Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  “The reality of the state you have created will be completed in the kingdom of the spirit.”

  “The kingdom of the spirit is already at hand; it is the state, the Roman state, the Roman Empire unto its last frontiers. State and spirit are one and the same.”

  The answer took shape from afar, even though shaped in his own mouth: “The kingdom is freedom … the kingdom of man and his humanity …”

  “The kingdom of the Roman, Virgil! For the Hellenic freedom, the Hellenic spirit, has appeared again in Rome. No one has contributed more to it than you, yourself! Hellas was the promise, the Roman state is the fulfillment.”

  And the voice of the slave said: “Eternal will be the kingdom, without death.”

  Did Caesar take up the discussion anew? One could not decide this, for he spoke and yet did not speak. The words stood motionless in space as if they were Caesar’s innermost thoughts: “The state must again provide the masses with that physical and mental security which they have lost, it has to guarantee them a lasting peace, it has to protect their gods, and it has to dispense freedom in accord with the needs of the common welfare. This, and only this, is the humanity of the state, perhaps the only possible humanity, in any case, certainly the best one, even though it often tends toward being quite inhuman, inconsiderate of the individual or separate group when the common welfare is at stake, for the sake of which the individual on his side should and must bow to the rights of the whole, the individual freedom to the collective freedom of Rome, the peace of the neighboring states to the Roman peace; verily, it is a hard humanity which the state has to offer, all the harder as the state, serving the commonwealth and, in so doing, personifying it, demands service in return from the individual, and his full subjugation to the power of the state, aye, going even further, it demands the right to requisition the life which has been protected by the state’s power whenever that life is needed for the protection and safety of the community. A disciplined humanity is what the state strives for, and what we, along with the state, must also strive for, a humanity within the bounds of reality, controlled by discipline and devoid of coddling, subsumed in the law of reality, the hard reality of Rome through which Rome has become great …”

  Oh, Mantuan landscape, landscape of childhood, the sweet landscape of childhood, the landscape of the fathers which could not be lost—nothing more of it could be seen outside; it had faded into immobility. Existence was motionless, motionless the one who stood there at the window, no longer Octavian, but a gentle and stern and strangely rigid picture, almost beyond anything human, while on every side the state expanded in far-reaching, spectral lines.

  “Even though now you may still have to protect the boundaries of the state, oh, Caesar, the kingdom will be unbounded; even though now you still feel you must separate major rights from minor ones, justice will become indivisible, the community will be vulnerable in the individual, and the right of the individual will be protected by the community; and even though today you may still feel forced to mete out freedom so parsimoniously as to leave none to the slave and very little to the Roman, in order to guard the freedom of the whole, in the kingdom of perception the freedom of men will exist without restrictions, a freedom on which the all-embracing freedom of the world will be erected. For the kingdom of freedom into which your state will blossom, the kingdom of true reality, will not be a kingdom of popular crowds, not even a kingdom of the people, but rather a kingdom that is a community supported by men of awareness, supported by the individual human soul, by its dignity and freedom, upheld by its power to reflect the divine likeness.”

  “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 guid
e 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 folkhood, 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 gods 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 o
ur 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.”