This Powerful Rhyme: A Helplessly Wandering Essay on a Willfully Meandering Poem

Notes: A version of this article appeared in John Tranter’s Journal of Poetics Research in early 2017,  written with the shock of November 2016 still fresh. Revising the piece after the perspective of the ensuing years, I’m struck by how little that shock has eased.

Except where otherwise noted, all translations in this article are mine. And, if relatively free, relatively accurate.

I. The Pen and the Sword

In our neo-Orwellian world, is it adage, cliche’, or just hypothesis to say “the pen is mightier than the sword”?  Does “the pen” equate with “the truth”? Or, since we’re talking about sword fights, aren’t the feints and parries of “alternative facts” every bit as much a weaponized pen as the sincerity of a straightforward lunge?

Yes, “the truth shall make you free”, but that’s a different proverb. The pen/sword saying is about prevailing, not escaping. The two maxims often cross paths, but they, just as often, diverge.  And isn’t “neo” just another kind of “retro”? A recurring theme in our current political dystopia is “Are we Rome yet?” If this rambling article has any thesis, it’s that these questions –including the Roman one – are territory worth exploring

Poetry and literature have been used to skewer, attack and advocate in every historical era. Even so, I think only those performances endure that rise past agit-prop to some level of vulnerable self-revelation. Juvenal, Petronius, Martial, Jonathan Swift, Pope, and Tom Wolfe all exaggerate in their different ways, but their distortions simultaneously unmask a deeper face. That said, isn’t the idea of language as weapon the very thing the greatest poets seem to want to escape? Consider the political cacophony of talk radio, cable news and partisan spin, then consider the timelessness of these lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65:

…How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days…

If one subscribes to Keat’s “Beauty is truth, truth, beauty…” Shakespeare’s question is even more to the point.

II. Beauty’s Plea

The pen/sword analogy is ancient. The exact English saying seems to date from an 1839 Bulwer-Lytton play about Cardinal Richelieu. But Wikipedia (that quickest, most suspect source) cites a 7th century B.C. Assyrian teaching: “The word is mightier than the sword.” And Euripides’, “the tongue is mightier than the blade.” Among other iterations, Napoleon Bonaparte’s observation that “four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets” puts a near contemporary turn on the phrase.

But there’s another ancient tradition of “the mighty word” that has nothing to do with weaponry and resists encapsulation in an adage. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 climaxes a meandering sequence that begins ten poems earlier with Sonnet 55’s opening statement:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme…

I’ll expand on Shakespeare later, but for now just want to note that the power of his black-inked rhyme isn’t set against adversarial bayonets but against an almost primordial human observation. One perhaps most concisely expressed in Camus’ “men die and they are not happy.”  It seems serendipitous that Camus voiced that sentiment in a play about Caligula, because the sources for Shakespeare’s poetic chutzpa here also date from Imperial Rome.

III. An ode to oneself, or an ode to odes?

But I’m running ahead of myself with Camus when I’m not even sure where I’m going. Humans die so they procreate, poets die so they write? Even if that’s the direction I want to take, I’d better get back to the beginning. And that origin is in two Latin poems generally cited as conscious models for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55.

The first is Horace’s Ode III, 30, the sign-off poem in his third book of Odes.

I’ve erected a monument to outlast bronze,
taller than the royal pyramids. Not raging
winds nor voracious rain or the incalculable years
racing in their flight, have the power to destroy it.
Because not all of me will die, a big piece will elude
my funeral. I’ll continue to thrive and be praised for
as long as the High Priest and Vestal silently mount
the Capitoline Steps. I’ll be recited on the banks
of the torrential Aufius which roars through the once
arid, rustic fields old Daunus ruled. Because I rose
from nothing much to be the first to master
Aeolian song in Italian breaths. Take pride my
muse Melpomene, you deserve the credit even as
you graciously wreathe my hair with Delphic laurel.

I’m sure Horace wasn’t the first poet to harbor a similar hope. But I’m starting with Horace because there’s almost an overt dialogue with Horace’s opening sentence in Shakespeare’s first seven words: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ of Princes…”

But then Shakespeare suddenly shifts to “…shall outlive this powerful rhyme…”. And regally sweeps Horace’s carefully arrayed images aside with a declaration as simple (and cryptic) as the logos of the John Gospel.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Horace is quite precise about why his work deserves its own ongoing life, but – at least the way I read him –still takes his glory tongue in cheek. And he’s careful to hedge his claim to personal mastery by acknowledging the muse’s mid-wife power.  But like a winning runner crossing the finish line, he still can’t hide his delight. Shakespeare’s version, on the other hand, remains somber throughout its fourteen lines. His emphasis is wholly on the living rhyme, not the skill of the rhymer.

Rightly so, because these aren’t narcissistic, look at me poems.  Their claim to life rests, not in the poet, but in the breathing, seemingly self-creating lines the poet almost magically conjures. Horace’s image of the silently ascending high priest and vestal seems to intentionally infer a parallel numinosity of art.  A Shakespearean model is, of course, Prospero in The Tempest. Poets, like magicians and priests, may be privy to spells and incantations,  but those rituals exist only to invoke powers with a life of their own.

IV: Another Model

As a parallel Latin source for Sonnet 55, commenters also like to cite from Horace’s half-generation contemporary, Ovid’s “envoi” to the Metamorphoses.

It begins:

Now my work is done, which neither the wrath
of Jove, nor fire, nor sword or the corrosive teeth
of old age have any power to destroy….

This is the short poem that ends the 15 volume magnum opus one recent edition styles as “the history of everything”. A compendium of ancient divinity myths, philosophy and legend, sardonically retold by an urbane sophisticate whose years straddle the BCE/ CE , republican/imperial divide. A sort of profane Summa Theologica that remains our most fertile aesthetic entree to the polytheist Classical world.

In Metamorphoses,  Ovid seems to create the future by redefining the past. The Evangelists transformed discarnate Hebrew monotheism into an incarnation dynamic that could take root in an anthropomorphic Graeco-Roman world.  I think Ovid, similarly,transforms polytheist mythos in Metamorphoses to the point, where, after a relative dozen or so generations, a newly monotheist Roman culture would access that ancestral canon primarily through Ovid rather than his myriad sources.

In that sense, Metamorphoses allows the old gods to continue precisely because Ovid’s irreverence appropriates their divinity to secular use. The Mets. are neither Christian nor monotheist, but rather seem to tap a brash enduring humanism inherent in the exhaustion of the ancient Pantheon. And it’s the outrageous unbelievability of Ovid’s tales that makes them so realistically telling.

As with Horace and Shakespeare it’s almost impossible to overstate the enduring vitality of Ovid’s work. Or to doubt Shakespeare wasn’t familiar with the above “Envoi” rendered in his contemporary, William Golding’s, translation:

Now have I brought a work to end which neither Jove’s fierce wrath,
Nor sword, nor fire, or freating age with all the force it hath
Are able to abolish quite. Let come that fatal hour
Which (saving of this brittle flesh) hath over me no power,
And at his pleasure make an end of my uncertain time.
Yet shall the better part of me assured be to climb
Aloft above the starry sky. And all the world shall never
Be able for to quench my name. For look how far so ever
The Roman Empire by the right of conquest shall extend,
So far shall all folk read this work. And time without all end
(If Poets as by prophesy about the truth may aim)
My life shall everlastingly be lengthened still by fame.

It’s also easy to catch echoes of Horace’s III, 30 in Ovid. And interesting that neither poet expected (or seemed to want) to outlive the Roman Empire. Perhaps the other side of that equation is that so long as Horace and Ovid have readers, their ancient Rome endures.

Ovid interjects another pernicious force: Iovis ira …  the wrath of god.  Given the array of whimsical divine cruelties the Mets. portray, this may be no surprise. When a human happens upon a god in Ovid’s forests, it’s usually that human’s unluckiest day.

Even so, Ovid hopes to be taken into the heavens above the stars, where he earlier tells us the gods have their “villas along the milky way”. An image reminiscent of the apotheosis of Julius Caesar which Ovid effusively described a few stanzas earlier, just before wrapping up his masterwork.

Of course, things quickly and famously turned to crap for Ovid.  Augustus (whose own anticipated apotheosis Ovid also dutifully incorporated) banished him to a remote illiterate village to endure the rest of his lonely days at the far frontier of the sprawling empire. Everyone speculates. No one really knows why. Ovid, himself, blamed it on “a poem and a mistake”.

One (albeit rarely offered, minority) opinion is that his inserting the story of the mythical republican era praetor, Cipus,  just before segueing to his cloying deification of the two Julian dynasts may have incurred the emperor’s ire.

As Ovid relates it, Cipus, returning from a journey finds horns have magically grown from his head. He consults the priests for the meaning of this omen and is confronted with an irrefutable prophecy: Upon entering the City the people would crown him King of Rome to rule peacefully and well to the end of his days.

Cipus’ response was to assemble the populace and Senate outside the City and have himself formally banished, lest the Republic be lost . “May the gods keep such a fate from me. Better to live in exile, than have the Capitol see me crowned.”

Augustus never tolerated a hint of recognition that Rome was now a republic in name only. While he quietly amassed all meaningful power over some 40 years.  Doesn’t this just point up the sensitivity of the officially unspoken question of just what that 1st century neologism, princeps (civitatis) implied? Under law all citizens were equal, but it was Augustus, princeps (that most equal of equals) who packed Ovid off to bitter solitude. Napoleon’s newspaper/bayonet metaphor notwithstanding, the affair is certainly no example of a poet’s pen being mightier than the cold steel that enforces a First Citizen’s whim.

But two thousand years later, when we anxiously ask “Are we Rome yet?”, it’s not Augustus who makes us shudder. He was, as Cipus would have been in Ovid’s story, an enlightened autocrat who managed the State ably and wisely. He nurtured the arts and the “golden age” of Latin poetry. He brought peace and prosperity to Rome’s far flung realm. The political “Rome” that frightens and fascinates us is rather that of his immediate descendants. And that perhaps is the implicit point of the Cipus parable. In our era the “constitutional monarchy” represents a stable evolution. Conversely, even if it begins with the most enlightened of autocrats an “autocratic republic” seems ultimately a contradiction, a devolutionary dynamic. A mere 23 years after Augustus’ carefully circumspect reign, Caligula sidled into power and just for fun, enrolled his horse in the Senate.

V. A Slight Detour to the Opposite Side of the Road

I’d planned to return to Shakespeare at this point, with another nuance between Shakespeare’s “immortal word” poems and those of his Latin forebears. But Ovid’s sad, last, mortal years seem to have diverted me into one of those dreamlike Ovidian woods where all plans keep changing. What about Ovid’s other, somewhat older, contemporary Virgil? Who notably renounced his claim to immortality by leaving death bed instructions that his not quite finished Aeneid be burnt. Augustus, who’d commissioned the work as a national epic of Homeric proportions, negated that will.

Why Virgil wanted his masterpiece destroyed, no one but Virgil really knows. Some speculate he perceived metrical imperfections. But it served as a handbook of elegance for still-living Latin for a thousand years after his death. It also became a defining text of Rome’s burgeoning Imperial culture that didn’t need to ask Virgil’s permission to survive. Perhaps that  jingoism had something to do with Virgil’s futile deathbed contrition? Homer’s Iliad, for which the Aeneid becomes a kind of Trojan/Roman rebirth sequel, is a cornerstone of world literature written in Greek. It’s decidedly not a patriotic Greek national epic. It’s a stretch to idly speculate, but did Virgil (somewhat akin to Cipus) decide to sacrifice his masterpiece rather than have it be used as a virtual crown for the princeps – rex?  But was it only Augustus or did the stubborn breath of Virgil’s living verse refuse that sacrifice as well? These questions resist either/or answers.

Kafka’s, still unpublished manuscripts of The Trial, The Castle and Amerika, also had no respect for his:“… last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters … to be burned unread.” Was it something in the still barely emergent twentieth century refusing not to be born that stayed Max Brod’s hand?

Are these contrarians just the exceptions that seem to confirm Horace, Ovid and Shakespeare’s assertion of the indestructible word? Their names also refuse to die; their works just won’t allow it.

And what about all those other Latin poets, abandoned and unread for centuries – Catullus, Martial, Lucretius, and on and on. Until like flowers stirring from dried desert seeds after a millennium of drought, they blossomed in the suddenly rediscovered manuscripts of the Renaissance. Did those ancient ghosts sense and impregnate a new culture just when that culture sensed it needed them? Because isn’t procreation an impulse of mutual need?

I’m reminding myself not to get too esoteric, but I’m also reminded of that other life’s words renouncer, Thomas Aquinas who, about to turn fifty, suddenly stopped writing, with the declaration that “everything I’ve written is like straw”. This was the master whose Summa Theologica soared like a cathedral of logic over the medieval world. Was it the satori of the Beatific Vision, as the Dominicans claim, or a more mundane awakening that turned it all to babel?  How did Shakespeare put it: “there are more things in heaven and earth….than are dreamt of in your philosophy”?

VI: This thought is as a death, which cannot choose but weep

We live in an age of minimal poetry, of poetry as a devalued art. Maybe that’s a corollary of our inability to resist Orwellian language. But our “music industry” gets more and more minimal as well. And the fine art of formally composed (as opposed to improvised) serious music seems to have seriously stumbled somewhere around the 1950s.  It’s not whether Bach and Shakespeare, or, say, Auden and Mahler are still relevant: They obviously are. But whether the ambition to build on that relevance exists or is even respectable in contemporary poetics and music.

These are, of course, arbitrary, and yes, even ignorant pronouncements. But, when was the last time a poet evoked something like Shakespeare’s “powerful rhyme” image without embarrassment?  I guess, for me, it’s implicit in Auden’s elegy for Yeats, for one. And explicit in Rilke’s Sonnet to Orpheus I, 5.  A poem in direct lineage with Horace III, 30 and Ovid’s Envoi. Whether either of those poems formed a conscious model for Rilke isn’t really important. What‘s worth looking at is how he handles the thema of mantic poetry in a 1922 world that was already Kafkaesque.

But to put that in context, this seems a good time to take another short detour and first revisit Shakespeare. Sonnet 55 goes somewhere its Latin models don’t:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents …

…Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity…

So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

There’s a subtle but significant shift in Shakespeare’s treatment of the Horace III, 30 and Ovid envoi theme. Shakespeare, as befitting a consummate dramatist, has an addressee. And because of that, the theme takes on even deeper resonance. That, let’s call it “relationship”,  aspect remains when he returns to the theme in 64:

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal, slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate —
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

And allows 65 to soar:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

For me, the whispered fear “that time will come and take my love away” is more devastating than all the other images of ruin in these common-theme Sonnets. Maybe Auden had something like this in mind when he, vainly, tried to quash his already famous poem, September 1, 1939. Of its iconic climactic line, “we must love one another, or die,”  he mordantly observed (as Shakespeare also implies) that there is no “or”. We still have to die. For Auden, there was no way to either fix or to omit the false hope of that line. Because the poem crumbled without it.

VII. Some 20th Century Alchemy.

Rilke: Sonnet to Orpheus I, V:

Don’t erect his monuments in stone. Just let the rose
bloom every spring as his token. Because this
too is Orpheus  – another of his metamorphoses
into one thing or another. Why stress ourselves

 

deciphering all his names? If there’s singing,
now and forever, it’s Orpheus as he comes and goes.
Isn’t it enough that every so often he lingers
a few days with the rose petals in the bowl?

 

So much of him has to wither so you can know.
It frightens him too, as he fades. But just as his
word transcends what’s here, what’s now –

 

he’s already there, alone where you can’t be.
The bars of the lyre strings don’t cramp his
fingers. Even transgressing, he obeys.

Whatever the intention, it’s hard not to hear echoes of Horace, Ovid and Shakespeare here. And the Ovidian image of the vatic, preternaturally inspired poet is embodied in Rilke’s addressee. Unlike Horace and Ovid, Rilke bypasses personal mastery to focus on the persona of the archetypical, semi-divine poet, Orpheus. And distinct from its Latin predecessors, Rilke’s poem speaks to the vulnerability as well as durability of the poetic word.

The fifty-five Orpheus sonnets also weave a theme of the coexistence of life and death reminiscent of  the angels in Rilke’s First Duino Elegy,  who “… (it’s said) often don’t know whether they’re traveling/ among the living or the dead….” Sonnet I, VI expands on the occult dynamics of Orphic song almost like a Prospero-voiced explication of Shakespeare’s “powerful rhyme”:

Is he someone from here – just one of us? No,
both realms nurtured that expansive heart.
He learned how to bend the weeping willow
branch from the willow’s own sad roots.

 

At night, when you go to bed, never leave bread,
never leave milk on the table. It draws the dead.
But under the caress of sleeping
eyelids, he – the initiate – will mingle their

 

intimate tokens into everything you dream.
To him, the magic summons of burnt earth-smoke
and rue is a transparent logic. Nothing

 

can decay his images: not the grave, not
the living in their rooms, as he infuses
finger ring, hair clasp and jug with his praise.

VIII: …That Time Will Come and Take My Love Away

The Sonnets to Orpheus willfully wander: From the antique shadows of a Jung-like dreamtime, into the early 20th century, still emerging from its “Great War”  fractured reptile egg in the Central Europe Rilke and Kafka shared. The sequence struggles with the organized sterility of “the machine”. Even a miracle like flight fails to escape Rilke’s Luddite observation that the airplane is, after all, just another tool we can’t allow ourselves to be mastered by. Rilke’s two-volume sequence is imbued with cultural and personal loss. Not just nostalgia, but also a free-floating anxiety hinting at losses to come.

The classical Orphic myths are varied and complex, but Rilke seems most emotionally drawn to the heartbroken poet’s descent to the underworld to bring his young wife, Eurydice, back from the dead. And to the ultimate failure of their doomed climb back.

In book II, XIII, the sequence reaches what Rilke considered its core with a poem that could arguably be Shakespeare 64/65 turned inside out in the way it blends the quasi-divinity of Orpheus as loving poet with the inescapable mortality of human love.

Anticipate each goodbye, as if it were
already behind you like a winter that’s passed.
Because underneath these winters is such an interminable
winter, that only by hibernating can your heart survive.

 

Always be dead in Eurydice – climb out the way a singer climbs,
in a voice rich with loss and celebration of that pure connection.
And here, below with the ghosts, in the empire of bitter endings,
be the clinking glass that, even as it shatters, rings.

 

Be – and at the same time – realize your inescapable non-existence
is the unquenchable root of your deepest resonance.
And just this once, be all you were meant to become:

 

To those already used and discarded, and to the numb, mute
stockyard of bloated nature – to that unspeakable sum –
count yourself gladly in and nullify the count.

All the poems we’ve been looking at are variations on the theme of art and death. But I think all are of a complexity that resists simplification into something as prosaic as ars longa, vita brevis.  Rilke’s II, XIII, e.g. can be read in poignant personal terms. The Orpheus Sonnets were dedicated to a friend’s eighteen year old daughter who’d died of leukemia. Rilke, was himself to die from, as yet undiagnosed, leukemia some four years later.  So the sequence, which came to him all in a rush, can be read as intuitively predictive of the death already in his blood.

Beyond the personal, the Sonnets to Orpheus were completed in 1922. Rilke’s 1912 First Duino Elegy seems to poetically foreshadow the cultural exhaustion that followed WWI. In Similarly it’s hard to not catch a whiff of the organized bloodlands to come in Sonnet II, XIII’s images of a stupefying, endless winter, the “already used and discarded…, the numb, mute stockyard of bloated nature”.

And in that prescience, wonder if the sequence may have been only possible before, not after, the cataclysms. Perhaps another simple reason Auden withdrew his September 1, 1939, outbreak of WWII, masterpiece was that after that “unspeakable sum” of human brutality, his facile 1939 logic seemed a cathedral of lyric straw. Celan, famously, struggled to intone poetry in his mother’s murderers’ tongue. But in the new nuclear age, was German the only language that melody deserted?

There is, however, Auden’s late life poem on the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring. It seems more than a little conversive with the question “how with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?”.

August 1968

 

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master Speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among the desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

IX. The Via Labicana and (Finally !) the End of a Long Winding Path

Martial, Epigrams I, 88  (circa 86 c.e.)

Stolen from your master in the ripeness of youth,

Alcimus; you lie gently hidden now by grassy earth

beside the Labicana Way. Don’t envy the sinking weight

of marble gravestones, those labored memorials

to ruin and futility. Take your ease here among vine

buds shaded by boxwood, in this green little plot

watered by the dew of my tears. Accept, treasured lad,

these monuments of our sorrow, which honors you

with timeless, perpetual life. When Lachesis spins out my

own final years, I want no other sleep for my ashes.

I’ve saved this for last because it embodies so much of all the other logos poems. It’s quieter: In part because it was written by a master of the miniature whose aesthetic abjured false praise, including of oneself. (Except when self preservation mandated effusive flattery of a very difficult emperor. But more on that in a bit.)

The poem introduces its claim to eternal life so gently, that you wonder if that’s indeed what Martial is claiming. But from its earliest English translations, the latter has always been the interpretation. As in this 17th century version by Henry Killigrew:

Alcime, who didst in Years yet blooming die,
And, by a light Turf cover’d, here dost lie.
I rear no towring Tombs of massie Stone,
A vain Expence, that Fame confers on None:
But plant frail Box and Palms, whose verdant shade
Drench’d by my Tears, shall be immortal made.
Receive thou then the Monument I give,
A Verse that will unto all Ages live:
And when my Life is spun, and Days expire,
No nobler Monument I my self Desire.

As with Shakespeare, Martial has an addressee. But this addressee has a name and social identity. A young famulus, or household slave. Did Martial have a (not unusual for him) sexual relationship with this fair youth? It doesn’t matter to the poem any more than the question matters to Shakespeare’s logos sonnets. As in the Orpheus sonnet, it’s the loss of love, not the particular love that’s at issue. Or rather, the inseparability of loss from love. And the leap-of-faith assertion of the power of logos as – not just a salve, but – salvation.

The sense of art as sacrament in the Alcimus poem, becomes more resonant for me in Martial’s use of the “poetic plural” in his line accipe, care puer, nostri monimenta doloris. That substitution of noster for meus is a common device in Latin poetry: A, “we” for “I”, “our” for “my”, blurring that survives in modern English in the royal, editorial, and medical “we”. (e.g., “how are we feeling today?)   Martial’s voice in translation is often harmonically enriched by a literal rendering of the Latin false-plural. In this case: “Accept dear lad, these monuments of our (mutual human) grief”.

Care puer implies more than a simple, “dear boy” here. Alcimus was a young man, a puer only because a slave was always a “boy”?  And with the poetic plural, nostri, Martial seems to speak simultaneously as emancipating head of household; as healer-sympathizer. And perhaps as an Orphic poet counting himself “gladly in” to “nullify the count.”

Did Rilke know this poem? Did Shakespeare? Does it matter? Because all of these – for want of a better term – logos variations  – aspire to escape and converse somewhere outside the cause and effect of time. To thrive in some always place where Martial’s lines can be read, not just as source, but as a responsive meditation on Sonnet 55’s: “… O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out against the wreckful siege of battering days… unless this miracle have might, that in black ink my love may still shine bright.”

X: Coda: Alcimus Memorialized in Marble

After all this, why a coda? Because those who’ve spent any time reading Martial might note a couple of things. One, is that he’s not given to either sentimentality or mysticism. Another is that he often revisits earlier epigrams with second looks that move in opposite emotional directions. In Epigrams Book V, 64, some four years after I, 88, a serving lad named Alcimus – a ghost or just a namesake? –  reappears in a very different, but common themed poem. This second, Alcimus variation isn’t an “eternal word” poem per se. But I think it helps put a little perspective on that essentially moot but irresistibly imaginative “are we Rome yet?” question.

Before we get to the poem, let’s briefly revisit Ovid and Cipus and Augustus.  Can Ovid’s Caesar–deification episode, coming on the heels of his preachy-republican Cipus legend, be taken as sarcasm? One reason that theory is “fringe” is that the divinity of Roman Caesars was a posthumous honorific, not all that different from the later Christian honor of sainthood. In Ovid’s time it didn’t equate with being a god on earth. Notably though, it was another Augustan innovation. The only precedent in the 500 year-old Roman Republic was the identification of the City’s mythical founder, Romulus as the god Quirinus.

Julius Caesar, was killed by senators on the Senate floor for regally appropriating power. His shocking murder by scions of some of Rome’s most distinguished families capped decades of internecine political violence. And ultimately led to an outright civil war in which Augustus’ faction finally prevailed. Augustus’, now tamed, Senate then posthumously honored  Julius Caesar as a Roman so unique he merited an afterlife among the immortals. As with the later Christian saints, martyrdom also helped. Perhaps more significantly, the living Latin language interjected its own afterlife on him when his personal name, Caesar, became a de facto Imperial title that persisted in German and Russian variations into the 20th century.

Years later, Augustus seemed worthy of no less a funeral tribute. And then – why not? – his wife and afterlife companion, Livia. The precedent set, it became routine to confer heavenly afterlife on every halfway decent “Caesar”. Obvious monsters like Caligula and Nero were excepted. But even stammering Claudius, widely considered an idiot in his day, merited an apotheosis after being poisoned by his wife to speed her son Nero’s succession. Albeit one satirized by Seneca.

In Martial’s time, Vespasian may have said it best in a famous deathbed joke. His last words were a request that he be pulled up out of bed because “an emperor ought to die on his feet.” But a bit earlier, his prognosis obvious, he quipped: Vae! Puto deus fio. A phrase that given his involvement in the destruction of Jerusalem might be wryly translated as “Oy, I think I’m becoming a god.” Augustus may have invented the politically useful practice, but Romans high and low seem to quickly develop a fondness for sanctifying their Caesars. Once the seed was planted, it flourished. Even weeds can sprout deep roots.

Vespasian’s son Titus, groomed to succeed him, died after less than two years in office. Titus’ inexperienced younger brother, Domitian, came to power by default to reign for 15 years. A period coinciding with Martial’s most productive years. A few years into that term, Martial penned this couplet in the form of a gift tag to accompany a Saturnalia present.

Incense

So that Germanicus may eventually rule in heavenly halls,

and on earth for many days, offer holy incense to Jove.

Germanicus in these lines, was Domitian who gave himself the title to commemorate his conquest of a small German tribe in a preemptive war most believed he conducted only to enhance his vanity. His formal Triumph was ridiculed. Undeterred, Domitian renamed the month of September, Germanicus, to showcase his new soubriquet.

What perverse compulsion led lightweight Domitian to anoint himself the calendar equal of Julius Caesar and Augustus? A hubris perhaps analogous with, say, an imaginary current day president, jealous because Washington was already named, one-upping his ancestral predecessor by renaming New York City after himself. One can only wonder.

Domitian lacked his father’s earthy irony. He began demanding to be addressed as Dominus et Deus: “Lord and god”.  Increasingly suspicious and devious, he cultivated a spider web of informants. Senators and prominent citizens were summarily arrested and killed for arcane reasons or just out of quixotic cruelty. Civic angst built steadily over a decade or so, until no one who was anyone felt safe. His Encyclopedia Brittanica entry notes that “…at least 12 former consuls were executed during his reign”. Finally, in an act of self-preservation applauded by all, Domitian was bumped off by a cabal of his inner circle and wife. There was no question of apotheosis: the Senate issued the formal dishonor of damnatio memoriae. The heads on his statues were replaced with others’. Even coins bearing his image were recalled and reminted.

But what does all this have to do with poor Alcimus?  In 89 C.E, around two thirds of the way through the reign of Domitian deus, Martial published epigram V, 64. It and I, 88 are the only Martial poems in which the name Alcimus appears, although this time he figures only in passing. The poems’ main commonality is their funereal subject.

The first Alcimus poem devalues stone monuments in favor of green living earth and honors a humble house servant. The second epigram, conversely, is a toast to the Mausoleum of Augustus. A grand complex of tombs and statuary that held the ashes of Augustus, Livia and their extended Julio-Claudian family, including the emperors Tiberius and Claudius. There was a lot of divinity at rest among those monuments, but not the sort of poetic perpetual life Martial holds out to Alcimus in I, 88.

To Martial, those imperial “gods” warrant a satiric toast. On surface, the epigram seems a jab at Domitian’s pretension. But it’s also festive, a waved wine glass more than a threatening stylus. Perhaps to cover his tracks, V, 64 is followed by a flattering poem in which Martial calls Domitian “Augustus” and predicts a long life. So just what is he toasting: The Caesars in their afterlives? The afterlife on earth of those hoping to survive the current Dominus et Deus?

Callistus pour a quadruple Falernian measure.

And you, Alcimus, add some summer snowmelt.

Oil my hair with fragrant amber and wreathe

roses around my crown. The Imperial Mausolea,

across the way, command us to live, despite it

all, while teaching us even gods can die.

Whatever Martial’s intent, his second Alcimus epigram seems almost the inverse of the words Camus put in the mouth of Caligula some 2000 years later: “Men die and they are not happy”. For Camus, Caligula’s refusal to accept that inevitability precipitated a descent into a level of homicidal (and ultimately self-destructive) megalomania only an imperial autocrat toying with divinity could manage. For Martial, conversely, the thought that mortal is a synomym for human brings a kind of liberation. And – perchance – a solace that can well like a smile when mere humans quietly roll their eyes at the eternally impossible political lie

Are we Rome yet? Only Rome was, or could be, Rome. And which political “Rome” – the 500 year Republic or the succeeding 500 year Empire of the myriad – sometimes awful, oftentimes good – Caesars? Despite all that’s been written and all the scholarly speculation, the only certainty is that Rome is now ancient and that one day we’ll be ancient as well. Only time will tell if we’ll be remembered as more than a footnote.