A Pillar of Iron: A Novel of Ancient Rome

by Taylor Caldwell

We are fast approaching the day when Rome will not be swayed by the temperate middle-class but by the rich, who will preside over whining and bottomless bellies, and slaves. Each serves the other, satisfies the other’s appetite, in an evil symbiosis. For the rabble’s votes the powerful man will betray Rome. Though Marius has lately pushed back the hordes of Germanic invaders, we have not done with turbulence, and turbulence is the climate in which tyrants flourish. Therefore, I fear for my country.

“We have come,” said the grandfather, “on the age of tyrants. Governments use national emergencies to restrict and then to destroy liberty.

Years later Marcus wrote of the Caesares: “They will be remembered as great, yet no one will be completely certain in what their greatness lies. I believe I have solved the riddle: They loved no one but themselves. At no time did they forget their duty to themselves, or their own advantage. By this magic they convinced every man that the Caesares were uncommon men, indeed, and deserved honor and love.”

“Perhaps it is because a totally evil man has an irresistible charm, and excites the envy and admiration of those who dare not display themselves so completely.” “Then total evil has a kind of virtue of its own,” said Marcus. “An honesty.”

“No!” cried Tullius, with sudden vehemence. “A government rarely represents the people! Love of country is often confused in simple minds with love of one’s government. They are rarely one; they are not synonymous. Yet,” he added, mournfully, “the evil men in government are compelled to show a public face of sympathy for the oppressed and must pretend, at all times, to be one with them, seeking to rectify the very wrong they have secretly committed.”

“It does not even matter that the evil man does not fulfill his promises! The people do not care, do not remind him. It is enough that he is evil, and reflects themselves. The mobs are more comfortable in the climate of malignity than the climate of good, which embarrasses and discomfits them, for it is against their nature.

I suppose the wheel of which I have been speaking should have abased itself before its creator and have dashed itself against a stone in repentance for being what it had been made!”

A man who can command the very dregs of a nation, and who has no love for his country, and who is revolutionary and hating and vengeful and envious and evil and a traitor, is not to be laughed at or ignored. My friends are too complacent; they believe that Rome is founded on rock and our Constitution invulnerable and our law too strong. They love to consider themselves tolerant of all men’s opinions and refuse to believe that some men are profoundly wicked and monstrous by nature. They look at their own pleasant and fatherly visages and believe that their mirrors reflect all others’. Do you know what they tell me? That Catilina’s following is a very small minority in Rome!”

“It is one thing for a man to be defeated by a powerful and significant foe. It is quite another for him to die of the bite of a bedbug.”

“I do not do well among subtle men whose every move and every word confuses me, who at one moment demand something and in the next demand that their demand not be heeded. When such scum as that jury could pretend to believe that something which had happened had not truly happened then the law is completely undermined, and without law the Republic is lost.”

He had entered politics not in eagerness and in pursuit of power, but to serve his country. He discovered that this was the most foolish of ambitions, for those who serve their country are not remembered with love, and honored, whereas those who serve only themselves and become rich and powerful are celebrated as wise and lovable men and given even higher honors. Who can refrain from adoring a man who adores himself?

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the carrier of the plague. You have unbarred the gates of Rome to him.*

He would not understand that in these fierce and rapid days of Rome the slow movement of the representatives of the people, the tribunes, was not enough to meet the needs of modern times. He is of the old days, the simple days, when the Constitution was enough, and law was law, and morality was in the people. But now, in our rushing society, in the growing grandeur of Rome, and her power, and her leadership of the world, the ponderous machinery of the representatives of the people is a hindrance to the new impatience which demands that a government must act speedily and decisively in the enormous face of events.

“The voice of the people is frequently the voice of jackasses and criminals and the demented and the avid bellies. They will believe the most monstrous lies if spoken by their current favorite and servant in politics. They will defame the best, if so commanded. They will riot and commit wholesale murder at the behest of any rascal who alleges he loves and serves them out of the nobility of his heart. The mob neither loves nor hates Cicero for himself. But they hate him because Clodius has commanded them so to hate. And this is democracy!”*

He is the most formidable man in Rome. He now manipulates everything and everyone in the city. He is loved by the people because he is a libertine, like them, and a lover of life, like them also, and despoiler like themselves, and has, in short, all their vices. Men adore their vices; they hide their virtues, if any, as if they were shameful secrets. They also adore the politician and the soldier who has their vices in larger measure, for in him they see themselves. Rome, in Caesar’s face, sees her own image.

“What can console me in my family, my library, my gardens, my farms, and even on my ancestral island if Rome dies without a word from me? There is active evil, such as supporting evil men and traitors. And there is the passive evil, speaking not when a man should speak. This is the worst—that good men do nothing or become tired or hopeless. It is notable that wicked men have boundless energy and enthusiasm, as if they draw sustenance and vile new spirit from some dark, Plutonian underground.”

“When a people are determined to become slaves, and are degraded, it is folly to try to animate in them again the spirit of pride and honor and freedom and law. They enthusiastically embrace their chains in order that they may be fed without any effort on their parts. Therefore, I have been a fool.”