Books: Imperial Purple
E >>
Edgar Saltus >> Imperial Purple
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7
Fire is a perfect poet. No designer ever imagined the surprises it
creates, and when, at the end of the week, three-fourths of the
city was in ruins, the beauty that reigned there must have been
sublime. That it inspired Nero is presumable. The palace on the
Palatine, which Tiberius embellished and Caligula enlarged, had
gone; in its place rose another, aflame with gold. Before it
Neropolis extended, a city of triumphal arches, enchanted temples,
royal dwellings, shimmering porticoes, glittering roofs, and wide,
hospitable streets. It was fair to the eye, purely Greek; and on
its heart, from the Circus Maximus to the Forum's edge, the new
and gigantic palace shone. Before it was a lake, a part of which
Vespasian drained and replaced with an amphitheatre that covered
eight acres. About that lake were separate edifices that formed a
city in themselves; between them and the palace, a statue of Nero
in gold and silver mounted precipitately a hundred and twenty
feet--a statue which it took twenty-four elephants to move. About
it were green savannahs, forest reaches, the call of bird and
deer, while in the distance, fronted by a stretch of columns a
mile in length, the palace stood--a palace so ineffably charming
that on the day of reckoning may it outbalance a few of his sins.
Even the cellars were frescoed. The baths were quite comfortable;
you had waters salt or sulphurous at will. The dining halls had
ivory ceilings from which flowers fell, and wainscots that changed
at each service. The walls were alive with the glisten of gems,
with marbles rarer than jewels. In one hall was a dome of
sapphire, a floor of malachite, crystal columns and red-gold
walls.
"At last," Nero murmured, "I am lodged like a man."
No doubt. Yet in a mirror he would have seen a bloated beast in a
flowered gown, the hair done up in a chignon, the skin covered
with eruptions, the eyes circled and yellow; a woman who had hours
when she imitated a virgin at bay, others when she was wife, still
others when she expected to be a mother, and that woman, a
senatorial patent of divinity aiding, was god--Apollo's peer,
imperator, chief of the army, pontifix maximus, master of the
world, with the incontestable right of life and death over every
being in the dominions.
It had taken the fresh-faced lad who blushed so readily, just
fourteen years to effect that change. Did he regret it? And what
should Nero regret? Nothing, perhaps, save that at the moment when
he declared himself to be lodged like a man, he had not killed
himself like one. But of that he was incapable. Had he known what
the future held, possibly he might have imitated that apotheosis
of vulgarity in which Sardanapalus eclipsed himself, but never
could he have died with the good breeding and philosophy of Cato,
for neither good breeding nor philosophy was in him. Nero killed
himself like a coward, yet that he did kill himself, in no matter
what fashion, is one of the few things that can be said in his
favor.
Those days differed from ours. There were circumstances in which
suicide was regarded as the simplest of duties. Nero did his duty,
but not until he was forced to it, and even then not until he had
been asked several times whether it was so hard to die. The empire
had wearied of him. In Neropolis his popularity had gone as
popularity ever does; the conflagration had killed it.
Even as he wandered, lyre in hand, a train of Lesbians and
pederasts at his heels, through those halls which had risen on the
ruins, and which inexhaustible Greece had furnished with a fresh
crop of white immortals, the world rebelled. Afar on the outskirts
of civilization a vassal, ashamed of his vassalage, declared war,
not against Rome, but against an emperor that played the flute. In
Spain, in Gaul, the legions were choosing other chiefs. The
provinces, depleted by imperial exactions, outwearied by the
increasing number of accusers, whose accusations impoverishing
them served only to multiply the prodigalities of their Caesar,
revolted.
Suddenly Nero found himself alone. As the advancing rumor of
rebellion reached him, he thought of flight; there was no one that
would accompany him. He called to the pretorians; they would not
hear. Through the immensity of his palace he sought one friend.
The doors would not open. He returned to his apartment; the guards
had gone. Then terror seized him. He was afraid to die, afraid to
live, afraid of his solitude, afraid of Rome, afraid of himself;
but what frightened him most was that everyone had lost their fear
of him. It was time to go, and a slave aiding, he escaped in
disguise from Rome, and killed himself, reluctantly, in a hovel.
"Qualis artifex pereo!" he is reported to have muttered. Say
rather, qualis maechus.
VI
THE HOUSE OF FLAVIA
It was in those days that the nebulous figure of Apollonius of
Tyana appeared and disappeared in Rome. His speech, a commingling
of puerility and charm, Philostratus has preserved. Rumor had
preceded him. It was said that he knew everything, save the
caresses of women; that he was familiar with all languages; with
the speech of bird and beast; with that of silence, for silence is
a language too; that he had prayed in the Temple of Jupiter
Lycoeus, where men lost their shadows, their lives as well; that
he had undergone eighty initiations of Mithra; that he had
perplexed the magi; confuted the gymnosophists; that he foretold
the future, healed the sick, raised the dead; that beyond the
Himalayas he had encountered every species of ferocious beast,
except the tyrant, and that it was to see one that he had come to
Rome.
Nero was quite free from prejudice. Apart from a doll which he
worshipped he had no superstitions. He had the plain man's dislike
of philosophy; Seneca had sickened him of it, perhaps; but he was
sensitive, not that he troubled himself particularly about any
lies that were told of him, but he did object to people who went
about telling the truth. In that respect he was not unique; we are
all like him, but he had ways of stilling the truth which were
imperial and his own.
Promptly on Apollonius he loosed his bull-dog, Tigellin, prefect
of police.
Tigellin caught him. "What have you with you?" he asked.
"Continence, Justice, Temperance, Strength and Patience,"
Apollonius answered.
"Your slaves, I suppose. Make out a list of them."
Apollonius shook his head. "They are not my slaves; they are my
masters."
"There is but one," Tigellin retorted--"Nero. Why do you not fear
him?"
"Because the god that made him terrible made me without fear."
"I will leave you your liberty," muttered the startled Tigellin,
"but you must give bail."
"And who," asked Apollonius superbly, "would bail a man whom no
one can enchain?" Therewith he turned and disappeared.
At that time Nero was in training to suffocate a lion in the
arena. A few days later he killed himself. Simultaneously there
came news from Syracuse. A woman of rank had given birth to a
child with three heads. Apollonius examined it.
"There will be three emperors at once," he announced. "But their
reign will be shorter than that of kings on the stage."
Within that year Galba, who was emperor for an instant, died at
the gates of Rome. Vitellius, after being emperor in little else
than dream, was butchered in the Forum; and Otho, in that fine
antique fashion, killed himself in Gaul. Apollonius meanwhile was
in Alexandria, predicting the purple to Vespasian, the rise of the
House of Flavia; invoking Jupiter in his protege's behalf; and
presently, the prediction accomplished, he was back in Rome,
threatening Domitian, warning him that the House of Flavia would
fall.
The atmosphere was then charged with the marvellous; the world was
filled with prodigies, with strange gods, beckoning chimeras and
credulous crowds. Belief in the supernatural was absolute; the
occult sciences, astrology, magic, divination, all had their
adepts. In Greece there were oracles at every turn, and with them
prophets who taught the art of adultery and how to construe the
past. On the banks of the Rhine there were girls who were regarded
as divinities, and in Gaul were men who were held wholly divine.
Jerusalem too had her follies. There was Simon the Magician,
founder of gnosticism, father of every heresy, Messiah to the
Jews, Jupiter to the Gentiles--an impudent self-made god, who
pretended to float in the air, and called his mistress Minerva--a
deification, parenthetically, which was accepted by Nicholas, his
successor, a deacon of the church, who raised her to the eighth
heaven as patron saint of lust. To him, as to Simon, she was
Ennoia, Prunikos, Helen of Troy. She had been Delilah, Lucretia.
She had prostituted herself to every nation; she had sung in the
by-ways, and hidden robbers in the vermin of her bed. But by Simon
she was rehabilitated. It was she, no doubt, of whom Caligula
thought when he beckoned to the moon. In Rome she had her statue,
and near it was one to Simon, the holy god.
But of all manifestations of divinity the most patent was that
which haloed Vespasian. He expected it, Suetonius says, but it is
doubtful if any one else did. One night he dreamed that an era of
prosperity was to dawn for him and his when Nero lost a tooth. The
next day he was shown one which had been drawn from the emperor's
mouth. But that was nothing. Presently at Carmel the Syrian oracle
assured him that he would be successful in whatever he undertook.
From Rome word came that, while the armies of Vitellius and Otho
were fighting, two eagles had fought above them, and that the
victor had been despatched by a third eagle that had come from the
East. In Alexandria Serapis whispered to him. The entire menagerie
of Egypt proclaimed him king. Apis bellowed, Anubis barked. Isis
visited him unveiled. The lame and the blind pressed about him; he
cured them with a touch. There could be no reasonable doubt now;
surely he was a god. On his shoulders Apollonius threw the purple,
and Vespasian set out for Rome.
His antecedents were less propitious. The descendant of an obscure
centurion, he had been a veterinary surgeon; then, having got
Caligula's ear, he flattered it abominably. Caligula disposed of,
he flattered Claud, or what amounted to the same thing, Narcissus,
Claud's chamberlain. Through the influence of the latter he became
a lieutenant, fought on remote frontiers--fought well, too--so
well even that, Narcissus gone, he felt Agrippina watching him,
and knowing the jealousy of her eyes, prudently kept quiet until
that lady did.
With Nero he promenaded through Greece--sat at the Olympian games
and fell asleep when his emperor sang. Treason of that high
nature--sacrilege, rather, for Nero was then a god--might have
been overlooked, had it occurred but once, for Nero could be
magnanimous when he chose. But it always occurred. To Nero's
tremolo invariably came the accompaniment of Vespasian's snore. He
was dreaming of that tooth, no doubt. "I am not a soporific, am
I?" Nero gnashed at him, and sent the blasphemer away.
For a while Vespasian lived in constant expectation of some civil
message inviting him to die. Finally it came, only he was invited
to die at the head of an army which Nero had projected against
seditious Jews. When he returned, leaving his son Titus to attend
to Jerusalem, it was as emperor.
Only a moment before Vitellius had been disposed of. That curious
glutton, whom the Rhenish legions had chosen because of his coarse
familiarity, would willingly have fled had the soldiery let him.
But not at all; they wanted a prince of their own manufacture.
They knew nothing of Vespasian, cared less; and into the Capitol
they chased the latter's partisans, his son Domitian as well. The
besieged defended themselves with masterpieces, with sacred urns,
the statues of gods, the pedestals of divinities. Suddenly the
Capitol was aflame. Simultaneously Vespasian's advance guard beat
at the gates. The besiegers turned, the mob was with them, and
together they fought, first at the gates, then in the streets, in
the Forum, retreating always, but like lions, their face to the
foe. The volatile mob, noting the retreat, turned from combatant
into spectator. Let the soldiers fight; it was their duty, not
theirs; and, as the struggle continued, from roof and window they
eyed it with that artistic delight which the arena had developed,
applauding the clever thrusts, abusing the vanquished, robbing the
dead, and therewith pillaging the wineshops, crowding the
lupanars. During the orgy, Vitellius was stabbed. The Flavians had
won the day, the empire was Vespasian's.
The use he made of it was very modest. In spite of his manifest
divinity he had nothing in common with the Caesars that had gone
before; he had no dreams of the impossible, no desire to frighten
Jupiter or seduce the moon. He was a plain man, tall and ruddy,
very coarse in speech and thought, open-armed and close-fisted,
slapping senators on the back and keeping a sharp eye on the
coppers; taxing the latrinae, and declaring that money had no
smell; yet still, in comparison with Claud and Nero, almost the
ideal; absolutely uninteresting also, yet doing what good he
could; effacing at once the traces of the civil war, rebuilding
the Capitol, calming the people, protecting the provinces,
restoring to Rome the gardens of Nero, clipping the wings of the
Palace of Gold, throwing open again the Via Sacra, over which the
Palace had spread; draining the lake that had shimmered before it,
and erecting the Colosseum in its place.
In spite of Serapsis, Anubis and Isis, he had not the faintest
odor of myth about him; absolutely bourgeois, he lacked even that
atmosphere of burlesque that surrounded Claud; he was not even
vicious. But he was a soldier, a brave one; and if, with the
acquired economy of a subaltern who has been obliged to live on
his pay, he kept his purse-strings tight, they were loose enough
if a friend were in need, and he paid no one the compliment of a
lie. He was projected sheer out of the republic. The better part
of his life had been passed under arms; the delicate sensuality of
Rome was foreign to him. It was there that Domitian had lived.
It were interesting to have watched that young man killing flies
by the hour, while he meditated on the atrocities he was to
commit--atrocities so numberless and needless that in the red
halls of the Caesars he has left a portrait which is unique.
Slender, graceful, handsome, as were all the young emperors of old
Rome, his blue, troubled eyes took pleasure, if at all, only in
the sight of blood.
In accordance with the fashion which Caligula and Nero had set,
Domitian's earliest manners were those of an urbane and gentle
prince. Later, when he made it his turn to rule, informers begged
their bread in exile. Where they are not punished, he announced,
they are encouraged. The sacrifices were so distressing to him
that he forbade the immolation of oxen. He was disinterested, too,
refusing legacies when the testator left nearer heirs, and
therewith royally generous, covering his suite with presents, and
declaring that to him avarice of all vices was the lowest and most
vile. In short, you would have said another adolescent Nero come
to Rome; there was the same silken sweetness of demeanor, the same
ready blush, in addition to a zeal for justice and equity which
other young emperors had been too thoughtless to show.
His boyhood, too, had not been above reproach. The same things
were whispered about him that had been shouted at Augustus.
Manifestly he lacked not one of the qualities which go to the
making of a model prince. Vespasian alone had his doubts.
"Mushrooms won't hurt you," he cried one day, as Domitian started
at the sight of a ragout a la Sardanapale, which he fancied,
possibly, was a la Locuste, "It is steel you should fear."
At that time, with a father for emperor and a brother who was
sacking Jerusalem, Domitian had but one cause for anxiety, to wit
--that the empire might escape him. It was then he began his
meditations over holocausts of flies. For hours he secluded
himself, occupied solely with their slaughter. He treated them
precisely as Titus treated the Jews, enjoying the quiver of their
legs, the little agonies of their silent death.
Tiberius had been in love with solitude, but never as he. Night
after night he wandered on the terraces of the palace, watching
the red moon wane white, companioned only by his dreams, those
waking dreams that poets and madmen share, that Pallas had him in
her charge, that Psyche was amorous of his eyes.
Meanwhile he was a nobody, a young gentleman merely, who might
have moved in the best society, and who preferred the worst--his
own. The sudden elevation of Vespasian preoccupied him, and while
he knew that in the natural course of events his father would move
to Olympus, yet there was his brother Titus, on whose broad
shoulders the mantle of purple would fall. If the seditious Jews
only knew their business! But no. Forty years before a white
apparition on the way to Golgotha had cried to a handful of women,
"The days are coming in which they shall say to the mountains,
'Fall on us'; to the hills, 'Cover us.'" And the days had come. A
million of them had been butchered. From the country they had fled
to the city; from Acra they had climbed to Zion. When the city
burst into flames their blood put it out. Decidedly they did not
know their business. Titus, instead of being stabbed before
Jerusalem's walls, was marching in triumph to Rome.
The procession that presently entered the gates was a stream of
splendor; crowns of rubies and gold; garments that glistened with
gems; gods on their sacred pedestals; prisoners; curious beasts;
Jerusalem in miniature; pictures of war; booty from the Temple,
the veil, the candelabra, the cups of gold and the Book of the
Law. To the rear rumbled the triumphal car, in which laurelled and
mantled Titus stood, Vespasian at his side; while, in the
distance, on horseback, came Domitian--a supernumerary, ignored by
the crowd.
When the prisoners disappeared in the Tullianum and a herald
shouted, "They have lived!" Domitian returned to the palace and
hunted morosely for flies. The excesses of the festival in which
Rome was swooning then had no delights for him. Presently the moon
would rise, and then on the deserted terrace perhaps he would
bathe a little in her light, and dream again of Pallas and of the
possibilities of an emperor's sway, but meanwhile those blue
troubled eyes that Psyche was amorous of were filled with envy and
with hate. It was not that he begrudged Titus the triumph. The man
who had disposed of a million Jews deserved not one triumph, but
ten. It was the purple that haunted him.
Domitian was then in the early twenties. The Temple of Peace was
ascending; the Temple of Janus was closed; the empire was at rest.
Side by side with Vespasian, Titus ruled. From the Euphrates came
the rumor of some vague revolt. Domitian thought he would like to
quell it. He was requested to keep quiet. It occurred to him that
his father ought to be ashamed of himself to reign so long. He was
requested to vacate his apartment. There were dumb plots in dark
cellars, of which only the echo of a whisper has descended to us,
but which at the time were quite loud enough to reach Vespasian's
ears. Titus interceded. Domitian was requested to behave.
For a while he prowled in the moonlight. He had been too
precipitate, he decided, and to allay suspicion presently he went
about in society, mingling his hours with those of married women.
Manifestly his ways had mended. But Vespasian was uneasy. A comet
had appeared. The doors of the imperial mausoleum had opened of
themselves, besides, he was not well. The robust and hardy
soldier, suddenly without tangible cause, felt his strength give
way. "It is nothing," his physician said; "a slight attack of
fever." Vespasian shook his head; he knew things of which the
physician was ignorant. "It is death," he answered, "and an
emperor should meet it standing."
Titus' turn came next. A violent, headstrong, handsome, rapacious
prince, terribly prodigal, thoroughly Oriental, surrounded by
dancers and mignons, living in state with a queen for mistress,
startling even Rome with the uproar of his debauches--no sooner
was Vespasian gone than presto! the queen went home, the dancers
disappeared, the debauches ceased, and a ruler appeared who
declared he had lost a day that a good action had not marked; a
ruler who could announce that no one should leave his presence
depressed.
Though Vespasian had gone, his reign continued. Not long, it is
true, and punctuated by a spectacle of which Caligula, for all his
poetry, had not dreamed--the burial of Pompeii. But a reign which,
while it lasted, was fastidious and refined, and during which,
again and again, Titus, who commanded death and whom death obeyed,
besought Domitian to be to him a brother.
Domitian had no such intention. He had a party behind him, one
made up of old Neronians, the army of the discontented, who wanted
a change, and greatly admired this charming young prince whose
hours were passed in killing flies and making love to married
women. The pretorians too had been seduced. Domitian could make
captivating promises when he chose.
As a consequence Titus, like Vespasian, was uneasy, and with
cause. Dion Cassius, or rather that brute Xiphilin, his
abbreviator, mentions the fever that overtook him, the same his
father had met. It was mortal, of course, and the purple was
Domitian's.
For a year and a day thereafter you would have thought Titus still
at the helm. There was the same clemency, the same regard for
justice, the same refinement and fastidiousness. The morose young
poet had developed into a model monarch. The old Neronians were
perplexed, irritated too; they had expected other things. Domitian
was merely feeling the way; the hand that held the sceptre was not
quite sure of its strength, and, tentatively almost, this Prince
of Virtue began to scrutinize the morals of Rome. For the first
time he noticed that the cocottes took their airing in litters.
But litters were not for them! That abuse he put a stop to at
once. A senator manifested an interest in ballet-girls; he was
disgraced. The vestals, to whose indiscretions no one had paid
much attention, learned the statutes of an archaic law, and were
buried alive. The early distaste for blood was diminishing.
Domitian had the purple, but it was not bright enough; he wanted
it red, and what Domitian wanted he got. Your god and master
orders it, was the formula he began to use when addressing the
Senate and People of Rome.
To that the people were indifferent. The spectacles he gave in the
Flavian amphitheatre were too magnificently atrocious not to be a
compensation in full for any eccentricity in which he might
indulge. Besides, under Nero, Claud, Caligula, on en avait vu bien
d'autres. And at those spectacles where he presided, crowned with
a tiara, on which were the images of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva,
while grouped about him the college of Flavian flamens wore tiaras
that differed therefrom merely in this, that they bore his image
too, the people right royally applauded their master and their
god.
And it was just as well they did; Domitian was quite capable of
ordering everybody into the arena. As yet, however, he had
appeared little different from any other prince. That Rome might
understand that there was a difference, and also in what that
difference consisted, he gave a supper. Everyone worth knowing was
bidden, and, as is usual in state functions, everyone that was
bidden came. The supper hall was draped with black; the ceiling,
the walls, the floor, everything was basaltic. The couches were
black, the linen was black, the slaves were black. Behind each
guest was a broken column with his name on it. The food was such
as is prepared when death has come. The silence was that of the
tomb. The only audible voice was Domitian's. He was talking very
wittily and charmingly about murder, about proscriptions, the good
informers do, the utility of the headsman, the majesty of the law.
The guests, a trifle ill at ease, wished their host sweet dreams.
"The same to you," he answered, and deplored that they must go.
On the morrow informers and headsmen were at work. Any pretext was
sufficient. Birth, wealth, fame, or the lack of them--anything
whatever--and there the culprit stood, charged not with treason to
an emperor, but with impiety to a god. On the judgment seat
Domitian sat. Before him the accused passed, and under his eyes
they were questioned, tortured, condemned and killed. At once
their property passed into the keeping of the prince.
Of that he had need. The arena was expensive, but the drain was
elsewhere. A little before, a quarrelsome people, the Dacians,
whom it took a Trajan to subdue, had overrun the Danube, and were
marching down to Rome. Domitian set out to meet them. The Dacians
retreated, not at all because they were repulsed, but because
Domitian thought it better warfare to pay them to do so. On his
return after that victory he enjoyed a triumph as fair as that of
Caesar. And each year since then the emperor of Rome had paid
tribute to a nation of mongrel oafs.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7