“Panting, he leaned against the railing of the Trajan Forum, which was still all torn up from recent excavations. Unsympathetic to these labours which devastated a near past for the profit of a more distant one, he leaned over and looked down into a space a few yards and a few centuries below ours, like one who, peering into an old grave reopened in the cemetery,
fears to fall into it.”

                 Maguerite Yourcenar,
                 A Coin in Nine Hands (1934)