XIV
If Marcus indeed hated anything, and was proscriptive about it, that was gladiatorial show. Some say it was because he detested blood sports, so vulgar and non-Greek, because siding with a team would be for him the beginning of partiality. Others insist that it had to do with his wife, Faustina, who, for all her thirteen children—only six survived—was remarkably promiscuous for an empress. Among her numerous affairs, these others single out a particular gladiator who, they claim, was the real father of Commodus. But nature works in mysterious ways; an apple often rolls far from the tree, especially if that tree grows on a slope. Commodus was both a rotten apple and its slope. Actually, as far as the imperial fortunes were concerned, he was a precipice. And perhaps an inability to grasp nature's mysterious ways was the source of Faustina's reputation (though if Marcus had it against the gladiators because of Faustina, he should have proscribed also against sailors, pantomime actors, generals, and so forth). Marcus himself would make light of this. Once, approached with these rumors and the suggestion that he get rid of her, he retorted: "If we send our wife away, we must give back her dowry, too." The dowry here was the empire itself, since Faustina was the daughter of Antoninus Pius. On the whole, he stood by her unswervingly and, judging by the honors he bestowed upon her when she died, perhaps even loved her. She was, it appears, one of those heavy main courses whose taste you barely sample in the Meditations. In general, Caesar's wife is beyond reproach and suspicion. And perhaps precisely in order to uphold this attitude as well as to save Faustina's reputation Marcus departed from the nearly two-century-old tradition of selecting an heir to the throne and passed the crown to what he thus asserted to be his own flesh and blood. At any rate, it was
Faustina's. Apparently his reverence for his father-in-law was enormous and he simply couldn't believe that someone in whose veins ran the blood of the Antonines could be all that bad. Or perhaps he regarded Faustina as a force of nature; and nature for a Stoic philosopher was the ultimate authority. If anything, nature taught him indifference and a sense of proportion; otherwise his life would have been pure hell; Meditations strings out solipsism like glacial debris. Toward the wrong and atrocious, Marcus was not so much forgiving as dismissive. Which is to say that he was impartial rather than just and that his impartiality was the product not of his mind's fairness but of his mind's appetite for the infinite; in particular, for impartiality's own limits. This would stun his subjects no less than it does his historians, for history is the domain of the partial. And as his subjects chided Marcus for his attitude toward gladiatorial shows, historians jumped on him for his persecution of Christians. It is unclear, of course, how much Marcus was informed about the Christian creed, but it is easy to imagine him finding its metaphysics myopic and its ethics detestable. From a Stoic point of view, a god with whom you trade in virtue to obtain eternal favors wouldn't be worth a prayer. For somebody like Marcus, virtue's value lay precisely in its being a gamble, not an investment. Intellectually, to say the least, he had very little reason to favor the Christians; still less could he do so as a ruler, faced at the time with wars, plague, uprisings—and a disobedient minority. Besides, he didn't introduce new laws against the Christians; those of Hadrian, and those of Trajan before him, were quite enough. It is obvious that, following his beloved Epictetus, Marcus regarded a philosopher, i.e., himself, as the missionary of Divine Providence to mankind, i.e., to his own subjects. You are welcome to quibble with his notion of it; one thing is quite clear, though: it was far more open-ended than the Christian version. Blessed are the partial, for they shall inherit the earth.
Take white, ocher, and blue; add to that a bit of green and a lot of geometry. You'll get the formula time has picked for its backdrop in these parts, since it is not without vanity, especially once it assumes the shape of history or of an individual. It does so out of its prurient interest in finality, in its reductive ability, if you will, for which it has numerous guises, including the human brain or the human eye. So you shouldn't be surprised, especially if you were born here, to find yourself one day surrounded by the white-cum-ocher, trapezoid square with the white-cum-blue trapeze overhead. The former is human-made (actually, by Michelangelo), the latter is heaven-made, and you may recognize it more readily. However, neither is of use to you, since you are green: the shade of oxidized bronze. And if the cumulus white in the oxygen blue overhead is still preferable to the balustrade's marble calves and well-tanned Tiburtine chests below, it is because clouds remind you ofyour native antiquity: because they are the future of any architecture. Well, you've been around for nearly two thousand years, and you ought to know. Perhaps they, the clouds, are indeed the only true antiquity there is, if only because among them you are not a bronze.
Ave, Caesar. How do you feel now, among barbarians? For we are barbarians to you, if only because we speak neither Greek nor Latin. We are also afraid of death far more than you ever were, and our herd instinct is stronger than the one for self-preservation. Sound familiar? Maybe it's our numbers, Caesar, or maybe it's the number of our goods. We sure feel that by dying we stand to lose far more than you ever had, empire or no empire. To you, if I remember correctly, birth was an entrance, death an exit, life a little island in the ocean of particles. To us, you see, it's all a bit more melodramatic. What spooks us, I guess, is that an entrance is always guarded, whereas an exit isn't. We can't conceive of dwindling into particles again: after hoarding so many goods, that's unpalatable. Status's inertia, I guess, or fear of the elemental freedom. Be that as it may, Caesar, you are among barbarians. We are your true Parthians, Mar- comanni, and Quadi, because nobody came in your stead, and we inhabit the earth. Some of us go even further, barging into your antiquity, supplying you with definitions. You can't respond, can't bless, can't greet or quell us with your outstretched right hand—the hand whose fingers still remember scribbling your Meditations. If that book hasn't civilized us, what will? Perhaps they billed you as the Philosopher- King precisely to dodge its spell by underscoring your uniqueness. For theoretically what's unique isn't valid, Caesar, and you were unique. Still, you were no philosopher- king—you'd be the first to wince at this label. You were what the mixture of power and inquiry made you: a postscript to both, a uniquely autonomous entity, almost to the point of pathology. Hence your emphasis on ethics, for supreme power exempts one from the moral norm practically by definition, and so does supreme knowledge. You got both for the price of one, Caesar; that's why you had to be so bloody ethical. You wrote an entire book to keep your soul in check, to steel yourself for daily conduct. But was it really ethics that you were after, Caesar? Wasn't it your extraordinary appetite for the infinite that drove you to the most minute self-scrutiny, since you considered yourself a fragment, no matter how tiny, of the Whole, of the Universe—and the Universe, you maintained, changes constantly. So whom were you checking, Marcus? Whose morality did you try and, for all I know, manage to prove? Small wonder, then, that you are not surprised to find yourself now among the barbarians; small wonder that you always were far less afraid of them than of yourself—since you were afraid of yourself far more than of death. "Reflect that the chief source of all evils to man," says Epictetus, "as well as of baseness and cowardice, is not death but the fear of death." But you knew also that no man owns his future—or, for that matter, his past. That all one stands to lose by dying is the day when it happens—the day's remaining part, to be precise—and in time's eye, still less. The true pupil of Zeno, weren't you? At any rate, you wouldn't allow the prospect of nonbeing to color your being, Universe or no Universe. The eventual dance of particles, you held, should have no bearing on the animated body, not to mention on its reason. You were an island, Caesar, or at least your ethics were, an island in the primordial and—pardon the expression—postmordial ocean of free atoms. And your statue just marks the place on the map of the species' history where this island once stood: uninhabited, before submerging. The waves of doctrine and of creed—of the Stoic doctrine and the Christian creed— have closed over your head, claiming you as their own Atlantis. The truth, though, is that you never were either's. You were just one of the best men that ever lived, and you were obsessed with your duty because you were obsessed with virtue. Because it's harder to master than the alternative and because, if the universal design had been evil, the world would not exist. Some will point out no doubt that the doctrine and the creed came before and after you, but it's not history that defines the good. To be sure, time, conscious of its monotony, calls forth men to tell its yesterday from its tomorrow. You, Caesar, were good because you didn't.