A few weeks ago, I spent my Friday night contemplating marble heads at the Seattle Art Museum’s Roman art exhibit.
I had a free ticket and didn’t expect to be wowed — I’ve seen statues of gods before, and old vases.
The exhibit was engrossing, to my surprise. Part of what got me was that the Romans seem to have so much in common with us.
And even scarier, at the height of the empire, I’m sure no one expected it to fall apart.
Take the focus on hair. Roman women were about as caught up in their hairstyles as we are.
A room of the exhibit is dedicated just to hairstyles. (It’s probably just cultural that I thought they all looked really bad.)
The marble head of one woman was piled high with tight tiny curls, like Cheerios. Other statues sported elaborate versions of a mullet: short and styled in front, party down the back, swept into a loose bun.
Drawings on the walls showed Roman city layouts, similar to what you see of Seattle when landing on a plane. Street grids bypassed houses, gardens, steps up to temples and sports arenas.
If you were middle class, you could rent an apartment or a townhouse in the city. If you were rich, you could afford a house with a walled garden. Suburbs sprawled out from the cities.
Merchants brought luxuries and spices from the East. People swam in swimming pools and went to sports arenas that held 250,000 people. We don’t even have arenas that big now. High-tech aqueducts carried water over long distances.
Like the U.S., the Romans spent a lot of money and time on their military. Like us, the focus was on commerce and practical matters, as opposed to the Greeks, who valued art and philosophy.
The Romans also took the idea of “citizenship” as seriously as we do post-9/11. If you were a Roman citizen condemned to death, you got to go the “easy” route of getting your head chopped off. If you weren’t a Roman citizen, you had a variety of gruesome ways to go, including crucifixion.
The Romans had art in their homes. They knew how to throw a good party.
But rather than getting more and more advanced, or sustaining all the comforts and entertainments they’d amassed, their civilization collapsed violently, with barbarians looting and torching the cities.
After the collapse, Western Europe slumped into a brutal, backwards age, as if the Greeks and Romans and their high tech advances had never existed. The temples were left to rot.
So what about us? We have our sprawling cities, our myriad entertainments, and a technology that just keeps getting more and more advanced.
I don’t have kids yet, but I’m convinced by the time they’re in middle school they’ll have computer chips implanted in their heads so they can communicate with their friends telepathically.
Seeing the Roman exhibit made me think twice about that. Will things keep getting more and more and more advanced? Will we build bigger and bigger stadiums, have more and more complicated cell phone ring tones, more and more ways to entertain ourselves, ad infinitum?
When you look at history, the answer is probably not.
The myth of progress is that things keep “improving” in a straight, upward line.
But the past shows, again and again, that things happen in cycles. You have the rise of an advanced civilization, then a crash.
The apocalyptic among us would say that global warming is one sign our own civilization, ascendant for so long, may be nearing one of those big drop-off points.
I won’t even start talking about the drop of the dollar overseas. Or China.
But there’s only so far you can get worrying about those things, once you’ve replaced your light bulbs with fluorescents and made a real effort — if possible — to take the bus more.
Until the fall of our empire, there’s sports games to go to, ring tones to choose from and of course, hair to be styled.
Sarah Koenig is education reporter for The Enterprise.
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