The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  And Plotius was scarcely inside the room before he broke out as usual into an expansive, noisy heartiness. "We were told that you were lying here sick and we spent the whole long night rattling out here, and now one catches you trying secretly to slip out of bed; but it is just as well that we have caught you, this is the way you always behave. .. but how do you really feel? The gods be thanked, you look all right; no different than ten years ago; you are a tough bit of leather . . . naturally, you are again the prey of your cough and your fever: we know all about that... if you had consulted your friends they certainly wouldn't have allowed you to go on this craziest of all journeys! We were told of it afterwards by Horace; you could tell him because you knew he would not try to hinder you, all that's important to him are his own verses! What in Hades did you have to do in Athens? Naturally you had to keep it a secret, and it was just your luck that Caesar dragged you out and brought you back in time. .. Augustus, wise as usual, and you, yes, you just as inconsiderate as ever ... for we, your friends, are now put to it to get you well again!" He let his heavy body drop creaking into the arm-chair, elbows bent, fists doubled up; he sat there now like a rower or a coachman, and his ruddy, fleshy, liver-spotted, double-chinned face shone with cheerfulness.

  Lucius Varius, on the other hand, who took care never to sit down at all, because he had to be mindful of the elegant, well-pressed folds of his toga, remained standing, dignified and spare in his usual posture, one arm resting on his hip, the other raised admonishingly at right angles: "We have been much troubled on your account, Vergilius."

  Despite all the preparation for death, the anxiety of the sick, which nobody can escape, was being aroused: "What have they been telling you about me?" And as if to anticipate the answer the expected and feared fit of coughing shook him suddenly.

  "Just let yourself cough," said Plotius, soothing him, and wiped his own eyes inflamed by a night's travel. "People are bound to cough in the morning."

  The reassurance that Lucius tendered sounded more correct: "The last news that we had of you is more than, a week old ... Augustus wrote to Maecenas that he had found you ill and had insisted that you return, and the Senate being in session today because of the birthday, Maecenas was unable to come on to receive you, so we gladly took over his commissions for Augustus in order to have the opportunity of seeing you at the same time ... that is all."

  It sounded correct and plausible, and yet the "Let yourself cough" of Plotius had been more of a comfort. "Ugh," said Plotius at this point, "rumbling along the whole night; that's no way to sleep, being waked up with every change of horses ... in our procession there were at least forty carriages, and at that we were not the only ones. I guess that more than a hundred have arrived here since yesterday...."

  Had Plotius come on one of the peasant-carts? He had the good strong face of an old peasant, and that was just how one might, nay, how one must imagine him, sitting on a peasant's cart, with his head nodding, his chin sunk onto his breast, resting there, snoring merrily . . . "Yes, I heard you driving . . ."

  "And now we are here," said Plotius, again resembling a rower.

  "Many were driving .. . very many .. ."

  "Don't speak while you are coughing," observed Lucius, busy with the folds of his toga, wrinkled from the night's journey. "You mustn't speak ... Don't you remember that this has always been forbidden by the doctors!"

  Ah yes, he remembered, and this was certainly well meant of Lucius despite his elegant posture, but it was this that as always roused him to contradiction: "It is nothing; had not Caesar taken me along to Megara I wouldn't have been sick at all. . . this is only the after-effect of the sun's heat during the festival..." A fresh coughing spell rewarded this longish statement and he tasted blood in his mouth.

  "Keep still," said Plotius.

  But he did not want to keep still; less than ever now that he perceived that Plotius was sitting in the very chair in which the boy had slept, and immediately he was compelled to ask: "Where is Lysanias?"

  "A Greek name," said Lucius thoughtfully, "who is that? —Do you mean him?" And he pointed toward the slave, who had retired to the doorway and was waiting there now with the same unmoved expression on his face as before.

  "No ... not him ... the boy . . ."

  Plotius became attentive: "So you have brought a Greek boy back with you . . . then you are not in such a bad way after all . . . Just think of him with a Grecian boy!"

  The boy—, the boy had disappeared. But the beaker was still standing there on the table, a carved ivory bowl with silver mountings, and even a sip of wine remained in it: "The boy ... he was here."

  "Then let him return ... call him in, show him to us."

  How could he call him in when he had vanished? And besides he had no wish to exhibit him: "I must go down to the beach with him . . ."

  "Lying down on the dry sea-sand wearily we care for the body, and sleep trickles through our members," recited Lucius freely, only to add, "but you will not do that today, my Virgil, you will postpone those indulgences until you have recovered..."

  "Quite so," agreed Plotius from the alcove.

  What were these two speaking of? it was all incongruous; he hardly heard them: "Where is Lysanias?"

  Turning to the slave, Plotius ordered: "Fetch the boy."

  "Sir, there is no boy anywhere about here."

  Yonder from the door the boy's voice had spoken to him, had whispered to him by night, now the slave stood there, and in gratitude for his having helped to deny the far-near voice, he beckoned him nearer: "Come, I want to get up."

  "Let that wait," advised Plotius. "The doctor may now be on his way to you, and he will treat you in bed: You only ruin your health with such trifling ... It is senseless for you to trump up some business just to withhold your boy from us."

  Was the slave perhaps a substitute for the boy? had the latter sent here a stronger comrade who would convey the sacrificial gift to the shore? "Take the chest," he heard himself say, startled at the same moment to have heard it, simultaneously blinking in the direction of his friends to ascertain whether or not this made an impression on them.

  And sure enough, Plotius, for all his ponderousness, was on his feet at once, while Lucius, nearer to the bed, moved over to it, searching for the invalid's pulse like a doctor: "You have fever, Virgil, be quiet."

  Plotius, however, was dispatching the slave: "Inquire about the doctor . . . hurry."

  "I need no doctor." This too was said against his will.

  "That is not for you to decide."

  "I am dying."

  There was a pause. He knew he had spoken the truth, and he was curiously little affected by it. He knew he would hardly live out the evening, and yet even this was a respite to him, offering no end of time. He felt relieved that it had been uttered.

  It seemed as if the other two were aware how grave things were; that was to be sensed, and for that very reason it took quite a while for Plotius to find words: "Do not blaspheme, Virgil, you are as far from death as we two . . . what should I say, who am ten years older than you and apoplectic besides ..."

  Lucius said nothing. He had let himself down on the chair next to the bed and was silent. And it was touching that he had omitted to put the folds of his toga to rights as he sat down.

  "I am going to die, perhaps even today . . . but before that I am going to burn the Aeneid ..."

  "What iniquity!" It was a real outcry, and it was Lucius who had uttered it.

  Again silence followed. The room was Septemberishly still and clear. Outside a rider trotted past on his horse, most likely one of the Imperial messengers. The hoof-beats clattered sharply on the pavement, then the four-four rhythm ebbed off into the distant city noises. A woman called something from somewhere; it sounded like the name of a child.

  Suddenly, with long and measured steps, Plotius began to pace the room, backward and forward, trailing a lap of his toga behind him, and suddenly he shouted: "If you want to die, well, that's your own
affair, we will not prevent you from doing it, but for a long time now the Aeneid has not been your affair, so get that out of your head . . ." And something savage gleamed in his small, fat-sunken eyes.

  It was significant that Plotius bore himself so wildly, for there had existed with him for years a silent convention, even though mutually not quite accredited, that their hour-long conversations on the harvest and the cattle were far more important than all the discourses on artistic and scientific themes that had been carried on in the presence of Lucius and Maecenas and the many others comprising their circle. And it was a refutation of that convention for Plotius to attach so much importance to the existence or non-existence of the Aeneid; it was a refutation of that bit of good conscience, embodied for him in the person of the country-nobleman, Plotius Tucca, and was therefore not to be tolerated: "The world is neither richer nor poorer for a few verses, on that we were always agreed, Plotius."

  Lucius shook his head earnestly: "You must not call the Aeneid a few verses!"

  "What else is it?"

  At that Plotius laughed, actually it was a forced laughter, but nonetheless, it was laughter: "Obtaining praise through modesty is an old vice of poets, Virgil, and as long as a person pursues old vices, there is nothing to fear for him."

  And Lucius added: "Do you really want to hear it again? Do you not know better than any other that the greatness of Rome and the greatness of your poem can no longer be divorced from each other?"

  A kind of dismay arose in him and became apparent: these two did not want to understand what a boy had grasped, but the finality of his decision, once taken, was not to be disturbed, and this had to be brought home to them: "Nothing unreal is allowed to survive."

  It had been formally, firmly and sententiously said, and now Lucius seemed to comprehend what it was leading to: "So in your opinion, both the Iliad and the Odyssey should also be called unreal—oh, divine Homer! And how does it stand with Aeschylus and Euripides? Are these not reality? how many names, how many works shall I still quote you, all of them of immortal reality?"

  "For instance Thyestes or the Caesar-epic of a certain Lucius Varius," Plotius could not refrain from adding, and his laughter was again that of a kind, fat man.

  Lucius, touched on his most sensitive spot, smiled a little sourly. "The seventeen performances of the Thyestes are certainly no proof of its eternal validity, but . . ."

  ". . . but it will outlive the Trojan Women . . . don't you think so too, Virgil? . . . now, you are laughing, I am glad that you can laugh again."

  Yes, he was laughing; but he was not able to laugh properly; his chest gave him too much pain and he was even ashamed of this laughter that fed itself on Lucius' embarrassment, unconcerned that it was really he who had wanted to defend the immortal worth of the Aeneid, and so for this reason it was imperative to return to seriousness: "Homer was the proclaimer of the gods, he lives on in their reality."

  Without bitterness for the laughter directed against him, Lucius answered: "And you are the proclaimer of Rome, you survive in Rome's reality, you will live as long as Rome endures —forever."

  Forever? He felt the ring on his finger, he felt his body, he felt the past. "No," he said. "Nothing earthly is eternal, nor Rome either."

  "You yourself have exalted Rome into the divine." This was true and not true. What was Lucius talking about? Was this not like the table-talk at Maecenas's, gliding over the surface, scarcely touching on reality? Darkness was about him as he said: "Within the earthbound, nothing becomes divine; I have adorned Rome, and what I have done has no more worth than the statues in the gardens of Maecenas. Rome does not live by the grace of the artists ... the statuary will be torn down, the Aeneid will be burnt..."

  Plotius, who would gladly have gone on laughing, stopped in his tracks. "When one considers what these master-artists have patched together recently, you have reserved a nice bit of sanitation for the years to come . . . what a lot there will be to be burned and cast down ... a lifework for a Hercules, that's what you've been planning for yourself . . ."

  The conception of this great work of disposal reacted on Lucius with surprising exhilaration; his dignified author's face started to fold into merry wrinkles, and he was unable even to continue with the conversation, so much did the picture of a general book-burning amuse him. "The two Sossii have acquired the publishing rights for the Carmen Saeculare from Horace and they will lose a good bit of money on that if you intend to burn his writings as well . . . and, of course, Horace may not be excluded."

  "Horace sent me some farewell verses to the boat when I left for Athens."

  "That's the sort of thing," Plotius supported Lucius so boisterously that one might think they wanted in this way to drown out the sound of death. "That's just it, and just that is his sin, and that is why his iambics and his odes, in fact everything that he has perpetrated, must perish . . ."

  Actually, why had Horace sent these lovely verses of congratulation to the boat? Had he wished in this way to soothe his own jealousy of the Aeneid? A jealous friend, but still a friend?

  But Lucius considered: "One ought to leave the choice to me; Horace I would spare, he is really gifted . . . but I would clear out all the mediocrity, all this mediocrity that has come up and is constantly on the increase . . . what decay, what degeneration! No more eloquence, no more theater, no more art ... in truth we are the last, and nothing will come after us . . . that is why there must be a clean sweep, and it is going to be terrific!" Again he was possessed by laughter.

  "Laughing in the dome of death as, turned into stone, he descended into the shimmering sea!"

  Lucius stopped short. "A wonderful verse, Virgil, say on, or better still, write it down."

  From what unfathomable depth had this line of verse emerged? whence had it come? yet now it pleased him too, and the appreciation of Lucius did him good, although it was not the beauty of the verses that should be praised; no, beauty in itself was never the important thing, but something of a different nature, something greater, something in truth was deserving of praise, and of praise desirous. Oh, now he knew it, now, for the first time, he knew what it was! True esteem could only be an acknowledgment of the verse's meaning, an acknowledgment of that which rose beyond it, the unachievable full reality, which disclosed its preciousness when a word penetrated to it without rebounding from its stony, smooth surface: he who praised a verse as such, without troubling about the reality of its meaning, confused the thing created with that which creates, became consciously or unconsciously guilty of the perjury which denies or destroys reality, became the accomplice of all perjurers. Oh, the enormous mountain-crag of reality, impervious and opposed to all invasion, permitting at most the outward touch; oh, the enormous crags of reality, over their pathless surface man could only creep along, clinging to the surface, constantly falling, constantly in threat of the fall. Lucius knew nothing of falling; to him surface and reality were one. Oh, craggy mountains of reality, rearing enormous, although rooted in the very depths, impenetrable, with sheer smooth sides; yet creatively opened, and the stumbler dashes into the opened shaft.

  Plotius shifted his arms like a rower, resting himself: "Agreed, so let Horace be spared and go on writing . . . and you, you will do the same, even if you should burn everything; for of course you would continue to write . . ."

  Horace! Yes, he had fought as a soldier for Rome, he had offered himself as a sacrifice that Rome might exist, and that was also the reason for the surprising and repeated outbreaks of reality in his poetry. Not even Plotius realized it, not even he realized how irreplaceable to the poet was the serving deed. "Oh Plotius, the serving deed in its reality . . . without it there is no poetry."

  "Aeneas," affirmed Lucius, while Plotius only nodded.

  Aeschylus fought as an infantryman at Marathon and Salamis, Publius Vergilius Maro had never fought for anything. Yet, warmly encouraging him, Plotius spun out his musing: "Besides you have to keep on writing, because before you burn it, the Aeneid
must be finished . . . one does not burn something unfinished, and in a few months, even weeks, you will have got this little piece of work behind you ... so even though you may be in haste to die, you must still hold out that little bit longer." To finish? To have finished? verily he had finished nothing. What significance had the Aeneid in comparison with a truthful history of Rome like the one Sallustus had written, or even in comparison with the grand scale of that work on which Livy was now engaged? what were the Georgics compared to the real knowledge which that most learned of all scholars, the most honorable Terentius Varro, had dedicated to Roman agriculture?! Compared to such achievements there was nothing that could be finished; whatever he may have written, whatever was left to be written, all this had to remain as unfinished. For, of a surety, Terentius Varro, like Gaius Sallustus, had actually served the Roman State in sober reality whereas Publius Vergilius Maro had never served anyone.

  And as if to settle the question, Plotius affirmed: "Oh Virgil, you have only been able to write the Aeneid, just so far have your faculties sufficed, but don't flatter yourself that you are able to comprehend it. Nor do you know anything of its reality or that of the man Virgil; you know them both only from hearsay." And folding his hands over his abdomen, he seated himself again in the easy chair near the window.

  The man Virgil! Certainly, he lay here, and this was his reality, nothing else. And the reality was that he had been endowed, fed, and kept by Asinius Pollio and by Augustus-—-they who had fought for Rome, who served Rome, they who had established and maintained the existence of Rome by what they were and what they did. They were the ones who paid him for the shallow enhancement of their works, and they did not even realize what trash they had paid for. That is what the reality of Publius Vergilius Maro looked like. And he said: "I shall not finish the Aeneid."