This artwork belongs to the fourteenth day of Better Out Than In, the residency Banksy carried out in New York in October 2013. For a whole month, the artist left a new work somewhere in the city every day and announced each one on his own website, together with a sarcastic audio guide recording.

On 14 October 2013, it was Queens’ turn. At the junction of 68th Street and 38th Avenue, on a wall right by the number 7 subway line, a single sentence appeared: “What we do in life echoes in eternity”.

The line comes from the 2000 film Gladiator. Maximus, played by Russell Crowe, says it while addressing his soldiers. The screenplay in turn draws this line from a Stoic thought in Meditations, by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. So the sentence has travelled from a two thousand year old philosophical text, through a Hollywood blockbuster, and on to a wall in Queens.

The irony behind Banksy’s choice of this line lies exactly in that journey. In the film, the line is a call to heroism and honour, spoken on a battlefield to men who are about to die. The same sentence, written on an ordinary street wall, raises a completely different question: whose actions really echo? Who does history remember, and who does it forget?

This question matched the fate of the piece itself almost cruelly. Shortly after it appeared, someone was filmed trying to erase the writing from the wall; sources do not make clear whether this person was a council worker or the building’s owner. A sentence said to echo through eternity did not last even a few hours on the street.

This coincidence also fits the general spirit of the residency. During Better Out Than In, some of Banksy’s pieces were erased almost immediately, some were protected behind plexiglass, and some were cut straight out of the wall in attempts to sell them. Perhaps the real subject of the series was not the pieces themselves, but how the city reacted to them.

This piece is one of Banksy’s most stripped back works: no figure, no stencil, no visual joke. Only a borrowed sentence, and all the meaning that comes from where it was put.