ABSTRACT
Some years ago I discovered that Pasolini was intending, before his untimely death, to make a film about the life of St Paul. The main centres in which the historical drama of the saint’s life took place would have been Jerusalem, Athens and Rome—broadly speaking the religious, intellectual and political centres of the ancient world. But Pasolini had the notion of re-siting the action in three contemporary cities of the post–World War II period: instead of Jerusalem, Rome; instead of Athens, Paris; instead of Rome, New York. Whether or not it would have worked cinematically is anyone’s guess. But it occurred to me that Pasolini was suggesting a variant on one of the most deeply ingrained elements in the cultural history of the West, identifiable by the Latin phrase translatio imperii—literally the “translation of empire.” As the late Sir Frank Kermode explained in the first chapter of his book The Classic, first published in 1975, the historical precondition of the development of Western literature in the postclassical period was the crucial act whereby the formerly barbarian West, in the person of Charlemagne, wrested back the empire from the Eastern emperors, who were heirs to Constantine and so had their seat in the city of Constantinople, now Istanbul. As Kermode phrased it, it was Pope Leo III who, in crowning Charlemagne in the year 800, “translat[ed] the imperium from the east, and from a Greek to a Frankish emperor, who now by his benefaction became Emperor of the Romans.” 1
