The Emperor. Georg Ebers
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swarm of bees, a colony of ants, have taken possession of the palace. Hands black, white and brown—more than we could count, are busy there and of all the hundreds of workmen which are astir there, not one got in the way of another, for one little man orders and manages them all, just as the prescient wisdom of the gods guides the stars through the ‘gracious and merciful night’ so that they may never push or run against each other.”
“I must put in a word on behalf of Pontius the architect,” interposed Verus. “He is a man of at least average height.”
“Let us admit it to satisfy your sense of justice,” returned Balbilla. “Let us admit it—a man of average height, with a papyrus-roll in his right-hand and a stylus in the left, controls them. Now, does my way of stating it please you better?”
“It can never displease me,” answered the praetor. “Let Balbilla go on with her story,” commanded the Empress.
“What we saw was chaos,” continued the girl, “still in the confusion we could divine the elements of an orderly creation in the future; nay, it was even visible to the eye.”
“And not unfrequently stumbled over with the foot,” laughed the praetor. “If it had been dark, and if the laborers had been worms, we must have trodden half of them to death—they swarmed so all over the pavement.”
“What were they doing?”
“Every thing,” answered Balbilla quickly. “Some were polishing damaged pieces, others were laying new bits of mosaic in the empty places from which it had formerly been removed, and skilled artists were painting colored figures on smooth surfaces of plaster. Every pillar and every statue was built round with a scaffolding reaching to the ceiling on which men were climbing and crowding each other just as the sailors climb into the enemy’s ships in the Naumachia.”
The girl’s pretty cheeks had flushed with her eager reminiscence of what she had seen, and, as she spoke, moving her hands with expressive gestures, the tall structure of curls which crowned her small head shook from side to side.
“Your description begins to be quite poetical,” said the Empress, interrupting her young companion. “Perhaps the Muse may even inspire you with verse.”
“All the Pierides,” said the praetor, “are represented at Lochias. We saw eight of them, but the ninth, that patroness of the arts, who protects the stargazer, the lofty Urania, has at present, in place of a head—allow me to leave it to you to guess divine Sabina?”
“Well—what?”
“A wisp of straw.”
“Alas,” sighed the Empress. “What do you say, Florus? Are there not among your learned and verse spinning associates certain men who resemble this Urania?”
“At any rate,” replied Florus, “we are more prudent than the goddess, for we conceal the contents of our heads in the hard nut of the skull, and under a more or less abundant thatch of hair. Urania displays her straw openly.”
“That almost sounds,” said Balbilla laughing and pointing to her abundant locks, “as if I especially needed to conceal what is covered by my hair.”
“Even the Lesbian swan was called the fair-haired,” replied Florus.
“And you are our Sappho,” said the praetor’s wife, drawing the girl’s arm to her bosom.
“Really! and will you not write in verse all that you have seen to-day?” asked the Empress.
Balbilla looked down on the ground a minute and then said brightly: “It might inspire me, everything strange that I meet with prompts me to write verse.”
“But follow the counsel of Apollonius the philologer,” advised Florus. “You are the Sappho of our day, and therefore you should write in the ancient Aeolian dialect and not Attic Greek.” Verus laughed, and the Empress, who never was strongly moved to laughter, gave a short sharp giggle, but Balbilla said eagerly:
“Do you think that I could not acquire it and do so? To-morrow morning I will begin to practise myself in the old Aeolian forms.”
“Let it alone,” said Domitia Lucilla; “your simplest songs are always the prettiest.”
“No one shall laugh at me!” declared Balbilla pertinaciously. “In a few weeks I will know how to use the Aeolian dialect, for I can do anything I am determined to do—anything, anything.”
“What a stubborn little head we have under our curls!” exclaimed the Empress, raising a graciously threatening finger.
“And what powers of apprehension,” added Florus.
“Her master in language and metre told me his best pupil was a woman of noble family and a poetess besides—Balbilla in short.”
The girl colored at the words, and said with pleased excitement:
“Are you flattering me or did Hephaestion really say that?”
“Woe is me!” cried the praetor, “for Hephaestion was my master too, and I am one of the masculine scholars beaten by Balbilla. But it is no news to me, for the Alexandrian himself told me the same thing as Florus.”
“You follow Ovid and she Sappho,” said Florus; “you write in Latin and she in Greek. Do you still always carry Ovid’s love-poems about with you?”
“Always,” replied Verus, “as Alexander did his Homer.”
“And out of respect for his master your husband endeavors, by the grace of Venus, to live like him,” added Sabina, addressing herself to Domitia Lucilla.
The tall and handsome Roman lady only shrugged her shoulders slightly in answer to this not very kindly-meant speech; but Verus said, while he picked up Sabina’s silken coverlet, and carefully spread it over her knees:
“My happiest fortune consists in this: that Venus Victrix favors me. But we are not yet at the end of our story; our Lesbian swan met at Lochias with another rare bird, an artist in statuary.”
“How long have the sculptors been reckoned among birds?” asked Sabina. “At the utmost can they be compared to woodpeckers.”
“When they work in wood,” laughed Verus. “Our artist, however, is an assistant of Papias, and handles noble materials in the grand style. On this occasion, however, he is building a statue out of a very queer mixture of materials.”
“Verus may very well call our new acquaintance a bird,” interrupted Balbilla, “for as we approached the screen behind which he is working he was whistling a tune with his lips, so pure and cheery, and loud, that it rang through the empty hall above all the noise of the workmen. A nightingale does not pipe more sweetly. We stood still to listen till the merry fellow, who had no idea that we were by, was silent again; and then hearing the architect’s voice, he called to him over the screen. ‘Now we must clap Urania’s head on; I saw it clearly in my mind and would have had it finished with a score of touches, but Papias said he had one in the workshop. I am curious to see what sort of a sugarplum face, turned out by the dozen, he will stick on my torso—which will please me, at any rate, for a couple of days. Find me a good model for the bust of the Sappho I am to restore. A thousand gadflies are buzzing in my brain—I am so tremendously excited! What I am planning now will come to something!’”
Balbilla, as she spoke the last words, tried to mimic a man’s deep voice, and seeing the Empress smile she went on eagerly.
“It all came out so fresh, from a heart full to bursting of happy vigorous creative joy, that it quite fired me, and we all went up to the screen and begged the sculptor to let us see his work.”
“And you found?” asked Sabina.
“He positively refused to let us into his retreat,” replied the praetor; “but Balbilla coaxed the permission out of him, and the tall young fellow seems to have really learnt something. The fall of the drapery that covers the Muse’s figure is