Marcus Aurelius in Aquincum (or, the Melancholy of History)

Let us look at the above pictures, shot by myself on June 2017 at óbuda or “Old Buda”, quarter of Budapest, like all the others here. They portray the four sides of the same ancient Roman artwork, or, better to say, the extant part of it. This seems to be an altar-stone. More likely, it worked as the base of a monumental column now presumably lost: a “Jupiter Column”, smaller than but similar to those erected at Stuttgart and at Mainz in today's Germany (in particular, the latter was indirectly dedicated to Emperor Nero [1]).

Reliably, the three figures sculpted as reliefs on this pedestal are the Greco-Roman goddess Minerva/Athena, the armed god Mars/Ares and a Genius of the Emperors. Which of them? In order to know something about, we must start reading and translating a Latin inscription on the fourth side of the square podium. It begins with the ritual formula [I]ovi O[ptimo] M[aximo] pro salute..., what means “To the best and greatest Jupiter, for the welfare of...” The names of the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus are following. Moreover, a consular datation acquaints us that the monument was built in 164 CE.

Nowadays that is placed in a park at Flórián Square, area of a legionary fortress near the homonymous underpass and the ruins of a bath-house. These are known, in Latin, as Thermae Maiores and are included in the Roman Bath Museum. The whole archaeological area was part of Aquincum, in Latin meaning “city of waters” and possibly deriving from the Celtic name Ac-Inco: “plenty of water”, thermal springs included. This was an important border town in Pannonia, province of the Roman Empire largely located over the territory of modern Hungary. Indeed, our monument has been found close to the Roman fortress of Albertfalva, somewhat more south along the river Danube (I have to thank the director of the Aquincum Museum, Orsolya Láng, for such a precious information [2]).

Lucius Verus was co-emperor of Rome, with his adoptive brother Marcus Aurelius, from 161 till his own death in 169 CE. Yet, here, we feel more interested in the latter. Actually, the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor from 161 to 180 is supposed to have begun at Aquincum his Greek work Meditations (in Greek, entitled Τ? ε?? ?αυτ?ν/Ta eis heautón: thus, “[Meditations] to Himself”). More specifically, part of it would have been written in 170-71, when the author was positioned not so far from Aquincum, since internal notes tell how he wrote the first book on the banks of the river Granus – modern-day Hron or Garam or Gran, tributary of the Danube –, during his campaign against the Germanic tribe of the barbarian Quadi in the Barbaricum, north of Pannonia Inferior, present-day Slovakia.

Anyhow, even better than a coincidence, there may be some intriguing connection between Marcus' stay in Aquincum, at the frontier of what then was considered the civilized world – a Greco-Roman civilization, and the inspiration for his famous philosophical work. All the more, visiting the Archaeological Museum of Aquincum, not so far from the afore mentioned Flórián park at Budapest, could be an interesting experience; whether we are curious tourists or serious scholars, this does not matter a lot. The museum is made of two main buldings, where various artifacts are displayed. Within a wide open air excavation area in the middle, several remains of the antique city can be admired (see my photos, above).

In Aquincum not only bath-houses, but also theatres and amphitheatres were not lacking. Mainly after Hellenistic models, imported more or less, or else influenced by a Celtic culture, fine arts were flourishing. For instance, in the Archaeological Museum there are fragmentary marble statues or statuettes, as the nude torsos of the goddess Venus/Aphrodite and of the god Apollo, which can be seen in my photos below. As a border town and a river-port, to a certain extent it was also a cosmopolitan city, worthy of being regarded as the “grandmother” of a future Budapest. In the same museum, a more complete small bronze of an African male dancer is an example visually evoking such a broad, somehow multiethnic and multireligious, ambience.[3]

Although the title or subtitle “To Himself” might have been added later, it well reflects the contents of the Meditations by M. Aurelius. They strive to step beyond the Delphic maxim γν?θι σεαυτ?ν/gnōthi seautón/“know thyself”, already adopted by Socrates not a few centuries before. Rather and more modernly, that is a “know yourself” in your existential and historical context, even if a cosmic horizon gets never forgotten. Not only the personal self is a relative percept, but also his existential and historical context. Even our political, national or religious identity, is but a contingent utility or social necessity.

The consciousness of such a precarity went so far, as to make him assert: “Look back over the past, with its changing empires which rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.”[4] Said by one, who spent so much of his life in defending and reinforcing the Roman Empire successfully, something alike may sound odd. Indeed, there is no contradiction with a Stoic worldview and ethics. Every individual or collective effort is to be inscribed in the perspective of an immanent providence. Of this, we can fully understand some details, for we ourselves are details, thinking and operating ones though: “Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.”[5]

In other terms, there was no gap between nature and culture, in Marcus' mind. Nay, our existences are like so many traits d'union, between them. Each of us should do his task according to nature, which is or becomes our own at once. Probably, a conception like that could be focused on in a peripheral reality, better than in the capital of the empire. In the “city of waters”, circumstances were such, that he could well act his challenge or resistance against the risk of a barbaric regression, but also realize how not even a form as the Roman Empire might last for ever. Later, other forms were going to represent and promote a progressive civilization, even if none of them might ever be the same as the classical one had been. Once, had not Heraclitus said: “You could not bathe twice in the same river”?

Now, let us focus back on the figures sculpted on the sides of the monument considered at the beginning of this speech, where the Latin inscription referring to M. A. does not appear. Unfortunately, currently the surface is much eroded, but the quality of the work had to be high. Nothing particular to comment, about the conventional and a bit rhetorical allegory of the Genius of the Emperors. We can just add, it may be compared with a more popular representation, in the Archaeological Museum of Aquincum: a cake mould, depicting the triumph of M. Aurelius. The archaeologist Orsolya Láng, above mentioned, reports that the na?ve object has been discovered in an eastern pottery workshop of the civil town.

Instead, the figures of a naked Mars and of a pensive Minerva – uncovering with her hands the terrible head of a Gorgon on her aegis-shield, and with a foot on a sphere, possibly representing the globe itself – look more impressive. Metaphorically, they may appear like contrasting but complementary aspects in the personality of an emperor as M. A. Antoninus, warrior by duty and philosopher by vocation. A double faced destiny, according to his words themselves, not devoid of a musing ambiguity: “My nature is rational and civic at once: my city and my country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome; so far as I am a man, it is the world. Whatever is to the advantage of these two cities, that only is good for me.”[6]

At this point we make a jump in time, hazarding a comparison between the heads of Minerva and Mars in the monument at Flórián Square – above, upper images – and two ideal profiles of Alexander the Great sculpted in marble in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, or by the Florentine master himself (National Gallery of Art, Washington, and private collection; ca. 1483-85): above, lower images. Actually, a similarity may be disconcerting. Is that a mere coincidence, or how might the Renaissance sculptors have seen their presumable models? What we know is that Lorenzo de' Medici sent some works by Verrocchio to Matthias Corvinus king of Hungary, but the artist did not go to there. In a conjectural way, nonetheless, we cannot exclude that some of his pupils did the jourmey.

Marcus Aurelius was not like Alexander the Great had been, not a few centuries earlier. Nor was he like Julius Caesar, somewhat more recently. He was not or could no longer be a conqueror, but was a clever soldier, and a sharp intellectual. After Stoic thinkers as Seneca and Epictetus, what he worked on is the same creation, which his predecessors had worked on. That is a civilization, which he wanted to be as open as possible, and especially a work in progress, despite all regressive decline history could reserve for it:

“If the power of thought is common then our reason is also shared, through which we are rational beings. If this is true, then we also share the assignment of what to do or not to do according to reason. If that is true, than law is shared. If this is the case, we are fellow citizens. And if that is true, we shared some state. If we share a state, the world resembles a city. For what other state could claim to contain the whole human race?”[7]

Besides and beyond his loyalty to a city or country, theoretically at least, he felt to be a πολ?τη? του κ?σμου/polítēs tou kósmou: literally, in Greek, a citizen of the cosmos or universe. Of course, this cosmopolitanism could grow an ideological justification for Roman imperialism and colonization, because the main ecumene the emperor-philosopher had in mind was the Roman Empire itself. It is true as well, a military but also civil town as Aquincum may have worked as a positive experiment in such a sense, so many there were immigrants from other nations, although the population around were mostly Celts Eravisci.

In my pictures above, shot in the local Archaeological Museum, on the right there is the statuette of an exotic dancer, already mentioned in this paper. On the left, a monumental column, not so tall and complete like those reconstructed in Stuttgart or Mainz, but meaningful anyway. On the top of the column, a mutilated statue depicts a young nude deity, differing enough from how Jupiter/Zeus, the mature king of gods, was usually represented in Greco-Roman mythology. In this late provincial version, he is standing, holding a long staff or scaeptrum in a hand. An eagle can be discerned at his feet. Was this bird a symbol of the empire, or of any indigenous cult, or else of both of them?

Actually, extant Latin inscriptions on the bases of other coeval “Jupiter Columns”, or on simple altar-stones, start with the initials IOMT: extensively, Iovi Optimo Maximo Teutano. This adjective more, with respect to the inscription on the monument in the park at Flórián Square, is not fortuitous. Teutanus was the attribute of a syncretic deity, adopted by a Roman cultural policy in order to meet with the religious beliefs especially of Celtic peoples, and to assimilate them better to Greco-Roman civilization. Obviously, often such a dedication was joined with a formula, invoking a salvation of the emperors.

Religious syncretism was tolerated and promoted, compatibly with a kind of veneration of the imperial power, in the persons of its main representatives. As to Marcus Aurelius, his religiosity was more complex. Formally, he did not refuse pagan gods at all. Essentially though, his pantheism or theodicy was coherent with Stoic metaphysics: “For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, one common reason in all intelligent animals, and one truth.”[8]

I like to conclude with a last quote, and three images of common citizens of the antique Aquincum: above from left to right, tombstones of a bierded chap seeming to be a fisherman; of a guy, who perhaps was a vine-dresser, or liked wine; of one proud, full armed, legionary Caius Castricius (Budapest, óbuda, Flórián Square Underpass; late 1st-2nd cent. CE). This time, the citation is not from Marcus Aurelius, but from Terence, who had been a North African prisoner and slave, before becoming a renowned Latin playright in the 2nd century BCE: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto/“I am human; nothing of that which is human I deem alien to me.”[9] Like M. A. far later, he was influenced by an early Stoicism.

NOTES

(1) See at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Column and https://resources.oncourse.iu.edu/access/content/user/leach/www/c414/provincial.html.

(2) Cf. Gizella Erdélyi, A ro?mai ko?faraga?s e?s ko?szobra?szat Magyarorsza?gon (“Roman stone carving and sculptures in Hungary”, published in 1974 in Hungarian; p. 116).

(3) The proper name of the Museum is Aquincum Museum and Archaeological Park, located in the area of the public town, distinct from a military area. In one sense, there may be some analogies between the ancient Ostia as seaport of Rome and Aquincum as a river-port: for instance, a Jewish funerary stele of the 4th cent. found in Albertirsa but most likely from Aquincum – in the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest – shows a few typical details, appearing also in the ruined Synagogue of Ostia.

(4) Meditations, book VII, chapter 49.

(5) Meditations, book V, chapter 8.

(6) Meditations, book VI, chapter 44.

(7) Meditations, book IV, chapter 1.

(8) Meditations, book VII, chapter 9.

(9) Heautontimorùmenos, I, 1, 25; 165 BCE.