Classic Records Reviewed or Deciphered (De Quincey’s Works; X)
Thomas De Quincey
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LONDON: JAMES HOGG &  + «© -« . 237 THE EssENEs, ° e & ° e e ® e e 253 Aruius Lamia, «tl ~ 2» © © «© « 801 PREFACE. “THe Casars,” it may be right to mention, was written in a situation which denied me the use of books ; so that with the exception of a few penciled extracts in a pocket-book from the Augustan history, I was obliged to depend upon my memory for materials, in so far as respected facts. These materials for the Western Empire are not more scanty than meagre ; and in that proportion so much the greater is the temptation which they offer to free and sceptical specu- lation. To this temptation I have yielded intermittingly ; ‘but from a fear (perhaps a cowardly fear) of being classed as a dealer in licentious paradox, I checked myself exactly where the largest license might have been properly allowed to a bold spirit of imeredulity. In particular, I cannot bring myself to believe, nor ought therefore to have assumed the tone of a believer, in the inhuman atrocities charged upon the earlier Caesars. Guided by my own instincts of truth and probability, I should, for instance, have summarily exploded the most revolting among the crimes imputed to Nero. But too often, writers who have been compelled to deal in ghastly horrors form a taste for sach scenes ; and vi PREFACE. sometimes, as may be seen exemplified in those who record the French “ Reign of Terror,” become angrily credulous, and impatient of the slightest hesitation in going along with the maniacal excesses recorded. Apparently Suetonius suffered from that morbid appetite. Else would he have countenanced the hyperbolical extravagances current about the murder ,of Agrippina? What motive had Nero for murdering his mother? or, assuming the slightest motive, what difficulty in accomplishing this murder by secret agencies ? What need for the elaborate contrivance (as in some costly pantomime) of self-dissolving ships? But waiving all this superfluity of useless mechanism, which by requiring many hands in working it must have multiplied the accomplices in the crime, and have published his inten- tions to all Rome, how do these statements tally with the instant resort of the lady herself, upon reaching land, to the affectionate sympathy of her son? Upon this sympathy she counted: but how, if all Rome knew that, like a hunted hare, she was then running on the traces of her last double before receiving her death-blow? Such a crime, so causeless as regarded provocation, so objectless as regarded purpose, and so revolting to the primal impulses of nature, would, unless popularly viewed as the crime of a maniac, have alienated from Nero even his poor simple nurse, and other dependants, who showed for many years after his death the strength of their attachment by adorning his grave with flowers, and by inflicting such vindictive insults as they could upon the corpse of his antagonist, Galba. _ Meantime that he might be insane, and entitled to the PREFACE. vii excuse Of insanity, is possible. If not, what a monstrous part in the drama is played by the Roman people, who, after this alleged crime, and believing it, yet sat with tran- quillity to hear his musical performances! But a taint of insanity certainly did prevail in the blood of the earlier Ceesars, t.e., down to Nero. Over and above this taint of physical insanity, we should do well to allow for the preternatural tendency towards moral insanity generated and nursed by the anomalous situation of the Zmperator—a situation unknown before or since ; in which situation the license allowed to the indi- vidual, after the popular comitia had virtually become ex- tinct, hid too often from his eye this perilous fact, that in one solitary direction, viz., in regard to the representative functions which he discharged as embodying the Roman majesty, he, the supreme of men upon earth, had a nar- rower license or discretionary power of action than any slave upon whose neck he trode. Better for Aum, for his own comfort in living, and for his chance of quiet in dying, that he should violate the moral sense by every act of bloody violence or of brutal appetite, than that he should trifle with the heraldic sanctity of his Imperatorial robe. Tae Essrnrs.—The paper on The Essenes, I will frankly acknowledge to my critical reader, has not had the good fortune to conciliate the sanction of the most learned amongst my friends. Good fortune, I say, as insinuating that its failure may be due to momentary accidents of hurry, or dyspepsy in the critic. For undeniably habent sua fasa libellt, by which proposition, I presume, is meant that books, and intellectual speculations of every class, are liable to good and bad luck, so little corresponding to their true proportions of merit, that sometimes for a season the momentary false reputation and the ultimate just reputation continue moving in opposite directions. Some indulgence is due to any attempt at reading into coherent meaning what, from the very beginning, was a SECRET society upon any hypothesis ; what was wilfully and elaborately darkened in order to evade an urgent danger ; what was reported only by a traitor who could not be suffered to understand much that he actually saw ; and what must now be read after a lapse of two thousand years by the glimmerings of a lamp muffled from the very first to defeat the purposes of perfidious hostility. Some indulgence, I repeat, may be claimed under such complex circumstances of difficulty. Better, meantime, by a thou- sandfold, is absolute sincerity in a critic than treacherous indulgence. Honourable, therefore, I hold it to the critic, and flattering to myself, that the answer to my Lssenes should have been sternly, and sans phrase, “It won't do.” Perhaps no; perhaps yes: we shall see. But, in the meantime, let me observe, that if my affirmative will not do, neither will a blank negative. Before an opponent can place himself in a position for rejecting my theory, he must have taken these following steps in advance towards a counter theory of his own. First, He must explain why it is that no writer in the New Testament mentions the Essenes, or even throws out PREFACE. , 1X a momentary hint of their existence.* On the assumption that the Essenes were not a Christian but a Judaic society, there could be no motive at all for ignoring them. Second, He must account for the mysterious approxima- tion to each other between the two codes of practical doc- trine—Christian and Essenic. The one is but the travesty * Some persons, not fully masters of the case, will perhaps object—That surely this difficulty presses even on myself. No, Ireply; not at all. Any notice of the Essenes would not occur in the New Testament, because any motive to such a society would not arise, until that point in the Acts of the Apostles at which occurs the protomartyrdom of St. Stephen; consequently not until near the close of the apostolic history. Whatever motive there- fore impelled the Apostles to discontinue their narrative at the particular crisis which now forms its close, would at any rate by its natural operation have excluded the secret narrative of the Essenes. But over and above that motive, whatsoever it might be, there was another. Until the Roman triumph over Jerusalem and the ecclesi- astical polity of the Temple, the danger subsisted unabated which the Essenic scheme had been devised to mect. This danger would always have menaced the Christians in Palestine, so long as the Temple service continued to flourish. And the original danger, which first prompted the Essenic resource, would—so long as it lasted—exact the same original caution as to the publication of its details—all or any. As respected the particular case of the Essenes, there was therefore a separate and special ground of silence ; and too obviously it was a matter of life and death. As to the more general motive which determined the Apostles in drawing their narrative to a close, I presume that it arose from the simple fact that the primary object was at length realized. That object had been to trace the Christian church from its earliest beginnings. This had now beer sufficiently accomplished. It was no purpose of the evan- gelists or the Apostles to write narratives of mere gratification to curiosity. And any urrear of explanations which still remained due, was simply a fuller development of doctrinal truth, which accordingly presented itself henceforward in direct epistles from the Apostles. 6 x ‘ PREFACE. of the other. The Essenic reads like such a parody of Christian ethics as would naturally emerge from the coarse hands of a Jew, intensely unspiritual and worldly, such as Josephus. But, if there were any truth in the high pre- Christian antiquity which Josephus ascribes to Essenism, in that case there must have been a Christianity before Christ. This insurmountable difficulty any opponent of my theory draws upon himself. Third, If there were eight thousand of the Josephan, z.e., the pretended non-Christian Essenes, and as their sec- tarian opinions were so widely published, how happened it that Christ, who talked freely with every order of men and women in Judea, never by accident fell in with one of this fraternity ? Or if we could suppose it possible that in so limited a territory this failure of personal rencontre should occur naturally, how happened it that Christ did not invite one of their body to his presence, or did not expressly visit some one of their pretended stations, so as to force their errors, or their truths, before the public eye ? Fourth, Supposing that, upon any inexplicable motive, such a casual meeting or such a deliberate visit did not occur from the Christian side, then why did not crowds of the Essenes spontaneously resort to Christ, as a teacher who, by repeating theer doctrines without any recognition of their community as the original well-head of such truths, was in effect ignoring themselves, and publishing in all quarters his disbelief of their existence 1 Finally, If all personal interviews on overtures from either side were unaccountably intercepted, how happened PREFACE. xi it that the doctrines and usages at least of the Essenes were not brought before Christ either by friend or by foe? or, this failing, were not subsequently noticed and discussed by the Apostles ? It has been said repeatedly that the creed of the Papal Church, or at least her theory, so far travels on the same route with the speculation here traced out, that no counte- nance is given to the pretensions of the Essenes as a Jewish philosophic sect. The plagiarisms from Christianity have apparently been felt as insufferable. But there the Romish Church halts : she denies, but she finds no satisfactory affir- mative creed to substitute. We differ, therefore (who differ? Why, go et rex meus—I and the Pope), in this important point ; and entirely to my advantage. His Holi- ness denies ; and I am bound to think him right; for 7 deny. But on Azs part this denial is a pure machtspruch, as the Germans term it ; a dogmatic assertion not resting on any pleadings whatever of fact or argument. Whereas my denial explains its own why and wherefore ; substituting besides for the frail flutterimg tent which it boasts to have demolished, a substantial house. So learned a church as the Roman Catholic would naturally have long since antici- pated this substitution, had it depended much or chiefly on erudition ; it is not however erudition that is primarily re- quired in such suggestions, but conjectural felicity. This is a qualification depending so much upon luck, and in so small a proportion upon any meritorious endow- ment, that I should not scruple to claim it for myself, and yet acknowledge any vanity in claiming it, were I abso- xii PREFACE. lutely satisfied with all the timbers and joists of my new Essenic structure, or were it “sure as death” that no horrid iconoclast, even whilst [ am yet speaking, may not be prowling round my new creation, and pointing his fatal finger to symptoms of dry-rot creeping this way or that, like cancer in unsuspected corners. Owning to this uneasiness myself (yet after all, not more in degree than the under- writers upon the Great Eastern will be likely to feel when she is out upon her trial trip), I cannot reasonably quarrel with the reader if he should utter even treasonable opinions upon my self-ascribed conjectural felicity. My own doubts are a license for Avs. Agrtius Lamr1a.—But no such license extends to the next case of Aelius Lamia: In that case I acknowledge no shadow of doubt. I have a list of conjectural decipherings applied by classical doctors to desperate lesions and abscesses in the text of famous classic authors; and [ am really ashamed to say, that my own emendation stands facile princeps among them all. I must repeat, however, that this pre-eminence is only that of luck ; and I must remind the critic, that, in judging of this case, he must not do as one writer did on the first publication of this little paper, viz., entirely lose sight of the main incident in the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Never perhaps on this earth was so threatening a whisper, a whisper so portentously significant, uttered between man and man in a single word, as in that secret suggestion of an Orpheutic voice where a wife was concerned THE CESARBS. THE majesty of the Roman Cesar Semper Augustus has never yet been fully appreciated ; nor has any man yet ex- plained sufficiently in what respects this title and this office were absolutely unique. There was but one Rome: no other city, as we are satisfied by the collation of many facts, has ever rivalled this astonishing metropolis in the grandeur of magnitude ; and not many—perhaps if we except the cities built under Grecian auspices along the line of three thousand miles, from Western Capua or Syracuse to the Euphrates and oriental Palmyra, none at all—in the gran- deur of architectural display. Speaking even of London, we ought in all reason to say—the Natron of London, and not the City of London ; but of Rome in her meridian hours, nothing else could be said im the naked rigour of logic. A million and a half of souls*—that population, apart from _ *, 4 million and a half,” which was the true numerical return of population from the English capital about twenty years back, when this paper was written. At present, and for some time, it has stood at two millions plus as many thousands as express the days of a solar year. But, if adjusted to meet the corrections due upon the annual growths of the people, in that case the true return must now (viz., January of the year 1859) show aconsiderable excess beyond two and a half millions. Do we mean to assert, then, that the ancient Rome of the Caesars, that mighty ancestral forerunner of the Papal Rome, which, in this year 1859, counts about 180,000 citizens (or, in fact, above Edinburgh by a trifle ; by 200,000 below Glasgow ; by 150,000 X-—A : THE CASARS. any other distinctions—is per se for London a justifying ground for such a classification ; @ fortiori, then, will it be- long to a city which counted from one horn to the other of its mighty suburbs not less than four millions of inhabitants at the very least, as we resolutely maintain after reviewing all that has been written on that much-vexed theme, and not impossibly half as many more. Republican Rome had below Manchester), did in reality ever surmount numerically the now awful London? Is that what we mean? Yes; that is what we mean. We must remember the prodigious area which Rome stretched over. We must remember that feature in the Roman domestic archi- tecture (so impressively insisted on by the rhetorician Aristides), in which the ancient Rome resembled the ancient Edinburgh, and so far greatly eclipsed London, viz., the vast ascending series of storeys, laying stratum upon stratum, tier upon tier, of men and women, as in some mighty theatre of human hives. Not that London is defi- cient in thousands of lofty streeta; but the storeys rarely ascend be- yond the fourth, or, at most, the fifth ; whereas the old Rome and the old Edinburgh counted at intervals by sevens or even tens. This element in the calculation being allowed for, perhaps the four millions of Lipsius may seem a reasonable population for the flourishing days of Cesarian Rome, which ran far ahead of Republican Rome. On this assumption, Rome will take the jirst place, London (as it now is) the second, Paris (of to-day) the third, New York (800,000), and pro- bably the ancient Alexandria, the fourth places on the world’s register of mighty metropolitan cities. Babylon and Nineveh are too en- tirely within the exaggerating influences of misty traditions and nur- sery fables, like the vapoury exhalations of the Fata Morgana—a species of delusion resting upon a primary basis of reality, but repeat- ing this reality so often, through endless self-multiplication, by means of optical reflexion and refraction, that the final result is little better than absolute fiction. And universally with regard to Asiatic cities (above all, with regard to Chinese cities), the reader must carry with him these cautions :-— - 1st, That Asiatics, with rare exceptions, have little regard for truth: by habit and policy they are even more mendacious than they are perfidious. THE CESARS., 3 her prerogative tribe ; the earth has its prerogative city ; and that city was Rome. As was the city, such was its prince—mysterious, soli- tary, unique. Each was to the other an adequate counter- part, each reciprocally that perfect mirror which reflected, as in alia materta, those incommunicable attributes of grandeur, that under the same shape and denomination never upon this earth were destined to be revived. Rome has not been repeated ; neither has Cesar. Ubi Cesar, ibs Roma, was a maxim of Roman jurisprudence. And the 2d, That, having no liberal curiosity, the Chinese man never troubles his head about the statistical circumstances of his own city, province, or natal territory. Such researches he would regard as ‘ ploughing the sands of the sea-shore, or counting the waves. 3d, That two grounds of falsification being thus laid, in (A) the ostentatious mendacity, and (B) which glories in its own blindness, the ignorance of all those who ought to be authorities upon such ques- tions, a third ground arises naturally from the peculiar and special character of Eastern cities, which, for all European ears, too readily aids in misleading. Too often such cities are improvised by means of mud, tarf, light spars, canvas, &c. Hibernian cabins, Scotch bothies (which word is radically the same as the bouth of English fairs), hovels for sheltering cattle from the weather,—or buildings of a similar style and fugitive make-shift character, under the hurried workmanship of three or four hundred thousand men, run up within a single forenoon a perishable town that meets the necessities of a southern climate. Schiller, in his ‘‘ Wallenstein,” sketches such a light canvas town as the hurried extempore creation of soldiers. Schiller’s description is a sketch ; and such a military creation is itself but a sketch of a regular and finished town. Military by its first outline and sugges- tion, such a frail scenical town always retains its military make-shift character ; and is, in fact, to the very last, an encampment of gipsies ur migrating travellers, rather than an architectural residence of settlers who have ceased from vagrancy. Even as an improvised home, such a stage mimicry of a city could find toleration only in a warm climate. But such a climate, and such slender masquerading abodes, are found throughout the Northern Tropic in the southern regions of Asia. 4 THE CESARS, same maxim may be translated into a wider meaning ; in which it becomes true also for our historical experience. Cesar and Rome have flourished and expired together. Each reciprocally was essential to the other. Even the Olympian Pantheon needed Rome for its full glorification ; and Jove himself first knew his own grandeur when robed and shrined as Jupiter Capitolinus. The illimitable attri- butes of the Roman prince, boundless and cumprehensive as the universal air—like that also bright and apprehensible to the most vagrant eye, yet in parts (and those not far re- moved) unfathomable as outer darkness (for no chamber in a dungeon could shroud in more impenetrable concealment a deed of murder than the upper chambers of the air)— these attributes, so impressive to the imagination, and which all the subtlety of the Roman* wit could as little fathom as the fleets of Caesar could traverse the Polar basin, or unlock the gates of the Pacific, are best symbolized, and find their most appropriate exponent, in the illimitable city itself—that Rome, whose centre, the Capitol, was immov- able as Teneriffe or Atlas, but whose circumference was shadowy, uncertain, restless, and advancing as the frontiers of her all-conquering empire. It is false to say, that with Cesar came the destruction of Roman greatness. Peace, hollow rhetoricians! until Cesar came, Rome was a minor ; by him she attained her majority, and fulfilled her destiny. Caius Julius, you say, deflowered the virgin purity of her civil liberties. Doubtless, then, Rome had risen immaculate from the arms of Sylla and of Marius. But, if it were Caius Julius that deflowered Rone, if under * Or even of modern wit; witness the vain attempt of so many eminent gctr (i.¢., jurisconsulti), and illustrious Antecessors (i.¢., doctors of law), to explain in self-consistency the differing functions of the Roman Cesar, and in what sense he was legibus solutus. THE CAISARS. Me) him she forfeited her dowry of civic purity, if to him she first unloosed her maiden zone, then be it affirmed boldly— that she reserved her greatest favours for the noblest of her wooers ; and we may plead the justification of Falconbridge for his mother’s transgression with the lion-hearted king— such a sin was self-ennobled. Did Julius deflower Rome ? Then, by that consummation, he caused her to fulfil the functions of her nature ; he compelled her to exchange the imperfect and inchoate condition of a mere femzna for the perfections of a mulzer. And, metaphor apart, we main- tain that Rome lost no liberties by the mighty Julius. That which in tendency, and by the spirit of her institu- tions—that which, by her very corruptions and abuses co- operating with her laws, Rome promised and involved in the germ—even that, and nothing less or different, did Rome unfold and accomplish under this Julian violence. The rape [if such it were] of Cesar, her final Romulus, completed for Rome that which the rape under Romulus, her initial or inaugurating Cesar, had prosperously begun. And thus by one supreme man was a nation-city matured ; and from the everlasting and nameless* city was a man -produced—capable of taming her indomitable nature, and of forcing her to immolate her wild virginity to the state best fitted for the destined ‘“ Mother of empires.” Peace, then, rhetoricians, false threnodists of false liberty ! hollow chanters over the ashes of a hollow republic! Without Ceesar, we affirm a thousand times, that there would have been no perfect Rome; and, but for Rome, there could have been no such man as Ceesar. Both then were immortal ; each worthy of each. And * “ Nameless city:” The true name of Rome it was a point of religion to conceal; and, in fact, it was never revealed. 6 THE CESARS. the Cut viget nihil simile aut secundum of the poet was as true of one as of the other. For, if by comparison with Rome other cities were but villages, with even more pro- priety it may be asserted, that after the Roman Ceesars all modern kings, kesars, or emperors, are mere phantoms of royalty. The Cesar of Western Rome—he only of all earthly potentates, past or to come, could be said to reign as a monarch, that is, as a solitary king. He was not the greatest of princes, simply because there was no other but himself. There were doubtless a few outlying rulers, of unknown names and titles, upon the margins of his empire, there were tributary lieutenants and barbarous regulz, the obscure vassals of his sceptre, whose homage was offered on the lowest step of his throne, and scarcely known to him but as objects of disdain. But these feudatories could no more break the unity of his empire, which embraced the whole otxovjevy—the total habitable world as then known to geography, or recognised by the muse of history—than at this day the British empire on the sea can be brought into question or made conditional, because some chief of Owyhee or Tongataboo should proclaim a momentary inde- pendence of the British trident, or should even offer a transient outrage to her sovereign flag. Such a tempestas an matulaé might raise a brief uproar in his little native archipelago, but too feeble to reach the shores of Europe by an echo—or to ascend by so much as an infantine susurrus to the ears of the British Neptune. Parthia, it is true, might pretend to the dignity of an empire. But her sovereigns, though sitting in the seat of the great king (0 BaotAeds), were no longer the rulers of a vast and polished nation. They were regarded as barbarians— potent only by their standing army, not upon the larger basis of civic strength ; and, even under this limitation, THE OASABS. vf they were supposed to owe more to the circumstances of their position—their climate, their remoteness, and their inaccessibility except through arid and sultry deserts—than to intrinsic resources, such as could be permanently relied on in a serious trial of strength between the two powers. The kings of Parthia, therefore, were far enough from being regarded in the light of antagonist forces to the majesty of Rome. And, these withdrawn from the comparison, who else was there—what prince, what king, what poten- tate of any denomination, to break the universal calm, that through centuries continued to lave, as with the quiet undulations of summer lakes, the sacred footsteps of the Cesarean throne ? The Byzantine court which, merely as the inheritor of some fragments from that august throne, was drunk with excess of pride, surrounded itself with elaborate expressions of a grandeur beyond what mortal eyes were supposed able to sustain. These fastidious, and sometimes fantastic ceremonies, originally devised as the very extremities of anti-barbarism, were often themselves but too nearly allied in spirit to the barbaresque in taste. In reality, some parts of the Byzan- tine court ritual were arranged in the same spirit as that of China or the Burman empire ; or fashioned by anticipation, as one might think, on the practice of that Oriental Cham (the progenitor, by the way, of the present Chinese empe- ror), who used daily to proclaim by sound of trumpet to the kings in the four corners of the earth, that they, having dutifully awaited the close of Ais dinner, might now with his royal license go to their own. From such vestiges of derivative grandeur, propagated to ages so remote from itself, and sustained by manners so dif- ferent from the spirit of her own,—we may faintly measure the strength of the original impulse given to the feelings ‘f 8 THE CHSARS, ‘men by the sacred majesty of the Roman throne. How potent must that splendour have been, whose mere reflection shot rays upon a distant crown, under another heaven, and across the wilderness of fourteen centuries |! Splendour, thus transmitted, thus sustained, and thus imperishable, argues a transcendent vigour in the basis of radical power. Broad and deep must those foundations have been laid, which could support an “arch of empire” rising to that giddy altitued— an altitude which sufficed to bring it within the ken of pos- terity to the sixtieth generation. Power is measured by resistance, Upen such a acale, if it were applied with skill, the relatvons of greatness in Rome to the greatest of all that has gone before her, and hitherto has come after her, would first be adequately revealed. The youngest reader will know that the grandest forms in which the collective might of the human race has manifested itself, are the four monarchies, Four times have the distributive forces of nations gathered themselves, under the strong com- pression of the sword, into mighty aggregates—denominated Uniwersal Empires or Monarchies. These are noticed in the Holy Scriptures; and it is upon their warrant that men have supposed no fifth monarchy or universal empire possible in an earthly sense ; but that, whenever such an empire arises, it will have Christ for its head ; in other words, that no fifth monarchia can take place until Christi- anity shall have swallowed up all other forms of religion, and shall have gathered the whole family of man into one fold under one all-conquering Shepherd. Hence™ the fana- * This we mention, because a great error has been sometimes com- mitted in exposing their error, which consisted, not in supposing that for a fifth time men were to be gathered under one sceptre, and that sceptre wielded by Jesus Christ, byt in supposing that this great era _had then arrived, or that with no deeper moral revolution men could be fitted for that yoke. THE OZSARS; om) tics of 1650, who proclaimed Jesus for their king, and who did sincerely anticipate his near advent in great power, and under some personal manifestation, were usually styled 1fth- Honarchists. However, waiving the question (interesting enough in it- self}—-Whether upon earthly principles a fifth universal em- pire could by possibility arise, in the present condition of knowledge for man individually, and of organization for man in general—this question waived, and confining our- selves to the comparison of those four monarchies which actually have existed,-of the Assyrian or earliest, we may remark, that it found men in no state of cohesion. This cause, which came in aid of its first foundation, would pro- bably continue ; and would diminish the entensity of the power in the same proportion as it promoted its extenscon. This monarchy would be absolute only by the personal pre- sence of the monarch ; elsewhere, from mere defect of or- ganization, it would and must betray the total imperfections of an elementary state, and of a first experiment. More by the weakness inherent in its enemy, than by its own strength, did the Persian spear of Cyrus prevail against the Assyrian. Two centuries revolved, seven or eight genera- tions, when Alexander found himself in the same position as Oyrus for building a third monarchy, and aided by the self-aame vices of luxurious effeminacy m his enemy, con- fronted with the self-same virtues of enterprise and hardi- hood in his compatriot soldiers. The native Persians, in the earliest and very limited import of that name, were a poor and hardy race of mountaineers. So were the men of Macedon ; and neither one tribe nor the other found any adequate resistance in the luxurious occupants of Babylonia. We may add, with respect to these two earliest monarchies, that the Assyrian was undefined with regard to space, and 10 THE CHESABS. the Persian fugitive with regard to time. But for the third —the Grecian or Macedonian—we know that the arts of civility, and of civil organization, had made great progress before the Roman strength was measured against it. In Macedon, in Achaia, in Syria, in Asia Minor, in Egypt,— everywhere the members of this empire had begun to knit ; the cohesion was far closer, the development of their re- sources more complete ; the resistance, therefore, by many hundred degrees more formidable: consequently, by the fairest inference, the power in that proportion greater which laid the foundations of this last great monarchy. It is pro- bable, indeed, both @ priorz, and upon the evidence of various facts which have survived, that each of the four great em- pires successively triumphed over an antagonist, barbarous in comparison of itself, and each by and through that very superiority in the arts and policy of civilisation. Rome, therefore, which came last in the succession, and swallowed up the three great powers that had sertatum cast the human race into one mould, and had brought them under the unity of a single will, entered by inheritance upon all that its predecessors in that career had appropriated, but in a condition of far ampler development. Estimated merely by longitude and latitude, the territory of the Roman empire was the finest by much that has ever fallen under a single sceptre. Amongst modern empires, doubtless, the Spanish of the sixteenth century, and the British of the present, can- not but be admired as prodigious growths out of so small a stem. In that view, they will be endless monuments in at- testation of the marvels which are lodged in civilisation. But considered in and for itself, and with no reference to the proportion of the creating forces, each of these empires has the great defect of being disjointed, and even insuscep- tible of perfect union. It is in fact no vinculum of social THE CHSARS. ll organization which held them together, but the ideal vincu- lum of a common fealty, and of submission to the same sceptre. This is not like the tie of manners, operative even where it is not perceived, but like the distinctions of geo- graphy—existing to-day, forgotten to-morrow—and abvulished by a stroke of the pen, or a trick of diplomacy. Russia, again, a mighty empire as respects the simple grandeur of magnitude, builds her power upon sterility. She has it in her power to seduce an invading foe into vast circles of starvation, of which the radii measure a thousand leagues. Frost and snow are confederates of her strength. She is strong by her very weakness. But Rome laid a belt about the Mediterranean of a thousand miles in breadth—of more than two thousand in length; and within that zone she comprehended not only all the great cities of the ancient world, but so perfectly did she lay the garden of the world in every climate, and for every mode of natural wealth, within her own ring-fence, that since that era no land, not having been part and parcel of the Roman empire, has ever risen into strength and opulence, except where unusual arti- ficial industry has availed to counteract the tendencies of nature. So entirely had Rome engrossed whatsoever was rich by the mere bounty of native endowment. Vast, therefore, unexampled, immeasurable, was the basis of natural power upon which the Roman throne reposed. The military force which put Rome in possession of this inordinate power, was certainly in some respects artificial ; but the power itself was natural, and not subject to the ebbs and flows which attend the commercial empires of our days ; and, in fact, to be commercial is the very laurel-crown of man’s development as civilisation slowly ascends to its supreme stages, for all are in part commercial. The depres- sion, the reverses, of Rome, were confined to one shape— 12 THE ORSARS. famine ; a terrific shape, doubtless, but one which levies its penalty of suffering, not by elaborate processes that do not exhaust their total cycle in less than long periods of years. Fortunately for those who survive, no arrears of misery are allowed by this scourge of ancient days ;* the total penalty is paid down at once. As respected the hand of man, Rome slept for ages in absolute security. She could suffer only by the wrath of Providence ; and, so long as she continued to be Rome, for many a generation she only of all the monarchies has feared no mortal hand,t ‘God and his Son except, Created thing nought valued she nor shunn’d.” That the possessor and wielder of such enormous power— power alike admirable for its extent, for its intensity, and for its consecration from all counter-forces which could re- strain it, or endanger it—-should be regarded as sharing in the attributes of supernatural beings, is no more than might naturally be expected. All other known power in human hands has either been extensive, but wanting in intensity-—or intense, but wanting in extent—or, thirdly, liable to permanent control and hazard from some antagonist power commensurate with itself. But the Roman power, *“ Of ancient days.” —For it is remarkable, and it serves to mark an indubitable progress of mankind, that, before the Christian era, famines were of frequent occurrence in countries the most civilised ; afterwards they became rare, and latterly have entirely altered their character into occasional dearths. ¢ Unless that hand were her own armed against herself; upon which topic there is a burst of noble eloquence in one of the ancient Panegyrici, when haranguing the Emperor Theodosius: “ Thou, Rome! that, having once suffered by the madness of Cinna, and of the cruel Marius raging from banishment, and of Sylla, that won his wreath of prosperity from thy disasters, and of Ceesar, compassionate to the dead, didst shudder at every blast of the trumpet filled by the breath of civil commotion,—thou, that, besides the wreck of thy sol- THE OAISARS. 13 in its centuries of. grandeur, involved every mode of strength, with absolute immunity from all kinds and degrees of weak- ness. It ought not, therefore, to surprise us that the em- peror, as the depositary of this charmed power, should have been looked upon as a sacred person, and the imperial family considered a ‘diwvina domus.’ It is an error to re- gard this as excess of adulation, or as built orginally upon hypocrisy. Undoubtedly the expressions of this feeling are sometimes gross and overcharged, as we find them in the very greatest of the Roman poets: for example, it shocks us to find a fine writer, in anticipating the future canoniza- tion of his patron, and his instalment amongst the heavenly hosts, begging him to keep his distance warily from this 01 that constellation, and to be cautious of throwing his weight into either hemisphere, until the scale of proportions were accurately adjusted. These, doubtless, are passages degrad- Ing alike to the poet and his subject. Nay, considering that even false religions, as those of Pagan mythology, have probably never been utterly stripped of all truth, but that every such mode of error has perhaps been designed as a process, and adapted by Providence to the case of those who were capable of admitting no more per- fect shape of truth ; even the heads of such superstitions (the Dalai Lama, for instance) may not unreasonably be presumed as within the cognizance and special protection of Heaven. Much more may this be supposed of him to whose care was confided the weightier part of the human race ; who had it in his power to promote or to suspend the progress of human improvement ; and of whom, and the motions of whose will, the very prophets of Judea took cognizance. No nation, and no king, was utterly divorced from the councils of God. Palestme, as a central chamber of God’s administration, stood in some relation to all. It has been remarked, as a mysterious and significant fact, that the founders of the great empires all had some connec- THE CASARS. 15 tion, more or less, with the temple of Jerusalem. Melanch- thon even observes it in his Sketch of Universal History, as worthy of notice—that Pompey died, as it were, within sight of that very temple which he had polluted. Let us not suppose that Paganism, or Pagan nations, were there- fore excluded from the concern and tender interest of Heaven. ‘They also had their place allowed. And we may be sure that, amongst them, the Roman emperor, as the great steward and factor for the happiness of more men, and men more cultivated, than ever before were intrusted to the motions of: a single will, had a special, singular, and mysterious relation to the secret counsels of Heaven. Even we, therefore, may lawfully attribute some sanctity to the Roman emperor. That the Romans did so with ab- solute sincerity is certain. The altars of the emperor had a twofold consecration ; to violate them, was the double crime of treason and sacrilege. In his appearances of state and ceremony, the fire, the sacred fire érdpzreve, moved pom- pously in ceremonial solemnity before him ; and every other circumstance of divine worship attended the emperor in his lifetime. * To this view of the imperial character and relations must be added one single circumstance, which in some measure altered the whole for the individual who happened to fill the office. The emperor de facto might be viewed under two aspects ; there was the man, and there was the office. In his office he was immortal and sacred: but as a ques- tion might still be raised, by means of a mercenary army, as to the claims of the particular individual who at any * The fact is, that the emperor was more of a sacred and divine creature in his lifetime than after his death. His consecrated cha- racter as a living ruler was a truth; his canonization, a fiction of tenderness to his memory. 16 THE CESABS. 