Dear and Glorious Physician Read Free Page A

Priscus had brought the wounded and broken youth to his house, had called his physician to treat him, had assigned him a place in his household, and had required only obedience from him. “We are all subject to obedience,” Priscus had told his new slave, sternly. “I obey the gods and the laws of my fathers, and there is pride in such subjection, for it is voluntary, and demanded of all honorable men. The man without discipline is a man without a soul.”
     
    Aeneas was illiterate, but he was quick and respectful and had a shrewd and orderly mind. Priscus, who believed every man, even a slave, should be developed to his full capacity, had permitted Aeneas to sit in a corner of a room where his young son was being tutored. Within an amazingly short time Aeneas had caught up with Diodorus; his memory was astounding. It was not long until Aeneas, at the command of Priscus, was sitting at the foot of the table where Diodorus sat with his tutor. “Have we a Greek scholar here?” Priscus asked the tutor ironically. But the tutor replied with sagacity that Aeneas was no true scholar, but only a young man of clever mind.
     
    By the time Aeneas was twenty-five he was managing the Roman estates of his master, Priscus, while Diodorus had taken up his proper profession as a soldier and was assisting the procurator in Jerusalem. He had also fallen in love with another slave, the young Iris, handmaiden to the wife of Priscus, a beautiful Greek girl, the pet of the household, educated personally by Antonia, who regarded her with the affection of a mother. Priscus and Antonia had presided over the wedding of the young people, and had given them many gifts, including the priceless one of their freedom.
     
    Diodorus Cyrinus, returning home after the death of his parents, had been pleased with the freedman, Aeneas, for the Roman estates were in fine order. He remembered his old fellow student as being a ‘commonplace fellow’ of no particular brilliance, but he recognized his qualities and honesty, though he was annoyed at the petulances and small arrogances he displayed against the slaves under his command. But, as Diodorus was extremely intelligent, and secretly merciful, he understood that in this way Aeneas was compensating for the years of his own slavery.
     
    The lonely young Roman, who was now twenty-seven, five years younger than Aeneas, soon married a young woman of a sturdy Roman family, who had his own robust qualities but not his intelligence. Shortly after this, Diodorus was assigned to govern Antioch, in Syria, and he took Aeneas and Iris with him. Here Aeneas found wider scope for his talents of meticulousness and management and bookkeeping and precision, and for the first time he had a home of his own on the estate in the suburbs of Antioch. In the evenings he dreamt his dreams of the glorious men of old Greece, and identified himself with them, and read the poems of Homer, and declaimed them aloud to his wife and son. His learning, intellectually, remained small and meager. He prated of Socrates, but the dialogues were beyond his real comprehension. He knew very little of the lesser giants of Greece, and almost nothing of the statesmen of his nation. He served his gods as dutifully as he served Diodorus. Perhaps they meant Greece to him; perhaps, in their loveliness and delicacy and splendor, they reminded him that their Roman counterparts were gross and lascivious and brutish, beyond all subtlety and grace, merely enlarged shadows of the Romans themselves. In his gods Aeneas found refuge from his memories of bitter slavery; in them he found pride for himself, for even Romans honored them and built temples to them, and began to draw distinctions between them and their own deities.
     
    Aeneas had preferred Rome to Antioch, for though he disdained the Roman rabble he had liked the bustle in the crowded streets and the excitements of the city and the air of power. Antioch, to him, was too ‘foreign’, for it was