and punctuated by a spectacle of which Caligula, for all his poetry,
had not dreamed--the burial of Pompeii. But a reign which, while it
lasted, was fastidious and refined, and during which, again and again,
Titus, who commanded death and whom death obeyed, besought Domitian to
be to him a brother.
Domitian had no such intention. He had a party behind him, one made up
of old Neronians, the army of the discontented, who wanted a change,
and greatly admired this charming young prince whose hours were passed
in killing flies and making love to married women. The pretorians too
had been seduced. Domitian could make captivating promises when he
chose.
As a consequence Titus, like Vespasian, was uneasy, and with cause.
Dion Cassius, or rather that brute Xiphilin, his abbreviator, mentions
the fever that overtook him, the same his father had met. It was
mortal, of course, and the purple was Domitian's.
For a year and a day thereafter you would have thought Titus still at
the helm. There was the same clemency, the same regard for justice, the
same refinement and fastidiousness. The morose young poet had developed
into a model monarch. The old Neronians were perplexed, irritated too;
they had expected other things. Domitian was merely feeling the way;
the hand that held the sceptre was not quite sure of its strength, and,
tentatively almost, this Prince of Virtue began to scrutinize the
morals of Rome. For the first time he noticed that the cocottes took
their airing in litters. But litters were not for them! That abuse he
put a stop to at once. A senator manifested an interest in
ballet-girls; he was disgraced. The vestals, to whose indiscretions no
one had paid much attention, learned the statutes of an archaic law,
and were buried alive. The early distaste for blood was diminishing.
Domitian had the purple, but it was not bright enough; he wanted it
red, and what Domitian wanted he got. Your god and master orders it,
was the formula he began to use when addressing the Senate and People
of Rome.
To that the people were indifferent. The spectacles he gave in the
Flavian amphitheatre were too magnificently atrocious not to be a
compensation in full for any eccentricity in which he might indulge.
Besides, under Nero, Claud, Caligula, on en avait vu bien d'autres. And
at those spectacles where he presided, crowned with a tiara, on which
were the images of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, while grouped about him
the college of Flavian flamens wore tiaras that differed therefrom
merely in this, that they bore his image too, the people right royally
applauded their master and their god.
And it was just as well they did; Domitian was quite capable of
ordering everybody into the arena. As yet, however, he had appeared
little different from any other prince. That Rome might understand that
there was a difference, and also in what that difference consisted, he
gave a supper. Everyone worth knowing was bidden, and, as is usual in
state functions, everyone that was bidden came. The supper hall was
draped with black; the ceiling, the walls, the floor, everything was
basaltic. The couches were black, the linen was black, the slaves were
black. Behind each guest was a broken column with his name on it. The
food was such as is prepared when death has come. The silence was that
of the tomb. The only audible voice was Domitian's. He was talking very
wittily and charmingly about murder, about proscriptions, the good
informers do, the utility of the headsman, the majesty of the law. The
guests, a trifle ill at ease, wished their host sweet dreams. "The same
to you," he answered, and deplored that they must go.
On the morrow informers and headsmen were at work. Any pretext was
sufficient. Birth, wealth, fame, or the lack of them--anything
whatever--and there the culprit stood, charged not with treason to an
emperor, but with impiety to a god. On the judgment seat Domitian sat.
Before him the accused passed, and under his eyes they were questioned,
tortured, condemned and killed. At once their property passed into the
keeping of the prince.
Of that he had need. The arena was expensive, but the drain was
elsewhere. A little before, a quarrelsome people, the Dacians, whom it
took a Trajan to subdue, had overrun the Danube, and were marching down
to Rome. Domitian set out to meet them. The Dacians retreated, not at
all because they were repulsed, but because Domitian thought it better
warfare to pay them to do so. On his return after that victory he
enjoyed a triumph as fair as that of Caesar. And each year since then
the emperor of Rome had paid tribute to a nation of mongrel oafs.
Of course he needed money. The informers were there and he got it, and
with it that spectacle of torture and of blood which he needed too.
Curiously, his melancholy increased; his good looks had gone; Psyche
was no longer amorous of his eyes. Something else haunted him,
something he could not define; the past, perhaps, perhaps the future.
To his ears came strange sounds, the murmur of his own name, and
suddenly silence. Then, too, there always seemed to be something behind
him; something that when he turned disappeared. The room in which he
slept he had covered with a polished metal that reflected everything,
yet still the intangible was there. Once Pallas came in her chariot,
waved him farewell, and disappeared, borne by black horses across the
black night.
The astrologers consulted had nothing pleasant to say. They knew, as
Domitian knew, that the end was near. So was theirs. To one of them,
who predicted his immediate death, he inquired, "What will your end
be?" "I," answered the astrologer--"I shall be torn by dogs." "To the
stake with him!" cried Domitian; "let him be burned alive!" Suetonius
says that a storm put out the flames, and dogs devoured the corpse.
Another astrologer predicted that Domitian would die before noon on the
morrow. In order to convince him of his error, Domitian ordered him to
be executed the subsequent night. Before noon on the morrow Domitian
was dead.
Philostratus and Dion Cassius both unite in saying that at that hour
Apollonius was at Ephesus, preaching to the multitude. In the middle of
the sermon he hesitated, but in a moment he began anew. Again he
hesitated, his eyes half closed; then, suddenly he shouted, "Strike
him! Strike him once more!" And immediately to his startled audience he
related a scene that was occurring at Rome, the attack on Domitian, his
struggle with an assailant, his effort to tear out his eyes, the rush
of conspirators, and finally the fall of the emperor, pierced by seven
knives.
The story may not be true, and yet if it were!
VII
THE POISON IN THE PURPLE
Rome never was healthy. The tramontana visited it then as now, fever,
too, and sudden death. To emperors it was fatal. Since Caesar a malaria
had battened on them all. Nerva escaped, but only through abdication.
The mantle that fell from Domitian's shoulders on to his was so
dangerous in its splendor, that, fearing the infection, he passed it to
Ulpius Trajanus, the lustre undimmed.
Ulpius Trajanus, Trajan for brevity, a Spaniard by birth, a soldier by
choice; one who had fought against Parthian and Jew, who had triumphed
through Pannonia and made it his own; a general whose hair had whitened
on the field; a consul who had frightened nations, was afraid of the
sheen of that purple which dazzled, corroded and killed. He bore it,
indeed, but at arm's-length. He kept himself free from the subtlety of
its poison, from the microbes of Rome as well.
He was in Cologne when Domitian died and Nerva accepted and renounced
the throne. It was a year before he ventured among the seven hills.
When he arrived you would have said another Augustus, not the real
Augustus, but the Augustus of legend, and the late Mr. Gibbon. When he
girt the new prefect of the pretorium with the immemorial sword, he
addressed him in copy-book phrases--"If I rule wisely, use it for me;
unwisely, against me."
Rome listened open-mouthed. The change from Domitian's formula, "Your
god and master orders it," was too abrupt to be immediately understood.
Before it was grasped Trajan was off again; this time to the Danube and
beyond it, to Dacia and her fens.
Many years later--a century or two, to be exact--a Persian satrap
loitered in a forum of Rome. "It is here," he declared, "I am tempted
to forget that man is mortal."
He had passed beneath a triumphal arch; before him was a glittering
square, grandiose, yet severe; a stretch of temples and basilicas, in
which masterpieces felt at home--the Forum of Trajan, the compliment of
a nation to a prince. Dominating it was a column, in whose thick
spirals you read to-day the one reliable chronicle of the Dacian
campaign. Was not Gautier well advised when he said only art endures?
There were other chronicles in plenty; there were the histories of
AElius Maurus, of Marius Maximus, and that of Spartian, but they are
lost. There is a page or two in the abbreviation which Xiphilin made of
Dion; Aurelius Victor has a little to add, so also has Eutropus, but,
practically speaking, there is, apart from that column, nothing save
conjecture.
Campaigns are wearisome reading, but not the one that is pictured
there. You ask a curve a question, and in the next you find the reply.
There is a point, however, on which it is dumb--the origin of the war.
But if you wish to know the result, not the momentary and transient
result, but the sequel which futurity held, look at the ruins at that
column's base.
The origin of the war was Domitian's diplomacy. The chieftain whom he
had made king, and who had been surprised enough at receiving a diadem
instead of the point of a sword, fancied, and not unreasonably, that
the annuity which Rome paid him was to continue forever. But Domitian,
though a god, was not otherwise immortal. When he died abruptly the
annuity ceased. The Dacian king sent word that he was surprised at the
delay, but he must have been far more so at the promptness with which
he got Trajan's reply. It was a blare of bugles, which he thought
forever dumb; a flight of eagles, which he thought were winged.
In the spirals of the column you see the advancing army, the retreating
foe; then the Dacian dragon saluting the standards of Rome; peace
declared, and an army, whose very repose is menacing, standing there to
see that peace is kept. And was it? In the ascending spiral is the new
revolt, the attempt to assassinate Trajan, the capture of the
conspirators, the advance of the legions, the retreat of the Dacians,
burning their cities as they go, carrying their wounded and their women
with them, and at last pressing about a huge cauldron that is filled
with poison, fighting among themselves for a cup of the brew, and
rolling on the ground in the convulsions of death. Farther on is the
treasure of the king. To hide it he had turned a river from its source,
sunk the gold in a vault beneath, and killed the workmen that had
labored there. Beyond is the capture of the capital, the suicide of the
chief, a troop of soldiers driving captives and cattle before them, the
death of a nation and the end of war.
The subsequent triumph does not appear on the column. It is said that
ten thousand beasts were slaughtered in the arenas, slaughtering, as
they fell, a thousand of their slaughterers. But the spectacle, however
fair, was not of a nature to detain Trajan long in Rome. The air there
had not improved in the least, and presently he was off again, this
time on the banks of the Euphrates, arguing with the Parthians,
avoiding danger in the only way he knew, by facing it.
It was then that the sheen of the purple glowed. If lustreless at home,
it was royally red abroad. In a campaign that was little more than a
triumphant promenade he doubled the empire. To the world of Caesar he
added that of Alexander. Allies he turned into subjects, vassals into
slaves. Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, were added to the realm.
Trajan's footstools were diadems. He had moved back one frontier, he
moved another. From Britain to the Indus, Rome was mistress of the
earth. Had Trajan been younger, China, whose very name was unknown,
would have yielded to him her corruption, her printing press, her
powder and her tea.
That he would have enjoyed these things is not at all conjectural. He
was then an old man, but he was not a good one--at least not in the
sense we use the term to-day. He had habits which are regarded now less
as vices than perversions, but which at that time were taken as a
matter of course and accepted by everyone, even by the stoics, very
calmly, with a grain of Attic salt at that. Men were regarded as
virtuous when they were brave, when they were honest; the idea of using
the expression in its later sense occurred, if at all, in jest merely,
as a synonym for the eunuch. It was the matron and the vestal who were
supposed to be straight, and their straightness was wholly
supposititious. The ceremonies connected with the phallus, and those
observed in the worship of the Bona Dea, were of a nature that no
virtue could withstand. Every altar, Juvenal said, had its Clodius, and
even in Clodius' absence there were always those breaths of Sapphic
song that blew through Mitylene.
It is just that absence of a quality which we regard as an added grace;
one, parenthetically, which dowered the world with a new conception of
beauty that makes it difficult to picture Rome. Modern ink has acquired
Nero's blush; it comes very readily, yet, however sensitive a writer
may be, once Roman history is before him, he may violate it if he
choose; he may even give it a child, but never can he make it
immaculate. He may skip, indeed, if he wish; and it is because he has
skipped so often that one fancies that Augustus was all right. The rain
of fire which fell on the cities that mirrored their towers in the
Bitter Sea, might just as well have fallen on him, on Vergil, too, on
Caligula, Claud, Nero, Otho, Vitellius, Titus, Domitian, and
particularly on Trajan.
As lieutenant in the latter's triumphant promenade, was a nephew,
AElius Hadrianus, a young man for whom Trajan's wife is rumored to have
had more than a platonic affection, and who in younger days was
numbered among Trajan's mignons. During the progress of that promenade
Trajan fell ill. The command of the troops was left to Hadrian, and
Trajan started for Rome. On the way he died. In what manner is not
known; his wife, however, was with him, and it was in her hand that a
letter went to the senate stating that Trajan had adopted Hadrian as
his heir. Trajan had done nothing of the sort. The idea had indeed
occurred to him, but long since it had been abandoned. He had even
formally selected someone else, but his wife was with him, and her
lover commanded the troops. The lustre of the purple, always dazzling,
had fascinated Hadrian's eyes. Did he steal it? One may conjecture, yet
never know. In any event it was his, and he folded it very
magnificently about him. Still young, a trifle over thirty, handsome,
unusually accomplished, grand seigneur to his finger-tips, endowed with
a manner which is rumored to have been one of great charm, possessed of
the amplest appreciation of the elegancies of life, he had precisely
the figure which purple adorns. But, though the lustre had fascinated,
he too knew its spell; and presently he started off on a journey about
the world, which lasted fifteen years, and which, when ended, left the
world the richer for his passing, decorated with the monuments he had
strewn. Before that journey began, at the earliest rumor of Trajan's
death, the Euphrates and Tigris awoke, the cinders of Nineveh flamed.
The rivers and land that lay between knew that their conqueror had
gone. Hadrian knew it also, and knew too that, though he might occupy
the warrior's throne, he never could fill the warrior's place. To
Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, freedom was restored. Dacia could have
had it for the asking. But over Dacia the toga had been thrown; it was
as Roman as Gaul. A corner of it is Roman still; the Roumanians are
there. But though Dacia was quiet, in its neighborhood the restless
Sarmatians prowled and threatened. Hadrian, who had already written a
book on tactics, knew at once how to act. Domitian's policy was before
him; he followed the precedent, and paid the Sarmatians to be still. It
requires little acumen to see that when Rome permitted herself to be
blackmailed the end was near.
For the time being, however, there was peace, and in its interest
Hadrian set out on that unequalled journey over a land that was his.
Had fate relented, Trajan could have made a wider one still. But in
Trajan was the soldier merely, when he journeyed it was with the sword.
In Hadrian was the dilettante, the erudite too; he travelled not to
conquer, but to learn, to satisfy an insatiable curiosity, for
self-improvement, for glory too. Behind him was an army, not of
soldiers, but of masons, captained by architects, artists and
engineers. Did a site please him, there was a temple at once, or if not
that, then a bridge, an aqueduct, a library, a new fashion, sovereignty
even, but everywhere the spectacle of an emperor in flesh and blood.
For the first time the provinces were able to understand that a Caesar
was not necessarily a brute, a phantom and a god.
It would have been interesting to have made one of that court of poets
and savants that surrounded him; to have dined with him in Paris, eaten
oysters in London; sat with him while he watched that wall go up before
the Scots, and then to have passed down again through a world still
young--a world beautiful, ornate, unutilitarian; a world to which
trams, advertisements and telegraph poles had not yet come; a world
that still had illusions, myths and mysteries; one in which religion
and poetry went hand in hand--a world without newspapers, hypocrisy and
cant.
Hadrian, doubtless, enjoyed it. He was young enough to have enthusiasms
and to show them; he was one of the best read men of the day; he was
poet, painter, sculptor, musician, erudite and emperor in one. Of
course he enjoyed it. The world, over which he travelled, was his, not
by virtue of the purple alone, but because of his knowledge of it. The
prince is not necessarily cosmopolitan; the historian and antiquarian
are. Hadrian was an early Quinet, an earlier Champollion; always the
thinker, sometimes the cook. And to those in his suite it must have
been a sight very unique to see a Caesar who had published his volume
of erotic verse, just as any other young man might do; who had hunted
lions, not in the arena, but in Africa, make researches on the plain
where Troy had been, and a supreme of sow's breast, peacock, pheasant,
ham and boar, which he called Pentapharmarch, and which he offered as
he had his Catacriani--the erotic verse--as something original and nice.
Insatiably inquisitive, verifying a history that he was preparing in
the lands which gave that history birth, he passed through Egypt and
Asia, questioning sphinxes, the cerements of kings, the arcana of the
temples; deciphering the sacred books, arguing with magi, interrogating
the stars. For the thinker, after the fashion of the hour, was
astrologer too, and one of the few anecdotes current concerning him is
in regard to a habit he had of drawing up on the 31st of December the
events of the coming year. After consulting the stars on that 31st of
December which occurred in the twenty-second year of his reign, he
prepared a calendar which extended only to the 10th of July. On that
day he died.
The calendar does not seem to have been otherwise serviceable. It was
in Bithynia he found a shepherd whose appearance which, in its
perfection, was quite earthly, suggested neither heaven nor hell, but
some planet where the atmosphere differs from ours; where it is pink,
perhaps, or faintly ochre; where birth and death have forms higher than
here.
Hadrian, captivated, led the lad in leash. The facts concerning that
episode have been so frequently given that the repetition is needless
here. Besides, the point is elsewhere. Presently the lad fell
overboard. Hadrian lost a valet, Rome an emperor, and Olympus a god.
But in attempting to deify the lost lackey, the grief of Hadrian was so
immediate, that it is permissible to fancy that the lad's death was not
one of those events which the emperor-astrologer noted beforehand on
his calendar. The lad was decently buried, the Nile gave up her dead,
and on the banks a fair city rose, one that had its temples, priests,
altars and shrines; a city that worshipped a star, and called that star
Antinous. Hadrian then could have congratulated himself. Even Caligula
would have envied him. He had done his worst; he had deified not a lad,
but a lust. And not for the moment alone. A half century later
Tertullian noted that the worship still endured, and subsequently the
Alexandrine Clement discovered consciences that Antinous had reproached.
Antinous, deified, was presently forgot. A young Roman, wonderfully
beautiful, Dion says, yet singularly effeminate; a youth who could
barely carry a shield; who slept between rose-leaves and lilies; who
was an artist withal; a poet who had written lines that Martial might
have mistaken for his own, Cejonius Verus by name, succeeded the
Bithynian shepherd. Hadrian, who would have adopted Antinous, adopted
Verus in his stead. But Hadrian was not happy in his choice. Verus
died, and singularly enough, Hadrian selected as future emperor the one
ruler against whom history has not a reproach, Pius Antonin.
Meanwhile the journey continued. The Thousand and One Nights were
realized then if ever. The beauty of the world was at its apogee, the
glory of Rome as well; and through secrets and marvels Hadrian
strolled, note-book in hand, his eyes unwearied, his curiosity
unsatiated still. To pleasure him the intervales took on a fairer glow;
cities decked themselves anew, the temples unveiled their mysteries;
and when he passed to the intervales liberty came; to the cities,
sovereignty; to the temples, shrines. The world rose to him as a woman
greets her lover. His travels were not fatigues; they were delights, in
which nations participated, and of which the memories endure as though
enchanted still.
It would have been interesting, no doubt, to have dined with him in
Paris; to have quarried lions in their African fens; to have heard
archaic hymns ripple through the rushes of the Nile; to have lounged in
the Academe, to have scaled Parnassus, and sailed the AEgean Sea; but,
a history and an arm-chair aiding, the traveller has but to close his
eyes and the past returns. Without disturbing so much as a shirt-box,
he may repeat that promenade. Triremes have foundered; litters are out
of date; painted elephants are no more; the sky has changed, climates
with it; there are colors, as there are arts, that have gone from us
forever; there are desolate plains, where green and yellow was; the
shriek of steam where gods have strayed; advertisements in sacred
groves; Baedekers in ruins that never heard an atheist's voice;
solitudes where there were splendors; the snarl of jackals where once
were birds and bees--yet, history and the arm-chair aiding, it all
returns. Any traveller may follow in Hadrian's steps; he is stayed but
once--on the threshold of the Temple of Eleusis. It is there history
gropes, impotent and blind, and it is there the interest of that
journey culminated.
Beyond the episode connected with Antinous, Hadrian's journey was
marked by another, one which occurred in Judaea. Both were infamous, no
doubt, but, what is more to the point, both mark the working of the
poison in the purple that he bore.