The Dream of Scipio (3 page)

“Was I jesting?” responded Lucontius in mock surprise, for he realized that Caius was slow-witted enough to be unable to distinguish between respect and mockery. “Surely I speak only the truth? Surely we see the Revelations of Our Lord solely through Greek eyes? Even Saint Paul was a Platonist.”

“I do not know what you mean,” Caius replied. “The truth is told to me in the Bible. I need no Greek words to tell me what I see there.”

Should Manlius intervene, explain how there are many ways of understanding even a simple passage? Teach him how such mysteries as the Incarnation, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit were given shape in our minds through the teaching of the Academies? Caius was one of those who gloried in his ignorance, called his lack of letters purity, scorned any subtlety of thought or expression. A man for his time, indeed. Once, and not so long ago, he would have fallen silent in embarrassment at his lack of knowledge; now it was the knowledgeable who had to mind their tongues.

“And you must remember, dear Lucontius,” Manlius interrupted, “that there are many who consider that Plato had access to the wisdom of Moses, that he merely translated Our Lord’s wisdom into Greek, not the other way around.” He looked anxiously, and saw that Lucontius, dear sensitive soul, took the warning, flashing a brief apology with his eyes. The moment of difficulty was over; the dinner continued, harmlessly and without point.

Except that Manlius was discomfited. He took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and his bubble of civility was becoming smaller and smaller. Caius Valerius, powerful member of a powerful family, had never even heard of Plato. A hundred, even fifty years before, such an absurdity would have been inconceivable. Now it was surprising if such a man did know anything of philosophy, and even if it was explained, he would not wish to understand.

Manlius thought greatly of such matters after most of the guests had gone to their beds, escorted by servants with torches. He stared out of the great doors at the landscape beyond, once a park of perfection, now disfigured by the rough cottages of farmers whose dwellings were coming ever closer, huddling nearer his huge villa for protection like piglets around a sow. He could have razed them, but feared their inhabitants might take themselves off, go and find a new lord to protect them—one who would not honor the law if he demanded them back. Then he looked the other way, to the bathhouse now abandoned and turned into a barracks for the soldiers permanently needed to protect the estate.

All they wanted was to live in security, and all the harm they did was to spoil his view. A man like Caius Valerius was very much more dangerous.

“None of us truly chooses our family, I’m afraid.” It was Felix who had walked up quietly behind him. “People like my dear cousin have always existed; even Vergil, I believe, had a brother-in-law who despised his poetry.”

Manlius put his arm around him, and they walked slowly in the fading light. Of all the creatures in the world, Felix was the one he truly loved, whose company made him relax and forget his cares. For years now, decades even, he had relied on this short, powerful man, whose mind was as quick as his frame was bulky. A deceptive man, for he looked as he was—a soldier, used to the hardships of fighting and the simplicities of armies. Yet at the same time, he was supple in argument, quick in understanding, and the most honorable, loyal friend Manlius had ever encountered. Nor did he ever condemn; while Manlius frequently heard himself making waspish comments about others, Felix never judged, always sought to see the good even in those who had so little virtue in them.

“I know,” Manlius replied. “And I tolerate him for your sake. But, truly it is a hard job.”

“Rude, vulgar, and scarcely lettered. I know. But a great donor to the church and someone who has dispatched men from his own estates to help defend Clermont from the Goths. As have I.”

“But I haven’t, even though Sidonius is one of my oldest friends? Is that how you wish to end your sentence?” Manlius added.

It had been preying on his mind greatly in the past few months. The city of Clermont, far to the west, was under siege from King Euric, blocking his desire to grab a stranglehold on the whole of Provence. If it fell, they would all soon follow, and it could not last long without reinforcements; indeed it might already have fallen had it not been for Sidonius, who had put himself at the head of the defenses and was refusing to accept the inevitable.

For inevitable it was, in Manlius’s view. For years now, the barbarians had been moving into Gaul; sometimes they were encouraged, sometimes resisted. Sometimes they were treated as enemies, sometimes as allies against a still worse danger. But every time they took a little bit more, and every time the power of Rome to stop them proved a mirage. Not many years ago, an army of thirty thousand had been sent against Euric’s father: none had come back. His own father had conceived the great strategy of the emperor Majorian to beat back the threat; but was undermined and killed by his enemies among the Roman aristocracy of Gaul even before any army could move. Now here was Sidonius, brave, foppish, foolish Sidonius, who had decided to take a stand where emperors had failed. He had always had a weakness for lost causes, for grand, heroic but empty gestures.

“I had another letter from him begging our help,” Felix continued. “He says that a few thousand troops now could make all the difference.”

“He said that six months ago as well. It made no difference at all. Has something now changed?”

Felix shrugged his shoulders wearily. “We must try, surely? The whole of the civilized world is at stake.”

Manlius smiled. “We are the civilized world, you and I,” he said. “A few dozen people, with our learning. As long as we continue to stroll through my garden arm in arm, civilization will continue. Euric or no Euric. And I fear that you may provoke worse anger than you imagine.”

Felix shook his head. “You would not have spoken so cravenly a few years ago.”

“A few years ago everything was different. When I was young we could travel without fear along well-maintained roads, through well-administered cities, and stay at the villas of friends stocked with labor. There was an emperor who wielded real power rather than being a plaything of warlords. Those days are as distant now as the age of Augustus.”

“It is peaceful enough here.”

“All illusion, my friend. We have been attacked by marauders at this villa three times in the last six weeks. It nearly fell to looters on the last occasion. Two of my other villas have been destroyed and now produce nothing. This tranquil scene you see here this evening depends on six hundred troops hidden in the background. They consume near a third of everything we produce and could turn on us one day. There are fewer people to tend the fields, fewer still to buy our diminishing surplus. In a way, we are under siege here as well, and slowly losing the battle, just as friend Sidonius is losing his. You must know all this from your own experience.”

“I do, of course.” Felix paused, and they walked some more before sitting at the edge of the pond. “And I am grateful to you for inviting me, as ever. I, too, grow lonely for company, even though I am surrounded by people.”

Manlius leaned over and kissed his friend on the cheek. “It is good to see you once more. But however restorative, that is not the sole reason I invited you, of all people. I need to tell you something. Something important.”

It was the moment when he had to test a friendship that had endured for nearly twenty years without argument, without dispute, with perfect amity. Manlius was aware that he was trespassing on something sacred.

Felix turned toward him, drew his arm away. “Such gravity and seriousness! Whatever can it be? You are publishing your letters at last?”

“This is not for laughing. I have been thinking as you have for some time. That we must try. That all we value may indeed be destroyed but it should not be given up so easily. I have received a letter from Bishop Faustus of Riez.”

“Good heavens! You are going to pray! You are going to start going to church! Truly, this man is a saint and a miracle worker. All that I hear about him must be true.”

Manlius grunted, and for a while they talked about the pond they were sitting beside, clogged now with weeds. They swapped aphorisms about water, played with quotations from Pliny about his garden, inverting grammatical constructions so that the neatness and order of the original became the clogged and unkempt reality of the present. Then, as old friends do, they said nothing, but looked at the lilies still growing and the insects hopping across them in the evening light.

“Faustus wrote to ask me to become Bishop of Vaison,” Manlius said eventually.

Felix knew immediately the importance of what he said, but still tried to cover it over with a joke. “Not Bishop of Rome? How about emperor, too? You’d look handsome in the purple. Truly, the man doesn’t know you very well, or he wouldn’t have wasted his ink.”

Manlius threw some dust into the water and watched as the perch swam toward it in the hope of food.

“I have decided to accept,” he said quietly.

TO A SCHOLAR of Julien’s generation, it almost seemed as though there were two Manlius Hippomaneses. On the one hand there was the bishop mentioned occasionally by the chroniclers, the miracle worker whose cult was still vaguely remembered; the man who converted the Jews of Vaison, whose shrine produced miracles long after his death and who protected his people from the depradations of the barbarian invaders. On the other hand, there was the man of letters who existed in the correspondence of his aristocratic friends and in the manuscript of the
Dream.
One was admired for his piety, the other known for his sophistication and learning, his disdain for the vulgarity of the world, his aloof contempt for the age in which he lived. Julien’s article, the one that brought him to the attention of the authorities in late 1940, sought to reconcile these two.

This he did by arguing, in an essay published as Europe collapsed into war once more, that there was nothing to reconcile. That Manlius’s two reputations were reflections of the same man seen through different perspectives. The bishop who looked after his flock was the same as the aristocrat who wrote dilettante poetry while the rule of Rome in Gaul crumbled into dust. The activist bishop, loved by his people for his good works, was identical to the languid man of literature, so consumed with degenerate idleness that he failed to block the advance of the Gothic Burgundian tribes down the Rhône in the year 475.

For, in Julien’s daringly revisionist view, Manlius’s hidden achievement was titanic, driven by a vision of breathtaking clarity. Because, he explained, Manlius did not fail to block the Burgundians, he deliberately handed over a portion of Provence to them, swapping the nonexistent protection of Rome for the coarser but more effective shield of a barbarian king. Roman Gaul did not fall; it was put out of its misery by the last embodiment of its cultural glory. And because Manlius did this, King Euric’s Visigoths were blocked in their expansion up the river, which would have given them command of the heart of Europe. Manlius, he insisted, saw that the Burgundians would be a powerful protector for the church and ensure its continued communication with Rome long after the last emperor of the West had been deposed. Christendom could not have survived without him; the West would have split between Romans and Arians in religion. The power of the papacy could never have grown. And he ensured that the new rulers governed by law, Roman law transferred into a Burgundian code.

All because Manlius was able to take the imaginative leap to see that Roman civilization was more than Roman rule; he protected the essential while being ready to jettison the appearance. He possessed an intelligence lacking in his peers, for he grasped that the days of the emperors had drawn to a close, but that what it meant could survive, if the ground was well prepared, if the newcomers were taught carefully to guard their inheritance.

Thus an argument that even Julien realized was colored by the somber hues of his own times. He wrote his article and moved on to a more hopeful theme, choosing the literary aspect of Manlius for further investigation, looking at his later influence and slowly focusing on Olivier de Noyen as a key figure in transmitting Manlius’s heritage to the modern age. For the extraordinary clarity of Manlius’s vision had to come from somewhere; something had to make him stand so much higher, think so much more dispassionately, than the others of his generation who, it seemed, scarcely even noticed the end of Rome until fifty years after it had happened.

The crucial document in this later argument was the one he found in the Vatican,
The Dream of Scipio,
showing the bishop’s grasp of Neoplatonism, that most sophisticated of philosophies. Of all those still capable of action, it was a philosopher who combined deeds and insight into a decisive intervention. Could someone like Julien have resisted such an interpretation? The secular Julien, concerned with literature and thought and history, did not consider the other part of Manlius’s reputation, the part that spoke of him as a miracle worker. This he didn’t even bother to dismiss as the superstitious nonsense of the credulous. He merely ignored it entirely.

WITHIN AN hour of his death around the year 486, Manlius’s body was torn to pieces by those who had gathered in the far courtyard to await the event. When it became known he had breathed his last, the crowd—which numbered perhaps two hundred people—surged into the building, demanding to see the corpse. As there were no longer any guards, nor any people capable of resisting such a force, the chamber was soon filled with mourners, singing, praying, and leaning forward to touch the human remains of a man who, everyone knew, was already a saint. It might, perhaps, have been a relic hunter, a type of creature already in existence, who first leaned through the throng to cut off a piece of Manlius’s shroud and take possession of the sanctity residing in a cloth that had touched his mortal flesh. Perhaps it was a townsperson or a neighboring deacon who wanted to possess some part of him to bring glory to his church. Certainly it was not one of his family or friends, all of whom were pushed out of the room by the weight of numbers, or retired in disgust.