Pergamon Altar

The city, Pergamon, one of the great power centers of the Hellenistic world.

Here, its kings built something extraordinary, a colossal altar, roughly 35 meters square, rising from the Acropolis.

A staircase so massive, so dramatic, that climbing it was meant to feel like ascending into the heavens themselves.

Wrapped around it, a marble frieze, hundreds of feet long, depicting a violent cosmic war, the Olympian gods crushing the giants, hurling them down in agonized, twisting stone.

A frieze nearly 400 feet long, carved in high relief, depicting the battle with a dynamism and emotional intensity that would not be surpassed in Western sculpture until the Italian Renaissance arrived 2,000 years later.

The Pergamon altar deserves to be held in the imagination for a moment, because it is one of those objects that changes something in you when you encounter it fully.

Constructed in the 2nd century BCE by the Attalid kings of Pergamon, a Hellenistic dynasty in what is now western Turkey, It depicted the Gigantomachy not as a distant mythological event, but as an immediate, almost overwhelming physical experience.

The figures are enormous.

And all the rest of America was transfixed by his melanin.

Well, and the Altar of Pergamon.

Well, they were.

Yeah, he was very, very, uh, uh-

I certainly don't wanna live my life like all the people that I'm surrounded by.

So my mentors were books and specifically stories of men that had lived before me.

And so in that way, I was surrounded by all these examples, even though they were dead.

And so a lot of the ideas that I get, a lot of the ways that I've achieved things in life are borrowing from the perspectives of those who came before.

He begins to start again.

I look at my computer, and I see, you can see a little bit of, you can see the cover, because it was kind of condensed, of the Altar of Pergamon on one side.

And I figure I'll distract him from his getting all this agitated.

And since I told him I was going to show him the book, I said, oh, there, that is the cover of the new book.

I said, the enemy's going to go crazy is what I said.

And then it happened.

But I knew it because of, it was because that was the week of the release of the new book and the altar of Pergamon.

And I, you know, with other books, virtually every book that I've released, there's been the attacks come from this side.