At sixteen I returned to Rome after a stretch of preliminary training in the Seventh Legion, stationed then well into the Pyrenees, in a wild region of Spain very different from the southern part of the peninsula where I had passed my childhood. Acilius Attianus, my guardian, thought it good that some serious study should counterbalance these months of rough living and violent hunting. He allowed himself, wisely, to be persuaded by Scaurus to send me to Athens to the sophist Isaeus, a brilliant man with a special gift for the art of improvisation. Athens won me straightway; the somewhat awkward student, a brooding but ardent youth, had his first taste of that subtle air, those swift conversations, the strolls in the long golden evenings, and that incomparable ease in which both discussions and pleasure are there pursued. Mathematics and the arts, as parallel studies, engaged me in turn; Athens afforded me also the good fortune to follow a course in medicine under Leotychides. The medical profession would have been congenial to me; its principles and methods are essentially the same as those by which I have tried to fulfill my function as emperor. I developed a passion for this science, which is too close to man ever to be absolute, but which, though subject to fad and to error, is constantly corrected by its contact with the immediate and the nude. Leotychides approached things from the most positive and practical point of view; he had developed an admirable system for reduction of fractures. We used to walk together at evening along the shore; this man of universal interests was curious about the structure of shells and the composition of sea mud. But he lacked facilities for experiment and regretted the Museum at Alexandria, where he had studied in his youth, with its laboratories and dissection rooms, its clash of opinions, and its competition between inventive minds. His was a clear, dry intelligence which taught me to value things above words, to mistrust mere formulas, and to observe rather than to judge. It was this bitter Greek who taught me method.
In spite of the legends surrounding me, I have cared little for youth, and for my own youth least of all. This much vaunted portion of existence, considered dispassionately, seems to me often a formless, opaque, and unpolished period, both fragile and unstable. Needless to say I have found a certain number of exquisite exceptions to the rule, and two or three were admirable; of these, Mark, you yourself will have been the most pure. As for me, I was at twenty much what I am today, but not consistently so. Not everything in me was bad, but it could have been: the good or the better parts also lent strength to the worse. I look back with shame on my ignorance of the world, which I thought that I knew, and on my impatience, and on a kind of frivolous ambition and gross avidity which I then had. Must the truth be told? In the midst of the studious life of Athens, where all pleasures, too, received their due, I regretted not Rome itself but the atmosphere of that place where the business of the world is continually done and undone, where are heard the pulleys and gears in the machine of governmental power. The reign of Domitian was drawing to a close; my cousin Trajan, who had covered himself with glory on the Rhine frontier, ranked now as a popular hero; the Spanish tribe was gaining hold in Rome. Compared with that world of immediate action, the beloved Greek province seemed to me to be slumbering in a haze of ideas seldom stirred by change, and the political passivity of the Hellenes appeared a somewhat servile form of renunciation. My appetite for power, and for money (which is often with us a first form of power), was undeniable, as was the craving for glory (to give that beautiful and impassioned name to what is merely our itch to hear ourselves spoken of). There was mingled confusedly with these desires the feeling that Rome, though inferior in many things, was after all superior in its demand that its citizens should take part in public affairs, those citizens at least who were of senatorial or equestrian rank. I had reached the point where I felt that the most ordinary debate on such a subject as importation of Egyptian wheat would have taught me more about government than would the entire Republic of Plato. Even a few years earlier, as a young Roman trained in military discipline, I could see that I had a better understanding than my professors of what it meant to be a Spartan soldier, or an athlete of Pindar’s time. I left the mellow light of Athens for the city where men wrapped and hooded in heavy togas battle against February winds, where luxury and debauch are barren of charm, but where the slightest decision taken affects the fate of some quarter of the world. There a young and eager provincial, not wholly obtuse but pursuing at first only vulgar ambitions, was little by little to lose such aspirations in the act of fulfilling them; he was to learn to contend both with men and with things, to command, and what is perhaps in the end slightly less futile, to serve.
Much was unsavory in that accession to power of a virtuous middle class which was hurrying to establish itself in anticipation of a change of regime: political honesty was gaining the upper hand by means of dubious stratagems. The Senate, by gradual transfer of all administrative posts to the hands of its favored dependents, was completing its encirclement of the hard-pressed Domitian; the newcomers, with whom all my family ties allied me, were not perhaps so different from those whom they were about to replace; they were chiefly less soiled by actual possession of power. Provincial cousins and nephews hoped at least for subaltern positions; still they were expected to fill such offices with integrity. I had my share: I was named judge in the court dealing with litigation over inheritances. It was from this modest post that I witnessed the last thrusts in a duel to the death between Domitian and Rome. The emperor had lost hold on the City, where he could no longer maintain himself except by resort to executions, which in turn hastened his own end; the whole army joined in plotting his death. I grasped but little of this fencing match, so much more deadly than those of the arena, and felt only a somewhat arrogant disdain for the tyrant at bay, philosopher’s pupil that I then was. Wisely counseled by Attianus, I kept to my work without meddling too much in politics.
That first year in office differed little from the years of study. I knew nothing of law but was fortunate in having Neratius Priscus for colleague in the tribunal. He consented to instruct me, and remained throughout his life my legal counselor and my friend. His was that rare type of mind which, though master of a subject, and seeing it, as it were, from within (from a point of view inaccessible to the uninitiated), nevertheless retains a sense of its merely relative value in the general order of things, and measures it in human terms. Better versed than any of his contemporaries in established procedures, he never hesitated when useful innovations were proposed. It is with his help that I have succeeded in my later years in putting certain reforms into effect. There were other things to think of. My Spanish accent had stayed with me; my first speech in the tribunal brought a burst of laughter. Here I made good use of my intimacy with actors, which had scandalized my family: lessons in elocution throughout long months proved the most arduous but most delightful of my tasks, and were the best guarded of my life’s secrets. In those difficult years even dissipation was a kind of study: I was trying to keep up with the young fashionables of Rome, but in that I never completely succeeded. With the cowardice typical of that age, when our courage is wholly physical, and is expended elsewhere, I seldom dared to be myself; in the hope of resembling the others I sometimes subdued and sometimes exaggerated my natural disposition.