To begin with, I adore cats. Then it should be added that I can't abide low ceilings; that the place only seemed like the Department of Philology, which is just two stories high anyway; that its grubby gray-brown color was that of the fa<;adcs and interiors of Istanbul, especially the offices I had visited in the last few days; that the streets there are crooked, filthy, dreadfully cobbled, and piled up with refuse, which is constantly rummaged through by ravenous local cats; that the city, and everything in it, strongly smells of Astrakhan and Samarkand; and that the night before I had made up my mind to leave— But of that later. There was enough, in short, to pollute one's subconscious.
5
Constantine was, first and foremost, a Roman emperor—in charge of the Western part of the Empire—and for him "In this sigi, conquer" was bound to signify, above all, an extension of his own rule, of his control over the whole empire. There is nothing novel about divining the most immediate future by roosters' innards, or about enlisting a deity as your own captain. Nor is the gulf between absolute ambition and utmost piety so vast. But even if he had been a true and zealous believer (a matter on which various doubts have been cast, especially in view of his conduct toward his children and in-laws), "conquer" must have had for him not only the military, sword-crossing meaning but also an administrative one—that is, settlements and cities. And the plan of any Roman settlement is precisely a cross: a central highway running north and south (like the Corso in Rome) intersects a similar road running east and west. From Leptis Magna to Castricum, an imperial citizen always knew where he was in relation to the capital.
Even if the cross of which Constantine spoke to Eusebius was that of the Redeemer, a constituent part of it in his dream was, un- or subconsciously, the principle of settlement planning. Besides, in the fourth century the symbol of the Redeemer was not the cross at all; it was the fish, a Greek acrostic for the name of Christ. And as for the Cross of the Crucifixion itself, it resembled the Russian (and Latin) capital T, rather than what Bernini depicted on that staircase in St. Peter's, or what we nowadays imagine it to have been. Whatever Constantine may or may not have had in mind, the execution of the instructions he received in a dream took the form in the first place of a territorial expansion toward the East, and the emergence of a Second Rome was a perfectly logical consequence of this eastward expansion. Possessing, by all accounts, a dynamic personality, he considered a forward policy perfectly natural. The more so if he was in actual fact a true believer.
Was he or wasn't he? Whatever the answer might be, it is the genetic code that laughed the last laugh. For his nephew happened to be no one else than Julian the Apostate.
6
Any movement along a plane surface which is not dictated by physical necessity is a spatial form of self-assertion, be it empire-building or tourism. In this sense, my reason for going to Istanbul differed only slightly from Constantine's. Especially if he really did become a Christian—that is, ceased to be a Roman. I have, however, rather more grounds for reproaching myself with superficiality; besides, the results of my displacements are of far less consequence. I don't even leave behind photographs taken "in front of' walls, let alone a set of walls themselves. In this sense, I am inferior even to the almost proverbial Japanese. (There is nothing more appalling to me than to think about the family album of the average Japanese: smiling and stocky, he/she/ both against a backdrop of everything vertical the world contains—statues, fountains, cathedrals, towers, mosques, ancient temples, etc. Least of all, I presume, Buddhas and pagodas.) Cogito ergo sum gives way to Kodak ergo sum, just as cogito in its day triumphed over "I create." In other words, the ephemeral nature of my presence and my motives is no less absolute than the physical tangibility of Constan- tine's activities and his thoughts, real or supposed.
7
The Roman elegiac poets of the end of the first century B.C. —especially Propertius and Ovid—openly mock their great contemporary Virgil and his Aeneid. This may be explicable in tenns of personal rivalry or professional jealousy or opposition of their idea of poetry as a personal, private art to a conception of it as something civic, as a fonn of state propaganda. (This last may ring true, but it is a far cry from the truth, nonetheless, since Virgil was the author not only of the Aeneid but also of the Bucolics and the Georgics.) There may also have been considerations of a purely stylistic nature. It is quite possible that from the eleg- ists' point of view, the epic—any epic, including Virgil's— was a retrograde phenomenon. The elegists, all of them, were disciples of the Alexandrian school of poetry, which had given birth to a tradition of short lyric verse such as we are familiar with in poetry today. The Alexandrian preference for brevity, terseness, compression, concreteness, erudition, didacticism, and a preoccupation with the personal was, it seems, the reaction of the Greek art of letters against the surplus forms of Greek literature in the Archaic period: against the epic, the drama; against mythologizing, not to say mythmaking itself. A reaction, if one thinks about it— though it's best not to—against Aristotle. The Alexandrian tradition absorbed all these things and fitted them to the confines of the elegy or the eclogue: to the almost hieroglyphic dialogue in the latter, to an illustrative function of myth ( exempla) in the former. In other words, we find a certain tendency toward miniaturization and condensation (as a means of survival for poetry in a world less and less inclined to pay it heed, if not as a more direct, more immediate means of influencing the hearts and minds of readers and listeners) when, lo and behold, Virgil appears with his hexameters and gigantic "social order."
I would add here that the elegists, almost without exception, were using the elegiac distich, a couplet combining dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter; also, that they, again almost without exception, came to poetry from the schools of rhetoric, where they had been trained for a juridical profession (as advocates: arguers in the modern sense). Nothing corresponds better to the rhetorical system of thought than the elegiac distich, which provided a means of expressing, at a minimum, two points of view, not to mention a whole palette of intonational coloring permitted by the contrasting meters.
All this, however, is in parentheses. Outside the parentheses lie the elegists' reproaches directed at Virgil on ethical rather than metrical grounds. Especially interesting in this regard is Ovid, in no way inferior to the author of the Aeneid in descriptive skills, and psychologically infinitely more subtle. In "Dido to Aeneas," one of his Heroides—a collection of made-up correspondence from love poetry's standard heroines to their either perished or unfaithful beloveds—the Carthaginian queen, rebuking Aeneas for abandoning her, does so in approximately the following fashion: "I could have understood if you had left me because you had resolved to return home, to your own kin- folk. But you are setting out for unknown lands, a new goal, a new, as yet unfounded city, in order, it seems, to break yet another heart." And so on. She even hints that Aeneas is leaving her pregnant and that one of the reasons for her suicide is the fear of disgrace. But this is not gennane to the matter in hand. What matters here is that in Virgil's eyes Aeneas is a hero, directed by the gods. In Ovid's eyes, he is an unprincipled scoundrel, attributing his mode of conduct —his movement along a plane surface—to Divine Providence. (As for Providence, Dido has her own teleological explanations as well, but that is of small consequence, as is our all too eager assumption of Ovid's anti-civic posture.)