The Caesars by Thomas de Quincey

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THE CÆSARS.

BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY

THE CÆSARS.

The condition of the Roman Emperors has never yet been fully appreciated;
nor has it been sufficiently perceived in what respects it was absolutely
unique. There was but one Rome: no other city, as we are satisfied by the
collation of many facts, either of ancient or modern times, has ever
rivalled this astonishing metropolis in the grandeur of magnitude; and not
many--if we except the cities of Greece, none at all--in the grandeur of
architectural display. Speaking even of London, we ought in all reason to
say--the _Nation of London,_ and not the City of London; but of Rome
in her palmy days, nothing less could be said in the naked severity of
logic. A million and a half of souls--that population, apart from any
other distinctions, is _per se_ for London a justifying ground for
such a classification; _à fortiori_, then, will it belong to a city
which counted from one horn to the other of its mighty suburbs not less
than four millions of inhabitants [Footnote: Concerning this question--
once so fervidly debated, yet so unprofitably for the final adjudication,
and in some respects, we may add, so erroneously--on a future occasion.]
at the very least, as we resolutely maintain after reviewing all that has
been written on that much vexed theme, and very probably half as many
more. Republican Rome had her _prerogative_ tribe; the earth has its
_prerogative_ city; and that city was Rome.

As was the city, such was its prince--mysterious, solitary, unique. Each
was to the other an adequate counterpart, each reciprocally that perfect
mirror which reflected, as it were _in alia materia,_ those incommunicable
attributes of grandeur, that under the same shape and denomination never
upon this earth were destined to be revived. Rome has not been repeated;
neither has Cæsar. _Ubi Cæsar, ibi Roma_--was a maxim of Roman
jurisprudence. And the same maxim may be translated into a wider meaning;
in which it becomes true also for our historical experience. Cæsar and
Rome have flourished and expired together. The illimitable attributes of
the Roman prince, boundless and comprehensive as the universal air,--like
that also bright and apprehensible to the most vagrant eye, yet in parts
(and those not far removed) unfathomable as outer darkness, (for no
chamber in a dungeon could shroud in more impenetrable concealment a deed
of murder than the upper chambers of the air,)--these attributes, so
impressive to the imagination, and which all the subtlety of the Roman
[Footnote: Or even of modern wit; witness the vain attempt of so many
eminent sort, and illustrious _Antecessors_, to explain in self-
consistency the differing functions of the Roman Cæsar, and in what sense
he was _legibus solutus_. The origin of this difficulty we shall soon
understand.] wit could as little fathom as the fleets of Cæsar could
traverse the Polar basin, or unlock the gates of the Pacific, are best
symbolized, and find their most appropriate exponent, in the illimitable
city itself--that Rome, whose centre, the Capitol, was immovable as
Teneriffe or Atlas, but whose circumference was shadowy, uncertain,
restless, and advancing as the frontiers of her all-conquering empire. It
is false to say, that with Cæsar came the destruction of Roman greatness.
Peace, hollow rhetoricians! Until Cæsar came, Rome was a minor; by him,
she attained her majority, and fulfilled her destiny. Caius Julius, you
say, deflowered the virgin purity of her civil liberties. Doubtless, then,
Rome had risen immaculate from the arms of Sylla and of Marius. But, if it
were Caius Julius who deflowered Rome, if under him she forfeited her
dowery of civic purity, if to him she first unloosed her maiden zone, then
be it affirmed boldly--that she reserved her greatest favors for the
noblest of her wooers, and we may plead the justification of Falconbridge
for his mother's trangression with the lion-hearted king--such a sin was
self-ennobled. Did Julius deflower Rome? Then, by that consummation, he
caused her to fulfill the functions of her nature; he compelled her to
exchange the imperfect and inchoate condition of a mere _fæmina_ for the
perfections of a _mulier_. And, metaphor apart, we maintain that Rome lost
no liberties by the mighty Julius. That which in tendency, and by the
spirit of her institutions--that which, by her very corruptions and abuses
co-operating with her laws, Rome promised and involved in the germ--even
that, and nothing less or different, did Rome unfold and accomplish under
this Julian violence. The rape [if such it were] of Cæsar, her final
Romulus, completed for Rome that which the rape under Romulus, her
earliest Cæsar, had prosperously begun. And thus by one godlike man was a
nation-city matured; and from the everlasting and nameless [Footnote:
"_Nameless city_."--The true name of Rome it was a point of religion to
conceal; and, in fact, it was never revealed.] city was a man produced--
capable of taming her indomitable nature, and of forcing her to immolate
her wild virginity to the state best fitted for the destined "Mother of
empires." Peace, then, rhetoricians, false threnodists of false liberty!
hollow chanters over the ashes of a hollow republic! Without Cæsar, we
affirm a thousand times that there would have been no perfect Rome; and,
but for Rome, there could have been no such man as Cæsar.

Both then were immortal; each worthy of each. And the _Cui viget nihil
simile aut secundum_ of the poet, was as true of one as of the other.
For, if by comparison with Rome other cities were but villages, with even
more propriety it may be asserted, that after the Roman Cæsars all modern
kings, kesars, or emperors, are mere phantoms of royalty. The Cæsar of
Western Rome--he only of all earthly potentates, past or to come, could be
said to reign as a _monarch_, that is, as a solitary king. He was not
the greatest of princes, simply because there was no other but himself.
There were doubtless a few outlying rulers, of unknown names and titles
upon the margins of his empire, there were tributary lieutenants and
barbarous _reguli_, the obscure vassals of his sceptre, whose homage
was offered on the lowest step of his throne, and scarcely known to him
but as objects of disdain. But these feudatories could no more break the
unity of his empire, which embraced the whole _oichomeni_;--the total
habitable world as then known to geography, or recognised by the muse of
History--than at this day the British empire on the sea can be brought
into question or made conditional, because some chief of Owyhee or
Tongataboo should proclaim a momentary independence of the British
trident, or should even offer a transient outrage to her sovereign flag.
Such a _tempestas in matulâ_ might raise a brief uproar in his little
native archipelago, but too feeble to reach the shores of Europe by an
echo--or to ascend by so much as an infantine _susurrus_ to the ears
of the British Neptune. Parthia, it is true, might pretend to the dignity
of an empire. But her sovereigns, though sitting in the seat of the great
king, (_o basileus_,) were no longer the rulers of a vast and polished
nation. They were regarded as barbarians--potent only by their standing
army, not upon the larger basis of civic strength; and, even under this
limitation, they were supposed to owe more to the circumstances of their
position--their climate, their remoteness, and their inaccessibility
except through arid and sultry deserts--than to intrinsic resources, such
as could be permanently relied on in a serious trial of strength between
the two powers. The kings of Parthia, therefore, were far enough from
being regarded in the light of antagonist forces to the majesty of Rome.
And, these withdrawn from the comparison, who else was there--what prince,
what king, what potentate of any denomination, to break the universal
calm, that through centuries continued to lave, as with the quiet
undulations of summer lakes, the sacred footsteps of the Cæsarean throne?
The Byzantine court, which, merely as the inheritor of some fragments from
that august throne, was drunk with excess of pride, surrounded itself with
elaborate expressions of a grandeur beyond what mortal eyes were supposed
able to sustain.

These fastidious, and sometimes fantastic ceremonies, originally devised
as the very extremities of anti-barbarism, were often themselves but too
nearly allied in spirit to the barbaresque in taste. In reality, some
parts of the Byzantine court ritual were arranged in the same spirit as
that of China or the Birman empire; or fashioned by anticipation, as one
might think, on the practice of that Oriental Cham, who daily proclaims by
sound of trumpet to the kings in the four corners of the earth--that they,
having dutifully awaited the close of _his_ dinner, may now with his
royal license go to their own.

From such vestiges of _derivative_ grandeur, propagated to ages so
remote from itself, and sustained by manners so different from the spirit
of her own,--we may faintly measure the strength of the original impulse
given to the feelings of men by the _sacred_ majesty of the Roman
throne. How potent must that splendor have been, whose mere reflection
shot rays upon a distant crown, under another heaven, and across the
wilderness of fourteen centuries! Splendor, thus transmitted, thus
sustained, and thus imperishable, argues a transcendent in the basis of
radical power. Broad and deep must those foundations have been laid, which
could support an "arch of empire" rising to that giddy altitude--an
altitude which sufficed to bring it within the ken of posterity to the
sixtieth generation.

Power is measured by resistance. Upon such a scale, if it were applied
with skill, the _relations_ of greatness in Rome to the greatest of
all that has gone before her, and has yet come after her, would first be
adequately revealed. The youngest reader will know that the grandest forms
in which the _collective_ might of the human race has manifested
itself, are the four monarchies. Four times have the distributive forces
of nations gathered themselves, under the strong compression of the sword,
into mighty aggregates--denominated _Universal Empires_, or Monarchies.
These are noticed in the Holy Scriptures; and it is upon _their_ warrant
that men have supposed no fifth monarchy or universal empire possible in
an earthly sense; but that, whenever such an empire arises, it will have
Christ for its head; in other words, that no fifth _monarchia_ can take
place until Christianity shall have swallowed up all other forms of
religion, and shall have gathered the whole family of man into one fold
under one all-conquering Shepherd. Hence [Footnote: This we mention,
because a great error has been sometimes committed in exposing _their_
error, that consisted, not in supposing that for a fifth time men were to
be gathered under one sceptre, and that sceptre wielded by Jesus Christ,
but in supposing that this great era had then arrived, or that with no
deeper moral revolution men could be fitted for that yoke.] the fanatics
of 1650, who proclaimed Jesus for their king, and who did sincerely
anticipate his near advent in great power, and under some personal
manifestation, were usually styled _Fifth-Monarchists_.

However, waiving the question (interesting enough in itself)--Whether upon
earthly principles a fifth universal empire could by possibility arise in
the present condition of knowledge for man individually, and of
organization for man in general--this question waived, and confining
ourselves to the comparison of those four monarchies which actually have
existed,--of the Assyrian or earliest, we may remark, that it found men in
no state of cohesion. This cause, which came in aid of its first
foundation, would probably continue; and would diminish the _intensity_ of
the power in the same proportion as it promoted its _extension_. This
monarchy would be absolute only by the personal presence of the monarch;
elsewhere, from mere defect of organization, it would and must betray the
total imperfections of an elementary state, and of a first experiment.
More by the weakness inherent in such a constitution, than by its own
strength, did the Persian spear prevail against the Assyrian. Two
centuries revolved, seven or eight generations, when Alexander found
himself in the same position as Cyrus for building a third monarchy, and
aided by the selfsame vices of luxurious effeminacy in his enemy,
confronted with the self-same virtues of enterprise and hardihood in his
compatriot soldiers. The native Persians, in the earliest and very limited
import of that name, were a poor and hardy race of mountaineers. So were
the men of Macedon; and neither one tribe nor the other found any adequate
resistance in the luxurious occupants of Babylonia. We may add, with
respect to these two earliest monarchies, that the Assyrian was undefined
with regard to space, and the Persian fugitive with regard to time. But
for the third--the Grecian or Macedonian--we know that the arts of
civility, and of civil organization, had made great progress before the
Roman strength was measured against it. In Macedon, in Achaia, in Syria,
in Asia Minor, in Egypt,--every where the members of this empire had begun
to knit; the cohesion was far closer, the development of their resources
more complete; the resistance therefore by many hundred degrees more
formidable: consequently, by the fairest inference, the power in that
proportion greater which laid the foundations of this last great monarchy.
It is probable, indeed, both _à priori_, and upon the evidence of various
facts which have survived, that each of the four great empires
successively triumphed over an antagonist, barbarous in comparison of
itself, and each _by_ and through that very superiority in the arts and
policy of civilization.

Rome, therefore, which came last in the succession, and swallowed up the
three great powers that had _seriatim_ cast the human race into one
mould, and had brought them under the unity of a single will, entered by
inheritance upon all that its predecessors in that career had
appropriated, but in a condition of far ampler development. Estimated
merely by longitude and latitude, the territory of the Roman empire was
the finest by much that has ever fallen under a single sceptre. Amongst
modern empires, doubtless, the Spanish of the sixteenth century, and the
British of the present, cannot but be admired as prodigious growths out of
so small a stem. In that view they will be endless monuments in
attestation of the marvels which are lodged in civilization. But
considered in and for itself, and with no reference to the proportion of
the creating forces, each of these empires has the great defect of being
disjointed, and even insusceptible of perfect union. It is in fact no
_vinculum_ of social organization which held them together, but the
ideal _vinculum_ of a common fealty, and of submission to the same
sceptre. This is not like the tie of manners, operative even where it is
not perceived, but like the distinctions of geography--existing to-day,
forgotten to-morrow--and abolished by a stroke of the pen, or a trick of
diplomacy. Russia, again, a mighty empire, as respects the simple grandeur
of magnitude, builds her power upon sterility. She has it in her power to
seduce an invading foe into vast circles of starvation, of which the radii
measure a thousand leagues. Frost and snow are confederates of her
strength. She is strong by her very weakness. But Rome laid a belt about
the Mediterranean of a thousand miles in breadth; and within that zone she
comprehended not only all the great cities of the ancient world, but so
perfectly did she lay the garden of the world in every climate, and for
every mode of natural wealth, within her own ring-fence, that since that
era no land, no part and parcel of the Roman empire, has ever risen into
strength and opulence, except where unusual artificial industry has
availed to counteract the tendencies of nature. So entirely had Rome
engrossed whatsoever was rich by the mere bounty of native endowment.

Vast, therefore, unexampled, immeasurable, was the basis of natural power
upon which the Roman throne reposed. The military force which put Rome in
possession of this inordinate power, was certainly in some respects
artificial; but the power itself was natural, and not subject to the ebbs
and flows which attend the commercial empires of our days, (for all are in
part commercial.) The depression, the reverses, of Rome, were confined to
one shape--famine; a terrific shape, doubtless, but one which levies its
penalty of suffering, not by elaborate processes that do not exhaust their
total cycle in less than long periods of years. Fortunately for those who
survive, no arrears of misery are allowed by this scourge of ancient days;
[Footnote: "_Of ancient days_."--For it is remarkable, and it serves
to mark an indubitable progress of mankind, that, before the Christian
era, famines were of frequent occurrence in countries the most civilized;
afterwards they became rare, and latterly have entirely altered their
character into occasional dearths.] the total penalty is paid down at
once. As respected the hand of man, Rome slept for ages in absolute
security. She could suffer only by the wrath of Providence; and, so long
as she continued to be Rome, for many a generation she only of all the
monarchies has feared no mortal hand [Footnote: Unless that hand were her
own armed against herself; upon which topic there is a burst of noble
eloquence in one of the ancient Panegyrici, when haranguing the Emperor
Theodosius: "Thou, Rome! that, having once suffered by the madness of
Cinna, and of the cruel Marius raging from banishment, and of Sylla, that
won his wreath of prosperity from thy disasters, and of Cæsar,
compassionate to the dead, didst shudder at every blast of the trumpet
filled by the breath of civil commotion,--thou, that, besides the wreck of
thy soldiery perishing on either side, didst bewail, amongst thy
spectacles of domestic woe, the luminaries of thy senate extinguished, the
heads of thy consuls fixed upon a halberd, weeping for ages over thy self-
slaughtered Catos, thy headless Ciceros (_truncosque Cicerones_), and
unburied Pompeys;--to whom the party madness of thy own children had
wrought in every age heavier woe than the Carthaginian thundering at thy
gates, or the Gaul admitted within thy walls; on whom OEmathia, more fatal
than the day of Allia,--Collina, more dismal than Cannæ,--had inflicted
such deep memorials of wounds, that, from bitter experience of thy own
valor, no enemy was to thee so formidable as thyself;--thou, Rome! didst
now for the first time behold a civil war issuing in a hallowed
prosperity, a soldiery appeased, recovered Italy, and for thyself liberty
established. Now first in thy long annals thou didst rest from a civil war
in such a peace, that righteously, and with maternal tenderness, thou
mightst claim for it the honors of a civic triumph."]

--"God and his Son except,
Created thing nought valued she nor shunned."

That the possessor and wielder of such enormous power--power alike
admirable for its extent, for its intensity, and for its consecration from
all counterforces which could restrain it, or endanger it--should be
regarded as sharing in the attributes of supernatural beings, is no more
than might naturally be expected. All other known power in human hands has
either been extensive, but wanting in intensity--or intense, but wanting
in extent--or, thirdly, liable to permanent control and hazard from some
antagonist power commensurate with itself. But the Roman power, in its
centuries of grandeur, involved every mode of strength, with absolute
immunity from all kinds and degrees of weakness. It ought not, therefore,
to surprise us that the emperor, as the depositary of this charmed power,
should have been looked upon as a _sacred_ person, and the imperial family
considered a "_divina_ domus." It is an error to regard this as excess of
adulation, or as built _originally_ upon hypocrisy. Undoubtedly the
expressions of this feeling are sometimes gross and overcharged, as we
find them in the very greatest of the Roman poets: for example, it shocks
us to find a fine writer in anticipating the future canonization of his
patron, and his instalment amongst the heavenly hosts, begging him to keep
his distance warily from this or that constellation, and to be cautious of
throwing his weight into either hemisphere, until the scale of proportions
were accurately adjusted. These doubtless are passages degrading alike to
the poet and his subject. But why? Not because they ascribe to the emperor
a sanctity which he had not in the minds of men universally, or which even
to the writer's feeling was exaggerated, but because it was expressed
coarsely, and as a _physical_ power: now, every thing physical is
measurable by weight, motion, and resistance; and is therefore definite.
But the very essence of whatsoever is supernatural lies in the indefinite.
That power, therefore, with which the minds of men invested the emperor,
was vulgarized by this coarse translation into the region of physics. Else
it is evident, that any power which, by standing above all human control,
occupies the next relation to superhuman modes of authority, must be
invested by all minds alike with some dim and undefined relation to the
sanctities of the next world. Thus, for instance, the Pope, as the father
of Catholic Christendom, could not _but_ be viewed with awe by any
Christian of deep feeling, as standing in some relation to the true and
unseen Father of the spiritual body. Nay, considering that even false
religions, as those of Pagan mythology, have probably never been utterly
stripped of all vestige of truth, but that every such mode of error has
perhaps been designed as a process, and adapted by Providence to the case
of those who were capable of admitting no more perfect shape of truth;
even the heads of such superstitions (the Dalai Lama, for instance) may
not unreasonably be presumed as within the cognizance and special
protection of Heaven. Much more may this be supposed of him to whose care
was confided the weightier part of the human race; who had it in his power
to promote or to suspend the progress of human improvement; and of whom,
and the motions of whose will, the very prophets of Judea took cognizance.
No nation, and no king, was utterly divorced from the councils of God.
Palestine, as a central chamber of God's administration, stood in some
relation to all. It has been remarked, as a mysterious and significant
fact, that the founders of the great empires all had some connection, more
or less, with the temple of Jerusalem. Melancthon even observes it in his
Sketch of Universal History, as worthy of notice--that Pompey died, as it
were, within sight of that very temple which he had polluted. Let us not
suppose that Paganism, or Pagan nations, were therefore excluded from the
concern and tender interest of Heaven. They also had their place allowed.
And we may be sure that, amongst them, the Roman emperor, as the great
accountant for the happiness of more men, and men more cultivated, than
ever before were intrusted to the motions of a single will, had a special,
singular, and mysterious relation to the secret counsels of Heaven.

Even we, therefore, may lawfully attribute some sanctity to the Roman
emperor. That the Romans did so with absolute sincerity is certain. The
altars of the emperor had a twofold consecration; to violate them, was the
double crime of treason and heresy, In his appearances of state and
ceremony, the fire, the sacred fire _epompeue_ was carried in ceremonial
solemnity before him; and every other circumstance of divine worship
attended the emperor in his lifetime. [Footnote: The fact is, that the
emperor was more of a sacred and divine creature in his lifetime than
after his death. His consecrated character as a living ruler was a truth;
his canonization, a fiction of tenderness to his memory.]

To this view of the imperial character and relations must be added one
single circumstance, which in some measure altered the whole for the
individual who happened to fill the office. The emperor _de facto_
might be viewed under two aspects: there was the man, and there was the
office. In his office he was immortal and sacred: but as a question might
still be raised, by means of a mercenary army, as to the claims of the
particular individual who at any time filled the office, the very sanctity
and privilege of the character with which he was clothed might actually be
turned against himself; and here it is, at this point, that the character
of Roman emperor became truly and mysteriously awful. Gibbon has taken
notice of the extraordinary situation of a subject in the Roman empire who
should attempt to fly from the wrath of the crown. Such was the ubiquity
of the emperor that this was absolutely hopeless. Except amongst pathless
deserts or barbarous nomads, it was impossible to find even a transient
sanctuary from the imperial pursuit. If he went down to the sea, there he
met the emperor: if he took the wings of the morning, and fled to the
uttermost parts of the earth, there also was the emperor or his
lieutenants. But the same omnipresence of imperial anger and retribution
which withered the hopes of the poor humble prisoner, met and confounded
the emperor himself, when hurled from his giddy elevation by some
fortunate rival. All the kingdoms of the earth, to one in that situation,
became but so many wards of the same infinite prison. Flight, if it were
even successful for the moment, did but a little retard his inevitable
doom. And so evident was this, that hardly in one instance did the fallen
prince _attempt_ to fly; but passively met the death which was inevitable,
in the very spot where ruin had overtaken him. Neither was it possible
even for a merciful conqueror to show mercy; for, in the presence of an
army so mercenary and factious, his own safety was but too deeply involved
in the extermination of rival pretenders to the crown.

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