by Jim Bernhard
HORACE
The Roman poet Horace, born on December 8, 65 BC, in Venusia, a military colony in southeast Italy, was named Quintus Horatius Flaccus—which means Limp, or Feeble, or maybe Flap-Eared Horace the Fifth. What his parents had in mind with that label is anybody’s guess.
As an adult, he was known to be short, fat, and prematurely gray-haired. No wonder he took his pleasures when and where he could find them. According to the reliably gossipy historian Suetonius, Horace was a notorious hedonist who was addicted to pornographic pictures and had mirrors installed in his bedroom. It was Horace, in one of his odes, who coined the phrase “Carpe diem,” usually translated as “Seize the day.” He was educated at Rome’s finest school and joined the army—unfortunately ending up on the wrong side at the battle of Philippi, where Marc Antony and Octavian defeated Brutus, for whom Horace fought.
Amnesty was granted all around by the new Emperor Octavian, soon to be Augustus, so Horace was able to find a government job and start writing poetry. His Satires, his Epistles, and his Odes became quite popular, and Horace obtained the patronage of Maecenas, one of Augustus’s chief advisers. Maecenas lavished Horace with gifts, one of which was an estate in the Sabine Hills, where Horace enjoyed a leisurely life, often sleeping until ten o’clock in the morning. Suetonius reports that Horace, who never married, led a vigorous sex life in his mirrored bedroom. There were reports that he enjoyed having partners of both genders.
Horace apparently accepted the traditional Roman religion, but devoted little speculative thought to the meaning of life and death, either in his works or in his private life. He claimed to have been startled out of his atheism when he heard a clap of thunder in a cloudless sky. His poems embody a conventional belief in the gods, to whom he gives due respect, but for whom there is little evident devotion.
In early November of 8 BC, Maecenas died, and Horace rushed to his patron’s villa in Rome, where he himself died suddenly three weeks later, on November 27, just twelve days before his fifty-seventh birthday. Some speculated that he died of grief at the loss of Maecenas, or possibly even committed suicide in order to follow him in death. It is more likely that Horace succumbed to a heart attack or stroke. However he died, it must have been unexpected—while he had begun to draft a will, in which he left all his belongings to the Emperor Augustus (as was expected of Augustus’s friends), he didn’t live long enough to complete the document. Horace is buried near Maecenas on the Esquiline Hill in Rome.
OVID
Ovid, the enormously popular Roman poet whose Metamorphoses is one of the most influential works of Western literature, spent the last decade of his life as an exile in a bleak and remote Black Sea community in what is now Romania, where the winters were bitter cold, savage Cossack barbarians made periodic raids, and no one spoke Latin.
Why one of Rome’s leading lights wound up in the boondocks is anybody’s guess. “A poem and a mistake” is the cryptic reason Ovid gave for his mysterious banishment by Augustus Caesar in 8 AD. The “poem” in question was undoubtedly Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a racy bit of erotica that might well have required punishment from an emperor supposedly dedicated to restoring public morality. But the “mistake,” which Ovid would say only was worse than murder and more harmful than poetry, remains unknown. Most likely it was some form of lèse majesté, a personal offense against the Emperor—possibly the discovery of Augustus in incestuous flagrante delicto with his own daughter. Be that as it may, Ovid was not a happy camper during the last years of his life.
Born on March 20, 43 BC, in Abruzzo, in central Italy, Ovid is best known for the Metamorphoses, a compendium of mythological transformations, which provided source material for such later authors as Dante, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Spenser, and Shakespeare. He is also noted for his love poetry, particularly the Ars Amatoria and Amores. In the Ars Amatoria, Ovid shows not only his cynical take on romance, but also an insouciant view of the role the gods play in human life:
Promise women anything; women love promises. And be sure to swear by all the gods that you’ll be true to your word. Jupiter will just look down and laugh at your lies and toss them to Aeolus for the winds to play with. He used to make the same kind of promises to Juno, down by the River Styx, when he swore he’d be faithful. And you know how well he kept those promises! So take courage from his example.
It’s a good idea to believe in the gods and to bring offerings of wine and incense to their altars. You would do well to observe the precepts of religion. Don’t lie to anybody, except, of course, women—for that doesn’t count!
It’s little wonder that Ovid was divorced twice before he was thirty. His third wife, however, was a keeper, and she thought the same of him, for she stuck by him during his exile.
Ovid’s poetry turned bitter during his years away from Rome. In his writings he complains of a harsh climate, a general weakness in his body, insomnia, loss of weight and appetite, pallor, a parched tongue, a pain in the side attributed to the winter cold, trembling hands, deep wrinkles, senility, delirium, and depression. These ailments finally caught up with him in the harsh winter of 17 AD, when Ovid died at the age of sixty. He was buried a few kilometers away in a town that was renamed Ovidiu in his honor in 1930.
MARCUS AURELIUS
“Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, from the desires that make us their puppets, from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh,” wrote Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations. The future Roman Emperor was to the manner born—his parents were both members of the ruling patrician class—in Rome on April 26, 121 AD. As a young man he was a serious student, devoted to the teachings of the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus.
Marcus’s early life would make a good soap opera. He came to the attention of the Emperor Hadrian, who arranged for him to be adopted by Antoninus, who was next in line to be Emperor. Antoninus, who had another adoptive son, known as Verus, succeeded to the throne in 138. Marcus continued his studies, married Antoninus’s daughter Faustina, and served as consul, the leader of the Senate. In 161, Antoninus died, and Marcus shared the throne with his adoptive brother until Verus’s death in 169, after which Marcus ruled alone.
Marcus Aurelius is most remembered for his philosophical Meditations, rooted in Stoic philosophy, many of which deal with the meaning of death, characterized as a welcome and natural part of life. “Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else,” he wrote. “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
Perhaps his final word on the subject is this wry observation: “Death smiles at us all. All we can do is smile back.”
Marcus Aurelius, smiling or not, met his death in 180, when he was fifty-nine, near what is now Vienna. He had been ill for some time with an unknown ailment, possibly cancer, and is thought to have died of an infection. There were tales that he had died of the plague brought back from Parthia by his army, or from lead poisoning in the water pipes, or that his son, Commodus, hastened his departure by administering poison—but these suppositions are all without evidence. Marcus is buried in the Mausoleum of Hadrian at Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome.
The Middle Ages
AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
Augustine of Hippo, known in many Christian churches as Saint Augustine or sometimes Saint Austin, was no saint as a young man. Born in 354 in Tagaste, a now-vanished city on the site of what is now Souk Ahras, Algeria, he was a pleasure-seeking playboy who lived in the fast lane until his mid-thirties. A professor of rhetoric, first in Carthage and later in Rome and Milan, he had a mistress in Carthage—with whom he sired a son named Adeodatus—and there were other paramours in Milan. He was noted for a prayer in which he asked God, �
�Give me chastity—but not yet.”
His mother, a devout Christian convert named Monica, took a dim view of Augustine’s debauchery and tried for years to convert her son. He went through a series of philosophical attachments—Manicheism, skepticism, and neo-Platonism—before renouncing his hedonistic life and adopting Christianity. He later became a bishop in the city of Hippo (Algeria), a revered Father of the Church, and the author of several notable works on theology, which include The City of God and the Confessions.
Augustine held carefully reasoned and theologically detailed ideas about what happens to people after death, stemming from his reading of the Bible and from traditional Catholic teaching. He was noted for expounding the doctrine of amillennialism, the belief that Christ was now reigning in a symbolic thousand-year period that would be followed, at world’s end, by final judgment and the establishment of a permanent Kingdom of God. Augustine taught that the eternal fate of the soul is determined at death, and that the fires of Purgatory purify those who die in communion with the Church, but are still tainted by sin.
Augustine’s death came at the age of seventy-six, on August 28, 430, of a virulent fever, aggravated by stress and malnutrition, that he suffered three months into a siege of the city of Hippo by the German tribe known as Vandals. The Vandals kept Hippo under attack for fourteen months, and twenty-five years later, ensuring their name would be known for centuries to come, the same bunch sacked Rome, leading to the fall of the Roman Empire.
Augustine’s remains were buried first in the Hippo cathedral, but when Catholic bishops were expelled from northern Africa by the Vandal ruler Huneric in 484, they took Augustine’s bones with them to Cagliari in Sardinia. About 720 the remains were acquired by the bishop of Pavia, Italy, who deposited them in Pavia’s Church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, where they now reside.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Nicknamed “Dumb Sicilian Ox” by his fellow monks, Thomas Aquinas was heavyset, hardworking, and slow to speak. But when he had something to say, he bellowed. Born January 28, 1225, into a well-connected family in Aquino County, Sicily, Thomas was the youngest son of Landulf of Aquino, a miles, or knight, and Dame Theodora, whose family were minor aristocrats in Naples. He was destined for monastic life from age five, when he was sent to study at the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, where his uncle had been abbot. At nineteen, he joined the upstart Dominican order—to the chagrin of his pro-Benedictine family, who went so far as to kidnap him to try to dissuade him, but to no avail.
Ensconced among the Dominicans, Thomas wrote numerous carefully reasoned theological works, the most famous of which, Summa Theologica (sometimes Theologiæ) and Summa Contra Gentiles, still form the basis of much Roman Catholic thought.
On December 6, 1273, when he was forty-eight years old, he was observed in the chapel of the Dominican monastery at Naples levitating and having a conversation with an icon of the crucified Christ. “What would you have as a reward for your labor?” Christ supposedly said. “Nothing but you, Lord,” said Thomas. After this episode—which was either a mystical epiphany or a stroke—Thomas never wrote another line, telling his secretary, “I cannot, for all that I have written before seems like straw, compared to what has been revealed to me.”
Thomas’s view of life after death was the orthodox Catholic view of reward and punishment in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory—a view that he himself helped to shape. In Summa Theologica, he wrote: “The soul becomes separated from its mortal body, and its merits determine whether it receives the consequences of good or of evil. Therefore, after death the soul either receives or is denied a final reward. The state of final retribution is twofold: for the good, it is Paradise; for the evil, because of unforgiven faults, it is Hell. . . . If, however, the soul is in a state that prevents it from receiving its final reward because of minor sins that have been committed, it is detained in Purgatory, where souls may expiate those faults and defects that detract from the glory of human nature until they are ready to obtain their reward.”
In 1274, Pope Gregory X summoned Thomas to take part in a council in Lyon on May 1, and in January he set out from Naples, a distance of some 600 miles, on foot and by donkey. Along the Appian Way, Thomas hit his head on a tree branch and was knocked off the donkey. He was taken to the nearby monastery of Monte Cassino to recuperate. He set out once more, but fell ill again, this time stopping at the castle of his niece, Countess Francesca Ceccano. After a few days, he felt no better, and asked to be moved to the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova six miles away. “If the Lord wishes to take me,” he said, “it’s better that he find me in a holy monastery than in a layperson’s castle.”
Thomas was given last rites by the monks, received the Eucharist, and, with remarkable stamina and syntactical precision for a dying man, offered this lengthy prayer:
If in this world there be any knowledge of this sacrament stronger than that of faith, I wish now to use it in affirming that I firmly believe and know as certain that Jesus Christ, True God and True Man, Son of God and Son of the Virgin Mary, is in this Sacrament . . . I receive Thee, the price of my redemption, for Whose love I have watched, studied, and laboured. Thee have I preached; Thee have I taught. Never have I said anything against Thee: if anything was not well said, that is to be attributed to my ignorance. Neither do I wish to be obstinate in my opinions, but if I have written anything erroneous concerning this sacrament or other matters, I submit all to the judgment and correction of the Holy Roman Church, in whose obedience I now pass from this life.
He died on March 7, 1274, at the age of forty-nine. The poet Dante Alighieri, in his Inferno, claimed that Thomas had been poisoned (possibly by a fellow monk, or a knight, or a physician) on the orders of King Charles of Anjou, with whom Thomas was at odds politically. Thomas’s body was given to the Dominican order, and today most of it is in a gold and silver sarcophagus in the Church of St. Sernin in Toulouse, France—except his right arm, which is in the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome, and a bone from his left arm, which is preserved as a relic in the cathedral of Naples. Canonized in 1323, Saint Thomas now rests in pieces.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
Dante Alighieri had a lifelong obsession with a young woman he saw only twice in his life. Best remembered for his epic poem, The Divine Comedy, Dante was born in Florence, Italy, around 1265. His family were Guelphs, members of a political party that supported the papacy in a power struggle with the German emperor, and this affiliation would later cause him much grief.
Dante married Gemma de Manetto Donati, and they had four children—but the love of his life, at least in his own mind, was Beatrice Portinari, whom he met for the first time at a May Day party at her house when he was nine years old and she was eight. Their second and last meeting was a chance encounter nine years later on a Florence street. Beatrice remained a fixation with him, and he wrote extensively of her in his autobiography La Vita Nuova (The New Life) and in the Paradiso section of The Divine Comedy, where she appears as his celestial guide.
Through a series of political machinations, in which the pro-pope Guelphs were pitted against the pro-emperor Ghibbelines, Dante found himself on the losing side and was banished in perpetual exile from his beloved Florence. Dante’s vision of life after death pops up often in his writing. Death is viewed as a dreaded calamity in La Vita Nuova, where Dante writes (in this translation by his namesake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti):
Death, always cruel,
Pity’s foe in chief,
Mother who brought forth grief,
Merciless judgment and without appeal!
Since thou alone hast made my heart to feel
This sadness and unweal,
My tongue upbraideth thee without relief.
In The Divine Comedy, Dante divides the afterlife into the three locales of Catholic theology: Hell (Inferno) for really nasty evil-doers, Purgatory (Purgatorio) for basically good people who backslid occasionally and must be cleansed of minor sins, and Heaven (Paradiso) for those right
eous few whose souls are pure and receive the beatific vision. The torments of Hell are hard to ignore, as Dante describes them in horrific detail, and the utter despair of those who are unfortunate enough to be sent there is reflected in the famous motto over the entrance: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The Roman poet Virgil is Dante’s guide through the Inferno and most of Purgatorio, but because he is a pagan and cannot enter Paradiso, he is replaced as a guide in the final book by Beatrice, the love of Dante’s life.
Certainly Dante must have aspired to the celestial glory that he tries to convey in the final canto of Paradiso:
My mind, thus wholly in suspense, was gazing
Steadfast and motionless, and all intent,
And, gazing, grew enkindled more and more.
Such in that Light doth one at last become,
That one can never possibly consent
To turn therefrom for any other sight;
Because the Good, which is the will’s real object,
Is therein wholly gathered, and, outside,
That is defective which is perfect there.
Dante reached the ultimate goodness and light in 1321 when he was fifty-six. On the way home to Ravenna from a visit to Venice, he came down with what was probably malaria and died a month later, on September 14. His body is buried in Ravenna, and the tomb erected for him in Florence in the Church of Santa Croce remains empty. Although the Florence City Council formally revoked his exile in 2008, there is no indication that Dante plans to relocate.