The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  The list of punishments for violating discipline was long and quite terrifying. Rebellion and desertion were punished by death; if these crimes were committed by larger military units, the units were decimated. A soldier caught sleeping on his watch was stoned by his fellows. Some commanders ordered a deserter’s right hand chopped off. The whip was used quite often and for minor infringements—centurions did not carry their grapevine horsewhips just for show. The punishment for the slightest trespass was degradation, loss of pay, punitive exercises, and cut food rations.

  From the time the Roman army became a professional army, legion soldiers bound their whole life’s career and existence to it. With the exception of the highest officers, they were people deprived of any personal possessions. Outside the army they were nothing. It guaranteed them a career, insurance in old age, a penny’s savings. So it is worth having a look at what they earned. The differentiation of wages clearly underlines the hierarchy of the separate groups in the profession.

  During the rule of emperor Domitian a centurion was paid 5000 dinars a year, and this was seventeen times the wages of a common legion soldier; the primi ordines (the centurions of each legion’s first cohort) got 10 000, or twice the amount of an ordinary centurion. The wages of the chiefs of centurions (primi pili) came to twice that: 20 000 dinars. The British researcher Peter Astbury Brunt puts forward a table of wages which reflects the changes from the time of Augustus to Caracalla, or from the beginning of the first century to the third. Under Augustus a common soldier got 225 dinars a year, a centurion 3750, the primi ordines 7500, and the primi pili 15 000. Two centuries later the wages had more than tripled, and was for the same groups: 750, 12 500, 25 000, and 50 000. This rise expressed in absolute figures is less impressive if we take into account the strong inflation of the Roman coin.

  It is difficult to interpret the figures today. They say more about the differentiation in rewards for army service than about a legion soldier’s standard of living. Another British scholar, Ralph Westwood Moore, proposes taking the price of grain as an orientational measuring stick, and comes to the conclusion that an ordinary soldier could support himself on two-thirds of his pay, and in later periods on only one-fifth.

  But the situation was not as rose-colored as these calculations suggest, since often troop rebellions broke out, with soldiers demanding improvements in their living conditions. The main cause of the rebellion in 14 A.D. described by Tacitus was the fact that the legionaries had to pay for their arms, clothes, and tents out of their own wages. In such cases the emperors preferred in the end not to irritate the main pillars of their power and ceded to the soldiers’ demands. To ensure themselves their loyalty, the emperor ascending to the throne allocated large sums to be divided among the legionnaires.

  How long did military service last? Under Augustus—16 years, plus four years unarmed service in administrative positions with the legion (as immunes). After leaving the army veterans received a retirement gratuity and a plot of land, allies were granted citizenship (in 212 A.D., the Constitutio Antoniniana16 awarded civil rights to all inhabitants of the provinces). In the first half of the first century, the term of duty was raised to twenty years, and veterans served in the army for five more years; later the period of active duty rose to twenty-five years.

  Incorporation into the ranks happened quite early and recruits in their teens were not a rarity. On one of the gravestones in the Grosvenor museum in Chester we read: DIS MANIBUS17 CAECILIUS AVITUS EMERITA AUGUSTA OPTIO LEG. XX V.V. STIPENDIORIUM XV VIXIT ANNOS XXXIV—which means that the deceased Caecilius Avitus, born in Emerita Augusta, deputy centurion in the XX legion Valeria Victrix served in the army for 15 years and lived for 34. O melancholy!

  Edward Gibbon in his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire writes as follows of the Roman legions in Britain: “The lords of the loveliest and richest lands on earth turned away in scorn from gloomy hills lashed by winter storms, from lakes wreathed in blue fog and from cold, unpopulated vistas across which a horde of naked barbarians chased woodland deer.” Gibbon (and following him other authors), undoubtedly idealizes the empire’s soldiers exiled to remote lands. We should not imagine them as pale dejected youths reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius on stopovers and consumed by longing for Lesbia and Rome. They were more like hearty, brutal musclemen, those defenders of civilization. The ethnic composition of the legions also made it a colorful mosaic in which “real Romans” were a negligible percentage. The overwhelming majority—grave inscriptions prove this—were from Dalmatia, Thrace, Spain, Gaul, the Rhinelands, Dacia, and even faraway Capadoccia and Syria. They probably communicated with each other in an inelegant Latin that had as much in common with Cicero as the language of the recruits in Franz Jozef’s army had with Hofmannsthal’s German.

  Each legion was stationed in a permanent camp, around which the local population and that of inflowing merchants and artisans were grouped. Up to the beginning of the third century A.D., soldiers were not allowed to enter into a legal marriage during the time they were serving their military duty. On the other hand they had concubines, and sons resulting from these liaisons were usually incorporated into the legions. Those born in lands remote from the capital knew Rome only from stories, and the emperor’s face from portraits carried by the ensign—the imaginifer. So it is not strange that the soldiers’ ideological ties to the empire and emperor became weaker with every generation.

  The border armies gradually changed into territorial forces with poor training and little military value. In 367 A.D., at the time of a great attack by the Saxons, Picts, and Scots, the legions’ being taken by surprise was entirely due to the treachery of soldiers patroling the border, whom the barbarians had promised a part in the distribution of booty. At that time instances of desertion were common.

  The character and even the external appearance of garrison towns and fortresses also changed beyond recognition. An expert on this period, Ian A. Richmond, writes of this as follows: “New soldiers lived with their wives and children entirely within the forts, hastily rebuilt after invasions by local laborers. The forts became small fortified courts, more reminiscent of medieval courts than the Romans’ castellum; on the model of medieval soldiers, they received adjacent farmland as recompense after they finished their service. This new organization, or rather its lack, contributed to the devastation of buildings set up along traditional lines; this has been revealed in many forts, where granaries became residences and the buildings for the army staff became shops. A centurion of the old school would have paled at the sight.”

  III

  IN SPITE OF THE iron discipline Grzesio imposed on us (or perhaps because of it) we liked (though the word conveys neither the nature nor the intensity of the emotion) both him and his subject. With time the classes came to include not just laborious translation and the polishing of our grammar but were partially devoted to ancient culture and civilization. Then we did not only probe the mystery of the conjunctive but acquainted ourselves with daily life in the imperial capital, the armor of a legionary, the ritual of the Saturnalia.

  Naturally this was an idealized Rome, a Rome of civic virtues, stern manhood. Neither the scandalous lives of the emperors as described by Suetonius nor the obscenities from the walls of Pompeii polluted our consciousness. Scipio the Elder, Cato, the Gracchi, the good emperors of the Antonine line were offered to us as models worthy of emulation. We knew, of course, of the plight of slaves, of the cruel persecution of Christians, the follies of Caligula, but the star of reason shone brightly over the darkness.

  I don’t know when it happened (and it probably didn’t happen all of a sudden) that Latin began to absorb and fascinate us. At first, if I remember correctly, it was the sound of it, grave, metallic, and yet clear: the harmony of well-distributed consonants and vowels. The simplest sentences had a line, a strongly drawn contour, as if carved in stone. Eadem nocte accidit, ut esset luna plena—It happened that night there was a full moon. The same thing, and
yet not the same. So we wound our gnome’s speech, the speech of the earth and its whispers, like ivy around a marble column.

  In my interest in Latin and my admittedly mediocre progress in that sphere there lay an element I might call personal. In the apartment building across the road from us there lived a young person, whose full shape, auburn hair, and dimples stirred my senses and gave me vertigo. She was the daughter of a Latin professor—not from our gymnasium, it is true, but known to us as the author of the book of adapted texts over which we labored; he also published articles in the monthly Philomat, to which Grzesio obliged us to subscribe through him. I used to sit on the balcony with my Auerbach & Dbrowski Latin grammar and pretend that reading this exceptionally dull tome put me in ecstasy.

  It was in fact an act of despair. If the object of my passionate feelings appeared on the balcony, it was not for my sake. She sometimes brushed me with a distracted look, as one glances at clouds moving across the sky. She was waiting for an older colleague of mine from the lyceum, a tall youth with a wavy blond crop, undeniably handsome (he was the standard-bearer of our school and wearing a sash and white gloves at celebrations he really did present well)—but I knew he could never make her happy. Every day around five in the afternoon she would leave the house with my mortal enemy and disappear around the corner into a little street shaded by chestnut trees, where (my feverish imagination told me) terrible things happened: he would take her arm (against the severest injunctions of middle-school rules) and perhaps press a fiery kiss on her silken glove. A storm of contradictory feelings in my tormented heart:

  Odi et amo18. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

  Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

  What did I think to achieve, holding my Auerbach & Dabrowski Latin grammar on the balcony so that its cover would be visible from afar? I thought that one day her father—the classical philologist—would notice me and shout across to me: “I have been observing you for a while now, my boy. Your modesty and industry, your love for the Roman tongue are a warranty that you are a proper candidate for my daughter’s husband. I therefore grant you her hand.” And from then on things would proceed as in a fairy tale.

  They didn’t. On the other hand, I learned many examples of the use of the more complicated grammatical forms by heart and was able to shine in class, even winning a cordial look from Grzesio.

  We labored in the sweat of our brows. The time to reap drew near: the next year we were to proceed to the poetry of Catullus and Horace. But then the barbarians invaded.

  HOW TO EVALUATE THE civilizational contribution by Rome in Britain? Scholars have given various answers to this question. The British archaeologist Francis John Haverfield says: “From the Romans who once ruled Britain, we Britons inherited virtually nothing.” The view of the excellent historian George Macauley Trevelyan seems more just. In his History of England he writes: “Ultimately the Romans left behind three valuable things: first (and this claim would amuse and astonish Caesar, Agricola, and Hadrian), Welsh Christianity; second, Roman roads; third, the growing importance of some of the new cities, and especially London. On the other hand, the Latin way of life in cities and villas, and the art, language, and political organization of the Romans vanished like a dream. The most important fact about the early history of the island was negative, namely that the Romans failed to latinize Britain in any lasting manner, as they had France.”

  Founding cities was not a disinterested beneficence on the part of the occupiers, it must be said. As Pierre Grimal rightly emphasizes, the Romans treated the cities they founded as powerful political instruments. “The Roman city could not be reduced simply to a collection of specific material conveniences, it was above all an omnipresent symbol of the religious, political, and social system that were the basic component of Roman civilization.”

  Archaeologists discovered twenty-odd large urban centers on the island deriving from Roman times. They were mainly founded on the sites of former tribal capitals. Surrounded by a wall and laid out in the typical Roman square pattern, Silchester (Calleva) had barely 80 houses, and the number of its inhabitants most likely did not exceed fifteen hundred. With the exception of London, whose population at its peak of development is estimated by scholars at 15 000, the other cities rarely exceeded a number of 3 000 inhabitants. What gave them an urban character was their being the seat of municipal authority, with public buildings—a characteristic Roman forum in the city center, with a capitol, the main temple of the official religion, a curia—where sessions of the provincial senate were held, a basilica, where a court deliberated, a theater and amphitheater, and spas fulfilling the role of clubs or today’s cafés. They decorated the city with triumphal arches, columns, and statues—in a word, these cities were small, often inept copies of the capital of the Empire.

  SHORT PROSE (1948–1998)1

  translated by

  Alissa Valles

  1Unless another source is given, these pieces are from the prose collection Wzeł Gordyjski (The Gordian Knot: Warsaw 2001), edited by Paweł Kdziela.

  POETRY IN A VACUUM?1

  THE BOOKSELLER ON whose counter I put down two slim volumes I’d found on a high shelf, looked at me in disbelief.

  “Poetry,” he marveled, “but almost nobody buys that these days. It’s commercial waste paper.”

  That last phrase, though softened by the adjective “commercial,” grated on my ear for a long time. On the way home I wondered, mournfully: are we really seeing the demise of poetry? Is this oldest of literary genres departing to the cemetery of exhausted forms? Forms too diminutive for the coming content? Does emotion lie under the threshold of sensitivity in a person of our atomic era?

  In spite of everything, poetry exists. There are poets who write poems, publish defenseless little books, literary journals print experts’ polemics, critics are led by the nose. Only the whole movement is suspended in air, because a poet’s word never becomes a household word. Contemporary poetry is ridiculed by the average reader, and school has done an expert job of making the classics repugnant. The number of people who read poetry is minuscule—it’s an inarguable fact.

  Let’s try to find the causes of this state of affairs, let’s try to find a way out.

  It is said that poetry, particularly contemporary poetry, is difficult, even incomprehensible. It’s a bunch of linguistic flails and shards devoid of any shred of meaning, wail the outraged citizens. They think writing poems means the erasure of beauty, the rejection of clarity. Just like the old joke: you paint herrings in green so it’s harder to guess what they are. This complaint turns entirely on the problem of poetic language.

  If we tell an acquaintance about something that happened on the bus yesterday, we seek to inform our listener about the occurrence, to describe it as exactly as possible. Our whole attention and his are both fixed on “what” happened, “what” we’re saying. The style of telling will naturally be very simple, casual, maybe even clumsy.

  If we now undertake to put some poetic work, like Mickiewicz’s Akerman Steppes2 “in our own words,” we see that the prose translation is very remote from the original. For two reasons. First, the meaning has changed, even if we used the same words, and second, all of the work’s beauty has vanished, evaporated like camphor. Hence the conclusion that Mickiewicz’s formulation was the best and therefore unique. And furthermore, that it’s not only “what” is said that determines the value but above all “how” it is said, and that you cannot change the order of words or lines in a poem. A poem is not a machine whose constituent parts can be changed without damage to the whole. For poetry—as one of our leading contemporary poets said—is what cannot be expressed in prose. The poet deforms, remolds, creates language to express what cannot be expressed otherwise.

  We will return more than once to this fundamental problem. In future articles we will attempt to clarify to our readers what constitutes the beauty of poetry. We will speak of how poems are built, of what one should look for in poetry.
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  “But is poetry necessary to life? Isn’t it a luxury toy for the lazy rich? Does it have any real value?”

  One could write a hefty tome on how poetry, in the course of its development, has paved the way for new ideas, how it has fought for freedom, progress, social justice, and peace. For the task of great poetry, as of all writing, is to render justice to the visible world. Justice and beauty.

  One could also write a book about what we Poles owe to poetry. I refer to the recent past. During the occupation even the least sensitive people felt the true value of poetry. The partisan song was a shorthand for rage, the camp poem an eye of hope, a few lines in a newspaper were a rhythmic pattern of our longing.

  But poetry cannot be an ark to help us survive the flood. It has to be our daily bread, an article of primary need.

  In olden days the poet was a sorcerer; many centuries later he played the sorcerer, when he said he expressed the mysterious meaning of existence. To underscore his unearthliness he fenced himself off from society. He looked down from above on all those who didn’t admire him, fitting them all with epithets, from layman to soap merchant.

  This conflict of the individual with society didn’t benefit either the health of society or poetry. The conflict endures, when one of our contemporaries writes that poetry is a “tangent of solitude”—No, sir! Poetry is not some kind of trigonometric function. It’s a human, an arch-human function. After many errings it will reach its destination and then it will be the conversation of one feeling creature with another.

  1948