Proceedings of the Virgil Society
Volume 20 1991
Proceedings of the Virgil Society
Volume 20 1991 Copyright © 1991 The Virgil Society
Published by the Virgil Society, do Professor M.M. Willcock, Department of Latin, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E6BT England
Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham Contents
Page
R.G.M. Nisbet The style of Virgil’s Eclogues 1
H.H. Huxley How well did Milton know Virgil? 15
Philip Hardie The Aeneid and the Oresteia 29
H.H. Huxley Lacrimae Vergilianae 46
D.W.T. Vessey Confessions of a Virgilian 47
Lord Dacre of Why Virgil? The Presidential Address 1990 60 Glanton
Gloria Vessey Through a glass darkly—reality and Virgil 76
Review 90
Volume 20 of The Proceedings o f the Virgil Society was edited by D.W.T. Vessey, Reader in Latin, King’s College London,
Proceedings of the Virgil Society 20 (1991) 1-14
©1991
The Style of Virgil’s Eclogues
The style of a poet is the most important thing about him, the element that cannot be translated, without which nobody but a scholar could endure to read him. But it is also the hardest part to characterise, which is why we all prefer to talk about other matters. Lists of vocabulary and metrical statistics provide useful raw material, but they may communi cate very little; a count of dactyls does not tell us what the Eclogues are actually like. I believe that here as elsewhere the best approach is to concentrate on particular passages where the idiosyncrasy of the poet appears in its most undiluted form. Such passages give a flavour to the whole, but this quality is easily dissipated in a statistical treatment; after all in most works of literature, including even the Eclogues, there are many lines that could have belonged somewhere else. Virgil in the Eclogues set out to do a Theocritus in Latin, that is to say to transfer the charm and precision of a very individual poet to his own slow-footed language. Partly of course he does the trick by specific imitations, and commentators have collected a store of more or less parallel passages, which for the most part will be omitted here. Such parallels are most evocative when they preserve the movement of the original; thus at 8.41 ut vidi, ut perii, ‘when I saw, then I was lost’ the use of the second ut as a correlative1 strains the possibilities of Latin, but it recalls the Theocritean prototype tSou 8>s e\i&vr\v (2.82). Then there is the notorious case of 8.58 omnia vel medium fiat mare, let everything become mid-ocean’; Theocritus had said u&pra 8’^aXXa ycTOiro, ‘let everything become contrary* (1.134), and by a process of free associa tion more characteristic of modem than classical poetry Virgil repre sents 'ivaXka, ‘contrary5, as if it were ei'dXia, ‘in the sea’. But quite apart from parallel passages there is a more indirect imitation of style that cannot be associated with any single model. This type of imitation is really the more subtle, though it is harder to pin down; in the same way
1 R.G.M. N is b e t
the best parodies are not the sort most common in antiquity, where a well-known line is modified by some ridiculous adaptation. The really clever parodies suggest the idiom of the original in an absurd way without referring to any particular passage; such is Calverley’s skit on Browning, ‘The Cock and the Bull’, or the hexameter of Persius that catches the quintessence of the old Roman tragedians, Antiopa aerumnis cor luctificabile fulta (1.78). The Eclogues deal with what Milton called ‘the homely slighted shep herd’s trade’, and so they affect a simplicity that is an accomplishment of art. That is why Tityrus at the beginning of the book plays on a thin oat, tenui avena, with reference to the style of the poems as well as the shape of the instrument; in the same way Virgil at the end of the last eclogue says that he has been weaving a basket from slender hibiscus, dum sedet et gracili fiscellam texit hibisco. Words for rustic objects like avena, ‘oat’, and fiscella, ‘basket’ give a suggestion of simplicity; however natural oats and baskets may have been in the context, the ancient sensitivity to levels of diction was such that they must have seemed to lower the style. Just as Theocritus talks of onions and snails, and the more realistic Greek epigrammatists describe cottage utensils and artisans’ implements, so Virgil flavours his bucolics with thyme and garlic, chestnuts and cheese. Theocritus had one great advantage: by writing in a kind of Doric, however bogus it often was, he produced a whiff of the countryside, and because of the dialect’s poetic status he could do this without seeming prosaic or banal. In view of the very different literary traditions of Latin, Virgil could not go to the backwoods for poetic expressions. His efforts in this direction were very limited: we may note the archaic nec vertat bene for ne vertat bene (9.6), perhaps his for hi in a passage whose interpreta tion is disputed (3.102 his certe—neque amor causa est—vix ossibus horrent), most notoriously cuium pecus for ‘whose flock?’ (3.1). That pro voked the well-known retort die mihi, Damoeta: cuium pecus anne Latinum? (Vita Donati 43), and Virgil did not venture again on what Catullus would have called the language of goat-milkers (caprimulgi). Apart from words for rustic objects, the most striking thing about the vocabulary of the Eclogues is the number of diminutives. There are only three proper diminutives in the whole of the Aeneid, palmula (5.163), sagulum (8.660), and most memorably parvulus Aeneas (4.328). In the Eclogues, on the other hand, there are a dozen diminutives, words like agellus, gemellus, luteolus, munusculum, novellus, with no fewer than
2 V ir g il’s E c lo g ue s thirteen instances of capella, ‘a nanny-goat’; this is out of line with other serious poetry apart from Catullus and elegy. Other instances of unpoetical words are not very common; suavis2 occurs 4 times and formosus 16 times, though they were avoided in the Aeneid and most other epic. In spite of the sprinkling of rusticity, there is plenty of stylistic heightening; the Latin poetic vocabulary is freely used, words like amnis (5.25), pontus (6.35), ratis (6.76), poetic plurals like otia (1.6, 5.61) or the notorious hordea for barley (5.36), forms like arbos (3.56) or risere (4.62), infinitives like suadebit inire (1.55), retained accusatives like suras evincta (7.32), Grecisms like suave rubenti (4.43). It is true that Tityrus mentions caseus or cheese (1.34), not a word that could be found in epic, but when he invites Meliboeus to supper he turns to a more dignified periphrasis, pressi copia lactis (1.81). It is this blend of the commonplace and the exquisite that gives the Eclogues some of their characteristic quality. ‘The most prominent single characteristic of Theokritos’ style is his repetition or partial repetition of words’: I quote Dover’s commentary (p. xlv), and I base my analysis partly on his. The repetition of a single word is too common to need much illustration, but one may note in particular the geminatio of a proper name (2.69 a Corydon, Corydon, Theoc. 11.72 & KtkXco^ KukXmiJj). More typical3 are lines like 1.74 ite meae, felix quondam pecus, ite capellae, where a word in the first foot is re peated in the fifth; by a rather mannered distribution meae is attached to the first ite and capellae to the second. The same pattern can be seen in Theocritus: cf. 1.64 dpxeTe pouKoXiKa?, Mokjcli
3 R.G.M. N is b e t
al tea Trjvos- eXg Kepa6v» Tpdyov, atya ti) Xat|rfj- al tea 8’ alya Xd(3-q Tfji'os’ y^pa?, eg re KaTappei a x ^ aPOS“ xiM-^Pw ^ KaXbu Kpeas, £are ic’ a.p.eX^^s'.
‘If he chooses the homed goat you will take the she-goat, and if he takes the she-goat for his prize, the kid falls to you; a kid’s flesh is fine until you milk her’. Here words for ‘take’, ‘she-goat’ and ‘kid’ reappear at different places in the line, sometimes in a different tense or case; the lines derive their charm from the ringing of the changes. The pattern is not confined to bucolic poetry, and is found also in Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo (2.9 ff.):
wtt6XXwu oil iravTl fyaeiveTai, dXX’ Sti? eo0X6? ’ 8? (JLiv 18-fl, niyas' oStos\ oiiic t8e, Xubg eKelvos” 6 ^ 6 | ie 0 ’, & EKdepye, K a l ^ a o -6 (ie 0 ’ ouTroTe XltoI.
‘Apollo does not appear to everybody but to him that is good. Who sees him, he is great; who has not seen him, he is lowly. We shall see you, Apollo, and we shall never be lowly.’ Virgil must have felt the movement as typically bucolic, and so we find similar juggling with words in the eighth eclogue when he assesses the relative guilt of Medea and Cupid (8.48 ff.):
crudelis tu quoque, mater, crudelis mater magis, an puer improbus4 ille? improbus ille puer; crudelis tu quoque, mater.
Commentators are offended by the pointlessness of it all: Heyne wished to delete the last two lines, and Coleman finds the triple repetition of crudelis and mater very jejune. In fact Virgil is using a pattern that he regarded as particularly Theocritean; no doubt this pattern has its origin in the jingles of shepherds, but in the hands of a poet the artless ness is contrived. The same movement is found in the bucolics of Calpurnius, and it has been observed also by modern imitators. Tennyson’s ‘Come down o maid from yonder mountain height’ is a beautiful pastoral poem, and everybody knows ‘the moan of doves in immemorial elms’, reflecting Virgil’s ono matopoeic necgemere aeria cessabit turtur ab ulmo (1.58). Less attention
4 V ir g il’s E clog ues is paid to what goes before: ‘and sweet is every sound, Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet’; here in a line and a half Tennyson shows that he has caught one of the most characteristic features of the bucolic idiom. The point has not been lost on so gifted a verse-composer as J.B. Poynton; see his rendering of Shakespeare’s ‘In such a night as this’:5
advenit, ecce, leo, Thisbe nec viderat ipsum. umbra est, quam vidit; visa tamen aufugit umbra.
Another form of balance is found in the poetic competitions where one shepherd caps the song of another, naturally in the same number of lines; the movement is familiar not only from Theocritus but from the rival choruses of Catullus’ epithalamium. The pattern must have its antecedents in popular poetry: Dover quotes the Greek children’s song where one speaker says: ‘Where are my roses, where are my violets, where is my beautiful parsley?’ and the other replies: ‘Here are the roses, here are the violets, here is the beautiful parsley.’6 The possible complexities of the pattern may be seen from the end of Virgil’s seventh eclogue (61 ff.):
Corydon: Populus Alcidae gratissima, vitis laccho, formosae myrtus Veneri, sua laurea Phoebo; Phyllis amat corylos: illas dum Phyllis amabit, nec myrtus vincet corylos nec laurea Phoebi. Thyrsis: Fraxinus in silvis pulcherrima, pinus in hortis, populus in fluviis, abies in montibus altis: saepius at si me, Lycida formose, revisas, fraxinus in silvis cedat tibi, pinus in hortis.
Here we should observe the degrees of correspondence not only between one speaker and another but within each separate quatrain and often within single lines. We may notice in particular the paratactic compari son, most simply illustrated from the opening of Theocritus 1; instead of saying ‘your piping is as sweet as the whisper of the pine’ we find instead ‘sweet is the whisper of the pine-tree and sweet too is your piping’. Another bucolic pattern may be seen very clearly in the second of these two stanzas: the statement of the first two lines 65-6 is followed by the hypothesis, saepius at si me, Lycida formose, revisas, which leads to the
5 R .G .M . N isbet conclusion in the last line. For the same movement we may compare Theocritus(?) 8.41 ff.:
■navrq. lap, TiauTg 8£ vo[loL, travTql 8£ ydXaKTOs* oflBcrra ttiSwctiu Kai rd. via Tpd
‘Everywhere is spring, and everywhere pastures, and every where udders gush with milk and younglings are fattened where fair Nais comes; but if she goes away, the cowherd and the cows dry up.’
The shepherds’ monologues, as well as their dialogues, seem to be influenced by popular poetry. This is seen most clearly with the repeated refrains, which tend to break speeches into snatches; but even when there is no refrain, there may be a lack of orderly progression. Stories are not told in any systematic way; the narrative about the capture of Silenus (6.14 ff.) is quite exceptional. In Damon’s love-song (8.17 ff.) the reader has to piece together what is going on,7 a natural consequence of the broken-up character of the bucolic style; the same is true to some extent with Corydon in 2 and Gallus in 10, though in the latter case the fluctuating movement of Gallus’s own elegies seems to play a part. Tityrus in the first eclogue cannot give a coherent account of himself; though this is meant to suggest the rustic wiseacre’s garrulity and love of mystification, Virgil may have been influenced in his strategy by the inherent bittiness of shepherds’ songs. As T.E. Page pronounces on modulans alterna notavi (5.14), Tou cannot sing and play a pipe at the same time.’ Another kind of disjointedness in bucolic arises from the frequency of parenthesis. Sometimes this involves quite a long hyperbaton; for a possible instance see 9.37 f. id quidem ago et tacitus, Lycida, mecum ipse voluto I si valeam meminisse neque est ignobile carmen. Here editors usually regard id as the object of voluto, but this does not combine satis factorily with the idiomatic id ago, T am busy with that’; it might be more elegant to take voluto with carmen and to mark off the intervening phrases with dashes. Sometimes a parenthesis gives an impression of spontaneity, which is of course achieved by art; cf. 3.93 frigidus. o pueri—
6 V ir g il’s E c lo g u e s fugite hinc—latet anguis in herba, where the disruptive fugite hinc indicates the speaker’s sudden alarm. See also 8.109 parcite—ab urbe venit—iarn parcite, carmina—Daphnis; here the separation of venit from Daphnis is highly mannered, but at the same time it indicates the excitement of the speaker and produces a climax with the lover’s name. For an even longer hyperbaton see 9.2 ff.:
o Lycida, vivi pervenimus, advena nostri (quod numquam veriti sumus) ut possessor agelli diceret ‘kaec mea sunt; veteres migrate colonV.
Here the long separation of nostri from agelli puts great emphasis on the possessive, and the parenthesis helps to suggest the breathless indigna tion of Moeris. Ellipse is another feature that is colloquial at least in origin. It is found in the clipped civilities of Theocritus (14.1 f.):
Xaipeiv ttoXXd. t6v duSpa Qucimxov—dXXa toicujto.
A la x tv g . cos1 xP&'los*— XP^io?— tl 8e t o l t6
‘A very good day to friend Thyonichus. —The same to Aeschinas. It’s a long time. —A long time. —What’s the trouble?’ So too the beginning of the third eclogue (a passage directly imitated from Theocritus (4.1 ff):
Die mihi, Damoeta, cuium pecus? an Meliboei? Non, verum Aegonis.
Sometimes the ellipse is more mannered than genuinely colloquial, quo te, Moeri, pedes? (9.1) may look idiomatic, but it is not what anybody would actually say; it is as artificial as ‘whither away?’. So too when Menalcas forgets an astronomer’s name, the interrupted construction gives an illusion of spontaneity: in medio duo signa Conon—et quis fuit alter I descripsit radio totum quigentibus orbem... ? (3.40). Ellipse may also be used for euphemistic reasons; Virgil would not dream of imitating the rustic obscenities of Theocritus, still less the unimaginable bad language of real pastores, a rough body of men, so he contents himself with the discreet impropriety of novimus et qui te (3.8). A marked feature of the Theocritan style is the number of appositions,
7 R.G.M. N isb e t
which suggest the disjointed afterthoughts of colloquial discourse; cf. 15.19 f. eTrra8pdx|i.tts KuvdSa?, ypcuav duoTlXnaTa Trripav, I Trivre tt6kcos' eXa(3’ duay f>(nrov\ Zpyov (hr’ £pycp (‘yesterday he bought five fleeces, seven-drachma dog-skins, pluckings of antiquated haversacks, nothing but filth, one job after another’). Appositions in the Eclogues are much less conspicuous, but there is one notable type that is mannered rather than colloquial; this is the appositional sandwich as in 1.57 raucae, tua cum, palumbes. This pattern is not paralleled in Theocritus, but is attested in Archilochus and the Greek epigram.8 Otto Skutsch has commented on the resemblance between raucae, tua cura, palumbes and a line in Propertius et Veneris dominae volucres, mea turba, columbae (3.3.31); he plausibly suggests a common source in Gallus,9 and has named the construction the ‘schema Comelianum’. The word-order appears intermittently in later Latin poetry, and Juvenal still uses it for sardonic effect (7.120 veteres, Maurorum epimenia, bulbi, ‘old onions, the rations of Moors’); no extant work favours it so much as the Eclogues, but it must be regarded as a neoteric rather than a bucolic feature. Some of the elements that I have been mentioning are brought to gether in a concentrated form in a passage in the ninth eclogue (23 ff.):
Tityre, dum redeo— brevis est via—pasce capellas, et potum pastas age, Tityre, et inter agendum occursare capro—cornu ferit ille—caveto.
This is an isolated snatch of song, typical of the bittiness to which I have referred. The passage is broken up by two parentheses (brevis est via and cornu ferit ille) that hint at the disorganised character of colloquial speech, though once again Virgil’s disorganisation is deliberately organ ised. We may also note the repeated repetition of key words to produce the traditional bucolic jingle: Tityre Tityre, pasce pastas, age agendum. And there is a distinctive metrical point that I have not yet dealt with, the so-called bucolic diaeresis. A diaeresis occurs when a word ends at the end of a foot, and the bucolic diaeresis is sometimes defined as any word-break at the end of the fourth foot; thus on this definition there would be a bucolic diaeresis after cornu ferit. Such word-breaks are notably common in Theocritus, and more common in the Eclogues than in Virgil’s other hexameters; but a more restrictive definition brings out more clearly a distinguishing
8 V ir g il’s E c lo g ue s characteristic of bucolic poetry. According to this a bucolic diaeresis occurs when there is not only a word-break but a pause in sense at the end of the fourth foot, as after brevis est via in the passage under dis cussion; by the normal rules of the Latin hexameter this pause is preceded by a dactyl, often produced by a pyrrhic word of two short syllables (as here via). The bucolic diaeresis in this strict sense is much more common in the Eclogues than in Virgil’s other works: I have counted 62 cases in the Eclogues compared with 4 in Aeneid II (including one in complete line). If we look at the distribution of these 62 cases the effect is even more striking: the early third eclogue has 10, the early seventh eclogue has 12, and though the first eclogue has only 4, 3 of these occur in the first eleven lines, where the characteristic tone is being established. It is also worth noting that the grander manner of the fourth eclogue allows no place for a bucolic diaeresis in the strict sense (i.e. followed by a pause). Other metrical points may be mentioned more summarily. One feature with a higher incidence than in the Aeneid is a line like Daphnin ad astra feremus: amavit nos quoque Daphnis (5.52); here after feremus, that is to say after the trochee in the third foot, there is not only a word-break but a pause. This so-called feminine caesura is often found with Greek words, as at 2.6 o crudelis Alexi; significantly there are three of these caesuras in the first seven lines of the early second eclogue. Then again the runs without strong punctuation at the end of the line are shorter than in the Aeneid, even if the statistics are exaggerated by the short snatches of dialogue between the shepherds. The relatively frequent elision of long vowels that is so characteristic of the Aeneid is much less common in the Eclogues', but such a feature is too negative to give us much sense of the tone of the poems. I shall mention briefly a few metrical abnormalities. Quadrisyllable endings may be noted at 2.24 Actaeo Aracyntho, 6.53 fultus hyacintho, 10.12 Aonie Aganippe', in all these cases the last word is Greek, and the Greek effect is underlined by a preceding hiatus or in one instance by an irrational lengthening; metrical licences often come two by two. Some times there is a shortening of a long final vowel before another vowel, again in the Greek manner; the abnormality is encouraged by the Greek name at 2.65 o Alexi, though not at 8.108 an qui amant, ipsi sibi somnia fingunt? The effect is more typically bucolic when the licence is com bined with a bucolic diaeresis, as at 6.44 ut litus ‘Hyla Hyla’omne sonaret.
9 R .G .M . N isbet
Here the first final a is long by Greek accidence, and the second is short ened by Greek correption before the vowel; the scansion of the same word in two different ways, a favourite Hellenistic trick,10 here gives hints of an echo. So again at 3.78 f.:
Phyllida amo ante alias: nam me discedere flevit et longum ‘formose, vale vale’ inquit ‘Iolla’.
The final e of the second vale is shortened before inquit, suggesting that the speaker is moving into the distance. Perhaps in passing I may give my version of the situation, which is different from the usual account. Phyllis wept that Menalcas was going, and said ‘goodbye, goodbye my beautiful’. One naturally assumes that she is going to say ‘my beautiful Menalcas’, but then by a surprise she adds ‘Iolla’; it transpires that she is going off with Menalcas, and that the farewells are being addressed to the other man. Some of the features that I have been discussing are not specifically bucolic, and we must look for further antecedents. Horace described the style of the poems as molle, soft;11 of course that is one side of Theocritus, but as a Hellenistic poet he could also be crisper and spikier than the Eclogues ever are. Virgil must have owed much to Catullus and no doubt Gallus for his emotional sentimentality, harmonious resonances, bright colouring, and elaborate word-pattems. If this paper deals only inciden tally with these aspects it is because I wish to isolate the more purely bucolic elements, but a full analysis of the style would recognise an element of neoteric mollitia that is not really Theocritean. When Horace characterised the Eclogues he combined molle with facetum; as Quintilian saw (6.3.20), facetum refers not to humour, though there is humour in the Eclogues, but to a neatness and elegance that may be distinguished from the lush sensuousness of the neoterics proper. Here it must be emphasised that in spite of a dominant tone, ancient poetry-books are not necessarily written in a uniform style. Theocritus himself shows a considerable variation between the purely bucolic idylls and the mime-like Adoniazusae (15), and Virgil introduces elements that properly belong to different types of poem; in such cases Kroll talked of the crossing of the genres,12 but where the abnormality is incidental Francis Cairns’s term ‘inclusion’13 seems more appropriate. For a single instance see the beginning of the song of Silenus (6.31 f.):
10 V ir g il’s E clo g ue s
namque canebat uti magnum per inane coacta semina terrarumque animaeque marisque fuissent.
Here uti is clearly Lucretian, particularly at that place in the line, and so is some of the vocabulary, though not the use of que. I have already referred to the subsequent lines on Hylas (6.43 f.)
his adiungit Hylan nautae quo fonte relictum clamassent, ut litus ‘Hyla Hyla’ omne sonaret.
Here a neoteric effect is produced not only by the scansion of Hyla Hyla but by the learned allusiveness of quo fonte. Another style is found in a snatch of song by Corydon at 7.29 f.:
saetosi caput hoc apri tibi Delia parvus et ramosa Micon vivacis cornua cervi.
That is the manner of dedicatory epigram, even if it is written in two hexameters rather than an elegiac couplet. Then again, at 8.80 limus ut hie durescit et haec ut cera liquescit the rhyming jingle suggests a magic spell. For a more thorough-going conflation of styles one may turn to the tenth eclogue, where the bucolic themes give way to a pastiche in hexameters of the love-elegies of Gallus:
a te ne frigora laedant! a tibi ne teneras glades secet aspera plantas! ibo et Chalcidico quae sunt mihi condita versu carmina pastoris Siculi modulabor avena. (10.48 ff.)
Here one may note the sentimental a, the sentimental theme of the ice taken from Gallus by Propertius,14 followed by the resolute ibo, suggest ing (as Gallus himself must have done) the fluctuating moods of the lover. The most persistent change of style is in the fourth eclogue, where Virgil himself describes his matter as paulo maiora, ‘somewhat grander’:
11 R .G .M . N isbet
ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas; magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo; iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna, iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto, tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo, casta fave Lucina,15 tuus iam regnat Apollo. (4 ff.)
This resonant passage is intended to suggest a sacred chant, though it is more resonant than the Jewish Sibylline oracles to which Virgil owes so much of his content. We may note the almost entirely end-stopped lines and the formal patterning in groups of 2+2+3; groups of 7 are in fact attested in the Jewish prototypes. But the most striking feature is the incantatory rhyming of o: integro, ordo, virgo, caelo, alto, puero, quo, toto, mundo, Apollo.16 The fourth eclogue has a manner of its own in other respects. One may note saeclorum, a molossus without elision in the centre of the line; there are 10 instances of this neoteric pattern in 63 lines, a greater incidence than in the other Eclogues and considerably greater than in the Aeneid. The artistic distribution of adjective and noun, again in imitation of Catullus 64, is also more marked than usual, even if there is only one ‘golden’ line in the strict sense: 28 incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uva. Then there is the grandiloquent address to the baby himself (48ff)
adgredere o magnos (aderit iam tempus) honores, cara deum suboles, magnum Iovis incrementum.
Here incrementum at the end of the line produces a spondeiazon almost unique in the Eclogues, though found occasionally in Theocritus; the rustic word is given dignity by its position, producing an ambiguity characteristic of this oracular poem. In the following lines we meet some more resonant rhymes (50 ff.), again quite unlike the normal style of the Eclogues:
aspice convexo nutantem pondere mundum, terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum; aspice, venturo laetentur ut omnia saeclo.
12 V ir g il’s E clo g u e s
As the poem nears its end the tone suddenly changes (55 ff.):
non me carminibus vincet nec Thracius Orpheus nec Linus, huic mater quamvis atque huic pater adsit, Orphei Calliopea, Lino formosus Apollo. Pan etiam, Arcadia mecum si iudice certet Pan etiam Arcadia dicat se iudice victum.
Coleman calls attention to the apparently pointless repetitions, which he regards as a possible indication of textual corruption. I believe that his observation could be explained in a different way: Virgil is changing gear and reverting in a rather exaggerated way to his normal bucolic idiom. In much the same way Catullus in his eleventh poem, after using the Sapphic metre inappropriately for cynical gibes at his friends and tasteless invective against his lady, reverts in his last stanza to a genuinely Sapphic image, the flower broken by the ploughshare. I conclude with the last lines of the tenth eclogue: evening appropri ately closes the poem and the book:
surgamus: solet esse gravis cantantibus umbra, iuniperi gravis umbra; nocent et frugibus umbrae, ite domum saturae—venit Hesperus—ite capellae.
Here we have the same jingling repetition that we found at the begin ning of Theocritus 1: gravis, gravis, umbra, umbra, umbrae. At iuniperi gravis umbra there is the enanalepsis that has already been mentioned, for it is surely wrong to understand est; that would disrupt the corre spondence with the next clause, where et frugibus balances cantantibus. It may also be suggested that gravis umbra is a delicate oxymoron of the sort familiar in sophisticated Roman poetry: a shade in all its senses is naturally levis. In the penultimate line we have the soft feminine caesura after the trochee in the third foot, and in the last line the even more typical bucolic diaeresis, the break after Hesperus. Also characteristic are the parenthesis venit Hesperus, the repetition of ite in the first and fifth feet, the artificial distribution by which saturae is combined with the first ite and capellae with the second; there seems also to be a whimsical implication that the audience like the animals now have had their fill. The poem closes with a Grecism for the Evening Star (Hesperus), and a
13 R.G.M. N isb e t diminutive for the humble nanny-goats (capellae), the word that is found in the Eclogues thirteen times; the blend of the poetic and the familiar that is so typical of these poems is here given special emphasis. Virgil has ended the book with his bucolic signature-tune, and if I am asked to define the bucolic style I can only point to these lines and say ‘That is what it is like/
Corpus Christi College, Oxford R.G.M. NISBET
NOTES 1. S. Timpanaro, Contributi di Filologia e di storia della lingua latina (Rome 1978) 219 ff., citing (p. 274) Cat. 62.45 sic virgo, durn intacta manet, durn cara suis est, 62.56. 2. B. Axelson, Unpoetiscke Worter (Lund 1945) 35 ff. 3. R. Gimm, De Vergilii stilo bucolico quaestiones selectae, Diss. Leipzig 1910, 80 ff. 4. In view of the following line I take improbus to be predicative, not attributive. 5. J.B. Poynton, Versions (Oxford 1936) 100, translating Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice. ' 6. P M G 852 itoS |xoi t A f>68a, itoD |iol tA la , ttou (ioi tA icaXA (j£Xiva; I TaSl t A jb68a, r a S k tA la, toSI tA KaXA a^Xtua. 7. B. Otis, Virgil, A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford 1964) 105 ff. 8. An authoritative treatment of the figure is provided by J. Solodow, HSCPh 90 (1986) 129 ff. 9. O. Skutsch, RhM 99 (1956) 198 f.; he also cites Eel. 10.22 tua cura Lycoris. 10. Nisbet-Hubbard on Horace, Odes 1.32.11; N. Hopkinson, Glotta 60 (1982) 162 ff. 11. Hor. Serm. 1.10.44 f. molle atque facetum ! Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae. 12. W. Kroll, Studien zum Verstandnis der romischen Literatur (Stuttgart 1924) 202 ff. 13. F. Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh 1972) 158 fF. 14. Prop. 1.8.7 f. tu pedibus teneris positas fulcire pruinas, I tu potes insolitas, Cynthia, ferre nives. 15. Against the general opinion I put a comma after Lucina and interpret ‘provided that Lucina favours the birth, Apollo is already as good as reigning1 (B/CS 25 [1978] 62). 16. This was pointed out in an early article by R.G. Austin, CQ 21 (1927) 100 ff.
14 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 20 (1991) 15-28
©1991
How well did Milton know Virgil?
Only five years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 there was bom at the Sign of the Spreadeagle in Bread Street, London, one of the greatest of all Londoners, a child who was to astonish the world with works of such high merit as Lycidas, Comus, Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. Not only was his poetry composed in the vernacular, but the breadth of his erudition was further demonstrated by compositions in Greek, Latin and Italian. Moreover by his matchless defence of the liberty of unlicensed printing, Areopagitica, published on 23 November 1644, he won for himself an immortal place in the annals of English prose. It was only two months before this that he became aware of the failure of his sight. A permanent curtain of darkness veiled his eyes from March 1652.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day! O first created beam, and thou great Word, Let there be light, and light was over all; Why am I thus bereav’d thy prime decree?1
This denial of light, so movingly expressed in Samson’s tragic soliloquy, was to be his bitter portion until November 1674 when his tempestuous and conflict-ridden life came to an end. Behind the disarmingly simple question ‘How well did Milton know Virgil?’ lies a perplexing series of related questions—‘How is the word ‘know’ to be interpreted?’, ‘How is the knowledge by one writer of an other to be effectively demonstrated?’ and—not least—‘How well does the present speaker know these two poets?’. Obviously the author of Paradise Lost is under no obligation to prove to his readers that he is an
15 H .H . H u x le y authority on the Bucolics, the Georgies and the Aeneid. Unlike T.S. Eliot, no lover of Martial’s dictum—
mea carmina, Sexte, grammaticis placeant, ut sine grammaticis.2 he does not favour us with private annotations. Moreover it would be hardly appropriate to remind an audience of Virgilians of the numerous similarities between Virgilian and Miltonic epic. My aims in this paper are more modest; I shall comment on a few limited passages and consider Milton both as a Latinist and as an adroit imitator of the kind of hexameters one finds in the Eclogues and the Aeneid. It would also be useful to say a little about other classical authors whom Milton obviously had studied. As a student of Milton’s Latinity I possess one slight advantage over most scholars from English faculties; for I have read with care and personally annotated an obscure collection of Greek and Latin poems penned by one whose scholarship and poetic technique were highly esteemed by the greatest alumnus of St Paul’s School. This collection is entitled Parerga sive Poetici Conatus; its date is 1632 and the author is Alexander Gil, the younger. Perhaps I have yet another advantage, since for nearly sixty years I have been practising the minor art of Latin verse composition and can therefore try to put myself in the position of seven- teenth-century Latinists grappling with the same problems of vocabulary and prosody. The sound foundations of Milton’s classical education began to be laid at St Paul’s School, London, at the age of twelve. His High Master there was the remarkable Alexander Gil, who was bom in Lincolnshire on 27 February 1565 and who became a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Among his many accomplishments one should not fail to mention the share he took in that translation of the Bible which we know as the Authorised Version. His highmastership dated from March 1609. A great enthusiast for English, he loved to illustrate his lessons on lan guage and metre with citations drawn from contemporary poets, not least from Spenser, a poet from whom in later years John Milton was to quote freely. His Logonomia Anglica (1619 and 1621), written in Latin, was the product of a versatile and independent mind. Of his other book, The Sacred Philosophy of the Holy Scripture (1635) Douglas Bush
16 M ilt o n a n d V ir g il significantly wrote: ‘he carried Christian rationalism to the extreme limits of orthodoxy, limits which his quondam pupil Milton was to overstep.’ With two other Pauline pedagogues, William Sound, Surmaster from 1603 to 1637, and Oliver Smythe, Under Usher from 1615 to 1621, we need have no concern. A strong influence, however, was exerted on Milton by the High Master’s son, Alexander Gil Jr., who was appointed Under Usher in 1621 at the age of twenty-four. A firm friendship was cemented between pupil and teacher. We have three letters addressed by Milton to Gil, and in one of these young John admits that Gil is the severest of critics in matters poetical and the most candid judge of his own poems. Gil’s own ‘slim volume’ of verses, which appeared in print three years before the death of the venerable High Master on the school premises in November 1635 (he was then seventy-one ) will be touched on later. Milton’s other close friend at St Paul’s, Charles Diodati, was the son of an Italian Protestant married to an English wife. To him were dedicated two of the poet’s Latin elegies, the first, described in the penultimate line as the fidi parvum... munus amid, and the sixth, the final pentameter of which—Tu mihi, cui redtem, judids instar eris—shows how Milton valued his friend’s judgment. In the former of these witty and lively productions Milton outlines (verses 81-86) his present creative activity.
Padferum canimus caelesti semine regem, Faustaque sacratis saecula pacta lihris, Vagitumque Dei, & stabulantem paupere tecto Qui suprema suo cum patre regna colit. Stelliparumque polum, modulantesque aethere turmas Et subito elisos ad sua fana Deos.
The mention of the King of Peace, the birth in the lowly stable, the star of Bethlehem and the choiring angels are a foretaste of the ode On the Morning of CHRISTS Nativity. May we detect Virgilian influence even here? The canimus of Eclogue 4.3 and 10.8? Does the ‘noble five-word line’ which opens the passage, with its ‘framing’ of paciferum regem, owe something to lines like con- cordes stabili fatorum numine Parcae (Eel. 4.47)? This may be fanciful. It must be admitted that the startling phrase stelliparumque polum smacks to me rather of Statius (cf. Theb. 12. 565: stelligeri... poll) than Virgil.
17 H .H . H u x le y
Milton was, however, to pay an even greater tribute to Diodati than these two elegies. The magnificent Epitaphium Damonis, comprising 219 beautiful hexameters, which bear a strong impress of the Bucolics, are dedicated to this promising young man, who, after graduating at Trinity College, Oxford, died in London before his thirtieth birthday. I quote selectively from the Argumentum to the lament: Damonis autem sub persona hie intelligitur Carolus Deodatus . . . ingenio, doctrina, clarissimisque caeteris virtutibus, dum viveret, juvenis egregius. Of Milton’s not wholly pleasurable sojourn at Christ’s College, Cam bridge I shall merely record that he was placed fourth in the Honours List for 1628-9 and that his best friend Edward King (1612-37) was elected to a fellowship at Christ’s in June 1630. King, (alas!) while crossing from Chester Bay to Dublin was drowned in calm seas (Aeolus confirmed ‘That not a blast was from his dungeon stray’d’, Lycidas 97). The drowned man’s sorrowing friends published a memorial volume entitled Justa Edouardo King naufrago ab amicis moerentibus amoris et mneias charin (Cambridge 1638). The undisputed jewel of this collection is the pastoral monody Lycidas, which, though twenty-six lines shorter than Epitaphium Damonis, is considerably more complex, for it embraces as a second subject the ruin of the corrupted clergy—
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheephook, or have learned aught else the least That to the faithful herdsman’s art belongs. (119-21)
Their spiritually unfed and bewildered congregations are an easy prey to the proselytising Jesuits represented here as wolves, not merely as being traditional foes of the flock (triste lupus stabulis, Eel. 3.80) but also because the coat of arms of their founder Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) depicted two gray wolves—
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing sed. (Lycidas 128-9)
Lycidas, which contains so many unmistakeable reminiscences of Virgilian and Theocritean pastoral, resembles the Bucolics also in the diversity of its many-layered fabric. At the end of Milton’s thirty-fifth year his eyesight began to cause him
18 M il t o n a n d V irgil serious concern. He was not yet forty-three when he had to grapple with the problems of total blindness and was—
Presented with a Universal blanc Of Nature’s works to mee expung’d and ras’d And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out. (P.L. 3.48-50)
After fifteen years spent in this pitiful condition appeared the first edition of Paradise Lost. The second edition, revised and augmented, was divided, like the Aeneid, into twelve books and was not published until a few months before his death in November 1674 and a month before his sixty-sixth birthday. Paradise Regain’d along with Samson Agonistes appeared in 1671. These dates are included because it is important to stress that for some thirty years personal consultation of books and verification of references were fraught with difficulty, whereas for as much as twenty-two years such work was physically impossible. Moreover his frenzied career as a controversialist and his marital and family differences allowed little leisure for the Muses. Alexander Gil’s Parerga are of importance both because Milton so much admired the author and because the choice made of metres and the use of classical models throw light on the Miltonic Latin corpus. The ninety-one pages of his anthology fairly present the man himself. No blemen, royalty and distinguished generals loom large in the work. Among these are King James I, Anne of Denmark, Viscount Campden, the Chancellor of Oxford University, Sir Paul Pindar (pietatis causa nominatus, for at his own expense he had in 1632 embellished the Cathedral Church of St Paul), Sir John Strange, who was a great admirer of Statius (indeed the elegiac poem addressed to him was sent along with a copy of the poet) and King Gustavus Adolphus II of Sweden, mortally wounded at the battle of Lutzen in 1632. Both the poems themselves and the verbose introductions to them would interest not merely the classicist but any observer of human foibles. For instance, the death of Anne is an obitus, while that of her husband, the most se rene and potent King, James I, ranks as an apotheosis. The longEpinikion for the ‘Lion of the North’ began in epic vein with arma prius cecini. He is hailed thus:
19 H .H . H u x le y
Tu vero qui tela Dei, qui sacra Tonantis Bella geris, spes Catholicae certissima turbae, Terror et Austriacae mastix saevissima gentis, Made animi, Gustave Heros; tibi militat aether.
Three brief notes may be useful: (1) just as Gil transliterates the Greek mastix, so Milton introduces an unfamiliar Greek word in Epitaphium Damonis (97); sic densi veniunt ad pabula thoes. Milton’s line recalls Iliad 11.474 ff. where the Trojans beset the wounded Odysseus as tawny jackals a wounded stag. Incidentally William Cowper’s verse translation of Milton’s Latin poems, well worth looking at, goes astray here in the rendering ‘So graze the dappled deer in numerous droves’. Gil’s meta phorical use of mastix stems of course from Homer (Iliad 12.37,13.812). Made animi suggests to every Virgilian made nova virtute (Aen. 9,641), but Statius’s made animo, iuvenis3 comes closer. The end of the verse, tibi militat aether, is a direct borrowing from Claudian’s panegyric on the third consulship of Honorius (cui militat aether, 97). Like Statius in the Silvae Gil uses Greek terms for genre poems: epithalamium, epinikion, genethliakon and threnodia. The Flavian poet, who made a deep impres sion on such masters as Chaucer and Dante, was unlikely to be overlooked by John Milton. Odium theologicum infects much seventeenth-century prose and verse. Gil excels himself in this. When the house of a Catholic burned down in London of 26 October 1623, Gil, celebrating the joyous event in savage senarii, used these choice definitions of the offending sect—Tou Papists, a race loathsome to Britain, locusts issuing from the cave of Tartarus and the pit of the abyss, cunning artificers of guile, comnon plague of the Christian world, Jesuits spawned of the seed of Satan ... ’ Let us look at the motto placed at the end of the poem
Occidit una domus, sed non domus una perire Digna fuit. (Ovid, Met. 1.240-1)
The appropriateness of the quotation deserves emphasis. The Arcadian king Lycaon, doubting Jupiter’s divinity, serves up before him a canni bal feast. His punishment fits the crime and he is changed into a wolf— fit lupus et veteris servat vestigia formae (ib. 237). Once again wolf is equated with Jesuit.
20 M ilt o n a n d V irgil
Gil’s Greek verse features trimeters and anacreontics, Milton’s trimeters and Homeric hexameters. Most of the latter is represented by an able rendering of Psalm 114 (In exitu Israel de Aegypto) in twenty-two epic verses, which naturally bear no resemblance to the Septuagint version. It is possible that at St Paul’s Milton gained some knowledge of the original Hebrew. In Latin both men compose in senarii, but Milton also tries scazons. Following the Greek poets and Varro rather than Catullus, Persius and Martial, he does not restrict himself to an iambic penultimate. The result startles the orthodox:
Vicina dulci prata mulcebit cantu. (Ad Salsillum 32)
Both compose in alcaics and the ‘Epode metre’ as well as in hexameters and elegiac couplets. Gil also tackles hendecasyllables and the anapaestic systems of Senecan choruses. What defies analysis is the extraordinary mish-mash of verses and non-verses which make up the Ode to John Rouse, Oxford University Librarian (eighty-seven lines of it!) composed on 23 January 1646 when the poet was thirty-eight. Altogether Milton seems to have composed two thousand and seventy six Latin verses, most of these before reaching the age of twenty. This is only one hundred and twelve lines less (about five per cent) than the total of the Georgies. The second Eclogue is only seventy-three lines long, Virgil was at least twenty-six before completing it. This shows the remarkable precocity of the Old Pauline. Undeniably there are some infelicities, false quantities, metrical aberrations; to my mind Milton too readily follows the trend in utilizing convenient metrical licences; but one should listen to Pope’s sage couplet:
Even copious Dryden wanted or forgot The last and greatest art, the art to blot.4
Of Milton’s five hexameter poems three may be briefly dismissed. Naturam non pati senium (Cowper’s Nature unimpaired by Time) sug gests that the processes of the universe continue with undiminished vigour until the final conflagration prophesied in 2 Peter 3.10. Of its sixty-nine verses let us quote one with a distinct Virgilian flavour:
Oedipodioniam volvit sub pectore noctem.
21 H.H. H u x le y
Setting aside the reference to Torquato Tasso, the complimentary verses addressed to John Baptista Manso are memorable chiefly for the infor mation that Milton, who had reviewed twenty-eight possible epic sub jects, toyed with the idea of writing an Arthuriad relating how Arthur, performing, like Aeneas, a katabasis, sought to acquire the magic caul dron of the Otherworld—
Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem.
Milton’s Ad Patrem, a record of filial piety, may owe something to Gil’s poem honouring his father’s sixtieth birthday; it may equally be in debted to Statius’s Epicedion in patrem suum (Silvae 5.3). In these lines he thanks his father for not forcing him into a lucrative profession but allowing him to cultivate the Muses:
Sed magis excultam cupiens ditescere mentem Me procul urbano strepitu, secessibus altis Abductum Aoniae iucunda per otia ripae Phoebaeo lateri comitem sinis ire beatum. (73-6)
In the long poem In quintum Novembris composed twenty-one years af ter the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot one might expect, if anywhere, to see clear evidence of the seventeen-year-old’s debt to Virgil. Not so; the smoothness of most verses, the rarity of harsh elision, the many compound and un-Virgilian epithets, the obvious imitations of Ovidian originals and the frequency of golden or near- golden lines point clearly to Ovidian influence. Here is a typical line:
Cannabeo lumbos constrinxit fune salaces.5 (84)
He has bound a hempen rope round his lustful loins.
When Milton writes—
neque enim secretus adulter Producit steriles molli sine pellice nodes (75-6)
the phrase secretus adulter (Juvenal 6.237) is far from proving that Milton
22 M ilt o n a n d V irgil had read and remembered the Sixth Satire; indeed, in view of Juvenal’s next line,6 one wonders if he used an expurgated edition. Though I admire the verbal fireworks of the poem on 5 November, I find myself in strong disagreement with E.K. Rand’s enthusiastic note of approval: ‘The little epic on Guy Fawkes, the work of the author’s seventeenth year, shows greater poise and firmness than the little epic on the Gnat which Virgil wrote at sixteen.’ Milton’s poem is colourful, exciting and impassioned (indeed, especially in its portrayal of Satan, it gives a shadowy glimpse of Paradise Lost), but comparare non comparanda is a pointless exercise, and even if the Culex were Virgilian one might bor row Martial’s useful dictum (12.36.13): nulla est gloria praeterire asellos. I find it not at all surprising that the gentle and melancholic Cowper found himself unable to translate this violent poem. The splendid Epitaphium Damonis has already been introduced. I briefly paraphrase the prose summary: Thyrsis and Damon, shepherds from the same neighbourhood, had followed the same interests and were bosom friends from childhood. While abroad Thyrsis heard of the death of Damon. Returning home and ascertaining the truth of the report, he mourns his loneliness in this poem. Thyrsis represents Milton, Damon Charles Diodati. Edward King, the subject of Lycidas, was drowned in August 1637: Diodati’s burial took place in the following August. As much as two years may have elapsed between the printing of the two laments. The flavour of Damon is well sampled in the first three lines:
HIMERIDES nymphae (nam vos & Daphnin & Hylan Et plorata diu meministis fata Bionis) Dicite Sicelicum Thamesina per oppida carmen.
Himerides nymphae along with Sicelicum at once suggests Sicelides nymphae in Eclogue 4.1. There is also the obvious adaptation of Romana per oppida carmen {Geo. 2.176). The Sicilian river Himera is twice men tioned by Theocritus, and by its waters in Idyll VII the oak trees sing a dirge for Daphnis. Moreover, when in Moschus’s Epitaphios Bionos the rivers are bid weep for the handsome Bion, the word rendered here by ‘handsome’—himeroenta—echoes the name of the river. Scholars are quick to pounce on the long first syllable in Hylan\ they should remem ber that in Elegy 7.24 Milton ends a pentameter correctly with raptus
23 H .H . H u x le y
Hylas (a line strongly echoing Prop. 1.20.6). As Virgil exercised the license of variable scansion with words like Orion, Diana and Sychaeus, so Milton pleased himself about quantities. Here are three hexameter endings to stress the point; donasse Jacobum, derisit Jacobus ignem and veniens Jacobus ab arcto. Pastoral poems in Latin and Greek are conspicuous for refrains which may remain unvaried throughout the entire piece, or undergo modification. In Theocritus 1 the verse ‘Begin, sweet Maids, begin the woodland song’ is changed to ‘Forget, sweet maids, Forget your woodland song.’ Moschus, a considerably later writer, confines himself to a single refrain ‘Sing, Sicilian Muses, raise your song of grief.’ Epitaphium Damonis has but one refrain:
Ite domum impasti, domino iam non vacat, agni.
Vacare with the sense of‘have time for’ occurs in Virgil only at Aen.l 373. Rhyme between the two halves of the hexameter, absent from the refrains of Eclogue 8, is present in Moschus (Sikelikai. . . Moisai). Ob servant readers of the Aeneid may raise their eyebrows at the word impasti, which at Aen.10.560 is applied to hungry fish licking the wounds of a decapitated warrior, while at 9.339 and 10.723 it refers to a starving lion let loose on a crowded shippen. One could say that pastoral usage of a word need not be identical with epic usage, or one could defend Milton by citing Eclogue 9.31:
sic cytiso pastae distendant ubera vaccae.
Perhaps the monosyllabic rhyme impasti agni deliberately evokes the rhyming of pastae with vaccae. As in Geo.3. 231 carice pastus acuta refers to a bull and in Lucan 6.628 impastae volucres are vultures, it may be that pastus is used of farm animals and impastus of predators and scavengers. Turning from the literal to the metaphorical sense of the refrain we note that Milton, who has towards the end of this poem canvassed possible subjects for an epic, is bidding farewell to the pastoral tradition. The refrain hammers home this message with seventeen identical strokes. Similarly the final verse of the last Eclogue signals the break with the pastoral tradition—
24 M ilt o n a n d V irgil
ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae.
The sense-link with Eclogue 10 is further underlined since, just before the refrain at 161, comes a verse ending with vos cedite silvae. This surely picks up Virgil’s ipsae rursus concedite silvae (63). Milton’s affection for the Eclogues is shown also in the motto of the title-page for Comus (1637):
Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus Austrum Perditus— (Eel. 2.58—9) and for the Poems both English and Latin (1645)—
Baccare frontem Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro. (Eel. 7.27-8)
The vates futurus is both the poet of the Aeneid and the composer of the small-scale epic Paradise Regain’d and the full-scale epic Paradise Lost, though the smaller work is a postscript to the larger. Paradise Regain’d has come in for much abuse from the critics, Northrop Frye going so far as to damn the central figure as ‘a pusillani mous quietist in the temptation of Parthia, an inhuman snob in the temptation of Rome, a peevish obscurantist in the temptation of Athens’. Complaints that the style is more flat and dry than that of Paradise Lost are not uncommon or without foundation, though the laconic terseness of the poem has not wanted admirers. If we look first at the seven-line introduction of which I quote the first three lines:
I who e’re while the happy Garden sung By one man’s disobedience lost, now sing Recover’d Paradise to all mankind. it is obviously a sphragis or seal-poem comparable to Georgies 4.559-66 and shorter by just one verse. We look back to a completed epic of Homeric proportions, forward to a second and complementary epic which to our surprise has fewer lines than the Georgies. Indeed Samson Agonistes is only three hundred lines shorter. Moreover the characters
25 H.H. H u x le y number only two, Jesus Christ, whose Greek and Hebrew titles signify ‘the Healer, the Anointed, the Saviour’ and Satan whose Hebrew name means ‘the adversary (in battle or the law-courts) or simply ‘the enemy’. No physical violence is offered by either to the other. One might—si parva licet componere magnis—compare the contest between Dikaios and Adikos Logos in Aristophanes’s Clouds. Nevertheless the Hel^Spirit is asked to inspire the bard ‘to tell of deeds I Above Heroic/though in secret done’ The bulk of the epic, that is from the first sight of the ‘aged man in Rural weeds’ (Satan disguised) to the climax, when ‘the Tempter proud ... Fell whence he stood to see his Victor fall’, more in fact than fifteen hundred lines, is an expansion of thirteen scriptural verses (Luke 4.1-13 ). How different is the Aeneid from Paradise Lostl While the former moves from defeat, painful wanderings and exile to victory, re-settlement and the fusion of two peoples destined to dominate the world, the other, considering first the two mortal characters, moves from unutterable bliss in a sedes beata to disgrace, misery and permanent expulsion. Aeneas personifies pietas, though his lapses from piety are pardoned; Adam, a man without ancestry and therefore without memory, puts his pietas for a new and unsophisticated wife, flesh of his flesh and bom fully nubile7 before piety to God, his creator. The rebel angels, precipitated from Heaven to the pit of Hell, denied return or the chance of expiation, doomed to never-ending torment, yet retain immunity from death. Being deathless they can perform no aristeia. Instead of the favouritism be stowed by the Olympians on warriors with whom they have personal links, a partisanship limited by the immutable laws of Fate, we have the intervention at infinite cost to himself of God’s only Son to the end that in the fullness of time the two sinners and their unborn progeny may be forgiven their sins and re-united with their Maker. Nevertheless, the similarities are numerous and significant. Action in Milton’s epic takes place, as in the Aeneid, on three planes; these are Heaven, Paradise and the bottomless pit. Great issues are at stake for the protagonists. Adam, like Aeneas, puts a lower before a higher loy alty; Eve, like Dido, commits a fatal culpa; God, like Jupiter, is the ulti mate agent of reconciliation. Both epics are enriched by copious descrip tions; both abound in elaborate similes and metaphors; both are to be interpreted in the light of past and future events; in both the subtleties of characterization and motives for action or inaction are analysed by speech and answering speech. Above all, the diction is majestic, as befits
26 M ilt o n a n d V irgil the noblest deeds and thoughts of gods and men. In my estimation what separates Miltonic from Classical epic (and this may be illustrated easily by the twenty-six line exordium to Para dise Lost) is the English poet’s refusal to maintain objectivity. Of course in expressions like cano, canimus,cecini, ordior arma or da fontis mihi, Phoebe, novos the singer is entitled to use the first person. With some what less justification he may descend, as does Lucan, to base adulation of the princeps and write si te pectore vates I Accipio (Bell. Civ. 1.63-4), where te refers not to Apollo or a Muse, but to the Emperor Nero (incidentally with a sickening perversion of Aen. 9. 276-7). What flatly contradicts the epic is to assume, as Milton does, that writer and reader are bound by a mutual bond and that the former may seek to influence the beliefs and behaviour of the latter. In expressions like ‘all our woe’, ‘till one greater man I Restore us’ and ‘what cause I Moved our grand parents?’ we are directly importuned, gratuitously solicited by a Puritan to react as he directs. The reader is bombarded by phrases like ‘our Saviour meek’, ‘our mother Eve’ and ‘our Father penitent’. It is summed up in two verses from Paradise Regain’d:
Queller of Satan, on thy glorious work Now enter, and begin to save mankind. (4.634-5)
The genre of Milton’s two poems on Paradise, didactic epic, is unac ceptable in ancient literary practice. As instruments of teaching one doubts if they achieved any success in the poet’s own day. Enthusiasm for these works in our own time does not march hand in hand with evangelistic fervour. When brilliant stars of our English faculties cannot praise too highly the Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer, it is decidedly gauche to enquire which church they attend. On a more serious note one has to give thought to Blake’s view expressed in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790):
The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.
I have, as I am well aware, failed to give an adequate answer to my question ‘How well did Milton know Virgil?’. Had Milton chosen a secular
27 H .H . H u x le y subject for his epic, I believe a more confident and better-documented answer could be given. As it is, the Old and the New Testaments, omnipresent in Paradise Lost, are like the mists in which Homeric gods wrapped their heroes to save them from exposure. Superficial imitation one can of course detect in many places, but I maintain that it is only in Milton’s pastorals that the Virgilian spirit is essentially caught. An instructive parallel is supplied by the Royalist poet Abraham Cowley, whose epic in decasyllabic couplets on King David, the Davideis, was published in 1656. Imitations of Virgil in this poem, which is rarely read today, are easily identified and meant to be identified. Incidentally, the author’s death, before he was fifty, occurred in 1667, the year when the ten-book version of Paradise Lost appeared. Ovid was undoubtedly Milton’s first love and with the important exception of Epitaphium Damonis, which is pure Virgil, his preferred model for composition. After all, no-one who could summarise the Aeneid as erage I Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous’d’ could be exactly on the Mantuan’s wavelength.
Cambridge H.H. HUXLEY
NOTES 1. Samson Agonistes 80-5 2. Martial 10.21.5-6. 3. Thebaid 7.280. 4. Book 2, Epistle 1 (to Augustus) 280-1. 5. Similar lines include: Sceptra Caledonia eonjunxerat Anglica Scotis: (4) Regnaque olivifera vertit florentia pace (15) Tarda fenestratis figens vestigia calceis (85) Signaque Aventino ponet fulgentia colie (109) Vasta ruinosi quondam fundamina tecti (140) 6. Impatiensque morae silet et praeputia ducit.
28 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 20 (1991) 29—45
©1991
The Aeneid and the Oresteia
When I was writing my book on the Aeneid I was much taken up with the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius as model for the universalising and unifying tendencies in the Aeneid—that is, the epic’s drive to construct an image of the cosmos within which all parts are connected by links of sympathy and analogy, and in particular the worlds of nature and of human history are seen to share the same principles of order or disor der.1 Since then I have repeatedly found myself thinking about the ways in which these features of the Virgilian epic find parallels in the tragedy of Aeschylus, above all in the one surviving trilogy the Oresteia', and I have come to reflect on the fact that some modem criticism has traced in Aeschylus patterns similar to those that had preoccupied me in my study of the Latin hexameter tradition. I subtitled my book Cosmos and Imperium: a recent (admittedly not particularly useful) French work on Aeschylus by B. Deforge is called Eschyle: poete cosmique,2 and the cos mic afflatus that strikes many readers of Virgil also breathes strongly through the works of Aeschylus. Of all the surviving works of Greek tragedy the Oresteia is perhaps the most obviously and thoroughly per meated with the ideology of the Athenian imperialist democracy; when thinking about the Aeneid, a poem written in the decade after the ending of the civil war that destroyed the Roman Republic it does not seem irrelevant to remember that the Oresteia was produced at a time, 458 b c , when faction had recently threatened the stability of the Athenian state. In what follow I shall pursue a comparison of the Aeneid and the Oresteia that starts from the premise that they are both highly public works of literature which seek to validate a social and political order. That is of course already a contentious description of either work and the fact that this is so is itself one example of how Virgilian and Aeschylean criticism have, independently, trodden similar paths. Much has been written on the subversiveness of Virgil’s portrayal of Roman
29 P h ilip H ardie imperialism, and in particular on the disturbing way that the war in Italy is brought to an end with Aeneas’ infuriated slaughter of the defenceless Tumus; similarly, a number of recent Aeschyleans have questioned the status of the telos of the Oresteia, and have found the resolution of the Eumenides through the trial scene deeply unsatisfactory as a way of reconciling the counterclaims of Apollo and the Furies, of the male and female principles.3 This coincidence of critical approach may only be an index of the modem disquiet with works that seem to have a firm set towards closure; but it may point to wider similarities between the two works themselves. The parallels that I shall describe are not for the most part so specific as to prove direct borrowing by Virgil from particular passages of Aeschylus, but they are suggestive of the possibity that in literature, as in the visual arts, Augustan imperialist images were developed with an eye to the productions of fifth-century Athenian artists working, directly or indirectly, in the service of the state. In this respect the present essay is part of a wider inquiry into the parallels between fifth-century b c
Athenian and late first-century b c Roman political iconographies: the kind of thing I have in mind is the prominent placing in the Forum of Augustus of close copies of the Caryatids of the Erechtheum. Was Pericles one of the many models that Augustus presented to himself in the elaboration of his own image?4 Virgil had of course read the Athenian tragedians with attention; Richard Heinze showed how in general he pursues the emotional goals of tragedy in his epic,5 and numerous specific models work to reinforce what many critics have seen as the tragic quality of the Aeneid in the more general sense. Scholars have focussed chiefly on Virgil’s use of Euripides, and to some extent of Sophocles; the possible influence of Aeschylus has received less attention.6 There are a number of verbal parallels with the Agamemnon',1 the most striking of these is found in Dido’s curse at 4.625, exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor. Unfortunately for the Romans Dido enjoys the prophetic power of one close to death, and her desperate imprecations will score a high hit-rate; the efficacy of these particular words is assured by the fact that they allude to the infallible words of Cassandra at Ag'-1279 f., o() [ifp &tl|j.oL y’ eK 0ewv Te0i/r|£o|j.ei'- I -r^ei yap fulfil/ aAAo? 30 A e n e id and O r esteia simile at 4.471 ff. where, in her frenzy, she is compared to Orestes: aut Agamemnonius scaenis agitatus Orestes, I armatam facibus matrem et serpentibus atris I cum fugit ultricesque sedent in limine Dirae; al though there is nothing in the language that forces us to take this as a specific reference to the Choephoroe or Eumenides rather than to one of the other numerous Greek and Roman plays on the subject.8 The similarity between the Oresteia and the Aeneid may best be ap proached from those aspects in which the Aeschylean trilogy differs as a form from the more normal tragic practice of writing single plays that constitute complete units in themselves. The Eumenides is not the only surviving Attic tragedy to end on a cheerful note, but the greater length of the trilogy allows for patterns of evolution towards that happy ending that could hardly be accommodated within the single play. A central structural principle that informs and unifies all three plays of the Oresteia is inversion; now inversion is a structural feature of many trag edies (classically Oedipus Rex, the story of a godlike king who eventually casts himself out from society little better than a beast, and already Aristotle saw peripety as a defining feature of the genre); but the Oresteia is largely built on a play of ‘repetition and reversal’9 that ex tends far beyond the limits of one complete praxis. Repetition and re versal link the opening of the first play to the ending of the third: the nocturnal lights of the stars and then of the beacons that announce the capture of Troy, seen through the eyes of the watchman in the prologue of the Agamemnon, are answered finally in the torches of the Panathenaic procession that concludes the Eumenides;10 the visual reflection points to a more important inversion, for the trilogy traces a vast arc from the total destruction of a city and its gods, Troy in the legendary past,to the affirmation of the political and divine order of another city, Athens, represented on stage in a thinly veiled allegory of the historical city of 458 b c . At Agamemnon 527 f. the messenger tells of the altars and temples of Troy destroyed, the ‘seed of the land’ annihilated; in the finale of the Eumenides the Erinyes are escorted to their new shrine as they assent to Athene’s request that they ensure the ‘preservation of human seed’ (909). Inversion is also the central structural principle of the Aeneid, a work that like the Oresteia charts the distance between the destruction of a city (the same city, Troy, the same act of destruction) and the glorification of another city, Rome.11 Seen in this light the true conclusion of the Aeneid is not the death of Tumus at the end of book 31 P h ilip H ardie twelve, but the triple triumph of Octavian shown on the Shield of Aeneas at the end of book eight, a religious procession that may be compared broadly with the Panathenaic procession at the end of the Oresteia; light out of darkness, the concelebration of triumph by man, god, and nature. In Virgil the mid-day brilliance of the temple of the sun-god Apollo and the triumphator’s easy mastering of the violent riv ers of barbarian lands form the strongest contrast to the dark night of the storm with which the poem opens and which nearly destroys Aeneas as he steps on to the epic stage. In the Oresteia the contrast between beginning and end is worked through two night scenes, the night which holds the ominous news of the fall of Troy and the night of the Panathenaic torch procession; but there is a secondary contrast between the darkness at the beginning of the Agamemnon and the sunny days ahead promised by the Eumenides (Eum. 906, 926); Peradotto shows how the clement weather and agricultural prosperity heralded at the end of the trilogy stand at the opposite pole to the storm-winds that preceded (bad weather at Aulis) and followed (the storm that strikes the returning Greeks) the expedition to Troy as described in the Agamemnon.12 Storm-imagery recurs insistently in the Aeneid, from the first time that we see Aeneas, at the mercy of the elements in book one, to his last appearance at the end of book twelve as, figuratively wielding the thunderbolt of Jupiter, he strikes down Tumus. As in the Oresteia imagery works to reinforce structure. This practice, of course, is hardly peculiar to Aeschylus and Virgil; here, if anywhere, my comparison of the two runs the risk of being formulated in terms that might be used to show a parallelism between Virgil and many other authors. But, if I may be allowed to run that risk for a few minutes: one of the most successful results of the application to Virgil of new-critical techniques was the anatomising of the image-systems that rim throughout the poem in a lacework of astounding complexity. In my book I examined the possibil ity that for Virgil this is more than a matter of verbal patterning, and is instead the expression of a philosophical or semi-philosophical view of the interconnections that structure the worlds of nature and of history; and I argued that in this respect (as in many others) a central model was Lucretius, the philosopher-poet who revalorises the analogies of poetic imagery as an accurate description of the connections of things in the Epicurean grand unified theory. In particular I looked at the way in which Lucretius uses the movement from figure to reality or from reality 32 A e n e id and O r esteia to figure, and compared this with Virgil’s practice: for example, at Aeneid 1.50 Juno is described as talia flammato secum dea corde volutans. Juno’s ‘fiery’ thoughts have included the memory of the blazing corpse of Oilean Ajax, and will lead to the release against the Trojans of the lightning-fires. One Lucretian and one Aeschylean parallel: at De Rerum Natura 1.473-7 the figurative flame of Paris’ love for Helen ignites the literal fires of Troy sacked; at Ag. 479—82 the sceptical chorus speaks of the fool whose heart may have been ‘set on fire’ by the message of the beacon-fire. I would now add that for the casting of such networks of imagery over a large-scale poetic work with mythological or legendary subject-matter the closest parallel to Virgil’s practice in the Aeneid is to be found in Aeschylus’ practice in the dramatic trilogy, of which our only extant example is the Oresteia. So far as I can see there is no real precedent in pre-Virgilian epic (neither Homer nor Apollonius of Rhodes seems to me to use imagery in a comparable way); and the Aeschylean trilogy is the only other kind of ancient poetic work that begins to approach the scale of the epic. We are well served with analyses of the imagery of both Virgil and Aeschylus, and little needs to be done other than to juxtapose the results of each. Striking is the coincidence not only of technique, but also of the range of subject-matters chosen by each poet: central images include storm, fire, serpents, hunting, sacrifice. Again I would not pitch my claim here too high: these are common images, and one could point to other tragedies which work with a complex of all or most of them, for example the Bacchae. It may be that we are dealing rather with a tragic, rather than specifically Oresteian or Aeschylean, quality of the Aeneid.13 I take a couple of these images as examples: firstly, the image of the hunt that reaches from beginning to end of the Aeneid as of the Oresteia: in the Agamemnon the omen of the eagles’ capture of the hare (114 ff.) foreshadows the Atreids’ successful hunt against Troy, caught in a figurative hunting-net (358), a figure that will turn into the reality of the woven robe thrown over Agamemnon by Clytemnestra (1382 f.) and which will be actually displayed on stage in the Choephoroe (980 ff.); by the end of the second play Orestes, who has in turn ensnared Clytemnestra, becomes himself the hunted as in his delirium he sees his mother’s avenging hounds (924,1054), figments that materialize as the chorus of hunting Erinyes in the Eumenides.u Virgil weaves another tapestry of real and figurative hunts, from the time that Aeneas shoots 33 P h ilip H ardie seven stags when he lands on the shore of Carthage (1.180 ff.); the real hunts of books four and seven form parts of chains of causality that result in more sinister figurative hunts, Love’s hunting down of Dido in book four and Aeneas’ hunting down of Tumus, reaching its climax in the hunting-dog simile of 12.749 ff.15 Secondly, the image of sacrifice: sacrifice pure, inverted, and perverted, runs throughout the Oresteia from the sacrifice of Iphigeneia which sets in train the whole series of actions to the good sacrifices instituted in honour of the Eumenides in the final scene of the trilogy, with the ghastly sacrificial victimisation of Agamemnon, Cassandra, Aegisthus, Clytemnestra, and Orestes along the way.16 Sacrifice is equally pervasive in the Aeneid where more work remains to be done: in absolute chronology the epic action begins with the perverted sacrifice of Laocoon, with its echoes of the Lucretian version of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia; book two reaches a climax with the ‘sacrifice’ of Priam at his own altar; Aeneas’ journey to and arrival in Italy is punctuated by a series of sacrifices, propitious and not so propi tious (as the sacrifice of the cattle of the Harpies); Palinurus’ death is also a kind of sacrifice, unum pro multis; in the last four books the killing of war is associated with the killing of sacrifice: the priest Haemonides is ‘sacrificed’ (immolat) by Aeneas, and the main action of the last book opens and closes with sacrifices, the solemn ritual of the foedus at 12.161 ff., and Aeneas’ final frenzied offering to Pallas (12.948 f.): Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas I immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit,17 The apparently innocent introduction of the hunting motif near the beginning of Aeneid 1, to be developed in most unexpected ways later on, is reminiscent of the Aeschylean practice of introducing themes and images at the beginning of the trilogy to be fully unfolded or unpacked later on: Lebeck speaks of prolepsis, i.e. ‘a brief initial statement of sev eral major themes en bloc’. The full development toward which each repetition builds may not occur for several hundred lines;18 with this compare for example Viktor Poschl’s analysis of the first three hundred lines of the Aeneid as ‘symbolic anticipation of the whole poem’.19 The interpenetration of the several levels of man, gods, nature; and of the moral, the political, and the philosophical, is a part of what I mean by the ‘cosmic’ quality of the Aeneid; Aeschylus is another poet who pro ceeds simultaneously on a number of levels. I have touched on the political aspect of the Oresteia, its treatment of cities and their manage ment; but the trilogy is often interpreted as dramatising the development 34 A e n e id and O r este ia of a certain type of morality, away from the blood-feud which is the family’s only sure recourse to justice and towards the more civilised forms of justice made possible by socialisation within the polis. Here one might think of a commonplace of Virgilian criticism, that in Aeneas we see the transition from the individualistic ethic of the Homeric hero to the socially responsible morality of the Augustan statesman. But the scope of the Oresteia is wider than human society alone, whether as organised in house or city; in Aeschylus as in Virgil there is a sense that events in the moral world and in nature are bound to each other by a sympathetic causality; the imagery of the last scene of the Eumenides suggests that justice in the city will be accompanied by, even in some way cause, balance and harmony in nature. The locus classicus for this kind of outlook is Hesiod’s description of the just and unjust cities at Works and Days 225 ff. Peradotto sees in the parallel a mark of Aeschylus’ archaic (or archaising) habits of thought; and I am reminded of archaising tendencies in Virgil, above all those transmitted from Lucretius’ sustained revival of pre-Socratic ways of thinking.20 Aeschylus and Virgil are also ‘cosmic poets’ in the simple sense that they write about the cosmos, the universe seen in its largest outline. I will bring out this aspect of Aeschylus through a brief annotated doxography. Herington discerns a ‘last phase’ of Aeschylean tragedy, consisting of the Suppliants-trilogy, the Prometheia and the Oresteia, characterised by ‘a preoccupation with the possibility that Zeus may emerge from the chaos as the ultimate authority’.21 George Thomson, in his commentary on the Prometheus Bound, speaks of the ‘cosmic breadth and grandeur’ of the trilogy, which charts the evolution of the universe.22 More recently N.S. Rabinowitz argues a similar case in an article called ‘From Force to Persuasion: Aeschylus’ Oresteia as Cosmogonic Myth’,23 a title which again reveals the double focus on human society and the natural universe; Rabinowitz in effect revives the methods of the Cam bridge school of myth critics by arguing that the human events of the trilogy are patterned on primitive mythological models of creation and of the struggle between Olympian forces and monstrous dragons, the latter embodied in the Furies and Clytemnestra. Rabinowitz stresses the link between dragon-slaying and city-founding, a link unmistakably present in book eight of the Aeneid which tells a story that begins with Hercules’ slaying of the monstrous Cacus and ends with the foundation and growth of Rome. M. Tierney, one of those scholars who argue for the 35 P h ilip H ardie pervasive influence of the Mysteries on the Oresteia, concludes his arti cle thus: ‘I believe that the ordinary Athenian in 458 b c was capable of seeing all through the Eumenides the majestic comparison between the institutions of his city and the eternal economy of the K6ap.osr which is implied in the echoes of mystic terminology here pointed out’.24 More bluntly, A. Moreau writes: ‘Un mythe essentiel sous-tend toute l’oeuvre d’Eschyle, celui du combat entre le Cosmos et le Chaos’.25 The movement from chaos, or the threat of chaos, to an ordered and stable universe is that of the Aeneid, from the storm of book one with its Gigantomachic allusions to the final reconciliation of Juno and Jupiter in book twelve; this reconciliation of husband and wife is also to be understood as an ending of the split in the cosmos which had reached a climax with the mobilisation by Juno of the lower against the upper world through the evocation of the Fury Allecto in book seven. Herington sees this concern with the order of the macrocosm as a reflection of Aeschylus’ interest in the speculative thought of the fifth century,26 though it might also be viewed as a continuation of the Hesiodic concern with the evolution of the world-order.27 And looking forward in time, the combination of poetry and philosophy will be central to Virgil’s conception of the Roman epic. Herington, in another article, has argued seductively that many of the peculiar features of the Eumenides, including the festive ending, could be explained as the result of the influence of Old Comedy on Aeschylus’ later trilogies.28 One may also come at the Oresteia, and the Eumenides especially, from another non-tragic genre, epic, and in particular the Odyssey. Comic and Odyssean models may in fact be difficult to disen tangle, for if the Iliad anticipates many features of tragedy, the Odyssey is in important ways the source of a typical comic plot, dislocation within the family finally resolved in renewed family harmony.29 The Oresteia’s theme of moral and political reintegration runs closely parallel with a reading of the Odyssey as a journey from the destruction of a city, via a series of struggles with disorder in the natural and human worlds, to the reassertion of order in the oikos. Particularly germane in this context is Norman Austin’s analysis of the Odyssey. He writes: ‘Odysseus’ task is not merely the expulsion of usurpers but the re-creation of an original order that had existed in Ithaka.30 Austin understands the Odyssean concern with order to apply to both the human and the natural worlds, and finds support for this idea in the Stoicising and allegorical Homeric Problems, a work perhaps of the early first century a d : ‘The cosmic 36 A e n e id and O resteia exegesis of Heraclitus Rhetor is more in tune with Homer’s psychology than [is] modern exegesis which circumscribes the poet by eliminating or diminishing the primary physical realities behind the symbols.’31 Austin’s neo-allegorical and structuralist reading of the Odyssey comes close to my reading of the Aeneid as an epic heavily influenced by pre cisely that post-Homeric allegorising tradition which is represented in Heraclitus’ Homeric Problems?2 But I see this convergence not simply as pointing to the Odyssey as shared source for the Oresteia and the Aeneid. There remain ways in which Virgil is closer still to the Aeschylean than to the Homeric version of social and cosmic reintegration; Goldhill, in his discussion of the influence of the Odyssey on the Oresteia, writes: ‘Orestes’ act of matricide is not only to re-order the disorder of the oikos [as Odysseus does in the Odys sey], but also to rediscover the relation of the internal ties of the oikos to the wider society of the polis’;33 the city is at the centre of both the Oresteia and the Aeneid in a way that it is obviously not in the the Odyssey. In both of the first two works the theme of political strife is closely bound up with the theme of the ‘threatened destruction of generational continuity’;34 the stability of the state is only ensured through the survival and prosperity of, respectively, the House of Atreus and the gens lulia. Fur thermore Aeschylus and Virgil stand together, and apart from Homer, in the breadth of their cosmic vision; in the profundity of the chasm that threatens to open up between the parts of the universe; in the pressing sense of history in both the Oresteia and the Aeneid, virtually absent from the Odyssey, and not least in the problematical nature of the progress from disorder to order—too much that seems valuable has to be jettisoned on the way. We hardly come to the end of the Odyssey feeling that the Cyclops’ eye or the suitors are serious losses. In both the Oresteia, in particular the Eumenides, and in the Aeneid the split in the universe is expressed through a radical theological dualism. Certainly many of the dichotomies that structure the Aeneid may be understood as reflections of the typically Greek polarities that run through Homer, but neither in the Iliad nor in the Odyssey do we find a suggestion that the world is divided between radically opposed moral or theological forces. The impartiality of Homer between the Achaeans and the Trojans in the Iliad is striking, and quite different from the fairy-tale-, or romance-like opposition between the goody, Odysseus, and the baddies, the suitors, at the end of the Odyssey, but even there the 37 P h ilip H ardie viciousness and worthlessness of the suitors is not associated with a notion of absolute evil. The idea of an absolute division between forces of the upper and the lower worlds is presented in the Eumenides, at least from the perspective of Apollo and his representatives for whom the Erinyes, daughters of Night, embody all that is opposed to the order and light of the Apollonian dispensation. Note especially lines 71-3: kouccov' 8’ £icaTi ic&yev'oi'T’, eTTel KaK6v» I cjk6tov i^ jio v T a i T d p T a p o i' 0 ’ lrrr6 y Q o v b s , I (1101*1(10.-1-’ dvSpwv Kai QeQv ’O X u iit tLcov, ‘it was for evil that they were bom, since they dwell in the evil darkness and Tartarus beneath the earth, hated of men and the Olympian gods’. Similarly Juno turns to Allecto for the embodiment of all that is opposed to the stability of human society and of the upper world, an evil demon who will work strife within both family and state. Allecto is, as the descendant of Ennius’ Discordia, a close relative of Empedocles’ cosmic principle of Strife.35 Radical theological or cosmic dualism is not commonly found in classical antiquity before the Hellenistic period, and the Apollonian view of the world as presented at the beginning of the Eumenides is striking in a fifth-century context; it is somewhat different from the opposition between forces of heaven and hell that we see in the wars between the gods and the Giants or Typhoeus, for the Erinyes claim to stand for an alternative divine order, rather than emerging simply as rebels against the established Olympian order.36 The Furies are central to the theology of the Oresteia. They motivate the action even from the time before the dramatic action; in the parodos of the Agamemnon the Chorus liken the Atreids to an Erinys proceeding to punish Troy. Further references to the agency, literal or otherwise, of the Furies abound in the first two plays of the trilogy, until the Hell hounds are physically called up into the world above, visible to Orestes at the end of the Choephoroe and to the audience at the beginning of the Eumenides. Virgilian criticism, today as in the Middle Ages, feels a strong urge to allegorise, reducing the plot of the Aeneid to a struggle between the psychological personifications of Pietas and Furor (so Brooks Otis, for example); but it should not be overlooked how frequently the mythological Furies appear in the poem, whether in person or figuratively, and not just in the second half of the poem which in a sense is all about the activity of Allecto: in the disputed Helen scene in book two Aeneas, picking up an originally Aeschylean topic, describes Helen as Troiae et patriae communis Erinys (2.573); in book three the Harpy Celaeno styles herself Furiarum . . . maxima (252); in book four Dido threatens Aeneas 38 A e n e id and O resteia that after her death she will ‘pursue him with black flames’ (384), in other words she will turn into a Fury; Furies turn up, as expected, in the Underworld scenes in book six and on the Shield of Aeneas in book eight. Here we come up against a problem central to the interpretation of both the Oresteia and the Aeneid. At the end of the Eumenides the Fu ries, converted into the Kindly Ones, are established at the very heart of Athens, the visible symbol of the human and natural harmony to which the whole trilogy has been striving; but do the incantations of the final chorus really succeed in persuading us that henceforth man and the Furies can enjoy a cosy coexistence? How kindly will the Eumenides really be; after all Athene herself had spoken of the fear that must be enshrined at the centre of the state to ensure justice (691), thus affirm- ing the Erinyes’ earlier claim that t6 8eiv6v is necessary if the individual and the city are to walk in the path of justice (517 ff.). Terror and order, it seems, cannot be separated.37 Turning to Virgil: at the end ofAeneid 12 the rift in heaven is patched up by the deal struck between Jupiter and Juno; Juno will henceforth comply with the requirements of Jovian fata. We might assume that the upper world will no longer be plagued by eruptions from Hell of the sort that Juno engineered in book one through the unleashing of the Titanic winds, and in book seven through the evocation of the Fury Allecto. It comes as something of a shock when Jupiter’s next action (12.843 ff.) is to send down one of his agents to warn off Jutuma from further support of her brother Tumus; who is the agent? Not for example Mercury, the god of logos, who descends as Jupiter’s messenger to Aeneas in book 4, but—a Fury, one of two who, it seems, had always been present in heaven as servants seated by the throne of Jupiter (12.845-54): dicuntur geminae pestes cognomine Dirae, quas et Tartaream Nox intempesta Megaeram uno eodemque tulit partu, paribusque reuinxit serpentum spiris uentosasque addidit alas, hae Iouis ad solium saeuique in limine regis apparent acuuntque metum mortalibus aegris, si quando letum horrificum morbosque deum rex molitur, meritas aut bello territat urbes. harum unam celerem demisit ab aethere summo Iuppiter inque omen Iuturnae occurrere iussit. 39 P h ilip H ardie W.R. Johnson has already suggested that in this last scene of divine action in the Aeneid Virgil is preoccupied with the issues of the Oresteia?6 In this passage Virgil spans the whole history of the question of the relation between order and violence: the mythological tableau of agents at the throne of Jupiter looks back to the beginning of Greek literature, to Hesiod’s Theogony (383 ff.), where four allegorical children of the Styx, Zelos, Nike, Kratos, and Bie, are described as attendant on the seat of Zeus.39 But Virgil also looks to the present day: in his use of the word apparent (12.850) Virgil presents Jupiter as the Roman magistrate accompanied by his apparitores, for example the lictors with their axes; legal terror is as much in place on earth, in Rome, as it is in heaven. From this point of view the poem’s final image of Aeneas, ultimate progenitor of the Roman imperator, seems quite in keeping with the dispensation of Jupiter: Aeneas poised implacable above Turnus, furiis accensus et ira terribilis (12.946 f.).40 The ancient text would of course make no distinction between furiae and Furiae. At the beginning of the Aeneid Juno had wished, in vain, that she might use the thunderbolt of Jupiter to destroy her human enemy Aeneas; excluded from the powers of her husband, she then looked to other agents in order to confound the upper and the lower worlds through the force of the storm; here at the end of the poem we find that the two worlds were never separate. Some, troubled by the association of Jupiter and a Fury, have at tempted to maintain a separation of powers between Upper and Lower worlds, most circumstantially W. Hiibner in his study of Dirae in Roman epic.41 Hiibner tries to distinguish between Virgil’s Furies, at home in the Underworld and responsible for the active infuriation of human beings, and Virgil’s Dirae, bird-like purveyors of omens from the gods above and whose function is to inhibit, rather than incite, action by inducing torpor and formido in those to whom they appear. The great value of Hiibner’s book lies in its detailed demonstration of the influence of Roman augural language and tradition on Virgil’s presentation of the Furiae and Dirae, but he seriously distorts the text in his desire to keep the two separate. In Aeneid 12.845-7 we are told that Jupiter’s Dirae are the sisters of the Erinys, or Fury, Megaera, all three spawned by Nox in one and the same birth. And in the Pentheus and Orestes simile in 4.469 ff. it is hard not to identify the Eumenides that appear to the deranged Pentheus with the Dirae that sit at the threshold as Orestes is pursued by the ghost of his mother. The ‘avenging Dirae’ on whom Dido calls as 40 A e n e id and O r esteia she curses Aeneas at 4.610 are surely none other than the Erinyes familiar to the Aeschylean Cassandra, whose prescience Dido here mimics.42 The Jupiter at the end of Aeneid 12 is the god who will preside over the future greatness of Rome, and we may compare what we learn here about the divine order with what we find in book eight, the book of Rome. In the Eumenides the Erinyes are housed in a cave under the Areopagus;43 the first story that we hear about Rome in Aeneid 8, a story that tells of the imposition of order on chaos as a preliminary to the history of the foundation of the city, concerns the removal by Hercules of a monster, Cacus, from a cave under the Palatine Hill; at the etymological level the extirpation of evil, to kakon, from Good-man Evander’s settlement. Cacus is a close relative of the monsters of the Underworld; the simile at 8.243 ff. compares the breaking-open by Hercules of his cave to the opening-up of Hades itself. At 194 he is described as Caci fades dira: when Virgil uses the adjective dirus there is often a hint of something infernal, something akin to the Dime;44 at 8.205 the majority of the manuscripts read at furiis Caci mens effera. The removal of the wicked Cacus can be taken as a mythical aetiology of the claim in the laudes Italiae in Georgies 2 that the land of Italy is free from natural and mythological monsters; the eradication of the forces of darkness from the Palatine here, at the beginning of the story of Rome, will be balanced in the final scene on the Shield of Aeneas at the end of the book, the brilliant temple of the Sun- god Apollo on the Palatine, the setting for the triumph of Octavian. That triumph celebrates the victory at Actium, decided according to Vulcan’s artistry by the terror (705) struck into the enemy by the effortless bowshot of Apollo: the controlled and unproblematic use of violence and fear against the barbarian enemy. Hercules, however, is a Jovian rather than an Apollonian hero; his victory is not so easy to categorise as simply the triumph of light over dark, and many critics have felt unease at the similarity between the methods of Hercules and his enemy Cacus. Hercules rages furious in his violence: 228 ecce furens animis aderat Tirynthius. He is the child of a fearful and not always sunny god. Rome has two centres, the Palatine and the Capitoline hills; if the Palatine is Apollo’s, the Capitol is Jupiter’s. At 8.347 ff. Evander shows Aeneas the future site of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; now, Virgil tells us, it gleams with gold, but then it was shaggy and shady with scrub. But the contrast between a shady 41 P h il ip H ardie past and a bright present is elided in what follows (349 f.): iam turn religio pavidos terrebat agrestis I dira loci, iam turn silvam saxumque tremebant. The woods may have gone, but iam turn assures us that whatever it was that frightened them then is still there now. Religio dira and fear are to this day planted in the heart of Rome, just as the worship of the fearful Furies is enshrined in perpetuity at the centre of Athens at the end of the Oresteia.45 Hubner makes the interesting suggestion that the de scription at Aeneid 12.849 of the Dirae as appearing Iovis ad solium saevique in limine regis might be read both of the mythological dwelling of Jupiter on Olympus and of the real Capitoline temple of Jupiter, with its seated cult-statue, and a place where birds of omen might be ex pected to appear;46 thus a vivid instantiation of the religio dira loci. The Capitol, like the Palatine, appears again at the end of book 8 of the Aeneid on the Shield of Aeneas, and a similar point is made visually. The Capitol is here shown in summo, successfully defended against the attack of the Gauls, types of the barbarian enemy of the gods; pious celebration of the city’s salvation is followed immediately by the scene of the Underworld, whose rewards and punishments are the sanctions for just or unjust lives in the world above; most vivid is the picture of Catiline pendentem scopulo Furiarumque ora trementem (669). So, above we have an image of the Capitol, symbol of the gods’ favour towards Rome; below in the dark cave of the Underworld the Furies, working with the gods to destroy the enemies of the state. The Furies make one last appearance on the shield, during the battle of Actium where they are described as tristesque ex aethere Dirae (8.701); ex aethere is difficult to take as simply, ‘in the air’, nor is it an exact translation of the Homeric f)epoc|>oLTis“ ’EpiWjs- (Iliad 9.571, 19.87) and it is tempting to take this together with the last appearance of the Furies in the poem when they are seen to be inseparable partners of Jupiter himself. Furies or Dirae act as a corps of stormtroopers on behalf of Rome, unlike the dirae fades that reveal themselves to Aeneas’ supematurally heightened vision as Troy sinks into the ashes in book 2.622.47 Among the dirae fades of the gods might perhaps also be discerned the Erinys sent by Zeus with the Atreids against Troy in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (59); an agent of destruction who three plays later has, with her sisters, been socialised as one of the Semnai in the centre of Athens. Magdalene College, Cambridge PHILIP HARDIE 42 A e n e id and O r esteia NOTES Versions of this paper were read in Canberra, Sydney, and Calgary, and as a lecture to the Virgil Society on 18 March 1989. I am grateful to those audiences for their comments, and also to Graham Ley and Simon Goldhill for their advice. 1. P.R. Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford 1986) ch. 5. 2. (Paris 1986). 3. Above all S. Goldhill, Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia (Cambridge 1984) esp. pp. 262 ff.; see also id., Two Notes on t£Xo? and Related Words in the Oresteia’, JHS 104 (1984) 169-76. 4. Perhaps surprisingly the question of the debt of Augustan political imagery to that of fifth-century Athens has been relatively little explored: some suggestive comments by E. La Rocca, Amazzonomachia: le sculture frontonali del tempio di Apollo Sosiano (Rome 1985) 89 ff. 5. Virgils epische Technik3 (Leipzig & Berlin 1915) 323 ff., 466 ff. In general see A. Konig, Die Aeneis und die griechische Tragodie: Studien zur imitatio-Technik Vergils (diss. Berlin 1970). 6. Konig, op. cit. p. 262, goes so far as to say that ‘Aischyleisches kann man nirgends in der Aeneis sicher erkennen’; she claims that none of the parallels meet her strict criteria for proof of borrowing. 7. For these, and other echoes of, or parallels with, Aeschylus, see V. Ussani, ‘Eschilo e il libro II dell’Eneide’, Maia 3 (1950) 237-54; Konig, op. cit., pp. 262 ff.; G. Highet, The Speeches in Virgil’s Aeneid (Prineton 1972) 171,201,229 f.; Fraenkel on Aesch. Ag. 1280. 8. See Pease on Aen. 4.471; Konig, op. cit., pp. 18-22. M.J. Dewar, CQ n.s. 38 (1988) 563-5, argues that the chariot simile at Geo. 1.511 ff. is modelled on the charioteering images of Orestes’ madness at Aesch. Choe. 1021 ff. Note also the family resemblances between the famous passage on the destructive power of love at Geo. 3.242 ff. and the first stasimon of the Choephoroe, 585 ff. 9. The phrase is Goldhill’s, op. cit., p. 224. On inversion in Aeschylus see also F. Zeitlin, TAPhA 96 (1965) 463 ff.; P. Vidal-Naquet, PP 129 (1969) 401 ff.; Winnington-Ingram, JHS 68 (1948) 130 ff. 10. T.N. Gantz, The Fires of the Oresteia’, JHS 97 (1977) 28-38. 11. Hardie, op. cit., index s.v. inversion. 12. J.J. Peradotto, AJPh 85 (1964) 378—93. See also W.C. Scott, ‘Wind Imagery in the Oresteia’. TAPhA 97 (1966) 459-71; E. Petrounias, Funktion und Thematik der Bilder beiAischylos (Gottingen 1976) 213 ff. 13. Others have suggested that Virgil’s use of imagery is indebted to Attic tragedy: already B.M.W. Knox, AJPh 71 (1950) 400, ‘[Virgil’s] use of the sustained metaphor, a power which he shares with Aeschylus and Shakespeare’; cf. R.O.A.M. Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford 1987) 193, ‘In this practice of linking imagery/motifs Vergil’s model was most probably the Greek tragic dramatists’. Simon Goldhill points out to me that one reason for the difficulty in pinpointing specifically Aeschylean allusion in Virgil is the pervasive influence of the Oresteia on later fifth-century Attic tragedy. 14. A. Lebeck, The Oresteia: A Study in Language and Structure (Washington 1971) 63 ff.; Petrounias, op. cit., pp. 140 ff., 185 f.; P. Vidal-Naquet ‘Chasse et sacrifice dans YOrestie’, in Mythe et tragedie en Grece ancienne (Paris 1973). 43 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 20 (1991) 46 ©1991 Lacrimae Vergilianae* Vltima pars nostrae scripta est Aeneidos. urbem Tantos per casus, per tanta pericla petitam Conspicit Aeneas animo; mox moenia surgent Exoptata diu, raptique ex hoste Penates Antiquo in Latio sperata sede fruentur. Devicisti, Anchisiade, Pallantis atrocem Victorem Rutulum, raptus cui balteus ingens Momentum fuit. est uxor tibi regia virgo Matre carens; matrem nam mors informis ademit. Ense tuo ceeidit Lausus certamine iniquo, Lausus opem patri dum fert pius. impius hausit Troianum genitor iugulo Mezentius ensem. Ocddit Arruntis iaculo pharetrata Camilla, Virgo Volsca, dolis praedaeque cupidine capta Feminea. quid te memorem, Sidonia Dido, Quam post tot benefacta pius Phryx prodidit, euro Mobilior volucri, ut peteret sibi debita regna? Sanguine non parvo stetit haec victoria Teucris. Sed fortasse mea perlecta Aeneide dicet Posteritas, teneris humectans fletibus ora, “Victrix causa Iovi placuit, sed victa Maroni.” Cambridge H.H. HUXLEY *A much-revised version of a contribution to Latinitas (Dec. 1978), p. 262 46 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 20 (1991) 47-59 ©1991 Confessions of a Virgilian ‘Confessions of a Virgilian.’ Does the title suggest Augustine or Rousseau or something less salubrious? To confess is up to a point somewhere short of penitence to defend. Apologetic is two-edged. Yet confession is good for the soul. Therefore one assumes that by the act of confessing a Virgilian might become a better Virgilian, or at another level defend his Virgilianism. More particularly, perhaps, on an occasion like this, before a congregation of believers, coram populo—believers and arbiters of faith and virtue. For, on the other hand, confession assumes sin, a will to amend. Neither in this case may be true. Let the People of Virgil judge. A starting-point: why a Virgil Society? It is a recognition of the pre eminence of our poet, his place, once and now, and hereafter. A society pays tribute, unites in admiration, desires to learn. The Virgil Society proclaims, commemorates, recommends, and even dares to praise. Some two millennia after the Eclogues we are here as Virgilians. It is a kind of faith. The world would be poorer and less true without it. In that sense I am a Virgilian. I share the faith. It is grounded on experience and tested by time. But faith must, in this instance as in others, be blind. I cannot convince others of my belief in the greatness and value of Virgil. Indeed, in my last examination of conscience, I found that in truth I know nothing of Virgil despite the years as a practising and ‘devout’ Virgilian. Nor shall I, in a sense, know more on my deathbed. But I shall still have the faith. That has to be enough. A distant scene, but no so long ago. A class-room: in it myself—at least in terms of physical and nominal continuity—with an Oxford text (Hirzel, not Mynors), brand new. To me, a source of curiosity and fascination, a wish to decipher. ‘Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi. . .’ The words are read. I knew some Virgil before this, but it was at that precise moment that I became a Virgilian. 47 D.W.T. V e sse y Mentioning Tityrus and Meliboeus involves latent assumptions. No one in this audience is a native speaker of Greek or Latin. No one is (I imagine) a neatherd, shepherd, goatherd or nymph. Indeed, the use of a typewriter to prepare material about a bucolic/pastoral world might be treasonable. When we drive through the country on a motorway to picnic on a river-bank, gazing, if unlucky, at fleets of pleasure-craft, we still, anomalously, have dim illusions of a lost rurality, of a closeness to the ‘nature’ that governs all. We are exiles not from the City but from the Garden of Eden: Babel came later, as did Athens, Alexandria, Rome, London, New York and Milton Keynes. Yet it is in the nature of exiles to experience nostalgia, even if home has long since become a scarcely- remembered dream and the paths we walked as children have disap peared under hypermarkets and housing estates. More profoundly, we are all bom into exile. This typescript and bucolic poetry have, however, something in com mon. They are both sequences of marks on a page. Tityrus adds up to seven such marks, Meliboeus nine. The whole of Theocritus’ Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues, when printed, consume a negligible quantity of ink, far less than a daily paper. The worlds within and beyond the marks have no existence to those for whom the marks remain just that. A statement obvious enough, if we are thinking only of literacy or knowledge of a particular language, less so if we raise the question as to why Theocritus and Virgil are apparently harder to read than The Sun or The Times. How art emerges from the thing is not a trivial matter. Typescript and pastoral start by sharing the same thingness. I might type these words or the first line of Eclogue 1. Whichever I do, Virgil’s words and mine share the same materiality of paper and ink, of space and mark, inane and corpora. Pass beyond this and we begin to add. We may call our additions true or false. That is arbitrary. Only God can endow a not-yet- created thing with full meaning before it falls into phenomenality, and that is because for God nothing is ‘not yet’, not even nothing. God makes no additions, because he is Plenitude. Our own case is very different; we are doomed to supplementarity. ‘Art... is the becoming and happening of truth,’ Heidegger remarked. A little later in the same essay, he wrote that ‘all art.. . is .. . essentially 48 C onfessions poetry.’1 One might question how truth is to be recognised as truth when one happens upon it. Art might be also the becoming and happening of falsehood. The Muses enlighten or deceive. Art may be light or darkness, depending who walks its ways. What we add to art for ourselves in reading or for others by writing about it may illumine or obscure. Moving beyond the mark, as move we must, is dangerous. Adam was not a shepherd. Nor were there shepherds under Cronos or Saturn. Pastorality implies labour and labour is a falling—from grace, from Meaning to meanings. The fact that there were shepherds abiding in the fields made necessary the coming of the Good Shepherd. Human beings, it appears, became sheep when they started to tend them. On that basis, Adam had no need of art. He spoke directly to God, for whom truth has always become and happened. It was only later that human voices mediated between the listener/reader and the omniscient (the Muses know all things). Poetry springs then from the world of labour, from the eating of the fruit of the tree. Writing is work; so is reading. So is being a shepherd. Only the lily toils not. Shepherds and goatherds play and sing at leisured moments, in the interstices that divide duty from duty. For them it is the grace that makes tolerable the whole business of toil. Before the fatal fruit was consumed there was only grace. But there was no art. Art is then one result of falling. Something of this emerges from, for example, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem ‘A musical instrument’. Pan, the great god, makes his revivifying and powerful pipe, but all is not wholly joyous: Yet half a beast is the great god Pan, To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man: The true gods sigh for the cost and pain— For the reed which grows nevermore again As a reed with the reeds in the river. A paradox. The reed that gives life to the lily and the dragon-fly also brings pain and loss. What music did the reed play before it was plucked? What was it before it was given a name and a use? Pan the piper is a 49 D.W.T. V e sse y powerful, but not the true, god. (But beware: he is prone to anger.) I might ask Pan a personal question. When and why did I first succumb to the allure of poetry, listen to the syrinx and cicada, ‘patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi’? In early childhood, I heard quite a lot of poetry or verse. There were When we were very young and Now we are six. Snippets from other peo ple’s stores, from anthologies for children by Walter de la Mare and others. Whole verses, stray lines and resonant words are with me to this day. Somewhat later, a gift of Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury with an appendix of modem additions. A revelation, indeed: I still have and use the book, a memento or talisman. At the time, the modern additions, no doubt little ‘understood’ (or better?), made in some ways the most im pression: Yeats, Eliot, Edith Sitwell. Not so modem now, or perhaps even then. All of this has been somehow or other assimilated; certain rhythms, lines, words have helped to form my own language. It was about the same time that the Butcher/Leaf/Lang translations of the Iliad and Odyssey came my way. It was a momentous, even fatal devel opment, as it seems now. Later on still came the boon of exposure to Greek and Latin poetry on a much broader level. Here were ‘modem additions’ on a grand scale, for only an accident of chronology, time’s flow, makes the ancients ancient. I have never fully lost my sense of the novelty, the innovative power and diversity of Greek and Latin poetry despite all that has happened since. For me the ancient poets are profoundly modern, contemporaries in a way that some writing of twenty years ago is not any more. As I have mentioned, I was fourteen or so when I first read Virgil’s Eclogues: Theocritus followed only a little afterwards. Both poets exert a certain thralldom; not as repositories of scholarly problems (these came later and have their proper place) but as poetry sufficient to last for more than a lifetime. Virgil has now first place of the two; but his Greek predecessor runs close. I feel no guilt in reading these two collections of poems for themselves as well as from what might be called a professional angle. Scholarship has obviously added to my knowledge; as to understanding—that is a different matter, for they are not to be identified; episteme is not sophia. These particular poems are strangely resistent to explication and wilt 50 C onfessions when picked: frail flowers, wild ones, perhaps. It is because in this case (as in so many things that are important) an understanding based on knowledge only is always also a misunderstanding bom of it. The Idylls (or rather some of them) and the Eclogues (all) appear to me as trans parently obscure and obscurely transparent, so that there is rarely a time or mood when they fail to offer something,this or that, and to survive uninjured the extraction from them of whatever it is that is momentarily or more lastingly found. If this could be explained, it would be lost for ever. We can only ask Pan, out there in the back of beyond; but we bear his irascibility in mind. Frail flowers have sometimes to be picked but it is better not to trample them underfoot. None of which is a denunciation of scholarship (how could it be?): but these are confessions, for your ears alone. vi It may sound as if this paper should close there. One way, however, that it might continue is to cite other poems that share the quality to which I have briefly alluded. A selection might soon run into a substantial anthology, even though we are here treating only a certain class of poems, tenuous, pursuing a narrow path. I might, in defiance of all the definitions and exclusions so far advanced (of which D.M. Halperin has given a good sample), call that mysterious, occulted factor X the bucolic or pastoral impulse. The various poems anthologised would not all be ‘about’ goatherds or shepherds: but then, is the Iliad ‘about’ heroes? In deed, if this haphazard and highly personal florilegium were brought into temporary union it would have to be by a deliberate act of classificatory distortion or generic misprision. That would be deemed by some as subversive as are in fact the texts themselves, and therefore open to scholarly dimissal. But, though dismissed, I should still have the texts. There will be no such anthology here and now. But as an indulgence, I might begin with any one of a number of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. ‘Felix Randal’ is a clear candidate, but on this occasion I choose ‘Spring’ instead: Nothing is so beautiful as spring— When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring 51 D.W.T. V e sse y The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling. What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, Lord, and sour with sinning Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, o maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning. To read is always already to interpret. There is no first or primal reading. The universe was already systematised and encoded as marks before ever it was deciphered and disordered with names. Hopkins is not describing spring. He mimics a mimicry that embraces all inscribed springs, his own and ours. When was spring first inscribed? Ask Pan. Factor X keeps turning while poetry is written. A second and final specimen: a poem, entitled ‘Jesus’, from Alan Moore’s Opia (1986):2 Jesus was tired; he had been walking alone all day. He rested beneath the shade of an olive tree, breathing deeply the fragrant air. Insects were busy in the fields about him; he watched the birds rising and trilling in the cloud-flecked light blue Women were coming out of their little white houses in the valley, beating their mats; one woman was dragging her boy by the ear because he had been taunting a dog. Others, in groups, were at their washing stones, where the river sparkled in the valley. Dust rose in clouds behind a column of marching, laughing, Roman soldiers; the rhythmic muffled sound of their 52 C o nfessions sandals soon diminished. Their tall spears still shone in the distance when all sound had gone. Beside his hand, Jesus saw an ant carrying a crumb larger than itself. The wind was warm. Jesus is here a resting exile, Tityrus and Melibeous. I attempt no valuation or criticism; one reads or does not read. In a recent book on the bucolic/pastoral tradition, Jonathan Goldberg has remarked: ‘The possibility of criticism rests on the most insecure of foundations, the endless decipherability of texts—and their endless witholding of ultimate answers. Texts are as unreadable as they are unreadable. To write permitting bafflement, acknowledging the excesses and outrages of texts (courting them even, if only to refuse the contain ment of formalistic procedure) means a practice of a certain impertinence.’3 There is certainly something that takes flight from pertinence, which enforces unreadability at the level at which we are now accustomed to read, which baffles bafflement. Reading is to be learned again, re discovered. For Jesus, the wind was warm. Silenus in Virgil’s sixth Eclogue knows the universe backwards. His is a great and unending song of which we homunculi must make do with knowing little or nothing. Poetry itself has precious little to tell us but what little it tells it strives to tell better, and little is a relative term. Even a distich may be too long for us to possess all at once. How far separates odi et amo from excrucior? Despite the distance, interpretation has traditionally felt itself capable of dealing with what we might term ‘macroeconomies’, consigning ‘microeconomies’ to the scholiast/commen tator. Interpretation, like life itself, which never adds up to a distich, may be hard graft and hard grind; scholiasts/commentators can, by contrast, be quite fun. They can be read, almost, in isolation from the parent text, as can lexica. The lemma is a subtext, from which almost anything can grow. Commentators stricto sensu also interpret, of course, but more covertly. Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi: thus have many like myself been introduced to bucolic/pastoral. That each word is worthy of 5 3 D.W.T. V e sse y annotation needs perhaps no demonstration, whether we take the voca tive Tityre, or the tree that somehow manages to be both Greek and Latin at the same time and a different species in each. Tegmine is a strange word; recubans and patulae are both worth investigating. And that is all before we begin to think about style or versification, or anything else. I confess to having done all these things, and to having read a large number of glosses on the line. I am better informed, certainly, but there is still more that might be said, more to be done. Such is the universe of commentary. The line is still there, and the poem. And the poem is another universe; that we must not forget. Meliboeus and Tityrus have suffered much at the hands of interpret ers. The latter, indeed, has in recent years been assailed by some as thoroughly insensitive and smug. There is a danger, as Paul Alpers has reminded us, of dealing with this poem as if it were a drama, the background to which may be reconstructed on the basis of a series of clues. Just so, in the past, Tityrus was Virgil himself or his vilicus. Meliboeus and Tityrus are not people. The deus, too. The young Octavian, we are assured on all sides, with only a few dissentient voices, like those of E.W. Leach and (in a modified way) J.R.G. Wright. The deus is, it is true, not identified directly with any figure on the stage of history, and lives in the same world as Meliboeus and Tityrus, wherever that is. The deus is Octavian, if you will: but then we need to consider what that might mean. Pascite, ut ante, boves, pueri, submittite tauros is his responsum to Tityrus, who is in quest of his libertas (45). When was ut ante? Not an terior to verse 1, for there is nothing anterior to Tityre, tu patulae recubans within this universe. Alternatively, the ut ante is always anterior, then and now. ‘Continue doing what you did.’ Is that libertas? Who, apart from Tityrus, was ‘there’? But then there never was a ‘there’, save in this poem. ‘Tityrus’ manumission is implicit’: so some tell us. But was Tityrus ever a slave? What might it mean that a textual being is first a slave, in some anterior existence, and now free? In what world or language may the proposition ‘Tityrus was a slave and is now free’ be validated? Only in the world of the first Eclogue, a poem of 83 lines, and with two ar ticulate residents. That is where the deus lives too. These last three paragraphs have been intended merely to show how still further worlds (including the one we like to call ‘real’) come to be applied to the one contained in the text. And larger interpretations bring 54 C onfessions need not be antithetical. Can entering a ‘world’ of scholarship be recon ciled with entering a ‘world’ of poetry? That is a question not often baldly posed by scholars. To sunder the two entails a double risk. First, to assume that any reading of a poem is as good or bad as any other. Second, to lose the poem tinder the weight of learning. One asks again: how many books and articles have been written about Virgil? We now even have an encyclopaedia. Is enough enough? This is to dismiss nothing. There is a pleasure here as well. We can live in more than one world. The ‘world’ of poetry, if it can be entered at all, might, like the gift of faith which must be childlike, be of an inestimable value. We have now to say ‘might’, for there can be no question of proof. Perhaps, too, ‘value’ is the wrong word. We may be dealing in varieties of pleasure. The hedonic is not isolable from the ‘worlds’ of poetry. The pleasure of reading Lucretius is to be a way to understanding the cosmos and how to live in it, on Epicurean principles. In that way the pleasure of the text becomes salvific. Poetry may evangelise, or try to—for there is religious verse. Then the ‘world’ of poetry becomes the ‘world’ of piety. (Or of pietas: as for fashion, who now dares to write of Virgil as a ‘spiritual’ poet, at least in terms of an older spirituality?) Pleasure is the simplest criterion. Virgil’s sixth Eclogue seems to me to give pleasure until we demolish it in favour of too much meaning. Does Silenus preside over meaning? Is his song to be interpreted or enjoyed? For him, all things, from the creation to Gallus, even the grotesque and the tragic, can become an enchantment that is the object of desire on the part of his listeners. Look too closely for a meaning and the enchantment is lost, but not for ever. Hedonic reading implies in part the suspension of meaning, in that meaning is possession and possession, possessiveness are a disturbance. Silenus, though captured, sings willingly, and is still singing. It is we who are bound. Gospel words contain truths for those with ears to hear them: otherwise not. They have a Divine sanction. Who sanctions the ‘truths’ of poetry or philosophy? If critics claim to uncover ‘meaning’, is that ‘meaning ‘truth? Perhaps, in a certain world: but it is the critic’s, not the poet’s. And truth in that instance is true only in that world, with the critic as God looking for ears to hear. Those that hear and assent join the critic in his world. 57 D.W.T. V e s s e y Virgil makes no direct claims to truth. Truth and falsity are forced on him only by a process of dismemberment. There is no Virgilian gospel. Turnus may die ‘ambiguously’ but Aeneas ‘dies’ with him. Rome pre dicted, is not Rome actualised. Aeneas never learns what his shield signifies: but he never marries Lavinia either. He lost Creusa, and Dido, but it is book 12 that kills him off. The rest is silence, as for all textual beings, like ourselves. The silence is filled with extraneous clamour. Writing is death, as Blanchot argued. Virgil himself died before completing the Aeneid—the writing of it, that is. We die before completing the Aeneid—the reading of it, that is. Clamour masks the fear of death and dying. Ears deafened by it can hear nothing. Earlier I cited a brief passage from Heidegger, which ended with a question; in answer one might remark that ‘some do, but none should’. We should confess that sometimes we include ourselves among those who presume to claim and above all to know. Another side to the picture is perhaps given by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Tenitent’, writing of his wife:5 What good did the education do Cynthia? She studied literature but the whole course consisted of taking some bad writer and ascribing meanings to him that he himself never dreamed of. Well then, are the so-called good writers any good either? What important things did Eliot or Joyce have in mind when they were writing their empty phrases? What did they want? One page of The Path of Righteousness contains more wisdom and psychology than all their writings. They’re often boring too. Confession without penitence is a graceless sham. We Virgilians do not share this fictional antagonism to ‘good writers’, or at least in relation to one of them. Why not? We should hesitate before we answer, and may in the end decide that the answer is incommunicable in terms of knowledge. George Steiner’s Real Presences faces such questions, among others. Confession and penitence are to be followed by amendment of life and the avoidance of sin in the future, which can only be achieved through grace. ‘To live without reckoning is to die without grace’ is a maxim known to another of Singer’s characters.6 In the matter of literature, there 58 C o nfessions may now be a need for penitence, but no less for reckoning, for the thinking that makes the books balance again. The start might be with Tityrus and Meliboeus, or elsewhere. Who would presume to know? King’s College, London D.W.T. VESSEY NOTES 1. Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought (trans. Albert Hofstadter; New York etc., 1975) 17-87 at pp. 71-2 (= ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, 1935/1950/1960). 2. Alan Moore, Opia:Poems (London: Anvil Press, 1986) 70. (This is reproduced by kind permission of the author and publishers.) 3. Jonathan Goldberg,Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (London, 1986) 7 (author’s italics). 4. Martin Heidegger, “What are poets for?’, Poetry , Language, Truth (n. 1 above) 89- 142 at p. 99 (= ‘Wozu Dichter?’ in Holzwege, 1st ed., Frankfurt-am-Main, 1950: the lec ture was first delivered in 1926 but subsequently revised). 5. Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Penitent (Penguin ed., London, 1986) 16. 6. See Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Manor (Penguin ed., Harmondsworth, 1967) 21. (This paper is a shortened and somewhat reworked version of a lecture delivered to the Virgil Society in 1989. Certain more purely philological sections, which will be used elsewhere, have been excised.) 59 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 20 (1991) 60-75 ©1991 Why Virgil? The Presidential Address 1990 I know why I am here, or at least why I was invited here. A year ago, I was interviewed by Miss Sue Lawley on the radio programme Desert Island Discs’, and I was asked, what book I would choose to take with me in my protracted, distant insulation—the works of Shakespeare and the Bible being already there, left behind (we must presume) by some previous castaway. I replied that I would choose the works of Virgil. This provoked some of my hearers to remonstrance, even to ridicule. To them such a choice seemed arcane, perhaps pretentious. To the members of this society I can safely presume that it would not. As far as I was concerned, it was an excogitated and, I believe, a reasoned choice, and I shall begin my address by briefly rehearsing my excogitations and giving my reasons. After all, I said to myself, I do not know how long I shall be on this island, how long I shall have to wait before my improvised flag, or my plaintive message scrawled in the sand or sent out to sea in a bottle, draws a passing vessel to my rescue. So I do not want a book which is despatched in a single reading. I must have a book which, in this sense, is not finite, which I can take up and read and re-read and discover new rewards in each reading of it. I do not want a work of mere utilitarian or decorative information, or of evanescent amusement, or indeed of pro found and difficult thought written in opaque, rebarbative prose. What I want is a work of literature, composed by a writer who has known how to use language with seductive felicity— such felicity that he can constantly invite us back again; and moreover a work of some elevation of mind, to distract me from the exhausting and banausic daily routine of climbing trees in order to collect berries or escape from alligators, fishing for crabs, coping with mosquitos, and keeping the essential protective fire from going out. I want, while reading, to forget those vulgar necessities, 60 P residential A d d r e ss to rise above thos discomforts, and to be able to say, with Izaak Walton (or whoever he was quoting): I was that moment lifted above earth And possess’d joys not promis’d at my birth. It seemed to me that Virgil fitted this bill. There was also, I must admit, an element of recantation in my choice; for I would not always have chosen thus. Half-a-century ago, during the war, I felt, at times, very frustrated. The news from the battle fronts was depressing; at home the enemy bombs were falling; and I am afraid that I, like many of my fellow-officers in the Secret Intelligence Service, was impatient—perhaps too impatient— of what we saw as the obstructive prejudices of our superiors. From this frustration I found relief, whenever possible, in literature: I am amazed now, when I look back, at the amount of literature I was then able to read in mere snatches of time; and I owe a great debt to that fastidious man of letters, Logan Pearsall Smith, whom I had come to know, and whom I often visited in London. By his conversation and his library, from which he was a generous lender, and of which I afterwards inherited a part, he introduced me to an even wider world of literature. But one day, in his house, I committed a dreadful solecism. I cannot remember the circumstances: I only recall the crime. I described Virgil as ‘a cissy poet’. Immediately I sense the horror of this audience, feel the frisson which runs through it—indeed, find myself participating in it. How could I ever have uttered such a shocking phrase? Logan, of course, was outraged. He accused me of blasphemy. ‘How I shall rejoice at the Day of Judgment,’ he afterwards wrote, on recalling the episode, ‘when I hear you sentenced to roast in the seats of the reprobates and doomed to dwell with devils for eternal ages!’ Well, I have repented since then, and hope to escape that fate, and I am now, in effect, reading my recantation. The process of conversion was eased for me when I discovered, several years later, that I was not alone in my transgression. In 1785 there was published a volume entitled Letters of Literature by Robert Heron esq. Not many of you, I suspect, have read it. The letters were imaginary, a literary exercise, as was the alleged writer of them, ‘Robert Heron’. The author was in fact John Pinkerton, a Scotchman, who would afterwards become one of the ablest, though also one of the most eccentric, of Scotch 61 L ord D acre of G lan to n antiquaries. Among his eccentricities were schemes to improve the Eng lish language by adding smooth Italian terminations to our rough Anglo- Saxon words, and to improve the Scottish race by drastically eliminating the whole Celtic population and restoring the country to its true owners, the Piets, who, he believed, were Goths and, as such, members of a master race. At the time when he published his imaginary Letters, he was twenty-seven years old—exactly my age when I uttered my blasphemy. In the course of his book, among other literary judgments, he dared to criticise, in a very patronising manner, the great work of Gibbon, of which the first three volumes had appeared. When Gibbon read the book—we know that he read it—I imagine that he was not much pleased to be told that the style of his own work was ‘rather incorrect... and even sometimes puerile’, and that his famous Conclusions on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West were ‘more worthy of an old woman who had been frightened into hysterics’ by a sixpenny pamphlet ‘than of a man of science’. What must have shocked Gibbon even more was Pinkerton’s even more patronising, not to say contemptuous, opinion of Virgil. ‘Can a work live long,’ Pinkerton had asked, ‘which is defective in style?’ and he had answered ‘impossible’. Then, giving examples to illustrate his answer, he concluded magisterially, ‘style has saved Virgil entirely, who has not the most distant pretence to any other attribute of a poet’. Having thus trailed his coat, he looked forward to trouble, and so, in later letters in the same volume, ‘to vindicate my opinion from the charge of rashness’, he expanded his thesis. In all the works of Virgil, he wrote, there was ‘not one ray of invention’. The Eclogues, ‘considered as works of invention, are beneath all contempt’. On the Georgies, so much admired by the eighteenth century, he was even more severe: didactic poetry was anyway ‘the lowest of all kinds of poetry’, and these were particularly ridiculous examples of it, addressing ‘country farmers’ in language quite unintelligible to them, maladroitly interspersed with gross flattery of Julius Caesar and Augustus, ‘superstitious offerings on the altar of slavery’. The Aeneid, said Pinkerton, warming to his theme, was worse still, a servile copy of Homer—the first six books being based on the Odyssey, the last six on the Iliad—but of course vastly inferior and often downright silly. ‘Not one sentiment or image in all the works of Virgil,’ wrote Pinkerton, ‘but may be found in Homer or other Greek poets.’ The most that could be said for him was that, at times, he rose to the level of Ovid (‘but who ever said Ovid was a poet?’) and that he 62 P residential A d d ress ‘displayed a great skill in the mechanical part of poetry’. That indeed had saved him, at least in the schools and academies to which his fame was now confined; for his style, Pinkerton admitted—‘the pickle that has preserved his mummy from corruption’—is ‘pure and exquisite’—though unfortunately, he hastened to add—overdone: too mannered, too pre cious. Virgil was, in fact, when Pinkerton came to sum him up, ‘a tinsel poet’, dealing in false ornament, put on to please Maecenas, who, as we all know—as Augustus himself admitted,—‘was fond of tinsel to excess’. When I read these shocking sentiments, I recognised that they were in fact—though more radically expressed—the same which I, at the same age, had entertained and rashly uttered. I too had seen Virgil as an essentially unoriginal, derivative poet, whose sole virtue lay in his style, and that style had seemed to me mannered, precious, Alexandrian, decadent. Looking back, I recognised my impertinence. I saw myself as Pinkerton. Gibbon, of course, like Logan, was shocked by Pinkerton’s heresy. Gibbon loved Virgil whom he described as ‘my favourite poet’, and understood him better than most of his contemporaries. He made very perceptive comments on him in his diaries and in his earliest work, his Essai sur UEtude de la Literature, and by 1770, when he wrote his Critical Remarks on the sixth book of the Aeneid, against the presump tuous fantasies of Bishop Warburton, he had read Virgil, he tells us, thirty times. But Gibbon was a magnanimous man, and four years later, when he read Pinkerton’s Lives of the Scottish Saints—a work of real erudition and originality on the Dark Age of Scotland—all was forgiven. Indeed Gibbon became Pinkerton’s patron. He wrote to him, as Pinkerton records, though personally unknown to him, in the most flattering terms, and invited him to become his coadjutor in his last projected undertaking: a plan to imitate the great Benedictine scholars of France and publish, in a scholarly series, the early chronicles of England. They met, discussed and planned. But then Gibbon had to undergo an opera tion, from which he did not recover. His death frustrated the project; but in his papers was found the prospectus which he had drawn up for it and in which he warmly recommended Pinkerton as his editor. Aware that that name might ‘provoke some resentment and revive some prejudices’, he explained away Pinkerton’s early eccentricities. Those, he said, were ‘juvenile sallies which candour will excuse’ and which Pinkerton himself ‘is the first to condemn and will perhaps be the last to forget. Repentance 6 3 L ord D acre of G lan to n has long since propitiated the mild divinity of Virgil, against whom the rash youth, under a fictitious name, had darted the javelin of criticism; he smiles at his reformation of our English tongue; . . . the Goths continue to be his chosen people, but he retains no antipathy to a Celtic savage’ .. } So Virgil, once again, triumphed over his critic. And yet the criticism will not die: indeed, on particular points, it is surely irrefutable. Can we really deny Pinkerton’s charge that the characterisation of the Aeneid is poor, that the imitations of Homer and other Greek poets, both in substance and in form, are obvious: that the storm at sea, the conversa tions of the gods, the funeral games for Anchises, the fire among the ships, the visit to Hades, the shield of Aeneas, and many other episodes are direct copies from Homer; that what Pinkerton called ‘the affected and silly episode of Nisus and Euryalus’ is a weak variant of Homer’s Doloneia, as the death of Pallas is of that of Patroclus and the battle between Aeneas and Tumus is of that between Achilles and Hector? At one point Pinkerton cites Gibbon as expressing surprise that ‘no Greek writer whatever, though many are posterior to Virgil, even thought him worth mention’. ‘The cause,’ says Pinkerton, ‘is evident’: the Greeks looked upon Virgil ‘as a paltry translator of their own immortal poet,’ and naturally regarded him with ‘utter scorn’; what would we think if a French author were to publish a French translation of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained ‘frittered down into a foppish production in six books, and desired the world to look upon it as an epic poem?’ Pinkerton at least allowed Virgil the essential preservative of style. Other critics did not even allow that. In a footnote to the last volume of his History, Gibbon cites an English critic who ‘in our own times . . . has accused the Aeneid of containing multa languida, nugatoria, spiritu et maiestate carminis heroici defecta: many such verses as he, the said Jeremiah Markland would have been ashamed of owning’. The said Jeremiah Markland was a reputable scholar, a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, who had been praised by Bentley and would be praised by Housman. His confident judgment reminds me of one of my own classi cal tutors at Oxford who, one day, offered me as an ideal model of Latin verse, in some particular matter, some hexameters of Virgil—only to pull himself suddenly up and correct that attribution: ‘how silly of me!’ he exclaimed, ‘I had forgotten—those verses are not Virgil: I wrote them myself. ..’ 64 P residential A d d ress Like Pinkerton, I revised my early view of Virgil long ago. I have not, like Gibbon, read him thirty times, but I have returned to him often, and the task you have imposed on me has supplied an occasion to re-read him in toto. But always, at each reading, I find myself asking the same question: what precisely is the quality which has enabled Virgil, again and again, to assert, without argument—indeed often against persua sive arguments—his invincible superiority? It is not the depth or power of thought, as in Lucretius. It is not dramatic characterisation: how artificial are his Arcadian shepherds, how insipid his epic heroes! How feebly they compare with the characters of Homer or the great dramatists! It is not boldness of language, originality of concepts or metaphors: his borrowings are visible everywhere, from Ennius and Lucretius in Latin, from Homer and the Hellenistic poets in Greek. Sometimes they are word-for-word renderings of the Greek of Theocritus, Callimachus or Apollonius Rhodius. It is not a unifying philosophical or political credo, like the Epicureanism of Lucretius or the stoicism of Seneca and Lucan. Attempts to place him in a philosophical tradition—Pythagorean, Pla tonic, Epicurean—founder through his inconsistent eclecticism. We think we have caught his philosophy, placed it in a tradition, only to see it slide away like his eschatology, through the ivory gate. As for his politics—well, they are interesting, and he was lucky; he backed the right horse. Who could have predicted that Octavian, the bloodstained triumvir, would go down in history as the great emperor, the founder of the Pax Romanal But what of that? The final judgment of poets should never depend on their politics. Their function is to look beyond politics, to transcend them. So what is Virgil’s secret power? The answer is, I suppose, that most indefinite an elusive of all qualities, pure poetry. If a quality is indefinable, it is a waste of effort, mere pedantry, to seek to define it. I shall only say that there are certain poets who have the gift of expressing quite ordinary facts or sentiments or judgments with an elevation and yet simplicity and economy, and a musical beauty of language which gives them a haunting, etherial, almost sublime character. Did I say ‘have the gift’? Ought I rather to have said, ‘have acquired the art’? Perhaps I ought. Whichever it is, the great primitive poets lack it, or have not cultivated it. There are few such lines in Homer: his greatness lies elsewhere. Perhaps it comes at a certain stage in the development of society, the sophistication of literary language. 65 L ord D acre of G lan to n Shakespeare has many such lines—but then Shakespeare, whom Ben Jonson saw as ‘Nature’s child’ and Voltaire as a primitive poet, ‘un barbare ivre’, was a highly sophisticated artist who began as a euphuist, a mannerist of words. Milton, the most musical of our poets, who studied language with such exquisite care, and Keats, who strained after a similar perfection, a ‘snailhom perception of beauty’, both have it; and it is this which, to me, is the great reward of reading Virgil. His eclogues may not breathe the authentic spirit of pastoral life. His Georgies may not give very practical advice to agriculturists. His pious Aeneas may not be a hero of the calibre of Achilles—the passionate, petulant, vindic tive, eloquent, sentimental barbarian of the Iliad—and the faithful Achates is a poor, pale reflexion of Patroclus. We can see why the Greeks preferred to stick to their own poet. But where else in world literature can we find such economy, such flexibility, of language, such supreme artistry in its manipulation, such musical sensitivity, such sustained elevation—whether it is used to describe the sack of Troy, the emotions of Dido, the descent into Hades of Orpheus or of Aeneas, the rise and fall of empires, the economy of bees and ants, the operations of moles and toads, the depredations of weevils, beetles and harvest mice? Virgil is an exact and exacting artist with words, a perfectionist aiming at a poetic ideal, unstated but deducible, of elevation, purity, simplicity, and charged with a message, also unstated, also deducible but clear: hatred of the convulsions of Italy, of civil war, desire for peace and order, for a return to the ancient virtue and stability of rural life, the foundation of Roman greatness, and, with it, a melancholy sense of the fragility of human greatness, human happiness. Like Milton, he was a very learned poet: learned in literature and philosophy, mythology and history; but unlike Milton he carried his learning lightly: he wrote slowly, polishing every line, eliminating all traces of pedantry. Even so, as we know, he was dissatisfied: he left many lines of the Aeneid unfinished, awaiting further attention, and on his death gave orders that the whole poem, as imperfect, be burned; which his executors, happily, did not obey. To me, on my desert island, it is the delight of rediscovering those magical lines that will lift me out of insulated depression, and I try to envisage their effect when they were fresh, before they were staled by custom, imitation and the schools. For this reason I will have no com mentary on my island. Commentaries, I believe—except that minimum 66 P residential A d d r e ss which is necessary in order to understand the text and the allusions— are the bane of literature, especially when they become, as they too often become in our system of education, a substitute for the literature on which they comment, and which is left unread. I think of all those dreary theses on great literature whose very language shows that the great literature has been read, if at all, in vain. But how can we recapture that freshness, how think away all the incrustations—the repetitions, the imitations, the reinterpretations—of intervening time? It is not easy. All Latin poetry after Virgil was influ enced by him, all before him was driven out by him. Cicero, like Virgil had a strong sense of history. A history of the Roman republic could be— has been2—compiled out of the incidental content of his speeches, letters and philosophical writings. Like Virgil, though with a different empha sis, he saw the present as the continuation of the past and treasured that continuity. He also treasured the old Roman poets who illustrated it, and he wrote somewhat disdainfully of the ‘neoterics’ like Catullus and Cinna who looked to Hellenistic models. Virgil was himself a neoteric in this sense, though he drew on the old Romans too, picking gold, as it was said, e stercore Enniano, from the dungheap of Ennius. But what was the result? All the old Roman poets were eclipsed and would be forgotten, left out of the syllabus, lost in the great gulf of the Lower Empire and the Dark Age. If a few fragments of them survive, it is because they had been lovingly cited by Cicero or quoted by the ancient editors of Virgil. Meanwhile, Virgilian writing had become the norm. His vocabulary, his prosody, his metrical idiosyncrasies—those calculated variations of cadence, that typical caesura at the end of the fourth foot, those subtle elisions, those Greek metrical liberties with Greek proper names—for like Milton he loved to make music out of names— Glauco et Panopeae et Inoo Melicertae . .. Atque Ephyre atque Opis et Asia Deiopeia . . . Atque Getae atque Hebrus et Actias Orithyia . . . or even with simple Greek words: hyacinthus, cyparissus, elephantus— all were taken over. He had broken the stiff protective barrier of the Latin language and a host of lesser poets walked easily through it behind him. So the Egyptian Greek Claudian could write verses the best 67 L ord D acre of G lan to n of which might have been written, on one of his dull days—in the third book of the Aeneid perhaps—by Virgil; the Latin poets of the Renais sance could write Virgilian eclogues, georgics, even epics, and call them selves the Pannonian or the Sarmatian or the Batavian Virgil; one of them, Mapheus Vegius, thought it no presumption to add a thirteenth book to the Aeneid, which the humanist printers would think it no pre sumption to include in their eitions; and in the eighteenth century Jeremiah Markland could be ashamed of the real Virgil for not having reached his own high standard of Virgilian composition. Let us forget all those pedants. There are, I believe, two ways of studying any great works of literature. One is historical. All literature, even the greatest, is conditioned by its historical context, its time, place and circumstances, the social, intellectual, even the political climate in which it was written. To understand its allusions, appreciate its nu ances and subtleties, it is useful, perhaps necessary, to know that context. This historical sense is a comparatively late development. In the Middle Ages, even after the Renaissance, classical literature, like Biblical literature, was abstracted from its context, except in the most obvious sense, and, because it was so abstracted, was made easily applicable to other times and places. So the famous Pollio, the fourth eclogue, could be seen as an announcement of the birth of Christ and it would be suggested that the poet had read the prophecies of Isaiah. Even in the eighteenth century the Georgics could be seen as no more than a practical handbook in poetic form. Gibbon was innovating—or at lest he believed he was innovating— when he suggested that they should be seen historically, in the context of the civil wars of Rome, the need to settle the disbanded soldiery on the land, and therefore to idealise, instead of war, the peaceful life of the countryman, the farmer, the forester, the bee-keeper. Hence too the idyllic picture of the restora tion of that life under Augustus, as illustrated by that old man from Corycia, in Asia Minor—a retired pirate, we are told, who had fought under Pompey—whom Virgil himself had seen cultivating his garden near Tarentum, under the high towers of Oebalia, among the golden cornfields watered by the river Galaesus in the same delightful spot—a sort of South Italian Bournemouth—in which Horace also thought of spending his retired old age. Then, no less important, there is the intellectual context. In our own time Jerome Carcopino has taken the fourth Eclogue, which has had such 68 P residential A ddress a long run as Christian propaganda, and put it back into that context, into the neo-pythagorean world of Rome in the time of the Triumvirs: a world dominated by the great polymath, Cicero’s friend, Varro, from whose work Virgil drew the substance of the Georgics, and P. Nigidius Figulus. Carcopino’s revelation of this world—for I think it was he who first revealed it— coincided in time with the exploration of the compara ble neo-platonic context of the late Italian Renaissance, so it can be seen as part of a general, and fruitful, re-direction of intellectual history. It has some enjoyable consequences too. It enabled the Catholic heretic Charles Guignebert to show how the Jewish heresy of Christianity, brought to Rome by St Paul, was there, through that same world, absorbed into Hellenism and transformed by it; a nice reversal of the old view of Virgil as the guide who led the way out of Hellenism into the Jewish heresy of Christianity.3 To see a great work of literature thus in its historical and intellectual context is to gain a fuller understanding and perhaps a deeper apprecia tion of its significance; but it does nothing to explain its greatness. That lies elsewhere, in the extent to which it transcends that context. A work that is totally explained by its context lives no longer than that context. It does not speak with a living voice to another age, another culture. Wherein, then, and how, does Virgil’s work transcend the conditions which created and, to some extent, limited it? I believe that this transcendence is always achieved by generalisa tion; perhaps we should say sublimation. The particular circumstances of Augustan Rome, on which Virgil and Horace inevitably commented, have disappeared, as have the particular circumstances of Elizabethan England, on which Shakespeare and Spenser commented. But these great poets made their comments in such general, even allegorical terms that their particular appreciation, being unspecified, has to be inferred. Sometimes the application is clear to the learned and can be demon strated. Sometimes it is obscure or ambiguous and even the learned can only speculate. Scholars have pointed to numerous passages in Shake speare that could refer to particular public events in his time or sup posed episodes in his undocumented private life, but none of them can be proved to refer to them because, by their language, they are lifted above that particularity; indeed, although we can draw some conclusions about Shakespeare’s personality from his works, we cannot use them to estab lish a single biographical fact. Virgil is like Shakespeare in this. He is 69 L ord D acr e of G la n to n one of the most elusive of poets. In this he is very difference from his friend Horace—indeed a perfect example of Horace’s ideal, fallentis semita vitae. Apart from that one reference to the old man gardening near Tarentum, I do not think there is a single explicit autobiographical reference in his works. Perhaps he is Tityrus in the first Eclogue, per haps Menalcas in the ninth, just as Shakespeare may be Hamlet; but we cannot be sure; he does not say so. Even his real views of Augustus and his golden age are not certain. Openly, of course, there are all those splendid puffs, those high-flown panegyrics in the Georgics: the portents when Julius Caesar was assas sinated, the constellations adjusting themselves to accommodate Augustus in the heavens; and there are the historical prophecies in the Aeneid: prophecies announced by Jupiter in Heaven, by Anchises in Elysium, prophecies implicit in the imprecations of Dido, foreshadowed in the shield of Aeneas, and all pointing forwards, though the continuity of Roman history, to the empire on which the sun would never set: His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono: Imperium sine fine dedi; and meanwhile, to emphasise that continuity, there are the images of all those shadowy kings and Roman heroes who would link and identify Troy with Rome, Aeneas with Augustus—like those foreshadowed Scot tish kings who would link Banquo with James VI and I of Scotland and England, However, when we look below the surface, when we listen to the private whisper within that magniloquent public voice, we are not quite so sure. Virgil’s hatred of war, the undercurrent of melancholy, the tragic sense of life which is never far below the surface and informs his most memorable lines, makes us pause. In his beautifully concise and perceptive little book on Virgil, Jasper Griffin shows, very persuasively, how Virgil, by choosing to write a heroic poem not on Augustus but on Aeneas, looking forward to him, contrived at the same time to satisfy the duties and to avoid the perils of a poet laureate, and, while publicly declaring the required theme, to mingle with it a quiet private voice not indeed of criticism or dissent but of ambiguity and unease: a recurrent reminder of the heavy cost of imperialism, the coarsening of spirit which it entails, the sacrifice of the Muses to the noise of war, the heavy burden 70 P residential A d d r e ss of greatness and rule. After all, if there is any explicit statement by Virgil of his own scale of values, surely it must be that marvellous closing passage of the second Georgic, where, for the only time, he speaks not through imaginary shepherds, or prophets, or gods, but in his own person, with his own voice: me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae, quarum sacra fero, ingenti percussus amore, accipiant caelique vias et sidera monstrent.. . and then, if full knowledge of the natural world is inaccessible to dull human senses, rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes: flumina amem silvasque inglorius. Happy is he who can discern the secrets of Nature, but happy also he who knows the divinities of the countryside, Pan and old Silvanus and the sister nymphs. Such a man is not troubled by affairs of state. The strife of the parties, the threat of war do not concern him: non res Romanae perituraque regna, not the state of Rome, nor empires doomed to perish. That is surely a real credo; and it is very different from the political triumphalism of the great set pieces of panegyric. Beyond all the fascinating problems of scholarship—problems of his torical context and application, or personal character and biography— the ultimate pleasure of reading Virgil is still, I believe, his style, that marvellous elevation and flexibility and music of language even when the context of it is nothing extraordinary. But this, to us now, poses a problem. At a time when knowledge of the Latin language is dying out, how is that pleasure to be communicated so that others can enjoy it? A later performer on that radio programme said that she would take the poems of Virgil with her to the island—but in translation. But can the quality of Virgil be conveyed in translation? Pure poetry is, by definition, that which cannot be translated, and the specific character of the Latin language—so economical, so exact, so lapidary—compounds the difficulty. 71 L ord D acr e of G lan to n Many have attempted to render Virgil into English, but who among them has caught his real voice? Certainly not the man who took most trouble about it, the Anglo-Irish convert to Catholicism, Richard Stanyhurst. He sought to capture the rhythm of Virgil by following the rules laid down by that arch-pedant, who was also Spenser’s mentor, Gabriel Harvey, and by keeping to Virgil’s metre; but our language has never been broken to hexameters, and the result was not a success. Here is Dido’s imprecation, in Virgil, as Aeneas sails away from Carthage: terque quaterque manu pectus percussa decorum, flaventesque abscissa comas, pro Iuppiter, ibit hie, ait, et nostris illuserit advena regnis. Who would recognise this in Stanyhurst’s version: Thrise, nay she foure seasons on fayre brest mightely bouncing, And her heare owt rowting yellow: ‘God Juppiter, ogh Lord, Quod she, shal hee scape thus? shal a stranger geve me the slampam? Stanyhurst translated the first four books of the Aeneid in this manner. He was very pleased with the result. He thought that he had succeeded in accurately conveying both ‘the peerless style’ and ‘matchless stuff of the poet and ‘beautifying our English language with heroical verses’. Gabriel Harvey was also delighted with it: he hailed Stanyhurst as a worthy disciple. Alas, they were in a minority: a minority of two. The rest of the literary world, then and since, has seen his work as, at best, ‘an incomparable oddity’. Perhaps only another poet—a poet in his own right, a poet who is also a delicate craftsman, ‘a nice critic in his mother tongue’—can translate Virgil. This was the expressed view of John Dryden, who was himself not only (in my opinion) one of the greatest of our poets but also one of the most careful and sensitive of critics. Dryden loved Virgil as one ‘whose beauties I have been endeavouring all my life to imitate’, and he was indignant to see him so often ‘abused . . . by a botching interpreter’. He also knew the hazards of life as a poet laureate and was a master of politic ambiguity. In 1685, when he was high in favour at court and looked forward to writing the Aeneid of the Stuart dynasty, he published some samples of translation, and in his preface to them he expressed his view of Virgil: 72 P residential A d d r e ss ‘a succinct and grave majestic writer, one who weighed not only every thought but every word and syllable . . . his verse is every where sounding the very thing in your ears whose sense it bears; yet the numbers are perpetually varied to increase the delight of the reader, so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together’ —unlike Ovid and Claudian who, though very different from each other, ‘have each of them but one sort of music in their voices’.4 Has anyone defined the style of Virgil better than this? After the Revolution of1688, when the Stuart dynasty had fallen, and Dryden with it, he took to systematic translation as a means of subsist ence, and in 1694 he undertook to translate the whole works of Virgil. By that time he was particularly sensitive to the subtleties and ambiguities of Virgil, whom he now saw, through the veil of courtly encomium and flattering allegory, as a closet republican; for how else could one inter pret that mysterious and gratuitous line which Virgil inserts into the shield of Aeneas, with its prefiguration of the glory of Rome, and the saints of its history, set apart in Elysium, receiving their laws from the republican martyr Cato: secretosque pios, his dantem iura Catonem? 5 What, I wonder, did Augustus make of that line? But it has been pointed out to me that the only line of the Aeneid known to have been quoted by Augustus comes very near the beginning of Book I; so perhaps the busy emperor did not persevere as far as Book VIII.6 To read Dryden’s translation, apart from the sheer pleasure of the poetry, is to thread a fascinating double labyrinth in which the politic ambiguities of the poet are compounded by those of his translator. For the translations were dedicated, by an unrepentant Jacobite, to crypto- Jacobite grandees; his Aeneas, who had been Augustus, now wore a contemporary look. Was he the exiled King James to whom Dryden hoped to dedicate his Aeneid on the triumphant return of the exile? Many sly renderings insinuate the suggestion. But such ingenuity could be exercised by others too; for did not Aeneas come to Italy from abroad, as an invader, and secure the crown of Latium, as son-in-law of the legiti mate king, displacing the established heir? Dryden’s whig publisher, whose proposal that the work be dedicated to William III had been 7 3 L ord D acre of G la n to n turned down by the poet, still made the inconvenient point by re-touch ing the old plates from a previous translation so as to give Aeneas the unmistakeable hooked nose of his hero. To which Dryden could only retort that at least Aeneas waited till his father-in-law was dead before taking his throne.7 But these are incidental subtleties. Let us return to the prime quality of Virgil: his pure poetry. To Dryden, himself rusticated from the infec tious air of the court, ‘the best poem of the best poet’ was the Georgics. As a sample, I turn up ‘those inimitable lines’ (as Addison called them) in which Virgil envisages the burial of the bloody civil wars of Rome by a returned Saturnian, or Augustan, reign of pastoral peace: Agricola incurvo terrain molitus aratro exesa inveniet scabra robigine pila et gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanes grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris. How does Dryden render this? Then, after length of time, the lab’ring swains Who turn the turf of those unhappy plains Shall rusty piles from the plough’d furrows take And over empty helmets pass the rake, Amaz’d at antique titles on the stones And mighty reliques of gigantick bones. Not Virgil perhaps, but Augustan, and poetry. ‘All that I can promise myself,’ Dryden wrote of his first translations from Virgil, ‘is only that I have done better than Ogleby’ (his English predecessor) ‘and perhaps as well as Caro’ (the Italian translator of the Aeneid)\ ‘so that methinks I come like a malefactor, to make a speech upon the gallows, and to warn all other poets, by my sad example, from the sacrilege of translating Virgil.’8 If that is the final judgment of the best translator of Virgil, the lesson, for lovers of literature, is clear. We must not allow the study and knowledge of the Latin language to die. Oxford LORD DACRE OF GLANTON 74 P residential A d d ress NOTES 1. Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works (1796) II, 714. 2. In that very rare work, William Bellenden’s De Tribus Luminibus Romanorum (Paris, 1633). 3. Ch. Guignebert, Le Christ (Paris, 1943) 181-7. 4. Dryden, Sylvae, or the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (1685), Preface. 5. Dryden* Dedication of the Aeneis (1697). 6. But perhaps Virgil reckoned on the tolerant spirit of his master. Mr Robert Parker has directed me to an episode cited by Macrobius (II.4.18), which shows Augustus defending Cato against his detractors: quisque praesentem statum civitatis commutari non volet, et civis et vir bonus est. 7. On this subject, see James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven, 1987) 485-9. 8. Sylvaef Preface. 75 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 20 (1991) 76-89 ©1991 Through a Glass Darkly— Reality and Virgil G.K. Chesterton once went to give a public lecture of some note. After being introduced he began to move his sizeable bulk towards the lectern. But just as he was about to speak, one of the younger members of the audience asked loudly, ‘Mummy, what is that fat man for?’ As children we quite naturally ask our parents that same question all the time, and as each answer comes we succeed in slotting another piece of the jigsaw of life into place. As we become aware of what everything is and of its function, so we learn more about the reality that is our world, our environment, the place where we live our lives. We soon understand what a door is, a knife and fork, a bat and ball, but then come the rather harder questions like: what is a story for, or later on, what is an epic or an Aeneid for? To use the image of G.K. Chesterton, it is in one sense not just a very fat book. Let us start at the most basic level. What is a story? A story is a narrative. Children read and are read stories and they take them at the level of simple narrative. They also derive great pleasure from them if, that is, they find them interesting. If they do not, then they just stop reading or listening and go on to something else. But the story is not necessarily simple. Some of the stories children read are of a fantastic or even grotesque kind. As children get older they understand that in the real world in which they live, animals cannot talk and people cannot just flap their arms up and down and fly. Yet, for children enjoying a story it does not really matter; what does matter is the fact that they are enjoying what they are reading and those stories which provide us with a means of escape are often those which still appeal to us when we have grown into adults. By the time we have become adults, it naturally follows that our taste in reading matter will have become more sophisticated. Nowadays, of 76 R e a l ity a n d V irgil course, the most common form of reading matter and probably the most popular is the novel. From Mills and Boon upwards we relax by escaping into the lives and experiences of others. A natural extension of that is also that the novel is big business. The Booker prize attracts enormous press attention and the winning book shoots up the best-seller list. If you look at the kind of novel that dominates these lists it is invariably the ‘epic’ stories about the rich and exotic who move in a world that it unknown to most of the readers; yet no matter how far removed the storyline is from the normal run of human experience, the reader still manages to find enough common ground of human response and feeling to be able to identify at least a little with the main character. Perhaps it is precisely this wish or even need to identify with a character, be the novel a kitchen-sink or a science-fiction work, that generates the enjoy ment of reading for those who prefer fiction. Most of the time when we pick up a novel, we do not think about how we are reading it or, in any deep sense, why we are reading it; although there are a large number of increasingly complex theories put forward. Reading without deep thoughts about the reasons why we are reading is the essence of reading for pleasure. When a book really grips our atten tion it begins to take on a certain reality for us as we become involved in the action. But then most novels have been written in the last two hundred and fifty years or so, and indeed most a good deal more recently than that. They throw up for us a whole series of temporary realities, which in many cases are then set aside as fast as the books themselves. We buy a novel at the supermarket, read it and bin it. What this is leading up to is the fact that before we consider reality and Virgil, or any realities we impose upon Virgil, it is important that we have thought about the way that we read today. It is also important to remember that, whereas for us the novel is the most widely read and most acceptable form of literature, in Virgil’s time the exact opposite was true. If there were any novels in our sense they were not considered to be literature. For us, living in a world of throwaway books, the impact that this work of literature made on the readers of the ancient world is probably hard to understand. But, in the words of Propertius, here at last was something that was greater than the Iliad. Virgil did more than just win a Booker Prize. He wrote a work which, from the moment it was published, became a universally read classic, a 77 G l o r ia V e sse y standard work, read and often memorised. No one binned the Aeneid. It became a text book, but that was not the reason why it was so widely read; nor was it because it said nice things about Rome which the Romans wanted to hear. It was read because it gave pleasure—but not a simple pleasure, because it was not a simple work. Two thousand years later, it is even less simple. How then did Roman readers react to the Aeneidl In considering this question it does, of course, first have to be made clear that, as with readers today, no two reactions to a work of literature were the same: each one was unique and largely exclusive to the individual. In any case it would also be rather dangerous for us to assume that we could know what the Romans thought. Did they then read it as a poem, pure and simple, or did they like so many modem literary critics attempt to read more and more into every word, look and gesture? What we do know is that most of the ‘burning questions’ to which the modern critic seeks an answer were not even mentioned by the critics in the ancient world. The critics then were more concerned with analysing the language used by Virgil and the way he used it. Not all were won over by his style. Would it be safe to assume that the Roman reader accepted that he could not really descend into the Underworld or become invisible, but that the story should be taken ‘as if’ one could? In the eyes of the modem critic this might be thought of as not really being good enough. There is always an ongoing search for the ‘real’: the real meaning, the real allegory, the real message. The question is, is this really the best way to look at the text, and if you do look at it this way, does it bring you any closer to ‘reality? The German novelist Heinrich von Kleist was a master at presenting his readers with a sort of cautionary tale about schein and sein, that is, appearance and reality. In his books his characters are presented with a series of experiences or difficulties or one great tragedy and they cope by looking at the situation and deciding how they can best deal with what they think they are seeing. But the point that Kleist makes everywhere is that what we think we see may be the exact opposite of the reality. So in his works a saviour becomes an attacker, an honest person a cheat and a good person an evil one. Never trust what you see or think you see. Interestingly Kleist wrote about classical subjects like Penthesilea. In his work too there is a sense that the only reason that his characters are finally saved if they have done the right thing is because they have 78 R e a l it y a n d V irgil remained true to themselves whatever they have had to deal with. That sort of character, battling on and staying true to what he knows he must do, looks rather familiar to us too—Aeneas and his famous pietas perhaps. So when we read the Aeneid we too are, like Kleist’s characters, set ting out into very dangerous areas in trying to find the ‘reality5 of it all. We may find that we think that we understand what it is that we are reading, and that we can explain what the hidden or real meaning may be, when we are in fact doing no such thing, and anyway, who can tell us whether we are right—Virgil cannot. Let us turn aside from his work for a moment and think a little about what we know about the ‘real’ world in which Virgil wrote. Virgil grew up in a politically unstable society—civil wars, the assas sination of Caesar and further civil war leading up to the final battle of Actium in 31 b c had all shaken the Roman state to its foundations and insecurity about the future was rife. Against this background emerged this rather diffident perfectionist striving to produce a perfect epic poem. It took him a decade and even then he was not satisfied with it, believing it to fall short of the standard he really wanted and intended to try to achieve by going over it again. It is not surprising perhaps that he asked on his deathbed that it should be destroyed—maybe because he died knowing that he had failed to produce one perfect thing (at least perfect in his eyes) in an imperfect world. So some important things can be deduced from that. Firstly, that if you go to the trouble of devoting ten years of your life to producing the perfect poem, then there must be some very good purpose to it. Why would you bother to take a whole day to get a single line right? Some critics have suggested that what Virgil is trying to say in the Aeneid is that war is bad and that if you set out to carve out an empire of your own then you will have to commit some immoral acts along the way. In the end that will mean that you will lose more than you gain for yourself. This suggestion is all very well, but it begs several questions. The first is, would a man of intelligence really sit down every day for a decade and strive to write a masterpiece of epic poetry just to say that war is bad? If that was all he had wanted to say, then a short piece of writing would have done just as well. Besides, it is rather difficult to think how the Aeneid could have been written so that the reader would have thought that war was a good thing. 79 G lo ria V e sse y What we can see from this one example is how difficult it is even to try to work out the answer to a simple question like why Virgil wrote the Aeneid. So if we start trying to turn the characters of the Aeneid into real people in order to help us reach the truth, then we are getting into even deeper water. In his book, Darkness Visible, W.R. Johnson attempts to find out what is behind the ‘famous blush’ of Lavinia. When in 12. 64-71 Tumus, enraged, resolves to go out and fight Aeneas in single combat, Lavinia, hearing her mother say she would rather die than see Aeneas as her son-in-law, blushes. accepit vocem lacrimis Lavinia matris flagrantes perfusa germs, cui plurimus ignem subiecit rubor, et calefacta per ora cucurrit. Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro si quis ebur, aut mixta rubent ubi lilia multa alba rosas: tales virgo dabat ore colores, ilium turbat amor, figitque in virgine vultus: ardet in arma magis paucisque adfatur Amata... Johnson asks ‘But why does she blush?’ He goes on: “We know nothing whatever of Lavinia’s conscious thoughts, much less of her private fantasies. Does she respond to the passion of Tumus? Has she toyed with notions of the glamourous Asiatic barbarian, a white sheikh come to brighten her humdrum existence? One may speculate, but Virgil has seen to it that such speculation is as fruitless as it is boring . . . ’ (I cite Johnson merely as an example, one out of many, often less subtle, and still recurring.) What one might better spend one’s time on is speculating whether statements like these can actually be taken seriously? I freely admit that I have not the slightest idea as to whether Lavinia toyed with the notion of a glamourous sheikh carrying her off. This is probably mainly because I do not know how to work out what notions seven letters on a page joined together to form the name Lavinia are supposed to have. Lavinia is not a complete human being but a character in an epic poem created by a writer two thousand years ago, so how can anyone ‘know’? There is nothing to know. Johnson himself admits the dangers of such questions when he says that not only do perceptions vary according to 80 R eality a n d V irgil trends and tastes, but that also, as we all perceive reality in a completely personal way, whatever we think of as the real meaning of the poem is bound to become overlaid with meanings and myths of our own making. Perhaps the real answer to the question why did Virgil say that Lavinia blushed and not give any explanation of it, was because he did not choose to or did not consider it necessary. The women characters in the Aeneid seem to be particularly singled out for this kind of treatment—the most notable example, of course, being Dido. Among the questions asked about her are the ‘old chestnuts’, did she betray Sychaeus by falling in love with Aeneas, is she a victim of Fate or the gods, is she a tragic figure or simply a woman unable to come to terms with the fact that the man she loves has to fulfil the responsibil ity that has been given to him, in spite of whatever it is that he feels for her? These questions have often appeared in various forms, even as examination questions. But the real question is, are they worth answer ing, because so much of what is said about Dido seems to assume that she is real. Aeneas has been seen as undertaking a sort of Trojan Pilgrim’s Progress. Although he is stepping into the unknown he shoulders the awesome responsibility of founding Rome, trusting in himself, praying that whatever the obstacles placed in his path he will have the strength to go on. On that reading, Dido represents temptation, not only in the form of love, but in the form of complacency and forgetfulness of his duty—the most fatal error of all in Roman eyes. It takes Mercury in a rather ambiguous, even deceitful speech, it should be said, to persuade him to carry on. Is Dido then to be seen as an obstacle in his path or as a means by which Virgil can make a moral point about her guilt or innocence or about the costs of founding an empire? As Dido is Virgil’s creation, how can we know? Let us break off for a moment for a flight of fancy. We know that Virgil and Horace were close friends and it is a remarkable image that is conjured up in our minds if we try and imagine these two literary giants meeting and discussing their work with each other. It does not really seem very likely that Horace would have asked Virgil any of the above questions, but rather that their main topic of conversation would have been whether a certain line was quite right or a given word ought to be 81 G lo ria V e sse y used or changed. In fact, they might not have understood the kind of questions which are so frequently asked today. It can even be said that as we persist in trying to analyse every aspect of a character and his or her behaviour, we may actually end up making the glass darker. Things become much less clear. By wondering about whether Lavinia has fantasies about being carried off by a sheikh all we are really doing is dragging into our world, our reality and our terms of reference something which in no way belongs there. When we set out to try to find answers to questions and hidden meanings in the text we are coming up against very difficult problems because the Aeneid is really a little world of its own. It is essentially self- contained and all that it needs is there inside it. The writer has included in the story all the characters and encounters, battles and heartbreak that he needs to complete his epic So to find any sort of answer to anything we have to look at each line of the text, the phrases and words and in doing so forget about our experiences in the world around us and think about what is written on the page in front of us. When we then consider what little we know of the historical events and social condi tions which the writer would have known and which produced the experiences he could use when he wrote, we might get more pertinent answers. As, for example, science-fiction writing is self-defining, the greater part of its appeal lies in the fact that aspects of it are still obscure and mysterious to us. Not everything can be explained. The realities of literature are more real in a way because they are held within very limited space—that of the text itself. Once we start to read the text in such a way that we try all the time to turn every event in the story into some kind of concrete reality, usually by drawing parallels with our own world and making all sorts of false equations about things in the light of our feelings and how we think we would have responded to something, then we are quite likely to be getting ever further from the story and from any real chance of understanding any part of it meaningfully. Aeneas is a character limited and constrained by Virgil’s definition of him and by what Virgil tells us about his character. What the Aeneas character does in the Aeneid cannot be added to or in any way changed except when we allow our own ideas of what is right and wrong, of what someone should or should not do in a given situation to be overlaid on to the narrative. 82 R e a l it y an d V irgil Aeneas possessed one of the qualities held most dear by the Roman people; he was pius. But this pietas is actually defined by the text itself, that is, by Virgil. In other words, Aeneas shows us what Virgil thought pietas was all about. If we do not think that Aeneas does act with pietas, then that is just unfortunate for us because it is a pointless exercise for us to try to turn Aeneas into a model of what we think of as a pius hero. At the end of the Aeneid when Aeneas kills Tumus the argument was once popular that this act made Aeneas betray his pietas, that by doing this he went against the principles for which he was supposed to stand. What he did could be said to have been the more human response unlike his leaving of Dido. We may want Aeneas to have more human re sponses, but that cannot be because Aeneas is Virgil’s Aeneas, a character in an epic poem and not a real person with real choices. This search for the real meaning of a text is not, of course, something which is confined to classical literature, but it is always dangerous to think that you can find out what lies behind ‘the story on the page’. When J.R.R. Tolkien was asked what the ‘real’ meaning, that is the allegorical significance of The Lord of the Rings was, he said that it did not have one. It was a story that defined itself and should be read as such. Judging by its enduring popularity with young and old alike, it obviously does not need one. The question perhaps should be asked—if Tolkien did not need an allegorical meaning, why whould we? Why do we find it necessary? The Lord of the Rings is essentially a story of good against evil, but that does not really tell us much about why it is so popular, why so many people read it. Most stories contain this idea in some form or another. It is always possible to boil down long narratives to short and simple moral terms or to find in them a moral lesson. Horace, perhaps not being entirely serious, does this with the Iliad and the Odyssey in Epistles 1.2 where he assures Lollius Maximus (the man to whom the epistle is addressed) that Homer tells us what is good, what is bad, what is useful and what is not useful more clearly and better than the Stoic philosophers Chrysippus and Crantor. Part of the joke might be that the Stoics themselves were quite fond of drawing out morals from literature in the way that Horace himself then goes on to do. According to Horace the Iliad presents a narrative of human folly and conniption whereas Odysseus is a useful example of what virtue and wisdom can achieve: 83 G lo ria V e sse y Fabula, qua Paridis propter narratur amorem Graecia barbariae lento collisa duello, stultorum regum et populorum continet aestus. Anterior censet belli praecidere causam. quid Paris2 ut salvus regnet vivatque beatus cogi posse negat. Nestor componere litis inter Peliden festinat et inter Atriden; hunc amor, ira quidem communiter urit utrumque. quidquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi. seditione, dolis, scelere atque libidine et ira Iliacos intra muros peccatur et extra. rursus quid virtus et quid sapientia possit, utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulixen, qui domitor Troiae multorum providus urbis et mores hominum inspexit latumque per aequor, dum sibi, dum sociis reditum parat, aspera multa pertulit, adversis rerum immersabilis undis. Sirenum voces et Circae pocula nosti; quae si cum sociis stultus cupidusque bibisset, sub domina meretrice fuisset turpis et excors, vixisset canis immundus vel arnica luto sus. (6-26) Horace then turns to our own position and our own failures. His reduction of the Homeric epics to simple statements about human be haviour finds its place within his own epistle. It is hardly intended to be a full ‘account’ of the epics of Homer or to explain why we really like to read them. In the end it is probably true that we feel a need to find some simple moral truth in long works of literature. But if you were asked to go away and write a 500-page novel just about good and evil, for example, you would soon find out that it is just not enough to sustain a long work of fiction. You need more elements in the story to make it work. But once you start to add the other ingredients that you need, the more likely you are to have your work analysed and interpreted, probably in a very sophisticated way, but in the end coming down to much the same thing as Horace’s ironic treatment of the Iliad and Odyssey. This can be summed up as—here is a text, now let me tell you what it is all about. If we now apply the Horatian principle to what has been said in this lecture so far, it really amounts to the fact that reading texts in the 84 R e a l ity a n d V irgil wrong way does more harm than good. We can end up knowing a good deal less than we might about the text and liking it a good deal less as well. To pose questions about a character in an ancient poem like the Aeneid and attempt to treat this literary character as a real person with independence of thought, feeling and will is, in the end, an unprofitable course, for the simple reason that if you start with a wrong premise you cannot arrive at the right answer. By treating characters as real and ascribing your own ideas and feelings to what the story tells us the characters do, you cannot claim that you have arrived at the real mean ing of the work or, for that matter, expect others to agree with you. Beware the critic who claims that everything he says can be proven by the text. Remember, every Christian sect says the same about the Bible. One might just as well write a thesis about a well-known soap-opera and ascribe to the characters in it actual choices in what they say and do. Mrs X would never have said that she would leave her husband if she had not been told to say that by Mr Y. Or is it rather a case of the actress just doing and saying what she is being told to do and say by the script that has been written for her and put in her hand? It may sound like a reductio in absurdum, but is it any less valid than the statement about Lavinia and the sheikh? Perhaps the fact that the turning of books into films and televison series, which has made us still more aware of and used to seeing famous characters in literature portrayed as real characters on the screen, means that we tend, almost without thinking, to turn our rather indis tinct mental images into actual people. When we hear the name of a famous literary character the name and, more importantly, the face of the actor or actress who has portrayed them often springs to mind. How many people think of the actor Derek Jacobi when they see the name of the Emperor Claudius? And, depend ing on the age of the person, when you speak about the character Sherlock Holmes, the older generations immediately mention Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing, whilst the latest generation of admirers may wax lyrical about Jeremy Brett. It has been scientifically assessed that the average person only recalls about 30% of what they hear, but they recall significantly more if the information given is backed up by a visual image. This tendency to want some image to hang on to is perhaps an inbuilt 85 G lo r ia V e sse y one, a natural response. We do have a tendency to want to project our ideas and images on to a text as we do on to celluloid—hence maybe the description of the multi-million dollar film industry as a ‘dream factory’. After all, we read by a process of analogy and we do sometimes need to form an opinion about something that has not happened. Interestingly, this tendency we have to analyse what we see and also the danger that there is in thinking that we really do understand it and are able, unlike the earlier characters in the books of the German author Kleist, whom I mentioned, to act in the sure knowledge that we are doing the right thing on the basis of having been able to tell the differ ence between appearance and reality, all appears in the Aeneid itself after Aeneas has made his journey into the Underworld. Aeneas, as you will recall, has seen various terrifying shapes and figures. His reaction is described as follows: corripit hie subita trepidus formidine ferrum Aeneas strictamque aciem venientibus offert, et ni docta comes tenuis sine corpore vitas admoneat volitare cava sub imagine formae, inruat at frustra ferro diverberet umbras. (6.290-4) Unlike Aeneas we have no Sibyl beside us as we venture into the text, no one to assure, guide and explain, no arbiter of appearance and reality. We might allude to here, but not discuss, Aeneas’ departure from the Underworld through the Ivory Gate (6.896-8), which has quite needlessly been transformed into a problem with some remarkable solu tions offered over the years. A number of realities have been confused in the debate. The image of Aeneas leaving through the door of false dreams is one which would have delighted Kleist. All of this leads towards one question—if trying to treat the charac ters Virgil describes in the Aeneid as real people leads to inevitable fail ure because of the fundamentally wrong approach that is being taken, how can we really use the Aeneidl To come back to the first question, What is it for? What can it give us? Why read it at all? I think, first of all, that it is not necessarily right that we should get anything particularly important out of a book, but assuming that we read certain books because we feel that we will benefit in some way or another, how should we approach a text like the Aeneidl 86 R e a l it y a n d V irgil Initially, we can define what the Aeneid is in very simple terms: it is a poem written in hexameters and made up of a certain number of words. It also has a certain number of characters whose actions and experiences are described. At root these characters and what they do are nothing more than words on a page. It does not matter how many times you read the Aeneid, the characters, their actions and the world in which they live are always fixed and unchanging. It is your attitude and powers of observation that change. This is all rather different from the constantly changing and unstable world we live in. What we get out of the text, and the best way to read it, is not something that can be rigidly defined. It may depend on when you read something, at what stage in your life or education, or for what purpose. There is a great difference in the way a text will be read by someone who wants to see what a work of literature written in ancient Rome was like and who decides to learn some Latin in order to read the Aeneid in the original on the train on the way to work, perhaps taking months over the job, and the seventeen year old student swotting for exams who has only a certain number of hours to devote to reading what is only one of several books that have to be studied, perhaps to get a place at university. Then there is the academic with a professional interest in Virgil and so A further difference between the students (and let us concentrate on them and not the academic, since this is a lecture to which sixth forms have been invited) who are reading the text as part of a course of study leading to an examination in the Latin language and those for whom it forms part of a Classical Civilisation course, for which a knowledge of the language is not required. A glib answer might be that in the case of students of Latin, they have their time cut out simply making sense of the words and coping with the grammar and syntax and worrying about how to show in an essay why the text is a wonderful piece of poetry. But how often does one hear from students who have taken A-levels and even who have completed University degrees that they never want or intend to pick up a classical text again because they have analysed every word until it drove them to distraction. For those reading the texts in translation there is one particular trap which is that, unable to analyse the language of the original and in this way explain the merits of the text, it is tempting to treat the translation as if it were the original text and to approach it like a piece of English 87 G lo ria V e sse y literature with a classical background. Stories are fun not because they are new but because they are different and there is certainly nothing wrong with liking the story of the Aeneid. But should that liking for the story lead back to an analysis of the characters as real people, then the whole thing has come full circle again. It is necessary for people to know that there is an informed way of reading that is also enjoyable. This means, of course, that they need to be provided with information, sometimes of a very basic nature; for example, who was Aeneas, what happened to him in the Trojan war, what is a sibyl and how many of them were there in the ancient world, who was Augustus and what was his connection with Aeneas, and so on. These and many more questions, some not so simple, emerge and, in getting the answers, the text and also something of the world from which it came begins to emerge and to make something like sense. And that means not just the sense of the present day. Many novelists today write books primarily because they want to give people enjoyment and pleasure in reading. Was Virgil so different, even if there are different levels of pleasure? Whether the Aeneid was or was not written to support or please Augustus is a question that is still being discussed, but whatever it was for, the poem had to be able to capture the imagination of the audience and hold it. An epic poem surely gives pleasure, whatever its other uses. The more we gain by understanding, not necessarily the grammar, syntax and vocabulary alone, but also what we can of the Roman world, the less, hopefully, we need to interpolate our own ideas, morals, opin ions and attitudes into the textual world of Aeneas. Then if we do wish to make a judgment about the text, we can at least look at things from a more objective standpoint. We wish to come closer to the text, to see it more as it is, not through a glass darkly, but face to face—not simply how we think it should be or must be. Obviously, not all our experience is irrelevant, but it has to be used with caution, particularly in view of a cultural background which is withdrawing further from the ancient world for most people. It is easy to think that more information about the ancient world is available—certainly there are numerous documentaries and the large and varied archaeological evidence that it coming in all the time is constantly expanding the boundaries of our understanding—but we should not forget that people are playing with computer games at home 88 R eality a n d V irgil and that for many television is their only form of entertainment. In other words, the knowledge may be increasing, but so is the culture gap. Because we are human and so were the Romans, we are not completely cut off from them, but that too can be misleading. The reality of the text always really stays the same, but the reality of the reader keeps changing. As the gap yawns into a chasm, so we seem to compensate by trying either to impose our reality more completely or by reducing the reality of Virgil and the ancient world generally to a sort of quaint picture, which is, in effect, depriving it of any reality it ever had. St Paul’s famous phrase implies that there are many realities and many true meanings, not all of them clear to us. He is, of course, thinking of the contrast between the world of the spirit and the world we have now. But the image he uses is striking. There will always be shades of darkness between different areas of reality, but the darkness does not have to remain impenetrable. There is a path to understanding, but we must take care where we tread. London GLORIA VESSEY NOTE This was a lecture to which sixth form students were invited. The lecture had to offer something to a group of people whose experience of the Latin language varied from a few years to a lifetime. So in writing it that thought was in the forefront of my mind. Some of the points being made are expressed in a less technical way, but the essence of what is being said is the same. Some ideas which have profound implications and many facets have had to be dealt with in a summary way. Only the Aeneid was alluded to in this paper. Many of the same points might be made about the Eclogues and Georgics, but it would require further lectures to deal with them all. Besides, the Aeneid is more commonly read first, especially in schools. The immense bibliography that now exists in relation to Virgil means that anything said about his work could easily become little more than a compilation of the views of other people. I have, in fact kept such references to the minimum. The last thing I want to do is to make it any harder to see through the glass. 89 Proceedings of the Virgil Society 20 (1991) 90-91 ©1991 Review Francis Cairns, Virgil's Augustan Epic (Cambridge University Press 1989) xi + 280pp. Casebound. £27.50 Readers acquainted with Professor Cairns’ numerous contributions to the study of Augustan poetry will expect to find in Virgil’s Augustan Epic thorough documentation and a number of new ideas; they will in neither respect be disappointed. They will rec ognise, too, a certain continuity in method and approach, even if the emphasis is some what different. Much of Cairns’ work has been devoted to an exposition of his view that ‘generic composition’ is an essential key to our unlocking of Roman poetry in its apogee no less than in its supposed or real decline. In his book on the Aeneid, the genre is replaced by the stereotype, with a discussion of Virgil’s adherence to and deviation from what may be termed the norm. Acceptance of the hypothesis in its generality as opposed to particular details will rest on similar premises in both instances. The early chapters deal with the theme of the ‘good king1. From a variety of sources, as codified by modern scholars, Caims draws up a catalogue of traits held in antiquity to be representative of this ideal; a kind of‘composite’ is thereby formed. By comparison and contrast, he then argues that the Virgilian Aeneas is by and large an embodiment of this array of monarchic virtues, whereas Dido and Tumus fail to attain them. The former, in fact, falls from grace, whereas the latter never really reaches it. As a consequence, the actions of Aeneas are made more comprehensible and indeed worthy of praise, at least from an ‘Augustan’ point of view. One wonders, however, whether the ‘good king" can be constructed on any other bases than those Cairns regards as stereotypical. One may of course concede readily that, at this or that historical moment, some may be dropped and others made more prominent. Is it possible that we might draw up a similar ‘profile’, for, say, the ‘good doctor’ or even the ‘good plumber’, and then apply them to texts that contain doctors and plumbers among their participants? This is only to assert that stereotypy is inevitable in any characterisation, indeed in our judgments of humankind in general. Instances conform or diverge, but the pattern is there, implicitly, as a yardstick. Again, is Aeneas in fact a king? He is termed rex certainly, but in the ancient world there was no hierarchy of noble ranks, no princes, dukes, earls or knights. What kind of rex was Aeneas? Is the leader of a band of exiles, even if of royal descent, a ‘king’ in the full sense with which we endow it? In chapter 4, stereotypy is applied not to people but to a quality, concordia. Its characteristics occupy two pages of the text, and it is then traced and measured with reference to them throughout the whole epic. Though some useful ideas emerge in the 90 R e v ie w process, one is again left with the feeling that, if concord is to play any part in the narrative at all, it cannot do so on a radically different basis from that which has been so carefully tabulated. Can concordia be other than concordant, or discord be other than its opposite? The same fundamental doubts may be felt about subsequent chapters, in which Dido is brought into relation with the elegiac tradition and Lavinia with the ‘maidens’ of lyric. One should not really be in any way surprised by the parallelisms, for they could, to a greater or lesser degree, be traced in traditions that owe nothing to ancient elegy or lyric. Which is not summarily to discount them; it is rather their status that raises important theoretical questions. There is a great deal more in Cairns’ book, all the same, that may be read with profit, including his chapter on the ‘Italianisation’ of Aeneas and his re-assessment of the relationship between Homer and Virgil in the last two chapters. The bibliography occupies 21 pages and there are two indexes. The title itself has a polemical edge, implying rejection of readings of Virgil popular ised in the ‘radical’ sixties and seventies, and still not quite dead today. That is commendable. Whether the directions indicated and assumptions made by Cairns are the right ones to carry Virgilian scholarship into the third millennium of the Christian era is much more doubtful. Whatever our doubts, however, the book should be read; indeed the raising of doubts is in itself a cause for gratitude. King’s College London D.W.T. VESSEY 91