Romulus the Great by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

First published:Romulus der Grosse, 1958 (English translation, 1961)

First produced: 1949, at the Stadttheater, Basel, Switzerland

Type of plot: History

Time of work: March 15-16, 476 c.e.

Locale: Villa of Emperor Romulus in Campania

Principal Characters:

• Romulus Augustus, the emperor of the Western Roman Empire
• Julia, his wife
• Rea, his daughter
• Emilian, a Roman patrician
• Zeno the Isaurian, the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire
• Spurius Titus Mamma, captain of the cavalry
• Caesar Rupf, a manufacturer of trousers
• Odoaker, a Teutonic chieftain

The Play

As Romulus the Great opens, Spurius Titus Mamma arrives totally exhausted and wounded at the emperor’s villa, which seems deserted except for a flock of chickens. He brings news that the Roman Empire is collapsing, but the chamberlains refuse to let him see the emperor without an appointment, which is impossible to arrange with any speed. As the cavalry officer runs out in frustration, Emperor Romulus appears onstage to discover that the minister of finance has fled with the empty imperial cashbox; the empire is bankrupt, but the imperturbable Romulus directs his full attention to his breakfast, whose centerpiece is an egg freshly laid by one of his chickens, each of which is named for a historical leader.

The minister of state enters, extremely agitated about the cavalry officer’s news, but Romulus suggests that the officer rest from his long ride before reporting any news to him. At the breakfast table, Romulus’s wife, Julia, and daughter Rea become more and more upset as it becomes clear that the Germans (Teutons) have conquered Pavia. Emperor Zeno enters, pleading for sanctuary. As bad news continues to arrive, Romulus makes wry jokes, indicating his detached attitude.

Caesar Rupf, a wealthy manufacturer of trousers, enters and offers to pay the invading Teutonic chief to evacuate Italy, on condition that trousers become obligatory dress and that the emperor’s daughter become his wife. Julia is in favor of the marriage, but Romulus refuses. At the end of the act, the cavalry officer tries to deliver his message but is turned away by Romulus, who tells him that he is sacrificing himself needlessly since the country is already doomed. “Emperor, you’re a disgrace to Rome!” cries the officer.

Act 2, which takes place that afternoon, finds everything in disarray. The minister of state is having the archives burned so they will not fall into enemy hands, Zeno keeps stepping on eggs, and the cavalry officer keeps up a litany about being “tired, so tired, . . . dead tired.” Into this chaos comes Emilian, Rea’s fiancé, who has just spent three years in a Teutonic prison. Rea appears, practicing her tragic verses, and meets a changed Emilian, who orders her to get a knife. Frightened, she runs off. When Emilian hears about Caesar Rupf’s proposal, he asks Rea to become Rupf’s wife in order to save Rome, and out of love for Emilian she agrees. Romulus, however, again refuses the marriage. When he leaves, Emilian voices the final word, “Down with the Emperor!”

That night (act 3) as Romulus is in his bedroom, Julia comes to say good-bye before escaping to Sicily. In the resulting conversation, Romulus reveals that he became emperor in order to destroy the empire by doing nothing, and she indignantly calls him a traitor. After she leaves, Rea enters and tries to persuade her father to agree to the marriage, but he convinces her that her love for Emilian is too important to sacrifice.

After she has left, Emilian, Zeno and his chamberlains, the ministers of war and state, and the cook step out of hiding places, one by one, wearing black cloaks and carrying daggers. As the conspirators demand an accounting, Romulus directs himself to Emilian, the only one to whom he believes he owes an accounting because he has suffered so much as a victim of Romulus’s refusal to defend himself and the empire. To Emilian, Romulus explains his judgment against Rome, which chose violence and tyranny over humaneness and truth. Romulus sees the arrival of the Teutons as just punishment and calmly challenges the would-be assassins to kill him if they believe him wrong. A cry that the Teutons are coming scatters the group, and Romulus orders that the Teutons be allowed to enter.

The last act opens on the next morning. Romulus calmly receives the news that his wife and daughter, Emilian, his ministers, and the cook have drowned on their raft-crossing to Sicily. Composed, he fully expects the Teutons to kill him. In the person of the Teutonic leader Odoaker, however, he finds a man like himself, a chicken breeder and antihero. Far from planning to execute Romulus, Odoaker had hoped to subject himself and his people to Rome in order to contain the warlike tendencies of people such as his nephew, Theodoric. Both Romulus and Odoaker have failed. Powerless before the blind fate that nullified their plans, each must accept his fate: Romulus will go into retirement, and Odoaker will rule as benevolently as possible until his nephew assassinates him. In the final scene, Odoaker is proclaimed king of Italy.

Dramatic Devices

The play is carefully constructed so that each act works up to a final moment. The character of Romulus is to be revealed slowly, as Friedrich Dürrenmatt himself indicated, so that he appears to be a disgrace to Rome at the end of act 1 and so that Emilian’s demand that he be removed is understandable at the end of act 2. Only in act 3 does the audience clearly perceive Romulus’s purpose in sitting in judgment over the Roman Empire. At this moment the fool gains a type of dignity, and the farce becomes more serious. At this moment, too, his firmness of purpose, totally lacking in consideration of others, becomes apparent. A man who seemed to be a cynical joker, witty in the face of danger, is revealed to be dangerous in his determined and blind focus on one purpose. Act 4 shows history’s punishment of him. Ignoring his hopes and wishes, fate refuses Romulus a sacrificial death and imposes instead the comedy of retirement.

Romulus the Great combines tragic and comic elements in a form that has come to be called tragicomedy. Clearly, the tone of the play includes farcical elements, among them a cast of secondary characters with humorous names. The central character’s chicken breeding makes him seem an utter fool, as he worries about which hen has laid an egg that morning while the Empire is falling to invaders. In keeping with this tone, it is the chicken Odoaker who lays eggs, and Romulus, the Julians, and Orestes, his commander-in-chief, lay nothing. The image of the cook chasing and beheading Romulus, Orestes, and Romulus’s predecessor for dinner completes this farcical scene. The fact that chickens are wandering everywhere in the rundown villa, so that the characters are continuously in danger of stepping on an egg if they do not tread carefully, confronts the audience with the nature of the do-nothing emperor. When Odoaker arrives and confesses to sharing Romulus’s passion for chicken breeding, this shared interest confirms a shared antiheroic character. The great contrast between the expected and reality as presented in the drama is the main source of comic, even grotesque, elements.

Tragedy is leavened with comedy throughout the play, even in the parody of Greek tragedy itself. In act 3, the assassination attempt, a staple of tragic drama, begins to unravel as Romulus steps on the fingers of the minister of state, who is hiding under his bed, and the man cuts himself with his dagger accidentally. Then Zeno is discovered in the closet when Romulus goes there for a bandage. One by one, the other members of the party come out of hiding, as the scene reaches a climax in Romulus’s justification and then quickly dissolves as a cry that the Teutons are coming scatters everyone except the exhausted Spurius Titus, who, at last, has fallen asleep.

Critical Context

For Friedrich Dürrenmatt, drama was an attempt to represent reality onstage. While specific political ideologies and dramatic theory were not areas of concern to Dürrenmatt insofar as they were purely abstract, his dramas reveal a perspective very much in line with literature written in German since 1950, characterized first of all by a radical pessimism and feelings of disillusion, nihilism, and isolation. Many postwar dramatists believed that the possibility of writing classical tragedy had been destroyed by the historical events they had just witnessed. Dürrenmatt himself wrote that in the twentieth century individuals could no longer be held accountable and there should be no more individual guilt and atonement. In the modern world, power is wielded by anonymous bureaucrats, leaving comedy as the only dramatic form possible.

Romulus the Great was Dürrenmatt’s first dramatic success; although often referred to as a comedy, it has the form of a consistent tragicomedy. In subsequent dramas, such as Der Besuch der alten Dame (pr., pb. 1956; The Visit, 1958) and Die Physiker (pr., pb. 1962; The Physicists, 1963), Dürrenmatt continued the practice of infusing a serious subject with a comic tone, presenting an incomprehensible world in which the individual is carried along by events outside his control.

Romulus the Great, revised several times, is deliberately provocative and shows a style and tone that are associated with all Dürrenmatt’s subsequent work. He used grotesque exaggeration, including parody and farce, and his heroes are determinedly unheroic, making decisions in a world that cannot be understood. The major themes of sacrificial death, the desire for justice, and blind chance, as well as minor elements such as the tendency of his characters to dine well (as Romulus does), reappear in later works. Much of Dürrenmatt’s view of reality was already demonstrated in this work, as was his skill as a practical dramatist. His plays can be read and enjoyed, but the real test is their success onstage. To judge by the number of performances and audience response, Romulus the Great and several of his subsequent dramas have passed the test.

Sources for Further Study

Crockett, Roger A. Understanding Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.

Daviau, Donald G. “Romulus der Grosse: A Traitor for Our Time?” Germanic Review 104 (1979): 104-109.

Diller, Edward. “Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Theological Concept of History.” German Quarterly 40 (1967): 363-371.

Jenny, Urs. Dürrenmatt: A Study of His Plays. London: Eyre Methuen, 1978.

Peppard, Murray B. Friedrich Dürrenmatt. New York: Twayne, 1969.

Tiusanen, Timo. Dürrenmatt: A Study in Plays, Prose, Theory. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Whitten, Kenneth. Dürrenmatt: Reinterpretation in Retrospect. Indianapolis: Berg, 1990.