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Virgil and the Military Tradition

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Virgil and the Military Tradition Proceedings of the Virgil Society 23 (1998) 177-191 ©1998 Virgil and the Military Tradition 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.
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