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.