These ancient places

I’d come a long way in 24 hours. From sitting in my bedroom in Durban here I stood in Athens at the foot of Hadrian’s Arch, the Acropolis rising in the background impressive and wise and ancient. It stands above Athens with a kind of antique though powerless majesty, like a dethroned king still sitting with a regal and haughty air on a kitchen chair.
I wandered crumbling alleyways on flag stones worn smooth and slippery from years of hurrying feet and came upon the Roman Agora and the Tower of Winds, and ran my fingers gently over the faded and perfect masonry. Feeling dazed and puny and young, I climbed the steep hill to the Acropolis, where sits the Parthenon unmoved and unfazed at all the attention it receives. I stood on the Areopagus and tried to catch snatches of Paul’s voice as it would have rung out almost 2000 years ago.
… and I felt greatly saddened. These places which hold such majesty and grace somehow also seemed like toothless old men whiling away their dotage in senility. Hadrian’s Arch sits cramped in a tight fence just metres from a busy road, itself the antipathy of the arch’s static state. I thought about Durban, where something built in 1800 is old, but in Athens everything is ancient, steeped in millennia of history. ‘History’, that word that rolls off the tongue, which when uttered as a whisper echoes with the clash of steel in antique battle, of witty retorts in the senate, of the wheels of chariots rumbling over cobblestone.
And yet, in this the most ancient of places, the locals do not glance at these monoliths of times lost and mostly forgotten. Every one of them pursues modernity; it must be difficult not to look forward when everyone else is looking back. Hadrian’s Arch is fenced in, almost as if to stop it from escaping and lumbering off to another land, one where it feels it most belongs, one of toga’d bodies and braying donkeys, to trap all this history here and stop this city from becoming like any other wreathed in smog and ringing with the expletives of bus drivers.
It’s so difficult to reconcile brash American tourists with their iPods firmly planted in their ears, boasting loudly about the previous night’s party, with the Parthenon. It seems counterintuitive for these two things to exist in the same space. And I think of the empire today which has replaced this discarded one. In 2000 years, will tourists visit the ancient Absa Stadium? Will the Empire State Building be an archaeological find? Will the numerous discoveries of McDonald’s franchises lead historians to believe mankind followed a deity called ‘Ronald?’ (In that respect, would they be wrong?) Will the writings of Dan Brown be to them our Plato?
I wondered what would become of these ancient places and mourned for the day when the last of these buildings crumbles into dust and is scattered by the wind.