Over the past week, I’ve read a variety of Latin literature with my ‘Iuniores’ students at the Paideia Institute here in Rome. We’ve looked at Republican history from Livy, Imperial poetry from Ovid, late classical etymologies from Festus, early Christian theology from Augustine, and Renaissance Humanism from Poggio Bracciolini. And that’s not even half of it. I’m finding it just as exciting as the students to read these texts, some familiar, others not. Together, we all realize and savor how these authors are writing about the very places and monuments before us. All these texts, from Livy to Poggio, become grounded, immediate, and tactile.
I’ve particularly enjoyed reading about the life cycle of Rome with my students. On our first day, we read a couple lines of Propertius, who wrote around the time of the rise of the Empire (the end of the first century BC to the beginning of the second century AD). Here’s the Latin:
hoc, quodcumque uides, hospes, qua maxima Roma est,
ante Phrygem Aenean collis et herba fuit;
Or in English:
This, visitor, whatever you see, where greatest Rome exists, was a hill and grass before Phrygian Aeneas.
Ovid, who was writing around the same time, provides a similar sentiment in his Fasti, a poem about the Roman Calendar:
Hic, ubi nunc Roma est, orbis caput, arbor et herbae
et paucae pecudes et casa rara fuit.
Or:
Here, where Rome now is, the head of the world, was a tree, grasses, a few sheep, and an occasional hut.
These two authors tell us about the powerful Roman state that arose from humble, rural beginnings.
But Rome wasn’t always so prosperous. It suffered wars, plagues, famines, civil unrest, and corruption. Its history, as much as it is a history of humanity’s prosperity, is also a history of humanity’s decline. And so Poggio Bracciolini, writing in the fifteenth century among confractas columnas (“shattered columns”), tells us that his Rome was far different from that of Ovid and Propertius:
Hic Antonius cum aliquantum huc illuc oculos circumtulisset, suspirans stupentique similis: “O quantum,” inquit, “Poggi haec Capitolia ab illis distant, quae noster Maro cecinit: ‘Aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis.’
Or:
Here, after Antonius had cast his eyes here and there for a while, he sighed and like a stupefied man said, “How much, Poggio, these places on the Capitoline differ from those which our Vergil sang of: ‘Now they are golden, which once long ago where rough with untamed briars.’
For Poggio and Antonius, Rome’s glory was little more than a memory, literally in ruins. The Capitoline Hill, of course, didn’t stay in that state of disrepair forever:
Reading these varied authors in the very locations they describe helps us — students and teachers alike — to dig down into the Roman cityscape and to traverse the timeline of this Eternal City. We see the grasses of its beginnings, the monuments of its ascent. Its wreckage and its rebirth.
Pictures courtesy of the Paideia Institute
