Memoirs of Hadrian

by Маргерит Юрсенар

  I should say outright that I have little faith in laws. If too severe, they are broken, and with good reason. If too complicated, human ingenuity finds means to slip easily between the meshes of this trailing but fragile net. Respect for ancient laws answers to what is deepest rooted in human piety, but it serves also to pillow the inertia of judges. The oldest codes are a part of that very savagery which they were striving to correct; even the most venerable among them are the product of force. Most of our punitive laws fail, perhaps happily, to reach the greater part of the culprits; our civil laws will never be supple enough to fit the immense and changing diversity of facts. Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom. And nevertheless from that mass of outworn routines and perilous innovations a few useful formulas have emerged here and there, just as they have in medicine. The Greek philosophers have taught us to know something more of the nature of man; our best jurists have worked for generations along lines of common sense. I have myself effected a few of those partial reforms which are the only reforms that endure. Any law too often subject to infraction is bad; it is the duty of the legislator to repeal or to change it, lest the contempt into which that rash ruling has fallen should extend to other, more just legislation. I proposed as my aim a prudent avoidance of superfluous decrees, and the firm promulgation, instead, of a small group of well-weighed decisions. The time seemed to have come to evaluate anew all the ancient prescriptions in the interest of mankind.

  One day in Spain, in the vicinity of Tarragona, when I was visiting alone a half-abandoned mine, a slave attacked me with a knife. He had passed most of his forty-three years in those subterranean corridors, and not without logic was taking revenge upon the emperor for his long servitude. I managed to disarm him easily enough; under the care of my physicians his violence subsided, and he changed into what he really was, a being not less sensible than others, and more loyal than many. Had the law been applied with savage rigor, he would have been promptly executed; as it was, he became my useful servant. Most men are like this slave: they are only too submissive; their long periods of torpor are interspersed with a few revolts as brutal as they are ineffectual. I wanted to see if well-regulated liberty would not have produced better results, and I am astonished that a similar experiment has not tempted more princes. This barbarian condemned to the mines became a symbol to me of all our slaves and all our barbarians. It seemed to me not impossible to treat them as I had treated this man, rendering them harmless simply by kindness, provided that first of all they understand that the hand which disarms them is sure. All nations who have perished up to this time have done so for lack of generosity: Sparta would have survived longer had she given her Helots some interest in that survival; there is always a day when Atlas ceases to support the weight of the heavens, and his revolt shakes the earth. I wished to postpone as long as possible, and to avoid, if it can be done, the moment when the barbarians from without and the slaves within will fall upon a world which they have been forced to respect from afar, or to serve from below, but the profits of which are not for them. I was determined that even the most wretched, from the slaves who clean the city sewers to the famished barbarians who hover along the frontiers, should have an interest in seeing Rome endure.

  I doubt if all the philosophy in the world can succeed in suppressing slavery; it will, at most, change the name. I can well imagine forms of servitude worse than our own, because more insidious, whether they transform men into stupid, complacent machines, who believe themselves free just when they are most subjugated, or whether to the exclusion of leisure and pleasures essential to man they develop a passion for work as violent as the passion for war among barbarous races. To such bondage for the human mind and imagination I prefer even our avowed slavery. However that may be, the horrible condition which puts one man at the mercy of another ought to be carefully regulated by law. I saw to it that a slave should no longer be anonymous merchandise sold without regard for the family ties which he has formed, or a contemptible object whom a judge submits to torture before taking his testimony, instead of accepting it upon oath. I prohibited forced entry of slaves into disreputable or dangerous occupations, forbidding their sale to brothel keepers, or to schools of gladiators. Let only those who like such professions practice them; the professions will but gain thereby. On farms, where overseers exploit the strength of slaves, I have replaced the latter, wherever possible, by free shareholders. Our collections of anecdotes abound in stories of gourmets who feed their household servants to their fish, but scandalous crimes are readily punishable, and are insignificant in comparison with the thousands of routine atrocities perpetrated daily by correct but heartless people whom no one would think of questioning. There was a great outcry when I banished from Rome a rich and highly esteemed patrician woman who maltreated her aged slaves; any bad son who neglects his old parents shocks the public conscience more, but I see little difference between these two forms of inhumanity.

  The condition of women is fixed by strange customs: they are at one and the same time subjected and protected, weak and powerful, too much despised and too much respected. In this chaos of contradictory usage, the practices of society are superposed upon the facts of nature, but it is not easy to distinguish between the two. This confused state of things is in every respect more stable than might appear: on the whole, women want to be just as they are; they resist change, or they utilize it for their one and only aim. The freedom of the women of today, which is greater, or at least more visible, than that of earlier times, is but an aspect of the easier life of a prosperous period; the principles and even the prejudices of old have not been seriously disturbed. Whether sincere or not, the official eulogies and epitaphs continue to attribute to our matrons those same virtues of industry, chastity, and sobriety which were demanded of them under the Republic. These real or supposed changes have in no respect modified the eternal freedom of morals in the humbler classes, nor the perpetual prudery of the bourgeoisie; time alone will prove which of these changes will last. The weakness of women, like that of slaves, lies in their legal status; they take their revenge by their strength in little things, where the power which they wield is almost unlimited. I have rarely seen a household where women do not rule; I have often seen also ruling with them the steward, the cook, or the enfranchised slave. In financial matters they remain legally subject to some form of guardianship, but in practice it is otherwise. In each small shop of the Suburra it is ordinarily the poulterer’s or fruiterer’s wife who sits firmly ensconced in command of the counter. The wife of Attianus directed the family estate with the acumen of a true businessman. The law should differ as little as possible from accustomed practice, so I have granted women greater liberty to administer or to bequeath their fortunes, and to inherit. I have insisted that no woman should be married without her consent; this form of legalized rape is as offensive as any other. Marriage is their great venture; it is only fair that they should not engage upon it against their will.

  One part of our ills comes from the fact that too many men are shamefully rich and too many desperately poor. Happily in our days we tend toward a balance between these two extremes; the colossal fortunes of emperors and freedmen are things of the past: Trimalchio and Nero are dead. But everything is still to be done for the intelligent reorganization of world economy. On coming to power I renounced the voluntary contributions made by the cities to the emperor; they are only a form of theft. I advise you to refuse them in your turn. My wholesale cancellation of private debts to the State was a more hazardous measure, but there was need to start afresh after ten years of wartime financing. Our currency has been dangerously depressed for a century; it is nevertheless by the exchange rate of our gold pieces that Rome’s eternity is appraised; it behooves us to give them solid weight and true value in terms of commodities. Our lands are cultivated without plan: only the more fortunate regions, like Egypt, Africa, Tusca
ny, and a few others, have known how to create peasant communities carefully trained in the culture of vineyards or grain. One of my chief cares has been to promote that class, and to draw instructors from it for more primitive or conservative rural populations with less skill. I have put an end to the scandal of unfilled fields neglected by great landowners too little concerned for the public good; any field not cultivated for five years’ time belongs hereafter to the farmer who proposes to put it to use. It is much the same for the mines. Most of our rich men make enormous gifts to the State, and to public institutions and the emperor; many do this for their own interest, a few act unselfishly, but nearly all gain thereby in the end. I should have preferred to see their generosity take other forms than that of ostentation in alms, and to teach them to augment their possessions wisely in the interest of the community as they had done hitherto only for the enrichment of their children. With this intention I myself took over the direction of the imperial domains; no one has the right to treat the earth so unproductively as the miser does his pot of gold.

  Our merchants are sometimes our best geographers, our best astronomers, and our most learned naturalists. Our bankers number among our ablest judges of men. I made use of these special capacities, but fought with all my strength against their possibilities for encroachment. Subsidies given to shipbuilders had multiplied tenfold our trade with foreign nations; thus I succeeded in reinforcing our costly imperial fleet with but slight expense. So far as importations from the Orient and Africa are concerned, Italy might as well be an island, dependent upon grain dealers for its subsistence, since it no longer supplies itself; the only means of coping with the dangers of this situation is to treat these indispensable men of business as functionaries to be watched over closely. In recent years our older provinces have attained to a state of prosperity which can still perhaps be increased, but it is important that that prosperity should serve for all, and not alone for the bank of Herod Atticus, or for the small speculator who buys up all the oil of a Greek village. No law is too strict which makes for reduction of the countless intermediaries who swarm in our cities, an obscene, fat and paunchy race, whispering in every tavern, leaning on every counter, ready to undermine any policy which is not to their immediate advantage. In time of shortage a judicious distribution from the State granaries helps to check the scandalous inflation of prices, but I was counting most of all on the organization of the producers themselves, the vineyard owners in Gaul and the fishermen in the Black Sea (whose miserable pittance is devoured by importers of caviar and salt fish, middlemen battening on the produce of those dangerous labors). One of my best days was the one on which I persuaded a group of seamen from the Archipelago to join in a single corporation in order to deal directly with retailers in the towns. I have never felt myself more usefully employed as ruler.

  For the army, peace is too often only a period of turbulent idleness between two periods of combat: the alternative to inaction or to disorder is first, preparation for a war already determined upon, and then the war itself. I broke with these routines; my perpetual visits to the advance posts were only one means among many of maintaining that peacetime army in a state of useful activity. Everywhere, on level ground as in the mountains, on the edge of the forest and in the desert, the legions spread or concentrate their buildings, always the same, their drill fields, their barracks, constructed at Cologne to resist the snow, at Lambaesis for shelter from sand storms; likewise their storehouses, from which I ordered all useless materials sold, and their officers’ clubs, over which a statue of the emperor presides.

  But that uniformity is no more than apparent: those interchangeable quarters house throngs of auxiliary troops who are never the same; each race contributes to the army its particular strength and its characteristic weapons, the genius of its foot soldiers, horsemen, or archers. There I found, in the rough, that diversity in unity which I sought for the empire as a whole. I authorized the use of native speech for commands, and encouraged the soldiers in their national war cries; I sanctioned unions between veterans and barbarian women, and gave legal status to their children, trying thus to mitigate the harshness of camp life, and to treat these simple and ignorant men as men. At the risk of rendering them less effectively mobile I intended to attach them to whatever territory they were expected to defend; I did not hesitate to regionalize the army. On an imperial scale I was hoping to re-establish the equivalent of the militias of the early Republic, where each man was wont to defend his field or his farm.

  I worked above all to develop the technical efficiency of the legions; my aim was to make use of these military centers as levers of civilization, as wedges strong enough to enter in little by little just where the more delicate instruments of civil life would have been blunted. The army was becoming a connecting link between the forest dwellers, the inhabitants of steppes and marshes, and the more refined urban populations; it offered primary schooling to the barbarians, and a school of endurance and responsibility for the cultured Greeks or our own equestrian youths accustomed to the comforts of Rome. The arduous elements of that life were known to me at first hand, as well as its easier side, with its subterfuges. I abolished special privileges, forbidding too frequent leaves for the officers and ordering the camps cleared of costly gardens, pleasure pavilions, and banquet halls. These superfluous buildings were turned into infirmaries and veterans’ homes. We were recruiting our soldiers at too tender an age and keeping them too old, a practice which was both uneconomic and cruel. I changed all that. The August Discipline ought to reflect the humane tendencies of our times.

  We emperors are not Caesars; we are functionaries of the State. That plaintiff whom I refused one day to hear to the end was right when she exclaimed that if I had no time to listen to her, I had no time to rule. The apologies which I offered her were not merely a matter of form. But nevertheless time is lacking: the more the empire expands the more the different aspects of authority tend to be concentrated in the hands of the chief of state; this man so pressed for time has necessarily to delegate some part of his tasks to others; his genius will consist more and more in surrounding himself with trustworthy personnel. The great crime of Claudius or of Nero was that they indolently allowed their slaves and freedmen to take on these roles of agent and representative of the master, or to serve him as counselor. One portion of my life and my travels has been passed in choosing the administrative heads of a new bureaucracy, in training them, in matching as judiciously as I could the talents to the posts, and in opening possibilities of useful employment to that middle class upon whom the State depends.

  I recognize the danger of these armies of civil servants; it can be stated in a word, the fatal increase of routine. This mechanism, wound up for centuries to come, will run awry if we do not watch out; the master must constantly regulate its movements, foreseeing and repairing the effects of wear. But experience shows that in spite of our infinite care in choosing our successors the mediocre emperors will always outnumber the wise, and that at least one fool will reign per century. In time of crisis these bureaus, if well organized, will go on with what must be done, filling the interim (sometimes very long) between two good rulers. Some emperors like to parade behind them whole lines of barbarians, bound at the neck, those interminable processions of the conquered. My cortčge will be different; the best of those officials whom I have attempted to train will compose it. Thanks to the members of the Imperial Council I have been able to leave Rome for years at a time, coming back for only brief stays. I communicated with them by the swiftest of couriers, and in time of danger by semaphore. They have in their turn trained other useful auxiliaries. Their authority is of my making; their efficient activity has left me free to employ myself elsewhere. It is going to let me depart, without too much concern, into death itself.

  In my twenty years of rule I have passed twelve without fixed abode. In succession I occupied palatial homes of Asiatic merchants, sober Greek houses, handsome villas in Roman Gaul provided with baths and
hot air heat, or mere huts and farms. My preference was still for the light tent, that architecture of canvas and cords. Life at sea was no less diversified than in lodgings on land: I had my own ship, equipped with gymnasium and library, but I was too distrustful of all fixity to attach myself to any one dwelling, even to one in motion. The pleasure bark of a Syrian millionaire, the high galleys of the fleet, the light skiff of a Greek fisherman, each served equally well. The one luxury was speed, and all that favored it, the finest horses, the best swung carriages, luggage as light as possible, clothing and accessories most fitted to the climate. But my greatest asset of all was perfect health: a forced march of twenty leagues was nothing; a night without sleep was no more than a chance to think in peace. Few men enjoy prolonged travel; it disrupts all habit and endlessly jolts each prejudice. But I was striving to have no prejudices and few habits. I welcomed the delight of a soft bed, but liked also the touch and smell of bare earth, some contact with the rough or smooth segments of the world’s circumference. I was well inured to all kinds of foods, whether British gruel or African watermelon. Once I tasted that delicacy of certain Germanic tribes, tainted game; it made me vomit, but the experiment had been tried. Though decided in my tastes in love, even there I feared routines. My attendants, reduced in number to the indispensable, or to the exquisite, separated me but little from other people; I took special care to be free in my movements, and to remain accessible to all. The provinces, those great administrative units for which I myself had chosen the emblems (Britannia on her throne of rocks, or Dacia with her scimitar) were entities for me composed of distinct parts, forests where I had sought shade, wells where I had slaked my thirst, chance encounters at halts, faces known and sometimes loved. I began to know each mile of our roads, Rome’s finest gift, perhaps, to the world. But best of all, and unforgettable, was the moment when a road came to an end on a mountainside, and we hoisted ourselves from crevice to crevice, from boulder to boulder, to catch the dawn from an Alpine peak, or a height of the Pyrenees.