Imperial Purple | Page 9

people publicly applied to him an
epithet which does not look well in print.
After Philippi and the suicide of Brutus; after Actium and Antony's
death, for the first time in ages, the gates of the Temple of Janus were
closed. There was peace in the world; but it was the sword of Caesar,
not of Augustus, that brought the insurgents to book. At each of the
victories he was either asleep or ill. At the time of battle there was
always some god warning him to be careful. The battle won, he was
brave enough, considerate even. A father and son begged for mercy. He
promised forgiveness to the son on condition that he killed his father.
The son accepted and did the work; then he had the son despatched. A
prisoner begged but for a grave. "The vultures will see to it," he
answered. When at the head of Caesar's legions, he entered Rome to
avenge the latter's death, he announced beforehand that he would
imitate neither Caesar's moderation nor Sylla's cruelty. There would be
only a few proscriptions, and a price--and what a price, liberty!--was
placed on the heads of hundreds of senators and thousands of knights.
And these people, who had more slaves than they knew by sight, slaves
whom they tossed alive to fatten fish, slaves to whom they affected
never to speak, and who were crucified did they so much as sneeze in
their presence--at the feet of these slaves they rolled, imploring them
not to deliver them up. Now and then a slave was merciful; Augustus

never.
Successes such as these made him ambitious. Having vanquished with
the sword, he tried the pen. "You may grant the freedom of the city to
your barbarians," said a wit to him one day, "but not to your
solecisms." Undeterred he began a tragedy entitled "Ajax," and
discovering his incompetence, gave it up. "And what has become of
Ajax?" a parasite asked. "Ajax threw himself on a sponge," replied
Augustus, whose father, it is to be regretted, did not do likewise.
Nevertheless, it were pleasant to have assisted at his funeral.
A couch of ivory and gold, ten feet high, draped with purple, stood for
a week in the atrium of the palace. Within the couch, hidden from view,
the body of the emperor lay, ravaged by poison. Above was a statue,
recumbent, in wax, made after his image and dressed in imperial robes.
Near by a little slave with a big fan protected the statue from flies. Each
day physicians came, gazed at the closed wax mouth, and murmured,
"He is worse." In the vestibule was a pot of burning ilex, and stretching
out through the portals a branch of cypress warned the pontiffs from the
contamination of the sight of death.
At high noon on the seventh day the funeral crossed the city. First were
the flaming torches; the statues of the House of Octavia; senators in
blue; knights in scarlet; magistrates; lictors; the pick of the praetorian
guard. Then, to the alternating choruses of boys and girls, the rotting
body passed down the Sacred Way. Behind it Tiberius in a
travelling-cloak, his hands unringed, marched meditating on the
curiosities of life, while to the rear there straggled a troop of dancing
satyrs, led by a mime dressed in resemblance of Augustus, whose
defects he caricatured, whose vices he parodied and on whom the
surging crowd closed in.
On the Field of Mars the pyre had been erected, a great square structure
of resinous wood, the interior filled with coke and sawdust, the exterior
covered with illuminated cloths, on which, for base, a tower rose, three
storeys high. Into the first storey flowers and perfumes were thrown,
into the second the couch was raised, then a torch was applied.
As the smoke ascended an eagle shot from the summit, circled a
moment, and disappeared. For the sum of a million sesterces a senator
swore that with the eagle he had seen the emperor's soul.

III
FABULOUS FIELDS
Mention Tiberius, and the name evokes a taciturn tyrant, devising in
the crypts of a palace infamies so monstrous that to describe them new
words were coined.
In the Borghese collection Tiberius is rather good-looking than
otherwise, not an Antinous certainly, but manifestly a dreamer; one
whose eyes must have been almost feline in their abstraction, and in the
corners of whose mouth you detect pride, no doubt, but melancholy as
well. The pride was congenital, the melancholy was not.
Under Tiberius there was quiet, a romancer wrote, and the phrase in its
significance passed into legend. During the dozen or more years that he
ruled in Rome, his common sense was obvious. The Tiber overflowed,
the senate looked for a remedy in the Sibyline Books. Tiberius set some