Humour in Virgil

Revised from a paper given to the Virgil Society on 21 October 200(6

I have no philosophical row to hoe. I start from the point that we can say there is humour wherever there is a smile. There are, of course, very many different sorts of smile. This short article, which covers very familiar ground, will deal with a number of different smiles, and perhaps consider a little of what Virgil is doing by raising them.

Routine Humour

Virgil is an epic poet, and there are some smiles which are de rigueur. That is routine humour.

Iliad 23 provides a certain amount o f slapstick at the funeral games. For all his accomplishment in running, the lesser Ajax slips in the muck and loses his first place to Odysseus; he looks ridiculous but he still wins a prize. In Virgil’s running race (5.315-61) Nisus contrives Euryalus’ victory, falling in blood and dung himself, but deliberately tripping Salius as he does so. Aeneas laughs at Nisus’ dung-covered features (358). His laughter is kindly (he is described as pater optimus as he laughs) and he gives Nisus a consolation prize. Previously, in the boat-race (5.114-285), Captain Gyas has become enraged with his cautious steersman Menoetes who is giving the turning-rock too wide a berth. He chucks him into the water and thinks he can do better himself (172-82). Menoetes is a comic sight as he flops into the water, swims to safety, and coughs up salt water. The Trojans certainly think so. They laugh loudly and insistently (risere, 180; rident, 181).

Gallows humour is part of the fighting. In Iliad 16.645-50 Patroclus, killing Cebriones, knocks him out of Hector’s chariot in a manner which invites mockery. The episode is recalled in Aeneid 10.592-94, where Lucagus suffers a similar fate.

1 Acknowledgements: Theo Zinn who taught me a few years back. The late Stephen Instone for his essay on ‘Humour in Virgil’ (P. G. M. Brown, T. E. H. Harrison, S. Instone (eds), Θεφ Λώρον: Essays by past pupils in honour of Theo Zinn for his 84th birthday, 2006, Leominster, 63-72); R. Coleman, Virgil: Eclogues, 1977, Cambridge; R. Thomas, Virgil,: Georgics, 1988, Cambridge. For unpublished constructive suggestions David West, James Morwood and Jonathan Foster himself, who was a graduate at Oxford when I was an undergraduate, and we were colleagues and victims of Fraenkel’s seminars. 2 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 27 (2011)

In these instances the poet tells us that his characters find humour in events. Does he himself? The context can offer clues: Menoetes in the water is an entertaining sight, but the laughter o f the Trojans is a little excessive, and reminds us that Menoetes is not a young man, that Gyas has in fact made a mistake.

Georgics

Does playfulness count as humour? If so, the Georgics are full o f it, perhaps first, as Instone observes, in the complicated consideration of Octavian’s catasterism at 1.33-35: “There is a gap between Virgo and the chasing Claws: in fact blazing Scorpio is pulling his arms together and leaving you more even than your fair share of heaven”.2

It is fun also to contemplate creatures having a good time, as birds do when bad weather is imminent. 1.385-87: “You can see rivalry as they soak their shoulders with masses of water, now pushing their heads into the stream, now running into the waves, taking delight in the joy o f bathing for its own sake”.3 It is entertaining to think o f the crane as engaged in a plot on the farmer’s crops: the adjective improbus turns birds into conspirators in 1.119-121: “M uch damage is done [to crops] by the sly goose and the crane”.4 The exiguus mus o f 1.181 is presented by Instone as Psicharpax king o f the mice in the Batrachomyomachia, on the grounds that monosyllabic line endings in Virgil convey majesty,5 — which is nice, and so they can — but in fact of some 30 monosyllabic endings in Virgil you could only make this point strongly about three of them,6 and just about the only general point to be made is that they disrupt the rhythm and often call attention to the monosyllable — so that the mouse is there, small word for small person, rather as in Hor. Sat. 2.6.80 rusticus urbanum murem mus paupere/fertur accepisse cavo, (“A country mouse, they say, welcomed a town mouse in the poverty o f his hole”) where the little mice are sheltered in mid-sentence by big words around.

In 3.219-36 we find two bulls fighting in the Sila. An agricultural commonplace is amusingly elevated to an epic scene: (proelia; bellantis; victor; signa movet; the human emotions, the training programme). The narrative style plays its part: we are building up

2 Cf. Instone (n.1 above) 68. 3 certatim largos umeris infundere rores, nunc caput obiectare fretis, nunc currere in undas, et studio incassum videas gestire lavandi. 4 nec tamen ... nihil improbus anser Strymoniaeque grues et amaris intiba fibris officiunt. 5 Instone (n. 1 above) 67. 6 hominum rex, Aen. 1.65, 2.648, 10.2, 743; restituis rem, Aen. 6.846; magnis dis, Aen. 3.12, 8.679. Keith Maclennan - Humour in Virgil 3

to a terrific climax: the bull charges signa movet praecepsque oblitum fertur in hostem: 7 the rumble of his charging gallop is reflected in the coincidence of ictus and accent almost throughout the line - and then - a simile intervenes and we never discover what the result is. The story is also potentially an epic: do the iuvenca and the bulls represent Helen, Paris and Menelaus? 219 might suggest that the heifer is coyly indifferent. Or is she like Lavinia, never revealed as having any preference? There is an obvious similarity between 220 and Aen. 8.452: is the humour one way — the Cyclopes in the divine forge are savage like the

bulls, or the other - the bulls are superhuman like the Cyclopes?8

3.349-66 is a passage about the Ukrainian winter. Does Virgil expect us to believe these tales? A discriminating audience might be entertained by travellers’ tales but not taken in by them: compare Alcinous’ response to Odysseus in Od. 11.363-68. Stories may be told without the expectation that they be believed, like Caesar’s version of how to catch

an elk (BG 6.27). There is a market for stories about the northern winter.9 Here, “no blade of grass on ground or a leaf on tree” (353); “they take an axe to slice the liquid wine” (364); “bronze pots split everywhere apart” (363); and the marvellous onomatopoeic line (362) describing wagons crunching over frostbound water: puppibus illa prius, patulis nunc

hospita plaustris. 10 The account is surely given for the frisson and the fun.

Eclogue 2

The origin for Corydon is Theocritus’ Cyclops (11), a youngster in a muddle. His muddle is externalised: he has to make the best of a rather odd appearance. He is a land creature who has yet to learn to swim (60); she is a sea-creature. Yet the distinction is blurred: Polyphemus wishes he could have gills to go and visit Galatea — but this doesn’t seem to mean that Galatea herself has gills, especially since he first met her picking apples with his mum. It’s left open to us to think that Polyphemus represents every teenage boy who thinks he needs to look totally different from his present dreary self, and is worried by girls who giggle — is it because they want me or because they want to make me look a fool?

7 “He advances and hurtles headlong on the foe who has forgot him” (trans. Day Lewis). Unacknowledged translations are the author’s. 8 The bulls of Sila appear again in Aen. 12.715-22, and here they do represent Aeneas and Turnus as they engage in their final combat. That passage is half the length of the bull-narrative here, and there is little of the hyperbole or of the romantic comedy by which the fair maiden is seen as the prize of victory — an interesting example of Virgil using similar material for different purposes. 9 Hor. C. 1.22.17-20; Ov. Tr. 3.10, 23-24: nudaque consistunt formam servantia testae vina, / nec hausta meri, sed data frusta bibunt — a typical Ovidian expansion of a Virgilian idea, rather than the exile’s personal experience? 10 “(Water) harbours broad-beamed waggons, that once was a home for ships” (trans. Day Lewis). 4 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 27 (2011)

Corydon’s poem is “unpolished” (4). His passion is “idle” (5). Nobody is there when he sings his song. W e know that Alexis is “fair o f face and o f form” (candidus, 16; formose, 17), and the pet of someone else. That is all. We hear about some of the other characters in Corydon’s life: Thestylis, Amaryllis, Menalcas, Damoetas, Amyntas. We end up knowing more about all these (except Menalcas) than we do about Alexis; as Coleman points out11 , Corydon does more to praise himself than to praise Alexis. In his self-absorption, he makes absurd claims for himself: “I own a thousand she-lambs wandering the mountains of Sicily” (21). His confidence in his music is expressed in an astonishing line Amphion Dircaeus in Actaeo Aracyntho (24):12 four Greek names; a four syllable ending, two recondite epithets, a hiatus and a very irregular caesura. It stands out from its context so strikingly as to make one think of Cicero: hunc σπονδειάζοντα si cui voles τών νεωτέρων pro tuo vendito (Att.7.1.1).13 Amphion moved rocks by his singing (Hor. C. 3.11.2), and Corydon has evidently been trying to play Amphion to Alexis’ rock. But Dircaeus, although a traditional epithet for Thebans and used of course by Horace in describing Pindar as “the swan of Dirce” (C. 4.2.25), is distinctly mal trovato in the context o f Amphion: Dirce was his evil aunt, and he arranged for her to be dismembered by a bull. We gather what Alexis’ reaction was from l. 25. Poor Corydon is unhappy: “I’m not as hideous as all that” — nec sum adeo informis. He has seen himself in the water o f the sea. Now at this point you may think me altogether too fanciful. There are two other occasions where individuals checked their own appearance by using the sea or a pool as a mirror: Narcissus when he admired himself a little too much, and Athena when she found that playing the flute was a disfiguring pursuit. The perfect infinitive trivisse (34) may suggest that Corydon has actually given Alexis a music lesson on the pipes so emphatically associated with Pan.14 Evidently it did not go very well: Alexis complained “it ruins my looks” or perhaps just “my lip’s sore”, threw the pipes down and ran off, leaving Corydon to console himself with the divine precedent.

Corydon is demented. His love is doomed from the start. He lives in the country, Alexis in town; he can offer nothing but things which will seem sordida (28, 44) to Alexis, while Alexis’ master Iollas can offer real presents, no doubt like the narrator in Petronius Sat. 86. Corydon overestimates himself to the point o f fantasy. He composes an imaginary bouquet for Alexis15 o f plants which could not be in flower together (and does not yet, as Theocritus’

11 n.1 (above) 108. 12 “(... all that was once sung by) Dircaean Amphion on (Mount) Aracynthus in Attica”. 13 If σπονδειάζοντα may be permitted to stand for “self-advertising Alexandrian line”. 14 Compare the gently erotic music-lesson ‘Pan and Daphnis’ from Herculaneum (Naples Museum 6329). 15 48-55, with Coleman’s notes (n.1 above). Keith Maclennan — Humour in Virgil 5

Polyphemus does (58), recognise and laugh at himself for the impossibility). His dementia reaches a climax in 60, the point where he actually attributes dementia to Alexis. Gods have lived in woods, and so has Paris, the ultra-successful, but doomed, lover. He sets up a contrast between Pallas Athena, the archetypal city-dweller—and the country dweller—himself. He then sets up a bizarre sequence o f pursuit which is a parody o f its original. Polyphemus is distressed when Galatea runs from him like a sheep which has seen a grey wolf (24). In Corydon’s wolf the desire to eat and the longing for love seem not to be distinguished (63-64).

At last in 69 Corydon, acknowledging that the madness is his, turns to basket- making. In Theocritus, Polyphemus’ appeal is framed within a conversation between the poet and the doctor Nicias, and one of the ironies is that the expression of love-sickness is its own treatment. At the end of Theocritus, it is that point on which we focus, and there is a sting in the tail — “at least if one’s a poet one can avoid paying the bills you doctors charge” (81). In Virgil there is no narrator to conclude. Corydon has understood his own absurdity. We have laughed at him, but as he ends with a rueful invenies alium, we are laughing with him too.16

There are other passages in the Eclogues which advertise themselves as humorous. There is the altercation of Menalcas and Damoetas in 3, a spiteful conversation reminiscent o f Horace Sat. 1.5.51-70. Here too music and poetry seem to play a reconciling part, if the participants do in fact accept Palaemon’s verdict that each is as good as the other. There is the whimsy where life by the Rhine in winter intrudes into the Arcadian setting and Gallus prays for Lycoris that the sharp ice should not cut her tender feet (10.49). But you may think that to represent a Roman’s mistress as an Arcadian shepherdess would hardly attract attention in a society where Octavian dresses up as Apollo at a Banquet of the Twelve Gods, Sextus Pompeius parades himself as “son of Neptune”, and Antony has himself portrayed on the gemstone of a ring as a naked Hercules.17

Intertextual Humour

I have not given much time to intertextual humour, but I suspect there is a great deal to be done in this area. Here are one or two examples o f how the question could be approached. One instance I have already mentioned — Corydon’s multi-seasonal bouquet

16 Theocritus 11 and Eclogue 2 are very different in tone. The narrator’s frame distances the subject. We know from the start that the Cyclops cures himself of his infatuation — by singing his song. The lover and his loved one are totally incompatible. The Cyclops is early on aware of his own absurdity. The humour is lighter: Theocritus is Belloc to Virgil’s Chekhov. 17 Apollo: Suet. Aug. 70; “son of Neptune”: Dio Cass. 48.19; Hercules: Naples, Mus. Naz. 25218. 6 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 27 (2011)

(2.45-55) whose impossibility he doesn’t acknowledge, though Polyphemus his original does. Also, Corydon’s nervous confidence in his own good looks (25) acquires a little extra with the knowledge that Polyphemus shares his concern and recognises that one eye stretching from ear to ear (31-33) is not much o f a recommendation. In Aen. 4 there is a famous simile (404-07) where the Trojans, active once more after the long pause in Carthage, are compared to a nest o f ants. The description begins it nigrum campis agmen. On this phrase Servius comments that it had previously been used by Ennius to refer to elephants.

The Aeneid

It might be thought that there was not much place for humour in the Aeneid, when the subject matter is so loaded with seriousness and the events so full of tragedy. But let me start in mediis rebus with book 6, Aeneas at the crossing of the Styx. Charon is introduced. The first word to refer to him (298) is portitor.118 It is not a word from elevated language: it is at home in comedy and the world of administration. Portitores are jumped-up interfering jobsworths. At the beginning of the Menaechmi Menaechmus I is fulminating at his wife (115): “whenever I go out, you stop me, haul me back, question me, where I’m off to, what I’m up to what my business is, what I’m looking for, what I’m bringing back, what I did when I was out — I have to go through such an interrogation that I might just as well have married a portitor ’. Cicero (Rep. 4.7) creates a bathetic contrast: “I don’t want to see the same nation as the world’s imperator and its portitor”. There is of course more to Charon — he may be a portitor and squalidly dressed too, but he is a terrifying one. Still, when he speaks, he does so in the language of an underpaid, uncared-for night-watchman. “Stop right there; don’t come any nearer” (389), as if Aeneas’ human weapons were a source of alarm to him. He is scared that Aeneas might be Hercules come back again. Hercules had been after Cerberus — and a fat lot of good Cerberus had been as a guard dog anyway. He had evidently (396) scuttled off to his master’s rooms and hidden there trembling under Pluto’s throne. It hadn’t been Charon’s fault, but Charon had caught it good and proper, chained up for a year.19 But now the sight of the golden branch placates

18 The word occurs three times in Virgil (Ge. 4.502; Aen. 6.298, 326). On its first appearance (portitor Orci) it should be understood as referring to Charon as Pafkontroll not as ferryman. In the Aeneid the two functions are conspicuously united. Later writers take over the idea of Charon as portitor and use the word to mean “ferryman, carrier”. In Columella, Rust. 10.155 the ram with the golden fleece is portitor Helles. Petronius and Juvenal seem to use porthmeus as a metrically tractable substitute for oblique cases ofportitor, so clearly the “ferryman” idea has taken root by then. What did they originally call a man who rowed people across the Tiber? Simply navita? But portitor used by Virgil of Charon seems to indicate that he is taking over an Aristophanic approach to the character. 19 nec sum laetatus 392; Servius ad loc. Keith Maclennan — Humour in Virgil 7

him. Grumpy to begin with, he is now too ready to please. He is half way across with a cargo of souls. They will just have to wait. He brings them all back to this side and bundles them unceremoniously out. One hopes for their sake that deturbat laxatque foros (412)20 is a hysteron proteron. As Aeneas steps into the boat it is impossible not to think of Dionysus in Frogs. Virgil does not altogether discourage us, as we are made vividly aware of the frail, barely adequate construction of the boat (413-14). From one thing only he holds back: Charon does not ask for a fare — but perhaps the branch counts as a complimentary ticket.

The Sibyl plays her own part in this sequence. This part seems to come not from comedy but rather from satire or the law courts. Casta licet patrui servet Proserpina limen (402). “We have no designs on Proserpina’s modesty: let her continue in her relationship with her uncle and keep what decency she can claim”. Humour, if of a black sort. She has already been established as a somewhat schoolmistressly sort of character, except when engaged in her formal responsibilities as priestess. The Trojans are admiring the carvings on the temple door when she first sees them, and her opening words are designed to make them feel in the wrong: “This is no time for standing and staring like that” (37). Then praestiterit, perfect subjunctive, the tense and mood of polite (but perhaps somewhat patronising) suggestion: “I rather think it would be better ...” She maintains this austere demeanour throughout their underworld journey, and calls Aeneas sharply to order when he seems to be spending too much time talking to Deiphobus: “It will be dark in no time” (539); and in Deiphobus’ response we get an idea of the aggressive tone in which this is delivered: “D on’t be angry” (544). There is humour here, and it arises out o f the fact that the Sibyl has been given a well-marked personality. She is as dignified as her august office requires, but she is surely just a touch bossy.

It is in fact something of a surprise to find the Sibyl such a personage. In instructing Aeneas to visit her (3.441-52), Helenus speaks o f“the mad prophetess, who sings her songs o f destiny deep under a cliff. She puts names and marks on leaves and files them carefully away in her cave. But whenever the door is opened and a breeze blows through the cave, they are all scattered, and she never then bothers to put them back in order. People go away without getting an answer, thoroughly discontented with the Sibyl’s establishment”. Helenus’ word for “without getting an answer” is inconsultus. This word is piously glossed by the OLD thus: “poetic word: ‘not having received advice at a consultation’”. No other

20 “He bundles them out and lowers the gangways” 8 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 27 (2011)

instance o f its use in this sense is to be found in L& S, OLD or TLL.21 I am reminded, perhaps with no good reason, of Plautus Aul. 368, where the slave contemplates saving the day by having dinner cooked at the bottom of a well ... but then what if the cooks eat the dinner themselves down there? The result will be superi incenati sunt et cenati inferi (“the high-ups will be dinnerless and the low-downs dinnered”). The comic association is not inconsistent with Helenus’ description. The Sibyl here is presented as a scatterbrain.22

You may not altogether go along with me in these readings. But we can surely agree that there is no need to read Virgil solemnly. I f David West is to be believed, there is even a touch of lightness about the parade of heroes: quo fessum rapitis, Fabii (6.845), as the Fabii, last in the line, bundle along poor old Cunctator, hesitant as his name suggests, in their eagerness to keep up with the rest.

Where does this begin? Very early in book 1, when that dishonest schemer Juno gets together with a creep called Aeolus. This Aeolus is not a sociable character like Odysseus’ Aeolus, who lives a pleasant family life with his wife and six sons married to six daughters, managing the winds only in a brief two-line parenthesis (10.21-22). In Virgil Aeolus is a prison governor — and, in case we should forget this, we are told it twice (54, 141). He governs on his own. Juno appears in front of him (65-75) and makes him an offer he can hardly refuse — an offer of perpetual marriage to her loveliest nymph, using the same words (“I shall join you in a secure marriage and declare her your own”, (73) as when she proposes a perpetual marriage between Dido and Aeneas in 4.126. Even here, the cozening tone (she is described as supplex — “begging”, 64) of her words invites scepticism. Aeolus’ response is the functionary’s flattery to his superior. “Ma’am, you just decide what you like best. That’s all the hard work you need to do. My sacred duty is to obey orders” (76-77). (I am making a lot of the stressed positions of optes, labor and fas est). We have just heard from Juno that Aeolus receives his responsibility direct from Jupiter, so it is a surprise now to hear him in flattering tones attributing it all in a long tricolon to Juno herself, with a suitable expression of modesty — “This little kingdom of mine” (78). Are we intended to think that he subsequently received his nymph and that the “fair offspring” which Juno promised him (75) consisted of those who helped to entertain Odysseus?

21 TLL refers to the usage as “rather bold” (audacius). 22 Both presentations of the Sibyl raise a smile. Why does Virgil offer us both? Is her demeanour in 6 a corrective for the impression given in 3, Virgil having felt the need to give the Sibyl the status appropriate to the Augustan restoration of Cumae as a sacred site? Keith Maclennan — Humour in Virgil 9

If so, I can include it in the intertextual humour. It’s probably an irrelevant entertainment that the last person to have been described as “mighty ruler of storms” (80) was Caesar Octavian himself in Ge. 1.27. But do you not think that this scene has some of the characteristics of ‘Yes, Minister’, and that Virgil’s skill is such that it is possible to smile at the intrigue and then immediately get caught up by the tremendous power of the storm which Aeolus lets loose?

If gods in discussion are a source of high comedy, it is worth considering their other conversations, perhaps most obviously in 8.370-406, when Venus persuades Vulcan to make Aeneas the arms he needs. The first point is another intertextual one. On the face of it, the scene is a replay of the very chaste little conversation (Il. 18.428-67) in which Hephaestus agrees to Thetis’ request to make arms for Achilles. But there is also, in the Odyssey, the story of how Hephaestus employed his skill at the expense of Ares and Aphrodite (8.266-366); here we have a story of Venus employing her skill to persuade Vulcan to do something for herself — and, in the end, for her own and Mars’ common descendants. Her speech is artful in the extreme, beginning with a captatio benevolentiae — “I was so good as not to trouble you when I might well have done”, and continued by a combination of beautiful-girl-in-tears with a little spicing of jealousy (“you did for her, and her”). Vulcan is reluctant (cunctantem, 388) but a hug persuades him, and all o f a sudden he, the fire-god, is on fire himself, full of reasons why of course he would have done what Venus asked anyway, had she simply taken the trouble to ask. There follow three scenes: two charming quiet little domestic ones — the midnight wool-worker first (407-13), Evander getting out of bed to the sound of birdsong third (453-56) — and in the middle the din, heat and sweat of the giants’ metalworks. I don’t know quite where you do smile at this sequence, but smile you surely must, and that is why I mention it. When Vulcan reaches his workshop, there is a scene of amazing productivity, but the old god is so much under his wife’s spell that work commissioned by Jupiter, Mars, Minerva (could you conceive of any clients more important?) all goes out of the window (tollite cuncta, 439) to satisfy her and her son — who is, on top of it all, not even his.

Juno appears again in conversation in 4.90, this time with Venus. She wants to bring Venus in on her scheme to unite Dido and Aeneas. But she cannot be bothered to make a serious effort to persuade her. Her tone to Venus throughout this conversation is patronising and contemptuous, very much, one thinks, as a patrician grande dame might treat the wife of a newly-arrived senator. (94-95: egregiam laudem, spolia ampla, a vitriolic chiasmus; puer tuus: not filius, not natus, but “your brat”). She ju st manages politeness in 98-103. But she is on form again with the insulting epithet Phrygio for 10 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 27 (2011)

Aeneas and the description of the relationship as servire (103). If Venus had not already made up her mind to do some such deal, she could hardly have accepted an approach in these terms. But Uriah Heep could do no better than Venus here. “O f course you are more important than I am. But I do have this one little worry: will the fates and Jupiter let us get away with it”?23 She knows very well that they won’t. But “you are the queen; I’ll just follow along”. Juno’s response is wonderfully lordly: Mecum erit iste labor (115). Particularly pointed is the phrase iste labor, “what you seem to think bothersome”. Venus laughs in 128, and it is not a pleasant sound. But there is a strong enough hint of Roman social mores for us to sense a whiff of satire and be amused even as we sympathise with Dido, the victim of the plot.

Events take their course: Rumour brings her news to Iarbas and Iarbas makes his appeal to Jupiter, whose words to Mercury are direct, confident and clear. But even Jupiter is not above a little rhetorical distortion. Non illum nobis genetrix pulcherrima talem promisit ... (228). (“This is not the sort of son his mother told us she had”). If the reference is to the conversation between Jupiter and Venus in book 1, it was not Venus who made the promise to Jupiter, but Jupiter to Venus. Mercury undertakes to convey this message. He delivers it in a rather different tone. Where Jupiter is direct, Mercury is plain rude: pulchram ... uxorius ... rerum oblite tuarum (266-67). Jupiter tells Mercury quite firmly that he is to indicate that his message comes on the highest possible authority (nostri nuntius esto, 237). Mercury lays this on thick over three lines, with a repeated ipse (the second occasion suggests the colloquial ipse: “the boss”). It is as if Mercury has to boast of the fact that he has rather an important master. To finish with, where Jupiter has concluded naviget! haec summa est (237), in Mercury’s words there is nothing at all to correspond to this crucial word naviget, he departs having said nothing beyond words which will make Aeneas feel in the wrong. Is this humour? It would probably be going too far to suggest that there is a reminiscence of Mercury’s use or misuse of his father’s authority in Plautus’ Amphitryo. But there is at least a sense of incongruity which is very near humour, when one god feels the need to behave like an inferior among humans, being insolent beyond his brief and making much more play of his superior’s authority than has that superior. The whole sequence is even more obviously humorous in its Homeric original, Od. 5, 97-115. Hermes has come on his mission to Calypso reluctantly, the journey being so tedious. He has not even bothered to listen to Zeus very carefully, because he has forgotten Odysseus’ name when he speaks

23 Paraphrase of 107-12. Keith Maclennan — Humour in Virgil 11

to Calypso, and the story he spins about the homecoming of the Greeks from Troy is irrelevant to Odysseus’ experiences.

Is it then possible to approach the great debate in heaven at the beginning ofbook 10 (1.17) in anything like the same spirit? It is clear that we are not necessarily to take what gods say solemnly or au pied de la lettre. The setting for the debate is one which would have been unfamiliar in Rome until recent times, but Cicero’s speeches for Ligarius, Marcellus, Deiotarus make familiar even to us the idea of the appeal for justice to the single ruler. Reports of senatorial meetings under Augustus make it clear that there was no shortage of members prepared to speak their mind forcefully: I think my favourite is the account of the meeting where Augustus told the senators that they would simply have to make rules for their wives and get them to obey them. The response was “Please, Augustus, tell us what your rules are for Livia”.24 The location in Aen. 10 is not as clearly a Palatine-transferred-to-Olympus as is Ovid’s setting for the meeting in Metamorphoses 1,25 but the balance of contributions between presiding officer, paper speakers, and crowd noises seems familiar. Both Venus’ and Juno’s speeches are marvellous, not to say outrageous, tours de force of rhetoric, and I quote Williams.26 “The rhetoric is not used in order to involve the reader deeply with the speaker, but in order to produce an intellectually satisfying display of verbal dexterity”. If we smile at all, it will be because we have some such reaction as: “The cheek of it! How can she get away with it?”.

There are plenty of opportunities for such a reaction. Right from the beginning, Venus strains truth: “They are fighting within the walls; a hostile army is on its way from Arpi”. Very soon she offers (threatens?) to go down to the battlefield and shed her own blood. We are surely being reminded of Il. 5.336-430 and the wound inflicted on her by Diomedes: what had Aphrodite’s reaction been? to scuttle back to Olympus and have her mother kiss it better. She moves on to play the part of resigned disappointment: “I am not influenced by thought of empire. That was a hope for past days, when fortune smiled on us”: (42-43; wonderful use of the perfect tense speravimus''). She will retire to those pleasant resorts of hers with Ascanius, leaving Aeneas to sink or swim. Jupiter may as well even allow the Carthaginians to invade Italy for all the opposition they will encounter from the residents. (A breath-taking point, this: even if Carthage has not burned to the ground, there is no-one in all Italy whom the Carthaginians will be remotely concerned with except Aeneas, who is being, ex hypothesi, dumped).

24 Dio Cass. 54.16.3-5. 25 168-252. 26 R. D. Williams, The Aeneid of Virgil: Books 7-12, 1973, Basingstoke, on 10.16f. 12 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 27 (2011)

Juno’s response is magnificent: “I have remained in profound silence so far” (63) (really?), “would never have spoken unless provoked” (63-64) (sic nota??) Aeneas is suffering the consequences of his own aggression (65: quisquam ... subegit) and his foolish insistence on believing what Cassandra said (what? he must be the first person ever!) She entirely ignores the charge of having prompted Allecto to exacerbate the quarrel. Her allegations against the Trojans are barely founded: “ploughing the fields of others, marching off with the plunder, and stealing brides from their mother’s breasts” (78-79; splendid plural). She has a gloriously alliterative line to present the Trojans’ efforts to defend themselves as hypocritical and aggressive: pacem orare manu, praefigere puppibus arma (80). The conclusion is that Juno poses as the True Friend of Troy: “It was Venus’ fault that the war happened in the first place. It’s too late to complain now that you have driven them to ruin yourself”.

Are political cartoons humorous? I think they would not be published unless someone thought they were. This scene, surely, is a political cartoon. Augustus brought peace to the Roman world. We hear in the conventional sources some of the methods by which he did so — ruthlessness to some individuals, clemency to others, shilly­ shallying with yet others. What I think we hear very little of is what must have been an endless chore: trying to reach some compromise in disputes between parties with entirely irreconcilable positions. After thirty years conspicuously “without law, without principle”,27 the Roman state must have been full of the sort of issues which surfaced after communism: whose is this patch of land? Is the debate between Juno and Venus a debate between Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, and does it prepare us for the end of book 12, where it becomes clear that, if a conflict is genuinely to be resolved, no-one will ever get everything they wanted. Nonetheless Augustus, acting as Jupiter does here, has succeeded in bringing peace where none might have been expected.

The smile which these arguments prompt is not a very happy one. This is not the only occasion where humour is used in painful circumstances. In 10.592-601 Aeneas killed Lucagus and his brother Liger. Over Lucagus he commented, as I mentioned, on the dying man’s quaint gymnastics. Liger begs for mercy. Aeneas will have none of it: “Brother must not abandon brother” (600). We are sharply reminded of a similar piece of gallows humour in 2.547-49, at the death of Priam, when Pyrrhus gloats “You shall be my messenger, informing my father Achilles of this. Tell him straight of my dreadful deeds; be sure to say Neoptolemus is not the man his father was”. Pyrrhus was inhuman

27 Non mos, non ius (Tac. Ann. 3.28.2). Keith Maclennan — Humour in Virgil 13

in victory, and Aeneas is not immune from the same savagery — there is a foreshadowing o f the last lines o f the poem.

The humour in tragic circumstances is not all savage. In D ido’s realm, when we first come to know it, all is brightness and joy. Traces of this last into book 4, until the hunt. High spirits abound, and none is more high spirited than Ascanius. In fact Ascanius is a teenager and a brat, as he takes advantage of his day out on a good horse (when did he last enjoy one?) to prove to everyone how fast he can ride (“outriding now the goats, now the stags”, 157) and to make impossible boasts of what he can do (“He longs for a tawny lion to come down from the mountain”, 169). The high spirits and humour, I think, extend to Dido herself: “The queen is late; she is still in her room while the Carthaginian princes are waiting at her door. Finally she appears” (133-36). We think of Milo in Cicero, who “came home, changed his clothes and shoes, hung around a little waiting (as one does) for his wife to get ready”.28 It is all a short-lived and doomed replay of that other scene of happiness, the banquet at the end of book 1. Dido here is overflowing with generosity and good spirits. We have seen her thoroughly in charge of her kingdom, and her welcome to Aeneas is full of confidence, dignity and generosity. At the climax of the feast, Dido takes a great and ancient wine bowl. After suitable prayers she puts it to her lips but, as a lady and a queen, she barely touches it. She passes it to her Carthaginian table-companion Bitias with the marvellous word increpitans (738): a mocking challenge — drink this if you can. He accepts this huge draught: “He readily drank it down; the golden bowl was brimful and he soused himself in the wine” (739). I doubt if there is a scene better designed to bring out a smile of sheer pleasure. And that is true, in spite of what comes next.

Afterthought

Virgil can use humour to draw us towards his characters (Dido at the end o f Aen. 1, Corydon in Ecl. 2) or to make us stand away from them (Juno and Venus in Aen. 4). He can use it to create ambiguity (the Charon scene: is the underworld a place o f real terrors or sham bogeymen?) or to underline by the Olympus debate in book 10 the urgent question he put at the beginning o f book 1: “Can gods feel anger such as this?” Humour can appear in unexpected places (the Sibyl in book 6), contributing to the uncertainty which plays such a part in any reading of Virgil. Another paper might approach the question from a different angle: which elements ofthe Aeneid are never touched by humour? Aeneas, it might conclude, hardly ever, and Augustus himself, never. Might Ovid have learned something from this?

KEITH MACLENNAN

28 Mil. 28.