A few men before me had traveled over the earth: Pythagoras, Plato, some dozen philosophers in all, and a fair number of adventurers. Now for the first time the traveller was also the master, free both to see and to reform, or to create anew. That chance fell to me; I reflected that possibly centuries would pass before there might be another such happy accord between an office, a temperament, and a world. And it was then that I felt the advantage of being a newcomer, a man alone, scarcely bound even by marriage, childless and practically without ancestors, a Ulysses with no external Ithaca. I must here admit what I have told no one else: I have never had a feeling of belonging wholly to any one place, not even to my beloved Athens, nor even to Rome. Though a foreigner in every land, in no place did I feel myself a stranger. The different professions which make up the trade of emperor were practiced along the way: I resumed military life like a garment grown comfortable with use, and fell back readily into the jargon of the camps, that Latin deformed by the pressure of barbaric languages and sprinkled with the usual profanity and obvious jokes; I again grew used to the heavy equipment of the days of maneuvers, and to that change in equilibrium in the whole body which the weight of a shield on the left arm can produce. More arduous were the interminable duties of accountant, wherever I went, whether for auditing the records of the province of Asia or those of a small British town in debt for construction of public baths. I have already spoken of my function as judge. Comparisons drawn from other employments came to mind: I thought of the itinerant doctor going from door to door for care of the sick, of the street department employee called to repair a pavement or to solder a water main; of the overseer running back and forth on the ship, encouraging the oarsmen but sparing his whip as he could. And today, on the Villa’s terrace, watching the slaves treat the orchard trees or weed the flower beds, I think most of all of the coming and going of a watchful gardener.
The craftsmen whom I took with me on my rounds caused me little concern: their love of travel was as strong as my own. But I had trouble with the writers and scholars. The indispensable Phlegon fusses like an old woman, but he is the only secretary who has held up under the years: he is still with me. The poet Florus, to whom I proposed a Latin secretaryship, proclaimed right and left that he would not have wished to be Caesar, forced to battle the cold of Scythia, or British rain. The long excursions on foot did not appeal to him either. On my side, I gladly left to him the delights of Rome’s literary life, the taverns where the same witticisms are exchanged each night and the same mosquitoes are endured in common. To Suetonius I had given the post of curator of archives, thus granting him access to secret documents which he needed for his biographies of the Caesars. This clever man so well named Tranquillus was hardly to be imagined outside a library; he, too, stayed behind in Rome, where he became one of my wife’s intimates, a member of that small circle of discontented conservatives who gathered around her to find fault with the ways of the world. This group was little to my liking; I had Tranquillus pensioned off, and he retired to his cottage in the Sabine Hills there to mull undisturbed over the vices of Tiberius. A Greek secretariat was held for some time by Favorinus of Arles. That dwarf with the high treble voice was not devoid of subtlety but his mind was the most given to false deductions of any that I have encountered. We were always disputing, but his erudition charmed me. I was amused at his hypochondria; he dwelt upon his health like a lover attending a cherished mistress. His Hindu servant prepared his rice, imported from the Orient at great expense; unfortunately, this exotic cook spoke Greek badly, and said but little in any language, so he taught me nothing about the marvels of his native land. Favorinus flattered himself on having accomplished three rather rare things in his life: though a Gaul, he had Hellenized himself better than anyone else; though of humble origin, he was constantly quarrelling with the emperor and coming off none the worse for it, a remarkable fact which was, however, entirely to my credit; though impotent, he was continually paying fines for seduction of married women. And it is true that his lady admirers in provincial literary circles caused him difficulties from which I had more than once to extricate him. I wearied of that, and Eudemo took his place. But on the whole I have been unaccountably well served. The respect of that little group of friends and employees has survived, the gods only know how, through the rough intimacies of travel; their discretion has been still more astonishing, if possible, than their fidelity. The Suetoniuses of the future will have few anecdotes to harvest concerning me. What the public knows of my life I have revealed. My friends have kept my secrets, political and otherwise; it is fair to say that I often did the same for them.
To build is to collaborate with earth, to put a human mark upon a landscape, modifying it forever thereby; the process also contributes to that slow change which makes up the history of cities. What thought and care to determine the exact site for a bridge, or for a fountain, and to give a mountain road that perfect curve which is at the same time the shortest… . The widening of the road to Megara transformed the shore along the Scironian Cliffs; the two thousand odd stadia of paved way, provided with cisterns and military posts, which connected Antinoöpolis with the Red Sea brought an era of security to the desert following an era of danger. For construction of a system of aqueducts in Troas all the revenue from five hundred cities of the province of Asia was not too high a price; an aqueduct for Carthage atoned in some part for the rigors of the Punic Wars. The erecting of fortifications was much like constructing dykes: the object was to find the line on which a shore, or an empire, can be defended, the point where the assault of waves (or barbarians) will be held back, stopped, or utterly broken. The beauty of the gulfs bore fruit with the opening of harbors. The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.