The Assembly of the Ancients (Paperback)

Politics is a necessary evil. The art —at times clumsy, at times sublime— of surviving in public for those who dare to practise this discipline. Yes, discipline, because although today it may resemble a theatre of the absurd, it was not born as spectacle but as tool. It arose from the need to coexist, from the urgency to impose order where only force existed, from the intuition that life in common demands more than impulses and desires.
There was a time when politics was a bridge between the individual and the community, between word and action, between conflict and coexistence. A space where logic had its place, where coherence was a virtue, and where responsibility was the given word —a real weight upon the shoulders of those who decided. But the world changed: haste devoured pause; opinion replaced thought; reaction took the place of reflection. And what was born as a noble art became a battlefield —a raging sea— where every gesture is measured in seconds and every mistake is amplified until it is deformed. Politics ceased to be an exercise of reason and became an exercise without its principal ‘muscle’: the mind. Even so, beneath the noise, beneath the saturation, beneath the immediacy that contaminates everything, an ancient question persists: “Who thinks for us when we stop thinking?” That question opens a crack in the present. A fissure through which something slips that does not belong to this time: something that comes from far away, from very far away, from when humanity still sought to understand before judging, to listen before speaking, and to learn before deciding. From that fracture an impossible place is born: a space suspended between eras, where time does not advance but unfolds. In a corner of time where the present cannot reach and the past still resonates, two chambers await. They are not temples nor palaces, though their solemnity could be mistaken for either. They are spaces born of human memory, of what we were once capable of thinking, creating, governing, and dreaming. In the first, the Assembly of the Ancients, gather the mortals who illuminated the world with their intelligence and courage. There sit Socrates, who taught how to question; Plato, who imagined worlds more perfect than our own; Aristotle, who ordered chaos with the patience of a craftsman; Marcus Aurelius, who governed without abandoning serenity; Hypatia, whose light survived the darkness of her age. Beside them, those who narrated History so it could not be lost: Homer, Aristophanes, Livy, Herodotus, and Xenophon. Nor are absent those who challenged nature in order to understand it: Archimedes, Pythagoras, Euclid, Galen, Hippocrates, and Aristarchus. Nor those who ruled entire peoples: Alexander the Great, Cyrus the Great, Octavian Augustus, Pericles, Solon, and Cleopatra. Nor those who fought with sword and strategy: Hannibal, Hamilcar, Scipio Africanus, Julius Caesar, Leonidas, Vercingetorix, Boudica, Arminius, Viriathus, and Themistocles. And among them, those who shaped law and order: Cato the Elder and Hammurabi. In a corner, with the serenity of one who needs no temple, Zoroaster watches in silence.

Beyond, on a plane belonging neither to earth nor sky, rises the Pedestal of the Eternals. There stand those who existed before language could name them. Gaia, the primordial Earth; Cronus and Rhea, parents of gods; Oceanus and Tethys, encircling the world; Hyperion and Theia, light and sight; Atlas, bearing the heavens; Prometheus and Epimetheus, brothers in destiny; Metis, deep wisdom; Helios, Selene, and Eos, marking the rhythm of the day. Above them, the Olympians: Zeus, Hera, Athena, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Poseidon, Hades, and Hermes. At the margins of the wind, Aeolus. And at the frontier between myth and deed, the heroes: Heracles, Achilles, Odysseus, Perseus, and Atalanta.
Two chambers, two gazes upon the same world that runs without knowing where. And when the moment comes, each will speak for itself.