The Caesars

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> The Caesars

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

In the sixth Caesar terminated the Julian line. The three next princes in
the succession were personally uninteresting; and, with a slight reserve
in favor of Otho, whose motives for committing suicide (if truly reported)
argue great nobility of mind, [Footnote: We may add that the unexampled
public grief which followed the death of Otho, exceeding even that which
followed the death of Germanicus, and causing several officers to commit
suicide, implies some remarkable goodness in this Prince, and a very
unusual power of conciliating attachment.] were even brutal in the tenor
of their lives and monstrous; besides that the extreme brevity of their
several reigns (all three, taken conjunctly, having held the supreme power
for no more than twelve months and twenty days) dismisses them from all
effectual station or right to a separate notice in the line of Caesars.
Coming to the tenth in succession, Vespasian, and his two sons, Titus and
Domitian, who make up the list of the twelve Caesars, as they are usually
called, we find matter for deeper political meditation and subjects of
curious research. But these emperors would be more properly classed with
the five who succeed them--Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines;
after whom comes the young ruffian, Commodus, another Caligula or Nero,
from whose short and infamous reign Gibbon takes up his tale of the
decline of the empire. And this classification would probably have
prevailed, had not the very curious work of Suetonius, whose own life and
period of observation determined the series and cycle of his subjects, led
to a different distribution. But as it is evident that, in the succession
of the first twelve Caesars, the six latter have no connection whatever by
descent, collaterally, or otherwise, with the six first, it would be a
more logical distribution to combine them according to the fortunes of the
state itself, and the succession of its prosperity through the several
stages of splendor, declension, revival, and final decay. Under this
arrangement, the first seventeen would belong to the first stage; Commodus
would open the second; Aurelian down to Constantine or Julian would fill
the third; and Jovian to Augustulus would bring up the melancholy rear.
Meantime it will be proper, after thus briefly throwing our eyes over the
monstrous atrocities of the early Caesars, to spend a few lines in
examining their origin, and the circumstances which favored their growth.
For a mere hunter after hidden or forgotten singularities; a lover on
their own account of all strange perversities and freaks of nature,
whether in action, taste, or opinion; for a collector and amateur of
misgrowths and abortions; for a Suetonius, in short, it may be quite
enough to state and to arrange his cabinet of specimens from the
marvellous in human nature. But certainly in modern times, any historian,
however little affecting the praise of a philosophic investigator, would
feel himself called upon to remove a little the taint of the miraculous
and preternatural which adheres to such anecdotes, by entering into the
psychological grounds of their possibility; whether lying in any
peculiarly vicious education, early familiarity with bad models,
corrupting associations, or other plausible key to effects, which, taken
separately, and out of their natural connection with their explanatory
causes, are apt rather to startle and revolt the feelings of sober
thinkers. Except, perhaps, in some chapters of Italian history, as, for
example, among the most profligate of the Papal houses, and amongst some
of the Florentine princes, we find hardly any parallel to the atrocities
of Caligula and Nero; nor indeed was Tiberius much (if at all) behind
them, though otherwise so wary and cautious in his conduct. The same tenor
of licentiousness beyond the needs of the individual, the same craving
after the marvellous and the stupendous in guilt, is continually emerging
in succeeding emperors--in Vitellius, in Domitian, in Commodus, in
Caracalla--every where, in short, where it was not overruled by one of two
causes, either by original goodness of nature too powerful to be mastered
by ordinary seductions, (and in some cases removed from their influence by
an early apprenticeship to camps,) or by the terrors of an exemplary ruin
immediately preceding. For such a determinate tendency to the enormous and
the anomalous, sufficient causes must exist. What were they?

In the first place, we may observe that the people of Rome in that age
were generally more corrupt by many degrees than has been usually supposed
possible. The effect of revolutionary times, to relax all modes of moral
obligation, and to unsettle the moral sense, has been well and
philosophically stated by Mr. Coleridge; but that would hardly account for
the utter licentiousness and depravity of Imperial Rome. Looking back to
Republican Rome, and considering the state of public morals but fifty
years before the emperors, we can with difficulty believe that the
descendants of a people so severe in their habits could thus rapidly
degenerate, and that a populace, once so hardy and masculine, should
assume the manners which we might expect in the debauchees of Daphne (the
infamous suburb of Antioch) or of Canopus, into which settled the very
lees and dregs of the vicious Alexandria. Such extreme changes would
falsify all that we know of human nature; we might _a priori_
pronounce them impossible; and in fact, upon searching history, we find
other modes of solving the difficulty. In reality, the citizens of Rome
were at this time a new race, brought together from every quarter of the
world, but especially from Asia. So vast a proportion of the ancient
citizens had been cut off by the sword, and partly to conceal this waste
of population, but much more by way of cheaply requiting services, or of
showing favor, or of acquiring influence, slaves had been emancipated in
such great multitudes, and afterwards invested with all the rights of
citizens, that, in a single generation, Rome became almost transmuted into
a baser metal; the progeny of those whom the last generation had purchased
from the slave merchants. These people derived their stock chiefly from
Cappadocia, Pontus, &c., and the other populous regions of Asia Minor; and
hence the taint of Asiatic luxury and depravity, which was so conspicuous
to all the Romans of the old republican severity. Juvenal is to be
understood more literally than is sometimes supposed, when he complains
that long before his time the Orontes (that river which washed the
infamous capital of Syria) had mingled its impure waters with those of the
Tiber. And a little before him, Lucan speaks with mere historic gravity
when he says--

------"Vivant Galataeque Syrique
Cappadoces, Gallique, extremique orbis Iberi,
Armenii, Cilices: _nam post civilia bella
Hic Populus Romanus erit."
[Footnote: Blackwell, in his Court of Augustus, vol. i. p. 382, when
noticing these lines upon occasion of the murder of Cicero, in the final
proscription under the last triumvirate, comments thus: "Those of the
greatest and truly Roman spirit had been murdered in the field by Julius
Caesar; the rest were now massacred in the city by his son and successors;
in their room came Syrians, Cappadocians, Phrygians, and other
enfranchised slaves from the conquered nations;"--"these in half a century
had sunk so low, that Tiberius pronounced her very senators to be
_homines ad sermtutem natos_, men born to be slaves."]

Probably in the time of Nero, not one man in six was of pure Roman
descent. [Footnote: Suetonius indeed pretends that Augustus, personally at
least, struggled against this ruinous practice--thinking it a matter of
the highest moment, "Sincerum atque ab omni colluvione peregrini et
servilis sanguinis incorruptum servare populum." And Horace is ready with
his flatteries on the same topic, lib. 3, Od. 6. But the facts are against
them; for the question is not what Augustus did in his own person, (which
at most could not operate very widely except by the example,) but what he
permitted to be done. Now there was a practice familiar to those times;
that when a congiary or any other popular liberality was announced,
multitudes were enfranchised by avaricious masters in order to make them
capable of the bounty, (as citizens,) and yet under the condition of
transferring to their emancipators whatsoever they should receive; _ina
ton daemosios d domenon siton lambanontes chata maena--pherosi tois
dedochasi taen eleutherian_ says Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in order
that after receiving the corn given publicly in every month, they might
carry it to those who had bestowed upon them their freedom. In a case,
then, where an extensive practice of this kind was exposed to Augustus,
and publicly reproved by him, how did he proceed? Did he reject the new-
made citizens? No; he contented himself with diminishing the proportion
originally destined for each, so that the same absolute sum being
distributed among a number increased by the whole amount of the new
enrolments, of necessity the relative sum for each separately was so much
less. But this was a remedy applied only to the pecuniary fraud as it
would have affected himself. The permanent mischief to the state went
unredressed.] And the consequences were suitable. Scarcely a family has
come down to our knowledge that could not in one generation enumerate a
long catalogue of divorces within its own contracted circle. Every man had
married a series of wives; every woman a series of husbands. Even in the
palace of Augustus, who wished to be viewed as an _exemplar_ or ideal
model of domestic purity, every principal member of his family was tainted
in that way; himself in a manner and a degree infamous even at that time.
[Footnote: Part of the story is well known, but not the whole. Tiberius
Nero, a promising young nobleman, had recently married a very splendid
beauty. Unfortunately for him, at the marriage of Octavia (sister to
Augustus) with Mark Anthony, he allowed his young wife, then about
eighteen, to attend upon the bride. Augustus was deeply and suddenly
fascinated by her charms, and without further scruple sent a message to
Nero--intimating that he was in love with his wife, and would thank him to
resign her. The other, thinking it vain, in those days of lawless
proscription, to contest a point of this nature with one who commanded
twelve legions, obeyed the requisition. Upon some motive, now unknown, he
was persuaded even to degrade himself farther; for he actually officiated
at the marriage in character of father, and gave away the young beauty to
his rival, although at that time six months advanced in pregnancy by
himself. These humiliating concessions were extorted from him, and yielded
(probably at the instigation of friends) in order to save his life. In the
sequel they had the very opposite result; for he died soon after, and it
is reasonably supposed of grief and mortification. At the marriage feast,
an incident occurred which threw the whole company into confusion: A
little boy, roving from couch to couch among the guests, came at length to
that in which Livia (the bride) was lying by the side of Augustus, on
which he cried out aloud,--"Lady, what are you doing here? You are
mistaken--this is not your husband--he is there," (pointing to Tiberius,)
"go, go--rise, lady, and recline beside _him_."] For the first 400
years of Rome, not one divorce had been granted or asked, although the
statute which allowed of this indulgence had always been in force. But in
the age succeeding to the civil wars men and women "married," says one
author, "with a view to divorce, and divorced in order to marry. Many of
these changes happened within the year, especially if the lady had a large
fortune, which always went with her, and procured her choice of transient
husbands." And, "can one imagine," asks the same writer, "that the fair
one, who changed her husband every quarter, strictly kept her matrimonial
faith all the three months?" Thus the very fountain of all the "household
charities" and household virtues was polluted. And after that we need
little wonder at the assassinations, poisonings, and forging of wills,
which then laid waste the domestic life of the Romans.

2. A second source of the universal depravity was the growing inefficacy
of the public religion; and this arose from its disproportion and
inadequacy to the intellectual advances of the nation. _Religion_, in
its very etymology, has been held to imply a _religatio_, that is, a
reiterated or secondary obligation of morals; a sanction supplementary to
that of the conscience. Now, for a rude and uncultivated people, the Pagan
mythology might not be too gross to discharge the main functions of a
useful religion. So long as the understanding could submit to the fables
of the Pagan creed, so long it was possible that the hopes and fears built
upon that creed might be practically efficient on men's lives and
intentions. But when the foundation gave way, the whole superstructure of
necessity fell to the ground. Those who were obliged to reject the
ridiculous legends which invested the whole of their Pantheon, together
with the fabulous adjudgers of future punishments, could not but dismiss
the punishments, which were, in fact, as laughable, and as obviously the
fictions of human ingenuity, as their dispensers. In short, the civilized
part of the world in those days lay in this dreadful condition; their
intellect had far outgrown their religion; the disproportions between the
two were at length become monstrous; and as yet no purer or more elevated
faith was prepared for their acceptance. The case was as shocking as if,
with our present intellectual needs, we should be unhappy enough to have
no creed on which to rest the burden of our final hopes and fears, of our
moral obligations, and of our consolations in misery, except the fairy
mythology of our nurses. The condition of a people so situated, of a
people under the calamity of having outgrown its religious faith, has
never been sufficiently considered. It is probable that such a condition
has never existed before or since that era of the world. The consequences
to Rome were--that the reasoning and disputatious part of her population
took refuge from the painful state of doubt in Atheism; amongst the
thoughtless and irreflective the consequences were chiefly felt in their
morals, which were thus sapped in their foundation.

3. A third cause, which from the first had exercised a most baleful
influence upon the arts and upon literature in Rome, had by this time
matured its disastrous tendencies towards the extinction of the moral
sensibilities. This was the circus, and the whole machinery, form and
substance, of the Circensian shows. Why had tragedy no existence as a part
of the Roman literature? Because--and _that_ was a reason which would
have sufficed to stifle all the dramatic genius of Greece and England--
there was too much tragedy in the shape of gross reality, almost daily
before their eyes. The amphitheatre extinguished the theatre. How was it
possible that the fine and intellectual griefs of the drama should win
their way to hearts seared and rendered callous by the continual
exhibition of scenes the most hideous, in which human blood was poured out
like water, and a human life sacrificed at any moment either to caprice in
the populace, or to a strife of rivalry between the _ayes_ and the
_noes_, or as the penalty for any trifling instance of awkwardness in
the performer himself? Even the more innocent exhibitions, in which brutes
only were the sufferers, could not but be mortal to all the finer
sensibilities. Five thousand wild animals, torn from their native abodes
in the wilderness or forest, were often turned out to be hunted, or for
mutual slaughter, in the course of a single exhibition of this nature; and
it sometimes happened, (a fact which of itself proclaims the course of the
public propensities,) that the person at whose expense the shows were
exhibited, by way of paying special court to the people and meriting their
favor, in the way most conspicuously open to him, issued orders that all,
without a solitary exception, should be slaughtered. He made it known, as
the very highest gratification which the case allowed, that (in the
language of our modern auctioneers) the whole, "without reserve," should
perish before their eyes. Even such spectacles must have hardened the
heart, and blunted the more delicate sensibilities; but these would soon
cease to stimulate the pampered and exhausted sense. From the combats of
tigers or leopards, in which the passions could only be gathered
indirectly, and by way of inference from the motions, the transition must
have been almost inevitable to those of men, whose nobler and more varied
passions spoke directly, and by the intelligible language of the eye, to
human spectators; and from the frequent contemplation of these authorized
murders, in which a whole people, women [Footnote: Augustus, indeed,
strove to exclude the women from one part of the circension spectacles;
and what was that? Simply from the sight of the _Athletae_, as being
naked. But that they should witness the pangs of the dying gladiators, he
deemed quite allowable. The smooth barbarian considered; that a license of
the first sort offended against decorum, whilst the other violated only
the sanctities of the human heart, and the whole sexual character of
women. It is our opinion, that to the brutalizing effect of these
exhibitions we are to ascribe not only the early extinction of the Roman
drama, but generally the inferiority of Rome to Greece in every department
of the fine arts. The fine temper of Roman sensibility, which no culture
could have brought to the level of the Grecian, was thus dulled for
_every_ application.] as much as men, and children intermingled with
both, looked on with leisurely indifference, with anxious expectation, or
with rapturous delight, whilst below them were passing the direct
sufferings of humanity, and not seldom its dying pangs, it was impossible
to expect a result different from that which did in fact take place,--
universal hardness of heart, obdurate depravity, and a twofold degradation
of human nature, which acted simultaneously upon the two pillars of
morality, (which are otherwise not often assailed together,) of natural
sensibility in the first place, and, in the second, of conscientious
principle.

4. But these were circumstances which applied to the whole population
indiscriminately. Superadded to these, in the case of the emperor, and
affecting _him_ exclusively, was this prodigious disadvantage--that
ancient reverence for the immediate witnesses of his actions, and for the
people and senate who would under other circumstances have exercised the
old functions of the censor, was, as to the emperor, pretty nearly
obliterated. The very title of _imperator_, from which we have derived our
modern one of _emperor_, proclaims the nature of the government, and the
tenure of that office. It was purely a government by the sword, or
permanent _stratocracy_ having a movable head. Never was there a people
who inquired so impertinently as the Romans into the domestic conduct of
each private citizen. No rank escaped this jealous vigilance; and private
liberty, even in the most indifferent circumstances of taste or expense,
was sacrificed to this inquisitorial rigor of _surveillance_ exercised on
behalf of the State, sometimes by erroneous patriotism, too often by
malice in disguise. To this spirit the highest public officers were
obliged to bow; the consuls, not less than others. And even the occasional
dictator, if by law irresponsible, acted nevertheless as one who knew that
any change which depressed his party, might eventually abrogate his
privilege. For the first time in the person of an imperator was seen a
supreme autocrat, who had virtually and effectively all the
irresponsibility which the law assigned, and the origin of his office
presumed. Satisfied to know that he possessed such power, Augustus, as
much from natural taste as policy, was glad to dissemble it, and by every
means to withdraw it from public notice. But he had passed his youth as
citizen of a republic; and in the state of transition to autocracy, in his
office of triumvir, had experimentally known the perils of rivalship, and
the pains of foreign control, too feelingly to provoke unnecessarily any
sleeping embers of the republican spirit. Tiberius, though familiar from
his infancy with the servile homage of a court, was yet modified by the
popular temper of Augustus; and he came late to the throne. Caligula was
the first prince on whom the entire effect of his political situation was
allowed to operate; and the natural results were seen--he was the first
absolute monster. He must early have seen the realities of his position,
and from what quarter it was that any cloud could arise to menace his
security. To the senate or people any respect which he might think proper
to pay, must have been imputed by all parties to the lingering
superstitions of custom, to involuntary habit, to court dissimulation, or
to the decencies of external form, and the prescriptive reverence of
ancient names. But neither senate nor people could enforce their claims,
whatever they might happen to be. Their sanction and ratifying vote might
be worth having, as consecrating what was already secure, and conciliating
the scruples of the weak to the absolute decision of the strong. But their
resistance, as an original movement, was so wholly without hope, that they
were never weak enough to threaten it.

The army was the true successor to their places, being the _ultimate_
depository of power. Yet, as the army was necessarily subdivided, as the
shifting circumstances upon every frontier were continually varying the
strength of the several divisions as to numbers and state of discipline,
one part might be balanced against the other by an imperator standing in
the centre of the whole. The rigor of the military _sacramentum_, or
oath of allegiance, made it dangerous to offer the first overtures to
rebellion; and the money, which the soldiers were continually depositing
in the bank, placed at the foot of their military standards, if sometimes
turned against the emperor, was also liable to be sequestrated in his
favor. There were then, in fact, two great forces in the government acting
in and by each other--the Stratocracy, and the Autocracy. Each needed the
other; each stood in awe of each. But, as regarded all other forces in the
empire, constitutional or irregular, popular or senatorial, neither had
any thing to fear. Under any ordinary circumstances, therefore,
considering the hazards of a rebellion, the emperor was substantially
liberated from all control. Vexations or outrages upon the populace were
not such to the army. It was but rarely that the soldier participated in
the emotions of the citizen. And thus, being effectually without check,
the most vicious of the Caesars went on without fear, presuming upon the
weakness of one part of his subjects, and the indifference of the other,
until he was tempted onwards to atrocities, which armed against him the
common feelings of human nature, and all mankind, as it were, rose in a
body with one voice, and apparently with one heart, united by mere force
of indignant sympathy, to put him down, and "abate" him as a monster. But,
until he brought matters to this extremity, Caesar had no cause to fear.
Nor was it at all certain, in any one instance, where this exemplary
chastisement overtook him, that the apparent unanimity of the actors went
further than the _practical_ conclusion of "abating" the imperial
nuisance, or that their indignation had settled upon the same offences. In
general the army measured the guilt by the public scandal, rather than by
its moral atrocity; and Caesar suffered perhaps in every case, not so much
because he had violated his duties, as because he had dishonored his
office.

It is, therefore, in the total absence of the checks which have almost
universally existed to control other despots, under some indirect shape,
even where none was provided by the laws, that we must seek for the main
peculiarity affecting the condition of the Roman Caesar, which peculiarity
it was, superadded to the other three, that finally made those three
operative in their fullest extent. It is in the perfection of the
stratocracy that we must look for the key to the excesses of the autocrat.
Even in the bloody despotisms of the Barbary States, there has always
existed in the religious prejudices of the people, which could not be
violated with safety, one check more upon the caprices of the despot than
was found at Rome. Upon the whole, therefore, what affects us on the first
reading as a prodigy or anomaly in the frantic outrages of the early
Caesars--falls within the natural bounds of intelligible human nature, when
we state the case considerately. Surrounded by a population which had not
only gone through a most vicious and corrupting discipline, and had been
utterly ruined by the license of revolutionary times, and the bloodiest
proscriptions, but had even been extensively changed in its very elements,
and from the descendants of Romulus had been transmuted into an Asiatic
mob;--starting from this point, and considering as the second feature of
the case, that this transfigured people, _morally_ so degenerate,
were carried, however, by the progress of civilization to a certain
intellectual altitude, which the popular religion had not strength to
ascend--but from inherent disproportion remained at the base of the
general civilization, incapable of accompanying the other elements in
their advance;--thirdly, that this polished condition of society, which
should naturally with the evils of a luxurious repose have counted upon
its pacific benefits, had yet, by means of its circus and its gladiatorial
contests, applied a constant irritation, and a system of provocations to
the appetites for blood, such as in all other nations are connected with
the rudest stages of society, and with the most barbarous modes of
warfare, nor even in such circumstances without many palliatives wanting
to the spectators of the circus;--combining these considerations, we have
already a key to the enormities and hideous excesses of the Roman
Imperator. The hot blood which excites, and the adventurous courage which
accompanies, the excesses of sanguinary warfare, presuppose a condition of
the moral nature not to be compared for malignity and baleful tendency to
the cool and cowardly spirit of amateurship, in which the Roman (perhaps
an effeminate Asiatic) sat looking down upon the bravest of men,
(Thracians, or other Europeans,) mangling each other for his recreation.
When, lastly, from such a population, and thus disciplined from his
nursery days, we suppose the case of one individual selected, privileged,
and raised to a conscious irresponsibility, except at the bar of one
extra-judicial tribunal, not easily irritated, and notoriously to be
propitiated by other means than those of upright or impartial conduct, we
lay together the elements of a situation too trying for poor human nature,
and fitted only to the faculties of an angel or a demon; of an angel, if
we suppose him to resist its full temptations; of a demon, if we suppose
him to use its total opportunities. Thus interpreted and solved, Caligula
and Nero become ordinary men.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16