East meets West
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- March
- 28
Are “Rome”:http://hbo.com fans suffering from series’ withdrawal? Curiously, I’m not. I think it was a good, even noble attempt to marry ancient history to pop culture and more specifically, “I, Claudius” to “The Sopranos.” But having hooked us on sex and intrigue in the first season, the series bombarded us with violence in the second. It was over the top, even for the Romans and ourselves.
If there is one image I’ll take away, it has to be the last  that of Polly Walker’s sublimely witchy Atia turning away as a tear streams down a generous cheek while she absorbs the parade of conquered Egyptians. She’s thinking, of course, of Antony, and perhaps, too, that you can’t build your happiness on the misery of others.
Speaking of Antony, he certainly went native in the last couple of episodes  all breastplate one day and eyeliner the next. That’s no fiction. In their lifetimes, Octavian accused Antony of having abandoned Rome for Cleopatra and Egypt. Certainly, it was no libel and it helped turn the Romans against the charismatic general. Perhaps it’s inevitable. From Alexander the Great to Lawrence of Arabia, history and literature are filled with stories of Western conquerors who went East only to be conquered by the East itself. (It’s the premise of Guy MacLean Rogers’ highly readable book “Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness,” published by Random House.)
Books like Rogers’ as well as the movies “Troy,” “Alexander” and “300” have plumbed the tension between East and West. It’s no accident that all of these have been released during the period of the Iraq War. We are the heirs to this conflict, one that we little understand. Witness the recent dismissal of “300” by The New York Times, always more self-righteous than thou, in which the paper all but accused the movie of racism, because the Greeks are portrayed as light-skinned and the Persians, dark. It does not help the cause of racial equality to apply political correctness or any of our standards to the past. Time does not flow backward, and neither does history. I’m not going to argue the Greco-Persian wars here, but simply put, the Greeks thought the Persians were barbarians and vice versa. It doesn’t matter what the characters look like. The movie is told from the Greeks’ viewpoint, and the Greeks saw the Persians as the evil Other. (Sound familiar?) No matter whom you cast, some one or group was going to be denigrated.
There is, however, another way for us in the West to look at the East, not as Other but as complement. As an Alexander aficionado, I treated myself for Christmas to Dick Davis’ new translation of “Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings” (Viking Penguin), which has just come out in paperback. You would think that the Persians and their heirs, the present-day Iranians, would portray Alexander as a devil. Nothing of the sort. And yet, the Iranian Alexander is different from the Greek one.
The Greek Alexander is I conquered this, I went there, I did that. The Iranian Alexander is yes, I conquered this and that, but these are the books I read, these are the women I loved, these are the philosophers I talked with. It’s an affective approach to life, one we sometimes miss in the eye-on-the-prize West, and it is this approach that I think seduced Alexander, Napoleon, Lawrence and many others who’ve spent time in the East.
We all have our little worlds to conquer. Doesn’t mean we can’t savor the journey while we’re doing it.
A final note on this subject: Those still pining for the glory that was Rome and “Rome” can get a taste of the real thing when “The Metropolitan Museum of Art”:http://metmuseum.org opens its New Greek and Roman Galleries on April 20, thanks in part to Lewisboro resident Shelby White and her late husband, Leon Levy. Much of this stuff hasn’t been seen for decades. It includes a marble portrait head of Augustus and a marble bust of his infamous descendant, Caligula.
The journey continues.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 2:56 pm by Georgette Gouveia.
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