A Roman Citizen

I

‘LOOK at him—a subject for his own verses — a grandfather metamorphosed into an infant Bacchus! Will he be a Mercury in swaddling clothes the next time? Oh, father, father, the gods certainly laid their own youth in your cradle fifty-two years ago! ’

The speaker, a young matron, smiled into her father’s eyes, which were as brilliant and tender as her own. Ovid and his daughter were singularly alike in a certain blitheness of demeanor, and to Fabia they made a charming picture now, both of them in festal white, against the March green of the slender poplars. Perilla’s youngest boy had climbed into his grandfather’s lap and laid upon his hair, still black and thick, a wreath of grape-leaves picked from early vines in a sunny corner. Fabia, and Perilla’s husband, Fidus Cornelius, smiled at each other in mutual appreciation of a youth shared equally, it seemed to them, by the other three with the new-born spring.

It was Ovid’s birthday and they were celebrating it at their country place at the juncture of the Flaminian and Clodian Roads. The poet had a special liking for his gardens here, and he had preferred to hold his fête away from the city in family seclusion, because Fidus was about to take Perilla off to Africa where he was to be proconsul. The shadow of the parting had thrown into high relief the happiness of the day. Perilla had always said that it was worth while to make a stir about her father’s birthday, because he could accept family incense without strutting like a god, and was never so charming as when he was being spoiled. To-day they had spared no pains, and his manner in return had fused with the tenderness he kept for them alone, the gallantry, at once of worldling and of poet, which made him the most popular man in Roman society. Now, as the afternoon grew older and his grandson curled comfortably into his arms, the conversation turned naturally to intimate things. Perilla’s jest led her father to talk of his age and to wonder whether he was to have as long a life as his father, who had died only two years before at ninety.

‘At least, having no sons,’ he went on, ‘I shall be spared some of his disappointments. It was cruel that my brother, who could have satisfied him by going into public life, should have died. Father had no use for literature. He used to point out to me that not even Homer made money, so what could I expect? But I believe that even he saw that my student speeches sounded like metreless verse, and later on he accepted the bad bargain with some grace. He sniffed at what I considered my youthful successes. I was immensely proud over seeing Virgil once in the same room with myself, and when I came to know Horace and Propertius fairly intimately I felt myself quite a figure in Rome. But father had little respect for them — except when Horace turned preacher — and no patience at all with what I wrote. Before he died, however, when these Olympians had passed off the stage, and he saw young men look up to me as I had looked up to them, and found I could sell my wares, he began to grant that I had, after all, done something with my time.’

‘I never can realize,’ Perilla exclaimed, ‘that you are old enough to have seen Virgil! Why, I was n’t even born when be died. I suppose those times, when Augustus was young, were very fiery and inspiring, but I am so glad I live in this very year! I would rather have you the chief poet of Rome than a hundred solemn Virgils, and surely life can never have been as lovely as it is now. Is n’t Rome much finer and more finished?’

Fidus smiled. ‘ You are your father’s own child,’ he said. ‘We certainly are getting the rustic accent out of our mouths and the rustic scruples out of our morals. In the mean time,’ he added lightly, ‘some of us have to plod along with our old habits, or where would the Empire be? I don’t expect to improve much on the proconsulship of my grandfather.’

Ovid’s eyes rested whimsically on the young man, and after a pause he said, ‘Art is one thing, and conduct is another. I trust Perilla to you, but with no greater assurance of her happiness than I have of Fabia’s entrusted to me. Soldiering and proconsuling have their place, but so has the brighter service of the Muses. While you are collecting taxes in Africa, we will make Rome a goal to come back to from the ends of the earth. After all, to live is the object of life, and where can you live as richly, as exquisitely, as you can here? You will find you cannot stay away long. Rome is the breath we breathe. I like to believe that will prove true of you. I cannot give up Perilla long — even with this young Roman as a hostage.’ The child had fallen asleep, and with a light kiss on his tousled curls the grandfather turned him over to his mother’s arms. ‘Come,’ he said to his son-in-law, ‘let us rout our other boy out of his beehives and have one more game of ball before I get too old.’

Perilla watched the two men as they walked through the garden, then rose and, tucking her sleeping child among the cushions on a neighboring bench, threw herself on the grass by the older woman’s feet, looking eagerly up into her face. Her forty-five years sat lightly upon Fabia, leaving her still lovely in the sensitive eyes of her husband and stepdaughter. A temperamental equableness and a disciplined character gave to her finely modeled face an inward tranquillity which was a refuge to their ardent natures. She only smiled now, as Perilla’s lively tongue began again, —

‘What a happy day we have had! How happy you make father all the time, any way! It keeps me from feeling too dreadfully about going away to Africa. Do you know, when you first came to us, I had an idea you would n’t understand him! I was just old enough to realize that all your traditions were very austere ones, that your family had done wonderful things of which you would be very proud, things that were n’t poetry and the joy of living at all. But I was far too young to know that just because you did belong to people like that, when you married a man you would sink your life in his. I have a feeling that within yourself your character stands like a rock, upon which all father’s ideas could beat forever without changing it. But you never let that character make you into a force in the community apart from him. You have made his home perfect in every detail, but outside you are just his wife. Tell me, does that really satisfy you?’

Fabia’s smile grew into a laugh. ’I seem very old-fashioned to you, do I not, dear child? It is not my age, either, for plenty of middle-aged women agree with you. It is quite in the air, is n’t it, the independence of women, their right to choose their own path? I was invited to a reading of the Lysistrata the other day, and actually one woman said that she believed Aristophanes was only foreseeing a time when women would take part in the government! She was laughed down for that, but most of the others agreed that the whole progress of Society since Aristophanes’s time was to be measured by the emancipation of women from the confines of the home and from intellectual servility. I, too, believe in the mind’s freedom, but I notice that you all insist a great deal upon the rights involved in being individuals. I have never been able to see what you gain by that. My husband is a citizen of Rome. To be called his wife is my proudest title. It makes no difference to the state what I am or do of myself. I live to the state only through him.’

The younger woman had begun to speak almost before Fabia had finished, but the conversation was interrupted by the nurse coming for the child. Perilla returned to the house with them, declaring, with a laugh, that an hour with her boy at bedtime was more important than trying to change her perfect mother.

It was not yet time to dress for the birthday dinner which was to crown the day, and Fabia lingered on in the garden to watch the gathering rose in the sky above the tree-tops. An enchanted sense of happiness came to her in the silence of the hour. She did not agree with her husband that happiness was the main object of life, but she was very grateful to the gods, who had let her be happy ever since she was a little girl, left to the best of uncles by parents whom she was too young too mourn, and had crowned the latter half of her life with a love which had made her youth immortal. She had been married when she was a mere girl to a young soldier who had not lived long enough to obtrude upon her life more than a gentle memory of his bravery. The bearing of a child had been the vital part of that marriage, and the child had come into her new home with her, leaving it only for a happy one of her own. Her husband’s child had been like another daughter to her. And throughout the twenty years of her life with Ovid, joy had consistently outweighed difficulties. Insolent tongues had been busy with his faithlessness to her. But after the first fears she had come to understand that, although other women often touched the poet and artist in him, none save herself knew the essential fidelity and the chivalrous tenderness of the husband. She had accepted with pride his shining place in public regard. It was no wonder that he loved Rome, for Rome loved him.

A nightingale broke into song among the rose-bushes. Her face was like a girl’s as she thought of her husband, with the fresh green grape-leaves above his vivid face, young as the gods are young, seeking her eyes with his. A faint smell, as of homely things, rose from the familiar earth. Lights began to appear in the windows of the villa. She had come to this home when she and Ovid were married, and this morning she had again offered her tranquil prayers to the Penates, so long her own. The happy years broke in upon her. Ah, yes, she and her husband had the divine essence of youth within them. But they had something finer also, something that comes only to middle age—the sense of security and peace, the assurance that, except for death, no violent changes lay ahead of them. She had only to nurture, as they faced old age together, a happiness that was already in full measure theirs.

As she turned toward the house she met her husband, come himself to seek her. In the recurrent springs of all her after life the faint smell of the burgeoning earth filled her with an unappeasable desire.

II

The next week Fid us and Perilla started for Libya, leaving the two children with their grandfather rather than expose them to the dangers of the African climate. Ovid and Fabia spent the summer, as usual, in the cool Apennines, at the old family homestead at Sulmo. They lingered on into the autumn for the sake of the vintage, a favorite season with them, and did not return to their beautiful town house at the foot of the Capitoline Hill until late in October. While Fabia was absorbed in the household readjustments entailed by the presence of the children with their servants and tutors, and before social engagements should become too numerous, Ovid undertook to give the final polish to his Metamorphoses. Patient work of this kind was uncongenial to him, and he always welcomed an excuse to avoid it. At the end of November, Fabia’s cousin, Fabius Maximus, of whom he was very fond, went to the island of Elba to look after some family mines, and he made his wife’s business interests a pretext for a holiday in the best of company. He was to be back soon after the Ides of December for a dinner with Macer, his fellow poet, in honor of some friends of both from Athens.

On the morning of the sixth day before the Ides, a message came to Fabia from the Palatine, asking where Ovid was. The inquiry seemed flattering and Fabia wondered what pleasant attention was in store for her husband. As it happened, she sawno one outside her own household, either t hat, day or the next, being kept indoors by the necessity of installing servants — sent down from the estate at Sulmo — in both kitchen and storerooms. She was, therefore, entirely unprepared for the appalling public news which her uncle, Rufus, brought to her on the second evening. There was something almost terrifying in the wrench of her mind from placid details of linen chests and pantries to the disasters in Cmsar’s household. Augustus, without warning, at the opening of what promised to be a brilliant social season, had risen in devastating wrath. Julia, his granddaughter, her lover, Decimus Junius Silanus, and, it was rumored, several other prominent men, had been given the choice of accepting banishment or submitting to a public prosecution. Everybody knew what that meant. The courts would condemn relentlessly, and the only way to save even their lives was for them to leave Rome.

‘But the brutal suddenness of it!’ Fabia exclaimed. ‘It seems more tragic, somehow, than her mother’s punishment. Is n’t everybody aghast? And do you think she has deserved it?’

Rufus looked very grave and troubled. ‘It is not easy to know what one does think,’ he said. ‘There has been a great deal of boasting about our prosperity, our victories abroad and our lustre at home. But some of us who have been watching closely have felt that there was no security. The Empire has been created at a great cost and cannot be preserved at a lesser price. Insurrections have to be put down in the provinces, efficiency has to be maintained in the capital. It takes harsh courage, inflexible morals, to do all that. Augustus has feared and fought against degeneracy. Julia, and Roman society with her, have defied his legislation, as her mother and her set defied it ten years ago. Imagine the grief and despair of our old Emperor! He must do something savage, drastic, irrevocable, to save his slate. My heart breaks for him, and yet I cannot help pitying our imperial lady. With her light grace and her audacious humor, among our stern old standards, she has often made me think of a Dryad, moving with rosy feet and gleaming shoulders within the gloom of a black forest. All our family, Fabia, have been like the trees, but perhaps Rome needs the Dryads, too. What is moral truth?’

Fabia smiled suddenly. ‘Ovid would say it is beauty,’ she said. ‘That is an old dispute between us.’ Her face fell again. ‘He will be deeply distressed by this news. Julia has been very gracious to him, and he admires her even more than he did her mother.’

‘When is he coming home?’ Rufus asked.

‘I didn’t expect him till the Ides,’ Fabia answered, ‘but I think now he may come earlier. Cæsar sent yesterday morning to inquire where he was, and perhaps some honor is going to be offered that will bring him back immediately — a reading at the Palace, perhaps, or — But, uncle!’ she exclaimed, ‘what is the matter? You look so white! You arc sick.’ She came near him with tender, anxious hands, and he gathered them into his thin old ones and drew her to him.

‘No, dear heart,’ he said, ‘I am not sick. For a moment fear outwitted me, a Fabian. You must promise me not to be afraid, whatever happens. Is it cruel to warn you of what may never come to you? But our days are troubled. Jove’s thunderstorm has broken upon us. Your husband is among the lofty. It is only the obscure who are sure of escaping the lightning. Send for me if you need me. Remember whose blood is in you. I must go — there may yet be time — ’

He kissed her forehead hurriedly and was gone.

Fabia never knew accurately what happened before the sun rose a second time after this night. Afterwards she recognized the linked hours as the bridge upon which she passed, without return, from joy to pain, from youth to age, from ignorance to knowledge. But the manner of the crossing never became clear in her memory. Details stood out mercilessly. Their relationship, their significance, were at the time as phantasmagoric as if she had been lost in the torturing unrealities of a nightmare.

Just after her uncle left she was called to the room of Perilla’s youngest child, who had wakened with a sore throat and fever. Against the protests of the nurse, she sat up with him herself all night, through the shadows that darkened her mind groping after some service to her husband. When she was an old woman she could have told what was carved on the cover of the little box from which she took the medicine every hour until the fever broke, and the color of the nurse’s dress when she hurried in at dawn. Practical matters claimed her attention after she had bathed and dressed. The doctor was sent for to confirm her own belief that the child had nothing more than a cold. The older boy’s tutor consulted her about a change in the hours of exercise. A Greek artist came with designs of new decorations for the walls of the dining-room. The forenoon passed. A cold wind, early herald of winter, which had been blowing all night, died down. A portentous silence seemed to isolate her from the rest, of the city.

At noon Ovid came home. She felt no surprise. They clung to each other, and when he spoke he seemed to be saying what she knew already. The words made little impression. She only thought how old he looked, — as old as she was herself. His voice seemed to reach her ears from a great distance.

He was to go away from her to the world’s end, to a town named Tomi, on the terrible Black Sea. The formal decree had stated as the cause the immorality of his Art of Love. Yes, the volume had been published ten years ago, and he had enjoyed the imperial favor as much since then as he had before. The real reason had been explained to him by the confidential messenger. It was not safe for her to know. Her ignorance was better for them both. He had made a ruinous blunder—the Emperor called it a crime — but he was innocent of evil intent. No; there was no use in making any plea. He had talked it over with Maximus, although he had not told him anything more than he could tell her. Maximus had been sure that nothing could be done, that the publicity of a trial would result only more disastrously. The Emperor was clement, his anger might cool, patience might bring a remission of the sentence. The only hope lay in obedience. Maximus had not been allowed to return with him in the hurried journey by government post. The officers had held out little hope to him. A change had come over Cæsar. Banishment was banishment. ‘An exile?’ No, he was not that, he still had his property and his rights, — she was no exile’s wife! Yes, she must stay in Rome. It was futile for her to argue, Cæsar was inexorable.

She asked him when he must go. He said before another sunrise—tomorrow must not find him within the city limits. The words held no new meaning for her. What were hours and minutes to the dead? They talked in broken sentences. She promised to comfort Perilla. He was glad his father and mother were dead. He hoped her daughter would come to her from Verona.

They were interrupted by the stormy arrival of a few friends — how few they were she did not realize until later. Rufus was the first to come, and she thought it strange that he should break down and sob while Ovid’s eyes were dry and hard. Knowing the servants, he undertook to tell them what had befallen their master. Their noisy grief throughout the house brought a dreary sense of disorder. Sextus Pompeius arrived and, characteristically, out of the chaos of sorrow plucked the need of preparation for the long journey. He brought out maps and went over every stage of the way. Only the sea journey from Brindisi to Corinth would be familiar to Ovid, but Pompeius had seen many years of military service in northern stations from the Hellespont to the Danube, and knew what to recommend. Although Tomi was a seaport, he advised making the last part of the journey by land through Thrace. He knew what dangers to fear from the natives, what precautions to take against sickness, and what clothing and private supplies a traveler should have with him. They made out a list of necessary things and Pompeius sent some of the servants out to procure what they could before night. The rest could be sent on to Brindisi before the ship sailed; he would see to that. Fabia need have no care. It was a great disadvantage that they could not control the choice of traveling companions, but he would go at once and see if he could exercise any influence.

The packing consumed several hours. This unemotional activity would have strengthened Fabia, had it not had a completely unnerving effect on Ovid. The preparation for a wild and dangerous country seemed to bring him face to face with despair. He rushed to the fire and threw upon it the thick manuscript of his Metamorphoses. Looking with sullen eyes at the smouldering parchment, he began to talk wildly, passing from a protest that no one should see his unfinished work to a paroxysm of rage against all his poetry, to which he attributed his ruin. He walked up and down the room, pushed his wife aside and mumbled that he was going to take his own life. Only Celsus, who had come after Pompeius left, proved able to influence him. By a patient reasonableness he made headway against his hysterical mood and brought him back, step by step, to saner thoughts.

The servants, stirred to their duties by Rufus, brought in food, and Fabia made Ovid eat a little bread and fruit. The evening wore on. The December moon was mounting the sky. Voices and footsteps of passers-by were vaguely heard. In the distance a dog barked incessantly. Lights had been lit, but the usual decorum of the house was broken. The fire died upon the hearth. The children were brought into the room, roused from sleep and pale and dull with the unwonted hour. Midnight came and went. All sounds of city life died away. Even the dog ceased his howling. Ovid went to the window and drew aside the heavy silk curtain. The moon rode high over the Capitol. Suddenly he stretched out his arms and they heard him praying to the great gods of his country. At this moment Fabia’s self-control, like a dam pressed upon too long, gave way. Except on ceremonial occasions, she had never heard her husband pray. Now, he who had had the heart of a child for Rome and for her was cast out by Rome and beyond her help. From her breast he must turn to the indifferent gods in heaven. She broke into hard, terrible sobs and threw herself upon the hearth, kissing the gray ashes. Recking nothing of those about her, she prayed wildly to the lesser gods of home, her gods. From the temple on the Capitoline, from the Penates came no answer.

His friends began to urge him to start. His carriage was ready, he must run no risk of not clearing Rome by daylight. Why should he start, he asked with a flicker of his old wit, when to go meant leaving Rome and facing Scythia? He called the children to him and spoke lowr to them of their mother. The morning star had risen. Again his friends urged him. Three times he started for the door, and three times he came back. At the end Fabia clung to him and beat, upon his shoulders and declared she must go with him. What was the Emperor’s command to her? Love was her Caesar. Rufus came and drew her away. The door opened. The cold night air swept the atrium. She caught sight of Ovid’s face, pitifully white beneath the black mass of his disheveled hair. His shoulders sagged, he stumbled as he went. out. She was conscious of falling, and knew no more.

III

Ovid’s second birthday in exile had passed. The hope of an early release, harbored at first, by his family and friends, had died away. None of them knew what the ‘blunder’ or ‘ crime ’ was which had aroused the anger of Augustus, and every effort to bring into high relief the innocence of Ovid’s personal life and his loyalty to the imperial family simply made them more cognizant of a mystery they could not fathom. Access to Cæsar was easy to some of them, and through Martia, the wife of Maximus, they had hoped to reach Livia. But these high personages remained as inscrutable as they were relentless. At times it seemed as if even Tiberius, although long absent from the city, might be playing a sinister rôle in the drama. All that was clear was that some storm wind, from the fastnesses of the imperial will, had swept through the gayety of Rome and quenched, like a candle, the bright life of her favorite poet.

It was easy to say that an astonishing amount of freedom was still his. His books had been removed from the public libraries, but the individual’s liberty to own and read them was in no way diminished, nor was the publication of new work frowned upon. In the autumn before his banishment Ovid had given out one or two preliminary copies of his Metamorphoses, and his friends now insisted that a work so full of charm, so characteristic of his best powers, so innocent of questionable material, should be published, even if it had not undergone a final revision. The author sent back from Tomi some lines of apology which he wished to have prefixed. He also arranged with the Sosii for the bringing out of his work on the Roman Calendar when he should have completed it. And he was at liberty, not only to keep up whatever private correspondence he chose, but to have published a new set of elegiac poems in the form of painfully candid letters to his wife and friends about his present life. A third volume of these Tristia had just appeared and more were likely to follow. He had an extraordinary instinct for self-revelation.

But in spite of this liberty to raise his voice in Rome, it was obvious that all that made life dear to Ovid had been taken away. The lover of sovereign Rome, of her streets and porticoes and theatres, of her forums and temples and gardens, must live at the farthest limit of the Empire in a little walled town, from whose highest tower a constant watch was kept against the incursions of untamed barbarians. The poet, to whom war had meant only the brilliance of triumphal pageants in the Sacred Way, must see the rude farmers of a Roman colony either borne off as captives or sacrificing to the enemy their oxen and carts and poor little rustic treasures. The man of fifty, who had spent his youth in writing love poetry and who had never ceased to have an eye for Venus in the temple of Mars, must wear a sword and helmet and dream at night of poisoned arrows and of fetters upon his wrists. The son of the Italian soil, bred in warmth, his eye accustomed to flowers and brooks and trees and fertile meadows, must shiver most of the year under bitter north winds, sweeping over fields of snow which melted neither under sun nor rain, and in spring could watch only for the breaking up of ice in the Danube, the restoration of the gloomy plains to their crop of wormwood, and the rare arrival of some brave ship from Greece or Italy. The acknowledged master of the Latin tongue, the courted talker in fastidious circles, must learn to speak and write a barbarous jargon if he wished to mingle with his fellow townsmen. The husband with the heart of a child, whose little caprices and moods, whose appetite and health had been the concern of tender eyes, must learn how to be sick without food or medicine or nursing, must, before his time, grow old and gray and thin and weak, dragged from the covert of a woman’s love.

It was spring again, and the late afternoon air which came through the open window by which Fabia was sitting was sweet with the year’s new hope, even though borne over city roofs. Fabia had dwelt with sorrow day and night until there was no one of its Protean shapes which she did not know intimately. She had even attained to a tolerance of her own hysteria that first night, when her uncle and her servants had had to care for her till morning. It was the last service she had required of others. Her daughter had hurried to her and spent weeks with her in watchful companionship. Perilla had come back in the summer and gone with her to Sulmo. But neither the love of the one child nor the grief of the other had passed into the citadel where her will stood at bay before the beleaguering troops of Pain. Those troops were newer to her than they usually are to a woman of her age. The loss of her child’s father had brought regret rather than grief, and her will had been disciplined through the years only by the habitual performance of simple duties which had given her happiness. But, untaught, unaided, it slew her enemies and left her victor. Her daughters had long since given over worrying about her,—had, rather, begun again to draw without thought upon her generous stores. Only her uncle, who knew the cost of warfare better, still silently watched her eyes. He knew that her victory had to be won afresh every night, as soon as the ægis of the day was lifted. For a long time this had meant nights of dry-eyed anguish which threatened her sanity, or nights of weakening tears. Through these months her uncle had come to see her every day. He had not doubted the strength of her will, but he had feared that the strength of her body might be sacrificed to its triumph. Her long days of self-control, however, repaired the ravages of the night hours, and little by little her strong mind, from which she had mercilessly withheld all narcotics, reasserted its sway over her nerves. She recovered her power to think. A clear understanding of principles, by which she was to decide the details of conduct, had always seemed to her essential.

To-day in this favorite hour of hers, when the mask laid by a busy day over the realities of life began to be gently withdrawn, she had set herself the task of analyzing certain thoughts which had been with her hazily for over a week. On Ovid’s birthday she had sent little presents to the grandchildren and had written her stepdaughter a letter which she hoped would make her feel that she was still the child of her father’s house. In doing this she had been poignantly reminded of the birthday fete of two years ago, and of Perilla’s sweetness to her, and of the conversation, so lighthearted at the time, about woman’s place in the state.

Since then she had been wondering whether she should still be able to say that it was enough for her to be a wife. She was perfectly sure that she did not miss the outer satisfactions of being Ovid’s wife. Except as they indicated his downfall, she did not regret the loss of her place in society or the desertion of many of their former friends. Indeed, she had welcomed as her only comfort whatever share she could have in his losses. But was it true that her life, as a whole, had no meaning apart from his? Had the hard, solitary fight to be brave meant nothing except that she could write her husband stimulating letters and help his child to take up again the joys of youth? She had found and tested powers in herself that were not Ovid’s. What significance was there in her old phrase —‘the wife of a Roman citizen’?

She began to think over what Ovid s idea of citizenship was. She realized suddenly, in one of those flashes that illuminate a series of facts long taken for granted, that the time when he had shown most emotion over being a citizen was on the night he had left home, when he had insisted that he still retained his property and rights. On the annual occasions when the Emperor had reviewed the equestrian order and he had ridden on his beautiful horse in the procession, he had always come home full of enthusiasm. But she had felt vaguely, even then, that the citizen’s pride was largely compounded of the courtier’s devotion to a ruler, the artist’s delight in a pageant, and the favorite’s pleasure in plaudits in which he had a personal share. That he loved Rome she had never doubted. He loved the external city because it was fair to the eye. He loved Roman life because in every detail it was free from all that was rustic, because it gave the prizes to wit and imagination and refinement. The culture of Athens had at last become domiciled in the capital of a world-empire. Ovid’s idea of citizenship, Fabia said to herself, was to live, amidst the beauties of this capital and in the warmth of imperial and popular favor, freely, easily, joyfully.

And what was her own idea? Fabia’s mind fled back to the days when she was a little girl in Falerii and her uncle used to come to the nursery after his dinner and take her on his lap and tell her stories until she was borne off to bed. The stories had always been about brave people, and her nurse used to scold, while she undressed her, about her flushed face and shining eyes. The procession of brave ones walked before her now, as a child’s eyes had seen it — Horatius, Virginia, Lucretia, Decius, Regulus, Cato — men and women who had loved the honor and virtue demanded by Rome or Rome’s own safety better than their lives. Her favorite story of all had been the one about her own ancestors, the three hundred and six Fabii who, to establish their country’s power, fought by the river Cremera until every man was dead.

She had grown old enough to read her own stories, to marry, to tell stories to her child and to grandchildren, but the time had never come when her heart had not beat quicker at the thought of men sacrificing life or children, will or well-being, to the need of their country. She had become a widely read woman in both Greek and Latin. Her reason told her that appreciation of beauty in nature and art, grace and elegance in manners, intellectual freedom and zest for individual development, were essential factors in the progress of civilization. She knew that if her husband had not believed in these things he could not have been the poet he was, and she believed that his poetry had done something for Roman letters which even Virgil’s had not done. Not only had she loved, wit h the pure passion of her maturity, his charm and his blitheness and his gifted sensitiveness, but she had been proud of his achievement. His citizenship had satisfied her. But always, within the barriers of her own individuality, that faith which is deeper, warmer, more masterly than reason had kept her the reverent lover of duty and of honor, the passionate guardian of character, for whose sake she would deny not only ease and joy, but even, if the dire need came, beauty itself.

Their art the Romans had had to borrow. Their character they had hewn for themselves, with chisels unknown to the Greeks, out of the brute mass of their instincts. Its dignity, its constancy, its magnanimity, probity, and fidelity, Cicero had described in words befitting their massive splendor. To possess this character was to be a Roman citizen, in the Forum and on the battlefield, in the studio and the study, in exile and in prison, in life and in death. Ovid’s citizenship, save for the empty title, had been ended by an imperial decree. In losing Rome he had ceased to be a Roman. His voice came back in cries in which there was no fortitude and no dignity. He was tiring out his friends. Perilla no longer let Fidus see his letters. Even in her own heart the sharpest sorrow was not his exile but his defeat. Her love had outlived her pride.

The dreaded night was coming on. Would he moan in his sleep again without her quieting hand upon his face, or wake from dreams of her to loneliness? She rose impetuously and looked up through the narrow window. The sky was filled wilh the rose and gold of the April sunset. Of pain she was no longer afraid. But she was afraid to go on fighting, with nothing to justify her successive battles or glorify their result. Against the transfiguring sky rose the Capitol. Burnished gold had been laid upon its austere contours. Strength was aflame with glory. Suddenly an answering flame leaped within her. In that majestic temple dwelt the omnipotent gods of her country. Why should all her prayers be said to the Penates on her hearth? What did her country need, save, in manifold forms which obliterated the barriers of sex, the sacrifice of desires, the performance of duty, the choice of courage? The feverish talk of women about having rights had failed to hold her attention. Now, a mightier voice, rising from the graves of the dead, trumpeted from the lives of the living, filled her ears, calling to her, above the warring of her will with sorrow, to be a citizen of Rome. She had neither arms nor counsels to give to her country. She could not even give sons, born of her body, taught of her spirit. She was a woman alone, she was growing old, she was ungifted; she would be nothing but a private in the ranks, an obscure workman among master-builders. But she could offer a victory over herself, a character hewn and shaped in accordance with her country’s laws. Her husband’s citizenship had dwindled to a legal fable. She would take it and weld it with her own and, content never to know the issue, lay them together upon the altar of Rome’s immortal Spirit.

The new moon rose out of the radiant west. On another moonlight night she had fallen by the ashes of her hearth and prayed in futile agony to the gods of her home. Now she stood erect and looked out upon the city and with a solemn faith prayed to the greatest gods. Later she slept peacefully, for the first time in fifteen months, as one whose taskmaster has turned comrade.

In the morning her uncle, who had been in Falerii for a few weeks, came to see her. He looked keenly into her eyes as she hastened across the wide room to greet him. Then his own eyes flashed and with a sudden glad movement he bent and kissed her hands. ‘Heart of my heart,’ he said, ‘in an exile’s house I salute a Roman.’