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.
Fancy a peak piercing the heavens, shadowing the earth. It was on
a peak such as that the young emperors of old Rome balanced
themselves, a precipice on either side. Did they look below, a
vertigo rose to meet them; from above delirium came, while the
horizon, though it hemmed the limits of vision, could not mark the
frontiers of their dream. In addition there was the exaltation
that altitudes produce. The valleys have their imbeciles; it is
from mountains the poet and madman come. Caligula was both,
sceptred at that; and with what a sceptre! One that stretched from
the Rhine to the Euphrates, dominated a hundred and fifty million
people; one that a mattress had given and a knife was to take
away; a sceptre that lashed the earth, threatened the sky,
beckoned planets and ravished the divinity of the divine.
To wield such a sceptre securely requires grace, no doubt, majesty
too, but certainly strength; the latter Caligula possessed, but it
was the feverish strength of one who had fathomed the
unfathomable, and who sought to make its depths his own. Caligula
was haunted by the intangible. His sleep was a communion with
Nature, with whom he believed himself one. At times the Ocean
talked to him; at others the Earth had secrets which it wished to
tell.
Pages:
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48