Flaxius

‘I should really like,’ said Flaxius to his attendant pocket-imp, Puttuli, ‘to see this grand young man, our Emperor Julian.’

[‘Grand jeune homme’ was a term applied in later days to Mr. James G. Bennett, of the New York Herald by the Figaro, but Flaxius was the inventor of it.’]

‘Nothing easier,’ replied the goblin. ‘You give the atriensis, or janitor, a hundred nummos or sestertios, or a ring, or any trifle, and so you may be admitted to a private-public view. For a sestertium he will manage an opportunity to speak to Cæsar. But you can have a good street view for nothing, and I think,’ added Puttuli as he critically eyed his master, ‘if he saw you he might speak to you; he isn’t at all particular as to his company.’

‘Gratias tibi ago, thank you for the compliment,’ replied the sage, ‘but as it concerns an emperor, we may as well do things genteelly. Assume a respectable form, if you know how——’

(‘Gratias tibi, or not tibi ago,’ murmured the imp.)

‘——and hire a place dans la première loge. For a sestertium.’

‘Would your excellency like to carry a bouquet?’ inquired Puttuli impudently.

‘A good idea! Yes, order me one of rue, concordia and verbena.’

‘Well, of all the nosegays that ever were nosed, that is the queerest,’ answered the servant. ‘But, fiat voluntas tua, my lord’s will be done! A great deal of rue with plenty of concordia, and most of all verbena. I will go to the pretty herb-seller in the Suburra. She has the vegetables.’

‘I must choose a lucky day,’ said Flaxius.

‘To-morrow,’ answered Puttuli, ‘is the three hundred and sixty-fifth day of the year three hundred and sixty-five A.D.’

So it came to pass that, twenty-four hours after, Flaxius stood in the grand hall of the imperial palace amid the row of suitors and courtiers and other great or wise, or otherwise, folk who awaited audience of Julian. He looked at the emperor with approbation.

‘I knew the first Julian,’ he reflected; ‘the man who bought the empire at auction and resigned in sixty-six days. He was indeed a caducus,—a word which will live in later days as cad—an imperial snob. This is a horse of another colour.’

Meanwhile the emperor who had the keenest eye in Rome for observing all sorts and conditions of men, and who, after sitting an hour in the amphitheatre, could describe the appearance of everybody present who was anybody, had not failed to note the tall and stately form of the philosopher, and his grandly flowing beard. Now Julian, having a very fine beard of his own, was deeply interested in this subject, as appears from his great work Misopogon, meaning ‘Enemy of the Beard,’ that is to say of wisdom, to say nothing of his ‘Letters.’ And as Flaxius had a very beard of beards flowing and curling in indescribable magnificence, and as he wore the purely white, long-flowing robe which indicated the professional philosopher, a being dearer to the emperor than the prettiest woman living, he gazed at Flaxius with what became absolute approval or admiration.

‘By Esculapius and Jupiter!’ he exclaimed, ‘that is a good-looking man. Something in my line, I think! Who is he?’

‘Cæsar!’ replied Puttuli, who had assumed the form and voice of Bumbulbulus, the court factotum, ‘that is the great Flaxius, a sage who has travelled all over the world, and who is reported to know everything from the works of Moloch the Pismirist, up to those of God.’

‘That is a large order,’ replied the emperor reflectively, ‘magnum postulatum est. But bring him here that I may measure him.’

‘That will take more time, O Cæsar, than it would for him to measure you!’ thought Puttuli, as he departed. ‘He needs a long line who would sound such a sea as the Master. Come now! I think we are as good as established at court.’

Now the emperor had for many years been devoted to magic and occulta, and observing the herb-bouquet which Flaxius bore, grasped its hidden meaning with great pleasure.

‘Salve, Cæsar!’ said the sage.

‘Salve, adepte!’ replied the monarch. ‘So thou hast mastered the lore of the Etruscan, as I read by the Concordia, “Janus adorandus cum quo Concordia mitis,” as Ovid saith; of Egypt, as the rue proclaims; “cingebat rutæ quæ coma multicomæ’; and of Persia, I see by the verbena, Verbenasque adole pinguis et mascula thura. Hem! Virgil!’

‘I have heard, even in the remotest region of the earth,’ replied Flaxius, ‘that what Cæsar could not do in the way of apt quotation was not worth doing.’

‘Um! I flatter myself that I know a thing or two,’ replied the emperor—the very phrase occurs in his Epistolæ—‘but like Apicius with the British oysters, I am always ready for a few more. And I read it in thee, O Flaxius,’ he added, suddenly changing his whole mien and manner, and looking through his tangled locks with that strange, unearthly glare which so impressed his contemporary familiars, as if he had become another man, ‘that thou canst teach me much which I do not know, therefore I ask thee to sup with me to-night.’

The emperor said this, turning away so abruptly, that all present who did not know his ways inwardly thanked God, according to their heathen or Christian faith, that they did not stand in the shoes of that philosopher with the flowing beard. But those who knew him better looked gravely, and said, ‘Cæsar hath found a new friend!’

But Flaxius himself was deeply amazed when Julian, leading him to a table, by which stood a single Greek servant—there was no other soul present—showed him with some pride that the meal consisted only of a grilled fish and garum, with bread and olives, new cheese and fruit.

‘There is your supper, Flaxius!’ he exclaimed, ‘and much good may it do you!’

‘By the lance and laurel bough or olive of the god Honour, whose temple is by the Campidoglio!’ cried the sage, ‘what am I, O Cæsar! that thou shouldst treat me with such esteem!’

‘Non rectis oculis aspice, never do you mind that,’ replied Julian. ‘Truly if I were going to entertain a Bythnian prince or a sow-bellied contractor for the army, whom I hoped some day to crucify, I would have given him a hundred courses of ortolans stuffed with oysters, and galantine with truffles and pistachios, and all that sort of thing. But to a philosopher whom I wish to treat as a brother, I give just what I am accustomed to eat myself. One cannot be a slave at the same time to his brain and his belly—non potes Tethidem simul et Galateam amare, as Lucian says.’

‘Now, I see,’ reflected Flaxius, ‘that when a man is a gentleman at heart, he can turn even his vanity to a kindness. A marvellous character is this Cæsar, and one who will do much to be misunderstood in history.’

So they held wondrous discourse of great and glorious things in philosophy, over which the emperor quoted nearly all the Orphic sayings, with the Poemander of Hermes, and finally came to what he had been aiming at from the first, by bluntly asking:

‘Knowest thou aught of magic?’

‘O Cæsar! do not think I seek to quibble or raise a sophistical cloud between us,’ replied Flaxius, ‘if I ask thee what is the meaning of magic.’

‘It is,’ replied the emperor—who had been there before—‘the violation of the laws of nature.’

‘And what is nature?’ asked the Sage.

‘H’m!—the eternal order of things—the action of laws, or potentia quatenus in potentia.’

‘Rather vague, yet good so far as it goes. But, Cæsar, if there be but one substance, though you call it matter in one form and spirit in another, and one eternal law manifesting itself in infinite forms, there can be no violation of them. Miracle or magic is only something which man cannot explain, something which puzzles and astonishes him. Si placet—give me an example for a miracle!’

‘I am devilish thirsty,’ replied Julian. ‘That garum or fish-sauce is pungent enough to make a Nazarene drink a gallon of strong Sicilian wine. Now, if you could pour me any kind of wine which I may call for out of one and the same bottle——

‘It may be done, O Cæsar! but remember that to do this one must invoke the invisible spirits or forces of nature, whom we call the gods, to aid in such mysteries.’

After a long pause of reflection, the emperor slowly replied, ‘Granted.’ He did not see that Puttuli, reduced to his natural stature of three inches, and who sat unseen behind him, advanced his thumb to his nose, and waved his fingers, making thereby an ancient and mysterious Egyptian sign used by the priests of Memphis when they initiated some great sage to their rites.

Then Flaxius winked to Puttuli, who presently reappeared in the form of Bumbulbulus.

‘Go to my rooms,’ said the sage, ‘and bring hither the ancient goblet of Bacchus!’

The goblin obeyed, and returned with a very large bottle of black cuir bouilli or moulded leather. It was of graceful shape, apparently of great antiquity, covered with exquisite silver relief, representing the deeds of Bacchus. Handling it with great reverence, Flaxius pronounced over it in a voice which was half-singing, such as one may hear to this day among witches in Italy when they chant the following:

Incantation to Bacchus

‘Golden master of the earth!
King of joy and lord of mirth!
By thy mother the divine,
Of the ancient Cadmean line!
Semele of Earth the pride;
Who of Jove’s great splendour died!
By the Seasons, who in truth,
Nursed thee from thy early youth!
Or fair Ino, who they say,
Brought thee from Arabia!
By the lion’s form you wore
When gods and Titans fought of yore!
And by the holy miracle
Of which the morning poets tell;
When from Naxos thou didst sail
With a gentle, favouring gale,
And pirates sought to conquer thee
But fell into captivity:
By the hour when thou did’st go
To the darkling realms below,
And brought thy mother, “ever bright,”
To the upper world of light,
And all that Nonnus ever sung
Of thee with mystic, golden tongue!
I conjure thee—the all-divine—
To give me what I ask, of wine!’

Saying this he took a small gold cup and said:

‘Now, Cæsar, ask for what wine thou wilt.’

‘Let it be Cæcuban,’ replied the emperor.

Then Flaxius poured forth wine from the bottle into the cup, and extended it to Julian.

‘Cæcuban it is, sure enough,’ replied the emperor when he had drunk to the last drop, which he poured super naculum upon his thumb-nail.

‘Wilt thou have another draught?’ inquired Flaxius. ‘If so—of what?’

‘Falernian,’ answered the emperor.

‘Sit,’ replied Flaxius. ‘Here you are. But, O Cæsar, I have not hung an ivy garland as yet round the cup, as the conjuration requires.’

‘Vino vendibili suspensâ hederâ nihil opus. Good wine needs no bush,’ answered Julian. ‘The miracle is wrought, and I wish that all were as agreeable. And now, Flaxius, since thou sayest that all miracles can be explained by natural causes, I pray thee to naturalise me this, for verily ut turris super omnes, it is a huckleberry above my persimmon, and I would like to know how it is done.’

‘Easily enough, O Cæsar. The bottle is made from a certain flexible substance, and it contains many chambers or cells, in each of which there is a different kind of wine. When I press on any one of these it pours forth its content.’

‘Then the incantation was all gammon?’ remarked Julian.

‘Not so, O Cæsar. It made the miracle.’

‘Hum‑um‑um‑ump!’ replied the monarch. ‘And yet, Flaxius, it still seems to me that there are and must be miracles surpassing all human skill and knowledge, which the utmost wisdom cannot compass or explain, and never will.’

‘Can your Greatness give me an example?’ replied Flaxius.

‘It is written in thine own ancient Etruscan chronicles,’ replied Julian, ‘that in the early time the mysterious nymph, Begoe or Bergoia, before the world, and in the Capitol, slew an ox by whispering in his ear a single word. Now, I believe, that had I tried, I might have worked out an explanation of thy Holy Bottle; but in the miracle of Bergoia I have reflected many a time and oft, without solving it, and therefore do I conclude that it was a violation of the laws of Nature.’

‘O Cæsar!’ replied Flaxius, ‘great is the man who can infallibly decide where human reason leaves off and Divinity begins, for, nusquam est, qui ubique est, that which is everywhere is nowhere, and this is true of miracle. But what if I perform for thee—openly before all thy court—and all Rome if thou wilt, that same miracle?’

‘By Hercules!’ cried Julian, amazed and delighted beyond measure, his wild and mysterious eyes gleaming so as to make a very respectable miracle of their own if he had but known it, ‘thou art a man of gold, set with gems—the first real sage I ever found in the stuffing of this duck of a world. And you really will in good faith—honestus Indicus—slay the ox with a whisper!’

‘Thou shalt see it, O Cæsar,’ replied Flaxius. ‘But it seems to me that the miracle would be improved on, if instead of an ox we were to substitute a man. For it might be said by the sceptical that we had poisoned the ox beforehand.’

‘By Medea!’ exclaimed the emperor admiringly, ‘I never thought of that!’

‘While if we take a man who declares himself to be in good health, there can be no suspicion. Now, Cæsar, thou hast, I doubt not, in thy prisons more than one unlucky wretch condemned to the torture and the crucifix, to whom a quick and painless death would be as a divine blessing and great joy?’

‘Depone! bet your head on it!’ cried Julian. ‘I sent one this morning to the Mamertine—hell would be too good for him—and I meant to give him a foretaste of it by means of preparation.’

‘He will do,’ replied Flaxius.

So on the following day, when the emperor and his court and all Rome assembled in the great amphitheatre, there was led in a ferocious, giant-like and bitterly wicked-looking Gaul, who, expecting to be tortured to death to make a Roman holiday, was on his best behaviour as regards defiance and dying game.

‘Man, whence comest thou,’ asked Flaxius.

‘From Lutetia,’ was the proud reply.

‘Ame de boue,’ thought the sage in a language of the future, and then asked:

‘And what is thy religion?’

‘I worship the devil; it was the last fashion ere I left home.’

‘You expect torture!’

‘I do not fear it. It will pain me, but when dead, I shall be amply revenged on ye all, if hate and hell can do it.’

‘If I could give thee out of pity a sudden painless death, wouldst thou declare that thou in all thy health and strength forgivest all men?’

The Gaul glared at him stolidly and grimly and then uttered in a strange tongue which none understood.

‘Mais, nom d’une pipe, pourquoi pas? J’aurais bien de quoi m’amuser sans me soucier de ces b-là!’ And then in rude Latin he said:

‘I consent. Hurry along with your washing, and get the pigs in!’ And he made the declaration.

Then Flaxius, who bore in his hand a long wand, as all the Magi were wont to do, touched him with it, while whispering a word in his ear. And the man fell dead at full length, while a thrill of awe and a murmur rose from all Rome, at sight of this mighty deed. And the great and wise and even the good, or such few of the latter as were present, rari nantes, thronged about him, and adored him.

‘And now, Flaxius,’ said the emperor, as they sat in solemn concert over the Holy Bottle, which his highness was never tired of admiring, ‘if thou canst explain to me on natural grounds how thou didst slay that Gaul, then “by Gaule!” as Julius Cæsar said to Vercingetorix, I will believe, or disbelieve, anything!’

‘Yea, Cæsar, I will do it,’ replied the sage. ‘Now if thou wilt remember Begoe or Bergoia, her who slew the Ox with a single word, left to Rome a book on the Ars Fulguritorum or the averting, that is to say, managing thunder and lightning, and this book, which is in the ancient Etruscan tongue, and hard to understand, for those who know the language, is even yet in the temple of the Palatine Apollo, where I read it. And it explains that the lightning is caused by an invisible but terrible secret force, which like heat pervades all things while seen by none, and this is the awful power of the Divinity to smite the earth, and it was by means of it that Bergoia slew the Ox. And know that there was in my wand a charge of condensed thunder and lightning, quite strong enough to knock a bull sky-high.’

‘But the word?’ asked Julian who had not quite recovered from his ideas of miracle.

‘Truly, Cæsar, the word was Electricity, which is as yet unknown, but which in ages to come will be the great heritage and power of mankind. For as when thou art done with a garment thou givest it to a servant, so the gods when they have somewhat worn out their attributes and glories, hand them over to men.’

‘Semper similem ducit Deus ad similem, and so the gods lead ever like to like. Ah, it is wonderful. And now, Flaxius, the light begins to shine in on me, and I see that there is indeed a higher and far more wonderful magic and miracle than the poor, thin Thaumaturgy which I sought for once. For true magic is the mastering the awful power and secrets of nature. Now I see that because thou mightest explain to me by natural means how Christ fed the multitude, or raised the dead or healed the sick, it would be none the less wonderful, for genius, even the genius to amaze and nothing more, is miraculous.’

‘That will be better understood, O Cæsar, in times to come when science shall have risen to glory, by means of such stupendous genius that no man can help revering it.’

‘Ah!’ said Julian with a deep sigh, ‘happy the age and happy mankind when there shall be but one faith, whatever it be! Thou wilt never know what I have suffered between the old faith in the Gods and Christianity. As Terence says, I think, somewhere in the Andria:

‘“How happy could I be with either,
Were t’ other dear charmer away!”’

‘Yes, Cæsar, yours is a hard case, and all the harder because you wish heart and soul to do what is right.’

‘Orcus and hell, heathen and Christian, take me if I don’t!’ replied the emperor in a passion and looking as wild as a panther on the spring: he who had seen him then and there would have believed him to be some young god enraged. ‘What the devil can they expect a man to do who has seen what I have seen, and gone through what I have endured? Well, I began in good faith enough as a Christian, and in truth I was cut out for one as few young Roman gentlemen are. I was never sensual, cruel, nor over-selfish.’

‘Right you are, O Cæsar,’ thought Flaxius, ‘and a very good Christian gentleman you’d have made, if your guardians had let well alone.’

‘So I, with a deep love of ancient heathen beauty and art and poetry, was put into a cloister, where the meanest, monkish, shaveling spite made a sin and a shame of all that I loved. It was not belief in their own faith, but the bitterest hate of what they called heathenism, which chiefly inspired every one of them. That was their real religion—all the rest was mere form—the adaptation to their ritual of what I knew were old Oriental ceremonies. Then I began to think out, O Flaxius, what has ever since been the idea of my life: Why cannot man keep the old faith in Beauty, and all that was charming in the old religion, and unite with it the humanity and higher truth of Christianity.’

‘There will perhaps be a time, in the dim and remote future,’ quoth Flaxius, prophetically quoting Gladstone, ‘when that idea will occur to others.’

‘So I dreamed that I, as an Eclectic—having read something of Ammonius Saccas the Egyptian—would be the apostle of the new combined religion. Well! time passed, and after I had become Cæsar, it occurred to me to examine all the faiths into which Christianity had split, and a nice job it was! Pheugh! everything from Trinitarians, Arians, and Unitarians down to Cainites, who worship the flesh and sin and the devil, all hating the common enemy but hating one another worse, like the Jews who slew one another in the siege of Jerusalem while all fought Titus.

‘O sage,’ he resumed, ‘when I think how beautiful and noble, how holy and perfect were the conceptions of Christ, and how it was His ideal that every man should commune directly with God, and when I see how each one of these sects steps in and proposes with saints and forms to do for you what you should do for yourself, I cannot wonder at the scarcity of Christians. Yet there is a stupendous truth in Christianity, the truth of human rights, which even they cannot crush. Magna est veritas et prævalebit.’

‘And the old religion?’ asked Flaxius.

‘Well! it admitted the Beautiful and let a man philosophise freely, and did not make devils out of all the sweet and fair conceptions of poetry, of fauns and nymphs and Oreads and all; and so, as I believe that nature must prevail in the end with man, I went back to it. Yet the old religion is not humane. It admits slavery and inhumanity, it allows the grosser passions of cruelty and lust full play, evil nature as well as good, and it needs reform. I would fain be that reformer.’

‘Now here is a great man,’ thought Flaxius, ‘who is either two hundred years behind his time, or a thousand or more in advance of it. He means well, but is out of the age.’ Then speaking aloud he said:

‘Cæsar, there was once a king of Bithynia or Cappadocia or some such country, who had a mind to marry. Now the king next door had two daughters; both were beautiful, but one was as Venus and the other as Minerva. One was beautiful and voluptuous, witty and charming, while the other was wise and just, humane and ever careful that no one should be oppressed. Now which of these should he have married?’

‘Had I been in his place, I would have married both,’ replied the emperor.

‘But that was impossible.’

‘H’m! Well, in that case I should have taken the wise one.’

‘That,’ said Flaxius, ‘is what he did, and it is what the world will do: it will adopt the religion which, despite all the corruption with which man surrounds it, promises the greatest good to the greatest number.’

‘I believe that thou art in the right, O sage!’ replied the emperor slowly. ‘However, jacta est alea, the die is cast, and I shall ever remain Julian the Apostate. But what will be the end of it all?’

‘Thou wilt die nobly as a king should die—in battle for thy country.’

‘Then,’ said Julian, ‘I am content.’