TWO CLASSICAL ROMANCES.*
IT is the besetting sin of books of this kind that they halt, so to speak, in the choice whether they will be romances or dictionaries of antiquities. Bekker's well-known works, Gallus and Charieles, have, indeed, their character pretty well determined : the thread of narrative is of the slenderest, the mass of classical archaeology attached to it enormously large. Herr Eckstein's romances are very different. The element of story predominates. Still, they are not wholly free from the fault spoken of. The action is sometimes hindered and the reader's attention distracted by a multiplicity of details, which are interesting enough in their way, but yet might well be spared. We want to know—and it is only fair to say that the author does make us want to know—what the personages of the drama are going to say or do; and it is a little vexatious to be told in detail the items of furniture in the room in which they may be talking, or the dishes of a meal in which
• Prwias: a Romance of Amcieot Rome under the RepuLlie. By Ernest Eck- stein. From the German, by Clara Bell. 2 vols.—Quintus Claudius: a Romance of Imperial Rome. By Ernest Eckstein. 2 vols. New York : Gottesberger; Lou. don : Trilbner and Co.
they may happen to join. If one of them takes his seat at a table to write some letter which is to influence the action of the story, it is a little absurd to be carefully told that the table is of citron wood, the pen an instrument of iron, pointed at one end and flat at the other, and the paper the product of an Egyptian reed: How would this read :—" He took his seat at a table of mahogany, brought from the swampy forests of Honduras. The paper on which he wrote had been cunningly wrought from rags which had formed the tattered wardrobe of some Tuscan or Andalusian beggar, and his pen was furnished by a goose which had wandered over the uplands of Surrey or the low-lying pas- tures of Lincolnshire." " The fault is, however, not so promi- nently offensive in Claudius and Prusias but that they may be read with great and fairly unbroken interest.
Prusias is, we are inclined to think, decidedly the better of the two. The hero is an Armenian, an Oriental philosopher and patriot, who feels the profoundest sympathy with the efforts of Mithridates to resist the growing domination of Rome, and who comes to Italy in the hope- that he may be able to strike a brave blow at the Republic. The Social War had left, he believes, some smouldering fire of discontent ; and there was a constant element of danger to Rome in the vast population of slaves which recent conquests had contributed to bring together. The result of his machinations is the outbreak known as the Servile War. This supplies the main action of the story, and it is described in a very vigorous and graphic way. Spartacus, who has been maligned playfully by Horace with his allusion to the wine-casks which could not escape his search, and more savagely by other writers, is the hero of this part of the tale. The man who held all the power of Rome in check for more than two years must have had no common strength of intellect and character. It is an ingenious suggestion of Herr Eckstein that the strategic knowledge with which it is certainly difficult to credit the rude Thracian gladiator was supplied by the Armenian Prusias, one who had learnt the military art in the school of a great com- mander; for how great Mithridates was it is only possible to conceive by imagining that he had Europeans instead of Asiatics to lead. Prusias himself, however, does not seem to us very real. He is rather the conventional "Wise Man of the East," with the usual properties of the "ample robe of the Chalda3ans and the broad-brimmed hat." The truth is, that here the romance-writer has very little on which to build his super- structure of imagination. As for the episode of Naevia—for this Ulysses of the East meets his Circe, and is not so potently armed against her enchantments—we cannot but say that the tale would have not suffered by its loss. On the Roman side the hero is Crassus, somewhat idealised, as Herr Eckstein frankly acknowledges, but skilfully drawn. Clodius Pulcher, the brave soldier, who knows but little outside the limits of the camp, is a genuine figure, which impresses us with its reality. Of minor figures, indeed, there is a whole crowd, worked out with no little skill, the most picturesque among them, perhaps, being Brenna, the fair-haired Frisian. Her love- story is a concession to the modern feeling which demands this as a necessary element in fiction ; and it is certainly very prettily told.
In Quintus Clav,clius—(was "Quintus," by the way, a prcenomen used by the patrician Claudii P)—we are carried on to the latter days of Domitian. The father of Quintus is the .Flamen Dialis, or priest of Jupiter. Quintus himself, when we are introduced to him at Bailie, as a Naafi young aristocrat, makes acquaintance with some of the "new sect of the Nazarenes." It is in the vehement antagonism between the new-born conviction of the young man, who finds in the Gospel the key to the mystery of life which he had vainly sought in the philosophies, and the firm faith of the father, one of the few who still retained their belief in the ancient gods, that the .dramatic interest of the story centres. There is a secondary plot in the events which lead on to the assassination of Domitiau, an incident which comes in at the last to solve the complications of the plot. The merits which we see in Prusias are not wanting in its com- panion work—(Quintus Claudius was, we gather, written first). There is the same brilliancy of description, and much of the same success in the vivid treatment of character ; but the action is much feebler in interest : it has nothing like the breadth and interest of the Romance of Rome under the Republic. After all, this is nothing more than might be expected from the character of the subject. Tacitus, it will be remembered, com- plains of the wearisome monotony of the events which he had to
relate compared with the stirring story which earlier historians had to tell. The writer of romance also finds it is a change for the worse when he leaves Spartacus and his associates fighting for liberty and life in the gorges of Vesuvius for the chambers of Domitian's palace.
A few misprints have crept into the note and text. The most serious is the word ergasiulae used as the plural of ergastulum (Prusias 1., 322).
Previous page
