To the
world of Caesar he added that of Alexander. Allies he turned into
subjects, vassals into slaves. Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, were
added to the realm. Trajan's footstools were diadems. He had moved
back one frontier, he moved another. From Britain to the Indus,
Rome was mistress of the earth. Had Trajan been younger, China,
whose very name was unknown, would have yielded to him her
corruption, her printing press, her powder and her tea.
That he would have enjoyed these things is not at all conjectural.
He was then an old man, but he was not a good one--at least not in
the sense we use the term to-day. He had habits which are regarded
now less as vices than perversions, but which at that time were
taken as a matter of course and accepted by everyone, even by the
stoics, very calmly, with a grain of Attic salt at that. Men were
regarded as virtuous when they were brave, when they were honest;
the idea of using the expression in its later sense occurred, if
at all, in jest merely, as a synonym for the eunuch. It was the
matron and the vestal who were supposed to be straight, and their
straightness was wholly supposititious. The ceremonies connected
with the phallus, and those observed in the worship of the Bona
Dea, were of a nature that no virtue could withstand. Every altar,
Juvenal said, had its Clodius, and even in Clodius' absence there
were always those breaths of Sapphic song that blew through
Mitylene.
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