Threshold of Fire Read online

  A living dead man. That is what Marcus Anicius called me when I stood next to him in his atrium. He himself looked like a corpse, shut away in the twilight of the grave. It would take sorcery to bring back the dreams and deeds of vanished centuries. I did not know whether to laugh or weep at the sight of this upright man who was still living in the days of the Republic, consorting with the likes of Cato, Brutus and Cicero, piously tending his lares and penates.

  “We need you!” For what? To dethrone Honorius, to expel the bishops? To defy the passion for salvation and the mystique of martyrdom and restore the sobriety and self-discipline which failed to inspire the Roman citizen four hundred years ago?

  Looking at him, I was suddenly overcome by the bitter feeling that I might be partially responsible for his state of mind. Nothing can erase those words which I had written one day, black on white, merging the ideal image of the Pax Romana with the Roman thought which had inspired him and his peers:

  Rome is a mother, not a harsh mistress. To those who submit to her, she grants the right to call themselves her citizens. Through wisdom and love, she brings together the far corners of the earth. Thanks to the peace she keeps, every foreigner finds a fatherland. We travel without fear, we enjoy going to Thule, penetrating far-flung territories to drink from the Rhone or the Orontes. Rome alone has made one people from many peoples; she cherishes the vanquished at her breast and unites all mankind under one name.

  Ringing words! Tears had come to my eyes when I delivered that panegyric at Stilicho’s first consulate. I saw, I felt, the august presence of Mother Rome: over the heads of the audience of Senators and courtiers, behind the columns of the porticos, I could discern the sea of marble, the City that was her crown, and beyond that white radiance, the Alban mountains far off in a haze of heat.

  Since those days, I have taken another look at our goddess and benefactress. At times she seems like a dead queen, lying in state, emitting a stench of decomposition which penetrates even the balm and bandages enwrapping her, crawling with maggots under her jewels; at other times, like an old brothelkeeper, withered and bedizened, who receives the worst scoundrels and then, in mortal fear, spends all her earnings on fortune tellers and amulets.

  As if I had been thinking aloud, Marcus Anicius exclaimed, “What kind of world are we living in? What is happening?”

  I shrugged. “Peace on earth through reason and order no longer has any appeal to the imagination. That possibility has been rejected.”

  “The barbarians and the Church are leading Rome down the road to ruin. We turn into barbarians to be free of the demand for reason and responsibility, and at the same time we become Christians so that we can believe in eternal salvation.”

  “Barbarians, Christians … What do those words mean? There are Gauls and Britons here who are more civilized in the Greek sense than we ever were. The Christian sects engage in a life and death struggle over the Holy Trinity and Transsubstantiation; they would rather make a monstrous alliance with the most decadent pagans than reach out to those they call apostates and heretics — are these the followers of the Galilean? The Church which calls itself catholic is more interested in exercising temporal power than in bringing salvation to souls. The so-called barbarians want more than anything else to live as Romans. And we — you and I — what are we? Impotent heirs to something that was once great in its clarity and efficacy but that now has been crushed under a weight of senseless formalities, a pompous muddle. Those who are stronger and more ambitious than we will lift this burden from our shoulders.”

  “But let us act!” He began to pace up and down beneath the double row of narrow columns around the rain basin. “For a moment I wasn’t sure … you’ve changed so much physically. But your tongue doesn’t lie; you haven’t lost the gift of eloquence. Listen, in the name of the friendship which my two nephews felt for you —”

  “A friendship which couldn’t withstand certain rumors. They didn’t want to be my friends at the time when I needed them most. Think, Marcus Anicius, you have such an excellent memory. Eloquent or not, I have no voice; nobody speaks to me any more.”

  He did not look at me. “I don’t know any longer. I’ve never attached any importance to rumors. A man of honor relies on what he sees himself and on what happens to him.”

  I gazed at his reflection in the shallow water, while he spoke.

  “At that time, you were isolated, excluded from public life by an indefensible judgment, the Prefect’s treachery. Your name became the name of a dead man. And you have resigned yourself to oblivion,” he cried, once more with sudden vehemence. “You endure a nameless existence among nameless people. I could not do that. There is only a degree of difference between your fate and mine. I can still come and go as I please, I have my own property at my disposal, I bear my name with honor. But you know, don’t you, that I’m no longer a Senator? The title wasn’t taken from me, but since the rules were tightened, Senators who do not accept the established Church are not admitted to sessions.

  “I see my old friends dying one by one or retiring to the country. I no longer have any contact with the official world outside this house — or what they call the ‘world’ these days. What shall I do then — take refuge in philosophy? I have always admired writers for their knowledge, for the meaning that their works can give to the reality of our daily life, to our aspirations, our actions. I’m a man of action — isolation, contemplation, are not in my nature. If I had your gift, your powers of persuasion, I could find words that would compel my contemporaries — those who share my beliefs — to listen. Won’t you lend me your voice?”

  His tone was supplicating; he came close to me again.

  I put my finger to my lips and shook my head, signalling that as far as his plea went, I was mute.

  “Perhaps it’s just as well that your statue was destroyed,” he said bitterly. “You’re throwing away the chance to restore your reputation. Yes, because you are the creature who in the eyes of Rome glorified the exploits and posturings of the man whom we have to thank for our misery — Stilicho, who first played the priests’ game and then tried to sell the Empire to the barbarians —”

  “Et tu, Brute?” I cried, suddenly remembering that Marcus Anicius Rufus had been one of those Senators who, in extraordinary session, had decided to murder Stilicho. “What you say is a lie and you know it! If ever anyone remembers the reign of this Honorius, who returned today with so much fanfare and incense, it will be because of the years that he relied on Stilicho —”

  “You still defend him? You put your muse at his service, you immortalized his campaigns, defended his politics, praised him and his wife to the skies. And yet he betrayed you — his treachery toward you was a thousand times worse than anything my nephews Olybrius and Probinus did, and all those who abandoned you — all put together!”

  I wrapped myself in my cloak, pulling part of it over my head. I was ready to go out into the night. It was rude of me to cut off his argument like that, but I could not speak about Stilicho. For a long time it was quiet. Then I heard the silver ball jingle in the bowl.

  “As you wish,” he said. “One thing is good — this will not last much longer. A few years more and my consciousness will be extinguished. I don’t want to go on witnessing this degradation. Sometimes I think about Socrates — when he was dying, he charged his friends to offer a cock to Aesculapius in thanks for the healing, the deliverance, which death would bring to him.”

  At that moment the door to the tablinum slid open; the slave who had ushered me in asked his master what he wanted. I did not hear Marcus Anicius’s reply, and when the man left I started to follow him. Marcus Anicius stopped me. “One moment.”

  I turned aside and waited. We did not exchange another word. The slave reappeared and handed me a scroll in a cylinder.

  4.

  I, who have sworn never again to put pen to paper except to teach the illiterate to read and write, behave as if nothing has happened. No, that’s not true. It’s i
mpossible to imagine a greater contrast between the past and the present. The Imperial clerk, busily composing his work in the palace libraries, a sort of high functionary, official magistrate of the poetic art, no longer exists. I am surrounded by the four walls of my tenement hole. Through the door, which I have to leave ajar in order to get a little light, seeps the stink of pickled fish and of the cesspool beneath the stairs. The gods of Olympus would not feel at home here.

  But what is left to write about, now that the lofty scribbling in the service of the Empire is a thing of the past? I am surprised and disturbed by this sudden need to put into words what has happened to me over the last few days. The silence — the refusal to go beyond the here and now — which has become second nature to me, is broken. I realize that for ten long years I have considered myself to be worthless — if by “myself” one means the series of metamorphoses that I have undergone since my youth, from the barefoot Egyptian country boy to the famous writer of flattery whose verses were as stiff with glittering metaphors as his tunics were with embroidery, and, finally, the pedagogue, under his various surnames, who teaches the seedy residents of his quarter to read and write.

  Everything is immediate and inevitable, as well as richer in possibilities, viewed from street level; he who stands on a pedestal does not see what is happening at his feet. The sausage makers, tanners and blacksmiths in the Subura react no differently from the occupants of the palaces of the clarissimi and illustrissimi — except that the former do not have the slightest interest in hiding or disguising their feelings; they curse, kick, kiss, weep, scold, with complete abandon. They lack self-control because they have not learned to think about it. But at least with them one does not find the hypocritical exploitation of self-control which often follows awareness of it. Their hatred, as well as their affection, is expressed openly, with noisy violence; but it is less dangerous than intrigue.

  As I write these words, one of the innumerable daily disputes is exploding on a lower floor; the stairwell is filled with the screeching of women and children and the sound of dishes breaking. At moments like these I do perhaps look back wistfully at the cool galleries and cypress-lined avenues where once, in tranquility, far removed from filth and discomfort, I could ponder appropriate metaphors for a panegyric. But this is reality, this has given meaning to my life. My place is here in the ant hill of the Subura—thanks, perhaps, to what I carry within me without conscious memory: the life experiences of my parents and grandparents — slaves, tillers of the soil of the Delta or the Fayyum, accustomed to windowless mud huts and the stench of the dunghill.

  My twilit room is stifling; my few possessions (a little cheap paper, writing gear for teaching, a lamp, a winter tunic hanging from a nail in the wall) are also the only moveable objects in the room: the stone bench serves as bed, chair and table. It has been ten years since I last held in my hand anything as luxurious as the volumen in which I am now writing. I can’t eradicate the seal, in the upper left-hand corner, stamped with the initials of Marcus Anicius Rufus.

  I should perhaps have turned tail, should have bolted from the procession when his cortege was moving through the Forum of Trajan. I knew that the confrontation with him would be an ordeal in many respects. I thought above all of the possibility of being recognized, of an unexpected reaction on my part. At the same time, I wanted to be recognized. But whatever I had expected, it was surely not this: a scroll of blank parchment between two ivory cylinders — a gift that was a challenge, a goad. And my response to it was the feverish urge to consign to that parchment the experiences, minute by minute, of a single day — the day of the second entry of Honorius.

  There was a singular element of repetition in these events, as if I had lived through them once before. I know why: what happened to me was part of a network of various possibilities which, in the days of fame and tranquility, I had rather playfully envisaged. I had asked myself, when I was proceeding to the Forum at the Emperor’s side during his first entry, how that magnificent spectacle should strike me if I were watching it as a disillusioned outsider. And when the Roman magistrates unveiled my statue in the midst of the immortals, I saw in my mind’s eye that marble in ruins, that place empty.

  5.

  Stilicho and Serena — they seemed to me to be demigods, the most powerful people in the realm of the Emperor Theodosius. When, on the recommendation of Mallius Theodorus, I was appointed to Stilicho’s personal staff, I obtained a privileged post. I lived in Milan, in his house which was part of the Imperial palace. The old Emperor doted on his family: always, wherever he was, he was surrounded by relatives. He looked upon his niece Serena as his own daughter and therefore on her husband as his son.

  It was claimed later that Stilicho had cleverly exploited a private conversation with the dying Emperor to have himself named guardian to Theodosius’s two sons — seventeen-year-old Arcadius and ten-year-old Honorius. There were no witnesses; no one could disprove it. Rufinus claimed the guardianship of Arcadius and dominion over the Eastern Empire, but everyone knew that Rufinus was a scoundrel. Even if it were true that Stilicho had contrived his appointment, he was still in the right: he acted in the spirit of the Emperor who had lived long enough in Constantinople to be well acquainted with the courtiers and eunuchs — their appetite for luxury, their corruption, their mutual spitefulness — and who wanted above everything to maintain the unity of the Empire.

  Although he was widely respected and admired, Stilicho was not loved. Many of those who praised him the loudest — because they needed him — must actually have hated him. He gave an impression of infallibility; he never seemed to make a mistake and he appeared in complete control of every situation — people will not forgive such perfection. He was in perfect health, indefatigable; in middle age, he still looked like a young man. And, in addition, he had a disarmingly naive air that had often struck me among people of his race. He had the easy manner of a man of the world; he had, after all, grown up in a villa on the Bosphorus, near the Eastern capital where his father was a military functionary at the Imperial court.

  His hair and eyes were light, but he had the smooth brown skin of a Greek, not the Vandal’s ruddy complexion. He spoke Greek and Latin without an accent; I believe he could not understand his father’s language. I used that in a poem as an argument defending him against the repeated accusation that he maintained secret contact with the chiefs of the Vandal hordes on the Thracian frontier.

  He never allowed himself to appear ridiculous; he had an undeniable air of authority. There were many who resented that: one of the deepest grievances against him was undoubtedly the fact that it was impossible to look down on him, even though he was of foreign origin and homo novus. His worst enemy could not accuse him of stupidity.

  In Stilicho I saw the embodiment of what, since my childhood, I considered true masculinity, qualities which I myself aspired to: calm courage, self-assurance without bravado, a dislike of deceit and corruption which was genuine and not rooted, as with so many people, in hypocrisy. What has been called his “twisting and turning”, his unpredictability, came, I believe, from the nature of his intelligence. He saw everything in a wider context than most people; his idea of reality encompassed much more than the narrow reality of others.

  When I first came to Rome, I thought that currents of opinion and political factions should be easily recognizable. I did not have the slightest idea of the diversity and complexity of the possibilities for and against the Emperor’s policies, for or against the Church, for or against what you will. Those who are friends and companions today become sworn enemies tomorrow and vice versa. Personal feuds transcend group interests. Words and deeds are seldom in accord with each other.

  Stilicho had continually to deal with all those personalities and all those opinions; to become explicitly involved in those relationships and internal situations was self-defeating; the only result could be deadlock. One made oneself vulnerable when one supported one man or one party. But as important as all these th
ings seemed (because one was close to them), they hardly counted for Stilicho in comparison with real problems: how to prevent the threatened rupture between the Occidental and the Eastern Empires, how to stop the aggressive barbaric tribes on the northern frontier from taking advantage of unrest at home. He was able on short notice to bring opposing factions together so he could resolve difficulties as quickly as possible. There were few who understood this, and later, after his death, there were fewer still who appreciated what he had accomplished in spite of everything.

  Time after time he was frustrated by treachery, lack of understanding, born stupidity or the blind hatred felt toward him by members of the Senate and the court. Without lightning-quick responses and an ability to take the long view, he would not have been able to succeed as often as he did. And it was those who were closest to him (Theodosius, Honorius, Serena and, in a certain sense — alas! — I myself, his personal poet) who were the first to oppose him.

  I have never been at a loss for words, but a feeling of impotence verging on despair seizes me whenever I attempt to express the complexity and ambiguity of my attitude toward Stilicho. I wish that I could be dignified and pragmatic as a true Roman and declare my deep-seated allegiance to everything clear, correct and well-ordered … and I wish that the intellect and the ability to integrate and deduce that I owe to my Greek education had granted me the calm certainty that, under the sun that lights the world of mortals, everything can be explained. But I am neither Roman nor Greek.

  Although Serena was small and slender, she was imposing because of her bearing and her choice of dress and ornaments. It is impossible to imagine greater elegance. She aspired to perfection in everything that she undertook. She had a passion for beautiful and costly things (a characteristic that had brought Stilicho more than once to the verge of bankruptcy). In addition she possessed naturally what Proba, the mother of the Anicii (often considered her rival) had never succeeded in acquiring, despite her zealous efforts: a strong aptitude for learning and fine taste in the arts.