Reading Note:
Brave Utensils
15 October 2013
It seems that I missed the point of The Tempest, which, Frank Kermode suggests, is a beautifully disciplined blend of language and pageantry. Disappointed, I shall try to bear that in mind. I wanted another play entirely. In my telling of the story, Prospero would be less pompous and more tragic. He would probably remain on his no-longer-magic isle at the end, for what would be the good of restoring him to his dukedom? He seems unaware that he made a hash of it the first time, delegating responsibility for the health of his realm to his thug of a brother. (The best thing in the play, I thought, was the repellent but mesmerizing chumminess — I should not call it friendship — between Sebastian and Antonio, each egging the other on to be the worst that he can be, a miserably adolescent sort of relationship that can be fatal if not outgrown.) My play would climax in a long, ambiguous, but very moving scene with Gonzalo, who appears to have merely tempered his concern for the stability of the state with a tenderness for Prospero and his daughter: the counselor did not, after all, accompany his master into exile. The more I think on’t, the more Gonzalo becomes the lead. Perhaps it is he who undoes Prospero’s magic! Sadly, such a play might easily be conceived, even plotted out; but it will never be written by Shakespeare.
The Tempest is certainly stuffed with famous tags— brave new worlds and coral bones — but there are plenty of others that ought to be famous but aren’t. My favorite comes from a speech of Caliban’s (III.2.95). The editor glosses “utensils” to mean “furnishings,” but that’s no fun; I’d much rather imagine Prospero’s cell decked with heroic spatulas and dashing food mills.
***
Rummaging through a pile of books in order to insert a clipping into one of them — there is no room for it on the shelf where it ought to be — I came across an unread tome that (it seems) I picked up several years ago at the Museum bookshop, I can only hope not at the price stickered on the back. It is a scholarly work published by Penn, Walter Goffart’s Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (2006). It appealed to me in the moment, so I hauled it up.
Goffart announces at the start that he doesn’t believe in the existence of a “Migration Age” — known in German as Völkerwanderung. Nor does he believe in the existence of Germans — not in Roman times. Most of all, he does not believe that the Roman Empire was brought down by “barbarian invasions.” He believed that the empire gave way from within.
I used to puzzle over the question, as did most of the bright and even semi-rebellious kids that I knew. The question was in the air from the moment that I grasped the existence of history. Already in the Sixties it was clear to many observers that the United States maintained a sort of empire throughout the “free world,” in the form of military installations. The official purpose of these operations was to contain wicked communists, but the relations that developed between the superpower and its satellites had precursors in ancient times, and the spread of American “popular culture” throughout the world did nothing to damp the imperial similes. Every now and then, the question was frankly posed: was the United States the new Rome? And, if so, would it come to the same sorry end? How might that eventuality be prevented?
Don’t worry: I’m not going to jump ahead and try to answer those questions. About the condition of the United States at the present moment, I’m content with the legal maxim, res ipsa loquitur — and mighty eloquently, too. Rather, I want to fasten on a thought that occurred to me as I was reading Goffart, and not so much agreeing with his disputation as cheering it on. I began to see that there are two schools of thought, not so much of empire as of masculine sovereignty, and that these schools have their intellectual wellsprings in either one of two predispositions toward fear. There are those who fear what they don’t know, and those who fear what they do. The former are warriors, and the latter are critics. Not just in theory, but in my experience of human beings, these two types have very little to say to one another; each is inclined to regard the other as a nuisance.
Goffart, of course, is a critic. He concedes that Roman forces struggled with tribal bands along the European perimeter, but he insists that these bands never formed a coherent enemy. Rome, in his view, was defeated militarily (whenever in fact it was) because of distracting turmoil at its heart, particularly in contests for the emperorship. Superpower status was of little use to those who, trying to run the empire, couldn’t agree about deploying its resources. Collapse was never a question of armed inadequacy per se. Romans simply stopped living up to their own standards.
The idea of Roman decay was as old as the empire itself. Suetonius, looking back from the early Second Century, cast the imperial throne as a hotseat of depravity. His contemporary, Tacitus, went one step further. He conceived, on the basis of no personal experience, a territory to the north of the empire that he called “Germany.” He never said that it was populated by “Germans,” but he bunched together the manners and institutions of the peoples living in his “Germany” in such a way that his little book on the subject, which slipped into near total obscurity when it was written, only to be sensationally rediscovered in the Fifteenth Century and put to well-nigh catastrophic use by actual Germans, has been called “a baptismal gift” that “a good fairy of our people laid on the cradle of our fatherland’s history.” In case you still don’t get it, I refer you to another small book, this more recent one by Christopher Krebs, called A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania From the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (Norton, 2011).
Tacitus was a critic — of Rome. He made out his Germany-inhabitants to be rude, warlike, moral, and somewhat lazy — nymphs and shepherds with clubs and bearskins. Their principal characteristics amounted to the lack of a resemblance to Romans. We will never know the purpose behind Germania. Was Tacitus suggesting that Romans were soft? Almost certainly, but why? Bearing in mind that Tacitus had no idea of a “migration of peoples” pressing down upon the empire’s borders — this was an idea of much later vintage, originating in Constantinople — we may ask whether Tacitus saw the peoples of Germany (Alemanni, Franks, Suevi, whatever) as a compelling threat to Rome. This seems unlikely.
The threat to Rome came from the east. From the first tangles with the Persians to the extinction of the Eastern Empire by the Turks, Rome’s mortal enemies always sprang from what we now call the Middle East. The tribes of Europe were trivial botherations by comparison, and they tended, after a generation or two of skirmishing, to adopt or be adopted by the empire, or at least to take on what was left of its values. We are usually taught that the Roman Empire in the West ended in 476, with the abdication of Romulus Augustulus. That is one way of looking at it. Another way — a much more contemporary (late Roman) way — would be to hold that the imperial crown fell into abeyance for three hundred years, but was then reclaimed by Charlemagne.
The humanist writers who kick-started modern historical methods in the Renaissance were not inclined to view Charlemagne’s empire as a continuation of that of Augustus. We talk of the “Renaissance” as if it were a rebirth of Rome, but in fact it marked Rome’s extinction and replacement, by “Europe.” And Europe was, from the start, a German thing. That is, it was a German conundrum, a puzzle that would be “solved,” one hopes for the last time, by the Third Reich. German apologists, from the humanists onwards, brandished Tacitus’s little book as the birth certificate, the genetic identikit, of Germans. Germans were the natural occupants of Europe — Tacitus said so, way back when! They just needed organizing, so as to defeat their inferior neighbors, who (especially the French), though too weak for a fair fight, were always trying to poison their wells with cosmopolitan ideas.
Criticism had nothing to do with the German outlook. When a modern German empire surged upon the scene, it was ludicrously warlike. War was the point. War — Tacitus said so! — was what Germans were about. Except, of course, that he never said anything about Germans.
It seems clear that Tacitus’s book makes more sense as a criticism of Roman mores than it does as a call to arms. But in the transmutation of history, applied to circumstances that could not be imagined by Tacitus or anyone alive at his time, it became a criticism of Roman mores (French sophistication) and a call to arms — German arms.
All of this is by way of illustrating the difference between the mind-sets that I mentioned at the beginning. There are men who believe that the enemy lies without (in the form of hostile armies), and those who believe that it lies within (compromised and incompetent leaders). They will always be able to find support for their very different stories. It may be that their outlooks are mutually incompatible, but their wisdom is not. We need to learn how to listen to both.