finally the future statesman. But let us not forget, either, the base opportunist who in fear of displeasing succumbed to drunkenness at the emperor’s table; the young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark; the soldier exercising with mechanical precision his vile gladiatorial trade. And we should include also that vacant figure, nameless and unplaced in history, though as much myself as all the others, the simple toy of circumstance, no more and no less than a body, lying on a camp bed, distracted by an aroma, aroused by a breath of wind, vaguely attentive to some eternal hum of a bee. But little by little a newcomer was taking hold, a stage director and manager. I was beginning to know the names of my actors, and could arrange plausible entrances for them, or exits; I cut short superfluous lines, and came gradually to avoid the most obvious effects. Last, I learned not to indulge too much in monologue. And gradually, in turn, my actions were forming me.
My military successes might have earned me enmity from a lesser man than Trajan. But courage was the only language which he grasped at once; its words went straight to his heart. He came to see in me a kind of secondin-command, almost a son, and nothing of what happened later could wholly separate us. On my side, certain of my newly conceived objections to his views were, at least momentarily, put aside or forgotten in presence of the admirable genius which he displayed with the armies. I have always liked to see a great specialist at work; the emperor, in his own field, had a skill and sureness of hand second to none. Placed at the head of the First Legion Minervia, most glorious of them all, I was assigned to wipe out the last enemy entrenchments in the region of the Iron Gates. After we had surrounded and taken the citadel of Sarmizegethusa I followed the emperor into that subterranean hall where the counselors of King Decebalus had just ended their last banquet by swallowing poison; Trajan gave me the order to set fire to that weird heap of dead men. The same evening, on the steep heights of the battlefield, he transferred to my finger the diamond ring which Nerva had given him, and which had come to be almost a token of imperial succession. That night I fell asleep content.
My newly won popularity diffused over my second stay in Rome something of the feeling of euphoria which I was to know again, but to a much stronger degree, during my years of felicity. Trajan had given me two million sesterces to distribute in public bounty; naturally it was not enough, but by that time I was administering my own estate, which was considerable, and money difficulties no longer troubled me. I had lost most of my ignoble fear of displeasing. A scar on my chin provided a pretext for wearing the short beard of the Greek philosophers. In my attire I adopted a simplicity which I carried to greater extremes after becoming emperor; my time of bracelets and perfumes had passed. That this simplicity was itself still an attitude is of little importance. Slowly I accustomed myself to plainness for its own sake, and to that contrast, which I was later to value, between a collection of gems and the unadorned hands of the collector. To speak further of attire, an incident from which portents were drawn occurred during the year of my tribuneship in Rome. One day of appallingly bad weather, when I was to deliver a public address, I had mislaid my mantle of heavy Gallic wool. Protected only by my toga, which caught the water in its gutterlike folds, I had continually to wipe the rain from my eyes as I pronounced my discourse. Catching cold is an emperor’s privilege in Rome, since he is forbidden, regardless of weather, to put anything over the toga: from that day on, every huckster and melon vendor believed in my approaching good fortune.
We talk much of the dreams of youth. Too often we forget its scheming. That, too, is a form of dream, and is no less extravagant than the others. I was not the only one to indulge in such calculations throughout that period of Roman festivities; the whole army rushed into the race for honors. I broke gaily enough into the role of ambitious politician, but I have never been able to play it for long with conviction, or without need of constant help from a prompter. I was willing to carry out with utmost conscientiousness the tiresome duty of recorder of senatorial proceedings; I knew what services would count most. The laconic style of the emperor, though admirable for the armies, did not suffice for Rome; the empress, whose literary tastes were akin to mine, persuaded him to let me compose his speeches. This was the first of the good offices of Plotina. I succeeded all the better for having had practice in that kind of accommodation: in the difficult period of my apprenticeship I had often written harangues for senators who were short of ideas or turns of phrase; they ended by thinking themselves the authors of these pieces. In working thus for Trajan, I took exactly the same delight as that afforded by the rhetorical exercises of my youth; alone in my room, trying out my effects before a mirror, I felt myself an emperor. In truth I was learning to be one; audacities of which I should not have dreamed myself capable became easy when someone else would have to shoulder them. The emperor’s thinking was simple but inarticulate, and therefore obscure; it became quite familiar to me, and I flattered myself that I knew it somewhat better than he did. I enjoyed aping the military style of the commander-in-chief, and hearing him thereafter in the Senate pronounce phrases which seemed typical, but for which I was responsible. On other days, when Trajan kept to his room, I was entrusted with the actual delivery of these discourses, which he no longer even read, and my enunciation, by this time above reproach, did honor to the lessons of the tragic actor Olympus.
Such personal services brought me into intimacy with the emperor, and even into his confidence, but the ancient antipathy went on. It had momentarily given way to the pleasure which an ageing ruler feels on seeing a young man of his blood begin a career which the elder imagines, rather nadvely, is to continue his own. But perhaps that enthusiasm had mounted so high on the battlefield at Sarmizegethusa only because it had come to the surface through so many superposed layers of mistrust. I think still that there was something more there than ineradicable animosity arising from quarrels painfully patched up, from differences of temperament, or merely from habits of mind in a man already growing old. By instinct the emperor detested all indispensable subordinates. He would have understood better on my part a mixture of irregularity and devotion to duty; I seemed to him almost suspect by reason of being technically irreproachable. That fact was apparent when the empress thought to advance my career in arranging for me a marriage with his grandniece. Trajan opposed himself obstinately to the project, adducing my lack of domestic virtues, the extreme youth of the girl, and even the old story of my debts. The empress persisted with like stubbornness; I warmed to the game myself; Sabina, at that age, was not wholly without charm. This marriage, though tempered by almost continuous absence, became for me subsequently a source of such irritation and annoyance that it is hard now to recall it as a triumph at the time for an ambitious young man of twenty- eight.
I was more than ever a member of the family, and was more or less forced to live within it. But everything in that circle displeased me, except for the handsome face of Plotina. Innumerable Spanish cousins were always present at the imperial table, just as later on I was to find them at my wife’s dinners during my rare visits to Rome; nor would I even say that later I found them grown older, for from the beginning all those people seemed like centenarians. From them emanated a kind of stale propriety and ponderous wisdom. The emperor had passed almost his whole life with the armies; he knew Rome infinitely less well than did I. With great good will he endeavored to surround himself with the best that the City had to offer, or with what had been presented to him as such. The official set was made up of men wholly admirable for their decency and respectability, but learning did not rest easily upon them, and their philosophy lacked the vigor to go below the surface of things. I have never greatly relished the pompous affability of Pliny; and the sublime rigidity of Tacitus seemed to me to enclose a Republican reactionary’s view of the world, unchanged since the death of Caesar. The unofficial circle was obnoxiously vulgar, a deterrent which kept me for the moment from running new risks in that quarter. I nevertheless constrained myself to the utmost politeness toward all these folk, diverse as they were. I was deferent toward some, compliant to others, dissipated when necessary, clever but not too clever. I had need of my versatility; I was many-sided by intention, and made it a game to be incalculable. I walked a tightrope, and could have used lessons not only from an actor, but from an acrobat.
I was reproached at this period for adultery with several of our patrician women. Two or three of these much criticized liaisons endured more or less up to the beginning of my principate. Although Rome is rather indulgent toward debauchery, it has never favored the loves of its rulers. Mark Antony and Titus had a taste of this. My adventures were more modest than theirs, but I fail to see how, according to our customs, a man who could never stomach courtesans and who was already bored to death with marriage might otherwise have come to know the varied world of women. My elderly brother-in-law, the impossible Servianus, whose thirty years’ seniority allowed him to stand over me both as schoolmaster and spy, led my enemies in giving out that curiosity and ambition played a greater part in these affairs than love itself; that intimacy with the wives introduced me gradually into the political secrets of the husbands, and that the confidences of my mistresses were as valuable to me as the police reports with which I regaled myself in later years. It is true that each attachment of any duration did procure for me, almost inevitably, the friendship of the fat or feeble husband, a pompous or timid fellow, and usually blind, but I seldom gained pleasure from such a connection, and profited even less. I must admit that certain indiscreet stories whispered in my ear by my mistresses served to awaken in me some sympathy for these much mocked and little
