I know this man now.

He told me his story yesterday when I visited the Roman ruins under Barcelona’s Royal Palace, part of MUHBA, Barcelona’s Museum of History.

He was smart. Successful. Used to getting his way. But dissatisfied. Convinced his talents were wasted in Barcino, a backwater town on the western edge of the empire. Longing for Rome.

Do you see these things, too? Or did the sculptor who made his death head tell you another story?

How about the man below? To me, he looks like a city elder wearied by the burdens of office: the constant complaints about the stinks from the fish factory, the rising costs of sewer maintenance, the damned Visigoths.

These men lived 2,000 years ago, in the small Roman city that would become Barcelona. When they died, these marble busts were commissioned to decorate their gravesites. Years passed; new administrators ruled Barcino. Pressed to build the city’s stone wall higher, but keep costs low, they recycled whatever materials they could find, including crypts and headstones and statues. These beautiful heads, and several more, were used as filler for the wall and remained buried for centuries, until the ruins were excavated in the 1930s.

History is one long, running conversation with the dead, and what a joy it was to pass the time with these ghosts of Barcelona.