Books: Imperial Purple
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Edgar Saltus >> Imperial Purple
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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.
Caligula had been frankly adored; there was in him an originality,
and 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.
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