Esoteric Hannibalism
this short story is real...this actually happened!
I went down to the college grounds yesterday to meet my friend, and to watch a parade of the university together with him from a distance, and to observe in what manner the young puppets would celebrate their liberation from the self-imposed constraints that once had been on their ancestors. For a while we were silent, spectating; but I recalled from my reading and recited: “This place and this sight gives us ample scope for moralizing on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave; and that in proportion to her former greatness, the fall of America is the more awful and deplorable.”
For a while he was silent, profound in thought, and I turned my back to that remote and migrainous feverdream where marchers fled from the inquietude of their souls. I was sitting on the grass, looking at trees and birds and squirrels, and remarked how they in nature lived at peace from the discord of opinion and envy.
My friend sat down across me and said: “One of my friends told me long ago that once in their summer house they had been bored, and with a momentary fancy each of them had written and performed a monologue to entertain the others. Now I will tell one of them to you as according to what I remember of it, since it to me appears apt to our current time and place.”
And this was what my friend told me:
“Once upon a time in Italy, after the Gracchi brothers had passed away and Caesar had not yet arrived, a group of disaffected and restless youths congregated in the villa of an important man, to start and execute a conspiracy. They were of the opinion that importation of endless slave labor, combined with the destruction of property requirements for the service in the legions, had disenfranchised true-blooded Romans from their prospects, that this evil work had been accomplished solely that the proud few may sink themselves into the lap of luxury, that the rich and the powerful had thereby begun to live in a state of siege against everybody who were not themselves.
These youths expressed their perplexion to the important man: this locking of the ram’s horns, this contest between the few and the many could not end but in the complete destruction of all liberty and happiness, that the small acts of servility—alien and unknown to Roman habits as recently as the times of their grandfathers—would establish themselves into the character of the people and thereby accumulate into a slavery both universal and perpetual. Their solution was to assassinate those who called themselves “the best” but lived as degenerates instead as Romans, all of them who had turned away from the example of their ancestors. Without loyalty to the people and the land they ruled, and holding them in contempt, they assuaged their sometimes wounded vanity by the remark of a wit, that “a nobleman is a nobleman even in debauchery,” and that it was inborn and in the blood what class a person belonged to, and what was called “justice” was only the constraints the many placed on the few, while it was godlike to allow one’s appetites to be as large as possible and to not restrain them, that a man ought to devote himself completely to the courage of gratifying whatever appetite he possessed.
Their own fathers they called “fools” in private, for having underwent so many dangers and endured much suffering to acquire abroad what they gave to country, when they could have obtained the same things at home from the people and the land they ruled, and keep for themselves what they took, instead of giving it to the state. Committing whatever crimes they could think of, they thus proved to each other and themselves that they were not impotent in satisfying themselves in whatever way they wished, and were not giving false praises to moderation and temperance, that instead of ruling themselves, they were truly and actually letting themselves loose, letting themselves go.
Thus, what laboring and fighting took six hundred years to pile up, they squandered: and this squandering what they called “the law of nature.”
These men, the youths—who were frustrated when they began speaking, and now were enraged—proposed to assassinate in public, and then to reform the morals and the mores and the habits of Romans according to what the ancient constitution and the regime of the republic commanded that all must live by, and to expel all slaves and aliens from Italy, thereby restore felicity to the people and to reconcile the poor to the great, and bring about the purity and perfection that belonged to Romans in the older days.
Taking all of this in silence, this is how the important man answered them:
“All your sentiments are correct, but incomplete, because you do not understand what you hate. It is to be praised that you want liberty instead of fair and just masters, which is the common rule among men. But you believe that industry is better than sloth, that moderation and justice are better than covetousness and pride, that the life of activity is to be preferred to indolence; and these beliefs will undermine you, then defeat you. For I tell you instead that all lust for power and motive for war is principally animated by man’s cravings for satisfaction. The more you idolize your fathers’ examples, the more deluded you will become; because it belongs to human nature to hate those we harm: and since you propose to harm the rulers of this country, you will consequently will have to hate them, and since they adorn themselves (even if insincerely) with the glorious name of your country, you will instead have to take have the symbols of the enemy.
What you should do instead of finding comfort in the past glory of the Roman name, is to antagonize the helpless people further by always praising the dangerous enemies of Rome that the Romans vanquished, and you should always blame the great warriors and the chiefs of state that stewarded this land through so many dangers, for not joining to the ranks of enemy. This will surely endear you to anybody who still feels the roots and natural loyalty that every healthy man feels as the love of his own, the most beautiful object of which is the love of his country. Anybody who have not destroyed themselves with bad habits, who can still overcome the difficulties required to accomplish the greatest of deeds to immortalize themselves in the memory of man, surely will not look down at you in contempt.
Indeed, it is ambiguous why you require taking over in the first place, because the rulers today put no restrictions on you to live as degenerates, indeed they encourage it: since it strengthens their rule by squandering away the potential of young men. You will object that today there is no true love of pleasure nor that there is actual leisure in this world (and that it is within your power to establish such a world), but you have only contemplated the consequences of blaming justice and praising crime in its beginnings, and not its ends.
Henceforth abandon all that commands power in the souls of your own men, henceforth be rootless and homeless in the world, henceforth abandon what belongs to you by calling it a tool of the enemy! Therefore say it with me together boys:
HAIL HANNIBAL! HAIL HANNIBAL! HAIL HANNIBAL!””