Spqr: A Roman Miscellany by Anthony Everitt
Author:Anthony Everitt [Everitt, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ancient, History, Rome, General
ISBN: 9781781855683
Google: qyNpCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2014-09-10T21:05:27+00:00
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SPACE TRAVEL
IN HIS STUDY of politics and philosophy, The Republic, written between 54 and 51 BC, Cicero imagines what it must be like to leave earth and move around among the stars. His vision of the universe is as unscientific as Lucian’s, but it evokes the grandeur of infinite space.
The book is an imaginary dialogue à la Plato. One of the speakers is Scipio Aemilianus, the man who captured and razed to the ground the city of Carthage.*1 He reports that he had a dream one night. The ghost of his adoptive grandfather, Scipio Africanus, the general who defeated Hannibal (see here), transported him to a transcendently high point among the constellations. This was where those who led good, patriotic lives went after death. ‘They live in that bright circle of light which you see over there,’ the old man says, pointing at the Milky Way. Scipio’s grandson was astounded and humbled:
When I looked all around me from that point, everything appeared extraordinarily beautiful. There were stars invisible from earth, all larger than we have ever imagined. The smallest was the most distant and the one closest to the earth [the moon] shone with a reflected light.
The starry globes were much larger than the earth. In fact, the earth itself seemed so small that I felt scornful of our Roman empire, which is only a kind of dot.
Beneath the moon there is nothing that is not mortal and doomed to decay, except for the souls which, by the grace of the gods, have been conferred on human beings. But above the moon everything is eternal.
Aemilianus couldn’t stop looking at the distant earth. His grandfather told him that only a few places were inhabited, with vast deserts in between. ‘The distances are so great that no communication is possible. The whole territory which you Romans hold is really only a small island surrounded by the sea which you on earth call the Atlantic, the Great Sea and the Ocean.’
Unusual to come across a Roman willing to be modest about his empire.
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