They were slaughtered by the barbarians, torn to pieces in the forests by wild beasts, and perished in the desert from hunger, tropical heat, chill blasts.
I have read in the pages of a contemporary how Proba, the wife of the Prefect of Rome, escaped at night in a boat with her two daughters, when Alaric and his Germans forced their entry into Rome.
Floating down the Tiber, the Roman women saw the flames devouring the eternal city....
It was the end of the world...."
The German opened his rucksack, and extracted from the very bottom of it a bulging notebook with a rubbed leather binding, the leaves of which he turned over in silence for a short time, smiling discreetly.
"There," he said, going over to Katya's side, "this passage from Ammianus Marcellinus will give you a better idea of what the Romans were like before their downfall:
" 'Their long robes of silk and purple fluttered in the wind and afforded glimpses of rich tunics embroidered with the likeness of various animals.
Accompanied by enormous suites, they thundered at a breakneck speed in their covered chariots, shaking the homes and roads.
When a patrician visited the baths, which were as a rule attached to shops, eating houses and pleasure gardens, he would demand in imperious tones that everything be given up to his exclusive use.
On emerging from the bath he donned jewelled rings and buckles, and a sumptuous gown whose folds would have sufficed for a dozen men.
On top of this came all sorts of attire conducive to his self-esteem. And he never failed to assume a pompous bearing, such as would not have been tolerated even in the great Marcellus, the conqueror of Syracuse.
He actually ventured to make occasional audacious sallies with a huge suite of servants, cooks, proteges, and loathsomely disfigured eunuchs, to his Italian estates, where he indulged in shooting wild fowl and hunting the hare.
On those rare occasions when, some sultry noontide, he ventured to cross the lake of Lucrin in his gilded barge, he would afterwards compare his journey to the campaigns of Caesar and Alexander.
If a fly blundered through the silken curtains sheltering his deck, or a stray sunbeam penetrated their folds, he would bemoan his bad luck, regretting he had not been born in some land of eternal, Cymric gloom.
Parasites and flatterers, ready to applaud every word uttered by their host, were the favourite guests of a great man.
They surveyed with ecstatic admiration the marble pillars and mosaic floors of the rooms.
Fish and fowl of extraordinary size evoked general astonishment.
Scales were brought in to demonstrate their weight, and while the more soberminded guests turned aside from such spectacles, the parasites clamoured for the recording of such miracles by lawyers....' "
"Yes," said the German, closing his notebook, "sic transit... these people were later forced to wander about the roads and the ruins of cities, in search of food.
And the barbarians rolled on in great waves from the east, looting and laying waste.
By fifty years or so there was not a trace of the Roman Empire left.
Great Rome was overgrown with grass, goats pastured in the abandoned court-yards.
Europe was plunged in darkness for almost seven centuries.
And all this because Christianity could destroy, but had not conceived the idea of the organization of labour.
There is not a word about labour in the Commandments.
They are intended for men who neither sow nor reap, for whom slaves sowed and reaped.
Christianity became the religion of emperors and conquerors.
Labour remained unorganized and outside the moral code.
The religion of labour is bringing new barbarians into the world, to destroy a second Rome.
Have you read Spengler?
He's a Roman from head to toe, but he is right in considering that the sun has set for his Europe.
But for us it is rising.
He cannot take the world proletariat into the tomb.
The dying, swan is said to sing, and the bourgeoisie forced Spengler to utter their own swan song. He was their idealistic trump card.
The fangs of Christianity are rotting away.
Ours are of steel.... We are countering the idea of Christianity with the socialist organization of labour.... We are being made to fight the Bolsheviks.
But d'you think we don't understand who it is that is making us take up arms, and against whom we are being made to take up arms?
Oh, we understand much more than people think.... We used to despise the Russians.
Now we are beginning to admire and respect them...."
The train tore past a big village with a long-drawn whistle: well-built huts with iron roofs, long haystacks, fenced orchards, shop signs, flashed by.
A peasant in an unbelted soldier's tunic and a sheepskin cap was driving along the dusty road beside the train.
His legs straddled, he stood in the small cart, the ends of the reins twisted in his hand.
The big, sleek horse galloped along, trying to overtake the train.
The peasant turned towards the windows of the carriages and shouted something with a generous display of white teeth.
"That's Gulyai-Polye," said the German. "It's a very rich village."
Katya, who had made the mistake of not getting into a through train, had to change several times. The bustle, the waiting on platforms, the stream of new faces, the steppe, of a vastness she had never before seen, unfolding itself slowly past the window of the compartment, all distracted her from her sad thoughts.
The German had got off long ago, with a hearty handshake in farewell.
This man had been firm in his conviction of the logic of events, and seemed to have defined with precision the extent of his own participation in them.
His optimism astonished and disquieted Katya.
That which everybody considered ruin, horror, chaos, was for him the long-awaited beginning of a new era.