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Melancholy of the Antique World |
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written
by liu9700 / 10.24.2005 |
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| melancholy of the antique world |
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Part 1: |
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There is no life remaining in the Forum. Gaze across its grounds and this fact will become apparent. True, you may spot the occasional tree or unkempt patch of grass peaking out from beneath some toppled wonder. Perhaps you will catch sight of a pigeon, nesting in the shade of a triumphal arch. But these glimpses of life in the present serve only to highlight that which is no more. Those who built and maintained the grandeur of the Forum are gone and no others will ever reclaim their place. Looking at the ruins of the Forum one takes a glimpse of the mortality of man and all his pursuits. In the end nature will reclaim us all. This is the melancholy we find in the Forum.
To the ancients immortality was achieved through remembrance of the dead by the living. What lay beyond the void was uncertain, sometimes doubted. It was therefore the pursuit of every ambitious Roman to perpetuate their place in history through earthly conquests and constructions. Tales reach us of the epic efforts to achieve such immortality. Murder, scandal, war and coercion all emerge as repeating themes throughout the history of Roman rule. The struggle for power was in part the struggle to live forever.
Knowing this we can feel the Forum’s sadness. The grandeur that once was and upon which so many placed their hopes of the eternal has fallen. This was their legacy and it lies broken at our feet. Some of the readings for this course relate a particular monument to a song which speaks to the visitor and connects the present to the past. The ruins of the Forum are the same, only here time has degraded the connection. Bits of marble and stone call out to the viewer, begging that they remember the people and stories behind their existence. However, unlike the fluid song we find in the heights of the domed Pantheon or the energetic roar that seeps from the depths of the Coliseum, the Forum has quietness to it. Its song is hushed, an inaudible din that begs our attention and receives our pity. Its melody has become broken by war, scattered by plunder, absorbed by time and mixed with the dark and damp of the swamp. Each fallen component competes with the next, the end result of which is a thousand hushed whispers incoherent to our ears.
In the Forum we see the decay of the physical pursuits of man. It reminds us of the futility of trying to conquer the temporal and of our own eventual mortality. That which was once the center of the ancient world, the site of glories and triumph, the heart of the Roman Empire now is a nesting site for pigeons.
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Part 2: |
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| Katherine Liu |
| From the top of the Theater - Pompeii |
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Pompeii isn’t a ruin, it’s a ghost town. If I hadn’t walked past a lemonade stand shortly before entering the site I might have thought I’d just stepped into another time. Knowing that I had this creative writing prompt to answer I spent the first few hours of my time there soaking in the atmosphere and picking apart the landscape with a student’s eye. But I saw nothing. The town was too intact, the roads too straight, the marble still too brilliant in hue. Pompeii was tragic, but it was not the same as the Forum. It was too much like the town it once was. Melancholy wasn’t the correct word. So I abandoned for a moment the assignment and returned my mind its ordinary, habitual activity.
Later in the day, presentations finished, I found myself wandering through the streets of Pompeii with a small group of other students from the class. At one point we wandered into an old theater. A wooden stage had been constructed at its base and new plastic chairs were arranged up the theater’s length in anticipation of a performance. I remember thinking to myself what a marvel it is that life still continued in this place, so many thousands of years after its construction. A short walk down the stairs and through an archway revealed another smaller theater. While some of us remained at its bottom, serenading tourists with whistled renditions of Disney melodies, I climbed to top row of seats to see what lay on the other side. From my perch on the theater’s wall I could see all the roofless ruins of the city laid out before me. Each broken cubicle was a shop, a home, a café, which no longer served a purpose because there were no longer any people who needed them. At this time it was late in the day and the streets were nearly empty. Under the shadow of the mountain this place looked abandoned by society. I could feel the hopelessness of the place, a lack of will to continue life on this site of tragedy. I wasn’t able to feel the melancholy of Pompeii until I could see its entire story before me. The forum is full of small, sad things. It isn’t necessary to see it all at once to know the grandeur that has been lost. The mountain still looks out over the town it has both destroyed and preserved. Once again the living highlights that which is gone.
One of the first symbols of the ancient world I encountered while in Rome was the Tiber. I know so many stories set against it as a backdrop, stories involving the might and glory of this city and its history. It’s no wonder then that in my mind I pictured a Tiber that was wide, blue and strong running. I pictured villas along its banks, proud boats floating its waters. My heart sunk when I first realized that the greenish, polluted stream I saw 20 feet below me was that same river. Part of the melancholy for both Pompeii and the Forum is the domination by nature over the pursuits of man. Here in the Tiber I see the opposite: the travesty the pursuits of man can create. The Tiber suffers from time. The city is slowly rising above it, building over it, forgetting the grandeur it once represented. It no longer serves a practical function; Rome is no longer a port town and boats rarely travel down the Tiber’s length. It is nothing now but a relic of the past. Man no longer requires it and so it is pushed aside. The Tiber is destined to run its same age-old course, decaying slowly until it runs dry and nothing but its bed and its memory will remain.
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