Morals are matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern. Any conspicuous license has always struck me as a tawdry display. I forbade use of the baths by both sexes at the same time, a custom which had given rise to almost continual brawling; I returned to the State treasury the colossal service of silver dishes, melted down by my order, which had been wrought for the hoggish appetite of Vitellius. Our early Caesars have acquired an odious reputation for courting inheritances; I made it a rule to refuse both for myself and for the State any legacy to which direct heirs might think themselves entitled. I tried to reduce the exorbitant number of slaves in the imperial household, and especially to curb their arrogance, which leads them to rival the upper classes and sometimes to terrorize them. One day one of my servants had the impertinence to address a senator; I had the man slapped. My hatred of disorder went so far as to decree flogging in the Circus for spendthrifts sunk in debt. To preserve distinction of rank I insisted that the toga and senatorial robe be worn at all times in public, even though these garments are inconvenient, like everything honorific, and I feel no obligation to wear them myself except when in Rome. I made a practice of rising to receive my friends and of standing throughout my audiences, in reaction against the negligence of a sitting or reclining posture. I reduced the insolent crowd of carriages which cumber our streets, for this luxury of speed destroys its own aim; a pedestrian makes more headway than a hundred conveyances jammed end to end along the twists and turns of the Sacred Way. For visits to private homes I took the habit of being carried inside by litter, thus sparing my host the irksome duty of awaiting me without, or of accompanying me back to the street in the heat of the sun, or in the churlish wind of Rome.
I was again among my own people: I have always had some affection for my sister Paulina, and Servianus himself seemed less obnoxious than before. My motherin-law Matidia had come back from the Orient already revealing the first symptoms of a mortal disease; to distract her from her suffering I devised simple dinners, and contrived to inebriate this modest and naďve matron with a harmless drop of wine. The absence of my wife, who had retreated to the country in a fit of ill humor, in no way detracted from these family pleasures. Of all persons she is probably the one whom I have least succeeded in pleasing; to be sure, I have made little effort to do so. I went often to the small house where the widowed empress now gave herself over to the serious delights of meditation and books; there I found unchanged the perfect silence of Plotina. She was withdrawing gently from life; that garden and those light rooms were daily becoming more the enclosure of a Muse, the temple of an empress already among the gods. Her friendships, however, remained exacting; but all things considered, her demands were only reasonable and wise.
I saw my friends again, and felt the subtle pleasure of renewed contact after long absence, of reappraising and of being reappraised. My companion in former pleasures and literary pursuits, Victor Voconius, had died; I made up some sort of funeral oration, provoking smiles in mentioning among the virtues of the deceased a chastity which his poems belied, as did the presence at the funeral of that very Thestylis, him of the honey-colored curls, whom Victor used to call his “fair torment.” My hypocrisy was less blatant than might appear: every pleasure enjoyed with art seemed to me chaste. I rearranged Rome like a house which the master intends to leave safe in his absence; new collaborators proved their worth, and adversaries now reconciled supped together at the Palatine with my supporters in former trials. At my table Neratius Priscus sketched his legislative plans; there the architect Apollodorus explained his designs; Ceionius Commodus, a wealthy patrician of Etruscan origin, descended from an ancient family of almost royal blood, was the friend who helped me work out my next moves in the Senate; he knew men, as well as wines.
His son Lucius Ceionius, barely eighteen at the time, brought the gay grace of a young prince to these banquets, which I had kept austere. He was already addicted to certain delightful follies: a passion for concocting rare dishes for his friends, an exquisite mania for arranging flowers, a wild love of travesty, and also of gambling. Martial was his Virgil; he recited those wanton poems with charming effrontery. I made promises which have cost me some trouble since; this dancing young faun filled six months of my life.
I have so often lost sight of Lucius, then found him anew in the course of the years which followed, that perhaps I retain an image of him which is made up of memories superposed, a composite which corresponds to no one phase of his brief existence. The somewhat arrogant arbiter of Roman fashion, the budding orator timidly dependent upon models of style and seeking my advice on a difficult passage, the anxious young officer twisting his thin beard, the invalid exhausted by coughing whom I watched over to his death, none of these existed till much later on. The picture of Lucius the boy is confined to more secret recesses of my memory: a face, a body, a complexion with the pale flush of alabaster, the exact equivalent of an amorous epigram of Callimachus or of certain perfectly turned, unadorned lines of Strato.
But I was eager to leave Rome. My predecessors, up to this time, had absented themselves chiefly for war; for me the great undertakings, the activities of peace, and my life itself began outside Rome’s bounds.
There was one last service to perform, the duty of giving to Trajan that triumph which had obsessed his dying dreams. Actually a triumph becomes only the dead. When we are living there is always someone to reproach us for our failings; thus once they mocked Caesar for his baldness and his loves. But the dead are entitled to such inauguration into the tomb, to those few hours of noisy pomp before the centuries of glory and the millenniums of oblivion.
Their fortune is safe from all reverses, and even their defeats acquire the splendor of victories. The last triumph of Trajan commemorated not his more or less dubious success over Parthia, but the honorable effort which his whole life had been. We had come together to celebrate the best emperor that Rome had known since the later years of Augustus, the hardest working, the most honest, and the least unjust. His very defects were no more than those distinguishing traits which prove the perfect resemblance between the marble portrait and the face. The emperor’s soul ascended to the heavens, borne up along the still spiral of the Trajan Column. My adoptive father became a god: he had taken his place in that series of soldierly incarnations of the eternal Mars who come from century to century to shake and to change the world. As I stood upon the balcony of the Palatine I weighed the differences between us; I was directing myself toward calmer ends. I began to dream of truly Olympian rule.