In a speech delivered at Copenhagen in 1898, Ibsen said: “It is now thirty-four years since I journeyed southward by way of Germany and Austria, and passed through the Alps on May 9. Over the mountains the clouds hung like a great dark curtain. We plunged in under it, steamed through the tunnel, and suddenly found ourselves at Miramare, where the beauty of the South, a strange luminosity, shining like white marble, suddenly revealed itself to me, and left its mark on my whole subsequent production, even though it may not all have taken the form of beauty.” Whatever else may have had its origin in this memorable moment of revelation, Emperor and Galilean certainly sprang from it. The poet felt an irresistible impulse to let his imagination loose in the Mediterranean world of sunshine and marble that had suddenly burst upon him. Antiquity sprang to life before his mental vision, and he felt that he must capture and perpetuate the shining pageant in the medium of his art. We see throughout the play how constantly the element of external picturesqueness was present to his mind. Though it has only once or twice found its way to the viiistage,^[1] it is nevertheless—for good and for ill—a great piece of scene-painting.

It did not take him long to decide upon the central figure for his picture. What moved him, as it must move every one who brings to Rome the smallest scintilla of imagination, was the spectacle of a superb civilisation, a polity of giant strength and radiant beauty, obliterated, save for a few pathetic fragments, and overlaid by forms of life in many ways so retrograde and inferior. The Rome of the sixties, even more than the Rome of to-day, was a standing monument to the triumph of mediævalism over antiquity. The poet who would give dramatic utterance to the emotions engendered by this spectacle must almost inevitably pitch upon the decisive moment in the transition—and Ibsen found that moment in the reaction of Julian. He attributed to it more “world-historic” import than the sober historian is disposed to allow it. Gaetano Negri^[2] shows very clearly (what, indeed, is plain enough in Gibbon) that Julian’s action had not the critical importance which Ibsen assigns to it. His brief reign produced, as nearly as possible, no effect at all upon the evolution of Christianity. None the less is it true that Julian made a spiritual struggle of what had been, to his predecessors, a mere question of politics, one might almost say of police. Never until his day did the opposing forces confront each other in full consciousness of what was at stake; and never after his day had they even the semblance of equality requisite to give the struggle dramatic ixinterest. As a dramatist, then—whatever the historian may say—Ibsen chose his protagonist with unerring instinct. Julian was the last, and not the least, of the heroes of antiquity.

Ibsen had been in Rome only two or three months when he wrote to Björnson (September 16, 1864): “I am busied with a long poem, and have in preparation a tragedy, Julianus Apostata, a piece of work which I set about with intense gusto, and in which I believe I shall succeed. I hope to have both finished next spring, or, at any rate, in the course of the summer.” As regards Julianus Apostata, this hope was very far astray, for nine years elapsed before the play was finished.^[3] Not till May 4, 1866, is the project again mentioned, when Ibsen writes to his friend, Michael Birkeland, that, though the Danish poet, Hauch, has in the meantime produced a play on the same theme, he does not intend to abandon it. On May 21, 1866, he writes to his publisher, Hegel, that, now that Brand is out of hand, he is still undecided what subject to tackle next. “I feel more and more disposed,” he says, “to set to work in earnest at Kejser Julian, which I have had in mind for two years.” He feels sure that Hauch’s conception of the subject must be entirely different from his; and he does not intend to read Hauch’s play. On July 22, 1866, he writes from Frascati to Paul Botten-Hansen that he is “wrestling with a subject and knows that he will soon get the upper hand of the brute.” His German editors take this to refer to Emperor and Galilean, and they are probably right; but it is not quite certain. The work he actually produced was xPeer Gynt; and we know that he had a third subject in mind at the time. We hear no more of Julian until October 28, 1870, when, in his autobiographic letter to Peter Hansen, he writes from Dresden: “... Here I live in a tediously well-ordered community. What will become of me when at last I actually reach home! I must seek salvation in remoteness of subject, and think of attacking Kejser Julian.”

This was, in fact, to be his next work; but two years and a half were still to pass before he finally “got the upper hand of the brute.” On January 18, 1871, he writes to Hegel: “Your supposition that Julian is so far advanced that it may go to the printers next month arises from a misunderstanding. The first part is finished; I am working at the second part; but the third part is not even begun. This third part will, however, go comparatively quickly, and I confidently hope to place the whole in your hands by the month of June.” This is the first mention we have of the division into three parts, which he ultimately abandoned. If Hegel looked for the manuscript in June, he looked in vain. On July 12 Ibsen wrote to him: “Now for the reason of my long silence: I am hard at work on Kejser Julian. This book will be my chief work, and it is engrossing all my thoughts and all my time. That positive view of the world which the critics have so long been demanding of me, they will find here.” Then he asks Hegel to procure for him three articles on Julian by Pastor Listov, which had appeared in the Danish paper, Fædrelandet, and inquires whether there is in Danish any other statement of the facts of Julian’s career. “I have Neander’s German works on the subject; also D. Strauss’s; but the latter’s book contains nothing xibut argumentative figments,^[4] and that sort of thing I can do myself. It is facts that I require.” His demand for more facts, even at this stage of the proceedings, shows that his work must still have been in a pretty fluid state.

Two months later (September 24, 1871) Ibsen wrote to Brandes, who had apparently been urging him to “hang out a banner” or nail his colours to the mast: “While I have been busied upon Julian, I have become, in a way, a fatalist; and yet this play will be a sort of a banner. Do not be afraid, however, of any tendency-nonsense: I look at the characters, at the conflicting designs, at history, and do not concern myself with the ‘moral’ of it all. Of course, you will not confound the moral of history with its philosophy; for that must inevitably shine forth as the final verdict on the conflicting and conquering forces.” On December 27 (still from Dresden) he writes to Hegel: “My new work goes steadily forward. The first part, Julian and the Philosophers, in three acts, is already copied out.... I am busily at work upon the second part, which will go quicker and be considerably shorter; the third part, on the other hand, will be somewhat longer.” To the same correspondent, on April 24, 1872, he reports the second part almost finished. “The third and last part,” he says, “will be mere child’s play. The spring has now come, and the warm season is my best time for working.” To Brandes, on May 31, he writes, “I go on wrestling with Julian”; and on July 23 (from Berchtesgaden) “That monster Julian has still such a grip of me that I cannot shake him off.” On August 8 he announces to Hegel that he xiihas “completed the second part of the trilogy. The first part, Julian and the Philosophers, a play in three acts, will make about a hundred printed pages. The second part, Julian’s Apostasy, a play in three acts, of which I am now making a fair copy, will be of about equal length. The third play, Julian on the Imperial Throne, will run to five acts, and my preparations for it are so far advanced that I shall get it out of hand very much quicker than the others. What I have done forms a whole in itself, and could quite well be published separately; but for the sake of the complete impression I think it most advisable that all three plays should appear together.”

Two months later (October 14) the poet is back in Dresden, and writes as follows to a new and much-valued friend, Mr Edmund Gosse: “I am working daily at Julianus Apostata, and ... hope that it may meet with your approval. I am putting into this book a part of my own spiritual life; what I depict, I have, under other forms, myself gone through, and the historic theme I have chosen has also a much closer relation to the movements of our own time than one might at first suppose. I believe such a relation to be indispensable to every modern treatment of so remote a subject, if it is, as a poem, to arouse interest.” In a somewhat later letter to Mr. Gosse he says: “I have kept strictly to history.... And yet I have put much self-anatomy into this book.”

In February 1873 the play was finished. On the 4th of that month Ibsen writes to his old friend Ludvig Daae that he is on the point of beginning his fair copy of what he can confidently say will be his “Hauptwerk,” and wants some guidance as to the proper way of spelling Greek names. Oddly enough, he is still in search of facts, and asks for information xiiias to the Vita Maximi of Eunapius, which has not been accessible to him. Two days later (February 6) he writes to Hegel: “I have the great pleasure of being able to inform you that my long work is finished—and more to my satisfaction than any of my earlier works. The book is entitled Emperor and Galilean, a World-Drama in Two Parts. It contains: Part First, Caesar’s Apostasy; play in five acts (170 pp.); Part Second, The Emperor Julian, play in five acts (252 pp.).... Owing to the growth of the idea during the process of composition, I shall have to make another fair copy of the first play. But it will not become longer in the process; on the contrary, I hope to reduce it by about twenty pages.... This play has been to me a labour of Hercules—not the actual composition:composition: that has been easy—but the effort it has cost me to live myself into a fresh and visual realisation of so remote and so unfamiliar an age.” On February 23, he writes to Ludvig Daae, discussing further the orthography of the Greek names, and adding: “My play deals with a struggle between two irreconcileable powers in the life of the world—a struggle which will always repeat itself. Because of this universality, I call the book ‘a world-historic drama.’ For the rest, there is in the character of Julian, as in most that I have written during my riper years, more of my own spiritual experience than I care to acknowledge to the public. But it is at the same time an entirely realistic piece of work. The figures stood solidly before my eyes in the light of their time—and I hope they will so stand before the readers’ eyes.”

The book was not published until the autumn (October 16, 1873). On September 8, Ibsen wrote to Brandes that he was daily expecting its appearance. “I hear from Norway,” he went on, “that Björnson, xivthough he cannot know anything about the book, has declared it to be ‘Atheism,’ adding that it was inevitable it should come to that with me. What the book is or is not I won’t attempt to decide; I only know that I have energetically seen a fragment of the history of humanity, and what I saw I have tried to reproduce.” On the very day of the book’s appearance, he again writes to Brandes from Dresden: “The direction public affairs have taken in these parts gives this poem an actuality I myself had not foreseen.”

A second edition of Emperor and Galilean appeared in December 1873. In the following January Ibsen writes to Mr. Gosse, who had expressed some regret at his abandonment of verse: “The illusion I wished to produce was that of reality. I wished to leave on the reader’s mind the impression that what he had read had actually happened. By employing verse I should have counteracted my own intention.... The many everyday, insignificant characters, whom I have intentionally introduced, would have become indistinct and mixed up with each other had I made them all speak in rhythmic measure. We no longer live in the days of Shakespeare.... The style ought to conform to the degree of ideality imparted to the whole presentment. My play is no tragedy in the ancient acceptation. My desire was to depict human beings and therefore I would not make them speak the language of the gods.” A year later (January 30, 1875) he thus answers a criticism by George Brandes: “I cannot but find an inconsistency between your disapproval of the doctrine of necessity contained in my book, and your approval of something very similar in Paul Heyse’s Kinder der Welt. For in my opinion it comes to much the same thing whether, in writing of a xvperson’s character, I say ‘It runs in his blood’ or ‘He is free—under necessity.’”

An expression in the same letter throws light on the idea which may be called the keystone of the arch of thought erected in this play. “Only entire nations,” Ibsen writes, “can join in great intellectual movements. A change of front in our conception of life and of the world is no parochial matter; and we Scandinavians, as compared with other European nations, have not yet got beyond the parish-council standpoint. But nowhere do you find a parish-council anticipating and furthering ‘the third empire.’” To the like effect runs a passage in a speech delivered at Stockholm, September 24, 1887: “I have sometimes been called a pessimist: and indeed I am one, inasmuch as I do not believe in the eternity of human ideals. But I am also an optimist, inasmuch as I fully and confidently believe in the ideals’ power of propagation and of development. Especially and definitely do I believe that the ideals of our time, as they pass away, are tending towards that which, in my drama of Emperor and Galilean, I have designated as ‘the third empire.’ Let me therefore drain my glass to the growing, the coming time.”

The latest (so far as I know) of Ibsen’s references to this play is perhaps the most significant of all. It occurs in a letter to the Danish-German scholar Julius Hoffory, written from Munich, February 26, 1888: “Emperor and Galilean is not the first work I wrote in Germany, but doubtless the first that I wrote under the influence of German spiritual life. When, in the autumn of 1868, I came from Italy to Dresden, I brought with me the plan of The League of Youth, and wrote that play in the following winter. During my four years’ stay in Rome, I had merely made various xvihistorical studies, and taken sundry notes, for Emperor and Galilean; I had not sketched out any definite plan, much less written any of it. My view of life was still, at that time, National-Scandinavian, wherefore I could not master the foreign material. Then, in Germany, I lived through the great time, the year of the war, and the development which followed it. This brought with it for me, at many points, an impulse of transformation. My conception of world-history and of human life had hitherto been a national one. It now widened into a racial conception; and then I could write Emperor and Galilean.”

I have now brought together those utterances of Ibsen’s which relate the external history of the great double-drama, and give us some insight into the spiritual influences which inspired and shaped it. We have seen that, at the time of its completion, he confidently regarded it as his masterpiece. It is the habit of many artists always to think their last work their best; but there is nothing to show that this was one of Ibsen’s foibles. Moreover, even towards the end of his life, when the poet was asked by Professor Schofield, of Harvard, what work he considered his greatest, he replied, Emperor and Galilean. If this was his deliberate and lasting opinion, we have here another curious instance of the tendency, so frequent among authors, to capricious over-valuation of one or another of their less successful efforts. Certainly we should be very sorry to miss this splendid fresco of the decadent Empire from the list of Ibsen’s works; but neither technically nor intellectually—unless I am very much mistaken—can it rank among his masterpieces.

xviiOf all historical plays it is perhaps the most strictly historical. Apart from some unimportant chronological rearrangements, the main lines of Julian’s career are reproduced with extraordinary fidelity. The individual occurrences of the first play are for the most part invented, and the dialogue freely composed; but the second play is a mere mosaic of historical or legendary incidents, while a large part of the dialogue is taken, almost word for word, either from Julian’s own writings, or from other historical or quasi-historical documents. I will try to distinguish briefly between the elements of history and fiction in the first play: in the second there is practically no fiction save the fictions of Gregory and the ecclesiastical historians.

The details of the first act have no historical foundation. Gallus was not appointed Caesar on any such occasion as Ibsen describes; and there seems to be no hint of any intrigue between him and Helena. The character of Agathon is fictitious, though all that is related of Julian’s life in Cappadocia is historical. The meeting with Libanius is an invention; and it was to Nicomedia, not to Pergamus, that Julian was sent shortly after the elevation of his brother to the second place in the Empire.

The chronological order of the events on which the second and third acts are founded is reversed by Ibsen. Julian fell under the influence of Maximus before ever he went to Athens. Eunapius relates his saying, “I go where torches light themselves, and where statues smile,” or words to that effect; but they were spoken at Pergamus to Chrysantius, a Neo-Platonist, who, while deprecating the thaumaturgic methods of Maximus, averred that he himself had witnessed this marvel. For the details of the symposium at Ephesus there is xviiino foundation, though Gregory and others relate weird legends of supernatural experiences which Julian underwent at the instance of Maximus. Not till after the disgrace and death of Gallus did Julian proceed to Athens, where he did not study under Libanius. Indeed, I cannot discover that he ever personally encountered Libanius before his accession to the throne. It is true that Gregory and Basil were his fellow students at Athens; but the tender friendship which Ibsen represents as existing between them is certainly imaginary.

All the military events at Paris, and the story of Julian’s victory over Knodomar, are strictly historical. Helena, however, did not die at Paris, but at Vienne, after her husband had assumed the purple. Her death was said to have been indirectly due to a jealous machination of the Empress Eusebia; but the incident of the poisoned fruit is quite fictitious, and equally so are the vague enormities revealed in the dying woman’s delirium. From the fact that Julian is strangely silent about his wife, we may conjecture that their marriage was not a happy one; but this is all the foundation Ibsen had to build upon.^[5]

xixFor the scene in the Catacombs at Vienne there is nothing that can fairly be called a historic basis. It is true that, after assuming the purple, Julian did at one time endanger his position by shutting himself away from his soldiery; it is true, or at least it is related, that Julian “brought from Greece into Gaul the high priest of the mysteries—the Hierophant, as he was called [not Maximus]—and did not decide to rebel until he had, with the greatest secrecy, accomplished the prescribed sacred rites.” There is also a vague, and probably mythical, report of his having gone through some barbarous ceremony of purification, in order to wipe out the stain of his baptism. On such slight suggestions did Ibsen build up the elaborate fabric of his fifth act. The character of Sallust, like that of Oribases, is historical: but of any approach to double-dealing on the part of the excellent Sallust there is no hint. As there is no foundation for the infidelity of the living Helena, so there is no foundation for the part played by Helena dead in determining Julian’s apostasy.

While Ibsen invents, however, he does not falsify; it is when he ceases to invent (paradoxically enough) that falsification sets in. In all essentials, this first play xxis a representation of the youth of Julian as just as it is vivid. His character is very truly portrayed—his intellectual and moral earnestness, his superstition, his vanity, his bravery, his military genius. The individual scenes are full of poetic and dramatic inspiration. There may be some question, indeed, as to the artistic legitimacy of the employment of the supernatural in the third act; but of its imaginative power there can be no doubt. The drama progresses in an ever-ascending scale of interest, from the idyllic-spectacular opening, through the philosophic second act, the mystic third act, the stirring and terrible fourth act, up to the magnificent poetic melodrama of the fifth. In a slightly old-fashioned, romantic style, the play is as impressive to the imagination as it is, in all essentials, faithful to historic fact.

When Julian has ascended the throne, a wholly different method of treatment sets in. We could almost guess from internal evidence, what Ibsen’s letters prove to be the fact—that he underwent a decisive change of mental attitude during the process of composition. The original first part, we see (that is to say the three-act play which was to have been called Julian and the Philosophers), was finished some time before January 18, 1871, on which date he tells Hegel that he is already at work on the second part. But January 18, 1871, was the very day on which, at Versailles, the King of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor; so that the first part must have been written before the Imperialisation of Germany was even to be foreseen. While the poet was engaged upon the second part of the “trilogy” he then designed, he was doubtless brooding over the great event of January 18, and gradually realising its nature and consequences. That change in his mental attitude was xxitaking place, which in his letter to Hoffory (p. xvi.) he described as the transition from a national to a racial standpoint. While in January he “confidently hopes” to have the whole play finished in June, July finds him, to all appearance, no further advanced, and (very significantly) asking for “facts,” documents of detail, whereof, in writing the first play, he had felt no need. At the same time he tells Hegel that the critics will find in the play that positive view of the world for which they have long been clamouring—a Weltanschauung, we may fairly conjecture, at which he has arrived during the six months’ interval since his last letter.

What, then, was that “positive view”? It can have been nothing else than the theory of the “third empire,” which is to absorb both Paganism and Christianity, and is to mark, as it were, the maturity of the race, in contrast to its Pagan childhood and its Christian adolescence. (Compare the scene between Julian and Maximus at the end of Part II. Act III.) The analogy between this theory and the Nietzschean conception of the “Overman” need not here be emphasised. It is sufficient to note that Ibsen had come to conceive world-history as moving, under the guidance of a Will which works through blinded, erring, and sacrificed human instruments, towards a “third empire,” in which the jarring elements of flesh and spirit shall be reconciled.

It may seem like a play on the word “empire” to connect this concept with the establishment in January 1871 of a political confederation of petty States, compared with which even Julian’s “orbis terrarum” was a world-empire indeed. But there is ample proof that in Ibsen’s mind political unification, the formation of large aggregates inspired by a common idea, figured xxiias a preliminary to the coming of the “third empire.” In no other sense can we read the letters to Hoffory and Brandes cited above (p. xv.); and I give in a footnote^[6] a reference to other passages of similar tenor. “But Julian,” it may be said, “represented precisely the ideal of political cohesion which was revived in the unification of Germany; why, then, should Ibsen, in writing the second play, have (so to speak) turned against his hero?” The reason, I think, was that Ibsen had come to feel that a loose political unity could be of little avail without the spiritual fusion implied in a world-religion; and this fusion it was Julian’s tragic error to oppose. He was a political imperialist by inheritance and as a matter of course; but what he really cared for, the point on which he bent his will, was the restoration of polytheism with all its local cults. And here Ibsen parted company with him. He sympathised to the full with Julian’s rebellion against certain phases of Christianity—against book-worship, death-worship, other-worldliness, hypocrisy, intolerance. He had himself gone through this phase of feeling. During his first years in Rome, he had seen the ruins of the ancient world of light and glory sicklied o’er with the pale cast of mediaevalism; and he had ardently sympathised with Julian’s passionate resentment against the creed which had defamed and defaced the old xxiiibeauty in the name of a truth that was so radically corrupted as to be no longer true. In this mood he had conceived and in great measure executed the First Part, as we now possess it. But further study of detail, in the light of that new political conception which had arisen out of the events of 1870-71, had shown him that the secret of Julian’s failure lay in the hopeless inferiority of the religion he championed to the religion he attacked. That religion, with all its corruptions, came to seem a necessary stage in the evolution of humanity; and the poet asked himself, perhaps, whether he, any more than Julian, had even now a more practical substitute to offer in its place. In this sense, I take it, we must read his repeated assertion that he had put into the play much of his own “spiritual experience.” In the concept of the “third empire” he found, I repeat, the keystone to his arch of thought, to which everything else must be brought into due relation. He re-wrote (it seems probable) the scene of the symposium (Part I. Act III.) in order to emphasise this idea; and it entirely dominated and conditioned the whole of the second play.

But what was the effect of the concept? It was to make Julian a plaything in the hands of some power, some implicitly-postulated World-Will, working slowly, deviously, but relentlessly, towards a far-off, dimly-divined consummation. Christianity, no doubt, was also an instrument of this power; but it was an instrument predestined (for the moment) to honourable uses, while its opponent was fated to dishonour. Thus the process of the second part is a gradual sapping of Julian’s intelligence and power of moral discrimination; while the World-Will, acting always on the side of Christianity, becomes indistinguishable from the mechanical Providence of the vulgar melodramatist.

xxivWhatever we may think of the historical or philosophical value of the theory of the “third empire,” there can be little doubt that its effect upon the play has been artistically disastrous. It has led Ibsen to cog the dice against Julian in a way from which even a Father of the Church might have shrunk. He has not only accepted uncritically all the invectives of Gregory, and the other Christian assailants of “Antichrist,” but he has given to many historic events a fictitious twist, and always to Julian’s disadvantage.^[7]

It would need a volume to apply to each incident of the Second Part the test of critical examination. I must be content with a rough outline of the distorting effect of the poet’s preoccupation with his “world-historic” idea.

In the first place, he makes Julian much more of a persecutor than even his enemies allege him to have been. Nothing is more certain than that Julian was sincerely convinced of the inefficacy of violence as a means of conversion, and keenly alive to the impolicy of conferring upon his opponents the distinction of martyrdom. Tried by the standards of his age, he was a marvellously humane man. Compared with his uncle, Constantine, his cousin Constantius, his brother Gallus—to go no further back among wearers of the purple—he seems like a being of another race. It is quite true, as his enemies allege, that his clemency was politic as well as humane; but, whatever its motives, it was real and consistent. Gregory, while trying to make him out a monster, explicitly and repeatedly complains that he denied to Christians the crown of martyrdom. Saint Jerome speaks of his “blanda persecutio”—persecution by methods of mildness. xxvThe worst that can be alleged against him is a lack of diligence in punishing popular outrages upon the Christians (generally of the nature of reprisals) which occurred here and there under his rule. That he incited to such riots is nowhere alleged; and it is difficult to judge whether his failure to repress them was due to malicious inertia or to actual lack of power. The policing of the empire cannot have been an easy matter, and Julian was occupied, during the whole of his brief reign, in concentrating his forces for the Persian expedition. It cannot be pretended that his tolerance rose to the pitch of impartiality. He favoured Pagans, and he more or less oppressed Christians; though a considerable part of his alleged oppression lay in the withdrawal of extravagant privileges conferred on them by his predecessors. In his attempt to undo some of the injustices that Christians had committed during their forty years of predominance—such as the seizure of temple glebes and so forth—he was doubtless guilty, on his own account, of more than one injustice. Wrong breeds wrong, and, in a time of religious dissolution and reconstruction, equity is always at the mercy of passion, resentment and greed. There was even, in some of Julian’s proceedings, a sort of perfidy and insolence that must have been peculiarly galling to the Christians. It would not be altogether unjust to accuse him of having instituted against the new religion a campaign of chicanery; but that is something wholly different from a campaign of blood. The alleged “martyrdoms” of his reign are few in number,^[8] are recounted by late and prejudiced authorities, are accompanied by all the xxvimanifestly fabulous details characteristic of such stories, and are none of them, with the smallest show of credibility, laid to the account of Julian himself.

But what is the impression we receive from Ibsen? We are given to understand that Julian drifted into a campaign of sanguinary atrocity, full of horrors as great as those recorded or imagined of the persecutions under Decius or Diocletian. It is made to seem, moreover, that he was personally concerned in some of the worst of these horrors. We are asked to conceive his life as being passed with the mingled shrieks and psalms of his victims ringing in his ears. He is made to gloat in imagination over their physical agonies. (“Where are the Galileans now? Some under the executioner’s hands, others flying through the narrow streets, ashy pale with terror, their eyes starting from their heads,” &c. &c.; p. 314). He is haunted in his last hours by ghastly visions of whole troops of martyrs. Moreover, his persecutions are made particularly hateful by the fact that they either fall upon or threaten his personal friends. The companion of his childhood, Agathon (a fictitious personage), is goaded by remorseless cruelty to that madness which eventually makes him the assassin of Antichrist. Gregory of Nazianzus is first made (what he never was) Julian’s most cherished comrade, and is then shown as doing what he never did—playing a noble and heroic part in personally defying the tyrant. Mad and monstrous designs are attributed to Julian, such as that of searching out (with the aid of tortures) and destroying all the writings of the Christians. This trait appears to be suggested by a letter from Julian to the Prefect of Egypt enjoining him to collect and preserve all the books which had belonged to George, Bishop of Alexandria: “He had many of them xxviiconcerning philosophy and rhetoric, and many of them that contained the doctrines of the impious Galileans. I would willingly see the last named all destroyed, if I did not fear that some good and useful books might, at the same time, be destroyed by mistake. Make, therefore, the most minute search concerning them. In this search the secretary of George may be of great help to you.... But if he try to deceive you in this affair, submit him immediately to the torture.” It is needless to remark upon the difference between a rhetorical wish that all the Christian books in a particular library might be destroyed, and an actual attempt to annihilate all the Christian writings in the world. Thus not only are the clearest evidences of Julian’s abstention from violence disregarded, but all sorts of minor incidents are misrepresented to his disadvantage.

A particularly grave injustice to his character meets us almost on the threshold of the Second Part. The execution of the Treasurer, Ursulus, by the military tribunal which Julian appointed on coming to the throne, is condemned by all historians and was regretted by Julian himself. No doubt he was culpably remiss in not preventing it; but Ibsen, without the slightest warrant, gives his conduct a peculiarly odious character in making it appear that he deliberately sacrificed the old man to his resentment of a blow administered to his vanity in the matter of the Eastern Ambassadors. There is nothing whatever to connect Ursulus with this incident.

The failure of Julian’s effort to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem is a matter of unquestioned history. It is impossible now to determine, though it is easy to conjecture, what natural accidents were magnified by fanaticism into supernatural intervention. But what xxviiidoes Ibsen do? He is not even content with the comparatively rational account of the matter given by Gregory within a few months of its occurrence. He adopts Ammian’s later and much exaggerated account; he makes Jovian, who had nothing to do with the affair, avouch it with the authority of an eye-witness; and, to give the miracle a still more purposeful significance, he represents it as the instrument of the conversion of Jovian, who was to be Julian’s successor, and the undoer of his work. Under ordinary circumstances, this would be a quite admissible re-arrangement of history, designed to save the introduction of another character. But the very fact that the poet is, throughout the play, so obviously sacrificing dramatic economy and concentration to historic accuracy, renders this heightening of the alleged miracle something very like a falsification of evidence. It arises, of course, from no desire to be unjust to Julian, for whom Ibsen’s sympathy remains unmistakable, but from a determination to make him the tragic victim of a World-Will pitilessly using him as an instrument to its far-off ends.

But this conception of a vague external power interfering at all sorts of critical moments to baffle designs of which, for one reason or another, it disapproves, belongs to the very essence of melodrama. Therefore the incident of the Temple of Jerusalem brings with it painful associations of The Sign of the Cross; and still more suggestive of that masterpiece is the downfall of the Temple of Apollo at Daphne which brings the second act of the Second Part to a close. Here the poet deliberately departs from history for the sake of a theatrical effect. The temple of Apollo was not destroyed by an earthquake, nor in any way that even suggested a miracle. It was simply xxixburnt to the ground; and though there was no evidence to show how the conflagration arose, the suspicion that it was the work of Christians cannot be regarded as wholly unreasonable.

An incident of which Ibsen quite uncritically accepts the accounts of Julian’s enemies is his edict imposing what we should now call a test on the teachers in public (municipal) schools. This was probably an impolitic act; but an act of frantic tyranny it certainly was not. Homer and Hesiod were in Julian’s eyes sacred books. They were the Scriptures of his religion; and he decreed that they should not be expounded to children, at the public expense, by “atheists” who (unless they were hypocrites as well) were bound to cast ridicule and contempt on them as religious documents. It is not as though Christians of that age could possibly have been expected to treat the Olympian divinities with the decent reverence with which even an agnostic teacher of to-day will speak of the Gospel story. Such tolerance was foreign to the whole spirit of fourth-century Christianity. It was nothing if not intolerant; and the teacher would have been no good Christian who did not make his lessons the vehicle of proselytism. There is something a little paradoxical in the idea that tolerance should go the length of endowing the propagation of intolerance. It is quite false to represent Julian’s measure as an attempt to deprive Christians of all instruction, and hurl them back into illiterate barbarism. He explicitly states that Christian children are as welcome as ever to attend the schools.

As the drama draws to a close, Ibsen shows his hero at every step more pitifully hoodwinked and led astray by the remorseless World-Will. He regains, towards the end, a certain tragic dignity, but it is at the xxxexpense of his sanity. “Quos deus vult perdere prius dementat.” Now, there is no real evidence for the frenzied megalomania, the “Cäsarenwahn,” which the poet attributes to Julian. It is not even certain that his conduct of the Persian expedition was so rash and desperate as it is represented to be. Gibbon (no blind partisan of Julian’s) has shown that there is a case to be made even for the burning of the fleet. The mistake, perhaps, lay, not so much in burning it, as in having it there at all. Even as events fell out, the result of the expedition was by no means the greatest disaster that ever befell the Roman arms. The commonplace, self-indulgent Jovian brought the army off, ignominiously indeed, but in tolerable preservation. Had Julian lived, who knows but that the burning of the ships might now have ranked as one of the most brilliant audacities recorded in the annals of warfare?

It would be too much, perhaps, to expect any poet to resist the introduction of the wholly unhistoric “I am hammering the Emperor’s coffin,” and “Thou hast conquered, Galilean!” They certainly fell in too aptly with Ibsen’s scheme for him to think of weighing their evidences. But one significant instance may be noted of the way in which he twists things to the detriment either of Julian’s character or of his sanity. In the second scene of the fifth act, he makes Julian contemplate suicide by drowning, in the hope that, if his body disappeared, the belief would spread abroad that he had been miraculously snatched up into the communion of the gods. Now Gregory, it is true, mentions the design of suicide; but he mentions it as an incident of Julian’s delirium after his wound. Gregory’s virulence of hatred makes him at best a suspected witness; but even he did not hold Julian xxxicapable of so mad a fantasy before his intellect had been overthrown by physical suffering and fever.

Thus from step to step, throughout the Second Part, does Ibsen disparage and degrade his hero. It is not for me to discuss the value of the conception of the “third empire” to which poor Julian was sacrificed. But one thing we may say with confidence—namely, that the postulated World-Will does not work by such extremely melodramatic methods as those which Ibsen attributes to it. So far as its incidents are concerned, the Second Part might have been designed by a superstitious hagiologist, or a melodramatist desirous of currying favour with the clergy. Nay, it might almost seem as though the spirit of Gregory of Nazianzus—himself a dramatist after a fashion—had entered into Ibsen during the composition of the play. Certainly, if the World-Will decreed that Julian should be sacrificed in the cause of the larger Imperialism, it made of Ibsen, too, its instrument for completing the immolation.

In translating Kejser og Galilæer I was enabled (by arrangement) to avail myself of occasional aid from Miss Catherine Ray’s version of the play, published in 1876. To Miss Ray belongs the credit of having been the first English translator of Ibsen, as Mr. Gosse was his first expositor. The text of my earlier rendering has been very carefully revised for the present edition.

One difficulty has encountered me at every turn. The Norwegians use only one word—Riget (German das Reich)—to cover the two ideas represented in English by “empire” and “kingdom.” In most cases “empire” is clearly the proper rendering, since it would be absurd to speak in English of the Roman xxxiior the Byzantine Kingdom. But it would be no less impossible to say, in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thine is the empire and the power and the glory.” In the scene with Maximus in Ephesus, and in several other passages, I have used the word “empire” where “kingdom,” in its Biblical sense, would have been preferable, were it not necessary to keep the analogy or contrast between the temporal and the spiritual “empire” clearly before the reader’s mind. But at the end of the fifth act of Caesar’s Apostasy, where the Lord’s Prayer is interwoven with the dialogue, I have been forced to fall back on “kingdom.” The reader, then, will please remember that these two words stand for one word—Riget—in the original.

The verse from Homer quoted by Julian in the third act of the second play occurs in the twentieth book of the Odyssey (line 18). Ibsen prints the sentence which follows it as a second hexameter line; but either he or one of his authorities has apparently misread the passage in the treatise, Against the Cynic Heraclius, on which this scene is founded. No such line occurs in Homer; and in the attack on Heraclius, the phrase about the mad dog appears as part of the author’s text, not as a quotation. I have ventured, therefore, to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” and print the phrase as Julian’s own.

• The Emperor Contstantius.
• The Empress Eusebia.
• The Princess Helena, the Emperor’s sister.
• Prince Gallus, the Emperor’s cousin.
• Prince Julian, Gallus’s younger half-brother.
• Memnon, an Ethiopian, the Emperor’s body-slave.
• Potamon, a goldsmith.
• Phocion, a dyer.
• Eunapius, a hairdresser.
• A Fruit-seller.
• A Captain of the Watch.
• A Soldier.
• A Painted Woman.
• A Paralytic Man.
• A Blind Beggar.
• Agathon, son of a Cappadocian vine-grower.
• Libanius, a Philosopher.
• Gregory of Nazianzus.
• Basil of Caesarea.
• Sallust of Perusia.
• Hekebolius, a Theologian.
• Maximus the Mystic.
• Eutherius, Julian’s chamberlain.
• Leontes, a Quaestor.
• Myrrha, a slave.
• Decentius, a Tribune.
• Sintula, Julian’s Master of the Horse.
• Florentius,
  Severus, } Generals.
• Oribases, a Physician.
• Laipso,
  Varro, } Subalterns.
• Maurus, a Standard-bearer.
• Soldiers, church-goers, heathen onlookers, courtiers, priests, students, dancing girls, servants, the Quaestor’s retinue, Gallic warriors.
• Visions and voices.

The first act passes in Constantinople, the second in Athens, the third in Ephesus, the fourth in Lutetia in Gaul, and the fifth in Vienna [Vienne] in the same province. The action takes place during the ten years between A.D. 351 and A.D. 361.

ACT FIRST.

Easter night in Constantinople. The scene is an open place, with trees, bushes, and overthrown statues, in the vicinity of the Imperial Palace. In the background, fully illuminated, stands the Imperial Chapel. To the right a marble balustrade, from which a staircase leads down to the water. Between the pines and cypresses appear glimpses of the Bosphorus and the Asiatic coast.

Service in the church. Soldiers of the Imperial Guard stand on the church steps. Great crowds of worshippers stream in. Beggars, cripples, and blind men at the doors. Heathen onlookers, fruit-sellers, and water-carriers fill up the place.

[Carrying a paper lantern, enters from the left, taps one of the soldiers on the shoulder, and asks:] Hist, good friend—when comes the Emperor?

I cannot tell.

[In the crowd, turning his head.] The Emperor? Did not some one ask about the Emperor? The Emperor will come a little before midnight—just before. I had it from Memnon himself.himself.

[Rushes in hastily and pushes a Fruit-seller aside.] Out of the way, heathen!

Softly, sir!

Dog, dog!

Grumbling at a well-dressed Christian—at a man of the Emperor’s own faith!

[Knocks the Fruit-seller down.] Into the gutter with you!

That’s right. Wallow there, along with your gods!

[Beating him with his stick.] Take that—and that—and that!

[Kicking him.] And this—and this! I’ll baste your god-detested skin for you!

[With the evident intention of being heard by the Captain of the Guard.] It is much to be desired that some one should bring this scene to our blessed Emperor’s ears. The Emperor has lately expressed his displeasure at the way in which we Christian citizens consort with the heathen, just as if no gulf divided us——

You refer to that placard in the market-places? I too have read it. And I hold that, as there is both true and false gold in the world——

——we ought not to clip every one with the same shears; that is my way of thinking. There are still zealous souls among us, praise be to God!

We are far from being zealous enough, dear brethren! See how boldly these scoffers hold up their heads. How many of this rabble, think you, bear the sign of the cross or of the fish on their arms?

Not many—and yet they actually swarm in front of the Imperial Chapel——

——on such a thrice-sacred night as this——

——blocking the way for true sons of the Church——

[In the crowd.] Are Donatists true sons of the Church?

What? A Donatist? Are you a Donatist?

What then? Are not you one?

I? I? May the lightning blast your tongue!

[Making the sign of the cross.] May plague and boils——!

A Donatist! You carrion! You rotten tree!

Right, right!

You brand for Satan’s furnace!

Right! Give it him; give it him, dear brother.brother.

[Pushing the Goldsmith away.] Hold your tongue get you behind me. I know you now;—you are Potamon the Manichæan!

A Manichæan? A stinking heretic! Faugh, faugh!

[Holding up his paper lantern.] Heyday! Why, you are Phocion the Dyer, of Antioch! The Cainite!

Woe is me, I have held communion with falsehood!

Woe is me, I have helped a son of Satan!

[Boxing his ear.] Take that for your help!

[Returning the blow.] Oh, you abandoned hound!hound!

Accursed, accursed be ye both!

[Calls to the soldiers.] The Emperor comes!

The Court enters in stately procession from the left. Priests with censers go before; after them men-at-arms and torch-bearers, courtiers and bodyguards. In their midst the Emperor Constantius, a man of thirty-four, of distinguished appearance, beardless, with brown curly hair; his eyes have a dark, distrustful expression; his gait and whole deportment betray uneasiness and debility. Beside him, on his left, walks the Empress Eusebia, a pale, delicate woman, the same age as the Emperor. Behind the imperial pair follows Prince Julian, a not yet fully developed youth of nineteen. He has black hair and the beginnings of a beard, sparkling brown eyes with a rapid glance; his court-dress sits badly upon him; his manners are notably awkward and abrupt. The Emperor’s sister, the Princess Helena, a voluptuous beauty of twenty-five, follows, accompanied by maidens and older women. Courtiers and men-at-arms close the procession. The Emperor’s body-slave, Memnon, a heavily-built, magnificently-dressed Ethiopian, is among them.

[Stops suddenly, turns round to Prince Julian, and asks sharply.] Where is Gallus?

[Turning pale.] Gallus? What would you with Gallus?

There, I caught you!

Sire——!

[Seizing the Emperor’s hand.] Come; come!

Conscience cried aloud. What are you two plotting?

We?

You and he!

Oh, come; come, Constantius!

So black a deed! What did the oracle answer?

The oracle! By my Holy Redeemer——

If any one maligns you, he shall pay for it at 10the stake. [Draws the Prince aside.] Oh, let us hold together, Julian! Dear kinsman, let us hold together!

Everything lies in your hands, my beloved lord!

My hands——!

Oh, stretch them in mercy over us!

My hands? What was in your mind as to my hands?

[Grasps his hands and kisses them.] The Emperor’s hands are white and cool.

What else should they be? What was in your mind? There I caught you again!

[Kisses them again.] They are like rose-leaves in this moonlight night.

Well, well, well, Julian!

Forward; it is time.

To go in before the presence of the Lord! I—I! Oh, pray for me Julian! They will offer me the consecrated wine. I see it! It glitters in the golden chalice like serpents’ eyes—— [Shrieks.] Bloody eyes——! Oh, Jesus Christ, pray for me!

The Emperor is ill——!

Where is Caesarius? The physician, the physician—summon him!

[Beckons.] Memnon, good Memnon!

[Softly.] Sire, have pity, and send me far from here.

Where would you go?

To Egypt. I would fain go to Egypt, if you think fit. So many go thither—into the great solitude.

Into the great solitude? Ha! In solitude one broods. I forbid you to brood.

I will not brood, if only you will let me——Here my anguish of soul increases day by day. 12Evil thoughts flock around me. For nine days I have worn a hair shirt, and it has not protected me; for nine nights I have lashed myself with thongs, but scourging does not banish them.

We must be steadfast, Julian! Satan is very busy in all of us. Speak with Hekebolius——

[To the Emperor.] It is time now——

No, no, I will not——

[Seizing him by the wrist.] Come, gracious lord;—come, I say.

[Draws himself up, and says with dignity.] Forward to the house of the Lord!

[Softly.] The other matter afterwards——

[To Julian.] I must see Gallus.

[Hastily and softly.] Fear nothing!

Remain without. Come not into the church with those thoughts in your mind. When you pray before the altar, it is to call down evil upon me.—Oh, lay not that sin upon your soul, my beloved kinsman!

Oh, mightiest ruler on earth, let me touch the hem of thy garment, that I may become whole.

Pray for me, anointed of the Lord, that my sight may be restored!

Be of good cheer, my son!—Memnon, scatter silver among them. In, in!

[Looking towards the church.] What would he with Gallus? On this sacred night he cannot think to——! Oh, if I did but know—— [He turns and jostles against the blind man, who is departing.] Look where you go, friend!

I am blind, my lord!

Still blind! Can you not yet see so much as yonder glittering star? Fie! man of little faith! Did not God’s anointed promise to pray for your sight?

Who are you, that mock at a blind brother?

A brother in unbelief and blindness.

[Softly, among the bushes behind him.] Julian, Julian!

[With a cry.] Ah!

[Nearer.] Julian!

Stand, stand;—I am armed.armed. Beware!

[Poorly clad, and with a traveller’s staff, appears among the trees.] Hush! It is I——

Stand where you are! Do not come near me, fellow!

Oh, do you not remember Agathon——?

Agathon! What say you? Agathon was a boy——

Six years ago.—I knew you at once.

Agathon;—by the holy cross, but I believe it is!

Look at me; look well——

[Embracing and kissing him.] Friend of my childhood! Playmate! Dearest of them all! And you are here? How wonderful! You have come all the long way over the mountains, and then across the sea,—the whole long way from Cappadocia?

I came two days ago, by ship, from Ephesus. Oh, how I have sought in vain for you these two days. At the palace gates the guards would not let me pass, and——

Did you speak my name to any one? or say that you were in search of me?

No, I dared not, because——

There you did right; never let any one know more than you needs must——.

Come hither, Agathon; out into the full moonlight, 16that I may see you.—How you have grown, Agathon;—how strong you look.

And you are paler.

I cannot thrive in the air of the palace. I think it is unwholesome here.—’Tis far otherwise at Makellon. Makellon lies high. No other town in Cappadocia lies so high; ah, how the fresh snow-winds from the Taurus sweep over it——! Are you weary, Agathon?

Oh, in no wise.

Let us sit down nevertheless. It is so quiet and lonely here. Close together; so! [Draws him down upon a seat beside the balustrade.]—“Can any good thing come out of Cappadocia,” they say. Yes—friends can come. Can anything be better?

How was it possible that I did not know you at once? Oh, my beloved treasure, is it not just as when we were boys——?

[Sinking down before him.] I at your feet, as of old.

No, no, no——!

Oh, let me kneel thus!

Oh, Agathon, it is a sin and a mockery to kneel to me. If you but knew how sinful I have become. Hekebolius, my beloved teacher, is sorely concerned about me, Agathon. He could tell you——

How thick and moist your hair has grown; and how it curls.—But Mardonius—how goes it with him? His hair must be almost white now?

It is snow-white.

How well Mardonius could interpret Homer! I amHomer! I am sure my old Mardonius has not his like at that.—Heroes embattled against heroes—and the gods above fanning the flames. I saw it all, as with my eyes.

Then your mind was set on being a great and victorious warrior.

They were happy times, those six years in Cappadocia. Were the years longer then than now? It seems so, when I think of all they contained——

Yes, they were happy years. We at our books, and Gallus on his Persian horse. He swept over the plain like the shadow of a cloud.—Oh, but one thing you must tell me. The church——?

The church? Over the Holy Mamas’s grave?

[Smiling faintly.] Which Gallus and I built Gallus finished his aisle; but I——; mine never fully prospered.—How has it gone on since?

Not at all. The builders said it was impossible as you had planned it.

[Thoughtfully.] No doubt, no doubt. I wronged them in thinking them incapable. Now I know why it was not to be. I must tell you, Agathon;—Mamas was a false saint.

The Holy Mamas?

That Mamas was never a martyr. His whole legend was a strange delusion. Hekebolius has, with infinite research, arrived at the real truth, and I myself have lately composed a slight treatise on the subject—a treatise, my Agathon, which certain philosophers are said, strangely enough, to have mentioned with praise in the lecture-rooms——

The Lord keep my heart free from vanity! The evil tempter has countless wiles; one can never know——.

That Gallus should succeed and I fail! Ah, my Agathon, when I think of that church-building, I see Cain’s altar——

Julian!

God will have none of me, Agathon!

Ah, do not speak so! Was not God strong in you when you led me out of the darkness of heathendom, and gave me light over all my days—child though you then were!

All that is like a dream to me.

And yet so blessed a truth.

[Sadly.] If only it were so now!—Where did I find the words of fire? The air seemed full of hymns of praise—a ladder from earth to heaven—[Gazes straight before him.] Did you see it?

What?

The star that fell; there, behind the two cypresses. [Is silent a moment, then suddenly changes his tone.] Have I told you what my mother dreamed the night before I was born?

I do not recall it.

No, no, I remember—I heard of it after we parted.

What did she dream?

My mother dreamed that she gave birth to Achilles.

[Eagerly.] Is your faith in dreams as strong as ever?

Why do you ask?

You shall hear; it concerns what has driven me to cross the sea——

You have a special errand here? I had quite forgotten to ask you——

A strange errand; so strange that I am lost in doubt and disquietude. There is so much I should like to know first—about life in the city—about yourself—and the Emperor——

[Looks hard at him.] Tell me the truth, Agathon—with whom have you spoken before meeting me?

With no one.

When did you arrive?

I have told you—two days ago.

And already you want to know——? What would you know about the Emperor? Has any one set you on to——? [Embraces him.] Oh, forgive me, Agathon, my friend!

What? Why?

[Rises and listens.] Hush!—No, it was nothing—only a bird in the bushes——

I am very happy here. Wherefore should you doubt it? Have I not all my family gathered here? at least—all over whom a gracious Saviour has held his hand.

And the Emperor is as a father to you?

The Emperor is beyond measure wise and good.

[Who has also risen.] Julian, is the rumour true that you are one day to be the Emperor’s successor?

[Hastily.] Speak not of such dangerous matters. I know not what foolish rumours are abroad.—Why do you question me so much? Not a word will I answer till you have told me what brings you to Constantinople.

I come at the bidding of the Lord God.

If you love your Saviour or your salvation, get you home again. [Leans over the balustrade and listens.] Speak softy; a boat is coming in——

What would you here? Kiss the splinter of the holy cross?—Get you home again, I say! Know you what Constantinople has become in these last fifteen months? A Babylon of blasphemy.—Have you not heard—do you not know that Libanius is here?

Ah, Julian, I know not Libanius.

Secluded Cappadocian! Happy region, where his voice and his teaching have found no echo.

Ah, he is one of those heathen teachers of falsehood——?

The most dangerous of them all.

Surely not more dangerous than Aedesius of Pergamus?

Aedesius!—who now thinks of Aedesius of Pergamus? Aedesius is in his dotage——

Is he more dangerous than even that mysterious Maximus?

Maximus? Do not speak of that mountebank. Who knows anything certain of Maximus?

He avers that he has slept three years in a cave beyond Jordan.

Hekebolius holds him an impostor, and doubtless he is not far wrong——

No, no, Agathon—Libanius is the most dangerous. Our sinful earth has writhed, as it were, under this scourge. Portents foretold his coming. A pestilential sickness slew men by thousands in the city. And then, when it was over, in the month of November, fire rained from heaven night by night.night. Nay, do not doubt it, Agathon! I have myself seen the stars break from their spheres, plunge down towards earth, and burn out on the way.

Since then he has lectured here, the philosopher, the orator. All proclaim him the king of eloquence; and well they may. I tell you he is terrible. Youths and men flock around him; he binds their souls in bonds, so that they must follow him; denial flows seductively from his lips, like songs of the Trojans and the Greeks——

[In terror.] Oh, you too have sought him Julian!

[Shrinking back.] I!—God preserve me from such a sin. Should any rumours come to your ears, believe them not. ’Tis not true that I have sought out Libanius by night, in disguise. All contact with him would be a horror to me. Besides, the Emperor has forbidden it, and Hekebolius still more strictly.—All believers who approach that subtle man fall away and turn to scoffers. And not they alone. His words are borne from mouth to mouth, even into the Emperor’s palace. His airy mockery, his incontrovertible arguments, his very lampoons seem to blend with my prayers;—they are to me like those monsters in the shape of birds who befouled all the food of a pious wandering hero of yore. I sometimes feel with horror that my gorge rises at the true meat of the Word—— [With an irrepressible outburst.] Were the empire mine, I would send you the head of Libanius on a charger!

But how can the Emperor tolerate this? How can our pious, Christian Emperor——?

The Emperor? Praised be the Emperor’s faith and piety! But the Emperor has no thoughts for anything but this luckless Persian war. All minds are full of it. No one heeds the war that is being waged here, against the Prince of Golgotha. Ah, my Agathon, it is not now as it was two years ago. Then the two brothers of the Mystic Maximus had to pay for their heresies with their lives. You do not know what mighty allies 25Libanius has. One or other of the lesser philosophers is now and then driven from the city; on him no one dares lay a finger. I have begged, I have implored both Hekebolius and the Empress to procure his banishment. But no, no!—What avails it to drive away the others? This one man poisons the air for all of us. Oh, thou my Saviour, if I could but flee from all this abomination of heathendom! To live here is to live in the lion’s den——

[Eagerly.] Julian—what was that you said?

Yes, yes; only a miracle can save us?

Oh, then listen! That miracle has happened.

What mean you?

You shall hear, Julian; for now I can no longer doubt that it is you it concerns. What sent me to Constantinople was a vision——

A vision, you say!

A heavenly revelation——

Oh, for God’s pity’s sake, speak!—Hush, do not speak. Wait—some one is coming. Stand here, quite carelessly;—look unconcerned.

26Both remain standing beside the balustrade. A tall, handsome, middle-aged man, dressed, according to the fashion of the philosophers, in a short cloak, enters by the avenue on the left. A troop of youths accompanies him, all in girt-up garments, with wreaths of ivy in their hair, and carrying books, papers and parchments. Laughter and loud talk among them as they approach.

Let nothing fall into the water, my joyous Gregory! Remember, what you carry is more precious than gold.

[Standing close beside him.] Your pardon,—is aught that a man may carry more precious than gold?

Can you buy back the fruits of your life for gold?

True; true. But why, then, do you entrust them to the treacherous waters?

The favour of man is more treacherous still.

That word was wisdom. And whither do you sail with your treasures?

To Athens.

[With suppressed laughter.] To Athens! Then, oh man of wealth, you do not own your own riches.

[Stops.] How so?

Is it the part of a wise man to take owls to Athens?

My owls cannot endure the church-lights here in the imperial city. [To one of the young men.] Give me your hand, Sallust.

[Half-way down the steps, whispers.] By the gods, it is he!

He——?

On my life, ’tis he! I know him;—I have seen him with Hekebolius.

Ah!

You smiled just now. At what did you smile?

When you complained of the church-lights, I wondered whether it were not rather the imperial light of the lecture-halls that shone too bright in your eyes.

Envy cannot hide under the short cloak.

What cannot hide shows forth.

You have a sharp tongue, noble Galilean.

Why Galilean? What proclaims me a Galilean?

Your court apparel.

There is a philosopher beneath it; for I wear a very coarse shirt.—But tell me, what do you seek in Athens?

What did Pontius Pilate seek?

Nay, nay! Is not truth here, where Libanius is?

[Looking hard at him.] H’m!—Libanius? Libanius will soon be silent. Libanius is weary of the strife, my lord!

Weary? He—the invulnerable, the ever-victorious——?

He is weary of waiting for his peer.

Now you jest, stranger! Where can Libanius hope to find his peer?

His peer exists.

Who? Where? Name him?

It might be dangerous.

Why?

Are you not a courtier?

And what then?

[In a lower voice.] Would you be foolhardy enough to praise the Emperor’s successor?

[Deeply shaken.] Ah!

[Hastily.] If you betray me, I shall deny all!

I betray no man; never fear, never fear!—The Emperor’s successor, you say? I cannot tell whom you mean; the Emperor has chosen no successor.—But why this jesting? Why did you speak of Libanius’s peer?

Yes or no—is there at the imperial court a youth who, by force and strict commandment, by prayers and persuasions, is held aloof from the light of the lecture-halls?

[Hastily.] That is done to keep his faith pure.

[Smiling.] Has this young man so scant faith in his faith? What can he know about his faith? What does a soldier know of his shield until he has proved it in battle?

True, true;—but they are loving kinsmen and teachers, I tell you——

Phrases, my lord! Let me tell you this: it is for the Emperor’s sake that his young kinsman is held aloof from the philosophers. The Emperor has not the divine gift of eloquence. Doubtless the Emperor is great; but he cannot endure that his successor should shine forth over the empire——

[In confusion.] And you dare to——!

Ay, ay, you are wroth on your master’s account, but——

Far from it; on the contrary—that is to say——

Listen; my place is somewhat near that young prince. I would gladly learn——

[Turns.]

Go apart, Agathon; I must speak alone with this man.

You said “shine forth”? “Shine forth over the empire?” What do you know, what can any of you know, of Prince Julian?

Can Sirius be hidden by a cloud? Will not the restless wind tear a rift in it here or there, so that——

Speak plainly, I beg you.

The palace and the church are as a double cage wherein the prince is mewed up. But the cage is not close enough. Now and then he lets fall an enigmatic word; the court vermin—forgive me, sir—the courtiers spread it abroad in scorn; its 32deep meaning does not exist for these gentlefolk—your pardon, sir—for most of them it does not exist.

For none. You may safely say for none.

Yet surely for you; and at any rate for us.——

Yes, he could indeed shine forth over the empire! Are there not legends of his childhood in Cappadocia, when, in disputation with his brother Gallus, he took the part of the gods, and defended them against the Galilean?

That was in jest, mere practice in rhetoric——

What has not Mardonius recorded of him? And afterwards Hekebolius! What art was there not even in his boyish utterances—what beauty, what grace in the light play of his thoughts!

You think so?

Yes, in him we might indeed find an adversary to fear and yet to long for. What should hinder him from reaching so honourable an eminence? He lacks nothing but to pass through the same school through which Paul passed, and passed so unscathed that, when he afterwards joined the Galileans, he shed more light than all the other 33apostles together, because he possessed knowledge and eloquence! Hekebolius fears for his pupil’s faith. Oh, I know it well; the fear is his. Does he forget then, in his exceeding tenderness of conscience, that he himself, in his youth, has drunk of those very springs from which he would now have his pupil debarred? Or think you it was not from us that he learned to use the weapons of speech which he now wields against us with such renowned dexterity?

True, true; undeniably true!

And what gifts has this Hekebolius in comparison with the gifts which declared themselves so marvellously in that princely boy, who, it is said, in Cappadocia, upon the graves of the slain Galileans, proclaimed a doctrine which I hold to be erroneous, and by so much the more difficult to instil, but which he nevertheless proclaimed with such fervour of spirit that—if I may believe a very widespread rumour—a multitude of children of his own age were carried away by him, and followed him as his disciples! Ah, Hekebolius is like the rest of you—more jealous than zealous; that is why Libanius has waited in vain.

[Seizes him by the arm.] What has Libanius said? Tell me, I conjure you, in the name of God?

He has said all that you have just heard. And 34he has said still more. He has said: “Behold yon princely Galilean; he is an Achilles of the spirit.”

Achilles! [Softly.] My mother’s dream!

There, in the open lecture-halls, lies the field of battle. Light and gladness encompass the fighters and the fray. Javelins of speech hurtle through the air; keen swords of wit clash in the combat; the blessed gods sit smiling in the clouds——

Oh, away from me with your heathendom——

——and the heroes go home to their tents, their arms entwined, their hearts untouched by rancour, their cheeks aglow, the blood coursing swiftly through every vein, admired, applauded, and with laurels on their brows. Ah, where is Achilles? I cannot see him. Achilles is wroth——

Achilles is unhappy!—But can I believe it? Oh, tell me—my brain is dizzy—has Libanius said all this?

What brought Libanius to Constantinople? Had he any other end than to achieve the illustrious friendship of a certain youth?

Speak the truth! No, no; this cannot be true. How reconcile it with the scoffs and jibes that——? Who scoffs at one whose friendship he would seek?

Wiles of the Galileans to build up a wall of wrath and hate between the two champions.

Yet you will not deny that it was Libanius——?

I will deny everything to the uttermost.

The lampoons were not his?

Not one of them. They have all been hatched in the palace, and spread abroad under his name——

Ah, what do you tell me——?

What I will avouch before all the world. You have a sharp tongue—who knows but that you yourself——

I——! But can I believe this? Libanius did not write them? Not one of them?

No, no!

Not even those infamous lines about Atlas with the crooked shoulders?

No, no, I tell you.

Nor that foolish and ribald verse about the ape in court dress?

Ha, ha; that came from the church, not from the lecture-hall. You disbelieve it? I tell you it was Hekebolius——

Hekebolius!

Yes, Hekebolius, Hekebolius himself, to breed hatred between his enemy and his pupil——

[Clenching his fists.] Ah, if it were so!

If that blinded and deceived young man had known us philosophers, he would not have dealt so hardly with us.

Of what are you speaking?

It is too late now. Farewell, my lord!

[Seizes his hand.] Friend and brother, who are you?

One who sorrows to see the God-born go to ruin.

What do you call the God-born?

The Uncreated in the Ever-changing.

Still I am in the dark.

There is a whole glorious world to which you Galileans are blind. In it our life is one long festival, amid statues and choral songs, foaming goblets in our hands, and our locks entwined with roses. Airy bridges span the gulfs between spirit and spirit, stretching away to the farthest orbs in space——

I know one who might be king of all that vast and sunlit realm.

[In dread.] Ay, at the cost of his salvation!

What is salvation? Reunion with the primal deeps.

Yes, in conscious life. Reunion for me, as the being I am!

Reunion like that of the raindrop with the sea, like that of the crumbling leaf with the earth that bore it.

Oh, had I but learning! Had I but the weapons to use against you!

Take to yourself weapons, young man! The lecture-hall is the armoury of intellect and talent——

[Recoiling.] Ah!

Look at those joyous youths yonder. There are Galileans among them. Errors in things divine cause no discord among us.

Farewell! You Galileans have sent truth into exile. See, now, how we bear the buffets of fate. See, we hold high our wreath-crowned heads. So we depart—shortening the night with song, and awaiting Helios.

[Gazes long over the water.] Who was he, that mysterious man?

[Approaching.] Listen to me, Julian——?

[In lively excitement.] He understood me! And Libanius himself, the great, incomparable Libanius——! Only think, Agathon, Libanius has said—— Oh, how keen must the heathen eye not be!

Trust me, this meeting was a work of the Tempter!

[Not heeding him.] I can no longer endure to live among these people. It was they, then, who wrote those abominable lampoons! They make a mockery of me here; they laugh behind my back; not one of them believes in the power that dwells in me. They ape my gait; they distort my manners and my speech; Hekebolius himself——! Oh, I feel it—Christ is deserting me; I grow evil here.

Oh, though you know it not—you, even you, stand under special grace.

[Walks up and down beside the balustrade.] I am he with whom Libanius longs to measure swords. How strange a wish! Libanius accounts me his peer. It is me he awaits——

Hear and obey: Christ awaits you!

What mean you, friend?

The vision that sent me to Constantinople——

Yes, yes, the vision; I had almost forgotten it. A revelation, you said? Oh, speak, speak!

It was at home in Cappadocia, a month ago or a little more. There went a rumour abroad that the heathens had again begun to hold secret meetings by night in the temple of Cybele——

How foolhardy! Are they not strictly forbidden——

Therefore all we believers arose in wrath. The magistrates ordered the temple to be pulled down, and we broke in pieces the abominable idols. The more zealous among us were impelled by the Spirit of the Lord to go still further. With singing of psalms, and with sacred banners at our head, we marched through the town and fell upon the godless like messengers of wrath; we took from them their treasures; many houses were set on fire, and heathens not a few perished in the flames; still more we slew in the streets as they fled. Oh, it was a marvellous time for the glory of God!

And then? The vision, my Agathon!

For three whole nights and days the Lord of Vengeance was strong in us. But at last the weak flesh could no longer keep pace with the willing spirit, and we desisted from the pursuit——

I lay upon my bed; I could neither wake nor sleep. I felt, as it were, an inward hollowness, as though the spirit had departed out of me. I lay in burning heat; I tore my hair, I wept, I prayed, I sang;—I cannot tell what came over me——

Then, on a sudden, I saw before me by the wall a white and shining light, and in the radiance stood a man in a long cloak. A glory encircled his head; he held a reed in his hand, and fixed his gaze mildly upon me.

You saw that!

I saw it. And then he spoke and said: “Agathon; arise, seek him out who shall inherit the empire; bid him enter the lion’s den and do battle with the lions.”

Do battle with the lions! Oh, strange, strange!—Ah, if it were——! The meeting with that philosopher—A revelation; a message to me—; am I the chosen one?

Assuredly you are!

Do battle with the lions!—Yes, I see it;—so it 42must be, my Agathon! It is God’s will that I should seek out Libanius——

No, no; hear me out!

——worm from him all his arts and his learning—smite the unbelievers with their own weapons—fight, fight like Paul—conquer like Paul, in the cause of the Lord!

No, no! that was not the intent.

Can you doubt it? Libanius—is he not strong as the mountain lion, and is not the lecture-hall——?

I tell you it is not so; for the vision added: “Proclaim to the chosen one that he shall shake the dust of the imperial city from his feet, and never more enter its gates.”

Are you sure of that, Agathon?

Absolutely sure.

Not here, then! Do battle with, the lions? Where, where? Oh, where shall I find light?

43

[Rushing up to him.] Gallus!

What now? [Points to Agathon.] Who is that man?

Agathon.

What Agathon? You have so many strange companions——Ah, by heaven, it is the Cappadocian! You have grown quite a man——

Do you know, Gallus—the Emperor has asked for you.

[Anxiously.] Just now? To-night?

Yes, yes; he wanted to speak with you. He seemed greatly angered.

How know you that? What did he say?

I did not understand it. He asked what some oracle had answered.

Ah!

Hide nothing from me. What is the matter?

Death or banishment is the matter.

Gracious Saviour!

I feared as much! But no, the Empress spoke hopefully. Oh, say on, say on!

What shall I say? How should I know more than you? If the Emperor spoke of an oracle, a certain messenger must have been intercepted, or some one must have betrayed me——

A messenger?—Gallus, what have you dared to do?

How could I live any longer this life of doubt and dread? Let him do with me as he pleases; anything is better than this——

[Softly, leading him some paces aside.] Have a care, Gallus! What is this about a messenger?

I have addressed a question to the priests of Osiris in Abydus——

Ah, the oracle! The heathen oracle——!

The heathenism might be forgiven me; but—well, why should you not know it?—I have inquired as to the issue of the Persian war——

What madness!—Gallus—I see it in your face: you have asked other questions!

No more; I have not asked——

Yes, yes; you have inquired as to a mighty man’s life or death!

And if I had? What can be of more moment to both of us?

[Throwing his arms around him.] Be silent, madman!

Away from me! You may cringe before him like a cur; but I have no mind to endure it longer. I will cry it aloud in all the market-places—— [Calls to Agathon.] Have you seen him, Cappadocian? Have you seen the murderer?

Gallus! Brother!

The murderer!

The murderer in the purple robe; my father’s murderer, my step-mother’s, my eldest brother’s——

Oh, you are calling down destruction upon us!

Eleven heads in one single night; eleven bodies; our whole house.—Ah, but be sure conscience is torturing him; it shivers through the marrow of his bones like a swarm of serpents.

Do not listen to him! Away, away!

[Seizes Julian by the shoulder.] Stay;—you look pale and disordered; is it you that have betrayed me?

I! Your own brother——!

What matter for that! Brotherhood protects no one in our family. Confess that you have secretly spied upon my doings! Who else should it be? Think you I do not know what people are whispering? The Emperor designs to make you his successor.

Never! I swear to you, my beloved Gallus, it shall never be! I will not. One mightier than he has chosen me.—Oh, trust me, Gallus: my path 47is marked out for me. I will not go thither, I tell you. Oh, God of Hosts—I on the imperial throne! No, no, no!

Ha-ha; well acted, mummer!

Ay, you may scoff, since you know not what has happened. Myself, I scarcely know. Oh, Agathon—if this head were to be anointed! Would it not be an apostasy—a deadly sin? Would not the Lord’s holy oil burn me like molten lead?

Were that so, then were our august kinsman balder than Julius Caesar.

Beware how you speak! Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s——

My father’s blood——your father’s and your mother’s——!

Oh, what know we of those horrors? We were children then. The soldiers were chiefly to blame; it was the rebels—evil counsellors——

[Laughing.] The Emperor’s successor rehearses his part!

[Weeping.] Oh, Gallus, would I might die or be banished in your stead! I am wrecking my soul here. I ought to forgive—and I cannot. Evil grows in me; hate and revenge whisper in my ear——

[Rapidly, looking towards the church.] There he comes!

Be prudent, my beloved brother!—Ah, Hekebolius!

The church door has meanwhile been opened. The congregation streams forth; some pass away, others remain standing to see the Court pass. Among those who come out is Hekebolius; he wears priestly dress.

[On the point of passing out to the left.] Is that you, my Julian? Ah, I have again passed a heavy hour for your sake.

Alas! I fear that happens too often.

Christ is wroth against you, my son! It is your froward spirit that angers him; it is your unloving thoughts, and all this worldly vanity——

I know it,it, my Hekebolius! You so often tell me so.

Even now I lifted up my soul in prayer for your amendment. Oh, it seemed as though our otherwise so gracious Saviour repulsed my prayer,—as though he would not listen to me; he suffered my thoughts to wander upon trifling things.

You prayed for me? Oh, loving Hekebolius, you pray even for us dumb animals—at least when we wear court dress?

What mean you, my son?

Hekebolius, how could you write those shameful verses?

I? I swear by all that is high and holy——

I see in your eyes that you are lying! I have full assurance that you wrote them. How could you do it, I ask—and under the name of Libanius, too?

Well, well, my dearly beloved, since you know it, I——

Ah, Hekebolius! Deceit, and lies, and treachery——

Behold, my precious friend, how deep is my love for you! I dare all to save the soul of that man who shall one day be the Lord’s anointed. If, in my zeal for you, I have had recourse to deceit and lies, I know that a gracious God has found my course well pleasing in his sight, and has stretched forth his hand to sanction it.

How blind have I been! Let me press these perjured fingers——

The Emperor!

Oh, blessed peace of heaven in my heart.

Do you feel yourself strengthened, my Constantius?

Yes, yes! I saw the living Dove hovering over me. It took away the burden of all my sin.—Now I dare venture much, Memnon!

[Softly.] Lose not a moment, sire!

There they both stand.

[Mechanically feels for his sword, and cries in terror.] Do me no ill!

[With outstretched arms.] Gallus! Kinsman!

Lo, in the light of the Easter stars, I choose the man who lies nearest my heart.—Bow all to the earth. Hail Gallus Caesar!^[9]

[With a shriek.] Constantius!

[Amazed.] Caesar!

Ah!

[Waving him aside.] Away from me! What would you? Is not Gallus the elder? What hopes have you been cherishing? What rumours have you, in your blind presumption——? Away; away!

I—I Caesar!

My heir and my successor. In three days you will set out for the army in Asia. I know the Persian war is much on your mind——

Oh, my most gracious sire——!

Thank me in deeds, my beloved Gallus! King Sapor lies west of the Euphrates. I know how solicitous you are for my life; be it your task, then, to crush him.

And you, Julian, my pious friend and brother—so it needs must be.

All blessings on the Emperor’s will!

Call down no blessings! Yet listen—I have thought of you too. Know, Julian, that now you can breathe freely in Constantinople——

Yes, praise be to Christ and the Emperor!

You know it already? Who has told you?

What, sire?

That Libanius is banished?

Libanius—banished!

I have banished him to Athens.

Ah!

Yonder lies his ship; he sails to-night.

[Aside.] He himself; he himself!

You have long wished it. I have not hitherto been able to fulfil your desire; but now——; let this be a slight requital to you, my Julian——

[Quickly seizing his hand.] Sire, do me one grace more.

Ask what you will.

Let me go to Pergamus. You know the old Aedesius teaches there——

A very strange wish. You, among the heathens——?

Aedesius is not dangerous; he is a high-minded old man, drawing towards the grave——

And what would you with him, brother?

I would learn to do battle with the lions.

I understand your pious thought. And you are not afraid——; you think yourself strong enough——?

The Lord God has called me with a loud voice. Like Daniel, I go fearless and joyful into the lions’ den.

Julian!

To-night, without knowing it, you have yourself been his instrument. Oh, let me go forth to purge the world!

[Softly to the Emperor.] Humour him, sire; it will prevent his brooding on higher things.

I implore you, Constantius—set no bar to this vehement longing.

Great Emperor, let him go to Pergamus. I 55fear I am losing hold of him here, and now ’tis no longer of such moment.

How could I deny you anything in such an hour? Go with God, Julian!

[Kissing his hands.] Oh, thanks—thanks!

And now to a banquet of rejoicing! My Capuan cook has invented some new fast-dishes, carp-necks in Chios wine, and—— Forward;—your place is next to me, Gallus Caesar!

[Softly.] Helena, what a marvellous change of fortune!

Oh, Gallus, dawn is breaking over our hopes.

I can scarce believe it! Who has brought it about?

Hush!

You, my beloved? Or who—who?

Memnon’s Spartan dog.

What do you mean?

Memnon’s dog. Julian kicked it; this is Memnon’s revenge.

Why so silent, Eusebia?

[Softly, in tears.] Oh, Constantius—how could you make such a choice!

Eleven ghosts demanded it.

Woe upon us; this will not appease the ghosts.

[Calls loudly.] Flute-players! Why are the rascals silent? Play, play!

Gallus his successor; and I—free, free, free!

Marvellously are the counsels of the Lord revealed.

Heard you what passed?

Yes, everything.

And to-morrow, my Agathon, to-morrow to Athens!

To Athens? ’Tis to Pergamus you go.

Hush! You do not know——; we must be cunning as serpents. First to Pergamus—and then to Athens!

Farewell, my lord and friend!

Will you go with me, Agathon?

I cannot. I must go home; I have my little brother to care for.

[At the balustrade.] There they are weighing anchor.—A fair wind to you, winged lion; Achilles follows in your wake.

Ah!

What was that?

Yonder fell a star.

In Athens. An open place surrounded by colonnades. In the square, statues and a fountain. A narrow street debouches in the left-hand corner. Sunset.

Basil of Caesarea, a delicately-built young man, sits reading beside a pillar. Gregory of Nazianzus and other scholars of the University stroll in scattered groups up and down the colonnades. A larger band runs shouting across the square, and out to the right; noise in the distance.

[Looks up from his book.] What mean these wild cries?

A ship has come in from Ephesus.

With new scholars?

Yes.

[Rising.] Then we shall have a night of tumult. Come, Gregory; let us not witness all this unseemliness.

[Points to the left.] Look yonder. Is that a pleasanter sight?

Prince Julian——; with roses in his hair, his face aflame——

Ay, and after him that reeling, glassy-eyed crew. Hear how the halting tongues babble with wine! They have sat the whole day in Lykon’s tavern.

And many of them are our own brethren, Gregory; they are Christian youths——

So they call themselves. Did not Lampon call himself a Christian—he who betrayed the oil-seller Zeno’s daughter? And Hilarion of Agrigentum, and the two others, who did what I shudder to name——

[Is heard calling without on the left.] Aha! See, see—the Cappadocian Castor and Pollux.

He has caught sight of us. I will go; I cannot endure to see him in this mood.

I will remain; he needs a friend.

60Basil goes out to the right. At the same moment, Prince Julian, followed by a crowd of young men, enters from the narrow street. His hair is dishevelled, and he is clad in a short cloak like the rest. Among the scholars is Sallust of Perusia.

Long live the light of Athens! Long live the lover of wisdom and eloquence!

All your flattery is wasted. Not another verse shall you have to-day.

When our leader is silent, life seems empty, as on the morning after a night’s carouse.

If we must needs do something, let it be something new. Let us hold a mock trial.

Yes, yes, yes; Prince Julian on the judgment-seat!

Have done with the Prince, friends——

Ascend the judgment-seat, incomparable one!

How could I presume——? There stands the man. Who is so learned in the law as Gregory of Nazianzus?

That is true!

To the judgment-seat, my wise Gregory; I am the prisoner at the bar.

I beg you, friend, let me stand out.

To the judgment-seat, I say! To the judgment-seat. [To the others,] What is my transgression?

Yes, what shall it be? Choose yourself!

Let it be something Galilean, as we of the ungodly say.

Right; something Galilean. I have it. I have refused to pay tribute to the Emperor——

Ha-ha; well bethought! Excellent!

Here am I, dragged forward by the nape of the neck, with my hands pinioned——

[To Gregory.] Blind judge—I mean since Justice is blind—behold this desperate wretch; he has denied to pay tribute to the Emperor.

Let me throw one word into the scales of judgment. I am a Greek citizen. How much does a Greek citizen owe the Emperor?

What the Emperor demands.

Good; but how much—answer now as though the Emperor himself were in court—how much has the Emperor a right to demand?

Everything.

Answered as though the Emperor were present indeed! But now comes the knotty point; for it is written: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s—and unto God the things that are God’s.

And what then?

Then tell me, oh sagacious judge—how much of what is mine belongs to God?

Everything.

And how much of God’s property may I give to the Emperor?

Dear friends, no more of this sport.

[Amid laughter and noise.] Yes, yes; answer him.

How much of God’s property has the Emperor a right to demand?

I will not answer. This is unseemly both towards God and the Emperor. Let me go.

Make a ring round him!

Hold him fast! What, you most luckless of judges, you have bungled the Emperor’s cause, and now you seek to escape? You would flee? Whither, whither? To the Scythians? Bring him before me! Tell me you servants that-are-to-be of the Emperor and of wisdom—has he not attempted to elude the Emperor’s power?

Yes, yes.

And what punishment do you award to such a misdeed?

Death! Death in a wine-jar!

Let us reflect. Let us answer as though the Emperor himself were present. What limit is there to the Emperor’s power?

The Emperor’s power has no limits.

So I should think. But to want to escape from the infinite, my friends, is not that madness?

Yes, yes; the Cappadocian is mad!

And what, then, is madness? How did our forefathers conceive of it? What was the doctrine of the Egyptian priests? And what says Maximus the Mystic and the other philosophers of the East? They say that the divine enigma reveals itself in the brainsick. Our Gregory—in setting himself up against the Emperor—is thus in special league with Heaven.—Make libations of wine to the Cappadocian; sing songs to our Gregory’s praise;—a statue of honour for Gregory of Nazianzus!

[Amid laughter and glee.] Praise to the Cappadocian! Praise to the Cappadocian’s judge!

Ah, see—is not my brother Julian dispensing wisdom in the open market-place?

Say folly, dear friend; wisdom has departed the city.

Has wisdom departed the city?

Or is on the point of departing; for are not you also bound for the Piraeus?

I, my brother? What should I want at the Piraeus?

Our Libanius, then, is the only teacher who does not know that a ship has just arrived from Ephesus.

Why, my friend, what have I to do with that ship?

It is loaded to the water’s edge with embryo philosophers——

[Scornfully.] They come from Ephesus!

Is not gold equally weighty whencesoever it may come?

Gold? Ha-ha! The golden ones Maximus keeps to himself; he does not let them go. What sort of scholars is Ephesus wont to send us? Shopkeepers’ sons, the first-born of mechanics. Gold say you, my Julian? I call it lack of gold. But 66I will turn this lack of gold to account, and out of it I will mint for you young men a coin of true and weighty metal. For may not a precious lesson in life, set forth in ingenious and attractive form, be compared to a piece of full-weighted golden currency?—

Hear then, if you have a mind to. Was it not said that certain men had rushed eagerly down to the Piraeus? Who are they, these eager ones? Far be it from me to mention names; they call themselves lovers and teachers of wisdom. Let us betake ourselves in thought to the Piraeus. What is passing there at this moment, even as I stand here in this circle of kindly listeners? I will tell you what is passing. Those men who give themselves out as lovers and dispensers of wisdom, are crowding upon the gangway, jostling, wrangling, biting, forgetting all decorum, and throwing dignity to the winds. And why? To be the first in the field,—to pounce upon the best dressed youths, to lead them home, to entertain them, hoping in the end to make profit out of them in all possible ways. What a shamefaced, empty awakening, as after a debauch, if it should presently appear—ha-ha-ha!—that these youths have scarcely brought with them the wherewithal to pay for their supper of welcome! Learn from this, young men, how ill it becomes a lover of wisdom, and how little it profits him, to run after good things other than the truth.

Oh, my Libanius, when I listen to you with closed eyes, I seem lapped in the sweet dream that Diogenes has once more arisen in our midst.midst.

Your lips are princely spendthrifts of praise, beloved of my soul!

Far from it. And yet I had almost interrupted your homily for in this case, one of your colleagues will scarce find himself disappointed.

My friend is jesting.

Your friend assures you that the two sons of the governor, Milo, are on board.

[Grasping his arm.] What do you say?

That the new Diogenes who secures them as his pupils will scarce need to drink out of the hollow of his hand for poverty.

The sons of the Governor Milo! That noble Milo, who sent the Emperor seven Persian horses, with saddles embroidered with pearls——?

Many thought that too mean a gift for Milo.

Very true. Milo ought to have sent a poem, or perhaps a well-polished speech, or a letter. Milo is a nobly-endowed man; all Milo’s family are nobly-endowed.

Especially the two young men.

No doubt, no doubt. For the sake of their beneficent and generous father, I pray the gods that they may fall into good hands. After all, then, you were right, my Julian; the ship brought real gold from Ephesus. For are not intellectual gifts the purest of gold? But I cannot rest; these young men’s welfare is, in truth, a weighty matter; so much depends on who first gains control of them. My young friends, if you think as I do, we will hold out a guiding hand to these two strangers, help them to make the wisest choice of teacher and abode, and——

I will go with you!

To the Piraeus! To the Piraeus!

We will fight like wild boars for Milo’s sons!

[Following them with his eyes.] See how they go leaping like a troop of fauns. How they lick their lips at the thought of the feast that awaits them this evening. [He turns to Gregory.] If there is 69one thing they would sigh to God for at this moment, it is that he would empty their stomachs of their breakfasts.

Julian——

Look at me; I am sober.

I know that. You are temperate in all things. And yet you share this life of theirs.

Why not? Do you know, or do I, when the thunderbolt will fall? Then why not make the most of the bright and sunlit day? Do you forget that I dragged out my childhood and the first years of my youth in gilded slavery? It had become a habit, I might almost say a necessity to me, to live under a weight of dread. And now? This stillness as of the grave on the Emperor’s part;—this sinister silence! I left Pergamus without the Emperor’s permission; the Emperor said nothing. I went of my own will to Nicomedia; I lived there, and studied with Nikokles and others; the Emperor gave no sign. I came to Athens, and sought out Libanius, whom the Emperor had forbidden me to see;—the Emperor has said nothing to this day. How am I to interpret this?

Interpret it in charity, Julian.

Oh, you do not know——! I hate this power without me, terrible in action, more terrible when at rest.

Be frank, my friend, and tell me whether it is this alone that has led you into all these strange ways?

What mean you by strange ways?

Is the rumour true, that you pass your nights in searching out the heathen mysteries in Eleusis?

Oh, pooh! I assure you there is little to be learnt from those riddle-mongering dreamers. Let us talk no more about them.

Then it is true! Oh, Julian, how could you seek such shameful intercourse?

I must live, Gregory,—and this life at the university is no life at all. This Libanius! I shall never forgive him the great love I once bore him! At my first coming, how humbly and with what tremors of joy did I not enter the presence of this man, bowing myself before him, kissing him, and calling him my great brother.brother.

Yes, we Christians all thought that you went too far.

And yet I came here in exaltation of spirit. I saw, in my fancy, a mighty contest between us two,—the world’s truth in pitched battle against God’s truth.—What has it all come to? Libanius never seriously desired that contest. He never desired any contest whatever; he cares only for his own interest. I tell you, Gregory—Libanius is not a great man.

Yet all enlightened Greece proclaims him great.

A great man he is not, I tell you. Once only have I seen Libanius great: that night in Constantinople. Then he was great, because he had suffered a great wrong, and because he was filled with a noble wrath. But here! Oh, what have I not seen here? Libanius has great learning, but he is no great man. Libanius is greedy; he is vain; he is eaten up with envy. See you not how he has writhed under the fame which I—largely, no doubt, owing to the indulgence of my friends—have been so fortunate as to acquire? Go to Libanius, and he will expound to you the inward essence and the outward signs of all the virtues. He has them ready to hand, just as he has the books in his library. But does he exercise these virtues? Is his life at one with his teaching? He a successor of Socrates and of Plato—ha-ha! Did he not flatter the Emperor, up to the time of his 72banishment? Did he not flatter me at our meeting in Constantinople, that meeting which he has since attempted, most unsuccessfully, to present in a ludicrous light! And what am I to him now? Now he writes letters to Gallus, to Gallus Caesar, to the Emperor’s heir, congratulating him on his successes against the Persians, although these successes have as yet been meagre enough, and Gallus Caesar is not distinguished either for learning or for any considerable eloquence.—And this Libanius the Greeks persist in calling the king of the philosophers! Ah, I will not deny that it stirs my indignation. I should have thought, to tell the truth, that the Greeks might have made a better choice, if they had noted a little more closely the cultivators of wisdom and eloquence, who of late years——

[Entering from the right.] Letters! Letters from Cappadocia!

For me too?

Yes, here; from your mother.

My pious mother!

[To Basil.] Is it your sister who writes to you?

[Who has entered with his own letter open.] Yes, it is Makrina. Her news is both sad and strange.

What is it? Tell me.

First of your noble brother Gallus. He rules sternly in Antioch.

Yes, Gallus is hard.—Does Makrina write “sternly.”

[Looking at him.] Makrina writes “bloodily”——

Ah, I thought as much! Why did the Emperor marry him to that dissolute widow, that Constantina?

[Reading.] Oh, what unheard-of infamy!

What is it, friend?

[To Basil.] Does Makrina say nothing of what is happening in Antioch?

Nothing definite. What is it? You are pale——

You knew the noble Clemazius, the Alexandrian?

Yes, yes; what of him?

He is murdered, Basil!

What do you say? Murdered?

I call it murdered;—they have executed him without law or judgment.

Who? Who has executed him?

Yes, who? How can I say who? My mother tells the story thus: Clemazius’s mother-in-law was inflamed with an impure love for her daughter’s husband; but as she could not move him to wrong, she gained some back-stairs access to the palace——

What palace?

My mother writes only “the palace.”

Well? And then——?

It is only known that she presented a very costly jewel to a great and powerful lady to procure a death-warrant——

Ah, but they did not get it!

They got it, Julian.

Oh, Jesus!

Horrible! And Clemazius——?

The death-warrant was sent to the governor, Honoratus. That weak man dared not disobey so high a command. Clemazius was thrown into prison and executed early next morning, without being suffered, my mother writes, to open his lips in his own defence.

[Pale, in a low voice.] Burn these dangerous letters; they might bring us all to ruin.

Such open violence in the midst of a great city!city! Where are we; where are we?

Aye, you may well ask where we are! A Christian murderer, a Christian adulteress, a Christian——!

Denunciations will not mend this matter. What do you intend to do?

I? I will go no more to Eleusis; I will break off all dealings with the heathen, and thank the Lord my God that he spared me the temptations of power.

Good; but then?

I do not understand you——

Then listen. The murder of Clemazius is not all, believe me. This unheard-of infamy has descended like a plague on Antioch. All evil things have awakened, and are swarming forth from their lairs. My mother writes that it seems as though some pestilent abyss had opened. Wives denounce their husbands, sons their fathers, priests the members of their own flock——

This will spread yet further. The abomination will corrupt us all.—— Oh, Gregory, would I could fly to the world’s end——!

Your place is at the world’s navel, Prince Julian.

What would you have me do?

You are this bloody Caesar’s brother. Stand forth before him—he calls himself a Christian—and 77cast his crime in his teeth; smite him to the earth in terror and remorse——

[Recoiling.] Madman, of what are you thinking?

Is your brother dear to you? Would you save him?

I once loved Gallus above all others.

Once——?

So long as he was only my brother. But now——; is he not Caesar? Gregory,—Basil,—oh, my beloved friends,—I tremble for my life, I draw every breath in fear, because of Gallus Caesar. And you ask me to defy him to his face, me, whose very existence is a danger to him?

Why came you to Athens? You gave out loudly in all quarters that Prince Julian was setting forth from Constantinople to do battle with philosophy, falsely so called—to champion Christian truth against heathen falsehood. What have you done of all this?

Ah, ’twas not here that the battle was to be.

No, it was not here,—not with phrase against phrase, not with book against book, not with the 78idle word-fencing of the lecture-room! No, Julian, you must go forth into life itself, with your own life in your hands——

I see it; I see it!

Yes, as Libanius sees it! You mocked at him. You said he knew the essence and the outward signs of all the virtues, but his doctrine was only a doctrine to him. How much of you belongs to God? How much may the Emperor demand?

You said yourself it was unseemly——

Towards whom? Towards God or the Emperor?

[Quickly.] Well then: shall we go together?

[Evasively.] I have my little circle; I have my family to watch over. I have neither the strength nor the gifts for a larger task.

[Is about to answer; suddenly he listens towards the right, and calls out.] To the bacchanal!

Julian!

To the bacchanal, friends!friends!

[Coming nearer.] Julian, will you listen to me!

See, see! They have taken their new friends to the bath, and anointed their hair. See how they swing their cudgels; how they yell and thump the pavement! What say you, Pericles? Methinks I can hear your wrathful shade——

Come, come!

Ah, look at the man they are driving naked among them. Now come the dancing-girls. Ah, do you see what——!

Fie! Fie!—turn your eyes away!

[After a short silence.] Tell me, Basil, why was the heathen sin so beautiful?

You are mistaken, friend; beautiful things have been said and sung of this heathen sin; but it was not beautiful.

Oh, how can you say so? Was not Alcibiades beautiful when, flushed with wine, he stormed at night like a young god through the streets of Athens? Was he not beautiful in his very audacity when he insulted Hermes and battered at the citizens’ doors,—when he summoned their wives and daughters forth, while within the women trembled, and, in breathless, panting silence, wished for nothing better than to——?

Oh listen to me, I beg and entreat you.

Was not Socrates beautiful in the symposium? And Plato, and all the joyous revellers? Yet they did such things, as, but to be accused of them, would make those Christian swine out there call down upon themselves the curse of God. Think of Oedipus, Medea, Leda——

Poetry, poetry; you confound fancies with facts.

Are not mind and will in poetry subject to the same laws as in fact? And then look at our holy scriptures, both the old and new. Was sin beautiful in Sodom and Gomorrah? Did not Jehovah’s fire avenge what Socrates shrank not from?—Oh, 81as I live this life of revel and riot, I often wonder whether truth is indeed the enemy of beauty!

And in such an hour can you sigh after beauty? Can you so easily forget what you have just heard——?

[Stopping his ears.] Not a word more of those horrors! We will shake off all thoughts of Antioch——

Tell me, what does Makrina write further? There was something more; I remember, you said——; what was it you called the rest of her news?

Strange.

Yes, yes;—what was it?

She writes of Maximus in Ephesus——

[Eagerly.] The Mystic?

Yes; that inscrutable man. He has appeared once more; this time in Ephesus. All the region around is in a ferment. Maximus is on all lips. Either he is a juggler or he has made a baleful compact with certain spirits. Even Christians are strangely allured by his impious signs and wonders.

More, more; I entreat you!

There is no more about him. Makrina only writes that she sees in the coming again of Maximus a proof that we are under the wrath of the Lord. She believes that great afflictions are in store for us, by reason of our sins.

Yes, yes, yes!—Tell me, Basil: your sister is surely a remarkable woman.

She is, indeed.

When you repeat to me passages from her letters, I seem to be listening to something full and perfect, such as I have long sighed for. Tell me, is she still bent on renouncing this world, and living in the wilderness?wilderness?

That is her steadfast intent.

Is it possible? She on whom all gifts seem to have been lavished? She who, ’tis known, is both young and beautiful; she, who has riches in prospect, and in possession such learning as is very rare in a woman! Do you know, Basil, I long to see her? What has she to do in the wilderness?

I have told you how her affianced lover died. She regards him as her expectant bridegroom, to whom she owes her every thought, and whom she is pledged to meet unsullied.

Strange how many feel the attraction of solitude in these times.—When you write to Makrina, you may tell her that I too——

She knows that, Julian; but she does not believe it.

Why not? What does she write?

I pray you, friend, spare me——

If you love me, do not hide from me one word she writes.

[Giving him the letter.] Read, if you must—it begins there.

[Reads.] “Whenever you write of the Emperor’s young kinsman, who is your friend, my soul is filled with a great and radiant joy——” O Basil! lend me your eye; read for me.

[Reading.] “Your account of the fearless confidence wherewith he came to Athens was to me 84as a picture from the ancient chronicles. Yes, I see in him David born again, to smite the champions of the heathen. God’s spirit watch over him in the strife, now and for ever.”

[Grasping his arm.] Enough of that! She too? What is it that you all, as with one mouth, demand of me? Have I sealed you a bond to do battle with the lions of power——?

How comes it that all believers look towards you in breathless expectation?

[Paces once or twice up and down the colonnade, then stops and stretches out his hand for the letter.] Give it to me; let me see. [Reading.] “God’s spirit watch over him in the strife, now and for ever.”—

Oh, Basil, if I could——! But I feel like Daedalus, between sky and sea. An appalling height and an abysmal depth.—What sense is there in these voices calling to me, from east and west, that I must save Christendom? Where is it, this Christendom that I am to save? With the Emperor or with Caesar? I think their deeds cry out, “No, no!” Among the powerful and high-born;—among those sensual and effeminate courtiers who fold their hands over their full bellies, and quaver: “Was the Son of God created out of nothing?” Or among the men of enlightenment, those who, like you and me, have drunk in beauty and learning from the heathen fountains? Do not most of our fellows lean to 85the Arian heresy, which the Emperor himself so greatly favours?—And then the whole ragged rabble of the Empire, who rage against the temples, who massacre heathens and the children of heathens! Is it for Christ’s sake? Ha ha! see how they fall to fighting among themselves for the spoils of the slain.—Ask Makrina if Christendom is to be sought in the wilderness,—on the pillar where the stylite-saint stands on one leg? Or is it in the cities? Perhaps among those bakers in Constantinople who lately took to their fists to decide whether the Trinity consists of three individuals or of three hypostases!—Which of all these would Christ acknowledge if he came down to earth again?—Out with your Diogenes-lantern, Basil! Enlighten this pitchy darkness.—Where is Christendom?

Seek the answer where it is ever to be found in evil days.

Hold me not aloof from the well of your wisdom! Slake my thirst, if you can. Where shall I seek and find?

In the writings of holy men.

The same despairing answer. Books,—always books! When I came to Libanius, it was: books, books! I come to you,—books, books, books! Stones for bread! I cannot live on books;—it is life I hunger for,—face-to-face communion with 86the spirit. Was it a book that made Saul a seer? Was it not a flood of light that enveloped him, a vision, a voice——?

Do you forget the vision and the voice which that Agathon of Makellon——?

An enigmatic message; an oracle I cannot interpret. Was I the chosen one? The “heir to the empire,” it said. And what empire——? That matter is beset with a thousand uncertainties. Only this I know: Athens is not the lion’s den. But where, where? Oh, I grope like Saul in the darkness. If Christ would have aught of me, he must speak plainly. Let me touch the nail-wound——

And yet it is written——

[With a gesture of impatience.] I know all that is written. This “it is written” is not the living truth. Do you not feel disgust and nausea, as on board ship in a windless swell, heaving to and fro between life, and written doctrine, and heathen wisdom and beauty? There must come a new revelation. Or a revelation of something new. It must come, I say;—the time is ripe.—Ah, a revelation! Oh, Basil, could your prayers call down that upon me! A martyr’s death, if need be——! A martyr’s death—ah, it makes me dizzy with its sweetness;sweetness; the crown of thorns on my brow——! [He clasps his head with both hands, 87feels the wreath of roses, which he tears off, bethinks himself long, and says softly:] That! I had forgotten that! [Casting the wreath away.] One thing alone have I learnt in Athens.

What, Julian?

The old beauty is no longer beautiful, and the new truth is no longer true.

[Still in the distance.] Now we have him; now we have him!

Him? I thought you would have had them both.

Both of whom?

Milo’s sons.

Ah, yes, I have them too. But we have him, my Julian!

Whom, dear brother?

He has caught himself in his own net!

Aha—a philosopher then?

The enemy of all wisdom.

Who, who, I ask?

Do you really not know? Have you not heard the news about Maximus?

Maximus? Oh, pray tell me——

Who could fail to see whither that restless visionary was tending,—step by step towards madness——?

In other words, towards the highest wisdom.

Ah, that is a figure of speech. But now is the time to act, to seize the opportunity. You, our dearly-prized Julian, you are the man. You are the Emperor’s near kinsman. The hopes of all true friends of wisdom are fixed upon you, both here and in Nikomedia——

Listen, oh excellent Libanius,—seeing I am not omniscient——

Know, then, that Maximus has lately made open avowal of what lies at the bottom of his teaching.

And do you blame him for that?

He has averred that he has power over spirits and shades of the dead.

[Grasping his cloak.] Libanius!

All on board the ship were full of the most marvellous stories, and here—— [He shows a letter], here, my colleague, Eusebius, writes at length on the subject.

Spirits and shades——

At Ephesus lately, in a large assembly both of his partisans and his opponents. Maximus applied forbidden arts to the statue of Hecate. It took place in the goddess’s temple. Eusebius writes that he himself was present, and saw everything from first to last. All was in pitch-black darkness. Maximus uttered strange incantations; then he chanted a hymn, which no one understood. Then the marble torch in the statue’s hand burst into flame——

Impious doings!

[Breathlessly.] And then——?

In the strong bluish light, they all saw the statue’s face come to life and smile at them.

What more?

Terror seized on the minds of most. All rushed towards the doors. Many have lain sick or raving ever since. But he himself—would you believe it, Julian?—in spite of the fate that befell his two brothers in Constantinople, he goes boldly forward on his reckless and scandalous way.

Scandalous? Call you that way scandalous? Is not this the end of all wisdom. Communion between spirit and spirit——

Oh, dear, misguided friend——!

More than scandalous, I call it! What is Hecate? What are the gods, as a whole, in the eyes of enlightened humanity? We have happily left far behind us the blind old singer’s days. Maximus ought to know better than that. Has not Plato—and we others after him—shed the light of interpretation over the whole? Is it not scandalous now, in our own days, to seek to enshroud afresh in riddles and misty dreams this admirable, palpable, and, let me add, this laboriously constructed edifice of ideas and interpretations which we, as lovers of wisdom, as a school, as——

[Wildly.] Basil, farewell! I see a light on my path!

[Flinging his arms around him.] I will not let you go; I will hold you fast!

[Extricating himself from his grasp.] No one shall withhold me;—kick not against the pricks——

What frenzy is this? Friend, brother, colleague, whither would you go?

Thither, thither, where torches light themselves and where statues smile!

And you can do this! You, Julian, our pride, our light, our hope,—you can think of rushing to bewildered Ephesus, to give yourself into a juggler’s power! Know that in the hour you so deeply debase yourself, in that same hour you throw away all that bright renown for learning and eloquence which, during these years in Pergamos and Nikomedia, and especially here in the great school of Athens——

Oh, the school, the school! Do you pore over your books;—you have pointed my way to the man for whom I have been seeking.

[Looking after him awhile.] This princely youth is a menace to enlightenment.

[Half to himself.] Prince Julian is a menace to more than that.

In Ephesus. A brightly lighted hall in Prince Julian’s dwelling. The entrance from the vestibule is on the right side; further back, a smaller door, covered by a curtain. On the left, a door, which leads to the inner part of the house. The wall in the back is pierced with an archway, through which a small enclosed court is visible, decked with small statues.

Servants prepare a festal supper, and lay cushions round the table. The Chamberlain, Eutherius, stands at the entrance, and, with much ceremony, half forces Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea to enter.

Yes, yes; I assure you it is as I say.

Impossible! Do not make sport of us.

You are jesting, friend! How can your master expect us? Not a creature knew of our leaving Athens; nothing has detained us on our way; we have kept pace with the clouds and the wild cranes.

Look around; see yonder table. His daily fare is herbs and bread.

Ay, truly; all our senses bear you witness;—wine-flagons, wreathed with flowers and leaves; lamps and fruits; incense filling the hall with its odour; flute-players before the door——

Early this morning he sent for me. He seemed unwontedly happy, for he paced the room to and fro, rubbing his hands. “Prepare a rich banquet,” said he, “for before evening I look for two friends from Athens——”

Is he there?

Prince Julian shortly afterwards enters from the left. He is dressed in long, Oriental garb; his whole demeanour is vivacious, and betrays strong inward excitement.

[Going towards them, and greeting them with great warmth.] I see you! I have you! Thanks, thanks, for sending your spirits to herald your bodies!

Julian!

My friend and brother!

I have been like a lover, languishing for the pressure of your hands. The court vermin, eager for certain persons’ applause, called me an ape;—oh, would I had an ape’s four hands, to squeeze yours all at once!

But explain——; your servants meet us with flutes before the door, want to lead us to the bath, to anoint our hair and deck us with roses——

I saw you last night. The moon was full, you see,—and then is the spirit always strangely alert within me. I sat at the table in my library, and had fallen asleep, weary, oh! so weary, my friends, with research and writing. Of a sudden it seemed as though a storm-wind filled the house; the curtain was swept flapping aloft, and I looked out into the night, far over the sea. I heard sweet singing; and the singers were two large birds, with women’s faces. They flew slanting towards the shore; there they dropped gently earthwards; the bird-forms melted away like a white mist, and, in a soft, glimmering light, I saw you two.

Are you sure of all this?

Were you thinking of me? Were you speaking of me last night?

Yes, yes—forward in the prow——

What time of the night was it?

What was the time of your vision?

An hour after midnight.

[With a look at Basil.] Strange!

[Rubbing his hands, and walking up and down the room.] You see! Ha-ha; you see?

[Following him with his eyes.] Ah, then it is true——

What? What is true?

The rumour of the mysterious arts you practise here.

Oh, what will not rumour exaggerate?—But tell me, what has rumour found to say? I am told 97there are many reports afloat concerning me. If I could believe some people’s assurances, it would seem that there are few men in the empire so much talked about as I.

That you may safely believe.

And what says Libanius to all this? He could never endure that the multitude should be busied with any one but himself. And what say all my never-to-be-forgotten friends in Athens? They know I am in disgrace with the Emperor and the whole court?

You? I have frequent intelligence from the court; but my brother Caesarius makes no mention of that.

I cannot interpret it otherwise, good Gregory! From all sides they think it needful to watch me. The other day, Gallus Caesar sent his chaplain Aëtius hither, to find out whether I hold fast to the orthodox faith.

Well——?

I am seldom absent from matins in the church. Moreover, I reckon the martyrs among the noblest of men; for truly it is no light matter to endure so great torments, ay, and death itself, for the sake of one’s creed. On the whole, I believe Aëtius departed well content with me.

[Grasping his hand.] Julian,—for the sake of our true friendship,—open your heart fully to us.

I am the happiest man on earth, dear friends! And Maximus—ay, he is rightly named—Maximus is the greatest man that has ever lived.

[Preparing to depart.] We only wished to see you, my lord!

Can this estrange brother from brother? You shrink in affright from the inexplicable. Oh, I do not wonder. So I, too, shrank before my eyes were opened, and I divined that which is the kernel of life.

What do you call the kernel of life?

Maximus knows it. In him is the new revelation.

And it has been imparted to you?

Almost. I am on the eve of learning it. This very night Maximus has promised me——

Maximus is a visionary, or else he is deceiving you——!

How dare you judge of these hidden things? They are beyond your learning, my Gregory! Fearful is the way into the glory of glories. Those dreamers in Eleusis were near the right track; Maximus found it, and I after him—by his help. I have wandered through chasms of darkness. A dead swampy water lay on my left—I believe it was a stream that had forgotten to flow. Piercing voices shrilled through the night confusedly, suddenly, and, as it were, without cause. Now and then I saw a bluish light; dreadful shapes floated past me;—I went on and on in deathly fear; but I endured the trial to the end.—

Since then—oh, beloved ones—with this my body transformed to spirit, I have passed far into the land of paradise; I have heard the angels chant their hymns of praise; I have gazed at the midmost light——

Woe to this ungodly Maximus! Woe to this devil-devoted heathen juggler!

Blindness, blindness! Maximus pays homage to his precursor and brother—to both his great brothers, the law-giver of Sinai and the seer of Nazareth.——

Would you know how the spirit of realisation filled me?—It happened on a night of prayer and fasting. I perceived that I was wafted far—far out into space, and beyond time; for there was broad and sun-shimmering day around me, and I stood alone on a ship, with drooping sails, in the midst of the glassy, gleaming Aegean sea. Islands 100towered aloft in the distance, like dim, still banks of clouds, and the ship lay heavily, as though sleeping, upon the wine-blue plain.—

Then behold! the plain became more and more transparent, lighter, thinner; at last, it was no longer there, and my ship hung over a fearful, empty abyss. No verdure down there, no sunlight,—only the dead, black, slimy bottom of the sea, in all its ghastly nakedness.——

But above, in the boundless dome, which before had seemed to me empty,—there was life; there invisibility clothed itself in form, and silence became sound.—Then I grasped the great redeeming realisation.

What realisation do you mean?

That which is, is not; and that which is not, is.

Oh, you are going to wreck and ruin in this maze of mists and gleams!

I? Do not miracles happen? Do not both omens and certain strange appearances among the stars declare that the divine will destines me to issues yet unrevealed?

Do not believe such signs; you cannot know whose work they are.

Am I not to believe in fortunate omens which events have already borne out?

Know, my friends, that a great revolution is at hand. Gallus Caesar and I shall ere long share the dominion of the earth—he as Emperor, and I as—what shall I call it? the unborn cannot be called by a name, for it has none. So no more of this till the time be fulfilled. But of Caesar I dare speak.—Have you heard of the vision for which Apollinaris, a citizen of Sidon, has been imprisoned and put to the torture?

No, no; how can we know——?

Apollinaris declared that he heard some one knocking many times at his door by night. He arose, and went out from his house; and lo! there he saw an apparition—whether man or woman, he could not tell. And the apparition spoke to him, and bade him make ready a purple robe, such as newly-chosen rulers wear. But when Apollinaris, in affright, would have declined so dangerous a task, the apparition vanished, and only a voice cried: “Go, go, Apollinaris, and speedily prepare the purple robe.”

Was this the sign that you said events had borne out?

[Nodding slowly.] Seven days later Caesar’s wife died in Bithynia. Constantina has always been his bad angel; therefore she had to be removed, in accordance with the change in the divine will. Three weeks after Constantina’s death, the Emperor’s emissary, the tribune Scudilo, came with a great retinue to Antioch, greeted Gallus Caesar with imperial honours, and invited him, in the Emperor’s name, to visit the imperial camp at Rome.—Caesar’s journey from province to province is now like a conqueror’s progress. In Constantinople he has held races in the hippodrome, and the multitude loudly acclaimed him when he, though as yet but Caesar by title, stood forth after the manner of the earlier Emperors, and gave the crown to Corax, the winner in the race. Thus marvellously does God again exalt our house, which had sunk under sin and persecution.

Strange! In Athens other reports were abroad.

I have certain information. The purple robe will soon be needed, Gregory! How, then, can I doubt as to the things which Maximus has foretold as near at hand for me? To-night the last veil falls. Here shall the great enigma be made manifest. Oh, stay with me, my brothers—stay with me through this night of anxiety and expectation! When Maximus comes you shall witness——

Never!

It cannot be; we are on our way home to Cappadocia.

And what has driven you in such haste from Greece?

My mother is a widow, Julian!

My father is feeble, both in body and mind; he needs my support.

Oh, at least remain at the hostelry; only until to-morrow——!

Impossible; our travelling companions start at daybreak.

At daybreak? Before midnight the day might dawn for you.

Julian, let me not set forth in too great sorrow of soul. Tell me,—when Maximus has interpreted all riddles for you,—what then?

Do you remember that river whereof Strabo writes—that river which rises in the Lybian mountains? It grows, and grows in its course; but when it is at its greatest, it oozes into the desert sands, and buries itself in the entrails of the earth, whence it arose.

Say not that you long for death, Julian!

What you slavishly hope for after death, ’tis the aim of the great mystery to win for all the initiated, here in our earthly life. ’Tis regeneration that Maximus and his disciples seek,—’tis our lost likeness to the godhead. Wherefore so full of doubt, my brothers? Why do you stand there as though before something insurmountable? I know what I know. In each successive generation there has been one soul wherein the pure Adam has been born again; he was strong in Moses the lawgiver; in the Macedonian Alexander he had power to subdue the world; he was well-nigh perfect in Jesus of Nazareth. But see, Basil—[He grasps him by the arm]—all of them lacked what is promised to me—the pure woman!

[Freeing himself.] Julian, Julian!

Blasphemer—to this has your pride of heart brought you!

Oh, Gregory, he is sick and beside himself!

Why all this scornful doubt? Is it my small stature that witnesses against me? Ha, ha; I tell you this gross and fleshly generation shall pass away. That which is to come shall be conceived rather in the soul than in the body. In the first 105Adam, soul and body were equally balanced, as in those statues of the god Apollo. Since then the balance has been lost. Was not Moses tongue-tied? Had not his arms to be supported when he held them up in imprecation, there by the Red Sea? Did not the Macedonian need ever to be fired by strong drinks and other artificial aids? And Jesus of Nazareth, too? Was he not feeble in body? Did he not fall asleep in the ship, whilst the others kept awake? Did he not faint under the cross, that cross which the Jew Simon carried with ease? The two thieves did not faint.—You call yourselves believers, and yet have so little faith in miraculous revelation. Wait, wait—you shall see; the Bride shall surely be given me; and then—hand in hand will we go forth to the east, where some say that Helios is born,—we will hide ourselves in the solitudes, as the godhead hides itself, seek out the grove on the banks of Euphrates, find it, and there—oh glory of glories!—thence shall a new race, perfect in beauty and in balance, go forth over the earth; there, ye book-worshipping doubters, there shall the empire of the spirit be founded!

Oh, well may I wring my hands in sorrow for your sake. Are you the same Julian who, three years ago, came out of Constantinople?

Then I was blind, as you are now; I knew only the way that stops short at doctrine.

Know you where your present way ends?

Where the path and the goal are one.—For the last time, Gregory, Basil—I implore you to stay with me. The vision I had last night,—that and many other things, point to a mysterious bond between us. To you, my Basil, I had so much to say. You are the head of your house; and who knows whether all the blessings that are promised me—may not come through you and yours——

Never! No one with my good will shall ever be led away by your frenzies and your wild dreams.

Ah, why talk of will? I see a hand writing on the wall; soon I shall interpret the writing.

Come, Basil.

[With outstretched arms.] Oh, my friends, my friends!

Between us there is a gulf from this day forward.

[Looking after them.] Ay, go! Go, go!—What do you two learned men know? What bring you from the city of wisdom? You, my strong, masterful Gregory,—and you, Basil, more girl than man—you know only two streets in Athens, 107the street to the schools, and the street to the church; of the third street toward Eleusis and further, you know naught; and still less——. Ah!

The curtain on the right is drawn aside. Two servants in eastern costume bring in a tall, veiled object, which they place in the corner, behind the table. Shortly after, Maximus the Mystic enters by the same door. He is a lean man of middle height, with a bronzed, hawk-like face; his hair and beard are much grizzled, but his thick eyebrows and moustache still retain their pitch-black colour. He wears a pointed cap and a long black robe; in his hand he carries a white wand.

Maximus goes, without heeding Julian, up to the veiled object, stops, and makes a sign to the servants; they retire noiselessly.

[Softly.] At last!

[In eager expectancy.] Is the time come?

[Without looking at him.] Art thou pure in soul and body?

I have fasted and anointed myself.

Then may the night’s high festival begin!

Maximus,—what is this?

Roses in the hair! Sparkling wine! See, see the lovely limbs at play!

And amid this whirl of the senses you would——?

Sin lies only in thy sense of sinfulness.

Roses in the hair! Sparkling wine! [He casts himself down on one of the couches beside the table, drains a full goblet, puts it hastily from him, and asks:] Ah! What was in the wine?

A spark of that fire which Prometheus stole.

My senses exchange their functions; I hear brightness and I see music.

Wine is the soul of the grape. The freed and yet willing captive. Logos in Pan!

[Drinking.] Yes, Yes; there is freedom in intoxication. Canst thou interpret this rapture?

This intoxication is thy marriage with the soul of nature.

Sweet riddle; tempting, alluring——! What was that? Why didst thou laugh?

I?

There is whispering on my left hand! The silk cushions rustle—— [Springing half up with a pale face.] Maximus, we are not alone!

[Loudly.] We are five at table!

Symposium with the spirits!

With the shades.

Name my guests!

Not now. Hark, hark!

What is that? There is a rushing, as of a storm, through the house——

[Shrieks.] Julian! Julian! Julian!

Speak, speak! What is befalling us?

The hour of annunciation is upon thee!

[Springing up and shrinking far back from the table.] Ah!

[Casting himself wholly down.] Thine eye toward the light!

Yonder?

Yes, yes!

[Staring at the radiance.] Maximus! Maximus!

[Softly.] Seest thou aught?

Yes.

What seest thou?

I see a shining countenance in the light.

Man, or woman?

I know not.

Speak to it.

Dare I?

Speak! speak!

[Advancing.] Why was I born?

To serve the spirit.

Does it answer?

Yes, yes.

Ask further.

What is my mission?

To establish the empire.

What empire?

The empire.

And by what way?

By the way of freedom.

Speak clearly! What is the way of freedom?

The way of necessity.

And by what power?

By willing.

What shall I will?

What thou must.

It pales; it vanishes——! [Coming closer.] Speak, speak! What must I will?

[Wailing.] Julian!

[Looking up.] Gone?

Gone.

Dost thou now see clearly?

Now less than ever. I hang in the void over the yawning deep—midway between light and darkness. [He lies down again.] What is the empire?

There are three empires.

Three?

First that empire which was founded on the tree of knowledge; then that which was founded on the tree of the cross——

And the third?

The third is the empire of the great mystery; that empire which shall be founded on the tree of knowledge and the tree of the cross together, because it hates and loves them both, and because it has its living sources under Adam’s grove and under Golgotha.

And this empire shall come——?

It stands on the threshold. I have counted and counted——

[Breaking off sharply.] The whispering again! Who are my guests?

The three corner-stones under the wrath of necessity.

Who, who?

The three great helpers in denial.

Name them!

I cannot; I know them not;—but I could show them to thee——

Then show me them! At once, Maximus——!

Beware——!

At once; at once! I will see them; I will speak with them, one by one.

The guilt be on thy head.

Take shape and come to sight, thou first-elected lamb of sacrifice!

Ah!

[With veiled face.] What seest thou?

[In a low voice.] There he lies; just by the corner.—He is great as Hercules, and beautiful,—yet no, not——

Speak to me if thou canst!

What wouldst thou know?

What was thy task in life?

My sin.

Why didst thou sin?

Why was I not my brother?

Palter not with me. Why didst thou sin?

Why was I myself?

And what didst thou will, being thyself?

What I must.

And wherefore must thou?

I was myself.

Thou art sparing of words.

[Without looking up.] In vino veritas.

Thou hast hit it, Maximus?

117Bathe thee in the fumes of wine, my pallid guest! Refresh thee. Feel, feel—it mounts aloft like the smoke of sacrifice.

The smoke of sacrifice does not always mount.

Why does that scar redden on thy brow? Nay, nay,—draw not the hair over it; What is it?

The mark.

H’m; no more of that. And what fruit has thy sin borne?

The most glorious.

What callest thou the most glorious?

Life.

And the ground of life?

Death.

And of death?

[Losing itself as in a sigh.] Ah, that is the riddle!

Gone!

[Looking up.] Gone?

Yes.

Didst thou know him?

Yes.

Who was it?

Cain.

By that way, then! Ask no more!

[With an impatient gesture.] The second, Maximus!

No, no, no; I will not!

The second, I say! Thou hast sworn that I should fathom the meaning of certain things. The second, Maximus. I will see him; I will know my guests!

Thou hast willed it, not I.

119Arise and come to light, thou willing slave, thou who didst help at the world’s next great turning-point.

[Gazes for a moment into the empty space; suddenly he makes a gesture of repulsion towards the seat at its side, and says in a low voice:] No nearer!

[Who has turned his back.] Dost thou see him?

Yes.

How dost thou see him?

I see him as a red-bearded man. His garments are rent, and he has a rope round his neck——

Speak to him, Maximus!

’Tis thou must speak.

What wast thou in life?

[Close beside him.] The twelfth wheel of the world chariot.

The twelfth? The fifth is reckoned useless.

But for me, whither had the chariot rolled?

Whither did it roll by means of thee?

Into the glory of glories.

Why didst thou help?

Because I willed.

What didst thou will?

What I must.

Who chose thee?

The master.

Did the master foreknow when he chose thee?

Ah, that is the riddle!

Thou art silent.

He is no longer here.

[Looking up.] Didst thou know him?

Yes.

How was he called in life?

Judas Iscariot.

[Springing up.] The abyss blossoms; the night betrays itself!

[Shrieks to him.] Forth with the third!

He shall come!

Come forth, thou third corner-stone! Come forth, thou third great freed-man under necessity!

What seest thou?

I see nothing.

And yet he is here.

By Solomon’s seal, by the eye in the triangle—I conjure thee—come to sight!——

What seest thou now?

Nothing, nothing!

[Waving his wand once more.] Come forth, thou——!

Ah! lightning in the night! I see it;—all art is in vain.

[Rising.] Why? Speak, speak!

The third is not yet among the shades.

He lives?

Yes, he lives.

And here, sayest thou——!

Here, or there, or among the unborn;—I know not——

[Rushing at him.] Thou liest! Thou art deceiving me! Here, here thou saidst——!

Let go my cloak!

Then it is thou, or I! But which of us?

Let go my cloak, Julian!

Which of us? Which? All hangs on that!

Thou knowest more than I. What said the voice in the light?

The voice in the light——!

[With a cry.] The empire! The empire? To found the empire——!

The third empire!

No; a thousand times no! Away, corrupter! I renounce thee and all thy works——

And necessity?

I defy necessity! I will not serve it! I am free, free, free!^[10]

[Listening towards the right.] What is this alarm and shrieking——?

Strange men are forcing their way into the house——

They are maltreating your servants; they will murder us!

Fear not; us no one can hurt.

[Comes hastily across the court.] My lord, my lord!

What is that noise without?

Strange men have surrounded the house; they have set a watch at all the doors; they are making their way in—almost by force. Here they come, my lord! Here they are!

The Quaestor Leontes, with a large and richly-attired retinue, enters from the right.

Pardon, a thousand pardons, most gracious lord——

[Recoiling a step.] What do I see!

Your servants would have hindered me from entering; and as my errand was of the utmost moment——

You here, in Ephesus, my excellent Leontes!

I have travelled night and day, as the Emperor’s envoy.

[Turning pale.] To me? What would the Emperor with me? I swear I am unwitting of any crime. I am sick, Leontes! This man—[Pointing to Maximus]—attends me as my physician.

Permit me, my gracious lord——!

Why do you force your way into my house? What is the Emperor’s will?

His will is to gladden you, my lord, by a great and weighty announcement.

I pray you, let me know what announcement you bring.

[Kneels.] My most noble lord,—with praise to your good fortune and my own, I hail you Caesar.

Long live Julian Caesar!

Caesar!

[Retreating, with an exclamation.] Caesar! Stand up, Leontes! What mad words are these!

I do but deliver the Emperor’s commands.

I—I Caesar!—Ah, where is Gallus?

Oh, do not ask me.

Where is Gallus? Tell me, I conjure you,—where is Gallus?

[Standing up.] Gallus Caesar is with his beloved wife.

Dead?

In bliss, with his wife.

Dead! dead! Gallus dead! Dead in the midst of his triumphal progress! But when,—and where?

Oh, my dear lord, spare me——

[Struggling with the guards at the door.] I must go to him! Aside, I say!—Julian!

Gregory, brother,—after all, you come again?

Is it true, what rumour is scattering like a storm of arrows over the city?

I am myself transfixed by one of its arrows. Dare I believe in this blending of good hap and of ill?

For Christ’s sake, bid the tempter avaunt!

The Emperor’s commands, Gregory!

You will trample on your brother’s bloody corpse——

Bloody——?

Know you it not? Gallus Caesar was murdered.

[Clasping his hands.] Murdered?

Ah, who is this audacious——?

Murdered? Murdered? [To Leontes.] Tell me he lies!

Gallus Caesar has fallen through his own misdeeds.

Murdered!—Who murdered him?

What has occurred was inevitable, my noble lord! Gallus Caesar madly misused his power here in the East. He was no longer content with his rank as Caesar. His conduct, both in Constantinople and elsewhere on his progress, showed clearly what was in his mind.

’Tis not his crime I would know, but the rest.

Oh, let me spare a brother’s ears.

A brother’s ears can bear what a son’s ears have borne. Who killed him?

The tribune Scudilo, who escorted him, thought it advisable to have him executed.

Where? Not in Rome?

No, my lord; it happened on the journey thither,—in the city of Pola, in Illyria.

[Bowing himself.] The Emperor is great and righteous.—The last of the race, Gregory!—The Emperor Constantius is great.

[Taking a purple robe from one of his attendants.] Noble Caesar, deign to array yourself——

Red! Away with it! Was it this he wore at Pola——?

This comes fresh from Sidon.

[With a look at Maximus.] From Sidon! The purple robe——!

Apollinaris’s vision!

Julian! Julian!

See, this is sent to you by your kinsman, the Emperor. He bids me tell you that, childless as he is, he looks to you to heal this the deepest wound of his life. He wishes to see you in Rome. Afterwards, it is his will that you should go, as Caesar, to Gaul. The border tribes of the Alemanni have passed the Rhine, and made a dangerous inroad into the empire. He builds securely on the success of your campaign against the barbarians. Certain things have been revealed to him in dreams, and his last word to me at my departure was that he was assured you would succeed in establishing the empire.

Establish the empire! The voice in the light, Maximus!

Sign against sign.

How, noble Caesar?

I also have been forewarned of certain things; but this——

Say no, Julian! ’Tis the wings of destruction they would fasten on your shoulders.

Who are you, that defy the Emperor?

My name is Gregory; I am the son of the Bishop of Nazianzus;—do with me what you will.

He is my friend and brother; let no one touch him!

[Making his way through the crowd.] Take not the purple, Julian!

You, too, my faithful Basil.

Take it not! For the Lord God’s sake——

What terrifies you so in this?

The horrors that will follow.

Through me shall the empire be established.

Christ’s empire?

The Emperor’s great and beautiful empire.

Was that the empire which shone before your eyes when, as a child, you preached the word beside the Cappadocian martyrs’ graves? Was that the empire you set forth from Constantinople to establish on earth? Was that the empire——?

Mists, mists;—all that lies behind me like a wild dream.

’Twere better you yourself should be at the bottom of the sea, with a mill-stone about your neck, than that that dream should lie behind you.—— See you not the work of the tempter? All the glory of the world is laid at your feet.

Sign against sign, Caesar!

One word, Leontes!

Whither do you lead me?

To Rome, my lord.

That is not what I ask. Whither do you lead me: to fortune and power,—or to the shambles?

Oh, my lord, so odious a suspicion——

My brother’s body can scarce have mouldered yet.

I can silence all doubt. [Taking out a paper.] This letter from the Emperor, which I had thought to hand you in private——

A letter? What does he write?——

Ah, Helena! Oh, Leontes! Helena,—Helena to me!

The Emperor gives her to you, my lord! He gives you his beloved sister, for whom Gallus Caesar begged in vain.

Helena to me! The unattainable attained!—But she, Leontes——?

At my departure he took the Princess by the hand and led her to me. A flush of maiden blood swept over her lovely cheeks, she cast down her eyes, and said: “Greet my dear kinsman, and let him know that he has ever been the man whom——”

Go on, Leontes!

These words were all she spoke, the modest and pure woman.

The pure woman!—How marvellously is all fulfilled!

Robe me in the purple!

You have chosen?

Chosen, Maximus!

Chosen, in spite of sign against sign?

Here is no sign against sign. Maximus, Maximus, seer though you be, you have been blind. Robe me in the purple!

It is done!

[Murmurs to himself with upstretched hands.] Light and victory be to him who wills!

And now to the Governor’s palace; the people would fain greet Caesar.

Caesar, in his exaltation, remains what he was,—the poor lover of wisdom, who owes all to the Emperor’s grace.—To the Governor’s palace, my friends!

Room, room for Julian Caesar!

Gregory? Whatever comes of this—let us hold together.

Here is my hand.

At Lutetia, in Gaul. A hall in Caesar’s palace, “The Warm Baths,” outside the city. Entrance, door in the back; to the right, another smaller door; in front, on the left, is a window with curtains.

The Princess Helena, richly attired, with pearls in her hair, sits in an arm-chair, and looks out of the window. Her slave, Myrrha, stands opposite her, and holds the curtain aside.

What a multitude! The whole city streams out to meet them.—Hark! Myrrha,—do you not hear flutes and drums?

Yes, I think I can hear——

You lie! The noise is too great; you can hear nothing. [Springing up.] Oh, this torturing uncertainty! Not to know whether he comes as a conqueror or as a fugitive.

Fear not, my noble mistress; Caesar has always returned a conqueror.

Ay, hitherto; after all his lesser encounters. But this time, Myrrha! This great, fearful battle. All these conflicting rumours. If Caesar were victorious, why should he have sent that letter to the city magistrates, forbidding them to meet him with shows of honour outside the gates?

Oh, you know well, my lady, how little your noble husband cares for such things.

Yes, yes, that is true. And had he been defeated—they must have known it in Rome—would the Emperor have sent us this envoy who is to arrive to-day, and whose courier has brought me all these rich ornaments and gifts? Ah, Eutherius! Well? Well?

[From the back.] My Princess, it is impossible to obtain any trustworthy tidings——

Impossible? You are deceiving me! The soldiers themselves must surely know——

They are only barbarian auxiliaries who are coming in—Batavians and others—and they know nothing.

[Wringing her hands.] Oh, have I deserved this 137torture? Sweet, holy Christ, have I not called upon Thee day and night——

Ah, my Julian! I hear him!—Julian; my beloved!

[In dusty armour, enters hastily by the back.] Helena!

My noble Caesar!

[Vehemently embracing the Princess.] Helena!—Bar all the doors, Eutherius!

Defeated! Pursued!

My lord!

Double guards at all the doors; let no one pass! Tell me: has any emissary arrived from the Emperor?

No, my lord; but one is expected.

Go, go! [To the Slave.] Away with you.

[Sinking into the arm-chair.] Then all is over with us?

[Drawing the curtains together.] Who knows? If we are cautious, the storm may yet——

After such a defeat——?

Defeat? What are you talking of, my beloved?

Have not the Alemanni defeated you?

If they had, you would not have seen me alive.

[Springing up.] Then, Lord of Heaven, what has happened?

[Softly.] The worst, Helena;—a stupendous victory.

Victory, you say! A stupendous victory? You have conquered, and yet——?

You know not how I stand. You see only the gilded outside of all a Caesar’s misery.

Julian!

Can you blame me for having hidden it from you? Did not both duty and shame constrain me——? Ah, what is this? What a change——!

What? What?

How these months have changed you! Helena, you have been ill?

No, no; but tell me——

Yes, you have been ill! You must be ill now;—your fever-flushed temples, the blue rings round your eyes——

Oh, ’tis nothing, my beloved! Do not look at me, Julian! ’Tis only anxiety and wakeful nights on your account; ardent prayers to the Blessed One on the cross——

Spare yourself, my treasure; it is more than doubtful whether such zeal is of any avail.

Fie; you speak impiously.—But tell me of your own affairs, Julian! I implore you, hide nothing from me.

Nothing can now be hidden. Since the Empress’s death, I have taken no single step here in 140Gaul that has not been evilly interpreted at court. If I went cautiously to work with the Alemanni, I was called timorous or inert. They laughed at the philosopher, ill at ease in his coat of mail. If I gained an advantage over the barbarians, I was told that I ought to have done more.

But all your friends in the army——

Who, think you, are my friends in the army? I have not one, my beloved Helena! Yes, one single man—the knight Sallust, of Perusia, to whom, during our marriage feast at Milan, I had to refuse a slight request. He magnanimously came to me in the camp, appealed to our old friendship in Athens, and begged leave to stand at my side in all dangers. But what does Sallust count for at the imperial court? He is one of those whom they call heathens. He can be of no help to me.—And the others! Arbetio, the tribune, who left me in the lurch when I was blockaded by the Senones! Old Severus, burdened with the sense of his own impotence, yet unable to reconcile himself to my new strategy! Or think you I can depend on Florentius, the captain of the Praetorians? I tell you, that turbulent man is filled with the most unbridled ambitions.

Ah, Julian!

[Pacing up and down.] If I could but come to the bottom of their intrigues! Every week secret letters pass between the camp and Rome. Everything I do is set down and distorted. No slave in the 141empire is so fettered as Caesar. Would you believe it, Helena, even my cook has to abide by a bill of fare sent to him by the Emperor; I may not alter it, either by adding or countermanding a single dish!

And all this you have borne in secrecy——!

All know it, except you. All mock at Caesar’s powerlessness. I will bear it no longer! I will not bear it!

But the great battle——? Tell me,—has rumour exaggerated——?

Rumour could not exaggerate.—Hush; what was that? [Listening towards the door.] No, no; I only thought——

I may say that in these months I have done all that mortal man could do. Step by step, and in spite of all hindrances in my own camp, I drove the barbarians back towards the eastern frontier. Before Argentoratum, with the Rhine at his back, King Knodomar gathered all his forces together. He was joined by five kings and ten lesser princes. But before he had collected the necessary boats for his retreat in case of need, I led my army to the attack.

My hero, my Julian!

Lupicinus, with the spearmen and the light-armed troops, outflanked the enemy on the north; the old legions, under Severus, drove the barbarians more and more to the eastward, towards the river; our allies, the Batavians, under the faithful Bainabaudes, stood gallantly by the legions; and when Knodomar saw that his case was desperate, he tried to make off southwards, in order to reach the islands. But before he could escape, I sent Florentius to intercept him with the Praetorian guards and the cavalry. Helena, I dare not say it aloud, but certain it is that treachery or envy had nearly robbed me of the fruits of victory. The Roman cavalry recoiled time after time before the barbarians, who threw themselves down on the ground and stabbed the horses in the belly. Defeat stared us in the face——

But the God of Battles was with you!

I seized a standard, fired the Imperial Guards by my shouts, made them a hasty address, which was, perhaps, not quite unworthy of a more enlightened audience, and then, rewarded by the soldiers’ acclamations, I plunged headlong into the thickest of the fight.

Julian! Oh, you do not love me!

At that moment you were not in my thoughts. 143I wished to die; for I despaired of victory. But it came, my love! It seemed as though lightnings of terror flashed from our lance-points. I saw Knodomar, that redoutable warrior—ah, you have seen him too—I saw him fleeing on foot from the battlefield, and with him his brother Vestralp, and the kings Hortar and Suomar, and all who had not fallen by our swords.

Oh, I can see it; I can see it! Blessed Saviour, ’twas thou that didst again send forth the destroying angels of the Milvian Bridge!

Never have I heard such shrieks of despair; never seen such gaping wounds as those we trampled on, as we waded through the slain. The river did the rest; the drowning men struggled among themselves until they rolled over, and went to the bottom. Most of the princes fell living into our hands; Knodomar himself had sought refuge in a bed of reeds; one of his attendants betrayed him, and our bowmen sent a shower of arrows into his hiding-place, but without hitting him. Then, of his own accord, he gave himself up.

And after such a victory do you not feel secure?

[Hesitatingly.] On the very evening of the victory an accident occurred, a trifle——

An accident?

I prefer to call it so. In Athens we used to speculate much upon Nemesis.—My victory was so overwhelming, Helena; my position had, as it were, got out of balance; I do not know——

Oh, speak, speak; you put me on the rack!

It was a trifle, I tell you. I ordered the captive Knodomar to be brought before me, in the presence of the army. Before the battle, he had threatened that I should be flayed alive when I fell into his hands. Now he came towards me with faltering steps, trembling in every limb. Crushed by disaster, as the barbarians are apt to be, he cast himself down before me, embraced my knees, shed tears, and begged for his life.

His mighty frame quivering with dread—I can see the prostrate Knodomar.—Did you kill him, my beloved?

I could not kill that man. I granted him his life, and promised to send him as a prisoner to Rome.

Without torturing him?

Prudence bade me deal mercifully with him. But then—I cannot tell how it happened—with a 145cry of overflowing gladness, the barbarian sprang up, stretched his pinioned hands into the air, and, half ignorant as he is of our language, shouted with a loud voice: “Praise be to thee, Julian, thou mighty Emperor!”

Ah!

My attendants were inclined to laugh; but the barbarian’s shout flew like a lightning-flash through the surrounding soldiery, kindling as it went. “Long live the Emperor Julian,” those who stood nearest repeated; and the cry spread around in wider and ever wider circles to the furthest distance. ’Twas as though some Titan had hurled a mighty rock far out into the ocean;—oh, my beloved, forgive me the heathen similitude, but——

Emperor Julian! He said Emperor Julian!

What did the rude Aleman know of Constantius, whom he had never seen? I, his conqueror, was in his eyes the greatest——

Yes, yes; but the soldiers——?

I rebuked them sternly; for I saw at a glance how Florentius, Severus, and certain others stood silently by, white with fear and wrath.

Yes, yes, they—but not the soldiers.

Before a single night had passed my secret foes had distorted the affair. “Caesar has induced Knodomar to proclaim him Emperor,” the story went, “and in requital he has granted the barbarian his life.” And, thus inverted, the news has travelled to Rome.

Are you sure of that? And through whom?

Ah, through whom? through whom? I myself wrote at once to the Emperor and told him everything, but——

Well—and how did he answer?

As usual. You know his ominous silence when he means to strike a blow.

I believe you misinterpret all this. It must be so. You will see that his envoy will soon assure you of——

I am assured, Helena! Here, in my bosom, I have some intercepted letters, which——

Oh, Lord my God, let me see!

By-and-by.By-and-by.

And all this after the services I have rendered him! I have put a stop to the inroads of the Alemanni for years to come, whilst he himself has suffered defeat after defeat on the Danube, and the army in Asia seems to make no way against the Persians. Shame and disaster on all sides, except here, where he placed a reluctant philosopher at the head of affairs. Yet none the less am I the scorn of the court. Even after the last great victory, they have lampooned me, and called me Victorinus. This must come to an end.

So I, too, think.

On such terms, what is the title of Caesar worth?

No; you are right, Julian; things cannot go on thus!

[Stopping.] Helena, could you follow me?

[Softly.] Have no fear for me; I will not fail you.

Then away from all this thankless toil; away to the solitude I have sighed for so long——!

What do you say? Solitude!

With you, my beloved; and with my dear books, that I have so seldom been able to open here, save only on my sleepless nights.

[Looking him down from head to foot.] Ah, that is what you mean!

What else?

Ay, truly; what else?

Yes, yes—I ask, what else?

[Coming nearer.] Julian—how did the barbarian king hail you?

[Shrinking.] Helena!

[Still nearer.] What was the name that echoed through the ranks of the legions?

Rash woman; there may be an eavesdropper at every door!

Why should you fear eavesdroppers? Is not God’s grace upon you? Have you not been victorious in every encounter?—I see the Saviour calling upon you; I see the angel with the flaming sword, who cleared the way for my father when he drove Maxentius into the Tiber!

Shall I rebel against the ruler of the empire?

Only against those who stand between you. Oh, go, go; smite them with the lightning of your wrath; put an end to this harassing, joyless life! Gaul is an outer wilderness. I am so cold here, Julian! I pine for home, for the sunshine of Rome and Greece.

For home and your brother?

[Softly.] Constantius is but a wreck.

Helena!

I can bear it no longer, I tell you. Time is flying. Eusebia is gone; her empty seat invites me to honour and greatness, while I am ageing——

You are not ageing; you are young and fair!

No, no, no! Time speeds; I cannot bear this patiently; life slips away from me!

[Gazing at her.] How temptingly beautiful, how divine you are!

[Clinging to him.] Am I so indeed, Julian?

[Embracing her.] You are the only woman I have loved,—the only one who has loved me.

I am older than you. I will not age still more. When all is over, then——

[Tearing himself away.] Hush! I will hear no more.

[Following him.] Constantius is dying by inches; he hangs by a hair over the grave. Oh, my beloved Julian, you have the soldiers on your side——

No more, no more!

He can bear no agitation. What is there, then, to recoil from? I mean nothing bloody. Fie, how can you think so? The terror will be enough; it will fold him in its embrace and gently end his sufferings.

Do you forget the invisible bodyguard around the Lord’s anointed?

Christ is good. Oh, be pious, Julian, and He will forgive much. I will help. Prayers shall go up for you. Praised be the saints! Praised be the martyrs! Trust me, we will atone for everything later. Give me the Alemanni to convert; I will send out priests among them; they shall bow under the mercy of the cross.

The Alemanni will not bow.

Then they shall die! Like sweet incense shall their blood rise up to Him, the blessed One. We will magnify His glory; His praise shall be made manifest in us. I myself will do my part. The women of the Alemanni shall be my care. If they will not bow, they shall be sacrificed! And then, my Julian—when next you see me——; young, young once more! Give me the women of the Alemanni, my beloved! Blood—’twould be no murder, and the remedy is a sovereign one—a bath of young virgins’ blood——

Helena, the thought is crime!

Is it crime to commit crime for your sake?

You beautiful, you peerless one!

[Bowing herself down over his hands.] My lord before God and men!—Draw not back this time, Julian! My hero, my Emperor! I see heaven open. Priests shall sing praises to Christ; my women shall assemble in prayer. [With upraised arms.] Oh, thou blessed One! Oh, thou God of Hosts,—thou, in whose hand lie grace and victory——

[With a look towards the door, exclaims:] Helena!

Ah!

[From the back.] My lord, the Emperor’s emissary——

Is he come?

Yes, my lord!

His name? Who is he?

The tribune Decentius.

Indeed? The pious Decentius!

Has he talked with any one?

With no one, my lord; he has this moment arrived.

I will see him at once. And listen; one thing more. Summon the captains and officers to me here.

It is well, most gracious lord.

Now, my Helena, now we shall see——

[Softly.] Whatever happens, forget not that you can trust in the soldiers.

Ah, trust, trust——; I am not sure that I can trust in any one.

[Meeting him.] Welcome, noble Decentius! A Roman face,—and, above all, this face,—oh! it sheds genial sunlight over our inclement Gaul.

The Emperor meets your longing and your hope half-way, noble Princess! We may hope that Gaul will not much longer hold you in its chains.

Say you so, messenger of gladness? So the Emperor still thinks lovingly of me? How is it with his health?

Go, go, my beloved Helena!

The Emperor’s health is certainly no worse.

No, surely not? I thought as much. All those alarming rumours——; God be praised that they were but rumours! Thank him most lovingly, good Decentius! And let me thank you too. What splendid gifts have heralded your coming! Imperial——no, let me say brotherly gifts indeed! Two shining black Nubians,—you should see them, my Julian!—and pearls! See, I am wearing them already. And fruits,—sweet, luscious fruits! Ah, peaches from Damascus, peaches in chalices of gold! How they will refresh me;—fruit, fruit; I am pining away here in Gaul.

A feast shall end the day; but business first. Go, my precious wife!

I go to the church,—to pray for my brother and for all good hopes.

[After an instant’s pause.] A message, or letters?

Letters.

[Reads, represses a smile, and holds out his hand.] More!

Noble Caesar, that is well-nigh all.

Truly? Has the Emperor sent his friend all this long way only to——?

Had Knodomar, the King of the Alemanni, arrived in Rome ere you left?

Yes, noble Caesar!

And how fares he in the strange land, ignorant as he is of our tongue! For he knows nought of it, Decentius! He was positively a laughing-stock to my soldiers. Only think, he mixed up two such common words as Emperor and Caesar.

[Shrugging his shoulders.] A barbarian. What can one expect?

No, what can one expect? But the Emperor has received him graciously?

Knodomar is dead, my lord!

[Stopping suddenly.] Knodomar dead!

Dead, in the foreigners’ quarters, on the Coelian hill.

Dead? Indeed!—Ah, the Roman air is unwholesome.

The King of the Alemanni died of home-sickness, my lord! The longing for kindred and freedom——

——wastes a man away, Decentius; yes, yes, I know that.—I should not have sent him living to Rome. I should have had him killed here.

Caesar’s heart is merciful.

H’m——! Home-sickness? Indeed!

Are you there, old faun? Tempt me no more.

[To Decentius.] Since the battle at Argentoratum, he is for ever talking to me of the triumphal chariot and the white horses. [To Sintula.] ’Twould be like Phaeton’s career with the 157Lybian sun-horses. How did that end? Have you forgotten—have you forgotten your heathendom, I had almost said?—Pardon me, Decentius, for wounding your pious ear.

Caesar delights his servant’s ear; he cannot wound it.

Yes, yes; bear with Caesar’s jesting. In truth I know not how else to take the matter.—Here they are.

[Advancing to receive them.] Greeting to you, brothers in arms and friends. Blame me not overmuch for summoning you hither, straight from the dust and toil of the march; truly, I should not have grudged you some hours’ rest; but——

Has aught of moment happened, my lord?

Aye, truly. Can you tell me—what was lacking to complete Caesar’s happiness?

What should be lacking to complete Caesar’s happiness?

Now, nothing. [To Decentius.] The army has demanded that I should enter the city in triumph. They would have had me pass through the gates of Lutetia at the head of the legions. Captive barbarian princes, with pinioned hands, were to march beside my chariot-wheels; women and slaves from twenty conquered peoples were to follow, crowded closely together, head against head—— [Breaking off suddenly.] Rejoice, my valiant fellow soldiers; here you see the Tribune Decentius, the Emperor’s trusted friend and councillor. He has arrived this morning with gifts and greetings from Rome.

Ah, then indeed naught can be lacking to complete Caesar’s happiness.

[Softly to Florentius.] Incomprehensible! Then he is in the Emperor’s grace again!

[Softly.] Oh, this unstable Emperor!

You seem all to be struck dumb with astonishment.—They think the Emperor has done too much, good Decentius!Decentius!

How can Caesar think such a thought?

Too much, noble Caesar? By no means. Who doubts that the Emperor knows how to set due bounds to his favour?

This is in truth a rare and remarkable distinction——

I should even call it beyond measure rare and remarkable——

And especially does it afford a striking proof that our august Emperor’s mind is free from all jealousy——

An unexampled proof, I venture to call it.

But then, what has not Caesar achieved in these few years in Gaul?

A year-long dream, dear friends! I have achieved nothing. Nothing, nothing!

All this your modesty counts as nothing? What was the army when you took command? A disorderly rabble——

——without coherence, without discipline, without direction——

You exaggerate, Severus!

And was it not with this undisciplined rabble that you took the field against the Alemanni? Did you not win battle after battle with these levies, till your victories transformed them into an invincible host? Did you not retake Colonia Agrippina——?

Come come, you see with the eye of friendship, my Florentius!—Or is it really so? Is it a fact, that I drove the barbarians out of the islands of the Rhine! That I placed the ruined Tres Tabernae in a posture of defence, making it a bulwark of the empire? Is it really so?

What, my lord! Can you be in doubt as to so great deeds?

No, I cannot but think—— And the battle of Argentoratum? Was I not there? I cannot but fancy that I defeated Knodomar. And after the victory——; Florentius, have I dreamt it, or did I rebuild Trajan’s fortress, when we marched into German territory?

Noble Caesar, is there any man so mad as to deny you the honour of these exploits?

[To Decentius.] I praise the destiny that has vouchsafed to my old age so victorious a leader.

[Also to the Tribune.] I dare scarcely think what turn this inroad of the Alemanni might have taken, but for Caesar’s courage and conduct.

[Pressing forward.] Yes, yes; Caesar is great!

[Clapping their hands.] Caesar is peerless!

[Looks for a time alternately at Decentius and the others; thereupon breaks out into a loud, short laugh.] So blind is friendship, Decentius! So blind, so blind!

Here I read far other tidings! listen and drink in the refreshing dew of knowledge. This is the Emperor’s despatch to all the proconsuls of the empire;—our excellent Decentius has brought me a copy of it. Here we learn that I have accomplished nothing in Gaul. It was, as I told you, a dream. Here we have the Emperor’s own words: it was under the Emperor’s happy auspices that the imminent danger to the empire was averted.

All the affairs of the empire flourish under the Emperor’s auspices.

More, more. It is here set forth that it was the Emperor who fought and conquered on the 162Rhine; it was the Emperor who raised up the King of the Alemanni, as he lay grovelling before him. My name is not fortunate enough to find any place in this document,—nor yours, Florentius, nor yours, Severus! And here, in the description of the battle of Argentoratum—where was it? Yes, here it stands!—it was the Emperor who determined the order of battle; it was the Emperor himself who, at peril of his life, fought till his sword was blunted, in the forefront of the battle: it was the Emperor who, by the terror of his presence, put the barbarians to headlong flight——; read, read, I tell you!

Noble Caesar, your word suffices.

What mean you, then, by your deluding speeches, my friends? Would you, in your too great love for me, make me a parasite, to be fed with the leavings you have pilfered from my kinsman’s table?—What think you, Decentius? What say you to this? You see, in my own camp, I have to keep an eye on adherents who, in their blind zeal, are sometimes in danger of straying over the border-line of revolt.

[Hastily, to the Tribune.] I assure you, my words have been sadly misconstrued if——

[Also to the Tribune.] It could never enter my mind to——

That is right, my brothers in arms; let us all agree to swallow our vainglory. I asked what was lacking to complete Caesar’s happiness. Now you know it. ’Twas the recognition of the truth that was lacking in Caesar’s happiness. Your silver helmet will never be dimmed with the dust of the triumph, Florentius! The Emperor has already triumphed for us, in Rome. He therefore declares all festivities here to be superfluous. Go, Sintula, and see that the intended procession is countermanded. The Emperor wishes to give his soldiers a much-needed rest. ’Tis his will that they remain in the camp outside the walls.

Was I not once a philosopher? They said so, at least, both in Athens and Ephesus. So weak is human nature in the hours of success; I had almost been false to philosophy. The Emperor has brought me to my senses. Thank him most humbly, Decentius. Have you more to say?

One thing more. From all the Emperor has learnt, and especially from the letter you wrote him from Argentoratum, it appears that the great work of pacification in Gaul is happily accomplished.

Most certainly; the Emperor, partly by his valour, partly by his magnanimous clemency——

The Rhine frontier of the empire has been placed in security.

By the Emperor, by the Emperor.

In the Danubian provinces, on the contrary, affairs are going ill; and still worse in Asia—King Sapor makes constant progress.

What audacity! Rumour has it that not even in this summer’s campaign has the Emperor been pleased to let his generals crush him.

The Emperor intends to do so himself in the spring. [Producing a roll of papers.] Here he makes known his will, noble Caesar.

Let us see, let us see! [Reading.] Ah!

Then, ’tis the Emperor’s will that——? Good, good, noble Decentius; the Emperor’s will shall be done.

It must be done, this very day.

This very day; of course. Come hither, Sintula! 165Where is he?—Ah, I remember!—Call Sintula back!

[In a low voice, to the Tribune.] I implore you not to misinterpret what I said. When I gave Caesar the credit, of course I did not mean to——

[In a low voice.] It could never occur to me to doubt that it was the Emperor’s supreme and wise direction that——

[On the other side of the Tribune.] I beg you, noble sir,—put in a word for me at court, and release me from this painful position in the household of a Caesar who——; well, he is the Emperor’s exalted kinsman, but——

I could tell you, alas! of things that indicate not only boundless vanity, but overweening ambition——

This very day! Let me say one word, Decentius! It has long been my dearest wish to lay down this burden of responsibility.

It shall be conveyed to the Emperor.

I call heaven to witness that I never——; Ah, here is Sintula; now we can——[To the Tribune.] You are going?

I have affairs to transact with the generals, noble Caesar!

Without my intervention?

The Emperor commands me to spare his beloved kinsman.

[Looking at him awhile.] Sintula!

Yes, noble master!

Come nearer—Yes, by my faith, you look honest. Pardon me; I never thought you could be so attached to me.

How know you that I am attached to you, my lord?

[Pointing to the roll of paper.] I can read it here, in this; it is written that you are to desert me.

I, my lord?

The Emperor disbands the army of Gaul, Sintula!

Disbands——?

Yes, what is it but a disbanding? The Emperor needs reinforcements, both on the Danube, and against the Persians. Our Batavian and Herulian auxiliaries are to depart with all speed, in order to reach Asia in the spring.

But the thing is impossible, my lord. You have solemnly sworn to these very allies that they shall in no case be called upon to serve beyond the Alps.

Just so, Sintula! The Emperor writes that I gave that promise over hastily, and without his consent. This is quite a new light to me; but here it stands. I am to be forced to break my word, dishonour myself in the eyes of the army, turn against me the unbridled rage of the barbarians, perhaps their murderous weapons.

They cannot hurt you, my lord! The Roman legions will make their breasts your shield.

The Roman legions. H’m;—my simple-minded friend! From every Roman legion three hundred 168men are to be drafted off, and are likewise to join the Emperor by the shortest route.

Ah! This is——?

Well planned, is it not? Every branch of the army is to be set against me, that I may the more easily be disarmed.

And I tell you, my lord, that not one of your generals will lend himself to such a design.

My generals are not to be led into temptation. You are the man.

I, my Caesar!

Here it is written. The Emperor commissions you to take all necessary measures, and then to lead the chosen detachments to Rome.

This task assigned to me? With men here like Florentius and old Severus——

You have no victories to your discredit, Sintula!

No, that is true. I have never been allowed an opportunity of showing——

I have been unjust to you. Thanks for your fidelity.

So great an imperial honour! My lord, may I see——

What would you see? You surely would not lend yourself to such a design.

God forbid that I should disobey the Emperor!

Sintula,—would you disarm your Caesar?

Caesar has ever undervalued me. Caesar has never forgiven me the fact of his having to endure about his person a Master of the Horse chosen by the Emperor.

The Emperor is great and wise; he chooses well.

My lord,—I long to set about my duty; may I beg to see the Emperor’s commission?

[Handing him one of the papers.] Here is the Emperor’s commission. Go, and do your duty.

[Entering hastily from the right.] Oh merciful Redeemer!

Myrrha! What is the matter?

Oh kind heaven, my mistress——

Your mistress,—what of her?

Sickness or frenzy——; help, help!

Helena sick! The physician! Oribases must come, Sintula! Summon him!

Loosen the comb! Loosen the comb, I say! It is red hot. My hair is on fire; I burn, I burn!

Helena! For God’s pity’s sake——!

Will no one help me? They are killing me with needle-pricks!

My Helena! What has befallen you?