The old man asked leave to sit down, and rested his leg, swathed in flannel, upon a stool. While speaking I arranged the coverlet over his ailing foot. He let me run on, smiling meanwhile like a grammarian who listens to his pupil making his way through a difficult recitation. When I had finished, he asked me calmly what I had planned to do with the enemies of the regime. It could be proved, if need were, that these four men had plotted my death; it was to their interest, in any case, to do so. Every transition from one reign to another involved its operations of mopping up; he had taken this task upon himself in order to leave my hands clean. If public opinion demanded a victim, nothing was simpler than to deprive him of his post of Praetorian prefect. He had envisaged such a measure; he was advising me to take it. And if more were needed to conciliate the Senate, he would approve my going as far as relegation to the provinces, or exile.
Attianus had been the guardian from whom money could be wheedled, the counselor of my difficult days, the faithful agent; but this was the first time that I had ever looked attentively at that face with its carefully shaven jowls, at those crippled hands tranquilly clasped over the handle of his ebony cane. I knew well enough the different elements of his life as a prosperous citizen: his wife, whom he loved, and whose health was frail; his married daughters and their children, for whom he was modest but tenacious in his ambitions, as he had been for himself; his love of choice dishes; his decided taste for Greek cameos and for young dancing girls. He had given me precedence over all these things: for thirty years his first care had been to protect me, and next to serve me. To me, who had not yet given first place to anything except to ideas or projects, or at the most to a future image of myself, this simple devotion of man to man seemed prodigious and unfathomable. No one is worthy of it, and I am still unable to account for it. I followed his counseclass="underline" he lost his post. His faint smile showed me that he expected to be taken at his word. He knew well that no untimely solicitude toward an old friend would ever keep me from adopting the more prudent course; this subtle politician would not have wished me otherwise. Let us not exaggerate the extent of his disgrace: after some months of eclipse, I succeeded in having him admitted to the Senate. It was the greatest honor that I could offer to this man of equestrian rank. He lived to enjoy the easy old age of a wealthy Roman knight, much sought after for his perfect knowledge of families and public affairs; I have often been his guest at his villa in the Alban Hills. Nevertheless, like Alexander on the eve of a battle, I had made a sacrifice to Fear before entering into Rome: I sometimes count Attianus among my human victims.
Attianus had been right in his conjectures: the virgin gold of respect would be too soft without some alloy of fear. The murder of four men of consular rank was received as was the story of the forged wilclass="underline" the honest and pure of heart refused to believe that I was implicated; the cynics supposed the worst, but admired me only the more. As soon as it was known that my resentment had suddenly come to an end Rome grew calm; each person’s joy in his own security caused the dead to be promptly forgotten. My clemency was matter for astonishment because it was deemed deliberate and voluntary, chosen each morning in preference to a violence which would have been equally natural to me; my simplicity was praised because it was thought that calculation figured therein. Trajan had had most of the virtues of the average man, but my qualities were more unexpected; one step further and they would have been regarded as a refinement of vice itself. I was the same man as before, but what had previously been despised now passed for sublime: my extreme courtesy, considered by the unsubtle a form of weakness, or even of cowardice, seemed now the smooth and polished sheath of force. They extolled my patience with petitioners, my frequent visits to the sick in the military hospitals, and my friendly familiarity with the discharged veterans. Nothing in all that differed from the manner in which I had treated my servants and tenant farmers my whole life long. Each of us has more virtues than he is credited with, but success alone brings them to view, perhaps because then we may be expected to cease practicing them. Human beings betray their worst failings when they marvel to find that a world ruler is neither foolishly indolent, presumptuous, nor cruel.
I had refused all titles. In the first month of my reign the Senate had adorned me, before I could know of it, with that long series of honorary appellations which is draped like a fringed shawl round the necks of certain emperors. Dacicus, Parthicus, Germanicus: Trajan had loved these brave blasts of martial music, like the cymbals and drums of the Parthian regiments; what had roused echoes and responses in him only irritated or bewildered me. I got rid of all that, and also postponed, for the time, the admirable title of Father of the Country; Augustus accepted that honor only late in life, and I esteemed myself not yet worthy. It was the same for a triumph; it would have been ridiculous to consent to one for a war in which my sole merit had been to force a conclusion. Those who saw modesty in these refusals were as much mistaken as they who reproached me for pride. My motives related less to the effect produced on others than to advantages for myself. I desired that my prestige should be my own, inseparable from my person, and directly measurable in terms of mental agility, strength and achievements. Titles, if they were to come, would come later on; but they would be other titles, evidences of more secret victories to which I dared not yet lay claim. For the moment I had enough to do to become, or merely to be, Hadrian to the utmost.
They accuse me of caring little for Rome. It had beauty, though, during those two years when the State and I were feeling our way with each other, the city of narrow streets, crowded Forums, and ancient, flesh-colored brick. Rome revisited, after the Orient and Greece, was clothed with a strangeness which a Roman born and bred wholly in the City would not find there. I accustomed myself once more to its damp and soot-grimed winters; to the African heat of its summers, tempered by the refreshing cascades of Tibur and by the Alban lakes; to its almost rustic population, bound with provincial attachment to the Seven Hills, but gradually exposed to the influx of all races of the world, driven thither by ambition, enticements to gain, and
[Hadrian 104a.jpg] Young Hadrian (bronze) London, British Museum (Found in the River Thames)
[Hadrian 104bc.jpg] Ruins of Hadrians Wall, Northumberland, England
[Hadrian 104d.jpg] Hand from Bronze Statue of Hadrian London, British Museum (Found in the River Thames)
the hazards of conquest and servitude, the tattooed black, the hairy German, the slender Greek, and the heavy Oriental. I freed myself of certain fastidious restraints: I no longer avoided the public baths at popular hours; I learned to endure the Games, where hitherto I had seen only brutal and stupid waste. My opinion had not changed; I detested these massacres where the beast had not one chance, but little by little I came to feel their ritual value, their effect of tragic purification upon the ignorant multitude. I wanted my festivities to equal those of Trajan in splendor, though with more art and decorum. I forced myself to derive pleasure from the perfect fencing of the gladiators, but only on the condition that no one should be compelled to practice this profession against his will. In the Circus I learned to parley with the crowd from the height of the tribune, speaking through heralds, and not to impose silence upon the throngs save with deference (which they repaid me hundred-fold); likewise never to accord them anything but what they had reasonably the right to expect, nor to refuse anything without explaining my refusal. I did not take my books with me, as you do, into the imperial loge; it is insulting to others to seem to disdain their joys. If the spectacle revolted me, the effort to bear it out was for me a more valuable exercise than the study of Epictetus.