The Prometheus Deception by Robert Ludlum Read Free Book Online Page A

perfect flower borders of an institution that could pay lavishly for aesthetic incidentals. The architecture was the brick-and-ivy, collegiate-Gothic style typical of so much university construction from the twenties. From a distance, it might have passed for one of the ancient colleges of Cambridge or Oxford—if the college was taken out of those shabby, light-industrial towns and placed in the middle of Arcadia. It was a sheltered, secure, conservative establishment, a place to which America’s richest and most powerful families had no anxieties about sending their impressionable scions. The campus convenience stores and eateries did a brisk business in latté and focaccia. Even during the late sixties, the college remained, as its then-president had once famously joked, a “hotbed of rest.”
    â€œJonas Barrett,” to his own surprise, turned out to be a gifted lecturer, his courses far more popular than the subjects he taught would normally have justified. Some of the students were bright, and almost all of them more studious and better behaved than he’d ever been in his own college days. One of his faculty colleagues, a wry, Brooklyn-bred physicist who used to teach at the City College of New York, had observed to him, shortly after he’d settled in, that the place made you feel like an eighteenth-century live-in tutor, responsible for educating the children of an English lord. You lived amid splendor, but it wasn’t exactly yours.
    Still, Waller had told the truth: this was a good life.
    Now Jonas Barrett looked out over a packed auditorium, at a hundred expectant faces. He’d been amused when the Campus Confidential had called him, after only his first year of teaching at Woodbridge, an “icily charismatic lecturer, more Professor Kingsfield than Mr. Chips,” and remarked on his “stone-faced, slyly ironic visage.” Whatever the reasons, his course on Byzantium was among the most popular classes in the history department.
    He glanced at his watch: it was time to wrap up the lecture and gesture toward the next. “The Roman Empire had been the most astonishing political achievement in human history, and the question that has haunted so many thinkers is, of course, why it fell,” he intoned in a high professorial manner laced with a tincture of irony. “You all know the sad tale. The light of civilization flickered and dimmed. The barbarians at the gate. The destruction of humanity’s best hope, right?” There was murmured assent. “Horseshit!” he exclaimed suddenly, and a surprised titter was followed by a sudden hush. “Pardon my Macedonian.” He looked around the lecture hall, his arched-brow expression challenging. “The Romans, so called, lost their claim to the moral high ground way before they lost their claim to empire. It was the Romans who avenged an early set-to with the Goths by taking Goth children they’d seized as hostages, marching them into the public squares of dozens of towns, then slaughtering them one by one. Slowly and painfully. As far as sheer calculated bloodthirstiness, nothing the Goths ever did could compare. The western Roman Empire was an arena of slavery and bloodsport. By contrast, the eastern Roman Empire was far more benign, and it survived the so-called fall of the Roman Empire. ‘Byzantium’ is only what the Westerners called it—the Byzantines always knew themselves as the true Roman Empire, and they safeguarded the scholarship and the humane values we cherish today. The west succumbed not to enemies from without, but rot from within—this much is true. And so civilization didn’t flicker and dim. It just moved east.” A pause. “You can come by and pick up your papers now. And enjoy your weekend, as much as you deem wise. Just remember Petronius: Moderation in all things. Including moderation.”
    *   *   *
    â€œProfessor Barrett?”