XII
Marcus was a good ruler and a lonely man. In his line of work, loneliness, of course, comes with the territory; but he was lonelier than most. Meditations gives you a greater taste of that than his correspondence; yet it is just a taste. The meal had many courses and was pretty heavy. To begin with, he knew that his life had been subverted. For the ancients, philosophy wasn't a by-product of life but the other way around, and Stoicism was particularly exacting. Perhaps we should momentarily dispense here with the very word "philosophy," for Stoicism, its Roman version especially, shouldn't be characterized as love for knowledge. It was, rather, a lifelong experiment in endurance, and a man was his own guinea pig: he was not a probing instrument, he was an answering instrument. By the time of Marcus, the doctrine's knowledge was to be lived rather than loved. Its materialist monism, its cosmogony, its logic, and its criterion of truth (the perception that irresistibly compels the subject to assent to it as true) were already in place, and for a philosopher, life's purpose was to prove the validity of this knowledge by applying it to reality till the end of his days. In other words, a Stoic's life was a study in ethics, since ethics buys nothing except osmosis. And Marcus knew that his experiment was interrupted, or qualified, to a degree he himself wouldn't be able to comprehend; worse still, that his findings—provided there were any—could have no application. He believed Plato, but not to this extent. At any rate, he would be the first to square the common good with individual unhappiness, and that's what Meditations is perhaps all about: a postscript to the Republic. He knew that as a philosopher he was finished: that concentration was out, that all he could hope for was some time for sporadic contemplation. That the best his life would amount to would be a few glimpses of eternity, a true surmise now and then. He accepted that, for the sake of the common good no doubt, but hence Meditations' overriding melancholy or, if you will, pessimism—all the more deep because the man definitely suspected that there was rather more to the story. Meditations is thus a patchy book, nurtured by interference. It is a disjointed, rambling internal monologue, with occasional flashes of pedantry as well as of genius. It shows you what he might have been rather than what he was: his vector, rather than an attained destination. It appears to have been jotted down amid the hubbub and babel of this or that military campaign, successful as they might have been—by the campfire, indeed, and the soldier's cloak played the Stoic philosopher's body coverlet. In other words, it was done in spite of—or, if you will, against—history, of which his destiny was trying to make him a part. A pessimist he perhaps was, but certainly not a determinist. That's why he was a good ruler, why the mixture of republic and imperial rule under him didn't look like a sham. (One may even argue that the larger democracies of the modern world show an increasing preference for his formula. Good examples are contagious, too; but virtue, as we said, alienates. Not to mention that time, wasting its carbon paper on subjects, seems to have very little left for rulers.) To say the least, he was a good caretaker: he didn't lose what he inherited; and if the empire under him didn't expand, it was just as well; as Augustus said, "Enough is enough." For somebody in charge ofan entity so vast and for so long (practically thirty- three years, from a.d. 147, when his father-in-law conferred upon him the powers of emperorship, to his death in a.d. 181 near the would-be Vienna), he has surprisingly little blood on his hands. He would rather pardon than punish those who rebelled against him; those who fought him, he would rather subdue than destroy. The laws he made benefited the most powerless: widows, slaves, juniors, although it must be said that he was the first to introduce the double standard in prosecuting criminal offenses by members of the Senate (the office of special prosecutor was his invention). He used the state's purse sparingly and, being abstemious himself, tried to encourage this in others. On several occasions, when the empire needed money, he sold imperial jewels rather than hit his subjects up for new taxes. Nor did he build anything extravagant, no Pantheon or Colosseum. In the first place, because those already existed; second, because his sojourn in Egypt was quite brief and he didn't go beyond Alexandria, unlike Agrippa and unlike Titus and Hadrian, to have his mind fired up by the gigantic, desert- fitting scale of Egyptian edifices. Besides, he didn't like cir- cenze that much, and when he had to attend a show, he is reported to have read or written or been briefed during the performance. It was he, however, who introduced to the Roman Circus the safety net for acrobats.
XIII
Antiquity is above all a visual concept, generated by objects whose age escapes definition. The Latin anticum is essentially a more drastic term for "old," deriving from the equally Latin ante, which means "before," and used to be applied presumably to things Greek. "Beforishness," then. As for the Greeks themselves, their arche denotes beginning or genesis, the moment when something occurs for the first time. "Firstness," then? Herein, in any case, lies a substantial distinction between the Romans and the Greeks—a distinction owing its existence partly to the Greeks having fewer objects at their disposal to fathom the provenance of, partly to their general predilection for dwelling on origins. The former, in fact, may very well be an explanation for the latter, since next to archaeology there is only geology. As for our own version ofantiquity, it eagerly swallows both the Greeks and the Romans, yet, if worse comes to worse, might cite the Latin precedent in its defense. Antiquity to us is a vast chronological jumble, filled with historical, mythical, and divine beings, interrelated among themselves by marble and also because a high percentage of the depicted mortals claim divine descendance or were deified. This last aspect, resulting in the practically identical scant attire of those marbles and in the confusion on our part of attributing fragments (did this splintered arm belong to a mortal or to a deity?), is worth noticing. The blurring ofdistinctions between mortals and deities was habitual with the ancients, with the Roman Caesars in particular. While the Greeks on the whole were interested in lineage, the Romans were after promotion. The target, however, was the same: Celestial Mansions, yet vanity or boosting the ruler's authority played a rather small part in this. The whole point of identifying with the gods lies not so much in the notion of their omniscience as in the sense that their extreme carnality is fully matched by the extremes of their detachment. To begin with, a ruler's own margin of detachment would make him identify with a god (carnality, of course, would be Nero or Caligula's shortcut). By acquiring a statue, he'd boost that margin considerably, and it's best if it's done in the course of one's lifetime, since marble reduces both the expectations of the subjects and the model's own willingness to deviate from manifest perfection. It sets one free, as it were, and freedom is the province of deities. Putting it very broadly, the marble and mental vista that we call antiquity is a great repository of shed and shredded skins, a landscape after the departure, if you will; a mask offreedom, a jumble of discarded boosters.