THE “MISTRESS AND MOTHER” OF PALACES
After that sharp, brief winter, the sun was already at work, softening
leaf and bud, as you might feel by a faint sweetness in the air; but he
did his work behind an evenly white sky, against which the abode of the
Caesars, its cypresses and bronze roofs, seemed like a picture in
beautiful but melancholy colour, as Marius climbed the long flights of
steps to be introduced to the emperor Aurelius. Attired in the newest
mode, his legs wound in dainty fasciae of white leather, with the heavy
gold ring of the ingenuus, and in his toga of ceremony, he still
retained all his country freshness of complexion. The eyes of the
“golden youth” of Rome were upon him as the chosen friend of Cornelius,
and the destined servant of the emperor; but not jealously. In spite
of, perhaps partly because of, his habitual reserve of manner, he had
become “the fashion,” even among those who felt instinctively the irony
which lay beneath that remarkable self-possession, as of one taking all
things with a difference from other people, perceptible in voice, in
expression, and even in his dress. It was, in truth, the air of one
who, entering vividly into life, and relishing to the full the
delicacies of its intercourse, yet feels all the while, from the point
of view of an ideal philosophy, that he is but conceding reality to
suppositions, choosing of his own will to walk in a day-dream, of the
illusiveness of which he at least is aware.
In the house of the chief chamberlain Marius waited for the due moment
of admission to the emperor’s presence. He was admiring the peculiar
decoration of the walls, coloured like rich old red leather. In the
midst of one of them was depicted, under a trellis of fruit you might
have gathered, the figure of a woman knocking at a door with wonderful
reality of perspective. Then the summons came; and in a few minutes,
the etiquette of the imperial household being still a simple matter, he
had passed the curtains which divided the central hall of the palace
into three parts—three degrees of approach to the sacred person—and was
speaking to Aurelius himself; not in Greek, in which the emperor
oftenest conversed with the learned, but, more familiarly, in Latin,
adorned however, or disfigured, by many a Greek phrase, as now and
again French phrases have made the adornment of fashionable English. It
was with real kindliness that Marcus Aurelius looked upon Marius, as a
youth of great attainments in Greek letters and philosophy; and he
liked also his serious expression, being, as we know, a believer in the
doctrine of physiognomy—that, as he puts it, not love only, but every
other affection of man’s soul, looks out very plainly from the window
of the eyes.
The apartment in which Marius found himself was of ancient aspect, and
richly decorated with the favourite toys of two or three generations of
imperial collectors, now finally revised by the high connoisseurship of
the Stoic emperor himself, though destined not much longer to remain
together there. It is the repeated boast of Aurelius that he had
learned from old Antoninus Pius to maintain authority without the
constant use of guards, in a robe woven by the handmaids of his own
consort, with no processional lights or images, and “that a prince may
shrink himself almost into the figure of a private gentleman.” And yet,
again as at his first sight of him, Marius was struck by the profound
religiousness of the surroundings of the imperial presence. The effect
might have been due in part to the very simplicity, the discreet and
scrupulous simplicity, of the central figure in this splendid abode;
but Marius could not forget that he saw before him not only the head of
the Roman religion, but one who might actually have claimed something
like divine worship, had he cared to do so. Though the fantastic
pretensions of Caligula had brought some contempt on that claim, which
had become almost a jest under the ungainly Claudius, yet, from
Augustus downwards, a vague divinity had seemed to surround the Caesars
even in this life; and the peculiar character of Aurelius, at once a
ceremonious polytheist never forgetful of his pontifical calling, and a
philosopher whose mystic speculation encircled him with a sort of
saintly halo, had restored to his person, without his intending it,
something of that divine prerogative, or prestige. Though he would
never allow the immediate dedication of altars to himself, yet the
image of his Genius—his spirituality or celestial counterpart—was
placed among those of the deified princes of the past; and his family,
including Faustina and the young Commodus, was spoken of as the “holy”
or “divine” house. Many a Roman courtier agreed with the barbarian
chief, who, after contemplating a predecessor of Aurelius, withdrew
from his presence with the exclamation:—“I have seen a god to-day!” The
very roof of his house, rising into a pediment or gable, like that of
the sanctuary of a god, the laurels on either side its doorway, the
chaplet of oak-leaves above, seemed to designate the place for
religious veneration. And notwithstanding all this, the household of
Aurelius was singularly modest, with none of the wasteful expense of
palaces after the fashion of Lewis the Fourteenth; the palatial dignity
being felt only in a peculiar sense of order, the absence of all that
was casual, of vulgarity and discomfort. A merely official residence of
his predecessors, the Palatine had become the favourite dwelling-place
of Aurelius; its many-coloured memories suiting, perhaps, his pensive
character, and the crude splendours of Nero and Hadrian being now
subdued by time. The window-less Roman abode must have had much of what
to a modern would be gloom. How did the children, one wonders, endure
houses with so little escape for the eye into the world outside?
Aurelius, who had altered little else, choosing to live there, in a
genuine homeliness, had shifted and made the most of the level lights,
and broken out a quite medieval window here and there, and the clear
daylight, fully appreciated by his youthful visitor, made pleasant
shadows among the objects of the imperial collection. Some of these,
indeed, by reason of their Greek simplicity and grace, themselves shone
out like spaces of a purer, early light, amid the splendours of the
Roman manufacture.
Though he looked, thought Marius, like a man who did not sleep enough,
he was abounding and bright to-day, after one of those pitiless
headaches, which since boyhood had been the “thorn in his side,”
challenging the pretensions of his philosophy to fortify one in humble
endurances. At the first moment, to Marius, remembering the spectacle
of the emperor in ceremony, it was almost bewildering to be in private
conversation with him. There was much in the philosophy of
Aurelius—much consideration of mankind at large, of great bodies,
aggregates and generalities, after the Stoic manner—which, on a nature
less rich than his, might have acted as an inducement to care for
people in inverse proportion to their nearness to him. That has
sometimes been the result of the Stoic cosmopolitanism. Aurelius,
however, determined to beautify by all means, great or little, a
doctrine which had in it some potential sourness, had brought all the
quickness of his intelligence, and long years of observation, to bear
on the conditions of social intercourse. He had early determined “not
to make business an excuse to decline the offices of humanity—not to
pretend to be too much occupied with important affairs to concede what
life with others may hourly demand;” and with such success, that, in an
age which made much of the finer points of that intercourse, it was
felt that the mere honesty of his conversation was more pleasing than
other men’s flattery. His agreeableness to his young visitor to-day
was, in truth, a blossom of the same wisdom which had made of Lucius
Verus really a brother—the wisdom of not being exigent with men, any
more than with fruit-trees (it is his own favourite figure) beyond
their nature. And there was another person, still nearer to him,
regarding whom this wisdom became a marvel, of equity—of charity.
The centre of a group of princely children, in the same apartment with
Aurelius, amid all the refined intimacies of a modern home, sat the
empress Faustina, warming her hands over a fire. With her long fingers
lighted up red by the glowing coals of the brazier Marius looked close
upon the most beautiful woman in the world, who was also the great
paradox of the age, among her boys and girls. As has been truly said of
the numerous representations of her in art, so in life, she had the air
of one curious, restless, to enter into conversation with the first
comer. She had certainly the power of stimulating a very ambiguous sort
of curiosity about herself. And Marius found this enigmatic point in
her expression, that even after seeing her many times he could never
precisely recall her features in absence. The lad of six years, looking
older, who stood beside her, impatiently plucking a rose to pieces over
the hearth, was, in outward appearance, his father—the young
Verissimus—over again; but with a certain feminine length of feature,
and with all his mother’s alertness, or license, of gaze.
Yet rumour knocked at every door and window of the imperial house
regarding the adulterers who knocked at them, or quietly left their
lovers’ garlands there. Was not that likeness of the husband, in the
boy beside her, really the effect of a shameful magic, in which the
blood of the murdered gladiator, his true father, had been an
ingredient? Were the tricks for deceiving husbands which the Roman poet
describes, really hers, and her household an efficient school of all
the arts of furtive love? Or, was the husband too aware, like every one
beside? Were certain sudden deaths which happened there, really the
work of apoplexy, or the plague?
The man whose ears, whose soul, those rumours were meant to penetrate,
was, however, faithful to his sanguine and optimist philosophy, to his
determination that the world should be to him simply what the higher
reason preferred to conceive it; and the life’s journey Aurelius had
made so far, though involving much moral and intellectual loneliness,
had been ever in affectionate and helpful contact with other wayfarers,
very unlike himself. Since his days of earliest childhood in the
Lateran gardens, he seemed to himself, blessing the gods for it after
deliberate survey, to have been always surrounded by kinsmen, friends,
servants, of exceptional virtue. From the great Stoic idea, that we are
all fellow-citizens of one city, he had derived a tenderer, a more
equitable estimate than was common among Stoics, of the eternal
shortcomings of men and women. Considerations that might tend to the
sweetening of his temper it was his daily care to store away, with a
kind of philosophic pride in the thought that no one took more
good-naturedly than he the “oversights” of his neighbours. For had not
Plato taught (it was not paradox, but simple truth of experience) that
if people sin, it is because they know no better, and are “under the
necessity of their own ignorance”? Hard to himself, he seemed at times,
doubtless, to decline too softly upon unworthy persons. Actually, he
came thereby upon many a useful instrument. The empress Faustina he
would seem at least to have kept, by a constraining affection, from
becoming altogether what most people have believed her, and won in her
(we must take him at his word in the “Thoughts,” abundantly confirmed
by letters, on both sides, in his correspondence with Cornelius Fronto)
a consolation, the more secure, perhaps, because misknown of others.
Was the secret of her actual blamelessness, after all, with him who has
at least screened her name? At all events, the one thing quite certain
about her, besides her extraordinary beauty, is her sweetness to
himself.
No! The wise, who had made due observation on the trees of the garden,
would not expect to gather grapes of thorns or fig-trees: and he was
the vine, putting forth his genial fruit, by natural law, again and
again, after his kind, whatever use people might make of it. Certainly,
his actual presence never lost its power, and Faustina was glad in it
to-day, the birthday of one of her children, a boy who stood at her
knee holding in his fingers tenderly a tiny silver trumpet, one of his
birthday gifts.—“For my part, unless I conceive my hurt to be such, I
have no hurt at all,”—boasts the would-be apathetic emperor:—“and how I
care to conceive of the thing rests with me.” Yet when his children
fall sick or die, this pretence breaks down, and he is broken-hearted:
and one of the charms of certain of his letters still extant, is his
reference to those childish sicknesses.—“On my return to Lorium,” he
writes, “I found my little lady—domnulam meam—in a fever;” and again,
in a letter to one of the most serious of men, “You will be glad to
hear that our little one is better, and running about the room—parvolam
nostram melius valere et intra cubiculum discurrere.”
The young Commodus had departed from the chamber, anxious to witness
the exercises of certain gladiators, having a native taste for such
company, inherited, according to popular rumour, from his true
father—anxious also to escape from the too impressive company of the
gravest and sweetest specimen of old age Marius had ever seen, the
tutor of the imperial children, who had arrived to offer his birthday
congratulations, and now, very familiarly and affectionately, made a
part of the group, falling on the shoulders of the emperor, kissing the
empress Faustina on the face, the little ones on the face and hands.
Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the “Orator,” favourite teacher of the
emperor’s youth, afterwards his most trusted counsellor, and now the
undisputed occupant of the sophistic throne, whose equipage, elegantly
mounted with silver, Marius had seen in the streets of Rome, had
certainly turned his many personal gifts to account with a good
fortune, remarkable even in that age, so indulgent to professors or
rhetoricians. The gratitude of the emperor Aurelius, always generous to
his teachers, arranging their very quarrels sometimes, for they were
not always fair to one another, had helped him to a really great place
in the world. But his sumptuous appendages, including the villa and
gardens of Maecenas, had been borne with an air perfectly becoming, by
the professor of a philosophy which, even in its most accomplished and
elegant phase, presupposed a gentle contempt for such things. With an
intimate practical knowledge of manners, physiognomies, smiles,
disguises, flatteries, and courtly tricks of every kind—a whole
accomplished rhetoric of daily life—he applied them all to the
promotion of humanity, and especially of men’s family affection.
Through a long life of now eighty years, he had been, as it were,
surrounded by the gracious and soothing air of his own eloquence—the
fame, the echoes, of it—like warbling birds, or murmuring bees. Setting
forth in that fine medium the best ideas of matured pagan philosophy,
he had become the favourite “director” of noble youth.
Yes! it was the one instance Marius, always eagerly on the look-out for
such, had yet seen of a perfectly tolerable, perfectly beautiful, old
age—an old age in which there seemed, to one who perhaps habitually
over-valued the expression of youth, nothing to be regretted, nothing
really lost, in what years had taken away. The wise old man, whose blue
eyes and fair skin were so delicate, uncontaminate and clear, would
seem to have replaced carefully and consciously each natural trait of
youth, as it departed from him, by an equivalent grace of culture; and
had the blitheness, the placid cheerfulness, as he had also the
infirmity, the claim on stronger people, of a delightful child. And yet
he seemed to be but awaiting his exit from life—that moment with which
the Stoics were almost as much preoccupied as the Christians, however
differently—and set Marius pondering on the contrast between a
placidity like this, at eighty years, and the sort of desperateness he
was aware of in his own manner of entertaining that thought. His
infirmities nevertheless had been painful and long-continued, with
losses of children, of pet grandchildren. What with the crowd, and the
wretched streets, it was a sign of affection which had cost him
something, for the old man to leave his own house at all that day; and
he was glad of the emperor’s support, as he moved from place to place
among the children he protests so often to have loved as his own.
For a strange piece of literary good fortune, at the beginning of the
present century, has set free the long-buried fragrance of this famous
friendship of the old world, from below a valueless later manuscript,
in a series of letters, wherein the two writers exchange, for the most
part their evening thoughts, especially at family anniversaries, and
with entire intimacy, on their children, on the art of speech, on all
the various subtleties of the “science of images”—rhetorical
images—above all, of course, on sleep and matters of health. They are
full of mutual admiration of each other’s eloquence, restless in
absence till they see one another again, noting, characteristically,
their very dreams of each other, expecting the day which will terminate
the office, the business or duty, which separates them—“as
superstitious people watch for the star, at the rising of which they
may break their fast.” To one of the writers, to Aurelius, the
correspondence was sincerely of value. We see him once reading his
letters with genuine delight on going to rest. Fronto seeks to deter
his pupil from writing in Greek.—Why buy, at great cost, a foreign
wine, inferior to that from one’s own vineyard? Aurelius, on the other
hand, with an extraordinary innate susceptibility to words—la parole
pour la parole, as the French say—despairs, in presence of Fronto’s
rhetorical perfection.
Like the modern visitor to the Capitoline and some other museums,
Fronto had been struck, pleasantly struck, by the family likeness among
the Antonines; and it was part of his friendship to make much of it, in
the case of the children of Faustina. “Well! I have seen the little
ones,” he writes to Aurelius, then, apparently, absent from them: “I
have seen the little ones—the pleasantest sight of my life; for they
are as like yourself as could possibly be. It has well repaid me for my
journey over that slippery road, and up those steep rocks; for I beheld
you, not simply face to face before me, but, more generously, whichever
way I turned, to my right and my left. For the rest, I found them,
Heaven be thanked! with healthy cheeks and lusty voices. One was
holding a slice of white bread, like a king’s son; the other a crust of
brown bread, as becomes the offspring of a philosopher. I pray the gods
to have both the sower and the seed in their keeping; to watch over
this field wherein the ears of corn are so kindly alike. Ah! I heard
too their pretty voices, so sweet that in the childish prattle of one
and the other I seemed somehow to be listening—yes! in that chirping of
your pretty chickens—to the limpid+ and harmonious notes of your own
oratory. Take care! you will find me growing independent, having those
I could love in your place:—love, on the surety of my eyes and ears.”
+“Limpid” is misprinted “Limped.”
“Magistro meo salutem!” replies the Emperor, “I too have seen my little
ones in your sight of them; as, also, I saw yourself in reading your
letter. It is that charming letter forces me to write thus:” with
reiterations of affection, that is, which are continual in these
letters, on both sides, and which may strike a modern reader perhaps as
fulsome; or, again, as having something in common with the old Judaic
unction of friendship. They were certainly sincere.
To one of those children Fronto had now brought the birthday gift of
the silver trumpet, upon which he ventured to blow softly now and
again, turning away with eyes delighted at the sound, when he thought
the old man was not listening. It was the well-worn, valetudinarian
subject of sleep, on which Fronto and Aurelius were talking together;
Aurelius always feeling it a burden, Fronto a thing of magic
capacities, so that he had written an encomium in its praise, and often
by ingenious arguments recommends his imperial pupil not to be sparing
of it. To-day, with his younger listeners in mind, he had a story to
tell about it:—
“They say that our father Jupiter, when he ordered the world at the
beginning, divided time into two parts exactly equal: the one part he
clothed with light, the other with darkness: he called them Day and
Night; and he assigned rest to the night and to day the work of life.
At that time Sleep was not yet born and men passed the whole of their
lives awake: only, the quiet of the night was ordained for them,
instead of sleep. But it came to pass, little by little, being that the
minds of men are restless, that they carried on their business alike by
night as by day, and gave no part at all to repose. And Jupiter, when
he perceived that even in the night-time they ceased not from trouble
and disputation, and that even the courts of law remained open (it was
the pride of Aurelius, as Fronto knew, to be assiduous in those courts
till far into the night) resolved to appoint one of his brothers to be
the overseer of the night and have authority over man’s rest. But
Neptune pleaded in excuse the gravity of his constant charge of the
seas, and Father Dis the difficulty of keeping in subjection the
spirits below; and Jupiter, having taken counsel with the other gods,
perceived that the practice of nightly vigils was somewhat in favour.
It was then, for the most part, that Juno gave birth to her children:
Minerva, the mistress of all art and craft, loved the midnight lamp:
Mars delighted in the darkness for his plots and sallies; and the
favour of Venus and Bacchus was with those who roused by night. Then it
was that Jupiter formed the design of creating Sleep; and he added him
to the number of the gods, and gave him the charge over night and rest,
putting into his hands the keys of human eyes. With his own hands he
mingled the juices wherewith Sleep should soothe the hearts of
mortals—herb of Enjoyment and herb of Safety, gathered from a grove in
Heaven; and, from the meadows of Acheron, the herb of Death; expressing
from it one single drop only, no bigger than a tear one might hide.
‘With this juice,’ he said, ‘pour slumber upon the eyelids of mortals.
So soon as it hath touched them they will lay themselves down
motionless, under thy power. But be not afraid: they shall revive, and
in a while stand up again upon their feet.’ Thereafter, Jupiter gave
wings to Sleep, attached, not, like Mercury’s, to his heels, but to his
shoulders, like the wings of Love. For he said, ‘It becomes thee not to
approach men’s eyes as with the noise of chariots, and the rushing of a
swift courser, but in placid and merciful flight, as upon the wings of
a swallow—nay! with not so much as the flutter of the dove.’ Besides
all this, that he might be yet pleasanter to men, he committed to him
also a multitude of blissful dreams, according to every man’s desire.
One watched his favourite actor; another listened to the flute, or
guided a charioteer in the race: in his dream, the soldier was
victorious, the general was borne in triumph, the wanderer returned
home. Yes!—and sometimes those dreams come true!
Just then Aurelius was summoned to make the birthday offerings to his
household gods. A heavy curtain of tapestry was drawn back; and beyond
it Marius gazed for a few moments into the Lararium, or imperial
chapel. A patrician youth, in white habit, was in waiting, with a
little chest in his hand containing incense for the use of the altar.
On richly carved consoles, or side boards, around this narrow chamber,
were arranged the rich apparatus of worship and the golden or gilded
images, adorned to-day with fresh flowers, among them that image of
Fortune from the apartment of Antoninus Pius, and such of the emperor’s
own teachers as were gone to their rest. A dim fresco on the wall
commemorated the ancient piety of Lucius Albinius, who in flight from
Rome on the morrow of a great disaster, overtaking certain priests on
foot with their sacred utensils, descended from the wagon in which he
rode and yielded it to the ministers of the gods. As he ascended into
the chapel the emperor paused, and with a grave but friendly look at
his young visitor, delivered a parting sentence, audible to him alone:
_Imitation is the most acceptable part of worship:—the gods had much
rather mankind should resemble than flatter them. Make sure that those
to whom you come nearest be the happier by your presence!_
It was the very spirit of the scene and the hour—the hour Marius had
spent in the imperial house. How temperate, how tranquillising! what
humanity! Yet, as he left the eminent company concerning whose ways of
life at home he had been so youthfully curious, and sought, after his
manner, to determine the main trait in all this, he had to confess that
it was a sentiment of mediocrity, though of a mediocrity for once
really golden.