The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis Page B

tomb with paintings of the hero.
    But of all the Roman emperors who were enslaved by the legacy of Alexander, none was more egregious than the emperor Nero. After he had murdered his own natural mother, and after fire had reduced Rome and its treasures to ashes, Nero decided to improve himself by tasting the refined arts of Greece. He played his lyre and enacted tragedies in the theaters. He competed in the arena and the stadium, and, needless to say, he was crowned with the victor’s laurel every time. So impressed was Nero by the culture of Greece that he stripped it of its works of art. From the sanctuary of Delphi alone he removed some five hundredbronze statues and carried them back to Rome. Perhaps the bronze charioteer and his horses were separated in this act of theft.
    Nero’s Grecian antics did not impress his subjects, who expected their imperator to wage war rather than play the lyre, and he realized that he would have to improve his reputation the old Roman way. As it happened, at this time the Romans were engaged in an interminable conflict against the Parthians. Nero seized upon a minor victory in this war and made the Senate grant him a triumph. He was a new Alexander, he said, who, like the ancient hero, had vanquished the Eastern barbarians.
    A triumph was contrived in the capital city of the republic; a procession wound its way from the city gate to the Field of Mars, and the spoils of victory were dedicated in the temple of Jupiter. An arch was hastily erected on the Capitoline Hill, and the four horses, recently stolen from Greece, or perhaps from the mausoleum of Augustus, were placed on top of it. The arch didn’t last long: Nero’s fantasies soon evaporated. He killed himself less than a year after his triumph, and the whole pageant was quietly dismantled.

     
    N EARLY THREE CENTURIES later, the emperor Constantine decided to move his court from Rome to Byzantium, giving that city a new name: Nova Roma (New Rome). In his new capital Constantine established a palace, a hippodrome, and a forum with a senate house; and in that forum he set up a column topped by a bronze image of Apollo, whose head he removed and replaced with his own. On his deathbed, Constantine was baptized into the Christian faith and declared himself the fourth member of the Trinity.
    Fifty-six years later, the emperor Theodosius finished what Constantine had started; for while Constantine had allowed the worship of the old gods to continue, his successor proclaimed himself their enemy. In A.D . 393 Theodosius attended the chariot races at the Olympic Games, declared himself the victor, and then abolished the games altogether; they would not be convened for another fifteen centuries. Theodosius cast down the altar of Victory in the Senate House in Rome and extinguished the eternal flame in the Temple of Vesta. The Delphic oracle was silenced; the Parthenon was vandalized; andin Alexandria the emperor’s agents split open the head of the god Serapis, revealing not the residence of a divinity but a secret cache of jewels jealously guarded by avaricious priests.
    Having demonstrated the empty vanity of the pagan idols, Theodosius had them all brought to the Hippodrome of New Rome. On the raised
spina
that ran down the middle of the racetrack he erected an obelisk from Luxor, made two thousand years before by the pharaoh Thutmosis. It was joined by the column of brazen serpents from Delphi, made by the Greeks in the dawn of classical antiquity, and by the statue of Athene Parthenos captured in Athens. Among all these treasures was a bronze
quadriga
that, some said, had been taken from Nero’s arch, or from Augustus’s mausoleum in Rome.
    Trapped on the
spina
, an island surrounded by a sea of sand and careering charioteers, these obsolete idols were captives on display: the booty of an old order that had been looted by a new one. But although the empire and the emperor were Christian, and laughed in the face of idolatry, they were