The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  A melancholy promenade: Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Volterra, Veii; hills of stone tombs completely overgrown with grass. In the kingdom of pines, crickets, and cypresses, not far under the earth, feasts, hunts, and dance are immortalized on walls. The tomb carvings engrave themselves deepest in memory. A man leaning on an elbow, head held high, draped in a garment revealing his torso, as if eternity were a long, hot summer night.

  A LATIN LESSON

  And so if you, Francesco, like all creatures, are governed by a desire for happiness, repeat: rana1, ranae, ranae, ranam, rana, rana. Come to know the complexity of temporal phrases: ubi, ut, ubi primum, ut primum, simul, simulac, simulaque, dum, donec, quod, antequam, priusquam, cum…And above all get to know the structure of conditional phrases, so that there will be no room in them for fraudulence, blackmail, lies.

  BOLESŁAW MICISKI, REPLY TO A LETTER FROM FRANCESCO, A CITIZEN OF ROME

  THE GYMNASIUM STOOD on a hill. It was a white three-story building with large windows and a red slanting roof. If it stood out in any way it was by virtue of its stern simplicity. A façade without ornament except at the summit, where there was a bas-relief of an eagle. Under the bas-relief there was a space, as if for an inscription. Most appropriate would have been a Latin maxim along the lines of: Felix qui potuit2 rerum cognoscere causas, or if anyone asked for our opinion—no one did—Juvenal’s directive to the educators of youth: Maxima debetur puero3 reverentia.

  One entered through a heavy gate. Steps, and at the top of the steps a massive statue of our school’s patron. The plaster-pale king had his left foot set forward, and this seemingly insignificant detail became the material cause of a student custom not in keeping with the gravity of an educational institution. The left shoe of our solemn white-clad patron was disturbingly black and polished by frequent touches that were supposed to protect us from evil charms, failing grades we called baniaks, and from the terrible wrath of our preceptors. Severe interdictions were of no avail, we devoted ourselves to these magical practices with an ignorant peasant stubbornness. In the school a cult of reason reigned, but as we know, nothing encourages the growth of occultism more than official rationalism.

  From the first my fearful novitiate’s sensitivity registered most strongly not images but olfactory impressions. The cloakroom was down in the vast basement. It was like the kitchen of school odors: dust, leather, damp clothes, and fear. From there one went down a long corridor with a stone floor, and thus over odorous stone, all the way to the classroom with its smell of varnish, chalk, with its damp blackboard.

  Right on the first day our attention was drawn by a group of pupils who seemed to stand slightly aloof. They were truly different. Their blue school uniforms were not new like ours, didn’t hang too pitifully big on them, without any intimacy with their bodies. In comparison with them we were like dolls from a clothing store window. We were especially envious of their linen pants whose seats were shiny like mirrors, an attribute of perverse gymnasium stylishness. They moved freely and looked down on us. Life’s slings and arrows had lent their faces a bitter sublimity.

  They were repeating a grade. It would appear that they had taken too literally the principle “Repetitio est mater studiorum4.” The bitterness of their defeat was probably mitigated by the fact that among us greenhorns they enjoyed the authority of veterans. It was they who initiated us into the complex world of school, bristling with danger. Because each of our professors was an individual, if not an original, you had to get to know your opponent as well as you possibly could. Fate endowed us with a charming class guardian, a gray-haired Polish studies teacher whose sweet nature led us to call him Rosie. The math teacher and the Latin teacher, on the other hand, put the fear of God into us.

  I don’t know why we nicknamed the latter “Grzesio” even though he was the total contradiction of the goodnatured country bumpkin the name suggested. I think there was something in this of the beautiful human striving to assimilate baffling and terrifying phenomena. It is probably for the same reason that cyclones bear sonorous women’s names.

  I well remember the day he first came, or rather, strode into our classroom. We stood up in front of our desks and he sauntered down the aisles, studying us closely, inspecting us like a commander inspecting his division before a parade. This took a long time. Then he told us to sit down and gave us a syllabus with required and suggested readings. He said he would not urge us to study but would only rely on our reasonableness and sense of responsibility; after all, Roman youths at our age put on a man’s toga and prepared to govern the greatest empire in the world.

  Then—without any logical connection, or so it seemed to us—he began to draw a map of the Roman Forum on the blackboard, starting from the Arch of Septimus Severus and extending to Constantine’s Basilica. Mysterious names were dropped: Curia, Lapis Niger, Rostra, Basilica Iulia, Via Sacra, the spring of Juturna, the Porch of Pearls. We obediently copied down the Forum map in our notebooks, not understanding what it was all about. Explanations would come later. For the time being the professor contented himself with the remark: “Some day you may arrive in Rome in a proconsul’s retinue. So you should familiarize yourselves with the Eternal City’s main buildings. I don’t want you to wander around the imperial capital like rude barbarians.”

  I arrived in Rome twenty years later, not in a retinue but alone. The territories where I was born then no longer belonged to the Roman Empire. To be correct, they never had, in the political sense. If they belonged it was in another sense entirely.

  I directed my first steps to the Forum. It was night, so the Forum was closed. From the Capitol I looked out at the arches, the remains of porches, the stones eaten away by time. It was a ghostly sight. In the cold light of reflectors this center of the ancient world was a vast, venerable rubbish heap, the rock bottom, the eschatology of a civilization, the ultimate form of all pride and power. It was cut off from the night like a photograph and therefore unreal; a lava of asphalt ran around it on which shiny vehicles raced by amid noise and commotion. There was no doubt who would win this duel.

  The next day I went to visit the Forum methodically, in the full light of day. The fact that I did not feel lost amid the stones I owe entirely to my Latin professor. I remember him with gratitude. But at the same time I was haunted by the thought that I should not seek Rome in Rome, that it is not there that this civilization’s grandeur would speak to me.

  Let me not be suspected of fishing for paradoxes if I say I was overcome by a sense of that greatness a few years later in the city of Newcastle, on the way to Scotland. I was then in England for a purpose remote from studying Roman remains. By that time I knew the south of France—Gallia Narbonensis5—fairly well, but the Pont du Gard, the Maison Carrée, the Arles arena, and the theater in Orange, no matter how fine these sites were, did not make the same impression on me and did not run my thoughts onto new tracks like what I encountered on the border of Britain and Scotland. Provence—like Spain and Dalmatia—belonged to Rome in a natural sort of way because of the sky and natural environment they shared, so my mind added those conquered provinces to the empire without wonder or resistance. But there, under low-hanging clouds from which a piercingly cold rain fell, the Romans’ message was an extraordinary thing, bordering on bold folly.

  In Newcastle, the place where I was seized by the spirit of Rome, there were no marble temples or triumphal arches, nothing, literally nothing that might prompt any kind of aesthetic frisson. But there was a well-preserved earthen wall stretching in a virtually straight line across the hilly countryside from the mouth of the river Tyne in the east to the Firth of Solway in the west, cutting across the whole island—the northernmost trench of a civilization struggling to defend itself against unconquered barbarian tribes.

  How did the conquest of Britain come about? The island lay far off, beyond the Mediterranean Sea basin and as it might seem, beyond the sphere of the empire’s vital interests. Reports on its shape, resources, and population were vague, deriv
ed from sailors and merchants and full of fantastical data. Best known was probably the account of Pytheas, a Greek traveler from the town of Massilia6 in Gaul who lived at the time of Alexander the Great. For the average Roman, Britain lay on the boundary line, if not beyond the boundaries of geographical reality, near the island of Thule, then on the edge of the known world.

  Roman forces first set foot on the island under the command of Julius Caesar at the end of August in 55 B.C. That bold military expedition happened suddenly, was inadequately prepared, and almost ended in defeat for the invading army, which consisted of two legions. The islanders were waiting for the invaders and from the moment they went ashore they suffered significant losses. Julius Caesar did not fight any decisive battle with the Britons and his forces made only slight inroads on the inhospitable country. Difficulties with provisions, worsening weather, and above all parts of the fleet destroyed by tidal waves forced the commander to accept a truce offered by the Britons and a withdrawal to Gaul. It was not exactly a defeat, but it was a dubious and dearly bought partial success.

  The second campaign a year later was planned on a far broader scale than the first. Five legions and two thousand cavalry soldiers took part in it. The enormous fleet, which counted 800 ships, so frightened the Britons that they did not put up resistance to the invaders until they had reached what is now Canterbury. But Caesar again made a fatal mistake, underestimating the sea’s laws, and part of his fleet was consumed by the element. If the Britons had managed to destroy the Roman fleet, the legions would have been left to the natives’ mercy or lack of it.

  Caesar’s greatest ally was his opponents’ lack of a political sense. He probably counted as much on that as on the courage of his soldiers.

  Like the inhabitants of Gaul, their Celtic brothers on the island were unable to organize themselves under one leadership to defy the invading army. Nor did they have any rational strategic plan. And yet they outnumbered the invaders, were quite well armed, and the woodlands and bogs were their natural allies. To be victorious they had to avoid a frontal assault and use the tactics—so inconvenient to legions—of small-scale or partisan warfare, i.e. attack transports and divisions astray in the wilderness. If the war had taken such a turn and had gone on for more than a year, the Romans would have been obliged to retreat, and with significant losses.

  Advising the commanders of lost campaigns two thousand years after the fact on what they should have done—the favorite entertainment of writers of history—makes little sense, especially as in this case the islanders did their utmost to resist the invaders. At first the majority of peoples in the southeast of Britain united under the command of King Cassivellaunus and employed the best tactics of partisan warfare, harrassing the legions while they made their slow and difficult way into unknown country. But before long a conflict developed within the camp of Caesar’s opponents and the kings of particular tribes began to make pacts with the Roman leader. Because unsettling reports of rebellion were coming from Gaul, Caesar seized the first opportunity to make peace with Cassivellaunus. A peace advantageous to the Romans, because they walked away from a campaign that might have ended in defeat as victors, taking loot, prisoners of war, and imposing taxes on the peoples they had conquered.

  Many historians have been vexed by the question why Caesar embarked on this risky venture. It was probably not only due to a passionate desire for pearls, as Suetonius suggests. The French historian Albert Grenier calls the invasion of Britain an extravagant and lunatic undertaking; Jerome Carcopino calls it a prestigious operation without a future, Camille Julien sees in it a manifestation of the gluttony typical of Caesar, “who wanted to conquer more than he could keep.”

  It seems, however, that the intentions of the future dictator were more prosaic and coldly calculating: he simply wished to enrich himself and his legions and also to secure conquered Gaul from an attack from the west, for theoretically it was possible that one day the Britons would come to the aid of their Celtic brothers on the continent; finally, and particularly importantly, the British expedition to some extent set the score even with Caesar’s rival for power, Pompey, and his military successes in the east. And indeed, the supremacy of Roman arms on the legendary island excited an uncommon enthusiasm in Rome.

  However, it would be hard to say that Britain—even part of it—was incorporated in the empire. A systematic conquest was begun almost a hundred years after Caesar’s military excursion. The Romans at that time had a much greater chance of bringing the foggy island washed by a cold sea under their yoke. Above all, they had quite detailed information, a decent knowledge of the enemy and his country. Britain had been penetrated by Roman merchants, who provided valuable data on both geography and social relations. A handful of political émigrés had appeared in the capital of the world, such as the unfortunate Cunobelinus, exiled and thrust from power by his son and seeking justice at the imperial court. The Britons committed a fatal error; they insulted the Romans by demanding the release of fugitives, and they also provoked skirmishes on the coast of Gaul. Of this Suetonius writes laconically: “tumultuantes Britannos ob non redditos transfugas7.” War was inevitable.

  In 43 A.D., during the rule of emperor Claudius, successor to Nero, a Roman army made up of four legions sets off to conquer Britain. Three quarters of the mobilized forces are soldiers stationed on the Rhine in Germany. They were the legions II Augusta of Argentoratum (now Strasbourg), XX Valeria Victrix of Novaesium (now Neuss), and XIV Gemina, stationed on the lower Rhine. To this formation was added the IX Hispana of Pannonia (now Austria). If we count on top of that the supporting forces (auxilia) and those from Gaul and Thrace, it was quite a hefty army for that time, counting about forty thousand.

  At the head of the expedition stands the consulary legate Aulus Plautius, who was to become the first governor of Britain. The forces land at three different points and the army moves westward. The British forces are led by Caratacus and Togodumnus. The latter soon dies and for long years Caratacus, ruler of a kingdom on the middle and lower Thames, will be the head of the anti-Roman resistance.

  The islanders’ strategy is based on the use of natural lines of defense and on thwarting the Romans in their attempted river-crossings. It comes to a hard, two-day battle on the river Medway. The Romans win, but their enemy is by no means undone. “For ten long years Caratacus was a thorn in the side of the Roman army and achieved many successes, some big, some small, but history recalls his struggles to speak only of one great battle on a terrain he chose himself, where he risked all and lost all in a final shattering defeat,” writes the British historian Ian A. Richmond.

  After crossing the Thames the legions stop to wait for the arrival of the emperor, for the divine Claudius “desired the glory of a real triumph8.” He arrived after a delay caused by meteorological vilenesses. For many historians the emperor’s participation was from a military point of view of no significance to the campaign as a whole. Something completely different was at stake, namely considerations of prestige. “Rome wanted to see its ruler wearing the victor’s wreath.” And at the head of his legions, Claudius enters Camulodunum (Colchester), the capital of the banished king Cunobelinus, afterward making haste back to Rome, where “he made a triumphant entry amid the most magnificent pomp.”

  But this is only the propagandistic window-dressing of a long, bloody, and muddled expedition. Muddled because the whole history of the conquest is like a fresco worn away in many places. It was a peripheral affair, and its history has to be reconstrued from the scattered fragments contained in the writings of the empire’s historians. These were not the records of eyewitnesses, but information acquired “second-hand,” often very brief and sketchy. For that reason it is difficult now to reconstruct the events, give an overview of the specific campaigns, movements of troops, locate the main battles and skirmishes; at times it is even tricky to name the peoples with whom the Romans were doing battle. For example, a biographer of the later emperor Vespasian, then the commander
of the II legion, says only that Vespasian defeated two powerful tribes and conquered more than twenty fortresses. That’s all.

  However, we are not completely helpless. The earth faithfully preserved eloquent traces of the battles. We have no particulars about the conquest of the fortress at Dunum (now Maiden Castle), but archaeologists discovered dramatic remains there, from which the fate of the fort’s defenders may be deciphered. In the area of defense ramparts a military cemetery was uncovered, probably founded hurriedly at the time of a siege. In the skulls of skeletons pieces of Roman swords were found, and in the backbone of one of the defenders, a bullet probably thrown by a euthytonos9, a Roman war machine.

  One should not imagine, though, that the conquest of Britain was simply a matter of the movement of a powerful military steamroller trampling and laying everything to waste. What force could not accomplish was tackled by politics; local leaders and tribal kings entered into negotiations with the invader. This happened mainly because the Romans were not at all concerned to destroy the country’s social structure and the hierarchy of power they found there, although there was the necessary curtailment of sovereignty, of course: an oath of fidelity to the emperor and a pledge of loyalty to Rome.

  Some declared themselves sincerely and apparently out of conviction, like Cogidubnus, the ruler of the kingdom of Verica (in Sussex). He was one of the first who agreed to collaborate with the invaders, and so he was permitted to rule his people and even granted the exceptional title of rex et legatus Augusti in Britannia, “in accordance with the old custom, long since adopted by the Roman people, of retaining kings as instruments of slavery10,” as Tacitus soberly comments. Other tribal heads on the other hand played the role of Wallenrod, signed peace treaties, declared their submission to the will of the conquerors, but waited for the right moment to transform themselves, like king Prasutagus of the Iceni, from allies into rebels.