timidly to compose love verses in that tongue. One cold autumn night he served as interpreter between me and a Sibyl. We were sitting in the smoky hut of a Celtic woodcutter, warming our legs clad in clumsy, heavy trousers of rough wool, when we saw creeping toward us an ancient creature drenched and disheveled by rain and wind, wild and furtive as any animal of the wood. She fell upon the small oaten loaves which lay baking upon the hearth. My guide coaxed this prophetess, and she consented to examine for me the smoke rings, the sudden sparks, and those fragile structures of embers and ashes. She saw cities a-building, and joyous throngs, but also cities in flames, with bitter lines of captives, who belied my dreams for peace; there was a young and gentle visage which she took for the face of a woman and in which I refused to believe; then a white spectre, which was perhaps only a statue, since that would be an object far stranger than any phantom for this denizen of forest and heath. And vaguely, at a distance of some years, she saw my death, which I could well have predicted without her.
There was less need for my presence in prosperous Gaul and wealthy Spain than in Britain. Narbonensian Gaul reminded me of Greece, whose graces had spread that far, the same fine schools of eloquence, the same porticoes under a cloudless sky. I stopped in Nimes to plan a basilica to be dedicated to Plotina and destined one day to become her temple. Some family ties endeared this city to the empress and so made its clear, sun-warmed landscape the dearer to me.
But the revolt in Mauretania was flaming still. I cut short my journey through Spain, with no stop between Corduba and the sea even for a moment in Italica, the city of my childhood and my ancestors. At Gades I embarked for Africa.
The handsome tattooed warriors of the Atlas mountains were still molesting the African coastal cities. For a very few days there I went through the Numidian equivalent of the Sarmatian battles; I again saw tribes subdued one by one and the surrender of haughty chiefs, prostrating themselves in the open desert in a chaos of women and packs and kneeling beasts. But this time the sand took the place of snow.
It would have been good, for once, to pass the spring in Rome, to find there the Villa begun, to have capricious Lucius and his caresses again, and the friendship of Plotina. But that stay in town was broken almost at once by alarming rumors of war. Peace with the Parthians had been concluded scarcely three years before, but already some grave incidents were occurring on the Euphrates. I set forth at once for the East.
I had made up my mind to settle these frontier disturbances by a less routine method than that of sending in the legions. A meeting was arranged with Osroes. I took with me his daughter, who had been captured in infancy, at the time of Trajan’s occupation of Babylon, and held thereafter in Rome as a hostage. She was a thin child with enormous eyes. Her presence, and that of her women attendants, was something of an encumbrance on a journey which had above all to be made with speed. This cluster of creatures in veils was jolted along on camelback across the Syrian desert. The curtains of their canopies were kept severely closed, but each evening at the halt I sent to inquire if the princess had need of anything.
In Lycia I stopped for an hour to persuade Opramoas, the merchant, who had already demonstrated his capacities for negotiation, to go with me into Parthia. The urgency of the moment restricted his customary display. Wealth and luxury had left him soft, but he was none the less admirable as a traveling companion, for he knew the desert and all its dangers.
The meeting was to take place on the left bank of the Euphrates, not far from Doura. We crossed the river on a raft. Along the bank the soldiers of the Parthian guard formed a dazzling line; their armor was of gold, and was matched in splendor by their horses’ trappings. My ever-attendant Phlegon was decidedly pale, and even the officers who accompanied me were in some fear; this meeting could prove a trap. But Opramoas, alert to every air stirring in Asia, was wholly at ease in this mingling of silence and tumult, immobility and sudden gallop, and in all this magnificence thrown on the desert like a carpet on the sand. As for me, I was wondrous free from concern; like Caesar on his bark, I was entrusting myself to those planks which carried my Fortune. I gave proof of this confidence by restoring the Parthian princess immediately to her father, instead of holding her in our lines until my departure. I promised also to give back the golden throne of the Arsacid dynasty, which Trajan had taken as spoil. We had no use for the thing, but Oriental superstition held it in great esteem.
The high ceremony of these sessions with Osroes was purely external. In substance they differed little from talks between two neighbors who are trying to arrive at some peaceable settlement over a boundary dispute. I had to do with a sophisticated, Greek-speaking barbarian, not at all obtuse, not necessarily more perfidious than I, but vacillating to the point of seeming untrustworthy. My peculiar mental disciplines helped me to grasp this elusive intelligence: seated facing the Parthian emperor, I learned to anticipate, and soon to direct, his replies; I entered into his game; last, I imagined myself as Osroes bargaining with Hadrian. I detest futile discussions where each party knows in advance that he will, or will not, give way; truth in business appeals to me most of all as a means of simplifying and advancing matters. The Parthians feared us; we, in turn, held them in dread, and from the mating of our two fears would come war. The Satraps were pressing toward this war for ends of their own; I could see at once that Osroes, like me, had his Quietus and his Palma. Pharasmanes, the most turbulent of those semi- independent border princes, was even more a danger for the Parthian Empire than for us. It has been charged against me that I kept those base and corruptible lords in hand by resort to subsidies; the money was well spent. For I was too confident of the superiority of our forces to be governed by false pride, so was ready for any concession of mere prestige, but for nothing else. The greatest difficulty was to persuade Osroes that if my promises were few it was because I meant to keep them. But he did believe me, in the end, or acted as if he did. The accord concluded between us in the course of that visit has endured; for fifteen years nothing has troubled the peace on the frontiers for either side. I count on you, Marcus, to continue this state of things after my death.
One evening in Osroes? tent, during a feast given in my honor, I observed among the women and long- eyelashed pages a naked, emaciated man who sat utterly motionless. His eyes were wide open, but he seemed to see nothing of that confusion of acrobats and dancers, or those dishes laden with viands. I addressed him through my interpreter but he deigned no reply, for this was indeed a sage. His disciples, however, were more loquacious; these pious beggars came from India, and their master belonged to the powerful caste of Brahmans. I gathered that his meditations led him to believe that the whole universe is only a tissue of illusion and error; for him self- denial, renunciation, death were the sole means of escape from this changing flood of forms whereon, on the contrary, our Heraclitus had willingly been borne along. Beyond the world of the senses he hoped to rejoin the sphere of the purely divine, that unmoving firmament of which Plato, too, had dreamed.
I got some inkling, therefore, in spite of the bungling of my interpreters, of conceptions not unlike those of certain of our philosophers, but expressed by this Indian with more absolute finality. He had reached the state where nothing was left, except his body, to separate him from intangible deity, without substance or form, and with which he would unite; he had resolved to burn himself alive that next morning. Osroes invited me to the solemnity. A pyre of fragrant woods was prepared; the man leaped into it and disappeared without one cry. His disciples gave no sign of sorrow; for them it was not a funeral ceremony.
I pondered these things far into the night which followed. There I lay on a carpet of finest wool on the floor of a tent hung with gleaming brocades. A page massaged my feet. From without came the few sounds of that Asiatic night: the whispering of slaves at my door; the soft rustle of a palm, and Opramoas’ snores behind a curtain; the stamp of a horse’s hoof; from farther away, in the women’s quarters, the melancholy murmur of a song. All of that had left the Brahman unmoved. In his veritable passion of refusal he had given himself to the flames as a lover to a bed. He had cast off everything and everyone, and finally himself, like so many garments which served to conceal from him that unique presence, the invisible void which was his all.
I felt myself to be different, and ready for wider choice. Austerity, renunciation, negation were not wholly new to me; I had been drawn to them young (as is almost always the case), at the age of twenty. I was even younger when a friend in Rome took me to see the aged Epictetus in his hovel in the Suburra, shortly before Domitian ordered his exile. As in his slave days, when a brutal master failed to extract from him even one cry, though the beating broke his leg, so now grown old and frail he was patiently bearing the slow torments of gravel; yet he seemed to me to enjoy a liberty which was almost divine. His crutches, his pallet, the earthenware lamp and wooden spoon in its vessel of clay were objects of admiration to me, the simple tools of a pure life.
But Epictetus gave up too many things, and I had been quick to observe that nothing was more dangerously easy for me than mere renunciation. This Indian, more logically, was rejecting life itself. There was much to learn from such pure-hearted fanatics, but on the condition of turning the lesson from the meaning originally intended. These sages were trying to rediscover their god above and beyond the ocean of forms, and to reduce him to that quality of the unique, intangible, and incorporeal which he had foregone in the very act of becoming universe. I perceived differently my relations with the divine. I could see myself as seconding the deity in his effort to give form
