BEATA URBS
“Many prophets and kings have desired to see the things which ye see.”
The enemy on the Danube was, indeed, but the vanguard of the mighty
invading hosts of the fifth century. Illusively repressed just now,
those confused movements along the northern boundary of the Empire were
destined to unite triumphantly at last, in the barbarism, which,
powerless to destroy the Christian church, was yet to suppress for a
time the achieved culture of the pagan world. The kingdom of Christ was
to grow up in a somewhat false alienation from the light and beauty of
the kingdom of nature, of the natural man, with a partly mistaken
tradition concerning it, and an incapacity, as it might almost seem at
times, for eventual reconciliation thereto. Meantime Italy had armed
itself once more, in haste, and the imperial brothers set forth for the
Alps.
Whatever misgiving the Roman people may have felt as to the leadership
of the younger was unexpectedly set at rest; though with some temporary
regret for the loss of what had been, after all, a popular figure on
the world’s stage. Travelling fraternally in the same litter with
Aurelius, Lucius Verus was struck with sudden and mysterious disease,
and died as he hastened back to Rome. His death awoke a swarm of
sinister rumours, to settle on Lucilla, jealous, it was said, of Fabia
her sister, perhaps of Faustina—on Faustina herself, who had
accompanied the imperial progress, and was anxious now to hide a crime
of her own—even on the elder brother, who, beforehand with the
treasonable designs of his colleague, should have helped him at supper
to a favourite morsel, cut with a knife poisoned ingeniously on one
side only. Aurelius, certainly, with sincere distress, his long
irritations, so dutifully concealed or repressed, turning now into a
single feeling of regret for the human creature, carried the remains
back to Rome, and demanded of the Senate a public funeral, with a
decree for the apotheôsis, or canonisation, of the dead.
For three days the body lay in state in the Forum, enclosed in an open
coffin of cedar-wood, on a bed of ivory and gold, in the centre of a
sort of temporary chapel, representing the temple of his patroness
Venus Genetrix. Armed soldiers kept watch around it, while choirs of
select voices relieved one another in the chanting of hymns or
monologues from the great tragedians.
At the head of the couch were displayed the various personal
decorations which had belonged to Verus in life. Like all the rest of
Rome, Marius went to gaze on the face he had seen last scarcely
disguised under the hood of a travelling-dress, as the wearer hurried,
at night-fall, along one of the streets below the palace, to some
amorous appointment. Unfamiliar as he still was with dead faces, he was
taken by surprise, and touched far beyond what he had reckoned on, by
the piteous change there; even the skill of Galen having been not
wholly successful in the process of embalming. It was as if a brother
of his own were lying low before him, with that meek and helpless
expression it would have been a sacrilege to treat rudely.
Meantime, in the centre of the Campus Martius, within the grove of
poplars which enclosed the space where the body of Augustus had been
burnt, the great funeral pyre, stuffed with shavings of various
aromatic woods, was built up in many stages, separated from each other
by a light entablature of woodwork, and adorned abundantly with carved
and tapestried images. Upon this pyramidal or flame-shaped structure
lay the corpse, hidden now under a mountain of flowers and incense
brought by the women, who from the first had had their fondness for the
wanton graces of the deceased. The dead body was surmounted by a waxen
effigy of great size, arrayed in the triumphal ornaments. At last the
Centurions to whom that office belonged, drew near, torch in hand, to
ignite the pile at its four corners, while the soldiers, in wild
excitement, flung themselves around it, casting into the flames the
decorations they had received for acts of valour under the dead
emperor’s command.
It had been a really heroic order, spoiled a little, at the last
moment, through the somewhat tawdry artifice, by which an eagle—not a
very noble or youthful specimen of its kind—was caused to take flight
amid the real or affected awe of the spectators, above the perishing
remains; a court chamberlain, according to ancient etiquette,
subsequently making official declaration before the Senate, that the
imperial “genius” had been seen in this way, escaping from the fire.
And Marius was present when the Fathers, duly certified of the fact, by
“acclamation,” muttering their judgment all together, in a kind of low,
rhythmical chant, decreed Caelum—the privilege of divine rank to the
departed.
The actual gathering of the ashes in a white cere-cloth by the widowed
Lucilla, when the last flicker had been extinguished by drops of wine;
and the conveyance of them to the little cell, already populous, in the
central mass of the sepulchre of Hadrian, still in all the splendour of
its statued colonnades, were a matter of private or domestic duty;
after the due accomplishment of which Aurelius was at liberty to retire
for a time into the privacy of his beloved apartments of the Palatine.
And hither, not long afterwards, Marius was summoned a second time, to
receive from the imperial hands the great pile of Manuscripts it would
be his business to revise and arrange.
One year had passed since his first visit to the palace; and as he
climbed the stairs to-day, the great cypresses rocked against the
sunless sky, like living creatures in pain. He had to traverse a long
subterranean gallery, once a secret entrance to the imperial
apartments, and in our own day, amid the ruin of all around it, as
smooth and fresh as if the carpets were but just removed from its floor
after the return of the emperor from the shows. It was here, on such an
occasion, that the emperor Caligula, at the age of twenty-nine, had
come by his end, the assassins gliding along it as he lingered a few
moments longer to watch the movements of a party of noble youths at
their exercise in the courtyard below. As Marius waited, a second time,
in that little red room in the house of the chief chamberlain, curious
to look once more upon its painted walls—the very place whither the
assassins were said to have turned for refuge after the murder—he could
all but see the figure, which in its surrounding light and darkness
seemed to him the most melancholy in the entire history of Rome. He
called to mind the greatness of that popularity and early promise—the
stupefying height of irresponsible power, from which, after all, only
men’s viler side had been clearly visible—the overthrow of reason—the
seemingly irredeemable memory; and still, above all, the beautiful head
in which the noble lines of the race of Augustus were united to, he
knew not what expression of sensibility and fineness, not theirs, and
for the like of which one must pass onward to the Antonines. Popular
hatred had been careful to destroy its semblance wherever it was to be
found; but one bust, in dark bronze-like basalt of a wonderful
perfection of finish, preserved in the museum of the Capitol, may have
seemed to some visitors there perhaps the finest extant relic of Roman
art. Had the very seal of empire upon those sombre brows, reflected
from his mirror, suggested his insane attempt upon the liberties, the
dignity of men?—“O humanity!” he seems to ask, “what hast thou done to
me that I should so despise thee?”—And might not this be indeed the
true meaning of kingship, if the world would have one man to reign over
it? The like of this: or, some incredible, surely never to be realised,
height of disinterestedness, in a king who should be the servant of
all, quite at the other extreme of the practical dilemma involved in
such a position. Not till some while after his death had the body been
decently interred by the piety of the sisters he had driven into exile.
Fraternity of feeling had been no invariable feature in the incidents
of Roman story. One long Vicus Sceleratus, from its first dim
foundation in fraternal quarrel on the morrow of a common deliverance
so touching—had not almost every step in it some gloomy memory of
unnatural violence? Romans did well to fancy the traitress Tarpeia
still “green in earth,” crowned, enthroned, at the roots of the
Capitoline rock. If in truth the religion of Rome was everywhere in it,
like that perfume of the funeral incense still upon the air, so also
was the memory of crime prompted by a hypocritical cruelty, down to the
erring, or not erring, Vesta calmly buried alive there, only eighty
years ago, under Domitian.
It was with a sense of relief that Marius found himself in the presence
of Aurelius, whose gesture of friendly intelligence, as he entered,
raised a smile at the gloomy train of his own thoughts just then,
although since his first visit to the palace a great change had passed
over it. The clear daylight found its way now into empty rooms. To
raise funds for the war, Aurelius, his luxurious brother being no more,
had determined to sell by auction the accumulated treasures of the
imperial household. The works of art, the dainty furniture, had been
removed, and were now “on view” in the Forum, to be the delight or
dismay, for many weeks to come, of the large public of those who were
curious in these things. In such wise had Aurelius come to the
condition of philosophic detachment he had affected as a boy, hardly
persuaded to wear warm clothing, or to sleep in more luxurious manner
than on the bare floor. But, in his empty house, the man of mind, who
had always made so much of the pleasures of philosophic contemplation,
felt freer in thought than ever. He had been reading, with less
self-reproach than usual, in the Republic of Plato, those passages
which describe the life of the philosopher-kings—like that of hired
servants in their own house—who, possessed of the “gold undefiled” of
intellectual vision, forgo so cheerfully all other riches. It was one
of his happy days: one of those rare days, when, almost with none of
the effort, otherwise so constant with him, his thoughts came rich and
full, and converged in a mental view, as exhilarating to him as the
prospect of some wide expanse of landscape to another man’s bodily eye.
He seemed to lie readier than was his wont to the imaginative influence
of the philosophic reason—to its suggestions of a possible open
country, commencing just where all actual experience leaves off, but
which experience, one’s own and not another’s, may one day occupy. In
fact, he was seeking strength for himself, in his own way, before he
started for that ambiguous earthly warfare which was to occupy the
remainder of his life. “Ever remember this,” he writes, “that a happy
life depends, not on many things—en oligistois keitai.”+ And to-day,
committing himself with a steady effort of volition to the mere silence
of the great empty apartments, he might be said to have escaped,
according to Plato’s promise to those who live closely with philosophy,
from the evils of the world.
In his “conversations with himself” Marcus Aurelius speaks often of
that City on high, of which all other cities are but single
habitations. From him in fact Cornelius Fronto, in his late discourse,
had borrowed the expression; and he certainly meant by it more than the
whole commonwealth of Rome, in any idealisation of it, however sublime.
Incorporate somehow with the actual city whose goodly stones were lying
beneath his gaze, it was also implicate in that reasonable constitution
of nature, by devout contemplation of which it is possible for man to
associate himself to the consciousness of God. In that New Rome he had
taken up his rest for awhile on this day, deliberately feeding his
thoughts on the better air of it, as another might have gone for mental
renewal to a favourite villa.
“Men seek retirement in country-houses,” he writes, “on the sea-coast,
on the mountains; and you have yourself as much fondness for such
places as another. But there is little proof of culture therein; since
the privilege is yours of retiring into yourself whensoever you
please,—into that little farm of one’s own mind, where a silence so
profound may be enjoyed.” That it could make these retreats, was a
plain consequence of the kingly prerogative of the mind, its dominion
over circumstance, its inherent liberty.—“It is in thy power to think
as thou wilt: The essence of things is in thy thoughts about them: All
is opinion, conception: No man can be hindered by another: What is
outside thy circle of thought is nothing at all to it; hold to this,
and you are safe: One thing is needful—to live close to the divine
genius within thee, and minister thereto worthily.” And the first point
in this true ministry, this culture, was to maintain one’s soul in a
condition of indifference and calm. How continually had public claims,
the claims of other persons, with their rough angularities of
character, broken in upon him, the shepherd of the flock. But after all
he had at least this privilege he could not part with, of thinking as
he would; and it was well, now and then, by a conscious effort of will,
to indulge it for a while, under systematic direction. The duty of thus
making discreet, systematic use of the power of imaginative vision for
purposes of spiritual culture, “since the soul takes colour from its
fantasies,” is a point he has frequently insisted on.
The influence of these seasonable meditations—a symbol, or sacrament,
because an intensified condition, of the soul’s own ordinary and
natural life—would remain upon it, perhaps for many days. There were
experiences he could not forget, intuitions beyond price, he had come
by in this way, which were almost like the breaking of a physical light
upon his mind; as the great Augustus was said to have seen a mysterious
physical splendour, yonder, upon the summit of the Capitol, where the
altar of the Sibyl now stood. With a prayer, therefore, for inward
quiet, for conformity to the divine reason, he read some select
passages of Plato, which bear upon the harmony of the reason, in all
its forms, with itself—“Could there be Cosmos, that wonderful,
reasonable order, in him, and nothing but disorder in the world
without?” It was from this question he had passed on to the vision of a
reasonable, a divine, order, not in nature, but in the condition of
human affairs—that unseen Celestial City, Uranopolis, Callipolis, Urbs
Beata—in which, a consciousness of the divine will being everywhere
realised, there would be, among other felicitous differences from this
lower visible world, no more quite hopeless death, of men, or children,
or of their affections. He had tried to-day, as never before, to make
the most of this vision of a New Rome, to realise it as distinctly as
he could,—and, as it were, find his way along its streets, ere he went
down into a world so irksomely different, to make his practical effort
towards it, with a soul full of compassion for men as they were.
However distinct the mental image might have been to him, with the
descent of but one flight of steps into the market-place below, it must
have retreated again, as if at touch of some malign magic wand, beyond
the utmost verge of the horizon. But it had been actually, in his
clearest vision of it, a confused place, with but a recognisable entry,
a tower or fountain, here or there, and haunted by strange faces, whose
novel expression he, the great physiognomist, could by no means read.
Plato, indeed, had been able to articulate, to see, at least in
thought, his ideal city. But just because Aurelius had passed beyond
Plato, in the scope of the gracious charities he pre-supposed there, he
had been unable really to track his way about it. Ah! after all,
according to Plato himself, all vision was but reminiscence, and this,
his heart’s desire, no place his soul could ever have visited in any
region of the old world’s achievements. He had but divined, by a kind
of generosity of spirit, the void place, which another experience than
his must fill.
Yet Marius noted the wonderful expression of peace, of quiet pleasure,
on the countenance of Aurelius, as he received from him the rolls of
fine clear manuscript, fancying the thoughts of the emperor occupied at
the moment with the famous prospect towards the Alban hills, from those
lofty windows.
NOTES
37. +Transliteration: en oligistois keitai. Definition “it lies in the
fewest [things].”