Proceedings of the Virgil Society

Volume 18 1986

Proceedings of the Virgil Society

Volume 18 1986 Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham Ill

PREFACE

This volume appears much later than intended but it is hoped that the quality of the contents will do something to compensate for the delay. Not all the papers which have been jciven to the Society since the publication of the last volume of the Proceedings have been included. Some have been published elsewhere; others were not thought to be ready, as vet, for publication.

The volume starts with two papers on Virgil and the monuments; it continues with examinations of the ways in the ooet used - and was used - by other writers; and it concludes with a discussion of a modern author and, fittingly, the personal reflections of the President of the Society.

I should like to thank the authors, the members of the Council of the Society, and the Honorary Treasurer, Professor M. M. Willcock, for all their help. My particular scratitude goes to Debbie Christian and Alaric Watson for their work.

May 1986 James Ball

CONTENTS

VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS 1 By J. B. Trapp VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS 19 By Elisabeth Henry FOLLOWING AFTER HERCULES, IN VIRGIL AND APOLLONIUS 47 By Denis Feeney VIRGIL AND TACITUS AGAIN 87 By Norma P. Miller VIRGIL AND CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY 107 By H. H. Huxley PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 133 By W. A. Camps

VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS

by J.B. Trapp

I Commemoration is a universal human preoccupation. Men and women wish themselves to live on in their descendants, in what they have done, or written, or otherwise wrought. Some, more generously, wish rather that those whom they admire should so continue to live. A physical monument, public or private, will be an aid to perpetuity. If the monument perish, or its purpose be forgotten, so too may memory. So philosophers, condemning the pursuit of fame, put their names on the title-pages of the very books in which they enshrine their condemnations. Books abide their fates. So, too, do monuments of bronze or stone: 'data sunt ipsis quoque fata sepulcris', as Juvenal (X.146) reminds us. The monuments of my title are not the ancient stones, incised, sculpted, or piled into structures which might illustrate the writings of Virgil. Nor are they works of art that have been made under Virgilian influence, direct influence at any rate. Nor can they truly be said to be the metaphorical monuments of the Eclogues, the Georgics, the Mneid. My monuments are the so-called tomb of Virgil at Posilipo and other commemorative monuments erected either at Naples, where the poet lived for so many years and where, according to tradition, he was buried, or at Mantua, near to which, in the hamlet anciently called Andes and now called Pietole, he was born. In addition to moving from south to north in Italy, my story moves in time from the Renaissance back to Antiquity, forward to the Middle Ages and finally, via the Renaissance and the era of the Grand Tour, to Napoleonic and so to modern times.

II Accounts of the discovery of ancient tombs are a staple of Renaissance archaeology, both in its romantic and its soberer manifestations. Many such accounts are modelled on Cicero's narrative (Jusculan Disputations, V.64ff.) of how he found the tomb of Archimedes: When I was quaestor in Sicily, I managed to track down the grave of Archimedes. The Syracusans knew nothing of it, and even denied that any such thing existed. But there it was, entirely surrounded and hidden under bushes of brambles and thorns. I remembered that I had heard of some simple lines of verse that had been inscribed on Archimedes's tomb, referring to a sphere and a cylinder sculpted in stone on top of the grave. I looked carefully at all the many tombs that stood beside the Agrigentine Gate. At last, I spied a little column just visible above the scrub. It was surmounted by a sphere and a cylinder. Some of the leading citizens of Syracuse were with me at the time and I said to them that I believed that this was the very object we were looking for. Men were sent in with J.B. TRAPP

sickles to clear the site and when they had opened a path to the monument we walked up to it. The verses could still be seen, though approximately the second half of each line had been worn away. So one of the most famous cities in the Greek world, formerly a great centre of learning, would have remained in total ignorance of the tomb of the most brilliant citizen it had ever produced, if the man from Arpinum had not come along and found it.

To Cicero's narrative are indebted Renaissance accounts of finding the tombs of Ovid - one of these is a sort of carbon copy - of Livy and of others. In a remoter degree, Cicero is the ancestor, too, of the discoverers of the Roman monument beside the Grotta Vecchia or Grotta Virgiliana at Posilipo above the Bay of Naples, known for centuries as 'Virgil's tomb'. Though there are extant today a great many tombs, grand or humble, of greater and lesser authors from the post-classical era, there is no longer in situ a single authentic monument erected even soon after the death of any of the great writers of Antiquity. We have to make do with such agreeably pathetic tokens as the tombstone of little Quintus Sulpitius Maximus, the Master Betty of his day, who died at the age of eleven, from too much study - but not before he had received honourable mention for his verses at the Capitoline Games of 94 A.D. Cicero's labours with the tomb of Archimedes were in vain: the monument is now lost. Nor are we better off with Ovid who, from exile, had proposed his own epitaph: Hie ego qui iaceo, tenerorum lusor amorum Ingenio perii Naso poeta meo. At tibi qui transis, ne sit grave, quisquis amasti Dicere, Nasonis molliter ossa cubent. (Tristia, III.iii.73-6) No tomb bearing these lines has yet been found, either at Constanja, on the Black Sea, where Ovid breathed his last, or in any of the other places where the learned imagination of the Renaissance located his sepulchre. Tales of the tomb had circulated in the Middle Ages, some of them accompanied by epitaphs. A pair of epitaphs, taken from elswhere in the Tristia and the Amores, is to be found in the earliest printed collection of such verses in 1472. Stories of a splendid tomb outside the gates of Tomis (Constanja), and of others in Poland and Hungary, with yet another epitaph, confected this time and not taken from Ovid's works, circulated widely. In 1674, on the Via Haminia in the suburbs of Rome - where Ovid himself says that he wished to be buried - an ancient tomb-chamber, with wall-paintings and an antique inscription, was laid bare. It was the family sepulchre of the Nasonii but was at once enthusiastically identified as Ovid's. It is still there, though its inscription has been removed, and the wall-paintings - except those which found their way to the British Museum - are all but illegible. Yet other tombs for Ovid have been imagined, but in a spirit of still purer fantasy, such as that in Richard de St Non's Voyage pittoresque de Naples et de Sidle of 1781-6. Historians, too, have been the object of 'discovery' of this kind. Livy's tomb was thought to have been found in Padua not once only, but three times: in 1340, in 1413 and in 1537. VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS

This sort of thing is an index of reverence for the vestiges of Antiquity and of its authors. Virgil's tomb would be a particular prize for such seekers, who had, indeed, some clues to its whereabouts to help them. Ancient biographies gave indications of where he was buried and of his epitaph; ancient writers, too, spoke of the veneration given to the spot. None of them, alas, say what the tomb looked like, and the first extant representation of it, made in Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century, is a fancy picture: it is the woodcut that first appears in the famous Virgil of Sebastian Brant, printed in Strasbourg in 1502. This woodcut was several times re-used and copied in France and Italy, in books and manuscripts. Half a century was to elapse before a specific monument, near Naples, would be identified as the tomb of Virgil, and illustrated as such. Still extant, it is a genuine vestige of antiquity, a Roman tomb of the type known as columbarium, dovecot. The story of how this monument came for at least three centuries to be identified as Virgil's tomb and visited by every traveller will occupy the next few pages.

rv According to the most widely diffused life of Virgil, written by the grammarian Donatus in the fourth century A.D., the poet died at Brindisi on his way back from Greece and was buried, in pursuance of his wish, in the vicinity of Naples. Donatus, it seems, was getting his information from, was reworking, even cribbing, the biography of Virgil by Suetonius, of a couple of centuries earlier. The death occurred on or about 20 September, 19 B.C.; Virgil's remains, if we believe Suetonius-Donatus, were transported to Naples and interred in a tomb on the road from Naples to Pozzuoli, before the second milestone. On the tomb was said to have been carved the epitaph Virgil was said to have written for himself: Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces. Other antique biographies of Virgil say much the same. Later, perhaps in the ninth century, sets of epitaphs, purportedly written by Virgil's purported pupils, make their appearance. None ever supplants the version that Donatus and others ascribe to Virgil himself. Nor does any of the many more modern variants - except (as we shall see) for one. Donatus -1 use him to stand for all the ancient lives - seemed to offer something precise about where the tomb was - provided only that you knew where the road to Pozzuoli had run in Virgil's day. By the time of Donatus, and indeed even in Suetonius's time, there were three roads to Pozzuoli. The oldest and longest was the Via Antiniana, which crossed the low range of hills running from the Vomero to the point of Posilipo, Sans Souci, which lies to the west of the city of Naples. During the Civil War and early Augustan times another road, the Via Puteolana, was constructed. It ran along the coast as it then was, approximately corresponding to the present Riviera di Chiaia and Mergellina, through the hill of Posilipo from near what is now Piazza Santa Maria di Piedigrotta, and out after some seven hundred metres at Fuorigrotta. The third Roman road, which ran through another, slightly longer tunnel, was to the south of this one. The crypta Neapolitana, the shorter and more famous of the two tunnels, was already notorious in Roman times for its dust and darkness, and remained so for as long as it was in use, that is to say until about 1885, when it was superseded by the Grotta Nuova, the Galleria Quattro Giornate. The crypta Neapolitana, or Grotta Vecchia, or Grotta J.B. TRAPP

Virgiliana, as it was known, was the tunnel which, according to legend, had been cut by the magic of Virgil the sorcerer. For English readers, it is most famously described in Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus, where Mephistophilis takes Faustus on that most expensive of all package tours: Then up to Naples, rich Campania Whose buildings, fair and gorgeous to the eye, The streets straight forth, and paved with finest brick, Quarter the town in four equivalents: There saw we learned Maro's golden tomb, The way he cut, an English mile in length, Thorough a rock of stone in one night's space.... (11.824-30)

The legends of Virgil the sorcerer are a strange transmutation of the reverence for the poet which we know to have prevailed in Rome a century or so after his death. Martial tells us that the Ides of October, Virgil's birthday, became sacred to the poet; and Pliny that Silius Italicus kept the day more ceremoniously than his own anniversary. Silius, says Martial, bought the tomb of Virgil from its impoverished owner and kept it as a shrine. He is shown doing so in paintings of the 1770s by Joseph Wright of Derby, the only artist, as far as I know, to depict this scene. Statius pictures himself seeking inspiration there and - much later - the bishop, poet and letter-writer Sidonius Apollinaris gave out that he too had visited Virgil's tomb. An even more famous visit, by St. Paul the Apostle, is - alas - apocryphal. The verses that record his presence have never been securely dated. They were known to Petrarch in the fourteenth century and may well have been written at about that time:

Ad Maronis mausoleum Ductus, fudit super eum Piae rorem lacrimae. Quern te, inquit, reddidissem, Si te vivum inuenissem, Poetarum maxime!

Silius, it may be supposed, lived soon enough after Virgil to have been sure of his place of burial, if the tomb that Wright painted was apocryphal. We, on the other hand, have only Donatus to go on, and assuming that Donatus was correct about the distance the tomb stood, on the Via Puteolana, from Neapolis, we can only say that it must have been well short of the hill of Posilipo - somewhere, perhaps, about the spot where there are now the gardens of the Villa Comunale, with their rectangular Ionic temple and its huge bust of Virgil erected in 1819. It would thus have been as close to Castel dell'Ovo, which also had medieval associations with Virgil the magician, as to the mount of Sans Souci. In 1624 the great German geographer Cluverius put the spot on the road to Vesuvius, in the opposite direction, at S. Giovanni a Teduccio. Though some followed Cluverius, including Joseph Addison in 1705, we shall do well not to. In the Middle Ages many legends gathered round Virgil. He was thought to have become prey to the wiles of women, and been suspended in a basket while ascending to the bedroom of one of them, variously described as a courtesan and VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS as the King of Rome's daughter. He was held to have devised the Bocca della veritd; and to have made a great bronze horse the very sight of which could cure the ailments of any living horse. The colossal ancient bronze horse's head now in the Museo Nazionale at Naples, given in 1471 by Lorenzo il Magnifico to Diomede Carafa, was once falsely believed to have been the head of Virgil's bronze horse. Among these achievements of Virgil the sorcerer, however, the Grotta Virgiliana was always, perhaps, the most famous and the largest. It seems to be the tunnel mentioned in the third quarter of the twelfth century by the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, who said it was fifteen miles long. About 1350, Fazio degli Uberti says that he had stood in it and more than a century later Charles VIII seems to have thought it worth a small detour. Petrarch - it is agreeable to report of such a great Virgilian - was sceptical about the grotto's Virgilian connection. Early in 1341, discussing it with his protector King Robert, also a Virgilian, he dismissed it as a work of necromancy, blandly professing himself unaware that Virgil was a sorcerer. The king agreed that the marks they could see on the stone were more likely to have been made by iron tools. Petrarch was, indeed, one of the greatest of Virgilians, his own poems full of Virgilian cadence, phrase and image. A splendid witness of his love is his cherished manuscript of Virgil, now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Into this he transcribed the verses on St. Paul just mentioned, besides the most important memoranda of his moral, amorous and intellectual life. More, about 1338, he commissioned a frontispiece for the volume from the Sienese painter Simone Martini. Servius, the great ancient commentator, drawing aside for us the veil which shrouds Virgil's meaning, points out the poet where he reclines, clearly an inspired writer by his wreath of bay, his pen and tablets and his heaven-seeking glance, under the beech-tree of Tityrus. Directly below Virgil, a shepherd is milking (the Eclogues), on the left, at the same level, is a slasher of brambles (the Georgics) and above him the Roman hero himself, with shield and lance (the Mneid). It is a visual translation of the epitaph: pascua, rura, duces. This epitaph was certainly known to Petrarch. On one or other of his visits to Naples, in 1341 and 1343, he must surely also have attempted to find the poet's tomb. He speaks in a verse letter of both the Grotta and his wish to visit it and of the remains of the poet. Later, in the Itinerarium Syriacum of 1357 or 1358, he gives his Milanese friend Giovannolo da Mandello quite definite instructions about the tomb, 'a work of great antiquity'. Boccaccio, too, visited the spot many times, and even indited some of his letters 'from Virgil's tomb'. The work of great antiquity that Petrarch speaks of still perches high above the Grotta. It is certainly Roman, a brick-built columbarium or family tomb of the Augustan period, one of a number - it seems - that once dotted the vicinity. A twenty-one-foot-sided square, with walls three feet thick, it is surmounted by a cylindrical dome some sixteen feet across, and entered by a single doorway. There are three windows and ten niches for the ashes of the dead. The floor is now clear, but in the last century there stood within the tomb a stele erected in 1840, in Virgil's honour, by the Greek scholar and French royal librarian, F.G. Eichhoff. There was also then a stone with the epitaph 'Mantua me genuit...'. A Roman tomb, then, of the right period, and on the Via Puteolana, if not exactly where it should be. Not even Petrarch, nor Boccaccio, still less the Neapolitans, could resist the identification with Virgil. It mattered little that Flavio Biondo, a century after Petrarch, made a search for the tomb of Virgil in the vicinity of the Grotta, and recorded scrupulously that he had failed to find it, or its epitaph. Local patriotism and wishful thinking were too strong. It is ironical that the new phase of systematic archaeology initiated by Biondo should lead not only J.B. TRAPP to vastly increased and more precise knowledge, but also to a fatal looseness in its application. In about 1540 Benedetto di Falco put Virgil's tomb at Fuorigrotta, by the imaginary church of Santa Maria dell'Idria. By 1543, our columbarium was already being shown to tourists .The great Leandro Alberti in 1550 is doubtful, though he finally gives credence to the columbarium above Piedigrotta. Another outsider, Paolo Giovio - he and Alberti both died in 1552 - thought the true tomb must have been destroyed by the Goths; but the only Neapolitan sceptic of the time was one Giovanni Francesco Lombardi - at least as far as I can discover. About Alberti's time the Lateran Canons who had had possession for a century of the church and convent of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta took steps to enhance a valuable tourist attraction. In 1554 they set up an inscription at the entrance to the tomb. This is still there, as 'Mantua me genuit...' is not. A tourist, one Stanislaus Cencovius, has inscribed his name on it, with the date 1589. It runs: Qui cineres? Tumuli haec vestigia. Conditur olim Me hoc qui cecinit pascua, rura, duces. The first printed book to record this new epitaph for Virgil is by Scipione Mazzella, and it was published in 1591. Two more epitaphs were added by Giulio Cesare Capaccio in 1607. It would be logical, given a columbarium with niches, for those niches to have contained urns. If the columbarium could be identified by association with the Grotta as Virgil's tomb, it would also follow that one of those urns must have contained Virgil. That is the implication of a passage interpolated in the Cronaca di Partenope and of another in Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, about the end of the fifteenth century. In 1550 one Pietro di Stefano goes further: he has seen in the tomb, he says, a marble urn with an inscription. In 1591, Mazzella reports that he and his friends had seen in the tomb., a few years before, a white marble urn containing Virgil's remains. It was supported on a beautiful pedestal and four marble columns. Before 1607, according to Capaccio, the supporting columns had increased to nine, through the intervention of a certain Bishop 'Alfonsus Heredia'. The patron of the Lateran Canons, the Cardinal of Mantua, having carried off the lot, however, had died a deserved death in Genoa, and all trace of urn and columns had been lost. What truth there is in all this, who dare say? Perhaps the Canons had so embellished their property. All that can be said is that any inscribed urn that had been put into the tomb was no longer there in 1607. Mazzella is also the first, as far as I am aware, to speak of a large bay-tree growing from the tomb's cupola. He has a crude woodcut to show it According to report, Petrarch had planted this tree, to replace an earlier one that had expired in sympathy with Dante, in the year of that poet's death. Mazzella's friends made verses to the tree, which later suffered from souvenir hunters, who were encouraged by the legend that the wrenched or cut off boughs would at once renew themselves - a clear extrapolation from the story of the Golden Bough in the sixth book of the Mneid: 'Uno avulso non deficit alter'. Memento takers were already active in 1632; exactly a hundred years later, Joseph Spence took a leaf for Christopher Pitt, the Virgil translator; later yet, Frederick the Great of Prussia was sent a sprig by his sister, and Voltaire celebrated the occasion. Count Chernichev, the vice-Grand-Admiral of Russia, took another to Voltaire himself. In 1760, the Abb6 Jean-Claude Richard de Saint-Non says that the tree was hardly visible, but he had excavated its root and been able to preserve the tender shoot that was the only indication that it was not totally extinct, as well as to secure a piece of the VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS dead wood for himself. Early nineteenth-century custodians blamed, impartially, the French and the English; a replacement tree, planted by Casimir Delavigne in 1825, was still growing there, it is said, in 1897. The tomb has now been thoroughly tidied of such things. By no means everyone believed that the columbarium was Virgil's tomb. J.-J. Bouchard in 1632, while censuring the Canons' neglect of their property, did not accept the identification. Later authors, whether they believe or not, are usually critical of the state it had been allowed to fall into, and of the liberties tourists had been allowed, or had taken. Sir Thomas Hoby and, a century and a half after him, in 1685, Bishop Burnet, called it Virgil's house and were dubious of its authenticity. In 1739 the President de Brasses complained both of its condition and of the old witch he found inside it. Edward Wright in the 1720s did not admire its 'wretched distich' and Kotzebue in the first years of the nineteenth century spoke scornfully of 'an insignificant inscription which has often been copied' - as well as of the signatures which he found there, including those of Gustavus III of Sweden, Sir William Hamilton, Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, Himmel, the organist ('the Russian Orpheus') and 'many ladies who have forgotten that they should engrave their names in hearts and not in stones'. The Duchess of Devonshire put up an epitaph by the tomb for her lap-dog - and made handsome amends with the sumptuous edition of Annibale Caro's JEneid which she caused to be published at Rome in 1819. The Rev. J.C. Eustace in 1802 and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1828 merely loved it. For the state of the tomb after 1643, the Lateran Canons are not to blame. In that year they ceded it to one Giuseppe Vitale, from whom it seems to have passed to the Dukes of Pesciolanciano, who had yet another new inscription put up. Later it was in various private hands until finally, in 1930, the Comune took over, restored the tomb and planted a little park round it with Virgilian plants in honour of the bimillennium of Virgil's birth. In 1939, a century after the death of Giacomo Leopardi, the putative remains of that poet were moved there, with his monument, from the church of S. Vitale at Fuorigrotta. The little park, closed for many years, was refurbished and re-opened in 1981. In 1668 a further inscription, and a monumental one at that, was erected below the Piedigrotta entrance to the Grotta, to commemorate the restoration - at the instigation of the Viceroy, Pedro Antonio d'Aragona - of various thermal baths in the vicinity. Don Pedro's aedicula has often been misidentified as Virgilian. As to the earliest picturings of the tomb of Virgil, the fancy woodcut of 1502 can have no claim to authenticity. At the time of writing, there is much uncertainty about whether the drawing of the Piedigrotta columbarium in the three sketchbooks by J.J. Boissard in Stockholm and in the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris (Fig.l) can claim primacy over the engraving first published by Tobias Fendt at Wroclaw in 1574.1 There is clearly a close relationship between Boissard's drawings and Fendt's engraving. One, I believe, was copied from the other. Fendt is not the most reliable of witnesses. Among other things, he provides a fake epitaph for Ovid and a Latin one for Euripides. Nevertheless, I believe that, in this instance, Boissard may have been copying from Fendt, on whose engraving are based some seventeenth-century guide-book engravings as well as - in all probability - the much more scientific- seeming engraving by Pietro Sante Bartoli late in that century, as well as its replica in Montfaucon's Antiquiti expliquee of 1719. On either Bartoli or Montfaucon depends the reconstruction of the tomb in Park Wilhelmshohe, of the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Bartoli held the field until 1768, when Paolo Antonio Paoli, much copied later by others, including Joseph Wright of Derby, issued a JJB.TRAPP

Fig.l. JJ. Boissard, 'Virgil's Tomb', c.1597. stately album with interior and exterior views and a ground plan. Sir William Hamilton's Campi Phlegraei (1776), being concerned more with geology than antiquities, omits the tomb almost entirely. There are also, during the later seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many independent sketches, finished drawings and engravings (Fig.2). VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS

y

Fig.2. Richard Symonds, 'Virgil's Tomb', 1651.

This brings me almost to an end concerning commemoration of Virgil at his place of burial. Before we move north to Mantua, one further act of reverence at Naples requires attention. It has parallels in Lombardy. On 25 February 1799, the Revolutionary general, Championnet, issued a decree in the newly founded Parthenopean Republic. The first duty of a state, he proclaimed, is to honour genius and thereby incite the citizens to emulation by placing ever before their eyes the glory that attaches, even in the grave, to the great men of all centuries. To this end, he proposed to erect a marble monument to Virgil on the site of his tomb at the mouth of the Grotta di Pozzuoli. Twenty days were allotted for a competition for the design of the memorial, and a three-man jury was to be set up. The winner would erect a monument to his own design. 10 J.B. TRAPP

I do not yet know what came of this. The whole procedure was, however, entirely in accord with French Revolutionary theory and practices regarding such manifestations. Rousseau had advocated monuments and festivals celebrating the heroes of culture so as to awaken a sense of human and national possibilities, and the Revolution took up his precepts with fervour. The most famous occasion of the kind was the posthumous Triumph of Voltaire in 1791, when the ashes of the champion of reason were transferred to the Pantheon. Such ceremonies are, of course, a turning to the purposes of liberty and equality of earlier occasions of monarchical propaganda: here the great ones of the intellect take the place of kings and conquerors.

VI My scene now shifts to Mantua and its neighbourhood where, not unnaturally, the monumental-political purpose seems always to have been stronger and more developed than anywhere else in Italy.2 We shall find ourselves involved with, among other things, the search for an authentic likeness of Virgil.3 In this there is not much to go on except - once again - Donatus, who tells us that the poet was tall, firm-set, dark, rustic-seeming, suffering from indifferent health. A challenge, that, to the imagination. The most famous and for later ages the most influential antique representations of Virgil are two. Neither is earlier than the fifth century A.D., and neither has the slightest claim to authenticity. In the first, an African mosaic, the so-called Bardo likeness, the poet sits toga'd between the muse of tragedy and the muse of epic poetry. In the second, in the manuscript known as 'Virgilius Romanus' (MS. Vaticanus latinus 3867), he is again toga'd and seated, with lectern and portable library at his side. In each, he is holding a book. I cannot here deal with the mosaic at Trier or the problems of the double herms and the portrait of Menander, but neither mosaic nor herms can in their turn claim to be true portraits. We are in no better case with the two famous medieval representations, both of them in Mantua.4 Both are of a type clearly derived from a late antique author portrait One, 'Virgil to the waist', was - it seems - placed on Palazzo Broletto in 1227, and labelled 'Virgilius Mantuanus poeta Clarissimus', as well as being given our epitaph: 'Mantua me genuit...'. The other, now in Palazzo Pucale, may belong to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Both are early witnesses to Boccaccio's statement about Mantuan reverence for Virgil and Virgilian localities; and to Pontano's note that the Mantuans were so proud of their Maro that they put his head on their seals, on their buildings and on their public monuments. We know that from about 1256 Mantuan coins bore an image of Virgil, sometimes modelled on the Broletto statue; sometimes having a curiously potted Virgil. Both the Broletto representation and that in Palazzo Ducale have suffered nasal damage, and we know also that this was repaired, for one of them at least - but which? - in 1468. The damage may be one reason why Ippolito Donesmondi in 1612 wrote that the Broletto statue had originally been part of a Virgil monument in Piazza delle Erbe thrown down by Carlo Malatesta in 1397. As far as I know, however, the Virgil figure from this putative monument is not actually described until 1617. Then Antonio Possevino says it was life-size, held a book in the left hand, and was making a gesture of allocution with the right, wore the senatorial toga and stood on a pedestal with eight steps and an iron railing; the familiar epitaph was there too. None of the early fifteenth-century sources, not Pope Pius II, nor Pier Paolo Vergerio, nor Coluccio Salutati - all three enemies of VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS 11 the Malatesta - tells us what the monument looked like. Pius, who visited Pietole, the poet's birthplace, in 1446, reports Vergerio as attributing Malatesta's crime to uncultured ignorance or feigned piety and a pretence that the statue of a pagan poet might beget idolatry. Malatesta did not know, Pius goes on, that poets were the guardians of fame, and that his infamy would be as lasting as his who burned the temple of Diana. Later, others joined the chorus. During the 1450s Platina, the papal librarian, proposed a replacement, but nothing came of it. In 1499, however, Isabella d'Este took a hand. At her request Pontano and other gentlemen at Naples gave their opinion that Andrea Mantegna was the man to make an image of Virgil and that it should stand on a base bearing few words, the nature of which Pontano was to decide. The monument had the specific purpose of repairing Malatesta's outrage. In May 1499 Isabella accepted Pontano's ideas. The statue might be, she said, of marble or of bronze, though marble was later agreed on. A drawing survives.5 If not - as we have it - by the hand of Mantegna, it almost certainly records an idea of his for Isabella's monument. A little later still, one Giovanni Battista Fiera, a Mantuan physician and man of letters, was reported to have discovered an authentic likeness of Virgil. The head and shoulders of Mantegna's drawing are quite close to those of Virgil in the terracotta bust made to Fiera's order in 1514 and placed by him upon an arch outside his house, though Fiera's terracotta carries no book. On 25 June 1514 Fiera secured a decree forbidding harm to his arch and its busts - Francesco IV Gonzaga and Battista Spagnuoli, the Carmelite, the Christian Virgil, known to the Renaissance as Mantuan, were also represented. The portrait type of the terracotta of Virgil is also related to that used by Justus of Ghent and Luca Signorelli - and perhaps also to Pontano's description of the poet's appearance.6 Out of the post- Mantegna circle, incidentally, probably from the hand of Leonbruno, comes the curious painted allegory of Mantua, with Virgil's head peeping out of a large vase - as on some Mantuan coins - perhaps an allusion to the belief that the poet's father was a potter.7 Can Fiera's bust bear any relation to another, a genuinely antique marble this time, which was - it seems - in Mantua about this period? Certainly this bust was later, much later, and again erroneously, thought to be a portrait of Virgil.8 That it was in Mantua in the 1490s is probable, since it looks as if Mantegna used it in his Madonna della Vittoria in 1496. To the question of whether he used it for the head of one of his saints merely out of reverence for the antique, or additionally out of reverence for Virgil, I am sorry to say I have no answer. Nor can I say where this bust was between the 1490s and its rediscovery in 1775, after which - as we shall see - it played a considerable role. For much if not all of the interval it may have been in Gonzaga possession - as it was when it turned up again. There are various possibilities which there is not time to explore here. Yet another commemoration of Virgil in Renaissance Mantua was made by Mario Equicola, the city's historian - a column with a bust set up in a tempietto at his house. At some indeterminate time, bust and column were parted - probably in 1708, when the house was pulled down - and the bust is no longer identifiable. The column now stands in the Cortile dei Cani of Palazzo Ducale, alongside, but separate from, yet another bust. Its coat of arms symbolizes - yet again - pascua, rura, duces. Now to return to that bust used by Mantegna, whether or not for his Virgil. In 1775, Gian Girolamo Carli, Secretary General of the newly founded Mantuan Academy, and the architect Paolo Pozzo, were arranging the removal of the Gonzaga collections at Sabbioneta to Mantua. Coming on to the bust in question, 12 J.B. TRAPP which had been crowned with poetical ivy, Carli was convinced that he had found the bust of Virgil from the monument destroyed by Malatesta, which he was also convinced had been classical. Luigi 'Rodomonte' Gonzaga must, he said, have fished it out of the Mincio, where Malatesta had flung it, and Vespasiano had treasured it up at Sabbioneta. He published a dissertation on the subject, which was later refuted by two eminent authorities. The authorities were right, and Carli was wrong. The Academy, however, clung to it as the likeness of their eponymous hero, both on their facade and in the catalogue of their antiquities. Except among spoilsport scholars, this bust then held the field for more than a century. The Napoleonic occupiers of Italy - we shall see - made much of it and carried it off to Paris, though they had to give it back in 1816. It was the model for Virgil on the monument in Giardino Cavriani at Mantua, put up in 1835; for the bronze bust in the Mantuan mascherata of 1838; it passed in schoolbooks for a portrait of Virgil until recently, and on the Albert Memorial, as well as -1 much regret to say - both on Neapolitan posters advertising their Virgilian year in 1981 and on the back cover of the British Library's little book, T.S. Pattie and R.D. Williams's Virgil: His Poetry through the Ages, issued for our Virgilian year of 1982.

vn The most important appearances of Carli's bust, however, were stage-managed by the army of Napoleon. On 18 July 1796, the conqueror himself paid a moonlight visit to Pietole, the village close to Mantua where the poet had been born - during which, he assured her by letter, he never ceased to think of Josephine - and next year he exempted the village from all levies. It was, however, his general at Mantua, Sextius-Alexandre-Francois Miollis, veteran of Yorktown, who gave Carli's bust a new lease of life. He also acted as protector of the Academy, adding Virgiliana to its title. Miollis was something of an expert in honouring dead poets a la frangaise: a little later he was to do something of the same kind for Ariosto and for the improwisatrice Corilla Olimpica. In 1797, Miollis conceived a scheme for a Revolutionary fete in honour of Virgil's birthday and his birthplace, in one: a pyramid and a bust to be erected on 15 October at Pietole. Pozzo, however, enlarged the project to include both an opening academic gathering and a popular festival, with a dowry from public funds for fifty young affianced ladies (only twenty-three presented themselves in the event) and a light luncheon on the birthday itself, to conclude in the evening with a ball. The citizens were invited to display representations of Virgil and on 14 October, in the evening, there were verse readings in the Academy's Teatro Scientifico. The local newspaper made fun of some of the verses, at which the Academy complained to its protector. Pozzo's project for a Virgilian park provided that it should be the perpetual property of the Academy. It was to have a marble entrance gate, surmounted by a figure of fame in the act of crowning a bust of Virgil. In a wood composed of Virgilian trees was to stand a pyramid or obelisk, topped by a swan and surrounded by a chain uniting three great marble vases, borne by three satyrs. On a crimson cushion, at the pyramid's foot, was to be placed the copy of Bodoni's Virgil which the printer had sent for the occasion. On each anniversary of Virgil's birth and death the pyramid was to be adorned with flowers and foliage; meantime, there was to be a free issue of bread and wine for anyone who placed a wreath there. The pyramid was soon famous (Fig.3). VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS 13

^J^rrt i y//idenAen ^J trat/,/.

Fig. 3. Obelisk in the Virgilian Park, Mantua, c. 1799 (after E.L. Posselt, Taschenbuchfur 1796, Nuremberg 1799)

In the park were also to be tempietti, and the statues of the poets and the muses, interspersed with flower-beds.Broa d avenues were to give a vista of Mantua and its lakes, of the ruins of Troy, the cave of the Cumean Sibyl, the temples of Apollo and Janus, the grave of Ocnus, founder of Mantua, and a group of rural huts. Between the temples of Apollo and Janus was to be a stretch of water with Charon's bark upon it and nearby, on the bank, the figure of a suppliant, guarded by Cerberus. On the other bank were to be the Elysian Fields. The statues of great men were to dotted about them: thirty-three Greek and Roman philosophers and poets and seventy-one modern exponents of the arts and sciences - Pomponazzi, Galileo, Rousseau, Descartes, Voltaire, Newton, Muratori, Mazzucchelli, Buffon, Benjamin Franklin, Columbus and Captain Cook. Pozzo proposed that, since all 14 J.B. TRAPP these images could not be got ready in time, the figures of the saints and the blessed from the churches should be re-used. It had been, the contemporary account assures us, a rather grey autumn but on 15 October the sun shone and the local dignitaries, accompanied by the sposati and sposate and their parents, went by water to Pietole. There had already been a foot­ race, with prizes, from Mantua to Pietole, and now there were more races on horseback and on the water. Finally, there were fireworks, and a portrait of Virgil ringed with lights. Two years later, Mantua fell again to the Austrians, who destroyed what there was of the Virgilian park. On his return, Miollis announced, in February 1801, that there was not enough money to rebuild it. Instead, he invited the citizens to erect a bust of Virgil in Mantua itself. Pozzo was again on the committee. A piazza was re-named for Virgil and it was proposed to transform a suitable church into a Mantuan Pantheon. High festival was appointed for 20 and 21 March, when there were to be verses and music at the Academy, as before. A gesso bust was modelled on Carli's marble and on 21 March it was taken in procession on a triumphal car drawn by four white horses and surrounded, inevitably, by nine young Mantuan ladies costumed as the Muses. Apollo also rode on the chariot, along with the geniuses of the arts, the sciences and immortality. All very splendid - and four years later the costumier was still trying to get his money. Their journey ended in the Piazza, where now stood a triumphal arch and column, with dedicatory inscriptions to the 'Bravi di Marengo e del Mincio' from Mantua, to the 'Nipoti di Maro' from the French Republic, to Virgil, to Miollis, to Liberty and to 'Oltraggio riparato'. The car and costumes, incidentally, were used again in the mascherata of 1838. Later a bronze was cast to replace the gesso bust. There was a further ceremony on Virgil's birthday, 15 October 1801, followed by yet another on the same date in 1802. Miollis had decreed three-yearly commemorations. The Rev. John Chetwode Eustace was a witness to one of these ceremonies: The French no sooner became masters of Mantua, than they began ... with cruel mockery, [to] celebrate civic feasts in honor of the poet, and erected plaster busts in place of his marble statues.... In the middle of the great square was erected an ill-proportioned pillar, about ten feet high. On it was placed a plaster bust of Vergil. Four lesser pillars supporting four other plaster busts, joined by garlands, formed a sort of square enclosure. Virgil's bust was crowned with laurel, and from it hung garlands, extending to the other four. These garlands or festoons, instead of hanging loose, and waving gracefully in the air, were drawn tight, and were consequently as motionless as ropes. Around this ridiculous pageant, the French troops drew up, and paraded. The inhabitants seemed purposely to keep aloof.10

Nor was Kotzebue more impressed by ...the monument recently erected with great pomp to Virgil, who was born at Mantua. Heavens, what an ironical compliment to that great poet! His bust is placed so high that it is impossible to distinguish the features. Four swans of iron, covered with plaster of paris, support a column; the plaster has already fallen off in several places, and the swans look as if they had been plucked. On a large quadrangular pedestal are four inscriptions.... The whole is not so VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS 15

much a monument of Virgil as of French vanity, which unfortunately is not always contented with iron swans covered with plaster of Paris....11

VIII Now forward to 1877 when a group of Mantuan citizens, realizing that the nineteen-hundredth anniversary of Virgil was approaching, decided to celebrate the event and to erect a monument, as well as to set in train a worthy edition of the works. Subscription lists were opened and dragged their slow length along until 1930, when the bimillenary of the birth was commemorated by the inauguration of the present monument. Its figure of Virgil, like the figure on the Cavriani monument, stands in the attitude described by Possevino as the attitude of the statue on the monument destroyed by Malatesta. The medal struck for the occasion derives its portrait from the Bardo mosaic. It was necessary to know which day to celebrate, and the Virgilian Academy debated the claims of 22 September 1881 and the same date in 1882. The learned, individuals and bodies, were appealed to. Half a dozen Italian scholars responded, but the University of Oxford made no reply. Victor Duruy, whose Histoire des Romains was then at the height of its fame, found for 1881 but suggested that the day be 21 September - the date (so he thought) of Garibaldi's entry into Rome, a date that Virgil would have been proud to celebrate. Vincenzo Giacometti, appointed adjudicator, settled for 1881, but the ceremonies did not take place until 1882 - so both sides won. Scholars and men of letters were invited to take part. Tennyson sent his majestic ode.12 Victor Hugo's secretary regretted that the master's contractual obligations would not allow him to express his love of the Roman poet in verse; Theodor Mommsen wrote that he was too busy with the proofs of the Corpus inscriptionum latinarum to be present, Pietole, in turn, got its monument in 1884. This was a mediocre cast-iron object by Agamemnone Paganini, on a column, inaugurated with a solemn oration from Giosu6 Carducci. Mantua's monument, when it finally came into being in 1930, was the work of the architect and amateur Luca Beltrami and the sculptor Emilio Quadrelli. Perhaps some revolution of taste will make it seem admirable to someone. Whether we should have been better off if the project of one Tertulliano Gandolfi had been realized is a moot point. Gandolfi wanted a female figure, a hundred feet tall, holding in her arms Augustus Caesar, Virgil and Manto the Theban. Finally, the Mantuan tally is completed by an ivy-twined and bay-flanked herm from the Bosco del Virgilio, an area of reafforestation laid out near Mantua in the 1920s. The face is modelled on the face of Quadrelli's figure.

rx These are the monuments of which my title spoke. It is easy work to mock them a little, as easy as to mock the attempts to locate the tombs of Ovid or of Livy, those great men of a past which many have ceased to think of as exemplary. Mockery is not my object. Men honour their forbears as best they can: the important thing is that they care. On the day that the world ceases to cherish the memory of Ovid, Livy, Virgil and the rest, we shall know that civilization as we have known it, perhaps even Europe itself, are dead. 16 J.B.TRAPP

APPENDIX: SOME FURTHER PICTURES OF 'VIRGIL'S TOMB'

1. Jean-Jacques Boissard; drawings a. After 1583. Stockholm, Royal Library, MS. S 68, fol. 125v. b. c. 1597. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, MS. lat.12,509, p.336(572). c. c. 1605. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, R6s. des imprimis J.468 bis, fol.Iff. 2. Richard Symonds; pen drawing, 1651. Italian notebook, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson D 121, p.62. 3. Joan Raye; coloured drawing, after engraving by H. Robert, 1771. Reisbe- schrijvingen over ... Italie ... 1768-9, The Hague, Royal Library, MS. 133.M.59-62. 4. Antonio Dominici (1730-before 1800); painting. Naples, Museo nazionale della Certosa di S. Martino. 5. Abraham-Louis-Rodolphe Ducros (1748-1810); watercolour, c. 1795. Lausanne, Musee cantonal des beaux-arts. 6. Anon., French, XVIII century; sepia watercolours of exterior (2) and interior (1). London, Sir John Soane's Museum, A.L.30, nos. 16,19,21 (pointed out to me by Arnold Nesselrath). 7. Anon., early XIX century; gouache. Naples, Pensa Collection. 8. Giacinto Gigante, 1806-76; watercolour. Naples, Museo nazionale di Capo- dimonte, Astarita Collection.

FOOTNOTES

Parts of this lecture have appeared in The Poet and the Monumental Impulse (Society for Renaissance Studies, Occasional Paper VI), London 1980. Parts have also been published in more extended, illustrated form as 'Ovid's Tomb. The Growth of a Legend from Eusebius to Laurence Sterne, Chateaubriand and George Richmond', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXVI, 1973, pp. 35-76; and 'The Grave of Vergil', ibid., XLVII, 1984, pp. 1-31. The present text is a revised and up-dated version of what was delivered on 17 January 1981, incorporating some new material and correcting some errors. Since full references will be found in the three publications mentioned, I have limited footnotes here to the documentation of new and/or corrected passages.

1. On these sketchbooks, see the tentative conclusions of C. Callmer, 'Un manuscrit de Jean-Jacques Boissard a la Bibliotheque royale de Stockholm', Acta Instituti Romani Regni Sueciae, Series in 4°, XXII (Opuscula Romana, IV), 1962, pp. 47-59, and E, Mandowsky and C. Mitchell, Pirro Ligorio's Roman Antiquities, London 1963, pp. 27-28. 2. See now R. Signorini, Ritorno a Virgilio, Verona 1981; the catalogue of the exhibition Misurare la terra. Centurazione e coloni nel mondo romano. II caso mantovano, Mantua 1984, esp. the contributions of Adele Bellu and Gianluigi VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS 17

Arcari; and the admirable exhibition catalogue of the Mantuan Archivio di Stato compiled by Dott.ssa Bellu: La memoria di Virgilio nella documentazione archivistica mantovana, Mantua 1981. 3. U. Tocchetti, 'Iconografia virgiliana', in Misurare la terra..., pp. 195-99; M.G. Fiorini Galassi and others, Virgilio: Alia ricerca del volto, Suzzara 1981. 4. Wolfgang Liebenwein, 'Princeps poetarum. Die mittelalterlichen Vergil- Bilder in Mantua', 2,000 Jahre Vergil. Ein Symposium, ed. V. Poschl (Wolfenbutteler Forschungen,XXJV), Wiesbaden 1983, pp. 109-51. 5. There is a convenient summary in D.S. Chambers and Jane T. Martineau, Splendours of the Gonzaga, Catalogue of the Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1981-2, no. 92. 6.Ibid.,nos. 98-100. 7. W. Kemp, 'Eine mantegneske Allegorie fur Mantua', Pantheon, XXVH., 1969, pp. 12-18. 8. For the antique type, see the useful bibliography in W. Helbig, Fuhrer durch die qffentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertumer in Rom; 4th ed., by Hermine Speier, II, Tubingen 1966, no. 1240, pp. 93-94. 9. See now, especially, the works of Adele Bellii cited in n. 2 above. 10. J.C. Eustace, A Tour through Italy, 1802; 3rd ed., London 1815,1, pp. 228-9. 11. A.F.F. von Kotzebue, Bemerkungen auf einer Reise..., Cologne 1801; English trans., London 1806, IV, pp. 258-9. 12. 'Mantua's Tennyson Manuscript', Times Literary Supplement, 18 September 1981, p. 1081.

19

VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS

(Lecture given to a joint meeting of the Virgil Society and the London Branch of the

Classical Association, on January 12th, 1985).

The title of this talk may sound enigmatic and even provocative; can it be appropriate to echo Miss Lorimer's magisterial work on Homer, when we turn to an epic poet whose awareness of the past was so much more complex than Homer's, and whose purposes were so different? A survey of archaeological sites mentioned in the Aeneid might have its own fascination, but would it necessarily establish a relation between Virgil and the monuments he chose, or needed, to include in his narrative? The subject is immense. To clarify the scope of this paper I must tell you how it first took shape.

In 1982 I was reading the Aeneid repeatedly, and attending especially to the idea of memory - both personal and collective - as a shaping theme throughout the poem. I was fortunate in being able to do this work in Italy, where I found myself increasingly aware of the natural surroundings and the remains surviving from Virgil's time. The relation between the poem and the material world seemed integral and significant in ways which I could not then attempt to define.

Two years later, when Dennis Blandford invited me to read this paper to the

Virgil Society, the title Virgil and the Monuments was his happy thought and it seemed to me exactly right. I was again in Italy, visiting monuments in Rome and Etruria. These visits were not planned as Virgilian expeditions. The twenty or so people who took part in them wanted to see the most important remains of Roman civilisation, to observe and understand as fully as was possible in ten days whatever material remains 20 might still express its essential nature. Again and again members of this group would raise questions that related these monuments to Virgil. It seemed important to them to ask whether Virgil would have seen this building, this tomb, this statue. If these artefacts were pre-Augustan, what did they mean to Virgil's generation? If post- Augustan, what elements of Augustan and Virgilian consciousness did their makers incorporate into them? These questions occurred to the members of our group because they knew the Aeneid well and could not help recalling it in the places we visited. They believed Virgil's poem to be the quintessential expression of Romanitas. So as we looked at the ruins of Veio and Tarquinia, at the House of Augustus or the Shrine of Juturna, we were all seeking answers to two questions: can we reach a fuller understanding of the Aeneid by looking at the monuments of Italy? and can the Aeneid throw light for us on these historical monuments themselves?

The word monument will be used today in the widest sense, as Virgil himself uses it, to include movable objects and personal possessions, also even natural features such as a tree or a rock. In Aeneid VIII, when Evander guides Aeneas over the site of the future Rome, he asks him to survey the veterum monimenta virorum, the "memorials of ancient men" (356), on the walk from the Forum Boarium to the Capitol and Palatine. These monimenta include an altar, a gate, a cave, two oppida, and a sacred grove. Whether constructed by human hands or not, all these are seen as embodying the qualities of the earlier generations, or the individuals, associated with them in the past.

Aeneas' visit to the site of Rome is the most detailed topographical passage in the Aeneid, and this more than any other Book presents the monuments of ancient Italy as charged with significance, one might almost say with creative energy, for the future. An example of such significance occurs in Book VIII, when Virgil describes the hilltop fortress of Tarchon (603-7). In Virgil's time, Etruscan greatness already belonged to 21 the past; it was almost four hundred years since Caere had provided a refuge for Rome's sacred objects and their priests during the invasion of the Gauls. But this historic moment of Caere's saving initiative is unmistakably foreshadowed when Aeneas and his cavalry enter the woodland where Tarchon's stronghold looms above, offering the promise of alliance and future security. This Trojan accord with Tarchon will bring to birth the alliance between Rome and Caere many generations later. This moment, pointing to Rome's coming domination of Italy, prefigures the unified Italy of the Augustan settlement. The gathering of historic momentum in this ancient structure, the fortress of Tarchon, is noted - as so many aspects of historic weighting in Book VIII are noted - in the edition of K.W. Gransden, a work whose wide-ranging perceptiveness will be well known to members of this audience.

The topographical material of Book VIII is full of such prefigurings. We can begin to perceive these more clearly now than was possible in earlier centuries, when so much of pre-Roman Italy was unrevealed by archaeology. Of course, we must still miss a great deal. But in the seventy years since Warde Fowler wrote his Observations on Books VII and VIII, we have realised more fully how precise and selective Virgil was in his descriptions of the monuments surviving from more distant times. Our increased knowledge of ancient Cumae for instance, and of many sites in Latium, enables us to answer very positively the first of our two questions about Virgil and the monuments. Archaeological study does help us to understand the Aeneid better: what Virgil selected, from all he knew of the richly varied Italian past, indicates something of what the cultural history of Italy meant to him, and what the task of Aeneas was to mean. Our second question - does the Aeneid help us to understand the monuments better? - will be best answered by examples, and I hope to point to a few of these which will justify a positive answer to this question too. 22

It is obvious that a single lecture could not attempt any adequate survey of the vast field of Italian topography and archaeology; and others are able to do this much better than I could. What perhaps makes my title's echo of Miss Lorimer into more than a strict impertinence is the reminder it offers of the strongly Greek elements that existed in the pre-Roman past of Italy, continually evoked by Virgil's monuments. Not only Greek, but specifically Homeric.

The presence of Homeric figures on Etruscan pottery, and in some Etruscan painting, is well known. But these Homeric elements are not limited to the Etruscan part of Virgil's Italian world. We may look at one example from the first Book whose action takes place on Italian soil. The palace of King Latinus in Book VII, with its hundred columns, and the venerable laurel tree that stands in the inner courtyard, brings a clear evocation of King Priam's palace at Troy in Book II. The detail of the laurel tree also carries a reminder of the laurels planted, or else hung, at the doorway of Augustus' house in 27 B.C.

The parallel with Troy is not, on the face of it, what we might expect. Latinus was not a Homeric figure. In Hesiod he is supposed to be the son of Odysseus and Circe; anything but Trojan. As a native-born Italian king he might be imagined as living in a different kind of palace from those of Asia Minor, even if his kinsman Dardanus had travelled to Phrygia and become the ancestor of Priam's line. It is Virgil who makes Latinus Homeric - and Trojan. The link with Dardanus is the first claim that Latinus recognises when he receives Aeneas' embassy with words of welcome; and Dardanus, he informs them, now dwells in "the golden palace of the starry heaven" (210). This line again recalls the palace in Troy, where the screams of the women rose to strike "the golden stars" on the night of Troy's destruction. 23

The identification of Latin with Trojan has often been recognised as a major theme in Book VII. The two peoples share qualities of heroic courage and spontaneity; before doom came upon them they lived sponte sua, in a Golden Age of unsuspecting openness. Just as the Trojans were trapped by their own gullibility at Troy, and Nisus and Euryalus are trapped by their own recklessness, so the Latin Camilla falls through her eagerness and folly, and both peoples can become victims of Juno's ruthless enmity.

Virgil establishes this identification of Latin with Trojan in several ways. One is the imagery of the flaming torch, brandished by the Fury Allecto and by the Latin queen whom she has driven mad. Lavinia the Latin princess is turned to a living torch by the supernatural fire that kindles in her hair. Juno also recalls the ominous dream in which Hecuba saw herself made pregnant by a flaming torch, before the birth of Paris. This speech of Juno's explicitly makes the association of the torch with the coming of a royal child, Latin or Trojan. In Juno's hands the flames are used to destroy the cities of those she hates.

The saving aspect of this fire-omen, seen in lulus' flaming hair in Book II, and in the flaming helmet given to Aeneas by Venus in Book VIII, does not concern us here. All the peoples of the epic, and most of the individuals, will move into new roles in the rather intricate narrative development of Books IX - XII. The identification of Latins and Trojans is not simple or final. But in Books VII and VIII it is of central importance. The imagery of a supernatural fire is only a confirmation of the link of genealogy and of the identity expressed through material things such as the robes of Priam and the columned palace with its laurel tree.

The material works which are the principal monuments of Book VII are made to embody the national, or cultural, qualities of the two peoples, in a way that we recognise 24 as peculiarly Virgilian. I mean that Virgil makes these buildings, robes, statues, trees, all these material things, carry the weight of the impulse and will exerted by Latins and Trojans. The gifts exchanged between Latinus and Aeneas show this clearly. When Aeneas sends the king the Trojan treasures that are described as "the poor remains of his former prosperity, remains rescued from blazing Troy" - his father Anchises' gold libation-bowl, the royal robes of Priam, his head-dress, and sceptre - this is not merely a complimentary gesture or an assurance of friendship; he is transferring to Latinus the authority that belonged to the aged king of Troy. From this moment the role of Latinus does become that of Priam, only too completely; at the first outbreak of conflict threatening his people, he crumples into a feeble old man, "standing within death's door", impotently raging like the Priam of Book II. The robes have changed his personality and his destiny - not acting in a magical sense, like the robe sent by Medea to Jason's bride, but because they bring with them the weight of Trojan doom as well as majesty. The gifts presented by Latinus in exchange are horses and a chariot; the significance of this would take us too far from our main theme today. Like almost every instance in the Aeneid of gifts or spoils or memorial objects transferred from one person to another, their past associations and history go with them, foreshadowing and even shaping what is to come in the future.

The climax of all these "prefiguring" passages in the central books of the epic comes at the end of Book VIII with the long and detailed description of the Shield of Aeneas. This extraordinary work of divine craftsmanship evokes a Homeric model, the Shield of Achilles, and it presents an array of figures to come in the future history of Rome. I mention only one detail. Among the individual heroes recognisable on the Shield are priest of an ancient Order, the dancing Salii. The reader of Book VIII has already seen the Salii assembled around an altar at the festival in honour of Hercules celebrated by Evander's people at the site of the Ara Maxima, close to the Tiber. On 25 the Shield, the Salii are dancing in procession, with their shields, which Virgil calls lapsa ancQia caelo, "the shields that fell from heaven" - as did Aeneas' Shield itself, on which these shields of the Salii were embossed.

The Shield of Aeneas thus literally carries the antique tradition of a native Italian priesthood, connected with Quirinus and Mars (and, since 29 B.C., with Augustus, whose name was added to the Carmen Saliare to honour his victory at Actium). It also carries the image of Augustus on board ship, standing aloft with flames encircling his head. Venus, who gave the Shield to Aeneas, appears on it beside Neptune and Minerva who were once the enemies of Troy. The Aeneadae who appear on the Shield as defenders of liberty are not Trojan at all, but Roman. This monumentum presents Rome as superseding both Trojan and Latin identities, taking the role of ruler and leader of Italy.

Yet the artistic medium chosen for this significant object, the Shield, is one whose style and associations are Greek. From the moment he receives the armour from Venus, Aeneas begins to shed his Trojan qualities, moving away from his Trojan past, and taking on the role of a victorous Greek, Achilles. The material artefact has pointed to the course that the final struggle with Turnus will take. It also has the power to help determine how this struggle must end. You will remember the moment when Aeneas lifts up the Shield as a sign to his men that the time has come for their decisive encounter with Turnus. He does this in response to the voice of the sea nymph Cymodocea (who was once on one of his own ships). Although he does not understand this supernatural message which comes to him on board ship, he is filled with hope and courage, and it is to convey hope and courage to his followers that he lifts up the glowing Shield for them to see it where they are trapped in camp some miles inland. Lifting the Shield on his left arm, Aeneas takes his stand on the stern of 26 his ship - stans celsa in puppi - and a flame glows on his head; it is the picture of Augustus himself, as he is described in almost identical words, on the Shield, when he leads the forces of Italy and their gods into battle at Actium. It therefore has the power to make Aeneas' men conscious of the future and of the potentialities of their own acts inspired by the lifting up of Venus' gift.

Virgil does not use the word monumentum of the Shield, but he does use it of another work of the metal-worker's art, the baldric of Pallas. When Aeneas sees this belt hanging from Turnus' shoulder, at the moment when he has the power to kill his last enemy or to spare his life, the sight of the flashing studs revives ferocity in him as he remembers how Turnus slaughtered the young owner of the belt. This elaborate sword-belt is inlaid with gold and chased with figures from the Danaus legend, scenes of murder and treachery. The scenes are Greek, and Pallas himself by descent is a Greek. It was the father of Pallas, Evander, who offered the "first path of safety" which the Sibyl had promised Aeneas should come from a Greek city on Italian soil. The killing of Pallas destroyed the promise of reconcilliation, and revised the sorrow of past enmities. So when Virgil calls the belt saevi monimenta doloris "a reminder of bitter grief", it is all the pain of the Trojan War as well as the death of Pallas himself that is implied in the words. Because the belt brings all this to Aeneas' mind, the impulse to kill Turnus takes hold of him and he strikes decisively.

Pallas' belt has here acted as a monimentum in the true sense, as a reminder and a warning. It could have warned Turnus at the time of Pallas' death, when he arrogantly took it as plunder from his dead enemy and paid no attention to the embossed scenes from the Danaus legend, a well known instance of crimes punished by divine justice. Virgil marks the reckless pride of Turnus' attitude, his Italian lack of awareness, by a rare judgement addressed in his own person on the actions of his characters: nescia 27 mens hominum fati sortisque futurae "O human mind unaware of fate and of what is to come!" Turnus, he adds, will one day wish he had acted otherwise; "he will hate these spoils, will hate this day". Turnus does not attend to the moirimentum of the belt, but later Aeneas does. The material object does not alter the course of events, except through the responsive wills of those who see or handle it. That is why I suggest Virgil's use of such objects with past associations is different from anything found in Homer or in Greek tragedy.

Throughout the Aeneid, the right handling of objects that have come down from the past, their preservation or destruction or transmission to others, is seen as an important part of religious and moral duty. Right judgements in this can be reached only when the person acting has a clear conscious memory of the past. The precise detail of the past has to be remembered and recorded; this is why, as Viktor Poschl emphasised, Aeneas "is never allowed to belong completely to the moment". His duty is to be conscious always of past and future. The responsibility for preserving the monimenta rests on him, as it rested on a Roman father or priest. The family imagines, the memorial statuary, the meticulous rituals, enshrined historical realities of which future generations would need to be aware.

The identification of Aeneas as a prototype Augustus is nowhere clearer than in this function, as guardian of national memory. When Anchises shows his son the Procession of Roman Heroes in Book VI, he immediately draws from it an admonition for action in the future: virtutem extendere factis (806). Norden compared the vision of these Heroes to the series of commemorative statues erected by Augustus on both sides of the temple he dedicated to Mars Ultor: the function of this array of figures was similarly intended as a spur to national exertion. 28

Part of Aeneas' duty, if he is to build a city, will be to set up his own monuments, as Dido has done in her city of Carthage. His tears, when he sees the paintings on the temple walls there, in Book I, are shed not only because their subjects remind him of his own past suffering, but also because he longs to build as Dido has done, and as yet has received no divine guidance of a clear or specific kind. The familiar scenes in these painting are food for his grief, and nothing more: "he fed his spirit on the insubstantial painting" (1.464). To advance from this bewilderment and despair to the understanding he needs for right action, he is going to be required to attend to other monuments and look at them with a different kind of attention. I shall not attempt here any consideration of his encounter with the Sibyl, or the Underworld journey. The rest of this paper will follow one particular image from the paintings in Dido's temple, and look at a number of monuments that are related to it. This image has much to do with the movement of Aeneas from bewilderment to understanding, and much to do also with the founding of Rome.

The attached series of quotations will make it clear that I am talking about Minerva.

The image of Minerva, or Pallas (the names are used interchangeably in Virgil, and of course she is never called Athene) appears among the paintings at Carthage, in the role of Troy's protecting goddess. The women of Troy are seen in the painting, entreating her help: "meanwhile the Trojan women, with hair streaming loose, were on their way to the temple of Pallas, now hostile; they were carrying a robe, in suppliant attitude, and in grief; they beat their breast with their hands. The goddess was still, turned aside, her gaze fixed on the ground". (1) 29

A figure on a height, looking downwards; that is all Virgil says about this statue. The offering of the role inevitably recalls the Panathenaic peplos, and if we visualise the painting we are likely to imagine something rather like the Parthenon statue - something Greek, at least; and that is what Virgil's first readers also were presumably likely to have in mind.

However, Pallas as protectress of cities was not only Athenian. The protecting figure on an acropolis appears in Virgil in Troy, in Calabria, and in Latium. Virgil was able to draw on Italian associations for this image (and we shall consider these shortly) and also Homeric ones. These are more relevant to the Pallas of the Aeneid than the associations of the Panathenaia, which was after all an occasion of national rejoicing.

In the Iliad, Hecuba and the Trojan women go in fear to Athena's temple to offer a peplos worked by Paris' Sidonian slave-women. Virgil's scene is not a mere reproduction of this one. He leaves out much of the Homeric detail - even the Sidonian origin of the robe, which in the setting of the Carthage temple-painting could have carried dramatic force. His scene has only these four lines, with imperfect verbs that suggest an endless stream of worshippers endlessley rejected. The women are seen in disorder and anguish as well as awe; the goddess remains still, passionless, inhuman. Here Virgil modifies the simple statement of Homer, "Pallas Athene refused".

As an example of the kind of Pallas-figure which might be called to mind by this passage, we may take the scripture from the west pediment of the temple known as Aphaia's on the island of Aegina. This dates from 500 B.C. and represents Pallas as armed but not fighting. She was at the centre of groups of men in conflict; these 30 were scenes from the Trojan war. The temple stood on a headland and the Pallas- figure would be visible from a distance.

Pallas here remains aloof from the battle; here Virgil accepts the traditional image. If she chose to exercise her power to protect her people, she would evidently not need to use the material weapons she carries (though of course in Homer she does enter the battlefield). She can ensure the safety of her people by inspiring those she favours with the insight and the will needed for victory. The clearest example of this is the ingenuity and skill she imparts to the maker of the Wooden Horse.

In Homer, Pallas Athene also offers personal protection to individual warriors, above all to Odysseus. What she affords is not only protection, but also encouragement, sudden warnings, intelligent ideas; whatever mental gift Odysseus may need at any crisis in his fortunes. The head of Athene from the Old Temple on the Acropolis at Athens seems to embody this image of the "goddess of good counsel". The head is bent slightly forward, as she takes part in the struggle between Gods and Giants. The figures are fragmentary, and her relation to the other gods, and to the fallen giants, is conjectural. But the angle of the head, and the very human expressiveness of the features, show her involvement in events.

The benevolence of this image accords with the Homeric Athene, whose great powers are used for purposes that men can share. In Homer, the prayers of the Trojan women are rejected, because the time is coming when Troy has to fall; but for the Greeks her help is active and unerring. In the Aeneid, she never intervenes to protect anyone. She does bring help at last to the Trojans, but not in a way that will spare them any suffering. 31

The scene of useless entreaty when the women of a threatened city take offerings to Pallas - Minerva's temple is repeated in Book XI (2). This time the women are not Trojan but Latin:

"So then to the temple, to the height of Pallas' citadel, came the queen with a throng of mothers attending; she was bringing gifts; and with her the maiden Lavinia, the cause of so much distress, her beautiful eyes cast down. The mothers came up and filled the temple with smoking incense. They poured out sorrowful words from the lofty doorway: "O powerful in arms, mistress of war, maiden Tritonia..."

The language of the prayer echoes that used of Pallas-Minerva in Troy, e.g. (3) and (4). The goddess is praeses, presiding over the war, settled aloft; praeses arcis, as Livi calls her, adsidua Minerva, in Tibullus' phrase. The epithet Tritonis or Tritonia we shall consider later.

The words of invocation used by the Latin women were quoted by Ferdinando Castagnoli in his account of the Minerva-statues found in 1977 during the excavations at Pratica di Mare, the ancient Lavinium. These figures were among the material found in a sanctuary to the west of the town; they have been dated between the 5th and the 3rd centuries B.C. There are five statues, all terracottas, varying in size, but all clearly representing Minerva as goddess of war. There are also a great many smaller terracottas, evidently ex-voto representations of birds, fruit, figures of women and infants, and anatomical images. The dedication of the sanctuary is not in doubt. A Minerva cult certainly existed at Lavinium, together with the cult of Aeneas and that of the Di Penates. The ex-voto terracottas prompt speculation about the antiquity of Minerva Medica, worshipped at Rome but so far traceably only in discoveries or Imperial date on the Esquiline. But healing was clearly not the only or even the main 32 function of the Lavinium Minerva; the figures show a warrior goddess, and one associated with animal and chthonic forms of an unexpected kind.

What was revealed with astonishing force, when the statues from Pratica were exhibited in 1982 in Rome, was the strangeness of these figures, both in iconographic details and in general character. The attributes of the Gorgon-head, and (in the case of the largest statue, the supporting Triton, suggest links with Greek religious imagery considerably earlier than had previously been established for Latium. Yet these are not Hellenic figures, and not Etruscan either. Greek and Etruscan elements are present, but assimilated to a Latin cultural tradition in which the Minerva-cult of Lavinium clearly retained a particular and native identity. These finds, Castagnoli suggests, must lead to a re-examination of the widely accepted view that Minerva was of minor importance in archaic Roman religion, until she was introduced from Etruria in the period of the monarchy, as one of the Capitoline Triad.

The five terracottas that have so far been identified or reassembled vary greatly in size, in iconography, and in artistic quality. All have the static frontal pose, and a generally warlike character. The largest statue also has a representation of the Gorgon-head. This has a horrific quality conveyed by heavy features, glaring eyes, and protruding tongue, rather than by the traditional snaky hair. There is, however, a three-headed serpent twined around the body of the goddess, and the shield is encircled by more serpents, animals, and birds; the shield rests on the head of the Triton. The smallest statue - known as "la brutta Minerva" - has no serpents (but the shield is lost); the dress worn by this figure is oddly ribbed and shapeless, and the Gorgon head resembles the face of the goddess herself in its extreme ferocity. 33

The association that Castagnoli makes between these figures from Lavinium and the lines of Virgil describing the Pallas of King Latinus' city has an overwhelming fitness, though one cannot, of course, maintain that these statues enable us to identify the site of that city any more confidently than before. The Minerva-sanctuary fell into disuse probably during the second century B.C., so it is most unlikely that Virgil ever saw any of these statues. But it is also unlikely that images so powerful - can we say 'numinous'? - left no trace in the imagination, the artistic tradition and the religious practice of the people who lived in that part of Italy. Of course, we do not know what else may yet be discovered. But meanwhile, I think we can accept that these images of Minerva do, at the i least, make clearer to us the nature of Pallas-Minerva as she is seen in the Aeneid.

Whether we should in any sense try to connect any of these images with the figure of the Palladium which was supposed to have come from Troy to Rome as a talismanic object has not, so far as I know, been hinted at by Castagnoli. Roman writers such as Cicero and Ovid who mention the Palladium do not say what it looked like. The only specific description of it that survives is that of ApoUodorus (5). This is a late and unconvincing account; if any such image had existed, it is hard to imagine that no example at all of a Pallas with both spear and distaff would have survived. This artificial construct of Minerva-Pallas in both her aspects is evidently what ApoUodorus believed the Palladium ought to have looked like. The most interesting detail is the phrase tois de posi sumbebekps, "with feet joined together". In existing statues of Pallas the feet are often covered by drapery, and if they are visible they are not attached together, but they are placed side by side. ApoUodorus, or whoever supplied this detail to him, did not think of Pallas in motion, or even ready to move; and this is true of existing portrayals of the goddess, except in vase-paintings. She is almost always shown in a static position - with a shield in her left hand, not a spindle 34

or distaff - either standing, in the pose we have seen, or sitting in the familiar pose of Roma/Britannia.

Virgil's narrative leaves many obscurities in reference to the Palladium; how much of Sinon's story is to be taken as truth and how much falsehood, for example. The Greek theft of the image, as told by Sinon (6), again uses the name Tritonia, and the picture of her anger is terrifying: "flashes of fire blazed in the statue's open eyes, a salty sweat poured over the limbs, and three times she sprang up from the ground holding her shield and quivering spear". This statue might easily be identified with the inhuman statue on the Acropolis, perhaps on a smaller scale, small enough for the Greeks to carry it off to their camp. By doing this they hoped to gain the gifts of cunning and purposeful skill that could come from Pallas; and indeed they did so, because she then put into their minds the scheme of the Wooden Horse. But they had enjoyed Pallas' favour even before this. Ever since Paris rejected the gifts of Pallas, and of Hera, in favour of Aphrodite's offer of pleasure and human love, and was not disowned by the Trojans, Pallas had withdrawn her protection from Troy, and the theft

of the Palladium could not make Troy's doom more certain than it was already. ,,;,:

What this action of the Greeks did do was to bring ruin on them as well as Troy, by provoking Pallas' anger, and also to make the Trojan loss of Pallas' favour obvious and final. This was an important aspect of Virgil's interpretation of Pallas-Minerva's role. He did not wish to use the well known version of the story which made Aeneas bring the Palladium with him to Italy. He could have done this, and still kept the theft-incident, because there was a second version bringing in a false Palladium stolen in error. The simple continuity which would have allowed Aeneas to bring the Palladium as Rome's talisman from the beginning was not what Virgil wanted. In the Aeneid all the Trojans, including Aeneas, are deprived of the protective power embodied in the 35 statue. Aeneas is not fit to be the preserver of the Palladium, because (like Laocoon and the rest) at the time of Troy's fall he has lost all the mental powers that are the gift of Pallas-Minerva: reasoning, understanding, clear memory, caution.

In the early Books of the Aeneid, the awe-inspiring power of Pallas-Minerva is released against those who have rejected her, or have lost her favour, in destructive but precisely directed ways. When Ajax committed sacrilege, by the rape of Cassandra in Minerva's temple (7), the goddess struck him down with a thunderbolt, transfixing him to a rock during his homeward voyage (I. 39-45). Again, the snakes that strangle Laocoon when he has attacked the Wooden Horse have the nature of chthonic forces, but forces directed in an exact unerring way which makes them all the more frightening. After killing Laocoon and his sons they touch no one else, but glide away beneath the shield carried by the Minerva-statue standing in the temple of Troy's acropolis.

When Minerva rejects the prayers of the Trojan women, and later those of the Latins, the reason is the same. These peoples have rejected her by choosing a course that is blindly irrational. It should be noted that Minerva is never, in the Aeneid or anywhere else, a goddess who rejoices in war for its own sake; on the contrary, she is the goddess of peacemaking, of the olive branch, as both Aeneas and Latinus understood when they tried to prevent the outbreak of war-fever in Italy. Minerva uses the elemental weapons under her control only when she is provoked to rage, when she is turbata. Virgil uses this word (VIII. 435) in his account of the making of her armour by the Cyclops, a passage that includes a very hideous description of the Gorgon's head (8). The Latin women who follow their queen in frenzy of hatred for Aeneas are poisoned "with the venom of the Gorgon". 36

The snaky-haired Gorgon can atrophy all the mental and physical powers of those whom Minerva wiahes to destroy; the snakes that strangle Laocoon, and the thunderbolt that strikes Ajax, are also elemental weapons associated with the god Neptune. Two of the Lavinium statues also illustrate this conception of Minerva's powers in a very literal and forceful way, The large terracotta already described shows Minerva armed not only with the Gorgon-head but also with a three-headed serpent. There are serpent- decorations also on the helmet, while her shield has serpents, small animals, and birds around the rim. The Triton supporting the shield has a scaly fish-tail. The second statue, of which only the lower half has been found, shows animal decoration including snakes on the shield; instead of the Triton, a goose sits on the left of the goddess. Both statues show Minerva with arms at rest, with weapons and animal figure under her control.

The Triton is a recurrent figure in the Aeneid; as a kind of marine Centaur, he is described in Book X as a figurehead on the ship of Aulestes, the last-named in the Etruscan fleet that comes to support Aeneas. The ship of this name is of huge size, immanis, moving with masterful and slightly uncanny progress along the coast and making the waters afraid. When Tritons appear in the poem they are always exerting decisive physical strength and it is usually in obedience to Neptune's explicit will. It is a Triton who in Book I heaves the Trojan ships off the rocks where Juno's rage has thrown them, and a Triton attends Neptune when he promises (V. 824) to bring Aeneas safely to Italy after Juno has destroyed part of the fleet in Sicily by fire. In all these examples the Tritons are using their strength in a protective way; but they can also destroy men, as the death of Misenus shows. The consistent element is the purposeful use of power for the end chosen by a divine will. Nothing is random. 37

The name Tritonia or Tritonis, used of Pallas five times in the Aeneid, is explained by Servius and related either to terribilis, from the Greek trein, or else from the river Triton in Boeotia, or from Tritonia a lake in Africa, where she is said to have been born. This Note of Servius, as Fraenkel pointed out, clearly derives from the Homeric Scholiast who glosses the epithet Tritogeneia in similar terms. The geographical reference of Tritonia and related names has generally been thought more convincing than etymologies suggesting terror. Tritons would have no connection with either the Boeotian or the African reference. However, the similarity of the names Triton/Tritonia/Amphitrite has been thought to indicate some early association of Pallas Athene with water. What is more important for Virgil's Minerva is that he does not use the form Tritogeneia at all: he is not concerned with the idea of her birth-place, but with her nature. Four out of the five contexts for the name Tritonis or Tritonia are connected;with her destructive powers. The fifth describes her as teacher of the uniquely favoured Nautes. The suggestion of awe-inspiring power seems inescapable in this name, not for any reason of etymology, but because the image of the Triton must have come along with it as obviously for the Roman reader as it does for us, and Virgil's Tritons are never merely decorative attributes but active servants of Neptune and of his partner Minerva.

When Minerva herself is actually seen in battle in the Aeneid - that is, on the Shield of Aeneas - there is no mention of a Triton, or of the Gorgon head, or any weapon. She stands beside Neptune and Venus (no longer her enemy now), and the chthonic terror is all on the other side, with the barbaric defeated gods of Egypt. In this victory of Augustus, Minerva is not turbata. 38

How has Minerva regained her serenity? or how has Aeneas secured her goodwill? Two passages, between the fall of Troy and the landing in Italy, give us some hints of an answer.

The first is the sign that meets the eyes of Aeneas' men on the morning when the Italian coast first comes in sight - Italiam, Italiam .. and Anchises offers prayers to the sea-gods, stans celsa in puppi, as both Augustus and Aeneas will do at different moments. The temple at Castrum Minervae is seen on the height, and there, primum omen, are four white horses grazing. Anchises interprets the omen, war followed by triumph: they are the horses of the triumphal quadriga above the temple of the Capitoline Triad. Aeneas then offers prayers to Pallas armisona, the goddess of ringing weapons, and rightly takes this as a sign pointing to his Roman future (III. 531-8)

The second gesture from Minerva comes in Book V after the burning of Aeneas' ships he is tempted to forget his destiny and stay in Sicily. Advice comes, unasked, from the old man Nautes, "the one man whom Tritonia Pallas taught and made glorious by his skill. She used to give replies to him about what the gods' anger might forebode, or what the order of the fates required."

Nautes gives advice both general and specific to Aeneas. Leave any who choose to stay in Sicily; and "let us follow where the fates may draw us on, and draw us back; whatever it shall be, every circumstance must be overcome, by enduring it" (V. 709-10).

This is unmistakably the voice of Roman Stoicism. Much has been written about the Stoicism of Aeneas, who, from this point onwards, constantly makes use of Stoic language as he welcomes hardship and personal sacrifice. Up to this point, his sacrifices 39 have been unwilling ones. He now gives an understanding consent to destiny, taking his ordeals in the spirit of Seneca's wise man, laeto ammo, as a mark of God's special favour.

It is surely significant that these lessons from Minerva were given to Nautes, traditionally the ancestor of the Roman family of Nautii, who claimed to have the Palladium at Rome under their care. (9).

Unlike other oracular deities, Minerva does not strike her prophets into madness or trance. Instead, she teaches. Virgil in this way associates the sapientia of the Stoics, the teachable wisdom, with lessons learnt from Minerva. This is the Minerva of the Capitol, who requires Romans to live a life of war for the sake of peace.

We can see the signs of such a concept of Minerva in the magnificent group - magnificent even in the fragmentary state that now remains - of Minerva and Hercules, from the archaic temple in the Foro Boario region. This temple was destroyed not long after it was built, possibly at the time of the expulsion of the kings. Although it must be at least fifty years earlier than the terracottas of Lavinium, it presents Minerva in a style that appears later, in the sense that it seems to belong to a culture that is more urbane; there is controlled power in it, but less immediacy; this Minerva presents Hercules to the gods as if he were her successful pupil. She is concerned with a human order that depends on the pax deorum; public affairs are her sphere. Already we can see how she will develop into the official divinity Dea Roma.

Most of the examples we have of this familiar figure are considerably later than Virgil's day, though on the most Virgilian monument in Rome it is generally agreed that this goddess did appear in a relief panel where the detail of her shape can only 40 be conjectured. This monument is of course the Ara Pacis. It was set up only six years after Virgil's death, and we do not know how far it had been planned before that date, and whether Virgil took any part in the planning. It can be called Virgilian because its purpose is so clearly in accord with the purpose of the Aeneid: to celebrate the Augustan Peace as the fulfilment of Roman hopes, the Roman mission to rule and civilise the world. The style of monument is symmetrical and majestic, but not grandiose. The processional figures along the two sides are individuals whose faces and bodies, as they approach the gods, express personal as well as public emotions.

It is in the four panels at the two ends of the Altar that we see the Virgilian inspiration of its design. Flanking the entrance to the alter precinct are the infants Romulus and Remus, suckled by the wolf, and on the right, a larger figure, Aeneas, with his head covered, standing in the attitude of a priest about to offer sacrifice. This attitude and the grouping of the figures here (as Jocelyn Toynbee has pointed out) unmistakably echoes those of the Augustan group of figures on the South frieze. Augustus is doing what Aeneas did - or, we could say, Aeneas is doing what Augustus will do. The repetition is like the repetition of action and of phrase in the Aeneid, when Augustus at Actium adopts the stance of Aeneas on board ship and like him becomes a fiery landmark and a glowing sign of hope for his followers.

At the other end of the monument, balancing the image of the wolf and twins, is the maternal goddess who has been identified as Terra Mater, or perhaps as Italia, embracing her children. Again this image became familiar in association with Augustus, on the breastplate of several Imperator statues known to us. In the badly damaged panel to the right of this one, is another figure who has been generally identified as Dea Roma. In this form Minerva, goddess of peace, solemnly presides, as Aeneas solemnly presides in the comparable position at the other end. 41

The passages appended to this paper do not include every appearance or mention of Minerva in the Aeneid, but only those which refer to a statue or other monument relating to her. However, the impression given by this group of quotations, that Minerva is missing from the last four Books of the epic, is largely correct. She does not appear in the later stage of Aeneas' struggle, because she does not need to appear. She shows herself in her terrifying aspect to the Latin women, but the Trojans are now behaving as her disciplined servants and the lessons she imparted to them through Nautes have been thoroughly learned. This is an oversimplification, of course; I have not forgotten the appalling slaughter of Book X, or Aeneas' loss of rationality at the end of XII. But in spite of these I think it is clear that Virgil wanted to show Aeneas as reconciled to Minerva even before he was reconciled to Juno. Without this reconciliation he could not have been victorious against his Italian enemies. One detail from the opening of Book XI, I suggest, offers a hint of this. (10).

Aeneas is erecting a trophy in commemoration and thanksgiving after his combat against Mezentius. "He set up a huge oak with branches stripped away, and he dressed it in glittering armour, the spoils of the leader Mezentius - a trophy for you, mighty one, powerful in war...."

The divinity powerful in war is not named in this passage. The spoils of war were usually dedicated to Mars or Jupiter, occasionally to Vulcan. (The contrast between this humble act of dedication by Aeneas and the arrogance of Turnus in wearing spoils taken from Pallas is obviously an important one). Editors have usually assumed that bellipotens here refers to Mars. However the Mediceus and Romanus reading magnae must make us wonder. Magnae of course is translatable, but will not scan. However, magna could lie behind it just as easily as magne could. There are Greek precedents for the offering of spoils to Pallas, notably the passage from Iliad X, where 42

the spoils are indicated by Odysseus. These are spoils taken from Dolon, who was killed through Athene's guidance and help. The passage in Aeneid XI is quite closely imitated by Statius, who applies the adjective bellipotens to Pallas-Minerva and describes her in terms that recall the prayer of the Latin women: diva ferox ... Tritonia virgo ... etc. Statius* attention to Minerva may well have been prompted (as has been suggested) by the special devotion to her which was displayed by Domitian; the word bellipotens is applied to her by Statius' contemporary Valerius Flaccus, but not as far as I know by any earlier poet. The Statius imitation does not therefore make a very strong case for asserting that Minerva is the recipient of the spoils in Aeneid XL I only say that I like to believe this. It would have a fitness more than dramatic, and would seem entirely in accordance with Virgil's treatment of memorials of whatever kind in his narrative.

The monumenta which are associated with Minerva within the poem - shield, statue, temple, perhaps spoils - can reveal their creative potency more fully to us when we have given attention to the material monumenta associated with Minerva in Italy. So it may be with other Virgilian images. The epic narrative of Virgil is indissolubly bound to "historical events - and to topographic actualities. To look at the landscapes and the remains of Virgil's world can bring illumination, not mere illustration, of his work; but the study needs the ready and humble attention which Aeneas gave to Evander as they walked about the Palatine:

miratur facilesque oculos fert omnia circum Aeneas, capiturque locis, et singula laetus exquiritque auditque virum monimenta priorum.

(vra. 310-12) 43

VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS; MINERVA

(1) interea ad templum non aequae Palladis ibant crinibus Iliades passis peplumque ferebant suppliciter, tristes et tunsae pectora palmis; diva solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat I. 479-82

(2) nee non ad templum summasque ad Palladis arces subvehitur magna matrum regina caterva dona ferens, iuxtaque comes Lavinia virgo; causa mali tanti, oculos deiecta decoros. succedunt matres et templum ture vaporant....' et maestas alto fundunt de limine voces: 'armipotens, praeses belli, Tritonia virgo ...' XI. 477-83

(3) at gemini lapsu delubra ad sum ma dracones effugiunt saevaeque petunt Tritonidis arcem, sub pedibusque deae clipeique sub orbe teguntur. II. 225-7

(4) iam summas arces Tritonia, respice, Pallas insedit limbo effulgens et Gorgone saeva. n. 615-6

(5) "It was three cubits in height, its feet joined together; in its right hand it held a spear aloft, and in the other hand a distaff and spindle." (ApoUodorus, Library, III. 12 .iii. tr. Frazer)

(6) omnis spes Danaum et coepti fiducia belli 44

Palladis auxiliis semper stetit. Impius ex quo Tydides sed enim scelerumque inventor Ulixes fatale adgressi sacrato avellere templo Palladium caesis summae custodibus arcis corripuere sacram effigiem manibusque cruentis virgineas ausi divae contingere vittas: ex illo fluere ac retro sublapsa referri spes Danaum, fractae vires, aversa deae mens. nee dubiis ea signa dedit Tritonia monstris. luminibus flammae arrectis, salsusque per artus sudor iit, terque ipsa solo (mirabile dictu) emicuit parmamque ferens hastamque trementem. II. 162-75

(7) ecce trahebatur passis Priameia virgo crinibus a templo Cassandra adytisque Minervae ad caelum tendens ardentia lumina frustra ... II. 404-6

(8) aegidaque horriferam, turbatae Palladis arm a, certatim squamis serpentum auroque polibant conexosque anguis ipsamque in pectore divae Gorgona desecto vertentem lumina collo. VIII. 435-8

(9) "For Nautius, the founder of the line, was one of those who took out the colony (?) with Aeneas, being a priest of Athena Palias; and when he removed from Troy, he brought with him the wooden statue of the goddess, which the family of the Nautii guarded thereafter, receiving it in succession one from another". (Dion. Hal. VI.69). 45

(10) ingentem quercum decisis undique ramis constituit tumulo fulgentiaque induit arma Mezenti ducis exuvias, tibi, magne, tropaeum, bellipotens XI. 5-8

magnae M R

cf. Stat. Theb. n. 716. Horn. n. X. 458-63.

47

FOLLOWING AFTER HERCULES, I IT VIRGIL AND APOLLONIUS* In creating a Hercules for his Aeneid. Virgil had a great deal of material to hand, even in the field of epic alone. The archaic period saw many epic poems on Heracles, of varying length, covering his whole life, or episodes from it: we have half a dozen titles, some with fragments, of which the Heracleia of Herodotus' uncle Panyassis was the best known."* Later times saw little slackening in production. Aristotle refers dismiss!vely to * those who write an epic about Heracles or about Theseus' <1451a21f.>, while the hellenistic period leaves testimony to the existence of, again, something over half a dozen epic poems on the hero.2 Doubtless some poems have left no trace at all. Since they are lost virtually in their entirety, we cannot really assess the contribution these poems made to the Aeneid (although I shall be making some claims for

the so-called Shield of Hercules, preserved in the Hesiodic corpus). One epic poem does survive intact, however, in which Heracles figures prominently, and that is the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes — the only epic, in fact, that survives entire out of the multitude produced between Homer and Virgil. Even amongst Hellenists, Apollonius has only recently begun to emerge from his unjustifiably underrated position, and students of Virgil, generally speaking, still tend to be insufficiently alive to the pervasive influence exerted upon Virgil by this very fine poet.3

As an introduction, and a demonstration of just how far-reaching and systematic Virgil's adaptations of Apollonius can be, let us consider the section of the Aeneid which most 48

extensively concerns Hercules: Aeneas' visit to Pallanteum, the site of Rome. Even as Aeneas' ships make their way up the Tiber, an Apollonian note is immediately sounded (8. 91f.). The gleam of the men's shields comes from Apollonius' description of the very first sailing of Argo,-* while the whole atmosphere recalls Apollonius, through a Catullan filter: this is the first time a ship has ever passed here (cf. A.R. 4. 316-22; Catullus 64.1 f.). One may also be reminded of the end of Argonaut ica 2 (itself adapted from Odyssey 5. 451-3), where the, Argonauts, finally arrive at Colchis, and row at night up the river, which makes way before them (1264-6) — a hint magnified by Virgil, who has Tiber co.operate with the Trojans, easing his flow and aiding their passage (86-9). Aeneas, like Jason, is arriving at the true goal of the quest, at the reXos (although, characteristically of Virgil, Aeneas does not know that Pallanteum is Rome: he arrives at his telos in ignorance).. The allusion to Rome as the true telos of the expedition, is reinforced at the end of the book, as Aeneas looks at his divine armour. The cuirass is compared to a dark cloud that kindles with the rays of the sun, and gleams far and wide (622 f.)j the simile is taken from Apollonius' description of the golden fleece, as Jason looks at it for the first time (4.125 f.).

Aeneas arrives as Evander's people are performing the annual celebration of their deliverance by Hercules from the monster Cacus. King Evander tells Aeneas of how he remembers the visit of Anchises to Arcadia, when Evander was young, when the first

stage of manhood was covering his cheeks with the flower of 51

Lycus, only seven weeks have gone by since he was accidentally left ashore on the coast of Mysia. Aeneas has never met Hercules. To him, Hercules is a remote figure, and a Greek — what is more, a Greek who sacked Troy, as we are allusively reminded in Evander's first speech (157 f.), and as the Salii commemorate in their hymn: ut bello egregias idem disiecerit urbes, Troiamque Oechaliamque (290 f.). Such difference impels us to inquire more closely into what Virgil is making of Apollonius' Heracles. Indeed, the admiring reaction of such an abnormally sensitive and intelligent critic as Virgil should make us wish to inquire more closely into what Apollonius himself is making of Heracles. Heracles was, after all, the most ambivalent creature in Greek myth. He was ambivalence itself — heros-theos, receiving divine and. heroic sacrifice in cult,s lying, as M.S.Silk well puts it, 'on the margins between human and divine, [occupying] the no-man's-land that is also no-god's-land,... a marginal, transitional, or, better, interstitial figure.'.9 That is, he occupies the interstices, the zones of transition, neither one thing nor the other. He may be the hero in epic, tragedy, or comedy. He is at home in the shared feast, *° sometimes as a glutton, and he is also famous for violating the holy laws of hospitality. He is the ultimate expression of Greek virility, and spends a year as the slave of a woman , the Asiatic Omphale. He is physical strength incarnate, and also a philosopher's paradigm of intellectual resource and self-control. He is the great civilizer, who wears the skin of an animal. His very name is a 52 paradox: the glory of Hera, the glory of the goddess who persecuted him all his life. It would be surprising if an artist of Apollonius' wit and zest failed to make something of this remarkable figure.11 We are not disappointed. Even the very first mention of Heracles, in the catalogue of Argonauts, repays close attention as an index of Apollonius' high craft, and as a marker of certain of his basic preoccupations:

ouSe uev ouSe J3iW kporrepo^povos 'HpakX^os J^:eu96uee, Al o*oviSaa XiXaloue\/au a8epi/ai Hor, indeed, nor did the force of strong-minded Heracles, so we hear, make light of Jason's earnest desire [that he come on the expedition](1.122 f.). The first line, as so often in Apollonius, is a tissue of Homeric phraseology; and, as so often, the impact of the line in the third century is one that is uniquely unhomeric, conditioned by the intellectual transformations of the inter­ vening years. Homer, in variations on stock phrases, says $(n 'HpakXe i*\ ,

(.11., 14.324). He never combines the two. By the time of Apollonius, Heracles had became the stock example of the antithesis between jSta and j^po^Ao-(s: sometimes, as in Pindar, the supreme embodiment of both qualities; sometimes, as in the comic tradition, held up as the exemplar of physical force alone; while sometimes, as in Isocrates' . Letter to Philip, or in certain Stoic and Cynic circles,he was praised for his jjfpovncis above all, in preference to his physical might.12 Antisthenes, regarded as the founder of the Cynic school, wrote three works on Heracles, of which one was entitled Hpakxrjs,»\ itepi ^payno'eos 53

13 ft nryuos. Shortly before him, Herodorus wrote a seventeen-volume work on the hero, and in one allegorising fragment mention is made of his kapTepikfts yux^s and his 8pao-u-

TOCTOU o-co^povos Xa* I O-JJIOU. *•* Apollonius' collocation of these homeric phrases makes them do completely new work, provoking the reader into wondering which of these capacities Heracles will embody in this poem — or will he embody both? In Homer, Heracles had stood for, above all, J3ia, and the infatuations of j3ca. 1S Will he do the same in Apollonius? As we ponder these questions, we may note that the men immediately preceding Heracles in the catalogue are the sons of Bias <118>.

Also very important in this line is another Homeric reference. The line recalls very closely a verse from Achilles' great? speech in Iliad 18, when he finally makes his irrevocable choice between glory or a long life. To his mother he says, "Let me die soon! ' <98). "Not even', he says, "not even the

might of Heracles escaped death'— outfe Yap ouSe #fn HpakxAos #uV€ Ki\poc (117). To Homer, of course, Heracles was mortal: it was a later tradition that inserted a reference to his apotheosis into the Homeric nekyia. If there is force in the allusion, it may be that we are alerted to the issue of Heracles' immortality: which way is Apollonius going to go?

The Virgilian density of Apollonius' allusions, then, already provokes questions concerning Heracles' status and significance. Before passing on, we must note that Heracles' participation in the expedition is represented as an interruption of his cycle of labours. He has just captured the Arcadian boar, and he joins the expedition "on his own initiative, in opposition to the will Cor purpose] of Eurystheus' (130). Since the tradition tells 54 us that Heracles was doomed to serve the will of Eurystheus until the cycle of labours was complete,, we recognise that his participation is anomalous. Further, Apollanius' poetic and scholarly tradition was virtually unanimous in saying that Heracles did not actually go on the expedition, since Argo spoke, saying that she could not carry his weight.,s Apollanius hints at this tradition when Heracles steps into Argo before they set off: "the keel sank down underneath his feet' (532f.).1"7" Only eight lines before, Argo had given a cry, to start the expedition <525). As her keel gives way, we must wonder whether she will give another cry, and whether Heracles will have to get out. All is well, and they set off, but Apollanius has left the impression that Heracles should not really be there. In various ways, it will become increasingly and significantly apparent that Heracles does not belong in this company. 1 s

There may. be a hint at the tradition of the oafish Heracles in the stress on his great weight (although we moderns are out of sympathy with the ancients in finding ridiculous their notion that pondus was a proper attribute of gods and heroes) . There may be a hint at this tradition later on in the book, when Heracles rows so powerfully that he snaps his oar (1168-71). But the remarkable thing about the picture of Heracles in the first book is Apollanius' fixed concentration on the Heracles of the philosophers, the exponent of ^poi/ncrfs and . Such is the picture we have of Heracles as we approach the moment where he is finally to leave the expedition, which he should never have been on in the first place. And as the events are introduced which will lead to his separation from the Argonauts, Apollonius fills in, tangentially, the first truly direct references to the 'other Heracles', who has so far been suppressed. The result is a passage, and an impression, of one antithesis after another. Hylas, Heracles' attendant, goes off to fetch water, so that he can get everything quickly ready for Heracles, in due order (kon-ot kocuoy, 1210). Such, says Apollonius, were the habits in which Heracles was bringing up the boy C1211) — the habits of koauos. Well and good. Ve then learn how Heracles acquired Hylas: He first snatched him as a child from his father's house, from god-like Theiodamas, whom he pitilessly killed in the land of the Dryopes, in a quarrel over a ploughing ox...Heracles demanded that he provide a ploughing ox, but Theiodamas was unwilling. For Heracles wanted a grievous pretext for war against 56

the Dryopes, since they lived without a thought for justice (1212-19). One antithesis after another. In an act of rape, Heracles seized the boy from his father, whom he killed pitilessly, in a dispute over an ox. It is from this squalid incident that he got his title "Bouthoinas', "feaster on oxen', as was told in Callimachus' Aetia (Book 1, fr.24). Apollonius conflates here two farmer-killing ox-related episodes which were adjacent in the first book of Callimachus* AeJila, doing away with the kindly motive of the second Callimachaean story, in which Heracles asked Theiodamas for food for his little son Hyllus.21 In Apollonius, there is nothing of this. Next, however, we learn that Heracles' real motive was to start a war against the people of Theiodamas, because they cared nothing for justice. After Heracles the bully and glutton, we have Heracles the civilizer and upholder of Sikn against barbarism. It is all rather disorientating, especially after the one-sidedly elevated picture we have had so far; and the impression is reinforced when we read of Heracles' frenzied reaction to the news of Hylas' disappearance (1261-72). Ve have now seen both sides of the Heraclean spectrum.

Unwittingly, the Argonauts sail off, leaving behind both Heracles and his friend Polyphemus. At this point we move into territory which is more closely tied in situation to the Aeneld, for from now on Heracles is not one of the company. He is someone who the Argonauts talk about, and hear about; in a strange sense, as we shall see, they are following in his footsteps, and the question of the distance — physical and otherwise — between the Argonauts and Heracles, comes to be of 57

increasing significance. Likewise, in the Aeneid, Hercules is a figure to be spoken of, and followed after, but not encountered. The first thing we hear about Heracles after he is abandoned is something told us by the poet, some 25 lines later: namely, that he will kill two of his erstwhile shipmates, the sons of Boreas, because they stopped Telamon from turning the ship around to go back and pick him up (1299-1309). Heracles' killing of the sons of Boreas was a given xfact' in legend, but there were various versions of motive and occasion, and Apollonius' version is unique.23 *|To mention need have been made at all: it is significant that Valerius Flaccus suppresses the story, just as he had suppressed any mention of Heracles' killing of the father of Hylas. These two grim anecdotes frame the narrative of Heracles' marooning. They are both stories told by the poet in parenthesis: Apollonius is starting to feed in snippets of information which reveal new facets of Heracles, and they are snippets which are not necessarily available to the Argonauts.

One remarkable piece of news the Argonauts do hear. As they quarrel away over whether or not to go back to look for Hera­ cles, the sea-god Glaucus appears from the depths, and says these words:

Why are you eager, contrary to the plan of great Zeus, to take bold Heracles to the city of Aeetes? At Argos it is his fate to toil at fulfilling all his twelve labours, for presumptuous Eurystheus, and to live with the gods, sharing their hearth, if he

can fulfil the few labours left (1315-20). 58

First of all they hear what the reader has known all along, that Heracles' arrival at Colchis is not part of tradition and not part of the plot. He has to complete his twelve labours — in Argos. vAp"tfeTf receives some stress, and I think that the reader at this point is entitled to assume that the Argonauts will not cross Heracles' path again. Most importantly, they hear Glaucus almost offhandedly declare that Heracles is going to become a god — if. he achieves his few remaining labours successfully. That conditional is crucial. He is not guaranteed immortality -— he may even yet not attain it — but he will win it as his reward, if he completes the allotted cycle. The phrasing makes the reader concentrate on the tradition that saw Heracles' immortality as a reward for what the labours signified — a reward, that is, for endurance, and for the beneficent cleansing of evils from the world.23

Cleansing an evil from the world is precisely what Polydeuces does in the very next episode, when he kills Amycus; this close linking of Polydeuces' deed with Glaucus* speech on Heracles' immortality may owe something to a tradition that Glaucus prophesied to the Argonauts when Heracles and the Dioscuri were all present, promising all three immortality (Diod. Sic. 4. 48. 6) . As we saw at the beginning, to King Lycus and his Mariandyni, this is an act worthy of Heracles, and one deserving divine honours. Even as he prepares to fight Amycus, Polydeuces is compared to the star he will later be as a god <2.40-2>; his opponent is compared to a giant C38-40), a breed which Heracles specialises in exterminating (even in this, poem; cf. 1.999-

1011). King Lycus, however, sets up a temple, not to Polydeuces alone, but also to his brother Castor. The immortality of the 59

Dioscuri is a very odd thing. Sometimes, they alternate in sequence between Hades and Olympus; sometimes, only one is immortal, and the other for ever dead.2-* Apollonius stresses their shared divinity

King Lycus tells the Argonauts that he had seen Heracles as the hero was returning from the East with the girdle of Hippolyte. As the Argonauts move westwards up the coast of the Black Sea, they are following the trail Heracles has blazed. They pass by the very spot where he craftily won the girdle, by ambushing Hippolyte's sister and holding her hostage <964 ff.). If they had tarried there, says Apollonius, they would have had to fight the Amazons, and they would have taken casualties (985 f.); but Zeus sends favourable winds, and they manage to pass by without incident <993-5>. The divine agency extricates the Argonauts from having to cope with a crisis which Heracles had managed to overcome. Shortly before, they likewise fail to avail themselves of the opportunity to follow Heracles' example, when they camp for a number of days at the mouth of the river Acheron (728 ff.). According to one tradition, this is the place where Heracles descended to the underworld to fetch Cerberus, the. hound of Hades.2B Apollonius, alert as ever to surprise us, refrains from introducing an epic underworld scene here: such an ordeal is not for the Argonauts. It is, 60

of course, within the capacity of Aeneas, who has greater hope of attaining to the standard of Heracles. Jason's steersman dies at this place <854 ff.); is it fortuitous that Aeneas* steersman Palinurus dies just before Aeneas makes his descent (Afiji. 5.833 ff. )? Heracles can still be an inspiration to the Argonauts, however. They approach the island of Ares, populated by vicious birds, which shoot their feathers at them (1030 ff,). Just like the Stymphalian birds that Heracles had to deal with, thinks the reader. Sure enough, one of the Argonauts had been- there with Heracles, and recalls Heracles' trick of scaring the birds with bronze rattles. "Heracles', he says,"did not have the strength to drive off the birds with arrows....Ve must devise u/vrts as he did' (1053-8). Heracles is held up here as a paradigm of using skill, wisdom to devise a plan when mere strength is not sufficient. This use of unr^s is one field in which the Argonauts can hope to emulate their former shipmate.

As they make their way up the coast, they encounter visible traces of Heracles' earlier expedition. They pass the tomb of Sthenelus, one of Heracles' companions. In one of the most moving passages in the poem, Sthenelus' shade is granted a brief glimpse of his fellow Greeks, and stands on his barrow, looking at the ship (915-20). In following Heracles, he had met death, and piteous isolation. More fortunate are three brothers whom the Argonauts meet on their next stop. They, too, had been on the expedition against the Amazons, and had been separated from Heracles (957): the Argonauts give them the companionship and

the safe journey home which Heracles had not been able to provide. Heracles' prodigious self-sufficiency has its reverse 61 side. He is a figure of fundamental isolation. We have already seen him losing Hylas and being cut off from the Argonauts; now we have seen four other men who lost touch with him on an earlier journey.

The second book, then, shows the Argonauts, in varying ways, coming close to Heracles, or falling short of him. Polydeuces comes closest of all; in the use of brains, the crew approximate him; but in his invulnerability and isolated self-sufficiency, Heracles remains unique.

Book 3 is the book of Jason's victory, and Heracles is mentioned once only. Apollonius lets us understand, with his tongue in his cheek, why he had disposed of Heracles — because with him there would have been no poem; Heracles could have won the fleece by outright superior force. As Medea's father takes up his mighty spear, Apollonius says:

No other of the heroes could have withstood it, once they had left Heracles behind far away, who alone could have fought him, force against force (1232-4). Book 4 describes the home leg. At the beginning of the book, Jason and Medea commit the shabby murder of Medea's brother. Eventually they will be ritually purified by Circe, and then married on the island of Phaeacia. On the way, they stop at the city of the Hylleans. Here, after a long lapse, we hear again the name of Heracles, for the people are named after a son of his, called Hyllus. This is not the son of Deianeira, but of

another woman, whom Heracles had "broken in' ie6ct}xavve\/, 542). He had met this lady on the island of Phaeacia, where Jason and

Medea are headed. What had he been doing on Phaeacia? Being purified for the deadly slaughter of his children (541). We 62 have had to wait a long time to hear about this most terrible of Heracles' actions. We hear about it as Jason and Medea head towards their purification, for the murder of Medea's brother; and as they head, beyond the action of the poem, towards Medea's own murder of the children she will have with Jason. Book 4 is very much Medea's book (she is the subject of the book's invocation): Heracles is polyvalent enough to be a paradigm even for her.

Hyllus, the son of Heracles, is already dead when the Argonauts arrive, killed, as befits a son of Heracles, in a dispute over oxen <551). These deeds of Heracles lie, then, far in the past. 850 lines later, in Libya, when they are desperate with thirst, at the other end of the Mediterranean from where they had last seen Heracles,2S the Argonauts, to their great surprise and ours, only just miss Heracles, to find* themselves literally in his footsteps — and in no other sense than literally. They come tantalisingly close to meeting him again, for only on the previous day he had passed through this very stretch of desert (1436). The Argonauts are in the Garden of the Hesperides: there is the dragon, killed only the day before by Heracles (1400); there is the tree, despoiled of its golden apples (1397); there are the Hesperides, bemoaning their loss (1406 f.). One of the Hesperides tells them the story, bitter with anger against the bestial Heracles, whom she calls 'dog-like' (1433), and compares to a beast of the field, as he fills his great belly from the spring he has caused to flow by kicking a rock (1449). This spring is the salvation of the

Argonauts, as one of them observes: *Friends, even in his 63 absence Heracles has saved his companions, afflicted with thirst' (1458 f.). The best-qualified of the Argonauts dash off to find him (1464-7): the sons of Boreas, who can fly; Euphemus, the fastest runner; Lynceus, with the spectacular eyesight, who, as the story went, could see even under the earth <1.153-5). One unmarvellous Argonaut also goes — Canthus, of whom more in a moment. All fail. %Only Lynceus thought he could see Heracles, far off, on the limitless land, seeing him as you see the moon, or think you see the moon, on the first day of the month, all obscured' (1477-80; following the text and interpretation of Vian-Delage). Lynceus rejoins his companions, swearing to them that none of the searchers would be able to catch up with Heracles on his route (1481 f.).

What does all this mean? Above all, it means that Heracles has managed to fulfil the conditions stated by the sea-god Glaucus at the end of Book 1. He has completed his labours, he has taken the golden apples of eternal life', which represent his final labour, and won his prize of immortality.2'7' He has gone virtually all the way down the path towards becoming a god, and that is the extraordinary interstitial point which Apollonius captures in that beautiful moment when Lynceus sees him in the far distance, or thinks he sees him. In this last mention of him in the poem, he is passing out of the world of men, and into the world of gods. In saving his companions, even in his absence, he has already begun to fulfil the functions of a god.*•

At the moment when the Argonauts come closest to him, they are in fact further away from him than they have ever been; as Lynceus says, they will never catch him up. The vast difference 64 between their principal achievement and his is heightened by a systematic series of correspondences.29 Heracles, in the furthest Vest, takes golden ufjXa from a tree guarded by a serpent, which he kills. The rationalisers of myth claimed that these }xR\

Minor. As Heracles moves out of the poem for good, Canthus tries to follow him, but is prevented from doing so; he is 65 killed by a local shepherd, as he tries to steal the sheep for his fellow Argonauts (1487-9). Unsuccessful in Heracles' metier of rustling, or in stealing u?]Xa, Canthus fails to catch up with Heracles in any sense. His death, by a ring-pattern, takes us back to the moment when Heracles first disappeared, at the end of the first book, for Canthus is trying to find out where Heracles left Polyphemus, after the two had been stranded together. Heracles did not protect Polyphemus either: Polyphemus followed along the coast of Asia Minor looking for Argo, and died there.32

A god, says Aristotle, is self-sufficient,33 and does not need friends (Eud. Eth. 7.12.1-3); it is, indeed, not possible to be friends with a god (Hie. Eth. 8.7.4), Aristotle also sheds light on what lies behind Apollonius' dramatic polarities of Heracles as god and beast. "Man is by nature', says Aristotle* 'an animal intended to live in a polls. He who is without a polls, by reason of his own nature and not of some accident, is either a poor sort of being, or a being higher than man' (EfiL.1.1.9). Heracles does not belong with the Argonauts, or with any human company: he has no fixed polls — does he belong to Tiryns, Argos, or Thebes? —;3* he cannot tie in successfully with a family, for he kills his children and is killed by his wife. And when he becomes a god, unlike Polydeuces, he takes no one with him. Aristotle further says, "The man who is isolated — who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient — is no part of the polls, and must therefore be either a beast or a god' (PjoJL- 1.1.14. The Argonautica is not a commentary on Aristotle, but 66

some such preconceptions lie behind Apollonius' paradoxes here, as he tells us of the bestial and god-like Heracles striding off alone across the desert, towards divinity.30 Virgil's exploitation of the figure is less systematic, and less flamboyant, but scarcely less intriguing.

The first time Hercules is named in the Aeneidf Virgil is, as it were, picking up where Apollonius left off. Apollonius' Heracles had been moving away into remoteness, and that is how we first encounter Hercules in the Aeneid, as a figure so remote that Aeneas is unsure whether or not to believe what he has heard about him. Just after landing on Italian soil for the first time, the Trojans catch sight of Tarentum: hinc sinus Herculei

Two books go by, and Aeneas now comes much closer to

Hercules, talking to men who had seen him, and walking on the same ground. What is more, for the first time we see someone 67 attempting, as had various of the Argonauts, to measure up to Hercules, to emulate him. And we see that person failing.

The episode concerned is the boxing-match in the funeral games of Book 5. The Trojan Dares stands up first <368 f.). At Hector's funeral games, we learn, he had finished off a man who had boasted of being one of the tribe of the Bebryces, the tribe of Amycus (371-3). Promising form, in Apollonian terms: this man could be the new Pollux. His opponent is a local man, Entellus, who was taught boxing by King Eryx. Entellus still has Eryx's boxing-gloves, and we learn from his mouth about Eryx's last fight: he was killed by Hercules, on this very spot (410-4). To Aeneas, this is a disquieting story. As Entellus point­ edly reminds him, Eryx was Aeneas' half-brother, the son of Venus and Butes <412; cf. 24). We are seeing Hercules 'from the other side', from the point of view of relatives and friends of his victims. To Aeneas, Hercules is still an enemy.

Entellus is, in a way, a toned-down version of King Amycus, and his fight with the Trojan Dares is closely modelled on the fight between Amycus and Polydeuces in Argonautica 2 (with elements from Theocritus 22). ^ Entellus is the more brutish of the two, while Dares, like Polydeuces, is younger, more nimble, relying on craft, not solely on strength.3* The climax of the fight is especially close to Apollonius (and to Theocritus). The older man aims a massive blow, which the younger man deftly evades (443-5; cf. Arg. 2. 90-3, Theoc. 22. 118-23). At this point, in Apollonius and Theocritus,',the younger man puts home the winning blow — but Virgil turns the tables, and has the older man recover from his ignominy to destroy . his opponent 68

(453-60). The Trojan Dares, in his literary and mythical pedigree, had had everything on his side. In defeating one of the Bebryces, he had followed the example of Polydeuces, who had, in his turn, emulated Heracles. Now Dares is himself directly emulating Hercules, arriving from overseas, like him, standing on the same ground, and squaring up to the successor of the man whom Hercules had defeated.3* But Dares confounds prediction, and is beaten by the new Amycus. Hercules remains an enemy of Trojan kin-folk: he is too vast a figure to be assimilated by the likes of Dares. Dares, like virtually all the Argonauts, can follow in Hercules' footsteps only literally: Aeneas, as we have already seen, is to be the new Pollux, the new imitator of Hercules, when he goes to the site of Rome. The next man to follow in Hercules' footsteps is, indeed, Aeneas himself, who follows his path down to the Underworld, a feat twice described as a la_b_an (6.129, 135; cf. 103). No Argonaut ever attempted as much. "A few descendants of the gods', says the Sibyl, 'have managed to come back up again; those whom impartial Jupiter loved, or whose blazing virtue carried them to heaven' (129-131). Hercules is the prime example of this category, and Aeneas will follow him, even to celestial immortality, as Jupiter has promised in Book 1 (259 f.). During the parade of heroes, we receive the first intimation that the future Augustus is in this line also. Indeed, he is cast as even superior to Hercules in the range of his might: 'nee uero Alcides tantum telluris obiuit...'(801-3). The enormous geographical range of Hercules' labours is drastically pruned back, and three comparatively trivial labours are chosen, involving certain beasts. There is a Lucretian 69 tinge to these lines: what difference would it make to anyone if the Arcadian boar and Lernaean hydra were still alive? — compare Lucr. 5. 22-44. A note of emulous rivalry, not present in the Argonautica. begins to emerge: the political achievements of the family of Aeneas are not necessarily inferior to the labours of the Greek hero.-*0

The connections between Hercules, Aeneas, and Augustus await their full development in Book 8. Before then, we have another Dares-figure, another character who has Herculean associations, without being able to live up to them. Dares had had good claims to be a follower of Hercules; this man has even better, for he is the second hero mentioned in the catalogue of Italians in Book 7 (655-79), and he is Hercules' son.

He is, it appears, an invention of Virgil's. His name is Aventinus, and the name declares his "Roman' origin. While Hercules was staying at the site of Rome with the cattle of Geryon, he impregnated a priestess, and she gave birth on the Aventine hill (659-63). Aventinus' shield bears the Hydra, an emblem of his father (657 f.); he wears his father's distinctive costume, the lion-skin (666). So "Herculean* is he that he anticipates in various ways Romulus, whom Ennius had made into another Hercules. His mother has the same name as Romulus' mother, Rhea (note the play on the full name, Rhea Silvia, in 659, "silua quern Rhea sacerdos. . . '). The son, like Romulus, of a priestess, he is also, like Ennius' Romulus, the pulcher son of a pulcher god (Annales 38 & 75 Skutsch). He is born on Romulus' hill, the Aventine, where Romulus won the auspices contest (72-91 Skutsch). This is potentially a very dangerous antagonist, son of the sacker of Troy, who might stop 70 the new Troy rising in Italy. But his threat is totally subsumed by Aeneas, the true new Hercules, who will be at Aventinus* birthplace within 250 lines, to be equipped with his own Herculean shield. There, Aeneas listens as the Salii praise Hercules for his sack of Troy <290 f.). The words might have been a threat, but Aeneas, having left Troy to stand on the site of Rome, has drawn their sting. Aventinus is never mentioned again. This pseudo-Hercules is a false alarm, a token of inadequacy in the face of Aeneas' increasing ability to assimilate past symbols of Trojan failure and convert them into future symbols of Roman success. -*1 In Book 8 we get closer still to Hercules. As in Book 5, Aeneas is in exactly the same spot as Hercules had been in some years before, but this time he is, as we saw at the beginning, walking in the footsteps of Hercules in the true sense, conforming to the Apollonian prototype which stamps him as an emulator of Hercules, winning immortality through being a saviour, an averter of evil. Aeneas is coming closer to Hercules all the time. In particular, never before have Aeneas and the audience heard about Hercules in any detailed and characterized fashion. In Book 5, we have only the uncharged epithet magnum (414), with no description from Entellus of the tristis pugna <411) of which he had been the eyewitness; in Book 8, we have ninety lines from Evander,.with a minute account —for the first and only time in the poem — of Hercules in action (185-275).

What do we see? We receive a picture which, although muted, recalls above all the Heracles of Apollonius' fourth book, in the Garden of the Hesperides. There is a formal correspondence, 71 in that both scenes concern the action by which the hero comes into possession of divine status; but there are more extensive correspondences between what we hear from the nymph and what we hear from Evander. The standpoint of the two speakers is very different, for the nymph loathes the hero, while Evander venerates him. This divergence makes it all the more striking that Evander, like the speaker in Apollonius, concentrates on the frenzy and power of Hercules, while maintaining an extreme distance from him, so that Hercules is as isolated as he had been in the desert of Libya.

Let me develop these two points. It is very remarkable that Evander's speech describes no meeting between Hercules and himself, no hospitality or contact of any sort.'*2 Virgil is concentrating on the exploit, of course, but the form of the aition virtually demands a description of hospitality. For Apollonius, Heracles is a figure from an earlier, rougher kind of poetry; for Virgil, Hercules is also a creature of Hellenistic epyllion, and against this background, within his own aition, Virgil's decision to excise the hospitality motif so dear to Callimachus is indeed noteworthy.-*3 As in Apollonius' fourth book, Hercules arrives and does his deed without a word spoken.**

Virgil's typical concern for compression is partly responsible. Aeneas is now receiving the hospitality that Hercules received (in the *story', and in the Asiia, Virgil's aition model),*s and Virgil does not want a close doublet. Further, allusion will be made later in the book to the hospitality Evander gave Hercules. Nonetheless, within 72

Evander's speech, Hercules' utter self-sufficiency and remoteness, the sense that he does not belong among normal men, are certainly striking, and very reminiscent of the impression left by the fourth book of Apollonius. Likewise very reminiscent of Apollonius is the way in which Virgil has chosen this juncture to emphasise Hercules' physicality and his furor. He does not polarise a whole range of paradoxes, as does Apollonius, even though it was open to him. In Livy, for example, Hercules is drunk when his cattle are stolen <1. 7. 4); again, Virgil could have alluded once more to the seduced priestess, the mother of Aventinus. None­ theless, the focus on the madly violent face of the Herculean prism is unmistak able.-*s When Hercules hears the lowing of his stolen cattle, *hic uero Alcidae furiis exarserat atro / felle dolor' <219 f.). He rushes to Cacus' lair: "ecce furens animis aderat Tirynthius. . . / dentibus infrendens' (228-30). He dashes around the hill: *ter totum feruidus ira / lustrat Auentini montem' <230 f.). The impression, even more strongly than in Apollonius, is one of terrific, manic violence. Even when saviour and candidate for apotheosis, Hercules is uis., J3foc, incarnate. As we contemplate the picture of Aeneas listening to the exemplum spoken by Evander, we must wonder what it means for him, whether this is part of the paradigm which he will also emulate. The other aspect of Hercules stressed here, his isolation, may appear not to correspond to Aeneas' situation, as he is being entertained by Evander. Yet the meal which Aeneas shares with Evander is the last one Virgil will narrate in the poem; Aeneas, as we shall see, is moving towards a solitude of a sort which Hercules never knew. 73

Hercules is not all yjLs_. We hear praise of his ratio (U^TIS) in the hymn of the Salii <299), and another facet of the paradigm is offered Aeneas shortly afterwards, when Virgil alludes to the Hercules of the philosophers, as Evander welcomes Aeneas to his poor palace, enjoining self-restraint and self- sufficiency, in emulation of Hercules:

aude, hospes, contemnere opes et te quoque dignum finge deo, rebusque ueni non asper egenis (364 f.). Hercules here is a paradigm for moral victory, over self, and the temptations of the world. The dichotomies are as sharp as anything in Apollonius; sharper, perhaps, since in Virgil the two different Hercules-traditions are in the mouth of the same speaker, within a hundred lines of each other.

Models are there to be outstripped as well as matched. And, inasmuch as he is the embodiment of an historical force, Aeneas does indeed outstrip his model, and himself provides a model for his descendant Augustus, who has inherited control of the historical force first given expression by Aeneas.47 The moment that shows us most clearly that Aeneas has caught up with Hercules, and overtaken him, comes at the end of Book 8, when he looks at his shield and picks up on his shoulder the fame and fate of his descendants (729-31). The scene is prefigured in miniature at the beginning of Aeneas* mission, in Book 2, when he drapes himself in a lion-skin (721-3) , and takes up his father on his shoulders: ipse subibo umeris nee me labor iste grauabit' (708).*e At the end of Book 8, the burden he takes up is incomparably greater. He takes up the historical burden that will issue in an imperium over the entire world; he is picking up a world, if not the world. In this he approximates to his 74

ancestor, Atlas, -*5* and outdoes Hercules, who had briefly acted as Atlas' surrogate.*0 And yet, at this definitive moment, it is, in a way, Hercules' own shield that Aeneas is picking up. The shield of Achilles in Iliad 18 is commonly referred to as Virgil's model here, and that shield was undoubtedly the most famous paradigm available. The so-called Shield of Heracles, however, preserved in the Hesiodic corpus, is also behind Virgil's picture. The Hesiodic shield is itself extensively modelled on the Homeric one, but certain links with Virgil's shield bear mention. In Homer, we see Achilles' shield as it is being made by Hephaestus; but in the Scutum we see it, as in Virgil, at the moment the hero picks it up. In the middle of Aeneas' shield is Discordia (702); in the middle of Heracles' , "Epi s (148). There is no sea on Achilles' shield, but Aeneas' and Heracles' shields both have sea, and dolphins (A.. 671-4; £c_, 207-15). The Scutum has a harbour, which is like a "heaving' water (kXu^ojjieVa) fkeXos, 209); Virgil's sea is tuaidi <671). Above all, the shield of Achilles is generalised, without individual characters; but Heracles' shield describes a specific battle, with the contestants named (between Centaurs and Lapiths, 178- 90).

Now that Aeneas has reached this climactic point, I imagine that no reader of the Aeneid would express surprise if Hercules received no further mention in the poem. Virgil, however, continues his closing-in movement, reversing the direction of Apollonius, who had taken the character of Heracles out of the

body of the narrative, and turned him into a figure of anecdote 75 and report. In the middle of Book 10, Virgil actually introduces Hercules into the narrative as a character in his own right; Virgil traces Hercules down that path where even Lynceus could not see, and shows him to us at its far end, as a god.

Hercules' reimbodiment in the narrative is flanked by two authorial references to him. Let us take these passages as they occur.

When Aeneas first enters battle, he dispatches four men within eight lines. The third and fourth are brothers, armed with Hercules' weapon, the club: nihil illos Herculis arma nee ualidae iuuere nanus genitorque Helampus, Alcidae comes usque grauis dum terra labores praebuit (319-22). It would seem that these two are, like Aventinus in the catalogue, false aspirants to the status of Hercules: their associations with Hercules are unavailing when they confront the true new Hercules. The passage appears to be, comparatively, unproblematical.

The focus switches to Pallas. After various combats, he is confronted with a certain Halaesus, and prays to Father Tiber for help (421-3). %audiit ilia deus' (424); Pallas kills the man. Some thirty lines later, he faces a greater enemy, Turnus, and prays to a greater god, Hercules, basing his plea (ominously?) on hospltium:

per patris hospitium et mensas, quas aduena adisti, te precor, Alcide, coeptis ingentibus adsis (460 f.). 76

The response is extraordinary: 'audiit Alcides iuuenem' (464). Not the way Father Tiber was able to do. Virgil introduces Hercules into the action itself, hearing Pallas, but unable to do anything but weep; he is unable even to speak, so that the poem goes by without our hearing a single word from him: audiit Alcides iuuenem magnumque sub imo corde premit gemitum lacrimasque effundit inanis (464 f.). We actually see the god who was recently a man, and we see him powerless to honour the ties he established as a man.

Jupiter, however, has never been anything but a god, and he tells the newcomer how a god regards these things: stat sua cuique dies, breue et inreparabile tempus

omnibus est uitae; sed famam extendere factiss hoc uirtutis opus <467-9).

A short life for all, but fame for the virtuous. Hercules should know, for he had been one of Anchises' models in Book 6, along with Bacchus <801-5>, when Anchises urged Aeneas on to his mission: "et dubitamus adhuc uirtutem extendere factis?' <806). Virgil refers directly to- the Homeric model when Jupiter goes on to mention Sarpedon, who was his son, and who nevertheless died at Troy <470 f.).S3! In the Iliad, however, when Sarpedon was about to die, it was not Zeus who insisted upon the inviolability of Fate, but Hera, acting as an inflexible foil to Zeus' pity and grief (16. 441 ff.). Now the tables are turned, as Hercules is overcome, and Jupiter enunciates —dictis anicis (406) — the lesson he has learnt from Hera.ss These few lines represent a shattering collision of human and divine perspectives, as the most human of the gods is told by the father of the gods how to regard the action. 77

Once again, Aeneas fits into the paradigm offered by Hercules, as he too fails to protect the young man tied to him by the bonds of hospitium.SA repeating Hercules' disastrous propensity to fail those closest to him. When he attempts to avenge Pallas, he is likewise very close to ${fi 'HpockXefA (as he is, again, when he actually kills Turnus in the end)ss: furit (545); desaeuit (569); dira frementem (572); fjurje_ns_ (604); faruidus (788); furit (802); saeuae irae (813).

One scene remains, a mirror to the one which began the sequence of references to Hercules in this book. In that first scene, two enemies of Aeneas found their Herculean associations unavailing; in this scene, an ally of Aeneas encounters the same fate. Mezentius throws a spear at Aeneas: it ricochets off the great shield, and hits a certain Antores, who is standing some distance away (777 f.):

Herculis Antoren comitem, qui missus ab Argis haeserat Euandrb atque Itala consederat urbe. sternitur infelix alieno uulnere, caelumque aspicit et dulcis moriens reminiscitur Argos (779-82). Once a comes of Hercules, now a comes of Aeneas, Antores dies by the spear that was meant for Aeneas, in a foreign country which he would never have seen if not for Hercules. Aeneas and Hercules are both jointly "responsible' for his death. Only twenty lines before, Virgil tells us that the gods are spectators of the battle (758 f.). Antores is the first subsequent casualty; one assumes that Hercules is with the other gods, still watching, as his comrade dies.

Hercules is a very complex phenomenon, and being a follower of Hercules is a very complex process. As in the Argonautica, 78 there is more than one character following after Hercules; and, as in the Argonaut!ca. the component paradoxes of Hercules are opened out and displayed in their separate aspects, which it is open to various of the characters to try to emulate. Aeneas, however, is the prime focus, in a way none of the characters is in Apollonius, and Aeneas comes closer to some of Hercules' aspects than to others. He is quite different from Hercules, for example, in his human responses; he is a far more sympathetic "character'. ss He is, after all, a Jason as well as a Hercules, as he shows when he comes to hjLs. Lemnos, in Carthage. And although he goes berserk in Book 10, he returns to himself when he kills Lausus <820-32). If, then, his nature is not very Herculean, his status and function are much more so. As an ocXeVfkakos, a victorious saviour, and a wielder of great power, he even outstrips Hercules, and will became, like him, a god. Yet, in adopting a Herculean status, and discharging Herculean functions, he also finds himself being assimilated to some of the more forbidding aspects of his paradigm. In his exercise of uis and f^uror, and in his frightful solitude, Aeneas comes all too close to another side of Hercules.sy'

It is the historical and political dimension of the Aeneid which conditions the major differences between Virgil's use of Hercules and Apollonius*. The way in which the initially hostile Greek Hercules is absorbed and tamed by the growth of Aeneas may be seen as emblematic of the Romans' accretive urge for assimilation. The political perspective of the Aeneid, virtually entirely absent in the Argonautica,se produces new ways of viewing Hercules and his imitators, and generates its own distinctive paradoxes. The isolation of Hercules and 79

Aeneas, for example, is one of their most striking similarities, a function, partly, of their incipiently divine status.59 Yet

Hercules is OCTTOXIS, while Aeneas lives for the urbs; Hercules is alone because he cannot belong with any organisation, while Aeneas is alone because he is wholly identified with an organisation.®0 This historical dimension sets Aeneas and Augustus quite apart from the Greek god-hero; yet their power, function and status place them, even on earth, as close to the boundary of the divine as it is possible to be. And some things about being on the boundary of the divine do not change.

D.C. FEESTEY University of Edinburgh 80

FOOTNOTES *For their help and criticisms I thank Dr.R.L. Hunter, Dr.N.M. Horsfall, Dr.W.S.M. Mcoll, Mr.J.G. Howie, Mr.R.M. Pinkerton, and Dr.J.Y. Kadeau.

The following books are referred to by author's name alone:

H. Frankel, Eoleja zu den Argonautica das Apolldnius (Munich, 1968); G.Karl Galinsky, Ike Heracles Xhejne. (Oxford, 1972); F. Vian and E. Delage, ApQlloniQS de Rhodes, Argonautiques Tome

L (Paris, 1976); K.W. Gransden, ed. Virgil. Aeneid Book 8 (Cam­ bridge, 1976); J. Henry, Aeneidea 1 (London, 1873).

1. G.L. Huxley, Greek, Epic Poetry (London, 1969), pp. 99- 112, 177-88. 2. Supplementum Hellenisticum, edd. H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons (Berlin, 1983), nos. 393-4, 669, 715, 948, 1166 (and 1168 ?).

3. The words of Knauer are still valid: xubrigens ist trotz mancher Vorarbeiten. . . der Einfluss des Apollonios noch nicht sicher zu fassen', Die Aeneis und Homer (Gdttingen, 1979), p. 56 n. 2.

4. 1. 544 f.j cf. Gransden on 91-2; M. Hugi, Vergil a Aeneis und die hellenistische Dichtung (Bern, 1952), p. 75. Mr. Howie informs me that Apollonius goes back to Homer for the gleam of weapons as a portent of victory:

cf. T. Krischer, Formale , Konventidnen der homerIscheq EpJJs. (Zetemata 56, Munich, 1971), pp. 36-8. 5. The text of 796-8 is disputed; A.. 8.200 f. and 477 appear to show that Virgil took the passage as the scholiast does, and I translate what I think Virgil's 81

text would have been. Frankel's account of the scholion is remarkable special pleading

6. Noted by the standard commentators. 7. Note, in particular, the structural similarities between the hymns in 2. 700-19 and A.. 8- 287-302; see, e.g., Gransden here. 8. cf. V. Burkert, Greek Religion

9. p. 6 of "Heracles and Greek tragedy', 2M.n,s, 32 (1985), 1-22. 10. Burkert, p. 211. 11. On these aspects of Heracles, see Burkert, pp. 208-11, and Galinsky, pp. 1-39.

12. cf. Galinsky, pp. 23-39, 101-8; R. Hoistad, Cynic Hero and Cynic King (Uppsala, 1948), pp. 22-73.

13. Diog. L. 6. 16 ff. 14. Jacoby, FGH I 218, fr. 14. This Herodorus was an important source for Apollonius, as Dr. Hunter points out to me; cf. P. Desideri, 'Studi di storiografia eracleota', SCO. 16 (1967), 366-416.

15. Galinsky, pp. 10-12. 16. cf. Vian-Delage, p. 44 n. 2, and note on 1. 123.

17. Another hint comes when he breaks his oar <1. 1168); see Vian-Delage ad loc. 18. He is out of place with these epigoni. 1. 992 says as

much, with a reference to the proem of the Cyclic Epigoni (a famous text; cf. Ar. EaxP_az.. 1270)1270) : ocXXoc tap ocu61 X^Xeurro trui/ otV

19. cf. Frankel, p. 115; Vian-Delage on 1. 856. A further consideration is shown by Mr. Howie, remarking that Apollonius cannot afford to have Heracles impregnate a Lemnian, for that might cause difficulties with the claims of the kings of Cyrene, descended from Euphemus (Pind. E. 4. 256 ff. ). 20. Frankel rewrites the text to obliterate the antithesis (pp. 144 f.). 21< cf. Vian-Delage, pp. 46-8. 22. cf. Vian-Delage, p. 122 n. 2.

23. Though with

26. n.b. 1. 80 f. 27. On the significance of the apples, see Bond on Eur. Her. 394-9. 28. cf. Qd. 4. 444; and compare 4. 1436 with Q&. 2. 262. When Virgil adapts the Lynceus simile for Dido in Book 6 (451-54), the sense of a vast and uncrossable gulf is redeployed for a diffent use. 29. cf. G. Lawall, ICS. 19 (1966), 129; C. R. Beye, Epic and

Rnmanoe in the. Argonautica al Apollonius (Southern Illinois U. P., 1982, p. 149. 30. Diod. Sic. 4. 26. 2. 83

31. His apartness already stressed in the Homeric nekyia, Od. 11. 601-27.

32. Argo makes three consecutive stops on this section of coast, all involving comrades left by Heracles: the first is at Sthenelus' tomb; the second is to pick up the three brothers; and the third is the site where Polyphemus later dies <2. 1001, 4. 1474 f.>.

33. The self-sufficiency of the divine is an idea that goes back to Xenophanes, A 32. 23 ff. DK.

34. Apposite here may be the tragic fragment, very likely on Heracles, often quoted by Diogenes the Cynic: coroXis,

aoikos, Karp{Sos eo-Tep/j jieyos. . . (Nauck, IGJL Adesp. 284). 35. Those who write on Heracles in Apollonius tend to opt for one Heracles or the other as being solely present. Frankel sees only the noble Heracles of the philosophers; most insist on Heracles as the archaic figure of violence: Galinsky, pp. 108-12 (some qualifications at pp. 112 f.>; Beye, op. cit. n. 29, p. 96; Lawall, art. cit, n, 29, 124-8. But everything depends on acknowledg­ ing both sides. D, N. Levin does so, though without any development, CJL 67 (1971), 22-8.

36. cf. Galinsky, p. 132; Henry, 188-95. 37. cf. F. Rutten, D_e Vergil 11 Studiis Apollonianis

38. Note arte, Aen. 5. 442; Kv Si.oc jiryriV, Axg.. 2. 75; \Spe(t\, Theoc. 22. 85. 84

39. It may also be a good omen that the Bebrycian whom Dares

defeated at Troy had the same name as Eryx* s father —

Butes <372>, 40. cf. B. Otis, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry

(Oxford, 1964), p. 302. 41. On this tendency, see ¥. Suerbaum, Poetica 1 C1967), 176-

204. 42. cf. E. V. George, Aeneid YIII and ins Aiiia of. CalUmachus (Mnemosyne Suppl. 27, Leiden, Brill, 1974),

pp. 67 f.

43. Contrast Ovid, EastL 1. 545, 5. 647. 44. Apollonius is perhaps already turning tradition in a similar way, for the Hesperides normally cooperate with Heracles: see E. Livrea, ed. Argonauticon Liber Quartus (Florence, 1973), p. 408. 45. In the Molorchus story, fr. 55-9. 46. Thus Gransden, correctly, p. 20; ignored by Otis, op. cit. n. 40; glossed over by Galinsky, AIPJl 87 (1966), 41f.

47. This is brief allusion to a very contentious topic, with a large bibliography: for an account that I would largely agree with, I refer only to V. A. Camps, An Introduction. to Virgil's Aeneid (Oxford, 1969), pp. 98-104.

48. cf. Galinsky, pp. 133 f. 49. cf. Gransden, pp. 17 f. 50. cf. Henry, 193. 51. The words recall 4. 449, where Aeneas is equally powerless before Fate.

52. Ve may be meant to think of the usual tradition concerning Pallas, that he was the son of Hercules (D. H. 85

Ant. 1. 32. 1); note, then, the effect of Turnus* words, "cuperem ipse parens spectator adesset', 443.

53. The Iliadic scene is even more systematically reversed at 621-7, where Jupiter tells Juno that she cannot, in the long run, save her favourite. 54. cf. Henry, 191 f.

55. cf. Gransden, p. 20. 56* Henry, 188-95, is very good on the differences between Aeneas and Hercules.

57. On the solitude of Aeneas, see CO. n.s. 33 (1983), 204-19. 58. Although one cannot help seeing, for example, contempo­ rary political practice in the cult offered to Polydeuces in Book 2, while the claimed Heraclean descent of the Ptolemies (Theoc. 17) no doubt has some impact on Apollonius' portrayal of this grand figure, as Mr. Howie points out to me.

59. I retract, accordingly, my uncomprehending criticism of Highet's remarks on Aeneas and Augustus, art. cit. n. 57, 218 n. 94. 60. See here D. J. Stewart, Ant. R. 32 (1972-3), 649-64.

87

VIRGIL AND TACITUS AGAIN

It seems proper to start with an explanation of my title, and of my return to this topic. When in 1962 I read to the Society a paper entitled 'Virgil and Tacitus' (1), that paper was a general survey of the problem, and part of an occasional series on 'Virgil and ... (2) which was organised by the then secretary. The paper argued that, although many suggested Virgil/Tacitus parallels were invalid, the influence of Virgil on Tacitus' language and thought was still strong: and that it might sometimes be a deliberate part of his historical presentation. Since then, a certain amount of writing on the subject has flown under sundry academic bridges. (3) Some of the writers see Tacitus' use of Virgilian language as deliberate and evocative, adding a dimension of interpretation-by-association to his historical narrative. Dr Baxter (4), for example, finds that the Virgilian echoes in Histories 3 cluster in the passages describing Cremona, the Capitol and the death of Vitellius, and that most of them come from Aeneid 2: he suggests that they give unity to Tacitus' book, and add a dimension to the narrative. Professor Benario (5) considers that Tacitus' account of the death of Galba in Histories

1 is pointed for the reader by its echoes of Virgil's story of the death of Priam in Aeneid 2 (and to this point we shall return). Dr Bews (6) sees the Virgilian language used of Germanicus in Annals 2 as both helping to set him in an 'heroic' context, and suggesting that he did not always match up to that context. Other scholars consider Virgilian words in Tacitus to be merely a verbal echo (conscious or unconscious), or a device to enhance his own expression, without reference to anything in the original Virgilian context. Battle has been joined. There are, naturally, arguments put forward in support of both positions: and not all of them are negligible. It is true, for example, that Virgil's works were educational textbooks in the first century A.D. (8), and that their language was therefore part of the educated man's intellectual furniture: it is true that Silver Latin prose is 88

much more 'poetical' in its language than is Republican prose, and that a good proportion of that poetical vocabulary would inevitably come from Virgil (9): it is true that commentators tend to cite the Virgilian parallel because Virgil's is the text most familiar to them, that we have little evidence for the stylistic development of historical prose in the years between Virgil and Tacitus, and that there is no contemporary prose stylist of comparable stature whose Virgilianus decor we can set against Tacitus' (10). And yet (if I may be allowed a Tacitean turn) I think the difficulties can be exaggerated and that, if used with reasonable caution and restraint, Virgil/Tacitus parallels can be illuminating. If, as seems clear, both Tacitus and his putative audience knew their Virgil, that could make it all the more likely that, when he used or adapted a Virgilian phrase, he knew exactly what he was doing, and expected it to be recognised. We all pick up words and phrases at second hand, and use them without thought of an original context which we never knew or have forgotten: but if we use or adapt phrases from a source we know well, we remain conscious of that source, even though it may have no particular significance for our immediate purposes. To illustrate: if I wish a colleague in a minor crisis 'a happy issue out of all your afflictions', or remark that Tacitus' Annals are neither short nor simple, I in fact know perfectly well what it is I am misquoting, and I use the 'quotation' only in a context where I believe my 'audience' will know it too. At a much more literary and relevant level, a poet like T.S. Eliot will use quotations from and references to other writers, and will even provide notes to enable the less widely read to find his 'sources': for these references are not mere verbal echoes, used to enhance his own expression, but they are integral to his poetic meaning, and he employs and adapts them for his own poetic purposes. (11). At a still more immediately relevant level, this process of association and allusion is surely part of Virgil's own poetic technique. His use of Homer and Ennius, of Lucretius and Catullus, of Hesiod and Theocritus, often goes far beyond tradition or rivalry, and is used to enlarge our apprehension of his poetic point. (12) This is the way a poet's 89 mind works: and Tacitus has, of all prose writers, something of the mind and approach of a poet. (13)

I do not think it matters greatly whether an echo can be established as conscious or unconscious (and how can one ever 'establish' such a thing?) What comes out of a great poet's subconscious is likely to be as interesting as what is happening at the conscious level. (Sometimes it can be more so: I find Eliot's 'The Cocktail Party' a thought-provoking play, but I am not sure that I am greatly enlightened by his explanation that it is based on Euripides' Alcestis.) (14) If therefore we can catch reasonably certain resonances between the text of Tacitus and the text of Virgil, (15) we are justified, I think, in pursuing them farther, and asking if they, individually or collectively, have anything to tell us about Tacitus' use of Virgil. It is the purpose of this paper to make such an examination and assessment of Histories 1: and although the inquiry inevitably starts from the text of Tacitus, I hope that the material may be of interest to Virgilians too. Some eighty-four parallels can be listed for this book, and a high proportion of them is illusory. I find it difficult to believe, for example, that sinistra (7,2) has any significant connection with sinistra ... cornix in Eel. 9.15 (if a source is needed for Tacitus' use of the adverb, Horace AP 452 would be a better one). Nor does cohibentur (prouinciae 11,2) seem to be much illuminated by a comparison with o cohibete iras (Aen. 12,314). hue illuc (40,1 and 76,1) is indubitably in Aen 4,363 and elsewhere in Virgil: but it is also to be found in Cicero (Att. 9,9,2) Tibullus (1,3,70), Livy (7,34,9) and many other authors, indecora (simulatione) at Hist. 1,74,1 is not very like noh erimus...indecores (Aen. 7,231) where, as in all his other examples, Virgil uses the form indecoris and uses it of persons: much closer to Tacitus is Livy 21,63,4 (quaestus), Quintilian 11,1,25 (iactatio) and Pliny Epp3,20,4 (confusio). And lymphatis (animis) at 82,1 can be par ailed not only by Aen 7,377 furit lymphata per urbem but by Catullus 90

64,254 lymphata mente, Horace, Od 1,37,14 mentemque lymphatam and Livy 7,17,3 lymphati et attoniti. There are many such examples, which clearly belong to common literary stock, and not to Virgil and Tacitus. Longer phrases, too, are not always what they seem, sceleris instinctor (22,3) is a striking phrase, and instinctor may be a Tacitean coinage: but the phrase is just as likely to have been suggested to Tacitus by Plautus (Capt.661 sator sartorque scelerum et messor) or Cicero (Cat.3,6 scelerum... machinatorem) as by Virgil (Aen. 6,529 hortator scelerum). Galba's famous query quis iussit (35,2) did not need the inspiration of Priam's quis auctor at Aen 2,150: both Plutarch (Galba 26,2) and Dio (64,6,2), who are parallel sources for the episode, have "who ... gave the order?", and the question would appear to have been in the common source (confusingly, Suetonius Galba 19,2 has quo auctore, but that does not bring Virgil and Tacitus any closer), male fidas (prouincias 52,3) may recall Aen 2,23 (statio) male fida: but it is a phrase also to be found in Ovid (Tr.1,6,13), Petrortius (123 v.193), Statius (Th.7,632) and elsewhere: the Virgilian connection is hardly a close one. tota mole belli secuturus (61) sounds splendidly Virgilian: but immani mole secuta (Aen. 9,542) is not really parallel in meaning, and molis belli exists from Accius (615W), is common in Livy (e.g. 33,20,2 tanta mole imminentis belli), and also in Velleius (e.g. 2,95,1 Caesar haud mediocris belli mole experiri statuit). ne turn quidem immemor amorum (78,2) might have been inspired by non ille oblitus amorum (Aen 5,334), but is it really any closer to that than to tenerae coniugis immemor in Horace, Od.1,1,26? Again, there are many phrases in this category.

I have laboured this point, because such investigation of even our incomplete evidence for literary and linguistic usage by the classical authors produces the sort of information I have been listing, and underlines the dangers of building Tacitean criticism on what may prove to be very shifting Virgilian sands. By removing examples such as those discussed above, the list of Virgilian 'echoes' can be reduced to twenty nine: and more than half of these are in various degrees doubtful. Can we, for example, 91 confidently connect horror animum subit (37,3) with Aen 10,824 mentem...subiit...imago and 2,559-560 circumstetit horror...subiit...imago, when Livy 39,16,7 offers subit animum timor and Statius Theb. 10,160-1 animum...horror...subit? Or foedare—sanguine (26,1) with Aen. 2,502 sanguine foedantem, when cum arae.-.supplieum sanguine foedarentur can be found in Sallust (Hist.l,22D) and sanguine foedatis in Ovid (Met. 3,523)? Not unless the Tacitean context is very Virgilian, and in other ways connected with the appropriate Virgilian passaged6). Other phrases, while not without parallels elsewhere, can be arguably claimed as more likely to come from Virgil than from any of the other sources. (17) For example, foedum imbribus diem (18,1). Foedus with dies is reasonably common (cf. Cicero, Phil. 3,12), and so is foedus with the ablative (cf. Justin 9,6,4 diem foedum luctu): imbribus is found with other adjectives (cf. Lucan 9,320 and Statius, Theb. 5,705 niger imbribus Auster and Lucan 5,608 imbribus atrum Notum. But the combinations of foedus and imbribus seems to be confined to Virgil and Tacitus, and the nearest parallel seems to be Panegyrici 10,12,4 mullus ... dies imbre foedatus. The argument for accepting such phrases as Virgilian will, like the previous one, be strengthened if the phrases appear in a context with other Virgilian colouring.

Finally, in this survey of the evidence, we reach the (much smaller) number of phrases where the line from Virgil to Tacitus seems clear. (18) And these must be examined individually, for their connections could be important. 2.3 (agerent) uerterent cuncta: cf. Aen.2,652-3 uertere cuncta seeum. uertere = euertere occurs elsewhere in both authors, but this is the only example with cuncta in either. Other writers use it with omnia (Cicero, Sex.Rosc. 61: Statius, Aeh. 1,249) or with other specific objects (domos Statius, Theb. 4,56: regna id., 5,696), or with the goal of action (in peiorem partem Cicero, Sex.Rosc. 103) or both (uertere ad extremum omnia Cicero, Off. 1,84 uersasque solo...turres Statius, Theb. 3,249). The only other example of the complete Virgilian phrase I have been able to find is in Lucan where, 92 at 7,58 hoc placet, o superi, cum uobis uertere cuncta/propositum itself looks like a clear echo of the Virgilian phrase. That is one thread. The other connects with agerent, the asyndeton and the phrase agunt feruntque cuncta in Dial.8. As Gudeman points out in his note there, this is the Latin version of a phrase which goes back to Homer (e.g. n. 5,484), and is a phrase which Livy appears to have introduced into Latin (cf. 3,37,7 hi ferre agere plebem plebisque res: 40,49,1 cum ferret passim cuncta atque ageret). Most examples (Greek and Latin) are literal in meaning, or of specific application. Latin, like Greek, usually has fero before ago. The phrase in the Dialogus refers to the activities of Eprius Marcellus and Vibius Crispus, notorious delatores. Our phrase in Hist. 1 appears in a highly wrought and deliberately effective chapter, and it appears at the climax of the chaos which that chapter records: it refers to the activities of the delatores. The Virgilian context is dramatic and memorable - it is the appeal to Anchises not to create total chaos by staying behind in Troy. I find this whole collocation interesting, and would hazard the suggestion that Tacitus is varying, in order to strengthen, the agere ferre phrase. That his variation produces, in an important context, a Virgilian phrase from an equally important context (and one which Lucan thought worth imitating) phrase which is nothing like as common as it might at first sight appear, seems to me to be at least a fact worth filing. 6,1 inualidum senem: cf. Aen. 12,132 inualidique senes. This is another apparently harmless phrase which is odder than it looks, inualidus is found, according to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, from Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid and Livy on: is it conceivably a Virgilian formation? In any case, its use with senex appears to be rare. Anchises (Aen. 6,114) is simply and emphatically inualidus: Hordeonius Flaccus (Hist. 1,9) or Camillus (Livy 6,8,2) are senecta inualidus: and categories are defined (Hist 4,14) of senes aut inualidos. But the adjective/noun combination appears only once in Virgil 93 and once in Tacitus, and the only other example I can find is in Silius 1,561 where nine puer inualidique senes looks like a clear echo of the Virgilian phrase and context. The phrase has great importance in Tacitus' text: its position, its order and its case set the tone for the whole chapter and the whole account of Galba. Is he using a Virgilian echo and a Virgilian context (of a city under siege) to emphasise the helplessness of Galba and the siege condition of Rome? Is this Tacitus' version of the common source which told of Galba's reign? Suetonius has no sign of the phrase, but Plutarch, Galba 15,4, describing the entry into the city, calls him "weak and old": and Dio 64,3,4 describes him as "old and weak". It is interesting that Tacitus' version echoes a Virgilian phrase. 6,2, infaustus omine: this shows a number of interesting points. It describes Galba's entry into Rome, in the context of the mass killing of Nero's marines, and it echoes, with variation, the Virgilian infausto omine at Aen 11,589. Apart from Seneca Contr. 10,4,16 and Pliny N.H. 7,69 (both infausto omine), I can find no other examples of the phrase. Omens are foeda (e.g. Livy 22,3,12), tristia (e.g. Livy 9,38,15) and even fausta (e.g. Livy 7,25,11) but not elsewhere infausta. infaustus seems to be first found in Virgil: it may therefore have been a more obviously Virgilian word that we imagine. The parallel sources for the incident are again of interest; Dio (64,3,2) positively approves of Galba's action, and so records no unfavourable omens: Suetonius (Galba 13,1) merely says that his arrival was not as welcome as it might have been: but Plutarch (Galba 15,4) makes the same connection as does Tacitus, that it was not a happy omen for Galba to enter the city amid such slaughter. Have we therefore here another example of Tacitus' more concentrated and more poetic (Virgilian) version of the common source? The Virgilian context has more than passing interest for us. The phrase appears in Diana's instructions to Opis to avenge Camilla, and her words are finisque inuise Latinos/ tristis ubi infausto committitur omine pugna. 94

I find it diffcult to believe that Tacitus, in adapting Virgil's phrase, did not see in its context a fitting comment on the first conflict on Latin soil of what was to be a long year of civil strife and slaughter. 12,2 fessa aetate. The phrase at Aen 2,596 (fessum aetate parentem) is described by R.G. Austin ad loc as 'a Virgilian turn: later poets and Tacitus use fessus with similar nouns (ualetudo, senium, aeuum).' There is indeed no trace of a connection between fessus and aetas before Virgil: and only some nine examples in the writers that come between Virgil and Tacitus (19). Valerius Flaccus 6,444 is an obvious adaptation of the Virgilian phrase: Seneca, Dial. 5,9,4 looks like a variation on Virgil (and is itself varied by Tacitus at Ann 16,13): none of the others has the noun aetas, and only Lucan 2,128 fessa senectus and Seneca, H.F. 1250/Pha 267 fessis annis make the adjective agree with the noun meaning 'age'. Apart from the example from Ann. 16,13 (above), Tacitus has six examples of the phrase. (20) There is no sign of it in contemporary writing, prose or poetry, but (interestingly) it reappears in the Scriptores Historiae Augustae (Hadr. 24,3 and A.P. 2,3). In all the contexts where it appears, from Virgil on, it has a strong emotive force, with overtones of compassion for the helplessness of age. The parallel sources for Galba's adoption of Piso (where Tacitus uses the phrase) (21) stress Galba's childlessness, and the revolt of Vitellius as his motives, and none has the colour or emotional quality of the Tacitean passage. Tacitus would seem to have been especially sensitive to the 'Virgilian turn'.

32,2 firmandos aditus. Vinius' advice (in reported speech) to Galba in a crisis echoes Turnus' instructions (in direct speech) to his men in a crisis (Aen 11,466) These are the only examples of the phrase in either author, and examples elsewhere are surprisingly difficult to find. One can claudere aditus (Livy 35,27,1) and firmare portas (Ann. 1,25) or ad omnes aditus firmare stationes (Livy 5,43,1). But the only other apparent example of the phrase is again in Silius, a writer who notoriously knew and used his Virgil (10,411 portarum aditus ...firmare). The presence of the phrase in Silius 95 suggests that it is not, in Virgil and Tacitus, the accidentally similar variation on a theme which it might otherwise appear to be: Silius is not a notable linguistic innovator. The fact that it is rare suggests that the phrase may have been more noticeable, and so more emphatic, than we think. And the presence in Suetonius, Galba 19,1 of the verb firmare raise speculation once more about the common source: did the presence of firmare there spark Tacitus' recollection of a more interesting phrase? 36,2 prensare manibus. This phrase, which Tacitus uses to describe the Praetorians rallying support for Otho, reflects an evocative phrase of Virgil's in Aen 6,360, where the ghost of Palinurus is describing to Aeneas the moment of his death. It is a vivid and memorable picture, and the phrase which evokes it is surprisingly absent from most of the rest of extant Latin literature. It is found in (almost inevitably) Silius (4,586-7) and as a variant reading in Horace Sat. 1,9,64, where the editors reject it: and nowhere else. It has no reflection in Plutarch, Suetonius or Dio. Only here does Tacitus use the verb with an ablative. The effect of the phrase is certainly pictorial: does it also carry undertones of pathos, and a suggestion that this effort too is not likely to be ultimately successful?. Its effect is heightened by its juxtaposition to another Virgilian phrase. 36,2 complecti armis. This is an interesting and complex echo. In Tacitus, the phrase appears in the climactic description of the Praetorians enlisting help for Otho (see above). The Virgilian context is Aen 12,433 as Aeneas bids farewell to Ascanius before going off to the final combat: it is a highly charged and emotional context. Does armis come from arma or armus? arma, almost certainly, in Virgil, where the embrace is embedded in Aeneas' armour: but armus, I think, in Tacitus, where surely the picture and the climax require it. But armus used of men's, as opposed to animals' arms is itself a Virgilian innovation (Servius on Aen 11,644): and the fact that it is also so used by Lucan (9,831) and Statius (Theb: 8,494 and 10,401) suggests that it was a recognisable Virgilianism and that Virgil might again be the common source for 96

these poets and for Tacitus. Furthermore, however different the uses of armis, compleetor armis seems to occur only in Virgil and Tacitus, complector can be found with manu and manibus (Curtius 7,4,37 and 7,11,15): with digitis (Ovid, Met 3,727): with bracchiis (Pliny N.H. 32,12): with lacertis (Ovid, Met. 1,555): and with ulnis (Silius 17,312): but elsewhere with armis, no. Nor is armis found with amplector. The echo, with all its complexity, seems to be clearly Virgilian. Is it ironically applied by Tacitus? 44,2 praefixa contis capita. Tacitus' language here is certainly intended to impress. His account of the displaying of the heads of Galba and Piso starts with this phrase, goes on to the horrifying detail inter signa cohorthun, iuxta aquilam legionis, and works to a climax through no less than four qui clauses in anaphora. It seems reasonable therefore to connect it with Virgil's account of a similar horrifying display, that of the heads of Nisus and Euryalus in Aen 9,465-6 and 471 arrectis (uisu miserabile) in hastis praefigunt capita... ora uirum praefixa mouebant. The verb appears only here in Tacitus, and nowhere else does Virgil use it of heads. Suetonius, Galba 20,2 says (caput) hasta suffixum (he has praefixum hastae at Jul. 85): Plutarch and Dio record the incident (Galba 27,3 and 64,6,3), Dio with the same word kontos. The only other example of the phrase (22) seems to be (again) Silius 7,704 ora...praefixa...cuspide. The association with the Nisus/Euryalus episode evokes extra pathos, as well as reflections on human folly and the brutality of war - surely appropriate to the year 69? 47,2 concedi corpora sepulturae. This is an interesting and vivid use of language (the only example of concedere so used in either author), which Tacitus employs to describe, in an important context, Otho's 'gracious' permission to deal with the results of his coup, and which appears in Virgil as the last words of Mezentius and almost the last words of Aen 10 (906). For concedere aliquem alicui rei TLL cites only our two passages and some late and/or legal writers, none of whom employs sepulchro or any word like it. Statius Theb. 8,473 has rogum concedere, which is the normal construction: 97 and Suetonius, Galba 20,2 has hoc (caput) et... truncum...sepulturae dedit, which is unexceptionable Latin; but does it perhaps against represent the common source, which Tacitus has expressed in a more vivid Virgilian phrase to emphasise a point? There is also, in both the Virgilian and Tacitean contexts, an element of alliteration which increases the impact. 51,1 nunc...expediam. This expression was, of course, Lucretian before it was Virgilian: but I think Tacitus borrowed it from Virgil, nunc expedibo is found in Pacuvius (62-3W) and nunc...expediam in Varro L.L. 5,7 and scattered examples of expediam alone can be found from Plautus (Amph. 912) on. But Virgil found it sufficiently Lucretian to make it his own. The Virgil passage which exactly parallels the Tacitean one is Aen 11,314-5, where Latinus puts forward his tentative proposal for settling the Trojans and bringing peace. Variations (with age) introduce the great procession of Roman heroes at Aen 6,756, and the catalogue of Latin forces at Aen 7,37. (23) None of these is a passage of negligible importance in the poem. Tacitus uses the phrase here, as he starts his account of Vitellius' bid for the Principate, and at Ann. 4,1, (24) as he points to the change in Tiberius and begins his character sketch of the arch-villain Sejanus. These are important stages in his narrative. Virgil borrowed the phrase from Lucretius via his didactic poem, but used it also to emphasise important points in his epic. Tacitus wants epic not didactic associations, and shows far more acquaintance with Virgil's poem and language than with Lucretius'. And if further proof were needed, the only example of the phrase I can trace between Virgil and Tacitus is in that conscientious purveyor of Virgilianisms, Silius Italicus (11,3). 55,1 raris ...uoeibus cf. Aen 3,314. Both the Tacitean and the Virgilian examples refer to difficulty of utterance, rather than to the commoner meaner of infrequency (cf. Ann 4,52: Livy 6,1,2: Propertius 4,3,53). I can find no other examples of rara with uox in this meaning, and think the close parallelism of case and meaning in the two 98

examples interesting. The Tacitean context is important - his account of the 'Vitellius for Emperor' movement, and he might well point it with a Virgilian phrase. 88,3 spe uana tumens. The phrase used by Tacitus to describe that section of Rome's populace which he considers leuissimus..et futuri improuidus, in a city where Otho is making final preparations to confront Vitellius, recalls Virgil's description (Aen. 11,854) of Arruns, the warrior who has killed Camilla and so doomed himself to die. Apart from the inevitable Silius example, (25) which has become almost a guarantee of Virgilian influence, the combination of nana and tumeo appears to be found only in Virgil and Tacitus. Phaedrus (1,3,4) and Propertius (3,6,3) show tumeo with inani: Livy (23,42,12 etc) has spes uana but no accompanying tumeo. The link looks sure, and it adds a pointed comment to Tacitus' description: he knows what is to happen to Otho and to Otho's army: the leuissimi are likely to meet a fate as inevitable as that of Arruns. It seemed to me essential to establish, as far as our evidence will allow, where and on what grounds a Tacitean use of Virgil's language may with any plausibility be argued to exist at all, before extending the inquiry to see if there is any pattern in the distribution of such phrases, any deeper purpose in their use. If one looks only at the twelve phrases I have argued as clear connections, some interesting points are immediately obvious. These vivid and Virgilian phrases in fact articulate and point the essential themes of Histories 1. In emphatic order they present to us general chaos, helpless age, an ill-omened start, helpless age (again), futile defence measures, emotional attempts (twice) to rally support for a rival Emperor, barbarity, burial, the challenge of a fresh rival, and the pointless posturing with which Rome prepared to meet this new challenge. The futility and folly of human behaviour, the barbarous actions to which men's irrational emotions can drive them, the suggestion of inevitable doom by the sword for those who use it to establish power, are the fundamental ideas of Tacitus, Histories 1: and they are not entirely foreign to Virgil's Aeneid. 99

If one adds the more doubtful examples (26) as possible extra Virgilian colouring, this merely intensifies the pointed allusions to internal division, doom, suffering and folly: and makes even clearer the fact that most of the Virgilian references come in the first fifty chapters of the book, the account of the Principate of Galba. The Virgilian echoes are by no means the only literary devices which Tacitus employs to add emotional weight and implicit comment to this part of the book, but they are an important arrow in his literary quiver. There are various plausible reasons for the imbalance of the Virgilian phrases (and of the other literary devices), it is important for Tacitus to establish main themes and tone in the opening section of his account of the civil war: it is equally important to drop the tone thereafter, to allow for the climaxes of Otho's suicide in Book 2 and for Cremona and the Capitol in Book 3: and Galba's short reign and brutal death provide very suitable material for an evocative and pictorial presentation of incidents illustrative of the issues involved in civil strife. Evocative and pictorial presentation is of the essence of poetry, and Virgil is of the essence of poets. Professor Benario (27) has made a good case for seeing in Tacitus' account of the death of Galba a reference to the death of Priam, as presented by Virgil at Aen 2,506-558. Both, he points out, are old men who uselessly don armour to defend themselves, meet a savage death at a sacred spot, and are left mutilated and headless after death: the evocation of the Virgilian passage skilfully underscores the mood of the Histories, that the world is out of joint. I think he has a point: and I think it can be supported by some further linguistic details. Tacitus cannot be quite so concentrated as the epic poet, and he cannot quite so readily manipulate his material. But he can place the themes of helplessness and age (conspicuously, and in Virgilian language) as early as 6,2 and 12,2: he can, when neither Plutarch nor Dio mentions the incident and Suetonius, Galba 19,1 says loricam... induit linteam, arm Galba with an echo (sumpto thorace 31,1) of Virgil's sumptis Priamum 100 iuuenalibus armis (Aen. 2,518): he can perhaps take from this Virgilian (Aen2,502) rather than from any other context (28) the phrase foedare...sanguine (26,1) in which he first articulates the decision of the soldiers to kill their Emperor: and he can use to good effect the historian's formula (nunc exitum habuit 49,2) for summing up an event of importance (29), a formula which Virgil borrowed to emphasise the importance of the death of Priam (Aen 2,554 haec finis Priami fatorum, hie exitus). R.G. Austin, commenting on the line, says 'any Roman reader would recognise in Virgil's lines the ethos of history in epic guise' and Professor Benario (30) neatly inverts this in his discussion of the passage, to comment that Tacitus is presenting 'the ethos of epic in historical guise.' And that, I think, is the nub of the matter, as it concerns Tacitus' narrative technique. We are fortunate in having, for this period in history, not only Tacitus' Histories but the works of Suetonius, Plutarch and Dio (31): and it is fairly obvious that they and Tacitus were using a common source. A comparison of the Tacitean passages containing Virgilian echoes with the parallel passages in the other sources, reveals very generally that one or more of these sources will have the fact or the incident, but that the Virgilian colouring and the implicit comment is Tacitus' alone. That the colouring is, at some level, deliberate, and so likely to include comment, is supported by the examples where the line is Virgil-Silius-Tacitus: because Silius parrots the Virgilian phrase, while Tacitus adapts and incorporates it. It is a technique demonstrably employed by many great writers, especially poets: and one of its masters is Virgil (32). There is a strong link between Tacitus, Histories 1 and Virgil Aen. 2, because of the Galba/Priam connection. But the main Virgilian reference of the book is, I think, to the Aeneid as a whole, and is general rather than particular, providing an epic tone and overtone for an epic theme, and providing, also, evocations of pathos and horror rather than of the conventionally heroic in human behaviour. And where else would 101

Tacitus naturally look for such subtle associations than in the work of Rome's greatest epic poet? NOTES

1. PVS 1961-62, 25-34. 2. PVS 1963-64, 12-26: id. 1966-67, 11-21: id. 1968-69, 1-12, among others.

3. R.T.S. Baxter, Virgil's influence on Tacitus in Book 3 of the Histories, CP (66) 1971, 93-107: id., Virgil's influence on Tacitus in Books 1 and 2 of the Annals, CP (67) 1972, 246-269. H.W. Benario, Priam and Galba, CW 1972, 146-7. J.P. Bews, Virgil, Tacitus, Tiberius and Germanicus, PVS (12) 1972-73, 35-48. J.

. Soubiran, Themes et rhythmes d'Efcopee dans les Annales de Tacite, Pallas (12) 1964, 55-79. P. Cornelius Tacitus: Die Historien ef. H. Heubner. Heidelberg, 1963-76. The Annals of Tacitus vol 1. ed. F.R.D. Goodyear, CUP, 1972.

4. op.cit., 1971 5. op.cit., 1972

6. op.cit., 1972-3 7. Cf. F.R.D. Goodyear, op.cit., 1972, pp306, 325 8. Martial 5,56: Suet. Gramm. 16: Quint. 1,8,5.

9. Dial 20,5 exigitur enim iam ab oratore etiam poeticus decor ...ex Horatii et Virgilii et Lucani sacrario prolatus. 10 Seneca is a stylist and he uses Virgil. But he quotes more than he adapts: his approach, being that of a philosopher, is inevitably argumentative rather than

allusive. See S. Consoli, Reminiscenze Virgiliane nelle Prose di L. Annaeo Seneca, RFIC (49) 1921, 456-467: N.P. Miller, Virgil and Tacitus, PVS 1961-62, 27.

11. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1935, (Faber & Faber, 1945) 78ff. In his Notes on the Waste Land he gives references to, e.g. Ecclesiastes, Baudelaire and Dante (though not to Shakespeare's Tempest, Spenser and the Greek Anthology, which 102

equally resound in the text). He explains that some of the associations are arbitrary, and to suit his own purposes. And he equally warns that certain collocations are not accidental.

12. Virgil's use of Homer is seen not only in

the way in which he associates Aeneas with Achilles and Odysseus, or Nisus and Eurylaus with Odysseus and Diomede: but in verbal echoes also e.g. Aen 9,803-811, where he is using (and seen to be using) Homer, n, 16,102f., as well as Ennius, Annals 409-16W: or Aen 1,52-6 which is based on Od. 10,lf. together with Lucr. 6,189f. Cf. also Aen 6,460 with Cat. 66,39 and Aen 9,435-6 with Cat. ll,21f.: Georg 1,299 with Hesiod Works 391: and Eel 8,65f, with Theoc 2. This process of association, adaptation and integration is not an intellectual game of poetic pastiche: it is an essentially poetic approach to material.

13. N.P. Miller, PVS 1961-2, 28-9: K. Quinn, Texts and Contexts (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 237, 239.

14. T.S.Eliot, Poetry and Drama (Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture, Harvard Univ., 1950) in On Poetry and Poets (Faber, 1957), 85.

15. The echoes have to be (as far as is possible) established as Virgilian and not simply poetic: to be (as far as we can tell) used only by Virgil and Tacitus, or by Virgil, Tacitus and (occasionally) by one or more of the Silver (especially Epic) writers, where the common source is almost certainly Virgil, or to be arguably more likely to come from the Virgilian context than from any other available source: and to be (unless very striking and evocative) more than single words.

16. 13,2 curam subisse cf. Aen. 9,757 and 2,575: 18,2 uerba et uoces cf. Aen 4,460: 26,1 foedare...sanguine cf. Aen. 2,502: clamore et gladiis cf. Aen. 10,716: 37,3 horror animum subit cf. Aen. 10,824 and 2,559: 40,2 auito—solio cf. Aen. 7,169: 103

43,2 in caedem eius ardentis cf. Aen. 12,71 and 2,529: 48,1 fama meliore cf. Aen. 4,221: 52,3 panderet sinum cf. Aen 8,712 are the relevant phrases.

17. 13,1 in duas factiones scindebantur cf. Aen 2,39: 18,1 foedum imbribus diem cf. Geor. 1,323: 20,1 super...erant cf. Aen. 2,567: 27,2 strictis mucronibus cf. Aen 2,449: 41.3 gladio lugulum eius hausisse cf. Aen. 10,314: 51,4 hauserunt animo cf. Aen. 10,648: 53,1. decorus iuuenta cf. Aen 4,559 and corpore ingens cf. Aen

11,641.

18. 2,3 uerterent cuncta cf. Aen 2,652-3: 6,1 inualidum senem cf. Aen 12,132: 6,2 infaustus omine cf.Aen. 11,589: 12,2 fessa aetate cf. Aen 2,596: 32, 2 firmandos aditus cf. Aen 11,466: 36,2 prensare manibus cf. Aen 6,360: 36,2 complecti armis cf. Aen 12,433: 44,2 praefixa contis capita cf. Aen 9 465-6: 47,2 concedi corpora sepulturae cf. Aen. 10,906: 51,1 nunc...expediam cf. Aen 11,315: 55,1 raris...uocibus cf. Aen. 3,314: 88,3 (spe) uana tumens cf. Aen 11,854.

19. Val. Fl. 6,444: Sen. Dial. 5,9,4: Luc. 2,128 and 3,729: Sen. H.F. 1309 and 1250, Fha. 267: Stat. Theb. 4,358 and Sil. 4,8,55.

20. Hist. 3,67: Ann. 1,46: 3,59: 14, 33: 15,38.

21. Dio 64,5,1: Plut. Galba 19,1: Suet. Galba 17,1.

22. It reappears in SHA, Maximin 23,6. 23. Also (Georg. 4,150) the divine nature of bees, and (with altius Georg. 4,286) the story of Aristaeus. 24. Also (Germ. 27) as he starts his detailed account of the German tribes: (with altius Hist. 4,12) to mark the start of the rebellion of Civilis: and (with quam uerissime Hist.4,48) to emphasise the bloody murder of a proconsul.

25. Sil. 17,429. 26. See nn. 16 and 17.

27. op.cit.: see n.3. 28. e.g. Ovid, Met 3,523: 7,845: 13,563. 104

29. Cf. Livy 39,51,12: Veil, 2,53,3: Tac. Hist. 3,75,1: Dio 64,7,1: Plut. Galba 29,1. 30. op.cit., p.147. 31. Suet. Galba: Plut. Galba: Dio 64. 32. See n.12 and cf. Soubiran (op.cit. n.3): G.D. Williams, Change and Decline (Univ. of California, 1978), pp. 163 and 196-7. 105

TACITUS (Histories 1) VIRGIL

* 2,3 (agerent) uerterent cuneta Aen. 2,652-3 uertere secum/cuncta

* 6,1 inualidum senem 12,132 inualidique senes

* 6,2 infaustus omine 11,589 infausto ... omine

* 12,2 fessa aetate 2,596 fessum aetate

13,1 in duas factiones scindebantur 2,39 scinditur...studia in contraria

uulgus

(13,2 curam subisse) 9,757 si...cura subisset

18,1 foedum imbribus diem Geo. 1,323 foedam...im br ibus

(18,2 uerba ac uoces) Aen. 4,460 uoces et uerba

20,1 super ...erant 2,567 super. ..eram

(26,1 foedare...sanguine) 2,502 sanguine foedantem

27,2 strictis mucronibus 2,449 strictis mucronibus

( elamore et gladiis) 10,716 missilibus...et...clamore

* 32,2 firmandos aditus 11,466 aditus...firmet

* 36,2 prensare manibus 6,360 prensantem... manibus

* complecti armis 12,433 complectitur armis

(37,3 (horror) animum subit) 2,575 subit ira

(40,2 auito...solio) 7,169 solio-.auito

41.3 gladio iugulum...hausisse 10,314 gladio...latus haurit

(43,2 in caedem...ardentis) 12,71 ardet in arma

* 44,2 praefixa contis capita 9,465-6 in hastis praefigunt capita

* 47,2 concedi corpora sepulturae 10,906 me...concede sepuichro

(48,1 fama meliore) 4,221 famae melioris

* 51,1 nunc.expediam 11,315 nunc.expediam

51,4 hauserunt ammo 10,648 animo.-.hausit

(52,3 pander et...sinum 8,712 pandentemque sinus 106

53,1 decorus iuuenta 4,559 membra decora iuuenta eorpore ingens 11,641 ingentem eorpore * 55,1 raris...uocibus 3,314 raris...uocibus * 88,3 (spe) uana turn ens 11,854 uana tumentem 107

VIRGIL AND CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY

A lecture to the Virgil Society, November 19, 1985

by

H H Huxley

Over a century and a half has passed since the birth at Martley in Worcestershire of the fun-loving parodist and fearless athlete whom we know now as Charles Stuart Calverley. From the beginning of the 19th century, the family, who traced their ancestry to pre-Norman times and whose native county was York, had been known as Blayds. In 1852 they resumed their proper name of Calverley. In this year Charles, after a fickle flirtation with Balliol College, from which he was sent down in his second year, transferring his allegiance from Isis to Cam, moved to Christ's College, the quondam home of Milton, whose Lycidas he turned into most attractive hexameters.

Charles did not attend a preparatory school but was under the care of private tutors (from his subsequent history it may be assumed that they found him quite a handful!) until in February 1846 he entered Marlborough School, where his sojourn was of brief duration, since he left in March of the same year. In autumn he began his remarkable career at Harrow, where a notable coeval was the great Henry Montagu Butler, Headmaster of Harrow at the age of 27 (a post he held for 25 years) and Master of Trinity from 1886 to 1918. 108

Calverley, a son of the vicarage, indubitably became very familiar with the unsurpassed liturgical prose of the Book of Common Prayer and the scriptural readings from the Authorised Version. When the boy was eight his father was admitted to the living of Monkton Combe with Combe Down, near Bath, which was in the gift of Christ Church, Oxford. Later he became Rural Dean and Prebendary of Wells. This saturation in Anglicanism bore fruit in the published versions of eighteen Latin hymns. Indeed the last work he prepared for the press was a rhyming version of the abecedarian poem on the Last Judgement, No. 13 in Raby's anthology, which begins Apparebit repentina dies magna Domini.(l) His irrepressible sense of fun enabled him to cite scripture to devastating effect. Having 'borrowed' an inn-sign from the Green Man at Trumpington and sought haven within the college-gates from the wrathful pursuit of the publican and his cronies, he justified the fracas to the astonished Dean in the words of Matthew 12,39: "An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall be no sign given to it." Lord Clonbrock, a Balliol contemporary, tells how, when C.S.C's secret ingress and egress from college was detected by Dr Wall, he parried the don's rebuke by instructing him to seek his answer in Psalm 18,3 and Acts 23,3; these read: "I call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised and I am saved from my enemies. God shall smite thee, thou whited Wall." This facility argues no mean familiarity with Alexander Cruden's invaluable Concordance. When precise theological expertise failed him, as it did at one of those viva voce tests quaintly termed 'Collections', his capacity for improvisation was endearing. "With what feelings," asked Dr. Jenkyns, "ought we to regard the Decalogue?" The examinee, whose fondness for this branch of knowledge was unrepentantly Laodicean, pondered before venturing the reply: "Master, with feelings of devotion, mingled with awe." "Quite right, young man, a very proper answer," rejoined the Master of Balliol.

This modest paper cannot probe Calverley's own religious feelings. Both 109 undergraduates and fellows must have been gravelled by certain numerical aspects of the O.T. Such a one was the learned mathematician and tutor of St. John's College, John Williams Colenso, referred to in Carmen Saeculare as pueris tu detestate, Colenso. Colenso, by 17 years Calverley's senior, became Bishop of Natal before the younger man took his degree. In his commentary on Romans (1861) and his papers on the Pentateuch and Joshua he showed how hard it was to persuade simple Zulus of the literal truth of the Bible. For rudimentary calculations established (1) that every Hebrew family must have been blessed by 42 sons on average, (2) that at the second Passover the priests, in sacrificing 50,000 lambs, achieved a work-rate of 400 lambs per minute, (3) that the digestive system of every priest had to cope with a daily intake of at least 88 pigeons!

Oxford and Cambridge in the 19th century were, with a few notable exceptions, not addicted to the rigorous pursuit of scholarship. For his second Alma Mater Calverley was fortunate to choose (or have chosen for him) Christ's where Gunson, a remarkable tutor, had resolved that his college should be something more ambitious than a mediocre hotel for athletic young bloods with time on their hands. Leslie Stephen, in Sketches from Cambridge, recalls a tutorial on the Kaine Diatheke, perfunctorily given by a don who, like Jesus's Steve Fairbairn, refused to let his studies impair his rowing. Faced by an unfamiliar word he exclaimed: "Easy all! Hard word there! Smith, do you know what it means? No? No more don't I. Paddle on, all!"

At Harrow Calverley was remembered for his athleticism, especially as a jumper, his phenominal skill in composing English, Latin and Greek verse, and his feat of learning in a single night the whole of Iliad 1. In 1849 a set of Latin verses produced seemingly without much cerebration won for him a coveted Balliol scholarship. He "lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." Going up to Oxford in 1850 he won the Chancellor's 110

Prize in 1852 with an hexameter poem of 236 lines, the longest of all his Latin poems, entitled Parthenonis Ruinae. We shall pass over the clashes with authority which were the precursors of the exodus of Blayds from Balliol in 1852. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit: errat et illinc/Huc venit, says Ovid's Pythagoras. Blayds quits Oxford, and Calverley descends on an unsuspecting Cambridge. In his freshman year the great hymn-writer J.M. Neale of Trinity won the Seatonian Prize for sacred verse, and F.W. Farrar, not yet (as Ovid would put it) the author of Eric, or_ Little by_ Little, won the Chancellor's English Medal. Farrar, fourth classic in 1854, I mention because, as I have written elsewhere (2), he refers clearly in his tale of Roslyn School to lines 20 and 21 °f Carmen Saeculare for which C.S.C. was awarded the Camden Medal in 1853. In this same year Butler carried off the Browne Medallion (Greek Ode), and on June 3 our poet was admitted a scholar of Christ's. In 1854, black with Crimean clouds, Butler took the Porson Prize and the Camden Medal as well as the Greek Ode for the second year running. In the next year Calverley qualified again for Camden Medal and Greek Ode, while Butler sealed a marvellous undergraduate career by being placed Senior Classic. The Crimean War ended in 1856, in which year C.S.C. sat for the Mathematical and Classical Triposes. In the former were 35 Wranglers, 41 Senior Optimes and 38 Junior Optimes. Calverley's position was 26th in the second class. These figures show, first, that nearly three times as many men took maths as classics; second, how hard it was to notch up a real "double first" by gaining first class honours in two simultaneous triposes. Forty passed the Classical Tripos, of whom 13 scored a first, 15 a second and 12 a third. Calverley came second, and in 1857 was elected a Finch and Baines Fellow of Christ's. With Butler out of the running, who passed Calverley? Another Trinity man, Edward Lawford Brown, taught at Shrewsbury by the formidable Benjamin Hall Kennedy. Not for long did his star brighten the classical firmament, for he died at 27 after four years as Assistant Master of Marlborough. Ill

The rest of Calverley's life is quickly told. For a few years he remained at Cambridge as classical lecturer and assistant tutor, publishing Verses and Translations in 1862. Having no mind to seek ordination he left Cambridge next year, entered the Inner Temple, and married his cousin, Ellen Calverley, by whom he had three children. In 1866, one year after being called to the Bar, he struck his head in what seemed a trivial skating accident. Not realizing he was concussed he sought no immediate treatment. However, with brief intermissions his health deteriorated for many years. In his fifty-third year he died of Bright's disease. Though he was a most tuneful and versatile 'mocking-bird', he failed to scale the sublime heights of song expected of him.

From his able pen we have 128 lines of Greek verse (Sapphics and Anacreontics), plus 1561 of Latin. Of these latter 1007 are in hexameters; the rest (apart from 18 lines of hendecasyllables and 28 of iambic dimeters) are all in the metres of the Odes and Epodes. Of the hexameters one piece only (from Butler's Analogy) imitates Lucretius. Catullus's distinctive hexameters are nowhere attempted. Only Juvenal of the Post-Augustans seems to have been much in Calverley's mind. The Greek Ode of 1855, the theme of which is Agamemnon's prophecy 'the day shall come for holy Ilios to be laid low' (Iliad 4, 167) is so masterly that it is clear it's author could have written splendid Homeric lines. If he wrote any, they have not survived, alas. A study of his Greek and Latin epic verses would have helped us to unravel his deeper thoughts about the two great epics. We do indeed have a full blank verse rendering of Iliads 1 and 2. There is also an interesting translation into accentual hexameters of Iliad 1, 1- 129. Some time after these translations were published the London Student for June 1868 carried an eight-page article on metrical translation, wherein C.S.C. easily demolished an earlier contributor's view that there can be no true translation of Greek or Roman poetry that does not reproduce the metre. With aptly-chosen examples he mocked scholarly attempts to write English elegiacs, sapphics and alcaics. Much of 112

this, like the observation "The ancients, I contend, made it a special point that their verses should not scan themselves" is quotable. Of a more glorious failure cited by Calverley I give three lines and invite identification -

Phantom sound of blows descending, moan of an enemy massacred, Phantom wail of women and children, multitudinous agonies. Bloodily flowed the Tamesa, rolling phantom bodies of horses and men.

Yes, it is Tennyson's experiment in Catullian galliambics, Boadicea.

Admirable as are Calverley's writings on classical metres, a close scrutiny forces the conclusion that his modus scribendi did not allow for scholarly verification of sweeping assertions. "A pentameter" he claims, "ending with a monosyllable, would not be found in Latin literature." Surely he had read -

Aut facere, haec a te_ dictaque factaque sunt. (Catull. 76,8) and Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.

When he enquires "Why is a verse bad, which has no caesura?" and offers melaina nux, melaina nux, melaina nux, had he forgotten such Aristophanic oddities as chair' o Charon, chair' o Charon, chair' o Charon (Ranae 184)? His concluding paragraph contains a splendid metaphor showing the relationship of metre to verse. "It seems possible to train a rose or a vine upon a trellis so that, while it adheres firmly, it is still left to follow its own devices and form its own pattern over the laths, which are only seen here and there among the leaves and tendrils."

Conington's translation of the Aeneid into the metre of Scott's Marmion appeared 113 in 1866, three years after C.S.C. left Cambridge for the Bar, and gained a sympathetic review, in which he voiced a deep conviction. "Virgil's language," he said, "is_ Virgil. His diction is an essential part of him, and Milton has taken such pains to show how it may be recast in English, that we cannot help wishing Professor Conington had elected to take more hints from him than he has taken; without becoming absolutely Miltonic, which would ill accord with Scott's metre. Two duties, he argues, bind a translator; (1) towards his original, (2) toward his readers. If we take the reductio ad absurdum of the first, we arrive at Milton's rendering of procellas emirabitur insolens as "Storms unwonted shall admire." Hang on, dixerit quispiam, didn't he write aspera nigris aequora ventis emirabitur insolens (Carm. 1.5.6-8)? He did! This citation demonstrates not only our poet's 'grand memory for forgetting' but also his uncanny knack of conjuring up a fifth Asclepiad from a 17th century translation.

Translators may, through the fascination of logorrhoea, journey to the opposite pole. It is a mark of high intelligence to choose the most forceful examples, a thing our author could certainly do. His comment is slightly expanded -

Through all the changing scenes of life, In trouble and in joy, The praises of my God shall still My heart and tongue employ

Tate and Brady's New Version of the Psalms (1696) eschews Spartan brachylogy. Psalm 33,1 (Vulgate) reads: Benedicam Domino omni tempore; semper laus eius in_ ore meo. Twelve words eke out the meaning of omni tempore!

Calverley offers no translations from the Aeneid, nor despite his proven familiarity 114

with the epic, did it hold much appeal for him. His version of The Dead Ox (Georgics 3,515-530) is doubtless selected because of the author's demonstrable sympathy with animals.

Not shadiest forest-depths, nor softest lawns, May move him now: not river amber-pure, That tumbles o'er the cragstone to the plain. Powerless the broad sides, glazed the rayless eye, And low and lower sinks the ponderous neck. (520-524)

If I select from the Bucolics some lines for which C.S.C. could find no convincing equivalent, it is not because my opinion of the translation as a whole is unenthusiastic, but rather because no-one seems able fully to reproduce the verbal magic.

Sicilian Muse, I would try now a somewhat grander theme.

Day Lewis's line is scarcely superior to translationese.

Muses of Sicily, a loftier song Wake we!

Calverley's uncalled-for enjambement, followed by the inelegant spondee "Wake we", gives Eclogue 4 a lamentable send-off.

But snakes will die, and so will fair-seeming poisonous plants.

Again Day-Lewis, and how far from the graceful and semantically chiastic original! 115

Occidet et serpens, et fallax herba veneni occidet

C.S.C. does better here -

Die must the serpent, treacherous poison-plants Must die.

The most ambitious English commentary suggests that at this point we observe the genitive of reference! I do not think that Virgil reproduces the pattern of Eel. 4,24- 25 exactly, but when Dido, drinking deep of love cannot hear enough about Troy, we have the patterned verse -

multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore rnulta. (Aen. 1,750)

Day-Lewis's version falls flat -

Asking over and over again about Priam and Hector.

Fallax herba veneni is not an expression easy to disregard. Only 62 lines before the verse just quoted we have the clearest reference to Eclogue 4.24-25 -

occultum inspires ignem fallasque veneno. (Aen. 1,688)

Nor do we quite forget the pastoral source when in Aeneid 12, 828 the verb occidere is repeated not with framing but in juxtaposition - 116

occidit, occideritque sinas cum nomine Troia.

A further example demonstrates Calverley's fidelity to his text at a point where critics, seeing Virgil below his best, demand drastic textual surgery -

"In her son's blood a mother dipped her hands At fierce love's bidding. Hard was her heart too - Which harder? her heart or that knavish boy's? Knavish the boy, and hard was her heart too. (Ecl.8,47-50)

"The triple occurrence of crudelis and mater," says Coleman, "is very jejune, and the rhetorical word-play of 49-50 has an irrelevant touch of Ovidian wit about it." Right he may be; but in Catullus 62, 20-24, a passage of roughly equal length, erudelior is balanced by crudelius in the same verse-positions, natam, complexu and matris repeated in two consecutive verses, avellere similarly recurring in the same verse-position, as well as ardenti picking up ignis. Was Virgil playfully outdoing Catullus?

Before we pass to more serious translations a brief digression will show with what fidelity Calverley sought to bring back the manner and spirit of his original. In 1812 the ingenious parodists Horace and James Smith had published Rejected Addresses. From Horace's pen comes Laura Matilda's Dirge, which our poet put into elegiacs. The writers here satirised were the 'Delia Cruscans', whose namby-pamby verses were collected into two volumes in 1790 entitled The British Album. Conspicuous among these sentimentalists was Hannah Cowley (1743 - 1809) whose poetic talent fell below her skill as a dramatist. This is how Smith pictures her style -

Lo! from Lemnos limping lamely, L17

Lags the lowly Lord of Fire, Cytherea yielding tamely To the Cyclops dark and dire.

Such alliteration is quintessential Quince -

Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade, He bravely broach'd his boiling bloody breast. (M.N.D. 5.1.145-6)

Here is Calverley -

Lustra sed ecce labans claudo pede Lemnia linquit Luridus (at lente lugubriterque) Deus: Amisit ve teres, amisit inultus, am ores; Teter habet Venerem terribilisque Cyclops.

Surely readers were meant to catch an echo of the defeated bull on Sila's heights -

multa gemens ignominiam plagasque superbi victoris, turn quos amisit inultus am ores. (Geo. 3,226-7)

It was almost predictable that Calverley should measure himself (albeit parva sub ingenti) against Milton, his college's most distinguished alumnus, who had shown great facility in many metres, both Latin and Greek, had translated several Psalms into rhyming English verse (even dressing Psalm 114 - In exitu Israel de Aegypto - in Homeric hexameters) and had clearly proved in Epitaphium 118

Damonis (218 lines long) and in Lycidas his fondness for pastoral. After his long apprenticeship in translating the Eclogues and the whole of Theocritus he believed he was ready to try to clothe Lycidas in a garment not wholly unworthy of him who wrote -

Exstinctum Nymphae crudeli funere Daphnim Flebant. (Eel. 5,20-21)

whereon see R.D. William's excellent note)

Milton's monody for Edward King, drowned in the Irish sea in 1637, runs to 193 lines of which 14 are short; possibly this feature is in imitation of Virgil's unfinished lines, but more probably the poet is seeking a mode of increasing emphasis or intensifying pathos. The elegy is (quis nescit?) steeped in Virgilian and other classical allusions, permeated with Hellenic and Roman poetic techniques, and, like Hamlet, overflowing with surprisingly familiar quotations. Two further qualities should be stressed, the deceptive simplicity of many of the best verses and the sheer music of Miltonic diction. Let two lines emphasise this point -

But O the heavy change, now thou art gon, Now thou art gon, and never must return! (37-38)

Compare it with -

Jamque, relicta tibi, quantum mutata videntur Rura - relicta tibi, cui non spes ulla regressus?

Note the repetition of relicta tibi in the same verse-position and the evocation of ei_ 119 mihi, qualis erat, quantum mutatus ab illo/Hectore (Aen. 2, 274-5).

Also perhaps admissible (since in Virgil regressus is an hapax legomenon) is the faint echo of funditus oecidimus neque habet Fortuna regressum (Aen. 11,413). Of course a couplet with fourteen monosyllables out of seventeen words defies reproduction in Latin.

In this passage Miltonic artistry is splendidly copied in the translation -

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew Himself to sing, and build the loft rhyme. (8-11)

In Calverley -

Nam periit Lycidas, periit superante juventa Imberbis Lycidas, nee par manet illius alter. Quis cantare super Lycida neget? Ipse quoque artem Norat Apollineam, versumque imponere versu.

The triple repetition of the name is to remind us of Eurydice in Georgics 4, 525-7. No more could the nymphs avert the watery doom of Lycidas than the Muse herself intervene to save Orpheus, her son, when -

His goary visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore. (62-63) 120

Probably the best-known quotation from Lycidas is -

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of Noble mind) To scorn delights and live laborious dayes. (70-72)

No versifier would relish tackling this; Calverley's solution is worth noting -

Scilicet ingenuum cor Fama, novissimus error nia animi majoris, uti calcaribus urget Spernere delicias ac dedi rebus agendis.

For the pairing of cor with ingenium see Martial, 3.26-4 -

Et cor solus habes, solus et ingenium.

The metaphor of the spur, weakened by Calverley's addition of uti to a simile recalls Ovid's inmensum gloria calcar habet (Ex Ponto, 4.2.36). Dedi rebus agendis derives from natum rebus agendis in Ars Poetica 82. This version is, by my reckoning, indebted to Virgil in some forty places; there are, of course Lucretian, Tibullian, Horatian and Ovidian echoes. The conclusion of Lycidas forms an eight-line sphragis or seal-signature, a device borrowed in essence by Virgil from Hellenistic poets. Its length exactly matches the conclusion of Georgics 4. C.S.C. fastidiously preserves the same quota of verses, beginning thus -

Haec incultus aquis puer ilicibusque canebat; Processit dum mane silens talaribus albis. 121

Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th' Okes and rills, While the still morn went out with Sandals gray. (186-7) Haec, canebat and dum are all taken from Virgil - Haec super arvorum cultu pecorumque cane bam et super arboribus, Caeser dum magnus ad altum fulminat Euphraten bello. (559-561)

Among Calverley's papers was found an alternative rendering of -

Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep Clos'd o're the head of your lov'd Lycidas? (50-51)

The rejected couplet ran thus -

Quae mora vos tenuit, Nymphae, quum immitibus aequor Delicias Lycidam vestras submergeret undis?

The translator wisely preferred - Qua, Nymphae, latuistis, ubi crudele profundum Delicias Lycidam vestras sub vortice torsit?

Its superiority is obvious: (1) it is altogether more direct and adheres closely to Milton, (2) the question is not "What delayed you?" but "Where could you be found", as is shown by line 57 "Had ye bin there -", (3) though submergeret undis awakens memory of summergere ponto (Aen. 1,40), sub vortice torsit (Geo. 4,528) comes appropriately from the Orpheus epyllion, and (4) the weak caesura after latuistis is employed, as often in Virgil (cf. Daphnin ad astra feremus: amavit nos quoque Daphnis, Ecl.5,52) to heighten 122

emotion.

Of the longer poems which won Calverley university prizes Parthenonis Ruinae (Oxford 1851), 236 lines long, does not easily lend itself to a brief exposition of its undoubted merits. Into its complex fabric are woven dozens of Virgilian borrowings, deftly altered so as to defy easy recognition. The composer was familiar not only with Virgil's complete vocabulary, but with his full armoury of sense-pauses, and his capacity for handling weighty sequences of polysyllables.

Atlantea feror trans aequora, transque sonorum Nimbis Ionium, pastoralesque recessus Arcadiae. (Parth. Ruin. 1-3)

If we omit the second line, we see a resemblance to -

illas ducit amor trans Gargara transque sonantem Ascanium. (Geo. 3,269-70)

The metrical shape of C.S.C's second line is found rarely in Virgil, determined as it is by the placing of a dispondaic word followed by enclitic -que just after the main caesura. Virgilian examples include tempestatesque sonoras (Aen.1,53) tempestatesque serenat (Aen.1,255), inconcessosque hymenaeos (Aen.1,651) and Dodonaeosque lebetas (Aen.3,466); it seems to be an Ennian borrowing. Persius strangely uses it four times in 640 hexameters. Some later writers (e.g. Statius and Claudian) used it to excess. Not finding in Virgil a sentence quite as ponderous as Calverley's, I turned hopefully to Statius and was not disappointed. Consider how Achilleis 1 begins - 125

Monstratur Sinus.

We are reminded of the Sibyl guiding Aeneas through Limbo -

nee procul hinc partem fusi monstrantur in omnem lugentes campi. (Aen. 6,440-1)

Here the convict, patriis e finibus exsul (cf.Ecl 1,61) worked the land with hated plough (terram tractabat aratro). Is the repetition of consonants here an attempt at the effect of -

ergo aegre rastris terram rimantur? (Geo.3,534)

It was a soil bearing a rich yield of punishment - Fecundumque solum poenis, a phrase recalling the torture of Tityos (fecundaque poenis / viscera, Aen. 6. 598-9). "You could fancy," writes Calverley, "that the shore still groaned with the dragging of chains."

Credas littus adhuc tracta stridere catena; Sed fuit.

We see here stridor ferri tractaeque catenae (Aen.6,558). Sed fuit ("But that is all in the past") clearly imitates sed fortuna fuit ("but her old prosperity is no more"), spoken of Ardea, which is still a magnum nomen (Aen. 7,411-413). Most Virgil-lovers, however, would think first of fuit Ilium et ingens/gloria Teucrorum (Aen.2,325-6). These examples show, as well as brief citations can, with what assurance Calverley interwove disiecti membra poetae which crowded his mind when he sought classical parallels for conditions in the early colony. When he was born there would be many old men alive who 126

remembered the year 1770 when Captain Cook landed to the south of what is now Sydney. By his eighth birthday transportation was virtually over. Gold was found at Bathurst, a town in New South Wales on the Macquarie River, one of the first settlements west of the Blue Mountains as early as 1851, two years before this poem was written. At that time the ex-Harrovian was diligently pursuing everything except his studies in the University of Oxford.

The poem ends with an eleven-line passage modelled on Georgics 2, 490ff. The essential framework is felix qui potuit followed by_ fortunatus et ille. Here are the last three verses - Patris amans illi soboles, nee laeta laborum Uxor abest; non ille timet de nocte latrones, Non auctumnalem maturis frugibus imbrem.

Is it entirely fanciful to read in the word soboles a possible allusion to su qua mihi de te suscepta fuisset / ante fugam suboles, (Aen. 4,327-8), the little Aeneas whom Dido bore, and behind that to the Catullian baby of poem 61, 219 "smiling sweetly to greet his father"? Laeta laborum (Aen.11,73) certainly brings us to Dido and to the garment she made, in which was shrouded the lifeless form of Pallas. In the next line we are by contrast whisked away to Horace -

ut iugulent hominem, surgunt de nocte latrones. (Ep. 1.2.32). The third line is of course based on the amoebaean song of Eclogue 3 -

Triste lupus stabulis, maturis frugibus imbres. (80)

Though it is less than fair to judge this poem on the basis of the small selection here 127 given, I feel strongly that Calverley's heart never lodged in the Antipodes, and that it might apply the cutting phrase used by Tacitus of Galba's ingenium - magis extra vitia quant cum virtutibus.

Far different is the case with Carmen Saeculare, (2) a far superior hexameter poem, also composed in 1853, the motto of which was Quicquid agunt homines, nostri est farrago libelli. The setting is Cambridge. After an introductory passage of fifteen lines describing the winter delights and perils of ice and snow we are concerned exclusively with undergraduates as they prepare or fail to prepare for the rigours of the Mathematical Tripos. Reference is even made to the mathematical text-books of John Hymers (1803-87 -dirus "Hymers" - James Wood (1760-1839) -nee pondus inutile "Lignum" -, George Salmon (1819 - 1904) - "Salmoque" - and John William Colenso (1814 - 83) - pueris tu detestate Colenso. The latter became Bishop of Natal in 1853 and ten years later was solemnly excommunicated by Robert Gray, Bishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of Africa. All these torturers of the juvenile mind were subsumed in an almost Virgilian phrase horribiles visu formae (cf. Aen 6,277). C.S.C. respected a man who in a non-Horatian way could be termed numerosus. In the amusing verses entitled "Hie vir, hie est" (Aen. 6,791) he described his feeling as "an unassuming Freshman" -

Each perambulating infant Had a magic in its squall, For my eager eye detected Senior Wranglers in them all.

It is probably coincidental that 1853, the date of this poem, saw the appearance of the first part of "The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Undergraduate", written by the Reverend Edward Bradley (1827-89), who as a graduate of Durham 128

University, adopted the nom de plume of Cuthbert Bede. Since in his Hie vir, hie est the poet confesses that Bacon Brothers, the famous tobacconists of 17 Market Hill, Cambridge, accelerated the blunting of his moral feelings, we shall cite in full the section on smoking in Carmen Saeculare, merely remarking in passing that the notorious Cambridge Tobacco Riot of November 3, 1854, was not occasioned by these innocent hexameters -

At juvenis feed cruda viro viridisque juventus) Quaerit bacciferas, tunica pendente, tabernas: Pervigil ecce Baco furva depromit ab area Splendidius quiddam solito, plenumque saporem Laudat, et antiqua jurat de stirpe Jamaicae O fumose puer, nimium, ne crede Baconi: Manillas vocat; hoc praetexit nomine caules.

I append the author's own scholarly annotations. tunica pendente: h.e. "suspensa e brachio. Quod procuratoribus illis valde ut ferunt, displicebat. Dicunt vero morem a barbaris tractum, urbem Bosporiam in fl. Iside habitantibus. Bacciferas tabernas: id. q. nostri vocant "tobacco-shops".

We all recognise Charon's hand (Aen. 6,304) in the composition of the first line. As for line 3, we may not so readily remember that Juvenal (8,158) writes of low taverns kept open at night (pervigiles popinas). Antiqua de stirpe in the fifth verse is practically Virgilian (cf. Aen.1,626; 6,864). Eclogue 2, 17, the source of the penultimate line, is rendered by Calverley himself thus - 129

Put not, oh fair, in difference of hue Faith overmuch

The theft of Aeneid 4,172 -

coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam to supply the last line is obvious. In these two lines we cannot help but admire the ingenious pairing of 'block hexameters from pastoral and epic. To illustrate the word caules I quote Punch 1851, p.63), a publication dear to Calverley -

SCENE: A greengrocer's shop. DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Greengrocer and Old Lady. O.L. (holding a very small cabbage) "What! 3d for such a small cabbage? Why, I never heard of such a thing! Greengrocer: "Werry sorry, Marm; but it's all along 'o that Exhibition! What with them foreigners and the gents as smokes, cabbages has riz"

It was of course an old joke. In Punch for 1843, the year of the first appearance of 'Liddell & Scott', the University Intelligence' on page 218 complains of the 'vile effluvia of their penny rolls of cabbage leaf"

In the year after Carmen Saeculare appeared a great Trinity classicist, Frederick William Farrar, the too-much-maligned author of Eric: or Little by Little (1858), became ah assistant master at Marlborough College. In chapter 13 Eric, deputed to buy Easter eggs for a picnic, having taken longer than expected, says, to forestall the chaffing of Montagu and Russell - "Ay, but I've procured a more refined article. Guess what it is. "A more 130 refined article" echoes splendidius quiddam solito, as is proven by the sequel, when Eric, the Satanic tempter, enlightens his young companions by inviting his fraterculus Monty to have a whiff.

"A whiff! Oh! I see you've been wasting your tin on cigars - alias rolled cabbage-leaves. Oh fumose puer!"

Whether the Balliol drop-out who in some ways out-Ericed Eric, would sympathise with a story "written with but one single object - the vivid inculcation of inward purity and moral purpose' aliis post me memoranda relinquo!

This remarkable pastiche, which I edited thirty-five years ago (3), abounds in scholarly wit, but I shall bring this discursive lecture to an end by translating and commenting on the last eight lines. "Your fourth year has arrived. Having now properly prepared your subjects, go in exultantly and win, and compel the dons to give you a B.A. If you bear all this in mind you will escape the vast abyss. Aye, industrious youth, and, if you should somehow break the harsh bars of fate, you will end up as a Wrangler. At least you will not turn up year after year at the old diggings (i.e. the Senate House) and be plucked, spending the whole of your youth in misery. Nor, when you have failed to get into the class-list and are given up to unproductive grief will the witty Mr. Leach poke fun at you."

Quartus venit: ini, rebus jam rite paratis, Exultans, et coge gradum eonferre magistros. His animadversis, fugies immane Barathrum. His, operose puer, si qua fata aspera rumpas, Tu fixator eris. Saltern non crebra revises 131

Ad stabulum, et tota moerens carpere juventa; Classe nex amisso nil profectura dolentem Tradet ludibriis te plena leporis HIRUDO.

The Latin sources are easily enumerated. Rebus iam rite paratis (Aen.4,555): Aeneas is about to be warned by Mercury in a dream. Coge gradum conferee iuvencos (Geo. 3,169): bull-calves must be trained to step side by side. His animadversis (Geo.3,123): a didactic formula referring to the wise choice of a stallion. Immane barathrum (Aen. 8,245): the sight of Cacus's den is like a sudden vision of Hades. Heu, miserande puer ... eris (Aen. 6,882-3): comment on Calverley's adaption is superfluous! (Crebra revisit / ad stabulum desiderio perfixa iuvenci (Lucretius 2,359-60): the moving description of the cow vainly seeking her calf slain at the altar; but earlier in Carm. Saec. the words desiderio perfixa galeri have been used of an old gentleman's fruitless pursuit of a topper snatched by a gust of wind. Perpetua maerens carpere iuventa (Aen. 4,32): Dido's loneliness excites Anna's pity, Plena cruoris hirudo (Are Poetica 476): an incurable verse-monger is like a leech which refuses to let go until gorged with blood. On this we must quote C.S.C's annotation -

Obscurior allusio ad picturam quandam (in collectione viri, vel plusquam viri, Punchii repositam,) in qua juvenis custodem stationis moerens alloquitur. The issue of Punch for Saturday, Feb 12, 1853, p.70 carries an illustrated joke with this legend -

Railway Porter (picking up a young man's luggage): "First class, Sir?" Unfortunate Oxonian: "No, plucked!"

I have tried to paint a picture of an age long-dead, an age before (I quote Dacre 132

Balsdon) "even Oxford came to grips with the new and ugly word Research." Calverley

would, I am sure, have been amused by the plight of modern academics who, the more they grope towards the ever-receding light of knowledge, the more they are hag-ridden by the sinister shadow of the curriculum vitae.

NOTES

1. See "Charles Stuart Calverley and the DE DIE JUDICIP in CLASSICA ET IBERICA: A Festschrift in honor of the Reverend Joseph M. - F. Marique, S.J. (Worcester, Mass.

1975).

2. Edited in Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical Society (Literary & Historical Section), VI, 472-481, May 1950.

3. Notes & Queries, July 1972, 265-6. 133

Presidential address to the Society by W A Camps

Some personal reflections on Virgilian and Homeric narrative

Everyone knows how nicely particularised are the actions of the people in the Homeric poems. Achilles, welcoming his visitors in the ninth book of the Iliad, jumps up to greet them, lyre still in hand. Responding to Priam's appeal in the twenty-fourth book, he puts the old man gently from his knees - with what an abundance of expression in that slight movement. Odysseus, coming to the surface after the great wave has submerged him in the storm, spits out the salt-water that is trickling down from his wet hair over his face. Before he speaks to Eumaeus as they stand together outside his house, he lays his hand on the swineherd's arm. When he sees the old dog feebly wag his tail in recognition, he brushes a tear from his eye. And so on. All the time, the movement of the story is made both visible and animated by these small but remarkably expressive references to common experience.

Virgil too sometimes sees things in this way. One thinks, for instance of the creak of Charon's boat and the seeping of water in its bottom as it takes the pressure of Aeneas' weight. But more commonly we are invited to see Virgil's hero illuminated by some striking but static attributes: the brilliance of his eyes, the gorgeous cloak and sword that Dido gave him, the glittering shield that he bears as he goes out to do battle with Turnus. Or he is shown in a conventionally impressive posture, static or, one might say, statuesque: in an attitude of prayer, or erect with arm outstretched 134

to check or urge on the men he commands, or seated at the helm of his ship, or standing at its prow to pour libation, or holding out an olive-branch in sign of peace. When he is sleepless he does not toss and turn like Achilles or Odysseus: only his thoughts are restless. In other contexts, again, his presence is communicated as an image not clearly defined but impressively diffused - a dimly seen figure calling aloud in the silence of fallen Troy, or walking with the Sibyl in the twilight of the Underworld, or looming up before a doomed adversary, or casting an awful shadow over one who has fallen.

To this diffusion of the image in descriptions there corresponds a certain suggestive imprecision that appears sometimes in Virgil's poetic diction, an effect of common words un-commonly applied. His is a contrived diction, as Agrippa unsympathetically remarked, but one so thoroughly mastered by its contriver that it seems natural until one tries to translate it; and among its fruits are that subtle expressiveness and multiple suggestiveness and those uniquely emotive qualities of sound and rhythm that place Virigil among the chiefest of poets in virtue of his style alone. Because this style yields diffused impressions rather than sharply focussed images it is arguably not as effective a medium for narrative as is Homer's; and this no doubt was one reason for Edmund Wilson's warning (in his recommendation of Virgil for the formation of literary taste in the young): "At no time attempt to persuade them that this epic (the Aeneid) is a rattling good story". But of the excellence of the Virgilian style as a poetical medium this society will not need to be persuaded; nor of the the fact that its excellence can seldom indeed be transferred into English. How is anyone to render the quality of spem fronte serenat, or miserum inter amorem praesentis terrae fatisque vocantia regna, or inceptus clamor frustratur hiantes or so many other phrases that will come to mind? 135

Though I should like here to record my admiration for the Earl of Surrey's version of a passage that he makes seem more translatable than most, helped, forus, the flavour of a diction that will have been natural to him as it could not be to a man of our time:

They whisted all, with fixed face attent, When Prince Aeneas from the royal seat Thus gan to speak. O Queen! It is thy will I should renew a woe cannot be told: How that the Greeks did spoil, and overthrow The Phrygian wealth, and wailful realm of Troy: Those ruthful things that I myself beheld; And whereof no small part fell to my share. Which to express, who could refrain from tears; What Myrmidon? or yet what Dolopes? What stern Ulysses' waged soldier? And lo! moist night now from the welkin falls; And stars declining counsel us to rest. But since so great is thy delight to hear Of our mishaps, and Troye's last decay; Though to record the same my mind abhors, And plaint eschews, yet thus will I begin.

But I think that it is true as a general proposition that the very essence of Virgil's poetry is lost in translation. And this leads to some reflections which may well be personal to myself. 136

First, that for anyone brought up as I was to try mentally to "translate" Greek and Latin authors when reading them, it is a truly liberating experience to hear Virgil's verse recited - as of course it was meant to be - instead of receiving it from the printed page. The instinctive impulse to try to "translate" is prevented, and the pricking of a schoolboy conscience or the sense of intellectual defeat no longer stand between the poet and myself. For this reason I have been lastingly grateful to Denis Moore for the gift some years ago of the recording of a recitation of Aeneid II made by a cast of eminent Virgilians of whom he was one. It was a revelation to me to find how easy Virgil becomes to take in, and understand, and feel, if his words can be allowed to come directly to one without having to negotiate the barrier of an intellectual process on the way.

Secondly, I would suggest, though with diffidence, that Virgil should not be used to supply exercise in translation for learners of Latin, and that that kind of very necessary exercise should rely for its material on authors who use the Latin language in a more normally regulated way.

Thirdly, I wonder whether, in talking and writing about Virgil, we should not do well to emphasise more than has been the custom lately those virtues that appealed so strongly to our fathers (or grandfathers as the case may be) - the "Virgilian magic", the "stateliest measure" and so on.

Morality and ideology and numerology and critical insights and perceptions and complexities and ironies and tensions and polarities and patterns of imagery are all very well, and some of them do indeed justly merit attention. But there is an inevitable tendency in academic environments to over-emphasise those elements in any matter that lend themselves to intellectual discourse: and this can woefully distort the proper 137 impact of the whole. After all, truth depends for its value on perspective just as much as on fact; and true fact in false perspective will yield a falsehood as a result. A good deal of modern criticism risks thrusting into the foreground of the consciousness things which ought to be in its background, or even out of view behind the scene.

Now, Homer, unlike Virgil, has a poetic diction based on a specifically poetic vocabulary. But this vocabulary is not contrived by the poet, being inherited and so in an important sense natural to him. Natural also is Homer's cast of expression, "plain and direct", as Matthew Arnold said. As a result, once the vocabulary is learnt Homer's story will go as a rule quite easily and naturally into English. And as Homer's story, as he tells it, is in itself a clear and vivid as well as a moving one, it follows that a very great deal of the effect of the Iliad or Odyssey can be conveyed in ordinary but reasonably dignified English prose, especially if the prose can, in some degree, be given an appropriate quality of rhythm. This is made easier by the fact that the typical resources of emphasis that Homer uses are of a simple kind, such as can also be rendered without difficulty in English prose: I mean, such things as simple metaphor, explicit simile, and rhetorical figures of arrangement. Some precious things, to be sure, are inevitably lost in an English rendering: first, certain qualities and potentialities of sound that are peculiar to the Greek language; secondly, the unique combination of metrical precision with speed and variety which Homer's predominantly dactylic hexameter provides; and thirdly, the advantage that a traditional poetic diction, familiar though archaic, can absorb without disharmony certain archaic and dignified mannerisms - recurrent phrases and ornamental epithets and picturesequely quaint locutions - which a necessarily plainer modern English diction cannot so well accommodate. In losing these advantages much indeed is lost; but the essential narrative excellence remains. It results that translation of Homer - that is to say, translation which will convey a good proportion both of the character and of the power of the original - is not even in our times an impossible 138 undertaking, though some of the traditional epithets may have to be softened or omitted, and though the movement of Homer's verse is impossible to reproduce in English: a slow (or tripping or ambling) metre is more of a disturbance than an advantage, and it may be found in the end that plain prose after all is the best medium that a translator in our language can hope to discover.

The language of Homer, splendid as it is, is secondary in importance to the story. And this leads to a further reflection, of a different order. It is well known how clearly individualised are even the secondary and minor characters in Homer's poems. Agamemnon and Menelaus, Nestor and Odysseus, Ajax and Diomede, Hector and Paris and Priam in the Iliad, and in the Odyssey the suitors and servants in Ithaca and the retired survivors of the Trojan War on their Peloponnesian estates - every one has a distinctive quality or combination of qualities that makes him or her alive and interesting to the imagination. In the Aeneid things are otherwise. It is perhaps an incidental consequence of Virgil's way of working - beginning with an outline sketch - that secondary figures who were functional in the outline have been more niggardly furnished with distinctive personal characteristics than those who were to be purely decorative. For they could fulfil their function still without acquiring personality, and so have remained the faceless role-figures that they will naturally have been in the preparatory outline: Anchises (father of the hero), lulus (his son), Achates (his attendant), Helenus (the seer), Anna (Dido's sister and confidante), Latinus (king of Latium), Amata (his Queen), Lavinia (the contested bride), and so on. On the other hand, persons destined to enliven essentially decorative though otherwise dispensable episodes had naturally to be given a decorative potential: hence Achaemenides, Nisus and Euryalus, Mezentius, Camilla, for instance, are endowed with sensational attributes such as would make them noteworthy in the judgement of a journalist of today - which is not to say that they have "character" in any real sense of the word. As for the two principal secondary 139 figures, Dido and Turnus, Dido is memorable indeed as victim of a particular and extraordinarily intense emotional experience, but she has been given only such traits of condition and personality as are necessary to the presentation of this and to emphasise the pathos of it. The same in essence can be said of the much less memorable Turnus.

But in Virgil's Aeneas a more elaborate characterisation has evidently been intended, and the main features of this are clear enough. He is a man who bears a heavy burden of responsibility, with perseverance, to the end: never yielding (though sorely tried and sometimes faltering) to the pressures of doubt and disappointment and danger and personal affections and, above all, of an often almost overwhelming fatigue. He is also a man of contradictions: affectionate yet cold-hearted, compassionate yet ruthless, self- disciplined yet liable to eruptions of savage rage. These could be the ingredients of a convincing and interesting and perhaps ultimately sympathetic human personality. But Virgil has not, to some of our minds at least, succeeded in causing a live image of his hero to emerge. He has left a sketch in which some traits are not firmly enough drawn, and others not firmly enough related one to another: an outline in part too faint and in part too incoherent.

The supposed hazards and hardships and long duration of Aeneas' journeying are too cursorily illustrated. His survival and indeed his victory in the war for Latium are from the outset too confidently promised, to him as well as to ourselves the readers. We are told, rather than helped to feel, that tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem. Meanwhile Aeneas' sentiments in regard to Dido are left obscure, and the revengeful fury that he exhibits in the latter part of the poem is not sufficiently motivated in the context of his relationship with Pallas and his humane professions: Aeneas is no Achilles and Pallas no Patroclus. 140

This lack of coherent reality in the person of the hero - or at least of a coherent reality sufficiently expressed - does not prevent the Aeneid from being the nobly conceived and adorned artefact that it is, a document of profound human experience, an expression of the mind of an age, and a golden river of musical and emotive language. Moreover, sympathetic readers have always been able to fill in from their own imaginations what Virgil's broken outline of his hero leaves obscure: and perhaps in this after all the obscurity itself may find its justification.

But if one needs more help than the poet gives us to imagine his Aeneas as a living creature flesh and blood, then I believe - though I confess it with apprehension - that a helpful supplement can be found in the account that ancient writers give us of the life and person of Virgil's patron Octavian-Caesar-Augustus - after making due allowance for adulation and malignity in the sources that those writers drew on, and bearing in mind above all that Virgil's Aeneas is certainly not supposed to be a portrait of his patron. For though Octavian is not the original of Aeneas, he was inevitably much in Virgil's mind when the Aeneid was in process of being made. And as one reads the hundred chapters of Suetonius' Life, and Seneca's anecdotes, and the Res Gestae, and the narratives of Appian and Dio, one becomes aware of a very real though enigmatic personality: and one also is recurrently intrigued to remark one or other of those correspondences between facts or events in history and particulars in Virgil's poem which were collected by Professor Drew in support of his interpretation of the Aeneid as an allegory, and which, whether they support that interpretation or not, are certainly worthy to receive attention. (Collectors of such correspondences will have noticed two at least in passages earlier referred to this afternoon: the brilliance of Aeneas' eyes as described in Aeneid I and the picture of him pouring libations from his ship's prow at the sailing from Sicily in Aeneid V.) The result of perusing this material in the ancient authors' own accounts will not, I think, be to persuade one that Aeneas is a 141 portrait or the Aeneid an allegory. But for me at least the reality of the enigmatic person in history gives substance to the reality of Virgil's creation.

The final reflection that occurs to me from alternate readings of Homer and of Virgil is this. The Aeneid in one respect at least, as we are often told, exhibits (and recommends) the victory of the virtues of discipline, principle and duty over unregulated emotion, and looks forward to the establishment of an ordered and peaceable society in consequence. But principle can be misguided, and become self-righteously inhuman: an ordered society can be rigid, and the quest for just institutions - so perpetually elusive - can lead in practical reality to unjust results. To the moral of the Aeneid there is a complementary moral in the Iliad, in the scene at its end in which common humanity, generous natural instinct, unaffected by principles or systems, expels as by magic two passionate reciprocal hates, and replaces them with mutual sympathy and mutual respect. The Iliad ends in an act of natural humanity, as the Aeneid does not.