Buried Treasure

One of the vies from inside The Forum

   Here's how Mary Beard opened her rather critical NY Review of Books review of an atlas of Rome: The ancient Roman Forum is one of the most frustrating tourist sites in the world.  This is the spot where some of the most famous events in Western history took place and some of the most consequential decisions were made.  It is where the Roman Senate debated how to respond to the threat of Hannibal, where Marcus Tullius Cicero denounced would-be tyrants and radical revolutionaries, where Julius Caesar’s body was cremated after his assassination in 44 BC, and where Mark Antony delivered the original version of “Friends, Romans, countrymen.”  Yet what you now see has almost nothing to do with any of that.  The imposing “senate house,” preserved to more or less its full height thanks to its conversion into a church in the seventh century AD, has no connection with the place in which Cicero held forth in the first century BC; it was completely rebuilt almost five hundred years later.  The elegant circular temple of the goddess Vesta (where the Vestal Virgins kept the sacred flame of the city permanently alight) owes more to Mussolini’s “restorers” in the 1930s than to any ancient Roman builders or architects.  The ground surface is largely a confusing mass of rubble and masonry, interspersed with equally confusing holes left by archaeologists digging down in search of the structures, shrines, and burials that formed the first layers of human occupation in the city of Rome, as far back as the eighth century BC.  Even the trained eye finds it hard to work out how any of this fits together, or what the place would have looked like at any particular period of antiquity.  Most visitors walk through the Forum baffled. Cicero would not have recognized it.  What is left of the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill, which rises above the Forum, is hardly less frustrating for the modern visitor—and endlessly debated among specialists.  For centuries after the end of the Republic, this vast complex of buildings was the hub of Rome’s empire, the main residence of its emperor, and luxuriously equipped to match. Contemporary poets --whose talent for exaggeration probably did not extend to outright invention-- described the precious colored marbles imported from all over the Mediterranean lining its walls, the hundreds of columns (enough to support the whole world if Atlas should decide to take a break), and the enormous height of the building, which dwarfed even the pyramids of Egypt.  

   My, my.  For the untrained eye such as myself, I found myself enthralled with The Forum, far more than I found the Colosseum or even the Trevi Fountains.   Walking through the area emblazoned with their brief descriptive signs of the history of each site (such signs seemed rare throughout many of the attractions in Rome), my wife and I could visualize what must have once been a thriving marketplace of plebeians and politicians, towering pillars and fabulous carvings atop grand buildings (although we would have never imagined that some of those buildings were taller than the pyramids of Egypt).  Also buried in the cordoned-off rubble were polished blocks of marble, huge blocks that still gleamed despite what must have been hundreds of thousands of feet walking over them day after day at one point.  Ah, it was as if we were visualizing Rome in its splendor, even the chariot stadium, while smaller than we thought, seeming to roar in its intensity.  But then these were impressions coming to uneducated eyes, the eyes of us as tourists who really knew little about what we were seeing, newcomers trying to match the pieces of rubble we were seeing with what might only be a recreated HBO version of Rome or something straight out of a Hollywood movie (Ben Hur, anyone?).

One of the many signs throughout The Forum

    This all happened years ago when my wife and I visited Rome as part of a treat to ourselves, a cruise on the Mediterranean (our first ever cruise), our older bodies as excited about stepping off the ship each morning (another land we've only read about!) as little kids would likely be when visiting the land of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Orlando or gazing at the Avatar forest at Disney World (we've only read about those).  But it also made me wonder if such imaginings of that which once was could also be extended to people's lives, the biographies one reads in books as well as the lives of one's own distant aunts or uncles (or maybe even parents).  Once gone and buried amidst our own rubble will our lives be re-imagined as they must, re-created by someone else in their memories, accurate or not?  Even the most studied or critical historian, as Mary Beard writes, can make mistakes just with a mix up of translations or with a simple inaccuracy of a time period.  Imagine trying to piece together what your aging aunt or uncle (or parent) encountered in life, from being in a war to getting through hard economic times, perhaps a bar fight or two with a few regrets thrown in for good measure.  But does getting it right or wrong in that imagining of their lives make it any less enjoyable?  If we had passed by the Forum as others did (it being just a few hundred yards away from the Colosseum and looking deceptively like a park), we would have missed a chunk of history and a bigger chunk of memories to take home with us.  Perhaps my own distant uncle with his laugh and his happy-go-lucky style was to be my own personal Forum, an uncle whom I had chosen to pass by, his life a blur to me made up of happy blips and blurbs but an uncle whose life I really didn't know.

    Life is like that so often, our ages catching up with us far quicker than expected and pushing our memories harder and harder as if to make up for it, all while realizing that our minds will be working like outdated hard drives that are shutting down unexpectedly and needing to reboot to a restore point.  Things may be going into the cloud now, only the cloud for our minds seems more and more like a real cloud that is little more than vapor and is dissipating as the weather heats up. Civilizations though, just as with lives, come and go; and if enough time passes they get buried and lost perhaps to be revealed at a much later date, or then again perhaps never to be discovered...Angkor Wat, Mayan temples, each bearing small protrusions that now are revealing massive networks of roads and walkways that marked once-thriving cities.  But all of this is happening today in Alaska.  In an article from National Geographic, the town of Nunalleq is discovering artifacts from ages ago, ancestral clues long buried in the ice and only now making their way to the surface as the weather warms.  And in a different issue, the Galapagos Islands (an archipelago of 100 outcroppings but just 13 recognized islands which are home to over 25,000 people but are visited by nearly 10 times that number of tourists) is facing the opposite, the threat of its history being buried as the ocean waters rise.  It's The Forum all over, lands and civilizations, peoples and histories being covered and re-covered, lost and then found.

    In the grand scheme of things, our lives are The Forum.  For each of us, there was something grand in our years, something to be celebrated as greatly and as ceremoniously as any Roman emperor's display.  Life may not have been easy, or on the other hand it may have been too easy.  But one thing is certain, it was and is short.  And just as with the towering pillars that once graced this marketplace called The Forum, we all will likely struggle to be remembered, our bones proving nowhere near as strong as the memories we hope to broadcast.   An interesting interview series is ongoing, that of financier and philanthropist David Rubenstein interviewing world leaders of all sorts, from Yo-Yo Ma to Nike's Phil Knight.  But when he interviewed Bill Gates, he asked what he --as someone who for 20 years was dubbed the richest man in the world-- would want to be remembered for, and found the answer rather surprising.  His foundation helping to end malaria and other third world diseases or the foundation's work helping to spread education?  That would be a great thing, he replied.  But most of all he thought that being remembered as a good father would be all that he wanted.  Warren Buffet was much the same.  Perhaps as much as we try to build something grandiose, even in our lives, it ends up being the simple things that matter most.  A good parent, a good son...probably even a good uncle.