Death, in taking Cleopatra, closed the doors of the temple Janus.  After centuries of turmoil, there was peace.  The reign of the Caesars had begun.  Octavius became Augustus, the rest of the litter divine.  The triumvirs of war were succeeded by the triumvirs of love.  These were the poets.

Catullus had gone with the republic.  In verse he might have been primus.  He was too negligent.  His microscopic masterpieces form but a brief bundle of pastels.  The face repeated there is Lesbia’s.  He saw her first lounging in a litter that slaves carried along the Sacred Way.  Immediately he was in love with her.  The love was returned.  In the delight of it the poet was born.  His first verses were to her, so also were his last.  But Lesbia wearied of song and kisses, at least of his.  She eloped with his nearest friend.  In the Somnambula the tenor sings O perche non posso odiarte-Why can I not hate thee?  The song is but a variant on that of Catullus.  Odi et amo, I love and hate you, he called after her.  But, if she heard, she heeded as little as Beatrice did when Dante cursed the day he saw her first.  Dante ceased to upbraid, but did not cease to love.  He was but following the example of Catullus, with this difference:  Beatrice went to heaven, Lesbia to hell, to an earthly hell, the worst of any, to a horrible inn on the Tiber where sailors brawled.  She descended to that, fell there, rather.  Catullus still loved her.

At the sight of Cynthia another poet was born.  What Lesbia pulchra had been to Catullus, Cynthia pulchrior became to Propertius.  He swore that she should be his sole muse, and kept his word, in so far as verse was concerned.  Otherwise, he was less constant.  It is doubtful if she deserved more, or as much.  Never did a girl succeed better in tormenting a lover, never was there a lover so poetically wretched as he.  In final fury he flung at her farewells that were malédictions, only to be recaptured, beaten even, subjugated anew.  She made him love her.  When she died, her death nearly killed him.  Nearly, but not quite.  He survived, and, first among poets, intercepted the possibility of reunion there where all things broken are made complete, and found again things vanished-Lethum non omnia finit.

Horace resembled him very remotely.  A little fat man-brevis atque obesus, Suetonius said-he waddled and wallowed in the excesses of the day, telling, in culpable iambics, of fair faces, facile amours, easy epicureanism, rose-crowned locks, yet telling of them-and of other matters less admissible-on a lyre with wonderful chords.  At the conclusion of the third book of the Odes, he declared that he had completed a monument which the succession of centuries without number could not destroy.  “I shall not die,” he added.  He was right.  Because of that flame of fair faces, lovers turn to him still.  Because of his iambics, he has a niche in the hearts of the polite.  Versatile in love and in verse, his inconstancy and his art are nowhere better displayed than in the incomparable Donec gratus eram tibi, which Ponsard rewrote: 

HORACE

     Tant que tu m’as aime, que nul autre plus digne
     N’entourait de ses bras ton col blanc comme un cygne,
     J’ai vecu plus heureux que Xerxes lé grand roi.

LYDIE.

     Tant que tu n’as aime personne plus que moi,
     Quand Chloe n’etait pas preferee a Lydie,
     J’ai vecu plus illustre et plus fière qu’Ilie.

HORACE.

     J’appartiens maintenant a la blonde Chloe,
     Qui plait par sa voix douce et son luth enjoue. 
     Je suis prêt a mourir pour prolonger sa vie.

LYDIE.

     Calais maintenant tient mon âme asservie,
     Nous brulons tous les deux de mutuels amours,
     Et je mourrais deux fois pour prolonger ses jours.

HORACE.

     Mais quoi!  Si j’ai regret de ma premiere chaîne? 
     Si Venus de retour sous son joug me ramène? 
     Si je refuse a l’autre, et te rends mon amour?

LYDIE.

     Encor que Calais soit beau comme lé jour,
     Et toi plus inconstant que la feuille inconstante,
     Avec toi je vivrais et je mourrais contente.

Horace was the poet of ease, Catullus of love, Propertius of passion, Tibullus of sentiment.  Ovid was the poet of pleasure.  A man of means, of fashion, of the world, what to-day would be called a gentleman, he might have been laureate of the Empire.  Corinna interfered.  Corinna was his figurative muse.  Whether she were one or many is uncertain, but nominally at least it was for her that he wrote the suite of feverish fancies entitled the “Art of Love” and which were better entitled the “Art of not Loving at all.”  Subsequently, he planned a great Homeric epic.  But, if Corinna inspired masterpieces, she gave him no time to complete them.  She wanted her poet to herself.  She refused to share him even with the gods.  It is supposed that Corinna was Julia, daughter of Augustus.  Because of her eyes, more exactly because of her father’s, Ovid was banished among barbarian brutes.  It was rather a frightful penalty for participating in the indiscretions of a woman who had always been the reverse of discreet.  Corinna, as described by Ovid, was a monster of perversity.  Julia, as described by Tacitus, yielded to her nothing in that respect.

The epoch itself was strange, curiously fecund in curious things that became more curious still.  Rome then, thoroughly Hellenized, had become very fair.  There were green terraces and porphyry porticoes that leaned to a river on which red galleys passed, there were bronze doors and garden roofs, glancing villas and temples more brilliant still.  There were spacious streets, a Forum curtained with silk, the glint and evocations of triumphal war.  There were theatres in which a multitude could jeer at an emperor, and arenas in which an emperor could watch a multitude die.  On the stage, there were tragedies, pantomime, farce.  There were races in the circus and in the sacred groves, girls with the Orient in their eyes and slim waists that swayed to the crotals.  Into the arenas patricians descended, in the amphitheatre were criminals from Gaul, in the Forum, philosophers from Greece.  For Rome’s entertainment the mountains sent lions; the deserts giraffes; there were boas from the jungles, bulls from the plains, hippopotami from the rushes of the Nile, and, above them, beasts greater than they-the Caesars.

There had been the first, memory of whose grandiose figure lingered still.  Rome recalled the unforgettable, and recalled, too, his face which incessant debauches had blanched.  After him had come Augustus, a pigmy by comparison, yet otherwise more depraved.  He gone, there was the spectacle of Tiberius devising infamies so monstrous that to describe them new words were coined.  That being insufficient, there followed Caligula, without whom Nero, Claud, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus could never have been.  It was he who gave them both inspiration and incentive.  It was he who built the Cloacus Maximus in which all Rome rolled.

Augustus had done a little digging for it himself, but hypocritically as he did everything, devising ethical laws as a cloak for turpitudes of his own.  Mecaenas, his minister and lackey, divorced and remarried twenty times.  Augustus repudiated his own marriages, those of his kin as well.  Suetonius said of Caligula that it was uncertain which were viler, the unions he contracted, their brevity, or their cause.  With such examples, it was inevitable that commoner people united but to part, and that, insensibly, the law annulled as a caprice a clause that defined marriage as the inseparable life.

Under the Caesars marriage became a temporary arrangement, abandoned and re-established as often as one liked.  Seneca said that women of rank counted their years by their husbands.  Juvenal said that it was in that fashion that they counted their days.  Tertullian added that divorce was the result of marriage.  Divorce, however, was not obligatory.  Matrimony was.  According to the Lex Pappea Poppoea, whoso at twenty-five was not married, whoso, divorced or widowed, did not remarry, whoso, though married, was childless, ipso facto became a public enemy, incapable of inheriting or of serving the State.  To this law-an Augustan hypocrisy-only a technical attention was paid.  Men married just enough to gain a position or inherit a legacy.  The next day they got a divorce.  At the moment of need a child was adopted.  The moment passed the brat was disowned.  As with men so with women.  The univira became the many-husbanded wife, occasionally a matron with no husband at all, one who, to escape the consequences of the lex Pappea Poppoea, hired a man to loan her his name, and who, with an establishment of her own, was free to do as she liked, to imitate men at their worst, to fight like them and with them for power, to dabble in the bloody dramas of State, to climb on the throne and kill there or be killed; perhaps, less ambitiously, whipping her slaves, summoning the headsman to them, quieting her nerves with drink, appearing on the stage, in the arena even, contending as a gladiator there, and remaining a patrician meanwhile.

In those days a sin was a prayer, and a prayer, Perseus said, was an invocation at which a meretrix would blush to hear pronounced aloud.  Religion sanctioned anything.  The primal gods, supplemented with the lords and queens of other skies, had made Rome an abridgment of every superstition, the temple of every crime.  Asiatic monsters, which Hellenic poetry had deodorized, landed there straight from the Orient, their native hideousness unchanged.  It was only the graceful Greek myths that Rome transformed.  Eros, who in Arcady seemed atiptoe, so delicately did he tread upon the tender places of the soul, acquired, behind the mask of Cupid, a maliciousness that was simian.  Aphrodite, whose eyes had been lifted to the north and south, and who in Attica was draped with light, obtained as Venus the leer of the Lampsacene.  Long since from Syria Astarte had arrived, as already, torn by Cilician pirates from Persia, Mithra had come, while, from Egypt, had strayed Apis from whose mouth two phalluses issued horizontally.

These were Rome’s gods, the divinities about whom men and maidens assembled, and to whom pledges were made.  There were others, so many, in such hordes had they come, that Petronius said they outnumbered the population.  The lettered believed in them no more than we do.  But, like the Athenians, they lived among a people that did.  Moreover, the lettered were few.  Rome, brutal at heart, sanguinary and voluptuous, fought, she did not read.  She could applaud, but not create.  Her literature, like her gods, her art, her corruption, had come from afar.  Her own breasts were sterile.  When she gave birth, it was to a litter of monsters, by accident to a genius, again to a poet, to Cæsar and to Lucretius, the only men of letters ever born within her walls.

Meanwhile, though the Pantheon was obviously but a lupanar, the people clung piously to creeds that justified every disorder, tenaciously to gods that sanctified every vice, and fervently to Caesars that incarnated them all.

The Caesars were religion in a concrete form.  Long before, Ennius, the Homer of Latium, had announced that the gods were but great men.  The Caesars accepted that view with amplifications.  They became greater than any that had been.  Save Death, who, in days that precede the fall of empires, is the one divinity whom all fear and in whom all believe, they alone were august.  In the absence of the aromas of tradition, they had something superior.  The Olympians inspired awe, the Caesars fright.  Death was their servant.  They ordered.  Death obeyed.  In the obedience was apotheosis.  In the apotheosis was the delirium that madmen know.  At their feet, Rome, mad as they, built them temples, raised them shrines, created for them hierophants and flamens, all the phantasmagoria of the megalomaniac Alexander, and, with it, a worship which they accepted as their due perhaps, but in which their reason fled.  That of Cæsar withstood it.  Insanity began with Antony, who called himself Osiris.  The brain of Tiberius, very steady at first, was insufficiently strong to withstand the nectar fumes.  The latter intoxicated Caligula so sheerly that he invited the moon to share his couch.  Thereafter, the palace of the Caesars became a vast court in which the wives and daughters of the nobility assisted at perversions which a Ministry of Pleasure devised, and where Rome abandoned whatever she had held holy, the innocence of girlhood, patrician pride, everything, shame included.

In post-pagan convulsions there was much that was very vile.  But there is one aspect of evil which subsequent barbarism reproved, and in which Rome delighted.  It was the symbolized shapes of sin, open and public, for which in modern speech there is no name, and which were then omnipresent, sung in verse, exhibited on the stage, paraded in the streets, put on the amulets that girls and matrons wore, put in the nursery, consecrated by custom, art, religion, and since recovered from disinterred Pompeii.  “The mouth,” said Quintillian, “does not dare describe what the eyes behold.”  Rome that had made orbs and urbs synonymous was being conquered by the turpitudes of the quelled.

“I have told of the Prince,” said Suetonius, “I will tell now of the Beast.”  It was his privilege.  He wrote in Latin.  In English it is not possible.  Gautier declared that the inexpressible does not exist.  Even his pen might have balked, had he tried it on the imperial orgy.  The ulcer that ravaged Sylla, gangrened a throne, and decomposed a world.  Less violent under Tiberius than under Caligula, under Nero the fever rose to the brain and added delirium to it.  In reading accounts of the epoch you feel as though you were assisting at the spectacle of a gigantic asylum, from which the keepers are gone, and of which the inmates are omnipotent.  But, in spite of the virulence of the virus, the athletic constitution of the empire, joined to its native element of might, resisted the disease so potently that one must assume that there was there a vitality which no other people had had, a hardiness that enabled Rome to survive excesses in which Nineveh and Babylon fainted.  From the disease itself Rome might have recovered.  It was the delirium that brought her down.  That delirium, mounting always, increased under Commodus, heightened under Caracalla, and reached its crisis in Heliogabalus.  Thereafter, for a while it waned only to flame again under Diocletian.  The virus remained.  To extirpate it the earth had to produce new races.  Already they were on their way.

Meanwhile, though there were reigns when, in the words of Tacitus, virtue was a sentence of death, the emperors were not always insane.  Vespasian was a soldier, Hadrian a scholar, Pius Antoninus a philosopher, and Marcus Aurelius a sage.  Rome was not wholly pandemoniac.  There is goodness everywhere, even in evil.  There was goodness even in Rome.  Stoicism, a code of the highest morality, had been adopted by the polite.  Cicero, in expounding it, had stated that no one could be a philosopher who has not learned that vice should be avoided, however concealable it may be.  Aristotle had praised virtue because of its extreme utility.  Seneca said that vices were maladies, among which Zeno catalogued love, as Plato did crime.  To him, vice stood to virtue as disease does to health.  All guilt, he said, is ignorance.

Expressions such as these appealed to a class relatively small, but highly lettered, whom the intense realism of the amphitheatre, the suggestive postures of the pantomimes, and the Orientalism of the orgy shocked.  There are now honest men everywhere, even in prison.  Even in Rome there were honest men then.  Moreover, paganism at its worst, always tolerant, was often poetic.  Then, too, life in the imperial epoch, while less fair than in the age of Pericles, was so splendidly brilliant that it exhausted possible glamour for a thousand years to come.  Dazzling in violence, its coruscations blinded the barbarians so thoroughly that thereafter there was but night.