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Melancholy After Pompeii |
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written
by joelnish / 10.24.2005 |
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| melancholy of the antique world |
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I cannot say that I know much of death and perhaps by extension my understanding of life is also stunted but I at least know that this is not the way the ancients lived. The colosseum seems to me a testament to this fact. When I walked through that odd building I was overcome by the power of it. The building called out for blood and I found myself echoing this desire, however repulsive it really is. I wanted to be there to witness the senseless slaughter of the grand gladiatorial battles.
The colosseum was a spiteful celebration of death and perhaps a bizarre investigative instrument. How could it be that regardless of one's power they would all ultimately die? Why could it be that all of human achievement and power could not extend the life of the most powerful king or warrior by a second? Shouldn't there be a person singular in power that was truly free from the specter of death? In a certain sort of way the colosseum was the world's greatest laboratory designed to test these questions, to see the strongest face death like the weak spectators would eventually. The results were always the same; no one would have thought that there was immortality past the colosseum. Death was a concrete fact to be held, seen and reveled in. It was the distinction between the immortal and the mortal and the knowledge of which man was that created the "melancholy of the antique world". I see the "melancholy of the antique world" like the feelings of a person tied to a railway line. At first they panic, but after they grow tired of panic and realize the strength of the ropes that bind them all that is left is to look into the front of the train as it creeps toward them from the horizon, entranced by the elaborate design of their own demise.
In such a state I suspect that the warrior was in a unique position as no other position was so honest about their own mortality. From the modern perspective it would seem ironic that any kind of power could come from a system that offered so little hope. The ancients though did find a way to kind of transcend mortality though, if only for a few seconds. Today we call it "the zone" but true "berserker" moments in battle were supposed to be beyond any sense of life or death. Indeed, I suspect that the gladiators who where ultimately the most loved, respected and looked up to were the ones who faced death with the understanding that they where already dead once they stepped into the ring, releasing them from the molasses of doubt and worry.
While the colosseum was a statement on how the individual must view an impending death the ruins of Herculaneum seem to be a statement of how a community does.
The housing in Herculaneum is densely packed, huddled together really. Surrounded by walls and sea the people there latched together in defiance to a natural world that seemed somewhere between neutral and hostile to their existence. They hug those around them tighter, united in their own meekness. The large volcano in the backdrop seems an apt reminder of a world where life seemed at the whim to larger unknowable and vengeful forces. In such places life must seem so delicate. It is as if the slightest things can kill, the size and decoration of a family alter, the sexual practices of the vestal virgins or the eccentricities of an animals’ entrails.
And then there is the high concentration of bars, baths and brothels—they seem everywhere. These people seemed to try and squeeze all the life out of life they could. Living under some perverse surprise deadline.
Yet to call all of these the product of melancholy seems a little inaccurate. It seems that this melancholy is particularly present in the grand monuments of the ancients, but on the more community level it is mixed with a certain zest for life that can only appear when you realize the brevity of it. Death is often too complicated an issue for the response to dominated by only a single emotion. Thus in an odd way their inescapable mortality led the Ancient Romans both to come together and to commit terrible slaughter.
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