Books: Imperial Purple
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Edgar Saltus >> Imperial Purple
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7 Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
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 Cassar, 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 pasing 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.
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