Inside each stone

Among the pages of Traveling with Herodotus, published in Italy in 2005, Ryzsard Kapucinski proposes an interesting dialogue between past and present, starting from the pages of the Stories of the great ancient Greek historian. In particular, when telling of his trip to Iran, Kapucinski tells us about his visit to Persepolis, one of the ancient capitals of Persia built by Darius between the sixth and fifth centuries BC, fifty kilometers from the city of Shiraz.

In the midst of the ruins, a reminder of a majestic and extraordinary city, Kapucinski was struck by a detail. In Persepolis there were no stones in their natural state, as commonly found in the mountains or outdoors, in the middle of the meadows: all of them had been worked, cut and polished. The sight of that immense human work inside every single stone raised profound questions in him: "How many years of effort in this cure! What a massacre of men! How many have died dragging these gigantic boulders? how many are crazed with thirst and exhaustion? "
The reflection expands to include the whole of human history: "Every time you contemplate the ruins of temples, palaces and dead cities, it is natural to wonder about the fate of the people who built them. About their pain, their broken backs, their eyes pierced by stone chips, their rheumatism, their unhappy life, their suffering. And at a certain point another question arises: could those wonders have been born without suffering? without the overseer's whip? '

Beauty and suffering, injustice and greatness are opposite terms that rigorously logical thinking considers opposite and therefore incompatible. In history, contradictions often occur together, in combinations that our minds struggle to understand.
Each of our attempts to understand the past must start from the awareness that we can only grasp a small part of it. A mortal sin for every historian, in addition to anachronism, is the lack of amazement. Nothing is taken for granted, beauty is discovering what is hidden, yet alive and present. We easily remember the names of sovereigns and great leaders who played an exceptional historical role; instead we often ignore the role of the masses who allowed those kings, those leaders even to think of achieving what they wanted. Paraphrasing the proverb that says "behind every great man there is a great woman", we can almost say that "behind every great person, there must necessarily be a group, a mass, a people". People with unknown names who made possible what one person couldn't do alone.


Renato Bonomo
NP February 2022