Virgil and the Military Tradition

Proceedings of the Virgil Society 23 (1998) 177-191

A Presidential Address given to the Virgil Society on 24 May 1997

When I first became a member of the academic profession I was fortu nate enough to have among my senior colleagues Victor Ehrenberg, the eminent ancient historian, who had fled to this country from Nazi persecution in the late 1930s. I remember his observing to me once that he had not been in England very long before he realised that every formal oration in public required at least one reference to Samuel Johnson. Let me fulfil the requirement early in this address. Boswell (April 10 1778) has the great controversialist opining thus: ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ In the magnificently designed Royal Armouries museum in Leeds which opened not long ago there is amongst the very diverse exhibits a video on personal violence and self-defence in medieval England. Dwell ers in scattered hamlets amidst deep forests had reason to be suspicious of strangers (and maybe even of neighbours). Sturdy staves were carried in case of theft, assault, disputes. The rustics of the Eclogues and the Georgics are a simple and innocent community marked by flyting, coun try sports, singing competitions and other such pastimes. Theocritus’ yokels tend to be more earthy and less inhibited in their attitude. But at Aeneid 7.504 (duros agrestes) and 521 (indomiti agricolae) where the Latins are arming themselves and preparing for war the poet admits realism in the adjectives he applies. For the idea of the Italian country man as a tough and ruthless foe see the remark of Cassius at Cicero ad Fam. 16.19.4, that he fears Pompey will seek revenge for the insults he imagines he has received and will want to repay the mockery with the sword, rustice (‘like a countryman’).1 This martial disposition finds practical expression in an epigram in Floras Vegetius Renatus (fifth century a d ), who

177 H. MacL. C urrie compiled a celebrated work on tactics, Epitome rei militaris, in four books. In the prologue to the third book he delivers this thought: qui desiderat pacem praeparet bellum. His knowledge is totally theoretical and second-hand, for he never himself had been a soldier (for which he expresses no regret) and freely acknowledges that he has merely ar ranged material produced by older writers from Cato onwards. In fact, the structural parallelism of the line quoted recalls a common stylistic feature of archaic Latin (verse and prose)—see, for example, Cato him self: primus cubitu surgat, postremus cubitum eat (a piece of country lore on the duties of a vilieus, De agrieultura 1.2.27).2 The Eclogues are individual compositions on varied themes—the beauty of nature, rural peace, dispossession, friendship, love and the loss of it, with poetry or song as a central one. Sometimes there is a hermetic quality to them going back to the neoteric or Alexandrian school of poetry with its learned and allusive character which was in vogue at the time. In the sixth and tenth Eclogues we meet C. Cornelius

Gallus (69-26 b c ), poet, soldier, politician and friend of Augustus and Virgil himself, born at Forum Iulii (Frejus), perhaps of a native Gallic family. He was a remarkable man, and it is a great pity that we are so poorly informed about him. To interpret what we do know in terms of possible Celtic influences would not perhaps be unreasonable. Catullus came from Verona in Cisalpine Gaul and the special kind of emotion and imagination found in his work may reflect his origin to some extent. The name Vergilius is Celtic, but it was personal attraction maybe rather than common ethnic origin along with a shared love of poetry which drew Virgil and Gallus together. But Virgil was no soldier and the military life was evidently not a factor in their friendship. Gallus transferred the theme of suffering love from bucolic or mytho logical settings to the real life pains of a deserted lover. Catullus antici pated the love elegy (cf. poem 68), but the credit for its invention and development went to Gallus; he was the first to publish a book (ulti mately four in all) of elegies, thus creating a literary form out of Catullus’ experiment. The first line of the ‘New Gallus’ fragment3 which consists of ten somewhat mutilated lines on papyrus apparently confirms that he wrote ‘subjective’, self-revealing love elegy: tristia nequitia...a Lycori tua (‘Sad, Lycoris, by your misbehaviour’). Lycoris was the name of his mistress and nequitia in comedy and in Cicero refers to the undisciplined conduct of self-indulgent young men. Catullus and Tibullus do not use

178 V irg il a n d th e M il it a r y T r ad itio n the term, but Propertius applies it to Cynthia (1.15.38; 2.5.2). Lycoris was capricious and led Gallus a dance. The elegy of the Augustans centres in the sphere of private life (otium) with its individual experiences, and though the Romans bor rowed many Greek themes (e.g. the contrast of love and death and the sorrows and joys of life) Roman elegy is not simply traceable back to the Greeks, but has a central endemic and subjective quality. Akin to the literary masochism of Gallus in his elegies there was the topos of servitium amoris invented by Propertius to give himself a persona, reminiscent of the ‘bondage’ of Antony who was depicted in Octavian’s propaganda as a degraded figure held in enslavement by Cleopatra. And there is familiar to us from Plautus to Ovid the not dissimilar and persistent figure of the miser amator with his particular language, gestures, and postures. Formally addressing P. Alfenus Varus (cos. suff. 39 b c ) and reporting Apollo’s warning to him that he is not yet ready to write epic, which means he cannot celebrate any military successes Varus might achieve, Virgil in the very attractive sixth Eclogue actually offers, I suggest, paraenesis (or advice) to his fellow neoteric, Gallus.4 By means of the Song of Silenus which is embedded in the piece he puts on view other kinds of poetic subjects (the creation of the world in a Lucretian mode and various mythological topics which would be appealing to Gallus and others of the same school). Virgil is seeking to raise his friend’s poetic aspirations and vision above the medium of elegy. The song ends with a meeting of Gallus with the Muses in plain allusion to one of his own compositions (on the Grynean Grove of Apollo, a subject apparently obscure enough to be of obvious interest to the imagination and taste of the Roman Alexandrians, and to us latter-day readers a source of serious puzzlement). Similarly, whatever esoteric material (literary, poetic, cultural) may lie below the surface of the tenth Eclogue, it is itself a beautiful piece of poetry with humane feelings at its heart. Throughout his whole oeuvre Virgil shows himself sympathetic to loss and defeat, though whatever excavations are undertaken in the Eclogues (and not least in the sixth and tenth) the effort often seems to result in what may simply be called a more informed state of ignorance on the part of researchers. The Eclogues still gaze at us with dark eyes, to use Franz Skutsch’s phrase. If paraenesis is the main thrust of the sixth Eclogue, consolatio is

179 H. MacL. C urrie that of the tenth. But often the ancient consolation had a robustness of tone which we would not immediately associate with the term. A practi cal realism was sometimes applied to help a grieving person recover his balance; mourning could be firmly declared unprofitable, or death some thing utterly unavoidable; and fortitude could be urged as the best means of facing life’s trials.5 Poem 68 (an elegiac piece) of Catullus and Eclogue 10 are associated in that the idea of poetic consolation is present in each. Catullus’ friend Allius has asked him to compose a poem to soothe his grief as a disap pointed lover. Though mourning over the loss of his brother through death and of his beloved through desertion, and also not having at the time access to the books necessary for a scholarly poem, Catullus never theless wishes to meet the request of the friend in whose house he has often been able to meet Lesbia, and he reminds him of his own happy days of love which, like those of Laodamia, did not last long; she lost her beloved Protesilaos at Troy where, in the Troad, his brother too, from visiting whose grave he has just returned, is buried. This is the central part of the poem; the poet’s thoughts then revert to the beginning, but at the conclusion there is a farewell greeting, not to Allius, however, but to Lesbia. The whole piece (or is it in fact two pieces?), obscure and even incoherent as it is, is an anticipation of the subjective love elegy, one of the most original creations of Latin poetry. Virgil was a great admirer of Catullus, and these lines could well have figured somehow in his imagination when he was meditating on Eclogue 10. Eclogue 10 presents Virgil, as a shepherd in Arcadia, singing a song of consolation for his friend Gallus who has been abandoned by his mistress Lycoris. All nature sympathises with his sorrow; the shepherd gods, Apollo and Pan, reason with him. Gallus (and here Virgil trans lates elements of his friend’s elegies into his own bucolic style) would be very happy to be at home in Arcadia. But he is enslaved by his love and cannot forget his pain. Though Lycoris has proved unfaithful, he con cernedly imagines her with her new innamorato on alpine snows and the frost-bound Rhine: ‘Ah, may the frosts not harm you!’ he exclaims; ‘Ah, may not the jagged ice cut your tender feet!’ When Apollo upbraids Gallus for his madness, bluntly saying that his darling has run off (22-3), he is not, I think, telling the poor man something of which he is not already aware. From line 10 we have known of his severely distraught condition. Apollo is using the technique

180 V irg il a n d the M il it a r y T r ad itio n of consolation based on, as it were, a straight and hefty blow to the chin. He wants Gallus to face reality. As early as Homer (Iliad 24.549-50, where Achilles tells Priam that ceaseless mourning will not bring Hector back from the dead) this style of consolation is found. Straightforward, unsentimental dealing is often applied by writers. When Pan (lines 28-30) warns Gallus that Love is utterly unmoved by such distress as he is experiencing and there is no cure for his suffering, he is adopting the same kind of consolatory argument as Apollo and articulating a ‘severe mercy’. The reader would expect that a tried soldier like Gallus would naturally put on a bold front to meet the harsh comfort offered him. Maybe he would have done so in reality. But this is a poem, and perhaps he was not enormously pleased to be publicly depicted by his brother poet as a broken-hearted lover, even though that was the way he seems to have presented himself in his elegies. From what we can gather about him Gallus seems to have had a character that was original, varied, and strongly marked. Other adjectives which come to mind are lively, daring, erratic, imaginative, resourceful. Virgil held him in great affection:

Gallo, cuius amor tantum mihi crescit in horas, quantum vere novo viridis se subicit alnus. (lines 73-4)

After Pan’s words of intended consolation Gallus remains in the same mood (tristis at ille..., line 31). ‘Never mind,’ he says, ‘you, my Arcadian friends, will sing of all this to your hills’ (line 32). Tristis means here ‘disconsolate’. Dio Cassius, the Greek author of a ‘History of Rome’, who lived c. 155-c. 230, supplies some details of Gallus’ military and administra tive career after he abandoned his early literary success. He continued to serve Octavian for many years, and held important command at the battle of Actium (31 b c ). The pursuit of the enemy to Egypt was en trusted to him and he played a distinguished part in the mopping-up operations. Gallus took a town named Paraetonium, which was on the west coast of Alexandria. When Antony came on the scene to mount an attack, Gallus, aware that some of his men had previously served with Antony and reflecting that if he could gain contact with them they might desert to him out of old loyalty, allowed his adversary to come right up to the walls. Therupon he had his assembled trumpeters blow loudly and

181 H . M a c L . C urrie concertedly, and thus Antony’s words were utterly drowned. A land assault was made but it was not successful, and instead a naval detach ment was assigned to the task. The harbour had a very narrow entrance, and Gallus drew chains across it, but left them on the bottom, taking care to avoid seeming to be keeping a watchful eye on the place. Antony sent his fleet in during the night; Gallus raised the chains and easily dealt with the imprisoned ships and men.6 As a reward for his good services Octavian now made Gallus first Viceroy of Egypt. The honour went to his head, however; he claimed credit for his exploits which by Roman usage should have gone to Octavian under whose auspicia he had fought. Though Octavian liked

Gallus personally, he fell into disgrace and committed suicide (26 b c ). Thus a vibrant and unusually gifted personality passed from the scene. One of my predecessors in office was a gallant Field Marshall of the British army and a noted lover of poetry, though not a composer of it himself, Archibald Wavell. Latterly he became Viceroy of India. He released Congress leaders from prison and let them join discussions on independence, and showed, as the Dictionary of National Biography says, ‘limitless patience in seeking settlement’. He published an acclaimed anthology, ‘Other Men’s Flowers’. The American scholar, Alfred Harbage, has shown in an interesting essay7 that Shakespeare’s ideal man is soldierly, scholarly and honest, and in his piece On Epitaphs, published in 1810, Wordsworth remarks that ‘both in the natural and the moral world, qualities pass insensibly into their contraries, and things revolve upon one another’. Pascal (Pensees no. 220, ‘Everyman’ edition) wrote: ‘I do not admire an excess of any virtue (for example, of valour) unless I see at the same time an excess of the opposite virtue, as in Epameinondas, who was extremely brave and also extremely kind.’ Greatness, Pascal goes on to say, lies not at one extreme but in touching two extremes so as to fill all the in-between. This notion of the entre-deux is treated by Sainte Beuve in one of the chapters of his Port Royal. He points out that when we become person ally acquainted with an eminent man whom we have hitherto known only by repute or at a distance we are often surprised at finding him to be so different from what we had thought on other sides and so complete within himself. When he wrote Pascal was thinking of Montaigne’s essay Of Profit and Honesty in which the opposing elements in Epameinondas’s nature are discussed—his fearless courage and his

182 V irg il a n d the M il it a r y T r ad itio n ready sympathy. The opposites to which both Montaigne and Pascal refer are not contradictions in character but are complementary, and in his Laokoon (1766) Lessing employs the entre-deux conception to explain the seemingly conflicting strains in the attitude of Sophocles’ Philoctetes: ‘The lamentations are those of a man but the acts are those of a hero. Both compose the manly hero who is neither effeminate nor hardened, but at one time appears as the former, at another as the latter, even as nature, principle, and duty alternately require. It is the sublimest sub ject which wisdom can produce and Art imitate.’ There is then agreement amongst some of the best minds that the magnanimous temperament is marked by the interplay of contrasting qualities. A gallant soldier and leader of men, as well as a creative and influential poet, Gallus drew the imagination and regard of Virgil to a special degree.

With the Commentaries of Caesar and the monographs of Sallust the study of extant Roman historiography begins. Before entering upon his account of the Numidian war in the Bellum Jugurthinum Sallust deals with such matters as geography, and the ethnic background and civilisational details of the natives (17-22). Similarly, Caesar (B.G. 5.12 ff.) gives a sketch of Britain and the Britons, and a more detailed account of the customs of the Gauls (ib. 6.11 ff.) and of the Germans, whose manners he observes are notably different (ib. 6.21 ff.). Virgil achieves the same effect when he includes a passage on the prehistory of Carthage near the beginning of the first book of the Aeneid (12 ff.). And then at Aeneid 8.314 ff., to give another example, there is an anthropological passage on early Italy and its Golden Age. The sense of the past is very strong in this poet. The scheme of Sallust’s two monographs, the Bellum Catilinae and the Bellum Jugurthinum, is roughly the same; introductory remarks, some digression, and speeches so closely interwoven with the narrative as to illuminate the events and characters involved. In this way Sallust imitates the method of his great model Thucydides. The basis of style is choice—of words and locutions. Sallust devised for himself a highly individualised, nervous style, marked by mannered brevity, terse asyndeton and antithesis, poetical constructions, the his toric infinitive, repetition of certain expressions. He excels in character studies—see especially his Catiline (Bellum Catilinae 5) and his Sempronia, a digression (ib. 25).

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Cicero did not have time to found Roman historiography, being other wise engaged. Our concern now at this stage in the discussion is with Caesar and his style as historian. This style is unique. The austere purist principle (‘steer clear of an unheard and unusual word as you would a rock’, as Gellius quotes from de Analogia),8 which Caesar han dled with some freedom in his orations (now mere fragments), is strictly maintained, especially in the Bellum Gallicum. Here it is evident in every respect—vocabulary, phraseology, word forms and construction. The same stylistic rigour is not present in the Bellum Civile (composed in a hurry). The clausulae of Cicero are unnecessary, even for the speeches which are obliquely reported. The appeal is not to the ear. Cicero (Brutus, 262) well likens the commentaries which make up the Bellum Gallicum to naked statues, straight and comely and devoid of all ornamental trappings. Consider how tellingly he describes in a few short sentences the terrain on which he was to meet the Nervii (.B.G. 2.18); or how clear is his description of the siege of Salonae (ib., 3.9), or how memorable is his narration of the despair of Petreius when confronted by the desertion of his troops, (ib. 1.76) A virtuoso piece of technical description (the building of a bridge) is presented (ib., 4.17), being admirably clear and concise. Caesar had a great command over lan guage, and in the Brutus (252) Atticus says that of almost all orators he spoke the choicest Latin. The use of third person narrative was derived by Caesar from Xenophon. And his unelaborate historiographical style looks back to Xenophon as well.9 What is the difference between poetry and rhetoric? Ovid offers some observations on this matter (ex Ponto 2.5.65-70): the nervi (energy and expertise) of the orator are strengthened by poetry. Writers on Ovid’s use of rhetoric tend to overemphasise it, for many of the rhetorical features are just as much poetic as they are rhetorical. The study of rhetoric at Rome dates from the second century b c , and it was part of Virgil’s intellectual formation. The Aeneid contains 331 speeches which make up 38% of the whole, while the figure for the Homeric poems is about 50%.10 The encounter in Book 11 between Drances and Turnus seems to reflect most closely the conditions of political debate, but the fourth book with its emotional atmosphere is very redolent of drama. The hexameter verse of Ennius and Lucretius has a homespun or ill- kempt appearance. Virgil decided to do something about this, and it is

184 V ir g il a n d the M il it a r y T rad itio n probable that the well-ordered prose of Cicero and Caesar was of mate rial assistance to him in the structuring of his verse paragraphs. Historiographic narration set out in the masterly periodic prose of Cae sar must have had an effect on his creative imagination. Cicero, Caesar, Sallust and, later, Livy are similar in their use of participles—especially the present participle—with a view to succinct ness and explication. And Virgil in this whole question reminds us, as being himself a quasi-historical writer in the Aeneid, of the historians. At the end of the poem (12.83) Jupiter tells Juno that he is convinced by, and content with, her plea that the Ausonian race will survive and be predominant in Italy with the following memorable sentence: do quod vis, et me vietusque volensque remitto, which has five monosyllabic words for solemn emphasis followed by a past participle and a present participle with alliteration in the initial letter of each and joined by a double -que, and then in conclusion a main verb. Eric Laughton finds11 in the letters both of Cicero and of his corre spondents that in the informal, day-to-day communications participles tend to be few or non-existent. Such instances as occur are either stereotyped epistolary uses or commonplace absolute or predicative par ticiples. It is when the writing becomes literary’ that participles are used as an integral element, and then they tend to appear not in isolation, but in groups. They are found where the language is especially elaborate and the sentence-structure complex. But above all they are found when it is a matter of succinctly describing or explaining a series of events or a situation, as well as in passages of close argumentation. Cicero’s practice differs from that of his correspondents only in the greater skill which he shows in incorporating participles in his sentence- structure. The second half of the Aeneid is generally considered not so success ful as the first half, but the subject-matter (violence and war) may be responsible for this judgement. Certainly at the artistic level there is no diminution in the poet’s creative powers, though individual innovations may not be readily perceptible. Amongst the more obvious developments the reader may note that there are more elisions, more full stops in the middle of lines, there is a greater proportion of short words, there are more words repeated and more assonances. Right up to the last lines of the poem the same inventive spirit is at work. In the Eclogues it is the cadences of Theocritus which Virgil frequently

185 H. MacL. C urrie seeks to reproduce—the pauses, the anaphora, and all the other devices or figures characteristic of the ‘pathetic’ style. He admired Catullus’ epyllion, Peleus and Thetis, in which only about 40 lines out of 408 have any appreciable pause within, while 284 have, in the edition of Mynors, a pause at the end. This phenomenon arises from late Alexandrian poetic usage which restricted pauses to the end or the caesura. In his early published work Virgil holds to a position between the looseness of ancient times and the purist outlook of neoterics. In the Eclogues, too, there are signs of the periodic, Ciceronian manner here and there (e.g. 3.35-9; 6.31-40, 74-81, and cf. E. Fraenkel, Vergil und Cicero, Atti Mantova (1926), p. 255), while experimentation with variety of pause is sometimes found (cf. 5.60-6). And in the Eclogues (3.80-3) we can find tetracolon in parallelistic form:

Damoetas: triste lupus stabulis, maturis frugibus imbres, arboribus venti, nobis Amaryllidis irae. Menalcas: dulce satis umor, depulsis arbutus herbis, lenta salix feto pecori, mihi solus Amyntas.

In the Georgics such total symmetry is avoided, but otherwise, with variations and refinements, and general, increased influence from the Ciceronian periodic method the Georgics stylistically are clearly from the same stable. They contain few sentences which are more than four lines in length and they carry many literary and artistic devices to maintain the reader’s interest and enthusiasm. ‘An artistic expression of the survival myth of a nation’ is J.B. Hainsworth’s definition of an epic composition (The idea of epic, Berkley and Los Angeles, 1991). The Aeneid in its scale, scope and objective called for a special endeavour on several planes. In the second half the style becomes distinctively military in flavour. The epyllion of Nisus and Euryalus in Book 9 shows warfare starting in earnest. The mission which the courageous pair undertake is to get through the enemy lines and make contact with Aeneas, and they remind us of other heroic and noble youths in the poem such as Pallas and Lausus. The preliminaries to the undertaking are drawn out, but at line 314 ff. the style of the narration palpably moves into clipped military mode:

Egressi superant fossas noctisque per umbram

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castra inimica petunt, multis tamen ante futuri exitio, passim somno vinoque per herbam corpora fusa vident, arrectos litore currus inter lora rotasque viros, simul arma iacere, vina simul. prior Hyrtacides sic ore locutus: ‘Euryale, audendum dextra: nunc ipsa vocat res. hac iter est. tu, ne qua manus se attollere nobis a tergo possit, custodi et consule longe; haec ego vasta dabo et lato te limite ducam. ’ sic memorat vocemque premit, simul ense superbum Rhamnetem adgreditur...

This passage shows brevity and directness, with a series of quick glimpses of certain things visible to the observer on the scene. And Hyrtacides issues his orders laconically. At this point it is worthwhile to compare Caesar B.G. 7.90. The passage is called by Eduard Fraenkel12 ‘ein Form Romischer Kriegsbulletins’:

His rebus confectis in Aeduos proficiscitur; ciuitatem recipit. Eo legati ab Arvernis missi quae imperaret se facturos pollicentur. Imperat magnum numerum obsidum. Legiones in hiberna mittit. Captivorum circiter viginti milia Aeduis Arvernisque reddit. Titum Labienum duabus cum legionibus et equitatu in Sequanos proficisci iubet; huic Marcum Sempro- nium Rutilum attribuit. Gaium Fabium legatum et Lucium Minucium Basilum cum legionibus duabus in Remis collocat, ne quam ab finitimis Bellovacis calamitatem accipiant. Gaium Antistium Reginum in Ambivaretos, Titum Sextium in Bituriges, Gaium Caninium Rebilum in Rutenos cum singulis legionibus mittit. Quintum Tullium Ciceronem et Publium Sulpicium Cabilloni et Matiscone in Aeduis ad Ararim rei frumentariae causa collocat. Ipse Bibracte hiemare constituit. His litteris cognitis Romae dierum viginti supplicatio redditur.

In the battle which begins at 10.308 ff. Virgil first of all describes the successes of Aeneas and then passes on to those of the Italians, using techniques and phrases of Homer and Ennius and their descriptions of combat. There is a stern austerity in the narration, a chilling directness.

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Aeneas may not have the hard brutality of the Iliadic hero, but when, as here, despatch and vigour are required, he does not hold back. The poet variegates his account of the slaughter with vignettes of the men cut down, and thus increases the pathos and horror of the engagement. At 11. 597 ff. a cavalry battle on a huge scale develops with one side at first prevailing and then the other. At 12.266 ff. an omen persuades Tolumnius that the Rutulians must attack in order to save Turnus. Fierce fighting then breaks out. The passages just cited illustrate Virgil’s power to handle realisti cally different aspects of warfare with its savagery, suffering, cruelty and bravery. The last four books have terrible and poignant greatness. Between lines 924 and 952 of the twelfth book which conclude both the duel between Turnus and Aeneas and the poem itself there are five instances of masculine singular participles in the nominative. This ef fect heightens the immediacy and the tension of the action. It comes clearly before our eyes. And the last one hundred and fifty lines of this same book show the poet at his best in the masterly use of language, metre, rhythm and sentiment. This now brings us to the question of Turnus and he demise. The Trojan incomers under Aeneas are bound to win the war. The very first speech of Jupiter (Aeneid 1.257 ff.) makes this clear. The future Rome is predestined to conquer and to civilise. As the idealised representative of the gens Romana Aeneas is pius (that is, ‘responsible’) and magnanimus to such a degree that he can appear rather a ‘stuffed- shirt’, burdened by virtues. The most lively characters are those who are rebels or outsiders (e.g. Dido)—the only objectionable figure in the whole cast is Mezentius who, as eontemptor divurn (Aeneid 7.648), is a cross between (as someone has remarked) Prometheus and Milton’s Satan and is the only villain in the poem. Valour is equally shown on both sides. The killing by Turnus of the young Pallas transforms Aeneas into an archaic Roman warrior who does not shrink from human sacrifice (Aeneid 10). The myth Virgil is using calls for the Romans to prevail in the struggle, but an eventual union of Italians and Trojans will result in a new people. Turnus is in general a sympathetically drawn character and is a fully worthy opponent for Aeneas. The slaying of Pallas is a part of the horror of war. Turnus possesses a deep sense of grievance at having to give up his intended bride, Lavinia, and to surrender his lands and powers to

188 V irg il a n d th e M il it a r y T r ad itio n invaders. Further, he is doomed to fail; he is a loser, but a gallant one. This kind of figure is not unfamiliar in literature. In a heroic setting success is sometimes not a main concern unless against massive odds. Turnus has the will and power of heaven against him; he is not merely striving against flesh and blood. The odds are insuperable. In the mag nificent proem to the ninth book of Paradise Lost Milton rejects the wars of fabled knights as a theme, and defines his subject as (31-2);

‘the better fortitude of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom.’

And in Samson Agonistes the spirit of Hebrew heroism and that of Greek heroism meet. Eyeless in Gaza, Samson recalls for us the blind Oedipus at Colonus, but in himself he symbolises every kind of heroism in the world.13 Livy has an interesting story which can be relevantly mentioned here. After Hannibal had crossed the Alps he wished to re-animate his weary troops before they engaged in battle with the Romans on Italian soil. He therefore arranged for some of the fierce Alpine tribesmen (probably Celts) whom he had taken prisoner en route to fight duels amongst themselves, the victors to be given their freedom. The gallantry of these death-despising warriors is amazing as they gladly accept the offer, taking up weapons and performing a native dance (cum sui moris trip udiis). During the actual fighting the spectators expressed just as much admiration for the losers, if they died well, as for the winners ut non vincentium magis quam bene morientium fortuna laudaretur (Livy 21.42). Here, too, we can recall that in gladiatorial encounters at Rome a good, brave fighter, even if he lost the match, could be spared by the will of the spectators. In chapters 34-52 of B.G. 7 Caesar describes the siege of Gergovia, an action he had to abandon after severe repulse. He gives special mention to the bravery of a centurion, Marcus Petronius (ch. 50). Having tried to cut down a gate, he was overpowered by superior numbers and in desperate case. He had already received many wounds, but Caesar puts into his mouth a brief but for the occasion too elegant and balanced a speech:

‘quoniam,’ inquit, ‘me una vobiscum servare non possum,

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uestrae quidem certe vitae prospiciam, quos cupiditate gloriae adductus in periculum deduxi. vos data facultate vobis consulite.’

He then burst into the midst of the enemy, and by slaying two men moved the rest a little from the gate. He thus allowed his men to get back to the legion, though he a moment later fell fighting, having saved his comrades. With their sense of chivalry it would have been possible for Romans to view Turnus as a worthy foe who had nobly faced up to the disadvantages inflicted upon him by the fates. As to Aeneas and his act of vengeance upon Turnus for his killing of Pallas, what would the Roman response have been? I think it would or could have been: ‘Serves him right!’ We are more tender-minded than the ancients. The robust Greek idea of social behaviour was to do good to your friends and evil to your enemies. And Aeneas has already been turned into an archaic Roman warrior by the slaying of Pallas in battle. To this particular loss he was very sensitive. For Julius Caesar dementia seems to have been more a self-serving instrument of policy than a genuine movement of the heart towards mercy and forgiveness. Vercingetorix raised a revolt against the Roman occupation of Gaul in 52 b c (see B.G. 7), and was only defeated after a long and heroic struggle. Caesar pays tribute to his ability (B.G. 7.4), but he was exhibited in

Caesar’s triumph in 46 b c and executed soon afterwards. In 54 b c Caesar entered upon a second invasion of Britain. On his return to Gaul he was himself defeated by the rebellious Eburones, upon whose leaders he carried out a terrible vengeance. And remember what the Romans did to Carthage.

University of Teesside H. MACL. CURRIE

Notes 1. Cf. Numanus Remulus (Aeneid 9.598 ff.) as the developed type of peasant-soldier in his most harsh and primitive aspects. See N. Horsfall, Latomus 30 (1972) 1108-16. 2. See the edition of Vegetius by N.P. Milner, Liverpool University Press, 19962. And see my article on parallelism in Latin, Latomus 43.3 (1984) 560-70. 3. See the paper by R.D. Anderson, R.G.M. Nisbet, and P. Parsons in J.R.S. 69 (1979) 138 ff.

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4. For paraenesis, towards which a certain degree of didacticism in his tempera ment inclined Horace, consult the indices to Odes I and II edited by R.G.M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard (Oxford, 1970 and 1978). Genre was a characteristically Hellenic interest. 5. See R. Kassel, Untersuchungen zur griechischen und romischen Konsolations- literatur (Munich, 1958). 6. Dio Cassius 51.9 ff.; 53.23. 7. Adams Memorial Studies (New York, 1948), 65—80. 8. See P.T. Eden, ‘Caesar: style and inheritance versus intelligence’, Glotta 40 (1962) 74-117. And cf. F.E. Adcock, Caesar as Man of Letters (Cambridge, 1956), as well as Christian Meier, Caesar, English trans. (London, 1995). 9. For the use of third person narrative derived from Xenophon by Caesar see E. Norden, Agnostos Theos (Leipzig-Berlin, 1913); reprinted Darmstadt (1956), pp. 313 ff. Caesar’s unelaborate historiographical style also looks back to Xenophon— see K. Miinscher, Xenophon in der griechisch-rdmischen Literatur (Leipzig, 1920), Philol. Suppl. 13.2, pp. 70 ff. (‘Xenophon bei den Romern). 10. G. Highet, The Speeches in Vergil’s Aeneid (Princeton, 1972). 11. See Eric Laughton, The Participle in Cicero (Oxford, 1964) p. 156. And cf. Hofmann-Szantyr, Lateinische Syntax und Stilistik (London, 1965) pp. 386-7, and H. Pinkster, Latin Syntax and Semantics (London, 1990) pp. 234 ff. I acknowledge a debt, too, to L.P. Wilkinson’s Golden Latin Artistry (Bristol Classical Press, 1985) pp. 118 ff. 12. Eranos 5 (1956) 189-94. 13. The butchery of the sleeping Rutulians by Nisus and Euryalus at the beginning of their aristeia in Book 9 is perhaps meant to alienate our sympathy, but neverthe less the fact that they are eventually overwhelmed by superior numbers is probably meant to place them in the heroic category summa cum laude. For Virgil’s battles in the Aeneid see M.M. Willcock, P.C.P.S. 29 (1983) 87 ff.

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