have, obliging myself only to possess it totally, and to taste the experience to the full. Thus the most dreary tasks were accomplished with ease as long as I was willing to give myself to them. Whenever an object repelled me, I made it a subject of study, ingeniously compelling myself to extract from it a motive for enjoyment. If faced with something unforeseen or near cause for despair, like an ambush or a storm at sea, after all measures for the safety of others had been taken, I strove to welcome this hazard, to rejoice in whatever it brought me of the new and unexpected, and thus without shock the ambush or the tempest was incorporated into my plans, or my thoughts. Even in the throes of my worst disaster, I have seen a moment when sheer exhaustion reduced some part of the horror of the experience, and when I made the defeat a thing of my own in being willing to accept it. If ever I am to undergo torture (and illness will doubtless see to that) I cannot be sure of maintaining the impassiveness of a Thrasea, but I shall at least have the resource of resigning myself to my cries. And it is in such a way, with a mixture of reserve and of daring, of submission and revolt carefully concerted, of extreme demand and prudent concession, that I have finally learned to accept myself.
Had it been too greatly prolonged, this life in Rome would undoubtedly have embittered or corrupted me, or else would have worn me out. My return to the army saved me. Army life has its compromises too, but they are simpler. Departure this time meant travel, and I set out with exultation. I had been advanced to the rank of tribune in the Second Legion Adjutrix, and passed some months of a rainy autumn on the banks of the Upper Danube with no other companion than a newly published volume of Plutarch. In November I was transferred to the Fifth Legion Macedonica, stationed at that time (as it still is) at the mouth of the same river, on the frontiers of Lower Moesia. Snow blocked the roads and kept me from traveling by land. I embarked at Pola, but had barely time on the way to revisit Athens, where later I was so long to reside. News of the assassination of Domitian, announced a few days after my arrival in camp, surprised no one, and was cause for general rejoicing. Trajan was promptly adopted by Nerva; the advanced age of the new ruler made actual succession a matter of months at the most. The policy of conquest on which it was known that my cousin proposed to launch Rome, the regrouping of troops which began, and the progressive tightening of discipline all served to keep the army in a state of excited expectancy. Those Danubian legions functioned with the precision of newly greased military machines; they bore no resemblance to the sleepy garrisons which I had known in Spain. Still more important, the army’s attention had ceased to center upon palace quarrels and was turned instead to the empire’s external affairs; our troops no longer behaved like a band of lictors ready to acclaim or to murder no matter whom.
The most intelligent among the officers attempted to trace some general plan in these reorganizations in which they took part, hoping to foresee the future, and not their own prospects alone. There were, however, a goodly number of absurdities exchanged by way of comment upon these initial events, and strategic planning as idle as it was ill-founded smeared the surface of the tables at each evening meal. For these professionals, with their firm belief in the beneficence of our authority and in the mission of Rome to govern the world, Roman patriotism assumed brutal forms to which I was not yet accustomed. On the frontiers, just where, for the moment at least, address was needed to conciliate certain of the nomad chieftains, the soldier completely eclipsed the statesman; exaction of labor and requisitions in kind gave rise to abuses too generally condoned. Thanks to incessant divisions among the barbarians the situation to the northeast was about as favorable as it ever could be; I doubt if even the wars which followed have improved matters there to any extent. Frontier incidents cost us few losses, and these were disquieting only because they were continuous. Let us admit that this perpetual vigilance was useful in any case for whetting the military spirit. All the same, I was convinced that a lesser expenditure, coupled with somewhat greater mental effort on our part, would have sufficed to subdue some chieftains and to win others to us. I decided to devote myself especially to this latter task, which everyone else was neglecting. I was drawn the more to this aim by my love of things foreign; I liked to deal with the barbarians. This great country lying between the mouths of the Danube and the Borysthenes, a triangular area of which I have covered at least two sides, is one of the most remarkable regions of the world, at least for us who are born on the shores of the Interior Sea and are used to the clear, dry line of southern landscape, with its hills and promontories. At times there I worshipped the goddess Earth in the way that we here worship the goddess Rome; I am speaking not so much of Ceres as of a more ancient divinity, anterior even to the invention of the harvest. Our Greek and Latin lands, everywhere supported by bone-structure of rock, have the trim beauty of a male body; the heavy abundance of the Scythian earth was that of a reclining woman. The plain ended only where the sky began. My wonder never ceased in presence of the rivers: that vast empty land was but a slope and a bed for their waters. Our rivers are short; we never feel far from their sources; but the enormous flow which ended there in confused estuaries swept with it the mud of an unknown continent and the ice of uninhabitable regions. The cold of Spain’s high plateaus is second to none, but this was the first time that I found myself face to face with true winter, which visits our countries but briefly. There it sets in for a long period of months; farther north it must be unchanging, without beginning and without end. The evening of my arrival in camp the Danube was one immense roadway of ice, red at first and then blue, furrowed by the inner working of currents with tracks as deep as those of chariots. We made use of furs to protect ourselves from the cold. The presence of that enemy, so impersonal as to be almost abstract, produced an indescribable exaltation, and a feeling of energy accrued. One fought to conserve body heat as elsewhere one fights to keep one’s courage. There were days when the snow effaced the few differences in level on the steppes; we galloped in a world of pure space and pure atoms. The frozen coating gave transparency to the most ordinary things, and the softest objects took on a celestial rigidity. Each broken reed was a flute of crystal. Assar, my Caucasian guide, chopped through the ice to water our horses at dusk. These animals were, by the way, one of our most useful points of contact with the barbarians: a kind of friendship grew up over the trading and endless bargaining, and out of the respect felt on each side for some act of prowess in horsemanship. At night the campfires lit up the extraordinary leaping of the slender-waisted dancers, and their extravagant bracelets of gold.
Many a time in spring, when the melting snows let me venture farther into the interior, I would turn my back on the southern horizon, which enclosed the seas and islands that we know, and on the western horizon likewise, where at some point the sun was setting on Rome, and would dream of pushing still farther into the steppes or beyond the ramparts of the Caucasus, toward the north or to uttermost Asia. What climates, what fauna, what races of men should I have discovered, what empires ignorant of us as we are of them, or knowing us at most through some few wares transmitted by a long succession of merchants, and as rare for them as the pepper of India or the amber of Baltic regions is for us? At Odessos a trader returning from a voyage of several years’ time made me a present of a green stone, of translucent substance held sacred, it seems, in an immense kingdom of which he had at least skirted the edges, but where he had noted neither customs nor gods, grossly centered upon his profit as he was. This exotic gem was to me like a stone fallen from the heavens, a meteor from another world. We know but little as yet of the configuration of the earth, though I fail to understand resignation to such ignorance. I envy those who will succeed in circling the two hundred and fifty thousand Greek stadia so ably calculated by Eratosthenes, the round of which would bring us back to our point of departure. In fancy I took the simple decision of going on, this time on the mere trail to which our roads had now given way. I played with the idea… . To be alone, without possessions, without renown, with none of the advantages of our own culture, to expose oneself among new men and amid fresh hazards… . Needless to say it was only a dream, and the briefest dream of all. This liberty that I was inventing ceased to exist upon closer view; I should quickly have rebuilt for myself everything that I had renounced. Furthermore, wherever I went I should only have been a Roman away from Rome. A kind of umbilical cord attached me to the City. Perhaps at that time, in my rank of tribune, I felt still more closely bound to the empire than later as emperor, for the same reason that the thumb joint is less free than the brain. Nevertheless I did have that outlandish dream, at which our ancestors, soberly confined within their Latian fields, would have shuddered; to have harbored the thought, even for a moment, makes me forever different from them.
Trajan was in command of the troops in Lower Germany; the army of the Danube sent me there to convey its felicitations to him as the new heir to the empire. I was three days’ march from Cologne, in mid-Gaul, when at the evening halt the death of Nerva was announced. I was tempted to push on ahead of the imperial post, and to be the first to bring to my cousin the news of his accession. I set off at a gallop and continued without stop, except at Treves where my brother-in-law Servianus resided in his capacity as governor. We supped together. The feeble head of Servianus was full of imperial vapors. This tortuous man, who sought to harm me or at least to prevent me from pleasing, thought to forestall me by sending his own courier to Trajan. Two hours later I was attacked at the ford of a river; the assailants wounded my orderly and killed our horses. We managed, however, to lay hold on one of the attacking party, a former slave of my brother-in-law, who told the whole story. Servianus ought to have realized that a resolute man is not so easily turned from his course, at least not by any means short of murder; but
