IX
A monument is by and large a vertical affair, a symbolic departure from the general horizontality of existence, an antithesis to spatial monotony. A monument never actually departs from this horizontality—well, nothing does—but rather rests upon it, punctuating it at the same time like an exclamation mark. In principle, a monument is a contradiction. In this way, it resembles its most frequent subject: a human being, equally endowed with vertical and horizontal properties, but eventually settling for the latter. The durability of the material a monument is usually made of—marble, bronze, increasingly cast-iron, and now even concrete —highlights the contradictory nature of the undertaking even further, especially if a monument's subject is a great battle, a revolution, or a natural disaster—i.e., an event that took a great toll and was momentary. Yet even if the subject is an abstract ideal or the consequence of a momentous event, there is a detectable clash of time frames and notions of viability, not to mention textures. Perhaps given the material's aspiration for permanence, the best subject for a monument is indeed destruction. Zadkin's statue of bombed-out Rotterdam immediately comes to mind: its verticality is functional, since it points at the catastrophe's very source. Also, what could be more horizontal than the Netherlands? And it occurs to one that the monument owes its genealogy to great planes, to the idea of something being seen from afar—whether in a spatial or a temporal sense. That it is of nomadic origin, for at least in a temporal sense we are all nomads. A man as aware of the futility of all human endeavor as our philosopher-king would be, of course, the first to object to bejng turned into a public statue. On the other hand, twenty years of what appears to have been practically nonstop frontier combat, taking him all over the place, effectively turned him into a nomad. Besides, here's his horse.
X
The Eternal City is a city of hills, though. Of seven of them, actually. Some are natural, some artificial, but negotiating them is an ordeal in any case, especially on foot and especially in summer, although the adjacent seasons' temperatures don't fall too far behind. Add to that the Emperor's rather precarious health; add to that its not getting any better with age. Hence, a horse. The monument sitting at the top of the Capitoline actually fills up the vacuum left by Marcus' actual mounted figure, which, some two thousand years ago, occupied that space quite frequently, not to say routinely. On the way to the Forum, as the saying goes. Actually, on his way from it. Were it not for Michelangelo's pedestal, the monument would be a footprint. Better yet, a hoofprint. The Romans, superstitious like all Italians, maintain that when the bronze Marcus hits the ground, the end of the world will occur. Whatever the origin of this superstition, it stands to reason if one bears in mind that Marcus' motto was Equanimity. The word suggests balance, composure under pressure, evenness of mental disposition; literally: equation of the animus, i.e., keeping the soul—and thus the world—in check. Give this formula of the Stoic posture a possible misspelling and you'll get the monument's definition: Equi- nimity. The horseman tilts, though, somewhat, as if leaning toward his subjects, and his hand is stretched out in a gesture that is a cross between a greeting and a blessing. So much so that for a while some insisted that this was not Marcus Aurelius but Constantine, who converted Rome to Christianity. For that, however, the horseman's face is too serene, too free of zeal or ardor, too uninvolved. It is the face of detachment, not of love—and detachment is precisely what Christianity never could manage. No, this is no Constantine, and no Christian. The face is devoid of any sentiment; it is a postscript to passions, and the lowered corners ofthe mouth bespeak the lack of illusion. Had there been a smile, you could think perhaps of the Buddha; but the Stoics knew too much about physics to toy with the finality of human existence in any fashion. The face shines with the bronze's original gold, but the hair and the beard have oxidized and turned green, the way one turns gray. All thought aspires to the condition of metal; and the bronze denies you any entry, including interpretation or touch. What you've got here, then, is detachment per se. And out ofthis detachment the Emperor leans toward you slightly, extending his right hand either to greet you or to bless you—which is to say, acknowledge your presence. For where he is, there is no you, and vice versa. The left hand theoretically holds the reins, which are either missing now or were never there in the first place: a horse would obey this rider no matter what.
Especially if it represented Nature. For he represents Reason. The face is clearly of the Antonine dynasty, though he wasn't born into it but adopted. The hair, the beard, the somewhat bulging eyes and slightly apoplectic posture are those of his stepfather turned father-in-law and his very own son. Small wonder that it is so hard to tell the three of them apart among the Ostia marbles. But, as we know nowadays, a period's fashion may easily beat the genes. Remember the Beatles. Besides, he revered Antoninus Pius enough to emulate him in a variety of ways; his appearance could be simply that attitude's spin-off. Also, the sculptor, being a contemporary, might have wished to convey the sense ofcontinuum perceived by the historians of the stepfather's and the stepson's reigns:_a sense that Marcus himself, needless to say, sought to create. Or else the sculptor just tried to produce a generic portrait of the era, of the perfect ruler, and what we've got here is the fusion of the two best emperors the realm had had since the murder of Domitian—the way he did the horse, whose identity we don't ponder. In all probability, however, this is the author of the Meditations himself: the face and the torso slightly tilted toward his subjects fit extremely well the text of that melancholy book, which itselfleans somewhat toward the reality of human existence, in the attitude not so much of a judge as of an umpire. In this sense this monument is a statue to a statue: it's hard to picture a Stoic in motion.
XI
The Eternal City resembles a gigantic old brain that long ago gave up any interest in the world—it being too graspable a proposition—and settled for its own crevasses and folds. Negotiating their narrows, where even a thought about yourself is too cumbersome, or their expanses, where the concept of the universe itself appears puny, you feel like a worn-out needle shuffling the grooves of a vast record—to the center and back—extracting with your soles the tune that the days of yore hum to the present. This is the real His Master's Voice for you, and it turns your heart into a dog. History is not a discipline but something that is not yours—which is the main definition of beauty. Hence, the sentiment, for it is not going to love you back. It is a one-way affair, and you recognize its platonic nature in this city instantly. The closer you get to the object of your desire, the more marble or bronze it gets, as the natives' fabled profiles scatter around like animated coins escaped from some broken terra-cotta jar. It is as though here time puts, between bedsheets and mattress, its own carbon paper—since time mints as much as it types. The moment you leave the Bolivar or the equally smelly yet cheaper Nerva, you hit Foro Trajano with its triumphant column tightly wrapped in conquered Dacians and soaring like a mast above the marble ice floe of broken pillars, capitals, and cornices. Now this is the domain ofstray cats, reduced lions in this city of reduced Christians. The huge white slabs and blocks are too unwieldy and random to arrange them in a semblance of order or to drag them away. They are left here to absorb the sun, or to represent "antiquity." In a sense they do; their ill-matching shapes are a democracy, this place is still a forum. And on his way from it, just across the road, beyond pines and cypresses, atop the Capitoline Hill, stands the man who made the fusion of republic and imperial rule probable. He has no company: virtue, like a malady, alienates. For a split second, it is still a.d. 176 or thereabouts, and the brain ponders the world.