The Eaves-Drip

by Lactantius, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

She came up my stair in the rain with a fleece over her head, and since in that season nobody climbed my stair at all, except the cooper's boy with the rent and the cooper himself when the boy had failed, I took her at first for a third messenger of the same embassy, and had my excuse half composed before she put the fleece down on my bench and I saw that it was not a bill but a sample.

"They say you write Latin," she said, in the Greek of the lower town, which drops its breathings as a tired porter drops his load.

I admitted it. I had been brought from Africa to Nicomedia at the Augustus's own charge to write it and to teach it, and I had written it with great industry and taught it to almost no one, for the sons of the Bithynians, who will pay a sophist his weight in silver to make them sound like Demosthenes, saw little profit in learning to sound like Cicero in a city that has never heard of him. I had not been dismissed. Nobody dismisses a professor whom nobody attends; he is permitted to lapse, like a lease, and the cooper downstairs had been the first to notice it.

"Then I want a speech," she said. "For the judge. In Latin."

Her name was Ammia. She was a widow, she washed and combed wool for the weavers by the harbour, and she had a neighbour, one Glykon, a maker of roof-tiles, who in the summer had raised his house by a storey and given it a new roof of his own manufacture, so that its eaves, which had formerly shed the winter into the lane, now shed it into her courtyard, where her fleeces lay drying on hurdles.

"Show me," I said, for I had been a rhetorician too long to take a narration on trust, and besides, my room was cold.

---

It is a short walk from the cooper's to the lower town, and it was a long one that day, because the rain, having found the hill, wished to go down it by the same streets as ourselves. Ammia walked before me with the fleece on her head again, and I behind with my cloak over mine, and in that order we passed the place on the rise where, until the Terminalia of that year, there had been a church, and where there was now a level of rubble on which some enterprising person had begun to grow cabbages. She did not look at it. I observed that she did not look at it, and that she did not look at it in the particular way of a person who has decided not to, which is quite different from the way of a person who has not noticed; and I put the observation away, as one puts away a coin of doubtful issue, to be examined later by a better light.

Her courtyard was perhaps eight paces by six, beaten earth, with a well-head at one end and a lean-to at the other where the combs hung. On the left rose the new wall of Glykon's upper storey, fresh brick, and along its top the red tiles ran out over her yard by the breadth of a hand, so that from every channel between them a thread of water came down, and the threads stood in a row, as straight as the strings of a lyre and much less agreeable. Beneath them, in the earth, was a line of little pits, each the size of a thumb's end and each exactly under its thread, so that the yard had acquired, in four months, a gutter that nobody had dug.

"Here," she said, and lifted a fleece from the nearest hurdle, and held it to the light.

It had been white. It was white still, except where the drip had caught it, and there it was marked with grey spots, each with a darker rim, as if a careless scribe had flicked his pen across it. I asked why rainwater should stain wool. She said it was the new tiles, which were not yet weathered, and the soot of Glykon's kiln, which lay on them, and the grit that came down with both; and that a weaver would pay a third less for a fleece so spotted, and the weavers by the harbour had already begun to say so.

I stood under her eaves, or rather under his, and let the drip fall on my shoulder, and I thought of the poet who denied that the gods have any care for us, and who was nonetheless the most attentive man who ever lived to the small things of the world: who saw that the ring on a finger thins with years of wearing, and the ploughshare wastes in the soil, and the falling of the drip hollows the stone. He meant it as a proof that all things are made of bodies too small to see. I have always thought it a better proof of something else, namely that what is small and constant is not therefore light; but there was no one in that courtyard to dispute it with, and so I asked her instead whether she had ever, by word or writing or long silence, granted Glykon the right to discharge his water upon her land.

She looked at me as one looks at a physician who asks whether one has ever consented to a fever.

"Then you have the law," I said. "It is called stillicidium. The right of the drip. He cannot have it unless you give it him, and you have not given it."

She repeated the word. It came out of her mouth with the accent on the wrong syllable and a Bithynian s at the front of it like a hiss through a gap in the teeth; and I laughed, for the first time that winter, and she did not laugh, but she said it again, and the second time it was nearer.

---

We settled the fee on the stair, as lawyers do. Three fleeces, unspotted, delivered when the case was heard. I would have taken two. I said three, because a man who names a low price for his eloquence teaches his client to value it low, and a client who values the speech low will deliver it badly; and also, I confess, because the cooper was owed for two months.

I wrote it that night and the two nights after, by a lamp whose oil I could not afford, at the same bench where, in the hours when no pupil came, I was writing another book, a long one, against the philosophers and the priests, which I kept under the bed in a box that had once held figs. I put the fig-box on the floor and the speech on the bench, and I wrote the speech as if it had been for the Senate.

I will not pretend that I did not enjoy it. A man who has been denied an audience for two years discovers, when an audience of one is offered him, that his periods have grown long in the dark, like the roots of a plant in a cellar, and want only a little light to fling themselves out. I gave her an exordium that began with modesty and ended with a blow: Si qua umquam mulier, iudex, de re parva magno animo dixit, ego ea sum. De stillicidio dicam; quod quam leve sit, vides; quam grave, ego sentio. If ever a woman spoke with a great heart of a small matter, it is I. I shall speak of a drip: how light it is, you see; how heavy, I feel. I gave her a narration in which Glykon's roof rose against the sky like the tower of Babel, though I did not call it that, the judge being a Pannonian of the old religion who would not have known the reference and would have resented it if he had. I gave her the law, with the Twelve Tables behind it and the jurists in front. I gave her a peroration on the rights of the small, how the law exists for the sake of those who have nothing else, and how a city in which the man with the higher roof may rain upon the man with the lower is a city in which justice has gone up into the hills again, as the poets say she did when the age of silver came in, before she left the earth altogether.

I read it over on the third night and found it good, and I want that set down plainly, so that what follows is not mistaken for the complaint of a man whose work was bad. It was the best thing I wrote that year, and that year I wrote a great deal.

---

She could not read. I had known it and had not thought about it, as one knows that a ship must be launched and does not think, while carving the figurehead, of the slipway. So the speech went into her by the ear, a period at a time, in her courtyard, because she could not leave the wool and I had nothing to leave.

It was the strangest school I ever kept. She sat on an upturned basket with a comb in each hand, drawing the fleece out between them in long pale strokes, and I stood by the well-head with the tablets and gave her a clause, and she gave it back, and the combs went on. She did not know what the words meant, at first, and I did not tell her all of them, for a pupil who is told the meaning too early begins to paraphrase. I gave her the sounds, the length of the vowels, the place where the voice must rise and the place where it must wait; and she took them as she took the wool, in strokes, without hurry and without loss. By the fourth day she had the exordium. By the seventh she had the narration and half the law. The sons of the Bithynians, whom I had once taught, could not have done it in a month, and they could read.

On the eighth day, at the point in the peroration where justice goes up into the hills, she stopped combing and asked me what iustitia was.

I told her it was the virtue that gives each his own.

"And who gives it to the one who has nothing?" she said, and took up the combs again, and did not wait for an answer, and went on with the peroration from where she had left it, rising where it rose and waiting where it waited; and I, who had an answer, and a long one, in the fig-box under my bed, stood by the well-head and found that it would not come up out of the box.

We ate together that day, bread and a little oil, under the lean-to, because the rain had come on harder and she could not, she said, send a man home wet who had done so much for nothing yet. Before she broke the bread she held it a moment in both hands, low, at the height of her knees, where a person sitting at a table across from her might not have seen it; and then she broke it, and gave me half. And I took the coin I had put away on the first day out of the place where I had put it, and looked at it by that better light, and saw what it was, and put it back, because she had not offered it to me, and a thing shown under the table is not shown.

---

Since the spring, since the second fire in the palace and the inquiries that followed it, there had stood in every court of Nicomedia, before every tribunal and in every judge's chamber, a small altar with a brazier and a box of incense, so that whoever came to plead might sacrifice first and only then be heard. I had known this the whole time. I had known it on the stair when we settled the fee and at the bench when I wrote the exordium and by the well-head every day for eight days. I had known it as one knows the day of one's own death, perfectly, and in a part of the mind that is never consulted.

On the evening before the hearing I said to her, as she put the combs away: "You know what stands before the bench."

"I know what stands there," she said.

And she asked me, since I was going, to take her through the peroration once more, because she was not sure of the place where the voice waited; and I took her through it; and she was sure of it.

I walked home in the dark and did not sleep, and in the hours before dawn, at the bench, with the fig-box on the floor, I composed another speech, which was not in Latin and was for an audience of one, and which I am more ashamed of than of anything I have ever written, because it was very good. I assembled for it the authorities, as I do: that a grain of resin is not a god, nor the coal it falls on, nor the bronze of the dish, nor the clerk who holds the box, and that he who knows this knows that to throw it is to throw nothing; that the Maker who set the eye in the head to look outward and upward sees the hand and also the heart that moves it, and is not deceived by the one about the other; that even the philosophers allowed the wise man to bow to the custom of the city while he kept his own opinion; that a drip is a small thing, and a pinch of incense smaller, and that a just God, who is angry at wickedness as a good father is angry, is not angry at a widow for wishing to keep her wool white. I had it, by dawn, in perfect order. I could have delivered it to a council.

---

The court sat in the old basilica by the harbour, in an aisle partitioned off with curtains, for the small matters. The judge was the Pannonian, a heavy man with a cold, who had been given the hearing of cases too small for the governor and too numerous for anyone else, and who bore it with the patience of a man counting the hours to his dinner. Before his chair, at the edge of the curtain, stood the altar: a stone the height of a man's hip, with a bronze dish on it and coals in the dish, and beside it a clerk, a boy of sixteen with ink on his thumb, holding the incense in a little wooden box with a sliding lid.

Glykon was called to the altar first, for the Pannonian liked to know, before he troubled to hear a plaintiff, whether the defendant meant to answer at all. He was a cheerful person with burnt forearms. He took a pinch from the clerk's box without looking at it, as one takes salt, threw it on the coals while turning to say something to his advocate, and stepped up to the bench, and the smoke went up behind him, sweet and grey, and hung under the roof of the aisle, and nobody looked at it but me.

Then the clerk turned to Ammia and slid back the lid of the box.

I had my speech ready. Not the Latin one; the other. I had it by heart, every period, and I stood a pace behind her with my mouth open on the first word of it, and she put her hand into the box.

She took a pinch, as Glykon had. She held it between her finger and thumb, over the box, for the space in which a voice rises and then waits. Then she opened her fingers, and the grains ran back into the box, every one, and she dusted her fingertips lightly against each other over the box, so that not a grain should be lost to the floor or given to the coals; and she nodded to the clerk, as one nods to a shopman when one has decided against the purchase, and stood back.

The clerk looked at the judge. The judge blew his nose.

"The woman will not be heard," he said, in Latin, to nobody, and then in Greek, to the clerk; and the clerk wrote it down, and slid the lid shut, and the case was over, for a plaintiff who may not plead has no case, and a defendant with no case against him has won it. Glykon looked surprised, and then pleased, and then, which I record in his favour, a little ashamed; and he went out by the curtain with his advocate, and the next matter came in, a dispute about a donkey.

My own speech was in my mouth still. I closed my mouth on it. I have not opened it since.

---

The three fleeces came up my stair the next afternoon, on the head of the cooper's boy, who had met her in the street and been given an obol to carry them. I unrolled them on the bench. They were the spotted ones. Each had the grey marks, with the darker rim, in a line, as the drip had laid them; She had considered the speech delivered.

I went down to the lower town to return them, which is to say I went down to the lower town, and I did not return them. I stood at the gate of her courtyard in the rain and did not go in. She was on the upturned basket under the lean-to with a comb in each hand, and under Glykon's eaves, where the line of pits had been, she had set out a row of earthen basins, one under every thread, and the threads were falling into them with a sound like a slow abacus. As the basins filled she would rise and empty them into the vat for the dark dyes, which is better served by rain than by the well, whatever soot comes down with it, and sit down, and take up the combs; and as she combed, under her breath, to the rhythm of the strokes, she was saying the exordium. Si qua umquam mulier, iudex. She had the accent on the right syllable now. She rose where it rose and waited where it waited, and the drip kept time.

I carried the fleeces home. The fig-box was on the floor where I had left it, and the book in it was open at the page where, some weeks before, I had written that boys and delicate women overcome their torturers in silence, and that the executioners grow tired before the patience of the condemned does; and I had meant, when I wrote it, the rack and the hook and the fire, for those were the instruments I had heard of.

I did not alter the sentence. I laid the spotted fleeces on the floor beneath the bench, for the boards were cold, and set my feet upon them, and took up the pen.

---

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem tertium decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (20 October 2026), ā Lactantiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Lactantius, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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