Conversation with the Kings

1

Zarathustra had not been on his way for an hour in his mountains and forests when all at once he saw a strange procession. Right on the path he meant to go down, two kings came walking, adorned with crowns and purple sashes and as colorful as flamingos: they were driving a laden donkey ahead of them. “What do these kings want in my kingdom?” Zarathustra said to his heart in astonishment, and quickly hid behind a bush. But when the kings came right up to him, he said, half aloud, like one talking only to himself: “Strange! Strange! How does that rhyme? Two kings I see—and only one donkey!”

Then the two kings stopped, smiled, looked toward the spot the voice had come from, and afterward looked each other in the face. “That sort of thing is thought among us too, no doubt,” said the king on the right, “but nobody says it out loud.”

But the king on the left shrugged his shoulders and answered: “That’s probably a goatherd. Or a hermit who lived too long among rocks and trees. For no company at all also spoils good manners.”

“Good manners?” the other king retorted, sullen and bitter. “Then whom are we running away from? Isn’t it ‘good manners’? Our ‘good society’?

“Better, truly, to live among hermits and goatherds than with our gilded, false, painted-over rabble,—even if it calls itself ‘good society,’

“—even if it calls itself ‘nobility.’ But there everything is false and rotten, the blood first of all, thanks to old bad diseases and worse healers.

“The best and dearest to me today is still a healthy peasant, coarse, cunning, stubborn, long-lasting: that is the most noble kind today.

“The peasant is the best today; and the peasant kind should be master! But it is the kingdom of the rabble,—I won’t be fooled anymore. Rabble, though, means: hodgepodge.

“Rabble hodgepodge: in it everything is mixed up with everything, saint and scoundrel and squire and Jew and every beast from Noah’s ark.

“Good manners! Everything among us is false and rotten. Nobody knows how to revere anymore: it is that we are running away from. They are sugary, pushy dogs; they gild palm leaves.

“This disgust is choking me, that we kings ourselves became false, draped and disguised in the old yellowed pomp of our grandfathers, show coins for the stupidest and the slyest and for all who traffic in power today!

“We are not the first—and yet we have to represent the first: of this fraud we have finally grown sick and disgusted.

“We got out of the way of the riffraff, of all these loudmouths and scribbling blowflies, of the shopkeepers’ stench, the wriggling of ambition, the foul breath—: ugh, to live among the riffraff,

“—ugh, to represent the first among the riffraff! Oh, disgust! Disgust! Disgust! What do we kings matter anymore!”—

“Your old illness is attacking you,” said the king on the left at this point, “disgust is attacking you, my poor brother. But you know, don’t you, that someone is listening to us.”

At once Zarathustra, who had opened his ears and eyes wide at these speeches, rose from his hiding place, stepped up to the kings, and began:

“The one who is listening to you, who gladly listens to you, you kings, is called Zarathustra.

“I am Zarathustra, who once said: ‘What do kings matter anymore!’ Forgive me, I was glad when you said to each other: ‘What do we kings matter!’

“But here is my kingdom and my dominion: what might you be looking for in my kingdom? But perhaps on the way you found what I am looking for: namely, the higher human.”

When the kings heard this, they beat their breasts and said with one mouth: “We are found out!

“With the sword of this word you cut through the thickest darkness of our heart. You have discovered our distress, for behold! we are on our way to find the higher human—

“—the human being who is higher than we are: although we are kings. To him we are leading this donkey. For the highest human being shall also be the highest lord on earth.

“There is no harder misfortune in all human fate than when the mighty of the earth are not also the first human beings. Then everything becomes false and crooked and monstrous.

“And when they are even the last, and more beast than human being: then the rabble rises and rises in price, and at last the rabble’s virtue even says: ‘Behold, I alone am virtue!’”—

What did I just hear? answered Zarathustra; what wisdom in kings! I am delighted, and, truly, I already have a craving to make a rhyme on it:—

—even if it turns out to be a rhyme not fit for everybody’s ears. I unlearned long ago any consideration for long ears. Well then! Up!

(But here it happened that the donkey too got a word in: and it said, distinctly and with ill will, Yea-a.)

Once—in the year of grace One, I think—
The Sibyl spoke, drunk without a drink:
“Woe, now all goes amiss!
Decay! Decay! The world never sank as deep as this!
Rome sank to whore and to a whorehouse too,
Rome’s Caesar sank to beast, God himself—turned Jew!”

2

The kings feasted on these rhymes of Zarathustra’s; but the king on the right said: “O Zarathustra, how well we did to set out to see you!

“For your enemies showed us your image in their mirror: there you looked out with the grimace of a devil, laughing in scorn: so that we were afraid of you.

“But what good did it do! Again and again you stung us in ear and heart with your sayings. Then at last we said: what does it matter how he looks!

“We must hear him, him who teaches: ‘You shall love peace as a means to new wars, and the short peace more than the long!’

“No one ever spoke such warlike words: ‘What is good? To be brave is good. It is the good war that hallows every cause.’

“O Zarathustra, our fathers’ blood stirred in our bodies at such words: it was like the speech of spring to old wine casks.

“When the swords crossed each other like red-spotted serpents, then our fathers grew fond of life; the sun of all peace seemed to them limp and lukewarm, but the long peace brought shame.

“How they sighed, our fathers, when they saw gleaming, dried-out swords on the wall! Like them they thirsted for war. For a sword wants to drink blood and sparkles with desire.”—

—When the kings were talking and chattering so eagerly about the happiness of their fathers, no small desire came over Zarathustra to mock their eagerness: for evidently they were very peaceable kings that he saw before him, kings with old and fine faces. But he restrained himself. “Well then!” he said. “That way leads the path, there lies Zarathustra’s cave; and this day shall have a long evening! But now a cry of distress calls me away from you in haste.

“It honors my cave if kings want to sit and wait in it: but of course you will have to wait a long time!

“Well, well! What does it matter! Where does one learn to wait better today than at courts? And the whole virtue of kings that is left to them,—is it not called today: being able to wait?”

Thus spoke Zarathustra.