The man who restlessly paced the vast halls of that palace built long ago by the Seleucids, and which I had myself embellished (what a spiritless task that was!) with eulogistic inscriptions in his honor and with panoplies of the Dacian war, was no longer the man who had welcomed me to the camp in Cologne nearly twenty years earlier. Even his virtues had aged. His somewhat heavy joviality, which formerly disguised genuine kindness, was now no more than vulgar habit; his firmness had changed to obstinacy; his aptitude for the immediate and the practical had led to a total refusal to think. The tender respect which he felt for the empress and the grumbling affection manifested for his niece Matidia had changed into a senile dependence upon these women, whose counsels, nevertheless, he resisted more and more. His attacks of liver disorder disturbed his physician Crito, though he himself took no thought for it. His pleasures had always lacked art, and they fell still lower as he grew older. It was of little importance that the emperor, when his day’s work was over, chose to abandon himself to barrack room debaucheries in company with youths whom he found agreeable, or handsome. It was, on the contrary, rather serious that he could hardly stand wine, and took too much of it; and that his small court of increasingly mediocre subalterns, selected and manipulated by freedmen of dubious character, was so placed as to be present at all my conversations with him and could report them to my adversaries. In daytime I saw him only at staff meetings, which were wholly given over to details of planning, and where the moment never came to express an independent opinion. At all other times he avoided private talks. Wine provided this man of little subtlety with a veritable arsenal of clumsy ruses. His susceptibilities of other years had indeed given way: he insisted that I join him in his pleasures; the noise, the laughter, the feeblest jokes of the young men were always welcomed as so many ways of signifying to me that this was no time for serious business. He waited for the moment when one more glass would deprive me of my reason. Everything reeled about me in this hall where barbaric trophies of wild ox heads seemed to laugh in my face. The wine jars followed in steady succession; a vinous song would spurt forth here and there, or the insolent, beguiling laugh of a page; the emperor, resting an ever more trembling hand upon the table, immured in a drunkenness possibly half feigned, lost far away upon the roads of Asia, sank heavily into his dreams… . Unfortunately these dreams had beauty. They were the same as those which had formerly made me think of giving up everything for the sake of following northern routes beyond the Caucasus toward Asia. This fascination, to which the elderly emperor was yielding as if entranced, had lured Alexander before him. That prince had almost made a reality of these same dreams, and had died because of them at thirty. But the gravest danger in these mighty projects lay still more in their apparent soundness; as always, practical reasons abounded for justification of the absurd and for being carried away by the impossible. The problem of the Orient had preoccupied us for centuries; it seemed natural to rid ourselves of it once and for all. Our exchanges of wares with India and the mysterious Land of Silks depended entirely upon Jewish merchants and Arabian exporters who held the franchise for Parthian roads and ports. Once the vast and loosely joined empire of the Arsacid horsemen had been reduced to nothingness we should touch directly upon those rich extremities of the world; Asia once unified would become but a province more for Rome. The port of Alexandria-in-Egypt was the only one of our outlets toward India which did not depend upon Parthian good will; there, too, we were continually confronted with the troublesome demands and revolts of the Jewish communities. Success on the part of Trajan’s expedition would have allowed us to disregard that untrustworthy city. But such array of reasoning had never persuaded me. Sound commercial treaties would have pleased me more, and I could already foresee the possibility of reducing the role of Alexandria by creating a second Greek metropolis near the Red Sea, as I did later on in founding Antinoöpolis. I was beginning to know this complicated world of Asia. The simple plan of total extermination which had worked for Dacia was not the right thing in this country of much more abundant and settled population, upon which, besides, the wealth of the world depended. Beyond the Euphrates began for us the land of mirage and danger, the sands where one helplessly sank, and the roads which ended in nothing. The slightest reversal would have resulted in a jolt to our prestige giving rise to all kinds of catastrophe; the problem was not only to conquer but to conquer again and again, perpetually; our forces would be drained off in the attempt. We had tried it already: I thought with horror of the head of Crassus, tossed from hand to hand like a ball in the course of a performance of Euripides’ Bacchantes which a barbarian king with a smattering of Greek learning had presented on the afternoon of a victory over Rome. Trajan thought to avenge this ancient defeat; I hoped chiefly to keep it from happening again. I could foretell the future with some accuracy, a thing quite possible, after all, when one is informed on a fair number of the elements which make up the present: a few meaningless victories would draw our armies too far on, leaving other frontiers perilously exposed; the dying emperor would cover himself with glory, and we who must go on living would have to resolve all the problems and remedy all the evils.
Caesar was right to prefer the first place in a village to the second in Rome. Not by ambition, nor by vain glory, but because a man in second place has only the choice between the dangers of obedience and those of revolt, or those still more serious dangers of compromise. I was not even second in Rome. The emperor, though about to set forth upon a hazardous expedition, had not yet designated his successor; each step taken to advance his projects offered some opportunity to the chiefs of the general staff. This man, though almost naďve, seemed to me now more complicated than myself. Only his rough manner reassured me; in his gruffness he treated me like a son. At other moments I expected to be supplanted by Palma or cut off by Quietus as soon as my services could be dispensed with. I had no real power: I did not even manage to obtain an audience for the influential members of the Sanhedrin of Antioch, who were as fearful as we of the surprise moves of the Jewish agitators, and who would have enlightened Trajan as to the contrivings of their fellow Jews. My friend Latinius Alexander, who was descended from one of the ancient royal families of Asia Minor, and whose name and wealth had great weight, was heeded no more than I. Pliny, sent out four years before to Bithynia, died there without having had time to inform the emperor of the exact state of public opinion and finances, even supposing that his incurable optimism would have allowed him to do so. The secret reports of the Lycian merchant Opramoas, who knew Asian affairs thoroughly, were derided by Palma. The freedmen took advantage of the morning headaches which followed the drunken evenings to keep me out of the imperial chamber; the emperor’s orderly, a man named Phoedimus, an honest but stupid fellow, and set against me, twice refused me entry. On the contrary, my enemy Celsus, of consular rank, locked himself in one evening with Trajan for a conference which lasted for hours, and at the end of which I thought myself lost. I sought allies where I could; for a price, in gold, I corrupted former slaves whom otherwise I would willingly have sent to the galleys; I caressed more than one curly-headed darling. Nerva’s diamond had lost its fire.