The Osireion at Abydos


Cleopatra tests poisons out on her lovers

"Nothing on earth is like her,
One made without fear.
She looks on everything that is high;
She is queen over all the sons of pride."
- Job 41:33,34

Hail Caesar

In the early Roman Empire, it was traditional for Roman Generals to have their own bodyguard. Julius Caesar had his favorite legion as well, the Tenth Legion - Legion X - and it's likely that his successor took these concepts and made a permanent body of these brave and loyal soldiers - all of whom were of noble Italian blood. Strangely enough, Caesar himself always claimed to have been a direct descendent of Mars. (Historians always assumed he was referring to the Roman god of war...) Otherwise, the Praetorians were largely of the mysterious, but very technically advanced, race known as the Etrustcans. This people were from the hills and mountains of central and northern Italy.

As an aside, Caesar and Cleopatra had a child named Caesareon. Historians assume the boy was killed by Caesar's enemies, but I think he was hidden in Egypt and took the name of Joseph. Joseph was rumored to be a high priest of the now banned Egyptian religion (Egypt was controlled by Rome after Cleopatra was killed by Augustus). The birth of Caesareon was widely considered a miracle, because Caesar had bed all the leading ladies of the day, but had no child. Cleopatra alone - Isis incarnate - bore him a child. Joseph was an immaculate conception, so to speak. It was Joseph who was, according to the beliefs of the day, the son of God.~ as many Romans of that time thought of Caesar as a God. However, as the son of Caesar, he was a threat to those who had assassinated his father on the Ides of March in 44 BC. He had to keep a low profile his whole life. One of Joseph's sons, now famous, was not so cautious. He was eventually found out by the Roman authorities, and crucified. He was a rebel to the cause, that one... Still, he had the good sense in his last supper to honor our ancestors in the traditional way, with the glass of wine symbolizing blood.

Be that as it may, The Praetorian Guard was formally established by the Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar around 27 BC. It was a Legion of elite soldiers stationed permanently in Rome, charged with the protection of the Emperor. Over time, they became a balance to the power of the military, the Senate, and the Emperor. On occasion the Praetorian Guard even deposed the Emperor, and more than once the commander of the Praetorians became Emperor himself. Ultimately, the Praetorian Guard were destroyed by the Emperor Constantine on 29 October (my birthday) 312 AD at the Battle of Milvan Bridge, about ten miles outside of Rome. (The stone bridge is there to this day.) Those few Praetorians who survived retreated to the Eastern Empire in what was to become known as Transylvania, a wild and ethereal land similar in many ways to that of their remote Etruscan antecedents. You know the myth from there:

Count Dracula, all by himself, set up a small kingdom in what is modern day Romania. He kept the Turks from invading the Roman Empire from the east, and obliterating it - and the Roman Catholic Church, and every last vestige of what we call Western Civilization. Sure he used brutal methods. But if he hadn't there would never have been a Renaissance, and the whole world would still be in a feudal dark age...

Always, whether from the ranks or from the throne, the Praetorian Guard fought to maintain the strength and honor of Rome. It's not hard to understand how they fought on the field of battle to keep Rome supreme. However, The Praetorian guard also fought to protect the values and virtues of Rome. Quintessentially, Rome was respect for people of all races and creeds, respect for nature, and - most of all - respect for the appropriate use of technology to better the human condition. Following is an essay meant to illustrate these values.


Neptune and Triton

Pliny - the First Environmentalist

Pliny the Elder hated how man abused nature - even back then in the height of the Roman Empire - and said so in blunt terms. Pliny reserved his greatest ire for man's abuse of granite and marble. The numbers in parenthesis refer to chapters in Pliny's Book 36, a chapter in his small book Natural History, which I highly recommend.

- - - - - -

Pliny begins Book 36, "Stones, Minerals, and Monuments" with a rhetorical diatribe against man's abuse of nature. Man, says Pliny, tears down whole mountains for his own selfish aggrandizement, disrupting nature's own purposeful placement of mountains.

Marble Versus Earth

Pliny is quick to make a distinction between common rock and the more precious of Earth's quarry stones, marble. (55) His angst is reserved for man's leveling whole mountains to extract marble and, to a lesser extent, granite. Quarrying these materials does more than disrupt nature's scheme, it upsets the balance between the elements. Man's tampering changes the natural flow of rivers and impacts the land via wave erosion. (2) To deprive nature of it's own purposes must, Pliny implores, be done only for equivalently important human purposes. (3) To do so for trivial man made things is - depending on the circumstances - evil, demeaning, and unnecessary. Pliny reserves these qualitative judgements for different purposes man makes of marble and granite, and when he does not say so rhetorically or literally, his opinion is clear enough from context. (8)

Pliny has a righteous indignation for the use of large massive columns for ignoble purposes. (6) The greatest outrage is when many columns are used for a temporary theatre in Rome, only slightly less offensive is when marble columns are used in private residences in Rome's most exclusive and aristocratic subdivision, the Palatine. (5,14,109) Pliny implies that the wonderful qualities of marble deserve far better than to span the hall of an esteemed Roman citizen, albeit of noble blood; much less for a temporary edifice in use for only a few glorious weeks. If marble is to be used by man at all, the least he could do is to show some respect in its use and application. Pliny has no such strenuous objection to the marble obelisks in Egypt, taking even a little pride in the manner by which the Romans copied and - if you are to believe Pliny - improved upon, the notion of obelisks as monuments. (64,71) These are works done on a grand scheme befitting the material itself. Alas, they are public works enriching the lives of all men, illustrating over a useful lifetime of centuries that marble is a glorious product of nature. (72)

If marble columns in a senator's abode are an injury to nature, building formless walls of solid marble is far worse, indeed. (48) It is hardly acceptable - if infinitely more preferable - to use a thin marble veneer on a common brick substrate. (50) At least great skill is required to cut this veneer, and much human ingenuity is needed to do so using a metal blade with special sand as the cutting agent. (51) If something is to be done by man with precious marble, natures - and Pliny's - rage can be partly mollified if great effort and expertise is necessary to finish the work. Indeed, by far the best use man has yet found for marble is in fine sculptures created by skillful - might one also say sensitive and respectful - sculptors. (9) The lives of the famous, historical sculptors are surely ennobled by the material of their work. Yet even the most brilliant sculptures like the wondrous "Laocoon," while superior to any painting or bronze work, is itself inferior to sculptures resulting from the use of ivory and gold. (37) Pliny's logic is impeccable, excepting perhaps that gold is mined from mountains too. (18)

Therefrom comes Pliny's rationale. He states sarcastically that it is a good thing marble grows of its own accord from the walls of quarries like a plant, because men are using it like it was available in unlimited quantities. (125) Marble, being of limited availability, should not be wasted on massive columns for a domicile, but is rather better suited for exceedingly long obelisks to do tasks amenable to no other of nature's materials. (64)

Marble versus Man

The issue of there being some intrinsic value endowed to marble by virtue of the amount of human labor required to achieve the finished product is subtle, but Pliny is consistent in his representation. He describes four marble artifacts of roughly equivalent man hours of construction (in Pliny's estimation, as the construction of the Egyptian pyramids is a mystery to him): the Egyptian obelisks, the pyramids, the Temple to Diana, and the sewer system in Rome. (67,81,95,107) He comments on the enormous amount of labor required for each project, but reserves the greatest ire for the labor needed to build the pyramids. (75) Clearly, this huge mountain of marble and granite was an evil project, as were its constructors.

The Roman sewer system, equally massive, was more worthy (despite the slaves' reluctance to build it) because the quality of the work was matched by the effort of the builders. The Temple to Diana was labor intensive also but was such an eloquent architectural statement as to be nearly justifiable in Pliny's mind. (96) Lastly, the labor of the obelisks receives only praise from Pliny, especially because of the special ships needed to transport the finished product and the cleverness needed in managing the crossing of turbulent oceans. (67,70) Thus, for Pliny, the greater the ratio of labor-to-volume of marble (all other aspects being equal) the more worthy the project. Presumably Pliny would have given bonus points for longevity, had he been aware of the overall timeliness of these objects - lasting hundreds, even thousands, of years into the future.

Marble versus Water

Pliny takes such great exception to man's desecration of mountains not just because doing so disrupts nature's own processes but because mountains are the wildest aspect of nature. (1) Marble and granite are violated by man "domesticating" them, taming their unmitigated fierceness for base pleasure. It's the very wildness of mountains that makes this such an heinous crime. (2)

Actually, mountains are mother nature's second wildest phenomenon. After all, something that was conquered by mere Carthegenians under the leadership of Rome's arch enemy Hannibal could not be all THAT wild. (2) Water, states Pliny, is actually the wildest thing in nature - especially the deepest, darkest oceans. Man add insult to injury by daring to transport marble across oceans and other large bodies of water. (2) The only thing that seems to make this justifiable is that, in the case of large obelisks, special ships and skills are necessary to make the trek across the wild water successfully. (67)

Elsewhere Pliny seems to imply unequivocally that a justifiable use of marble is in containing and controlling something of a wilder nature, water. Take the aqueducts as an example. While lamenting the role of aqueducts in transporting water to mine precious minerals by washing the guts of mountains away, Pliny elsewhere lavishes praise on the use of aqueducts for other human purposes - potable water for city dwellers, and so forth. (123, 124) Though the skill level is something less than exceptional and the labor nominal, the fact that aqueducts tame the wildness of water is simply awesome. The sewers of Rome are an even greater engineering accomplishment. (104) Pliny, alone of all writers in Antiquity, not just describes the Roman sewers but extravagantly - admiring their durability, longevity, and practicality. (106) Also, beneath it all, praising not only the ease with which it not only tames water, but in the very firmament of nature herself.

A Functional Hiearchy

Any attempt to plumb the mind of Pliny to discern the rationale behind the selections and descriptions in his Book 36 must not only show a consistency between his rhetoric and his subsequent factual descriptions, but it must also presume to illustrate an overall structure. At least, the more consistent the underpinnings of the arguments, the stronger the reader's impression thereof. If an overall structure can be discovered, then any omissions or errors - lamentable though they may be - will be accepted in stride and not detract from the force of the argument. So, an effort will now be made to rank superficially the marble constructs that Pliny describes from the perspective that it's bad enough to quarry marble in the first place - you better do your utmost to build something nice with it, or suffer the consequences of Pliny's ire.

The lowest item in the ranking - the odious pyramids - are also something of a contradiction; and not just because man dares to make mountains himself. (75, 80) Pliny seems torn between the obvious and the possible: the pyramids, bulky and arrogant they may be, but to what end? As if to say, if they are long lasting enough, they may very well go from the lowest to the highest ranked item. Pliny is just vague enough to leave this possibility open.

No such contradiction happens with regards to the marble columns on the Palatine. (109) They are more odious than Rome's ignoble defeat at Cannae. Pliny leaves no room for doubt in that statement. (119)

The Temple of Diana is another matter all together. It is more than bulky colors of pure marble in a backed brick setting of a Roman mansion. It's an architectural place. It has elements of style, elegance, and reference. (95) The grandiose architectural style appeases the damage done to nature. It gives the public the kind of visage of marble that such a noble thing warrants.

If the Temple of Diana is worthy, the Labyrinths are more so. They are a smorgasbord of examples of marble work to bedazzle the public, even to humiliate them into regretting the defilement of nature in the first place. (87-88)

Next up the ladder, though not obviously so, comes that enigma the Sphinx. (77) Here is marble emulating an actual creature of nature herself - challenging the onlooker furthermore, in its sublime mystery. Better yet, that the colors of different marbles are employed to elaborate upon an already elaborate creation.

Small exquisite sculptures by talented artists are next in Pliny's esteem. The penultimate is a collective project of several blocks of marble, the "Laocoon" that seemingly exceeds the collective skills of its contributors. (37) No less should be expected of any manmade artifact using nature's best material.

The highest level of admiration is not for these exquisite sculptures - goodness, ivory and gold can do just as good a job, if not better - but for marble creations that comprise many functions, like the elephant's multi-purpose trunk. (18) Nature strives to efficacy; how better to show your admiration by doing the same, however clumsy the endeavor. Lighthouses do just that; multi-task. (83) They are very tall: an obelisk with an eminently Roman practicality, to show wayward ships the way to safe harbor. In so doing, they conquer the wildness of water. Doing so, they are a great benefit to the public (not to mention being in the whole public's view - night and day). Finally, lighthouses conquer yet another wildness of nature: fire. The Greek in Pliny may admire the skill of sculpture or the elegance of the architecture at the Temple of Diana - but the Roman in him can't but admire the practical multi functionality of the lighthouses, such as that at Pharos at Alexandria, Egypt. (83)

A Qualitative Hierarchy

Pliny has stated that marble is precious and that man should not use it indiscriminately, if at all. An attempt has been made to categorize his issues according to major project types. It is also possible to postulate an aesthetic ranking, to whit a qualitative hierarchy.

Within a given category, the more intricately worked the better. Many small columns are better than a few massive ones. (6) A superlative statue by a skilled artisan is bettered only by a complex scheme comprised of several interlocking pieces, the penultimate "Laocoon." An underground maze of tunnels to transport water supercedes a single artificial aqueduct above ground.

The more public the project the better. Marble columns and walls in a domicile are abhorrent, such features in a place of worship are justifiable - maybe even commendable, given Pliny's predilection to depict nature as godlike. Obelisks are good, if remote - a Sphinx is better because it more closely intimates nature, and invites as it were an emotional commitment from the observer. Aqueducts for public water supply are ok, if obvious; sewers serve the public even better, by doing their job sight unseen, out of the public forum. A project too - like Rome's sewer system - that serves the public over a very long time, is even more enviable.

The taming of water is much to be desired, as water is wilder in Pliny's mind than marble. A lighthouse is the ultimate. It tames water by expediting the passage of men's ships on public waterways. It serves the public good by benefiting commerce and safety; moreover, it also tames an even wilder force than water, fire. Lighthouses may not tame fire literally, but Pliny accredits the beneficial use of a thing with its taming. An elegant statue tames the nature of marble gracefully, and a grand tower piercing the uncharted darkness with light is no less affective in its use of nature's best and brightest.

Marble versus Rocks

Thus far it has been implied that Pliny's anger against man's destruction of mother nature's precious mountains is reserved solely for the quarrying of marble and granite. Book 36 closes with some brief descriptions of other minerals, notably magnetite (which is a lodestone), selenite (which has translucent qualities), mosaics, and glass. (127, 160, 189) Magnetite would be better suited for Book 34 on Tin, Lead, and Iron; whereas selenite, glass, and mosaics would be better fit for Book 35 on Architecture, in which Pliny discusses construction materials. Is this a flaw or a sublime consistency?

The final paragraphs in book 36 are on the power of fire. (200) This made it possible to conjecture previously on the esteem with which Pliny held edifices that controlled fire. In addition, the notion of fire parallels that of light; hence, the necessary inclusion of transparent minerals. The mention of mosaics is obvious, as a simple and effective replacement material for decorative marble. However, the mystery of magnetite remains. Perhaps Pliny has noted this apparently useless metal out of context, to imply that man has typically no use for marble in the first place - thus as much business quarrying it as we quarry magnetite.

Conclusion

Pliny has made a survey of marble and granite the theme of Book 36. Rhetoric aside, he describes the whole chain of events from quarrying, to transport, shaping, and construction. He describes examples from all the known lands, and from beneath to on and above the surface. Given this scope, the reader would naturally assume the whole gamut of man's (mis)use of marble was covered. There are, however, a couple of notable exceptions.

The roads built by the Romans should have ranked high in Pliny's esteem. They were skillfully build, long lasting, and a great benefit to the public. Perhaps he excludes them because using marble or granite for such a purpose is not an offense to nature at all but an enhancement. Whereas diverting rivers or moving mountains incites wind and rain erosion, sturdy roads avoid it. Cobbled roads preserve nature by limiting the environmental impact of commerce, and travel by armies and pedestrians. Thus to comment on roads would detract from the overall theme; although not doing so has nearly the same affect. (Assuming the passages missing from the text do not comment on these topics.)

Another omission is in the Egyptian temples. Pliny writes about the pyramids, obelisks, and the Labyrinth - the pyramids alone were unique to Egypt, and near the bottom in his estimation of quality uses of marble; whereas the obelisks and Labyrinths existed in Greek and Roman versions, and thus were worthy of his attention. (75, 84, 86) Were not the Egyptian monuments superior to all others in the world, Pliny's omission would be forgiven. Yet, their use of marble and granite so far exceeds any other examples Pliny gives in every category that to include the ancient temples of Egypt would so have dwarfed all other examples as to make the whole exercise moot. After all, Pliny was Roman and when in Rome it's wise to do as the Romans - at least until such time as the are able to build their own versions of these wonders in Egypt, at which time a comparative anatomy would be advisable.

© 2002 bill h. clark ii
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