In 168 BC, at the Battle of Pydna, during what would become known as the Third Macedonian War, the Roman legions, in flexible formation, moving over uneven ground, defeated the Macedonian phalanx, a more traditional war formation, ultimately routing the Macedonians, and sending their leader fleeing. The leader, Perseus of Macedonia, was later captured from an island in the Aegean (Samothraki) , where he had sought refuge in a temple (The Temple of the Greater Gods), which was under the guardianship of a Winged Goddess. He was taken to Rome, paraded through the streets manacled, then expurgated to an underground dungeon in Alba Fucens in central Italy, where the Romans, who didn’t believe in the Macedonian gods, but didn’t disbelieve in them altogether, and were aware that Perseus was likely under the protection of Forces they did not understand, demurred from killing him outright, yet did so eventually by depriving him of sleep, or so we are told.
The statue of the Winged Goddess was beheaded, as the Romans sought not merely to kill their enemies, but to kill the Divinities of their enemies. The Romans sought to kill people, but what they wanted to extinguish was a worldview, and worldviews are bound up in our comprehension of the Divine. Knowing that the Macedonians were animists, aware that the Goddess might come into the stone through the breath, they removed her head. I find myself wondering if this was done ceremonially. Beheaded, and plundered from the Temple of which she was guardian, she might have been lost to history, except that she is not. You can visit her in the Louvre, where she is known as the Nike of Samothrace.
Deprived of her gaze, her listening, her voice, it is hard for me to yet gender the statue female, though she undoubtedly is. Yet gaze upon her beauty. Gaze upon the sculpture, made of stone, the garments of which are rendered shear– and marvel at being able to see, somehow, her skin, as it were, through the fabric of the gown blown by the winds, knowing that she is in fact made of stone. The artistry!
It is, you will observe, a rather macabre statue at this point. I wonder what it says about us moderns, and our lack of sensitivity to the energies in objects, that we don’t seem to notice this? The contrast between the regal beauty of the body and the absence of a head, which makes this notional aliveness a deeply vacated proposition, is not lost on anyone who understands that she did, at one time, have a head. Imagine how beautiful and sovereign she must have been before she was beheaded by the Romans. If the artist could render the stone garments transparent, imagine her gaze. But we are accustomed to statues without heads. We have seen Roman, Greek, and Egyptian statuary all deprived of limbs and heads. It seems normal to us. Its meaning fails to register.
The Roman Empire was, to my knowledge, nearly unmatched in its annihilatory glee, during its time. The Romans had a pure zeal for war engines, delighted in combat. They were whole-heartedly obsessed with what the Irish poet John O’Donohue refers to as our ‘fatal attraction to aggression.’1 If we explore theories of war, which have been catalogued and outlined with precision since at least the time when Sun-Tzu authored the manifesto that is known to us as The Art of War, we can find two broad camps arrayed in terms of their understanding of what war is, and these camps are distinguished principally by whether or not the civilizations holding the beliefs are under the impression that Nature is above them, i.e., they are part of (or subservient to Nature) and Nature is superior, or whether they are superior to Nature, and Nature is subservient to them.
In my explanation here, I am referring explicitly to a body of teaching that I received from my friend & mentor Pete Jackson, an artist of reknown, and a soldier 4 peace. Pete is a master of the Afro-Brasilian martial art of Capoeira, and a profound student of the martial lineages. In my early years of friendship with him, I was confounded by his contention that the martial arts were a route to peace, until I began to understand what was required to master one’s rage.
Pete Jackson, the Ladder - 48 x 54 - Oil on Canvas2
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