You're building your tomb, Paulus, so your fame can last forever.
But don't you know? Even tombs can die.
Monumentality, and the temporary nature of memorials, have been topics for discussion in the news these past two weeks, as statues of people who made their fortunes off the misery of other people were torn down. There have been a spate of responses to this, treating these statues as a vital part of our history education, or that we should respect the erection of these memorials, and keep them up. In a recent column for The Guardian, Charlotte Higgins noted that:
Memorials, by virtue of having been set up, do not enter some state of timeless purity. Their meaning is contingent and relational, activated by the place and time in which they are seen, and by those who are doing the looking.
Higgins goes on to refer to Horace, a Roman poet of the 1st century BCE, and his creation of a monument in his poetry: I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze (Odes, 3.30). This awareness of temporality in their monumental surroundings is found throughout Roman ideas, and is evident in their trees too.
An obvious fact of using a tree as a memorial is that it will, one day, die, and I have already written about two of these trees on this blog: Romulus' spear, and the ficus Navia/Ruminalis. The deaths of these trees are treated as portentous, and the death of the ficus Navia in particular is read to mark a moment of change in the fabric of Rome.
But what about these monuments of bronze, or the tombs that Horace and John Owen both refer to? Why begin a blog about trees with comments about, well, not-trees? (And yes, this trees and not-trees distinction is sometimes how I view the world around me, fellow not-tree.)
Juvenal, in his Satires, writes about a barren fig tree erupting through a tomb:
But a nation was once ruined by the desire of a few for glory and honours, and for a name which would stick to the stones destined to guard their ashes, stones which the evil strength of a barren fig tree is strong enough to break, since even their tombs have been allotted fates as well. (10.142-6).
This poem, which was written some time in the late first and early second centuries CE, discusses false goods, and this section of it shows how a lust for fame and glory is ruinous. No tomb, no monument, can be everlasting, since they will all eventually be broken apart by a more powerful force. In this instance, it is nature that overpowers the legacy of the eager generals.
This is a trope that recurs throughout Juvenal's predecessors in the genre, and a few examples are below:
May the tomb of the procuress be an old wine jar with a broken neck: may a wild fig tree push down upon your amphora with force. (Propertius, Elegies, 4.5.75-6)
'Why study, if this ferment, this wild fig tree has taken root within and cannot burst forth in a passionate eruption?’ (Persius, Satires, 1.25)
A wild fig tree splits the marble tomb of Messala. (Martial, Epigrams, 10.2.9)
Tombs, monuments, are broken, shattered by an irrefutable force of nature. A wild fig tree, breaks them apart and grows anew. But why did these elegists choose the the fig tree to break apart monuments? In addition to the tree's roots being known to crack rock, the fig tree also comes with some consistent associations in Latin literature:
Sweet bearing figs, dripping milk from the whole udder (Ennius, Incertae 448)
A fig tree was planted at the shrine of Rumina, whose offerings are milk, not sucklings and wine (Varro, De re rustica 2.11.5)
For the fig tree yields a large amount of milk (Columella, De re rustica 5.11.9)
In the fig tree, the sap is milky... The milky juice of the fig has the nature of vinegar (Pliny, Natural History 16.181; 23.117)
The fig tree is associated with the goddess Rumina, who was an ancient goddess of fertility and motherhood, and the patron of the ficus Ruminalis. This link is likely to have originated from the milky sap of the fig tree, and will have played some part in its close ties to the she-wolf and Rome's founding.
What breaks the prideful, stale monuments of the past apart is new growth, new change, and an arboreal symbol of fertile new beginnings. These tombs, these attempts to feel grand and timeless, are cast aside in favour of radical change, from marble to greenery, and men are reminded by the poets, from Propertius to John Owen, 1700 years later, that their fame is only temporary, that their monuments are destined to fall.