“A delightful and immersive guide to the city of Rome and the philosophical tradition it embodies concerning the good life, or as we would say today, the meaning of life. Travelers seeking ancient wisdom among the city’s famous buildings and works of art could ask for no better companion.”
—Donald Robertson, author of
How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
a rotating gallery of images and insights related to Rome as a Guide to the Good Life
Grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Protestant Cemetery. The lines on it, from Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s Tempest, are the origin of the word “sea-change” to mean a metamorphosis. Unfortunately, this sea-change began when Shelley, just twenty-nine years old, drowned after his boat wrecked at sea. His washed-up body was identified by the book of Keats’s poems in his pocket. When the poet was cremated, his heart wouldn’t burn—perhaps because it had calcified due to a prior bout with tuberculosis. After a battle with Shelley’s friend Leigh Hunt, his wife, the great Mary Shelley, claimed the heart, wrapped it in silk, and carried it around with her for the rest of her life. COR CORDIUM means “heart of hearts.”
Caravaggio, Crucifixion of St. Peter (1601). Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo. In his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” W.H. Auden says, “About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters.”
Hagesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, Laocoön and His Sons (c. 40-20 BC), Vatican Museums. Pliny the Elder, who saw it in the palace of the emperor Titus, calls it “a work superior to any painting or bronze.” It’s reasonable to believe—though no one knows for sure—that this sculpture was based on Book II of the Aeneid and was made while Virgil’s poem was still in progress. Lost for centuries, it was unearthed in 1506 in a vineyard near Santa Maria Maggiore. Michelangelo was called when it was found. He immediately recognized it as the sculpture Pliny praised.
Bust of Cicero (c. first century BC), Capitoline Museums. Gustave Flaubert writes in a letter to La Sylphide, “The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that “black hole” is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of a pensive gaze. Just when the Gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.”
Swift philosophical musings and updates on what I’m fascinated with and working on.
