It is now long ago that I ceased speaking and writing Latin, but since it is the custom that those who have something to communicate to the scholarly world do so in Latin, I must put to the test if whatever there was once of the Roman in me can be brought back to life from long disuse. For a man tossed about far and wide by land and by sea, for a quarter of a century removed from Latin letters and now at length returned to them, I should expect it pardonable to be somewhat constrained in subject matter, somewhat harsh in his choice of words and somewhat archaic in his manner of expression, a man, moreover, for whom, whether in public or private life, no other guideline exists than truth and justice.
If for a citizen there were time and opportunity for honorable activity, I would have never limited myself to mere reading and writing, but it is the spirit of our age, indeed the evil spirit, that for a decent man on friendly terms with the truth there remains no solace but in letters, and even in letters hardly, unless one is bold in behalf of the divine power of truth and ready to accept the ultimate consequences.
A fatherland - I shudder to set down the words - a fatherland is no longer ours, foreigners have us in a stranglehold, have subjugated and enslaved us. The Rhine is no longer ours, nor the Main, nor the Weser, where once our ancestors with Arminius expelled the Romans; the Danube and the Elbe are imperiled, no longer are there Gatti, the Cheruscans have perished, the Bructeri exist no more. There is not a single fortress in our land, not a town, but that foreigners with consummate arrogance had not captured and continued to hold it. Everywhere our people are thrown to the ground, cut down, put to flight, mocked, or, for a glory worthy of barbarians, in actual servitude under the flags of the interlopers; everywhere our people are abased, publicly disparaged, injured and humiliated. With blind fury Germans rage against the innards of Germans, mutually persecuting and mauling one another with bitterest hatred, that all in equal measure are scorned by the foreigners for their stupidity. Citizens are slaughtered without judicial process. Our crops are consumed by alien soldiers, lusting for wine and blood; peasants and city dwellers alike are mistreated, everywhere there is poverty. The unbridled impudence of the conquerors reaches inhuman cruelty; upright maidens are seized, violated and afflicted with death more revolting than wild animals might inflict, then buried in filth and offal so as to conceal the atrocity and infamy of such fearful crimes; girls dragged with open force from the streets in broad daylight to the barracks to serve the lust of soldiers never appeared again. Compared with our times the rage of Tilly, the ruthless destroyer of Magdeburg, was sheer humanity and gentleness. Whence comes all this? Whither will it lead? Already we are spoiled wine and a byword among the nations; nothing more worthless, contemptible, servile can be uttered than the German name. What then is the cause and origin of such countless, massive evils, which oppress our common fatherland, ruin and ultimately destroy it? No longer is there a remedy at hand; so far have we fallen into misery, folly and madness! Yes, this corruption, disease, pestilence and destruction follows upon prerogatives, exemptions and privileges. Everyone for himself, no one for our country. The more property anyone possesses, the more he strives for privileges to vex the rest, to keep them down and treat them like clods and blockheads. There is but one justice, one liberty, and that is equal rights for all; among us in more than barbarous manner justices and liberties are called whatever amounts to the abolition and destruction of freedom, of justice and of public policy. Therein lies our misery; thence flow our tears. Everywhere among us there are despotic presumptions, kingdoms, principalities, dynasties, counts, barons, barbarous in name as in fact; nowhere is there a legitimate supreme authority, neither civil nor military, nowhere a citizenry. The name of citizenry is a crime, the name of citizen a disgrace. Whoever speaks openly of just administration for the benefit of the people is carted off to join the raving lunatics in the workhouses. The whole complex of our public law consists of the decisions of semibarbarians who carry on their business by force of arms, not by sound reason; most of the laws, enough to burden a drove of camels, provide evidence of patent iniquity, since for the most part they lack any rational basis and are written with the point of a sword, not any sort of benevolent justice. We have been unable to rise from barbarism, hence we must needs sink into servitude. Let there be one people, one supreme command, one public power, one the authority and majesty of our fatherland! Our country began on the path of perdition when our princes and our nobility made bold to exempt themselves from the number of its citizens; ruin grew certain once they had succeeded. As soon as unity had been squandered, unification became difficult and nearly hopeless. The greatest endeavors have already come to nought by way of discord. The man who was once the support and the glory of our people, who steadfastly and fearlessly adhered to the truth, Luther, saw this back in his own times and uttered laments without avail. Now we have hordes of princes and droves of nobles, than whom there can be nothing more ignoble in all the world: our country is on its knees. Our princes are bodyguards and camp followers of foreigners, and, what makes it all the more ignominious, of upstarts whom but twenty—five years ago they would, for all their stolid conceit, have disdained to invite to table or to address with a single word. This came about because justice and equity meant nothing to them, their people went for nought. Income, tributes, ostentation, pride, impotent displays were their only concern; the common good took the very last place. Barricaded in their palaces and chalets, they were besieged by courtiers, often fawning parasites of no account; meanwhile the wretched populace was in every way shamefully neglected, plagued and scourged. There are no virtues for the common good, where there is no common good! Where the people revert simply to personal property and matter for inheritance, then liberty, justice and any sort of sound, rational public policy are done for; insanity rules, servitude is at hand. The imperial power may, of course, to avoid dangerous occasions for dissension, be handed down by inheritance, but the people must never be taken as an object. Property rights pertain only to objects, never is there ownership of persons. In human nature shines that beam of divine power, so that anyone daring to take away liberty, is held by all mankind to be guilty of an evil deed and the sacrilege of consummate wickedness. A hundred times you can impiously destroy this palladium, a hundred times it will more splendidly rise again with greater glory. Those who made glowing pronouncements about German liberty had no idea what they were talking about. Freedom is the equality of citizens in the state, equal access to public office as well as responsibility for the greatest common good. Among us there is no equality. Our much exalted liberty consisted for the most part in the lawless cruelty of princes towards everybody, in the boundless presumption of the nobility against alike common people and peasants, in a disgraceful and in the highest degree destructive commerce in privileges, and in the abasement of the populace down to the gutter. For where among us has ability, constancy, learning and merit ever been in demand? House, family, parents and wealth were looked for by those who held the reins of power. For public office not intelligent, capable men, equal to performing the tasks at hand were called upon, but most commonly were such positions conferred on the immature sons of patricians. Beardless youths often look down disdainfully on the whole people and on men of the greatest dignity, since they hardly require much character and wisdom to enter upon an office of state by way of inheritance, that state which from day to day they are manifestly ruining by their stupidity and incompetence. Enough to have a father of noble rank or at least a mother, so that sitting like stone upon stone he might drive away the others, taking them for slaves and bondsmen. As soon as the time came to pay taxes to preserve our common fatherland, everyone, the more powerful and the nobler he was, clamored for immunity and exemption, the most pestilential and criminal arrangement of public affairs one could possibly imagine. The course of public policy rests in our hands; we want you to give and to labor, we who are born to consume the fruits of your labor; we the choice products swim on the surface. In the end only that is a sound, a firm and a consistent method of public administration where everyone by measure of his property in the community carries his burden without demurral along with all the rest. Unconscionable and mindless is that division of property into untaxed freeholds with immunity and those subject to levies. What is not liable for the common burden has no place in the state; every exemption is ill-advised, is unwise, is destructive. So that in time of greatest danger the greatest resilience of the populace be in evidence, the most extensive possessions are, I suppose, held immune; nothing can be found more unjust, more ruinous than these immunities. This perverse understanding of the meaning of words has removed all common sense from public law, and introduced iniquity in the place of equity. But as soon as equity is excluded from the law, there is no further question about right and wrong; business is carried on by force and violence, and every aspect of life is driven into perdition. 'Law and order' is often called that which is worst for safety and security; and 'peace and quiet' what is suffering and lassitude unto death. 'I prefer a dangerous freedom,' once said a distinguished citizen, 'to peaceful servitude.'
From the Romans and Greeks one can and should acquire their love of country and of freedom, and their striving for character and its lofty recognition, but not in the same way their ideas of law and its first principles. If someone is by law born a slave or later reverts to being enslaved, then ancient justice is at an end. The uncommon character of a few propelled Antiquity to such splendor, but original human rights were hardly within their ken. Even divine Plato's concept of the state was fatally flawed, since he compelled more than three quarters of the populace to toil as slaves, conceding no other role to them, invoking I know not what rule of law. If some stout-hearted, fearless Spartacus leads them out of this workhouse, he does this with right on his side and overturns the pretensions of the Academy. No one must be compelled to labor for another unwillingly. No one is by nature a slave nor can be rendered such by law, even if Aristotle, court favorite of the Macedonian kings, the teacher of tyranny, who for that doctrine deserved rather to be called Aeschistotle, had so declared a thousand times at the top of his lungs. No one has of himself, absolutely speaking, greater power than anyone else, and the source of all law consists in original equality and pristine equity, as all history and the consensus of all tongues manifestly teach. A system of natural law can thus in no way be derived from the ancients, but it can beautifully be illustrated by the examples they have given. They had more character than we have learning, but rightly is character more highly esteemed. Far be it from us ever to revert to their massive errors, but let us always retain their courageous spirit.
Our enemies should in no way be accused; they have dealt decently with us; a bit more decently than our people would deal with them. Of course, they divided the conquered lands among themselves, having no care for justice or equity, following their unbridled nature. Now the law of retribution returned, and with direr consequences. Liberty along with sound common sense was victorious; but it already threatens to turn into its opposite. Foreigners are the masters everywhere in our country; no one on our side dares open his mouth, much less to murmur. Let it be right, let it be wrong, everything is confounded. There is no longer anything German; the very source of our name becomes a reproach. Our officials are driven out or compelled to side with the conquerors. On account of tyranny our masters have been turned into slaves and look for a halo of glory even in the abasement of their country. Everywhere there is a king, a dynast, in a barbarous manner a ruler with his satellite, and himself a satellite as well, tax exemption and privilege; nowhere a citizen and a civic community. As soon as public burdens are to be assumed, the wealthiest and the noblest, protected by the most insufferable privileges, register their strenuous objections. That is the very nobility through whom it has come about that even our ignominy has become ennobled. That flood of noblemen, whether clothed for peace or for war, retained every dignity whereby we have in most unworthy manner been altogether laid low. Whoever was not a noble counted for a slave, with the result that there is nothing more servile than our nobles. Let our country be doomed so long as our privileges are secure; let us slave away in the abjectest servitude, so long as there those who still more corrupted are our slaves! The earth will no longer hold our humiliation nor our servile acfulation; in our folly we even turn to the heavens. What the people avail under a steadfast, legitimate leader our enemies have sufficiently shown us; what on the other hand leaders in their thick—skulled ambition avail without the people is illustrated by our plight. There was no strength because there was no unity, no public justice because precisely the richest were a dead weight in the land, because nowhere was there a consensus of wisdom. All the dregs of humanity were driven into the army which was to safeguard the common good, but the civic-minded were not among them. The common soldier, the most vital entity in the state, because the strength and security of the nation rests in him, was everywhere treated with indignity. Not with vines but with staves, not with staves but with cudgels were they dragged by the babbling young offspring of the nobility to their wretched service. This was the field where the mindless madness of the patricians was to run riot unto the ruin of the nation. For these wretches there was no recourse to law, but continual caning at the sign of the slightest independence of mind. This was their destiny: 'labor that you may weep, weep that you may be beaten;' destructive iniquity which has brought us all our just deserts: we are dust and ashes. Whatever has befallen us are the deeds of our princes and the mighty with their privileges. We are indebted for our miseries not to the enemy but to our own officials, not indeed officials but buyers of provinces, unjust collectors of taxes and tributes, destroyers of all rights. Now they have what for centuries they did not desist from preparing for themselves: they slave with other slaves, because they refused to live in freedom with free men. They scorned living under equitable laws of the nation; now they suffer those that are dictated by foreigners. They are obedient to the interlopers, they have dragged their country into perdition and ruin, because they hated equity in the state under legitimate authority.
We have no complaint, I say, against the enemy: they returned brave deeds for idle threats, the strictest accounting for hostile sentiments. Cleverly they outwitted us as an enemy may do, they defeated us bravely in open combat, diligently repressed us, and astutely provided against any resurgence of power. Their enmity is harsh, harsher their friendship; alliances Roman style: whose friends they are, they are also their masters. All this might have been foreseen, but it was not foreseen.
Our nobility competed among themselves, not in justice but in arrogance, not in manly virtue but in pride, not in good counsel but in license.
Carousing, hunting, love affairs, indeed with loose women as their favorite playthings: therein thrives the liveliest competition. They were not military commanders, not judges, but connoisseurs of luxury and a self-indulgent lifestyle. Everywhere among them are to be found courtiers distinguished by their depravity of character, boastful soldiers, indeed hordes of parasites sunken in pleasures, from whose aggressive insolence hardly anyone is safe, who appeared audacious against the hard-working populace and peaceful peasants but cowards against the enemy at arms, and where military action occurred, ready to turn tail and run. Our wars are now nothing but disgraces; hardly is there one or the other who truly acts like a man. Our excellencies of commandants, as they are addressed in our servile idiom, have surrendered fully equipped fortresses to the enemy without contest so that even common soldiers are stunned by the infamy of the deed. After Frederick the Second of Prussia there are few Germans indeed who in public records could receive honorable mention. There was no age to utter prettier speeches: we are a people of speechmakers, actors, musicians and philosophers, but withal, I think, of hucksters and idlers who make a lot of noise, run hither and yon - but accomplish nothing. Honesty has vanished from public and private life; friends enrich themselves by the spoils of friends; everywhere there is fraud and moral corruption. A good reputation is a liability on earth, the ancient sanctity of honor has disappeared. That famous Socrates, the best of citizens, drew his philosophy from heaven; our people by their abuse of religion compel wisdom to leave the earth to return to heaven. All religion is destroyed by religious practices. We are an object and count for nothing. So from the North enters barbarism together with servitude, from the South perhaps a somewhat gentler dominion but servitude no less perilous and even more shameful. Who dares gainsay? We are but opprobrium, but spoils of war.
Hope is vain where there is no common sense, where everyone fears open-minded justice and decency as would miserable old women. We have not dared to be wise; now it would avail little even if we dared.
The greatest states succumbed to privileges, none were strengthened by them. By privileges the Persians perished, the Greeks perished, and after the Greeks the Romans, all of them tormented unto death by this madness. Greed and avarice, by whatever name you call them, are everywhere disastrous: immunity means the loss of freedom, an abominable crime, a cancer upon society. Aristoi and Optimates are they impiously called in contempt of all common sense, since they are the very destroyers of all right reason. The source and origin of all ancient law is lost to us; we are throttled by erudition no less than by barbarism. Those among us who are called erudite and literate, devoid of any desire for rightly deserved fame, engage in nitpicking and hairsplitting, feuding over trifles and irrelevancies which contribute nothing to our situation. The enemy has everything within his grasp to distract and confuse, and yet, as the nadir of our shame, failed to render anything worse than it already was. Everything now follows the trend of the foreigner; whatever smacks of native ways is disdained, laughed at and scorned. Everything is filled with Napoleon, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Don; everything twists and turns by his divine power alone. Worthy of banishment to Gyariae and for sacrilege twice punishable by death is anyone who dares but by a word to question that we are dull and dim-witted, while the foreigners are of nimble mind. Our mother tongue, the dignified speech of our ancestors, will soon be in the true sense a vulgar tongue as used only by the vulgar, while those who want to be taken for the highest, though in fact taken for the lowest, for some time now mangle their mother tongue no less than the foreign idiom with barbarous babbling. They do battle as they speak, and speak as they please, which is most foully.
Centuries later, or even after a single century we will be like the Alsatians and the Lotharingians, like the Curonians and Livonians along with the Poles, who in their misery know not whence they come nor to what people they belong. Among them the madness of the aristocracy has already run its course; in our midst it is about to do so. Not by our enemies but by our own countrymen who held the reins of power have we been ruined, miserably fallen victim through imprudence, idleness and cowardice, which are all founded as their root cause in privilege and injustice. 'Only equality is justice' was it wisely put by one of the ancients, and by the same token nomoV derives its name from the fact that it distributes (nemei) equally; and only that golden balance of rights and privileges can found states, stabilize, strengthen and preserve them. The better man always remains better in relation to himself and his country, as human nature brings it about, but the one who clamors for privileges and advantages is without exception the worse and the more deleterious. What might have served as a remedy is evident: freedom, character, justice, universal equality, whereof even the concepts were hardly familiar among us. Now Hannibal is no longer at the gates but right in the Capitol. That is what I had to say, dear reader, to save, if not my life, at least my spirit.
Finally, a few words about Plutarch. All my annotations, such as they are, pertain to places which to my knowledge the interpreters have not yet adequately explained. What occurred to me in reading I commented and jotted down, and here you have it. However you may take it, I have but a modest inventory. I used the most recent edition by Hutten, in my estimation quite copious in literary material. What I ventured to communicate I do not esteem highly; after the manner of life I have led, it is not my place to look for glory in the scholarly world. If my trifles are acceptable, I am quite satisfied. In about the same manner I have made notes on nearly all the Greek orators and poets, though of less volume and consequence than those I am publishing here. To live among the dead with Thucydides and Tacitus and Plutarch, at Marathon and at Salamis, is about the most decent way of life still at hand, when we can no longer act on behalf of the dignity and majesty of our country. And yet: "One watchword remains the best: to come to the aid of our country."
