Finally, one evening, perhaps because she had drunk a beverage prepared by Tryphene, perhaps because there was a full moon and she had gone to sleep with its pale light over her body, she had a dream.
She saw herself in a mute and uninhabited Rome, a Rome that seemed dead, going along the Tiber. She was walking with a sensation of extraordinary lightness under immeasurably magnified temples, alongside theaters and tombs of fabulous proportions. She saw a boat painted red that was coming down the Tiber, and, standing in the prow, a boatman in a black toga, whose face she could distinguish, who was very pale, long and somewhat emaciated. With his right hand he was plying the unique oar attached to the prow, and with the left he was making a gesture that seemed to be telling her to follow him.
Impelled by an irrational force, she started to run. The boat was moving rapidly and she had difficulty not losing sight of it. The landscape changed. There was no longer a city around her; the Tiber plunged into melancholy valleys populated with cypresses and large white stones with inscriptions in a language that she did not know. Then the river narrowed, and in spite of the faster current, Messalina went into the water in order to reach the boat.
She distinguished the face of the boatman more clearly and saw that it had an attractive and noble beauty. His eyes were fixed upon her, but he was still manipulating his oar. Then, as she reached out toward him, the waters opened up and she saw an enormous head surging forth, part-human and part-fish, with lips that hung down over its torso, large webbed hands that seized her under the breasts, and an obscene body that pressed against her own. She did not experience any physical horror, and allowed herself to be tipped back on the sand of the shore.
She was still looking at the boatman, who was rowing away, and she was gripped by a delicious sensation that invaded her on contact with the river monster that was embracing her. Her mouth was crushed beneath a fleshy mouth, and scales doubtless agitated over her delicate body. She dissolved in a carnal wellbeing that she had never known. Her loins sank voluptuously into the sand and the warm mud. In the distance, a fantastic setting sun bathed the horizon with crimson, and before closing her eyes, she glimpsed, one final time, a somber silhouette over the water and a hand that was beckoning to her.
V. Simon Magus
Perhaps it is true that the entire design of an existence shows itself to you in the first years, and the days of the life that flow past subsequently are like the thread that is placed on the template of an embroidery already traced. Perhaps it is true that by virtue of an inexplicable play of destiny, you have around you, at the age of twenty or thereabouts, all the individuals that are to play a role, good or bad, in your existence. They might disappear for some time, in order to return later, and one cannot tell whether they will be minor actors of heroes, but all the characters of the drama or the comedy of which one is to be the center come when the curtain rises to present their faces and state their names.
Thus, it was given to Messalina, shortly before she turned twenty, to see, gathered at the same supper, those she was to love, those she was to hate, and the future emperor that she was to marry.
A man called Simon, who had been nicknamed the Magus, happened at that moment to conquer a great celebrity in Rome because of the prodigies he accomplished.7 Almost nothing was known about him except that he had come from Gittes in Samaria and that he possessed immense wealth. He lived in a splendid house near the Via Appia, not far from the tomb of Cecilia Metella, where he was served by Syrian slaves he had brought with him, and who seemed to venerate him like a god. Moreover, he said that he was a god, and there were many simple people who believed him, because he accomplished marvelous feats before them.
He was Jupiter in person, some affirmed; but others thought that he was an Asiatic charlatan, so many of whom came to Rome in order to exploit public curiosity. It is certain, however, that he had the faculty of rising into the air by mental effort alone. It was also certain that he did not ask for any money for the cures that he operated, simply by the imposition of his hands, and that if he received any without asking for it, it was only in large sums.
A widow named Calpurnia claimed that, under the pretext of enchantments, he had caused her to give him all her jewels, among which there were pearls from India and emeralds from Persia. She had a great deal of difficulty getting them back, because Simon had assured her at first that a redoubtable genius, which he had evoked, had carried them all away. She had insisted, threatening to bring him before the law. He had then returned larger pearls and emeralds, because the genius had been mistaken in taking them away, and he had advised Calpurnia to keep silent regarding the affair, whose outcome was so fortunate for her. But all the jewels had been found to be fakes. It is true that Calpurnia’s life was full of complicated stories of that genre, and one could never derive an argument from what she said.
He was also reputed to have acquired the house in which he resided by exploiting the folly of an old man. The house had belonged to a certain Cethegus, who had grown rich trading in grains and had talked a certain amount of nonsense since the death of his daughter. Cethegus had come to find Simon soon after his arrival in Rome because of his reputation as a miracle-worker and had asked him whether he could resurrect his daughter, whom he had lost the previous year.
Simon had replied that the operation, without being easy, was nevertheless quite realizable. He told him that he had seen it done, when he was young, in Bethany in Palestine, by a Jewish prophet named Jesus, but that was a matter of a man, and he had only been dead for four days. As it was a matter of a woman, dead for a year, he could not proceed with the same rapidity as the Jewish prophet. He asked for time. It even appeared to be necessary for him to install himself in the house where the young woman had lived, in order that the magical practices to which he was about to devote himself would be more operable.
Cethegus went to live in a small villa he had outside Rome, where he waited impatiently for his daughter’s return to life. To while away the time, he devoted himself to gardening. One morning, having climbed a fig-tree to collect figs, he fell so awkwardly that he broke his back. He had time, before dying, to give his house to Simon by testament, in exchange for which the latter would bring the work of resurrection to completion. He sometimes affirmed that he had done that, and that the young woman had been resuscitated from among the dead, but he did not provide any evidence of it.
Simon had for a companion a woman of extreme beauty named Helen. He did not hide the fact that he had found her in a brothel in the Paloetirus quarter of Tyre. He said that in an anterior life she had been the beautiful Helen who had provoked the Trojan War. He seemed to love her infinitely. However, the rich Lucius Agrippa affirmed to his friends, when he had been drinking, that he had spent an entire night with her in exchange for a thousand gold deniers. As proof, he gave details of the form of her body, which was splendid, and the pleasure he had obtained, which had been very great—but, apart from the fact that these details were not verifiable, the enormity of the sum paid rendered the story implausible, all the more so as Lucius Agrippa was very miserly. What is certain in that regard is that Simon Magus conceived of amour in a manner different from that of other men. He allowed his mistress to appear almost naked at suppers and sometimes undressed her himself in order to have the guests admire the pure lines of her legs and breasts.
Opinions were therefore divided on his subject. Philosophers who had argued with him on the nature of the gods claimed that there was no man more learned or wiser. One compared him to Pythagoras, another to Plato. A third recognized in him a man who had received the highest initiation in the temples of Egypt. Others said that he was merely an eloquent charlatan, a conjurer more skilful and better endowed than the others.
The numerous cures of sick people that he performed among the poor gave him a great popularity. All of Roman high society sought him out, but he did not seem to desire the company of the rich. He sometimes invited to his home a small number of privileged individuals
, and the difficulty of being in their number was extreme. Then, in conversation, he gave very precious prescriptions. One of them made the fortune of the keepers of the wild beasts in the circus for some time. He had indicated, as a remedy against tumors, a grease found on the forehead of lions between the eyebrows; but no dead lions whose skins were removed had any grease in that location. He replied to those who complained that the grease did indeed dissolve immediately as soon as the lions quit the desert.
He also affirmed once, in the market of the Equimelum, that he had caused a woman to enter into an egg, and he had brought her out and given the egg to a member of the audience to eat, to demonstrate that it had not been damaged. Thanks to him, many people knew their future, several madmen had become sane again, and a eunuch had recovered his virility.
One evening, Messalina came to the house of Simon Magus with Lepida. She was to see the image of her destiny there. At that moment Claudius was thinking of marrying her. He had mentioned it to his cousin Barbatus. The latter, whom drunkenness rendered stupid, had left the concern of deciding to Lepida. Lepida hesitated. Should she push her daughter to marry an old, stupid, debt-ridden man of dissolute mores, who had no other title than that of being Caligula’s uncle?
Claudius desired Messalina for her beauty, but he knew that he was a mediocre catch. Furthermore, he was feeble and devoid of the will-power to realize what he wanted. Things were at that point when he encountered her at Simon’s house.
What struck Messalina most of all when the ostiarius had closed the cedar-wood door again, and when she had traversed the prothyrum and the atrium, was the large quantity of unknown gods that were offered to her sight. They were of all sorts, represented in paintings, sculpted in marble or bronze, or molded in baked clay. Apart from those of Greece and Rome, there were images of Isis, in a transparent robe enameled with sapphires, in order to evoke by their blueness the principle of amour that they symbolized, and of Osiris radiant with intelligence. There were images of Horus, raising a magical lotus; Anubis with the head of a jackal, guardian of the places where the dead live; Amon-Ra, the god of the planets; Hermes with his golden wand; and Nephtys, the goddess of damp regions, holding an open seashell.
There was an immense Phoenician Baaltis and a very tiny Carthaginian Tanit. She also saw a golden calf similar to the one the Jews had worshiped; a Melkarth with a cunning face; A Set Typhon with stupid features, and the group of the primitive Babylonian trinity, formed of Anu, Sin and Bel. The bird of the tempest, Zu, in bronze corroded by time, swung at the end of a wire. With his twenty-one arms, a Hindu Savitar seemed to be trying to seize her; a Siva fixed her with his thirty-three eyes; and a Mongolian Erlik-Khan was dreaming under a forest of hair that emerged from all parts of his cranium. And there were also crude idols, animal gods, half-fish and half-bird, gods that were no more than a beak or a tooth, and others that scarcely had any form. There was a conical stone adored by the Thracians, and a red pebble worshiped by the Getes.
When Messalina and Lepida penetrated into the triclinium, Simon Magus was speaking. He had a forehead so high and prominent that he seemed deformed, and little eyes, by turns laughing and grave, in which one could not determine whether they were animated by the most sublime intelligence or the endless desire to seduce. Helen was lying on the same bed as him, and he sometimes parted the jewels she wore around her neck in order to caress her nape. Her hair formed a profound mass around her milk-white face. Her body had a great linear beauty. She was slim and seemed indolent. A slight vulgarity in the joints was the sole defect in her perfect form.
At their feet, on the same bed, was a bizarre being whose sex Messalina could not distinguish at first. He had short curly hair and an adolescent body where, under a violet stola, one thought one could see the rounding of a woman’s cleavage. The face was also feminine, but the shoulders and arms were hose of a young man. He could not have been older than fifteen. The hermaphrodite’s head reposed between Helen’s knees, and he sometimes pressed them with his blue-painted fingernails.
A murmur of sympathy greeted the arrival of the two women. Claudius tried to get up, but could not do it. He had already drunk to excess, and the disturbance he felt on seeing Messalina was not sufficient to allow him to recover his mental grip.
Messalina sensed, posing upon her at such length that it eventually became an embarrassment, the gaze of Caius Silius, a young man who was not yet twenty and was famous in Rome for his beauty. It was a severe, icy gaze, in which an irrational antipathy was manifest. She perceived that antipathy and returned it, forcefully. She was seeing Caius Silius for the first time, of whom she had heard talk, and was glad to find that his reputation for beauty was unmerited. How could she have thought then that the man she started to hate with such force would be the same one that she would love a few years later, to the death?
Valerius Asiaticus saluted them almost without seeing them. His thoughts gave the impression of being far away, and what impressed Messalina was the extraordinary serenity that was disengaged from his entire person. He had just reached his fortieth year, and he had stripped himself of his passions like a tree that, at the beginning of autumn, allows its leaves to fall around it. He had loved life ardently had had enjoyed it in all its forms. Several times a consul, he had had the satisfactions of power. He had known the glory of commanding Roman legions victoriously in Britain and on the borders of Persia. His fortune was immense and he loved justice. In the name of that justice he had been one of the instigators of the murder of Caligula, and that had contributed to rendering him very popular.
Without him being able to define its origin, however, wisdom had suddenly come to him. The love of women, luxury and the pleasure that success gives had ceased to have any value in his eyes. He only took pleasure in speculations regarding the nature of things or future existence. He had become sober and chaste. It was claimed that he had changed as a consequence of a great disappointed amour for Poppea, the wife of the venerable Scipio, but there was no evidence to support that rumor.
There were also others round Simon, including Theogonius, who had made a semblance of being an imbecile for fear of Caligula, but, by virtue of simulating imbecility, had really acquired it.
Apion, the most learned man in Rome in philosophy and the natural sciences,8 which he professed before numerous disciples, was holding his chin in his bony hands and staring at him with red eyes, radiating jealousy. The facility he had in expressing himself in all subjects and the science that seemed to be innate in the magician devoured his heart with more force than Prometheus’ vulture would have done.
Amaryllis, the aged wife of a senator, known for her gaiety and her extravagance, was fanning herself with a large fan made from ostrich feathers. She sweated perpetually and was prey to surges of heat. She was very assiduous in Simon’s regard because she had been struck by the experiment of the woman and the egg and keenly desired, she said, to be enclosed in the little oval palace of calcareous coolness that the interior of an egg must be.
A prince named Arbaces, the companion of the king of Armenia, Mithridates, a refugee in Rome, gave the impression of a bronzed young athlete, who understood nothing of what was said but nodded his head perpetually, while staring at Helen with naïve eyes full of concupiscence.
And that evening, Messalina heard words that were to influence her life forever.
“I don’t understand,” said Valerius Asiaticus to Simon, “why you tell simple folk that you’re Jupiter. You thus make yourself, without any advantage, pass for an impostor among intelligent folk.”
“I am Jupiter for those who believe that I am Jupiter,” replied Simon, smiling. “There isn’t only one truth. There are a great number, in fact, and we ought to present ourselves to men under aspects that differ in accordance with their intelligence. I perform miracles for the simple, I utilize unknown forces for average minds, and for you, Valerius Asiaticus, I merely put my mind in communication with the universal mind. I don’t suffer at all from passing for
a charlatan, for the opinion of men is of scant importance and I only take account of my own, which is favorable to me. I have been initiated in a temple in Memphis by Pentaour, who had initiated Plato several centuries earlier. He was near to his death and he bequeathed to me the last wave of his wisdom.
“Afterwards, I was part of the community of the thirty disciples of Dositheus in Arabia. I lived among them the life of an ascetic, nourishing myself on herbs, sleeping on the sand, with a stone for a pillow, and seeking divine ecstasy. It was there that I heard talk of a sage in the community of Essenes who performed miracles in public and revealed all the mysteries. It was then that a light came to me. I had learned in my cell in the desert that the nourishment of herbs is poor, that a stone is insufficient as a pillow, and that the ascetic life is not the best one to fortify the spirit.
“I knew that I needed to go into the world in order to teach that the Essene Jesus was mistaken, that men were not yet sufficiently developed to receive the verities that he was revealing, that it would only be much later, perhaps in thousands of years, that the mind would be able to disengage itself from matter and attain, directly, what he called the kingdom of God. I knew that it was important to proclaim that there is a divine path, slower but as certain, in the normal enjoyment of life, which permits the drinking of wine according to one’s desire, the admiration of the light of the sun and the extraction of sensuality from the bodies of women.
“I quit the desert, having learned the ingratitude of its sand, and went to find Helen, in order that she would be the instrument of my own pleasure. Thus I am, with her, a perfect example of the truly virtuous man who brings out the moral beauty of joy.”
“But how did you know that it was really this one, and not another, that you ought to encounter?” Apion interjected.
“By the knowledge of the secret teachings of Pythagoras, from which almost all our true science comes to us, I learned the means of rediscovering my former incarnations and those of the woman I shall call my double, and who is linked to me in the course of my different lives. I can say that I have known Helen for many centuries. We have made one another suffer mutually under other corporeal forms in Persia, in Chaldea and in lands that have now disappeared beneath the sea. I was only about to be born when her beauty unleashed the Trojan War, alas—one cannot encounter one another in every life.
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