CHAPTER XIII - THE "MISTRESS AND MOTHER" OF PALACES

Marius the Epicurean - Volume 1

by Walter Pater

CHAPTER XIII - THE "MISTRESS AND MOTHER" OF PALACES, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - VOLUME 1 by Walter Pater

AFTER that sharp, brief winter, the sun was already at work,
softening leaf and bud, as you might feel by a faint sweetness in the
air; but he did his work behind an evenly white sky, against which
the abode of the Caesars, its cypresses and bronze roofs, seemed like
a picture in beautiful but melancholy colour, as Marius climbed the
long flights of steps to be introduced to the emperor Aurelius.
Attired in the newest mode, his legs wound in dainty fasciae of white
leather, with the heavy gold ring of the ingenuus, and in his toga
of ceremony, he still retained all his country freshness of
complexion. The eyes of the "golden youth" of Rome were upon him as
the chosen friend of Cornelius, and the destined servant of the
emperor; but not jealously. In spite of, perhaps partly because of,
his habitual reserve of manner, he had become "the fashion," even
among those who felt instinctively the irony which lay beneath that
remarkable self-possession, as of one taking all things with a [213]
difference from other people, perceptible in voice, in expression,
and even in his dress. It was, in truth, the air of one who,
entering vividly into life, and relishing to the full the delicacies
of its intercourse, yet feels all the while, from the point of view
of an ideal philosophy, that he is but conceding reality to
suppositions, choosing of his own will to walk in a day-dream, of the
illusiveness of which he at least is aware.

In the house of the chief chamberlain Marius waited for the due
moment of admission to the emperor's presence. He was admiring the
peculiar decoration of the walls, coloured like rich old red leather.
In the midst of one of them was depicted, under a trellis of fruit
you might have gathered, the figure of a woman knocking at a door
with wonderful reality of perspective. Then the summons came; and in
a few minutes, the etiquette of the imperial household being still a
simple matter, he had passed the curtains which divided the central
hall of the palace into three parts--three degrees of approach to the
sacred person--and was speaking to Aurelius himself; not in Greek, in
which the emperor oftenest conversed with the learned, but, more
familiarly, in Latin, adorned however, or disfigured, by many a Greek
phrase, as now and again French phrases have made the adornment of
fashionable English. It was with real kindliness that Marcus
Aurelius looked upon Marius, as [214] a youth of great attainments in
Greek letters and philosophy; and he liked also his serious
expression, being, as we know, a believer in the doctrine of
physiognomy--that, as he puts it, not love only, but every other
affection of man's soul, looks out very plainly from the window of
the eyes.

The apartment in which Marius found himself was of ancient aspect,
and richly decorated with the favourite toys of two or three
generations of imperial collectors, now finally revised by the high
connoisseurship of the Stoic emperor himself, though destined not
much longer to remain together there. It is the repeated boast of
Aurelius that he had learned from old Antoninus Pius to maintain
authority without the constant use of guards, in a robe woven by the
handmaids of his own consort, with no processional lights or images,
and "that a prince may shrink himself almost into the figure of a
private gentleman." And yet, again as at his first sight of him,
Marius was struck by the profound religiousness of the surroundings
of the imperial presence. The effect might have been due in part to
the very simplicity, the discreet and scrupulous simplicity, of the
central figure in this splendid abode; but Marius could not forget
that he saw before him not only the head of the Roman religion, but
one who might actually have claimed something like divine worship,
had he cared to do so. Though the fantastic pretensions of Caligula
had brought some contempt [215] on that claim, which had become
almost a jest under the ungainly Claudius, yet, from Augustus
downwards, a vague divinity had seemed to surround the Caesars even
in this life; and the peculiar character of Aurelius, at once a
ceremonious polytheist never forgetful of his pontifical calling, and
a philosopher whose mystic speculation encircled him with a sort of
saintly halo, had restored to his person, without his intending it,
something of that divine prerogative, or prestige. Though he would
never allow the immediate dedication of altars to himself, yet the
image of his Genius--his spirituality or celestial counterpart--was
placed among those of the deified princes of the past; and his
family, including Faustina and the young Commodus, was spoken of as
the "holy" or "divine" house. Many a Roman courtier agreed with the
barbarian chief, who, after contemplating a predecessor of Aurelius,
withdrew from his presence with the exclamation:--"I have seen a god
to-day!" The very roof of his house, rising into a pediment or
gable, like that of the sanctuary of a god, the laurels on either
side its doorway, the chaplet of oak-leaves above, seemed to
designate the place for religious veneration. And notwithstanding
all this, the household of Aurelius was singularly modest, with none
of the wasteful expense of palaces after the fashion of Lewis the
Fourteenth; the palatial dignity being felt only in a peculiar sense
of order, the absence [216] of all that was casual, of vulgarity and
discomfort. A merely official residence of his predecessors, the
Palatine had become the favourite dwelling-place of Aurelius; its
many-coloured memories suiting, perhaps, his pensive character, and
the crude splendours of Nero and Hadrian being now subdued by time.
The window-less Roman abode must have had much of what to a modern
would be gloom. How did the children, one wonders, endure houses
with so little escape for the eye into the world outside? Aurelius,
who had altered little else, choosing to live there, in a genuine
homeliness, had shifted and made the most of the level lights, and
broken out a quite medieval window here and there, and the clear
daylight, fully appreciated by his youthful visitor, made pleasant
shadows among the objects of the imperial collection. Some of these,
indeed, by reason of their Greek simplicity and grace, themselves
shone out like spaces of a purer, early light, amid the splendours of
the Roman manufacture.

Though he looked, thought Marius, like a man who did not sleep
enough, he was abounding and bright to-day, after one of those
pitiless headaches, which since boyhood had been the "thorn in his
side," challenging the pretensions of his philosophy to fortify one
in humble endurances. At the first moment, to Marius, remembering
the spectacle of the emperor in ceremony, it was almost bewildering
to be in [217] private conversation with him. There was much in the
philosophy of Aurelius--much consideration of mankind at large, of
great bodies, aggregates and generalities, after the Stoic manner--
which, on a nature less rich than his, might have acted as an
inducement to care for people in inverse proportion to their nearness
to him. That has sometimes been the result of the Stoic
cosmopolitanism. Aurelius, however, determined to beautify by all
means, great or little, a doctrine which had in it some potential
sourness, had brought all the quickness of his intelligence, and long
years of observation, to bear on the conditions of social
intercourse. He had early determined "not to make business an excuse
to decline the offices of humanity--not to pretend to be too much
occupied with important affairs to concede what life with others may
hourly demand;" and with such success, that, in an age which made
much of the finer points of that intercourse, it was felt that the
mere honesty of his conversation was more pleasing than other men's
flattery. His agreeableness to his young visitor to-day was, in
truth, a blossom of the same wisdom which had made of Lucius Verus
really a brother--the wisdom of not being exigent with men, any more
than with fruit-trees (it is his own favourite figure) beyond their
nature. And there was another person, still nearer to him, regarding
whom this wisdom became a marvel, of equity--of charity.

[218] The centre of a group of princely children, in the same
apartment with Aurelius, amid all the refined intimacies of a modern
home, sat the empress Faustina, warming her hands over a fire. With
her long fingers lighted up red by the glowing coals of the brazier
Marius looked close upon the most beautiful woman in the world, who
was also the great paradox of the age, among her boys and girls. As
has been truly said of the numerous representations of her in art, so
in life, she had the air of one curious, restless, to enter into
conversation with the first comer. She had certainly the power of
stimulating a very ambiguous sort of curiosity about herself. And
Marius found this enigmatic point in her expression, that even after
seeing her many times he could never precisely recall her features in
absence. The lad of six years, looking older, who stood beside her,
impatiently plucking a rose to pieces over the hearth, was, in
outward appearance, his father--the young Verissimus--over again; but
with a certain feminine length of feature, and with all his mother's
alertness, or license, of gaze.

Yet rumour knocked at every door and window of the imperial house
regarding the adulterers who knocked at them, or quietly left their
lovers' garlands there. Was not that likeness of the husband, in the
boy beside her, really the effect of a shameful magic, in which the
blood of the murdered gladiator, his true father, had been an
ingredient? Were the tricks for [219] deceiving husbands which the
Roman poet describes, really hers, and her household an efficient
school of all the arts of furtive love? Or, was the husband too
aware, like every one beside? Were certain sudden deaths which
happened there, really the work of apoplexy, or the plague?

The man whose ears, whose soul, those rumours were meant to
penetrate, was, however, faithful to his sanguine and optimist
philosophy, to his determination that the world should be to him
simply what the higher reason preferred to conceive it; and the
life's journey Aurelius had made so far, though involving much moral
and intellectual loneliness, had been ever in affectionate and
helpful contact with other wayfarers, very unlike himself. Since his
days of earliest childhood in the Lateran gardens, he seemed to
himself, blessing the gods for it after deliberate survey, to have
been always surrounded by kinsmen, friends, servants, of exceptional
virtue. From the great Stoic idea, that we are all fellow-citizens
of one city, he had derived a tenderer, a more equitable estimate
than was common among Stoics, of the eternal shortcomings of men and
women. Considerations that might tend to the sweetening of his
temper it was his daily care to store away, with a kind of
philosophic pride in the thought that no one took more good-naturedly
than he the "oversights" of his neighbours. For had not Plato taught
(it was not [220] paradox, but simple truth of experience) that if
people sin, it is because they know no better, and are "under the
necessity of their own ignorance"? Hard to himself, he seemed at
times, doubtless, to decline too softly upon unworthy persons.
Actually, he came thereby upon many a useful instrument. The empress
Faustina he would seem at least to have kept, by a constraining
affection, from becoming altogether what most people have believed
her, and won in her (we must take him at his word in the "Thoughts,"
abundantly confirmed by letters, on both sides, in his correspondence
with Cornelius Fronto) a consolation, the more secure, perhaps,
because misknown of others. Was the secret of her actual
blamelessness, after all, with him who has at least screened her
name? At all events, the one thing quite certain about her, besides
her extraordinary beauty, is her sweetness to himself.

No! The wise, who had made due observation on the trees of the
garden, would not expect to gather grapes of thorns or fig-trees: and
he was the vine, putting forth his genial fruit, by natural law,
again and again, after his kind, whatever use people might make of
it. Certainly, his actual presence never lost its power, and
Faustina was glad in it to-day, the birthday of one of her children,
a boy who stood at her knee holding in his fingers tenderly a tiny
silver trumpet, one of his birthday gifts.--"For my [221] part,
unless I conceive my hurt to be such, I have no hurt at all,"--boasts
the would-be apathetic emperor:--"and how I care to conceive of the
thing rests with me." Yet when his children fall sick or die, this
pretence breaks down, and he is broken-hearted: and one of the charms
of certain of his letters still extant, is his reference to those
childish sicknesses.--"On my return to Lorium," he writes, "I found
my little lady--domnulam meam--in a fever;" and again, in a letter to
one of the most serious of men, "You will be glad to hear that our
little one is better, and running about the room--parvolam nostram
melius valere et intra cubiculum discurrere."

The young Commodus had departed from the chamber, anxious to witness
the exercises of certain gladiators, having a native taste for such
company, inherited, according to popular rumour, from his true
father--anxious also to escape from the too impressive company of the
gravest and sweetest specimen of old age Marius had ever seen, the
tutor of the imperial children, who had arrived to offer his birthday
congratulations, and now, very familiarly and affectionately, made a
part of the group, falling on the shoulders of the emperor, kissing
the empress Faustina on the face, the little ones on the face and
hands. Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the "Orator," favourite teacher of
the emperor's youth, afterwards his most trusted counsellor, and now
the undisputed occupant of the sophistic throne, whose equipage,
[222] elegantly mounted with silver, Marius had seen in the streets
of Rome, had certainly turned his many personal gifts to account with
a good fortune, remarkable even in that age, so indulgent to
professors or rhetoricians. The gratitude of the emperor Aurelius,
always generous to his teachers, arranging their very quarrels
sometimes, for they were not always fair to one another, had helped
him to a really great place in the world. But his sumptuous
appendages, including the villa and gardens of Maecenas, had been
borne with an air perfectly becoming, by the professor of a
philosophy which, even in its most accomplished and elegant phase,
presupposed a gentle contempt for such things. With an intimate
practical knowledge of manners, physiognomies, smiles, disguises,
flatteries, and courtly tricks of every kind--a whole accomplished
rhetoric of daily life--he applied them all to the promotion of
humanity, and especially of men's family affection. Through a long
life of now eighty years, he had been, as it were, surrounded by the
gracious and soothing air of his own eloquence--the fame, the echoes,
of it--like warbling birds, or murmuring bees. Setting forth in that
fine medium the best ideas of matured pagan philosophy, he had become
the favourite "director" of noble youth

Yes! it was the one instance Marius, always eagerly on the look-out
for such, had yet seen of [223] a perfectly tolerable, perfectly
beautiful, old age--an old age in which there seemed, to one who
perhaps habitually over-valued the expression of youth, nothing to be
regretted, nothing really lost, in what years had taken away. The
wise old man, whose blue eyes and fair skin were so delicate,
uncontaminate and clear, would seem to have replaced carefully and
consciously each natural trait of youth, as it departed from him, by
an equivalent grace of culture; and had the blitheness, the placid
cheerfulness, as he had also the infirmity, the claim on stronger
people, of a delightful child. And yet he seemed to be but awaiting
his exit from life--that moment with which the Stoics were almost as
much preoccupied as the Christians, however differently--and set
Marius pondering on the contrast between a placidity like this, at
eighty years, and the sort of desperateness he was aware of in his
own manner of entertaining that thought. His infirmities
nevertheless had been painful and long-continued, with losses of
children, of pet grandchildren. What with the crowd, and the
wretched streets, it was a sign of affection which had cost him
something, for the old man to leave his own house at all that day;
and he was glad of the emperor's support, as he moved from place to
place among the children he protests so often to have loved as his
own.

For a strange piece of literary good fortune, at the beginning of the
present century, has set [224] free the long-buried fragrance of this
famous friendship of the old world, from below a valueless later
manuscript, in a series of letters, wherein the two writers exchange,
for the most part their evening thoughts, especially at family
anniversaries, and with entire intimacy, on their children, on the
art of speech, on all the various subtleties of the "science of
images"--rhetorical images--above all, of course, on sleep and
matters of health. They are full of mutual admiration of each
other's eloquence, restless in absence till they see one another
again, noting, characteristically, their very dreams of each other,
expecting the day which will terminate the office, the business or
duty, which separates them--"as superstitious people watch for the
star, at the rising of which they may break their fast." To one of
the writers, to Aurelius, the correspondence was sincerely of value.
We see him once reading his letters with genuine delight on going to
rest. Fronto seeks to deter his pupil from writing in Greek.--Why
buy, at great cost, a foreign wine, inferior to that from one's own
vineyard? Aurelius, on the other hand, with an extraordinary innate
susceptibility to words--la parole pour la parole, as the French say-
-despairs, in presence of Fronto's rhetorical perfection.

Like the modern visitor to the Capitoline and some other museums,
Fronto had been struck, pleasantly struck, by the family likeness
[225] among the Antonines; and it was part of his friendship to make
much of it, in the case of the children of Faustina. "Well! I have
seen the little ones," he writes to Aurelius, then, apparently,
absent from them: "I have seen the little ones--the pleasantest sight
of my life; for they are as like yourself as could possibly be. It
has well repaid me for my journey over that slippery road, and up
those steep rocks; for I beheld you, not simply face to face before
me, but, more generously, whichever way I turned, to my right and my
left. For the rest, I found them, Heaven be thanked! with healthy
cheeks and lusty voices. One was holding a slice of white bread,
like a king's son; the other a crust of brown bread, as becomes the
offspring of a philosopher. I pray the gods to have both the sower
and the seed in their keeping; to watch over this field wherein the
ears of corn are so kindly alike. Ah! I heard too their pretty
voices, so sweet that in the childish prattle of one and the other I
seemed somehow to be listening--yes! in that chirping of your pretty
chickens--to the limpid+ and harmonious notes of your own oratory.
Take care! you will find me growing independent, having those I could
love in your place:--love, on the surety of my eyes and ears."

"Magistro meo salutem!" replies the Emperor, "I too have seen my
little ones in your sight of them; as, also, I saw yourself in
reading your [226] letter. It is that charming letter forces me to
write thus:" with reiterations of affection, that is, which are
continual in these letters, on both sides, and which may strike a
modern reader perhaps as fulsome; or, again, as having something in
common with the old Judaic unction of friendship. They were
certainly sincere.

To one of those children Fronto had now brought the birthday gift of
the silver trumpet, upon which he ventured to blow softly now and
again, turning away with eyes delighted at the sound, when he thought
the old man was not listening. It was the well-worn, valetudinarian
subject of sleep, on which Fronto and Aurelius were talking together;
Aurelius always feeling it a burden, Fronto a thing of magic
capacities, so that he had written an encomium in its praise, and
often by ingenious arguments recommends his imperial pupil not to be
sparing of it. To-day, with his younger listeners in mind, he had a
story to tell about it:--

"They say that our father Jupiter, when he ordered the world at the
beginning, divided time into two parts exactly equal: the one part he
clothed with light, the other with darkness: he called them Day and
Night; and he assigned rest to the night and to day the work of life.
At that time Sleep was not yet born and men passed the whole of their
lives awake: only, the quiet of the night was ordained for them,
instead of sleep. But it came to pass, little by little, [227] being
that the minds of men are restless, that they carried on their
business alike by night as by day, and gave no part at all to repose.
And Jupiter, when he perceived that even in the night-time they
ceased not from trouble and disputation, and that even the courts of
law remained open (it was the pride of Aurelius, as Fronto knew, to
be assiduous in those courts till far into the night) resolved to
appoint one of his brothers to be the overseer of the night and have
authority over man's rest. But Neptune pleaded in excuse the gravity
of his constant charge of the seas, and Father Dis the difficulty of
keeping in subjection the spirits below; and Jupiter, having taken
counsel with the other gods, perceived that the practice of nightly
vigils was somewhat in favour. It was then, for the most part, that
Juno gave birth to her children: Minerva, the mistress of all art and
craft, loved the midnight lamp: Mars delighted in the darkness for
his plots and sallies; and the favour of Venus and Bacchus was with
those who roused by night. Then it was that Jupiter formed the
design of creating Sleep; and he added him to the number of the gods,
and gave him the charge over night and rest, putting into his hands
the keys of human eyes. With his own hands he mingled the juices
wherewith Sleep should soothe the hearts of mortals--herb of
Enjoyment and herb of Safety, gathered from a grove in Heaven; and,
from the meadows of [228] Acheron, the herb of Death; expressing from
it one single drop only, no bigger than a tear one might hide. 'With
this juice,' he said, 'pour slumber upon the eyelids of mortals. So
soon as it hath touched them they will lay themselves down
motionless, under thy power. But be not afraid: they shall revive,
and in a while stand up again upon their feet.' Thereafter, Jupiter
gave wings to Sleep, attached, not, like Mercury's, to his heels, but
to his shoulders, like the wings of Love. For he said, 'It becomes
thee not to approach men's eyes as with the noise of chariots, and
the rushing of a swift courser, but in placid and merciful flight, as
upon the wings of a swallow--nay! with not so much as the flutter of
the dove.' Besides all this, that he might be yet pleasanter to men,
he committed to him also a multitude of blissful dreams, according to
every man's desire. One watched his favourite actor; another
listened to the flute, or guided a charioteer in the race: in his
dream, the soldier was victorious, the general was borne in triumph,
the wanderer returned home. Yes!--and sometimes those dreams come
true!

Just then Aurelius was summoned to make the birthday offerings to his
household gods. A heavy curtain of tapestry was drawn back; and
beyond it Marius gazed for a few moments into the Lararium, or
imperial chapel. A patrician youth, in white habit, was in waiting,
with a little chest in his hand containing incense for the [229] use
of the altar. On richly carved consoles, or side boards, around this
narrow chamber, were arranged the rich apparatus of worship and the
golden or gilded images, adorned to-day with fresh flowers, among
them that image of Fortune from the apartment of Antoninus Pius, and
such of the emperor's own teachers as were gone to their rest. A dim
fresco on the wall commemorated the ancient piety of Lucius Albinius,
who in flight from Rome on the morrow of a great disaster, overtaking
certain priests on foot with their sacred utensils, descended from
the wagon in which he rode and yielded it to the ministers of the
gods. As he ascended into the chapel the emperor paused, and with a
grave but friendly look at his young visitor, delivered a parting
sentence, audible to him alone: Imitation is the most acceptable--
Make sure that those to whom you come nearest be the happier by your*

It was the very spirit of the scene and the hour--the hour Marius had
spent in the imperial house. How temperate, how tranquillising! what
humanity! Yet, as he left the eminent company concerning whose ways
of life at home he had been so youthfully curious, and sought, after
his manner, to determine the main trait in all this, he had to
confess that it was a sentiment of mediocrity, though of a mediocrity
for once really golden.

NOTES

225. +"Limpid" is misprinted "Limped."