The New Greek and Roman Galleries at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art are more than just a walk back in time. They are a passage into another dimension. You can imagine the sweat and blood that went into creating these colossal columns—which yet are so beautiful—and the countless eons they stood under the baking Mediterranean sun through the march of time and wars and the rise and fall of empires. They stayed impervious to it all, though crumbling a little every century. But they did survive to our age.
And they are more than a walk back in time because they remind us that despite the tumult of life—despite the hardship and barbarity of the ancient world (the endless wars and butchery, the slavery that was the norm)—there was a longing immemorial for beauty and peace and an ideal world that man, since the Stone Age, has felt compelled to create in the face of all his hardships.
Walking through the galleries, with their light so delicate and ethereal, so cool and classical, frankly, so unlike the real sun of the Mediterranean—more like a Van Gogh blare of color—one can imagine the ideal world these ancient people envisioned in their mind when they toiled at their task. Why else would a tinsmith work at something so delicate for hours and days and perhaps weeks and months on end? To make a little money? Yes, but somebody wanted to buy the product of his art, some connoisseur of art—enough of them to make his trade profitable.
The ancient world was full of art, some restrained and classical, as the ancient Greek in its maturity, some robust and effulgent, as the Hellenistic and the later Roman. But it was art, and it was a compulsion for these ancient people who are our kin, and for us who roam through these wonderful galleries and make contact with our ancestors and their dreams, so parallel to others.
We live a hectic life, they lived a life of sheer survival, and yet they found the time to create such beauty and lavish all their care on it. Perhaps we should take time in our busy lives to pay tribute to their devotion to beauty and its wonder that they tried to capture and which makes us all distinctly human.
Dimitri C. Michalakis
