The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  "Ours, however, will be the perception," concluded the voice of the slave, "we shall find it in the utter humility of our extinction."

  Augustus seemed to have heard nothing; unmoved, he continued: 'The reality of Rome is earthly, its humanity is earthly, sober and mild for the submissive, sober and hard for those who seditiously attempt to disturb its order. It is not only in Italy that I have protected the peasant against dispossession, no, I have adhered to this principle throughout the whole empire; I have minimized the pressure of taxes in the provinces, I have restored to the people their rights and special privileges, I have put a stop to the mismanagement of the so-called Republican administration, which by calling itself Republican cast shame on the name of the Republic. My critics may reproach me by calling these achievements very sober ones, not at all brilliant. Well, with these sober achievements of mine I have brought the disreputable name of the Republic to honor again, and despite the ravages of civil war I have restored well-being to the whole empire. Sobriety is the splendor of Rome, and sober is Rome's humanity; this sobriety takes care of the community's well-being and it competes for nobody's favor, indeed it often seems to cut short the development toward a better humanity, or at least to postpone it till later. I have, to be sure, been active in ameliorating the lot of the slaves, but the welfare of the Empire demands slaves, and they have to accommodate themselves to this fact, disregarding the rights due to the oppressed for which they might clamor; truly it was most unwillingly and against all my desire for clemency, that I have had to accustom myself to limit by law their widespread emancipation, and should they rebel against this, should another Spartacus arise as their leader, like Crassus I should have to let thousands of them be slain on the cross, as much as a warning to the people as to divert them, and in order to make them, who are always ready for cruelty and fear, realize with fear and trembling, how impotent the individual is in comparison to the all-commanding state."

  "No," said the slave, "no, we shall be resurrected in spirit. For every imprisonment is a new liberation for us."

  Without granting him the slightest attention, the speech of the ruler continued: "Ourselves a part of the people, we are the property of the all-commanding state, we are owned by it with all that we are and have, and in belonging to the state we belong to the people; for just as the state personifies the people, so must the people personify the state, and if the state has unrestricted rights of ownership on us and our achievements, the same rights come in turn to the people. Be our achievement great or small, be it called the Aeneid or anything else, the people are entitled and duty-bound to exercise their rights of ownership; each of us is the slave of the people, the slave of immature and tyrannical children who resist any kind of guidance, but for all that are in need of it"

  "This people calls you father, and it is the perception of a father that they expect from you, Augustus."

  "The people are as uncertain as children, fearful and ready for flight when left in the lurch, dangerous in their uncertainty, inaccessible to consolation or to advice of any sort, far from being humane, without conscience, unstable, fitful, unreliable and cruel, yet also generous and magnanimous, ready for sacrifice and full of courage when they become secure in themselves, full of the utter assurance of a child who senses in himself the dawning of the right path and makes for his goal like a somnambulist. Oh, my friends, it is a great and magnificent people we have been born into, and we have to be grateful for the duty of serving them with all our works, more grateful even for the leadership which has been bestowed upon us, most grateful for the divine command to put this leadership into action. In our concern for this great childlike quality which has been entrusted to us, we have to discipline it without robbing it of anything, we have to let it retain all its valuable qualities as well as its childish intoxication with play and cruelty, by which it protects itself from weakening, but, along with all this, we must take heed that all this is held within certain limits to prevent injury or self-injury, or running amok, for nothing is so terrible and dangerous as the bewildered madness of this child, which is called the people; theirs is the madness of a deserted child, and therefore it must be our care that the people never feel abandoned. Oh, my friends, we have to nurse the childlike qualities of the people, we have to provide them with the security of a child in his father's house, and he who knows how to guide the people in this paternally mild and firm manner, who by this means creates security for their livelihood, their souls, and their faith, he who brings this to pass, he and he only is the one chosen to summon the people to the state, not only to life in the state's security, but still more, to death for it in the hour of danger, in the hour when the state must be defended; oh, my friends, only a people thus guided and controlled will be able to defend itself, as well as its state, with enough endurance to keep both of them immune for all time and eternity from an otherwise inevitable downfall. This is the goal, eternal in its validity, eternal for the state, eternal for the people."

  Who gave the answer? Was one to be found? And yet it came: "Eternal alone is truth, the madness-freed, madness-preventing truth of reality, retrieved from the depths above and below, for it alone is immutable reality; and summoned to truth, summoned to affirmation, summoned to the deed of truth, the folk, and beyond all folkhood, men as men, will participate in the kingdom forever, participating in its boundless bounty. Only through the deed of truth can death be annulled, death that has been, death that is to come; only thus is the somnolent soul to be fully awakened to the perception of the whole, which grace is inherent in everyone bearing a human face. It is toward truth and into truth that the state is growing, seeking therein its inner growth, finding therein its ultimate reality, reaching back to its divinely-supernatural source, so that the glory of the ages may fulfill itself in this time, fulfill itself as the kingdom of mankind, as the divine realm of humanity, as the kingdom that stands above all nations and embraces them all. The goal of the state is the realm of truth, extending over all lands yet growing like a tree from the depths of earth to those of heaven, for it is the growing piety out of which will unfold the kingdom, the peace of the kingdom, and reality as the revelation of truth."

  Again Augustus did not let himself be turned aside, and again it seemed as if they had not heard one another. Again their speeches, unmoved in the immobility, glided past each other: "The gods have no care for the individual, they are indifferent to him and they take no note of his death; the gods turn toward the people, their own imperishability turns toward the imperishability of the people, which they wish to maintain, perhaps because they realize that their own would vanish with that of the people; and yet, should they set their mark on a single mortal, it is done only to lend him power to build up for the state a way of life in which the eternally destined and imperishable continuity of the people shall be organized and secured. The earthly power is a reflection of the divine power, and framed between the reality of the gods and the reality of the people, between an eternal order of the gods and an eternal order of the people, both realized in the state, the earthly power itself comes to have eternal existence, comes with the gods and the people to be greater than death and life, greater by virtue of its twofold reality. And framed between godhood and folk-hood, a reflection of one and a likeness of the other, earthly power does not turn toward the individual, nor the state toward the multiplicity of mankind, but always toward the people as a whole, in order to preserve in them the reality of its eternal existence. No sovereignty supported by men alone can maintain itself; it perishes as these perish, indeed, be it ever so richly blessed, it will be brushed aside by the first breath of human fickleness; it was thus with Pericles' work of peace, Pericles who was driven out because he could not ward off pestilence from the city, and it might have been the same with me when famine threatened Rome three years ago. To be sure, the gods who contributed daily bread also laid on me, their surrogate, the task of keeping up the Senatorial distributions of grain to the people; yes, at that time the go
ds granted me their greatest protection, allowing me to set up the Alexandrine corn-fleet, sending favorable winds that shortened the journey, and letting the worst misery be prevented, but their help would have come to nothing, and the unrest springing up everywhere would without doubt have been my undoing, had not my power been founded on the totality of the gods and the totality of the people. And I would continue to expose myself and the entire Roman state to every chance in the game of public opinion were I to permit the exercise of power to be dissipated by dealing with groups, or with a single individual. The state is the supreme reality, invisibly spread over the landscape, but so much the highest reality that nothing mortal or perishable may be tolerated in the sphere of its validity; I stand here a mortal and perishable, but in the state's sphere of validity, in the sphere of my power, I must strip off the perishable and become the symbol of the imperishable, for only as a symbol may a mortal fit himself into imperishability, into an imperishability which, like the Roman state, stands by virtue of its own reality above any symbol whatsoever . . . The state, in its twofold reality, has not only to symbolize the gods; it is not enough for it to have built the Acropolis for the glorification of the gods, it has also to set up a symbol for the people who constitute the second half of its reality? a strong symbol that the people will see and comprehend, a strong symbol in which they in turn will recognize themselves, the likeness of their own power to which they may and will bow, sensing that power within the earthbound always inclines toward the criminal—Antonius was an example of this—and that only a bearer of earthly power who is at the same time a symbol of eternity precludes this kind of danger. And therefore I, who have been given the power to maintain Roman order as a vassal of the gods and as a heritage from my blessed father, only to be able to pass it on, in the future to the last grandchild in an uninterrupted chain of generation, I have been permitted, nay, more, commanded to set up my images in the temples apart from those of the gods on whom the various peoples of this empire otherwise depend, as a symbol of the empire's unity, of its growth into a common order extending from the ocean to the borders of the Euphrates. We force no one to accept our institutions, we do not need to disturb anything, we have time and can wait till the people of themselves take advantage of our justice, our weights and measures, our coinage, and indeed there are already some indications that they have begun to do so, but we have inexorably taken over the task of accelerating as much as possible this inauguration into a Roman way of thinking. This we must do at once, without delay we must awake the consciousness of the empire in the various people belonging to it, we must do it for the sake of the gods who represent the summit of Roman thought, and we can do it, but only by means of a symbol and its image; the Roman people realized this when they demanded that statues of me be set up, not to pray to me superstitiously as to a god, which I am not, but rather to pay that pious respect to my god-appointed office which the alien peoples within the empire's borders are also obliged to do, because in the symbol of my office the true inner growth of the state is shown forth, the necessity for its growth to a total empire, organized in the security of Roman peace, and for all time."

  For all time! The Caesar had ended his speech, his gaze was fixed into the distance, into spacelessness and timelessness, there where the Roman State extended in invisible lines over the landscape of the earth, still unlighted though filled with light, and waiting for the light to come. Mysteriously time flowed on, echoing despite all its emptiness with hoof-beats heard in the Poseidonian quaking, flowed on like a heavy stream, without water, without shores, and the wall-fountain trickled, also in need of water. Waiting pervaded the world.

  "Time, oh, Augustus, unfolds in the growing piety of mankind, in piety the kingdom is growing, unswayed and unswayable by earthly might and earthly institutions, which remain together still within the realm of the symbolic. But this symbol will be realized in the kingdom as a mirror of the creation, will come to be the reality into which your work will unfold by the growth of that very piety to which you have pointed the way."

  Caesar's gaze, lost in the distance, came back again into the room: "I have resumed the Auguries and the priestly Order of Titus and am about to reform the Lucullian festivals; on all occasions I remind the people of the venerable forms of religion and take pains with the pious and solemn festivals with which our progenitors surrounded their faith. This suffices for the gods, this suffices for the people, and this constituted the true piety of your Aeneas, faithful and strong in the memory of Anchises, his father. In memory of my blessed father, to whom I have proved faithful, the people appointed me to sovereignty, recognizing in my zeal the ancestral beliefs toward which they yearned, and they have chosen me to embody them as the embodiment of the people's power, not only by making me Tribune, but also by entrusting me with the highest priestly power, with the symbol-filled office of Protector of the Faith. There is no need for Roman piety to grow, it has always been there from the very beginning, like the Roman gods which it served, and it is merely a question of winning it back."

  "Oh, Augustus, you who have achieved the piety of human existence primarily by surrendering yourself to your father's will, you who in his holy name protect the forms of religion so powerfully that the people obey you through love, that no transgressor would dare lay hands again on the order set up by the gods and re-established by you, oh, Augustus, the traditional piety of the people, and yours also, reaches beyond the circles of the manifold gods, it extends beyond the glorious chain of the fathers, for piety turns toward the prime ancestor, devotedly waiting for him to announce himself, to entrust his mission and his creation to the son,, steadfast in piety."

  "Apollo was the protecting divinity of my line, and he, sun-god and earth-god in one, he the founder of order, the averter of all evil, he is the son of Zeus, the heavenly father whom we all serve. All lucidity springs from him."

  And now the slave could again be heard; from a great distance his voice came hither, like pen-strokes thin and dry: "Even Zeus himself is piously serving fate, but beyond Zeus, yonder where unsearchable light veils every thought, there fate itself is serving, aye, more than serving the primal unknown whose name is forbidden."

  Over in the alcove Caesar leaned back, thinking, and all was quiet. Everything remained immobile, but the lividness of the light receded, the light resumed shape as if wanting to become the sun-lion which guarded the border, the powerfully-pawed lion who was to come and to lie down with soft paws at the feet of the pious subduer. The heaving of earth subsided, Poseidon was calming down, the sun-eclipse on the point of vanishing.

  "All lucidity gives birth to new piety, Augustus."

  "But our piety must lead to lucidity."

  "He who is pious, Augustus, is already in awareness; he lives in the memory of the law given by the forefathers and therefore his memory is able to speak with him who is to come, although his step has not yet been heard: he serves him in serving love, although the command to do so has not yet been received; thus he summons the unsummonable one, and by invoking him, he creates him . . . piety is that knowledge by which men escape their inescapable loneliness; piety is seeing to the blind and hearing to the deaf, piety is the perception of the simple . . . the gods arose from the piety of men, and in serving them, piety will come to be the death-annulling perception of love beyond the gods . . . the return from the depths . . . error and rage annulled ... the perception-bearing truth . . . yes, that is piety."

  "What next, Virgil! Where are you heading! All this leads far beyond the earthly realm and has nothing more to do with the earthly task. But I have been placed in the sphere of earth and I have to acquiesce in that. The Roman people have made their own, laws in accordance with the will of the gods, thereby curbing their own liberty; they have transmuted it into the state, and thus pointed out to themselves the way to Apollonian lucidity and order; this course must be adhered to ... I must take care of that. . . and though the path has been opened through the influence of human piety, piety may
not be allowed to go beyond this path and its goal; it may not go beyond the state which, in that case, would have to be abandoned, the reality of the state shattered, and with it the reality of the gods and the people. Piety and the state are one, to be pious is to serve the state and to coordinate oneself with it; the pious person is one who serves the Roman state with his whole being and the whole of his works ... I want no other kind of piety; but this one is a duty from which neither you, nor I, nor anyone is excluded."

  All this that Augustus had just expressed sounded curiously implausible, implausible and at the same time painful in its masked way; and the reaction that it created was painful, as of a loss, of disappointment, of aversion, perhaps even shame, maybe, because in spite of all one felt caught by it, caught either by the inescapability of friendship, or it may be by the inescapability of death. Actually was it not Augustus who must die? His words sounded like a legacy for the future leader of the Roman Empire, yet the words themselves were dead, reaching neither to the gods nor to men. It seemed that Augustus had become tired, for he sat down again; isolated, self-absorbed, he sat there bent slightly forward, and his handsome, boyish face did not look over, but his hand lay on the lion's head. Whatever the earthly realm contained, Caesar had participated in it to its utmost limits, and he had remained imprisoned in its earthliness; now he was tired. But withal, a monarch.

  And even so, yes, just for this reason one had to speak, to speak out: "Beyond the piety of the gods there is the piety of the individual soul, it is beyond the piety of the state, beyond that of the people; though the gods may restrict themselves to the people as a whole, wishing to know nothing of the individual, the soul is scarcely in need of the gods whom she has created, she has need of them no longer, neither this god nor that one, as soon as she finds herself in converse with the inscrutable . . ."