Classics in the News: Robert Hughes

This interview with Robert Hughes, author of Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History, is highly intriguing. Oddly enough (considering the focus of this blog), I particularly like the part where Hughes talked about his Catholic upbringing:

When I say to him Rome has a lot of history in it, he says, "Well, you have to do that." The man who was educated by the Jesuits at Sydney's St Ignatius College, Riverview, is off, talking about the way his Catholic education was what made it possible for him to write a narrative portrait of Rome. "My Jesuit education is still very much in my head," he says. "You know, once it gets in there it's never likely to get out. Nor would you want it to. The Catholicism ran very deep. The combination of some training in Latin and the religion itself made it possible to take on the hubristic task of writing this book."

Many of my Classics colleagues here in the US are Catholic or (more commonly) former Catholic, and certainly the language background (however slight it has become) is a part of that. What Hughes says about "the religion itself" is also telling. When I visited Rome I was struck by how much ancient Roman religion can be glimpsed beneath the surface of Catholicism: the title "pontifex," the temple turned into churches, etc. The seriousness of devout Catholicism may well find an affinity in the stark realities of life in antiquity, and the art that developed as a way of explaining and coping with those realities. Pin It