The Caesars

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> The Caesars

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Such, amidst the sacred security and inviolability of the office, was the
hazardous tenure of the individual. Nor did his dangers always arise from
persons in the rank of competitors and rivals. Sometimes it menaced him in
quarters which his eye had never penetrated, and from enemies too obscure
to have reached his ear. By way of illustration we will cite a case from
the life of the Emperor Commodus, which is wild enough to have furnished
the plot of a romance--though as well authenticated as any other passage
in that reign. The story is narrated by Herodian, and the circumstances
are these: A slave of noble qualities, and of magnificent person, having
liberated himself from the degradations of bondage, determined to avenge
his own wrongs by inflicting continual terror upon the town and
neighborhood which had witnessed his humiliation. For this purpose he
resorted to the woody recesses of the province, (somewhere in the modern
Transylvania,) and, attracting to his wild encampment as many fugitives as
he could, by degrees he succeeded in forming and training a very
formidable troop of freebooters. Partly from the energy of his own nature,
and partly from the neglect and remissness of the provincial magistrates,
the robber captain rose from less to more, until he had formed a little
army, equal to the task of assaulting fortified cities. In this stage of
his adventures, he encountered and defeated several of the imperial
officers commanding large detachments of troops; and at length grew of
consequence sufficient to draw upon himself the emperor's eye, and the
honor of his personal displeasure. In high wrath and disdain at the
insults offered to his eagles by this fugitive slave, Commodus fulminated
against him such an edict as left him no hope of much longer escaping with
impunity.

Public vengeance was now awakened; the imperial troops were marching from
every quarter upon the same centre; and the slave became sensible that in
a very short space of time he must be surrounded and destroyed. In this
desperate situation he took a desperate resolution: he assembled his
troops, laid before them his plan, concerted the various steps for
carrying it into effect, and then dismissed them as independent wanderers.
So ends the first chapter of the tale.

The next opens in the passes of the Alps, whither by various routes, of
seven or eight hundred miles in extent, these men had threaded their way
in manifold disguises through the very midst of the emperor's camps.
According to this man's gigantic enterprise, in which the means were as
audacious as the purpose, the conspirators were to rendezvous, and first
to recognise each other at the gates of Rome. From the Danube to the Tiber
did this band of robbers severally pursue their perilous routes through
all the difficulties of the road and the jealousies of the military
stations, sustained by the mere thirst of vengeance--vengeance against
that mighty foe whom they knew only by his proclamations against
themselves. Every thing continued to prosper; the conspirators met under
the walls of Rome; the final details were arranged; and those also would
have prospered but for a trifling accident. The season was one of general
carnival at Rome; and, by the help of those disguises which the license of
this festal time allowed, the murderers were to have penetrated as maskers
to the emperor's retirement, when a casual word or two awoke the
suspicions of a sentinel. One of the conspirators was arrested; under the
terror and uncertainty of the moment, he made much ampler discoveries than
were expected of him; the other accomplices were secured: and Commodus was
delivered from the uplifted daggers of those who had sought him by months
of patient wanderings, pursued through all the depths of the Illyrian
forests, and the difficulties of the Alpine passes. It is not easy to find
words commensurate to the energetic hardihood of a slave--who, by way of
answer and reprisal to an edict which consigned him to persecution and
death, determines to cross Europe in quest of its author, though no less a
person than the master of the world--to seek him out in the inner recesses
of his capital city and his private palace--and there to lodge a dagger in
his heart, as the adequate reply to the imperial sentence of proscription
against himself.

Such, amidst his superhuman grandeur and consecrated powers of the Roman
emperor's office, were the extraordinary perils which menaced the
individual, and the peculiar frailties of his condition. Nor is it
possible that these circumstances of violent opposition can be better
illustrated than in this tale of Herodian. Whilst the emperor's mighty
arms were stretched out to arrest some potentate in the heart of Asia, a
poor slave is silently and stealthily creeping round the base of the Alps,
with the purpose of winning his way as a murderer to the imperial
bedchamber; Caesar is watching some mighty rebel of the Orient, at a
distance of two thousand leagues, and he overlooks the dagger which is at
his own heart. In short, all the heights and the depths which belong to
man as aspirers, all the contrasts of glory and meanness, the extremities
of what is his highest and lowest in human possibility,--all met in the
situation of the Roman Caesars, and have combined to make them the most
interesting studies which history has furnished.

This, as a general proposition, will be readily admitted. But meantime, it
is remarkable that no field has been less trodden than the private
memorials of those very Caesars; whilst at the same time it is equally
remarkable, in concurrence with that subject for wonder, that precisely
with the first of the Caesars commences the first page of what in modern
times we understand by anecdotes. Suetonius is the earliest writer in that
department of biography; so far as we know, he may be held first to have
devised it as a mode of history. The six writers, whose sketches are
collected under the general title of the _Augustan History_, followed
in the same track. Though full of entertainment, and of the most curious
researches, they are all of them entirely unknown, except to a few
elaborate scholars. We purpose to collect from these obscure, but most
interesting memorialists, a few sketches and biographical portraits of
these great princes, whose public life is sometimes known, but very rarely
any part of their private and personal history. We must of course commence
with the mighty founder of the Caesars. In his case we cannot expect so
much of absolute novelty as in that of those who succeed. But if, in this
first instance, we are forced to touch a little upon old things, we shall
confine ourselves as much as possible to those which are susceptible of
new aspects. For the whole gallery of those who follow, we can undertake
that the memorials which we shall bring forward, may be looked upon as
belonging pretty much to what has hitherto been a sealed book.

CHAPTER I.

The character of the first Caesar has perhaps never been worse appreciated
than by him who in one sense described it best--that is, with most force
and eloquence wherever he really _did_ comprehend it. This was Lucan,
who has nowhere exhibited more brilliant rhetoric, nor wandered more from
the truth, than in the contrasted portraits of Caesar and Pompey. The
famous line, "_Nil actum reputans si quid superesset agendum_," is a fine
feature of the real character, finely expressed. But if it had been
Lucan's purpose (as possibly, with a view to Pompey's benefit, in some
respects it was) utterly and extravagantly to falsify the character of the
great Dictator, by no single trait could he more effectually have
fulfilled that purpose, nor in fewer words, than by this expressive
passage, "_Gaudensque viam fecisse ruina_." Such a trait would be almost
extravagant applied even to Marius, who (though in many respects a perfect
model of Roman grandeur, massy, columnar, imperturbable, and more perhaps
than any one man recorded in history capable of justifying the bold
illustration of that character in Horace, "_Si fractus illabatur orbis,
impavidum ferient ruinae_") had, however, a ferocity in his character, and
a touch of the devil in him, very rarely united with the same tranquil
intrepidity. But for Caesar, the all-accomplished statesman, the splendid
orator, the man of elegant habits and polished taste, the patron of the
fine arts in a degree transcending all example of his own or the previous
age, and as a man of general literature so much beyond his contemporaries,
except Cicero, that he looked down even upon the brilliant Sylla as an
illiterate person,--to class such a man with the race of furious
destroyers exulting in the desolations they spread, is to err not by an
individual trait, but by the whole genus. The Attilas and the Tamerlanes,
who rejoice in avowing themselves the scourges of God, and the special
instruments of his wrath, have no one feature of affinity to the polished
and humane Caesar, and would as little have comprehended his character, as
he could have respected theirs. Even Cato, the unworthy hero of Lucan,
might have suggested to him a little more truth in this instance, by a
celebrated remark which he made on the characteristic distinction of
Caesar, in comparison with other revolutionary disturbers; for, whereas
others had attempted the overthrow of the state in a continued paroxysm of
fury, and in a state of mind resembling the lunacy of intoxication, that
Caesar, on the contrary, among that whole class of civil disturbers, was
the only one who had come to the task in a temper of sobriety and
moderation, (_unum accessisse sobrium ad rempublicam delendam_.)

In reality, Lucan did not think as he wrote. He had a purpose to serve;
and in an age when to act like a freeman was no longer possible, he
determined at least to write in that character. It is probable, also, that
he wrote with a vindictive or a malicious feeling towards Nero; and, as
the single means he had for gratifying _that_, resolved upon sacrificing
the grandeur of Caesar's character wherever it should be found possible.
Meantime, in spite of himself, Lucan for ever betrays his lurking
consciousness of the truth. Nor are there any testimonies to Caesar's vast
superiority more memorably pointed, than those which are indirectly and
involuntarily extorted from this Catonic poet, by the course of his
narration. Never, for example, was there within the same compass of words,
a more emphatic expression of Caesar's essential and inseparable grandeur
of thought, which could not be disguised or be laid aside for an instant,
than is found in the three casual words--_Indocilis privata loqui_. The
very mould, it seems, by Lucan's confession, of his trivial conversation
was regal; nor could he, even to serve a purpose, abjure it for so much as
a casual purpose. The acts of Caesar speak also the same language; and as
these are less susceptible of a false coloring than the features of a
general character, we find this poet of liberty, in the midst of one
continuous effort to distort the truth, and to dress up two scenical
heroes, forced by the mere necessities of history into a reluctant homage
to Caesar's supremacy of moral grandeur.

Of so great a man it must be interesting to know all the well attested
opinions which bear upon topics of universal interest to human nature; as
indeed no others stood much chance of preservation, unless it were from as
minute and curious a collector of _anecdotage_ as Suetonius. And, first,
it would be gratifying to know the opinion of Caesar, if he had any
peculiar to himself, on the great theme of Religion. It has been held,
indeed, that the constitution of his mind, and the general cast of his
character, indisposed him to religious thoughts. Nay, it has been common
to class him amongst deliberate atheists; and some well known anecdotes
are current in books, which illustrate his contempt for the vulgar class
of auguries. In this, however, he went no farther than Cicero, and other
great contemporaries, who assuredly were no atheists. One mark perhaps of
the wide interval which, in Caesar's age, had begun to separate the Roman
nobility from the hungry and venal populace who were daily put up to sale,
and bought by the highest bidder, manifested itself in the increasing
disdain for the tastes and ruling sympathies of the lowest vulgar. No mob
could be more abjectly servile than was that of Rome to the superstition
of portents, prodigies, and omens. Thus far, in common with his order, and
in this sense, Julius Caesar was naturally a despiser of superstition. Mere
strength of understanding would, perhaps, have made him so in any age, and
apart from the circumstances of his personal history. This natural
tendency in him would doubtless receive a further bias in the same
direction from the office of Pontifex Maximus, which he held at an early
stage of his public career. This office, by letting him too much behind
the curtain, and exposing too entirely the base machinery of ropes and
pulleys, which sustained the miserable jugglery played off upon the
popular credulity, impressed him perhaps even unduly with contempt for
those who could be its dupes. And we may add--that Caesar was
constitutionally, as well as by accident of position, too much a man of
the world, had too powerful a leaning to the virtues of active life, was
governed by too partial a sympathy with the whole class of _active_ forces
in human nature, as contradistinguished from those which tend to
contemplative purposes, under any circumstances, to have become a profound
believer, or a steadfast reposer of his fears and anxieties, in religious
influences. A man of the world is but another designation for a man
indisposed to religious awe or contemplative enthusiasm. Still it is a
doctrine which we cherish--that grandeur of mind in any one department
whatsoever, supposing only that it exists in excess, disposes a man to
some degree of sympathy with all other grandeur, however alien in its
quality or different in its form. And upon this ground we presume the
great Dictator to have had an interest in religious themes by mere
compulsion of his own extraordinary elevation of mind, after making the
fullest allowance for the special quality of that mind, which did
certainly, to the whole extent of its characteristics, tend entirely to
estrange him from such themes. We find, accordingly, that though sincerely
a despiser of superstition, and with a frankness which must sometimes have
been hazardous in that age, Caesar was himself also superstitious. No man
could have been otherwise who lived and conversed with that generation and
people. But if superstitious, he was so after a mode of his own. In his
very infirmities Caesar manifested his greatness: his very littlenesses
were noble.

"Nec licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre."

That he placed some confidence in dreams, for instance, is certain:
because, had he slighted them unreservedly, he would not have dwelt upon
them afterwards, or have troubled himself to recall their circumstances.
Here we trace his human weakness. Yet again we are reminded that it was
the weakness of Caesar; for the dreams were noble in their imagery, and
Caesarean (so to speak) in their tone of moral feeling. Thus, for example,
the night before he was assassinated, he dreamt at intervals that he was
soaring above the clouds on wings, and that he placed his hand within the
right hand of Jove. It would seem that perhaps some obscure and half-
formed image floated in his mind, of the eagle, as the king of birds;
secondly, as the tutelary emblem under which his conquering legions had so
often obeyed his voice; and, thirdly, as the bird of Jove. To this triple
relation of the bird his dream covertly appears to point. And a singular
coincidence appears between this dream and a little anecdote brought down
to us, as having actually occurred in Rome about twenty-four hours before
his death. A little bird, which by some is represented as a very small
kind of sparrow, but which, both to the Greeks and the Romans, was known
by a name implying a regal station (probably from the ambitious courage
which at times prompted it to attack the eagle), was observed to direct
its flight towards the senate-house, consecrated by Pompey, whilst a crowd
of other birds were seen to hang upon its flight in close pursuit. What
might be the object of the chase, whether the little king himself, or a
sprig of laurel which he bore in his mouth, could not be determined. The
whole train, pursuers and pursued, continued their flight towards Pompey's
hall. Flight and pursuit were there alike arrested; the little king was
overtaken by his enemies, who fell upon him as so many conspirators, and
tore him limb from limb.

If this anecdote were reported to Caesar, which is not at all improbable,
considering the earnestness with which his friends labored to dissuade him
from his purpose of meeting the senate on the approaching Ides of March,
it is very little to be doubted that it had a considerable effect upon his
feelings, and that, in fact, his own dream grew out of the impression
which it had made. This way of linking the two anecdotes, as cause and
effect, would also bring a third anecdote under the same _nexus_. We
are told that Calpurnia, the last wife of Caesar, dreamed on the same
night, and to the same ominous result. The circumstances of _her_ dream
are less striking, because less figurative; but on that account its import
was less open to doubt: she dreamed, in fact, that after the roof of their
mansion had fallen in, her husband was stabbed in her bosom. Laying all
these omens together, Caesar would have been more or less than human had he
continued utterly undepressed by them. And if so much superstition as even
this implies, must be taken to argue some little weakness, on the other
hand let it not be forgotten, that this very weakness does but the more
illustrate the unusual force of mind, and the heroic will, which
obstinately laid aside these concurring prefigurations of impending
destruction; concurring, we say, amongst themselves--and concurring also
with a prophecy of older date, which was totally independent of them all.

There is another and somewhat sublime story of the same class, which
belongs to the most interesting moment of Caesar's life; and those who are
disposed to explain all such tales upon physiological principles, will
find an easy solution of this, in particular, in the exhaustion of body,
and the intense anxiety which must have debilitated even Caesar under the
whole circumstances of the case. On the ever memorable night when he had
resolved to take the first step (and in such a case the first step, as
regarded the power of retreating, was also the final step) which placed
him in arms against the state, it happened that his headquarters were at
some distance from the little river Rubicon, which formed the boundary of
his province. With his usual caution, that no news of his motions might
run before himself, on this night Caesar gave an entertainment to his
friends, in the midst of which he slipped away unobserved, and with a
small retinue proceeded through the woods to the point of the river at
which he designed to cross. The night [Footnote: It is an interesting
circumstance in the habits of the ancient Romans, that their journeys were
pursued very much in the night-time, and by torchlight. Cicero, in one of
his letters, speaks of passing through the towns of Italy by night, as a
serviceable scheme for some political purpose, either of avoiding too much
to publish his motions, or of evading the necessity (else perhaps not
avoidable), of drawing out the party sentiments of the magistrates in the
circumstances of honor or neglect with which they might choose to receive
him. His words, however, imply that the practice was by no means an
uncommon one. And, indeed, from some passages in writers of the Augustan
era, it would seem that this custom was not confined to people of
distinction, but was familiar to a class of travellers so low in rank as
to be capable of abusing their opportunities of concealment for the
infliction of wanton injury upon the woods and fences which bounded the
margin, of the high-road. Under the cloud of night and solitude, the
mischief-loving traveller was often in the habit of applying his torch to
the withered boughs of woods, or to artificial hedges; and extensive
ravages by fire, such as now happen, not unfrequently in the American
woods, (but generally from carelessness in scattering the glowing embers
of a fire, or even the ashes of a pipe,) were then occasionally the result
of mere wantonness of mischief. Ovid accordingly notices, as one amongst
the familiar images of daybreak, the half-burnt torch of the traveller;
and, apparently, from the position which it holds in his description,
where it is ranked with the most familiar of all circumstances in all
countries,--that of the rural laborer going out to his morning tasks,--it
must have been common indeed:

"Semiustamque facem vigilata nocte viator
Ponet; et ad solitum rusticus ibit opus."

This occurs in the _Fasti_;--elsewhere he notices it for its danger:

"Ut facibus sepes ardent, cum forte viator
Vel nimis admovit, vel jam sub luce reliquit."

He, however, we see, good-naturedly ascribes the danger to mere
carelessness, in bringing the torch too near to the hedge, or tossing it
away at daybreak. But Varro, a more matter-of-fact observer, does not
disguise the plain truth, that these disasters were often the product of
pure malicious frolic. For instance, in recommending a certain kind of
quickset fence, he insists upon it, as one of its advantages, that it will
not readily ignite under the torch of the mischievous wayfarer: "Naturale
sepimentum," says he, "quod obseri solet virgultis aut spinis,
_praetereuntis lascivi non metuet facem._" It is not easy to see the origin
or advantage of this practice of nocturnal travelling (which must have
considerably increased the hazards of a journey), excepting only in the
heats of summer. It is probable, however, that men of high rank and public
station may have introduced the practice by way of releasing corporate
bodies in large towns from the burdensome ceremonies of public receptions;
thus making a compromise between their own dignity and the convenience of
the provincial public. Once introduced, and the arrangements upon the road
for meeting the wants of travellers once adapted to such a practice, it
would easily become universal. It is, however, very possible that mere
horror of the heats of day-time may have been the original ground for it.
The ancients appear to have shrunk from no hardship so trying and
insufferable as that of heat. And in relation to that subject, it is
interesting to observe the way in which the ordinary use of language has
accommodated itself to that feeling. Our northern way of expressing
effeminacy is derived chiefly from the hardships of cold. He that shrinks
from the trials and rough experience of real life in any department, is
described by the contemptuous prefix of _chimney-corner_, as if shrinking
from the cold which he would meet on coming out into the open air amongst
his fellow-men. Thus, a _chimney-corner_ politician, for a mere
speculator or unpractical dreamer. But the very same indolent habit of
aerial speculation, which courts no test of real life and practice, is
described by the ancients under the term _umbraticus_, or seeking the cool
shade, and shrinking from the heat. Thus, an _umbraticus doctor_ is one
who has no practical solidity in his teaching. The fatigue and hardship of
real life, in short, is represented by the ancients under the uniform
image of heat, and by the moderns under that of cold.] was stormy, and by
the violence of the wind all the torches of his escort were blown out, so
that the whole party lost their road, having probably at first
intentionally deviated from the main route, and wandered about through the
whole night, until the early dawn enabled them to recover their true
course. The light was still gray and uncertain, as Caesar and his retinue
rode down upon the banks of the fatal river--to cross which with arms in
his hands, since the further bank lay within the territory of the
Republic, _ipso facto_ proclaimed any Roman a rebel and a traitor. No man,
the firmest or the most obtuse, could be otherwise than deeply agitated,
when looking down upon this little brook--so insignificant in itself, but
invested by law with a sanctity so awful, and so dire a consecration. The
whole course of future history, and the fate of every nation, would
necessarily be determined by the irretrievable act of the next half hour.

In these moments, and with this spectacle before him, and contemplating
these immeasurable consequences consciously for the last time that could
allow him a retreat,--impressed also by the solemnity and deep
tranquillity of the silent dawn, whilst the exhaustion of his night
wanderings predisposed him to nervous irritation,--Caesar, we may be sure,
was profoundly agitated. The whole elements of the scene were almost
scenically disposed; the law of antagonism having perhaps never been
employed with so much effect: the little quiet brook presenting a direct,
antithesis to its grand political character; and the innocent dawn, with
its pure, untroubled repose, contrasting potently, to a man of any
intellectual sensibility, with the long chaos of bloodshed, darkness, and
anarchy, which was to take its rise from the apparently trifling acts of
this one morning. So prepared, we need not much wonder at what followed.
Caesar was yet lingering on the hither bank, when suddenly, at a point not
far distant from himself, an apparition was descried in a sitting posture,
and holding in its hand what seemed a flute. This phantom was of unusual
size, and of beauty more than human, so far as its lineaments could be
traced in the early dawn. What is singular, however, in the story, on any
hypothesis which would explain it out of Caesar's individual condition, is,
that others saw it as well as he; both pastoral laborers, (who were
present, probably, in the character of guides,) and some of the sentinels
stationed at the passage of the river. These men fancied even that a
strain of music issued from this aerial flute. And some, both of the
shepherds and the Roman soldiers, who were bolder than the rest, advanced
towards the figure. Amongst this party, it happened that there were a few
Roman trumpeters. From one of these, the phantom, rising as they advanced
nearer, suddenly caught a trumpet, and blowing through it a blast of
superhuman strength, plunged into the Rubicon, passed to the other bank,
and disappeared in the dusky twilight of the dawn. Upon which Caesar
exclaimed:--"It is finished--the die is cast--let us follow whither the
guiding portents from Heaven, and the malice of our enemy, alike summon us
to go." So saying, he crossed the river with impetuosity; and, in a sudden
rapture of passionate and vindictive ambition, placed himself and his
retinue upon the Italian soil; and, as if by inspiration from Heaven, in
one moment involved himself and his followers in treason, raised the
standard of revolt, put his foot upon the neck of the invincible republic
which had humbled all the kings of the earth, and founded an empire which
was to last for a thousand and half a thousand years. In what manner this
spectral appearance was managed--whether Caesar were its author, or its
dupe--will remain unknown for ever. But undoubtedly this was the first
time that the advanced guard of a victorious army was headed by an
apparition; and we may conjecture that it will be the last. [Footnote:
According to Suetonius, the circumstances of this memorable night were as
follows:--As soon as the decisive intelligence was received, that the
intrigues of his enemies had prevailed at Rome, and that the interposition
of the popular magistrates (the tribunes) was set aside, Caesar sent
forward the troops, who were then at his head-quarters, but in as private
a manner as possible. He himself, by way of masque, (_per
dissimulationem_,) attended a public spectacle, gave an audience to an
architect who wished to lay before him a plan for a school of gladiators
which Caesar designed to build, and finally presented himself at a banquet,
which was very numerously attended. From this, about sunset, he set
forward in a carriage, drawn by mules, and with a small escort (_modico
comitatu_.) Losing his road, which was the most private he could find
(_occultissimum_), he quitted his carriage and proceeded on foot. At
dawn he met with a guide; after which followed the above incidents.]

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