Memoirs of Hadrian

by Маргерит Юрсенар

  Contrary to the orders given me I began negotiations immediately, but in secret, for peace with Osroës. I was banking on the fact that I should probably no longer have to render an accounting to the emperor. Less than ten days later I was awakened in the middle of the night by arrival of a messenger; at once I recognized a confidential envoy of Plotina. He brought two missives. One, official, informed me that Trajan, unable to stand the sea voyage, had been put down at Selinus-in-Cilicia, where he lay gravely ill in the house of a merchant. A second letter, this one secret, told me of his death, which Plotina promised to keep hidden as long as possible, thus giving me the advantage of being the first one warned. I set off immediately for Selinus, after having taken all necessary precautions to assure myself of the loyalty of the Syrian garrisons. I was barely on the way when a new courier brought me official announcement that the emperor was dead. His will, which designated me as his heir, had just been sent to Rome in safe hands. Everything that for ten years’ time had been feverishly dreamed of, schemed, discussed or kept silent, was here reduced to a message of two lines, traced in Greek in a small, firm, feminine hand. Attianus, who awaited me on the pier of Selinus, was the first to salute me with the title of emperor.

  And it is here, in that interval between the disembarkation of the invalid and the moment of his death, that occurs one of those series of events which will forever be impossible for me to reconstruct, and upon which nevertheless my destiny has been built. Those few days passed by Attianus and the women in that merchant’s house determined my life forever after, but concerning them, as later on concerning a certain afternoon on the Nile, I shall never know anything, precisely because it would be of utmost importance to me to know all. Any idler in Rome has his views about these episodes of my life, but I am the least informed of men on that score. My enemies have accused Plotina of taking advantage of the emperor’s last moments to make the dying man pen the few words which bequeathed me the power. Calumniators still more lurid-minded have described a curtained bed, the uncertain gleam of a lamp, the physician Crito dictating the last wishes of Trajan in a voice which counterfeited that of the dead man. They have pointed out that the orderly Phoedimus, who hated me, and whose silence could not have been bought by my friends, very opportunely died of a malignant fever the day after the death of his master. There is something in those pictures of violence and intrigue to strike the popular imagination, and even my own. It would not displease me that a handful of reasonable people should have proved capable of verging upon crime in my behalf, nor that the devotion of the empress should have carried her so far. She was well aware of the dangers which a decision not taken portended for the State; I respect her enough to believe that she would have agreed to commit a necessary fraud if discretion, common sense, public interest, and friendship had all impelled her to it. Subsequently to these events I have seen this document, so violently contested by my adversaries; I am unable to pronounce either for or against the authenticity of this last dictation of a sick man. Certainly I prefer to think that Trajan himself, relinquishing his personal prejudices before he died, did of his own free will leave the empire to him whom he judged on the whole most worthy. But it must be admitted that the end, in this case, was of more concern to me than the means; the essential is that the man invested with power should have proved thereafter that he deserved to wield it.

  The body was burned on the shore, not long after my arrival, as preliminary to the triumphal rites which would be solemnized in Rome. Almost no one was present at the very simple ceremony, which took place at dawn and was only a last episode in the prolonged domestic service rendered by the women to the person of Trajan. Matidia wept unrestrainedly; Plotina’s features seemed blurred in the wavering air round the heat of the funeral pyre. Calm, detached, slightly hollow from fever, she remained, as always, cooly impenetrable. Attianus and Crito watched until everything had been duly consumed; the faint smoke faded away in the pale air of unshadowed morning. None of my friends referred to the incidents of those few days which had preceded the emperor’s death. Their rule was evidently to keep silent; mine was to ask no dangerous questions.

  That same day the widowed empress and her companions re-embarked for Rome. I returned to Antioch, accompanied along the way by the acclamations of the legions. An extraordinary calm had come over me: ambition and fear alike seemed a nightmare of the past. Whatever happened, I had always been determined to defend my chance of empire to the end, but the act of adoption simplified everything. My own life no longer preoccupied me; I could once more think of the rest of mankind.

  TELLUS STABILITA

  Order was restored in my life, but not in the empire. The world which I had inherited resembled a man in full vigor of maturity who was still robust (though already revealing, to a physician’s eyes, some barely perceptible signs of wear), but who had just passed through the convulsions of a serious illness. Negotiations were resumed, this time openly; I let it be generally understood that Trajan himself had told me to do so before he died. With one stroke of the pen I erased all conquests which might have proved dangerous: not only Mesopotamia, where we could not have maintained ourselves, but Armenia, which was too far away and too removed from our sphere, and which I retained only as a vassal state. Two or three difficulties, which would have made a peace conference drag on for years if the principals concerned had had any advantage in lengthening it out, were smoothed over by the skillful mediation of the merchant Opramoas, who was in the confidence of the Satraps. I tried to put into these diplomatic conversations the same ardor that others reserve for the field of battle; I forced a peace. Osroës, moreover, desired peace at least as much as I: the Parthians were concerned only to reopen their trade routes between us and India. A few months after the great crisis I had the joy of seeing the line of caravans re-form on the banks of the Orontes; the oases were again the resort of merchants exchanging news in the glow of their evening fires, each morning repacking along with their goods for transportation to lands unknown a certain number of thoughts, words, and customs genuinely our own, which little by little would take possession of the globe more securely than can advancing legions. The circulation of gold and the passage of ideas (as subtle as that of vital air in the arteries) were beginning again within the world’s great body; earth’s pulse began to beat once more.

  The fever of rebellion subsided in its turn. In Egypt it had been so violent that they had been obliged to levy peasant militia at utmost speed while awaiting reinforcements. Immediately I sent my comrade Marcius Turbo to re-establish order there, a task which he accomplished with judicious firmness. But order in the streets was hardly enough for me; I desired to restore order in the public consciousness, if it were possible, or rather to make order rule there for the first time. A stay of a week in Pelusium was given over entirely to adjusting differences between those eternal incompatibles, Greeks and Jews. I saw nothing of what I should have wished to see: neither the banks of the Nile nor the Museum of Alexandria, nor the temple statues; I barely found time to devote a night to the agreeable debauches of Canopus. Six interminable days were passed in the steaming vat of a courtroom, protected from the heat without by long slatted blinds which slapped to and fro in the wind. At night enormous mosquitoes swarmed round the lamps. I tried to point out to the Greeks that they were not always the wisest of peoples, and to the Jews that they were by no means the most pure. The satiric songs with which these low-class Hellenes were wont to antagonize their adversaries were scarcely less stupid than the grotesque imprecations from the Jewries. These races who had lived side by side for centuries had never had the curiosity to get to know each other, nor the decency to accept each other. The exhausted litigants who did not give way till late into the night would find me on my bench at dawn, still engaged in sorting over the rubbish of false testimony; the stabbed corpses which they offered me as evidence for conviction were frequently those of invalids who had died in their beds and had been stolen from the embalmers. But each hour of c
alm was a victory gained, though precarious like all victories; each dispute arbitrated served as precedent and pledge for the future. It mattered little to me that the accord obtained was external, imposed from without and perhaps temporary; I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself. Since hatred, stupidity, and delirium have lasting effects, I saw no reason why good will, clarity of mind and just practice would not have their effects, too. Order on the frontiers was nothing if I could not persuade a Jewish peddler and a Greek grocer to live peaceably side by side.

  Peace was my aim, but not at all my idol; even to call it my ideal would displease me as too remote from reality. I had considered going so far in my refusal of conquests as to abandon Dacia, and would have done so had it been prudent to break openly with the policy of my predecessor; but it was better to utilize as wisely as possible those gains acquired before my accession and already recorded by history. The admirable Julius Bassus, first governor of that newly organized province, had died in his labors there, as I myself had almost succumbed in my year on the Sarmatian frontiers, exhausted by the thankless task of endless pacification in a country which had supposedly been subdued. I ordered a funeral triumph for him in Rome, an honor reserved ordinarily only for emperors; this homage to a good servitor sacrificed in obscurity was my last, and indirect, protest against the policy of conquest; nor had I need to denounce it publicly from the time that I was empowered to cut it short. On the other hand, military measures had to be taken in Mauretania, where agents of Lusius Quietus were fomenting revolt; nothing, however, required my immediate presence there. It was the same in Britain, where the Caledonians had taken advantage of withdrawal of troops for the war in Asia to decimate the reduced garrisons left on the frontiers. Julius Severus saw to what was most urgent there while awaiting the time when restoration of order in Roman affairs would permit me to undertake that long voyage. But I greatly desired to take charge myself in the Sarmatian war, which had been left inconclusive, and this time to throw in the number of troops requisite to make an end of barbarian depredations. For I refused, here as everywhere, to subject myself to a system. I accepted war as a means toward peace where negotiations proved useless, in the manner of a physician who decides to cauterize only after having tried simples. Everything is so complicated in human affairs that my rule, even if pacific, would have also its periods of war, just as the life of a great captain has, whether he likes it or not, its interludes of peace.

  Before heading north for the final settlement of the Sarmatian conflict, I saw Quietus once more. The butcher of Gyrene remained formidable. My first move had been to disband his columns of Numidian scouts, but he still had his place in the Senate, his post in the regular army, and that immense domain of western sands which he could convert at will either into a springboard or a hiding-place. He invited me to a hunt in Mysia, deep in the forests, and skilfully engineered an accident in which with a little less luck or less bodily agility I should certainly have lost my life. It seemed best to appear unsuspecting, to be patient and to wait. Shortly thereafter, in Lower Moesia, at a time when the capitulation of the Sarmatian princes allowed me to think of an early return to Italy, an exchange of dispatches in code with my former guardian warned me that Quietus had come back abruptly to Rome and had just conferred there with Palma. Our enemies were strengthening their positions and realigning their troops. No security was possible so long as we should have these two men against us. I wrote to Attianus to act quickly. The old man struck like lightning. He overstepped his orders and with a single stroke freed me of the last of my avowed foes: on the same day, a few hours apart, Celsus was killed at Baiae, Palma in his villa at Terracina, and Nigrinus at Faventia on the threshold of his summer house. Quietus met his end on the road, on departing from a conference with his fellow conspirators, struck down on the step of the carriage which was bringing him back to the City. A wave of terror broke over Rome. Servianus, my aged brother-in-law, who had seemed resigned to my success but who was avidly anticipating my errors to come, must have felt an impulse of joy more nearly akin to ecstasy than any experience of his whole life. All the sinister rumors which circulated about me found credence anew.

  I received this news aboard the ship which was bringing me back to Italy. I was appalled. One is always content to be relieved of one’s adversaries, but my guardian had proceeded with the indifference of age for the far-reaching consequences of his act: he had forgotten that I should have to live with the after effects of these murders for more than twenty years. I thought of the proscriptions of Octavius, which had forever stained the memory of Augustus; of the first crimes of Nero, which had been followed by other crimes. I recalled the last years of Domitian, of that merely average man, no worse than another, whom fear had gradually destroyed (his own fear and the fears he caused), dying in his palace like a beast tracked down in the woods. My public life was already getting out of hand: the first line of the inscription bore in letters deeply incised a few words which I could no longer erase. The Senate, that great, weak body, powerful only when persecuted, would never forget that four of its members had been summarily executed by my order; three intriguing scoundrels and a brute would thus live on as martyrs. I notified Attianus at once that he was to meet me at Brundisium to answer for his action.

  He was awaiting me near the harbor in one of the rooms of that inn facing toward the East where Virgil died long ago. He came limping to receive me on the threshold, for he was suffering from an attack of gout. The moment that I was alone with him, I burst into upbraiding: a reign which I intended to be moderate, and even exemplary, was beginning with four executions, only one of which was indispensable and for all of which too little precaution had been taken in the way of legal formalities. Such abuse of power would be cause for the more reproach to me whenever I strove thereafter to be clement, scrupulous, and just; it would serve as pretext for proving that my so-called virtues were only a series of masks, and for building about me a trite legend of tyranny which would cling to me perhaps to the end of history. I admitted my fear; I felt no more exempt from cruelty than from any other human fault; I accepted the commonplace that crime breeds crime, and the example of the animal which has once tasted blood. An old friend whose loyalty had seemed wholly assured was already taking liberties, profiting by the weaknesses which he thought that he saw in me; under the guise of serving me he had arranged to settle a personal score against Nigrinus and Palma. He was compromising my work of pacification, and was preparing for me a grim return to Rome, indeed.

  The old man asked leave to sit down, and rested his leg, swathed in flannel, upon a stool. While speaking I arranged the coverlet over his ailing foot. He let me run on, smiling meanwhile like a grammarian who listens to his pupil making his way through a difficult recitation. When I had finished, he asked me calmly what I had planned to do with the enemies of the regime. It could be proved, if need were, that these four men had plotted my death; it was to their interest, in any case, to do so. Every transition from one reign to another involved its operations of mopping up; he had taken this task upon himself in order to leave my hands clean. If public opinion demanded a victim, nothing was simpler than to deprive him of his post of Praetorian prefect. He had envisaged such a measure; he was advising me to take it. And if more were needed to conciliate the Senate, he would approve my going as far as relegation to the provinces, or exile.

  Attianus had been the guardian from whom money could be wheedled, the counselor of my difficult days, the faithful agent; but this was the first time that I had ever looked attentively at that face with its carefully shaven jowls, at those crippled hands tranquilly clasped over the handle of his ebony cane. I knew well enough the different elements of his life as a prosperous citizen: his wife, whom he loved, and whose health was frail; his married daughters and their children, for whom he was modest but tenacious in his ambitions, as he h
ad been for himself; his love of choice dishes; his decided taste for Greek cameos and for young dancing girls. He had given me precedence over all these things: for thirty years his first care had been to protect me, and next to serve me. To me, who had not yet given first place to anything except to ideas or projects, or at the most to a future image of myself, this simple devotion of man to man seemed prodigious and unfathomable. No one is worthy of it, and I am still unable to account for it. I followed his counsel: he lost his post. His faint smile showed me that he expected to be taken at his word. He knew well that no untimely solicitude toward an old friend would ever keep me from adopting the more prudent course; this subtle politician would not have wished me otherwise. Let us not exaggerate the extent of his disgrace: after some months of eclipse, I succeeded in having him admitted to the Senate. It was the greatest honor that I could offer to this man of equestrian rank. He lived to enjoy the easy old age of a wealthy Roman knight, much sought after for his perfect knowledge of families and public affairs; I have often been his guest at his villa in the Alban Hills. Nevertheless, like Alexander on the eve of a battle, I had made a sacrifice to Fear before entering into Rome: I sometimes count Attianus among my human victims.