Fame and the Emperor’s Column: Reading the Illegible
“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes” (Andy Warhol)
Everyone wants to be famous. But fame, as we know, is elusive and complex. It can mean many different things in different times, indeed, all at once. On the one hand Fame was often seen as the mark of eternity and truth – humanity’s response to the condition of mortality and transient life. This was kleos aphthiton, “imperishable fame”, as Homer called it – a prize to be won by the greatest of heroes, sometimes in exchange for their lives. Achilles, best of the Achaeans and the hero of the Iliad, knew this well (Iliad Book 9, lines 412-13. I here include the Greek, a transliteration of the Greek, and Richmond Lattimore’s translation, with minor changes):
εἰ μέν κ' αὖθι μένων Τρώων πόλιν ἀμφιμάχωμαι,
ei men k' authi menôn Trôôn polin amphimachômai,
if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans
ὤλετο μέν μοι νόστος, ἀτὰρ κλέος ἄφθιτον ἔσται:
ôleto men moi nostos, atar kleos aphthiton estai:
my return home is gone, but my glory shall be imperishable;
Yet, on the other hand, in Homer’s Iliad this very same word kleos could also have the exact opposite meaning. At one point in his poem, the Iliad, the singer calls on the Muses for help with his song. They, the Muses are divinities, he says. Their knowledge is eternal and complete, whereas he, the mortal singer, knows “nothing” but “passing rumour” – nothing but kleos (Iliad Book 4, lines 412-13):
ὑμεῖς γὰρ θεαί ἐστε πάρεστέ τε ἴστέ τε πάντα,
humeis gar theai este pareste te iste te panta,
For you, who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things,
ἡμεῖς δὲ κλέος οἶον ἀκούομεν οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν:
hêmeis de kleos oion akouomen oude ti idmen:
and we hear nothing but rumour and know nothing.
The ancients are, of course, long gone. We are all Moderns today. We live for the future, not for the past. “In the future”, as Andy Warhol once famously said (one can hardly resist the allure of such casual puns) “everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”. With the ascent of social media everyone may, indeed, have their very short moment of eternal fame. But does this modern view not simply stir up ancient paradoxes? Does it not simply keep antiquity’s lesson alive?
We must ask if Fame’s strange mix of power and impotence, of eternal truth and ephemeral chit-chat, is really so different from that fame the Greeks and Romans knew? Did Andy Warhol even really make his immortal comment on fame, or was it just rumour? Some say this witticism was made up by a Swedish museum curator named Pontus Hultén; others say it was Alfonse Daudet, a 19th century French novelist; Nat Finkelstein, an American photograph who worked with Warhol at the so-called ‘Factory’ in New York claimed he was the author of that famous quip. Fame is powerful, but its truth, and its eternity are as fleeting as the moment.
What then is fame? Consider one more lesson from antiquity – the (famous) Column of Trajan. Completed in 113 CE, set in the heart of Rome, in what was once Trajan’s magnificent marble Forum, the Column rises 98 feet up in the air. It is a monument to Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, one of the five ‘good’ Roman emperors. A spiral frieze 620-feet long snakes up the Column, circling it twenty three times and telling, in countless low-relief sculpted images, of the Emperor’s conquests in Dacia on the Black Sea – a story which was otherwise told in Trajan’s lost De Bello Dacico (On the Dacian War). Today, only a single sentence from that book remains: inde Berzobim, deinde Aizi processimus: “We then advanced to Berzobim, next to Aizi”, almost accidentally preserved in the Roman Grammarian Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae, (“The Foundations of Grammar, in Keil’s Grammatici Latini [Latin Grammarians] vol. 2, Section 205). How strange are the vicissitudes of Fame! Atop the Column of Trajan stood a statue of the Emperor. It was lost in the middle ages, never to be seen again; it was replaced on December 4 1587 by a statue of St. Peter.
But here’s the point: Could anyone standing in the Forum looking at the Column and awed by the Emperor’s fame have seen Trajan’s face, or indeed the face of St. Peter who is still there at the top of the Column today, 98 feet up in the sky? More importantly, could anyone, in the past, as today, have run around the Column - twenty three times - following the spiral frieze and its winding visual narrative, cranking their neck to the point of breaking so as to ‘read’ the snaking climax of the Emperor’s glorious triumphs and learn of his eternal fame? This is as impossible today as it was in ancient Rome. The end of the story is as unknown as Trajan’s fame is unseen. Indeed, fame itself, the Column suggests, is always, for better or worse, beyond reach, in the realm of the illegible.
Did the builder of the Column, the great architect Diodorus of Damascus, make a mistake, then? Was Trajan’s fame lost in the clouds? Most scholars, and I too, think not. The Column teaches us that fame’s eternity and truth are only there in the instant of the moment, always more, and at the same time less, than what we can see. That fame, indeed, for better or worse, is nothing but the paradox of past, present, and future.
Further reading:
For fame in antiquity:
Philip Hardie, Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge 2014)
Simon Goldhill, Intimations of Immortality: Fame and Tradition from Homer to Pindar (Cambridge 2011).
For the paradoxes of memory and history: A
Ahuvia Kahane, Epic, Novel and the Progress of Antiquity (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
Image sources:
Fig. 1: Andy Warhol with his dog (Jack Mitchell; CC BY 2.0)
Fig. 2: Trajan’s Column
(Cezar Suceveanu, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Columna_lui_Traian_din_Roma2.jpg; CC BY-SA 4.0)
Fig. 3: Detail of Trajan’s Column
(Trajan’s Column; Greg Willis from Denver, CO, usa, (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trajans_Column_(4226258580).jpg; CC BY-SA 2.0)
Fig.4: Looking up at Trajan’s Column at night
(John Samuel: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trajan's_Column_01.jpg; CC BY-SA 4.0)
Fig 5: St Peter, at the top of the column
(Gary Todd; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trajan%27s_Column_Statue_of_St._Peter_at_Top_(48423644281).jpg )
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Ahuvia Kahane (he/his) is Regius Professor of Greek (1761) and A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture (2017)
in the Department of CLassics, Trinity College Dublin