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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.