With other guides Tiberius journeyed through lands
where dreams come true. Aristeas of Proconnesus
led him among the Arimaspi, a curious people who passed
their lives fighting for gold with griffons in the
dark. With Isogonus he descended the valley of
Ismaus, where wild men were, whose feet turned inwards.
In Albania he found a race with pink eyes and white
hair; in Sarmatia another that ate only on alternate
days. Agatharcides took him to Libya, and there
introduced him to the Psyllians, in whose bodies was
a poison deadly to serpents, and who, to test the
fidelity of their wives, placed their children in
the presence of snakes; if the snakes fled they knew
their wives were pure. Callias took him further
yet, to the home of the hermaphrodites; Nymphodorus
showed him a race of fascinators who used enchanted
words. With Apollonides he encountered women
who killed with their eyes those on whom they looked
too long. Megasthenes guided him to the Astomians,
whose garments were the down of feathers, and who lived
on the scent of the rose.
In his cups they all passed, confusedly, before him;
the hermaphrodites whispered to the rose-breathers
the secrets of impossible love; the griffons bore
to him women with magical eyes; the Albanians danced
with elastic feet; he heard the shrill call of the
Psyllians, luring the serpents to death; the column
of Panchaia unveiled its mysteries; the Hyperboreans
the reason of their fear of life, and on the wings
of the chimera he set out again in search of that
continent which haunted antiquity and which lay beyond
the sea.
IV
THE PURSUIT OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
“Another Phaethon for the universe,” Tiberius
is reported to have muttered, as he gazed at his nephew
Caius, nicknamed Caligula, who was to suffocate him
with a mattress and rule in his stead.
To rule is hardly the expression. There is no
term in English to convey that dominion over sea and
sky which a Caesar possessed, and which Caligula was
the earliest to understand. Augustus was the
first magistrate of Rome, Tiberius the first citizen.
Caligula was the first emperor, but an emperor hallucinated
by the enigma of his own grandeur, a prince for whose
sovereignty the world was too small.
Each epoch has its secret, sometimes puerile, often
perplexing; but in its maker there is another and
a more interesting one yet. Eliminate Caligula,
and Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla and Heliogabalus
would never have been. It was he who gave them
both raison d’etre and incentive. The lives
of all of them are horrible, yet analyze the horrible
and you find the sublime.
