Reading Livy Against Livy Poem by gershon hepner

Herbert, reading Livy against Livy,
understood that facts aren’t not what is recorded.
the reason why the future’s always iffy
is that the past becomes in time disordered.

The empire, always doomed to fall, will not
explode but will unravel while it panders
to those who wish to cut its Gordian knot,
deluding all the would-be Alexanders.


Inspired by a poem by Zbigniew Herbert, cited by Anthony Grafton in his review of “A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century” in TNR, June 12: 2008:

Livy, who wrote a vast account of the Roman past in the last decades of Augustus’s reign, taught generations of schoolboys that history was really philosophy, embodied in examples that made its lessons more palatable and emotionally powerful. He chiseled dozens of the examples in question, such as the stories of Horatius at the bridge and the rape of Lucretia, in what became their decorous, marmoreal form. By the twentieth century, many readers found Livy appalling: an unself-critical celebrator of Romes’s rise to imperial status, a propagator of the “old lie” that duty and honor made even death pleasant in a good cause. For Zbigniew Herbert, whose poem on Livy became an anthem for young Polish dissidents in the 1960’s, he exemplified the condescension and blindness that typfiied modern, as well as ancient, empires:

Only my father and myself after him
read Livy against Livy
carefully examining what is under the fresco
this is why the theatrical gesture of
Scevola awoke no echo in us….

My father knew well and I also know
that one day on a remote boundary
without any signs in heaven’in Pannonia Sarajevo or Trebizond
in a city by a cold sea
or in a valley in Panshir
a local conflagration will explode

and the empire will fall.



5/30/08