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{"id":18199,"date":"2016-06-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2980"},"modified":"2016-06-20T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-06-20T00:00:00","slug":"city-of-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/06\/city-of-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"City of the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I<\/span>n his stimulating meditation on The Dominion of the Dead<\/em><\/a>, Robert Pogue Harrison observes, following Fustel de Coulanges, that \u201cthe ancient house and in its turn the ancient city, were founded upon such sepulchers\u201d (26). Even empires are so founded. Witness The<\/em> <\/em>Aeneid<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter the destruction of Troy, Aeneas was entrusted with the responsibility of transporting the House of Troy from one land to another, so as to save the house itself. More exactly, he was charged with carrying the ancestral gods of the family to a new home\u201d (26). In Book 2, Hector\u2019s ghost appears to Aeneas, reminding him that \u201cTroy entrusts \/ her holy things and household gods to you; \/ take them away as comrades of your fortunes, \/ seek out for them the great walls that at last, \/ once you have crossed the sea, you will establish\u201d (quoted, 26).<\/p>\n

But carrying the penates<\/em> to a new place isn\u2019t enough. He must also emplace his new home by placing the dead there: \u201che must also domesticate the terra nova<\/em> by interring his people there.\u201d Hence, \u201cThe Aeneid<\/em> is punctuated by such ritual burials. Aeneas buries his father Anchises in Sicily; Palinurus he buries at the bottom of the mainland; Misenus he buries near Cumae; his nursemaid Gaeta he buries at Gaeta (naming the place after her), a hundred miles south of the future imperial city. Each one of those sites becomes in its turn a place in Rome\u2019s future history. In this retrospective epic of Rome\u2019s founding\u2014all the more revealing insofar as its mythical burials are<\/em> retrospective\u2014Virgil makes of Aeneas a tamer of the Italian peninsula, a hero who founds places in its wilderness by giving them the names of those whom he buries there. It is as if, by planting his dead at various sites as he makes his way up the coast, he lays the ground for Rome\u2019s future political claims on those territories\u201d (26-7). Virgil\u2019s epic thus illustrates Harrison\u2019s theme: \u201cIf one wanted to speak Heideggerese, one could say that the hic<\/em> of hic jacet<\/em> is the aboriginal Da<\/em> that grounds Dasein<\/em>\u2018s situatedness and historicizes his being in the world, especially since jacet<\/em> alludes to the finite temporality that Dasein<\/em> makes its own in its so-called being-toward-death\u201d (22). An intriguing point, though why one would want to speak Heideggerese remains a question.<\/p>\n

And one gloss: Aeneas claims Italy with burial sites. Abraham buries Sarah in the land, but before that he\u2019s claimed future sites of Israel\u2019s history not with burials but with sacrifice. What sort of difference between Roman and Israelite religion and culture is thereby indicated?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"