under this woman’s influence that I undertook to plan the administrative divisions of Antinoopolis, its demes, its streets, its city blocks, on the model of the world of the gods, and at the same time to include therein a reflection of my own life. All the deities were to be represented, Hestia and Bacchus, divinities of the hearth and of the orgy, the gods of the heavens and those of the underworld. I placed my imperial ancestors there, too, Trajan and Nerva, now an integral part of that system of symbols. Plotina figured; the good Matidia was there, in the likeness of Demeter; my wife herself, with whom at the time my relations were cordial enough, made one of that procession of divinities. Some months later I bestowed the name of my sister Paulina upon a district of Antinoopolis; I had finally broken off with her as the wife of Servianus, but she had now died and thus had regained her unique position of sister in that city of memories. The site of sorrow was becoming the ideal center for reunions and recollections, the Elysian Fields of a life, the place where contradictions are resolved and where everything, within its rank, is equally sacred.
Standing at a window in Arrian’s house under night skies alive with stars, I thought of those words which the Egyptian priests had had carved on Antinous’ tomb: He has obeyed the command of heaven. Can it be that the sky intimates its orders to us, and that only the best among us hear them while the remainder of mankind is aware of no more than oppressive silence? The priestess of Eleusis and Chabrias both thought so. I should have liked them to be right. In my mind I could see the palm of that hand again, smoothed by death, as I had looked on it for the last time that morning at the embalmers’; the lines which had previously disquieted me were no longer visible; the surface was like a wax tablet from which an instruction, once carried out, had been erased. But such lofty affirmations enlighten without rewarming us, like the light of stars, and the night all around us is darker still. If the sacrifice of Antinous had been thrown into the balance in my favor in some divine scale, the results of that terrible gift of self were not yet manifest; the benefits were neither those of life nor even those of immortality. I hardly dared seek a name for them. Sometimes, at rare intervals, a feeble gleam pulsed without warmth on my sky’s horizon; but it served to improve neither the world nor myself; I continued to feel more deteriorated than saved.
It was near this period that Quadratus, a bishop of the Christians, sent me a defense of his faith. I had made it a principle to maintain towards that sect the strictly equitable line of conduct which had been Trajan’s in his better days: I had just reminded the provincial governors that the protection of the law extends to all citizens, and that defamers of Christians would be punished if they levelled accusations against that group without proof. But any tolerance shown to fanatics is immediately mistaken by them for sympathy with their cause; though I can hardly imagine that Quadratus was hoping to make a Christian of me, he assuredly strove to convince me of the excellence of his doctrine, and to prove, above all, that it offered no harm to the State. I read his work, and was even enough interested to have Phlegon assemble some information about the life of the young prophet named Jesus who had founded the sect, but who died a victim of Jewish intolerance about a hundred years ago. This young sage seems to have left behind him some teachings not unlike those of Orpheus, to whom at times his disciples compare him. In spite of Quadratus’ singularly flat prose I could discern through it the appealing charm of virtues of simple folk, their kindness, their ingenuousness, and their devotion to each other. All of that strongly resembled the fraternities which slaves or poor citizens found almost everywhere in honor of our gods in the crowded quarters of our cities. Within a world which remains, despite all our efforts, hard and indifferent to men’s hopes and trials, these small societies for mutual aid offer the unfortunate a source of comfort and support. But I was aware, too, of certain dangers. Such glorification of virtues befitting children and slaves was made at the expense of more virile and more intellectual qualities; under that narrow, vapid innocence I could detect the fierce intransigence of the sectarian in presence of forms of life and of thought which are not his own, the insolent pride which makes him value himself above other men, and his voluntarily circumscribed vision. I speedily tired of Quadratus’ captious arguments, and of those scraps of wisdom ineptly borrowed from the writings of our philosophers. Chabrias, ever preoccupied to offer the gods the worship due them, was disturbed by the progress of sects of this kind among the populace of large cities; he feared for the welfare of our ancient religions, which yoke men to no dogma whatsoever, but lend themselves, on the contrary, to interpretations as varied as nature itself; they allow austere spirits who desire to do so to invent for themselves a higher morality, but they do not bind the masses by precepts so strict as to engender immediate constraint and hypocrisy. Arrian shared these views. I passed a whole evening discussing with him the injunction which consists in loving another as oneself; it is too foreign to the nature of man to be followed with sincerity by the average person, who will never love anyone but himself, and it is not at all suited to the philosopher, who is little given to self-love.
On many points, however, the thinking of our philosophers also seemed to be limited and confused, if not sterile. Three quarters of our intellectual performances are no more than decorations upon a void; I wondered if that increasing vacuity was due to the lowering of intelligence or to moral decline; whatever the cause, mediocrity of mind was matched almost everywhere by shocking selfishness and dishonesty. I had directed Herod Atticus to supervise the construction of a chain of aqueducts in the Troad; he made use of that trust to squander public funds in shameful fashion, and when called to render an accounting sent back the insolent reply that he was rich enough to cover all deficits; such wealth was itself a scandal. His father, who had but recently died, had made a discreet arrangement to disinherit him by multiplying bounties to the Athenian citizenry; young Herod refused outright to pay the paternal legacy, and a law suit ensued which is still going on. In Smyrna my erstwhile intimate, Polemo, had the effrontery to oust a deputation of senators from Rome who had thought it reasonable to count on his hospitality. Your father Antoninus, the gentlest of men, was enraged; statesman and sophist finally came to blows over the matter; such pugilism, if unworthy of an emperor-to-be, was still more disgraceful for a Greek philosopher. Favorinus, that greedy dwarf whom I had showered with money and honors, was peddling witticisms on all sides at my expense: the thirty legions which I commanded were, according to him, my only strong arguments in the philosophical bouts wherein I had the vanity to indulge, and wherein, he explained, he took care to leave the last word to the emperor. That was to tax me with both presumption and stupidity, but it amounted, above all, to admission of singular cowardice on his part. Pedants are always annoyed when others know their narrow specialty as well as they do themselves, and everything now served as pretext for their ugly remarks: because I had added the much neglected works of Hesiod and Ennius to the school curriculum, those routine minds promptly attributed to me the desire to dethrone Homer, and the gentle Virgil as well (whom nevertheless I was always quoting). There was nothing to be done with people of that sort.
Arrian was better than that. I liked to talk with him on all subjects. He had retained a fervent and profoundly serious memory of the Bithynian youth; I was grateful to him for ranking that love, which he had witnessed, with the famous mutual attachments of antiquity; from time to time we spoke of it, but although no lie was uttered I frequently had the impression of a certain falsity in our words; the truth was being covered beneath the sublime. I was almost as much disappointed by Chabrias: his blind devotion to Antinous had been like that of an aged slave for a young master, but, absorbed as he was in the worship of the new god, he seemed to have lost all remembrance of the living boy. My black Euphorion had at least observed our life at closer range. Arrian and Chabrias were dear to me, and I felt myself in no way superior to those two decent men, but sometimes it seemed to me that I was the only person struggling to keep his eyes wholly open.
Yes, Athens remained exquisite, and I did not regret the choice of Greek disciplines for my life. Everything in us which is human, or well-ordered and clearly thought out comes to us from them. But I was beginning to feel that Rome’s seriousness, even if somewhat heavy, and its sense of continuity and love of the concrete, had all been needed for the full realization of what was for Greece still only an admirable idea, a splendid impulse of the soul. Plato had written the Republic and glorified the Just, but we were the ones who were striving, warned by our own errors, to make the State a machine fit to serve man, with the least possible risk of crushing him. The word philanthropy is Greek, but the legist Salvius Julianus and I are the ones who are working to change the wretched condition of the slaves. Rome had taught me prudence and assiduous application to detail, those virtues which temper the boldness of broad general views.
There were times, too, when deep within myself I would come upon those vast, melancholy landscapes of Virgil, and his twilights veiled by tears; if I searched deeper still I would encounter the burning sadness of Spain and its stark violence; I reflected upon the varied blood, Celtic, Iberian, Punic perhaps, which must have infiltrated into the veins of those Roman colonists in Italica; I recalled that my father had been surnamed “the African.” Greece had helped me evaluate those elements in my nature which were not Greek. Likewise for Antinous: I had made him the very image and symbol of that country so passionate for beauty, and he would be, perhaps, the last of its gods; yet the refinements of Persia and the savagery of Thrace had met in Bithynia with the shepherds of ancient Arcadia; that slightly arched nose recalled profiles of Osroes’ pages; the broad visage and high cheekbones were those of the Thracian horsemen who gallop along the shores of the Bosphorus, and who burst forth at night into wild, sad
