eats it, cuts another slice which he offers to Plautus.] THOMASINA Regina reclinabat . . . the queen?was reclining?praeter des
criptionem?indescribably?in a golden tent . . . like Venus and yet more? SEPTIMUS Try to put some poetry into it. THOMASINA How can I if there is none in the Latin? SEPTIMUS Oh, a critic! THOMASINA IS it Queen Dido? 8
SEPTIMUS No .
THOMASINA Who is the poet?
SEPTIMUS Known to you.
THOMASINA Known to me?
SEPTIMUS Not a Roman.
7. Latin passage that a student is required to pretends Shakespeare's lines are his own translatranslate: here the Roman historian Plutarch's tion. description of Cleopatra in her barge, on which 8. Legendary queen of Carthage who, abandoned Shakespeare based a famous speech by Enobarbus by her lover Aeneas, in Virgil's Aeneid, commits (Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.196ff.) Below Septimus suicide.
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277 8 / TOM STOPPARD
THOMASINA Mr Chater? SEPTIMUS Your translation is quite like Chater.
[SEPTIMUS picks up his pen and continues with his own writing.]
THOMASINA I know who it is, it is your friend Byron. SEPTIMUS Lord Byron, if you please. THOMASINA Mama is in love with Lord Byron. SEPTIMUS [Absorbed.] Yes. Nonsense. THOMASINA It is not nonsense. I saw them together in the gazebo.
[SEPTIMUS'S pen stops moving, he raises his eyes to her at last.]
Lord Byron was reading to her from his satire, and mama was laughing, with her head in her best position. SEPTIMUS She did not understand the satire, and was showing politeness to a guest.
THOMASINA She is vexed with papa for his determination to alter the park, but that alone cannot account for her politeness to a guest. She came downstairs hours before her custom. Lord Byron was amusing at breakfast. He paid you a tribute, Septimus.
SEPTIMUS Did he?
THOMASINA He said you were a witty fellow, and he had almost by heart an article you wrote about?well, I forget what, but it concerned a book called 'The Maid of Turkey' and how you would not give it to your dog for dinner.
SEPTIMUS Ah. Mr Chater was at breakfast, of course. THOMASINA He was, not like certain lazybones. SEPTIMUS He does not have Latin to set and mathematics to correct.
[He takes Thomasinas lesson book from underneath Plautus and tosses it down the table to her.] THOMASINA Correct? What was incorrect in it? [She looks into the book.]
Alpha minus?9 Pooh! What is the minus for? SEPTIMUS For doing more than was asked. THOMASINA YOU did not like my discovery? SEPTIMUS A fancy is not a discovery. THOMASINA A gibe is not a rebuttal.
[SEPTIMUS finishes what he is writing. He folds the pages into a letter. He has sealing wax and the means to melt it. He seals the letter and writes on the cover. Meanwhile?]
You are churlish with me because mama is paying attention to your friend. Well, let them elope, they cannot turn back the advancement of knowledge. I think it is an excellent discovery. Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, %s against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God's truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?
SEPTIMUS We do.
THOMASINA Then why do your equations only describe the shapes of manu
facture? SEPTIMUS I do not know. THOMASINA Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet.
9. A grade of A minus.
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ARCADIA II.5 / 2779
SEPTIMUS He has mastery of equations which lead into infinities where we cannot follow.
THOMASINA What a faint-heart! We must work outward from the middle of the maze. We will start with something simple. [She -picks up the apple leaf.] I will plot this leaf and deduce its equation. You will be famous for being my tutor when Lord Byron is dead and forgotten. [SEPTIMUS completes the business with his letter. He puts the letter in his pocket.] SEPTIMUS [Firmly.] Back to Cleopatra.1 THOMASINA Is it Cleopatra??I hate Cleopatra! SEPTIMUS You hate her? Why? THOMASINA Everything is turned to love with her. New love, absent love, lost love?I never knew a heroine that makes such noodles of our sex. It only needs a Roman general to drop anchor outside the window and away goes the empire like a christening mug into a pawn shop. If Queen Elizabeth had been a Ptolemy history would have been quite different?we would be admiring the pyramids of Rome and the great Sphinx of Verona.2 SEPTIMUS God save us. THOMASINA But instead, the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus!?can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides? thousands of poems?Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt by the noodle's ancestors!3 How can we sleep for grief? SEPTIMUS By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of
