before such an act as that his cowardice recoiled. I had to cover some three miles on foot before coming upon a peasant who sold me his horse. I reached Cologne that very night, beating my brother-in-law’s courier by only a few lengths. This kind of adventure met with success; I was the better received for it by the army. The emperor retained me there with him as tribune in the Second Legion Fidelis.
Trajan had taken the news of his accession with admirable composure. He had long expected it, and it left his plans unchanged. He remained what he always had been, and what he was to be up to his death, a commander-in- chief; but his virtue was to have acquired, by means of his wholly military conception of discipline, an idea of order in government. Around that idea everything else was organized, in the beginning at least, even his plans for war and his designs for conquest. A soldierly emperor, but not at all a military adventurer. He altered nothing in his way of living; his modesty left room neither for affectation nor for arrogance. While the army was rejoicing he accepted his new responsibilities as a part of the day’s ordinary work, and very simply made evident his contentment to his intimates.
He had but little confidence in me. We were cousins, but he was twenty-four years my senior, and had been my co-guardian since my father’s death. He fulfilled his family obligations with provincial seriousness, and was ready to do the impossible to advance me, if I proved worthy; if incompetent, to treat me with more severity than anyone else. He had taken my youthful follies with an indignation which was not wholly unjustified, but which is seldom encountered outside the bosom of the family; my debts, in any case, shocked him more than my misdoings. Other things in me disturbed him. Though his learning was limited, he had a touching respect for philosophers and scholars; but it is one thing to admire the great philosophers from afar, and quite another to have at one’s side a young lieutenant who dabbles in letters. Not knowing where my principles lay, or my safeguards or restraints, he supposed me to have none, and to be without resource against my own nature. I had, at least, never committed the error of neglecting my duties. My reputation as an officer reassured him, but in his eyes I was no more than a young and promising tribune, who would bear close watching.
An incident of our personal lives soon threatened to be my undoing. A handsome face was my conqueror. I became passionately attached to a youth whom the emperor also fancied. The adventure was dangerous, and was relished as such. A certain secretary Gallus, who had long taken it upon himself to report each of my debts to Trajan, denounced us to the emperor. His irritation knew no bounds; things were bad enough for a while. Some friends, Acilius Attianus among others, did their best to keep him from settling into a permanent and rather ridiculous resentment. He ended by yielding to their entreaties, and the reconciliation, though at first barely sincere on either side, was more humiliating for me than the scenes of anger had been. I admit to having harbored for this Gallus a hatred beyond compare. Many years later he was found guilty of embezzlement of the public funds, and it was with utter satisfaction that I saw myself avenged.
The first expedition against the Dacians got under way the following year. By preference and by political conviction I have always been opposed to a policy based on war, but I should have been either more or less than a man if these great enterprises of Trajan had not intoxicated me. Viewed as a whole, and from afar, those years of war count among my happy years. They were hard at the start, or seemed to me so. At first I held only secondary posts, since Trajan’s good will was not yet fully won. But I knew the country, and knew that I was useful. Although barely aware of what was growing within me, winter by winter, encampment after encampment, battle after battle, I began to feel objections to the emperor’s policy, objections which at this period it was not my duty, or even my right, to voice; furthermore, nobody would have listened to me. Placed more or less to one side, in fifth or tenth rank, I knew my troops the better for my position; I shared more of their life. I still retained a certain liberty of action, or rather a certain detachment toward action itself, which cannot readily be indulged in once one has attained power, and has passed the age of thirty. There were also advantages special to me: my liking for this harsh land, and my passion for all voluntary (though of course intermittent) forms of privation and discipline. I was perhaps the only one of the young officers who did not regret Rome. The longer the campaign
[Hadrian 52a.jpg] Trajan at Middle Age, Rome, Capitoline Museum
[Hadrian 52bc.jpg] Roman Troops Crossing the Danube
Care of the Wounded, Dacian Wars (Rome, Reliefs on Trajan?s Column)
[Hadrian 52d.jpg] Sabina Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Museum
years extended into the mud and the snow the more they brought forth my resources.
There I lived through an entire epoch of extraordinary exaltation, due in part to the influence of a small group of lieutenants around me who had brought back strange gods from the garrisons deep in Asia. The cult of Mithra, less widespread then than it has become since our expedition in Parthia, won me over temporarily by the rigors of its stark asceticism, which drew taut the bowstring of the will, and by its obsession with death, blood, and iron, which elevated the routine harshness of our military lives to the level of a symbol of universal struggle. Nothing could have been more in contradiction to the views which I was beginning to hold about war, but those barbarous rites creating bonds of life and death between the affiliates all served to flatter the most secret aspirations of a young man impatient of the present, uncertain as to the future, and thereby open to the gods. My initiation took place in a turret constructed of wood and reeds on the banks of the Danube, with Marcius Turbo, my fellow officer, for sponsor. I remember that the weight of the bull in its death throes nearly brought down the latticed floor beneath which I lay to receive the bloody aspersion. In recent years I have reflected upon the dangers which this sort of near-secret society might entail for the State under a weak ruler, and I have finally restricted them, but I admit that in presence of an enemy they give their followers a strength which is almost godlike. Each of us believed that he was escaping from the narrow limits of his human state, feeling himself to be at the same time himself and his own adversary, at one with the god who seems to be both the animal victim and the human slayer. Such fantastic dreams, which sometimes terrify me now, were not so very different from the theories of Heraclitus upon the identity of the mark and the bow. They helped me in those days to endure life. Victory and defeat were inextricably mixed like rays of the same sun. These Dacian footsoldiers whom I crushed under my horse’s hoofs, those Sarmatian cavalrymen overthrown in the close combat of later years when our rearing horses tore at each other’s chests, were all struck down the more easily if I identified myself with them. Had my body been abandoned on the battlefield, stripped of its attire, it would not have differed greatly from theirs. The shock of the final sword thrust would have been the same. I am confessing to you here some extraordinary thoughts, among the most secret of my life, and a strange intoxication which I have never again experienced under that same form.
A certain number of deeds of daring, which would have passed unnoticed, perhaps, if performed by a simple soldier, won me a reputation in Rome and a sort of renown in the army. But most of my so-called acts of prowess were little more than idle bravado; I see now with some shame that, mingled with that almost sacred exaltation of which I was just speaking, there was still my ignoble desire to please at any price, and to draw attention upon myself. It was thus that one autumn day when the Danube was swollen by floods I crossed the river on horseback, wearing the full heavy equipment of our Batavian auxiliaries. For this feat of arms, if it was a feat, my horse deserved credit more than I. But that period of heroic foolhardiness taught me to distinguish between the different aspects of courage. The kind of courage which I should like always to possess would be cool and detached, free from all physical excitement and impassive as the calm of a god. I do not flatter myself that I have ever attained it. The semblance of such courage which I later employed was, in my worst days, only a cynical recklessness toward life; in my best days it was only a sense of duty to which I clung. When confronted with the danger itself, however, that cynicism or that sense of duty quickly gave place to a mad intrepidity, a kind of strange orgasm of a man mated with his destiny. At the age which I then was this drunken courage persisted without cessation. A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists. If death does take him, he is probably unaware of the fact; it amounts to no more for him than a shock or a spasm. I smile with some bitterness at the realization that now out of any two thoughts I devote one to my own death, as if so much ceremony were needed to decide this worn body for the inevitable. At that time, on the contrary, a young man who would have lost much in not living a few years more was daily risking his future with complete unconcern.
It would be easy to construe what I have just told as the story of a too scholarly soldier who wishes to be forgiven his love for books. But such simplified perspectives are false. Different persons ruled in me in turn, though no one of them for long; each fallen tyrant was quick to regain power. Thus have I played host successively to the meticulous officer, fanatic in discipline, but gaily sharing with his men the privations of war; to the melancholy dreamer intent on the gods; the lover ready to risk all for a moment’s rapture; the haughty young lieutenant retiring to his tent to study his maps by lamplight, making clear to his friends his disdain for the way the world goes; and
