completely in the shade. The Emperor did call him up to his box and tried his best to show him to the people, but the crowd only shouted for Lucius Domitius and he received the acclaim with such modesty and good manners that everyone was even more delighted.
As far as I was concerned, I should have been lame for life if the cavalry doctor from the temple of Castor and Pollux had not been so skillful. He handled me cruelly and I suffered fearful pain. I had to lie in splints for two whole months. After that I had to practice walking on crutches and could not leave our house for long.
The pain, the fear of being a cripple and the discovery of how fleeting are all success and fame were certainly good for me. At least I did not become involved in the many fights which the wildest of my friends joined in at night in the streets of Rome during the general excitement of the festival. At first I thought that my enforced confinement in bed and the intolerable pain were part of fate’s efforts to determine my character. I was lonely, once more abandoned by my father because of his marriage. I had to decide for myself what I wished from my life.
As I lay in bed right into that hot summer, I was seized with such melancholy that everything that had hitherto happened seemed to be quite meaningless. Aunt Laelia’s good and nourishing food tasted of nothing. At night I could not sleep. I thought of Timaius, who had committed suicide because of me. For the first time I realized that a good horse was perhaps not after all the best in life. I had to find out for myself what was best for me, duty and virtue or comfort and enjoyment. The writings of philosophers which had formerly bored me suddenly became meaningful. And I did not have to think very hard for long before I real- ized that discipline and self-control gave me more satisfaction than childish lack of restraint.
The most faithful among my friends turned out to be Lucius Pollio, the son of a senator. He was a slender, frail youth only a few years older than I, and he had only just managed to get through the riding exercises. He had been attracted to me because my disposition was the exact opposite to his, rough, self-confident and irresponsible, and yet I had never spoken a harsh word against him. That much I had probably learned from my father, so I was more friendly to those who were weaker than to those who were like me. I was reluctant, for instance, to strike a slave, even if he were insolent.
In the Pollio family there had always been bookish and scientific interests. Lucius himself was also much more of a bookworm than a rider.
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The riding exercises were for him nothing but a tedious duty which he had to endure for the sake of his career and he did not enjoy hardening his body. He came to me with books from his father’s library which he thought would be good for me to read. He envied me my perfect Greek. His secret dream was to be a writer, although his father, Senator Mummius Pollio, took it for granted that he would be an administrator.
“What’s the use of my wasting several years on riding and listening to cases?” said Lucius rebelliously. “In time I’ll be given command of a maniple with an experienced centurion under me and after that I’ll be in command of a cavalry division somewhere in the provinces. In the end I’ll become a tribune on the staff of some legion building roads at the other end of the world. Not until I’m thirty can I apply for the office of quaestor, if one can get dispensation on the grounds of age because of one’s own or one’s family’s merits. I know perfectly well that I’ll be a bad officer and a wretched official because I’ve no real interest in such activities.”
“While I’ve been lying here, I’ve been thinking that perhaps it’s not all that clever to get one’s limbs broken for a moment of glory,” I admitted. “But what would you really like to do?”
“Rome already rules over the whole of the world,” said Lucius, “and is not seeking new conquests. The god Augustus sensibly limited the number of legions to twenty-five. Now the most important thing to do is to convert Rome’s crude habits to those of Greek civilization. Books, poetry, drama, music and dance are more important than the blood-drenched performances at the amphitheater.”
“Don’t take away the races,” I said. “At least one can see fine horses there.”
“Gambling, promiscuity and shameless orgies,” said Lucius gloomily. “If I try to get a symposium going to talk in Greek in the way the old philosophers did, it always ends up with dirty stories and a drunken orgy. In Rome it’s impossible to find a society interested in good music and song or which would appreciate classical drama more than adventure stories and dirty jokes. Most of all I’d like to go and study in Athens or Rhodes, but my father won’t let me. According to him Greek culture has only an effeminate effect on the manly virtues of
Roman youth. Just as if there were nothing left of the earlier Roman virtues except hollow pretense and pomp and ceremony.”
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