Memoirs of Hadrian

VARIUS MULTIPLEX MULTIFORMIS

Marullinus, my grandfather, believed in the stars. This tall old man, emaciated and sallow with age, conceded to me much the same degree of affection, without tenderness or visible sign, and almost without words, that he felt for the animals on his farm and for his lands, or for his collection of stones fallen from the sky. He was descended from a line of ancestors long established in Spain, from the period of the Scipios, and was third of our name to bear senatorial rank; before that time our family had belonged to the equestrian order. Under Titus he had taken some modest part in public affairs. Provincial that he was, he had never learned Greek, and he spoke Latin with a harsh Spanish accent which he passed on to me, and for which I was later ridiculed in Rome. His mind, however, was not wholly uncultivated; after his death they found in his house a trunk full of mathematical instruments and books untouched by him for twenty years. He was learned in his way, with a knowledge half scientific, half peasant, that same mixture of narrow prejudice and ancient wisdom which characterized the elder Cato. But Cato was a man of the Roman Senate all his life, and of the war with Carthage, a true representative of the stern Rome of the Republic. The almost impenetrable hardness of Marullinus came from farther back, and from more ancient times. He was a man of the tribe, the incarnation of a sacred and awe-inspiring world of which I have sometimes found vestiges among our Etruscan soothsayers. He always went bareheaded, as I was criticized for doing later on; his horny feet spurned all use of sandals, and his everyday clothing was hardly distinguishable from that of the aged beggars, or of the grave tenant farmers whom I used to see squatting in the sun. They said that he was a wizard, and the village folk tried to avoid his glance. But over animals he had singular powers. I have watched his grizzled head approaching cautiously, though in friendly wise, toward a nest of adders, and before a lizard have seen his gnarled fingers execute a kind of dance.

On summer nights he took me with him to study the sky from the top of a barren hill. I used to fall asleep in a furrow, tired out from counting meteors. He would stay sitting, gazing upward and turning imperceptibly with the stars. He must have known the systems of Philolaus and of Hipparchus, and that of Aristarchus of Samos which was my choice in later years, but these speculations had ceased to interest him. For him the stars were fiery points in the heavens, objects akin to the stones and slow-moving insects from which he also drew portents, constituent parts of a magic universe in which were combined the will of the gods, the influence of demons, and the lot apportioned to men. He had cast my horoscope. One night (I was eleven years old at the time) he came and shook me from my sleep and announced, with the same grumbling laconism that he would have employed to predict a good harvest to his tenants, that I should rule the world. Then, seized with mistrust, he went to fetch a brand from the small fire of root ends kept going to warm us through the colder hours, held it over my hand, and read in my solid, childish palm I know not what confirmation of lines written in the sky. The world for him was all of a piece; a hand served to confirm the stars. His news affected me less than one might think; a child is ready for anything. Later, I imagine, he forgot his own prophecy in that indifference to both present and future which is characteristic of advanced age. They found him one morning in the chestnut woods on the far edge of his domain, dead and already cold, and torn by birds of prey. Before his death he had tried to teach me his art, but with no success; my natural curiosity tended to jump at once to conclusions without burdening itself under the complicated and somewhat repellent details of his science. But the taste for certain dangerous experiments has remained with me, indeed only too much so.

My father, Aelius Hadrianus Afer, was a man weighed down by his very virtues. His life was passed in the thankless duties of civil administration; his voice hardly counted in the Senate. Contrary to usual practice, his governorship of the province of Africa had not made him richer. At home, in our Spanish township of Italica, he exhausted himself in the settlement of local disputes. Without ambitions and without joy, like many a man who from year to year thus effaces himself more and more, he had come to put a fanatic application into minor matters to which he limited himself. I have myself known these honorable temptations to meticulousness and scruple. Experience had produced in my father a skepticism toward all mankind in which he included me, as yet a child. My success, had he lived to see it, would not have impressed him in the least; family pride was so strong that it would not have been admitted that I could add anything to it. I was twelve when this overburdened man left us. My mother settled down, for the rest of her life, to an austere widowhood; I never saw her again from the day that I set out for Rome, summoned hither by my guardian. My memory of her face, elongated like those of most of our Spanish women and touched with melancholy sweetness, is confirmed by her image in wax on the Wall of Ancestors. She had the dainty feet of the women of Gades, in their close-fitting sandals, nor was the gentle swaying of the hips which marks the dancers of that region alien to this virtuous young matron. I have often reflected upon the error that we commit in supposing that a man or a family necessarily share in the ideas or events of the century in which they happen to exist. The effect of intrigues in Rome barely reached my parents in that distant province of Spain, even though at the time of the revolt against Nero my grandfather had for one night offered hospitality to Galba. We lived on the memory of obscure heroes of archives without renown, of a certain Fabius Hadrianus who was burned alive by the Carthaginians in the siege of Utica, and of a second Fabius, an ill-starred soldier who pursued Mithridates on the roads of Asia Minor. Of the writers of the period my father knew practically nothing: Lucan and Seneca were strangers to him, although like us they were of Spanish origin. My great uncle Aelius, a scholar, confined his reading to the best known authors of the time of Augustus. Such indifference to contemporary fashion kept them from many an error in taste, and especially from falling into turgid rhetoric. Hellenism and the Orient were unknown, or at best regarded frowningly from afar; there was not, I believe, a single good Greek statue in the whole peninsula. Thrift went hand in hand with wealth, and a certain rusticity was always present in our love of pompous ceremony. My sister Paulina was grave, silent, and sullen; she was married young to an old man. The standard of honesty was rigorous, but we were harsh to slaves. There was no curiosity about anything whatsoever; one was careful to think on all subjects what becomes a citizen of Rome. Of these many virtues, if virtues they be, I shall have been the squanderer.

Officially a Roman emperor is said to be born in Rome, but it was in Italica that I was born; it was upon that dry but fertile country that I later superposed so many regions of the world. The official fiction has some merit: it proves that decisions of the mind and of the will do prevail over circumstance. The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools. The schools of Spain had suffered from the effects of provincial leisure. Terentius Scaurus’ school, in Rome, gave mediocre instruction in the philosophers and the poets but afforded rather good preparation for the vicissitudes of human existence: teachers exercised a tyranny over pupils which it would shame me to impose upon men; enclosed within the narrow limits of his own learning, each one despised his colleagues, who, in turn, had equally narrow knowledge of something else. These pedants made themselves hoarse in mere verbal disputes. The quarrels over precedence, the intrigues and calumnies, gave me acquaintance with what I was to encounter thereafter in every society in which I have lived, and to such experiences was added the brutality of all childhood. And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal to you a masterpiece, or to unveil for you a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, after all; it was Socrates.

The methods of grammarians and rhetoricians are perhaps less absurd than I thought them to be during the years when I was subjected to them. Grammar, with its mixture of logical rule and arbitrary usage, proposes to a young mind a foretaste of what will be offered to him later on by law and ethics, those sciences of human conduct, and by all the systems wherein man has codified his instinctive experience. As for the rhetorical exercises in which we were successively Xerxes and Themistocles, Octavius and Mark Antony, they intoxicated me; I felt like Proteus. They taught me to enter into the thought of each man in turn, and to understand that each makes his own decisions, and lives and dies according to his own laws. The reading of the poets had still more overpowering effects; I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry. Poetry transformed me: initiation into death itself will not carry me farther along into another world than does a dusk of Virgil. In later years I came to prefer the roughness of Ennius, so close to the sacred origins of our race, or Lucretius’ bitter wisdom; or to Homer’s noble ease the homely parsimony of Hesiod. The most complicated and most obscure poets have pleased me above all; they force my thought to strenuous exercise; I have sought, too, the latest and the oldest, those who open wholly new paths, or help me to find lost trails. But in those days I liked chiefly in the art of verse whatever appealed most directly to the senses, whether the polished metal of Horace, or Ovid’s soft texture, like flesh. Scaurus cast me into despair in assuring me that I should never be more than a mediocre poet; that both the gift and the application were wanting. For a long time I thought he was mistaken; somewhere locked away are a volume or two of my love poems, most of them imitated from Catullus. But it is of little concern to me now whether my personal productions are worthless or not.

To my dying day I shall be grateful to Scaurus for having set me early to the study of Greek. I was still a child when for the first time I tried to trace on my tablets those characters of an unknown alphabet: here was a new world and the beginning of my great travels, and also the feeling of a choice as deliberate, but at the same time as involuntary, as that of love. I have loved the language for its flexibility, like that of a supple, perfect body, and for the richness of its vocabulary, in which every word bespeaks direct and varied contact with reality: and because almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek. There are, I know, other languages, but they are petrified, or have yet to be born. Egyptian priests have shown me their antique symbols; they are signs rather than words, ancient attempts at classification of the world and of things, the sepulchral speech of a dead race. During the Jewish War the rabbi Joshua translated literally for me some texts from Hebrew, that language of sectarians so obsessed by their god that they have neglected the human. In the armies I grew accustomed to the language of the Celtic auxiliaries, and remember above all certain of their songs… But barbarian jargons are chiefly important as a reserve for human expression, and for all the things which they will doubtless say in time to come. Greek, on the contrary, has its treasures of experience already behind it, experience both of man and of the State. From the Ionian tyrants to the Athenian demagogues, from the austere integrity of an Agesilaus to the excesses of a Dionysius or a Demetrius, from the treason of Demaratus to the fidelity of Philopoemen, everything that any one of us can do to help or to hinder his fellow man has been done, at least once, by a Greek. It is the same with our personal decisions: from cynicism to idealism, from the skepticism of Pyrrho to the mystic dreams of Pythagoras, our refusals or our acceptances have already taken place; our very vices and virtues have Greek models. There is nothing to equal the beauty of a Latin votive or burial inscription: those few words graved on stone sum up with majestic impersonality all that the world need ever know of us. It is in Latin that I have administered the empire; my epitaph will be carved in Latin on the walls of my mausoleum beside the Tiber; but it is in Greek that I shall have thought and lived.

At sixteen I returned to Rome after a stretch of preliminary training in the Seventh Legion, stationed then well into the Pyrenees, in a wild region of Spain very different from the southern part of the peninsula where I had passed my childhood. Acilius Attianus, my guardian, thought it good that some serious study should counterbalance these months of rough living and violent hunting. He allowed himself, wisely, to be persuaded by Scaurus to send me to Athens to the sophist Isaeus, a brilliant man with a special gift for the art of improvisation. Athens won me straightway; the somewhat awkward student, a brooding but ardent youth, had his first taste of that subtle air, those swift conversations, the strolls in the long golden evenings, and that incomparable ease in which both discussions and pleasure are there pursued. Mathematics and the arts, as parallel studies, engaged me in turn; Athens afforded me also the good fortune to follow a course in medicine under Leotychides. The medical profession would have been congenial to me; its principles and methods are essentially the same as those by which I have tried to fulfill my function as emperor. I developed a passion for this science, which is too close to man ever to be absolute, but which, though subject to fad and to error, is constantly corrected by its contact with the immediate and the nude. Leotychides approached things from the most positive and practical point of view; he had developed an admirable system for reduction of fractures. We used to walk together at evening along the shore; this man of universal interests was curious about the structure of shells and the composition of sea mud. But he lacked facilities for experiment and regretted the Museum at Alexandria, where he had studied in his youth, with its laboratories and dissection rooms, its clash of opinions, and its competition between inventive minds. His was a clear, dry intelligence which taught me to value things above words, to mistrust mere formulas, and to observe rather than to judge. It was this bitter Greek who taught me method.

In spite of the legends surrounding me, I have cared little for youth, and for my own youth least of all. This much vaunted portion of existence, considered dispassionately, seems to me often a formless, opaque, and unpolished period, both fragile and unstable. Needless to say I have found a certain number of exquisite exceptions to the rule, and two or three were admirable; of these, Mark, you yourself will have been the most pure. As for me, I was at twenty much what I am today, but not consistently so. Not everything in me was bad, but it could have been: the good or the better parts also lent strength to the worse. I look back with shame on my ignorance of the world, which I thought that I knew, and on my impatience, and on a kind of frivolous ambition and gross avidity which I then had. Must the truth be told? In the midst of the studious life of Athens, where all pleasures, too, received their due, I regretted not Rome itself but the atmosphere of that place where the business of the world is continually done and undone, where are heard the pulleys and gears in the machine of governmental power. The reign of Domitian was drawing to a close; my cousin Trajan, who had covered himself with glory on the Rhine frontier, ranked now as a popular hero; the Spanish tribe was gaining hold in Rome. Compared with that world of immediate action, the beloved Greek province seemed to me to be slumbering in a haze of ideas seldom stirred by change, and the political passivity of the Hellenes appeared a somewhat servile form of renunciation. My appetite for power, and for money (which is often with us a first form of power), was undeniable, as was the craving for glory (to give that beautiful and impassioned name to what is merely our itch to hear ourselves spoken of). There was mingled confusedly with these desires the feeling that Rome, though inferior in many things, was after all superior in its demand that its citizens should take part in public affairs, those citizens at least who were of senatorial or equestrian rank. I had reached the point where I felt that the most ordinary debate on such a subject as importation of Egyptian wheat would have taught me more about government than would the entire Republic of Plato. Even a few years earlier, as a young Roman trained in military discipline, I could see that I had a better understanding than my professors of what it meant to be a Spartan soldier, or an athlete of Pindar’s time. I left the mellow light of Athens for the city where men wrapped and hooded in heavy togas battle against February winds, where luxury and debauch are barren of charm, but where the slightest decision taken affects the fate of some quarter of the world. There a young and eager provincial, not wholly obtuse but pursuing at first only vulgar ambitions, was little by little to lose such aspirations in the act of fulfilling them; he was to learn to contend both with men and with things, to command, and what is perhaps in the end slightly less futile, to serve.

Much was unsavory in that accession to power of a virtuous middle class which was hurrying to establish itself in anticipation of a change of regime: political honesty was gaining the upper hand by means of dubious stratagems. The Senate, by gradual transfer of all administrative posts to the hands of its favored dependents, was completing its encirclement of the hard-pressed Domitian; the newcomers, with whom all my family ties allied me, were not perhaps so different from those whom they were about to replace; they were chiefly less soiled by actual possession of power. Provincial cousins and nephews hoped at least for subaltern positions; still they were expected to fill such offices with integrity. I had my share: I was named judge in the court dealing with litigation over inheritances. It was from this modest post that I witnessed the last thrusts in a duel to the death between Domitian and Rome. The emperor had lost hold on the City, where he could no longer maintain himself except by resort to executions, which in turn hastened his own end; the whole army joined in plotting his death. I grasped but little of this fencing match, so much more deadly than those of the arena, and felt only a somewhat arrogant disdain for the tyrant at bay, philosopher’s pupil that I then was. Wisely counseled by Attianus, I kept to my work without meddling too much in politics.

That first year in office differed little from the years of study. I knew nothing of law but was fortunate in having Neratius Priscus for colleague in the tribunal. He consented to instruct me, and remained throughout his life my legal counselor and my friend. His was that rare type of mind which, though master of a subject, and seeing it, as it were, from within (from a point of view inaccessible to the uninitiated), nevertheless retains a sense of its merely relative value in the general order of things, and measures it in human terms. Better versed than any of his contemporaries in established procedures, he never hesitated when useful innovations were proposed. It is with his help that I have succeeded in my later years in putting certain reforms into effect. There were other things to think of. My Spanish accent had stayed with me; my first speech in the tribunal brought a burst of laughter. Here I made good use of my intimacy with actors, which had scandalized my family: lessons in elocution throughout long months proved the most arduous but most delightful of my tasks, and were the best guarded of my life’s secrets. In those difficult years even dissipation was a kind of study: I was trying to keep up with the young fashionables of Rome, but in that I never completely succeeded. With the cowardice typical of that age, when our courage is wholly physical, and is expended elsewhere, I seldom dared to be myself; in the hope of resembling the others I sometimes subdued and sometimes exaggerated my natural disposition.

I was not much liked. There was, in fact, no reason why I should have been. Certain traits, for example my taste for the arts, which went unnoticed in the student at Athens, and which was to be more or less generally accepted in the emperor, were disturbing in the officer and magistrate at his first stage of authority. My Hellenism was cause for amusement, the more so in that ineptly I alternated between dissimulating and displaying it. The senators referred to me as “the Greekling.” I was beginning to have my legend, that strange flashing reflection made up partly of what we do, and partly of what the public thinks about us. Plaintiffs, on learning of my intrigue with a senator’s wife, brazenly sent me their wives in their stead, or their sons when I had flaunted my passion for some young mime. There was a certain pleasure in confounding such folk by my indifference. The sorriest lot of all were those who tried to win me with talk about literature.

The technique which I was obliged to develop in those unimportant early posts has served me in later years for my imperial audiences: to give oneself totally to each person throughout the brief duration of a hearing; to reduce the world for a moment to this banker, that veteran, or that widow; to accord to these individuals, each so different though each confined naturally within the narrow limits of a type, all the polite attention which at the best moments one gives to oneself, and to see them, almost every time, make use of this opportunity to swell themselves out like the frog in the fable; furthermore, to devote seriously a few moments to thinking about their business or their problem. It was again the method of the physician: I uncovered old and festering hatreds, and a leprosy of lies. Husbands against wives, fathers against children, collateral heirs against everyone: the small respect in which I personally hold the institution of the family has hardly held up under it all.

It is not that I despise men. If I did I should have no right, and no reason, to try to govern. I know them to be vain, ignorant, greedy, and timorous, capable of almost anything for the sake of success, or for raising themselves in esteem (even in their own eyes), or simply for avoidance of suffering. I know, for I am like them, at least from time to time, or could have been. Between another and myself the differences which I can recognize are too slight to count for much in the final total; I try therefore to maintain a position as far removed from the cold superiority of the philosopher as from the arrogance of a ruling Caesar. The most benighted of men are not without some glimmerings of the divine: that murderer plays passing well upon the flute; this overseer flaying the backs of his slaves is perhaps a dutiful son; this simpleton would share with me his last crust of bread. And there are few who cannot be made to learn at least something reasonably well. Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has. I might apply here to the search for these partial virtues what I was saying earlier, in sensuous terms, about the search for beauty. I have known men infinitely nobler and more perfect than myself, like your father Antoninus, and have come across many a hero, and even a few sages. In most men I have found little consistency in adhering to the good, but no steadier adherence to evil; their mistrust and indifference, usually more or less hostile, gave way almost too soon, almost in shame, changing too readily into gratitude and respect, which in turn were equally shortlived; even their selfishness could be bent to useful ends. I am always surprised that so few have hated me; I have had only one or two bitter enemies, for whom I was, as is always the case, in part responsible. Some few have loved me: they have given me far more than I had the right to demand, or to hope for: their deaths, and sometimes their lives. And the god whom they bear within them is often revealed when they die.

There is but one thing in which I feel superior to most men: I am freer, and at the same time more compliant, than they dare to be. Nearly all of them fail to recognize their due liberty, and likewise their true servitude. They curse their fetters, but seem sometimes to find them matter for pride. Yet they pass their days in vain license, and do not know how to fashion for themselves the lightest yoke. For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom. What interested me was not a philosophy of the free man (all who try that have proved tiresome), but a technique: I hoped to discover the hinge where our will meets and moves with destiny, and where discipline strengthens, instead of restraining, our nature. Understand clearly that here is no question of harsh Stoic will, which you value too high, nor of some mere abstract choice or refusal, which grossly affronts the conditions of our universe, this solid whole, compounded as it is of objects and bodies. No, I have dreamed of a more secret acquiescence, or of a more supple response. Life was to me a horse to whose motion one yields, but only after having trained the animal to the utmost. Since everything is finally a decision of the mind, however slowly and imperceptibly made, and involves also the body’s assent, I strove to attain by degrees to that state of liberty, or of submission, which is almost pure. In this effort gymnastics helped, and dialectics aided me, too. I sought at first the simple liberty of leisure moments; each life well regulated has some such intervals, and he who cannot make way for them does not know how to live. A step further, and I conceived of a liberty of simultaneity, whereby two actions or two states would be possible at the same time; I learned, for example, by modeling myself upon Caesar to dictate more than one text at a time, and to speak while continuing to read. I invented a mode of life in which the heaviest task could be accomplished perfectly without engaging myself wholly therein; in fact, I have sometimes gone so far as to propose to myself elimination of the very concept of physical fatigue.

At other moments I practiced a liberty acquired by methods of alternation: feelings, thoughts, or work had all to be subject to interruption at any moment, and then resumed; the certainty of being able to summon or dismiss such preoccupations, like slaves, robbed them of all chance for tyranny, and freed me of all sense of servitude. I did a better thing: I organized the day’s activities round some chosen train of thought and did not let it go; whatever would have distracted or discouraged me from it, such as projects or work of another kind, words of no import, or the thousand incidents of the day, were made to take their place around it as a vine is trained round the shaft of a column. Sometimes, on the contrary, I made infinite divisions of each thought and each fact under view, breaking and sectioning them into a vast number of smaller thoughts and facts, easier thus to keep in hand. By this method resolutions difficult to take were broken down into a veritable powder of minute decisions, to be adopted one by one, each leading to the next, and thereby becoming, as it were, easy and inevitable.

But it was still to the liberty of submission, the most difficult of all, that I applied myself most strenuously. I determined to make the best of whatever situation I was in; during my years of dependence my subjection lost its portion of bitterness, and even ignominy, if I learned to accept it as a useful exercise. Whatever I had I chose to have, obliging myself only to possess it totally, and to taste the experience to the full. Thus the most dreary tasks were accomplished with ease as long as I was willing to give myself to them. Whenever an object repelled me, I made it a subject of study, ingeniously compelling myself to extract from it a motive for enjoyment. If faced with something unforeseen or near cause for despair, like an ambush or a storm at sea, after all measures for the safety of others had been taken, I strove to welcome this hazard, to rejoice in whatever it brought me of the new and unexpected, and thus without shock the ambush or the tempest was incorporated into my plans, or my thoughts. Even in the throes of my worst disaster, I have seen a moment when sheer exhaustion reduced some part of the horror of the experience, and when I made the defeat a thing of my own in being willing to accept it. If ever I am to undergo torture (and illness will doubtless see to that) I cannot be sure of maintaining the impassiveness of a Thrasea, but I shall at least have the resource of resigning myself to my cries. And it is in such a way, with a mixture of reserve and of daring, of submission and revolt carefully concerted, of extreme demand and prudent concession, that I have finally learned to accept myself.

Had it been too greatly prolonged, this life in Rome would undoubtedly have embittered or corrupted me, or else would have worn me out. My return to the army saved me. Army life has its compromises too, but they are simpler. Departure this time meant travel, and I set out with exultation. I had been advanced to the rank of tribune in the Second Legion Adjutrix, and passed some months of a rainy autumn on the banks of the Upper Danube with no other companion than a newly published volume of Plutarch. In November I was transferred to the Fifth Legion Macedonica, stationed at that time (as it still is) at the mouth of the same river, on the frontiers of Lower Moesia. Snow blocked the roads and kept me from traveling by land. I embarked at Pola, but had barely time on the way to revisit Athens, where later I was so long to reside. News of the assassination of Domitian, announced a few days after my arrival in camp, surprised no one, and was cause for general rejoicing. Trajan was promptly adopted by Nerva; the advanced age of the new ruler made actual succession a matter of months at the most. The policy of conquest on which it was known that my cousin proposed to launch Rome, the regrouping of troops which began, and the progressive tightening of discipline all served to keep the army in a state of excited expectancy. Those Danubian legions functioned with the precision of newly greased military machines; they bore no resemblance to the sleepy garrisons which I had known in Spain. Still more important, the army’s attention had ceased to center upon palace quarrels and was turned instead to the empire’s external affairs; our troops no longer behaved like a band of lictors ready to acclaim or to murder no matter whom.

The most intelligent among the officers attempted to trace some general plan in these reorganizations in which they took part, hoping to foresee the future, and not their own prospects alone. There were, however, a goodly number of absurdities exchanged by way of comment upon these initial events, and strategic planning as idle as it was ill-founded smeared the surface of the tables at each evening meal. For these professionals, with their firm belief in the beneficence of our authority and in the mission of Rome to govern the world, Roman patriotism assumed brutal forms to which I was not yet accustomed. On the frontiers, just where, for the moment at least, address was needed to conciliate certain of the nomad chieftains, the soldier completely eclipsed the statesman; exaction of labor and requisitions in kind gave rise to abuses too generally condoned. Thanks to incessant divisions among the barbarians the situation to the northeast was about as favorable as it ever could be; I doubt if even the wars which followed have improved matters there to any extent. Frontier incidents cost us few losses, and these were disquieting only because they were continuous. Let us admit that this perpetual vigilance was useful in any case for whetting the military spirit. All the same, I was convinced that a lesser expenditure, coupled with somewhat greater mental effort on our part, would have sufficed to subdue some chieftains and to win others to us. I decided to devote myself especially to this latter task, which everyone else was neglecting. I was drawn the more to this aim by my love of things foreign; I liked to deal with the barbarians. This great country lying between the mouths of the Danube and the Borysthenes, a triangular area of which I have covered at least two sides, is one of the most remarkable regions of the world, at least for us who are born on the shores of the Interior Sea and are used to the clear, dry line of southern landscape, with its hills and promontories. At times there I worshipped the goddess Earth in the way that we here worship the goddess Rome; I am speaking not so much of Ceres as of a more ancient divinity, anterior even to the invention of the harvest. Our Greek and Latin lands, everywhere supported by bone-structure of rock, have the trim beauty of a male body; the heavy abundance of the Scythian earth was that of a reclining woman. The plain ended only where the sky began. My wonder never ceased in presence of the rivers: that vast empty land was but a slope and a bed for their waters. Our rivers are short; we never feel far from their sources; but the enormous flow which ended there in confused estuaries swept with it the mud of an unknown continent and the ice of uninhabitable regions. The cold of Spain’s high plateaus is second to none, but this was the first time that I found myself face to face with true winter, which visits our countries but briefly. There it sets in for a long period of months; farther north it must be unchanging, without beginning and without end. The evening of my arrival in camp the Danube was one immense roadway of ice, red at first and then blue, furrowed by the inner working of currents with tracks as deep as those of chariots. We made use of furs to protect ourselves from the cold. The presence of that enemy, so impersonal as to be almost abstract, produced an indescribable exaltation, and a feeling of energy accrued. One fought to conserve body heat as elsewhere one fights to keep one’s courage. There were days when the snow effaced the few differences in level on the steppes; we galloped in a world of pure space and pure atoms. The frozen coating gave transparency to the most ordinary things, and the softest objects took on a celestial rigidity. Each broken reed was a flute of crystal. Assar, my Caucasian guide, chopped through the ice to water our horses at dusk. These animals were, by the way, one of our most useful points of contact with the barbarians: a kind of friendship grew up over the trading and endless bargaining, and out of the respect felt on each side for some act of prowess in horsemanship. At night the campfires lit up the extraordinary leaping of the slender-waisted dancers, and their extravagant bracelets of gold.

Many a time in spring, when the melting snows let me venture farther into the interior, I would turn my back on the southern horizon, which enclosed the seas and islands that we know, and on the western horizon likewise, where at some point the sun was setting on Rome, and would dream of pushing still farther into the steppes or beyond the ramparts of the Caucasus, toward the north or to uttermost Asia. What climates, what fauna, what races of men should I have discovered, what empires ignorant of us as we are of them, or knowing us at most through some few wares transmitted by a long succession of merchants, and as rare for them as the pepper of India or the amber of Baltic regions is for us? At Odessos a trader returning from a voyage of several years’ time made me a present of a green stone, of translucent substance held sacred, it seems, in an immense kingdom of which he had at least skirted the edges, but where he had noted neither customs nor gods, grossly centered upon his profit as he was. This exotic gem was to me like a stone fallen from the heavens, a meteor from another world. We know but little as yet of the configuration of the earth, though I fail to understand resignation to such ignorance. I envy those who will succeed in circling the two hundred and fifty thousand Greek stadia so ably calculated by Eratosthenes, the round of which would bring us back to our point of departure. In fancy I took the simple decision of going on, this time on the mere trail to which our roads had now given way. I played with the idea… To be alone, without possessions, without renown, with none of the advantages of our own culture, to expose oneself among new men and amid fresh hazards… Needless to say it was only a dream, and the briefest dream of all. This liberty that I was inventing ceased to exist upon closer view; I should quickly have rebuilt for myself everything that I had renounced. Furthermore, wherever I went I should only have been a Roman away from Rome. A kind of umbilical cord attached me to the City. Perhaps at that time, in my rank of tribune, I felt still more closely bound to the empire than later as emperor, for the same reason that the thumb joint is less free than the brain. Nevertheless I did have that outlandish dream, at which our ancestors, soberly confined within their Latian fields, would have shuddered; to have harbored the thought, even for a moment, makes me forever different from them.

Trajan was in command of the troops in Lower Germany; the army of the Danube sent me there to convey its felicitations to him as the new heir to the empire. I was three days’ march from Cologne, in mid-Gaul, when at the evening halt the death of Nerva was announced. I was tempted to push on ahead of the imperial post, and to be the first to bring to my cousin the news of his accession. I set off at a gallop and continued without stop, except at Treves where my brother-in-law Servianus resided in his capacity as governor. We supped together. The feeble head of Servianus was full of imperial vapors. This tortuous man, who sought to harm me or at least to prevent me from pleasing, thought to forestall me by sending his own courier to Trajan. Two hours later I was attacked at the ford of a river; the assailants wounded my orderly and killed our horses. We managed, however, to lay hold on one of the attacking party, a former slave of my brother-in-law, who told the whole story. Servianus ought to have realized that a resolute man is not so easily turned from his course, at least not by any means short of murder; but before such an act as that his cowardice recoiled. I had to cover some three miles on foot before coming upon a peasant who sold me his horse. I reached Cologne that very night, beating my brother-in-law’s courier by only a few lengths. This kind of adventure met with success; I was the better received for it by the army. The emperor retained me there with him as tribune in the Second Legion Fidelis.

Trajan had taken the news of his accession with admirable composure. He had long expected it, and it left his plans unchanged. He remained what he always had been, and what he was to be up to his death, a commander-in-chief; but his virtue was to have acquired, by means of his wholly military conception of discipline, an idea of order in government. Around that idea everything else was organized, in the beginning at least, even his plans for war and his designs for conquest. A soldierly emperor, but not at all a military adventurer. He altered nothing in his way of living; his modesty left room neither for affectation nor for arrogance. While the army was rejoicing he accepted his new responsibilities as a part of the day’s ordinary work, and very simply made evident his contentment to his intimates.

He had but little confidence in me. We were cousins, but he was twenty-four years my senior, and had been my co-guardian since my father’s death. He fulfilled his family obligations with provincial seriousness, and was ready to do the impossible to advance me, if I proved worthy; if incompetent, to treat me with more severity than anyone else. He had taken my youthful follies with an indignation which was not wholly unjustified, but which is seldom encountered outside the bosom of the family; my debts, in any case, shocked him more than my misdoings. Other things in me disturbed him. Though his learning was limited, he had a touching respect for philosophers and scholars; but it is one thing to admire the great philosophers from afar, and quite another to have at one’s side a young lieutenant who dabbles in letters. Not knowing where my principles lay, or my safeguards or restraints, he supposed me to have none, and to be without resource against my own nature. I had, at least, never committed the error of neglecting my duties. My reputation as an officer reassured him, but in his eyes I was no more than a young and promising tribune, who would bear close watching.

An incident of our personal lives soon threatened to be my undoing. A handsome face was my conqueror. I became passionately attached to a youth whom the emperor also fancied. The adventure was dangerous, and was relished as such. A certain secretary Gallus, who had long taken it upon himself to report each of my debts to Trajan, denounced us to the emperor. His irritation knew no bounds; things were bad enough for a while. Some friends, Acilius Attianus among others, did their best to keep him from settling into a permanent and rather ridiculous resentment. He ended by yielding to their entreaties, and the reconciliation, though at first barely sincere on either side, was more humiliating for me than the scenes of anger had been. I admit to having harbored for this Gallus a hatred beyond compare. Many years later he was found guilty of embezzlement of the public funds, and it was with utter satisfaction that I saw myself avenged.

The first expedition against the Dacians got under way the following year. By preference and by political conviction I have always been opposed to a policy based on war, but I should have been either more or less than a man if these great enterprises of Trajan had not intoxicated me. Viewed as a whole, and from afar, those years of war count among my happy years. They were hard at the start, or seemed to me so. At first I held only secondary posts, since Trajan’s good will was not yet fully won. But I knew the country, and knew that I was useful. Although barely aware of what was growing within me, winter by winter, encampment after encampment, battle after battle, I began to feel objections to the emperor’s policy, objections which at this period it was not my duty, or even my right, to voice; furthermore, nobody would have listened to me. Placed more or less to one side, in fifth or tenth rank, I knew my troops the better for my position; I shared more of their life. I still retained a certain liberty of action, or rather a certain detachment toward action itself, which cannot readily be indulged in once one has attained power, and has passed the age of thirty. There were also advantages special to me: my liking for this harsh land, and my passion for all voluntary (though of course intermittent) forms of privation and discipline. I was perhaps the only one of the young officers who did not regret Rome. The longer the campaign years extended into the mud and the snow the more they brought forth my resources.

There I lived through an entire epoch of extraordinary exaltation, due in part to the influence of a small group of lieutenants around me who had brought back strange gods from the garrisons deep in Asia. The cult of Mithra, less widespread then than it has become since our expedition in Parthia, won me over temporarily by the rigors of its stark asceticism, which drew taut the bowstring of the will, and by its obsession with death, blood, and iron, which elevated the routine harshness of our military lives to the level of a symbol of universal struggle. Nothing could have been more in contradiction to the views which I was beginning to hold about war, but those barbarous rites creating bonds of life and death between the affiliates all served to flatter the most secret aspirations of a young man impatient of the present, uncertain as to the future, and thereby open to the gods. My initiation took place in a turret constructed of wood and reeds on the banks of the Danube, with Marcius Turbo, my fellow officer, for sponsor. I remember that the weight of the bull in its death throes nearly brought down the latticed floor beneath which I lay to receive the bloody aspersion. In recent years I have reflected upon the dangers which this sort of near-secret society might entail for the State under a weak ruler, and I have finally restricted them, but I admit that in presence of an enemy they give their followers a strength which is almost godlike. Each of us believed that he was escaping from the narrow limits of his human state, feeling himself to be at the same time himself and his own adversary, at one with the god who seems to be both the animal victim and the human slayer. Such fantastic dreams, which sometimes terrify me now, were not so very different from the theories of Heraclitus upon the identity of the mark and the bow. They helped me in those days to endure life. Victory and defeat were inextricably mixed like rays of the same sun. These Dacian footsoldiers whom I crushed under my horse’s hoofs, those Sarmatian cavalrymen overthrown in the close combat of later years when our rearing horses tore at each other’s chests, were all struck down the more easily if I identified myself with them. Had my body been abandoned on the battlefield, stripped of its attire, it would not have differed greatly from theirs. The shock of the final sword thrust would have been the same. I am confessing to you here some extraordinary thoughts, among the most secret of my life, and a strange intoxication which I have never again experienced under that same form.

A certain number of deeds of daring, which would have passed unnoticed, perhaps, if performed by a simple soldier, won me a reputation in Rome and a sort of renown in the army. But most of my so-called acts of prowess were little more than idle bravado; I see now with some shame that, mingled with that almost sacred exaltation of which I was just speaking, there was still my ignoble desire to please at any price, and to draw attention upon myself. It was thus that one autumn day when the Danube was swollen by floods I crossed the river on horseback, wearing the full heavy equipment of our Batavian auxiliaries. For this feat of arms, if it was a feat, my horse deserved credit more than I. But that period of heroic foolhardiness taught me to distinguish between the different aspects of courage. The kind of courage which I should like always to possess would be cool and detached, free from all physical excitement and impassive as the calm of a god. I do not flatter myself that I have ever attained it. The semblance of such courage which I later employed was, in my worst days, only a cynical recklessness toward life; in my best days it was only a sense of duty to which I clung. When confronted with the danger itself, however, that cynicism or that sense of duty quickly gave place to a mad intrepidity, a kind of strange orgasm of a man mated with his destiny. At the age which I then was this drunken courage persisted without cessation. A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists. If death does take him, he is probably unaware of the fact; it amounts to no more for him than a shock or a spasm. I smile with some bitterness at the realization that now out of any two thoughts I devote one to my own death, as if so much ceremony were needed to decide this worn body for the inevitable. At that time, on the contrary, a young man who would have lost much in not living a few years more was daily risking his future with complete unconcern.

It would be easy to construe what I have just told as the story of a too scholarly soldier who wishes to be forgiven his love for books. But such simplified perspectives are false. Different persons ruled in me in turn, though no one of them for long; each fallen tyrant was quick to regain power. Thus have I played host successively to the meticulous officer, fanatic in discipline, but gaily sharing with his men the privations of war; to the melancholy dreamer intent on the gods; the lover ready to risk all for a moment’s rapture; the haughty young lieutenant retiring to his tent to study his maps by lamplight, making clear to his friends his disdain for the way the world goes; and finally the future statesman. But let us not forget, either, the base opportunist who in fear of displeasing succumbed to drunkenness at the emperor’s table; the young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark; the soldier exercising with mechanical precision his vile gladiatorial trade. And we should include also that vacant figure, nameless and unplaced in history, though as much myself as all the others, the simple toy of circumstance, no more and no less than a body, lying on a camp bed, distracted by an aroma, aroused by a breath of wind, vaguely attentive to some eternal hum of a bee. But little by little a newcomer was taking hold, a stage director and manager. I was beginning to know the names of my actors, and could arrange plausible entrances for them, or exits; I cut short superfluous lines, and came gradually to avoid the most obvious effects. Last, I learned not to indulge too much in monologue. And gradually, in turn, my actions were forming me.

My military successes might have earned me enmity from a lesser man than Trajan. But courage was the only language which he grasped at once; its words went straight to his heart. He came to see in me a kind of secondin-command, almost a son, and nothing of what happened later could wholly separate us. On my side, certain of my newly conceived objections to his views were, at least momentarily, put aside or forgotten in presence of the admirable genius which he displayed with the armies. I have always liked to see a great specialist at work; the emperor, in his own field, had a skill and sureness of hand second to none. Placed at the head of the First Legion Minervia, most glorious of them all, I was assigned to wipe out the last enemy entrenchments in the region of the Iron Gates. After we had surrounded and taken the citadel of Sarmizegethusa I followed the emperor into that subterranean hall where the counselors of King Decebalus had just ended their last banquet by swallowing poison; Trajan gave me the order to set fire to that weird heap of dead men. The same evening, on the steep heights of the battlefield, he transferred to my finger the diamond ring which Nerva had given him, and which had come to be almost a token of imperial succession. That night I fell asleep content.

My newly won popularity diffused over my second stay in Rome something of the feeling of euphoria which I was to know again, but to a much stronger degree, during my years of felicity. Trajan had given me two million sesterces to distribute in public bounty; naturally it was not enough, but by that time I was administering my own estate, which was considerable, and money difficulties no longer troubled me. I had lost most of my ignoble fear of displeasing. A scar on my chin provided a pretext for wearing the short beard of the Greek philosophers. In my attire I adopted a simplicity which I carried to greater extremes after becoming emperor; my time of bracelets and perfumes had passed. That this simplicity was itself still an attitude is of little importance. Slowly I accustomed myself to plainness for its own sake, and to that contrast, which I was later to value, between a collection of gems and the unadorned hands of the collector. To speak further of attire, an incident from which portents were drawn occurred during the year of my tribuneship in Rome. One day of appallingly bad weather, when I was to deliver a public address, I had mislaid my mantle of heavy Gallic wool. Protected only by my toga, which caught the water in its gutterlike folds, I had continually to wipe the rain from my eyes as I pronounced my discourse. Catching cold is an emperor’s privilege in Rome, since he is forbidden, regardless of weather, to put anything over the toga: from that day on, every huckster and melon vendor believed in my approaching good fortune.

We talk much of the dreams of youth. Too often we forget its scheming. That, too, is a form of dream, and is no less extravagant than the others. I was not the only one to indulge in such calculations throughout that period of Roman festivities; the whole army rushed into the race for honors. I broke gaily enough into the role of ambitious politician, but I have never been able to play it for long with conviction, or without need of constant help from a prompter. I was willing to carry out with utmost conscientiousness the tiresome duty of recorder of senatorial proceedings; I knew what services would count most. The laconic style of the emperor, though admirable for the armies, did not suffice for Rome; the empress, whose literary tastes were akin to mine, persuaded him to let me compose his speeches. This was the first of the good offices of Plotina. I succeeded all the better for having had practice in that kind of accommodation: in the difficult period of my apprenticeship I had often written harangues for senators who were short of ideas or turns of phrase; they ended by thinking themselves the authors of these pieces. In working thus for Trajan, I took exactly the same delight as that afforded by the rhetorical exercises of my youth; alone in my room, trying out my effects before a mirror, I felt myself an emperor. In truth I was learning to be one; audacities of which I should not have dreamed myself capable became easy when someone else would have to shoulder them. The emperor’s thinking was simple but inarticulate, and therefore obscure; it became quite familiar to me, and I flattered myself that I knew it somewhat better than he did. I enjoyed aping the military style of the commander-in-chief, and hearing him thereafter in the Senate pronounce phrases which seemed typical, but for which I was responsible. On other days, when Trajan kept to his room, I was entrusted with the actual delivery of these discourses, which he no longer even read, and my enunciation, by this time above reproach, did honor to the lessons of the tragic actor Olympus.

Such personal services brought me into intimacy with the emperor, and even into his confidence, but the ancient antipathy went on. It had momentarily given way to the pleasure which an ageing ruler feels on seeing a young man of his blood begin a career which the elder imagines, rather naďvely, is to continue his own. But perhaps that enthusiasm had mounted so high on the battlefield at Sarmizegethusa only because it had come to the surface through so many superposed layers of mistrust. I think still that there was something more there than ineradicable animosity arising from quarrels painfully patched up, from differences of temperament, or merely from habits of mind in a man already growing old. By instinct the emperor detested all indispensable subordinates. He would have understood better on my part a mixture of irregularity and devotion to duty; I seemed to him almost suspect by reason of being technically irreproachable. That fact was apparent when the empress thought to advance my career in arranging for me a marriage with his grandniece. Trajan opposed himself obstinately to the project, adducing my lack of domestic virtues, the extreme youth of the girl, and even the old story of my debts. The empress persisted with like stubbornness; I warmed to the game myself; Sabina, at that age, was not wholly without charm. This marriage, though tempered by almost continuous absence, became for me subsequently a source of such irritation and annoyance that it is hard now to recall it as a triumph at the time for an ambitious young man of twenty-eight.

I was more than ever a member of the family, and was more or less forced to live within it. But everything in that circle displeased me, except for the handsome face of Plotina. Innumerable Spanish cousins were always present at the imperial table, just as later on I was to find them at my wife’s dinners during my rare visits to Rome; nor would I even say that later I found them grown older, for from the beginning all those people seemed like centenarians. From them emanated a kind of stale propriety and ponderous wisdom. The emperor had passed almost his whole life with the armies; he knew Rome infinitely less well than did I. With great good will he endeavored to surround himself with the best that the City had to offer, or with what had been presented to him as such. The official set was made up of men wholly admirable for their decency and respectability, but learning did not rest easily upon them, and their philosophy lacked the vigor to go below the surface of things. I have never greatly relished the pompous affability of Pliny; and the sublime rigidity of Tacitus seemed to me to enclose a Republican reactionary’s view of the world, unchanged since the death of Caesar. The unofficial circle was obnoxiously vulgar, a deterrent which kept me for the moment from running new risks in that quarter. I nevertheless constrained myself to the utmost politeness toward all these folk, diverse as they were. I was deferent toward some, compliant to others, dissipated when necessary, clever but not too clever. I had need of my versatility; I was many-sided by intention, and made it a game to be incalculable. I walked a tightrope, and could have used lessons not only from an actor, but from an acrobat.

I was reproached at this period for adultery with several of our patrician women. Two or three of these much criticized liaisons endured more or less up to the beginning of my principate. Although Rome is rather indulgent toward debauchery, it has never favored the loves of its rulers. Mark Antony and Titus had a taste of this. My adventures were more modest than theirs, but I fail to see how, according to our customs, a man who could never stomach courtesans and who was already bored to death with marriage might otherwise have come to know the varied world of women. My elderly brother-in-law, the impossible Servianus, whose thirty years’ seniority allowed him to stand over me both as schoolmaster and spy, led my enemies in giving out that curiosity and ambition played a greater part in these affairs than love itself; that intimacy with the wives introduced me gradually into the political secrets of the husbands, and that the confidences of my mistresses were as valuable to me as the police reports with which I regaled myself in later years. It is true that each attachment of any duration did procure for me, almost inevitably, the friendship of the fat or feeble husband, a pompous or timid fellow, and usually blind, but I seldom gained pleasure from such a connection, and profited even less. I must admit that certain indiscreet stories whispered in my ear by my mistresses served to awaken in me some sympathy for these much mocked and little understood spouses. Such liaisons, agreeable enough when the women were expert in love, became truly moving when these women were beautiful. It was a study of the arts for me; I came to know statues, and to appreciate at close range a Cnidian Venus or a Leda trembling under the weight of the swan. It was the world of Tibullus and Propertius: a melancholy, an ardor somewhat feigned but intoxicating as a melody in the Phrygian mode, kisses on back stairways, scarves floating across a breast, departures at dawn, and wreaths of flowers left on doorsteps.

I knew almost nothing of these women; the part of their lives which they conceded to me was narrowly confined between two half-opened doors; their love, of which they never ceased talking, seemed to me sometimes as light as one of their garlands; it was like a fashionable jewel, or a fragile and costly fillet, and I suspected them of putting on their passion with their necklaces and their rouge. My own life was not less mysterious to them; they hardly desired to know it, preferring to dream vaguely, and mistakenly, about it; I came to understand that the spirit of the game demanded these perpetual disguises, these exaggerated avowals and complaints, this pleasure sometimes simulated and sometimes concealed, these meetings contrived like the figures of a dance. Even in our quarrels they expected a conventional response from me, and the weeping beauty would wring her hands as if on the stage.

I have often thought that men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself: they delight in fingers reddened with henna, in perfumes rubbed on the skin, and in the thousand devices which enhance that beauty and sometimes fabricate it entirely. These tender idols differed in every respect from the tall females of the barbarians, or from our grave and heavy peasant women; they were born from the golden volutes of great cities, from the vats of the dyers or the baths’ damp vapor, like Venus from the foam of Greek seas. They seemed hardly separable from the feverish sweetness of certain evenings in Antioch, from the excited stir of mornings in Rome, from the famous names which they bore, or from that luxury amid which their last secret was to show themselves nude, but never without ornament. I should have desired more: to see the human creature unadorned, alone with herself as she indeed must have been at least sometimes, in illness or after the death of a first-born child, or when a wrinkle began to show in her mirror. A man who reads, reflects, or plans belongs to his species rather than to his sex; in his best moments he rises even above the human. But my fair loves seemed to glory in thinking only as women: the mind, or perhaps the soul, that I searched for was never more than a perfume.

There must have been more to it than that: hidden behind a curtain like a character of comedy awaiting the auspicious moment, I would listen intently to the sounds of an unknown interior, the particular tone of women’s chatter, a burst of anger or of laughter, intimate murmurings; all this would cease the moment they knew I was there. The children, and the perpetual preoccupation with clothing or money matters, must again have taken first place once I was gone, though their importance was never mentioned in my presence; even the scorned husband would become essential, and perhaps an object for love. I compared my mistresses with the unsmiling faces of the women of my family, those whose concerns were chiefly domestic, interminably at work on the household accounts, and those who, steeped in family pride, were forever directing the care and repainting of the ancestral busts; I wondered if these frigid matrons would also be embracing a lover in some garden recess, and if my pliant beauties were not waiting merely for my departure to plunge again into some interrupted quarrel with a housekeeper. I tried as best I could to fit together these two aspects of the world of women.

Last year, shortly after the conspiracy in which Servianus came to his end, one of my mistresses of yore chose to travel all the way to the Villa in order to inform against one of her sons-in-law. I took no action upon the denunciation, which could have been inspired as much by a motherin-law’s hatred as by a desire of being useful to me. But the conversation interested me: just as in the inheritance court of old, it was wholly about wills, darkest machinations between relatives, unforeseen or unfortunate marriages. Here again was the narrow domain of women, their hard practical sense and their horizon turned grey the moment that love has ceased to illumine it. A certain acerbity and a kind of harsh loyalty brought to mind my vexatious Sabina. My visitor’s features seemed flattened out, melted, as it were, as if the hand of time had passed brutally back and forth over a mask of softened wax; what I had consented, for a moment, to take for beauty had never been more than the first bloom of youth. But artifice reigned there still: the wrinkled face played awkwardly at smiles. Voluptuous memories, if ever there had been any, were completely effaced for me; this was no more than a pleasant exchange with a creature marked like me by sickness or age; I felt the same slightly irritated sympathy that I would have had for an elderly cousin from Spain, or a distant relative coming from Narbonne.

I am trying for a moment to recapture mere curls of smoke, the iridescent bubbles of some childish game. But it is easy to forget. … So many things have happened since the days of those ephemeral loves that doubtless I no longer recognize their flavor; above all I am pleased to deny that they ever made me suffer. And yet among those mistresses there was one, at least, who was a delight to love. She was both more delicate and more firm than the others, gentler but harder, too; her slender body was rounded like a reed. I have always warmed to the beauty of human hair, that silken and undulating part of a body, but the headdresses of most of our women are towers, labyrinths, ships, or nests of adders. Hers was simply what I liked them to be: the cluster of harvest grapes, or the bird’s spread wing. Lying beside me and resting her small proud head against mine, she used to speak with admirable candor of her loves. I liked her intensity and her detachment in loving, her exacting taste in pleasure, and her consuming passion for harrowing her very soul. I have known her to take dozens of lovers, more than she could keep count of; I was only a passer-by who made no demands of fidelity.

She fell in love with a dancer named Bathyllus, so handsome that all follies for his sake were justified in advance. She sobbed out his name in my arms, and my approbation gave her courage. At other times we laughed a great deal together. She died young, on a fever-ridden island to which her family had exiled her after a scandalous divorce. She had feared old age, so I could only rejoice for her, but that is a feeling we never have for those whom we have truly loved. Her need for money was fantastic. One day she asked me to lend her a hundred thousand sesterces. I brought them to her the next morning. She sat down on the floor like some small, trim figure playing at knucklebones, emptied the sack on the marble paving, and began to divide the gleaming pile into heaps. I knew that for her, as for all us prodigals, those pieces of gold were not true-ringing specie marked with the head of a Caesar, but a magic substance, a personal currency stamped with the effigy of a chimera and the likeness of the dancer Bathyllus. I had ceased to exist for her; she was alone. Almost plain for the moment, and puckering her brow with delightful indifference to her own beauty, like a pouting schoolboy she counted and recounted upon her fingers those difficult additions. To my eyes she was never more charming.

The news of the Sarmatian incursions reached Rome during the celebration of Trajan’s Dacian triumph. These long-delayed festivities lasted eight days. It had taken nearly a year to bring from Africa and from Asia wild animals destined for slaughter in the arena; the massacre of twelve thousand such beasts and the systematic destruction of ten thousand gladiators turned Rome into an evil resort of death. On that particular evening I was on the roof of Attianus’ house, with Marcius Turbo and our host. The illuminated city was hideous with riotous rejoicing: that bitter war, to which Marcius and I had devoted four years of our youth, served the populace only as pretext for drunken festival, a brutal, vicarious triumph. It was not the time to announce publicly that these much vaunted victories were not final, and that a new enemy was at our frontiers. The emperor, already absorbed in his projects for Asia, took less and less interest in the situation to the northeast, which he preferred to consider as settled once and for all. That first Sarmatian war was represented as a simple punitive expedition. I was sent out to it with the title of governor of Pannonia, and with full military powers.

The war lasted eleven months, and was atrocious. I still believe the annihilation of the Dacians to have been almost justified; no chief of state can willingly assent to the presence of an organized enemy established at his very gates. But the collapse of the kingdom of Decebalus had created a void in those regions upon which the Sarmatians swooped down; bands starting up from no one knew where infested a country already devastated by years of war and burned time and again by us, thus affording no base for our troops, whose numbers were in any case inadequate; new enemies teemed like worms in the corpse of our Dacian victories. Our recent successes had sapped our discipline: at the advance posts I found something of the gross heedlessness evinced in the feasting at Rome. Certain tribunes gave proof of foolish overconfidence in the face of danger: perilously isolated in a region where the only part we knew well was our former frontier, they were depending for continued victories upon our armament, which I beheld daily diminishing from loss and from wear, and upon reinforcements which I had no hope to see, knowing that all our resources would thereafter be concentrated upon Asia.

Another danger began to threaten: four years of official requisitioning had ruined the villages to our rear; from the time of the first Dacian campaigns, for each herd of oxen or flock of sheep so ostentatiously captured from the enemy I had seen innumerable droves of cattle seized from the inhabitants. If that state of things continued, the moment was approaching when our peasant populations, tired of supporting our burdensome military machine, would end by preferring the barbarians. Pillage by our soldiery presented a less important problem, perhaps, but one which was far more conspicuous. My popularity was such that I could risk imposition of the most rigorous restrictions upon the troops; I made current an austerity which I practiced myself, inventing the cult of the Imperial Discipline, which later I succeeded in extending throughout the army. The rash and the ambitious, who were complicating my task, were sent back to Rome; in their stead I summoned technicians, of whom we had too few. It was essential to repair the defensive works which inflated pride over our recent victories had left singularly neglected; I abandoned entirely whatever would have been too costly to maintain. Civil administrators, solidly installed in the disorder which follows every war, were rising by degrees to the level of semi-independent chieftains, capable of all kinds of extortion from our subjects and of every possible treachery toward us. On that score, as well, I could see in the more or less immediate future the beginning of revolts and divisions to come. I do not believe that we can avoid these disasters, any more than we can escape death, but it depends upon us to postpone them for a few centuries. I got rid of incompetent officials; I had the worst executed. I was discovering myself to be inexorable.

A humid summer gave way to a misty autumn, and then to a cold winter. I had need of my knowledge of medicine, and needed it first of all to treat myself. That life on the frontiers brought me little by little down to the level of the Sarmatian tribesmen: the philosopher’s beard changed to that of the barbarian chieftain. I again went through what we had already seen, to the point of revulsion, during the Dacian campaigns. Our enemies burned their prisoners alive; we began to slaughter ours, for lack of means to transport them to slave markets in Rome or Asia. The stakes of our palisades bristled with severed heads. The enemy tortured their hostages; several of my friends perished in this way. One of them dragged himself on his bleeding limbs as far as the camp; he had been so disfigured that I was never able, thereafter, to recall his former aspect. The winter took its toll of victims; groups of horsemen caught in the ice or carried off by the river floods, the sick racked by cough, groaning feebly in their tents, wounded men with frozen extremities. Some admirable spirits gathered round me; this small, closely bound company whose devotion I held had the highest form of virtue, and the only one in which I still believe, namely, the firm determination to be of service. A Sarmatian fugitive whom I had made my interpreter risked his life to return to his people, there to foment revolts or treason; I succeeded in coming to an understanding with this tribe, and from that time on its men fought to protect our advance posts. A few bold strokes, imprudent in themselves but skillfully contrived, demonstrated to the enemy the absurdity of attacking the Roman State. One of the Sarmatian chieftains followed the example of Decebalus: he was found dead in his tent of felt; beside him lay his wives, who had been strangled, and a horrible bundle which contained the bodies of their children. That day my disgust for waste and futility extended to the barbarian losses themselves; I regretted these dead whom Rome might have absorbed and employed one day as allies against hordes more savage still. Our scattered attackers disappeared as they had come, into that obscure region from which no doubt many another storm will break forth. The war had not ended. I was obliged to take it up again and finish it some months after my accession. Order reigned for the moment, at least, on that frontier. I returned to Rome covered with honors. But I had aged.

My first consulate proved also to be a year of campaign, but this time the struggle was secret, though incessant, and was waged on behalf of peace. It was not, however, a struggle carried on alone. Before my return a change of attitude parallel to my own had taken place in Licinius Sura, Attianus, and Turbo alike, as if in spite of the severe censorship which I exercised over my letters these friends had already understood, and were either following me or had gone on ahead. Formerly the ups and downs of my fortunes worried me chiefly because of my friends’ solicitude; fears or impatience which I should have borne lightly, if alone, grew oppressive when they had to be concealed from others, or on the contrary revealed, to their distress. I resented the fact that in their affection they felt more concern for me than I did for myself, and that they failed to see beneath the surface agitation that more tranquil being to whom no one thing is wholly important, and who can therefore endure anything. But there was no time thereafter to think about myself, or not to think either. My person began to count less precisely because my point of view was beginning to matter. What was important was that someone should be in opposition to the policy of conquest, envisaging its consequences and the final aim, and should prepare himself, if possible, to repair its errors.

My post on the frontiers had shown me an aspect of victory which does not appear on Trajan’s Column. My return to civil administration gave me the chance to accumulate against the military party evidence still more decisive than all the proofs which I had amassed in the army. The ranking personnel of the legions and the entire Praetorian Guard are formed exclusively of native Italian stock; these distant wars were draining off the reserves of a country already underpopulated. Those who survived were as much a loss for this country as the others, since they were forced to settle in the newly conquered lands. Even in the provinces the system of recruiting caused some serious uprisings at about that time. A journey in Spain undertaken somewhat later on in order to inspect the operation of copper mines on my family estates, convinced me of the disorder introduced by war into all branches of the economy; I confirmed my belief in the justice of the protestations of business men whom I knew in Rome. I was not so sanguine as to think that it would always lie within our power to avoid all wars, but I wished them to be no more than defensive; I dreamed of an army trained to maintain order on frontiers less extended, if necessary, but secure. Every new increase in the vast imperial organism seemed to me an unsound growth, like a cancer or dropsical edema which would eventually cause our death.

Not one of these ideas could be presented to the emperor. He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandons himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself. On the whole, the achievements of his principate had been admirable, but the labors of peace to which the best of his advisors had ingeniously directed him, those great projects of the architects and legists of his reign, had always counted less for him than a single victory. This man, so nobly parsimonious for his personal needs, was now seized by a passion for expenditure. Barbarian gold raised from the bed of the Danube, the five hundred thousand ingots of King Decebalus, had sufficed to defray the cost of a public bounty and donations to the army (of which I had had my part), as well as the wild luxury of the games and initial outlays for the tremendous venture in Asia. These baneful riches falsified the true state of the finances. The fruits of war were food for new wars.

Licinius Sura died at about that time. He was the most liberal of the emperor’s private counselors, so his death was a battle lost for our side. He had always been like a father in his solicitude for me; for some years illness had left him too little strength to fulfill any of his personal ambitions, but he had always enough energy to aid a man whose views appeared to him sane. The conquest of Arabia had been undertaken against his advice; he alone, had he lived, would have been able to save the State the gigantic strain and expense of the Parthian campaign. Ridden by fever, he employed his hours of insomnia in discussing with me plans for reform; they exhausted him, but their success was more important to him than a few more hours of life. At his bedside I lived in advance, and to the last administrative detail, certain of the future phases of my reign. This dying man spared the emperor in his criticisms, but he knew that he was carrying with him to the tomb what reason was left in the regime. Had he lived two or three years longer, I could perhaps have avoided some tortuous devices which marked my accession to power; he would have succeeded in persuading the emperor to adopt me sooner, and openly. But even so the last words of that statesman in bequeathing his task to me were one part of my imperial investiture.

If the group of my followers was increasing, so was that of my enemies. The most dangerous of my adversaries was Lusius Quietus, a Roman with some Arab blood, whose Numidian squadrons had played an important part in the second Dacian campaign, and who was pressing fiercely for the Asiatic war. I detested everything about him, his barbarous luxury, the pretentious swirl of his white headgear bound with cord of gold, his false, arrogant eyes, and his unbelievable cruelty toward the conquered and to those who had offered their submission. The leaders of the military party were destroying themselves in internal strife, but those who remained were thereby only the more entrenched in power, and I was only the more exposed to the mistrust of Palma or to the hatred of Celsus. My own position, happily, was almost impregnable. The civil administration was coming increasingly into my hands, since the emperor now occupied himself exclusively with his plans for war. My friends, who would have been the only persons capable of supplanting me because of their ability or their knowledge of affairs, with noble self-effacement yielded me first place. Neratius Priscus, whom the emperor trusted, daily confined his activities more deliberately within his legal specialty. Attianus organized his life with a view to serving me, and I had the prudent approbation of Plotina. A year before the war I was promoted to the governorship of Syria; later was added the post of military legate. Ordered to organize and supervise our bases, I became one of the levers of command in an undertaking which I knew to be out of all reason. I hesitated for some time, and then accepted. To refuse would have been tantamount to closing the roads to power at a moment when power was more vital to me than ever. It would also have deprived me of the one chance to act as moderator.

During these few years which preceded the great crisis for the State, I had taken a decision which left me forever exposed to the accusation of frivolity by my enemies, and which was in part calculated for that effect, to parry thus all chance of attack. I had gone to spend some months in Greece. Political considerations were no part of this voyage, in appearance at least. It was an excursion for pleasure and for study: I brought back some graven cups, and some books which I shared with Plotina. Of all my official honors, it was there that I received the one accepted with true joy: I was named archon of Athens. I allowed myself some months of effortless work and delights, walks in spring on hillsides strewn with anemones, friendly contact with bare marble. At Chaeronea, where I went to muse upon the heroic friendships of the Sacred Battalion, I spent two days as the guest of Plutarch. I had had my own Sacred Battalion, but, as is often the case with me, my life was less moving to me than history itself. I had some hunting in Arcadia, and went to Delphi to pray. At Sparta, on the edge of the Eurotas, some shepherds taught me an ancient air on the flute, a strange birdsong. Near Megara there was a peasant wedding which lasted the night long; my companions and I joined in the dances, as we should not have dared do in custom-bound Rome.

The traces of Roman crimes were visible on all sides: the walls of Corinth, left in ruins by Mummius, and the spaces within the sanctuaries left empty by Nero’s organized theft of statues during his scandalous voyage. Impoverished Greece lived on in an atmosphere of pensive grace, with a kind of lucid subtlety and sober delight. Nothing had changed since the period when the pupil of the rhetorician Isaeus had breathed in for the first time that odor of warm honey, salt, and resin; nothing, in short, had changed for centuries. The sands of the palaestrae were as golden as before; Phidias and Socrates no longer frequented them, but the young men who exercised there still resembled the exquisite Charmides. It seemed to me sometimes that the Greek spirit had not carried the premises of its own genius through to their ultimate conclusions: the harvests were still to be reaped; the grain ripened in the sun and already cut was but little in comparison with the Eleusinian promise of riches hidden in that fair soil. Even among my savage enemies, the Sarmatians, I had found vases of perfect form and a mirror decorated with Apollo’s image, gleams from Greece like a pale sun on snow. I could see possibilities of Hellenizing the barbarians and Atticizing Rome, thus imposing upon the world by degrees the only culture which has once for all separated itself from the monstrous, the shapeless, and the inert, the only one to have invented a definition of method, a system of politics, and a theory of beauty. The light disdain of the Greeks, which I have never ceased to feel under their most ardent homage, did not offend me; I found it natural. Whatever virtues may have distinguished me from them, I knew that I should always be less subtle than an Aegean sailor, less wise than an herb vendor of the Agora. I accepted without irritation the slightly haughty condescension of that proud race, according to an entire nation the privileges which I have always so readily conceded to those I loved. But to give the Greeks time to continue and perfect their work some centuries of peace were needed, with those calm leisures and discreet liberties which peace allows. Greece was depending upon us to be her protector, since after all we say that we are her master. I promised myself to stand watch over the defenseless god.

I had held my post as governor of Syria for a year when Trajan joined me in Antioch. He came to inspect the final preparations for the Armenian expedition, which was preliminary in his thoughts to the attack upon the Parthians. Plotina accompanied him as always, and his niece Matidia, my accommodating motherin-law, who for some years had gone with him in camp as the head of his household. Celsus, Palma, and Nigrinus, my old enemies, still sat in the Council and dominated the general staff. All these people packed themselves into the palace while awaiting the opening of the campaign. Court intrigues flourished as never before. Everyone was laying his bets in expectation of the first throws of the dice of war.

The army moved off almost immediately in a northerly direction. With it departed the vast swarm of high officials, office-seekers, and hangers-on. The emperor and his suite paused for a few days in Commagene for festivals which were already triumphal; the lesser kings of the Orient, gathered at Satala, outdid each other in protestations of loyalty upon which, had I been in Trajan’s place, I should have counted little for the future. Lusius Quietus, my dangerous rival, placed in charge of the advance posts, took possession of the shores of Lake Van in the course of a sweeping but absurdly easy conquest; the northern part of Mesopotamia, vacated by the Parthians, was annexed without difficulty; Abgar, king of Osroëne, surrendered in Edessa. The emperor came back to Antioch to take up his winter quarters, postponing till spring the invasion of the Parthian Empire itself, but already determined to accept no overture for peace. Everything had gone according to his plans. The joy of plunging into this adventure, so long delayed, restored a kind of youth to this man of sixty-four. My views of the outcome remained somber. The Jewish and the Arabian elements were more and more hostile to the war; the great provincial landowners were angered at having to defray costs of troops passing through; the cities objected strenuously to the imposition of new taxes. Just after the emperor’s return, a first catastrophe occurred which served as forerunner to all the rest: in the middle of a December night an earthquake laid a fourth of the city of Antioch in ruins within a few seconds. Trajan was bruised by a falling beam, but heroically went on tending the wounded; his immediate following numbered several dead. The Syrian mobs straightway sought to place the blame for the disaster on someone, and the emperor, for once putting aside his principles of tolerance, committed the error of allowing a group of Christians to be massacred. I have little enough sympathy for that sect myself, but the spectacle of old men flogged and children tortured all contributed to the general agitation of spirit and rendered that sinister winter more odious still. There was no money for prompt repair of the effects of the quake; thousands of shelterless people camped at night in the squares. My rounds of inspection revealed to me the existence of a hidden discontent and a secret hatred which the dignitaries who thronged the palace did not even suspect. In the midst of the ruins the emperor was pursuing his preparations for the next campaign: an entire forest was used up in the construction of movable bridges and rafts for the crossing of the Tigris. He had received with joy a whole series of new titles conferred upon him by the Senate, and was impatient to finish with the Orient in order to return to his triumph in Rome. The slightest delay would loose furies which shook him like an access of fever.

The man who restlessly paced the vast halls of that palace built long ago by the Seleucids, and which I had myself embellished (what a spiritless task that was!) with eulogistic inscriptions in his honor and with panoplies of the Dacian war, was no longer the man who had welcomed me to the camp in Cologne nearly twenty years earlier. Even his virtues had aged. His somewhat heavy joviality, which formerly disguised genuine kindness, was now no more than vulgar habit; his firmness had changed to obstinacy; his aptitude for the immediate and the practical had led to a total refusal to think. The tender respect which he felt for the empress and the grumbling affection manifested for his niece Matidia had changed into a senile dependence upon these women, whose counsels, nevertheless, he resisted more and more. His attacks of liver disorder disturbed his physician Crito, though he himself took no thought for it. His pleasures had always lacked art, and they fell still lower as he grew older. It was of little importance that the emperor, when his day’s work was over, chose to abandon himself to barrack room debaucheries in company with youths whom he found agreeable, or handsome. It was, on the contrary, rather serious that he could hardly stand wine, and took too much of it; and that his small court of increasingly mediocre subalterns, selected and manipulated by freedmen of dubious character, was so placed as to be present at all my conversations with him and could report them to my adversaries. In daytime I saw him only at staff meetings, which were wholly given over to details of planning, and where the moment never came to express an independent opinion. At all other times he avoided private talks. Wine provided this man of little subtlety with a veritable arsenal of clumsy ruses. His susceptibilities of other years had indeed given way: he insisted that I join him in his pleasures; the noise, the laughter, the feeblest jokes of the young men were always welcomed as so many ways of signifying to me that this was no time for serious business. He waited for the moment when one more glass would deprive me of my reason. Everything reeled about me in this hall where barbaric trophies of wild ox heads seemed to laugh in my face. The wine jars followed in steady succession; a vinous song would spurt forth here and there, or the insolent, beguiling laugh of a page; the emperor, resting an ever more trembling hand upon the table, immured in a drunkenness possibly half feigned, lost far away upon the roads of Asia, sank heavily into his dreams… Unfortunately these dreams had beauty. They were the same as those which had formerly made me think of giving up everything for the sake of following northern routes beyond the Caucasus toward Asia. This fascination, to which the elderly emperor was yielding as if entranced, had lured Alexander before him. That prince had almost made a reality of these same dreams, and had died because of them at thirty. But the gravest danger in these mighty projects lay still more in their apparent soundness; as always, practical reasons abounded for justification of the absurd and for being carried away by the impossible. The problem of the Orient had preoccupied us for centuries; it seemed natural to rid ourselves of it once and for all. Our exchanges of wares with India and the mysterious Land of Silks depended entirely upon Jewish merchants and Arabian exporters who held the franchise for Parthian roads and ports. Once the vast and loosely joined empire of the Arsacid horsemen had been reduced to nothingness we should touch directly upon those rich extremities of the world; Asia once unified would become but a province more for Rome. The port of Alexandria-in-Egypt was the only one of our outlets toward India which did not depend upon Parthian good will; there, too, we were continually confronted with the troublesome demands and revolts of the Jewish communities. Success on the part of Trajan’s expedition would have allowed us to disregard that untrustworthy city. But such array of reasoning had never persuaded me. Sound commercial treaties would have pleased me more, and I could already foresee the possibility of reducing the role of Alexandria by creating a second Greek metropolis near the Red Sea, as I did later on in founding Antinoöpolis. I was beginning to know this complicated world of Asia. The simple plan of total extermination which had worked for Dacia was not the right thing in this country of much more abundant and settled population, upon which, besides, the wealth of the world depended. Beyond the Euphrates began for us the land of mirage and danger, the sands where one helplessly sank, and the roads which ended in nothing. The slightest reversal would have resulted in a jolt to our prestige giving rise to all kinds of catastrophe; the problem was not only to conquer but to conquer again and again, perpetually; our forces would be drained off in the attempt. We had tried it already: I thought with horror of the head of Crassus, tossed from hand to hand like a ball in the course of a performance of Euripides’ Bacchantes which a barbarian king with a smattering of Greek learning had presented on the afternoon of a victory over Rome. Trajan thought to avenge this ancient defeat; I hoped chiefly to keep it from happening again. I could foretell the future with some accuracy, a thing quite possible, after all, when one is informed on a fair number of the elements which make up the present: a few meaningless victories would draw our armies too far on, leaving other frontiers perilously exposed; the dying emperor would cover himself with glory, and we who must go on living would have to resolve all the problems and remedy all the evils.

Caesar was right to prefer the first place in a village to the second in Rome. Not by ambition, nor by vain glory, but because a man in second place has only the choice between the dangers of obedience and those of revolt, or those still more serious dangers of compromise. I was not even second in Rome. The emperor, though about to set forth upon a hazardous expedition, had not yet designated his successor; each step taken to advance his projects offered some opportunity to the chiefs of the general staff. This man, though almost naďve, seemed to me now more complicated than myself. Only his rough manner reassured me; in his gruffness he treated me like a son. At other moments I expected to be supplanted by Palma or cut off by Quietus as soon as my services could be dispensed with. I had no real power: I did not even manage to obtain an audience for the influential members of the Sanhedrin of Antioch, who were as fearful as we of the surprise moves of the Jewish agitators, and who would have enlightened Trajan as to the contrivings of their fellow Jews. My friend Latinius Alexander, who was descended from one of the ancient royal families of Asia Minor, and whose name and wealth had great weight, was heeded no more than I. Pliny, sent out four years before to Bithynia, died there without having had time to inform the emperor of the exact state of public opinion and finances, even supposing that his incurable optimism would have allowed him to do so. The secret reports of the Lycian merchant Opramoas, who knew Asian affairs thoroughly, were derided by Palma. The freedmen took advantage of the morning headaches which followed the drunken evenings to keep me out of the imperial chamber; the emperor’s orderly, a man named Phoedimus, an honest but stupid fellow, and set against me, twice refused me entry. On the contrary, my enemy Celsus, of consular rank, locked himself in one evening with Trajan for a conference which lasted for hours, and at the end of which I thought myself lost. I sought allies where I could; for a price, in gold, I corrupted former slaves whom otherwise I would willingly have sent to the galleys; I caressed more than one curly-headed darling. Nerva’s diamond had lost its fire.

And it was then that the wisest of my good geniuses came to my aid: Plotina. I had known the empress for nearly twenty years. We were of the same circle and of about the same age. I had seen her living calmly through almost as constrained an existence as my own, and one more deprived of future. She had taken my part, without appearing to notice that she did so, in my difficult moments. But it was during the evil days at Antioch that her presence became indispensable to me, as was always her esteem in after times, an esteem which I kept till her death. I grew accustomed to that white-clad figure, in garments as simple as a woman’s can be, and to her silences, or to words so measured as to be never more than replies, and these as succinct as possible. Nothing in her appearance or bearing was out of keeping with that palace more ancient than the splendors of Rome: this daughter of a race newly come to power was in no way inferior to the Seleucids. We two were in accord on almost everything. Both of us had a passion for adorning, then laying bare, our souls, and for testing our minds on every touchstone. She leaned toward Epicurean philosophy, that narrow but clean bed whereon I have sometimes rested my thought. The mystery of gods, which haunted me, did not trouble her, nor had she my ardent love for the human body. She was chaste by reason of her disgust with the merely facile, generous by determination rather than by nature, wisely mistrustful but ready to accept anything from a friend, even his inevitable errors. Friendship was a choice to which she devoted her whole being; she gave herself to it utterly, and as I have done only to my loves. She has known me better than anyone has; I have let her see what I carefully concealed from everyone else; for example, my secret lapses into cowardice. I like to think that on her side she has kept almost nothing from me. No bodily intimacy ever existed between us; in its place was this contact of two minds closely intermingled.

Our accord dispensed with explanations and avowals, or reticences: facts themselves sufficed. She observed these more closely than I; under the heavy braids which the fashion demanded her smooth brow was that of a judge. Her memory retained the exact impression of minutest objects; therefore, unlike me, she never had occasion to hesitate too long or to decide too quickly. She could detect at a glance my most secret adversaries, and evaluated my followers with cool detachment. In truth, we were accomplices, but the most trained ear would hardly have been able to catch the tones of a secret accord between us. She never committed the gross error of complaining to me about the emperor, nor the more subtle one of excusing or praising him. On my side, my loyalty was not questioned. Attianus, who had just come from Rome, joined in these discussions, which sometimes lasted all night; but nothing seemed to tire this imperturbable, yet frail, woman. She had managed to have my former guardian named privy councillor, thus eliminating my enemy Celsus. Trajan’s mistrust of me, or else the impossibility of finding someone to fill my post in the rear, would keep me in Antioch: I was counting upon these friends to inform me about everything not revealed in the official dispatches. In case of disaster they would know how to rally round me the fidelity of a part of the army. My adversaries would have to reckon with the presence of this aged sufferer from gout, who was setting forth only in order to serve me, and with this woman who could exact of herself the long endurance of a soldier.

I watched them depart, the emperor on horseback, firm and admirably placid, the patient group of women borne in litters, Praetorian guards mingled with the Numidian scouts of the redoubtable Lusius Quietus. The army, which had passed the winter on the banks of the Euphrates, moved forward as soon as its chief arrived; the Parthian campaign was beginning in earnest. First reports were magnificent: Babylon conquered, the Tigris crossed, Ctesiphon fallen. Everything, as always, gave way before the astonishing mastery of this man. The prince of Characene Arabia declared his allegiance, opening thus the entire course of the Tigris to the Roman barges. The emperor embarked for the port of Charax at the head of the Persian Gulf. He was nearing the fabled shores. My fears persisted, but I hid them like something criminal; to be right too soon is to be in the wrong. Worse still, I was beginning to doubt my judgment; had I been guilty of that base incredulity which keeps us from recognizing the grandeur of a man whom we know too well? I had forgotten that certain beings shift the boundaries of destiny and alter history thereby. I had uttered blasphemy against the Genius of the emperor. I was consumed with anxiety at my post: if by chance the impossible were to take place, was I to play no part? Since everything is always easier than to exercise common sense, the desire seized me to don once more the coat of mail of the Sarmatian wars, using Plotina’s influence to have myself recalled to the army. I envied the least of our soldiers their lot on the dusty roadways of Asia and the shock of their encounter with Persia’s mailed battalions. This time the Senate voted the emperor the right to celebrate not one triumph but a succession of triumphs which would last as long as he lived. I myself did what the occasion demanded: I ordered festivities and went to offer sacrifice on the summit of Mount Casius.

Suddenly the fire which was smoldering in that land of the Orient burst forth everywhere at one time. The Jewish merchants refused to pay tax at Seleucia; Gyrene straightway revolted, and the Oriental element of the city massacred the Greek element; the roads by which Egyptian grain was brought to our troops were cut by a band of Zealots from Jerusalem; at Cyprus the Greek and Roman residents were seized by the Jewish populace, who forced them to slay each other in gladiatorial combats. I succeeded in maintaining order in Syria, but could see flame in the eyes of beggars sitting at the doors of the synagogues, and mute sneers on the heavy lips of the camel drivers, a hatred which after all we did not merit. The Jews and Arabs had made common cause from the beginning against a war which threatened to ruin their commerce; but Israel took advantage of the times to throw itself against a world from which it was excluded by its religious frenzies, its strange rites, and the intransigence of its god. The emperor, returned with all speed to Babylon, delegated Quietus to chastise the rebel cities: Gyrene, Edessa, Seleucia, great Greek centers of the Orient, were set on fire as punishment for treasons planned at mere caravan stops or contrived and directed from Jewries. Some time later, in visiting these cities for reconstruction, I passed beneath colonnades in ruins and between rows of broken statues. The emperor Osroës, who had subsidized these revolts, immediately took the offensive; Abgar rose up in resistance to re-enter demolished Edessa; our Armenian allies, on whom Trajan had thought he could depend, lent a helping hand to the Persian war lords. Without warning, the emperor found himself at the center of an immense field of battle where he had to face the enemy on all sides.

He wasted the winter in the siege of Hatra, a virtually impregnable fortress situated in the heart of a desert; it cost our army some thousands of deaths. His stubbornness became more and more a form of personal courage: this ailing man would not let go. I knew from Plotina that Trajan still refused to name his heir, in spite of the admonition of a brief paralytic attack. If this imitator of Alexander were to die, in his turn, of fever or intemperance in some unhealthy corner of Asia this foreign war would be complicated by civil war; a struggle to the death would break out between my supporters and those of Celsus or of Palma. Suddenly reports ceased almost completely; the thin line of communication between the emperor and me was maintained only by the Numidian bands of my worst enemy. It was at this period that I ordered my physician for the first time to mark with red ink on my chest the position of my heart; if it came to the worst, I did not intend to fall, alive, into Lusius Quietus’ hands. The difficult task of pacifying the adjacent islands and provinces was now added to the other duties of my office, but the exhausting work of daytime was nothing in comparison with the length of the restless nights. All the problems of the empire fell upon me at once, but my own plight weighed upon me even more. I desired the supreme power. I desired it that I might put my own plans into effect, try my remedies, and restore peace. I wanted it above all in order to become my full self before I died.

I was in my fortieth year. If I were to die at that time, nothing more of me would survive than a name in a series of high functionaries, and an inscription in Greek in honor of an archon of Athens. Ever since that anxious period, each time that I have witnessed the disappearance of a man just at middle age, whose successes and reverses the public thinks it can judge exactly, I have recalled that at the same age I still figured only in my own eyes, and in those of a few friends, who must sometimes have doubted my abilities as I doubted them myself. I have come to the realization that few men fulfill themselves before death, and I have judged their interrupted work with the more pity. This obsession with the possibility of a life frustrated immobilized my thought at one point, drawing everything to it like an abscess. My hunger for power was like the craving for love, which keeps the lover from eating or sleeping, from thinking, or even from loving so long as certain rites remain unperformed. The most urgent tasks seemed vain when I was not the free master over decisions affecting the future; I needed to be assured of reigning in order to recapture the desire to serve. That palace of Antioch, where I was to live some years later on in a virtual frenzy of delight, was for me then but a prison, and perhaps my death cell. I sent messages to the oracles, to Jupiter Ammon, to Castalia, and to Zeus Dolichenus. I summoned Persian Magi; I went so far as to send to the dungeons of Antioch for a criminal intended for crucifixion, whose throat was slit in my presence by a sorcerer in the hope that the soul, floating for an instant between life and death, would reveal the future. The wretch gained thereby escape from slower death, but the questions put remained unanswered. At night I trailed from one window recess to another, from balcony to balcony through the rooms of that palace where the walls were still cracked from the earthquake, here and there tracing my astrological calculations upon the stones, and questioning the trembling stars. But it is on earth that the signs of the future have to be sought.

At last the emperor raised the siege of Hatra and decided to come back over the Euphrates, which never should have been crossed at all. The heat, which was already torrid, and harassing from the Parthian archers rendered that bitter return more disastrous still. On a burning evening in May I rode out beyond the city gates along the banks of the Orontes to meet the small group so worn by anxiety, fever, and fatigue: the ailing emperor, Attianus, and the women. Trajan determinedly kept to his horse as far as the palace door. He could hardly stand; this man once so full of vitality seemed more changed than others are by the approach of death. Crito and Matidia helped him to climb the steps, induced him to lie down, and thereafter established themselves at his bedside. Attianus and Plotina recounted to me those incidents of the campaign which they had not been able to include in their brief dispatches. One of these episodes so moved me as to become forever a personal remembrance, a symbol of my own. As soon as the weary emperor had reached Charax he had gone to sit upon the shore, looking out over the brackish waters of the Persian Gulf. This was still the period when he felt no doubt of victory, but for the first time the immensity of the world overwhelmed him, and the feeling of age, and those limits which circumscribe us all. Great tears rolled down the cheeks of the man ever deemed incapable of weeping. The supreme commander who had borne the Roman eagles to hitherto unexplored shores knew now that he would never embark upon that sea so long in his thoughts: India, Bactria, the whole of that vague East which had intoxicated him from afar, would continue to be for him only names and dreams. On the very next day bad news forced him to turn back. Each time, in my turn, that destiny has denied me my wish I have remembered those tears shed that evening on a distant shore by an old man who, perhaps for the first time, was confronting his own life face to face.

I went the following morning to the emperor’s room. I felt filial toward him, or rather, fraternal. The man who had prided himself on living and thinking in every respect like any ordinary soldier of his army was ending his life in complete solitude; lying abed he continued to build up grandiose plans in which no one was any longer interested. As always, his brusque habits of speech served to disfigure his thought; forming his words now with utmost difficulty he talked to me of the triumph which they were preparing for him in Rome. He was denying defeat just as he was denying death. Two days later he had a second attack. My anxious consultations were renewed with Attianus, and with Plotina. The foresight of the empress had just effected the elevation of my old friend to the all-powerful position of commander of the Praetorian cohorts, bringing the imperial guard thus under our control. Happily Matidia, who never left the invalid’s chamber, was wholly on our side; in any case, this simple, affectionate woman was like wax in Plotina’s hands. But not one of us dared to remind the emperor that the question of the succession was still pendent. Perhaps like Alexander he had decided not to name his heir himself; perhaps, known to himself alone, he had commitments toward the party of Quietus. More likely, he was refusing to face his end. One sees thus in families many an obstinate old man dying intestate. For them it is less a matter of keeping their treasure to the last (or their empire), from which their numbed fingers are already half detached, than of avoiding too early entry into that posthumous state where one no longer has decisions to take, surprises to give, or threats or promises to make to the living. I pitied him; we were too different for him to find in me what most people who have wielded total authority seek desperately on their deathbeds, a docile successor pledged in advance to the same methods, and even to the same errors. But the world about him was void of statesmen: I was the only one whom he could choose without failing in his obligations as a good executive and great prince; this chief so accustomed to evaluate records of service was almost forced to accept me. That was, moreover, an excellent reason to hate me. Little by little his health was restored just enough to allow him to leave his room. He spoke of undertaking a new campaign; he did not believe in it himself. His physician Crito, who feared for him the effects of midsummer heat, succeeded at last in persuading him to re-embark for Rome. The evening before his departure he had me summoned aboard the ship which was to take him back to Italy and named me commander-in-chief in his place. He committed himself that far. But the essential was not done.

Contrary to the orders given me I began negotiations immediately, but in secret, for peace with Osroës. I was banking on the fact that I should probably no longer have to render an accounting to the emperor. Less than ten days later I was awakened in the middle of the night by arrival of a messenger; at once I recognized a confidential envoy of Plotina. He brought two missives. One, official, informed me that Trajan, unable to stand the sea voyage, had been put down at Selinus-in-Cilicia, where he lay gravely ill in the house of a merchant. A second letter, this one secret, told me of his death, which Plotina promised to keep hidden as long as possible, thus giving me the advantage of being the first one warned. I set off immediately for Selinus, after having taken all necessary precautions to assure myself of the loyalty of the Syrian garrisons. I was barely on the way when a new courier brought me official announcement that the emperor was dead. His will, which designated me as his heir, had just been sent to Rome in safe hands. Everything that for ten years’ time had been feverishly dreamed of, schemed, discussed or kept silent, was here reduced to a message of two lines, traced in Greek in a small, firm, feminine hand. Attianus, who awaited me on the pier of Selinus, was the first to salute me with the title of emperor.

And it is here, in that interval between the disembarkation of the invalid and the moment of his death, that occurs one of those series of events which will forever be impossible for me to reconstruct, and upon which nevertheless my destiny has been built. Those few days passed by Attianus and the women in that merchant’s house determined my life forever after, but concerning them, as later on concerning a certain afternoon on the Nile, I shall never know anything, precisely because it would be of utmost importance to me to know all. Any idler in Rome has his views about these episodes of my life, but I am the least informed of men on that score. My enemies have accused Plotina of taking advantage of the emperor’s last moments to make the dying man pen the few words which bequeathed me the power. Calumniators still more lurid-minded have described a curtained bed, the uncertain gleam of a lamp, the physician Crito dictating the last wishes of Trajan in a voice which counterfeited that of the dead man. They have pointed out that the orderly Phoedimus, who hated me, and whose silence could not have been bought by my friends, very opportunely died of a malignant fever the day after the death of his master. There is something in those pictures of violence and intrigue to strike the popular imagination, and even my own. It would not displease me that a handful of reasonable people should have proved capable of verging upon crime in my behalf, nor that the devotion of the empress should have carried her so far. She was well aware of the dangers which a decision not taken portended for the State; I respect her enough to believe that she would have agreed to commit a necessary fraud if discretion, common sense, public interest, and friendship had all impelled her to it. Subsequently to these events I have seen this document, so violently contested by my adversaries; I am unable to pronounce either for or against the authenticity of this last dictation of a sick man. Certainly I prefer to think that Trajan himself, relinquishing his personal prejudices before he died, did of his own free will leave the empire to him whom he judged on the whole most worthy. But it must be admitted that the end, in this case, was of more concern to me than the means; the essential is that the man invested with power should have proved thereafter that he deserved to wield it.

The body was burned on the shore, not long after my arrival, as preliminary to the triumphal rites which would be solemnized in Rome. Almost no one was present at the very simple ceremony, which took place at dawn and was only a last episode in the prolonged domestic service rendered by the women to the person of Trajan. Matidia wept unrestrainedly; Plotina’s features seemed blurred in the wavering air round the heat of the funeral pyre. Calm, detached, slightly hollow from fever, she remained, as always, cooly impenetrable. Attianus and Crito watched until everything had been duly consumed; the faint smoke faded away in the pale air of unshadowed morning. None of my friends referred to the incidents of those few days which had preceded the emperor’s death. Their rule was evidently to keep silent; mine was to ask no dangerous questions.

That same day the widowed empress and her companions re-embarked for Rome. I returned to Antioch, accompanied along the way by the acclamations of the legions. An extraordinary calm had come over me: ambition and fear alike seemed a nightmare of the past. Whatever happened, I had always been determined to defend my chance of empire to the end, but the act of adoption simplified everything. My own life no longer preoccupied me; I could once more think of the rest of mankind.