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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Imperial Purple, by Edgar Saltus
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Imperial Purple
+
+Author: Edgar Saltus
+
+Posting Date: July 9, 2009 [EBook #4250]
+Release Date: July, 2003
+First Posted: December 19, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IMPERIAL PURPLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IMPERIAL PURPLE
+
+
+By
+
+EDGAR SALTUS
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    I. That Woman
+   II. Conjectural Rome
+  III. Fabulous Fields
+   IV. The Pursuit of the Impossible
+    V. Nero
+   VI. The House of Flavia
+  VII. The Poison in the Purple
+ VIII. Faustine
+   IX. The Agony
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THAT WOMAN
+
+
+When the murder was done and the heralds shouted through the thick
+streets the passing of Caesar, it was the passing of the republic they
+announced, the foundation of Imperial Rome.
+
+There was a hush, then a riot which frightened a senate that frightened
+the world. Caesar was adored. A man who could give millions away and
+sup on dry bread was apt to conquer, not provinces alone, but hearts.
+Besides, he had begun well and his people had done their best. The
+House of Julia, to which he belonged, descended, he declared, from
+Venus. The ancestry was less legendary than typical. Cinna drafted a
+law giving him the right to marry as often as he chose. His mistresses
+were queens. After the episodes in Gaul, when he entered Rome his
+legions warned the citizens to have an eye on their wives. At seventeen
+he fascinated pirates. A shipload of the latter had caught him and
+demanded twenty talents ransom. "Too little," said the lad; "I will
+give you fifty, and impale you too," which he did, jesting with them
+meanwhile, reciting verses of his own composition, calling them
+barbarians when they did not applaud, ordering them to be quiet when he
+wished to sleep, captivating them by the effrontery of his assurance,
+and, the ransom paid, slaughtering them as he had promised.
+
+Tall, slender, not handsome, but superb and therewith so perfectly sent
+out that Cicero mistook him for a fop from whom the republic had
+nothing to fear; splendidly lavish, exquisitely gracious, he was born
+to charm, and his charm was such that it still subsists. Cato alone was
+unenthralled. But Cato was never pleased; he laughed but once, and all
+Rome turned out to see him; he belonged to an earlier day, to an
+austerer, perhaps to a better one, and it may be that in "that woman,"
+as he called Caesar, his clearer vision discerned beneath the plumage
+of the peacock, the beak and talons of the bird of prey. For they were
+there, and needed only a vote of the senate to batten on nations of
+which the senate had never heard. Loan him an army, and "that woman"
+was to give geography such a twist that today whoso says Caesar says
+history.
+
+Was it this that Cato saw, or may it be that one of the oracles which
+had not ceased to speak had told him of that coming night when he was
+to take his own life, fearful lest "that woman" should overwhelm him
+with the magnificence of his forgiveness? Cato walks through history,
+as he walked through the Forum, bare of foot--too severe to be simple,
+too obstinate to be generous--the image of ancient Rome.
+
+In Caesar there was nothing of this. He was wholly modern; dissolute
+enough for any epoch, but possessed of virtues that his contemporaries
+could not spell. A slave tried to poison him. Suetonius says he merely
+put the slave to death. The "merely" is to the point. Cato would have
+tortured him first. After Pharsalus he forgave everyone. When severe,
+it was to himself. It is true he turned over two million people into so
+many dead flies, their legs in the air, creating, as Tacitus has it, a
+solitude which he described as Peace; but what antitheses may not be
+expected in a man who, before the first century was begun, divined the
+fifth, and who in the Suevians--that terrible people beside whom no
+nation could live--foresaw Attila!
+
+Save in battle his health was poor. He was epileptic, his strength
+undermined by incessant debauches; yet let a nation fancying him months
+away put on insurgent airs, and on that nation he descended as the
+thunder does. In his campaigns time and again he overtook his own
+messengers. A phantom in a ballad was not swifter than he.
+Simultaneously his sword flashed in Germany, on the banks of the
+Adriatic, in that Ultima Thule where the Britons lived. From the depths
+of Gaul he dominated Rome, and therewith he was penetrating
+impenetrable forests, trailing legions as a torch trails smoke,
+erecting walls that a nation could not cross, turning soldiers into
+marines, infantry into cavalry, building roads that are roads to-day,
+fighting with one hand and writing an epic with the other, dictating
+love-letters, chronicles, dramas; finding time to make a collection of
+witticisms; overturning thrones while he decorated Greece; mingling
+initiate into orgies of the Druids, and, as the cymbals clashed,
+coquetting with those terrible virgins who awoke the tempest; not only
+conquering, but captivating, transforming barbarians into soldiers and
+those soldiers into senators, submitting three hundred nations and
+ransacking Britannia for pearls for his mistresses' ears.
+
+Each epoch has its secret, and each epoch-maker his own. Caesar's
+secret lay in the power he had of projecting a soul into the ranks of
+an army, of making legions and their leader one. Disobedience only he
+punished; anything else he forgave. After a victory his soldiery did
+what they liked. He gave them arms, slaves to burnish them, women,
+feasts, sleep. They were his comrades; he called them so; he wept at
+the death of any of them, and when they were frightened, as they were
+in Gaul before they met the Germans, and in Africa before they
+encountered Juba, Caesar frightened them still more. He permitted no
+questions, no making of wills. The cowards could hide where they liked;
+his old guard, the Tenth, would do the work alone; or, threat still
+more sinister, he would command a retreat. Ah, that, never! Fanaticism
+returned, the legions begged to be punished.
+
+Michelet says he would like to have seen him crossing Gaul, bareheaded,
+in the rain. It would have been as interesting, perhaps, to have
+watched him beneath the shade of the velarium pleading the cause of
+Masintha against the Numidian king. Before him was a crowd that covered
+not the Forum alone, but the steps of the adjacent temples, the roofs
+of the basilicas, the arches of Janus, one that extended remotely to
+the black walls of the Curia Hostilia beyond. And there, on the
+rostrum, a musician behind him supplying the la from a flute, the air
+filled with gold motes, Caesar, his toga becomingly adjusted, a
+jewelled hand extended, opened for the defence. Presently, when through
+the exercise of that art of his which Cicero pronounced incomparable,
+he felt that the sympathy of the audience was won, it would have been
+interesting, indeed, to have heard him argue point after
+point--clearly, brilliantly, wittily; insulting the plaintiff in poetic
+terms; consigning him gracefully to the infernal regions; accentuating
+a fictitious and harmonious anger; drying his forehead without
+disarranging his hair; suffocating with the emotions he evoked;
+displaying real tears, and with them a knowledge, not only of law,
+rhetoric, philosophy, but of geometry, astronomy, ethics and the fine
+arts; blinding his hearers with the coruscations of his erudition;
+stirring them with his tongue, as with the point of a sword, until, as
+though abruptly possessed by an access of fury, he seized the plaintiff
+by the beard and sent him spinning like a leaf which the wind had
+caught.
+
+It would have bored no one either to have assisted at his triumph when
+he returned from Gaul, when he returned after Spain, after Pharsalus,
+when he returned from Cleopatra's arms.
+
+On that day the Via Sacra was curtained with silk. To the blare of
+twisted bugles there descended to it from the turning at the hill a
+troop of musicians garmented in leather tunics, bonneted with lions'
+heads. Behind them a hundred bulls, too fat to be troublesome, and
+decked for death, bellowed musingly at the sacrifants, who, naked to
+the waist, a long-handled hammer on the shoulder, maintained them with
+colored cords. To the rumble of wide wheels and the thunder of
+spectators the prodigious booty passed, and with it triumphs of war,
+vistas of conquered countries, pictures of battles, lists of the
+vanquished, symbols of cities that no longer were; a stretch of ivory
+on which shone three words, each beginning with a V; images of gods
+disturbed, the Rhine, the Rhone, the captive Ocean in massive gold; the
+glitter of three thousand crowns offered to the dictator by the army
+and allies of Rome. Then came the standards of the republic, a swarm of
+eagles, the size of pigeons, in polished silver upheld by lances which
+ensigns bore, preceding the six hundred senators who marched in a body,
+their togas bordered with red, while to the din of incessant insults,
+interminable files of prisoners passed, their wrists chained to iron
+collars, which held their heads very straight, and to the rear a
+litter, in which crouched the Vercingetorix of Gaul, a great moody
+giant, his menacing eyes nearly hidden in the tangles of his tawny hair.
+
+When they had gone the street was alive with explosions of brass,
+aflame with the burning red cloaks of laureled lictors making way for
+the coming of Caesar. Four horses, harnessed abreast, their manes dyed,
+their forelocks puffed, drew a high and wonderfully jewelled car; and
+there, in the attributes and attitude of Jupiter Capitolinus, Caesar
+sat, blinking his tired eyes. His face and arms were painted vermilion;
+above the Tyrian purple of his toga, above the gold work and palms of
+his tunic, there oscillated a little ball in which there were charms
+against Envy. On his head a wreath concealed his increasing baldness;
+along his left arm the sceptre lay; behind him a boy admonished him
+noisily to remember he was man, while to the rear for miles and miles
+there rang the laugh of trumpets, the click of castanets, the shouts of
+dancers, the roar of the multitude, the tramp of legions, and the cry,
+caught up and repeated, "Io! Triomphe!"
+
+Presently, in the temple of the god of gods, side by side with the
+statue of Jupiter, Caesar found his own statue with "Caesar, demi-god,"
+at its base. The captive chiefs disappeared in the Tullianum, and a
+herald called, "They have lived!" Through the squares jesters
+circulated, polyglot and obscene; across the Tiber, in an artificial
+lake, the flotilla of Egypt fought against that of Tyr; in the
+amphitheatre there was a combat of soldiers, infantry against cavalry,
+one that indemnified those that had not seen the massacres in Thessaly
+and in Spain. There were public feasts, gifts to everyone. Tables were
+set in the Forum, in the circuses and theatres. Falernian circulated in
+amphorae, Chios in barrels. When the populace was gorged there were the
+red feathers to enable it to gorge again. Of the Rome of Romulus there
+was nothing left save the gaunt she-wolf, her wide lips curled at the
+descendants of her nursling.
+
+Later, when in slippered feet Caesar wandered through those lovely
+gardens of his that lay beyond the Tiber, it may be that he recalled a
+dream which had come to him as a lad; one which concerned the
+submission of his mother; one which had disturbed him until the
+sooth-sayers said: "The mother you saw is the earth, and you will be
+her master." And as the memory of the dream returned, perhaps with it
+came the memory of the hour when as simple quaestor he had wept at
+Gaddir before a statue that was there. Demi-god, yes; he was that.
+More, even; he was dictator, but the dream was unfulfilled. There were
+the depths of Hither Asia, the mysteries that lay beyond; there were
+the glimmering plains of the Caucasus; there were the Vistula and the
+Baltic; the diadems of Cyrus and of Alexander defying his ambition yet,
+and what were triumphs and divinity to one who would own the world!
+
+It was this that preoccupied him. The immensity of his successes seemed
+petty and Rome very small. Heretofore he had forgiven those who had
+opposed him. Presently his attitude changed, and so subtly that it was
+the more humiliating; it was not that he no longer forgave, he
+disdained to punish. His contempt was absolute. The senate made his
+office of pontifix maximus hereditary and accorded the title of
+Imperator to his heirs. He snubbed the senate and the honors that it
+brought. The senate was shocked. Composed of men whose fortunes he had
+made, the senate was not only shocked, its education in ingratitude was
+complete. Already there had been murmurs. Not content with disarranging
+the calendar, outlining an empire, drafting a code while planning fresh
+beauties, new theatres, bilingual libraries, larger temples, grander
+gods, Caesar was at work in the markets, in the kitchens of the
+gourmets, in the jewel-boxes of the virgins. Liberty, visibly, was
+taking flight. Besides, the power concentrated in him might be so
+pleasantly distributed. It was decided that Caesar was in the way. To
+put him out of it a pretext was necessary.
+
+One day the senate assembled at his command. They were to sign a decree
+creating him king. In order not to, Suetonius says, they killed him,
+wounding each other in the effort, for Caesar fought like the demon
+that he was, desisting only when he recognized Brutus, to whom, in
+Greek, he muttered a reproach, and, draping his toga that he might fall
+with decency, sank backward, his head covered, a few feet from the
+bronze wolf that stood, its ears pointed at the letters S. P. Q. R.
+which decorated a frieze of the Curia.
+
+Brutus turned to harangue the senate; it had fled. He went to the Forum
+to address the people; there was no one. Rome was strangely empty.
+Doors were barricaded, windows closed. Through the silent streets
+gladiators prowled. Night came, and with it whispering groups. The
+groups thickened, voices mounted. Caesar's will had been read. He had
+left his gardens to the people, a gift to every citizen, his wealth and
+power to his butchers. The body, which two slaves had removed, an arm
+hanging from the litter, had never been as powerfully alive. Caesar
+reigned then as never before. A mummer mouthed:
+
+    "I brought them life, they gave me death."
+
+And willingly would the mob have made Rome the funeral pyre of their
+idol. In the sky a comet appeared. It was his soul on its way to
+Olympus.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+CONJECTURAL ROME
+
+
+"I received Rome in brick; I shall leave it in marble," said Augustus,
+who was fond of fine phrases, a trick he had caught from Vergil. And
+when he looked from his home on the Palatine over the glitter of the
+Forum and the glare of the Capitol to the new and wonderful precinct
+which extended to the Field of Mars, there was a stretch of splendor
+which sanctioned the boast. The city then was very vast. The tourist
+might walk in it, as in the London of to-day, mile after mile, and at
+whatever point he placed himself, Rome still lay beyond; a Rome quite
+like London--one that was choked with mystery, with gold and curious
+crime.
+
+But it was not all marble. There were green terraces and porphyry
+porticoes that leaned to a river on which red galleys passed; there
+were theatres in which a multitude could jeer at an emperor, and arenas
+in which an emperor could watch a multitude die; there were bronze
+doors and garden roofs, glancing villas and temples that defied the
+sun; there were spacious streets, a Forum curtained with silk, the
+glint and evocations of triumphal war, the splendor of a host of gods,
+but it was not all marble; there were rents in the magnificence and
+tatters in the laticlave of state.
+
+In the Subura, where at night women sat in high chairs, ogling the
+passer with painted eyes, there was still plenty of brick; tall
+tenements, soiled linen, the odor of Whitechapel and St. Giles. The
+streets were noisy with match-peddlers, with vendors of cake and tripe
+and coke; there were touts there too, altars to unimportant divinities,
+lying Jews who dealt in old clothes, in obscene pictures and
+unmentionable wares; at the crossings there were thimbleriggers, clowns
+and jugglers, who made glass balls appear and disappear surprisingly;
+there were doorways decorated with curious invitations, gossipy barber
+shops, where, through the liberality of politicians, the scum of a
+great city was shaved, curled and painted free; and there were public
+houses, where vagabond slaves and sexless priests drank the mulled wine
+of Crete, supped on the flesh of beasts slaughtered in the arena, or
+watched the Syrian women twist to the click of castanets.
+
+Beyond were gray quadrangular buildings, the stomach of Rome, through
+which, each noon, ediles passed, verifying the prices, the weights and
+measures of the market men, examining the fish and meats, the enormous
+cauliflowers that came from the suburbs, Veronese carrots, Arician
+pears, stout thrushes, suckling pigs, eggs embedded in grass, oysters
+from Baiae, boxes of onions and garlic mixed, mountains of poppies,
+beans and fennel, destroying whatever had ceased to be fresh and taxing
+that which was.
+
+On the Via Sacra were the shops frequented by ladies; bazaars where
+silks and xylons were to be had, essences and unguents, travelling
+boxes of scented wood, switches of yellow hair, useful drugs such as
+hemlock, aconite, mandragora and cantharides; the last thing of Ovid's
+and the improper little novels that came from Greece.
+
+On the Appian Way, through green afternoons and pink arcades, fashion
+strolled. There wealth passed in its chariots, smart young men that
+smelt of cinnamon instead of war, nobles, matrons, cocottes.
+
+At the other end of the city, beyond the menagerie of the Pantheon, was
+the Field of Mars, an open-air gymnasium, where every form of exercise
+was to be had, even to that simple promenade in which the Romans
+delighted, and which in Caesar's camp so astonished the Verronians that
+they thought the promenaders crazy and offered to lead them to their
+tents. There was tennis for those who liked it; racquets, polo,
+football, quoits, wrestling, everything apt to induce perspiration and
+prepare for the hour when a gong of bronze announced the opening of the
+baths--those wonderful baths, where the Roman, his slaves about him,
+after passing through steam and water and the hands of the masseur, had
+every hair plucked from his arms, legs and armpits; his flesh rubbed
+down with nard, his limbs polished with pumice; and then, wrapped in a
+scarlet robe, lined with fur, was sent home in a litter. "Strike them
+in the face!" cried Caesar at Pharsalus, when the young patricians made
+their charge; and the young patricians, who cared more for their looks
+than they did for victory, turned and fled.
+
+It was to the Field of Mars that Agrippa came, to whom Rome owed the
+Pantheon and the demand for a law which should inhibit the private
+ownership of a masterpiece. There, too, his eunuchs about him, Mecaenas
+lounged, companioned by Varus, by Horace and the mime Bathylle, all of
+whom he was accustomed to invite to that lovely villa of his which
+overlooked the blue Sabinian hills, and where suppers were given such
+as those which Petronius has described so alertly and so well.
+
+In the hall like that of Mecaenas', one divided against itself, the
+upper half containing the couches and tables, the other reserved for
+the service and the entertainments that follow, the ceiling was met by
+columns, the walls hidden by panels of gems. On a frieze twelve
+pictures, surmounted by the signs of the zodiac, represented the dishes
+of the different months. Beneath the bronze beds and silver tables
+mosaics were set in imitation of food that had fallen and had not been
+swept away. And there, in white ungirdled tunics, the head and neck
+circled with coils of amaranth--the perfume of which in opening the
+pores neutralizes the fumes of wine--the guests lay, fanned by boys,
+whose curly hair they used for napkins. Under the supervision of
+butlers the courses were served on platters so large that they covered
+the tables; sows' breasts with Lybian truffles; dormice baked in
+poppies and honey, peacock-tongues flavored with cinnamon; oysters
+stewed in garum--a sauce made of the intestines of fish--sea-wolves
+from the Baltic; sturgeons from Rhodes; fig-peckers from Samos; African
+snails; pale beans in pink lard; and a yellow pig cooked after the
+Troan fashion, from which, when carved, hot sausages fell and live
+thrushes flew. Therewith was the mulsum, a cup made of white wine,
+nard, roses, absinthe and honey; the delicate sweet wines of Greece;
+and crusty Falernian of the year six hundred and thirty-two. As the
+cups circulated, choirs entered, chanting sedately the last erotic
+song; a clown danced on the top of a ladder, which he maintained
+upright as he danced, telling meanwhile untellable stories to the
+frieze; and host and guests, unvociferously, as good breeding dictates,
+chatted through the pauses of the service; discussed the disadvantages
+of death, the value of Noevian iambics, the disgrace of Ovid, banished
+because of Livia's eyes.
+
+Such was the Rome of Augustus. "Caesar," cried a mime to him one day,
+"do you know that it is important for you that the people should be
+interested in Bathylle and in myself?"
+
+The mime was right. The sovereign of Rome was not the Caesar, nor yet
+the aristocracy. The latter was dead. It had been banished by barbarian
+senators, by barbarian gods; it had died twice, at Pharsalus, at
+Philippi; it was the people that was sovereign, and it was important
+that that sovereign should be amused--flattered, too, and fed. For
+thirty years not a Roman of note had died in his bed; not one but had
+kept by him a slave who should kill him when his hour had come; anarchy
+had been continuous; but now Rome was at rest and its sovereign wished
+to laugh. Made up of every nation and every vice, the universe was
+ransacked for its entertainment. The mountain sent its lions, the
+desert giraffes; there were boas from the jungles, bulls from the
+plains, and hippopotami from the waters of the Nile. Into the arenas
+patricians descended; in the amphitheatre there were criminals from
+Gaul; in the Forum philosophers from Greece. On the stage, there were
+tragedies, pantomimes and farce; there were races in the circus, and in
+the sacred groves girls with the Orient in their eyes and slim waists
+that swayed to the crotals. For the thirst of the sovereign there were
+aqueducts, and for its hunger Africa, Egypt, Sicily contributed grain.
+Syria unveiled her altars, Persia the mystery and magnificence of her
+gods.
+
+Such was Rome. Augustus was less noteworthy; so unnecessary even that
+every student must regret Actium, Antony's defeat, the passing of
+Caesar's dream. For Antony was made for conquests; it was he who,
+fortune favoring, might have given the world to Rome. A splendid, an
+impudent bandit, first and foremost a soldier, calling himself a
+descendant of Hercules whom he resembled; hailed at Ephesus as Bacchus,
+in Egypt as Osiris; Asiatic in lavishness, and Teuton in his capacity
+for drink; vomiting in the open Forum, and making and unmaking kings;
+weaving with that viper of the Nile a romance which is history; passing
+initiate into the inimitable life, it would have been curious to have
+watched him that last night when the silence was stirred by the hum of
+harps, the cries of bacchantes bearing his tutelary god back to the
+Roman camp, while he said farewell to love, to empire and to life.
+
+Augustus resembled him not at all. He was a colorless monarch; an
+emperor in everything but dignity, a prince in everything but grace; a
+tactician, not a soldier; a superstitious braggart, afraid of nothing
+but danger; seducing women to learn their husband's secrets; exiling
+his daughter, not because she had lovers, but because she had other
+lovers than himself; exiling Ovid because of Livia, who in the end
+poisoned her prince, and adroitly, too; illiterate, blundering of
+speech, and coarse of manner--a hypocrite and a comedian in one--so
+guileful and yet so stupid that while a credulous moribund ordered the
+gods to be thanked that Augustus survived him, the people publicly
+applied to him an epithet which does not look well in print.
+
+After Philippi and the suicide of Brutus; after Actium and Antony's
+death, for the first time in ages, the gates of the Temple of Janus
+were closed. There was peace in the world; but it was the sword of
+Caesar, not of Augustus, that brought the insurgents to book. At each
+of the victories he was either asleep or ill. At the time of battle
+there was always some god warning him to be careful. The battle won, he
+was brave enough, considerate even. A father and son begged for mercy.
+He promised forgiveness to the son on condition that he killed his
+father. The son accepted and did the work; then he had the son
+despatched. A prisoner begged but for a grave. "The vultures will see
+to it," he answered. When at the head of Caesar's legions, he entered
+Rome to avenge the latter's death, he announced beforehand that he
+would imitate neither Caesar's moderation nor Sylla's cruelty. There
+would be only a few proscriptions, and a price--and what a price,
+liberty!--was placed on the heads of hundreds of senators and thousands
+of knights. And these people, who had more slaves than they knew by
+sight, slaves whom they tossed alive to fatten fish, slaves to whom
+they affected never to speak, and who were crucified did they so much
+as sneeze in their presence--at the feet of these slaves they rolled,
+imploring them not to deliver them up. Now and then a slave was
+merciful; Augustus never.
+
+Successes such as these made him ambitious. Having vanquished with the
+sword, he tried the pen. "You may grant the freedom of the city to your
+barbarians," said a wit to him one day, "but not to your solecisms."
+Undeterred he began a tragedy entitled "Ajax," and discovering his
+incompetence, gave it up. "And what has become of Ajax?" a parasite
+asked. "Ajax threw himself on a sponge," replied Augustus, whose
+father, it is to be regretted, did not do likewise. Nevertheless, it
+were pleasant to have assisted at his funeral.
+
+A couch of ivory and gold, ten feet high, draped with purple, stood for
+a week in the atrium of the palace. Within the couch, hidden from view,
+the body of the emperor lay, ravaged by poison. Above was a statue,
+recumbent, in wax, made after his image and dressed in imperial robes.
+Near by a little slave with a big fan protected the statue from flies.
+Each day physicians came, gazed at the closed wax mouth, and murmured,
+"He is worse." In the vestibule was a pot of burning ilex, and
+stretching out through the portals a branch of cypress warned the
+pontiffs from the contamination of the sight of death.
+
+At high noon on the seventh day the funeral crossed the city. First
+were the flaming torches; the statues of the House of Octavia; senators
+in blue; knights in scarlet; magistrates; lictors; the pick of the
+praetorian guard. Then, to the alternating choruses of boys and girls,
+the rotting body passed down the Sacred Way. Behind it Tiberius in a
+travelling-cloak, his hands unringed, marched meditating on the
+curiosities of life, while to the rear there straggled a troop of
+dancing satyrs, led by a mime dressed in resemblance of Augustus, whose
+defects he caricatured, whose vices he parodied and on whom the surging
+crowd closed in.
+
+On the Field of Mars the pyre had been erected, a great square
+structure of resinous wood, the interior filled with coke and sawdust,
+the exterior covered with illuminated cloths, on which, for base, a
+tower rose, three storeys high. Into the first storey flowers and
+perfumes were thrown, into the second the couch was raised, then a
+torch was applied.
+
+As the smoke ascended an eagle shot from the summit, circled a moment,
+and disappeared. For the sum of a million sesterces a senator swore
+that with the eagle he had seen the emperor's soul.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+FABULOUS FIELDS
+
+
+Mention Tiberius, and the name evokes a taciturn tyrant, devising in
+the crypts of a palace infamies so monstrous that to describe them new
+words were coined.
+
+In the Borghese collection Tiberius is rather good-looking than
+otherwise, not an Antinous certainly, but manifestly a dreamer; one
+whose eyes must have been almost feline in their abstraction, and in
+the corners of whose mouth you detect pride, no doubt, but melancholy
+as well. The pride was congenital, the melancholy was not.
+
+Under Tiberius there was quiet, a romancer wrote, and the phrase in its
+significance passed into legend. During the dozen or more years that he
+ruled in Rome, his common sense was obvious. The Tiber overflowed, the
+senate looked for a remedy in the Sibyline Books. Tiberius set some
+engineers to work. A citizen swore by Augustus and swore falsely. The
+senate sought to punish him, not for perjury but for sacrilege. It is
+for Augustus to punish, said Tiberius. The senate wanted to name a
+month after him. Tiberius declined. "Supposing I were the thirteenth
+Caesar, what would you do?" For years he reigned, popular and
+acclaimed, caring the while nothing for popularity and less for pomp.
+Sagacious, witty even, believing perhaps in little else than fate and
+mathematics, yet maintaining the institutions of the land, striving
+resolutely for the best, outwardly impassable and inwardly mobile, he
+was a man and his patience had bounds. There were conspirators in the
+atrium, there was death in the courtier's smile; and finding his
+favorites false, his life threatened, danger at every turn, his
+conception of rulership changed. Where moderation had been suddenly
+there gleamed the axe.
+
+Tacitus, always dramatic, states that at the time terror devastated the
+city. It so happened that under the republic there was a law against
+whomso diminished the majesty of the people. The republic was a god,
+one that had its temple, its priests, its altars. When the republic
+succumbed, its divinity passed to the emperor; he became Jupiter's
+peer, and, as such, possessed of a majesty which it was sacrilege to
+slight. Consulted on the subject, Tiberius replied that the law must be
+observed. Originally instituted in prevention of offences against the
+public good, it was found to change into a crime, a word, a gesture or
+a look. It was a crime to undress before a statue of Augustus, to
+mention his name in the latrinae, to carry a coin with his image into a
+lupanar. The punishment was death. Of the property of the accused, a
+third went to the informer, the rest to the state. Then abruptly terror
+stalked abroad. No one was safe except the obscure, and it was the
+obscure that accused. Once an accused accused his accuser; the latter
+went mad. There was but one refuge--the tomb. If the accused had time
+to kill himself before he was tried, his property was safe from seizure
+and his corpse from disgrace. Suicide became endemic in Rome. Never
+among the rich were orgies as frenetic as then. There was a breathless
+chase after delights, which the summons, "It is time to die," might at
+any moment interrupt.
+
+Tiberius meanwhile had gone from Rome. It was then his legend began. He
+was represented living at Capri in a collection of twelve villas, each
+of which was dedicated to a particular form of lust, and there with the
+paintings of Parrhasius for stimulant the satyr lounged. He was then an
+old man; his life had been passed in public, his conduct unreproved. If
+no one becomes suddenly base, it is rare for a man of seventy to become
+abruptly vile. "Whoso," Sakya Muni announced--"whoso discovers that
+grief comes from affection, will retire into the jungles and there
+remain." Tiberius had made the discovery. The jungles he selected were
+the gardens by the sea. And in those gardens, gossip represented him
+devising new forms of old vice. On the subject every doubt is
+permissible, and even otherwise, morality then existed in but one form,
+one which the entire nation observed, wholly, absolutely; that form was
+patriotism. Chastity was expected of the vestal, but of no one else.
+The matrons had certain traditions to maintain, certain appearances to
+preserve, but otherwise morality was unimagined and matrimony unpopular.
+
+When matrimony occurred, divorce was its natural consequence.
+Incompatibility was sufficient cause. Cicero, who has given it to
+history that the best women counted the years not numerically, but by
+their different husbands, obtained a divorce on the ground that his
+wife did not idolize him.
+
+Divorce was not obligatory. Matrimony was. According to a recent law
+whoso at twenty-five was not married, whoso, divorced or widowed, did
+not remarry, whoso, though married, was without children, was regarded
+as a public enemy and declared incapable of inheriting or of serving
+the state. To this law, one of Augustus' stupidities which presently
+fell into disuse, only a technical observance was paid. Men married
+just enough to gain a position or inherit a legacy; next day they got a
+divorce. At the moment of need a child was adopted; the moment passed,
+the child was disowned. But if the law had little value, at least it
+shows the condition of things. Moreover, if in that condition Tiberius
+participated, it was not because he did not differ from other men.
+
+"Ho sempre amato la solitaria vita," Petrarch, referring to himself,
+declared, and Tiberius might have said the same thing. He was in love
+with solitude; ill with efforts for the unattained; sick with the
+ingratitude of man. Presently it was decided that he had lived long
+enough. He was suffocated--beneath a mattress at that. Caesar had
+dreamed of a universal monarchy of which he should be king; he was
+murdered. That dream was also Antony's; he killed himself. Cato had
+sought the restoration of the republic, and Brutus the attainment of
+virtue; both committed suicide. Under the empire dreamers fared ill.
+Tiberius was a dreamer.
+
+In a palace where a curious conception of the love of Atalanta and
+Meleager was said to figure on the walls, there was a door on which was
+a sign, imitated from one that overhung the Theban library of
+Osymandias--Pharmacy of the Soul. It was there Tiberius dreamed.
+
+On the ivory shelves were the philtres of Parthenius, labelled De
+Amatoriis Affectionibus, the Sybaris of Clitonymus, the Erotopaegnia of
+Laevius, the maxims and instructions of Elephantis, the nine books of
+Sappho. There also were the pathetic adventures of Odatis and
+Zariadres, which Chares of Mitylene had given to the world; the
+astonishing tales of that early Cinderella, Rhodopis; and with them
+those romances of Ionian nights by Aristides of Milet, which Crassus
+took with him when he set out to subdue the Parthians, and which; found
+in the booty, were read aloud to the people that they might judge the
+morals of a nation that pretended to rule the world.
+
+Whether such medicaments are serviceable to the soul is problematic.
+Tiberius had other drugs on the ivory shelves--magic preparations that
+transported him to fabulous fields. There was a work by Hecataesus,
+with which he could visit Hyperborea, that land where happiness was a
+birthright, inalienable at that; yet a happiness so sweet that it must
+have been cloying; for the people who enjoyed it, and with it the
+appanage of limitless life, killed themselves from sheer ennui.
+Theopompus disclosed to him a stranger vista--a continent beyond the
+ocean--one where there were immense cities, and where two rivers
+flowed--the River of Pleasure and the River of Pain. With Iambulus he
+discovered the Fortunate Isles, where there were men with elastic
+bones, bifurcated tongues; men who never married, who worshipped the
+sun, whose life was an uninterrupted delight, and who, when overtaken
+by age, lay on a perfumed grass that produced a voluptuous death.
+Evhemerus, a terrible atheist, whose Sacred History the early bishops
+wielded against polytheism until they discovered it was double-edged,
+took him to Panchaia, an island where incense grew; where property was
+held in common; where there was but one law--Justice, yet a justice
+different from our own, one which Hugo must have intercepted when he
+made an entrancing yet enigmatical apparition exclaim:
+
+    "Tu me crois la Justice, je suis la Pitie."
+
+And in this paradise there was a temple, and before it a column, about
+which, in Panchaian characters, ran a history of ancient kings, who, to
+the astonishment of the tourist, were found to be none other than the
+gods whom the universe worshipped, and who in earlier days had
+announced themselves divinities, the better to rule the hearts and
+minds of man.
+
+With other guides Tiberius journeyed through lands where dreams come
+true. Aristeas of Proconnesus led him among the Arimaspi, a curious
+people who passed their lives fighting for gold with griffons in the
+dark. With Isogonus he descended the valley of Ismaus, where wild men
+were, whose feet turned inwards. In Albania he found a race with pink
+eyes and white hair; in Sarmatia another that ate only on alternate
+days. Agatharcides took him to Libya, and there introduced him to the
+Psyllians, in whose bodies was a poison deadly to serpents, and who, to
+test the fidelity of their wives, placed their children in the presence
+of snakes; if the snakes fled they knew their wives were pure. Callias
+took him further yet, to the home of the hermaphrodites; Nymphodorus
+showed him a race of fascinators who used enchanted words. With
+Apollonides he encountered women who killed with their eyes those on
+whom they looked too long. Megasthenes guided him to the Astomians,
+whose garments were the down of feathers, and who lived on the scent of
+the rose.
+
+In his cups they all passed, confusedly, before him; the hermaphrodites
+whispered to the rose-breathers the secrets of impossible love; the
+griffons bore to him women with magical eyes; the Albanians danced with
+elastic feet; he heard the shrill call of the Psyllians, luring the
+serpents to death; the column of Panchaia unveiled its mysteries; the
+Hyperboreans the reason of their fear of life, and on the wings of the
+chimera he set out again in search of that continent which haunted
+antiquity and which lay beyond the sea.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PURSUIT OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
+
+
+"Another Phaethon for the universe," Tiberius is reported to have
+muttered, as he gazed at his nephew Caius, nicknamed Caligula, who was
+to suffocate him with a mattress and rule in his stead.
+
+To rule is hardly the expression. There is no term in English to convey
+that dominion over sea and sky which a Caesar possessed, and which
+Caligula was the earliest to understand. Augustus was the first
+magistrate of Rome, Tiberius the first citizen. Caligula was the first
+emperor, but an emperor hallucinated by the enigma of his own grandeur,
+a prince for whose sovereignty the world was too small.
+
+Each epoch has its secret, sometimes puerile, often perplexing; but in
+its maker there is another and a more interesting one yet. Eliminate
+Caligula, and Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla and Heliogabalus
+would never have been. It was he who gave them both raison d'etre and
+incentive. The lives of all of them are horrible, yet analyze the
+horrible and you find the sublime.
+
+Fancy a peak piercing the heavens, shadowing the earth. It was on a
+peak such as that the young emperors of old Rome balanced themselves, a
+precipice on either side. Did they look below, a vertigo rose to meet
+them; from above delirium came, while the horizon, though it hemmed the
+limits of vision, could not mark the frontiers of their dream. In
+addition there was the exaltation that altitudes produce. The valleys
+have their imbeciles; it is from mountains the poet and madman come.
+Caligula was both, sceptred at that; and with what a sceptre! One that
+stretched from the Rhine to the Euphrates, dominated a hundred and
+fifty million people; one that a mattress had given and a knife was to
+take away; a sceptre that lashed the earth, threatened the sky,
+beckoned planets and ravished the divinity of the divine.
+
+To wield such a sceptre securely requires grace, no doubt, majesty too,
+but certainly strength; the latter Caligula possessed, but it was the
+feverish strength of one who had fathomed the unfathomable, and who
+sought to make its depths his own. Caligula was haunted by the
+intangible. His sleep was a communion with Nature, with whom he
+believed himself one. At times the Ocean talked to him; at others the
+Earth had secrets which it wished to tell. Again there was some matter
+of moment which he must mention to the day, and he would wander out in
+the vast galleries of the palace and invoke the Dawn, bidding it come
+and listen to his speech. The day was deaf, but there was the moon, and
+he prayed her to descend and share his couch. Luna declined to be the
+mistress of a mortal; to seduce her Caligula determined to become a god.
+
+Nothing was easier. An emperor had but to open his veins, and in an
+hour he was a divinity. But the divinity which Caligula desired was not
+of that kind. He wished to be a god, not on Olympus alone, but on earth
+as well. He wished to be a palpable, tangible, living god; one that
+mortals could see, which was more, he knew, than could be said of the
+others. The mere wish was sufficient--Rome fell at his feet. The patent
+of divinity was in the genuflections of a nation. At once he had a
+temple, priests and flamens. Inexhaustible Greece was sacked again. The
+statues of her gods, disembarked at Rome, were decapitated, and on them
+the head of Caius shone.
+
+Heretofore his dress had not been Roman, nor, for that matter, the
+dress of a man. On his wrists were bracelets; about his shoulders was a
+mantle sewn with gems; beneath was a tunic, and on his feet were the
+high white slippers that women wore. But when the god came the costume
+changed. One day he was Apollo, the nimbus on his curls, the Graces at
+his side; the next he was Mercury, wings at his heels, the caduceus in
+his hand; again he was Venus. But it was as Jupiter Latialis, armed
+with the thunderbolt and decorated with a great gold beard, that he
+appeared at his best.
+
+The role was very real to him. After the fashion of Olympians he became
+frankly incestuous, seducing vestals, his sisters too, and gaining in
+boldness with each metamorphosis, he menaced the Capitoline Jove.
+"Prove your power," he cried to him, "or fear my own!" He thundered at
+him with machine-made thunder, with lightning that flashed from a pan.
+"Kill me," he shouted, "or I will kill you!" Jove, unmoved, must have
+moved his assailant, for presently Caligula lowered his voice,
+whispered in the old god's ear, questioned him, meditated on his
+answer, grew perplexed, violent again, and threatened to send him home.
+
+These interviews humanized him. He forgot the moon and mingled with
+men, inviting them to die. The invitation being invariably accepted, he
+became a connoisseur in death, an artist in blood, a ruler to whom
+cruelty was not merely an aid to government but an individual pleasure,
+and therewith such a perfect lover, such a charming host!
+
+"Dear heart," he murmured to his mistress Pryallis, as she lay one
+night in his arms, "I think I will have you tortured that you may tell
+me why I love you so." But of that the girl saw no need. She either
+knew the reason or invented one, for presently he added: "And to think
+that I have but a sign to make and that beautiful head of yours is
+off!" Musings of this description were so humorous that one evening he
+explained to guests whom he had startled with his laughter, that it was
+amusing to reflect how easily he could have all of them killed.
+
+But even to a god life is not an unmixed delight. Caligula had his
+troubles. About him there had settled a disturbing quiet. Rome was
+hushed, the world was very still. There was not so much as an
+earthquake. The reign of Augustus had been marked by the defeat of
+Varus. Under Tiberius a falling amphitheatre had killed a multitude.
+Caligula felt that through sheer felicity his own reign might be
+forgot. A famine, a pest, an absolute defeat, a terrific
+conflagration--any prodigious calamity that should sweep millions away
+and stamp his own memory immutably on the chronicles of time, how
+desirable it were! But there was nothing. The crops had never been more
+abundant; apart from the arenas and the prisons, the health of the
+empire was excellent; on the frontiers not so much as the rumor of an
+insurrection could be heard, and Nero was yet to come.
+
+Perplexed, Caligula reflected, and presently from Baiae to Puzzoli,
+over the waters of the bay, he galloped on horseback, the cuirass of
+Alexander glittering on his breast. The intervening miles had been
+spanned by a bridge of ships and on them a road had been built, one of
+those roads for which the Romans were famous, a road like the Appian
+Way, in earth and stone, bordered by inns, by pink arcades, green
+retreats, forest reaches, the murmur of trickling streams. So many
+ships were anchored there that through the unrepleted granaries the
+fear of famine stalked. Caligula, meanwhile, his guests behind him,
+made cavalry charges across the sea, or in a circus-chariot held the
+ribbons, while four white horses, maddened by swaying lights, bore him
+to the other shore. At night the entire coast was illuminated; the
+bridge was one great festival, brilliant but brief. Caligula had
+wearied of it all. At a signal the multitude of guests he had assembled
+there were tossed into the sea.
+
+By way of a souvenir, Tiberius, whom he murdered, had left him the
+immensity of his treasure. "I must be economical or Caesar," Caligula
+reflected, and tipped a coachman a million, rained on the people a hail
+of coin, bathed in essences, set before his guests loaves of silver,
+gold omelettes, sausages of gems; sailed to the hum of harps on a ship
+that had porticoes, gardens, baths, bowers, spangled sails and a
+jewelled prow; removed a mountain, and put a palace where it had been;
+filled in a valley and erected a temple on the top; supplied a horse
+with a marble home, with ivory stalls, with furniture and slaves;
+contemplated making him consul; made him a host instead, one that in
+his own equine name invited the fashion of Rome to sup with Incitatus.
+
+In one year Tiberius' legacy, a sum that amounted to four hundred
+million of our money, was spent. Caligula had achieved the impossible;
+he was a bankrupt god, an emperor without a copper. But the very
+splendor of that triumph demanded a climax. If Caligula hesitated, no
+one knew it. On the morrow the palace of the Caesars was turned into a
+lupanar, a little larger, a little handsomer than the others, but still
+a brothel, one of which the inmates were matrons of Rome and the keeper
+Jupiter Latialis.
+
+After that, seemingly, there was nothing save apotheosis. But Caligula,
+in the nick of time, remembered the ocean. At the head of an army he
+crossed Gaul, attacked it, and returned refreshed. Decidedly he had not
+exhausted everything yet. He recalled Tiberius' policy, and abruptly
+the world was filled again with accusers and accused. Gold poured in on
+him, the earth paid him tribute. In a vast hall he danced naked on the
+wealth of nations. Once more he was rich, richer than ever; there were
+still illusions to be looted, other dreams to be pierced; yet, even as
+he mused, conspirators were abroad. He loosed his pretorians. "Had Rome
+but one head!" he muttered. "Let them FEEL themselves die," he cried to
+his officers. "Let me be hated, but let me be feared."
+
+One day, as he was returning from the theatre, the dagger did its usual
+work. Rome had lost a genius; in his place there came an ass.
+
+There is a verse in Greek to the effect that the blessed have children
+in three months. Livia and Augustus were blessed in this pleasant
+fashion. Three months after their marriage a child was born--a miracle
+which surprised no one aware of their previous intimacy. The child
+became a man, and the father of Claud, an imbecile whom the pretorians,
+after Caligula's death, found in a closet, shaking with fright, and
+whom for their own protection they made emperor in his stead.
+
+Caligula had been frankly adored; there was in him an originality, and
+with it a grandeur and a mad magnificence that enthralled. Then, too,
+he was young, and at his hours what the French call charmeur. If at
+times he frightened, always he dazzled. Of course he was adored; the
+prodigal emperors always were; so were their successors, the wicked
+popes. Man was still too near to nature to be aware of shame, and
+infantile enough to care to be surprised. In that was Caligula's charm;
+he petted his people and surprised them too. Claud wearied. Between
+them they assimilate every contradiction, and in their incoherences
+explain that incomprehensible chaos which was Rome. Caligula jeered at
+everybody; everybody jeered at Claud.
+
+The latter was a fantastic, vacillating, abstracted, cowardly tyrant,
+issuing edicts in regard to the proper tarring of barrels, and
+rendering absurd decrees; declaring himself to be of the opinion of
+those who were right; falling asleep on the bench, and on awakening
+announcing that he gave judgment in favor of those whose reasons were
+the best; slapped in the face by an irritable plaintiff; held down by
+main force when he wanted to leave; inviting to supper those whom he
+had killed before breakfast; answering the mournful salute of the
+gladiators with a grotesque Avete vos--"Be it well too with you," a
+response, parenthetically, which the gladiators construed as a pardon
+and refused to fight; dowering the alphabet with three new letters
+which lasted no longer than he did; asserting that he would give
+centennial games as often as he saw fit; an emperor whom no one obeyed,
+whose eunuchs ruled in his stead, whose lackeys dispensed exiles,
+death, consulates and crucifixions; whose valets insulted the senate,
+insulted Rome, insulted the sovereign that ruled the world, whose
+people shared his consort's couch; a slipshod drunkard in a tattered
+gown--such was the imbecile that succeeded Caligula and had Messalina
+for wife.
+
+It were curious to have seen that woman as Juvenal did, a veil over her
+yellow wig, hunting adventures through the streets of Rome, while her
+husband in the Forum censured the dissoluteness of citizens. And it
+were curious, too, to understand whether it was her audacity or his
+stupidity which left him the only man in Rome unacquainted with the
+prodigious multiplicity and variety of her lovers. History has its
+secrets, yet, in connection with Messalina, there is one that
+historians have not taken the trouble to probe; to them she has been an
+imperial strumpet. Messalina was not that. At heart she was probably no
+better and no worse than any other lady of the land, but pathologically
+she was an unbalanced person, who to-day would be put through a course
+of treatment, instead of being put to death. When Claud at last
+learned, not the truth, but that some of her lovers were conspiring to
+get rid of him, he was not indignant; he was frightened. The
+conspirators were promptly disposed of, Messalina with them. Suetonius
+says that, a few days later, as he went in to supper, he asked why the
+empress did not appear.
+
+Apart from the neurosis from which she suffered, were it possible to
+find an excuse for her conduct, the excuse would be Claud. The purple
+which made Caligula mad, made him an idiot; and when in course of time
+he was served with a succulent poison, there must have been many
+conjectures in Rome as to what the empire would next produce.
+
+The empire was extremely fecund, enormously vast. About Rome extended
+an immense circle of provinces and cities that were wholly hers.
+Without that circle was another, the sovereignty exercised over vassals
+and allies; beyond that, beyond the Rhine on one side, were the
+silenced Teutons; beyond the Euphrates on the other, the hazardous
+Parthians, while remotely to the north there extended the enigmas of
+barbarism; to the south, those semi-fabulous regions where geography
+ceased to be.
+
+Little by little, through the patience of a people that felt itself
+eternal, this immensity had been assimilated and fused. A few
+fortresses and legions on the frontiers, a stretch of soldiery at any
+spot an invasion might be feared; a little tact, a maternal solicitude,
+and that was all. Rome governed unarmed, or perhaps it might be more
+exact to say she did not govern at all; she was the mistress of a
+federation of realms and republics that governed themselves, in whose
+government she was content, and from whom she exacted little, tribute
+merely, and obeisance to herself. Her strength was not in the sword;
+the lioness roared rarely, often slept; it was the fear smaller beasts
+had of her awakening that made them docile; once aroused those indolent
+paws could do terrible work, and it was well not to excite them. When
+the Jews threatened to revolt, Agrippa warned them: "Look at Rome; look
+at her well; her arms are invisible, her troops are afar; she rules,
+not by them, but by the certainty of her power. If you rebel, the
+invisible sword will flash, and what can you do against Rome armed,
+when Rome unarmed frightens the world?"
+
+The argument was pertinent and suggestive, but the secret of Rome's
+ascendency consisted in the fact that where she conquered she dwelt.
+Wherever the eagles pounced, Rome multiplied herself in miniature. In
+the army was the nation, in the legion the city. Where it camped,
+presto! a judgment seat and an altar. On the morrow there was a forum;
+in a week there were paved avenues; in a fortnight, temples, porticoes;
+in a month you felt yourself at home. Rome built with a magic that
+startled as surely as the glint of her sword. Time and again the
+nations whom Caesar encountered planned to eliminate his camp. When
+they reached it the camp had vanished; in its place was a walled,
+impregnable town.
+
+As the standards lowered before that town, the pomoerium was traced.
+Within it the veteran found a home, without it a wife; and the family
+established, the legion that had conquered the soil with the sword,
+subsisted on it with the plow. Presently there were priests there,
+aqueducts, baths, theatres and games, all the marvel of imperial
+elegance and vice. When the aborigine wandered that way, his seduction
+was swift.
+
+The enemy that submitted became a subject, not a slave. Rome commanded
+only the free. If his goods were taxed, his goods remained his own, his
+personal liberty untrammelled. His land had become part of a new
+province, it is true, but provided he did not interest himself in such
+matters as peace and war, not only was he free to manage his own
+affairs, but that land, were it at the uttermost end of the earth,
+might, in recompense of his fidelity, come to be regarded as within the
+Italian territory; as such, sacred, inviolate, free from taxes, and he
+a citizen of Rome, senator even, emperor!
+
+Conquest once solidified, the rest was easy. Tattered furs were
+replaced by the tunic and uncouth idioms by the niceties of Latin
+speech. In some cases, where the speech had been beaten in with the
+hilt of the sword, the accent was apt to be rough, but a generation,
+two at most, and there were sweethearts and swains quoting Horace in
+the moonlight, naively unaware that only the verse of the Greeks could
+pleasure the Roman ear.
+
+The principalities and kingdoms that of their own wish [a wish often
+suggested, and not always amicably either] became allies of Rome and
+mingled their freedom with hers, entered into an alliance whereby in
+return for Rome's patronage and protection they agreed to have a proper
+regard for the dignity of the Roman people and to have no other friends
+or enemies than those that were Rome's--a formula exquisite in the
+civility with which it exacted the renunciation of every inherent
+right. A king wrote to the senate: "I have obeyed your deputy as I
+would have obeyed a god." "And you have done wisely," the senate
+answered, a reply which, in its terseness, tells all.
+
+Diplomacy and the plow, such were Rome's methods. As for herself she
+fought, she did not till. Italy, devastated by the civil wars, was
+uncultivated, cut up into vast unproductive estates. From one end to
+the other there was barely a trace of agriculture, not a sign of
+traffic. You met soldiers, cooks, petty tradesmen, gladiators,
+philosophers, patricians, market gardeners, lazzaroni and millionaires;
+the merchant and the farmer, never. Rome's resources were in distant
+commercial centres, in taxes and tribute; her wealth had come of
+pillage and exaction. Save her strength, she had nothing of her own.
+Her religion, literature, art, philosophy, luxury and corruption,
+everything had come from abroad. In Greece were her artists; in Africa,
+Gaul and Spain, her agriculturists; in Asia her artisans. Her own
+breasts were sterile. When she gave birth it was to a litter of
+monsters, sometimes to a genius, by accident to a poet. She consumed,
+she did not produce. It was because of that she fell.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+NERO
+
+
+"Save a monster, what can you expect from Agrippina and myself?"
+
+It was Domitius, Nero's father, who made this ingenious remark. He was
+not a good man; he was not even good-looking, merely vicious and rich.
+But his viciousness was benign beside that of Agrippina, who poisoned
+him when Nero's birth ensured the heritage of his wealth.
+
+In all its galleries history has no other portrait such as hers.
+Caligula's sister, his mistress as well, exiled by him and threatened
+with death, her eyes dazzled and her nerves unstrung by the
+impossibilities of that fabulous reign, it was not until Claud, her
+uncle, recalled her and Messalina disappeared, that the empress awoke.
+She too, she determined, would rule, and the jus osculi aiding, she
+married out of hand that imbecile uncle of hers, on whose knee she had
+played as a child.
+
+The day of the wedding a young patrician, expelled from the senate,
+killed himself. Agrippina had accused him of something not nice, not
+because he was guilty, nor yet because the possibility of the thing
+shocked her, but because he was betrothed to Octavia, Claud's daughter,
+who, Agrippina determined, should be Nero's wife. Presently Caligula's
+widow, an old rival of her own, a lady who had thought she would like
+to be empress twice, and whom Claud had eyed grotesquely, was
+disencumbered of three million worth of emeralds, with which she
+heightened her beauty, and told very civilly that it was time to die.
+So, too, disappeared a Calpurina, a Lepida; women young, rich,
+handsome, impure, and as such dangerous to Agrippina's peace of mind.
+The legality of her crimes was so absolute that the mere ownership of
+an enviable object was a cause for death. A senator had a villa which
+pleased her; he was invited to die. Another had a pair of those odorous
+murrhine vases, which Pompey had found in Armenia, and which on their
+first appearance set Rome wild; he, too, was invited to die.
+
+But, though Agrippina dealt in death, she dealt in seductions too.
+Rome, that had adored Caligula, promptly fell under his sister's sway.
+There was a splendor in her eyes, which so many crimes had lit; in her
+carriage there was such majesty, the pomp with which she surrounded
+herself was so magnificent, that Rome, enthralled, applauded. Beyond,
+on the Rhine, a city which is today Cologne, rose in honor of her
+sovereignty. To her wishes the senate was subservient, to her
+indiscretions blind. Claud, who meanwhile had been wholly sightless,
+suddenly showed signs of discernment. A woman, charged with illicit
+commerce, was brought to his tribunal. He condemned her, of course. "In
+my case," he explained, "matrimony has not been successful, but the
+fate that destined me to marry impure women destined me also to punish
+them." It was then that Agrippina ordered of Locusta that famous stew
+of poison and mushrooms, which Nero, in allusion to Claud's apotheosis,
+called the food of the gods. The fate that destined Claud to marry
+Agrippina destined her to kill him.
+
+It was under her care, between a barber and a ballerine, amid the
+shamelessness of his stepfather's palace, where any day he could have
+seen his mother beckon indolently to a centurion and pointing to some
+lover who had ceased to please, make the gesture which signified Death,
+that the young Enobarbus--Nero, as he subsequently called himself--was
+trained for the throne.
+
+He had entered the world like a tiger cub, feet first; a circumstance
+which is said to have disturbed his mother, and well it might. During
+his adolescence that lady made herself feared. He was but seventeen
+when the pretorians called upon him to rule the world; and at the time
+an ingenuous lad, one who blushed like Lalage, very readily,
+particularly at the title of Father of the Country, which the senate
+was anxious to give him; endowed with excellent instincts, which he had
+got no one knew whence; a trifle petit maitre, perhaps, perfuming the
+soles of his feet, and careful about the arrangement of his yellow
+curls, but withal generous, modest, sympathetic--in short, a flower in
+a cesspool, a youth not over well-fitted to reign. But his mother was
+there; as he developed so did his fear of her, to such proportions even
+that he gave certain orders, and his mother was killed. That duel
+between mother and son, terrible in its intensity and unnameable
+horror, even the Borgias could not surpass. Tacitus has told it,
+dramatically, as was his wont, but he told it in Latin, in which tongue
+it had best remain.
+
+At that time the ingenuous lad had disappeared. The cub was full-grown.
+Besides, he had tasted blood. Octavia, who with her brother,
+Britannicus, and her sister, Antonia, had been his playmates; who was
+almost his own sister; whose earliest memories interlinked with his,
+and who had become his wife, had been put to death; not that she had
+failed to please, but because a lady, Sabina Poppoea, who, Tacitus
+says, lacked nothing except virtue, had declined to be his mistress. At
+the time Sabina was married. But divorce was easy. Sabina got one at
+the bar; Nero with the axe. The twain were then united. Nero seems to
+have loved her greatly, a fact, as Suetonius puts it, which did not
+prevent him from kicking her to death. Already he had poisoned
+Britannicus, and with Octavia decapitated and Agrippina gone, of the
+imperial house there remained but Antonia and himself. The latter he
+invited to marry him; she declined. He invited her to die. He was then
+alone, the last of his race. Monsters never engender. A thinker who
+passed that way thought him right to have killed his mother; her crime
+was in giving him birth.
+
+Therewith he was popular; more so even than Caligula, who was a poet,
+and as such apart from the crowd, while Nero was frankly
+canaille--well-meaning at that--which Caligula never was. During the
+early years of his reign he could not do good enough. The gladiators
+were not permitted to die; he would have no shedding of blood; the
+smell of it was distasteful. He would listen to no denunciations; when
+a decree of death was brought to him to sign, he regretted that he knew
+how to write. Rome had never seen a gentler prince, nor yet one more
+splendidly lavish. The people had not only the necessities of life, but
+the luxuries, the superfluities, too. For days and days in the Forum
+there was an incessant shower of tickets that were exchangeable, not
+for bread or trivial sums, but for gems, pictures, slaves, fortunes,
+ships, villas and estates. The creator of that shower was bound to be
+adored.
+
+It was that, no doubt, which awoke him. A city like Rome, one that had
+over a million inhabitants, could make a terrific noise, and when that
+noise was applause, the recipient found it heady. Nero got drunk on
+popularity, and heredity aiding where the prince had been emerged the
+cad, a poseur that bored, a beast that disgusted, a caricature of the
+impossible in a crimson frame.
+
+"What an artist the world is to lose!" he exclaimed as he died; and
+artist he was, but in the Roman sense; one that enveloped in the same
+contempt the musician, acrobat and actor. It was the artist that played
+the flute while gladiators died and lovers embraced; it was the artist
+that entertained the vulgar.
+
+As an artist Nero might have been a card. Fancy the attraction--an
+emperor before the footlights; but fancy the boredom also. The joy at
+the announcement of his first appearance was so great that thanks were
+offered to the gods; and the verses he was to sing, graven in gold,
+were dedicated to the Capitoline Jove. The joy was brief. The exits of
+the theatre were closed. It was treason to attempt to leave. People
+pretended to be dead in order to be carried out, and well they might.
+The star was a fat man with a husky tenorino voice, who sang drunk and
+half-naked to a protecting claque of ten thousand hands.
+
+But it was in the circus that Nero was at his best; there, no matter
+though he were last in the race, it was to him the palm was awarded, or
+rather it was he that awarded the palm to himself, and then quite
+magnificently shouted, "Nero, Caesar, victor in the race, gives his
+crown to the People of Rome!"
+
+On the stage he had no rivals, and by chance did one appear, he was
+invited to die. In that respect he was artistically susceptible. When
+he turned acrobat, the statues of former victors were tossed in the
+latrinae. Yet, as competitors were needed, and moreover as he, singly,
+could fill neither a stage nor a track, it was the nobility of Rome
+that he ordered to appear with him. For that the nobility never forgave
+him. On the other hand, the proletariat loved him the better. What
+greater salve could it have than the sight of the conquerors of the
+world entertaining the conquered, lords amusing their lackeys?
+
+Greece meanwhile sent him crowns and prayers; crowns for anticipated
+victories, prayers that he would come and win them. Homage so delicate
+was not to be disdained. Nero set forth, an army at his heels; a legion
+of claquers, a phalanx of musicians, cohorts of comedians, and with
+these for retinue, through sacred groves that Homer knew, through
+intervales which Hesiod sang, through a year of festivals he wandered,
+always victorious. It was he who conquered at Olympia; it was he who
+conquered at Corinth. No one could withstand him. Alone in history he
+won in every game, and with eighteen hundred crowns as trophies of war
+he repeated Caesar's triumph. In a robe immaterial as a moonbeam, the
+Olympian wreath on his curls, the Isthmian laurel in his hand, his army
+behind him, the clown that was emperor entered Rome. Victims were
+immolated as he passed, the Via Sacra was strewn with saffron, the day
+was rent with acclaiming shouts. Throughout the empire sacrifices were
+ordered. Old people that lived in the country fancied him, Philostratus
+says, the conqueror of new nations, and sacrificed with delight.
+
+But if as artist he bored everybody, he was yet an admirable
+impresario. The spectacles he gave were unique. At one which was held
+in the Taurian amphitheatre it must have been delightful to assist.
+Fancy eighty thousand people on ascending galleries, protected from the
+sun by a canopy of spangled silk; an arena three acres large carpeted
+with sand, cinnabar and borax, and in that arena death in every form,
+on those galleries colossal delight.
+
+The lowest gallery, immediately above the arena, was a wide terrace
+where the senate sat. There were the dignitaries of the empire, and
+with them priests in their sacerdotal robes; vestals in linen, their
+hair arranged in the six braids that were symbolic of virginity; swarms
+of Oriental princes, rainbows of foreign ambassadors; and in the
+centre, the imperial pulvinar, an enclosed pavilion, in which Nero
+lounged, a mignon at his feet.
+
+In the gallery above were the necklaced knights, their tunics bordered
+with the augusticlave, their deep-blue cloaks fastened to the shoulder;
+and there, too, in their wide white togas, were the citizens of Rome.
+
+Still higher the people sat. In the topmost gallery were the women, and
+in a separate enclosure a thousand musicians answered the cries of the
+multitude with the blare and the laugh of brass.
+
+Beneath the terraces, behind the barred doors that punctuated the
+marble wall which circled the arena, were Mauritian panthers that had
+been entrapped with rotten meat; hippopotami from Sais, lured by the
+smell of carrots into pits; the rhinoceros of Gaul, taken with the net;
+lions, lassoed in the deserts; Lucanian bears, Spanish bulls; and, in
+remoter dens, men, unarmed, that waited.
+
+By way of foretaste for better things, a handful of criminals, local
+desperadoes, an impertinent slave, a machinist, who in a theatre the
+night before had missed an effect--these, together with a negligent
+usher, were tossed one after the other naked into the ring, and bound
+to a scaffold that surmounted a miniature hill. At a signal the
+scaffold fell, the hill crumbled, and from it a few hyenas issued, who
+indolently devoured their prey.
+
+With this for prelude, the gods avenged and justice appeased, a
+rhinoceros ambled that way, stimulated from behind by the point of a
+spear; and in a moment the hyenas were disembowelled, their legs
+quivering in the air. Throughout the arena other beasts, tied together
+with long cords, quarrelled in couples; there was the bellow of bulls,
+and the moan of leopards tearing at their flesh, a flight of stags, and
+the long, clean spring of the panther.
+
+Presently the arena was cleared, the sand reraked and the Bestiarii
+advanced--Sarmatians, nourished on mares' milk; Sicambrians, their hair
+done up in chignons; horsemen from Thessaly, Ethiopian warriors,
+Parthian archers, huntsmen from the steppes, their different idioms
+uniting in a single cry--"Caesar, we salute you." The sunlight,
+filtering through the spangled canopy, chequered their tunics with
+burning spots, danced on their spears and helmets, dazzled the
+spectators' eyes. From above descended the caresses of flutes; the air
+was sweet with perfumes, alive with multicolored motes; the terraces
+were parterres of blending hues, and into that splendor a hundred
+lions, their tasselled tails sweeping the sand, entered obliquely.
+
+The mob of the Bestiarii had gone. In the middle of the arena, a band
+of Ethiopians, armed with arrows, knives and spears, knelt, their oiled
+black breasts uncovered.
+
+Leisurely the lions turned their huge, intrepid heads; to their jowls
+wide creases came. There was a glitter of fangs, a shiver that moved
+the mane, a flight of arrows, mounting murmurs; the crouch of beasts
+preparing to spring, a deafening roar, and, abruptly, a tumultuous
+mass, the suddenness of knives, the snap of bones, the cry of the
+agonized, the fury of beasts transfixed, the shrieks of the mangled, a
+combat hand to fang, from which lions fell back, their jaws torn
+asunder, while others retreated, a black body swaying between their
+terrible teeth, and, insensibly, a descending quiet.
+
+At once there was an eruption of bellowing elephants, painted and
+trained for slaughter, that trampled on wounded and dead. At a call
+from a keeper the elephants disappeared. There was a rush of mules and
+slaves; the carcasses and corpses vanished, the toilet of the ring was
+made; then came a plunge of bulls, mists of vapor about their long,
+straight horns, their anxious eyes dilated. Beyond was a troop of
+Thessalians. For a moment the bulls snorted, pawing the sand with their
+fore-feet, as though trying to realize what they were doing there. Yet
+instantly they seemed to know, and with lowered heads, they plunged on
+the point of spears. But no matter, horses went down by the hundred;
+and as the bulls tired of gorging the dead, they fought each other;
+fought rancorously, fought until weariness overtook them, and the
+surviving Thessalians leaped on their backs, twisted their horns, and
+threw them down, a sword through their throbbing throats.
+
+Successively the arena was occupied by bears, by panthers, by dogs
+trained for the chase, by hunters and hunted. But the episode of the
+morning was a dash of wild elephants, attacked on either side; a moment
+of sheer delight, in which the hunters were tossed up on the terraces,
+tossed back again by the spectators, and trampled to death.
+
+With that for bouquet the first part of the performance was at an end.
+By way of interlude, the ring was peopled with acrobats, who flew up in
+the air like birds, formed pyramids together, on the top of which
+little boys swung and smiled. There was a troop of trained lions, their
+manes gilded, that walked on tight-ropes, wrote obscenities in Greek,
+and danced to cymbals which one of them played. There were
+geese-fights, wonderful combats between dwarfs and women; a chariot
+race, in which bulls, painted white, held the reins, standing upright
+while drawn at full speed; a chase of ostriches, and feats of haute
+ecole on zebras from Madagascar.
+
+The interlude at an end, the sand was reraked, and preceded by the pomp
+of lictors, interminable files of gladiators entered, holding their
+knives to Nero that he might see that they were sharp. It was then the
+eyes of the vestals lighted; artistic death was their chiefest joy, and
+in a moment, when the spectacle began and the first gladiator fell,
+above the din you could hear their cry "Hic habet!" and watch their
+delicate thumbs reverse.
+
+There was no cowardice in that arena. If by chance any hesitation were
+discernible, instantly there were hot irons, the sear of which
+revivified courage at once. But that was rare. The gladiators fought
+for applause, for liberty, for death; fought manfully, skilfully,
+terribly, too, and received the point of the sword or the palm of the
+victor, their expression unchanged, the face unmoved. Among them, some
+provided with a net and prodigiously agile, pursued their adversaries
+hither and thither, trying to entangle them first and kill them later.
+Others, protected by oblong shields and armed with short, sharp swords,
+fought hand-to-hand. There were still others, mailed horsemen, who
+fought with the lance, and charioteers that dealt death from high
+Briton cars.
+
+As a spectacle it was unique; one that the Romans, or more exactly,
+their predecessors, the Etruscans, had devised to train their children
+for war and allay the fear of blood. It had been serviceable, indeed,
+and though the need of it had gone, still the institution endured, and
+in enduring constituted the chief delight of the vestals and of Rome.
+By means of it a bankrupt became consul and an emperor beloved. It had
+stayed revolutions, it was the tax of the proletariat on the rich.
+Silver and bread were for the individual, but these things were for the
+crowd.
+
+During the pauses of the combats the dead were removed by men masked as
+Mercury, god of hell; red irons, that others, masked as Charon, bore,
+being first applied as safeguard against swoon or fraud. And when, to
+the kisses of flutes, the last palm had been awarded, the last death
+acclaimed, a ballet was given; that of Paris and Venus, which Apuleius
+has described so well, and for afterpiece the romance of Pasipha? and
+the bull. Then, as night descended, so did torches, too; the arena was
+strewn with vermilion; tables were set, and to the incitement of
+crotals, Lydians danced before the multitude, toasting the last act of
+that wonderful day.
+
+It was with such magnificence that Nero showed the impresario's skill,
+the politician's adroitness. Where the artist, which he claimed to be,
+really appeared, was in the refurbishing of Rome.
+
+In spite of Augustus' boast, the city was not by any means of marble.
+It was filled with crooked little streets, with the atrocities of the
+Tarquins, with houses unsightly and perilous, with the moss and dust of
+ages; it compared with Alexandria as London compares with Paris; it had
+a splendor of its own, but a splendor that could be heightened.
+
+Whether the conflagration which occurred at that time was the result of
+accident or design is uncertain and in any event immaterial. Tacitus
+says that when it began Nero was at Antium, in which case he must have
+hastened to return, for admitting that he did not originate the fire,
+it is a matter of agreement that he collaborated in it. In quarters
+where it showed symptoms of weakness it was by his orders coaxed to new
+strength; colossal stone buildings, on which it had little effect, were
+battered down with catapults.
+
+Fire is a perfect poet. No designer ever imagined the surprises it
+creates, and when, at the end of the week, three-fourths of the city
+was in ruins, the beauty that reigned there must have been sublime.
+That it inspired Nero is presumable. The palace on the Palatine, which
+Tiberius embellished and Caligula enlarged, had gone; in its place rose
+another, aflame with gold. Before it Neropolis extended, a city of
+triumphal arches, enchanted temples, royal dwellings, shimmering
+porticoes, glittering roofs, and wide, hospitable streets. It was fair
+to the eye, purely Greek; and on its heart, from the Circus Maximus to
+the Forum's edge, the new and gigantic palace shone. Before it was a
+lake, a part of which Vespasian drained and replaced with an
+amphitheatre that covered eight acres. About that lake were separate
+edifices that formed a city in themselves; between them and the palace,
+a statue of Nero in gold and silver mounted precipitately a hundred and
+twenty feet--a statue which it took twenty-four elephants to move.
+About it were green savannahs, forest reaches, the call of bird and
+deer, while in the distance, fronted by a stretch of columns a mile in
+length, the palace stood--a palace so ineffably charming that on the
+day of reckoning may it outbalance a few of his sins. Even the cellars
+were frescoed. The baths were quite comfortable; you had waters salt or
+sulphurous at will. The dining halls had ivory ceilings from which
+flowers fell, and wainscots that changed at each service. The walls
+were alive with the glisten of gems, with marbles rarer than jewels. In
+one hall was a dome of sapphire, a floor of malachite, crystal columns
+and red-gold walls.
+
+"At last," Nero murmured, "I am lodged like a man."
+
+No doubt. Yet in a mirror he would have seen a bloated beast in a
+flowered gown, the hair done up in a chignon, the skin covered with
+eruptions, the eyes circled and yellow; a woman who had hours when she
+imitated a virgin at bay, others when she was wife, still others when
+she expected to be a mother, and that woman, a senatorial patent of
+divinity aiding, was god--Apollo's peer, imperator, chief of the army,
+pontifix maximus, master of the world, with the incontestable right of
+life and death over every being in the dominions.
+
+It had taken the fresh-faced lad who blushed so readily, just fourteen
+years to effect that change. Did he regret it? And what should Nero
+regret? Nothing, perhaps, save that at the moment when he declared
+himself to be lodged like a man, he had not killed himself like one.
+But of that he was incapable. Had he known what the future held,
+possibly he might have imitated that apotheosis of vulgarity in which
+Sardanapalus eclipsed himself, but never could he have died with the
+good breeding and philosophy of Cato, for neither good breeding nor
+philosophy was in him. Nero killed himself like a coward, yet that he
+did kill himself, in no matter what fashion, is one of the few things
+that can be said in his favor.
+
+Those days differed from ours. There were circumstances in which
+suicide was regarded as the simplest of duties. Nero did his duty, but
+not until he was forced to it, and even then not until he had been
+asked several times whether it was so hard to die. The empire had
+wearied of him. In Neropolis his popularity had gone as popularity ever
+does; the conflagration had killed it.
+
+Even as he wandered, lyre in hand, a train of Lesbians and pederasts at
+his heels, through those halls which had risen on the ruins, and which
+inexhaustible Greece had furnished with a fresh crop of white
+immortals, the world rebelled. Afar on the outskirts of civilization a
+vassal, ashamed of his vassalage, declared war, not against Rome, but
+against an emperor that played the flute. In Spain, in Gaul, the
+legions were choosing other chiefs. The provinces, depleted by imperial
+exactions, outwearied by the increasing number of accusers, whose
+accusations impoverishing them served only to multiply the
+prodigalities of their Caesar, revolted.
+
+Suddenly Nero found himself alone. As the advancing rumor of rebellion
+reached him, he thought of flight; there was no one that would
+accompany him. He called to the pretorians; they would not hear.
+Through the immensity of his palace he sought one friend. The doors
+would not open. He returned to his apartment; the guards had gone. Then
+terror seized him. He was afraid to die, afraid to live, afraid of his
+solitude, afraid of Rome, afraid of himself; but what frightened him
+most was that everyone had lost their fear of him. It was time to go,
+and a slave aiding, he escaped in disguise from Rome, and killed
+himself, reluctantly, in a hovel.
+
+"Qualis artifex pereo!" he is reported to have muttered. Say rather,
+qualis maechus.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE HOUSE OF FLAVIA
+
+
+It was in those days that the nebulous figure of Apollonius of Tyana
+appeared and disappeared in Rome. His speech, a commingling of
+puerility and charm, Philostratus has preserved. Rumor had preceded
+him. It was said that he knew everything, save the caresses of women;
+that he was familiar with all languages; with the speech of bird and
+beast; with that of silence, for silence is a language too; that he had
+prayed in the Temple of Jupiter Lycoeus, where men lost their shadows,
+their lives as well; that he had undergone eighty initiations of
+Mithra; that he had perplexed the magi; confuted the gymnosophists;
+that he foretold the future, healed the sick, raised the dead; that
+beyond the Himalayas he had encountered every species of ferocious
+beast, except the tyrant, and that it was to see one that he had come
+to Rome.
+
+Nero was quite free from prejudice. Apart from a doll which he
+worshipped he had no superstitions. He had the plain man's dislike of
+philosophy; Seneca had sickened him of it, perhaps; but he was
+sensitive, not that he troubled himself particularly about any lies
+that were told of him, but he did object to people who went about
+telling the truth. In that respect he was not unique; we are all like
+him, but he had ways of stilling the truth which were imperial and his
+own.
+
+Promptly on Apollonius he loosed his bull-dog, Tigellin, prefect of
+police.
+
+Tigellin caught him. "What have you with you?" he asked.
+
+"Continence, Justice, Temperance, Strength and Patience," Apollonius
+answered.
+
+"Your slaves, I suppose. Make out a list of them."
+
+Apollonius shook his head. "They are not my slaves; they are my
+masters."
+
+"There is but one," Tigellin retorted--"Nero. Why do you not fear him?"
+
+"Because the god that made him terrible made me without fear."
+
+"I will leave you your liberty," muttered the startled Tigellin, "but
+you must give bail."
+
+"And who," asked Apollonius superbly, "would bail a man whom no one can
+enchain?" Therewith he turned and disappeared.
+
+At that time Nero was in training to suffocate a lion in the arena. A
+few days later he killed himself. Simultaneously there came news from
+Syracuse. A woman of rank had given birth to a child with three heads.
+Apollonius examined it.
+
+"There will be three emperors at once," he announced. "But their reign
+will be shorter than that of kings on the stage."
+
+Within that year Galba, who was emperor for an instant, died at the
+gates of Rome. Vitellius, after being emperor in little else than
+dream, was butchered in the Forum; and Otho, in that fine antique
+fashion, killed himself in Gaul. Apollonius meanwhile was in
+Alexandria, predicting the purple to Vespasian, the rise of the House
+of Flavia; invoking Jupiter in his protege's behalf; and presently, the
+prediction accomplished, he was back in Rome, threatening Domitian,
+warning him that the House of Flavia would fall.
+
+The atmosphere was then charged with the marvellous; the world was
+filled with prodigies, with strange gods, beckoning chimeras and
+credulous crowds. Belief in the supernatural was absolute; the occult
+sciences, astrology, magic, divination, all had their adepts. In Greece
+there were oracles at every turn, and with them prophets who taught the
+art of adultery and how to construe the past. On the banks of the Rhine
+there were girls who were regarded as divinities, and in Gaul were men
+who were held wholly divine.
+
+Jerusalem too had her follies. There was Simon the Magician, founder of
+gnosticism, father of every heresy, Messiah to the Jews, Jupiter to the
+Gentiles--an impudent self-made god, who pretended to float in the air,
+and called his mistress Minerva--a deification, parenthetically, which
+was accepted by Nicholas, his successor, a deacon of the church, who
+raised her to the eighth heaven as patron saint of lust. To him, as to
+Simon, she was Ennoia, Prunikos, Helen of Troy. She had been Delilah,
+Lucretia. She had prostituted herself to every nation; she had sung in
+the by-ways, and hidden robbers in the vermin of her bed. But by Simon
+she was rehabilitated. It was she, no doubt, of whom Caligula thought
+when he beckoned to the moon. In Rome she had her statue, and near it
+was one to Simon, the holy god.
+
+But of all manifestations of divinity the most patent was that which
+haloed Vespasian. He expected it, Suetonius says, but it is doubtful if
+any one else did. One night he dreamed that an era of prosperity was to
+dawn for him and his when Nero lost a tooth. The next day he was shown
+one which had been drawn from the emperor's mouth. But that was
+nothing. Presently at Carmel the Syrian oracle assured him that he
+would be successful in whatever he undertook. From Rome word came that,
+while the armies of Vitellius and Otho were fighting, two eagles had
+fought above them, and that the victor had been despatched by a third
+eagle that had come from the East. In Alexandria Serapis whispered to
+him. The entire menagerie of Egypt proclaimed him king. Apis bellowed,
+Anubis barked. Isis visited him unveiled. The lame and the blind
+pressed about him; he cured them with a touch. There could be no
+reasonable doubt now; surely he was a god. On his shoulders Apollonius
+threw the purple, and Vespasian set out for Rome.
+
+His antecedents were less propitious. The descendant of an obscure
+centurion, he had been a veterinary surgeon; then, having got
+Caligula's ear, he flattered it abominably. Caligula disposed of, he
+flattered Claud, or what amounted to the same thing, Narcissus, Claud's
+chamberlain. Through the influence of the latter he became a
+lieutenant, fought on remote frontiers--fought well, too--so well even
+that, Narcissus gone, he felt Agrippina watching him, and knowing the
+jealousy of her eyes, prudently kept quiet until that lady did.
+
+With Nero he promenaded through Greece--sat at the Olympian games and
+fell asleep when his emperor sang. Treason of that high
+nature--sacrilege, rather, for Nero was then a god--might have been
+overlooked, had it occurred but once, for Nero could be magnanimous
+when he chose. But it always occurred. To Nero's tremolo invariably
+came the accompaniment of Vespasian's snore. He was dreaming of that
+tooth, no doubt. "I am not a soporific, am I?" Nero gnashed at him, and
+sent the blasphemer away.
+
+For a while Vespasian lived in constant expectation of some civil
+message inviting him to die. Finally it came, only he was invited to
+die at the head of an army which Nero had projected against seditious
+Jews. When he returned, leaving his son Titus to attend to Jerusalem,
+it was as emperor.
+
+Only a moment before Vitellius had been disposed of. That curious
+glutton, whom the Rhenish legions had chosen because of his coarse
+familiarity, would willingly have fled had the soldiery let him. But
+not at all; they wanted a prince of their own manufacture. They knew
+nothing of Vespasian, cared less; and into the Capitol they chased the
+latter's partisans, his son Domitian as well. The besieged defended
+themselves with masterpieces, with sacred urns, the statues of gods,
+the pedestals of divinities. Suddenly the Capitol was aflame.
+Simultaneously Vespasian's advance guard beat at the gates. The
+besiegers turned, the mob was with them, and together they fought,
+first at the gates, then in the streets, in the Forum, retreating
+always, but like lions, their face to the foe. The volatile mob, noting
+the retreat, turned from combatant into spectator. Let the soldiers
+fight; it was their duty, not theirs; and, as the struggle continued,
+from roof and window they eyed it with that artistic delight which the
+arena had developed, applauding the clever thrusts, abusing the
+vanquished, robbing the dead, and therewith pillaging the wineshops,
+crowding the lupanars. During the orgy, Vitellius was stabbed. The
+Flavians had won the day, the empire was Vespasian's.
+
+The use he made of it was very modest. In spite of his manifest
+divinity he had nothing in common with the Caesars that had gone
+before; he had no dreams of the impossible, no desire to frighten
+Jupiter or seduce the moon. He was a plain man, tall and ruddy, very
+coarse in speech and thought, open-armed and close-fisted, slapping
+senators on the back and keeping a sharp eye on the coppers; taxing the
+latrinae, and declaring that money had no smell; yet still, in
+comparison with Claud and Nero, almost the ideal; absolutely
+uninteresting also, yet doing what good he could; effacing at once the
+traces of the civil war, rebuilding the Capitol, calming the people,
+protecting the provinces, restoring to Rome the gardens of Nero,
+clipping the wings of the Palace of Gold, throwing open again the Via
+Sacra, over which the Palace had spread; draining the lake that had
+shimmered before it, and erecting the Colosseum in its place.
+
+In spite of Serapsis, Anubis and Isis, he had not the faintest odor of
+myth about him; absolutely bourgeois, he lacked even that atmosphere of
+burlesque that surrounded Claud; he was not even vicious. But he was a
+soldier, a brave one; and if, with the acquired economy of a subaltern
+who has been obliged to live on his pay, he kept his purse-strings
+tight, they were loose enough if a friend were in need, and he paid no
+one the compliment of a lie. He was projected sheer out of the
+republic. The better part of his life had been passed under arms; the
+delicate sensuality of Rome was foreign to him. It was there that
+Domitian had lived.
+
+It were interesting to have watched that young man killing flies by the
+hour, while he meditated on the atrocities he was to commit--atrocities
+so numberless and needless that in the red halls of the Caesars he has
+left a portrait which is unique. Slender, graceful, handsome, as were
+all the young emperors of old Rome, his blue, troubled eyes took
+pleasure, if at all, only in the sight of blood.
+
+In accordance with the fashion which Caligula and Nero had set,
+Domitian's earliest manners were those of an urbane and gentle prince.
+Later, when he made it his turn to rule, informers begged their bread
+in exile. Where they are not punished, he announced, they are
+encouraged. The sacrifices were so distressing to him that he forbade
+the immolation of oxen. He was disinterested, too, refusing legacies
+when the testator left nearer heirs, and therewith royally generous,
+covering his suite with presents, and declaring that to him avarice of
+all vices was the lowest and most vile. In short, you would have said
+another adolescent Nero come to Rome; there was the same silken
+sweetness of demeanor, the same ready blush, in addition to a zeal for
+justice and equity which other young emperors had been too thoughtless
+to show.
+
+His boyhood, too, had not been above reproach. The same things were
+whispered about him that had been shouted at Augustus. Manifestly he
+lacked not one of the qualities which go to the making of a model
+prince. Vespasian alone had his doubts.
+
+"Mushrooms won't hurt you," he cried one day, as Domitian started at
+the sight of a ragout a la Sardanapale, which he fancied, possibly, was
+a la Locuste, "It is steel you should fear."
+
+At that time, with a father for emperor and a brother who was sacking
+Jerusalem, Domitian had but one cause for anxiety, to wit--that the
+empire might escape him. It was then he began his meditations over
+holocausts of flies. For hours he secluded himself, occupied solely
+with their slaughter. He treated them precisely as Titus treated the
+Jews, enjoying the quiver of their legs, the little agonies of their
+silent death.
+
+Tiberius had been in love with solitude, but never as he. Night after
+night he wandered on the terraces of the palace, watching the red moon
+wane white, companioned only by his dreams, those waking dreams that
+poets and madmen share, that Pallas had him in her charge, that Psyche
+was amorous of his eyes.
+
+Meanwhile he was a nobody, a young gentleman merely, who might have
+moved in the best society, and who preferred the worst--his own. The
+sudden elevation of Vespasian preoccupied him, and while he knew that
+in the natural course of events his father would move to Olympus, yet
+there was his brother Titus, on whose broad shoulders the mantle of
+purple would fall. If the seditious Jews only knew their business! But
+no. Forty years before a white apparition on the way to Golgotha had
+cried to a handful of women, "The days are coming in which they shall
+say to the mountains, 'Fall on us'; to the hills, 'Cover us.'" And the
+days had come. A million of them had been butchered. From the country
+they had fled to the city; from Acra they had climbed to Zion. When the
+city burst into flames their blood put it out. Decidedly they did not
+know their business. Titus, instead of being stabbed before Jerusalem's
+walls, was marching in triumph to Rome.
+
+The procession that presently entered the gates was a stream of
+splendor; crowns of rubies and gold; garments that glistened with gems;
+gods on their sacred pedestals; prisoners; curious beasts; Jerusalem in
+miniature; pictures of war; booty from the Temple, the veil, the
+candelabra, the cups of gold and the Book of the Law. To the rear
+rumbled the triumphal car, in which laurelled and mantled Titus stood,
+Vespasian at his side; while, in the distance, on horseback, came
+Domitian--a supernumerary, ignored by the crowd.
+
+When the prisoners disappeared in the Tullianum and a herald shouted,
+"They have lived!" Domitian returned to the palace and hunted morosely
+for flies. The excesses of the festival in which Rome was swooning then
+had no delights for him. Presently the moon would rise, and then on the
+deserted terrace perhaps he would bathe a little in her light, and
+dream again of Pallas and of the possibilities of an emperor's sway,
+but meanwhile those blue troubled eyes that Psyche was amorous of were
+filled with envy and with hate. It was not that he begrudged Titus the
+triumph. The man who had disposed of a million Jews deserved not one
+triumph, but ten. It was the purple that haunted him.
+
+Domitian was then in the early twenties. The Temple of Peace was
+ascending; the Temple of Janus was closed; the empire was at rest. Side
+by side with Vespasian, Titus ruled. From the Euphrates came the rumor
+of some vague revolt. Domitian thought he would like to quell it. He
+was requested to keep quiet. It occurred to him that his father ought
+to be ashamed of himself to reign so long. He was requested to vacate
+his apartment. There were dumb plots in dark cellars, of which only the
+echo of a whisper has descended to us, but which at the time were quite
+loud enough to reach Vespasian's ears. Titus interceded. Domitian was
+requested to behave.
+
+For a while he prowled in the moonlight. He had been too precipitate,
+he decided, and to allay suspicion presently he went about in society,
+mingling his hours with those of married women. Manifestly his ways had
+mended. But Vespasian was uneasy. A comet had appeared. The doors of
+the imperial mausoleum had opened of themselves, besides, he was not
+well. The robust and hardy soldier, suddenly without tangible cause,
+felt his strength give way. "It is nothing," his physician said; "a
+slight attack of fever." Vespasian shook his head; he knew things of
+which the physician was ignorant. "It is death," he answered, "and an
+emperor should meet it standing."
+
+Titus' turn came next. A violent, headstrong, handsome, rapacious
+prince, terribly prodigal, thoroughly Oriental, surrounded by dancers
+and mignons, living in state with a queen for mistress, startling even
+Rome with the uproar of his debauches--no sooner was Vespasian gone
+than presto! the queen went home, the dancers disappeared, the
+debauches ceased, and a ruler appeared who declared he had lost a day
+that a good action had not marked; a ruler who could announce that no
+one should leave his presence depressed.
+
+Though Vespasian had gone, his reign continued. Not long, it is true,
+and punctuated by a spectacle of which Caligula, for all his poetry,
+had not dreamed--the burial of Pompeii. But a reign which, while it
+lasted, was fastidious and refined, and during which, again and again,
+Titus, who commanded death and whom death obeyed, besought Domitian to
+be to him a brother.
+
+Domitian had no such intention. He had a party behind him, one made up
+of old Neronians, the army of the discontented, who wanted a change,
+and greatly admired this charming young prince whose hours were passed
+in killing flies and making love to married women. The pretorians too
+had been seduced. Domitian could make captivating promises when he
+chose.
+
+As a consequence Titus, like Vespasian, was uneasy, and with cause.
+Dion Cassius, or rather that brute Xiphilin, his abbreviator, mentions
+the fever that overtook him, the same his father had met. It was
+mortal, of course, and the purple was Domitian's.
+
+For a year and a day thereafter you would have thought Titus still at
+the helm. There was the same clemency, the same regard for justice, the
+same refinement and fastidiousness. The morose young poet had developed
+into a model monarch. The old Neronians were perplexed, irritated too;
+they had expected other things. Domitian was merely feeling the way;
+the hand that held the sceptre was not quite sure of its strength, and,
+tentatively almost, this Prince of Virtue began to scrutinize the
+morals of Rome. For the first time he noticed that the cocottes took
+their airing in litters. But litters were not for them! That abuse he
+put a stop to at once. A senator manifested an interest in
+ballet-girls; he was disgraced. The vestals, to whose indiscretions no
+one had paid much attention, learned the statutes of an archaic law,
+and were buried alive. The early distaste for blood was diminishing.
+Domitian had the purple, but it was not bright enough; he wanted it
+red, and what Domitian wanted he got. Your god and master orders it,
+was the formula he began to use when addressing the Senate and People
+of Rome.
+
+To that the people were indifferent. The spectacles he gave in the
+Flavian amphitheatre were too magnificently atrocious not to be a
+compensation in full for any eccentricity in which he might indulge.
+Besides, under Nero, Claud, Caligula, on en avait vu bien d'autres. And
+at those spectacles where he presided, crowned with a tiara, on which
+were the images of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, while grouped about him
+the college of Flavian flamens wore tiaras that differed therefrom
+merely in this, that they bore his image too, the people right royally
+applauded their master and their god.
+
+And it was just as well they did; Domitian was quite capable of
+ordering everybody into the arena. As yet, however, he had appeared
+little different from any other prince. That Rome might understand that
+there was a difference, and also in what that difference consisted, he
+gave a supper. Everyone worth knowing was bidden, and, as is usual in
+state functions, everyone that was bidden came. The supper hall was
+draped with black; the ceiling, the walls, the floor, everything was
+basaltic. The couches were black, the linen was black, the slaves were
+black. Behind each guest was a broken column with his name on it. The
+food was such as is prepared when death has come. The silence was that
+of the tomb. The only audible voice was Domitian's. He was talking very
+wittily and charmingly about murder, about proscriptions, the good
+informers do, the utility of the headsman, the majesty of the law. The
+guests, a trifle ill at ease, wished their host sweet dreams. "The same
+to you," he answered, and deplored that they must go.
+
+On the morrow informers and headsmen were at work. Any pretext was
+sufficient. Birth, wealth, fame, or the lack of them--anything
+whatever--and there the culprit stood, charged not with treason to an
+emperor, but with impiety to a god. On the judgment seat Domitian sat.
+Before him the accused passed, and under his eyes they were questioned,
+tortured, condemned and killed. At once their property passed into the
+keeping of the prince.
+
+Of that he had need. The arena was expensive, but the drain was
+elsewhere. A little before, a quarrelsome people, the Dacians, whom it
+took a Trajan to subdue, had overrun the Danube, and were marching down
+to Rome. Domitian set out to meet them. The Dacians retreated, not at
+all because they were repulsed, but because Domitian thought it better
+warfare to pay them to do so. On his return after that victory he
+enjoyed a triumph as fair as that of Caesar. And each year since then
+the emperor of Rome had paid tribute to a nation of mongrel oafs.
+
+Of course he needed money. The informers were there and he got it, and
+with it that spectacle of torture and of blood which he needed too.
+Curiously, his melancholy increased; his good looks had gone; Psyche
+was no longer amorous of his eyes. Something else haunted him,
+something he could not define; the past, perhaps, perhaps the future.
+To his ears came strange sounds, the murmur of his own name, and
+suddenly silence. Then, too, there always seemed to be something behind
+him; something that when he turned disappeared. The room in which he
+slept he had covered with a polished metal that reflected everything,
+yet still the intangible was there. Once Pallas came in her chariot,
+waved him farewell, and disappeared, borne by black horses across the
+black night.
+
+The astrologers consulted had nothing pleasant to say. They knew, as
+Domitian knew, that the end was near. So was theirs. To one of them,
+who predicted his immediate death, he inquired, "What will your end
+be?" "I," answered the astrologer--"I shall be torn by dogs." "To the
+stake with him!" cried Domitian; "let him be burned alive!" Suetonius
+says that a storm put out the flames, and dogs devoured the corpse.
+Another astrologer predicted that Domitian would die before noon on the
+morrow. In order to convince him of his error, Domitian ordered him to
+be executed the subsequent night. Before noon on the morrow Domitian
+was dead.
+
+Philostratus and Dion Cassius both unite in saying that at that hour
+Apollonius was at Ephesus, preaching to the multitude. In the middle of
+the sermon he hesitated, but in a moment he began anew. Again he
+hesitated, his eyes half closed; then, suddenly he shouted, "Strike
+him! Strike him once more!" And immediately to his startled audience he
+related a scene that was occurring at Rome, the attack on Domitian, his
+struggle with an assailant, his effort to tear out his eyes, the rush
+of conspirators, and finally the fall of the emperor, pierced by seven
+knives.
+
+The story may not be true, and yet if it were!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE POISON IN THE PURPLE
+
+
+Rome never was healthy. The tramontana visited it then as now, fever,
+too, and sudden death. To emperors it was fatal. Since Caesar a malaria
+had battened on them all. Nerva escaped, but only through abdication.
+The mantle that fell from Domitian's shoulders on to his was so
+dangerous in its splendor, that, fearing the infection, he passed it to
+Ulpius Trajanus, the lustre undimmed.
+
+Ulpius Trajanus, Trajan for brevity, a Spaniard by birth, a soldier by
+choice; one who had fought against Parthian and Jew, who had triumphed
+through Pannonia and made it his own; a general whose hair had whitened
+on the field; a consul who had frightened nations, was afraid of the
+sheen of that purple which dazzled, corroded and killed. He bore it,
+indeed, but at arm's-length. He kept himself free from the subtlety of
+its poison, from the microbes of Rome as well.
+
+He was in Cologne when Domitian died and Nerva accepted and renounced
+the throne. It was a year before he ventured among the seven hills.
+When he arrived you would have said another Augustus, not the real
+Augustus, but the Augustus of legend, and the late Mr. Gibbon. When he
+girt the new prefect of the pretorium with the immemorial sword, he
+addressed him in copy-book phrases--"If I rule wisely, use it for me;
+unwisely, against me."
+
+Rome listened open-mouthed. The change from Domitian's formula, "Your
+god and master orders it," was too abrupt to be immediately understood.
+Before it was grasped Trajan was off again; this time to the Danube and
+beyond it, to Dacia and her fens.
+
+Many years later--a century or two, to be exact--a Persian satrap
+loitered in a forum of Rome. "It is here," he declared, "I am tempted
+to forget that man is mortal."
+
+He had passed beneath a triumphal arch; before him was a glittering
+square, grandiose, yet severe; a stretch of temples and basilicas, in
+which masterpieces felt at home--the Forum of Trajan, the compliment of
+a nation to a prince. Dominating it was a column, in whose thick
+spirals you read to-day the one reliable chronicle of the Dacian
+campaign. Was not Gautier well advised when he said only art endures?
+
+There were other chronicles in plenty; there were the histories of
+AElius Maurus, of Marius Maximus, and that of Spartian, but they are
+lost. There is a page or two in the abbreviation which Xiphilin made of
+Dion; Aurelius Victor has a little to add, so also has Eutropus, but,
+practically speaking, there is, apart from that column, nothing save
+conjecture.
+
+Campaigns are wearisome reading, but not the one that is pictured
+there. You ask a curve a question, and in the next you find the reply.
+There is a point, however, on which it is dumb--the origin of the war.
+But if you wish to know the result, not the momentary and transient
+result, but the sequel which futurity held, look at the ruins at that
+column's base.
+
+The origin of the war was Domitian's diplomacy. The chieftain whom he
+had made king, and who had been surprised enough at receiving a diadem
+instead of the point of a sword, fancied, and not unreasonably, that
+the annuity which Rome paid him was to continue forever. But Domitian,
+though a god, was not otherwise immortal. When he died abruptly the
+annuity ceased. The Dacian king sent word that he was surprised at the
+delay, but he must have been far more so at the promptness with which
+he got Trajan's reply. It was a blare of bugles, which he thought
+forever dumb; a flight of eagles, which he thought were winged.
+
+In the spirals of the column you see the advancing army, the retreating
+foe; then the Dacian dragon saluting the standards of Rome; peace
+declared, and an army, whose very repose is menacing, standing there to
+see that peace is kept. And was it? In the ascending spiral is the new
+revolt, the attempt to assassinate Trajan, the capture of the
+conspirators, the advance of the legions, the retreat of the Dacians,
+burning their cities as they go, carrying their wounded and their women
+with them, and at last pressing about a huge cauldron that is filled
+with poison, fighting among themselves for a cup of the brew, and
+rolling on the ground in the convulsions of death. Farther on is the
+treasure of the king. To hide it he had turned a river from its source,
+sunk the gold in a vault beneath, and killed the workmen that had
+labored there. Beyond is the capture of the capital, the suicide of the
+chief, a troop of soldiers driving captives and cattle before them, the
+death of a nation and the end of war.
+
+The subsequent triumph does not appear on the column. It is said that
+ten thousand beasts were slaughtered in the arenas, slaughtering, as
+they fell, a thousand of their slaughterers. But the spectacle, however
+fair, was not of a nature to detain Trajan long in Rome. The air there
+had not improved in the least, and presently he was off again, this
+time on the banks of the Euphrates, arguing with the Parthians,
+avoiding danger in the only way he knew, by facing it.
+
+It was then that the sheen of the purple glowed. If lustreless at home,
+it was royally red abroad. In a campaign that was little more than a
+triumphant promenade he doubled the empire. To the world of Caesar he
+added that of Alexander. Allies he turned into subjects, vassals into
+slaves. Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, were added to the realm.
+Trajan's footstools were diadems. He had moved back one frontier, he
+moved another. From Britain to the Indus, Rome was mistress of the
+earth. Had Trajan been younger, China, whose very name was unknown,
+would have yielded to him her corruption, her printing press, her
+powder and her tea.
+
+That he would have enjoyed these things is not at all conjectural. He
+was then an old man, but he was not a good one--at least not in the
+sense we use the term to-day. He had habits which are regarded now less
+as vices than perversions, but which at that time were taken as a
+matter of course and accepted by everyone, even by the stoics, very
+calmly, with a grain of Attic salt at that. Men were regarded as
+virtuous when they were brave, when they were honest; the idea of using
+the expression in its later sense occurred, if at all, in jest merely,
+as a synonym for the eunuch. It was the matron and the vestal who were
+supposed to be straight, and their straightness was wholly
+supposititious. The ceremonies connected with the phallus, and those
+observed in the worship of the Bona Dea, were of a nature that no
+virtue could withstand. Every altar, Juvenal said, had its Clodius, and
+even in Clodius' absence there were always those breaths of Sapphic
+song that blew through Mitylene.
+
+It is just that absence of a quality which we regard as an added grace;
+one, parenthetically, which dowered the world with a new conception of
+beauty that makes it difficult to picture Rome. Modern ink has acquired
+Nero's blush; it comes very readily, yet, however sensitive a writer
+may be, once Roman history is before him, he may violate it if he
+choose; he may even give it a child, but never can he make it
+immaculate. He may skip, indeed, if he wish; and it is because he has
+skipped so often that one fancies that Augustus was all right. The rain
+of fire which fell on the cities that mirrored their towers in the
+Bitter Sea, might just as well have fallen on him, on Vergil, too, on
+Caligula, Claud, Nero, Otho, Vitellius, Titus, Domitian, and
+particularly on Trajan.
+
+As lieutenant in the latter's triumphant promenade, was a nephew,
+AElius Hadrianus, a young man for whom Trajan's wife is rumored to have
+had more than a platonic affection, and who in younger days was
+numbered among Trajan's mignons. During the progress of that promenade
+Trajan fell ill. The command of the troops was left to Hadrian, and
+Trajan started for Rome. On the way he died. In what manner is not
+known; his wife, however, was with him, and it was in her hand that a
+letter went to the senate stating that Trajan had adopted Hadrian as
+his heir. Trajan had done nothing of the sort. The idea had indeed
+occurred to him, but long since it had been abandoned. He had even
+formally selected someone else, but his wife was with him, and her
+lover commanded the troops. The lustre of the purple, always dazzling,
+had fascinated Hadrian's eyes. Did he steal it? One may conjecture, yet
+never know. In any event it was his, and he folded it very
+magnificently about him. Still young, a trifle over thirty, handsome,
+unusually accomplished, grand seigneur to his finger-tips, endowed with
+a manner which is rumored to have been one of great charm, possessed of
+the amplest appreciation of the elegancies of life, he had precisely
+the figure which purple adorns. But, though the lustre had fascinated,
+he too knew its spell; and presently he started off on a journey about
+the world, which lasted fifteen years, and which, when ended, left the
+world the richer for his passing, decorated with the monuments he had
+strewn. Before that journey began, at the earliest rumor of Trajan's
+death, the Euphrates and Tigris awoke, the cinders of Nineveh flamed.
+The rivers and land that lay between knew that their conqueror had
+gone. Hadrian knew it also, and knew too that, though he might occupy
+the warrior's throne, he never could fill the warrior's place. To
+Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, freedom was restored. Dacia could have
+had it for the asking. But over Dacia the toga had been thrown; it was
+as Roman as Gaul. A corner of it is Roman still; the Roumanians are
+there. But though Dacia was quiet, in its neighborhood the restless
+Sarmatians prowled and threatened. Hadrian, who had already written a
+book on tactics, knew at once how to act. Domitian's policy was before
+him; he followed the precedent, and paid the Sarmatians to be still. It
+requires little acumen to see that when Rome permitted herself to be
+blackmailed the end was near.
+
+For the time being, however, there was peace, and in its interest
+Hadrian set out on that unequalled journey over a land that was his.
+Had fate relented, Trajan could have made a wider one still. But in
+Trajan was the soldier merely, when he journeyed it was with the sword.
+In Hadrian was the dilettante, the erudite too; he travelled not to
+conquer, but to learn, to satisfy an insatiable curiosity, for
+self-improvement, for glory too. Behind him was an army, not of
+soldiers, but of masons, captained by architects, artists and
+engineers. Did a site please him, there was a temple at once, or if not
+that, then a bridge, an aqueduct, a library, a new fashion, sovereignty
+even, but everywhere the spectacle of an emperor in flesh and blood.
+For the first time the provinces were able to understand that a Caesar
+was not necessarily a brute, a phantom and a god.
+
+It would have been interesting to have made one of that court of poets
+and savants that surrounded him; to have dined with him in Paris, eaten
+oysters in London; sat with him while he watched that wall go up before
+the Scots, and then to have passed down again through a world still
+young--a world beautiful, ornate, unutilitarian; a world to which
+trams, advertisements and telegraph poles had not yet come; a world
+that still had illusions, myths and mysteries; one in which religion
+and poetry went hand in hand--a world without newspapers, hypocrisy and
+cant.
+
+Hadrian, doubtless, enjoyed it. He was young enough to have enthusiasms
+and to show them; he was one of the best read men of the day; he was
+poet, painter, sculptor, musician, erudite and emperor in one. Of
+course he enjoyed it. The world, over which he travelled, was his, not
+by virtue of the purple alone, but because of his knowledge of it. The
+prince is not necessarily cosmopolitan; the historian and antiquarian
+are. Hadrian was an early Quinet, an earlier Champollion; always the
+thinker, sometimes the cook. And to those in his suite it must have
+been a sight very unique to see a Caesar who had published his volume
+of erotic verse, just as any other young man might do; who had hunted
+lions, not in the arena, but in Africa, make researches on the plain
+where Troy had been, and a supreme of sow's breast, peacock, pheasant,
+ham and boar, which he called Pentapharmarch, and which he offered as
+he had his Catacriani--the erotic verse--as something original and nice.
+
+Insatiably inquisitive, verifying a history that he was preparing in
+the lands which gave that history birth, he passed through Egypt and
+Asia, questioning sphinxes, the cerements of kings, the arcana of the
+temples; deciphering the sacred books, arguing with magi, interrogating
+the stars. For the thinker, after the fashion of the hour, was
+astrologer too, and one of the few anecdotes current concerning him is
+in regard to a habit he had of drawing up on the 31st of December the
+events of the coming year. After consulting the stars on that 31st of
+December which occurred in the twenty-second year of his reign, he
+prepared a calendar which extended only to the 10th of July. On that
+day he died.
+
+The calendar does not seem to have been otherwise serviceable. It was
+in Bithynia he found a shepherd whose appearance which, in its
+perfection, was quite earthly, suggested neither heaven nor hell, but
+some planet where the atmosphere differs from ours; where it is pink,
+perhaps, or faintly ochre; where birth and death have forms higher than
+here.
+
+Hadrian, captivated, led the lad in leash. The facts concerning that
+episode have been so frequently given that the repetition is needless
+here. Besides, the point is elsewhere. Presently the lad fell
+overboard. Hadrian lost a valet, Rome an emperor, and Olympus a god.
+But in attempting to deify the lost lackey, the grief of Hadrian was so
+immediate, that it is permissible to fancy that the lad's death was not
+one of those events which the emperor-astrologer noted beforehand on
+his calendar. The lad was decently buried, the Nile gave up her dead,
+and on the banks a fair city rose, one that had its temples, priests,
+altars and shrines; a city that worshipped a star, and called that star
+Antinous. Hadrian then could have congratulated himself. Even Caligula
+would have envied him. He had done his worst; he had deified not a lad,
+but a lust. And not for the moment alone. A half century later
+Tertullian noted that the worship still endured, and subsequently the
+Alexandrine Clement discovered consciences that Antinous had reproached.
+
+Antinous, deified, was presently forgot. A young Roman, wonderfully
+beautiful, Dion says, yet singularly effeminate; a youth who could
+barely carry a shield; who slept between rose-leaves and lilies; who
+was an artist withal; a poet who had written lines that Martial might
+have mistaken for his own, Cejonius Verus by name, succeeded the
+Bithynian shepherd. Hadrian, who would have adopted Antinous, adopted
+Verus in his stead. But Hadrian was not happy in his choice. Verus
+died, and singularly enough, Hadrian selected as future emperor the one
+ruler against whom history has not a reproach, Pius Antonin.
+
+Meanwhile the journey continued. The Thousand and One Nights were
+realized then if ever. The beauty of the world was at its apogee, the
+glory of Rome as well; and through secrets and marvels Hadrian
+strolled, note-book in hand, his eyes unwearied, his curiosity
+unsatiated still. To pleasure him the intervales took on a fairer glow;
+cities decked themselves anew, the temples unveiled their mysteries;
+and when he passed to the intervales liberty came; to the cities,
+sovereignty; to the temples, shrines. The world rose to him as a woman
+greets her lover. His travels were not fatigues; they were delights, in
+which nations participated, and of which the memories endure as though
+enchanted still.
+
+It would have been interesting, no doubt, to have dined with him in
+Paris; to have quarried lions in their African fens; to have heard
+archaic hymns ripple through the rushes of the Nile; to have lounged in
+the Academe, to have scaled Parnassus, and sailed the AEgean Sea; but,
+a history and an arm-chair aiding, the traveller has but to close his
+eyes and the past returns. Without disturbing so much as a shirt-box,
+he may repeat that promenade. Triremes have foundered; litters are out
+of date; painted elephants are no more; the sky has changed, climates
+with it; there are colors, as there are arts, that have gone from us
+forever; there are desolate plains, where green and yellow was; the
+shriek of steam where gods have strayed; advertisements in sacred
+groves; Baedekers in ruins that never heard an atheist's voice;
+solitudes where there were splendors; the snarl of jackals where once
+were birds and bees--yet, history and the arm-chair aiding, it all
+returns. Any traveller may follow in Hadrian's steps; he is stayed but
+once--on the threshold of the Temple of Eleusis. It is there history
+gropes, impotent and blind, and it is there the interest of that
+journey culminated.
+
+Beyond the episode connected with Antinous, Hadrian's journey was
+marked by another, one which occurred in Judaea. Both were infamous, no
+doubt, but, what is more to the point, both mark the working of the
+poison in the purple that he bore.
+
+Since Titus had gone, despairful Judaea had taken heart again. Hope in
+that land was inextinguishable. The walls of Jerusalem were still
+standing; in the Temple the offices continued. Though Rome remained,
+there was Israel too. Passing that way one afternoon, Hadrian mused.
+The city affected him; the site was superb. And as he mused it occurred
+to him that Jerusalem was less harmonious to the ear than
+Hadrianopolis; that the Temple occupied a position on which a Capitol
+would look far better; in brief, that Jehovah might be advantageously
+replaced by Jove. The army of masons that were ever at his heels were
+set to work at once. They had received similar orders and performed
+similar tasks so often that they could not fancy anyone would object.
+The Jews did. They fought as they had never fought before; they fought
+for three years against a Nebuchadnezzar who created torrents of blood
+so abundant that stones were carried for miles, and who left corpses
+enough to fertilize the land for a decade. The survivors were sold.
+Those for whom no purchasers could be found had their heads amputated.
+Jerusalem was razed to the ground. The site of the Temple was furrowed
+by the plow, sown with salt, and in place of the City of David rose
+AElia Capitolina, a miniature Rome, whose gates, save on one day in the
+year, Jews were forbidden under penalty of death to pass, were
+forbidden to look at, and over which were images of swine, pigs with
+scornful snouts, the feet turned inward, the tail twisted like a lie.
+
+It was not honorable warfare, but it was effective; then, too, it was
+Hadrianesque, the mad insult of a madman to a race as mad as he. The
+purple had done its work. History has left the rise of this emperor
+conjectural; his fall is written in blood. As he began he ended, a poet
+and a beast.
+
+Presently he was in Rome. It was not homesickness that took him there;
+he was far too cosmopolitan to suffer from any such malady as that. It
+was the accumulations of a fifteen-year excursion through the
+metropoles of art which demanded a gallery of their own. Another with
+similar tastes and similar power might have ordered everything which
+pleasured his eye to be carted to Rome, but in his quality of artifex
+omnipotens Hadrian embellished and never sacked. There were painters
+and sculptors enough in that army at his heels, and whatever appealed
+to him was copied on the spot. So much was copied that a park of ten
+square miles was just large enough to form the open-air museum which he
+had designed, one which centuries of excavation have not exhausted yet.
+
+The museum became a mad-house. Hadrian was ill; tired in mind and body,
+smitten with imperialia. It was then the young Verus died, leaving for
+a wonder a child behind, and more wonderful still, Antonin was adopted.
+Through Rome, meanwhile, terror stalked. Hadrian, in search of a remedy
+against his increasing confusion of mind, his visible weakness of body,
+turned from physicians to oracles; from them to magic, and then to
+blood. He decimated the senate. Soldiers, freemen, citizens, anybody
+and everybody were ordered off to death. He tried to kill himself and
+failed; he tried again, wondering, no doubt, why he who commanded death
+for others could not command it for himself. Presently he succeeded,
+and Antonin--the pious Antonin, as the senate called him--marshalled
+from cellars and crypts the senators and citizens whom Hadrian had
+ordered to be destroyed.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+FAUSTINE
+
+
+Anyone who has loitered a moment among the statues in the Salle des
+Antonins at the Louvre will recall the bust of the Empress Faustina. It
+stands near the entrance, coercing the idler to remove his hat; to stop
+a moment, to gaze and dream. The face differs from that which Mr.
+Swinburne has described. In the poise of the head, in the expression of
+the lips, particularly in the features which, save the low brow, are
+not of the Roman type, there is a commingling of just that loveliness
+and melancholy which must have come to Psyche when she lost her god. In
+the corners of the mouth, in the droop of the eyelids, in the moulding
+of the chin, you may see that rarity--beauty and intellect in one--and
+with it the heightening shadow of an eternal regret. Before her Marcus
+Aurelius, her husband, stands, decked with the purple, with all the
+splendor of the imperator, his beard in overlapping curls, his
+questioning eyes dilated. Beyond is her daughter, Lucille, less fair
+than the mother, a healthy girl of the dairymaid type. Near by is the
+son, Commodus. Across the hall is Lucius Verus, the husband of Lucille;
+in a corner, Antonin, Faustine's father, and, more remotely, his wife.
+Together they form quite a family group, and to the average tourist
+they must seem a thoroughly respectable lot. Antonin certainly was
+respectable. He was the first emperor who declined to be a brute.
+Referring to his wife he said that he would rather be with her in a
+desert than without her in a palace; the speech, parenthetically, of a
+man who, though he could have cited that little Greek princess,
+Nausicaa, as a precedent, was too well-bred to permit so much as a
+fringe of his household linen to flutter in public. Besides, at his
+hours, he was a poet, and it is said that if a poet tell a lie twice he
+will believe it. Antonin so often declared his wife to be a charming
+person that in the end no doubt he thought so. She was not charming,
+however, or if she were, her charm was not that of exclusiveness.
+
+It was in full sight of this lady's inconsequences that Faustine was
+educated. Wherever she looked, the candors of her girlhood were
+violated. The phallus then was omnipresent. Iamblicus, not the
+novelist, but the philosopher, has much to say on the subject; as has
+Arnobius in the Adversus gentes, and Lactance in the De falsa
+religione. If Juvenal, Martial, Petronius, are more reticent, it is
+because they were not Fathers of the Church, nor yet antiquarians. No
+one among us exacts a description of a spire. The phallus was as common
+to them, commoner even. It was on the coins, on the doors, in the
+gardens. As a preservative against Envy it hung from children's necks.
+On sun-dials and water clocks it marked the flight of time. The vestals
+worshipped it. At weddings it was used in a manner which need not be
+described.
+
+It was from such surroundings that Faustine stepped into the arms of
+the severe and stately prince whom her father had chosen. That Marcus
+Aurelius adored her is certain. His notebook shows it. A more
+tender-hearted and perfect lover romance may show, but history cannot.
+He must have been the quintessence of refinement, a thoroughbred to his
+finger-tips; one for whom that purple mantle was too gaudy, and yet who
+bore it, as he bore everything else, in that self-abnegatory spirit
+which the higher reaches of philosophy bring.
+
+He was of that rare type that never complains and always consoles.
+
+After Antonin's death, his hours ceased to be his own. On the Euphrates
+there was the wildest disorder. To the north new races were pushing
+nations over the Danube and the Rhine. From the catacombs Christ was
+emerging; from the Nile, Serapis. The empire was in disarray. Antonin
+had provided his son-in-law with a coadjutor, Lucius Verus, the son of
+Hadrian's mignon, a magnificent scoundrel; a tall, broad-shouldered
+athlete, with a skin as fresh as a girl's and thick curly hair, which
+he covered with a powder of gold; a viveur, whose suppers are famous
+still; whose guests were given the slaves that served them, the plate
+off which they had eaten, the cups from which they had drunk--cups of
+gold, cups of silver, jewelled cups, cups from Alexandria, murrhine
+vases filled with nard--cars and litters to go home with, mules with
+silver trappings and negro muleteers. Capitolinus says that, while the
+guests feasted, sometimes the magnificent Verus got drunk, and was
+carried to bed in a coverlid, or else, the red feather aiding, turned
+out and fought the watch.
+
+It was this splendid individual to whom Marcus Aurelius entrusted the
+Euphrates. They had been brought up together, sharing each others
+tutors, writing themes for the same instructor, both meanwhile
+adolescently enamored of the fair Faustine. It was to Marcus she was
+given, the empire as a dower; and when that dower passed into his
+hands, he could think of nothing more equitable than to ask Verus to
+share it with him. Verus was not stupid enough to refuse, and at the
+hour when the Parthians turned ugly, he needed little urging to set out
+for the East, dreaming, as he did so, of creating there an empire that
+should be wholly his.
+
+At that time Faustine must have been at least twenty-eight, possibly
+thirty. There were matrons who had not seen their fifteenth year, and
+Faustine had been married young. Her daughter, Lucille, was nubile.
+Presently Verus, or rather his lieutenants, succeeded, and the girl was
+betrothed to him. There was a festival, of course, games in abundance,
+and plenty of blood.
+
+It would have been interesting to have seen her that day, the iron ring
+of betrothal on her finger, her brother, Commodus, staring at the
+arrangement of her hair, her mother prettily perplexed, her father
+signing orders which messengers brought and despatched while the sand
+took on a deeper red, and Rome shrieked its delight. Yes, it would have
+been interesting and typical of the hour. Her hair in the ten tresses
+which were symbolic of a fiancee's innocence, must have amused that
+brute of a brother of hers, and the iron ring on the fourth finger of
+her left hand must have given Faustine food for thought; the vestals,
+in their immaculate robes, must have gazed at her in curious, sisterly
+ways, and because of her fresh beauty surely there were undertones of
+applause. Should her father disappear she would make a gracious
+imperatrix indeed.
+
+But, meanwhile, there was Faustine, and at sight of her legends of old
+imperial days returned. She was not Messalina yet, but in the stables
+there were jockeys whose sudden wealth surprised no one; in the arenas
+there were gladiators that fought, not for liberty, nor for death, but
+for the caresses of her eyes; in the side-scenes there were mimes who
+spoke of her; there were senators who boasted in their cups, and in the
+theatre Rome laughed colossally at the catchword of her amours.
+
+Marcus Aurelius then was occupied with affairs of state. In similar
+circumstances so was Claud--Messalina's husband--so, too, was Antonin.
+But Claud was an imbecile, Antonin a man of the world, while Marcus
+Aurelius was a philosopher. When fate links a woman to any one of these
+varieties of the husband, she is blessed indeed. Faustine was
+particularly favored.
+
+The stately prince was not alone a philosopher--a calling, by the way,
+which was common enough then, and has become commoner since--he was a
+philosopher who believed in philosophy, a rarity then as now. The exact
+trend of his thought is difficult to define. His note-book is filled
+with hesitations; materialism had its allurements, so also had
+pantheism; the advantages of the Pyrrhonic suspension of judgment were
+clear to him too; according to the frame of mind in which he wrote, you
+might fancy him an agnostic, again an akosmist, sometimes both, but
+always the ethical result is the same.
+
+"Revenge yourself on your enemy by not resembling him. Forgive; forgive
+always; die forgiving. Be indulgent to the wrong-doer; be compassionate
+to him; tell him how he should act; speak to him without anger, without
+sarcasm; speak to him affectionately. Besides, what do you know of his
+wrong-doing? Are all his thoughts familiar to you? May there not be
+something that justifies him? And you, are you entirely free from
+reproach? Have you never done wrong? And if not, was it fear that
+restrained you? Was it pride, or what?"
+
+In the synoptic gospels similar recommendations appear. Charity is the
+New Testament told in a word. Christians read and forget it. But
+Christians are not philosophers. The latter are charitable because they
+regard evil as a part of the universal order of things, one which it is
+idle to blame, yet permissible to rectify.
+
+From whatever source such a tenet springs, whether from materialism,
+stoicism, pyrrhonism, epicureanism, atheism even, is of small matter;
+it is a tenet which is honorable to the holder. This sceptred
+misanthrope possessed it, and it was in that his wife was blessed.
+Years later he died, forgiving her in silence, praising her aloud.
+Claud, referring to Messalina, shouted through the Forum that the fate
+which destined him to marry impure women destined him to punish them.
+Marcus Aurelius said nothing. He did not know what fate destined him to
+do, but he did know that philosophy taught him to forgive.
+
+It was this philosophy that first perplexed Faustine. She was restless,
+frivolous, perhaps also a trifle depraved. Frivolous because all women
+were, depraved because her mother was, and restless because of the
+curiosity that inflammable imaginations share--in brief, a Roman
+princess. Her husband differed from the Roman prince. His youth had not
+been entirely circumspect; he, too, had his curiosities, but they were
+satisfied, he had found that they stained. When he married he was
+already the thinker; doubtless, he was tiresome; he could have had
+little small-talk, and his hours of love-making must have been rare.
+Presently the affairs of state engrossed him. Faustine was left to
+herself; save a friend of her own sex, a woman can have no worse
+companion. She, too, discovered she had curiosities. A gladiator passed
+that way--then Rome; then Lesbos; then the Lampsacene. "You are my
+husband's mistress," her daughter cried at her. "And you," the mother
+answered, "are your brother's." Even in the aridity of a chronicle the
+accusation and rejoinder are dramatic. Fancy what they must have been
+when mother and daughter hissed them in each other's teeth. Whether the
+argument continued is immaterial. Both could have claimed the sanction
+of religion. In those days a sin was a prayer. Religion was then, as it
+always had been, purely political. With the individual, with his
+happiness or aspirations, it concerned itself not at all. It was the
+prosperity of the empire, its peace and immortality, for which
+sacrifices were made, and libations offered. The god of Rome was Rome,
+and religion was patriotism. The antique virtues, courage in war,
+moderation in peace, and honor at all times, were civic, not personal.
+It was the state that had a soul, not the individual. Man was
+ephemeral; it was the nation that endured. It was the permanence of its
+grandeur that was important, nothing else.
+
+To ensure that permanence each citizen labored. As for the citizen,
+death was near, and he hastened to live; before the roses could fade he
+wreathed himself with them. Immortality to him was in his descendants,
+the continuation of his name, respect to his ashes. Any other form of
+future life was a speculation, infrequent at that. In anterior epochs
+Fright had peopled Tartarus, but Fright had gone. The Elysian Fields
+were vague, wearisome to contemplate; even metempsychosis had no
+adherents. "After death," said Caesar, "there is nothing," and all the
+world agreed with him. The hour, too, in which three thousand gods had
+not a single atheist, had gone, never to return. Old faiths had
+crumbled. None the less was Rome the abridgment of every superstition.
+The gods of the conquered had always been part of her spoils. The
+Pantheon had become a lupanar of divinities that presided over birth,
+and whose rites were obscene; an abattoir of gods that presided over
+death, and whose worship was gore. To please them was easy. Blood and
+debauchery was all that was required. That the upper classes had no
+faith in them at all goes without the need of telling; the atmosphere
+of their atriums dripped with metaphysics. But of the atheism of the
+upper classes the people knew nothing; they clung piously to a faith
+which held a theological justification of every sin, and in the temples
+fervent prayers were murmured, not for future happiness, for that was
+unobtainable, nor yet for wisdom or virtue, for those things the gods
+neither granted nor possessed; the prayers were that the gods would
+favor the suppliant in his hatreds and in his lusts.
+
+Such was Rome when Verus returned to wed Lucille. Before his car the
+phallus swung; behind it was the pest. A little before, the Tiber
+overflowed. Presently, in addition to the pest, famine came. It was
+patent to everyone that the gods were vexed. There was blasphemy
+somewhere, and the Christians were tossed to the beasts. Faustine
+watched them die. At first they were to her as other criminals, but
+immediately a difference was discerned. They met death, not with grace,
+perhaps, but with exaltation. They entered the arena as though it were
+an enchanted garden, the color of the emerald, where dreams came true.
+Faustine questioned. They were enemies of state, she was told. The
+reply left her perplexed, and she questioned again. It was then her
+eyes became inhabited by regret. The past she tried to put from her,
+but remorse is physical; it declines to be dismissed. She would have
+killed herself, but she no longer dared. Besides, in the future there
+was light. In some ray of it she must have walked, for when at the foot
+of Mount Taurus, in a little Cappadocian village, years later, she
+died, it was at the sign of the cross.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE AGONY
+
+
+The high virtues are not complaisant, it is the cad the canaille adore.
+In spite of everything, Nero had been beloved by the masses. For years
+there were roses on his tomb. Under Vespasian there was an impostor
+whom Greece and Asia acclaimed in his name. The memory of his festivals
+was unforgetable; regret for him refused to be stilled. He was more
+than a god; he was a tradition. His second advent was confidently
+expected; the Jews believed in his resurrection; to the Christian he
+had never died, and suddenly he reappeared.
+
+Rome had declined to accept the old world tenet that the soul has its
+avatars, yet, when Commodus sauntered from that distant sepulchre, into
+which, poison aiding, he had placed his putative father, Rome felt that
+the Egyptians were wiser than they looked; that the soul did migrate,
+and that in the blue eyes of the young emperor Nero's spirit shone.
+
+Herodian, who has written very agreeably on the subject, describes him
+as another Prince Charming. His hair, which was very fair, glistened
+like gold in the sun; he was slender, not at all effeminate,
+exceedingly graceful, exceedingly gracious; endowed with the promptest
+blush, with the best intentions; studious of the interests of his
+people; glad of advice, seeking it even; courteous and deferential to
+the senate and his father's friends--in short, an adolescent Nero--a
+trifle more guileful, however; already a parricide, a comedian as well;
+one who in a moment would toss the mask aside and disclose the mongrel;
+the offspring, not of an empress and an emperor, but the tiger-cub that
+Faustine had got by a gladiator.
+
+The tender-hearted philosopher, who in a campaign against some fretful
+Teutons, had taken Commodus with him, knew that he was not his son;
+knew, too, when the agony seized him, from whose hand the agony came;
+but in earlier life he had jotted in his notebook, "Forgive, forgive
+always; die forgiving"; and, as he forgave the mother, so he forgave
+the child, recommending him with his last breath to the army and to
+Rome.
+
+As the people had loved Nero, so did the aristocracy love Marcus
+Aurelius; his foster-father Antonin excepted, he was the only gentleman
+that had sat on the throne. No wonder they loved him; and seeing this
+early edition of the prince in the fairy tale emerge from the bogs of
+Germany, his fair face haloed by the glisten and gold of his hair,
+hearts went out to him; the wish of his putative father was ratified,
+and the son of a gladiator was emperor of Rome.
+
+Lampridus--or Spartian was it? The title-page bears Lampridus' name,
+but there is some doubt as to the authorship. However, whoever made the
+abridgment of the life of Commodus which appears among the chronicles
+of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, says that before his birth
+Faustine dreamed she had engendered a serpent. It is not impossible
+that Faustine had been reading Ctzias, and had stumbled over his
+account of the Martichoras, a serpent with a woman's face and the
+talons of a bird of prey. For it was that she conceived.
+
+It would have been interesting to have seen that young man, the mask
+removed, frightening the senate into calling Rome Commodia, and then in
+a linen robe promenading in the attributes of a priest of Anubis
+through a seraglio of six hundred girls and mignons embracing as he
+passed. There was a spectacle, which Nero had not imagined. But Nero
+was vieux jeu. Commodus outdid him, first in debauchery, then in the
+arena. Nero had died while in training to kill a lion; Commodus did not
+take the trouble to train. It was the lions that were trained, not he.
+A skin on his shoulders, a club in his hand, he descended naked into
+the ring, and there felled beasts and men. Then, acclaimed as Hercules,
+he returned to the pulvina, and a mignon on one side, a mistress on the
+other, ordered the guard to massacre the spectators and set fire to
+Rome. After entering the arena six or seven hundred times, and there
+vanquishing men whose eyes had been put out and whose legs were tied,
+the colossal statue which Nero had made after his own image was
+altered; to the top came the bust of Commodus, to the base this legend:
+THE VICTOR OF TEN THOUSAND GLADIATORS, COMMODUS-HERCULES, IMPERATOR.
+
+Meanwhile conspirators were at work. Like Nero, Commodus could have
+sought in vain for a friend. His life was attempted again and again; he
+escaped, but never the plotters; only when they had gone there were
+more. He knew he was doomed. There was the usual comet; the statue of
+Hercules had perspired visibly; an owl had been caught above his
+bedroom, and once he had wiped in his hair the hand which he had
+plunged in the warm wound of a gladiator, dead at his feet. These omens
+could mean but one thing. None the less, if he were doomed, so were
+others. One day one of those miserable children that the emperors kept
+about them found a tablet. It was as good as anything else to play
+with; and, as the child tossed it through the hall, the one woman that
+had loved Commodus caught it and read on it that she and all the
+household were to die. Within an hour Commodus was killed.
+
+There is a page in Lampridus, which he quotes as coming from the lost
+chronicles of Marius Maximus, and which contains the joy of the senate
+at the news. It is too long for transcription, but as a bit of realism
+it is unique. There is a shiver in every line. You hear the voices of
+hundreds, drunk with fury, frenzied with delight; the fierce welcome
+that greeted Pertinax--a slave's grandson, who was emperor for a
+minute--the joy of hate assuaged.
+
+The delight of the senate was not shared by the pretorians. Pertinax
+was promptly massacred; the throne was put up at auction; there were
+two or three emperors at once, and presently the purple was seized by
+Septimus Severus, a rigid, white-haired disciplinarian, who, in his
+admiration for Marcus Aurelius, founded that second dynasty of the
+Antonins with which antiquity may be said to end.
+
+When he had gone, his elder son, Bastian, renamed Aurelius Antonin, and
+because of a cloak he had invented nicknamed Caracalla, bounded like a
+panther on the throne. In a moment he was gnawing at his brother's
+throat, and immediately there occurred a massacre such as Rome had
+never seen. Xiphilin says the nights were not long enough to kill all
+of the condemned. Twenty thousand people were slaughtered in twenty
+hours. The streets were emptied, the theatres closed.
+
+The blood that ran then must have been in rillets too thin to slake
+Caracalla's thirst, for simultaneously almost, he was in Gaul, in
+Dacia--wherever there was prey. African by his father, Syrian on his
+mother's side, Caracalla was not a panther merely; he was a herd of
+them. He had the cruelty, the treachery and guile of a wilderness of
+tiger-cats. No man, said a thinker, is wholly base. Caracalla was. He
+had not a taste, not a vice, even, which was not washed and rewashed in
+blood. In a moment of excitement Commodus set his guards on the
+spectators in the amphitheatre; the damage was slight, for the
+Colosseum was so constructed that in two minutes the eighty or ninety
+thousand people which it held could escape. Caracalla had the exits
+closed. Those who escaped were naked; to bribe the guards they were
+forced to strip themselves to the skin. In the circus a vestal caught
+his eye. He tried to violate her, and failing impotently, had her
+buried alive. "Caracalla knows that I am a virgin, and knows why," the
+girl cried as the earth swallowed her, but there was no one there to
+aid.
+
+Such things show the trend of a temperament, though not, perhaps, its
+force. Presently the latter was displayed. For years those arch-enemies
+of Rome, the unconquerable Parthians, had been quiet; bound, too, by
+treaties which held Rome's honor. Not Caracalla's, however; he had
+none. An embassy went out to Artobane, the king. Caracalla wished a
+bride, and what fairer one could he have than the child of the Parthian
+monarch? Then, too, the embassy was charged to explain, the marriage of
+Rome and Parthia would be the union of the Orient and the Occident,
+peace by land and sea. Artobane hesitated, and with cause; but
+Caracalla wooed so ardently that finally the king said yes. The news
+went abroad. The Parthians, delighted, prepared to receive the emperor.
+When Caracalla crossed the Tigris, the highroad that led to the capital
+was strewn with sacrifices, with altars covered with flowers, with
+welcomings of every kind. Caracalla was visibly pleased. Beyond the
+gates of the capital, there was the king; he had advanced to greet his
+son-in-law, and that the greeting might be effective, he had assembled
+his nobles and his troops. The latter were armed with cymbals, with
+hautbois, and with flutes; and as Caracalla and his army approached,
+there was music, dancing and song; there were libations too, and as the
+day was practically the wedding of East and West, there was not a
+weapon to be seen--gala robes merely, brilliant and long. Caracalla
+saluted the king, gave an order to an adjutant, and on the smiling
+defenceless Parthians the Roman eagles pounced. Those who were not
+killed were made prisoners of war. The next day Caracalla withdrew,
+charged with booty, firing cities as he went.
+
+A little before, rumor reached him that a group of the citizens of
+Alexandria had referred to him as a fratricide. After the adventure in
+Parthia he bethought him of the city which Alexander had founded, and
+of the temple of Serapis that was there. He wished to honor both, he
+declared, and presently he was at the gates. The people were enchanted;
+the avenues were strewn with flowers, lined with musicians. There were
+illuminations, festivals, sacrifices, torrents of perfumes, and through
+it all Caracalla passed, a legion at his heels. To see him, to
+participate in the succession of prodigalities, the surrounding country
+flocked there too. In recognition of the courtesy with which he was
+received, Caracalla gave a banquet to the magnates and the clergy.
+Before his guests could leave him they were killed. Through the streets
+the legion was at work. Alexandria was turned into a cemetery. Herodian
+states that the carnage was so great that the Nile was red to its mouth.
+
+In Rome at that time was a prefect, Macrin by name, who had dreamed the
+purple would be his. He was a swarthy liar, and his promises were such
+that the pretorians were willing that the dream should come true.
+Emissaries were despatched, and Caracalla was stabbed. In his luggage
+poison was found to the value of five million five hundred thousand
+drachmae. What fresh turpitude he was devising no one knew, and the
+discovery might serve as an epitaph, were it not that by his legions he
+was adored. No one had abandoned to the army such booty as he.
+
+Meanwhile, in a chapel at Emissa, a boy was dancing indolently to the
+kiss of flutes. A handful of Caracalla's soldiers passed that way, and
+thought him Bacchus. In his face was the enigmatic beauty of gods and
+girls--the charm of the dissolute and the wayward heightened by the
+divine. On his head was a diadem; his frail tunic was of purple and
+gold, but the sleeves, after the Phoenician fashion, were wide, and he
+was shod with a thin white leather that reached to the thighs. He was
+fourteen, and priest of the Sun. The chapel was roomy and rich. There
+was no statue--a black phallus merely, which had fallen from above, and
+on which, if you looked closely, you could see the image of Elagabal,
+the Sun.
+
+The rumor of his beauty brought other soldiers that way, and the lad,
+feeling that Rome was there, ceased to dance, strolling through pauses
+of the worship, a troop of galli at his heels, surveying the intruders
+with querulous, feminine eyes.
+
+Presently a whisper filtered that the lad was Caracalla's son. There
+were centurions there that remembered Semiamire, the lad's mother, very
+well; they had often seen her, a superb creature with scorching eyes,
+before whom fire had been carried as though she were empress. It was
+she who had put it beyond Caracalla's power to violate that vestal when
+he tried. She was his cousin; her life had been passed at court; it was
+Macrin who had exiled her. And with the whisper filtered another--that
+she was rich; that she had lumps of gold, which she would give gladly
+to whomso aided in placing her Antonin on the throne. There were
+gossips who said ill-natured things of this lady; who insinuated that
+she had so many lovers that she herself could not tell who was the
+father of her child; but the lumps of gold had a language of their own.
+The disbanded army espoused the young priest's cause; there was a
+skirmish, Macrin was killed, and Heliogabalus was emperor of Rome.
+
+"I would never have written the life of this Antonin Impurissimus,"
+said Lampridus, "were it not that he had predecessors." Even in Latin
+the task was difficult. In English it is impossible. There are subjects
+that permit of a hint, particularly if it be masked to the teeth, but
+there are others that no art can drape. "The inexpressible does not
+exist," Gautier remarked, when he finished a notorious romance, nor
+does it; but even his pen would have balked had he tried it on
+Heliogabalus.
+
+In his work on the Caesars, Suetonius drew breath but once--he called
+Nero a monster. Subsequently he must have regretted having done so, not
+because Nero was not a monster, but because it was sufficient to
+display the beast without adding a descriptive placard. In that was
+Suetonius' advantage; he could describe. Nowadays a writer may not, or
+at least not Heliogabalus. It is not merely that he was depraved, for
+all of that lot were; it was that he made depravity a pursuit; and, the
+purple favoring, carried it not only beyond the limits of the
+imaginable, but beyond the limits of the real. At the feet of that
+painted boy, Elephantis and Parrhasius could have sat and learned a
+lesson. Apart from that phase of his sovereignty, he was a little
+Sardanapalus, an Asiatic mignon, who found himself great.
+
+It would have been curious to have seen him in that wonderful palace,
+clothed like a Persian queen, insisting that he should be addressed as
+Imperatrix, and quite living up to the title. It would not only be
+interesting, it would give one an insight into just how much the Romans
+could stand. It would have been curious, also, to have assisted at that
+superb and poetic ceremonial, in which, having got Tanit from Carthage
+as consort for Elagabal, he presided, girt with the pomp of church and
+state, over the nuptials of the Sun and Moon.
+
+He had read Suetonius, and not an eccentricity of the Caesars escaped
+him. He would not hunt flies by the hour, as Domitian had done, for
+that would be mere imitation; but he could collect cobwebs, and he did,
+by the ton. Caligula and Vitellius had been famous as hosts, but the
+feasts that Heliogabalus gave outranked them for sheer splendor. From
+panels in the ceiling such masses of flowers fell that guests were
+smothered. Those that survived had set before them glass game and
+sweets of crystal. The menu was embroidered on the table-cloth--not the
+mere list of dishes, but pictures drawn with the needle of the dishes
+themselves. And presently, after the little jest in glass had been
+enjoyed, you were served with camel's heels; combs torn from living
+cocks; platters of nightingale tongues; ostrich brains, prepared with
+that garum sauce which the Sybarites invented, and of which the secret
+is lost; therewith were peas and grains of gold; beans and amber
+peppered with pearl dust; lentils and rubies; spiders in jelly; lion's
+dung, served in pastry. The guests that wine overcame were carried to
+bedrooms. When they awoke, there staring at them were tigers and
+leopards--tame, of course; but some of the guests were stupid enough
+not to know it, and died of fright.
+
+All this was of a nature to amuse a lad who had made the phallus the
+chief object of worship; who had banished Jupiter, dismissed Isis; who,
+over paths that were strewn with lilies, had himself, in the attributes
+of Bacchus, drawn by tigers; by lions as Mother of the Gods; again, by
+naked women, as Heliogabalus on his way to wed a vestal, and procure
+for the empire a child that should be wholly divine.
+
+It amused Rome, too, and his prodigalities in the circus were such that
+Lampridus admits that the people were glad he was emperor. Neither
+Caligula nor Nero had been as lavish, and neither Caligula nor Nero as
+cruel. The atrocities he committed, if less vast than those of
+Caracalla's, were more acute. Domitian even was surpassed in the
+tortures invented by a boy, so dainty that he never used the same
+garments, the same shoes, the same jewels, the same woman twice.
+
+In spite of this, or perhaps precisely on that account, the usual
+conspirators were at work, and one day this little painted girl, who
+had prepared several devices for a unique and splendid suicide, was
+taken unawares and tossed in the latrinae.
+
+In him the glow of the purple reached its apogee. Rome had been
+watching a crescendo that had mounted with the years. Its culmination
+was in that hermaphrodite. But the tension had been too
+great--something snapped; there was nothing left--a procession of
+colorless bandits merely, Thracians, Gauls, Pannonians, Dalmatians,
+Goths, women even, with Attila for a climax and the refurbishing of the
+world.
+
+Rome was still mistress, but she was growing very old. She had
+conquered step by step. When one nation had fallen, she garrotted
+another. To vanquish her, the earth had to produce not only new races,
+but new creeds. The parturitions, as we know, were successful. Already
+the blue, victorious eyes of Vandal and of Goth were peering down at
+Rome; already they had whispered together, and over the hydromel had
+drunk to her fall. The earth's new children fell upon her, not one by
+one, but all at once, and presently the colossus tottered, startling
+the universe with the uproar of her agony; calling to gods that had
+vacated the skies; calling to Jupiter; calling to Isis; calling in
+vain. Where the thunderbolt had gleamed, a crucifix stood. On the
+shoulders of a prelate was the purple that had dazzled the world.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Imperial Purple, by Edgar Saltus
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