MANLY AMUSEMENT
During the Eastern war there came a moment when schism in the empire
had seemed possible through the defection of Lucius Verus; when to
Aurelius it had also seemed possible to confirm his allegiance by no
less a gift than his beautiful daughter Lucilla, the eldest of his
children—the domnula, probably, of those letters. The little lady,
grown now to strong and stately maidenhood, had been ever something of
the good genius, the better soul, to Lucius Verus, by the law of
contraries, her somewhat cold and apathetic modesty acting as
counterfoil to the young man’s tigrish fervour. Conducted to Ephesus,
she had become his wife by form of civil marriage, the more solemn
wedding rites being deferred till their return to Rome.
The ceremony of the Confarreation, or religious marriage, in which
bride and bridegroom partook together of a certain mystic bread, was
celebrated accordingly, with due pomp, early in the spring; Aurelius
himself assisting, with much domestic feeling. A crowd of fashionable
people filled the space before the entrance to the apartments of Lucius
on the Palatine hill, richly decorated for the occasion, commenting,
not always quite delicately, on the various details of the rite, which
only a favoured few succeeded in actually witnessing. “She comes!”
Marius could hear them say, “escorted by her young brothers: it is the
young Commodus who carries the torch of white-thornwood, the little
basket of work-things, the toys for the children:”—and then, after a
watchful pause, “she is winding the woollen thread round the doorposts.
Ah! I see the marriage-cake: the bridegroom presents the fire and
water.” Then, in a longer pause, was heard the chorus, Thalassie!
Thalassie! and for just a few moments, in the strange light of many wax
tapers at noonday, Marius could see them both, side by side, while the
bride was lifted over the doorstep: Lucius Verus heated and
handsome—the pale, impassive Lucilla looking very long and slender, in
her closely folded yellow veil, and high nuptial crown.
As Marius turned away, glad to escape from the pressure of the crowd,
he found himself face to face with Cornelius, an infrequent spectator
on occasions such as this. It was a relief to depart with him—so fresh
and quiet he looked, though in all his splendid equestrian array in
honour of the ceremony—from the garish heat of the marriage scene. The
reserve which had puzzled Marius so much on his first day in Rome, was
but an instance of many, to him wholly unaccountable, avoidances alike
of things and persons, which must certainly mean that an intimate
companionship would cost him something in the way of seemingly
indifferent amusements. Some inward standard Marius seemed to detect
there (though wholly unable to estimate its nature) of distinction,
selection, refusal, amid the various elements of the fervid and corrupt
life across which they were moving together:—some secret, constraining
motive, ever on the alert at eye and ear, which carried him through
Rome as under a charm, so that Marius could not but think of that
figure of the white bird in the market-place as undoubtedly made true
of him. And Marius was still full of admiration for this companion, who
had known how to make himself very pleasant to him. Here was the clear,
cold corrective, which the fever of his present life demanded. Without
it, he would have felt alternately suffocated and exhausted by an
existence, at once so gaudy and overdone, and yet so intolerably empty;
in which people, even at their best, seemed only to be brooding, like
the wise emperor himself, over a world’s disillusion. For with all the
severity of Cornelius, there was such a breeze of hopefulness—freshness
and hopefulness, as of new morning, about him. For the most part, as I
said, those refusals, that reserve of his, seemed unaccountable. But
there were cases where the unknown monitor acted in a direction with
which the judgment, or instinct, of Marius himself wholly concurred;
the effective decision of Cornelius strengthening him further therein,
as by a kind of outwardly embodied conscience. And the entire drift of
his education determined him, on one point at least, to be wholly of
the same mind with this peculiar friend (they two, it might be,
together, against the world!) when, alone of a whole company of
brilliant youth, he had withdrawn from his appointed place in the
amphitheatre, at a grand public show, which after an interval of many
months, was presented there, in honour of the nuptials of Lucius Verus
and Lucilla.
And it was still to the eye, through visible movement and aspect, that
the character, or genius of Cornelius made itself felt by Marius; even
as on that afternoon when he had girt on his armour, among the
expressive lights and shades of the dim old villa at the roadside, and
every object of his knightly array had seemed to be but sign or symbol
of some other thing far beyond it. For, consistently with his really
poetic temper, all influence reached Marius, even more exclusively than
he was aware, through the medium of sense. From Flavian in that brief
early summer of his existence, he had derived a powerful impression of
the “perpetual flux”: he had caught there, as in cipher or symbol, or
low whispers more effective than any definite language, his own
Cyrenaic philosophy, presented thus, for the first time, in an image or
person, with much attractiveness, touched also, consequently, with a
pathetic sense of personal sorrow:—a concrete image, the abstract
equivalent of which he could recognise afterwards, when the agitating
personal influence had settled down for him, clearly enough, into a
theory of practice. But of what possible intellectual formula could
this mystic Cornelius be the sensible exponent; seeming, as he did, to
live ever in close relationship with, and recognition of, a mental
view, a source of discernment, a light upon his way, which had
certainly not yet sprung up for Marius? Meantime, the discretion of
Cornelius, his energetic clearness and purity, were a charm, rather
physical than moral: his exquisite correctness of spirit, at all
events, accorded so perfectly with the regular beauty of his person, as
to seem to depend upon it. And wholly different as was this later
friendship, with its exigency, its warnings, its restraints, from the
feverish attachment to Flavian, which had made him at times like an
uneasy slave, still, like that, it was a reconciliation to the world of
sense, the visible world. From the hopefulness of this gracious
presence, all visible things around him, even the commonest objects of
everyday life—if they but stood together to warm their hands at the
same fire—took for him a new poetry, a delicate fresh bloom, and
interest. It was as if his bodily eyes had been indeed mystically
washed, renewed, strengthened.
And how eagerly, with what a light heart, would Flavian have taken his
place in the amphitheatre, among the youth of his own age! with what an
appetite for every detail of the entertainment, and its various
accessories:—the sunshine, filtered into soft gold by the vela, with
their serpentine patterning, spread over the more select part of the
company; the Vestal virgins, taking their privilege of seats near the
empress Faustina, who sat there in a maze of double-coloured gems,
changing, as she moved, like the waves of the sea; the cool circle of
shadow, in which the wonderful toilets of the fashionable told so
effectively around the blazing arena, covered again and again during
the many hours’ show, with clean sand for the absorption of certain
great red patches there, by troops of white-shirted boys, for whom the
good-natured audience provided a scramble of nuts and small coin, flung
to them over a trellis-work of silver-gilt and amber, precious gift of
Nero, while a rain of flowers and perfume fell over themselves, as they
paused between the parts of their long feast upon the spectacle of
animal suffering.
During his sojourn at Ephesus, Lucius Verus had readily become a
patron, patron or protégé, of the great goddess of Ephesus, the goddess
of hunters; and the show, celebrated by way of a compliment to him
to-day, was to present some incidents of her story, where she figures
almost as the genius of madness, in animals, or in the humanity which
comes in contact with them. The entertainment would have an element of
old Greek revival in it, welcome to the taste of a learned and
Hellenising society; and, as Lucius Verus was in some sense a lover of
animals, was to be a display of animals mainly. There would be real
wild and domestic creatures, all of rare species; and a real slaughter.
On so happy an occasion, it was hoped, the elder emperor might even
concede a point, and a living criminal fall into the jaws of the wild
beasts. And the spectacle was, certainly, to end in the destruction, by
one mighty shower of arrows, of a hundred lions, “nobly” provided by
Aurelius himself for the amusement of his people.—Tam magnanimus fuit!
The arena, decked and in order for the first scene, looked delightfully
fresh, re-inforcing on the spirits of the audience the actual freshness
of the morning, which at this season still brought the dew. Along the
subterranean ways that led up to it, the sound of an advancing chorus
was heard at last, chanting the words of a sacred song, or hymn to
Diana; for the spectacle of the amphitheatre was, after all, a
religious occasion. To its grim acts of blood-shedding a kind of
sacrificial character still belonged in the view of certain religious
casuists, tending conveniently to soothe the humane sensibilities of so
pious an emperor as Aurelius, who, in his fraternal complacency, had
consented to preside over the shows.
Artemis or Diana, as she may be understood in the actual development of
her worship, was, indeed, the symbolical expression of two allied yet
contrasted elements of human temper and experience—man’s amity, and
also his enmity, towards the wild creatures, when they were still, in a
certain sense, his brothers. She is the complete, and therefore highly
complex, representative of a state, in which man was still much
occupied with animals, not as his flock, or as his servants after the
pastoral relationship of our later, orderly world, but rather as his
equals, on friendly terms or the reverse,—a state full of primeval
sympathies and antipathies, of rivalries and common wants—while he
watched, and could enter into, the humours of those “younger brothers,”
with an intimacy, the “survivals” of which in a later age seem often to
have had a kind of madness about them. Diana represents alike the
bright and the dark side of such relationship. But the humanities of
that relationship were all forgotten to-day in the excitement of a
show, in which mere cruelty to animals, their useless suffering and
death, formed the main point of interest. People watched their
destruction, batch after batch, in a not particularly inventive
fashion; though it was expected that the animals themselves, as living
creatures are apt to do when hard put to it, would become inventive,
and make up, by the fantastic accidents of their agony, for the
deficiencies of an age fallen behind in this matter of manly amusement.
It was as a Deity of Slaughter—the Taurian goddess who demands the
sacrifice of the shipwrecked sailors thrown on her coasts—the cruel,
moonstruck huntress, who brings not only sudden death, but rabies,
among the wild creatures that Diana was to be presented, in the person
of a famous courtesan. The aim at an actual theatrical illusion, after
the first introductory scene, was frankly surrendered to the display of
the animals, artificially stimulated and maddened to attack each other.
And as Diana was also a special protectress of new-born creatures,
there would be a certain curious interest in the dexterously contrived
escape of the young from their mother’s torn bosoms; as many pregnant
animals as possible being carefully selected for the purpose.
The time had been, and was to come again, when the pleasures of the
amphitheatre centered in a similar practical joking upon human beings.
What more ingenious diversion had stage manager ever contrived than
that incident, itself a practical epigram never to be forgottten, when
a criminal, who, like slaves and animals, had no rights, was compelled
to present the part of Icarus; and, the wings failing him in due
course, had fallen into a pack of hungry bears? For the long shows of
the amphitheatre were, so to speak, the novel-reading of that age—a
current help provided for sluggish imaginations, in regard, for
instance, to grisly accidents, such as might happen to one’s self; but
with every facility for comfortable inspection. Scaevola might watch
his own hand, consuming, crackling, in the fire, in the person of a
culprit, willing to redeem his life by an act so delightful to the
eyes, the very ears, of a curious public. If the part of Marsyas was
called for, there was a criminal condemned to lose his skin. It might
be almost edifying to study minutely the expression of his face, while
the assistants corded and pegged him to the bench, cunningly; the
servant of the law waiting by, who, after one short cut with his knife,
would slip the man’s leg from his skin, as neatly as if it were a
stocking—a finesse in providing the due amount of suffering for
wrong-doers only brought to its height in Nero’s living bonfires. But
then, by making his suffering ridiculous, you enlist against the
sufferer, some real, and all would-be manliness, and do much to stifle
any false sentiment of compassion. The philosophic emperor, having no
great taste for sport, and asserting here a personal scruple, had
greatly changed all that; had provided that nets should be spread under
the dancers on the tight-rope, and buttons for the swords of the
gladiators. But the gladiators were still there. Their bloody contests
had, under the form of a popular amusement, the efficacy of a human
sacrifice; as, indeed, the whole system of the public shows was
understood to possess a religious import. Just at this point,
certainly, the judgment of Lucretius on pagan religion is without
reproach—
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
And Marius, weary and indignant, feeling isolated in the great
slaughter-house, could not but observe that, in his habitual
complaisance to Lucius Verus, who, with loud shouts of applause from
time to time, lounged beside him, Aurelius had sat impassibly through
all the hours Marius himself had remained there. For the most part
indeed, the emperor had actually averted his eyes from the show,
reading, or writing on matters of public business, but had seemed,
after all, indifferent. He was revolving, perhaps, that old Stoic
paradox of the Imperceptibility of pain; which might serve as an
excuse, should those savage popular humours ever again turn against men
and women. Marius remembered well his very attitude and expression on
this day, when, a few years later, certain things came to pass in Gaul,
under his full authority; and that attitude and expression defined
already, even thus early in their so friendly intercourse, and though
he was still full of gratitude for his interest, a permanent point of
difference between the emperor and himself—between himself, with all
the convictions of his life taking centre to-day in his merciful, angry
heart, and Aurelius, as representing all the light, all the
apprehensive power there might be in pagan intellect. There was
something in a tolerance such as this, in the bare fact that he could
sit patiently through a scene like this, which seemed to Marius to mark
Aurelius as his inferior now and for ever on the question of
righteousness; to set them on opposite sides, in some great conflict,
of which that difference was but a single presentment. Due, in whatever
proportions, to the abstract principles he had formulated for himself,
or in spite of them, there was the loyal conscience within him,
deciding, judging himself and every one else, with a wonderful sort of
authority:—You ought, methinks, to be something quite different from
what you are; here! and here! Surely Aurelius must be lacking in that
decisive conscience at first sight, of the intimations of which Marius
could entertain no doubt—which he looked for in others. He at least,
the humble follower of the bodily eye, was aware of a crisis in life,
in this brief, obscure existence, a fierce opposition of real good and
real evil around him, the issues of which he must by no means
compromise or confuse; of the antagonisms of which the “wise” Marcus
Aurelius was unaware.
That long chapter of the cruelty of the Roman public shows may,
perhaps, leave with the children of the modern world a feeling of
self-complacency. Yet it might seem well to ask ourselves—it is always
well to do so, when we read of the slave-trade, for instance, or of
great religious persecutions on this side or on that, or of anything
else which raises in us the question, “Is thy servant a dog, that he
should do this thing?”—not merely, what germs of feeling we may
entertain which, under fitting circumstances, would induce us to the
like; but, even more practically, what thoughts, what sort of
considerations, may be actually present to our minds such as might have
furnished us, living in another age, and in the midst of those legal
crimes, with plausible excuses for them: each age in turn, perhaps,
having its own peculiar point of blindness, with its consequent
peculiar sin—the touch-stone of an unfailing conscience in the select
few.
Those cruel amusements were, certainly, the sin of blindness, of
deadness and stupidity, in the age of Marius; and his light had not
failed him regarding it. Yes! what was needed was the heart that would
make it impossible to witness all this; and the future would be with
the forces that could beget a heart like that. His chosen philosophy
had said,—Trust the eye: Strive to be right always in regard to the
concrete experience: Beware of falsifying your impressions. And its
sanction had at least been effective here, in protesting—“This, and
this, is what you may not look upon!” Surely evil was a real thing, and
the wise man wanting in the sense of it, where, not to have been, by
instinctive election, on the right side, was to have failed in life.
END OF VOL. I