These
facts have repeatedly been proved by volunteer investigators and
are not to be gainsaid.
I repeat that there has been too much of this. If the craze for
smashing all our romantic fixtures persists, after a while we shall
have no glorious traditions left with which to fire the youthful
heart at high-school commencements. But in the interests of truth,
and also because I made the discovery myself, I feel it to be my
solemn duty to expose the Roman sentry, stationed at the gate of
Pompeii looking toward the sea, who died because he would not quit
his post without orders and had no orders to quit.
Until now this party has stood the acid test of centuries. Everybody
who ever wrote about the fall of Pompeii, from Plutarch and Pliny
the Younger clear down to Bulwer Lytton and Burton Holmes, had
something to say about him. The lines on this subject by the Greek
poet Laryngitis are familiar to all lovers of that great master
of classic verse, and I shall not undertake to quote from them here.
Suffice it to say that the Roman sentry, perishing at his post,
has ever been a favorite subject for historic and romantic writers.
I myself often read of him - how on that dread day when the devil's
stew came to a boil and spewed over the sides of Vesuvius, and
death and destruction poured down to blight the land, he, typifying
fortitude and discipline and unfaltering devotion, stood firm and
stayed fast while all about him chaos reigned and fathers forgot
their children and husbands forgot their wives, and vice versa,
though probably not to the same extent; and how finally the drifting
ashes and the choking dust fell thicker upon him and mounted higher
about him, until he died and in time turned to ashes himself,
leaving only a void in the solidified slag.
