Image: Emperor Maximilian I
My headline comes from a poem written in the 12th century, but its opening line does not prepare one for the punchline. The four lines in Latin translate as follows:
“Nothing can be compared to you, Rome, even though you are almost completely in ruin; even in pieces you teach how great you were when intact. Long age has destroyed your pride, and the strongholds of Caesar and the temples of the gods lie in a swamp.”
This dichotomy of the greatness and ruin of Rome is at the heart of this insightful book by Susanna de Beer (Leiden University). “The main purpose of this book,” she writes, “is to lay bare the dynamic pattern of competitive claims to the ancient Roman legacy that results from the absolute authority of this legacy in the Renaissance that leads to the vast proliferation of positive and negative images of Rome.” This dichotomy is clear from two poets in particular. “The French poet Joachim Du Bellay presented Rome as dead.” But the Scottish poet George Buchanan praised another poet, Lorenzo Valla, “for metaphorically saving Rome.” Valla famously considered as Romans all those who wrote in Latin, who, by doing do, “strove to restore ancient style and eloquence.”
To approach the assigned task of her book, de Beer innovatively uses Latin poetry to probe the positive and negative imagery in four domains: power, morality, cityscape and literature. On power, she identifies two essential features of how people in the Renaissance grappled with the problematic legacy of Rome. “First, it resulted in the notion that the imperium of Rome was still alive. And second, it provided the idea that the imperium did not necessarily continue in its original location, Rome.” These two ideas continued the living imperium right up until 1917, when the last of the Romanovs ruled Russia. The Tsar was their version of the name of Caesar, with the Roman imperium transferred to Moscow or St. Petersburg. Even though such recent history does not intrude in these pages, it is worth keeping in mind when the original transference of imperium is being discussed: from Troy to Rome, when it was founded by the Prince of Troy, Aeneas.
In literature, Virgil in his Aeneid wrote “the imperium of Rome was given to them by Jupiter, the supreme god in their pantheon.” We learn this in Jupiter’s speech to his daughter, the goddess Venus, who is worried about the fate of her son Aeneas. Not to worry, says Jupiter. “For the Romans I set no bounds in space or time, but have empire without end.” Very comforting indeed! In the Renaissance, de Beer quotes three Latin poems, spanning two centuries, that show how the Aeneid was “appropriated to support the idea that Rome was divinely sanctioned also to be the head of the Christian world.” Nothing is more bizarre than mapping pagan beliefs onto a Christian world-view, but that is what was done. It is fascinating, and very sad, to learn how scholars tied themselves in knots for centuries to this end.
A prime beneficiary of this was the papacy, which was based in Avignon, France, from 1309-1377. “Petrarch presents the pope’s absence as an exile, Here, he follows the example of Ovid’s poetry of exile.” Ovid spent the years 8-17 in exile from Rome. Petrarch represented “the connection between the pope and the city of Rome as a marriage,” writes de Beer. They belonged together. “The city witnessed an urban and cultural revival under the leadership of Pope Sixtus IV in the 1470s, leading to the High Renaissance when Raphael and Michelangelo worked their artistic magic. A poem in praise of Raphael was written after his death in 1520:
“So many princes, so much time had built Rome. So many foes, so many centuries have destroyed Rome. Now Raphael searches for Rome in Rome and finds it again.”
Fittingly, the tomb of Raphael, which is pictured on page 39, is in the Pantheon, the greatest building that is still intact from ancient times. As for the popes, the peak was certainly reached in 1508, when Julius II was set to crown Maximilian I as the Holy Roman Emperor (lead photo). A poem composed at the time equates Maximilian with Caesar as he approached Rome for the coronation:
“Caesar was heading towards the seven hills of Rome in a procession drawn out in many columns to be crowned by our Pope and to bind his imperial temples with the golden diadem; behold, the most splendid descendant of the ancient Caesar is coming.”
(De Beer does not make it clear that the coronation never happened, as Maximilian was unable to travel to Rome). Terming Maximilian as the worthiest descendant of Julius Caesar “represents a clear allusion to the Aeneid, in which Aeneas was hailed as the certain descendant of the Gods.” The import of all this is made manifest by de Beer. “The transfer of power from Troy to Rome turns genealogy into a powerful yet flexible tool for claiming the imperial legacy of Rome.” But there was another transfer of power involved here. When Maximilian’s father became Emperor, his poet laureate Conrad Celtis wrote “In your lifetime the Golden Age is returning.” In this passage, explains de Beer, “Celtis appropriates the Virgilian return of the Golden Age on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire (the first Reich, which lasted from 962 to 1806). He aligns Frederick with Augustus (first emperor of Rome and nephew of Julius Caesar)…The logical implication is that the Golden Age of ancient Rome is returning in Germany because that is where the imperium romanum has been transferred.” De Beer admits “this may seem strange,” and her exploration of it is one of the many fascinating aspects of this book.
Who can claim the moral legacy of Rome? This is what the book explores through Latin poetry. Citing the poets Spagnoli and Vitalis, the author states that “with their circular reasoning and belief in moral reform, they uphold the church’s claim to the imperial and moral legacy that renders Rome the caput ecclesiae (head of the church).”
In conclusion, I go beyond what DeBeer writes: With its government buildings, Washington DC was clearly created to be the repository of a new imperium, transferred from Europe. In lamenting the fall of Rome, the Renaissance poet Paolo Spinoso interpreted its “internal” destruction to the “uneducated mass.” A warning for the near future? Where will the imperium be transferred next? Perhaps Moscow (again) as Putin plots to become the next Tsar. Don’t scoff. As the poets of the Renaissance showed with their circular reasoning, stranger things have happened.
There is a typo on page 70: “in the hero” should be “into the hero”. The Index is good, but must be used in conjunction with a separate Index of Authors and Works. For example, the Index has no line entry for Spinoso. An entry for him is under the line entry for Sixtus IV, pointing to page 216, but one must look to the Index of Authors for every instance of his inclusion in the text.
A capsule biography of the author of this superbly intriguing book:
Susanna de Beer studied Classics at Leiden University and holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. She is Senior Lecturer in (Renaissance) Latin Literature and Early Modern Studies at Leiden University, with a specialization in Classical Reception Studies, Renaissance Humanism, and Digital Humanities. She is currently on detachment as Director of Ancient Studies and Classical Receptions at the Royal Netherlands Institute (KNIR) in Rome. In 2009 she co-edited The Neo-Latin Epigram: A Learned and Witty Genre and in 2013 she published The Poetics of Patronage: Poetry as Self-Advancement in Giannantonio Campano.
The Renaissance Battle for Rome: Competing Claims to an Idealized Past in Humanist Latin Poetry, is by Oxford University Press. It lists for $105.
Image: painting of Emperor Maximilian I, in 1519, by Albrecht Durer. It can be seen now at an art museum in Vienna, the Imperial capital.