Imperial Purple
Saltus, Edgar, 1858-1921
English
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Below is a summary of Imperial Purple
Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
IMPERIAL PURPLE
By EDGAR SALTUS
CONTENTS
I. That Woman
II. Conjectural Rome
III. Fabulous Fields
IV. The Pursuit of the Impossible
V. Nero
VI. The House of Flavia
VII. The Poison in the Purple
VIII. Faustine
IX. The Agony
I
THAT WOMAN
When the murder was done and the heralds shouted through the thick
streets the passing of Caesar, it was the passing of the republic
they announced, the foundation of Imperial Rome.
There was a hush, then a riot which frightened a senate that
frightened the world. Caesar was adored. A man who could give
millions away and sup on dry bread was apt to conquer, not
provinces alone, but hearts. Besides, he had begun well and his
people had done their best. The House of Julia, to which he
belonged, descended, he declared, from Venus. The ancestry was
less legendary than typical. Cinna drafted a law giving him the
right to marry as often as he chose. His mistresses were queens.
After the episodes in Gaul, when he entered Rome his legions
warned the citizens to have an eye on their wives. At seventeen he
fascinated pirates. A shipload of the latter had caught him and
demanded twenty talents ransom. "Too little," said the lad; "I
will give you fifty, and impale you too," which he did, jesting
with them meanwhile, reciting verses of his own composition,
calling them barbarians when they did not applaud, ordering them
to be quiet when he wished to sleep, captivating them by the
effrontery of his assurance, and, the ransom paid, slaughtering
them as he had promised.
Tall, slender, not handsome, but superb and therewith so perfectly
sent out that Cicero mistook him for a fop from whom the republic
had nothing to fear; splendidly lavish, exquisitely gracious, he
was born to charm, and his charm was such that it still subsists.
Cato alone was unenthralled. But Cato was never pleased; he
laughed but once, and all Rome turned out to see him; he belonged
to an earlier day, to an austerer, perhaps to a better one, and it
may be that in "that woman," as he called Cassar, his clearer
vision discerned beneath the plumage of the peacock, the beak and
talons of the bird of prey. For they were there, and needed only a
vote of the senate to batten on nations of which the senate had
never heard. Loan him an army, and "that woman" was to give
geography such a twist that today whoso says Caesar says history.
Was it this that Cato saw, or may it be that one of the oracles
which had not ceased to speak had told him of that coming night
when he was to take his own life, fearful lest "that woman" should
overwhelm him with the magnificence of his forgiveness? Cato walks
through history, as he walked through the Forum, bare of foot--too
severe to be simple, too obstinate to be generous--the image of
ancient Rome.
In Caesar there was nothing of this. He was wholly modern;
dissolute enough for any epoch, but possessed of virtues that his
contemporaries could not spell. A slave tried to poison him.
Suetonius says he merely put the slave to death. The "merely" is
to the point. Cato would have tortured him first. After Pharsalus
he forgave everyone. When severe, it was to himself. It is true he
turned over two million people into so many dead flies, their legs
in the air, creating, as Tacitus has it, a solitude which he
described as Peace; but what antitheses may not be expected in a
man who, before the first century was begun, divined the fifth,
and who in the Suevians--that terrible people beside whom no
nation could live--foresaw Attila!
Save in battle his health was poor. He was epileptic, his strength
undermined by incessant debauches; yet let a nation fancying him
months away put on insurgent airs, and on that nation he descended
as the thunder does. In his campaigns time and again he overtook
his own messengers. A phantom in a ballad was not swifter than he.
Simultaneously his sword flashed in Germany, on the banks of the
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