In these ships, however, the cargo was not so much goods as gluttons, the members of the court: the rear half of the ship up to the stern’s end was given over to feeding them, from early morning it reverberated with the sounds of eating and there was always a crowd of guzzlers in the dining-hall, impatient for a triclinium to be vacated, waiting, after a tussle with rivals, to tumble themselves onto it, finally to lie down and do their part by beginning a meal or maybe by starting one all over again. The waiters, light-footed, smart, flashy fellows, not a few pleasure-boys among them, but now sweaty and harried, scarcely had time to catch their breaths, and their forever-smiling head-steward, with the cold look in the corner of his eyes and the politely tip-opened hand, drove them hither and thither, himself rushing up-deck and down-deck because, apart from the progress of the meal, it was necessary at the same time to take care of those who—wonderful to relate—seemed to be already sated and now were taking their pleasure in other ways, some promenading with hands clasped upon their bellies or over their behinds, some, on the contrary, discoursing with expansive gestures, some dozing on their cots or snoring, their faces covered with their togas, some sitting at the gaming boards, all of whom had to be served and appeased incessantly with tidbits which were passed around the decks on large silver platters and offered to them, keeping in mind a hunger which might assert itself at any moment, keeping in mind a gluttony which was limned in the expression of all of them, ineradicably and unmistakably, as much in the faces of the well-nourished as in those of the haggard, in those of the slack as well as the swift, of the restless and the indolent, in the faces of the sleepers and wakers, sometimes chiselled in, sometimes kneaded in, clearly or cloudily, cruelly or kindly, wolfish, foxish, cattish, parrottish, horsish, sharkish, but always dedicated to a horrible, somehow self-imprisoned lust, insatiably desirous of having, desirous of bargaining for goods, money, place and honors, desirous of the bustling idleness of possession. Everywhere there was someone putting something into his mouth, everywhere smouldered avarice and lust, rootless but ready to devour, all-devouring, their fumes wavered over the deck, carried along on the beat of the oars, inescapable, unavoidable; the whole ship was lapped in a wave of greed. Oh, they deserved to be shown up once for what they were! A song of avarice should be dedicated to them! But what would that accomplish? Nothing availed the poet, he could right no wrongs; he is heeded only if he extols the world, never if he portrays it as it is. Only falsehood wins renown, not understanding! And could one assume that the Aeneid would be vouchsafed another or better influence? Oh yes, people would praise it because as yet everything he had written had been praised, because only the agreeable things would be abstracted from it, and because there was neither danger nor hope that the exhortations would be heeded; ah, he was forbidden either to delude himself or to permit himself to be deluded, only too well he knew the public to which the grave, the knowledge-burdening and actual work of the poet was as negligible as that of the bitterly oppressed and bitterness-filled slave rowers, the public which held the value of one to be equal with that of the other, as tribute due to the usufructuary, to be received and enjoyed as a right! However those who lolled about and gorged themselves were by no means all parasites, even though Augustus was obliged to tolerate so many of this sort in his following, no, quite a few of them had already achieved much that was worthy and useful, but during the idleness of the voyage they had stripped off, with almost luxuriating self-exposure, most of what they customarily were, and the only thing which they had kept intact was their blind arrogance and their unceasing and befogged greed. Below, magnificent, savage, brutal, sub-human, but not less befogged, the tamed rowing-mass worked together, stroke after stroke. Down there they did not understand him and paid no attention to him, these up here maintained that they revered him, yes, they even believed it; but, be that as it may, whether they presumed to cherish his work by falsely pretending to be connoisseurs, or whether, no less falsely, they paid homage to him as Caesar’s friend, it was of no moment, he Publius Vergilius Maro had nothing in common with them although fate had driven him into their midst, they nauseated him and if the land-breeze, in an advance-salute to the sunset, had not started to blow the stench of the meal and the kitchen away from the ship, seasickness would have befallen him again. He assured himself that the chest with the manuscript of the Aeneid stood undisturbed near him, and, blinking into the deeply-sinking western day-star, he pulled his robe up to his chin; he was cold.

From time to time there arose in him a desire to turn round to the noisy gang at his back, almost curious to see what they were up to now; but he did not do it and it was better not to, since more and more he was convinced that such looking back was in some way forbidden him.

So he lay quietly. The first twilight spread lucidly over the heavens, gently over the world, as they arrived at the narrow river-like approach to Brundisium; it had become cooler yet milder, the salt breath merging with the heavier air of the land into whose entrance the ships now intruded, one after the other slowing down its speed. Iron-gray, leaden-hued became Poseidon’s element, no longer rippled by a wave. On the ramparts of the fortifications to the left and right of the canal, troops of the garrison were on parade in honor of Caesar, perhaps also as a first birthday greeting to him, for it was to his cradle-feast that Octavianus Augustus had come home; in two days, in fact the day after tomorrow, it was to be celebrated in Rome, and Octavian, who rode there in the preceding ship, would be forty-three years old. The cheering of the soldiers arose hoarsely from the banks, the flag-bearers at both flanks of the manipels, precise and practised, thrust the red vexillum aloft, timed to the cheers, afterwards lowering it aslant before the emperor, its tip pointed to the ground; in short what took place was the hearty unimpassioned performance of the salute as stipulated by the army manual, regimentally right in its military ruggedness, and in spite of that it was curiously mild, curiously soothing; it could almost be described as dreamy, so very, so exceedingly puny the cheering that floated off into the grandeur of the sunset, so very, so exceedingly autumnal the fading of the red flag overshone by the firmament glimmering into gray. Greater than the earth is light, greater than man is the earth, and man’s existence avails him nothing until he breathes his native air, returning to the earth, through earth returning to the light, an earthly being receiving the light on earth, received in turn by the light only through earth, earth changing to light. And never was the earth nearer the heart of light, nor light closer to the earth than in the approaching dusk at the two boundaries of night. Night still slumbered in the depths of the waters, but with tiny dark noiseless waves it began to filter upward, everywhere in the mirror of heaven, in the mirror of the sea, above indistinguishable from below, the velvet-muffled waves dove up from the wake of night, the waves of a second immensity, of the fecund outspreading utter-immensity, and downily they began to overcast the radiance with the breath of silence. The light came no longer from above, it hung in itself and, hanging so, it was luminous but it no longer illumined anything, so that even the landscape over which it hung seemed confined in its own light. The chirping of crickets, myriadfold yet issuing as one continuous monotone, piercing yet lulling in its evenness, neither rising nor falling, vibrated throughout the twilit land; endless. Under the fortifications the slopes were overgrown with sparse grass down to the stony beach, and, meagre though it was, that growth was peace, was nocturnal quiet, was rudimental darkness, the darkness of earth spread out under the departing light. Then the patches became more connected, richer in plant life, deeper in color, and very soon were interspersed with shrubbery, while on the hill-tops between the stone-fenced quadrangles of the peasants, the first olive trees revealed themselves, gray as the breath-thin fog-spray of the deepening twilight. Oh, unbridled became the desire to stretch the hand toward those still so distant shores, to reach into the darkness of the shrubbery, to feel the earth-born leaf between his fingers, to hold it tightly there forevermore—, the wish quivered in his hands, quivered in his fingers with uncontrollable desire toward the leafy branches, toward the flexible leaf-stems, toward the sharp-soft leaf edges, toward the firm living leaf-flesh, yearningly he felt it when he closed his eyes, and it was almost a sensual desire, sensually simple and grasping like his masculine, raw-boned peasant’s fist, sensually savoring and sensitive like the slender-wristed nervousness of this same hand: Oh grass, oh leaf, bark-smoothness, bark-roughness, vitality of burgeoning, in this branching out and embodiment ye are earth’s darkness made manifest! oh hand, tingling, touching, fondling, embracing, oh finger and finger-tip, rough and gentle and soft, living flesh, the outermost surface of the soul’s darkness opened up in the lifted hands! He had always been aware of this strange almost volcanic pulsation in his hands, always the intimation of the strange separate life of his hands had accompanied him, an intimation that once and for all had been forbidden to overstep the threshold into actual knowledge, as if an obscure danger lurked in such knowledge, and when now, as was his habit, he turned the seal ring, the one finely-wrought and even a little unmasculine in its delicate workmanship, which he wore on a finger of his right hand, it was as if by so doing he could avert that obscure danger, as if he could appease the hands’ longing, as if by this act he could bring them to a certain self-control, abating their fear, the longing fear of peasant hands that never again might grasp the plough or scatter the seed and therefore had learned to grasp the intangible, the foreboding fear of hands to whose will-to-form, robbed of the earth, nothing remained but a life of their own in the incomprehensible universe, threatened and threatening, reaching so deeply into nothingness and so gripped by its perils that the dread foreboding, lifted to a certain extent above itself, was transmuted into a mighty endeavor, an endeavor to hold fast to the unity of human existence, to preserve the integrity of human desire in a way that would protect it from disintegrating into manifold existences, full of small desires and small in desire; for insufficient was the desire of hands, insufficient the desire of eyes, insufficient the desire of hearing, sufficient alone was the desire of heart and mind communing together, the yearning completion of the infinity within and without, beholding, hearkening, comprehending, breathing in the unity of the doubled breath, the unity of the universe; for by unity alone might one overcome the lowering hopeless blindness of fearful isolation, in unity alone occurred the twofold development from the roots of understanding, and this he divined, this he had always divined—, oh the yearning of one who was and always must be only a lodger, oh yearning of man—, this had been his prescient-listening, his prescient-breathing, his prescient-thinking, drawn by reciprocal listening, breathing, thinking, into the flowing light of the universe, into the never-ending approach to the endlessness of the universe, unattainable the pearly shimmer of its abysmal depths, unattainable even its outermost edge, so that the longing desirous hand dares not even touch it. Still there was an approach and there was his thought, breathing and waiting, listening into the twofold abysses where Poseidon and Vulcan reigned, both realms united by the heavenly arch of Jove. Opened and flowing now the light, the breath too was flowing, as flowing as the current into which the keels plunged, flood-bath of the innermost and outermost, flood-bath of the soul, the breath flowing from this life into the beyond, from the beyond back into this life, the unveiled portal of knowledge, never knowledge itself, but still a presentiment of knowledge, a presentiment of the entrance, a presentiment of the path, a dim presentiment of the twilight journey. Forward on the bow a young slave, one of the musicians, was singing; possibly those assembled there, whose hubbub had been hushed in the quiet of the evening, had summoned the boy, even they aware of homecoming, and after a short interval for tuning the lyre followed by a suitable pause, there rang out, wafted back to him, the nameless song of a nameless boy; mildly flowing the song, floating insubstantially, like rainbow tints in the nocturnal heavens, mildly flowing the strings, soft-hued as ivory, human accomplishments, both the song and the strings, but removed beyond their human source, delivered from mankind, delivered from suffering; this was the music of the spheres singing itself. It became darker, faces became dimmer, the shores faded out, the boat seemed to vanish, only the voice remained, becoming clearer and more dominant as if it wished to direct the ship and the timing of the oars, forgotten the source of the voice, the nonetheless-guiding voice of a slave boy; guidance the song, secure in itself and for that reason guidance, just for that reason exposed to eternity, for only the serene may guide, only the singular, wrested, nay rescued, from the flow of things, lays itself open to immensity, only that which is held fast—ah, had he ever succeeded in getting such an actual, guiding grasp?—only the truly comprehended, even though it be only for a moment in the ocean of millenniums, only the firmly-retained becomes timeless, becomes permanent, becomes a guiding song, becomes guidance; oh, for a single life-moment enlarged to eternity, enlarged to the limits of understanding, susceptible of immensity: high above the shining song, high above the shining sunset breathed the heaven, whose sharp-clear autumnal sweetness had repeated itself unchanged for millenniums past and would repeat itself unchanged for millenniums to come, nevertheless unique in its manifestation here and now as the silky bright shimmer of its dome was overcast by the silent breath of the oncoming night.

The song led them, though not for long; the journey between the banks of the incoming canal was almost at an end, and the song expired in the general restlessness which developed on board as the inner bay of the harbor, its leaden mirror already gleaming darkly, opened out, revealing the city built around it in the form of a half-circle with its myriad lights shimmering in the twilight like a starry heaven. It was suddenly warm. The flotilla halted to let Caesar’s boat proceed to the head of the line, and now—and even this which happened under the soft immutability of the autumn sky should have been retained as an infinite unique occurrence—there began a careful maneuvering to pilot a way in safety between the boats, sailing-vessels, fishing-smacks, tartanes and merchantmen, anchored on every side; the farther one went the narrower became the channel, the more jammed the mass of ship-hulls, the denser the tangle of masts and rigging and furled sails, dead in their rigidity, living in their repose, a strange, dusky, knotted and confused network that lifted itself darkly from the shiny oily-dark surface of the water toward the unmoved evening brightness of the heavens, a black spiderweb of wood and hemp reflected spectrally in the waters beneath, flashing spectrally above from the wild flickering of the torches swung all about the decks with shouts of welcome, spectrally lit from the splendor of lights on the landing-place: in the rows of houses surrounding the harbor, window after window was illuminated even up to the attics, illuminated the osterias ranged one after the other under the colonnades; directly across the square there formed a double line of soldiers bearing torches, man after man in gleaming helmets, obviously there to keep an unobstructed thoroughfare from the landing-place into the city, the customs-stalls and custom-offices on the piers were lit by torches, the whole was a sparkling, gigantic space packed with human bodies, a sparkling gigantic reservoir of a waiting at once vast and vehement, filled with the rustling of a hundred thousand feet, slipping, sliding, treading, shuffling on the stone pavement, a seething giant arena, throbbing with the rise and fall of a black buzzing, with a roar of impatience that was suddenly hushed and held in abeyance as the imperial ship, propelled now by only a dozen oars, reached the quay with an easy turn at the designated place—awaited there by the city officials in the center of the torchlit, military quadrangles—and landed with scarcely a sound; in fact the moment had arrived which the brooding mass-beast had awaited to release its howl of joy, and now it broke loose, without pause, without end, victorious, violent, unbridled, fear-inspiring, magnificent, fawning, the mass worshiping itself in the person of the One.

These were the masses for whom Caesar had lived, for whom the empire had been established, for whom Gaul was conquered, for whom the Parthians were besieged and Germany brought into battle, these were the masses for whom the great peace of Augustus had been made, who, to maintain this peace had to be brought again to civic discipline and order, to belief in the gods and to a humanly-divine morality. And these were the masses without whom no policy could be carried out and on whose support Augustus must rely if he wished to maintain himself, and naturally Augustus had no other wish. Yes and this was the people, the Roman people, whose spirit and honor he, Publius Vergilius Maro, he a real farmer’s son from Andes near Mantua, had not so much described as tried to glorify! To glorify and not describe, that had been the mistake, oh, and this represented the Italy of the Aeneid! Evil, a tide of evil, an immense wave of unspeakable, inexpressible, incomprehensible evil seethed in the reservoir of the plaza; fifty thousand, a hundred thousand mouths yelled the evil out of themselves, yelled it to one another without hearing it, without knowing it was evil, nevertheless willing to stifle it and outshout it in the infernal bellowing. What a birthday greeting! Was he the only one to realize it? Stone-weighted the earth, leaden-weighted the waters, a demonic crater of evil, ripped open by Vulcan himself, a howling crater on the border of Poseidon’s realm. Did not Augustus see that this was no birthday greeting, that it had quite other implications? A feeling of harassed sympathy arose in him, a compassion that pertained as much to Augustus as to the mass of humanity, to the ruler as well as to the ruled, and it was accompanied by a responsibility no less importunate, a truly unbearable one which he himself could not account for beyond knowing that it bore small resemblance to the burden which Caesar had taken upon himself, rather that it was a responsibility of quite another kind; for this seething, befuddled, unrecognized evil was beyond the reach of every governmental enterprise, beyond reach of every earthly force however great, beyond reach, perhaps, of the gods themselves, and no human outcry sufficed to overwhelm it except, it may be, that small voice of the soul, called song, which while it makes known the evil, announces also the awakening of salvation, knowledge-aware, knowledge-fraught, knowledge-persuading, the provenance of every true song.