The PROCEEDINGS o f the VIRGIL SOCIETY VOLUME 27 2011 The PROCEEDINGS o f the VIRGIL SOCIETY VOLUME 27 2011 Copyright ©2011 The Virgil Society ISSN: 0968 2112 Edited by Daniel Hadas e-mail: [email protected] Published by The Virgil Society, c/o Jill Kilsby, Treasurer, 8 Purley Oaks Road, Sanderstead, Surrey CR2 ONP UK Typeset and Layout by Fraser Thompson, 37 Sinclair Street, Helensburgh, Argyll and Bute G84 8SR UK Tel: 07917 564523 Printed in the U K by Hill and Hay Ltd 56-60 Rogart Street, Glasgow G40 2AA UK tel: 0141 554 2205 e-mail: [email protected] website: www.hillhay.co.uk Cover illustration: Gillian Cooper The Virgil Society is a Registered Charity (no. 313768) ii Contents Keith Maclennan Humour in Virgil 1 C . J. I. Butler Virgil in the Classroom 14 John Davie Reflections of Virgil in Milton 26 J. S. C. Eidinow Virgil in the Works of Alexandre Dumas pere - An Introduction 38 Robert Cowan Hopefully Surviving: Despair and the Limits of devotio in Virgil and Others 56 Dunstan Lowe Tree-Worship, Sacred Groves and Roman Antiquities in the Aeneid 99 Helen Lovatt Aeneid 1 and the Epic Gaze in the Carlias of Ugolino Verino 130 Jean-Michel Hulls Re-casting the Master: Further Faces of Virgil in Imperial Rome 156 J. F. G. Powell Aeneas The Spin Doctor: Rhetorical Self-Presentation in Aeneid 2 185 D. W. Blandford Deiphobe or What’s In a Name? 204 The Virgil Society is very grateful to Fraser Thompson for his advice, patience and diligence during the development of a new format for PVS. iii Humour in Virgil Revised from a paper given to the Virgil Society on 21 October 200(6 I have no philosophical row to hoe. I start from the point that we can say there is humour wherever there is a smile. There are, of course, very many different sorts of smile. This short article, which covers very familiar ground, will deal with a number of different smiles, and perhaps consider a little of what Virgil is doing by raising them. Routine Humour Virgil is an epic poet, and there are some smiles which are de rigueur. That is routine humour. Iliad 23 provides a certain amount o f slapstick at the funeral games. For all his accomplishment in running, the lesser Ajax slips in the muck and loses his first place to Odysseus; he looks ridiculous but he still wins a prize. In Virgil’s running race (5.315-61) Nisus contrives Euryalus’ victory, falling in blood and dung himself, but deliberately tripping Salius as he does so. Aeneas laughs at Nisus’ dung-covered features (358). His laughter is kindly (he is described as pater optimus as he laughs) and he gives Nisus a consolation prize. Previously, in the boat-race (5.114-285), Captain Gyas has become enraged with his cautious steersman Menoetes who is giving the turning-rock too wide a berth. He chucks him into the water and thinks he can do better himself (172-82). Menoetes is a comic sight as he flops into the water, swims to safety, and coughs up salt water. The Trojans certainly think so. They laugh loudly and insistently (risere, 180; rident, 181). Gallows humour is part of the fighting. In Iliad 16.645-50 Patroclus, killing Cebriones, knocks him out of Hector’s chariot in a manner which invites mockery. The episode is recalled in Aeneid 10.592-94, where Lucagus suffers a similar fate. 1 Acknowledgements: Theo Zinn who taught me a few years back. The late Stephen Instone for his essay on ‘Humour in Virgil’ (P. G. M. Brown, T. E. H. Harrison, S. Instone (eds), Θεφ Λώρον: Essays by past pupils in honour of Theo Zinn for his 84th birthday, 2006, Leominster, 63-72); R. Coleman, Virgil: Eclogues, 1977, Cambridge; R. Thomas, Virgil,: Georgics, 1988, Cambridge. For unpublished constructive suggestions David West, James Morwood and Jonathan Foster himself, who was a graduate at Oxford when I was an undergraduate, and we were colleagues and victims of Fraenkel’s seminars. 2 Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 27 (2011) In these instances the poet tells us that his characters find humour in events. Does he himself? The context can offer clues: Menoetes in the water is an entertaining sight, but the laughter o f the Trojans is a little excessive, and reminds us that Menoetes is not a young man, that Gyas has in fact made a mistake. Georgics Does playfulness count as humour? If so, the Georgics are full o f it, perhaps first, as Instone observes, in the complicated consideration of Octavian’s catasterism at 1.33-35: “There is a gap between Virgo and the chasing Claws: in fact blazing Scorpio is pulling his arms together and leaving you more even than your fair share of heaven”.2 It is fun also to contemplate creatures having a good time, as birds do when bad weather is imminent. 1.385-87: “You can see rivalry as they soak their shoulders with masses of water, now pushing their heads into the stream, now running into the waves, taking delight in the joy o f bathing for its own sake”.3 It is entertaining to think o f the crane as engaged in a plot on the farmer’s crops: the adjective improbus turns birds into conspirators in 1.119-121: “M uch damage is done [to crops] by the sly goose and the crane”.4 The exiguus mus o f 1.181 is presented by Instone as Psicharpax king o f the mice in the Batrachomyomachia, on the grounds that monosyllabic line endings in Virgil convey majesty,5 — which is nice, and so they can — but in fact of some 30 monosyllabic endings in Virgil you could only make this point strongly about three of them,6 and just about the only general point to be made is that they disrupt the rhythm and often call attention to the monosyllable — so that the mouse is there, small word for small person, rather as in Hor. Sat. 2.6.80 rusticus urbanum murem mus paupere/fertur accepisse cavo, (“A country mouse, they say, welcomed a town mouse in the poverty o f his hole”) where the little mice are sheltered in mid-sentence by big words around. In 3.219-36 we find two bulls fighting in the Sila. An agricultural commonplace is amusingly elevated to an epic scene: (proelia; bellantis; victor; signa movet; the human emotions, the training programme). The narrative style plays its part: we are building up 2 Cf. Instone (n.1 above) 68. 3 certatim largos umeris infundere rores, nunc caput obiectare fretis, nunc currere in undas, et studio incassum videas gestire lavandi. 4 nec tamen ... nihil improbus anser Strymoniaeque grues et amaris intiba fibris officiunt. 5 Instone (n. 1 above) 67. 6 hominum rex, Aen. 1.65, 2.648, 10.2, 743; restituis rem, Aen. 6.846; magnis dis, Aen. 3.12, 8.679. Keith Maclennan - Humour in Virgil 3 to a terrific climax: the bull charges signa movet praecepsque oblitum fertur in hostem: 7 the rumble of his charging gallop is reflected in the coincidence of ictus and accent almost throughout the line - and then - a simile intervenes and we never discover what the result is. The story is also potentially an epic: do the iuvenca and the bulls represent Helen, Paris and Menelaus? 219 might suggest that the heifer is coyly indifferent. Or is she like Lavinia, never revealed as having any preference? There is an obvious similarity between 220 and Aen. 8.452: is the humour one way — the Cyclopes in the divine forge are savage like the bulls, or the other - the bulls are superhuman like the Cyclopes?8 3.349-66 is a passage about the Ukrainian winter. Does Virgil expect us to believe these tales? A discriminating audience might be entertained by travellers’ tales but not taken in by them: compare Alcinous’ response to Odysseus in Od. 11.363-68. Stories may be told without the expectation that they be believed, like Caesar’s version of how to catch an elk (BG 6.27). There is a market for stories about the northern winter.9 Here, “no blade of grass on ground or a leaf on tree” (353); “they take an axe to slice the liquid wine” (364); “bronze pots split everywhere apart” (363); and the marvellous onomatopoeic line (362) describing wagons crunching over frostbound water: puppibus illa prius, patulis nunc hospita plaustris. 10 The account is surely given for the frisson and the fun. Eclogue 2 The origin for Corydon is Theocritus’ Cyclops (11), a youngster in a muddle. His muddle is externalised: he has to make the best of a rather odd appearance. He is a land creature who has yet to learn to swim (60); she is a sea-creature. Yet the distinction is blurred: Polyphemus wishes he could have gills to go and visit Galatea — but this doesn’t seem to mean that Galatea herself has gills, especially since he first met her picking apples with his mum. It’s left open to us to think that Polyphemus represents every teenage boy who thinks he needs to look totally different from his present dreary self, and is worried by girls who giggle — is it because they want me or because they want to make me look a fool? 7 “He advances and hurtles headlong on the foe who has forgot him” (trans. Day Lewis). Unacknowledged translations are the author’s. 8 The bulls of Sila appear again in Aen.