Mimesis (11 page)

The general body received this harangue with shouts of applause, but stimulated by various motives,—some showing, in all the bitterness of reproach, the marks of stripes, others their hoary heads, many their tattered vestments and naked bodies.)
The Works of Tacitus
. The Oxford Translation. London: Bell. 1888.

At first sight it may seem that this passage does give really serious expression to a movement of the submerged, that it does painstakingly present the practical everyday motives, the underlying economic factors, and the actual events marking the inception of the movement. The grievances of the soldiers discussed in Percennius’ speech—excessive length of service, hardships, insufficient pay, inadequate old-age provision, corruption, envy of the easier life of metropolitan troops—are presented vividly and graphically in a manner not frequently encountered even in modern historians. Tacitus is a great artist. Under his hands things come strikingly alive. The modern historian, we must imagine, would proceed more theoretically (one might say, more bookishly); on this occasion he would not have had Percennius speak; he would have presented a factually objective, well-documented study of pay-scales and welfare provisions, or he might have referred to such a study elsewhere in his own or in some colleague’s publications. He would have gone on to discuss the justification of the soldier’s demands; he would have given a brief review of the government’s past and future policies in the matter, and so forth. All this Tacitus does not do; and the modern historian of antiquity, in order to apply his characteristic methodology, has to reorganize the material which the antique chroniclers have to offer, and to supplement it by inscriptions, excavators’ findings, and various other types of indirect evidence.

Tacitus presents the soldiers’ grievances and demands, which cast a light upon the facts of their everyday situation, as utterances of the
ringleader Percennius; he sees no reason to discuss them, to inquire whether and how far they were justified, to explain how the Roman soldier’s lot had changed since the days of the Republic, and the like. All this, he considers, is not worth treating, and it is evident that he could rely on his readers’ not missing anything of the kind either. But this is not all. The factual information he gives on the causes of the revolt—information presented in the form of a ringleader’s speech and not discussed further—he invalidates in advance by stating at the outset his own view of the real causes of the revolt in purely ethical terms:
nullis novis causis, nisi quod mutatus princeps licentiam turbarum et ex civili bello spem praemiorum ostendebat
. It would be difficult to put it more contemptuously. In his view, the whole thing is merely a matter of mob effrontery and lack of discipline. The blame is placed on the interruption of the usual schedule of duties (they are idle and therefore they shout, says Pharaoh of the Jews). We must be careful not to read into the word
novis
the admission that older grievances are justified. Nothing could be further from Tacitus’ view. Time and again he dwells upon the point that only the worst elements are ready to rebel; and as for the leader Percennius, the former chief claqueur, boasting his
histrionale studium
and playing the general, Tacitus feels only the most profound contempt for him.

So it becomes manifest that Tacitus’ vivid recital of the soldiers’ grievances and demands is by no means based upon an understanding of those demands. This fact might naturally be explained as the result of Tacitus’ characteristic attitude of aristocratic conservatism; to his mind, a rebellious legion is nothing but a lawless mob; a common soldier in the role of a mutinous ringleader defies classification in terms of constitutional law, especially since even during the revolutionary epoch of Roman history the most radical rebels could not attain their goal except by submitting to the established order of a civil service career. It may moreover be assumed that Tacitus viewed with alarm the growing power of the military; during the civil wars it had increased to threatening proportions, as later it came to undermine the very structure of the state. But this explanation is not enough. For Tacitus not only lacks understanding, he actually has no interest whatever in the facts underlying the soldiers’ demands. He does not argue against their demands in objective terms; he will not take the trouble to prove that they are not justified; a few purely ethical considerations (
licentia, spes praemiorum, pessimus quisque, inexperti animi
) are quite enough to reject them in advance. Had other views existed in
his time, views contrary to his own and based on a more clearly sociological and historical interpretation of human actions, Tacitus would have had to take a stand in regard to the problems thus raised—precisely as during the more recent decades of our own period even the most conservative politician still felt obliged to consider the problems raised by his socialist opponents’ conception of politics, or at any rate to discuss them polemically, which often implied an elaborate preoccupation with them. Tacitus felt no such obligation, for no such opponents could exist. Historiography in depth—that is, methodical research into the historical growth of social as well as intellectual movements—is a thing unknown to antiquity. This fact has often been alluded to by modern students. So Norden writes in his
Antike Kunstprosa
(2, 647): “We must bear in mind that the historians of antiquity did not attain, and indeed did not seek to attain, a presentation of general, world-moving ideas.” And Rostovtzeff in his
Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire
(p. 88): “The historians were not interested in the economic life of the Empire.” These two statements, chosen at random, may at first sight appear to have little to do with each other, but what they express goes back to the same peculiarity of the ancients’ way of viewing things; it does not see forces, it sees vices and virtues, successes and mistakes. Its formulation of problems is not concerned with historical developments either intellectual or material, but with ethical judgments. But this is most intimately connected with the prevailing view which is manifested in the stylistic differentiation between the tragic-problematic and realism. Both are based upon an aristocratic reluctance to become involved with growth processes in the depths, for these processes are felt to be both vulgar and orgiastically lawless.

An ethically oriented historiography, which also on the whole proceeds in strict chronological order, is bound to use an unchangeable system of categories and hence cannot produce synthetic-dynamic concepts of the kind we are accustomed to employ today. Concepts like “industrial capitalism” or “absenteeism,” which are syntheses of characteristic data, applicable especially to specific epochs, and, on the other hand, concepts like Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism, which first of all designate epochs but are also syntheses of characteristic data, sometimes applicable to epochs other than those originally designated by them, are designed to cover phenomena in motion; such phenomena are traced from their first sporadic appearance, then as they occur with progressive density, and finally as they abate and
change and vanish; and an essential aspect of all these concepts is the fact that their growth and transformation—that is, an idea of evolution—is contained in them, is conceived as part of their content. On the contrary, the ethical and even the political concepts of antiquity (aristocracy, democracy, etc.) are fixed, aprioristic model concepts. All the modern authorities in the field, from Vico down to Rostovtzeff, have endeavored to dissolve these, to trace the formulation which lies concealed behind them, and which our thought can grasp, a formulation which we can only achieve by collecting and rearranging the characteristic data. As I open Rostovtzeff’s work to check the quotation above, my eyes fall on this sentence: “The question, however, arises, How are we to account for the existence of comparatively large numbers of proletarians in Italy?” Such a sentence, such a question, is unthinkable in an author of classical antiquity. It reaches back behind any foreground movements and seeks the changes of significance to them in processes of historical growth which no antique author observed, still less reduced to system and coherence. When we read Thucydides we get, aside from a continuous account of foreground events, nothing but considerations which are statically aprioristic and ethical in content, on such matters as human nature or fate, and which, though it is true that they are sometimes applied to specific situations, are of an absolute validity in themselves.

Let us return to our passage from Tacitus. If he was not at all interested in the soldiers’ demands and never intended to discuss them objectively, why does he express them so graphically in Percennius’ speech? The reasons are purely aesthetic. The grand style of historiography requires grandiloquent speeches, which as a rule are fictitious. Their function is graphic dramatization (
illustratio
) of a given occurrence, or at times the presentation of great political or moral ideas; in either case they are intended as the rhetorical bravura pieces of the presentation. The writer is permitted a certain sympathetic entering into the thoughts of the supposed speaker, and even a certain realism. Essentially, however, such speeches are products of a specific stylistic tradition cultivated in the schools for rhetors. The composition of speeches which one person or another might have delivered on one or another great historical occasion was a favorite exercise. Tacitus is a master of his craft, and his speeches are not sheer display; they are really imbued with the character and the situation of the persons supposed to have delivered them; but they too are primarily rhetoric. Percennius does not speak his own language; he speaks Tacitean, that is,
he speaks with extreme terseness, as a master of disposition, and highly rhetorically. Undoubtedly his words—though given as indirect discourse—vibrate with the actual excitement of mutinous soldiers and their leader. Yet even if we assume that Percennius was a gifted demagogue, such brevity, incisiveness, and order are not possible in a rebellious propaganda speech, and of soldiers’ slang there is not the slightest trace. The same is true of the soldier Vibulenus’ words in chapter 22. In the very next chapter they are discounted as lies. They are certainly profoundly moving, but they nevertheless represent the highest degree of rhetorical stylization. Though anaphora, here repeatedly employed (
quis fratri meo vitam, quis fratrem mihi reddit
), may have been frequent in popular usage, it still remains a rhetorical manifestation of the elevated style and has nothing to do with soldiers’ language. And this is the second distinctive characteristic of antique historiography: it is rhetorical. The combination of ethical and rhetorical preoccupations gives it a high degree of order, clarity, and dramatic impact. In the case of the Romans there is further a broad and comprehensive view of the extensive stage on which the political and military events occur. Beyond these characteristics, the greatest writers possess a realistic knowledge of the human heart which, though it is soberly based on experience, is never mean. At times we even find traces of an ontogenetic derivation of individual characters, as for example in Sallust’s portrait of Catiline and especially in Tacitus’ portrait of Tiberius. But this is the limit which cannot be passed. The ethical and rhetorical approach are incompatible with a conception in which reality is a development of forces. Antique historiography gives us neither social history nor economic history nor cultural history. These can only be inferred indirectly from the data presented. However vast the difference between the two passages here considered—the talk of the dinner guest in Petronius and the Pannonian mutiny in Tacitus—both reveal the limits of antique realism and thus of antique historical consciousness.

It will be assumed that, to find a counter example in which these limits are extended, I should have to take a modern text. Yet here again I have at my disposal documents of Jewish-Christian literature which are approximately contemporaneous with Petronius and Tacitus. I choose the story of Peter’s denial and I follow Mark’s version of it—the differences in the Synoptists are, in any case, quite insignificant.

After the arrest of Jesus—he alone has been arrested, while his
entourage has been allowed to escape—Peter, keeping at a safe distance, follows the armed men who take Jesus away. He has been bold enough to enter the court of the High Priest’s palace and there, feigning the curiosity of an uninvolved spectator, he stands by the fire among the servants. In doing so he has displayed greater courage than the others. For, since he was a member of the prisoner’s inner circle, the risk of his being recognized was very great. And in fact, as he stands there by the fire, a servant girl tells him to his face that he is one of Jesus’ group. He denies this and tries unobtrusively to withdraw from the vicinity of the fire. It seems, however, that the girl has kept an eye on him; she follows him to the outer court and repeats her accusation, so that several bystanders hear it. He repeats his denial, but now his Galilean accent has been noticed and the situation begins to look dangerous for him. We are not told how he managed to get away. It is not likely that his third asseveration was given greater credence than the first two. Perhaps something happened to draw the crowd’s attention away from him; or perhaps an order had been issued not to molest the prisoner’s followers so long as they offered no resistance, and so it may have seemed enough to tell the suspect to move on.

It is apparent at first glance that the rule of differentiated styles cannot possibly apply in this case. The incident, entirely realistic both in regard to locale and
dramatis personae
—note particularly their low social station—is replete with problem and tragedy. Peter is no mere accessory figure serving as
illustratio
, like the soldiers Vibulenus and Percennius, who are represented as mere scoundrels and swindlers. He is the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense. Of course this mingling of styles is not dictated by an artistic purpose. On the contrary, it was rooted from the beginning in the character of Jewish-Christian literature; it was graphically and harshly dramatized through God’s incarnation in a human being of the humblest social station, through his existence on earth amid humble everyday people and conditions, and through his Passion which, judged by earthly standards, was ignominious; and it naturally came to have—in view of the wide diffusion and strong effect of that literature in later ages—a most decisive bearing upon man’s conception of the tragic and the sublime. Peter, whose personal account may be assumed to have been the basis of the story, was a fisherman from Galilee, of humblest background and humblest education. The other participants in the night scene in the court of the High Priest’s palace are servant girls and soldiers.
From the humdrum existence of his daily life, Peter is called to the most tremendous role. Here, like everything else to do with Jesus’ arrest, his appearance on the stage—viewed in the world-historical continuity of the Roman Empire—is nothing but a provincial incident, an insignificant local occurrence, noted by none but those directly involved. Yet how tremendous it is, viewed in relation to the life a fisherman from the Sea of Galilee normally lives, and what enormous “pendulation” (Harnack in discussing the denial scene once used the term
Pendelausschlag
) is going on in him! He has left his home and his work; he has followed his master to Jerusalem; he has been the first to recognize him as the Messiah; when the catastrophe came, he was more courageous than the others; not only was he among those who tried to resist but even when the miracle which he had doubtless expected failed to occur, he once again attempted to follow Jesus as he had followed him before. It is but an attempt, halfhearted and timid, motivated perhaps by a confused hope that the miracle by which the Messiah would crush his enemies might still take place. But since his attempt to follow Jesus is a halfhearted, doubt-ridden venture, furtive and full of fear, he falls deeper than all the others, who at least had no occasion to deny Jesus explicitly. Because his faith was deep, but not deep enough, the worst happened to him that can happen to one whom faith had inspired but a short time before: he trembles for his miserable life. And it is entirely credible that this terrifying inner experience should have brought about another swing of the pendulum—this time in the opposite direction and far stronger. Despair and remorse following his desperate failure prepared him for the visions which contributed decisively to the constitution of Christianity. It is only through this experience that the significance of Christ’s coming and Passion is revealed to him.