He Founded Rome

What is this? Who is that burly guy and why is he carrying an old man?

The burly guy is Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome; and he’s caring his dad, Anchises. They are getting out of Troy, their home, as fast as they can because the city is on fire.
The little boy is Aeneas’ son, Ascanius.

What’s the old man carrying?

Those are the penates, the home-gods that watch over you. Every household had some in a niche in the hall. They were what you grabbed to take with you when you could take only one thing. They would protect you and your family.

Who made the statue?

Gian Lorenzo Bernini. He carved it in 1619, when he was only twenty. It is in the Galleria Borghese, Rome.

But what is the story?

It is a side-story in the Trojan War legend, the subject of the Illiad, Homer’s great epic poem. The Greeks all knew this and many other stories from that idealized history of their country. The Greek version of this one ended with the flight of Aeneas, a prince of Troy, and his family.

Aeneas and his father as depicted on a Greek vase

When Rome was inventing its own history years later and looking for a founder, it took up this Aeneas thread. Roman historians thought they couldn’t do better than the old Greek legends. Monkeying the story of Ulysses, who after the Trojan War was kept wandering around the world because of the curse of an angry god, they said Aeneas and his family were made to wander around the Mediterranean after leaving Troy because of the curse of an angry goddess. The hero was not able to settle down until, after years, he reached Latium, the place that would become Rome. Anchises died along the way. Aeneas’s wife did too. Eventually Aeneas became king of the Latins and married a local princess.

Aeneas’ flight from Troy with his father on his shoulders was always a hard one to depict with grace. Here is Raphael’s version.

Aeneas is carrying the old man fireman-style and really struggling with the weight.

Barocci’s painting is wonderful illustration of the whole scene:

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Sertorius Was the Roman Hannibal

One morning a hunter brought a snow-white fawn into camp and presented it to Sertorius.

Sertorius smiled to see such a beautiful and curious animal. He was happy for a gift like that from the Lusitani. He needed all the support he could get.

He had it tied to his tent. In time it became tame and gentle and he let it follow him around camp. It obeyed his orders—it came when he called and walked off when he told it to leave. Somehow it didn’t mind all the uproar of camp, all the thousands of soldiers. It listened only to Sertorius.

He was astute. Not for nothing was he known as the Roman Hannibal. Probably already as soon as the white deer began following him around he had the idea to say it came from heaven, from the goddess Diana, and that it talked to him and revealed her secrets. The Lusitani were all superstitious—it was easy to get them to believe a story like that.

Whenever he received secret information, he said the deer had whispered it to him. If news came to him that the enemy had made an incursion into his territory he told his men to arm themselves, that the doe had warned him in a dream of an imminent attack. When he heard of or suspected some mutiny or treachery among his soldiers, he said the fawn told him to be on the lookout. And when news reached him of the victory of one of his generals, he hushed the messenger and brought out the doe all covered in garlands. “Good news,” he announced to his soldiers. “Blessed news. Let us offer sacrifice to the gods because good fortune has come our way. I’ve been told.” And he turned to the fawn, who looked back at him with great, loving eyes.

“By these devices,” says Plutarch, “he made the people tractable, and so found them more serviceable for all his plans; they believed that they were led, not by the mortal wisdom of a foreigner, but by a god.”

Meanwhile, everything began to go well for Sertorius and his army of Lusitani barbarians. His power grew and grew. He had started out with only a handful of real Roman soldiers and a motley band of Libyans from Africa. In Lusitania (modern Portugal) he picked up four thousand targeteers and a few hundred horsemen. That was all—that was his army.
With that he waged war against four Roman generals and one hundred and twenty thousand foot-soldiers, six thousand horsemen, and two thousand archers and slingers. Most of the cities in Spain were hostile too and closed their gates to him.
“But nevertheless, from so weak and slender a beginning,” says Plutarch, “he not only subdued great nations and took many cities, but was also victorious over the generals sent against him.”

Who was this Sertorius anyway—and what was he doing fighting on the side of the barbarians against the Romans, his own people?

There was a civil war going on in Italy. A general named Sulla, after winning a great victory in the East, had come back to Rome with his army and started killing his adversaries. He was on the side of the senate and the old patrician families. Sertorius was a leader of the other side—the people’s party. He had to flee or be murdered. For months he was on the run all over the Mediterranean and Africa. Finally he accepted the call of the Lusitani to be their leader and he began organizing an army.

He began organizing a second Rome, a more just Rome, from Spain. His reputation as a fearless soldier and a great leader had already spread over Hispania. He knew how to win the confidence of his men with shows of clemency and also frequent victories. Yet his situation was always very precarious. Now Pompey,  the greatest Roman general of all, had come to Hispania with a vast army to end his revolt.

And just when Sertorius needed all the help he could get to keep his army confident, an aide announced that the doe was gone. No one had seen it for days.
Yet Sertorius was lucky one more time. Some men found the doe wandering in the hills at night and brought it to him. “Keep this quiet,” he told the men, and paid them good money.

He hid the doe and allowed a few days to pass. Then one morning he came out of his tent with strange cheerfulness and strode to the tribunal, where he did his daily business. “I’ve had a wonderful dream,” he told the barbarian leaders. “Great good fortune is on the way.”
Then he climbed up onto the tribunal and began to work.

“And now,” says Plutarch, “the doe was released by her keepers at a point close by. She spied Sertorius and bounded joyfully towards the tribunal, stood by his side and put her head in his lap and licked his hand as she had always done before. Sertorius returned her caresses appropriately and even shed a few tears, whereupon the bystanders were struck with amazement. Convinced that Sertorius was a marvellous man and dear to the gods, they escorted him with shouts and clapping of hands to his home, and were full of confidence and good hopes.”

He beat Pompey.

Read more about  Sertorius, the Roman Hannibal

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Charles V Quits and Goes to Yuste

How would you like to rule the world?
Charles V ruled it—the best part of it, which included Western Europe and America.

Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg by Titian

He worked and worried day and night for forty years and then threw in the towel. “Don’t imagine that the pleasure of ruling so many peoples…isn’t mixed with… bitterness and linked with trouble,” he told his son. “If you weigh in a fair balance on the one hand the prerogatives and preeminences of sovereignty, and on the other the work in which it involves you, you will find it a source of grief rather than of joy and delight. But this truth looks so much like a lie that only experience can make it believable.”

Charles was a particularly gifted ruler. He was smart and brave and hard-working. But those qualities weren’t enough to make him successful except now and then and only for a short time. The French King Francis I tried to take his possessions; the Turks assembled great armies to seize the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, the Lutherans split up the Church.

He fought plenty of wars and he won a few; but his failure to recapture the city of Metz in 1552 got him down. He was worn out, tired, achey. “I’ve had it,” he told himself. “Let someone else take the helm.”

So he gave his Austrian possessions to his brother Ferdinand and his Spanish, Italian, Netherlandish, and American possessions to his son Philip. And he walked out of the palace—an unheard-of thing for a monarch to do.

Where did he go? To one of the beautiful cities of his kingdom? To the Blue Coast to watch the waves?

No. He went to a little monastery in an oak forest in Spain. It was a dinky Hieromite monastery called Yuste with no more than twenty cloistered monks. They must not have believed their ears when the prior announced to them that the emperor was coming and not just for a visit.

The cloister of Yuste

Why did Charles go to a monastery?

He wanted to spend his final years preparing his soul for eternity. After all, he believed he would have to give an account to God of his stewardship and he wanted to work, so to say, on its presentation.
He had never had much time to stop and think. When he took over Spain at twenty it was as though he had hopped onto a coach that set off at a gallop and never stopped or slowed down. He rode right through the world, right through life. There was barely enough time to try to understand the conflicts he met before he was asked to solve them, to act. Then, almost before he knew it, they were far behind him and new ones were in front. A thousand times he would have liked to tell the driver to stop and let him go over what he had done or get a better look at the wonderful things he saw passing by the window; but there was no driver.

They built a little annex for him at the monastery. It was  two-storey building but his quarters  were as small as a modern apartment and not half as comfortable. The tapestries covering the walls were fine art but they didn’t keep out all the draft. And besides, the emperor ached all over. He had gout. The court carpenters under orders from his doctors made him a special chair so he could raise his legs while sitting but he got relief only occasionally. There was a passage leading from his living-room to the altar of the chapel. At first he walked over to Mass every day. Later, when it became too painful for him to move, he just watched through the open doors.
After only eighteen months he died. They buried him in the courtyard, the emperor of the world.

And now?

Now his body is in the famous crypt of the Escorial with all the Spanish kings since his day. His son Philip II built that huge palace-monastery in the mountains near Madrid.
The monastery of Yuste, burnt down by Napoleon’s troops, was rebuilt in the last century, and the emperor’s rooms restored. You see it just as it was in his time.

Charles V at Yuste by Delacroix

Some say the truth of Yuste was that the Emperor didn’t lead a simple, monastic life but that he spoiled himself. He painted and listened to music and fished and ate like a pig. But a drive up through the woods of Cuacos and a visit to Charles’ rooms will show you their inadequacy for worldly delights.

Lately Yuste has become a symbol of Europeness and the Spanish government has created a European Academy of Yuste which awards a yearly Charles V European Prize.
Here is the 2007 prize-winner, the Bulgarian Tzvetan Todorov, entering the chapel. This year’s winner is the French politician Simone Veil.

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