Please take a moment to settle.
When you are ready, play the following sound and read on.
Did you complete the exercise from our last lesson and fall into your own reflection?
If so, did anything fall with you?
The world, perhaps?
Worlds do fall.
Rome was once a world…
… and Rome fell.
How did she fall?
And where did she go?
We don’t know where she fell to.
All we know is where she fell from.
For her fall did not begin in Italy…
But far further East…
In Troy…
THE FALL OF TROY
Inside the palace,
Groans mingle with sad confusion,
And, deep within, the hollow halls howl with women’s cries:
the NOISE strikes the golden stars.
Trembling mothers wander the vast building,
Clasping the doorposts,
And kissing them.
Virgil’s AENEID (19 BCE)
The Trojan war is a story told twice. First, by the Homer the Greek, in the ILIAD, and then by Virgil the Roman, in the AENEID.
In both, the fall of Troy is marked by kisses.
In the Greek poem, the kiss is given by Priam to Achilles, as he begs the warrior for the corpse of his dead son, Hector. The kiss succeeds and Hector’s funeral ends the poem. The Roman epic offers a more haphazard vision, with desperate Trojan women running around pointlessly kissing doorposts, hoping against hope to shore up the thresholds of their home against the onslaught of Agamemnon’s army.
Unfortunately, and famously, their kissing did not work.
And Troy fell.
But why?
What went wrong?
According to Virgil, Ulysses the Greek built a wooden horse and put it outside the gate. The Trojans mistook it for a gift horse and being courteous people, they took it into the city to put it on display, even though by all accounts it looked like it had been cobbled together in half an hour. But their manners proved their downfall. For inside the belly of the horse was Death in the form of nine Greek soldiers.
Now, everyone knows that once you have welcomed Death over the threshold of your home, no amount of kissing will save you. In fact, it often exacerbates the problem.
And so it was that the women were dead by sunrise.
Or enslaved.
The men were dead.
But a Trojan hero escaped!
His name was Aeneas. He ran and ran and ran, with his son in his arms and his father on his back. He ran to Crete, he ran to Carthage but neither the kisses of queens nor the soft lapping of the waves on his ankles could calm the terrific aftershocks of war that wracked his sleep. His wife was dead, his home destroyed, and now, on foreign shores, his father died. Aeneas travelled on with his son to Italy, but he felt lonely. He longed for a chance to visit the land of the dead and commune with his lost loved ones. He wanted to tell them how he missed them.
It is not easy to go to the underworld unless you want to stay there forever, so Aeneas asked Sibyl for help and she famously told him, ‘you need a magic twig or they’ll never let you pass.’
He found this twig, or ‘golden bough’, or ‘mistletoe’ and, true enough, the plant seduced the ghostly boatman and calmed the barking of Cerberus so Aeneas met his father once again.
On his way back up, Aeneas gave the golden bough to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld.
‘You keep that.’
He said.
‘I’ll see you soon.’
And, with a wink, he left.
How sweet it was to feel the sunlight on his skin.
Now, he was ready. He made a new town and he called it Rome and he hung mistletoe all over it and he cried out that the people of Rome should kiss at each doorway in memory of the mothers of Troy and the people of Rome should kiss and make love and make families in memory of the children of Troy and the people of Rome should kiss and kiss and never stop so that with their endless kissing they might blot out the memory of the endless grief of Troy and so it is that Roman literature is littered with oscula, savia, basia…
The Romans kissed and they kissed and The Emperor Tiberius cried stop it is spreading disease! - but no one listened. They kissed and they kissed until eventually, in 541 AD, when the empire was already tottering, a plague hit which killed half the population and so it was that the dream of Aeneas tumbled like an old lady on a slippy floor.
Rome fell as Troy once fell and we are falling still of course.
Like flowers.
FINIS
EXERCISE LESSON ELEVEN (II)
Turn into a daffodil.
This exercise does not require great levels of skill, but it may take some years to complete.
Music : Kite I : Brian Eno
The Mirror of Venus : Burne Jones (1898)
Stills from The Fall of Rome sequence in Manslaughter (1922)
The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy : Tiepolo (1760)
Date of publication : 6.2.21