II
I, Theodorus, the narrator of these events, have spent the night reflecting upon them, setting them down upon the papers you hold, or someday will hold, in your hands, reader, and in considering myself as I would consider another person: the third person of objective narration; the second person of subjective narration; yes, Tiberius’s second person, his observer and servant; and only now, in the seclusion of this cubicle filled with piles of papers I have collected throughout my travels, seated on a rough wooden cot near a window that does not look out upon the sea, my only view the barren ocher rocks of Capri, I can consider myself, in the solitude that is my spare autonomy, first person: I, the narrator.
I have witnessed these events; most monstrous events, for I could understand the Emperor’s lewd appetites if, in fact, the children he calls his little fish were normal children, or the women called Lesbia and Cynthia were beautiful females, or handsome youths Fabianus, Persius, and Gaius; but to have to attend these orgies, accepting the beauty imagined by Tiberius and imposed upon his sexual attendants while my eyes see what they see, is something that would perturb the serenity of the most discreet and even-tempered man; the pitiful children are blind, Cynthia and Gaius are dwarfs, Persius a hunchback, Fabianus an albino, and Lesbia a monster who has lost the lower portion of her face, from nose to chin, so that the poor woman’s face is partly a great scarred hole, and partly an opening for swallowing ground food, a face dominated by two maddened eyes that attempt to say to me: You who look at me with compassion, tell me how I have come here, what I am doing here, why I repeat these acts I do not understand, why they subject me to this derision and torture …
I would like to explain to her that Caesar is very attentive to the birth of deformed beings, he searches for them in circuses, in ports laid waste by sudden plagues, in isolated mountains where incest reigns, and in subterranean quarters in criminal cities, and from there he has brought to his Imperial Villa these poor creatures forced to acquaint themselves with the book of the poetess Elephantis and to represent a beauty whose patrons Caesar has invented, I do not know whether he does this so that the normality of his own body may be comparatively impressive, or whether, compared to his senescence and impotence, the monsters believe, in spite of everything, that they are beautiful because they can still do with their deformed bodies what our Emperor can no longer do with his.
I do not know; nor is it my function to ascertain, choosing among solutions, involving myself emotionally in all this. I fulfill the simple function of witness. Without ever saying so, Tiberius requires a witness of his character; it is that necessity that saves, and will always save, those of us who otherwise would be the first to be thrown to the lions. Once I attended a venatic spectacle with the Emperor; a man fought in the arena against the beasts, and in the end was devoured by them. I was surprised not to see a single spark of fear in the eyes of that gladiator; he was a tranquil man; he expected nothing, he lost nothing.
Perhaps I, too, am a lost man; my death is deferred by Caesar’s need for a witness. He must know that I write, that I leave proof of these events, and that the Romans of the future will know of them. Consequently, he knows that I do not assign him endearing traits. Nevertheless, he permits it; furthermore, he desires it. Because, perhaps, I am not merely witness to events, which are only actions, but, more importantly, witness to the character that is the agent of these events. Actions change, and different men may enact them; character does not change, only one man may be its agent. The character Tiberius possesses in these later years has been his character always, although, perhaps, in the springtime of his life no one, not even he, was aware of it; the good man does not become evil, or the evil man good. Power does not alter a man’s character; it merely reveals it. If we know this, we shall always understand the character of the powerful. At least, power possesses this virtue; he who retains it can never lie; the light of history is too powerful; it will not serve the powerful to be hypocritical, for the exercise of power will reveal the extent of his hypocrisy. Thus, wise nature balances the fact that she gives much to very few and little to many; the few cannot hide the truth, and this is the penance they serve for having strength; the many can never help but see it, and this is the reward of their weakness.
A man like myself, who understands these things, must, nevertheless, choose between two attitudes as he writes history. Either history is merely the testimony of what we have seen and can thus corroborate, or it is the investigation of the immutable principles that determine these events. For the ancient Greek chroniclers, who lived in an unstable world, subject to invasions, civil wars, and natural catastrophes, the reaction was clear: history can concern itself only with what is permanent; only that which does not change can be known; what changes is not intelligible. Rome has inherited this concept, but has given it a practical purpose: history should be at the service of legitimacy and continuity; future chance must support the act of founding. The law of Rome is an act that defines several and individual chance concerning paternity, possession, marriage, inheritance, and contracts. None of these events would be legitimate without reference to the principle, the act, the general norm — superior to the individual’s — that legitimize them. And what is the base of this legitimacy? The nation itself, the Roman nation, its origins, its foundation. And what is the projection of this legitimacy? The entire world, since the Roman nation incarnates universal principles capable of converting pure nature, cosmos, into a social and historical world, into ecumenae. This is the privilege of Rome; this is why she has been able to conquer the world, to impose unity, to be caput mundis, but the head of a world conceived as extension of the intangible act of our law, our morality, our civil and military administration, not of a natural world where chance prevails over action, a world which consequently is destined to dispersion. Our success is the best proof of this truth: we are the amphora that gives form to the wine of pure creation.
Before these truths and these disjunctions, I choose to be witness to the fatal chance represented by my master Tiberius, asking myself by virtue of which fates a man can wear the imperial purple who denies all the founding virtues of a society so preoccupied with legitimizing itself and its conquests. I have known the East: why do our preceptors lie when they compare the presumed corruption of the Levantine with their equally presumed belief in the simplicity, strength, and beneficence of Rome? And why, if this is believed, is vice secretly fomented in Rome, the cults of Venus and Bacchus, while pressure is exerted on the poets to exalt the virtues represented by a government that maintains the order so disastrously altered following the murder of Julius Caesar that sad day in March? And by what strange contradiction do all these necessities for true responsibility exempt our master Tiberius?
I know that my questions imply a temptation: that of acting, of intervening in the world of chance and placing my grain of sand upon the hazardous beach of events. If I succumb to it, I may lose my life without gaining glory; my kingdom is not that of necessity but that of whatever fragile liberty I can gain for myself in spite of necessity. To the temptation of action I oppose a conviction: since I neither want nor can influence the events of the world, my mission is to conserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be the manner in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen.