empire expands the more the different aspects of authority tend to be concentrated in the hands of the chief of state; this man so pressed for time has necessarily to delegate some part of his tasks to others; his genius will consist more and more in surrounding himself with trustworthy personnel. The great crime of Claudius or of Nero was that they indolently allowed their slaves and freedmen to take on these roles of agent and representative of the master, or to serve him as counselor. One portion of my life and my travels has been passed in choosing the administrative heads of a new bureaucracy, in training them, in matching as judiciously as I could the talents to the posts, and in opening possibilities of useful employment to that middle class upon whom the State depends.
I recognize the danger of these armies of civil servants; it can be stated in a word, the fatal increase of routine. This mechanism, wound up for centuries to come, will run awry if we do not watch out; the master must constantly regulate its movements, foreseeing and repairing the effects of wear. But experience shows that in spite of our infinite care in choosing our successors the mediocre emperors will always outnumber the wise, and that at least one fool will reign per century. In time of crisis these bureaus, if well organized, will go on with what must be done, filling the interim (sometimes very long) between two good rulers. Some emperors like to parade behind them whole lines of barbarians, bound at the neck, those interminable processions of the conquered. My cortcge will be different; the best of those officials whom I have attempted to train will compose it. Thanks to the members of the Imperial Council I have been able to leave Rome for years at a time, coming back for only brief stays. I communicated with them by the swiftest of couriers, and in time of danger by semaphore. They have in their turn trained other useful auxiliaries. Their authority is of my making; their efficient activity has left me free to employ myself elsewhere. It is going to let me depart, without too much concern, into death itself.
In my twenty years of rule I have passed twelve without fixed abode. In succession I occupied palatial homes of Asiatic merchants, sober Greek houses, handsome villas in Roman Gaul provided with baths and hot air heat, or mere huts and farms. My preference was still for the light tent, that architecture of canvas and cords. Life at sea was no less diversified than in lodgings on land: I had my own ship, equipped with gymnasium and library, but I was too distrustful of all fixity to attach myself to any one dwelling, even to one in motion. The pleasure bark of a Syrian millionaire, the high galleys of the fleet, the light skiff of a Greek fisherman, each served equally well. The one luxury was speed, and all that favored it, the finest horses, the best swung carriages, luggage as light as possible, clothing and accessories most fitted to the climate. But my greatest asset of all was perfect health: a forced march of twenty leagues was nothing; a night without sleep was no more than a chance to think in peace. Few men enjoy prolonged travel; it disrupts all habit and endlessly jolts each prejudice. But I was striving to have no prejudices and few habits. I welcomed the delight of a soft bed, but liked also the touch and smell of bare earth, some contact with the rough or smooth segments of the world’s circumference. I was well inured to all kinds of foods, whether British gruel or African watermelon. Once I tasted that delicacy of certain Germanic tribes, tainted game; it made me vomit, but the experiment had been tried. Though decided in my tastes in love, even there I feared routines. My attendants, reduced in number to the indispensable, or to the exquisite, separated me but little from other people; I took special care to be free in my movements, and to remain accessible to all. The provinces, those great administrative units for which I myself had chosen the emblems (Britannia on her throne of rocks, or Dacia with her scimitar) were entities for me composed of distinct parts, forests where I had sought shade, wells where I had slaked my thirst, chance encounters at halts, faces known and sometimes loved. I began to know each mile of our roads, Rome’s finest gift, perhaps, to the world. But best of all, and unforgettable, was the moment when a road came to an end on a mountainside, and we hoisted ourselves from crevice to crevice, from boulder to boulder, to catch the dawn from an Alpine peak, or a height of the Pyrenees.
A few men before me had traveled over the earth: Pythagoras, Plato, some dozen philosophers in all, and a fair number of adventurers. Now for the first time the traveller was also the master, free both to see and to reform, or to create anew. That chance fell to me; I reflected that possibly centuries would pass before there might be another such happy accord between an office, a temperament, and a world. And it was then that I felt the advantage of being a newcomer, a man alone, scarcely bound even by marriage, childless and practically without ancestors, a Ulysses with no external Ithaca. I must here admit what I have told no one else: I have never had a feeling of belonging wholly to any one place, not even to my beloved Athens, nor even to Rome. Though a foreigner in every land, in no place did I feel myself a stranger. The different professions which make up the trade of emperor were practiced along the way: I resumed military life like a garment grown comfortable with use, and fell back readily into the jargon of the camps, that Latin deformed by the pressure of barbaric languages and sprinkled with the usual profanity and obvious jokes; I again grew used to the heavy equipment of the days of maneuvers, and to that change in equilibrium in the whole body which the weight of a shield on the left arm can produce. More arduous were the interminable duties of accountant, wherever I went, whether for auditing the records of the province of Asia or those of a small British town in debt for construction of public baths. I have already spoken of my function as judge. Comparisons drawn from other employments came to mind: I thought of the itinerant doctor going from door to door for care of the sick, of the street department employee called to repair a pavement or to solder a water main; of the overseer running back and forth on the ship, encouraging the oarsmen but sparing his whip as he could. And today, on the Villa’s terrace, watching the slaves treat the orchard trees or weed the flower beds, I think most of all of the coming and going of a watchful gardener.
The craftsmen whom I took with me on my rounds caused me little concern: their love of travel was as strong as my own. But I had trouble with the writers and scholars. The indispensable Phlegon fusses like an old woman, but he is the only secretary who has held up under the years: he is still with me. The poet Florus, to whom I proposed a Latin secretaryship, proclaimed right and left that he would not have wished to be Caesar, forced to battle the cold of Scythia, or British rain. The long excursions on foot did not appeal to him either. On my side, I gladly left to him the delights of Rome’s literary life, the taverns where the same witticisms are exchanged each night and the same mosquitoes are endured in common. To Suetonius I had given the post of curator of archives, thus granting him access to secret documents which he needed for his biographies of the Caesars. This clever man so well named Tranquillus was hardly to be imagined outside a library; he, too, stayed behind in Rome, where he became one of my wife’s intimates, a member of that small circle of discontented conservatives who gathered around her to find fault with the ways of the world. This group was little to my liking; I had Tranquillus pensioned off, and he retired to his cottage in the Sabine Hills there to mull undisturbed over the vices of Tiberius. A Greek secretariat was held for some time by Favorinus of Arles. That dwarf with the high treble voice was not devoid of subtlety but his mind was the most given to false deductions of any that I have encountered. We were always disputing, but his erudition charmed me. I was amused at his hypochondria; he dwelt upon his health like a lover attending a cherished mistress. His Hindu servant prepared his rice, imported from the Orient at great expense; unfortunately, this exotic cook spoke Greek badly, and said but little in any language, so he taught me nothing about the marvels of his native land. Favorinus flattered himself on having accomplished three rather rare things in his life: though a Gaul, he had Hellenized himself better than anyone else; though of humble origin, he was constantly quarrelling with the emperor and coming off none the worse for it, a remarkable fact which was, however, entirely to my credit; though impotent, he was continually paying fines for seduction of married women. And it is true that his lady admirers in provincial literary circles caused him difficulties from which I had more than once to extricate him. I wearied of that, and Eudemo took his place. But on the whole I have been unaccountably well served. The respect of that little group of friends and employees has survived, the gods only know how, through the rough intimacies of travel; their discretion has been still more astonishing, if possible, than their fidelity. The Suetoniuses of the future will have few anecdotes to harvest concerning me. What the public knows of my life I have revealed. My friends have kept my secrets, political and otherwise; it is fair to say that I often did the same for them.
To build is to collaborate with earth, to put a human mark upon a landscape, modifying it forever thereby; the process also contributes to that slow change which makes up the history of cities. What thought and care to determine the exact site for a bridge, or for a fountain, and to give a mountain road that perfect curve which is at the same time the shortest… . The widening of the road to Megara transformed the shore along the Scironian Cliffs; the two thousand odd stadia of paved way, provided with cisterns and military posts, which connected Antinoopolis with the Red Sea brought an era of security to the desert following an era of danger. For construction of a system of aqueducts in Troas all the revenue from five hundred cities of the province of Asia was not too high a price; an aqueduct for Carthage atoned in some part for the rigors of the Punic Wars. The erecting of fortifications was much like constructing dykes: the object was to find the line on which a shore, or an empire, can be defended, the point where the assault of waves (or barbarians) will be held back, stopped, or utterly broken. The beauty of the gulfs bore fruit with the opening of harbors. The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.
