CHAPTER IV. Life in the Palace

LIFE IN THE PALACE

There is much truth in the saying, “No man is a hero to his valet”--be his reputed heroism either of the physical or the moral type. Humanity, even at its best, is an imperfect thing, much in need of the kindly haze which mostly veils its withered ruggedness; and many an angel of sweetness and light reveals the serpent’s tail on too close inspection; but I have no such revelation to offer in this chapter. Indeed, it is in his intimate domestic life that Marcus appears to best advantage. His presence in the palace brought with it a sense of restfulness, of serenity and calm, of mutual forbearance and love. It was as if some pale glimmer of the Christian love-light played about him and diffused itself over all that came within the charmed round. His household was known as the Sacra Domus--“the sacred house.” Thus the Pax Romana--the peace that was the gift of the Antonines--though lost to the Empire, was never interrupted in the Emperor’s home; and to Marcus is due the credit.

All through life it was his lot to consort with persons having sadly different views from his own on the meaning of existence, the value of virtue; yet he was kind and sociable with all. In this he did but follow the example of the gods: “They are not vexed because, during so long a time, they must tolerate men, such as they are, and so many of them bad; and besides this they also take care of them in all ways. But thou, who art destined to end so soon, art thou wearied of enduring the bad, and this, too, when thou art one of them?” This tolerance towards the failings of others had its source in his peculiar gospel of resignation:--or should we say, fatalism? “That is good for each thing which the universal nature brings to each. And it is for its good at the time when nature brings it. ‘The earth loves the shower,’ and ‘the solemn æther loves,’ and the Universe loves to make whatever is about to be. I say then to the Universe: ‘I love as thou lovest.’” In this spirit he bore the trials of his domestic, as of his public, life; keen griefs coming from without and from within; and the keenest of all for one of his affectionate nature were those of his own household.

Apollonius had taught him “to be always the same in sharp pains, and on the occasion of the loss of a child and in long illness.” He learnt the theory of indifference to natural affection; but, fortunately, never the practice. The severe light of Stoicism was softened and suffused in passing through the medium of his gentle nature; he trusted the reasons of the heart, more than those of the pure intellect. If Stoic cosmopolitanism would have him care for men in inverse proportion to their nearness to him, he must depart from type in this. To his wife Faustina, to his children, to his tutor Fronto and to Fronto’s children, especially “little Gratia,” he was genuinely devoted.

The correspondence with Fronto, if too effusive for our taste, yet shows both in their best light. It is full of tender references to the “little ones,” their joys and their ailments. Fronto writes to the Emperor: “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 behold you, not simply face to face before me, but, more generously, whichever way I turned, to my right and to 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 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.” The Emperor replies with equal affection: “I, too, have seen my little ones in your sight of them: as also I saw yourself in reading your letter. It is that charming letter which forces me to write thus.” Alas! Apollonius; what has become of the Stoic ἀπάθεια which you inculcated with such great pains? The spirit indeed was willing, but the flesh was weak; and so the good Emperor cared more for the slender breath of life that kept soul and body together in his little Annius Verus than for all the sublime mysticity of the Weltseele--the world-soul of the Stoic creed. All the sadder was the early death of his children, one after another; one son alone being left to him--Commodus, his successor in the Empire--assuredly not the fittest to survive. “Better that he had never been born,” anyone had said, except he who had most right of all to say it. But for Marcus, whatever was, was right; the gods, if gods there were, determined all things, and they could do no wrong. Commodus, bright, handsome, impulsive, wayward, fond of gladiators and low life, found the teaching of Fronto and his father little to his taste. He was more at home in the circus and the amphitheatre than in the lecture-room; with the actors, the archers and the gladiators and the “smart set,” which Faustina gathered round her, than with the bearded and hooded sophists and rhetoricians who talked ἐγκράτεια (self-restraint) and αὐτάρκεια (self-sufficiency) in the palace gardens.

Bitter as must have been his disappointment at his ill-success with Commodus, there was another which thrust home deeper. Ill-fame had long been gathering round the name of his wife Faustina--the most beautiful woman in the Empire. One of her vivacious temperament, more Parisian than Roman, was assuredly ill-mated with the Stoic Emperor, whose days were spent in introspection; their union was “the great paradox of the age.” She knew no law but the law of the senses: while he was ever guided by the admirable but unamiable call of duty, cold as the beckoning of a star, not soft and warm as the sunlight of devotion. No modern belle of the season had more zest in the life of the moment than she had; whilst he lived always in the shadow of the wings of Death. “Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly.” Every act was to be done “with forethought, as if it were the last of thy life.” Yet, different as they were, by a whole heaven’s breadth in character, it is to the credit of both that they loved one another. The rumours that assailed her name were probably in great part the exaggerations of prurient gossips, though with sufficient foundation to make them credible. Whatever their truth, the Emperor did not hearken to them. Even when they became the property of the stage and he himself was ridiculed in connexion with them, he paid no heed. In the first book of the Meditations, written a few years before the death of Faustina, he thanks the gods that he had such a wife, “so obedient, so affectionate, so simple.” He, too, must have felt at times that Cæsar’s wife should be above suspicion, but his kindly nature was ever disposed to take the most charitable view of things, and he minded little the slanderous tongues of men.

“Does a man gather figs from thistles, or grapes from thorns?”--this was the keynote to his philosophy of life--a strange fatalist philosophy it too often was; but it served to lay the gibbering spectres that haunted the palace of the Cæsars. After all, Faustina, associating with sailors and gladiators (even if the worst were true), and Commodus, already giving free reign to his passions over all the paths of license, were but acting in accordance with nature, “just as the fruit trees” or the beasts of the forest. Thus, in the loneliness of his spirit, would Aurelius reason, with an indulgence to the shortcomings (or worse) of others, which we must condemn as weakness. But perhaps it was owing to his tact and consideration that her untamed restlessness carried her to no greater excesses, and that Pater’s words are true, “the one thing quite certain about her, besides her extraordinary beauty, is her sweetness to himself.”

One of his biographers, writing under the Emperor Diocletian, has this pious reflection on the story: “Such is the force of daily life in a good ruler, so great the power of his sanctity, gentleness, and piety, that no breath of slander or invidious suggestion from an acquaintance can avail to sully his memory. In short, to Antonine, immutable as the heavens in the tenor of his own life, and in the manifestations of his own moral temper, and who was not by possibility liable to any impulse or movement of change, on any alien suggestion, it was not eventually an injury that he was dishonoured by some of his connexions; on him, invulnerable in his own character, neither a harlot for his wife, nor a gladiator for his son, could inflict a wound. Then as now, O sacred lord Diocletian! he was reputed a god; not as others are reputed but specially and in a separate sense, and with a privilege to such worship from all men as is addressed to his memory by yourself, who often breathe a wish to heaven that you were or could be such in life and merciful disposition as was Marcus Aurelius.”

We saw that even Marcus’ integrity could not shield his household from the taint of scandal, ever mingling with the divinity that doth hedge a king; yet the life of that household was of the simplest kind. The Emperor’s tastes were mostly domestic--philosophy, the fine arts and intercourse with the learned world around him. The palace was a museum of all the curious and choice things of every land gathered together by Hadrian and preceding Emperors; the precious and luxurious were strewn all around in Oriental magnificence; but not for long. The Emperor had learnt from Antoninus to be a king without the trappings; and in his later life he set an example truly Platonic to all future monarchs of private detachment for the sake of the public good. At that time distress became universal; the treasury was exhausted; and yet money was wanted for the wars in the North. In these circumstances, in order to avoid all further taxation, Marcus put all the treasures of his Roman palaces and country villas into the public market. Jewels, pictures, furniture of rare workmanship; dinner-services of gold and crystal; murrhine vases; the rich hangings and sumptuous apparel of the imperial household, including even the wardrobe of silken robes, interwoven with gold, which had been his wife’s before her death: all these objects, made sacred by long use in the home of the divine Cæsars, were put under the hammer and fetched fabulous prices. The auction lasted two months. The novi homines--the Roman equivalent for our nouveaux riches--were as keen as would be a group of Americans at an auction of the Vatican contents. Thus the historic palace of the Cæsars was despoiled; but Marcus was content while the neighbouring library in the temple of Apollo remained intact, with Fronto and Rusticus to come at morning and evening and walk with him amidst the shrubberies of the Palatine discoursing on the great Greek schools of Ionia, of Athens, and of Elea; of Democrites, of Plato, Zeno and Pythagoras and his favourite Epictetus.

In his home, as in public, he was devoted to the old religious practices. The lararium--or family shrine--contained statues of his favourite gods, one of his own Genius (or spiritual counterpart) and those of his favourite philosophers and teachers. Here he would offer the morning sacrifice with flowers and lights and incense, and beg the favour of the gods for himself and for the Empire. There he would utter a prayer for the wayward Commodus and Faustina, and for the courage to persevere to the end on his own steep path. “Every morning I pray for Faustina,” he writes; and again: “My mother’s illness leaves me not a moment’s rest; and now Faustina’s confinement is approaching. Well, we must trust in the gods.” In all this, how strange the mixture of truth and falsehood; of crude superstition and a higher light breaking through; of matter and spirit; perhaps even of nature and grace; for it is hard not to see the special handiwork of God in these fair works of the spirit world--who will set limits to His mercy and power? or who will nicely disentangle the strands of that strange mesh-work, a human soul? St. Clement of Alexandria and St. Augustine saw in those pagan heroes those who were to prepare the way of the Lord and make straight His paths. “Paganism saw at least the road from its hill-top,” said Augustine. We too may say that they were not far from the Kingdom of God.

Christo iam tum venienti, Crede, parata via est.

“Believe me even then the path was made straight for Christ already on His way.” So sang the Christian Prudentius; and we sing, Amen! Even so, Lord Jesus.