Saturday 8 January 2011

January 8- Rome and the Poor

Rome was not, as we think of it today, an orderly city of clipped villas with elegant roofs. Rather, it was cramped as a chicken farm: A place designed to fit an entire metropolis of a million souls into an area we would fit about a fifth of that today. So the Rome of the real world was a city of prototype skyscrapers, of buildings that stretched five or more stories high and streets just wide enough to let a herd of oxen make it to the market. It was a place of little space and less light, and it is perhaps not surprising that we have forgotten it today.

Yet this is not what interests me about that city, lost to us by an overgrowth of time and myth. Instead it is this: shorn of the chance to relegate the poor to distant outskirts, the rich men of Rome created a system whereby the more money you had, the closer to the ground you could be. And so above their stately homes with plumbing and heating were progressively desperate people, their fortunes becoming bleaker the further up you went. And at the very top were those without bedding and without hope, who would be the most likely to start a fire that consumed the building and the most likely to die from it. It is, you will have noticed, a world where our concepts of status were inverted, where the higher a man is the more hopeless and desperate his life has become. Perhaps this thought occured in another way to Jesus all those years ago, but I am neither hopeless or desperate, and so it is not what interests me.

Rather this: the rich of Rome scorned their poor, but were never far away from them. In their marbled rooms they could never forget that above them was squalor and despair, and that mere feet away there existed men who -if they so desired- could bring their roofs crashing down about their heads. And as a rich man I consider this: my time is one without slavery and without pleasure over bloodshed, without discrimination or the chance of dying for belief. And yet for all this I do not think I could live as a privaliged Roman did, constantly aware and beside all that his lifestyle implies. Rather all I can do is to remember it sometimes, while squinting, and glimpse the world we have made as it slowly begins to burn.

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