The Last Days of Pompeii

E >> Edward George Bulwer Lytton >> The Last Days of Pompeii


'Ione--at that name my heart yet beats!--Ione is by my side as I write:
I lift my eyes, and meet her smile. The sunlight quivers over Hymettus:
and along my garden I hear the hum of the summer bees. Am I happy, ask
you? Oh, what can Rome give me equal to what I possess at Athens? Here,
everything awakens the soul and inspires the affections--the trees, the
waters, the hills, the skies, are those of Athens!--fair, though
mourning-mother of the Poetry and the Wisdom of the World. In my hall I
see the marble faces of my ancestors. In the Ceramicus, I survey their
tombs! In the streets, I behold the hand of Phidias and the soul of
Pericles. Harmodius, Aristogiton--they are everywhere--but in our
hearts!--in mine, at least, they shall not perish! If anything can make
me forget that I am an Athenian and not free, it is partly the
soothing--the love--watchful, vivid, sleepless--of Ione--a love that has
taken a new sentiment in our new creed--a love which none of our poets,
beautiful though they be, had shadowed forth in description; for mingled
with religion, it partakes of religion; it is blended with pure and
unworldly thoughts; it is that which we may hope to carry through
eternity, and keep, therefore, white and unsullied, that we may not
blush to confess it to our God! This is the true type of the dark fable
of our Grecian Eros and Psyche--it is, in truth, the soul asleep in the
arms of love. And if this, our love, support me partly against the
fever of the desire for freedom, my religion supports me more; for
whenever I would grasp the sword and sound the shell, and rush to a new
Marathon (but Marathon without victory), I feel my despair at the
chilling thought of my country's impotence--the crushing weight of the
Roman yoke, comforted, at least, by the thought that earth is but the
beginning of life--that the glory of a few years matters little in the
vast space of eternity--that there is no perfect freedom till the chains
of clay fall from the soul, and all space, all time, become its heritage
and domain. Yet, Sallust, some mixture of the soft Greek blood still
mingles with my faith. I can share not the zeal of those who see crime
and eternal wrath in men who cannot believe as they. I shudder not at
the creed of others. I dare not curse them--I pray the Great Father to
convert. This lukewarmness exposes me to some suspicion amongst the
Christians: but I forgive it; and, not offending openly the prejudices
of the crowd, I am thus enabled to protect my brethren from the danger
of the law, and the consequences of their own zeal. If moderation seem
to me the natural creature of benevolence, it gives, also, the greatest
scope to beneficence.

'Such, then, O Sallust! is my life--such my opinions. In this manner I
greet existence and await death. And thou, glad-hearted and kindly
pupil of Epicurus, thou... But come hither, and see what enjoyments,
what hopes are ours--and not the splendor of imperial banquets, nor the
shouts of the crowded circus, nor the noisy forum, nor the glittering
theatre, nor the luxuriant gardens, nor the voluptuous baths of
Rome--shall seem to thee to constitute a life of more vivid and
uninterrupted happiness than that which thou so unreasonably pitiest as
the career of Glaucus the Athenian!--Farewell!'

Nearly Seventeen Centuries had rolled away when the City of Pompeii was
disinterred from its silent tomb, all vivid with undimmed hues; its
walls fresh as if painted yesterday--not a hue faded on the rich mosaic
of its floors--in its forum the half-finished columns as left by the
workman's hand--in its gardens the sacrificial tripod--in its halls the
chest of treasure--in its baths the strigil--in its theatres the counter
of admission--in its saloons the furniture and the lamp--in its
triclinia the fragments of the last feast--in its cubicula the perfumes
and the rouge of faded beauty--and everywhere the bones and skeletons of
those who once moved the springs of that minute yet gorgeous machine of
luxury and of life! In the house of Diomed, in the subterranean vaults,
twenty skeletons (one of a babe) were discovered in one spot by the
door, covered by a fine ashen dust, that had evidently been wafted
slowly through the apertures, until it had filled the whole space.
There were jewels and coins, candelabra for unavailing light, and wine
hardened in the amphorae for a prolongation of agonized life. The sand,
consolidated by damps, had taken the forms of the skeletons as in a
cast; and the traveler may yet see the impression of a female neck and
bosom of young and round proportions--the trace of the fated Julia! It
seems to the inquirer as if the air had been gradually changed into a
sulphurous vapor; the inmates of the vaults had rushed to the door, to
find it closed and blocked up by the scoria without, and in their
attempts to force it, had been suffocated with the atmosphere.

In the garden was found a skeleton with a key by its bony hand, and near
it a bag of coins. This is believed to have been the master of the
house--the unfortunate Diomed, who had probably sought to escape by the
garden, and been destroyed either by the vapors or some fragment of
stone. Beside some silver vases lay another skeleton, probably of a
slave.

The houses of Sallust and of Pansa, the Temple of Isis, with the
juggling concealments behind the statues--the lurking-place of its holy
oracles--are now bared to the gaze of the curious. In one of the
chambers of that temple was found a huge skeleton with an axe beside it:
two walls had been pierced by the axe--the victim could penetrate no
farther. In the midst of the city was found another skeleton, by the
side of which was a heap of coins, and many of the mystic ornaments of
the fane of Isis. Death had fallen upon him in his avarice, and Calenus
perished simultaneously with Burbo! As the excavators cleared on
through the mass of ruin, they found the skeleton of a man literally
severed in two by a prostrate column; the skull was of so striking a
conformation, so boldly marked in its intellectual as well as its worse
physical developments, that it has excited the constant speculation of
every itinerant believer in the theories of Spurzheim who has gazed upon
that ruined palace of the mind. Still, after the lapse of ages, the
traveler may survey that airy hall within whose cunning galleries and
elaborate chambers once thought, reasoned, dreamed, and sinned, the soul
of Arbaces the Egyptian.

Viewing the various witnesses of a social system which has passed from
the world for ever--a stranger, from that remote and barbarian Isle
which the Imperial Roman shivered when he named, paused amidst the
delights of the soft Campania and composed this history!