‘No Pyramids, no Parthenon, no beautiful tombs or temples?’

    

Classical Wisdom

You are following Classical Wisdom on Substack, yes? On Monday, its founder, Anya Leonard, posed her weekly question:

At what cost are great works? Should we celebrate beautiful monuments that were constructed on pain and thievery? Is it important to know the backstories, and does that knowledge take away from their grandeur? Should we unearth these skeletons, or let the past rest in the past?

And she begins her column with a few sentences from a beloved old detective novel worth sharing here:

“Take the Pyramids. Great blocks of useless masonry, put up to minister to the egoism of a despotic bloated king. Think of the sweated masses who toiled to build them and died doing it. It makes me sick to think of the suffering and torture they represent.” Mrs. Allerton said cheerfully: “You’d rather have no Pyramids, no Parthenon, no beautiful tombs or temples—just the solid satisfaction of knowing that people got three meals a day and died in their beds.”

Agatha Christie

Death on the Nile

Not the case with King Solomon’s Temple, obviously, with its happy masons laboring for God, but what a question!

At what cost? Pain? Thievery? Skeletons? All that precludes any love for the beautiful and sublime. (Leonard’s point is to initiate a conversation about history.) 

Who knows if this ever crossed any of the laborers’ minds, but they built civilizations, and we should be thankful visitors to those enduring human triumphs.