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POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Northwestern University
Studies in Phenomenology
and
Existential Philosophy

General Editor Anthony J. Steinbock

POLITICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY

Helmuth Plessner

Translated from the German by Nils F. Schott

Edited and with an introduction by Heike Delitz

and Robert Seyfert

Epilogue by Joachim Fischer

Northwestern University Press

Evanston, Illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu

English translation copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Pub-

lished 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Originally published in German
in 1931 under the title Macht und menschliche Natur: Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie
der geschichtlichen Weltansicht. This translation is based on the edition published
as vol. 5 of Helmuth Plessner, Gesammelte Schriften. Copyright © 1981 Suhrkamp
Verlag Frankfurt am Main. All rights reserved by and controlled through
Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

Support for the publication of this book was provided by the Helmuth Plessner
Gesellschaft and the Groninger Helmuth Plessner Fund.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Plessner, Helmuth, 1892–­1985, author. | Schott, Nils F., translator. |

Delitz, Heike, editor, writer of introduction. | Seyfert, Robert, editor, writer of
introduction. | Fischer, Joachim, 1951– writer of afterword.
Title: Political anthropology / Helmuth Plessner ; translated from the Ger-
man by Nils F. Schott ; edited and with an introduction by Heike Delitz and
Robert Seyfert ; epilogue by Joachim Fischer.
Other titles: Macht und menschliche Natur. English | Northwestern University
studies in phenomenology & existential philosophy.
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Series:
Northwestern University studies in phenomenology and existential philos-
ophy | “Originally published in German in 1931 under the title Macht und
menschliche Natur: Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie der geschichtlichen
Weltansicht.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018020169 | ISBN 9780810138001 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780810138018 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810138025 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Power (Social sciences) | Political anthropology. | Radicalism.
Classification: LCC JC330 .P55613 2018 | DDC 320.0113—dc23
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc​.gov/​2018020169
 Contents

Introduction vii
Heike Delitz and Robert Seyfert

Political Anthropology
Helmuth Plessner

The Purpose of This Book 3

1 The Naturalistic Conception of Anthropology

and Its Political Ambiguity 9

The Path to Political Anthropology

2 The Universal Conception of Political Anthropology

with Regard to the Human as the Historical Subject
of Attribution of Its World 13

3 Should Universal Anthropology Proceed Empirically

or A Priori? 17

4 Two Possible A Priori Procedures 21

5 The New Possibility of Combining the A Priori and

Empirical Views according to the Principle of the
Human’s Unfathomability 25

6 Excursus: Dilthey’s Idea of a Philosophy of Life 31

7 The Principle of Unfathomability, or The Principle of

Open Questions 39

8 The Human as Power 47

9 The Exposure of the Human 53

v
10 Excursus: Why It Is Significant for the Question of
Power That the Primacy of Philosophy or Anthropology
Is Undecidable 61

11 The Powerlessness and Predictability of the Human 77

12 The Human Is Tied to a People 83

Epilogue: Political Anthropology: Plessner’s Fascinating

Voice from Weimar 89
Joachim Fischer

Notes 111

Glossary 123

Index of Names 129

 Introduction
Heike Delitz and Robert Seyfert

The Topic

Among German-language theories of the political, Helmuth Plessner’s

difficult, profound, and fraught Political Anthropology occupies a singular
place. Its fraught elements include Plessner’s affirmative (if not whole-
sale) adoption of Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction, the idea of a
“nationality” of the human,1 the thesis of an anthropologically necessary
struggle for “power,” and the sense of a German-European historical
mission. With Schmitt, Plessner shares a political realism; with Hannah
Arendt he shares a negative anthropology that emphasizes the undefin-
ability of the human and, resulting from it, a theory of the public. As in
his 1924 Limits of Community, Plessner in Political Anthropology thinks of
politics as a rule-based game, an institutional curbing of political vio-
lence, and he thinks the political as an essential sphere of all human life.
Using the terms employed in current debates, the book and its key con-
cept of “unfathomability” may be seen as a variant of “post-foundational
political thought.”2 Plessner assumes that humanity and human beings
are hidden from themselves. This concealment necessarily requires both
individual personality and particular cultures to close onto themselves
and requires all individuals and groups to differentiate others as others. A
first, central, post-foundational element is Plessner’s principle of “a lack
of a beginning” (44), familiar to readers of Derrida, say, or Deleuze and
Guattari. Societies or cultures do not possess an “extra-historical, extra-
temporal absolute position” (44) but are pure cultures of immanence. In
Plessner’s political anthropology, the delimitation of each cultural sphere
against an outside, moreover, plays as significant a role as it does in the
hegemony theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, whose political
philosophy is influenced by Carl Schmitt. Such an approach situates the
immanent definition of cultures always also in a differentiation from a
“constitutive outside.” As we will see, however, there are limits to such
parallels with deconstructivist approaches, namely insofar as the latter
make it possible to think only a negative definition of identities instead
of a positive, creative, institutive definition.3 Finally, the concept of un-
viii
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

fathomability also points to a thoroughly historical anthropology that

anticipates post-structuralist thought.
Published in 1931, Plessner’s Political Anthropology continues to stim-
ulate debate. This is true not only for theories of society or collective
identity, of becoming a “people.” It is also true for debates in social phi-
losophy about the relative or universal nature of human rights, for dis-
cussions in political philosophy of the concept of democratic society and
the weakness of liberal political theory, for assessments of the anthropo-
logical necessity of the political, and generally for philosophical claims
about the human.
“As with others, and with Carl Schmitt above all, Plessner wants to
remedy the sorry state of the estrangement of politics from the spirit
by attempting to show the mutual interpenetration of philosophy and
politics.”4 This complex work—Eric Voegelin goes on to admit that he
“cannot offer an adequate critique of this brilliant and very condensed
presentation”5 — is a direct continuation of Plessner’s first major work,
The Levels of the Organic and the Human of 1928. And indeed, Political An-
thropology sets in with the concept of “excentric positionality” elaborated
in the earlier book. “Excentric positionality” is opposed to the “centric”
or instinctual positionality of animals and the “open” positionality of
plants and names the specific relationship of humans with their environ-
ment and their world; in other words, the specifically human way of liv-
ing and experiencing. In Levels of the Organic, Plessner had developed the
central aspects of such an “excentric,” decentered life that distances itself
from itself against the background of a philosophy of nature and of life
(of the organic). In Political Anthropology, he spells out its radical historic-
ity. Because humans are excentric, not bound by instinct, they are highly
variable historically and culturally or, in other terms, unfathomable to
themselves: the human is homo absconditus.6 The essence of the human is
not fixed. Instead, this life only ever settles preliminarily and imaginarily.
Rather than privileging one characteristic or another, absolutizing one as-
pect or another in claims about the human, all anthropologies must thus
remain “open,” they must consider themselves “bound” by the openness
of the question of what the human is.
Binding unfathomability as a formula for human life thus joins the
paradoxical definitions from the concluding chapter of Levels of the Or-
ganic, where Plessner, following the definition of the forms of vegetal and
animal life, had articulated specifically human life in terms of its “natural
artificiality,” “mediated immediacy,” and “utopian standpoint.” Yet by
the same token, we might also say that Political Anthropology constitutes
a complement to the philosophical anthropology of 1928 by developing a
concept of the human that is not obtained from a philosophical biology
 ix
I N T R O D UCT I O N

(that is, by comparing forms of the living) but on the contrary by look-
ing at the historical and cultural diversity of human life alone—which
also includes recognizing oneself to be human in relation to animals or
God, for example. Instead of grounding anthropology exclusively in a
philosophy of organic life, Plessner now also bases it on a philosophy of
historical and political life. Or, in yet another set of terms: while Levels of
the Organic foregrounded the human as subject and object of nature and
(organic) life, the specific, singular relation of the human to itself (the
awareness not just of being a body but of “having” a body, of being able
to objectivize it), Political Anthropology thematizes the human as subject
and object of culture. At its core, “excentric positionality” now constitutes
the originary foundation of anthropology, philosophy (of life), and poli-
tics equally (73–74). Because the human confronts itself excentrically, it
must always make itself into something— endow itself with an identity,
settle. This is true on the individual as well as, and above all, the cultural
level. To make this point, Plessner discusses the philosophy of Wilhelm
Dilthey (as well as that of Georg Misch).7 The task Plessner has set himself
is to develop a philosophy of the political, a theory of political existence,
from the radical historicity of the human. The human, society, is always
also a differentiation from the other. For Plessner, this follows from the
very principle of unfathomability, which not only allows the self to en-
counter an other (for breaking out of the self) but the very “possibility of
understanding the human” (84). In the analogous space of the political,
it refers to the ethnically other, to other cultural spheres. Every identity
implies difference and therefore implies the political in the sense of de-
fining what is one’s own in delimiting it from what is foreign.
Political Anthropology thus develops, alongside its theory of the
political, a political ethics as well. Each concrete politics— the question
of how one fashions oneself and how one treats others— always depends
on an anthropology, on the contemporary philosophical (or, generally,
cultural) definition of the human. The political relation also permeates
all social relations. For Plessner, besides international relations, relations
of neighborship in the literal sense are “political,” too. With Schmitt and
against him, Plessner here advocates an ethics or a civilizing of politics.
The diversity of human possibilities results from excentric positionality
and thus from the unfathomability of human life. This diversity has a cor-
relate in the competition for political existence, in contest, in striving for
success. The political means a relationship of power. Yet from excentric
positionality also follows powerlessness and thus the possibility of hubris,
crime, and blunders.8 Human life remains tied to the body and to one’s
history. Given the potential seriousness of the political, namely violence
done to organic and mortal living beings, politics, in modern, liberal
x
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

societies, must curb itself. This, for Plessner, is the function of the state
and of the law.
In other words, Plessner’s concept of the political, which adopts but
at the same time formalizes Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction, results
from his definition of human life as an “and-connection” (81) of power
and powerlessness (excentricity and positionality). The differentiation into
friend and enemy corresponds to the formal structure of the human, “ex-
centric positionality,” thanks to which humans in their own familiarity can
also always encounter themselves as foreign. The friend–enemy relation
is to be thought abstractly. It also concerns political-existential questions,
but it permeates all social relationships. In 1931, in the face of the loom-
ing catastrophe, Plessner urges a limitation of the intensity of the struggle
for power, and he urges a playful form of the political, democracy, which
turns the struggle into a competition, an election instead of a violent
campaign. Plessner thus seeks to derive the seriousness and the relativity
of the political from the simultaneity of power (in the sense of creative
ability and genuinely political power) and powerlessness, from the fact
that the human is creative, formative of world, and a physical “thing.”
Not least of all, Plessner’s anthropology and ethics seek to engage
with the philosophy that dominated contemporary debate, the philos-
ophy of Martin Heidegger.9 As a philosophy of the human (Dasein) that
despises the sphere of the public and political, Heidegger’s philosophy
is co-responsible for the Fate of the German Spirit at the End of Its Bourgeois
Period (as the original title of Plessner’s 1935 book, Belated Nation, has it).10
It is an apolitical thinking that turns out to be indifferent toward the usur-
pation of power and racist political ideologies. When moral philosophy,
and the study of art and culture, despise the political, it is no wonder
that politics attacks cultural life “from below” (87) and becomes racist,
for example. Against existentialism, Plessner also stresses the equal status
of all forms of being human, their historical, sociocultural relativity—
which acknowledgment of relativity is at the same time genuinely Euro-
pean. Plessner thus insists, on the one hand, on relativizing all values, on
“renouncing the supremacy” of one’s own system of values (47). On the
other hand, he stresses the concomitant binding quality that each cul-
ture has for itself and the achievement of European culture (in the sense
of humanism, liberalism, the peaceful struggle for power) that consists
in having reached this idea. Relativization must not lead to giving one-
self up. Relativization cannot stop at seemingly universally valid human
rights— that would be yet another “one-sided reduction,” a “monopoli-
zation of a specific, historically become human-kind” (54)— yet neither
does it relativize its own values: it legitimizes them in particular ways,
like other cultures. Nor can European culture view humanist values as
nonbinding (74).
 xi
I N T R O D UCT I O N

Context, Author, Work

Genesis, Intellectual Context, and Historical Background

Political Anthropology entertains close relationships with Plessner’s other
major works. It refers to Levels of the Organic; it continues the defense of
the principles of bourgeois civil society developed in The Limits of Commu-
nity; and it looks ahead, in content and structure (including the debate
with Mannheim), to Belated Nation.11
In providing the theoretical framework, Political Anthropology consti-
tutes the center of his work in social theory, which also includes The Limits
of Community and Belated Nation. With all three books, Plessner seeks to
endow the political with dignity, especially in Germany— opposing an
intellectual contempt for the political (Heidegger) as much as an “idol-
ization” of power (Schmitt).12 The context of the work’s genesis is thus,
on the one hand, the contemporary resonance of Heidegger’s existential
anthropology, which, focused on a philosophy of the subject, precisely
does not develop a positive concept of the political or the public. On the
other hand, where the competing systems of political ideas and their in-
terpretation are concerned, Plessner stands in a triangular relationship
with Eric Voegelin and Carl Schmitt.
Finally, the work is also contemporaneous with a virulent debate
about the sociological analysis of systems of thought, especially of polit-
ical and philosophical knowledge. The “debate about the sociology
of knowledge” in the Weimar Republic centrally concerned the thesis
that all knowledge is tied to social systems and is thus relative.13 Plessner
reproached the founder of the classical sociology of knowledge, Karl
Mannheim, for maintaining a covertly Marxist position, that is to say, a
position that pertained to the philosophy of history and was therefore not
radically historical.14 As he suggests in the opening pages, Plessner thus
conceives Political Anthropology and its demand to maintain the concep-
tion of the unfathomability of human life throughout as an answer to
Mannheim. Within the contemporary context, Plessner seeks to respond
as well to the suspicion of being ideological that this sociology of knowl-
edge casts on every political system. The political form Plessner defends
(bourgeois civil society in the sense of political liberalism, democracy,
and humanism) certainly has a political a priori of its own. In their origin
and in the way they imposed themselves, its guiding principles are politi-
cally interested, polemic concepts. Nonetheless, Plessner considers it to
be the duty of European intellectuals to maintain humanism and to share
the “conviction” that these principles remain “viable in the future” (47).
As for the political and intellectual context more broadly, the Wei-
mar Republic was in the process of drowning in the worldwide economic
xii
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

crisis and the civil war of ideologies (between the equally radical ideas
of community on the left and right Plessner had diagnosed in Limits of
Community). Yet its future still remained open; the republic had not yet
been dissolved. Plessner in this situation placed his hopes in a “civil com-
promise” in which agreement on European values would be reached.
Europe had experienced wars of religion and the First World War; in
the “German civil war, the real possibility of a second world war” already
announced itself, a war between (European) nation-states. Only empires
stood a chance “to survive a state of exception, i.e., Carl Schmitt’s crite-
rion for political sovereignty.” In that sense, Plessner was not just con-
cerned with a compromise, not just with cherishing European values in
the sense of a lowest common denominator; he sought actively to defend
them.15 This is true in particular with respect to the concept of the people.
Plessner seeks to demystify this concept— which in Political Anthropology
has a connotation so positive it puts off some readers— the way he had
sought in 1928 to demystify the concept of life and in 1924 the concept of
community. At precisely this point, in the age of the people or “the age of
the demos and its self-determination in a nation-state,” precisely in “an age
in which dictatorship has become a living power,” the task is to outline a
political philosophy that does not substantialize the “people.” The task is to find
an anthropological concept of the political or, in other words, “to under-
stand the human necessity of politics” (5).
The concrete occasion for Plessner’s writing Political Anthopology, in
a professional and personal situation severely impacted by accusations of
plagiarism,16 was, it seems, an invitation by the publisher Ernst von Hippel
to write a volume on “Political Anthropology” in the series Fachschriften
zur Politik und staatsbürgerlichen Erziehung (Technical Papers on Poli-
tics and Civic Education), specializing in politics and civic education.
Plessner himself wrote about the project that he was now (following the
Levels) attempting the “‘derivation’ of excentric positionality as a struc-
ture that opens up the political (the ‘historical’).”17

Helmuth Plessner: Life, Work, Reception

Having studied biology and philosophy, Plessner taught philosophy and
sociology in Cologne, Groningen, Göttingen, and at the New School in
New York City. With Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, Plessner is one of
the main authors of German philosophical anthropology understood
as a specific approach within the wider discipline of political anthropol-
ogy. Among contemporary authors, there are many parallels with the
work of Henri Bergson.18 With respect to organic life, however, Plessner
primarily takes up the philosophy of life elaborated by Hans Driesch
 xiii
I N T R O D UCT I O N

and Jakob von Uexküll. Their approach is to develop a philosophical

concept of the human from a theory of organic life by comparing plant,
animal, and human as well as ape and human.19 In Political Anthropology,
the peculiar structure of the environment-position or “boundary reali-
zation”20 of the human— humans’ excentric position toward themselves,
the excentering of the way they conduct their lives, “mediated immedi-
acy” and “natural artificiality”— is the foundation of the definition of the
human as a non- fixable, historically conditioned, and, simultaneously,
profoundly variable organism that time and again views itself differently
and makes itself different.
In his three books on social theory, Plessner develops a theory of
the political to correspond to this anthropology. In his 1924 The Limits
of Community, Plessner defends the Weimar Republic (a bourgeois lib-
eral, democratically institutionalized society) against the genuinely Ger-
man, radical “idea of community” coming from both the right and the
left.21 At a time when “the alternative between community and society . . .
stands at the center of public discussion, especially in Germany,”22 Pless-
ner defends the form of life of “society” or “civilization,” the form of the
political public, of distance, play, and tact. At a time when practically the
entire intellectual public, especially in Germany, turns its back on the
idea of (civil) “society,” Plessner on the contrary criticizes all ideas of
community as equally radical one-sided fixations that do not do justice
to the human, no matter whether they fixate on a shared concern with
reason (“ideal-based community”) or on shared “blood.”23

One can express the problem of a critique of social radicalism in the

following formula: Is it possible to eliminate force from an ideal social
life of humans? Is it possible to integrate without force, restraint and
artificiality the physical dimension of man’s being with his personality
as soul and spirit, considering that the physical dimension forces man
wherever he goes to employ means of force of the basest kind? Should
and may a human being, indeed as an extra-bodily person, make the
value of sincerity exclusively into a guiding principle? Should and may
the person, indeed as a being possessing soul and spirit, be direct over-
all? Is there not value in indirectness? Is it not possible that these values
are fulfilled only in a societal form of life— no matter how specially
formed— and never in a community?24

Exiled in Groningen in the Netherlands, Plessner in his 1935 Belated

Nation explains the political genealogy of the German concept of the
“people” and its substantialist, racist conception as a fateful effect of
the specifically German history of philosophy and nationhood, including
xiv
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

the religious energies that nourished it. In the background of this Fate of
the German Mind at the End of Its Bourgeois Period— that is, its self-demise in
National Socialism—Plessner sees on the one hand a specifically German
Protestant (Lutheran) piety.25 Unlike the lighter, institutionally bound
faith of Catholicism, its endowment of secular objects and ideas with
religious content and intensity leads to German intellectuals’ apolitical
attitude. Political Anthropology is written against this attitude. On the other
hand, the specifically German political situation (the irresolvably double
imperial tradition of Prussia and Austria) leads to a belated (compared
to Britain and France) formation of the idea of nationhood. That is why,
according to Plessner, the concept of the “people” is formed instead of
that of a “nation,” which defines itself through civil society and citizen-
ship. The concept “people” was not endowed with European values; the
German nation was defined by its shared “blood.” Political Anthropology is
also written to oppose this community of the people. In short, Plessner (like
Voegelin) seeks a genealogical and anthropological sobering of the genu-
inely German mystification of the concept of the people, which served
to legitimize a policy of exclusion, cleansing, and extermination. In this
sense, the book is a direct continuation of what Plessner had described
as the motivation behind his Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (the
subtitle of Levels of the Organic and the Human) in 1928:

Every age finds its own redeeming word. The terminology of the eigh-
teenth century culminated in the concept of reason; that of the nine-
teenth in the concept of progress; the current one in the concept of
life. . . . And yet all periods want to grasp the same thing, and the actual
meanings of the words become for them merely the means . . . for ren-
dering visible that ultimate depth of things without a consciousness of
which all human beginning would be without background and without
meaning.26

Now, in 1931, as already in 1924, Plessner pushes ahead with the demys-
tification of the “people.” This is why he speaks of the “nationality” of
human existence in an entirely formal or structural and precisely not a
substantialist sense.
Plessner was considered Jewish according to the Nazis’ racist clas-
sification and so was forced to emigrate in 1933, first to Turkey, then to
the Netherlands and the United States. There, he was one of the “ar-
gonauts on Long Island”— the intellectual community around Hannah
Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Carl
Löwith, and Max Horkheimer.27 In 1962– 63 he was the first Theodor
Heuss Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
 xv
I N T R O D UCT I O N

While the reception of his work in Germany was stymied for a long time,
first by the accusations of plagiarism already mentioned, and then by
his exclusion from German academia because of an arbitrarily assigned
Jewishness, in the years since 1989 his oeuvre has increasingly become a
subject of discussion in German and Continental philosophy and related
fields (sociology, political theory, pedagogy).
Internationally and in the English- speaking world, he is known
thanks to the translations of The Limits of Community and Laughing and
Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior (1941). Written in the midst
of World War II, this latter anthropological study addresses laughing
and crying in order to “proceed” to philosophy or philosophical anthro-
pology “from man as a whole,” from “what is common to all men” and
women “and differentiates them from other beings.” In this way, “laugh-
ing and crying are revealed as genuine, basic possibilities of the univer-
sally human, despite all historical change, all varieties of jest, wit, drollery,
humor, irony, pain, and tragedy.”28 An English translation is underway
of Plessner’s first major work, Levels of the Organic and the Human, which
may rightly be considered his major work overall. In addition, there are
translations of several shorter essays.29 Among the secondary literature in
English, special mention must be made of Marjorie Grene’s work, even
if it does not concern Plessner’s theory of the political but philosophical
anthropology and biology.30 The number of studies and the range of
topics they address have increased in recent years.31

The Book

Main Theses and Argumentation

The book, of which we have already given a short summary, develops in
two parts, “The Purpose of This Book” and “The Path to Political Anthro-
pology.” In the first chapter, Plessner situates his topic within contempo-
rary debates. Referring to Weimar Republic intellectuals’ contempt for
the political, he insists on the urgency of a philosophical anthropology
of the political for practical politics itself: “The less politics is respected,
the worse it becomes” (3). The task he sets for himself is to outline a
political anthropology against this contempt, allowing for the possibility
that even this very philosophy still has a political a priori, that it is out-
lined with a political interest in mind— just as inversely, all politics is
based on a philosophical a priori, a specific philosophy of life and anthro-
pology. Both are indispensable to understanding the “seriousness” and
xvi
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

the “necessity” of politics (5). Plessner’s question is whether the political

(in the sense of the friend–enemy distinction) belongs constitutively “to
the definition of the human” (6) or whether it is merely an expression
of human imperfections. Might the political merely name an— in Hei-
degger’s sense— inauthentic sphere, the sphere of the public which the
human has only “fallen into” to conceal from itself what is most authentic
(namely, “Being-toward-death”)?
Yet in the next step of this opening part, Plessner first turns to a cri-
tique of biology-based anthropologies (race theories) and classical, pessi-
mistic anthropologies (Hobbes). Both approaches define the political ex-
clusively by the “biological limit function” of struggling against enemies;
in both, philosophical anthropology becomes the foundation of “pure
power politics” (10). The “path to political anthropology” traced in the
book’s second part can thus not lead via a biological, disciplinarily narrow
concept of anthropology. It must be based on a comprehensive, universal
anthropology that encompasses “all modes of being and forms of expres-
sion” of the human (13). This is why philosophy cannot be guided here
by any single discipline. It must take history itself as its guide, namely a
“historical conception that goes to extremes” by seeing the human as the
creator of different cultures and worldviews (13). For Plessner, this im-
plies a definition of the human as “a reality that is formative of world and
indifferent to religious and racial differences” (14). This reality includes,
among others, the European reality, which must therefore allow itself
to be relativized by a philosophical anthropology. If there is any “prog-
ress” of European culture vis-à-vis “non- and pre-Christian nations” at
all, then it consists in the fact that the idea of different cultures’ equal
status originates in the European conception “of the human.” This is why
the “affirmation of our culture and religion . . . means renouncing its
absolutization” (14). On this point, Plessner explicitly prefers Nietzsche’s
radicality to Scheler’s anthropology of Christian and Platonist inspira-
tion. A “universal doctrine of the essence of the human” (16) will not be
attained until the human is thought as creator of truths. In other words,
philosophical anthropology properly understood must envision the es-
sence of the human so broadly that it includes all factually existing and
even all conceivable cultures. At the same time, it must be as reflexive as
possible and think of itself as an invented doctrine, as one possible an-
thropology among others.
The human is the subject but also the object of culture. Humans
invent their worlds and their truths, and they are formed by them and
conceived of differently. Accordingly, Plessner at this point raises the
methodological question of whether philosophical anthropology should
“proceed empirically or a priori.” The answer: neither one nor the other.
 xvii
I N T R O D UCT I O N

No “essence” of the human is to be found empirically (in the individual

sciences). And defining such an essence a priori amounts to ontolo-
gizing one’s own concept of the human (19). Of these two variants, a
material and a formal positing of human essence, Plessner’s discussion
focuses on the second, on Heidegger’s definition of being- human as a
self- knowledge of human individuality, personality, and freedom. This
establishes one human possibility (the European one) as the “authentic”
one. To the extent that other cultures have not invented these values,
such a philosophy can really consider them to be human “in appearance
only” and “only in a state of latency” (23). The political consequences of
such an anthropology are evident, as is the fact already mentioned that
this anthropology considers the political and the public to be inauthen-
tic insofar as they precisely do not concern the individual, the personal,
one’s own existence.
What the human is must, on the contrary, “remain open.” Philo-
sophical anthropology must hold on to unfathomability. What Plessner
writes here is paradoxical: the concept of unfathomability, the choice
of starting with the historicity of the human, is an absolutization of one
(namely a negative) concept of the human, of a historical anthropology.
In this respect, incidentally, Plessner’s thoroughly historical anthropol-
ogy resembles the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault or Gilles De-
leuze, whose choice of starting from the becoming-other of the human
he anticipates.32 What is important for Plessner is to show that such a
negative or historical anthropology is the only way of giving up the Euro-
pean “position of supremacy over other cultures” (26). He adopts this
key term from Dilthey and immediately gives it a political turn. Only an
anthropology which assumes that the human is always becoming an other
can grasp the “seriousness” of politics. It alone conceives of the human
as a deeply “historical and therefore political being” (45). For Plessner,
the unpredictable variety of human life is not a purely empirical fact.
Instead, each historical fact also amounts to a “decision about the essence
of the human” (26), a political statement, an assertion in the “competi-
tion with other possibilities of being-human” (54). And precisely because
each possibility is only one among many, what is our own must be al-
lowed “nonetheless [to] be real,” our own view of the world must be as-
serted to be binding for ourselves. This relativization amounts to “releasing
one’s own essential possibilities to evolve under the auspices of political
autonomy and national self-determination” (28).
In an excursus on “Dilthey’s philosophy of life,” Plessner dem-
onstrates that this philosophical “revolution” is Dilthey’s doing and, in
the central chapters that follow (“The Principle of Unfathomability, or
The Principle of Open Questions,” “The Human as Power,” and “The
xviii
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

Exposure of the Human”), he lays out the foundation and the conse-
quences of his own political theory. In its relation to historicity, European
culture paradoxically relativizes itself in the very move by which, for itself,
it asserts this view of the world to be the only one that is “correct.” It sees
itself as one among many possible cultures past and present, it becomes
aware of “its own relativity”— and yet it is deeply convinced that a way
of thinking that accepts “unfathomability as binding for any knowledge
of the life of the human” remains “viable in the future” (47–48). In ac-
knowledging the indeterminacy of the human or the contingency of each
and every cultural form, the human now conceives of itself as a political
being— as power, as ability, as an open question that must be answered
anew time and again. Historicity here is, first of all, a “theoretical” power,
a power over history, the power of again and again letting history become
anew (54–55). Yet it is also “practical- political power” (45). The past is not
only re-actualized or instrumentalized politically; all creation, all making
of history is a political act. In this respect, the human is “a historical and
therefore political being” (45).
Here, too, Plessner engages with Heidegger, specifically his “abso-
lutiz[ing] our own Western position” (50). This is the most important
backdrop to Plessner’s foundation of the political in the sense of a
struggle about familiarity and foreignness, about one’s own culture and
that of others, about integration and exclusion— even if these formu-
las are introduced in an entirely formal or abstract way. “As power, the
human”— and not just a given society or culture—“is necessarily engaged
in a struggle for power, i.e., in the opposition of familiarity and foreignness,
of friend and enemy” (53). Why is the other always uncanny, why is the
other structurally more enemy than friend, why is the foreign the danger-
ous, and why does this institute a political situation? The friend–enemy
distinction is an effect and consequence of the “essential constitution of
the human” (53), its excentric positionality. Precisely because the human
perceives itself to be indeterminate, encounters itself as an open ques-
tion, a horizon appears in the human world that separates the famil-
iar from the unfamiliar. The friend–enemy distinction begins in being-
oneself: “the human does not see ‘itself’ only in its Here but also in the
There of the other” (54). This horizon traverses excentric positionality
(the individual) as much as it does the cultural sphere or the nation. It
is culturally and historically indeterminate. There can thus be politics
concerning just about anything— wherever a horizon separates the fa-
miliar from the unfamiliar, within one’s own self as much as “between
man and woman, master and servant, teacher and student,” or different
cultures (55). “Unfathomability” entails that cultures determine them-
selves. Accordingly, they determine themselves differently historically. Un-
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I N T R O D UCT I O N

fathomability here means for Plessner (referring to Freud) that the other
appears as uncanny, as an alterity. This uncanniness is not explained by
some “detrimental effect the foreign might possibly have on the sphere of
familiarity” (54) but paradoxically by the familiarity of the foreign: “The
foreign is that which is one’s own, familiar, and homely in the other” (54).
Such structural foreignness (which pervades the self as much as it does
cultures) is radical and cannot be resolved by universal values, not even
by the idea of human rights, which absolutizes one conception of being-
human (54). Plessner stresses throughout that “horizon[s] of uncanni-
ness” differ in each culture and that the friend–enemy distinction shifts
constantly (55) and exists on many levels (thus also, for example, in the
relations between the sexes or between classes).
This is where he now defines the political. The political is the “con-
stant of the human situation” that is concerned with “securing and in-
creasing one’s own power by restricting or annihilating the foreign do-
main” (55). Plessner immediately ties this definition to the institution
of (always specific) law. The political relation is changeable, it is never
clearly delimited. Between what is one’s own and what is foreign, there
is instead an “unstable front line on which, in a thousand ways, what is
needed for life must be won from the opponents, it must be wrought from
them, they must be prayed to for it, cheated out of it” (57). These oppo-
nents may include nature, or the extraterrestrial, or Ebola, or some other
entity, yet what Plessner is aiming at is the essential non-securedness or
“exposure” of the human. This is the reason for an always artificial institu-
tion of the law, of a meaning that denies the “randomness, corrigibility,
and one-sidedness” of all modes of being-human (59). Law, as Cornelius
Castoriadis would say, is grounded in a culture’s central imaginary, which
itself needs no further foundation, in the “empty signifier.” In appealing
to God or to human rights, in instituting an in their eyes “‘natural’ order as
the just order,” in inventing for themselves “what is right and what is just,”
cultures establish it as, precisely, not unfounded. “The human does not
invent anything it does not discover” and vice versa.33 In this imaginary,
unfounded-founding enforcement of statutory law lies the meaning of
the organization of power, including the state (59).
Following a further excursus on the “nondecidability of the pri-
macy of the philosophical or anthropological view of the human,” Pless-
ner brings in the second paradox, that of the power and powerlessness
of the human. Human facts such as the formation of collectives testify
to human power, to creative ability, to the imagination of worlds. At the
same time, this form of life, too, remains tied to the body, it is subject to
the laws of nature “like a head of cattle” (80). As a body, the human is an
other to itself, the body determines the human “down to the last detail”
xx
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

(81). A theory that seeks to know “what makes the human the human”
(how the human makes itself the human) cannot ignore this aspect of
human existence. As “excentric position,” the human is foreign to itself
(84). This is where we may situate the point at which Plessner could have
thematized the role of political violence.34 In terms of social theory, how-
ever, Plessner draws a different conclusion: because human existence is
tied to a body, there is no form of being-human that would not already
be “particular and partisan” and necessarily spatialized in a juxtaposition.
Plessner situates this particularity on several levels, yet on none of these,
not even on the level of the people, is there a “ground” to be found,
something substantially divided: “Belonging to a people is an essential
trait of the human like being able to say I and You, like familiarity and
foreignness, like . . . riskedness and authenticity” (86). What people one
belongs to, moreover, is contingent. For both of these reasons, it is nec-
essary to civilize politics.

The Contemporary Context in Political Philosophy:

Arendt–Schmitt–Voegelin–Morgenthau
Unlike Levels of the Organic in 1928, Political Anthropology immediately
met with lively interest. Both in the context of contemporary theories
of the political and of debates today, the triangular and reciprocal re-
views by Helmuth Plessner, Eric Voegelin, and Carl Schmitt are particu-
larly interesting. Plessner having adopted Schmitt’s 1927 friend–enemy
distinction—“the specific political distinction to which political ac-
tions and motives can be reduced is the distinction between friend and
enemy”35— as the quintessence of the political, Schmitt in the 1932 ex-
panded edition of The Concept of the Political praised Plessner’s book as
a modern “political anthropology of a grand style.” Schmitt turned to
Plessner for an anthropological foundation of his own concept of the
political. According to him, Plessner

correctly says that there exists no philosophy and no anthropology

which is not politically relevant, just as there is no philosophically irrele-
vant politics. . . . Man, for Plessner, is “primarily a being capable of
creating distance” who in his essence is undetermined, unfathomable,
and remains an “open question.” If one bears in mind the anthropo-
logical distinction of evil and good and combines Plessner’s “remaining
open” with his positive reference to danger, Plessner’s theory is closer
to evil than to goodness.36

“You must give the Devil his due” was the epigraph Plessner had chosen
for The Limits of Community in 1924.37 Both Schmitt and Plessner sought
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I N T R O D UCT I O N

a realistic anthropology to confront a political romanticism, a political

theory presupposing an anthropology of the “good” human being.38

One could test all theories of state and political ideas according to
their anthropology and thereby classify these as to whether they con-
sciously or unconsciously presuppose man to be by nature evil or by
nature good. The distinction is to be taken here in a rather summary
fashion and not in a specifically moral or ethical sense. The problematic
or unproblematic conception of man is decisive for the presupposi-
tion of every further political consideration, the answer to the ques-
tion whether man is a dangerous being or not, a risky or a harmless
creature.39

Eric Voegelin,40 as already mentioned, also reviewed Political Anthropology—

favorably but not uncritically, highlighting in particular the lack of a sepa-
ration between theories of the social and of society, the seamless transi-
tion from relations between neighbors to relations between peoples.

I would like to draw attention to only one point: that the concept of
“life” is applied without qualification to existences of all types, per-
sonal and individual human existence as well as collective existence. I
consider this breadth of meaning to be inappropriate because a whole
range of problems concerning the interhuman constitution of a supra-
personal, social existence is not considered.41

Plessner in turn reviewed Voegelin’s 1933 Race and State as a theory of

the political that showed race theory to be a political, not a scientific proj-
ect.42 The concept of race, Plessner credited Voegelin with demonstrat-
ing, was a politically conditioned “possibility of human self-conception.”43
Voegelin thus contributed to a modern philosophical anthropology that
aimed “at a concept of the human that does justice to its multilayered
existence as a physical, vital, psychic, and intellectual being, without mak-
ing one of these layers the measure and explanatory basis for the others.”
Plessner thus sees in Voegelin a comrade in arms: “The value of a state
is measured by the force of integration its ideal exercises on a physi-
cally non- homogenous population,” while, inversely, every “attempt at
subjecting the human to categories of animality” has profound political
consequences. “When, however, humans voluntarily renounce their men-
tal or spiritual essence, they will indeed turn into animals and must not
complain when they are administered according to Mendel’s laws.”44 And
Voegelin conversely refers to Plessner’s Political Anthropology.45
Moreover, there are parallels with Hannah Arendt’s political an-
thropology. Both Plessner and Arendt develop negative anthropologies,
xxii
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

definitions of the human as homo absconditus that lead to a political theory

of the public, of curbed conflict. Although Arendt in her 1958 The Human
Condition does not “intend to evolve an ‘anthropological’ or philosophi-
cal account of human nature,”46 she develops a similar historical anthro-
pology that, in Plessner’s terms, takes as its starting point the “power of
ability,” the practical power of doing and making something as well as
oneself differently again and again:

In addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth,

and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made con-
ditions, which, their human origin and their variability notwithstanding,
possess the same conditioning power as natural things.47

Similarly, Hans J. Morgenthau’s 1933 definition of the political may be

related to Plessner’s 1931 definition, with which Morgenthau was familiar.
Both develop a realist theory of the political (and its difference from the
juridical).48

Current Debates about Plessner’s Political Anthropology

Time and again, Political Anthropology has given rise to new debates in
political philosophy and philosophical anthropology. These turn, on the
one hand, around the interpretation of Plessner’s philosophical anthro-
pology. Is Political Anthropology the foundational work, or is it Levels of
the Organic? Does Plessner pursue an ultimately historical foundation of
political philosophy (the philosophy of law, of culture, etc.) or does he
ultimately seek such a foundation in the philosophy of nature? Is the
relationship between Levels of the Organic and Political Anthropology such
that primacy goes to an anthropology that argues epistemologically, in
which the human is primarily the subject of nature? Or do Plessner’s two
major works instead argue for an anthropology founded on a theory of
life, which thinks the human primarily as the object of nature, as living
being? At stake is the answer to the question of whether his philosophical
anthropology is to be read as a philosophy of the organic or as a philos-
ophy of history— whether Plessner sees his philosophical anthropology
as one possibility of describing the human (emphasizing the unfathom-
ability, the indeterminability of the human) or instead seeks to account
for all human self- descriptions on the basis of the structure of organic
nature. Plessner himself writes that the task is to think the human equally
as “subject-object of nature” and as “subject-object of culture.”49 Much
can be gleaned about Plessner’s view of a philosophical anthropology
that does justice to the diversity of human life from his critique of Hei-
 xxiii
I N T R O D UCT I O N

degger’s existential anthropology, a critique that takes up the kind of his-

torical anthropology implied in Dilthey’s and Misch’s concept of human
historicity.50 A similar point would later be made by Lévi-Strauss in criticiz-
ing Sartre and all evolutionist, Eurocentric anthropology: a “good deal
of egocentricity and naivety is necessary to believe that man has taken
refuge in a single one of the historical or geographical modes of his exis-
tence, when the truth about man resides in the system of their differences
and common properties.”51
Beyond these debates about philosophical anthropology (as a state-
ment about the human, negative or positive, grounded in history and the
humanities or in a theory of life), Plessner’s foundation of the political, his
theory of collective existence, remains a “hot potato.”52 Its concept of the
people, its (partial) appeal to Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, the
political realism of the concept of the struggle for power, the text’s pa-
thos, and finally, the call for Germany’s political self-empowerment and
the confidence of being able to organize (at least) European civilization:
all these make for a book that is disturbing, especially for German intel-
lectuals. Shortly before German reunification, Rüdiger Kramme saw in
the book an attempt at articulating a model for providing the “preserva-
tion of individual and national identity” with a model.53 The “preser-
vation of national identity”— such a desire was outlawed in the German
context after 1945. Attributing a national-identitarian thinking to Pless-
ner (i.e., emphasizing the concept of the people in the book) amounts,
for intellectuals on the Left, to a “denunciation” of an author forced into
exile by racist policies.54 Others take Plessner’s concepts more seriously
and emphasize the “productive paradox” of his call to bear the tension
between the contingency of one’s own values and the assertion of their
universality, between the contingency of one’s own form of society and
its affirmation.55 Others again see in Plessner’s political anthropology, in
its emphasis on the equal status of all cultures in combative-playful coop-
eration and confrontation about the question of which culture allows for
the best life, the foundation for a “democracy of values.”56

Political Anthropology and Recent

International Debates in Political Theory

As for international debates, Plessner’s political philosophy speaks above

all to a theory of radical or plural democracy. There are parallels (which
are characteristic even in their limitations) with Ernesto Laclau’s and
Chantal Mouffe’s theory of the political, which picks up on Schmitt in
xxiv
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

ways that resemble Plessner. Central for these authors’ definition of the
political is an “ever present possibility of antagonism”57 and the curbing
of enmity, of struggle, in the conflict about power conducted according
to democratic-parliamentarian rules. Plessner’s text can thus also be re-
lated to a general theory of collective identity, a theory of the logic of the
social as such, in addition to a theory that specifies this social logic in the
case of democratic regimes. Laclau and Mouffe think the general logic
of the social as identification via difference:

In the field of collective identities, we are always dealing with the crea-
tion of a “we” which can exist only by the demarcation of a “they.”
This does not mean of course that such a relation is necessarily one
of friend/enemy, i.e. an antagonistic one. But we should acknowledge
that, in certain conditions, there is always the possibility that this we/
they relation can become antagonistic.58

In the tradition of deconstructivist theory, to which Laclau and Mouffe

belong, collective identities or societies imply a “system of differences” or
a “constitutive outside.”59 Moreover, beside the emphasis on competition
as the quintessence of the political and the public, the idea that the con-
stitutive relationship is not one between enemies but between opponents,
we also find here the “democratic paradox” from Plessner’s book, the
tension, characteristic of modern democracies, between the universalist
idea of human rights on the one hand and the idea of the sovereignty of
a particular people on the other.60
Yet there are important differences between the two concepts of the
political that have to do with the question of unfathomability. In Plessner,
the outside, exteriority is not a constitutive necessity but a consequence. De-
limitation against an outside does not mean the same for him as it does
for deconstructive approaches. In his view, the antagonism itself has a
“reason” (53), it does not itself serve as a ground. As the uncanny, the for-
eign is a moment of one’s own unfathomability and thereby forms part of
“that which is one’s own, familiar” (54). In other words, the inside is not
constituted (negatively) by a delimitation from the outside alone but re-
quires a production of its own, a positive act of institution. Plessner’s concept
stresses the creative, institutive, positive aspect of the political. One’s own
culture and identity are the products of an immanent, creative process.
This positive emphasis on invention thus sets Plessner’s theory of
the political apart from Laclau and Mouffe— and brings it closer to Cas-
toriadis’s concept of an “imaginary institution” of society. And indeed,
both the openness to the future grounded in unfathomability and the
strict conditioning by history in Plessner recall Castoriadis’s description
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I N T R O D UCT I O N

of the imaginary institution of society as creatively “instituted” as well as

always already historically “instituted.”61 For Plessner, the human and cul-
ture are “conditioned by history” but at the same time are “conditioning
history” (50). Identities, in other words, are not constituted solely by a
delimiting “constitutive outside” (in turning other humans into others),
they are also founded in a second, a founding outside. Castoriadis speaks
of a “central or primary imaginary signification” that “denote[s] nothing
at all, and . . . connote[s] just about everything.”62 Every determination
of what is one’s own is not necessary but imaginary. In the end, it rests on
the fabulation or imagination of an ultimate signifier claimed as a ground
of existence, on social meaning, which is entirely imaginary.63 As we saw,
Plessner’s book in this respect and in the case of modern democracy basi-
cally refers to humanism.64
In short: Plessner’s 1931 book contains a differentiated theory of
the political, of the constitution of society, which emphasizes, beside the
(negative) formation of identity via delimitation, its (positive) invention
and imaginary creation. Not only are our own person and culture relative,
they are also binding. Political Anthropology offers a theory of the political
that remains complex enough today to describe our political and social
present. It insists on “acknowledging non-European cultural systems
and worldviews” while affirming “our own culture”(14), it recognizes the
agonistic character of the political without essentializing it as the core of
the political. Instead, competition with the foreign and uncanny is some-
thing with which we are always already familiar from other social spheres.
Conflict and rivalry are thus taken seriously as human relationships but
are also relativized, which makes it possible to avoid competition that
veers into violence. This allows for making connections with current con-
flicts between religions and cultures, with postcolonial debates about the
legitimization of the West and the self-affirmation of the global South,
or with the emergence of new personal, ethnic, collective, and national
identities.65 In each case, much depends on one’s view of the human; in
each case, political empowerment draws on a specific anthropology— this
is not the least of the claims made by Plessner’s complex political anthro-
pology. It is in how we ask the question of the human— does the human
owe its essence, commandments, and dignity to God or rather to its indi-
vidual rational nature, tradition, cultural sphere, people, or blood?— that
concrete politics, the way we treat others and our own, is decided.
POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
The idea wants to become a deed, the word to become flesh.
And, wonderful to relate! like the God of the Bible, man has
only to voice his idea, and the world takes shape, there is light
or darkness, the waters divide themselves from the dry land, or
wild beasts appear. The world is the signature of the word. Mark
this well, you proud men of action. You are no more than the
unwitting servants of the men of ideas, who have often, humbly
and quietly, drawn up distinct plans in advance for everything
you do.
—Heinrich Heine
The Purpose of This Book

The principal question of political anthropology is: to what extent does

politics— the struggle for power in human relations among individuals,
groups and associations, nations and states— belong to the essence of the
human?1 To many, this question seems to be only of philosophical, not
political interest. Yet this is to forget how deeply practice must be steeped
in theory to be able to make decisions. Never completely forgotten in the
government and newspaper offices of countries that have a political cul-
ture, this insight has of course been much devalued in Germany by the
methods and aftereffects of the Bismarck era.
Politics has not benefited from this devaluation. The less politics is
respected, the worse it becomes. The quality of politics is not determined
by the lucky chance of being conducted by some great individual; it is
determined by the measure of attention it receives from those strata of a
people that have no immediate material interest in politics. In Germany,
the fact, so characteristic of this disdain, that political questions are al-
lowed to slip onto the level of the economy, that the state is considered
to have been lost to finance, industry, and commerce, arises to a large
degree from the attitude of intellectuals toward the political sphere as
such, an attitude untouched even by war and upheaval. As before, the
conviction prevails among us that politics is a technology that must be
operated by the agents of groups with some sort of power; yet it must also
never be named in one breath with the great objects of science, art, the
law, and faith. And it is bad enough, in this view, that it is not even pos-
sible to avoid having something like cultural policy. The divide between
the great ideological parties’ conceptions of cultural policy renders the
calamity of the political particularly palpable to intellectuals.
Especially in the age of the demos and its self- determination in a
nation-state, it is precisely not a matter of indifference how the people
and the state are thought in purely theoretical terms. How philosophy
thinks about them is not a matter of indifference because, in order to
be clear about their own categories, legislation and jurisprudence have
to take recourse to philosophy. It is the business of philosophy, after all,
to establish strong foundations to replace the temporary structures of
functional definitions without which individual sciences and practitioners
cannot make do.

3
Other documents randomly have
different content
There are few points on which men practically differ
more than on the question, What is the right use
of riches? On this head there was as much
diversity of opinion among the philosophers of old
as in the present day. Some maintaining that not
only a virtuous, but also a happy life consisted in
the absence of all those external aids that wealth
can bestow; others as zealously arguing that a
competency of means was absolutely necessary to
the due performance of the higher social virtues.
The source of error in most men lies in their
mistaking the means for the end; and the object
of this Satire, which is the most original, and
perhaps the most pleasing of the whole, is to point
out how a proper employment of the fortune that
falls to our lot may be made to forward the best
interests of man. Persius begins with a warm
encomium on the genius and learning of his friend
Cæsius Bassus, the lyric poet; especially
complimenting him on his antiquarian knowledge,
and versatility of talent: and he then proceeds to
show, by setting forth his own line of conduct,
how true happiness may be attained by avoiding
the extremes of sordid meanness on the one
hand, and ostentatious prodigality on the other; by
disregarding the suggestions of envy and the
dictates of ambition. A prompt and liberal regard
to the necessities and distresses of others is then
inculcated; for this, coupled with the maintenance
of such an establishment as our fortune warrants
us in keeping up, is, to use the words of the poet,
"to use wealth, not to abuse it." He then proceeds
with great severity and bitter sarcasm to expose
the shallow artifices of those who attempt to
disguise their sordid selfishness under the
 specious pretense of a proper prudence, a
reverence for the ancient simplicity and frugality of
manners, and a proper regard for the interests of
those who are to succeed to our inheritance. The
Satire concludes with a lively and graphic
conversation between Persius and his imaginary
heir, in which he exposes the cupidity of those
who are waiting for the deaths of men whom they
expect to succeed; and shows that the anxiety of
these for the death of their friends, furnishes the
strongest motive for a due indulgence in the good
things of this life; which it would be folly to hoard
up merely to be squandered by the spendthrift, or
feed the insatiable avarice of one whom even
boundless wealth could never satisfy. This Satire
was probably written, as Gifford says, "while the
poet was still in the flower of youth, possessed of
an independent fortune, of estimable friends, dear
connections, and of a cultivated mind, under the
consciousness of irrecoverable disease; a situation
in itself sufficiently affecting, and which is
rendered still more so by the placid and even
cheerful spirit which pervades every part of the
poem."
Has the winter[1511] already made thee retire, Bassus,[1512] to thy
Sabine hearth? Does thy harp, and its strings, now wake to life[1513]
for thee with its manly[1514] quill? Of wondrous skill in adapting to
minstrelsy the early forms of ancient words,[1515] and the masculine
sound of the Latin lute—and then again give vent to youthful
merriment; or, with dignified touch, sing of distinguished old men.
For me the Ligurian[1516] shore now grows warm, and my sea wears
its wintry aspect, where the cliffs present a broad side, and the
shore retires with a capacious bay. "It is worth while, citizens, to
become acquainted with the Port of Luna!"[1517] Such is the best of
Ennius in his senses,[1518] when he ceased to dream he was Homer
and sprung from a Pythagorean peacock, and woke up plain
"Quintus."
Here I live, careless of the vulgar herd—careless too of the evil
which malignant Auster[1519] is plotting against my flock—or that
that corner[1520] of my neighbor's farm is more fruitful than my own.
Nay, even though all who spring from a worse stock than mine,
should grow ever so rich, I would still refuse to be bowed down
double by old age[1521] on that account, or dine without good cheer,
or touch with my nose[1522] the seal on some vapid flagon.
Another man may act differently from this. The star that presides
over the natal hour[1523] produces even twins with widely-differing
disposition. One, a cunning dog, would, only on his birthday, dip his
dry cabbage in pickle[1524] which he has bought in a cup, sprinkling
over it with his own hands the pepper, as if it were sacred; the other,
a fine-spirited lad, runs through his large estate to please his palate.
I, for my part, will use—not abuse—my property; neither sumptuous
enough to serve up turbots before my freedmen, nor epicure enough
to discern the delicate flavor of female thrushes.[1525]
Live up to your income, and exhaust your granaries. You have a
right to do it! What should you fear? Harrow, and lo! another crop is
already in the blade!
"But duty calls! My friend,[1526] reduced to beggary, with
shipwrecked bark, is clutching at the Bruttian rocks, and has buried
all his property, and his prayers unheard by heaven, in the Ionian
sea. He himself lies on the shore, and by him the tall gods from the
stern;[1527] and the ribs of his shattered vessel are a station for
cormorants."[1528] Now therefore detach a fragment from the live
turf; and bestow it upon him in his need, that he may not have to
roam about with a painting of himself[1529] on a sea-green picture.
But[1530] your heir, enraged that you have curtailed your estate, will
neglect your funeral supper, he will commit your bones unperfumed
to their urn, quite prepared to be careless whether the cinnamon
has a scentless flavor, or the cassia be adulterated with cherry-gum.
Should you then in your lifetime impair your estate?
But Bestius[1531] rails against the Grecian philosophers: "So it is—
ever since this counterfeit[1532] philosophy[1533] came into the city,
along with pepper and dates, the very haymakers spoil their pottage
with gross unguents."
And are you afraid of this beyond the grave? But you, my heir,
whoever you are to be, come apart a little from the crowd, and hear.
—"Don't you know, my good friend, that a laureate[1534] letter has
been sent by Cæsar on account of his glorious defeat of the flower
of the German youth; and now the ashes are being swept from the
altars, where they have lain cold; already Cæsonia is hiring arms for
the door-posts, mantles for kings, yellow wigs for captives, and
chariots, and tall Rhinelanders. Consequently I intend to contribute a
hundred pair of gladiators to the gods and the emperor's Genius, in
honor of his splendid exploits.—Who shall prevent me? Do you, if
you dare! Woe betide you, unless you consent.—I mean to make a
largess to the people of oil and meat-pies. Do you forbid it? Speak
out plainly!" "Not so," you say. I have a well-cleared field[1535] close
by. Well, then! If I have not a single aunt left, or a cousin, nor a
single niece's daughter; if my mother's sister is barren, and none of
my grandmother's stock survives—I will go to Bovillæ,[1536] and
Virbius' hill.[1537] There is Manius already as my heir. "What that son
of earth!" Well, ask me who my great-great-grandfather was! I could
tell you certainly, but not very readily. Go yet a step farther back,
and one more; you will find he is a son of earth! and on this
principle of genealogy Manius turns out to be my great uncle. You,
who are before me, why do you ask of me the torch[1538] in the
race? I am your Mercury! I come to you as the god, in the guise in
which he is painted. Do you reject the offer? Will you not be content
with what is left? But there is some deficiency in the sum total! Well,
I spent it on myself! But the whole of what is left is yours, whatever
it is. Attempt not to inquire what is become of what Tadius once left
me; nor din into my ears precepts such as fathers give.[1539] "Get
interest for your principal, and live upon that."—What is the residue?
"The residue!" Here, slave, at once pour oil more bountifully over my
cabbage. Am I to have a nettle, or a smoky pig's cheek with a split
ear, cooked for me on a festival day, that that spendthrift
grandson[1540] of yours may one day stuff himself with goose-
giblets, and when his froward humor urge him on, indulge in a
patrician mistress? Am I to live a threadbare skeleton,[1541] that his
fat paunch[1542] may sway from side to side?
Barter your soul for gain. Traffic; and with keen craft sift every
quarter of the globe. Let none exceed you in the art of puffing
off[1543] your sleek Cappadocian slaves, on their close-confining
platform.[1544] Double[1545] your property. "I have done so"—
already it returns three-fold, four-fold, ten-fold to my scrip. Mark
where I am to stop. Could I do so, he were found, Chrysippus,[1546]
that could put the finish to thy heap!

FOOTNOTES:

[1511] Bruma. The learned Romans, who divided their time

between business and study, used to begin their lucubrations
about the time of the Vulcanalia, which were held on the 23d of
August (x. Kal. Sept.), and for this purpose usually returned from
Rome to their country houses. Pliny, describing the studious
habits of his uncle, says (iii., Ep. 5), "Sed erat acre ingenium,
incredibile studium, summa vigilantia. Lucubrare a Vulcanalibus
incipiebat, non auspicandi causâ sed studendi, statim a nocte." So
Horace, i., Ep. vii., 10, "Quod si bruma nives Albanis illinet agris,
Ad mare descendet vates tuus et sibi parcet Contractusque leget."
He gives the reason, ii., Ep. ii., 77, "Scriptorum chorus omnis
amat nemus et fugit urbem." Cf. Juv., vii., 58. Plin., i., Ep. 9.
[1512] Basse. Cæsius Bassus, a lyric poet, said to have
approached most nearly to Horace. Cf. Quint., Inst., X., i., 96.
Prop., I., iv., 1. He was destroyed with his country house by the
eruption of Mount Vesuvius, in which Pliny the elder perished.
Vid. Plin., vi., Ep. 16.
[1513] Vivunt, Casaubon explains by the Greek ἐνεργεῖν "to be in
active operation."
[1514] Tetrico is spelt in some editions with a capital letter. The
sense is the same, as the rough, hardy, masculine virtues of the
ancient Romans were attributed to Sabine training and
institutions. Tetricus, or Tetrica, was a hill in the Sabine district.
Virg., Æen., vii., 712, "Qui Tetricæ horrentis rupes, montemque
severum Casperiamque colunt." Liv., i., 18, "Suopte igitur ingenio
temperatum animum virtutibus fuisse opinor magis;
instructumque non tam peregrinis artibus quam disciplina tetricâ
ac tristi veterum Sabinorum: quo genere nullum quondam
incorruptius fuit." Ov., Am., III., viii., 61, "Exæquet tetricas licet
illa Sabinas." Hor., iii., Od. vi., 38. Cic. pro Ligar., xi.
[1515] Vocum. Another reading is "rerum," which Casaubon
adopts, and supposes Bassus to have been the author of a
Theogony or Cosmogony. He is said, on the authority of
Terentianus Maurus and Priscian, to have written a book on
Metres, dedicated to Nero. Those who read "vocum," suppose
that Persius meant to imply that he successfully transferred to his
Odes the nervous words of the older dialects of his country.
[1516] Ligus ora. Fulvia Sisennia, the mother of Persius, is said to
have been married, after her husband's death, to a native of
Liguria, or of Luna. It was to her house that Persius retired in the
winter.
[1517] Lunai portum. A line from the beginning of the Annals of
Ennius. The town of Luna, now Luni, is in Etruria, but only
separated by the river Macra (now Magra) from Liguria. The Lunai
Portus, now Golfo di Spezzia, is in Liguria, and was the harbor
from which the Romans usually took shipping for Corsica and
Sardinia. Ennius therefore must have known it well, from often
sailing thence with the elder Cato.
[1518] Cor Ennii. "Cor" is frequently used for sense. It is here a
periphrasis for "Ennius in his senses." Quintus Ennius was born
B.C. 239, at Rudiæ, now Rugge, in Calabria, near Brundusium,
and was brought to Rome from Sardinia by Cato when quæstor
there B.C. 204. He lived in a very humble way on Mount Aventine,
and died B.C. 169, of gout (morbus articularis), and was buried in
Scipio's tomb on the Via Appia. He held the Pythagorean doctrine
of Metempsychosis, and says himself, in the beginning of his
Annals, that Homer appeared to him in a dream, and told him
that he had once been a peacock, and that his soul was
transferred to him. The fragment describing this is extant.
"Transnavit cita per teneras Caliginis auras (anima Homeri) visus
Homerus adesse poeta. Tum memini fieri me pavum." [Cf. Hor., ii.,
Ep. i., 50. "Ennius et sapiens et fortis et alter Homerus, Ut critici
dicunt, leviter curare videtur Quo promissa cadant et somnia
Pythagorea." Tertull., de An., 24, "Pavum se meminit Homerus,
Ennio Somniante."] The interpretation in the text seems the most
reasonable. Others take quintus as a numeral adjective, and
explain the meaning to be, that the soul of a peacock
transmigrated first into Euphorbus, then into Homer, then into
Pythagoras, and then into Ennius, who was consequently fifth
from the peacock.
[1519] Auster, the Sirocco of the modern Italians, was reckoned
peculiarly unwholesome to cattle. Cf. Virg., Georg., i., 443, "Urget
ab alto Arboribusque satisque Notus pecorique sinister." 462,
"Quid cogitet humidus Auster." Ecl., ii., 58. Tibul., I., i., 41. Hor.,
ii., Sat. vi., 18, "Nec mala me ambitio perdit nec plumbeus Auster,
Auctumnusque gravis, Libitinæ quæstus acerbæ." ii., Od. xiv., 15.
Some derive the name from "Ardeo," others from αὐὼ, "to parch
or burn up:" so Austerus, from αὐστηρός.
[1520] Angulus. Hor., ii., Sat. vi., 8, "Oh! si angulus ille proximus
accedat qui nunc denormat agellum."
[1521] Senio. "The premature old age brought on by pining at
another's welfare." So Plautus, "Præ mærore adeo miser æquè
ægritudine consenui." Cf. Capt., I., ii., 20. Truc., ii., 5, 13.
[1522] Naso tetigisse. "I will not become such a miser as to seal
up vapid wine, and then closely examine the seal when it is again
produced, to see whether it is untouched." Cf. Theophr. π.
αἰσχροκερδ. So Cicero says, "Lagenas etiam inanes obsignare."
Fam., xiv., 26.
[1523] Horoscope. Properly, "the star that is in the ascendant at
the moment of a person's birth, from which the nativity is
calculated." Persius has just ridiculed the Pythagoreans, he now
laughs at the Astrologers. Whatever they may say, twins born
under exactly the same horoscope, have widely different
characters and pursuits. "Castor gaudet equis—ovo prognatus
eodem Pugnis." Hor., ii., Sat. i., 26. Cf. Diog. Laert., II., i., 3.
[1524] Muria. Either a brine made of salt and water, or a kind of
fishsauce made of the liquor of the thunny. Every word is a
picture. "He buys his sauce in a cup; instead of pouring it over his
salad, he dips the salad in it, and then scarcely moistens it: he
will not trust his servant to season it, so he does it himself; but
only sprinkles the pepper like dew, not in a good shower, and as
sparingly as if it were some holy thing." Cf. Theophr., π. μικρολογ,
καὶ ἀπαγορεῦσαι τῇ γυναικὶ, μήτε ἅλας χρωννύειν μήτε ἐλλύχνιον,
μήτε κύμινον, μήτε ὀρίγανον, μήτε οὐλὰς, μήτε στεμματα, μήτε
θυηλήματα· ἀλλὰ λέγειν, ὅτι τὰ μικρὰ ταῦτα πολλά ἐστι τοῦ
ἐνιαυτοῦ. Hor., i., Sat. i., 71, "Tanquam parcere sacris cogeris." ii.,
Sat. iii., 110, "Metuensque velut contingere sacrum."
[1525] Turdarum. So the best MSS. and the Scholiasts read, and
Casaubon follows. Varro, L. L., viii., 38, says the feminine form is
not Latin. The "turdus" (Greek κίχλη), probably like our "field-
fare," was esteemed the greatest delicacy by the Greeks and
Romans. In the Nubes of Aristophanes, the λόγος δίκαιος says,
"In former days young men were not allowed οὐδ' ὀψοφαγεῖν,
οὐδὲ κιχλίζειν." (Ubi vid. Schol.; but cf. Theoc., Id., xi., 78, cum
Schol.) To be able to distinguish the sex of so small a bird by the
flavor would be the acme of Epicurism. Hor., i., Ep. xv., 41, "Cum
sit obeso nil melius turdo." Mart., xiii., Ep. 92, "Inter aves turdus,
si quis me judice certet, Inter quadrupedes mattya prima lepus."
Cf. Athen., ii., 68, D.
[1526] Prendit amicus. From Hom., Od., v., 425, τόφρα δέ μιν
μέγα κῦμα φέρε τρηχεῖαν ἐπ' ἀκτήν· ἔνθα κ' ἀπὸ ῥινοὺς δρύφθη,
σὺν δ' ὀστέ' ἀράχθη, and 435. Virg., Æn., vi., 360. Cf. Palimirus,"
Prensantemque uncis manibus capita ardua montis."
[1527] Ingentes de puppe dei. The tutelary gods were placed at
the stern as well as the stem of the ship. Cf. Æsch., S. Theb., 208.
Virg., Æn., x., 170, "Aurato fulgebat Apolline puppis." Ov., Trist.,
I., x., l. Hor., i., Od. xiv., 10. Acts, xxviii., 11. Catull., I., iv., 36.
Eurip., Hel., 1664.
[1528] Mergis. Cf. Hom., Od., v., 337. The Mergus (αἴθυια of the
Greeks) is put for any large sea-bird. Hor., Epod. x., 21, "Opima
quodsi præda curvo litore porrecta mergos juveris."
[1529] Pictus oberret. Cf. ad Juv., xiv., 302, "Pictâ se tempestate
tuetur." xii., 27.
[1530] Sed. "But perhaps you will object," etc. He now ridicules
the folly of those who deny themselves all the luxuries and even
the necessaries of life, in order to leave behind a splendid
inheritance to their heirs. "Quum sit manifesta phrenesis Ut
locuples moriaris egenti vivere fato." Juv., xiv., 186. Cf. Hor., ii.,
Ep. ii., 191, "Utar, et ex modico quantum res poscet acervo
Tollam, nec metuam quid de me judicet hæres Quod non plura
datis invenerit." i., Ep. v., 13, "Parcus ob hæredis curam,
nimiumque severus assidet insano." ii., Od. xiv., 25.
[1531] Bestius, from Hor., i., Ep. xv., 37, "Diceret urendos
corrector Bestius." Probably both Horace and Persius borrowed
from Lucilius. Weichert, P. L., p. 420.
[1532] Maris expers. Hor., ii., Sat. viii., 15, "Chium maris expers,"
which is generally interpreted to mean that Nasidienus set before
his guests wine which he called Chian, but which in reality had
never crossed the seas, being made at home. It may be put
therefore for any thing "adulterated, not genuine." Another
interpretation is, "effeminate, emasculate, void of manly vigor
and energy," from the supposed enervating effect of Greek
philosophy on the masculine character of the Romans of other
days. A third explanation is, "that which has experienced the
sea," from the active sense of expers, and therefore is simply
equivalent to "foreign, or imported." Casaubon seems to incline to
the latter view.
[1533] Sapere. So "Scire tuum," i., 27 and 9, "Nostrum illud
vivere triste." In the indiscriminate hatred of all that was Greek,
philosophy and literature were often included.
[1534] Laurus. After a victory, the Roman soldiers saluted their
general as Imperator. His lictors then wreathed their fasces, and
his soldiers their spears, with bays, and then he sent letters
wreathed with bays (literæ laureatæ) to the senate, and
demanded a triumph. If the senate approved, they decreed a
thanksgiving (supplicatio) to the gods. The bays were worn by
himself and his soldiers till the triumph was over. (Branches of
bay were set up before the gate of Augustus, by a decree of the
senate, as being the perpetual conqueror of his enemies. Cf. Ov.,
Trist., III., i., 39.) These letters were very rare under the
emperors, vid. Tac., Agric., xviii., except those sent by the
emperors themselves. Mart., vii., Ep. v., 3, "Invidet hosti Roma
suo veniat laurea multa licet." Caligula's mock expedition into
Germany (A.D. 40) is well known. The account given by
Suetonius tallies exactly with the words of Persius. "Conversus
hinc ad curam triumphi præter captivos ac transfugas barbaros,
Galliarum quoque procerissimum quemque et ut ipse dicebat
ἀξιοθριαμβευτον legit ac seposuit ad pompam; coegitque non
tantum rutilare et submittere comam, sed et sermonem
Germanicum addiscere et nomina barbarica ferre." Vid. Domit., c.
xlvii. Cf. Tac., German., xxxvii. (Virg., Æn., vii., 183. Mart., viii., Ep.
xxxiii., 20.)
[1535] Exossatus ager. Among the Romans it was esteemed a
great disgrace for a legatee to refuse to administer to the estate
of the testator. Persius says, "even though you refuse to act as
my heir, I shall have no great difficulty in finding some one who
will. Though I have spent large sums in largesses to the mob, and
in honor of the emperor, I have still a field left near the city,
which many would gladly take." Such is unquestionably the drift
of the passage; but "exossatus" is variously explained. It literally
means that from which the bones have been taken: vid. Plaut.,
Aul., II., ix., 2, "Murænam exdorsua, atque omnia exossata fac
sient." Amph., I., i., 163. So Lucr., iv., 1267. Ter., Ad., III., iv., 14.
As stones are "the bones of the earth" (Ov., Met., i., 393, "Lapides
in corpore terræ ossa reor"), it may mean "thoroughly cleared
from stones;" or, as Casaubon says, so thoroughly exhausted by
constant cropping, that the land is reduced to its very bones (as
Juv., viii., 90, "Ossa vides regum vacuis exhausta medullis"). "Yet
even this field, bad as it is, some terræ filius may be found to
take." Juxta is generally explained "near Rome," and therefore
parted with last. D'Achaintre takes it with exossatus in the sense
of "almost."
[1536] Bovillæ, a village on the Via Appia, no great distance from
Rome; hence called Suburbanæ, by Ovid (Fast., iii., 667) and
Propertius (IV., i., 33). Here Clodius was killed by Milo. Like Aricia,
it was infested by beggars. (Cf. Juv., iv., 117, "Dignus Aricinos qui
mendicaret ad axes.") Hence the proverb "Multi Manii Ariciæ."
[1537] Virbii clivum, a hill near Aricia, by the wood sacred to
Diana Nemorensis. It took its name from Hippolytus, son of
Theseus, who was worshiped here under the name of Virbius (bis
vir) as having been restored by Æsculapius to life. Cf. Ov., Met.,
xv., 543. Virg., Æn., vii., 760-782. There was also a hill within the
walls of Rome called by this name (cf. Liv., i., 48, where, however,
Gronovius reads Orbii), near the Vicus Sceleratus.
[1538] Lampada. The allusion is to the Torch-race λαμπαδηφόρια
at Athens. There were three festivals of this kind, according to
Suidas, the Panathenæan, Hephæstian, and Promethean. In the
latter they ran from the altar of Prometheus through the
Ceramicus to the city. The object of the runners in these races
was to carry a lighted torch to the end of their courses. But the
manner of the running is a disputed point among the
commentators. Some say three competitors started together, and
he that carried his torch unextinguished to the goal was
victorious. Others say the runners were stationed at different
intervals, and the first who started gave up his torch at the first
station to another, who took up the running, and in turn
delivering it to a third; and to this the words of Lucretius seem to
refer, ii., 77, "Inque brevi spatio mutantur sæcla animantúm Et
quasi cursores vitaï lampada tradunt." Others again think that
several competitors started, but one only bore a torch, which,
when wearied, he delivered to some better-winded rival; which
view is supported by Varro, R. R., iii., 16, "In palæstra qui tædas
ardentes accipit, celerior est in cursu continuo quam ille qui
tradit: propterea quod defatigatus cursor dat integro facem." Cic.,
Heren., 4. The explanations of this line consequently are almost
as various. Prate, the Delphin editor, supposes that Persius' heir
was a man farther advanced in years than Persius himself. Gifford
explains it, "You are in full health, and have every prospect of
outstripping me in the career of life; do not then prematurely take
from me the chance of extending my days a little. Do not call for
the torch before I have given up the race:" and sees in it a
pathetic conviction of Persius' own mind, that his health was fast
failing, and that a fatal termination of the contest was inevitable
and not far remote. D'Achaintre thinks, with Casaubon, that "qui
prior es" means, "You are my nearer heir than the imaginary
Manius, why therefore do you disturb yourself? Receive my
inheritance, as all legacies should be received, i. e., as
unexpected gifts of fortune; as treasures found on the road, of
which Mercurius is the supposed giver. I am then your Mercury.
Imagine me to be your god of luck, coming, as he is painted, with
a purse in my hand." Cf. Hor., ii., Sat. iii., 68.
[1539] Dicta paterna. Not "the precepts of my father," because
Persius' father was dead; but such as fathers give, inculcating
lessons of thrift and money-getting; as Hor., i., Ep. i., 53, "Virtus
post nummos—hæc recinunt juvenes dictata senesque." Cf. Juv.,
xiv., 122.
[1540] Vago. Cf. Varr. ap. Non., i., 223, "Spatale eviravit omnes
Venerivaga pueros."
[1541] Trama is the "warp," according to some interpretations,
the "woof," according to others. The metaphor is simply from the
fact, that when the nap is worn off the cloth turns threadbare;
and implies here one so worn down that his bones almost show
through his skin.
[1542] Popa venter. With paunch so fat that he looks like a
"popa," "the sacrificing priest," who had good opportunities of
growing fat from the number of victims he got a share of; and
therefore, like our butchers, grew gross and corpulent. Popa is
also put for the female who sold victims for sacrifice, and
probably had as many chances of growing fat. The idea of the
passage is borrowed from Hor., ii., Sat. iii., 122.
[1543] Plausisse, either in the sense of jactâsse, "to praise their
good qualities," or, "to clap them with the hand, to show what
good condition they are in." Cf. Ov., Met., ii., 866, "Modo pectora
præbet virgineâ plaudenda manu." Others read "pavisse,"
"clausisse," and "pausasse." (Cf. Sen., Epist. lxxx., 9.)
[1544] Catasta, from κατάστασις, "a wooden platform on which
slaves were exposed to sale," in order that purchasers might have
full opportunity of inspecting and examining them. These were
sometimes in the forum, sometimes in the houses of the
Mangones. Cf. Mart., ix., Ep. lx., 5, "Sed quos arcanæ servant
tabulata Catastæ." Plin., H. N., xxxv., 17. Tib., II., iii., 59,
"Regnum ipse tenet quem sæpe coëgit Barbara gypsatos ferre
catasta pedes." Persius recommends his miserly friend to
condescend to any low trade, even that of a slave-dealer, to get
money. Cappadocia was a great emporium for slaves. Cic., Post.
Red., "Cappadocem modo abreptum de grege venalium diceres."
Hor., i., Ep. vi., 39, "Mancipiis locuples eget æris Cappadocum
rex." The royal property, consisting chiefly in slaves, was kept in
different fortresses throughout the country. The whole nation
might be said to be addicted to servitude; for when they were
offered a free constitution by the Romans, they declined the
favor, and preferred receiving a master from the hand of their
allies. Strabo, xii., p. 540. After the conquest of Pontus, Rome and
Italy were filled with Cappadocian slaves, many of whom were
excellent bakers and confectioners. Vid. Plutarch v. Lucullus.
Athen., i, p. 20; iii., 112, 3. Cramer, Asia Minor, ii., p. 121. Mart.,
vi., Ep. lxvii., 4.
[1545] Depunge. A metaphor from the graduated arm of the
steelyard. Cf. v., 100, "Certo compescere puncto nescius
examen." The end of the fourteenth Satire of Juvenal, and of the
fifteenth Epistle of Seneca, may be compared with the conclusion
of this Satire. "Congeratur in te quidquid multi locupletes
possederunt: Ultra privatum pecuniæ modum fortuna te
provehat, auro tegat, purpurâ vestiat, ... majora cupere ab his
disces. Naturalia desideria finita sunt: ex falsâ opinione nascentia
ubi desinant non habent. Nullus enim terminus falso est." Sen.,
Ep. xvi., 7, 8; xxxix., 5; ii., 5.
[1546] Chrysippi. This refers to the σωρειτικὴ ἀπορία of the
Stoics, of which Chrysippus, the disciple of Zeno or Cleanthes,
was said to have been the inventor. The Sorites consisted of an
indefinite number of syllogisms, according to Chrysippus; to
attempt to limit which, or to bound the insatiable desires of the
miser, would be equally impossible. It takes its name from σῶρος,
acerbus, "a heap:" "he that could assign this limit, could also
affirm with precision how many grains of corn just make a heap;
so that were but one grain taken away, the remainder would be
no heap." Cf. Cic., Ac. Qu., II., xxviii. Diog. Laert., VII., vii. Hor., i.,
Ep. ii., 4. Juv., ii., 5; xiii., 184. Of the seven hundred and fifty
books said to have been written by Chrysippus, and enumerated
by Diogenes Laertius, not one fragment remains. His logic was so
highly thought of, that it was said "that, had the gods used logic,
they would have used that of Chrysippus."
 SULPICIA.
INTRODUCTION.
The occasion of the following Satire is generally known as "the
expulsion of the philosophers from Rome by Domitian." As the same
thing took place under Vespasian also, it becomes worth while to
inquire who are the persons intended to be included under this
designation; and in what manner the fears of the two emperors
could be so worked upon as to pass a sweeping sentence of
banishment against persons apparently so helpless and so little
formidable as the peaceful cultivators of philosophy. It seems not
improbable then that the fears both of Vespasian and Domitian were
of a personal as well as of a political nature. We find that in both
cases the "Mathematici" are coupled with the "Philosophi." Now
these persons were no more nor less than pretenders to the science
of judicial astrology [cf. Juv., iii., 43; vi., 562; xiv., 248; Suet., Cal.,
57; Tit., 9; Otho, 4; Gell., i., 9]; and to what an extent those who
were believed to possess this knowledge were dreaded in those days
of gross superstition, may be easily inferred by merely looking into
Juvenal's sixth and Persius' fifth Satire. Besides the baleful effects of
incantations, which were sources of terror even in Horace's days, the
mere possession by another of the nativity of a person whose death
might be an object of desire to the bearer, was supposed, at the
time of which we are now speaking, to be a sufficient ground of
serious alarm. We are not surprised therefore to find it recorded as
an instance of great generosity on the part of Vespasian, that on one
occasion he pardoned one Metius Pomposianus, although he was
informed that he had in his possession a "Genesis Imperatoria;" or
that the possession of a similar document with regard to Domitian
cost the owner his life. (Cf. Suet., Vesp., 14; Domit., 10.) With regard
to the philosophers, it appears that the followers of the Stoic school
were those against whom the edict was especially directed. Not only
did the tenets of this school inculcate that independence of thought
and manners most directly at variance with the servility and
submissiveness inseparable from a state of thraldom under a despot;
but the cultivation of this branch of philosophy was held to be
nothing more than a specious cover for an attachment to the
freedom of speech and action enjoyed under the republican form of
government: and philosophy was accounted only another name for
revolution and rebellion.[1547]
The story told of Demetrius the Cynic, in Dio (lxvi., 13), and
confirmed by Suetonius (Vesp., c. 13), illustrates this view of the
subject. (Cf. Tac., Hist., iv., 40.) It appears to have been at the
suggestion of Mucianus,[1548] that all philosophers, but especially
the Stoics, were banished from Rome; and that the celebrated
Musonius Rufus was the only one who was suffered to remain. This
took place A.D. 74. Sixteen years after this we find a decree of the
senate passed to a similar effect. Now, as philosophy may be studied
equally well any where, there seems no reason why, if it were not in
some way connected with their political creed, all these votaries of
Stoicism should in the interim have taken up their abode at Rome.
And though, no doubt, the unoffending may have suffered with the
guilty, the history of the edict seems pretty plainly to show what
particular doctrines of their philosophy were so obnoxious to
Domitian. Suetonius, Tacitus, and Dio all agree in the cause assigned
for the sentence: viz., that Julius Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius
Senecio had been enthusiastic in their praises of Thrasea Pætus and
Helvidius Priscus; and that therefore "all philosophers were removed
from Rome." ("Cujus criminis occasione philosophos omnes Urbe
Italiâque submovit." Suet., Domit., 10. Cf. Tac., Agric, 2; Dio, lxvii.,
13.) But it was for their undisguised hatred of tyrants, and for no
dogma of the schools, that the former of these was put to death by
Nero, and the latter by Vespasian. Both of them, as we know,
celebrated with no ordinary festivities the birthdays of the Bruti (Juv.,
v., 36); and Helvidius, even while prætor, went so far as to omit all
titles of honor or distinction before the name of Vespasian. (Suet.,
Vesp., 15.) We must not therefore fall into the common error of
supposing this "banishment of philosophers" to have been a mere
act of wanton, senseless tyranny, or of brutal ignorance. Even by his
enemies' showing, the opening scenes of Domitian's life[1549] are at
direct variance with such an idea. (Cf. ad Juv., vii., 1.) And though
we regret to find that men like Epictetus and Dio of Prusa were
included in the disastrous sentence, it is some relief to learn that
Pliny the younger, though living at the time in the house of the
philosopher Artemidorus, and the intimate friend of Senecio and six
or seven others of the banished, to whom he supplied money (a fact
which, as he himself hints, could not but have been known to the
emperor, as Pliny was prætor at the time), yet escaped unscathed.
(Cf. Plin., iii., Ep. XI., vii., 19; Gell., xv., 11.)
How far Sulpicia was connected with this movement, or whether she
was involved in the same sentence which overwhelmed the others,
we have now no means of ascertaining. It is quite clear that all her
sympathies were with the Greeks; and the passage concerning
Scipio and Cato (1. 45-50) leaves little doubt that her philosophical
opinions were those of the Stoics. She rivals Juvenal in her thorough
hatred of Domitian; which may, perhaps, be partly also attributed to
family reasons. For we must remember that she belonged to the
gens which produced Servius Sulpicius Galba; and, as we have
noticed on many occasions with regard to Juvenal, an attachment to
that emperor seems to go hand in hand with hatred of Otho and
Domitian. From the conclusion of the Satire, it is probable that her
husband was not implicated.
The Sulpician gens produced many distinguished men; of whom we
may mention the commissioner sent to Greece, and the conquerors
of the Samnites, of Sardinia, and of Pyrrhus, besides the notorious
friend of Marius. Of this illustrious stock she was no unworthy scion.
Martial[1550] bears the strongest testimony to the purity of her
morals and the chastity of her life, as well as to her devoted
conjugal affection; which latter virtue she illustrated in a poem
replete with the most lively, delicate, and virtuous sentiments; and
which, had not the licentiousness of the age been beyond such a
cure, might have produced a deep moral effect on the peculiar vices
which especially disgraced the era of the Cæsars. Her husband's
name was Calenus, who not improbably belonged to the Fufian
gens,[1551] and with him she enjoyed fifteen years of the purest
domestic felicity, as we learn from the Epigram addressed to him by
Martial, in which, not without a tinge of envy, he congratulates
Calenus on the possession of so inestimable a treasure. Both
Epigrams are exceedingly beautiful, and every reader of Martial will
be only too ready to say, "O si sic omnia." Of her other works we
unfortunately do not possess a single fragment;[1552] and even the
solitary Satire which bears her name, was at one time, as Scaliger
tells us, falsely attributed to Ausonius.
Very much of the Satire is corrupt. Wernsdorf's seems, on the whole,
the best approximation to a true reading; and the Commentary of
Dousa is, as far as it goes, satisfactory.

FOOTNOTES:

[1547] Vid. Niebuhr's Lectures, iii., p. 212.

[1548] Licinius Mucianus, the governor of Syria. He belonged to
the noble family of the Licinii, and was connected with the Mucii.
For his character, see Niebuhr's Lectures, vol. iii., p. 206.
[1549] "Domitian was a man of a cultivated mind and decided
talent, and is of considerable importance in the history of Roman
literature. The Paraphrase of Aratus, which is usually ascribed to
Germanicus, is the work of Domitian. The subject of the poem is
poor, but it is executed in a very respectable manner. Domitian's
taste for Roman literature produced its beneficial effects. He
instituted the great pension for rhetoricians, which Quintilian, for
example, enjoyed, and the Capitoline contests, in which the prize
poems were crowned. During this period, Roman literature
received a great impulse, to which Domitian himself must have
contributed. From his poem we see that he was opposed to the
false taste of the time." Niebuhr's Lectures, iii., p. 216, 7.
 [1550] Lib. x., Epig. 35 and 38. There is nothing in these two
Epigrams to imply that Sulpicia and Calenus were not both living
peacefully and happily at Rome, at the time Martial wrote his
tenth book of Epigrams. Now he says himself that he scarcely
produced one book in a year, (x., 70), and lib. ix. was written A.D.
94 or 95. The second edition of his tenth book came out A.D. 99.
The Epigrams to Calenus and Sulpicia were probably therefore
written at least six years after the Edict of Domitian, i. e.,
between A.D. 90 and 99.
[1551] Vid. not. ad l. 62.
[1552] With the exception of a doubtful fragment quoted by the
old Scholiast on Juvenal, Sat. vi., 538.

SULPICIA.
ARGUMENT.
The Satire opens with an Invocation of Calliope, the
Muse of Heroic poetry. The dignity of the subject,
which is in fact the undeserved sufferings of the
good and great men whom Domitian's edict was
ejecting from their homes, deserves a higher
strain than is compatible with the more
commonplace, and therefore less powerful,
invectives of Iambic metre. The effect produced by
such a measure is described as nothing less than
forcing the civilized world to retrograde to a state
of primæval barbarism. The cause which has led
to such a perversion of taste and degradation of
intellect is then examined; which are shown to be
the result of a long-protracted peace. The old
Roman valor which had raised the city to the
proud position promised by the father of gods and
men, had become gradually enervated and
enfeebled, as it ceased to have an object on which
to exercise itself. The stern and rigid virtue of the
best period of the city's history, which had led her
 greatest men, even in the fierce struggles for
existence against the rival republic, to appreciate
and patronize the philosophy of Greece, the love
of country and the ties of brotherhood which had
been fostered by that "rugged nurse Adversity,"
were now all buried in the corpse-like lethargy
induced by the enervating influence of a
lengthened peace. The Satire concludes with a
bitter denunciation of coming vengeance against
the tyrant; and a prophetic anticipation of the
lasting fame to be enjoyed by the poem.
Grant me, O Muse,[1553] to tell my little tale in a few words, in those
numbers in which thou art wont to celebrate[1554] heroes and arms!
For to thee I have retired; with thee revising[1555] my secret plan.
[1556] For which reason, I neither trip on in the measure of

Phalæcus,[1557] nor in Iambic[1558] trimeter; nor in that metre

which, halting with the same foot, learned under its Clazomenæan
guide boldly to give vent to its wrath. All other things[1559]
moreover, in short, my thousand sportive effusions; and how I was
the first that taught our Roman matrons to rival the Greeks, and to
diversify their subject with wit untried before, consistently[1560] with
my purpose, I pass by; and thee I invoke, in those points in which
thou art chief of all, and, supreme in eloquence, art best skilled.
Descend[1561] at thy votary's prayer and hear!
Tell me, O Calliope, what is it the great[1562] father of the gods
purposes to do? Does he revert to earth, and his father's age; and
wrest from us in death the arts that once he gave; and bid us, in
silence, nay, bereft of reason, too, just as when we arose in the
primæval age,[1563] stoop again[1564] to acorns,[1565] and the pure
stream? Or does he guard with friendly care all other lands and
cities, but thrusts away[1566] the race of Ausonia, and the nurslings
of Remus?[1567]
For, what must we suppose? There are two ways by which Rome
reared aloft her mighty head. Valor in war, and wisdom in peace. But
valor, practiced[1568] at home and by civil warfare, passed over to
the seas of Sicily and the citadels of Carthage, and swept away also
all other empires and the whole world.
Then, as the victor, who, left alone in the Grecian stadium, droops,
and though with valor undaunted, feels his heart sink within him—
just so the Roman race, when it had ceased from its struggles, and
had bridled peace in lasting trammels; then, revising at home the
laws and discoveries of the Greeks,[1569] ruled with policy and gentle
influence[1570] all that had been won by sea and land as the prizes
of war.
By this Rome stood—nor could she indeed have maintained her
ground without these. Else with vain words[1571] and lying lips would
Jupiter[1572] have been proved to have said to his queen, "I have
given them empire[1573] without limit!"
Therefore, now, he who sways the Roman state[1574] has
commanded all studies, and the philosophic name and race of men
to depart out of doors and quit the city.
What are we to do? We left the Greeks and the cities of men,[1575]
that the Roman youth might be better instructed in these.
Now, just as the Gauls,[1576] abandoning their swords and scales,
fled when Capitoline Camillus thrust them forth; so our aged men
are said to be wandering forth,[1577] and like some deadly burden,
themselves eradicating their own books. Therefore the hero of
Numantia and of Libya, Scipio, erred in that point, who grew wise
under the training of his Rhodian[1578] master; and that other band,
fruitful in talent, in the second war;[1579] among whom the divine
apophthegm[1580] of Priscus[1581] Cato[1582] held it of such deep
import to determine whether the Roman stock would better be
upheld[1583] by prosperity or adversity. By adversity, doubtless; for
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