Virgil and the 9/11 Memorial

by Caroline Lawrence

The 9/11 Memorial Museum opened to the public in 2014. It is impressive on many levels but what interests me most is a quote from Virgil on the wall of the Memorial Hall, deep underground: No day shall erase you from the memory of time.

The capital letters of the quote are just over a foot tall, forged from steel recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Centre. The quote is surrounded by 2983 squares of paper, one for each life lost, in shades of blue ‘trying to remember the colour of the sky on that September morning’.

When the memorial first opened there was some controversy about the use of the quote based on its original context. 

So when did Virgil say No day shall erase you from the memory of time?

And why?

He didn’t actually say it in a speech, like a Caesar or a Cicero. 

He wrote it down in a poem, his great epic poem: the Aeneid. 

And yet in a way he did say it. 

Here are the two verses from which the 9/11 quote was pulled:

Fortunati ambo! writes Virgil, si quid mea carmina possunt, nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo... Literally: ‘Lucky pair! If my verses have any power, no day ever shall remove you (plural) from the memory of time.’ Aeneid IX.446-7

Modern bust of Virgil at his tomb in Naples

These words are not put into the mouth of a character in the poem, they are the words of the poet himself. This is one of the few places where Virgil steps out of the story, as it were, to utter this prayer: if my poem lasts, so will the memory of what you did.

So who are the lucky pair? And what did they do?

The short answer is that they are two teenage refugees from a war torn city who die in a failed raid against the inhabitants of the land they hope to settle. 

For the longer answer, we have to go back to the sack of Troy.

Remember the story of the Trojan Horse?

How it wasn’t really a Trojan Horse but a Greek Horse, full of soldiers?

How they sneakily smuggled themselves into the city they had been besieging for ten years?

How the Greeks dropped out of the giant horse’s wooden belly in the middle of the night and set about burning Troy and killing everyone in it?

Well, the Greeks didn't kill quite everyone. Aeneas was a hero who had fought in the Trojan war escaped with his aged father and young son. 

Trautmann 'Burning of Troy' 1759

Once safely outside the town walls, Aeneas hides on the slopes of Mount Ida among the trees of a sacred grove. Over the next few days and even weeks he receives a steady trickle of refugees from the sacked city, many of them probably traumatised orphans. Aeneas is conscientious, responsible and also reputedly the son of a goddess (Venus). So he soon became their natural leader.

For various reasons, Aeneas decides to seek a new place to live rather than rebuild the old one. So he cuts down the trees of the sacred grove, uses the wood to make a dozen ships and sets off in search of his ‘New Troy’. 

'Where Aeneas Disembarked' restaurant in Ostia

For seven years Aeneas and his twelve boatloads of refugees sail the Mediterranean. The children grow up. The older refugees die and are buried on strange soil. This is the fate of Aeneas's father. Aeneas’s young son Ascanius, probably about seven when they fled Troy is fourteen when they finally find the place to build their new city: on the banks of the River Tiber in Italy, eight hundred miles west of Troy.

Virgil famously modelled the first six books of the Aeneid (the sea voyage) on the Odyssey and the last six (land battles) on the the Iliad. 

When Aeneas sails up the river Tiber, it seems to him that there is enough space for them to settle. One of the local kings is even happy to marry his daughter to the Trojan. But other Latin tribes are unhappy, especially the Rutulians, whose leader Turnus was engaged to the princess now promised to Aeneas. 

The Rutulians threaten to attack

The refugee Trojans hear rumours that Turnus is planning to attack them, so they build a wooden fort on the banks of the Tiber. When Aeneas hears that Turnus is on his way, he leaves his fourteen-year-old son Ascanius in charge and goes off with a couple of scouts to seek additional forces from an Etruscan a few miles upstream. 

No sooner has Aeneas is gone, than Turnus arrives with many allied troops. The Trojans retreat to the safety of the fort and although Turnus calls them cowards, they refuse to come out and fight. But the fort on the banks of the Tiber is wood, not stone, and Turnus threatens to burn it down in the morning. He wants to force them to come out and be slaughtered. Having burned the Trojan ships so that they can’t escape by river, Turnus and his troops surround the fort and settle in for the night. They celebrate their anticipated victory with food, wine and dicing.  

Euryalus and Nisus

Meanwhile in the fort, Ascanius assigns guards to patrol the ramparts and watch for a night attack. At midnight guards are changed and two youths come up together. Their names are Nisus and Euryalus. Virgil's description hints that Euryalus is about Ascanius’s age, fourteen, and Nisus is about seventeen or eighteen. They may be lovers or just good friends, but they are devoted to each other. In my retelling of their story in The Night Raid, a book for teens, I have them meeting during the sack of Troy when Nisus is seven and Euryalus ten or eleven. I try to imagine how traumatic it must have been for the two boys to flee the burning city.

Now, seven years later, they are once again besieged with a threat of burning and destruction. As the two friends pace the lofty ramparts of the wooden fort and look down on the sleeping enemy, the older boy has an idea. If just one of them could creep unseen through the sleeping enemy troops, he might reach Aeneas and bring back reinforcements before dawn, thereby saving his comrades and winning glory for himself. Euryalus won’t hear of Nisus going on his own; they will go together. They have hunted together in the woods and think they know the way. This is something they feel they can do.

They take their proposal to young Ascanius who is standing by a campfire with some of the older Trojan leaders, worrying about what to do. They eagerly agree to Nisus’s plan and promise the two friends great rewards if they succeed. Without offering sacrifice or taking the omens, they almost push the two friends outside the fort. Nisus and Euryalus go down into a ditch and when they come up they are among the sleeping enemy soldiers. 

At first all goes well as they sneak through the snoring enemy. Then they discover how easy it is to kill drunken and sleeping enemy soldiers. Soon they forget the urgency of their mission and start to loot as well as kill. Euryalus, the younger boy, takes a shiny helmet and puts it on. This is their fatal mistake. A band of enemy allies have just arrived on horseback to join Turnus. They see the moonlight flashing on the bright metal of the helmet and chase the youths into the dark and tangled woods.  

Confused by the limited visibility and unaccustomed weight of the helmet, Euryalus stumbles into the open and is surrounded by the enemy. 

Nisus has been hiding in the woods, but when he sees his young friend surrounded by enemy troops, he runs out of the woods crying ‘Me, me! Kill me instead!’ But Euryalus is already mortally wounded. He falls like a white poppy beaten down by rain. Instead of turning around and running for safety, Nisus makes a suicidal rush into the heavily armed soldiers. Pierced by several swords, he falls dying on top of his friend to protect his body from mutilation. 

This is when Virgil steps out of the poem to state that the two will never be forgotten if his verses have any power. 

The quote shows one thing common to humans in the past two thousand years: the desire not to be forgotten. And more than that: the desire to be well-thought of. This is true not just of the warrior and his victim but of the artists who help us remember.

You can read the original Latin HERE. It starts at line 175 and our quote is at line 447. You can read the English poet Dryden’s translation HERE. You can read what various scholars have said about the controversy HERE. And you can read my version of the story in The Night Raid. 

A version of this post first appeared on the now defunct Wonders and Marvels blog in 2014...

Japanese jugglers, acrobats and top spinners in Victorian London - by Lesley Downer

Japanese acrobats at the Paris Expo 1867

When Phileas Fogg arrives in Japan, the first thing he does is to go to an ‘acrobatic performance’. There he sees the ‘butterfly trick’, where the performers make origami butterflies fly across the stage just by waving their fans. Another performer juggles lighted candles while one sends tops spinning along ‘pipe stems, sabres, wires and even hairs’ as if they have a life of their own. He watches ‘astonishing performances of acrobats and gymnasts turning on ladders, poles, balls, barrels, etc., all executed with wonderful precision.’ And he finally tracks down his lost servant, young Passepartout, underneath an entire human pyramid.

All of this makes perfect sense. In 1872, when Jules Verne was writing his Around the World in Eighty Days, westerners’ image of Japan was as a land of acrobats. Before the arrival of Japonisme the first Japanese to tickle westerners’ fancy were top-spinners, jugglers, acrobats and other performers and when westerners thought of Japanese they thought of acrobats.

'The Japanese at St Martin's Hall'

This year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of circus - in April 5th 1768, when Philip Astley opened his Amphitheatre in Surrey Road, London. To celebrate I’ve been looking into the jugglers, acrobats and other performers who were the first Japanese to arrive in Victorian Britain.

For 250 years Japan had been closed to the west and Japanese had been prohibited from leaving the country under pain of death. It was only in 1866 that the prohibition was lifted and the first ‘passports’ - actually ‘letters of request’ - were issued. The idea was to enable diplomats, government officials, merchants and students to travel abroad to help develop Japan and its economy. But entertainers were also eager to apply.

'Matsui Gensui Troop of Top Spinners' 1865

Among the very first was a legendary top-spinner called Matsui Gensui. He was 43 years old and had been wowing crowds with his amazing feats for decades in Edo (now Tokyo)’s East End, around the famous Asakusa Sensoji Temple. In the traditional way the illustrious name of Matsui Gensui was handed down through the generations. He was the thirteenth to bear it. 

On December 2 1866 the Gensui troupe - seven men, two women, two boys and a girl - set sail on the British steamer Nepaul. They landed in Southampton on February 2nd 1867. On February 11th they made their debut to a packed house at St Martin’s Hall, just behind the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

The arrival of the Japanese acrobats led to one of the first Japanese crazes of the nineteenth century. Audiences filled theatres to capacity and newspapers reported extensively on their performances and daily activities.

Hayatake Torakichi performs
the ladder trick

The Times reported that ‘a company of acrobats, conjurors and jugglers have established themselves at St. Martin’s-hall where, richly habited in their native costume, they go through a set of feats. ... The children are whirled around in huge humming tops. The others walk on the slack rope and do the famous butterfly trick.’ 

The Era reported on May 5 1867 that the tight rope walker, ‘Kosakichi, in common with the rest of the Japanese does not seem to know the meaning of the word nervousness. ... He carries an umbrella in one hand and a fan in the other and grasps the rope between the first and second toe, after the manner of monkeys in general. Kosakichi rests for a time and, sitting on the rope, smiles amiably at the public while he fans himself. He recovers his position without touching the rope, and never for a moment dispenses with the umbrella.’ Then, to the shock of the audience, the cord snapped, sending Kosakichi to the ground, where he landed gracefully and dexterously on his feet. 

The troupe also performed the ladder trick, in which a man lying on his back balanced a vertical ladder on his feet. The Brighton Gazette described it: ‘A child with the greatest ease ascends to the top of the upright ladder, where he stands upon his head and again upon his feet, and with an intrepid air and serene aspect clasps his hands, amidst the greatest applause; he then continues his journey along the horizontal ladder where again his flexible manoeuvres and gyrations, at a very lofty elevation, are as surprising as they are wonderful.’

Hayatake Torakichi spinning tops

The troupe went on to tour England and performed for the royal family at Windsor Castle. Then, on May 27 1867, they left from Liverpool for the Paris Exhibition. Here they took on the new and grand title of ‘The Tycoon’s Japanese Troupe’. They must have known they’d be crossing paths - and swords - with some old friends and rivals ­- the so called ‘Japan Imperial Artistes’ Company’, fresh from the newly United States.

In 1864, when westerners were allowed in to Japan but Japanese were not yet allowed to leave, the shogun’s government gave permission for the self-styled ‘Professor’ Richard Risley and his American circus troupe to perform in Yokohama. He arrived with ten artists and eight horses. Their performances were a sensation. Many Japanese balancing artistes, jugglers, contortionists, top spinners, and conjurers came to watch and to show off their own expertise.

Amazed at what he saw, Risley had the idea of taking Japanese-style acrobatics abroad. He assembled several groups of Japanese entertainers including Hamaikari Sadakichi’s troupe, who performed tricks with their feet, Sumidagawa Namigoro’s troupe of jugglers and conjurers and Matsui Kijujiro’s top-spinning specialists. Three days after Matsui and his troupe left for London, on 5 December 1866, they set sail for San Francisco. Under the name ‘The Japan Imperial Artistes’ Company’, they performed there for several months in early 1867, then went on to New York where they performed until July, when they left for Paris.

The tumbling tubs trick - Japanese Imperial Troupe in Paris

The most celebrated member of the company was a little boy called Hamaikari Nagakichi, the only child athlete to appear abroad. The first time he performed in San Francisco, he fell from the slack wire. The audience rose to their feet, gasping in horror. The boy picked himself up and shouted, ‘Little All Right,’ which became his nickname thereafter. He was hugely popular.

The greatest acrobat of all was Hayatake Torakichi, celebrated as the last superstar ringmaster of the Edo period. He was based in Osaka but thrilled crowds across the country. Torakichi’s specialty was an act called kyokuzashi, in which he balanced long bamboo poles on his shoulders or feet while other members of the troupe performed juggling tricks or quick-change acts on top. He too was lured to San Francisco and performed there in 1867.

Frog acrobats by
Kawanabe Kyosai

Jostling for public acclaim, all these different troupe members unexpectedly found themselves in each other’s company. In New York it transpired that Hamaikari Sadakichi, the popular young leader of one of the three troupes in The Japan Imperial Artistes’ Company, had had a secret love affair with a lady shamisen player named Tou, who was part of the Sumidagawa group, another of the three. She found herself pregnant and eventually had her baby in London. The Times reported that this was the first Japanese ever to be born abroad. 

Thus it was that Japan’s first representatives on the world stage were its acrobats and stage performers.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

East Side Story by Lesley Downer

Until 1954 most immigrants arriving in the United States went through the immigration inspection station on Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay. Having travelled across Europe, often on foot, carrying your few precious belongings in a small wicker suitcase, you’d board a ship to cross the rough waters of the Atlantic. After weeks at sea you’d see the Statue of Liberty and weep with joy, thinking you’d arrived. But first you had to get past the immigration officials at Ellis Island.

Ellis Island Immigrant
Landing Station 1905

Those who travelled in first and second class were given a cursory check on board. It was assumed that they had the wherewithal to support themselves and were in relatively good health and would not be a burden on their new country. But those in third class were transported by ferry to the immigration station. There you left your wicker suitcase in a giant pile downstairs - where it was often stolen, so you ended up with nothing, not even your few small belongings - while you lined up for hours upstairs.

First you had to undergo a medical inspection. If you were found to have ‘mental defects’ or be carrying a contagious disease like TB you had a cross chalked on your forehead and were put on the next ship back. Then came interrogation, to find out who you were and check that you had no criminal record and enough money or relatives or a trade to support yourself. 

Ellis Island pens, main hall, 1902-1913
by Edwin Levick

With five thousand immigrants filing through each day, the inspectors had a bare two minutes with each person which meant they often got the immigrant’s name and sometimes even their country of origin wrong. It was a chance to reinvent yourself, give yourself a name like ‘Smith’ instead of a name that gave away your East European roots.

Of the immigrants who made it through, the vast majority of those who stayed in New York ended up in the cramped, poorly lit, unsanitary tenements of the Lower East Side. First to arrive were Germans and East European Jews in the late 19th Century, followed by Italians in the early 20th century, together with Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, Romanians, Russians and Ukrainians, each of whom settled in separate enclaves, crammed into tall skinny Dickensian buildings with fire escapes zigzagging up the fronts. It was a sort of Babel, a pot pourri of people all speaking different languages. The Marx Brothers grew up in the neighbourhood and so did Al Johnson, Gershwin and Irving Berlin, and as for the East Village, the northern part of the Lower East Side, it later became a hub for artists.

Orchard Street 1933
by J. Blightman

I identify very much with this story. Nowadays ‘multiculturalism’ is a term much bandied about and it’s fashionable to discuss one’s roots and to be proud of being of mixed racial heritage. But in the 1950s and 60s, the suburb of London were I grew up was entirely Anglo-Saxon and most families had been there for generations. Mine was the only immigrant, mixed race, nuclear family. My parents were Canadian and my mother was Chinese - an immigrant twice over. When my father’s student friends saw a photograph of her on his mantelpiece before she came over, they told him in no uncertain terms to find a nice English girl to marry. I always felt a little different from everyone else.

In 1991, when I first went to New York, I found myself in a place where everyone had a story. Everyone’s family had come from somewhere else not that many generations back and everyone was interested in my story whereas back in England even in those days it was still unusual, even weird, to have a family story to tell. I felt immediately at home.

East Village tenements

I stayed with my friend Kim in Brooklyn. In 1991 New York was still considered a rough place. Kim gave me a map and marked the areas to avoid, prime among them being the Lower East Side and the mean streets of Alphabet City. In the 1980s she and her boyfriend had lived in the East Village. There’d been only one toilet, shared with the other apartments on her floor, and they’d had to heat up water to bathe in a tub in the kitchen. Once they were at home when they heard a loud bang which seemed to be right inside the room. They looked around, wondering what had happened. Then they spotted dust seeping from a hole in the wall just above Kim’s head. There was a bullet embedded in the wall opposite. It had come through from the next apartment.

For me it was the beginning of a love affair. I’ve been back pretty much every year since then and lived there for two years at the end of the nineties in a sublet near Washington Square. Nowadays I go once or twice a year with my American husband. We quickly discovered that the East Village and the Lower East Side were the most interesting places to stay.

Five or six few years ago we took a sublet in the East Village, on 7th Street between Avenues A and B, opposite Tomkins Park, where as late as the 1980s and 90s there was an ongoing turf war between heroin dealers, gangs and police. The homeless lined up outside the park every day waiting for the trucks that brought them meals and at night we’d hear people going through the dustbins outside our apartment.

Orchard Street today

We went to a gallery opening in Orchard Street deep in the Lower East Side. The area still looked forbidding, dark and grimy, with a few galleries and the occasional restaurant tucked among shops offering cheap leather goods and suitcases.

Since then the area has changed in leaps and bounds. It feels like a privilege to have the chance to see it while it’s still in the process of transformation, before it becomes set and - perish the thought - full of expensive boutiques like SoHo or staid and middle aged like the Upper West Side, both of which were in their time edgy places.

This year we stayed at the bottom rim of the Lower East Side, where it meets Chinatown. Much of the area retains its old character. It’s still edgy, still being formed. It still feels rough. The tenements are still there with their iconic fire escapes.

What makes the place so wonderful is the contrasts. There are still old men spitting on the sidewalks, women pushing carts of vegetables and groups of youths hanging around looking threatening. There are leather goods shops, Chinese laundries, corner grocery stores, flower shops, Chinese vegetable shops with no English translations on the store front, fish shops, a fish market, suitcase shops, clothes shops. But right alongside are restaurants, galleries, nail spas, massage parlours, shops offering Ayurvedic massage and a pharmacy advertising matcha smoothies directly across the road from a Chinese laundry. Even the trendy restaurant Forgtmenot (sic) has scaffolding outside with a sign saying it’s a hardware store. At first sight it looks like a building site.

And now hotels are arriving with a vengeance. First came the Hotel on Rivington. This year there are several new hotels, such as the Blue Moon, a four star hotel on Orchard Street (which still seems like an oxymoron), and the glossy Orchard Street Hotel. The latest big opening was for Ian Schrager’s Public, a shiny new building at the top of Chrystie Street where non-hotel guests have to wait in a dark tunnel to be vetted before they can take the lift to the bar on the 18th floor.

The anonymous front of Metrograph

There’s even a movie theatre. You walk down Ludlow Street past several Chinese laundries and a ramshackle Chinese grocery and suddenly come to a blank facade. Push open the door and you find yourself in Metrograph, a sleek cinema complex styled after 1940s Hollywood, showing old films, with an excellent restaurant upstairs. Appropriately it was having a Chinatown season when we were there. One minute you’re in quite a rough grimy street, the next in this very sleek restaurant.

Catch it while you can. For a lover of history it’s an amazing place to be. You can actually track the process of change, see history in the making.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com/.