VINICIUS to LYGIA
:
"Hast thou ever been in Antium, my dear one, with Aulus and Pomponia? If not, 1
shall be happy when I show this place to thee. All the way from Laurentuns there
is a line of villas along the seashore; and Antium itself is an endless succession
of palaces and porticos, whose columns in fair weather see themselves in the
water. I, too, have a residence here right over the sea, with an olive garden and a
forest of cypresses behind the villa, and when I think that the place will sometime
be thine, its marble seems whiter to me, its groves more shady, and the sea
bluer. Oh, Lygia, how good it is to live and love! Old Menikles, who manages the
villa, planted irises on the ground under myrtles, and at sight of them the house
of Aulus, the impluvium, and the garden in which I sat near thee, came to my
mind. The irises will remind thee, too of thy childhood's home; therefore I am
certain that thou wilt love Antium and this villa.
"Immediately after our arrival I talked long wfth Paul at dinner. We spoke of thee,
and afterward he taught. I listened long, and I say only this, that eyed zuiuld I
write like Patronius, I should not have power to explain everything which passed
through my soul and my mind. I had not suppoed that there could be such
happiness in this world, such beauty and peace of which hitherto people had no
knowledge. But I retain all this for conversation with thee, for at the first free
moment I shall be in Rome.
"How could the earth find place at once for the Apostle Peter, Paul of Tarsus, and
Caesar? Tell me this. I ask because I passed the evening after Paul's teaching
with Nero, and dost thou know what I heard there? Well, to begin with, he read
his poem on the destruction of Troy, and complained that never had he seen a
burning city. He envied Priam, and called him happy just for this, that he saw the
conflagration and ruin of his birthplace. Whereupon Tigellinus said, 'Speak a
word, O divinity, I will take a torch, and before the night passes thou shalt see
blazing Antium.' But Caesar called him a fool. 'Where,' asked he, 'should I go to
breathe the sea air, and preserve the voice with which the gods have gifted me,
and which men say I should preserve for the benefit of mankind? Is it not Rome
that injures me; is it not the exhalations of the Subura and the Esquiline which
add to my hoarseness? Would not the palaces of Rome present a spectacle a
hundredfold more tragic and magnificent than Antium?' Here all began to talk,
and to say what an unheard tragedy the picture of a city like that would be, a city
which had conquered the world turned now into a heap of gray ashes. Caesar
declared that then his poem would surpass the songs of Homer, and he began to
describe how he would rebuild the city, and how coming ages would admire his
achievensents, in presence of which all other human works would be petty. 'Do
that! do that!' exclaimed the drunken company. 'I must have more faithful and
more devoted friends,' answered he. I confess that I was alarmed at once when I
heard this, for thou art in Rome, carissima. I laugh now at that alarm, and I think
that Caesar and his friends, though mad, would not dare to permit such insanity..
