Dear and Glorious Physician (23 page)

“If a man looks with loving compassion on his suffering fellow men, and out of his bitterness inquires of the gods, ‘Why do you afflict my brothers?’ then surely he is gazed upon more tenderly by God than a man who congratulates Him on being merciful so that he flourishes happily, and has only words of adoration to offer. For the first prays out of love and pity, divine attributes, and so close to the heart of God, and the other speaks out of selfish complacency, a beastly attribute, which does not approach the circumambient light of the spirit of God.”

— Horace

Iris wrote to her son, Lucanus:

It is nearly four years since we last met, my dear and beloved son, and you have steadfastly invented excuses not to come to Rome, which I confess is not so beautiful as Syria. Nevertheless, we live quietly on our estates and enjoy the peace of the evening and the bright crystal of the morning. It is enough for me. Your sister, Aurelia, will soon be three years old, and she is the light of our souls, with her golden hair and eyes as brown and soft as the heart of a daisy. There is nothing she can demand, in her infant insistence, from Diodorus, her father, that he will not grant immediately, in spite of my protests. Your brother Priscus is Aurelia’s fondest playmate, and his tyrant, a state of affairs which he endures with the most affable merriment. Your new brother, Gaius Octavius, named for your father’s old comrade in arms, is almost a year old, and a very serious boy, with my blue eyes and his father’s sober expression. He laughs seldom, and prefers to crawl over the grass and inspect each blade intently. He is certainly a philosopher. If only my son, Lucanus, were with us, we should be the happiest of mortals. You shall not escape us! In three months you will be bereft of excuses, for you will have left Alexandria, a physician.

In the past year Diodorus has become restless. He is a man of action as well as a man of thought. For a long time he was content with his library, his olive and palm groves, his garden, his fields, and his family. Philo visited us, the Jewish philosopher, who is much admired and esteemed in Rome, and the two talked to the dawn incessantly. Since then Diodorus has begun to brood, and to visit Rome at least every seven days, and returns in a most irascible temper, and with a fresh sense of outrage. It is not possible, I say to him, for a single man to save the world or set it aright, and this serves only to make him the more irritable. I often hear him cursing in his library, and once he hurled a quantity of books against the walls and stamped heavily up and down for hours. But he is as gentle as a dove to me, his wife, and to our children. Perhaps when you visit us — and I pray that you will remain with us — you will be able to lighten his gloomy expression and solace him.

Her letter glowed with her gentle love and contentment, and her solicitude for her family. Lucanus could feel these things, and he moved restlessly in the great garden near the main marble colonnade. The floor of the colonnade was of dark yellow marble, but the double row of Ionic columns gleamed like fluted snow as they rose from the floor to the white roof. Two men paced up and down in the sunset, one a respectful tall student and the other the short and harpy-faced master of mathematics, Claudius Vesalius. The golden light brightened them as they paced between the columns. Sometimes Claudius Vesalius paused to gesticulate vehemently, and his shrill womanish voice disturbed the peaceful birds, and most especially disturbed Lucanus. The teacher liked none of his students; in particular he did not like Lucanus because the young man was the best mathematician in the university and yet obdurately insisted upon becoming a physician. Lucanus smiled slightly, thinking of this. Every teacher believed his own art to be the most important of all, and all others of minor significance, with the exception of Joseph ben Gamliel, who believed God the only Importance, and all art and science and knowledge, like the roads of omnipresent Rome, leading only to a greater understanding of God and to the City of God. But then Joseph ben Gamliel was a Jew.

The university covered eight acres of land, an agora roughly square-shaped around immense tropical gardens, and all four sides were of colonnades such as the one now facing Lucanus. Each school had its particular doorway, entered from the gardens and the colonnades, and here were the schools of democracy, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, art, architecture, drama, science, epic, didactic and elegiac poetry, grammar, languages and philology, law, history and astronomy and literature. There was also a school of government for young Romans who aspired to public service, a museum guarded by vigilant Egyptian teachers, the world’s most famous library, an odeum or music hall, and beyond the agora itself a theater for hopeful young dramatists, and a pantheon. Each teacher believed his own stoa to house the most profound learning — and the most stupid of students, unworthy to be taught by such a master. Only Joseph ben Gamliel possessed humility, and his stoa of Oriental religion was the only peaceful place, unmarred by hectoring voices and imprecations against ass-headed students regularly consigned to Hades and advised to study brickmaking, or even lesser trades. It was nothing for the teachers to say, violently, “My idiot students and I resemble the Laocoon, and who will deliver me from the serpents!” But Joseph ben Gamliel would say gently, “Let us contemplate God together and try to discover His Most Holy designs.”

Again, thinking of this teacher, Lucanus moved restlessly on his marble bench in the center of the gardens. He, alone, found no peace in the stoa of Joseph ben Gamliel. He often wondered, somberly, why the teacher frequently sought him out to talk with him in the gardens.

The buildings of the school, behind the colonnades, hid the sea, but Lucanus could hear its eternally unquiet voice speaking to the golden light and to the skies. Why did not Claudius Vesalius, whose shrill voice whined continuously at the silent student, go away so that the gardens could bring Lucanus the only quietude he ever knew? The great gardens lay about him, musical with fountains, brilliant with flower beds, rattling sweetly with palms, murmurous with the sea wind, harmoniously alive with the calls, songs, and sleepy chatter of birds. The dark-faced slaves who came to the fountains for water, carrying their terra-cotta jugs on their shoulders, or the slaves reaching for golden clusters of dates from the palms to put in their baskets, or the slaves raking up the red-earthed paths among the flower beds did not disturb Lucanus. They were part of the natural flora and fauna. Their dusky skins contrasted beautifully with the many tall statues of gods, goddesses, and scholars and philosophers which rose with white and powerful grace from bowers and looked upon the gardens with dignity and majesty. The perfume of roses, lilies and jasmine, and more pungent scents, lifted like unseen webs of fragrance in the early evening air. A parrot suddenly squawked fussily, and a slave laughed and held out a date to the bird, which flashed from a grove of trees to light in a flutter of scarlet and green and yellow on the slave’s shoulder. He ate daintily of the date, and with an air of tolerant politeness. “Rascal,” said the slave, in Egyptian. The bird cocked a wise and humorous eye at him, and that eye was alert, cynical, and bright in the golden air. Lucanus felt an impulse to laugh. As if the parrot felt that amusement, he uttered a single harsh sound that resembled an oath. He turned his head and glared at the young man on his marble bench, then soared off to practice his swearing on the branch of a tree.

The slave laughed softly, then meekly and covertly gazed at Lucanus with his letters on his knees. All the teachers, students, and slaves were aware of the beauty and stately demeanor of the young Greek, and secretly marveled at it. His fair face, which not even the fierce sun could darken, possessed smooth hard planes, as if carved from white stone. His blue eyes, so perfectly cerulean, were like jewels, and as cold. His yellow hair flowed back from his snowy brow in shining waves, and curled behind his ears. His throat was a column, his shoulders perfection under his pale tunic. He excelled in the races, at discus throwing, at wrestling, at boxing, at jumping, at throwing the spear, at swimming and diving and assorted sports required of the students. “A sound mind cannot exist except in a sound body, and a sound body cannot exist without a sound mind,” said the master of the school.

Lucanus took up the letter from Diodorus, which had arrived that morning from Rome. He liked the tribune’s letters; they might be fiery and salty and filled with angry oaths, but they possessed vitality and a healthy anger and some eloquence. He poured out his wrath to his stepson, understanding that here was a receptive ear.

Greetings to my son, Lucanus,
the letter began formally. Then it continued:

All is well at home. Your mother basks among her children like Niobe, and it is beauteous to see. Unlike Niobe, she is infinitely wise, and a constant consolation to my heart, which is frequently inflamed after visits to the City. Each year finds her lovelier, as if Venus herself had touched her with the gift of immortal youth and beauty. What have I done to deserve such a wife, and such adorable children? I feel that I must strive to be worthy of such happiness. Therefore my frequent visits to Rome and my enraged arguments with the red-sandaled senators who complacently watch our world quickly descending into hell. Because of my connections, and through the offices of Carvilius Ulpian, who grows fatter daily in the body and thinner in the face, I am sometimes allowed to address the Senate. They listen without boredom, I assure you!

They prefer serenity to thought, long, windy dissertations on their particular interests to serious reflection on the state of our country. Most of them are armchair generals, liking to sit on their terraces of an evening, with a goblet of wine in their hands, and discussing with their friends some general’s campaigns, and learnedly and disapprovingly remarking on them. They prepare diagrams of campaigns. What do they know of tenting in the wilderness, of long hot marches, of struggles with the barbarians? They are lawmakers, they say. Let them confine themselves to their law and leave soldiers alone! But let there be a rumbling among the populace, and the senators are the first ones who speak of Praetorians and the legions, and in pusillanimous voices. The prefects and the city police are not enough for these knaves. They would have the military protect them! Rome sometimes resembles an armed camp.

In the meantime, while they are not addressing their fellow senators on the subject of more public baths and more circuses and more free housing for the motley mobs of Rome, and more free food for the mobs who dislike work, they furtively oversee businesses such as the making of uniforms and arms for the military, clothing and blanket factories, or help to subsidize relatives who are in those businesses or throw government contracts in their direction. I have not yet seen a senator whose hand is not sticky with bribes, or who does not extort bribes. The Senate has become a closed organization of scoundrels who loot the Treasury in the name of the general welfare, and who have a rabble-following of hungry bellies and avaricious thieves they call their clients, and about whom they express the most touching solicitude. The fate of Rome, the fate of the desperate taxpayers, is nothing to such as these. Let the public debt mount! Let the middle class be crushed to death under taxes, extortions, and exploitation! Why did the gods create the middle class if not to serve as oxen drawing the chariots of senators followed by multitudes of ravenous beggars? An honest man, a man who works and honors Rome and the Constitution of the Republic, is not only a fool. He is suspect. Send the tax collector to him for fresh robberies! He is probably not paying his ‘just’ share of the taxes.

The military is constantly clamoring for new appropriations for the ‘defense’ of Rome, and against ‘the enemy’. To question these appropriations is to bring the cry of denunciation. Am I a traitor? Am I indifferent to the strength of Rome? Would I have Rome weak in the face of encompassing barbarians? Do I not understand that we must keep our allies strong with gifts from the Treasury, and arms, and the presence of our legions? Not to mention the advice of our military and political experts, whose long and expensive journeys in their advisory capacities are financed by the Treasury? It is odd that Carvilius Ulpian, who is an Egyptologist, and a lover of Egyptian art, managed to convince the Senate that it was absolutely necessary that he be financed to ‘study the present defenses of Egypt’, and that his presence was needed for that ‘study’ in Cairo. He went, of course, accompanied by Praetorians and a whole retinue of handsome ladies and slaves and actors and gladiators, all paid for out of the funds in the Treasury. He came back and addressed the Senate, giving them the reassuring news that Egypt was loyal to the Pax Romana, though the proconsul in Cairo could have sent that news on request at the cost of a single messenger on a regular ship.

Lucanus involuntarily smiled, but the smile had a touch with dreary melancholy in it. The letter in his hands seemed to vibrate with the angry passion of the tribune. Lucanus continued to read.

But ten days ago I was present, as a guest, in the Senate. One senator declaimed sadly, but nobly! that world leadership had been thrust upon the strong shoulders of Rome. ‘It was not our choice,’ said this lying hypocrite, mouthing his words heroically, ‘but the choice of fate, or the gods, or the mysterious forces of history,’ he giving the impression that history in some mystical way exists above and apart from mankind which makes history! ‘Shall we again refuse this yoke?’ demanded the vomitous liar. ‘Shall we again refuse to take upon us what has been decreed because we possess the genius for government, the genius for invention, the genius for productive work? No! By Jupiter, no! Onerous though the burden is, we accept it for the sake of humanity!’

I could not contain myself. I rose from my guest’s seat beside Carvilius Ulpian and stood there with my thumbs in my belt, letting them see my armor and my sword. How these ladylike men love the show of militarism! They immediately took on serious expressions, though they have seen me often enough, Mars knows! ‘Let the tribune speak!’ some of them shouted, as if they could have stopped the son of Priscus!

I lifted my fist and shook it in their mendacious faces. ‘And who,’ I demanded, ‘has declared that Rome has been given the leadership of the world? The civilized Greeks who detest us and laugh at us and our bloody pretensions? The Egyptians, who were an old dynasty when Remus and Romulus were suckled by the she-wolf? The Jews, who had their wise code of laws when Rome had no law but the short sword? The barbarians in Britain, who tear down our fortifications as fast as we raise them? The Gauls, the Goths, the ancient Etruscans, the Germani, the millions of those as yet unblessed by Roman militarism? The millions who do not know our name, or, if knowing, spit at hearing it? Who gave us leadership but ourselves, out of our force, our craft and threats, our urge to despoil and steal, our lust for power? We are like a young, uncouth but corrupt bully swaggering among old men, or among babes growing large for the future on their mothers’ milk.’