But Which Must Refer to Something Ancient and Traditional, Belonging to Italy
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- 50 - but which must refer to something ancient and traditional, belonging to Italy. Aeneas is called 'indigetem' (Aen.794) by Jupiter and described as destined for Heaven and the stars. (3) Romulus, the traditional legendary founder of the urbs aeterna, symbol of Roman rule. (4) Vesta mater, to Vergil the most Roman concept of all, Vesta of the Roman hearth, long before she was equated to Hestia, the symbol of the family and of the State, which is the family writ large and is endowed with the tradition of the Vestal Virgins. This was not a Greek idea. Vesta is so important that she is described as the one who preserves Tuscan Tiber and the Roman Palatine (most ancient of Roman sites) - quae Tuscum Tiberim et Romana Palatia servas (singular, with quae referring to Vesta). Now the poet who is perhaps nearest to Vergil in his regard for the country side, is Tibullus. He has a deeply rooted religious feeling for Tellus Mater, as distinct from the Alexandrian attitude of Propertius and Ovid. When he is lying sick at Corcyra, as Luck points out, (’Latin Love - Elegy1, p.70) he invokes di patrii where Propertius would have appealed to dique deaeque omnes of the Greek Pantheon. He frequently calls on Pales, Silvanus, Ceres in their Italian context, as Vergil does. He dwells on the typical Italian concept of the Genius, of whom Horace says (Epist.II.2.187) that he goes with us (comes) to influence of destiny (natale — astrum) and that he is naturae deus humanae - an ascription of high power and an acknowledgement of the spiritual element behind human life. So too, Tibullus uses the Roman Genius in the place of the Alexand rian Graces, a purely Roman conception in the place of Greek convention. In the attitude to the old Italian ideas of deity there is a certain affinity between Vergil and Tibullus which is related to their deep regard for the Italian countryside and which is contrasted in certain passages to their literary adoption of the Olympian gods. Vergil's thought however is deeperthan that of Tibullus; but we cannot go into that now. SERVIUS - COMMENTATOR AND GUIDE by R.D. Williams,M.A. Servius' commentary on Virgil is widely used by classical scholarship as a source book for antiquarian information of all sorts - mythology, religion, law, social and political history, geography, philosophy, and so on; and it is invaluable for its citations of ancient authors and authorities which we would not otherwise have. My question is - how reliable, how helpful, is Servius for the understanding of Virgil? If he tells us that saeva Iuno (Aen.1.4) is an archaism for magna Iuno, should we believe him? If he says that finem dedit ore loquendi (Aen.6.76) means 'he defined to her that she should speak it with her lips', do we accept it? If we try to classify his attitudes, to place him in the context of his times and of his personal excellencies and limitations, we shall better be able to see when he is likely to be correct, and when he may be in error; we may be less inclined to unreasonable panegyric or violent denigrat ion of his judgment. In what follows all the examples quoted occur both in the shorter version (S) and the longer version (DS). I do not think the picture would very greatly change if examples were taken from those parts of DS which do not occur in S; but it is no part of my present intention to discuss this complicated relationship.1 Let us consider then some of the special attitudes and prejudices of Servius, beginning with the most general and obvious one, that his chief interest is in learning for its own sake. He lived at a time when pedantry was unusually pervasive - we may illustrate this from the qualities admired in - 51 - Virgil by various characters in Macrobius' Saturnalia (roughly contemporary with Servius): they salute not only a great poet but an encyclopedia, an antiquarian source-book. After an attack on Virgil by one Evangelus, the others agree to state what they find most admirable in Virgil. Vettius says 'his knowledge of priestly lore', Flavianus 'his knowledge of augural lore', Eustathius 'his imitation of Greek authors', Albinus 'his knowledge of antiquity'. After further discussion they all agree that he really excels in ars rhetorica: they discuss the four types of oratory, and decide that Virgil is surpassing in all of them. They then return to imitation, and a long list is given of Virgiiian borrowings from Homer, then from other Greeks, then from Roman authors. Finally Servius (who is a character in the Saturnalia) expounds some of the difficult passages, and the emphasis is on the learning both of Virgil and of Servius. My point here is exemplified in Servius' introductory note on Aeneid 6, to which he comes with special relish as the most learned book of all: 'totus quidem Vergilius scientia plenus est, in qua hic liber possidet principatum*. We must not then look in Servius for imaginative interpretation, for penet rative insight into the poet's intention, for any of the sensitive warmth or sympathetic enthusiasm that we find in Longinus. When he tells us for example in his introductory comment to the Aeneid that Virgil's intention was to imitate Homer and praise Augustus through his ancestors (Homerum imitari et Augustum laudare a parentibus) this is not the literary judgment of a critic who has considered the poem deeply and reached a carefully weighed conclusion, but the superficial answer of the commentator to the question he must answer - what is the purpose of the author, scribentis intentio? When he tells us at the beginning of Aeneid 4 that the whole book is taken from Apollonius Arg.3 ('Apollonius Argonautica scripsit, et in tertio inducit amantem Medeam; inde totus hic liber translatus est') he does not seem to us to have reacted the heart of the matter; when he goes on 'sane totus est in consiliis et subtilitatibus, nam paene comicus stilus est, nec mirum ubi de amore tractatur' we do not feel that this summarises the impact of the book. This literary insensitivity and stereotyped scholarship is well discussed by T.R. Glover (Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, Chapter VIII). Saintsbury (A History of Criticism, vol.I. 334 f.) comments thus on Servius' method: 'You construct, or accept from tradition as already constructed, a vast classification of terms and kinds, hierarchically arranged; and when a subject presents itself you simply refer it to the classification'. And again 'But of criticism nothing, or less than nothing'. James Henry (Aeneidea, vol.iii. p.77) is more outspoken still: 'Servius, the third of the commentators of whom I have here been led to speak, derives from the accident of his having lived so much nearer to the time of Virgil a double advantage over the other two: viz. a vernacular knowledge of the language, and access to sources of information respecting Virgil which have since been lost. Notwithstanding these two great advantages, Servius (or whoever else may have been the author of the commentaries ascribed to Servius) was, owing to defects in himself, infinitely inferior as a commentator of Virgil both to Voss and Heyne. Totally destitute of poetical sentiment, and stone-blind to Virgil's fascinating grace and elegance, Servius sees nothing in the Aeneid but a mere matter-of-fact narrative, such as might have come from the pen of an Aratus or an Avienus, and writes comments on it which bear the same relation to those of Heyne and Voss as we may suppose critiques upon the dramas of Shakespeare, written some two hundred years ago by the master of a village grammar school in Yorkshire, would bear to those of Schlegel.' But while we may well agree that Servius lacks literary insight and penetration, we should not therefore discount his other qualities. We should attempt instead to define in what ways his love of learning rather than of literature have affected his outlook. - 52 - One particular way, which especially concerns us now, in which Servius' pedantry found expression was in his passion for the 'Rules', rules of grammar, rhetoric, metre and so o n . 3 He had a rich heritage of predecessors in this field extending back more than four centuries (look for example at Books 8 and 9 of Quintilian), and he commands a formidable and prodigious technical vocab ulary. He was himself a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, one of its acknowledged masters (Macrob.Sat.6.6). There is perhaps no harm in using tags like acyrologia, tapeinosis, cacemphaton, antiptosis, hysteron proteron and so on, unless you are using them as labels to conceal the fact that you cannot make out what the poet has really said and so you are altering it to what you can understand. The figure hypallage (’transferred epithet') is much abused in this connexion; the implication often is that once the commentator has divined this trick of the poet, and transferred the epithet back, all becomes well. The winner in this line is ’antiptosis’, the substitution of one case for another. It is a kind of joker card: it gives carte blanche. In some cases when Servius uses it no harm is done: at Aen.5.609 Iris descends to earth per mille coloribus arcum and Servius says 'aut subaudis factum, aut antiptosis est mille colorum'. To call the ablative of description antiptosis for the genitive of description is accept able. But in the difficult phrase at Aen.11.149 f.