Books: Imperial Purple
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Edgar Saltus >> Imperial Purple
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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.
The interlude at an end, the sand was reraked, and preceded by the
pomp of lictors, interminable files of gladiators entered, holding
their knives to Nero that he might see that they were sharp. It
was then the eyes of the vestals lighted; artistic death was their
chiefest joy, and in a moment, when the spectacle began and the
first gladiator fell, above the din you could hear their cry "Hic
habet!" and watch their delicate thumbs reverse.
There was no cowardice in that arena. If by chance any hesitation
were discernible, instantly there were hot irons, the sear of
which revivified courage at once. But that was rare. The
gladiators fought for applause, for liberty, for death; fought
manfully, skilfully, terribly, too, and received the point of the
sword or the palm of the victor, their expression unchanged, the
face unmoved. Among them, some provided with a net and
prodigiously agile, pursued their adversaries hither and thither,
trying to entangle them first and kill them later. Others,
protected by oblong shields and armed with short, sharp swords,
fought hand-to-hand. There were still others, mailed horsemen, who
fought with the lance, and charioteers that dealt death from high
Briton cars.
As a spectacle it was unique; one that the Romans, or more
exactly, their predecessors, the Etruscans, had devised to train
their children for war and allay the fear of blood. It had been
serviceable, indeed, and though the need of it had gone, still the
institution endured, and in enduring constituted the chief delight
of the vestals and of Rome. By means of it a bankrupt became
consul and an emperor beloved. It had stayed revolutions, it was
the tax of the proletariat on the rich. Silver and bread were for
the individual, but these things were for the crowd.
During the pauses of the combats the dead were removed by men
masked as Mercury, god of hell; red irons, that others, masked as
Charon, bore, being first applied as safeguard against swoon or
fraud. And when, to the kisses of flutes, the last palm had been
awarded, the last death acclaimed, a ballet was given; that of
Paris and Venus, which Apuleius has described so well, and for
afterpiece the romance of Pasipha? and the bull. Then, as night
descended, so did torches, too; the arena was strewn with
vermilion; tables were set, and to the incitement of crotals,
Lydians danced before the multitude, toasting the last act of that
wonderful day.
It was with such magnificence that Nero showed the impresario's
skill, the politician's adroitness. Where the artist, which he
claimed to be, really appeared, was in the refurbishing of Rome.
In spite of Augustus' boast, the city was not by any means of
marble. It was filled with crooked little streets, with the
atrocities of the Tarquins, with houses unsightly and perilous,
with the moss and dust of ages; it compared with Alexandria as
London compares with Paris; it had a splendor of its own, but a
splendor that could be heightened.
Whether the conflagration which occurred at that time was the
result of accident or design is uncertain and in any event
immaterial. Tacitus says that when it began Nero was at Antium, in
which case he must have hastened to return, for admitting that he
did not originate the fire, it is a matter of agreement that he
collaborated in it. In quarters where it showed symptoms of
weakness it was by his orders coaxed to new strength; colossal
stone buildings, on which it had little effect, were battered down
with catapults.
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