Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

He laughed. “I like it,” he replied. “I’ve even started to like her. A strange woman. Special, if you know what I mean. Educated. Intelligent. Accomplished. All the sort of things a woman would need if she was to keep Julien Barneuve. Permanently, that is.”

This said with an edge to his voice, a hardness as he put the print down. He had it framed and hung on the wall to act as a constant reminder to his wife of the difference between an ordinary woman and a special one. She tried to take it down, or move it, but every time he put it back again, and would comment on how much he was growing to like it. He said it many times.

A sought-after work, now, for those who collect French prints. Only six were ever drawn off the plate before Julia erased it for more dangerous work later on. And few of those found buyers. She sold little; the dealer who had previously taken her paintings was in Paris, and inaccessible. And initially no one else would stock her work. She was now unknown, after all. Most were too considerate, or too dishonest, to say why they refused her. It was only when one looked closely at her, studied her face, then stared at the ceiling and said, “I just don’t think I can sell cosmopolitan art at the moment, you see,” that she understood. For some reason, she never thought it would touch her; not there, not in her painting. She almost said, “But I’m not Jewish,” when she stopped, sensing that she had said those words too often already.

MANLIUS SET OUT the day after his discussion with Sophia and went north. He knew there was little time. Somewhere in Italy was Felix, spending money he did not have to raise an army that would never come; it would, in his imagination, march in an ordered fashion along the coast, then strike north, hurling itself against Euric’s army, raising the siege of Clermont. Felix would establish his family’s dominion over the whole of the province, the gentle balm of Roman life would return, and a peace of Augustan dimensions would fall over a contented land.

It was not to counter his friend and rival’s ambition that Manlius left. It was because he knew, as his friend should have known, that Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely. For any army of barbarians marching under the Roman standard would accomplish nothing except looting, and the wrath of Euric would be the greater for the attempt to block him. In trying to save everything, everything would be lost.

So Manlius reasoned, and in order to accomplish his aims he made haste, as much as the roads and baggage would allow. He rode on a donkey—or rather, he took a donkey with him so that he could transfer to it when they neared the Burgundian encampment. A little detail, but an important one nonetheless. He was going as a bishop, not as a politician or a landowner, and needed to make this clear.

For the first time he gave a task to his adopted son when he left; it was time that his family assisted him, he considered. “Go into Vaison, Syagrius. Keep watch on the mood of the people there,” he said. “Do nothing but listen; find out who is the most afraid, who is most on my side. I will need this information when I return.”

Syagrius nodded eagerly; he had been waiting for such a commission, was desperate to show his worth. But Manlius took no leave of him as a father should of a son. Instead, he turned, mounted his horse, and began talking to the estate manager. Then he wheeled the beast around and rode off.

He talked little on the way; there was no one he wished to talk to. Of the thirty people traveling with him, not one had enough to say to tempt him out of his silence. Going through a valley toward the end of a day, after a hard drive that lasted ten hours, he saw the sunset, framed between the body of the hill and a decayed fruit orchard, long abandoned. The noise of wasps and bees gorging themselves on the fruit that had fallen unwanted to the ground was so loud they could hear it a full half hour before they passed by.

A bittersweet reference to Hesiod would have begun an exchange with more cultivated travelers, the theme developing into a discussion of the idea of descent, from the age of gold into the brute age of iron. Could the process be reversed? Could the age of iron be made to give way to a new age of peace and prosperity? What a pleasure to have such a discussion, to swim in the comfort of shared ideas and shared memories, to prepare for the encounter to come. Manlius instead had to have the conversation in his head, and later wrote it down (in edited form) as what became ff23-25 of Olivier’s copy of The Dream of Scipio. He dwelt there on the divine and inevitability, a subtle (if inevitably sketchy) discussion of free will, pleased with himself for avoiding any reference whatsoever to the ponderous Christian contributions on the topic.

Are we fated or not? Can we individually alter what is to come? Are civilizations as a whole, mankind as a race, doomed to rise, then decline, from gold to silver to the brutality of iron? Was he—for this was the essence of the conversation he never had—fighting against the gods in trying to fend off disaster?

No, says Sophia. Polite but sure in her correctness, deriving the logic from Plato, but refined by near eight centuries of consideration into a form he would scarcely have recognized. You cannot change fate; even the gods (a reference here to Lucian, unspotted by Gersonides but picked up by Julien) are subject to the whim of Lachesis. She and her sister fates alone know what is to be, but they do not care.

The question is a false one, for the concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. There is no reward for good behavior, as the Christians suppose, no judge to decide. The more nearly our soul resembles the divine, the closer it is able to approach the model from which it was formed and which it ceased resembling when it became tainted by the material on falling to earth. Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. Faith means nothing, for we are too corrupted to apprehend the truth.

Rephrase the question, then: Can Manlius Hippomanes, trudging northward with his small entourage, reverse the decline and restore tranquillity to the land? Possibly not, nor does it matter. The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; success or failure is secondary. The good man, the philosopher—the terms to Manlius were the same—would strive to act rightly and discount the opinion of the world. Only other philosophers could judge a philosopher, for only they can grasp what lies beyond the world.

DID MANLIUS DISPLAY a sense of humor in the Dream, of a sort utterly undetectable in any of his other writings? Certainly, there was a touch of the whimsical about it that added to the difficulty of its comprehension. For his Scipio was modeled in form but not in nature on the more famous work written nearly half a millennium previously by Cicero; the modifications look backward and forward simultaneously, bringing the past of Rome’s golden age into association with a future that was dark and uncertain.

Cicero’s great work—much commented on for nearly two millennia—was a part of his Republica, a final survey of the problem of civic virtue conducted through the mouth of Scipio Africanus, the most noble Roman of them all. In it the younger Scipio dreams he meets the older one and is shown the marvels of the universe, and has explained to him the way in which the actions of great men in society are part of the universal harmony, required by the divine.