Rome reborn in our lives

Rome reborn in our lives: a conversation with Scott Samuelson

Humanities Watch sat down with Scott Samuelson, author of Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour, just out from University of Chicago Press. The book takes its readers on a journey into the Eternal City and into themselves. A scholar and teacher of philosophy, Scott has also written Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering and The Deepest Human Life.

Humanities Watch: When did you first travel to Rome, and what impression did it leave on you?

Scott Samuelson: I’d been mentally traveling to Rome long before I took a plane there. I started dreaming about the city as a sixteen-year-old, when I checked out of the public library H.V. Morton’s The Fountains of Rome. I studied Latin in college and ancient Roman philosophy in grad school. But I didn’t set foot in Rome until I was in my late thirties and was invited to be a co-instructor of a summer study abroad course. By the time my head hit the pillow after my first jetlagged day there, I was already in love with the city. I felt immersed in an art of life that had been unfolding for thousands of years. The best way I can characterize my first impression of Rome is that it made me feel as big in my humanity as possible while still being human.

HW: We hear today about people spending more money on “services” or “experiences,” including travel. In your book, you discuss current — and past! — tourists in Rome. How has Rome changed, or not changed, as a destination for tourists? How have tourists changed?

SS: People have been coming to Rome since before Rome even existed, starting with a war refugee: Aeneas. (Almost all of us are travelers but only some of us are lucky enough to get to choose our trips.) I identify two main forerunners of the contemporary tourist. The first is the religious pilgrim. In the Middle Ages, Christians went to Rome in search of gracing the holy life by worshipping at the city’s main churches. The second is the Grand Tourist. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, upper-class young men, and occasionally young women, primarily British, went to Italy to complete their education. These two kinds of travelers live on. Catholics still consider Rome a site of pilgrimage, and the Grand Tour continues in study abroad programs. But I think that the dominant model of contemporary tourists, even for pilgrims and students, is consumerist. We want to buy, collect, and show off our experiences of an attractive place. We want to say, “Been there, done that.” Among the many ways Rome has changed over the years is that it’s always catered to its visitors and partly remodeled itself to accommodate them. However, I think that all these types of travelers contain more than their official models demarcate. The holiest pilgrim still wants to take home silly souvenirs, and the crassest rider on the Rome-in-Two-Days bus still longs for jolts of beauty and holiness. I want my book to contribute to bringing out another latent facet of most travelers: the questing for the good life. We can be philosophical tourists who pursue the big questions posed by our journeys and open ourselves up to being transformed by them. In a way, philosophy itself is a form of travel. Think of Plato’s famous image of philosophical education as the disorienting trip out of a cave into the sunlit world.

HW: We are constantly seeking to justify the place of the humanities in our education and in our lives. What does Rome tell us about its place?

SS: I’ve long thought that the best defense of the humanities is a good offense. Beyond the uphill battle of trying to convince society that the humanities are a useful way of helping students to meet their goals (for instance, by arguing that the humanities will give them the soft skills to advance in the global economy), I think it’s better to have the humanities work their magic on us—among other things, by transforming what we take our goals to be. In this sense, Rome is about the best defense of the humanities you can get. Its beauty and history overwhelm almost everybody. Once travelers are under its spell, the humanities can pounce. For instance, when I’m with students in the Colosseum, they’re naturally asking questions of ethics (is it ever right to consume violent spectacle?) or human nature (what does it tell us about who we are that we’ve always enjoyed blood sports?). It’s easy to get them interested in the history of the site as well as what thinkers like Seneca or Augustine have said about just these questions in relationship to the gladiatorial games. Or, when we’re in the Protestant Cemetery, full of remarkable people who met death on their journeys, it’s practically inevitable for us to wonder about what kind of adventure we want to be defined by, what kind of memory we want to leave behind. It’s a short step from there to engage in the best of the humanities—an ode recited by Keats’s grave, a conversation about ancient conceptions of the good life in a Testaccio bar. Sure, in engaging in these activities, students are picking up useful skills, but the value of the humanities shines far beyond our confining conceptions of usefulness. Even those who dismiss Western civilization as thoroughly wicked are unlikely to turn down a trip to Rome!

HW: A central concept you return to time and again is decorum. How have you come to understand this term? How does a place like Rome teach us about ways it informs, or should inform, our lives?

SS: In Latin, decorum means something like “fittingness” or “appropriateness.” We still use the word in roughly the same way in English. But our concept is too limited, too tame, to express the original concept as we find it in Cicero. Though he’s a great proponent of the rule of law in political life, Cicero thinks that our moral life is irreducible to a set of rules. Decorum is about mastering the grammar of social life to bring out the best of our humanity. It means being polite when politeness is called for, but it also means being fun when politeness isn’t called for. It’s a kind of eloquence in action. Dante has a wonderful formulation: “in church with the saints, at the tavern with the drunks.” We see the concept of decorum all over Rome and its history. For instance, the great art historian Robert Williams argues that Cicero’s concept of decorum is the key to Raphael’s artistic style and also his well-run workshop of otherwise rowdy artists. I think that we see decorum to this day in Rome in what Italians call l’arte di arrangiarsi, which means something like “the art of finessing predicaments.” The idea is that relational life is complex, and it’s an art to make the best of tricky situations. No rule or set of rules could ever capture the complex balances that must be struck. The lack of decorum is a big problem for us now. I suppose it’s always been common for people to put their moral or political principles over their fellow human beings, but in our era of social media it seems like the relentless norm. I think we’d benefit, both personally and socially, by working on the art of serving our humanity in all the messy predicaments we get into, even if that means occasionally shrugging our shoulders at having to suspend whatever principles we’re fond of. I think we’d all be well served by thinking of our relational humanity as an artform requiring cultivation and ingenuity.

HW: You have been leading groups of students to Rome for over ten years. Thousands of US students study in Italy every year. Based on your experience, how do they benefit from their time in Italy? What preparation helps them benefit from their stay?

SS: As trying as it can sometimes be, study abroad is, pound for pound, the best kind of learning experience you can be part of, regardless of where you’re based. Though Rome is an especially magical place, everywhere is a magical place—especially for someone with open eyes, curious mind, and big heart. But I think that at least two things make Rome—and Italy more broadly—unique. First, it’s ideal for students of the humanities. In even just two weeks there, students usually get a better sense of the history of politics, religion, and art in the West than they do in several semesters of required courses. Second, Italian culture is profoundly seductive—the rhythms of eating and drinking, the sense of style, the deep history that’s still alive. Thoughtful travelers usually take some seed of Italian culture and replant it in their lives back home. As for what benefits students in preparation for their travels, I think it’s important to frontload as much of the basics as possible, because being in a place like Rome is mentally and emotionally overwhelming. For instance, mastering a timeline in advance is useful. When students are there, I want them not just to learn about the place but to engage with it. Beyond the exams (they’re important too!), I like them to have a project that they formulate and develop: a photographic series, a personal essay, a set of poems, a philosophical life experiment—anything that helps them connect their personal aptitudes to the city in a transformative way.

HW: You begin and end your book with funeral monuments: the tombstone of Rosa Bathurst and the statue of Giordano Bruno. The second section of your book has the theme, “Remember Death.” How is this a key to the “good life”?

SS: If you get nothing else from Rome, you get that it’s a city of ruins and rebirths. You just can’t avoid the fact that things pass away, buildings crumble, people die—and others come to take their place. Roman thinkers have always asked how we should live in light of this unavoidable reality. It’s common for us now to believe that thinking about death is macabre, something to be avoided for the sake of our mental wellbeing. I think that’s a mistake. Don’t misunderstand me: doom-scrolling through all that could go wrong is no good. But without reflecting on the fact of our mortality, I think it’s hard for us to live well. The point is to remember our limited time so as to empower us to make the most of it, to up our odds of having nothing to resent when all is said and done. The Roman philosophical tradition links memento mori (remember you will die) with carpe diem (reap the day). Similarly, the city’s religious traditions startle us with bones and skulls, like Bernini’s tomb for Alexander VII in St. Peter’s where a veiled bronze skeleton holds a tilting hourglass,

or the crypt in Santa Maria della Concezione where the walls are decorated with the actual skeletons of over three thousand Capuchin friars.

Though the value-systems of religions and philosophies vary, the deep wisdom is that remembering death is inextricable from caring for your soul. How in your limited time here can you tap into what’s most valuable and be a continuator of it?

HW: Another theme in your book is wealth and commerce, whether in the writings of Horace or the Villa Farnesina. What can we learn from Rome about the value of money, business, and commerce?

SS: Let me begin by saying that Roman philosophers, like their Greek counterparts, are pretty hard on financial wealth. Epicureans like Lucretius regard money as the very form of our destructive desire for more, more, more. If we can scale our desires back to the essential ones, we feel ourselves rich with relationships, food, drink, natural beauty—goods that cost very little or often nothing at all. Stoics like Epictetus go even further and insist that whether we’re rich or poor has absolutely nothing to do with our flourishing: what matters is only how we carry ourselves and relate to our circumstances. That said, wealth has obviously played a huge role in the legacy of Rome. The greatest flowerings of Roman culture, like the Augustan Age and the Renaissance, have involved extensive patronage of artists and scholars. If you’re looking for what to do with all your money, history proves you can’t beat an investment in the arts. But accepting money carries a high potential for servitude—for selling out, for being corrupted explicitly or implicitly by the powers that be. In my view, the greatest guide for how to navigate the situation is Horace, whose patron was the famously generous Maecenas, an advisor to Caesar Augustus. Though Maecenas gave the poet an estate and full financial support, Horace was still able to turn down significant requests from Augustus himself. It’s really quite astonishing how Horace was able to maintain his independence while being so financially supported. It took tremendous decorum—we might say “tact”—to pull this trick off. He praised and gave thanks to Maecenas and Augustus in both genuine and canny ways. He also manifested the worth of his independence to them. Though he wasn’t going to turn his nose up at what money could do for him, he’d learned from the philosophers the importance of building and maintaining an inner citadel of freedom. The way Horace puts it is, “Though I don’t praise poverty after a chicken dinner, I wouldn’t trade my freedom for all Arabia’s gold.” His lesson to us is that we must be in the world of money but not of the world of money. As far as the financing of the arts and the humanities goes, I’d say the key is picking the right horses, so to speak, and then giving them free rein. As for artists and scholars, insofar as they’re being financed, I’d say the key is keeping alive the inner freedom that can’t be had for all the gold in the world. And if nobody’s financing you, check out books by Epicureans and Stoics from the public library!

HW: Please complete this sentence: after my time in Rome, the finer things in life are….

SS: not our moralisms or dogmas, which come and go, but rather humane goods like leisurely meals, stylistic flair, the eclectic use of our traditions, crafts that repair and pass on what’s important, a sense of humor, gratitude, dignity, art, and love.

For other posts on Rome, see here.