skepticlawyer

I wrote this piece while I was living in Italy, some years ago now. It was originally an experiment in Italian composition, to see if I could sustain a piece of complex prose in a foreign language. It got rather baroque in spots - the sort of thing you can carry off in Italian and Spanish, but do it in English and people go ewww, overwritten.

Forgotten soon after completion, I came across it again while going through my papers during a chuck-out session a few months later. Figuring that it shouldn’t just be abandoned to its fate, I translated it back into English and finished up with a very unusual piece of writing - nothing like my typical style at all. I’m not even sure whether it should be called fiction or non-fiction, or even magic realism. Anyway, for those interested in my recent burst of summer litblogging, Other Places is over the fold.

One: Meditiation on a Building

I write a card to my cousin Jim from one of the upper tiers of the colosseum. “I’m actually writing this card from within the colosseum (up in the ‘gods’) - doesn’t that sound like a breathless newsreel intro?” I say. I’m trying to be funny-serious, but it doesn’t work. “Have been feeling in a meditative mood” I continue. “Mel and I have had a long talk about bloodthirsty entertainments without resolving much”.

Behind me, two boys decide to use the perfect ellipse of the second tier to race in, like cyclists in a pursuit, in opposite directions. They crouch back-to-back, eyes front. They’re part of a big group of Polish tourists. Everybody in Rome seems to be Polish today. I keep forgetting the Pope’s a Pole. They sprint, arms pumping, cheeks puffed out. The rest of the tour cheers them on. For an instant, the cheers of the tourists and the strained faces of the two boys capture some of the competitive spirit of this place.

“We’ve watched kids chattering and skylarking between the columns, and listened to tour guides burble in a dozen languages,” I tell Jim. The sprinting boys are nearly opposite one another now, and everyone - even the non-Poles - watches. One ginger-haired, slight and quick, one darker, heavier, broad-shouldered. I see the dark one up close because I have to dodge out of his way as he thumps past. The cheering is unintelligible to me and so has a certain animal energy to it absent in my native language. “It’s a beautiful building,” I write, “and despite the fact that my favourite classical scholar (Michael Grant) says it is ‘replete with a potent, ineradicable impression of evil’ I can’t see it. The day is too pleasant, the sun too warm.”

Writers are always writing about the colosseum. Dickens. Lawrence. Byron. Goethe. Stendhal. Nietzsche. It is at once described and inscribed. It is a site in the file conveniently marked “human cruelty”. Along with the Holy Inquisition, Stalin’s purges, the Holocaust. We discuss it - always in measured, condemnatory tones - to keep its implications at a distance. “The two most quantitatively destructive institutions in human history,” Michael Grant also says, “are Nazism and the Roman games.”

Dickens sees “the ghost of old Rome, wicked, wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod. It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight conceivable. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic colosseum, full and running over with the lustiest life, have moved one’s heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin. God be thanked: a ruin!”

In AD 107 Trajan celebrated his victories in Dacia (modern Romania) with games lasting four months. Among other things, he sent 10,000 wild animals and 10,000 gladiators into the arena. Trajan was one of the good emperors. Byron’s Childe Harold imagines it thus:

The arena swims around him - he is gone,
Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won.
He heard it, but he heeded not - his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away;
He recked not of the life he lost nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,
There were his young barbarians all at play,
There was their Dacian mother - he, their sire,
Butchered to make a Roman holiday.

I sit on a slab of concrete warmed by the sun and stretch my legs out in front. I watch the two boys, red-faced now, resolutely running towards each other, the dark one just in front. Cheers boom up through the stands and roll under and over the arches. Everyone applauds as they finish and bend over, arms hanging down straight.

No creative writer makes the dead stones speak: shame on my profession. Not Dickens. Not Byron. Not Lawrence. It’s the classicists who animate the past. Who tell you that the spectators yelled out the Latin equivalent of ‘ave a go ya mug’ and ‘keep yer bloody hands off our flies, Jardine.’ Who tell you that they sang, and formed factions, and threw food and alcohol at each other. Here we go, Here we go, Here we go. Who tell you that in AD 59 there was a riot in the Pompeian amphitheatre between the Pompeians and the Nocerans. Riot proof fences pushed over, stands set on fire, bottles landing on the paddock at the rate of a couple of hundred a minute, numerous deaths. The consuls closed the amphitheatre for ten years, arrested the hooligans, expelled the games’ organiser from the senate. I think of Hillsborough, all those faces pushed against the wire. Of the whole wing held in readiness at Wormwood Scrubs just for Euro ‘96. Just in case.

I’ve tried hard to rationalise the Romans, who are in many ways the cornerstone - or at least the retaining wall - of Western Civilisation. Witty rationalisations, I like to think. The approach to the colosseum from the forum’s a bit like the run into the MCG, I’ve said. I’m sure the Romans would have loved messrs Ettinghausen and Ablett, I say. Can’t you just see ‘The High Mark’ cast in bronze?

But I can’t sustain it. Their likes are too bloodthirsty, too frighteningly close to some of our own. The Roman poet Ovid advises young blades on the lookout for the girlfriend of their dreams to knock on her door and ask to borrow a program for the day’s games (yes, they even had those). From there, Ovid thinks, a date is definitely on the cards. I transfer his picture-show image, see a couple of teenagers trooping off hand-in-hand down the road to the amphitheatre. And am revolted. Or am I? History, despite some people’s wishes to the contrary, forgives everything. Two more boys are preparing to sprint around the tier. A group of Americans has joined the Poles. The crowd cheers once more.

Two: blindness & sight

The intersecting other place of this recollection is the land of Italy, which in schoolbooks they tell you is shaped like a boot. With the island of Sicily at the toe. The Sicilians say this is a metaphorical kick in the arse. I’m not sure what they mean. Who is kicking whom?

We visit a Roman villa in central Sicily where the floor is carpeted with glittering mosaics; exuberant, sensual, cruel. A man and a woman fornicate against a piece of statuary. Children play at being charioteers. Women in bikinis (no, there is nothing new under the sun) work out with dumbbells and medicine balls. We’re here in the middle of Italy’s school excursion week and the villa is full of chattering schoolchildren. They are easy to avoid and we have the place to ourselves. They titter as children will at the lust and the violence, all graphically endowed with passion and blood. In one room cupids pose as gladiators, tridents and swords clutched in chubby hands. The fineness of the execution is extraordinary. I think of various tradie friends and begin to appreciate the man-hours in this floor.

In the history of religion there is this poignant story. A young woman from a wealthy, dissolute Roman family converts to Christianity and takes vows of poverty and chastity. She is shunned by her mother and step-father, her siblings and step-siblings. (The Romans, like us, have complicated families full of ‘exes’, reforming, coalescing, bifurcating). The emperor Diocletian issues an edict demanding an oath of loyalty to the state. To be sworn before Jove and the Great Mother. The girl refuses to swear. But this is easy, her mother says. Look, life is short. Enjoy it. Look at the handsome boy who wants to give you pleasure. Think of the sun, the moon, the stars. The girl says, no.