John Roberts - The Sacrilege

I wonder sometimes if we can ever know what truly happened. Dead men do not write, so histories perforce are written by those who survived. Of those who survived, some experienced the events firsthand, while others only heard about them. Each who speaks or writes relates events not necessarily as they occurred, but rather as they should have occurred in order to make the teller, or his ancestors, or his political faction, look good.

Once, during one of my numerous periods of exile, I was confined to the beautiful but boring island of Rhodes. There is nothing to do on Rhodes except attend lectures at its many institutes of learning. I chose to attend a course of lectures on history because there was nothing else available that season save philosophy, which I avoided like any sensible man.

The history lectures were delivered by a scholar named Antigonus, who enjoyed a great reputation in those days, although he is all but forgotten now. He devoted the whole of one lecture to this seeming mutability of historical fact. He gave, as example the case of the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogiton, who lived in Athens five hundred years ago. At that time, Athens was ruled by Hippias and Hipparchus, the sons of the tyrant, Pisistratus. Now, it seems that Harmodius and Aristogiton raised a rebellion against the Pisistratids, but they only contrived to kill one of them, I forget which. The surviving and aggrieved brother had both put to death, with embellishments. The anti-Pisistratid party, with the two slain tyrannicides as its martyrs, then raised a successful rebellion and imposed its own enlightened ruler, either Cleisthenes or somebody else. Before you knew it, there were statues of the tyrannicides all over Greece and its colonies. My father had a splendid group, sculpted by Axias, in the garden of his country villa, brought back by an ancestor after we looted Corinth.

But the facts, Antigonus explained, were quite different. Harmodius and Aristogiton were not idealistic young democrats with a hatred of tyrants. They were lovers. The Pisistradid who was killed had conceived a lust for the prettier of the two, who was not about to leave his boyfriend for some ugly old pederast, and so the assassination plot was hatched. It was only after the two were dead that the legend of the tyrannicides was created by the anti-Pisistratid party.

The amazing thing was, everybody knew the true story at the time! They all just consented to believe the legend for propaganda purposes. Thus the legend became, in a term created by Antigonus, "political truth." It was a very Greek story, and only a Greek could have come up with such a term.

Antigonus went on to say that only those who directly experienced historical events knew what truly happened, and the rest of us could only perceive them as if through a dense fog, or as blind men tracing the lineaments of a statue with their fingertips. He said that there are sorcerers who, like Proteus in the tale of Ulysses, can summon the shades of the dead and cause them to speak to us, and that it may be only thus that we can ever arrive at a true knowledge of past events.

I thought that made excellent sense at the time, but I have since come to doubt it. About the time I arrived at my present profound knowledge of human nature, the question occurred to me: Would men stop lying just because they are dead? I do not think so. Men of ambition are always concerned about how they shall be remembered after they are dead, and that very end would be defeated were they to start speaking the truth about themselves the moment they found themselves idling by the shores of the Styx, waiting for the ferryboat to come for its latest load of passengers.

One need not go back to a pack of ancient Athenian boy-fanciers to find a warped tale of tyrannicide. Take the assassination of Julius Caesar. There is an official story, sanctioned by our First Citizen, which constitutes Antigonus's "political truth." I know quite another story, and I was there at the time, which our First Citizen was not. Doubtless there are many other versions, though, each shedding the finest light on the teller or his ancestors. If we had one of those necromantic sorcerers, and were he to raise before us the shade of the Divine Julius, and those of Cassius, Brutus, Casca and, say, five of the others (nine is a number very dear to the gods), then I think we should hear nine very different accounts of the events of that fateful ides of March. The fog of men's self-love is as dense as any thrown up by time or distance.

Enough. I shall write of the death of Caesar another time, if age, health and the First Citizen spare me. I write instead of an earlier time, seventeen years earlier, in fact, and of events not quite so celebrated, although they are remembered and certainly seemed momentous at the time.

And you can put your trust in my words, because I was there and saw it all, and I have lived too long and seen too much to care what the living think of me. Much less do I worry about the opinion held of me after I am dead.

I was looking forward to a good year. I always surveyed each new year with optimism, and events almost always proved my outlook mistaken. This year was to be no exception. I was young, not yet quite twenty-nine, and it takes much to overcome the natural high spirits of the young. The wherewithal to crush my optimism was waiting, in great supply.

Everything looked fair as I rode toward the city, though. One reason for my cheerfulness lay outside the walls: a huge encampment of soldiers, prisoners and loot. The loot alone covered acres of land, protected by sheds and awnings. Pompey was back from Asia, and these were the preparations for his triumph. Until the day of his triumph, Pompey could not enter the city, and that was the way I liked it. The anti-Pompeian faction in the Senate had blocked permission for the triumph so far. As far as I was concerned, he could wait out there until the gods called him unto themselves, an unlikely occurrence, whatever he might think.

I knew I would have an active year. My father had been elected Censor, and that is an office with many duties. I expected him to assign me to the census of citizens, since that is tedious and demanding work, leaving him free to concentrate on purging the Senate of unworthy members, which was satisfying, and letting the public contracts, which was profitable.

I did not care. I would be in Rome! I had spent the past year in Gaul, where the climate is disagreeable and people do not bathe. They do not eat well, and a thousand years of Roman civilization will never teach the Gauls to make decent wine. The gladiators were second-rate, and the only saving grace of the place was its wonderful charioteers and racing horses. The Circuses were mean and shabby by Roman standards, but the races were breathtaking. Also, my duties had lain principally with the army. I always had a most un-Roman dislike of military life. There had been no fighting, which was boring and unprofitable, and my duties had been principally as paymaster, which was humiliating. Soldiers always smirk when they see an officer tricked out in parade armor counting out their wages one coin at a time and making them sign the ledger.

All that was over, and my heart sang as I drew nearer the Ostian Gate. I could have taken a barge upriver from the port, but I felt like making an entrance, so I had borrowed a horse from the quaestor at Ostia, had my parade armor polished and bought new plumes for my helmet. It was a fine day, and I made a splendid sight as I rode in, acknowledging the gate guard's salute.

The city walls now stood well beyond the pomerium, and I could ride through this part of the town in full military splendor, accepting the admiring hails of my fellow citizens. The popularity of the military stood very high at that moment, as Roman arms had turned in a string of victories with rich loot. I halted and dismounted at the line of the old city wall, established by Romulus. To cross the pomerium in arms meant death.