"The Millennial Classicist" on outer space and human achievement
For the ancient Greeks and Romans, heavenly bodies were not the sorts of objects to which one anchors a craft. For them, if one’s ship was flying among the stars, then the predicament was a bit more like so:
"As he flings forth such words, a gust, shrieking from the North, strikes full on his sail and lifts the waves to heaven. The oars snap, then the prow swings round and gives the broadside to the waves; down in a heap comes a sheer mountain of water."
This is a passage from Aeneid 1 (102 ff) describing a storm in which Aeneas and his ships are caught when Juno is maddened at not being the center of attention in heaven or earth. The depiction of “waves lifting to heaven,” corny though it may sound to modern sensibilities, was in fact a popular trope in ancient literature.
This is because it articulated a particular breakdown of world order in which the sea, typically relegated to one sphere of influence, ascends into the realm of fire towards the realm of heaven. Everything had its own place in the hierarchy.
Poets often used such illustrations as metaphors for political or social order because conceptions of the human cosmos were so closely intertwined physically and conceptually with those of the natural cosmos.
For example, according to the well-known idea of Plato’s Republic, society was structured in a fixed hierarchy consisting of the “highest,” “middle” and “lowest” orders, like the heavens. This, as in Athens, then degenerates into mob rule, and robs from society the potential of any embellishment (ornatus), a word which translates the Greek cosmos, which means “good order” but also “adornment.”
This same metaphoric correlation of the macrocosm of nature and microcosm of culture is articulated in Virgil’s praise of Augustus as articulated by Jupiter in Aeneid: “his empire will stretch to Ocean and his fame to the stars.”
The recent comet-lassoing spaceship reminds us that this ancient paradigm of hierarchical human-in-nature has fallen, like the spaceship itself, into obsolescence.
The physicists, engineers and cosmologists who orchestrated the landing of Philae no longer aspire to snuggle up against the boundary stones of nature: rather, it is assumed that the ideal is to challenge, surpass and revolutionize the human proportion to the universe.
Indeed, their achievement merits the praise given by the Roman poet Lucretius in his poem On the Nature of Things to his teacher Epicurus:
"His vigor of mind prevailed, and he strode far
Beyond the fiery battlements of the world,
Raiding the fields of the unmeasured All …
Superstition now lies trampled under foot
And victory brings us level with the sky."