d you, the pleasures that are within his
gift will have a finer edge for you than those of the Colosseum and
the Circus Maximus."

As Gellius droned on about some of the niceties of Ovid's language,
fragmentary sentences of this letter recurred to Paulus and he
wondered what his father's friend would think of him could he
accurately read his desires for pleasure. Certainly the shows of the
Amphitheatre seemed remote enough here under the cool, grey branches,
tipped with early green, of the Attic beech tree, but scarcely, after
all, more remote than they often seemed in Rome itself to a youth
who found virile recreation by the sea at Ostia or in following the
Anio over the hills of Tibur. No, he had not flung away from Rome
to escape in the back waters of a smaller town the noisy vulgarities
of the metropolis. Nor was he one of those who confused the contests
of the Circus with the creative struggles of the Forum. His
abstinence from political life was due to temperament rather than
conviction, nature having shaped him for active citizenship in a
world dissociated from public insignia. It was in this world that
he found himself at twenty-five ill at ease. Without genius, his
slender vein of talent was yet of pure gold. There was no danger of
his overrating his own poetry. He saw it as it was, of the day and
hour, wearing no immortal grace of thought or language. But in it
he was at his best, more honest and more whole-hearted than he could
be in any public service. This seemed to him, quite simply, to
constitute a reason for being such a poet as he was.

He belonged to an ancient family, which had furnished a consul in
the first Punic War, had left distinguished dead on the field of
Cannae and had borne on its roll the conqueror of Macedonia. AEmilius
Paulus Macedonicus had rendered Rome the further and signal service
of a public life as spotless as it was brilliant, and something of
this statesman's scrupulous integrity had passed to the youngest son
of the house, leading him to discriminate in his world also between
shadows and realities. To Paulus the happiest age in the world's
history was the age of Pericles, when the wedlock of life and learning
issued in universal power. In Rome he would have been glad to have
lived in the last years of the Republic, or under Augustus, when
Lucretius and Catullus, Virgil and Horace, by submitting themselves
in pupilage to the Greeks, became masters of new thoughts and new
emoti