Licinius Sura died at about that time. He was the most liberal of the emperor’s private counselors, so his death was a battle lost for our side. He had always been like a father in his solicitude for me; for some years illness had left him too little strength to fulfill any of his personal ambitions, but he had always enough energy to aid a man whose views appeared to him sane. The conquest of Arabia had been undertaken against his advice; he alone, had he lived, would have been able to save the State the gigantic strain and expense of the Parthian campaign. Ridden by fever, he employed his hours of insomnia in discussing with me plans for reform; they exhausted him, but their success was more important to him than a few more hours of life. At his bedside I lived in advance, and to the last administrative detail, certain of the future phases of my reign. This dying man spared the emperor in his criticisms, but he knew that he was carrying with him to the tomb what reason was left in the regime. Had he lived two or three years longer, I could perhaps have avoided some tortuous devices which marked my accession to power; he would have succeeded in persuading the emperor to adopt me sooner, and openly. But even so the last words of that statesman in bequeathing his task to me were one part of my imperial investiture.
If the group of my followers was increasing, so was that of my enemies. The most dangerous of my adversaries was Lusius Quietus, a Roman with some Arab blood, whose Numidian squadrons had played an important part in the second Dacian campaign, and who was pressing fiercely for the Asiatic war. I detested everything about him, his barbarous luxury, the pretentious swirl of his white headgear bound with cord of gold, his false, arrogant eyes, and his unbelievable cruelty toward the conquered and to those who had offered their submission. The leaders of the military party were destroying themselves in internal strife, but those who remained were thereby only the more entrenched in power, and I was only the more exposed to the mistrust of Palma or to the hatred of Celsus. My own position, happily, was almost impregnable. The civil administration was coming increasingly into my hands, since the emperor now occupied himself exclusively with his plans for war. My friends, who would have been the only persons capable of supplanting me because of their ability or their knowledge of affairs, with noble self-effacement yielded me first place. Neratius Priscus, whom the emperor trusted, daily confined his activities more deliberately within his legal specialty. Attianus organized his life with a view to serving me, and I had the prudent approbation of Plotina. A year before the war I was promoted to the governorship of Syria; later was added the post of military legate. Ordered to organize and supervise our bases, I became one of the levers of command in an undertaking which I knew to be out of all reason. I hesitated for some time, and then accepted. To refuse would have been tantamount to closing the roads to power at a moment when power was more vital to me than ever. It would also have deprived me of the one chance to act as moderator.
During these few years which preceded the great crisis for the State, I had taken a decision which left me forever exposed to the accusation of frivolity by my enemies, and which was in part calculated for that effect, to parry thus all chance of attack. I had gone to spend some months in Greece. Political considerations were no part of this voyage, in appearance at least. It was an excursion for pleasure and for study: I brought back some graven cups, and some books which I shared with Plotina. Of all my official honors, it was there that I received the one accepted with true joy: I was named archon of Athens. I allowed myself some months of effortless work and delights, walks in spring on hillsides strewn with anemones, friendly contact with bare marble. At Chaeronea, where I went to muse upon the heroic friendships of the Sacred Battalion, I spent two days as the guest of Plutarch. I had had my own Sacred Battalion, but, as is often the case with me, my life was less moving to me than history itself. I had some hunting in Arcadia, and went to Delphi to pray. At Sparta, on the edge of the Eurotas, some shepherds taught me an ancient air on the flute, a strange birdsong. Near Megara there was a peasant wedding which lasted the night long; my companions and I joined in the dances, as we should not have dared do in custom-bound Rome.
The traces of Roman crimes were visible on all sides: the walls of Corinth, left in ruins by Mummius, and the spaces within the sanctuaries left empty by Nero’s organized theft of statues during his scandalous voyage. Impoverished Greece lived on in an atmosphere of pensive grace, with a kind of lucid subtlety and sober delight. Nothing had changed since the period when the pupil of the rhetorician Isaeus had breathed in for the first time that odor of warm honey, salt, and resin; nothing, in short, had changed for centuries. The sands of the palaestrae were as golden as before; Phidias and Socrates no longer frequented them, but the young men who exercised there still resembled the exquisite Charmides. It seemed to me sometimes that the Greek spirit had not carried the premises of its own genius through to their ultimate conclusions: the harvests were still to be reaped; the grain ripened in the sun and already cut was but little in comparison with the Eleusinian promise of riches hidden in that fair soil. Even among my savage enemies, the Sarmatians, I had found vases of perfect form and a mirror decorated with Apollo’s image, gleams from Greece like a pale sun on snow. I could see possibilities of Hellenizing the barbarians and Atticizing Rome, thus imposing upon the world by degrees the only culture which has once for all separated itself from the monstrous, the shapeless, and the inert, the only one to have invented a definition of method, a system of politics, and a theory of beauty. The light disdain of the Greeks, which I have never ceased to feel under their most ardent homage, did not offend me; I found it natural. Whatever virtues may have distinguished me from them, I knew that I should always be less subtle than an Aegean sailor, less wise than an herb vendor of the Agora. I accepted without irritation the slightly haughty condescension of that proud race, according to an entire nation the privileges which I have always so readily conceded to those I loved. But to give the Greeks time to continue and perfect their work some centuries of peace were needed, with those calm leisures and discreet liberties which peace allows. Greece was depending upon us to be her protector, since after all we say that we are her master. I promised myself to stand watch over the defenseless god.
I had held my post as governor of Syria for a year when Trajan joined me in Antioch. He came to inspect the final preparations for the Armenian expedition, which was preliminary in his thoughts to the attack upon the Parthians. Plotina accompanied him as always, and his niece Matidia, my accommodating motherin-law, who for some years had gone with him in camp as the head of his household. Celsus, Palma, and Nigrinus, my old enemies, still sat in the Council and dominated the general staff. All these people packed themselves into the palace while awaiting the opening of the campaign. Court intrigues flourished as never before. Everyone was laying his bets in expectation of the first throws of the dice of war.
The army moved off almost immediately in a northerly direction. With it departed the vast swarm of high officials, office-seekers, and hangers-on. The emperor and his suite paused for a few days in Commagene for festivals which were already triumphal; the lesser kings of the Orient, gathered at Satala, outdid each other in protestations of loyalty upon which, had I been in Trajan’s place, I should have counted little for the future. Lusius Quietus, my dangerous rival, placed in charge of the advance posts, took possession of the shores of Lake Van in the course of a sweeping but absurdly easy conquest; the northern part of Mesopotamia, vacated by the Parthians, was annexed without difficulty; Abgar, king of Osroëne, surrendered in Edessa. The emperor came back to Antioch to take up his winter quarters, postponing till spring the invasion of the Parthian Empire itself, but already determined to accept no overture for peace. Everything had gone according to his plans. The joy of plunging into this adventure, so long delayed, restored a kind of youth to this man of sixty-four. My views of the outcome remained somber. The Jewish and the Arabian elements were more and more hostile to the war; the great provincial landowners were angered at having to defray costs of troops passing through; the cities objected strenuously to the imposition of new taxes. Just after the emperor’s return, a first catastrophe occurred which served as forerunner to all the rest: in the middle of a December night an earthquake laid a fourth of the city of Antioch in ruins within a few seconds. Trajan was bruised by a falling beam, but heroically went on tending the wounded; his immediate following numbered several dead. The Syrian mobs straightway sought to place the blame for the disaster on someone, and the emperor, for once putting aside his principles of tolerance, committed the error of allowing a group of Christians to be massacred. I have little enough sympathy for that sect myself, but the spectacle of old men flogged and children tortured all contributed to the general agitation of spirit and rendered that sinister winter more odious still. There was no money for prompt repair of the effects of the quake; thousands of shelterless people camped at night in the squares. My rounds of inspection revealed to me the existence of a hidden discontent and a secret hatred which the dignitaries who thronged the palace did not even suspect. In the midst of the ruins the emperor was pursuing his preparations for the next campaign: an entire forest was used up in the construction of movable bridges and rafts for the crossing of the Tigris. He had received with joy a whole series of new titles conferred upon him by the Senate, and was impatient to finish with the Orient in order to return to his triumph in Rome. The slightest delay would loose furies which shook him like an access of fever.