Cambridge University Press 0521782880 - Virgil and the Augustan Reception Richard F. Thomas Frontmatter More information VIR GIL AND THE AUGUSTAN R ECEPTION This book is an examination of the ideological reception of Virgil at speci®c moments in the last two millennia. Following Tennyson's evaluation of Virgil ± ``Thou majesticin thy sadness|at the doubtful doom of human kind'' ± Richard Thomas ®rst scrutinizes the Virgil tradition for readings that refute contemporary dismissals of the puta- tive post-Vietnam Angst of the so-called ``Harvard School,'' then de- tects the suppression of such readings in the ``Augustan'' reception, e¨ected through the lens of Augustus and the European successors of Augustus who constructed Rome's ®rst emperor ± and Virgil ± for their own political purposes. He looks at Augustus in the poetry of Virgil, detects in the poets and grammarians of antiquity alternately a collaborative oppositional reading and an attempt to suppress such reading, studies creative translation (particularly Dryden's), which re- asserts the ``Augustan'' Virgil, and examines naive translation which can be truer to the spirit of Virgil. Scrutiny of ``textual cleansing,'' philology's rewriting or excision of troubling readings, leads to read- ings by both supporters and opponents of fascism and National Social- ism to support or subvert the latter-day Augustus. The book ends with a diachronic examination of the ways successive ages have tried to make the Aeneid conform to their upbeat expectations of this poet. richard thomas is Professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard Uni- versity. He is the author of Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry (1982), a two-volume commentary on Virgil's Georgics (1988) and Reading Virgil and his Texts (1999). He has also published more than ®fty articles and reviews on HellenisticGreek and Roman poetry. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521782880 - Virgil and the Augustan Reception Richard F. Thomas Frontmatter More information VIR GIL AND THE AUGUSTAN R ECEPTION Richard F. Thomas Harvard University ab © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521782880 - Virgil and the Augustan Reception Richard F. Thomas Frontmatter More information published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb22ru,UK 40 West 20th Street, New York ny 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, vic 3166, Australia Ruiz de AlarcoÂn 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org ( Richard F. Thomas 2001 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Bembo and New HellenicGreek in `3B2' [ ao] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 0 521 78288 0 hardback © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521782880 - Virgil and the Augustan Reception Richard F. Thomas Frontmatter More information For Joan, Sarah and Julia, so often the companions of this work, andinmemoryofJohnWald ibi omnis e¨usus labor © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521782880 - Virgil and the Augustan Reception Richard F. Thomas Frontmatter More information CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Prologue xi Introduction: the critical landscape 1 1 Virgil and Augustus 25 2 Virgil and the poets: Horace, Ovid and Lucan 55 3 Other voices in Servius: schooldust of the ages 93 4 Dryden's Virgil and the politics of translation 122 5 Dido and her translators 154 6 Philology and textual cleansing 190 7 Virgil in a cold climate: fascist reception 222 8 Beyond the borders of Eboli: anti-fascist reception 260 9 Critical end games 278 Bibliography 297 Index 313 vii © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521782880 - Virgil and the Augustan Reception Richard F. Thomas Frontmatter More information ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to test my ideas on a number of occasions, and to have pro®ted from discussion on those occasions with faculty and students of a number of institutions, in particular the Universities of Colorado, GoÈteborg, Oslo, Pittsburgh, Washington, Georgetown, Rice, Emory, Boston University, the Vermont Classical Association, the Universities of Florida, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the University of Florence, and of Venice, the Virginia Classical Associ- ation, the University of Tennessee and Bryn Mawr. It is my pleasure to single out those colleagues whose invitations gave me the oppor- tunity to share my ideas on these occasions, namely Ariana Traill, Monika Azstalos, Egil Kraggerud, Hans-Peter Stahl, Michael Hal- leran, Alex Sens, Harvey Yunis, Peter Bing, Patricia Johnson, Mary Ann Hopkins, Gareth Schmeling, Ward Briggs, Joe Farrell, Stephen Harrison, Emanuele Narducci, Mario Geymonat, Cathy Dougherty, David Tandy and Celia Schultz. On each of these occasions, and at other times, I was fortunate to have good discussion with more colleagues than I can now remem- ber, some of whom also read and commented on parts of the work. With apologies to those whose contribution I may have omitted (numeros memini, si verba tenerem), I would single out, in addition to those just named, Alessandro Barchiesi, Ewen Bowie, Brian Breed, Francis Cairns, Kathy Coleman, Denis Feeney, Don Fowler, Alain Gowing, Jasper Gri½n, Albert Henrichs, Stephen Hinds, Christina Kraus, Leah Kronenberg, Christopher Jones, Nico Knauer, Mario Labate, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Oliver Lyne, Greg Nagy, Robin Nisbet, James O'Donnell, Tim O'Sullivan, Victoria PagaÂn, Lee Pearcy, Chris Pelling, David Ross, Andreola Rossi, Thomas Schmidt, Zeph Stew- ix © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521782880 - Virgil and the Augustan Reception Richard F. Thomas Frontmatter More information acknowledgements art, Sarolta TakaÂcs, Richard Tarrant, Mike Tueller, Ariana Traill, Jessica Wissmann, David Wray and Jan Ziolkowski. I owe a particular debt of thanks for the expertise and industry of Wendell Clausen, Craig Kallendorf, Peter Knox, James O'Hara, Hayden Pelliccia and Christine Perkell, valued friends and colleagues who took on the task of reading and fully commenting on an early draft of the book; it was their detailed and critical response that helped me most to formulate the presentation of this study, and it is my pleasure to acknowledge this valuable contribution. They also saved me from many embarrassments; for those I have not avoided they bear no responsibility. Pauline Hire, who has been my editorial helpmate almost since my day begun, so to say, has all my thanks and all my best wishes for her life after CUP, her thanks not the least because she chose as one of her readers Charles Martindale, than whom there could have been no better judge and critic of a book on Virgilian, or any other Latin, reception. I here also record my thanks to an anonymous Dryden critic whose thoughtful and detailed criti- cisms led to complete revison of Chapters 4 and 5; I hope remaining criticisms will be tempered by such improvements as I have achieved. I am grateful to have had help in the form of research funds from the Clark Fund at Harvard, and from the James Loeb Trust, and in this connection I thank Matthew Carter for his assistance. Otherwise my chief debt, after those expressed in the dedication, is to the wonderful students I have been fortunate to teach and work with over the past years, for it is they who have most helped me to test and shape my ideas about Virgil: to the Harvard graduate students and undergraduates, to the students of the Harvard Summer School and Extension School, among them John Wald, and to the school teachers who participated in my NEH Summer seminar on Virgil in 1995. It has been my pleasure to discover with these groups just how vital, relevant and immediate a poet is Virgil. x © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521782880 - Virgil and the Augustan Reception Richard F. Thomas Frontmatter More information P R OLOGUE As one long convinced that much of the power and the beauty of Virgilian poetry lies in the profound quali®cations of the poet's vision of the political and cultural worlds that his poetry engages, I used to be uncomfortable with the possibility that this view was somehow related to my opposition to the involvement of my country (New Zealand at that point) in an illegal and unjust war in Vietnam. Indeed, as a good classicist, I even felt a little guilty as I read such comments as ``the damage su¨ered by the interpretation of Roman poetry has consisted largely of the Vietnam war being imposed on the wars of Aeneas in Italy.''1 One scholar even responded to some o¨prints I sent with the admonition that ``it don't help to use the sort of language that goes back to the worst years of Vietnam or the Spanish civil war.'' But since my convictions about the darkness of Virgil's vision, far from abating, only developed as I read, taught and wrote about this author, and since I continued to be unhappy with the proposition that these views were just the product of my days as a Vietnam war protester, which were after all becoming somewhat remote, I decided to go looking for my Virgil elsewhere in the Virgil tradition, hoping that he might have ¯ourished also in other ages. I found him here and there, but, more importantly, I found him being suppressed and avoided, replaced by something else, and transformed into what I will be calling the ``Augustan Virgil.'' E.