Almighty painter

Chapter 617 Mission Completed (Part )

Capitoline Hill was the core area of ​​the old Roman Empire.

Ancient poets called this place the "Roman Square".

Back when the concept of "Rome" was just a simple prototype formed by several relatively primitive settlements around it, Capitoline Hill was the most prosperous, most sacred and tallest mountain within a radius of hundreds of kilometers.

Capitoline Hill witnessed the heyday of Rome, the totem of civilization in the hearts of Westerners.

At its feet are the Senate and the Market Square, as well as the symbols of Roman life - the steaming baths and the cheering Colosseum.

At the top of its mountain is the temple of Jupiter, the king of gods in Roman polytheism.

people say.

Rome was once the center of ancient Europe.

So all roads lead to Rome.

The Capitoline Hill is the center of Rome.

The roads that spread from the foot of the mountain to the city carry the Romans' life, culture, philosophy, survival wisdom... and even the blood vessels of the concept of "Romans".

Its significance to the vast empire in history, which once turned the entire Mediterranean into its inland sea through its military force, is like the significance of the heart and brain to a person.

The newly crowned emperor and the victorious generals would march along the Sacred Way from west to east, passing through the City Hall, the Senate, and a series of huge triumphal gates, amid the cheers of the Roman people throwing flowers, and ride all the way to the temple on the Capitoline Hill under the protection of the army.

Caesar, Octavian, Antony, Tiberius, Caraguaz... any sacred ruler of an empire has reached the pinnacle of power step by step in this way.

1800 years after Caesar walked the Sacred Way.

At the peak of his career, Napoleon almost conquered the whole of Europe. At that moment, he felt that he would be the one chosen by God to rebuild Rome again. So, he ordered the construction of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and the prototype was modeled after this.

Rome.

The glorious Rome in the hearts of Westerners, the great Rome, the irreplaceable Rome.

But when the young nobleman Edward Gibbon left his hometown and traveled all the way to Rome - historically, wealthy families in Western Europe would traditionally fund their boys to travel across the European continent to Italy and even Central Asia when they were about to reach adulthood, as a rite of passage for them to be able to stand on their own feet, which was the so-called "Grand Tour".

All he saw was ruins.

Gu Weijing read Mr. Sloth's reproduction of that scene in his voice.

"I think that for Edward Gibbon, who had received historical education since childhood, studied Roman classical literature, served as an imperial officer, and had a beautiful imagination of Rome, the scene he saw on the night of October 10 was so touching."

In the manor.

Miss Elena sat on the chair, stirring the coffee in the cup with a spoon and looking out the window.

Her voice was neither fast nor slow, like the strings of a violin played slowly.

"All the splendor had turned to dust. The thrones of power that countless people had fought for were buried in the ruins and broken marble sculptures. Some of the broken arches were fifteen and a third feet high (about 4.7 meters). He could not imagine how grand a building it had once been. But now, it was just a ruin collapsed in the mud, with delicate relief decorations and mottled traces of weathering mixed together."

“Seeing these fragments of ruins may be more shocking than seeing a complete building. Under it are the remains of the entire Roman people—”

"Those great, small, brave, cowardly, glorious, hateful, once-mighty kings and insignificant slaves, have all become a grain of dust under our feet. No one sings their praises anymore, and no one even hates them anymore. Those once earth-shaking people and events in history, the places where Romulus stood, where Cicero gave a speech, where Caesar fell and were soaked with his blood, have all become part of the ruins in the market square."

“They have all become ghosts of history.”

Anna is wearing headphones.

She drew aside the curtains, and outside the window the sun was gradually setting over the Austrian mountains.

The bright red sunset gradually shifted towards the ancient outer wall of the watchtower in the distance of the manor. It was the last intact pre-medieval building in the manor.

It is also the last one - a building where you can see traces of "Roman".

Historians say.

Vienna, Austria, is the second "capital" of Europe after Rome. In a sense, it has inherited the atmosphere of Rome to a certain extent.

but.

For the once powerful empire.

The land where Miss Elena lives is considered a remote edge of the sphere of influence, and the Pannonia province of the Roman Empire is located here.

Of the 45 provinces at the empire's peak, it was the most northernly located one.

For centuries, the Danube was the dividing line in the Romans' minds between civilization and enlightenment, and between the inhabitants of the empire and the barbarians.

She spoke slowly.

"Time is ruthless. The power of the emperor and the might of the army cannot defeat time. Caesar plundered the obelisk from Egypt and tried to make his glory immortal, but he fell on the steps of the Senate like a mortal. The Roman Guards claimed to remain loyal forever, but they auctioned off power to the highest bidder like merchants auctioning goods. Forever - this is a word that belongs to the gods, but even the gods cannot seem to bear the weight of the word 'eternity'."

"When Rome was destroyed, where was the majesty of the Roman gods? When the statues were pushed down by pagans, where was the divine punishment brought down by Jupiter, the king of the gods? This was once the sanctuary of the Roman gods. It was the temple of Jupiter. When Numa, the second king of Rome, was in office, 27 different shrines were newly established on the mountain for various religious sacrifices."

Miss Elena sighed softly.

"The Dionysian Festival in March every year was once the most grand festival at the foot of Capitoline Hill. Women wore long robes with bare shoulders and carried baskets full of fruits through the streets. Administrators held sacrificial ceremonies in front of the temple. A chorus of fifty boys and adult men performed lyrical choral poems and fashionable art on the stage... These scenes in the books seemed to reappear in front of Gibbon's eyes in a trance."

"But the next moment, he realized that these were just illusions of the past. The poems floating on the wind were nothing more than the scriptures of the monastery's evening prayers, and those barefoot Christian monks were nothing more than a group of pagans to Rome. With the massive invasion of Christian culture, people began to destroy all sculptures and buildings related to the old Roman religion, and the large number of ruins here came from this."

"I think that at that time, the only relatively intact remains of the glorious rulers and noble gods that Gibbon could see was a statue of a man on horseback pointing to the distance in front of the Piazza del Comune. It was a bronze statue of the philosopher king Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Five Wise Kings of Rome."

"The reason why his sculptures survived is not because he was an emperor with extraordinary leadership talents, nor because of his Meditations, which contains thoughts on fatalism and freedom, nihilism and morality, but simply because the Christians demolished everything here."

"It was saved by someone who mistook it for a statue of Constantine, which was a very dark humor."

Anna scooped up a spoonful of coffee with a silver spoon.

Then in the sunset, watch it flow into the cup little by little.

In the setting sun, her cheeks shone with a jade-like luster.

"Gibbon looked into the eyes of the statue, as if he was looking into the eyes of a ghost from 1600 years ago. At that moment, he felt the call of time and a sense of destiny. He had to write something. Just like Augustine, who was in North Africa in 413 AD, heard from a caravan in the distance that Rome had been conquered by the Gothic barbarians, and wrote The City of God out of his heart. He had to write..."

At this moment.

Gu Weijing stood under the locust tree. He pinched the fallen leaves in his hand, feeling the sadness of the girl next to him, and the voice of Mr. Sloth rang in his ears again.

The end of an actor and the fall of the Roman Empire.

These two completely unrelated things were combined together in his mind.

No matter how great an actor is, whether it is John Travolta or Marlon Brando, compared with what an empire like Rome represents, they may be as small as a grain of dust.

But the sadness in Koko's heart and the bleakness in Mr. Sloth's tone have the same temperament.

With the same coldness, and the same temperature.

Those are the desolation and sighs a person feels when facing the end of prosperity.

The only difference is——

One is the short-lived good time under the spotlight, measured in years.

another one.

It is the rise and fall of empires in the long river of history, century after century.

Gu Weijing suddenly realized that he seemed to have really returned to the scene described by Mr. Sloth.

He became Edward Gibbon.

On the night of October 1764, 10.

He came to Rome, got off the carriage, walked among the ruins, looked at the wreckage, and imagined what this magnificent empire looked like at its peak a thousand years ago.

He walked among generals in armor, philosophers in robes, women with bare shoulders, and vendors selling fruits and vegetables… In the silence, he heard the noise and bustle.

Except myself.

They are all ancient ghosts.

No.

He himself is a ghost.

He is not Gu Weijing.

He is not the historian Edward Gibbon.

He’s Gus, a theater cat straight out of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

"Once, I played a ghost." The theater cat finally licked the remaining wine in the glass, and said slowly to the prosperous and silent street.

suddenly.

The ghost really came to life.

This is the gaze between two ghosts.

"That is no country for old men. The youngIn one another's arms， birds in the trees，—Those dying generations—at their song……"

The sound of a long narrative poem was carried on the wind.

"Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make, wrought and gilded. Sing the past and the future or the present, to the masters and ladies of Byzantium."

That night.

When hanging up the chat.

Mr. Sloth read him a long English poem to end the conversation.

"Sailing to Byzantium" is an octave poem written by William Butler Yeats, the leader of the Irish Renaissance.

In poetry.

Yeats expressed his personal experience of the contradiction between eternal loneliness and the brevity of life.

Between the lines of his writing, Byzantium no longer represented a country, nor did it represent the Eastern Roman Empire that disappeared with the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

It represents a rich connotation of "eternity and transcendence" and the supernatural "eternity and immortality".

"As Yeats aged and his body began to age, he hoped to achieve ultimate immortality through poetry and art."

Miss Elena finally asked, "Everything that has substance will eventually decline and perish. After the publication of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a later scholar was filled with grief after reading it. At that time, Britain had become the empire on which the sun never sets and ruled nearly a quarter of the world's land. Its land area was far larger than that of Rome in the past. He shed tears and said that one day, a visitor from afar would stand by the Thames, looking at the ruins around him and recalling the declining empire. Just like the British today standing at the foot of Capitoline Hill and recalling the former Rome."

"If all prosperity and glory will come to an end, and every long spring will come to an end, just like the collapse of the Roman Empire or the British Empire, then, Ms. Detective Cat, I would like to ask--"

"In your heart, what can lead to eternity?"

Gu Weijing suddenly felt.

He should draw something.

He did not start writing immediately, but instead looked at Koko beside him.

"Koko?"

"Yeah." Koko turned her head.

"Let's paint a self-portrait," said Gu Weijing.

"Is it the theme painting of the collection?" Koko thought for a moment and asked.

Gu Weijing nodded.

"Teacher Sakai has already taught me how to draw it, and it's all printed out." Koko pointed to the large folder on the small stool in front of her.

The campus recruitment fair will be held next week, and she has almost completed all preparations.

(End of this chapter)