The question of my health has always been less interesting to me than it has been to others. From my youth I have been frail, and subject to such a variety of maladies that more doctors than I like to imagine have been made wealthy. Their wealth has been largely unearned, I suspect; but I do not begrudge them what I have given them. So often has my body led me near death that, in my sixth consulship, when I was thirty-five years old, the Senate decreed that every four years the consuls and the priests of the orders undertake vows and make sacrifices for the state of my health. To fulfill these vows, games were held so that the people might be made to remember their prayers, and all citizens, both individually and by municipalities, were encouraged to perform continued sacrifices for my health at the temples of the gods. It was a foolishness, of course; but it did at least as much for my health as the various medications and treatments that my doctors subjected me to, and it let the people feel that they were participating in the fate of the Empire.
Six times during my life has this tomb of my soul led me to the brink ofthat eternal darkness into which all men sink at last, and six times it has stepped back, as if at the behest of a destiny it could not overmaster. And I have long outlived my friends, in whose lives I existed more fully than in my own. All are dead, those early friends. Julius Caesar died at fifty-eight, nearly twenty years younger than I am now; and I have always believed that his death came as much from that boredom which presages carelessness as from the assassins’ daggers. Salvidienus Rufus died at the age of twenty-three, in his pride and by his own hand, because he thought he had betrayed our friendship. Poor Salvidienus. Of all my early friends, he was most like me. I wonder if he ever knew that the betrayal was my own, that he was the innocent victim of an infection that he caught from me. Vergil died at fifty-one, and I was at his bedside; in his delirium, he thought he died a failure, and made me promise to destroy his great poem on the founding of Rome. And then Marcus Agrippa, at the age of fifty, who had never had a day of illness in his life, died suddenly, at the height of his powers, before I could reach him to bid him farewell. And a few years later-in my memory, the years dissolve into one another, like the notes of tambour and lute and trumpet, to make a single sound-within a month of each other, Maecenas and Horace were dead. Except for you, my dear Nicolaus, they were the last of my old friends.
It seems to me now, as my own life is slowly trickling away, that there was a kind of symmetry in their lives that my own has not had. My friends died at the height of their powers, when they had accomplished their work and yet had further triumphs to look forward to; nor were they so unfortunate to come to believe that their lives had been lived for nothing. For nearly twenty years, it seems to me now, my life has been lived for nothing. Alexander was fortunate to have died so young, else he would have come to know that if to conquer a world is a small thing, to rule it is even less.
As you know, both my admirers and detractors have likened me to that ambitious young Macedonian; it is true that the Roman Empire is now constituted of many of the lands that Alexander first conquered, it is true that like him I came to my power as a young man, and it is true that I have traveled in many of the lands that he first subjugated to his rather barbaric will. But I have never wished to conquer the world, and I have been more nearly ruled than ruler.
The lands that I have added to our Empire, I have added to insure the safety of our frontiers; had Italy been safe without those additions, I should have been content to remain within our ancient borders. As it turned out, I have had to spend more of my life than I would have liked in foreign lands. From the mouth where the Bosporus spills into the Black Sea to the farthest shores of Spain I have traveled, and from the cold wastes of Pannonia where the German barbarians are contained to the burning deserts of Africa. Yet more often than not I did not go as conqueror, but as emissary, in peaceful negotiation with rulers that were more likely to resemble tribal chieftains than heads of state, and who often had neither Latin nor Greek. Unlike my uncle Julius Caesar, who found some odd renewal in such extended travels, I never felt at home in those distant lands, and always longed for the Italian countryside, and even Rome.
And yet I came to have respect and even some affection for these strange people, so unlike Romans, with whom I had to deal. The northern tribesman, his half-naked body swathed in the skins of animals he had killed with his own hands, staring at me through the smoke of a campfire, was not unlike the swarthy African who entertained me in a villa the opulence of which would dim that of many a Roman mansion; nor was the tur-baned Persian chieftain with his carefully curled beard and his curious trousers and cloak embroidered with gold and silver thread, his eyes as watchful as those of a serpent, unlike the Numidian savage chieftain who stood before me with his javelin and his shield of elephant hide, his ebon body wrapped loosely with the skin of a leopard. At one time or another I have given power to such men; I have made them kings in their lands and given them the protection of Rome. I have even made them citizens, so that the stability of their kingdoms might have the name of Rome behind them. They were barbarians; I could not trust them; and yet more often than not I found as much to admire in them as I did to detest. And knowing them made me more fully understand my own countrymen, who have often seemed to me as strange as any people who inhabit the world.
Beneath the perfume and under the coiffure of the Roman dandy who minces about his carefully tended garden in his toga of forbidden silk, there is the rude peasant who walks behind his plough and is anointed by the dust of his labor; hidden by the marble facade of the most opulent Roman mansion there is the straw-thatched hut of the farmer; and within the priest who by solemn ritual dispatches the white heifer there is the laboring father who would provide meat for his family's table and clothing against the winter's chill.
At one time, when it was necessary for me to secure the favor and gratitude of the people, I was in the habit of arranging gladiatorial games. At that time, most of the contestants were criminals whose offenses would otherwise have been punishable by death or deportation. I gave them the choice of the arena or the legal consequences of their acts, and further stipulated that the defeated fighter might plead for mercy, and that he who survived three years, no matter what his offense might have been, would be set free. I had no surprise that the criminal condemned to death or relegated to the mines might choose the arena; but it always surprised me that a criminal who had been exiled from Rome more quickly chose the arena than the relatively safe hazards of a strange country. I never enjoyed these contests, yet I forced myself to attend them, so that the people might feel that I shared in their pleasure; and their pleasure in this carnage was extraordinary to behold. It was as if they took some strange sustenance into their lives by observing another less fortunate than they relinquish his own. More than once I have had to calm the lust of the mob by sparing the life of some poor wretch who had fought bravely; and I have observed, as if upon a single face, the sullen disappointment of unconsum-mated lust. At one time I suspended those games in which one or another of the contestants was intended to lose his life, and substituted boxing matches, in which Italian was pitted against barbarian; but this did not please the mob, and others who wished to buy the admiration of the people produced spectacles of such carnage and abandon that I was forced to give up my substitution and once again be guided by the desires of my countrymen, so that I might control them.