Poster for Mario Soldati's 1941 film Piccolo mondo antico, based on Antonio Fogazzaro's 1895 novel of that title, which I saw at the Pacific Film Archive with the director—who had become a friend of ours—when he was teaching at Berkeley in the 1970s.
They mean no harm by it, of that I’m sure,
The silent ones, we plunging on, the unknown future
Already 2025! Who’d have thought I’d still be alive,
So far now from the piccolo mondo antico.
Receding further every day into the depths of time,
There’s nowhere left to go, nothing to do, although
I, for some reason, go on writing, line by line
Emerging as from the air; I note the things down,
Then edit them a bit, wondering whether today’s the day to quit.
Will there be a signal, do you suppose? Some firm gentle voice that says,
Be quiet now: there’s no one left who knows.
The Lines and the Beast
"The fate of little writings accords with the capacity of the reader."*
—Terentianus Maurus
I can’t control
These rabid lines
They’ll have their way
Such are the times
The rhyming beast
Must have its feast
I don’t know why
Much though I try
*Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli, verse 1286 of De litteris, de syllabis, de metris by Terentianus Maurus (ca. second century CE). We may deduce from his name that the author was an African from Mauretania, the western half of the ancient Maghreb.
The Saint and the Emperor
Although identified by the Metropolitan Museum in New York as "African Magus, one of the Three Kings from an Adoration Group. German, before 1489," it seems to me that this perhaps rather (or also) represents the African soldier–saint Maurice, or Maurikios, whose image was common in Germany prior to the global rise of African slavery.
There was also an East Roman general and emperor of that name, who was likely of North African ancestry, although evidently a native Greek speaker. He and his family were brutally put to death by a usurping general, murders that Maurikios's friend the Iranian ruler Khosrow II went to war to avenge.
Solidus issued by the Byzantine emperor Maurikios (582–602 CE)
Saturday, January 4, 2025