EPICURUS and Menander walked together in the garden. The fall of the year had come; Autumn laid her hand upon the earth, and the sun, shining through it, turned things to red and gold. The friends passed with sedate footsteps beside a steep bank of silvery shale, upon which grew succulent plants, sprawling lush and glaucous green, their arms and fingers starred with blossom still. They sparkled with radiant light, and hung a tapestry of many colours upon the little cliff.
“It shall be with us as with Crete,” prophesied Epicurus. “As we of old time won the Cretan culture — that leaven which, by way of Ionia, leavened the lump of us — and destroyed her body in so doing, so now Moira hands us to Nemesis, and those who follow us will on a distant day find Rome treat Greece in like manner.”
They pursued the gloomy theme for a space; then Menander turned to a more present subject.
“I accosted Melia, Leontion and Metrodorus in the Acropolis. They go to the ceremonial unveiling of your statue,” said he. “That woman! She strutted like a peacock under her golden umbrella! You make Leontion too clever, Epicurus. ‘Where have you been these many days, Menander?’ she demanded, and I answered, ‘In the lap of Mother Nature, Leontion.’ ‘And who was in your lap?’ asked the pert thing. I hate these hard, bright, witty females. You have much to answer for in throwing your terrace open to the minxes.”
“Archaic Menander!” smiled the Master.
“Archaic, but consistent. Have I not said that he who teaches a woman Letters feeds poison to an asp?”
“Alas! you have. And more than that. Who wrote, ‘Though many the wild beasts on land and sea, the beastliest of all is a woman’?”
“Nay, nay; now you confound me with one of my characters. But well you know the danger of setting their minds too much on learning.”
“You are a ‘backwoodsman,’ dear poet, in this matter,” declared his companion, “and by much dwelling with the best and wisest have dulled your wits to the new sphere of women. Why deny the world that infinite melioration our clever women will bring into it? Their brains are as large as ours; their wit is greater. They have a quality in Letters you look for vainly among us, and the time is at hand when Sappho shall be no longer a solitary miracle. But they will not only sing; we shall look to them for whole philosophies and legislations, touched with that divine quality of perception which still we know not. They will bring a hurricane of clean, sane thought into our assemblies; they will — ”
“Peace, my august friend,” replied Menander. “You may be right. It is a melancholy possibility. But let me be in Hades before it happens. They are numerous enough, learned enough and noisy enough as it is. They have the whip-hand of us, and know how to win our ears at the inadequate price of their fascinating persons; but, in affairs, they must ever lack that fundamental self-control and patience essential to the ruler mind in all capacities. Some women are saner than others; that I concede — no more.”
Epicurus laughed, well knowing that the playwright was used thus to deal in hyperbole for the sake of the amusement or indignation his jests commanded.
“Let them cleave to their native wisdom, which comes from their own dæmons,” concluded Menander. “That, I grant, is precious to the world — far more so than any second-hand learning they may gather from the books and voices of men.”
“But this generation forgets that fact,” explained Epicurus. “In the days of matriarchy the women reigned and ruled by virtue of that sublime woman wisdom — my own mother possessed it richly — a thing higher than man wisdom, because it is their native gift from the gods. Men knew this when women ruled, and were content. It is because we have denied the force and splendour of their dæmon that they, in despair, seek ours. Presently they will find their own a more precious possession after all.”
“It is so,” granted the poet. “And they will also discover that their keenest weapons have been blunted, rather than sharpened, by the hone of man’s knowledge. They will presently seek to employ our cumbrous reasoning for their own ends, and then, the gods help them, for their true magic will be lost, love perish out of the earth and propagation become a duty to be shirked, like other duties.”
They discoursed on this subject and then Menander asked a question.
“Do you admire Elpenice, the wife of Agathion?” he inquired, and Epicurus jested with him.
“When Ardys, the rhetorician, asked of a wise man if he deemed some woman handsome, the elder answered, ‘I have ceased, Ardys, to suffer from eye trouble’; and that is my happy state, Menander. You and I have fed in the gardens of Tantalus, and know what pleasures are a shadow and a dream, what endure and desert us never. But for each age its delight, and for mine, your comedies, that give me the cream of living men and women without the trouble of skimming the milk for myself.”
“Philemon will always be more popular than I, however,” declared the poet.
“Naturally: he makes appeal to the mightier audience. To few is it given that they write good things and command the greater company of the listeners also. You interpret the rich and the cultured, whose numbers must ever be small; Philemon makes a wider appeal to those middle classes concerning which you neither know nor care. It follows that they neither know nor care for you, and so Philemon often wins the popular vote against you. But you cannot have your cake and eat it also. He who might have reclined at the table of Alexander if he would, must not regret the popular voice.”
“And yet I want more money,” declared Menander; “I am seriously hampered for lack of gold, in collecting about me exquisite and inspiring treasures.”
“Had I known that, perhaps I had accepted Agathion’s suggested gift on behalf of his son; but I declined the very generous fee he pressed upon me. You come too late.”
“I hate a poor man who offers presents to the rich,” declared Menander. “And before you all men are poor. Those who would give you cash do not understand that what you have to market is beyond price, or purchase. But most of these creatures rolling in wealth rate their coin as representing the only real value. They do not perceive that they vitiate decency in approaching you with their rubbish. With me, who am one of themselves, the case is different. Gold can buy nothing for you; for me it may be turned into many exceedingly desirable things.”
“If a philosopher gives the world no more than he can receive back from it, he must be a very inferior son of wisdom,” answered Epicurus. “And for yourself that also holds. Small is the poet who can be paid enough.”
“They might make the attempt, however,” answered his friend.
Then Epicurus and Menander passed from the fierce sunshine into the shadows of a little wood, where, beyond the fret of green branches, rolled out the Saronic Gulf, and glimmered jewelly Ægina, like a ship of pearl upon the blue; while at the same moment, from a path which led upwards to the spot on which they stood, there sprang a youthful figure, on tireless feet, and the son of Agathion saluted Epicurus.
Young Typhon wore a snow-white, sleeveless chiton, or tunic, caught upon the right shoulder with a little fibula of gold wherein flashed a ruby. His belt was of dull crimson, and his sandals brown. His bare head was dark and curly and lifted on a proud throat. He stood five feet, nine inches high, and was of a lean and wiry build exquisitely proportioned. He glanced straightly and without evasion from his dark and violet eyes, and he had been a very typical ideal of Greek youthful beauty, save for a mouth and chin that denoted more character, and an expression fuller of thought than was proper to that acme of dreaming indifference, that suggestion of a being superior to existence, denoted by a great statue of the noblest time. Typhon was not superior to existence. He carried himself with a deliberate and graceful mien; but his gentle air disguised physical strength and the power to move swiftly, feel fiercely, and endure long.
“He walks like a Roman,” said Menander, as the boy approached and saluted his elders civilly, though without any display of awe.
“I am sent by my father to wait upon you, Epicurus, and I thank you for permitting me to occupy your time,” began he.
“Welcome,” replied the philosopher. “Welcome, Typhon. You are most fortunate, for behold! no less a poet than Menander honours my garden. We would be your friends, young man, if you will permit us.”
Typhon’s brooding eyes passed from one to the other, but Epicurus had an art to set small and great at their ease, and the boy, prepared to be on the defensive in the presence of these great men, found them genial and, in truth, much like other people. Yet he had barely reached this defective conclusion when he saw reason to change it.
The philosopher invited Typhon to declare his ambitions.
“The lad lacking ambition is worthless, Typhon, and I trust you have one, if not more.”
“I have a hundred, Epicurus; but my ambitions are not those of my father.”
“A hundred ambitions are, however, too many,” declared Menander. “Remember, Typhon, that you cannot be all things to all men if you would remain yourself a man.”
“Fear not that for him, dear poet,” replied Epicurus. “You speak a word of needless wisdom, since Typhon has so far taken care to be nothing to any man. For him we must first prepare a foundation of urbanity and grace. Yesterday there came my gardener, Telamon, with the news that his wife had borne twin girls. He desired to know what their names should be, and I bade him call them ‘Gratitude’ and ‘Patience,’ so that we shall never lack for a little gratitude and patience in the garden of Epicurus.”
“Gratitude was always a rare virtue,” admitted Menander, “and since the wars no man is patient, though never did the nation more demand it. We are as a nest of fretful ants plagued by an unkindly monkey, who stirs their sanctuaries with a stick.”
Epicurus turned to his guest.
“What would your honoured father, Agathion, have you do?” he inquired.
“He would have me be an artist,” answered Typhon, with scorn in his voice. “That is his feeble fancy. Who am I that I should use pens and ink, or paint-brush, or a mallet and chisel? I don’t want to make statues; I want statues to be made of me. I don’t want to write books; I want books to be written about me. Where would Amyntor’s statue of Epicurus be if there were no Epicurus? Artists depend upon the men who do things for their material, and I am going to do things.”
“Then you, too, are an artist, though you laugh at us, Typhon,” replied Menander. “And to all artists I would say this: ‘Make ugly things for your living, if you must; but make beautiful things for your life.’ Do you understand that?”
“Not in the least,” replied Typhon.
“Then I’ll put it differently. You scorn to make things; but make things you must, because you cannot help it. Everybody is making something, from his cradle to his pyre, if it be only a mess, or a war, or a poem, or a worse world for others to live in. Now every man and boy must be the artist of his own life in the long run; and so I say that if your place in the scheme of things should call you to make ugly works — as a soldier for example — yet look to it that for your life, which is a greater thing than your living, you contrive to create beauty. Nothing that lacks beauty is altogether immortal.”
“I must go my own way then,” replied Typhon.
“That entirely depends upon the way you would go,” answered Epicurus. “Society is now so organised that it demands from us much from which there can be no escape. Some are reasonable demands; some are tyrannous; but you cannot hope to evade the consequences of being born a human boy — painful though many of these consequences may appear.”
“Are we only born to be broken in?” asked Typhon.
“Why we are born is still a question man has not answered, my son,” replied Epicurus mildly; “but society has grown so complex that it demands the surrender of much our simple forefathers valued. Any other freedom, save that of thought, is a chimera. The citizen must be broken in, and we catch him young for his own sake, because youth still runs too near our primitive and unsocial ancestors to be trusted alone. Among the few beauties attaching to grown-up people, Typhon, may be their kindly attitude to those who are not grown up.”
“I think otherwise,” answered the boy. “You break us in for your own good, not ours.”
Menander applauded.
“Fearless Typhon! We break you in that our faulty, social ideals shall be planted in your young bosoms while you are powerless to resist them. We break your hearts, Typhon, so that you shall not break our heads.”
Epicurus laughed.
“This will not do,” he said. “Law is law, and as you must yield to Nature’s laws, so must you yield to man’s, until you develop wit and wisdom to make better.”
“A law observed is merely a law,” explained Menander; “but the point about Nature’s laws, young Typhon, is this: that if you break them, they will become judge and executioner both, and break you. Therefore treat them with all possible respect, since there is no appeal against them; but the laws of man — ”
“Have done!” cried Epicurus. “We are here to listen to Typhon, not he to us. To-day we would learn of him his own image of the cosmos; not until we know it can we speak fruitfully and perhaps correct it.”
“I would travel and see the kingdoms of the world,” declared Typhon.
“Wisely wished,” replied Menander. “The fortunate voyager is he who returns to his starting-place, having beheld those majestic sights, the sun, the clouds, the stars and fire; the oceans and mountains, the rivers and great trees. Live a hundred years or ten, such august splendours are at the service of all men, whatever their condition, and grander things you will never see. The eyebrow lifters, whom we call ‘intellectuals,’ declare that solitude ministers to invention, though one does not observe that they themselves much court it. Yet there is truth in the opinion. We return from solitude, as from a bath of sweet water, cleansed from the dusty accretions of gregarious life. Whereupon we reflect with more distinction, attain to a clearer vision and greater patience. Travel by all means; but let your journeyings be planned with wisdom, and taken alone.”
“Admirable counsel, Typhon,” admitted Epicurus, who perceived that his visitor found Menander more attractive than himself, and was glad of it.
“My time will come,” he continued. “To-day you are privileged to attend Menander, who loves youth and understands it. Listen well to all he may tell you.”
“I am listening,” answered Typhon.
“If you would be a hero,” continued the poet, “then there are certain little essentials. I admire your purpose, for every man should wish to be a hero.”
“There is no harm in wishing,” said Typhon.
“None; on the contrary, there is good. It is the first step, and the first step may be half the whole journey. But heroes are bred on lean lands. You seldom find them in purple and fine linen till they have had a tough battle for any clothes at all. To understand life, you must support it yourself, and not let other men support it for you. A stern, clean, understanding mind is better than a fat, anointed body, and the hunting wasp I regard as a more attractive person than a maggot bedded in a plum. A wealthy soul is more precious than a wealthy carcass, Typhon. To have fine limbs, such as you possess, and a poor soul to guard them, would be like trusting the citadel to slaves, or a good ship to an idiot pilot. What then shall be done? You have wealth, or your father possesses it; but wealth is vain without wisdom, just as power is vain without discipline; and wealth will purchase neither wisdom nor discipline. These have to be bought with something better than money.”
Typhon had wits to follow the argument, and perceive its conclusion.
“I must set forth, then, unattended, with an empty purse and no companion but my own courage and determination?” he asked.
“Excellently put,” declared Menander.
“That is exactly what I want to do,” answered Typhon.
“Then we have advanced our inquiry on to firm ground,” said Epicurus. “One sees light already. Let us now walk upwards and proceed through the garden, where refreshment will await us. Do you like flowers, Typhon?”
“No,” replied the boy.
“Do you dislike them?”
“I am sorry for things in gardens, caught and tamed, and made to grow amid stranger plants, which they may hate. I gather flowers sometimes; but they must come from the edges of precipices, or hang over running rivers. Flowers are only good to me that live in difficult places and are dangerous to come at.”
“A title for a comedy,” laughed Menander. “‘Flowers from difficult places.’ Doubtless such flowers are the sweetest, Typhon.”
“I will show you a difficult place where grow some of my captives,” said Epicurus, and presently, as they passed beneath the shelf of silver shale, he pointed to a plant sparkling with little tongues of blossom as it had been flakes of pure fire upon it. The thing was planted above a dizzy slope, and seemed beyond approach.
“Think you that is within even your reach, Typhon?” he asked, and the boy became alive and alert on the instant. His face grew animated and full of an intense seriousness. His chin and mouth declared themselves.
“If the boulder that juts forth on the face of the cliff holds me, I can pluck them,” he asserted.
“That is for you to find out,” answered Epicurus.
“If it holds not, you will be killed, and the stone fall on us and kill us also,” said Menander.
“You must look to yourselves,” replied the youth. “As for me, I shall not be killed, because when I leap for the stone I shall at the same moment clutch that drooping bough of the pine-tree above. If I can do that I shall succeed; if that is impossible, then I cannot gather the flowers.”
He was off, with feet as sure as a mountain goat’s, and sped up the gnarled face of the little cliff as though the wings of Hermes were on his sandals. Then, having considered the problem at a near approach, he declared that it could be done. Epicurus had meanwhile calmed the fear of the poet, for he knew the stone was intrinsic to the cliff, and would grant all needful support.
In a moment Typhon had leapt to it, and alighted, bird-like.
“What a statue he would make, perched there against the fiery flowers!” murmured Menander. “In truth Amyntor shall mould the wonderful creature and render him immortal as the blossoms.”
With a dozen of the living flames in his hand Typhon swiftly returned.
“It was easier than I had hoped, great Epicurus,” he said.
“Will you suffer Amyntor to make a clay Typhon, and then turn it into bronze, that you may stand on yonder pinnacle for a few years?” asked Menander; but the boy refused.
“No man shall make a statue of me till I deserve one,” he said.
“But if Epicurus asks?”
“Epicurus will not ask,” replied the sage.
“So it ever is,” declared the poet. “By the time our souls have won statues, our bodies offer no temptation to make them.”
They came presently to the villa and Mys set food and fruit, cakes and liquor before them. The boy, now at his ease, ate heartily, while Menander sipped a glass of the hill wine.
“Remember on your travels, Typhon,” said he, “that it is always far more important to consider with whom you feed than what you feed upon. A feast lies with the feasters, not the food. To a hungry mountaineer, like yourself, this no doubt sounds nonsense; but you will find that it is better sometimes to share the trough of the swine than the board of the swineherd. And now the sun has dived into yonder bed of spruce; the air sharpens and I must be on my way.”
They walked with him to the outer gate and then Menander, who had taken kindly interest in the boy, did a gracious thing.
“A gift, my lad,” said he, and brought from his cloak a piece of paper whereon he had written:
“Here is my latest poem, flame new, for I composed it last night. Accept it, Typhon, as a gift, and some day read it and ponder upon it.”
“Poetry is Latin to me. What should I do with a poem, noble Menander?” inquired the visitor.
“First,” replied Epicurus, “you should go upon your knees to the august genius who deigns to give you such a gift, Typhon. Remember that in your hand you hold what may well be your first heirloom and everlasting treasure — something to hand down for generations as yet unborn — a memorial more enduring than marble or bronze.”
“I’ll take care of it, even if I cannot understand it,” promised the boy, and Menander spoke.
He enjoyed to touch upon his achievements, with the manner of their invention and their significance to his own mind and memory. Having humour he did not dwell overmuch with his own performances, or write many pages to illuminate them, in the portentous, modern manner of our eminent authors; but he told of the curious circumstance which had inspired this copy of verses.
“Read it some night in the silent woods, when the moon gives light to see the script. This was what went to the making — an incident perhaps without parallel in human experience. Gazing upon the midnight sky, I beheld the death of a star. By some miracle of punctuality, my eyes rested upon a heavenly body — one tiny speck in a galaxy of nobler and mightier lights — at the instant when it paled and perished and its place in the constellation knew it no more. Surely no man had ever seen the like. It is as though, out of the myriad dancing insects whirling together about yonder watercourse, one were to fold its wings and pass before our sight; or as if upon a mead of many flowers our eyes were holden by a single blossom that suddenly flung down its robe of petals and died, waking within us a desire to run and comfort her in that supreme moment.”
So speaking, he took his farewell, yet lingered and uttered another thought before he left them.
“There is a deity of whom we do not hear much except on profane lips,” declared Menander. “Tyche is her name — originally the Goddess of Chance — worshipped as the guardian of prosperity, into whose protection great cities were assigned. I think we do not leave enough to Chance in these strenuous days. Only the politicians pay any court to her, and it cannot be maintained that she rewards their devotion very handsomely. Perhaps you, Typhon, may commend yourself to her protection, and I hope that her cornucopia holds a blessing or two for you. Yet remember her other symbols — the wings, the rolling wheel and flying ball. These denote her variable moods, for she is a woman as well as a goddess. Therefore steel yourself against bad luck and weaken not the fibres of your mind by always expecting good. Remember how Chance often contrives better than our happiest thoughts, but also how she will sometimes do the contrary and confound what looks a certainty. And now, farewell, my master, and farewell, hurricane boy.”
They parted, and Epicurus spoke:
“Fortunate Typhon, to have heard Menander! He is an entertainment always — rich and varied — and, after him, I shall not inflict any dull word of mine upon you to-day. Come back to-morrow and we will be serious and determine your actions. I already find a great idea taking form for you in my mind. Return, therefore, and I shall study you further, and have something to say that may please you well.”
At this moment appeared a company upon its way home from the Areopagus. They were led by Leontion, Nicedia, Melia and other females; but Typhon, who disliked women very much, did not wait for them. He promised to appear again on the following evening, then saluted the Master and dived into those lower labyrinths of the garden whence he had climbed when he first came.