We still do not know to what extent men like Alexis, Isidore, and Bruince, and such writers as Justus Dion and Valerius, shared these beliefs. Alexis had himself crowned by the priests, spiritual head of the hierarchy. Isidore and Bruince were priests themselves. But the religion of the Empire, with its multiplicity of gods and spirits, its countless legends, and its triple superstition of sun, eagle, and oak, had remained very primitive. It is hard to see how a mind as universal as Alexis’s, initiate of a sun worship far removed from the crude polytheism of the priests of Aquileus and familiar with the mysticisms of Asia that represented one of the highest peaks of human thought, could have accommodated itself to beliefs already disparaged by the more advanced thinkers of the time. We know the reply of Feuerbach and the Marxists: Alexis believed in nothing but man; he did not even believe in sun worship, and his apparent acquiescence in the ritual and superstitions of the priests was pure politics. But not all historians of religion are so sweeping. Among the tendencies of current research, some, inspired by structuralism and such writers as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault, tell us we should not impose the values and criteria of our own culture on other cultures, which are all of equal dignity though organized differently. At that rate, the fundamental meaning of Alexis’s religion would remain, if not inaccessible to us, at least very obscure. Others see each stage of history and religious thought as part of a continual growth toward maturity, the progress of morality and conscience toward an ever greater richness and universality. For example, Teilhard de Chardin writes: “Between the creative alpha and the christic omega are strung all the letters of the mystic alphabet. On the long road from the mineral to the society of the divine universal, the halts are called Abraham and Plato, Ikhnaton and Alexis, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.” And in an article that aroused the widest interest,[8] another Jesuit makes room for Alexis, together with Tamerlane, Peter the Great, and Lenin, among the helmeted prophets who bear, on ax, spear, or submachine gun, God’s message to the peoples of their time.
We have said enough to demonstrate how impossible it is to speak of Alexis without attempting, as we have tried to do, to describe his predecessors, particularly Basil and Arsaphes, and even to give a brief account of what we have called “the Empire before the Empire.” In his Short History of the Empire Under Alexis for the Use of Milords of Trévoux*, Voltaire points out quite correctly that the idea of Alexis waking up one day and deciding to create everything in the Empire cannot be entertained. And he stresses the importance of the first golden age and the role played by Arsaphes and Basil. Chamfort, commenting on this passage in Voltaire, says: “Everything has its awaited moment of maturity. Happy the man who arrives, like Alexis, at the same time as the moment of maturity!”[9] Alexis appears to be the perfect embodiment of two opposite theories: that of the man of destiny, and that of the predominating influence of environment, cultural background, and the propitious moment. That Alexis was extraordinary there can be no doubt. But it is equally certain that he was served by circumstances of which he, in his turn, was the outstanding instrument. Sir Allan Carter-Bennett summarizes it very well: “Alexis is the conjunction of a man, a people, an age, and a civilization.” The City was the symbol of that man, that people, that age, and that civilization. It was the incarnation of the Empire, and still bears witness today to Alexis’s glory.
In Alexis’s time the City had two centers. Its origin lay in trade, and one of the centers was the port. It had just replaced Aquileus as the capital of the Empire, and the other center, which contained the temples and the Emperor’s palace, was called the “imperial city,” or sometimes the “sacred precinct” or “holy city.” To outdo in splendor the great temple at Aquileus, Alexis had called upon the greatest architects of his time. He summoned them from Greece, Egypt, Syria, and Samarkand, and under the supervision of two of the most famous among them, Sostratus and Metagenes, there had risen from the earth one of the most magnificent architectural ensembles of all time. Unfortunately all that remains today are ruins which convey little to the uninstructed traveler. But contemporary chronicles, the accounts given by ambassadors and travelers, and recent excavations by the French School of the City and the American and Italian archeological missions combine to give a fairly accurate idea of how the City, its temples, and its port must once have appeared to a visitor.[10]
The port was entirely rebuilt by Alexis. As Petrarch says in his Latin poem on the Empire, it was “Omnium orbis terrae classium capax” (capable of sheltering all the fleets on Earth) and remained for a long time the largest in the known world. Ships passed into it under a huge chryselephantine allegorical representation of the sun, which gave rise by contamination to the legend of the Colossus of Rhodes. In the third century B.C. Rhodes did have the famous giant statue that was counted as one of the seven wonders of the world, but, contrary to what the fable and the colored pictures of the souvenir merchants would have us believe, ships did not pass between its legs: it was at the entrance to the harbor of the City that galleys and triremes passed majestically, propelled by sail or oars, under the triumphal arch of the sun. The harbor itself was bordered with colonnades, warehouses, and markets, of which no trace remains. Only the northwest portico has been reconstructed by the Americans, under the name of Bruince’s Portico; the documents on which the work was based are now in the Library of Congress. But of course this reconstruction is quite modern, and it has been the object of much criticism by specialists. Beyond the port a sacred way led to the imperial city; it was lined with statues said to have produced melodious sounds when touched by the sun, the morning dew, or the wind. At night the port and the sacred way were lit up with torches. The glow could be seen miles out to sea, heralding the splendors of the City to sailors making for the land. The fantastic imagination of Monsu Desiderio affords us a glimpse of this vision, amidst darkness and decay, in the famous picture in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. The imperial city, on slightly higher ground, overlooked the port. It was surrounded by ramparts within which lay temples and palaces in profusion with gardens in between. The two most striking buildings were the great temple of the sun and the Emperor’s palace. They have been considered the masterpieces of world architecture by Bramante, the three Sangalli, Vasari, Palladio, Ledoux, Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier.
The vastness and majesty of the plan of the great temple give a somewhat extravagant impression, due no doubt to a mixture of influences, which made it impossible always to avoid the errors of taste involved in eclecticism and the monumental style. But the overall harmony together with the delicacy of the detail, the profusion of scenes in bas-relief, the elegance of capitals in which fabulous beasts from Persia and the East alternate with the geometrical simplicity of Greek motifs, the union of grandeur and gracefulness, rigor and imagination—all these, Justus Dion says, “evoked cries of wonder from astonished strangers.” The subtlety of the general conception extended to details that have become famous in the history of architecture. These include a slight curvature in the masonry to facilitate drainage and to counteract the rigidity and starkness of perfectly straight lines; the inward slope of the vertical axis to avoid bulging and produce a pyramidal shape giving better resistance to earth tremors; and the placing of slightly thicker columns at the corners to avoid the optical illusion by which columns uniform with the rest would look thinner because of being isolated against the sky.
The Emperor’s palace was something entirely new in the architecture of its time. It was a huge edifice in the form of a pentagon, more like a medieval castle than a classical temple, and built entirely of brick and pink and green marble, with roofs of rare woods and pillared campaniles where priests trained in music and astronomy sounded, at various hours of the day and night, bells of bronze and silver brought from China and India. From the vast courtyard, said to be quite big enough to hold the Cohort of Twelve Thousand, a monumental staircase of Parian marble, lined with giants and fabulous beasts, led up to the throne room, where councils
were held and where the emperor received high priests, generals, and foreign ambassadors. The view from the windows of the palace extended over the port and the City, part of the coast to the west, and to the east the valley of the Amphyses. Between the palace and the great temple lay a park planted with tall trees, meadows full of flowers, and fountains where water diverted from the Amphyses spouted from the mouths of Tritons and mermaids. Along the paths, in the gardens, inside the buildings, and above all in the Emperor’s palace and the great temple of the sun, were statues, sculptured groups in pink stone or marble, high reliefs depicting work in the fields, myths, sieges, tiger or boar hunts. All were masterpieces; all, alas, are scattered, mutilated beyond repair, destroyed by nature, soldiers, scholars, and by time. A few undistinguished copies, quite unworthy of the originals, can still be seen in the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, in the museums at Munich and Dresden, and especially in the fine Curators’ Palace in the Capitol Square in Rome. Here is the most famous of all these reproductions, Man Shooting an Arrow, which was much admired by Winckelmann, Goethe, and Thorvaldsen. But all these copies give but a poor idea of that marvelous sculpture in which crudest realism mingled with wildest fantasy, and of which Focillon wrote: “It is the dream of the Creator before the creation, and it is God looking at all his creatures. . . . Both together, and in the same art, it is an encyclopedia of the imaginary and an encyclopedia of the real.”[11] The paintings could not have been inferior to the architecture and sculpture, but it is difficult to know what it was like: canvases, paintings on wood, frescoes, all without exception have disappeared.[12]
Painting is not the only art in the Empire of which we know nothing. We are almost completely ignorant, too, of its music, songs, and dances. The mind reels at the depths of our ignorance of a civilization as brilliant as that of the Empire. Innumerable trustworthy accounts tell us of its splendor, and yet we often seem to be confronted with a void. It is discouraging—it is as if that rich and powerful Empire had disappeared without trace. How can one help meditating, then, on the fragile destiny of all cultures? Valéry was thinking of the Empire when he wrote the famous phrase that sounds like a knell for all history, including our own: “We civilizations know now that we are mortal.”
The modern traveler arriving by boat at the site of the City does not experience any shock like that produced by the savage grandeur of Onessa’s shores. But the sea is incomparably clear, and the hills, still green, stoop gently toward the jagged coast and what used to be the port. It was the sight of the bay, once lined with the glories of the City, that inspired one of Walt Whitman’s finest poems:
O to have been brought up on bays, lagoons, creeks, or along the coast . . .
The whole landscape has a unique charm, limpid and melancholy. Imagination sweeps both mind and heart into almost painful reverie, reconstructing, on the heights, the imperial city with its palace and its temples; bringing back to life the processions of priests and maidens singing hymns and waving palms and rose laurels all along the sacred way; filling with merchant ships, with heavy galleys, with triremes, with boats of all colors and sizes the pretty deserted cove that used to be the port. Here, on these now forgotten shores, which in their silence seem so far away from it all to tourists fleeing the noise and bustle of our metropolises, there once arose what for more than three centuries was the capital of the civilized world. The mind must conjure up the hum of activity, the prosperity, the luxury that then prevailed where now there is no stir save the swift flight of a goat, the roar of the waves on the beach, or the wind blowing in from the sea. Between this beach and those rocks, sailors, carpenters, potters, armorers, dyers, fullers, oil merchants, and bewildered shepherds down from the mountains used to rub shoulders with barbarian captains, priests, solemn magistrates, ambassadors borne in litters, and high palace officials accompanied by their guard. A sea bird flies slowly overhead; dusk is about to fall. You would swear all that never existed, that the fate of the world was never decided on those hills. How swiftly things fall from the heights of glory to the depths of oblivion! It was when visiting these haunts of terrifying silence that Chateaubriand, the Book of Ecclesiastes in his hand and borrowing from Bossuet, uttered the words that delighted Natalie de Noailles, and that many since have admired for their strength and simplicity: “We shall all die.”
We shall all die. But we shall not die altogether. Something will be left behind us like a trail of light to transmit to succeeding generations all that is great in work and in the imagination. And more than crumbling palaces and mutilated statues, what shines forever in men’s memories are the efforts of the mind to lift itself above everyday existence by laughter, terror, metaphysical thought, the beauty of the word, and the brilliance of ideas. By a strange paradox, iron and marble have been worn away by time; the jetties, wharves, and quays of the port have been flung into the sea or destroyed by fire; the temples and palaces of the imperial city have crumbled to dust. What remains, defying the ages, is what is most fragile, most intangible, barely existing in the form of murmurs, confidences, meditations, reveries: verses, speech, the words of poets and historians. The reader may recall the luster that philosophy and the theater had in the first golden age of the City. The Empire of Alexis seemed suddenly to remember all this vanished past. Comedy, tragedy, literature, art—the Empire, and above all the City, made them flower again and wore them to perfection.
Here, again, Alexis was well served by the age and by men. It was a time when talent and genius seemed to compete with and fertilize one another. But Alexis singled them out, honored them, helped them. He surrounded himself with poets as well as generals, and between wars would listen to readings from The Onessiad, or of Valerius’s great poems on The Creation of the World and The Birth of the Empire (in the latter the poet goes so far as to refer, very discreetly it is true, to the affair between Alexis and Vanessa). In his palace in the City, Alexis attended performances of the tragedies of Polyphilus and Manalchas: Arsaphes and Heloise, The Barbarians, The Tomb of Arsaphes, The Eagle and the Tiger, Basil the Great, The Banquet at Onessa, The Meaning of Death, The Four Before the Golden City, The Glory of Balamir. With such lofty examples, writing soon became a fashion, an ambition, an honor, and the days were far away when literature had been despised. The Emperor Basil had sung coarse songs before ambassadors from foreign countries. Now refinement and good taste had conquered the court and the Empire. Various works on the literature of the Empire that differ in other things agree in this: that it was not uncommon, in great families, for the eldest son to adopt a military career, the second son to become a priest, and the youngest to go in for letters or philosophy. The Emperor encouraged them all. He remembered he himself had been a poet before becoming a military and political leader, and literature was still, in his eyes, one of the noblest of callings. He even admitted criticism, satire, including outright attacks, as long as their inspiration and form were worthy of respect. A very modern sense of the need for balanced values told him that freedom of thought makes countries great, and that by according honor to literature the Empire would add to its own another, reflected glory.
In Alexis’s own entourage the history of his reign was recounted with minuteness, naïveté, and passion in the Histories and Chronicles of one of the greatest writers of all time, thanks to whom the people, manners, and happenings of his age live still before our eyes and to whom all succeeding historians of the Empire owe a debt of admiration and, in one way or another, of gratitude: he was called Justus Dion. He gives us a mass of colorful and lively information on the Empire at the time of Alexis and before. It is only natural we should want to know something about the mysterious Justus Dion. The historian gives us a history of the Emperor, and what we need now is a history of the historian. Who was Justus Dion? The question has been asked more insistently in the last couple of centuries, with the progress of historical criticism. Many still accept the traditional answer which, for a long while, was accepted by everyone—Justus Dion wa
s a historian more or less contemporary with Alexis, who lived at the Emperor’s court, and of whom the most important thing we know is that Alexis had complete confidence in him. But some people maintain nowadays that Justus Dion never existed. Of course, no one could deny the existence of the Histories and the Chronicles, the source of all we know about the Empire and the Emperor, to which such eminent yet different historians as Sir Allan Carter-Bennett, Robert Weill-Pichon, and Fulgence Tapir owe almost everything. What is in question is Justus Dion’s personal existence and what he was like. As to this there have been the boldest hypotheses. According to Abel Lefranc, Justus Dion is none other than Valerius. For others, Justus Dion is a pseudonym for Bruince. But recent studies, including those of Jorge Luis Borges, Pauline Réage, and Roger Caillois, have gone further still. They say the name of Justus Dion was the pseudonym of the Emperor Alexis himself. We would thus have a Janus, one of whose faces is history as it is lived, the other history as it is written.
The poems of Alexis and the Histories and Chronicles of Justus Dion are now being subjected to structural analysis—in particular at Trinity College, Oxford, and at the University of Besançon—in order to check this theory, which has left scholars deeply divided. Passionate arguments have been exchanged. Alexis a historian? It is easy enough to imagine the poet writing about the Empire. But when, among all his other duties, could the Emperor have found the time for so vast a body of work? The example of Caesar has, of course, been put forward. In the present state of research it is impossible to come down definitely on one side or the other; but it would certainly be astonishing if all we know about Alexis had come from Alexis himself. The history of the Empire would in that case be a closed circle. The jest of the German metaphysician and humorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg would then be revealed as an inspired intuition, made as it was at a time when the problem of Justus Dion’s identity had scarcely arisen: “History fabricates its own sources: it is from the Histories and Chronicles of Justius Dion that our idea of the Empire gets its life, and it is from our idea of the Empire that the Histories and Chronicles of Justus Dion get their life. Science, like the world itself, is the daughter of illusion.”[13] Fortunately, whoever was their author—historian, poet, or emperor—we only have to reread the Histories and the Chronicles for the Empire to come to life again before our eyes, and for paradox and witticism to vanish before reality. The Emperor may perhaps have created Justus Dion, but it was not Justus Dion who created the Empire—it would take too much genius. One may perhaps, if driven to it, doubt that there was ever a Justus Dion. But who could doubt that there was ever an Empire?
The Glory of the Empire Page 33