To kick off "Meridians and Meditations", here's a relic from the pre-internet days: a travel piece I published in The New York Times on March 14, 1993.
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| Plaster reconstruction of the area around the Theater of Pompey (lower left). The chamber where Caesar probably fell is marked. |
My aim was not to praise
Caesar, or even to bury him. I was simply attempting to remedy the cultural
overload of Italian travel by following the advice of the 19th
century English poet and traveler W.S. Landor. According to this authority,
there are really only two sights most worth seeing in all of Italy. The first
is the so-called Cypress of Soma, near the site where Hannibal and Scipio
Africanus first met in battle. The other is a statue of Pompey the Great “at
the base of which fell Caesar.” Now my travels would, regrettably, take me
nowhere near the celebrated tree (or more plausibly, stump). But my days in
Rome would, I thought, surely afford me an opportunity to pay homage to
Pompey’s statue. And what could be more thrilling than finding some clue to
antiquity’s most celebrated murder, some remnant of that desperate, flailing
instant when the conspirators Brutus, Cassius, Casca et al. ended a life of
supremely calculated ambition?
My first stop was the Forum. I assumed that since the
stabbing was done by senators, and the senatorial Curia was on the Forum,
Caesar must have been done in there.
No dice. Pompey was nowhere to be seen. Moreover, there
weren’t many flesh-and-blood Romans there either. Instead of a descendant of
that imperial race, I encountered with an osteopathologist from New York
strolling through the remains of the Basilica Giulia. He liked to talk shop,
too. Among the tumbled stones ringed with thirsting weeds, we paused, stood,
and wondered how to keep old age from ravaging our hipbones.
We were momentarily silenced before the remains of the
Temple of the Deified Julius Caesar, contemplating a plaque that evoked a wild
night of post-assassination pandemonium—a pyre built of chairs and tables, a
crowd crazed with grief, a spontaneous apotheosis hailed before the cinders had
cooled. Back then, this spot was the center of the known civilized earth, and
to be cremated in sight of such sacred precincts was an unprecedented honor.
“It all happened right here,” the bone doctor breathed, “On this spot, the Ides
of March, the guys with the knives, the lending of the ears, the whole show…”
Or did it?
I asked around. The question of where Caesar was
murdered, alas, inspired many a creative answer among the Italians. Some
insisted it all happened in the Forum. Others swore by the crest of the
Capitoline. My confusion was finally relieved by some formal research, which
established that Caesar met his end in the Portico of the Theater of Pompey, on
the Campus Martius, and that this was where Landor’s Pompey statue also must
have stood. The fact that the one-time “field of Mars” is now a
spaghetti-tangle of one-lane streets, boutiques, trattorias and tenements did
not bode well for my quest.
Sinking, I placed my faith in old Herr Baedeker, with his
Victorian ideal of monomaniacal accuracy that demands that every cypress, every
cenotaph, every carcass of a fallen idol by faithfully recorded on his maps.
Sure enough, according to my copy of the Guide
to Italy from the Alps to Naples, 2nd edition, 1909, south of
the modern Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II, near the Campo dei Fiori, there rose in
55 BC a three-storied semi-circular edifice. This was the city’s first stone
theater, commissioned by Pompey after his travels in the East convinced him
that Rome deserved an establishment as impressive as the ones he had seen in
Greece.
Though much of the superstructure of the theater is long
gone, some compensation comes in the form of Da Pancrazio, a gastronomic landmark
set in its basement. Examining the place over fine pasta with wild
mushrooms and artichokes, I could glean morsels
of history around the re-dressed bones of the arcaded entranceway, the arched
and vaulted vestibules that once opened to more than 27,000 seats. The
intermission before my tiramisu was an opportunity to peruse the many
assassination-related drawings, plaster casts and clippings adorning the walls.
Still, the good stuff happened in the Portico, not the
theater. The former was a colonnaded complex adjoining the back of the stage.
Its purpose was pure convenience—to give senators and other important
personages a “convention center” close by the centers of trade and amusement. It was there—not the Curia on the Forum—that
Caesar insisted on going despite the warnings of soothsayers and his own wife.
It was there that he was quickly surrounded by assailants and, upon the first
blow, cried “But this is violence!” It was there, twenty-three cuts later, that
he collapsed at the feet of the Pompey, the one-time rival he had defeated on
his way to supreme—but short-lived—dictatorship.
Unfortunately, “there” was no longer there; it is buried
under 2,000 years of subsequent development. According to the staff at Da
Pancrazio, Pompey resides these days in the nearby Palazzo Spada.
The trail, I hoped, was getting warmer.
The Palazzo was a building of modest grace, housing the
offices of the Italian Consiglio di Stato and a minor art gallery. A guard
informed me that "Pompeo" had been removed to one of the official
state offices. I was packed off with an address to which to mail a written
request to see it.
As I was only going to be in Rome for two more days,
waiting for a letter to be swallowed, digested and spat back at me by the
Italian bureaucracy would probably take too long. Instead, I drafted a letter
with the help of Maria Pia, my endlessly patient hostess at the Albergo
Albruzzi, and hand-delivered it to the Palazzo Spada that afternoon. As my
request filtered upstairs, I was invited to cool my heels in the security
police squad room. A guard sat across from me, swabbing the back of his neck
with a handkerchief, watching me with a combined air of professional vigilance
and nativist dismay at tourists.
Forty minutes later, I was collected by a dark-eyed young
woman in blue jeans. I was made to understand that I should follow this denim
Beatrice to the next circle of my Divine Comedy. Soon I was introduced to the
Consiglio di Stato's Head of Security--a bald fellow in a crumpled sports
jacket, seated a wide desk of burled wood. He was, when I arrived, chatting on
one of a half-dozen telephones he kept on a shelf behind a curtain.
More waiting. This, I judged, was the last test. The
Sports Jacket finally turned his attention my way. He glanced at me, Maria
Pia's letter, and at me again with an unstated pity for "mad dogs and
Englishmen" After a brief exchange
of words with my Beatrice, he evidently judged on the basis of sight that I was
not a terrorist, and initialed my request to see Pompey. Of course, it was
impossible for this visit to be effected immediately--I
would have to come back. "When?" I wondered. "Whenever you
wish."
I set my term of self-banishment at two hours.
Humbly returning, I discovered my guide would be none
other than the suspicious neck-swabber who had minded me earlier. He trundled
on well ahead of me, making abundantly clear the magnitude of the favor he was
doing me.
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| Pompey--maybe |
If any mere statue could be worth this trouble, it was
the nude colossus in pink marble ringed by the seats of the legislative
chamber, posed before a trompe-l'oeil architectural mural. One arm was
concealed in swirls of drapery, ending in a massive hand clutching an orb; the
other extended outward in a gesture that could have suggested the brilliance of
his all-subsuming authority...or maybe just a grab for power.
Was this, in fact, the same marble Pompey that was
Caesar's last vision on earth--a posthumous avenger in stone, stretching forth
an arm in triumph over his rival's dying body? There's no visible inscription,
no way to be sure. The Palazzo's statue may not be of Pompey at all, but
Agrippa (perhaps) or merely some allegorical figure (more likely).
With the guard shifting his feet impatiently, in danger
of sweating, there was no time for such niceties. For my trouble, this will
always be Pompey--not because I loved dry facts less, but because I liked a
plausible romance more. Even within this strong-room of secular power, I felt
W.S. Landor cast his eyes down upon me from his poetical promontory--and smile.
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| Block marks the spot |
Addendum: On a return trip to Rome eighteen years
later, I encountered the spot most well-informed Romans believe Caesar was
assassinated. It's a spot at the edge of the Largo di Torre Argentina, a
complex of four Republican-era temples (and current cat shelter) that abutted the eastern wall of the Portico of Pompey. The chamber where the Senators gathered and stabbed no longer stands, but the alleged spot of the assassination is marked with a block of marble (see photo).
© Nicholas Nicastro, 2012
