III
What the past and the future have in common is our imagination, which conjures them. And our imagination is rooted in our eschatological dread: the dread of thinking that we are without precedence or consequence. The stronger that dread, the more detailed our notion of antiquity or of utopia. Sometimes—actually, all too often—they overlap, as when antiquity appears' to possess an ideal order and abundance of virtues, or when the inhabitants of our utopias stroll through their marble well-governed cities clad in togas. Marble is, to be sure, the perennial building material of our antiquity and utopia alike. On the whole, the color white permeates our imagination all the way through its extreme ends, when its version of the past or the future takes a metaphysical or religious turn. Paradise is white, so are ancient Greece and Rome. This predilection is not so much an alternative to the darkness of our fancy's source as a metaphor for our ignorance, or simply a reflection of the material our fancy normally employs for its flight: paper. A crumpled paper ball on its way to the wastebasket could easily be taken for a splinter of a civilization, especially with your glasses off.
IV
I first saw this bronze horseman indeed through a windshield of a taxi some twenty years ago, almost in a previous incarnation. I'd just landed in Rome for the first time, and was on my way to the hotel, where a distant acquaintance of mine had made a reservation. The hotel bore a very un- Roman name: it was called Bolivar. Something equestrian was already in the air, since the great libertador is normally depicted atop his rearing horse. Did he die in battle? I couldn't remember. Presently we were stuck in the evening traffic, in what looked like a cross between a railroad station's square and the end of a soccer game. I wanted to ask the driver how far we had to go, but my Italian was good only for "Where are we?" "Piazza Venezia," he blurted, nodding to the left. "Campidoglio," a nod to the right. And with another nod: "Marco Aurelio," followed by what was no doubt an energetic reference to the traffic. I looked to the right. "Marco Aurelio," I repeated to myself, and felt as if two thousand years were collapsing, dissolving in my mouth thanks to the Italian's familiar form of this Emperor's name. Which always had for me an epic, indeed imperial, sway, sounding like a caesura-studded, thundering announcement by history's own majordomo: Marcus!—caesura—Aurelius! The Roman! Emperor! Marcus! Aurelius! This is how I knew him in high school, where the majordomo was our o^ stumpy Sarah Isaakovna, a very Jewish and very resigned lady in her fifties, who taught us history. Yet for all her resignation, when it came to uttering the names of Roman emperors, she'd straighten up, assuming an attitude of grandeur, and practically shout, well above our heads, into the peeling-off stucco of the classroom wall adorned with its portrait of Stalin: Caius Julius Caesar! Caesar Octavian Augustus! Caesar Tiberius! Caesar Vespasianus Flavius! The Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius! And then—Marcus Au- relius! It was as though the names were bigger than she herself, as though they were swelling up from inside to be released into a far greater space than her own body or, for that matter, the room, the country, the times themselves could contain. She reveled in those odd-sounding foreign names, in their unpredictable succession of vowels and consonants, and that was, frankly, contagious. A child loves this sort of thing: strange words, strange sounds, and that's why, I suppose, history is best taught in childhood. At the age of twelve one may not grasp the intrigue, but a strange sound suggests an alternative reality. "Marcus Aurelius" certainly did to me, and that reality proved to be quite vast: larger, in fact, than that Emperor's own. Now apparently came time to domesticate that reality; which is why, I suppose, I was in Rome. "Marco Aurelio, eh?" I said to myself, and turned to the driver: "Where?" He pointed to the top of a huge waterfall of marble steps leading uphill, now right in front of us, and as the car sharply swerved to gain some minuscule advantage in the sea of traffic, I momentarily beheld a floodlit pair of horse's ears, a bearded head, and a protruding arm. Then the sea swallowed us up. Half an hour later, at the entrance to the Bolivar, my valet pack in one hand, my money in another, I asked the driver in a sudden surge of fraternity and gratitude—after all, he was the first person I had spoken with in Rome and he had also brought me to my hotel and didn't even overcharge me, or so it seemed—his name. "Marco," he said, and drove off.
v
The most definitive feature of antiquity is our absence. The more available its debris and the longer you stare at it, the more you are denied entry. Marble negates you particularly well, though bronze and papyri don't fall too far behind. Reaching us intact or in fragments, these things strike us, of course, with their durability and tempt us to assemble them, fragments especially, into a coherent whole, but they were not meant to reach us. They were, and still are, for themselves. For man's appetite for the future is as limited as his own ability to consume time, or as grammar, this first casualty of every discourse on the subject of the hereafter, shows. At best, these marbles, bronzes, and papyri were meant to outlast their subjects and their makers, but not themselves. Their existence was functional, which is to say, of limited purpose. Time is no jigsaw puzzle, because it is made up of perishing pieces. And though perhaps objects- inspired, the idea of the afterlife wasn't an option until quite late. Anyhow, what is before us are the leftovers of necessity or vanity, i.e., ofconsiderations always nearsighted. Nothing exists for the future's sake; and the ancients couldn't in nature regard themselves as the ancients. Nor should we bill ourselves as their tomorrow. We won't be admitted into antiquity: it being well inhabited—in fact, overpopulated—as it was. There are no vacancies. No point in busting your knuckles against marble.
VI
If we find the lives of Roman emperors highly absorbing, it is because we are highly self-absorbed creatures. To say the least, we regard ourselves as the centers of our own universes, varying to be sure in width, but universes nonetheless, and as such having centers. The difference between an empire and a family, a network offriends, a web of romantic entanglements, a field of expertise, etc., is a difference in volume, not in structure. Also, because the Caesars are so much removed from us in time, the complexity of their predicament appears to be graspable, shrunk, as it were, by the perspective of two millennia to almost a fairy-tale scale, with its wonders_ and its naivete. Our address books are their empires, especially after hours. One reads Suetonius or Ae- lius or, for that matter, Psellus, for archetypes even if all one runs is a bike shop or a household of two. Somehow it is easier to identify with a Caesar than with a consul, or praetor, or lictor, or slave, even though that is what one's actual station in the modern reality corresponds to. This has nothing to do with self-aggrandizement or aspirations but is due to the understandable attraction of king-size (so to speak), clear-cut versions of compromised virtue, vice, or self-delusion rather than their fuzzy, inarticulate originals next door or, for that matter, in the mirror. That's why, perhaps, one looks at their likenesses, at the marbles especially. For in the end, a human oval can accommodate only so much. You can't have more than two eyes or less than one mouth; surrealism wasn't yet invented and African masks were not yet in vogue. (Or maybe the Romans clung so much to Greek standards precisely because they were.) So in the end you are bound to recognize yourself in one of them. For there is no Caesar without a bust, as there is no swan without a reflection. Clean-shaven, bearded, bald, or well coiffed, they all return a vacant, pupil-free, marble stare, pretty much like that of a passport photo or the mug shot of a criminal. You won't know what they have been up to; and putting these faces to their stories is what, perhaps, makes them indeed archetypal. It also moves them somewhat closer to us, since, being depicted fairly often, they, no doubt, must also have developed a degree of detachment vis-a-vis their physical reality. In any case, to them a bust or a statue was indeed what a photograph is to us, and the most "photographed" person would obviously be a Caesar. There were, of course, others: their wives, senators, consuls, praetors, great athletes or beauties, actors and orators. On the whole, though, judging by what has survived, men were chiseled more often than women, which presumably reflects who controlled the purse as much as the society's ethos. By either standard, a Caesar would be a winner. In the Capi- toline Museum you can shuffle for hours through chambers filled up practically to the rafters with rows and rows of marble portraits of Caesars, emperors, dictators, augusti hoarded there from all over what used to be the place they ran. The longer one stayed on the job, the more numerous would be one's "photographs." One would be depicted in one's youth, maturity, decrepitude; sometimes the distance between one's busts is no more, it would seem, than a couple of years. It appears that marble portraiture was an industry and, with its calibrations of decay, something of a mortuary one; the rooms strike you in the end as not unlike a library housing an encyclopedia of beheading. It is hard to "read," though, because marble is notoriously blank. In a sense, what it also has in common with photography—or, more accurately, with what photographs used to be—is that it is literally monochrome. For one thing, it renders everyone blond. Whereas in their real lives, some of the models—