Plotina was no more. On a previous sojourn in the City I had seen her for the last time, this woman with the tired smile whom official nomenclature named my mother, and who was so much more, my sole friend among women. This time there was only her funeral urn, placed in the chamber below Trajan’s Column. I attended in person the ceremonies for her apotheosis, and contrary to imperial custom wore mourning for the full nine days. But death made little change in an intimacy which for years had dispensed with mere presence; the empress remained for me what she always had been, a mind and a spirit with which mine had united.
Some of the great works of construction were nearing completion: the Colosseum, restored and cleansed of reminders of Nero which still haunted its site, was no longer adorned with the image of that emperor, but with a colossal statue of the Sun, Helios the King, in allusion to my family name of Aelius. They were putting the last touches to the Temple of Venus and Rome, erected likewise on the site of the scandalous House of Gold, where Nero had grossly displayed a luxury ill acquired. Roma, Amor: the divinity of the Eternal City was now for the first time identified with the Mother of Love, inspirer of every joy. It was a basic concept in my life. The Roman power was thus taking on that cosmic and sacred character, that pacific, protective form which I aspired to give it. At times it occurred to me to identify the late empress with that wise Venus, my heavenly counselor.
More and more the different gods seemed to me merged mysteriously in one Whole, emanations infinitely varied, but all equally manifesting the same force; their contradictions were only expressions of an underlying accord. The construction of a temple of All Gods, a Pantheon, seemed increasingly desirable to me. I had chosen a site on the ruins of the old public baths given by Agrippa, Augustus’ son-in-law, to the people of Rome. Nothing remained of the former structure except a porch and a marble plaque bearing his dedication to the Roman citizens; this inscription was carefully replaced, just as before, on the front of the new temple. It mattered little to me to have my name recorded on this monument, which was the product of my very thought. On the contrary, it pleased me that a text of more than a century ago should link this new edifice to the beginning of our empire, to that reign which Augustus had brought to peaceful conclusion. Even in my innovations I liked to feel that I was, above all, a continuator. Farther back, beyond Trajan and Nerva, now become officially my father and my grandfather, I looked for example even to those twelve Caesars so mistreated by Suetonius: the clearsightedness of Tiberius, without his harshness; the learning of Claudius, without his weakness; Nero’s taste for the arts, but stripped of all foolish vanity; the kindness of Titus, stopping short of his sentimentality; Vespasian’s thrift, but not his absurd miserliness. These princes had played their part in human affairs; it devolved upon me, to choose hereafter from among their acts what should be continued, consolidating the best things, correcting the worst, until the day when other men, either more or less qualified than I, but charged with equal responsibility, would undertake to review my acts likewise. The dedication of the Temple of Venus and Rome was a kind of triumph, celebrated by chariot races, public spectacles, and distribution of spices and perfumes. The twenty-four elephants which had transported the enormous blocks of building stone, reducing thereby the forced labor of slaves, figured in the procession, great living monoliths themselves. The date chosen for this festival was the anniversary of Rome’s birth, the eighth day following the Ides of April in the eight hundred and eighty-second year after the founding of the City. Never had a Roman spring been so intense, so sweet and so blue.
On the same day, with graver solemnity, as if muted, a dedicatory ceremony took place inside the Pantheon. I myself had revised the architectural plans, drawn with too little daring by Apollodorus: utilizing the arts of Greece only as ornamentation, like an added luxury, I had gone back for the basic form of the structure to primitive, fabled times of Rome, to the round temples of ancient Etruria. My intention had been that this sanctuary of All Gods should reproduce the likeness of the terrestrial globe and of the stellar sphere, that globe wherein are enclosed the seeds of eternal fire, and that hollow sphere containing all. Such was also the form of our ancestors’ huts where the smoke of man’s earliest hearths escaped through an orifice at the top. The cupola, constructed of a hard but lightweight volcanic stone which seemed still to share in the upward movement of flames, revealed the sky through a great hole at the center, showing alternately dark and blue. This temple, both open and mysteriously enclosed, was conceived as a solar quadrant. The hours would make their round on that caissoned ceiling, so carefully polished by Greek artisans; the disk of daylight would rest suspended there like a shield of gold; rain would form its clear pool on the pavement below; prayers would rise like smoke toward that void where we place the gods.
This solemnity was for me one of those moments when all things converge. Standing beside me in that well of daylight was my entire administrative staff; these men were the materials which composed the destiny of my mature years, by then already more than half completed. I could discern the austere vigor of Marcius Turbo, faithful servitor of the State; the frowning dignity of Servianus, whose grumblings, whispered ever lower, no longer reached my ears; the regal elegance of Lucius Ceionius; and slightly to one side, in that luminous shade which is best for divine apparitions, the dreamy visage of the young Greek in whom I had embodied my Fortune. My wife, present there also, had just received the title of empress.
For a long time, already, I had been more inclined toward the fables of loves and quarrels of the gods than to the clumsy commentaries of philosophers upon the nature of divinity; I was willing to be the terrestrial image of that Jupiter who is the more god in that he is also man, who supports the world, incarnating justice and giving order to the universe, but who is at the same time the lover of Ganymedes and Europas, the negligent husband of a bitter Juno. Disposed that day to see everything without shadow, in fancy I likened the empress to that goddess in whose honor, during a recent visit to Argos, I had consecrated a golden peacock adorned with precious stones. I could have freed myself by divorce from this unloved woman; had I been a private citizen I should not have hesitated to do so. But she troubled me very little, and nothing in her conduct justified so public an insult. As a young wife, she had taken offense at my ways, but only in much the same manner as her uncle had been irked by my debts. She was now confronted with manifestations of a passion which promised to endure, but she seemed not to notice them. Like many a woman little sensitive to love she poorly divined its power; such ignorance precluded the possibilities of tolerance and jealousy alike. She took umbrage only if her titles or her security were threatened, and such was not the case.
Nothing was left of that youthful charm which had briefly attracted me to her in former days; this Spanish woman grown prematurely old was grave and hard. I owed it to her natural coldness that she never took a lover, and was pleased that she wore her matronly veils with dignity; they were almost the veils of a widow. I rather liked to have the profile of an empress on the Roman coins, with an inscription on the reverse, sometimes to Matronly Virtue, sometimes to Tranquillity. Often now I thought of that symbolical marriage which takes place on the night of the Eleusinian festivities between the high priestess and the hierophant, and which is not a union or even a contact, but is a rite, and is sacred as such.