Emperors, Achievements and Unscheduled Check-Ups

An inquiry into the dental health of empires, then and now.

Sep 05, 2025

There’s a hallway in the Vatican longer than a football field with thirty-foot ceilings whose walls are covered with maps of Italy. A few rooms away, there’s a map that includes New York Harbor, from 500 years ago.

Worldly power can seem abstract in the hinterlands. But even the loneliest hollow of the most distant backwater is on someone’s map. In Rome, the opulence, cruelty, and absurdity of worldly power is tangible.

The seven hills of Worcester

The Roman Empire has always been around me, even in New England. Worcester, Massachusetts itself is named for the Worcester in Great Britain, which was named by the Romans. The cester in the name - like chester - is a variation on castra, the Latin word for camps. It’s one of the few Latin words to make it into the English language directly from the Roman occupation. Most of the Latin came in later, via the French.

I grew up in a landscape of hints - riverside mills, three-deckers sucking in their guts beside the interstate, stone walls divvying up woods that used to be farms, abandoned mental hospitals in disused cornfields, cannons outside tiny old schoolhouses, shopping centers named for amusement parks.

History is how the earth becomes a mnemonic device for human nature. In Massachusetts in the 1980s, it was all there to read, and I learned to read very slowly.

Imperial fascination

Like many young Americans, my imagination drifted to Rome. My nation claims to have modeled itself on the Roman and Greek Republics, with democratic ideals, a Senate and so forth. By the time I was a teenager, my country was an empire, though embarrassed to be one. And as a red-blooded young man, it was easy to get excited about the naked, pre-Christian celebration of power found in early Rome. The story of an unabashed empire, which famously fell, was hard to ignore.

Castel Sant’Angelo

At a bend in the Tiber River in Rome, this giant pile of masonry was first the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian. He’s famous because the Roman Empire reached its geographical zenith under his rule, because he commissioned and erected hundreds of statues of a lover who died in swimming mishap, and because he’s the narrator of a pretty great novel by Marguerite Yourcenar.

Since its days as an imperial mausoleum, it’s been a military fortress, a papal stronghold-slash-apartment, and a prison. Some bored soldiers invented the Roman Candle there.

The tomb is tall compared with the old city of Rome. An upper terrace leaves you eye-to-eye with St. Peter’s dome. But you enter by walking down first,

below the level of the nearby dry moats, then up a long, winding ramp. The ramp has a drawbridge, as well as a chute in the ceiling for dumping rocks and boiling oil on interlopers.

Those improvements were installed by a pope who lived in a city filled with competitors. It’s a hypocrisy that feels relatable: You say you want to shepherd souls to heaven, but then spend all day planning trapdoors and drawbridges to protect you from other would-be shepherds.

Four out of five dentists

On the heavenly listicle of top emperors, Augustus is still number one. And he has his own mausoleum, just up and across the river, also a huge and heavy ring of masonry, though it’s seen better days. At one point, the locals’ name for the tomb of Augustus Caesar Imperator was the decayed tooth.

The tomb was closed to visitors when I was there, seemingly in the throes of some cosmetic archaeology designed to flatter Silicon-Valley triumphalists who have the trumpets of the legions in their air pods. Rome has been in the tourism business for thousands of years, and can spot a wealthy sucker from half a world away.

The family palace

My wife and I spent most of one day at the Palazzo Barberini - one of many palazzos we visited. This wasn’t because we were highly sought after by the elite of the city. Rather, these palaces are too opulent to stay in anyone’s hands. They end up belonging to the state, a foundation, a university, or maybe a hotelier.

The career paths of the Palazzo-owning families aren’t identical, but similar from what I could gather: Garment trade, then banking, a pope or two, then government, aristocratic marriages, then…

Even in the days of Julius Caesar, powerful families struggled to produce sane heirs who could continue the line. The next step after a stint or two at the top of the pyramid seems to be extinction. After all, who’d want to bequeath a world that withholds nothing?

The walnut tree

The final emperor’s tomb I saw is a small church, nondescript from the outside, tucked right inside Porta Flaminia of the Aurelian Walls on the Piazza del Popolo. It’s home to porphyry pyramids caved by Bernini, and two famous Caravaggio paintings - St. Paul being struck from his horse, and St. Peter being crucified upside down.

According to legend, the Emperor Nero - too despised to be interred with his family in the Augustan tomb with the other emperors - had been buried there. His grave was a plain affair. But the largest walnut tree anyone had ever seen soon grew out of it. The tree, though, was filled with demons, who’d possess and harry guests, and interfere with commerce passing through the northern entrance to the city.

So they chopped down the tree and built a Christian church as a marble-and-masonry cap on the corpse. It may sound funny to the modern ear, but they believed that a symbol of long-repressed forgiveness and charity could undo, or at least muffle, the ancient evil they’d inherited, alongside clean water and even roads.

In far less spiritual terms, civilization today grapples with similar traumas and inherited injustices. Nobody agrees on how to undo them before they undo us. But according to the people who told the walnut-tree story, a church full of art seems to go a long way.

Crows’ feet, ex cathedra

In the Palazzo Barberini, I found two busts Bernini had done of the Barberini pope - Urban the Eighth - about fifteen years apart. In both, he’s in repose, looking out into the distance.

In the first, the sculptor makes the young pope look older and more authoritative. In the second, he makes an older pope look younger and more energetic. I had to keep walking back and forth and checking the years on placards to make sense of it.

Pope in action

Pope Urban the Eighth is best remembered for giving Galileo a hard time. He plays the part of the inflexible institution and dogma-blinded boss in the dramas of science. But in the Capitoline Museum, on the original high ground of the city, he’s something else entirely.

Urban sits at both ends of a giant ballroom. Two larger-than-life statues in bronze and marble show him seated but in action, gesturing, his gaze intense, all his robes and fringes askew, wearing a crown like a second head all covered in eyes. Between the detail on the clothes and scarves and the virtuosity of the carving, they’re unearthly objects. They’re something outside of time, depicting something other than human. This violation lingers in the vast chamber. It lingers in the visitor.

Ruling with beauty, after centuries of ruling by cruelty, results in excessive beauty. It’s a dizzy ice-cream headache where we giddy revelers soon become beleaguered waiters and waitresses. This giddiness and weariness are common on the lesser faces of the paintings in the palazzos.

Beauty and the wary American

Growing up in middle-class, post-war America, beauty was always suspect. Anyone who relied on it for power - even just the power to buy dinner - was suspicious if not disreputable.

Until I was a teenager, my country was locked in a civilizational Cold War where real, legitimate power was measured in kilotons and megajoules. But it’s a war that the U.S. seems to have won with blue jeans, guitars and sunglasses. Maybe that was an accident. Maybe a war waged with beauty, like a seduction, always has to come off as accidental.

Back to prehistory, back to the airport

On the Capitoline, the upper walls of the ballroom with the unearthly popes are covered in movie-screen sized frescoes. One depicts a symmetrical flaming altar of the faith of the vestals, a religious order of virginal women going back before the founding of Rome.

The mother of Rome’s founders, Remus and Romulus, was supposed to have been a Vestal virgin. And when it turned out she wasn’t, the temple elders ordered the twin infants to be exposed on a hillside. This punishment, which the kids weren’t supposed to survive, may have been what their successors would to take over most of the known world to avenge. The twins had help, though. They were raised by wolves, as the city’s statues and manhole covers remind us.

Raised by wolves, the Romans could boast, like we Americans do when we visit older, creakier, less-desperate Italy. It’s a boast that turns to dread as we hurry back to Fiumicino airport.

A note on ambition

The famous statue of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf is in the Capitoline Museum. It’s been so widely reproduced that it kind of floats past the eye in the gallery. The original a sculptural pastiche, using a wolf from the Etruscans, and plopping in some infants cast to fit during the 15th century.

Attempt on your life as an infant is a strange qualification for world-historical leadership. But used to be one. In addition to Romulus and Remus, you have Herod’s infanticide when Jesus was born. This event is a gruesome staple of Renaissance painting. Depicted in often-nauseating detail, they’re the splatter movies of their day. And that’s just a literary echo of Pharaoh’s slaughter of Israelite children when Moses was born, which may have been an echo of a similar attempt made on the life of Abraham, whom, according to some sources, was hidden in a cave to evade a similar infanticide.

The twins would survive found a city that would conquer most of the known world. Was this revenge? The conquest, the beauty, the hunger for both, and beyond that, the grappling with G-d, the rearrangement of the cosmos - at least the mental cosmos: Was it all only ever revenge?

Maybe that’s why great families and great empires eventually give up the ghost. After revenge, what’s left? Maybe that’s why a faith endures - it sets up every day as a condition that requires vengeance.

Perspective

In Rome, all this jockeying for power, against a backdrop of so many generations of the ambitious dead, can start to seem ridiculous. A painting in one palazzo shows a woman wheat-pasting “Vanity Of Vanities! All Is Vanity!” on the concrete wall, laughing a real laugh.

The baker’s tomb

Rome isn’t only about the emperors or the popes. It’s a city, by and for regular people. Outside the glorious part of town, streetcars roll with a soft rhythmic clatter, sorry not sorry past the tomb of an ancient baker.

The baker, according to legend, started out as a slave. He won his way freedom by baking more bread in a month than any man ever, or something like that. Then he won a government contract, alongside the guy who did the circuses. The tomb is at least two stories high, and strangely modern, its walls marked by the perfect circles of the bread-kneading troughs of the day.

Walking farther on, towards Pigneto, we stopped for espresso and water at a deli-slash-betting parlor, resting in in the aluminum chairs and tables outside, with bet receipts and shredded lotto tickets in the ashtrays. On the walk back, we passed the ruins of grand bath houses, stadiums and racetracks, where other people passed other times.

A dubious idea

Rome the empire and Rome the Christianity came to rest on a single idea: The World.

By definition, The World is the only game in town. It’s the shadow of G-d, and nearly as strong. In song, The World doesn’t roll off the tongue. It hardly feels right. It’s more at home in an excuse than in a willing declaration. But The World is, as a corollary to its definition, desirable. In Rome, the empires and the churches fought so fiercely over it that no one questioned the concept.

And now The World has become a stronger, stranger and more nightmarish concept than either the church or the empire. The World is the thing that force feeds itself to us. It’s the sum total of physics, culture, chemistry, markets, biology, legislation, engineering, pornography, real estate, art, finance and entertainment. The highest ambition of the average dunderhead in America is to “Change the world,” or “Make the world a better place,” or some variation of them.

In my lifetime, people have started to use The Market in ways they once used The World: Let the market decide; The market’s not fair; Trust the market, and so on. Both are invasive species. Both are, as the poet said, too much with us.

Daydreams and workdays

As an artist, I can live among the works and ideas and arguments of three thousand years of incredible individuals. But as a father, I have to pay bills, play nice, wipe butts and try to clear some kind of path for my kids.

Children focus the mind, often on things I’d rather not focus, like power. Power seems silly, until it turns out you don’t have enough to get by. And power mostly comes from other people. It’s willingly given, or else extracted through trickery or force. This was true for Romulus, and true for Mark Zuckerberg.

I visited the Palazzo Altemps with my wife and daughter. My wife had to deal with an Airbnb hassle, and was experiencing statue-fatigue by this point. So it was just me and my little girl. I was on the hook for explaining the many busts, sculptural pastiches and sarcophagi. I had no idea what I was in for.

Only a few blocks from the gelato-and-keychain trenches around the Pantheon, the Altemps was all but empty. We could linger, ponder and double back among the herms in the courtyard, the miniatures first floor, and the devastating comeuppance on the top floor.

These two powerful pieces get a giant salon mostly to themselves, though the museum almost hides them from view. The first is called the Ludovisi Gaul, or the Gallic Suicide. And after all the columns, triumphal arches and pitiless stares of noble busts, it’s a final revelation about the source of imperial wealth, and to some extent, all earthly power.

Carved from what looks like twelve cubic feet of marble, it depicts a muscular and noble man taller than any who’s ever lived. He’s holding the limp corpse of his dead wife by her waist with one hand. With the other, he’s stabbed himself, and is pulling the sword between his collarbone and ribcage, downward, to his heart.

The statue was discovered buried in Julius Caesar’s old neighborhood. It was intended to flatter the conqueror, by showing so impressive a man so defeated as to murder his wife and himself. It’s a masterpiece.

No photo. Although gorgeous, it’s not an image I wanted to reproduce.

Before you praise an emperor

I’d been to Rome before, and visited the Forum - a glorified junkyard of old pillars, famous names and broken capitals. While wandering, I passed a spot where someone had left a bouquet of roses and a note saying, “R.I.P. Julius Caesar.” It seemed cringeworthy. But this is what people worship. It’s how they imagine themselves. Maybe I did once, too.

In that same upper room of the Palazzo Altemps as the Ludovisi Gaul is a giant sarcophagus, more than six feet high, covered with an elaborate battle scene. At the center of the conflict is the man who commissioned the coffin, a minor commander, rearing back on his horse. There are soldiers, swords, killing, and corpses. It’s lively. And despite the centrality of the deceased, who’s presented victorious, and higher than the rest, something else steals all the attention.

It’s a scene between two men, included because it’s how the dead man paid for his flamboyant casket.

On the coffin frieze, in deep relief, a canny soldier checks the teeth of the bound barbarian. Teeth are a reliable indicator of both the age and the health of human property, and the barbarian is being sized up for his value as a slave. The barbarian, his battle lost, and his fate sealed, seems to smile obsequiously at his appraiser.

Anyone who’s interviewed for a job lately can relate to the half-hopeful smile offered to an appraiser.

As a work of art, it the sarcophagus seemed like another example of an artist subverting both their assignment (see August’s “Roman Slideshow”) and their employer. It filled me with a physical sense of pity for all the subjects of the empire - the captives playing along and the opportunistic officers doing what they think they should be doing.

There’s no indication of who carved the sarcophagus, so many centuries ago. But if you lived in the Roman Empire, you were about ten times more likely to be a slave than a soldier, and probably a thousand times more likely to be a slave than a member of the comfortable classes. It’s enough to put you off your appreciation for the “accomplishments” of a Caesar.

A closing quaternity

The Baths of Diocletian are another stunning but less-visited destination. Since shutting down in the sixth century over a water dispute with invading barbarians, it’s been converted to a cloister, a basilica and an observatory, partly using plans by Michelangelo, and now a museum.

There’s all kinds of great art here, but forget that for now. The cloister has a large square arcade around a symmetrical garden. At the center of the garden are four pine trees - three healthy, and a fourth one that’s huge, but rotted, surviving off one healthy branch and one healthy root. The trunk of this fourth tree is supported with steel braces.

That sick tree, struck by lightning, has witnessed human patience, intelligence and care. It lived through its own death and reaches with its own death in its hands, towards where death does not go, within a world that it truly resembles.