Books: Imperial Purple
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Edgar Saltus >> Imperial Purple
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Of course he needed money. The informers were there and he got it,
and with it that spectacle of torture and of blood which he needed
too. Curiously, his melancholy increased; his good looks had gone;
Psyche was no longer amorous of his eyes. Something else haunted
him, something he could not define; the past, perhaps, perhaps the
future. To his ears came strange sounds, the murmur of his own
name, and suddenly silence. Then, too, there always seemed to be
something behind him; something that when he turned disappeared.
The room in which he slept he had covered with a polished metal
that reflected everything, yet still the intangible was there.
Once Pallas came in her chariot, waved him farewell, and
disappeared, borne by black horses across the black night.
The astrologers consulted had nothing pleasant to say. They knew,
as Domitian knew, that the end was near. So was theirs. To one of
them, who predicted his immediate death, he inquired, "What will
your end be?" "I," answered the astrologer--"I shall be torn by
dogs." "To the stake with him!" cried Domitian; "let him be burned
alive!" Suetonius says that a storm put out the flames, and dogs
devoured the corpse. Another astrologer predicted that Domitian
would die before noon on the morrow. In order to convince him of
his error, Domitian ordered him to be executed the subsequent
night. Before noon on the morrow Domitian was dead.
Philostratus and Dion Cassius both unite in saying that at that
hour Apollonius was at Ephesus, preaching to the multitude. In the
middle of the sermon he hesitated, but in a moment he began anew.
Again he hesitated, his eyes half closed; then, suddenly he
shouted, "Strike him! Strike him once more!" And immediately to
his startled audience he related a scene that was occurring at
Rome, the attack on Domitian, his struggle with an assailant, his
effort to tear out his eyes, the rush of conspirators, and finally
the fall of the emperor, pierced by seven knives.
The story may not be true, and yet if it were!
VII
THE POISON IN THE PURPLE
Rome never was healthy. The tramontana visited it then as now,
fever, too, and sudden death. To emperors it was fatal. Since
Caesar a malaria had battened on them all. Nerva escaped, but only
through abdication. The mantle that fell from Domitian's shoulders
on to his was so dangerous in its splendor, that, fearing the
infection, he passed it to Ulpius Trajanus, the lustre undimmed.
Ulpius Trajanus, Trajan for brevity, a Spaniard by birth, a
soldier by choice; one who had fought against Parthian and Jew,
who had triumphed through Pannonia and made it his own; a general
whose hair had whitened on the field; a consul who had frightened
nations, was afraid of the sheen of that purple which dazzled,
corroded and killed. He bore it, indeed, but at arm's-length. He
kept himself free from the subtlety of its poison, from the
microbes of Rome as well.
He was in Cologne when Domitian died and Nerva accepted and
renounced the throne. It was a year before he ventured among the
seven hills. When he arrived you would have said another Augustus,
not the real Augustus, but the Augustus of legend, and the late
Mr. Gibbon. When he girt the new prefect of the pretorium with the
immemorial sword, he addressed him in copy-book phrases--"If I
rule wisely, use it for me; unwisely, against me."
Rome listened open-mouthed. The change from Domitian's formula,
"Your god and master orders it," was too abrupt to be immediately
understood. Before it was grasped Trajan was off again; this time
to the Danube and beyond it, to Dacia and her fens.
Many years later--a century or two, to be exact--a Persian satrap
loitered in a forum of Rome. "It is here," he declared, "I am
tempted to forget that man is mortal."
He had passed beneath a triumphal arch; before him was a
glittering square, grandiose, yet severe; a stretch of temples and
basilicas, in which masterpieces felt at home--the Forum of
Trajan, the compliment of a nation to a prince. Dominating it was
a column, in whose thick spirals you read to-day the one reliable
chronicle of the Dacian campaign. Was not Gautier well advised
when he said only art endures?
There were other chronicles in plenty; there were the histories of
AElius Maurus, of Marius Maximus, and that of Spartian, but they
are lost. There is a page or two in the abbreviation which
Xiphilin made of Dion; Aurelius Victor has a little to add, so
also has Eutropus, but, practically speaking, there is, apart from
that column, nothing save conjecture.
Campaigns are wearisome reading, but not the one that is pictured
there. You ask a curve a question, and in the next you find the
reply. There is a point, however, on which it is dumb--the origin
of the war. But if you wish to know the result, not the momentary
and transient result, but the sequel which futurity held, look at
the ruins at that column's base.
The origin of the war was Domitian's diplomacy. The chieftain whom
he had made king, and who had been surprised enough at receiving a
diadem instead of the point of a sword, fancied, and not
unreasonably, that the annuity which Rome paid him was to continue
forever. But Domitian, though a god, was not otherwise immortal.
When he died abruptly the annuity ceased. The Dacian king sent
word that he was surprised at the delay, but he must have been far
more so at the promptness with which he got Trajan's reply. It was
a blare of bugles, which he thought forever dumb; a flight of
eagles, which he thought were winged.
In the spirals of the column you see the advancing army, the
retreating foe; then the Dacian dragon saluting the standards of
Rome; peace declared, and an army, whose very repose is menacing,
standing there to see that peace is kept. And was it? In the
ascending spiral is the new revolt, the attempt to assassinate
Trajan, the capture of the conspirators, the advance of the
legions, the retreat of the Dacians, burning their cities as they
go, carrying their wounded and their women with them, and at last
pressing about a huge cauldron that is filled with poison,
fighting among themselves for a cup of the brew, and rolling on
the ground in the convulsions of death. Farther on is the treasure
of the king. To hide it he had turned a river from its source,
sunk the gold in a vault beneath, and killed the workmen that had
labored there. Beyond is the capture of the capital, the suicide
of the chief, a troop of soldiers driving captives and cattle
before them, the death of a nation and the end of war.
The subsequent triumph does not appear on the column. It is said
that ten thousand beasts were slaughtered in the arenas,
slaughtering, as they fell, a thousand of their slaughterers. But
the spectacle, however fair, was not of a nature to detain Trajan
long in Rome. The air there had not improved in the least, and
presently he was off again, this time on the banks of the
Euphrates, arguing with the Parthians, avoiding danger in the only
way he knew, by facing it.
It was then that the sheen of the purple glowed. If lustreless at
home, it was royally red abroad. In a campaign that was little
more than a triumphant promenade he doubled the empire. To the
world of Caesar he added that of Alexander. Allies he turned into
subjects, vassals into slaves. Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, were
added to the realm. Trajan's footstools were diadems. He had moved
back one frontier, he moved another. From Britain to the Indus,
Rome was mistress of the earth. Had Trajan been younger, China,
whose very name was unknown, would have yielded to him her
corruption, her printing press, her powder and her tea.
That he would have enjoyed these things is not at all conjectural.
He was then an old man, but he was not a good one--at least not in
the sense we use the term to-day. He had habits which are regarded
now less as vices than perversions, but which at that time were
taken as a matter of course and accepted by everyone, even by the
stoics, very calmly, with a grain of Attic salt at that. Men were
regarded as virtuous when they were brave, when they were honest;
the idea of using the expression in its later sense occurred, if
at all, in jest merely, as a synonym for the eunuch. It was the
matron and the vestal who were supposed to be straight, and their
straightness was wholly supposititious. The ceremonies connected
with the phallus, and those observed in the worship of the Bona
Dea, were of a nature that no virtue could withstand. Every altar,
Juvenal said, had its Clodius, and even in Clodius' absence there
were always those breaths of Sapphic song that blew through
Mitylene.
It is just that absence of a quality which we regard as an added
grace; one, parenthetically, which dowered the world with a new
conception of beauty that makes it difficult to picture Rome.
Modern ink has acquired Nero's blush; it comes very readily, yet,
however sensitive a writer may be, once Roman history is before
him, he may violate it if he choose; he may even give it a child,
but never can he make it immaculate. He may skip, indeed, if he
wish; and it is because he has skipped so often that one fancies
that Augustus was all right. The rain of fire which fell on the
cities that mirrored their towers in the Bitter Sea, might just as
well have fallen on him, on Vergil, too, on Caligula, Claud, Nero,
Otho, Vitellius, Titus, Domitian, and particularly on Trajan.
As lieutenant in the latter's triumphant promenade, was a nephew,
AElius Hadrianus, a young man for whom Trajan's wife is rumored to
have had more than a platonic affection, and who in younger days
was numbered among Trajan's mignons. During the progress of that
promenade Trajan fell ill. The command of the troops was left to
Hadrian, and Trajan started for Rome. On the way he died. In what
manner is not known; his wife, however, was with him, and it was
in her hand that a letter went to the senate stating that Trajan
had adopted Hadrian as his heir. Trajan had done nothing of the
sort. The idea had indeed occurred to him, but long since it had
been abandoned. He had even formally selected someone else, but
his wife was with him, and her lover commanded the troops. The
lustre of the purple, always dazzling, had fascinated Hadrian's
eyes. Did he steal it? One may conjecture, yet never know. In any
event it was his, and he folded it very magnificently about him.
Still young, a trifle over thirty, handsome, unusually
accomplished, grand seigneur to his finger-tips, endowed with a
manner which is rumored to have been one of great charm, possessed
of the amplest appreciation of the elegancies of life, he had
precisely the figure which purple adorns. But, though the lustre
had fascinated, he too knew its spell; and presently he started
off on a journey about the world, which lasted fifteen years, and
which, when ended, left the world the richer for his passing,
decorated with the monuments he had strewn. Before that journey
began, at the earliest rumor of Trajan's death, the Euphrates and
Tigris awoke, the cinders of Nineveh flamed. The rivers and land
that lay between knew that their conqueror had gone. Hadrian knew
it also, and knew too that, though he might occupy the warrior's
throne, he never could fill the warrior's place. To Armenia,
Mesopotamia, Assyria, freedom was restored. Dacia could have had
it for the asking. But over Dacia the toga had been thrown; it was
as Roman as Gaul. A corner of it is Roman still; the Roumanians
are there. But though Dacia was quiet, in its neighborhood the
restless Sarmatians prowled and threatened. Hadrian, who had
already written a book on tactics, knew at once how to act.
Domitian's policy was before him; he followed the precedent, and
paid the Sarmatians to be still. It requires little acumen to see
that when Rome permitted herself to be blackmailed the end was
near.
For the time being, however, there was peace, and in its interest
Hadrian set out on that unequalled journey over a land that was
his. Had fate relented, Trajan could have made a wider one still.
But in Trajan was the soldier merely, when he journeyed it was
with the sword. In Hadrian was the dilettante, the erudite too; he
travelled not to conquer, but to learn, to satisfy an insatiable
curiosity, for self-improvement, for glory too. Behind him was an
army, not of soldiers, but of masons, captained by architects,
artists and engineers. Did a site please him, there was a temple
at once, or if not that, then a bridge, an aqueduct, a library, a
new fashion, sovereignty even, but everywhere the spectacle of an
emperor in flesh and blood. For the first time the provinces were
able to understand that a Caesar was not necessarily a brute, a
phantom and a god.
It would have been interesting to have made one of that court of
poets and savants that surrounded him; to have dined with him in
Paris, eaten oysters in London; sat with him while he watched that
wall go up before the Scots, and then to have passed down again
through a world still young--a world beautiful, ornate,
unutilitarian; a world to which trams, advertisements and
telegraph poles had not yet come; a world that still had
illusions, myths and mysteries; one in which religion and poetry
went hand in hand--a world without newspapers, hypocrisy and cant.
Hadrian, doubtless, enjoyed it. He was young enough to have
enthusiasms and to show them; he was one of the best read men of
the day; he was poet, painter, sculptor, musician, erudite and
emperor in one. Of course he enjoyed it. The world, over which he
travelled, was his, not by virtue of the purple alone, but because
of his knowledge of it. The prince is not necessarily
cosmopolitan; the historian and antiquarian are. Hadrian was an
early Quinet, an earlier Champollion; always the thinker,
sometimes the cook. And to those in his suite it must have been a
sight very unique to see a Caesar who had published his volume of
erotic verse, just as any other young man might do; who had hunted
lions, not in the arena, but in Africa, make researches on the
plain where Troy had been, and a supreme of sow's breast, peacock,
pheasant, ham and boar, which he called Pentapharmarch, and which
he offered as he had his Catacriani--the erotic verse--as
something original and nice.
Insatiably inquisitive, verifying a history that he was preparing
in the lands which gave that history birth, he passed through
Egypt and Asia, questioning sphinxes, the cerements of kings, the
arcana of the temples; deciphering the sacred books, arguing with
magi, interrogating the stars. For the thinker, after the fashion
of the hour, was astrologer too, and one of the few anecdotes
current concerning him is in regard to a habit he had of drawing
up on the 31st of December the events of the coming year. After
consulting the stars on that 31st of December which occurred in
the twenty-second year of his reign, he prepared a calendar which
extended only to the 10th of July. On that day he died.
The calendar does not seem to have been otherwise serviceable. It
was in Bithynia he found a shepherd whose appearance which, in its
perfection, was quite earthly, suggested neither heaven nor hell,
but some planet where the atmosphere differs from ours; where it
is pink, perhaps, or faintly ochre; where birth and death have
forms higher than here.
Hadrian, captivated, led the lad in leash. The facts concerning
that episode have been so frequently given that the repetition is
needless here. Besides, the point is elsewhere. Presently the lad
fell overboard. Hadrian lost a valet, Rome an emperor, and Olympus
a god. But in attempting to deify the lost lackey, the grief of
Hadrian was so immediate, that it is permissible to fancy that the
lad's death was not one of those events which the emperor-
astrologer noted beforehand on his calendar. The lad was decently
buried, the Nile gave up her dead, and on the banks a fair city
rose, one that had its temples, priests, altars and shrines; a
city that worshipped a star, and called that star Antinous.
Hadrian then could have congratulated himself. Even Caligula would
have envied him. He had done his worst; he had deified not a lad,
but a lust. And not for the moment alone. A half century later
Tertullian noted that the worship still endured, and subsequently
the Alexandrine Clement discovered consciences that Antinous had
reproached.
Antinous, deified, was presently forgot. A young Roman,
wonderfully beautiful, Dion says, yet singularly effeminate; a
youth who could barely carry a shield; who slept between rose-
leaves and lilies; who was an artist withal; a poet who had
written lines that Martial might have mistaken for his own,
Cejonius Verus by name, succeeded the Bithynian shepherd. Hadrian,
who would have adopted Antinous, adopted Verus in his stead. But
Hadrian was not happy in his choice. Verus died, and singularly
enough, Hadrian selected as future emperor the one ruler against
whom history has not a reproach, Pius Antonin.
Meanwhile the journey continued. The Thousand and One Nights were
realized then if ever. The beauty of the world was at its apogee,
the glory of Rome as well; and through secrets and marvels Hadrian
strolled, note-book in hand, his eyes unwearied, his curiosity
unsatiated still. To pleasure him the intervales took on a fairer
glow; cities decked themselves anew, the temples unveiled their
mysteries; and when he passed to the intervales liberty came; to
the cities, sovereignty; to the temples, shrines. The world rose
to him as a woman greets her lover. His travels were not fatigues;
they were delights, in which nations participated, and of which
the memories endure as though enchanted still.
It would have been interesting, no doubt, to have dined with him
in Paris; to have quarried lions in their African fens; to have
heard archaic hymns ripple through the rushes of the Nile; to have
lounged in the Academe, to have scaled Parnassus, and sailed the
AEgean Sea; but, a history and an arm-chair aiding, the traveller
has but to close his eyes and the past returns. Without disturbing
so much as a shirt-box, he may repeat that promenade. Triremes
have foundered; litters are out of date; painted elephants are no
more; the sky has changed, climates with it; there are colors, as
there are arts, that have gone from us forever; there are desolate
plains, where green and yellow was; the shriek of steam where gods
have strayed; advertisements in sacred groves; Baedekers in ruins
that never heard an atheist's voice; solitudes where there were
splendors; the snarl of jackals where once were birds and bees--
yet, history and the arm-chair aiding, it all returns. Any
traveller may follow in Hadrian's steps; he is stayed but once--
on the threshold of the Temple of Eleusis. It is there history
gropes, impotent and blind, and it is there the interest of that
journey culminated.
Beyond the episode connected with Antinous, Hadrian's journey was
marked by another, one which occurred in Judaea. Both were
infamous, no doubt, but, what is more to the point, both mark the
working of the poison in the purple that he bore.
Since Titus had gone, despairful Judaea had taken heart again.
Hope in that land was inextinguishable. The walls of Jerusalem
were still standing; in the Temple the offices continued. Though
Rome remained, there was Israel too. Passing that way one
afternoon, Hadrian mused. The city affected him; the site was
superb. And as he mused it occurred to him that Jerusalem was less
harmonious to the ear than Hadrianopolis; that the Temple occupied
a position on which a Capitol would look far better; in brief,
that Jehovah might be advantageously replaced by Jove. The army of
masons that were ever at his heels were set to work at once. They
had received similar orders and performed similar tasks so often
that they could not fancy anyone would object. The Jews did. They
fought as they had never fought before; they fought for three
years against a Nebuchadnezzar who created torrents of blood so
abundant that stones were carried for miles, and who left corpses
enough to fertilize the land for a decade. The survivors were
sold. Those for whom no purchasers could be found had their heads
amputated. Jerusalem was razed to the ground. The site of the
Temple was furrowed by the plow, sown with salt, and in place of
the City of David rose AElia Capitolina, a miniature Rome, whose
gates, save on one day in the year, Jews were forbidden under
penalty of death to pass, were forbidden to look at, and over
which were images of swine, pigs with scornful snouts, the feet
turned inward, the tail twisted like a lie.
It was not honorable warfare, but it was effective; then, too, it
was Hadrianesque, the mad insult of a madman to a race as mad as
he. The purple had done its work. History has left the rise of
this emperor conjectural; his fall is written in blood. As he
began he ended, a poet and a beast.
Presently he was in Rome. It was not homesickness that took him
there; he was far too cosmopolitan to suffer from any such malady
as that. It was the accumulations of a fifteen-year excursion
through the metropoles of art which demanded a gallery of their
own. Another with similar tastes and similar power might have
ordered everything which pleasured his eye to be carted to Rome,
but in his quality of artifex omnipotens Hadrian embellished and
never sacked. There were painters and sculptors enough in that
army at his heels, and whatever appealed to him was copied on the
spot. So much was copied that a park of ten square miles was just
large enough to form the open-air museum which he had designed,
one which centuries of excavation have not exhausted yet.
The museum became a mad-house. Hadrian was ill; tired in mind and
body, smitten with imperialia. It was then the young Verus died,
leaving for a wonder a child behind, and more wonderful still,
Antonin was adopted. Through Rome, meanwhile, terror stalked.
Hadrian, in search of a remedy against his increasing confusion of
mind, his visible weakness of body, turned from physicians to
oracles; from them to magic, and then to blood. He decimated the
senate. Soldiers, freemen, citizens, anybody and everybody were
ordered off to death. He tried to kill himself and failed; he
tried again, wondering, no doubt, why he who commanded death for
others could not command it for himself. Presently he succeeded,
and Antonin--the pious Antonin, as the senate called him--
marshalled from cellars and crypts the senators and citizens whom
Hadrian had ordered to be destroyed.
VIII
FAUSTINE
Anyone who has loitered a moment among the statues in the Salle
des Antonins at the Louvre will recall the bust of the Empress
Faustina. It stands near the entrance, coercing the idler to
remove his hat; to stop a moment, to gaze and dream. The face
differs from that which Mr. Swinburne has described. In the poise
of the head, in the expression of the lips, particularly in the
features which, save the low brow, are not of the Roman type,
there is a commingling of just that loveliness and melancholy
which must have come to Psyche when she lost her god. In the
corners of the mouth, in the droop of the eyelids, in the moulding
of the chin, you may see that rarity--beauty and intellect in one
--and with it the heightening shadow of an eternal regret. Before
her Marcus Aurelius, her husband, stands, decked with the purple,
with all the splendor of the imperator, his beard in overlapping
curls, his questioning eyes dilated. Beyond is her daughter,
Lucille, less fair than the mother, a healthy girl of the
dairymaid type. Near by is the son, Commodus. Across the hall is
Lucius Verus, the husband of Lucille; in a corner, Antonin,
Faustine's father, and, more remotely, his wife. Together they
form quite a family group, and to the average tourist they must
seem a thoroughly respectable lot. Antonin certainly was
respectable. He was the first emperor who declined to be a brute.
Referring to his wife he said that he would rather be with her in
a desert than without her in a palace; the speech,
parenthetically, of a man who, though he could have cited that
little Greek princess, Nausicaa, as a precedent, was too well-bred
to permit so much as a fringe of his household linen to flutter in
public. Besides, at his hours, he was a poet, and it is said that
if a poet tell a lie twice he will believe it. Antonin so often
declared his wife to be a charming person that in the end no doubt
he thought so. She was not charming, however, or if she were, her
charm was not that of exclusiveness.
It was in full sight of this lady's inconsequences that Faustine
was educated. Wherever she looked, the candors of her girlhood
were violated. The phallus then was omnipresent. Iamblicus, not
the novelist, but the philosopher, has much to say on the subject;
as has Arnobius in the Adversus gentes, and Lactance in the De
falsa religione. If Juvenal, Martial, Petronius, are more
reticent, it is because they were not Fathers of the Church, nor
yet antiquarians. No one among us exacts a description of a spire.
The phallus was as common to them, commoner even. It was on the
coins, on the doors, in the gardens. As a preservative against
Envy it hung from children's necks. On sun-dials and water clocks
it marked the flight of time. The vestals worshipped it. At
weddings it was used in a manner which need not be described.
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