He wasted the winter in the siege of Hatra, a virtually impregnable fortress situated in the heart of a desert; it cost our army some thousands of deaths. His stubbornness became more and more a form of personal courage: this ailing man would not let go. I knew from Plotina that Trajan still refused to name his heir, in spite of the admonition of a brief paralytic attack. If this imitator of Alexander were to die, in his turn, of fever or intemperance in some unhealthy corner of Asia this foreign war would be complicated by civil war; a struggle to the death would break out between my supporters and those of Celsus or of Palma. Suddenly reports ceased almost completely; the thin line of communication between the emperor and me was maintained only by the Numidian bands of my worst enemy. It was at this period that I ordered my physician for the first time to mark with red ink on my chest the position of my heart; if it came to the worst, I did not intend to fall, alive, into Lusius Quietus’ hands. The difficult task of pacifying the adjacent islands and provinces was now added to the other duties of my office, but the exhausting work of daytime was nothing in comparison with the length of the restless nights. All the problems of the empire fell upon me at once, but my own plight weighed upon me even more. I desired the supreme power. I desired it that I might put my own plans into effect, try my remedies, and restore peace. I wanted it above all in order to become my full self before I died.
I was in my fortieth year. If I were to die at that time, nothing more of me would survive than a name in a series of high functionaries, and an inscription in Greek in honor of an archon of Athens. Ever since that anxious period, each time that I have witnessed the disappearance of a man just at middle age, whose successes and reverses the public thinks it can judge exactly, I have recalled that at the same age I still figured only in my own eyes, and in those of a few friends, who must sometimes have doubted my abilities as I doubted them myself. I have come to the realization that few men fulfill themselves before death, and I have judged their interrupted work with the more pity. This obsession with the possibility of a life frustrated immobilized my thought at one point, drawing everything to it like an abscess. My hunger for power was like the craving for love, which keeps the lover from eating or sleeping, from thinking, or even from loving so long as certain rites remain unperformed. The most urgent tasks seemed vain when I was not the free master over decisions affecting the future; I needed to be assured of reigning in order to recapture the desire to serve. That palace of Antioch, where I was to live some years later on in a virtual frenzy of delight, was for me then but a prison, and perhaps my death cell. I sent messages to the oracles, to Jupiter Ammon, to Castalia, and to Zeus Dolichenus. I summoned Persian Magi; I went so far as to send to the dungeons of Antioch for a criminal intended for crucifixion, whose throat was slit in my presence by a sorcerer in the hope that the soul, floating for an instant between life and death, would reveal the future. The wretch gained thereby escape from slower death, but the questions put remained unanswered. At night I trailed from one window recess to another, from balcony to balcony through the rooms of that palace where the walls were still cracked from the earthquake, here and there tracing my astrological calculations upon the stones, and questioning the trembling stars. But it is on earth that the signs of the future have to be sought.
At last the emperor raised the siege of Hatra and decided to come back over the Euphrates, which never should have been crossed at all. The heat, which was already torrid, and harassing from the Parthian archers rendered that bitter return more disastrous still. On a burning evening in May I rode out beyond the city gates along the banks of the Orontes to meet the small group so worn by anxiety, fever, and fatigue: the ailing emperor, Attianus, and the women. Trajan determinedly kept to his horse as far as the palace door. He could hardly stand; this man once so full of vitality seemed more changed than others are by the approach of death. Crito and Matidia helped him to climb the steps, induced him to lie down, and thereafter established themselves at his bedside. Attianus and Plotina recounted to me those incidents of the campaign which they had not been able to include in their brief dispatches. One of these episodes so moved me as to become forever a personal remembrance, a symbol of my own. As soon as the weary emperor had reached Charax he had gone to sit upon the shore, looking out over the brackish waters of the Persian Gulf. This was still the period when he felt no doubt of victory, but for the first time the immensity of the world overwhelmed him, and the feeling of age, and those limits which circumscribe us all. Great tears rolled down the cheeks of the man ever deemed incapable of weeping. The supreme commander who had borne the Roman eagles to hitherto unexplored shores knew now that he would never embark upon that sea so long in his thoughts: India, Bactria, the whole of that vague East which had intoxicated him from afar, would continue to be for him only names and dreams. On the very next day bad news forced him to turn back. Each time, in my turn, that destiny has denied me my wish I have remembered those tears shed that evening on a distant shore by an old man who, perhaps for the first time, was confronting his own life face to face.
I went the following morning to the emperor’s room. I felt filial toward him, or rather, fraternal. The man who had prided himself on living and thinking in every respect like any ordinary soldier of his army was ending his life in complete solitude; lying abed he continued to build up grandiose plans in which no one was any longer interested. As always, his brusque habits of speech served to disfigure his thought; forming his words now with utmost difficulty he talked to me of the triumph which they were preparing for him in Rome. He was denying defeat just as he was denying death. Two days later he had a second attack. My anxious consultations were renewed with Attianus, and with Plotina. The foresight of the empress had just effected the elevation of my old friend to the all-powerful position of commander of the Praetorian cohorts, bringing the imperial guard thus under our control. Happily Matidia, who never left the invalid’s chamber, was wholly on our side; in any case, this simple, affectionate woman was like wax in Plotina’s hands. But not one of us dared to remind the emperor that the question of the succession was still pendent. Perhaps like Alexander he had decided not to name his heir himself; perhaps, known to himself alone, he had commitments toward the party of Quietus. More likely, he was refusing to face his end. One sees thus in families many an obstinate old man dying intestate. For them it is less a matter of keeping their treasure to the last (or their empire), from which their numbed fingers are already half detached, than of avoiding too early entry into that posthumous state where one no longer has decisions to take, surprises to give, or threats or promises to make to the living. I pitied him; we were too different for him to find in me what most people who have wielded total authority seek desperately on their deathbeds, a docile successor pledged in advance to the same methods, and even to the same errors. But the world about him was void of statesmen: I was the only one whom he could choose without failing in his obligations as a good executive and great prince; this chief so accustomed to evaluate records of service was almost forced to accept me. That was, moreover, an excellent reason to hate me. Little by little his health was restored just enough to allow him to leave his room. He spoke of undertaking a new campaign; he did not believe in it himself. His physician Crito, who feared for him the effects of midsummer heat, succeeded at last in persuading him to re-embark for Rome. The evening before his departure he had me summoned aboard the ship which was to take him back to Italy and named me commander-in-chief in his place. He committed himself that far. But the essential was not done.