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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.