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Imperial Purple By: Edgar Saltus (1855-1921) |
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By EDGAR SALTUS CONTENTS I. That Woman
II. Conjectural Rome
III. Fabulous Fields
IV. The Pursuit of the Impossible
V. Nero
VI. The House of Flavia
VII. The Poison in the Purple
VIII. Faustine
IX. The Agony
I THAT WOMAN
When the murder was done and the heralds shouted through the thick
streets the passing of Caesar, it was the passing of the republic they
announced, the foundation of Imperial Rome. There was a hush, then a riot which frightened a senate that frightened
the world. Caesar was adored. A man who could give millions away and
sup on dry bread was apt to conquer, not provinces alone, but hearts.
Besides, he had begun well and his people had done their best. The
House of Julia, to which he belonged, descended, he declared, from
Venus. The ancestry was less legendary than typical. Cinna drafted a
law giving him the right to marry as often as he chose. His mistresses
were queens. After the episodes in Gaul, when he entered Rome his
legions warned the citizens to have an eye on their wives. At seventeen
he fascinated pirates. A shipload of the latter had caught him and
demanded twenty talents ransom. "Too little," said the lad; "I will
give you fifty, and impale you too," which he did, jesting with them
meanwhile, reciting verses of his own composition, calling them
barbarians when they did not applaud, ordering them to be quiet when he
wished to sleep, captivating them by the effrontery of his assurance,
and, the ransom paid, slaughtering them as he had promised. Tall, slender, not handsome, but superb and therewith so perfectly sent
out that Cicero mistook him for a fop from whom the republic had
nothing to fear; splendidly lavish, exquisitely gracious, he was born
to charm, and his charm was such that it still subsists. Cato alone was
unenthralled. But Cato was never pleased; he laughed but once, and all
Rome turned out to see him; he belonged to an earlier day, to an
austerer, perhaps to a better one, and it may be that in "that woman,"
as he called Caesar, his clearer vision discerned beneath the plumage
of the peacock, the beak and talons of the bird of prey. For they were
there, and needed only a vote of the senate to batten on nations of
which the senate had never heard. Loan him an army, and "that woman"
was to give geography such a twist that today whoso says Caesar says
history. Was it this that Cato saw, or may it be that one of the oracles which
had not ceased to speak had told him of that coming night when he was
to take his own life, fearful lest "that woman" should overwhelm him
with the magnificence of his forgiveness? Cato walks through history,
as he walked through the Forum, bare of foot too severe to be simple,
too obstinate to be generous the image of ancient Rome. In Caesar there was nothing of this. He was wholly modern; dissolute
enough for any epoch, but possessed of virtues that his contemporaries
could not spell. A slave tried to poison him. Suetonius says he merely
put the slave to death. The "merely" is to the point. Cato would have
tortured him first. After Pharsalus he forgave everyone. When severe,
it was to himself. It is true he turned over two million people into so
many dead flies, their legs in the air, creating, as Tacitus has it, a
solitude which he described as Peace; but what antitheses may not be
expected in a man who, before the first century was begun, divined the
fifth, and who in the Suevians that terrible people beside whom no
nation could live foresaw Attila! Save in battle his health was poor. He was epileptic, his strength
undermined by incessant debauches; yet let a nation fancying him months
away put on insurgent airs, and on that nation he descended as the
thunder does. In his campaigns time and again he overtook his own
messengers. A phantom in a ballad was not swifter than he.
Simultaneously his sword flashed in Germany, on the banks of the
Adriatic, in that Ultima Thule where the Britons lived. From the depths
of Gaul he dominated Rome, and therewith he was penetrating
impenetrable forests, trailing legions as a torch trails smoke,
erecting walls that a nation could not cross, turning soldiers into
marines, infantry into cavalry, building roads that are roads to day,
fighting with one hand and writing an epic with the other, dictating
love letters, chronicles, dramas; finding time to make a collection of
witticisms; overturning thrones while he decorated Greece; mingling
initiate into orgies of the Druids, and, as the cymbals clashed,
coquetting with those terrible virgins who awoke the tempest; not only
conquering, but captivating, transforming barbarians into soldiers and
those soldiers into senators, submitting three hundred nations and
ransacking Britannia for pearls for his mistresses' ears... Continue reading book >>
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