Finding humanity in Rome

Sunday dawned clear and sunny here in Rome, and, as usual, the church bells tolled throughout the day calling the faithful. Our small conclave of Americans studying the history of the Urbs Aeterna awoke and set about a day of studying, gelato, and the one American football game we get on satellite TV. It was mid-afternoon here before any of us realized what day it was; as one person flipped through the news channels looking for the weather report, up came a waving American flag, and we stopped. It was Sept. 11, and the siblings of those who died were reading their names in New York. A feeling of guilt flowed through some of us as we realized that, caught up in our own world, we had managed to forget what ought never to be forgotten. Here I am in a city 10 times older than the United States, but what is the history of this city? On our first day here, we walked up the route taken by the French when they besieged the city in 1849, when thousands died to establish the new Roman Republic. A few days later, we had dinner at pizzeria across from the Coliseum, where thousands died in armed and unarmed combat before cheering crowds. On Thursday night, we watched a film called Rome: Open City, about Rome under German occupation and the sacrifices of three men: an atheist, a priest, and a traitor, all fighting against the tyranny of fascism. We talked today about the expansion of Rome from city-state to dominance of all Italy, following three centuries of almost continuous warfare. This is the city of Rome, the capital of a great empire that became the capital of a great faith; a city that fell into ruin as the Middle Ages consumed it; a city resurrected from medieval shadows in the time of the Renaissance by popes (some corrupt, some not) to be the grand spiritual capital of the world. Here have trod men like Caesar and Augustus, Peter and Constantine, Michelangelo and Paganini, Garibaldi and Mussolini. A city of political, religious, and artistic preeminence, its history yet stained by the blood of countless men and women who fell beneath the sword and to the gun. Men and women were killed four years ago in New York; they were also killed last week when car bombs rocked the cities of Iraq. They were killed by roving gangs in the streets of a flooded city; they were killed in the sands of the Sudan because they belonged to the wrong tribe; they were killed on a subway on their way to work. And so, on Sept. 11, 2005, I remembered. I remembered the thousands who died in New York, once hailed as "the new Rome"; I remembered the martyrs fed to lions just down the hill in this ancient, yet modern, city. And I wondered why? In one of our classes, we are reading from Virgil's Aeneid. Hailed in the Middle Ages as an enlightened prophet of Christ to the pagan world, he spins in his grand epic a tale not unlike the grand battles and bloodshed of his literary forerunner, Homer. Yet, we read in Virgil a subtext, a questioning of this honorable pursuit of the crimson stains of war. The Medievals saw in Virgil a prophet of Christ, and it was Christ 2,000 years ago who proclaimed the peacemakers blessed. Yet, we hate and we fight; we still thrust sword and spear into flesh (only now we fly airplanes and bomb buses), defiling the ground with unholy gore as our hearts feed upon the blackness of enmity. St. Augustine enunciated the doctrine of just war, rightfully explaining that it is just to use the evil of war but only to bring to an end greater evil. We now face the ideology of hatred and extremism that would make war rather than let freedom survive, and so we must make war rather than let freedom perish. Yet flying airplanes into buildings is not justified; neither is sniping at doctors trying to evacuate a flooded hospital. Have we not learned in the last 2,000 years that blessed are the peacemakers? Have we not mourned the carnage of war waged through the history of the world for our own greed? Have we, a world of one common humanity, not understood that the destruction of one life is the destruction of a little piece of all? Nathaniel Campbell is a junior in A&S and is currently studying at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies, Rome, Italy.

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