XVII
I saw him for the last time a few years ago, on a wet winter night, in the company of a stray Dalmatian. I was returning by taxi to my hotel after one of the most disastrous evenings in my entire life. The next morning I was leaving Rome for the States. I was drunk. The traffic moved with the speed one wishes for one's funeral. At the foot of the Capitol I asked the driver to stop, paid, and got out of the car. The hotel was not far away and I guess I intended to continue on foot; instead, I climbed the hill. It was raining, not terribly hard but enough to turn the floodlights of the square—nay! trapeze—into fizzing-off Alka-Seltzer pellets. I hid myself under the conservatory's arcade and looked around. The square was absolutely empty and the rain was taking a crash course in geometry. Presently I discovered I was not alone: a middle-sized Dalmatian appeared out of nowhere and quietly sat down a couple offeet away. Its sudden presence was so oddly comforting that momentarily I felt like offering it one of my cigarettes. I guess this had to do with the pattern of its spots; the dog's hide was the only place in the whole piazza free ofhuman intervention. For a while we both stared at the horseman's statue. "The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now molds the figure of a horse, then melting this down uses the material for a tree, next for a man, next for something else; and each of these things subsists for a very short time. Yet it is no hardship for a box to be broken up, as it was none for it to be nailed together." This is what a boy memorized at the age of fifteen and remembered thirty-five years later. Still, this horse didn't melt down, nor did this man. Apparently the universal nature was satisfied with this version of its substance and cast it in bronze. And suddenly—presumably because of the rain and the rhythmic pattern of Michelangelo's pilasters and arches—all got blurred, and against that blur, the shining statue, devoid of any geometry, seemed to be moving. Not at great speed, and not out of this place; but enough for the Dalmatian to leave my side and follow the bronze progress.
XVIII
As absorbing as Roman antiquity appears to be, perhaps we should be a bit more careful with our retrospective proclivity. What if man-made chronology is but a self-fulfilling fallacy, a means of obscuring the backwardness of one's own intelligence? What if it's just a way of justifying the snail's pace of the species' evolution? And what if the very notion of such evolution is a lie? Ultimately, what if this good old sense of history is just the dormant majority's self-defense against the alert minority? What if our concept of antiquity, for example, is but the switching off of an alarm clock? Let's take this horseman and his book. To begin with, Meditations wasn't written in the second century A. D., if only because its author wasn't going by the Christian calendar. In fact, the time of its composition is of no relevance, since its subject is precisely ethics. Unless, of course, humanity takes a special pride in having wasted fifteen centuries before Marcus' insights were reiterated by Spinoza. Maybe we are just better at counting than at thinking, or else we mistake the former for the latter? Why is it that we are always so interested in knowing when truth was uttered for the first time? Isn't this sort of archaeology in itself an indication that we are living a lie? In any case, if Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins. If only because we believe that ethics has the future. Well, perhaps our retrospective ability should indeed be reined in somewhat, lest it become all-consuming. For ifnothing else, ethics is the criterion ofthe present—perhaps the only one there is, since it turns every yesterday and tomorrow into now. It is precisely that sort of arrow that at every moment of its flight is immobile. Meditations is no existential manual and it wasn't written for posterity. Nor should we, for that matter, be interested in the identity of its author or promote him to the rank of philosopher-king: ethics is an equalizer; thus the author here is Everyman. His concept of duty cannot be attributed to his royal overdose of it, because he wasn't the only emperor around; neither can his resignation of the imperial origin, because one is able to empathize with it quite readily. Nor can we put it down to his philosophic training—and for the same reasons: there were too many philosophers apart from Marcus, and on the other hand, most of us are not Stoics. What if his sense of duty and his resignation were, in the first place, products of his individual temperament, of the melancholic disposition, ifone wants to be precise; combined perhaps with the man's aging? There are, after all, only four known humors; so at least the melancholies among us can take this book to heart and skip the bit about the historical perspective nobody possesses anyhow. As for the sanguinics, cholerics, and phleg- matics, they, too, perhaps should admit that the melancholic version of ethics is accommodating enough for them to marvel at its pedigree and chronology. Perhaps short of compulsory Stoic indoctrination, society may profit by making a detectable melancholic streak a prerequisite for anyone aspiring to rule it. To this extent, a democracy can afford what an empire could. And on top of that, one shouldn't call the Stoic acceptance of the perceptible reality resignation. Serenity would be more apt, given the ratio between man and the subjects of his attention, or—as the case may be—vice versa. A grain of sand can't resign itself to the desert; and perhaps what's ultimately good about melancholies is that they seldom get hysterical. By and large, they are quite reasonable, and, "what is reasonable," as Marcus once said, "is consequently social." Did he say this in Greek, to fit your idea of antiquity?
XIX
Of all Roman poets, Marcus knew best and preferred Seneca. Partly because Seneca, too, was of Spanish origin, sickly, and a great statesman; mainly, of course, because he was a Stoic. As for Catullus, Marcus would find him no doubt too hot and choleric. Ovid for him would be licentious and excessively ingenious, Virgil too heavy-handed and perhaps even servile, Propertius too obsessive and passionate. Horace? Horace would seem to be the most congenial author for Marcus, what with his equipoise and attachment to the Greek monody. Yet perhaps our Emperor thought him too quirky, or too diverse and unsteady as welclass="underline" in short, too much of a poet. In any case, there is almost no trace of Horace in Meditations, nor for that matter of the greatest among the Latins, Lucretius—another you would think a natural choice for Marcus. But then perhaps a Stoic didn't want to be depressed by an Epicurean. On the whole, Marcus seems to have been far more fluent in Greek literature, preferring dramatists and philosophers to poets of course, though snatches from Homer, Agathon, and Menander crop up in his book quite frequently. Come to think of it, if anything makes antiquity a coherent concept, it is the volume of its literature. The library of someone like Marcus would contain a hundred or so authors; another hundred perhaps would be hearsay, a rumor. Those were the good old days indeed: antiquity or no antiquity. And even that rumored writing would be limited to two languages: Greek and Latin. If you were he, if you were a Roman emperor, would you in the evening, to take your mind off your cares, read a Latin author if you had a choice? Even if he was Horace? No; too close for comfort. You'd pick up a Greek—because that's what you'd never be. Because a Greek, especially a philosopher, is in your eyes a more genuine item than yourself, since he knew no Latin. If only because of that, he was less a relativist than you, who consider yourself practically a mongrel. So if he were a Stoic, you must take heed. You even may go so far as to take up a stylus yourself. Otherwise you might not fit into someone's notion of antiquity.