The only possibility was to play the barbarians off against one another. It might have succeeded, but it failed. After the murder of Thaumas, the only ones left to combat those troubled times were a handful of isolated priests. They plotted together; they managed here and there to buy the support of a few troops; they tried to establish, now in Onessa, now in Amphibolus, now in some lesser place, a semblance of authority that might bring back law and security to town, country, and highway, and restore peace to people’s minds. These miniature coups d’état sometimes met with a local success that kindled hearts and hope. But at once the rival groups of barbarians stationed in the other towns would bury their differences and unite against any sign of real power and all attempts to revive anything resembling imperial order. Thus there came fresh massacres and new divisions. All endeavors toward unification and peace ended in war and convulsions. Every man thought only of the immediate interest of his own tribe, his own group, himself. To foment the general disorder was to safeguard one’s own privileges. These privileges were illusory and soon were swept away by the violence of fire or sword. But who saw that far? Who thought of the common good? Who thought even of his own, beyond today or tomorrow? The public interest, the common future, political strategy—none of these existed any longer. All that was left were the short-term ambitions of careerists looking for jobs, moneylenders seeking quick profits, and leaders of factions blinded by their own paltry illusions.
Want and famine spread daily farther over town and country. As corn and milk, fish and olives became scarce and more expensive, everyone grew more fiercely determined to seize at all costs what he needed to feed himself and his dependents. To survive soon meant to steal and kill. As well as the troops of the barbarians and the emperor, as well as the militia and the warring tribes, there soon arose bands of brigands and adventurers who reminded the less ignorant of the Empire’s bloody beginnings and the fratricidal struggles of the Eagle and the Tiger. Now it was no longer a matter of Eagle and Tiger, but merely of eating. On the coasts the pirates reappeared; in the winter, the wolves. On the frontiers a fresh lot of barbarians from Scythia and Sogdiana, Arachosia and Sarmatia, Hyrcania and Gedrosia gathered in haste to pick up the crumbs of the spoils.
Blood. Fire. Rape. Murder. There was nothing left of the Empire. A few priests and philosophers hid themselves away to preserve the memory of past glories. They no longer aimed at spreading knowledge, wisdom, tolerance, liberty. Their only care was to try to save a few traces of them against some future resurrection. If no one knew how to lay out a garden, build a temple, write an ode, or minister to the gods, who would be able later to bring about the rebirth of culture, civilization, pleasure in living and learning? They cultivated but one flower—hope. They worked only for the children, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren who perhaps would one day know what a past was and what a future might be.
Disorder and want called forth war with all its evils. There arose here and there a whole series of petty yet horrific tyrants, incapable of great designs but only too capable of murder and intrigue. They killed for nothing—out of madness, spite, revenge, vanity. Astakia in Parapoli, Mardoch in Mezzopotamo, Arrhideus in the north, and Kanishka in the south—nothing survives of them but the memory of injustice, torture, and slaughter, unredeemed by one palace, one statue, one feast, one poem. Abroad, neither Sicily, Pomposa, nor the great-grandsons of the Great Khan of the Oïghurs, who had extended their power from the borders of Scythia to the Alph and the Orontes, let slip the opportunities offered by the breakup of the Empire. Foreign ports on the northwest sea were closed one after the other to ships from the City or Onessa. Caravans avoided Aquileus and Amphibolus—their approaches were too dangerous. Coins of the Empire were refused at Syracuse, Pomposa, Maguelonne, and Xanadu. Looked at askance inside the Empire, the imperial currency was not even legal tender abroad.
Language and culture were not slow to follow the deterioration in maritime activity, the currency, and the trade in luxury goods. Civilization is weak without wealth and power. Greek ebbed far back from the shores where it had been carried by commerce, literature, works of art, and general admiration and esteem. It lost ground even within the Empire, where its place was gradually taken by the dialects of the mercenaries and barbarians. The theaters, the schools of grammar, music, and philosophy, the observatories had all been forced to close down long ago. Weapons were still made, and in large quantities, but of rough quality. Circuses were more popular than ever, but they had become only pretexts for obscenity and riot. The gods were forgotten, the shrines deserted, priests humbled, poets and philosophers mocked and persecuted. The Empire no longer had need of scholars, architects, geometricians, or historians. It no longer needed even sailors and craftsmen. The ships rotted in the ports; the water dried up in canals and reservoirs; houses crumbled away in gardens laid waste; roads and highways were overgrown with weeds. It was as if the gods were taking vengeance on man at last for his scorn and neglect. A new eruption of Mount Kora-Kora not only rekindled memories and legends, but also buried in ashes more than fourteen villages and thousands of men, women, and children. There were earth tremors along the Amphyses, and one winter’s night a pack of starving wolves got into Aquileus, past the city walls, past the walls of the temples, and killed twenty-four priests as they slept. Bridges collapsed, statues of the gods broke out in sweat, and on the night of the autumnal equinox two pairs of albino twins were born, one in Evcharisto and one in Parapoli. A month later to the day, there was a three-sided battle halfway between the City and Cape Gildor, in which Scythians, Kirghizes, and Syrians engaged in a relatively small but utterly ruthless struggle that went on late into the night. The combatants were not many, but they practically wiped each other out with unexampled savagery. When the sun rose, three or four thousand corpses were strewn over the plain. All through the winter, internal struggles increased in the Empire. With the approach of spring, Astakia, Mardoch, and Kanishka tried once more to come to terms: they sealed their triple alliance with massacres and proscriptions. Sir Allan Carter-Bennett estimates the number of victims at one hundred fifty thousand at least: it was the worst slaughter since the banquet at Onessa, when Basil exterminated the supporters of the priests.
The priests that now remained no longer had any choice. Since, as before, they would be massacred whatever they did, they might as well fight. They set themselves at the head of a peasant uprising, which had only sticks and cudgels against arrows and spears. Toward the beginning of spring disaster struck again, and on the banks of the Nephta the priests’ makeshift army was annihilated by a coalition of barbarians. The Nephta’s waters flow red every spring, as we see in Théophile Gautier and Maurice Barrès. According to legend, this phenomenon goes back to that still unforgotten carnage.[1] What with murders, proscriptions, battles, and skirmishes, there was not a family in the Empire that did not mourn someone. But the blood already shed was not enough for the chiefs of the mercenaries and barbarians, who wished to strengthen their shaky authority with terror. All seers, soothsayers, and priests still left alive, their families and servants, all that remained in the Empire of memory or hope, were brought before summary courts for sham trials. Isidore was among the long lines of prisoners in chains waiting for the executioner under an already deadly sun.
It will be recalled that Isidore, who was Philocrates’ friend when they were both students in Aquileus, had entered the priesthood.[2] During the time that Philocrates was in Balkh with Fabrician, traveling the roads of Europe and Asia with Alexis, and witnessing in Alexandria the close of the first part of his pupil’s fabulous career, Isidore was experiencing from the inside the decline of the Empire, an appalled and helpless witness looking on from Aquileus, where he had lived all his life. After Basil’s death he came out of retirement to support, in fiery speeches and in his writings, the priests’ resistance to excesses not so much of power as of its absence. After the defeat on the Nephta he felt honor-bound to share the fate of all the rest before the
barbarian courts. Sentence was not pronounced for many days. When the verdict was made known, it disposed of everyone in a few minutes, sending between ten and twelve thousand people to their death simultaneously. Those found guilty had their throats cut. One in a hundred escaped to tell in the towns and villages the tale of one of the most savage acts of repression in the history of man. Isidore was one of the one hundred or one hundred fifty the victors spared, whether out of clemency or ferocity, to serve as examples to the terror-stricken people. Even the survivors went through the hands of the executioners, who put out their eyes with long, red-hot needles or white-hot sabres.[3]
Blind, isolated, abandoned, Isidore was as determined as ever to oppose murder and anarchy. He tried to organize the few dozen men who had not been broken down by death, torture, or fear. His martyred body radiated power, the power of unimpaired conviction and fervor. He believed, hoped, and acted through words, and through the flame that still burned within him. In his suffering and darkness he often remembered Philocrates who was far away from the Empire and had escaped the troubles of the times. He sent his old friend via a lively, gay lad of about twelve or fifteen, so brave he was unaware of danger, always full of fun and mockery, the sad news of the Empire’s agony, and the cry of anguish of a defenseless people. The boy, Jester, whose twin brother had been killed by the barbarians, managed to cross frontiers and track down Philocrates. When he found him he told him, laughing as was his custom, of the disasters, tortures, and massacres. Then Philocrates himself set out, accompanied by Jester, to scour the roads of Asia and find Alexis. Before the end of the winter, in a house far away in the East, two men and a boy dreamed of their future, and of the fate of an empire. They spoke in low voices. Whether the place was Samarkand or Bukhara, it was very cold outside.[4] Every so often they would throw a great log on the fire.
In a few hours Alexis had made his decision. It was the third time he had set forth: first from the forest, then from Alexandria, now from deepest Asia—and each time, suddenly, so many memories wiped out! He was able from one moment to the next to break all the links that bound him. Here, again, we see the staggering swiftness of choice and power to drop everything that were characteristic of him. But this was not due to insensitiveness or indifference. We have already referred to the disputed poem called “To the Yemenite,” and to the apocryphal one on the blinding of Isidore. Now here is a poem from the East that we know to be by Alexis himself, which tells how he wrenched himself away from the past, and of the journey through Persia on the way back to the Empire. It is known under the various titles, “Exile,” “Poem by Alexis,” and “Persian Poem.” It opens with the famous line:
Not for aye shall we dwell in beloved gold lands. . . .
It goes on to marvel at the poet’s adventures, all he has lived through and learned, for there are
many things on earth to see and to hear.
It refers sadly to the work of literary creation (apparently called “Rain”) that has had to be sacrificed to the exigencies of history:
The coolness running along the crest of language, the foam still on the lips of the poem,
And man, pressed on all sides by new ideas, yields to the surge, the great swell of the mind . . .
. . . O Rain, my poem that will never be written!
but it already foresees the fate of the warrior and statesman destined, among dangers and triumphs, to have
authority over all the insignia on earth.
As Sir Allan Carter-Bennett points out, Alexis here already presents himself as the heir not only of the Porphyries, but also of the priests and of the Venostae, whose symbol he invokes much as a Christian might invoke the Cross, a Moslem the Crescent, or a Russian Marxist the hammer and sickle:
Since yesterday two eagles hold the City in thrall.
He appeals at once to war and to the images of peace:
The City made bright with the flash of a thousand swords, the sacred flight o’er the altars, the sky once more reflected in the bowls of fountains.
He questions the future, with an allusion to his knowledge of many different religions:
Gods near and many, of what iron rose will you make our tomorrow?
And he turns once more to the present, and to the coming downfall of the barbarians and mercenaries
Whose masters made off one night at a whiff of the graveyard![5]
Those were the last lines written in exile. The “Persian Poem” is both a greeting to power, history, and the Empire, and a farewell to distant Asia. Its author is midway between past and future, still half poet and already half leader of men. Now, with Philocrates and Jester, he set out for the burning Empire and for new adventures. “The saint was dead,” writes Sir Allan Carter-Bennett, “and there could already be detected the hero, who was also, in due course, to die.”
Two men and a boy on horseback rode through steppes, deserts, palm groves, rivers, mountains, and valleys. It took them weeks—perhaps two or three months, according to Robert Weill-Pichon’s calculations—to reach the frontiers of the Empire. The sun was already hot when they came to places where the light and the vegetation, the shape of the fields, the outline of hills and dells, the horizon, and the color of the sky were at last familiar. It was about twenty years since Alexis had left the northern forests of the Empire. Deep down, he did not feel that he belonged to the Empire. He came from the marches and had the attitude characteristic of the border dweller or assimilated foreigner, whose liking and admiration for the dominating civilization is all the more keen, and sometimes all the more conscientious, because he does not quite belong to it.[6] Nonetheless, even if he was half a foreigner, since being torn from the forest he had lived in still more distant countries, with strange dialects and weird customs, surrounded by men and women different from himself in blood and race. And as he crossed the dried-up river that in theory marked one of the limits of the Empire, Alexis’s heart leaped within him as it had not done since his rides through the northeastern forests, since his initiation, and his passion for Vanessa. He stood still for a moment, looking around at the wild and arid hills stretching as far as the eye could see beneath a clear, almost cloudless sky. He stretched out his arms as if to measure the horizon and take immediate possession of all he surveyed. Then he knelt, scooped up in his hands the already sun-scorched soil of the Empire, mingled with sand and stones, and kissed it.
XIV
THE CONQUEST OF POWER
THE RIDE OF THE TWO MEN AND THE LAUGHING BOY across hostile territories, beckoned by the shades of the future, is one of the most fabulous adventures of all time. They were alone, strangers; before long, hunted. They had no help, no resources, no plan. They went at a venture, on the plea of a blind man, directed to him by fate, or history, or unconscious wisdom, or the gods.
Philocrates’ and Alexis’s first object was to find Isidore, and this they did without too much difficulty. The blind priest had taken refuge in a village at the foot of the mountains southwest of Aquileus, where there gathered secretly, after dark, those few, only a handful in all, who still nourished the hope of a rebellion. Now and then, disguised as beggars or peddlers, a priest who had survived the massacre, a former army captain, a poet or a philosopher, the owner of a fleet of ships or a herd of buffalo, a shepherd or a woodcutter would come to discuss wild projects with Isidore. Plans for killing Mardoch or Kanishka, for rallying an army of young men, for kidnapping the puppet emperor, for making an alliance with the new barbarians gathering impatiently on the borders, for appealing to Sicily or Pomposa or the descendants of the Great Khan—vague, fervent plans sketched out at night in the light of a meager flame, around a drop of rye brandy, only to disappear with the coming of morning. In all this fear and fatigue, one can imagine what a comfort Alexis’s coming must have been. Hope suddenly sprang to life again. After so many years of wandering and exile, Helen’s son had almost forgotten his imperial origins. But the others remembered for him, and greeted in Alexis the descendant of the Porphyries.
The Glory of the Empire Page 21