The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  It is nevertheless true that up to the coming of Ingeburgh, which almost coincided with Thaumas’s return from his eastern travels, Basil conducted a series of successful wars against Aquileus, against the barbarians, and against the cruel pirates who were just beginning their maraudings. These hostilities were interspersed, in accordance with Basil’s natural genius, with often tortuous negotiations, lengthy preparations, violent intrigues, and underhanded subterranean dealings. Then, after he had married Ingeburgh and Thaumas was installed in highest office, Basil’s first preoccupation became the organization of the Empire. The lame emperor now pursued for peaceful purposes the works Arsaphes had undertaken for military ends. Water, roads, the development of crafts and skills, provincial government, the organization of feasts and religious worship—nothing escaped his vigilance or his prodigious energy. Thaumas played the part, in fact, of his prime minister. It was impossible for Gandolphus not to take offense, and he often contrasted the length of his own fidelity and devotion, dating from the now distant time when the emperor was still only prince of Onessa, against the recent support, the fierce independence, and the violent and haughty character of the new high priest of the Empire. For by a strange paradox the belligerent Gandolphus was compliant and crafty in manner, while Thaumas, always bent on peace, was intransigent and abrupt, especially with Gandolphus. But to tell the truth, it is impossible to compare the two. From the very beginning Thaumas distinguished himself and rose to importance through the loftiness of his views and the nobility of his character, while Gandolphus was the bad angel, the doer of dirty work. As Justus Dion cruelly observed, “Nature for once showed herself equitable and straightforward, and set physical beauty and greatness of mind on one side, and on the other, a mean appearance and the heart of a flunky.” We know little of what the high priest thought of Gandolphus. Thaumas’s writings and official utterances are silent on the subject, except on the occasion of the battle of Amphibolus. On the other hand, we have plenty of proof of Gandolphus’s hatred for the man who had supplanted him with the emperor. And when the day came that offered the possibility of revenge, he welcomed it with joy. The old counselor had been too long and too resentfully humiliated by the other’s greatness not to seize the occasion with both hands.

  The rivalry between Thaumas and Gandolphus is inseparable from the history of the Empire itself toward the end of Basil’s reign. So long as Ingeburgh was there to keep the peace, the struggle only smoldered; but as soon as she was dead, open conflict broke out. Even before her death there were the first symptoms of an opposition between the two men that went further than mere antipathy or secret hostility. This was on the occasion of the last war against the pirates. A year or two before the empress’s death, when the Empire had been enjoying a somewhat less precarious peace than before, there arose a danger not new in kind, but unprecedented in the scope it now assumed. The inhabitants of the coast had always been subject to raids imperilling their peace and prosperity. Once, it had been the fighting between Onessa and the City; then, the various invasions by the Pomposan army. Now they were continually harried by pirates who grew ever more bold, sometimes coming from far away to pillage ports and settlements. These pirates were what might be called marine nomads, with no fixed home, who might spend weeks and weeks at sea before putting in to land for a few months somewhere to repair their ships and replenish their stocks of food and wine. They came from Carthage, Syria, Ireland, the Gulf of Oman, and the Coromandel and Malabar coasts. Some historians maintain that they had crossed the Atlantic even, and that they originally came from the shores of the Caribbean or Greenland. They were fearless sailors and fighters, almost as formidable on land as at sea. Neither Pomposa nor Sicily had ever succeeded in subduing them, and the decline of the City and the Empire’s turning inward on itself had left them masters of the seas and, to a certain extent, of the coasts as well.

  Single attacks evolved into a kind of outright warfare with pitched battles that, just before Ingeburgh’s death, reached the proportions of actual invasion. The whole southwest part of the Empire was vulnerable, and the inhabitants sent message after message imploring help from the City, Onessa, and Aquileus. Basil’s first step was to prevent the pirates from penetrating to the interior; and in less than six months the scattered groups of pillagers, some of whom had gotten as far as the upper valley of the Nephta, were all exterminated. But the emperor soon realized that despite this success inland the pirates’ pressure on the coast was as remorseless as ever, and that to rid himself of them he would have to strike them at the heart of their power—in other words, at sea. Thanks partly to the Pomposan and Sicilian alliances, he was able to build up a strong navy in less than two years. And it was on the very day of Ingeburgh’s funeral that a breathless messenger brought the emperor the news of a decisive victory over the pirates’ galleys off Cape Pantama.

  As soon as the empress was dead the enmity between Thaumas and Gandolphus came out into the open. Thaumas urged Basil to offer the pirates peace and bring them virtually under the protection of the Empire. Gandolphus wanted them to be pursued and wiped out. For a few days the emperor hesitated, but in the end Thaumas carried the day. Gandolphus never forgave him. The matter was more important than may at first appear. In a sense it was a confrontation between two conceptions of the Empire. Gandolphus’s would close the Empire, basing it on Onessa’s domination of the territories conquered and grouped together after the victory over Aquileus. Thaumas’s conception would open the Empire to all kinds of people and ways of life, in a kind of vast coexistence under the same laws and the same ruler. This is, in fact, the same problem and the same choice as had presented themselves to Basil at the beginning: was the Empire to be based on Onessa’s supremacy over her crushed rivals or to be the birth of a new idea, a community of different races and nations? Despite his harshness and his bloodthirsty methods, the emperor had not yet really decided between the two alternatives, and the Empire might still have developed in either direction. So Thaumas’s influence seems to have been crucial, and his example was to have incalculable consequences later for the Empire and for Alexis.

  A similar situation was to arise again at the very end of Basil’s reign, but this time on land, and with much more tragic results. All the time the pirates were attacking in the west, the barbarians continued to exercise pressure on the vague frontiers which ran through the deserts and forests in the east. As we have seen, as early as Arsaphes’s reign there had been the beginnings of an interaction both subtle and violent between the barbarians within, who served the City and Aquileus, and the barbarians without, eager to share in the pleasures and powers belonging to what was to become the Empire. As the years went by, an ever-increasing number of barbarians infiltrated, and were finally absorbed into, the Empire. But there was always a new and more formidable wave ready to batter at the frontiers. To the invaders the frontiers seemed like some mirage of happiness and prosperity, where gold, wine, and girls were there for the taking. For years Thaumas and Gandolphus had been preparing for the crisis, Gandolphus by continually strengthening the army and its auxiliary services, Thaumas by using the power and prestige of the church and its ministers to weave a subtle but honorable web of expanding trade and religious and political relations with the barbarians. Between Aquileus and the barbarians there was a continual exchange of goods and persons, and, as in the time of Arsaphes, countless caravans began to cross mountains and deserts, following the routes of jade, amber, spices, and silk.

  The situation in the area was suddenly transformed by far-off events whose repercussions finally spread to the borders of the Empire. These events were the thrusts made by the Ainus and the Khmers respectively toward China and India.[1] Few collective events have played a more important role in history. The terrified victims, fleeing before the invaders and rendered ruthless by necessity, soon became in their turn the scourge of their neighbors. A flood of migrations, in which the fear of one group was transformed relentlessly into the terror of another,
began to break in wave after wave over vast areas. A large part of the world’s population began to move across the steppes and the high plateaus, together with its sheep and cattle and horses, its carts and its tents of felt. In Justus Dion’s image: “The weight of men fleeing made the earth tremble.” Irresistible pressure was brought to bear on the portals of the Empire by the last to be stricken, endeavoring to be the first to be saved. For all the multitudes caught up in this military vortex, the Empire was at once forbidden territory and promised land, representing prosperity as well as safety and peace. But those who already enjoyed these treasures had no intention of sharing them with starving refugees, made dangerous by despair. Both those who came and those already there were afraid. All saw that the road to peace must lie through war.

  Gandolphus prepared for war, and Thaumas, more farsighted, prepared for peace. It was as obvious to Thaumas as to everyone else that armed conflict was inevitable. But he believed that with such enormous forces involved—Justus Dion speaks, with apparent justification, of three or four million men—battles, even successful ones, could settle nothing. For Thaumas, as for Arsaphes before and Alexis after him, the only problem, the only solution, was the incorporation of the barbarians into the Empire—vanquished if possible, but in any case reconciled with the wealth, peace, and order their terrified millions sought to gain by disorder and violence. Gandolphus’s one idea, on the other hand, was to fight and to exterminate the barbarians.

  After more attacks, lulls, skirmishes, and intermittent parleys than can be gone into in detail, one of the bloodiest battles in history took place in the late autumn on the plain south of Amphibolus. Thaumas had never given up negotiating with the barbarian leaders, and Gandolphus had never given up representing this to Basil as treason in the height of battle. At first the imperial army withstood the barbarians’ onslaught; then they drove them off in disorder and passed to the attack. Basil’s forces were far superior to the enemy’s in discipline and equipment, and by midday it seemed as if the battle was over. It was at this point that Basil’s troops, established on a hilltop, saw a sea of barbarian reinforcements sweeping toward them over the plain. In a second the news spread through the ranks that five, seven, eight hundred thousand, perhaps a million men of the most savage appearance, yelling war cries already faintly audible in the distance, were about to hurl themselves into the fray. There was a moment’s confusion, and this was the moment Thaumas chose to suggest that Basil should meet the barbarian leaders, who were ready to negotiate.

  This was just what Gandolphus had been dreading. He was a clever and cunning strategist, and had soon realized that the tide of battle was turning. This meant it was necessary to regroup and rally the men, prepare new moves and attacks, anything rather than negotiate. The army had to take a breather, not lay down its arms. It was then that Gandolphus had an idea which was to have sweeping consequences for the history of the Empire.

  For a long while the relations between the barbarians within and those without, and more generally between the Empire itself and its nearest neighbors, had exposed the religious unity that revealed itself ever more clearly as characteristic of the period. No one either in the Empire or outside it contested the religious pre-eminence of Aquileus. Even when pressure by the barbarians was at its height, thousands of pilgrims and sick people still flocked to the shrines at Amphibolus, Parapoli, Mezzopotamo, and above all Aquileus. By his policy of rapprochement with the barbarians Thaumas intended not only to serve the Empire but also to fulfill his role as spiritual leader of both sides. Even those fighting against him recognized his authority, and revered him as the guardian of myths in which all alike believed. This is a difficult concept for the modern mind to grasp, conditioned as it is by national and economic conflicts in which clearly distinguished interests are ranged one against another. We must cultivate a kind of intellectual empathy in order to understand those equivocal conflicts in which the adversaries, though aiming at mutual destruction perhaps even more determinedly than enemies do today, both wished to share a supreme good whose value neither side denied.

  Religion was mixed up, in a way incomprehensible to us, in certain rituals that, no matter what sphere of life they belonged to, literally could not be disobeyed. It was unthinkable not to observe them, whether in sport, marriage, or trade, or in any aspect of economic, social, cultural, or everyday life. In a no longer exclusively religious context we probably still obey similar imperatives today, though they are so taken for granted we are not even conscious of them. And so it was with the Empire and with the barbarians who wished to become part of it. Religion was so closely bound up with life and custom it was indistinguishable from them.

  Feasting and war were the two spheres most deeply impregnated by religion: feasting, war, and worship were but three different aspects of a single reality. All were, therefore, dominated by a number of sacred rituals also observed by the barbarians—or at least by those in direct contact with the peoples of the Empire. Things were to be very different with the other barbarians who emerged later from the depths of Asia. All hostilities, for example, came to a halt if snow began to fall on the battlefield, or if three eagles in succession flew over the opposing armies. And if a fox happened to pass between the two camps, the sun must rise twice before fighting could begin again. On this occasion the wily Gandolphus, who stuck at nothing and whose only rule was to succeed, had, as usual, brought along a heavily guarded chariot that was kept well out of sight. It held half a dozen foxes in cages. At the very moment when discouragement had seized the imperial army and Thaumas was trying to arrange for Basil to meet the barbarian leaders, Gandolphus had the foxes secretly released by his trusty henchmen. No sooner did the emperor and the enemy generals catch sight of the foxes streaking between the two armies than they gave orders for all activity to be brought to a standstill. Thaumas, informed by his spies, soon saw through the trick. The suspension of the fighting did not really mean there was to be negotiation and peace; it was only to provide a lull before fresh attacks. Thaumas hastened to Basil, told him of Gandolphus’s deceit, and begged him to make use of the coming hours to restore peace while there was yet time. But Gandolphus was there before him, reporting on the fresh reserves he had called up from all the camps and fortresses between Amphibolus and Aquileus; within twenty-four hours nearly one hundred and fifty thousand reinforcements would arrive ready to go into action, and the imperial army’s inferior numbers would be amply compensated for by its tactical superiority. A violent dispute broke out between Thaumas and Gandolphus. Basil took Gandolphus’s side, and gave orders halting both the fighting and the preparations for a meeting with the enemy. Gandolphus had at last won the revenge he had been waiting for ever since the affair of the pirates. The reinforcements arrived as planned by the following sunset. By dawn on the third day the emperor had been hit by an arrow and lost an eye, but the barbarians had been cut to pieces.

  Such was the origin of the phrase now found in almost every language, “to let loose the fox of Amphibolus,” which has come to mean merely to slide out of something, or, more precisely, to use underhanded means to escape from a difficult situation, and, by extension, to betray or desert a cause, to leave the weak and innocent to their fate. Time and circumstance have gradually turned the fox of Amphibolus into a symbol of cowardice and indifference. Such are the paradoxes of living language that the phrase has come to refer not to the power of guile but to that of baseness or even impotence. Napoleon still used the expression in its proper sense when he suggested it to Las Cases for his St. Helena Memoirs: “The armory of the Prince of Beneventum must have included the fox of Amphibolus.” But it was unfortunately both a misapplication of the term and a vain hope when, after Munich, on a front page still usually devoted to personal advertisements, the Times printed an eight-column headline that read, “The Fox of Amphibolus Again.”