He reigned thirteen years; then came Nero. If one accepts the traditional view of him, it is not without evidence. His portraits suggest one ensouled by some horrible elemental; one with no human ego in him at all. The accounts given of his moods and actions are quite credible in the light of the modern medical knowledge as to insanity; you would find men like Tacitus Nero in most asylums. Neither Tacitus nor Suetonius was in the habit of taking science as a guide in their transcriptions; they did not, in dealing with Tiberius for example, suit their facts to the probabilities, but just set down the worst they had heard said. What they record of him is unlikely, and does not fit in with his known actions. But in drawing Nero, on the contrary, they made a picture that would surprise no alienist. Besides, Tacitus was born some seventeen years after Tiberius died; but he was fourteen years old at the death of Nero, and so of an age to have seen for himself, and remembered. Nero did kill his mother, who probably tried to influence him for good; and he did kill Seneca, who certainly did. His reign is a monument to the rottenness of Rome; his fall, a proof, perhaps, of the soundness of the provinces. For when they felt the shame of his conduct, they rose and put him down; Roman Gaul and Germany and Spain and the East did. Here is a curious indication: Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, who made such a sorry thing of the two years (68 and 69) they shared in the Principate, had each done well as a provincial governor. In the provinces, then, the Tiberian tradition of honest efficient government suffered not much, if any, interruption. The fact that Rome itself stood the nine years of Nero's criminal insanity,—and even, so far as the mob was concerned, liked it (for his grave was long kept strewn with flowers)—shows what a people can fall to, that the Crest-Wave had first made rotten, and then left soulless.
By the beginning of 70, things were comfortably in the hands of Vespasian, another provincial governor; under whom, and his son Titus after him, there were twelve years of dignified government; and seven more of the same, and then seven or eight of tyranny, under his second son, Domitian. Against the first two of these Flavians nothing is to be said except that the rise of their house to the Principate was by caprice of the soldiery. Vespasian was an honest Sabine, fond of retiring to his native farm; he brought in much good provincial blood with him into Roman society.—Then in 96 came a revolution which placed the aged senator Nerva on the throne; who set before himself the definite policy—as it was intended he should—of replacing personal caprice by legality and constitutionalism as the instrument of government. He reigned two years, and left the empire to Trajan; who was strong enough as a general to hold his position, and as a statesman, to establish the principles of Nerva. And so things began to expand again; and a new strength became evident, the like of which had not been seen since (at least) the death of Tiberius.
Octavian returned to Rome, sole Master of the world, in B.C. 29. A half-cycle on from that brings us to 36 A.D., the year before Tiberius died: that half-cycle was one, for the Empire all of it, and for Rome most of it, of bright daylight. The next half-cycle ends in 101, in the third year of Trajan: a time, for the most part, of decline, of twilight. You will notice that the Han day lasted the full thirteen decades before twilight came; the Roman, but six decades and a half.
We ought to understand just how far this second Roman half-cycle was an age of decline: just how much darkneww suffused the twilight it was. We talk of representative government; as if any government were ever really anything else. Men get the government that represents them; that represent their intelligence, or their laxity, or their vices:—whether it be sent in by the ballot or by a Praetorian Guard with their caprice and spears. In a pralayic time there is no keen national consciousness, no centripetalism. There was none in Rome in those days; or not enough to counteract the centrifugalism that simply did not care. The empire held together, because Augustus and Tiberius had created a centripetalism in the provinces; and these continued in the main through it all to enjoy the good government the first two emperors had made a tradition in them, and felt but little the hands of the fools or madmen reigning in Rome. And then, blood from the provinces was always flowing into Rome itself; particularly in the Flavian time; and supplied or fed a new centripetalism there which righted things in the next half-cycle. It was Rome, not the provinces, that Nero and Caligula represented in their day; the time was transitional; you may call Otho and Vitellius the first bungling shots of the provinces at having a hand in things at the center; wholesome Vespasian was their first representative emperor: Nerva and those that followed him represented equally the provinces and a regenerated Rome.—This tells you what Nero's Rome was, and how it came to tolerate Nero; when Vitellius came in with his band of ruffians from the Rhine, and the streets flowed with blood day after day, the places of low resort were as full as ever through it all; while carnage reigned in the forums, riotous vice reigned within doors.
But look outside of Rome, and the picture is very different. The Spaniard, Gaul, Illyrian, Asiatic and the rest, were enjoying the Roman Peace. There was progress; if not at the center, everywhere between that and the periphery of civilization. Life, even in Italy (in the country parts) was growing steadily more cultured, serious, and dignified; and in all remote regions was assimilating its standards to the best in Italy. From the Scottish Lowlands to the Cataracts of the Nile a single people was coming into being; it was a wide and well-tilled field in which incarnate souls might grow. The satirists make lurid pictures of the evils Rome; and the evils were there, with perhaps not much to counter-balance them, in Rome. Paris has been latterly the capital of civilization; and one of its phases as such has been to be the capital of the seven deadly sins. The sins are or were there: Paris provided for the sinners of the world, in her capacity of world-metropolis; just as she provided for the artists, the litteratuers, and so on. Foolish people drew from that the conclusion that therefore Frenchmen were more wicked than other people: whereas in truth the life of provincial France all along has probably been among the soundest of any. So we must offset Martial's and Juvenal's pictures of the calm and gracious life in the country: virtuous life, often, with quiet striving after usefulness and the higher things. He reveals to us, in the last quarter of the century, interiors in northern Italy, by Lake Como; you should have found the like anywhere in the empire. And where, since Rome fell, shall you come on a century in which Britain, Gaul, Spain, Italy, the Balkans, Asia and Africa, enjoyed a Roman or any kind of peace? Be not deceived: there has been no such success in Europe since as the empire that Augustus the Initiate made, and for which Tiberius his disciple was crucified.
Yet they captured it, as I find things, out of the jaws of failure and disaster. Failure: that of Pythagoreanism six centuries before;—disaster: Caesar's conquest of Gaul and destruction of the Mysteries there. Men come from the Masters of the World to work on this plane or on that: to found an empire perhaps, or to start a spiritual movement. Augustus came commissioned to the former, not to the latter, work. Supposing in his time the Gaulish Mysteries had been intact. We may trust him to have established relations somehow: he would have had close and friendly relations with the Gaulish hierophants; even if he had conquered the people, he would not have put out their light. But I imagine he would have found a means to union without conquest. Then what would have happened? We have seen that the cyclic impulse did touch Gaul at that time; it made her vastly rich, hugely industrial;—as Ferero says, the Egypt of the West. That, and nothing better than that, because she had lost her spiritual center, and might not figure as the world Teacher among nations. But, you say, Augustus proscribed Druidism—which sounds like carrying on Julius' nefarious work. He did, I believe;—but why? Because Julius had seen to it that the white side of Druidism had perished. The Druids were magicians; and now it was the dark magic and its practitioners that remained among them,—at least in Gaul. So of course Augustus proscribed it.
Remember how France has stood, these last seven centuries, as the teacher of the arts and civilization to Europe; and this idea that she might have been, and should have been, something far higher to the Roman world, need not seem at all extravagant. I think it was a possibility; which Caesar had been sent by the kings of night to forestall. And so, that Augustus lacked that reinforcement by which he might have secured for Europe a unity as enduring as the Chinese Teachers secured for the Far East.
And yet the Lodge did not leave Rome lightless; there was much spiritual teaching in the centuries of the Empire; indeed, a new out-breathing in each century, as an effort to retrieve the great defeat;—and this has been the inner history of europe ever since. This: raidings from the Godworld: swift cavalry raidings, that took no towns as a rule, nor set up strongholds here on hell's border; yet did each time, no doubt, carry off captives. Set up no strongholds;—that is, until our own times; so what we have missed is the continuous effort; the established base 'but here upon this bank and shoal,' from which the shining squadrons of the Gods might ride. Such a base was lost when Caesar conquered Gaul; then some substitute for Gaul had to be found. It was Greece and the East; where, as you may say, abjects and orts of truth came down; not the live Mysteries, but the membra disjecta of the vanished Mysteries of a vanished age. With these the Teachers of the Roman world had to work, distilling out of them what they might of the ancient Theosophy. So latterly H.P. Blavasky must gather up fragments in the East for the nexus of her teaching; she must find seeds in old sarcophagi, and plant and make them grow in this soil so uncongenial; because there was no well-grown Tree patent to the world, with whose undeniable fruitage she might feed the nations. This was one great difficulty in her way; whe had to introduce Theosphy into a world that had forgotten it ever existed.
So,—but with a difference,—in that first century. The difference was that Pythagoreanism, the nexus, was only six hundrd years away, and the memory of it fairly fresh. Stoicism was the most serious living influence within the empire; a system that concerned itself with right and brave living, and was so far spiritual; but perhaps not much further. The best in men reacted against the sensuality of the mid-century, and made Stoicism strong; but this formed only a basis of moral grit for the higher teaching; of which, while we know it was there, there is not very much to say. I shall come to it presently; meanwhile, to something else.—In literature, this was the cycle of Spain: the Crest-Wave was largely there during the first thirteen decades of the Christian era. Seneca was born in Cordova about 3 B. C.; Hadrian, the last greatman of Spanish birth (though probably of Italian race), died in 138. Seneca was a Stoic: a man with many imperfections, of whom history cannot make up its mind wholly to approve. He was Nero's tutor and minister during the first five golden years of the reign; his government was wise and beneficent, though, it is said, sometimes upheld by rather doubtful means. In the growing gloom and horror of the nightmare reign of Nero, he wrote many counsels of perfection; his notes rise often, someone has said, to a sort of falsetto shriek; but then, the wonder is he could sing at all in such a hell's cacophony. A man with obvious weaknesses, perhaps; but fighting hard to be brave and hopeful where there was nothing in sight to encourage bravery or foster hope; when every moment was pregnant with ghastly possibilities; when death and abominable torture hobnobbed in the Roman streets with riots of disgusting indulgence, abnormal lusts, filthiness parading unabashed. He speaks of the horrors, the gruesome impalings; deprecating them in a general way; not daring to come down to particulars, and rebuke Nero. Well; Nero commanded the legions, and was kittle cattle to rebuke. If sometimes you see tinsel and tawdriness about poor Seneca, look a little deeper, and you seem to see him writing it in agony and bloody sweat. . . . He was among the richest men in Rome, when riches were a deadly peril: he might even, had he been another man, have made himself emperor; perhaps the worst thing against him is that he did not. His counsels and aspirations were much better than his deeds;—which is as much as to say his Higher Self than his lower. He stood father-confessor to Roman Society: a Stoic philosopher in high, luxurious, and most perilous places: he cannot escape looking a little unreal. Someone in some seemingly petty difficulties, writes asking him to sue his influence on his behalf; and he replies with a dissertation on death, and what good may lie in it, and the folly of fearing it. Cold comfort for his correspondent; a tactless, strained, theatrical thing to do, we may call it. But what strain upon his nerves, what hideous knowledge of the times and of evils he did not see his way to prevent, what haunting sense of danger, must have driven him to that fervid hectic eloquence that now seems so unnatural! One guesses there may be a place in the Pantheons or in Valhalla of the heroes for this poor not untawdry not unheroic Seneca. One sees in him a kind of Hamlet, hitting in timorous indecision on the likely possibility of converting his Claudius by a string of moral axioms and eloquence to a condition that should satisfy the Ghost and undo the something rotten in the state…. Yet the Gods must have been grateful to him for the work he did in holding for Stoicism and aspiration a center in Rome during that dreadful darkness. Perhaps only the very strongest, in his position, could have done better; and then perhaps only by killing Nero.*
——— * Dill: Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. ———