Accoutrements

August 30th, 2006General0 comments

I have all the accoutrements of a modern citizen. I have TiVo. I have a Netflix queue. I have videogames and three email accounts. It’s weird to think how much baggage I have. Historically we are the most entertained generation that has ever existed.

In Chicago right next to the theater (on the first floor of the Temple Building) there was a rare coin collector’s store. In the window were a bunch of old Roman coins, the earliest being from the Marcus Aurelius era (~ 160 AD). They were about the size of a dime and were $160 each.

Examples of Denarii featuring the visage of Marcus Aurelius.

Along with World War II, I am pretty obsessed with Roman history. Back then all you needed were these coins and a cudgel. Probably also a small knife.

It’s interesting to think about what we think we need and what our wants and desires are. In Roman times all you needed was a good joke teller. Back then, a witty or entertaining person was probably even more well-regarded than they are today since the only forms of entertainment were instrument playing, singing, joke or poem reciting, or bloody arena battles against giraffes. There was no recorded entertainment — all entertainment was LIVE.

Having a particularly funny friend was thus probably a real treasure.

I stood there in front of the coin store wondering where these Roman coins had been — whose cloth bag they jingled in, what they were used to purchase. Apples? Olive oil? Slaves? Votes? It’s amazing to think that they had survived 18 centuries without being melted down or lost forever.

I think I would like to start collecting these. Then maybe a millenia from now my own collection will be in the tentacles of an alien archaeologist who will also wonder where these coins came from, who they belonged to.

Netflix, TiVo, email, videogames. So many of the things we own are digital and temporary.