The last workbook of Greek and Roman Culture asked us to write an essay on some of the most influential ideologies that we had encountered while journeying through ancient Greece and into the Roman Empire. We were asked to “pluck a bouquet” of insights that we found applicable today.
I usually have a zero tolerance policy for taking things literally, but this time I couldn’t resist:
The first flower I would pluck from ancient Roman culture would be the rose of Epicureanism. It would be a large red rose, placed directly in the center of the bouquet as the tallest specimen; a magical rose that blooms forever like in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, and it would offer all those who glanced upon it or caught its beautiful smell to remember to keep life simple and of a high quality. We need not mangle up our lives with items and pursuits that cost us time and energy, we need only decide to live apart from this madness, with a few items of high quality which are genuine accompaniments to the good life; to forgo the bourgeois ways which lead to trouble.
It is also imperative to understand the underlying physics of all things, as explained by Lucretius and Democritus before him, and in his own way, Plotinus. I would pepper my bouquet with five stalks of a heathery-yellow long-stalked flower to represent the atomistic and physical reality that constitutes all of creation, because this understanding precludes certain delusions which crop up in the human mind from time to time to serve our wants and needs—ideas which usually only serve to divide and separate humans whose thinking is actually fundamentally similar.
After all, there are only so many thoughts we have ever thunk, and I would add one hot-pink, stiff-stalked flower, the one whose bloom looks like a brain which florists are fond of using in dried arrangements, to symbolize this eternal oneness of the mind that I believe Romans had a sense of. It is placed at a harsh angle, jutting off to the right as a modern skyscraper in a city full of bricks.
I would now fill up this vase with a good amount of fresh clean water to represent the need for quality infrastructure like the Romans (and their precursors, the Greeks) were able to build into their cities and colonies, because any culture is benefited by sanitary conditions, the leisure of public baths and breeze in the bedrooms, courtyards which bloom with edible things, and the sense of human accomplishment which comes with these innovations we are capable of.
To this bare but powerfully fragrant and eye-catching bouquet, I might look for a small and soft purple flower, the ones whose round petals flare out from a small dark center and whose stem consists of many, many stems of fine green flexible lengths, each boasting these little upright purple flowers profusely. This purple flowers would represent the stories that give a people their identity and help them categorize and give meaning to their world. I choose these flowers because they are unassuming and practically unnoticeable at first blush, yet the bouquet does not take on fullness and a sense of life and movement without them. These stories we tell ourselves are the nuance and the subtle greatness that a bouquet must have in abundance to be something greater than stark and arrogant.
To this collection, I would add one tall orange day lily to represent the Philosopher King, placed slightly to the left of the rose, to represent the merit based opportunity to rise from the pack of common flowers who grow from shared root bulbs (homes) to become the Philosopher King—a uniting force the common whole, an order keeper, a wise and graceful presence which at once blends into the bouquet and stands apart from it.
And to this I would add a final low round of dandelion flowers, rimming the edge of the base and circling– in a tight packed, seemingly rigid formation– the entire bouquet. These dandelions represent the philosophers, those we could consider Roman or to have influenced the Romans, because they seem somewhat individual and somewhat stiff when they are first added to the bouquet, like a formal brigade of soldiers they convey an unapproachable and somewhat lofty seriousness. But when they set to seed as the rest of the bouquet is in full bloom with, they send little floating beauties bearing the bouquets trademark scent, on the winds in all directions… and even those neighboring eras, with fields and yards cultivated just-so to their liking, cannot prevent the dandelion, the philosopher’s thought, from taking root in fertile ground. And this is how the Roman bouquet lives through the ages and is plucked anew each generation.