At that period Athens had its philosopher of the frugal life: in a cabin of the village of Colonus, Demonax was leading an exemplary but merry existence. He was no Socrates, for he lacked both the subtlety and the ardor, but I relished his waggish good humor. Another of these good-hearted friends was the actor Aristomenes, a spirited performer of ancient Attic comedy. I used to call him my Greek partridge; short, fat, happy as a child (or a bird), he was better informed than anyone else on religious rituals, poetry, and cookery of former days. He was long a source of amusement and instruction to me. At about that time Antinous chose as his tutor the philosopher Chabrias, a Platonist with leanings toward Orphic teachings, and the most innocent of men; he developed a kind of watchdog fidelity to the boy which was later transferred to me. Eleven years of court life have not changed him; he is still the same honest, pious creature, chastely absorbed in his dreams, blind to all intrigue and deaf to rumor. He annoys me at times, but I shall part with him only at my death.
My relations with the Stoic philosopher Euphrates were of shorter duration. He had retired to Athens after brilliant successes in Rome. I engaged him as my reader, but the suffering which he had long endured from a liver abscess, and the resulting weakness, convinced him that his life no longer offered him anything worth the living. He asked my permission to quit my service by suicide. I have never been opposed to voluntary departure from life, and had considered it as a possible end in my hour of crisis before Trajan’s death. The problem of suicide which has obsessed me since seemed then of easy solution. Euphrates received the authorization which he sought; I had it carried to him by my young Bithynian, perhaps because it would have pleased me myself to receive from the hands of such a messenger this final response. The philosopher came to the palace that same evening for a conversation which differed in no respect from all preceding visits; he killed himself the next day. We talked over the incident several times; the boy remained somber for some days thereafter. This ardent young creature held death in horror; I had not observed that he already gave it much thought. For my part I could ill conceive that anyone would willingly leave a world which seemed to me so fair, or fail to exhaust to the end, despite all its evils, its utmost possibility of thought and of contact, and even of seeing. I have indeed changed since that time.
The years merge: my memory forms but a single fresco whereon are crowded the events and travels of several seasons. The luxuriously fitted bark of the merchant Erastos turned its prow first toward the Orient, then to the south, and only at last toward Italy, which was fast becoming for me the Occident. We twice touched Rhodes; Delos, blinding white, was visited on an April morning, and later on under full moon of the summer solstice; storms on the coast of Epirus allowed me to prolong a stay in Dodona. In Sicily we delayed a few days to explore the mystery of the Syracusan springs, Arethusa and Cyane, fair nymphs of blue waters. There I thought again of Licinius Sura, the statesman devoting his scant leisure to study of the marvels of hydraulics. They had told me much of the curious colors of dawn on the Ionian Sea, when beheld from the heights of Aetna. I decided to make the ascent of the mountain. We passed from the region of vines to the beds of lava, and on to the snow; the agile youth fairly ran on those steep slopes, but the scientists who went with me climbed by muleback. At the summit a shelter had been built for us to await the dawn. It came: an immense rainbow arched from horizon to horizon; on the icy crest strange fires blazed; earth and sea spread out to view as far as Africa, within sight, and as Greece, which we merely guessed at. That was truly an Olympian height in my life. All was there, the golden fringe of cloud, the eagles, and the cupbearer of immortality.
Halcyon seasons, solstice of my days… . Far from exaggerating my former happiness, I must struggle against too weak a portrayal; even now the recollection overpowers me. More sincere than most men, I can freely admit the secret causes of this felicity: that calm so propitious for work and for discipline of the mind seems to me one of the richest results of love. And it puzzles me that these joys, so precarious at best, and so rarely perfect in the course of human life, however we may have sought or received them, should be regarded with such mistrust by the so-called wise, who denounce the danger of habit and excess in sensuous delight, instead of fearing its absence or its loss; in tyrannizing over their senses they pass time which would be better occupied in putting their souls to rights, or embellishing them. At that period I paid as constant attention to the greater securing of my happiness, to enjoying and judging it, too, as I had always done for the smallest details of my acts; and what is the act of love, itself, if not a moment of passionate attention on the part of the body? Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece; the slightest error turns it awry, and it alters with one touch of doubt; any heaviness detracts from its charm, the least stupidity renders it dull. My own felicity is in no way responsible for those of my imprudences which shattered it later on; in so far as I have acted in harmony with it I have been wise. I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.
It was some time later, in Phrygia, on the borderlands where Greece melts into Asia, that I formed the clearest and most complete idea of the nature of this happiness. We were camping in a wild and desert place, on the site of the tomb of Alcibiades, who died there a victim of machinations of the Satraps. His grave had been neglected for several centuries; I ordered a statue of Parian marble for the effigy of that man so beloved by Greece. I also arranged for commemorative rites to be celebrated annually there. The neighboring villagers joined with the members of my escort for the first of these ceremonies; a young bull was sacrificed, and part of its flesh put aside for the night’s feast. A horse race was improvised upon the plain, and dances likewise. The Bithynian took part with a kind of fiery grace, and later that evening beside the last fire he sang. The upraised head showed the curve of the fine, strong throat.
I like to measure myself alongside the dead; that night I compared my life with the life of that great artist in pleasure, no longer young, who fell pierced by arrows on this spot, defended to the end by a beloved companion and wept over by an Athenian courtesan. My young years made no pretension to the prestige of Alcibiades’ youth, but my versatility equalled or surpassed his own. I had tasted as many delights, had reflected more, and had done far more work; I knew, like him, the strange felicity of being loved. Alcibiades had seduced everyone and everything, even History herself; and nevertheless he left behind him mounds of Athenian dead, abandoned in the quarries of Syracuse, his own country on verge of collapse, and the gods of the crossroads drunkenly mutilated by his hands. I had governed a world infinitely larger than that of his time, and had kept peace therein; I had rigged it like a fair ship made ready for a voyage which might last for centuries; I had striven my utmost to encourage in man the sense of the divine, but without at the same time sacrificing to it what is essentially human. My bliss was my reward.
There was Rome still. But I was no longer obliged to feel my way there, to reassure and to please. The achievements of my administration were not to be denied; the gates of the temple of Janus, open in time of war, remained closed; my plans were bearing fruit: the prosperity of the provinces flowed back upon the capital. I no longer refused the title which they had proposed to me at the time of my accession, Father of the Country.