Hubert Monteilhet: Empire’s mercenaries will devour the metropolis

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Hubert Monteilhet: Slain by their own swords

====

Hubert Monteilhet
Neropolis
Translated by Christopher Robinson

“Things are going badly. The worm is in the bud, and has been for a long time. Roman civilization is myself and a handful of distinguished people who do their best to imitate me. I owe the possibility of leading this inimitable lifestyle of mine to the fact that the Roman peasantry lost its roots in the land while fighting abroad. So they came to the big city to beg scraps from my table, or they turned themselves into a few legions of mercenaries hungry for money. How long do you think such a situation can last?

“The day of the citizen will be over because everyone will have the right to call himself a citizen. And then the weary back of the Empire will break. But such an evolution is inevitable. In the first phase you rob every foreigner you can get your hands on: in the second and final phase when there is nothing left to pillage anywhere, you give the conquered races the tile of citizen to keep them quiet. Mercenaries bring military disorder. The vulgarization of the rank of citizen brings general dishonor and civil disorder.

“What is worse, the more we trade, the more we ruin ourselves. The gold from the eastern part of the empire goes off into the coffers of the Parthians, the Arabs, the Hindus, even the Chinese. And the gold from the western part of the empire goes the same way. By some strange curse of fate all precious goods go from east to west and all merchandise of little value from west to east. The Gauls smoke hams and the Phoenicians make purple dyes. In consequence the more purple the emperor wears, the less ham he can eat. The day will come when the west will no longer even be able to pay its mercenaries in ready cash, though that is the only way to maintain a modicum of discipline. Our frontiers will be wide open, our cities sacked, and the last traces of civilization will be wiped out, given that, as things stand at present, the definition of civilization is spending in town the money one has got from one’s estates in the country. When it comes to it, if there is any one thing worse than the criminal insolence of the mercenaries and the urban lower classes, it is the complete disappearance of both categories of people.”