Memoirs of Hadrian

by Маргерит Юрсенар

  Trahit sua quemque voluptas. Each to his own bent; likewise each to his aim or his ambition, if you will, or his most secret desire and his highest ideal. My ideal was contained within the word beauty, so difficult to define despite all the evidence of our senses. I felt responsible for sustaining and increasing the beauty of the world. I wanted the cities to be splendid, spacious and airy, their streets sprayed with clean water, their inhabitants all human beings whose bodies were neither degraded by marks of misery and servitude nor bloated by vulgar riches; I desired that the schoolboys should recite correctly some useful lessons; that the women presiding in their households should move with maternal dignity, expressing both vigor and calm; that the gymnasiums should be used by youths not unversed in arts and in sports; that the orchards should bear the finest fruits and the fields the richest harvests. I desired that the might and majesty of the Roman Peace should extend to all, insensibly present like the music of the revolving skies; that the most humble traveller might wander from one country, or one continent, to another without vexatious formalities, and without danger, assured everywhere of a minimum of legal protection and culture; that our soldiers should continue their eternal pyrrhic dance on the frontiers; that everything should go smoothly, whether workshops or temples; that the sea should be furrowed by brave ships, and the roads resounding to frequent carriages; that, in a world well ordered, the philosophers should have their place, and the dancers also. This ideal, modest on the whole, would be often enough approached if men would devote to it one part of the energy which they expend on stupid or cruel activities; great good fortune has allowed me a partial realization of my aims during the last quarter of a century. Arrian of Nicomedia, one of the best minds of our time, likes to recall to me the beautiful lines of ancient Terpander, defining in three words the Spartan ideal (that perfect mode of life to which Lacedaemon aspired without ever attaining it): Strength, Justice, the Muses. Strength was the basis, discipline without which there is no beauty, and firmness without which there is no justice. Justice was the balance of the parts, that whole so harmoniously composed which no excess should be permitted to endanger. Strength and Justice together were but one instrument, well tuned, in the hands of the Muses. All forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres.

  In Germany construction or renovation of camps, fortifications, and roads detained me for nearly a year; new bastions, erected over a distance of seventy leagues, reinforced our frontiers along the Rhine. This country of vineyards and rushing streams was wholly familiar to me: there I recrossed the path of the young tribune who had borne news to Trajan of his accession to power. There, too, beyond our farthest fort, built of logs from the spruce forests, lay the same dark, monotonous horizon, the same world which has been closed to us from the time of the imprudent offensive launched by Augustus’ legions, the ocean of trees and that vast reserve of fair-haired men. When the task of reorganization was finished, I descended to the mouth of the Rhine along the Belgian and Batavian plains. Desolate dunes cut by stiff grasses made up this northern landscape; at the port of Noviomagus the houses raised on piles stood abreast ships moored at their doors; seabirds perched on their roofs. I liked those forlorn places, though they seemed hideous to my aides, the overcast sky and the muddy rivers channeling their way through a land without form or visible spark, where no god has yet shaped the clay.

  I crossed to the Isle of Britain in a ship which was flat as a barge. More than once the wind threw us back toward the coast from which we had sailed: that difficult passage afforded some wonderfully vacant hours. Gigantic clouds rose out of a heavy sea roiled by sand and incessantly stirred in its bed. As formerly in the land of the Dacians and the Sarmatians I had venerated the goddess Earth, I had here a feeling for the first time of a Neptune more chaotic than our own, of an infinite world of waters. In Plutarch I had read a mariner’s legend concerning an island in those regions which border the Arctic Sea, where centuries ago the victorious Olympians are said to have exiled the vanquished Titans. There those great captives of rock and wave, eternally lashed by a tireless ocean, never at rest, forever consumed by dreams, continue to defy the Olympian rule with their violence, their anguish, and their burning but perpetually crucified desire. In this myth which is set on the remote edges of the world I came again upon philosophical theories which I had already adopted as my own: each of us has to choose, in the course of his brief life, between endless striving and wise resignation, between the delights of disorder and those of stability, between the Titan and the Olympian… . To choose between them, or to succeed, at last, in bringing them into accord. The civil reforms effected in Britain are part of my administrative work of which I have spoken elsewhere. What imports here is that I was the first emperor to settle pacifically in that island situated on the boundaries of the known world, where before me only Claudius had ventured for several days’ time in his capacity as commander-in-chief. For an entire winter Londinium became, by my choice, what Antioch had been by necessity at the time of the Parthian war, the virtual center of the world. Thus each of my voyages changed the center of gravity for imperial power, placing it for some time along the Rhine, or on the banks of the Thames, and permitting me to estimate what would have been the strength and the weakness of such a capital. That stay in Britain made me envisage a hypothetical empire governed from the West, an Atlantic world. Such imaginary perspectives have no practical value; they cease, however, to be absurd as soon as the calculator extends his computations sufficiently far into the future.

  Barely three months before my arrival the Sixth Legion Victrix had been transferred to British territory. It replaced the unhappy Ninth Legion, cut to pieces by the Caledonians during the uprisings which made the grim aftermath, in Britain, of our Parthian expedition. Two measures were necessary to prevent the return of a like disaster. Our troops were reinforced by creation of a native auxiliary corps at Eboracum. From the top of a green knoll, I watched the first maneuvers of this newly formed British army. At the same time the erection of a wall cutting the island in two in its narrowest part served to protect the fertile, guarded areas of the south from the attacks of northern tribes. I myself inspected a substantial part of those constructions begun everywhere at the same time along an earthwork eighty miles in length; it was my chance to try out, on that carefully defined space running from coast to coast, a system of defense which could afterward be applied anywhere else. But already that purely military project was proving an aid to peace and to development of prosperity in that part of Britain; villages sprang up, and there was a general movement of settlers toward our frontiers. The trench-diggers of the legion were aided in their task by native crews; the building of the wall was for many of these mountain dwellers, so newly subdued, the first irrefutable proof of the protective power of Rome; their pay was the first Roman money to pass through their hands. This rampart became the emblem of my renunciation of the policy of conquest: below the northernmost bastion I ordered the erection of a temple to the god Terminus.

  Everything enchanted me in that rainy land: the shreds of mist on the hillsides, the lakes consecrated to nymphs wilder than ours, the melancholy, grey-eyed inhabitants. I took as a guide a young tribune of the British auxiliary corps, a fair-haired god who had learned Latin and who spoke some halting Greek; he even attempted timidly to compose love verses in that tongue. One cold autumn night he served as interpreter between me and a Sibyl. We were sitting in the smoky hut of a Celtic woodcutter, warming our legs clad in clumsy, heavy trousers of rough wool, when we saw creeping toward us an ancient creature drenched and disheveled by rain and wind, wild and furtive as any animal of the wood. She fell upon the small oaten loaves which lay baking upon the hearth. My guide coaxed this prophetess, and she consented to examine for me the smoke rings, the sudden sparks, and those fragile structures of embers and ashes. She saw cities a-building, and joyous throngs, but al
so cities in flames, with bitter lines of captives, who belied my dreams for peace; there was a young and gentle visage which she took for the face of a woman and in which I refused to believe; then a white spectre, which was perhaps only a statue, since that would be an object far stranger than any phantom for this denizen of forest and heath. And vaguely, at a distance of some years, she saw my death, which I could well have predicted without her.

  There was less need for my presence in prosperous Gaul and wealthy Spain than in Britain. Narbonensian Gaul reminded me of Greece, whose graces had spread that far, the same fine schools of eloquence, the same porticoes under a cloudless sky. I stopped in Nîmes to plan a basilica to be dedicated to Plotina and destined one day to become her temple. Some family ties endeared this city to the empress and so made its clear, sun-warmed landscape the dearer to me.

  But the revolt in Mauretania was flaming still. I cut short my journey through Spain, with no stop between Corduba and the sea even for a moment in Italica, the city of my childhood and my ancestors. At Gades I embarked for Africa.

  The handsome tattooed warriors of the Atlas mountains were still molesting the African coastal cities. For a very few days there I went through the Numidian equivalent of the Sarmatian battles; I again saw tribes subdued one by one and the surrender of haughty chiefs, prostrating themselves in the open desert in a chaos of women and packs and kneeling beasts. But this time the sand took the place of snow.

  It would have been good, for once, to pass the spring in Rome, to find there the Villa begun, to have capricious Lucius and his caresses again, and the friendship of Plotina. But that stay in town was broken almost at once by alarming rumors of war. Peace with the Parthians had been concluded scarcely three years before, but already some grave incidents were occurring on the Euphrates. I set forth at once for the East.

  I had made up my mind to settle these frontier disturbances by a less routine method than that of sending in the legions. A meeting was arranged with Osroës. I took with me his daughter, who had been captured in infancy, at the time of Trajan’s occupation of Babylon, and held thereafter in Rome as a hostage. She was a thin child with enormous eyes. Her presence, and that of her women attendants, was something of an encumbrance on a journey which had above all to be made with speed. This cluster of creatures in veils was jolted along on camelback across the Syrian desert. The curtains of their canopies were kept severely closed, but each evening at the halt I sent to inquire if the princess had need of anything.

  In Lycia I stopped for an hour to persuade Opramoas, the merchant, who had already demonstrated his capacities for negotiation, to go with me into Parthia. The urgency of the moment restricted his customary display. Wealth and luxury had left him soft, but he was none the less admirable as a traveling companion, for he knew the desert and all its dangers.

  The meeting was to take place on the left bank of the Euphrates, not far from Doura. We crossed the river on a raft. Along the bank the soldiers of the Parthian guard formed a dazzling line; their armor was of gold, and was matched in splendor by their horses’ trappings. My ever-attendant Phlegon was decidedly pale, and even the officers who accompanied me were in some fear; this meeting could prove a trap. But Opramoas, alert to every air stirring in Asia, was wholly at ease in this mingling of silence and tumult, immobility and sudden gallop, and in all this magnificence thrown on the desert like a carpet on the sand. As for me, I was wondrous free from concern; like Caesar on his bark, I was entrusting myself to those planks which carried my Fortune. I gave proof of this confidence by restoring the Parthian princess immediately to her father, instead of holding her in our lines until my departure. I promised also to give back the golden throne of the Arsacid dynasty, which Trajan had taken as spoil. We had no use for the thing, but Oriental superstition held it in great esteem.

  The high ceremony of these sessions with Osroës was purely external. In substance they differed little from talks between two neighbors who are trying to arrive at some peaceable settlement over a boundary dispute. I had to do with a sophisticated, Greek-speaking barbarian, not at all obtuse, not necessarily more perfidious than I, but vacillating to the point of seeming untrustworthy. My peculiar mental disciplines helped me to grasp this elusive intelligence: seated facing the Parthian emperor, I learned to anticipate, and soon to direct, his replies; I entered into his game; last, I imagined myself as Osroës bargaining with Hadrian. I detest futile discussions where each party knows in advance that he will, or will not, give way; truth in business appeals to me most of all as a means of simplifying and advancing matters. The Parthians feared us; we, in turn, held them in dread, and from the mating of our two fears would come war. The Satraps were pressing toward this war for ends of their own; I could see at once that Osroës, like me, had his Quietus and his Palma. Pharasmanes, the most turbulent of those semi-independent border princes, was even more a danger for the Parthian Empire than for us. It has been charged against me that I kept those base and corruptible lords in hand by resort to subsidies; the money was well spent. For I was too confident of the superiority of our forces to be governed by false pride, so was ready for any concession of mere prestige, but for nothing else. The greatest difficulty was to persuade Osroës that if my promises were few it was because I meant to keep them. But he did believe me, in the end, or acted as if he did. The accord concluded between us in the course of that visit has endured; for fifteen years nothing has troubled the peace on the frontiers for either side. I count on you, Marcus, to continue this state of things after my death.

  One evening in Osroës’ tent, during a feast given in my honor, I observed among the women and long-eyelashed pages a naked, emaciated man who sat utterly motionless. His eyes were wide open, but he seemed to see nothing of that confusion of acrobats and dancers, or those dishes laden with viands. I addressed him through my interpreter but he deigned no reply, for this was indeed a sage. His disciples, however, were more loquacious; these pious beggars came from India, and their master belonged to the powerful caste of Brahmans. I gathered that his meditations led him to believe that the whole universe is only a tissue of illusion and error; for him self-denial, renunciation, death were the sole means of escape from this changing flood of forms whereon, on the contrary, our Heraclitus had willingly been borne along. Beyond the world of the senses he hoped to rejoin the sphere of the purely divine, that unmoving firmament of which Plato, too, had dreamed.

  I got some inkling, therefore, in spite of the bungling of my interpreters, of conceptions not unlike those of certain of our philosophers, but expressed by this Indian with more absolute finality. He had reached the state where nothing was left, except his body, to separate him from intangible deity, without substance or form, and with which he would unite; he had resolved to burn himself alive that next morning. Osroës invited me to the solemnity. A pyre of fragrant woods was prepared; the man leaped into it and disappeared without one cry. His disciples gave no sign of sorrow; for them it was not a funeral ceremony.

  I pondered these things far into the night which followed. There I lay on a carpet of finest wool on the floor of a tent hung with gleaming brocades. A page massaged my feet. From without came the few sounds of that Asiatic night: the whispering of slaves at my door; the soft rustle of a palm, and Opramoas’ snores behind a curtain; the stamp of a horse’s hoof; from farther away, in the women’s quarters, the melancholy murmur of a song. All of that had left the Brahman unmoved. In his veritable passion of refusal he had given himself to the flames as a lover to a bed. He had cast off everything and everyone, and finally himself, like so many garments which served to conceal from him that unique presence, the invisible void which was his all.

  I felt myself to be different, and ready for wider choice. Austerity, renunciation, negation were not wholly new to me; I had been drawn to them young (as is almost always the case), at the age of twenty. I was even younger when a friend in Rome took me to see the aged Epictetus in his hovel in the Suburra, shortly before Domitian or
dered his exile. As in his slave days, when a brutal master failed to extract from him even one cry, though the beating broke his leg, so now grown old and frail he was patiently bearing the slow torments of gravel; yet he seemed to me to enjoy a liberty which was almost divine. His crutches, his pallet, the earthenware lamp and wooden spoon in its vessel of clay were objects of admiration to me, the simple tools of a pure life.

  But Epictetus gave up too many things, and I had been quick to observe that nothing was more dangerously easy for me than mere renunciation. This Indian, more logically, was rejecting life itself. There was much to learn from such pure-hearted fanatics, but on the condition of turning the lesson from the meaning originally intended. These sages were trying to rediscover their god above and beyond the ocean of forms, and to reduce him to that quality of the unique, intangible, and incorporeal which he had foregone in the very act of becoming universe. I perceived differently my relations with the divine. I could see myself as seconding the deity in his effort to give form and order to a world, to develop and multiply its convolutions, extensions, and complexities. I was one of the segments of the wheel, an aspect of that unique force caught up in the multiplicity of things; I was eagle and bull, man and swan, phallus and brain all together, a Proteus who is also a Jupiter.