Divine Fury (8 page)

A guardian and protector, the
genius
was simultaneously conceived as an intercessor to the divine and a spiritual embodiment of what was unique to the character of each man. Horace reflects this dual sense in a well-known passage from the
Epistles
, when he asks what determines the difference in temperament between two brothers, the one lazy and fancy-free, the other serious and hardworking. Only our
genius
knows, Horace responds,

that companion who controls our birth-star
,

the god of human nature, mortal throughout each man’s life
,

variable in features, bright and gloomy
.

The
genius
, an individual’s intimate “companion” (
comes
) and spiritual double, is aware of, and responsible for, the differences that shape human personalities and determine their fates. And fate is written in the stars. That, at any rate, was the assertion of ancient astrologers, whose influence on popular Roman religious beliefs was extensive. Horace’s invocation of the birth-star (
astrum natale
) reflects that influence, which precisely in this period was giving to the concept of
genius
a pronounced
astrological inflection. The connection is understandable: a
genius
was the god of our conception, honored on our birthday, the day on which the stars aligned in such a way as to assign our fate and form our character, giving us a “personality” and particular traits. And so it was natural to conclude that this god was a powerful force in the zodiac, guiding the alignment of the planets that influenced our temperament and predicted our destiny.
³⁸

It was also natural to conclude that this god—who might soar through the heavens to intercede with the divine forces of the universe—was also resident within us. Roman commentators disagreed about the precise dwelling place of the
genius
—whether it hovered continually about us, or was resident within, whether it took its seat in the head, or the knees (
genua
), or suffused the entire body like a breath or soul. But given that the
genius
helped to form a unique temperament and character in us from birth—and was invariably represented in statuary and painting as an individual’s exact likeness—the relationship between this divine companion and one’s inborn nature was close. Already in Roman times,
genius
was intimately related to a cognate word with which it would much later be conflated entirely, the classical Latin
ingenium
, meaning our inborn nature, disposition, or talent. Formed from the prefix “in” and the accusative form of the noun
genius
, the word literally meant the
genius
within—the nature of the god that shapes us. And as every man has a different
genius
, a different guardian and companion, so, too, does each man have a different personality, a different nature and fate. The two notions,
genius
and
ingenium
, tended to merge.

And so a line of inquiry that had preoccupied the Greeks—what makes the nature of men, and, more specifically, what makes the nature of great men—also exercised the Romans, who drew freely on the answers of the predecessors they so admired. As they did so, they conflated their own reflections on
genius
and
ingenium
with Greek speculation about the
daimon
and natural talent (
phusis
). Thus can a Roman author like Seneca observe, in a much-repeated gloss on the Pseudo-Aristotelian
Problems
, that “there can be no great
ingenium
without a touch of madness.” Others embraced Plato, giving his divine enthusiasm the Latin name by which it would resound through the ages, the
furor poeticus
, that divine
afflatus
or breath that served as a species of the more general
furor divinus
. Still other influential commentators refused to take sides. Cicero, for example, sings the praises of
ingenium
—that natural talent that cannot be learned—while also endorsing the enthusiastic transports of divine inspiration. Horace, in his
Ars Poetica
, invokes the madness of outstanding poets, conflating the Pseudo-Aristotelian
and Platonic accounts. And the author known as Longinus, in a treatise on the sublime that would have a major impact on later thinking about genius, describes how writers of great natural talents were in possession of a force that could carry them out of themselves “above all mortal range,” lifting them “near the mind of God.”
³⁹

In all of these ways, Roman subjects carried on and kept alive the Greek discussion about what outstanding individuals had in their possession—or what it was that possessed them—to make them more than ordinary men. But the best example of such syncretism is the Romans’ reflection on what they came to call the
genius
of Socrates. Already in the first century, Plutarch’s treatise
On the Sign of Socrates
was being called, in Latin,
De Genio Socratis
(On Socrates’s
genius
), a convention that the English poet John Dryden adopted when he translated Plutarch’s writings into English in the seventeenth century. Not long after Plutarch, Apuleius asserted in his own reflection on the “god” of Socrates the direct correspondence of the Greek
daimon
and the Roman
genius
. The coupling allowed Romans to see their own
genii
in Greek demons, and vice versa. Thus can the learned Varro speak of the
genius
in terms that borrowed from Plato’s conception of the
daimon
as the rational part of the soul. “
Genius
,” he writes, in a now lost manuscript cited by Saint Augustine, “is the rational soul (
anima rationalis
) of each man.” Apuleius maintained that position while further incorporating the received Greek notion that human beings were guided not only by a good god, a friendly
daimon-genius
, but an evil one as well. Whereas the good
genius
was simultaneously the god and soul of each man—dwelling “in the inmost sanctum of the human mind in the function of consciousness itself”—the evil
genius
represented our potential for wickedness and depravity. Plutarch, similarly, recounts in a famous passage how Brutus, the slayer of Caesar, sat alone in his camp one night during the Second War of the Triumvirate with “a dim light burning by him,” as the other soldiers slept: “Reasoning about something with himself and very thoughtful, he fancied some one came in, and, looking towards the door, he saw a terrible and strange appearance of an unnatural and frightful body standing by him without speaking. Brutus boldly asked it, ‘What are you, of men or gods, and upon what business come to me?’ The figure answered, ‘I am your evil genius, Brutus; you shall see me at Philippi.’” Philippi is the place where Brutus dies. His evil
genius
is his angel of death. The Roman soul in this reckoning becomes the site of a great war of
genii
, a battlefield of conflicting forces of the divine. By the fourth century, the Roman grammarian Servius was perfectly explicit on the matter, writing that “when we are born, we are allotted two
genii
: one exists which urges
us toward good things, the other which corrupts us towards evil things.” To the stronger would go the spoils.
⁴⁰

Not everyone, to be sure, affirmed the existence of twin
genii
. A single
genius
could just as easily be made to do the work of two, leading men wisely, or leading them astray. But whether conceived as a single or double agent, a procreative urge or the highest faculty of the soul, a guardian spirit, an emissary of evil, or a fragment of the great World Soul, the governing spirit that some said permeated the universe, the classical
genius
, was, in all its forms, a piece of the divine in man—with him, in him, about him, animating his existence, enchanting his world. Serving to connect the individual to a form of being that was different from and beyond human existence, it assured him that he did not walk alone in the universe, but shared his journey with his private god, his
comes
, his companion double and friend. With his
genius
, the individual was in the presence of a force other than himself that was greater than himself, a divine expression of his nature that linked him to the gods.
⁴¹

All men had a
genius
. But no man’s
genius
was the same as any other’s. And just as the
genius
of Socrates was conceived as a special being—a reflection of his own uncommon nature and self—the
genii
of the greatest Romans were imagined as extraordinary and unique. One, in particular, that of Brutus’s adversary at Philippi, came to dominate all others, seeking to subsume the
genius populi
, the
genius
of the Roman people. Whereas Socrates’s
daimonion
forbade him to enter politics, the
genius
of Octavian, the future Augustus Caesar, urged him to extend his sway over all.

T
HERE WERE OTHERS BEFORE
him who had been moved in this way, other god-men and heroes who sought to impose their will on the world. The model of the kind was Alexander. Both Octavian and Julius Caesar were captivated by the man, who had paraded in triumph across empires in the mid-fourth century
BCE
, seizing the imagination, while shedding the blood, of the ancient world. Alexander, who unraveled the Gordian Knot, slashing with his sword, where others lost themselves in loops. Alexander, the brilliant commander, who conquered much of the world before he was thirty, and kept a copy of Homer close to his person at all times. It was a gift from his teacher, Aristotle, and an ever-present reminder of what men who were more than men could be. Alexander, who longed not only to do extraordinary things, but to have them remembered, to be a man of whom the Muses would sing. Alexander, who died, half mad, claiming to be a god.

It has been said that Alexander was the first famous person. His fame was very much willed, the product less of position, dynasty, or tradition than of who he was and who he aimed to be. In this respect Alexander differed from earlier divine rulers, the Chinese emperors or Egyptian pharaohs, who also claimed to rule as gods on earth, but who did so on the basis of what had come before or what had always been. Vast pyramids and terracotta armies, still standing, recall their names. But Alexander’s renown was different; he made it largely for himself. His example inspired all who yearned for fame in the ancient world, and fame was highly coveted, above all among Alexander’s Roman successors. “The nobler a man is, the more susceptible he is to the sweets of glory,” Cicero maintained. Cicero was more susceptible than most, wondering aloud how he would be remembered 1,000 years in the future, and marveling at the example of Alexander, who had the foresight to bring along historians to record the details of his campaigns. Cicero did him one better: he did his own recording. But those who coveted the very highest glory were drawn directly to the source, traveling to Alexander’s tomb in the city he had founded in Egypt, Alexandria, as if one might glean his secrets simply by being in the place. Pompey went there, and Julius Caesar, and, most famously of all, Caesar’s grand-nephew and adopted son, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, who made the journey after defeating his rival, Marc Antony, at the Battle of Actium in 31
BCE
and deposing Antony’s consort, the queen Cleopatra. Unsealing the tomb, Octavian placed a crown on Alexander’s corpse and covered it with flowers, inadvertently breaking off the nose. Octavian was only thirty-three. Standing before this prodigy, he must have wondered: How does one account for this marvel of a man? How can one explain Alexander’s greatness?
⁴²

Contemporaries could only have done so in the way they explained all extraordinary achievement, by reference to the divine. Today we would call it “genius,” “charisma,” or both. The terms are ours, though the roots are ancient, in the latter case from the Greek
kharis
, meaning divine favor or grace, a gift of the gods. Charisma is, by definition, a thing apart—as its first and still most famous analyst, the German sociologist Max Weber, took pains to observe, a certain ineffable something, a quality of the personality or soul, that created the illusion that one was touched by supernatural, superhuman, or exceptional powers. Alexander had this thing—this
numen
, this aura—and to such a degree that it was easy to conflate the giver with the gift.
⁴³

Octavian was no Alexander when it came to moving men on the battlefield, and no Julius Caesar either. But as a strategist of power, he was
at least their equal, and like them seems to have recognized in a penetrating way a paradox of eminence in the ancient world. Greatness, and the fame it conferred, must be willed. But greatness must depend, and must seem to depend, on what was not—on what was ineluctable, fated, foreordained. Men of eminence took their breath from the gods; they were in their nature unnatural; they possessed extraordinary
ingenium
, strange demons, uncommon
genius
. The man sired by a snake understood this, and believed it, too, as a man of the ancients must. And in that combination of calculation and conviction, he wrought something without precedent. If the worship of the
genius
of Augustus is a turning point in the history of fame, it is no less a landmark in the history of genius itself.
⁴⁴