The PROCEEDINGS o f the VIRGIL SOCIETY VOLUME XXVI 2008 ISSN: 0968-2112

The PROCEEDINGS o f the VIRGIL SOCIETY VOLUME XXVI 2008

I Copyright ©2008 The Virgil Society

Published by the Virgil Society, c/o Jill Kilsby, Treasurer, 8 Purley Oaks Road, Sanderstead, Surrey CR2 ONP UK

Typeset and Layout by BB Katt Design, Scotland www.bbkatt.co.uk

Printed in the UK by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

COVER ILLUSTRATION: A roundel commemorating the foundation of the Society commissioned by Jonathan Foster from Gillian Cooper. It represents the tradition preserved by his biographer Aelius Donatus, that Virgil described himself as bringing forth his poetry as a she-bear does her young, licking it eventually into shape. An epitaph attributed to the poet concludes with the words: ‘ Cecini pascua, rura, duces', ‘I sang of pastures, farms and leaders' (in allusion to the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid respectively).

II Contents Page

Colin Burrow English Renaissance Readers and the Appendix Vergiliana 1

Marina Warner Ghosts and Daemons: The Revival of Myth and Magic 17

John Mair Some Glimpses of Virgil in Late Antiquity 32

Angus Bowie Aeneas Narrator 41

D. E. Hill Statius' Debt to Virgil 52

Stephen Moorby Achates: Faithful Friend or Poetic Fraud? 66

Richard Jenkyns Dryden's Translation of the Eclogues in a Comparative Light 76

L. B. T. Houghton Virgil the “Renaissance Man” and his Medieval Antecedents 89

Egil Kraggerud Transpositions in the Bucolics? (On Ecl. 7. 53-60) 105

Niall Rudd On ‘Making it Strange' 111

Jonathan Foster Reflections on ‘Oxford Reds’ 113

Obituary Malcolm Willcock 120

III Volume XXVI of the Proceedings of the Virgil Society was edited by: JONATHAN FOSTER and STEPHEN MOORBY

The editors express their warmest thanks to Fraser Thompson for his continuing help and good will in producing our ‘new style' PVS.

The lectures printed in the present volume do not represent a complete record of what the Society has heard in the past three years: some of the lectures have been, or will be, otherwise or elsewhere published.

THE VIRGIL SOCIETY IS A REGISTERED CHARITY

IV Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

English Renaissance Readers and the Appendix Vergiliana

A paper given to the Virgil Society on 17 January 2004

ery little of note has been written about the reception history of the Appendix Vergiliana in England. Perhaps this is what one should expect, given that this group of poems has traditionally Vinspired debates about their date and their authorship rather than about their intrinsic interest or their reception. But there are two reasons why this gap in the study of Virgil’s reception in English literature is notable, and perhaps even deplorable. The first of these reasons is reasonably dull: that the Appendix did have rather an interesting history in the sixteenth century, as these things go. The second reason why we should be uneasy about the present state of scholarship in this area is slightly less dull: many standard histories of Virgil in the Renaissance say or imply that ‘Virgil’ meant effectively only the Aeneid, the Georgics, and the Eclogues. This has led many literary historians, and even very good literary historians, to see the figure of Virgil in the sixteenth century as much simpler than in fact it was. Even a polymath such as Alastair Fowler, for instance, in Kinds o f Literature outlines (and criticises) the stable form of the rota Virgilii, in which particular varieties of style and even allusions to particular kinds of trees are associated with particular phases in Virgil’s career. Not even a spoke of the wheel allows for the possibility that anyone might ever have thought that Virgil wrote poems apart from the big three.1 And literary historians who have focussed on literary careers often adopt an extremely simple model of the cursus Virgilii, which moves from pastoral to epic. Some slot in to that career-structure, more or less convincingly, some room for sonnets, hymns or other Christian forms. But very few indeed of those who have discussed literary careers in the Renaissance take at all seriously the fact that for most Renaissance readers Virgil’s career was not a simple wheel or a simple cursus through the genres. Students of Edmund Spenser have had particular difficulty in this area. Few critics have been able to explain why Spenser produced a volume of Complaints in 1591, twelve years after the Virgilian Shepheardes Calender and a year after the appearance of the first three books of the epic Faerie Queene. Patrick Cheney, for instance, in his valuable study of Spenser’s poetic career, finds almost no room at all for the Complaints volume,2 while for Joseph Loewenstein the Complaints volume represents a ‘serious interruption to a specifically

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Virgilian cursus’ - and that way of putting it implies that the volume represents an untoward bump in the road which buckles the wheel of a Virgilian career.3 As we shall see, the Complaints volume makes a lot more sense as part of Spenser’s career if one takes due account of the fact that throughout the sixteenth century a significant number of poems from the Appendix Vergiliana were regarded not as appendices to Virgil, but as opuscula, or little early works. There are other reasons why the neglect of the Appendix Vergiliana has distorted critical understanding of English sixteenth century writing. It is a commonplace voiced by legions of scholars that there was some kind of stylistic incompatibility between sober Virgil and randy Ovid in the Renaissance, and that allusions to Ovid might simply undercut or qualify allusions to Virgil. This cliche too does not take account of the possibility that many poets in the Renaissance thought that Virgil started his career writing in what now looks like an Ovidian vein, in the Culex and the Ciris. The idea that the Culex or the Ciris or the satirical epigrams attributed to Virgil might be interesting for what they tell us about the reception of Virgil in the Renaissance, let alone in themselves, is almost entirely absent from secondary literature on the relationship between Renaissance English, and so far as my investigations have gone, European Renaissance literature more generally, and the classics. There are, as this paper will show, reasons, as well as a case, for that neglect; but there are also strong reasons for thinking that the Appendix Vergiliana mattered a great deal, at least for some Renaissance poets. What I will present here is a start of an attempt to show why and how the Appendix mattered. No doubt there will be further appendices to add as further aspects of the subject come to light. *

The first question to ask in this investigation is how widely was the Appendix read, and in what form was it read, in the sixteenth century? The first of these questions can be answered with a cautious ‘not much’. Girolamo Vida does recommend the young poet to try his arm with ‘the fearsome fates of a gnat’ in his De Arte Poetica 4 But I know of no evidence that any of the poems customarily included in the Appendix were ever read in schools. They are not mentioned in the statutes or surviving timetables of St Paul’s and Westminster or any other school in sixteenth century England, and there is no evidence that any measure of attention was accorded to them at the Universities. So where Shakespeare, for example, read quite a lot of Ovid and some of the Aeneid at school, there is no evidence of any kind that he ever read any of the poems from the Appendix.5 John Stockwood, a schoolmaster at Tonbridge, preached a sermon in May 1579 in which he complained that among ‘horrible beastly Authors [which] are taught in some schooles’ are ‘the most horrible beastliness of Priapus ioyned to the end of euery Virgil’. Stockwood, however, can scarcely be described as a proselytizer for reading the Appendix, since he suggests that good parents should rather see their children ‘murthered and slaine before your eyes’ than let them read such filth.6 Adversaria and marginalia on editions of the Appendix from the sixteenth century are suspiciously rare, and some sixteenth-century Virgils which do contain manuscript annotations on the Aeneid have eloquently blank margins on the pages devoted to the Appendix. This does not necessarily mean that the Appendix remained unread, of course, but it may well indicate that the poems included in it were not routinely included in the systematic or semi-systematic readings of classical literature undertaken by humanist scholars to stock their commonplace books. There was good reason for not reading these poems in this period. Quite apart from any more reputable reasons for their neglect, in the sixteenth century, as now, they always figure, if at all, at the back of collected editions of Virgil. As a result readers do have to plough through a lot to get to them. But readers who did persist in their journey through the majority of folio editions of Virgil before the 1570s would find major reasons for taking the poems in the Appendix seriously. Before this date they tend to

2 Colin Burrow - English Renaissance Readers and the A p p e n d i x V e r g il ia n a be given the same level of commentary as the canonical poems. This level of commentary, in volume if not always in quality, was high. Virgil’s poems would be physically surrounded by commentary on the page. This practice is the origin of Pope’s gorgeous line on annotators: they ‘write about it, Goddess, and about it :| So spins the silk-worm small its slender store’,7 where ‘about’ does not just mean ‘on the subject of’, but also ‘physically around it’, sweetly choking the text in fine filaments of speculation. On several pages of early modern Virgils you can find occasions on which the commentators have virtually filled entire pages with swathes of annotation. The many variorum editions in folio provide the most muscle-bound commentaries, which often almost squeeze Virgil off the page entirely by surrounding him with glosses and comments by Lambinus, Ascensius, Servius, and Melancthon and others. One particularly influential commentator took a surprising degree of care over the Appendix. This was Jodocus Badius Ascensius, whose heavily annotated edition of Virgil’s works first appeared in 1501.8 (It was this edition which was extensively used in Gavin Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid into Middle Scots). Ascensius’ notes were frequently reprinted and pirated throughout the sixteenth century. His model readers included school-children, so as a result his commentary often consists of little more than careful paraphrases and advice on how to construe the text. But he does sometimes venture onto larger-scale interpretative flights. From 1517 onwards his edition was ornamented with handsome woodcuts, which had been originally carved to embellish Sebastian Brant’s edition of 1502.9 These continued to be printed with Ascensius’ text well into the sixteenth century, and there are indications that these influence the woodcuts used in 1579 for the publication of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender.10 Ascensius’ commentary does not stop when he comes to the Appendix - although he, in common with all editors before the 1570s, does not term it the Appendix, but the Opuscula, or minor early works, which are given a volume to themselves in the edition of 1501. The woodcuts also continue to reflect the contents of the works which they illustrate with reasonable accuracy. The Culex is illustrated by a fine picture of a shepherd swatting his ear, while a snake (reared up in the posture familiar from many medieval representations of the temptation of Eve) stands ready to strike. (Presumably it is simply realism that makes the artist present the gnat as attacking the shepherd’s ear, rather than his eye as he does in the poem; gnats are more audible than visible.) The Ciris has a close-up of Scylla cutting the lock in her father’s castle, while Minos’ troops encircle the city. These images ensure that for a reader of Ascensius the Opuscula look every bit as compelling as the Aeneid. In the case of the Dirae the woodcut makes the poem look perhaps even more canonical than some of the earlier poems in the volume, since it presents a picture of Virgil complete with his laurel wreath reciting his curses against a backdrop of Mantua. This woodcut illustrates how keen Renaissance editors and printers were to embed the Appendix in the life of Virgil, and to relate the poems in it to his status as vates.

The corpus of the Appendix was of course substantially larger for Ascensius and for later Renaissance readers and editors than it is for us, including as it did a number of moral epigrams (the ‘Vir Bonus’, ‘On the Letter Y’, ‘Rosae’ and ‘Hortus’ among others). Ascensius’ commentary continues to hug the texts of these implausible opuscula in a particularly expansive version of his usual genially pedantic embrace. The poems which are given the longest commentary are the ‘Vir Bonus’ epigram and the epigram on envy (neither of which will be found in editions of the Appendix today). Here Ascensius’ schoolmasterly and late medieval preoccupations come through: straightforwardly sententious and moral poems by the great Virgil are of course a late medieval schoolmaster’s dream, and would strike a direct hit on the taste-buds of most late medieval readers. They are broadly equivalent to the moral ballades of Chaucer, which are given little critical attention today, but which in the early sixteenth century were widely admired and imitated.11 But Ascensius is not simply interested in Virgil’s moralitas when he glosses the opuscula. He is interested in the question of when and whether Virgil wrote the

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poems, and is reasonably careful to distinguish between poems which are more and those which are less likely to be by Virgil himself - so the elegy on the death of Maecenas is described as ‘incerti auctoris’ and is given very skimpy commentary. He regards the Culex as an ‘opusculum’ written by Virgil when he was young, and describes it as ‘in re tenui non tenuem gloriam meritum’, a poem on a slender subject which deserves more than slender glory. The Ciris is, according to Ascensius, a poem from which Virgil borrowed later in life, and should be regarded as a trial of his talent (‘Namplurima ex hoc in alia opera transtulisse constat: vt sicut de culice diximus hoc opusculum quasi sui ingenii tentamentum atque periculum praelusisse credere par sit’).12 It is not hard in these remarks to see the influence of that other notable schoolmaster, Donatus’ life of Virgil, on Ascensius: the received text of Donatus, of course, suggested that Virgil wrote the Ciris and the Culex in his early youth (by the time he was fifteen, according to some manuscripts, sixteen or seventeen according to others): modern texts have it that ‘deinde catalecton et priapea et epigrammata et diras, item cirim et culicem, cum esset annorum XXVI’13; ‘After this - though he was only 26 - he composed the Catalecton, as well as pieces about Priapus, as well as epigrams, as well as curses, along with poems about the ciris and the gnat’. Twenty- six seems young enough, but even this was older than the majority of Virgil’s early readers believed him to have been when he composed the poems in the Appendix. Before Joseph Scaliger (who, as we shall see, played a vital part in the history of the Appendix Vergiliana in the sixteenth century) proposed emending ‘XVI’ to ‘XXVI’, the majority of editors present the author of the Culex and Ciris as little more than a boy. Donatus’ opinion that the Appendix contained very early works was widely accepted in the early sixteenth century, and his life was frequently printed among the prefatory matter of early modern Virgils.14 This means that the majority of early modern readers would have thought of Virgil as having started his career as both a satirist and a moralist, and most of them with any kind of ear who read the Ciris would have also thought that Virgil started his poetic career sounding very like - indeed anticipating - Ovid as well as his own mature works. As we shall see, all of these beliefs have a major influence on the understanding of Virgil in the Renaissance. But not everyone would have incorporated the opuscula into their sense of the Virgilian corpus. Ascensius was popular, but there was a rival editorial tradition of the Appendix in the early years of print. Aldus Manutius, no less, in 1517 produced Diversorum Veterum Poetarum in Priapum Lusus. CVM Catalecta. Copa. Rosae. Culex. Dirae. Moretum. Ciris. Aetna. Elegia in Mecoenatis obitum. Et alia nonulla, quae falso Virgilii creduntur. Aldus’ famous anchor emblem figures prominently on the title-page to give this edition a seal of authority; but of course one notable name - that of Virgil himself - is shunted right down the title page in a way that allows for the possibility that the entirety of the Appendix has ‘falsely been believed to be by Virgil’. The collection was reprinted in 1534 to take account of Bembo’s emendations of 1531, but judging by the number of editions which survive, it does not seem to have been popular. It does, however, mark one extreme of the tendency to separate the Appendix from the rest of Virgil in the sixteenth century, since it presents the entire group of poems in a form that is physically separate from the remainder of the works. Cheaper quarto editions of Virgil often included the opuscula, and sometimes gave them sparse glosses in the margins, but those which do include them seldom have longer notes on these lesser poems. A representative edition from 1563 with notes by Melancthon and others has longer notes on the canonical poems at the back of the volume, but has no notes on the opuscula at all.15 A desire on the part of printers to make economies in these cases had the effect of marginalising the Appendix. Printerly economies, though, sometimes also had the opposite consequence: the one collected edition of Virgil’s works to be printed in sixteenth-century England, Bynneman’s of 1570, is a relatively modest affair, with brief marginal notes.16 These extend to the poems in the Appendix. And a desire to save paper here presses the Opuscula into close, perhaps

4 Colin Burrow - English Renaissance Readers and the A p p e n d i x V e r g il ia n a unhealthily close, proximity to the Aeneid. Turnus’s spirit flees murmuring to the shades half way down page 478, and ‘P. Virgilii Maronis aliorumque poetarum opuscula’ begins immediately below on the same page, without comment or introduction. A clear hierarchy is established in the titles to the poems which follow in Bynneman’s edition: the Culex is Virgil’s, as is the Dirae, the Copa, the Moretum, the Epigrams and the Ciris; but the Aetna is ascribed to Cornelius Severus. Bynneman’s edition preceded by two years the most significant event in the reception of the Appendix in the sixteenth century, and perhaps the biggest event in the reception history of the poems - a gnat-bite, of course, in comparison with major events in the reception history of the Aeneid, but still an event of note. This was the publication in 1572 of Joseph Scaliger’s edition of the Appendix, which here, for the first time, was called the Appendix: Publii Virgilii Maronis Appendix cum supplemento multorum antehac nunquam excusorum Poematum veterum Poetarum. Anthony Grafton has described the text of this edition as ‘a fascinating but confused hodge-podge of clever but unconnected insights and remarkably elementary mistakes’,17 and notes its debts to the edition of the Appendix by Theodore Poelman (Antwerp, 1566), from which it even reprints misprints. Despite the textual shortcomings of this early work by Scaliger, his edition of 1572 marks an important moment because in its very title it creates a hierarchy of Virgilianness: the whole group of works is an Appendix; but it is an appendix cum supplemento, with a supplement of never before printed poems by ancient poets. Scaliger’s tone in the volume is defensive, since he is anxious about the morality of the Priapea in particular; but he is also insistent that some of the poems in the Appendix are by Virgil, and that they are not just opuscula. It is not quite clear why Scaliger termed the collection an appendix, but it may have been to avoid that potentially pejorative term opusculum, and to make his collection appear newer in its content than it actually was. Scaliger was indeed less original than he wished to appear: he expresses views about the authorship of the poems which are in one crucial respect very similar to those of Ascensius a generation before. He hardens up the tradition that Virgil wrote the Ciris and the Culex. In other respects he is much more of a sceptic than Ascensius: he denies Virgil wrote the Aetna, ascribes the Dirae to Cato Grammaticus, shares the Priapea among Catullus, Tibullus and Petronius, and denies that Virgil composed the Copa. It is Scaliger’s comments on the Culex and the Ciris which are of particular interest, however. He argues for Virgil’s authorship of the Ciris and gives it high praise: Est autem prorsus cultissimum poematium, & quod nulli Latinorum neque nitore, neque elegantia cedat: atque adeo quod venustate sua merebat, vt minus ad nos deprauatum veniret.18 It is a most cultivated poem, and is second to none in Latinity, polish, or elegance, and so its beauty deserves that it should come down to us less corrupted. But his comments on the Culex are even more significant. He launches a withering attack on the tradition stemming from Donatus that Virgil had written the poem very early in his life, on the grounds that it shows far too high a level of knowledge of the arts and sciences to have been written when he was a mere teenager: Quanquam hoc poematium quo anno aetatis suae scripserit Virgilius, plane compertum non habemus: tamen maiorem natu scripsisse satis constat, quam voluerit eius vitae auctor, ignobilis Grammaticus: qui annos tantum quindecim natum vult hoc poematium confecisse.19 Although we have not certainly discovered the year in which Virgil wrote this poem, nonetheless it’s likely that he wrote it when he was older than that dumb schoolteacher who wrote his life believes, who wants him to have written this poem when he was only fifteen.

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The Culex and the Ciris emerge from Scaliger’s edition as not just opuscula or dubia; they emerge as significant works of a poet on the threshold of maturity, albeit works which it is hard to pin down within an absolutely reliable chronology of Virgil’s verse. Although Scaliger’s edition was a major event, its longer-term consequences were not what one might expect. It did not lead to the incorporation of the Ciris and the Culex into the larger body of Virgil’s works, nor did it result in the discarding of the penumbra of supplementary elements in the Appendix. This is partly because of a law of attribution studies which has near universal force: that the force required to remove a work from the body of an author’s dubia is directly proportional to the status of that author. The other reason why it did not lead to a more divisive treatment of different poems in the Appendix is because Scaliger’s work itself came to enjoy such enormous respect. This meant that his edition had curious consequences for the reception of the Appendix. The first was that a number of folio editions of Virgil after 1572 incorporate Scaliger’s commentary more or less in its entirety. The earliest folio edition of this type which I have seen appeared in 1575, a mere three years after Scaliger’s Appendix was first printed, and boasts of its appendix on its title-page: P. Virgilius Maro, et in eum Commentationes, & Paralipomena Germani Valentis Guellii, eiusdem Virgilii Appendix, cum Josephi Scaligeri Commentariis & castionibus. That phrase eiusdem Virgilii Appendix is deeply relishable, and differs notably from the modern preferred title, ‘Appendix Vergiliana’. It means ‘the appendix of the same Virgil’: it consists, presumably, of works which are both part of the corpus and separable from it. Scaliger’s labour did much to augment the scholarly tradition of commentary to the Appendix. But the weight of Scaliger’s scholarly reputation was also sufficient to enforce a graphic separation of the Appendix from the rest of Virgil’s oeuvre. The physical form of the 1575 Antwerp folio enforces the effect of the appendix as both part and not part of the volume in which it appears. The major works are surrounded with commentary in the orthodox way. The poems in the Appendix, however, are printed without any commentary on the same page. Scaliger’s notes are reproduced in full, but they are reproduced on separate pages after the text, as endnotes. These features typographically encode the message that the Appendix is a separate body of material from the poems which have gone before. The effect of Scaliger’s edition on how readers might have responded to Virgil in the later sixteenth century might be summed up in this way: the Appendix would have been more, rather than less, detached from the corpus of Virgil than it was before, but it would have enjoyed a higher status as the subject of fashionable scholarly debate. The Ciris and the Culex would appear to those who read Scaliger’s notes to be by Virgil, but it was still not clear when they were composed: were they juvenilia, or just earlier works on which the mature Virgil drew? Was Virgil 15, or as Scaliger would later prefer, 26? An up-to-the minute person who read Virgil after 1572 would think that the great poet started his career not as the author of Eclogues in imitation of Theocritus, but as a poet who started off looking as though he was imitating Virgil. Careful readers of the entire Virgilian corpus (and it is of course not possible to be sure how many of these there actually were) would believe that satirical epigrams and Priapeia were also possibly part of the works of Virgil. Now, if we accept R.O.A.M. Lyne’s view that the Ciris in particular is something approaching a cento of lost neoteric epyllia which influenced Ovid and others,20 then we have the further enticing thought that scholars and at least some poets in the late sixteenth century would have believed that Virgil began life sounding not only as though he was imitating Virgil, but also as though he was one of Ovid’s sources. This is a particularly significant possibility, since it implies that for some readers of Virgil in the Renaissance literary history would have appeared to go backwards as well as forwards, with a set of late derivatives of Virgil appearing to be the origins not only of some of Virgil’s works but also of some of Ovid’s too.

6 Colin Burrow - English Renaissance Readers and the A p p e n d i x V e r g il ia n a

As a result the Appendix Vergiliana in the sixteenth century made mischief for literary history: it made Virgil into his own source, and made Virgil appear to belong to the same poetic universe as Ovid. This was a major aspect of its literary influence. *

How did all of this affect sixteenth-century England? A variety of strange things happened to Virgil in England in this period: a cento by Lelio Capilupi (Cento ex Virgilii de vita monachorum) was reprinted in 1565,21 and a Greek translation of Book 2 was printed in 1553. There was also, of course, a flourishing tradition of translating the major works.22 But there was in this period no translation of the Appendix, although individual poems from it do crop up in odd places and at odd times through the century. These are very various, but they do suggest that the poems in the Appendix were perhaps perceived as more accommodating than their fully canonical brethren, and that they these poems could fit quite comfortably into a literary system that was generically more fluid than its Roman equivalent. This is true of the earliest example of an English translation from the Appendix. This is found in a particularly surprising place. Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s Tryumphes o f Fraunces Petrarcke, translated out o f Italian into English is famous as the first printed example of a substantial body of translations from Petrarch. It was probably printed in 1565; although there is a great deal of uncertainty about when it was written the recent consensus is that the translation was first undertaken in the early 1520s.23 Morley’s volume ends with a very free translation of an epigram printed in the majority of editions of the opuscula in this period, ‘De Venere et Vino’. This was described in the old Dictionary of National Biography as ‘an original poem’ by Morley, which it is not. Morley’s translation is not an uplifting work, and even the briefest comparison with the original shows that it is an expansive moral commentary rather than a literal translation. Morley transforms the direct speech of the ‘Virgilian’ epigram into indirect speech: ‘Virgil says that ...’ precedes a broad, moralising and, it must be said, undistinguished paraphrase of the original: That wonderous wytty Virgil that so wel cold endight The wayes to wyne to virtue righte harde for to attayne In his sententiouse verses declareth with reason right Howe that both wyne and women doth put a man to payne He sayth in passyng measure with eyther of these twayne It is a thyng abhominable. Nowe here what he doth tell Although my ryme be rude to touche so high a vayne Yf that ye marke this doctrine doubtles ye shall do well.24 This in its general method if not its precise detail almost certainly derives from Ascensius’s commentary, which is prefixed by a general description of what Virgil is saying in the poem (Nunc vero de Venere & vino locuturus, quorum abusus, non usus, malus est: inquit)2 and which then goes on to say that drink and sex in excess un-man us (At quantum ebrietas detestanda sit facillime constabit: si hominem potum inspexeris: qui iam omne id ... quo a belluis ferisque differimus, exuit)26 Although it is impossible to pin down a precise source for such flabby paraphrase, it is very likely that Morley had Ascensius in front of him as he translated. The important thing about Morley’s translation, though, apart from showing us that the opuscula could be used to present Virgil as a moral sage, is its strange position in the printed volume. It acts as a form of generic segue from the Trionfi, which precede it, to the epitaph on Morley which follows it. In this respect it is perhaps an early example of a tendency in English Renaissance poetry to show an interest in texts which stand in a questioning or transitional generic relationship to the poems either side of them. In later sonnet sequences, including Spenser’s

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Amoretti and Daniel’s Delia, such segue poems were quite frequently used as a way of bridging the divide between Petrarchan poems and works in other genres - complaints or epithalamia - and the generically transitional poems themselves could be anacreontics, odes, or English versions of neo- Latin pieces. Morley’s volume gives an impression that the uncertainties surrounding the dates and canonical status of poems in the Appendix might have extended in the early sixteenth century to their genre: they were poems which no-one quite knew how to place, because they could not be fitted within a clear career structure or hierarchy of genres, and could not even be reliably contained within a single corpus. They were as a result, oddly enough, the most assimilable poems in the Virgilian canon: to imitate the Aeneid was to engage with a clear set of generic expectations; but to translate the ‘Virgilian’ epigrams was a far less clearly defined kind of activity, and the poems could be freely dressed anew. A glance forward to the 1620s shows that the epigrams later allowed Virgil to be re-dressed in a very literal way. He is presented in the woodcut which precedes John Penkethman’s translation of the epigrams as a Jacobean gallant (the woodcut is very similar to several used in rogue pamphlets from the 1590s, and clearly was not purpose-made).27 Penkethman’s preface is of some interest, even though his translations are very undistinguished: it says that he regarded translating Virgil’s epigrams as an alternative to writing epigrams of ‘scandalous and reprehensive invective’, for which there had been a vogue since the mid-1590s. He also says that his translation is a slap in the face for ‘self­ conceited grammarians’ who had sought to keep the epigrams to themselves.28 This is further evidence that the poems in the Appendix were not widely read in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, and indeed were regarded as little better than bedtime reading for Holofernes and his ilk. But the vital point to carry away from the interest in the Virgilian epigrams is that for Renaissance readers and writers it was entirely possible to be a satirist and a laureate poet if not at the same time, then at least in sequence: after all, Virgil had done it. *

Edmund Spenser is the only English poet in the sixteenth century who provides an extensive and sophisticated response to the poems in the Appendix. His response does not just show him to have been a careful reader of the poems themselves: it also indicates that he was aware of the arguments which surrounded these poems in the sixteenth century. Spenser, like his contemporaries, was not sure how young Virgil was when he wrote them, and knew that they occupied a slightly odd position in the canon. Like other Renaissance readers he noticed many of the echoes in the Appendix of the canonical works (which scholars today might read as signs that the poems are Virgilian pastiches), but he, like his contemporaries, probably thought these were signs that these poems were early works on which Virgil later drew. We have also seen that poems in the Appendix, and especially the epigrams, could serve to bridge the divide between genres and different aspects of a poet’s career, and that the Appendix in general did something to straddle the perceived divide between epic and satire in this period. All of these things mattered to Spenser. Spenser’s first engagement with the Appendix probably came when he rendered the Culex into a poem entitled Virgils Gnat. The poem appeared first in volume called Complaints, which appeared in 1591. This volume has given rise to a fair amount of debate among Spenserians.29 Published between the two printed instalments of The Faerie Queene, the collection contains a miscellany of complaints of various forms, ranging from specific political satires, through beast fable and metamorphic narrative, to laments for the world’s mutability. People who have written overviews of Spenser’s career have often been puzzled by this volume, or have overlooked it entirely. What was Spenser doing in

8 Colin Burrow - English Renaissance Readers and the A p p e n d i x V e r g il ia n a publishing a volume of miscellaneous complaints in between the publication of the first three books of The Faerie Queene in 1590 and the final three books in 1596? How could he intercalate satire into a laureate career?30 The most radical argument about this matter to date has been put forward by Jean Brink, who claimed that Spenser himself probably had nothing to do with the printing of the volume, which, she argues, was put together piecemeal by its printer William Ponsonby.31 Ponsonby does indeed include a preface saying that he has gathered the collection together in Spenser’s absence, but Brink is perhaps naive to assume that the printer should be taken literally when he makes this claim, and she may also be too quick to assume that the sharper edges of satire were incompatible with Spenser’s laureate career. The Complaints is very clearly set forth as a collection of juvenilia, and as being semi-separate from Spenser’s corpus: it shares a printer with The Faerie Queene, but its author is partially detached from the volume. The prefatory and dedicatory matter of several of the separate sections of the collection are keen to emphasise that the works which follow were composed some time before their publication. So Mother Hubberds Tale is presented as having been ‘long sithens composed in the raw conceipt of my youth’,32 and Virgils Gnat itself is introduced on its title-page as having been ‘Long since dedicated to the most noble and excellent Lord, the Earl of Leicester, late deceased’.33 This dedication has given rise to a number of speculations - which are unlikely ever to be satisfactorily resolved as a result of the paucity of evidence - about the allegorical and biographical significance of Virgils Gnat. (Leicester failed to reward his poor servant Edmund Spenser for some unspecified warning, and sent him instead to Ireland, that swampy hell on earth; this is the basic gist of most of these theories, some of which throw in the notion that Spenser was responsible for leaking news of Leicester’s ill-advised marriage to Lettice Knowles to add a trace of sexual scandal to the speculation.)34 The most important words in the preliminary description of Virgils Gnat are, however, not ‘The Earl of Leicester’ but ‘long since’. As we have seen, arguments were going on since 1572 about when Virgil composed his opuscula. Was he sixteen? Was he 26? The dedication to Spenser’s translation is designed to parallel this uncertainty about when the poem was composed; and the uncertain time-frame of the poem’s composition has the further benefit of introducing a possibility of personal or political satire, whilst not giving its readers enough of a clue to be able to penetrate the heart of the mystery. The presentation of Virgils Gnat is part of a pretty consistent policy in the Complaints volume to invent satirical and metamorphic juvenilia for Spenser: it is, as it were, an Appendix Spenseriana. Before I develop this claim it is worth pausing to say something very simple about Spenser’s translation of the Culex: that it is an extremely lovely poem (although its first half, which reads as though it is more worked up, is better than its later sections). This would not be worth saying if the poem had attracted any significant amount of commentary or any sympathetic criticism, but it has not.35 Lottspeich determined many years ago now that the text from which Spenser translated it was an edition similar to or deriving from a Dumaeus edition of 1542 (Spenser incorporates Bembo’s emendations, but does not take any account of Scaliger’s); but apart from that critics have found little to say about what makes the poem worth reading. Richard Brown concludes merely that ‘It is a text which articulates the tensions between Elizabethan writers and their classical models’ .36 No-one has made the straightforward observation that it contains some ravishing phrases: its ‘whelky pearles’ (105) are echt Spenserian beauties, and the description of the gnat as ‘a little noursling of the humid ayre’ (282) makes the gnat a child of wetness, just emerging from the air as a solidification of the damp, which is just how gnats feel until they bite you. This phrase ‘a little noursling of the humid ayre’ is part of what is not only beautiful but also significant in the poem: it gives a strong sense of beginnings, and of tender new growth. This is

9 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8 the main way in which Spenser makes up for his lack of a ready equivalent for the neoteric code-word tenuis on which the Latin plays twice in its proem (2, 35). English has no equivalent for the promise of slightness and neoteric elegance which is promised by that word, which is why Spenser has to turn it into a term for youth and delicacy. The ‘thin-spun task’ of the opening of the Culex becomes ‘Tuning our song vnto a tender Muse’ (2; my emphasis); a little later the same word tenuis is rendered by ‘An easie running verse with tender feete’ (53; my emphasis). These are not just misprisions of a promise of elegance in the Latin. They are part of a consistent process of stressing that Spenser’s poem deals in beginnings, in earliness and freshness: the Latin coepta (41), too, takes on not just an exordial force in the sense ‘the job that I have begun’; it is translated in a way that suggests the poem could be Spenser’s (or Virgil’s) very first beginning: ‘O come (thou sacred childe) come sliding soft, | And fauour my beginnings graciously’ (37-8; my emphasis). The poem seeks to be not tenuis (sophisticatedly slight), but tender, a young man’s poem. As a result its best passages are places which seem fresh and newly alive. It can use the superabundance of syllables provided by feminine rhymes to evoke an overpacked fresh abundance to a deliciously engaging effect: The verie nature o f the place, resounding With gentle murmure o f the breathing ayre, A pleasant bowre with all delight abounding In the fresh shadowe did for them prepayre, To rest their limbs with wearines redounding. (185-9) Echoes and murmurs expand uncontrollably from their pretext in the Culex, as though they reverberate with something in Spenser. And here it is possible to inch beyond the pre-critical naivety of saying that the poem is beautiful, and say something which sounds even more obvious. The poem sounds Spenserian; it can do bowers, even if not yet Bowers of Blisse and, as has been frequently noted, it takes every chance the original offers to bewail the mutability of the world in a manner which was to become a trademark of Spenserianism: Well may appeare by proofe o f their mischaunce, The chaungfull turning o f mens slipperie state, That none, whom fortune freely doth aduaunce, Himselfe therefore to heauen should eleuate: For loftie type o f honour through the glaunce O f enuies dart, is downe in dust prostrate; And all that vaunts in worldly vanitie, Shall fall through fortunes mutabilitie. (553-60) The pretext in the Latin for this is slight, and puts the emphasis on envy rather than mutability, and fortune is a positive force: illa uices hominum testata est copia quondam, ne quisquam propriae fortunae munere diues iret ineuectus caelum super: omne propinquo frangitur inuidiae telo decus. (Culex 339-42)37 That force bore witness in its time to human vicissitudes, lest anyone, enriched by his own Fortune’s bounty, should mount exalted above the heavens; all glory is shattered by Envy’s nigh-awaiting dart.

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Spenser’s translation of this passage does more than show that he is unable to resist any opportunity to bewail the mutability of the world, or that he is under the doleful enchantment of the Mirror for Magistrates. Rather Spenser’s elaboration makes the Gnat seem imaginatively cognate with the complaints on the world’s vanity which have preceded it in the Complaints volume. As a result, it insinuates the poem into the Spenserian corpus. And this makes it one of a large number of moments at the start of the poem which recall other moments in Spenser’s works. And should ‘recall’ more properly be ‘anticipate’? We cannot be sure if this poem is, as it were, pre-Spenserian or post- Spenserian, whether it tenderly anticipates The Faerie Queene, or whether part of the lexis of that poem is fed back into the language of what is presented to us as a belatedly printed early work. The catalogue of trees (193-224) certainly points back to one Spenserian beginning: in 1591 it would remind even the least tenacious reader of the start of Spenser’s epic, since very near the start of Book I Canto i of The Faerie Queene the Redcrosse knight journeys through the forest of error, and his journey is beset by a similar catalogue of trees (1.1.8-9). When the list of trees in the Gnat gets to the ivy which defends the poplar from the sun, readers of the poem in 1591 might well have felt that they have already traced the trails of this particular plant across earlier Spenserian pages, and that this is both a beginning and an innocent pre-echo of the falsely twining ivy in the Bower of Bliss. ‘Emongst the rest the clambring Yuie grew, | Knitting his wanton armes with grasping hold’, we read in Virgils Gnat (217-18). Wanton Ivy repeatedly winds through Book II of The Faerie Queene ‘Ouer the which was cast a wandring vine, | Enchaced with a wanton yuie twine’ (2. 9.24.5),38 which eventually becomes the sophisticatedly artificial twines in the Bower of Blisse:

And ouer all, o f purest gold was spred, A trayle o f yuie in his natiue hew: For the rich mettall was so coloured, That wight, who did not well auis’d it vew, Would surely deeme it to be yuie trew: (2.12.61)

Here a reader might feel Virgils Gnat is a beginning;39 a fresh and simply wanton swirl of ivy, ripe to turn into a piece of studied artifice, just as the catalogue of trees is awaiting its later metamorphosis into a moralised forest of Errour. Elsewhere the Gnat offers traces too of the sterner side of Spenser. In The Faerie Queene Spenser’s heroes are often subject to fits of galvanic passion, which stimulate them to action. One of these galvanic moments is evoked when the Shepherd kills the gnat: ‘Wherewith enrag’d, he fiercely gan vpstart’ (289). There is no precise parallel to this in The Faerie Queene, but it is an unmistakable Spenserianism: Cymocles ‘fiercely gan approch’ (2.8.44.3) his adversary, and there are all but innumerable moments when starts of rage lead to the ‘upstarting’ of characters in The Faerie Queene. Spenserian trademarks are being inserted into the Virgilian poem.

We do not know when Spenser composed Virgil’s Gnat. We do not know if he revised it, although he manifestly did revise for the Complaints volume several of the sonnets in The Ruines o f Rome, from versions he had originally composed in the 1560s. It is possible that he retouched at least its early sections in order to make it resound as closely as it does at several points with the first three books of The Faerie Queene. The alternative hypothesis, which is the simpler and therefore the one that Occam would prefer, is that Virgil’s Gnat was an early and foundational poem in his career, in which he began to sound like Spenser. It is probably neither possible nor desirable to decide between these alternatives, since the poem as it is presented to its readers in 1591 is both early and later Spenser; it is presented as having been composed ‘long since’, and yet anyone reading it after the publication of the first three books of The Faerie Queene would have heard in it echoes of the longer and greater and both subsequent and precedent poem,

11 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8 and would have experienced it as a beginning of a story of which they knew the middle if not the end (The Faerie Queene of course remained unfinished in 1590, and even remained unfinished after the posthumous publication of the Mutabilitie Cantos in 1609). How does this relate to the position of the Appendix Vergiliana in the Renaissance? Sixteenth century readers generally regarded these post-Virgilian poems as early Virgil; as a result they had an extraordinarily topsy-turvy view of how Virgil wrote. They had good grounds to believe that he began by quoting Virgil, that he did the epic journey to the underworld in the minor key first, sung by the shrill voice of a gnat, before he did it for real in Book 6 of the Aeneid. In the Gnat, Spenser is picking out these notes and doing something similar: he almost makes it appear that he began his literary career by imitating Spenser. What both Virgils Gnat and the Virgilian Appendix as it was read in the Renaissance give you, then, is a style that starts with self-pastiche, in which a pre-write masquerades as a rewrite, or in which a pre-write and a rewrite are indistinguishable. *

There is another major imitation from the Appendix Vergiliana in Spenser’s works to which I would now like to move either backwards or forwards, depending on one’s point of view. This occurs in Book III Canto ii of The Faerie Queene, which had been printed in 1590, the year before the Gnat. It relates how Britomart, the heroine of Book III, fell in love with her future dynastic partner Arthegall when she saw him in a magic mirror. The detail of her passion, and her relationship with Glauce, her nurse, have been recognised as imitations of the Appendix ever since Thomas Warton said that Spenser ‘copied’ the love of Scylla from the Ciris40 More recently the episode has been described by Nelson as a ‘perverse’ imitation of the Virgilian poem.41 It is clearly no copy, and clearly is the product of a form of aggressive imitation of a kind quite different from Spenser’s (presumably) earlier treatment of the Culex. ‘Perverse’ is probably not the right word for it, though. What Spenser does in his version of the love of Scylla is to take a sledgehammer to the motivational centre of the Virgilian poem. Instead of describing the passion of Scylla for the enemy of her city Minos, he adopts the name of Charme’s daughter Britomartis for his heroine. Britomartis in the Ciris fled away from Minos and, according to some versions of the story, fell off a cliff. As Scaliger notes, quoting from Solinus, Britomartis was a Cretan name for Diana: Cretes Dianam religiosissime uenerantur, Βριτόμαρτιν gentiliter nominantes: quod sermone nostro sonat uirginem dulcem.42 What Spenser does is write what is effectively a twinned alternative tale of Scylla’s passion, in which a virgo dulcis associated with Diana is put in the place of Scylla. As a result he rewrites the Ciris from the inside out, forcibly excising moments from it which allude to the anti-civic passion of Scylla. The result risks creating a motivational void at the centre of the imitation on which Spenser’s version of the tale actively plays: without its antisocial passion, what is the Ciris? In Spenser’s revision of it, it becomes the tale of a passionate love of the chaste Britomart for a man in a mirror who may not even exist at all. The motivational vacuum has a point made of it: the figure of Arthegall in the mirror may not even have a carnal being. This transformation is not ‘perverse’; in sexual terms it is trying to be as un-perverse as you can get by founding itself on a passion so chaste that its object may not even exist; but in literary terms it is also not simply blasting the centre out of the Ciris. Rather it is feeding on the imitative poetics of the Ciris. The Ciris emphasises the fact that it is not like Ovid’s tale of Myrrha (and possibly also that it is not like earlier epyllia which had incest as a theme).43 Carme asks Scylla if she loves her father incestuously, and she retorts: nil amat hic animus, nutrix, quod oportet amari, | in quo falsa tamen lateat pietatis imago (262-3). This is Scylla’s way of establishing her own distinctiveness: she denies that she feels the kind of incestuous passion that had characterised Ovid’s Myrrha (or perhaps one of the neoteric sources of Ovid’s

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Myrrha). As a result, her love is a kind of nothing, not even a false imago pietatis like that of Myrrha in Ovid. Now that Virgilian phrase pietatis imago - no need to chart its uses in the Aeneid (6.405, 9.294, 10.824) here - is clearly being warped by the poet. And the same phrase has a strong bearing on how Spenser transforms the tale. Britomart falls literally and hard for an imago, a man in a mirror. And this in turn guarantees the distinctiveness of her passion, which in its turn is defined negatively, as being not like those of her predecessors: But mine is not (quoth she) like other wownd; For which no reason can finde remedy. (3.2.36)

The stress falls on ‘not’; this passion, the parenthesis insists, is as distinctive as Scylla’s. What she describes is not not incest; it’s not even for a man (‘Nor man it is, nor other liuing wight’). The insistence on the negative uniqueness of her passion continues in the next stanza ‘For no no vsuall fire, no vsuall rage | Yt is, O Nourse, which on my life doth feed’. There is perhaps something going on here that one might call kenosis, the sucking out of the motivational centre of a source and its replacement by pure emptiness:44 Britomart is not like her source, indeed not like anyone. But this negativity in Britomart’s passion does not go the whole way down, since there is a little hint of salvation which grows out of that Virgilian phrase imago pietatis. Imago can mean ‘image’ of course, and an image is exactly what Britomart does love. That Virgilian phrase comes finally to be retranslated back from a description of incestuous passion (into which the author of the Ciris has mischievously transformed it, the parody ofpietas) into a description of affection which is rootedly civic. I think Spenser is rolling this phrase around his mind, and is attempting to transform the imago pietatis back from what he would have seen as a youthful abuse of pietas by the young Virgil into something of which the grown up Virgil might have approved. Britomart, it transpires, is not just in love with an imago in a mirror, but with the man who is to be her dynastic partner; it is finally a pious love for an imago pietatis, which will be translated ultimately into a fit motive for a dynastic epic.

Now Book III is perhaps best regarded as a book of beginnings (forms of the word ‘begin’ occur significantly more frequently in that book than in any other part of The Faerie Queene; it contains eighteen such forms, while Book IV comes next with eleven usages). It is so in a number of senses. A particular feature of its narrative structure is a tendency to regress to moments prior to the literal time of the main narrative. It does this extra-diegetically when it relates the contents of chronicle histories read by characters within the fiction. It also recoils to consider the birth of Belphoebe and Amoret in Canto vi. I have argued elsewhere that such moments of temporal disruption in the poem are associated with a peculiarly violent release of imitative energy; that is, Spenser’s sources tend to be more radically transformed at such moments of retrospection than they are at moments within the main temporal sequence of the narrative.45 Put simply, locating events in the past gives Spenser an imaginative licence to transform earlier texts. It has also been suggested that Book III is best regarded as a book of beginnings in another sense: Josephine Waters Bennett argued many years ago now that it contained material from the earliest stages of composition of the poem. Her argument, which no one has seriously attacked, but which few have seriously explored either, rests on the fact that we know Spenser was thinking about Ariosto hard in the 1570s, and that Book III contains an unusually high number of borrowings from Ariosto.46 Bennett also showed that several of those moments deriving from Ariosto were spliced with audible awkwardness into Book III. Now the story of Britomart’s early love for Arthegall is a beginning; it partakes in a sense in the etiological preoccupations of the Ciris in that it tells not of the origins of a sea-bird but the origins of a state of mind. It is also spliced with audible awkwardness into the main narrative sequence, and the sleight of hand required to stitch it into the poem is both considerable and visible. Britomart sets off, we are told in the argument, with

13 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8 the Redcrosse knight; in the text of the poem she is with Guyon. The confusion over names may well indicate a rough edit. Redcrosse (or Guyon) praises Arthegall. Then the narrator says: By straunge occasion she did him behold, And much more straungely gan to loue his sight, As it in bookes hath written beene of old. (3.2.18) This is evasive writing: the books ‘ of old’ presumably are the books which record the magic mirror in which she sees her lover, but they also presumably mark some kind of allusion to the deep indebtedness of what follows to the Ciris. I think it is extremely likely that the Ciris episode was among the earlier sections of The Faerie Queene to have been composed. It is possible that Spenser translated the poem as he had done the Culex and then mined his translation when he came to write the Faerie Queene, just as Ascensius had suggested Virgil did with his earlier works. Certainly there are moments when you can feel the surgeon’s knife slicing away a section of ethically dubious matter from the heroine before Spenser proceeds to follow the Ciris very closely. But the more powerful point is that the episode imitated from the Ciris is framed and staged for readers of the poem as a beginning. It is the start of her love, which is described by Glauce as having had a ‘strange beginning’ and it disrupts the forward movement of the narrative by a recoil into the past. It is another of Spenser’s original fictions, fictions about origins which at the same time make claims to originality by marking their radical transformation of an earlier work. How does Spenser’s response to the Ciris mesh with early-modern conceptions of what went on in the Appendix Vergiliana? There are some obvious things to say here and some less obvious things to say. The most obvious thing to say would be that here we have evidence that Spenser knew of Donatus’ belief that the Ciris was early. He may have engaged with it early in his own career, and he certainly tags it within his poem as a work about an ‘early’ state of mind; the imitation of it occurs not in the epic present of his heroine’s life but in her proto-epic phase, a phase where she might just have ended up trapped within an epyllion (and the allusions to the subjects of Ovidian tales of metamorphosis in the early part of the tale of Britomart are more than ornamental: the allusions to Myrrha and Byblis and Narcissus, that other great specular lover, lay out possible options for her future in a manner which suggests both a personal and a generic threat - she could end up in the wrong kind of poem entirely). A less obvious thing to say would be that the episode suggests that Spenser may well not just have known what Donatus said about the Ciris being a piece of juvenilia. He may also have known what Ascensius said: that the poem was a fine work on which Virgil drew later in his career. And he might have known what Scaliger said, that it is a poem for which it is impossible to determine finally a date, and which might actually be a more or less mature product of the poet. Spenser’s story of the beginnings of Britomart’s love is a passage of hazy age, recorded in books of old, and yet it is sufficiently close in its temporal relation to the time scale of the main narrative to be joined almost but not quite seamlessly onto it; so the tale of Britomart’s past is related onwards in time through her departure to seek Arthegall, and through her prophetic encounter with Merlin, up to the moment when she meets Redcrosse who tells her about Arthegall. At this moment we return, temporally speaking, to the point from which we started (3.3.62). In the ‘real’ time of the poem it is not that long ago that Britomart lived in the world of the Ciris; and perhaps in the ‘real’ time of Spenser’s poetic career it was not that long ago that Spenser imitated it. Spenser’s borrowing from the Appendix is uncertainly pitched between the juvenile and the adult, just as Scaliger had suggested the Ciris itself was. (It is an obstacle to any claim that Spenser knew about Scaliger’s work that Spenser in his translation of the Culex does not show any sign of adopting Scaliger’s emendations, but not an insuperable one. It is perfectly possible that Spenser did not work from Scaliger’s text when he first was attracted to the Culex, but that he had access to Scaliger’s opinions about the later date of the poems by the time he thought seriously about how to weave the elements he had imitated from the Appendix into his own career; but on this there can be no certainty.)

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There is another unobvious thing to say about the generic status of the Ciris episode in Britomart’s history. I said earlier that there are slight signs in earlier English responses to poems in the Appendix that they were regarded as generically fluid, and that in Morley’s Triumphs a pseudo-Virgilian epigram could act as a segue from Petrarch to a meditation on mortality. Spenser’s response to the Appendix very much bears out and augments this suggestion. For him, poems from the Appendix are transitional; they are neither old nor young, they are beginnings which can feed later works and perhaps be revised in the light of later works. They are also generically pivotal works. In this respect, it is an absolutely crucial fact that the transformed version of the tale of Scylla is used to describe not just any old process, but a process of growing up. By this I mean both the growing up of Britomart and the generic transformation of her into someone around whom an epic might form. Spenser may well have thought that in imitating the Ciris he was making not just Britomart but Virgil too grow up before his reader’s eyes. The early poem about uncivic passion is turned into a story of transition at once psychological and generic, about the emotional and generic development of a heroine. If Spenser did incorporate some of his own earlier work in translating the Ciris into the poem, here too there is perhaps an excessively tidy three-way process of transformation going on: Spenser rewrites Virgil’s juvenilia at the same time as he rewrites his own juvenilia at the same time as he writes about a civic heroine setting aside earlier and indeed juvenile erotic moods and the genres in which they are customarily articulated. I think in doing all these things at once Spenser showed himself to be the most acute of the Renaissance readers of the Appendix Vergiliana. He responded to the edginess of these poems, their odd relation to the canon and career of Virgil, and he tried to weave them back into the Virgilian canon by transformative imitation. He did in his poetry everything which the scholarly understanding of the Appendix Vergiliana in the Renaissance was telling him to do.

All Souls College, Oxford COLIN BURROW

NOTES 1 Alastair Fowler, Kinds o f Literature: An Introduction to the Theory ofGenres and Modes (Oxford, 1982) 240-1. 2 Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea o f a Literary Career (Toronto, 1993). 3 Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Spenser’s Retrography: Two Episodes in Post-Petrarchan Bibliography’, in Spenser’s Life and the Subject o f Biography, ed. J. H. Anderson, D. Cheney and D. A. Richardson (Amherst, 1996) 117. 4 Iam poterit culicis numeris fera dicere fata, Marco Girolamo Vida, The De Arte Poetica, trans. R. G. Williams (New York, 1976) 32-3 (1.461). 5 See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere ’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 1944) and Colin Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Humanistic Culture’, in Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. C. Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge, England, 2004) 9-27. 6 Cited in Baldwin, Small Latine, 1.109-10. 7 ‘The Dunciad in Four Books’, IV.253-4. Quotation from Alexander Pope, The Poems: A One-Volume Edition o f the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. J. Butt (London, 1963). 8 Virgil, Buccolica et Georgica ...Aeneis Virgiliana (Paris, 1501); see Priscilla Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study (Edinburgh, 1976) 99. 9 De Operibus Virgilii Sebastianus Brant (Strasburg, 1502). 10 Cf. Ruth Luborsky, ‘The Allusive Presentation of The Shepheardes Calender’, Spenser Studies, 1 (1980) 29-67, 43-4; Luborsky seems unduly cautious in suggesting only that The Shepheardes Calender was indebted to editions of Virgil in its presentation of arguments before each eclogue. 11 See Helen Cooper, ‘Wyatt and Chaucer: A Reappraisal’, Leeds Studies in English, 13 (1982) 104-123. 12 Virgil, Opuscula (Paris, 1501) fol. 33v. 13 Aelius Donatus, Vitae Vergilianae, ed. J. Brummer (Leipzig, 1912) 4. 14 R. M. Greer argued in 1926 that the passage which included reference to the Appendix was not by Suetonius, but a later interpolation; see R. M. Greer, ‘Non-Suetonian Passages in the Life of Virgil Formerly ascribed to Donatus’, Transactions o f the American Philological Association 57 (1926), 107-15, 110-12. 15 Virgil, Poemata quae extant omnia (Zurich, 1563). 16 P. Virgilii Maronis Opera (London, 1570). Further editions followed in 1572, 1580, 1583, 1597, 1616, 1632, and 1634. 17 Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History ofClassical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983) 1.124.

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18 Publii Virgilii Maronis Appendix cum supplemento multorum antehac nunquam excusorum Poematum veterum Poetarum, ed. J. Scaliger (Lyons, 1572) 304. 19 Virgil, Publii Virgilii Maronis Appendix cum supplemento multorum antehac nunquam excusorum Poematum veterum Poetarum, 265. 20 Virgil, Ciris: A Poem Attributed to Vergil, ed. R.O. A. M. Lyne (Cambridge, 1978) esp. 55-6. 21 On this work, see G. Hugo Tucker, ‘Mantua’s “Second Virgil”: Du Bellay, Montaigne and the Curious Fortune of Lelio Capilupi’s Centones ex Virgilio ([Romae, 1555])’, in Ut Granum Sinapis: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Honour of Jozef IJsewijn, ed. G. Tournoy and D. Sacre (Leuven, 1997) 264-91. 22 See, e.g., Colin Burrow, ‘Virgil in English Translation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. C. Martindale (Cambridge, 1997) 21-37. 23 See Marie Axton, ‘Lord Morley’s Tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke: Reading Spectacles’, in ‘Triumphs o f English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court, ed. M. Axton and J. P. Carley (London, 2000) 171-200. Earlier studies tend to see the work as the product of Morley’s old age, as Carnicelli does in Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Lord Morley’s Tryumphes o f Fraunces Petrarcke; the first English Translation o f the Trionfi, ed. D. D. Carnicelli (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). Axton shows how unlikely this hypothesis is, but she does not comment on the Virgil translation. 24 Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Tryumphes o f Fraunces Petrarcke, translated out of Italian into English (London, ?1565), sig. N3r. 25 Virgil, Opuscula, fol. 60v. 26 Virgil, Opuscula, fol. 61r. 27 John Penkethman, The Epigrams o f P. Virgilius Maro, and others (London, 1624), sig. A1v 28 Penkethman, The Epigrams o f P. Virgilius Maro, and others, sig. A4r. 29 Critical studies include Richard Danson Brown, ‘The New P oet’: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints, Liverpool English Texts and Studies 32 (Liverpool, 1999), who argues for the unity of the collection, and Indraneel Mukherjee, Edmund Spenser and the Complaint (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2000). 30 This combination is perceived as a problem in Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley, 1983) 127-32, and the poems in the Complaints volume are seen as simply an interruption of Spenser’s laureate career (82-9). 31 J. R. Brink, ‘Who Fashioned Edmund Spenser: the Textual History of ‘Complaints’’, Studies in Philology, 88 (2) (1991) 153-168. Brink may too rapidly exclude the possibility that Spenser was in London for the setting of the volume (the press corrections to which do appear to be exceptionally careful) and that he had left for Ireland by the time Ponsonby’s preface was set, at the very end of the printing process. 32 Dedication to the Lady Compton and Mounteagle, in Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. R. A. McCabe (Harmondsworth, 1999) 234. All quotations from Spenser’s shorter poems from this edition. 33 Spenser, The Shorter Poems, 210. 34 Greenlaw argues that Spenser warned Leicester of the perils of a French match in 1579; Charles E. Mounts, ‘Spenser and the Countess of Leicester’, ELH 19 (1952) 191-202, favours the view that Spenser was indiscreet about his patron’s relationship to Lettice Knollys in the March Eclogue, a view developed by Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge, 1993) 19­ 24. 35 Notable studies include H. G. Lotspeich, ‘Spenser’s Virgil’s Gnat and its Latin Original’, ELH 2 (1935) 235-41, David Lee Miller, ‘Spenser’s Vocation, Spenser’s Career’, ELH 50 (1983) 197-231, Brown, ‘The New P oet’, 39-62. 36 Brown, ‘The New P oet’, 61. 37 Texts from Virgil, Appendix Vergiliana, ed. W. V. Clausen, F. R. D. Goodyear, E. J. Kenney and J. A. Richmond (Oxford, 1966). 38 All quotations from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, H. Yamashita and T. Suzuki (Harlow, 2001). 39 Miller, ‘Spenser’s Vocation, Spenser’s Career’ notes (210) that the beginnings promise future epic designs, and ‘evoke the context of Spenser’s Virgilian ambitions.’ 40 Quoted in Edmund Spenser, The Works o f Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition Volume 3, ed. E. Greenlaw, C. G. Osgood and F. M. Padelford (Baltimore, 1934) 330. 41 William Nelson, The Poetry o f Spenser: A Study (New York, 1963) 142-3; see also Merritt Y. Hughes, Virgil and Spenser (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), 348-54, and Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993), 104-6. 42 Virgil, Publii Virgilii Maronis Appendix cum supplemento multorum antehac nunquam excusorum Poematum veterum Poetarum, 330. 43 See Virgil, Ciris: A Poem Attributed to Vergil 41-5; the relationship is complicated by the possibility that both Ovid and the Ciris poet are imitating Cinna’s Zmyrna. 44 I borrow the term from Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York and Oxford, 1975) 72, without subscribing to Bloom’s psychoanalytic superstructure. Bloom’s association between kenosis and regression, however, is suggestive in this context (ibid.): ‘Most crucially, influence as a metonymy defends against itself by regression, by a return to earlier periods of supposed creativity when poetic experience seemed more an unmixed pleasure, and when the satisfactions of composition seemed more complete. 45 Colin Burrow, ‘Original Fictions: Metamorphoses in ‘The Faerie Queene’’, in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. C. Martindale (Cambridge, 1988) 99-119. 46 Josephine W. Bennett, The Evolution o f ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Chicago, 1942).

16 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

Ghosts and Daemons: The Revival of Myth and Magic

A Presidential Address given to the Virgil Society on 23 October 2004

t’s a great honour to become the President of your Society. I was very surprised to be invited to take this role, and it strikes me as a very generous act of encouragement on your part. Virgil was the first Iclassical poet I read: before we began studying the Aeneid, we read Julius Caesar’s language, so the richness, music, and drama of Virgil threw open casements on a new horizon. I also responded very strongly to the poet’s Italian links: above all to the landscape and mythology of southern Italy, which is where my mother was born. I have in mind to write a novel, set in the middle of the last century, inspired by Book 4 of the Aeneid, and by the historic splitting of North Africa from the old οικουμένη of the Mediterranean. This parting, the consequences of which are setting the world in turmoil today, is symboliwsed, it seems to me, by Virgil’s extraordinarily passionate story of Dido and Aeneas. I haven’t managed to begin this book yet, so today I am going to give you some thoughts about Virgil and ghosts, and turn to classical tropes of magic and metamorphosis. Virgil’s spirit stalks contemporary encounters with the third kind, above all with ghosts and with visions of an Underworld, or descents into the abyss of death: via Dante, via Milton, he has shaped enduring imaginings of spirit presences. But he not only contributes to the character of spectral and apocalyptic experiences, but to active theories of magic, especially female divination and possession. His apparent expertise in these fields inspired a rich body of legends about the poet and ways of reading him now. This afternoon, I’ll look briefly at Virgil’s magic, in ritual, divination, and the descent into the Underworld; and then describe how strikingly Virgilian tropes about ghosts and possession continue to mould myth and magic in popular culture. I’ll explore classical myths about the defeat of death: the story of descending into hell becomes attached to mythic heroes, from Gilgamesh, who goes to the land of the dead to fetch back his friend, the wild man Enkidu, to Odysseus, Aeneas, Hercules, Theseus, and even Jesus Christ, who harrows Hell in order to redeem the just - according to a tenet of the Christian creed. I’ll glance at a parallel tradition developing in counterpoint to these myths of male heroism that casts a female hero at the centre of eschatological drama, through Alcestis and, most recently, Lyra in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

17 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

THE DEscENT INTo THE UNDERwoRLD

From the earliest extant poem, the Sumerian Epic o f Gilgamesh, the anguish of losing a loved one recurs as one of the deepest themes that myths engage with, and it inspires stories about conquering death, about going down into the realm of shadows and bringing the lost beloved back from the grave. Orpheus may be the most familiar of these myths, especially to opera goers, as his relation to music itself makes him an embodiment of the power of song, and of harmony. But of course Orpheus loses Eurydice when he breaks the prohibition and looks back at her shade as he is leading her out of Hades. Virgil treats it in the Georgics, and from there this story of love and loss has spread through the arts, a rich treasure afloat on the ocean of story down the centuries: restitit, Eurydicenque suam iam luce sub ipsa immemor heu! victusque animi respexit. ibi omnis effusus labor atque immitis rupta tyranni foedera, terque fragor stagnis auditus Avernis. illa, ‘quis et me, ’ inquit ‘miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu, quis tantus furor? en iterum crudelia retro fata vocant, conditque natantia lumina somnus. iamque vale: feror ingenti circumdata nocte invalidasque tibi tendens, heu non tua, palmas! ’ dixit et ex oculis subito, ceu fumus in auras commixtus tenuis, fugit diversa, neque illum, prensantem nequiquam umbras et multa volentem dicere praeterea vidit; nec portitor Orci amplius obiectam passus transire paludem. (4.490-503) He halts. Eurydice, his own, is now on the lip of Daylight. Alas! he forgot. His purpose broke. He looked back. His labour was lost, the pact he had made with the merciless king Annulled. Three times did thunder peal over the pools of Avernus. “Who,” she cried, “has doomed me to misery, who has doomed us? What madness beyond measure? Once more a cruel fate Drags me away, and my swimming eyes are drowned in darkness. Good-bye. I am borne away. A limitless night is about me And over the strengthless hands I stretch to you, yours no longer.” Thus she spoke: and at once from his sight, like a wisp of smoke Thinned into air, was gone. Wildly he grasped at shadows, wanting to say much more, But she did not see him; nor would the ferryman of the Inferno Let him again cross the fen that lay between them.1 Virgil’s lyric drama reverberates in Gluck’s most melodious of arias, of course, and sounds most recently in Harrison Birtwistle’s opera, The Mask o f Orpheus. In Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Orpheus becomes a rock star, Ormus Cama. Another Birtwistle opera, The Second Mrs Kong, dramatised a new Orphic tragedy, about the love of King Kong for Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring; the story takes place in Hades, where the lovers are doomed not to be able to reach one another. This evocation of Eurydice thinning into air echoes metaphors of ghostliness from Homer’s vision of the insubstantial shades who can be seen but not grasped, and the imagery returns in the Erebus of the

18 M ar in a W a r n er - G h o sts an d D a e m o n s : T he R evival of M yth a n d M agic

Aeneid. But it is the Georgics, and Virgil’s description of the shades in Tartarus and of the smoke-like wraith of Eurydice, that has remained the imagination’s template for spirits, especially since the development of moving pictures made it possible to render such states visible and apparent. at cantu commotae Erebi de sedibus imis umbrae ibant tenues simulacraque luce carentum, quam multa in foliis avium se milia condunt, Vesper ubi aut hibernus agit de montibus imber, matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae, impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum (4.471-77) But, by his song aroused from Hell’s nethermost basements, Flocked out the flimsy shades, the phantoms lost to light, In number like to the millions of birds that hide in the leaves When evening or winter rain from the hills has driven them - Mothers and men, the dead Bodies of great-heart heroes, boys and unmarried maidens, Young men laid on the pyre before their parents’ eyes - .. .2 Dante, guided by Virgil through the Underworld, adopts the earlier poet’s metaphors as well as his expert knowledge of the territory. But when he tackles the condition of ghostliness, he uses Statius for his mouthpiece and analyses the evocation of souls in the Aeneid using scientific, meteorological imagery, as he conveys to Dante the symbiosis between bodily form and spiritual substance in terms of rainbow colours playing in light, and flames dancing in response to air: e come l ’aere, quand’e ben p'iorno, per l ’altrui raggio che ‘n si si reflette, di diversi color diventa adorno; cosi l ’aere vicin quivi si mette in quella forma che in lui suggella virtualmente l ’alma che ristette; e simigliante poi allafiammella chi segue ilfoco fa ‘vunque si muta, segue lo spirto sua forma novella. Pero che quindi ha poscia sua paruta e chiamata ombra... (Purg. 25, ll. 94-101) and as the air, when it is full of rain, becomes adorned with various colours through another’s beams that are reflected in it, so the neighbouring air sets itself into that form which the soul that stopped there stamps upon it by its power, and then like the flame that follows the fire wherever its shifts, its new form follows the spirit. Since it has by this its semblance henceforth, it is called a shade... (trans. John D. Sinclair) Or better, perhaps, Mark Musa’s verse translation:3 Then, once the soul is there, contained in space, the informing power radiates around to reshape what the body had before.

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And as the air, after a heavy rain, adorns itself with different, fragile hues born of the outer rays reflected there, just so, the air enveloping the soul where it has fallen must assume the form imprinted on it by the soul’s own powers; as flame inevitably goes with fire, following it wherever it may shift, so the new form accompanies the soul. Since air around it makes it visible, it’s called a ‘shade’; and out of air it forms organs for every sense, including sight. The extraordinary aspect of these dense, precise images for the shade, or the form of human existence after death, is its prophetic affinity with photographic drawing in light and, even more presciently, with moving pictures of people in the past who are long dead. In his very first novel, Vladimir Nabokov envisaged his afterlife in the language of film, and imagined the continued existence of the soul as an extra; already, in l926, he adopted the metaphors of the new mass medium: ‘As he walked he thought how his shade would wander from city to city, from screen to screen, how he would never know what sort of people would see it or how long it would roam in the world.4 In l940, the Argentinian surrealist and friend of Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, took this vision further, in a strange, compressed, enthralling fable called The Invention o f Morel. It’s the diary of a fugitive from justice, who is struggling for survival on an uninhabited island, but keeps encountering a mysterious group of elegant party-goers in the abandoned buildings around him. He falls in love with one of the women, Faustine, but she does not even appear to see him. Gradually he pieces together that the inventor, Morel, has created machines that project people as they were in life, doing and saying the things they said, and thus preserves them eternally; but in the process of granting them this uncanny immortality and perpetuity of their memories, his machines steal their souls. Gradually, the narrator feels himself to be disappearing and becoming one of Morel’s un-dead, his deathless spectres, but he welcomes the state as he believes he will find Faustine there, in the phantasmic dimension of Morel’s invention. The fable is highly evocative, eerie, comic, genuinely enchanted, a personal apocalypse both romantic and bleak, in which the copies survive while the originals wither and die. ‘The images are not alive,’ the narrator tells us. ‘But since [Morel’s] invention has blazed the trail, as it were, another machine should be invented to find out whether the images think and feel (or at least if they have the thoughts and feelings that the people themselves had when the picture was made; of course the relationship between their consciousness and these thoughts and feelings cannot be determined)... Someday there will be a more complete machine.’5 This visionary novella inspired the cult movie of the Sixties, Last Year in Marienbad, not altogether unexpectedly, since the eternity in which Faustine and her friends have their existence resembles cinematic reality so closely. 6 Film inhabits an Underworld condition as framed in the visions of the afterlife, first by Homer, but above all by Virgil: spectral insubstantiality. The potential of the new digital media for realising fantasy seems inexhaustible. It does not by any means stop at the outward circumstances of experiences of other worlds like the afterlife: the time and space of film representations institute a parallel world, which interrelates with ours, as depicted in contemporary plots about illusion and

20 M ar in a W a r n er - G h o sts an d D a e m o n s : T he R evival of M yth a n d M agic reality - from Blade Runner to The Truman Show and The Matrix. In these films, there is a new kind of spectral protagonist, sometimes called a replicant, whose apparent existence is created entirely by televisual communications and virtual, cyber-reality. Cinematic media have realised visions of phantoms that in the living pictures of Homer or Virgil take form in language alone; the paradoxical presences of Anticleia and Anchises, who look as they used to be in the world but have no substance, can be perfectly captured by the moving camera. s a c r if ic e a n d r e d e m p t io n When Aeneas pleads with the Sibyl to be allowed to descend into the Underworld, he brings in Orpheus as well as Pollux, Theseus and Hercules, all of them male forerunners in raiding the infernal regions. Naturally he does not mention Odysseus/Ulysses, the Greek deceiver and hence villain of this Trojan national epic. Male precursors of his ambition, these heroes wanted for the most part to rescue someone beloved from death, as Gilgamesh longs to do after Enkidu’s death, as Christ was later to achieve when he released the just from hell by harrowing it. Virgil’s Aeneas by contrast wishes to fulfil the highest demands of filial piety and see his father again (thereby silently glossing the encounter of the reprobate Odysseus with the shade of his mother), and pay his respects to Anchises. There is no suggestion he can or wants to bring him back. In Virgil’s epic plot, Aeneas’s journey to Avernus and back assigns him securely to the company of the highest demi-gods and founding heroes; but Aeneas’s aim, to see his father one more time, does not give him hope that he can rescue him. When he at last finds his father, Aeneas gives the immediate cause of his coming: ille autem: ‘tua me, genitor, tua tristis imago saepius occurrens haec limina tendere adegit. (6.695-6) Your ghost, my father.. .your grieving ghost, so often it came and urged me to your threshold!7 So he has been inspired by the apparition of Anchises that compelled him to make the journey. If the vision came in a dream or in a prophetic hallucination or reverie, Virgil does not say but Aeneas, in this respect at least, is also a visionary who translates the mind’s immaterial work into real consequences. Neither the dream mission nor the touching, passionate encounter and farewell of father and son stamps the reader’s memory with the vividness that the poet’s indelible visions of hell provoke, the unfolding story’s wide angle views of the lie of the land, of the yearning souls, most pitiably, infants, and the ordered ranks of the transgressors and afflicted. In some ways, anguished as the experience is for Aeneas, the episode does not move to the dramatic dynamic of the tragic stories, culminating in bitter loss, as with Gilgamesh and Orpheus; nor does it build towards a triumphant reprieve, as with Hercules and Alcestis. This is partly because Virgil does not stage a sacrifice in this epic poem, unlike tragedy, which obeys the laws of religious economy of exchange between divine and human (something still enacted in the ritual of the mass). This is a distinguishing feature of epic poetry with its more linear, and leisurely, succession of events, as well as the historic calling of the Aeneid’s protagonist: the poem does not represent a symbolic re­ enacting of a mystery that needs to be ritually performed to propitiate or to generate auspicious conditions in the present time. It is not in itself redemptive, and so does not seek to redeem Anchises, for example, or to perform any kind of ritual substitution - any life against any death. Virgil is moving into history, out of myth and faith. But it is a mark of Virgil’s mastery of atmospheric effects that while he does not wring our hearts as he does in the Georgics with a hope that Anchises - or anyone else - will be regained, his vision of the Underworld confronts us so memorably with the ineluctability of death.

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In the Rig Veda, by contrast, the romance of Savitri describes how Savitri so loves her husband that she offers to die for him instead and through this heroic self-sacrifice softens the heart of Death himself. The Sanskrit romance embodies the hope, characteristic of Hinduism, that virtue can bring about another, more blessed incarnation - the story implies that Savitri and Satyavan are perfected by love and will pass beyond death into another, higher existence as a symbolic bridal pair. The myth of Alcestis in Euripides’s play bears a close resemblance to Savitri’s, except that, as one would expect of Euripides, he has very much heightened the dramatic psychology, the conflicts between his cast of characters, so that the deliverance of Admetos, Alcestis’s husband, from the grip of death here grants a blessed relief of family tension rather than a symbolic rebirth of the cosmos. Euripides introduces, for example, a completely different twist into the plot, because it is assumed, from the start, that Death will accept a surrogate for the doomed husband, if someone can be found to offer up their life instead of Admetos. In short, Euripides reshapes the story to fit into a sacrificial economy of exchange, substitution, and a divine debt called in implacably, as it is in the Christian story of redemption through Christ’s death on the cross. When Gustav Holst revisited the Rig Veda legend, no shadow of blame or responsibility falls upon Satyavan. His near fatal illness is his karma, the story relates, and Savitri is warned about it when she chooses him as her love; the pivotal crisis in this story involves no crime, witting or unwitting. Satyavan is simply doomed to die, even before Savitri chooses him, and no bargain is offered for his life. Death comes for him, and him alone. But by introducing the possibility of redemption through sacrifice, the ritual substitution at the centre of Judaeo-Christian worship, Euripides intensely complicates the moral issues of the story. Admetos, Alcestis’s husband, cannot but be implicated in his wife’s self-sacrifice on his behalf, and his love is profoundly tested by his response - by his acquiescence to this reprieve. Admetos’s aged parents refuse point blank to die for their son to live, and they come in for some tough abuse from him for this reason; to which his father retorts that Admetos himself hardly shows great heroism and virtue in letting Alcestis die for him. Admetos’s father tells Alcestis she’s a fool to volunteer to change places with her husband in the Underworld, and calls his own son ‘cannibal’ (in Ted Hughes’s translation) for accepting that she should: Every day you live she nourishes you With her dead body. The exchanges between parents and child, in Hughes’ merciless translation, are fraught and extremely vituperative.: Like the beating hearts Torn out of living crocodiles These two refused to stop. Bodiless, feeling nothing, With the dust on their tongues They go on gasping for life.8 Yet in the play, each speaker successfully persuades us in turn of the rightness of his, or her, position. The bitter confrontation ends with Admetos’ mother cursing him for his self-love. Euripides stacks the pleas of one voice after another for mercy towards Alcestis: the god Apollo himself intercedes with Death on her behalf. Admetos, bewailing her impending death and his future loss, recalls Orpheus, and how he lost his Eurydice. Though the playwright never says so in so many words, he implies that Admetos is perhaps allowed to escape death himself and find Alcestis restored to him because his grief intensifies his love, that he learns through this ordeal sincerity and loyalty.

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The children’s writer Philip Pullman recently undertook the descent into the Underworld in his highly ambitious trilogy, His Dark Materials. Writing in the wake of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton, Pullman has also consciously cast himself in a very English, home-grown tradition, a blend of classicism and Christianity. Pullman read English - unhappily - and then started out as a schoolteacher in Oxford during the first peak phase of the Tolkien cult and, as he often recalls, the popularity of another Oxford children’s visionary, C. S. Lewis and the Narnia cycle. However, Pullman consciously defies both these great successes of his youth: he challenges the archaic savagery and the apocalyptic vision of Tolkien’s invented Englishness, and the Christian-Anglican piety of the Inklings like Lewis. Going down into the Underworld to rejoin a lost loved one without the slightest hope of bringing them back fills the third book of Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and it responds antiphonally in a spirit of both love and defiance to the whole Virgilian tradition. Will Parry, the boy hero from this world, is the designated, magical bearer of the Subtle Knife, a talisman and enchanted wand-like sword which, like the Golden Bough, can give access to other worlds, and specifically lead the way down to the kingdom of the dead. Will wants to go to see his father, who died very soon after Will was reunited with him after a long separation, but the main thrust of the story shifts from Will for Lyra, the scrap of a girl - rough, wild, clever and big-hearted - with whom Pullman has created one of the most lovable heroines of children’s epic. Through Lyra, Pullman openly challenges Virgilian heroic male pietas, though in other respects he pays homage to the classical poet with warm admiration, evoking the lightless, drab expanse of the infernal regions in Virgilian terms, punctuated by the bitter cries and wailing of the dead. He also recasts particular scenes: take this picture, for example: Then suddenly there was the boat. It was an ancient rowing boat, battered, patched, rotting; and the figure rowing it was aged beyond age, huddled in a robe of sacking bound with string, crippled and bent, his bony hands crooked permanently around the oar-handles, and his moist pale eyes sunk deep among folds and wrinkles of grey sk in .9 When Charon speaks, he says: How many ages do you think I’ve been ferrying people to the land of the dead?10 Later, as the boat begins to make the crossing, Will asks, ‘Are we dead now?’, to which Charon, as surly as Virgil’s, replies: Makes no difference . i f you don’t know whether you’re dead or no t. I say nothing to contradict you. What you are, you’ll know soon enough.11 Lyra’s motive is grief for a wrong she did her childhood friend, Roger, when she inadvertently betrayed him to his death, and she wants to go down among the dead to find him and make reparation, and say goodbye properly. Pullman deals with the theme of female heroic sacrifice and altruism, as in Alcestis, with a difference that conforms to his declared anti-religious stand. Lyra is not offering herself as a sacrificial substitute for Roger, even though it costs her terribly (Pullman expresses her anguish very strongly) to face the dangers and the partings and the threat of death for herself. But above all, Lyra leads Will into hell and then, seeing the desperate sadness and horror of the dead in eternal nothingness, in a blaze of indignation decides to let them out: Will, I want us to take all these poor dead ghost-kids outside - the grown-ups as well - we could set ’em free! We’ll find Roger and your father, and then let’s open the way to the world outside, and set ’em all free!’12

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It’s a strange story to find in a book for children, not least in one that has won a readership of millions. It is determinedly pagan, as opposed to Christian. In a spirit of radical atheism, Pullman proposes release from the falsehood of Christian eschatology and apocalypse, into a cosmological vision of created unity. Lyra’s own divinatory instrument, her alethiometer, tells her what will happen to the ghosts: When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. ... they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything. And that’s exactly what’ll happen to you.. 13 In this way, Pullman revives a classical vision of the soul’s afterlife and revisits Anchises’ explanation to Aeneas, when he tells his son that all shades of the dead will eventually return to the Spirit and Mind that generate and quicken all things. This vision owes something to Lucretius, and echoes in Pythagoras’s closing speech from the Metamorphoses. It is a uniquely bold theological challenge. Yet, at the same time, it belongs comfortably to a wide seam in popular culture, which is turning towards a diffuse animism in its conception of individuals and other worlds. By a twofold effect, therefore, Virgil’s ghost inhabits contemporary literature about the afterlife and the Underworld: not only through his atmosphere and scene-painting, but also through his asserted principles of fantasy in action, which makes the imaginary (Aeneas’s visions of his father) the mainspring of action and of history.

VIRGIL THE MAGiciAN

Through the first-hand knowledge that Virgil demonstrated in his poems about the realm of death and the Underworld, the poet was startlingly transmogrified in his own afterlife, and in popular story he began to figure from the late twelfth century as a marvellous magician. In the imagination of Europe - and not only in secular or unlettered circles - Virgil becomes an omniscient and powerful practitioner of secret arts, not without a touch of humour, and this reputation developed in part because Virgil the poet’s vivid passage through the Underworld read as the report of an experience, not a fabrication. His poetry transformed him, in medieval tradition, into an apocalyptic visionary, his historical character becoming buried under a rich mulch of stories. In numerous chronicles and encyclopaedias of the Middle Ages, compiled by courtiers, scholars, and churchmen like Gervase of Tilbury and Vincent of Beauvais, Virgil cuts an ambiguous, flamboyant figure of superseded paganism, part jester, near sorcerer, part prophet, part shaman. The enchanter Virgil presents a recognisable model for Merlin and Gandalf and even Dumbledore today in Harry Potter. He is the prototype white wizard, adept at all the arts of sorcery, at spells and counter-spells, who never uses them for dark purposes but stringently rejects those possibilities. He has foreknowledge of the future, but again applies this only to warn and lead the virtuous. Not a twister or a trickster, he surpasses other legendary magicians in power and wisdom because he has direct experience of the Underworld and has, in that sense, encountered death and not suffered from the consequences. Surprisingly perhaps, English scholars in the late twelfth century led the way in the transformation of the classical epic poet Virgil into this good magician: Alexander of Neckham, who was Richard the Lion-Heart’s foster brother, was one source of the stories; Gervase of Tilbury, then professor at Bologna, another; John of Salisbury a third. By contrast, Dante does not repeat a single one of the bizarre and witty stories in circulation in his day about the poet’s skills in predicting the future and diverting it from its predestined course; he set aside Virgil’s favoured means of transport, a bridge he conjured in the air to take him in any direction, or his curious beanstalk, with telepathic powers to communicate the thoughts of the

24 M ar in a W a r n er - G h o sts an d D a e m o n s : T he R evival of M yth a n d M agic person who picked the beans to anyone who ate them (does this connect with ‘spilling the beans’?). Dante has no time for magic or magicians. Domenico Comparetti, the scholar who wrote a definitive work - Vergil in the Middle Ages - published in l895, was very tense about the legends that had accrued, and deplored medieval storytelling, trying as hard as he could to corral Virgil the magician into the alleyways and bassi of Naples’spopolo. He expostulated, ‘The association of incongruous ideas no longer excited surprise, and [that] any direct investigation of the real causes of things, or any just appreciation of them, was not to be expected. Hence the imagination, ever ready to break bounds, failed to find in the influence of reflection those checks and correctives which it encounters in an age accustomed to critical investigation.’14 The mediaeval Virgil of nearly a thousand years ago seems to belong to Naples, where the historical Virgil had lived for a while and where he is buried. In his capacity as the legendary founder of the city, this magical Virgil was highly specialized in areas of concern today: pollution, defence, and surveillance. Neapolitan interests lay close to his heart. So, ‘by mathematical art’ he forges a bronze fly that scared off all other flies from entering the city. (In my novel The Leto Bundle, I borrowed this story and gave it to my protagonist to tell as a kind of fairy story about the future safe-haven she and her children would eventually find.) Virgil did not stop at clearing flies. He also devises a magic butcher’s block on which meat never rotted - something which, like protection against flies, would indeed be useful in Naples. When the Neapolitans are plagued by leeches, he makes a golden replica of a leech that he drops into a well, which frightens off the real offenders. Like St Patrick, he cleanses the city of snakes. He keeps a private herb garden, where he grows the spices and plants he needs for his elixirs and potions, and he surrounds it with an invisible rampart which prevents all cross-fertilising from foreign bodies (early GM protection). In his grounds, he sets up a bronze statue of a youth with a trumpet raised in the direction of Vesuvius; by this means, Virgil deflectes the volcano’s devastating fire and brimstone, for the trumpeter blows it all in the opposite direction. At Pozzuoli, he opens a series of medicinal baths, with images over each one depicting the specific disease or condition for which that bath was to be used. Most crucially of all, he guarantees the city’s security by making a model of it, enclosing it in an egg, placing the egg in an iron cage, and the whole at the bottom of a fortress, This fortress, referred to in 1352 as the Castellum Ovi incantati, or Castle of the Enchanted Egg and still known as the Castel dell’Ovo, stands on the shore front of the city, not far from the monument to Virgil.15 Meanwhile, in Rome - for Virgil’s exploits are not confined to Naples - he also makes an automaton called The Safety o f Rome. It consists of an elaborate and ingenious series of carved statues personifying the imperial provinces. When trouble brews in Libya, say, or the Middle East, the figure in question rings a bell; this alarm rouses a bronze equestrian figure, mounted like a weathervane on the apex of the roof; he then turns to shake a spear in the direction of the turbulent region, and so the Roman legions, magically informed of the whereabouts of the true culprits, can then move against rebellion - an early instance of pre­ emptive strike. This legend draws on the traditional Christian interpretations of the Fourth Eclogue, adding an ironic narrative twist: when Virgil confidently tells the Romans that his invention will last until a virgin gives birth to a child, they laugh, and (like Macbeth at the three witches’ similar deceptive oracle) unwisely they relax. The story reveals how the legends were spun from interpretations - from overdetermined readings - of Virgil’s own writings: he figured as an honorary Christian prophet as Dante makes clear. Tale-spinners of the early Middle Ages enjoyed fabulism for its own sake, and cared much less than modern readers about plausibility or moral uplift. Learned monks appear to love dwelling on devilry and divination, and then pointing gleefully to their pagan forebears’ folly. They had it both ways: passing on entertaining nonsense about Virgil and then scorning him and his society for trusting in such flimflam. But the fable that seems to me to encapsulate the atmosphere of a thousand years ago has a more domestic character, and it laughs up its sleeve at Virgil the magician’s claims to wisdom. Medieval stories,

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poems and ballads are full of sinister truth-telling devices: mirrors that speak, severed heads that still utter the name of their murderer, robes that reveal by magic the true characters of the person who puts them on (these are the predecessors of the Emperor’s New Clothes). The Virgil of legend contributes one of his masterpieces to this repertory: he makes a stone lion which, if an adulteress puts two fingers into its wide-open mouth and proclaims she was innocent, will snap shut and bite them off. So when the Empress of Rome falls under general suspicion of infidelity, the Emperor orders her to take the ordeal. The Empress, one of those thousands of clever and enterprising (and unruly) women who paradoxically throng the annals of misogyny, agrees, But before doing so, she disguises her lover as a drunken beggar and they plan together that as she is making her way to the test, he will assault her and kiss her wantonly in the public street before the crowd. Then she will be able to swear truthfully that no man has ever touched her intimately - except her husband and that filthy beggar who has just leapt on her, as everyone has just witnessed. This story, which finds its way into Boccaccio and the Arabian Nights and no doubt other compendia of stories, still provides the aetiological legend for the famous Bocca della Verita (Mouth of Truth) in Rome, the grim grinning mask in the narthex of the ancient church of S. Maria in Cosmedin. Visitors today like to shudder and grimace before putting their hand in its open jaws for a photograph, because not all of them are as crafty as the empress and can shape a story to pass the test.

M AGic AND M oN sTR osiTY

Virgil the poet was endowed by his audience and his admirers with experiences he conjured; as a result of their conviction, he found himself part of his own text in its most extreme and fantastical readings. His legendary afterlife offers an interesting demonstration of Shakespeare’s famous lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream about the shaping power of literary imagination: And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (5.1.14-17) Such speech acts, forging vision from fantasy, can become so persuasive, so real that they abolish their imaginary condition and figure as actual experiences. Dante also learned this from Virgil. For whereas many of his predecessors as visionary travellers to the afterlife - not least St John in the Book o f Revelation - did not situate it in a material topography in time and space, congruent with physical laws, Dante is assiduous in marshalling realistic coordinates as he charts his journey with Virgil by his side until the close of Purgatorio. This empiricism, applied to an unequivocal act of imagination about realms of fantasy, distinguishes both Ovidian and Virgilian visions of the supernatural, and remains one of the most reliable tools for contemporary fantasists, too. The vivid persuasion Virgil works on our minds, as he takes us down into the Underworld, arises from the wide-angle vistas of hell, of the fog and fire, the green shade of the valley where Aeneas finds Anchises, the troops and crowds of souls on the bank of Styx and the Abyss, conveyed in the famous extended similes which Dante imitated: souls as numerous as leaves in autumn and birds gathering to migrate, or the bees humming among lilies on the banks of Lethe. From these commanding high-angle long shots, Virgil moves in to the close-ups, as it were, of the terrible mutilations of Deiphobus, the severed nose and cropped ears, and the glimpse of Aeneas’s hands reaching out, three times, to grasp his father’s wraith, which slips through his hands. Narrative poetry, especially epic, has itself shaped the modes of picturing and telling that persist today: literature has given form to phantasmata, and still does. The cinema has mimicked these characteristic literary effects, with the long panning shot, surveying an unfolding landscape, and the close up and

26 M ar in a W a r n er - G h o sts an d D a e m o n s : T he R evival of M yth a n d M agic jump cut, bringing the crucial instance, the epiphany, the crisis, up before the eyes, crowding the field of vision from end to end, magnified. Contemporary cinema has continued the earliest epics’ visions very effectively: an apocalyptic film, such as the recent Lord of the Rings III, alternates between huge, thrilling panoramas of burning mountains, louring skies, sable shrouded plains, fields, and countless nameless figures and sudden, passionate scenes featuring the heroes in dialogue.

Virgil’s reputation as an enchanter arises from his knowledge of the afterlife and his prophetic acumen. But is there an aspect of his imagination that would warrant such a high reputation for wizardry? Most commentators, like Comparetti, recoil from the medieval concoctions and absolve Virgil the poet from all blame. However, Virgil does display his intimate grasp of magic arts and rituals in the Aeneid, while he makes plain at the same time his distance from them. One of the differences between Virgil and Ovid is that the Metamorphoses can often communicate a passionate sympathy with transmogrifications, with hybrid punishments and with monstrosity, and the Gods figure as terrifying, cruel, and capricious, all the more redoubtable through Ovid’s tight-lipped restraint from condemning them. Think of poor Scylla, cursed through Circe’s spite to be girdled with snapping dogs’ heads. Virgil, on the other hand, observes a myth like the passion of Pasiphae for the bull and the birth of the Minotaur with moral horror, different in tone from Ovid’s mordant, cynical, pessimism.

Ovid wasn’t set when I studied Latin at school, but Virgil was. Sister Christina, who taught us, was very young at the time (though of course I only realised this later) and she told us, blushing, not to read certain lines. As in a fairy tale, the prohibition worked wonders on our energies with dictionary and crib, and we spelt out the forbidden passages with great excitement. They both involved sex, of course, but also, more particularly, love-magic devices to achieve the object of desire, and in this sense, they disclosed a disturbing undercurrent in Virgil’s expertise. In Book 4, the lines describe the priestess’s offerings on Dido’s funeral pyre: the herbs, reaped with sickles by moonlight, and bursting with black poisonous milk, ... and with them, the love charm, the hippomanes, bitten from the forehead of a newborn foal before the mother could take it.

sparserat et latices simulatos fontis Averni, falcibus et messae ad lunam quaeruntur aenis pubentes herbae nigri cum lacte veneni; quaeritur et nascentis equi de fronte revulsus et matri praereptus amor. (4. 512-6 )

She’d sprinkled water, simulating the springs of hell, and gathered potent herbs, reaped with bronze sickles under the moonlight, dripping their milky black poison, and fetched a love-charm ripped from a foal’s brow, just born, before the mother could gnaw it off.16

I remember that we were very puzzled when we made this out and couldn’t understand what it meant, and indeed, it was only when I looked it up last week that I saw why Sister Christina was embarrassed. For this ingredient of the witches’ brew - equivalent to the ‘fillet of a fenny snake’, ‘wool of bat and tongue of dog’, or a pilot’s thumb - means ‘a secretion of a mare in heat’ (Webster’s) and is a traditional aphrodisiac. According to the legend to which Virgil is referring, a hippomanes grew on the foal’s brow and was bitten off by the mare, who would reject her offspring if another took it. In these lines the combination of young growths, animal and vegetable, with the anomalous black milk produces a definitely queasy atmosphere, which then culminates in the spondaic fall of the lines on to the single word amor to powerful effect.

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This magic bears an affinity with the second passage which we were told not to read, the ekphrasis of the gateway to Diana’s temple, wrought by Daedalus himself into pictured myths: hic crudelis amor tauri suppostaque furto Pasiphae mixtumque genus prolesque biformis Minotaurus inest, Veneri monimenta nefandae; (Aen. 6. 24-6 ) Here the cursed lust for the bull and Pasiphae spread beneath him, duping both her mates, and here the mixed breed, part man, part beast, the Minotaur - a warning against such monstrous passion.17 Pasiphae’s ‘secret union’ and the bull’s ‘brutal passion’ were the nun’s worries here. The passage relates to the earlier image of the love-charm because it involves the use of nature against nature, a perverting of proper ends and categories, which is a powerful defining characteristic of black magic. Both Circe or Medea flit behind Virgil’s Massylian priestess, whom Dido evokes, and their shadow also lies on the enigmatic figure who performs the rites at Dido’s suttee. Such magic acts trespass against the natural order: the mare is turned against her foal and her milk goes to waste -the imagery resonates by implication with the ‘black milk’ of the herbs in the same sacrificial offerings. By applying the horseflesh amulet, a woman is mingling her nature with an animal’s too, as Pasiphae later does in the ‘monstrous passion’ that produces the Minotaur. Re-visiting these passages forty years on, I see that Sister Christina was right: Virgil’s distaste has a touch of Puritan hypocrisy about it, as he lingers so dramatically on the making of Dido’s pyre and its ghastly simulacrum of a love-nest as she places her bed on it, with Aeneas’s picture, and then festoons it with flowers. The poet also brushes in allusions to black arts several times to produce undoubted dramatic excitement, and he associates them with Africa in ways that remain a tradition into folklore and fairy tale: Dido refers to the powers of the priestess of the Hesperides as a Massylian - the word for Numidian, used genetically for African - many of whom, Dido tells us soon after, she has scorned for a husband. She stresses the power of her love magic to her sister Anna in a litany of other enchantments and portents under her sway: sistere aquam fluviis et vertere sidera retro, nocturnosque movet Manis: mugire videbis sub pedibus terram et descendere montibus ornos. (4. 489-91) With her spells she vows... To stop the rivers in midstream, reverse the stars in their courses, raise the souls of the dead at night, and make earth shudder and rumble underfoot - you’ll see - and send the ash-trees marching down the mountains.18 Virgil’s controlled display of esoteric insider wisdom and his sheer writerly brilliance at evoking scenes of magic ritual and touching in moments of perversity perhaps justify some of the fantasies that clustered around him in the Middle Ages, and can go a little way to explain dear Sister Christina’s reddening.

M AGic To DAY

Magic occupies the centre of cultural production in all kinds of areas today - books, films, games. A new sensibility characterises the uses of magic and metamorphosis, myth and faerie; it exhibits certain continuities with the classical past through shared images, motifs, themes, even plots. These frame a contradiction - and it makes matters even more complicated. First, the panoply of fantastic and mythic

28 M ar in a W a r n er - G h o sts an d D a e m o n s : T he R evival of M yth a n d M agic elements today are split off from belief systems. For example, James Lasdun’s The Horned Man is a novel subtly tuned to the misadventures and delusions of a New Yorker who, when his wife leaves him, starts stalking her, and then, like Actaeon in Ovid’s terrible tale of vengeance, develops a pair of stag’s horns on his head. Even if you’re the kind of person who consults your horoscope with genuine anticipation, you probably don’t consent to a pagan myth of animal transformation as a possibility in the actual world - but the fiction illuminates psychological depths in the same way as metamorphosis and other improbabilities in mythological children’s literature act as metaphorical devices to release truth. But at the very same time, magic and faerie now command more allegiance and assenting collaboration than was admissible before because, in some unprecedented way, the fantastic has become real, and the various operating dynamics of magic stories - time shifts, ubiquity, metamorphosis itself - have indeed moved into the foreground of everyday experience. A new model of human consciousness and the concept of the individual that emerges from some current writing, for young and old, and a significant aspect of this present vision, aims precisely at dissolving the subject, at evoking the self’s volatile, discontinuous disembodiment. Magical psychology, visionary, unstable, metamorphic, telepathic, and deracinated, permeates many of the most enjoyed stories being written and read now. Interest in persons as no longer unified, but split, doubled, or even multiple - haunted by an evil genius, or illuminated by a familiar daimon - has combined with new instruments of perception and knowledge to reconfigure character and story in contemporary fiction. Philip Pullman is by no means the only writer who is generating new metamorphoses for our time. In the Harry Potter series, metamorphoses take place in many different forms, often involving elaborate spells to control and ward off their effects. Hogwart’s curriculum includes lessons in Managing Magical Creatures and Transformation, Lord Voldemort has insinuating powers to change shape, become invisible and even, in The Prisoner o f Askaban (in my view the tightest and most enjoyable of the series so far) to take up habitation as part of Snape’s head. Many of the most successful fiction writers for adults also operate in this metamorphic and supernatural territory: Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison introduces the returning dead in Paradise; Margaret Atwood explicitly evokes a revenant who works through spirit possession as the avenging motive force in Alias Grace, her fictional treatment of the first murder committed by a woman in Canada. In all three cases, the writers are paying homage to the muted voices of past histories, and invoking a nearly obliterated legacy of belief. But they are also engaged, as are the illusionists of the era of phantasmagoria, with making the impossible happen through acts of mimetic language and projection. As Salman Rushdie comments, through his own Orpheus reincarnate, the singer Ormus Cama: ‘Everything must be made real, step by step . This is a mirage, a ghost world, which becomes real only beneath our magic touch, our loving footfall, our kiss. We have to imagine it into being, from the ground up.’19 c o N cL U sio N

Why do magic and myth attract new audiences today, young and old? What does magic mean today? Why this revival of interest in other worlds under the appearance of the disenchanted horizons of classical mythology? Why are readers and audiences turning to magical zones outside space-time, peopled by fantastic creatures and organised according to the principles of wonders and myths? The current phenomenon includes writing for adults, at the literary end of the market, where surprising best-sellers include re-visionings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Ted Hughes, some of Carol Ann Duffy’s poetic monologues (in the tradition of the Heroides), and many other contemporary writers of mythological fiction and poetry.20 At the same time, less accessible but also acclaimed self-conscious literary writers - W. G. Sebald, Iain Sinclair, Marie Darieussecq, James Lasdun, David Mitchell, and the Spanish novelist Javier Marias

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- summon zones of contemporary magic: they move through warps of memory and time, they experience the disembodied ubiquity of psychic travel, and explore the farther reaches of consciousness, and the bewildering inter-sheaving of actuality and imaginings, of dream and reality. And I’m not even going to try and pause with popular fantasy fictions which are obsessed with spells and spirit possession, vampires and zombies, such as the occult novels of Stephen King and the vampire fiction of Anne Rice (highly rated as literature of course, in many quarters). The world wide web, needless to say, reveals inextinguishable famishing for the fantastic. It seems that the nightmare banquet at the end of Through the Looking Glass has become an everyday state of experience, though no less disorientating for that. You remember, Alice wakes up and asks, was she part of the Red King’s dream just as he was part of hers?

Fascinating heroes and heroines like Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or Lyra Silvertongue and Will in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights draw their magical being from a deep and ancient tradition of myth, of metamorphosis and oracle, of divine possession and ubiquity. When Sethe hears the voices of Beloved, the daughter she killed rather than let her live a life in slavery, Sethe acts like a clairvoyant cunning woman in the African and Afro-American syncretic religious ritual, in the footsteps of the pagan oracles, and especially Virgil’s Cumaean Sibyl. The haunted, multiple consciousness of the newly conceived personal subject has brought back to immediate experience metamorphic ideas about the life principle, and reanimated ancient, mythological visions of ghosts and spectres. The zones of contemporary entertainment are populated by ancient figures from old stories and to say that the process is growing stronger is really a commonplace. What is perhaps fresher in my thinking about these things is the relation between imaginary realms conjured by poetic language in the past and their realisation in contemporary media, especially photographic. (This is the theme of the book I have just finished, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media.)

A fantastic storyteller constitutes through ‘reasoned imagination’ (Borges’ phrase) a metaphysical and poetic dimension of reality which repositions us as we confront our selves and our identities in these times. An imagination which thinks by generating images, choosing among fantasies and memories, allows expression to individual subj ectivity; but this subj ectivity keep itself separate from the phantasmatic phenomena which whirl around us, from which choices have to be made. This contemporary subjectivity does not respect the distinction that used to seem so clear between lived experience and dreams, between actual and unreal events, either in the forms they take or the degree of intensity with which they impinge. We continue to demand that stories be told over and over, we want them to metamorphose themselves from the recipes of the manuals into drama and poems, into novels and texts, we want them not only for themselves, but for how they seed storytellers’ imaginations, how they make other stories, how they change in different poets or novelists or playwrights’ hands into works - into opera, and indeed operas, into poesis.

One of the things that we want from stories, it seems, is orientation with regard to the powers that we imagine govern our destinies, call them gods or fate or providence or chaos or relativity. The marvellous geography of myth takes a writer through variable and highly emotional terrain, where anxiety and pleasure, perplexity and discovery take different shapes, like beckoning figures in a dream. It would be stupid to suggest stories invariably enlighten; but stories do offer a way of imagining alternatives, mapping possibilities, exciting hope, warding off danger by forestalling it, casting spells of order on the unknown ahead. Death in a story, as told in the myth of Orpheus, or of Dido and Aeneas, or of fatal, forbidden passion, as imagined in the story of the Minotaur and Pasiphae, tells us such terrible things can happen, but also can perform an apotropaic act by speaking of it, by conjuring it in fantasy. These overlapping qualities and effects contribute to the pleasure, the sheer enjoyment that so much of the literature of myth and metamorphosis can give. Margaret Atwood, in her recent essays called Negotiating with the Dead

30 M ar in a W a r n er - G h o sts an d D a e m o n s : T he R evival of M yth a n d M agic discusses the purposes and effects of writing and the reasons and motives of writers, and she emphasises the importance of readers in supplying inflections on a work of art’s meaning. Magic, myth, fairyland and other realms of imagination, the irrational and the demonic used to attract a stigma. Philip Larkin famously spurned reworking old stories when in the Sixties he contemptuously rejected ‘dipping into the myth kitty’ in favour of writing that dealt with the everyday, the realities of contemporary existence - ambulances, mum and dad, the rain in the north. But today, something very different is taking place, and the ancient stories of love and loss, ambition and destiny, such as Virgil told in the Georgics and the Aeneid, are still calling out to us. No wonder Orpheus symbolises poetry itself; in his head, which goes on singing, we can recognise Virgil’s own voice, calling to us now: Tum quoque marmorea caput a cervice revulsum gurgite cum medio portans Oeagrius Hebrus volveret, Eurydicen vox ipsa etfrigida lingua ah miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat: Eurydicen toto referebantflumine ripae. (Georgics 4.523-7) .But even then that head, plucked from the marble-pale Neck, and rolling down mid-stream on the river Hebrus - That voice, that cold, cold tongue cried out “Eurydice!” Cried “Poor Eurydice!” as the soul of the singer fled, And the banks of the river echoed, echoed, “Eurydice!”21

MARINA wARNER

n o t e s 1 Cecil Day-Lewis, trans., The Eclogues and Georgics (Oxford, 1999 [1963]) 125. 2 ibid. 124. 3 Purgatory (Penguin Classics, 1985) 272. 4 Vladmir Nabokov, Mary (Mashen’ka) (l926), quoted by Stefan Andriopoulos, ‘TheTerror of Reproduction: Early Cinema’s Ghostly Doubles and the Right to One’s Own Image’, New German Critique (2006). 5 Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention o f Morel, trans.Ruth L. C. Simms (New York, 2003 [1964]) 82. 6 The Quay Brothers, visionary film-makers and puppeteers, are now returning to the story in the inspiration behind their new film The Piano Tuner o f Earthquakes (2006). 7 Robert Fagles, trans., The Aeneid (London, 2006) 205. 8 Alcestis: In a Version by Ted Hughes (London, 1999) 28. 9 Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London, 2000) 294-5. 10 ibid. 297. 11 ibid. 302. 12 ibid. 319. 13 ibid. 335. 14 Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E.F.M. Benecke (London l895 [reprinted Princeton 1997]) 241-2. 15 ibid. 268-9. 16 Fagles (n.7) 145. 17 Fagles (n.7) 183. 18 Fagles (n.7) 144. 19 Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. 20 Since this address was given, Canongate in Edinburgh have begun publishing a series on Myths retold or revisited by celebrated writers, including Margaret Atwood (The Penelopiad), Ali Smith (Where Girl Meets Boy), David Grossman (Lion’s Honey), Salley Vickers (Where Three Roads Meet) among other titles. 21 Day-Lewis (n.1) 126.

31 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

Some Glimpses of Virgil in Late Antiquity

A paper given to the Virgil Society on 27 November 2004

count myself greatly honoured to be invited to address our Society, to whose existence the late William Francis Jackson Knight drew my attention some forty years ago. ‘J. K.’, as he was invariably known, suggested to students, I recall, that if they could afford to subscribe to just oneI learned institution, they might consider joining the Virgil Society, the annual subscription to which, I think, then stood at seven shillings and sixpence. I have never regretted taking his advice upon this matter (or indeed upon many other matters). I confess, however, that I appear before you as something of a goose amongst swans, for in this forum we are accustomed to hearing of new insights and of original thought about the life, works and influence of ‘Our Poet’, Vergilius noster. What I offer today is more elementary and historical, and so I need to take my stand upon what I may call, in current parlance, the Virgil Society’s mission statement, as declared upon our programme card:

The purpose of the Virgil Society is to unite all those who cherish the central educational tradition of Western Europe. Of that tradition Virgil is the symbol.

I also need to emphasize that the operative word in my title is ‘glimpses’, for my chosen period is one of great internal diversity. I take it to extend from 205 CE, the approximate year of the birth of Plotinus, whose formulation of Neo-Platonism was to prove deeply influential throughout our period and beyond, to 636 CE, when Isidore of Seville, encyclopaedist, educationalist, and last of the Latin Fathers of the Church, died. I do not intend to speak further this afternoon about either of these gentlemen, but this is the period - ‘time within which’, if you like, in the ablative case - during which we shall be taking our ‘glimpses’ of Virgil’s presence in the tradition we cherish.

32 J ohn M air - S o m e G lim pses o f V irgil in Late A ntiquity

ROMAN EDUCATION

First, however, in order to set the scene, I should like to attempt a rapid retrospect of Roman educational history.1 In the early days (roughly from the beginning of the Republic), Roman education was carried out ‘in-house’, or, more precisely, ‘in-home’, for it was chiefly the responsibility of parents to teach children what we might today call ‘life skills’, to prepare them for practical life in agriculture, business, law or government; to produce a certain hardiness of mind and body; and perhaps above all to imbue them with a value system derived from ‘traditional ways’ - the mos maiorum. In this overall process, ‘book-learning’ played only a modest, although not insignificant, part.

Matters might have continued thus, perhaps with some gradual evolution, had not, from the mid-third century BCE onwards, the extension of Roman political and military control in various Mediterranean lands exposed the homeland to external, most notably Hellenic, influences. Rapid change curtailed the development of a genuinely autonomous central Italian and Roman civilization and culture. Defenders of the ancien rigime - for example, Cato - tried to check and even to halt foreign infiltration of literature and manners.2 Viewed in retrospect, however, these attempts at isolationism could not possibly succeed. The acquisition of advanced rhetorical skills had become essential for those seeking to gain and to retain positions of influence and power. Such skills could be obtained only by recourse to Greek teachers and models. At first tentatively, schools began to open in the late third century BCE, and took over at least some of the teaching previously given at home. The grammatistes, or litterator, taught literacy; the grammaticus built upon this foundation and taught composition and literary studies; and these in turn prepared pupils for transfer to the rhetor, who taught rhetoric - the art of speaking so as to persuade. This is the pattern of education with which Virgil, who was born in 70 BCE, would probably have been familiar. We know also that he underwent at least some of the stages of a rhetorical education, but found it uncongenial.

In the main, ancient education relied heavily upon precept, example, and imitation as the principal means of instruction. The qualities most esteemed in pupils were a good memory and powers of imitation. There was therefore a permanent need for suitable illustrative material, and the classical writers were treated as the instrumenta studiorum.3 Initially, only Greek authors were available for this purpose in the schools, but they gradually came to be supplemented or supplanted by early Latin writers: Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Naevius, Pacuvius and, most notably, Terence. These then were the kind of authors to be studied and emulated by students of the generation of Varro and Cicero, and later by that of Horace and Virgil.

In about the year 26 BCE, a turning point was reached when Quintus Caecilius Epirota, a freedman of Cicero’s friend Atticus, decided to relegate earlier authors and to utilize instead contemporary writers - which in practice meant the Augustan poets - to provide the mass of illustrations which the educational system insatiably demanded. By this time, Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics had been published (42-40 and 30 BCE respectively) and well received, and work on the Aeneid was in full swing. In Propertius’s famous prediction, ‘something greater than the Iliad is coming to birth’.4 From now on, Virgil’s work would become authoritative for correct morphology (spelling and inflections), vowel quantities (lengths), syntax, usage, and style; and his poetry was destined to become an irremovable gold standard both in his own lifetime and beyond.

33 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

THE ΕΓΚΥΚΛΙΟΣ ΠΑΙΔΕΙΑ AND THE SEVEN LIBERAL ARTS

I move now to say a little about the seven liberal arts, the term used to designate the cycle of studies which stems from the Hellenistic programme of the εγκύκλιος παιδεία. Although it is etymologically the source of our word ‘encyclopaedia’, the expression εγκύκλιος παιδεία certainly did not denote anything encyclopaedic in the sense familiar nowadays, that is, as being concerned with a comprehensive survey of all branches of human knowledge. It was much narrower in its scope, although it was internally diverse and intricate, being intended both to provide a good grounding for freeborn people (hence the Latin name artes liberales)5 and also to serve as a gradus ad Parnassum for those proceeding to more advanced studies6. (I suppose we could in today’s parlance translate artes as ‘competencies’.) After the usual hesitancy and time-lag which preceded her adoption of Greek institutions, Rome began to embrace the εγκύκλιος παιδεία. The first three subjects to be studied were grammar, which comprised literacy, reading, composition and elementary literary studies, as well as grammar and syntax; rhetoric, the manifold art of speaking so as to persuade; and dialectic, or logic. This third area (which was closely related to rhetoric and was indeed sometimes studied first) included ideas of sameness and difference, classification, and the validity of arguments and of syllogisms. Except perhaps for specialists, ancient works on dialectic may now have a rather desiccated character, but with an effort of the imagination we can recover a sense of the excitement which attended new discoveries. I particularly like the saying of the nineteenth century historian Lecky: ‘Doctrines which the noblest intellects of antiquity could barely grasp have become the truisms of the village school, the proverbs of the cottage and the alley.’7

Virgil’s poems provided a rich source of illustrations for all three of these subjects, which in the early Middle Ages became collectively known as the Trivium. The counterpart of the Trivium was the Quadrivium, a term which, in the form Quadruvium, is first found in Boethius.8 This group was made up of the mathematical sciences: arithmetic - the study of number and of its properties (rather than of calculation); music - the study of pitch, ratios, intervals and rhythm (rather than of playing an instrument!); geometry; and astronomy. This mathematical quartet was studied at a largely abstract level, and accordingly needed fewer literary illustrations than did the subjects of the Trivium. Many Latin writers referred to the seven liberal arts,9 and some wrote treatises upon one or more of the individual subjects. Apuleius, for example, produced an ‘Arithmetic’, which was essentially a Latin adaptation of a work of the Neo-Pythagorean Nicomachus of Gerasa.10 Few writers, however, attempted coverage of the whole programme, to expound which in its entirety was an arduous process, requiring exceptional stamina as well as detailed knowledge. It is therefore all the more regrettable that we do not possess Marcus Terentius Varro’s pioneering work De disciplinis libri novem - nine because Varro added treatments of architecture and of medicine. Augustine planned a complete survey of the liberal arts, but in the event was able to complete only six books on music and one on grammar (Retractationes 1.6).

MARTIANUS CAPELLA

The first complete Latin treatment of the seven liberal arts which we have is that of Martianus Capella, whose work, entitled De Nuptiis Philologiae etMercurii, appeared at sometime between 410 and 440 CE. This work, which Professor Henry Chadwick describes as ‘bizarre and curiously fascinating’,11 is written in alternating prose and verse and consists of nine books, of which the first two in particular have a markedly Neo-Platonic character, possibly reflecting the influence of Porphyry (the pupil,

34 J ohn M air - S o m e G lim pses o f V irgil in Late A ntiquity biographer, and friend of Plotinus) and of Iamblichus the Syrian. They present a framework of pagan myth and allegory in which the study of the seven liberal arts can become a pathway leading to heaven. I have examined the forty-eight references to Virgil’s works which have been identified in the edition of Martianus by Adolfus Dick (1925), as revised by Jean Preaux (1969 and 1978). Many of these references are made in order to illustrate the length of vowels, which, in classical and much post-classical poetry, determine the length of syllables and hence the metre and rhythm of the verses; and in order to guarantee the legitimacy of particular grammatical forms. Individually and collectively, these allusions to Virgil’s ipsissima verba indicate that Martianus Capella treats Virgilian usage as being authoritative and indeed as speaking with finality.

Perhaps enough has been said to indicate how Virgil is regarded as the authority, what I have called the irremovable gold standard. Not that Martianus is uncritical. Whilst not averse to alliteration in general, he twice comments adversely upon Virgil’s use of the same consonant in consecutive words: casus Cassandra canebat (Aeneid 3.183; Dick 253.18); and tum rauca adsiduo longe sale saxa sonabant (Aeneid 5.866; Dick 253.17). I think that in the case of the second example, J. K. might have thought the repeated sibilant to be entirely apposite for expressing the withdrawing tide - compare ‘soft sounds the surf upon the sandy shore’.

CASSIODORUS

Cassiodorus compiled another full compendium of the seven liberal arts. Born in the decade 480-490 CE, Cassiodorus presumably underwent the rhetorical education which was by now largely reserved for the elite, and he entered public life, traversing the cursus honorum to become the Ostrogothic King Theodoric’s magister officiorum (Chancellor) from 523 to 527, and later praefectus praetorii under Theodoric’s daughter Amalasuntha from 533 to 537. Justinian was at this time gradually but inexorably regaining control over Italy (his general, Belisarius, would enter Ravenna in 540), and Cassiodorus retired from public life. He founded, on his ancestral estate at Squillace in Calabria, the monastery of Vivarium.12 Cassiodorus composed for his monks a two-part manual, called the Institutiones.13 The first part is a guide - essentially an annotated index - to the study of the Scriptures and of the Fathers. It contains a (part) verse from the Eclogues:

Et (OCT sed) argutos inter strepere anser olores (Eclogues 9.36: Inst. 20.23) and two verses from the Georgics:

Sin... Frigidus obstiterit circum praecordia sanguis Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes (Georgics 2.483-5: Inst 71.17 and 21)

These two verses are quoted when Cassiodorus discusses the possibility of horticultural occupation for the less academically inclined monks. The second part of the Institutiones is a compendium of the seven liberal arts. Cassiodorus considered that the Bible and the works of the Fathers would lose in intelligibility if they were allowed to drift away from what he perceived to be their literary and scientific moorings. So he allows a place for secular studies as a preparation for the lectio divina, although he tempers his earlier enthusiasm for them and is careful to legitimate their pursuit

35 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8 by frequent reference to the Fathers themselves. In his treatment of the seven liberal arts, he draws his excerpta, as far as one can see without exception, from Latin authorities.14

Given the essentially Latin provenance of his manual, one might expect Cassiodorus to avail himself of Virgil to provide illustrative material, particularly in the chapters upon grammar and rhetoric. But here we have a case of the dog which did not bark in the night. Apart from a fleeting reference, in his Introduction, to Virgil as ‘The Poet’ (Inst. 92.10), Cassiodorus makes no reference to, and takes no quotations from, Virgil in the course of the chapters upon grammar and rhetoric, the main sources of which are Donatus, Cicero, Quintilian, Fortunatianus, the Auctor ad Herennium, and Marius Victorinus. It is not until we delve deeply into Cassiodorus’s long chapter upon dialectic that we at last encounter a cluster of Virgilian quotations. These arise in the course of a discussion of the classification of Topics (Divisio Topicorum: Inst. 125.1-127.9). ‘Topics’ here do not mean (as we usually understand the word) subjects or themes for consideration and discussion: the word means ‘places’ or ‘regions’ (even ‘pigeon-holes’) in which are stocked different types of argument appropriate for various situations. It seems likely that Cassiodorus’s treatment is an adaptation from Book IV of the commentary of the fourth century writer Marius Victorinus on the Topica of Cicero. Unfortunately Marius Victorinus’s work is lost, but, thanks to Boethius, who wrote his own book, De topicis differentiis, on the same subject, we can have a reasonably clear idea of its contents. Cassiodorus’s examples are all taken from the Aeneid}5

THIRD AND FOURTH CENTURY LATIN LITERATURE

It is now time to emerge from the thickets of philology and to consider some more expressly literary material. The third and, especially, the fourth centuries CE proved to be a long Indian summer for Latin literature. During these centuries, political and military power was transferred, gradually but irrevocably, from a conservative circle of senatorial aristocrats to professional soldiers, many of whom rose from the ranks in distant parts of the Empire. From their commanders came a series of soldier-emperors whose effective resistance against the attempted incursions by barbarian peoples into the Empire’s vast borderlands had the perhaps unintended effect of immunizing from change the senatorial aristocracy and its cherished - and to its upholders most natural - educational system, which, in a serene and almost surreal way, continued largely untouched by contemporary events.

Many cities and large towns retained their schools of grammar and of rhetoric. Notable examples of these centres were those situated at Bordeaux and at Trier. The blithe, generally backward looking, educational programme, in which Virgil was a key exemplar, tended unselfconsciously to provide a stabilizing influence. Offspring of army officers and of court officials recruited from remote reaches of the Danube or from the fogbound Rhineland would find themselves in school, contemplating the properties of subsuperparticular numbers or savouring aberrant uses of the gerund. They would move on to rhetorical figures and tropes, copiously illustrated by Virgilian examples gathered and presented by the tireless grammarians and rhetoricians who abounded in third and fourth century Western Europe. Away from the bustle of army and court, the old aristocracy continued to run their estates. Some landowners became Christian; others did not. But they all shared a common formation provided by classical Latin literature, and above all by the works of Cicero and of Virgil. They quite literally spoke the same language.

36 J ohn M air - S o m e G lim pses o f V irgil in Late A ntiquity

This leads me to mention the effects of the decision taken by Constantine and Licinius in 313 CE to declare Christianity a religio licita. Nowadays there is a vogue in certain church circles to deplore this intervention, on the grounds that it irreversibly altered the direction and character of the Church. But at the material time the Church did not at all share this view. Indeed, freed at last from liability to persecution, and now entitled to hold property, churchmen lost no time in extending their sphere of influence within a newly favourable political and educational climate. Although some individual Christians were uneasy about the traditional Graeco-Roman educational programme - we may recall Jerome’s unpleasant dream in which he was accused of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian (Epistulae 22.30), from which it took him several years to recover - the Church at large saw no need to propose an alternative scheme of study.

AUSONIUS

A representative figure of this period is Decimus Magnus Ausonius (c. 310 - c.395 CE). For many years he taught grammar and rhetoric at his home city of Bordeaux. Amongst his pupils was the future Emperor Gratian, who in due course appreciatively rewarded his former teacher with a succession of state offices. Ausonius was also a prolific writer: he produced academic works, many letters (which included a correspondence with Paulinus of Nola), and various poems in a variety of metres. Of the latter, perhaps the best known is his poem about the Moselle, the Mosella, written in Virgilian hexameters, describing his journey from Vincum (the modern Bingen) on the Rhine to Trier on the Moselle. Charles-Marie Ternes has identified in the Mosella numerous reminiscences of, and borrowings from, Virgil.16 Frequently these allusions are not so much straightforward quotations as adaptations of Virgilian expressions. For example, in Aeneid 2.236 f, the Trojans stretch ropes of tow (flax) to the neck of the horse:

stuppea vincula collo / intendunt.

A similar collocation occurs in the Mosella (v. 42), where Ausonius writes of the boatmen straining to pull a vessel against the current:

Intendunt collo malorum vincula nautae.

Some more direct borrowings include (v. 381):

Salve magna parens frugumque virumque, Mosella! recalling Georgics 2.173 f:

Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus, magna virum:

A direct borrowing is found at v. 460:

stringentem ripas et pinguia culta secantem recalling Aeneid 8.63 (of the Tiber). Thus Ausonius sometimes rearranges a Virgilian collocation of words, and at others borrows directly. After the poem Mosella had been completed, Ausonius’s friend Symmachus wrote to him in a letter (Epistulae 1.14): Ego hoc tuum carmen libris Maronis adiungo.

37 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

THE FIFTH CENTURY

With the dawn of the fifth century CE came intensified barbarian incursions. These had the effect inter alia of leading members of the educated class, regardless of religious affiliation, to close ranks against alien powers. Tentacular connexions bound together the landed gentry. Maintenance of linguistic rectitude was regarded as being tantamount to moral excellence. We should, however, also recognize that the invaders were not always intent upon conquest for its own sake or upon the usurping of political power: rather, they wished to acquire for themselves what they shrewdly perceived to be the superior economic and cultural benefits enjoyed by Roman citizens. In Peter Brown’s felicitous phrase, their incursions were more in the nature of a ‘gold rush’ from the underdeveloped countries of the north into the rich lands of the Mediterranean.17 By the year 400 CE, and thanks to, amongst others, the Emperor Gratian, Christianity had in effect become established in, and hence close to, the centres of power in Western Europe. It became natural for aristocrats to gravitate to bishoprics. These residual landed gentry had little difficulty in absorbing episcopacy into their system. It was found that high ecclesiastical office could be assumed without undue disturbance to the way of life of a country gentleman. Indeed, there was a considerable read-across: whether as landed proprietor, patronus, or as bishop, episcopus, the same person was liable to be called upon to act as local magistrate or arbitrator. So a local landowner might nonchalantly acquire and enter upon a bishopric very much in the spirit of noblesse oblige. He would not find this an impediment to his continued cultivation of classical learning and enjoyment of Virgil.

As for the more specifically religious side - well, often the duties were not unbearably arduous. For example, the longueurs of an all-night vigil could be eased by the prospect of a really good alfresco breakfast - a fete champetre - accompanied by readings from Virgil and from other classical poets.18 Even that most serious of bishops, Augustine of Hippo, would well into middle life read daily half a book of the Aeneid, no doubt as a relief from the tiresomeness of determining civil disputes between the relentlessly argumentative citizens of his see and of contesting the teachings of unorthodox theologians.

SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS

A perhaps not altogether representative example - his life was too eventful - of this type of aristocrat/scholar/bishop is Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 431 - c. 489 CE). Sidonius was one of the beneficiaries of a comprehensive literary education: he reveals detailed acquaintance with Plautus, Terence, Horace, Virgil, Lucan, Martial, Statius, Ausonius, and Claudian. He did not, however, enjoy the tranquil life of a fifth century savant. A bright future seemed assured when he married Papianilla, the daughter of the newly (455) proclaimed Emperor Avitus, and so received the delightful estate of Avitacum (near the present day Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne). But after only a year in office, Avitus was deposed. Sidonius supported a soon quelled Gallo-Roman rising, and was fortunate to be pardoned by the incoming Emperor Majorian (Maiorinus), with whom he sought a full rapprochement by addressing to him a panegyric prefaced by a short poem19 making adroit use of Virgil’s First Eclogue, which celebrated Octavian’s return to Tityrus of land confiscated after the defeat of Brutus in 42 BCE. Turbulent times continued, and in 475, some six years after he had become Bishop of Clermont, Sidonius was sent into exile after a Visigothic incursion under King Euric. He was imprisoned at Lucia (near Carcassonne), from where he wrote a letter (Epistulae 8.9), ostensibly addressed to his friend Lampridius, who had had his own land restored to him, but really intended

38 J ohn M air - S o m e G lim pses o f V irgil in Late A ntiquity for the eyes of Euric. Sidonius again resorted to the First Eclogue of Virgil, and expressed the fear that this time he might be in the position of the unhappy Meliboeus, who did not regain his requisitioned property. After an anxious wait, Sidonius was allowed to return to Clermont, and to resume possession and enjoyment of his lands.20

CONCLUDING REMARKS

As the fifth and sixth centuries CE proceeded, what we might now call the knowledge-base narrowed, and educational standards declined. But this very tendency of downward drift had the effect of inclining the remaining high-level practitioners to display a defiant flamboyance in their accomplishments. Peter Brown again: 21

When the bishops met on solemn occasions or wrote to one another, the ‘grand style’ rose in them: their smooth flood of phrases, ‘polished as onyx’, would have been as impenetrable to the contemporary outsider as they are now to the modern reader. The letters and jeux d ’esprit of bishops such as Avitus of Vienne (c. 490-518) and Ennodius of Pavia (513-521), and the rhetoric of the edicts framed by Cassiodorus are typical products of this movement: shorn of their privileges, their wealth curtailed by confiscations, ruled by outsiders, the Senators of the West showed, in a rococo zest for Latin rhetoric, their determination to survive and to be seen to survive.

I have already referred to the small number of Virgilian references in Cassiodorus’s Institutiones. One is left with the uneasy feeling that, at least in mid and later life, Cassiodorus may not actually have possessed a copy of Virgil’s works. It is notable that in his Index Auctorum to his very careful edition of the Institutiones, Sir Roger Mynors obelizes works ‘whose presence [at Vivarium] is certain or virtually so’. No such sign appears by Virgil’s name. It is difficult to resist Pierre Courcelle’s observation:22

This absence of direct contact with the classical masterpieces, this lack of perspective, this want of a historical sense, is one of the gravest signs of decadence. The best minds could not resist. They meditated, not on the texts, but on the commentaries, on which they in turn produced commentaries. From commentary to commentary, thought thinned out and degenerated.

It is clear that by now we are in a world of imitations, commentaries, summaries, illustrations, examples. But, notwithstanding the generally low level of new or creative thought in the late fifth and sixth centuries, the very accumulation of vast amounts of literary material ensured that at some time in the future there would be firm foundations upon which to build. I have not spoken of Martin, Bishop of Bracara (Braga), or of Isidore, Bishop of Seville, but I read a paragraph from Etienne Gilson:23

These modest writings particularly fostered the sentiment, so lively in the Middle Ages, of a community of culture which bound the Christians, over and above their own origins, to the best that classical antiquity had ever produced. Cassiodorus is seldom if ever read now, though that charming spirit still gives pleasure; Isidore is consulted only out of curiosity, and for the verification of references; Martin of Bracara is no more than a name familiar to a few specialists; but those who know what role those supporters of a civilization in ruins played in their time still preserve a grateful memory of them.

39 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

To the authors named in Gilson’s graceful tribute could be conjoined Ausonius, Martianus Capella, Salvian, Sidonius Apollinaris, Claudianus Mamertus, Boethius, and many others. Variable as their writings were in originality and erudition, their deep regard for classical writings, including the poetry of Virgil, helped to keep aglow the study of secular letters in seventh and eighth century Europe, and then to rekindle it at the Carolingian Renaissance.

Stanmore, Middlesex JOHN MAIR

NOTES

1 Aubrey Gwynn, Roman Education from Cicero to Quintilian (Oxford, 1926) includes a valuable survey of the early period.

2 A. Gwynn, op. cit., chapter III.

3 I recall the delightful story of the classics teacher who beamed at his class, saying, ‘Pupils, this term we have the inestimable privilege of studying Sophocles’s masterpiece, the Oedipus at Colonus, which you will find to be a veritable treasure-house of grammatical peculiarities.’

4 Propertius, Elegies 2.34.65 ff. Propertius enthused similarly over the forthcoming Thebaid of Ponticus (Elegies 1.7.1-3).

5 Seneca Epistles 88.2.

6 For a useful survey, see H. I. Marrou, St Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris, 1938) 187-275 and especially 211-235.

7 W. H. E. Lecky, History o f European Morals (1869) ii. 3. I owe this reference to Dr James Shiel.

8 Boethius, De institutione arithmetica, ed. G. Friedlein (Leipzig, 1867) 7, 25 and 9, 28.

9 H. I. Marrou, loc. cit.

10 Apuleius is credited with producing a Latin version of the Introductio arithmetica of Nicomachus of Gerasa (ed. R. Hoche, Leipzig, 1866).

11 H. Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford, 1981) 21.

12 A pleasing pen picture of Vivarium may be found in George Gissing’s atmospheric memoir By the Ionian Sea (1901, repub­ lished London, 1956).

13 Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, edited from the manuscripts by R.A.B. Mynors (revised edition, Oxford, 1963). References are to the page and line numbers of this edition.

14 J.R.S. Mair, ‘A Manual for Monks: Cassiodorus and the εγκύκλιος παιδεία’ in Journal of Theological Studies New Series xxxi Part 2 (1980) 547-551.

15 The correspondences are noted by Mynors, Inst. 125.1-127.9.

16 C.-M. Ternes, Mosella; La Moselle (Paris, 1972).

17 Peter Brown, The World o f Late Antiquity (London, 1971) 122.

18 ibid. 130

19 Poem I V (Preface to the Panegyric to Majorian, Poem V).

20 Robert E. Colton has made an careful and interesting study of correspondences between Bishop Sidonius and the Eclogues and Georgics (Some Literary influences upon Sidonius Apollinaris, Amsterdam 2000). I do not know whether he intends to take his investigation any further but, if he does not, a study of Sidonius’s borrowings from the Aeneid might form a good project for an M. Phil. thesis!

21 P. Brown op. cit. 130 f.

22 P. Courcelle, Late Latin Writers and their Greek Sources (Cambridge, Mass. 1969, E. T. by H. E. Wedeck of Les Lettres grecques en Occident de Macrobe a Cassiodore (2nd edition Paris, 1948) 414.

23 E. Gilson, History o f Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London, 1955) 108.

40 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

Aeneas Narrator

A paper given to the Virgil Society on 22 January 2005

want to look this afternoon at a topic which I find has also been considered by other scholars, but has not, to my knowledge, actually been much studied, and that is the account of the fall of ITroy and of his wanderings which Aeneas gives to Dido and the Carthaginians in Books 2 and 3, and its relationship with the rest of the poem. There are two main questions: the nature of Aeneas’ narration itself and then its relationship to the narrations in the rest of the work by the ‘first narrator’, Virgil: how far, if at all, does Virgil make Aeneas, the ‘second narrator’, narrate in a style different from his own? We are therefore for the next 50 minutes going to be essentially in the somewhat formal world of narratology. This is obviously a very large topic, which would take a great deal of time to research and condense fully, so what I shall offer this afternoon is no more than a series of soundings and suggestions, concerned more with a grosso modo approach to the poem than to fine detail, which I imagine you will all be able to supplement and indeed surpass, if not also subvert, in the discussion afterwards. First, what sort of narrator is Aeneas? Let us look at the opening of his narration (Aen. 2.3-13): You bid me renew an unspeakable grief, O queen, in telling how the Greeks destroyed the wealth of Troy and its now pitiable kingdom, and all the terrible things I saw and of which I was a major part. What soldier of the Myrmidons or Dolopes or of Odysseus could keep back his tears if he were to tell this story? What’s more, damp night is sliding over the sky and the setting stars suggest sleep. But, if you do have a consuming passion to know what happened to us and hear - in brief - the last toil of Troy, though my mind shudders to remember it and recoils in grief, I shall begin. We can see at once that Aeneas is a skilled orator, who shows a concern for his audience - it is late (suadentque cadentia sidera somnos), so perhaps a story is inappropriate; at the same time, he puts the responsibility on to them for the recitation (si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros), and even implies that they are asking a bit too much in not letting painful bygones be bygones (iubes renovare dolorem). His own importance in the matter is made clear (quorumpars maximafui), but at the same time so is the cost to him (dolorem, lamentabile, miserrima - even the Greeks would weep). The story is essentially too tragic to be told (infandum) but, like a good guest, he will be brief (breviter), hard though it is for him (quamquam animus meminisse horret). When Aeneas begins his tale after this passage, it is with

41 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8 an almost sympathetic picture of the hardships of the Greeks. A master story-teller has thus divested himself of responsibility for the lengthy account he is about to give, promised brevity, ensured that his importance and the sufferings of the Trojans are clear, and given a hint of his objectivity. Objectivity is indeed a feature of his whole account of the sack of Troy and even of the role of Sinon’s trickery in it. Aeneas does not abstain from comment on Sinon’s actions, but he is again relatively brief in what he says: accipe nunc Danaum insidias et crimine ab uno / disce omnis (‘hear now of the tricks of the Greeks and from one scandalous act learn those of a whole people’, 2.65-6.), and at the end of Sinon’s speech he says talibus insidiisperiurique arte Sinonis / credita res, captique dolis lacrimisque coactis (‘we believed this because of these deceits and the cunning of Sinon who perjured himself; we were taken in by trickery and forced tears’, 2.195-6). He does not try to diminish the responsibility of the Trojans for what happens, though he will balance this by also making plain the gods’ role. It is the Trojans who are keen to hear more of Sinon’s lies (2.105-6), who rush to open the city (2.234), and are mad keen to take the horse in, though it four times sticks on the threshold (instamus tamen immemores caecique furore, ‘we pressed on nonetheless unmindful and blind with madness’, 2.244). It is notable that Aeneas attributes a communal responsibility for what happens to all the Trojans. The use of the second person plural is frequent in these descriptions. Aeneas ends with a statement of the extraordinary irony of the whole business: we were deceived (2.197-8): quos neque Tydides nec Larisaeus Achilles, non anni domuere decem, non mille carinae. whom neither Diomedes nor Achilles of Larisa, nor ten years and a thousand ships had conquered. Even so, he is measured in his attitude to Sinon, where he might have been ballistic. It is also notable that in Book 2 Aeneas does not spare himself: the first-person plurals associate him with the errors the Trojans make over the horse, and on a number of occasions he makes no attempt to disguise the fact that he acted in an irrational manner. For instance, there is no reason to believe that he did not agree with the disastrous plan, which his band of Trojans devised during the sack, of changing their armour so as to look like Greeks, which resulted in the deaths of so many of them at the hands of their fellow Trojans. More importantly, even after Hector has commended to him the sacra tuosque ... Penatis (‘your sacred objects and gods’, 2.293), he soon describes his mad dash for war (2.314-7): arma amens capio; nec sat rationis in armis, sed glomerare manum bello ... . furor iraque mentem praecipitat, pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis.

I seized my weapons madly; there was no sense in fighting, but rage and anger drove my desire to gather men together to fight, and it seemed splendid to die in battle. If the passage is genuine, his desire to punish Helen is also presented as pointless but gratifying (2.583-8):

‘For though there be no glory in punishing a woman’s crime, and such a victory would bring no praise, nonetheless I shall be praised for exterminating an outrage and exacting a just penalty, and it will give me some pleasure to have filled my spirit with the flame of revenge and to have appeased the ashes of my people.’ So I raved, and was carried away by my frenzied mind.

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Only his mother’s intervention stops him here. When his father Anchises has refused to follow him in flight from Troy, he once again decides to plunge back into battle to die, until the fire on his son’s head prevents him. Finally, when Creusa is lost, he again threatens the whole future of Rome by dashing back into the city to find her. If he has only the vaguest idea of what the future holds when he is in Troy, by the time he recounts all this it is much clearer to him, so his refusal to hide his potentially disastrous desire to die in Troy speaks much in his favour before his audience. He comes across as one marked by great deeds, but one who is very capable of wrecking the whole venture. His importance, and also some mitigation of the errors he and the Trojans make, is also conveyed by the way the part played by the gods is stressed. When Thymoetes suggests the horse be taken into the city, Aeneas says he did this sive dolo seu iam Troiae sic fata ferebant (‘either out of treachery or because now the fates of Troy were moving in that direction’, 2.34); and when Laocoon’s spear causes the hollow belly of the horse to echo, they would have probed the horse’s recesses si fata deum, si mens non laeva fuisset (‘if the fates of the gods and our own minds had not been against us’, 2.54).1 Sinon lets the Greeks out of the horse fatisque deum defensus iniquis (‘protected by the cruel fates of the gods’, 2.257). Aeneas makes it clear, in other words, that the gods had obviously decided that Troy should fall, and that the Trojans were almost bound to act in a way that would bring that about. This objectivity in his narrative and his concern for his audience’s view of himself is again noticeable at the very end of his account, in the story of Achaemenides, left behind by Odysseus and his men when they flee the Cyclops. This forms a counterpart to the story of Sinon near the start of Book 2 in that in each story a dishevelled Greek throws himself on the mercy of the Trojans and is given assistance, despite being a Greek (and indeed in each, a monstrous figure, a Horse or a Cyclops, also features). That the experience with Sinon does not lead the Trojans to reject Achaemenides’ appeal (or worse) is of course further evidence of the kind of people Aeneas and the Trojans are. There is a further instance of sympathy in this episode, which is also an important indicator as to the nature of Aeneas’ narrative, which we shall come to in the second part of this paper. When he introduces himself, Achaemenides describes himself as comes infelicis Vlixi (‘companion of unhappy Ulysses’, 3.613), and at the end of the episode, Aeneas uses exactly the same words (3.691). That Aeneas should call Ulysses infelix is strange. Is it Virgil using ring-composition to mark off the episode from the coda to the book, as Williams suggests? Or is it Aeneas simply ‘quoting’ Achaemenides’ words? Or is it Virgil making a link between his hero and Homer’s, reminding us of the parallelism between them? Or, finally, is this perhaps an inkling on Aeneas’ part that his old enemy Odysseus and he now have sufficient in common for him to think of Odysseus as infelix in having to undergo such hardships as the Cyclops? It is perhaps worth noting here that in Book 2 frequent reference is made to Odysseus, on no less than nine occasions in fact (7, 44, 90, 97, 122ff., 164, 261, 436, 762), and here in Book 3, the episode which closes Aeneas’ account concerns Odysseus again. In these cases, of course, the ‘speaker’ as it were is Virgil, since Aeneas can know nothing of what has or is about to happen to Odysseus (beyond the Cyclops), so that the significance of the parallelism with the Odyssey is something which the reader but not the character can appreciate.2 The sympathy expressed by Aeneas is striking, all the more so for us because he is unaware of the significance of what he has said. This is a gap, between reader and character, which Virgil exploits quite often, and we shall return to it. Finally, having looked at the more emotional aspects of his narrative, we can see that Aeneas is also a skilled presenter of it in the technical sense. Not only does he employ a variety of simple devices to make it vivid, such as the use of ecce eleven times in the two books (for instance when Sinon is brought in [2.57] or when Hector’s ghost visits him [2.270]), or the use of apostrophe to the likes of

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Troy (si fata deum, si mens non laeva fuisset ... Priamique arx alta maneres, 2.54-6), or the frequent editorialising, which brings the advantages of hindsight to his narrative. In Book 2, there is also a careful structuring, which begins with the communal actions of the Troj ans concerning the horse, moves through Aeneas’ actions in the fighting with his comrades, and reaches its climax with the description of what he saw alone as he looked down into the palace (2.453 ff.). In this part, Aeneas changes his manner of narration from one in which he simply narrates what he saw to one where his own sight of the events is emphasised. The climax of the sack is seen very much through his eyes, and Venus enables him to have an especially privileged view at the crucial moment when, having stopped him from harming Helen, she explains what is really happening. Here we have the most remarkable aspect of Aeneas’ viewing of the fall of the city (2.604-20):

‘Look, I will take away the dank cloud which now surrounds you, dims your mortal sight, and dulls your vision. Do not fear to do what I tell you, and do not refuse to follow my instructions. Here, where you see the shattered buildings, stones torn from stones, and smoke billowing with dust, Neptune shakes the walls and loosened foundations with his great trident, and rips the whole city from its base. Here, Juno, most savage, is first to seize the Scaean Gates, and girded with iron and raving calls an army of allies from the ships. Now, look, Athena is sitting on top of the Acropolis, shining in a cloud and savage- looking with her Gorgon. The father of the gods himself is giving the Greeks courage and strength, he himself rouses the gods against the Trojan forces. Seize the chance to escape, my son, and put an end to your efforts. I shall never be far away and will put you safe on your ancestral threshold’. So she spoke, and hid herself in the thick shadows of night. There appeared to me the awful faces and powers of the gods now hostile to Troy. Then it was that the whole of Ilium seemed to sink into the flames and Neptune’s Troy to be turned upside down. At the very moment when Troy falls, Aeneas sees most clearly what is really happening. Isay that Aeneas sees, but it is perhaps noteworthy that he does not himself explicitly say this.The words are all Venus’. She tells him to look (aspice, respice) and that she will remove the cloud from his vision, and then directs his gaze with hic ... hic. This is a neat device because it means that, just as he describes how Venus then described the divine scene for him and directed his gaze, so now he does the same for his audience and readers: as for him, the scene is laid for us, and the effect is all the more graphic than it would have been if Aeneas had simply described it in his own words. Indeed, it would have meant making an almost unbelievable or arrogant claim to have maintained that he had seen such things. He seems to sense this, restricting himself to a bald line-and-a-half of his own words after Venus has finished: apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae / numina magna deum (‘there appeared the savage faces of the gods and their great powers, hostile to Troy’, 2.622-3). It is a very shrewd narrative choice, and produces one of the most striking moments of his whole narration. The effect of all this is once more to lay emphasis upon Aeneas as a special figure, one with divine assistance and a divinely-ordained mission. He then returns to human company and vision, and recounts the final moments of the Trojans in Troy. Aeneas thus paints himself as a man of sorrows, but also of destiny, as a survivor, though also one capable of upsetting the apple-cart in his emotive reactions to things. He is also a skilled narrator, in command of his tale. This then is Aeneas’ picture of himself, for consumption by the Carthaginians, who have saved him from the great storm stirred up by Juno. One might now ask how it relates to the picture of Aeneas in those portions of the work where he is not the narrator. A big topic, but the basic outlines reappear. His impulsiveness and tendency to destructive despair are the very first things we see of him in Book 1.92-101:

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Suddenly, Aeneas’ limbs were loosened by the cold. He groaned, and, lifting both hands to the skies, he cried: ‘O thrice and four-times blest who were able to die before the eyes of their relatives under the high walls of Troy! O Diomedes, greatest of the Greek race, could I not have died on the plains of Troy, and poured out my life at your right hand, when fierce Hector was laid low by Achilles’ spear, and great Sarpedon, and the Simois rolled so many shields, helmets and bodies of men in its waves?’ He describes himself as subject to the same furor as the rest of the Trojans, and furor will possess him at various times, most noticeably in Book 10, where he slays priest and suppliant, and at the very end when he kills Turnus. He notes his own mistakes and misunderstandings in Troy and on his journey, and the way the gods have to correct him, and Virgil will tell of similar mistakes and divine corrections, e.g. in the case of his dalliance with Dido. His pietas towards the gods is indicated by his descriptions of the sacrifices he made in various places, and towards men in his treatment of Achaemenides. This is of course a virtue that Virgil makes much of in other books, but it is perhaps worth noting that, though Virgil repeatedly calls him pius Aeneas and makes him lay claim himself to pietas when he introduces himself to Dido (sum pius Aeneas, 1.378, not perhaps the best chat-up line), he never again refers to himself as pius and only indirectly to his own pietas: the only times he uses that word in his narrative are when he describes how the pietas of Panthus did not save him from death (2.430), and when he quotes Helenus’ description of his father Anchises as o felix nati pietate (‘happy in your son’s piety’, 3.480). This is an important point when we confront those who try to claim that there is a strong element of saccharine in the character of Aeneas, too much goody-two-shoes piety. We can respond that the fault (if fault it is) lies with Virgil, and that his hero makes almost nothing of this quality himself. At the same time, one can detect some differences. We have seen the sympathy that Aeneas displays towards those who suffer, and his capacity for love, seen so clearly in the case of his wife Creusa or of his father. This is reflected in his affair with Dido, but his treatment of her and especially the ‘silences’ of Aeneas, so well discussed by Dennis Feeney,3 when Dido confronts him with what she sees as his treachery and ingratitude, seem to suggest a different man, though he has of course just been the recipient of a visit from Mercury, which has made him think. His mercy we have also noted, but his killing of Turnus at the very end, though Turnus has accepted defeat before the assembled armies and acts as a suppliant, will always come as a shock (to me at least) when I read the end of the work. There are, however, elements of this sort of behaviour in his own account, so that essentially there are no major structural discrepancies between author and character in their presentation of Aeneas: we do not have a sense of a completely different man in the rest of the work from the one in Books 2 and 3. We have looked at the presentation of Aeneas as a character, and our last point introduces the subj ect of the technical management of narrative and how Aeneas and Venus compare in this. I move now to my second question, of the relationship between author and hero. Narratology concerns itself with the order in which events are told, looking at analepses (‘flash-backs’) to the past and prolepses (‘flashes-forward’) to the future, and being interested in anachronies, where the sequence of events is disturbed in the telling. As a narrator, Aeneas in general does not engage in complex use of anachrony, usually recounting events in the order they happened, and where he does look to the past, it is usually in a formalised way through speeches by others rather than simple analepses in his own words or in words reported from others. Thus, Sinon’s speech, though deceitful, gives us a long account of supposed earlier events in the Greek camp and the construction of the Horse. Anchises, misinterpreting Apollo’s oracle, tells of the Trojans’ origins in Crete, and later of Cassandra’s prophecy about Hesperia; Anchises again, reporting Apollo’s words, the Harpy Celaeno, and Helenus all make important predictions about the future; Andromache fills in her story from the fall of Troy to her time in Buthrotum, Achaemenides tells the story of the Cyclops, and so on.

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For the most part, Virgil too narrates events in their chronological order, without major dislocations (Books 2 and 3 are an obvious exception). There are of course analepses to fill in background for reader and characters, but as in the case of Aeneas, these are often given by speakers in the narrative rather than Virgil: there is a key prophecy made by Jupiter early in Book 1 to reassure Venus about Aeneas’ coming success (1.254 ff.); Venus gives us the background to Dido when she meets Aeneas (1.335 ff.), as does Diana for Camilla when she speaks to Opis (11.532 ff.); Evander tells Aeneas the story of Hercules and Cacus at the festival that commemorates that tale (8.184 ff.). It is also a feature of the Aeneid that Virgil will use physical objects or similar devices to recount the past: the pictures on Dido’s temple of Juno depict aspects of Troy and its fall not mentioned elsewhere (1.459 ff.); the doors of Daedalus’ temple depict Theseus and the Minotaur (6.14 ff.), and the Shield of Aeneas contains in its orb the future of Rome. In a slightly different manner, in Hades Aeneas sees a parade of heroes depicting the future that depends on him. In each case, the prolepsis or analepsis is woven into the story, as something recounted or depicted internally to the narrative. If we seek a fancy name for this, they are intradiegetic, rather than extradiegetic. There are exceptions, but the big blocks tend to be of this kind. Similarly, at the very start of the work, after a summary of its subject matter that plays with time in a very complicated way, he gives Juno’s reasons for her hatred of the Trojans, but soon modulates into a direct speech, with her giving further reasons. Author and characters are alike therefore in their use of chronological narrative, and in the way that major passages about the past or future tend to be delivered not by the primary narrator but by a character in the story. One might contrast Anchises in the Underworld, whose Parade of Heroes quite ignores chronology, with Virgil’s own account of the future on the Shield, which, while selective, does go down through the ages to Augustus. There is however a notable exception to Virgil’s use of characters to convey events before or after the main narrative. In Book 7.600 ff., King Latinus, in despair at the route events are taking, abandons his attempts to control matters. He has however refused to open the Gates of Janus to show that war has been declared, but Juno steps in to do it herself. At this point, Virgil goes into a passage which contains a striking description of how war was declared in ancient Latium and ancient Rome: the two time-periods are strikingly blended together. The passage clearly relates to what happens in the epic, but the details are closer to contemporary Roman than mythical Italian practices (7.601-16):

There was a custom in the Hesperian land of Latium, which the cities of Alba revered as sacred, and now Rome, greatest of all, cultivates, when first men rouse Mars for battle, whether they are preparing to bring tearful war to the Getae or the Hyrcani or the Arabes, or to march against the Indians, following the dawn, and demanding the standards from the Parthians. There are two gates of war (that is the name they use), sanctified by religion and the fear of savage Mars. A hundred bolts of bronze close them and the eternal strength of iron, and Janus, their guardian, never leaves the threshold. These, when the senators have fixed on war, the consul himself, conspicuous in the toga of Quirinus and garbed in the Gabine manner, unbars and they shriek as they open. He calls for war, and then the rest of the people follow him, and the bronze horns blow their shrill agreement.

The dislocation of time here is remarkable: Rome and its epic past are brought brutally together at this moment when war is about to break out, a war which, in its conflict between the Italians and the Troj ans, who are ultimately from Italy, is uncomfortably reminiscent of the Civil War from which Rome is only now recovering. The significance of the Aeneid to recent contemporary events is firmly emphasised: Augustus closed the Gates of Janus after Actium, and several times thereafter. Do we find anything like this in Aeneas’ narrative? There is, I think, at least one example. As I have tried to argue elsewhere, the death of Priam at the hands of Pyrrhus is full of references to the death of Pompey4 The lines of Aeneas’ obituary for Priam point to Pompey the Great in a number of ways (2.556-8):

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Once the ruler of Asia, proud of so many subject lands and peoples. He lies a great trunk on the shore, his head torn from his shoulders, a corpse without name. Priam, like Pompey, rules in the east, and Pompey was famous for his superbia: he was called ‘king of kings’ and ‘Agamemnon’ by his subordinates,5 and Seneca, in a splendid passage, asks:6 quid in Mithridaten et Armeniam et omnis Asiae angulos traxit? infinita scilicet cupido crescendi, cum sibi uni parum magnus videretur (Ep. 94.65).

What dragged him against Mithridates and Armenia and every corner of Asia? Why, an infinite desire for increasing power, since to himself alone he seemed insufficiently magnus. There is also a notable disjunction in the lines just quoted: in the first half of line 557, Priam is lying dead by the altar in the very middle of the palace; in the second half, he is several miles away on the shore, with his head torn off. This sort of dislocation is unusual for Virgil. But it can be explained again with reference to Pompey, who was killed on the shore in Egypt, and then his head was cut off and sent to a disgusted Caesar. Curiously, even the names ‘Neoptolemus’, the less frequent alternative name for Pyrrhus used here, and ‘Achilles’, Neoptolemus’ father, look forward to the names of Pompey’s murderers, Ptolemy (XIV Dionysius) and Achillas. Finally, Priam tells Neoptolemus that Achilles meque in mea regna remisit (‘sent me back to my kingdoms’, 2.543), an odd expression for letting him return to the palace with the body of Hector, but again reminiscent of the way in which Pompey had restored to the throne Ptolemy’s father Auletes: the words used by Priam of himself fit rather better with Pompey. This heavy parallelism between these two great men cannot be without significance: as in the example of the Gates of War just discussed, past and present are violently yoked together. In the former, the parallelism between past and present is brought before our eyes, and this is true in the current example too, but there is something more. I think it is the first place where the Aeneid explicitly encourages an allegorical reading of itself specifically in terms of recent Roman history. An allegorical reading of epic (or indeed other texts) was obviously possible and a regular mode of reading,7 and Aeneas’ connection with the Julian gens would be a further encouragement, but nowhere before this passage has the link between past and present been so explicitly made. Once it has been made, of course, it is much used, not least in Book 3, where, as Stahl has shown with enormous detail, the various places visited by the Troj ans are closely connected with aspects of Augustan propaganda: each episode gives ancient sanction to Octavian’s actions and victory.8 This intrusion of the contemporary into Aeneas’ words leads us to move from the chronology of and use of time in the narrative to consider whether there are other ways in which Aeneas’ words are imbued with matters of which he could have no inkling. In narratological terms, we move from ‘order’ to ‘voice’. There is a simple example of this in the story of Polydorus, which Aeneas tells in Book 3, when Polydorus reveals himself as the inhabitant of the bush Aeneas tries to pull apart (3.48-57):

I stood amazed, my hair stood up on my head and my voice stuck in my throat. This Polydorus, with a great quantity of gold, wretched Priam had sent in secret to the Thracian king to be raised, when he had begun to lose confidence in the Trojan forces and he saw the city surrounded by a siege. He, when the resources of the Trojans were broken and Fortune left the city, defected to Agamemnon’s side and the winning army, and destroyed all decency: he slaughtered Polydorus and gained the gold by force. O unholy greed for gold, what will you not make mortal hearts do? After the fear left my b on es. I say Aeneas tells the story, but there is the problem of how Aeneas has come about this knowledge of Polymestor’s behaviour. Williams tries to explain this away: ‘He would not have known at the time he

47 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

went to Thrace of Polymestor’s treachery, but he may now be assumed to know of it so that he can tell Dido the complete story’. But it is not clear what we should base that assumption on. Narratologically, one might almost be better off imagining that the voice of the primary narrator, Virgil, breaks in here. This is an idea that would gain some support from the fact that Aeneas’ description of his horrified reaction (3.48) is picked up after the account of Polydorus’ death by postquam pavor ossa reliquit (‘once fear had left his bones’, 3.57): the story could thus be taken as Virgil’s own addition to his narrator’s tale. The expostulation quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames? (3.56-7) accursed greed for gold, to what do you not drive men’s hearts? would thus not be (or not solely be), as Williams suggests, a remark made to be ‘relevant to Dido’s own experience, for Pygmalion had murdered her husband Sychaeus for gold’, but a remark intruded by the author: perhaps the Latin archaism in the use of sacer to mean ‘accursed’ also points to a Roman voice.9 We would have then an analepsis introduced not, as elsewhere, by the current narrator Aeneas or by a character whom he quotes, but by Virgil. The implication would be that we should not simply take Aeneas’ narration as a long story within a story, as a ‘realist’ text, but as something more complex into which the narrator’s voice intrudes, in a manner very reminiscent of Ovid. One might object that this is a lot to build on a single example and that one must expect such illogicalities in a long work, but there are other examples which would support the idea that Virgil’s voice may be heard in Aeneas’. On four occasions in this book, Virgil uses expressions such as fama volat (121), fama occupat auris (294), fama est (578, 694). In some cases, one might accept that, though Aeneas does not trouble to say so, some of the Trojans can be imagined as meeting someone who starts the rumour, as for instance when they reach Buthrotum (3.294-7):

Here an incredible rumour reached our ears, that Helenus, son of Priam, was ruler over Greek cities, and had won the kingdom and bed of Pyrrhus, descendant of Aeacus, and that Andromache had again returned to a Trojan husband. On other occasions, however, it is not so clear that stray locals will explain things. Consider the passage about Ortygia (3.694-6):

The rumour is that the river Alpheus made his secret way here under the sea, and mingles with the Sicilian waters at your mouth, Arethusa. How did Aeneas come about this learned myth, when he did not visit Syracuse but merely sailed by, worshipping its numina? Is this not the Hellenistic poet Virgil entering his text to give us information that it is all but impossible to imagine his hero obtaining? Indeed one might say that the whole of this final passage of Book 3 demands a knowledge of Sicilian and Italian geography and learned traditions that Aeneas could not in the time conceivably have discovered. This point was made as early as Servius, who considered it vitiosum, ‘not without justification’, says Williams admiringly. Consider what Aeneas tells us in 692 ff. He knows the name of Plemyrium (that he knows the names of these places is itself rather incredible), but more than that, he knows its derivation from Greekplemyris ‘tide’, and is thus able to produce the punning etymological epithet undosum, a Hellenistic move if ever there was one, and this is not an isolated instance of such puns. He knows the tradition of the fatal attempt (long after his time) of the people of Camarina to drain its marsh, and implies a knowledge of the Greek proverb ‘don’t move Camarina: it is better unmoved’. He knows that Acragas was famous for its horses but, as commentators have

48 A n g u s B owie - A en eas N arrator noticed, he says this was true quondam, which is problematic. Williams puts it well: ‘if we take this to mean “in the past”, the anachronism coming from the mouth of Aeneas seems very harsh. But we cannot possibly take it to mean “in the future”, because it is an inappropriate piece of prophecy for Aeneas to make, and draws immediate attention to other anachronisms in the passage. It is perhaps a further indication that this passage may have been originally narrative, not a speech by Aeneas’. I do not like this kind of explanation, because it depends upon pure speculation. A narratological explanation, in terms of ‘voices’, seems preferable, since these are not isolated features. This passage is like those elsewhere, where Virgil will drop into his narrative learned facts and etymologies, as when he notes the presence of Capys amongst the Trojan defenders and adds hinc nomen Campanae ducitur urbi (‘this is where the Campanian city [of Capua] gets its name’, 10.145). This is where narratology can make a contribution. If we see this as another place where the narrator’s voice breaks in to speak to his learned reader, then we need not consider such passages as vitiosa, nor worry about what Aeneas could or could not have known, nor see anachronisms as problematic, nor create stories about the Aeneid’s composition. The density of things Aeneas cannot have known is very high here: perhaps appropriately, because the narrating voice is about to pass from hero to poet, and so Virgil gradually turns hero into poet through his apparent knowledge of what only a trained Hellenistic poet could know, In this context, one could also include the use of intertexts, quotations or references in Aeneas’ words to works of literature written long after his time. The most obvious, of course, are the persistent quotations from Homer, which are plainly in Virgil’s voice not Aeneas’. We have noted already the case of Achaemenides and the echoes of Ulysses which he anchors. But there are many others. For instance, we have looked at the historical intertext of the death of Pompey in the death of Priam, but that is not all. The simile that introduces Pyrrhus (qualis ubi in lucem coluber mala gramina pastus, ‘as when a snake, fed on poisonous herbs, comes into the light’, 2.471) imitates Homer’s description of Hector in Iliad 22.93-5. The description of the lamentations in the palace are from Ennius’ description of the fall of Alba Longa, and this then modulates into quotation of his Andromache in 2.499-505: I myself saw Neoptolemus frenzied with slaughter, and both Atreus’ sons on the threshold; I saw Hecuba and her hundred daughters and Priam, at the altars, fouling them, which he had consecrated himself, with his blood. There were fifty couches, which offered great hope of heirs, and doorposts proudly decorated with barbarian gold and spoils, all thrown down. Where the fire had not reached, there were Greeks. cf. Ennius, Androm. 92-101:

O country, country, o house of Priam, temple shut by the high-sounding gate. You I saw standing magnificently bedecked in barbarian splendour, roofs chased and coffered with gold and ivory. All of this I saw go up in flames, Priam’s life violently ended, Jove’s altar with blood befouled. It would be an enormous task to see whether Aeneas is given more intertexts than Virgil uses himself. To avoid such a (probably futile) task, I simply counted the number of columns which each book occupies in Knauer’s great lists of parallels between Aeneid and Homer. To begin with, I thought I had found a great difference between Aeneas and Virgil: Book 1 occupies 15 columns, but 2 and 3 no more than about seven each. This hope was however dashed by the discovery that Book 4 occupies less than seven, so, although 2 and 3, along with 4, 7 and 8, have slightly fewer columns than the other books, the differences are not significant.10 Being in mathematical mood, I thought too to look at speeches, but again could find no significant differences:

49 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

Book % speech Speeches Speakers Average Longest 2 35.5 26 13 11 41 3 39.6 21 9 13.5 89 9 31 35 16 7 31 10 29.5 42 12 6.5 45 11 44 25 15 16 62 12 30 31 11 9 33

The percentages and averages for Books 2 and 3 lie within the range of the other books, the numbers of speeches and speakers are comparable, and even the technique of having the longest speech deal with the most important matter in the books is found in all these books. It will be fairly clear that I have not found much in the way of differences between the two narrators. They characterise Aeneas in the same way, and there are many similarities in their handling of things like time and voice, intertexts, references to the future and so on, in the narratives. This is a disappointment perhaps, but may explain why the subject has not been treated very much: there is nothing to find! Indeed, there are a number of other similarities that I could have talked about were there time. Have I simply been wasting your time? I hope not. What we have now to ask is what the significance of this finding might be. The most obvious explanation is an aesthetic one: Virgil did not want to create a work of which one-sixth was of a very different nature to the rest, so he carried the modes of composition over into Books 2 and 3 that he had used elsewhere; or alternatively, if one agrees with those who think that Book 3 was the first book and an experiment in a new kind of epic, carried over Book 3’s methods to the rest of the Aeneid. The classical canons of unity would have led him to do this. But can we do better than this? Can we give a significance to the way that Virgil creates such a close similarity between himself and his secondary narrator, Aeneas? Is there more than a simple desire for stylistic consistency? We have seen that he regularly blurs the boundary between his voice and Aeneas’, and between what Aeneas can know and what he himself knows. Is there a point here, something about the nature of history and specifically Roman history? Aeneas’ narration, as we have seen, looks forward to significant events in the later history of Rome, such as the death of Pompey, and this is also, of course, a feature of Virgil’s whole work. There is furthermore one place which we have not yet considered, where hero and poet are brought especially close together. This is the Trojans’ visit on their wanderings to Actium, the site of Augustus’ final victory over Antony and Cleopatra. There is therefore an obvious resonance with Augustus’ final victory in having Aeneas go there. Indeed, the games the Trojans celebrate there mirror those which Augustus himself put on at Nicopolis. Aeneas also dedicates a shield there, which recalls the Clipeum Virtutis given to Augustus by the Senate and people, to mark his ‘virtue, clemency, justice and piety towards the gods and his fatherland’, as the copy set up in Arles in 26 BC puts it. It is at Actium that Aeneas is finally free from the threat of Greeks and Greek lands (3.282-3), and at Actium that Augustus frees the Roman world from its civil war. The parallels here between Aeneas and Augustus are striking therefore. But what about Aeneas and Virgil? It is important for our argument that Aeneas does not just dedicate a shield (3.286-8):

I attached to the doors a shield of hollow bronze, the great weapon of Abas, and I marked the event with an inscription/song: ‘Aeneas dedicated these arms taken from the victorious Greeks’.

50 A n g u s B owie - A en eas N arrator

He puts up an inscription, but it is the word that Virgil uses for the inscription that is interesting: rem carmine signo. The use of carmen, a word for a poem, is notable because it brings Aeneas and Virgil closer together. By using that word, Virgil has Aeneas celebrate Actium with a carmen, in exactly the same way that he does himself with the Aeneid, if on a rather larger scale. Furthermore, one of the most striking passages explicitly about Augustus in the poem is the description of the shield of Aeneas. Aeneas therefore seems to become, for a brief time, at this key moment, a poet, marking Actium with a hexameter poem to celebrate it and with a fine and famous shield. Here especially, the boundaries between poet and hero are collapsed. z We have, therefore, two different narrators telling, in similar styles, stories in which past, present and future are similarly woven together. It is almost as if it were the same narrative, variously fragmented and repeated between the two narrators, each of whom narrates stories which evoke later and contemporary parallels. The similarities in the historical events are matched by similarities in their narrators, whether the mythical Aeneas or first-century Virgil. It is as if there is only one narrative, of the history of Rome, prefigured in the past and with resonances into the future, and it almost does not matter who narrates this history; the narrations of Aeneas and Virgil are given a consistent style as it is the same narrative at bottom that they are narrating. Alongside them are all the other narrators whom they use to tell the tale. Time differences are collapsed in the events which evoke the future, and differences of narrative voice are also effaced by the consistency of style. This consistency and similarity of style would not, therefore, be simply a matter of aesthetics, but convey something of Virgil’s concept of history and the way in which events in different periods, whoever narrates them, imitate and illuminate those of other periods. If we wish, as Romans, to understand our own recent history, we need to hear its resonances in the past, and the resonances of the future in the past, in whoever’s voice the narrative happens to be.

The Queen’s College, Oxford ANGUS BOWIE

NOTES 1 It is debated whether mens belongs to the Trojans or the gods. 2 It is perhaps preferable to consider the passage along these lines rather than worrying about the relative chronologies of the wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas, as did Servius auctus on 590. 3 D. Feeney, ‘The Taciturnity of Aeneas’, CQ 33 (1983) 204-19. 4 Cf. A.M. Bowie, ‘The Death of Priam: allegory and history in the Aeneid’, CQ 40 (1990) 470-81. 5 Cf. Appian, BC 2.67. 6 Cf. Lucan, 1.125-6 nec quemquam iam ferre potest Caesarve priorem / Pompeiusve parem. 7 Cf. P. Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: cosmos and imperium (Oxford 1986). 8 Cf. H.-P. Stahl ‘Political stop-overs on a mythological travel route: from battling Harpies to the battle of Actium’, in id. (ed.), Vergil’s Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political Context, (London, 1998) 37-84. 9 Cf. OLD s.v. 2 c. 10 The figures for each book are: 15, 7, 7.5, 6.5, 9, 10, 7.5, 8, 13, 15, 10.5, 12.5.

51 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

Statius’ Debt to Virgil

A paper given to the Virgil Society on 21 May 2005

efore finally committing myself to addressing this august body, I took the elementary precaution of asking a friend of mine to read a draft of this paper and make appropriate Bsuggestions for its improvement. Imagine my reaction when he reported to me a few days later that he had fallen asleep over the second page. Happily, he pulled himself together, read the piece in its entirety without any more sleep, and made many helpful suggestions and encouraging remarks. Many years ago, I read a paper on Statius to the Leeds Latin seminar. When it was over, Harry Jocelyn approached me, smiled, and said: ‘There is of course no Latin poet after Lucretius that is worth reading.’ I thought that the Virgil Society would enjoy that. Many years earlier, when I had just arrived at Newcastle, I was due to give a paper to the local branch of the Classical Association immediately after their AGM. Unfortunately, at the AGM, some savage controversy arose that kept them busy for about an hour, thus obliging me, at the shortest imaginable notice, to abbreviate my talk very significantly. Although, like all abbreviations, it was, of course, an improvement, it did not seem so at the time. The context of this talk is the fact that CUP have commissioned Hans Smolenaars and me to produce an edition of Statius Thebaid 1 in the Green and Yellow series. This has been an ambition of mine for some years during which I have spoken and written on Thebaid 1 on several occasions, largely, but not exclusively, on establishing the text. So when I received Jonathan Foster’s generous invitation to speak to the Virgil Society, it seemed to provide a wonderful opportunity to develop further my ideas on the relationship between Statius and Virgil, a topic I have touched on before, but not in the detail it deserves. This is the Virgil Society, a group of enthusiasts who will be steeped in the Aeneid but who will be far less likely to be familiar with the Thebaid. You are accordingly very like Statius’ readership when his great epic first became available from the booksellers’. You may well resemble that first readership in another way. Roman authors normally gave public recitals of their work before full publication, and there is no reason to suppose that Statius did not. You will not have attended such occasions, but you probably have read brief extracts from the Thebaid, if only in Latin unseen translation exercises, and you will have come away with some kind of impression.

52 D . E. H ill - S ta tiu s' debt to V irgil

*

uiue, precor; nec tu diuinam Aeneida tempta, sed longe sequere et uestigia semper adora. (Theb. 12.816-17) Live, I pray; and do not challenge the divine Aeneid, but follow from a distance and always revere its footsteps. In the past, these two lines from almost the end of the Thebaid were used to dismiss the epic as trite and derivative. As reported by Kathleen Coleman in her most thorough account of modern Statian scholarship,1 this view has been almost entirely discredited in the last forty years, not so much by reinterpreting the lines as by ignoring them and relying on the text itself. However, there is profit in placing the lines in context to see exactly what they do mean: durabisne procul dominoque legere superstes, o mihi bissenos multum uigilata per annos Thebai? iam certe praesens tibi Fama benignum strauit iter coepitque nouam monstrare futuris. iam te magnanimus dignatur noscere Caesar, Itala iam studio discit memoratque iuuentus.

Then the two lines quoted above, followed by:

mox, tibi si quis adhuc praetendit nubila liuor, occidet, et meriti post me referentur honores. (Theb.12.810-15, 18-19) Will you long endure, and be read surviving your master, O Thebaid much toiled on wakefully by me for twice six years? Already for you present Fame has surely strewn a kindly way and begun to show you, still new, to future times. Already great-hearted Caesar deigns to know you, and Italian youth eagerly learns and recites you. Soon, if any envy still stretches clouds before you, it will die, and after me your deserved honours will be paid. These are not the words of an unsure poet. Out of context, 12.816-17 might just be understood as timid (though to claim to walk in the footsteps of the Aeneid, even longe, is no mean claim); in context, such an interpretation is impossible. Similarly, at Silvae 4.7.25-8, Statius claims: ...nostra Thebais multa cruciata lima temptat audaci fide Mantuanae gaudia famae. .o u r Thebaid, tortured by much polishing, is, with audacious lyre, challenging the joys of Mantuan fame. Note in particular that, although at 12.816 the Thebaid is told not to temptare the Aeneid, at Silvae 4.7.27-8 Statius claims that his epic temptat audaci fide Mantuanae gaudia famae, hardly a self- effacing claim.

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Why listen to prose, when you can hear poetry? Why listen to an essay on a poem when you can hear the poem itself? I accordingly make no apology for reciting some significantly long sections of the Thebaid to you, following them with a very literal translation in case you are unfamiliar with the poet’s style. Classical epic poets are either historical and political - Ennius, Virgil, Lucan and, later, Silius Italicus; or mythological - Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, Valerius Flaccus. If it is objected that the Aeneid is mythological, the reply is that the epic, though set in mythological times, is transparently a poem of contemporary Augustan political importance. And where does Statius’ Thebaid stand? The very beginning of the Thebaid is instructive: fraternas acies (1.1); there is clearly a resonance with Virgil’s arma (the first word of the Aeneid) and Lucan’s bella.plus quam ciuilia (1.1), two unequivocally political works, unlike Valerius Flaccus’ unquestionably mythological Argonautica, which begins: Prima deum magnis canimus freta peruia natis fatidicamque ratem, Scythici quae Phasidos oras ausa sequi mediosque inter iuga concita cursus rumpere, flammifero tandem consedit Olympo. Though even Valerius cannot resist patriotic outbursts as at 1.7-21, 558-60. At the beginning of his epic, he has no words such as arma, bella or acies, neither does he offer a recusatio refusing to make any of the three Flavians the subject of his epic; though he does call upon each of them, duly praised for their exploits, to favour his poem. Statius, on the other hand, explicitly claims that it is his intention to write an epic on the exploits of Domitian when he is ready to do it justice; meanwhile, he writes: limes mihi carminis esto Oedipodae confusa domus, quando Itala nondum signa nec Arctoos ausim spirare triumphos bisque iugo Rhenum, bis adactum legibus Histrum et coniurato deiectos uertice Dacos aut defensa prius uix pubescentibus annis bella Iouis. tuque, o Latiae decus addite famae, quem noua maturi subeuntem exorsa parentis aeternum sibi Roma cupit. licet artior omnes limes agat stellas et te plaga lucida caeli Pleiadum Boreaeque et hiulci fulminis expers sollicitet, licet ignipedum frenator equorum ipse tuis alte radiantem crinibus arcum imprimat aut magni cedat tibi Iuppiter aequa parte poli, maneas hominum contentus habenis, undarum terraeque potens, et sidera dones. tempus erit, cum Pierio tua fortior oestro facta canam. (1.16-33) let the limit o f my song be the confused house o f Oedipus, since not yet would I dare to breathe out the Italian standards nor the northern triumphs and the Rhine twice under the yoke and the Danube twice submitting to the and the Dacians thrown down from their conspiring mountain, [laws

54 D . E. H ill - S ta tiu s' debt to V irgil

or earlier the defensive wars o f Jupiter scarcely in your adolescent years.2 And you, O glory added to Latian fame, whom, taking on the new beginnings o f your father, Rome wants for herselffor ever. Though a tighter track drives all the stars along and a clear region o f the sky, free o f the Pleiades and of Boreas and of cracking lightning, summons you, though the curber of the fire-footed horses himself presses the high shining diadem upon your hair, or Jupiter yields to you an equal part of the sky, may you remain content with the reins of men, powerful on land and sea, and may you give up the stars. There will be a time when I shall sing your deeds made stronger by the Pierian gad-fly. You will, of course, recognize the allusions to the Georgics (1.32-5) and to Lucan (1.33-6), but that is not our interest today. We may readily disbelieve Statius’ claim that he harboured ambitions to compose an epic poem about Domitian, but we are, at the very least, obliged to confront the theoretical possibility that, as in the case of Virgil, his relationship with his emperor was important to him. It could be argued that Valerius’ pleas for support from the Flavians argue for a similar relationship, but there is an important difference between seeking the Flavians’ support for a mythical epic and laying claim to a future epic on Domitian’s achievements. As I have pointed out elsewhere,3 there is a remarkable symmetry between Aeneid 1.1-304 and Thebaid 1.1-311: Aeneid 1 Thebaid 1 1-33 Prologue Prologue 1-45 34-49 Juno’s anger Oedipus’ anger 46-5 50-64 Aeolus’ cave Prayer to Tisiphone 56-87 65-80 Prayer to Aeolus, and his response Description of Tisiphone 88-113 81-222 Effect of Aeolus’ intervention Effect of Tisiphone’s intervention 197-302 223-296 Divine Council Divine Council 197-302 297-304 Mercury sent to earth Mercury sent to earth 303-311 pattern requires further analysis. Some critics are content to record echoes from one poem to another without establishing whether a reader who notices the echo will enjoy a better appreciation of what he is reading. Others will argue that any resemblance between two works must be, in some sense, significant. My own position is that the onus of proof resides with those who wish to argue for the significance of any particular resemblance; at the same time, however, this may be an opportune moment to suggest that the ancients were accustomed to frequent readings of the same work and that many important features of their literature could not possibly have been appreciated on a first reading. Much of the analysis here is based on these assumptions. Both poems start with a prologue; the Aeneids ends with the ringing words tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem (1.33: How great an effort it was to found the Roman race); the Thebaid s with: atque alio Capaneus horrore canendus (1.45: and Capaneus to be sung with quite another shudder). The noble Virgilian words, implicitly imposing a duty on the Romans of Virgil’s day to live their lives mindful of the sacrifices of their ancestors, give way to an allusion to Capaneus, perhaps the most impious of the Seven (e.g. superum contemptor 3.602). Immediately after these words,

55 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

both poets launch into their story proper, Virgil giving us, very briefly, Aeneas at sea with his men sailing happily (laeti) in Sicilian waters (1.34-5), though, admittedly, the happiness will be short­ lived, followed by a longer section on Juno’s anger that she alone of the goddesses cannot protect her favourites, the Trojans (1.36-49). Statius gives us no one who is laetus even for the shortest time, only Oedipus, recently self-blinded and soon to start a vendetta against his sons. The contrast is striking and is reinforced by the very first word of Statius’ narrative - impia - which must remind us of the Aeneids obsession with pietas: impia iam merita scrutatus lumina dextra merserat aeterna damnatum nocte pudorem Oedipodes longaque animam sub morte trahebat. illum indulgentem tenebris imaeque recessu sedis inaspectos caelo radiisque penates seruantem tamen adsiduis circumuolat alis saeua dies animi, scelerumque in pectore Dirae. tunc uacuos orbes, crudum ac miserabile uitae supplicium, ostentat caelo manibusque cruentis pulsat inane solum saeuaque ita uoceprecatur: (1.46-55) He had already probed at his impious eyes with his guilty right hand and plunged his condemned shame in eternal night, had Oedipus, and he was dragging his life out in a long death. He embraced the shadows and in a recess deep in his dwelling kept his penates unseen by sky or sunlight, yet, with persistent wings, the cruel day of the soul flew round him, and in his breast were the Furies of his crime. Then he showed his empty orbs, the raw and pitiable punishment of his life, to the sky and with bloody hands beat the empty earth and in a savage voice prayed thus: Virgil’s Juno had explained why she was angry, Oedipus reveals only the intensity of his anger, not, beyond general unhappiness with his family, its cause. In Virgil’s next two sections (Aen. 1.50-64 and 65-80), we meet first an account of Aeolus controlling the winds, in accordance with a constitutional arrangement set up by Jupiter himself, followed by Juno’s apparently reasonable request to Aeolus to assist her by sinking Aeneas’ ships, a request which Aeolus sees as his duty to obey, not least because Juno promises him a wife if he complies. Statius’ corresponding sections are, again, very different. Oedipus appeals, not to Aeolus but to Tisiphone and the powers of the underworld (1.56-87), and the following description is not of Aeolus but of Tisiphone herself (1. 88-113). Oedipus’ prayer is unashamedly wicked, and in that respect too, rather different from Juno’s appeal to Aeolus: ‘di, sontes animas angustaque Tartara poenis qui regitis, tuque umbrifero Styx liuida fundo, quam uideo, multumque mihi consueta uocari adnue, Tisiphone, peruersaque uota secunda: si bene quid merui, si me de matre cadentem fouisti gremio et traiectum uulnere plantas firmasti, si stagna peti Cirrhaea bicorni

56 D . E. H ill - S ta tiu s' debt to V irgil interfusa iugo, possem cum degere falso contentus Polybo, trifidaeque in Phocidos arto longaeuum implicui regem secuique trementis ora senis, dum quaero patrem, si Sphingos iniquae callidus ambages te praemonstrante resolui, si dulces furias et lamentabile matris conubium gauisus ini noctemque nefandam saepe tuli natosque tibi, scis ipsa, paraui, mox auidus poenae digitis caedentibus ultro incubui miseraque oculos in matre reliqui: exaudi, si digna precor, quaeque ipsa furenti subiceres. orbum uisu regnisque carentem non regere aut dictis maerentem flectere adorti, quos genui quocumque toro; quin ecce superbi --pro dolor!--et nostro iamdudum funere reges insultant tenebris gemitusque odere paternos. hisne etiam funestus ego? et uidet ista deorum ignauus genitor? tu saltem debita uindex huc ades et totos in poenam ordire nepotes. indue quod madidum tabo diadema cruentis unguibus abripui, uotisque instincta paternis i media in fratres, generis consortia ferro dissiliant. da, Tartarei regina barathri, quod cupiam uidisse nefas, nec tarda sequetur mens iuuenum: modo digna ueni, mea pignora nosces. ’ (1.56-87)

Gods, you who rule guilty spirits and mean Tartarus with punishments, and you, Styx, whom I see livid in your shady depths, and you, very used to being called upon by me, nod, Tisiphone, and favour my perverse prayers: if I have deserved anything, if you cherished me in your bosom as I dropped from my mother, and if you strengthened me when I was transfixed through my feet, if I sought the Carrhaean ponds flowing between the two-peaked ridge, when I could have lived content with false Polybus, and if in a narrow place of three-road Phocis grasped the long-lived king and cut the head of the trembling old man, while I was seeking my father, if I cleverly solved the riddles of the unjust Sphinx, with you to show the way, if I gladly entered upon the sweet passions and lamentable marriage with my mother, and often spent a guilty night, and made sons for you, as you know yourself, and if soon, eager for punishment, I fell deliberately upon my cutting fingers, and left my eyes on my wretched mother: hear me, if I am praying worthily and for the sort of thing you yourself would supply to a madman. I was deprived of sight, lacking a kingdom, but they did not try to direct or distract me in my grief with words, those whom I had begotten in whatever bed; no, instead, look, proud ones

57 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

- O grief - and by my disaster kings for some time now, they mock my blindness and hate their father’s groans. Even to them am I unclean? And does the idle father of the gods see this? You at least, my deserved avenger, come here and line up all my descendants for punishment. Put on the diadem wet with gore that I snatched off with bloody hands, and, driven by a father’s prayers, go in amongst the brothers, and with a sword let the family’s partnership fly apart. Grant, queen of Tartarus’ pit, the evil that I have wanted to have seen, and not slowly will the mind of the young men follow; only come worthily, and you will know my offspring.’ It is not easy to imagine a more dramatic opening to an epic poem than a speech from the blind Oedipus begging the infernal gods to bring down punishment upon his sons. Notice how, unlike Juno’s address to Aeolus, this request is candidly presented as nothing other than blatant evil. The arrangement of the speech is very striking; as is not uncommon in prayers, it starts with an amazingly complex sentence with a host of si clauses (56-74) but it is the content, not the form of these clauses, that startles the reader; after a complex but much shorter sentence (74-8), there follow three quite brief sentences (79-81) and a much more conventional conclusion (82-7). A few details will sharpen the argument: 58 multumque mihi consueta uocari: it is indeed a disturbing thought that it is not some sudden whim that has made Oedipus turn to Tisiphone, she has become the constant focus of his devotions. 59 Tisiphone: one of the Dirae; according to Fordyce (on Virg. Aen. 7.324ff.), their original function was to punish sin, but at least as early as the Aeneid, ‘their concern is provoking strife, not punishing guilt’, for which he cites Juno’s words when she is trying to persuade not Aeolus but Allecto (another of the Dirae) to do her wicked bidding: tu potes unanimos armare in proelia fratres (Aen. 7.335). In the Aeneid, the brothers are merely theoretical if striking examples of Allecto’s ability to create strife; in the Thebaid, the strife to be created is between specific brothers, Eteocles and Polynices. 60 si bene quid merui: this is an example of the fact that it is not just Aeneid 1 that has contributed to this speech. The echoing here of Dido’s si bene quid de te merui (Aen. 4.317) in her passionate plea to Aeneas must bring into the sharpest contrast the monstrous difference between her state and that of Oedipus. As we shall see, Dido is frequently invoked here. 60-72 Oedipus attributes to Tisiphone every significant event in his life from his birth to his self blinding. This is, of course, a perversion of the normal prayer where the supplicant lists all previous benefits received from the god to whom the prayer is addressed. A ‘perversion’ because here the ‘benefits’ are all evil. 61 fouisti gremio: it is striking that such an action, normally attributed to a mother or someone who would like to be a mother (compare Aen. 1.718, where Dido fondles Cupid disguised as Ascanius: interdum gremio fouet inscia Dido), should here have been performed by Tisiphone, especially after de matre cadentem. The circumstances of Oedipus’ early childhood were, of course, unusual. 1.63 degere: sc. uitam of a happy life he could have spent with Polybus, which is to be compared with Aen. 4.550-1 uitam / degere of a happy life forbidden to Dido. 67 callidus...te praemonstrante: even when he is acknowledging the assistance of Tisiphone, Oedipus’ notorious pride drives him to call himself callidus.

58 D . E. H ill - S ta tiu s' debt to V irgil

71-72 digitis caedentibus.. .incubui: incumbo is the uoxpropria for falling on one’s sword (OLD s.v. 4b); how falling on one’s digitis caedentibus could be effective becomes clear only in the next clause with the mention of his eyes left on his unhappy mother.

80 ignauus: note the position in the line occupied by this key word. This is a first hint of the contempt in which Jupiter is held throughout the Thebaid. Normally, an expression of this sort leads to action by the addressee (e.g. Iarbas’ words at Virg. Aen. 4.206-210: Iuppiter omnipotens...aspicis haec?); here, however, the contempt for Jupiter, so different from the tone of Virgil’s Juno, explains why Oedipus turns to Tisiphone and not to him.

As indicated above, the description of Tisiphone which follows (1.88-113) is suitably disturbing and in great contrast to the corresponding passage in the Aeneid, the description of Aeolus’ cave (1.50-64), a model of constitutional government. Of course, Virgil’s Juno is abusing her power and his Aeolus is a fawning toady, but these are the kind of faults that the best regulated societies will, from time to time, encounter and have mechanisms to correct; Statius’ Tisiphone, on the other hand, is the very embodiment of evil persuaded into unimaginable evil by a depraved Oedipus. The effect of Aeolus’ intervention is a dreadful storm that terrifies Aeneas and scatters his ships (1.81-124), followed by an intervention by Neptune, who rebukes Aeolus for exceeding his authority and restores calm, thus reinforcing the impression we have received that there is fundamentally order in the world, even though it can sometimes be challenged (1.125-56). Virgil then turns our attention to Aeneas, who finds a safe harbour in Libya and resumes control of those of his men who are not still scattered elsewhere (1.157-222). The effect of Tisiphone’s intervention is to fill the minds of Polynices and Eteocles with poison. The policy of alternating power breaks down at the end of the first year and the people, represented by a single unnamed individual (aliquis 1.171), have no time for either of their rulers (1.114-96). The contrast with the corresponding Virgilian section could hardly be greater. From Virgil we learn that a robust constitution has ways of dealing with breakdown; from Statius we learn that a weak constitution is powerless against the forces of evil.

Both poems now present us with a Divine Council. In the Virgilian version, Jupiter looks down from heaven and notices Aeneas’ troubles (1.223-6); before he can react, he is approached by his daughter, Venus, complaining about Aeneas’ suffering, doubting Jupiter’s earlier promises, and contrasting the happy state of Antenor with the plight of Aeneas and his men (1.227-53). Jupiter’s response is to reaffirm his promises and to give a ringing prediction of Rome’s future, a future that Virgil’s readers will recognize as, indeed, the history of the Rome they know (1.254-96). Once again we are in an orderly universe. It was, of course, precisely that sort of contrast between Virgil and Statius that persuaded earlier critics to dismiss Statius’ work, whereas, if I am right, it is an essential part of his strategy. Statius’ Jupiter, on the other hand, calls a council for no apparent reason, lectures to it on the incorrigibility of humans, with copious examples, and then petulantly announces that he will punish Argos and Thebes, Argos because of their frightful history starting with Tantalus, and Thebes because of Oedipus’ defiling sins (1.197-247). Juno tries very hard to make him change his mind, but without success (1.248-82). The section ends with Jupiter’s prediction of a future very different from that predicted by Virgil’s Jupiter; Virgil’s Jupiter (Aen. 1.257-96) predicts the inexorable rise of Rome culminating in the triumph of pietas over furor; Statius’ Jupiter (Theb. 1.214-47) predicts the shameful destruction of the Theban royal family. Jupiter then sends Mercury down to find Laius’ ghost and to send him up from the underworld to poison the hearts of Polynices and Eteocles by persuading Eteocles not to relinquish the kingdom at the end of his first year (1.283-302). Virgil’s Jupiter was an effective ruler of a reasonably well organized world; Statius’ Jupiter is petulant and

59 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8 ineffective; he appears to know nothing of what the reader knows; in particular, he does not know that his interference on earth has already been anticipated by Tisiphone. Virgil’s Mercury is sent to ensure that Dido and her people receive Aeneas generously (1.297-304); Statius merely relates Mercury’s traditional function to accompany the dead (1.303-11); the reader must wait for the beginning of Book 2 to learn any more of what he does. At this point, the close structural symmetry between the Aeneid and the Thebaid ends, but Statius’ readers have surely been alerted to the fact that there is a significant contrast between the two epics, so that, to achieve a full understanding, the reader must remember the former when reading the latter. Polynices, expelled from Thebes, makes his way towards Argos (1.312-35). Since he is the injured party, it might be expected that he would be treated sympathetically by Statius, in spite of his usual depiction in the literature. However, as I show elsewhere in detail,4 this passage uses a wide range of allusions to associate Polynices with the very worst figures of Greek mythology. There is, however, no particular allusion to Virgil. Next, we encounter a great storm scene following immediately after a passage of intense calm (1.336-41): sed nec puniceo rediturum nubila caelo promisere iubar, nec rarescentibus umbris longa repercusso nituere crepuscula Phoebo: densior a terris et nulli peruia flammae subtexit nox atra polos. iam claustra rigentis Aeoliae percussa sonant, uenturaque rauco ore minatur hiems, uenti transuersa frementes confligunt axemque emoto cardine uellunt, dum caelum sibi quisque rapit; sed plurimus Auster inglomerat noctem, tenebrosa uolumina torquens, defunditque imbres sicco quos asper hiatu praesolidat Boreas; nec non abrupta tremescunt fulgura, et attritus subita face rumpitur aether. iam Nemea, iam Taenariis contermina lucis Arcadiae capita alta madent; ruit agmine magno Inachus et gelidas surgens Erasinus in undas. puluerulenta prius calcandaque flumina nullae aggeribus tenuere morae, stagnoque refusa est funditus et ueteri spumauit Lerna ueneno. frangitur omne nemus, rapiunt antiqua procellae bracchia siluarum, nullisque aspecta per aeuum solibus umbrosi patuere aestiua Lycaei. ille tamen, modo saxa iugis fugientia ruptis miratus, modo nubigenas e montibus amnes aure pauens passimque insano turbine raptas pastorum pecorumque domos, non segnius amens incertusque uiae per nigra silentia uastum haurit iter; pulsat metus undique et undique frater, ac uelut hiberno deprensus nauita ponto, cui neque Temo piger neque amico sidere monstrat Luna uias, medio caeli pelagique tumultu

60 D . E. H ill - S ta tiu s' debt to V irgil

stat rationis inops, iam iamque aut saxa malignis expectat summersa uadis aut uertice acuto spumantes scopulos erectae incurrere prorae: talis opaca legens nemorum Cadmeius heros accelerat, uasto metuenda umbone ferarum excutiens stabula, et prono uirgulta refringit pectore (dat stimulos animo uis maesta timoris) donec ab Inachiis uicta caligine tectis emicuit lucem deuexa in moenia fundens Larisaeus apex. illo spe concitus omni euolat, hinc celsae Iunonia templa Prosymnae laeuus habens, hinc Herculeo signata uapore Lernaei stagna atra uadi, tandemque reclusis infertur portis. actutum regia cernit uestibula; hic artus imbri uentoque rigentes proicit ignotaeque adclinis postibus aulae inuitat tenues ad dura cubilia somnos. (1.342-89)

But neither did clouds in a red sky promise returning sunshine, nor did a long twilight with reducing shadows shine from reflected Phoebus: black night, penetrable by no flame and thicker nearer the earth, covered the sky. Now the prisons of frozen Aeolia are struck and sound out, and the storm to come threatens with hoarse mouth, the roaring cross winds collide and pluck at the pole, its hinge removed, while each seizes the sky for himself; but mostly it is the Auster that doubles the night, twisting the shaded whirlpools, and pours down rainstorms which harsh Boreas solidifies with his dry mouth; also sudden lightnings quiver, and the ether chafed by a sudden flash is broken. Now Nemea, now the high peaks of Arcadia next to the Taenarian groves are drenched; the Inachus rushes in a great column as does the Erasinus rising into cold waves. Rivers, dusty before and to be trampled on, could now not be restrained by delaying dykes, and the Lerna, flooded deeply from its pools, and foamed with ancient poison. Every glade was broken, gales snatched the ancient branches of the woods and, seen through the ages by no suns, the summers of shadowed Lycaeus lay open. But he [Polynices], now wondering at rocks fleeing from the broken ridges, now made by his ear fearful of cloud-born rivers from the mountains, and the houses of shepherds and flocks snatched by the mad storm on every side, distraught, slowly no more and uncertain of the way, devours his vast journey through black silences; fear from every side drove him and from every side his brother. And just as a sailor caught in a stormy sea,

61 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

to whom neither the sluggish Plough nor the Moon with her friendly shine shows the way, stays in the middle of the tumult of sky and sea, bereft of strategy and now, now expects either reefs submerged in treacherous shallows or foaming rocks with sharp tops to run into his upturned prow: even so, the Cadmean hero picking out the dark parts of the glades, hurries on, shaking out the fearful lairs of wild beasts with his huge shield boss, and breaks through the thickets with breast turned down (the sad force of fear gives goads to his spirit) until, with darkness overcome by the Inachian houses, the Larisaean peak shone out pouring light onto the sloping walls. To there, excited by every hope, he flies, on this side keeping the temple of Juno of high Prosymna to the left, on the other side the dark pools of the Lernaean waters marked by Hercules’ heat, and, at last, he is brought in to the opened gates. Immediately, he sees the king’s forecourt; here he throws down his body stiff from rain and wind, and leaning on the doors of the unfamiliar palace he summons light sleep to his hard bed. The reader will see that though the strict structural paralleli sm between the Aeneid and the Thebaid has come to an end, the connection between the two epics foreshadowed at Silvae 4 and trumpeted at the end of the Thebaid, is still fully engaged. There is indeed, in these storm scenes, a complex interplay of similarities. In the Aeneid (1.81-123), the storm is a direct result of Juno’s anger and her instructions to Aeolus. In the Thebaid, no cause is postulated, the storm simply happens. We are subtly reminded of this point by claustra.Aeoliae (1.346-7: the prisons of Aeolia) which reminds us of the Virgilian Aeolus, but forces us to acknowledge that he has no role to play in this storm. In both epics, however, the storm advances the plot. In the Aeneid, it led on to Aeneas’ encounter with Dido, in the Thebaid, it started a chain of events which led to the friendship between Polynices and Tydeus. But, because the storm had no expressed causation, we are entitled to presume that that friendship is part of no plan. At 1.370-5, Statius gives us a storm at sea, also with no apparent cause, as a simile. This must underline the fact that Virgil’s Book 1 storm was at sea, Statius’ on land. However, Virgil himself provides a precedent for blurring the distinction. At Aeneid 1.124, during Virgil’s sea storm, we read interea magno misceri murmure pontum and at 4.160, interea magno misceri murmure caelum. This to introduce the land storm engineered by Venus at Aen. 4.120, a storm which drives Aeneas and Dido into the cave and cements their relationship. Once again, we see the contrast between Statius’ storm with no cause or instigator and Virgil’s, a result of Venus’ scheming, and important for the development of the plot. In both cases, however, the distinction between storm at sea and storm on land is blurred. In Virgil’s case, both types advance the plot and share one near identical line; Statius’ land storm includes a simile based on a storm at sea. Thus similarity and difference are, in both authors, inextricably bound together. So far, we have concentrated on the relationship between Thebaid 1 and Aeneid 1. Next, however, we need to turn our attention to the beginning of the second half of the Aeneid, in Book 7. There we meet Latinus, a noble but old king, who is seeking a husband for his only daughter, Lavinia. Two striking portents, a swarm of bees predicting, according to a prophet, an approaching army, and Lavinia’s hair catching fire, persuaded Latinus to consult Faunus, who, after elaborate ceremonies, forbade Latinus to marry his daughter to a local man and predicted a glorious future for her descendants if she married the correct stranger. The elaborate nature of these portents made them seem authentic and, in any case,

62 D . E. H ill - S ta tiu s' debt to V irgil

Virgil’s readership, with the benefit of hindsight, knew that they were authentic. Similarly, with Polynices apparently safely asleep in the forecourt of Adrastus’ palace, Statius gives us a brief description of the king, revealing him to be very like Latinus and in a similar predicament: rex ibi, tranquillae medio de limite uitae in senium uergens, populos Adrastus habebat, diues auis et utroque Iouem de sanguine ducens. hic sexus melioris inops sedprole uirebat feminea, gemino natarum pignore fultus. cui Phoebus generos (monstrum exitiabile dictu! mox adapertafides) fato ducente canebat saetigerumque suem etfuluum aduentare leonem. id uoluens non ipse pater, non docte futuri Amphiarae uides, etenim uetat auctor Apollo. tantum in corde sedens aegrescit cura parenti. (1.390-400) The king, Adrastus, passing from the middle limit of his peaceful life into old age, was ruling the people there, rich in ancestors and tracing his ancestry to Jove on both sides. He lacked children of the better sex but flourished5 with female offspring, propped up by a double pledge of daughters. Phoebus prophesied to him (a deadly portent to say! But soon its truth was revealed) that sons-in-law, with fate to lead, were approaching, a bristling pig and a tawny lion. Turning this over, not the father himself, not you, Amphiaraus, learned about the future, understands; for its source, Apollo, forbids. Only his care, sitting in his heart, grows sick in the father. Once again, similarity and contrast are intertwined. Both kings are noble, both have a daughter, or daughters, whom they wish to marry off, both receive portents. Latinus, however, is given clear and auspicious portents and the reader knows that what has been predicted will take place. The divine intervention is purposeful. Adrastus, on the other hand, is left in uncomfortable ignorance. Apollo refuses to allow either the king or Amphiaraus, his priest/prophet, to know what the portents mean, nor is there any sense that we are witnessing the working out of some great divine plan. Readers who know the mythology or who have read the epic before will know that the rest of this old king’s life will be neither ‘peaceful’ (tranquilla), nor long. There then follows an account of Tydeus’ flight from his native Calydon through the same storm suffered by Polynices and his arrival at the same shelter as his (1.401-7), followed by a savage fight between the two young men (1.408-30), until it is stopped by Adrastus, woken from his nocturnal sleep by the brawl outside (1.431-46). At first they continue their quarrel, but only with words (1.447-51), then Tydeus tries to justify himself at some length and ends with an account of his ancestry (1.451-65). Polynices’ reply starts with an attempt to give his ancestry in return, but the need to mention Oedipus silences him almost before he can start (1.465-7). Adrastus then calms them down and takes them into his palace predicting that they may even become friends, a prediction which, as Statius himself says, was to be fulfilled (1.468-81). Next Adrastus notices a lion’s skin on Polynices’ shoulders and a boar’s skin on Tydeus’, which, naturally, he interprets with joy as the fulfilment of Apollo’s portent (1.482-97). Our sense of unease on his behalf, however, is not alleviated when he turns to a god to give extravagant praise to and chooses Night because it was at night that he found his sons-in-law (1.482-509). The general associations of Night are bad enough, but we have not forgotten the close association between Oedipus and Night:

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merserat aeterna damnatum nocte pudorem (1.47) noctemque nefandam / saepe tuli (1.69-70) Adrastus becomes ever more enthusiastic in his praise of Night. Note in particular, during his address to Night, the opening word, (Nox 1.498) and, a little further on: semper honoratam dimensis orbibus anni te [Noctem] domus ista colet; nigri tibi, diua, litabunt electa ceruice greges... Always in the measured circles of the year will that house worship you [Night]; black herds with choice necks, goddess, will be sacrificed to you. Our sense of foreboding is strengthened when we remember that black animals are sacrificed only to the denizens of the Underworld. Dido, in her preparations for entertaining Aeneas, had organized a magnificent sacrifice of twenty bulls, a hundred hogs and a hundred lambs, none of them, we should guess, black (Aen. 1.634-5). Just as Dido holds a cheerful banquet for Aeneas and his men at the end ofAeneid 1, so Adrastus holds a banquet full of foreboding to welcome the two strangers; during the festivities, the king’s two daughters are brought down to see, and to be seen by, the two strangers who, it seems, are the fulfilment of Apollo’s riddling prediction. So both banquets sow the seeds of possible marriages to come; in the case of Aeneas and Dido, the marriage never properly happens and ends in safety for the Roman dream, and tragedy for her but not for him; in the case of Adrastus and his daughters, the marriages did take place but with disastrous consequences for all concerned. At the end of the banquet, libations are poured to all the gods, especially Apollo, from an ancient cup elaborately decorated with lifelike images of Perseus and the Gorgon’s head, and of Ganymede snatched away by an eagle (1.542-56), not, perhaps, the most auspicious images possible. Dido’s silverware too was heavily decorated, not with sinister images but with fortiafacta patrum (Aen. 1.641). Adrastus then explains why his people worship Apollo (1.557-668). The dreadful story reinforces our sense that this epic does not celebrate good government either in heaven or on earth. I have discussed it in detail elsewhere;6 suffice it to say here that it develops the idea that Apollo, and probably the other Olympians, are utterly amoral. Critics have recognized many respects in which the incidents described seem to relate to aspects of Oedipus’ own unhappy story; some of these alleged parallels are probably no more than the inevitable overlaps when similar stories are rehearsed; others seem more plausible, but since I have nothing to add to my 1990 analysis of this section, I shall say no more here, except that a city which has as its central cult the most flawed Apollo imaginable will inevitably seem to be destined for disaster. Before the libations to Apollo are completed, Adrastus asks the two strangers to identify themselves (1.668-9); before Tydeus can comply, Adrastus reveals that he has already overheard the answer (1.669­ 72). This leaves Polynices exposed and so, nervously and apologetically, he identifies himself (1.673-81). This enables Adrastus to reveal that he, and indeed the whole world, knows the story of Oedipus, echoing Dido’s words to Aeneas. Compare those: ‘soluite corde metum, Teucri, secludite curas.

quis genus Aeneadum, quis Troiae nesciat urbem, uirtutesque uirosque aut tanti incendia belli? non obtunsa adeo gestamus pectora Poeni, nec tam auersus equos Tyria Sol iungit ab u r b e .’ (Aen. 1.562, 565-68)

64 D . E. H ill - S ta tiu s' debt to V irgil with Adrastus’ words: tum motus Adrastus hospitiis (agnouit enim): ‘quidnota recondis? scimus ’ ait ‘nec sic auersum fama Mycenis uoluit iter. regnum et furias oculosque pudentes nouit et Arctois si quis de solibus horret quique bibit Gangen aut nigrum occasibus intrat Oceanum et si quos incerto litore Syrtes destituunt... ’ (1.681-8) Then Adrastus, moved to hospitality (for he recognized him), said: ‘Why hide what is known? We know and fame does not roll its way so far from Mycenae. The kingdom and the madness and the shameful eyes are known to anyone who shivers in the Arctic sun and to anyone who drinks the Ganges or enters black Ocean in the West and to those who have been left by the Syrtes on an uncertain sh o re.’ But whereas Dido’s hospitality was excited by her knowledge of Aeneas’ great reputation, Adrastus’ hospitality was offered in spite of the shameful background suffered by Polynices, son of Oedipus. The book ends with an elaborate hymn to Apollo which, given all that we have seen of Apollo, fills the reader with foreboding. I hope that I have shown that Statius, in his Thebaid, is setting up an epic to respond in detail to Virgil’s and that his account is deeply pessimistic when compared to Virgil’s. To those of you who, to any degree, take what is popularly known as the Harvard position, that is, that the Aeneid is itself pessimistic, I have two responses. First, I personally see in the Aeneid admiration for the privations suffered by those who have contributed to creating a modern Rome and to confidence in its future, but no pessimism. Secondly, that since Statius’ epic is so manifestly more pessimistic than Virgil’s, it is evident that if we find the Aeneid bleak, we shall be even more horrified by the pessimism of the Thebaid. That of course inevitably moves on to what might be called the Ahl theory, i.e. that Statius and others produce material at two levels, one which to the tyrant will seem to be flattery, but to the cognoscenti will be obvious ridicule.

University o f Newcastle upon Tyne D. E. HILL

NOTES

1 In Shackleton Bailey’s new Loeb Statius, volume 2, pp. 10-24. 2 During the struggle between Vespasian and Vitellius in 69, the eighteen-year-old Domitian took refuge in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, according to Suetonius Dom. 1.2. Elsewhere (Silv. 5.3.195-204), Statius records a much more flattering account of the battle, reporting that his father had intended to write a poem on the subject. See also Tac. Hist. 3.69-75. 3 Hill, D.E. (1990) ‘Statius’ Thebaid: a glimmer of light in a sea of darkness’, in A.J. Boyle, ed. The Imperial Muse: Flavian Epicist to Claudian (Bendigo) 98-118 4 Hill (1990) 106-7 5 ‘flourished’; the Latin word uirebat may be chosen for its punning effect with the word uir ‘a man’ as opposed to ‘a woman’. 6 Hill (1990) 113-15.

65 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

Achates: Faithful Friend or Poetic Fraud?

A paper given to the Virgil Society on 22 October 2005

[Halsey] became, in Weaver’s phrase, [Margaret Thatcher’s] fidus Achates - her faithful companion - accompanying her on visits to schools and conferences, trusted completely and with whom she could relax. John Campbell 1

chates’ reputation, as the quotation above suggests, has stood the test of time remarkably well. If a political biographer writing at the start of the third millennium can find a reference Ato Achates sufficiently meaningful to be worth mentioning to his readers, then the character might well be considered a success. Scholars too have succumbed to the charms of Achates. In his preface to The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, Martindale conceives of the book as a fidus Achates2 And yet on anything but the most superficial examination, there is a strong suspicion that Achates’ much vaunted reputation is undeserved. He is described as fidus, fortis and magnus, yet a survey of the evidence reveals that he does remarkably little, and says even less, to justify these epithets. He is presented as Aeneas’ friend and confidant, yet he takes very little part in the action, is spoken to by Aeneas only twice and himself speaks only once (a speech of four lines). We discover very little of what he is thinking, feeling or doing, and neither Aeneas nor any other character pays much attention to him. It is hard to avoid the thought that Achates amounts to a lot less than he is made out to be, that he is a literary impostor, a trick played on a trusting (and perhaps complacent) audience.

DOUBTS ABOUT ACHATES’ FIDELITAS

Critics have had their doubts. Williams calls Achates ‘a very colourless figure’ .3 Lee says he is “so dimly sketched by Virgil as almost to be Aeneas’ shadow”.4 For Weber, he is the least characterized figure for the number of appearances he makes in the whole poem. He has no separate destiny like Palinurus or Misenus, no independence like Ilioneus, no significance as a forefather like Mnestheus or Sergestus.

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He has no past, no heredity. His social position remains unclear. We are not told what he looks like or how old he is. He has no personal history whatever.5 There is also a striking imbalance between his appearances in Book 1 and in the rest of the poem. This imbalance is heightened since his biggest scene (the arrival of Aeneas at Dido’s court), and the only one in which he speaks, takes place in Book 1. For the rest of the poem, he plays an entirely peripheral part. Even when he is wounded, it is only a light wound (10.344).

A brief inspection of a list of Achates’ appearances (see appendix) soon reveals how desperately thin his role is. He is mentioned 11 times in Book 1, and only nine times in the remaining 11 books (Book 3, once; Book 6, twice; Book 8, three times; Book 10, twice; and Book 12, twice). He is described as fidus five times, fortis once, and magnus once.6 He is spoken to, by Aeneas, twice (1.459-63 and 10.333-5), and he speaks once only, to Aeneas (1.582-5). He makes his entrance at 1.120 where, along with three fellow captains, Ilioneus, Abas and Aletes, his ship is being buffeted by Juno’s storm. He is given the epithet fortis but otherwise is not introduced. When the Trojans land on the Libyan shore 50 lines later, he lights a fire (1.174) and shortly after is on hand to provide Aeneas with a bow and arrows. When Aeneas sets out to explore the place, he takes Achates with him. They meet Venus, who provides them with a protective cloud, and then proceed to Carthage, where they come across the Temple of Juno. Gazing at the story of the fall of Troy depicted within the temple, Aeneas shares his sorrowful thoughts with Achates (1.459-63), the only time, apart from 10.333-5, that he is directly addressed. Dido then makes her entrance and Aeneas and Achates are overjoyed to see, from their cloud, their friends arrive at court (1.513). Seeing the warm welcome they receive, Achates, in the only speech (a mere four lines) Virgil gives him, urges Aeneas to quit the cloud and reveal himself (1.582-5). After an exchange of greetings, Aeneas sends Achates back to the ships to fetch Ascanius and gifts for Dido (1.643-44) and he returns, 40 or so lines later, with Cupid in the guise of Ascanius (1.695). The next mention of Achates is at 3.523, when he is credited with being the first Trojan to sight Italy after their long wanderings. He then disappears until Book 6, where at 6.34 he arrives with the Sibyl as the Trojans admire the Temple of Apollo at Cumae. Then, at 6.158, he is shown leaving the cave of the Sibyl with Aeneas as they discuss who the dead comrade might be of whom the Sibyl has spoken. His next appearance is in Book 8 when he accompanies Aeneas on his visit to King Evander at Pallanteum. He is mentioned three times (8.466, 8.521 and 8.586). He then disappears again until re-surfacing by the side of Aeneas in the middle of the fighting in Book 10. At 10.332, Aeneas asks him to pile up javelins, and a few lines later, at 10.344, he is wounded when an arrow aimed at Aeneas misses its intended target. His next and final appearance is at 12.384, where he kills Epulo, a total unknown.

ACHATES DEFENDED

Faced with this sort of difficulty, various critics have rallied to the cause of defending Achates. While conceding that his role may be limited, Eubanks argues that he is nevertheless an important character who plays the sympathetic companion to a rather lonely Aeneas and who elicits our sympathy for the hero. Where Aeneas is pius, Achates is fidus: “His actions are minor. But he is the faithful companion who is with his friend at important moments.”7 Speranza claims that he is an inseparable companion/ confidant who always appears at decisive moments.8 Lossau sees Achates as a symbolic companion figure, a complement to Palinurus. Palinurus is the Odyssean element, drifting, representing the sea. Achates is Iliadic, representing land - he conquers and stays.9 Revesz suggests that Achates may stand for Agrippa and that his role may have been limited at Augustus’ request.10 Lee, while conceding the shadowiness of the character, speculates that

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The mysterious Achates may be Virgil’s equivalent to that companion given heroes in stories the world over, always dutiful (Patroclus), often silent (Pylades), usually of inferior social standing (Sancho Panza) or intelligence (Dr Watson).. .Though in almost every case the companion is of little practical help to the hero, his traits are complementary.11 Weber makes the most extensive defence of Achates. He argues that Aeneas and Achates are an archetype of the ‘pair’. Roman history is not the history of one leader but of a pair. Aeneas and Achates prefigure the duality of the consulship. They are older than Romulus and Remus and their harmony, unlike the disharmony of Romulus and Remus, makes them the archetype of a true duality. The Res Romana started peacefully, and recalling that original harmony validates the Augustan set-up. It is no coincidence thatfides is a significant Augustan term for restoring old values. Achates is a sympathetic figure and that sympathy rubs off on Aeneas. He is everyman and so the reader identifies with him. As a witness of events, the reader becomes the companion of Aeneas. He educates the reader through his actions. He is a good example, who stands by his leader during the painful and difficult exercise of leadership. In turn, for the leader, he represents the led and the interests of the led.12 Achates can also be seen to stand in for Virgil himself, as faithful servant and witness.13

PROBLEMS FOR THE DEFENCE

The argument that Achates is present at important moments fails on two counts. First, he is in fact absent at many important moments. He is given no role in the story of the Fall of Troy in Book 2,14 he is not turned to for advice or support when Aeneas is struggling with his destiny in Book 4, and he takes no part in the funeral games of Book 5. Second, when he is present, in the Dido scenes in Book 1, for instance, or in the embassy to Evander in Book 8, or in the battle scenes in Books 10 and 12, his presence is a tenuous one. Throughout the poem, he does and says nothing of any significance and nothing of any significance happens to him. Indeed, he is barely present at all. Arguments for his roles as elicitor of sympathy for Aeneas, witness of the action, and stand-in for audience or poet fall before the same objection. How can he be said to fulfil these roles given his absence as a character? Lossau’s suggestion of a symbolic role alongside Palinurus also fails to convince. It is not clear how Lossau reconciles the notion that Palinurus represents the Odyssean companion and Achates the Iliadic with the fact that Achates makes his biggest impact in Book 1, which lies within the Odyssean half of the story. And the question remains - even if the symbolism is intended, is it achieved? The argument that the Aeneas/Achates partnership prefigures the new harmony of the Augustan settlement suffers from the drawback that if that is what was intended, it would only serve to highlight the fact that this harmony was based on the complete self-abnegation of one half of the partnership. This was indeed the nature of the arrangement, but Augustus went to great lengths to preserve the appearances of constitutional decency and it is unlikely that he would have encouraged Virgil to draw attention to the deceit. Nor, if Achates was meant to be Agrippa, would one expect Agrippa to have been flattered by the comparison. Similarly, arguments for Achates’ role as stand-in for the Trojan band, the reader, or the poet himself are compromised by the thinness of Achates’ actual presence. In fact, these arguments for a larger role for Achates only serve to point up the discrepancy between the role mapped out for him in Book 1 and the role he actually plays in the rest of the poem.

OTHER MINOR CHARACTERS

A look at other minor characters in the Aeneid does nothing to improve Achates’ situation. Lossau’s comparison of Achates with Palinurus only draws attention to how beautifully Palinurus’ character

68 S tephen M o o rby - A c h a t e s : Fa ith fu l F riend o r Po etic F r a u d ? is realised. Achates, as Aeneas’ right-hand man and confidant, making appearances throughout the poem, is on the face of it a much more important character than Palinurus. But Palinurus has the better part by far. He is the subject of an interesting, significant and touching story (5.827-71); the narrator addresses him directly (Somnus...aera dimouit...te Palinure petens 5.838-40); and Aeneas himself, in the last lines of Book 5, with all the powerful emphasis this positioning bestows, bemoans his fate (5.870-1):

‘o nimium caelo et pelago confise sereno nudus in ignota Palinure iacebis harena.’

The only time Aeneas addresses Achates in direct speech, it is to reflect generally on the sadness of life (1.459-463):

‘quis iam locus ’inquit ‘Achate, quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? en Priamus. sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. solue metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.’

We learn nothing from this speech about Achates, who remains invisible (though he does perhaps have the consolation of being the recipient of one of the most famous lines in the poem). In Book 6, Palinurus is the first shade Aeneas meets in the Underworld (6.337-83), and is thus the subject of an important allusion to Odyssey Book 11, where Odysseus, while journeying to consult Tiresias, meets Elpenor - an allusion that serves to connect Aeneas with Odysseus. And so, although a minor character, Palinurus is part of a story that is both sad and beautiful, and that has a significant part to play in the overall design of the Aeneid.

Anna is another minor character who positively sparkles when compared with Achates. As companion and character, Anna is everything Achates is not. At 4.9-29 we actually see, or rather hear, Dido confiding in Anna about her love for Aeneas. Anna responds, playing a crucial part in the unfolding drama (4.31-53):

his dictis impenso animum flammauit amore spemque dedit dubiae menti soluitque pudorem.

She is sent by Dido to plead with Aeneas not to leave (4.424). She is persuaded to build the fateful pyre (4.478-98). When she discovers that she has been tricked, she is given a moving speech, pronouncing the final words over Dido before climbing the pyre to cradle her dying sister in her arms (4.675-85). Anna plays a real and dramatic part in the story. She interacts with Dido. They talk to each other. Their fates are intertwined. Unlike with Achates, there is no gap between her intended and actual role in the poem. Her character is fully realised.15 Even Acca, companion to the warrior queen Camilla, while obviously the most minor of minor characters, is nevertheless well done in comparison to Achates. She appears twice, very briefly - at 11.821-2 where, described as fida ante alias quae sola Camillae / quicum partiri curas, she receives Camilla’s dying words, and at 11.897 where she is the bearer of Camilla’s last message to Turnus. Her part is drawn in exact proportion to her importance, a tiny but well-executed brush stroke.

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REALISM AND EPIC

Heinze, in Virgil’s Epic Technique, detects a widely felt difficulty with characterisation in the Aeneid:16 Not a single person is depicted with a unique set of characteristics as a man who once walked on this earth, once and once only; nor is any of them drawn from real life. There is a preponderance of generalised figures with an absence of individual traits and this, he says, is a weakness. But Heinze’s conception of realism is distinctly modern. It is heavily based on the emphasis placed on the individual in the modern value system and the importance this has given to a certain approach to realism in literature. In fact, all characters in any kind of literature are in some sense types, for it is this typing that allows the reader to make sense of them. With the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century, conventions of characterisation became bound up with realism and, as a result, certain expectations were generated. In ancient epic, it is reasonable to suppose that a different set of conventions and expectations is operating, conventions that have their own rationale, and which make possible a different kind of literature. It is the blurring of the boundary between what a modern reader would consider the realistic and the mythical characteristics of the hero that makes the epic hero heroic. The mixture of the heroic and the flawed is a common characteristic of literature because it allows the reader, who experiences himself as flawed, to identify with the heroic deeds of the characters and so become involved in the story. And it is this involvement that provides a lot of the pleasure in literature, since it allows the reader to escape from his time-bound, limited, contingent, mundane world into a world of imaginative possibility. Art does imitate life, but in a highly stylised way. Epic heroes, while they are ordinary men in their vices, are heroes in their virtues. They are often demi-gods and are always larger than life. In fact they are more real than real men, in the way that Plato’s ideal forms are more real than the imperfect instances we experience in our day-to-day lives. And it is by this largeness-of-life that characters in epic are to be judged. Are they inspiring? Do they say and do the things we expect and want heroes to say and do? But if these larger-than-life characters have to be judged as inspirational figures, they also have jobs to do within the story. Weber argues that to understand the characters in the Aeneid, we need to look at the part they play in the overall scheme of things.17 Clearly, within the Homeric tradition, Aeneas as hero needs a special friend, a Patroclus figure. But Virgil is re-working the tradition, not merely copying it. Where the Iliad is the story of many heroes, the Aeneid is the story of one hero, and like Aeneas himself in his unflinching devotion to his destiny, Virgil is not to be distracted from keeping his hero at the centre of that story, is not to be lured into make it anyone else’s story (not even Dido’s, and certainly not Achates’). Lavinia is another major/minor character who, like Achates, is ruthlessly made to submit to her role in the story. Doomed (or destined) to share Achates’ non-character state, she remains a shadowy and indistinct figure. Like Achates, her name is mentioned repeatedly but, like Achates, she says and does nothing. We don’t even know if she is beautiful. Two things happen to her. In Book 7, we are told that during a religious ceremony her hair caught fire, which was taken as a portent of great things to come for her, but also of war. And at 12.605, having learned that her mother, Amata, has hanged herself, she gets two lines (605-6) in which she tears her hair and scratches her cheeks. If the comparison with her mother, who is spirited and given plenty to say, is painful, the contrast with Dido couldn’t be more devastating.18 But it is Dido’s very success that makes a bigger role for Lavinia impossible. Once Dido has taken the stage, no other female character can compete in the love-interest department and Virgil wisely refrains from trying to create another Dido figure in the second half of the book. So Lavinia is sacrificed to the requirements of the story (and, one might think, accepts her fate with exemplary meekness).

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A SUCCESSFUL FRAUD?

Commenting on the scene in Book 1 where Aeneas weeps as he gazes at the story of the Fall of Troy depicted on the walls of the Temple of Juno (1.453-63), Johnson points to the ornamental aspect of Achates’ role: The ubiquitous and insubstantial Achates presumably witnesses these tears; indeed, perhaps he adds some tears of his own. We don’t know. He exists in this scene only by virtue of a vocative...in this scene, as in others, he is a heavily stylized, almost ironic epical ornament. In a sense, then, Aeneas, saeptus nebula, is alone as he gazes on the images of the desolation of his native city.19

‘Ornament’ often carries pejorative overtones, suggesting something false, or superfluous, and Johnson seems to be suggesting something similar here. But ornament, in a certain kind of literature, and especially epic, might be thought to occupy a useful and honourable role in the poet’s armoury. Concerning Virgil’s use of epithet, Moskalew writes: It is evident.. .that Vergil wishes to appear rather than be Homeric. His aim is not to reproduce the traditional epic style, but to suggest an affinity with such a style.20

Sale argues that in adopting a Homeric manner, Virgil wants to co-opt the authority of Homer to validate his subject-matter, which is mostly different from Homer’s.21 Taking up this thought, it might be said that Virgil wants to suggest the Patroclus role for Achates without actually giving it to him. And, viewed from this angle, Achates plays his part perfectly. He appears at 1.120 in the midst of the storm without any introduction beyond the epithet fidus, a character without history, quem epici graeci non commemorant (TLL)22 He enters with Ilioneus, Abas and Aletes, three other made-up characters with dubious or non-existent literary pasts who are destined to play even more minor roles than Achates.23 And yet we never feel that these characters are strangers, nor, unless we look too closely, do we ever doubt their importance. As Weber points out, Achates’ matter-of-fact appearances throughout the poem make him a basic, though illusive, character.24 The audience is made to feel as if they are on familiar territory, among stories and characters they know well.

It is possible to imagine many ways in which Virgil might have developed the Achates character. The Iliad is full of heroic companions of all stripes, from the archetypal Achilles/Patroclus relationship, and the Agamemnon/Menelaus, Odysseus/Diomedes partnerships, to the drivers of chariots and weapons carriers who follow the great. The Aeneas/Achates relationship involves an inevitable reference to Achilles and Patroclus, which only emphasises the difference. Patroclus is anything but ornamental. Although the role played by Patroclus in the Iliad is unavailable, since it reserved for Pallas, Virgil might have developed him in other ways. He might have given him more dialogue, shown him discussing the Dido situation with Aeneas, given him a bigger part in the embassy to Evander, or a bigger role in the fighting. Above all, he might have placed him at Aeneas’ side when he kills Turnus. But Virgil takes up none of these opportunities not, I would suggest, because he was a bad workman, but because he was a very good one. Jenkyns argues that Virgil learned two things from Lucretius: how to write a long poem, and how to write a long poem without characters.25 The Aeneid, he argues, unlike the Iliad, has hardly any characters with individuated personalities, but This absence.. .is related to some of Virgil’s best and most original effects. It assists his subjectivity: the concern not so much to let us see Aeneas plain as to see with him, to enter into his thoughts and feelings.

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Achates may be “a mere cipher, Ascanius mostly lifeless, and.. .Turnus not quite interesting enough to bear the emotional weight placed upon him.” But that weakness, says Jenkyns, becomes a strength in that it allows Virgil to do something new. For in the Aeneid, Virgil creates a new kind of hero - alone, above, set apart from the action. And this new kind of hero needs a new kind of friend, one who will not distract attention from his chief, a friend, one might think, truly in tune with Augustus’ new political and social arrangements. It is not that Virgil does not do minor characters well, it is that he does them in his own way, and that he knows how to keep them minor. The story of the Aeneid is the story of Rome viewed through the thoughts and feelings of Aeneas and of no one else. The job of Achates is to reflect glory on Aeneas, not to draw attention to himself. When they emerge from the cloud at 1.580, Achates is immediately forgotten as Aeneas appears resplendent os umerosque deo similis (1.589). Having served his purpose, he is of no further interest. Achates is a sort of trompe I ’oeil effect, a trick played on the reader in the interests of telling the story. He is there to add lustre to Aeneas, a semi-precious stone that Virgil polishes up until it glitters like something much more valuable. And if there is an element of deception in this, the fraud is truly poetic.

POSTSCRIPT

When the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae points out that Achates is not mentioned in the Greek epic tradition, it also notes, 'semper in fine hexametri’. And so it is. In all 21 occurrences of Achates, the name is always the last word of the line. On closer examination, Achates shares this distinctive feature with several other characters in the Aeneid. Achilles, who is mentioned 22 times, is always last. Similarly Ulixes (14), Acestes (27), and Metiscus (5). Iulus is mentioned 35 times, all but once at the line-end; Sychaeus eight times, six at the line-end. Various forms of Latinus appear 101 times, all but three at the line-end. The metrical reason for this was not immediately obvious. The natural syllable quantities are short-long-long - Achates, “which seemed to mean that it would fit almost anywhere in the line. Here was yet another mystery enveloping the elusive Achates. However, this mystery itself turns out to be an illusion. Raven points out that, in the fully developed type of hexameter used for epic and serious poetry by Cicero, Catullus, Virgil, Ovid and the post-Augustans, the false illusion of a line ending created by the " _ _ pattern (a Bacchius) was frowned on and is particularly rare.26 I am indebted to Professor Roland Mayer for pointing out the solution to this 'mystery’: uix ea fatus erat cum circumfusa repente scindit se nubes et in aethera purgat apertum. Aen. 1.586-7

APPENDIX: ACHATES’ APPEARANCES

◊ 1. 120-2 In the eye of the storm iam validam Ilionei navem, iam fortis Achatae, ...vicit hiems

◊ 1.174-5 First landing on the Libyan shore after the storm ac primum silici scintillam excudit Achates succepitque ignem foliis

◊ 1.187-8 Achates as weapons bearer constitit [Aeneas] hic arcumque manu celerisque sagittas corripuit fidus quae tela gerebat Achates

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◊ 1.312 Aeneas and Achates set out to explore - and run into Venus in disguise ipse [Aeneas] uno graditur comitatus Achate

◊ 1.459-60 They gaze at the story of the fall of Troy on the temple walls et lacrimans ‘quis iam locus’ inquit [Aeneas] ‘Achate, quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?’

◊ 1.513-5 Aeneas and Achates, watching Dido from their protective cloud, see their friends arrive at court obstipuit simul ipse [Aeneas] simul perculsus Achates laetitiaque metuque; auidi coniungere dextras ardebant sed res animos incognita turbat.

◊ 1.579-85 Aeneas and Achates, still hidden in the cloud, long to reveal themselves to Dido his animum arrecti dictis et fortis Achates et pater Aeneas iamdudum erumpere nubem ardebant. prior Aenean compellat Achates ‘nate dea, quae nunc animo sententia surgit? omnia tuta uides classem sociosque receptos. unus abest medio in fluctu quem uidimus ipsi submersum. dictis respondent cetera matris.’

◊ 1.643-56 Aeneas sends Achates back to the ships to fetch Ascanius and gifts for Dido Aeneas (neque enim patrius consistere mentem passus amor) rapidum ad navis praemittit Achaten

haec celerans iter ad naves tendebat Achates.

◊ 1.695-6 Achates returns with Cupid/Ascanius iamque ibat dicto parens et dona Cupido regia portabat Tyriis, duce laetus Achate.

◊ 3.523 They sight Italy Italiam primus conclamat Achates

◊ 6.33-5 Achates brings the Sibyl quin protinus omnia perlegerent oculis, ni iam praemissus Achates adforet atque una Phoebi Triuiaeque sacerdos

◊ 6.158-9 Aeneas and Achates leave the Sibyl’s cave and find the body of Misenus cui [Aeneas] fidus Achates it comes etparibus curis uestigia figit.

◊ 8.466 Evander and Pallas meet Aeneas and Achates filius huic Pallas, illi comes ibat Achates.

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◊ 8.520-1 Aeneas and Achates not convinced by Evander’s offer - but Venus sends a sign defixique ora tenebant Aeneas Anchisiades et fidus Achates

◊ 8.585-6 Aeneas and Achates, with Pallas in tow, leave Evander Iamque adeo exierat portis equitatus apertis Aeneas inter primos et fidus Achates

◊ 10.332-5 Aeneas and Achates in the thick of the fighting fidum Aeneas adfatur Achaten: ‘suggere tela mihi,non ullum dextera frustra torserit in Rutulos steterunt quae in corpore Graium Iliacis campis.’

◊ 10.344 Achates is wounded magnique femur perstrinxit Achatae

◊ 12.384-5 Achates and others take the wounded Aeneas back to camp interea Aenean Mnestheus et fidus Achates Ascaniusque comes castris statuere cruentum

◊ 12.459 Achates kills one of the enemy Epulonem obtruncat Achates

REFERENCES

Eubanks, L. E. (1982) “The Role of Achates: Comes fidus Achates”, Vergilius 28, 59-61. Harrison, S. J. (1991). Aeneid 10. Oxford. Heinze, R. (1999) Virgil’s Epic Technique. London. Jenkyns, R. (1998). Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History, Times, Names, and Places. Oxford. Johnson, W. R. (1976) Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid. Los Angeles. Lee, M. Owen (1979) Fathers and Sons in Virgil’s Aeneid. Albany, N.Y. Lossau, M. (1987). “Symbolfigur der Aeneis”, Hermes 115 89-99. Martindale, C. (1997) The Cambridge Companion to Virgil. Cambridge. Moskalew, W. (1982) “Formular Language and Poetic Design in the Aeneid”, in Mnemosyne Suppl. 73. Paschalis, M. (1997) Virgil’s Aeneid: Semantic Relations and Proper Names. Oxford. Raven, D. S. (1965) Latin Metre: An Introduction. London. Revesz M. (1972) “Fidus Achates”, AUB (Class), 53-58. Sale M. (1999) Virgil’s Formularity and Pius Aeneas, in Signs of Orality: the Oral Tradition and its Influence in the Greek and Roman World, ed. E. Anne Mackay. Brill. Speranza, F. (1984) “Art. Acate”, Enciclopedia Virgiliana. Rome. Weber, Thomas (1988). Fidus Achates. Frankfurt. Williams, R. D., ed. (1972) The Aeneid of Virgil Books 1-6. London.

74 S tephen M o o rby - A c h a t e s : Fa ith fu l F riend o r Po etic F r a u d ?

NoTES

1 John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Vol. 1: The Grocer’s Daughter (London, 2001) 220. 2 Martindale (1997) xvii. 3 Williams (1972) note on 1.120. 4 Lee (1979) 105. 5 Weber (1988) 27-29. 6 Also rapidus at 1.644, but the adjective seems to be used adverbially. 7 Eubanks (1982) 59-61. 8 Speranza (1984) article on Acate. 9 Lossau (1987) 92. 10 Revesz (1972) 53-8. 11 Lee (1979) 107. 12 Weber (1988) 162-9. 13 Weber (1988) 173-9. 14 There is, of course, no Achates character in the tradition of the Troy story and, for this reason, Virgil may have felt unable to insert him. 15 As if to rub it in, Ovid, in the Fasti, has Achates walking along the beach with Aeneas when they meet Anna. "Anna est! ” exclamat Achates (3.607). Achates’ brief and insubstantial appearance contrasts with the long story of how Anna is turned into a river nymph. 16 Heinze (1999) 227-8. 17 Weber (1988) 28. 18 One can imagine that even the stiffest Roman might consider that Jupiter, in requiring Aeneas to give up Dido for Lavinia, was taking the call of duty to extremes. 19 Johnson (1976) 101. 20 Moskalew (1982) 81. 21 Sale (1999) 210. 22 The name is conveniently obscure. Servius suggests αχάτης (agate) (1.174) or άχος (grief) (1.312) as the source of the name, but Harrison believes it is more likely to derive from the River Achates in Sicily, ‘a region rich in the Aeneas legend’ (cf. Harrison (1991) note on 10.332). 23 Ilioneus and Abas appear in the Iliad (14.489 and 5.148) but both are killed, so they are clearly different persons. Abas appears four times in the Aeneid as three different persons (1.121, 3.286, 10.170, 10.427). Ilioneus addresses Dido 1.522-58 and Latinus 7.213-48. Aletes (another made-up name, apparently, perhaps from αλήτης ‘wanderer’ cf. Paschalis [1997] 59) encourages Nisus and Euryalus in their fatal expedition (9.247-50). 24 Weber (1988) 29. 25 Jenkyns (1998) 284-5. 26 Raven (1965) 97. He cites as an exception mersatur missusque secundo defluit amni (Virgil Georg. 3.447), wheresecwwdo creates just such a false illusion.

75 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

Dryden’s Translation of the Eclogues in a Comparative Light A paper given to the Virgil Society on 21 January 2006

n this paper I shall sample some passages from Dryden’s version of Virgil’s Eclogues and compare them with the renderings of other translators, both earlier and later. One of my purposes is to consider Ihow Dryden and others conceived Virgil: for example, the styles of sixteenth and seventeenth century translations of the Eclogues indicate with some clarity how the dominant idea of pastoral changed in this period. But my aim is also to study how Dryden faced the problems of translating a poet especially admired for his verbal art, partly by considering his own discussion of the matter and partly by examination of the translations themselves. Matthew Arnold declared that the heroic couplet could not adequately represent Homer; a nicer question is how well it can represent Virgil. In the ‘Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’ which he placed as a preface to his translation of Juvenal, Dryden himself declared that Virgil could have written sharper satires than either Horace or Juvenal if he had chosen to employ his talent that way.1 The lines that he took to support this contention are from the Eclogues (3.26-7): non tu in triviis, indocte, solebas, stridenti, miserum, stipula, disperdere, carmen? In the Loeb edition - by H. Rushton Fairclough, revised by G. P. Goold - the lines are rendered thus: ‘Wasn’t it you, you dunce, that at the crossroads used to murder a sorry tune on a scrannel pipe?’ ‘Scrannel’ is not part of modern vocabulary; this departure from the usual practice of the Loeb Classical Library is a matter to which I shall return. The distinctive punctuation of the Latin lines as they appear on the page here, with a comma after seven successive words, is Dryden’s own, designed to show that Virgil, as he puts it, ‘has given almost as many lashes, as he has written syllables’. This quotation from Virgil, and Dryden’s comments upon it, raise some interesting issues. I have long been in two minds about Dryden’s remark as a piece of criticism. It exhibits what I shall call a classical approach to the poetic art. Dryden’s argument, in effect, seems to be that Virgil could

76 Richard Jenkyns - Dryden's Translation of the E c l o g u e s in a Comparative Light have been the greatest Roman satirist because he had the finest technique. Juvenal himself, whom I would suppose Dryden had more in mind than anyone else when he wrote Absalom andAchitophel, took a different view. Facit indignatio versum (‘Indignation makes my verse’), he wrote (1. 79). This is the romantic idea of poetic composition - the idea that for it to be effective, it needs to come from the heart. And thus Juvenal represents himself as driven to the topics about which he writes: he describes a world in which the abundance of vices and follies is greater than it has ever been, and depicts himself out in the street overwhelmed by a mass of impressions that compel his words. What he is driven to write may not be the best kind of matter for a poet - facit indignatio versum qualemcumque potest, quales ego et Cluvienus. - poor stuff, perhaps, the kind of thing Cluvienus writes, but the only possible response to circumstance. Similarly, Juvenal’s great contemporary Tacitus represents his own work as narrow and inglorious (Ann. 4. 32). Earlier historians (he explains) were able to write about noble battles, the storming of cities, the extending of empire, but his own work may put readers off, glutting them by the dour monotony of its subject. Now it is arguable that each of these authors is somewhat disingenuous. I am also confident that Tacitus at least implicates us in a kind of game. He is knows that he is disingenuous; and we know that he knows; and he knows that we know that he knows. Juvenal’s case is not so sure. But for my present purpose, I do not need to be concerned with whether the attitude expressed is sincerely expressed, but only with the attitude itself. The romantic view would hold, against Dryden, that Virgil would have needed more than top technique to become the top satirist: he would have needed the appropriate temperament. Some kind of indignatio is surely needed. In this connection I think of Horace’s seventh Epode, an invective for which no motive is supplied and where no cause of offence is given. It reads like a literary exercise, a demonstration of the invective mode exemplified in Archilochus and Hipponax; and a sense of emotion fabricated in tranquillity is fatal to the art of abuse. With this comparison in mind, it is interesting to note that the lines of Virgil which Dryden quotes are in a sense presented as an exercise: they are a piece of flyting within a contest in which two herdsmen vie to cap each other in smart abuse. Dryden is pointing to the density and economy of Virgil’s writing: every word - for when he says syllable, he means word - is working, laying on another lash, with no little auxiliary words to dilute the effect. That does indeed require high craftsmanship. But Dryden is also, in effect, pointing to something which is relevant to the issue of translation: he is marking a characteristic of the Latin language. Eight words in succession are either verb, noun or adjective; in this sequence there is not one preposition, pronoun, adverb or conjunction. English cannot manage that. If the translator wants to convey the original’s effect, he must look for some equivalent. So it is instructive to turn to Milton’s imitatio in Lycidas (123-4): their lean andflashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes o f wretched straw. This is also highly economical, but Milton cannot avoid the little in-between words, ‘and’, ‘on’, ‘their’, ‘of’. He compensates by a more obvious use of sound effects, working notably with the alliteration of the letter r, and recurrently placing it after a velar or plosive consonant: ‘grate’, ‘scrannel’, ‘wretched’, ‘straw’. But Milton has picked up something that is already present in Virgil. The combination of letters str in ‘straw’ is already in Virgil’s stridenti, for which Milton substitutes ‘scrannel’; and indeed

77 T he proceedings o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8 the combination scr will strike the English reader as especially expressive of the disagreeable: think of ‘scrape’, ‘scratch’, ‘screech’, ‘scrofula’. It is with s and especially s followed by a plosive that Virgil works: stridenti, miserum, stipula, disperdere. But he also exploits r, the littera canina or dog letter: stridenti, miserum disperdere carmen. Milton has, in fact, studied his Virgil very carefully. I now turn to the two twentieth century translations that I shall use for comparison with Dryden, by Cecil Day Lewis (1963) and David Ferry (1999), both of them significant poets in their own right.2 They in turn have been studying their Milton. Here is Day Lewis: You amateur, puffing a scrannel Tune on a squeaky straw at the crossroads is more your mark! That is a direct homage to Milton, and the skw sound in ‘squeaky’ is of course the Roy Jenkins version of scr. But Day Lewis does not match Virgil’s or Milton’s economy: apart from the ineffectualness of ‘you amateur’, the air goes out of the balloon, the invective loses its force and fizzles out into ‘is more your mark’. David Ferry, I take it, has also had Milton in his mind: Aren’t you the one Who used to murder some song, down by the crossroads, Screeching away through a whining pipe o f straw? This takes an extra line, which is less than ideal, and even so has lost Virgil’s indocte, which does not matter much. What does matter is that Ferry’s version is much more forceful, and it keeps its energy all through the last line, with ‘straw’, as in Milton, as the final word. In place of ‘scrannel’ we have ‘whining’ (good), but the scr appears elsewhere in ‘screeching’ (excellent). As we have seen, ‘scrannel’ finds its way even into the Loeb translation, although it will not help most modern readers to Virgil’s sense. It is the more striking then that Dryden’s own version should be so different: Dunce at the best! In streets but scarce allowed To tickle, on thy straw, the stupid crowd. Virgil has two words beginning with an s followed by a plosive: stridenti, stipula. In Dryden’s translation there are four: ‘streets’, ‘scarce’, ‘straw’, ‘stupid’. That apart, he does not try to copy Virgil’s particular effects, but to convey the general force by different means. ‘Dunce’ is good, better perhaps than the original’s indocte; placed at the start of the line, it acquires a new prominence, and the trochaic inversion adds punch. In the second line of the couplet, Dryden cannot avoid the in- between words, but each important word - ‘tickle’, ‘straw’, ‘stupid’, ‘crowd’ - adds its own lash in the way that Dryden commended in the original. This is not the only place that Dryden is sensitive to harshness or coarseness in the Latin text. Take his version of three lines earlier in the same Eclogue (7-9), which in his rendering become five: parcius ista viris tamen obicienda memento. novimus et qui te transversa tuentibus hircis et quo (sed faciles Nymphae risere) sacello.

Good words, young catamite, at least to men. We know who did your business, how, and when; And in what chapel too you played your prize, And what the goats observed with leering eyes; The nymphs were kind, and laughed; and there your safety lies.

78 Richard Jenkyns - Dryden's Translation of the E c l o g u e s in a Comparative Light

There are two places in this sentence where Dryden adds to the original. The second of these comes at the end: his last clause corresponds to nothing in the Latin. Throughout his translation, he uses the two standard ways of varying the heroic couplet: by having a triplet instead of a couplet rhyme, and by adding a couple of syllables to the usual ten-syllable line. At the end of this passage he combines both these variations to produce a line of light elegance. In other words, it seems to be a concern for shape and euphony that has provoked this addition. The other addition is different: the words ‘young catamite’. Why has he done this? Let us again compare the two twentieth century translators. First Ferry: Watch out what you say, Menalcas, because I know What you were doing in that cave and who You were doing it with, while the goats looked on, Rolling their eyes, and the laughing Nymphs were watching. No hint of homosexuality there, and viris is not translated at all. The goats and the nymphs seem to be sharing the same reaction, one of cheerful merriment at the sight of what any reader is bound to take as straightforward slap and tickle. This is Day Lewis: Watch it! What right have you to lecture a chap? We all know What you did - even the he-goats looked shocked - and in a shrine too (But the nymphs are easy-going, they only smiled at it.) Well, I say: the Greyfriars School patois of the first line must surely have struck quite the wrong note even in 1963. That is apart from the fact that Day Lewis has clearly misunderstood the line (which is indeed tricky) and got the force of viris wrong. That apart, there is hardly any more clue here than in Ferry’s version as to what Damoetas is actually saying. What Dryden has taken account of is that qui is a key word, because it is masculine: the sting is in that seemingly colourless and innocuous syllable. But English does not distinguish between the genders in the case of the relative pronoun. Dryden has therefore added ‘young catamite’, so that the meaning gets through. This suggests first, that though he is often a rather free translator, he is also a conscientious translator, who wants to ensure that the essential meaning is conveyed. Second, he wants the coarse and satiric element in the Eclogues to be felt. Bowdlerising the homosexuality out of the classics can often be hard work. Here, nothing could be easier; indeed a little care is needed to keep it in. Dryden takes that care. Coarseness and satire are not the qualities that are likely to occur most readily to the modern reader when he thinks about the Eclogues, but the idea would not have surprised a reader in the sixteenth century. Then the belief was widespread that pastoral was properly rude and rustical. Spenser took Virgil for his model in The Shepherd’s Calendar, which is designedly rough, shaggy, harsh and allegorical. The idea that pastoral was the lowliest of genres was a renaissance commonplace; it is in Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, for example, or to take a slightly earlier work read across Europe, in J. C. Scaliger’s Poetice. It goes back to the idea, voiced by Donatus as early as the fourth century, that Virgil had followed the perfect pattern of the poetic career, beginning with the humblest genre, proceeding to the middle kind in the Georgics, and culminating in the loftiest of poetic forms, the epic. From that idea sprang another: that the styles of each genre were properly different. So pastoral should take the forms of rustic speech, as epic should adopt an elevated diction. Now Dryden clearly does not take that view: though he is alert to the satiric element in the Eclogues - a pretty small element, to be frank - his manner in translating them is essentially as smooth and elegant as it is when he translates the Aeneid. He chooses the same metre for both works. That may seem the obvious thing to do as Virgil, of course, uses the hexameter for

79 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

all his verse. But if we set Dryden in his historical context, it is perhaps not quite so obvious. One might add that the hexameter is a flexible metre, and Virgil’s use of it is astonishingly various. In such matters as enjambment, metrical Grecisms, elision, and treatment of the caesura, the Eclogues can feel quite a long way from the later epic. The heroic couplet is incapable of that degree of variety. So it would not be unreasonable to think that different metres might be appropriate for the different parts of Virgil’s oeuvre.

This takes us to the question of metre in general, and the associated question of rhyme. Pope will translate the Iliad into heroic couplets, as Dryden had so translated the Aeneid. But Pope’s decision has recurrently been called into question, and was from the start. Bentley’s famous comment - ‘a very pretty poem, but you must not call it Homer’ - is as likely to apply to the metrical form as to the language. Much later in the eighteenth century, Cowper translated the Iliad into unrhymed blank verse (1791). In his introduction to this work, he took a French print of a Homeric scene in which ‘Agamemnon addresses Achilles exactly in the attitude of a dancing- master turning miss in a minuet’ and contrasted it with an English picture which represented Homer in a more manly fashion. That, he said, was the difference between Pope’s translation and his own. He affected plainness: some of his lines, he agreed, had ‘an ugly hitch in their gait, ungraceful in itself’ but they were ‘made such with a willful intention’. After Cowper, Keats wrote his sonnet On First Looking on Chapman’s Homer, a title which mutters beneath its breath, ‘On first getting away from Pope’. Thanks to Chapman, Keats at last hears Homer speak out loud and bold: Chapman’s exuberant metre and language have the right fire and energy. Matthew Arnold, in his lectures ‘On Translating Homer’ (1860-1), finds Chapman inadequate in turn - as he does Pope, for sure. For Arnold Homer is pre-eminently grand, rapid and direct; Chapman’s clogged metre and diction will not do.

But supposing, for the sake of argument, that we accept this case, what does it tell us about Virgil? He has his own form of that grand style which Arnold thought so important, but he is not rapid or direct. In mere terms of metre, his movement is very different from Homer’s - Homer being so predominantly dactylic, and Virgil not. His language is not direct but oblique, and he loads every rift with ore. So might the Aeneid and the Homeric epics be appropriately rendered by different English metres? One can imagine a case being made that while the heroic couplet might be inadequate for Homer, its civility was suited to the ‘civilised poetry’ of Virgil’s epic. But if one then considers the notion of different metres for different parts of Virgil’s oeuvre, another thought may suggest itself. Perhaps it is not after all the heroic poem to which the heroic couplet is best suited; may its even flow not be more answerable to the cool balance and symmetry of the Eclogues, and their avoidance of the tragic note, than to the asymmetries and the variations in pace and tone which Virgil cultivated in the Aeneid?

I suspect that many readers today would readily answer yes to that question. But the earliest English translators take a very different line. Three Englishmen translated the Eclogues, in part or in whole, before 1600. William Webbe included in his Discourse of English Poetry (1586) a specimen rendering of the first two Eclogues into accentual hexameters, and Abraham Fraunce published a translation of the second Eclogue, also in hexameters, in 1591. These clumsy experiments are little more than curiosities. In any case, the hexameter is notoriously hard to bring off in English. The two most notable English works in this metre are Clough’s The Bothy o f Tober-na-Vuolich and Amours de Voyage, both works conveying a sense of conversation and ordinary modernity and, in the latter case, a strong element of satire.

80 Richard Jenkyns - Dryden's Translation of the E c l o g u e s in a Comparative Light

There were only two complete translations of the Eclogues in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and both, oddly, were by the same man, Abraham Fleming. His first version, published in 1575, is made in rhymed fourteeners. In our own time one might think that this metre too was long ago obsolete as a vehicle for rendering the Latin hexameter - but one would be wrong: the new Penguin translation of Lucretius by A. E. Stallings (2007) uses this form. And she has indeed, I believe, found a metre which conveys the vigour and energy and roughness of Lucretius, but also his use of a disciplined form with firm rules; and besides, she can make the verse sing and be eloquent when she needs to. But the manner of Lucretius is indeed a great distance from that of the Eclogues. Fleming means to be rough, it seems, and his second translation, published in 1589, is rougher. Though it was designed, at least in part, to help learners to understand Virgil’s Latin, it is still in fourteeners, but this time they are unrhymed. In a prefatory letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, Fleming notes that Virgil’s pastorals are written in a base style. The translation is not made into ‘foolish rhyme’, but is translated ‘into English verse, in a familiar phrase’; that is, into the language of every day. The matter may seem ‘too base’ for the Archbishop, but in fact it is ‘mere allegorical’ and deals with lofty issues in humble disguise: it is ‘even a pearl in a shell, divine wit in a homely style, shepherds and clowns representing great personages, and matters of great weight wrapped up in country talk...’ As far as style goes, then, a translation of the Eclogues ought to be base, homely and rustic. In those terms - though in no others - one might be able to claim that Fleming succeeded.

Let us then take the opening of the first Eclogue in each of Fleming’s versions. First, Virgil’s text: Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi silvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena: nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arva; nos patriam fugimus: tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.

You, Tityrus, lie under the canopy of a spreading beech, wooing the woodland Muse on slender reed, but we are leaving our country’s bounds and sweet fields. We are outcasts from our country; you, Tityrus, at ease beneath the shade, teach the woods to re-echo ‘fair Amaryllis’. (Fairclough/Goold)

Now Fleming in 1575: Thou, Tityr, lying at thine ease, under the broad beech shade, A country song dost tune right well, in pipe of oat straw made; Our country borders we do leave and meadows sweet forsake, Our country soil we shun, but you in shade thine ease dost take Teaching the woods of Amaryll most fair a sound to make. And now 1589: O Tityrus thou lying under shade of spreading beech, Dost play a country song upon a slender oaten pipe, We do forsake our country bounds, and meadows sweet [which be] We do forsake our native soil, thou Tityr slug in shade Dost teach the woods to sound so shrill, thy love fair Amaryll.

‘Thou Tityr slug in shade’ is conspicuously unappealing, and the jingle ‘shrill. Amaryll’ I take to be an accident - and not attractive. But the later version is not consistently more graceless

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than the first. In the earlier version, ‘broad beech shade’ is pleasantly alliterative, and its spondaic rhythm, with an expansiveness suitable to the content, helps to break the monotony of what can be a remorselessly jolly metre; but otherwise, the first two lines flow more easily in the second version than in the first. In the third and fourth lines the 1575 version is faithful to the emphasis of Virgil’s anaphora (nos patriae finis... nos patriam fugimus), and the variation of ‘country ‘ and ‘country soil’ preserves something of the spirit of Virgil’s polyptoton, the figure of speech whereby a word is repeated in a different case or cases (patriae... patriam). In 1589, Fleming makes no attempt to render the anaphora of patria in English, but whereas Virgil takes care to vary the verb (linquimus, fugimus), Fleming repeats ‘We do forsake’. In each case, Fleming does seem concerned to render the balance between repetition and variation that Virgil cultivates.

When we turn from Fleming’s versions (and Webbe’s and Fraunce’s too, for that matter) to the seventeenth century translators, we seem to have entered a quite different world. In 1620, John Brinsley produced a literal prose translation; this was simply a crib for schoolboys, and need not concern us. The next verse translations were by William Lisle in 1628 and John Bidle in 1634. Lisle attempted a variety of stanza forms, and for the first Eclogue he chose rhyme royal: that is, a seven- line stanza, with the rhyme scheme ABABACC. In English, rhyme royal goes back to Chaucer, but Lisle differs from Troilus and Criseyde in expanding the last line of the stanza from five feet to six feet. This makes the stanza feel like an adaptation of the Spenserian form, and Spenser is indeed Lisle’s acknowledged model. Here is Lisle’s opening: Thou, in cool covert of this broad beech-tree, (Tityrus) at ease, doest meditating lie On small oat pipe, thy sylvan muse; but we Leave our fair fields, and our dear country flie: While thou lie’st shaded in security, Teaching the hollow woods, loud to proclaim, And echo, with the sound of Amaryllis’ name.

The Spenser who is Lisle’s pattern here is not the rustic Spenser of The Shepherd’s Calendar, his Anglicisation of the Eclogues, but the ‘golden’ Spenser of The Faery Queen and Virgil’s Gnat (his translation of the pseudo-Virgilian Culex, believed in the renaissance to be authentic). In his preface, Lisle claims that whereas many Latin authors, both in prose and verse, have been successfully translated into English, Virgil, despite his great reputation, has not. The reason, he suggests, is Virgil’s Gnat: this led other people to suppose that Spenser would go on to translate more of Virgil, and deterred potential translators from attempting a work which Spenser would then carry out much better. This is an odd claim: many earlier translators of the Aeneid are blandly ignored - Douglas, Surrey, Phaer, Stanyhurst - as well, of course, as Fleming’s two versions of the Eclogues themselves. And Virgil’s Gnat is unusually sugared and ‘golden’ for an Elizabethan translation. Lisle himself uses the metaphor of golden sweetness to characterise what he calls ‘these dainty Aeclogues’: ‘Some can be very well content to delight their tastes with the pleasant juice, as their eye with the outward rind of these golden Pastorals.’ This statement retains the Elizabethan belief in the allegorical significations of the Eclogues, but without the old sense of their moral urgency. Allegory is now the juice of a delicious fruit and the superficial meaning of the poem its golden skin.

We have moved from hearty jogtrot to lyric fluidity as the answerable style for translating the Eclogues, with nothing in between. But of course the Eclogues are neither jogtrot nor lyric. With Bidle we finally reach the heroic couplet:

82 Richard Jenkyns - Dryden's Translation of the E c l o g u e s in a Comparative Light

Thou, Tityrus, in shroud of beech, dost play On slender oaten-pipe a sylvan lay; Our native confines we abandon: we Our pleasant granges, and our country flee: Thou, Tityrus, i’th’ shade reposing still, Learn’st the woods to resound fair Amaryll. Metrically, this is more dutiful than sensitive. The last of these lines has the right number of syllables, but I cannot get it to sound like a five-foot line. And (if we may suppose that the printer has obeyed his wishes) his conscientious zeal to count the syllables has led him in the previous line to elide the vowel in ‘the’, whereas unelided the line reads better with a perfectly acceptable eleven syllables and an anapaest in the third foot. Together with the Eclogues Bidle published a translation of the first two satires of Juvenal. The coupling of Virgilian pastoral and Juvenal is perhaps a sign of the lingering influence of the moralising interpretation of the Eclogues, and more particularly of the influence of Mantuan, the fifteenth century neo-Latin poet whose Eclogues combine Virgilian pastiche with severe moralising, and who was much read in English schools (by Shakespeare, among others). But Bidle no longer sees the Eclogues as harsh and rough. Apologising to his readers for providing only two of Juvenal’s poems, he explains, ‘I was loath to cloy your appetites at the first, knowing... that men’s queasy and squeamish stomachs relish better the poignant suckets of a love-sonnet, or the juleps of a frothy epigram, than a homely (though wholesome) dish of satirical stuff...’ Here, as with Lisle, is the metaphor of sugary food and drink. It is now satire that is ‘homely’ and ‘wholesome’, terms that half a century earlier would have been commonly applied to the Eclogues; the implication is that the pastoral muse is sweeter and more appealing. And certainly Bidle’s version brings Virgil closer to the manner of William Browne, Drayton and the pastoralists of the Jacobean and Caroline age. This survey suggests that by the middle of the seventeenth century the heroic couplet had emerged as one possible form for translating the Eclogues; but it was not the only nor necessarily the obvious form. It also suggests that well before Dryden the harsh reading of the Eclogues had gradually given way to a more arcadian interpretation, though as we have seen, Dryden remains more sensitive to the harsher elements in Virgil than many readers after him have been. He may have owed that to the reception of the Eclogues in the century and a half that preceded him. Let us now turn to his own version of the opening, and add those two twentieth-century versions as well: Beneath the shade which beechen boughs diffuse You, Tityrus, entertain your silvan muse. Round the wide world in banishment we roam, Forced from our pleasing fields and native home; While, stretched at ease, you sing your happy loves, And Amaryllis fills the shady groves. Day Lewis: Tityrus, here you loll, your slim reed-pipe serenading The woodland spirit beneath a spread of sheltering beech, While I must leave my home place, the fields so dear to me. I’m driven from my home place: but you can take it easy In shade and teach the woods to repeat ‘Fair Amaryllis’.

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Ferry: Tityrus, there you lie in the beech-tree shade, Brooding over your music for the Muse, While we must leave our native place, our homes, The fields we love, and go elsewhere; meanwhile, You teach the woods to echo ‘Amaryllis’. Day Lewis’s rendering shifts uncertainly in tone between the literary and the colloquial, with one or two awkward phrases which no real person has ever used. Ferry, like Tityrus, seems much more at ease: in tone and lucidity, his version is admirable, though in turning five lines of Latin into the same number of shorter English lines he has lost some adjectives: the spreading beech, the woodland Muse, the slender reed, and Tityrus relaxed. Virgil is evoking a complex mood in these first phrases, a mixture of modest deprecation and comfortable sprawl, and without the epithets much of this disappears. In that light, let us return to Dryden. The manner is of course superbly accomplished. The dactyl of ‘Tityre’ is easily incorporated into a line which happily permits an anapaest in the second foot. The trochaic inversions at the start of the third and fourth lines add both vigour and variety. The euphony and the hints of alliteration, not overdone, make these lines feel freer from constraint and more like original composition than any other version. Most significant nouns have their amplifying adjective attached to them in a manner that is highly Virgilian. In some broad sense, Dryden’s feels more Virgilian than any other version. But when one looks closer, some doubts begin to creep in. Though Dryden, turning five lines into six, has found room for most of what Ferry leaves out, he too has dropped the slender reed, that famous symbol of the pastoral mode. We do need that. And he does nothing to convey the repetitions in the original (n o s . nos,patriae... patriam, Tityre... Tityre.). Here, in fact, Bidle does better, and with his ‘we abandon; we’ he preserves a strong emphasis in the original through a quite different placing in the line. The use of rhyme has one distinct advantage: it conveys the sense of a fairly exigent metrical form which in English is not easily conveyed by other means. But it gives Dryden some difficulty. Do boughs ‘diffuse’ shade? ‘Roam’ is not quite the word wanted. The shortage of rhymes for ‘love’ is notoriously a problem for the English poet; ‘love’ and ‘grove’ seems rather tamely conventional, and I suspect would have seemed so already in the 1690s. Let me add a word more about Dryden and rhyme. One of his most famous moments has been censured for its poor use of rhyme (Absalom andAchitophel 163-4): Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide. Rhyme apart, there is a recurrent risk with the couplet form in general when the poet is in epigrammatic mood. The danger is that he will make his point in the first line, and the second line, with nothing much to do, will merely vary the first, often less effectively. It is a common problem in Ovid, and it is a problem here. (In a different medium, one might also contemplate the second sentence of Pride and Prejudice, though Jane Austen did succeed, I believe, in solving the problem of how to follow what was to become the most famous opening in English prose fiction.) Rhyme adds to Dryden’s discomfort: in the second line of the couplet, the emphasis should be on the thinness, but the rhyme puts it on the division. Form and content have come apart: the form stresses division, the content says that it barely exists at all. Even without the rhyme, the other emphasis is on ‘partition’, though again it is the virtual lack of partition that ought to be stressed. Here Pope was the finer craftsman (The Rape o f the Lock 3. 7-8):

84 Richard Jenkyns - Dryden's Translation of the E c l o g u e s in a Comparative Light

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take - and sometimes tea.

It is not that there has to be a thump on the rhyme:

Come live with me and be my love And we will all the pleasures prove.

Marlowe’s couplet is lovely because the natural spoken rhythm of the sentence puts the weight where it ought to be, on ‘pleasures’. The rhyme follows like a gentle control (and offers a more original pairing for ‘love’).

In general, my impression is that Dryden’s translations do not use rhyme with particular skill or force, but I am aware of at least one exception. So I turn for a moment from the Eclogues to the very beginning of the Aeneid:

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Lavinaque venit litora - multum ille et terris iactatus et alto vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram, multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem inferretque deos Latio; genus unde Latinum Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae.

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by Fate, And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate, Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore. Long labours, both by sea and land, he bore, And in the doubtful war, before he won The Latian realm, and built the destined town; His banished gods restored to rites divine; And settled sure succession on his line, From whence the race of Alban fathers come, And the long glories of majestic Rome.

This powerful period culminates in Rome, as does Virgil’s original. But rhyme gives Dryden the chance for an extra sense of climax and closure. And there is something especially romantic, resonant and authoritative about the grand monosyllable ‘Rome’, an advantage which English, French and German have, ironically enough, over Latin and Italian themselves. We might also recall that it was Dryden himself who defined the ‘golden’ line as two nouns and two adjectives with a poor verb between them to keep the peace. Virgil liked to use the golden line or some variant upon it to round off a period or a paragraph, especially in the Georgics. ‘And the long glories of majestic Rome’ feels like the English equivalent of a golden line - two nouns, two epithets, and a certain majestic self-containment. The line has a Virgilian sense of closure, even though the golden line is not what Virgil writes in this particular place.

‘Arms and the man I sing’ - that must be the canonical translation, unimprovable. It entails a separation of the antecedent ‘man’ from the relative ‘who’, not wholly natural in English but a price which has to be paid for conveying what Virgil’s Arma virumque conveys. One might say that the first seven syllables of Dryden’s translation are forced upon him; or that he has known

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how to get them absolutely right. The force of this paragraph comes partly from a discreet use of alliteration, not exaggerated: ‘forced by Fate’, ‘haughty. hate’, ‘expelled and exile’, ‘long labours’, ‘w ar. won’, ‘restored to rites’, ‘settled sure succession’. (Compare Virgil: fato... profugus, Lavina... litora, Latio... Latinum.) In the first couplet, ‘Fate’ and ‘hate’ place the emphasis exactly where it should be, setting against each other the two forces which will impel Aeneas through the twelve books of his story. We can notice too each noun supported by its adjective. That is thoroughly Virgilian: for example, ‘haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate’ gives the quality of saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram admirably, one’s only reservation being that ‘haughty’ understates saevae. Actually, Dryden is here more Virgilian than Virgil, who does not attach as many adjectives to nouns as does his translator. Virgil outclasses him - as he does everyone else - in the flexibility of his style and tone. Dum conderet urbem, for example, has a simplicity and universality in expressing the human need for rootedness in place and society which ‘built the destined town’ has not preserved.

And in other ways this noble paragraph is imperfect. The seventh and eighth lines slacken a little. Again, rhyme is a problem. ‘Rites divine’ - what other rites might the gods expect? Line 8 is Dryden’s own expansion, and one feels the effect of that: it seems to have little of interest to say. Just a little of the formidable compression of Virgil’s first seven lines has been lost, or so the modern reader may think. But perhaps we should consider another possibility. If, as has been maintained, Dryden’s Aeneid is a political act, here we may have the first political intrusion. What the Glorious Revolution had done was to destroy the sure succession of a line, and Dryden makes his Jacobite protest. On this account, he is to be criticised (or approved) in other terms: for placing the translator’s duty to his original below the duty to bear political witness.

It is time to return to the Eclogues. I began with their harsher side, and I shall end with two places where, by contrast, especial elegance and euphony are required of the translator. I have chosen the first of these because it enables me to bring Dryden into comparison with another major poet. For a space, the miniature drama of the first Eclogue, sometimes tense and bitter, yields to the pleasure of pure surface and mellifluous onomatopoeia (53-8):

hinc tibi, quae semper, vicino ab limite saepes Hyblaeis apibus florem depasta salicti saepe levi somnum suadebit inire susurro; hinc alta sub rupe canet frondator ad auras: nec tamen interea raucae, tua cura, palumbes, nec gemere aeria cessabit turtur ab ulmo.

Here, as ever, the hedge at your neighbour’s boundary where the bees of Hybla feed full on the willow blossom will often by its gentle humming invite sleep to come; and there the woodman below the high rock will waft his song to the breezes, nor meanwhile will the hoarse wood-doves, your delight, nor the turtle-dove cease to moan from the lofty elm.

Three of these lines inspired Tennyson’s superlative imitatio in The Princess (7.205-7):

Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

86 Richard Jenkyns - Dryden's Translation of the E c l o g u e s in a Comparative Light

Here is Dryden’s version:

Behold! Yon bordering fence of sallow-trees Is fraught with flowers; the flowers are fraught with bees: The busy bees, with a soft murmuring strain, Invite to gentle sleep the labouring swain. While from the neighbouring rock, with rural songs, The pruner’s voice the pleasing dream prolongs, Stock doves and turtles tell their amorous pain, And, from the lofty elms, of love complain.

And here is Ferry:

Often beside the hedge of willows that marks This edge of what you own, the humming of bees That visit the willow flowers will make you sleepy; And over there, at the other edge of your land, Under the ledge of that high outcropping of rock, The song of a woodman pruning the trees can be heard; And always you can hear your pigeons throating And the moaning of the doves high in the elm tree.

With tua cura Virgil reproduces the sound of doves more closely than one might have supposed possible in real words. If there is no onomatopoeia in the translation of those last two lines, their nature and function are not shown. Ferry does pretty well: ‘throating’ may be a little stilted, but the sound and the flow are good. Dryden is further from the Latin, but superbly assured: it is hard not to imagine Mr Handel setting these lines to music, anachronistic though the fancy may be. Earlier in the passage, Dryden enlivens the verse with chiasmus and epanalepsis: ‘fraught with flow ers. flowers are fraught’, ‘with bees; The busy b e e s. ’ This corresponds to nothing in the Latin. But Dryden conceives that the translator’s duty (or so we may suppose) is to produce something that reads as though it might have been first conceived in English. If he sees an opportunity for elegances of his own, he will take it.

This approach, free but essentially faithful, may also be seen in his treatment of the refrain of the second song in the eighth Eclogue. In Virgil’s Latin, this is repeated identically time after time; Dryden varies the wording as the refrain reappears, and he also binds the refrain (as Virgil does not) into the syntax of the preceding line. Such elegant variatio is thoroughly Virgilian in character, though it happens not to be what Virgil does in these particular places. The same Eclogue will also provide me with my final sampling. I take the lines which Macaulay thought the most beautiful in all Latin poetry, and which Professor Kenney in our own time has compared to Le GrandMeaulnes as an evocation of the lost idyll of childhood.3 The passage is a severe challenge to any translator (8. 37-41):

saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala (dux ego vester eram) vidi cum matre legentem. alter ab undecimo tum me iam acceperat annus, iam fragilis poteram a terra contingere ramos: ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error!

[I saw you as a little girl in our enclosure (I was your guide) gathering dewy apples with your mother. At that time I had just reached my twelfth year, I could just reach the brittle branches from the ground. When I saw, how I died, how wretched delusion carried me away!]

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Dryden: I viewed thee first (how fatal was the view!) And led thee where the ruddy wildings grew, High on the hedge, and wet with morning dew. Then scarce the bending branches I could win; The callow down began to clothe my chin. I saw; I perished; yet indulged my pain. Ferry: I saw you, when you were a little child. Your mother was with you. I led you to the place In our garden where there was the apple tree, With dewy apples growing on the boughs. I was just going on twelve, just tall enough To reach up to the branches to pick the apples. I saw, I saw, and I was lost forever. These are two intelligent and sensitive versions. True, Dryden’s very last phrase is a touch too comfortable, the gouty gentleman sinking into his fauteuil; here Ferry is not only more accurate but cuts more keenly. Ferry handles this passage with a simple, luminous clarity, and he has managed to keep pretty close to Virgil’s original. Some things have been lost. Virgil’s tiny parenthesis - ‘(I was your guide)’ - has a shy urgency which has gone from the translation; Dryden has felt the need to preserve this syntactical shape, though he has put a different sense, drawn from a few lines later, into his own parenthesis. Virgil’s branches were ‘fragile’, a perfect epithet enhancing the eggshell delicacy of the scene; neither translator has kept that. And the Latin also contains the idea of enclosure, hinting at the mother’s protective care and the idea of the garden as a symbol of innocence and virginity; again, neither translator quite catches that, though Dryden has the word ‘hedge’. Dryden is freer: he is prepared to replace the boy’s age with the picture of the down on his chin - which is not in Virgil at all. Ferry’s ‘I saw, I saw’ is an ineffectual repetition which loses the change of verb in the Latin, and seems to misunderstand the syntax: a fancy elegance uses ut first in one sense, then in another: ‘When I saw, how I perished.’ Dryden’s ‘I saw, I perished’ is simple but unbeatable. At moments, Ferry’s rhythms are slightly flabby (try the third and fifth of those lines), as indeed his syntax can be (too much ‘was’ and ‘were’); Dryden is almost always sinewy. And here - since I must have some sort of a conclusion - is one of Dryden’s most signal virtues as a translator: that he does not seem cramped or embarrassed by the original. The firmness, flow and naturalness of his Virgil make it seem that these are English poems, fitted to the genius of the English language. No other translator of Virgil quite achieves that.4

Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford RICHARD JENKYNS

NOTES 1 The Poems o f John Dryden, ed. J. Kinsley (Oxford, 1958) ii, 650. 2 The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid o f Virgil, tr. C. Day Lewis (Oxford, 1966) (the translation of the Eclogues had earlier been published separately, London, 1963); The Eclogues o f Virgil, tr. David Ferry (New York, 1999). 3 The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed T. Pinney (Cambridge, 1976) iii, 62; E. J. Kenney, ICS 8 (1983) 44-59, at 53. 4 This paper was first written for a colloquium on ‘Dryden in the 1690s’ held at the British Academy and later read to the Virgil Society. I am grateful to both audiences for their comments.

88 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

Virgil the “Renaissance Man” and his Medieval Antecedents

A paper given to the Virgil Society on 20 May 2006

ne of the most enduring myths in that elaborate concatenation of myths known as the Renaissance is that of the Renaissance man, or uomo universale - the supremely cultivated individual who Ocould turn with equal facility from statecraft to philosophy; from horsemanship to painting or the dance; and from the stratagems of the battlefield to the gentler arts of love. For Jacob Burckhardt, in his classic study The Civilisation o f the Renaissance in Italy, ‘The fifteenth century is, above all, that of the many-sided men’. His analysis of the phenomenon is worth quoting at length:1 When this impulse to the highest individual development was combined with a powerful and varied nature, which had mastered all the elements of the culture of the age, then arose the ‘all-sided man’ - l ’uomo universale - who belonged to Italy alone. Men there were of encyclopedic knowledge in many countries during the Middle Ages, for this knowledge was confined within narrow limits; and even in the twelfth century there were universal artists, but the problems of architecture were comparatively simple and uniform, and in sculpture and painting the matter was of more importance than the form. But in Italy at the time of the Renaissance we find artists who in every branch created new and perfect works, and who also made the greatest impression as men. Others, outside the arts they practised, were masters of a vast circle of spiritual interests. Whether or not we believe this ideal was ever fully realised in the humanist culture of Italy during this period, and irrespective of whether we accept the aspiration to universal competence as one exclusively confined to or even principally characteristic of this historical milieu, it is very clear that a high value was set on the virtue of versatility by the educators and cultural authorities of the age. In Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book o f the Courtier, that manual of etiquette and accomplishment for the Renaissance gentleman published after a long gestation in 1528, we hear that the perfect courtier will have the ability to keep his sovereign engaged ‘now with music, now with arms and horses, at other times with verse or with conversations about love’;2 and the list of desirable qualities prescribed by Castiglione’s characters

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becomes sufficiently exhaustive that one of his interlocutors is moved to exclaim, ‘I don’t think one could discover anywhere in the world a vessel big enough to hold all the things you want to put into our courtier’.3 Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, recommending in his treatise of 1450 On the education o f boys grammar, elocution, astronomy, geometry, music, arithmetic and orthography among numerous other branches of learning fit for the instruction of the young, defends his curriculum against an imaginary critic as follows:4 Someone may perhaps inquire how these things are to be learned and whether they can be taught and understood at the same time. Some will deny that this is possible because the mind is confused and wearied by so many studies tending in different directions. But these people do not sufficiently appreciate how great is the power of the human mind, which is so busy, so active and so universally curious that it is impossible for it to limit its activity to one thing only; rather it expends its whole power on many subjects, not only in the course of a single day, but even in a single moment of time. For Piccolomini, then, a figure of no mean stature in the humanist movement of the mid-Quattrocento, the universality of his syllabus is to be a source not of exhaustion, but of exhilaration. Not least among the myriad disciplines advocated by the teachers of the Renaissance was the study of literature, and in particular the literature of classical antiquity. Castiglione’s Count Lodovico maintains, ‘I should like our courtier to be a more than average scholar, at least in those studies which we call the humanities; and he should have a knowledge of Greek as well as Latin, because of the many different things that are so beautifully written in that language’;5 that the narrator of the dialogue found himself in agreement on this point is suggested by his tribute to Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino, who was, he says, ‘very well versed in both Latin and Greek, and possessed as well as an affable and charming nature, an infinite range of knowledge’.6 And chief among the authors of antiquity - notwithstanding intermittent nods to the primacy of Homer or Cicero - the Italian humanists were united in their commendation of the works of Virgil. Battista Guarino’s influential De ordine docendi et studendi (1459) cites the authority of St Augustine to demonstrate ‘that one should begin with Vergil’ (a Vergilio...inchoandum esse) (24), and Guarino encourages his pupil to memorise Virgil’s poetry in order to inculcate the principles of Latin scansion (15).7 The six-book treatise De educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus of Maffeo Vegio, written slightly earlier,8 had already used Augustine to point to Virgil’s pedagogical primacy, recommending that ‘not undeservedly will boys in their earliest years take up Virgil, as being the most elegant and most weighty of all poets, to be read as much as possible’. Those features of Virgil’s poetry - at least in the case of the Aeneid - that most appealed to his Renaissance readers can be partly deduced from the supplement to the Aeneid composed by Vegio in the late 1420s.9 Vegio’s selection of material for his Virgilian imitation and the emphases he gives to it tell us a great deal about the author’s own tastes in reading Virgil, and the immediate popularity of Vegio’s thirteenth book, which appeared as an appendix to Virgil’s poem in numerous editions of the Aeneid after the completion of the supplement in 1428, suggests that these tastes were largely shared by his contemporaries. Virgil’s speeches, his pageantry and ceremonial, his memorable similes, his etymologies, his pathos, his sense of history - these are the favoured characteristics of Vegio’s master as mirrored in his disciple’s ‘completion’ of the fortunes of Aeneas. Both in broad outline and in the details of custom and ritual,10 these interests accord neatly with what can be inferred of Renaissance attitudes to literature in more expressly theoretical works of the period. Of particular interest is the prominence given by Vegio to speech and oratory: his meticulous recreation of Virgilian speech-patterns, his conspicuous inclusion of oratores (311; cf. Aen. 7.153, 8.505 etc.) in the embassy sent by Latinus to Aeneas to sue

90 L. B. T. H o u g h to n - V irgil th e " R en a issa n ce M a n " a n d his M edieval A n t eced en ts for peace, and his insertion of Turnus’ prowess in eloquium (273) among the various attributes of his son lamented by the aged Daunus, a detail introduced ‘umanisticamente ’, as Zabughin observes.11 This concentration on the cultural importance of rhetoric in Vegio’s continuation of the Aeneid reflects a cardinal virtue of the educated elite in Renaissance society, the need for eloquence, and reminds us that Virgil himself was constantly exalted in humanistic circles as a model of correct and appropriate speech. Piccolomini tells his youthful audience that ‘Among the epic poets your teacher shall prefer Vergil above all, whose eloquence, whose glory, is so great that it can be neither augmented by praise nor diminished by censure’;12 for him, as for others, there is to be found in Virgil a model for every kind of style. Indeed, for the theorists of the Renaissance, Virgil and eloquence were to become practically synonymous: Cristoforo Landino, in an introductory lecture on Virgil delivered at the academy in Florence in the 1460s, declares that Virgil must be the first port of call for those who seek ‘the choicest principles of good speaking’ (bene dicendi exquisitissimas rationes), and that his own task in teaching the poet’s wuvre is ‘the office of instructing the youth in eloquence’ (erudiendae adolescentiae in eloquentia munus)}2 ‘From here’, he concludes, ‘you will receive the elegance of the grammarian’s art, from here the power and adornment of the orator’s’.14 In his later Disputationes Camaldulenses, the same Landino, prior to embarking on a Platonising exegesis of the allegorical content of the first six books of the Aeneid, asserts that ‘no-one, though he be imbued with only moderate learning, has ever doubted that this man [that is, Virgil], by his force and fullness of speech, surpasses eloquence herself, so to speak’, again avowing that the pattern for every variety of speech is to be found in the works of the poet.15 It is this aspect of Virgil’s achievement, appropriately enough, that is dwelt on by Marco Girolamo Vida in the rapturous hymn to Virgil with which he ends his versified treatise De arte poetica, the final version of which was issued in 1527.16 And at the very dawn of the humanists’ revival of antiquity, the acknowledgement of Virgil’s eloquence forms a constant thread in Petrarch’s dealings with the poet whom, in a letter to his ancient avatar, the author of the Africa addresses as ‘shining light of eloquence, other hope of the Latin language, illustrious Maro, whom Mantua, happy in so great an offspring, rejoices at having produced as the glory of Rome through the ages’ (eloquii splendor, latie spes altera lingue, | clare Maro, tanta quem felix Mantua prole | Romanum genuisse decus per secula gaudet, Fam. XXIV 11.1-3). But it was not just the eloquence they perceived in Virgil that attracted his Renaissance devotees to the poet of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid. The allegorical tradition of Virgilian commentary, exemplified in this period by the interpretations of Virgil’s epic put forward by Petrarch (in Seniles IV.5), by Salutati, and especially by Landino in the Disputationes, found in Aeneas the model of the perfect man, endowed with every virtue, whose arduous voyage towards the promised land of Italy represented the progress of the soul from bodily taints and temptations to the perfection of enlightenment.17 Thus Virgil was for his allegorising interpreters a philosopher, in Landino’s reading an outright (neo-)Platonist (platonicus omnino ex[s]titerit), whose poem - if correctly understood - would lead its readers towards virtue and away from vice, as Craig Kallendorf has demonstrated.18 For the orator of the Renaissance, as for his Ciceronian predecessors, rhetoric went hand in hand with moralising - so we find Landino, in his inaugural lecture in praise of Virgil, maintaining that ‘our divine Maro, observing all these things, and desiring to encourage us not only to good speaking but to upright living, that he might advise the human race as best he could’, therefore fashioned Aeneas as ‘a model for living’ (tanquam vivendi exemplar)}9 Anchises’ discourse on the purification of souls at Aeneid 6.724-51 did much to confirm this image of Virgil as philosopher, as no doubt did the information in the ancient Lives of the poet (and the Appendix Vergiliana, still at this date attributed to Virgil) that he had studied in his youth at the Epicurean school of Siro at Naples.20 Leonardo Bruni, the chancellor and historian of Florence, quotes the opening of Anchises’ speech in his tract De studiis et litteris, addressed to Battista Malatesta, with the exclamation ‘let us consider the great value

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of our Vergil’s wisdom’, before going on to observe, ‘Can we esteem the philosophers at such a rate when we read passages such as this? Which of them ever laid bare the nature and essence of soul with such knowledge?’.21 If Aeneas, moreover, was to be seen as the embodiment of all good qualities, as the template for human action, then it followed that the accomplishments exhibited by the hero of the Aeneid could be projected back on to the poet, whose multifarious knowledge enabled him to instil in his character the various merits and expertise that he was thought to represent. The passage of Landino’s inaugural oration quoted above continues as follows:22 Has anyone ever governed a state with better laws and regulations? In what commander have you heard or read that there was ever more discipline in the art of war? And since we cannot all be leaders of the state, or be put in command of armies, and far more live as private citizens than in a position of power, does he not very frequently advise them too in what way they should act in themselves, with their household, with citizens and with foreigners? Doesn’t he not only order that caution should be exercised, piety observed, justice maintained, fortitude preserved and restraint applied in all things, and that decorum should be upheld in civic life - but finally, exalting his Aeneas above humankind, does he not bring him through that class of virtues that the Platonists call ‘purgatorial’, all the way to those which do not exist except in the soul that has been purged, and by which blessedness is made perfect? The notion of Aeneas, and through him Virgil, as exemplum is here combined with Landino’s interest in Platonic allegory; but this is a comparatively late development. Virgil’s credentials as a constitutional consultant had been affirmed as early as Dante, whose use of the Aeneid in his De monarchia established an antique legitimacy for the divinely ordained authority of the Holy Roman Empire. The respect accorded to the poet in political circles is further reflected in quotations and adaptations of Virgil’s works in the decorative schemes of Italian civic buildings of this period - perhaps most notably the quotation of Aeneid 6.853, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos, below the personified figure of the virtue Magnanimity in Taddeo di Bartolo’s frescoes for the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, executed in 1413-14.23 The same text appears in a fresco cycle of uomini famosi in the Palazzo Comunale of Lucignano, between Siena and Arezzo, where Aeneid 6.851-3 - with the significant alteration of Romane to ratione in line 851 - are displayed on the open pages of a book held by Virgil himself, one of the series of ‘famous men’ held up for the viewer’s edification in this central venue of communal decision-making (fig. 1).24 Here Virgiliopoeta, the advocate of government by rational principle, is portrayed as a respectable citizen of the Quattrocento, and as a figure of learning, his ermine-lined robes suggesting the doctoral mantle (habitus magistralis) identified by Zabughin as one of the two main types of Virgilian iconography current in this period.25 We find a similar thing in (for instance) the learned and secular figures of Sallust and Varro in Hartmann Schedel’s Weltkronik printed at Nuremberg in 1493 (fig. 2a, overleaf) - though the accompanying Virgil, while no less learned, is rather more hieratic in character.26 How Virgil might have been appropriated to impart instruction in the art of war, the second discipline mentioned by Landino, requires little imagination to conjecture: the last four books of the Aeneid, after all, provide an account of the manreuvres and counter-manreuvres of the Trojans and Italians in their struggle for supremacy in Ausonia. Bruni offers his pupil a similar analysis of Homer shortly before the passage on Virgil’s philosophical acumen cited above, setting this in the context of a more general assertion of the universality of Homer’s learning:27

92 L. B. T. H o u g h to n - V irgil th e " R en a issa n ce M a n " a n d his M edieval A n t eced en ts

Figure 1 Virgil, c.1430s, anonymous Sienese artist, Palazzo Comunale, Lucignano, Sala del Consiglio

93 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

Saluftiue

^Urgfliue ilfearo

Figure 2a Sallust, Varro and Virgil, from H. Schedel, Weltkronik (Nuremberg, 1493), fol. 92v

94 L. B. T. H o u g h to n - V irgil th e " R en a issa n ce M a n " a n d his M edieval A n t eced en ts

Does Homer lack any sort of wisdom that we should refuse him the repute of being most wise (in omni sapientia sapientissimus)? Some say that his poetry provides a complete doctrine of life, divided into periods of peace and war. And indeed in the affairs of war, what has he not told us of the prudence of the general, of the cunning and bravery of the soldier, of the kinds of trickery to be allowed or omitted, of advice, of counsel? ... And he has ten thousand more such counsels which I would gladly speak of, did I not fear being too prolix. Again, despite the fact that the meeting of Dido and Aeneas was by this date widely acknowledged as one of the more extreme examples of historical cradle-snatching, Virgil was recognised by his Renaissance readers as a consummate historian. In a passage from the Disputationes Camaldulenses partly repeated verbatim from his inaugural oration on Virgil, Cristoforo Landino adds the poet’s antiquarian interests to his mastery of rhetoric, and adumbrates yet more fields of erudition - in some cases quite arcane - that fall within Virgil’s competence:28 Add to this his awareness of history, add how very painstaking an investigator of antiquity he was, and not only of our affairs, but also of Greek history and that of all nations, how extremely fond he was of archaic words, how elegantly he devised new words himself, how he controlled the force of all of them as his own. I pass over the civil law, I leave out the pontifical law, I say nothing of the law of the augurs, with which he was so conversant that he seems not to have received them from others, but to have devised them himself. This view of Virgil as universal historian can once more be easily traced back to the poet’s own works: the Aeneid looks back, on the one hand, to events before its own narrative begins, to the Homeric legends of the Trojan War, and forward, on the other, to Aeneas’ founding of Rome, through all subsequent periods of Roman history (including the Punic Wars, in Dido’s prayer for an avenger to rise from her ashes, Aeneid 4.625), to Catiline, Cato and Augustus’ most recent triumphs (8.666­ 70, 714-16), to the untimely death of Marcellus (6.860-86), and further still, to a Roman empire without bounds in space or time (1.278). The Georgics move from the world’s first spring (2.336-42), to Caesar’s thunderous progress beside the Euphrates (4.560-1), to a distant future when the farmer will turn up with his plough the bones of those who died in Rome’s civil wars and wonder at their size (1.493-7). And the Eclogues relate the creation of the world from chaos (in the song of Silenus, 6.31-40), celebrate the appearance of the sidus Iulium (9.46-9), and anticipate the birth of a child in the consulship of Pollio, which will inaugurate a new Golden Age (Ecl. 4). Indeed, an awareness of this tendency in Virgilian criticism of the period helps to account for a curious mistake in one of the most important Renaissance manuscripts of another classical author. In modern texts, lines 5-7 of the opening poem of Catullus, addressed (as the vocative Corneli in line 3 makes clear) to one Cornelius - later identified by Antonio Partenio as the historian Cornelius Nepos29 - read as follows: ‘even then when you dared [ausus es], alone of Italians, to unroll all history in three volumes - learned tomes, by Jove, and laborious’. Beside line 5, in the fourteenth- century Oxoniensis manuscript of the poet,30 which has the reading ‘ausus esT (‘even then when one of the Italians dared to unroll all history...’), the scribe has added ‘I take this to refer to Virgil, and by “three volumes” I understand his three books, namely the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid). This extraordinary misunderstanding - even allowing for the textual variant - can only have been triggered by an automatic response to the combination of tribus...chartis, omne aevum and laborious learning, illustrating how deeply the association of Virgil with universal history had permeated into the consciousness even of a copyist of little learning and less patience (there are very few annotations in the manuscript after this first poem, which sets this initial intervention in even starker relief).31

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But to demonstrate that Virgil was regarded as an authority in the fields of rhetoric, warfare, constitutional affairs and historical writing is merely to scratch the surface of Renaissance ingenuity when it comes to the uses to which this poet could be put. Even the notion of Virgil as theologian, as conscious or unconscious prophet of Christ,32 can be unearthed without excessive excavation of the text of Eclogue 4.4-7: the theory was already subj ect to doubt by the time of Petrarch, in any case, although Bruni refers to it immediately after his exposition of Virgil the philosopher, and by the late fifteenth century Virgil’s lines could still appear alongside the Cumaean Sibyl in the marble pavement of the Duomo at Siena, as well as in contemporary woodcuts. His poetry was also mined for precept and example by theorists of the visual arts:33 Leon Battista Alberti - himself Burckhardt’s favoured candidate for the title of uomo universale - makes frequent allusion to the Aeneid in his De pictura of 1435, using Virgil’s text as a sourcebook for the student of painting in the fitting depiction of the emaciated Achaemenides, the companion of Odysseus rescued by Aeneas from the land of the Cyclops in Aeneid 3 (cf. 3.590-4), and in the representation of the attributes of Diana the huntress, to whom Dido is paralleled at Aeneid 1.498-502. Virgil’s description of Dido herself at Aeneid 4.134-9 is also held up by Alberti as a model for emulation by the aspiring artist; and in his later De re aedificatoria the Florentine adduces the temple crafted by Daedalus at Cumae, the sculptural programme of which is described by Virgil at the beginning of Aeneid 6 (6.14-33) as an example of ‘moralising’ architecture, bringing the ancient poet within the remit of the plastic arts. Even more remarkably, as Zabughin notes, Pomponio Gaurico’s treatise De sculptura (1504) finds in Virgil instances of the different varieties of perspective, while Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, in his Trattato dell’arte dellapittura (1584), sets out guidelines for the proper representation not only of Virgilian scenes, but also of the poet himself.34 Zabughin points also to the appearance of Virgil in theoretical works on music from this period (the poet’s account of the performance by the long-haired Punic bard Iopas at the banquet which concludes Aeneid 1 seems to have been particularly influential), though we have to wait a little longer for the first Virgilian operas.35 Two further departments of Virgil’s presumed expertise emerge from the life of the poet accompanying his portrait in Schedel’s Weltkronik (fig. 2b), taken from the popular humanistic compilation known as Donatus auctus, which records that ‘when he had paid the most earnest attention to Greek and Latin literature, finally he immersed himself with all diligence and all studiousness in medicine and mathematics [or ‘astrology’]. When he was more learned and more skilled in these fields than anyone else, he made his way to the city...’.36 Virgil’s proficiency as a physician is no doubt connected with his account of the activities of the surgeon Iapyx in the twelfth book of the Aeneid, whose unsuccessful attempts to heal Aeneas’ wound are assisted by Venus’ intervention with a more esoteric remedy (12.391-421). The foundation for the biographer’s depiction of the poet as an accomplished mathematician - or, perhaps more likely, astrologer - is less easy to identify; it may possibly be related to a conception current at the time that Aeneas’ first words in the Aeneid, O terque quaterque (1.94), refer to the Pythagorean theory of numbers - but this is no more than a guess.37 This picture of Virgil’s versatility, his learning and accomplishment in an exhaustive range of different disciplines, is beginning to exhibit distinct similarities to the portrait ofthe many-sided ‘Renaissance man’ we encountered above. Is it legitimate, then, to claim that for at least some of his Renaissance readers, the poet of the Aeneid embodied an ideal of the ‘universal man’? That his work was regarded at least as a repository of every kind of wisdom emerges from a source that is neither a practical treatise nor a direct engagement with Virgil’s own work. In his commentary on Dante’s Commedia,38 in which Virgil famously serves as the protagonist’s guide through the circles of Hell and along the winding ledges of Mount Purgatory, Cristoforo Landino is able to exploit the tension between Virgil as a character - the personification of human reason, according to the earliest commentators on the Commedia - in Dante’s

96 L. B. T. H o u g h to n - V irgil th e " R en a issa n ce M a n " a n d his M edieval A n t eced en ts

V γ ?rgtlius maro poetaru pjtnrtps uatio V ^ftw t z pctbue patre marone.tlatus eft i crafio pnmucofuladuu octobziu tueinpago . non procul.dfeatcr etus maia feemjtam laure .fpem pjofperis gemture.JImtm eta tis cremo lanujmde paulopoft neapolim tranfii'tt vbia tifftma operam ccdiiTetnande omni cur a omt tbematttts.iQmbus rebus aim ante alios er contulit:vbi ab augufto acceprus ftutn illus

tura fuit grandi: aquilino cokwetfaae rufticar Figure 2b ab ftomaebo x faucibus ac ooloje capitis lab» Opening of Life of repulfatti habuit nuncg. "(barentibus quot an Virgil, from H. Schedel. mittebattquos fam grandis amifit.ilkulca fa Weltkronik (Nuremberg. ______- - *______~___ * - m ±L___ i ___ :______:______. - ■___ ------1 - ____ _ 1493), fol. 92v

poem and Virgil as historical figure and literary model, in order to represent Dante’s portrayal of his ancient predecessor as an endorsement of his own reading of Virgil’s poetry. So when Dante introduces Virgil in the first canto of the Inferno, Landino gives a brief, conventional biography of the Roman poet (including his supposed qualifications in medicine and mathematics), before adding a further observation alien to the ancient biographical tradition: ‘it would be very prolix to recount the divers learning and the supreme eloquence of this poet, nor can the pen get close to my desire, nor does the place call for it, and the fact by itself is evident to every scholar’ - that is, the Renaissance appreciation of Virgil’s oratorical skill and multi-faceted wisdom is sufficiently widely known that it calls for neither repetition nor explanation.39 Again, when the Inferno's narrator addresses his guide as ‘you who honour both knowledge and art’ (‘O tu che onori e scienza ed arte’, IV.73), his Renaissance commentator observes: ‘undoubtedly all learning is honoured by its own nature, but when it is adorned with the eloquence of poetry it is honoured much more greatly. It is therefore a fitting tribute to so great a poet, whose poems are packed full of all manner of learning. And deservedly one could say of him that as gold adorns the gem set in it, so he makes all knowledge that he handles yet more illustrious.’40 And perhaps most telling of all is Landino’s comment on Dante’s characterisation of Virgil as ‘that gentle sage, who knew everything’ (‘quel savio gentil, che tutto seppe’, Inferno VII.3): here it is not human reason that comprehends all; rather this is ‘great praise of Virgil, worthy of him, inasmuch as whoever reads his poem carefully sees that it is packed full of such great and so varied things, that he understands easily that Virgil was universal in all the disciplines of the ancients. ..’.41

Here we have, it seems, something approximating to Virgil the ‘Renaissance man’ - the adept in every branch of learning, the master of every discipline of his time: a further illustration, if it were needed, that (as Kallendorf puts it) ‘ [t]he Aeneid... served for almost two thousand years as a vehicle through which the powerful elites of Europe visualized the culture they wanted and brought that culture into being’.42 A Virgil for the age of the humanists, then, fashioned in the image of the universal scholar, or the perfect courtier. But once we turn to the question of why Virgil in particular was subjected to this interpretative treatment, and begin to locate this Renaissance Virgil within the context of previous receptions of the

97 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8 poet, the picture becomes considerably more complicated. For Landino, as for other theorists, poetry encompassed the entirety of the liberal arts43 - indeed, by the time of the Disputationes he was arguing that it transcended the arts, being ‘res quaedam divinior’ (Disputationes [n.15], 111) - and Virgil, divinus Maro, as supreme representative of poetry, could naturally be expected to supply this conception with its most comprehensive expression. But no reading exists in a cultural vacuum, and the belief in Virgil’s universal wisdom, which seemed to fit so neatly into our template of the ‘Renaissance man’, turns out to have an extremely distinguished, and highly persistent, critical heritage.

Let us take as our point of departure the scholarly tradition on Dante with which we concluded the investigation of Virgil’s fortunes in the Renaissance. The notion that Dante’s attribution of all­ embracing knowledge to his guide and master reflects the Florentine poet’s own reading of the works of the historical author did not originate with Landino: over a century earlier Guido da Pisa, commenting on the characterisation of Virgil as ‘the sea of all wisdom’ (‘[i]l mar di tutto il senno’) at Inferno VIII.7, claims that ‘the author calls his master “sea of all wisdom” because truly he was a man most deeply versed in all wordly knowledge’.44 That this was not an unreasonable deduction for a scholar of this period to make is suggested by an etymology of the poet’s name from the ninth-century Codex Gudianus, quoted by Comparetti: ‘he was called Maro from mare, for as the sea abounds in water so did he abound in wisdom more than any other man’.45 The association between Virgil and the metaphorical ‘sea of wisdom’ had thus been established five centuries before Dante and his earliest commentators. Another etymology of the same date derives Vergilius from vere gliscens, on the grounds that he was ‘a most illustrious teacher of great philosophy and multifarious, like the produce of spring’ 46 It has even been suggested that in Byzantine hagiographical texts the transliterated form of the poet’s name, Βιργίλιος, came to be synonymous with the adjective or noun sapientissimus (most learned).47

In his great work on European literature and the Latin Middle Ages, E. R. Curtius observes that - as we have seen in the case of Landino and his fellow theorists of the Renaissance - ‘The arts of poetry of the period...demand encyclopedic knowledge of the poet’.48 It has already been noted that the Aeneid served as a major source for Dante’s constitutional theories in the De monarchia, but the association between Virgil and political philosophy goes back much further. In the twelfth-century treatise of John of Salisbury, the Policraticus, we find the contention that republican forms of government are modelled on the social organisation of bees illustrated by extensive quotation from the fourth Georgic of ‘the most learned poet Maro’ (poetarum doctissimus Maro); and shortly afterwards the reader is told ‘You may be confronted by the Mantuan poet, who under the pretext of fiction expressed all the truths of philosophy’.49 There is even an anticipation of Landino’s simile of the gold and the gem in the assertion that ‘Virgil was permitted to acquire the gold of wisdom from the clay of Ennius’ (itself an echo - with the significant addition of the word sapientiae, wisdom - of one of Virgil’s own supposed sayings, reported in the Vita Donati aucti).50 The related iconography of Virgil as civic benefactor can be traced back at least to 1227, the date recorded in an inscription below a seated effigy of the poet that still surveys the passing populace from the fa9ade of the Palazzo Broletto at Mantua.51

The image of Aeneas as ‘an ideal prince and object for worldly imitation’, as an ethical example for the instruction of youth, had also enj oyed a widespread vogue in the Middle Ages before its apotheosis in the humanists’ elevation of virtue and excoriation of vice.52 A late fourteenth-century commentary in a Norwich manuscript of the Aeneid analysed by Baswell draws from Virgil’s text precise instructions for conduct in a variety of different situations, including the proper use of prayer, means of approach to friends and enemies, the importance of self-help and avoidance of danger, and appropriate veneration of the saints.53 The common tendency to envisage the poet as actually engaged in the activities he describes results in a number

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Figure 3 Rota Virgilii, after E. Faral (n.56), p.87 of Virgilian epitaphs that depict the poet as shepherd, farmer and soldier, as for example in the following lines reported by Curtius: ‘As shepherd, farmer, knight, I pastured, tilled, conquered goats, the soil, foes, with leafage, mattock, hand’.54 A twelfth-century English manuscript of the Aeneid later owned by the humanist John Free has a similar, if less elaborate, couplet: ‘A shepherd, I marshalled sheep; a ploughman, fields; and a soldier, battles - Maro, renowned in everlasting honour’,55 and Petrarch situates himself in this tradition when he talks in Bucolicum carmen X.46-7 of ‘a single Venetian...shepherd, farmer and warrior by turns’. The rhetorical theorists of the Middle Ages found, like their successors, a model in Virgil for every kind of style, a conception that assumed diagrammatic form in ‘Virgil’s wheel’ (fig. 3), where the three styles represented by Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid respectively are associated with their own characteristic objects, landscapes and literary personalities, in most cases derived from the poems themselves.56 And the thirteenth-century French poem Dolopathos, derived from traditional legends of the Seven Sages, depicts Virgil imparting to his pupil instruction in all the liberal arts, distilled into a single small volume.57 Virgil’s authority in the field of historical narrative, praised in all its fullness by Landino, had already gained a hold over the mind of medieval readers via the Roman d ’Eneas and the early thirteenth- century Histoire ancienne jusqu ’ά Cesar, the popularity of which extended well into the Renaissance.58 The numerological interpretation of Aeneid 1.94 mentioned above makes an appearance in the influential twelfth-century commentary attributed to ‘Anselm of Laon’;59 while the allegorical approaches to Virgil championed by Petrarch in his youth and Landino throughout his career built on the investigations of the poet’s integumenta by scholars of earlier centuries, and Platonic interpretations of the hidden depths of Virgil’s poem had been pioneered long before the age of Marsilio Ficino and the Florentine school.60 It was no doubt the corruption of these attestations of the Roman poet’s ‘unfathomable store of universal wisdom’ that resulted in the bizarre legends of Virgil’s magical powers and superhuman achievements that enjoyed some currency in medieval Italy, the most memorable (and most notorious) feature of Comparetti’s monumental work of historical synthesis.61

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Can Virgil the uomo universale of the princely court and the humanist lecture hall ever be wholly separated, then, from the encyclopedic intellect of the cloisters? We shall not find the poet used to illustrate the principles of perspective before the sixteenth century, it is true, and definitions and tastes in rhetoric are not necessarily constant, but it can scarcely be doubted that - as Kallendorf contends - ‘The medieval Virgil...did not disappear overnight’.62 As so often in the study of the Renaissance, an acknowledgement of the essential continuity of certain cultural phenomena is the precondition for identifying possible developments and shifts in emphasis. But we should note that this medieval view of Virgil’s comprehensive competence was itself founded on a critical tradition extending back much further, and already firmly ingrained in the Virgilian studies of late antiquity.63 The summary of the poet’s recondite learning so eloquently expounded by Landino is itself little more than a variation on a famous passage from the early fifth-century commentary of the grammarian Servius, which retained its popularity as an exegetical tool throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.64 Servius opens his commentary on the sixth book of the Aeneid with a declaration of the wonders that await the reader of this book, and an indication that the limitless variety of Virgil’s wisdom had already been the subject of separate studies by earlier scholars, even closer in time to the poet himself: The whole of Virgil, indeed, is full of knowledge, in which quality this book holds first place; the larger part of it is from Homer. And some things are said simply, many things from history, many things through the profound knowledge of the philosophers, the theologians and the Egyptians - to the degree that very many people have written entire treatises on these individual points of this book.65

One of these previous commentators was Aelius Donatus, whose surviving Life of the poet appears to preserve even more ancient material derived from the life of Virgil in the second-century biographer Suetonius’ De poetis.66 To Donatus we owe the account of Virgil’s education appropriated by the humanist compilers of the Vita Donati aucti mentioned above, with one possibly significant alteration: here we learn that ‘among the rest of his studies he also paid attention to medicine and particularly to mathematics/astrology’ (Vita Donatiana 15) - but the detail in the fifteenth-century recension that he became better at them than anyone else is a later addition, no doubt based on the assumption that Virgil could not have failed to excel in whatever he turned his hand to. The acclamation of Virgil’s versatile accomplishments and monumental erudition reached its zenith around the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries with Macrobius, in whose dialogue the Saturnalia Servius himself (described as ‘far the greatest of all literary critics’) appears as a character.67 Some impression of the approaches to Virgilian criticism adopted in this eclectic compendium can be gained from a passage in Book I in which Macrobius’ speakers set out the features of the poet’s work on which they will expatiate in the forthcoming discussion (Sat. I.24.16-18, tr. Davies): Of all the high qualities for which Vergil is praised, said Vettius, my constant reading of his poems leads me, for my part, to admire the great learning with which he has observed the rules of the pontifical law in many different parts of his work. One might well suppose that he had made a special study of this law, and if my discourse does not prove unequal to so lofty a topic, I undertake to show that our Vergil may fairly be regarded as a Pontifex Maximus. Flavianus was the next to speak. I find in our poet, he said, such knowledge of augural law that, even if he were unskilled in all other branches of learning, the exhibition of this knowledge alone would win him high esteem.

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I, added Eustathius, should give the highest praise to his use of Greek models - a cautious use and one which may even have the appearance of being accidental, since he sometimes skillfully conceals the debt, although at other times he imitates openly - did I not admire even more his knowledge of astronomy and of the whole field of philosophy, and the sparing and restrained way in which he makes occasional, and everywhere praiseworthy, use of this knowledge in his poems.

And so on. Who can suppose that Landino, whom we saw ostentatiously passing over Virgil’s learning in pontifical and augural law in the Disputationes, was unfamiliar with this epitome of the lost parts of Macrobius’ work, whether he knew the text directly or had encountered some echo of its contents in an intermediate source? Again, Landino’s comment on the gentle, all-knowing sage he found in Dante, that he was ‘universale in tutte le discipline degli antichi’, looks rather like Macrobius’ reference to Maro omnium disciplinarum peritus (‘Vergil, who is an authority in every branch of learning’, Sat. I.16.12). The judgement is repeated in Macrobius’ commentary on Cicero’s Dream o f Scipio (Vergilius nullius disciplinae expers),68 where the late antique devotee takes his enthusiasm one step further down the path of Virgilian infallibility, calling his hero ‘Virgil, a poet who has never been caught in error on any subject’ and ‘a man admittedly above error’ (Comm. II.8.1, 8, tr. Stahl): our Renaissance appreciations of Virgil’s intellectual universality begin to look judicious and restrained by comparison.

Yet another of Servius’ successors, the sixth-century commentator Fulgentius,69 attributes to the Eclogues and Georgics an (almost) equally wide range of competences, before launching into the allegorical reading of the Aeneid that occupies the main body of his Expositio Virgilianae continentiae. Medieval assessments of Virgil’s mastery of the various artes may well have taken a hint from Fulgentius’ observation, ‘I have left out the Eclogues and the Georgics, in which such mystical rationes are imbued, whereby in these same books Virgil has touched on the inner core of almost every single art [nullius pene artis...interna Virgilius praeterierit viscera]’ (Exp. Virg. cont. 738 [p.83 Helm]). For all Comparetti’s fulminations against ‘the abortive offspring of a barbarism as deficient in taste as in knowledge’ (p.112, on Fulgentius’ Latin), Fulgentius’ exposition of Virgil was undoubtedly influential in later ages, and may have provided one more stimulus for the subsequent attribution to his subject of authority in every discipline known to man. It certainly laid - or perhaps rather secured - the foundations for the allegorical tendency that was to dominate Virgilian criticism in subsequent centuries.

Finally, Vegio and Guarino were by no means the first educationalists to set Virgil at the head of their syllabus: the ancient rhetorician Quintilian, prescribing the epic poets of antiquity as the foundation for the study of oratory just as his humanistic successors were to mine the Aeneid for illustrations of practical eloquence and exemplary virtue, begins his reading list for the budding orator as follows: 70 The other aspects of reading require important cautions: above all, these tender minds, which will be deeply affected by whatever is impressed upon them in their untrained ignorance, should learn not only eloquent passages but, even more, passages which are morally improving. The practice of making reading start with Homer and Vergil is therefore excellent. Of course it needs a more developed judgement to appreciate their virtues; but there is time enough for this, for they will be read more than once. Quintilian’s words (attributed merely to veteres, the ancients) are quoted verbatim in Piccolomini’s treatise, and the future pope’s curriculum of approved authors displays a number of other points of convergence with that proposed by his antique precursor some thirteen hundred years earlier.71

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By this time it may seem that I have constructed an edifice only to pull the foundations from under it and thereby send the whole building crashing down around the Neapolitan egg on which it was so precariously balanced.72 But I think some general and positive conclusions can be drawn from our hurried tour through centuries of Virgilian universality. Virgil’s Renaissance readers could scarcely help viewing the works of Rome’s greatest poet at least partly through the lens of past perceptions of his literary achievement - for no age has sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus, and no historical moment is hermetically sealed from the messy continuum on either side. But these readers did not have to adopt their predecessors’ vision of Virgil’s multifarious interests and accomplishments. Unless we attribute the persistence of Virgil’s popularity solely to pedagogical inertia, the fact that the educated elite of the Renaissance chose to retain and perpetuate this aspect of the Virgilian critical inheritance, and to build on the pre-existing foundation of ideas of Virgil’s comprehensive intelligence, can tell us much about the tastes and aspirations with which the Italian humanists approached their reading of the poet’s work. Kallendorf maintains that ‘ most reactions to the poem confirm the assertion that the Aeneid reinforced the educational, religious, and political values that its elite readers found reflected there’,73 and the readers of this period are no exception. It would be rash to claim that the traditional picture of Virgil as universal teacher played any part in formulating a concept of the many-sided ‘Renaissance man’. But when the humanists came to look for what they felt to be the necessary historical endorsement and ancient authority for their own emphasis on the value of versatility, the long-established reputation of Virgil’s consummate proficiency in all disciplines will have furnished a readily applicable means of accommodating this pre-eminent classical author to their own cultural proj ects. Castiglione, with whose reflections on the ideal courtier we began our survey, expresses the need for guidance and instruction as follows in the final dialogue of his book:74 Therefore, as with other arts and skills so also with the virtues, it is necessary to have a master who by his teaching and precepts stirs and awakens the moral virtues whose seed is enclosed and buried in our souls and who, like a good farmer, cultivates and clears the way for them by removing the thorns and tares of our appetites which often so darken and choke our minds as not to let them flower or produce those splendid fruits which alone we should wish to see born in the human heart. Given what we have seen of the Virgilian traditions inherited by the scholarship of the Renaissance, to whom would the studious minds of the age more naturally have turned in their quest for this master than the ‘good farmer’ who had sung his Ascraean song through Roman towns (Georgics 2.176), and the moralist who had represented in Aeneas the man endowed with every virtue, enclosing within the golden soil of his poetry the gem-like seed of all wisdom? It was not only Dante - whose own treatment of Virgil now inevitably coloured his descendants’ perceptions of the literary and historical figure behind his guide and mentor - who could look to the poet of Rome and say, ‘Tu se’ lo mio maestro e il mio autore’ (Inferno I.85). University College London L. B. T. HOUGHTON

NOTES I am very grateful to Professor M. D. Reeve, Miss A. C. Dionisotti and Professor R. G. Mayer for their helpful observations on a previous draft of this paper. 1 J. Burckhardt, The Civilization o f the Renaissance in Italy, tr. S. G. C. Middlemore (Penguin Classics; Harmondsworth, 1990) 101; see ibid. 101-4. 2 Castiglione, The Book o f the Courtier, tr. G. Bull (Penguin Classics; Harmondsworth, 1976 [rev. edn]) 288. 3 Castiglione (n.2) 94. 4 Piccolomini, De liberorum educatione 95, in C. W. Kallendorf (ed./tr.), Humanist Educational Treatises (I Tatti Renaissance Library; Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2002). 5 Castiglione (n.2) 90. 6 Castiglione (n.2) 42.

102 L. B. T. H o u g h to n - V irgil th e " R en a issa n ce M a n " a n d his M edieval A n t eced en ts

7 Guarino, De ordine docendi et studendi, in Kallendorf, Humanist Educational Treatises (n.4). 8 Vegio, De liberorum educatione et eorum claris moribus libri sex II.18-19 (ed. M. W. Fanning [I-III] and A. S. Sullivan [IV-VI], 2 vols, Washington, 1933-6). 9 For Vegio’s supplement, see nowMaffeo Vegio:Short Epics, ed. M. C. J. Putnam with J. Hankins (I Tatti Renaissance Library; Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2004). Also C. Kallendorf, In Praise o f Aeneas. Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover and London, 1989) 100-28; B. Schneider, Das Aeneissupplementum des Maffeo Vegio (Weinheim, 1985); A. Cox Brinton, Maphaeus Vegius and his Thirteenth Book o f the Aeneid (Stanford, 1930; repr. London, 2002); and see Anne Rogerson’s piece in the present volume. 10 For resemblances between marriage and funeral ceremonies in Vegio’s epic and those of Renaissance Italy, see V Zabughin, Vergilio nel rinascimento italiano, da Dante a Torquato Tasso (Bologna, 1921-3; repr. Trento, 2000) I.282-4. 11 Zabughin (n.10) I.284. On Vegio’s speeches, see Kallendorf (n.9) 106-7: ‘Speechmaking was an important part of fifteenth-century life, and humanists found many opportunities to mark public events...with demonstrations of their oratorical skill. It is logical to assume that the same audiences who enjoyed Filelfo’s panegyric of Filippo Maria Visconti or Landino’s “Praefatio in Virgilio” would also enjoy the speeches in Vegio’s Supplement. 12 Piccolomini, De liberorum educatione 69, tr. Kallendorf. 13 A. Field, ‘An Inaugural Oration by Cristoforo Landino in Praise of Virgil (from Codex «2», Casa Cavalli, Ravenna)’, Rinascimento ser. II 21 (1981) 235-45 at 240, lines 5, 10. 14 Field (n.13) 244, lines 143-4. 15 Cristoforo Landino, Disputationes Camaldulenses, ed. P. Lohe (Studi e Testi VI; Florence, 1980) 116-17. 16 Marco Girolamo Vida, De arte poetica III.554-92 (tr. R. G. Williams: New York, 1976). 17 Kallendorf (n.9). 18 Kallendorf (n.9) passim. 19 Field (n.13) 243, lines 81-5. See also Landino’s proemium to his Virgil commentary of 1488: Cristoforo Landino, Scritti critici e teorici, ed. R. Cardini, 2 vols (Rome, 1974) I.211-25 at 215-16 (esp. 216 line 1 ‘exemplar ad vitam degendam ’). 20 Vita Focae 87-8 (Brugnoli/Stok); some manuscripts of Vita Donati aucti 79 have Syrone, but G. Brugnoli and F. Stok, Vitae Vergilianae antiquae (Rome, 1997) 119 print Silone. See also [Virgil], Catalepton 5, 8. 21 Bruni, De studiis et litteris liber ad Baptistam de Malatestis 22, in Kallendorf, Humanist Educational Treatises (n.4); note also Landino, Scritti critici (n.19) I.216 lines 1-3 (Ac nescio an melius multo apud hunc quam apud philosophos huiuscemodi omnia assequaris). 22 Field (n.13) 243, lines 85-96; cf. Landino, Scritti critici (n.19) I.216, lines 11-19. 23 R. Funari (ed.) Un ciclo di tradizione repubblicana nel Palazzo Pubblico di Siena. Le iscrizioni degli affreschi di Taddeo di Bartolo(1413- 1414) (Siena, 2002) 67 with pl. IVb. 24 See L. B. T. Houghton, ‘A Fresco Portrait of Virgil at Lucignano’, Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 66 (2003) 1-28; E. Hlawitschka-Roth, Die ‘uomini famosi’ der Sala di Udienza im Palazzo Comunale zu Lucignano (Neuried, 1998) 40-3, 140-5. 25 Zabughin (n.10) II.387-91 with illustr. facing I.152; Houghton (n.24) 18-19. On Virgilian portrait types, see also G. Zippel, ‘Il culto e gli studi Virgiliani nel Rinascimento’, in Studi Virgiliani, volumeprimo (Rome, 1931) 235-53 at 251-2. 26 I am very grateful to Mr Michael Halsey for supplying me with the relevant folio (92) of this work. 27 Bruni, De studiis et litteris 21, tr. Kallendorf; on Homeric universality, cf. Politian, Ambra 481-589 (Angelo Poliziano: Silvae, ed./tr. C. Fantazzi [I Tatti Renaissance Library; Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2004]). 28 Landino, Disputationes (n.15) 117; cf. Field (n.13) 244, lines 132-40; also Landino’s later Virgil commentary (Scritti critici [n.19], 217 lines 4-8). On Landino’s poetics in the Disputationes, see P. R. Hardie, ‘Humanist Exegesis of Poetry in fifteenth-century Italy and the Medieval Tradition of Commentary’ (unpublished M.Phil. thesis; London [Warburg Institute], 1976) 36-69; R. Cardini, La critica del Landino (Florence, 1973). 29 See J. H. Gaisser, Catullus and his Renaissance Readers (Oxford, 1993) 88. 30 Catullus, Carmina. Codex Oxoniensis Bibliothecae Bodleianae Canonicianus class. Lat. 30, pref. R. A. B. Mynors (Codices Graeci et Latini 21; Leiden, 1966) fol. 1r. 31 For the possibility that these annotations were inherited from an earlier stage in the tradition, see Gaisser (n.29) 19 with 285 n.86. 32 For the Renaissance, see esp. C. Kallendorf, Virgil and the Myth o f Venice. Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford, 1999) 91-139. In general, S. Freund, Vergil im fruhen Christentum (Paderborn etc., 2000); P. Courcelle, Lecteurspaiens et lecteurs chretiens de lEneide, 2 vols. (Paris, 1984-9); S. Benko, ‘Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in Christian Interpretation’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt II.31.1 (1980) 646-705; D. Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, tr. E. F. M. Benecke (London, 1895; repr. Princeton, 1997) esp. 96-103, 309-17, 360-1; R. D. Williams and T. S. Pattie, Virgil. His Poetry through the Ages (London, 1982) 85-9. 33 Zabughin (n.10) II.29-33. 34 Zabughin (n.10) II.30-2 (Gaurico) 32-3 (Lomazzo). 35 Zabughin (n.10) II.32, 33-4 (for Virgilian operas, II.383-4). 36 Vita Donati aucti 7-8 (Brugnoli/Stok; cf. also 26). F. Stok, who dates this Life to between 1426 and 1437, observes that in it ‘Virgil... becomes a sort of gentlemanly court intellectual and advisor to the prince, in terms that evidently reflect the sociocultural reality in which the Humanists were operating’ (‘Virgil Between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, International Journal o f the Classical Tradition 1 [1994], 15-22 at 21). For mathematica as ‘astrology’, see Thesaurus Linguae Latinae VIII.471-2 s.v. mathematicus IB, IIB 2b; Dictionary o f Medieval Latin from British Sources (Oxford, 1975-) VI.1734 s.v. mathematicus 5c, 7b. 37 Cf. e.g. Badius’ commentary in the Juntine edition of Virgil (Venice, 1544; repr. New York, 1976) fol. 161r, citing Macrobius (see n.59 below); for a later discussion of the idea, see Sir Thomas Browne’s PseudodoxiaEpidemica (6th ed., 1672) IV 12 (p.337 Robbins). Note also Landino’s calculation of the mathematical (astronomical) ‘accuracy’ of Eclogue 4: Zabughin (n.10) I.196.

103 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

38 Cristoforo Landino, Comento sopra la Comedia, 4 vols, ed. P. Procaccioli (Rome, 2001). On Landino’s Dante commentary, see S. A. Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 2005) 163-230; Kallendorf (n.9) 129-65; M. Lentzen, Studien zur Dante-Exegese Cristoforo Landinos (Cologne & Vienna, 1971). 39 Landino, Comento (n.38) I.313; Landino’s ‘ne puo la penna andar presso al volere’ seems to be an allusion to Petrarch, Canzoniere 23.91. For Sebastiano Regolo’s Aristotelian Virgil (influenced by Landino), ‘quem omnes divinum, & Poetarum Principem, aureum eloquentiae flumen, fontem omnium scientiarum esse testantur\ see Zabughin (n.10) II.81-2 with 109 n.92. 40 Landino, Comento (n.38) I.420. 41 Landino, Comento (n.38) II.490. 42 C. Kallendorf, ‘Virgil’s Post-classical Legacy’, in J. M. Foley (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic (Oxford, 2005) 574-88 at 577. 43 See Landino, Disputationes (n.15) 118-19; Hardie (n.28) 11-13 (also ibid. 13-15 on the idea of the omniscient poet). 44 Guido da Pisa, Expositiones et Glose super Comediam Dantis, or, Commentary on Dante’s Inferno, ed. V. Cioffari (Albany, 1974) 152. 45 Comparetti (n.32) 147. 46 Comparetti (n.32) 146-7. 47 For discussion see V Peri, 'Βιργίλιος = Sapientissimus. Riflessi culturali latino-greci nell’agiografia bizantina’, Italia medioevale e umanistica 19 (1976) 1-41. 48 E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. W. R. Trask (London, 1953) 207; for Virgil’s universal knowledge, see ibid. 206-7. 49 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, tr. C. J. Nederman (Cambridge, 1990) VI.21, 22. 50 Policraticus V prologue, tr. Nederman; cf. Vita Donati aucti 71. 51 See W. Liebenwein, ‘Princeps Poetarum: Die mittelalterlichen Vergil-Bilder in Mantua’, in V. Poschl (ed.), 2000 Jahre Vergil: Ein Symposion (Wiesbaden, 1983) 109-51; Houghton (n.24) 21-3 with 22 fig.12. 52 C. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the twelfth century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995) 20, 78, 151-4, 167. 53 Baswell (n.52) 151-2. 54 Curtius (n.48) 286 (=Anthologia Latina 800 Riese): ‘Pastor arator eques pavi colui superavi | capras rus hostesfronde ligone manu’. 55 Cambridge, Jesus College 33 (Q.B. 16) fol.103r (cited by Baswell [n.52], 294): ‘Pastor oves, et arator agros, etprelia miles | Instruxi, eterno clarus honore Maro’. 56 E. Faral, Les arts poetiques du XII et du XIII siecle (Paris, 1924) 86-9; A. T. Laugesen, ‘La Roue de Virgile. Une page de la theorie litteraire du Moyen Age’, Classica etMedievalia 23 (1962) 248-73; P. R. Hardie, Virgil (Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics No. 28; Oxford, 1998) 1 n.1. 57 See Comparetti (n.32) 232-8, 292. 58 Baswell (n.52) 11, 28. 59 Baswell (n.52) 67 - cf. also Macrobius, Comm. Somn. Scip. I.6.44. For the medieval Virgil as ‘mathematician’, see also Comparetti (n.32) 262, 272, 290-1 (as astrologer, 272-3, 290-1, 355-6). 60 Baswell (n.52) 84-135, 136-9; P. Dronke, ‘Integumenta Virgilii’, in Lectures medievales de Virgile (Collection de l’ecole fran^aise de Rome 80; Rome, 1985) 313-29; Comparetti (n.32) 104-18. 61 Comparetti (n.32) 239-376; J. W. Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer. Studies in Virgilian Legends (Cambridge, Mass., 1934); Williams and Pattie (n.32) 89-93. 62 Kallendorf (n.9) 8. 63 For the idea of the universal poet in antiquity, see P. R. Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, 1986) 22-5. 64 On Servius, see esp. Comparetti (n.32) 57-61; A. Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Berkeley, 1987) 19-42; R. A. Kaster, Guardians o f Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1988) 169-97; D. Fowler, ‘The Virgil Commentary of Servius’, in C. Martindale (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge, 1997) 73-8; R. F. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge, 2001) 93-121; A. Pellizzari, Servio (Florence, 2003). 65 For the possible impact of this passage on medieval readings of Aeneid 6, see A. Laird, ‘The Poetics and Afterlife of Virgil’s Descent to the Underworld: Servius, Dante, Fulgentius and the Culex’, PVS 24 (2001) 49-80 at 53-60. See also Servius ad Aen. 2.148: Virgil ‘implants varied knowledge in his poem’ (variam scientiam suo inserit carmini). 66 For the VitaDonatiana, see Brugnoli and Stok (n.20) 9-56; Suetonius, vol. 2, ed./tr. J. C. Rolfe, (Loeb Classical Library No. 38; rev. edn, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1997) II.442-59. 67 Macrobius, Saturnalia, tr. P. V. Davies (New York, 1969); on Macrobius, see Comparetti (n.32) 63-9. 68 Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis I.6.44, tr. W. H. Stahl (New York, 1952). 69 On Fulgentius, see Comparetti’s famous comments ([n.32], 107-16); more positively, Laird (n.65) 60-7 (‘a text which had a fundamental and dynamic role in shaping the reception of Virgil until well into the eighteenth century’, 60). 70 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria I.8.4-5, tr. D. A. Russell (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2001). 71 Piccolomini, De liberorum educatione 61, tr. Kallendorf. 72 For the allusion, see Comparetti (n.32) 303, 347. 73 Kallendorf (n.42) 578. 74 Castiglione (n.2) 291.

104 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

Transpositions in the Bucolics? (On Ecl. 7. 53-60)

A contribution from the President

n more recent times transpositions have not been much in vogue among editors of Virgil. Readers of Mynors’ respected Oxford-edition (1969) will find very few of them in his text: none in the IBucolics, one in the Georgics (4. 292-293) and two in the Aeneid (10. 663-664; 10. 714-716). But according to Edward Courtney, there are good reasons to consider at least nine more for a place in the sun.1 Much information about earlier proposals can be found in Geymonat’s Paravia-edition (1973). In his critical apparatus, Geymonat records 21 transpositions in the Bucolics alone,2 two-thirds of which are from the 20th century (due mostly to the concentrated efforts of Leon Herrmann3); five critics from three centuries are responsible for the rest (six transpositions), the last of which was published in 1897.4 I do not intend here to pass verdicts on these. Most of them belong probably to the spacious dustbin of unsuccessful textual criticism. I will concentrate on a proposal published in 1961 but regrettably passed over in silence by Geymonat and recent commentators.5 Some words about the ‘subgenre’ which the Seventh Eclogue belongs to are not irrelevant to our issue. This eclogue is, together with the Third, an example of a singing-match where Virgil is a sort of meta-competitor himself insofar as he constantly evokes his predecessor Theocritus and must be measured against him. The Seventh Eclogue presents a dramatic scene pointing clearly to the Eighth Idyll of Theocritus.6 The fact that our two singers, Corydon and Thyrsis, are Arcadians highlights Virgil’s aemulatio of the Greek model. The Roman poet who grew up along the banks of Mincius would hardly have expected to meet Arcadian shepherds there in real life. The ‘immigrants’ are bringing with them the art of their homeland, making it shine with brilliance in their singing-matches. Virgil’s native river as scene for these Greek virtuosos visualises the passing of the genre from Greece to Italy and its transformation from its original idiom to Latin. The Bucolics may be seen as Virgil’s first attempt at “transporting the Muses from Helicon to Italy” (cf. Ge. 3. 11) and thus as programmatic for his ambition in all three of his poems. Some basic conditions and requirements characterize competitions like the duel between Corydon and Thyrsis. The outcome will be either victory for one and defeat for the other or alternatively

105 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8 a draw. Eclogues Seven and Three illustrate these two possibilities respectively. A singing-match requires moreover an umpire or judge (iudex certaminis). In its basic structure, the Seventh Eclogue reminds us of a Platonic dialogue (like e.g. Phaidon and Symposion): the account is put in the mouth of a narrator, Meliboeus, who is comparable to Plato’s Phaidon or his Apollodoros. The narrator introduces the scene and the ‘dramatic agon’ that took place there. Towards the audience of Meliboeus,7 he has to be an actor capable of presenting the participants’ spoken lines and exchanges. We tend to forget that most of Virgil’s early readers were listeners whose literary enjoyment depended to a large extent on the reciter’s histrionic talent. The reciter would, like the narrator Meliboeus, start off being ‘Meliboeus’, then act ‘Daphnis’, the organiser,8 whereupon he had to mobilize his best abilities to perform the two singers’ quatrains, constantly attentive to their individual character and style; otherwise his audience would pretty soon face the difficulty of holding them apart, and the thrill of the match would be lost on them. Of course a serious reciter would have prepared and rehearsed his ‘roles’. He would above all try to achieve success by trying to differentiate the personalities involved and take care of the clues in the text for this. Few would doubt today that Virgil made an effort to characterize his singers with individual traits.

To start with I can do nothing better than to quote Coleman’s short summary of Corydon’s and Thyrsis’ characters:9

The singers are finely characterized through their quatrains: the arrogant and self-assertive Thyrsis contrasted with a gentle modest Corydon reminiscent of the pathetic lover of Ecl. 2. Here and there a slight coarseness in Thyrsis’ language (e.g. 26) or versification (e.g. 35) stands out against Corydon’s uniform elegance. Sometimes Thyrsis’ figures are inept (51-2) and his imagery more repellent (41-42), even where (49-50) it is intended to please. [...] In any case the difference between the two singers, a matter of accumulated detail, must not be exaggerated; Thyrsis shows considerable ingenuity in the construction of his responses and it is no disgrace to have been defeated by a Corydon in such superlative form.10

I allow myself, however, to expatiate on this sketch. From the start, Thyrsis tries constantly to outdo his colleague. Compare, in the first exchange, Thyrsis’ quatrain (25-28) with Corydon’s (21-24). Thyrsis’ manner of response is not likely to arouse enthusiasm in a good judge: for him Codrus has become a rival of the worst sort, not as he was for Corydon, an inspiring and admired example. Then, in the second exchange, Thyrsis promises Priapus a statue of gold11 ostentatiously trumping Corydon who had promised his deity Diana (only!) a marble statue. A similar impression is left by the singers’ relation to ‘Galatea’ in the third exchange. Instead of, like Corydon, hoping for a warm response from his admired girl-friend, Thyrsis is an importunate wooer parading his love in a coarse way and eagerly looking forward to open- air love-making in broad daylight.12 Also, the fourth exchange is in tune with this character drawing, when Thyrsis plays down shivering cold as a trifling matter, whereas Corydon is bent on defending his goats against the heat of summer by mobilizing a personalised locus amoenus to help him.

As can be seen above, Coleman said nothing about lines 53-60, the fifth interchange. If one turns to Poschl’s generally thorough and empathic analysis of our eclogue, he addresses the issue of quality and personality in this interchange as well.13 Though having Corydon’s superiority as the governing idea of his overall interpretation of the competition, he finds the fifth interchange to be somewhat of a surprise and exception: not only does Thyrsis cut a far better figure here than elsewhere, but “love seems to give his poetical power wings”.14 The fifth interchange consists of the following two stanzas:

106 Egil Kraggerud - Transpositions in the B u c o u c s ? (Q n E c l . 7. 5 3 -6 0 )

stant et iuniperi et castaneae hirsutae; strata iacent passim sua quaeque sub arbore poma; omnia nunc rident: at si formosus Alexis montibus his abeat, videas et flumina sicca. Here stand junipers and shaggy chestnuts; strewn beneath each tree lies its native fruit; now all nature smiles; but if fair Alexis should quit these hills you would see even the rivers dry.

aret ager, vitio moriens sitit aeris herba, Liber pampineas invidit15 collibus umbras: Phyllidis adventu nostrae nemus omne virebit, Iuppiter et laeto descendet plurimus imbri. The field is parched, the grass thirsty, dying because of the tainted air; Bacchus begrudges the hills the shade of his vines: but at the coming of my Phyllis all the woodland will be green, and Jupiter will descend abundantly with propitious rain. Above I have left the attribution to singers out on purpose. That lines 53-56 (stant et iuniperi etc.) should be attributed to Thyrsis (and not to Corydon as in MP and all editions) and 57-60 (aret ager etc.) to Corydon, and that the stanzas therefore should change place, was an idea first launched by Jacques Perret in 1961,16 though not adopted in his text.17 His reasons were these:

1. lines 53-56 seem to take up again a theme put forward much more naturally in lines 57-60: without water spring will be barren, but in autumn dry weather is on the contrary the most favourable for fruit to ripen.18

2. lines 57-60 have elegance, gracious images and the nobleness characterising Corydon, whereas line 53 is written in the bitter, generally offensive style of Thyrsis, calling forth images of stiff and prickly objects; line 56 is prosaic and without phantasy, ending his quatrain with the disagreeable vision of nature having retired. According to Perret, the ancient editors were convinced that only Corydon could take any fancy for an ‘Alexis’ and therefore changed the order of the two quatrains. But the Alexis of line 55 is in fact a rusticus living in “our mountains”, while the ‘Alexis’ of the Second Eclogue is a city-dweller; homonymy, then, is of no importance.19

Harald Fuchs soon accepted Perret’s reasons as “uberzeugend”20 but rejected his hypothesis of why the ancient tradition had manipulated the order of the text.21 As further arguments in favour of Perret’s idea, Fuchs22 pointed to line 53 with its two unparalleled hiatuses, the second of which is moreover in a spondaic fifth foot, the result of which is unpleasant (“Unbehagen”); he further emphasized Corydon’s dolce stil novo (cf. Dante, Purg. 24, 57) characterized by smooth, liquid and sonorous verses23 and referred particularly to the relevance of Horace’s compliment to Virgil (cf. molle Sat. 1.10.44). Fuchs may be read to the effect that a transposition should be earnestly considered, indeed that it deserved to be adopted by future editors.

As a first step towards an assessment, I want to compare the Theocritean model for the fifth interchange, Id. 8.41-47:24

107 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8

Menalcas ένθ' οις, ένθ' αίγες διδυμάτοκοι, ένθα μέλισσαι σμηνεα πληρουσιν, καί δρύες ύψίτεραι, ένθ' ό καλός Μίλων βαίνει ποσίν, αί δ' αν άφέρπηι, χώ ποιμην ξηρός τηνόθι χαί βοτάναι. There does the sheep, there do the goats bear twins; and there the bees fill the hives and the oaks are taller, where fair Milon steps. But should he depart, then the shepherd is parched and so is the pasture. Daphnis πανται έαρ, πανται δε νομοί, πανται δε γάλακτος ουθατα πιδώσιν, καί τα νέα τράφεται, ένθα καλα Ναίς έπινίσσεται, αί δ' αν άφέρπηι, χώ τας βώς βόσκων χαί βόες αύότεραι.25 Everywhere is spring, and pastures everywhere, and everywhere udders gush with milk and younglings are fattened, where fair Nais ranges. But should she depart, then wasted is the neatherd and the cattle wasted. Both singers in Theocritus adhere to the same pattern: 1) Nature is thriving and animals are producing wealth 2) (owing to the presence of the loved one) 3) but if he / she should disappear from the scene, then 4a) the shepherd as well as 4b) his pastures / his cattle will wither away. Virgil follows the same pattern in stant et iuniperi etc. though varying it by emphasizing trees26 and their fruit as nature’s particular blessing due to the presence of the loved one. But the formation and contents of the first line (stant et iuniperi et castaneae hirsutae) show indeed some anomalous aspects. Why just iuniperi and castaneae? One should have expected cultivated fruit trees to be prominent right from the start. Even if one thinks that the juniper’s berries and the nuts from the chestnut tree are useful, one cannot free oneself from the impression that Virgil plays down nature’s blessings compared with Theocritus. The juniper, which is in Italy often “a shapely tree eighteen or twenty feet high”,27 is hardly a tree to admire, either for its beauty or for its product depicting the landscape in the wake of Theocritus. In a passage in the First Idyll often shining through in the Bucolics, the dying Daphnis couples the juniper, άρκενθος,28 with plants like βάτος (bramble) and άκανθα (some thorny plant not identified for certain) and contrasted with the καλά νάρκισσος adorning it when he envisages how nature will react abnormally in protest to his death (1. 133). So the iuniperus is in itself an unpleasant tree not worthy of high praise as part of any thriving landscape. This rather low evaluation of the tree chosen for mention is yet further accentuated by the epithet hirsutus going with castaneae. The castanea (the tree, not the fruit) is not disagreeable owing to its shaggy nutshells. The singer’s praise of blessed nature seems, then, to start off somewhat perversely. Moreover, almost in contradiction to the trees specified, the singer uses a highly artificial metrical form for the line. Hiatus combined with a spondeiazon occurs only here in the Bucolics, never in the Georgics and five times in the Aeneid.29 The epic examples have names and epithets pointing to Greek influence; in one case Virgil applies the same form to an Italian locality giving it thereby high dignity (turrigerae Antemnae 7. 631), whereas hirsutus at Ecl. 7. 53 (combined with the loanword castanea from Greek καστανέα) lends the same exquisite metrics a deflating effect. This tension between Greek-inspired artificial form on the one hand and an unpleasant

108 Egil Kraggerud - Transpositions in the B u c o l i c s ? (Q n E c l . 7. 5 3 -6 0 ) adjective30 on the other reveals that the singer has no feeling for harmony between contents and form. Should we not then consider whether these lines suit Thyrsis better than Corydon? Although the motive of nature’s prosperity is not particularly marked in line 53,31 it gets more emphasis in line 54 and reaches its climax in the first half of 55 (omnia nunc rident). In Theocritus, on the other hand, words like δίδνματόκος, πληρουσιν, υψίτεραί and milk streaming from udders are meant to depict the pastoral landscape in its most blessed state.32 But the effect of the beloved person’s disappearance is less drastic in the finishing lines of both Menalcas and Daphnis: the lover and his cattle will indeed wither away, but not necessarily all nature as in Virgil’s stanza, where the result will be a non plus ultra of dryness, cf. “even dry rivers” (et flumina sicca).33 Though not specifically mentioned by Perret, this is another argument in favour of transposition, on the assumption that Thyrsis is trying to cap Corydon’s withering landscape (57) by means of another knock-out hyperbole. A greater economy of expression concerning the lover, i.e. the singer himself, and the beloved person can be observed in Virgil’s version. Instead of describing the effect both of the beloved person’s presence and of his disappearance as in Theocritus, Virgil’s stanza concentrates only on his/her change of quarters, varying this respectively as (his) disappearance (56) and (her) appearance (59). Like Theocritus, Virgil does not explicitly mention the singer’s affection but, even more economically, does not even mention either the lover or his miseries. But who would fail to feel the lover’s presence through the singer and grasp how he was affected both in bonam and in malam partem? The aret ager stanza does not begin in the traditional way above, with the presence of the beloved girl in a thriving landscape. The singer starts from the other end, describing the effects of her absence; the landscape is suffering from draught, preventing the vines from producing their valuable fruit.34 The singer does not mention her absence explicitly, he is focussed instead on showing what kind of metamorphosis will follow from the return of the loved one in the form of joyous rain, which in turn, so I believe, will be answered by his colleague with a depressing picture of total drought. In the ‘meta-competition’ with Theocritus, Virgil achieves in this way a successful variation of the traditional form, worthy of a master of bucolic song. I would, then, prefer to attribute this stanza to Corydon. Thyrsis moves on the other hand with no elegance within a well-known Theocritean pattern. As to Fuchs’ criticism of the motive Perret assumed behind the transposition (viz. in order to re-establish Corydon’s love for Alexis on the basis of the Second Eclogue), Perret’s observation is valid enough as a general principle: ‘Menalcas’ in the Third Eclogue is not necessarily the same man as his namesake in the Fifth, ‘Lycidas’ at 7. 67 does not pop up again in the Ninth, ‘Meliboeus’ in the Seventh is not the exiled ‘Meliboeus’ from the First, the ‘Galatea’ of Tityrus (1. 30) is not the ‘Galatea’ Corydon and Thyrsis admire in the Seventh. On the other hand, Phyllis nostra (59) seems to be the same ‘Phyllis’ who is so admired by Corydon in his next stanza (63).

University o f Oslo EGIL KRAGGERUD [email protected]

NOTES 1 E. Courtney, “The formation of the text of Vergil”, BICS 28 (1981) 13-29. (None in the Bucolics, however, two in the Georgics and seven in the Aeneid.). 2 ecl. 2: Herrmann transp. 10. 16-18 post 33, 60-62post 27; 3: Cartault 98-99 post 93; 4: Herrmann 11-14 & 8. 6-13 post 4. 59, Kloucek 23 post 20; 5: Herrmann 4 post 7, 16-18 ante 10, 81-90 [Mopsus] ante 53 (qui v. cum duobus sequentibus Menalcae attribuitur); 6: Herrmann 1-2 ante 6; Scaliger (& Heyne) 64-73 post 74-81; 7: Berlage 17 ante 16; 8: (quod attinet ad Herrmanni transpositionem versuum 6-13 v. ad ecl. quartam) Herrmann transp. 26 ante 25, 42 ante 41, 57 ante 56, 88 ante 3, 95-100post 104, Haupt 108 ante 107; 9: Herrmann 37-50 ante 26, 39-43 ante 21; 10: Scaliger 16-18 post 8 (quod ad Herrmanni coniecturam attinet vide ecl. secundam). 3 L. Herrmann, “Notes critiques sur les Bucoliques de Virgile”, Latomus 11 (1938) 12-19.

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4 Only one transposition gets approval even today, W. Kloucek’s (1873) transposition of 4. 23, accepted by Geymonat and now usual in Italian editions (but not in Castiglioni-Sabbadini). Mynors’ silence is followed by Coleman (1977). Clausen (1994) has a discussion (149, n.9); Goold accepted it in his revised edition of Fairclough’s LCL edition (1999). And so adhuc sub iudice lis est 5 Like Coleman (1977), Coleiro (1979), R. D. Williams (1979), and Clausen (1994). 6 It is a matter of no importance whether this idyll stems from Theocritus’ pen or not. 7 i.e. = Virgil’s audience. And so ‘Meliboeus’ becomes in a way ‘Virgil’ and in that respect unlike Plato’s narrator, who has his own internal audience. 8 As certaminis iudex, Daphnis is the centre of the pastoral tableau. He is obviously from the start something more than a casual listener, appearing gradually as an άγωονοθέτης: he is the first person on the scene, before Corydon and Thyrsis. Daphnis invites Meliboeus to attend the coming match (certamen 16), and last, but not least, we must conclude that he has been appointed judge by the two competitors. In the end we are to think of him as the one who adjudges victory to Corydon (cf. victum frustra contendere Thyrsin 69). 9 Coleman, Vergil. Eclogues [Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics] (Cambridge 1977) 266. 10 Wendell Clausen (1994) has in my view missed the mark when he concludes with the following aporia: “By making his [i.e. Virgil’s] poem dramatic - the imperfect recollection, that is, of a witness [i.e. Meliboeus] to an event, and not, like the Third Eclogue, an omniscient poet’s description of it - Virgil frees himself from the obligation, or possibly the embarrassment, of justifying his umpire’s decision.” (213). 11 For a possible ambiguity in aureus cf. J. Foster, SO 56 (1991) 109 f. 12 See V Poschl, Die Hirtendichtung Virgils (Heidelberg, 1964) 102 ff.. 13 ibid. 129-137. 14 “Die Liebe scheint auch seine dichterische Kraft zu beflugeln” (ibid. 129). 15 Most probably present and not perfect. 16 J. Perret, Virgile, Les Bucoliques [“Erasme”. Textes lat. 4] (Paris 1961). 17 In his note on line 60, p. 82 f. This could be compared with conjectures presented in an app. crit. by a half-heartedfortasse, malim or the like. 18 I take this to mean that dry weather is at odds with the singer’s intention to create a strong contrast between the first and the second half of the stanza. 19 “Nous croirions volontiers que les anciens editeurs, convaincus que seul Corydon pouvait s’interesser a un Alexis (en marge du v. 53, P a inscrit cor, d’est-a-dire Corydon), ont echange ici les strophes des deux chanteurs. En fait l’Alexis du v. 55 est un campagnard qui habite ‘nos montagnes’; celui de B 2 est un citadin, l’homonymie n’a donc aucune signification. Les v. 53-56 semblent la retractatio d’un theme pose beaucoup plus naturellement en 57-60: sans eau, le printemps serait infecond; mais en automne un temps sec est au contraire le plus favorable a la maturation des fruits. Les v. 57-60 ont l’elegance, les images gracieuses, la noblesse qui caracterisent Corydon; le v. 53 est ecrit dans le style apre, volontiers heurte, de Thyrsis, il evoque l’image d’objets raides et piquants; le v. 56 est prosaique et sans fantaisie, il termine le quatrain sur la vision desagreable d’une nature retractee.” 20 H. Fuchs, “Zum Wettgesang der Hirten in Vergils siebenter Ekloge”, MH 23 (1966) 218 n.1 21 ibid. 218-223. 22 ibid. notes 1 and 7. 23 ibid. 219 and 223. 24 The opening of the first stanza raises some minor questions without much bearing on our main issue: 1) How closely do lines 53 and 54 belong together? The iuniperus carries every second year ripened bacae whereas the castaneae have nuces (or glandes) as their fruit. It seems that both trees may be called pomiferae, as also pomum (54) can be used in its wide sense. If so, is the singer in line 54 envisaging the juniper’s berries and the chestnut’s nuts underneath their respective mother trees? I would not think so, however. There is a contrast between stant and strata iacent that makes us think of the trees in line 53 in all their pride before they have shed their fruit. 2) Hirsutae has been taken predicatively (e.g. by Poschl) with stant (one could point for instance to Horace’s famous Odes 1. 9. 1f (Vides ut alta stet nive candidum / Soracte.), but I find this less natural here for the same reason as under 1), that stant, suggesting ‘standing erect’, is set against (strata) iacent in the next line. 3) Further one could ask whether hirsutae belongs to both nouns in line 53 or to castaneae alone as a kind of hypallage adjectivi (thus TLL). The latter idea is attractive. It is not so much the chestnut-tree itself as its shellnut that is hirsuta, but all the same, for the singer, the tree and its nuts are a whole. 25 As can be seen from Gow’s Oxford-text these lines were reshuffled by Bindemann: the line numbers are 45, 46, 47, 44, 41, 42, 43, 48. 26 In Theocritus’ lines, the only trees to be mentioned are δρνες νψίτεραι (cf. Virgil’s stant) in Menalcas’ stanza; these are also a sign of affluent nature. 27 J Sargeaunt, The Trees, Shrubs, and Plants o f Virgil (Oxford, 1920) 64. 28 cf. K. Lembach, Die Pflanzen bei Theokrit (Heidelberg, 1970) 85 f suggesting that it is a strong perversion of nature when the beautiful narcissus shall bloom on a tree either unfruitful or at best with sour black berries. 29 Dardanio Anchisae 1. 617 = 9. 647; Nernidum matri et (cf. iuniperi et) Neptuno Aegaeo 3. 74; turrigerae Antemnae 7. 631; Parrhasio Euandro 11. 31. 30 Hirsutus is used once elsewhere in the Eclogues, at 8. 34, of an uncouth goat-like appearance. If the stanza is attributed to Thyrsis, one would ask whether it would allude to the singer’s own appearance. 31 Poschl (n. 12) (129) tries to evoke such a picture of affluence in the first line, but this is exaggerated at best: “Wacholder und Kastanien stehen in struppiger Fulle” (my italics). 32 Omnia nunc rident seems influenced by Daphnis’ first line with its emphatic anaphora: πανται... πανται... πανται (‘everywhere’). 33 Line 56 has not ipsa but et (“even”) to outshine some previous image of dryness, it seems. 34 That pampini rank higher than iuniperi and castaneae few would contest.

110 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) 1-2 Copyright 2008

On ‘Making it Strange’

offer here a few comments on Prof. Morton Braund’s Presidential Address, entitled ‘Making Virgil Strange’ (Proceedings, 2004, 135-46). I shall leave aside the ‘many Virgils’ which have existed over Ithe centuries, except to make two points which are so obvious that they are sometimes overlooked. First, apart from a couple of very old questions (in particular the Ille ego lines and the Helen episode) the text of the Aeneid has, for well known reasons, remained relatively constant. The same is wholly true of the narrative. Ask anyone today what takes place in the epic - what the story is about - and the answer will be what it has always been since Varius and Tucca’s text first appeared. Different interpretations, whether religious, moral, or political, are on a secondary level and can (it seems to me) be exaggerated. But that is another matter. Prof. Morton Braund concentrates on the problems of translation, and I am concerned only with her thesis that a good translation will make the Aeneid ‘strange’. Take the question of form. In the last hundred years the most familiar form has been prose, whether in the Globe, Oxford, Loeb or Penguin edition. That is because the translator, while avoiding crude literalism, has aimed primarily to help students with the Latin. If he abandons prose and decides on a regular verse-form, he will often have to forfeit that kind of authenticity, though if he is an accomplished versifier he will gain another. What form, then, should he choose? Prof. Morton Braund prints six samples, ranging from Douglas to Fitzgerald; several others can be studied in Ken Gransden’s Virgil in English (Penguin, 1996). Which of these, one wonders, should be rejected because of its familiarity? If blank verse (Milton’s, as copied by Addison) and the rhyming couplet (as used by Cowley and Dryden) are ruled out, it can hardly be because of their familiarity, though it would be nice to think so. The reason why they have been avoided in the last fifty years is surely that they are out of date. Recent versions have adopted some dactylic rhythms (especially Humphries, but also to some extent Day Lewis and Heaney). A much larger dactylic element, as employed by Bridges, showed that a high proportion of dactyls in English was too monotonous. In Latin, of course, the dactylic hexameter was not monotonous, because of the variety imparted by spondees and the ictus/accent tension. That, to a certain degree, was a refinement of Virgil’s; but the metre as such had been familiar to the Romans since the time of Ennius (to say nothing of Homer). Its long history enhanced its authority. It remains to be seen whether in the twenty-first century some translators will revert to the unrhymed iambic pentameter or settle for the various forms which have become familiar in the past fifty years. It is quite a dilemma.

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As for diction, it is true that some ancient critics found Virgil’s somewhat affected (see Conington, vol.1, xxix-xxxv), but he had many defenders, including Horace; and his admirers eventually won an overwhelming victory. So one infers that his innovations in the use of Latin actually enhanced his charm. Naturally, translators cannot hope to match these effects, but they can try not to falsify the meaning. This problem occurs in the first word of the poem. Servius says that per ‘arma’ bellum significat and rejects the idea of weapons. The writers of the four prose versions mentioned above were no doubt perfectly aware of this, but they all wrote ‘Arms’, because the poet had chosen arma, not bella, and because they expected their readers to recognize the metonymy. If this expectation is no longer realistic, go for ‘War’ (a bigger word than Prof. Morton Braund’s ‘combat’), but if we do, we are taking a step away from fidelity. And we are doing so, not on the grounds that ‘Arms’ is familiar, but that it has become misleading. (Incidentally, OED glosses ‘arms’ in II 6 by ‘war’, citing passages from Chaucer, Marlowe, and Dryden; but in II 8 it gives ‘Deeds or feats of arms’ and cites Chaucer, House of Fame 144, ‘The armes and also the man’, and Dryden ‘Arms, and the man I sing.’ This looks like a mistake, though arma in some passages does seem to have that sense, e.g. Aen. 4.403 pietate insignis et armis and Ovid Fast. 1.260 Oebalii rettulit arma Tati.) Some years ago, when preparing a translation of Juvenal, I came across a version which was deliberately strange (for the notion is not exactly new). From Sat. 16 on the army I quote the following, largely dactylic, lines: Who could number the prizes, Gallius, of successful Soldiering? If one is entering prosperous barracks Under their lucky star me let the gate receive, Timid recruit. For one hour’s kindly fate works more Than if from Venus a letter should commend us to Mars, She (sic) and his mother who delights in Samos sand. Such a passage demonstrates that when a translator tries too hard to be strange, he tends to become unreadable. Prof. Morton Braund’s Juvenal is very different. Written in good, straightforward prose, it sticks close to the Latin and supplies a lot of scholarly information. But that volume was written within the conventions of the Loeb series. So we turn to her specimen of Aeneid 1.1-11 to clarify what she means by ‘strange’ (p. 146). What we find is something in rather stiff, but certainly not strange or unusual, English. As for the form, on reading the first line: “I sing of combat and the hero who was first to c o m e .” we may infer that, like Phaer, she has chosen the old fourteener as her medium. But that effect seems to have been inadvertent; for the following lines have no regular rhythm (as far as I could discover). So perhaps the piece has to be read as free verse. And whatever one may say about that self-contradictory phenomenon, it is certainly very familiar. As the reader has probably guessed, these comments come from one who is a generation older than Prof. Morton Braund. So they are not intended to sound impertinent. If they contain any message, it is, perhaps, that if she intends to translate the Aeneid, she should do what she does best, and ignore those siren voices which urge her to aim at strangeness. Otherwise, instead of making a valuable addition to the company of translations, she may find that the result is just another curiosity.

University o f Liverpool NIALL RUDD

112 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

Reflections on ‘Oxford Reds’ ‘OxfordReds’: Classic Commentaries on Latin Classics, R.G. Austin on Cicero and Virgil, C. J. Fordyce on Catullus, R G. and R. G. M. Nisbet on Cicero by John Henderson (Duckworth 2006)

his will not be a conventional review, for neither is this, by any stretch of the imagination, a conventional book. No, it is a marvel of sympathy, of generosity, of clear-headed scholarship Tand almost incredible re-creative and archival exploration of what it was that made several of the pre-eminent Latinists of the 20th century ‘tick’. So right from the outset, my urgent plea is for our readers to get hold of a copy and immerse themselves in its fascinating detail, dispassionate disclosure, and deeply human insights, all conveyed in John Henderson’s highly idiomatic, not to say idiosyncratic, style, which has been a cherished phenomenon of the British classical world for a generation now. There may be those who regret that we did not print a version of The Song of Roland as delivered to the Society in 2004. But after discussion with the author, and the publication of the entire, close-meshed text of the book in 2006, it seemed best to accord to it a very special and committed write-up and to urge full study of the book as a whole. Messrs Duckworth have responded to this in a most generous way, as our members have been informed in the most recent Newsletter. As this is the PVS, it stands to reason that this account will concentrate more on R.G. Austin, subject of the 2004 lecture, than on C.J. Fordyce or the Nisbets. For one thing, I knew Austin for twelve years, first as his Assistant Lecturer, then Lecturer, at Liverpool until his retirement in 1968, and then at Stanton, Gloucs. But already as a student at Aberdeen I had been examined by him in Greek and Latin in 1956, whence The Earl of Buchan’s Silver Pen in Greek, just a figment by this stage in history, but fleshed out by the De Gurbs Prize, and another in Humanity (Latin). Our class had been convulsed by our maverick Greek lecturer, Hector Thompson, (spouse of Andromache indeed!), who described RGA as ‘a fat man like a pig’. See Frontispiece, but Frank Walbank’s ‘teddy-bear’ (p.11, note 10) is much truer, even though nowadays one might suggest that he resembled a (slimmer) Hector (Richard Griffiths) in The History Boys, but with none of that character’s proclivities. Professors Fordyce and Watt would be more aptly compared to Professor Moriarty as portrayed by Eric Porter.

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In 1960, our paths crossed again in respect of the Ferguson Scholarship, and that turned out to be bread cast upon the waters, for in 1962, when he interviewed me pre-emptively to the official encounter later that day, he remarked, ‘I say, Foster, your Latin essay for the Ferguson was awfully jolly. I still have it in my desk. It made me laugh out loud!’ Does it horrify the nouvelle vague of classical scholars to be told how much importance was attached to composing in Greek and Latin in prose and verse, to ‘taste papers’, not to speak of the requisite, very precise acquaintance with language, idiom and vocabulary which enabled people to win prizes and scholarships as well as academic postings both to Oxbridge and to the provinces? The relationship of this phenomenon with several of the subjects of this book, and the links between the Scottish Universities and Balliol, will be apparent to many. I have before now said that there was more to Austin than a slightly bumbling, old-fashioned schoolmasterly figure; one which, with a touch of Socratic irony, he rather enjoyed cultivating. It was all too easy for smart people to disparage him - and there is evidence of this in his early dealings with the OUP, as detailed by Henderson. To my mind there was something Elgarian about him - a passionate soul, partly suppressed but infinitely creative and capable of immense work and dedication. For me the most telling document of all which H. has discovered in the OUP archive (p.56) is RGA to Cordy 30.ix.62, actually the very day on which I arrived at Liverpool to take up my post (Virgilian biographers like this kind of coincidence). He declines to revise his Aeneid 4: ‘The book as it stands was to a great extent the product of emotion.’ He is typically defensive about this, but he says it, and it marks a milestone in commentary-making. (On Virgilian emotion, I recall with much respect R.D. Williams brought close to tears by his subject.) Austin’s students adored him. His letters (to them and to us) whether conveyed in his spidery but always legible hand, or typewritten, were always jewels, which one now treasures. His wit and capacity for allusion were quite exceptional, as of course is also true of his commentaries. He was, self-evidently, a great networker: childless, like so many commentary-makers (R.D. Williams was a notable exception - see p.152), he was father-figure to many whose careers he influenced and indeed fostered. He was an Elector to Regius and other important Chairs and a great writer of ‘private letters’, such as he offered to write on my behalf should my candidacy at Liverpool be unsuccessful. There was a chair which he wanted me to try for about 1971, but I demurred on the grounds of my lack of Welsh, which I hope was a valid reservation on my part. That said, Austin had clearly relished his years at Cathays Park, Cardiff, where he was, I believe, Vice-Principal (everyone else, he said, was called Rees!). But he was tempted away in consequence of a meeting on a train with that eminent Latinist, Sir James Mountford, once Professor at Liverpool, then Vice-Chancellor; I gather that the stipendiary emoluments at Liverpool were quite a bit higher than those at a Welsh college. About a Virgilian’s spiritual side it is sometimes hard to make any conjecture. H. (p.57) speaks of ‘a provocative Christianising tic of his’ ά propos 2.620: Nusquam abero, et tutum patrio te limine sistam, where A. quotes from Psalm 23, not identified, as if to say ‘You will all recognise this.’ He does this to give body to ‘A simple, beautiful line of extraordinary comfort and blessing.’ This was Venus’s last appearance to Aeneas until the totally different atmosphere on the shore of Carthage (1.314 ff). I wish we could trust her sincerity as far as RGA does! Christianising or not, I know that Roland took comfort in his retirement years in the Evensong service at Stanton Parish Church. His sensitive love of the English language was displayed to great effect in his masterly Public Orations at Liverpool from 1965-68. Of course he could be quite tetchy and hot-tempered: ‘Demn! demn! demn! Look here! X,’ (a member of the Department) ‘is interested only in his private advantage!’ he ejaculated, stamping

114 R eview round the polished blue linoleum of his huge, if Spartan, room at No. 34 Oxford Street, before it was demolished to make way for the new Senate House. And if he suffered at the earlier stages of his career from the snootiness of the Establishment, it is only fair to say that he could be pretty exclusive himself: ‘not a proper academic’ was his standard description of dentists or geographers or professors of mining (such as was his father-in-law ‘Old Dron’ of Glasgow). And I can remember his discouraging me from joining the Oxford Society Merseyside Branch as a way of implementing his injunction to ‘settle down and make a few friends’ because (I suspect) they wouldn’t all be Balliol men, and ‘goodness knows what sort of rum coves you might meet.’ (The Wodehousian idiom came easily to him.) In the event this deprived me of making the acquaintance of the Rattle family, who lived across the road. (Sir) Simon’s father was the local secretary, a genial man who played jazz. But what conversations might I have shared with the infant Rattle on Haydn symphonies, say! But you can’t have everything. I remember a marvellous exchange one evening when several of us were enjoying Violet’s excellent cuisine at Lance House. RGA mentioned with some satisfaction that he had recently received a letter addressed simply to ‘Professor R.G. Austin, Childwall, Liverpool’. ‘That’s nothing,’ came Violet’s response, ‘my sister Evie’ - a prognathous female involved in community drama and politically a great deal to the left of RGA, and perhaps of Violet too - ‘my sister Evie received a letter addressed to Miss Evelyn Dron, Glasgow.’ RGA : ‘Well, I expect your d— d sister is well known to the Police!’ Only later did I trace the genealogy of his retort to that of Mr Gussie Fink-Nottle in respect of Master G.G. Simmons’ winning of the Scripture Knowledge prize at Market Snodsbury Grammar School (Right Ho, Jeeves 1934, ch. 17). But let me return to RGA’s generosity and his capacity to be receptive of new ideas. It is slightly unfair of Horsfall (somewhere, but not in the index) to claim that neither scholar (Austin nor Fordyce) cared for developments in Virgilian studies beyond c.1940. True, the shadow of the idiosyncratic English colossus in a very specialised field of Latin scholarship, A.E. Housman, was very much around in their formative years: the Oxford man who became the ‘Dry Tab’par excellence, Textual Criticism being as it were akin to Mathematics, that Cambridge speciality. And then there were the ‘modernists’, who presented their ‘reading’ of the Aeneid, generally referred to scathingly as ‘THAT N. or M.’ No surprise then that RGA demurred at the idea of a book about Virgil, whether with Duckworth or the OUP (p.63). His strength lay in exposition of a particular passage. I attended the lecture he gave to us all at Liverpool, of which C. Collard writes (p.56. note 13) ‘I shall never forget hearing him live Book 2 of the Aeneid.’ That slightly ironical trait led him frequently to lament, ‘I am a terrible opsimath’, but he did, and he was by no means discouraging of new ideas. Indeed it was his active encouragement which was a main reason for my finding my way into Virgil. One of the more extraordinary omissions of our four-year syllabus in Classics at Aberdeen was that it didn’t include a single word of the Aeneid. There were books 3 and 4 of the Georgics, delivered with closed eyes by W.S. Watt, apparently known (p.158), though not to us, as ‘Swot’. There was also the Eclogues, from R.G.G. Coleman, who subsequently edited the yellow / green Cambridge commentary (but I am absolutely certain that we never got as far as the actual text of the poems). I must not be ungrateful to Watt; he advanced my career, and I am sure that he was a consummate scholar when it came to Cicero’s letters. But his method of instruction was to sort out difficulties so exactly that the solution would ever after hold good (he once said as much). This left very little scope for the student but zealous parroting. His first year lectures entailed translating the text twice, so when it came to Horace Odes 4.2.49 f. io Triumphe! non semel dicemus ..., our glee can be imagined

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when four times Watt vociferated, ‘Ho! Triumph!’ It was rumoured that Watt had known the whole of Paradise Lost by heart in his younger days. But never did he give us the slightest inkling of this, nor make allusion to what, for many of us, is Milton’s (England’s?) greatest poem, Lycidas, that Christian bucolic, that Eleventh Eclogue, if one might so call it. We had had an excellent exposition of this by the admirable Chalmers Professor of English Literature, G.I. Duthie, a pupil of Dover Wilson. One might speculate whether the Great Cham de nos jours (C.J. Fordyce, see Austin on p.71, note 5), shared Johnson’s withering views of that masterpiece.

But to return to the Aeneid. It may have been assumed that we had read it at school (yes we had, bits of 2 and 6, but that was all). So it came as a revelation to read 1-12 for Classical Mods, and that marked one’s first acquaintance with Austin’s 4 (the only one of his four Aeneid commentaries in existence in 1959), a different world from T.E. Page’s useful if dusty volumes. Of Austin’s Pro Caelio and Quintilian 12 we had been the glad beneficiaries already, the latter forming the basis for one of Coleman’s best courses (how could it not be so?). One took delight in the penetrating felicity of RGA’s translations offered at the head of each note: they always seemed a notch or two beyond what one could manage oneself. (How sad to see that Q12 was dropped from the Oxford lists the year after Roland’s death - see p.162.)

After Mods, I kept the Aeneid on hold. The reason for this brings me to crave a little more indulgence for (I hope, illustrative) autobiography. As a Scottish graduate at Balliol (cf. Fordyce, Watt, R.G.M. Nisbet, F.J. Cairns etc.), I was fortunate to be fenced around with a Balliol Scholarship, an Aberdeen postgraduate award, and the Ferguson. I was very comfortably off in 1960, better, in real terms, than when I assumed my assistant lectureship at Liverpool in 1962 (£800 p.a. raised to £900 before I got there). But I could see the need for realism, and I knew that neither Ancient History nor Philosophy was likely to be my Fach, Ancient History because we had been blandly taught at Aberdeen - I just couldn’t get worked up over the Pentekontaetea, or notes by W.S. Ferguson. Of Philosophy, it was rather awe which deterred me: we had the opportunity of hearing the great D.M. Mackinnon (later Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge), and his lectures on the Republic of Plato were overwhelming. But I felt at sea with (Sir) A.J. Ayer’s writings, never imagining that he would actually invigilate my B. Phil. exam some years later. So I boldly claimed my right after Mods of transferring as an external graduate to the B. Phil. (now the M. Phil., i.e. Master’s degree stricto sensu, as compared to the traditional Oxford, or indeed Scottish, M.A) in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature. I had been fortunate in having at Balliol the charming, lively and highly original Gordon Williams (an Austin ‘discovery’) as my tutor, specializing in Plautus and Early Roman Poetry, as well as the legendary seminars of Eduard Fraenkel, notably on Catullus 64 and Plautine Cantica. (I must confess that I found the Greek seminars, which I attended religiously, rather less enjoyable than the Latin ones, but that no doubt reflected the direction I was taking.)

Here was Sosia in Amphitruo, out-Leporello-ing da Ponte by some two thousand years. (Fraenkel adored Mozart and spoke to me of Richard Strauss’s ‘rediscovery’ of Cosi Fan Tutte.) I enjoyed these iambic octonarii like anything, and Uncle Ed was most encouraging, going so far as to present me with an inscribed copy of Elementi Plautini in Plauto (this was in 1961.) For the B. Phil. I chose Aeschylus’ Eumenides, a close study, for which the terrifying (Sir) Hugh Lloyd-Jones lent me (si displacet!) his personal manuscripts, and the whole of Plautus. I very soon identified Casina as the play I wanted to make the basis of my B. Phil. dissertation of 20,000 words. Obviously, for the commentary to be of any serious validity, it would only cover part of the text, ‘but,’ said my supervisor, ‘there is always the Press’. At last, I come to the (tenuous) connection that

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I have personally enjoyed with ‘Oxford Reds’. I am heartened by R.G.M. Nisbet’s excellent advice (p.9, note 3): ‘A commentary should not be duller than the text on which it is based.’ And yet I suppose I was naively ambitious: it seemed to me that I had a good basis in the sound training provided by Fraenkel, Williams, and the irrepressible Johnny G. (J.G. Griffith), Fordyce’s successor at Jesus College. My examiners encouraged me and I set out on my quest to become the author of an ‘Oxford Red’ on Plautus’s Casina. I was attracted to the play not least because of obvious parallels with the end of Beaumarchais’ (da Ponte’s) Le Mariage de Figaro. No doubt I should have invoked RGA’s guidance in providing a sample for the Press agent who canvassed my work. Eventually, I got a letter saying that they had received a negative recommendation. Naturally I was briefly crestfallen, but I realised I must adjust my sights. But one of the insights I have derived from Henderson’s work is that the OUP is not a charity; it had to be a hard-headed business, and realistically how many copies could they hope to sell of a commentary by an unknown youngster on a decidedly risque play of Plautus? (cf. Fordyce’s Castrated Catullus, quite recently published - ά propos of which Fraenkel once opined to us that the only obscene poem in Catullus is 63, where Attis castrated becomes a female). But Austin, doubtless ‘in the know’, was most creatively helpful in the sequel. It was not until much later that I discovered that Housman himself had to subsidise the publication of his Manilius, which gave me a crumb of comfort, and (Wodehouse again, an Austin and Housman favourite) that Sir Buckston Abbott had to have recourse to publishing ‘My Sporting Memories’ with J. Mortimer Busby at his own expense. I can, I hope, be forgiven for feeling slightly cool towards my good friend and VS colleague Malcolm Willcock’s Cambridge commentary on Casina (1978, with W.P. MacCary) for all its competence, and its generous inclusion of myself in both apparatus criticus and notes. When Austin was preparing his Aeneid 1, he wrote to me from Stanton to ask whether I could detect any signs of comedy influence in that book. Clearly he had an instinct that there might be. After a while I saw past the heus’s and came to realise that the whole interview of Venus (‘Virgo’ - the love goddess! 1.315 twice, 327, 336) with Aeneas and Achates is instinct with comic aspects. My discoveries were fitful, and began with the recognition (PVS 11, 1971-72, 77 f.) that the account of Sychaeus’s ghost-scene (1.343 ff.) has no fewer than eight points of close resemblance to Tranio’s (fictitious) ghost-scene in Plautus’s Mostellaria (475 ff). Do we know of any other ghost-scenes in Latin literature between Plautus and Virgil? Is this ‘crossing of the genres’? But having begun, I was able to continue: surely Venus / Aphrodite is the ‘lover of laughter’ (philommeides) and her whole demeanour in this scene is calculated to bamboozle her unfortunate and perhaps embarrassed son (cf. Chesney and Cilla Battersby-Brown in Coronation Street!) The sister (1.322) is as much a figment as the one in Miles Gloriosus, but has an equally practical function. Venus has a very big agenda in relation to Dido, and to safeguard Aeneas’s pietas does not figure prominently in it. Juno’s suborning of Aeolus has landed Aeneas in Carthage, destined to be Rome’s signal enemy but, as is casually revealed, no stranger because of its ancestral king of Tyre, Belus (cf. Hannibal, Jezebel and so on) to Venus’s ineluctable hostility. Greek tragedy leaves us in no doubt as to what happens to those who sack holy places and, according to Dido (621 ff), that is exactly what her father had done to Cyprus, sacred to the Cyprian herself. ‘What great parentage was yours?’ asks Aeneas (606), with heroic simplicity. She tells him, with the awful gushing disclosure just mentioned. Why then does he not pick up on it? The answer is given by the poet at 643 f, because all Aeneas’s thoughts, as a good father, were of Ascanius. But the reader has the benefit of a ‘frame’: Venus going off laeta to Paphos (415 ff) and her later sneaking the real Ascanius away to Cyprus (692 f), while leaving

117 T he Pr o c eed in g s o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8 his dangerous uncle Cupid to work on infelix Dido (749). Infelix - tragic, yes, but also ‘lacking in fruit’, as later we hear of her disappointed longing for the consolation prize of a child by Aeneas (4.327 ff). Those ideas, those conversations with Roland Austin, were sympathetically received, and I realised that my calling was to be a teacher, one who enthused others in the cause of great literature. Austin’s successor, Niall Rudd, in collaboration with the eminent Shakespearian Kenneth Muir, himself well-versed in classical literature, introduced ‘Greek and Latin Literature in Translation’, where such advocacy was much in place. The seventies were not at all bad, with neither eighties academic butchery nor nineties overnight cloning of universities. And, more particularly, in 1971 came what I feel (perhaps for personal reasons) to be the loveliest and most relaxed of Austin’s Aeneid commentaries, that on 1. Nineteen seventy seven saw the posthumous publication of his masterly 6 and of Fordyce’s 7 and 8 with, inside, the appearance of an Oxford ‘Red’, but with a lurid green cover, seen through the Press by the dutiful Messrs Christie and Walsh. A consummate grammarian does not necessarily make a sympathetic commentator: I presume that those who saw to Fordyce’s 7 and 8 had removed such errors as so disappointingly disfigured his Catullus. But what Fordyce does not do is to make connections: a commentator on poetry is bound to give an account of its structure, content and the implications of what it contains. Austin had discovered how to do this in the most sympathetic fashion. Just listen to him on 1.589-93, where he takes issue with Conington’s austere outlook on Virgil: ‘C., in the manner of his time, comments that the passage is almost a translation of Od. 23. 156-62, and that V. is as usual’ (my italics) ‘less appropriate as well as less forcible than Homer. But “translation” will not do: the language is far richer, displaying light and warmth of colour, happiness and glow, with deep musical beauty.’ It is disappointing, for instance, to find that Fordyce, awe-inspiring, yet compared to RGA, frigid, does not see fit to point out the sinister relationship of Turnus with both Danae (7.372, 410) and Io (7.789), and the implication this holds for Juno’s attitude to Turnus, nor does the Index Nominum include Danae, although it does have Dahae, who perhaps elbowed the victim of the Golden Shower out. And why does F. on 7.353 ossibus implicat ignem say ‘the words are repeated in 1.660’? (from? Was 7prior to 1?) Interestingly, Austin makes no comment at all. So what of ‘the Great Cham’, as Austin called him (p.71, note 5)? ‘It makes him a second Sam Johnson - the walking dictionary - but also stigmatizes a bully? and tells on a fraud?’ In the late sixties, I sent him several notes for CR ; to my surprise he never rebuffed me, and gave me a number of books to review. I could hardly attribute it to Ferguson freemasonry or Balliol bonhomie, but was the answer to be found in his regard and reputation for Sprachgefuhl? Had he been thinking more of railway tickets than Terentian idiom when he, the editor, read the original which prompted my ‘Terence, Andria 567-8 Again’, CR XXI.2.1971.170 f? I wonder. Two Fordyce foibles fascinate. Why ‘Yours Sincerely’ (Fig.5), and his habit of referring to Professors and Doctors as Mr (p.80 and Fig.6)? I must briefly record the deep satisfaction I have received from acquaintance with R.G.M. Nisbet and R.D. Williams. I remember how, as house guests, both of them got on swimmingly with our little boys. Although I confess to only a superficial knowledge of their work on Cicero, I instinctively accord to the two generations of Nisbet the respect due to scholars who display true Humanity, which was paradoxically the title of Scottish Latin departments. Such a quality belongs to

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Austin par excellence, and to Deryck Williams, a mad-keen squash player and gardener. Let us draw a veil over RGA’s early description of him as ‘an earnest man at Reading’ (RGA to Spicer 10.iii.57: p.53). RDW’s contribution to Virgilian fluency, his Oxford Reds of 3 and 5, even if not ‘Oxford Reds’, his sane, concise, but valuable Macmillan Reds of 1-6, 7-12, and the Eclogues and Georgics in a different format - thank Heaven that his entire output is still to be had from the astounding classical catalogue of Messrs Duckworth. I have been much blessed in my modest career. Fraenkel was in all probability the greatest figure in Oxford Classics for centuries. Yes, Cambridge could boast Bentley, Porson, and Housman - no wonder Oxford men were defensive. But Fraenkel was of the twentieth century, and his range was far broader than Housman’s: Sprachgefuhl in spades, Textkritik, Greek, Latin, the reflection of the teaching of Wackernagel, Wilamowitz, Leo, and so many more. His four mighty volumes of Big Oxford Blacks, Aeschylus, Agamemnon in three volumes (1950), and Horace (1957), speak of that prodigious range, and stand beside Bailey’s three-volume Lucretius (1947). But where is Plautine Elements in Plautus? One’s good fortune to have been his pupil is almost beyond expression: felix qui ... But fortunatus et ille ..., and this is the place for me wholeheartedly to declare my undying love and admiration for that quite excellent Latinist, Roland Gregory Austin, who conscientiously and cheerfully has done as much for the well-being of sound and enlightened teaching of Latin literature in Anglophone countries as anyone else in the twentieth century. I am proud to have been his Lehrbursche. Note: My review of the paperback reissue (1982) of Austin’s Aeneid 4 can be found in LCM 7.10 (December 1982) p.151 f.

JONATHAN FOSTER

119 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

Malcolm Willcock

alcolm Willcock’s death at the age of eighty came as a considerable shock, and members of the Virgil Society have particular reasons to mourn their loss. It is not too much to say, and indeed, it has been said by Dennis Blandford, that he hauled our Society back from theM brink of extinction. Malcolm’s curriculum is set out in Who’s Who, and in the warmly appreciative obituaries which appeared in The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday May 23 and in The Times on Friday June 16 2006. His school was Fettes College, Edinburgh, his college Pembroke, Cambridge, to which he went after a spell in the Royal Air Force. From 1952-65 he was a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, also in Cambridge. The mid sixties saw a necessary expansion of tertiary education, and Malcolm became the first Professor of Classics at the new university of Lancaster, where he also performed a number of important administrative functions, the sort of thing in fact which enabled him to tackle the problems of our Society. In 1980 he was appointed to the Chair of Latin at University College London, in which institution again he served as an administrator of distinction. Malcolm’s scholarship was neatly divided between Greek and Latin literature. On the Greek side he was devoted to Homer and Pindar. Indeed his edition of selected epinicia for the Cambridge Series of Greek and Latin Classics is a model, since it guides the reader through odes carefully chosen for their increasing levels of elaboration and complexity. On the Latin side he concentrated upon Plautus (especially the fiendishly difficult metrical problems) and Virgil. Here the obituary in The Times can be corrected: Malcolm did not regard himself as a Virgilian, though he published a lucid piece on the battle scenes of the Aeneid in the Proceedings o f the Cambridge Philological Society 29 (1983) 87-99 (previously read to the Society in March 1982) and read us another paper on “Homer’s chariot race and Virgil’s boat race” (Proceedings 19, pp. 1-13). He therefore declined the Presidency of our Society. It was as the Society’s Treasurer that he put its financial affairs in order and so ensured its longevity. He often took the chair at meetings, and was unfailingly supportive of the speakers with his appreciative comments and helpful questions. What characterised him was an old-fashioned modesty, now lost within the academic profession, where self-promotion is the key to advancement. Malcolm advanced thanks to his broad competence in matters scholarly and administrative; he was also unfailingly courteous. The Virgil Society owes Malcolm a great deal, and we shall all miss him very much.

RGM

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