R. Howard Bloch Yale University

Eneas before the Walls of Carthage: The Beginnings of the City and Romance in the Suburbs

Beginning from a discussion of the color of the marble of the walls of Carthage, which show how two different qualities might inhere in the same substance, this article traces the law of inherence as a structuring principle of Romance seen throughout the Roman d’Eneas in a variety of areas from that of gender difference, to the definition of love and psychic life, to the notion of what the human being can be said to be. From this widely operating principal also emanate a series of subsidiary effects involving a belief in the efficacy of the will, an emphasis upon logic and empirical observation, and renewed interest in technology and the arts. Romance, in comparison to epic, is linked to the return in the High Middle Ages of Aristotelianism with increased stress upon natural sciences, upon the relation of particulars to each other, upon dialectics and relativism. Despite the present-day resonance of Romance with the irrational (evasion, dream) and the naive, it is, in fact, a cradle of skepticism and an early avatar of the scientific spirit.

If what is known for better or worse as the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century is synonymous with the revival of Classical culture beginning around the 1140s, there is no element of that revival more essential than the topos of translatio studii, the belief that knowledge, and by implication power, was born in Greece, migrated to Rome, then reached France in its inevitable journey West. By the time such news was first explicitly articulated in a literary text, Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès (mid-1170s), it was, however, already over a decade old, for the Classical romances of mid-century—the Roman de Thèbes, Roman de Troie, 2 FLS, Vol. XXIX, 2002 Roman d’Alexandre—not only bore witness to a return to the Ancient world, but from the start implicitly thematized the westward thrust via the retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid in the Roman d’Eneas written by an anonymous Norman clerk at the court of the Plantagenets around 1160.1 The Roman d’Eneas is a tale of at least three cities: first Carthage and Laurentium, and then—via the lineage of Lavinia and Eneas—of Rome, as if from the start Romance, which originally marked the difference between works written in the vernacular and Latin, were a looking towards Rome. The Eneas makes free use—some translation, but for most part adaptation—of the Aeneid, which its author follows directly. In this it is the least “unfaithful” of the romances of antiquity. Classical mythology is not suppressed, but subaltern deities such as Eolius, Cupid, Allecto, as well as Olympic councils and natural and social “machinery” (Aeneas’s dream, Hector’s apparition, the opening of the gates of the temple of Janus or the funeral games for Anchises) are eliminated. Virgil’s secondary characters are also absent—Laocoon, Palinurus—as is all of Book III. The Eneas does open with the Judgment of Paris, its author does dwell at length upon the suffering of Dido (1600 verses) as well as the internal amorous struggle of Lavinia and of Eneas. Yet little remains of the Aeneid’s national, dynastic, religious even, spirit; little remains of the high lyric tone and style of Virgil, whose founding epic, an epic of foundation, is transformed essentially into the narration of a love story, a courtly romance that is also set in a culture much closer to a twelfth- century aristocratic circle than to that of the Classical world. In terms of the translatio studii the Roman d’Eneas contains what seems to me to be a remarkable twist that makes it clear that this is one of those seminal texts which not only afford a glimpse of how literature from its inception should be read, but of how medieval literature both reflects—and, more importantly, enables—wider changes in the way the

1 “Par les livres que nos avons/Les fez des ancïens savons/ Et del siegle qui fu jadis./ Ce nos ont nostre livre apris/ Qu’an Grece ot de chevalerie/ Le premier los et de clergie./ Puis vint chevalerie a Rome/ Et de la clergie la some,/ Qui or est an France venue./ Dex doint qu’ele i soit maintenue/ Et que li leus li abelisse/ Tant que ja mes de France n’isse/ L’enrs qui s’i est arestee./ Dex l’avoit as altres prestee:/ Car des Grezois ne des Romains/ Ne dit an mes ne plus ne mains,/ D’ax est la parole remise/ Et estainte la vive brese” (Chrétien de Troyes, Cligès, ed. Alexandre Micha, v. 27).