Words&Dirt

“To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand––that is art.”

––A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, loc. 3035

“Heading due north, Caesar was venturing into territory never before penetrated by Roman forces. It was shadow-haunted, sinister, dank with mud and slaughter. Travelers whispered of strange rites of sacrifice, performed in the dead of oaken glades or by the side of black-watered, bottomless lakes. Sometimes, it was said, the nights would be lit by vast torches of wickerwork, erected in the forms of giants, their limbs and bellies filled with prisoners writing in an orgy of death. Even at the feasts for which the Gauls were famous, their customs were barbarous and repulsive. The ubiquitous Posidonius, who had traveled through Gaul in the nineties B.C., taking notes wherever he went, observed that duels were common over the best cuts of meat, and that even when warriors did get around to feasting they would not lie down to eat, as civilized men did, but would sit and let their straggling mustaches drip with grease and gravy. Blank-eyed spectators of these scenes of gluttony, and a spectacle even more repellent, were the severed heads of the warriors’ enemies, stuck on poles or in niches. So universally were these used as decorations in Gaulish villages that, Posidonius confessed, he had almost grown used to them by the end of his trip.

To the legionaries, marching ever farther north along pitted, winding tracks, peering nervously through the endless screens of trees, it must have appeared that they were entering a realm of utter darkness. This was why, on their shoulders, they bore stakes as well as spears. The camp they built after every day’s march, always identical, night after night, provided them not only with security against ambushes but also a reminder of civilization, of home. In the midst of barbarism, a forum and two straight streets would be laid out. The sentries, peering out into the blackness from behind the palisade, would have the comfort of knowing that behind them, at least, there was a corner of a foreign field that was temporarily Rome.”

––Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, loc. 3702-15