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Melancholy of the Antique World |
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written
by kayanna / 10.24.2005 |
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| melancholy of the antique world |
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Part 1: |
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The ancient world built for immortality – emperors flexed their power, transient as it was in each lifetime, in the hope that their memories would persist. They built in a time before the printing press allowed for history to be widely recorded with ink, so architecture was the way for the powerful to record their histories. Some succeeded in that we have the remains of some of their visions and power, and others surely failed. Each emperor sought to use his power to build upon what previous emperors had done, as we see in the Forum. Nero built a palace and statues to himself. Vespasian and Titus built the Colosseum and arches, and the Caesars further built monumental structures in their honor. These structures created a long succession of power and memory, only threads of which could survive into the future. The rest of the past is left behind, left forever to stare at the future that continued without it, staring with that pensive gaze.
The melancholy of the antique world reflects that the ancient world could have no way of knowing whether immortality lay on the other side of the void of time. The ancients built for their day in the hopes that their structures and spirit would last, but the antique world had so much that it lost – the marble, the beauty, the glory, the power. The melancholy lies in a hope for immortality that cannot be guessed at or measured, nor could it be relied on as moderns do through the printed pages of history.
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Part 2: |
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Pompeii, like the Forum, stands as a memory from the ancient past. Unlike the Forum, however, Pompeii is frozen in time. Even the bodies of Vesuvius' victims were frozen in molds in the positions they were that day. The Forum has slowly crumbled, dissolved, decayed, like an unrealized dream that melts away until no one can remember why the thought occurred in the first place. Only white skeletal structures remain, as the prickings in the brain remind you that you had a vivid dream the night before, but the shapes cannot be clearly made out.
Not so with Pompeii. Brilliant frescoes on the wall give clues not only to ideals of beauty and admired symbols, but also that even then, these cultural ideals of beauty even existed. The address and the crosswalk were in use. Bars, bathhouses, and the details of the sandal show what the citizens of Pompeii were doing – they were in the prime of their years, in a civilization saturated with modernity like ours, but they were cut off before they tried to build for a future that went on without them.
Ostia, likewise, resembles an unintentional ghost town, slowly fading from memory with the fall of the Roman Empire. However, no one built Ostia’s houses and walls to be symbols to future generations. They were made for the times they were used. The fact that carpets of grass and dandelions now grace the former dining rooms of residents of Ostia is merely happenstance. The dining rooms and cellars wink at their visitors invitingly, as though eager to once again have someone run their fingers along their bricks and gambol through their courtyards. There is little of the melancholy of either Pompeii or the Forum. Ostia was not choked in the prime of its existence like Pompeii was; it just faded with neglect. While the weather has done its damage and much of its marble has been removed, it does not have the same ravaged appearance as the Forum and Palatine. Although Ostia might seem somewhat lonely, it does not stand as grave a symbol as the Forum or Pompeii of the melancholy traces of the ancient world.
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