Historia Amoris: A History of Love, Ancient and Modern Part 7

Socrates, who had been leaning against the table, lay back on his couch.

The grave discourse was ended. Aristophanes was preparing to reply.

Suddenly there was violent knocking at the door without. A little later the voice of Alcibiades was heard resounding through the court. In a state of great intoxication he was roaring and shouting "Agathon! Where is Agathon? Lead me to Agathon." Then at once, ma.s.sively crowned with flowers, half supported by a flute girl, Alcibiades, ribald and importunate, staggered in. The grave discourse was ended, the banquet as well.

There is an Orphic fragment which runs: The innumerable souls that are precipitated from the great heart of the universe swarms as birds swarm.

They flutter and sink. From sphere to sphere they fall and in falling weep. They are thy tears, Dionysos. O Liberator divine, resummon thy children to thy breast of light.

In the Epiphanies at Eleusis the doctrine disclosed was demonstrative of that conception. The initiate learned the theosophy of the soul, its cycles and career. In that career the soul's primal home was color, its sustenance light. From beat.i.tude to beat.i.tude it floated, blissfully, in ethereal evolutions, until, attracted by the forms of matter, it sank lower, still lower, to awake in the senses of man.

The theory detained Plato. In the _Phaedrus_, which is the supplement of the _Symposion_, he made it refract something approaching the splendor of truth revealed. With Socrates again for mouthpiece, he declared that in anterior existence we all stood a constant witness of the beautiful and the true, adding that, if now the presence of any shape of earthly loveliness evokes a sense of astonishment and delight, the effect is due to reminiscences of what we once beheld when we were other than what we are.

"It seems, then," Plato noted, "as though we had found again some object, very precious, which, once ours, had vanished. The impression is not illusory. Beauty is really a belonging which we formerly possessed.

Mingling in the choir of the elect our souls anteriorly contemplated the eternal essences among which beauty shone. Fallen to this earth we recognize it by the intermediary of the most luminous of our senses.

Sight, though the subtlest of the organs, does not perceive wisdom. Beauty is more apparent. At the sight of a face lit with its rays, memory returns, emotions recur, we think love is born in us and it is, yet it is but born anew."

There is a Persian ma.n.u.script which, read one way, is an invocation to love in verse, and which, read backward, is an essay on mathematics in prose. Love is both a poem and a treatise. It was in that aspect Plato regarded it. It had grown since Homer. It had developed since the Song of Songs. With Plato it attained a height which it never exceeded until Plato himself revived with the Renaissance. In the interim it wavered and diminished. There came periods when it pa.s.sed completely away. Whether Plato foresaw that evaporation, is conjectural. But his projection of the drunken Alcibiades into the gravity of the Banquet is significant. The dissolute, entering suddenly there, routed beauty and was, it may be, but an unconscious prefigurement of the coming orgy in which love also disappeared.

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, citizens.h.i.+p and the family. The t.i.tle Roma.n.u.s sum was equal to that of rex. The t.i.tle 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 G.o.ds. In the rude beginnings the latter were savage as they. Revealed in panic and thunder, they were G.o.ds of prey and of fright. Rome, whom they mortified, made no attempt to impose them on other people. With superior tact she lured their G.o.ds from them. She made love to them. With nave effrontery she seduced them away. The process Macrobius described. At the walls of any beleaguered city, a consul, his head veiled, p.r.o.nounced the consecrated words. "If there be here G.o.ds 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 G.o.d could resist. In triumph Rome escorted one after another away, leaving the forsaken but doorposts to wors.h.i.+p, 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 G.o.ds, 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 laevitatem_--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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sed before a divorce occurred.[15]

The supremacy was otherwise facilitated. The atrium, unlike the gynaeceum, was not a remote and inaccessible apartment, it was the living-room, the sanctuary of the household G.o.ds, 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 Caus, ibi ego Caa--from that moment, legally _in manum viri_, actually she became mistress of whatever her husband possessed, she became his a.s.sociate, his partner, sharing with him the administration of the patrimony, governing the household, the slaves, Caus 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 inst.i.tuted with symbolic nymphs a veritable wors.h.i.+p of women. Thereafter feminine prerogatives developed from the theory and practice of marriage itself. In theory, marriage was an a.s.sociation 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 G.o.ds brooded inimical still. Ultimately, protests persisting, the patricians consented that these n.o.bodies 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.ds 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 _univirae_--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, "G.o.d 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 und.y.k.ed 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, pa.s.sed 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 aemilius 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 cus.h.i.+oned 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 h.e.l.lenic 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 ma.s.sacres, 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 pa.s.sion mingled, and spilled them in the open streets. Cra.s.sus 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 Caesar. Sylla told him to repudiate his wife as Pompey had. Caesar 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 a.s.sisting at the mysteries of the Bona Dea, held on this occasion in Caesar'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 Caesar 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. Caesar 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 Caesar 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 G.o.ds 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 beat.i.tude that the statues displayed.

Isis typified that beat.i.tude. The G.o.ddess, 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 G.o.ds. 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 G.o.ds also, a hierarchy of great idle divinities with, beneath them, cohorts of inferior fiends. But the great light was Isis. G.o.ddess of life and G.o.ddess 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 h.e.l.lenic hetaira. To apt.i.tudes natural and very great, she added a varied a.s.sortment 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 Caesar.

Cleopatra must have been very heady. Caesar 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 Caesar. 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 n.o.body--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.