Dear and Glorious Physician Read Free

her husband’s more pathetic fictions, but she nodded in agreement. “Yes, our son has the soul of a poet. Yet I see and hear him playing with great liveliness with the little Rubria; they chase the sheep together and hide from each other among the olive trees, and sometimes their childish laughter is boisterous and loud.”
     
    She watched her husband gently as he lifted his long head with importance and attempted to frown. In his poor heart he was flattered, for all his contempt for the Romans. “I trust he does not neglect his lessons,” he said. “With all respect to my employer, it is hard to forget that he is a Roman barbarian, and that his daughter cannot offer my son any intellectual diversion.” He added, quickly, “However, one must remember that he is but ten years old, and the little Rubria is still younger. You say, my dear one, that they play constantly together? I have not noticed it, but then I am busy from dawn to sunset in the tribune’s house.”
     
    “Lucanus assists Rubria with her own lessons.” Iris shook a golden lock from her forehead. “How unfortunate it is that the noble tribune, Diodorus Cyrinus, does not employ you to teach her.”
     
    Aeneas sighed, and touched his wife’s white forehead with his grateful lips. “But who then would manage these Roman affairs in Antioch, and keep the records and supervise the overseers of the slaves? Ah, these greedy, sucking Romans! Rome is an abyss into which all the wealth and the labor of the world sinks without a sound, an abyss from which no music rises or has risen.”
     
    Iris considerately forbore to remind her husband of Virgil. Aeneas usually compared him disdainfully with Homer.
     
    It offended Aeneas that his employer was only a rude tribune, and not an Augustale. True, many of the Roman tribunes were Augustales, but not Diodorus, who loathed patricians and whose hero was Cincinnatus. Diodorus had considerable education and much intellect, and was the son of a sound and virtuous family of many soldiers, but he pretended to the soldier’s scorn for men who preferred the things of the mind. He hugged his old-fashioned virtues to his breast and affected ignorance of the things he knew, and spoke in the harsh and simple accents of a soldier to whom books were contemptible. In his way he possessed as many affectations as Aeneas. They were both frauds, Iris would tell herself sadly, but they were also piteous frauds. Let Aeneas condescend to the soldier whose father had freed him, and let Diodorus deliberately use bad grammar and display bad manners: it did not matter.
     
    The father of Diodorus Cyrinus, a moral man of noble qualities, had bought the young Aeneas from an acquaintance who had been noted for his extreme cruelty to his slaves, a cruelty which had become infamous even among a callous and cynical people. It was told that there was none of this man’s slaves who did not bear scars, from the workers in his fields and vineyards and olive groves to the youngest females in his house. Nor, in spite of the laws, did he desist from the wanton killing, at will, of any slave who displeased him, and he had devised manners of torture and murder which gave him immense pleasure. An Augustale of proud if decadent family, and of immense wealth and power, he was also a senator, and it was said that even Caesar feared him.
     
    There was only one man in Rome who dared to scorn him publicly, the virtuous tribune, Priscus, father of Diodorus, who was loved by the Roman mobs, who, themselves debased and vicious as their masters, yet paid him honor for his integrity and his soldierly qualities. The mobs even admired him for his kindness and his justice to his slaves, and this was paradoxical among a people to whom a slave was less than a four-legged beast.
     
    Aeneas, the Greek slave, had been one of the workers on the senator’s land, and no one was quite certain how Priscus had acquired him, except Aeneas, and he never spoke of it. But