Cover image: Painting by Eva Bovenzi, When mountains walk, 2020
Area Sacra at Torre di Largo Argentina—or, Calpurnia’s Dream
In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles…(I)f we want to go beyond history, or even, while remaining in history…the calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery.
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
what do these goons “have on” everyone…?
—Anne Waldman, “In Wilderness”[1]
How one man entirely fucks up Republic and calls it Empire
He is not alone
He has bros!
Role models and usurpers
write the manual for despots
elections become formalities
only patrons win
He who owns the military—disregarding tradition
forgets res publica the Peoples’ opinion
no longer counts
while Oligarchs anoint the Dictator for Life
good title for a Caesar
he’s good for the economy
now rests for eternity
under the image of
another man’s stone feet
*
This is Calpurnia’s dream
a renowned crime scene
here lies the “calendars of lives”
the day of March Ides
only
what you see
appears to be not
a seamless dream but
modern concrete over this rubble of female ruins
Discrete, perpetrated—often hidden
a sunken piazza they call
Largo di Torre Argentina Area Sacra—
devoted to the goddess
“an other-worldly temple complex found in 1926”
You pay obeyance to spendthrift god-women
demanding libations as well as real names
Roman women brought to shame—having no name
but a man’s repeating cognomen
jealous of Fortuna and Feronia for linguistic difference
connected to the “Torre” part = female personal wealth
(“Argentina” = “silver,” not country)
It’s always about money
the genocide of foreign tribes and proto-nations
brings in a lot of cash
the Torre holds your hard-earned stash
from slave profits
what’s sold and done to bodies
a cash-register still rings in the torre remnant
the sound of the memory of money made by murder
the ticket-price under the sign of fickle female divinity
battered under archeological mounds of ash
the significance of which is where
Pompeius Magnus built his Great Theater
a little temple at the butt end
hoping his lady gods bless him
the lean male body full of health and wealth
(the birth of a first-born boy triggers financial pride
thanks to so much genocide)
Pompousness dedicates this shrine to his Magnus “self”
cut in gold statue to the form
of the long shadow resting over
Caesar’s arrested dying
inside the dream, another catastrophe
homoerotic play of masculine chivalry
brother-love, hate, Great Men’s rivalry
*
According to Suetonius and Plutarch, Calpurnia awakens
from her sordid dream, sour liquid
pouring all over
urine-bleached sheets
She’s at the end of her bed
the husband’s body is found dead
And, awake, the wife begs:
Don’t go there!
(This Area Sacra)
The man, of course, doesn’t listen
Just woman’s apprehension
suspicion marked by menstrual debris
insults manly dignitas and virtus
can catch a man
in a woman’s swollen net
No Great Man can be cut down!
all that pietas—imperium and pride
he’s the People’s man
no need for special security
How many times we repeat this story
the dozens of sweet
daggers hidden
in folds—
the betrayers’
togas—
“23”
cuts of the knife
The wife is right—her premonition ignites
the scheme inside the dream, just where
loaded tourist buses go joyfully by
honking on streets above
at this crossing of four roads
with nothing left to see below
but a largo and three
annihilated
goddess temples
That Pilipino breakfast server telling you it was Nero who was killed there
just under your hotel window
no one knows history serving biscuits
It’s all a mix-up— a particular hero’s
sizing down. How many clowns like dictators
have their death scenes
reduced to piles of detritus
living on
only in
the Imaginary
Yet anyone can buy a torre ticket today
descend a stairway, glide—an
older age, remains
the stages of the Republican version of an Area Sacra
dedicated to the women who break your soul
how well you know them
hording their jewelry in a buried box before disappearing for the record
still wanting to be fully human
in the interstitial air of fantasy
a stifling tale re-performing over and over
the black & white reels
projected through
Technicolor’s tyranny
only “colorized” because this ancient murder seems surreal
—as if staging it, playing and versifying it
saturates the audience
stunning visual purpose right before you—right under
an urban street giving way to
its own crumbling
revealing the Populist’s myth of “accessibility”
that giving bread and circuses to everybody
while taking away Medicare and Social Security
still makes a better Dictator
A woman’s dream predicting
the dissolve of red running over her boudoir bed— that Fiat
at the intersection
nearly crushed your head
screeches to a stop—
you walk, lost in this script
crossing over long traffic lights at Largo di Torre
the bookstore meets stern grey walls
replaced contrivances of what once was
Great Pompey’s mega-theater
built out of torre stolen funds
winter sky now hard and bright
you blink in the empty daylight
You know the poor adore
a rich man they also abhor
“He” remains for them
the steady
predictable image
of Power
He does not really care for them— they go to his shows
believing
he sides with them
(he does not
he votes with the oligarchical conservatives)
In Pompey’s own saga, a footnote to the god-general
lies a Dictator-in-Waiting
What are People saying if anything?
Politics, entertainment, playing, performing games
—this writer’s nightmare
to be nearly run over by a Fiat right here or there
before the light changes
The Area Sacra of Largo di Torre Argentina is a fucking cat sanctuary!
In spite of archeologists’ loud complaints,
the lazy housecat just lays around
gazing luxuriously on the ground at sketchy grasses
knocked out, sunning fur hides
taking up all four sides of the historic square
Where Republic stopped and Empire started!
Cats defecating on a major archeological dig
this litter box telling us about how history might be rigged
how Caesar could possibly take off
where cars whiz by—the pollution envelops
the civic air
where the torre cash register already closes so coldly
at only 3 p.m. American. And the guard won’t let you in
neighboring café displays people drinking wine and Campari
ignoring the early sunset
and you who only came
for the purpose of looking
many backgrounds and foregrounds to digest
and sacred levels
—you are always too late
for The Republic
(yours was almost over by the time you were born)
while here time and Empire shuttered itself centuries ago
you beg him—the man at the gate
to let you go down
you tell him you are a writer, he almost says Fuck You!
changes his mind, thinks you’ll put him in a newspaper or cartoon
you—flowing into this oldest level in plaid and scarves
say you’ll make it quick
you didn’t buy a ticket
*
Descend
ruins
you are
moving
below
slowly into
sacred
catastrophe
Late Republic / Early Empiric / discovery
coagulates in aging soil 20-feet under
collapsing regimes
of civilizations
the residue of what was once great so diminished
You, with Calpurnia, enter
her stages of grief
How many men ever listen to women?
None ever attended your words or beliefs
(they just ignored and harassed you for having ideas.)
Kill the witch! You hear a phrase in your mind—not seeing
anything under the concrete river, the floor that floods from this bridge
and the traffic flows like a river over you
and you flatter yourself—it knows you
You “believe”
reading is valuable
so you read and re-read the silly tourist plaques
try to put the scene all “back”
as if you were learning something
as if in “place,”
all the broken pieces
from that day
make a picture “true”
a dream come true just for you
You—flying …
Do you really know that the Best Man of Empire is a philander and a liar?
Do you really know he crossed that river with his legions? (they can’t even find the river)
Do you really know this man evaded arrest and prosecution increasing his imperium?
(Then why not just take Greenland)?
Did he really die attending a meeting?
(How many times did you almost die attending a meeting?)
All fall down— you hear it in the wind—playing London Bridge again
as if in childhood
peeking through the frame of holy brick and mortal mortar
All fall down—fallen contrasts
The way all fall down means
expensive tessellating breaking patterns
disappear
to puzzle over
unable to uphold or contain
Empire’s
done for! like The Republic
gone!
The piteously mewing cats
Does every act of violence
spill over the image?
do you see—those parasol pines
rooted in brown
stabilizing blood and bone
the displaced tufa stone? See see
once chopped from another’s swell
trees roar up
through dark tannins and greens
beige nuances
in their rebirth, give
life
to the woman’s dream
Trees mark the spot
where Caesar is sliced up
like a kitchen carrot
*
Illusionary. Unseen. in the sound of the voice-over
at the nearby Forum and Comitium, listen as
Caesar speaks words
to the People….
I am the dawn of the success of the Empire
There’s never been anything like me
I will make Rome great again
Remove any senator who disagrees
I restore optimism all across all our lands
I am the most successful person in history
(Pompey was the worst person in history)
My enemies will not smile and cheer
(It shouldn’t be that way)
To my enemies I say
Why not celebrate my victory
I take big bold action
Why not clap for me?
I am making Rome affordable again
Under Pompey you couldn’t even buy an egg
We inherited a mess. That’s why I now
Make myself Dictator for Life
You’ve never seen anything like me
That’s why I’ve declared this emergency
We will stop wasting your tax dollars
No more collars for transgender mice!
Or to translate “Sesame Street” into Parthenian
They show records in the Tabularium
that 6.5 million people are already over 300 years old
Whatever I do is for the best
Pompey overwhelmed our schools and hospitals with aliens
I am achieving the Great Liberation
No more indoctrination!
I’ve cut off all funding that cuts the genitals
(Those priests at Magna Mater’s Temple—they have to stop suffering)
Jupiter made you who you are
Don’t we feel better?
All we really needed was a Dictator
What a difference I make!
I have unshackled all laws
No one
can challenge me
I have brought back
free speech
for me
so you can speak well
only of me
Mastery of rhetoric
words
separate
flesh
from fact
You are surprised, then, by his
Statement of surprise:
Why—is this violence?!! he cries
The jostle of the knife
the man cannot perceive
that violence can be used
against violence
or that death comes so suddenly
In the split of words in a man’s
roiling consciousness
before he turns over and hides his head
behavior mimics his savage end
Hear the words’ dramatic pause, the
caesura
the lasting sentence.
Caesar, they parse your silence
wishing for more violence
Wasn’t your grandstanding speech
like a leaf falling from an infected tree?
All fall down
under an enemy’s
likeness
the mind, that water drain, swishing around
If one man’s narcissism
stirs the other man’s forgetting fever
may they rest together, in mirrored image
May they float
together and apart
the artistic body seeing from on high
a spoken indignity alighting
the disbelief in
the others’ loss of earth shell
He is over
a single man’s wound in the shape
of the play on words,
“violence??…”
And one big bully lies his body down
under the signature of another
Such are images rebounding
under the roadside cavern
on this darkening, insipid day
not very interesting or profound, rather
limpid—
if you subtract the trees
But—the sounds!
You are hearing screams
like in Hitchcock’s shower scene—slicing
the visual trees
Janet Leigh’s not screaming—it’s Bernard Herrmann’s
score that lets you know
how terrible is the feat of dying
the plunging plug
the water dripping
evil at that tree’s rot
a roar in the pipes underground provides the subtle orchestra relieving painful
notes
the soul is floating backwards, looking for
a sacred area’s sacred goddess to go to
*
The father who gives away the daughter to love the man inside her
a woman’s nightmare is not a solid base to repudiate
masculine longing for exchange
A daughter’s trained obedience to the Paterfamilias
is fodder for a father’s career
one exchange turns ally into son-in-law
another into hated rival
The daughter
says nothing
maybe she is sobbing
she never has had
a voice
*
Together with a brick alter
…we will demolish the smallest cella….
You dig into the archeological language with your hands and trowel
Here in Temple B… rests a solid base for a colossal statue
[is] probably a goddess… smiling …. Missing … missing…[2]
A daughter dies in childbirth
the baby boy dies with her
all the empty men cannot put together again
this London Bridge, this proprietary
dream of men over women
over death
to live as if together
without fear
There’s always this fear of nothingness
*
An alliance concludes
the daughter’s corpse with the child’s corpse passes over the Area Sacra
to be burned and buried in the Field of Mars
But this Martian Field is constructed for marching men
made out of the great buildings
men build up and tear down
It’s never enough for Great Men to build up
they must
tear
it
all
down
*
Caesar pulls his toga up
a tourniquet to the bleeding face
crawls to where
a once-beloved competitive comrade
gives way to marble grief
his nakedness covered by the fig leaf
Caesar’s dying manhood recalls what brought him under this bridge:
I should have remembered Decimus controls the gladiators
I should have noticed Trebonius chatting up Mark Anthony at the door
I should have taken heed of Calpurnia’s dream
I should have realized Pompey built a great theater to sedate, not educate, the People
I should have called upon res publica to kiss the ring before this happened
I should have known that standing alone would leave me alone
I should have not trusted “friends,” for I have no “friends”
I should have known my blood would blend
with the blood of other Great Men
that these men, too, will have violent ends—
[1] Anne Waldman’s “In Wilderness,” Chant de la Sirene: Journal of the Hybrid Arts (2025), no. 5: www.chantdelasirenejournal.com
[2] These are all miscellaneous quotes from a tourist Archeological Guidebook to the Area Sacra
Laura Hinton is the author of two full-length poetry books and one chapbook, including most recently Ubermutter’s Death Dance (BlazeVox), a multi-media performance series that she has staged in poetry venues from Tucson to Maine as well as New York City. Her critical books and collections include The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (SUNY Press), We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics (co-editor, U Alabama P); and Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and the Feminist Superhero: Voice, Vision, Politics and Performance in the U.S. Contemporary Women’s Poetics. She is a Professor of English Emerita at the City College of New York, where she taught feminist and literary theory, experimental contemporary poetics, and visual studies as well as creative writing for over three decades. She is editor of an on-line journal she began in 2020, Chant de la Sirene: A Journal of Poetics & the Hybrid Arts; and currently is working on a poetry series collection titled “A Little Book of Human Violence,” the research for which has recently taken her to archeological sites including ancient Carthage as well as Roman sites in Italy (including to Imperial villas under the sea) and North Africa. This piece about Julius Caesar’s murder and the “Area Sacra” is from this unpublished manuscript.
