The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  That the Porphyries and Venostae are actually descendants of the two rival brothers is extremely doubtful. But what is certain is the persistence with which each party invoked one of the two princes and, in calling respectively upon the Eagle and the Tiger, fostered the enmity between the two factions. The Porphyries were masters of the City, while the Venostae ruled over Onessa and the surrounding region. As the years went by, the fratricidal struggle continued and developed. Each of the rival families had its lands, its fortresses, its troops and retainers; of each the only object seemed to be the annihilation of the other. There were traps and poisons, murders and reprisals. Every year at Onessa, on the first day of spring, a tiger and one hundred forty-four prisoners were tortured and put to death. The Porphyries were not so keen on killing. But the galleys of the City were full of oarsmen from Onessa.

  The legendary and traditional motives for hatred eventually came to be only rhetorical. More real differences appeared and came into play. In a little more than two centuries the City, because of its climate and its position at the mouth of the Amphyses and as the outlet for the salt, spice, silk, and amber routes which wound north round the mountains and high plateaus, developed at a fantastic rate and soon began to enjoy an unparalleled prosperity. Onessa remained the war capital and unchallenged center of military power. But the City’s trade and industry carried its fame far and wide. Another hundred and fifty or two hundred years, and its harbor gradually became one of the most important, then incontestably the most important, in the then known world. Pomposa alone could attempt to rival it. The ships of the City, their sails emblazoned with a tiger, scoured the sea to the northwest and pressed as far as Brittany, Barbary, and India. They came back laden with monkeys, parrots, ostriches, giraffes, breadfruit trees, coconuts, gold dust, ivory, wonderful tales, redheaded girls, and black slaves. The City was adorned with buildings each more huge and beautiful than the last; with temples, covered markets, circuses, hanging gardens. The philosophers and musicians came close on the heels of the merchants. Independently of the Arabs, Archimandrites discovered the theoretical rudiments of algebra and laid the foundations for calculating the probable losses of merchant ships; many centuries later, in Italy and Spain and the distant Low Countries, this was to give rise to the insurance system. Almost simultaneously, Hermenides and Paraclitus founded their two rival schools of physics and metaphysics. The first maintained that the universe was immaterial like air and fire, that it was infinite, and that in it continuity reigned, there was room for freedom, and nothing ever repeated itself; the second declared that the world was like earth and water, that it was finite, composed of atoms, and ruled by necessity, and that history repeated itself cyclically.[3] Both schools were soon rent by schisms and heresies, and many apostates changed from one side to the other—atomists came to believe in freedom, while believers in continuity supported necessity.[4] The wild-beast shows, which throughout the history of the Empire drew huge crowds thirsty for color and blood, now no longer satisfied the more refined. Other kinds of entertainment grew up, to which merchants and their families went to give themselves a rest from trade risks and columns of figures. First came farces and pantomimes, then satires and clowning. They were intended to evoke coarse laughter, but gradually became as cruel and harsh as the real world. Terror and tears gave even more pleasure than guffaws, and the adventures of the two princes of Onessa were revived in endless cycles where, intermingled with religious allusions, blood flowed in torrents and all was ruled by fate and the vengeance of the gods.[5] But beneath all the violence and roughness there were signs of the coming masterpieces of such dramatists as Menalchas and Polyphilus. After tragedy, comedy—nothing is subtler than a smile. Fun was poked at betrayed or beaten lovers, at misers and braggarts, above all at the audience itself. Sophistication was the order of the day: paradox, contradiction, and fine distinctions infiltrated everywhere. Moralists explained the whys and wherefores of events and feelings. Civilization was born.

  Beneath the veneer of a skill and prosperity already widely famed, the City still lived under the constant threat of Onessa’s enmity. It was a double danger, for as well as Onessa itself, other peoples were encouraged to take advantage of the rivalry between the Eagle and the Tiger. Every citizen tried to forget the fragility of fortune, and the tragedy of the City was that everyone succeeded. Yet the danger was always there, a faint background noise that all conspired to stifle. Pomposa never relented. Sicily, the islands in the northwest sea, the factories in Africa, and the sea routes to Syria and Scythia were all the subject of fierce, often violent, competition, and sometimes out-right battles. Three times the fleets of Pomposa were victorious: off the Arginous Islands, at Maddalena Point, and in actual sight of the City harbor. In the east, the volcano district was uncertain, and the Aquilean Way was cut by roaming barbarians. In the north, the pressure from Onessa never relaxed. Prosperity and culture had come to the City too soon. After the first bright brief burst there came the resistance offered by men and things, adversity, the first setbacks, suffering, misfortune.

  The history of the City and of Onessa now loses its early simplicity, only to recapture it again later at the same time as its grandeur. Meanwhile came dim ages of uncertain fortune, reversals, and confusion. The City was too weak to destroy Onessa. Onessa was not rich enough to master the City. Virtue reigned in Onessa, sharing the throne with cruelty and caprice. In the City, liberty and luxury verged on vice and weakness. While the first golden age of the City still showed legendary traces of its myths and origins, it also bore already the stigmata of decadence. Hardly was the City born, hardly had it begun to shine in the history of maritime powers and merchant republics, than it began to die. Historians later compared it to Tyre, Phoenicia, Venice, to England at the time of her triumphs. But now it was dying, dead. Confronted with the threat of the nomad barbarians, who had submerged Aquileus and were descending along the Amphyses to the sea, the City could only turn to one of its two enemies, Onessa or Pomposa. But the memory of the two rival brothers was still alive, maintained by literature and the arts, by the bitterness of old men and the raids that were a daily occurrence. Onessa was at once too near and too hated for its rigor, its obscure virtue, its austerity. So bitter was their hatred for the city of the Eagle that the rulers of the City threw themselves into the arms of the merchant warriors of Pomposa; with them, at least, drama and philosophy, easy living, and the trade in fine fabrics could go on as before. Capitulations were signed. The foreigners’ ships appeared at the mouth of the Amphyses. A garrison disembarked. The harbor of the City became an annex of Pomposa. Though the appearance of well-being was preserved, the powers of trade and of the mind were sapped. By contrast with the roughness and pride of Onessa, the City showed the tinseled and torn façade of conquered splendor. The first act was over. The curtain fell on the City which had failed to create the Empire.

  No one would dwell on this flash in the pan, these riches for a day, this weak showiness so soon swallowed up again in darkness, if the Empire yet to come had not lent them significance. But every element in every story derives its meaning and importance from the ever-open future, which will give it its place, role, and rank. Nothing is ever complete at the time it happens. If the Empire had not come into being, if there had been no Arsaphes, no Basil, no Alexis, the City would have left behind only a minor trace. But the Empire did come into being, and Alexis did arise. And the first golden age of the City, instead of remaining in men’s minds as a dead end and a failure, was transfigured into a sign and a promise.

  In those far-off days, Onessa might have acted as an instrument of fate. The struggle between the Tiger and the Eagle was transformed into something resembling the dim beginnings of national sentiment. Onessa, still free while the City was under the Pomposan yoke, represented, as against the foreign invader, the spirit of the Empire that was to come. But Onessa had no navy. Pomposa could call on mercenaries from every quarter; the gold of the merchant warriors commanded power and inte
rest, and was not without effect even on conscience. The attacks from the north continued almost without respite, but also without result. The paradox of the conflict lay in the position of the City, and in particular of the Porphyries. Every year, every month, the demands of Pomposa became more exacting, more unbearable. And the Onessan troops several times reached the walls of the City. Yet, caught as the Tiger was between two dangers, to give in and appeal to the Eagle was impossible. The past hung too heavy. Submission itself still had too many charms. In their palaces the Porphyries lolled inactive, in a sort of willful blindness, hovering between two dangers. As Weill-Pichon puts it, “The City, with a mixture of reserve and abandon, sampled the taste of slavery and collaboration.” Pomposa presents a perfect example of colonialism before its time. Its shops and warehouses, its commercial and financial organizations, covered the country with a network of hangers-on. Wealth was skillfully exploited. Talent went into exile. The merchants and their High Council produced in the City a reign of mild and even smiling terror. Their barbarian mercenaries were the guarantee of an order that the Porphyries did not shake off because they could not, which they did not even decry because, in a sense, it suited them.

  Everything is paradoxical and surprising about this first golden age of the City: that it came into being at all; that it lasted so short a time. Its good and bad fortune are equally improbable—as improbable as the ways of history, the ways of God and men. The City had thought that its fortune was made, but no—lack of courage had brought servitude instead. The City was to believe that all was lost, but no—everything would be saved. Saved? Yes. But by what deviousness, what tricks of history! There would have to be new tragedies and new actors. The curtain was already rising again; the theater was falling silent; the actors were taking their places. Each time the plot was a little thicker. History cannot advance without people, plenty of people. But beneath all the suffering and blood, beneath the luxury of palaces and the misery of slaves, beneath hatred, avarice, obscure religion, and the strangeness of men’s minds, how simple things really are, how clear the designs of history, all ready to be inscribed in books and in human memory. The Eagle and the Tiger represent the rival brothers. Onessa, the City, Pomposa (or the Venostae, the Porphyries, and the merchant princes) represent a triangular and ambiguous combat. Then a fourth force comes upon the scene of the Empire—the barbarians.

  III

  ARSAPHES’S MERCENARIES

  THERE WAS NO GAYER OR LIVELIER SIGHT IMAGINABLE than the streets of the City, even at the time of its decadence. Every traveler’s tale is full of surprise and wonder.[1] A unique prosperity and animation reigned there still, or already. According to the most conservative estimates, two or three hundred thousand people (some authorities say four hundred thousand) were engaged in trade, the arts, and entertainment, and they went about it with an energy, almost a frenzy, that was indifferent to servitude. From sunrise the harbor seethed with people, and long after night had fallen, mansions, palaces, and theaters rang with the echoes of banquets and revels which often went on until dawn. All night the watchmen would see people still on the streets—drunks, fops, wits, bores, people going home to bed late after a gay evening. The Pomposan merchants took good care not to interfere with this prosperity and these easygoing ways. They contented themselves with collecting profits and enormous taxes, and did their best to encourage pleasure and levity. True, there were two or three attempts at rebellion in the City, but they were crushed, and the roads leading into the town were lined with thousands of crucified rebels to serve as examples. The merchants did not soil their own hands with such unpleasant tasks. They left them to the barbarian mercenaries who occupied and controlled the country in the name of the High Council. Bearded, rough, often drunk, always cruel and brutal, they rode about on their little horses spreading terror. All the High Council had to do to intimidate everyone was bring in the mercenaries; all they had to do to reassure everyone was withdraw them. Everyday life and prosperity, the activities of docks and theaters, all presupposed the absence of the mercenaries. Any attempt at independence on the part of the people, any thrust of ambition on the part of the Porphyries produced the mercenaries’ presence and the threat of their violence. Once or twice a year the City was delivered over to them. Early in the morning, the sound of galloping horses would be heard on the outskirts. Panic would spread to the harbor, the City center, and the fashionable districts. The streets emptied. Every citizen peered out fearfully from behind barred doors at the wild hordes sweeping by.

  The barbarians did not speak Greek. They came from Mongolia, Bactria, the Persian provinces, or Libya, and were grouped according to country and dialect. Their inability to communicate among themselves put them at the mercy of chiefs who spoke several languages and could thus command the movements of several divisions. Their chief general took orders from the High Council, who soon realized the power of the mercenaries. Army commissars saw to it that they were ruled with ruthless discipline. Several generals were summoned to Pomposa and tried and imprisoned. Some were executed, some were stricken with sudden mysterious illness—there was talk of poison. The object of the merchant warriors was to keep the mercenaries’ power within the strictest limits so as to spread fear in the City and control the Porphyries without ever putting Pomposa’s own supremacy in danger. The merchants were very good at such delicate juggling acts.

  For several years the Bactrian troops were commanded by a young captain very popular with the women. His courage, intelligence, and good looks soon made him well known not only among the mercenaries but also in the City. Men of business and education began to invite him to banquets, to the circus, and even to the theater. The captain, whose name was Arsaphes, spoke several languages equally well: Persian, Libyan, Syrian, the far-off dialect of the Rhine, Latin, and Greek. He had distinguished himself on several occasions fighting against the Onessan army, he danced well, and combined the violence of the barbarians with the ease, charm, and breeding of the City and of Pomposa. On his return from an expedition against the armies of Venosta, he became the lover of one of the Porphyries’ ladies in waiting. All the charms of garrison life then unfolded before the young captain. Feasting and pleasure were his for the taking.

  After the violent incidents that accompany the beginning of any occupation, several barbarian officers had succumbed to the attractions of the City. Arsaphes differed from the others not only in his success but also in his steadfastness: he had become the most brilliant of the barbarians adopted by the fashionable world of the City, but he remained the most intransigent. After dancing with Aspasia in the Porphyries’ palaces, he would go back to camp outside the City and sleep on a rough wooden cot.

  The prince who then reigned, in name at least, over the City, was called Nephaot. He noticed Arsaphes, knew of his liaison with one of the ladies at court, and began to have hopes of an alliance between the Porphyries and the mercenaries against the domination of Pomposa and the High Council. By an already well-established custom, Nephaot’s daughter, the princess Heloise, was being educated in Pomposa, as a sort of honored hostage. She was due to return to her father for her eighteenth birthday, and Nephaot planned, under cover of the celebrations and with the help of the mercenaries, to try to regain power. Aspasia, Arsaphes’s mistress, was a key figure in the affair. She was admitted into the plot, and tried, by hints and allusions, to win over her lover. Arsaphes said neither yes or no. He was biding his time.

  The arrival in harbor of the ship bringing back Princess Heloise was the occasion for one of those ceremonies that enchanted the crowd at the time, and later inspired the historical melodramas of Alexandre Dumas and Victorien Sardou, the once famous pictures of Paul Delaroche, Alphonse de Neuville, and Jean-Paul Laurens, and the Italian cinema between the two world wars. From early morning the port was full of people. It was spring, and the weather was already fine and warm after the rigors of winter. The sky had been clear for two or three days, and a mild breeze had coaxed open flowers and leaf buds
. The crowd swarmed on the quays, children were perched on roofs and masts, and boats bursting with passengers set out to sea to meet the ship. The ocher cliffs to the south of the harbor, the white town on the hill, the high buildings along the shore, the colorful clothes of the spectators lent the scene the gaiety and liveliness so characteristic of the City. The women munched olives and dried fruit, the men drank the local rye brandy, so clear and pure it looked like water. As usual, a tent and a dais had been set up on the quay for the prince and the members of the High Council. As if display were inversely proportionate to real power, the prince was dressed in crimson, with high boots and a belt of gold. The merchant warriors wore their usual black, with white collars and strange round caps. The simplicity of their costume was enough in itself to set the people of the City murmuring with dread and respect mingled with an undercurrent of hostility.

  When the princess’s ship reached the entrance to the harbor a great shout arose from the boats, the quays, the houses, the hill, and the little boys perched in the trees. It took some time for the ship to berth, and the attendant dignitaries got through the deflating interval as best they could. At last a long gangplank was set up between the ship and the shore, and Princess Heloise, preceded by her nurse, her astrologer, and a Negro page, disembarked. With never a glance for the merchant warriors, she sank in so deep and graceful a curtsy before the prince that the crowd went wild. The prince raised her up and folded her in his arms.