Of the religion of the Empire we know little. The externals are evident, but the spirit escapes us. Texts and bas-reliefs show priests and their flocks in action, praying and dancing; we know their chants and rituals and instructions, but we do not understand them. Regarding their sense of holiness and the meaning of their rituals, there are diametrically opposed and irreconcilable opinions. Some, under the influence of Bayet or Guignebert or of Marxist thought, explain everything as sheer exploitation by greedy and fraudulent priests of a credulous and simple-minded people. Others, following the German Romantics, depict prophets and seers adept in secret rites and mystic revelation. The followers of Renan have seen the priestly caste as approaching a true mysticism which was yet very near collective hysteria and madness. We shall not try to resolve the question, but merely set before the reader what the records tell us of such great priestly figures as Thaumas, Isidore, and Bruince. In any event, they represent, beneath the splendor of wealth and the thirst for power, a sustained and sometimes successful attempt at a dream of order, and at the same time a suggestion of another world beyond order and even, sometimes, beyond the Empire. Order and another world: this dual aspiration not only ranged priests and seers sometimes for and sometimes against the emperor, but in the end destroyed itself.
War, feasting, religion. For a long time the history of the Empire was confined to anecdotes, genealogies of princes, roll calls of priests and victors at the games, and lists of battles and peace treaties. Bossuet reads in it the finger of God, Voltaire the struggle between man’s folly and the slow rise of reason. Its welter of color and crime provided romanticism with a favorite occasion for the resurrection of the past. It was not until the arrival of the modern school that historians began to perceive, beneath the pomp and the blood and the hymns, both the everyday life of the common people and the often complicated system of rites and beliefs that governed it. Then the wave of interest in ordinary existence, in the preoccupations of classes so long ignored, in trade and crafts, in new techniques and group sensibility was replaced by a new phase of broad theoretical visions, comprehensive systems, total interpretations. One after the other, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism each inspired important works of sociology, cultural anthropology, comparative religion, linguistics, and semiotics, while at the same time researchers tirelessly sought for man and his workaday cares beneath the brilliant trappings of camp and court life. And so each day brought a further descent into the depths of concrete existence and a further ascent toward the heights of abstraction. A dual process of contrast and correlation at once brought man closer and set him at a greater distance. We shall make no attempt here to reproduce all the details of such excellent works as those of Bloch, Sommerfelt, Pierre Dupont, Weill-Pichon, and Rostopchin. But no one can now ignore the main results of their achievements.
The peoples of the Empire claimed to be autochthonous. According to legend they were born one spring morning between the warm plains and the great oak forests, when the demiurge, in the form of an eagle, let fall from its talons an acorn which was fertilized by a sunbeam. Hence the triple cult of the sun, the eagle, and the oak in the early religion of the Empire concentrated particularly on the heights of Aquileus, where priests and a shrine drew flocks of believers, invalids, and pilgrims. But modern science has not only thrown doubt on such heliocentric and arboreal theories of the origins of mankind, it has also demolished the national claim, of which the myth was merely a transposition, that the peoples of Europe sprang from local soil. It now seems certain that they came from Central Asia comparatively recently, that they wandered for a long time over the plateaus of Pamir and Altai, and came gradually to their ultimate habitat by a slow process of migration. Two points that still remain obscure are their links with the Ossetic people on the one hand and with the Etruscans on the other. But the airy ideas once entertained about kinship with the Basques and the Japanese can now be regarded as definitely ruled out.
Most of the languages in the Empire belong to the Indo-European group, with Semitic influences varying according to area. Recent works have pointed out a number of puzzling links with the pre-Columbian languages of Mexico and Peru, with Aymara and Quechua. This discovery has, of course, revived speculations about Atlantis, about the countries that emerged and the continent that disappeared between Brazil and Africa. It may be that research now in progress will teach us something more about the origins of the Empire and its linguistic structure. But for the moment it is best to abstain from farfetched hypotheses and stick to established facts—they provide so much material there is no need to let the imagination run riot or to resort to sensation mongering.
Many nations came together in the Empire, and about a dozen of them spoke quite separate languages, which, though coming from a common root, were often very unlike one another. Between them all, an official language served as a link. Greek was not only the language of the court and of lawyers, poets, and merchants, but also the lingua franca and medium of communication for a whole section of the known world. At their famous meeting in Cyprus, Basil the Great, the khan of the Oïghurs, and the king of Sicily all spoke practically pure Greek. Within the Empire, however, Greek did not reign alone. During the reigns of Basil and Alexis, a stroller through the metropolis would have heard a thousand different tongues. People from Brittany, Persia, Kuchan, Egypt, Syria, Bactria, and even from India, China, and Africa joined the vivid tones of the Mediterranean to the rasp of the steppes and the mountains in a great aural motley. In the provinces there were a variety of dialects, patois, and accents that foreigners, and even sometimes inhabitants of the Empire itself, found difficult to follow. The remotest areas presented a sort of patchwork of strange tongues, from Mongol to Aramaean, from the ancient sacred languages, mostly reserved for priests and liturgy, in which linguists detect old Sanskrit roots, to Phoenician and perhaps Etruscan, which, like Mayan, resists all the attempts of modern science to decipher it. Some people wrote from left to right, others from right to left, some from the top downward, others from the bottom up. Some still used ideograms or crude pictograms, or did not communicate in writing at all, or read alternately from left to right and from right to left, as in boustrophedon. It was at court, in the institutions of government, and in circles that prided themselves on refinement or efficiency that Greek had its revenge. Basil the Great did much to impose it as the common language of the Empire. It soon became essential to know Greek if one wanted an important post at court or in the army, or to represent the emperor abroad or in the provinces, or to aspire to fashion or notoriety. The measures to promote Greek were the making of great numbers of grammarians and masters of rhetoric—wealthy families and men of ambition paid the earth for their services. The peoples of the Empire acquired this taste for the spoken word, eloquence, and poetry at about the time of Basil’s reign. Before, except in the capital, language and letters had been held in low esteem. Women talked and sang, men drank and fought. But the requirements of administration, the need to transmit orders and keep records, and the growing popularity of bards and minstrels who entertained the troops in the evening by chanting fabulous or heroic adventures, gave the written or recited word a new dignity, into which fashion and emulation also entered. We shall see later the extraordinary role that soon came to be played by a historian like Justus Dion, by the poet Valerius, and by Logophilus the grammarian. In less than a century language became a kind of craze. Basil the Great was not above singing before foreign ambassadors, Alexis’s guests would include as many poets and historians as generals, and the sciences of language were soon as highly esteemed and as seriously studied as military science, medicine, and the interpretation of sacred signs and wonders.
The attitude of the soothsayers and the priests toward what, despite its humble origins, has justly been called “the rise of learning,” was bound to be ambiguous. On the one hand, the rise of learning was also the rise of danger. It was a threat to customs and privileges that had only been established and preserved through
secrecy, mystery, and exclusivity. On the other hand, the growing taste for words and writing lent enormous power to anyone who could make them his instrument. The priests were quick to see that here was something that had to be either annihilated or annexed. After a period in which they tried to fight against the grammarians and historians, they decided not only to make them their allies if possible, but also to become grammarians and historians themselves—and later, as we shall see, mathematicians and accountants too. They succeeded brilliantly. But throughout the history of the Empire, like a persistent thread, runs the equivocal interplay between priests and scholars, ranging from coalitions in which they were almost indistinguishable to more or less openly declared enmity. The most significant example of this ambiguity was to be provided by Greek philosophy, to which we shall return in due course. One influential sect of priests from Syria finally saw language not merely as the image, but as the very essence of the absolute. Their faith, a precursor of monotheism, conceived the Word as a special hypostasis of divinity. In contrast, in the wild regions of the north a schism raged for over thirty years, in which both books and anyone who could read them were burned, poets and singers were imprisoned, and axes destroyed any pictures or statues guilty of fostering man’s taste for symbols and signs.
Through wars and feasting, under priests and generals, with poets and grammarians, with the occasional ruin or disaster, the two or three centuries spanning the reigns of Arsaphes and Basil thus witnessed the exaltation of the mind and the mind’s possibilities—as also of its fertile contradictions. By the sort of felicity of which history affords other examples, everything seemed to be progressing in unison toward more knowledge, more wealth, more beauty. Violence and insecurity no longer damaged trade, but encouraged and, in a sense, created it. Priests sometimes burned poets, but they also made use of them and praised them. Emperors and seers did not always agree, but they knew they needed one another. And so slowly ripened that rare and precious miracle, a civilization. In it, emperors saw power, priests an order of things, scholars a culture, merchants prosperity. All were glad of it and moved in hidden concert, by different paths, toward one common goal. The struggles between them worked toward accord and resolved in harmony. Ships sailed in with saffron and pepper, gold and silk, amber and precious woods. They sailed out carrying ivory worked by craftsmen in the suburbs of the City, cloth of silver set with gems and mother-of-pearl, vases and goblets, weapons and statues. New metals, more ingenious and efficient tools slowly percolated to the countryside and into artisans’ workshops. Smith and sailor, peasant and woodcutter, architect and musician, harvester and weaver all marveled at a world still full of secrets and wonders; they loved them to the point of fierceness, of the most extreme cruelty. For to survive meant choosing to suffer. In their shops, in their fields, in the forests, on the sea, they worked, and waited. Peace was not yet. Wars threatened and sometimes struck. But wars were often successful, and, most important, they did not leave behind them the poisons of fear and lethargy. The strength of the people was still new enough not to recoil before pain or death, but to rejoice in them as an honor and happiness. Life in the Empire was hard and gay. Death was common. Suffering and atrocities were accepted. War was a celebration. Rejoicing was cruel. Promise loomed larger than the past. The Empire was young and, even in its ignorance and suffering, dreamed already of the million golden eagles of its future strength.
II
THE EAGLE AND THE TIGER
ABOUT 350 MILES NORTH OF THE CITY AND THE mouth of the Amphyses, a modern traveler sailing past the shores of what was once the Empire suddenly sees a twisted promontory appear against a landscape of sun-scorched cliffs. If one manages, under the thin clouds that persist even in high summer, to reach this narrow headland, all one finds are heaps of rocks, scree, steep hillocks, and strange figures carved in the stone. The local shepherds are still ready to point out the Tortoise, the Throne, the imperial Eagle, and the recumbent Woman, all silhouetted against the sky. But the visitor, forewarned by culture-conscious guides, goes up and examines them more closely. And as well as these paesine, these stone landscapes in which fanciful nature imitates and invents harbors, houses, fleets in battle array, and Giotto-like visions, there suddenly appears, beneath the geological chaos, human hand and intention—the remains of a door, an arch, a fallen tower, a rampart: the ruins of Onessa. They tell the story of the struggle between the Porphyries and the Venostae, who for more than four centuries, by their mutual hatred and common violence, steeped in blood the land that was to emerge from their strife as the Empire.
The origins of the Empire, as related by Justus Dion or sung by Valerius, long remained buried in the legends and the fables which have proved so inexhaustible a source of inspiration for literature and art. Right down to our own day, men’s hearts and imaginations have been fired by the story of the rival brothers, of which both source and illustration are to be found in the endless tales, tragedies, songs, poems, and accounts, epic or romantic, of their successes and reverses. When, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, rationalist criticism, and in particular the brothers Grimm, detected in this rivalry between symmetrically opposed champions one of the most classical elements in popular legend, this insight was enough to call in doubt the historical reality. But, as is well known, ever since the ruins of Onessa were discovered by Hiram Bingham and Schliemann, the latter a Mecklenburg pastor’s son who had succeeded in business, modern scholarship has been unanimous in confirming the almost literal truth of the old tradition. All the hatred, fury, treachery, cruelty, daring, passion, and cunning was not invented by poets and dramatists, but inscribed in stone and time: it was humanity itself and its history. The birth of the Empire had not been just invented by literature and art. The crimes, achievements, follies, and legends involved were all lived before they were related.[1]
It is difficult to conjure up what the Empire was like before it became the Empire. The early poets, up to Valerius, speak of a mythical age when happiness reigned and work and war were unknown. The first historical accounts paint a less rosy picture. The country was ravaged by armed bands, descending on their victims at random. Insecurity was rife, a neighbor no less a threat than the enemy. Everyone’s chief preoccupation was how to survive from one day to the next, and this precluded any larger enterprise, any exchanges, any thought for the future. The idea of happiness is not new—people used to be happy in the midst of want and danger. What is new is the idea of choice. The only choice open to a man in those days was between death or going on as he was. It was chiefly in this sense that he was unfree. Then, even more than now, everything was determined by chance and birth, situation and climate. The forests in the north and the east were impenetrable, the southern plains scorching, and the mountain ranges between impassable and terrifying. Everyone was governed by the earth and the sky and immemorial danger. It was naturally in the west, toward the sea, that trade, art, and working in wood and bronze were to develop. But even in the most favored areas some sort of order and security had to emerge before there could be any thought, any ambition, any appreciation of wealth and beauty. It is a terrible illusion to think that prosperity and culture can flourish except under the shelter of strength. In the Empire, whether by chance or necessity, power arrived in time.
The real name of the first prince of Onessa is unknown. Some call him Kanabel, some Protus, others Tarkinos or Hvotan.[2] In certain texts he even appears under the name of Kaisari, the anachronism of which is glaringly obvious. What seems certain, at all events, is that all these different names apply to one war lord who brought under his command the whole northwest of what was to be the Empire. He chose as his residence the promontory of Onessa, and had it strongly fortified. It is the remains of this town which modern archeologists call Onessa III and IV (for two or three earlier settlements, of which almost nothing is known, had already succeeded one another on the same site). The whole cycle of Onessa legends, so extensively exploited, originates in the wars, splendors, and
miseries of that era. Valerius’s Onessiad will certainly remain its most outstanding memorial. It has been translated into French by the Abbé Delille, Burnouf, and Robert Brasillach; into English by T. S. Eliot; into Russian by Esenin and Mayakovsky; into German by Kleist and Rilke. These versions give us a glimpse of a daily life at once peaceful, ardent, and cruel, transfigured by a splendor of imagination and expression which translation still sometimes succeeds in transmitting through the ages.
With the two sons of the prince of Onessa, tradition emerges into a history still mythical but ever more thoroughly explored, and into family tragedy. Everyone in Onessa still knows the famous legend. The prince, on his deathbed, left his throne to whichever of his two sons most resembled, and could subdue, the tiger and the eagle. According to tradition, the elder, a gentle dreamer, was the first poet of the Empire. All the younger brother’s thoughts were of war and of gaining power. A great clearing was made among the olive groves which can still be faintly traced to the northeast of Onessa. The two princes, unarmed, appeared simultaneously at opposite ends of the clearing, in the middle of which the priests loosed an eagle brought from the mountains and a tiger brought from the southern plains. The eagle flew up into the air, and after circling around three times came and perched on the shoulder of the younger brother. The tiger, after stretching itself, strolled to where the elder brother stood motionless, his sistrum or zither in his hand. Then the younger son, with the eagle still on his shoulder, came and strangled the tiger with his bare hands; and ever afterward the brothers were divided by a mortal hatred. The younger reigned at Onessa, which he had seized in the name of the eagle. The elder, taking the tiger as his emblem, went into exile, and for years, supported by just a faithful few, had to flee before the fury of his brother. He withdrew toward the south, and after a series of ambushes, battles, attempted betrayals, and narrowly escaped murders, he came and settled at last at the mouth of a great river. The river was the Amphyses, and the City was born.
The Glory of the Empire Page 3