Alexis was a Porphyry only on his mother’s side. If not from his putative father, at least from the northern forests where he spent his childhood he derived the violence and the love of conquest that had been so absent from the pure race of the Porphyries. Arsaphes himself, who stood for the Porphyries in people’s memories, had only belonged by marriage to that illustrious but ineffective line. Alexis, like Arsaphes, was connected through feminine links to the race of the Tiger—one more omen of good fortune and victory. In their present woes, the survivors of the defeat on the Nephta had nothing else to pin their hopes on but signs and portents.
The truth about Alexis’s birth was a secret to everyone except Helen, Philocrates, probably Simeon, and perhaps a few others. It has been much debated whether even Alexis at this time regarded himself as the son of Fabrician the priest. But it seems rather unlikely that neither Philocrates nor Helen—or perhaps Simeon—should ever have spoken to him about it. Is not the answer to this question to be found in the conversation between mother and son that night, followed by the son’s exile far from the forest? What is certain—and it shows Alexis’s political maturity regardless of any preoccupation with his personal origins—is that he at once began to think and act less as a descendant of the Porphyries than as the unifier of the Empire. Sir Allan has expressed it well: “From the outset of his political career, Alexis is not so much the heir of the Tiger as the hero of the Empire. The banquet at Onessa is not so much avenged as forgotten. Alexis, flanked by Isidore and Philocrates, is nothing other than the Porphyries and Thaumas put together, the reconciliation in common misfortune of Onessa and the City, of the Eagle and the Tiger.” From the depths of suffering, and from the wild hopes of Isidore, was first born the idea of an Empire that would be for the good of all.
The meetings, plans, and moves that then followed are known to history as “Isidore’s Conspiracy.” Isidore was its soul, Philocrates its counselor. Alexis was soon to become, if not the leader, the linchpin. He brought to the plot the calm, the inner force—yet also, in a sense, the humanity—the patience, ardor, imagination, and power of decision of which we have already seen such striking proofs, both in pleasure and in adversity. The plot was organized with absolute deliberation, as if there were no shortage of time or of money—and, it must be admitted, as if human life were of no account. Many writers have stressed the number not only of enemies slain, but also of voluntary victims, abandoned hostages, and innocent people caught up in the mesh of war and reprisal. One has to bear in mind the origins of the Empire and all the dead of recent years, and relate the sacrifice to all that was at stake. With the coming of Isidore and Alexis, blood continued to be shed. But now the blood was different—it was transfigured with hope.
Isidore’s plan was to build up somehow a well-ordered secret force to fight disorder and oppression. Philocrates and Alexis adopted the main outline of this plan, but made it more flexible and practical. The whole conspiracy was based on cells ignorant of one another’s existence that received their orders secretly, recruited independently, and developed like ever-spreading tentacles, so that before long it would become very hard for the enemy to destroy the whole system at a blow. Men might be knocked out here and there, but the system as a whole would be unaffected. Watertight compartments, secret messengers, missing links—even, where necessary, suicides or summary executions—made it impossible to trace anything back to its source. And at the source they were building up a small but powerful fighting force, which was to be responsible for the decisive action, and which would be supported, when the time came, by a whole network of partisans, pawns stationed to come to their support all over the chessboard. Philocrates believed the conspirators should be all over the Empire, in town, country, ports, and taverns, “like fish in the water.”[1] Philocrates’ special responsibility was organizing post horses and seeking out allies. Alexis reserved for himself the command of a group of young men, selected individually, which he called the Cohort of Death. At first they numbered twenty or so, then fifty, then one hundred and fifty, then three hundred. As we shall see, the total soon rose to five hundred, and remained at that figure for some time. But in the end it reached two thousand, and it was these two thousand who were to win the Empire, against an army who outnumbered them by a hundred to one. After the victory they formed the guard known as the Twelve Thousand, the elite and ultimate standby of the imperial army.
Henceforward Alexis is a historical character. Whereas before the problem has been to find documentation on his love affair with Vanessa and his secret life in Asia, from this point on the historian is overwhelmed with source material. But by one of history’s paradoxes, Alexis’s mounting fame is at first hidden. He was just one fighter among many, and he did his best to remain anonymous. As Robert Weill-Pichon puts it, “he enters clandestinely into glory.” At first, it was a group of five or six people at most who knew his name. But despite his efforts his fame spread soon and rapidly. Then, in a characteristic gesture, Alexis reversed his attitude completely: instead of hiding his name, he proclaimed it and used it as a weapon. Alexis; Prince Porphyry; the Soldier of the Empire; the Beloved Bandit—these names were so many standards fluttering in the wind of revolt, spreading from one end of the Empire to the other the name of a mysterious, ubiquitous, legendary hero. People started to say he had been seen the same day at Mezzopotamo and Parapoli, at Onessa and Aquileus, that he flew through the air seeking out his enemies, and had made a pact with the eagles for them to carry him across the Empire. It is not impossible that two or three doubles, discovered by Philocrates, began to play, in widely separated areas, the part of the liberator.[2] According to a theory favored especially by English and Italian historians, the real Alexis was killed in the course of the struggle, and it is the memory of one of his doubles that we honor. It makes one think of the famous joke, “Shakespeare was not really Shakespeare but someone else who called himself Shakespeare.” There is no need to invent such an imaginary Alexis. If an unknown did take over from Alexis at some point, he had the same kind of genius as Alexis, in fact the very same—a very improbable hypothesis. In all events, alone or with the help of his doubles, Alexis inspired enough passion and enthusiasm for Mardoch and Kanishka to put a price on his head. Twice he was taken prisoner, and twice set free by his own partisans. He had a few minor successes and several defeats. But the situation was now such that even setbacks usually turned to his advantage. His popularity grew, and his reputation spread. When luck is against you, everything fails—even success. When luck is with you, everything succeeds.
After his task of organizing the struggle, but connected with it, Alexis had two immediate preoccupations: to see his mother again, and to visit Arsaphes’s tomb. His affection for his mother is sufficient explanation of his eagerness to find her. Helen, too, had been swept away in the upheaval of the Empire’s decline. But it should also be made clear that both Alexis’s desires here had also a political significance. Helen and Arsaphes both represented, for Alexis himself and especially for the people, his connection with the Porphyries. He wanted to affirm and exploit this connection.
The reader may recall the legend that grew up around Arsaphes’s tomb: the conqueror’s body was supposed to be put there by eagles and to come to life again in times of trouble.[3] The prophecies were not fulfilled to the letter. Seven times seventy-seven years had not yet gone by since Arsaphes’s mysterious death. But the tradition, ceaselessly repeated, distorted, and modified, left plenty of room for different interpretations, and Alexis soon saw the use to be made of popular legend reinforced by the desire to believe and the need to hope. A vague suggestion that Alexis and Arsaphes were one and the same, a widespread rumor that the Bactrian captain had appeared in a new incarnation, whispers that swelled and traveled like lightning from one end of the Empire to the other—all this could only help a plan that depended at once on secrecy and rumor, mystery and revelation. Alexis or a new Arsaphes—the conspirators had no objection to such an identification.
Alexis’s link was with Arsaphes much more than with Basil. Or if with Basil, too, it was, as we have seen, in his repeatedly expressed desire to reconcile the Eagle and the Tiger, with the Basil of Thaumas rather than the Basil of Gandolphus. In any case, Arsaphes remained the legendary hero whose memory still lived in the imagination of the people of the Empire.
The pilgrimage to Arsaphes’s tomb—a still empty tomb, it will be remembered—was an acute example of the sort of problem facing Alexis at the beginning. He had to act both in secret and in the broad light of day—in secret, because any open action would have been nipped in the bud by the barbarian armies; in the broad light of day, because the main object was to strike the popular imagination. It was not easy to combine the two, but Alexis succeeded. Over several days, small groups of his supporters trickled into the somnolent town of Aquileus disguised as pilgrims or invalids, sellers of oil or rye brandy. They took up their positions at crossroads, in the streets of the town, in the open courtyards of taverns and gaming houses. They drank, gambled, slept, waited. A few hours before Alexis’s arrival rumors began to circulate. It was whispered that the gods had taken pity on the Empire, that something was going to happen, that the fall of the tyrants was at hand. All eyes were turned upward hoping for thunderbolts or a chariot of fire. There was nothing in the sky but a blazing sun. Suddenly three eagles—released, no doubt, by Alexis’s supporters—flew slowly over the city. At the same moment, with a stir felt simultaneously in all the streets, squares, and markets and along the sacred way that led to the temples, Alexis, preceded by trumpeters and standard-bearer, appeared. A few moments and he was before the steps of the great temple, then, while the priests looked on in stupefaction, entering it to the acclamations of the crowd. He withdrew, quite alone, to Arsaphes’s tomb, and his meditation before the cenotaph in Aquileus, which later inspired a famous scene in Hugo’s Hernani, soon became one of the main themes of historical mythology in all the then known world. When he reappeared in public he was no longer just Alexis and the descendant of the Porphyries, but Arsaphes himself, brought back from the dead for the salvation of the Empire. The incident created an enormous stir—Arsaphes had risen from the dead, and Isidore and Philocrates exploited the effect with extraordinary skill. A dozen messengers were dispatched to the four corners of the Empire to spread the marvelous news and the idea of the rebirth of the Empire. Of the twelve, more than half perished, crucified, tortured, or decapitated by the mercenaries. But in all the peoples of the Empire hope was suddenly reborn. Arsaphes had risen from the dead![4]
Several documents inform us that the Cohort of Death had for some time consisted of five hundred thirty-nine men divided into seven battalions. Historians have pondered a good deal over this curious figure, which corresponds neither to the sacred traditions nor to the military usage of the age and of the Empire as we know them. Robert Weill-Pichon, following the researches of Sir Allan Carter-Bennett, seems finally to have discovered the key to the enigma. Five hundred thirty-nine divided by seven is seventy-seven. So seven times seventy-seven was both the number of men in the Cohort in its finest hour, and the number of years that legend said were to elapse before the resurrection of Arsaphes. The prophecy did not come true in every detail, but this was a sort of magical homage made to it to win over fate, victory, and the gods.
The tyrants, mercenaries, and barbarians did not take long to learn that an enemy worthy of them had come into being, and a fight to the death began between them and Alexis. The alliance between Kanishka and Mardoch was strengthened, and Astakia was also brought into it. A manhunt was set on foot all over the Empire. Alexis, not content just to elude it with insolent ease, provoked his enemies and covered them with ridicule and humiliation. It was as if their efforts only amused him, and he turned to his own advantage their ineffectual power. And through the enemy detachments, despite danger and spies, he went to see his mother.
The meeting between Helen and her outlawed son was a scene full of emotion and color. Historians never tire of giving more or less fanciful accounts of it, poets have sung it, painters have recreated it in justly famous pictures.[5] The most famous representation of all is without a doubt the beautiful fresco by Piero della Francesca in the great hall of the municipal palace at Ascoli Piceno in central Italy. It shows Helen, in a flowing blue robe, opening her arms to raise up her son who has prostrated himself at her feet.[6] The fresco by Il Sodoma in the Farnesina in Rome[7] illustrates the same event in a very different style. The scene was destined to become one of the main subjects of Western art, and countless other works have created around it a wonderful frieze of colors and forms. But let us try first to discover, beneath the embroidery of legend, the perhaps more modest but still astonishing truth of the historical events, and then to describe briefly some of their most brilliant illustrations by pen or brush.
Helen had been separated from Alexis for some twenty years. She had had news of him, chiefly through Philocrates, until the time of his flight from Alexandria. After that there had been silence, and she like everyone else may have, probably must have, thought he was dead. But something inside her constantly clung, in spite of the evidence, to the hope that the child whose birth and whole existence had cost her so many tears would return. She never left the forests of the northeast. She lived there alone, abandoned by Simeon as well as by Alexis. She kept up a fairly regular correspondence with Philocrates and Isidore—she felt an affectionate friendship for both, mingled in the case of Philocrates with amused astonishment at his resourcefulness, and in the case of Isidore with admiration and respect. For Alexis, far away and probably lost to her forever, she always felt the passionate tenderness that began in Balkh, in the days and nights whose horror and delight were graven eternally in her flesh and in her heart. Absence could not alter this feeling, obstinate though silent. Simeon was enraged by it, and it was one more factor that drove the son of Roderick and Helen, dedicated to duplicity and perhaps to treason, into the camp of such as Mardoch and Arrhideus. Sir Allan Carter-Bennett remarks, perhaps not entirely without bias, that “Ambiguity and guile lay all with the legitimate son, fidelity and rectitude all with the bastard.” The rumors circulating through the Empire had not failed to reach Helen’s ears, but she had given them little attention and no credence. Justus Dion relates that she was one of those who believed in the existence of the doubles—to be precise, she believed that the doubles existed, but not their model. She thought they had usurped Alexis’s name, reputation, and physical appearance, but that Alexis himself, far away and perhaps dead, had nothing to do with the activities rumor traced back to him. She who had never been able to bring herself to admit her son was dead began to doubt at the very moment when the repercussions of his return were rousing all the Empire. She felt a distant and slightly jealous sympathy for the doubles, whom she called “my children” or “my twins,” but the mother’s heart did not recognize the son in the already legendary adventures dinned into her ears by eager chambermaids and squires whose eyes shone with curiosity and excitement.
Justus Dion’s account of the meeting between Helen and Alexis has been the point of departure for all the historians of the Empire, and still retains its freshness and naïve charm. It tells of how Helen was taking her usual evening walk in the forest, by a pool where she used to feed a pair of swans and their brood. She was accompanied by a few faithful retainers who had never left her. The sun was setting, and the little party was about to return, when the sound of galloping hoofs was heard in the distance. It was two horsemen; they were just visible through the leaves and branches. They rode up, halted, and the younger of the two—who in Piero della Francesca’s fresco wears a blue page’s costume and the famous little cap of yellow silk that so fascinated Proust and the thought of which haunted the dying Bergotte—approached Helen and knelt before her. He was a young lad with rosy cheeks and a laughing air—the faithful Jester.
In this world of culture and history with all its parallels between events and words, forms and color
s, fiction and reality, the famous passage on the death of Bergotte in À la Recherche du temps perdu is so closely linked to the artistic heritage of Alexis and Helen and to Piero della Francesca’s picture of their meeting in the northern forest that the reader who has been the witness of their vicissitudes will no doubt want to refer to it. Here, for his convenience, are the relevant lines from toward the end of the first half of Proust’s La Prisonnière:
“. . . one of the critics having written somewhere that in Piero della Francesca’s Meeting Between Helen and Alexis, a fresco that he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little cap of yellow silk (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte set out for Ascoli Piceno and went to the municipal palace. At the first few steps that he had to climb he was overcome by giddiness. He passed in front of several pictures and was struck by the stiffness and futility of so artificial a school, nothing of which equaled the fresh air and sunshine of a Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Piero della Francesca which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he remarked for the first time Alexis’s little page in blue, that the ground was pink, and finally the precious substance of the little cap of yellow silk. ‘That is how I ought to have written,’ he said. ‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint, made my language exquisite in itself, like this little cap of yellow silk.’ Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial balance there appeared to him, upon one of its scales, his own life, while the other contained the little cap of silk so beautifully painted in yellow. . . . He repeated to himself : ‘Little cap of yellow silk with a blue suit, little cap of yellow silk.’ While doing so he sank down upon a circular divan. He was dead.”[8]
The Glory of the Empire Page 22