Content area
Full Text
RISING THROUGH the stars, on the very edge of Cloud Nine, the fastest revolving, crystalline sphere of the heavens, Dante looks back earthward, and sees, beyond the western edge of continental Europe, the passage of Ulysses into the Atlantic: "On the one hand I saw, beyond Cadiz, the mad track of Ulysses, and on the other almost to the shore where Europa made herself a sweet burden" (Paradiso 27, trans. John D. Sinclair). The "mad track of Ulysses" took him through and beyond the Straits of Gibraltar to his death, according to Dante, and in this essay, my own journey will follow in his wake, through the Pillars of Hercules, which stood at the limen where the Mediterranean opened onto the Atlantic ocean. I will explore that gateway as a symbol of limits, and the columns as the "renowned witnesses" to the "suprema orbis meta"-as Erasmus wrote, quoting Pindarin other words, the uttermost ends of the earth beyond which lay "nether darkness." The extreme language of these classical metaphors may ring oddly, when so much traffic passed through the Straits of Gibraltar in ancient and medieval times, but from Pindar to Dante, the tradition holds that the pillars set up by the hero marked some kind of voyage into the beyond.
Summoning up the ghostly presence of both adventuring heroes-Ulysses and Hercules-I will then look at the reappearance of those landmarks on the first coins minted in the Mundo Otro, as the Spanish conquistadors called the New World of the Americas, where their original ominous symbolism is transfigured, exploring how they coalesced into the familiar contours of the dollar sign, and the global ambitions they encoded. I will develop the speculationpreviously offered in neglected corners of numismatics and touched on in an important article of 1971 by Earl Rosenthal ("Plus Ultra, Non Plus Ultra, and the Columnar Device of Emperor Charles V")that the pillars do not only underlie the visual form of the dollar sign, but, more resonantly, articulate a story of limits and excesses, of human striving and overreaching, of getting and spending. Through this minor incident of heroic myth, I hope to throw an odd, oblique light on the creation of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, their destruction, and the...
