—That last drear mood
Of envious sloth, and proud decrepitude;
No faith, no art, no king, no priest, no God;
While round the freezing founts of life in snarling ring,
Crouch’d on the bareworn sod,
Babbling about the unreturning spring,
And whining for dead gods, who cannot save,
The toothless systems shiver to their grave.
The last scene of their tragedy was not without a touch of pathos. … In the year 629, Justinian finally closed, by imperial edict, the schools of Athens. They had nothing more to tell the world, but what the world had yawned over a thousand times before: why should they break the blessed silence by any more such noises? The philosophers felt so themselves. They had no mind to be martyrs, for they had nothing for which to testify. They had no message for mankind, and mankind no interest for them. All that was left for them was to take care of their own souls; and fancying that they saw something like Plato’s ideal republic in the pure monotheism of the Guebres, their philosophic emperor the Khozroo, and his holy caste of magi, seven of them set off to Persia, to forget the hateful existence of Christianity in that realised ideal. Alas for the facts! The purest monotheism, they discovered, was perfectly compatible with bigotry and ferocity, luxury and tyranny, serails and bowstrings, incestuous marriages and corpses exposed to the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air; and in reasonable fear for their own necks, the last seven Sages of Greece returned home weary-hearted, into the Christian Empire from which they had fled, fully contented with the permission, which the Khozroo had obtained for them from Justinian, to hold their peace, and die among decent people. So among decent people they died, leaving behind them, as their last legacy to mankind, Simplicius’s Commentaries on Epictetus’s “Enchiridion,” an essay on the art of egotism, by obeying which, whosoever list may become as perfect a Pharisee as ever darkened the earth of God. Peace be to their ashes! … They are gone to their own place.
Wulf, too, had gone to his own place, wheresoever that may be. He died in Spain, full of years and honours, at the court of Adolf and Placidia, having resigned his sovereignty into the hands of his lawful chieftain, and having lived long enough to see Goderic and his younger companions in arms settled with their Alexandrian brides upon the sunny slopes from which they had expelled the Vandals and the Suevi, to be the ancestors of “bluest-blooded” Castilian nobles. Wulf died, as he had lived, a heathen. Placidia, who loved him well, as she loved all righteous and noble souls, had succeeded once in persuading him to accept baptism. Adolf himself acted as one of his sponsors; and the old warrior was in the act of stepping into the font, when he turned suddenly to the bishop, and asked where were the souls of his heathen ancestors? “In hell,” replied the worthy prelate. Wulf drew back from the font, and threw his bearskin cloak around him. … “He would prefer, if Adolf had no objection, to go to his own people.”6 And so he died unbaptized, and went to his own place.
Victoria was still alive and busy: but Augustine’s warning had come true—she had found trouble in the flesh. The day of the Lord had come, and Vandal tyrants were now the masters of the fair corn-lands of Africa. Her father and brother were lying by the side of Raphael Aben-Ezra, beneath the ruined walls of Hippo, slain, long years before, in the vain attempt to deliver their country from the invading swarms. But they had died the death of heroes: and Victoria was content. And it was whispered, among the downtrodden Catholics, who clung to her as an angel of mercy, that she, too, had endured strange misery and disgrace; that her delicate limbs bore the scars of fearful tortures; that a room in her house, into which none ever entered but herself, contained a young boy’s grave; and that she passed long nights of prayer upon the spot, where lay her only child, martyred by the hands of Arian persecutors. Nay, some of the few who, having dared to face that fearful storm, had survived its fury, asserted that she herself, amid her own shame and agony, had cheered the shrinking boy on to his glorious death. But though she had found trouble in the flesh, her spirit knew none. Clear-eyed and joyful as when she walked by her father’s side on the field of Ostia, she went to and fro among the victims of Vandal rapine and persecution, spending upon the maimed, the sick, the ruined, the small remnants of her former wealth, and winning, by her purity and her piety, the reverence and favour even of the barbarian conquerors. She had her work to do, and she did it, and was content; and, in good time, she also went to her own place.
Abbot Pambo, as well as Arsenius, had been dead several years; the abbot’s place was filled, by his own dying command, by a hermit from the
