The Melancholy of the Antique World

Flaubert wrote, “The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze…”

The Roman Forum looks like a ghost town. Only the foundations of what were once grand buildings remain for us to ponder. We can read the stories of the ancient Romans through their iconography, see their lives in their carvings and architecture. We see the crumbling memories of the people from so long ago and feel melancholic about the loss of their civilization, of their history. This feeling of loss is even more profound in the abandoned city of Ostia Antica. We can feel the footsteps of the ancients that once walked the straight cobbled streets, we can hear the voices that once chatted and cheered in the baths and at the stadium, we can smell the heady reek of the market that once operated with its mosaic signs built into the ground. But there is nothing to see of the verve that was there so long ago. It is a gloomy feeling. To think that there was so much life here, and now there is nothing but bits and pieces of monuments, the shell of an entire city abandoned.

It is true that the ancients did not have the hope we have now of a life after death. There was no loving and forgiving God Almighty, no heaven or hell to look forward to (or fear.) There was no afterlife at all to work toward, at least not in the sense that we live by today. They did indeed see a universe of “immutable ebony.”

And yet on their monuments and arches we see no messages of despair. They are triumphal arches, in their very name testaments to the hope and the resilience of the ancient Romans. To be remembered by posterity was their idea of afterlife. Perhaps there were no divine rules about sin to inspire people to refrain from doing evil in ancient times, but to be remembered in a negative light was as good as Hell for moral motivation. We look upon the relics of the ancient past, crumbling and decaying, and we see only structures without life, of no use to those who built them. These monuments, these arches, these temples, these baths and theatres and mosaics have a certain power over us. They exude a sadness that we cannot quite place. And yet, it is us, the people of today, who are feeling the melancholy, and it is them, the people of the past, who are being remembered. And so the ancients get exactly what they so desired when they wrote their histories in stone and statue and mosaic; we give them an afterlife in our thoughts, their dreams still looming against that dark background of ebony that we moderns so fear. Yes, there is melancholy in the antique world, but it is wholly ours.