Ruminations on Ruins
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
-Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
A lot of people’s interactions with history revolve around ruins.
It’s a thought that first came to mind as I sat in the Acropolis, probably in my third or fourth hour of just staring at the Parthenon in awe. Parts of the structure remain standing, but the inside is hollowed out and empty, and the entire roof is gone. Nearly the entire famed facade lies in the Acropolis Museum a few hundred feet below. It’s one of the most famous buildings on earth, but it’s barely even a building anymore.
What draws us to the Parthenon is what happened there millennia ago. I think a lot of people just go because they think they’re supposed to. We have collectively decided that ruins are an attraction, whether you’re into history or not. Tons of people go see the Parthenon without knowing who Pericles was. That’s completely normal. Despite the fact that reading about Classical Athens tells us far more about what happened at the Parthenon, we feel the need to go see the skeleton of it. For some reason, that gives us far more feeling and connection to its significance.
What’s interesting is that it didn’t always used to be this way. For centuries after the Fall of Rome, people in Western and Southern Europe walked by Roman ruins with the same indifference as we do when we walk by a Starbucks. Most of them had no idea what the ruins were from or who the Romans were. They were just there, features of the land that people had made peace with and felt no need to explore the significance of. People took stones off the Colosseum to build their houses with, and perhaps an inquisitive thought about the structure’s original purpose entered one of those people’s heads, but we have no way of knowing. In mere centuries, the Roman Empire had disappeared from historical memory and its legacy had faded into ignored piles of stones.
The resurgence in interest in ruins coincides with the resurgence of history as a concept and field. In Europe, this was a product of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Ever since, average people have treated ruins as the finest available window into the past. I think it says something about human psychology that the world’s premier historians and the world’s most clueless tourists both want to go see the Parthenon when they’re in Athens. People all have their own reactions to the sight, and most don’t think too deeply about it, but the entire world has seemingly come to a quiet consensus that ruins are worth seeing. All of us today have at least a shred of historical understanding, a concept that only a few highly educated people grasped in years past.
It’s that sense of significance, plus a varying degree of curious empathy for people in the past, that combine to make ruins the perfect historical attraction. You only consciously make a strong effort to put yourself in people of the past’s shoes if you enjoy history. You develop the understanding that you will never, ever, get close to really knowing what life was like for people in the past or what they thought or felt. A lot of studying history is chasing that knowledge and getting as close as you can to it, but still being held back by this inescapable mental barrier, psychological Theodosian Walls preventing you from crossing over into those people’s lives. It’s a sad realization, but a necessary one. If we knew everything, there would be no reason to study history.
A sense of wistful melancholy is what strikes me when I see ruins. I’d place it as most similar to nostalgia, a sorrowful but beautiful and deeply human feeling. Ruins are inherently sad, but if we all got too sad when we saw them, then no one would go. For me, the feeling of seeing ruins is intoxicating and gets me thinking more than maybe anything else. The feeling revolves around the fact that I will never see what the Acropolis, or the Roman Forum, or Angkor Wat looked like in their heydays, pristine buildings and spaces full of people and commotion. Yet if I did, would I find it as interesting as the feeling I get from seeing their ruins? For people in the Roman Forum, it was simply the place they had to go for many parts of civil life. Ruins leave a lot to the imagination, and what our imagination fills in is often better than the normality of what actually existed.
It’s not just that ruins are old, it’s the fact that they’re ruined. It makes you wonder how people were so foolish to let it fall apart, and later on so clueless not to wonder what each building was there for. However, that’s the most important part of ruins’ grip on us. The Parthenon was actually in relatively okay shape until 1687, when the Turks decided to use it as a base and to store ammunition during a war with the Venetians. The Venetians fired their artillery upon the Acropolis, and the Parthenon went from a building to a ruin. This makes any good historian angry. But again, that anger is almost better, or at least more interesting, than if the Parthenon remained standing in decent shape. That would get you to think less. The “If only” is the real attraction, the real feeling we want to feel. It’s why fans of history are still up in arms about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. If it hadn’t burned, it wouldn’t be as captivating a topic.
One example of this thought pattern is the Pantheon in Rome. The Pantheon is in utterly pristine condition. I adore the Pantheon, but I don’t think about it as much as the Parthenon. There is no if only, no unfinished business, no possibility that things could have turned out differently. It’s just a really, really nice building that’s been there for an unbelievably long time. I didn’t sit and stare at it for hours because there were fewer threads for my mind to unwind. The sands of time have just not eroded it, and while that doesn’t impact the building’s significance, it also doesn’t give me that melancholy/nostalgia that gets me thinking and feeling. There needs to be weathered stone, and chunks missing, and broken-off columns. The site needs to carry some deeper conclusion about humanity and the passing of time, some trigger for a potent emotional reaction. Otherwise, it’s like visiting Versailles. Fantastic and interesting, but more for the spectacle than the feeling.
In a weird paradox, I find it far easier to picture a first-century Roman in the Forum, which is now a desolate mess of broken stone, than the Pantheon, an actual classical building that looks the same as it did in the first century.
Ruins are also inherently haunting. They’re skeletons, almost ghosts. Everyone who was there in their heyday is dead. The idea of them sitting there slowly disintegrating or being destroyed in a disaster is deeply unsettling. They are signs that time and death come for all, even people and societies of the highest echelon. Perhaps one reason we are drawn to them is to subconsciously remind ourselves of that, to remember we are not all-powerful even as technology accelerates ever faster. Everyone has at least a shred of humility, adding to our consensus on ruins.
Looking into the past sometimes gets us thinking about our own futures. In 401 BC, Xenophon, a fascinating Ancient Greek figure, went on an expedition with other Greek mercenaries to fight in a Persian civil war. Retreating after a lost battle, the army he was in happened upon the ruins of massive cities, far larger than they had ever seen before. These were Assyrian cities, the largest cities that had ever been built to that point. The Assyrian Empire had fallen in 612 BC, a mere 200 years before, a blink of an eye in historical terms. Neither Xenophon, an extremely well-studied man, nor any of the thousands of other men he was with knew what these ruins were. None of them knew of the Assyrians or their empire, one of the largest and most powerful the Near East had ever seen. It seems the Persians had little knowledge or memory of them either, despite succeeding the Assyrians as the Near East’s dominant power only a few decades after Assyria’s fall. The Assyrian Empire, which inflicted some of the worst terror the world has ever seen upon the region, had been completely forgotten in potentially as little time as a single lifetime.
In 200, or 2,000, or 20,000 years, will travelers happen upon the ruins of New York City and wonder for what reason we built it? Will they wonder what life was like for us? Will they even know who we were?
