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Friday, June 27, Introduction to the 1st Edition, To My Readers. They accused me of levity, carelessness, defeatism, and some even of irreverence for the manner in which I was treating a subject considered sacred. I was not particularly surprised because until now talking about Rome in Italian was not done except in the manner of the academic lecture hall and in an apologist's style.

Nevertheless I remain convinced that precisely because of that nothing remains in the heads of those who studied it, and once we have left high school almost none of us feels the desire to refresh our memories about it. As I recall, I had to fight off quite a few yawns after years of having forgotten everything, or almost everything, and I wanted to re-study it all from the beginning.

It was not until I came across Suetonius and Cassius Dio, who were practically comtemporaries of those monuments and they harbored no particular respect or reverence for them. In their footsteps I set off to browse through all the other Roman historians and memorialists. It was like bringing stone to life. All of a sudden those personalities they had introduced to us in school, always in a mummified pose, never men, nor women, but abstract symbols, and always without any essential humanity, I came to realize that they fell in love, could become flush with blood in their veins, who had vices, and weaknesses, and tics, great and small obsessions; in other words, they came alive and were real.

Why should we regard these personalities with any more respect than the Romans themselves did? And do we do them any huge favor leaving them up on their pedestals in cold rooms in museums, where only school children and university students are led to them by their teachers and professors, or by some upcoming exam? I have known Jesuits who have written impartial histories of the saints without offending orthodoxy, in which the saints appear just as they were, men among men, with all their hard-headedness and weirdness.

The fact that many of them may have made mistakes and that many of them were tempted instinctively by their mistakes, does not reduce their sanctity at all.