Historia Amoris: A History of Love, Ancient and Modern

VII
ROMA-AMOR

It was the mission of Rome to make conquests, not statues, not to create, but to quell. Her might reverberated in the roar of her name. Roma means strength. It is only in reading it backward that Amor appears. Love there was secondary. Might had precedence. It was Might that made first the home, then the state, then the senate that ruled the world. That might, which was so great that to ablate it the earth had to bear new races, was based on two things, citizenship and the family. The title Romanus sum was equal to that of rex. The title of matron was superior.

The Romans, primarily but a band of outlaws, carried away the daughters of their neighbors by force. Their first conquest was woman. The next was the gods. In the rude beginnings the latter were savage as they. Revealed in panic and thunder, they were gods of prey and of fright. Rome, whom they mortified, made no attempt to impose them on other people. With superior tact she lured their gods from them. She made love to them. With naïve effrontery she seduced them away. The process Macrobius described. At the walls of any beleaguered city, a consul, his head veiled, pronounced the consecrated words. “If there be here gods that have under their care this people and this city, we pray, supplicate, and adjure them to desert the temples, to abandon the altars, to inspire terror there, to come to Rome near us and ours, that our temples, being more agreeable and precious, may predispose them to protect us. It being understood and agreed that we dedicate to them larger altars, grander games.”¹³

It was with that formula that Rome conquered the world. She omitted it but once, at the walls of Jerusalem. The deity whom she forgot there to invoke, entered her temples and overthrew them.

Meanwhile the flatteries of the formula no known god could resist. In triumph Rome escorted one after another away, leaving the forsaken but doorposts to worship, and stimulating in them the desire to become part of the favored city where their divinities were. But in that city everything was closed to them. Deserted by their gods, divested, in consequence, of religion and, therefore, of every right, they could no longer pray, the significance of signs and omens was lost to them, they were plebs. But the Romans, who had captivated the divinities, and who, through them, alone possessed the incommunicable science of augury, were patrician. In that distinction is the origin of Rome’s aristocracy and her might.

The might pre-existed in the despotic organization of the home. There the slaves and children were but things that could be sold or killed. They were the chattels of the paterfamilias, whose wife was a being without influence or initiative, a creature in the hands of a man, unable to leave him for any cause whatever, a domestic animal over whom he had the right of life and death, a ward who, regarded as mentally irresponsible —propter animi lævitatem– might not escape his power even though he died, a woman whom he could repudiate at will and of whom he was owner and judge.¹⁴

Such was the law and such it remained, a dead letter, nullified by a reason profoundly human, which the legislature had overlooked, but which the Asiatics had foreseen and which they combated with the seraglio where woman, restricted to a fraction of her lord, exhausted herself in contending even for that. But Rome, in making the paterfamilias despotic, made him monogamous as well. He was strictly restricted to one wife. As a consequence, the materfamilias, while theoretically a slave, became practically what woman with her husband to herself and no rivals to fear almost inevitably does become – supreme. Legally she was the property of her husband, actually he was hers. When he returned from forage or from war, she alone had the right to greet him, she alone might console and caress. In the eye of the gods if not of the law she was his equal when not his superior. By virtue of the law he could divorce her at will, he could kill her if she so much as presumed to drink wine. By virtue of her supremacy five hundred and twenty years passed before a divorce occurred.¹⁵

The supremacy was otherwise facilitated. The atrium, unlike the gynæceum, was not a remote and inaccessible apartment, it was the living-room, the sanctuary of the household gods, a common hall to which friends were admitted, visitors came, and where the matron presided. From the moment when, in accordance with the ceremonies of marriage, her hair – in memory of the Sabines – parted by a javelin’s point, an iron ring – symbol of eternity – on her fourth finger, the wedding bread eaten, her purchase money paid, and she, lifted over the threshold of the atrium, uttered the sacramental words – Ubi tu Caïus, ibi ego Caïa – from that moment, legally in manum viri, actually she became mistress of whatever her husband possessed, she became his associate, his partner, sharing with him the administration of the patrimony, governing the household, the slaves, Caïus himself.

Said Cato: “Everywhere else women are ruled by men, but we who rule all men, are ruled by women.” They had done so from the first. The treatment of the Sabines was clearly violent in addition to being mythical. But, even in legend, these young women were not deserted as were the Ariadnes and Medeas of Greece. They became Roman matrons, as such circled with respect. Later, Egeria instituted with symbolic nymphs a veritable worship of women. Thereafter feminine prerogatives developed from the theory and practice of marriage itself. In theory, marriage was an association for the pursuit of things human and divine.¹⁶ In practice, it was the fusion of two lives – a fusion manifestly incomplete if all were not held in common. Community of goods means equality. From equality to superiority there is but a step. The matron took it. She became supreme as already she was patrician.

Between patrician and plebeian there was an abyss too wide for marriage to bridge. Such a union would have been regarded as abnormal. The plebeian did not at first dare to conceive of such a thing. When later he protested against his helotry it was in silence. He but vacated the city where the earth threatened to open beneath him and where his lost gods brooded inimical still. Ultimately, protests persisting, the patricians consented that these nobodies should be somebodies, provided at least they were men. Already Roman by birth, they became Roman by law.

Whether man or woman, it was a high privilege to be that. The woman who was not, the manumitted slave, the foreigner within the walls, the code disdained to consider. Statutes against shames took no account of her. Beyond the pale even of ethics, the attitude to her of others concerned but herself.

But about the Roman woman were thrown Lycurgian laws. A forfeiture of her honor was a disgrace to the State. Her people killed her —Cognati necanto uti volent– as they liked. On the morrow there was nothing that told of the tragedy save the absence of a woman seen no more. If she were seen, if father or husband neglected his duty, public indictment ensued with death or exile for result. From the indictment and its penalties appeal could be had. From the edile could be obtained the Licentia stupri, the right to the antique livery of shame. But thereafter the purple no longer bordered the robe of the ex-patrician. She could no longer be driven in chariots or be borne in litters by slaves; the fillet, taken from her, was replaced by a yellow wig; a harlot then, she was civilly dead.¹⁷

Tacitus has said that under Tiberius a special law had to be enacted to prevent women of rank from such descent. During the austerer days of the republic the derogation was unknown. The Greek ideal of woman which the hetaira exemplified was beauty. Honor, which was the Roman ideal, the matron achieved.

To the matrons reverently Rome bowed. The purple border on their mantle compelled respect. The modesty of their eyes and ears was protected by grave laws. In days of danger the senate asked their aid. The gods could have no purer incense than their prayers. There was no homage greater than their esteem. Such a word as dignity was too colorless to be employed regarding them, it was the term majesty that was used. The vestal was but a more perfect type of these women on whose tomb univiræ– the wife of one man – was alone inscribed.

The honor of the Roman matron was a national affair, the honor of a Roman girl a public concern. Because of the one, royalty was abolished. Because of the other, the decemvirs fell. In neither case was there revolution. On the contrary. In the first instance, that of Lucretia, it was the insurrection of Tarquin against the inviolability of virtue. In the second, that of Virginia, it was the insurrection of Appius Claudius against the inviolability of love, dual insurrections, probably mythical, which Rome, with legendary fury, suppressed, and which, whether historic or imaginary, was typical of the energetic character that made her what she was, proud, despotic, sovereign of the world.

“The empire that Rome won,” St. Augustin, with agreeable ingenuousness, remarked, “God gave her in order that, though pagan and consequently unrewardable hereafter, her virtues should not remain unrecognized below.” Nor were they, and that, too, despite the fact that they omitted to endure, except, as Cicero said, in books; “in old books,” he added, “which no one reads any more.” But in the interim three things had occurred. Greece, wounded to the death, had flooded Rome with the hemorrhages of her expiring art. Asia had undyked the sea of her corruption. Both had cascaded their riches. Rome hitherto had been poor, she had been puritan. Hers had been the peasant’s hard plain life. The costume of the matron, which custom had made stately, the lex Oppia had made severe. This statute, passed at the time of the Carthagenian invasion, was a measure of public utility devised to increase the budget of war. Its abrogation coincided with the fall of Macedon and the return of Æmilius Paulus, bringing with him the sack of seventy cities, the prodigious booty of ravaged Greece, the prelude to that of the East. Behind these eruptions was the contagion of fastidious caprices that demoralized Rome.

Heretofore, innocent of excesses, ignorant of refinements, in antique simplicity, Rome had sat briefly and upright before her frugal fare. Thereafter, on cushioned beds were repasts, long and savorous, eaten to the sound of crotal and of flute. There were after-courses of ballerine and song, the refreshment of perfume, the luxurious tonic of the bath, the red feather that enabled one to eat again, the marvels of Asiatic debauchery, the surprises of Hellenic grace. In the charm of foreign spells former austerities were forgot. Romans who had not been initiated in them abroad had the returning victors for tutors at home.

Sylla was particularly instructive. Carthagenian in ferocity, Babylonian in lubricity, Hamilcar and Belshazzar in one, the ugliest and most formidable Roman of the lot, his life, which an ulcer ravaged, was a succession of massacres, orgies, and crimes. Married one after another to three women of wealth, who to him were but stepping stones to fortune, on a day when he was preparing to give one of those festivals, the splendor and the art of which he had learned from Mithridates, his third wife fell ill. Death discourages Fortune. Sylla sent her a bill of divorce and ordered her to be taken from the house, which was done, just in time, she was dying. Sylla promptly remarried, then married again, and yet again. Meanwhile, he had a daughter and an eye on the promising Pompey. His daughter was married. So too was Pompey. He forced his daughter from her husband, forced Pompey to repudiate his wife, and forced them to marry.

Sylla had brought with him from the East its curious cups in which blood and passion mingled, and spilled them in the open streets. Crassus outdid him in magnificence, and Lucullus eclipsed them both. Asia had yielded to these men the fortune of her people, the honor of her children, the treasure of her temples, the secrets of their sin. The Orientalisms which they imported, their deluge of coin, their art of marrying cruelty to pleasure, set Rome mad.

Among the maddest was Catiline. That tiger, in whose vestibule were engraved the laws of facile love, affiliated women of rank, others of none, soldiers and slaves, in his convulsive cause. Shortly, throughout the Latin territory, a mysterious sound was heard. It was like the clash of arms afar. The augurs, interrogated, announced that the form of the State was about to change. The noise was the crackling of the republic.¹⁸

Before it fell came Cæsar. Sylla told him to repudiate his wife as Pompey had. Cæsar declined to be commanded. The house of Julia, to which he belonged, descended, he declared, from Venus. Venus Pandemos, perhaps. But the ancestry was typical. Cinna drafted a law giving him the right to marry as often as he chose. After the episodes in Gaul, when he entered Rome, his legions warned the citizens to have an eye to their wives. Meanwhile, he had repudiated Pompeia, his wife, not to please Sylla but himself, or rather because Publius Claudius, a young gallant, had been discovered disguised as a woman assisting at the mysteries of the Bona Dea, held on this occasion in Cæsar’s house. To these ceremonies men were not admitted. The affair made a great scandal. Pompeia was suspected of having helped Publius to be present. The suspicion was probably unfounded. But Cæsar held that his wife should be above suspicion. He divorced her in consequence and married Calpurnia, not for love but for place. Her father was consul. Cæsar wanted his aid and got it. Then, after creating a solitude and calling it peace, after turning over two million people into so many dead flies, after giving geography such a twist that to-day whoso says Cæsar says history – after these pauses in the ascending scale of his unequalled life, at the age of fifty, bald, tired, and very pale, there was brought to him at Alexandria a bundle, from which, when opened, there emerged a little wonder called Cleopatra, but who was Isis unveiled.¹⁹

VIII
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

In Greece beauty was the secret of life. In Egypt it was the secret of death. The sphinxes that crouched in the avenues, the caryatides at the palace doors, the gods on their pedestals, had an expression enigmatic but identical. It was as though some of them listened, while others repeated the story of the soul’s career. In the chambers of the tombs the echo of the story descended. The dead were dreaming, and draining it. Saturated with aromatics, wound about with spirals of thin bands, they were dressed as for nuptials. On their faces was the same beatitude that the statues displayed.

Isis typified that beatitude. The goddess, in whose mysteries were taught both the immortality of the soul and the secret of its migrations, was one of Ishtar’s many avatars, the only one whose attributes accorded even remotely with the divine. Egypt adored her. There were other gods. There was Osiris, the father; Horus, the son, who with Isis formed the trinity which India and Persia both possessed, and which Byzance afterward perpetuated. There were other gods also, a hierarchy of great idle divinities with, beneath them, cohorts of inferior fiends. But the great light was Isis. Goddess of life and goddess of death, she had for sceptre a lotos and for crown a cormorant; the lotos because it is emblematic of love, and the cormorant because, however replete, it says never Enough.

Isis was the consort of Osiris. She was also his sister. It was customary for the queens of Egypt to call themselves after her, and, like her, to marry a brother. Cleopatra followed the usual custom. In other ways she must have resembled her. She was beautiful, but not remarkably so. The Egyptian women generally were good-looking. The Asiatics admired them very much. They were preferred to the Chinese, whose eyes oblique and half-closed perturbed sages, demons even, with whom, Michelet has suggested, they were perhaps akin. Cleopatra lacked that insidiousness. Semi-Greek, a daughter of the Ptolomies, she had the charm of the Hellenic hetaira. To aptitudes natural and very great, she added a varied assortment of accomplishments. It is said that she could talk to any one in any tongue. That is probably an exaggeration. But, though a queen, she was ambitious; though a girl, she was lettered; succinctly, she was masterful, a match for any man except Cæsar.

Cleopatra must have been very heady. Cæsar knew how to keep his head. He could not have done what he did, had he not known. Dissolute, as all men of that epoch had become, he differed from all of them in his epicureanism. Like Epicurus, he was strictly temperate. He supped on dry bread. Cato said that he was the first sober man that had tried to overthrow the republic. But, then, he had been to school, to the best of schools, which the world is. His studies in anima vili had taught him many things, among them, how to win and not be won. Cleopatra might almost have been his granddaughter. But he was Cæsar. His eyes blazed with genius. Besides, he was the most alluring of men. Tall, slender, not handsome but superb – so superb that Cicero mistook him for a fop from whom the republic had nothing to fear – at seventeen he had fascinated pirates. Ever since he had fascinated queens. In the long list, Cleopatra was but another to this man whom the depths of Hither Asia, the mysteries that lay beyond, the diadems of Cyrus and Alexander, the Vistula and the Baltic claimed. There were his ambitions. They were immense. So were also Cleopatra’s. What he wanted, she wanted for him, and for herself as well. She wanted him sovereign of the world and herself its empress.

These views, in so far as they concerned her, did not interest him very greatly. His lack of interest he was, however, too well bred to display. He solidified her throne, which at the time was not stable, left her a son for souvenir, went away, forgot her, remembered her, invited her to Rome, where, presumably with Calpurnia’s permission, he put her up at his house, and again forgot her. He was becoming divine, what is superior, immortal. Even when dead, his name, adopted by the emperors of Rome, survived in Czars and Kaisers. His power too, coextensive with Rome, persisted. Severed as it was like his heart when he fell, the booty was divided between Octavius, Lepidus, and Marc Antony.

Their triumvirate – duumvirate rather, Lepidus was nobody – matrimony consolidated. Octavius married a relative of Antony and Antony married Octavius’ sister. Then the world was apportioned. Octavius got the Occident, Antony the Orient. Rome became the capital of the one, Alexandria that of the other. At the time Alexandria was Rome’s rival and superior. Rome, unsightly still with the atrocities of the Tarquins, had neither art nor commerce. These things were regarded as the occupations of slaves. Alexandria, purely Greek, very fair, opulent, and teeming, was the universal centre of both, of learning too, of debauchery as well – elements which its queen, a viper of the Nile, personified.

Before going there Antony made and unmade a dozen kings. Then, presently, at Tarsus he ordered Cleopatra to come to him. Indolently, his subject obeyed.

Cæsar claimed descent from Venus. Antony’s tutelary god was Bacchus, but he claimed descent from Hercules, whom in size and strength he resembled. The strength was not intellectual. He was an understudy of genius, a soldier of limited intelligence, who tried to imitate Cæsar and failed to understand him, a big barbarian boy, by accident satrap and god.

At Rome he had seen Cleopatra. Whether she had noticed him is uncertain. But the gilded galley with the purple sails, its silver oars, its canopy of enchantments in which she went to him at Tarsus, has been told and retold, sung and painted.

At the approach of Isis, the Tarsians crowded the shore. Bacchus, deserted on his throne, sent an officer to fetch her to him. Cleopatra insisted that he come to her. Antony, amused at the impertinence, complied. The infinite variety of this woman, that made her a suite of surprises, instantly enthralled him. From that moment he was hers, a lion in leash, led captive into Alexandria, where, initiated by her into the inimitable life, probably into the refinements of the savoir-vivre as well, Bacchus developed into Osiris, while Isis transformed herself anew. She drank with him, fished with him, hunted with him, drilled with him, played tricks on him, and, at night, in slave’s dress, romped with him in Rhakotis – a local slum – broke windows, beat the watch, captivating the captive wholly.²⁰

Where she had failed with Cæsar she determined to succeed with him, and would have succeeded, had Antony been Cæsar. Octavius was not Cæsar, either. Any man of ability, with the power and resources of which Antony disposed, could have taken the Occident from him and, with Cleopatra, ruled the world.

Together they dreamed of it. It was a beautiful dream, inimitable like their life. Rumors of the one and of the other reached Octavius. He waited, not impatiently and not long. Meanwhile Antony was still the husband of Octavia. But Cleopatra had poisoned her brother-husband. There being, therefore, no lawful reason why she and Antony should not marry, they did. Together, in the splendid palace of the Bruchium – an antique gem of which the historic brilliance still persists – they seated themselves, he as Osiris, she as Isis, on thrones of gold. Their children they declared kings of kings. Armenia, Phœnicia, Media, and Parthea, were allotted to them. To Cleopatra’s realm Antony added Syria, Lydia, and Cyprus. These distributions constituted just so many dismemberments of the res publica, Antony thought them so entirely within the scope of his prerogatives that he sent an account of the proceedings to the senate. With the account there went to Octavia a bill of divorce. Rome stood by indignant. It was precisely what Octavius wanted.

Octavius had divorced his wife and married a married woman. According to the ethics of the day, he was a model citizen, whereas Antony throning as Osiris with a female Mithridates for consort, was as oblivious of Roman dignity as of conjugal faith. In addition, it was found that he had made a will by which Rome, in the event of capture, was devised as tributary city to Cleopatra. Moreover, a senator, who had visited Antony at the Bruchium, testified that he had seen him upholding the woman’s litter like a slave. It was obvious that he was mad, demented by her aphrodisiacs. But it was obvious also that the gods of the East were rising, that Isis with her cormorant, her lotos and her spangled arms, was arrayed against the Roman penates.²¹

War was declared. At Actium the clash occurred. Antony might have won. But before he had had time to lose, Cleopatra, with singular clairvoyance, deserted him. Her reasons for believing that he would be defeated are not clear, but her motive in going is obvious. She wanted to rule the world’s ruler, whoever he might be, and she thought by prompt defection to find favor with Octavius.

At the sight of her scudding sail Antony lost his senses. Instead of remaining and winning, as he might have, he followed her. Together they reached Alexandria. But there it was no longer the inimitable life that they led, rather that of the inseparables in death, or at least Antony so fancied. Cleopatra intoxicated him with funereal delights while corresponding in secret with Octavius who had written engagingly to her. In the Bruchium the nights were festivals. By day she experimented on slaves with different poisons. Antony believed that she was preparing to die with him. She had no such intention. She was preparing to be rid of him. Then, suddenly, the enemy was at the gates. Antony challenged Octavius to single combat. Octavius sent him word that there were many other ways in which he could end his life. At that the lion roared. Even then he thought he might demolish him. He tried. He went forth to fight. But Cleopatra had other views. The infantry, the cavalry, the flotilla, joined the Roman forces. The viper of the Nile had betrayed him. Bacchus had also. The night had been stirred by the hum of harps and the cries of bacchantes bearing the tutelary god to the Romans.

Antony, staggering back to the palace, was told that Cleopatra had killed herself. She had not, but fearful lest he kill her, she had hidden with her treasure in a temple. Antony, after the Roman fashion, kept always with him a slave who should kill him when his hour was come. The slave’s name, Plutarch said, was Eros. Antony called him. Eros raised a sword, but instead of striking his master, struck himself. Antony reddened and imitated him. Another slave then told him that Cleopatra still lived. He had himself taken to where she was, and died while attempting to console this woman who was preparing for the consolations of Octavius.

It is said that she received the conqueror magnificently. But his engaging letters had been ruses de guerre. They had triumphed. The new Cæsar wanted to triumph still further. He wanted Cleopatra, a chain about her neck, dragged after his chariot through Rome. He wanted in that abjection to triumph over the entire East. Instead of yielding to her, as she had expected, he threatened to kill her children if she eluded him by killing herself. The threat was horrible. But more horrible still was the thought of the infamy to be.

Shortly, on a bed of gold, dressed as for nuptials, she was found dead among her expiring women, one of whom even then was putting back on her head her diadem which had fallen. At last the cormorant had cried “Enough!”

Said Horace: “Nunc est bibendum.”