Last week I had the pleasure and the honour of spending the evening in Austin, Texas with Tony Antonelli, a former NASA astronaut, educator and inspirational speaker. Tony spoke about his experience in the US Navy and then at NASA, of flying F-18s on Earth and two Space Shuttle missions to the International Space Station. With humour and candour, he pointed out he had always been afraid of heights. And, once in space, he suddenly realised everyone he had ever known had come from the same place, a tiny globe it took him and his crew under two hours to fully orbit.
He was struck, he said, by ‘how small it really was’.
The exact same words describing the Earth from space were uttered in 51 BC at a time when space travel wasn’t a thing:
“Moreover you see that this earth is girdled and surrounded by certain belts, as it were; of which two, the most remote from each other, and which rest upon the poles of the heaven at either end, have become rigid with frost; while that one in the middle, which is also the largest, is scorched by the burning heat of the sun. Two are habitable; of these, that one in the South—men standing in which have their feet planted right opposite to yours—has no connection with your race: moreover this other, in the Northern hemisphere which you inhabit, see in how small a measure it concerns you! For all the earth, which you inhabit, being narrow in the direction of the poles, broader East and West, is a kind of little island surrounded by the waters of that sea, which you on earth call the Atlantic, the Great Sea, the Ocean; and yet though it has such a grand name, see how small it really is!” (Cicero, De Re Publica, Book 6, 13)
See how small it really is!
The Roman orator and statesman Cicero was no spaceman, and yet these words are his. In the ‘De Re Republica’ (On the Republic), completed in 51 BC, but surviving only in fragments, Cicero explores the nature of an ideal state through a series of dialogues that draw heavily on the works of Plato and Aristotle. The text, framed as a conversation between notable Roman statesmen, addresses themes such as justice, the role of virtue in governance, and the balance of powers within a mixed constitution.
The Somnium Scipionis (The Dream of Scipio), originally the final part of Cicero’s De Re Publica, from which the quote above is taken, recounts a dream of Scipio Aemilianus, a Roman general and statesman known for destroying Carthage. In the dream, he is visited by his deceased grandfather, the famed general Scipio Africanus, who reveals cosmic truths about the immortality of the soul and the insignificance of earthly concerns, emphasizing that true honor lies in serving one’s country and upholding justice.
In the Somnium, the view is from above, or more specifically, as we would say today, from space. One Scipio takes the other beyond the Earth, offering a cosmic perspective on human life. From this vantage point, Scipio sees Rome and the entire world as small and transient.
It is the first view from space in all world literature, and it was written on Earth, by a Stoic, using philosophical insight, rather than sensory experience, like Tony, and other astronauts, before or since.
But Cicero’s realisation was no less powerful than Tony’s. Both had the potential to change one’s perspective on things. Not by rejecting human embodiment or human value, but by celebrating it. A sense of smallness, grounded in the smallness of human existence at cosmic scale, only elevates one’s commitment to a life fully lived, fully connected and fully real, emptied of all dross of human arrogance and navel-gazing. In the first century BC as well as the 2000s, less meant more and small meant large - a large appetite for deep living, connected and deeply human.