visage, told them that both Babylon and Egypt were baubles of yesterday compared with the million years of India.

The dagger would have silenced many a discussion on the chief good, the origin of benevolence, and the beauty of virtue, but for the voice of the captain, which like thunder cleared the air. He, I will allow, was the truest philosopher of us all. The trierarch was an unconscious optimist; nothing could touch him in the shape of misfortune, for to him it had no existence. If the storm rose, “we should get the more rapidly into port”; if the calm came to fix us scorching on the face of the waters, “nothing could be safer.” If our provisions fell short, “abstemiousness now and then was worth a generation of doctors.” If the sun burned above us with the fire of a ball of red-hot iron, “it was the test of fair weather”; if the sky was a mass of vapor, “we escaped being roasted alive.”

[Sidenote: The Philosophy of a Captain]

His maxims on higher subjects were equally consoling. “If man had to struggle through life, struggle was the nursing-mother of greatness; if he were opulent, he had gained the end without the trouble. If he had disease, he learned patience, essential for sailor, soldier, and philosopher alike; if he enjoyed health, who could doubt the blessing? If he lived long, he had time for pleasure; if he died early, he escaped the chances of the tables’ turning.” The optimist applied his principle to me, by gravely informing me that “though it depended on the Emperor’s state of digestion whether I should or should not carry back my head from his presence, yet if I lived, I should see the games of the Circus, and if I did not, I should in all probability care but little about the matter.”

Nothing in the variety of later Europe gives me a parallel to the distinctions of rank and profession, style of subsistence, and physiognomy of society in the ancient world. Human nature was classed in every kingdom, province, and city almost as rigidly as the different races of mankind. The divisions of the slave, the freedman, the citizen, the artist, the priest, the man of literature, and the man of public life were cut with a plowshare whose furrows were never filled up. Life had the curious mixture of costume, the palpable diversity of purpose, and the studied intricacy of a drama.

Our voyage was rapid, but even a lingering transit would have been cheered by the innumerable objects of beauty and memory which rise on every side in the passage through a Grecian sea. The islands were then untouched by the spoiler; the opulence of Rome had been added to Attic taste; and temples, theaters, and palaces, starting from groves, or studding the sides of the stately hills, and reflected in the mirror of bays, smooth and bright as polished steel, held the eye a continual captive. On the sea, nights of vessels, steering in all directions, glittering with the emblems of their nations, the colored pennants, the painted prows, and gilded images of their protecting deities, covered the horizon with life. We had reached the southern cape of Greece, and were, with a boldness unusual to ancient navigation, stretching across in a starless night for the coast of Italy, when we caught a sound of distant music that recalled the poetic dreams of nymphs and tritons. The sound swelled and sank on the wind, as if it came from the depths of the sea or the bosom of the clouds. As we parted from the land, it swelled higher until it filled the midnight with pompous harmony. To sleep was profanation, and we all gathered on the deck, exhausting nature and art in conjectures of the cause.

[Sidenote: The Imperial Fleet]

The harmony approached and receded at intervals, grew in volume and richness, then stole away in wild murmurs, to revive with still more luxuriant sweetness. Night passed in delight and conjecture. Morning alone brought the solution.

Full in the blaze of sunrise steered the imperial fleet, returning in triumph from the Olympic games, with the Emperor on board. We had unconsciously approached it during the darkness.

The whole scene wore the aspect of a vision summoned by the hand of an enchanter. The sea was covered with the fleet in order of battle. Some of the galleys were of vast size, and all were gleaming with gold and decorations; silken sails, garlands on the masts, trophies hung over the sides, and embroidered streamers of every shape and hue, met the morning light. We passed the wing of the fleet, close enough to see the sacrificial fires on the poop of the imperial quinquereme. A crowd in purple and military habits was standing round a throne, above which proudly waved the scarlet flag of command. A figure advanced; all foreheads were bowed, acclamations rent the air, the trumpets of the fleet flourished, and the lofty harmonies that had charmed us in the night again swelled upon the wind and followed us, long after the whole floating splendor had dissolved into the distant blue.

At length the headlands of the noble bay of Tarentum rose above the horizon. While we were running with the speed of a lapwing, the captain, to our surprise, shortened sail. I soon discovered that no philosophy was perfect; that even the optimist thought that daylight might be worse than useless, and that a blot had been left on creation in the shape of a custom-house officer.

Night fell at last; the moon, to which our captain had taken a sudden aversion, was as cloudy as he could desire, and we rushed in between the glimmering watch-towers on the Iapygian and Lacinian promontories. The glow of light along the waters soon pointed out where the luxurious citizens of Tarentum were enjoying the banquet in their barges and villas. Next came the hum of the great city, whose popular boast was, like that of later times, that it had more festivals than days in the year.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Lands]

But the trierarch’s often-told delight at finding himself free to rove among the indulgences of his favorite shore had lost its poignancy; and with a firmness which set the Stoic in a rage, the Epicurean in a state of rebellion, and the whole tribe of our sages in a temper of mere mortal remonstrance, he resisted alike the remonstrance and the allurement, and sullenly cast anchor in the center of the bay.

It was not until song and feast had died, and all was hushed, that he stole with the slightest possible noise to the back of the mole, and sending us below, disburdened his conscience and the hold of the good ship _Ganymede_. I had no time to give to the glories of Tarentum. Nero’s approach hurried my departure. The centurion who had me in charge trembled at the idea of delay, and we rode through the midst of three hundred thousand sleepers in streets of marble and ranks of statues, as silently and swiftly as if we had been the ghosts of their ancestors.

When the day broke we found ourselves among the Lucanian hills, then no desert, but crowded with population and bright with the memorials of Italian opulence and taste. From the inn where we halted to change horses, the Tarentine gulf spread broad and bold before the eye.

The city of luxury and of power, once the ruler of Southern Italy, and mistress of the seas that sent out armies and fleets, worthy to contest the supremacy with Pyrrhus and the Carthaginian, was, from this spot, sunk like all the works of man, into littleness. But the gulf, like all the works of nature, grew in grandeur. Its circular shore edged with thirteen cities, the deep azure of its smooth waters inlaid with the flashes of sunrise, and traversed by fleets, diminished to toys, reminded me of one of the magnificent Roman shields, with its center of sanguine steel, the silver incrustation of the rim, and the storied sculpture. We passed at full speed through the Lucanian and Samnian provinces, fine sweeps of cultivated country, interspersed with the hunting-grounds of the great patricians; forests that had not felt the ax for centuries, and hills and valleys sheeted with the vine and rose.

[Sidenote: In Rome]

But on reaching the border of Latium, I was already in Rome; I traveled a day’s journey among streets and in the midst of a crowded and hurrying population. The whole was one huge suburb with occasional glimpses of a central mount, crowned with glittering and gilded structures.

“There!” said the centurion, with somewhat of religious reverence, “behold the eternal Capitol!”

I entered Rome at night, passing through an endless number of narrow and intricate streets where hovels, the very abode of want, were mingled with palaces blazing with lights and echoing with festivity. The centurion’s house was at length reached. He showed me to an apartment, and left me, saying, “that I must prepare to be brought before the Emperor immediately on his arrival.”

I am now, thought I, in the heart of the heart of the world; in the midst of that place of power from which the destiny of nations issues; in the great treasure-house to which men come from the ends of the earth for knowledge, for justice, for wealth, honor, thrones! And what am I?—a solitary slave!