I entered Rome at night, passing through an endless number of narrow and intricate streets where hovels, the very abode of want, were mingled with palaces blazing with lights and echoing with festivity. The centurion’s house was at length reached. He showed me to an apartment, and left me, saying, “that I must prepare to be brought before the Emperor immediately on his arrival.”
I am now, thought I, in the heart of the heart of the world; in the midst of that place of power from which the destiny of nations issues; in the great treasure-house to which men come from the ends of the earth for knowledge, for justice, for wealth, honor, thrones! And what am I?—a solitary slave!
CHAPTER XX
The Burning of Rome
With the original mixture of Ionian and northern blood in his veins, the character of the Roman was at once tasteful and barbarian. Like the Asiatic, delighting in luxury, like the Tatar, delighting in gore, he turned the elegance of the Greek games into the combat of gladiators. He was a voluptuary, but the gravest of all voluptuaries. Of all nations the Roman bore the strongest resemblance to that people of conquerors who at length swept its name from Byzantium; superb, but slavish; fierce, but sensual; brave as the lion, but base in its appetites as the jackal; a people made for the possession of empire and for its corruption.[26]
Of all men he had the least resemblance to his successor. Haughty, sagacious, and solemn, tho ravening for rapine, and merciless in his revenge, he bequeathed nothing to that miscellany of mankind which has followed him, but his passion for shows.
Roman Pageantry
Rome was all shows. Its innumerable public events were all thrown into the shape of pageantry. Its worship, elections, the departure and return of governors and consuls, every operation of public life, was modeled into a pomp, and in the boundless extent of the empire those operations were crowding on one another every day. The multitude that can still be set in motion by a wooden saint was then summoned by the stirring ceremonial of empire, the actual sovereignty of the globe. What must have been the strong excitement, the perpetual concourse, the living and various activity of a city from which flowed the stream of power through the world, to return to it loaded with all that the opulence, skill, and splendor of the world could give.
Triumphs to whose grandeur and singularity the pomps of later days are but as the attempts of paupers and children; rites on which the very existence of the state was to depend; the levy and march of armies which were to carry fate to the remotest corners of the earth; the kings of the East and West coming to solicit diadems or to deprecate the irresistible wrath of Rome; vast theaters; public games that tasked the whole fertility of Roman talent, and the most prodigal lavishness of imperial luxury, were the movers that among the four millions of Rome made life a hurricane.