This Is What Will Happen To Your Accomplishments

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2:52This is what will happen to your accomplishments. Marcus Aurelius spent 14 years at war. It was a brutal grinding campaign, which he eventually won at great cost and risk. His victory was celebrated as a triumph, immortalized in a 97-foot-tall marble tower which winds upward, showing in brilliant detail the heroic emotion and despair of Roman soldiers with the unwavering leadership of Marcus Aurelius. And some 19 centuries later, this monument to his accomplishments still stands. Disproving, you might say, Marcus Aurelius' reminders to himself in meditations that posthumous fame doesn't last and that no one would remember him.

3:38Except it's a little more complicated than that. Because if you've been to Rome and seen this column, you'll notice that there is a statue on top of it, and it's not of Marcus. In fact, it's St. Paul. In the 16th century, Pope Sixtus V decided to take this monument to Marcus and reuse it for his own purposes. Small world, Seneca's brother freed St. Paul in the year 51 AD, and Paul himself came from Tarsus, one of the centers of Greek Stoicism. them. Like the cult of the emperor, which worshipped a statue with a replaceable head, because so many emperors had short reigns, in the end, that's what Marcus's greatest trophy was.

4:16It was turned into a pedestal for a Christian saint. And that's what history does to everyone, even those famous enough to be remembered. It remixes, it reuses, it perverts, it undermines, it contradicts, it absorbs us for its own purposes. And on a long enough timeline, everyone's will and testament is ignored, their graves lost and obscured, their memory written over. Accomplishments are turned into cautionary tales, existences reduced to punchlines. If they can do it to kings and conquerors, they can do it to you too. Remember that before it's too late.

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