Memoirs of Hadrian

DISCIPLINA AUGUSTA

I returned to Greece by the land route. The journey was long. I had reason to think that this would be my last official tour in the Orient, and I was the more anxious, therefore, to see everything for myself. Antioch, where I stopped for some weeks, appeared to me under a new light; I was less impressed than before by the spell of its theaters and festivals, by the delights of the pleasure gardens of Daphne, and by the brilliant color in its passing crowds. I was increasingly aware of the eternal frivolity of the populace, mocking and malicious like the people of Alexandria, and of the stupidity of their so-called intellectual activities; likewise of the vulgar display of luxury on the part of the rich. Hardly one of these leading citizens grasped in its entirety my program for public works and reforms in Asia; they were satisfied to profit by them for their city, and above all for themselves. For a short time I considered advancing Smyrna or Pergamum to the detriment of the arrogant Syrian capital, but the faults of Antioch are those inherent in any metropolis; no great city can escape them. My disgust with urban life made me apply myself even more, if possible, to agrarian reform; I put the finishing touches to the long and complex reorganization of the imperial domains in Asia Minor; the peasants were the better off for it, and the State, too. Crossing Thrace, I went to revisit Hadrianopolis, where veterans of the Dacian and Sarmatian campaigns had settled in great numbers, attracted by land grants and reductions in taxes. The same plan was to be put into operation in Antinoöpolis. I had long since made comparable exemptions everywhere for doctors and professors in the hope of favoring the survival and development of a serious, well-educated middle class. I know the deficiences of this class, but only through it does a State endure.

Athens remained the stop of my choice; I marveled that its beauty depended so little upon memories, whether my own or those of history; that city seemed new with each new day. I stayed this time with Arrian. He had been initiated like me at Eleusis, so was accordingly adopted by one of the great priestly families of Attica, the Kerykes, as I had been by the family of the Eumolpides. He had married into the Kerykes family; his wife was a proud and elegant young Athenian. The two of them gave me every care. Their house was only a few steps from the new library with which I had just endowed Athens, and which offered every aid to meditation, or to the repose which must precede it: comfortable chairs and adequate heating for winters which are often so sharp; stairways giving ready access to the galleries where books are kept; a luxury of alabaster and gold, quiet and subdued. Particular attention had been paid to the choice of lamps, and to their placing. I felt more and more the need to gather together and conserve our ancient books, and to entrust the making of new copies to conscientious scribes. This noble task seemed to me no less urgent than aid to veterans or subsidies to prolific families of the poor; I warned myself that it would take only a few wars, and the misery that follows them, or a single period of brutality or savagery under a few bad rulers to destroy forever the ideas passed down with the help of these frail objects in fiber and ink. Each man fortunate enough to benefit to some degree from this legacy of culture seemed to me responsible for protecting it and holding it in trust for the human race.

During that period I read a great deal. I had encouraged Phlegon to compose a series of chronicles, under the name of Olympiads, which would continue Xenophon’s Hellenica and which would come down to my reign, a bold plan in that it reduced Rome’s vast history to a mere sequel of that of Greece. Phlegon’s style is annoyingly dry, but it would already be something done to have untangled and assembled the facts. The project inspired me to reread the historians of other days; their works, judged in the light of my own experience, filled me with somber thoughts; the energy and good intentions of each statesman seemed of slight avail before this flood so fortuitous and so fatal, this torrent of happenings too confused to be foreseen or directed, or even appraised. The poets, too, engaged me; I liked to conjure those few clear, mellow voices out of a distant past. Theognis became a friend, the aristocrat, the exile, observing human activities without illusion and without indulgence, ever ready to denounce the faults and errors which we call our woes. This clearsighted man had known love’s poignant delights; his liaison with Cyrnus, in spite of suspicions, jealousies, and mutual grievances, had endured into the old age of the one and the mature years of the other: the immortality which he was wont to promise to that youth of Megara was more than an empty assurance, since their two memories have come down to me through a space of more than six centuries. But among the ancient poets Antimachus especially won me: I liked his rich but abstruse style, his ample though highly concentrated phrases, like great bronze cups filled with a heavy wine. I preferred his account of Jason’s expedition to the more romantic Argonautica by Apollonius: Antimachus understood better the mystery of voyages and horizons, and how ephemeral a shadow man throws on this abiding earth. He had wept passionately over the death of his wife, Lydia, and had given her name to a long poem made up of all manner of legends of grief and mourning. That Lydia, whom perhaps I should have taken no notice of as a living being, became a familiar figure for me, dearer than many a feminine face in my own existence. Such poems, though almost forgotten, were little by little restoring to me my faith in immortality.

I revised my own works, the love poems, the occasional pieces, and the ode to the memory of Plotina. One day, perhaps, someone would wish to read all that. A group of obscene verses were matter for hesitation, but I ended, after all, by including them. Our best and most cultivated men write such things. They make a game of it; I should have preferred mine to be more than that, to reflect exactly the naked truth. But there as elsewhere the commonplace entraps us; I was beginning to understand that it takes more than audacity of mind to free us from banality, and that the poet triumphs over routines or imposes his thought upon words by efforts quite as long and persevering as those of my work of emperor. For my part I could aspire only to the rare good luck of the amateur: it would already be considerable if from all this rubble two or three verses were to survive. At about this time, however, I outlined a rather ambitious work, half in prose, half in verse, wherein I intended to include the curious facts observed in the course of my life, together with my meditations and certain dreams, mingling the serious and the ironic; all this would have been bound together by the merest thread, a sort of Satyricon, but harsher. In it I should have set forth a philosophy which had become my own, the Heraclitean idea of change and return. But I have put aside that project as far too vast.

In that same year I held several conversations with the priestess who had formerly initiated me at Eleusis (and whose name must remain secret) in order to discuss and establish details of the cult of Antinous, one by one. The great Eleusiac symbols continued to exert upon me their calming effect; the world has no meaning, perhaps, but if it does have one, that meaning is expressed at Eleusis more wisely and nobly than anywhere else. It was under this woman’s influence that I undertook to plan the administrative divisions of Antinoöpolis, its demes, its streets, its city blocks, on the model of the world of the gods, and at the same time to include therein a reflection of my own life. All the deities were to be represented, Hestia and Bacchus, divinities of the hearth and of the orgy, the gods of the heavens and those of the underworld. I placed my imperial ancestors there, too, Trajan and Nerva, now an integral part of that system of symbols. Plotina figured; the good Matidia was there, in the likeness of Demeter; my wife herself, with whom at the time my relations were cordial enough, made one of that procession of divinities. Some months later I bestowed the name of my sister Paulina upon a district of Antinoöpolis; I had finally broken off with her as the wife of Servianus, but she had now died and thus had regained her unique position of sister in that city of memories. The site of sorrow was becoming the ideal center for reunions and recollections, the Elysian Fields of a life, the place where contradictions are resolved and where everything, within its rank, is equally sacred.

Standing at a window in Arrian’s house under night skies alive with stars, I thought of those words which the Egyptian priests had had carved on Antinous’ tomb: He has obeyed the command of heaven. Can it be that the sky intimates its orders to us, and that only the best among us hear them while the remainder of mankind is aware of no more than oppressive silence? The priestess of Eleusis and Chabrias both thought so. I should have liked them to be right. In my mind I could see the palm of that hand again, smoothed by death, as I had looked on it for the last time that morning at the embalmers’; the lines which had previously disquieted me were no longer visible; the surface was like a wax tablet from which an instruction, once carried out, had been erased. But such lofty affirmations enlighten without rewarming us, like the light of stars, and the night all around us is darker still. If the sacrifice of Antinous had been thrown into the balance in my favor in some divine scale, the results of that terrible gift of self were not yet manifest; the benefits were neither those of life nor even those of immortality. I hardly dared seek a name for them. Sometimes, at rare intervals, a feeble gleam pulsed without warmth on my sky’s horizon; but it served to improve neither the world nor myself; I continued to feel more deteriorated than saved.

It was near this period that Quadratus, a bishop of the Christians, sent me a defense of his faith. I had made it a principle to maintain towards that sect the strictly equitable line of conduct which had been Trajan’s in his better days: I had just reminded the provincial governors that the protection of the law extends to all citizens, and that defamers of Christians would be punished if they levelled accusations against that group without proof. But any tolerance shown to fanatics is immediately mistaken by them for sympathy with their cause; though I can hardly imagine that Quadratus was hoping to make a Christian of me, he assuredly strove to convince me of the excellence of his doctrine, and to prove, above all, that it offered no harm to the State. I read his work, and was even enough interested to have Phlegon assemble some information about the life of the young prophet named Jesus who had founded the sect, but who died a victim of Jewish intolerance about a hundred years ago. This young sage seems to have left behind him some teachings not unlike those of Orpheus, to whom at times his disciples compare him. In spite of Quadratus’ singularly flat prose I could discern through it the appealing charm of virtues of simple folk, their kindness, their ingenuousness, and their devotion to each other. All of that strongly resembled the fraternities which slaves or poor citizens found almost everywhere in honor of our gods in the crowded quarters of our cities. Within a world which remains, despite all our efforts, hard and indifferent to men’s hopes and trials, these small societies for mutual aid offer the unfortunate a source of comfort and support. But I was aware, too, of certain dangers. Such glorification of virtues befitting children and slaves was made at the expense of more virile and more intellectual qualities; under that narrow, vapid innocence I could detect the fierce intransigence of the sectarian in presence of forms of life and of thought which are not his own, the insolent pride which makes him value himself above other men, and his voluntarily circumscribed vision. I speedily tired of Quadratus’ captious arguments, and of those scraps of wisdom ineptly borrowed from the writings of our philosophers. Chabrias, ever preoccupied to offer the gods the worship due them, was disturbed by the progress of sects of this kind among the populace of large cities; he feared for the welfare of our ancient religions, which yoke men to no dogma whatsoever, but lend themselves, on the contrary, to interpretations as varied as nature itself; they allow austere spirits who desire to do so to invent for themselves a higher morality, but they do not bind the masses by precepts so strict as to engender immediate constraint and hypocrisy. Arrian shared these views. I passed a whole evening discussing with him the injunction which consists in loving another as oneself; it is too foreign to the nature of man to be followed with sincerity by the average person, who will never love anyone but himself, and it is not at all suited to the philosopher, who is little given to self-love.

On many points, however, the thinking of our philosophers also seemed to be limited and confused, if not sterile. Three quarters of our intellectual performances are no more than decorations upon a void; I wondered if that increasing vacuity was due to the lowering of intelligence or to moral decline; whatever the cause, mediocrity of mind was matched almost everywhere by shocking selfishness and dishonesty. I had directed Herod Atticus to supervise the construction of a chain of aqueducts in the Troad; he made use of that trust to squander public funds in shameful fashion, and when called to render an accounting sent back the insolent reply that he was rich enough to cover all deficits; such wealth was itself a scandal. His father, who had but recently died, had made a discreet arrangement to disinherit him by multiplying bounties to the Athenian citizenry; young Herod refused outright to pay the paternal legacy, and a law suit ensued which is still going on. In Smyrna my erstwhile intimate, Polemo, had the effrontery to oust a deputation of senators from Rome who had thought it reasonable to count on his hospitality. Your father Antoninus, the gentlest of men, was enraged; statesman and sophist finally came to blows over the matter; such pugilism, if unworthy of an emperor-to-be, was still more disgraceful for a Greek philosopher. Favorinus, that greedy dwarf whom I had showered with money and honors, was peddling witticisms on all sides at my expense: the thirty legions which I commanded were, according to him, my only strong arguments in the philosophical bouts wherein I had the vanity to indulge, and wherein, he explained, he took care to leave the last word to the emperor. That was to tax me with both presumption and stupidity, but it amounted, above all, to admission of singular cowardice on his part. Pedants are always annoyed when others know their narrow specialty as well as they do themselves, and everything now served as pretext for their ugly remarks: because I had added the much neglected works of Hesiod and Ennius to the school curriculum, those routine minds promptly attributed to me the desire to dethrone Homer, and the gentle Virgil as well (whom nevertheless I was always quoting). There was nothing to be done with people of that sort.

Arrian was better than that. I liked to talk with him on all subjects. He had retained a fervent and profoundly serious memory of the Bithynian youth; I was grateful to him for ranking that love, which he had witnessed, with the famous mutual attachments of antiquity; from time to time we spoke of it, but although no lie was uttered I frequently had the impression of a certain falsity in our words; the truth was being covered beneath the sublime. I was almost as much disappointed by Chabrias: his blind devotion to Antinous had been like that of an aged slave for a young master, but, absorbed as he was in the worship of the new god, he seemed to have lost all remembrance of the living boy. My black Euphorion had at least observed our life at closer range. Arrian and Chabrias were dear to me, and I felt myself in no way superior to those two decent men, but sometimes it seemed to me that I was the only person struggling to keep his eyes wholly open.

Yes, Athens remained exquisite, and I did not regret the choice of Greek disciplines for my life. Everything in us which is human, or well-ordered and clearly thought out comes to us from them. But I was beginning to feel that Rome’s seriousness, even if somewhat heavy, and its sense of continuity and love of the concrete, had all been needed for the full realization of what was for Greece still only an admirable idea, a splendid impulse of the soul. Plato had written the Republic and glorified the Just, but we were the ones who were striving, warned by our own errors, to make the State a machine fit to serve man, with the least possible risk of crushing him. The word philanthropy is Greek, but the legist Salvius Julianus and I are the ones who are working to change the wretched condition of the slaves. Rome had taught me prudence and assiduous application to detail, those virtues which temper the boldness of broad general views.

There were times, too, when deep within myself I would come upon those vast, melancholy landscapes of Virgil, and his twilights veiled by tears; if I searched deeper still I would encounter the burning sadness of Spain and its stark violence; I reflected upon the varied blood, Celtic, Iberian, Punic perhaps, which must have infiltrated into the veins of those Roman colonists in Italica; I recalled that my father had been surnamed “the African.” Greece had helped me evaluate those elements in my nature which were not Greek. Likewise for Antinous: I had made him the very image and symbol of that country so passionate for beauty, and he would be, perhaps, the last of its gods; yet the refinements of Persia and the savagery of Thrace had met in Bithynia with the shepherds of ancient Arcadia; that slightly arched nose recalled profiles of Osroës’ pages; the broad visage and high cheekbones were those of the Thracian horsemen who gallop along the shores of the Bosphorus, and who burst forth at night into wild, sad song. No formula is so complete as to contain all.

That year I completed the revision of the Athenian constitution, a reform begun by me long before. For the new instrument I went back, in so far as possible, to Cleisthenes’ ancient democratic laws. Governmental costs were lightened by reducing the number of officials; I tried, too, to put a stop to the farming of taxes, a disastrous system unfortunately still employed here and there by local administrations. University endowments, established at about the same period, helped Athens to become once more an important center of learning. Beauty lovers who flocked to that city before my time had been content to admire its monuments without concern for the growing poverty of the inhabitants. On the contrary, I had done my utmost to increase the resources of that poor land. One of the great projects of my reign was realized shortly before my departure, the establishment of annual assemblies in Athens wherein delegates from all the Greek world would hereafter transact all affairs for Greece, thus restoring this small, perfect city to its due rank of metropolis. The plan had taken shape only after delicate negotiations with cities jealous of Athens’ supremacy and still nursing ancient resentments against her; little by little, however, common sense and even some enthusiasm carried the day. The first of those assemblies coincided with the opening of the Olympieion for public worship; that temple was becoming more than ever the symbol of a reawakened Greece.

On that occasion a series of spectacles was given, with marked success, in the theater of Dionysos; my seat there was beside that of the Hierophant, and only slightly higher; thereafter the priest of Antinous had his place, too, among the notables and the clergy. I had had the stage of the theater enlarged and ornamented with new bas-reliefs; on one of these friezes my young Bithynian was receiving a kind of eternal right of citizenship from the Eleusinian goddesses. In the Panathenaic stadium, transformed for a few hours into a forest of mythological times, I staged a hunt in which some thousand wild animals figured; thus was revived for the brief space of the festival that primitive and rustic town of Hippolytus, servitor of Diana, and of Theseus, companion of Hercules. A few days later I left Athens. Nor have I returned there since.

The administration of Italy, left for centuries wholly in the hands of the praetors, had never been definitely codified. The Perpetual Edict, which settles the issue once and for all, dates from this period of my life. For years I had been corresponding with Salvius Julianus about these reforms, and my return to Rome served to hasten their completion. The Italian cities were not to be deprived of their civil liberties; on the contrary, we had everything to gain, in that respect as in others, if we did not forcibly impose upon them an artificial uniformity. I am even surprised that such townships, many of which are older than Rome, should be so ready to renounce their customs (some of them wise, indeed) in order to follow the capital in every respect. My purpose was simply to diminish that mass of contradictions and abuses which eventually turn legal procedure into a wilderness where decent people hardly dare venture, and where bandits abound. Such endeavors obliged me to travel frequently from one place to another about the country. I made several stays in Baiae, in the former villa of Cicero which I had purchased early in my reign; this province of Campania interested me, for it reminded me of Greece. On the edge of the Adriatic, in the small city of Hadria whence my ancestors had emigrated to Spain nearly four centuries earlier, I was honored with the highest municipal offices. Near that stormy sea whose name I bear, I came upon some of my family urns in a ruined cemetery. There I meditated on those men, of whom I knew nothing but from whom I sprang, and whose race would end with me.

In Rome they were enlarging my mausoleum, since Decrianus had cleverly redrawn the plans; they are still at work upon it, even now. The idea for those circular galleries came from Egypt, and likewise the ramps descending to underground chambers; I had conceived of a colossal tomb to be reserved not for myself alone, or for my immediate successors, but as the eventual resting-place of future emperors for centuries to come; princes yet to be born have thus their places already marked in this palace of death. I saw also to the ornamentation of the cenotaph erected on the Field of Mars in memory of Antinous; a barge from Alexandria had discharged its loads of sphinxes and obelisks for this work. A new project long occupied me, and has not ceased to do so, namely, the construction of the Odeon, a model library provided with halls for courses and lectures to serve as a center of Greek culture in Rome. I made it less splendid than the new library at Ephesus, built three or four years before, and gave it less grace and elegance than the library of Athens, but I intend to make this foundation a close second to, if not the equal of, the Museum of Alexandria; its further development will rest with you. In working upon it I often think of the library established by Plotina in Trajan’s Forum, with that noble inscription placed by her order over its door: Dispensary to the Soul.

The Villa was near enough completion to have my collections transported to it, my musical instruments and the several thousand books purchased here and there in the course of my travels. I gave a series of banquets where everything was assembled with care, both the menu for the repasts and the somewhat restricted list of my guests. My goal was to have all in harmony with the calm beauty of these gardens and these halls, to have fruits as exquisite as the music, and the sequence of courses as perfect as the chasing on the silver plates. For the first time I took an interest in the choice of foods, giving orders that the oysters must come from Lucrinus and the crayfish be taken from the rivers of Gaul. My dislike of the combined pomposity and negligence which too often characterize an emperor’s table led me to rule that all viands be shown to me before they were presented to any of my guests, even to the least of them. I insisted upon verifying the accounts of cooks and caterers myself; there were times when I recalled that my grandfather had been miserly.

Neither the small Greek theater of the Villa, nor the Latin theater, hardly larger, had been completed, but I had a few plays produced in them nevertheless, tragedies, pantomimes, musical dramas, and old local farces. I delighted above all in the subtle gymnastics of the dance, and discovered a weakness for women with castanets, who reminded me of the region of Gades and the first spectacles which I had attended as a child. I liked that brittle sound, those uplifted arms, the furling and unfurling of veils, the dancer who changed now from woman to cloud, and then to bird, who became sometimes the ship and sometimes the wave. For one of these creatures I even took a fancy, though briefly enough. Nor had the kennels and studs been neglected in my absence; I came back to the rough coats of the hounds, the silken horses, the fair pack of the pages. I arranged a few hunting parties in Umbria, on the shore of Lake Trasimene, or nearer Rome, in the Alban woods.

Pleasure had regained its place in my life; my secretary Onesimus served me as purveyor. He knew when to avoid certain resemblances, or when, just the reverse, it was better to seek them out. But such a hurried and half attentive lover was hardly loved in return. Now and then I met with a being finer and gentler than the rest, someone worth hearing talk, and perhaps worth seeing again. Those happy chances were rare, though I may have been to blame. Ordinarily I did no more than appease (or deceive) my hunger. At other times my indifference to such games was like that of an old man.

In my wakeful hours I took to pacing the corridors of the Villa, proceeding from room to room, sometimes disturbing a mason at work as he laid a mosaic. I would examine, in passing, a Satyr of Praxiteles and then would pause before the effigies of the beloved dead. Each room had its own, and each portico. Sheltering the flame of my lamp with my hand, I would lightly touch that breast of stone. Such encounters served to complicate the memory’s task; I had to put aside like a curtain the pallor of the marble to go back, in so far as possible, from those motionless contours to the living form, from the hard texture of Paros or Pentelikon to the flesh itself. Again I would resume my round; the statue, once interrogated, would relapse into darkness; a few steps away my lamp would reveal another image; these great white figures differed little from ghosts. I reflected bitterly upon those magic passes whereby the Egyptian priests had drawn the soul of the dead youth into the wooden effigies which they use in their rites; I had done like them; I had cast a spell over stones which, in their turn, had spellbound me; nevermore should I escape from their cold and silence, henceforth closer to me than the warmth and voices of the living; it was with resentment that I gazed upon that dangerous countenance and its elusive smile. Still, a few hours later, once more abed, I would decide to order another statue from Papias of Aphrodisias; I would insist upon a more exact modeling of the cheeks, just where they hollow almost insensibly under the temples, and a gentler inclination of the head toward the shoulder; I would have the garlands of vine leaves or the clusters of precious stones give way to the glory of the unadorned hair. I took care to have the weight of these bas-reliefs and these busts reduced by drilling out the inside, thus leaving them easier to transport. The best likenesses among them have accompanied me everywhere; it no longer matters to me whether they are good works of art or not.

In appearance my life was reasonable; I applied myself more steadily than ever to my task as emperor, exerting more discrimination, perhaps, if less ardor than before. I had somewhat lost my zest for new ideas and new contacts, and that flexibility of mind which used once to help me enter into another’s thought, and to learn from it while I judged it. My curiosity, wherein I could formerly trace the mainspring of my thinking and one of the bases of my method, was now aroused only over futile details: I opened letters addressed to my friends, to their indignation; such a glimpse into their loves and domestic quarrels amused me for the moment. But an element of suspicion was mingled therein: for a few days I was even prey to the dread of being poisoned, that horrible fear which I had previously beheld in the eyes of the ailing Trajan, and which a ruler dare not avow, since it would seem grotesque so long as unjustified by the event. Such an obsession may seem surprising in one who was already deep in meditation upon death, but I do not pretend to be more consistent than others. When confronted by the least stupidity or the commonest petty contriving I was seized with inward fury and wild impatience (nor did I exempt myself from my own disgust). For example, Juvenal, in one of his Satires, was bold enough to attack the actor Paris, whom I liked. I was tired of that pompous, tirading poet; I had little relish for his coarse disdain of the Orient and Greece, or for his affected delight in the so-called simplicity of our forefathers; his mixture of detailed descriptions of vice with virtuous declamation titillates the reader’s senses without shaking him from his hypocrisy. As a man of letters, however, he was entitled to certain consideration; I had him summoned to Tibur to tell him myself of his sentence to exile. This scorner of the luxuries and pleasures of Rome would be able hereafter to study provincial life and manners at first hand; his insults to the handsome Paris had drawn the curtain on his own act.

Favorinus, towards that same time, settled into his comfortable exile in Chios (where I should have rather liked to dwell myself), whence his biting voice came no longer to my ears. At about this period, too, I ordered a wisdom vendor chased ignominiously from a banquet hall, an ill-washed Cynic who complained of dying of hunger, as if that breed merited anything else. I took great pleasure in seeing the prater packed off, bent double by fear, midst the barking of dogs and the mocking laughter of the pages. Literary and philosophical riff-raff no longer impressed me.

The least setback in political affairs exasperated me just as did the slightest inequality in a pavement at the Villa, or the smallest dripping of wax on the marble surface of a table, the merest defect of an object which one would wish to keep free of imperfections and stains. A report from Arrian, recently appointed governor of Cappadocia, cautioned me against Pharasmanes, who was continuing in his small kingdom along the Caspian Sea to play that double game which had cost us dear under Trajan. This petty prince was slyly pushing hordes of barbarian Alani toward our frontiers; his quarrels with Armenia endangered peace in the Orient. When summoned to Rome he refused to come, just as he had already refused to attend the conference at Samosata four years before. By way of excuse he sent me a present of three hundred robes of gold, royal garments which I ordered worn in the arena by criminals loosed to wild beasts. That rash gesture solaced me like the action of one who scratches himself nearly raw.

I had a secretary, a very mediocre fellow, whom I retained because he knew all the routines of the chancellery, but who provoked me by his stubborn, snarling self-sufficiency: he refused to try new methods, and had a mania for arguing endlessly over trivial details. This fool irritated me one day more than usual; I raised my hand to slap him; unhappily, I was holding a style, which blinded his right eye. I shall never forget that howl of pain, that arm awkwardly bent to ward off the blow, that convulsed visage from which the blood spurted. I had Hermogenes sent for at once, to give the first care, and the oculist Capito was then consulted. But in vain; the eye was gone. Some days later the man resumed his work, a bandage across his face. I sent for him and asked him humbly to fix the amount of compensation which was his due. He replied with a wry smile that he asked of me only one thing, another right eye. He ended, however, by accepting a pension. I have kept him in my service; his presence serves me as a warning, and a punishment, perhaps. I had not wished to injure the wretch. But I had not desired, either, that a boy who loved me should die in his twentieth year.

Jewish affairs were going from bad to worse. The work of construction was continuing in Jerusalem, in spite of the violent opposition of Zealot groups. A certain number of errors had been committed, not irreparable in themselves but immediately seized upon by fomentors of trouble for their own advantage. The Tenth Legion Fretensis has a wild boar for its emblem; when its standard was placed at the city gates, as is the custom, the populace, unused to painted or sculptured images (deprived as they have been for centuries by a superstition highly unfavorable to the progress of the arts), mistook that symbol for a swine, the meat of which is forbidden them, and read into that insignificant affair an affront to the customs of Israel. The festivals of the Jewish New Year, celebrated with a din of trumpets and rams’ horns, give rise every year to brawling and bloodshed; our authorities accordingly forbade the public reading of a certain legendary account devoted to the exploits of a Jewish heroine who was said to have become, under an assumed name, the concubine of a king of Persia, and to have instigated a savage massacre of the enemies of her despised and persecuted race. The rabbis managed to read at night what the governor Tineus Rufus forbade them to read by day; that barbarous story, wherein Persians and Jews rivaled each other in atrocities, roused the nationalistic fervor of the Zealots to frenzy. Finally, this same Tineus Rufus, a man of good judgment in other respects and not uninterested in Israel’s traditions and fables, decided to extend to the Jewish practice of circumcision the same severe penalties of the law which I had recently promulgated against castration (and which was aimed especially at cruelties perpetrated upon young slaves for the sake of exorbitant gain or debauch). He hoped thus to obliterate one of the marks whereby Israel claims to distinguish itself from the rest of human kind. I took the less notice of the danger of that measure, when I received word of it, in that many wealthy and enlightened Jews whom one meets in Alexandria and in Rome have ceased to submit their children to a practice which makes them ridiculous in the public baths and gymnasiums; and they even arrange to conceal the evidence on themselves. I was unaware of the extent to which these banker collectors of myrrhine vases differed from the true Israel.

As I said, nothing in all that was beyond repair, but the hatred, the mutual contempt, and the rancor were so. In principle, Judaism has its place among the religions of the empire; in practice, Israel has refused for centuries to be one people among many others, with one god among the gods. The most primitive Dacians know that their Zalmoxis is called Jupiter in Rome; the Phoenician Baal of Mount Casius has been readily identified with the Father who holds Victory in his hand, and of whom Wisdom is born; the Egyptians, though so proud of their myths some thousands of years old, are willing to see in Osiris a Bacchus with funeral attributes; harsh Mithra admits himself brother to Apollo. No people but Israel has the arrogance to confine truth wholly within the narrow limits of a single conception of the divine, thereby insulting the manifold nature of the Deity, who contains all; no other god has inspired his worshipers with disdain and hatred for those who pray at different altars. I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a city like the others, where several races and several beliefs could live in peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand. The clergy of the ancient city were scandalized by the opening of schools where Greek literature was taught; the rabbi Joshua, a pleasant, learned man with whom I had frequently conversed in Athens, but who was trying to excuse himself to his people for his foreign culture and his relations with us, now ordered his disciples not to take up such profane studies unless they could find an hour which was neither day nor night, since Jewish law must be studied night and day. Ismael, an important member of the Sanhedrin, who supposedly adhered to the side of Rome, let his nephew Ben-Dama die rather than accept the services of the Greek surgeon sent to him by Tineus Rufus. While here in Tibur means were still being sought to conciliate differences without appearing to yield to demands of fanatics, affairs in the East took a turn for the worse; a Zealot revolt triumphed in Jerusalem.

An adventurer born of the very dregs of the people, a fellow named Simon who entitled himself Bar-Kochba, Son of the Star, played the part of firebrand or incendiary mirror in that revolt. I could judge this Simon only by hearsay; I have seen him but once face-to-face, the day a centurion brought me his severed head. Yet I am disposed to grant him that degree of genius which must always be present in one who rises so fast and so high in human affairs; such ascendancy is not gained without at least some crude skill. The Jews of the moderate party were the first to accuse this supposed Son of the Star of deceit and imposture; I believe rather that his untrained mind was of the type which is taken in by its own lies, and that guile in his case went hand in hand with fanaticism. He paraded as the hero whom the Jewish people had awaited for centuries in order to gratify their ambitions and their hate; this demagogue proclaimed himself Messiah and King of Israel. The aged Akiba, in a foolish state of exaltation, led the adventurer through the streets of Jerusalem, holding his horse by the bridle; the high priest Eleazar rededicated the temple, said to be denied from the time that uncircumcised visitors had crossed its threshold. Stacks of arms hidden underground for nearly twenty years were distributed to the rebels by agents of the Son of the Star; they also had recourse to weapons formerly rejected for our ordnance as defective (and purposely constructed thus by Jewish workers in our arsenals over a period of years). Zealot groups attacked isolated Roman garrisons and massacred our soldiers with refinements of cruelty which recalled the worst memories of the Jewish revolt under Trajan; Jerusalem finally fell wholly into the hands of the insurgents, and the new quarters of Aelia Capitolina were set burning like a torch. The first detachments of the Twenty-Second Legion Deiotariana, sent from Egypt with utmost speed under the command of the legate of Syria, Publius Marcellus, were routed by bands ten times their number. The revolt had become war, and war to the bitter end.

Two legions, the Twelfth Fulminata and the Sixth Ferrata, came immediately to reinforce the troops already stationed in Judaea; some months later, Julius Severus took charge of the military operations. He had formerly pacified the mountainous regions of Northern Britain, and brought with him some small contingents of British auxiliaries accustomed to fighting on difficult terrain. Our heavily equipped troops and our officers trained to the square or the phalanx formation of pitched battles were hard put to it to adapt themselves to that war of skirmishes and surprise attacks which, even in open country, retained the techniques of street fighting. Simon, a great man in his way, had divided his followers into hundreds of squadrons posted on mountain ridges or placed in ambush in caverns and abandoned quarries, or even hidden in houses of the teeming suburbs of the cities. Severus was quick to grasp that such an elusive enemy could be exterminated, but not conquered; he resigned himself to a war of attrition. The peasants, fired by Simon’s enthusiasm, or terrorized by him, made common cause with the Zealots from the start; each rock became a bastion, each vineyard a trench; each tiny farm had to be starved out, or taken by assault. Jerusalem was not recaptured until the third year, when last efforts to negotiate proved futile; what little of the Jewish city had been spared by the destruction under Titus was now wiped out. Severus closed his eyes for a long time, voluntarily, to the flagrant complicity of the other large cities now become the last fortresses of the enemy; they were later attacked and reconquered in their turn, street by street and ruin by ruin.

In those times of trial my place was with the army, and in Judaea. I had utter confidence in my two lieutenants, but it was all the more fitting, therefore, that I should be present to share responsibility for decisions which, however carried out, promised atrocities to come. At the end of a second summer of campaign I made my preparations for travel, but with bitterness; once more Euphorion packed up my toilet kit, wrought long ago by an artisan of Smyrna and somewhat dented by wear, my case of books and maps, and the ivory statuette of the Imperial Genius with his lamp of silver; I landed at Sidon early in autumn.

The army is the first of my callings; I have never gone back into it without feeling repaid for my constraints there by certain inner compensations; I do not regret having passed the last two active years of my existence in sharing with the legions the harshness and desolation of that Palestine campaign. I had become again the man clad in leather and iron, putting aside all that is not immediate, sustained by the routines of a hard life, though somewhat slower than of old to mount my horse, or to dismount, somewhat more taciturn, perhaps more somber, surrounded as ever (the gods alone know why) by a devotion from the troops which was both religious and fraternal. During this last stay in the army I made an encounter of inestimable value: I took a young tribune named Celer, to whom I was attached, as my aide-de-camp. You know him; he has not left me. I admired that handsome face of a casqued Minerva, but on the whole the senses played as small a part in this affection as they can so long as one is alive. I recommend Celer to you: he has all the qualities to be sought in an officer placed in second rank; his very virtues will always keep him from pushing into first place. Once again, but in circumstances somewhat different from those of other days, I had come upon one of those beings whose destiny is to devote himself, to love, and to serve. Since I have known him Celer has had no thought which was not for my comfort or my security; I lean still upon that firm shoulder.

In the spring of the third year of campaign the army laid siege to the citadel of Bethar, an eagle’s nest where Simon and his partisans held out for nearly a year against the slow tortures of hunger, thirst, and despair, and where the Son of the Star saw his followers perish one by one but still would not surrender. Our army suffered almost as much as the rebels, for the latter, on retiring, had burned the forests, laid waste the fields, slaughtered the cattle, and polluted the wells by throwing our dead therein; these methods from savage times were hideous in a land naturally arid and already consumed to the bone by centuries of folly and fury. The summer was hot and unhealthy; fever and dysentery decimated our troops, but an admirable discipline continued to rule in those legions, forced to inaction and yet obliged to be constantly on the alert; though sick and harassed, they were sustained by a kind of silent rage in which I, too, began to share. My body no longer withstood as well as it once did the fatigues of campaign, the torrid days, the alternately suffocating or chilly nights, the harsh wind, and the gritty dust; I sometimes left the bacon and boiled lentils of the camp mess in my bowl, and went hungry. A bad cough stayed with me well into the summer, nor was I the only one in such case. In my dispatches to the Senate I suppressed the formula which is regulation for the opening of official communications: The emperor and the army are well. The emperor and the army were, on the contrary, dangerously weary. At night, after the last conversation with Severus, the last audience with fugitives from the enemy side, the last courier from Rome, the last message from Publius Marcellus or from Rufus, whose respective tasks were to wipe up outside Jerusalem and to reorganize Gaza, Euphorion would measure my bath water sparingly into a tub of tarred canvas; I would lie down on my bed and try to think.

There is no denying it; that war in Judaea was one of my defeats. The crimes of Simon and the madness of Akiba were not of my making, but I reproached myself for having been blind in Jerusalem, heedless in Alexandria, impatient in Rome. I had not known how to find words which would have prevented, or at least retarded, this outburst of fury in a nation; I had not known in time how to be either supple enough or sufficiently firm. Surely we had no reason to be unduly disturbed, and still less need to despair; the blunder and the reversal had occurred only in our relations with Israel; everywhere else at this critical hour we were reaping the reward of sixteen years of generosity in the Orient. Simon had supposed that he could count on a revolt in the Arab world similar to the uprising which had darkened the last years of Trajan’s reign; even more, he had ventured to bank on Parthian aid. He was mistaken, and that error in calculation was causing his slow death in the besieged citadel of Bethar: the Arab tribes were drawing apart from the Jewish communities; the Parthians remained faithful to the treaties. The synagogues of the great Syrian cities proved undecided or lukewarm, the most ardent among them contenting themselves with sending money in secret to the Zealots; the Jewish population of Alexandria, though naturally so turbulent, remained calm; the abscess in Jewish affairs remained local, confined within the arid region which extends from Jordan to the sea; this ailing finger could safely be cauterized, or amputated. And nevertheless, in a sense, the evil days which had immediately preceded my reign seemed to begin over again. In the past Quietus had burned down Gyrene, executed the dignitaries of Laodicea, and recaptured a ruined Edessa… The evening courier had just informed me that we had re-established ourselves on the heap of tumbled stones which I called Aelia Capitolina and which the Jews still called Jerusalem; we had burned Ascalon, and had been forced to mass executions of rebels in Gaza. … If sixteen years of rule by a prince so pacifically inclined were to culminate in the Palestine campaign, then the chances for peace in the world looked dim ahead.

I raised myself on my elbow, uneasy on the narrow camp bed. To be sure, there were some Jews who had escaped the Zealot contagion: even in Jerusalem the Pharisees spat on the ground before Akiba, treating that fanatic like an old fool who threw to the wind the solid advantages of the Roman peace, and shouting to him that grass would grow from his mouth before Israel’s victory would be seen on this earth. But I preferred even false prophets to those lovers of order at all costs who, though despising us, counted on us to protect them from Simon’s demands upon their gold (placed for safety with Syrian bankers), and upon their farms in Galilee. I thought of the deserters from his camp who, a few hours back, had been sitting in my tent, humble, conciliatory, servile, but always managing to turn their backs to the image of my Genius. Our best agent, Elias Ben-Abayad, who played the role of informer and spy for Rome, was justly despised by both camps; he was nevertheless the most intelligent man in the group, a liberal mind but a man sick at heart, torn between love for his people and his liking for us and for our culture; he too, however, thought essentially only of Israel. Joshua Ben-Kisma, who preached appeasement, was but a more timid, or more hypocritical Akiba. Even in the rabbi Joshua, who had long been my counselor in Jewish affairs, I had felt irreconcilable differences under that compliance and desire to please, a point where two opposite kinds of thinking meet only to engage in combat. Our territories extended over hundreds of leagues and thousands of stadia beyond that dry, hilly horizon, but the rock of Bethar was our frontier; we could level to dust the massive walls of that citadel where Simon in his frenzy was consummating his suicide, but we could not prevent that race from answering us “No.”

A mosquito hummed over me; Euphorion, who was getting along in years, had failed to close exactly the thin curtains of gauze; books and maps left on the ground rattled in the low wind which crept under the tent wall. Sitting up on my bed, I drew on my boots and groped for my tunic and belt with its dagger, then went out to breathe the night air. I walked through the wide, straight streets of the camp, empty at that late hour, but lighted like city streets; sentries saluted formally as I passed; alongside the barracks which served for hospital I caught the stale stench of the dysenterics. I proceeded towards the earthwork which separated us from the precipice, and from the enemy. A sentinel, perilously outlined by the moon, was making his round with long, even tread; his passage and return was one part of the movement of that immense machine in which I was the pivot; for a moment I was stirred by the spectacle of that solitary form, that brief flame burning in the breast of a man midst a world of dangers. An arrow whistled by, hardly more irksome than the mosquito which had troubled me in my tent; I stood looking out, leaning against the rampart of sandbags.

For some years now people have credited me with strange insight, and with knowledge of divine secrets. But they are mistaken; I have no such power. It is true, however, that during those nights of Bethar some disturbing phantoms passed before my eyes. The perspectives afforded the mind from the height of those barren hills were less majestic than these of the Janiculum, and less golden than those of Cape Sunion; they offered the reverse and the nadir. I admitted that it was indeed vain to hope for an eternity for Athens and for Rome which is accorded neither to objects nor men, and which the wisest among us deny even to the gods. These subtle and complex forms of life, these civilizations comfortably installed in their refinements of ease and of art, the very freedom of mind to seek and to judge, all this depended upon countless rare chances, upon conditions almost impossible to bring about, and none of which could be expected to endure. We should manage to destroy Simon; Arrian would be able to protect Armenia from Alani invasions. But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else, would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man.

Natura deficit, fortuna mutatur, deus omnia cernit. Nature fails us, fortune changes, a god beholds all things from on high: I fingered the stone of a ring on which on a day of bitter depression I had had those few sad words engraved. I went deeper in disillusion, and perhaps into blasphemy: I was beginning to find it natural, if not just, that we should perish. Our literature is nearing exhaustion, our arts are falling asleep; Pancrates is not Homer, nor is Arrian a Xenophon; when I have tried to immortalize Antinous in stone no Praxiteles has come to hand. Our sciences have been at a standstill from the times of Aristotle and Archimedes; our technical development is inadequate to the strain of a long war; even our pleasure-lovers grow weary of delight. More civilized ways of living and more liberal thinking in the course of the last century are the work of a very small minority of good minds; the masses remain wholly ignorant, fierce and cruel when they can be so, and in any case limited and selfish; it is safe to wager that they will never change. Our effort has been compromised in advance by too many greedy procurators and publicans, too many suspicious senators, too many brutal centurions. Nor is time granted oftener to empires than to men to learn from past errors. Although a weaver would wish to mend his web or a clever calculator would correct his mistakes, and the artist would try to retouch his masterpiece if still imperfect or slightly damaged, Nature prefers to start again from the very clay, from chaos itself, and this horrible waste is what we term natural order.

I raised my head and moved slightly in order to limber myself. From the top of Simon’s citadel vague gleams reddened the sky, unexplained manifestations of the nocturnal life of the enemy. The wind was blowing from Egypt; a whirl of dust passed by like a specter; the flattened rims of the hills reminded me of the Arabic range in moonlight. I went slowly back, drawing a fold of my cloak over my mouth, provoked with myself for having devoted to hollow meditations upon the future a night which I could have employed to prepare the work of the next day, or to sleep. The collapse of Rome, if it were to come about, would concern my successors; in that eight hundred and forty-seventh year of the Roman era my task consisted of stifling the revolt in Judaea and bringing back from the Orient, without too great loss, an ailing army. In crossing the esplanade I slipped at times on the blood of some rebel executed the evening before. I lay down on my bed without undressing, to be awakened two hours later by the trumpets at dawn.

All my life long I had been on the best of terms with my body; I had implicitly counted upon its docility, and its strength. That close alliance was beginning to dissolve; my body was no longer at one with my will and my mind, and with what after all, however ineptly, I must call my soul; the ready comrade of other days was only a slave sulking at his task. In fact, my body was afraid of me; continually now I was aware of the obscure presence of fear, of a feeling of constriction in my chest which was not yet pain, but the first step toward it. I had long been used to insomnia, but from this time on sleep was worse than vigil; hardly would I doze off before there were frightful awakenings. I was subject to headaches which Hermogenes attributed to the heat of the climate and the helmet’s weight; by evening, after prolonged fatigue, I sank into a chair like one falling; rising to receive Rufus or Severus was an effort for which I had to prepare well in advance; when seated I leaned heavily on the arms of my chair, and my thigh muscles trembled like those of an exhausted runner. The slightest motion became actual labor, and of such labors life was now composed.

An accident almost ridiculous, a mere childish indisposition, brought to light the true malady beneath that appalling fatigue. During a meeting of the general staff I had a nosebleed, but took little notice of it at first; it persisted, however, until time for the evening meal; I awoke at night to find myself drenched in blood. I called Celer, who slept in the next tent, and he in his turn roused Hermogenes, but the horid warm flood went on. With careful hands the young officer wiped away the liquid which smirched my face. At dawn I was seized with retching as are the condemned in Rome who open their veins in their bath. They warmed my chilled body the best they could with the aid of blankets and hot packs; to staunch the blood Hermogenes prescribed snow; it was not to be had in camp; coping with innumerable difficulties Celer had it brought from the summit of Mount Hermon. I learned later that they had despaired of my life, and I myself felt attached to it by no more than the merest thread, as imperceptible as the too rapid pulse which now dismayed my physician. But the sudden, inexplicable hemorrhage came to an end; I got up again and strove to live as before, but did not succeed. When, but poorly restored to health, I had imprudently attempted an evening ride, I received a second warning, more serious than the first. For the space of a second I felt my heartbeats quicken, then slow down, falter, and cease; I seemed to fall like a stone into some black well which is doubtless death. If death it was, it is a mistake to call it silent: I was swept down by cataracts, and deafened like a diver by the roaring of waters. I did not reach bottom, but came to the surface again, choking for breath. All my strength in that moment, which I thought my last, had been concentrated into my hand as I clutched at Celer, who was standing beside me; he later showed me the marks of my fingers upon his shoulder. But that brief agony was, like all bodily experiences, indescribable, and remains the secret of him who has lived through it, whether he would tell it or no. Since that time I have passed similar crises, though never identical, and no doubt one does not go twice (and still live) through that terror and that night. Hermogenes finally diagnosed an initial stage of hydropic heart; there was no choice but to accept the orders given me by this illness, which had suddenly become my master, and to consent to a long period of inaction, if not of rest, limiting the perspectives of my life for a time to the frame of a bed. I was almost ashamed of such an ailment, wholly internal and barely visible, without fever, abscess, or intestinal pain, with its only symptom a somewhat hoarser breathing and a livid mark left by the sandal strap across the swollen foot. An extraordinary silence reigned round my tent; the entire camp of Bethar seemed to have become a sick room.

The aromatic oil which burned below my Genius rendered the close air of this canvas cage heavier still; the pounding of my arteries made me think vaguely of the island of the Titans on the edge of night. At other moments the insufferable noise changed to that of galloping horses thudding down on wet earth; the mind so carefully reined in for nearly fifty years was wandering; the tall body was floating adrift; I resigned myself to be that tired man who absently counted the star-and-diamond pattern of his blanket. I gazed at the white blur of a marble bust in the shadow; a chant in honor of Epona, goddess of horses, which used to be sung by my Spanish nurse, a tall, somber woman who looked like a Fate, came back to me from the depths of more than half a century’s time. The long days, and after them the nights, seemed measured out not by the clepsydra but by the brown drops which Hermogenes counted one by one into a cup of glass.

At evening I mustered my strength to listen to Rufus’ report: the war was nearing its end; Akiba, who had ostensibly retired from public affairs since the outbreak of hostilities, was devoting himself to the teaching of rabbinic law in the small city of Usfa in Galilee; his lecture room had become the center of Zealot resistance; secret messages were transcribed from one cipher to another by the hands of this nonagenarian and transmitted to the partisans of Simon; the fanatic students who surrounded the old man had to be sent off by force to their homes. After long hesitation Rufus decided to ban the study of Jewish law as seditious; a few days later Akiba, who had disregarded that decree, was arrested and put to death. Nine other Doctors of the Law, the heart and soul of the Zealot faction, perished with him. I had approved all these measures by nods of assent. Akiba and his followers died persuaded to the end that they alone were innocent, they alone were just; not one of them dreamed of admitting his share in responsibility for the evils which weighed down his people. They would be enviable if one could envy the blind. I do not deny these ten madmen the title of heroes, but in no case were they sages.

Three months later, from the top of a hill on a cold morning in February, I sat leaning against the trunk of a leafless fig-tree to watch the assault which preceded by only a few hours the capitulation of Bethar. I saw the last defenders of the fortress come out one by one, haggard, emaciated, hideous to view but nevertheless superb, like all that is indomitable. At the end of the same month I had myself borne to the place called Abraham’s Well, where the rebels in the urban centers, taken with weapons in hand, had been assembled to be sold at auction: children sneering defiance, already turned fierce and deformed by implacable convictions, boasting loudly of having brought death to dozens of legionaries; old men immured in somnambulistic dreams; women with fat, heavy bodies and others stern and stately, like the Great Mother of the Oriental cults; all these filed by under the cool scrutiny of the slave merchants; that multitude passed before me like a haze of dust. Joshua Ben-Kisma, leader of the so-called moderates, who had lamentably failed in his role of peacemaker, succumbed at about that time to the last stages of a long illness; he died calling down upon us foreign wars and victory for Parthia. On the other hand, the Christianized Jews, whom we had not disturbed and who harbored resentment against the rest of the Hebrews for having persecuted their prophet, saw in us the instrument of divine wrath. The long series of frenzies and misconceptions was thus continuing.

An inscription placed on the site of Jerusalem forbade the Jews, under pain of death, to re-establish themselves anew upon that heap of rubble; it reproduced word for word the interdict formerly inscribed on the temple door, forbidding entrance to the uncircumcised. One day a year, on the ninth of the month of Ab, the Jews have the right to come to weep in front of a ruined wall. The most devout refused to leave their native land; they settled as well as they could in the regions least devastated by the war. The most fanatical emigrated to Parthian territory; others went to Antioch, to Alexandria, and to Pergamum; the clever ones made for Rome, where they prospered. Judaea was struck from the map and took the name of Palestine by my order. In those four years of war fifty fortresses and more than nine hundred villages and towns had been sacked and destroyed; the enemy had lost nearly six hundred thousand men; battles, endemic fevers, and epidemics had taken nearly ninety thousand of ours. The labors of war were followed immediately by reconstruction in that area; Aelia Capitolina was rebuilt, though on a more modest scale; one has always to begin over again.

I rested for some time in Sidon, where a Greek merchant lent me his house and his gardens. In March those inner courts were already carpeted with roses. I had regained my strength, and was even discovering surprising resources in this body which at first had been prostrated by the violence of the initial attack. But we have understood nothing about illness so long as we have not recognized its odd resemblance to war and to love, its compromises, its feints, its exactions, that strange and unique amalgam produced by the mixture of a temperament and a malady. I was better, but in order to contrive with my body, to impose my wishes upon it or to cede prudently to its will, I devoted as much art as I had formerly employed in regulating and enlarging my world, in building the being who I am, and in embellishing my life. I resumed the exercises of the gymnasium, but with moderation; although my physician no longer forbade me the use of a horse, riding was now no more than a means of transport; I had to forego the dangerous jumps of other days. In the course of any work or any pleasure, neither work nor pleasure was now the essential; my first concern was to get through it without fatigue. A recovery which seemed so complete astonished my friends; they tried to believe that the illness had been due merely to excessive efforts in those years of war, and would not recur. I judged otherwise; I recalled the great pines of Bithynia’s forests which the woodsman notches in passing, and which he will return next season to fell. Towards the end of spring I embarked for Italy on a large galley of the fleet, taking with me Celer, now become indispensable, and Diotimus of Gadara, a young Greek of slave origin encountered in Sidon, who had beauty.

The route of return crossed the Archipelago; for the last time in my life, doubtless, I was watching the dolphins leap in that blue sea; with no thought henceforth of seeking for omens I followed the long straight flight of the migrating birds, which sometimes alighted in friendly fashion to rest on the deck of the ship; I drank in the odor of salt and sun on the human skin, the perfume of lentisk and terebinth from the isles where each voyager longs to dwell, but knows in advance that he will not pause. Diotimus read me the poets of his country; he has had that perfect instruction in letters which is often given to young slaves endowed with bodily graces in order to increase further their value; as night fell I would lie in the stern, protected by the purple canopy, listening till darkness came to efface both those lines which describe the tragic incertitude of our life, and those which speak of doves and kisses and garlands of roses. The sea was exhaling its moist, warm breath; the stars mounted one by one to their stations; the ship inclining before the wind made straight for the Occident, where showed the last shreds of red; phosphorescence glittered in the wake which stretched out behind us, soon covered over by the black masses of the waves. I said to myself that only two things of importance awaited me in Rome: one was the choice of my successor, of interest to the whole empire; the other was my death, of concern to me alone.

Rome had prepared me a triumph, which this time I accepted. I no longer protested against these vain but venerable customs; anything which honors man’s effort, even if only for a day, seemed to me salutary in presence of a world so prone to forget. I was celebrating more than the suppression of the Jewish revolt; in a sense more profound, and known to me alone, I had triumphed. I included the name of Arrian in these honors. He had just inflicted a series of defeats on the hordes of the Alani which would throw them back for a long time to come into that obscure center of Asia which they had thought to leave for good; Armenia had been saved; the reader of Xenophon was revealing himself as the emulator of that general, showing that the race of scholars who could also command and fight, if need be, was not extinct. That evening, on returning to my house in Tibur, it was with a weary but tranquil heart that I received from Diotimus’ hands the incense and wine of the daily sacrifice to my Genius.

While still a private citizen I had begun to buy up and unite these lands, spread below the Sabine Halls along clear streams, with the patient tenacity of a peasant who parcel by parcel rounds out his vineyard; later on, between two imperial tours, I had camped in these groves then in prey of architects and masons; a youth imbued with all the superstitions of Asia used often to urge devoutly that the trees be spared. On the return from my longest travel in the Orient I had worked in a kind of frenzy to perfect this immense stage-setting for a play then already three-quarters completed. I was coming back to it this time to end my days as reasonably as possible. Everything here was arranged to facilitate work as well as pleasure: the chancellery, the audience halls, and the court where I judged difficult cases in last appeal all saved me the tiring journeys between Tibur and Rome. I had given each of these edifices names reminiscent of Greece: the Pœcile, the Academy, the Prytaneum. I knew very well that this small valley planted with olive trees was not Tempe, but I was reaching the age when each beauteous place recalls another, fairer still, when each delight is weighted with the memory of past joys. I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire. I had even given the name of Styx to a particularly somber corner of the park, and the name of Elysian Fields to a meadow strewn with anemones, thus preparing myself for that other world where the torments resemble those of this world, but where joys are nebulous, and inferior to our joys. But most important of all, in the heart of this retreat I had built for myself a refuge more private still, an islet of marble at the center of a pool surrounded by colonnades; this gave me a room wholly apart, connected with, or rather, separated from the shore by a turning bridge so light that with one hand I could make it slide in its grooves. Into this summer pavilion I had two or three beloved statues moved, and the small bust of Augustus as a child, which Suetonius had given me in the period when we still were friends; I used to go there at the hour of siesta to sleep or to think, or to read.

My dog would stretch out across the doorway, extending his paws somewhat stiffly now; reflections played on the marble; Diotimus would rest his cheek, to cool himself, against the smooth surface of an urn; my thoughts were on my successor.

I have no children, nor is that a regret. To be sure, in time of weakness and fatigue, when one lacks the courage of one’s convictions, I have sometimes reproached myself for not having taken the precaution to engender a son, to follow me. But such a vain regret rests upon two hypotheses, equally doubtful: first, that a son necessarily continues us, and second, that the strange mixture of good and evil, that mass of minute and odd particularities which make up a person, deserves continuation. I have put my virtues to use as well as I could, and have profited from my vices likewise, but I have no special concern to bequeath myself to anyone. It is not by blood, anyhow, that man’s true continuity is established: Alexander’s direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant born of a Persian princess in an Asiatic citadel; Epaminondas, dying without issue, was right to boast that he had Victories for daughters. Most men who figure in history have but mediocre offspring, or worse; they seem to exhaust within themselves the resources of a race. A father’s affection is almost always in conflict with the interests of a ruler. Were it otherwise, then an emperor’s son would still have to suffer the drawbacks of a princely education, the worst possible school for a future prince. Happily, in so far as our State has been able to formulate a rule for imperial succession, that rule has been adoption: I see there the wisdom of Rome. I know the dangers of choice, and its possible errors; I am well aware, too, that blindness is not reserved to paternal affections alone; but any decision in which intelligence presides, or where it at least plays a part, will always seem to me infinitely superior to the vague wishes of chance and unthinking nature. The power to the worthiest! It is good and fitting that a man who has proved his competence in handling the affairs of the world should choose his replacement, and that a decision of such grave consequence should be both his last privilege and his last service rendered to the State. But this important choice seemed to me more difficult than ever to make.

I had bitterly reproached Trajan for having evaded the problem for twenty years before he resolved to adopt me, and for having decided the matter only upon his deathbed. But nearly eighteen years had passed since my accession to power and I in my turn, despite the dangers of an adventurous life, had put off till the last my choice of a successor. Hundreds of rumors were circulating, almost all of them false; countless hypotheses had been built up; but what was supposed my secret decision was only my hesitation and my doubt. All around me good functionaries abounded, but not one of them had the necessary breadth of view. Forty years of integrity made Marcius Turbo a likely candidate, my friend and companion of yore and my incomparable prefect of the Praetorian Guard; but he was my age, too old. Julius Severus, an excellent general and a good administrator for Britain, knew little of the complex affairs of the Orient; Arrian had given proof of all the qualities expected of a statesman, but he was Greek, and the time has not yet come to place a Greek emperor over Rome and its prejudices.

Servianus was living still: such longevity looked like deliberate calculation on his part, an obstinate form of waiting. He had waited for sixty years. In Nerva’s time he had been both disappointed and encouraged by the adoption of Trajan; he was hoping for more, but the rise to power of this cousin incessantly occupied with the army seemed at least to assure him a considerable place in the State, perhaps second place. There, too, he was mistaken, for he had obtained only a rather empty share of honors. He waited for that time when he had stationed his slaves to attack me from an ambush in a poplar grove, along the Moselle; the duel-to-the-death begun on that morning between the young man and the man of fifty had gone on for twenty years; he had turned the mind of the sovereign against me, exaggerating my escapades and making the most of my slightest error. Such an enemy is an excellent schoolmaster: Servianus has taught me much, all in all, about prudence. After my accession to power he had had sufficient subtlety to appear to accept the inevitable; he disclaimed all connection with the plot of the four consular conspirators, and I had preferred not to remark the stains on those fingers still visibly soiled. On his side he had limited himself to mere whispered protest, and only in private pronounced my actions outrageous. With support in the Senate from that small but powerful faction of life-long conservatives who were hindering my reforms he had comfortably installed himself in the role of silent critic of my reign. Little by little he had alienated my sister Paulina from me. Their only child was a daughter, married to a certain Salinator, a man of high birth whom I had raised to the consulship, but who had died young of consumption. My niece did not long survive him; their one child, Fuscus, was set against me by this pernicious grandfather.

But the hatred between us kept within certain bounds: I did not begrudge him his part in public functions, though I took care, nevertheless, not to stand beside him in ceremonies where his advanced age would have given him precedence over the emperor. On each return to Rome I agreed, for appearances’ sake, to attend one of those family meals where one keeps on one’s guard; we exchanged letters; his were not without wit. In the long run, however, I had become disgusted with such dreary pretense; the possibility of discarding the mask in every respect is one of the rare advantages which I find in growing old: I had refused to be present at the funeral of Paulina. In the camp of Bethar, in the worst hours of physical distress and discouragement, the supreme bitterness had been to tell myself that Servianus was nearing his goal, and nearing it by my fault; that octogenarian so niggard of his strength would manage to survive an invalid of fifty-seven years; if I should die intestate he would contrive to obtain both the votes of the malcontents and the approval of those who thought that they were remaining faithful to me in electing my brother-in-law; he would profit from our slender kinship to undermine my work. In order to calm my fears I used to say to myself that the empire could find worse masters; Servianus after all was not without qualities; even the dull Fuscus would one day perhaps be worthy to reign. But all the energy which I had left was summoned to refuse this lie, and I wished to live if only to crush that viper. On coming back to Rome I saw much of Lucius again. In former days I had made commitments to him which ordinarily one hardly troubles to fulfill, but which I had kept. It is not true, however, that I had promised him the imperial purple; such things are not done. But for nearly fifteen years I had paid his debts, hushed up his scandals, and answered his letters without delay; delightful letters they were, but they always ended with requests for money for himself, or for advancement for his friends. He was too much mingled with my life for me to exclude him from it had I wished to do so, but I wished nothing of the sort. His conversation was brilliant: this young man whom people judged superficial had read more, and more intelligently, than the writers who make such works their profession. In everything his taste was exquisite, whether for people, objects, manners, or the most exact fashion of scanning a line of Greek verse. In the Senate, where he was considered able, he had made a reputation as an orator: his speeches were at the same time terse and ornate, and served immediately upon utterance as models for the professors of eloquence. I had had him named praetor, and then consul: he had fulfilled these functions well. Some years earlier I had arranged a marriage for him with the daughter of Nigrinus, one of the consular conspirators executed at the beginning of my reign; that union became the emblem of my policy of conciliation. It was but moderately successful: the young woman complained of being neglected, but she had three children by him, one of whom was a son. To her almost continual repining he would reply with frigid politeness that one marries for one’s family’s sake and not for oneself, and that so weighty a contract ill affords with the carefree play of love. His complicated system demanded mistresses for display and willing slaves for sensuous delights. He was killing himself in pursuit of pleasure, but was doing so like an artist who destroys himself in completing a masterpiece: it is not for me to reproach him in that.

I watched him live: my opinion of him was constantly changing, a thing which rarely happens except for those persons to whom we are closely attached; we are satisfied to judge others more in general, and once for all. Sometimes a studied insolence and hardness, or a coldly frivolous remark would disturb me; more often, however, I let myself be carried along by his swift and nimble intelligence; an astute comment seemed suddenly to reveal the future statesman. I spoke of all this to Marcius Turbo, who after his tiring day as Praetorian prefect came every evening to talk over current business and play his game of dice with me; together we re-examined in utmost detail Lucius’ possibilities for suitably fulfilling the career of emperor. My friends were amazed at my scruples; some of them counseled me, with a shrug of the shoulders, to take whatever decision I liked; such people imagine that one bequeaths half the world to someone as one would leave a country house to a friend. I reflected further about it by night: Lucius had hardly reached thirty; what was Caesar at thirty years but a young patrician submerged in debts and sullied by scandal? As in the bad days of Antioch, before my adoption by Trajan, I thought with a pang that nothing is slower than the true birth of a man: I had myself passed my thirtieth year before the Pannonian campaign had opened my eyes to the responsibilities of power; Lucius seemed to me at times more accomplished than I was at that age. I made up my mind abruptly, after a crisis of suffocation graver than the others, which warned me that I had no more time to lose.

I adopted Lucius, who took the name of Aelius Caesar. He was carefree even in his ambition, and though demanding was not grasping, having always been accustomed to obtain everything; he took my decision with casual ease. I had the imprudence to mention that this fair-haired prince would be admirably handsome clad in the purple; the maliciously inclined hastened to assert that I was giving an empire in return for a voluptuous intimacy of earlier days. Such a charge shows no understanding of the way that the mind of a ruler functions (provided that in some degree he merits his post and his title). If like considerations had figured, then Lucius would not have been the only one on whom I could have fixed my choice.

My wife had just died in her residence at the Palatine, which she had preferred to the end to Tibur, and where she lived surrounded by a small court of friends and Spanish relations, who were all that she cared about. The polite evasions, the proprieties, the feeble efforts towards understanding had gradually terminated between us, and had left exposed only antipathy, irritation, and rancor, and, on her part, hatred. I paid her a visit in the last days; sickness had further soured her morose and acid disposition; that interview was occasion for her for violent recrimination; she gained relief thereby, but was indiscreet in speaking thus before witnesses. She congratulated herself on dying childless: my sons would doubtless have resembled me, she said, and she would have had the save aversion for them as for their father. That avowal, in which such bitterness rankled, is the only proof of love which she has ever given me. My Sabina: I searched for the few passably good memories which are left of someone when we take the trouble to look back for them; I recalled a basket of fruit which she had sent me for my birthday, after a quarrel; while passing by litter through the narrow streets of the town of Tibur and before the small summer house which had once belonged to my motherin-law Matidia, I thought bitterly of some nights of a summer long ago, when I had tried in vain to arouse some amorous feeling for this young bride so harsh and so cold. The death of my wife was less moving for me than the loss of the good Arete, the housekeeper at the Villa, stricken that same winter by fever. Because the illness to which the empress succumbed had been put poorly diagnosed by the physicians, and towards the last caused her cruel intestinal pain, I was accused of having had her poisoned, and that wild rumor was readily believed. It goes without saying that so superfluous a crime had never tempted me.

The death of Sabina perhaps pushed Servianus to risk his all: her influence in Rome had been wholly at his disposal; with her fell one of his most respected supports. And further, he had just entered upon his ninetieth year; like me, he had no more time to lose. For some months now he had tried to draw around him small groups of officers of the Praetorian Guard; sometimes he ventured to exploit the superstitious respect which great age inspires in order to assume imperial authority within his four walls. I had recently reinforced the secret military police, a distasteful institution, I admit, but one which the event proved useful. I knew all about those supposedly secret assemblies, wherein the aged Ursus was teaching the art of conspiracy to his grandson. The nomination of Lucius did not surprise the old man; he had long taken my incertitude on this subject for a well dissimulated decision; but he chose to act at the moment when the legal adoption was still a matter of controversy in Rome. His secretary, Crescens, weary of forty years of faithful service badly repaid, divulged the project, the date and place of attack, and the names of the accomplices. My enemies had not taxed their imagination; they simply copied outright the assault premeditated long before by Quietus and Nigrinus: I was to be struck down during a religious ceremony at the Capitol; my adopted son was to fall with me.

I took my precautions that very night: our enemy had lived only too long; I would leave Lucius a heritage cleansed of dangers. Towards the twelfth hour, on a gray dawn of February, a tribune bearing a sentence of death for Servianus and his grandson presented himself to my brother-in-law; his instructions were to wait in the vestibule until the order which he brought had been executed. Servianus sent for his physician, and all was decently performed. Before dying he expressed the wish that I should expire in the slow torments of incurable illness, without having like him the privilege of brief agony. His prayer has already been granted.

I had not ordered this double execution light-heartedly, but I felt no regret for it thereafter, and still less remorse. An old score had been paid at last; that was all. Age has never seemed to me an excuse for human malevolence; I should even be inclined to consider advanced years as the less excuse for such dangerous ill-will. The sentencing of Akiba and his acolytes had cost me longer hesitation; of the two old men I should still prefer the fanatic to the conspirator. As to Fuscus, however mediocre he might be and however completely his odious grandfather might have alienated him from me, he was the grandson of Paulina. But bonds of blood are truly slight (despite assertions to the contrary) when they are not reinforced by affection; this fact is evident in any family where the least matter of inheritance arises. The youth of Fuscus moved me somewhat more to pity, for he had barely reached eighteen. But interests of State required this conclusion, which the aged Ursus had seemed voluntarily to render inevitable. And from then on I was too near my own death to take time for meditation upon those two endings.

For a few days Marcius Turbo doubled his vigilance; the friends of Servianus could have sought revenge. But nothing came of it, neither attack nor sedition, nor even complaints. I was no longer the newcomer trying to win public opinion after the execution of four men of consular rank; nineteen years of just rule arbitrated in my favor; my enemies were execrated as a group, and the crowd approved me for having rid myself of a traitor. Fuscus was commiserated, but without being judged innocent. The Senate, I well knew, would not pardon me for having once more struck down one of its members, but it kept quiet, and would remain quiet until my death. As formerly, also, an admixture of clemency soon mitigated the dose of severity: not one of the partisans of Servianus was disturbed. The only exception to this rule was the eminent Apollodorus, the malevolent depositary of my brother-in-law’s secrets, who perished with him. That talented man had been the favorite architect of my predecessor; he had piled up the great stone blocks of Trajan’s Column with art. We did not care much for each other: he had of old derided my unskilled amateur paintings, my conscientious still-lifes of pumpkins and gourds; I had on my side, with a young man’s presumption, criticized his works. Later on he had disparaged mine: he knew nothing of the finest period of Greek art; that literal mind reproached me for having filled our temples with colossal statues which, if they were to rise, would batter their brows against the vaults of their sanctuaries. An inane criticism that, and one to hurt Phidias even more than me. But the gods do not rise; they rise neither to warn us nor to protect us, nor to recompense nor to punish. Nor did they rise on that night to save Apollodorus.

By spring the health of Lucius began to cause me rather grave concern. One morning in Tibur we went down from the bath to the palaestra where Celer was exercising with other youths; someone proposed one of those contests where each participant runs bearing his shield and his spear. Lucius managed to excuse himself from the sport, as he usually did, but finally yielded to our friendly raillery; in equipping himself he complained of the weight of the bronze shield; compared with the firm beauty of Celer that slender body seemed frail. After a few strides he fell breathless, and spit blood. The incident had no sequel, and he recovered without difficulty; but I had been alarmed. I should not have been so soon reassured. I resisted these first symptoms of his illness with the stupid confidence of a man who had long been robust, and who had implicit faith in the undepleted reserves of youth and in the capacities of bodies to function as they should. It is true that he was mistaken, too; some light flame sustained him, and his vivacity created the same illusion for him as for us. My best years had been passed in travel and in camp, or on the frontiers; I had known at first hand the values of a rude life, and the salubrious effect of frozen or desert regions. I decided to name Lucius governor of that same Pannonia where I had had my first experience in rule. The situation on that frontier was less critical than formerly; his task would be limited to the peaceful work of civil administration or to routine military inspections. Such difficult country would rouse him from Rome’s easy ways; he would get better acquainted with that immense world which the City governs, and on which she depends. He dreaded those distant climes, and would not understand that life could be enjoyed elsewhere than in Rome. He accepted, however, with the compliance which he always showed when he wished to please me.

Throughout the summer I read with care both his official reports and those more secret communications from Domitius Rogatus, my confidential informant whom I had sent with him as a secretary instructed to watch over him. These accounts satisfied me: Lucius demonstrated in Pannonia that he was capable of the seriousness which I expected of him, but from which he might have relaxed, perhaps, after my death. He even conducted himself rather brilliantly in a series of cavalry skirmishes at the advance posts. In the provinces, as everywhere else, he succeeded in charming everyone around him; his dry and somewhat imperious manner did him no disservice; at least this would not be a case of one of those easy-going princes who is governed by a coterie. But with the very beginning of autumn he caught cold. He was thought to be well again soon, but the cough recurred and the fever persisted, setting in for good. A temporary gain was followed by a sudden relapse the next spring. The bulletins from the physicians appalled me; the public postal service, which I had just established with its relays of horses and carriages over vast territories, seemed to function only in order to bring me news of the invalid more promptly each morning. I could not pardon myself for having been inhumane towards him in the fear of being, or seeming, too indulgent. As soon as he was recovered enough to travel I had him brought back to Italy.

In company with the aged Rufus of Ephesus, a specialist in phthisis, I went to the port of Baiae to await my fragile Aelius Caesar. The climate of Tibur, though better than that of Rome, is nevertheless not mild enough for affected lungs; I had decided to have him spend the late autumn in that safer region. The ship anchored in the middle of the bay; a light tender brought the sick man and his physician ashore. His haggard face seemed thinner still under the fringe of beard with which he had let his cheeks be covered, in the hope of resembling me. But his eyes had kept their hard fire, the gleam of precious stones. His first words to me were to remind me that he had come back only at my command; that his administration had incurred no reproach; that he had obeyed me in everything. He spoke like a schoolboy who justifies the way that he has spent his day. I established him in that villa of Cicero where he had formerly passed a season with me when he was eighteen. He had the elegance never to speak of those times.

The first few days seemed like a victory over the disease; this return to Italy was already a remedy in itself; at that time of year the countryside there was wine-red in hue. But the rains began; a damp wind blew from the strong sea; the old house built in the time of the Republic lacked the more modern comforts of the villa in Tibur; I watched Lucius dispiritedly warming his slender fingers, laden with rings, over the brazier. Hermogenes had returned but a short time before from the Orient, where I had sent him to refurnish and augment his provision of medicaments; he tried on Lucius the effects of a mud impregnated with powerful minerals salts; these applications were reputed to cure everything. But they were of no more help to his lungs than to my arteries.

Illness exposed the worst aspects of that hard and frivolous nature: his wife paid him a visit; as always, their interview ended in bitter words; she did not come back again. His son was brought to see him, a beautiful child of seven, laughing and gay, and just at the toothless age; Lucius beheld him without interest. He asked eagerly for political news from Rome, but more as a gambler would than a statesman. Such levity, however, was a form of courage on his part; he would awaken from long afternoons of pain or torpor to throw his whole being into one of those sparkling conversations of his former days; that face wet with sweat still knew how to smile; the emaciated body rose with grace to receive the physician. He would be to the end the prince formed of ivory and gold.

At night, unable to sleep, I would take up my station in the invalid’s room; Celer, who disliked Lucius, but who is too loyal not to serve with care those dear to me, consented to share my vigil; from the covers came the sound of rattled breathing. A feeling of bitterness swept over me, deep as the sea: he had never loved me; our relations had quickly become those of the spendthrift son and the indulgent father; that life had run out without ever having known great hopes or serious thoughts and ardent passions; he had squandered his years as a prodigal scatters gold coin. I had leaned for support upon a ruined wall: I thought with anger of the enormous sums expended for his adoption, three hundred million sesterces distributed to the soldiers. In a sense, my good fortune had followed me, though sadly: I had satisfied my old desire to give Lucius all that can be given, but the State would not suffer for it now; I should not risk being dishonored by that choice. In the very depths of my being I was even fearing that he might get better; if by chance he should drag on some years still, I could not leave the empire to such a shade.

Without ever asking questions he seemed to penetrate my thoughts on this point; his eyes followed anxiously my slightest motion. I had named him consul for the second time; he worried because he could not fulfill the functions of that office; the dread of displeasing me aggravated his condition. Tu Marcellus eris. … I repeated to myself Virgil’s lines devoted to the nephew of Augustus, likewise designated to rule, and whom death stopped short on the way. Manibus date lilia plenis… Purpureos spargam flores… The lover of flowers would receive only futile funeral wreaths from me.

He believed that he was better, and wished to return to Rome. The physicians, who no longer disputed among themselves except as to the length of time left him to live, counseled me to do whatever he liked; I took him back by short stages to the Villa. His formal presentation to the Senate as heir to the empire was to take place during the session which would follow almost immediately upon the New Year. According to custom, he was supposed on that occasion to address to me a speech of thanks; this piece of eloquence had preoccupied him for months, and together we had smoothed over its difficult passages. He was working at it on the morning of the first of January, when he was suddenly taken with hemorrhage; he grew faint, and leaned against the back of his chair, closing his eyes. Death was no more than dizziness for this light creature. It was New Year’s Day: in order not to interrupt the public and private festivities, I restricted immediate proclamation of the news of his passing; it was not announced officially until the following day. He was buried quietly on his family estate. The evening before that ceremony the Senate sent a delegation to me bearing its condolences, and offering the honors of divinization to Lucius, to which he was entitled as the emperor’s adopted son. But I refused: this whole affair had already cost only too much to the State. I confined myself to having some funeral chapels constructed for him, and statues erected here and there in different places where he had lived: this poor Lucius was not a god.

This time each moment counted. But I had had ample leisure for reflection at the invalid’s bedside; my plans were made. In the Senate I had remarked a certain Antoninus, a man of about fifty, of a provincial family distantly related to that of Plotina. He had impressed me by the deferent but tender care with which he surrounded his father-in-law, an old man partially paralyzed, who sat beside him. I read through his records; this honest man had proved himself in every post that he had held an irreproachable official. My choice fell on him. The more I frequent Antoninus the more my esteem for him tends to change into profound respect. This simple man possesses a virtue which I had thought little about up to this time, even when I happened to practice it, namely, kindness. He is not devoid of the modest faults of a sage: in applying his intelligence to the meticulous accomplishment of daily tasks he concerns himself more with the present than the future; his experience of life is limited by his very virtues; his travel has been confined to certain official missions, though these have been well fulfilled. He is little versed in the arts. He yields only unwillingly to innovation; the provinces, for example, will never represent for him the immense possibilities for development that they have always signified for me; he will continue rather than expand my work, but he will continue it well; in him the State will have an honest servitor and a good master.

But the space of one generation seemed to me but a small thing when the problem was to safeguard the security of the world; I wanted if possible to prolong further this line created by prudent adoption, and to prepare for the empire one more relay on the road of time. Upon each return to Rome I had never failed to visit my old friends, the Verus family, Spanish like me, and among the most liberal members of the upper magistracy. I have known you from your cradle, young Annius Verus, who by my provision now call yourself Marcus Aurelius. During one of the most glorious years of my life, in the period which is marked for me by the erection of the Pantheon, I had you elected, out of friendship for your family, to the sacred college of the Arval Brethren, over which the emperor presides, and which devoutly perpetuates our ancient Roman religious customs. I held you by the hand during the sacrifice which took place that year on the bank of the Tiber, and with tender amusement watched your childish face (you were only five years old at the time), frightened by the cries of the immolated swine, but trying bravely to imitate the dignified demeanor of your elders. I concerned myself with the education of this almost too sober little boy, helping your father to choose the best masters for you. Verus, the Most Veracious: I used so to play on your name; you are perhaps the only being who has never lied to me.

I have seen you read with passion the writings of the philosophers, and clothe yourself in harsh wool, sleeping on the bare floor and forcing your somewhat frail body to all the mortifications of the Stoics. There is some excess in all that, but excess is a virtue at the age of seventeen. I sometimes wonder on what reef that wisdom will founder, for one always founders: will it be a wife, or a son too greatly beloved, one of those legitimate snares (to sum it up in a word) where overscrupulous, pure hearts are caught? Or will it be more simply age, illness, fatigue, or the disillusion which says to us that if all is vain, then virtue is, too? I can imagine in place of your candid, boyish countenance your weary visage as an older man. I am aware that your severity, so carefully acquired, has beneath it some sweetness, and some weakness, perhaps; I divine in you the presence of a genius which is not necessarily that of the statesman; the world will doubtless be forever the better off, however, for having once seen such qualities operating in conjunction with supreme authority. I have arranged the essentials for your adoption by Antoninus; under the new name by which you will one day be designated in the list of emperors you are now and henceforth my grandson. I believe that I may be giving mankind the only chance it will ever have to realize Plato’s dream, to see a philosopher pure of heart ruling over his fellow men.

You have accepted these honors only with reluctance; your rank obliges you to live in court; Tibur, this place where to the very end I am assembling whatever pleasures life has, disturbs you for your young virtue. I watch you wandering gravely under these rose-covered alleys, and smile to see you drawn towards the fair human objects who cross your path; you hesitate tenderly between Veronica and Theodores, but quickly renounce them both in favor of that chaste phantom, austerity. You have not concealed from me your melancholy disdain for these shortlived splendors, nor for this court, which will disperse after my death. You scarcely care for me; your filial affection goes more toward Antoninus; in me you discern a kind of wisdom which is contrary to what your masters teach you, and in my abandonment to the life of the senses you see a mode of life opposed to the severity of your own, but which nevertheless is parallel to it. Never mind: it is not necessary that you understand me. There is more than one kind of wisdom, and all are essential in the world; it is not bad that they should alternate.

Eight days after the death of Lucius, I had myself taken by litter to the Senate; I asked permission to enter thus into the council chamber, and to remain lying against my pile of cushions as I gave my address. Speaking tires me: I requested the senators to form a close circle around me, in order not to be obliged to force my voice. I pronounced Lucius’ eulogy; these few lines took the place on that session’s program of the discourse which he was to have given on that same day. Thereafter I announced my decision: I nominated Antoninus, and named you also. I had counted upon completely unanimous adherence, and obtained it. I expressed a last wish, which was acceded to like the others: I asked that Antoninus should also adopt Lucius’ son, who will in this way become your brother; you two will govern together, and I rely upon you as the elder to look after his welfare. I want the State to conserve something of Lucius.

On returning home, for the first time in many a day I was tempted to smile. I had played my game singularly well. The followers of Servianus, conservatives hostile to my administration, had not capitulated; all the courtesies which I had paid to this great and ancient, but outworn, senatorial body were no compensation to them for the two or three blows which I had dealt them. They would undoubtedly take advantage of the moment of my death to try to annul my acts. But my worst enemies would not dare to reject their most upright representative, nor the son of one of their most respected members as well. My public duty was done: I could now return to Tibur, going back into that retreat which is called illness, to experiment with my suffering, to taste fully what delights are left to me, and to resume in peace my interrupted dialogue with a shade. My imperial heritage was safe in the hands of the devoted Antoninus and the grave Marcus Aurelius; Lucius himself would survive in his son. All that was not too badly arranged.