Part 36

Rome was strong without compassion; so her strength led her on to conquests, and her conquests to vices, and her vices to hideous ruin and combustion. She loved her _gravitas,_--which implied great things;--but contemned the Beautiful; and so, when a knowledge of the Beautiful would have gone far to save her, by maintaining in her a sense of proportion and the fitness of things--she lost her morale and became utterly vulgarian. But think of China, taking it as a matter of course that music was an essential part of government; or of France, with her _Ministre des Beaux Arts_ in every cabinet. Perhaps; these two, of all historical nations, have made the greatest achievements; for you must say that neither India nor Greece was a nation.--As for Rome, with all her initial grandeur, it would be hard to find another nation of her standing that made such an awful mess of it as she did; one refers, of course, to Republican Rome; when Augustus had had his way with her, it was another matter.

She took the Gadarene slope at a hand-gallop; and there you have her history during the second century B.C. Not till near the end of that century did the egos of the Crest-Wave begin to come in in any numbers. From the dawn of the last quarter, there or thereabouts, all was an ever-growing rout and riot; the hideous toppling of the herd over the cliff-edge. It was a time of wars civil and the reverse; of huge bloody conscriptions and massacre; reforms and demagogism and murder of the Gracchi:-- Marius and Sulla cat and dog;--the original Spartican movement, that wrecked Italy and ended with six thousand crucifixions along the road to Capua;--ended so, and not with a slave conquest and wiping-out of Rome, simply because Spartacus's revolted slave-army was even less disciplined than the legions that Beast-Crassus decimated into a kind of order and finally conquered them with. It was decade after decade of brutal devasting wars, --wars chronic and incurable, you would say: the untimely wreck and ruin of the world.

It is a strange gallery of portraits that comes down to us from this time: man after notable man arising without the qualities that could save Rome. Here are a few of the likenesses, as they are given Dr. Stobart: there were the Gracchi, with so much that was fine in them, but a ruining dash of the demagog,--an idea that socialism could accomplish anything real;--and no wisdom to see through to ultimite causes. There was Marius, simple peasant with huge military genius: a wolf of a soldier and foolish lamb of a politician; a law-maker who, captured by the insinuations and flatteries of the opposite side, swears to obey his own laws "so far as they may be legal." There was Sulla, of the class of men to which Alcibiades and Alexander belonged, but an inferior specimen of the class and unscrupulous rip, and a brave successful commander; personally beautiful, till his way of living made his face "like a mulberry sprinkled with flour";-- with many elements of greatness always negatived by sudden fatuities; much of genius, more of fool, and most of rake-helly demirep; highly cultured, and plunderer of Athens and Delphi; great general, who maintained his hold on his troops by unlimited tolerance of undiscipline. There was Crassus the millionaire, and all his millions won by cheatery and ugly methods; the man with the slave fire-brigade, with which he made a pretty thing out of looting at fires. There was Cicero, with many noble and Roman qualities and a large foolish vanity: thundering orator with more than a _soupcon_ of the vaudeville favorite in him: a Hamlet who hardly showed his real fineness until he came to die.

And there was Pompey;--real honesty in Pompey, perhaps the one true-hearted gentleman of the age: a man of morale, and a great soldier,--who might have done something if his general intelligence had been as great as his military genius and his sense of honor:--surely Pompey was the best of the lot of them; only the cursed spite was that the world was out of joint, and it needed something more than a fine soldier and gentleman to set it right.--And then Caesar--could he not do it? Caesar, the Superman,--the brilliant all-round genius at last,--the man of scandalous life--scandalous even in that cesspool Rome,--the epileptic who dreamed of world-dominion,--the conqueror of Gaul, says H.P. Blavatsky, because in Gaul alone the Sacred Mysteries survived in their integrity, and it was his business, on behalf of the dark forces against mankind, to quench their life and light for ever;--could not this Caesar do it? No; he had the genius; but not that little quality which all greatest personalities,--all who have not passed beyond the limits of personality: tact, impersonality, the power that the disciple shall covet, to make himself as nothing in the eyes of men:-- and because he lacked that for armor, there were knives sharpened which should reach his heart before long.--And then, in literature, two figures mentionable: Lucretius, thinker and philosopher in poetry: a high Roman type, and a kind of materialist, and a kind of God's warrior, and a suicide. And Catullus: no noble type; neither Roman nor Greek, but Italian perhaps; singing in the old Saturnian meters with a real lyrical fervor, but with nothing better to sing than his loves.--And then, in politics again, Brutus: type, in sentimental history of the Republican School, of the high old roman and republican virtues; Brutus of the "blood-bright splendor," the tyrant-slayer and Roman Harmodios-Aristogeiton; the adored of philosophic French liberty-equality-fraternity adorers; Shakespeare's "noblest Roman of them all";--O how featly Cassius might have answered, when Brutus accused him of the "itching palm," if he had only been keeping _au fait_ with the newspapers through the preceding years! _"Et tu, Brute,"_ I hear him say, quoting words that should have reminded his dear friend of the sacrd ties of friendship,--

"Art thou the man will rate thy Cassius thus? This is the most unkindest cut of all; For truly I have filched a coin or two:-- Have been, say, _thrifty;_ gathered here and there _Pickings,_ we'll call them; but, my Brutus, thou-- Didst thou not shut the senators of Rhodes (I think 'twas Rhodes) up in their senate-house, And keep them there unfoddered day by day. Until starvation forced them to disgorge All of their million to thee? Didst not thou--"

Brutus is much too philosophical, much to studious, to listen to qualities of that kind, and cuts the conversation short right there. Cassius was right: that about starving the senators of his province that surrendered their wealth was precisely what our Brutus did.--Then there was Anthony, the rough brave soldier,--a kind of man of the unfittest when the giants Pompey and Caesar had been in; Anthony, master of Rome for awhile,--and truly, God knows Rome will do with bluff Mark Anthony for her master!--It is a very interesting list; most of them queer lobsided creatures, fighting with own hands or for nothing in particular; most with some virtues: Then that might have saved Rome, if, as Mrs Poyser said, "they are hatched again, and hatched different."

XVIII. AUGUSTUS

We left Rome galloping down the Gadarene slope, and scrimmaging for a vantage point whence to hurl herself headlong. Down she came; a riot and roaring ruin: doing those things she ought not to have done, and leaving undone those things she ought to have done, and with no semblance of health in her. There was nothing for it but the downfall of the world; good-bye civilization and all that was ever upbuilded of old. Come now; we should become good Congo forester in our time, with what they call 'long pig' for our daintiest diet. It is a euphemism for your brother man.

But supposing this mist-filled Gadarene gulf were really bridgable: supposing there were another side beyond the roar of hungry waters and the horror; and that mankind,--European mankind,--might pass over, and be saved, were there but staying the rout for a moment, and affording a means to cross?

There is a bardic proverb in the Welsh: _A fo Ben, bydded Bont:_--'He who is Chief, let him be the bridge': Bran the Blessed said it, when he threw down his giant body over the gulf, so that the men of the Island of the Mighty might pass over into Ireland. And the end of an old cycle, and the beginning of a new, when there is--as in our Rome at that time--a sort of psychic and cyclic impasse, a break-down and terrible chasm in history, if civilization is to pass over from the old conditions to the new, a man must be found who can be the bridge. He must solve the problems within himself; he must care so little for, and have such control of, his personality, that he can lay it down, so to speak, and let humanity cross over upon it. History may get no news of him at all; although he is then the Chief of Men, and the greatest living;--or it may get news, only to belittle him. His own and the after ages may think very little of him; he may possess no single quality to dazzle the imagination:--he may seem cold and uninteresting, a crafty tyrant;--or an uncouth old ex-rail-splitter to have in the White House;--or an illiterate peasant-girl to lead your armies; yet because he is the bridge, he is the Chief; and you may suspect someone out of the Pantheons incarnate in him.

For the truth of all which, humanity has a sure instinct. When there is a crisis we say, _Look for the Man._ Rome thought (for the most part) that she had found him when Caesar, having conquered Pompey, came home master of the world. If this phoenix and phenomenon in time, now with no competitor above the horizons, could not settle affairs, only Omnipotence could. Every thinking (or sane) Roman knew that what Rome needed was a head; and now at last she had got one. Pompey, the only possible alternative, was dead; Caesar was lord of all things. Pharsalus, the deciding battle, was fought in 48; he returned home in 46. From the year between, in which he put the finishing touches to his supremacy, you may count the full manvantara of Imperial Rome: fifteen centuries until 1453 and the fall of the Eastern Empire.

All opinion since has been divided as to the character of Caesar. To those whose religion is democracy, he is the grand Destroyer of Freedom; to the worshipers of the Superman, he is the chief avatar of their god. Mr. Stobart,* who deals with him sanely, but leaning to the favorable view, says he was "not a bad man, for he preferred justice and mercy to tyranny and cruelty, and had a passion for logic and order"; and adds, "he was a man without beliefs or illusions or scruples." He began by being a fop and ultra-extravagant; and was always, if we may believe accounts, a libertine of the first water. He was, of course, an epileptic. In short, there is nothing in history to give an absolutely sure clue to his real self. But there is that passage in Madame Blavatsky, which I have quoted before, to the effect that he was an agent of the dark forces, and conquered Gaul for them, to abolish the last effective Mysteries; and I think in the light of that, his character, and a great deal of history besides, becomes intelligible enough.--I will be remembered that he stood at the head of the Roman religion, as Potifex Maximus.

* On whose book, _The Grandeur that was Rome,_ this paper also largely leans. ------

But it was not the evil that he did that (obviously) brought about his downfall. Caesar was fortified against Karma by the immensity of his genius. Whom should he fear, who had conquered Pompeius Magnus? None in the roman world could reach so high as to his elbow;--for sheer largeness of mind, quickness and daring, he stoood absolutely the Superman among pygmies. He knew his aim, and could make or wait for it; and it was big and real. Other men crowed or fumbled after petty and pinch-beck ends; impossible rhetorical republicanisms; vain senatorial prestiges; --or pleasure pure and simple--say rather, very complex and impure. Let them clack, let them fumble! Caesar would do things and get things done. He wore the whole armor of his greatness, and could see no chink or joint in it through which a hostile dagger might pierce. Even his military victories were won by some greater than mere military greatness.--Karma, perhaps, remembering the Mysteries at Gaulish Bibracte, and the world left now quite lightless, might have a word to say; might even be looking round for shafts to speed. But what, against a man so golden-panoplied? "Tush!" saith Caesar, "there are no arrows now but straws."

One such straw was this: (a foolish one, but it may serve)--

Rome for centuries has been amusing herself on all public occasions with Fourth of July rhetoric against kings, and in praise of tyrannicides. Rome for centuries has been cherishing in her heart what she calls a love of Freedom,--to scourge your slaves, steal from your provincials, and waste your substance in riotous living. All of which Julius Caesar,--being a real man, mind you,--holds in profoundest contempt for driveling unreality; which it certainly is. But unrealities are awfully real at times.

Unluckily, with all his supermannism, he retained some traces of personality. He was bald, and sensitive about it; he always had been a trifle foppish. So when they gave him a nice laurel wreath for his triumph over Pompey, he continued, against all precedent, to wear it indefinitely,--as hiding certain shining surfaces from the vulgar gaze.... "H'm," said Rome, "he goes about the next thing to crowned!" And here is his statue, set up with those of the Seven Kings of antiquity; he allowing it, or not protesting.--They remembered their schoolboy exercises, their spoutings on many Latins for Glorious Fourth; and felt very badly indeed. Then it was unlucky that, being too intent on realities, he could not bother to rise when those absurd old Piccadilly pterodactyls the Senators came into his presence; that he filled up their ridiculous house promiscuously with low-born soldiers and creatures of his own. And that there was a crowd of foolish prigs and pedants in Rome to take note of these so trivial things, and to be more irked by them than by all the realities of his power:--a lean hungry Cassius; an envious brusque detractor Casca; a Brutus with a penchant for being considered a philosopher, after a rather maiden-auntish sort of conception of the part,--and for being considered a true descendant of his well-known ancestor: a cold soul much fired with the _ignis fatuus_ of Republican slave-scourging province-fleecing freedom. An unreal lot, with not the ghost of a Man between them;--what should the one Great Man of the age find in them to disturb the least ofhis dreams?

Came, however, the Ides of March in B.C. 44; and the laugh once more was with Karma,--the one great final laugher of the world. Caesar essayed to be Chief of the Romans: he who is chief, let him be the bridge;--this one, because of a few ludicrous personal foibles, has broken down now under the hurry and thunder of the marching cycles. The fact being that your true Chief aspires only to the bridgehood; whereas this one overlooked that part of it, intent on the chieftaincy.--And now, God have mercy on us! there is to be all the round of wars and proscriptions and massacres over again: _Roma caput mundi_ herself piteously decapitate; and with every booby and popinjay rising in turn to kick her about at his pleasure;--and here first comes Mark Anthony to start the game, it seems.

Well; Mark Anthony managed wisely enough at that crisis; you would almost have said, hearing him speak at Caesar's funeral, that there was at least a ha'porth of brains hidden somewhere within that particularly thick skull of his. Half an hour changes him from a mere thing alive on sufferance--too foolish to be worth bothering to kill--into the master of Rome. And yet probably it was not brains that did it, but the force of genuine feeling: he loved dead Caesar; he was trying now to be cautious, for his own skin's sake: was repressing himself;--but his feelings got the better of him,--and were catching,-- and set the mob on fire. Your lean and hungry ones; your envious detractors; your thin maiden-auntish prig republican philosophers:--all very wisely sheer off. Your grand resounding Cicero,--_vox et praeterea almost nihil_ (he had yet to die and show that it was _almost,_ not _quite,_) sheers off too, into the country, there to busy himself with an essay on the _Nature of the Gods_ (to contain, be sure, some fine eloquence), and with making up his mind to attack Anthony on behalf of Republican Freedom.--Anthony's next step is wise too: he appoints himself Caesar's executor, gets hold of the estate, and proceeds to squander it right and left buying up for himself doubtful support.--All you can depend on is the quick coming-on of final ruin and dismay: of all impossibilities, the most impossible is to imagine Mark Anthony capable of averting it. As to Caesar's heir, so nominated in the will--the persona from whom busy Anthony has virtually stolen the estate,--no one gives him a thought. Seeing who he was, it would be absurd to do so.

And then he turned up in Rome, a sickly youth of eighteen; demanded his moneys from Anthony; dunned him till he got some fragment of them;--then borrowed largely on his own securities, and proceeded to pay--what prodigal Anthony had been much too thrifty to think of doing--Ceasar's debts. Rome was surprised.

This was Caesar's grand-nephew, Octavius; who had been in camp at Apollonia in Illyricum since he had coolly proposed to his great-uncle that the latter, being Dictator, and about to start on his Parthian campaign, should make him his Master of the Horse. He had been exempted from military service on account of ill-health; and Julius had a sense of humor; so he packed him off to Apollonia to 'finish' a military training that had never begun. There he had made a close friend of a rising young officer by the name of Vipsanius Agrippa; a man of high capacities who, when the news came of Caesar's death, urged him to lose no time, but rouse the legions in their master's name, and march on Rome to avenge his murder.--"No," says Octavius, "I shall go there alone."

Landing in Italy, he heard of the publication of the will, in which he himself had been named heir. That meant, to a very vast fortune, and to the duty of revenge. Of the fortune, since it was now in Mark Anthony's hands, you could predict nothing too surely but its vanishment; as to the duty, it might also imply a labor for which the Mariuses and Sullas, the Caesars and Pompeys, albeit with strong parties at their backs, had been too small men. And Octavius had no party, and he was no soldier, and he had no friends except that Vipsanius back in Apollonia.

His mother and step-father, with whom he stayed awhile on his journey, urged him to throw the whole matter up: forgo the improbably fortune and very certain peril, and not rush in where the strongest living might fear to tread. Why, there was Mark Anthony, Caesar's lieutenant--the Hercules, mailed Bacchus, Roman Anthony--the great dashing captain whom his soldiers so adored-- even he was shilly-shallying with the situation, and not daring to say _Caesar shall be avenged._ And Anthony, you might be sure, would want no competitor--least of all in the boy named heir in Caesar's will.--"Oh, I shall go on and take it up," said Octavius; and went. And paid Caesar's debts, as we have seen, presently: thereby advertising his assumption of all responsibilities. Anthony began to be uneasy about him; the Senatorial Party to make advances to him; people began to suspect that, possibly, this sickly boy might grow into a man to be reckoned with.

I am not going to follow him in detail through the next thirteen years. It is a tortuous difficult story; to which we lack the true clues, unless they are to be found in the series of protrait-busts of him taken during this period. The makers of such busts were the photographers of the age; and, you may say, as good as the best photographers. Every prominent Roman availed himself of their services. Mr. Baring-Gould, in his _Tragedy of the Caesars,_ arranges, examines, and interprets these portraits of Augustus; I shall give you the gist of his conclusions, which are illuminating.--First we see a boy with delicate and exceedingly beautiful features, impassive and unawakend: Octavius when he came to Rome. A cloud gathers on his face, deepening into a look of intense anguish; and with the anguish grows firmness and the clenched expression of an iron will: this is Octavian in the dark days of the thirties.--the anguish passes, but leaves the firmness behind: the strength remains, the beauty remains, and a light of high serenity has taken the place of the aspect of pain: this is Augustus the Emperor. The same writer contrasts this story with that revealed by the busts of Julius: wherein we see first a gay insouciant dare-devil youth, and at last a man old before his time; a face sinister (I should say) and haunted with ugly sorrow.

We get no contemporary account of Augustus; no interpeting biography from the hand of any one who knew him. We have to read between the lines of history, and with what intuition we can muster: and especially the story of that lonely soul struggling through the awful waters of the years that followed Caesar's death. We see him allying himself first with one party, then with another; exercising (apparently) no great or brilliant qualities, yet by every change thrown nearer the top; till with Anthony and Lepidus he is one of the Triumvirate that rules the world. Then came those cruel proscriptions. This is the picture commonly seen:--a cold keen intellect perpetually dissembling; keen enough to deceive Anthony, to decieve the senate, to decieve Cicero and all the world; cruel for policy's sake, without ever a twinge of remorse or compunciton: a marble-cold impassive _mind,_ and no heart al all, with master-subtlety achieving mastery of the world.--Alas! a boy in his late teens and early twenties, so nearly friendless, and with enemies so many and so great... A boy "up aginst" so huge and difficult circumstances always, that (you would say) there was no time, no possibility, for him to look ahead: in every moment the next agonizing perilous step that must be taken vast enough to fill the whole horizon of his mind, of any human mind perhaps;--ay, so vast and compelling that every day with wrenches and torsion that horizon must be pushed back and back to contain them,--a harrowing painful process, as we may read on his busts... As to the proscriptions, Dio, a writer, as Mr. Baring-Gould says, "never willing to allow a good quality to one of the Caesars, or to put their conduct in other than an unfavorable light," says that they were brought about mainly--"by Lepidus and Anthony, who, having been long in honor under Julius Caesar, and having held many offices in state and army, had acquired many enemies. But as Octavian was associated with them in power, an appearance of complicity attached to him. But he was not cruel by nature, and he had no occasion for putting many to death; moreover, he had resolved to imitate the example of his adoptive father. Added to this, he was young, was just entering on his career, and sought rather to gain hearts than to alienate them. No sooner was he in sole power than he showed no signs of severity, and at that time he caused the death of very few, and saved very many. He proceeded with the utmost severity against such as betrayed their [proscribed?] masters or friends; but was most favorable to such as helped the proscribed to escape."