The Cambridge Companion to Virgil [2 ed.] 1107170184, 9781107170186

Table of contents :
01.0_pp_i_i_The_Cambridge_Companion_to_Virgil
05.0_pp_v_vii_Contents
06.0_pp_viii_x_Illustrations
07.0_pp_xi_xii_Contributors
08.0_pp_xiii_xiv_Preface_to_the_Second_Edition
09.0_pp_xv_xvi_Preface_to_the_First_Edition
10.0_pp_1_20_Introduction_The_Classic_of_All_Europe
11.0_pp_21_170_Receptions
11.1_pp_23_42_Modern_Receptions_and_their_Interpretative_Implications_The_Case_of_T_S_Eliot
11.2_pp_43_62_Aspects_of_Virgils_Reception_in_Antiquity
11.3_pp_63_76_The_Appendix_Vergiliana
11.4_pp_77_87_Augustines_Virgil
11.5_pp_88_94_The_Virgil_Commentary_of_Servius
11.6_pp_95_108_Post-classical_Commentary
11.7_pp_109_127_Virgil_in_English_Translation
11.8_pp_128_140_Virgils_from_Dante_to_Milton
11.9_pp_141_170_Virgil_in_Art
12.0_pp_171_240_Forms
12.1_pp_173_192_Green_Politics_The_Eclogues
12.2_pp_193_215_Virgilian_Didaxis_Value_and_Meaning_in_the_Georgics
12.3_pp_216_225_Virgilian_Epic
12.4_pp_226_240_Closure_and_the_Book_of_Virgil
13.0_pp_241_342_Contexts
13.1_pp_243_262_Poetry_and_Power_Virgils_Poetry_in_Contemporary_Context
13.2_pp_263_278_Rome_and_its_Traditions
13.3_pp_279_298_Virgil_and_the_Cosmos_Religious_and_Philosophical_Ideas
13.4_pp_299_325_Virgils_Intertextual_Personae
13.5_pp_326_342_Virgil_and_Tragedy
14.0_pp_343_458_Themes
14.1_pp_345_367_Virgil_as_a_Poet
14.2_pp_368_386_Virgils_Style
14.3_pp_387_399_Character_in_Virgil
14.4_pp_400_412_Virgilian_Narrative_Storytelling
14.5_pp_413_424_Virgilian_Narrative_Ecphrasis
14.6_pp_425_444_Sons_and_Lovers_Sexuality_and_Gender_in_Virgils_Poetry
14.7_pp_445_458_Authority
15.0_pp_459_478_Envois
15.1_pp_461_471_The_Death_of_Virgil
15.2_pp_472_478_Virgil_The_Future
16.0_pp_479_482_Dateline
17.0_pp_483_530_Works_Cited
18.0_pp_531_538_Index_Locorum
19.0_pp_539_550_Index_Nominum_et_Rerum
20.0_pp_551_556_Cambridge_Companions_to

Citation preview

i

The Cambridge Companion to Virgil The poet Virgil remains the most significant and influential figure in Latin literature, and this expanded and updated Companion covers his life, work and reception from antiquity to the present. The Aeneid, the Eclogues, the Georgics and the Appendix Vergiliana are all discussed, as are art, history, politics and philosophy. Virgil’s literary style is carefully explored along with poetic traditions before and since, and chapters engage with his poems and their reception from perspectives including intertextuality, narratology, gender theory, philology and historicism. Leading authors cover topics from translations and commentaries to genre, authority and characterization, providing revised and updated recommendations for further reading. This volume is an accessible introduction to Virgil and his legacy for students and teachers, while also providing wide-ranging and in-depth investigations that will appeal to scholars of classical literature and other disciplines. Fiachra Mac Góráin is Associate Professor of Classics at University College London. He has published extensively on Virgil and his reception and is regularly invited to speak about him in various countries around the world. He has also engaged in consultancy work for the BBC. Charles Martindale is Emeritus Professor of Latin at the University of Bristol. His work focuses on Latin poetry (including Virgil), reception studies, English/ Classics relationships and aesthetics, and he has published five authored or co-authored books and twelve edited or co-edited volumes, among them the five-volume Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. A special issue of Classical Receptions Journal was devoted to his pioneering work Redeeming the Text (1993). A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book.

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Frontispiece: Simone Martini, Frontispiece to Petrarch’s Virgil Manuscript (between 1338 and 1344), Biblioteca Ambrosiana (S.P. 10, 27), Milan. Photo courtesy of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana. (This photograph is the property of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. All rights reserved. No reproductions allowed.) The picture is an allegory showing Virgil seated beneath a tree composing one of his books. The figure drawing aside the muslin curtain is the fourth-century grammarian Servius, whose commentary on Virgil was an influential source for later writers and readers:  he symbolically ‘reveals’ Virgil to posterity. The other figures personify Virgil’s books:  Aeneas stands beside Servius, while below them a farmer pruning a vine represents the Georgics, and a shepherd symbolises the Eclogues. The two Latin inscriptions make the meaning of the image clear: ‘Italy, benevolent country, you nourish famous poets. Thus this one [Virgil] enables you to achieve Grecian genius’, and ‘This is Servius, who recovers the mysteries of eloquent Virgil so they are revealed to leaders, shepherds and farmers.’ The miniature was painted for Petrarch between 1338 and 1344 when he recovered his prized manuscript copy of Virgil’s work, which had been stolen in 1326. See Houghton, pp. 143–4.

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THE CAMBRIDGE C O M PA N I O N TO

VIRGIL SECOND EDITION

ED ITED BY

FI ACHRA MAC GÓRÁ I N University College London

CHARLES MARTI NDA L E University of Bristol

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB 2 8B S , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, U SA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107170186 DOI: 10.1017/9781316756102 © Cambridge University Press 1997, 2019 This publication 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 1997 Sixth printing 2008 Second edition 2019 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mac Góráin, Fiachra, editor. | Martindale, Charles, editor. Title: The Cambridge companion to Virgil / edited by Fiachra Mac Góráin, Charles Martindale. Description: Second edition. | Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018049105 | IS BN 9781107170186 (hardback) | IS BN 9781316621349 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Virgil – Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC P A 6825.C 35 2019 | DDC 873/.01–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049105 IS BN 978-1-107-17018-6 Hardback IS BN 978-1-316-62134-9 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of UR L s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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CONTENTS

page viii

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition

xi xiii xv

1 Introduction: ‘The Classic of All Europe’ Ch arl e s M art i n da l e

P a rt I

1

R e c e p t i on s

2 Modern Receptions and their Interpretative Implications: The Case of T. S. Eliot D u n can F .   Ke n n e dy

23

3 Aspects of Virgil’s Reception in Antiquity Ri ch ard T arr a n t

43

4 The Appendix Vergiliana S co t t M c G i l l

63

5 Augustine’s Virgil G i l l i an Cl ar k

77

6a The Virgil Commentary of Servius Don Fowler (revised by Sergio Casali and Fabio Stok)

88

6b Post-classical Commentary S e rg i o Casal i a n d F a b i o S to k

95

v

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Contents 7 Virgil in English Translation Co l i n Bu rrow

109

8 Virgils from Dante to Milton Co l i n Bu rrow

128

9 Virgil in Art L . B.   T . H o u g h ton

141

P a rt I I

F or ms

10 Green Politics: The Eclogues Ch arl e s M a rt i n da l e

173

11 Virgilian Didaxis: Value and Meaning in the Georgics W i l l i am W . B at s to n e

193

12 Virgilian Epic D u n can F .   K e n n e dy

216

13 Closure and the Book of Virgil E l e n a T h e od or a kop ou l os

226

P a rt I I I

C o n t e x ts

14 Poetry and Power: Virgil’s Poetry in Contemporary Context Ri ch ard T a r r a n t

243

15 Rome and its Traditions Jam e s E .   G . Z e t z e l

263

16 Virgil and the Cosmos: Religious and Philosophical Ideas S u san n a Br au n d

279

17 Virgil’s Intertextual Personae Jo s e p h F ar r e l l

299

18 Virgil and Tragedy P h i l i p H ar di e

326

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Contents P a rt I V

T he me s

19 Virgil as a Poet Vi cto ri a M o u l

345

20 Virgil’s Style Jam e s J.   O ’ H a r a

368

21 Character in Virgil H e l e n L ovat t

387

22a Virgilian Narrative: Storytelling D o n F ow l e r (r e v i s e d b y A l e s sa n d ro Barch ies i)

400

22b Virgilian Narrative: Ecphrasis Al e s san d ro B a rc hi e s i

413

23 Sons and Lovers: Sexuality and Gender in Virgil’s Poetry E l l e n O l i e n si s

425

24 Authority F i ach ra M ac G ór á i n

445

E n voi s 25 The Death of Virgil F i o n a Cox

461

26 Virgil: The Future? F i ach ra M ac G ór á i n

472

Dateline Compiled by Genevieve Liveley Works Cited Index Locorum Index Nominum et Rerum

479 483 531 539

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I L L U S T R AT I O N S

1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

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Frontispiece: Simone Martini, Frontispiece to Petrarch’s Virgil Manuscript (between 1338 and 1344), Biblioteca Ambrosiana (S.P. 10, 27), Milan. Photo courtesy of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana. (This photograph is the property of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. All rights reserved. No reproductions allowed.) Virgil Seated between Two Muses (third century), mosaic from Hadrumetum, Bardo Museum, Tunis. Master of the Grüninger Workshop, Eclogue 4, from Publii Virgilii Maronis Opera, ed. Sebastian Brant (1502). Image from the Warburg Institute, University of London. Crispijn de Passe the Elder, Eclogues 4 and 5, from Compendium Operum Virgilianorum (1612). Image from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Apollonio di Giovanni, Neptune Calms the Storm Caused by Aeolus at Juno’s Request, cassone panel, c. 1460, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (Jarves Collection). Marcantonio Raimondi (after Raphael), Quos ego (c. 1518). Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Portrait of Virgil (early fifth century?), miniature from the Roman Virgil, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Codex Vat. Lat. 3867, fol. 3v), Vatican City. © 2018 Photo Art Resource/SCALA, Florence. Virgil and Horace, from L. W. Yaggy and T. L. Haines, Museum of Antiquity (1882). Image © Ivy Close Images / Alamy stock Photo. Samuel Palmer and A. H. Palmer, Eclogue 9 (1883). Image from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts. Raphael, Fire in the Borgo (1514), Stanza dell’ Incendio del Borgo, Vatican City. © Fratelli Alinari IDEA S.p.A. / Getty Images.

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143

144

145

147 148

150 151

152 153

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I l l u st r at i o n s 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

Gianlorenzo Bernini, Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius (c. 1618–19), Galleria Borghese, Rome. © Archivi Alinari, Firenze. Federico Barocci, The Flight of Aeneas from Troy (1598), Galleria Borghese, Rome. © De Agostini / V. Pirozzi / Getty Images. Quentin Metsys the Younger, Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (‘Sieve’ Portrait) (c. 1583), Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena. © DEA / G. Dagli Orti / Getty Images. Bernardino di Betto (Pinturicchio), Enea Silvio Piccolomini Departs for the Council of Basel (1502–3), Piccolomini Library, Siena. © Lucas Schifres / Getty Images. Claude Lorrain, Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia (1682), Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1560). © National Gallery, London. Sir James Thornhill, King George I and his Family with Allegorical Figures (1725), Painted Hall, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Image from Jigsaw Design & Publishing. Agostino Carracci, Omnia vincit amor (1599). Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cumaean Sibyl (1483–6), Cappella Sassetti, S. Trinità, Florence. Photograph: L. Houghton. Ludger tom Ring, Virgil (c. 1538), Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster. Image from the Digital Images and Slides Collection, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Virgil Reading the Aeneid to the Emperor Augustus (1812–19), Musée des Augustins, Toulouse. Lucas van Leyden, Virgil in the Basket (1525). Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Charles I before his execution. Frontispiece to [John Gauden], Eikon Basilike. The Pourtracture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings. [London: printed by William Bentley], 1648 [i.e. 1649].

154 155

156

157 158 160

161 163 164

165 166 168

365

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C ONT R I B U TORS

Ales san d ro Barc h i e si is Professor of Classics at New York University. Wil l i am W .   Bat s to n e is Professor of Classics at The Ohio State University. Susa n n a Brau n d holds a Canada Research Chair in Latin Poetry and its Reception at the University of British Columbia. Col i n Bu rrow is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Ser g i o Casal i is Associate Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata. Gill i an Cl ark FBA is Professor Emerita of Ancient History at the University of Bristol. Fio n a Cox is Associate Professor in French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. Jose p h F arre l l is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Don F ow l e r was Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford. Phi l i p H ard i e is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. L. B .  T . H o u g h ton is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Department of Greek and Latin, University College London. Duncan F .  Ke n n e dy is Professor Emeritus of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of Bristol. Hel e n L ovat t is Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham.

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C o n t r i b u tors F i ach ra M ac Gó r á i n is Associate Professor of Classics at University College London. Ch arl e s M art i n da l e is Professor Emeritus of Latin at the University of Bristol. Sco t t M c G i l l is Professor of Classical Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Vi cto ri a M o u l is Associate Professor of Early Modern Latin and English at University College London. J am e s J.   O ’ H ar a is George L. Paddison Professor of Latin at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. EL L E N O L I E N S I S is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. F abi o S to k is Professor of Latin Literature and the Classical Tradition at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata. Ri ch ard T arr a n t is Pope Professor Emeritus of the Latin Language and Literature at Harvard University. E l e n a T h e o d o r a kop ou l os is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Birmingham. Jam e s E . G . Ze t z e l is Charles Anthon Professor Emeritus of the Latin Language and Literature at Columbia University.

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PR E FAC E TO  T H E S E C O N D EDIT ION

The original Cambridge Companion to Virgil (1997) was significantly the first in that series devoted to a single classical author. After two decades’ worth of advancements in the field it was felt to be due a renewal. The second edition follows the philosophy of the first in providing what we hope are stimulating contributions on various aspects of Virgil that together offer an overview of Virgilian studies as now constituted. Much valuable work on Virgil has of course been published since 1997. All chapters have been revised and updated here to take account of this work, some extensively, others more lightly, but all referencing recent publications (the only exception is Chapter 15, which, at the author’s request, remains as it was in 1997, though we have added to the Further Reading). Partly in response to reviewers’ criticisms, and partly in line with our own view, we have commissioned nine completely new chapters, including chapters on such central topics as characterization, intertextuality, authority, the defining qualities of Virgil’s poetry, and his influence on the visual arts. We have also reorganized the sections, while still starting with reception, for the reasons given in the Introduction. Some reviewers were unhappy with the stress on reception, but since 1997 the importance of classical reception studies has been widely acknowledged; and the way Virgil is read today depends in large part on the responses of earlier ages. Indeed the revised Companion helps to flesh out the story further. A somewhat perverse decision was taken in 1997 to exclude the Appendix Vergiliana on the grounds of spurious authorship. A number of those poems, including the Culex, were long taken to be genuine works of Virgil, and the collection played a significant role in establishing what ‘Virgil’ signified  – we accordingly remedy this omission with a new chapter. We have also added a chapter on St Augustine, a close and intelligent reader of the poems who had an authority comparable to Virgil’s, and influenced subsequent Christian readings, particularly in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; and one on post-classical commentary, since commentaries have always had a fundamental impact on the way Virgil’s xiii

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P r e fac e to t h e Se c on d Ed itio n

works have been read. Critics of the first edition also commented on its anglophone emphasis; we have tried to mitigate this shortcoming, particularly with regard to bibliography. All the original chapters remain available through the Cambridge Companions website. We are very grateful to the authors for their cooperation. We thank Nick Freer and Daniel Hadas for bibliographical advice; Luke Houghton and Oliver Clamp for help with the index; and Nik Nicheperovich for his work on the bibliography and technical assistance. At Cambridge University Press we thank Sarah Starkey, Sophie Taylor, and their production team, including Sarah Green and her colleagues at Newgen Publishing UK Ltd. Finally, we extend particular thanks to Michael Sharp at Cambridge University Press for his help and guidance throughout. Fiachra Mac Góráin, London Charles Martindale, York April, 2018

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P R E FAC E TO  T H E F I RS T EDITION

cui fidus Achates it comes et paribus curis vestigia figit.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines a fidus Achates as ‘devoted follower, henchman’; and one of the aims of this Companion is to be as helpful as possible to its readers. It is devised for anyone, whether a classicist or not, who is seeking guidance and orientation for a fuller understanding of Virgil. We have assumed that most of those who consult this volume will have read parts of Virgil’s poetry if only in translation – for those with Latin the best introduction is to read some of the texts with a good commentary, of which there are many. We certainly cannot attempt to replicate the work of the commentators here; rather we offer a series of essays on topics which can constitute useful entry-points for the devoted student of Virgil. And though we aim to help and to provide what is sometimes called ‘basic information’, we do not seek to simplify or to offer any sort of bland orthodoxy. We assume that our readers (even if not expert on the subject) are seeking intelligent and sophisticated comment, and we hope that the book will prove exciting as well as useful, and will point to the shape of Virgilian scholarship and criticism to come. This book is very much a collaborative endeavour; and I am grateful to all the contributors for responding so positively to the various demands made upon them. Genevieve Liveley took time off from her PhD to assist me most efficiently in the editorial work; she is also responsible for the ‘List of Works Cited’ and for the ‘Dateline’. I would particularly like to thank Pauline Hire of Cambridge University Press who gave patient help and advice throughout to a sometimes recalcitrant editor. Finally I would like to express my general pleasure in the task; all those who have helped to produce this book,

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P r e fac e to t he F i rs t Ed itio n

whatever their differences of view about particulars, would surely be happy to be described as devoted followers of the poet whom Dante hailed with the words tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore. Charles Martindale Bristol, October 1996

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1 C H A R L E S M A RT I NDALE

Introduction: ‘The Classic of All Europe’

On 18 December 1943, during some of the darkest days of the Second World War, a leader appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, commending the Roman poet Virgil  – ‘one of the most valuable common possessions of a distracted humanity’ – and the newly formed Virgil Society.1 On the opposite page a letter announced the formation of the Society with its purpose ‘to bring together those men and women everywhere who are united in cherishing the central educational tradition of Western Europe’ among whom ‘the love of the poetry of Virgil is most likely to be found’. The signatories included the poet T. S. Eliot (the Society’s first President), J. W. Mackail, Latin scholar and son-in-law to the painter Edward Burne-Jones, and Vita Sackville-West. Early letters of support were received from Lord Wavell, then Viceroy of India, and from the architect of the 1944 Education Act, R. A. Butler, who wrote that ‘the influence of men of such sensitive humanity as Virgil will be needed in the post-war years’. The letter to the TLS describes Virgil as ‘the symbol of continuous tradition’, and tradition was throughout his life a particular word of power for Eliot (in 1919 he had published his famous and still indispensable essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ on the subject). The Waste Land includes Virgil’s laquearia (Aen. 1.726) among its many splintered intertexts, and Virgilian echoes appear elsewhere in his poetry, while after the war he published two artful if rather derivative essays on Virgil (discussed here in detail in Chapter 2). However, one suspects that Eliot’s allegiance was always more to Virgil as a convenient cultural icon than as a particular personal favourite. Eliot’s Virgil is above all the Virgil who guides Dante through Hell and Purgatory to the Earthly Paradise and Beatrice, and for him, as for the great scholar E. R. Curtius, it is the link between Virgil and Dante that is the very heart of the European Latin-based tradition.

1

For the text and more details, see Blandford (1993).

1

2

C h a r l e s Ma rt i n da le

The inaugural date of the Virgil Society is obviously significant. ‘Western Civilisation’  – one recalls the famous quip often wrongly attributed to Gandhi ‘it would be a good idea’ – was at its lowest ebb, and needed to be rebuilt from its foundations. Europeans often turn to Virgil at such moments, partly because the Aeneid itself both reflects a time of turmoil in Rome and offers the hope at least of redemption after suffering and labour. However, it would be hard to imagine a Virgil Society being formed today amid quite such loud cultural fanfares. And the Society, estimable as it doubtless is, has scarcely played that ‘important part in the intellectual life of the country, in reversing the present descent to vulgarization of taste and debasement of standards’ envisaged in the letter. Meanwhile the study of Latin as a language has broadly continued its seemingly inexorable decline; prediction is always perilous, but it is hard to conceive that it will ever resume the cultural supremacy among the educated which it enjoyed over so many long centuries. Nonetheless it is striking that, in publishing terms at least, interest in the classical tradition has been enjoying something of a marked revival recently.2 Certainly fewer people today read Virgil in Latin than in 1943. However, the Aeneid in translation is still widely included in university courses of the ‘Great Books’ type, and new versions of the poem are constantly appearing. Something of the power of the canonical name thus still persists. Witness the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things, first published in 1991, to immediate acclaim. The collection is framed by translations of two passages of what for Heaney is clearly canonical poetry: Virgil’s account of Aeneas’ consultation of the Sibyl and the instructions he receives from her about finding the Golden Bough, often read as a symbol of wisdom and initiation, prior to his descent into the Underworld, and Dante’s meeting in Inferno 3 with Charon the ferryman of Hell, itself inspired by another episode in Aeneid 6. (Heaney’s complete translation of this book was published posthumously in 2016.) The first original poem in the book, ‘The Journey Back’, describes an encounter with a more immediate poetic predecessor, Philip Larkin, whose shade quotes from Dante and describes himself as ‘A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry’; the piece resonates with earlier poetic meetings, T. S. Eliot’s with the ‘familiar compound ghost’ in part two of ‘Little Gidding’ and – one of Eliot’s intertexts here – Dante’s with the shade of Virgil at the outset of the Divine Comedy. In his new pursuit of the visionary, Heaney was also coming home to some of the historically most influential traditions of 2

2

See e.g. Kallendorf (2007b); Grafton, Most, and Settis (2010); Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow (2014). For Virgil, see Farrell and Putnam (2010) and, on the Aeneid, Hardie (2014). The Blackwell Virgil Encyclopedia (Thomas and Ziolkowski 2014) has many entries on the tradition.

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Introduction: ‘The Classic of All Europe’

Western poetry. Not long afterwards Heaney became a Nobel Laureate, and Seeing Things an A-level set text. Successful canonisation can be achieved with surprising rapidity – the Aeneid itself, greeted (according to some with a degree of irony) by the elegist Propertius in advance of its publication as ‘something greater than the Iliad’ (nescioquid maius … Iliade, 2.34.66), almost instantly became a school text, and part of the furniture of the minds of educated Romans. We could say, following the argument of Colin Burrow’s chapter on translation in this volume (Chapter  7), that Heaney, coming from what some might see as the ‘margins’ of Europe, seems to be laying claim to a share of the dominant cultural authority of the ‘centre’, in part by his appeal to Virgil. There has over many years been vigorous and often acrimonious debate about the status and significance of the canon, regarded at one extreme as a conspiracy of the ruling elite and at the other as a collection of masterpieces that transcend history and constitute, in Matthew Arnold’s terms, ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’.3 Heaney’s success hardly suggests any headlong flight from the canonical (whatever the fears and hopes of contestants, conservative or radical, in the culture wars over the future of the curriculum), and can be used to make two observations. First, it illustrates how writers frequently themselves take the lead in canon-making. In Inferno 4 Dante, a great lover of lists of the famous dead, recounts how in Limbo he mingles with the bella scuola, the excellent school, of five great classical poets, ‘masters of exalted song’, Homer (whom in fact he had never read), Virgil hailed as ‘l’altissimo poeta’, Horace, Ovid and Lucan, and by implication claims equality with them: ‘They made me one of their company so that I was sixth among those great intellects’ (101–2). Authors elect their own precursors, by allusion, quotation, imitation, translation, homage, at once creating a canon and making a claim for their own inclusion in it.4 So, in the Georgics, Virgil himself gathers into a single work features of the various strands of non-narrative epos (Hesiodic, technical, philosophical), thereby in effect making his own work the climax of a Graeco-Roman ‘didactic’ tradition. Secondly, the case of Heaney reminds us that canonical flourishing is always and necessarily sustained by and within institutions which enable dissemination (which include in this case publishing houses, the media, schools and universities, literary prizes like the Nobel Prize for Literature). In consequence such flourishing is never simply a matter of intrinsic aesthetic merit but is necessarily also implicated in a range of socio-economic and (in the broad sense) political factors; we cannot wholly 3 4

Arnold (1964: 33). See Ricks (2002).

3

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separate great books from the wider culture in which they have been, and are, embedded. The medievalist E. R. Curtius begins his discussion of the canon thus: ‘The formation of a canon serves to safeguard a tradition … the literary tradition of the school, the juristic tradition of the state, and the religious tradition of the Church: these are the three medieval world powers, studium, imperium, sacerdotium.’5 A  canon established which texts were to be accorded authority and also ensured an authorised interpretation of them. Quintilian, who, in Book 10 of his Institutio oratoria, listed the ‘best’ authors both Greek and Latin in all the major genres for the practical benefit of the rising orator (with Virgil providing ‘the most auspicious opening’, auspicatissimum exordium, for the Latin writers), uses the phrase ordo a grammaticis datus, ‘the corpus of accepted writers given by the scholars of literature’ (10.1.54); significantly ordo is the word for a social grouping within a hierarchy (thus the senatorial ‘order’), just as ‘classic’ was first used by Aulus Gellius to denote ‘a first-class and tax-paying author, not a proletarian’.6 The connections between the literary and the social and the political are inscribed within the very vocabulary of canon-making. It is entirely appropriate that in 1997 Virgil should have been the first classical poet to obtain a whole volume in the Cambridge Companions series, since, if we look at the last 2,000 years, it is hard not to agree with T. S. Eliot’s description of him as ‘the classic of all Europe’.7 This is not to say that he is the greatest European poet (some would argue for the rival claims of, say, Homer or Ovid or Dante or Shakespeare), rather that he occupied the central place in the literary canon for the whole of Europe for longer than any other writer. As a result Virgil’s significance extends far beyond his influence (massive as it is) on other writers and artists, itself something that can only be gestured towards in this book. For example as the poet of empire – given the importance, for worse or for better, of the European imperial project – he speaks, at least on the most influential readings of his works, for many of the values and attitudes that have shaped the Latin West. When Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800, the translatio imperii, the transfer of the Roman Empire to the Franks, was accompanied by an analogous translatio studii, the scholarly appropriation of the Roman past, with Virgil at its core; the two acts of succession are indeed profoundly implicated in each other. Similarly Camões turned to Virgil for the Lusiads, his poem justifying Portuguese global expansion.8 In that sense poems like 5 6 7 8

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Curtius (1953: 256, ch. 14, ‘Classicism’). Curtius (1953: 249). On Gellius’ use of the term ‘classic’, see Citroni (2005). Eliot (1957: 70 (‘What Is a Classic?’)). Andrew Laird and others have charted the colonial resonances of new world Latin. See e.g. Laird (2006).

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the Aeneid have effects beyond the literary, can even, in Mandelstam’s memorable words, ‘get people killed’. Analogously a piece of landscaping like Henry Hoare’s garden at Stourhead, or the paintings of Claude that in part inspired it, are not Virgilian merely in the sense that they allude to events and persons in the Aeneid; rather this whole way of seeing and shaping the ‘natural’ world is profoundly informed by a particular response to Virgil’s texts. The traces of Virgil are everywhere in European culture whether recognised or not; and in that sense Virgil should be of interest both to traditionalists who espouse the timeless value of great poetry and to radicals alert to the ideological work performed by ‘literature’ within history.9 Not without reason did the Austrian Catholic writer Theodore Haecker, socialist and staunch anti-fascist, call his popular and influential book on the poet first published in 1931 Vergil. Vater des Abendlandes: Virgil. Father of the West. As we have seen, for Eliot the link between Dante and Virgil was central to European civilisation, a link which thus became, in Frank Kermode’s words, ‘a sort of key to his historical imagination’,10 with Roman culture as a prefigurement, a figura, of Christian culture. This view of Virgil as anima naturaliter Christiana (‘a soul by nature Christian’), in Tertullian’s famous phrase, and a bridge between pagan and Christian Europe has of course a venerable ancestry; the Fourth Eclogue was early read as a prophecy of the Incarnation, while Aeneas became ‘the prototype of a Christian hero’.11 Eliot did not suppose, any more than Dante himself, that Virgil was in any way conscious of these things. Virgil’s works can be read under the aspect of time, but also under the aspect of the timeless; neither reading excludes the other, and neither reading is adequate without the other. One can argue that what Eliot does here overtly is what any interpreter of past texts does – and must do. The Christianising interpretation of Virgil is thus not less historical than any other, it is simply differently historical; all historical narratives, it can be claimed, depend on teleological structures, however concealed, as a very condition of their possibility, and all historical narratives involve a simultaneous double reading of the past, backwards and forwards at the same time. If the Eliotic narrative seems different from other, ‘secular’ narratives, that is only because the ideological entailments of that teleology and that double reading are made explicit and because, in this explicit Christian form, they are no longer acceptable to many of Eliot’s readers. There is an important connection between Virgil’s status as a classic and his imperial vision (visible even as early as the Eclogues): as Kermode 9 10 11

For reception as a way into Virgilian studies in a German context, see Glei (1997). Kermode cited in Reeves (1989: 1). Eliot (1957: 128).

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observes (quoting from the final section of Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’), ‘The classic, like the Empire, must be thought of as “timeless … except in the aspect of time”.’12 Both classic and empire exist within history, but also transcend history, evincing both permanence and change and enabling us to grasp, or at least to experience in practice, the relationship between them. This shuttle between the aspect of time and the aspect of the timeless is operative at some level within any act of interpretation, and constitutes, we might say, an organising principle of the Aeneid itself. One could take an episode analysed by a number of contributors to this volume, the account of Aeneas at the site of Rome (8.306–61), where Aeneas walks over spots hallowed in later Roman history, and Virgil superimposes on Evander’s rustic settlement the stately buildings of his own day, contrasting the pastoral simplicity of Pallanteum with the contemporary grandeur of Rome. The narrator draws our attention to both difference (then a wooded spot, now the golden Capitol, 347–8) and continuity (even then the Capitol was instinct with divinity). Finally Virgil shades a third layer on to the other two, when Aeneas sees the remains of ancient cities, their walls collapsed, monuments of the men of old, citadels built by Saturn and Janus. A reading which emphasises the aspect of time produces a narrative either of progress or decline. An optimistic version would give us the rise of Rome from primitive settlement to mistress of the world with an empire without end. A pessimistic version would give us a reversed trajectory, as pastoral idyll gives way to imported luxury and modern vulgar display; or such might be the implication of lines 360–1 where cattle low in what will be a fashionable district of the city, the ‘chic’ Carinae (lautis Carinis). The nunc/olim figure in 348 is itself ambiguous since olim can refer to past or future: either ‘golden now, once densely wooded’ or ‘golden now, one day to be densely wooded’.13 So it is not only a matter of whether we prefer woods or gold; the trajectory of history is itself unclear, either from gold to woods or vice versa, and the lines might allow us to see beyond Augustan grandeur to a return to the wild. Nunc may introduce a further wavering, since it could mean ‘now in Virgil’s day’ or ‘now in Aeneas’ day’, and ‘golden’ could be literal or metaphorical, ‘belonging to a golden time’ or ‘made of gold/gilded’. In this way a more complex narrativisation would give us cycles of growth and decay; so too ancient cities powerful long ago are ruined already in the time of Aeneas, perhaps thereby portending the eventual fall of Rome itself. On the other hand we might prefer to read the whole passage under the aspect of the timeless; then all the elements in Virgil’s description can 12 13

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Kermode (1975/1983: 60). I owe this point to a lecture by J. E. G. Zetzel. See Chapter 15 in this volume.

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be held together synchronically. Rome the eternal city is always both the world capital, caput rerum, the metropolis which Augustus found brick and left marble, and ‘sweet especial rural scene’, both the res publica restored by political and military might and the place where an Age of Gold can be renewed. Such a Rome, itself a new Troy, could be simultaneously always both standing proud and yet in embryo or in ruins. Bruno Snell in a famous essay argued that Virgil discovered a spiritual landscape which he called Arcadia;14 analogously Aeneas’ visit to Pallanteum discloses a spiritual city which Europeans have always called Rome. So too a literary classic, like the Virgilian imperium, is both here-and-now and eternal. But of course such a timeless synchrony can in turn be challenged by appeals to the aspect of time.15 All readings of past texts, even those claiming ‘historical accuracy’, are representable as acts of appropriation. But an unusual and unusually evident openness to appropriation, so that the meaning of the text is configured within the value system and personal life-history of the individual reader, seems throughout the centuries to have been a particular feature of the response to Virgil, reaching its extreme point in the practice of the sortes Vergilianae, a practice whose efficacy has been amply confirmed by the historical record: a passage, arbitrarily chosen and torn from its context, could possess readers to the extent of revealing, and shaping, their futures. The most familiar examples concern famous men (for example Charles I during the Civil War, who consulted a copy of Virgil in the Bodleian Library in Oxford). But in 1783 Dr Johnson’s friend Hester Thrale, agonising over whether to marry the Italian musician Gabriel Piozzi and go with him to Italy, against the opposition of family and friends, ‘seeing a very fine Virgil was tempted to open it with something of a superstitious intention by way of trying the sortes Vergilianae: the book spontaneously opened where Turnus welcomes Camilla, and fixing his fine eyes upon her cries out with a mixture of admiration and gratitude O decus Italiae etc. I thought it a good omen.’ Perhaps we have here a back-door way (not without irony) of appropriating in a ‘female’ amatory context the authority of a venerated writer much less accessible to women readers than to men, or at any rate less accessed by them.16 We can represent this prophetic conception, constantly lurking 14

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‘Arcadia: The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape’, in Snell (1953: 281–309). The chapter was first published as an essay in German in 1945, and exerted a huge influence for the remainder of the century. Snell was answered by E. A. Schmidt in 1975 in ‘Arcadia: Modern Occident and Classical Antiquity’, included in Volk (2008a). See also Feeney (2007: 162–8). Thrale (1942: i . 560–1). For an example in fiction see Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801: ch. 13). I am indebted to Jackie Pearson for these references. In a review of Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid, George Steiner (1990) observes that of the

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within Virgil’s reception history, in rather more orthodox terms using the words of Ronald Knox in Let Dons Delight (1939): ‘Virgil – he has the gift, has he not, of summing up in a phrase used at random the aspiration and the tragedy of minds he could never have understood; that is the real poetic genius.’17 So Helen Waddell found comfort in Virgil in the face of the Nazi threat: It was expedient that Rome should die. For one must die to become a legend: and the Roman legend was the inspiration of Europe. It is a strange thing to remember that in the meridian of her power, she herself looked back to her beginnings in a conquered city and a burning town: and the man who gave her immortality was the hollow-cheeked sad-eyed Virgil of the Hadrumetum mosaic. If all else goes from the schools, let us at least keep the second book of Virgil. I speak of it with passion, for something sent me to it on that September afternoon when the Luftwaffe first broke through the defences of London, and that night it seemed as though London and her river burned. You remember the cry of Aeneas waking in the night, the rush, arming as he went, the hurried question – ‘Where’s the fighting now?’ – and the answer: Come is the ending day, Troy’s hour is come, The ineluctable hour. Once were we Trojan men, And Troy was once, and once a mighty glory Of the Trojan race.18

For reasons such as these this volume devotes an unusual degree of emphasis to Virgil’s reception within European culture (hence the choice of the traditional spelling Virgil rather than the more ‘correct’ Vergil). Virgil, or ‘Virgil’ (the very name can be regarded as a trope), even if he should not be wholly collapsed into what his readers have made of him, can never be the originary, reified text-in-itself that too many classical scholars fantasise about uncovering. Despite the impact of the theory wars, the view is still commonly encountered, not least in departments of Classics, that the only proper meaning of a text is its original meaning which the modern scholar tries to restore (usually identified with the hypothetical intentions of the author and responses of the first readers); whereas the history of its reception becomes largely a history of the errors that we have outgrown. By contrast,

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twenty-six papers none are by women. The male dominance of twentieth-century Virgilian scholarship could be said to replicate the marginalization of women within Virgil’s own texts (even the unforgettable Dido must die). This Companion represents an advance in this respect, though we are still far from equality. See Cox (2011) and also Ellen Oliensis, Chapter 23 in this volume. Cited by Stephen Medcalf, ‘Virgil at the Turn of Time’, in Martindale (1984: 222). Waddell (1976: 40 and 43).

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in the historicised version of reception theory pioneered by the Constance school in Germany the meaning and interpretation of texts is inseparable from what readers and reading communities, employing particular reading practices, have made of them, and in this way reception-history becomes hermeneutically vital. Antiquity cannot be studied merely in itself, because there is always a ‘fusion of horizons’ (in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s somewhat awkward metaphor) between text and interpreter. It is not merely that in practice we cannot read Virgil like a Roman (which Roman?); it would not be desirable if we could, since it would no longer be ‘we’ who were doing the reading.19 Interpretation is situated, contingent upon time and place and ideological preconception, is always made from within history. The point seems so obvious as to be not worth labouring were it not that scholars often ignore it when it comes to their own interpretations. Stephen Harrison in his survey of twentieth-century Virgilian scholarship writes of the so-called Harvard Pessimists, who stressed the darker aspects of the Aeneid and the poem’s sense of the cost of imperialism, that ‘for an outside observer it is difficult to separate such an interpretation from the characteristic concerns of US (and other) intellectuals in these years: the doubt of the traditional view of the Aeneid has at least some connection with the 1960s questioning of all institutions, political, religious, and intellectual, and in particular with attitudes towards America’s own imperialism’.20 But something similar could be said of all readings; any reading can be historicised in an analogous fashion. Moreover it is not clear that the history of interpretation is best figured as a history of progress; a comparison of (for example) the classical scholar David West’s Penguin translation of the Aeneid with the version of Dryden does not suggest that West is in any simple sense a ‘better’ reader of Virgil, even if he is possession of certain scholarly data that Dryden did not have. The mistake of scholars is to suppose that the discourses within which they work are the only ones that can deliver valid ‘findings’. For example the view that the Aeneid must be understood in relation to its sources is taken as the only ‘natural’ or ‘appropriate’ one. Yet did not the Greekless Dante effect one of the two or three most powerful and exciting readings of Virgil – what Harold Bloom, who argues that all readings can be construed as ‘misreadings’ (either strong or weak), would call a ‘strong misreading’21 – in the Divine Comedy, his own narrative revision of the Aeneid? 19

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For this view of reading, see especially Gadamer (1975). A more productive metaphor might be interpretation as dialogue. For a fuller exploration of these arguments, see Martindale (1993a). Harrison (1990: 5). However, this interpretation does not fit easily the chronology. For the so-called ‘Harvard School’ controversy, see Hejduk (2017). Bloom (1973).

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This is not to say that reception-theorists, any more than other interpreters, can escape the shuttle between temporality and timelessness that I described earlier. Kermode calls Eliot’s theory of tradition ‘Cubist historiography, unlearning the trick of perspective and ordering history as a system of perpetually varying spatial alignments’,22 in which apparent opposites, tradition and novelty, classicism and modernism, change and stasis, can co-exist. A canon is precisely where the diachronic is organised into a synchrony, or, to put the point in the more Eliotic terms I have been employing, where the aspect of time is reconciled with the aspect of the timeless. Thus a secular canon, as much as a religious canon, has metaphysical entailments – with some reason Bloom doubts whether, in high literature, secularisation has ever taken place.23 And indeed Virgil operates for the committed Virgilian like a sacred book, endlessly repaying meditation, and part of a system of belief and cognition; it is not so much that Virgil imitates, effectively, an extra-literary world as that, for the lover of Virgil, the experience of the world, including the experience of other people, is significantly informed by his works. A  canon is an assertion of what is valuable for us, and we need canons both because we cannot read everything and because we have no choice but to make value judgements about what we read. We organise the synchrony as a way of showing that our experience of the texts (which, to be sure, originated historically) is our experience. One obvious sense in which a classic like the Aeneid could be described as ‘timeless’ is its capacity (itself a function of its reception) for constant reinscription within new temporal contexts, what Derrida called a work’s ‘iterability’. In this process the ‘same’ text means differently, and in that sense is not the same; or rather it is precisely this sameness-in-difference and difference-in-sameness that is the mark of a classic. Some of these points can be illustrated by further consideration of the political significance of the poems, an issue that remains at the centre of much discussion. Are the poems firmly pro-Augustan, or are they in some sense a critique of empire and emperor? And if Virgil indeed wrote in support of an autocratic regime, does this compromise the value of those writings? A history of the British reception of the Aeneid from 1600 shows how the politics of the poem are always interconnected with the politics of talking about it. A necessarily simplified narrative might go something like this.24 In the early seventeenth century the Aeneid was widely regarded as the greatest 22 23 24

Kermode (1968: 229). Bloom (1995: 247). See in particular Harrison (1967); for the quotations see 11 and 85. For an account of the importance of reception to the political interpretation of the Aeneid, see White (1993: 95–109).

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of epic poems. Virgil’s comprehensive grasp of human knowledge, including ethics, politics and metaphysics, had created a work of unique profundity and profound unity, celebrating the Roman Empire and its values and the merits of royalism and one-man rule. Aeneas, the hero, was exemplary, or virtually so, for the Christian prince and leader, and reflected the qualities of Augustus. Virgil’s mastery embraced all the arts of rhetoric (with its tropes and figures), including pathos. This reading, however, came under pressure as a result of the English Revolution and the subsequent rise of Whiggism, with its commitment to British liberty and its enthusiasm for the old Roman Republic. Those who wished to dispraise the Aeneid argued that Virgil had prostituted himself to the service of a tyrant and autocrat. The poem was also ‘borrowed, unconnected, broken and ill-placed’, or so thought a critic in 1763, and had no clear or single subject – it had only the virtues of good style. Those who wished rather to continue to praise the Aeneid countered in various ways; Virgil could be represented as, covertly or in reality, a friend to liberty, or as trying to charm Augustus into clement behaviour. The poem could be seen, not as a unity, but as disunified in a productive way, or as unified in sensibility if not in structure and theme. Pathos was privileged over patriotism (and indeed narrative), along with sublimity, sensibility, the picturesque, and tenderness. Joseph Warton, in the Postscript to his edition (1763), wrote:  ‘the art of Virgil is never so powerfully felt as when he attempts to move the passions, especially the more tender ones. The pathetic was the grand distinguishing characteristic of his genius and temper.’ One of the clearest cases of this revisionism was the treatment of the line sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt, ‘there are tears for things, and mortality touches the heart’ (1.462). In seventeenth-century editions and translations the line was treated as wholly intrinsic to its local context, but by the end of the nineteenth century it is widely seen as a general comment on the tears of the world (so, for example, the nineteenth-century commentator James Henry), or as both general and specific at the same time. As always ‘findings’ only make sense within the terms of the enquiry that produces them, which is one reason why different readings are possible in the first place. In an extraordinarily influential essay, first published in 1963 in the enterprising journal Arion committed to the literary study of ancient texts, Adam Parry argued for a division, within the Aeneid, between a public voice celebrating Roman achievement and a private voice of mourning.25 The passage from which he started in order to illustrate this competing elegiac strain was the lyrical lament of the Italian landscape for the dead Umbro (7.759–60), an example of what Ruskin named the ‘pathetic fallacy’ 25

Parry (1963).

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(te nemus Angitiae, vitrea te Fucinus unda, | te liquidi flevere lacus, ‘For you the grove of Angitia mourned, and Fucinus’ glassy waters, and the clear lakes’). In opposition to this liberal, New Critical, reading, S. L. Wofford, working within a neo-Marxist framework, sees the figure as reinforcing rather than undermining the workings of Augustan ideology.26 For such a passage aestheticises death and distances grief, thereby partly concealing the violence in ‘political and poetic claims to the land’. Violence is rendered natural or beautiful by ‘the compulsion exercised by the text’s figures’. The sense of history’s (retrospective) inevitability survives all such gestures of protest. In other words there is a paradoxical element of ‘congruence’ between a poetics of loss and absence and an ideology of conquest and war. The process of naturalising imperium is as much at work in the lines on the dead Umbro as in more obviously patriotic passages. The structure of temporality (past as future) and the grand figural frame establish the Augustan settlement as history’s goal, and render invisible, or inevitable, the sacrifices involved in its achievement; and in that sense history and causality become among the poem’s principal figures. It would be pointless to say that the text simply ‘means’ one or the other interpretation (or neither), but this does not absolve us from the freedom, or burden, of choice – for that too is what it means to live within history. If, for a moment, we accept an account like Wofford’s, does it undermine the value of the Aeneid today? On such a view the poem tracks the achievement of civilisation through the exercise of imperium, which includes a claim of the right to rule others. And one recalls Walter Benjamin’s resonant saying, ‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’27 On the other hand an observer of current events in the Middle East might conclude that perhaps the choice on occasion is between a version of imperium (a UN-sponsored peace or whatever) and a collapse into tribal violence. Some models of imperium may favour diversity-within-unity more readily than the modern homogenised nation-state. In general Don Fowler well describes the twentieth-century response to Virgil thus: ‘If there is a common element … it lies in the sense of crisis that has been so central to the century’s rhetoric – whether it is that Virgil’s poems are figured as a refuge from cultural disintegration, an answer to it, or merely the fellow-feeling of someone who has been through the same.’28 No single book on Virgil could be comprehensive, if only because history continues (we might say that interpretation is itself figured within the Aeneid 26 27 28

Wofford (1992); quotations 196–7, 199. Benjamin (1970: 258), from the essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Fowler (1994).

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in respect of its desire for finality, a desire which is a feature both of imperialist projects and of interpretative texts29). ‘Virgil’ here means the author of the three canonical ‘authentic’ works accepted as such by modern scholarship. However, we have also included a chapter on the poems collected by J. C. Scaliger in 1572 as the Appendix Vergiliana and in the past attributed by many to the youthful Virgil. These poems, in particular the Culex (which Lucan, for example, apparently thought genuine and which Spenser in his Virgilian progress Englished as ‘Virgil’s Gnat’) have their significance from the perspective of reception and for the construction of ‘Virgil’ as an author and as an idea. As a result they can have an unexpected cultural importance. The Great Seal of the United States and consequently the dollar bill contain three Latin phrases, all connected with Virgil, of which the best-known, e pluribus unum, comes from the Moretum, one of the poems included in the Appendix, probably by way of The Gentleman’s Magazine, a periodical popular in America – it printed the complete text of the Declaration of Independence – which, as composing a miscellany, included the tag in the 1770s on its title page.30 No scholar today believes that the Moretum is by Virgil, a good reminder of the fluidity of the tradition and of some instability in the poetic character of ‘Virgil’. This Companion can obviously be consulted piecemeal (the area covered by each chapter is clearly indicated in its title), but its structure has been planned for continuous sequential reading. Histories of reception tend to come as final chapters or postscripts; however, since this volume is based on the premise that reception and interpretation are closely intertwined, we have reversed the conventional order. Interpretation of a foreign classic obviously and necessarily begins with translation, so we include in this section a substantial chapter on Virgil in English translation, in which Colin Burrow argues that Virgil has been most alive when his translators have had a constructive sense of distance from him. No translation, not even the humblest crib, is a neutral transcription, but always an exercise in interpretation, a reading. George Steiner’s starting-point in After Babel is that translation constitutes the primary hermeneutic act, and that all acts of understanding and communication are configurable as exercises in translation.31 The chapter that opens the section explores the nature of the reading process as it affects our response to Virgil. Duncan Kennedy shows how modern readings of Virgil rest on strategies of appropriation, ideological

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One could counter by arguing that allegories of reception and readerly responses in relation to the Aeneid figure the openness and provisionality of interpretation. Mor. 102, e pluribus unus. See Floyd (2014). Steiner (1998).

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assumptions, and changing notions of historical understanding; he illustrates this general thesis by a close reading of Eliot’s influential critical essays on Virgil. The rest of this first part comprises fragments of a reception-history from antiquity onwards, including a short chapter on Servius as the oldest and most influential scholarly reader who engages with all the poems, and one on commentaries in general which have determined, to a not inconsiderable extent, how Virgil has been read. Necessarily we operate here under the sign of the figure synecdoche and with a particular emphasis on the Anglophone tradition – anything less selective would in the space available be little more than a list which would not teach the reader a great deal.32 And indeed all historical narratives or views of the past are, and must be, synecdochal. Part II focuses on genre, for most classicists – trained as they are within a strong tradition of literary formalism – a key defining concept for ancient texts. However, genres can be differently theorised: Virgil’s career is usually seen as a determined ascent through the genres from lower to higher, from pastoral to didactic to epic, a model for the developing careers of future laureates, but for Quintilian Virgil wrote in only one genre, hexameter epos. And, like the Bible, Virgil’s works have often been seen as constituting a higher unity, a notion explored in the final chapter in this group by Elena Theodorakopoulos. The idea of Virgil as a continuous text links with the way that Virgil has been constructed  – partly as a result of his own selfconstructions – as an auctor, at once author and authority. How Virgil’s works are interpreted varies in accordance with the way they are contextualised. And contexts are not self-evident or unproblematic but are themselves constructions composed by juxtaposing texts that in turn have to be interpreted. Part III explores a number of contexts within which meanings – often conflicting meanings – might be determined or generated. And it includes a substantial essay on intertextuality. The question of originality has been central to discussion of Virgil’s poems since antiquity because of the abnormal extent to which they are saturated in previous Greek and Roman literature; most Latinists today take the view that modern discussions of intertextuality provide a framework for a more positive assessment of Virgil’s relationship with his predecessors than a 32

Sadly one major omission is music (reception history is less practised in music studies than in the literary sphere). See Fitzgerald (2010) for an overview. Among major works inspired by Virgil are the massive Les Troyens of Berlioz, whose literary deities were Virgil and Shakespeare, and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with its eloquent concluding lament over a ground, ‘When I am laid in earth’. The latter, so familiar today, whether originally written as a court masque or for a girls’ school (the issue is currently debated), had no great immediate impact on the history of opera.

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belated romantic embarrassment that Latin poets were not more ‘original’. Moreover intertexts  – like contexts  – do not simply resolve problems of interpretation, they complicate them still more, multiplying possibilities. The final part entitled ‘Themes’ assembles a more loosely connected collection of topics that deal with matters of form and content which traditionally have been felt to be an important part of the appeal of great literature, including the aesthetic appeal of the writing, narrative power, and skill in characterisation. The whole Companion is designedly pluralist; a variety of approaches are demonstrated, the contributors disagree among themselves on numerous issues, and some of them would not accept the major propositions advanced in this introduction. This very diversity we hope adds to the volume’s usefulness, reflecting the diversity of responses to Virgil today as in the past. Contributors were asked to include material that, in their opinion, would be useful to the reader, give a state-of-the-art treatment of their topic as currently conceived, and point to possible future developments; they were free to reconceptualise the topic if they felt it appropriate (for example Philip Hardie shares the now traditional view of the Aeneid as in some sense a ‘tragic’ text, but shifts our sense of what that tragic element might comprise). Nonetheless some common presuppositions can be observed. Discussion of Virgil (perhaps somewhat becalmed in comparison with other ancient authors) is still largely dominated on the one hand by a philological tradition descending from Richard Heinze, whose seminal study Virgil’s Epic Technique first published in 1903 is still regarded by many as the best book on the poem,33 and on the other by the New Criticism and its heirs in close reading, with the emphasis on poise, ambivalence, patterns of language and imagery and how they signify.34 The well-wrought urn is still clearly on view in this volume; many of the contributors stress the rich complexities and ambiguities of the poems (rather than seeing them, say, as containing faultlines that point to internal contradictions within Augustan ideology, as might a New Historicist for example). The various binary tensions seem to constitute an eternal return of those two voices.

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The book was translated into English in 1993. For its significance, see Hardie (1995); Conte (2007: 23–57). A copybook example is Bernard Knox’s article ‘The serpent and the flame’ (1950). The employment of imagery as a key to meaning is especially prevalent among ‘pessimists’. There is also continuity between the New Criticism and the poststructuralist notions of textualism and fractured signification. The slide can be illustrated in the chapter on the Aeneid in Feeney (1991); Feeney never abandons the notion of Virgil’s overall writerly control, but increasingly edges the text’s discontinuities in the direction of an achieved undecidability.

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The title of the first envoi (Chapter  25), ‘The Death of Virgil’, carries various resonances. It recalls modern debates about the Death of the Author. It alludes to the story that the dying Virgil sought to burn his unpublished and unfinished Aeneid (similar stories are told of a number of subsequent writers including Kafka). Most obviously it recalls Hermann Broch’s novel constructed around this event, a novel which is regarded by George Steiner as one of the supreme masterpieces of literary modernism and which Fiona Cox here relates to some major strands in twentieth-century accounts of Virgil. And it also raises the question of whether Virgil is still living for us today, or whether he is a species of dead classic, still a potent name perhaps but not widely influential. Theodore Ziolkowski in his Virgil and the Moderns goes so far as to present the period between the two world wars as a renewed aetas Vergiliana, with Virgil as ‘a prophet of modernity’35 able to provide succour for the contemporary mal de siècle, the widespread sense of disintegration and fracture; but he sees us as no longer, since 1945, living in so obviously Virgilian a world. Against such a view Steiner convincingly argued in 1990 that Virgil can be seen as speaking to many of our continuing preoccupations and discontents: Our landscapes at evening, our manifold intimation of ‘town and country’, the ambivalent stance we take towards warfare, towards the exactions which public, civic life places on privacy, are at many points consequent on the Bucolics and Aeneid … Above all, Virgil is European, or so we take him to be … The Virgilian Mediterranean, the Aeneid’s vision of Carthage, the cardinal themes of the instauration of civic institutions, of a state cult, of a politicallyanimate historicity, are ours, or, more precisely, they lie at the roots of our European conditions. Neither Homer nor Shakespeare has very much to say of the illusions or potentialities which now engage European self-consciousness. Virgil and Dante are talismanic and exemplary of just that consciousness and of its singular contamination of Classical and modern, of pagan and Christian, of private and public modes. We follow on disaster as does Aeneas. The dead swarm at us with dire demands both of due remembrance and future resolve as they do in Book VI of the Aeneid. We are twilit, uneasy imperialists or exploiters of less privileged peoples in ways for which Virgil found the most searching expression. Being survivors in Europe, we grow wary of vengeance as Odysseus did not.36

Appropriated like this, Virgil remains as much ‘ours’ as for Seneca he was Vergilius noster. And much in these words remains as true today as when Steiner wrote them, though it will be interesting to see how Britain’s current 35 36

Ziolkowski (1993: 6). Steiner (1990: 10).

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Introduction: ‘The Classic of All Europe’

attempts to break free of the European Union will affect our relationship with the poet who might be said, in some degree, to have invented it. This introduction has indeed focused on the past and on Virgil’s role as ‘the classic of all Europe’. The second envoi (Chapter 26) looks to the future and to a wider globalised world beyond the West, and speculates on what role Virgil might, or could, play there. Finally, in our concern with meaning and interpretation, we should not forget the sheer beauty and expressiveness of Virgil’s Latin, the grace and cantabile that characterises many passages in the Eclogues, the sheer variousness, from gaiety to despair, of the Georgics, or the grave march of the Aeneid. Of English poets it is Tennyson perhaps who, if hardly Virgil’s equal, is to my mind closest to him in mood, sensibility, and the particular music of his verse. In both poets there is a constant concern with beauty of sound, with verbalism, with results that are often lyrical in the modern sense of the word more than traditionally epic, and, in the slow movement of the verse, an almost constantly perceptible sadness.37 The Idylls of the King are widely seen as falling short of truly epic grasp, but the combination of noble heroic melancholy with an (unHomeric) sense of temporal process catches the grave march of the Aeneid uniquely for the period and better perhaps than any translation of any period: He saw Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand, Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King, Down that long water opening on the deep Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go From less to less and vanish into light. And the new sun rose bringing the new year. (Passing of Arthur, 464–70)

For the diminishing number who can read Virgil in the original there are countless lines to haunt the memory and crowd the imagination. Sophisticated critics no longer cite with approval Housman’s test in ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’ for the greatness of poetry that it made his skin bristle along with a shiver down the spine, or share Arnold’s commitment to poetic touchstones ‘for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality’;38 these seem too much like mystifications of the aesthetic. Yet we read poetry as embodied beings, and it is too easy to neglect the rhythms of writing, the danced and gestural elements in poesis, and the response of the body to sound and metre. C. S. Lewis records one of his teachers saying that a 37

38

See Martindale (2017) for the argument in detail. For further reflections on these matters, see Moul, Chapter 19 in this volume. Arnold (1964: 242).

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particular line in Milton (the sounding ‘Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers’) had made him happy for a week.39 We can document how for 2,000 years quotations of Virgil have provided solace or inspiration or material for reflection for thousands of readers in a fashion which cannot be confined to their paraphrasable meaning. We may end in Arnoldian fashion by citing a few famous instances of such possible ‘touchstones’: take Silenus’ picture of the new-created world in Eclogue 6: iamque novum terrae stupeant lucescere solem …

take the picture in the Georgics of hilltop towns and rivers flowing under ancient walls: tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis fluminaque antiquos subter labentia muros.

take the plangent lament of Orpheus’ severed head for his twice-lost Eurydice: Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua, a miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat: Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae.

take Aeneas’ haunting dream address in Book 2 to the ghost of Hector: o lux Dardaniae, spes o fidissima Teucrum, quae tantae tenuere morae?

take his realisation that Troy’s doom has finally come (already cited in Helen Waddell’s version): venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus Dardaniae. fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens gloria Teucrorum …

take the words to him of the Sibyl of Cumae about descending into Hell: sate sanguine divum, Tros Anchisiade, facilis descensus Averno: noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est …

and finish with the gesture of the dead seeking to cross the river of death into oblivion:

39

Lewis (1955: ch. 7).

18

19

Introduction: ‘The Classic of All Europe’ stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.40

even if we no longer have the confidence to conclude as Arnold concluded: ‘these few lines, if we have tact and can use them, are enough even of themselves to keep clear and sound our judgements about poetry, to save us from fallacious estimates of it, to conduct us to a real estimate’.41

40

41

The references are Ecl. 6.37; G. 2.156–7, 4.525–7; Aen. 2.281–2, 2.324–6, 6.125–9, 6.314–15. In this instance I deliberately refrain from offering translations. Arnold (1964: 243). I have reworked material from two previously published essays for this introduction. See Martindale (1993a) and (1996).

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P art I

Receptions

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2 DU N CA N F. K E NNE DY

Modern Receptions and their Interpretative Implications: The Case of T. S. Eliot To offer a survey of modern receptions of Virgil in this chapter would be to follow, with unequal footsteps, Theodore Ziolkowski’s magisterial account in his Virgil and the Moderns.1 Instead, this chapter will offer a detailed analysis of one particular modern reception, that of T. S. Eliot (particularly the Eliot of the critical essays). Eliot not only offers a reception of Virgil that is itself explicitly and profoundly shaped by earlier episodes of reception, but has been seen himself as one of the key figures who have shaped reception theory and the distinctive view of history it offers;2 and it is through his engagement with, and appropriation of, the figure of Aeneas and his place within history as Virgil presents it that Eliot develops that view. It is one of the central tenets of reception theory that interpretation is shaped by, and shapes in turn, its historical moment. Ziolkowski suggests that Virgil’s presence in the twentieth century is particularly apparent as a cultural icon and avatar appropriated by poets, novelists, historians and politicians to configure their aspirations and anxieties in the period between the two world wars: [T]he response, including the preference for particular works, varied from country to country and from individual to individual, depending upon political, social and even religious orientation. Virgil’s texts, almost like the sortes Virgilianae of the Middle Ages, became a mirror in which every reader found what he wished: populism or elitism, fascism or democracy, commitment or escapism.3

The status accorded to the text of Virgil in this period was almost scriptural, explicitly so for Theodor Haecker, the passionate anti-Nazi whose Vergil. Vater des Abendlandes of 1931 was one of the most popular works of the period on the poet, and was translated into English in 1934 (as Virgil: Father 1 2 3

Ziolkowski (1993). Martindale (1993a: xiii–xiv). Ziolkowski (1993: 26).

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of the West), French and Italian in 1935, Dutch in 1942 and Spanish in 1945. Haecker proclaims: Virgil is the only pagan who takes rank with the Jewish and Christian prophets; the Aeneid is the only book, apart from Holy Scriptures, to contain sayings that are valid beyond the particular hour and circumstance of their day, prophecies that re-echo from the doors of eternity, whence they first draw their breath … For whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, we are all still members of that Imperium Romanum, which finally and after terrible errors accepted Christianity sua sponte, of its own free will – a Christianity which it could not abandon now without abandoning itself and humanism too.4

Virgil’s poetry has, of course, always brought out a strongly proprietorial sense in his readers. Already in the first century ad , the Stoic Seneca was calling him Vergilius noster as he cited him as an authority, and for Tertullian in the following century, in a more complex appropriation that has continued to resonate through the poet’s reception, he could be referred to as anima naturaliter Christiana. From the vantage point of his own moment, Ziolkowski offers a thoughtful commentary on the depth of the emotional investment involved in their appropriation of Virgil by twentiethcentury figures representing ideological perspectives that were often dramatically divergent: Although the political readings range from conservative to totalitarian, the religious views from pagan to Christian, and the ethnic stamp from narrowly national to broadly occidental, the response was triggered in every case by the powerful conviction that Virgil in his works offers a message of compelling relevance for the morally chaotic and socially anarchic present entre deux guerres – a view that strikes us, in retrospect, as particularly poignant because we know today what followed those hopeful bimillennial appeals to Virgilian ordo, pietas, and humanitas.5

It is with such sentiments in mind that Ziolkowski prefaced his study with the statement that ‘Virgil is too important to be left to the classicists’,6 signalling and reproducing a distinction between academic and non-academic receptions of the poet that was entrenched in the twentieth century. This is a distinction less polemically policed in the early twenty-first than in the theoretically contentious closing decades of the twentieth. That is symptomatic of the extent to which reception studies have been absorbed into both the

4 5 6

Haecker (1934: 77–8). Ziolkowski (1993: 56). Ziolkowski (1993: ix).

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Modern Receptions: The Case of T. S. Eliot

scholarly and cultural mainstream in recent years (perhaps at the price of a diminution of the challenges they can pose). Nonetheless, the distinction remains one that can be invoked to champion preferred interpretative strategies and ideological outlooks. In a historical survey of scholarship on the Aeneid in the twentieth century written as a preface to a collection of articles reprinted in 1990 as Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid, Stephen Harrison characterized the inter-war years thus: The Aeneid was seen by scholars such as E. K. Rand as a classic, a foretaste of Christianity and a fundamental document of Western civilization, and T. S. Eliot’s well-known assertion of this view in ‘What Is a Classic?’ (1945) and ‘Virgil and the Christian World’ (1951) acknowledges a direct debt to the German scholar Haecker, who had presented Vergil as ‘Father of the West’ in 1931. J.  W. Mackail’s edition of the Aeneid (1930), likewise part of the bimilleniary festivities, pursued a similar line. This positive presentation of the Aeneid as a classic vindication of the European world-order, happily consonant with Roman imperialism and the achievements and political settlement of Augustus, found few dissenters between the two World Wars.7

Eliot’s presence in this company of classical scholars is striking, but perhaps also a source of unease. However, this unease, it may be felt, had to be negotiated: such is Eliot’s cultural authority that some recognition was not to be denied him here, and yet in attempting to accommodate Eliot’s writings on Virgil to the preoccupations and goals of classical scholarship, Harrison ends up by implying that anything of substance a classicist might find in them is derived from the work of classical scholars of the time. The consensus is indeed that evidence for Eliot’s detailed knowledge of Virgil’s works is scant, whether in his poetry (‘even the critics who try the hardest to make the case for a “Virgilian” Eliot are able to demonstrate his presence in at most a few lines in some half-dozen poems’)8 or his essays on Virgil (‘utterly derivative in content’).9 There is, then, a received distinction between studying ‘Virgil’ (the business of classicists, it is implied) and his ‘reception’. It seems equally clear to Ziolkowski and Harrison the side on which Eliot’s encounter with Virgil lies, differ though they may in the value they attach to their respective interpretative strategies. Is that the end of the matter, and are the issues finally and definitively settled? At the heart of this question is what is involved in the interpretation of the past and the role 7

8 9

Harrison (1990: 3–4). The Eurocentrism that characterized this period of Virgilian reception is very pronounced. Ziolkowski (1993: 120). Ziolkowski (1993: 133).

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of such interpretation in articulating the present, an issue, it can be argued, that can be rendered unusually visible in the interaction of the writings of Virgil and Eliot. We may lead into an examination of the implications of Eliot’s engagement with Virgil by articulating two different aspects of a term which plays an important role in his thought, ‘tradition’. The first could take as its perspective the etymology of the word, the notion of ‘handing down’: the present is seen as the passive recipient of the texts of the past, or of whatever else constitutes the tradition. The past is viewed as closed and as determining the present, and tradition is a quasi-religious process like apostolic succession. Within this aspect, the means by which those texts came to constitute the tradition, the succession of judgements over the passage of time by which some texts were included in the canon and others excluded, are elided. There are moments in Eliot’s writings when this view of tradition can be felt strongly. Thus in his essay of 1919, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, he speaks of tradition as involving the historical sense, which in turn involves a ‘perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order’.10 What might be termed the politics of tradition is here suppressed (and thus a sense that tradition in this aspect has its own history). In the word ‘simultaneous’, the ‘pastness of the past’ is collapsed and narrative time is compressed into an instantaneous moment experienced in the here and now. This notion is presented in the sentence that follows as ‘the timeless’:  ‘This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional’.11 The alternative aspect is that what gets called ‘tradition’, far from being an inheritance handed down from the past, is an active, open process intimately connected with the pursuit of particular interests in the present, the selective appropriation of the past to serve a particular vision of the present and to project that vision into the future. Eliot’s formulation is somewhat milder than this. ‘Tradition’, he says, ‘cannot be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labour’.12 This aspect comes out most clearly in the notion of the ‘usable past’ which Eliot develops in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, and criticism of Eliot emphasizes this appropriative 10 11 12

Eliot (1951: 14). Eliot (1951: 14). Eliot (1951: 14).

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aspect of tradition when it plots the ways in which Eliot’s literary essays themselves select, organize and evaluate past writers in such a way as to underpin and validate his own poetic production. This ambivalence within the term is subtly orchestrated in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in ways which are important for understanding Eliot’s use of Virgil. A gravitation towards one or other of the two aspects could be suggested by highlighting the static ‘timelessness’ of the first in bold type and the reconfigurating activity involved in the second in italics: What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives. For order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations of each work of art towards the whole are readjusted.13

In characterizing tradition here, the rhetoric of words and phrases such as ‘existing order’, ‘arrives’, ‘supervention’ and the use of passive verbs work to suppress the notion of agency. A tension is being constructed within the term ‘tradition’ which will find its resolution in the notion of the ‘individual talent’ Eliot is developing. The curiously discomforting associations of appropriation which can be fleetingly felt in the phrase ‘usable past’ can be spirited away if the poet can be presented as altering the past, but not of himself. To configure the poet’s relation to tradition in terms of appropriation is to emphasize intervention, agency, the force of will, where Eliot’s references to the poet’s ‘continual surrender of himself’, or the progress of the artist as ‘a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’, and the doctrine of ‘depersonalization’,14 work to spirit such associations away. This resistance to what I  called earlier the ‘politics’ of tradition  – the process of contested judgement and evaluation, the play of interests which constitute tradition-making  – can provide a point of transition to Eliot’s interpretation of Virgil’s Aeneid as the representative of the classic. For Eliot, as we shall see, a defining feature of the classic is its capacity to transcend the immediate circumstances of its composition. So, at the very beginning of ‘What Is a Classic?’, Eliot moves quickly at the conclusion of the opening paragraph to rid the term ‘classic’ of some unwanted contemporary associations that smack of politics: ‘And finally, I think that the account of the classic which I propose to give here should remove it from the area of

13 14

Eliot (1951: 15). Eliot (1951: 17).

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antithesis between “classic” and “romantic” – a pair of terms belonging to literary politics, and therefore arousing winds of passion which I ask Aeolus, on this occasion, to contain in the bag’.15 The elegant allusion to Aeolus, calculated to create a bond of shared intertextual reference with his audience, the Virgil Society, seems sufficient to foreclose discussion of this particular point, and Eliot promptly moves on. However, it is worth enquiring how this bare reference manages to carry such weight and why it might be deemed to be especially appropriate here. If we are to be precise, the ‘bag’ of Aeolus recalls Homer’s Odyssey (10.19–20), but in the context of an address to the Virgil Society, it could be argued that the name of Aeolus recalls more potently the incident in Aeneid 1 in which the winds, let loose from their cave by Aeolus to force the ships of Aeneas on to the shores of Carthage, are quelled by Neptune, who then drives in state over the pacified seas in his chariot. A simile, the first in the epic and so occupying a position of particular prominence, compares the situation to what is presented as a characteristic  – timeless, we might say  – outbreak of violence amongst a crowd: ac veluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est seditio, saevitque animis ignobile vulgus, iamque faces et saxa volant – furor arma ministrat – tum pietate gravem et meritis si forte virum quem conspexere, silent arrectisque auribus adstant; ille regit dictis animos, et pectora mulcet: sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor, aequora postquam prospiciens genitor caeloque invectus aperto flectit equos curruque volans dat lora secundo. And as often when unrest brews up in a large crowd, and the common rabble rages angrily and presently firebrands and stones are flying (for fury brings missiles to hand), if at that point they happen to have caught sight of a man who commands their respect by the quality of his character and conduct, they become silent and stand by with attentive ears; he controls their passions with his words and soothes their hearts:  just so all the crashing of the sea died down, as soon as Father Neptune gazing over its surface and driving beneath the cloudless sky guides his steeds and, as he flies along, gives rein to his speeding chariot. (Aen. 1.148–56)

The simile works to associate elemental forces with political disorder in such a way as to represent an ideology of social control generated and presided over by the great man. Eliot’s reference to Aeolus serves to appropriate this 15

Eliot (1957: 53–4).

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discourse so as to position himself within it: as the unruly rabble of critics takes sides in a dispute over ‘classic’ versus ‘romantic’, there comes among them a man who commands their respect by the quality of his character and conduct to control their passions with his words and soothe their hearts, rescuing the idea of the classic for the notion of timelessness, and thus restoring order to the sordidness of literary politics. The mystique of the great man who can calm the crowd with his words and the respect in which he is held (which downplays the political aspect or motivation of his intervention) finds its counterpart in the realm of the aesthetic in the mystique of the individual talent grounded in a notion of tradition which suppresses that individual’s role as an appropriating agent and so part of the fray. The timelessness of the classic in the realm of the aesthetic is being constructed by means of an opposition to the sociopolitical, the discourse which seeks to ground its explanations in circumstance, in contestation and in use. The realm of the aesthetic is more overtly characterized in terms of social emplacement when Eliot, in sketching a theory of cultures, turns to discuss what he calls ‘maturity of manners’: With maturity of mind I have associated maturity of manners and absence of provinciality. I suppose that, to a modern European suddenly precipitated into the past, the social behaviour of the Romans and Athenians would seem indifferently coarse, barbarous and offensive. But if the poet can portray something superior to contemporary practice, it is not in the way of anticipating some later, and quite different code of behaviour, but by an insight into what the conduct of his own people at his own time might be, at its best.16

Note the way in which Eliot at this juncture is projecting the past as alien, as other than contemporary practice. Things were very different then, the argument goes; be that as it may, Virgil presents us with a picture of what that society might be. Eliot then presents a near-contemporary illustration in which the terms of social emplacement are immediately apparent: House parties of the wealthy, in Edwardian England, were not exactly what we read of in the pages of Henry James; but Mr. James’ society was an idealization, of a kind, of that society, and not an anticipation of any other. I think that we are conscious, in Virgil more than in any other poet – for Catullus and Propertius seem ruffians, and Horace somewhat plebeian, by comparison – of a refinement of manners springing from a delicate sensibility, and particularly in that test of manners, private and public conduct between the sexes.17

16 17

Eliot (1957: 62). Eliot (1957: 63).

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Unlike the uncouth Catullus and Propertius, and the worthy but common Horace, Virgil could be relied upon, it seems, not to do anything embarrassing at a house party, particularly perhaps in his behaviour towards the hostess. Private and public conduct between the sexes is exemplified by Eliot’s reading of the story of Dido and Aeneas, and this episode is held to testify to the ‘civilised consciousness and conscience’ of the whole. ‘It will be observed, finally’, he concludes, ‘that the behaviour of Virgil’s characters (I might except Turnus, the man without a destiny) never appears to be according to some purely local or tribal code of manners: it is in its time, both Roman and European. Virgil certainly, on the plane of manners, is not provincial’.18 The absence of Turnus I will consider in a moment; but note how the argument has shifted. From being alien or other, Roman manners have now become the same, ‘European’ indeed. From presenting the past as different, Eliot has shifted to presenting it as the same: where before the past was constructed as punctuated, discontinuous with the present, now it is continuous. The past is indeed usable, and in more than one way. The assertion of continuity and timelessness within codes of social behaviour slides into an assertion of continuity and timelessness within the realm of the aesthetic, the sameness in the face of change which for Eliot is the defining feature of the classic, realized in the Aeneid. Decorum in social behaviour becomes fused with decorum in the aesthetic sphere, and symbolizes that which transcends any immediate manifestation. So, when Eliot develops his notion of the classic, which for him represents the timeless and the universal within the realm of the aesthetic, that realm, ostensibly transcending the sociopolitical dimension of contestation and use, nonetheless constantly appeals to it and is realized in its terms. Eliot interprets the Aeneid in such a way as to configure certain themes as timeless, and so in Eliot’s account serving to make the poem transcend any immediate historical circumstance to which those themes may refer – whilst also serving to underpin ideologically the present as Eliot himself wishes to see it. In ‘Virgil and the Christian World’, he asserts that in the Aeneid, ‘Virgil is concerned with the imperium romanum, with the extension and justification of imperial rule’, thus affirming that the poem was a product of particular historical circumstance. But he immediately engineers such a shift to the timeless when he goes on to remark that Virgil ‘set an ideal for Rome, and for empire in general, which has never been realized in history’.19 Eliot cites the prophecy of Jupiter:

18 19

Eliot (1957: 63). Eliot (1957: 126).

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Modern Receptions: The Case of T. S. Eliot his ego nec metas rerum, nec tempora pono: imperium sine fine dedi … For the Romans I set down no boundaries of space or time: power without limit I have given them … (Aen. 1.278–9)

As Frank Kermode has remarked, thus formulated, imperium sine fine becomes the paradigm of the classic for Eliot, and figures its essential characteristics:  ‘a perpetuity, a transcendent entity, however remote its provinces, however extraordinary its temporal vicissitudes’.20 Eliot’s notion of the individual talent, as we have seen, is grounded in a view of tradition which, in suppressing that individual’s role as an agent appropriating the past, evokes a sense of the timeless which he then figures in the Virgilian phrase imperium sine fine. However, it is always possible to reveal the rhetoric of a text by treating it as an interested appropriation, precisely by viewing ‘in the aspect of time’ what is presented as ‘timeless’, as I did in the case of Eliot’s reference to Aeolus. Thus we might view Eliot’s essay not as the definition of the classic, but as a definition – precisely the imposition of one set of fines, discursive boundaries, on the (timeless) notion of the classic. To treat this characterization of the classic as an instance of literary politics is to uncover the pretensions, the will to power it encodes: a desire to be part of an imperium that will be coextensive with European culture, past, present and future. Eliot’s allusion to Aeolus configures an episode in the Aeneid in such a way as to suggest an archetype of the great man in his poetic manifestation, the individual talent, but this is not the only way in which Virgil’s poem functions as a usable past for Eliot. In the terms of his characterization of Aeneas in ‘What Is a Classic?’, we may just be able to glimpse another figure playing possum: Aeneas is himself, from first to last, a ‘man in fate’, a man who is neither an adventurer nor a schemer, neither a vagabond nor a careerist, a man fulfilling his destiny, not under compulsion or arbitrary decree, and certainly from no stimulus to glory, but by surrendering his will to a higher power behind the gods who would thwart or direct him. He would have preferred to stop in Troy, but he became an exile, and something more significant than any exile; he is exiled for a purpose greater than he can know, but which he recognises; and he is not, in a human sense, a happy or successful man. But he is a symbol of Rome; and, as Aeneas is to Rome, so is ancient Rome to Europe.21

20 21

Kermode (1975/1983: 28). Eliot (1957: 68).

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Virgilian discourse is appropriated and mobilized not only to negotiate the anxieties involved in the delicate question of the American Eliot’s own social emplacement in his adopted society (unlike Eliot, Turnus is not a man of destiny, and so there is no place for him in polite society, still less in the greater scheme of things), but more importantly to subserve Eliot’s vision of European culture and his own perceived role within it. A number of critics have observed that Eliot seems to identify personally with Aeneas, but we may press this issue somewhat further and explore the mechanisms of such identification and the appropriateness of the Aeneid in acting as its vehicle. Eliot speaks of ‘the new insight into history’ that the Aeneid provides,22 but how does the poem’s narrative generate this? Narratives, and the analyses made of them, characteristically operate by invoking a distinction between ‘story’, an idealized series of events in a notionally sequential order, and ‘narrative’, their emplotment in an actual telling. An easy assumption is that ‘story’ pre-exists its ‘emplotment’ in ‘narrative’. The relationship emerges as more complex, and open to manipulation and re-description for different ends. Virgilian narrative offers itself as the telling of a preexisting story. The famous narrative plunge in medias res (the storm which shipwrecks Aeneas on the shores of Carthage seven years after the fall of Troy provides the narrative with its opening incident) and the consequent flashbacks from the narrative’s ‘present’ in the wanderings of Aeneas and his arrival in Italy help to create this sense of the story as already determined, as simply a matter of report. The narrator’s agency is downplayed:  the narrative is presented as handed down to the poet as much as shaped by him, as is signalled in the poet’s appeal to the Muse in 1.8 to ‘recount to me the causes’ (Musa, mihi causas memora). Or, to re-present that in Eliot’s terms, the past is presented as though it were not usable but an ideal order. In the Aeneid, as well as flashbacks such as Aeneas’ own account of the fall of Troy, a view ‘forwards’ from the narrative’s ‘present’ into its ‘future’ is presented by means of the supernatural, primarily prophecy in various guises. Jupiter’s speech to Venus (1.257–96), the parade of Roman heroes as yet unborn in the Underworld (6.756–886), and the scenes depicted on the shield fashioned by Vulcan for Aeneas (8.630–728) look ‘forward’ from the moment chosen as the narrative’s ‘present’ beyond the incident with which the narrative closes, the death of Turnus, to the age of Augustus as its end, in the sense of both finishing-point and goal, its telos. Strictly speaking, Jupiter’s prophecy looks beyond that moment to an imperium that stretches into the future without end, though he makes reference to no specific historical events after Virgil’s time. Nonetheless, it lays claim to those events that 22

Eliot (1957: 70).

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have not yet happened: as yet unknown, they are to be understood in terms of an explanatory shape or order constituted in perpetuity by imperium sine fine. For characters within such a narrative (Aeneas, for example, or ‘Eliot’ figured in the character sketch of Aeneas in ‘What Is a Classic?’), events will appear contingent, their shape or goal uncertain. The significance of their actions, and the consequences that will flow from them, cannot be wholly known, or perhaps even guessed at. No such character can normally see into the future, and for that reason, the view ‘forwards’ is usually occluded in most narratives (though, as we shall see, we should not make the mistake of believing that it is therefore absent). It is the explicit representation in the person of Jupiter within the narrative of the view ‘forwards’ (of the ‘future’ from the narrative’s ‘present’ as known, its significance already determined) that has made the Aeneid the paradigm of teleological narrative. The association of the view ‘forwards’ with the god Jupiter makes the view, in the fullest sense of the term, providential. The episodes of the poem are enddetermined; the story elements are selected, characterized and arranged so as to exist, in Frank Kermode’s phrase, ‘under the shadow of the end’.23 But that end is, of course, the Virgilian narrator’s own time, and it is he who has chosen the story elements and constructed the sequence, its beginning and end points and its order of presentation, and thus furnishes the narrative with its view ‘forwards’. The view ‘forwards’ from the narrative’s ‘present’ is thus the view ‘backwards’ from the Virgilian narrator’s ‘present’. The ‘story’ which the Aeneid purports to narrate emerges as a suprapersonal, providential order of history (History with a capital H), named in the Aeneid as fatum (‘an utterance’) and articulated in the utterances of Jupiter. It is thus no less possible to view Fate or History (and, indeed, history) as an effect of narrative and the Virgilian narrator’s agency than, as the poem seeks to suggest, its cause. For there to be a ‘shape’ or ‘order’ to history, the ‘future’ (seen from whatever constitutes the narrative’s ‘present’) must be, in some way, known:  we are asked not only to look back to a point in the past, but also to look forward from that point to the telos of the here and now, the moment which encapsulates the interests and desires which motivate the narrative act, and which the narrative act seeks to satisfy. It is from this shuttle effect, backwards and forwards, that narratives and historical representations derive their sense of closure and fulfilment. What I  have analysed as the view ‘backwards’ and the view ‘forwards’ are totally separable only in theory, never in practice. However, if they are ultimately inseparable, interactive components of any narrative act, they are 23

Kermode (1966: 5).

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nonetheless open to manipulation in different ways to different ends. Thus prophecy presents a sequence of events from the narrative’s ‘present’ with the view ‘forwards’ explicit, but although the view ‘backwards’ is occluded, the point and perspective, the end, from which that sequence is viewed, is necessary to establish it as a prophecy rather than, say, a prediction, a conjecture, or a guess. For a prophecy to be a prophecy, the significance of the events it narrates must be simultaneously already, but not yet, known. The Aeneid may be regarded as a dramatic allegory of the act of narration and of historical understanding. The complex of perspectives involved in any act of historical narration are distributed across, and enacted by, the poem’s characters, and Jupiter, the one character who enjoys perspectives both ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards’, and thus can view events in their full intentional and consequential significance, becomes a figure of the narrator, the epic poet transcribing History – even down to the description of his own articulation of Fate in terms of reading a book already written: ‘I will unroll and bring to light the secrets of fate’ (volvens fatorum arcana movebo, 1.262). Although it is the explicit representation within the narrative of the perspective ‘forwards’ in the character of Jupiter that has made the Aeneid the model of teleological narrative, the implication of the previous argument is that any narrative, whether it be fiction or history, can be seen to have a teleological character and a providential aspect by virtue of having a narrator, though generally this will only be apparent if the perspective ‘forwards’ is in some way rendered explicit. Contrariwise, if this forward perspective is suppressed by various rhetorical means (primarily, as we have seen, by suppressing the agency of the narrator in the fashioning of the narrative), both the teleological and the providential aspect will be occluded. This is no less the case in the stories we tell about ourselves, in which we are both narrator and character. In such stories, we create a character in a narrative ‘present’ which is never entirely identical to the narrator’s ‘present’, and whose perspective on events, and hence of their significance, is never quite the same as that of the narrator. If for the character ‘Eliot’ (be he configured in the ‘individual talent’ of the essay of 1919 or the terms of the character sketch of Aeneas in ‘What Is a Classic?’), events appear contingent, their shape, direction, or ultimate significance unclear, it is the narrator Eliot who furnishes him with the destiny he cannot know; and if ‘Eliot’ has inklings of his destiny (also, in Eliot’s terms, an imperium sine fine, in this case identified as European culture), it is by virtue of a very oblique and subtle appropriation of the figure of Aeneas in the Aeneid, who is given glimpses of the future which he cannot fully understand because he cannot view them as a whole, in their full intentional and consequential significance, the prerogative of the narrator. Allusion to, and identification with, the figure of Aeneas 34

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in the Aeneid provides a way of activating, without explicitly acknowledging, the providential perspective within such a personal narrative. However, the implications of such an appropriation go further than this. Eliot’s account of Virgil and the Aeneid is at times explicitly providential. In ‘What Is a Classic?’ he speaks of ‘the Roman empire and the Latin language conforming to its destiny’ which he then goes on to define teleologically as ‘a unique destiny in relation to ourselves’,24 and in ‘Virgil and the Christian World’, Virgil is presented as an adventist Christian and Aeneas as ‘the prototype of a Christian hero’.25 Eliot thus casts his interpretation in an explicitly typological form which will be familiar to readers of the Aeneid: Aeneas is already but not yet a Roman of Virgil’s own time. Some of the implications of this emerge in Frank Kermode’s discussion of the phenomenon of typology in The Classic: Strictly speaking, a type is distinguished from a symbol or allegory in that it is constituted by an historical event or person (as Christ makes Jonah the type of his resurrection, and St. Paul the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites a type of baptism). A type can therefore be identified only by its antitype, a later event in a providentially structured history; the Old Covenant is a type of the New.26

Thus, seen retrospectively from the narrator’s point of view at the end, earlier events or personalities are deemed to prefigure or foreshadow significant aspects of the present: a prospective, providential view is simultaneously operative. Typology is most closely associated with scripture, but not restricted to it, as Kermode’s subsequent comments make clear: Types are essentially what Auerbach has in mind when he speaks of figurae, events or persons that are themselves, but may presage others. Their purpose, to put it too simply, is to accommodate the events and persons of a superseded order of time to a new one.27

Such typologies are explicitly precipitated in texts which, as Kermode suggests, project themselves as signalling the advent of a new order (the New Testament, the Aeneid, or, it can be argued, the literary essays of Eliot) and thus offer a revision of received, ‘traditional’, interpretations of the past. But it is possible to see such an accommodatory aspect in any historical statement or interpretation, whenever ‘events or persons that are themselves’ are held to ‘figure’ others, or a text is so ‘characterized’ as to 24 25 26 27

Eliot (1957: 67–8). Eliot (1957: 127–8). Kermode (1975/1983: 89–90). Kermode (1975/1983: 90).

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foreshadow someone or something. Thus typologies are precipitated in the course of any interpretative activity which involves a process of identification in any form, identification with (for example, Aeneas with Augustus, or Aeneas with Eliot) and, more subtly, identification as, for such identification as is as a type, constituted as such ‘only when fulfilled by its antitype, a later event in a providentially structured history’, as Kermode says. In an essay on Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1936), Eliot speaks of its poet thus: ‘Tennyson is not only a minor Virgil, he is also with Virgil as Dante saw him, a Virgil among the Shades, the saddest of all English poets, among the Great in Limbo, the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist.’28 Eliot here explicitly identifies Tennyson with Virgil, and in his book T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet, Gareth Reeves remarks of this passage that ‘[u]ndoubtedly this view of Virgil owes much to Eliot’s own radical conservatism’,29 thus further identifying Virgil with Eliot in such a way as to suggest, in the terms in which the identification is configured by Reeves, the teleology of Eliot’s rhetoric. Identification with (as Tennyson with Virgil, or Eliot with Virgil, or, to a lesser extent we may surmise, with that minor Virgil, Tennyson) entails identification as, which is revealed in the terms in which the identification is made:  ‘the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist’. When Eliot is characterized in the title of Reeves’ book as ‘a Virgilian poet’, a typology is no less operative. For there to be a ‘shape’ or ‘order’ to history, the ‘future’ (seen from whatever constitutes the narrative’s ‘present’) must be, in some way, known: we are asked not only to look back to a point in the past, but also to look forward from that point to the telos of the here and now. However, the providential aspect of Reeves’ historical view is occluded. Eliot is, in this account, a Virgilian poet, but buried in this assertion is the assumption, certainly unspoken and perhaps also unacknowledged, that (in whatever characteristics are held to link the two across time and so are presented as transcendent) Virgil is already, but not yet, an Eliotic poet. Any interpretation (be it Virgil’s of a History already written, Eliot’s of Virgil, Reeves’ of Eliot, or mine of all of these) will thus figure its object, which might equally be a person or a text, as the type of its concerns, so making itself the antitype within its own providential history; and such interpretations, interpreted in turn, will thereby be seen to be accommodated teleologically to their ends  – the preoccupations and interests of their interpreters. But, with the passage of time, the end from and to which any text is viewed, is always shifting, thus requiring the constant reinterpretation 28 29

Eliot (1951: 337). Reeves (1989: 88).

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of ‘classic’ texts and canonical monuments so as to accommodate them to contemporary concerns, so as to make them modern. The terms in which the shuttle between past and present, antitype and type, is configured are thereby projected in the interpretation as timeless, transcending their realization in any particular historical manifestation. Thus Eliot’s interpretation can be seen to configure the Aeneid as the type of providential history and of a decorum that is both social and aesthetic, and Jupiter’s phrase imperium sine fine as the type of the transcendent, all of which have their antitype in Eliot’s definition of the classic. Again, description as ‘the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist’ projects a set of categories which can embrace Virgil and Tennyson, and Eliot too, and elide the historical distance between them. And, sometimes, the appropriation configures text and interpretation, type and antitype, so deftly as to make the reading seem, more or less, ‘appropriate’ to both: from first to last, a ‘man in fate’, a man who is neither an adventurer nor a schemer, neither a vagabond nor a careerist … he became an exile, and something more than an exile; he is exiled for a purpose greater than he can know, but which he recognises; and he is not, in a human sense, a happy or successful man …

In such cases, the text has been so thoroughly appropriated that we might even speak of possession – not only of but by the text. Eliot’s appropriation of Virgil, for those of his interpreters at least who accept Eliot’s version of his own role in relation to European culture, would seem to have worked; but we may also be close to getting some purchase on the wariness with which classicists view him and his interpretation of Virgil. Writing in ‘Virgil and the Christian World’ of the messianic interpretation of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue and opining that ‘whether we consider Virgil a Christian prophet will depend on our interpretation of the word “prophecy” ’, Eliot at first emphasizes the traditional perspective of scholarly interpretation and observes its constraints:  ‘That Virgil himself was consciously concerned only with domestic affairs or with Roman politics I feel sure.’30 In this formulation, the character Virgil in the narrative present of 40 bc can have no certain knowledge of the future, but in a gesture of sympathetic identification which endows his character momentarily with a view forwards over the events to the end from which the narrator looks back, Eliot immediately continues:  ‘I think that he would have been very much astonished by the career which his fourth Eclogue was to have.’ The providential aspect of historical narrative, so often occluded, is laid open to 30

Eliot (1957: 122).

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view, but is attributed to the character in a way that distances it from the narrator, who can now offer an interpretation of the word ‘prophecy’ which continues ostensibly to foreswear recourse to overtly providential history: If a prophet were by definition a man who understood the full meaning of what he was saying, this would be for me the end of the matter. But if the word ‘inspiration’ is to have any meaning, it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer is uttering something which he does not wholly understand – or which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him … It seems to me that one can accept whatever explanation of the fourth Eclogue, by a scholar or historian, is the most plausible; because scholars and historians can only be concerned with what Virgil thought he was doing. But at the same time, if there is such a thing as inspiration – and we do go on using the word – then it is something which escapes historical research.31

We can view the ‘historical research’ of ‘scholars and historians’, which seeks to eschew its providential aspect and teleological structure, and Eliot’s own history, which allows them to emerge, as two divergent definitions of the notion of history. Eliot’s interpretation of Virgil as an adventist Christian is ahistorical only within one definition of ‘history’, the imposition, in the aspect of time, of one set of boundaries (fines) on the (timeless) notion of history. Eliot works within the constraints of the ‘scholarly’ definition here so as to gesture towards something beyond them, not history in the aspect of time, but History in its metaphysical aspect, the realm in which not only Prophecy operates, but Destiny and Providence as well, forces beyond human understanding and control whose workings we can glimpse but darkly, as Aeneas struggles to descry the operations of Fate. Unless, that is, we recuperate them in the aspect of time as ‘providential’ history, occluded aspects of the human will to understand and to control, where the appropriation of the past to serve present interests is, precisely, rhetorically disowned. We may now move to a consideration of the more general implications of what we have been discussing for the issue of interpretation itself. For the purposes of this chapter, my interpretation has configured the Aeneid as a dramatic allegory of the act of historical understanding and of some of the issues involved. Within the narrative of the past which the poem constructs, the end of History and the telos of the narrative are identified through the narrator’s surrogate, Jupiter, as imperium without boundaries of space or time. Imperium is thus represented as the outcome of linking disparate phenomena across time into a meaningful narrative, figured in the Aeneid, as we have seen, not as the result of the agency of the narrator, nor even perhaps

31

Eliot (1957: 122–3).

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of Jupiter himself, but as the transcription of (the book of) History itself. From this perspective, historical understanding, narrative and power are all intimately linked. ‘Conversely’, as David Quint has argued, ‘the ability to construct narratives that join beginnings purposefully to ends is already the sign and dispensation of power’.32 As Quint goes on to suggest, the Aeneid signals its complicity with power by the shape of its narrative, representing the achievement of its goal by its steady advance to reach the ending towards which it has been directed from the beginning, projecting episodes of suspension and indirection in order that it may overcome them and in so doing demonstrate its ultimately teleological form. Rhetorically, the effect of identifying imperium sine fine with the fulfilment of narrative form is to give the impression of a cessation of history, a feeling that History, in achieving its goal, has reached its end as well. Imperium thus emerges as identical with the capacity to create an order of historical meaning, to impose a unified interpretation upon the past, configuring and accommodating it to the end from, and to, which it is viewed. That end was once Virgil’s own time, and the goal of History, imperium sine fine, could be felt to be realized in the aspect of time in the Principate of Augustus – or, to be more precise, never quite fully realized, thus leaving the moment of complete fulfilment ever a tantalizing prospect. But with the passage of time, that end is always shifting and the prospect in the Aeneid of imperium sine fine is accommodated to fresh circumstance. It becomes, for example, the vehicle for the ideology of translatio imperii, in accordance with which the King of the Franks, Charlemagne, could be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, and its sibling, translatio studii, embodied in the Carolingian scholarly project, indicating how the appropriation of the Aeneid is complicit with the institutions of its interpretation. For Camões in the Lusiads, it provides a ratification for the project of Portuguese imperialism, and it legitimizes in turn the succession of the Hapsburgs, the last dynasty (or the latest, to date) to lay claim to the posterity and inheritance of Aeneas and Augustus.33 But imperium sine fine can come to configure the telos of any interpretative act, as Eliot appropriates the Aeneid for his vision of European culture and Christianity. It can even, as here, configure the act of interpretation itself, with its pursuit of the tantalizing prospect of final meaning. Any interpretative act can be resolved into, on the one hand, the search for an originary meaning for the text, attributed to it as immanent, and on the other, the accommodation of the text to the particular circumstances in which the reading is produced, which highlights the role of the text in 32 33

Quint (1993: 45). See Tanner (1993).

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the authorization of the beliefs and practices which inform the reading. In the timeless aspect of theory, these two constituent elements carry equal weight, but in the aspect of time, in practice and use in different interpretative schemes, privilege will be accorded to one element at the expense of the other in furtherance of some end or other. Thus for E.  D. Hirsch in The Validity of Interpretation,34 the ‘meaning’ of a text is exalted above its ‘significance’ in order to posit authorial intention as the goal of valid interpretation. The search for an originary, immanent meaning, in seeing history as already determined and simply awaiting discovery and transcription, must marginalize the notion of appropriation (and, in particular, its own appropriative activity) insofar as it suggests that history is an open-ended process, continuing here and now, and will relegate interpretations, such as Eliot’s of Virgil, to a secondary sphere of ‘reception’. Contrariwise, an interpretative method which is rhetorically weighted towards the notion of appropriation will assert that the meaning of a text cannot be immanent in an original moment of inscription (the author’s intentions or the immediate circumstances of composition, as it may be), but lies in the multiplicity of ways it has been interpreted. From this perspective, the meaning of the text is its significance, and that will be a story forever open to fresh interpretation as the text is endlessly reappropriated in different contexts to configure fresh interests and preoccupations. From within such a definition of history, Eliot’s interpretation of Virgil as an adventist Christian, far from being ahistorical, becomes essential to the meaning of the text. But such a method will correspondingly marginalize the way in which it attributes immanent meanings to those interpretations, and emplots previous modes of interpretation as episodes within a teleological narrative of ‘reception’ in such a way as to project ‘reception’ as the transcendentally true mode of interpretation. Thus the meaning of a text can neither be collapsed into an instantaneous moment of inscription nor reduced to a history, however protracted, of its reception. A meaning can only be attributed to a text when its significance (in whatever terms that is construed, political, aesthetic, personal, or whatever) is at some level, however occluded, already known. Rather than insisting upon a distinction between pairs of opposed terms (tradition/appropriation, text/interpretation, meaning/significance, theory/ practice, the timeless/the aspect of time), we might rather meditate upon the way each of these terms forms an essential constituent of the other, which may be repressed but can never be excluded. However much an interpreter may succeed in elevating one term at the expense of marginalizing the other, the latter always remains in play and has the potential to undermine, not 34

Hirsch (1967).

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necessarily the ‘findings’ (for all findings depend on distinctions such as these being operative, and are validated or negated only in terms of the discourse, for example ‘historical philology’, in which they appear), but the pretensions of the interpretation, its claim to authority as presenting the final truth, the ‘end of history’. Reading for the repressed term performs the immediate function of indicating the way in which texts are appropriated to inform institutions which, by perpetuating particular modes of interpretation as legitimate or appropriate, attempt to ‘turn cultural values into ideological possessions’, as Frank Kermode has put it.35 We might rephrase that as ‘project ideological possessions as cultural values’ so as to bring under scrutiny in turn the way in which Kermode’s use of the term ‘cultural values’ rhetorically appeals to the realm of the timeless. In the aspect of time, that emollient phrase ‘cultural values’, redolent of an ideal order, covers over the continuing process of interaction and contestation out of which value emerges and without which the term could have no meaning. This process inevitably produces winners and losers, and the need for both to identify their positions and be reconciled to them. To a sense of the vertiginous contingency of being in history, a situation that cries out for the reassurance of shape and closure, an end, the Aeneid has offered to its readers, and continues to offer to them however they accommodate it to their own preoccupations, a memorably elaborated and seductively attractive response: a sense of destiny, an end to history in imperium and the role-complex of authority and submission it offers. FURTHER READING The reception of Virgil in the modern period is now subject to intensive study:  the pioneering Ziolkowski (1993) is an attractively written, wideranging and informative survey. Besides a number of essays on modern reception, Farrell and Putnam (2010) contains a section devoted to the reception of Virgil in the USA. The most troubling episode in the modern period is the appropriation of Virgil within totalitarian regimes, which is treated by Thomas (2001), notable especially for the way it confronts the ideological role of scholarship in this process. For book-length treatments of particular aspects of the modern reception of Virgil, see: Cox (1999) and (2011); Torlone (2014); Kallendorf (2015). Martindale (1993a) remains a spirited introduction to reception theory and an influential exploration of its role in the interpretation of classical texts (see esp. Chapter 2 on Virgil); and a special issue of Classical Receptions 35

Kermode (1990: 26).

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Journal 5.2 (2013) offers a range of perspectives on Martindale’s book twenty years after its publication. For those seeking to orient themselves within the field of reception studies more generally, Willis (2017) presents a concise and accessible historical and theoretical overview. Kallendorf (2007b) contains a range of essays, all with extensive bibliographies, which embrace period and area studies, and explore the intersection of reception theory with other contemporary theoretical concerns, a focus also for the contributors to Martindale and Thomas (2006).

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3 R I C H A R D TA R R A N T

Aspects of Virgil’s Reception in Antiquity

I The celebrity of Virgil’s works in the Roman world was immediate and lasting. The Aeneid enjoyed the rare distinction of being hailed as a canonical poem while it was still being written: ‘something greater than the Iliad is being born’ (nescioquid maius nascitur Iliade), wrote the elegist Propertius in the mid-20s, perhaps with a touch of irony, but anticipating the serious comparisons with Homer that would become conventional.1 Virgil’s first appearance as a school author also dates to the 20s, when his published work still comprised only the Eclogues and Georgics; in the guise of a ‘modern poet’, he was lectured on by Q.  Caecilius Epirota, a freedman of Cicero’s friend Atticus and an intimate of Cornelius Gallus, from whom he may have derived a fondness for contemporary poetry uncommon in a schoolmaster.2 Caecilius probably knew Virgil, and may have had personal reasons for including him among the authors he read with his students, but his decision looks forward to the central role Virgil was to play in Roman literary education for the rest of antiquity. Acclaim by fellow poets and early embalmment as a school text are not unusual fates for a major Latin poet; as much could be said of Horace, especially the lyric Horace of the Odes. What makes the reception of Virgil unique is the pervasive character of his influence, which is visible at the level of both popular culture and official ideology. Verses and characters from his poetry appear in wall paintings and graffiti, mosaics and sarcophagi, even the occasional silver spoon, in locations ranging from Somerset to

1

2

Prop. 2.34.66. Propertius’ fellow elegist Tibullus also seems to have paid tribute to the Aeneid before its publication: in his elegy 2.5, probably written shortly before Tibullus’ death in19 b c , a Sibyl foretells the future greatness of Rome to Aeneas, despondent after the fall of Troy. For a judicious discussion of Tibullus’ debt to Virgil see Murgatroyd (1994: 165–6). Kaster (1995: esp. 188–9).

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Halicarnassus.3 Schoolchildren and budding calligraphers in Egypt honed their writing skills by copying out a line of Virgil (Aeneid 2.601 non tibi Tyndaridis facies invisa Lacaenae) over and over.4 Several of the Eclogues and select episodes from the Aeneid were performed in theatres by actors of mime and pantomime, thereby both elevating the cultural position of those genres and advertising Virgil’s poetry to an audience that might otherwise have had little access to it.5 Educated Romans cited Virgilian tags with the same familiarity as English speakers quote Shakespeare; Suetonius relates that when the emperor Nero hesitated to take his own life in his desperate last moments, one of those with him asked, ‘Is it such a wretched thing to die?’ (usque adeone mori miserum est?), words addressed by Virgil’s Turnus to himself (Aen. 12.646). Virgil’s place in the development of an Augustan public discourse is harder to make out, but his depiction of Aeneas as a heroic founder figure almost certainly contributed to the prominence of Aeneas in major Augustan monuments such as the Ara Pacis (planned and built between 13 and 9 bc ) and the Forum of Augustus (completed in 2 bc ). In both settings Aeneas occupies a place visually equivalent to that of Romulus, and is no longer presented as a figure with partisan associations – as on some of Julius Caesar’s coins – but as a national icon. More speculatively, one might see a connection between the layout of the Forum of Augustus, in which galleries of Roman worthies implicitly point towards the greatness of the present, and the teleologically oriented pageants of Roman history in Aeneid 6 and 8.6 A close personal relationship with Augustus is itself a component of Virgil’s image in later times; evocations of one often involve the other, and changes in attitude towards one inevitably affect the interpretation of the other. The popularity of Virgil’s works naturally stimulated interest in the person of their author, and that interest is reflected in the relative fullness of the ancient biographical tradition regarding him. The most substantial of the extant lives, formally the work of Virgil’s great fourth-century commentator Aelius Donatus, in large part replicates the life published two centuries 3

4 5

6

Useful collection of material in Horsfall (2000b: 249–55). On Virgilian lines in Pompeian graffiti see Milnor (2014: esp. 233–72). She registers sixty-nine quotations, of which fifty-three come from the Aeneid. Dow (1968). Panayotakis (2008: 190–7). According to a delightful story related by Servius on Ecl. 6.11, when the Sixth Eclogue had been sung to great acclaim by the actress Cytheris (the mistress of Cornelius Gallus, aka ‘Lycoris’), Cicero, who was in the audience, was amazed (stupefactus) and asked who the author might be. The tale forges a link between the greatest writer of the late Republic and the leading representative of the new generation. Zanker (1988: 201–13).

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earlier by Suetonius in his De poetis, and Suetonius was able to draw on a substantial body of anecdotal and documentary material.7 Considered as biography in the usual sense, virtually no component of the Virgilian tradition is entirely free from the suspicion of having been embellished or even invented; indeed, the biographical picture may have been elaborated in part precisely to compensate for the personal reticence of Virgil’s writing.8 Ancient Virgilian biography can thus be most profitably seen as an aspect of Virgilian exegesis and reception, especially given the tendency of ancient literary biographers to transform elements of an author’s work into episodes of that author’s life.9 Most of the individual details furnished by the ancient biographies are harmless – some may even be true – but if taken as statements of fact they have the potential to exert a distorting influence from which critics of Virgil’s work must strive to remain free.10 A similar fascination with the life of the poet helps to account for some of the poems that circulated under Virgil’s name in antiquity.11 Many of these were written as long as a century after Virgil’s death and with no intention of passing for his work, but a few present themselves as Virgilian compositions. Among the latter is an epyllion called the Culex (‘The gnat’), a work of late Augustan or Tiberian date that was, amazingly, accepted as authentic by Lucan, Statius and Martial. In its proem the poet addresses a youth named Octavius (i.e. the future Augustus before his adoption by Julius Caesar) and offers him this literary trifle, promising to compose poetry of a more serious sort in the future. As Eduard Fraenkel showed, the author of the Culex adopts the persona of the young Virgil to fill an apparent gap in the poet’s literary career.12 Virgil’s genuine works described a steady ascent in poetic ambition, from bucolic to didactic to epic; but even the Eclogues were obviously the work of a fully mature poet, and ancient conceptions of a poet’s development suggested that they must have been preceded by 7

8 9

10

11

12

Edition of the ancient lives by Brugnoli and Stok (1997); text and translation in Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008). A sceptical discussion is offered by Horsfall (2000b: 1–25). See also Stok (2010). On ancient lives of the Greek poets, see Lefkowitz (2012) and Kivilo (2010). Several of the papers in Powell and Hardie (2017) move beyond debating the historical truth of the Virgilian lives. For an example see below, p. 257 (on connections between Virgil and Augustus); also Oliensis, below, p. 425 (on Virgil’s alleged homosexuality). A selection is found in modern editions such as Clausen et al. (1966) under the conventional title Appendix Vergiliana. Some of the individual items were mentioned as youthful works of Virgil by late antique commentators, but the collection as a whole corresponds closely to the contents of a now lost manuscript described in a ninthcentury catalogue of the library of Murbach. see Reeve (1983). On the Appendix see McGill, Chapter 4 in this volume. Fraenkel (1952).

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youthful efforts that dimly foretold the greatness to come. Homer had the Batrachomyomachia (‘Battle of frogs and mice’); Virgil now had the Culex.13 The analogy with Homer can be pursued more generally, since Homer provides the closest ancient parallel for the combination of literary prestige and popular recognition that characterizes Virgil’s reputation in antiquity.14 Virgil’s name was regularly coupled with Homer’s, as in the line of Propertius quoted earlier, which expresses a nationalistic pride in Rome’s having produced a poet worthy to challenge Homer. Sober Roman judges admitted that Virgil was not Homer’s equal – Quintilian, for example, approvingly cited the dictum of his teacher Domitius Afer that ‘Virgil comes second [to Homer], but is closer to first place than to third’15  – but his standing as Homerus alter16 was unquestioned, and accounts for certain features of his ancient reception. One of those is the attention devoted to Virgil’s text by ancient scholars and the continuity of such scholarly work from Virgil’s own time onward. Virgil was the first Roman poet to achieve canonical status after literary scholarship on the Alexandrian model had taken root in Rome, and his poetry quickly received the kind of philological analysis developed in Greek Homeric scholarship and previously applied to older Latin authors such as Plautus; this approach focused on establishing an authentic text by weighing variant readings, explicating difficulties and apparent inconsistencies, and commenting on features of language, especially anomalies.17 Those techniques might seem to have little relevance to criticism of a contemporary poet, but Virgil’s early death and the unfinished state of the Aeneid lent his text some of the indefinite quality appropriate to a more remote classic, and fuelled lively discussion (and perhaps invention) of possible authorial variants.18 Virgilian scholarship also aped its Homeric counterpart in its pedantic carping; the connection is made explicitly by Donatus, who remarked that Virgil, like Homer before him, never lacked detractors (obtrectatores).19 One hostile critic, a certain Carvilius Pictor, entitled a treatise Aeneidomastix 13

14 15 16 17 18

19

Peirano (2012) offers incisive readings of some other pseudo-Virgilian texts. On the shape of Virgil’s poetic career see Putnam (2010a) and Theodorakopoulos, Chapter 13 in this volume. Among later authors perhaps Dante comes closest – a highly suitable conjunction. Inst. 10.1.86. The phrase is Jerome’s, cf. Epist. 121.10. For the methods employed see Pfeiffer (1968) and, more recently, Montana (2015). For a sceptical assessment of the quality and integrity of ancient Virgilian textual scholarship, see Zetzel (1973) and (1981). Timpanaro (1986) takes a more charitable view. Vit. Don. 43 (probably based on Suetonius).

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(‘The scourge of the Aeneid’), echoing the title ‘Homeromastix’ given to Zoilus of Amphipolis for his obsession with alleged Homeric blunders. The work of these Virgilian obtrectatores – most of them shadowy figures even among the ranks of scholiasts – is no indication that Virgil’s authority was seriously challenged; indeed, the parallel with adverse criticism of Homer is the clearest admission of Virgil’s canonical status.20 Homer and Virgil, as the most widely familiar poets in their respective cultures, also shared the honour of parody and whimsical quotation. The practice of giving Virgilian phrases a new point by citing them out of context, which began in Virgil’s own lifetime, found especially skilled exponents in the Neronian period:  Seneca applies non passibus aequis (Aen. 2.724, describing the ‘unequal steps’ of the child Ascanius relative to those of his father) to the limping emperor Claudius (Apocol. 1.2), and Petronius conflates lines relating to Dido and Nisus and Euryalus into a mock-heroic description of the unresponsive penis of his narrator Encolpius.21 Such isolated quotation foreshadows the poetic cento, in which lines or halflines of a famous poet were stitched together to form a new composition.22 A Homeric pastiche in a speech by Dio Chrysostom shows an embryonic stage of the genre,23 but the earliest extant specimens are in Latin and several are based on Virgil.24 It appears to have been a rule of the game that the text produced should be on a subject that differed entirely from that of the original – sometimes shockingly so, as in the description of sexual intercourse that concludes Ausonius’ Cento nuptialis.25 The cento gave modestly gifted writers an opportunity for the kind of variatio in handling a classic text that stronger poets created for themselves. The diversity of subjects also fostered the notion that the source material had a universal character;

20 21

22 23

24 25

See Görler (1985: 807–13); Farrell (2010). Sat. 132.11, illa solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat, | nec magis incepto vultum sermone movebat [= Aen. 6.469–70] quam lentae salices lassove papavera collo [= Ecl. 5.16 + Aen. 9.436]. Encolpius is depicted as having had a good literary education, so his use of Virgilian material is an instance of conscious irony. See Crusius (1899); Lamacchia (1984). Or. 32.82–5, probably delivered during the reign of Vespasian. See Jones (1978: 40, 134). On the Virgilian centos, see McGill (2005). Edition by Green (1999), excerpts in Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008: 472–5). The same Virgilian phrase, pedibus per mutua nexis (Aen. 7.66), describing bees’ intertwined feet, was redeployed by Ausonius of lovers’ entangled legs and applied by the Christian cento writer Proba to Christ’s feet being nailed to the cross. See Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008: 479). On Proba, see below, p. 60 (Christian poetry during the reign of Constantine).

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Virgil’s work thus becomes a sort of ‘master poem’ containing the seeds of an infinite number of other poems.26 II Some works of literature create an immediate impetus for similar writings; for example, Cornelius Gallus’ elegiac collection of love poetry, the Amores, spawned a body of love elegy by Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Others deter imitation, either by the weight of their authority or because they appear to exhaust for the moment the possibilities of a given genre. To varying degrees, each of Virgil’s works seems to have had a repressive effect of this kind; while none of the genres involved remained unexplored by later writers, no poetry in those genres directly inspired by his work is known to have appeared for at least two generations (with the partial exception of Ovid’s Ars amatoria). Even then the imitators are relatively minor figures, such as the Neronian bucolic poets Calpurnius Siculus and the unknown author of the Einsiedeln Eclogues, who took up Virgil’s use of pastoral as a framework for dealing with contemporary events, but employed it in a more blatantly panegyrical vein.27 It is not surprising that the Georgics had no immediate followers:  Virgil’s transformation of the didactic genre, though profound, was less overt than his reshaping of bucolic or epic, and his Greek didactic predecessors Nicander and Aratus continued to serve as models for poets in subsequent generations. The Aeneid, on the other hand, may have been too conspicuously innovative to be easily imitated; in any event, Virgil’s thoroughgoing fusion of mythological epic and poetry on themes from Roman history remained essentially unique, and later poets continued to treat the mythological and the historical as distinct forms of epic writing.28 Virgil’s strongest poetic contemporaries, Horace and Propertius, kept their generic distance from him, while registering the disturbance in the literary atmosphere produced by his successively more imposing works. For both poets, the influence of Virgil is most clearly visible in works written in the years immediately following the publication of the Aeneid. Horace gave 26

27

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From here it is but one intelligible step to endow his text with the power to predict the future, the origins of the practice of taking the sortes Vergilianae. On the Christian view of Virgil as a prophet, see below, p. 59. I tentatively call Calpurnius a Neronian writer, but the case for dating him much later, to the Severan period, is not negligible. See Champlin (1978) and Horsfall (1993: 270). So, for example, the Heracleid, Posthomerica, and Perseid (all lost) mentioned by Ovid in Pont. 4.16.7, 19, 25 and the historical epics of Rabirius and Cornelius Severus (also lost). While the mythological poems may have contained historical references and vice versa, none of these works is likely to have resembled the Aeneid. Lucan’s Bellum civile is another matter. See below.

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Aeneas as proto-founder of Rome a central place in his Carmen Saeculare, a hymn commissioned by Augustus for the Ludi Saeculares celebrated in 17 bc  – a commission that might have gone to Virgil had he lived – and Aeneas also appears conspicuously in two poems of Horace’s second collection of lyrics, Odes 4.29 Propertius’ final collection of elegies, usually dated to 16 bc or slightly later, contains descriptions of the Underworld enriched by the account of Aeneas’ journey in Aeneid Book 6;30 it also seems likely that the proliferation of female speakers in that collection is an early response to the Dido of Aeneid Book 4.  On the whole, though, Virgilian influence in Horace and Propertius is subordinate to other factors in their development, such as Horace’s evolving role as a public poet and consequent handling of Augustan themes, and Propertius’ interest in aetiology and in an enlarged conception of elegy’s poetic range. The case is different with Ovid. Born in 43 bc , he was not yet in his teens at the time of Actium, and still in his early twenties when Virgil died. Just as he was the first Roman poet to regard the Augustan Principate as an established fact, he was also the first for whom the poetic career of Virgil is a given rather than a gradual discovery, and the first to see it as paradigmatic.31 His earliest published collection of poems, the elegiac Amores, opens with a poem in which Ovid is deflected from epic to elegy when Amor mischievously removes a metrical foot from the second line of his work in progress. The elegy (and presumably the imagined epic) begins with arma, and an allusion to the Aeneid seems inescapable.32 Since Ovid, unlike other elegists, does not portray himself as unfit for grander themes, and since his service as a writer of elegy is from the outset seen as temporary, the Virgilian echo may signal a desire to emulate Virgil by rising through the genres to epic. Certainly imitation (in parodic form) of the Georgics is one of the motivating forces of the mock-didactic Ars amatoria, a mid-career work, while Ovid’s largest and most ambitious work, the Metamorphoses, is in several senses a response to and a counterpart of the Aeneid. (Ovid clinches the connection by claiming that he burned a copy – though not, he wryly adds, the only copy – of the Metamorphoses when he was sent into exile, a clear reference to Virgil’s reported deathbed attempt to destroy the

29

30 31

32

Odes 4.7.15, 4.15.31–2. Thomas (2001: 65–73) considers Horace the first of many readers of Virgil to see him through an Augustan lens. Elegies, 4.7.55–68, 87–92; 4.11.15–26. Though Ovid was not the last. See Conte (1994a: 289–90). On Ovid’s Virgilian career, see also Farrell (2004). The Amores, as transmitted, are a revised version in three books of an original five books, which began to appear in the late 20s b c ; the Virgilian echo in 1.1.1 is almost certainly a product of the revision.

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Aeneid.)33 While observing all the stages of the Virgilian cursus, Ovid characteristically went several steps further, adding tragedy (the lost Medea) and aetiological poetry (the Fasti), and (with some help from Augustus) creating the genre of exile poetry. Whatever its genre, Ovid’s writing is suffused with Virgilian reminiscences, often paraded rather than concealed. To take a programmatic example, Ovid’s lovelorn Echo bids farewell to the dying Narcissus in a line that is itself an echo and an ‘improvement’ of a line from the Eclogues:  compare Metamorphoses 3.501, dictoque ‘vale’ ‘vale’ inquit et Echo (‘when he said, “farewell”, “farewell”, said Echo too’), and Eclogue 3.79, longum ‘formose, vale, vale’, inquit ‘Iolla’ (‘long did she say, “farewell, farewell, beautiful Iollas” ’). The repeated vale (with shifting metrical treatment of the second syllable), a slightly mannered pathetic feature of the Virgilian passage, becomes in Ovid both the final word of Narcissus and the last reply of Echo. The allusion acknowledges Virgil’s place as model (thereby casting Ovid in the role of a ‘mere’ echo) while demonstrating Ovid’s originality (thus showing the echo metaphor to be ironic).34 Ovid’s appropriations of Virgilian language usually contain an element of mischief, often transposing material from solemn contexts to humorous or disreputable settings. One example is the notorious quotation of hoc opus, hic labor est (‘this is the labor, this the task’, Aeneid 6.129, the Sibyl to Aeneas on returning from the Underworld) to describe the difficulty of sleeping with a woman without having given her presents beforehand (Ars 1.453); another is the even bolder (and generally unnoticed) appearance of details from Dido’s death agony  – heavy eyes, futile attempts to rise, leaning on one elbow – in the droll description of Somnus shaking himself awake.35 Ovid clearly relishes the challenge of stealing Hercules’ club,36 but even his most impish reworkings are at the same time a means of artistic self-assertion; by showing that the most authoritative poetic language – that of Virgil – is at every point open to reuse and reimagining, Ovid creates the space and the freedom to articulate his own very different vision. The agonistic quality in Ovid’s relation to Virgil becomes more overt when Ovid comes into contact with Virgilian subject matter; here his need

33 34 35

36

Tr. 1.7.15ff. Cf. Vit. Don. 39. See Krevans (2010: esp. 206–8). On this passage, see Wills (1996: 347). Aen. 4.688ff., illa gravis oculos conata attollere rursus | deficit … | ter sese attollens cubitoque adnixa levavit, | ter revoluta toro est; Met. 11.618ff., tarda … gravitate iacentes | vix oculos tollens iterumque iterumque relabens | … excussit tandem sibi se cubitoque levatus, etc. Allegedly Virgil’s own image for taking a line out of Homer. Cf. Vit. Don. 46; Macrob. Sat. 5.23.16.

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to assert poetic equality takes the form of revisionism. Where this entails confronting Virgil directly, as in the letter of Dido to Aeneas (Heroides 7), the result is arguably less than successful: Ovid gives Dido a blatantly accusatory and point-scoring approach to a situation for which Virgil had already provided her with powerfully moving rhetoric, and risks seeming merely strident by comparison.37 By contrast, Ovid’s way of dealing with Aeneas and the Aeneid in the Metamorphoses, though hardly subtle, is highly effective.38 Aeneas has an important structural function in Ovid’s poem, as the hinge that moves the narrative from Troy to Italy in its final books, but Ovid is determined to make Aeneas a subsidiary or even a marginal figure. The thread of his story is constantly interrupted in favour of less familiar (usually erotic) plots, the most famous episodes in his Virgilian career – his affair with Dido and his journey to the Underworld – are each reduced to bald four-line summaries (Met. 14.78–81, 116–19), and his climactic battle with Turnus is treated as just one more instance of a war fought over a stolen bride (Met. 14.450–1, compare 5.10, 12.5). By subsuming Aeneas into the Metamorphoses in this way, Ovid subordinates Virgil’s epic to his own poem, which can thus claim to be the more truly comprehensive work. This response to the Aeneid operates on the ideological as well as the literary level: just as Aeneas as a character is deprived of the centrality given him by Virgil, the logic of constant change that governs the Metamorphoses has no room for the distinctness and permanence forecast for the Roman state by the Aeneid.39 III The shifting literary tastes of the mid- and late first century ad are reflected in the treatment of Virgil’s poetry. Even among modernist Neronians, Virgil’s canonical status was not affected, but their different stylistic preferences and their self-confidence made them openly critical of him in a way not seen before. Seneca, for example, accused Virgil of inserting uncouth archaisms into his poetry to please a public that still idolized Ennius as a model of

37

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For some specific connections between Aeneid 4 and Heroides 7, see Tarrant (2002: 25); for a more sympathetic reading of Ovid’s letter, see Casali (2004–5). For another angle on Ovid’s Aeneid, see Hinds (1998: 104–22). The most explicit statement of that logic comes in the speech of Pythagoras in Book 15. To illustrate the rise and fall of nations, Pythagoras contrasts Troy (once great, now in ruins) with Rome (now small, but destined for greatness). Rome will be more powerful than any nation yet seen, but Ovid/Pythagoras stops short of predicting that it will last forever (Met. 15.420–35).

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epic diction.40 Just as Cicero seemed bland and long-winded to a generation grown accustomed to the pointed declamatory style,41 Virgil’s manner might have struck admirers of Ovidian epigram as ponderous and lacking in polish. By contrast, the neoclassical reaction of the Flavian period, as represented by its professorial spokesman Quintilian, firmly placed Virgil at the head of Latin poets, demoted Ovid to the role of gifted but self-indulgent trifler, and singled out Seneca for particular execration.42 Quintilian’s capsule judgements have been so often quoted, and so closely correspond to what has long been conventional wisdom, that it is easy to ignore their polemical and tendentious aspects. Perhaps precisely because of their critical attitude towards Virgil, the Neronian writers’ engagement with him is particularly intense. As at other periods, that engagement is as much ideological as literary; since Nero was, for a time at least, heralded as a new, improved version of Augustus, the Augustan component of Virgil’s poetry offered a stimulus for competitive imitation. The extravagant hopes that attended Nero’s accession found a natural poetic outlet in the Golden Age imagery of the Fourth Eclogue, and the writer of the Second Einsiedeln Eclogue quotes the words tuus iam regnat Apollo (‘your Apollo now reigns’, Ecl. 4.10), applying them to Nero.43 The companion piece to that poem enlists Virgil himself in Nero’s praises: when Mantua hears Nero perform his poem on the Fall of Troy, she is moved to destroy her own writings (48–9). Virgil is inextricably bound to Augustus in defining the canon of imperial virtue which Nero is said to surpass. The most significant poetry of the period, however, Seneca’s tragedies and Lucan’s Bellum civile, responds to Virgil in a grimmer spirit. In Seneca’s depictions of extreme emotional states and his horrific portrayal of the destructive power of passion, the darker side of Virgil’s view of human nature finds a more hellish, apocalyptic expression. The final scene of the Aeneid in particular, it has been argued, impressed itself upon Seneca’s imagination

40

41 42

43

From one of the lost books of Epistulae morales, cited by Aulus Gellius 12.2.10. Seneca’s comment appears to be aimed specifically at the hypermetric verses found occasionally in the Georgics and the Aeneid; oddly enough, no such lines are found in the surviving fragments of Ennius, and Virgil himself accounts for more than half the extant examples in classical Latin. In deference to Virgil, the Flavian epic writers Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus both permit themselves one hypermetric line. As shown by the remarks of M. Aper in Tacitus’ Dialogus 22–3. Inst. 10.1.88 (Ovid), 10.1.125–31 (Seneca). In Petronius Sat. 118.5, the mediocre poet Eumolpus, deprecating the sententious style (as found, for example, in Lucan), adduces Homer, Virgil, and Horace as models of proper procedure. A more skilful use of similar material can be seen in Seneca’s Apocol. 4.1. For a later allusion to Ecl. 4.10 in an imperial context see below, p. 60 (Constantine eulogized as Apollo reborn).

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as an archetypal account of pietas overwhelmed by ira.44 In Thyestes, arguably Seneca’s most powerful tragedy and certainly the most overtly Roman in its atmosphere,45 Virgilian reminiscence takes on an important thematic function. The play opens with a scene in which the shade of Tantalus is forced by a Fury to infect the home of his descendants. The Virgilian model is the appearance of the Fury Allecto to Turnus in Aeneid 7, the starting point for the conflict between Trojans and Latins that dominates the second half of the epic. By invoking Virgil in this way, Seneca lends his own story of fraternal strife some of the Roman resonance of his source.46 A later allusion to the same book of the Aeneid is yet more pointed. The palace of Atreus, in whose innermost recess Thyestes’ children are killed and prepared to be eaten by their father, is described in terms that unmistakably recall the palace of Latinus (Thy. 641ff., cf. Aen. 7.170ff.). Since Virgil’s lines were thought in antiquity to refer to the house of Augustus on the Palatine,47 one might conclude that Seneca is contrasting the depraved present with the Virgilian ideal of imperial authority. Alternatively, on a more pessimistic reading, the allusion might imply that the Augustan past is not wholly alien to the horrors of the present. The use of Virgil (and specifically Virgil regarded as the voice of Augustan ideology) as a means of articulating a contemporary political viewpoint would seem to apply even more fully to Lucan’s historical epic. Lucan’s impassioned meditation on the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, and the loathing for Caesar and his legacy that becomes more pronounced as the poem proceeds, have traditionally been linked to the opposition to Nero that eventually cost Lucan his life. The connection may be valid, but seeing the Bellum civile as merely a literary reflex of Lucan’s political activism has had a reductive effect on its interpretation, hindering awareness of the poem’s ambiguities and contradictions.48 Whatever the relation between Lucan’s epic and his political views, the Aeneid occupies a central place in Lucan’s project, and much of the poem constitutes a bitterly disillusioned rewriting of the Virgilian myth of Rome’s past and future – what has often been called an ‘anti-Aeneid’.49 44 45

46

47 48

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So Putnam (1995: 246–85). It is also one of the few Senecan plays that can with some confidence be called Neronian in the literal sense. See Tarrant (1985: 10–13); on Roman elements, 48. Schiesaro (1994: 200–2). Since Virgil’s Trojans and Latins are destined to make up a single people, the war between them is a metaphorical civil war. So Servius on Aen. 7.170, presumably echoing earlier commentators. See Masters (1992, 1994). Something comparable has taken place with Virgil and the Aeneid, see below, pp. 257–8 (on assuming that Virgil was a ‘client’ of Augustus and that the Aeneid must therefore have been straightforwardly Augustan). See Casali (2011) for a nuanced discussion.

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Detailed encounters with Virgil’s text pervade the Bellum civile, beginning with its prologue, seven lines corresponding exactly in length to the opening of the Aeneid:50 Bella per Emathios plus quam civilia campos iusque datum sceleri canimus, populumque potentem in sua victrici conversum viscera dextra cognatasque acies et rupto foedere regni certatum totis concussi viribus orbis in commune nefas infestisque obvia signis signa, pares aquilas et pila minantia pilis. Of wars across Emathian plains, worse than civil wars, and of legality conferred on crime we sing, and of a mighty people attacking its own guts with victorious sword-hand, of kin facing kin, and, once the pact of tyranny was broken, of conflict waged with all the forces of the shaken world for universal guilt, and of standards raised in enmity against standards, of eagles matched and javelins threatening javelins. (Lucan Bellum civile 1.1–7, trans. S. Braund) Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram, multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem inferretque deos Latio; genus unde Latinum Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae. Wars and a man I sing – an exile driven on by Fate, he was the first to flee the coast of Troy, destined to reach Lavinian shores and Italian soil, yet many blows he took on land and sea from the gods above – thanks to cruel Juno’s relentless rage – and many losses he bore in battle too, before he could found a city, bring his gods to Latium, source of the Latin race, the Alban lords and the high walls of Rome. (Aen. 1.1–7, trans. R. Fagles) 50

A scholion on this passage (perhaps derived from Suetonius) asserts that Lucan’s poem originally began with 1.8, quis furor, o cives, and that the proem was composed by Seneca after Lucan’s death. In a way that might have pleased Lucan, the story conflates two motifs found in the Virgilian biographical tradition, ‘poem left unfinished at poet’s death and edited by others’ and ‘original beginning of poem different from standard text’ (in Virgil’s case, the notion that the original opening of the Aeneid, Ille ego qui quondam, had been deleted by his editors Varius and Tucca). See Conte (1966).

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Virgil’s introduction encapsulates the movement of the poem as a whole from Troy (1) to Rome (7); the process is difficult and several times thwarted by Juno’s opposition, but issues in ultimate triumph. Lucan negates any sense of progression, obsessively repeating with variation the single idea of civil war. The repetitiveness of Lucan’s opening, which was criticized in the following century by Fronto, thus has thematic value, but it also points up Lucan’s conscious stylistic distancing from Virgil. In place of Virgil’s dense and highly wrought manner (the result, according to the biographers, of a painstakingly slow writing process), from the start Lucan gives the impression of having written at furious speed, relying on emotive language and pointed epigrams to engage his readers. The absence of references to the gods or to a mythological background is programmatic: Lucan rigorously demystifies Virgil’s conception of Roman history and so denies Caesar the ennobling effects of a divine origin and Trojan forebears.51 Though studiously un-Virgilian in mood and style, Lucan’s opening contains a clear echo of the Aeneid that illustrates in a nutshell his inversion of Virgil’s outlook. The words populumque potentem | in sua victrici conversum viscera dextra recall the plea of Anchises in the Underworld to the yet-unborn Caesar and Pompey to refrain from civil war: ne, pueri, ne tanta animis adsuescite bella | neu patriae validas in viscera vertite vestra (‘do not, my sons, make such wars familiar to your minds, nor turn your mighty strength against your country’s guts’, Aen. 6.832–3). Anchises’ appeal was, of course, destined to fail; Virgil acknowledges the failure but subsumes it in a larger historical context, while Lucan refuses to see beyond the event and its catastrophic consequences. Revision of a similar kind but on a larger scale animates Lucan’s depiction of Romans in the Underworld, placed in strict parallelism with Virgil’s at the end of the Aeneid’s Sixth Book;52 there civil war divides the shades too, while Catiline, loosed from the eternal punishment to which Virgil had consigned him on the shield of Aeneas, rejoices at the coming victory of the demagogue Caesar.53

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On Lucan’s proem see more fully Roche (2009: 92–7). BC 6.777–820, cf. Aen. 6.756–859. The structural parallel is one argument for believing that Lucan planned an epic in twelve books. If so, the most plausible concluding point would have been the suicide of Cato, an act of liberation from Caesarian tyranny corresponding to the killing of Turnus by Aeneas, which had made that tyranny possible. BC 6.793–4: abruptis Catilina minax fractisque catenis | exultat. Cf. Aen. 8.668–9: et te, Catilina, minaci | pendentem scopulo Furiarumque ora trementem. The verbal echo underscores the change in Catiline’s position.

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The most puzzling passage in Lucan’s poem, the ostensibly panegyrical address to Nero that follows the statement of the theme, is a sustained allusion to the invocation of Octavian at the start of the Georgics, and some of its problems result from Lucan’s use of that model. The appearance in an epic of an invocation in a radically different mode raises questions of generic propriety; furthermore, the disastrous subject of the poem which the princeps is called upon to inspire makes Nero’s involvement far more troubling than Octavian’s. Virgil treats the future divinity of his addressee with amiable irony, while Lucan’s more extravagant portrait of Nero as a god must be read either as straight panegyric or as bitterly sarcastic.54 However the passage is understood, it takes Virgil’s praise of Octavian as a norm that it characteristically subverts. In the Flavian period Virgil becomes a monument in the literal sense: Silius Italicus visited the poet’s alleged resting place as if it were a shrine (and apparently purchased the property, as he had one of Cicero’s villas), and Statius portrays himself as ‘singing by the side of the great master’s tomb’ (magni tumulis accanto magistri, Silv. 4.4.55).55 Such reverential gestures helped create an image of Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus as mere epigones, content (as the penultimate line of Statius’ Thebaid puts it) to ‘follow the Aeneid at a distance and worshipfully trace its footsteps’.56 Recent criticism has revealed in these poets a more active and genuinely emulous form of engagement with Virgil’s work,57 and Statius’ concluding reference to the Aeneid can now be seen as suggesting the exalted company he wished his poem to keep in the eyes of posterity.58 Still, by comparison with Ovid and Lucan, the Flavian approach to epic after the Aeneid is more accommodating than confrontational. By choosing precisely the type of epic subject that Virgil had rejected (the myths of Thebes and the Argonauts, the youthful exploits of Achilles, safely remote Roman history), they avoid challenging him directly and give themselves space within which to work freely. Their relationship to Virgil is nicely figured by 54

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The hostile reading is expounded by, e.g. Feeney (1993: 298–301), and the opposite interpretation by Dewar (1994). Roche (2009: 7–9) inclines towards the former view. For Silius’ devotion to Virgil, see Pliny, Epist. 3.7; Martial 1.48 (also Pun. 8.596–7). Theb. 12.816–17, nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, | sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora. Hardie (1993) remains fundamental. So also at Theb. 10.445–8, where he hopes (in vain, as it happened) that two of his characters will enjoy renown as ‘comrades’ (comites) of the shades of Nisus and Euryalus. Statius’ lines occupy the same numerical position in their book as Virgil’s famous salute to Nisus and Euryalus (fortunati ambo!, etc.) at Aen. 9. 446–9, since line 121 in the modern numbering of Aeneid 9 appears in no ancient codex and so was not known to Statius.

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a passage in the first book of the Argonautica, where Valerius’ Jason urges his men  – in almost the same words previously used by Aeneas  – to perform deeds ‘that it will be a pleasure to remember and that may inspire our descendants’ (quae meminisse iuvet nostrisque nepotibus instent, 1.249, cf. Aen. 1.203: forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, ‘perhaps one day it will be a pleasure to remember even these things’) – a suitable image for these poets’ efforts to achieve something memorable after Virgil while using the poetic means that Virgil had fashioned. Literary influence, however, is hardly ever unmediated, and as Virgil read Homer in the light of Hellenistic poetry and exegesis, the Flavians’ evocation of Virgil is filtered through an awareness of Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan. Valerius follows Lucan in addressing the princeps as a source of epic inspiration, and Statius’ announcement of the Thebaid’s subject of brotherly strife, fraternas acies, is indebted to Lucan in both content and wording. Silius’ subject, the Second Punic War, occupies a space between that of the Aeneid and the Bellum civile: his poem supplements Virgil by narrating the conflict between Rome and Carthage foretold in Dido’s curse (Aen. 4.622ff.), and anticipates Lucan by depicting the seeds of the moral decline which was thought to have culminated in the fall of the Republic.59 Statius offers an especially striking instance of mediated influence in his description of the Fury Tisiphone’s appearance in the first book of the Thebaid: while recalling Allecto’s maddening of Turnus in Aeneid 7, the scene draws its sense of cosmic disintegration from the prologue of Seneca’s Thyestes, which is itself strongly shaped by the same episode of the Aeneid.60 As that example suggests, their post-Neronian perspective on Virgil may help to explain why the Flavians (Statius in particular) seem so responsive to the darker aspects of the Aeneid. In addition, the fact that Virgil had admitted irrational and chaotic forces into his poem but had not given them free rein made fuller exploration of that area a natural step for a successor. Already in the Aeneid, pietas is under constant threat and is only imperfectly realized; in the Thebaid it has lost all ability to restrain characters who inhabit a world dominated by nefas.61 Contemporary anxieties may have played a part in shaping this pessimistic outlook, although clear evidence of political subtexts is not easily found. Whatever the cause, the Flavian treatment of Virgil offers further evidence that the ambivalence which much modern criticism finds in Virgil’s poetry is also present in the responses of 59

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Feeney (1993: 302). Ganiban (2010) explores Silius’ use of Virgil’s Dido in his depiction of Hannibal. Feeney (1993: 347). See also above p. 53 (on echoes of Aeneid 7 in the first scene of Thyestes). Ganiban (2007).

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his earliest ancient readers. (It is another question – and one with which the study of Virgil’s reception continues to grapple – whether any ancient reader attributed to Virgil himself ambivalence of the sort that many modern critics have found in his work.)62 One of the most perceptive of those readers was the historian Tacitus; the ‘sympathetic assimilation’ of Virgil that Tacitus’ greatest modern interpreter describes63 is due at least in part to a sympathy of outlook, since Tacitus is perhaps Virgil’s only equal among Roman writers in what Keats called ‘negative capability’, the capacity for holding contradictory views in tension.64 Virgilian colouring often heightens Tacitus’ narrative, but it is applied with such skill that specific reference is not usually detectable, still less any crude equation between characters in the respective works.65 On the rare occasions when Tacitus points to a particular Virgilian passage, the effect is correspondingly more powerful:  for example, the mordant irony with which Virgil’s description of Dido in the Underworld, among those who had wasted away from unhappy love, is evoked by Tiberius’ condemnation of his former wife Julia to a lingering death in exile.66 The obituary of Galba in the Histories begins hunc exitum habuit Servius Galba (‘this was the end of Servius Galba’, 1.49.2), recalling Virgil’s summingup on Priam, haec finis Priami fatorum, hic exitus illum | sorte tulit (‘this was the close of Priam’s destiny, this the allotted end that took him off’, Aen. 2.554–5) and capping a series of allusions that aligns Galba and Priam in their murder and decapitation. As Tacitus knew, Virgil’s description of Priam’s headless body had been read as a reference to Pompey; his account of Galba looks back through Virgil’s Priam to Pompey, thereby suggesting the repetitive nature of civil war.67 A yet more complex interaction with Virgil involves Tacitus’ reworking of Georgics 4.6 in tenui labor; at tenuis non gloria (‘slight is my field of labour, but not slight the glory’) in Annals 4.32.2 as in arto et inglorius labor (‘my labour is in a narrow field and without glory’). Virgil had asserted that the apparently 62

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As Casali (2011: 17) asks, ‘to what extent does Lucan knock Virgil down, and to what extent does he, instead, develop cracks and fissures, which were already recognized in Virgil?’ Syme (1957: 357–8). On Virgil’s ‘strategy of contradiction’, see Conte (2007: 150–69). Goodyear (1981: 200 n. 1, 243–4). Ann. 1.53.2, inopia ac tabe longa peremit. Cf. Aen. 6.442, hic quos durus amor crudeli tabe peredit. Damon (2010: 382–3); Joseph (2012: 79–85). Virgil’s lines on Priam had already been echoed by Lucan in his account of the death of Pompey; as Joseph (85) neatly puts it, ‘Lucan seizes on and perpetuates the image [i.e. of Priam’s headless corpse], turning Virgil’s Pompeian Priam into a Priam-like Pompey.’

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slight subject matter of this book (i.e. beekeeping) would yield no slight fame; Tacitus affects to complain that the unappealing topics open to him as a historian of Tiberius’ rule cramp his efforts and deny them glory. (It will not have escaped Tacitus’ notice that it was the Augustan Principate celebrated by Virgil which in his own view inaugurated the change he is ostensibly lamenting.) At another level, however, Tacitus sees himself engaged in a task similar to Virgil’s, drawing out the larger significance of events that appear trivial or unmemorable, and can therefore implicitly forecast a similar renown for his work.68 IV In the most famous expression of Christian anxiety about its relation to classical literature, Jerome relates a dream in which he found himself haled before the divine judgement seat to hear the dread accusation Ciceronianus es, non Christianus (Epist. 22.30). It is difficult to imagine this scene replayed with Virgil’s name instead of Cicero’s, and not simply for reasons of assonance. By Jerome’s time, Virgil had become the common property of pagans and Christians – a situation symbolized by the fact that Jerome himself, like his contemporary Servius, was a student of Virgil’s commentator Aelius Donatus.69 This position is only in part due to Virgil’s now customary place at the heart of literary education, as one of the quadriga of authors studied most universally, since the other members of that quartet – Terence, Cicero, and Sallust – did not attain the same degree of acceptance among Christians. None of those authors, however, could be claimed as a vehicle of divine inspiration, as had been done for Virgil a century before Jerome. Lactantius appears to have been the first writer to see in the wondrous child of the Fourth Eclogue a prophecy of the birth of Jesus, but that reading received its most explicit statement from the emperor Constantine himself in his ‘Speech to the Assembly of the Saints’, an extraordinary Good Friday sermon delivered in the early 320s.70 By its use of Virgil, Constantine’s speech implicitly acknowledged the place of classical 68

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Syme (1957: 339 n. 2): ‘what he wished to suggest, but could not claim, was “in tenui labor; at tenuis non gloria” ’. For a scrupulous Christian – or a Christian in a scrupulous frame of mind – even reading the Aeneid could elicit pangs of conscience. Augustine thought Virgil preeminent among poets (CD 1.3, magnus poeta omniumque praeclarissimus), but could still upbraid himself for being concerned with Aeneas and Dido rather than the state of his soul (Conf. 1.13.20). On Virgil and Augustine, see also Clark, Chapter 5 in this volume. For the speech and its date, see Barnes (1981: 73–6), who defends the transmitted text as essentially Constantinian.

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culture in his new empire, while at the same time clothing his Christianized regime in the prestige of that culture’s leading literary exponent. Whether coincidentally or not, Constantine’s reign was especially rich in the composition of Christian poetry that takes Virgil as its formal model, including the most ambitious of the Virgilian centos, by the aristocratic lady Proba, and the first biblical epic, Juvencus’ Evangelia.71 In his preface (17–18) Juvencus cites Virgil along with Homer as the epic forerunners destined to be surpassed by his own work; thus begins a new phase in Virgil’s reception, a new stimulus for competitive imitation that would continue for more than a millennium. As it happens, the ‘Speech to the Assembly of the Saints’ was not Constantine’s first encounter with the Fourth Eclogue. A dozen years earlier, before his adoption of Christianity, he had been eulogized in strictly classical terms by an orator who attributed to him a vision of Apollo in which he had recognized himself, the youthful saviour and world ruler sung of in the ‘divine poems of bards’ (vatum carmina divina). The discreetly phrased reference is to Eclogue 4.10, tuus iam regnat Apollo (‘your Apollo now rules’), a text that would soon be regarded as a ‘divine poem’ in a very different sense.72 The contrasting citations show Virgil assisting at one of the formative events in the history of the West, and illustrate the conjunction of his poetry with imperial ideology that is a recurring feature of his ancient reception. FURTHER READING There is no comprehensive study of Virgil’s ancient reception. The Enciclopedia virgiliana contains entries (some quite substantial) on all major Latin authors in relation to Virgil, with extensive bibliography; shorter entries with select bibliography can be found in Thomas and Ziolkowski (2014). Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008) is a rich anthology of primary sources touching on several aspects of Virgilian reception, including references in contemporary and later Latin authors, ancient lives and commentaries, centos and parodies, and responses to particular works, episodes and characters. On the Virgilian biographical tradition, see Horsfall (2000b) (highly sceptical), Stok (2010) (less so), and Powell and Hardie (2017). Contrasting

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Edition of Proba by Lucarini and Fassina (2015); translation of Juvencus by McGill (2016). Pan. lat. 6 (7).21.5. See also Barnes (1981: 36 n. 72).

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estimates of the character of ancient scholarship on the text of Virgil are offered by Zetzel (1973, 1981) and Timpanaro (1986). Much scholarship in recent years has studied the reception of Virgil by his younger contemporaries and writers of the Neronian and Flavian periods; only a few representative items can be mentioned here. On Virgil and his epic successors, Hardie (1993) and Feeney (1993) remain essential; Barnes (2000) gives a well-documented overview. Thomas (2001) focuses on Horace, Ovid and Lucan and the construction of an ‘Augustan’ Virgil. For Ovid, see also Kenney (1973), Hinds (1998: 104–22), Tarrant (2002), Thomas (2009) and the excellent studies of Casali (2004–5, 2006). Virgil’s influence on Senecan tragedy is investigated by Putnam (1995) and Trinacty (2014). On Lucan’s response to the Aeneid in his Bellum civile, see Roche (2009) and Casali (2011). A  resurgence of interest in Flavian epic has produced numerous studies of its links to Virgil. Ganiban (2007) offers a sustained reading of Statius’ Thebaid as a pessimistic reinterpretation of the Aeneid, while more specific uses of Virgil are explored by Ganiban (2010, 2014), Pagán (2015) and Gervais (2017). Tacitus’ use of Virgil is ably studied by Joseph (2012). In addition, many commentaries on post-Virgilian authors record and discuss echoes and allusions to Virgil; these discussions can usually be accessed through an index locorum. Rees (2004) brings together a dozen essays on aspects of Virgil’s reception in the fourth century ad ; the authors discussed include both poets (Juvencus, Claudian, Avienus, Prudentius, Ausonius) and prose writers (the Panegyrici, Ambrose, Augustine, the Historia Augusta). The pioneering work of Hagendahl (1958) on Virgil and Latin patristic writers is still useful, while Courcelle (1984) offers a fuller study of late antique readers of the Aeneid. On Virgil and Augustine, Wills (2010) is a good short treatment, while MacCormack (1998) subtly probes Virgil’s role in shaping Augustine’s imagination. Virgil’s unique standing in late antique culture is physically manifested in the seven codices written between about 400 and the middle of the sixth century ad that are at least partially extant; good short discussion of these can be found in Wright (2014). Two of these codices feature illustrations: the socalled ‘Vatican Virgil’, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana lat. 3225, see Wright (1993), and the Vergilius Romanus, BAV lat. 3867, see Wright (2001). These were deluxe copies, far grander than the single surviving late antique codices of Plautus, Terence, and Livy. The grandest of all, now each represented by only a few leaves, are a manuscript preserved at the monastery of St Gall and another whose surviving folios are divided between the Vatican and the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. With a lavishly spacious layout that had room 61

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for only thirteen or fourteen lines per page, these books would have been far too heavy to hold in the hand, and were instead designed for display on a stand. The script employed, known as Square Capital, was otherwise reserved for the most imposing of inscriptions  – a literal instance of the monumentalizing of Virgil’s text.

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4 S C OT T M C GI L L

The Appendix Vergiliana

In his fourth-century biography of Virgil, Aelius Donatus quotes an epitaph in elegiac couplets that Virgil supposedly wrote for himself:  Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc | Parthenope. cecini pascua rura duces (Mantua gave birth to me, the Calabrians snatched me away, Naples now holds me; I sang of pastures, fields, leaders, VSD 36). The epitaph captures with lean economy Virgil’s literary career, with the metonyms pascua rura duces representing, in order, the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid. But the story of that career is not so easily confined to a tripartite frame or to part of a pentameter line. Many poems besides the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, including his epitaph, are attributed to Virgil, beginning in antiquity. Several comprise the Appendix Vergiliana, a title coined by Joseph Scaliger for his 1572 edition of the poems. The Appendix today, as comprised in its authoritative Oxford edition,1 consists of twelve poems. Nine are found in the Murbach Catalogue, a ninth-century catalogue of manuscripts in the library of Murbach in southern Alsace: Dirae, Culex, Aetna, Copa, Elegiae in Maecenatem, Ciris, Catalepton, Priapea, and Moretum. The three others are De institutione viri boni, De est et non, and De rosis nascentibus.2 Did Virgil write the poems in the Appendix? Since antiquity, many have accepted his authorship of at least some of the texts; these Virgil believers continue to be found well into the twentieth century.3 Especially in modern scholarship, and with the decline of credulity and advance of critical 1

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Clausen, Goodyear, Kenney, and Richmond (1966), whose set and order of Appendix poems are followed by Salvatore, De Vivo, Nicastri, and Polara (1997) and Iodice (2002). Reeve (1983: 437–8). On the transmission of the Appendix, see Courtney (1968: 133– 41); Giomini (1996: 233–8). Scaliger’s edition of the Appendix follows the Murbach catalogue; in their OCT edition, Clausen, Goodyear, Kenney, and Richmond (1966) do the same but add the three other poems. E.g. Rand (1919); Clift (1945: 124); Westendorp Boerma (1949: xlviii); Richmond (1984: 61). Most (1987: 200) gives examples of twentieth-century critics who believed in the authenticity of the Culex (200).

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methods,4 however, many Virgil sceptics have emerged to challenge the attribution of the Appendix to him. Today there is very strong evidence, and very strong consensus, that Virgil did not write the Appendix poems and, thus, that they constitute a collection of pseudepigraphy.5 As such, they belong to the reception history of Virgil: they are responses to him and to his poetry, and they reveal different ways of rethinking and remaking his career and corpus. When examining the Appendix, it is necessary first to distinguish between primary and secondary pseudepigraphy. In primary pseudepigraphy, the author adopts the identity of another writer and regularly adds textual clues that allow him to be recognized as that assumed identity. In secondary pseudepigraphy, the false ascription does not stem from the author, but occurs during the course of transmission. Because it is the product of misattribution, it is extrinsic to the text, not intrinsic to it.6 Three works of secondary pseudepigraphy in the Appendix are the De institutione viri boni (‘On the Formation of the Good Man’), De est et non (‘On Yes and No’), and De rosis nascentibus (‘On Budding Roses’). These are linked through their associations with the fourth-century poet Ausonius. The first two are works by him (Ecl. 20 and 21)7 that came to circulate at times under Virgil’s name. The third has been attributed to both Virgil and Ausonius, and it looks to be late antique, if not, in fact, Ausonian.8 Four other examples of this form of pseudepigraphy are the Elegiae in Maecenatem, Aetna, Copa and Moretum. The Elegiae has two sections, which some editors print as separate poems. The first mourns the death of Maecenas, and the second quotes him as he speaks at the very edge of death, full of praise for Augustus. The poem was assigned to Virgil some time between its publication, probably in the late first century ad, and its appearance in the Murbach Catalogue, no doubt because of Maecenas’ role as Virgil’s patron.9 This was enough to justify the attribution despite its chronological impossibility: Virgil died in 19 bc and Maecenas in 8 bc . The Aetna, Copa and Moretum, which all probably date to the first century ad, meanwhile, have features that make them suitable for attribution to Virgil. The Aetna is a didactic poem on volcanology, while the Copa

4 5

6 7 8 9

I echo Syme (1983: 9) on belief in literary frauds generally. Cf. Most (1987); Horsfall (2000b: 10–11); Holzberg (2004, 2005); Peirano (2012); Stachon (2014). I will add my own arguments below. Much more circumspect is Salvatore (1996: 230–3). Stachon (2014: 14–24). Cf. Ehrman (2013: 30–1). Green (1999). Green (1991: 669). Cupaiuolo (1984) argues against Ausonian authorship. Schoonhoven (1980: 65).

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and Moretum are variations on Alexandrian realism (the first set in an inn, the second on a lowly farm) that combine humility of subject matter with layered literariness.10 It is easy to understand how a didactic poem could be attributed to the author of the Georgics, even though the Aetna’s poet distinguishes his work from didactic on agriculture (260–9). In addition, Virgil had himself dealt with Mt Etna (Aen. 3.570–82). Copa and Moretum, meanwhile, both contain strong Virgilian notes, including pervasive echoes of his poetry, especially the Eclogues and Georgics. A  particular form of retrojection appears to cause their ascription to Virgil. Poems with things in common with Virgil’s work and which take much from him are attributed to him – a process that emphasizes resemblance over difference, and finds in textual similarity a basis for authorial identification.11 These instances of secondary pseudepigraphy illustrate how, among the vagaries of transmission, texts could gather around the authoritative Virgil. This exercise of the author function redirected the circulation of independent texts by absorbing them into the Virgilian corpus as minor works by that major poet. The greatness of Virgil is magnetic and pulls texts to his name; his canonicity creates poetry adjunct to the canon. Virgil also attracted a range of primary pseudepigraphy, of which a striking example in the Appendix is the Catalepton. This is a collection of fifteen epigrams in different metres, predominantly iambics and elegiac couplets.12 The subject matter is varied, although the organization of the poems indicates that they were conceived as a collection.13 Catalepton 15 further unifies the texts: it serves as an epilogue and states that the collection gathers Virgil’s early, untutored poems. This is probably the work of the author posing as an editor.14 Literary fakes often include pseudo-documentary frames that explain their origin and, thus, identify the kind of text they purport to be.15 Belief in the authenticity of at least some of the Catalepton poems (especially 1, 5, 7, and 8) stubbornly persisted into the twentieth century, because they deal with people and events found in the ancient biographical tradition 10

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13 14 15

On the Aetna, see Goodyear (1965); Volk (2005). On the Copa, see Goodyear (1977); Tarrant (1992); Henderson (2002); Merkle (2005). On the Moretum, see Ross (1975b: 254–63); Kenney (1984); Horsfall (2001); Höschele (2005). Aetna and Copa were attributed to Virgil in antiquity; Moretum is first attributed to him in the Murbach Catalogue. This excludes the Priapea, although these might have been part of the Catalepton. See Holzberg (2004: 34–8) and n. 59 below. Richmond (1984: 52–3); Holzberg (2004). Peirano (2012: 83–5). For ancient examples of such frames, see Grafton (1990: 18–19), to which we can add Dares the Phrygian’s De excidio Troiae historia. See also Ní Mheallaigh (2008).

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of Virgil.16 This is to get things backwards:  the author of the Catalepton does not write about things in Virgil’s life that are later included or reflected in his Vita, but rather takes Virgilian biography as his point of departure and adapts what he knows and extrapolates from that tradition to impersonate the poet.17 The pseudepigrapher adopts the identity specifically of the young Virgil. Not only does Catalepton 15 make this clear, but also most of the poetry is appropriate to that stage of his life and literary development. This includes its neoteric orientation – indeed, the very title, from the Greek κατὰ λεπτόν (‘on a small scale’ or ‘in a refined style’), reflects neoteric/Hellenistic poetics.18 The neoteric colour is historically plausible, since that literary movement was in full swing when Virgil was young, and believable for the poet, since his first authentic work, the Eclogues, has marked neoteric elements. The pseudepigrapher’s Virgil is also deeply aware of and indebted to the neoteric Catullus. Notable is his parody of Catullus 4 in Catalepton 10; in addition, he produces polymetric epigrams like Catullus and imitates Catullan nugae.19 Towards the end of the Catalepton, the author demonstrates a different concern: to show Virgil’s artistic development. This he does first by having him write an abusive epode in the more sophisticated manner of Horace (Catal. 13), and then by having him refer to the writing of the Aeneid (Catal. 14), which he states he has begun (susceptum … munus, Catal. 14.1).20 The fiction that Virgil has just started his epic masterpiece adds to the analeptic quality of the Catalepton. The collection presents Virgil at an oblique angle and shows him at different stages of becoming, which offers new perspectives on what he ended up being. An important question arises at this point: was the Catalepton’s author hoping to deceive his readers about his identity and thus operating as a forger, or did he think of his ‘Virgil’ as an unmasked persona, a role whose fiction would be apparent? No sure answer is possible. The pseudepigrapher might have aimed to produce a forgery that filled in a blank space in Virgil’s literary development (and, presumably, to win readers by generating excitement over the ‘discovery’ of previously unknown Virgilian works);

16 17 18 19 20

Examples in n. 3. Horsfall (2000b: 10–11). On the Catalepton (specifically Catal. 9) and Hellenistic poetry, see Kayachev (2016a). Richmond (1984: 56); Peirano (2012: 89–94). The apparent premise is that Catal. 13 and 14 are later than the other poems in the collection. They thus do not really fit with the description of the collection in Catal. 15, but are included anyway as minora and, in the case of Catal. 14, as a kind of pre-text (i.e. a text before the Aeneid).

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apparent parallels for such pseudo-juvenilia are the elegies and letters of recommendation supposedly written by Horace but exposed as spurious by Suetonius in his biography of the poet.21 Yet equally plausible is a desire to produce an entertaining fiction that would be recognized as such. This would place the Catalepton on a continuum with the ancient practice of creating new fictional scenarios in school exercises, including rhetorical suasoriae, related to historical figures.22 In that case, Catalepton 15 invites the reader to join in on the game; it does not work to authenticate the collection. The epilogue is part of the fiction and is designed to lend only pseudo-credibility.23 Virgil’s prominence in Roman culture would have made him a conspicuous target for a Catalepton author interested in forgery, in which he sought to pass his work off as Virgil’s, or in imposture, in which he adopted the identity of Virgil so that his audience would recognize his role-playing. A forger would have naturally been drawn to the prospect of producing ‘undiscovered’ work from such a well-known figure and, thus, of satisfying curiosity about the early writings of an author who subsequently became a classic.24 Likewise, it is easy to imagine Virgilian imposture as a form of literary entertainment designed to make the familiar look unfamiliar, by presenting the famous poet before he was known or at an interstitial moment in his career, before he wrote the Aeneid. In either event, the treatment of Virgil in the Catalepton shows that his life could be reanimated during its Nachleben. For the pseudepigrapher, the poet’s biography was an open work, in that his early forays into writing  – his pre-career  – and concomitant biographical details, as well as other moments in his life as an author, could be remade and thus brought into new form in later performances.25 The pseudepigrapher thus treats Virgil’s life as others did his texts, especially the Aeneid, when they rewrote passages of his poetry, thereby opening them to new expression and giving them new shape. The grammatical and rhetorical curricula were important loci for this.26 Intended transparency is easier to discern in the Culex, another example of primary pseudepigraphy in the Appendix. The 414-line poem tells the story of a gnat (culex) that saves a shepherd: its bite awakens him from a nap and, after he kills it, he notices a monstrous snake that threatens him and dispatches it with a stone. A vision of the insect subsequently comes to the 21 22 23 24 25 26

Peirano (2012: 86–7). Peirano (2012: 12–24). Holzberg (2004: 30). Syme (1983: 5). My sense of the ‘open work’ is adapted from Eco (1989). McGill (2005: xviii–xix); Peirano (2012: 14, 16–17, 23–4).

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shepherd from the Underworld, complaining of its treatment. In response, he creates an elaborate tomb for it, and the poem closes with its epitaph. A preface to the Culex (1–41) identifies the author as the young Virgil, who dedicates his work to the also youthful Octavian; he represents the Culex as a ludic piece (with terms drawn from neoteric/Hellenistic poetics) and promises his addressee something grander in the future (cf. G. 3.16–39). The pose resembles Virgil’s own use of ludus/ludere to portray the Eclogues as early, light verse, as well as the description of the Eclogues in the ancient pseudepigraphic preface to the Aeneid.27 In addition, the Culex gives a new Homeric cast to Virgil’s career: as Homer was believed to have written the mock-epic Batrachomyomachia (‘Battle of frogs and mice’), so Virgil comes to engage in mock-epic writing of his own. What gives the act of impersonation away in the Culex are the parallels between the structure of the poem and Virgil’s literary career: there are three parts to the poem, and each has predominant features that line up with the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, respectively.28 The third part, moreover, has many elements in common with the katabasis in Aeneid 6; the author of the Culex creates a mock-heroic version of Aeneas’ trip to the Underworld. It beggars belief that the young Virgil just happened to anticipate the arc of his later career. Yet this is the fiction that the Culex poet creates; his Virgil produces versions of what he will go on to write in the ‘future’. Like the author of the Catalepton, the pseudepigrapher fills in a gap in the literary record by going back to the time before Virgil wrote the Eclogues.29 He creates a retrospective prehistory of the Virgilian corpus, which is represented by the structure of his poem and details in it. It seems evident that the pseudepigrapher sought to make it easy for at least some readers to see through what he was doing, so that they might recognize and enjoy the game of impersonation he was playing. By recapitulating the career of Virgil in an obvious way, ‘Virgil’ creates a ‘fictionality pact’ with that audience, or a clear signal that the Culex is a fiction that follows from Virgil’s career, rather than prefiguring it.30 The readers are then 27

28

29 30

See Ecl. 6.1–2; G. 4.565. The pseudepigraphic preface to the Aeneid begins ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena [carmen], ‘I am the man who once tuned his song on a tender reed.’ Compare Cul. 1, lusimus, Octavi, gracili modulante Thalia, with Fraenkel (1952: 8). On the preface, see e.g. Austin (1968); La Penna (1985); Scafoglio (2010: 11– 30); Kayachev (2011); Peirano (2013); and Theodorakopoulos, Chapter 13 in this volume. Most (1987: 204–9). The poem is thus part of the reception history of Virgil’s canonical literary career. On other aspects of that reception, see several of the essays in Hardie and Moore (2010). Fraenkel (1952: 7–8). Cf. Peirano (2012: 86); Fabre-Serris (2013). I adapt Peirano (2012: 31), on breaches of the ‘historicity pact’ in literary fakes.

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to participate in the fiction and to appreciate the ‘future reflexive’ mode, in which an author of a text set in the past presents established literary history as something yet to unfold, thereby dislocating time and inverting past and future.31 How far the author intended this knowing response to extend is unknowable, however: he might have sought it for all readers, or his motivations might have been mixed, with an eye to having some smaller circle recognize the fiction while leaving the possibility open for others to miss the signs and ascribe the poem to Virgil, as indeed happened in the reception history of the poem.32 Just how deep the authorial role-playing goes in the Culex is uncertain. The poem is neoteric in many of its features, presumably because the author wished to produce an appropriate text for a young neoteric Virgil.33 Yet a good amount of this is overdone, which contributes to the frequent obscurity of the poem. The Culex has in consequence been viewed as a parody of neoteric style.34 The alternative is that its author is simply a turgid poetaster. The Culex poet thus adopts the role of Virgil and, seemingly, that of the artist as a young neoteric, but then pursues a separate parodic aim or writes in his own infelicitous manner – unless the style is meant to contribute to the authorial fiction, by showing the young Virgil succumbing to (parodied) neoteric excesses, before he finds his footing as a writer.35 Another ‘fictionality pact’ is evident in the Ciris, a 541-line neoteric epyllion on Scylla, the daughter of Nisus, king of Megara. Again, a neoteric work is believable for the young Virgil – and the author of the Ciris identifies the text as the labour of youth in the proem to the piece (42–5).36 Further details in the proem (1–100) indicate all the more that the author

31 32

33 34 35

36

I draw from Barchiesi (1993: 334), on the ‘future reflexive’ in literature more widely. Such mixed motives are also possible for the author of the Catalepton (and for the Ciris author to come). As mentioned in n. 3, the Culex has had a curiously persistent ability to gull readers. It bears mentioning the argument of Oudin (1729) and Plésent (1910) that Virgil had, in fact, written a Culex, but that it disappeared and was replaced by the one we possess. Cf. Kennedy (1982); Janka (2005: 67). Ross (1975b: 237–53); Seelentag (2012: 22–5). Janka (2005: 36–7); Seelentag (2012: 24). Discrepancy in style between a piece of pseudepigraphy and the poetry of the target author is compatible with forgery: the idea would simply be that the author changed or developed his style (and pitching a poem as the work of youth would help to explain differences). This would also explain why a poet after Virgil and Ovid (Lyne (1978: 36), probably writing in the late first century a d , produced a neoteric epyllion, even though neotericism was not in fashion. Of course, one could also explain the stylistic choice as an idiosyncrasy. For a different view, reviving the idea that the Ciris is a neoteric poem that pre-dates Virgil, see Kayachev (2016b).

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wished to be identified as Virgil.37 In an example of counterfactual literary history, this version of the young poet addresses Messalla Corvinus with the suggestion that he has or wants to have Messalla as his patron; this parallels Catalepton 9, a short verse panegyric on the same addressee. The pseudepigapher then seems to reiterate that he is Virgil at the very end of the poem (538–41), where he echoes verbatim Virgil’s Georgics 1.406–9, on the metamorphosed Nisus and Scylla. This is a pronounced parallel at a conspicuous moment in the poem, which strongly suggests that the Ciris poet wished to have it recognized. After the clues in the opening of the work that the author was impersonating Virgil, the natural implication is that the same author produced both Ciris 538–41 and Georgics 1.406–9. The pseudepigrapher uses the close of the text to confirm his assumed authorial identity; the corollary is that Virgil repeated the conclusion of his youthful epyllion later in the Georgics.38 That the Ciris also contains a very close echo of Eclogues 6.75–7, on Scylla, is no coincidence (59–61). The pseudepigrapher repeats almost word-for-word two Virgilian passages on Scylla so that audiences might appreciate the ‘anticipation’ of his references to her in his major works.39 It is too good to be true that Virgil would echo his own Ciris exactly, or nearly so, the two times that he ‘later’ treated Scylla in his canonical work. While he did sometimes repeat himself in his major works, lengthy selfimitation of the kind the Ciris implies is very rare;40 and the idea that he would extensively echo his youthful poetry each time he handled Scylla in his Eclogues and Georgics is impossible to believe. This indicates that the pseudepigrapher was not aiming to make things plausible for at least some segment of his readership, a circle of those in the know, if not for all anticipated readers. Instead, he intertextually advertises the learned game of impersonation he plays. This makes the conclusion to the Ciris an inauthenticating sphragis, in that it reveals who the author pretends to be but is not.41 37

38 39

40

41

Peirano (2012: 176–83). On the proem, see also Kayachev (2016b: 20–54). It does not seem that Servius Auctus has this poem in mind when he refers to a Scylla that Virgil began to write (ad Ecl. 6.3). Mariotti (1951). See also Bretzigheimer (2005: 147). There is also a probable correction of Ecl. 6.74–7, where Virgil conflates Scylla, daughter of Nisus, and the sea monster Scylla known especially from the Odyssey. The Ciris implies that Virgil knew the difference between the two Scyllas, which means that Ecl. 6.74–7 is a reference to a learned variant, not an error. Virgil refers to the sea monster Scylla at Aen. 3.420. Cf. Aen. 6.306–8, which repeats G. 4.475–7, as well as the repeated dawn formula at 4.584–5 and 9.459–60. On Virgilian self-repetition, see Niehl (2002). I owe this to Lyndy Danvers. Cf. Peirano (2012: 188–200).

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The repetition of Georgics 1.406–9 and Eclogues 6.75–7 are only two of the very many textual parallels that fill the Ciris. These include echoes of sources besides Virgil who come after the purported date of the text. The anachronisms do not exclude an intent to deceive:  they could reflect the carelessness or indifference of the forger, or the intended idea could be that the ‘later’ authors imitate the Ciris, not the other way round.42 Yet in a poem where the role-playing looks well-advertised, the strong suggestion is of someone unconcerned with chronological logic because uncommitted to presenting intertextually alert readers with a forger’s plausible fiction.43 Rather than aiming for belief, the pseudepigrapher seeks suspension of disbelief among such readers, so that they might accept the fictional premise of the poem despite the anachronisms. The Ciris thus joins the Culex, and perhaps the Catalepton, to show that in antiquity, Virgil was an identity that one could don as a mask, but not necessarily as a disguise. Fundamental to that identity was Virgil’s canonical status. The point was to play off it by fashioning a pre-canonical poet; Virgil’s early career lay open to creative reconstruction, which was thrown into relief against the lofty status of the historical author. Another Appendix poem lies uncertainly between primary and secondary pseudepigraphy. This is the Dirae, in which a farmer who forced to leave his land issues curses against Lycurgus, who will now occupy it. The poem has a pastoral frame, but is dominated by the curses down to line 103. An eighty-line lament over the narrator’s loss of his love Lydia, still in a pastoral setting, then begins at that point in the manuscripts. The lament, however, quite probably constitutes a separate poem (editors entitle it Lydia) by a different author; in that case, it was no doubt joined to the Dirae because the two texts contain a beloved with the name Lydia.44 The Dirae, at least down to line 103, deals with a situation like that in Eclogues 1 and 9, which treat the land confiscations of the late 40s bc , and it builds upon Eclogues 9.5–6, where the dispossessed Moeris curses the stranger who has taken his farm (quod nec vertat bene, 6). Several echoes of the Eclogues within the Dirae then further link it to that model.45 It is more probable that the Dirae poet took his cue from Virgil and wrote a variation,

42

43

44

45

These are different from echoes of Virgil, which have their own logic of self-imitation. For a thorough study of the intertextuality of the Ciris, see Gall (1999). Again, whether or not the author envisioned all his readers to be so intertextually aware and, thus, to be keen anachronism hunters cannot be determined. Fraenkel (1966: 151–3) reconstructs a scenario for the linking of the texts, but it must remain speculative. We cannot dismiss the possibility that the Lydia, assuming it was a separate poem, was conceived as a supplement to the Dirae. Lorenz (2005: 1–14); Rupprecht (2007: esp. 55–121).

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with roots in pastoral and Hellenistic curse poetry, on a Virgilian theme than that he sought to pass himself off as Virgil.46 But the latter possibility cannot be ruled out, particularly since ancient readers understood Virgil to reflect his own experience when treating the land confiscations in the Eclogues. This was part of a wider approach to Virgil’s poetry in antiquity, in which readers derived information about his life from his works, sometimes on the assumption that he wove his own experiences into what he wrote. That mode of interpretation is very evident in Aelius Donatus’ Vita Vergiliana.47 The biography includes the statement that Virgil wrote the Eclogues to thank powerful men for helping him to get his land back during the confiscations (VSD 19; cf. VSD 61–3) – an idea which carries the assumption that Virgil drew from his own life in Eclogues 1 and 9. A similar biographical reading of those poems might have led to the biographical turn of primary pseudepigraphy; the Dirae author would have adopted the identity of Virgil and shown him again converting his own experience into (now partly pastoral) poetry. The Priapea, or three short pieces honouring a Priapus located on a humble farm, also cannot be definitively categorized as either primary or secondary pseudepigraphy.48 One problem is that we do not know for sure if they were part of the Catalepton.49 Even if they were not, there is some reason to think that the author was feigning Virgil’s authorial identity. The setting matches the property which the biographical tradition assigns to Virgil’s family before the land confiscations. In addition, the author echoes the First Eclogue and Georgics 4.134–8, on the old Corycian and his garden; just before the latter passage, Virgil mentions Priapus (110–11). Perhaps the author of the Priapea wished to suggest that this was the young Virgil, writing verses that he would later echo in the Eclogues and Georgics.50 Yet imitation of Virgil without this pseudepigraphical motive is certainly also possible.51

46 47 48

49 50

51

Fraenkel (1966: 154). Horsfall (2000b: 1–25). These are distinguished from another Priapic poem in the Appendix entitled Quid hoc novi est?, a piece of secondary pseudepigraphy. Cf. nn. 12 and 59. It bears mentioning that modern critics have, in different ways, read the Corycian as a figure for Virgil (e.g. Thomas (1999: 181–8); Kronenberg (2009: 172–3)). But there is no way of telling, of course, whether the Priapea’s author did the same. In both the Dirae and Priapea, it is easy to see how the resemblances to Virgil’s poetry and biography could lead to attribution to him, despite the differences between them and his major works (and, in the case of the Priapea, the disparity between their content and the reputation for prudery that Virgil had in the biographical tradition [cf. VSD 10– 11]), and irrespective of whether the author was writing as Virgil.

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Even a brief examination of the primary and secondary pseudepigraphy that comprises the Appendix demonstrates how heterogeneous the poems are, not only in their subject matter but also in the ways they connect to Virgil. Those connections are, however, their unifying thread. Even more, Virgil is the reason the collection exists; he is its originator, despite writing not a word of it, and his identity and authority precede and generate it. In the Appendix, the author is far from dead. Instead, he acquires new life, whether through a pseudepigrapher’s agency or through misattribution, and he groups together and defines a range of disparate texts, thus creating a kind of unity out of diversity (e pluribus unus, Moretum 104). Of course, the line between fiction and reality is often blurred, and the former bleeds into the latter when a fiction is perceived to be real. Such is the case with pseudepigraphy when audiences accept the authorial attribution as genuine. As shown or indicated by the testimonia, this occurred in antiquity with the Appendix poems. Evidence of familiarity with individual pieces begins in the late first century ad , by which time at least several of the poems that comprise the collection had been written, and extends into late antiquity.52 The testimonia are rather few and far between, which suggests limited knowledge of the texts as Virgilian poetry.53 No ancient source denies Virgil’s authorship of any Appendix poem. While this is suggestive, to conclude that the works’ authenticity was unquestioned is an argumentum ex silentio. More compellingly, sources also deal with Appendix poems in a way that indicates belief that they were Virgil’s. Thus Martial (8.55.10–20; 14.185) treats the Culex and Aeneid as works that reveal two different sides of Virgil’s actual authorial identity. Statius, meanwhile, compares himself (Silv. 1 praef.) and Lucan (Silv. 2.7.73–4) to Virgil when he wrote the Culex, while Suetonius’ biography of Lucan relates that the poet audaciously (ausus sit) compared his youthful epic the Bellum civile to the same Virgilian poem:  et quantum mihi restat ad Culicem. While the precise meaning of this statement is uncertain,54 it clearly sets out

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Stachon (2014: 80–96). Lyne (1978: 48–56) argues for a later date for the Ciris, perhaps even in the third century, but this has not found general acceptance. Cf. Peirano (2012: 174–5 and 183–4). The dating of Appendix poems is on the whole difficult, but a terminus ante quem of the Flavian period seems reasonable for a good block of them (although Holzberg (2004: 30 n. 7) suggests that the Catalepton might be slightly later). Lyne (1971: 235–8) and (1978: 51–3). On some of the testimonia, see Zogg (2016). The meaning is something like, ‘how much is left for me [to do] in relation to the Culex’, i.e. ‘how far do I fall short of/how far am I lagging behind the Culex’ (with obvious irony, given the reference to Lucan’s audacity).

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a comparison of what a young Lucan was able to achieve with Virgil’s juvenilia. The rhetoric in the Statius passages and in the Lucan anecdote only works if Virgilian authorship is assumed; that premise is necessary to give the comparisons their meaning and force.55 None of this guarantees that Martial, Statius, and Lucan/Suetonius believed that Virgil wrote the Culex – an author can of course use content for rhetorical effect without necessarily believing it, or can recount another’s statement without necessarily accepting its premise – although it certainly suggests it. At the very least, those authors expect that Virgilian authorship of the poem would be legible to their audiences, and they imply that this was a normal way of thinking about the text. Assumption of authenticity is clear in another, important source on the Appendix, the fourth-century Virgilian biography of Aelius Donatus. His is the first extant text that groups several Appendix poems together.56 (That list, however, does not imply familiarity with a collected edition in antiquity, for which there is no sure evidence.)57 After quoting an epitaphic distich on the teacher Ballista as Virgil’s first poem while still a puer,58 Donatus lists several subsequent youthful works:  Catale

ton et Priapea et Epigrammata et Diras, item Cirim et Culicem (VSD 17).59 Donatus proceeds to give a summary of the Culex and to quote its two-line epitaph on the gnat (VSD 18), thus linking the poem to the Ballista distich. He then ends the section on the juvenilia by stating that Virgil also wrote the Aetna (VSD 19). Several manuscripts include the phrase de qua ambigitur: ‘[the Aetna], concerning which there is uncertainty’ (scripsit etiam, de qua ambigitur, Aetnam). There is some reason to suspect, however, that this is an interpolation.60

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58 59

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This is the case regardless of whether the Lucan anecdote is apocryphal; the statement functions in a way that assumes Virgilian authorship whether or not Lucan delivered it. Donatus also need not have taken his list, or all of his list, from Suetonius’ now lost Vita of Virgil, even though his heavy reliance on that biography is firmly established. Lists are highly susceptible to corruption and interpolation, and we cannot know how much Suetonius’ looked like Donatus’ (assuming Suetonius had one). Cf. Lyne (1971: 234–7). Contra, e.g. Teuffel (1873: 440), who argued for a collection Virgilii iuvenalis ludi libellus. Cf. Barrett (1970: 348–9). Surely this is another piece of Virgilian pseudepigraphy. What Donatus means by epigrammata is uncertain. It might be another title for the Catalepton, in which case the punctuation should be Catale

ton (et Priapea et Epigrammata). See also Rand (1919: 110); Lyne (1971: 243 n. 5). But epigrammata might refer to another collection of minora now lost. See Richmond (1984: 51). How young Donatus claimed Virgil to be when he wrote his juvenilia has been debated: the question is usually whether the text of VSD 17 reads XVI or XXVI – hence whether Virgil was sixteen or twenty-six years old. Cf. Barrett (1972). Rand (1919: 107–8).

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Donatus might not have known the Appendix poems well; perhaps they were little more than titles to him.61 Yet it is clear that he accepted them, with the possible exception of the Aetna, as authentic pieces of Virgilian juvenilia  – a point confirmed if de qua ambigitur, Aetnam is, in fact, Donatan, since the comment would show that he entertains doubts only about the authorship of that poem (yet still does not deny outright that Virgil produced it). An aim in his biography is to trace Virgil’s development as an author from youth to maturity, and, in VSD 17–19, he cites what he must have felt were actual Virgilian works to show the output of the young poet. Further support for the idea that Donatus accepted the texts’ authenticity is offered byVSD 48, a passage at the start of his commentary on the Eclogues that follows his Vita. Donatus states that there are many examples of ψευδεπίγραφα, ‘that is, things put out with a false title, under another’s name’ (id est falsa inscriptione sub alieno nomine … prolata). If Donatus thought that the juvenile Virgilian works were by someone else and falsely ascribed to him, it seems reasonable that he would have said as much at this point. No doubt there were also those in antiquity who rejected the attribution of the Appendix poems to Virgil. For instance, a number of knowing readers would surely have been in on the advertised game of impersonation in the Culex and Ciris. This means that at least some of the Appendix texts were considered both authentic and fake in antiquity, with the designation shifting according to audience. To understand the poems as really Virgil’s is to think differently about him as an author.62 Thus the Appendix offers a wider view of his career and reveals the writer he was in the years bc  – before canonization. In addition, it shows him to be a broader poet, whose output was less compact and more varied than his epitaph, with its pascua rura duces, made it out to be. Yet while expanding Virgil’s œuvre, the Appendix also reveals a smaller Virgil – a writer of minor poems, including juvenilia that at times anticipate some of his later subject matter, but display an author before he grew into the audax poet of the Eclogues (cf. G. 4.565–6) and the Homerus Romanus of the epic tradition. The Appendix poems continue to move between the categories of authentic and fake throughout their history. Today, they are firmly settled in the realm of pseudepigraphy, where things are not as they seem. As such, they are not the apprentice pieces of a master or the efforts of a canonical author in a marginal mood. Instead, the Appendix poems are documents of Virgilian reception, revealing or suggesting a range of responses to the 61 62

Lyne (1978: 50–2). See Burrow (2008).

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poet. Those responses all lie below Virgil’s authentic works, owing to their minor genres, the fiction that they are pieces of juvenilia, or their inferior quality (or some combination of these). Yet as texts circling the rota Vergilii, a visual metaphor for Virgil’s career as author of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, the Appendix poems also acquire peculiar standing due to their strange proximity to the canonical centre of Latin poetry. FURTHER READING Several works on the Appendix Vergiliana have appeared since the turn of the century. Peirano (2012) deals especially with the Catalepton, Ciris and Elegiae in Maecenatem; the book marks a significant advance in the study of the poems as literary performances. Useful for its thorough analysis of imitation/allusion in the Ciris is Kayachev (2016b). A number of German studies are also notable:  Holzberg (2005), Rupprecht (2007), Seelentag (2012), and Stachon (2014). Still extremely valuable books for the study of individual Appendix poems are Westendorp Boerma (1949–63) on Catalepton, Lyne (1978) on Ciris, and Kenney (1984) on Moretum. Some important articles and chapters are Fraenkel (1952) on Culex, Fraenkel (1966) on Dirae; Ross (1975b) on Culex and Moretum as post-Augustan literary parodies; Most (1987) on Culex; Horsfall (2001) on Moretum, and (2006) on the Helen episode and the Appendix; Henderson (2002) on Copa; and Holzberg (2004) on Catalepton. On the textual transmission of the Appendix, see Reeve (1983). On pseudepigraphy/forgery in antiquity, see Clift (1945), Speyer (1971), Syme (1983: 1–11), and Martínez (2014).

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5 GI L L I A N C L A R K

Augustine’s Virgil

‘I deferred the discussion to another day, as we had begun when the sun was already setting, and most of the day had been spent in organizing farm business and reading Virgil book 1’ (Contra academicos 1.5.15). Augustine set his earliest surviving work (386 ad ), a philosophical dialogue, in a country house where the participants are at leisure. His model was Cicero’s dialogue Academica. There the participants are leading Romans who own villas near the bay of Naples; Augustine’s, in a borrowed farm at Cassiciacum outside Milan, are his mother, his teenage son, his brother, two cousins, his friend Alypius, and two students, all from Thagaste in North Africa. Augustine had been a student, then a teacher, of literature and rhetoric. He crossed the sea from Carthage to Italy and taught briefly at Rome before his appointment in 384 as Professor of Rhetoric at Milan, then a base of the western imperial court. His duties included praise speeches (Conf. 6.6.9); panegyrics by others show how Virgil could be evoked in poetry and prose.1 Two years later, Augustine made a commitment to a celibate Christian life of prayer and study. In late summer 386 he left for Cassiciacum, where he read Virgil with the students, and everyone, whatever their level of education, took part in philosophical discussion. On return to Milan, Augustine resigned his post, and after his baptism in 387 he decided to return to Africa. There he became a priest, then bishop, of the seaport Hippo Regius. Augustine deserves a chapter in this Companion because he has so much to offer on the experience and the effect of reading Virgil, whom he called poeta noster (‘our poet’, Contra Acad. 3.9) because Virgil was Latin, but later ‘their poet’ because Virgil was not Christian.2 In late antiquity Virgil was central to the education and culture of Latin speakers, as Homer was for Greek speakers. If parents could afford education, their sons studied with

1 2

Rees (2017); Ware (2017). MacCormack (1998) remains the classic study.

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a grammaticus who taught language and literature, especially Virgil, and especially the Aeneid.3 The commentaries of Augustine’s contemporaries Donatus (teacher of Jerome) and Servius show how students were trained to appreciate Virgil’s choice of words, figures of speech, and techniques for conveying emotion, and to understand Virgil on the history, traditions and religious rituals of Rome.4 Virgil, who told how the dutiful Aeneas founded Rome as Jupiter willed, with the promise of empire without limit, could also be read as a source of inspired wisdom on human life in a world governed by a divine power which is active under many names.5 This was not necessarily a problem for Christian parents: everyone knew that poets make things up, so Virgil’s gods could be seen as traditional poetic ornament, just as statues and temples of the gods could be seen as civic and artistic heritage.6 Quoting a line or phrase of Virgil, in Africa or in any other part of the Latin-speaking empire, signalled a shared culture; Augustine did not suggest that Africans felt differently about Aeneas abandoning Carthage for Rome. Some students, like Augustine and Jerome, responded so intensely to Virgil that his lines came to mind in almost any circumstances, just as Shakespeare still does for some English speakers. Augustine’s many works include quotations from every book of the Aeneid (not just from the bestknown books, 2, 4 and 6) as well as the Georgics and the Eclogues.7 Some Christians saw Virgil as himself a prophet of Christ, especially in Eclogue 4 on the birth of a wondrous child.8 Christian poets could write in dialogue with Virgil, appropriating or adapting phrases and lines to make ‘our poet’ convey a Christian message. The extreme case is Proba, who in the introduction to her Virgilian cento wrote, ‘I shall say how Virgil sang of Christ’s pious gifts.’ In recent years these poets have come to be seen as innovative rather than imitative.9 Augustine did not attempt Christian classical poetry, or show awareness of contemporaries who did.10 But he too used Virgil for Christian purposes, differently at different times, but always prompting the question: How much Virgil did he want his readers to remember? Augustine’s early philosophical dialogues provide a first example. ‘We had not engaged in discussion for seven days, but were reading three books 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

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Kaster (1988). See Fowler, Casali, and Stok in this volume. On Servius and Macrobius, see Pelttari (2014: 32–43). See Braund in this volume on Virgil’s gods. See Ware (2017) on poetic fiction. Hagendahl (1967). Augustine thought Virgil was citing a prophecy by the Sibyl of Cumae (De civitate Dei 10.27). See further Hadas (2013: esp. 113–25). See Pollmann (2017) on borrowing the authority of classical poets; Kaufmann (2017) on varieties of allusion; McGill (2005) on the cento. Clark (2017).

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of Virgil after the first, and I  was lecturing [tractaremus] when it seemed appropriate’ (Contra acad. 2.4.10).11 The student Licentius, entranced by Aeneid books 2–4, declared his devotion to poetry. In another dialogue, Licentius transferred his passion to philosophy, and Augustine’s joy broke out in words taken from Virgil:12 Hic ego multo uberius cernens abundare laetitias meas quam vel optare aliquando ausus sum, versum istum gestiens effudi:  Sic pater ille deus faciat! Perducet enim ipse, si sequimur quo nos ire iubet atque ubi ponere sedem, qui dat modo augurium nostrisque illabitur animis. Nec enim altus Apollo est, qui in speluncis, in montibus, in nemoribus, nidore turis pecudumque calamitate concitatus implet insanos, sed alius profecto est, alius ille altus veridicus, atque ipsa (quid enim verbis ambiam?) veritas, cuius vates sunt quicumque possunt esse sapientes. Ergo aggrediemur, Licenti, freti pietate cultores, vestigiis nostris ignem perniciosum fumosarum cupiditatum opprimamus.13 Here, perceiving that my joys were more richly abundant than I had ventured even to wish, I exultantly uttered the line ‘May God the Father so grant!’ For he will lead us if we follow where he tells us to go and to settle, he who now gives the augury and slips into our souls. For it is not ‘lofty Apollo’ who in caves, in mountains, in groves is aroused by fumes of incense and slaughter of cattle and fills insane people, but clearly it is another, another is that lofty truth-teller and (why circumvent with words?) truth itself, whose prophets are all those capable of wisdom. So let us advance, Licentius, ‘worshippers relying on devotion’, and tread down with our footsteps the pernicious fire of smouldering desires. (Aug. De ordine 1.4.10)

‘Words taken from Virgil’ is a precise description. These sentences link parts of three prayers to Apollo, taken from different contexts in the Aeneid, and adapted to Augustine’s concerns. The first citation presents a difficulty, because the line Virgil wrote is sic pater ille deum faciat, sic altus Apollo (‘may the Father of gods so grant, may lofty Apollo!’, Aen. 10.875). Augustine, or a Christian copyist, changed pater ille deum (‘the father of gods’) to pater ille deus (‘God the Father’), and left out Apollo.14 If it was Augustine who made the change, he left his readers to supply Apollo, and continued by reporting in indirect speech an earlier prayer of Aeneas to Apollo at Delos:  quem sequimur? quove ire iubes? ubi ponere sedes? | da, pater, augurium atque animis inlabere nostris (‘Whom do we follow? Where do you tell us to go, where to settle? Give us an augury, father, and 11 12 13 14

Pucci (2014: 179–82) lists all the references to Virgil in the early dialogues. Licentius continued to write poetry with allusions to Virgil. See Augustine, Epistula 26. Text as in CCSL 29:94; words from Virgil in bold. Wills (2010: 127) and Pucci (2014: 108) think that Augustine quoted the line.

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slip into our souls’, Aen. 3.88–9). But, Augustine declared, it is not ‘lofty Apollo’ who gives guidance, and the god who ‘slips into our souls’ is not the god, aroused by incense and blood sacrifice, who takes possession of a prophet. Then Augustine exhorted Licentius with a third citation, from a prayer by the Etruscan warrior Arruns to Apollo of Mount Soracte in Italy. It invokes an unusual fire-walking rite to which Augustine gave moral significance: medium freti pietate per ignem | cultores multa premimus vestigia pruna (‘we worshippers, relying on devotion, through the midst of the fire press our footsteps on the deep live coals’, Aen. 11.787–8). Licentius abandoned poetry for philosophy, and Augustine used Virgil to show how Christians abandon Virgil’s gods for devotion to the true God who gives them direction and moral strength. The envisaged audience for these dialogues would immediately hear Virgil, but did Augustine want them to read Virgil differently, taking only what could be used for Christian purposes and dismissing Apollo and the rest of the story, as builders of churches reused columns and ornaments taken from temples?15 In Augustine’s outburst to Licentius, sometimes the unstated context is appropriate. The second prayer to Apollo comes from a plea by Aeneas when the Trojan refugees have set sail not knowing for where: ‘give us a home of our own; we are weary, give us walls and a people and a city which will last’. But the first and third prayers must be removed from their contexts in the fight for Italy. In the first, Aeneas responds to the challenge of Mezentius, father of young Lausus whom Aeneas kills and then pities; in the third, Arruns asks that his spear hit the virgin warrior Camilla, and Apollo grants this but not the rest of his prayer, so he achieves glory but dies.16 In his early career Augustine the teacher assumed that his hearers had some knowledge of Virgil, but as a bishop in Africa his task was to expound Christian scripture. He used the techniques he had learned for Latin literature, asking whether the text was correct, how it should be read, what readers need to know, whether the author speaks in person or in character, whether the passage is literal or figurative. To understand a word or phrase, he considered other uses by the author, believing that the same Spirit inspired every writer of scripture.17 But he rarely quoted classical literature, because preaching had to be inclusive. Some hearers, especially women, lacked formal education; in the early dialogues Augustine’s mother Monica 15

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On spolia, see MacCormack (1998: 37–44). Pucci (2014) argues for Augustine ‘recuperating’ Virgil. In contrast, Macrobius (Sat. 5.3.7) discusses the prayer of Arruns and its precedents in Homer. E.g. Conf. 13.6.7–7.8.

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shows no awareness of Virgil, but quotes a hymn of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (De beata vita 4.35).18 Classical poetry was difficult, because metre required unfamiliar words or word order, and metre was difficult to hear, especially in the region where ‘African ears’ did not distinguish long from short vowels; students, then as now, had to learn scansion.19 In letters to educated people, Augustine could cite Virgil; for example, in a letter to the senator Volusianus, former proconsul of Africa: nunc ergo quod Maro ait, et omnes videmus:  amomum Assyrium vulgo nascitur, quod autem ad adiutorium gratiae pertinet, quae in Christo est, ipse est omnino quo duce si qua manent sceleris vestigia nostri, irrita perpetua solvent formidine terras. Now we all see what Virgil says: ‘Assyrian balm is born everywhere’; and in relation to help from the grace which is in Christ, it is he with whom ‘as leader, if any traces remain of our crime, they will be annulled and release the lands from perpetual terror’.20 (Aug. Epist. 137.12)

In Confessions, written (397 ad ) after ten years of studying scripture, Augustine assumed readers who recognized both scripture and Virgil. Confessio means ‘acknowledgement’, of Augustine’s failings and of God’s love. Augustine asked why, at school, he had to memorize the errores of ‘some man called Aeneas’ while forgetting his own wanderings (Conf. 1.13.20), and why he was made wretched by the suicide of the fictional and adulterous Dido, not by his own spiritual dying. The wanderings of Aeneas in search of a homeland, tossed on a stormy sea and following divine commands he cannot understand, offered one (not the only) model for Augustine’s wanderings in search of his true home.21 He made this evident in narrating his own stealthy departure from Carthage for Italy, leaving on the shore an anguished woman who loves him (5.8.15). But Augustine’s life did not follow the Virgilian model. Dido’s false gods bring her to despair and suicide, whereas Monica’s devotion to the true God ensures that her son is not lost; instead, like the mother of Euryalus (Aen. 9.492–3), she follows her son ‘over land and sea’ to Italy when others stayed behind (Conf. 6.1.1). Augustine’s God-given destination is not Rome, of which he says little, but Milan and its Bishop Ambrose. The mother of Euryalus 18

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On the education of women, see Clark (2015: 80–95). ‘Monica’ is the traditional spelling; for ‘Monnica’, now preferred by many specialists, see Clark (2015: 126). Clark (2017). On ‘African ears’, see De doctrina Christiana 4.65. Augustine quotes Ecl. 4.25, 4.13–14. ‘Assyrian balm’, an exotic healing plant, is accessible to all because the gospel is preached everywhere. See further Hadas (2013: 121–4). Bennett (1988) argues that Augustine modelled himself on Aeneas.

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laments her son’s death; Monica dies knowing that her son is Christian, and he laments but hopes for her eternal life. The narrative part of Confessions ends with Monica’s death at Ostia Tiberina, as Augustine and his friends await return from Italy to Africa (9.8.17). This might prompt a memory of Karthago, Italiam contra Tiberinaque longe | ostia (‘Carthage, far off, over against Italy and the mouths of the Tiber’, Aen. 1.13–14); but Augustine ended Book 9 not by reversing the Aeneid, but by requesting prayers for his parents and his fellow Christians. Augustine did not think that Christians should reject pagan literature. He preferred the example of the people of Israel, who in their exodus from Egypt borrowed from the worshippers of false gods real treasure which they used in the service of the true God.22 Thus, even when writing on a central Christian doctrine, Augustine could quote Virgil in arguing that the structure of the human mind reflects the Trinity.23 But in Confessions he used Virgil to condemn an education based on Virgil. He told (Conf. 1.17.27) how he had won a school prize for a speech conveying verba Iunonis irascentis et dolentis quod non posset Italia Teucrorum avertere regem (‘the words of Juno angry and aggrieved that she could not turn the king of the Trojans away from Italy’, Aen. 1.38). This was doubly wrong, because Juno was fiction, and because her words conveyed damaging emotions. A  fusion of scripture and Virgil showed how it could have been: laudes tuae, domine, laudes tuae per scripturas tuas suspenderent palmitem cordis mei, et non raperetur per inania nugarum turpis praeda volatilibus. Non enim uno modo sacrificatur transgressoribus angelis. Your praises, Lord, your praises through your scriptures would have supported the vine shoot of my heart, and it would not have been snatched away through the follies of futility, a shameful spoil for birds. For there is more than one way of sacrificing to the rebel angels. (Aug. Conf. 1.17.27)

The ‘vine-shoot of my heart’ (cor connotes both thought and feeling) evokes the words of Jesus, ‘a vine shoot cannot bear fruit of itself unless it remains on the vine … I am the vine, you are the vine shoots’ (John 15:4). Turpis praeda volatilibus evokes Virgil’s words on the need to cultivate fruit trees: otherwise they bear inferior fruit, et turpis avibus praedam fert uva racemos (‘and the grape bears poor clusters, spoil for birds’, G. 2.60). Studying Virgil instead of scripture is a failure to cultivate; turning from

22 23

Exod. 3:22; De doctr. Chr. 2.144–7. De trinitate 14.11.14, quoting Aen. 3.628–9: ‘Ulysses was not forgetful of himself.’

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scriptural truth to fictional gods becomes a way of sacrificing to the ‘rebel angels’ who turned from God to demand worship for themselves. But is there such a sacrifice in every allusion to Virgil? Augustine’s envisaged readers would recognize Virgil’s Juno, and might remember how their teachers discussed the problem of an angry god who opposes the will of the supreme god Jupiter.24 The fruit trees might be recognized only from the metre. (If praeda volatilibus were translated ‘for daws to peck at’, how many present-day readers would recognize Shakespeare and supply Iago’s ‘I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at; I am not what I am’ from Othello Act 1, scene 1?) When Augustine said that his mother married plenis nubilis annis (Aen. 7.53, Conf. 9.9.19), that may be only a tag, a familiar phrase for ‘marriageable age’ that is not intended to evoke Lavinia the bride of Aeneas (any more than ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’ evokes Iago), or even to evoke Virgil. Augustine wrote in retrospect (Retractationes 2.6) that ‘the first ten books [of Confessions] are about me, the last three about the holy scriptures’, but even in the books ‘about me’, scripture, especially the poetry of the psalms, displaces Virgil. In Confessions there is no mention of reading Virgil at Cassiciacum: there Augustine is deeply moved by the psalms (9.4.8), as he is by the psalms and hymns of the congregation at his baptism (9.6.14). At Monica’s death a psalm and a hymn of Ambrose give consolation (9.12.31– 2). When Augustine reflects in book 10 on his present life, there are troubling memories of sex, but no troubling memories of Virgil. Reflecting on the sense of taste (10.31.46), Augustine did not draw on his mental concordance for lines he used many years later, writing against a well-educated bishop (Contra Iulianum 4.67), to distinguish satisfaction of hunger from wanting to eat more.25 Reflecting on the sense of hearing (Conf. 10.33.50), he wondered whether music distracts attention from the words of the psalms; and it is a line from a hymn of Ambrose, not from Virgil, which provides the example (11.27.35) for the movement of the mind through time.26 More than a decade after Confessions, Augustine began City of God (c. ad 412)  ‘to defend the city of God against those who prefer their own

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MacCormack (1998: 132–41). Aen. 1.216, postquam exempta fames epulis, mensaeque remotae; Aen. 1.184, postquam exempta fames et amor compressus edendi. In the early dialogue De ordine (2.14.39), Augustine used a line of Virgil (G. 2.480–1) to illustrate the difference between hearing sound patterns and hearing what they signify; in De musica, begun about the same time (c. 387), the technical discussion in books 1–5 uses the opening lines of the Aeneid, but Book 6, on moving from physical to immutable ‘numbers’, uses Ambrose. See further Clark (2017: 428–30).

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gods to its founder’. Virgil became a witness for the defence.27 Augustine contrasted two cities (civitates), which prove to be two communities of all rational beings, angels as well as humans.28 The citizens of the city of God love God even to disregard of themselves, and are motivated by the wish to serve God and neighbour. The citizens of the earthly city love themselves even to disregard of God, and are dominated by the lust to dominate. In the opening sentences, long before these civitates are clearly defined, Virgil says what the earthly city wants to hear: Rex enim et conditor civitatis huius, de qua loqui instituimus, in scriptura populi sui sententiam divinae legis aperuit, qua dictum est:  Deus superbis resistit, humilibus autem dat gratiam [James 4:6]. Hoc vero, quod Dei est, superbae quoque animae spiritus inflatus adfectat amatque sibi in laudibus dici: parcere subiectis et debellare superbos [Aen. 6.853]. For the king and founder of this city, of which I have undertaken to speak, has revealed in the scripture of his people a statement of divine law, in which it is said, ‘God resists the proud, but gives favour to the humble.’ This belongs to God, but the swollen spirit of a proud soul lays claim to it, and loves to have said in its praise, ‘to spare the subject and fight down the proud’. (Aug. Civ. 1 pref.)

A central message of Christian scripture confronts a line of Virgil, from Rome’s mission statement voiced by Anchises, which was so well known that Augustine had no need to name its author.29 Augustine’s opponents did not recognize the authority of scripture, so he said that he would cite authorities they did recognize and wanted their children to study (Civ. 1.3, 4.1). He used the forensic technique of repeating quotations from his chosen witnesses; and he presented quotations from Virgil as statements of fact by ‘their most famous poet’. In deploying excessere omnes, adytis arisque relictis, | di quibus imperium hoc steterat (‘all the gods through whom this empire stood have left, abandoning their shrines and altars’, Aen. 2.351–2), Augustine did not want his readers to remember that the speaker is Aeneas, narrating to Dido his despairing words to his men as Troy fell to the Greeks. He used Virgil’s gods as evidence that his opponents worship gods who are subject to human passions and present humans with 27

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Almost half of all Augustine’s citations of Virgil come from this work. See Hagendahl (1967: 705). Augustine had used the theme of the two cities for over a decade, and assumed that readers knew what he meant. The fullest and most-quoted definition is at Civ. 14.28. De doctr. Chr. 3.75, ‘Almost every page of the holy books proclaims, “God resists the proud and gives favour to the humble”.’ On the Roman Empire in relation to the earthly city, see Clark (2018).

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models of anger and cruelty, lust and grief: ‘Diana grieved for Camilla in Virgil, and Hercules wept for Pallas who would die’ (nam Camillam Diana doluit apud Vergilium et Pallantem moriturum Hercules flevit, Civ. 3.11). Sometimes Augustine distinguished Virgil from Virgil’s poetry. Platonists, he thought, were the best philosophers and the closest to Christianity, but were overconfident in human reason, permitted worship of lesser gods, and believed that the soul cannot be blessed until it is separated from the body, which weighs it down and is the source of the basic emotions: fear and desire, grief and joy. He cited Virgil for memorable expressions of Platonism, but did not claim that Virgil was a Platonist. ‘Virgil seems to set out the Platonic view in brilliant lines’ (Vergilius Platonicam videatur luculentis versibus explicare sententiam, Civ. 14.3) introduces a quotation from the speech of Anchises explaining to Aeneas what happens to souls in the Underworld.30 This passage reappears on one of the rare occasions when Augustine did quote Virgil in a sermon, taking care that everyone understood. One Easter week he contrasted Christian teaching on resurrection with pagan beliefs about reincarnation: One of their authors was horrified: he was shown, or he introduced, a father showing his son in the Underworld. Almost all of you know this; I wish only a few did!31 But a few know from books, and many from the theatre, that Aeneas went down to the Underworld, and his father showed him the souls of great Romans which would go to bodies. Aeneas was appalled, and said, ‘Father, are we to think some lofty souls go hence to heaven, and return to bodies slow?’ Are we to believe, he says, that they go to heaven and come back? ‘What dire desire for light afflicts these wretches?’ [Aen. 6.719–21] The son understood better than the father explained. (Aug. Ser. 241.5)

In another sermon, preached after the Goths sacked Rome in 410, Augustine made it explicit that Virgil did not always speak in his own person. He imagined asking Virgil, ‘Why did you make Jupiter say “Empire without end I gave”?’ Virgil, he suggested, would reply, ‘I know, but what was I to do, selling words to the Romans, unless I flattered them by promising something false?’ Virgil would also point out that he gave the words to Jupiter: ‘the god was false, the poet a liar’, whereas in his own person, Virgil said, ‘not Roman state nor kingdoms which will die’ (Ser. 105.10, citing G. 2.498).

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Aen. 6.750–1, cited Civ. 13.19; Aen. 6.730–5, cited Civ. 14.3. For ‘Virgil the Platonist’, see Fowler, Casali, and Stok, this volume; for Augustine on Virgil on the afterlife, see Clark (2010). Not because it is Virgil, but because most people knew from the theatre, of which Augustine disapproved.

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Augustine could dismiss Virgil’s claims as poetic fiction, or could argue that Virgil correctly portrayed gods who are deceptive demons; he could treat Virgil as a source of wisdom and show that Virgil was wrong, or that he was partly right. Near the end of City of God, in a long discussion of works of mercy as compensation for sin, there is an unexpected parenthesis: I always find it remarkable [mirari … soleo] that in Virgil too there is found the Lord’s saying, ‘make yourselves friends from the mammon of unrighteousness, that they may receive you in everlasting habitations’ [Luke 16:9] … for when the poet described the Elysian fields where they think the souls of the blessed dwell, he placed there not only those who were able to attain those dwelling places by their own merits, but added, 'and those who by deserving made others mindful of them’ [Aen. 6.664, as when Christians commend themselves to saints with the words ‘be mindful of me’]. (Aug. Civ. 21.27)

In the final book, Augustine said that Virgil partly understood the truth that souls yearn for a body: each soul yearns for its own body (Civ. 22.26). Scripture did not displace Virgil altogether, for Augustine himself or for later centuries in which education came to be based on scripture. In the Early Middle Ages, monastic scribes copied the Bible and Augustine, not Virgil;32 but the transmission of Virgil did not depend on Augustine’s selective quotation and adaptation, as was the case for some other classical texts. Augustine did not offer distinctive literary readings of Virgil, but his ways of alluding to Virgil do illustrate the cultural status of Virgil in late antiquity, and exemplify late antique willingness to allow the reader’s involvement with the text.33 Augustine insisted that the objects of love must be rightly ordered, and he found Virgil his proper place. FURTHER READING There is an immense bibliography on all aspects of Augustine, updated twice a year in the Revue d’études augustiniennes. There are also many resources online:  www.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/augustine, maintained by the Augustinian scholar and internet pioneer James O’Donnell, offers an impressive range of material, including O’Donnell’s commentary on the Confessions (1992), made available with the permission of OUP; www .augustinus.de is maintained by the Zentrum für Augustinus-Forschung (Würzburg); and texts are freely available at www.augustinus.it.

32 33

I owe this point to Daniel Hadas. Pelttari (2014: 114–30); Pucci (1998: 51–82).

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For those new to Augustine, Brown (1967; rev. edn 2000) remains the classic intellectual and social biography; the revised edition adds two major chapters on new evidence and new directions, and shows how Brown’s perspective has changed. Vessey (2012) offers a wide range of introductory essays, including Danuta Shanzer’s overview of ‘Augustine and the Latin Classics’ (2012: 161–74). MacCormack (1998) remains the fullest study of Augustine’s engagement with Virgil throughout his writings. For the early philosophical dialogues see Pucci (2014). Bennett (1988) is the most cited of many readings of the Confessions in relation to Virgil. O’Daly (1999:  246–8) helpfully surveys citations of Virgil.

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6a DO N FOW L E R (R E V I S E D B Y S E R GI O CA SA LI A ND FA BIO STOK )

The Virgil Commentary of Servius

Servius (called Marius or Maurus Servius Honoratus in manuscripts from the ninth century onwards) was a grammarian active in Rome in the late fourth and fifth centuries ad . His celebrated commentary on Virgil is generally held to be based on a commentary (now lost) by the earlier fourthcentury commentator Aelius Donatus (the teacher of St Jerome). Some manuscripts contain an enlarged version of Servius’ commentary, the socalled Servius Danielis (Servius auctus, DServius or DS), published in 1600 by Pierre Daniel and thought to be a seventh- to eighth-century expansion made on the basis of material from Donatus’ commentary not used by Servius himself. We know little about Servius’ life. He appears as a young man in Macrobius’ dialogue the Saturnalia (dramatic date 383–4) as a respectful follower of the pagan leader Aurelius Symmachus (Sat. 1.2.15). But Servius’ speeches in the Saturnalia have little to do with the commentary of the real Servius:1 Macrobius shaped the figure of the famous grammarian for his own purposes (and probably wrote his work after the death of Servius). It is true that Servius was a pagan, but he was not as strong an advocate of Neoplatonism as Macrobius; Alan Cameron includes him among the ‘centre-pagans’, people with no deep investment in the pagan cults.2 Interestingly, Servius uses the past tense in referring to pagan cults, where his source, that is Donatus, had used the present tense. We can observe this change of tense by comparing Servius with DS;3 for example, in his note on Aeneid 8.641, Servius writes that for sacrifices endorsing treaties and alliances, porcus adhibebatur (‘a pig was used’). Referring to the same type of sacrifice DS on Aeneid 12.170 refers to those who porcum adserunt … in foederibus … solere mactari (‘affirm it is customary to sacrifice a pig when 1 2 3

Cf. Kaster (1980). Cameron (2011: 176–7). Cf. Murgia (1988: 496 n. 5); Cameron (2011: 555–7).

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making treaties’). Servius’ use of the past tense (adhibebatur) corresponds to the political state of his times: in 391 ad the emperor Theodosius had banned pagan sacrifices and, when Servius wrote his commentary (probably in the first decade of the fifth century), pagan cults were no longer officially practised. This adjustment to the new political situation shows that Servius’ commentary was not a sort of pagan Bible, as stated fifty years ago by Herbert Bloch.4 Readers and users of Servius’ commentary were mainly Christians, who had to reconcile their reading of Virgil with their faith. Several features of the commentary were conducive to this reconciliation, and in fact supported it, if we consider its success and fortune in the fifth century (and later). One such feature was the allegorical approach applied to pagan gods, for example the incestuous relationship between Jupiter and Juno, mentioned by Virgil at Aeneid 1.47, where Juno calls herself et soror et coniunx of Jupiter (‘at once sister and wife’). This line is quoted by Lactantius to criticize the immorality of pagan religion (Inst. 1.47.14). Servius explains it allegorically: et soror et coniunx: physici Iovem aetherem id est ignem volunt, Iunonem vero aërem, et quoniam tenuitate haec elementa paria sunt, dixerunt esse germana. Sed quoniam Iuno, hoc est aër subiectus est igni, id est Iovi, iure superposito elemento mariti traditum nomen est. both sister and wife: the natural philosophers take Jupiter to be understood as the upper air, that is fire, but Juno as the lower air, and, since these elements are equal in thinness, they called them siblings. But since Juno, that is the lower air, was subject to fire, that is Jupiter, logically the name of husband has been given to the element on top.

Virgil was also criticized by Christian authors for the theory of metempsychosis expounded by Anchises in Aeneid 6. Augustine (Civ. 13.19) attributes to Virgil a Platonic view on metempsychosis, which is in fact Plotinus’ position. Servius distinguishes between the doctrine expounded by Anchises and Virgil’s own position, attributing to the poet the less radical theory of metempsychosis worked out by Porphyry, which Augustine preferred to the orthodox Platonic version (Civ. 10.30).5 Servius’ commentary comes at the end of a long period of Virgilian commentary, which had already begun in the first century bc .6 The commentary form itself goes back to Hellenistic and earlier Greek scholarship, above 4 5 6

Bloch (1963: 210). Cf. Stok (2013). Cf. Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008: 623–8).

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all on Homer, and in a sense Servius’ work bears the same relationship to Homeric commentary as the Aeneid does to the Iliad and the Odyssey (the commentary on the Eclogues, similarly, has its roots in the Greek commentaries on Theocritus).7 The format is the familiar one of a lemma (one or more words of the text) followed by comments, in the manner later reproduced in the modern variorum edition. Sometimes scholars are named, but more commonly we have merely expressions like ‘some say …, others …’. The text is typically seen as raising a ‘problem’ (quaestio), to which a ‘solution’ is offered; the methodology goes back to the beginnings of Homeric commentary.8 From a modern point of view, this means that the tendency is towards the removal of ‘difficulties’, rather than their incorporation into a more complex reading, but the same objection might be made to many modern commentaries. The range of interests is also similar to that of modern commentaries (unsurprisingly, since modern commentary has been shaped in part by the Servian model), including textual problems, grammatical points, rhetoric and poetics, and general cultural background. Servius was not a philologist, but sometimes he discusses textual variants on the reading of the text he comments upon. In his note on Aeneid 12.120, where the priests preparing the duel between Aeneas and Turnus are velati lino (‘veiled with linen’), Servius observes that the officials in charge of making treaties, such as the Fetials and the pater patratus, never used linen clothing. Evidently Virgil had been criticized for this by earlier commentators, but Servius affirms that Virgil was not ignorant, but purposefully introduced a discordant element because the peace treaty was ill-fated. In addition to this defence, Servius says that Hyginus and Caper considered the text corrupt, and that Virgil wrote velati limo, that is wearing a limus, the apron worn by the ministers who brought the victims to the altar. The variant limo has been criticized,9 but in fact it is adopted by all the major modern editions of the Aeneid. Servius’ ‘literary’ explication of the text consists in part of elementary explanations of the meaning of words and the construction of sentences (often introduced with the phrase ordo est …, meaning ‘take the words in the following order’).10 An example is 1.109, saxa vocant Itali mediis quae in fluctibus aras: ordo est ‘quae saxa in mediis fluctibus Itali aras vocant’ (‘take the words in the order: “which rocks in the middle of the waves the

7 8 9 10

Cf. Farrell (2016). Cf. Aristotle, Poetics ch. 25, with Lucas (1968). Murgia (2004: 195). Cf. Levy (1969: 237).

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Italians call altars” ’). There are also, however, more advanced observations on rhetorical figures of thought and speech and on narrative technique. It is this last element which may be most interesting for modern critics. Servius often comments on what he calls persona, and what modern narratologists would see as matters of voice and mood (focalization, point of view). At Aeneid 1.23, for instance, Juno is described as veteris … memor … belli (‘mindful of the old war’), referring to Troy; however, since the Trojan War was not particularly old at the dramatic date of the Aeneid, there is a problema awaiting a lysis or solution. Modern commentators tend to take veteris as focalized by Juno, and meaning something like ‘past’ rather than ‘ancient’ (with a hint of bitterness), but Servius adopts a different solution: veteris belli: quantum ad Vergilium pertinet, antiqui; si ad Iunonem referas, diu gesti. Tunc autem ad personam referendum est, cum ipsa loquitur; quod si nulla persona sit, ad poetam refertur. Nunc ergo ‘veteris’ ex persona poetae intellegendum. Sic ipse in alio loco ‘mirantur dona Aeneae, mirantur Iulum flagrantesque dei vultus’ partem ad se rettulit, partem ad Tyrios, qui deum esse nesciebant. the old war: to the extent that it refers to Virgil, ‘ancient’; if you refer it to Juno, ‘fought for a long time’. One must refer an expression to the point of view of a character only when he or she speaks; if there is no character speaking, it is referred to the poet. Therefore here, ‘old’ is to be taken as coming from the character of the poet. So Virgil himself in another passage says, ‘they admire the gift of Aeneas, they admire Iulus and the blazing face of the god’ [Aen. 1.709–10], referring in part to himself, in part to the Tyrians, who did not know that he was a god.

Since Virgil speaks in 1.23, Servius is not prepared to accept an embedded focalization, even though it would be natural with a phrase like ‘mindful of …’; he therefore says that veteris (‘old’), must ‘pertain to Virgil’, that is, represent his point of view rather than Juno’s. The example cited within the note is, however, more complicated. When Cupid, disguised as Iulus, goes to the banquet in Dido’s palace, he is much admired; the denomination ‘Iulus’ represents the point of view of the Tyrians, who do not know that it is really Cupid, while ‘the blazing face of the god’ is clearly from the point of view of the omniscient narrator, who knows his real nature. Despite his explicit statement that ‘who sees?’ should coincide with ‘who speaks?’, therefore, Servius is in fact willing to accept variation in focalization as a critical tool, and does so elsewhere in his commentary. Even where a modern critic might wish to take a different line, the comments are extremely suggestive. Rhetorical analysis naturally plays an important role throughout. This may consist simply in the labelling of rhetorical figures in the poems, from 91

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aposiopesis (e.g. 2.100) to zeugma (e.g. 1.120), but it may be more extensive, especially in the comments on the speeches of characters such as Sinon in Book 2 or Drances in Book 11. The rhetorical tendency to see all speech as performance directed towards an end rather than revelatory of character has in the past seemed antiquated and unhelpful, but now perhaps attracts more respect. One interesting aspect of this approach to rhetoric is the way Servius reads descriptions of speakers’ moods in the introduction to speeches. In Aeneid 1.521, for instance, when Ilioneus speaks to Dido, he is described as beginning to speak placido … pectore (‘with a calm breast’), and Servius comments: placido sic pectore coepit: more suo uno sermone habitum futurae orationis expressit. thus he began with placid breast: in his usual fashion, Virgil has expressed the tone of the coming speech in one phrase.

It is not so much that Ilioneus really is calm at this point, as that he speaks calmly, puts on an air of calm. Servius’ approach to these introductory phrases can be very subtle; in 4.265, for instance, Mercury’s speech to Aeneas is introduced with the words continuo invadit (‘at once he assails him’), and Servius again comments:  habitum futurae orationis ostendit (‘he expresses the tone of the following speech’).11 Here Servius captures well the implication of aggressiveness which is clearly present in invadit, although other commentators will prefer a more neutral evaluation of the word (so Heyne says that he would prefer to take it simply as ‘he addresses him’). More subtly, when in 4.92 Juno ‘accosts Venus with these words’ (talibus adgreditur Venerem … dictis), Servius sees the ‘craftiness’ of her speech already anticipated by the introductory word adgreditur:  cum calliditate loquitur (‘she speaks with craftiness’). Adgredi is a common idiom for ‘addressing’ someone (OLD s.v. 2), and certainly there are other instances where no ‘craftiness’ is implied, for instance in the occurrence of the same phrase at 3.358 (Aeneas addresses Helenus), but here, as Juno accosts Venus, the verb may well have hostile overtones (‘to attack’, ‘to work upon someone by guile’, ‘to try to corrupt someone’, OLD s.v. 3), although subsequent commentators have not picked up Servius’ suggestion.12 The Servian commentaries can be studied from various aspects. Most readers of Virgil use them as a heuristic device, a mine of information and 11

12

Servius uses the same phrase a further seven times (on Aen. 1.107; 2.115; 7.451; 8.35; 11.387, 534; 12.807). For similar remarks see Servius on Aen. 4.107; 6.387.

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views to excavate for use in constructing their own reading of the Virgilian text. They tend to be used opportunistically: quoted if they support an interpretation, ignored if they do not. There is nothing wrong with this approach, so long as it is clear that Servius’ authority in itself does not in any way validate a reading. Another perspective is to study Servius’ commentary in its own right, as a late antique work with an ideology of its own and as an important document in the history of ancient literary criticism, rhetoric and education. Such studies are complicated by the stratified nature of the commentary itself, but in several cases comparison between Servius and DS allows us to detect Servius’ position against that of previous exegetes. A striking feature of his approach is the defence of Virgil from criticisms made against him in the past13 (already by Hyginus, a contemporary of the poet, then by Virgil’s detractors of the first century a d , and also by Probus and other commentators). We have already seen above an example of Servius’ defence of Virgil, apropos the linen clothing of the priests in Aeneid 12.120. The same approach is applied by Servius to grammatical questions; for example, previous exegetes had criticized Virgil’s use of tota instead of omnia in Aeneid 1.185 (the stags hunted by Aeneas) hos tota armenta secuntur (‘whole herds follow behind these’). Servius justifies the Virgilian use as poetic:  usurpant tamen poetae et ista confundunt (‘the poets however misuse and confuse the two forms’). Servius’ consideration of Virgil as always ‘right’ is highlighted by his definition of the poet as totus … scientia plenus (‘overflowing with knowledge’, ad Aen. 6 praef.), an image shared by Macrobius and later developed by Fulgentius and in medieval culture. Apart from its own interest as a late antique text, the Servian commentary is always worth consulting on passages in Virgil’s poems. The more interesting observations are by no means always picked up by modern commentators, even those (such as R.  G. Austin) who make an especial point of using the Servian material. They are not an infallible, neutral source of information about Roman customs or lost texts, nor do they embody ‘what the ancients thought’ about Virgil or anything else. Even Servius’ knowledge of Latin, as a native speaker, is not necessarily to be preferred to that of a modern scholar (he is as far distant in time from Virgil as a modern scholar is from Shakespeare). Even where a critic may wish to disagree, however, Servius’ commentary is always a potentially productive stimulus for criticism.

13

Cf. Keeline (2013).

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FURTHER READING Editions: Thilo (1881–87); the ‘Harvard Servius’: Rand et al. (1946) (Aen. 1–2); Stocker and Travis (1965) (Aen. 3–5); and now Murgia and Kaster (2018) (Aen. 9–12). See also Ramires (1996) (Aen. 7); Ramires (2003) (Aen. 9); Jeunet-Mancy (2012) (Aen. 6). On the manuscript tradition, see Murgia (2014). For a dissenting view on the relationship of DS with Aelius Donatus, see Daintree (1990). Index: Mountford and Schultz (1930). Life: Murgia (2003). General works:  Goold (1970); Kaster (1988:  169–97); Casali and Stok (2008); Bouquet and Méniel (2011); Copeland and Sluiter (2012); Garcea, Lhommé, and Vallat (2016); Zetzel (2018). Hermeneutics: Jones (1961); Lazzarini (1984); Dietz (1995); Delvigo (2013). Varro in Servius: Vallat (2017).

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Post-classical Commentary

From late antiquity to the present day, a great many commentaries have been written on Virgil, and each of them gives a window onto both the reception of Virgil and the cultural features of the age in which it was produced. These two aspects can always be discerned, despite the outward continuity of the exegesis and of the tradition of materials which every commentator inherits from his predecessors. Just as the text of Virgil has been constantly reinterpreted, so too late antique commentaries have been subject to a constant process of revision, in an effort to produce an interpretation appropriate for readers at any given time: Virgil’s reception is always connected to the reception of his commentaries. In this chapter we will consider within a loose historical framework some significant moments in the history of Virgil commentaries: the transition from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, when the fifth-century commentary of Philargyrius on the Eclogues and Georgics was excerpted to produce an interpretation that would appeal to Christian sensitivities; and the ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ of the Renaissance tradition of Virgil commentaries, with the fifteenthcentury commentary of Pomponius Laetus, which could be viewed as the first modern Virgil commentary; before turning finally to Juan Luis de la Cerda, a Spanish Jesuit who, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, laid the foundations of the tradition of Virgil commentaries still alive today. Philargyrius between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages Servius’ commentary was not the only one written on Virgil in late antiquity. At least two others survive, those of Tiberius Claudius Donatus on the Aeneid and Philargyrius (his true name was probably ‘Philagrius’) on the Eclogues and the Georgics.1 Whereas Servius’ commentary was soon 1

The name ‘Philargyrius’ (introduced by Politian) was suggested by the reading Filargirius / Filagirius in the manuscripts of the Explanationes, but in the Scholia Bernensia the

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adopted by the schools thanks to his grammatical approach, we do not know anything about the late antique reception of these commentaries. The origins of Tiberius Claudius Donatus are completely obscure, but he was probably a contemporary of Servius; he proposes a rhetorical reading of Virgil’s poem and interprets it as praise of Aeneas and Augustus, viewing the Aeneid as an epideictic text. His commentary is clearly influenced by the declamatory tradition, which often used Virgilian themes. Tiberius sometimes argues with inherited grammatical exegeses (he does not mention any names, but Aelius Donatus is a likely target), frequently proposes moralizing interpretations, and seems to address a ‘conservative’ ancient reader interested in valorizing the Roman tradition.2 We are better informed about Philargyrius:  in the manuscripts we read that his commentary was written at Milan during the reign of an emperor Valentinianus, identifiable with Augustus Valentinianus III (425–55 ad ). According to Geymonat, Philargyrius is to be identified with Philagrius, the ancestor of the emperor Avitus who is mentioned by Sidonius Apollinaris in his panegyric (456 ad ); in another poem, Sidonius mentions Philagrius’ rich library (Carm. 24.93).3 Philargyrius’ commentary was used by some Irish monks in the seventh century, who excerpted from it to compile two ‘Expositions’ on the Eclogues, followed in the manuscripts by the ‘Brief exposition’ on the Georgics, and the so-called ‘Bern scholia’ on the Eclogues and Georgics. The first ‘Exposition’ is signed with the name of ‘Fatosus’, which is the Latin version of the Irish name Toicthech.4 The Irish origin of these compilations is confirmed by the presence of glosses in old Irish.5 The note of the first ‘Exposition’ on Eclogue 3.90 mentions an ‘Adamnanus’ who should probably be identified with Adamnán, biographer of Saint Columba and abbot of the monastery of Iona in the Hebrides from 694 to 704. Iona was the most important centre for cultural exchange between Ireland and Britain at this time. Besides Philargyrius, the Bern scholia also mention the names of two other commentators, Gaudentius and Titus Gallus (who seems to have commented only on the first book of the Georgics), but the core of the Irish compilations was very likely the commentary of Philargyrius. His exegetical approach differed from that of Servius. Philargyrius was not interested in grammar. He does give the meanings of rare and unusual words, but

2 3 4 5

name given by the manuscript is Flagrius. That the true name was Philagrius was conjectured by Heraeus (1930: 391). Kaster (2014: 271). Geymonat (1984: 171–4). Miles (2011: 28). Lambert (1986).

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avoids the grammatical explanations frequent in Servius. He reproduces instead several interpretations of the ancient exegetes, probably using the same source used by Servius, that is the commentary of Aelius Donatus. In contrast with Servius, he often gives different interpretations, mostly in summary form but sometimes reproducing quotations from ancient authors’ works (for example, Sallust’s Histories). But the most striking characteristic of Philargyrius’ commentary is his allegorical approach. Besides the autobiographical interpretations of the First and Ninth Eclogues, which Servius also adopts, Philargyrius records several other identifications: in the Third Eclogue Menalcas is considered a personification of Mark Antony or of Cornificius, an enemy of Virgil; in the Fifth, Menalcas and Mopsus are identified with Virgil and the poet Aemilius Macer respectively; in the Sixth, Chromis and Mnasyllus are fellow students of Virgil, and the nymph Aegle a slave of Maecenas named Leria or a friend of Varus, and so on. In the Eighth Eclogue, Moeris is presented as tutor Virgilii et magus huius rei peritissimus (‘patron of Virgil and very expert in magic’), a statement that foreshadows the medieval tradition of Virgil as a magician. Philargyrius also collects anecdotes regarding problematic passages of Virgil, for example the story (also known to Servius) of a certain Caelius of Mantua who had squandered his heritage and was buried in a tomb three ells wide, the size of heaven’s vault in the riddle of Damoetas in Eclogue 3.104. Philargyrius’ commentary seems to be addressed to readers who no longer had access to the historical and literary context of the works of Virgil, but who still considered them part of their cultural heritage. Anecdotes and allegories gave Virgil’s text a meaning comprehensible to these readers, together with a much-simplified digest of the over-complex and recondite exegesis collected by Aelius Donatus. Unlike Aelius Donatus, but like Servius and Tiberius Donatus, Philargyrius omits criticisms directed at Virgil’s poetic choices and considers him a model of excellence. This approach seems consistent with the culture of the Gallic aristocracy we know from Sidonius Apollinaris, to which Philargyrius may have been connected. Sidonius largely imitates Virgil, but reveals a particular interest in the Eclogues and their allegorical interpretation. Sidonius was a Christian, as Philargyrius very probably was too, but there are no traces of Christianity in his works, which are informed by a classical tradition that is advanced as a model for cultural identity. Philargyrius’ commentary was recovered by the Irish compilers of the above-mentioned ‘Expositions’ and Bern scholia. They inserted into their compilations not only Irish glosses, but also passages from Isidore and other authors. They also knew the commentary of Servius, but considered that of Philargyrius a useful complement, which enriched their understanding of 97

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Virgil (the first ‘Exposition’ also fills the lacuna of Servius at Eclogues 1.37– 2.19). The enlarged version of Servius’ commentary, that of Servius Danielis, was very likely put together in the same context as the Irish compilations of Philargyrius.6 Allegorical interpretations were congenial to the culture of the Irish compilers, who inserted in their compilations the Christian interpretation of the Fourth Eclogue, according to which the newborn child announced by Virgil was Jesus Christ.7 This interpretation was known already to Lactantius, but became controversial in the fourth century (it was rejected by Jerome, but accepted by Augustine). The compilers agreed on this interpretation and adopted its traditional topics, but independently from each other; the compiler of the Bern scholia is more prudent and presents some interpretations as ‘our opinion’ or ‘according to the Christians’. The compiler of the second ‘Exposition’ seems more resolute and gives an allegorical interpretation of several verses of the eclogue; for example, the flores of line 23 are interpreted as the gifts of the three kings to the baby Jesus, the serpens and the herba of line 24 as the devil (diabolus) and the pagan doctrine (doctrina gentilium; the compilers usually refer to the pagans as gentiles). All compilers attribute the prophecy to the Sibyl mentioned by Virgil in line 4 and identify the virgo of line 6 (i.e. Justice) with the Virgin Mary. The compilers juxtaposed the Christian interpretation with the interpretations given by Philargyrius: the compiler of the Bern scholia writes that the progenies of 4.4 is either Saloninus or Augustus or Christ or Marcellus, son of Octavia, simply adding the Christian reading to the traditional ones. In other cases, the compiler modifies the ancient exegesis and inserts his own observations. The note of the Bern scholia to Georgics 4.493 is attributed to Gaudentius, but in fact it seems partly attributable to the compiler himself, who says that Orpheus descended into hell (descendit in infernum), but who also observes at the end that the whole story of Orpheus and Eurydice is a falsehood invented by the pagans (ridiculosa gentilitas fingit falsa). The compiler of the first ‘Exposition’ completed his commentary on the Eclogues with a biography of Virgil largely reproducing that of Donatus, with some omissions and some modifications which moralize Donatus’ references to Virgil’s sexual life.8 This attempt at moralization also appears in the commentary, with regard to the traditional identification of Alexis with a boy given to Virgil by Asinius Pollio. In notes on Eclogue 2.1, the compiler of the first ‘Exposition’ writes that Virgil loved boys, but not 6 7 8

Stok (2015a: 296–7). Stok (2018). Stok (2014–15).

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‘shamefully’ (turpiter), whereas the compiler of the second takes into consideration the possibility that Alexis was Augustus himself or a slave boy of Augustus, and that Virgil praised him to eulogize the emperor. The compilations based on Philargyrius’ commentary enjoyed a little success in the eighth and ninth centuries, after which they were eclipsed by Servius’ commentary. Pomponius Laetus’ Ghost Commentary Servius’ commentary was obscured in the late Middle Ages by new commentaries which reflected the demands of ‘modernity’ which arose in the twelfth century. An influential revision of Servius’ commentary was written by Hilarius of Orléans, a teacher in Angers between 1105 and 1123; his commentary (formerly attributed to Anselm of Laon) omits parts of the quotations and many of the grammatical exegeses provided by Servius, but adds historical and rhetorical notes, explains words whose meaning had changed during the Middle Ages, and sometimes incorporates from Eusebius episodes from biblical history (for example, in a note on Aeneid 1.265 the fall of Troy is situated at the time of Moses’ flight from Egypt). A commentary on the first six books of the Aeneid is attributed to Bernardus Silvestris (twelfth century); it renews the allegorical approach introduced in late antiquity by Fulgentius (fifth–sixth century), and interprets the plot of the Aeneid as an integumentum (‘covering’) of philosophical truths. This commentary was influenced by the Platonism of the school of Chartres. Zono de’ Magnalis, a master in Montepulciano near Siena in the first decades of the fourteenth century, wrote an ample commentary on the whole of Virgil in which he collected several literary and historical sources available in his time; at times he adopts an allegorical approach; he also endorses the authenticity of the Helen episode. The English Dominican Nicholas Trevet (1265–1335) commented on the Eclogues in the light of contemporary Aristotelianism. It was the humanists who rediscovered Servius’ commentary. The forerunner of this revaluation of Servius was Petrarch (1304–74), who read Virgil together with Servius in his famous codex illuminated by Simone Martini (now in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana S.P. 10, 27). The popularity of Servius in the fifteenth century is revealed by the large number of manuscripts and by the interest devoted to him by Guarino of Verona and his school. Other humanists, such as Lorenzo Valla, were more critical of Servius, and so Pomponius Laetus, successor of Valla at the Studium of Rome, prepared a new commentary for the courses he held on Virgil from 1471. 99

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Following the printing of the editio princeps of Virgil, without any commentary, at Rome in 1469, between 1469 and 1599 around 150 separate commentaries on Virgil, by at least 125 different authors, were produced. Some of them would appear in thirty or more editions.9 Pomponius Laetus, however, did not publish his commentary, even though he collaborated from 1470 with printers active in Rome, but it survives in manuscript. The reasons for his choice are not clear. In a letter written to Agostino Maffei in 1490, Laetus affirms that in order to interpret Virgil it was necessary to know his world (cognitio rerum), and that he was conscious of his own ignorance on this point.10 This statement is consistent with the whole approach of his commentary, which aims to illuminate the cultural and historical dimensions of Virgil’s world, but it does not fully explain Laetus’ resolution not to publish his commentary in a printed edition. His behaviour seems somehow consistent with the esoteric aspects of the Roman Academy he founded, whose members sometimes convened in the catacombs of Rome. Laetus made two important discoveries around 1470, thanks to his relationship with the monastery of Bobbio, which he shared only with his pupils:  the late antique Mediceus manuscript of Virgil (now in Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana Plut. 39.1) and the commentary on the Eclogues and Georgics attributed to Valerius Probus. Both discoveries were long known only to Laetus’ circle, and were not publicized until the sixteenth century. Around 1490 a manuscript of Laetus’ commentary was used by a printer based in Brescia to publish a pirated edition; it is not known how the editor, Daniele Gaetani, came into possession of it. Laetus promptly disavowed it, in the same letter to Maffei. Nevertheless the commentary was later reprinted by Johannes Oporinus (1544) and by Georg Fabricius (in his several editions of Virgil from 1561) under the name ‘Pomponius Sabinus’. Commentators until Heyne used it and frequently mentioned this name, and it was not until 1824 that Naecke established that the mysterious Pomponius Sabinus was indeed Pomponius Laetus.11 The original version of Laetus’ commentary, transmitted by some manuscripts, remains unpublished. It concerns not only Virgil’s works, but also the Appendix (indeed the first printed commentary on the Appendix, published in 1480 by Domizio Calderini, largely plagiarized that of Pomponius). Despite some ambiguities and idiosyncrasies, Laetus’ commentary can be considered the first Virgilian commentary of the modern age.

9 10 11

Wilson-Okamura (2010: 24–31). The letter was published in Laetus’ edition of Sallust printed in Rome, also in 1490. Naecke (1842: 119–43).

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Laetus had historical and antiquarian interests (he collected inscriptions and other archaeological items). Several of his notes on Virgil deal with religion and ritual, customs, and geography, among other topics, and include explanatory quotations from Pliny the Elder, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Theophrastus, and many other Greek and Latin authors. Laetus also frequently identifies Virgilian parallels in Lucan, Silius, and Statius’ Silvae, works which either Laetus or students of his school had commented on in previous years. In several cases Laetus corrects or improves on the exegesis of Servius.12 At Aeneid 7.563, Virgil presents the Valley of Amsanctus, through which Allecto returns to the Underworld, as a ‘place in the heart of Italy’ (locus Italiae medio). Servius, following Aelius Donatus, criticizes medio on the grounds that Amsanctus is in Lucania in southern Italy. Laetus redeems Virgil’s medio, pointing out that Virgil’s geographic indications refer to preRoman Italy, and quotes Pliny, who writes that the Rubicon was the ancient frontier of Italy (NH 3.115). Commenting on the Eclogues, Laetus adopts a strongly autobiographical reading. He did not know Philargyrius’ commentary, but mainly used that of pseudo-Probus. The same approach is adopted in regard to the Culex and the Dirae, which he obviously attributed to Virgil. The allegorical reading allowed Laetus to write an innovative Life of Virgil, which he probably used as an introduction to his lectures on the poet.13 In it he highlights some aspects of the biographical tradition previously censored, such as Virgil’s sex life and his Epicurean sympathies. These sections may also partly explain Laetus’ cautious stance on publishing his commentary; after all, in 1468 he had been imprisoned and accused of heresy, paganism and homosexuality. Laetus frequently adopts the textual variants he found in the codex Mediceus, against the vulgate text printed in the 1471 Roman edition by Sweynheym and Pannartz. For example, at Aeneid 4.27 Laetus read in the Mediceus the correct violo … resolvo, as against the vulgate violem … resolvam. In some cases he also includes in the textual discussion the variant given by the commentary he attributed to Probus. At Aeneid 2.691 he prefers Probus’ augurium to the auxilium read by the Mediceus. Sometimes Laetus himself offers conjectures, as in the case of Aeneid 1.2, where the textual alternative Lavinaque/Laviniaque was known to Servius, who preferred Lavinaque. Laetus read Lavinaque in the Mediceus but conjectured Lavinia (and wrote this correction in the Mediceus itself!).

12 13

Stok (2011). Stok (2015b).

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In several cases Laetus attributes the variants of the Mediceus to ‘Apronianus’, shorthand for Flavius Turcius Rufius Apronianus Asterius, a Roman aristocrat and consul in 494, whose name appears in the subscript of the manuscript. Laetus is rather ambiguous about this figure, and sometimes presents Apronianus as an ancient commentator. One of the good variants recovered by Laetus from the Mediceus is tenet at Aeneid 7.412 – et nunc magnum tenet Ardea nomen (‘and Ardea still retains a mighty name’) – as against the vulgate’s manet: Laetus presents the variant as read by Apronianus (Apronianus legit), and elsewhere attributes to Apronianus not only a reading, but also exegetical comment. Scholars long thought that the mysterious Pomponius Sabinus knew a lost commentary written by Apronianus. This belief was a by-product of the complicated history of Laetus’ commentary. La Cerda and the Foundation of the Modern Commentary Tradition In the bibliographies of the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century commentaries on Virgil, neither Pomponius Laetus nor any of the multitude of Virgil commentaries published in the fifteenth and sixteenth century are considered. In the history of the modern Virgilian commentary tradition we register a strong rupture at the end of the eighteenth century with the commentary of Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), whose first edition appeared in four volumes between 1767 and 1775.14 Only one pre-Heyne commentary survives in the bibliographies of the most recent commentaries on Virgil:  the three-volume commentary of the Spanish Jesuit Juan Luis de la Cerda (c. 1558–1643), published in 1608 (Eclogues and Georgics), 1612 (Aeneid 1–6), and 1617 (Aeneid 7–12). This survival is not a matter of chance: there are qualitative and quantitative differences between La Cerda and his predecessors. Not only is his work considerably longer than any of the other early modern Virgil commentaries, but La Cerda is also an immensely erudite scholar (note the enormous number of parallels from ancient authors both earlier and later than Virgil) who exhibits an acute sensitivity for the interpretation of Virgil’s works. If it is true that we are living in a ‘neo-baroque’ age, his typically baroque sensitivity may paradoxically make him in some ways a more ‘modern’ commentator than not only his Renaissance predecessors, but also many of his now more commonly consulted successors, and in fact some of his notes are more likely to be

14

Heyne (1767–75); most commonly used today is Heyne and Wagner (1830–41).

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appreciated in the present day than in the past.15 For example, less than a century after the publication of La Cerda’s commentary, the Italian priest and author Ludovico Antonio Muratori could reject as nonsense La Cerda’s observation that at Aeneid 10.834, where Mezentius vulnera siccabat lymphis (lit. ‘dried with water his wound’), Virgil intended to create an ‘acumen’, that is a ‘witticism’.16 Of course, today we have no problem seeing ‘an apparent oxymoron’.17 To take another example, Conington defines as ‘of course absurd’ La Cerda’s suggestion that at Aeneid 4.271 aut qua spe Libycis teris otia terris? (‘or what are you hoping to do by idling your time away in the Lybian lands?’), the cluster teris … terris alludes to the ancient etymology of terra from tero.18 On the contrary, for O’Hara there can be no doubt that this really is the case, and Muse goes so far as to see in the wordplay teris … terris an imitation of the similarly etymological Homeric wordplay at Odyssey 15.10 involving the Tel- (‘far’) in Telemachus.19 La Cerda spent most of his adult life teaching students in a Jesuit preuniversity school, the Colegio Imperial of Madrid, as a professor and a ‘prefect of studies’, and the didactic aims of his commentary are evident and pervasive.20 La Cerda’s commentary is didactic in two ways: he wants both to explain Virgil, and to teach his students how to compose poetry. In his address to the reader at the beginning of the first volume, La Cerda explains that he divided his work into Argumenta, that is brief statements of the subject of the chunk of text under consideration; Explicationes, that is explanatory paraphrases which often contain the main interpretative points and explain ‘the mind of Virgil’; and Notae, more minute miscellaneous observations by which he proposes to confirm the explanation given in the Explanatio, to expound – but only rarely – the opinions of others, and to collect parallels from Greek and Latin authors both preceding and following Virgil. The stated aim of this massive accumulation of parallels is to teach how properly to compose poetry by observing the ways in which Virgil imitated his Greek predecessors, and also the ways in which his followers imitated him – almost always unsuccessfully, it will turn out – but in such 15

16 17 18

19 20

On La Cerda’s ‘baroque’ approach to Virgil, see Mazzocchi (1993: 663–6); Casali (2008). On postmodernity as a neo-baroque age, see the seminal Calabrese (1992); and Lambert (2004); Ndalianis (2004); Egginton (2010). Muratori (1706: ii.554), quoted by Mazzocchi (1993: 663). Harrison (1991: ad loc.). Conington (1872: ad loc.). Cf. Varr. LL 5.21 (attributing it to Aelius Stilo fr. 39 GRF); Isid. Orig. 14.1.1. O’Hara (2017: 155); Muse (2005). The starting point on La Cerda’s life is still Simón-Díaz (1944); cf. (1992: 521–2). See also, with due caution, Stevens (1945: 201–17). A brief summary and further references are provided by J. Escalera in O’Neill and Domínguez (2001: i .734).

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a way as to work as a stimulus for the students in their own practice of imitation. La Cerda is notably reticent in his Foreword regarding the names of his predecessors. He only mentions ‘Germanus Valens Guellius P.  P.’ (i.e. Pimpontius), Germain Vaillant de Guélis (1516–87), Abbot of Paimpont and Bishop of Orléans from 1585 to his death, as the one whose judgement he considers the most authoritative.21 In the course of La Cerda’s commentary, indeed, Germanus (1575) is the most frequently cited of the preceding commentators of Virgil, if perhaps not the most cited name, an honour probably to be split between Julius Caesar Scaliger and his son Joseph Justus  – neither of whom, however, had written a proper Virgilian commentary (apart from Joseph’s commentary on the Appendix (1573), also printed at the end of the commentary of Germanus). Germanus’ commentary was much more concise than that of La Cerda, but what most attracted La Cerda’s attention was probably the space it devoted to Virgil’s Greek models, starting of course with Homer and Apollonius. Germanus had been preceded in this especially by the 1567 ‘monograph’ of Ursinus (Fulvio Orsini, 1529–1600) specifically dedicated to Virgil’s Greek models, published by Plantin of Antwerp, and in fact Germanus’ detractors accused him of having plagiarized Ursinus.22 Germanus, the only commentator mentioned in the epistle to the reader, is but one of 150 names of modern scholars listed in the ‘syllabus’ which forms part of the prefatory materials of La Cerda’s first volume. Not all of these names belong to scholars of Virgil and, more importantly, not all the Virgilian commentators and interpreters cited in the course of the commentary are present in this list. For example, Jodocus Badius Ascensius, the most frequently printed of the early modern commentators on Virgil, is absent from the syllabus, and is in fact very rarely quoted in the notes; Ascensius’ annotations are evidently too elementary to merit La Cerda’s attention.23 To take another example, also absent from the syllabus is another commentator whom instead La Cerda quotes often enough and usually with approbation, Nascimbene Nascimbeni, author of a commentary on the first six books of the Aeneid (1577), which was often used, notwithstanding Nascimbeni’s heretical tendencies,24 by the other major Jesuit commentator of this period, 21 22

23

24

On Germanus’ life and works, see Delacourcelle (1954). Delacourcelle (1954: 354). On the history of early modern Virgil commentaries in light of their preoccupation with Greek models and Homer in particular, see Knauer (1964a: 31–106). On Badius Ascensius, also a famous printer, as a scholar and commentator, see the fundamental study of White (2013: 61–106 and 207–33). He was persecuted by the Inquisition for his involvement with the cult of Giorgio Siculo. See Prosperi (2000: 322–40).

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Jacobus Pontanus (Jakob Spanmüller, c. 1542–1626), whose work appeared in 1599.25 In fact, from a ‘moralistic’ point of view, both Pontanus and La Cerda appear relatively uninhibited. For example, they both ignore the prescriptions of the Ratio studiorum (‘Plan of studies’) adopted in 1599 by the Society of Jesus regarding the prohibition on reading some of the Eclogues and Book 4 of the Aeneid at school. According to the Ratio, during the penultimate class of the lower curriculum, ‘Humanities’, mainly dedicated to poetry, and propaideutic to the final class, ‘Rhetoric’, the students should have improved their style and obtained ‘correctness of expression and ample vocabulary’ through daily readings of Cicero’s moral works, of the historians, and, with respect to poetry, of Virgil, ‘with the exception of some eclogues and the fourth book of the Aeneid’ (plus selected odes of Horace, to which might be added ‘elegies, epigrams, and other poems of recognized poets, provided that they are purged of all immoral expressions’).26 Not only does La Cerda not flinch in the face of Eclogues such as the second one, but sometimes he is less prudish than some of his twentieth-century successors. For example, when at Aeneid 4.317–18 Dido begs Aeneas to reconsider his decision to leave Carthage, si bene quid de te merui, fuit aut tibi quicquam | dulce meum (‘if ever I deserved well of you, or if anything of mine has been sweet to you’), the sexual reference in the second half of this clause worried interpreters even before Servius’ time. Servius, for his part, clearly saw that Dido tegit rem inhonestam (‘covers up a shameful thing’) – quoting Terence’s Andria 294:  seu tibi morigera fuit in rebus omnibus (‘if she has been complying with you in all things’) – but Servius Danielis reports that other interpreters were uncomfortable with this explanation, and advanced various ways to neutralize Dido’s reference to res veneria (‘intercourse’). Just such an attitude can still be found in the great 1935 commentary on Aeneid 4 of A. S. Pease: ‘We need not, with Servius …, take this clause in an obscene sense …; cases of dulce so employed, collected by various editors, are not adequate to prove a bad sense here’, and this after having accumulated parallels from Greek poetry (especially Pind. Olympians 1.75–6 and Sophocles Ajax 520– 1) that prove beyond any doubt that a ‘bad sense’ is just what is meant here. In his ‘explicatio’, La Cerda (who, by the way, already had access to Servius Danielis) knows how to say the needful without compromise: velat modestissime rem coniugum, tantum indicata voluptate (‘she most modestly veils the conjugal intercourse, mentioning only the pleasure of it’); in his note, he further clarifies: dulce] Pindarus Od. 1 Olymp. [Ol. 1.75] φίλια 25 26

On Pontanus see, most recently, Leinsle (2009); Rädle (2013: 266–8). Trans. Farrell (1970: 80).

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δῶρα Κυπρίας:  Amica Veneris dona. Clarius Od. 6 [Ol. 6.35] γλυκείας … Ἀφροδίτας:  Dulcis Veneris (‘Pind. Ol. 1.75  “Venus’ pleasing gifts”. More clearly at Ol. 6.35  “of sweet Venus” ’).27 For his part, La Cerda’s fellow Jesuit Pontanus (‘our Pontanus’, as La Cerda usually calls him) also candidly reprised Servius’ note without softening its content. In fact, far from disliking Dido, La Cerda goes so far as to declare her reaction to Aeneas’ farewell in the Underworld to be the part of the Aeneid in which Virgil is at his absolute best; in the ‘explicatio’ to Aeneid 6.467–76, he says that Totus hic locus, ut vivide intelligatur, pendet ab his, quae dicta 4. Aen. Cum enim magnus ubique Poëta, tum maximus in hac vicissitudine Didonis, et Aeneae (‘all this passage, in order for it to be understood in its full vividness, depends on what was said in Book 4. For, although Virgil is a great poet at every point, in no place is he greater than in this exchange of roles between Dido and Aeneas’). He then proceeds to an analysis of the passage that shows how in the Underworld Aeneas and Dido have exchanged the roles they played in Book 4: ‘a profound, double reversal of roles’ is Horsfall’s comment ad loc.,28 where he cites seven items of bibliography on the subject, the oldest being Cartault.29 It is fascinating to note how all these ‘modern’ observations are already contained in nuce in La Cerda, and even more fascinating to realize that La Cerda was not the first to notice that reversal of roles. He does not cite any predecessor on this occasion, but Pontanus, on Aeneid 6.471 (quam si dura silex …), reproduces (something La Cerda never does, always reworking in his own words the notes of his predecessors) the note of Nascimbeni, who observed how Virgil, by comparing Dido to an immovable rock: egregie sane duram Didonem, atque animo immobilem duritiae, immobilitatique animi Aeneae ex aequo respondere facit: nam ut Aeneas nullis Elisae fletibus movetur in quarto, ita hoc in loco vicissim Elisa Aenea lacrymante, atque etiam orante nihilo melius movetur. quamobrem et Aeneam quercui, cum ait: Et veluti annosam … quercum … et Didonem hic silici comparavit. well does he make Dido, hard and immovable in her mind, correspond exactly to the hardness and immovableness of Aeneas; for just as Aeneas is not moved by any weeping of Dido in Book 4, so here in her turn Dido, while Aeneas

27

28 29

The reference to Pind. Ol. 1.75–6, actually more to the point than that to Ol. 6.35, goes back at least to Ursinus (1567: 286–7), who also quotes the highly relevant words of Tecmessa at Soph. Ai. 520–1. On the philological reception of Aen. 4.317–18, see Finglass (2020). Horsfall (2013: 343). Cartault (1926: i .456–7).

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Early modern Virgil commentaries are interesting not only from a strictly historical perspective, but also for what they can still contribute to a proper understanding of the text. FURTHER READING On Tiberius Donatus, see Starr (1992); on Philargyrius, see Funaioli (1930); the ‘Explanations’ and the Bern scholia are in Hagen (1902) and (1867); for a recent edition of the commentary on G. 1.1–42 see Cadili (2003). The commentary attributed to Bernardus Silvestris is published in Jones and Jones (1977), that of Nicholas Trevet in Nascimento and Díaz de Bustamente (1984); the commentaries of Hilarius of Orléans and Zono de’ Magnalis are unpublished;  on the attribution to Hilarius, see De Angelis (1997); on Hilarius’ commentary on the Aeneid, see Bognini (2005), and on Zono, Stok (1991). On Pomponius Laetus’ commentary, see: Lunelli (2014), Stok (2009, 2014). Scholarship on both classical commentaries in general and Renaissance and early modern commentaries is increasingly flourishing. Interesting collections of essays on the traditions of the commentary on classical authors are Gibson and Kraus (2002) and Kraus and Stray (2016); for Renaissance neo-Latin commentaries specifically, see Enenkel and Hellen (2013) and Enenkel (2014). For a survey of the practices of commentary from antiquity to the present, see Grafton (2010). See also Copeland and Sluiter (2012) and Zetzel (2018). The scholarly reception of Virgil in the Renaissance has been explored by Craig Kallendorf in a series of fundamental studies; see most recently, Kallendorf (2015) and his essential bibliography of all the early printed editions of Virgil (including commentaries) (2012). Wilson-Okamura (2010) gives ample space to commentaries up to 1599; his Appendix B lists the commentaries on Virgil according to the number of editions that contain them. For a brief useful survey of the history of Virgil commentaries from ancient to modern times see the multi-authored ‘commentaries’ entry in Thomas and Ziolkowski (2014: 288–95). On La Cerda’s commentary see also Laird (2002). On the growth and spread of Jesuit schools, initially not a fundamental part of Ignatius’ project but soon destined to become a major source of glory for the Society, with over 800 schools open worldwide by the time of the Suppression (1773), see 107

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O’Malley (1993: 200–42). On Jesuit humanism, pedagogy, and education there is a vast bibliography: the classic study is Codina Mir (1968); more recently see Casalini and Pavur (2016). On the Jesuits’ attitude to Virgil, especially from the point of view of the theorists and practitioners of imitation, see the excellent studies of Haskell (2010) and (2014).

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Virgil in English Translation

‘Virgil’ does not just denote the 13,000 or so lines of verse which are now usually attributed to the poet who is believed to have lived between 70 and 19 bc : the word also connotes all the interpretations which have accreted around those lines over the past two thousand years. A  study of English translations – over a more modest period of five hundred years – can help us to understand what kind of Virgil has become embedded in English culture. Translations influence the reception of texts in a myriad capillary ways. They may establish at a barely conscious level a particular way of understanding that text, or they may explicitly present an individual’s view of it. It is easy to assume that reading and interpreting are solitary activities. But the translation of canonical texts into an inherited language necessarily brings with it buried fragments of the past. This chapter aims to show the genesis of two more or less irreconcilable tendencies in recent responses to Virgil. The first is the belief that Virgil is a poet of divided loyalties whose poems cannot completely align themselves with the empire of Rome – a belief set out in the criticism of the ‘Harvard school’ but which, Craig Kallendorf has argued, was anticipated by early modern writers.1 The second is the very widespread view that a perfect translation of Virgil would be so accurate that its translator would be invisible.2 Both of these beliefs emerge at very specific and surprisingly early periods. What also comes out of this survey, albeit partial, of Virgil in English translation is that Virgil has never in Britain been simply an ‘imperial poet’. He has only rarely appealed to poets who enjoy the patronage of English monarchs. Most British and Irish translators of Virgil are anxious about their own standing, usually support losing political causes, and often they were not ‘English’ but Irish or Scots, or inhabitants of the Welsh Marches. Virgil tends to be adopted into English by poets who need the consolation of his authority, or who are attracted by his manifest interest 1 2

Parry (1963); Lyne (1987); Kallendorf (2007a). Venuti (1995).

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in those who are underdogs, or by the sustaining dream of his imperial vision. As a result, he has often been used as a source of literary strength by English-speaking writers (including, as we shall see, Seamus Heaney) in regions traditionally regarded as outside or on the edges of Britain. The earliest rendering of Virgil in English occurs in Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame (c. 1380) as part of a dream vision. ‘Geffrey’, the dreamer, is a comically anxious figure who doubts that his poetic labours will be rewarded. He encounters a version of the Aeneid in Venus’ temple, engraved in brass in a form which is, like many medieval manuscripts of Virgil, part text and part picture. His first response to the image is tentatively to translate its words: ‘I wol now synge, yif I kan | The armes also the man’ (143–4; emphasis added).3 Geffrey, though, is not quite as modest as he sounds, and manages to associate himself with the power of Virgil’s verse. In witnessing Aeneas’ story engraved on the walls of a temple, he makes himself a double of Virgil’s hero, who sees a picture of the sack of Troy in Dido’s Temple of Juno. Chaucer then summarizes the action of the Aeneid in chronological order and, like many a medieval reader of the poem, is overwhelmed by the pathetic tale of Dido, which comes to dominate his paraphrase. The strength of his pity for Dido enables him to forget that his poem has a source in Virgil – ‘Non other auctour alegge I’ (314) – and to present himself as in effect the author of the Aeneid. In a poem about fame, this is a significant thing to do: Chaucer introduces the idea that Virgil is the poet to be imitated by those who are eager to press their own claims for a place in the House of Fame, but who fear they might belong on its threshold.4 Gavin Douglas’ translation of the Aeneid into Middle Scots (1513) is often seen as marking a new age in the reception of Virgil, in which the ‘medieval’ free paraphrase of Chaucer is superseded by a ‘Renaissance’ concern with the accurate understanding of ancient literatures and mores. Douglas is traditionally praised as a rugged Scot whose surging descriptions of storms exploit the magnificent sibilance of Middle Scots (winds which ‘quhissil’ do sound so much more vivid than those which just whistle). Douglas, however, makes full use of the recent painstaking philological commentary of Jacobus Badius Ascensius, and promises ‘Virgillis verse to folwe and no thing fain’ (1.Pr.266).5 He attacks the free prose paraphrase of the Aeneid which Caxton had printed in 1490, and his outrage at Caxton is designed partly to tell his readers that he, Gavin Douglas, is closer to the ‘real’ Virgil than his English predecessor. Douglas’ professed literalism serves to unite 3 4 5

References to Chaucer (1987). On medieval English Virgils, see Baswell (1995). On fame, see Hardie (2012). References to Douglas (1957–64), book, chapter and line.

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Virgil’s authority with his own. His prologues to each book counterpoint his own experiences with those of Aeneas and, like Chaucer, his strongest responses to the Aeneid are to its pathos. He describes the poem as ‘feilabill in all degre’ (‘affecting to the highest degree’, 1.Pr.13), and his ‘pius Aeneas’ is, like Chaucer’s narrator, a man of pity more than piety, who introduces himself as ‘Rewthfull Ene’. Douglas, though, struggles to erase the dominant medieval reading of his original as a chivalric tale of pity, adding a long philological note on the meaning of pietas, which he claims to interpret ‘quhylys [sometimes] for “rewth”, quhils for “devotion” and quhilis for “pyete” and “compasson” ’ (note on 1.vi.125). Douglas is also very responsive to the dynastic plot of the Aeneid. He repeatedly strengthens words in the Latin which concern kinship, such as gens (‘family’) and proles (‘offspring’), by introducing a touch of blood (‘Troian blude’, or, his favourite, ‘kynrent [kindred] and blude’, laces his version), or by seeing the family of Aeneas as having all the closeness of a Scottish ‘clan’ (3.iii.61). Douglas creates in his Eneydos a world where families feel almost magically drawn together by blood: Ascanius is a ‘tendir get’ (‘tender offspring’) of Aeneas, as is Lausus of Mezentius. Euryalus’ bereaved mother cries out, ‘O my maist tendir hart, quhar art thou gane?’ (9.viii.56). Families, and the pain to which they can give rise, are of course a central preoccupation of the Aeneid, since the pietas of its hero encompasses the emotions felt towards parents as well as duty to the gods; but in exaggerating this element of Virgil’s poem, Douglas may well have had one eye on his own search for fame. His translation is dedicated to his kinsman Lord Henry Sinclair, with whom he claims to be ‘neir coniunct … in blude’ (1.Pr.90). Douglas owed all his subsequent advances to his ties of blood with the earls of Angus: he became Bishop of Dunkeld two years after completing his Virgil, and died in 1522 having been exiled to France after the fall of his kin from favour. He produces a distinctively Scottish Aeneid, ‘Kepand na sudron bot our awyn langage’ (‘keeping no southern [English] but our own language’, 1.Pr.110) not just in its dialect, but also in its insistence that blood is what makes a dynasty grow, and what makes people ‘tendir’ to each other. It has been claimed that cultures which are uneasy about their own status are more likely to produce translations than those which are confident about the strength of their native literature.6 In the case of British translations of Virgil, however, this thesis applies more to the individuals who translated Virgil than to the nation. The act of translating Virgil gives writers in English a sense of writing an empire even if they could not themselves participate in 6

Bassnett (1991: xii).

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one. A case in point is the Earl of Surrey’s translation of Aeneid 2 and 4. The first blank verse in English, Surrey’s is also the first English translation which sought to replicate the impacted rhetoric of the Aeneid:  timeo Danaos et dona ferentis (2.49) is crisply rendered as ‘I dred the Grekes, yea, when they offer gyftes’ (2.66).7 It is also the first to make the poem voice not the tender effects of pity, but the experience of isolation. Surrey’s Dido is above all a solitary, shut off from human companionship by the imperial ambition of Aeneas. Surrey artfully opposes the solitary ‘I’ of Dido to the collective ‘they’ of the Trojans in a way that carries over into his own verse, which frequently dwells on the experiences of those who are compelled into solitude as a result of political events. Surrey’s public life was isolating: unsuccessful military missions in France were interspersed with repeated imprisonments at home. As a powerful magnate who unwisely boasted of his Plantagenet blood, he never enjoyed the favour of Henry VIII , and in 1547 was executed on a charge of treason. How far these experiences influence his Aeneid is impossible to say, since scholars are unsure of its date; but the poem is for him less about the collective power of a nation than about wounded isolation and imperial aloneness. Surprisingly, no complete translation of Virgil was dedicated to a reigning English monarch until 1849. In 1558 Thomas Phaer dedicated his translation of The Seven First Bookes of the Eneidos to the Catholic Mary I, only months before her death. Later editions sought more modest patrons, as Mary was succeeded by her Protestant sister Elizabeth. Even in its later editions, Phaer’s version contains hints that its author remained loyal to the old faith – images and icons leap out of the heavy matter of his fourteeners, and marginal notes make catholicizing remarks such as, ‘no grace without prayer’ (Sig. O3b).8 By 1584, when his translation was completed by Thomas Twyne, it read like a remnant of an earlier epoch, harking back to an age when Virgil’s Rome could be used to evoke the universal authority of the Roman Church. The translation remained in print until 1620, however, and played a part in associating the Aeneid with the archaic. In Hamlet the Player King recites a Virgilian pastiche of the death of Hecuba in insistently archaic language, and Shakespeare may well have been thinking of Phaer’s version, which is jolted into a thickly alliterative manner when Pyrrhus, that cultural throwback to the world of the Iliad, enters to kill Priam.9 Phaer was both out of time and out of place: no successful courtier, he was an obscure

7 8 9

References to Surrey (1964). References to Phaer (1596). Burrow (2013: 66–9), though Marlowe is often regarded as the target of Shakespeare’s pastiche.

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solicitor in the Welsh Marches. He is an example of how writers on the margins of England have turned to Virgil in order to persuade themselves that they are at the nation’s centre. The Aeneid claims great strength and influence for Rome, and this can generate an uneasy relationship between English translators and their Latin original. Many Virgilian translators insisted that ‘native’ words, by which they usually meant words with Anglo-Saxon roots, be used in translating Rome’s chief epic: John Dryden expressed unease about monosyllables ‘which are the dead weight of our mother tongue’,10 but defended their use nonetheless, and Robert Singleton boasts of his ‘choice of Anglo-Saxon words’.11 By employing what they consider to be ‘native’ English words, translators may strive to make Virgil truly ‘English’, rather than succumbing to the weight of his, and Rome’s, linguistic authority. The first English writer to attempt what is as much a linguistic conquest as a translation of Virgil was Richard Stanyhurst, whose translation of four books of the Aeneid first appeared in 1583. Stanyhurst’s version is in quantitative metre, which attempts to naturalize in English the effects of Virgil’s hexameters. The quantitative verse movement had distinctive national ambitions in the late sixteenth century. For its advocates it was a means of effecting not just a translation, but a full translatio imperii from Greece, to Rome, to England by grafting Roman versification onto the native tongue.12 In Stanyhurst’s version Germanic words; words redolent of English folklore such as ‘pouke [Puck] bugs’; and strange coinages, such as ‘to ferret’ for ‘to follow’, are compelled to march in Latinate measures. His version attempts to make English triumph over Latin, but it succeeds only in hobbling on vernacular monosyllables, limping, like his Ascanius, after its cultural father: ‘My father on shoulders I set, my young lad Iülus | I lead with right hand, tripping with pit pat unequal’.13 Stanyhurst was Irish, and by the time his translation appeared he was in exile at Leiden, having in 1579 converted to Catholicism. Against this background, the eccentricity of his language becomes significant: Stanyhurst does not attempt so much to English Virgil, as to impose, through Virgil, a new vision of Englishness on a language to which he did not wish to render himself fully subject. This short phase of Catholic Virgils was followed by royal, or wouldbe royal Virgils. George Sandys’ translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, dedicated to Charles I, contained in editions after 1632 a translation of

10 11 12 13

Dryden (1987: 329). Singleton (1859: xvii). Helgerson (1992: 25–40). Helgerson (1992: 40).

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Book I of the Aeneid, which its author presents as having been composed ‘divers yeares’ before (p.  532). Sheldon Brammall has shown that Sandys was one of several translators connected to the Virginia company, such as Dudley Digges (1583–1639), who associated the translation of Virgil with colonial politics in the 1620s.14 By the later seventeenth century followers of Sandys developed a self-conscious tradition of royalist versions of Virgil. There were alternatives:  the ramshackle translation by the Presbyterian John Vicars (1632), and the free rendering by the republican theorist James Harrington (1659) both sought to present parliamentarian alternatives to a developing ‘Augustan’ strain of translations, which tended to treat the Aeneid as a panegyric of ‘imperial’ Stuart peacemakers.15 Both Vicars and Harrington were laughed into oblivion by royalists such as Samuel Butler, for whom the only true Virgil was one who spoke to princes in an austerely classical English which had roots in earlier English heroic poems. Richard Fanshawe, who became secretary of war to Prince Charles in 1644, rendered Book 4 into Spenserian stanzas and dedicated it to his prince along with his translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido. Printed as it was by a royalist in 1648, during Charles I’s imprisonment by Parliament, Fanshawe’s work suggests a new role for the Virgilian translator, as one who uses the protection afforded by his prestigious Latin original to stand against the tendencies of the age. The volume concludes with a summary of Rome’s civil wars, which connects the lives of Virgil and Horace to Roman political history, as well as making explicit links between the civil wars of Rome and England. Fanshawe then concludes by transforming Anchises’ advice to Aeneas (to spare the subject and subdue the proud) into words fit for a future king of a war-torn Britain: Breton remember thou to governe men (Be this thy trade) And to establish Peace, To spare the humble, and the proud depresse. The Prince of Peace protect your Highnesse most excellent life. (p. 312)

Anchises’ maxim had often been quoted in sixteenth-century manuals of advice to princes, and Sir John Harington, dedicating his manuscript version of Book 6 to Henry Prince of Wales in 1604, had emphasized the value of Virgil’s precepts to future kings. But where Fanshawe marks a new development in the English reception of Virgil is in his suggestion that the Aeneid offers consoling prophecies to losing causes.

14 15

See Brammall (2015: 116–48). On Sandys, see Lyne (2001). For a reappraisal, see Brammall (2015: 149–86).

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Sir John Denham (another Irish-born English Virgilian) printed his Destruction of Troy:  An Essay upon the Second Book of Virgil’s Æneis anonymously in 1656, at the height of Cromwell’s supremacy. Like Fanshawe and Sandys, he presents his version as having been written earlier, in 1636, well before the outbreak of the civil war. He does this both in order to disarm any efforts to apply his version to contemporary events by hostile readers and, presumably, to alert his sympathizers to the possibility that a poem which ends with the headless body of a king has more than a little to say about the desperate position of royalist exiles after the execution of Charles I in 1649. Denham’s influential preface on the theory of translation might alert the wary to think that his Virgil speaks of the present: ‘if Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit he should speak not onely as a man of this Nation, but as a man of this age’ (Sig. A3a) – which he does, in the description of the death of Priam with which Denham’s version abruptly ends: ‘On the cold earth lyes this neglected King, | A headless Carcass, and a nameless Thing’ (p. 28). The circumstances of these civil war translators sensitized them to the complexities of the Aeneid. There is no simple triumphalism: fragments of the poem are produced by disparate translators, each commenting on their own life and their flagging state, and looking forward to an age which might allow for the whole imperial fabric of Virgil to be replicated. John Ogilby’s Virgil of 1649, radically revised in 1654, is the last of this camp. The 1654 edition contains elaborate engraved plates, protected from piracy by royal warrant at the Restoration, which mark the volume as one which, had there then been a king in England, would have sought royal patronage. Ogilby lost everything in the civil war, and was shipwrecked on his return from Ireland in the 1640s. He rarely peeks a royalist head over the parapet in his translation, since that might have led to the suppression of his expensive volume; but his Virgil showed just enough of its allegiances to win for its author the enviable job of composing the poetry for the coronation of Charles II. The version is a royalist work printed in a notionally republican country, and this compels it to equivocate. Brutus, the republican hero, is jeered at in the text as a man who would ‘o’er his Sons the cruel Axes shake, | For Specious Liberty, and to judgement bring, | Because they rais’d new War for their old King’. Ogilby’s notes, though, are more cautious, and suggest that he was aware that Cromwell, frequently praised as a new Brutus and no friend of kings, might cast an eye over the work. The notes describe Brutus circumspectly as ‘The avenger of Lucretia’s injur’d Chastity … and of the opprest Commonwealth groaning under the Tyrrannie of T. Superbus’ (p.  362). The civil war compelled Virgilians to present a Virgil who had divided political loyalties, and alerted them to 115

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the ways in which the aftershocks of Rome’s civil wars are registered in Virgil’s poem. Virgil is not quite a Vicar of Bray: his text changes with the times, but always resists the simplicities of an imposed ideology. With the Restoration he is marched into Toryism, and a number of the resistant voices which might oppose this transformation are forcibly repressed, or surface in parodies such as John Phillips’ scurrilous Maronides (1678). Gone are the voices of despair and unease which had been heard by Denham. In the copiously annotated translations of books 3 and 6 by John Boys, printed a year after the Restoration in 1661, Virgil becomes an imperial triumphalist. Æneas his Errours is remarkable only for the extraordinary predictability with which Boys relates Aeneas’ wanderings to the exile and Restoration of Charles II ‘by the undeniable conduct of the divine Providence’ (p. 60). Boys’ prolix annotations to Æneas his Descent into Hell remove Ogilby’s unease with the figure of Brutus, claiming, with a clear slash at the Cromwellian era, that ‘under that specious and plausible pretence of asserting the people’s liberty, those popular Magistrates did drive on their own sinister and ambitious designes’ (p. 185). We are entering a world of party political Virgils, in which the Fourth Eclogue could be read, not as a prophecy of the birth of Christ, but of how, in William Walsh’s parody, ‘The Vile, Degenerate, Whiggish Offspring ends, | A High-Church Progeny from Heaven descends’.16 John Dryden tried his hand at imitating Virgil after the Restoration. His Astraea Redux draws on the Fourth Eclogue for its rejoicings at the return of Charles II, and the anti-Dutch mini-epic Annus Mirabilis is nourished by allusions to the Aeneid. When Dryden came to translate Virgil in 1697, however, times had changed around him. He had become a Catholic in 1685, and had lost his post as poet laureate after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Dutch Protestant William of Orange was installed on the throne and the Catholic James II was deemed to have abdicated. Virgil’s translators need adversity to alert them to the painful worth of a Virgilian prophetic future, and to the complexities of the Aeneid’s embedded politics; Dryden’s Virgil is the greatest offspring of the line of resistant Virgils composed by displaced writers. It appeared in a rich folio ornamented with the plates from Ogilby’s version, and was ostentatiously not dedicated to the then King William III. Dryden’s heroic couplets are elastic, sometimes jocular, sometimes as strictly disciplining as the moral environment of Virgil’s poems. In his critical writings Dryden frequently associated Virgil with ‘retrenchment’, a word which he uses to mean that Virgil, unlike Ovid, curbs his style (he speaks of ‘the sober retrenchments of his Sense’ (p. 326)), 16

Wells (1970: 491).

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and sometimes too to mean that Virgil’s chief ethic is that of cutting back the potential excesses of individual emotion. Dryden, however, rarely retrenches his own wish to elaborate the original. Often his version brings to the surface currents of metaphorical suggestion at which Virgil only hints. In the Georgics this habitual working up of Virgil’s metaphors enables Dryden to reproduce the continual interweavings of politics and agriculture which run through his original. When, for example, Virgil writes that ploughing is necessary to prevent sterile reeds from overrunning (dominantur) the carefully nurtured corn, Dryden turns this into an outright battle: So that unless the Land with daily Care Is exercis’d, and with an Iron War, Of Rakes and Harrows, the proud Foes expell’d, And Birds with clamours frighted from the Field … (i .231–4)

‘Exercis’d’, ‘Iron War’ and ‘proud Foes’ are all Dryden’s importations to Virgil, which together make the innocent ‘field’ of the original a field of battle in which the cultivator tries vigorously to expel the interloping weeds. Dryden was himself embattled in 1697. In his ‘Postscript to the Reader’ he noted, ‘What Virgil wrote in the vigour of his Age, in Plenty and at Ease, I have undertaken to Translate in my Declining Years: strugling with Wants, oppress’d with Sickness, curb’d in my Genius, lyable to be misconstrued in all I write’ (p. 807). Dryden’s age and sickness everywhere lend a feverish energy to his version. His Aeneid displays a fitful zeal for the fresh energies of younger characters, which draws from the poem a sympathy for the youthful Turnus, and a fascination with the death of youth which parallels Virgil’s own. When young men such as Pallas die, Dryden’s language becomes tenderly ambiguous: One vest array’d the Corps, and one they spread O’re his clos’d Eyes, and wrap’d around his Head: That when the yellow Hair in Flame shou’d fall, The catching Fire might Burn the Golden Caul. (11.107–10)

‘The catching Fire’ seems almost protective, arresting Pallas as he falls into it, at the same time as igniting him. The pun brings out the tenderness of those who burn him in order to release his spirit. The translation is not at its subtlest when it renders the ethical framework of the poem (pius Aeneas is usually just ‘good’, and far too often Dryden baldly states that actions are ‘ordain’d by Fate’ rather than struggling to render Virgil’s delicate elisions of human and divine agency); but Dryden’s fascination with age and youth can enable him to provide living equivalents for the pains of Virgilian family feeling. 117

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When Dryden spoke of himself as ‘lyable to be misconstrued in all I write’, he was referring to his position as a Catholic Tory within the literary and political world of the 1690s. His Virgil has been seen as a ‘Jacobite’ work – that is, as a poem which shows his support of the exiled James II. Dryden quite often introduces the language of legitimate kingship and succession to his version. His Aeneas, at 1.8, ‘setl’d sure Succession in his Line’, and that added word ‘Succession’ may have been designed to remind sympathetic readers that William III’s hereditary claims to the throne were tenuous. In Dryden’s Georgics the beekeeper must ‘to the lawful King restore his Right’ (4.134), where in Virgil’s original he must simply ensure that the more healthy of two would-be king bees goes on to rule the hive. Luke Milbourne in his censorious Notes on Dryden’s Virgil of 1698 accused Dryden, with some justice, of ‘Still girding at the Publick Management’ (p. 173). Dryden’s loathing of William often makes him read into Virgil a hostility to foreigners, and especially towards foreign kings. In hell, always a place where translators vent their animosities, he inserts those who ‘To Tyrants … have their Country sold, | Imposing Foreign Lords, for Foreign Gold’ (6.845–6). Dryden’s friend the Earl of Roscommon said that translators should ‘chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend’ (p. 7), because of some affinity they feel for the original. Dryden himself advocated a form of translation which was very close to that of Denham: ‘I have endeavour’d to make Virgil speak such English as he wou’d himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age’ (pp. 330–1). His translation of Virgil draws on his own experience as a resistant member of a persecuted minority, compelled to bite his lip in a political milieu which was abhorrent to him. In his ‘Life of Virgil’ the Roman poet is presented as a man like Dryden himself, at odds with the political order of his day, a man who resisted Augustus’ imperial revolution as quietly and firmly as Dryden resisted the Revolution of 1688: ‘Yet I may safely affirm for our great Author … that he was still of Republican principles in his Heart’ (p. 280). Dryden’s Virgil is no simple imperial poet, but a closet republican, prudently muting his admiration for Brutus and Cato in an age when support of Augustus was the only politic course. Dryden’s own political position is not simply imposed on his original, however. His hostility to foreign invasions is qualified by his own awareness that he, as a translator, is bringing a foreign text into England (and in the Georgics this can lead him to stress the benefits of hybridizing native stock: a grafted apple tree ‘admires the Leaves unknown, | Of Alien Trees, and Apples not her own’ (2.116–17)), and by the inescapable fact that Aeneas is a foreigner seeking to settle in a new land. His translator’s wish to absorb the foreign, rather than being overwhelmed by it, leads Dryden to have a strong, almost anti-imperial, bias in favour of the native people who resist 118

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Aeneas. Adam Parry, Oliver Lyne and scholars of the ‘Harvard school’ have drawn attention to the ‘other voices’ of private lament which qualify the imperial triumphalism of the Aeneid.17 Dryden’s Virgil is not quite the reluctant imperialist of later twentieth-century criticism; but he is, like his civil war predecessors, a Virgil of divided loyalties. Dryden is sure that Lavinia prefers the indigenous Turnus to Aeneas, and his Jove is far more explicit than Virgil’s that the invading nation will have to assimilate its customs to those of the natives: The Trojans to their Customs shall be ty’d, I will, my self, their Common Rites provide, The Natives shall command, the Foreigners subside. (12.1210–12)

For Dryden, Aeneas’ victory in Italy is not complete:  foreign rulers must yield to the customs of native peoples just as foreign texts must be absorbed by the language and customs of their translators. Later translators of Virgil shrink anxiously away from Dryden’s example, and many claim to produce ‘literal’ translations, far removed from what they often term the ‘indulgences’ of Dryden. Theories of translation have always adopted a terminology which connects the translator’s activity with larger questions of national identity, politics and morality:  Horace spoke of a fidus interpres (a faithful interpreter), and Dryden himself had in his Anglican days presented his preferred form of translation as a via media, like his own church, which afforded a ‘latitude’ to translators between the extremes of ‘metaphrase’ (word-for-word translation) and imitation. After 1700 the translator’s task is often described in terms which represent his obligation to Virgil as a moral one. Joseph Trapp, in his blank verse Virgil of 1718–31, accuses Dryden of being ‘extremely licentious’ (p. xlix), and that moralized term of criticism marks an epoch in the history of translating Virgil:  for Trapp, rendering the very word of Virgil is akin to being virtuous, and Dryden’s fertile overlap between his own concerns and those of Virgil is a culpable indulgence. Trapp, comfortably ensconced as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, begins the process of disentangling Virgil from the political and spiritual battles of the translator’s own times. The Virgil who could voice the dislocation of an embattled royalist, or could speak like a friend to an expropriated Catholic died, and in his place came the Virgil of dons, parsons, and schoolmasters. Christopher Pitt (Rector of Pimperne in Dorset) and Joseph Warton (a headmaster of Winchester) produced the most influential eighteenth-century Englishing of The Works of Virgil (1753), which prompted Samuel Johnson (justly) to remark that ‘Dryden’s 17

Parry (1963); Lyne (1987); Kallendorf (2007a).

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faults are forgotten in the hurry of delight, and Pitt’s beauties are neglected in the languor of a cold and listless perusal.’18 Pitt’s version, over-burdened with adjectives, is set in amber by the surrounding antiquarianism of the annotations by Warton and his friends. Book 6 in the Pitt-Warton Virgil is not a mirror for princes, or a fable for poets such as Dante who wish to explore their debts to earlier writing: in William Warburton’s lengthy disquisition, it is turned into an allegory of the mysteries of Eleusis. With this long note begins the shower of dusty antiquarianism which was to dull the surface of Virgil in English for generations. By the later eighteenth century, translators of Virgil were presenting themselves as accurate copyists. The preface to James Beresford’s Aeneid in 1794 quotes with approval Pierre-Daniel Huet’s assertion in De interpretatione (1661) that translators should, like painters, copy from the life, and states his ambition to be ‘a faithful Representer’ of Virgil (p. vii). This leads Beresford to write with a tortured Latinity (‘Relume the altars’ (p. 95)) which is the lineal ancestor of A. E. Housman’s parody of translationese in his ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy’ (‘O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots’). Many translators in this period, however, and even those who claim to replicate the true shape of their original, render Virgil in an English which bears the unmistakable imprint of Milton. The preface to Alexander Strahan’s version in blank verse of 1767 insists on its fidelity and, like Beresford, quotes approvingly from Huet. But Strahan’s professed admiration for Milton leads him to paint a Virgil in Miltonic dress: ‘High on a royal throne’ sits not Milton’s Satan, but Strahan’s Aeolus (1.75; cf. Paradise Lost 2.1). Milton’s dominance as a model for translators can influence the politics as well as the vocabulary of the English Virgil. In the eighteenth century, nourished by an odd alliance between Milton’s austere anti-royalism and Dryden the Catholic Tory’s insistence that Virgil was a closet republican, Virgil first becomes a Whig.19 Robert Andrews, a Presbyterian minister, wrote in the preface to his The Works of Virgil (1766) that Virgil ‘never inspires in his intelligent and unaffected Admirers any other than the spirit of liberty’. As befits an enemy of untrammelled royal authority, Andrews presents Juno as a would-be absolute monarch rankling over an infringement of her royal prerogative:  ‘Say Muse! the Cause; what touch’d Praerogative | Or what Affront mov’d heaven’s Queen …’ (1.8). The Whig Virgil lived on in the 1817 version of Charles Symmons, a cleric who wrote a life of Milton, and whose outspoken Whig views prevented his advancement in the Church. Symmons’ passion for liberty leads him to represent Aeolus’ subjugation 18 19

Johnson (2006: iv. 95). Pace Harrison (1967).

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of the winds in Aeneid 1 (a passage which many earlier translators read as a paradigm of regal government) as akin to the restrictive regime of a nineteenth-century madhouse: ‘Mad with control, they shake their prison’s bounds; | And the high mountain with their howl resounds (1.72). Symmons lived in the Welsh Marches, and his family estate contained the house in which Thomas Phaer, that earlier borderland Virgilian, had translated the Aeneid: he is a typical English translator of Virgil, on the boundaries of the country and politically at odds with his social superiors. In the later eighteenth century Virgil was on the cusp between two readings, one which made him a Miltonic prophet of national liberty, and another which made him, and his translators, more Latin than the original. The world of Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard:  Author of the Quixote’, in which an imitator seeks to become so faithful to Don Quixote that he rewrites it verbatim, is not far away. In 1855–9 Robert Singleton’s Works of Virgil illustrates a final odd turn in the cult of accuracy. Renaissance readers of Virgil saw moral precepts embedded in the Aeneid (as Philip Sidney put it, ‘Who readeth not Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act’).20 For Singleton, the first warden of Radley, whose fascination with discipline led him to produce a treatise on ‘Uncleanness’, translating Virgil was itself a moral activity, by which his charges would be able ‘to acquire accuracy; to lay up stores of knowledge; in a word, to chasten and inform their minds’ (p. iii). Not for him the ‘indulgence’, as he calls it, of Dryden’s version. In Singleton’s hands, Virgil becomes a text which compels schoolboys to evacuate themselves of identity and, in the name of purity, to turn themselves into little Romans. Singleton – another Irish-born Englisher of Virgil, who wrote a primer of the Irish language – marks his own additions and the grammatical necessities of the English language in square brackets; but the authorized language of classical translation, laced with phrases from Shakespeare and Milton, thickly adorns his version. By 1800 Virgil is so associated with poetical self-denial and with efforts to Latinize English that few poets with a sense of their own mastery would attempt him. Shelley, who preferred the republican Lucan, turns Gallus into a wanderer drifting away from civilization in his version of Eclogue 10, and was attracted too by the under-sea voyage of Aristaeus in Georgics 4.  Wordsworth translated Aeneid 1–3 into heroic couplets in the early 1820s in a spirit which typifies the era: ‘Having been displeased in modern translations with the additions of incongruous matter, I began to translate with a resolve to keep clear of that fault, by adding nothing; but I became 20

Sidney (1973; 115).

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convinced that a spirited translation can scarcely be accomplished in the English language without admitting a principle of compensation.’21 A poet with a sense of his own identity as strong as Wordsworth would inevitably shrink from a version which ‘added nothing’. A zero degree of presence for the translator is unattainable, and a great poet who set out to achieve such perfect non-being would inevitably wince in horror from the void which opened before him:  the translator’s poetic identity depends upon there being some elusive flavour of selfhood or nationhood slipped into the foreign text as it passes to its new cultural milieu. The unconscious identity of the translator is the one thing which must always be gained in translation, and to attempt to eradicate it is to seek a kind of non-being. Wordsworth cannot ‘add nothing’, and he cannot escape from the dominance of Miltonic vocabulary:  Laocoon’s serpent ends like the tail of Milton’s Sin, ‘In folds voluminous and vast’ (2.275; cf. Paradise Lost 2.652). Wordsworth’s own poems, too, of memory and guilt colour his Aeneas, a compulsive narrator like Wordsworth’s own Solitaries: ‘I will attempt the theme though in my breast | Memory recoils and shudders at the test’ (2.18–19). Wordsworth’s unfinished version is eventually driven to add some ‘compensation’ for Virgil’s effects, despite its wish to render the very word of its original. Most Victorian Virgils are influenced by the prevalent belief that the ‘primary’ epic of Homer was superior to the ‘secondary’, literary, epic of Virgil. There were attempts to turn Virgil into a folk epic by rendering him in ballad measure (John Conington in 1885), in rhyming hexameters (Charles Bowen in 1887), and in the omni-purpose Germanic-heroic style of William Morris (1876), whose Aeneas sounds as ruggedly Anglo-Saxon as Beowulf: ‘Nor less Aeneas, howso’er, hampered by arrow-hurt’ (12.745) is deliberately reminiscent of alliterative English heroic narrative. Translating Virgil became the weekend activity (one suspects the chief weekend activity) of many a Victorian parson. A domestic Virgil can result, intended to educate the immediate family of the translator in the ways of ancient Rome. The Rev. J. M. King, rendering Virgil in neo-Popean couplets for his family in 1847, creates an Aeneas who does not think first of his father Anchises after witnessing the death of Priam, but of his entire family: ‘My wife, my son, my sire of equal age, | My plunder’d dwelling all my care engage’ (2.687– 8). Virgil found at last a royal home when the father-and-son team Rann and Charles Rann Kennedy (the former a friend of Wordsworth’s) dedicated their Works of Virgil (1849) to Prince Albert. The muscular examples of Shakespeare and Milton are used to justify their limp blank verse. The chief goal of the translation is to flex the native thew and sinew of English, claim 21

Wordsworth (1947: iv.545).

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these two Scots: ‘These two great Masters have shown, of what the English language is capable, when its masculine strength is properly applied’ (p. iv). Virgil is rarely deployed explicitly by Victorian translators to justify the Empire, since such an appropriation would weaken their repeated claims to fidelity, but the vocabulary with which they describe the act of translation shows that they regard the conquest of Virgil as the ultimate display of Anglo-Saxon masculinity. And now? Virgil has not found an Ezra Pound (whose Cantos show an evident preference for Douglas’ translation over Virgil’s original) or a Christopher Logue to wrench him into modernity. Translators still tend to work in the shadow of the schoolroom. David Slavitt’s effort in 1971 to turn the Eclogues and the Georgics into exercises in literary self-consciousness often collapses into a parody of someone who is haunted by the voices of dead schoolmasters: The beautiful shepherd, Corydon ardebat – ardently loved. ‘Ardeo here acquires a transitive signification and takes the accusative.’ (Ecl. 2.1–3)

It was as a schoolroom text, a glossed and annotated model for rhetoricians, that Virgil first entered the Western canon, and it may yet be that dons and schoolmasters will retire him into the Elysian Fields to sport with Molesworth as he hunts the gerund. Our legacy from the Virgils of earlier translators is a schizophrenic one in which there is an absolute divide between personal responses to Virgil, sophisticated scholarly accounts of his politics, and the ideal selfless accuracy of the translator. We inherit the idea that translating Virgil with a minimum of intrusions from our own cultural milieu is a good idea; we also inherit the idea that Virgil is politically and emotionally polymorphous. But in the present these Virgils belong to different modes of writing. This is illustrated by the editions in which translations of Virgil are now most readily available. Both the World’s Classics Aeneid and that in the Everyman’s Library present full and poetically uncoloured translations of the poem (by C. Day Lewis and of Robert Fitzgerald respectively). They also include introductions in which first-rate scholars of Virgil (Jasper Griffin and Philip Hardie) outline the political complexity of the poem when read in its historical context. What is profoundly odd about these books is that neither of their respective dust jackets, nor even their introductions, mentions the fact that the poem which they are introducing is a translation rather than the original. We have so deeply imbibed the notion that translators should be invisible that it has become possible to ignore the fact that they are even there; equally, we have so completely grasped the idea that Virgil is implicated in the political life 123

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of the early Principate that no edition is thinkable which does not learnedly historicize his verse. What one tends not to find in recent Virgils is any honestly confessed fruitful overlap between the political and historical concerns of the translator and the way in which they translate. And the myth of the modern translator’s transparency is more of a myth than a reality. Even our twentieth-century literalists retain a folk memory that Virgil is a poet for exiles. C. Day Lewis, although the World’s Classics edition will not confess as much, turned to the Georgics after leaving the Communist Party in 1940 and retiring to Devon, finding in Virgil, as so many of his fellow translators had done, an imaginary version of the community which eluded him in reality. Fitzgerald too confesses that he first read the Aeneid in ‘the closing months of the Second Great War, when I was stationed on an island in the Western Pacific’.22 Other kinds of twentiethcentury exile have turned to Aeneas for comfort too. C. H. Sisson’s Aeneid (1986) is steeped in a post-Eliotean conviction that Culture has departed from the West: his prefatory remark that ‘Everyone should know something of the Aeneid. Until recently, everybody did’ (p. vii) creates an ambience of cultural loss which flavours his entire version. ‘Pater Aeneas’ is ‘our ancestor’ for Sisson, reminding his readers – sometimes with a prod – that for him, as for T. S. Eliot, Virgil is one of the founding texts of a Western civilization with which the present is losing touch. The status of Virgil as a classic has made translators feel that they should suppress their own presence in order to allow his voice to emerge; but despite their efforts at self-effacement, Virgil remains a writer who appeals to poets who want to reinsert themselves into the centre of a cultural tradition from which they feel displaced. Seamus Heaney’s Aeneas (in Seeing Things, 1991) is worn by time, aware that his language has been uttered before – that, as Charles Bowen put it in 1887, ‘Hundreds of Virgil’s lines are for most of us familiar quotations, which linger in our memory, and round which our literary associations cluster and hang, just as religious feeling clings to well-known texts or passages from Scripture’: ‘No ordeal, O Priestess, | That you can imagine would ever surprise me | For already I have foreseen and foresuffered all’.23 Aeneas’ weariness was anticipated by T.  S. Eliot:  ‘And I  Tiresias have foresuffered all | Enacted on the same divan or bed’ (The Waste Land, 234– 5). Heaney’s posthumously published translation of Book 6 of the Aeneid (2016), which incorporates and revises the partial version in Seeing Things, is the direct heir of all the contradictory currents within British reactions 22 23

Fitzgerald (1984: 414). Bowen (1887: 7, 1).

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to Virgil that have been explored in this chapter. Although it is modestly presented as a ‘literal’ translation undertaken as an exercise ‘like classics homework’24 in pious memory of his former teacher Father McGlinchey, Heaney’s translation is the final instalment in a series of efforts in his later verse to align himself with Virgil.25 The translation, despite Heaney’s protestations that it is an exercise in modest literalism, is packed with thunking Heaneyisms which impress the unmistakeable poetic identity of the translator onto Virgil’s text:  Holm oaks echo the crack of their axes, spruce trees Get felled, they hammer in wedges, split open Beams of the ash and the tougher cross-grain of oak. (Aen. 6.246–8)

Virgil describes the oak as ‘fissile’, splittable, relatively weak when those purposeful imperial axes hit it; Heaney has to build additional resistance into the ‘tougher cross-grain of oak’ because for him making and building have to be hard. He wants quietly to impress upon his readers the fact that this son of an Irish farmer has laboured his way to the centre of the Western canon. Heaney’s translations from Virgil are part of a consistent project late in his career to position himself within an Eliotean-European line of poetry, which links Dante and Virgil and Eliot in one tradition. And Heaney, of course, who, like so many earlier translators of Virgil, was no spokesman for an English Empire, but an Irish Catholic. In his attack on ‘The Cult of Virgil’, Robert Graves remarked sourly that ‘Whenever a golden age of stable government, full churches, and expanding wealth dawns among the Western nations, Virgil always returns to supreme favour.’26 Virgil has indeed often appealed in the modern era to conservatives who wish to resist what they see as the cultural decline around them.27 But when he is translated into English, he has more usually given a voice to those who feel that they are on the outside of a dominant culture. Those who, like Fanshawe or Dryden, are longing to occupy a world which no longer exists or, like Chaucer or Heaney, wish to drag themselves across the threshold of the House of Fame – these poets have turned to Virgil for support. And which of these many translations of the Aeneid should one read? There are several recent versions which manage to make the translator more or less invisible whilst not evacuating the poem of all character. The blank verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum from 1971 remains the best of these. It captures the pace and varied tones of Virgil and, perhaps because 24 25 26 27

Heaney (2016: vii). Burrow (2016). Graves (1962: 13). Ziolkowski (1993).

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Mandelbaum had also translated Dante, it manages unobtrusively to hint at connections between Virgil and later writers without ever creating an overtly allusive or over-thickly poetic idiom. The blank verse lines can spill on a bit too much in order to decompress Virgil’s sense, but never to the point of redundancy. Sarah Ruden’s version of 2008 (the only complete translation published so far by a woman) also adopts blank verse, but takes on the burden of rendering line for line. Sometimes this captures the density of Virgil’s language, but at others it chokes him into unnatural English. So the dead infants in the Underworld are described by ‘At the breast, | An early death – black day! – had swallowed them’, (6.428–9), whereas in Heaney’s decompressed and moving version they are ‘little ones denied | Their share of sweet life, torn from the breast | On life’s very doorstep’ (571–3). Ruden states that, ‘In writing fiction you should work to get into your characters’ minds; in translating you should work to get into your author’s, and an attempt to keep as close as possible to his style is one way to do this.’28 That quest to be invisible is, as we have seen, a long and unending one. A better way is Dryden’s: he actively sought to generate friction between the experience of the translator and his original, and his is still the only complete version of Virgil’s works in English to catch poetic fire from that creative friction. FURTHER READING Among translations of the Aeneid, Gavin Douglas’ (reprinted in the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations series (2011)) and Dryden’s are wonderful to read alongside the more recent versions by Allen Mandelbaum (1971; much reprinted) and Sarah Ruden (2008). While modern and readable translations of Virgil’s entire œuvre exist (C. Day Lewis’ versions from the period 1940–63 have been much reprinted), it is unlikely that the versions of the Georgics and Eclogues will make a reader’s heart dance for joy. Janet Lembke’s version of the Georgics (2005) is not afraid to get its hands dirty, and Christian Bök’s experimental transformation of Georgics 4 into the postmodern cellular reduplications of The Xenotext:  Book I (2015) is in itself an interesting chapter in Virgil’s reception history. The combination of sophisticated allusion, political vehemence and playful elegance in the Eclogues tends to be better represented in English by imitations (such as Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender of 1579) than by translations, the leaden would-be feyness of which often leave this reader at least with a desire to go out and kick a sheep. For this reason, Gransden (1996) is worth 28

Ruden (2008: xi).

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hunting down, despite being out of print: it presents a miscellany of versions in an attractively digestible form, along with a sage introduction. There have been few comprehensive overviews of Virgil in English translation before Braund and Torlone (2018). Individual chapters in the Oxford History of Literary Translation offer expert accounts of particular periods, and any study of translation will benefit from Reynolds (2011), which includes a very helpful bibliography. For the early modern and later periods, Sowerby (2006) is nicely complemented by his anthology (2010). Brammall (2015) delves deeply into the background of printed and manuscript versions. On Dryden, Sloman (1985) is still valuable, but should be supplemented by the critically shrewd Harrison (1967). On later versions and the reception of Virgil after the eighteenth century, Ziolkowski (1993) remains very helpful.

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Virgils from Dante to Milton

A medieval companion to Virgil would not have presented him as the author of a tightly limited canon, nor would it have related his works, as modern scholars do, to the context of political life in the early Principate or to their Greek sources. It would probably have reproduced exemplary stories about the poet’s life drawn from the biography attributed to Donatus, perhaps augmented with tales of Virgil the magician (whose feats included ridding Naples of flies with a magic bronze statue), which enjoyed widespread circulation in thirteenth-century Italy.1 It might well have included discussion of what came to be called the Appendix Vergiliana, the Culex, Ciris and miscellaneous epigrams, which were widely believed to be Virgilian juvenilia, and it would certainly also have contained a large quantity of allegorical commentary on Virgil’s works. The Fourth Eclogue was often read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ, while commentators such as Fulgentius (in the fifth century) established a reading of the first half of the Aeneid – which persisted until the sixteenth century – as an allegory of the moral progress of the soul from childish cupidity to maturity. There might have been an updated edition of the companion in 1479, when Politian suggested that early codices read not ‘Virgil’ but ‘Vergil’, and after Petrarch had done much to make Virgil a model for a laureate poet’s career rather than an allegorical guide to living.2 There were multiple Virgils in circulation throughout this period  – Virgils transformed into vernacular romance, Virgils which included the thirteenth book of the Aeneid by Mapheus Vegius in which the hero marries Lavinia, Virgils accompanied by accurate philological annotation, and Virgils who guided poets through their lives and their careers.3 Not ‘Virgil from Dante to Milton’, then, but Virgils.

1 2 3

Comparetti (1997: 259). Wilson-Okamura (2010: 20). Baswell (1995); Cheney and de Armas (2002); Hardie and Moore (2010). For reasons of space, this essay will concentrate on the reception of the Aeneid. On the Georgics, see

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There are, however, some recurrent features in the ways in which writers read Virgil across this long period. Most see him as not quite a Christian, and this could be taken in a positive sense – he leads the way to the Christian era  – or a negative one  – he presents a secular vision of imperial power which a Christian reader must seek to leave behind. These responses, however, are seldom simply antithetical, as writers find it impossible entirely to discard or overgo Virgil’s influence. Augustine rebukes himself in the Confessions for weeping over the abandoned Dido in a way that is explicitly anti-Virgilian: ‘What is more pitiable than a wretch without pity for himself who weeps over the death of Dido dying for love of Aeneas, but not weeping over himself dying for lack of love for you, my God.’4 But Augustine’s abandonment of his literary pity for Dido in favour of spiritual advancement has clear Virgilian precedent: it is a spiritualized version of Aeneas’ departure from Dido for an imperial future. Even in trying to transcend Virgil writers remain structurally indebted to him.5 Virgil is often invoked at moments of personal or historical transition, and the reason for this is not hard to find. The most literal-minded reading of the Aeneid would see it as a poem centrally concerned with relocation, and perhaps too with constructive departure: it tells how one society moves from one place to another, and how that society reconstructs a set of values by which to live. The poem also itself enacts a process of translation (in the literal sense of ‘moving across’) in the way it adapts material from the Homeric poems and their Hellenistic imitators to suit a Roman setting. Every level of the poem testifies to the strain of moving between worlds: Aeneas endures the literal hardships of a wanderer and the deeper forms of unease created by entering a world governed by conventions which are not quite those of Troy. Virgil himself shows the efforts to reconcile innovation and indebtedness required of one who is attempting to transpose an old genre into a new place. As a poet of inauguration and renovation (as the Fourth Eclogue says, magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo, ‘the great sequence of centuries is born anew’, 5), Virgil invites renovation himself. Dante is the most sophisticated medieval renovator of Virgil. His Statius says when he meets Virgil in Purgatory:  ‘You first set me on the way to Parnassus to drink in its waters, and you first set me on fire towards God … Through you I was a poet, through you a Christian’ (Purgatorio 22.64–73). This praise is apparently the highest which Statius could offer, attributing

4 5

Chalker (1969), Low (1985), and Fairer (2016); on the Eclogues, see Patterson (1987) and Cooper (1977). Chadwick (1991: 15). See Watkins (1995: 34–8). On Augustine’s Virgil, see Clark, Chapter 5 in this volume.

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both his poetic and religious advancement to his master. But it is also carefully qualified: Virgil directs him on the way towards God, rather than actually leading him directly to the beatific vision. Dante’s view of Virgil is of a guide who cannot himself complete the course towards which he points his imitators, and who needs the benevolent reinterpretations of later readers to complete what is only suggested in his own work. Virgil directs Dante the wayfarer throughout the Inferno and Purgatorio, carrying him in his bosom like a child, or laying down footsteps in which his imitator can follow. The Commedia maintains a continual delicate counterpoint between the actions of the character Virgil and allusions to his poems, in which the two Virgils, the man and the text, sustain or comment ruefully on each other.6 Often when the character Virgil stumbles, Dante the poet graciously acknowledges his debt to his master by an allusion to his writing, as though picking him up from a fall; equally, when Dante’s Virgil is made a silent witness of the inaccuracy of his own poem, the wayfarer’s responses to his guide grow in emotional intensity. Like Augustine, Dante is unable to keep Virgil from his mind even when he is renouncing or transforming his predecessor’s vision. When the wayfarer first encounters Beatrice, who is to be his guide through Paradise, he turns to Virgil to exclaim, ‘conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma’ (30.48), but finds as he turns that Virgil is no longer beside him. The allusion to Aeneid 4.23, when Dido says to Anna that because of Aeneas’ arrival she ‘recognises the signs of ancient passion’, transfigures Virgil – Dante’s love for Beatrice is not a distraction from empire but a means towards God – but also indicates that for Dante, Virgil’s influence grows in intensity as he is abandoned. The words of this ‘dolcissimo padre’, his sweetest father, guide the wayfarer on to a new era, while Virgil himself is left behind like his own Dido.7 Critics can write heavy-handedly when they consider the sense of cultural superiority which Christianity brings: all writers who had a rhetorical training – and up to at least 1700, that was all writers – knew that their style was immeasurably indebted to the works of pagan antiquity. Dante by no means simply triumphs over Virgil, and in one particular respect he saw Virgil as having enjoyed a more complete world than his own. When he wrote the Commedia Dante had been exiled from Florence. From around 1310 (scholars are not agreed over the chronology) he became convinced that the solution to the chaos of Italy was to reverse the effects of the Donation of Constantine, which had ceded secular authority over the Western Empire 6

7

Barolini (1984: 188–256). On Dante’s Virgil, see Foster (1977: 156–253); Consoli and Ronconi (1976). See Hawkins (1991) and Watkins (1995).

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to the pope, and to re-establish an empire under a ruler who enjoyed absolute sway over temporal affairs.8 Dante derived this vision partly from his reading of Virgil, whom he came to idealize as a poet who enjoyed a perfect political state: the imperium of Augustan Rome, he believed, guaranteed the universal peace into which Christ was born (De Monarchia I.xvi and Paradiso 6.80–1). Measured against this grand political example, Dante’s own Italy was an enfeebled relic of a Roman past, and Virgil was not a benighted pagan but the poet of an ideal polity. So in Paradiso 15– 16, when Dante’s great-great-great grandfather Cacciaguida describes the origins of the Florentine state, he does so in an impoverished, backwardlooking version of Anchises’ prophetic visions of Rome’s future in Aeneid 6. Cacciaguida’s description of Florence has affinities too with Aeneas’ tour around the kingdom of Evander in Aeneid 8, but it pointedly lacks Virgil’s continual glances towards the future greatness of Rome. For Dante the ideal Florence lies in the past, not the future, and his poem, written by an exiled, disappointed imperialist, can only limp after the confident strides of Virgil. The weakness of Dante’s own imperial vision, however, does prompt him to pick out moments in the Aeneid which intimate frailties within the Roman imperial dynasty. In Paradiso 30 he describes an empty imperial chair in heaven which awaits the arrival of the Emperor Henry VII , who promised in 1310 to re-establish the power of the Holy Roman Empire in Italy. By the time Dante wrote the latter part of the Paradiso, however, Henry was dead, having failed entirely in his Italian expedition. When Dante sees that empty throne it is impossible to exclude a reminiscence of Virgil’s Marcellus, the dead heir to Augustus described at the end of Aeneid 6. At such moments the incompleteness of Virgil’s historical vision – which does not dare to extend itself into the future after Augustus – allows Dante to find a comforting shared vulnerability in Virgil. Dante’s imperialism often expresses itself in excitedly apocalyptic prophecy; but both the Commedia and the Aeneid reluctantly confess the fragility of imperial ambitions. In many respects the Commedia is unlike subsequent imitations of Virgil. It shows little interest in reduplicating the narrative structure or the densely compacted style of Virgil’s poem, and Dante himself did not seek to follow what came to be regarded as the ‘Virgilian’ progression of genres from pastoral to georgic and epic (indeed his neo-Latin eclogues, which echo Virgil’s, were written right at the end of his life).9 Commentaries from about the fifteenth century onwards concentrate less on the life of Virgil and the allegorical significance of his poems than on their language and style; accordingly 8 9

For a summary of debates about the chronology Dante’s works, see Davis (1993). On literary careers, see Cheney and de Armas (2002) and Hardie and Moore (2010).

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Virgil generally ceases to be represented as a real person, and his authority is experienced by poets more as a set of formal and stylistic pressures than as direct moral admonition. One feature of Dante’s Virgil, though, does anticipate Renaissance responses to Virgil. Dante’s guide tells his charge not to waste pity on the damned, and by the end of the Inferno Virgil has enabled the wayfarer to feel righteous anger towards the souls he sees in Hell. This progression from pity to just anger became central to the development of the epic genre in the sixteenth century, as poets are guided by Virgil to emerge out of a world of romance into a poetic realm of formal unity and ethical rigour. Throughout the fifteenth century, imitations of Virgil tended to be founded on the belief that Virgil’s pietas – familial and religious duty – meant something like ‘pity’ (the word did give rise to both our ‘pity’ and ‘piety’). This interpretation was brought about by a complex interplay between semantic change, shifts in ethical priorities, and readings of Virgil.10 It intensifies a problem raised by the Aeneid itself, in which the strength of devotion to divine command is often registered by the way that it forces characters to act against their emotional instincts, which grow with resistance to them. Aeneas does groan as he leaves Dido and pities her spirit as it flees from him in Book 6. But if one believes that ‘pius Aeneas’ means no more than ‘pitiful Aeneas’ then several of the hero’s actions become not just agonizing but inexplicable: how can a hero who is adequately characterized as ‘pitiful’ leave Dido behind him, or execute Turnus after only a brief pause? For many medieval readers, Aeneas’ killing of Turnus was an outrage against compassion  – Lactantius vehemently cries ‘Where then was your pietas (pity)?’ when he discusses the episode. The way to resolve this problem was to revise the poem, giving the more or less unconscious ethical transposition of Aeneas’ character deliberate structural consequences: an Aeneas who is primarily motivated by pity does not leave Dido or kill Turnus; instead he acts on his instincts, wanders after distressed women, and spares suppliant antagonists. In the hybrids of vernacular romance and classically influenced epic which developed in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy, this transformation of Aeneas into a man of pity generated poems which have both local debts to the Aeneid and an overall indebtedness to the reading of the poem as one steeped in pity, or pietà. And that allowed the incorporation of vernacular romance narrative features – knights who pursue ladies, and multiplying chivalric heroes  – which in turn enabled the adaptation of Virgil to new literary conventions and social milieux. Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516–32) wanders with the pitying instincts of its many heroes, digressing as they encounter unfortunate women, and often actually reviving 10

See Ball (1991) and Burrow (1993).

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characters from the Aeneid who meet a pitiful end. When Ariosto imitates the episode of Nisus and Euryalus in Aeneid 9, his equivalent of Euryalus (a squire called Medoro) does not die pathetically. He is left apparently for dead, and is then cured by the pagan princess Angelica, whom he subsequently marries. A reading of Virgil which attaches primary significance to his compassion for the victims of empire produces a potentially endless work. Characters are not sacrificed to an emerging imperial design, but live on, spared by the pity of the poem’s heroes or by their authors’ misprision of the Aeneid, or by a collusion between these two forces. Ariosto’s poem, however, concludes with the single combat of Ruggiero and his irascible pagan adversary Rodomonte in an episode which is unmistakably modelled on the encounter between Aeneas and Turnus which ends the Aeneid. In the course of writing the Orlando furioso, Ariosto came increasingly to curb his digressive, pity-centred reading of Virgil, and to impose upon it both the austere narrative structure of the Aeneid and an appreciation of the harshness to which Virgil’s pietas can lead. This reflects, and in part anticipates, increasing concern among literary critics in sixteenthcentury Italy to establish formal unity in the epic, in which Virgil, allied with Aristotle, comes to take on a new role as a structural guide to composition. Virgil is not a character within Orlando furioso who rebukes Ariosto for his inappropriate compassion for vanquished pagans as Dante’s Virgil does; but the text of the Aeneid becomes as it were the superego of the mode of romance, urging it to renounce the indulgence of digressions in order to return to the austere imperial outline of the Aeneid. In Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581) Virgil becomes not just a poet who writes of the self-denials necessary to imperial expansion, but one whose example compels his imitators to curb their own imaginations to the shape of his. Tasso’s poem is scattered with the mournful deaths of youths who are ruthlessly slain by irascible heroes and then lamented by their compassionate author. At the climax of the poem his main hero, Tancred, has to perform a symbolic exorcism of the spirit of fantastical romance digressions from his poem: in an enchanted forest a tree talks to him with the voice of his pagan love Clorinda. With a just disdain Tancred destroys this delusion, which appeals for pity in a vain echo of Virgil’s Polydorus, whom Aeneas piously reinters in Aeneid 3. Tasso’s version of the episode has moral, political, and formal significance:  it suggests that renouncing pity is a precondition for achieving epic unity, and that it is the means by which Tancred is able to return to the government of his ruler ‘pio Goffredo’ – and ‘pio’ there means pious rather than pitiful. The episode also implies that by 1570 a ‘Virgilian’ conception of formal restraint was beginning to turn against Virgil himself. Neoclassical critics wrote increasingly against the ‘marvellous’ episodes in 133

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the Aeneid, such as the Polydorus episode and the metamorphosis of the Trojan ships into nymphs in Aeneid 9.11 Epic poets came consciously to seek to drive such Ovidian metamorphic excesses from the epic tradition (Tasso extensively revised his poem), and they did so in the name of Virgil. Virgil’s influence as a regulator of the Renaissance epic tradition became so rigorous by the late sixteenth century that even his own poems could not live up to the critical precepts extracted from them. The poet of Empire became the poet of formal and political unity and of poetical self-suppression. Dante’s fascination with Virgil’s politics, and particularly with the traces of vulnerability which attend Virgil’s imperialism, also anticipates later imitations. Renaissance epics tended to be gestures of national selfdefinition which praised the dynasty of their ruling house, and illustrated the potential of their own vernacular tongue to rival the achievements of Virgil. Since epic was also regarded as the highest of the genres, writing a heroic poem became the most effective means by which poets could win the patronage of a ruler. For these reasons the panegyric and prophetic elements in the Aeneid became definitional elements in the genre by the later sixteenth century. Poets such as Ariosto and Tasso, however, who wrote for the Estense, the ruling dynasty of Ferrara, confronted the central problem of Renaissance epic:  that in comparison with the example of Virgil their state was provincial, and their celebrations of a relatively minor signoria in northern Italy could in no sense match the imperial authority which underwrote the poems of Virgil.12 For Ariosto the lack of fit between his city state and the imperial city of Rome becomes a source of continual and very deliberate irony. The blood line of Ippolito d’Este, which he praises, is simply not equivalent to its Virgilian prototype, and Ariosto frequently signals this fact by the awkwardness with which he inserts prophetic and encomiastic material into his poem. Ariosto’s heroine Bradamante, who is to bring forth the blood line of the Estense, receives a prophecy of her family’s future not, like Aeneas, after being gravely conducted to the Underworld by the Sibyl, but after falling into a pit. Ariosto’s own relationship with his patron was uneasy, and he spent the latter part of his career in miserable exile as governor of Garfagnana, a military outpost on the edges of the Ferrarese signoria. He was no Virgil reciting historical prophecies to the ruler of the greater part of the world, and he repeatedly reminds his readers of this fact. The result is a poem which jokily augments the qualifications which Virgil writes into his imperialism. 11 12

See e.g. Tasso (1973). See Quint (1993: 213–47).

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Virgil can give to poets after Dante a vision of an ideal imperial state against which their own political world is found wanting; but frequently their sense of inferiority to the Aeneid leads them to respond with eager sympathy to moments when Virgil implies less than total confidence in the imperium sine fine which Jove promises to the Trojan exiles. Edmund Spenser was another would-be author of an imperial epic who, like Dante and Ariosto, was a heroic poet in exile: the majority of his adult life was spent in Ireland. He began his poetic career in good Virgilian fashion by endenizening the Virgilian pastoral into the English idiom in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), and went on also to translate the Culex as Virgils Gnat. His unfinished Faerie Queene (1590–6), dedicated to Elizabeth i , is an epic romance in the line of Ariosto and Tasso which re-enacts their fraught struggles between the urge pitifully to wander and the desire dutifully to complete a heroic task. Implicit in every stage of The Faerie Queene too is an imprisoning nostalgia, which locates in the ideal world of Faerie-land a moral and political ideal which pointedly cannot be related to the poet’s own present. The poem, dedicated to the childless and ageing Elizabeth i , attempts to extend its dynastic vision back into a Virgilian past and on into an Elizabethan Protestant future in which London becomes Troynovant, ruled over by an imperial virgin. Spenser, however, is often unable to bridge the gap between mythical past and the present, and his vision of the future is, like Virgil’s, scarred by anxieties about the future succession. In Book III the heroine Britomart receives a prophecy of her dynastic future from Merlin, and the moment is carefully signalled as a Virgilian one: Britomart descends into an Underworld as Aeneas does in Aeneid 6 (here Spenser both recalls Ariosto’s mildly ironized imitation of the episode in Orlando furioso and seeks to remind his readers of the Virgilian original), and the immediately preceding narrative alludes very closely to the pseudo-Virgilian Ciris, which Spenser believed was by Virgil.13 The prophecy of Britain’s future which Britomart receives serves a structurally Virgilian effect: it transforms her from being a passionately obsessed girl like the heroine of the Ciris into a purposive dynastic heroine. But Merlin’s triumphant vision of England’s future breaks off, like Anchises’ prophecy in Aeneid 6, before it can extend from the time of its composition into the future – and it does so with a stark rupture which recalls Virgil’s uncertainties about imperial succession. Merlin predicts the accession of Elizabeth (‘Then shall a royall virgin raine’), and then stops on the brink of the future as though by ‘ghastly spectacle dismayd’ (III.iii.50). Virgin queens cannot be expected to have children, and their empires consequently cannot last forever. Spenser’s Virgilianism is sporadic, and is often 13

See Burrow (2008).

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hybridized with influences from other authors; but the greatest lesson he learnt from Virgil was that an epic which appears to praise an imperial ruler need not do so in an unqualified way. Prophecy is a two-edged sword, promising at once a glorious future for a nation and at the same time drawing attention to features of the present which might make the emergence of that future impossible. Virgil gave to the Renaissance the concept of an encomiastic epic, which praises a nation state and its ruler and which seeks to manifest the strengths of a vernacular tongue. He also gave to the period a precedent for poems which accommodate political unease within their praise, in which prophecies seem to emerge from the gates of ivory like false dreams. John Milton stands at the end of this line of sceptical responses to Virgil. Through the 1630s he composed pastorals which show his early efforts to shape a Virgilian career for himself. His ‘Epitaphium Damonis’ adapts with extreme delicacy the language and concerns of Virgil’s Eclogues to a Christian purpose; in ‘Lycidas’ Virgil’s lament for Daphnis fuses with an apocalyptic zeal for the violent reconstruction of the English Church in a radical Protestant Virgilian renovatio. Milton’s later works also allude to the Virgilian career structure: Paradise Regained begins by echoing the pseudoVirgilian opening to the Aeneid (‘I who erewhile the happy Garden sung’), and has been seen as a georgic poem, in which a hero works to cultivate a wilderness.14 But in Paradise Lost (1667) Milton deliberately resists much of the received image of Virgil which had grown up over the previous three centuries. By 1660 Virgil had been thoroughly assimilated into the tradition of Christian epic. Girolamo Vida’s neo-Latin Christiad (1535) had used a richly Virgilian style to recount the life of Christ and the prophetic hopes it released. Virgil had also acquired clear political colours:  the imperial conquests of Aeneas had provided a model for fables of national expansion (to which Milton preferred the cultivation of godliness at home) under absolute monarchies (to which Milton was constitutionally averse). Fracastoro’s neo-Latin Syphilis relates the discovery of a cure for the French disease by Spaniards venturing into the new world; Camões’ Lusiads (1572) praises the heroic expansion of Portugal with insistent allusion to the empirebuilding of Aeneas. These Catholic and absolutist epics were matched by the Virgils produced by the majority of seventeenth-century English translators. As Chapter 7 shows, Virgilian dreams of imperium sine fine consoled many a disappointed royalist in the English civil war, who hoped that the future would bring back the monarchy they had lost in 1649. At the Restoration innumerable panegyrists alluded to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in order to voice 14

See Low (1985: 296–352).

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their hope that England would enjoy a glorious renewal under Charles II. This background, when combined with Milton’s defeated but still resistant republicanism, and welded to the growing association of Virgil with selfrestraint and self-suppression, gives us Paradise Lost, which is in many ways the most anti-Virgilian epic ever written. Conquest and imperial voyaging are consistently associated with Satanic fraudulence in the poem, and empire is always shown to be a divine prerogative alone. At 4.159–65 Satan is compared to a voyager seeking booty in a new world; later he claims to seek ‘Honour and empire with revenge enlarged’ by making Adam and Eve fall. There is, though, no final victory of an imperial hero in Milton’s poem; indeed the most remarkable feature of Paradise Lost is its combination of an enormous chronological span, stretching from the creation to the apocalypse, with a great bashfulness about indulging in Christian triumphalism. It ends with the fallen Adam and Eve venturing out of paradise ‘with wandering steps and slow’ in victorious defeat, consoled not by the reassuring shape of an imperial prophecy stretching out before them, but by the Archangel Michael’s narration of a tortuous and often bloody biblical history. During the previous century Virgil had become associated with imperial destiny and resistance to the charms of women, and had increasingly come to embody a stylistic ideal to which poets aspired at the expense of their own poetic identity. Milton’s poem militantly opposes these features of his Virgil: his hero, Adam, falls because of his sympathetic bond with Eve, and his only searcher after an empire is the devil himself. Running through the reception of Virgil is a continual oscillation between received readings of the poet and direct responses to his works. The strongest means of resisting a received reading is to return to the works themselves in order to show that the received image of them is partial or misleading. Milton’s anti-Virgilianism is of this type. It often entails a predatory inflation of the negative elements that lie within Virgil’s portrayal of Aeneas in order to express Milton’s hostility to human aspirations to imperial dominion. So when Satan emerges from hell on a fitful, chancy voyage through Chaos, Milton is thinking of Aeneas’ storm-tossed voyage from Troy; but he sets the action of his hero within a sublimely vast space which shrinks him to the scale of a feather: At last his Sail-broad Vanns He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoke Uplifted spurns the ground, thence many a League As in a cloudy Chair ascending rides Audacious, but that seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuitie: all unawares Fluttering his pennons vain plumb down he drops 137

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All of time (‘to this hour’) and all the chaotic extent of the cosmos swirl around and nearly swamp the audacious activity of Satan. This is not simply a sublime overgoing on a cosmic scale of Aeneas’ storm-tossed journey. Satan’s desperate tumbling through a disordered cosmos develops Virgil’s hints that part of Aeneas’ heroism lies in his inability to control his fate – his ship is, after all, left rudderless after the death of Palinurus, and we first meet him when he is tossed on a storm at sea. By pressing on the heroic powerlessness, or amechania, which Virgil’s hero derives from Apollonius Rhodius’ Jason, Milton transforms Aeneas’ heroic incapacity to know the structure of the imperial plot in which he acts into Satan’s vain aspiration to achieve some heroic conquest within the providential framework established by Milton’s omniscient deity. That is a provocative transformation of Virgil’s poem, because it entails substituting a willing acceptance of the providential unfolding of God’s will for Aeneas’ self-abnegating acceptance of his place in an imperial design. But it is a reading of the Aeneid, rather than a dismissive violation of its ethos. Virgil writes with sufficient complexity to enable even his enemies to learn from his methods. Milton mines like a destructive virus into his uncertainties, and wrests from them a Christian transcendence of his imperial predecessor. Paradise Lost is in one respect a profoundly Virgilian poem. It uses allusions to the earlier epic tradition both to show debts and to signal radical departures from that tradition in a way which would have been impossible without Virgil, and without the post-Virgilian epicists such as Lucan, who learnt from their master how best to signal their differences from him. At the end of Book 4, a third of the way through his poem, Milton alludes to the death of Turnus with which Virgil’s poem ends. A squadron of angels discover Satan ‘squat like a toad’ as he attempts to seduce Eve’s sleeping imagination to his cause. He blazes like a comet as he prepares for battle with the heavenly hosts, then sees God’s scales (‘Wherein all things created first he weighd, | The pendulous round Earth with ballanc’t Aire | In counterpoise’, 4.999–1001) in the sky tip against him. The allusion to Aeneid 12.725–7 is clear; so too is its aggressive inversion. Satan’s imminent defeat is indicated by his scale going up, rather than down, as Milton recalls Daniel 5:27, ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ When Jove’s scales sink under the weight of Turnus’ fate, the Iliadic hero barely 138

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looks at them, but leaps into battle (emicat hic), and at the end of the poem his ‘indignant soul flees beneath the shadows’ of death; when Satan sees the future running against him, however, he just gives up the fight and runs: The Fiend lookd up and knew His mounted scale aloft: nor more; but fled Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night. (Paradise Lost 4.1013–15)

The hint of dawn with which Milton’s imitation concludes, together with its biblical readjustment of the heavenly balances, is just the sort of indebted reversal which Virgil performs on his sources. One way, and perhaps the most powerful way, of imitating a predecessor is to imitate his methods of imitation, and to treat his text as he had treated his own sources.15 This is what Milton does with Virgil, and in doing so he makes full use of the growing awareness in seventeenth-century commentaries of the radical delicacy with which Virgil had transformed Homer. Virgil’s techniques for shifting the ethical mood of an episode from the Homeric poems, or of combining them with allusions to their Hellenistic offshoots, feed directly into Milton’s poem. In Paradise Lost allusions to Virgil resound backwards to Homer, or give faint echoes of Italian imitations of Virgil’s original. Virgil becomes in Milton’s works not a moral guide but a model of how to insinuate one’s poem into the complex of intertextual relations within which epic poems make their significance. Virgil was by 1667 so associated with poetic, emotional and political self-suppression that it is entirely appropriate that Milton all but suppresses his presence in Paradise Lost. But although Virgil was no longer the sustaining guide who could lift the struggling Dante to his bosom and carry him over the ramparts of Hell, he remained embedded in the epic tradition as the master of how to allude, of how to impose a new epic poem and a new poetic and political form onto an existing tradition of writing. FURTHER READING Martindale (1984) is still an excellent general guide, and Thomas and Ziolkowski (2014) includes many helpful references to articles on writers considered in this chapter. Jacoff and Schnapp (1991) and Barolini (1984) explore the intertextual relations between Virgil and Dante, inter alia. Foster (1977) remains a classic; and on Virgil’s own classic status, Kermode’s The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (1975/1983) is what it 15

For this aspect of early modern imitation theory, see e.g. Ascham (1989: 271).

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says on the tin. On Virgil’s reception in medieval England, Baswell (1995) is packed with information, while the elderly Comparetti (1997) has been usefully supplemented by Ziolkowski and Putnam’s wide-ranging study (2008). For Virgil in the Renaissance, Burrow (1993) discusses Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser and Milton in relation to Virgil, while Quint (1993) draws attention to alternatives to Virgil’s ‘winner’s epic’. Quint (2014) is excellent on Milton’s allusions. Watkins (1995) is full of valuable material. Kallendorf (2007a) argues that the ‘pessimistic’ Virgil of the Harvard school was registered in early modern versions of and responses to him. Wilson-Okamura (2010) is very helpful on commentaries in particular, while Wallace (2010) explores the literary effects of the ways in which Virgil was taught in schools. Whittington (2016) expands its view well beyond Virgil, but connects his works to a fascinating larger argument about the ways in which identity and family were explored through the act of supplication. Shakespeare’s Virgil is explored in Burrow (2013: 51–91). Virgil’s other genres have received less critical attention than the Aeneid in recent years. Cooper (1977) remains radiant with good sense, while Patterson (1987) emphasizes the politics of the genre. The reception of the Georgics is a field less well tilled, but Chalker (1969) digs through the eighteenthcentury material, while Low (1985) presents a stimulating argument about georgic poetry in the English civil war; Fairer (2016) provides an excellent recent starting point for further work. Patrick Cheney has explored the Virgilian career as a template for early modern writers in many books and articles. The best introductions to that rich field are perhaps Cheney and de Armas (2002) and Hardie and Moore (2010). Volumes in the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature series under the general editorship of Charles Martindale and David Hopkins contain chapters on the general intellectual background as well as many specific and valuable references to Virgil, and are an excellent first port of call.

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Virgil in Art

Virgil’s poetry abounds in depictions of works of art, from the cups of Alcimedon in the Third Eclogue to the poetic temple anticipated at the start of Georgics 3 to the temple of Juno at Carthage, the temple of Apollo at Cumae, the Ganymede cloak, the statues in the palace of Picus, the armour of Turnus, the sword belt of Pallas, and the non enarrabile textum (‘indescribable fabric’, 8.625) of Aeneas’ shield in the Aeneid.1 At a number of points the imagery employed by the poet displays striking similarities to the subject matter of works of art either created or available to Roman viewers at the time Virgil was writing: notable examples are the first simile in the Aeneid, which compares Neptune stilling the storm to a statesman pacifying an unruly mob, a reverse analogy to the presentation of Octavian as Neptune riding down an enemy on a first-century carved gem now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and Virgil’s account of Madness chained in the prophecy of Jupiter in Aeneid 1, which may owe something to Apelles’ painting of the figure of War with hands tied behind its back, later placed by Augustus in his forum.2 Early critical appreciations of Virgil often characterize the poet’s literary techniques in language that evokes or invites comparison with the visual arts.3 Perhaps it is only natural, then, that the Roman poet’s works should have been felt to offer such a compelling challenge to practitioners in other branches of artistic endeavour, and that Virgilian 1

2

3

See Ecl. 3.35–48; G. 3.13–39; Aen. 1.441–93, 5.250–7, 6.14–33, 7.170–91, 7.783–92, 8.626–728, 10.495–500. On Virgilian ekphrasis, see generally Simon (1982), Putnam (1998a), Squire (2014: 386–401), and Barchiesi, Chapter 22b in this volume. Aen. 1.148–56, 1.294–6. For Apelles’ painting see Pliny, NH 35.94, and on the statesman simile and the Boston gem, see Galinsky (1996: 20–4). The most famous (potential) example of this phenomenon is that of the Laocoon statue, which appears to interact in some way with Virgil’s description at Aen. 2.212–24; but despite its importance for later debates on verbal and visual art, ‘the precise relation between the two remains evanescent and ungraspable, like the shade of Creusa’ (Most (2010: 335; see also 332–3). See e.g. Macrobius, Saturnalia 5.11.11, 5.13.21.

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themes and subjects should have maintained so unshakeable a presence in painting, sculpture, engraving, tapestry and other visual media. Illustration and Interpretation Any attempt to illustrate a text, or to represent in visual terms the content of a literary passage, necessarily involves an act of interpretation.4 Given the frequency with which artists over the last two millennia have turned for inspiration to the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, it would probably be possible to write a history of Virgilian interpretation using evidence drawn exclusively from the visual arts. This tendency (conscious or otherwise) to present Virgilian subjects through the filtre of contemporary attitudes towards the poet and his work can be seen from a very early stage in the story of artistic engagements with the Virgilian corpus. The famous mosaic of Virgil from Hadrumetum (modern-day Sousse) in Tunisia, generally dated to the third century ad , depicts the seated poet flanked by two Muses – Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy, and (probably) Calliope, the Muse of history – and holding in his lap a scroll quoting Aeneid 1.8 [Figure 1]. The appeal in this line to the poet’s Muse to supply him with causae (‘causes’) accords well with both the presence of the two Muses and the probability that one of them is the Muse of history, a discipline with strong aetiological associations and a field in which late antique commentators recognized Virgil’s authority. Perhaps even more significant, in view of the provenance of the mosaic, is the identity of the other Muse. Again, Virgil’s earliest interpreters were fully aware of the poet’s borrowings from tragedy, but the emphasis on this aspect of his work might be thought particularly significant in a location so close to Carthage, the setting of the most tragic (in every sense) episode of the Aeneid, an episode which is likely to have held a special interest for readers in this locality. An audience at the centre of the empire might have felt that, on balance, the triumph of the Aeneid outweighed its tragedy; for Dido’s countrymen in Roman North Africa (as suggested also by Augustine’s tears for the Carthaginian queen, Confessions 1.13), the situation may have been rather different.5 The varying patterns of Virgilian exegesis continue to make their presence felt in the artistic sphere well beyond antiquity, a phenomenon

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For demonstration of this principle with reference to Virgil, see Fedeli (2002); Kallendorf (2001) and (2015: 121–51); Patterson (1987: 92–106); Leach (1982). See Kelly (2006: 57–9), and on the Hadrumetum mosaic, see generally Dunbabin (1999: 115–16). On Dido and tragedy, see also Hardie, Chapter 18 in this volume.

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Figure 1. Virgil Seated between Two Muses (third century), mosaic from Hadrumetum, Bardo Museum, Tunis.

that demonstrates the truth of the claim that the study of later engagements with ‘Virgil’ must take account not merely of the poet’s own words, but of ‘all-the-forces-that-moulded-the-text-plus-its-reception’.6 No serious study of the interpretation of Virgil from late antiquity onwards can afford to neglect the colossal impact exerted for centuries on later Virgilian criticism by the commentary of Servius. Servius himself makes an appearance in the frontispiece executed in the mid-fourteenth century by the Sienese painter Simone Martini for Petrarch’s treasured manuscript of Virgil’s works [Frontispiece, p. ii], drawing back the veil of allegory to reveal the poet reclining in the shade of a tree in the manner of the shepherd Tityrus in Virgil’s First Eclogue (identified allegorically with the poet by Servius himself, though ‘only where 6

For the formulation, see Martindale (1993a: 54).

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Figure 2. Master of the Grüninger Workshop, Eclogue 4, from Publii Virgilii Maronis Opera, ed. Sebastian Brant (1502). Image from Warburg Institute, University of London.

reason demands’).7 In attendance on poet and commentator are figures of an upright soldier, a stooping farmer and a seated shepherd, representatives of the epic Aeneid, agricultural Georgics and pastoral Eclogues respectively. The relative positions of these figures in the composition, together with their poses and features, suggest not only the theory of the hierarchy of genres but also the notion that Virgil’s works relate to different stages in the development of human civilization – an idea propounded by Servius in the opening pages of his commentary, included in the manuscript immediately after this preliminary image. The shadow of Servius can also be felt in the identification of the child in the cradle as Saloninus in the illustration of Eclogue 4 in Sebastian Brant’s 1502 edition of the poet’s works [Figure 2]. Servius had named Saloninus as the son of Pollio, whose consulship is celebrated in Virgil’s mysterious poem proclaiming the return of the Golden Age through the birth of a 7

On the frontispiece to Petrarch’s Virgil (Biblioteca Ambrosiana S.P. 10, 27), see especially Mann (2004: 47–71); Fenzi (2011); Markey (2016). On the manuscript as evidence for Petrarch’s reading of Virgil, see Lord (1982).

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Figure 3. Crispijn de Passe the Elder, Eclogues 4 and 5, from Compendium Operum Virgilianorum (1612). Image from Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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miraculous heaven-sent child; the interpretation of the Fourth Eclogue offered here is therefore (at least apparently) straightforwardly historical.8 A very different strand in the reception of the Virgilian prophecy is reflected in an early seventeenth-century illustration combining Eclogues 4 and 5 by the Dutch engraver Crispijn de Passe the Elder [Figure  3]. Although the image is marked at the top as an illustration of the two Eclogues, the mother and child in the foreground surrounded by harmonious animals and luxuriant vegetation, and the background showing shepherds on a hillside illuminated by a star (the catasterized Daphnis of Eclogue 5)  make the composition at first glance virtually indistinguishable from a traditional Christian nativity scene. By this date the interpretation of the Fourth Eclogue as a conscious or unconscious prophecy of the birth of Christ had long been established among readers of and commentators on Virgil.9 Other interpretations dating from late antiquity could also condition the treatment of Virgilian material among later artists. The selection of Juno’s visit to Aeolus and the storm at sea in Aeneid 1 as the subject matter for a panel for a cassone (wedding chest) decorated in the midfifteenth century by the Florentine painter Apollonio di Giovanni [Figure 4] might not initially seem an obvious choice; but it becomes more explicable if we remember that the late antique mythographer Fulgentius, followed by later medieval luminaries of Virgilian commentary such as Bernardus Silvestris and John of Salisbury, had interpreted the storm allegorically as birth, the first stage in the human life course – and no doubt anticipated as an important consequence of a Renaissance wedding.10 By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, other mediating sources had come to leave their mark on visual treatments of Virgil and his works. The storm in Aeneid 1 became so popular a subject in art that paintings on the theme were given a generic title, Quos ego (‘Whom I …’), after Neptune’s unfinished threat at Aeneid 1.135. Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael of scenes from the first book (c. 1518)  [Figure  5] features the storm as its central element,11 but although its lapidary lettering and

8 9

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Patterson (1987: 104); Zabughin (1921–3: ii .390). See e.g. Courcelle (1957); Benko (1980); Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008: 487–503); Kallendorf (2015: 48–58). For discussion of interpretative tendencies in illustrations of Eclogue 4, see Houghton (2015: 211–17). See Baswell (1995: 10, 96, 106); Brumble (1998: 11–12 (s.v. Aeneas)); Schreiber and Maresca (1979: xv, xvii–xviii, xxii, 6–7, 10, 12, 110 n. 2). On Apollonio and Virgil, see Morrison (1992) and Gombrich (1955), and on Virgil and cassone painting, see generally Franklin (2014); Fagiolo (1981: 224–7). For discussion see e.g. Kleinbub (2012); Emison (2005: 204–6); Jones and Penny (1983: 180–3, with 182 Fig. 194); Nees (1978).

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Figure 4. Apollonio di Giovanni, Neptune Calms the Storm Caused by Aeolus at Juno’s Request, cassone panel, c. 1460, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (Jarves Collection).

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Figure 5. Marcantonio Raimondi (after Raphael), Quos ego (c. 1518). Image from Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

suggestion of relief carving seek to give an antique feel to the composition, the engraving derives its captions not from Virgil’s own text but from the synopsis of Book 1 attributed to Vomanus, available in the Aldine edition of 1505. Renaissance portraits of Virgil in manuscripts and other media regularly take their cue from illustrations to Dante’s Commedia depicting 148

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the protagonist’s guide through the Inferno and Purgatory,12 just as literary and scholarly engagements with the Virgilian corpus display traces of the vernacular poet’s presentation of his ancient precursor – and there is considerable interplay between other aspects of the traditions of Virgiland Dante-illustration. An example of this can be seen in some surprising resemblances in the way the two poets’ conceptions of the Underworld are represented by illustrators.13 As time went on, the pictorial tradition developed an afterlife of its own, conditioning subsequent Virgilian imagery: in particular, after its publication in 1502, ‘Brant’s highly popular and successful edition influenced virtually every published or painted illustration of Virgil’s works over the next half century and beyond’,14 including a series of enamels produced in Limoges in the 1530s with scenes from the Aeneid based on designs for the Brant edition, and the frescoes of the gabinetto of Scandiano painted for Giulio Boiardo around 1540 by Nicolò dell’Abate, again with episodes from Virgil’s epic.15 The illustrations of the late antique manuscripts known as Vergilius Romanus and Vergilius Vaticanus form the basis of engravings from the sixteenth century onwards;16 a plate (apparently executed by a German artist) in a compendious volume of 1882 entitled Museum of Antiquity presents, next to a bust of Horace, a seated figure of Virgil which is clearly modelled on the author portraits in the Vergilius Romanus [Figures 6 and 7].17 Samuel Palmer’s engraved illustration (completed by his son A. H. Palmer) to Eclogue 9 in his translation (published 1883)  consciously evokes the Virgilian landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Turner,18 while also featuring a reclining figure based on classical depictions of Ariadne [Figure 8]; Palmer also drew inspiration for his illustrations of the Eclogues from William

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See Houghton (2003: 18–21), and for another ‘Dantean’ Virgil, Zabughin (1921–3: i i .389). See Kallendorf (1994: 146–50) for an extreme manifestation. Ruby (1990: 66). On the illustrations to Brant’s Virgil, see especially Rabb (1960); Gorrichon (1979); Leach (1982); Schneider (1983); Patterson (1987: 92–106); Pasquier (1992: esp. 31–2, 58–9, 99–103, 151–2, 218–25); Suerbaum (2008: 131–57); Eastin (2016). Usher (2012); Langmuir (1976); Fagiolo (1981: 123–35). Ruby (1990: 66) notes that the Brant woodcuts seem not to have influenced the sixty-five or more illustrations to the Aeneid designed by Sebastiaen Vrancx around 1615. See Pasquier (1992: 8–11, 189 with 352 figures 1–6); on the Vergilius Romanus (BAV Vat. Lat. 3867) and Vergilius Vaticanus (BAV Vat. Lat. 3225), see especially Small (2003: 129–31, 143–53); Wright (1993) and (2001), with Cameron (2004); Pasquier (1992: 3–11); Rosenthal (1972). Yaggy and Haines (1882: 813) (first published 1880). On Claude and Turner, see McKay (1969); Llewellyn (1984: 128–34); Wine (1994: 93– 103); Brown (2010: 312–16); Hardie (2014: 204–8).

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Figure 6. Portrait of Virgil (early fifth century?), miniature from the Roman Virgil, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Codex Vat. Lat. 3867, fol. 3v), Vatican City. © 2018 Photo Art Resource/SCALA, Florence.

Blake’s woodcuts illustrating Robert John Thornton’s translation of Virgil’s pastoral poetry (1821).19 Contemporary Concerns The Virgilian current in art does more than merely signal the permeation of particular interpretations of Virgil’s poetry into the visual sphere. In the same way that portraits of Virgil are conditioned by the time, place and function for which they were created, presenting the poet variously as scribe, seer and scholar,20 so the same Virgilian motifs can be deployed in different pictorial contexts and 19

20

On Palmer and Virgil, see especially Lightbown (1978); Patterson (1987: 284–303); Brown (2010: 319–23). For Blake’s Virgil woodcuts, see Bain et al. (1977); Patterson (1987: 252–62); Garber (1988); Sung (2009: 141–63). On portraits of Virgil, see especially Joyner (2008) and (2014b); McHam (2005); Houghton (2003); Pasquier (1992: 180–2, 449–53, 456–7, 459); Courcelle and

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Figure 7. Virgil and Horace, from L. W. Yaggy and T. L. Haines, Museum of Antiquity (1882). Image © Ivy Close Images / Alamy Stock Photo.

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Figure 8. Samuel Palmer and A. H. Palmer, Eclogue 9 (1883). Image from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts.

different historical settings to convey meanings relevant to the contemporary situation. Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo (1514) in the papal apartments of the Vatican famously features in the left foreground a group reminiscent of Virgil’s description of Aeneas’ escape from Troy with his elderly father Anchises on his shoulders, his little son Ascanius by his side, and his wife Creusa following at a distance [Figure 9].21 The scene is not a classical one, however, but of a fire quelled by Pope Leo IV in 847, and the choice of subject offers an oblique compliment to the reigning pontiff, Leo X. Since Aeneas’ flight from the burning city of Troy resulted eventually in the foundation of Rome, the presence of the Aeneas group in Raphael’s scene casts the miraculous termination of the fire by Leo IV as in a sense a refoundation of Rome, and by implication confers the same tribute on the pope’s present-day namesake and successor. In the changed climate of the Counter-Reformation, the same family group could be enlisted to promote the claims of the Roman Church as a whole, rather than serving the purposes of personal panegyric:  Bernini’s sculpture of the triad of Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius (c. 1618–19)

21

Courcelle (1989: 12–16 with figures 1–4); Fiorini Galassi et al. (1981); Zabughin (1921–3: i .xxv, I I . 387–8, 389). Portraits of the poet were in circulation as early as the reign of Caligula (Suetonius, Gaius 34.2) and the time of Martial (14.186). See e.g. Zabughin (1921–3: ii .388, 393); Fagiolo (1981: 206–7, figures 1–2); Baumbach (2010: 8–9; Hardie (2014: 198).

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Figure 9. Raphael, Fire in the Borgo (1514), Stanza dell’ Incendio del Borgo, Vatican City. © Fratelli Alinari IDEA S.p.A. / Getty Images.

[Figure 10], now in the Galleria Borghese, emphasizes the preservation of ancestral religion through Anchises’ guardianship of the Trojan penates (not present in Raphael’s mural) and the succession of generations from Anchises through Aeneas to Ascanius.22 The usual identification of Bernini’s source for the figure of Aeneas as Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Risen Christ in the Roman basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva arguably serves to reinforce this message. Bernini’s group has also been linked with Federico Barocci’s painting of the same subject (c. 1589) for the emperor Rudolf II, now known only from a copy by the artist himself [Figure 11]. The buildings in the background of this scene prompt the reflection that the flight from Troy will lead ultimately not just to the glories of the ancient Roman empire, as represented by Trajan’s column, but also to the splendours of Christian Rome, symbolized by a structure strongly resembling Bramante’s Tempietto (1502), built on the traditional site of the martyrdom of St Peter.23 Like 22 23

See e.g. Kauffmann (1965); Fagiolo (1981: 208–9); Hardie (2014: 198). On Barocci’s painting, see especially Verstegen (2015) (on the Roman architecture, 406, 410–11); for a later engraving based on the image, see Pasquier (1992: 179, 243 with 453 figure 308).

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Figure 10. Gianlorenzo Bernini, Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius (c. 1618–19), Galleria Borghese, Rome. © Archivi Alinari, Firenze.

Bernini, Barocci includes the penates, but unlike the later sculpture, his painting also features Creusa, in a pose that might be seen to suggest the Virgin Annunciate, as Ian Verstegen has recently noted. The Aeneas group in Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo is an example of the insertion of Virgilian iconography into an otherwise non-Virgilian context, with interpretative consequences. A further instance can be seen in the ‘sieve portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1583) by Quentin Metsys the Younger, now 154

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Figure 11. Federico Barocci, The Flight of Aeneas from Troy (1598), Galleria Borghese, Rome. © De Agostini / V. Pirozzi / Getty Images.

in the Pinacoteca in Siena [Figure 12].24 On a pillar behind the queen, who holds in her hand a sieve alluding to the legend of the Vestal Virgin Tuccia and hence evoking the monarch’s own virginity, appear nine scenes from the story of Dido and Aeneas – perhaps intended as an admonition of what can happen when a queen sworn to chastity allows herself to be tempted into a new liaison.25 Not far from the present location of the ‘sieve portrait’, the sequence of episodes from the life of Pope Pius II painted on the walls of the Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral by Pinturicchio (1502–3) opens with a storm at sea, casting the young Enea Silvio Piccolomini (before the adoption of his equally Virgilian pontifical name) as the homonymous hero of Virgil’s epic, an identification adumbrated by the pope himself in his Commentaries [Figure  13].26 Certain compositional parallels between

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See especially Yates (1975: 114–20); Hardie (2014: 63). On Elizabeth I and Dido, see further Weber (1999); Purkiss (1998). Since ‘there were clear parallels between Elizabeth and the chaste Elissa who resembled Diana and, like Penthesilea, was fully a match for men’ (Weber 1999: 142), it is possible that Dido is meant as a more positive role-model in the portrait. On the Piccolomini Library, see e.g. Green (2005). On the Virgilianism of Pius II, see especially Seeber (1997); O’Brien (2015: 191–2, 203–11).

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Figure 12. Quentin Metsys the Younger, Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (‘Sieve’ Portrait) (c. 1583), Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena © DEA / G. Dagli Orti / Getty Images.

this scene and the fresco of Aeneid 5 (though not that of Aeneid 1)  at Scandiano raise the possibility that Nicolò dell’Abate might have recognized the Virgilian allusion implicit in Pinturicchio’s treatment of the youthful Piccolomini’s departure for the Council of Basel. 156

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Figure 13. Bernardino di Betto (Pinturicchio), Enea Silvio Piccolomini Departs for the Council of Basel (1502–3), Piccolomini Library, Siena. © Lucas Schifres / Getty Images.

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Figure 14. Claude Lorrain, Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia (1682). © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

The Severed Word27 Some pictorial responses to Virgilian material offer a profound and coherent reading of the texts with which they engage: Claude’s final painting, Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia (1682) [Figure 14], for example, with its unsettled sky, restless trees and distant seascape (the last of these, though calm enough at this point, perhaps anticipates the simile applied to the oncoming war at Aeneid 7.528–30) might be seen as a literal expression of the idea that ‘Vergil uses Ascanius as a type of barometer in the epic, warning the reader of storms to come’.28 More common, however, is the appropriation of verbal tags from Virgil’s works to convey a particular message in combination with ostensibly unrelated visual imagery. A late nineteenth-century war memorial in the courtyard

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With apologies to the title of Brownlee (1990). Merriam (2002: 852). On Claude’s painting, see e.g. McKay (1969: 153–4); Wine (1994: 101, 103); Sonnabend et al. (2011: 52–5); Hardie (2014: 204–5).

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of the University of Siena carries Dido’s entreaty for an avenger to arise from her bones (Aen. 4.625) beneath sculptures of a fallen soldier clutching a rifle and a standing allegorical figure in classical pose and drapery, while a roughly contemporary shopping arcade in Rome, the Galleria Sciarra, pairs scenes of idealized domestic life by Giuseppe Cellini with quotations from ancient authors promoting traditional feminine virtues, including Dido’s expression of compassion from Aeneid 1.630 and the injunction to the newborn child to greet his mother with a smile from Eclogue 4.60.29 The inclusion of an adapted form of Andromache’s lament for Astyanax (sic oculos, sic ille genas [for Virgil’s manus (‘hands’) – these are head and upper-body portraits!], sic ora ferebat, ‘like this he used to bear his eyes, like this his cheeks, like this his mouth’, Aen. 3.490) in engravings by Dürer of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (1519, 1523) clearly makes a claim for the veracity of the portraiture, at least on a physical level;30 but what the prominent incorporation of Aeneas’ words to Dido, dum spiritus hos reget artus (‘while breath rules these limbs’, Aen. 4.336), beneath a portrait by the Bergamasque painter Giovanni Battista Moroni may have meant to its subject or to the artist must remain a matter of speculation [Figure 15].31 Such disembodied tituli seem to have enjoyed a particular currency in the arena of politics and civic pageantry, often with cosmetic adaptations to the text in order to reflect the contemporary context. Above all, the resonant imperial pronouncements of the Aeneid offered a prestigious source of reusable slogans for congratulatory rhetoric. When James VI of Scotland entered London in 1604 to take the throne of England as James I, he passed through an Italian arch bearing a quotation of Aeneid 6.851–3, Anchises’ famous lines on the mission of Rome,32 with the word Romane (‘Roman’) altered to Iacobe (‘James’) in honour of the new claimant to imperial power, who had quoted these verses at the end of his Basilikon Doron (‘Royal Gift’), a treatise on government first published in 1599 and addressed to his son.33 A quotation of the same lines on the pages of a book held by the figure of Virgil in a fifteenthcentury cycle of famous men in the Palazzo Comunale of the small Tuscan hill town of Lucignano changes Romane to ratione (‘by reason’), evoking both

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See Piantoni (1984); Houghton (2015: 188–9). Strauss (1972: 186–7 (no. 88), 204–5 (no. 97)). See Braham (1978: 13, 17, 36 with figure 22). Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento | (hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem, | parcere subiectis et debellare superbos (‘You, Roman, remember to rule the nations with your sway (these will be the arts for you), and to add custom to peace, to spare the conquered and war down the proud’). James (1997: 20–1); Hardie (2014: 105–7 with 108 figure 9); Rickard (2015) 62–3. The arch also carried a quotation from Aen. 6.791.

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Figure 15. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1560). © The National Gallery, London.

medieval political doctrine and allegorical interpretations of Dante’s Virgil.34 Again, above the gateway to the eighteenth-century Arsenal de la Carraca in San Fernando, Cádiz, can be found the words tu regere ymperio fluctus, Hispane, memento (‘you, Spaniard, remember to rule the waves with your sway’), adjusting Aeneid 6.851 to urge the expansion of Spanish naval power. It has been rightly observed that ‘in a prophet’s vagueness also lies the opportunity, often readily welcomed, for the listener to match up what is 34

Houghton (2003). See also Hlawitschka-Roth (1998: 40–3, 140–5).

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Figure 16. Sir James Thornhill, King George I and his Family with Allegorical Figures (1725), Painted Hall, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Image from Jigsaw Design & Publishing.

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said to some contemporary event’,35 and the enigmatic prophecies of the Fourth Eclogue provided a convenient repository of millenarian metaphors to assert the return of the Golden Age in the reigns of successive kings, queens, popes and emperors.36 The west wall of the Painted Hall in the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, decorated by Sir James Thornhill between 1707 and 1726, features an allegorical celebration of renewal under the new Hanoverian dynasty, in which the dome of the rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral (also decorated by Thornhill) is prominent [Figure  16]; across the top of the painted architecture that frames the scene runs the inscription Iam nova progenies cœlo (‘now a new lineage [is sent down] from heaven’, Ecl. 4.7), and there are further Virgilian elements elsewhere in the composition.37 Coins and medals likewise marked significant public occasions or broadcast the virtues of a ruler or a regime through the combination of visual designs and Virgilian mottos,38 while individual Virgilian sententiae of a non-political kind could also take on a pictorial life of their own: Agostino Carracci’s engraving Omnia vincit amor (1599, title from Ecl. 10.69) presents Cupid (Amor) triumphant in his struggle with Pan (Greek πᾶν, everything), to illustrate the universal power of love [Figure 17].39 Another strand (which we have already observed) in the interpretation of the Fourth Eclogue was responsible for the infiltration of excerpted lines from Virgil into the art of the Church.40 The reading of the poem as a prefiguration of the Christian Incarnation ensured that series of prophetic sibyls and other harbingers of Christ in ecclesiastical settings frequently include the Cumaean Sibyl (or occasionally the poet himself), identifiable by an accompanying text from Eclogue 4, usually one or more verses from lines 4–7.41 The cathedrals of Amiens, Siena and Zamora, the choir stalls of Ulm Minster, the Roman churches of Santa Maria sopra Minerva 35 36 37

38

39

40

41

Osgood (2006: 196). See generally Bietenholz (1994: 209–13); Binder (2010). See discussion in Smith (2006: 130). For further artistic appropriations of Ecl. 4 to convey a political message, see Houghton (2015: 181–8). For a recent study see Arnould and Assenmaker (2018), and for some fascinating early examples on the coinage of Carausius, see de la Bédoyère (1998). On Virgilian imprese (personal emblems combining text and image), see Zabughin (1921–3: i i .378–80); also de Tervarent (1967: 21–37) on ‘devises’. Bohlin (1979: 339–40 (cat. no. 210)). For another treatment of the subject by the same artist, see Turner (2001: 27–31), and more generally, see Bull (2005: 190–1). For Virgil in Christian artwork, see also the Ghent Altarpiece by the brothers van Eyck (completed 1432), where the white-robed figure crowned with laurel and holding a sprig among the prophets on the lower central panel has been identified as the Roman poet. See e.g. Dhanens (1973: 59 with Figure 21, 105–6); Martindale (1984: 16). See especially Houghton (2015: 191–210), with extensive bibliography at 191 n. 42; Stark (2014: 1169–70); Romani (1902: 45–70). On fifteenth-century Sibylline cycles, see Raybould (2016).

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Figure 17. Agostino Carracci, Omnia vincit amor (1599). Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

(Raffaellino del Garbo), Santa Maria della Pace (Raphael) and San Pietro in Montorio (attributed to Baldassare Peruzzi), and the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican (Pinturicchio) all offer notable examples, while the fresco by Ghirlandaio on the vault of the Sassetti Chapel of Santa Trinità in Florence manages to convey the same message by quoting no more than the first word (magnus) of Eclogue 4.5 [Figure 18]. This Christianizing tendency is also responsible for what is perhaps the most outlandish attempt at visualizing Virgil: the turbaned, bearded and bespectacled seer by Ludger tom Ring the Elder (c. 1538), part of a series of sibyls and other venerable visionaries designed for the cathedral at Münster [Figure 19].42 The curious iconography is combined with a painted inscription on Virgil’s stone bookrest at the lower edge of the picture, which presents a couplet composed of a modified text of Eclogue 4.4–5, adjusted to lend the lines an even stronger Christian resonance:  Ultima cumei iam uenit carminis etas | magnus ab eterno sanctorum nascitur ordo (‘The last age of Cumaean prophecy has now come; the great order of saints is born from eternity’).

42

See Leidl (1993); Houghton (2015: 208–10).

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Figure 18. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cumaean Sibyl (1483–6), Cappella Sassetti, S. Trinità, Florence. Photograph: L. Houghton.

Beyond the Canon Between them, pictorial encounters with the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid offer ample prospects for students of the Virgilian contribution to the visual arts; but even this vast corpus of material does not represent the full story of Virgil’s integration into the realm of art. Just as subsequent accretions to the Virgilian tradition leave their mark on literary engagements with the canonical triad, so the biographical tradition and the body of legends that attached themselves to the figure of the poet in later ages both play a part in Virgil’s fortunes in the domain of the graphic artist. Jean-Joseph Taillasson (1787), Angelica Kauffman (1788), Jean-Baptiste Wicar (1790– 1, 1820), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1812, 1819)  and Vincenzo Camuccini (1819) all produced paintings of the moment in the Life of Virgil by Suetonius/Donatus when Augustus’ sister Octavia is said to have fainted when the poet, in the course of a recitation from the sixth book of the Aeneid, reached the words tu Marcellus eris (‘you shall be Marcellus’, 883),

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Figure 19. Ludger tom Ring, Virgil (c. 1538), Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster. Image from Digital Images and Slides Collection, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

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Figure 20. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Virgil Reading the Aeneid to the Emperor Augustus (1812–19), Musée des Augustins, Toulouse.

referring to Octavia’s dead son.43 Evidently the subject appealed to neoclassical sensibilities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:  the feeling for Virgil as the poet of ‘tears in things’ (lacrimae rerum, Aen. 1.462),44 of pity for the youthful dead (here focused through Marcellus, but seen also in the cases of Pallas, Lausus and Euryalus), was certainly current before the Victorian era. Ingres’ candlelit scene [Figure 20] not only offers a scrupulously classical setting and an Augustus whose profile is modelled on ancient portraits, but also captures the human drama of the episode: the modest Virgil, slightly separated from the enclosed world of the imperial court, taken aback at the emotional power of his own poetry; the shaded

43

44

See e.g. de Vergnette (1989); Joyner (2014b : 1356–7); Zerner (2014). Further examples in Fagiolo (1981: 80–1). See Vance (1997: 143–6); Hardie (2014: 16). Fry (2000: 19) maintains that Virgil’s ‘lacrimae rerum were not romanticized until the late nineteenth century’.

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Livia (whose son Tiberius was promoted in the succession thanks to the death of Marcellus) darting an oblique glance of conspiratorial discomfort at the viewer; the imperious ruler cradling the collapsed figure of his sister; the thoughtful, suspicious onlookers.45 Among the legends associated with the name of Virgil, the story of Virgil in the basket appears to have received particular attention from artists and their patrons, largely as a result of its moralizing character: the image of the poet suspended in a basket in mid-air through the duplicity of the emperor’s daughter could be used (often alongside Aristotle’s degradation at the hands of the courtesan Phyllis) to illustrate female power, the supremacy of love, and the dangers of lust.46 The forlorn figure of the stranded poet-sorcerer dangling from a tower can be seen on an architectural capital in the church of St Pierre at Caen, on fourteenth-century French ivory writing tablets in the British Museum and Walters Art Gallery and other ivory artefacts of a similar date elsewhere, and on an enamelled Venetian goblet of the late fifteenth century,47 as well as in a painted panel by Giovanni Bonconsiglio (c. 1515)48 and engravings by Lucas van Leyden (1525) [Figure  21] and Georg Pencz (1541–2). Such tales may have little to do with the historical poet Virgil, whose works formed such a staple of education throughout these centuries, but clearly they were deeply enough entrenched in the consciousness of the age to make their way into the art of the time, sometimes on luxury objects which scarcely support the traditional classification of these fables as ‘popular’.49 Two-way Traffic As a coda to our investigation, it should be noted that interaction between interpretations of Virgil’s works and attempts to render the content of those works in pictorial form will surely not have been a one-way process. Portraits of the poet, illustrations of scenes from his poems, and visual and verbal allusions to Virgilian material in depictions of other subjects are likely to have coloured viewers’ perceptions of the Virgilian corpus when they resumed their role as readers of the poet’s texts, while they were engaged in reading them in illustrated editions, or even in some cases when they approached the texts for the first time. It is considerably less easy to 45 46

47 48 49

See e.g. Condon et al. (1983: 52–9). See Koch (1959); Fagiolo (1981: 67–9); Joyner (2008: 457–9) and (2014b: 1355). On the iconography of Virgilian legends, see generally Spargo (1934: 255–67). See Bayer (2008: 93–4). Dal Pozzolo (1998: 136–7, 174 with 139 figure 118). For challenges to this designation, see Tudeau-Clayton (1998: 97–8).

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Figure 21. Lucas van Leyden, Virgil in the Basket (1525). Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

demonstrate this on a practical level, however, than it is to chart the flow of exegetical traffic in the other direction. It is unfortunate that the clearest example of the phenomenon that I have been able to find involves a work of art acknowledged by the author as ‘wholly fanciful’ (in other words, a fiction invented by himself), but it nonetheless gives a reasonable impression of how the dynamic traced in the opening part of this essay might operate 168

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in reverse.50 In the letter ‘On Virgil’ in his Letters on Literature (1889), the Victorian anthropologist, mythographer and classical scholar Andrew Lang professes to offer a reply to a correspondent who feels she ought to like Virgil’s poetry but admits that she finds it difficult to do so. In response to her flagging enthusiasm, Lang conjures a portrait of Virgil seen during his schooldays, which (he says) overcame his aversion to the Aeneid itself and continues to shape his attitude towards the poet and his work: I half fancy I can trace the origin of this personal affection for Virgil, which survives in me despite the lack of a very strong love of parts of his poems. When I  was at school we met every morning for prayer, in a large circular hall, round which, on pedestals, were set copies of the portrait busts of great ancient writers. Among these was ‘the Ionian father of the rest’, our father Homer, with a winning and venerable majesty. But the bust of Virgil was, I think, of white marble, not a cast (so, at least, I remember it), and was of a singular youthful purity and beauty, sharing my affections with a copy of the exquisite Psyche of Naples. It showed us that Virgil who was called ‘The Maiden’ as Milton was named ‘The Lady of Christ’s.’ I don’t know the archæology of it, perhaps it was a mere work of modern fancy, but the charm of this image, beheld daily, overcame even the tedium of short scraps of the ‘Æneid’ daily parsed, not without stripes and anguish. So I retain a sentiment for Virgil, though I well perceive the many drawbacks of his poetry.51

If Virgil is in large part what his readers have made of him, he is also what artists and viewers have made of him  – and that includes viewers (and artists) who may never have read his texts or may have read them only after encountering images inspired by the poet’s works. For what it is worth, I  suspect Virgil himself would have recognized this:  as he demonstrates in his description of Aeneas’ reactions to the scenes on the temple of Juno at Carthage in Aeneid 1, the poet was well aware that a person’s response to a work of art is shaped by his or her past experiences, and there is no reason to suppose that he would have felt any differently about the emotional, imaginative and aesthetic preconditioning that readers bring with them to a work of literature.52 That preconceptions of a work extend well beyond the actual (and even the potential) readership of that work is part of the price an author pays, and part of the honour an author receives, for becoming a classic.

50

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For another possible instance, see Helen Waddell’s reference to ‘the hollow-cheeked sadeyed Virgil of the Hadrumetum mosaic’ (1976: 40, quoted by Martindale above, p. 8). Lang (1889: 70–1) (for acknowledgement of the bust as ‘wholly fanciful’, see 199). On the episode of the temple of Juno as a paradigm for the reading of the Aeneid itself, see Perkell (1999b: 45–6).

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FURTHER READING A single short chapter cannot come close to doing full justice to the richness, range and variety of the Virgilian vein in the visual arts; the reader is strongly encouraged to consult the extensive bibliography on the subject. General surveys include Farinella (2011), Joyner (2008), Liversidge (1997), Llewellyn (1984), McKay (1982), Fagiolo (1981) and de Tervarent (1967). Illustration receives excellent coverage in Wilke and Suerbaum (2014), Suerbaum (2008), Kallendorf (2001) and (2015: 121–51) (see also Kallendorf (2009)), Wlosok (1997–8), Pasquier (1992) and Patterson (1987). On the Aeneid, see generally Hardie (2014:  189–208), Wlosok (1992), Suerbaum (1992) and (2009), Courcelle and Courcelle (1989), McKay (1987), Stief (1986) and Bardon (1950). Individual themes are handled in McKay (1969) (landscape), Montagu (1998) (Dido), Wlosok (2002) (Underworld), and Hardie (2012:  603–15) (Fama). The Virgilian element in garden design deserves more attention than it has received here:  see e.g. Hardie (2014:  205–6) and Liversidge (1997: 100–1). On Virgil in late antique art, see Karterouli (2014), Cameron (2004) and Wright (1993) and (2001); for medieval art, see Joyner (2014a) and Mâle (1932); for the Renaissance, see Zabughin (1921–3:  ii .29–33, 384–97), Usher (2014), and essays in Houghton and Sgarbi (2018), and for the sixteenth century, see Mortimer (1986); on pictorial treatments of Virgil in the Romantic and Victorian eras, see Brown (2010) and Barrow (2001). There are entries on individual artists in the Enciclopedia virgiliana, and articles on Virgilian themes and characters in art and the poet’s artistic fortunes in different locations and historical periods in Thomas and Ziolkowski’s The Virgil Encyclopedia.

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10 C H A R L E S M A RT I NDALE

Green Politics: The Eclogues

It may have been at the suggestion of his patron Asinius Pollio, aristocratic promoter of the new poetics which began with the generation of Catullus, that Virgil undertook to become the Roman Theocritus.1 At all events, his decision to imitate a collection of sophisticated Hellenistic literary experiments, and in the process to ‘pastoralise’ them (only a minority of the Idylls have a rustic setting), was to have important and unexpected consequences. Without the Eclogues2 pastoral might never have become one of the major, exemplary genres of European poetry. E. R. Curtius declared that anyone unfamiliar with the First Eclogue ‘lacks one key to the literary tradition of Europe’; while for Paul Alpers the collection constitutes ‘probably the single most important document in the history of poetry’.3 Moreover Virgil’s canonical status and the eventual shape of his poetic career as it appeared in retrospect, with its apparently purposeful upward march through the genres, meant that pastoral became an appropriate point d’appui for a youthful poet with aspirations to immortality; both Spenser and Milton, for example, were among those who consciously shaped their artistic lives to some extent to the Virgilian example.4 There are many literary precedents one could cite for Theocritus’ green world (leaving aside the possibility that he was inspired by actual shepherd songs): pastoral elements in the Iliad and Odyssey (the similes, the shield of Achilles which includes a vignette of music at a grape harvest, Calypso’s island, the gardens of Alcinous, rustic scenes and characters in Ithaca); Hippolytus’ virgin meadow in Euripides’ play; the enchanted landscape 1

2

3 4

See Ecl. 8.11–12 (accipe iussis | carmina coepta tuis), if we assume, as do the majority of scholars, that these lines are addressed to Pollio, not Octavian. In line with this Companion’s stress on reception, as with the spelling ‘Virgil’, I retain the traditional name, even though it is unlikely to be original. Curtius (1953: 190); Alpers (1979: 1). But see Pugh (2016) for the argument that Spenser significantly modifies the Virgilian cursus.

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setting at the opening of Plato’s Phaedrus that has nothing to teach Socrates, lover of the city. But Theocritus is normally credited with the ‘invention’ of pastoral as a literary genre. David Halperin in 1983 argued that to do this is to read history backwards, and that the Idylls were designed as a species of avant-garde, modernist epic;5 this accounts for the metre (hexameters) and the complex intertextual relationship with Homer (for example, the appearance of the Cyclops). That Theocritus wrote what he himself called ‘bucolic (cowherd’s) song’ (so the refrain in Idyll 1, and also Idyll 7.36), a term used also by ancient critics which Halperin is at pains to differentiate from the later conception of pastoral, does not mean that there was a separate bucolic genre. Quintilian, for whom metre was a key defining element of genre, classifies the Eclogues too as epic; no classical theorist clearly recognises a pastoral genre as such. Pastoral in anything like the modern sense was, in this historicising account, the invention of late antiquity or even (in Halperin’s view) of the Renaissance. The situation is complicated by the fact that between Theocritus and Virgil a separate collection may have been made of the rustic idylls (if so, does the selector have a claim to be the true ‘inventor’ of pastoral?). Or are we to say that Virgil, almost by accident as it were, invented pastoral when he chose to unify his Theocritean book by making shepherds and the countryside central to it? One could argue that it is precisely such a process of concentration and selection that makes a genre; according to the elder Scaliger, one of the Renaissance’s most influential theorists of literature, ‘pastoral works continually draw back material of every kind to a rural character’ (pastoralia … cuiuscumque generis negotium semper retrahunt ad agrorum naturam).6 Within a generation, Ovid could evoke, with a few deft touches, the defining hallmarks of what thus must already have become to a degree ‘a closed and self-sufficient discourse’;7 during the story of Io (Met. 1.674ff.) Mercury, to assume the role of a shepherd, takes off his usual accoutrements save his staff (virga), which immediately functions as a discursive marker plunging us into a bucolic world (pastor, per devia rura, capellas, structis avenis). But, although Virgil had a Neronian imitator (Calpurnius Siculus), there was no outbreak of such writing in antiquity as there was to be, on a truly massive scale, in the Renaissance. Or can a single great work on its own constitute a genre, albeit one that had yet to receive its name? The failure to find a clear validating point of origin, or even any authoritative ancient account, for what is often considered an unusually normative 5 6 7

For a critique of this view see Cameron (1995: ch. 16, ‘Theocritus’). Quoted in Conte (1994b: 116). Conte (1994b: 116).

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genre is itself instructive. It might suggest that genres are best thought of as processes; not as essences or ontological entities, things, but as discursive formations, contested, fluid, resisting even while inviting definition (Derrida famously asked in ‘The Law of Genre’ whether there might not be ‘lodged within the heart of the law itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination’).8 Scholars, like the ancients themselves, often employ the rhetoric of invention and discovery (so a celebrated essay by Bruno Snell begins with the claim that Virgil ‘discovered’ Arcadia); poststructuralists preferred a counter-rhetoric of betweenness – genres are not discovered but, in so far as they ‘exist’ at all, are ‘always already’ there. And genres are historical not only in the sense that they operate within history but in the sense that they have a history. A historicist can argue that Virgil did not suppose himself to be writing pastoral but rather a form of neoteric epos in imitation of Theocritus. One possible reply is that history always involves reading backwards, and that the Eclogues must unavoidably be read in relation to the pastoral tradition within which they have been inscribed. Even if not conceived as pastoral (any more than the Iliad was conceived as epic in anything like its current sense), they are pastoral now. The title of this chapter is contrivedly ambiguous. The colour green, a colour of complex signification (its English meanings include ‘simple’, ‘innocent’, ‘naïve’, ‘lovesick’, ‘jealous’), came to be an emblem of pastoral. A familiar example would be Spenser’s ‘green cabinet’ from the December Eclogue of his Shepherd’s Calendar which Thomas Rosenmeyer in 1969 appropriated for the title of a famous study of the Theocritean tradition (Spenser himself plucked the phrase from an earlier pastoralist, Clement Marot, pastoral being in general self-consciously imitative, traditional and intertextual). In ‘The Garden’, Marvell famously colour codes the contrast between erotic and pastoral discourse to suggest the latter’s paradoxically greater sexual allure: ‘Nor white nor red was ever seen | So am’rous as this lovely green’. A  later stanza praises the garden for ‘Annihilating all that’s made | To a green thought in a green shade’, where ‘green shade’ translates Virgil’s viridis umbra. (Viridis occurs eleven times in the Eclogues, while grass is an unsurprising staple ingredient of the Virgilian landscape, but other words, including fagus, umbra and silva, are more clearly used metonymically as bucolic markers.) Pastoral politics might mean the politics, or political themes, to be found in pastoral, and indeed it is commonplace to say that, in comparison with Theocritus, Virgil politicises pastoral space by more obviously admitting elements of the wider world, including the world of high politics, into his 8

Derrida (1981: 204).

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green one. Or it might mean the politics of pastoral, with the poems treated as political through and through, as constituting a potent ideological vehicle. And green politics also hints at the modern environmental movement, whose prescriptions for the good life, designed to counter ever-encroaching urbanism and the rape of nature, might be construed as another modern version of pastoral (if one generally lacking that self-reflexiveness and ironic sense of play to be found in Theocritus or Virgil). Indeed the allegorisations of the Eclogues favoured by modern scholarship include some of a rather evidently environmentalist hue; so according to A. J. Boyle, the poems investigate ‘the psychological chaos and spiritual impoverishment which Virgil sees as the city’s legacy and the corollary of technological growth’.9 And, in general, at least since Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, Virgil’s green spaces have been constituted as a privileged place for the harmonious cooperation between Man and Nature.10 This chapter will explore the relationship between the political and the aesthetic both within the Eclogues themselves and within writings about them (indeed my contention would be that, because of the importance of reception in the making of meanings, this distinction between text and commentary can be partially collapsed). The poetry of third-century bc Alexandria, to which the Idylls belong, has often been regarded as comparatively ‘pure’ and autonomous, art mainly for art’s sake, at least in comparison with the earlier ‘political’ poetry of classical Athens, the poetry of the polis. There is an obvious paradox here for those who hold such a view.11 Callimachus, the most important and innovative writer of the period, held an official post under the ruling Ptolemies and composed poems in their praise. Artists – in this at least like academics – have a necessary complicity with the political systems they work under, whatever claims to purity they may make or have made for them. The Eclogues likewise are often presented as inhabiting a charmed enclosure, a comparatively self-contained aesthetic sphere. When Paul Veyne argues that Roman love elegy is a kind of literary game bearing little relation to any social realities, he calls it ‘pastoral in city clothes’;

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Boyle (1986: 15). For ‘ecocritical’ readings of the Eclogues see e.g. Saunders (2008) and Apostol (2015). See Halperin (1983: 42–9). This view has become more difficult to maintain since Cameron (1995) and subsequent scholarship. Cucchiarelli (2012) works fruitfully with the ‘political turn’ in studies of Hellenistic poetry as a background to the Eclogues. However it can be argued that there is a difference between the concerns of the citizen body reflected in the writings of fifthand fourth-century Athens and the politics of Hellenistic court poets focused on praising their ruler. Moreover, Theocritus has not been as radically politicized as Callimachus or Apollonius of Rhodes.

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elegy for him takes place ‘outside the world, just like bucolic poetry’.12 The Eclogues, in other words, are an unproblematic instance of evidently aesthetic play; whereas many have been misled by elegy, ‘such pastoral fiction never fooled anyone’.13 In what is perhaps the most influential account of the Eclogues written by a classicist in the last century, ‘Arcadia: the Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape’, first published in German in 1946, Bruno Snell argued that they are set, not in any actual Mediterranean countryside, but in ‘a faraway land overlaid with the golden haze of unreality’.14 Although Virgil allowed political matters to intrude into his Arcadia, in this departing from Theocritean precedent, he converted them into myth, being indeed ‘always careful not to get involved in the slippery problems of political action; in fact one may presume that they never even penetrated to his dreaming ear’.15 And, like Veyne, Snell stressed the poetic autonomy of the Eclogues, which ‘represent the first serious attempt in literature to mould the Greek motifs into self-contained forms of beauty whose reality lies within themselves’; as a result, for the first time, ‘art became “symbol” ’.16 The New Historicist Louis Montrose observed how theories of pastoral have a way of becoming theories of literature, and certainly many of those who have been drawn to pastoral seem anxious to clear a space for the aesthetic uncontaminated by more banausic discourses in what can itself be seen as ‘an exemplary pastoral process’; in Montrose’s words, ‘to write about pastoral may be a way of displacing and simplifying the discontents of the latter-day humanist in an increasingly technocratic academy and society’.17 The pastoral world can, on this view, readily function as an emblem for the academic world. It is easy to find elements in the Eclogues to support such an aestheticising reading. The poems certainly display a consistent concern to achieve an exquisite musicality and sustained cantabile (they make most earlier Latin poetry sound shaggy and crude by comparison).18 And pastoral is, in general, unusually self-conscious about its own status as art, to the extent that critics sometimes claim that this is what the genre is fundamentally ‘about’; for example, the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser finds in the invented world of the Eclogues not so much Snell’s landscape of the mind as ‘a work of art that thematizes art itself’,19 one indeed that largely frees itself from the 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Veyne (1988: 101). For a critique of Veyne’s general approach see Kennedy (1993: 95–100). Veyne (1988: 101). Snell (1953: 282). Snell (1953: 294). Snell (1953: 308). Montrose (1983: 415). See Fitzgerald (2016). Iser (1993: 34).

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traditional referential function of poetry as mimesis articulated by Plato and Aristotle. Certainly Eclogue 6 is now normally read metapoetically, as a poem about poem-making, one that constitutes a poetics relevant to Virgil’s project. Significantly, although the piece has some bucolic colour, its principal matter is mythology, not the rustic world. It opens with what in modern times has been termed a recusatio, a refusal enjoined by Apollo to write about kings and battles, which is a close imitation, seemingly the first in Latin, of a passage from the Aetia prologue where Callimachus answers his critics and defends his poetic practice. We are often told that Virgil here rejects epic for pastoral; in view of what has been said above, we might say rather that Virgil justifies writing Theocritean bucolic epos by appealing to Callimachus’ aesthetic credo, his championing of stylistic refinement, leptotês (as Theocritus himself had already done in Idyll 7).20 Apollo had told Callimachus, ‘poet, feed your offering as fat as possible, but keep the Muse lean [leptaleên]’. With witty appropriateness, Virgil gives the Callimachean imagery a more specifically bucolic turn. Tityrus is instructed to feed his sheep fat, but the song of the Theocritean poet, troped as a shepherd, is to be fine-spun (deductum carmen); the resonant figure of the shepherd-poet can be traced back to Hesiod’s meeting with the Muses on Mount Helicon while tending his flocks (Theogony 21–34), a passage imitated subsequently in the poem. Virgil’s Muse will display tenuitas (Ecl. 6.8; tenuis is used of the shepherd’s reed pipe, both literally and with reference to the poetry associated with it), and will be a species of play, lusus, far from the gloom of traditional martial themes (tristia bella, Ecl. 6.7). The song of Silenus which follows, a catalogue of mythological tales, might almost be a blueprint for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the work that in so many ways can be seen as the climax of Roman Alexandrianism. It begins with a tiny cosmology, in the style of Hesiod (a poet  also evoked by Callimachus in the Aetia prologue)21 and with Lucretian echoes, and continues with abbreviated narrations of various myths, several of them involving metamorphosis or love or both. At its centre is a mini epyllion, a miniaturisation of the miniature epic that Catullus and his fellow modernists favoured. It tells, obliquely and with a sort of hyper-refined lyricism, of Pasiphae’s perverse desire for the bull, and 20

21

For Callimachus’ text and a list of Latin texts derived from it, see Hopkinson (1988). Cameron (1995) has challenged many of the previous orthodoxies about Callimachus, particularly the view that the Aetia prologue is an attack on traditional narrative epic. Acceptance of his arguments would require considerable modification of Latin literary history as previously construed. A useful introduction to the topic that takes account of Cameron is Barchiesi (2008). But see Cameron (1995: ch. 13, ‘Hesiodic elegy’).

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it even includes, in the manner of some other epyllia, including Catullus 64, an inset narrative (the story of the Proetides who imagined they had become cows). The writer projects himself empathetically into his story, and consoles (solatur) the victim for her pathological condition. This is the sort of writing that, in both content and preciosity of style, traditionalists, ancient and modern, might stigmatise as ‘decadent’ (Jasper Griffin compares it to Wilde’s Salome).22 Silenus’ song also compliments a second-generation neoteric, Virgil’s friend Gaius Cornelius Gallus, who composes a poem in imitation of Euphorion, another Alexandrian of ostentatious obscurity, and becomes Hesiod’s successor, receiving the pipes with which, like Orpheus, Hesiod used to bring down (deducere, Ecl. 6.71) the trees from the mountains. And in all this we have both a poetics of eros and an erotics of poetry (Silenus recalls songs Apollo sang by the River Eurotas after killing his lover, the beautiful and beautifully named boy Hyacinthus). There is likewise a heralding of the Orphic and Apollonian powers of poetry: poets create the world of myth, create, that is, their own kind of reality, one far from the tedium and tristitia of high politics, and one in which they are sovereign. From a different perspective, of course, one could call this escapism (or at least an escape from the everyday world of politics and citizenship). Veyne’s conception of aesthetic play is consonant both with the importance of singing contests in Theocritus and Virgil and with the characterisation of the Eclogues by one of their most intelligent early readers. The poet Horace contrasts the martial poetry of ‘fierce’ Varius with what may be rendered ‘the sensitive and witty epos that the Italian Muses who rejoice in the countryside have bestowed on Virgil’:  epos … molle atque facetum | Vergilio adnuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae (Satires 1.10.44–5).23 The sophisticated, at times whimsical wit of the Eclogues is something that much modern criticism (eager to stress the ‘serious’, even dark, side of the poems, in an understandable anxiety to free them from any imputations of triviality) frequently underplays. The Tenth Eclogue, for example, is one of which rather heavy critical weather has been made; the poem is widely read as acknowledging the failure of pastoral (already threatened in Eclogue 9 by the irruptions of politics and war), since the world of the shepherds proves impotent to assuage the passional dolours of Gallus who, in a concretisation of a common erotic trope, is literally dying of love (amore peribat, Ecl. 10.10). The poem is seen as staging a debate about literary modes, the

22 23

Griffin (1986: 32). I follow here the interpretation of Halperin (1983: 213–14); editors usually take the adjectives adverbially.

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deficiencies and limitations of pastoral leading in the end to its abandonment by Virgil. Certainly Eclogue 10 explicitly presents itself as closural, the last of the collection (extremum laborem, 1), and the shadows of evening fall across its close:24 haec sat erit, divae, vestrum cecinisse poetam, dum sedet et gracili fiscellam texit hibisco … surgamus: solet esse gravis cantantibus umbra, iuniperi gravis umbra; nocent et frugibus umbrae. ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae. To have sung these things, goddesses, while he sat and wove A frail of thin hibiscus, will suffice your poet … Let us arise: for singers heavy is the shade, Heavy the shade of juniper; and shade harms fruit. Go, little she-goats, Hesper comes, go home replete.25 (Ecl. 10.70–1, 75–7)

Umbra, shade, is readily taken as a figure for bucolic writing (the beginning of the First Eclogue saw Tityrus reclining lentus in umbra), while surgamus might imply, figurally, that the writer will proceed to other, perhaps ‘higher’ poetic forms (already in the Fourth Eclogue he had assayed paulo maiora (Ecl. 4.1), a slightly grander, panegyrical theme).26 Virgil tropes himself as an inhabitant of his bucolic world, sitting at ease while Gallus pours forth his passionate complaint, and weaving his slender hibiscus basket (which could stand for the poem itself and its stylistic gracilitas or for the whole now-completed eclogue book – weaving had been used as a metaphor for writing poetry by Catullus and others).27 This passage then evidently elides being a shepherd and writing Theocritean verse. There is a sense of completion: the poet has sung enough (sat), the flocks are fed full (saturae) – the sheep are fat, though the bucolic Muse must remain lean. The lines thus constitute a sort of sphragis or seal for the entire collection (designed as an artistically satisfying whole) which introduces, or reintroduces, its author. The poem fuses with wit and virtuosity material from two literary models, themselves both probably indebted to Callimachus’ thin-spun verse, Theocritus (especially the First Idyll, in which the shepherd hero Daphnis dies) and Gallus, where the object of imitation was in a different metre (elegiac couplets). Since, according to Servius, Amores was the title Gallus gave

24 25 26 27

See further the chapter by Elena Theodorakopoulos, Chapter 13 in this volume. Trans. Lee (1984). For some possible resonances of maiora, see Cameron (1995: 470–1). This interpretation is already found in Servius ad loc.

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his elegies, sollicitos Galli dicamus amores (Ecl. 10.6) could be translated either ‘let me describe Gallus’ troubled feelings of love/love affair’, or ‘let me speak of Gallus’ poems the Amores with their depiction of troubled love’; the line punningly collapses the distinction between love as an emotion and its literary expression in a text. Although Gallus’ love poetry is lost, except for a fragment recovered in Egypt in 1979,28 there are pretty clearly reminiscences of it in his lament, which constitutes a song within a song (the performance element is strong here as throughout the Eclogues). At one point in Servius’ commentary we read that ‘all these verses of Gallus have been transferred from his own poems’, while surviving love elegy provides close parallels for the mood and topoi of the speech together with the dramatic situation it presupposes (Lycoris, Gallus’ mistress, is away with a rival, like Cynthia in Propertius 1.8). Omnia vincit amor (Ecl. 10.69) could be a quotation from Gallus since it constitutes half of a pentameter, while the threefold exclamatory a (Ecl. 10.47–9) reproduces a mannerism Gallus must have shared with other neoterics. But none of this means that Virgil is solemnly debating the merits and demerits of different genres, let alone acknowledging the failure of his own bucolic art, including its failure to deal with the vicissitudes of erotic passion (there is anyway no clear distinction between bucolic and elegiac love, which share many of the same tropes). Virgil has to compose verses to honour or to help his friend for Lycoris herself to read:  pauca meo Gallo, sed quae legat ipsa Lycoris, | carmina sunt dicenda (Ecl. 10.2–3; from the recovered fragment we know that these lines too echo Gallus: carmina … | quae possem domina dicere digna mea).29 We could say that Virgil is expressing poetic and erotic solidarity with Gallus, with consummate art is helping him court his docta puella. Virgil himself is a lover of Gallus (cuius amor … mihi crescit in horas, Ecl. 10.73), so is perhaps humorously presenting himself as Lycoris’ rival in erotics. There is an undertow of (often pleasing) melancholy about much pastoral writing, but it is easier to read this comparatively sprightly, poised poem as primarily an exercise in wit, facetiae (Horace, as we have seen, found the Eclogues ‘sensitive and witty’). Veyne is quite insistent: I do not for an instant believe that … Virgil meant to deliver a ‘message’ to us, to draw melancholy conclusions about ‘the final failure of poetry, unable to purge the passions’. What reader would think of taking a poetic fiction for some moralist’s guidebook, drawing such a clear lesson from it? This epilogue merely signifies that, the pastiche being ended, the two poets again become 28

29

For the text see Anderson et al. (1979: 138ff.). For links with Eclogue 10 see Gagliardi (2014). See Anderson et al. (1979).

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One may contrast the stress on aesthetic autonomy we encounter in Veyne or Snell with some of the uses the Eclogues have been put to outside the academy. In 1917 John H. Finley, commissioner of education for New York State and President of the State University, in his poem ‘Virgil’s First Eclogue Remembered’ appropriated the piece to argue for US intervention in the First World War. In ‘Build Soil: A Political Pastoral’, the conservative Robert Frost used the same poem to criticise Roosevelt’s liberal agricultural policies, while in Latin America, from a different point in the political spectrum, Eclogues 1 and 9 could serve to provide oblique support for land reform.31 More recently, Seamus Heaney turned to Virgilian pastoral to comment on the peace process in Northern Ireland in ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ (Electric Light, 2001).32 In the Renaissance, when the fashion for pastoral poetry on the Virgilian model was at its height, critics underlined the political subtexts of the Eclogues. Thus Sidney wrote in his Apology for Poetry (published 1595), ‘Is the poor pipe [i.e. pastoral poetry] disdained, which sometimes out of Meliboeus’ mouth can show the misery of people under hard lords or ravening soldiers, and again, by Tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest?’; while George Puttenham in The Art of English Poetry (1589) sees the eclogue as a late and oblique form of poetry devised not of purpose to counterfeit or represent the rustical manner of loves and communication, but under the veil of homely persons and in rude speeches to insinuate and glance at greater matters, and such as perchance had not been safe to have been disclosed in any other sort, which may be perceived by the Eclogues of Virgil, in which are treated by figure matters of greater importance than the loves of Tityrus and Corydon.33

Renaissance texts of the Eclogues often featured the ancient commentary of Servius, which presented the poems as intermittently allegorical (Puttenham’s ‘by figure’), in contrast to Theocritus’ Idylls, supposedly written on one level (simpliciter). Donatus had been of the same opinion, stating that there is a certain amount of figurative allegorical discourse ‘neither nowhere nor

30 31 32

33

Veyne (1988: 103–4). See too Conte (1994b: 120–1). See for these details Ziolkowski (1993: 156–63; 21–2). Cf. Connolly (2001). First published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1999. See Putnam (2010b) on Virgil and Heaney, with further bibliography. Loughrey (1984: 33–4; texts modernized). Osgood (2006) uses the Eclogues as evidence for the human experience of land confiscation, alongside epigraphic and historical texts.

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everywhere’ (neque nusquam neque ubique aliquid figurate dici, hoc est per allegoriam) (Life of Virgil 66). Such scraps of evidence as we possess might suggest that the Eclogues were read allegorically throughout antiquity. Quintilian (8.6.46), citing lines from Eclogue 9 to illustrate a particular type of allegory, assumes that Menalcas in this poem is to be understood as Virgil. Apuleius (Apology 10) tells that through the masks of Corydon and Alexis, Virgil is expressing his love for a slave boy of Pollio’s. Despite their continual appeals to the supposed responses of ancient readers, modern scholars reject the story (while accepting Apuleius’ identifications in the same passage of the various women in love elegy), although something like it seems already assumed in one of Martial’s epigrams (8.56) and elsewhere; it might suggest a possible reading of Eclogue 2 as a witty coterie piece. ‘Where he [Servius] goes most astray is in allegorizing the Eclogues’; Richard Jenkyns’ comment is typical enough of modern scholarship34 (actually, it would be easy to configure all interpretations, scholarly or otherwise, as allegory, a saying of the text in other words which involves appropriation to current concerns). By contrast, Annabel Patterson argues that such hostility to what she calls ‘the Servian hermeneutic’ can be seen as an occlusive attempt to depoliticise the Eclogues, to represent them as comparatively pure art untainted by ideology, whereas to both Servius and those poets influenced by the Servian tradition they incorporated social and political concerns as much as artistic ones. As Patterson puts it (thereby herself becoming a modern shepherd-scholar), Among the competing ideologies proleptically displayed in the Eclogues are Roman republicanism, the classic statement of the claims of the many to equal consideration; the counter-claim of the privileged few to special treatment on the grounds of special talent; the hegemonic needs of the holders of power for cultural authentication; the responsibility of the intellectual for providing that authentication, in the interests of stability; the value of political or social stability in nurturing the arts; the responsibility of the intellectual for telling the whole truth, in the interests of social justice; the intellectual’s claim to personal autonomy.35

And she observes that any appeal to ideological purity can itself be construed as ideological. Classicists, in a way that can be related to romantic and postromantic aesthetic preferences, are happier with symbolism, a mode of fusion which implies wholeness, than with allegory, which works by fragmentation and discontinuity. Thus it is frequently argued that Tityrus in Eclogue 1 34 35

Jenkyns (1992: 155). Patterson (1987: 8). Patterson’s approach is shared by many, e.g. Connolly (2001). But see Leigh (2016) for the occlusions that pastoral can enact.

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cannot stand for Virgil, because he is an elderly man and an ex-slave; but, it can be argued, it is because Tityrus is different from Virgil (or Daphnis in Eclogue 5 from Julius Caesar) that he can be (as Servius supposed) an allegory of him – allegory is precisely a figure of disjunction.36 Significantly, it is only with poetic allegory that modern criticism seems much at home; the poems are acknowledged to be self-reflexive, allegorising their own writing. We have seen how commentators are happy to discuss the possibility that the end of Eclogue 10 is a farewell to pastoral, with umbra figuring bucolic poetry, whereas they would not even think to cite Servius Danielis’ gloss on in umbra in Eclogue 1, ‘under Augustus’ protection’ (allegorice sub tutela Imperatoris Augusti), though a glance at the dictionary will show the political connotations of shade. Jasper Griffin comments that if Virgil indeed lost his farm, or had one restored to him, ‘this series of transactions … was … inherently unpoetical’37 (a stress on aesthetic autonomy always tends to narrow the range of what poetry can treat). In similar vein, he regards Eclogue 4 as not so much ‘a response to a political settlement’38 (the poem may be a celebration of the peace of Brundisium and a sort of epithalamium for the marriage of Antony and Octavia) as a poetic fantasy. Yet Eclogue 4 has continually been evoked in precise political circumstance; Dryden, for example, echoes it in connection with the Restoration of Charles II in Astraea Redux. The poem, of course, became the subject of the most famous of all allegorisations of the Eclogues, and one whose resonance has lasted well into modern times, as being ‘about’ the birth of Christ. In Purgatorio 22, in a notable piece of fiction-making, Dante has Statius tell ‘the poet of the bucolic songs’ that he was first drawn to Christianity by reading the Fourth Eclogue; this is not mere historical naivety (Dante knows perfectly well that the virgo of line 6 is the goddess Astraea, not the Virgin Mary), but rather a matter of different reading habits. Politicising accounts of the Eclogues may take both admiring and hostile forms. The poems may be praised for articulating a desire for simplicity (though always from the perspective of the sophisticated), and constituting a protest, sometimes overt, more often implied, against the evils of the 36

37 38

Since there is no question of simple elision, it does not follow that Virgil cannot also associate himself with Tityrus’ interlocutor Meliboeus. And certainly it is not the case that if Tityrus is to be associated with Virgil in Eclogue 1 he must be so everywhere in the collection. Van Sickle (1998) is right to suggest that characters in the Eclogues should not be read ‘in the manner of traditional biographical inference as representing Virgil tout court’; Virgil’s approach to figuration is more subtle, elusive and ironic than that; as Perkell (1990b: 52) has it, irony ‘allows the poet, the zero-voice, to be more inclusive than his speakers’. Griffin (1986: 24). Griffin (1986: 29).

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city, even an implicit pacifism. Thus Servius claims that Eclogue 1 not only thanks Octavian for restoring the poet’s farm, but also criticises him over the sufferings of the dispossessed (his note on impius miles in line 70 begins hic Vergilius Octavianum Augustum laesit). Or they may be criticised for concealing the realities and oppressions of rural life, in a way that serves the interests of the ruling class. Thus the editors of The Penguin Book of English Pastoral, writing in the Marxising tradition of Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City, argue that the genre is ‘a way of not looking at the countryside’: For the pastoral vision is, at base, a false vision positing a simplistic, unhistorical relationship between the ruling, landowning class – the poet’s patrons and often the poet himself – and the workers on the land; as such its function is to mystify and to obscure the harshness of actual social and economic organization.39

One response to such criticism is to say that it rests on a naïve representational realism. There is no unmediated way of representing the countryside; any representation is, in the words of Simon Schama, ‘the product of culture’s craving and culture’s framing’ (his Landscape and Memory argues that ‘landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock’, texts ‘on which generations write their recurring obsessions’).40 Or one could say that no reader anyway ever mistook the pastoral world for the real countryside, while there are, in C. S. Lewis’ words, ‘many causes (reasons too) that have led humanity to symbolise by rural scenes a region in the mind which does exist and which should be visited often’.41 But the argument that pastoral never fooled anyone sits uneasily, perhaps, with the memory of Marie Antoinette and her courtiers playing at shepherds as the poor starved and the old order began to crumble. Certainly anti-pastoralists like the poet George Crabbe found the Virgilian tradition an oppressive one: ‘From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray | Where fancy leads, or Virgil led the way’ (The Village, 1783).42 At the very least, one must recognise that Virgil’s green spaces are somewhat ‘lordly possessions’.43 Virgil shapes his rustic world into a form that

39 40 41 42

43

Barrell and Bull (1974: 4). Schama (1995: 7, 61, 12). Loughrey (1984: 142; from The Allegory of Love, 1936, ch. 7). See Raymond Williams in Loughrey (1984: 155–7). Dr Johnson persuaded Crabbe to emend the second line of the quotation to ‘Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way’. Schama (1995: 546).

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allows him and his friends and patrons to make their own appearance there without embarrassment alongside the shepherds. Corydon in Eclogue 2 is said to produce artless verses (incondita, Ecl. 2.4); but his song is decked out with obtruded artistry (what Crabbe would call ‘the tinsel trappings of poetic pride’), including the notorious line Amphion Dircaeus in Actaeo Aracyntho (Ecl. 2.24), mannered, allusive, Graecising (it can be turned into a Greek hexameter with the lightest of adjustments).44 For all the supposed rusticity of the bucolic style, its ‘lowness’, the Eclogues belong rather evidently to ‘high’ culture; as one feminist scholar puts it, ‘access to the pastoral speaking position is determined by cultural possessions  – of specific educational, class, gender, and racial identities’, while ‘the lowly are not assigned a subjectivity of their own’.45 To Montrose and his fellow New Historicists, the question is not what pastoral is, but what it does;46 and what it does is to mediate social relations and cultural exchanges among the elite. Such ‘demystifying’ (‘remystifying’?) political readings tend to become exact mirror images of the mystified aesthetic readings they seek to displace. A  critic of pastoral from outside classics makes the point well:  ‘What is occurring here is a kind of aesthetic scapegoating: the creation of a stable category of pure, “empty”, idyllic formalism allows for the simultaneous creation of a category of pure, “full” political meaning, of an unmediated real uncontaminated by “the mirror of art”.’47 The argument partly revolves round both what the Eclogues represent (if indeed they are referential) and how they represent. Iser insists that they are not mimetic in any traditional sense; in his view, the tendency to treat them as such vitiates Snell’s account, in which the pastoral world serves to represent an internal landscape as much as any other. The green cabinet is a cabinet of tropes, but there is no straightforwardly ‘proper’ sense to which those tropes can be reduced (this is a familiar poststructuralist position about textuality in general). Signified and signifier float free, so that the signs ‘no longer denote given positions or substances; instead, they insinuate links, unfold directions, and adumbrate realizations in order to reveal what cannot be denoted’.48 The poems do not imitate politics, instead politics are inscribed within poetry that has become its own concern.49 This is a subtle reading, not least because it respects the self-imitation of the eclogue 44

45 46 47 48 49

Of course, the grandiloquence of the line may be read as pompous and thus serve to characterize Corydon as something of a fool. Smith (1993: 170–1). So Montrose (1983: 416). Haber (1994: 5). Iser (1993: 31). Iser (1993: 34).

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world without making that self-imitation autonomous, but it still assumes that the text is subject to a single account. However, one could argue for an intermittent mimetic element in the Eclogues; indeed, according to some ancient accounts, the poems (which are indebted to mime and display some interest in characterisation) were performed on stage.50 Perhaps then, just as the Eclogues may be discontinuously allegorical (in his note on Eclogue 1.1 Servius comments that Tityrus should be understood as Virgil, but not everywhere, only where reason requires, ubi exigit ratio), so they are discontinuously mimetic. This fits well enough with the landscape setting, which critics so frequently describe as Arcadian and idealised. It is true that the depiction (like any representation of nature) involves selection but what seems most distinctive is not the element of idealisation (one should not forget the bare rock and bog that surround Tityrus’ farm in Ecl. 1.48–9) but again the discontinuity and disjunction. The landscape is a composite of Theocritus’ Sicily and various Italian scenes and indeed Arcadia (perhaps out of Gallus’ poetry);51 but one element in this mix is a precision of visualisation which involves a form of mimesis, like the picture of the goats Meliboeus used to watch hang (pendere) on the hills around his farm (Ecl. 1.76) that Wordsworth so admired.52 In general, the modern critical stress on the structural unity of the collection may serve to conceal the considerable variousness of its contents – the title it was in all probability given by later editors, ‘Selections’ (Virgil’s was almost certainly Bucolica), serves to suggest that, certainly in comparison with the Georgics or Aeneid, it is fragmented as much as unified, composed at it were of chips from the writer’s block.53 Indeed Eclogue 9 operates with what might be termed a poetics of fragmentation as, amid the chaos brought by the land confiscations, the two farmers on their way to town recall snatches of the songs of Menalcas (as we have seen, taken in antiquity to be a mask for Virgil himself); these Virgilian bucolic fragments, two closely imitated from Theocritus, two recalling Roman political life (Caesar’s comet, the land 50

51

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In particular, see Vita Donati 26–7: Bucolica eo successu edidit ut in scaena quoque per cantores pronuntiarentur (‘he issued the Eclogues with such success that they were delivered in the theatre too by performers’). Even if the ancient testimonia are correct, the precise form of these performances is unknown. For a full discussion, see Kohn (2000); Panayotakis (2008); Höschele (2013); Van Sickle (2014). So Kennedy (1987). Only Eclogue 10 is clearly set in Arcadia, and perhaps represents an attempt on Virgil’s part to construct his own aetiological myth for the origins of bucolic, by providing a prequel to Idyll 1; so Van Sickle (2014: 11). For the reference, see the note of Clausen (1994: ad loc.). This is not of course to deny that the Eclogues as a whole constitute a most artfully composed poetry book, one which stood as model and inspiration for later collections both in Augustan and post-Augustan Rome and in the later European tradition.

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confiscations), are in turn framed by a bucolic dialogue which imitates and inverts Theocritus’ celebratory Idyll 7, proclaiming, in lines that particularly caught the imagination of Renaissance readers, the impotence of poetry amid the weapons of war (Ecl. 9.11–13). We could say that what is shown here is precisely the impossibility of creating an enclosed self-sustaining aesthetic domain, but to take this as the final ‘message’ of the whole book would be to privilege this poem at the expense of, say, Eclogue 6. ‘Alternate singing is proper to a Pastoral’ (so said Rapin, the leading neoclassical theorist of the genre, in 1659).54 One can imagine a pastoral dialogue debating the issue of aesthetics versus politics (Renaissance writers used the mode to stage religious debates as well as to explore the role of the intellectual in society).55 The two singing contests, Eclogues 3 and 7, provide different models of dialogue, one ending in compromise and harmony, the other in victory for one party, both agonistic, competitive, the second more abrasively so. Such amoebaean poems (as they are called) do not necessarily involve any substantive engagement at the level of content  – engagement may rather be primarily formal, in terms of rhetorical organisation and sentence structure. In an analogous way, the two kinds of critic treated in this chapter seem often to be talking past each other. Yet aesthetics and politics (in this like genres) may be thought of as differential terms rather than ontological entities, in which case each term may be present within the other, at however occluded a level. And, more pragmatically, we can say that we need both discourses, and the Eclogues seem to acknowledge that need. Seamus Heaney, in a series of essays that compose yet another apology for poetry, observes that we want poems to be ‘a source of truth and at the same time a vehicle for harmony’.56 Heaney, whose writing often reflected the Troubles in Ireland, seeks himself ‘to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing’.57 If we can find that frontier and recover the Renaissance’s sense of the Eclogues as both a refined artistic enclosure and an oblique mode of addressing and redressing a variety of worldly concerns, then these ten short poems that for so long were one of the cornerstones of the Western canon may again speak forcefully to our condition. 54 55

56 57

Loughrey (1984: 41): Thomas Creech’s translation of 1684. Auden’s distinction between the Arcadian and the Utopian has a bearing on this dispute. See Loughrey (1984: 90–2); from The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (1962) and the poem ‘Vespers’ from The Shield of Achilles. Heaney (1995: 193). Heaney (1995: 203).

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*** Ah me! this many a year My pipe is lost, my shepherd’s holiday! Needs must I lose them, needs with heavy heart Into the world and wave of men depart.58

Pastoral is often said to be dead or dying. Since 1800 there has been the occasional pastoral deliberately conceived after the ancient model (Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ and ‘Scholar Gypsy’, for instance), but nothing like the widespread production of earlier centuries. Some would say that the pastoral impulse has simply transferred itself to other forms, the literature of childhood say, like Cider with Rosie or Dylan Thomas’ ‘Fern Hill’. Each such attempt to define an abstracted and essentialised ‘spirit’ of pastoral – whether as a mode of nostalgia or as putting the complex into the simple (so William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 1935), or as ‘the recognition of a contrast, implicit or expressed, between pastoral life and some more complex type of civilisation’ (W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama, 1906)59 – will involve privileging different passages from Virgil and his successors in support of the definition that is proposed. Again we see at work that desire and need to produce a unified account which lies within the very notion of genre, and which indeed, along with the attendant failure of that desire, is, one can argue, thematised within pastoral. Thus those who see a connection between pastoral and infancy (including the childhood of the world, recalled in representations of the Golden Age) will inevitably cite the wistful lines in Eclogue 8 – so admired by Macaulay, who thought them, ‘the finest … in the Latin language’60 – which intertwine the loss of innocence and the end of childhood and the first experience of sexuality: saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala (dux ego vester eram) vidi cum matre legentem. alter ab undecimo tum me iam acceperat annus, iam fragilis poteram a terra contingere ramos: ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error! Inside our fence I saw you, as a little girl (I was your guide) with mother, picking dewy apples. I had just entered upon my thirteenth year, And could just reach the brittle branches from the ground. I looked and I was lost. How fantasy misled me!61 (Ecl. 8.37–41) 58 59 60 61

Arnold, ‘Thyrsis’, 36–9. Loughrey (1984: 79, 21). See Page’s note ad loc. Translation Lee (1984).

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Whether the current preoccupation with the environment and the greening of politics will turn poets back to the Eclogues remains to be seen. The editors of the Penguin anthology ended their introduction by proclaiming, eloquently, the end of pastoral: The separation of life in the town and in the country that the Pastoral demands is now almost devoid of any meaning … As the countryside becomes ever more efficiently a dormitory for a managerial and executive elite … so the last sad remains of the Pastoral are parcelled up and auctioned off in semi-detached lots. The purchasers of such pastoral remains look around in vain for the Arcadian shepherd or shepherdess to reassure them that they, too, are in Arcadia; but for them, much as for Sidney and Pope, the shepherds are invisible, and now for the simplest of reasons – that there are no shepherds left … The Pastoral vision might still have some life elsewhere – in the Third World, or in North America perhaps … but now and in England, the Pastoral, occasional twitches notwithstanding, is a lifeless form, of service only to decorate the shelves of tasteful cottages, ‘modernized to a high standard’.62

But paradoxically this very denial might itself be seen as a piece of modern pastoral, even a version of Virgil’s First Eclogue, a lament for a lost harmony projected onto a past which is timeless but haunted by a sense of temporality, and for an authentic nature free from the discontents and vulgarities of the life of the modern city. Let us arise, for singers heavy is the shade, Go, little she-goats, Hesper comes, go home replete.63

FURTHER READING A student with Latin would do best to start with a good commentary: the fullest and most helpful is Cucchiarelli (2012); an English translation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Also in Italian is a commentary on Eclogue 10 by Gagliardi (2014). In French there is Casanova-Robin (2014); in English, Clausen (1994), whose approach is philological and

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Barrell and Bull (1974: 432–3). Their account is rather Anglocentric and even colonial; there are many other countries which are rather less polarized along country/city lines. On the need for a more global context for Virgil in future, see the second envoi in this volume (Chapter 26). I would like to thank Susanna Morton Braund, Catharine Edwards, Duncan Kennedy, and, in its revised version, Fiachra Mac Góráin, for help with this chapter. I have also made some adjustments in the light of the criticisms of Van Sickle (1998).

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formalist, with a particular stress on Hellenistic parallels and on the formal artistry of individual poems; compare his essay ‘Theocritus and Virgil’, in Kenney and Clausen (1982: 301–19). The earlier commentary by Coleman (1977) is still worth consulting. The excellent Penguin translation by Guy Lee (1984) contains the Latin text of Mynors, a helpful introduction and brief notes. Snell’s influential account (1953) is part of his celebrated book The Discovery of the Mind. A useful introduction to pastoral as a genre is Alpers (1996). There are many book-length studies of the Eclogues in English, among them: Putnam (1970); Leach (1974), on landscape; Alpers (1979); Thomas (1999), on intertextuality with several chapters on the Eclogues; Lipka (2001), on language; Van Sickle (2005), on the structure of the book; Breed (2006) on poetic ‘voice’; Saunders (2008), an ecocritical approach; Davis (2012), an Epicurean reading; Kania (2016a), on the poems’ fictiveness. Two representative collections of essays are Boyle (1975) and Volk (2008a). The poems have been worked over in detail by classicists:  for a bibliography  1927–77 see Briggs (1981b); for more recent works see Niklas Holzberg’s bibliography at www.niklasholzberg.com/Homepage/ Bibliographien.html. There are important extended discussions of individual Eclogues by DuQuesnay (1981) on Eclogue 1 and DuQuesnay (1979: 35– 69) on Eclogue 2; Perkell (2001) on Eclogue 9 (dividing recent interpreters into optimists and pessimists). A number of the poems are well discussed in Williams (1968). Some of the most innovative work on pastoral has been done by nonclassicists:  among the most influential studies are Empson (1935) and Poggioli (1975). See too the chapter ‘Renaissance pastoralism as a paradigm of literary fictionality’ in Iser (1993). For political approaches to pastoral, see Williams (1973); the general introduction and section introductions in Barrell and Bull (1974); Montrose (1983); Patterson (1987), an influential study unfortunately marred by inaccuracies and mistranslations. For genre and the Eclogues, see especially Halperin (1983), and Conte (1986) and (1994b). The fable convenue about the place of the Eclogues in Latin literary history, as formulated by Clausen and others, is criticized by Cameron (1995), a controversial and iconoclastic study which reinvigorated and repoliticised the study of Hellenistic poetry. For the influence and critical reception of the Eclogues and the history of pastoral, see the essay ‘Pastoral’ by the editor in Jenkyns (1992); also the 191

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first part of Halperin (1983). Loughrey (1984) contains a collection of early criticism until 1818 together with a representative selection of twentiethcentury studies. Renaissance readers read Mantuan before Virgil; see Hinds (2017). On the reception of the Fourth Eclogue see Houghton (forthcoming).

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11 W I L L I A M W. B AT S TO NE

Virgilian Didaxis: Value and Meaning in the Georgics

The best poem by the best poet. (Dryden 1987: v.137)

Introduction Nor does it mean that truth is never itself but, viewed dialectically, is always also its opposite. (Heidegger 1971: 54)

Despite the labours of many critics, Virgil’s Georgics remains one of the most fundamentally intractable works of ancient literature.1 In recent years, most interpreters have agreed that the poem does not really tell us about farming2 but about ourselves and our world:3 ‘didacticism about agriculture proves metaphor for didacticism about man’.4 While this consensus may result in part from a modern distaste for and unfamiliarity with agriculture, it has yielded a diversity of compelling and contradictory interpretations,5 which is to say that the move to the allegorical and metaphysical has not finally moved us closer to a consensus. I will try to suggest in the following pages that if we are to understand more fully what this poem does, we need to abandon the interpretive paradigm that seeks some demonstrative communication, discursive unity, or magisterial and totalizing perspective. I would like to argue that the diversity of compelling interpretations, like the diversity of topics and themes, is part of the Georgics’ larger value and meaning, not because it comes to rest in some singular truth, but because 1

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Wilkinson (1969: 3): ‘What kind of poem is it?’ The answer, ‘descriptive’. See also Wilkinson (1950) and Otis (1972). For a positive assessment of Virgil’s understanding of agriculture, see Spurr (1986). The Georgics is: ‘A handbook showing us ourselves’ (Putnam 1979: 15); a politicalphilosophical dialectic (Miles 1980); the poet’s truth (Perkell 1989). For a view of the poem as ‘a means for examining and calling into question the fundamental assumptions on which all didactic poetry is based’, see Kromer (1979). Boyle (1979: 37). See ‘Further Reading’ below.

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it helps us to imagine from a diversity of diverse perspectives how we are in the world. And in this regard the poem is not ambiguous. We live in the midst of this diversity and it does not come to rest in optimism or pessimism. I am concerned with what the poem does for its readers. If we ask Virgil to answer questions about success and failure, the poem will be ambiguous. But if we ask what value it has in our world and in connecting us to other worlds, we may be able to find an unambiguous value. We do not need to choose between a poem about dirt and dung and a poem about metaphysics, because this poem addresses the great abstracts (knowledge, history, power, psychology, ethics, art, death) in the way our lives do: by ‘contact’ with things, by fictions and interpretations, by witty and elegant postures, and ultimately by the failure of projects and systems. The poem captures a double movement:  particulars serve as allegories of human problems and values, while allegories are inhabited by things with their particular tasks, objects, and (sometimes colliding) perspectives. There is interdependence and discontinuity in both the object and the interpretations, and here we find the space which the poem opens for thought and feeling as its tensions, contradictions, and mysteries impinge upon the project of knowing-and-doing which seems to underwrite didaxis and exegesis.6 Here, where the ordinary is not ordinary (bees, for instance), where hope and failure coexist (e.g. labor omnia vicit) and material excess meets interpretive inadequacy (e.g. laetas segetes),7 I find the opening for the meaning and the value that this poem can have for its readers. In these openings, one finds what Heidegger thought of as the nature of truth as unconcealedness. ‘At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary, uncanny. The nature of truth, that is, of unconcealedness, is dominated throughout by denial … Truth, in its nature, is un-truth.’8 Heidegger’s view of art/poesis and how truth happens in poetry is the clearest (one is tempted to say the ‘clearing-est’, for it happens as a clearing) and most trenchant explication of the work of art that I know. In brief, the work of art is not some communication, but the endless conflict between world (culture, the symbolic, opinion, assertion) and earth (the jutting facticity, the elusive stubbornness, 6

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See Perkell (1989: 139–45). Perkell’s ‘oppositions’ require reified and distinct entities which I believe the poem ultimately does not support: in other words, we do not find victor opposed to vanquished, profit to art, or past to future; nor do we have the elements of these oppositions (e.g. of precept and myth) hierarchically arranged – see e.g. Perkell’s argument for the poet’s truth as higher than the farmer’s knowledge (1989: 177). Rather, we find one inhabiting, becoming, concealing, and revealing, the other. Laetas connects human affect (‘happy’) to fertilized soil (laetamen), copious crops, auspicious and pleasing, while segetes may be the soil, field, and growing crop. See further below and Batstone (1988). Heidegger (1971: 50–6).

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of things). It does not create meanings that are separate or contradictory, but the movement from one meaning to another which the first conceals. Truth, as ‘unconcealment’, is an event, not an assertion; it is an event that involves us (‘being there’, Dasein) and so there are no uniquely right answers and there is no stopping, either with propositional truth or with contradiction. There is only thinking. As Heidegger would say, ‘Are we thinking yet?’ ‘Earth juts through the world and world grounds itself on the earth only so far as truth happens as the primal conflict between clearing and concealing.’9 Orpheus and Aristaeus Th[e] multiplicity of possible interpretations does not discredit the strictness of the thought content. For all true thought remains open to more than one interpretation10 and this by reason of its nature. (Heidegger 1968: 71)

The end of Book 4 is exemplary of the poem’s interdependencies and discontinuities.11 Here, two obvious fictions interweave their threads:  the story of Aristaeus ending in his discovery of bougonia and the inserted story of Orpheus and Eurydice ending in both their deaths. The tales are carefully linked in that Aristaeus sets in motion the events that destroy Orpheus and Eurydice (he attempts to rape her) while Orpheus sets in motion the events that lead to Aristaeus’ discovery of bougonia (he destroys Aristaeus’ bees). Critics attempt to unravel and account for these tales by posing polar oppositions: Aristaeus is heroic, effective, capable of learning, while Orpheus is ineffective, forgetful and victimized; Aristaeus is the public man, arrogant, self-assertive, indifferent to his guilt, while Orpheus is the poet, the sympathetic and passionate figure of love and human values; Aristaeus is Iron Age man interested in exchange value and the future, while Orpheus values the individual, the irreplaceable and the past. These readings can be brilliant for the truths in them, but in the end they are partial and founder. Orpheus and Aristaeus exceed the polar oppositions by which we might know them with an uncanny likeness and elude those 9 10

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Heidegger (1971: 54). Compare the opposite impulse: Jenkyns (1993). The issue of multiple and changing meanings was explored under the rubric of ‘shifting parameters’ in my dissertation (Batstone 1984): this still has the advantage of connecting one meaning to another as part of the reading experience. Among recent studies, Gale (2000) considers polyphony and ambiguity in Virgil. See my review (Batstone 2003) for the larger context. Conte (2007: 150–69) pursues a similar thesis regarding the Aeneid in terms of tragic form and intertextuality. However, ‘more than one interpretation’ is not the same as ‘contradiction’ or ‘ambiguity’. Griffin (1979: 61) reviews seventeen interpretations within the period 1967–79. See also Volk (2008b: 6–10); Hardie (1999: ii .50–2). No chapter like this can address all these individual interpretations. This discussion is based primarily on Perkell (1989), since she comes closest to arguing for the openness that I find at work in the Georgics.

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same constructs by virtue of particular circumstances. They merge as they separate: both are passionate, self-absorbed, and destructive of others; both destroy Eurydice but are more moved by their own loss than hers.12 If the greatness (and seductiveness) of Orpheus’ passion gains our sympathy, its self-indulgence (which cannot be separated from his backward glance) is shared by Aristaeus in his lust for Eurydice and his longing for new bees. Both seek to dominate nature and death. They are the victims of their own capacities, and these capacities, both similar and different, are inextricably linked to their destructiveness and their greatness. The conceptual closure that would categorize them as symbolic abstracts founders on particulars. Orpheus is not just the grieving lover. His grief is savage (graviter pro coniuge saevit, 4.456) and his desire for vengeance requires fate’s intervention (ni fata resistant, 4.455). But this is not a simple resistance. It is expressed in terms of an unsatisfied moral imperative (haudquaquam ob meritum poenas, ni fata resistant). Aristaeus deserved worse; Orpheus would have incited worse; fate intervened. Even Orpheus’ desire to see Eurydice is not univocal, subita incautum dementia cepit amantem (4.488):  madness, lack of caution, love. Proserpina’s law turns out to be the law of fate, adjusted to Orpheus’ strength: your song and your grief guarantee that you’ll never be able to resist a backward glance, and death will keep its victims. And so, Orpheus fails both Eurydice and himself, which ironically and tragically can only be a failure already built into the power of his love. The extraordinary beauty of his subsequent songs derives from loss and from guilt and self-loathing. Some of this contrasts with Aristaeus: Orpheus values the human and the irreplaceable (Eurydice); Aristaeus desires economy, a replacement. Orpheus is mad and Aristaeus practical. But these abstract differences are contingent on material differences. The bee’s lack of individuality is an experiential fact: it would be absurd for Aristaeus to mourn individual bees and to want them back. His loss is an economic loss: different desires, different objects, different losses. Even Aristaeus’ status as practical hero is contextualized: his religious ritual (modus orandi, 4.537) performed as an act of atonement becomes a benefaction – he is an accidental hero, a chance symbol. Interpretation Interpretive decisions to identify, align and evaluate the elements of the text in one way or another disambiguate the poem through processes of 12

Only when dead does Orpheus’ frigid tongue cry, miseram Eurydicen (4.526). Cf. Eurydice, illa ‘quis et me’ inquit ‘miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu’ (4.494).

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supplementation and reduction13 always at the expense of denying other identifications and alignments. The poem addresses this dilemma:  it ends with a story of interpretation which becomes part of the labyrinth of thought. Aristaeus is sent to Proteus to learn the cause and remedy for his loss. Proteus gives only the cause (non … nullius … numinis irae and Orpheus); Cyrene interprets the remedy, but she adds new causes:  not a numen but the nymphs who danced with Eurydice. But where is Orpheus in this? Couldn’t we leave him out and still have Aristaeus’ loss and so his compensatory sacrifice? Thus Cyrene points to both the excess and the gap in Proteus’ story, but in so doing she raises other questions: Did Cyrene know all along that it was the nymphs? Or is she just being careful not to forget an offended numen? Is the ritual she prescribes the Egyptian bougonia or did the Egyptians turn a religious act into an economic remedy? In fact, her interpretation is contingent and practical, and so it cannot be ours: she asks for inferias Orphei (4.545) but forgets the blame that belongs to Orpheus and the matrons who tore Orpheus limb from limb. Cyrene is a figure of practical disambiguation and represents the problems of praxis and disambiguation: they must add, subtract, and are always local. The book and the poem end, then, with a vignette in which victims and heroes are similar, interdependent and inconsistent; where passion rescues and destroys; where destruction almost meets vengeance; where divine benefactions are the accidental outcomes of supplements and precarious interpretations; where beauty derives its energy from loss and self-loathing; and where interpretation is precarious and practical. In these combinations we approach something of the Georgics’ inarticulate strength:  it is the gathering of the discrepancies and harmonies of our presence in the world into word and thought. Of course, the poem does not end with Cyrene’s interpretation. After the bougonia is enacted and the bees  – really some kind of ‘drone fly’, and so impractical, uneconomical, imaginary – appear, they swirl like a storm cloud and hang from the pliant boughs like a cluster of grapes. It is Proteus’ world again, where (drone flies are) bees are a cloud is a cluster of grapes, where the promise and fantasy of agricultural ease is composed with the dangers of storms. But even this suspense and closure is not the end. For the poem ends again, with another storm cloud, as Caesar 13

See Martindale (1993a: 11–18, 37–9) on ‘supplementarity’ as the interpretive response to gaps, to lacks. The opposite, ‘reduction’, is a response to excess (contradiction, tension, polyphony) which is also at work in texts. By addition or subtraction, readers appropriate the poems they perform. In this double movement the reader conceals and discloses in a fashion precisely complementary to the work’s disclosures and concealments.

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thunders in the East, and another image of ease, as Virgil recalls his zeal and leisure, his ignoble flourishing (studiis florentem ignobilis oti, 4.564) and Tityrus reclining in the shade – an ease which is itself protected and threatened by Caesar. The poem ends circling back to the grapes of Book 2 and the invocation to Caesar in Book 1. Outside the poem, I may believe in success or Caesar or entropy or order; I may find the distinction between science and religion significant and absolute; I  may need to judge and act. This poem cannot rescue me from those precarious inevitabilities. But it provides a place where conflicting realities coexist and inhabit each other – not to suggest something about the real world (although it can do that), but because here readers may experience in complex figures the violence of success, the beautiful pathos of failure, and the contingency of ‘knowing’. This I take to be the value of the Georgics: it is not ambiguous. We forget that whatever we see depends on what we do not see. The Georgics keeps reminding us of what we do not see and what we do. For truth is always the undoing of truth: this is the nature of truth as untruth. ‘And when man no longer sees the one side as one side, he has lost sight of the other side as well.’14 In what follows, I  will try to show that Virgil continually presses the resources of didaxis in the direction of multiplicity and, from the discursive point of view, excess. In formal and in substantive matters, the poem fragments as it unifies the reader’s perspective and creates a simultaneous sense of continuity, discontinuity and interdependence. It is my implicit argument that this ‘failure of message’ can enrich our lives even as it exceeds our grasp. Generic Features Although ancient critics seem to treat didaxis not as a genre, but as a particular mode of epos,15 modern readers reasonably identify a set of practices and goals in which ‘didactic poets’ participate. A brief discussion of three formal elements – the statement of subject matter, the invocation, and the addressee16  – will suggest how Virgil places his poem within these norms at the same time as he modifies and manipulates them in specific and typical ways.

14 15 16

Heidegger (1968: 43). See also Halliburton (1981: 42–5). See Volk (2002). Ancient critics identify only the addressee as necessary to didaxis: ‘so he [Virgil] writes to Maecenas as Hesiod to Perses, Lucretius to Memmius’ (Servius, praefatio in G.).

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Beginning with the Subject Matter But does the tree stand ‘in our consciousness’, or does it stand on the meadow? Does the meadow lie in the soul, as experience, or is it spread out there on earth? Is the earth in our head? Or do we stand on earth? (Heidegger 1968: 41)

Beginnings present distinct problems. Epic poetry boldly stated the subject matter in the first word of the poem as a noun: anger, a hero, and so on. In the Aeneid, Virgil designated his subject with two nouns, ‘arms and the man’, and so drew attention to a dynamic relationship, rather than a thing. Didactic epos follows epic: the poet begins either with the name of the god he invokes (Hesiod, Aratus, Lucretius) or his nominal subject (Nicander). And the poets who begin invoking a god later transit to the body of the didaxis with the name of their subject. In this context, the beginning of the Georgics is extraordinary (I offer an overly literal translation which, at the obvious expense of elegance, tries to preserve the order of ideas within Virgil’s lines and the resonance of at least some of the particular terms): Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram uertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere uitis conueniat, quae cura boum, qui cultus habendo sit pecori, apibus quanta experientia parcis, hinc canere incipiam. What to do to make happy crops, beneath what star, Maecenas, would it be proper to turn the land, to join vines to elms, what should be the concern for cattle, what regimen for keeping a herd, for the thrifty bees how much experience, from here I begin to sing. (G. 1.1–5)

Critics and scholiasts have labelled this ‘a table of contents’:  four subjects (crops, vines, herds and bees) in four lines representing the four books of the Georgics. Such a summary, however, makes tidy and secure a literary experience which is anything but tidy and secure. In the first place, the summary as represented does not correspond fully to the content of the four books (Georgics 2 includes trees and grafting; the order of Georgics 2 is reversed; the digressions are ignored). Also these four ‘subjects’ are articulated as (at least) five questions, some elliptical, most enjambed. Further, the language designates the particular subjects (field, land, vine, elm, cattle, herd, bees) at the same time as it points to qualities – happiness, concern (or passion), regimen (or culture), thrift, experience – that inform a life. As a result, abstract issues of human life join agricultural particulars and suggest the inextricable 199

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interpenetration of the practical and the spiritual, the objective and subjective, the material earth and the inhabited world. This interpenetration is actually richer and more elusive in the Latin than the English translation suggests. ‘What makes the fields happy?’ The term for ‘happy’, laetas, may in Latin designate an objective quality of the land (‘teeming’ or ‘rich’, cognate with the Latin term for ‘dung’, laetamen), or the way success makes us feel (‘happy’, laetitia). The term segetes (‘fields’) may refer to the land where you plant corn, to the ploughed and fertilized field, or to the standing corn crop. The adjective-noun unit, which we know was a farmer’s idiom, gives only nominal stability to a process that drifts from cow manure to human joy. While the words make the precise reference elusive, they point to the coinherence of joy and dung, the world of economic success (which will mean hard work and even unhappiness) and human happiness. Similarly, throughout these lines, Virgil’s language sets forth his subject as a gathering of coinherent elements. The caretaker’s ‘concern’ joins the erotic passion of his bulls in Georgics 3 to the farmer’s care for cattle; the bees’ thrift either informs human knowledge or is protected by human experience. Only by fiat can we make Virgil’s opening create a singular and secure didactic meaning. And whenever we do that, our rejected readings return in the poem:  bulls suffer passion in Book 3, and the experience of bees seems to offer lessons to humans in Book 4. The fact is that the poem’s language makes accessible an indeterminacy about the distinction between ‘the farm’ as some thing we control and act upon for our purposes and as something that gathers us into its control and power. The introduction’s diction, syntax and structure gather round the reader an unruly conflict of things and images, a world at once precarious and full. There is nothing like this in ancient didaxis or ancient epos. Beginning Again: Invocation Virgil’s invocation is similarly complex, and similarly shifty and opaque. Typically, a didactic poet invokes a single god before turning to his subject. Virgil invokes an indeterminate number of gods. His model was Varro’s Res rusticae, a prose treatise on agriculture which first invoked an ‘agricultural pantheon’ (including Mildew, Moisture and Good Luck). Varro secured and negotiated his expanded invocation by good humour and explicit directorial statements. ‘First I will invoke the gods … those twelve gods who are especially helpful to farmers’ (prius invocabo eos … illos XII deos, qui maxime agricolarum duces sunt, 1.1.4–5) and ‘Therefore, having

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summoned the gods …’ (1.1.7). Virgil’s concatenation takes Varro several steps further. First, he abandons directorial statement and, in the middle of line 5, recontextualizes his multiple subjects: ‘You, O clearest lights of the heaven’ (vos, o clarissima mundi | lumina, 1.5–6). This allows what began in the Nicandrian secular mode to switch mid-line to the Aratean and Hesiodic mode. We are reoriented, but as we move from dirt and bees to the gods and the heavens, we find the ‘lights of heaven’, a reference to the same powers at work in line 1, ‘beneath what star to turn the earth’ (quo sidere terram | vertere). Beginning again, then, we arrive at a new place, only to discover that we were already there. In this way, Virgil makes the very beginning of his poem address what we might call ‘the problem of beginning’, namely that one is always beginning and that one’s beginnings are always already in another context. Not coincidentally, this ‘problem’ is the very one occluded by the typical didactic opening: for example, ‘Venus, mother of Rome … Be with me as I explain the nature of things’ (Lucr. De rerum natura 1.1, 1.24–5). A close examination of the details of Virgil’s invocation will reveal similar poetic gestures throughout:  these ‘clearest lights’ may be the sun and the moon, or the next two gods, Liber et alma Ceres (who have themselves been identified with the sun and the moon), or the twelve constellations. Thus, by an elegant irony, the ‘clearest lights’ violate Varronian clarity at the very moment they are called ‘clearest lights’; but, on the other hand, it is this very lack of clarity which creates the blurred boundary of numinous power which is part of the experience of knowing the deities that oversee and inhabit the agricultural world. As the invocation proceeds, we find ourselves in a movement from the Roman gods Liber and Ceres backwards to Grecian myths and suggestions of chaotic origins and forward again to wheatfields, water, and wine. We are caught in the web of progress and cultural syncretism, of Alexandrian learning and artifice, as well as the forces that inhabit the wheat and the grapes. Virgil invokes and evokes not only the divine forces that play around and within the fields but the various traditions of thought and feeling within which we conceptualize their immanence. Even Virgil’s closure, ‘O gods and goddesses all, whose care looks over the fields’ (1.21), suggests that we have here only a representative selection from a larger pantheon. But this closural gesture is not the end: Virgil calls finally on Octavian, the future Augustus, a 34-year-old young man in whom Rome found its greatest hopes and fears. He is, of course, another example of polyvalent and precarious potential.

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Praeceptor and Addressee17 Ancient didaxis retained through its addressee a personal orientation and a mimetic potential.18 The tradition offers a great range of addressees. Perses helps Hesiod to articulate the danger of injustice which sets brother against brother. Memmius helps Lucretius set Epicurean values in a Roman world of war. Even Aratus’ impersonal ‘you’ becomes the context of Zeus’s general beneficence and the measure of the god as ‘Great wonder, great benefit to men’ (Phaenomena 15). Virgil’s addressees are unique in range and conception. The first addressee is Maecenas, friend of Octavian and member of the power elite in Rome, literary patron, and self-indulgent litteratus. Virgil could hardly have found a more suggestive addressee. This potential is protected in two ways. First, he does not need instruction; in fact, he suggested the poem (tua, Maecenas, haud mollia iussa, 3.41). Second, no particular aspect of his life or influence is specified. He is Virgil’s moral support and the force that gives the project depth and breadth (3.42; 2.41), but his presence also suggests the poem’s vulnerable position before other powers. Maecenas seems to mediate between Caesar’s heroic accomplishments and the tenuis labor of Virgil’s Callimachean project (2.41; 4.4). Because he straddles so many worlds and yet is not precisely defined, he becomes part of the fullness which inhabits both Virgil’s subject and his audience. He is an equally congenial recipient of political allegory, philosophical allegory, Hellenistic poetasting, or agricultural practicality. There are other addressees. Caesar, always at a distance, consistently associated with war and political life, is asked to join Virgil’s project (1.40– 2). The reader is now singular, now plural, sometimes addressed as a farmer, sometimes assumed to be a litteratus, sometimes a contemporary and patriotic Roman. One may add as addressees objects of praise, improvisatory apostrophes, and the sympathetic ‘you’.19 They are all part of this multiplicity of Virgil’s subject and help create the many voices and perspectives of Virgil’s praeceptor. Thus, in a single brief passage (1.276–82), Virgil translates Hesiodic superstition with Catonian brevity: ‘Flee the fifth [day of the month]!’ (quintam fuge). He then proceeds with a learned mistranslation of Hesiod in which ‘Oath’ (Greek, Horkos) has become ‘Pale Orcus’ (pallidus Orcus), while ‘Earth’, the material subject of Book 1, is creating 17

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The discussion here quotes and paraphrases from my dissertation, Batstone (1984: 17– 41, esp. 31–8). See Schiesaro et al. (1993), esp. Schiesaro’s own contribution. See Mitsis (1993: 123–4): ‘Didactic epic, by its very nature, calls to our attention the process of instruction. Moreover, it does so by positing an internal addressee to receive the poet’s instruction. In effect, when we are reading the poem, the poet allows us to witness him in a therapeutic session with his addressee.’ See Oksala (1978: 56).

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monsters who conspire to threaten the structure of heaven. This mythic danger, however, becomes Virgil’s Olympic moment, the opportunity to contest Homer’s version of the same event:  ‘Ossa on Olympus, and leafy Pelion on Ossa’ (Homer, Od. 11.304–5) becomes ‘to pile Ossa on Pelion, indeed, and to roll leafy Olympus on Ossa’ (imponere Pelio Ossam | scilicet atque Ossae frondosum involvere Olympum). Writing like this creates a space without direction  – where life’s practical urgency and the shadowy dangers of myth are foil to and foiled by the elegant verse and its learned pretensions. In seven lines we find that: (1) trouble in the world is deeper and more mysterious than Hesiod allowed; (2) we need simple and direct action; (3) superstition gives habitation to real fears; and (4) play, distraction, literary elegance and competition are part of how we make it through. This is rather like the systems analysed in chaos theory: balance is maintained by a continually changing centre. In Virgil, the clash of perspectives remains unresolved, not just because life is chaotic, but because balance is as well. This polyphony is an extension of didactic resources, especially those exploited by Varro.20 In the first book of the Res rusticae, Varro brings on his conversants, a random collection who meet at the temple of Tellus. As the conversation turns to Italy, the Socratic (or perhaps scholiastic) Agrius (Field Guy) discourses on the world as divided into its zones by Eratosthenes. Fundanius (Farm Guy) is more interested in his midday nap. But when the conversation turns to the praise of Italy, he too has a store of authorities: Pacuvius, Homer, Cato. Finally, the group sees Stolo (Sucker Guy) and Scrofa (Breeding Sow Guy) arriving and admits that these are the men who speak with authority on the subject. Their ancestral and personal connections with farming and government produce allusions to the Licinian Laws, to Roman progress, to Campanian land divisions. Thus Varro uses his personae and their personal and family connections as well as their names and chance activities (like looking at a map of Italy) to touch upon many of the connections and significances that agriculture had for a Roman. The variety of characters allows the different perspectives to arise naturally and the reader is co-opted into sharing them, into seeing agriculture in the broad physical terms of Agrius; the broad historical terms of Fundanius; the narrow, practical and Aristotelian terms of Scrofa; and, finally, in terms of the contemporary Roman context as Varro’s first book ends with news of a riot and a murder.

20

On Hesiod and Aratus, see Griffith (1983); Clay (1993: 23–34); Bing (1993: 99–129); and Gagarin (1990: 173–84, esp. 181). On Varro, Thibodeau’s (2011) reading of the Georgics through the agronomic tradition and what can be surmised of Virgil’s first readers puts the poem’s agricultural content in a new light; and Kronenberg (2009) finds irony and satire in the contradictions and attitudes of Varro’s speakers.

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That the reader of Varro gathers in these different perspectives (and the list is not complete) is important. The Varronian dialogue, unlike the Platonic dialogue, does not move through dialectic to a conclusion; it recreates the voices of individuals as it protects the camaraderie of the group it vivifies.21 It is my suggestion that Virgil, beginning in some sense with the addressees, contexts and complex ambiguities of Hesiod, took the multiple perspectives of Varro’s conversants as a model for his own multivalent voice in the Georgics, a voice that is never bound or defined by the practical, day-to-day apiculture of Varro’s Merula, nor Appius’ praise of the bees’ incredible apian nature and their civitates, nor by one speaker’s antique frugality or another’s concern with contemporary luxury. For the work of the Georgics, it was a fiction of limited value to separate our many ways of thinking and knowing into different persons speaking with separate voices. Similarly, Virgil’s multiple models and his easy movement between them keep recontextualizing his world in different discourses. The full life of mind and feeling requires the continual impingement from within of, say, antique frugality upon contemporary luxury, of Callimachean flourishes upon crop rotation. In this way, the leisurely values of urbane literary play may meet the need for timely labour; the sympathy of man for nature and her losses can confront the indifferent press of necessity and chance; an allegorical and philosophically expansive worldliness may founder on the stubborn factitude of the material earth of the poem; and the objective system with its precise precepts may be informed by the subjective experience of actors in contexts. As the Georgics explores the demands of action and knowledge, it creates a deeply contextualized and lyricized sense of the complex and conflicting variety within what things are. This is what allows the poem to ponder its mundane and practical subject matter as well as the powerful allegories and metaphors that arise from the soil, and the limits and failures of those allegories and of didaxis itself. Georgic Didaxis: Examples Knowing certainly aims at truth, even if this truth, as in the sciences, is never an abiding truth but a provisional verity … To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know. (Arendt 1981: 61)22 21

22

See, for instance, the disagreements about pastio and their ‘resolution’ in Res rusticae 1.2.21 and 2.1.11, and the discussion of modern luxuria and avaritia as it pertains to the profitable aviary (3.4.1). See also Bakhtin (1984: 112–20). The original epigraph for this section read, ‘Knowing will never know what thinking is doing.’ I could not, however, find its source. Arendt’s ideas about thinking are developed

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Didaxis should be about knowing, and practical didaxis especially should be about knowing things, what to do with things, and when. Meaning in the Georgics, however, is so difficult to name because the epistemological certainty presupposed by didaxis is exactly what the poem puts in question. The heterogeneity of being is what provokes thought. In the Georgics this experience is in large part a function of discontinuity and contradiction held together by the simultaneous presence of continuity and harmony. While the poem’s dynamic or temporal process moves the reader from one centre of value and meaning to another,23 a standing polyphony (the function of slippage in the sign and the signified as well as of interpretive memory) makes diverse and sometimes contradictory meanings simultaneously accessible. The result is that, while readers move from centre to centre, they are always in a field whose potential exceeds their grasp but whose resonance is familiar: they are always in the middle. A few examples will illustrate. In mediis rebus Virgil’s beginnings put us in the midst of things. Even the beginning of didaxis catches the reader in a collision between description and precept: vere nouo, gelidus canis cum montibus umor liquitur et Zephyro putris se glaeba resolvit, depresso incipiat iam tum mihi taurus aratro ingemere … In the new spring, when the chilly water melts on the white mountains and Zephyr loosens the crumbling clod, then let the bull already groan at the deep-pressed plough … (G. 1.43–6)

Here the impulse to enjoy spring (cf. the happy fields) meets the need for immediate labour. But with the adverb ‘already’ and the precondition that the plough is pressed into the ground, the order to make the bull groan requires that both the reader and the farmer must in a sense catch up after chasing breezes. The celebration of spring will be postponed to the middle of Book 2 (the ‘Praise of Spring’, 315–45), but the very next lines revel in the beaming land and the gleaming plough. Virgil created this complexity in part

23

in The Life of the Mind, esp. 129–96. On thinking and nihilism, consider: ‘thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements of good and evil, in short, on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics’ (175). For a dialectical interpretation, see Miles (1980); for a reader-response reading, see Batstone (1988).

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by ignoring tradition: in agricultural didaxis, neither spring nor the calendar comes first because there are preliminaries to labour (location, crops, tools and so on). Virgil, of course, knows this and in a few lines he advises, ‘and before we cleave the unknown plain … care should be taken first to learn the winds and weather’ (ac prius ignotum ferro quam scindimus aequor, | ventos et varium caeli praediscere morem | cura sit, 1.50–2). For a second time, the reader is conceptually behind. These verses gather round the reader the contingencies of engaged agency. We live our life in the middle and the middle requires knowledge of the past and our surroundings, understanding of the process we are part of, and hopes and fears for the future. In Georgics Book 1, Virgil’s military metaphors for farming develop into the self-destructive civil war that destroys the field. Something at work in our labour destroys our labour, but when did it appear? Critics tell us that the military metaphor begins at line 99 – ‘the farmer commands the fields’24 – but the poem has already spoken of ‘breaking through’ (98), of ‘shattering’ (94), of the ‘hard race of men’ (63) and nature’s ‘eternal treaties’ (60), of the ‘palms’ of victory (59), crops that do not require ‘orders’ (55), of ‘cutting the main with steel’ (50), ‘lust for domination’ (37) and the march of stars in the sky (6). The language of violence and control is part of the poem’s diction. When military destruction becomes ineluctable, one realizes that it was there all along, growing from seeds of order and violence, power and victory, since the poem began, since before the poem began, and the poem catches the reader within the developing force of the metaphor. Military language and metaphors, just like many military virtues (and vices), grew out of the Roman experience with the land and their ideology of that experience.25 It was part of the web in which their lives were woven, and this web is rewoven (and, to that extent, unwoven) in the Georgics itself. I suggested above that the forces which threaten or destroy appear in the metaphors by which we construct our lives and weave together our hopes and fears, our strengths and weaknesses. A brief example will illustrate the density of Virgil’s imagination: illa seges demum votis respondet auari agricolae, bis quae solem, bis frigora sensit; illius immensae ruperunt horrea messes. That cornfield finally answers the prayer of the greedy farmer, which twice has felt the sun, twice the cool. The great harvest has burst that man’s granary. (G. 1.47–9) 24 25

See e.g. Thomas (1988: ad loc.). See Miles (1980: 1–63).

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‘The greedy farmer’ who prays and labours is an ethically ambivalent image: what we customarily blame is demanded and desired by our practical life. This ambivalence is further complicated by line 49: the burst granary. Practical success depends on a practically dangerous desire. With the oxymoron of ‘pious avarice’ and the hyperbole of ‘burst granary’, the reader must negotiate contradiction with some form of denial and the boundary between success and excess by the restraint of hyperbole (verbal excess). In the web in which our lives are woven, reading mimes action in untangling and restraining the figures of our thought. System and Context Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.) (Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’)

Virgil’s didaxis returns us to the vulnerability of our engaged selves, not to closure or an imagined, objective security. The objective, mechanistic certainty of the signs that end Book 1 is a good example of this process: they hold together man’s hope and man’s despair. ‘We are able to predict storms in an uncertain sky’, Virgil assures the farmer (hinc tempestates dubio praediscere caelo | possumus, 252–3). But, as the language stresses greater certainty, there is a growing and inevitable sense of vulnerability. The ‘surest signs’ (certissima signa) foretell destructive storms (439–60) and civil war (465–6), and when war comes, the sun’s pity signals more war (489–90). Our only protection is, in fact, our ignorance and the hope that the signs upon which we rely are false. In the midst of this civil chaos Virgil imagines a diminutive post-bellum farmer still hacking clods in the field where the great bones of his ancestors amaze him. This curious return from signs to the midst of action and to humour is immediately followed by an appeal to Caesar. In a continuous movement, then, we find science and hope and certainty leading to fear and failure, ignorance, guilt and prayer. But it is a prayer that returns us to the invocation (soliciting pity), back to the middle, and, since prayer is a form of hope, back to our resources and our resourcelessness. Another passage is more richly complex and compact. Probably no lines in Virgil have received more commentary per word than the conclusion of the ‘Theodicy’: ‘then came the various artes. Labour conquered everything, damnable labour, and lack pressing on in the midst of hardship’ (tum variae venere artes. labor omnia uicit | improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas, 1.145–6). Critics have debated whether the labor which Virgil imagines is successful (labour conquers all hardships) or has failed (everywhere labour 207

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overwhelmed the world). I suggest that these lines compose the divergent and discordant being of labor: simultaneously victory and defeat, effort and the need for effort, artifice and the failure of artifice. The Jovian dispensation had promised artes, and artes we got: navigation, astrology, hunting, fishing, and tools. But as the Jovian age moves towards the present, labor itself expands its scope and ethical implications: from planting and counting stars (134 and 137) to ‘lashing the rivers’ (verberat amnem, 141) and ‘dragging the sea’ (alta petens, 142). The delicate balance and epigrammatic closure of tum variae venere artes. labor omnia vicit (145) comes in the midst of this movement. The form promises gnomic resolution,26 but omnia is hyperbolic (if it were true, readers would all live a life of leisure), and the past tense (‘has conquered’) is false, unless the victory was over our leisure and not over our problems. The line flirts with our hopes at the very moment that it undermines its own epigrammatic certainty. It seems to be about arrival, victory, and closure (labor venit, vidit, vicit), but we are not arriving, labor is still arriving (mox et frumentis labor additus, 150). And we are already moving on, into the variety and need for artes, back to the intention of Jupiter, back to labor and lack and uncertainty. Commentators say that labor’s epithet, improbus, comes as a surprise.27 It’s no surprise:  we knew it was coming since before the fisherman was lashing the stream. We regret getting where we were going. Sifted by the Jovian dispensation and the progress of history, labor turns out to be as various as the artes which stand both as memorials of past labor and as promises of future labor. A few victories, inevitable failures; we are left with dangers and hopes. Since we must endure labor, we should not forget the many things it is and our many feelings about it. To gather together this essentially human complexity (Dasein, ‘being there’) and then to return to weeding, shooing off birds, pruning overgrowth and prayer (votisque vocaveris imbrem, 157) is an extraordinary evocation of the human condition, and for the reader, any reader, to be able to do it in the space of seventeen lines is a valuable spiritual achievement. It may be something that we can only do within the confines and luxuries of art. But that makes it no less valuable than the charity we have only in prayer. Extended Implications There is no ‘the truth’, ‘a truth’ – truth is not one thing or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. (Rich 1979: 187)

26 27

Cf. Sallust, B.C. 7.6 virtus omnia domuerat. See Perkell (1986).

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If beginnings are always in the middle and middles are multiply contextualized, then one should expect to find projects imbricated with projects just as one finds innocent beginnings extending into unforeseen conclusions. In Book 3, Virgil explores the complex dynamic of eros. A  herd requires breeding, eros must be controlled and focused while its hunger (and fullness) must be cultivated and increased. The farmer is playing with fire, but he must, and one of the things that Book 3 does is to set our dreams of control and victory in the context of the eros that drives those dreams. The selection of horses will be my example. Virgil begins with a line from Ennius, adapting the crane’s jerky motions to the gawky movement of a foal (76). But soon both the prizes of poetic primacy and the passions of historical epic are at work: the foal boldly sets forth on this path like the Callimachean poet (77), then, like Iron Age man, he tries the rivers and the sea (77–8). Soon he hears the empty sound of war (79) and then the sound of war itself (83). His hoof responds with its resounding ring (88) and we enter the realm of the Greek poets (90), of the chariots of Mars and Achilles (91), and of Saturn, disguised as a horse, fleeing discovery by Rhea when he tried to seduce Philyra. As he flees, he fills Pelion with the sound of his whinny (94). The passage is a tour de force of energies spilling over, of physical and literary boundaries being crossed, of something in the air, on the wind, a sound from afar calling. The very energies that the farmer must direct (out of his own ‘love of praise’) are energies that will not stand still, that burst barriers, cross rivers and mountains.28 In the chariot race, driver and horse merge as their fiery emotions burn the axles of the car. These are the energies of Virgil’s poem – ‘but we have crossed the unmeasured spaces of the plain and now it is time to unyoke the smoking necks of our steeds’ (2.541–2) – and the energies that fuel civil war – ‘just so the chariots stream forth from their pens’ (1.512–14). The opportunity to improve the present and to fulfil dreams derives from eros’ capacity to exceed, to drive mad, and to create violence and destruction in the world. This joins man and beast, or god and beast and woman, or Greek and Latin, or poet and tradition in the boundary-crossing, penbursting drive for life. The didaxis is not simply about which controls are useful or necessary, but about the necessary and hyperbolic force that drives our dreams, our passions and our poetry, and fuels civil war. Symbolic Coherence I have just been thinking, and I have come to a very important decision. These are the wrong sort of bees. (Milne 1926: 18) 28

See Miles (1975: 177–97), which is still the best overall discussion, and Gale (1991).

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Before closing Book 4 with Orpheus and Aristaeus, Virgil meditates on bees and community.29 Virgil’s bees have a rich society with home, fatherland, ancestral gods, and so on. They are devoted to law and country; their life is impersonal, collective, motivated by a love of possessions, a love of flowers and the glory of honey-making. These ‘virtues’ have tempted critics to see in the hive a model for human communities or, at least, a reflection of traditional Roman values, and Varro shows that such a view was traditional. But there is another side to the bees: they are a negative model for Romans. They inhabit their finely wrought homes and indulge their fickle spirits in play. They display an Oriental devotion to their king, and this devotion is the very cause of civil destruction, both when there are two kings and when there is no king. But the bees never were a human allegory:  they do not (according to Virgil) reproduce sexually. Within the economy of the poem, this is the nominal solution to the disruptive power of sexual love but, as a solution, it simultaneously destroys the human analogy and requires the human invention of bougonia. At the same time, it does not free the bee community of the essential problem inherent in the erotic energies of life:  the bees have their loves, ‘love of possession’, and their glory, ‘glory of honey-making’. They also have their bee wars with trembling hearts, sounds in the air, and bursting gates. In fact, bee wars elucidate the impossibility of a bee model. When the keeper ends the battle with a handful of dust, it may be a poignant reminder that human battles, too, end in a handful of dust, but the problem is that there is no human keeper to cast the dust. Similarly, the beekeeper is told to examine the warring kings and kill the inferior one: was this the way to choose between Antony and Octavian? There is no principle of human governance here. The model fails precisely when it is needed and precisely because the allegory does not work for men. Instead, it recontextualizes human problems and imagines human vulnerability without offering an apian solution. The failure of allegory, however, is not without wit and humour. In a recapitulation of the major themes of ‘plague’ and ‘signs’, the beekeeper is advised to look for ‘unambiguous signs’ of disease in his population. Varro had already remarked that fuzzy bees were a bad sign, and then described what a fuzzy bee would look like: ‘dusty’ (3.16.20). Virgil takes this relatively sensible and realistic description one step further: the beekeeper is to examine the tiny bee faces and if they are thin and deformed with bristly

29

See Nappa (2005: 160–216) for a complex didactic-political reading of Georgics 4.

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hair, the bee is sick. Virgil’s contribution is a change that presses credulity – tenuis labor, indeed – as it emphasizes the incommensurability of men and bees, an incommensurability that informs the difference between Aristaeus and Orpheus. How then should we see what Virgil is doing here? Clearly the bees represent many real virtues, but they also represent the impossibility of projecting our world onto nature. They allow us to contemplate a kind of utopian society, its admirable qualities, the reality upon which it must exist, the necessary consequences of assumptions like asexual reproduction, and the impracticality and impossibility of human stability on these terms. The allegory does not work, both because the bees are continually becoming or remaining bees and because they are themselves a multiple allegory: of what to be, of what not to be, of what we cannot be. It is not that they are real bees in one passage and an allegory in another; rather, they continually resonate with all the ramifications of their potential, including their contradictory allegorical potential – they are a model, a bad model, a failed model, a hilarious example, a problem, and a model for how models fail us. Here is the space for thought where the poem’s excess creates interpretive inadequacy. Shifting the Conceptual Centre The Georgics’ four books divide the work of the farm into four general areas:  ploughing and field crops; trees and vines; large and small herd animals; and bees. It has long been recognized that this material organization corresponds to two other movements. One in which the outcomes of man’s labour result alternately in failure (war), success (harvest), failure (destructive passion) and success (the restoration of the hive); and another in which man’s relationship to agricultural reality changes from the combative to the educative to the controlling to the protective. How these movements hold together is a significant question for critics of the poem. It is my view that, in an important sense, they do not hold together: life modelled on or from the perspective of a vineyard is importantly discontinuous with life modelled on a stable. As the poem explores the implications of its different material centres and the metaphors that arise from them, we find that the world changes, that we change, and that our dreams and fears change. It is not that one view is more right than another, or that we must decide whether Virgil is optimistic or pessimistic; rather the poem’s movement and organization allow us to explore the particular implications of our contact with particular things and, then, as our material object shifts, to find 211

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a different centre. None of these material relationships is ideal or sufficient to model our more complex relationships with ourselves and the world, but neither are they simplistic irrelevancies; as things, as metaphors and allegories, as contexts, they are the stuff of our contact with the world. The desire to totalize the Georgics is not, however, unfounded. It is part of the poem’s movement, as indeed it seems to be part of life, that when the centre shifts we uncannily find ourselves a new centre where we already were, or part of a movement that has its own specific rhythm. I would like here to characterize from the broadest perspective the overall movement of the poem in a way that suggests its shifting centres. Book 1 takes its bearings from the harrowing labour of the field and man’s militaristic dominance over nature; what develops is the intrusion of the real: on the one hand, of wars we never meant to fight as we set out to plough the land and, on the other, of forces with which we were complicit. We cannot escape labour, in part because we are the cause of our labour. Then, Book 2 begins, ‘So far, cultivation of fields and the stars of the sky’ (hactenus aruorum cultus et sidera caeli), as if we could set aside the civil war and get back to work – which we can, which the diminished future farmer of Book 1 had already done. This new book imagines man’s cooperation with nature and nature’s response. Labour reappears, and weather to be feared (2.397– 419). The vineyard stretches before the eye straight and orderly like a legion deployed in columns in the field; the land gleams with the flash of swords (2.273–87). The new centre does not change the world or man (though it is where Virgil imagines impossible grafts of fruit trees); it recomposes them in new configurations. But, finally, nature is not commensurate with our aspirations until contaminated by our artifice and filled with our fictions. By the end of Book 2, those aspirations fade into the dreams they always were, located in a past that draws us on. Book 3 explores the other side of the same coin: man no longer grafted to nature or dominating it, but working with it to control it. But we cannot be separate from nature because we are ineluctably a part of it:  human passion infects horse and chariot, and human artifice becomes nature’s way of spreading the plague from animal to man. In Book 4 the centre shifts again as the poem imagines community and the benevolent care of bees. The keeper cultivates an allegory which, like the hive, eventually fails. The understanding we may gain from contemplating the bees (and there is some to be gained) is no more sufficient for our human projects and human passions than the world and labour of Book 1, the dreams of Book 2, or the cultivation and care of Book 3. The poem ends with isolated, self-pitying heroes, images of what is great in man inextricably tied to what destroys 212

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us. The various centres of this story (practical success, mythic narrative, personal passions, impractical song, community and isolation, interpretive coherence) recycle the conceptual problems of the poem.

Conclusion Both art and life desire to lighten their respective burdens; for it is, after all, easier to create without answering to life, and easier to live without answering to art. (Bakhtin 1990: 3)

Critics have generally looked to the Georgics for some determinate meaning or unified attitude towards the world. I have tried to challenge this endeavour by describing the poem as a field or a dynamic. Rather than create security, clarity, message, the poem complicates our feelings and confounds our paradigms. It offers an excess of thought and feeling which, while true to the life of the mind, exceeds both the propositions by which we try to secure our understanding and the determinations upon which we must and do act. We may take directions from the poem (for planting or for governing), but the Georgics will also always remind us that our understanding is larger than these pressing necessities and that the contingencies of life have already implicated us in failure and greatness. This means that the value of the Georgics lies not in knowing or in the virtues of action, but in reading, in revising, in becoming larger than we thought we were and in imagining ourselves larger than we are. The poem offers a place where we can experience what we are and can be, as well as what we are not, where we can know that truth is always also its opposite, and feel the pressure of things in our lives, both our intellectual and emotional lives and our practical lives. The Georgics most assuredly does not tell us what to do – but it reminds us of where we are and could be as we inevitably undertake the tasks which are as urgent as gerunds, as slippery as time, and as formative as the metaphors we live by.

FURTHER READING A very thorough and useful bibliography, current as of 2015, can be downloaded from www.niklasholzberg.com/Homepage/Bibliographien.html. The most recent modern scholarly commentary in English on the Georgics is by Mynors (1990). The standard commentary for students is by Thomas (1988), who emphasizes the highly allusive nature of the poem; see his important and influential article (1986b). 213

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Wilkinson (1969) was in some ways the culmination of an approach to the Georgics that took its agricultural lore seriously and found in the poem a celebration of the Italian countryside; see also Wilkinson’s article (1950). Agriculture has been a topic of occasional interest. See Spurr (1986), while Thibodeau (2011) has re-examined Virgil’s relationship to agronomic writers and offered a reappraisal of farming in the Georgics. However, a more literary approach had already been adopted by German critics, who argued for the symbolic coherence of the whole poem:  see Burck (1929), followed by Klingner (1967). In the second half of the twentieth century, the symbolic approach began to dominate discussions in English. See the review essay of Wilkinson by Otis (1972: 40–62). This led to a new polarity: was the poem fundamentally optimistic or pessimistic? Otis (1964) saw in the poem an optimistic, even redemptive image of political and moral rebirth. Putnam (1979) emphasized the dangers and futility of labor. The dark view of Virgil’s message informed the work of Ross (1987) and Thomas. At about the same time, others were trying to recognize the poem’s tragic and pessimistic aspects without succumbing to an unrelentingly pessimistic analysis. Miles (1980) found in the poem’s formal structure a dialectical movement between idealized and inadequate versions of rustic life and Roman civilization. Perkell (1989) emphasized the meditative over the strictly ‘didactic’ or allegorical, and found the poem’s value in ambiguity, ambivalence and mystery. Other studies that focus on particular aspects of the poem are: Johnston (1980) on the Golden Age; Spofford (1981) on its ‘social poetry’; Farrell (1991) on allusion and intertextuality. The twenty-first century has seen a turn away from hermeneutics (What does the poem mean?) and towards politics and ideology (How does it reflect on or relate to Octavian? How does it serve the elite?) and towards poetics (How is it related to the poetic tradition through intertextuality and generic development?). Morgan (1999) sees in Virgil’s engagement with Homer and Stoicism the basis for reading the Aristaeus episode as a symbol of rebirth under Augustus; Gale (2000) looks at Virgil’s interaction with Lucretius and others and finds complication and ambiguity; Volk (2002) builds a definition of didactic poetry as defined by didactic intent, student addressee, poetic self-consciousness, and the illusion of a lesson; Nappa (2005) reads the poem as a series of lessons for Octavian; Harrison (2007a), in both his discussion of genre and genre theory and in his readings in Chapter 5 of the laudes Italiae, the proem to Book 3, and Book 4 as a whole, helps define and expand the kind of epic this didactic poetry is; Kronenberg (2009) reads the instruction as an extended allegory that engages competing ways 214

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of looking at the world; and Thibodeau (2011) sees in the agricultural realia an imaginary experience of farming that counsels moderation and can offer consolation for its elite readers. All these writers evince to one degree or another the new interests in politics, ideology and poetics. Among non-classicists, useful discussions of the Georgics and agricultural literature can be found in O’Loughlin (1978) and Williams (1973).

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12 DU N CA N F. K E NNEDY

Virgilian Epic

In retrospect, the career of Virgil seems to trace out an inevitable progression. Working within a tradition which defined poetry composed in dactylic hexameter verse as epos (connoting ‘word’ or ‘utterance’), through the figure of the shepherd-singer Tityrus, the poet of the Eclogues recalls how his earliest poetic production involved a rejection of martial themes (reges et proelia, ‘kings and battles’, Ecl. 6.3) in favour of a pastoral mode, avowedly lowly and humble (cf. Ecl. 4.1–2), which looked back to the ‘Syracusan verse’ of Theocritus (Ecl. 6.1–2). Taking leave of this mode at the end of the final poem of the collection, the shepherd-singer, in his characteristic pose recumbent in the shade of a tree, announces his intention to ‘rise’ (surgamus, Ecl. 10.75), presaging the composition of the Hesiodic Georgics. He thereby attributes to that poem a more elevated stylistic level, reiterates a hierarchy within the received types of epos, and begins to map an upward trajectory through those types on to the poet’s own life cycle. In the opening lines of the third Georgic, a further move upwards is envisaged: temptanda via est, qua me quoque possim tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora. I must attempt a way, whereby I too may raise myself from the ground and victorious fly through the mouths of men. (G. 3.8–9)

‘I too’ suggests a desired affiliation to an existing tradition, and allusion to the epitaph of Ennius (fr. 46 Courtney), who in the early second century bc was the first Roman poet to adapt to Latin the Greek quantitative hexameter, pointing perhaps to the kind of Roman historical themes and the fusion of epic form and nationalist ideology which Ennius fashioned in his Annals. The poet explicitly promises that: mox tamen ardentis accingar dicere pugnas Caesaris et nomen fama tot ferre per annos Tithoni prima quot abest ab origine Caesar. 216

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However, the opening words of the poem which was eventually to transpire (arma virumque cano, ‘I sing of arms and the man’, Aen. 1.1) famously signal a return to Homer and a combination within a single poem of the themes of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Nonetheless, the centrality of Caesar promised in the Georgics (in medio mihi Caesar erit, ‘in the middle I will have Caesar’, G. 3.16), and the extravagant timescale stretching back to Trojan times, is realized as the Aeneid emplots the story of Aeneas as the first stage of the Romans’ destined rise towards universal dominion up to the poet’s own day under the leadership of the posterity of Aeneas, the house of Caesar (cf. Aen. 1.1–7). However, rather than looking back from the age of Augustus to Troy, the poem takes as its narrative ‘present’ events in the aftermath of the fall of Troy and insistently looks ‘forward’ from there to the age of Augustus, though not explicitly through the agency of the poet. The poem’s supernatural machinery looks beyond the incident with which the narrative ends, the death of Turnus, to the events and personalities of the poet’s own time – and even beyond, for the prophecy of Jupiter sees the outcome of the events narrated as empire without limits of space or time for the Romans (his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono, | imperium sine fine dedi, Aen. 1.278–9). On a number of levels, the notion of repetition can be a useful way of exploring issues in the interpretation of Virgilian epic. In his book Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks remarked of narrative that [it] must ever present itself as a repetition of events that have already happened, and within this postulate of a generalized repetition it must make use of specific, perceptible repetition in order to create plot, that is, to show us a significant interconnection of events. An event gains meaning by its repetition, which is both the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it: the concept of repetition hovers ambiguously between the idea of reproduction and that of change, forward and backward movement.1

In a response to Brooks’ observations, David Quint has explored the way the plot of the Aeneid is structured around, and achieves some of its most notable effects through, a series of such perceptible repetitions. In what is often termed the ‘Odyssean’ half of the poem (books 1–6), instructed to ‘seek out

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Brooks (1984: 99).

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their ancient mother’ (Aen. 3.96), the wandering Trojans visit a ‘parade of replica Troys’ in a series of regressive repetitions as they try to recover what they have lost.2 The Sibyl’s prophecy to Aeneas (Aen. 6.83–97) explicitly figures the action of the second half of the Aeneid as a reprise of the action of the Trojan War, familiar from the Iliad; in contrast with the first half of the poem, however, repetition now involves not regression but reversal as previous failures are rerun as successes, notably in Aeneas’ climactic duel with Turnus in Book 12: the details recall Aeneas’ ignoble encounters on the battlefield with Diomedes and Achilles in Iliad books 5 and 20, except that now the roles are reversed and it is Aeneas who emerges as victor. Repetition is thus not a matter of identity, but involves the interplay of perceived similarities and differences and must, in one way or another, be signalled or recognized as such for its significance to emerge. Repetition in emplotment thus underlies effects of frustration, anticipation and tension on the one hand, and on the other of progress towards fulfilment and closure. For a plot (whether of a fable or a historical account) to have a shape or order, its events must have a beginning, a middle and an end; but some slippage between ‘end’ as ‘stopping point’ and as ‘goal’ (telos) is both unavoidable and open to manipulation to different effects. Quint suggests that it is such considerations that distinguish the open-endedly repetitious, circular narrative form characteristic of romance from the linear, teleological narrative of epic, and that the Aeneid incorporates the former into the latter in order ultimately to transcend it and to signal all the more clearly the triumph of the poem’s teleological form.3 In her distressed response to what appears to her to be the latest in a meaningless sequence of reversals for her son Aeneas, his shipwreck on the shores of Carthage, Venus challenges her father Jupiter who, she asserts, as king of the gods, is in control of events (Aen. 1.229–30): ‘what end do you set to these troubles?’ (quem das finem … laborum, Aen. 1.241). Significantly, he responds with a narrative, a prophecy about the posterity of Aeneas down to the time of Augustus, which identifies that ‘end’, that telos, as an empire without boundaries of time and space for the Romans. The disclosure of the full meaning of these events lies, it can be seen, in the possibility of their narrative completion, and Quint has observed that this identification of the telos of the poem serves to associate its epic form with imperialist victory and so to figure its pretensions:4 totalizing and terminable, narrative structure works to answer the questions it raises in the course of its elaboration and to provide a closure in which 2 3 4

Quint (1993: 61). Quint (1993: 31–41). Quint (1993: 45–6).

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the events it embraces, however remote in time or place, are displayed in their full intentional and consequential significance. Sic placitum (‘thus it has seemed good’, Aen. 1.283) Jupiter remarks of his master narrative; what is to happen in the ‘future’ has already been decided.5 ‘Telling the story’ thus offers the possibility of coming to terms with or being reconciled with the past and with the present which is seen to be its outcome, and narrative closure in turn depends on the satisfaction of the desire to discover the full dramatic significance of events. ‘Muse, recount to me the causes’ (Musa, mihi causas memora, Aen. 1.8), the poet appeals: the narrative of the Aeneid is from the very start figured as a telling, a report, a transcription. Narratives, whether they call themselves ‘history’ or ‘fiction’, necessarily characterize themselves as repeating what has happened, a structure that is mirrored in the analysis of narrative, which operates by invoking a distinction between ‘story’, an idealized sequence of events, and their ‘emplotment’ in an actual narrative which invests them with their significance. Paul Ricoeur has remarked of the writing of history that it ‘repeats action in the figure of the memorable’,6 and this is a particularly pronounced feature of the history that epic ‘recounts’. Homeric epic is thematized as klea andrôn, the famous deeds of men (cf. Iliad 9.189), and in a rare apostrophe of his characters, the narrator of the Aeneid promises Nisus and Euryalus that, if his poem has any power, no day will take them from the memory of time, so long as Rome retains her imperium (9.446–9; for all the formal depersonalization of the epic narrator, his fame remains an important part of the process of memorialization, as G. 3.8–9, quoted above, suggests). More emphatically than other types of narrative, epic appeals to what Hannah Arendt has called the capacity for ‘remembrance’, by which the lasting significance of events is affirmed in and through a narrative felt to be satisfactory and complete and in which the past, however distant, is presented as available, and comprehensible, in terms of qualities, good or bad, uplifting or sorrowful, which are transcendentally attached to human achievement or suffering. Arendt sees Odysseus shedding tears at the Phaeacian court as he listens to the song of Demodocus (Od. 8.84–92) as paradigmatic of such cathartic remembrance.7 The past thus celebrated

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O’Hara (1990: 133) observes that Jupiter ‘is carefully tailoring his prophecy to console Venus’ and goes on to show in detail (133–63) how his speech emphasizes the positive aspects of the ‘future’ for Venus’ sake and downplays the negative. That Jupiter is highly adept at tailoring his utterances to his different audiences was noted by Virgil’s fourth-century commentator Servius in his note on Aen. 1.261. Cf. Thilo and Hagen (1878–1902: i .97). Ricoeur (1991: 115). Arendt (1961: 45).

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becomes, for those capable of such remembrance, an inheritance with which they feel themselves entrusted, and this posture in turn serves to valorize claims made on the basis of a past so presented. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition, a feature that distinguishes epic from other forms of narrative is that it presents a picture of a valorized ‘absolute past’ that accounts for the present specifically through ‘ “beginnings” and “peak times” in the national history, a world of fathers and of founders of families, a world of “firsts” and “bests” ’.8 In the memorialization epic proposes, the act of telling is importantly situated in relation to the account of the past it offers: ‘an absolute epic distance separates the epic world from contemporary reality, that is from the time in which the singer (the author and his audience) lives’ and ‘the authorial position immanent in the epic and constitutive for it (that is, the position of the one who utters the epic word) is the environment of a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible, the reverent point of view of a descendent’.9 The narrator of the Aeneid presents the point of view of just such a reverent descendent, but authorial agency and authority are subtly distributed. The poet-narrator may style himself the singer (Aen. 1.1), but calls on the Muses to recount to him the causes of the gods’ wrath (Aen. 1.8). In particular, thanks to this distribution of authorial agency, a subtle manipulation of the relationship of story to emplotment emerges in the poem. In analytical terms, the events of Roman history from the fall of Troy to the Augustan Age form the ‘story’ the Aeneid ‘emplots’. But as we have seen, the supernatural machinery of the poem offers a prospective account of Rome’s history that looks towards the ‘time in which the singer lives’, so that the impression left by the poem is that ‘history’ repeats the events narrated by figures such as Jupiter in the heavens (Aen. 1. 257–96), Anchises in the Underworld (Aen. 6.756–886), or portrayed on the shield that Vulcan forges for Aeneas (Aen. 8.626–728), thus giving ‘history’ the sense of being the fulfilment of what has been preordained and destined. This sense of destiny is referred to in the poem as fatum (‘an utterance’), and is identified above all with the utterances of Jupiter, who thus crucially takes on the responsibility of the ‘one who utters the epic word’ for the ‘providential’ aspects of the narrative and becomes a surrogate for the epic poet. A  sense of inevitability is so 8 9

Bakhtin (1981: 13). Bakhtin (1981: 13). Seider (2013) explores the interplay of individual and social memory in the Aeneid, and in addition considers what he calls the ‘oikotype’, a version of the past around which the members of a community gather, tailored to their needs. Jupiter’s speech to Venus could be seen as an oikotype, but prospective rather than retrospective in the narrative context of its delivery.

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marked a feature of the Aeneid that we might even see fatum self-reflexively characterized thereby as a distinctively Virgilian calque on the generic term epos. Whilst it is this perspective ‘forwards’ to ‘the time in which the singer (the author and his audience) lives’ which gives to the Aeneid its overtly teleological character, the singer’s agency and perspective ‘backwards’ from the end, the point of fulfilment, is an integral, if occluded, part of an effect which is in no way restricted to the Aeneid, but open to narrative in general. We might compare the account of Virgil’s career with which I began. Virgil’s ongoing pronouncements are so organized as to construct prospectively a telos of his career’s fulfilment in the composition of epic; from the perspective of the realization of that telos (‘in retrospect’), they take on the guise of prophecy and their realization a sense of inevitability. This Virgilian meditation on ‘utterance’ raises the possibility that any attempt to order the past in relation to the present, to say ‘this is how it was’, by virtue of its narrative structure incorporates, albeit at a level that may escape our attention, the claim ‘this is how it was-to-be’. Jupiter’s role as surrogate narrator of a history of predetermined thingsgoing-to-happen further implies that not only the Aeneid but ‘history’ too, rather than being a contingent series of things-that-happened, has a plot, a shape and structure, with a beginning and an end (to which it looks forward), and is thus no less analysable in terms of the sort of significant repetition we have been looking at. And so, to recall Brooks’ comments quoted above, an event in ‘history’ will gain its meaning by its repetition, ‘which is both the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it’. Such a pattern is present in typological readings of the poem which assert, for example, that Aeneas is a ‘figure’ of Augustus, implying not an identity (for ‘both the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it’ are at work) but rather that Aeneas is the ‘type’, manifesting, however imperfectly, particular idealized, historically transcendent qualities (most famously pietas, a sense of duty), which within this overtly providential account find later manifestation, their ‘antitype’, in Augustus. And their fulfilment? Proponents of ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ readings of the poem will both have their say for, as we have seen, ‘the concept of repetition hovers ambiguously between the idea of reproduction and that of change’. These considerations can be extended to issues of literary history and interpretation as well. Epic seems to be a tradition that is always already at an end, its monuments firmly in place. For example, Philip Hardie’s book The Epic Successors of Virgil, which argues that post-Virgilian epic ‘may in some ways be understood better through a forward rather than a backward glance, to the epics of the Middle Ages and Renaissance’ (and so explicitly 221

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promises to explain ‘how it was’ as ‘how it was-to-be’), speaks of ‘Glancing forward to the end of the tradition, in Paradise Lost …’.10 In the words of Bakhtin, ‘we come upon epic when it is already completely finished’,11 and within narratives of literary history, epic as a genre seems to belong to a Bakhtinian ‘absolute past’ which itself is a world of ‘ “beginnings” and “peak times” … of fathers and founders of families … of “firsts” and “bests” ’, in which the place of Homer seems enshrined once and for all. Affiliation to a tradition that seems so closed is an object of desire and anxiety for Roman poets; Virgil’s pronouncements in the Eclogues and Georgics are part of a complex discourse in Augustan poetry which appeals to the precedent of Callimachus to keep Homeric epic in view, but at a distance. Ennius’ solution at the beginning of the Annals had been to present himself as a reincarnation of Homer.12 We could plot a Virgilian strategy along the following lines. In the Iliad, Hector at the Scaean Gate had prophesied:  ‘There will come a day when the holy city of Troy will fall’ (6.448). What in the Iliad is a prophetic future finds its fulfilment in the Aeneid in the lament of the priest Panthus on the night the city is sacked:  venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus | Dardaniae (‘Troy’s final day and its inevitable hour has come’, Aen. 2.324–5). The event which signals the ‘end’ in one emplotment becomes transformed into the ‘beginning’ in another, the repetition serving to open a previous closure, disclosing the previous story as but one element in a grander narrative. Repetition not only underlies narrative emplotment but is involved in notions of citation, imitation, allusion and intertextuality as well, and it is in the act of relating the Aeneid to the Homeric poems that such patterning and its significance particularly emerge. Genre, it has been remarked, is allusion on a massive scale, an intertextual frame which ‘constitutes a field of reference within which, by means of comparisons and contrasts, the author can direct the specificity of his texts and the addressee can recognise it’.13 For the ancient commentators on Homer, the Odyssey was the anaplêrôsis, the completion or fulfilment, of the Iliad, not merely its narrative continuation. Through an extraordinarily complex web of verbal repetitions such as this, the Aeneid not only establishes its identity as an epic but offers itself in turn as the anaplêrôsis, generic no less than narrative, of the Homeric poems. Much recent criticism of Virgil has seen the Aeneid as seeking to open out any closure  – of narrative, of national and cultural identity, of

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Hardie (1993: 89; emphasis added). Bakhtin (1981: 14). See Skutsch (1985: 147–67). Conte (1994a: 4).

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genre or literary history – which the Homeric poems imposed; and in turn, the criticism of post-Virgilian epic has seen the epic successors of Virgil as attempting to question and challenge the various such closures the Aeneid may be thought to have imposed. Such interpretations suggest that the text supports a multiplicity of interacting meanings, that, for example, what is read as a narrative theme can self-reflexively (a critical notion that invokes repetition once more) thematize generic issues as well, or that a character in the narrative (Tityrus in the Eclogues or Jupiter in the Aeneid, for example) can ‘figure’ authorial – or interpretative – preoccupations (the structure of such arguments is typological in the sense explored above). Thus, if legitimacy of succession is identified as a narrative theme of the Aeneid, such a theme can also be seen self-reflexively as its literary concern as well. From some perspectives, Aeneas comes to Italy as an interloper. His rights are valorized by presenting his presence there as a return, specifically metaphorized, in the words of the prophecy (‘seek out your ancestral mother’), in terms of familial succession. Metapoetically, the citation of the openings of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the first words of the Aeneid can be seen to set in motion a literary historical emplotment of the Aeneid as the successor of the Homeric poems. G. B. Conte has said of the generic significance of such citations that the opening of a poem ‘is the place where all the signals point to the originality of the work or to its position within literary production … It classifies the genre so that the new text enters the literary system as a literary work, as though by hereditary right’.14 The qualification is important, for the language of hereditary right is fully apropos only if literary systems are regarded as closed ‘traditions’ in which the poet is the passive recipient of ‘what is handed down’ to him, as Conte elsewhere remarks: ‘If literary genres were merely closed structures … then [the] dialogue between texts would only take the form of direct patrilinear succession: in each instance, the patriarch, the authorinventor, would stand at the beginning of the family, and after him would follow a pure-blooded genealogy’.15 The language of hereditary right and affiliation, of coming rightfully into one’s inheritance, in the case of Virgil no less than that of Aeneas (or of Augustus, for that matter), occludes the actively appropriative and agonistic role each plays in relation to the past. The telos of the Aeneid in Jupiter’s speech is ‘empire without boundaries of time and space’, suggesting the absorption into one unit of territories previously viewed as discrete and autonomous, and the significance of this for the poem’s epic form has already been remarked upon. The citation of 14 15

Conte (1986: 76, 82; emphasis added). Conte (1994a: 5–6).

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the Iliad and the Odyssey in the opening words of the Aeneid can be seen to offer a literary historical emplotment for the poem as not merely succeeding but superseding the Homeric poems, and embracing both in a gesture of totalizing imperialism. The ancient Homeric commentators saw Homer as the source of all subsequent genres, and critics have recently paid considerable attention to the way Virgilian epic in turn seems to incorporate within it a wide variety of generic forms: cosmological poetry, elegy, lyric, and tragedy have all been the subject of extended discussions. But there is more than that. Genre (genus) implies ‘type’, and all generic criticism, even that which would deny that any one work can ever fully exemplify a generic norm, still relies on and invokes the concept of the norm. Any attempt, by poet or literary historian, to conceptualize genre by narrativizing it, by offering a historical overview, will inevitably offer a framework teleologically directed by and towards a particular characterizing, typifying work (e.g. a martial tradition of epic characterized by Homer or an aetiological tradition characterized by Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Just as Jupiter’s vision of empire seeks to place it beyond the boundaries (the fines) of space and time and thus give it a transcendent status beyond the contingencies of history as the ‘type’ of empire, so we might conceive of the Aeneid as attempting generically to transcend any definition, any closure, that might be imposed upon it, so as to arrogate for itself the role of norm or type of epic, and thus to assert for itself a privileged position in the structure of literary history analogous to that of Rome’s imperium within the ‘history’ the narrative of the poem constructs. Finally, if we think about the (history of the) interpretation of a text such as the Aeneid in terms of repetition, two possible though not distinct models come to mind. A ‘romance’ model would see any interpretation of the text (including the author’s) as one in an endless series of readings (none of which has a more privileged status than any other per se) which make of the text a configuration or allegory of the interpreter’s concerns. An ‘epic’ model would similarly see previous readings as allegories, but within a teleological structure that would foreground the present interpretation as the truth. In the words of Philip Hardie, ‘The epic strives for totality and completion, yet is at the same time driven obsessively to repetition and reworking.’16 However, in so far as any interpretation makes its totalizing claim to truth, to be the last word, it will be a version of epos.

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Hardie (1993: 1).

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FURTHER READING Heinze (1903, trans. 1993) underlies much of the scholarly work done on Virgilian epic since its publication. The issues of narrative, tradition and politics treated above came to the fore in the 1990s in pioneering works by Quint (1993) and Hardie (1993), and are theoretically revisited in Willis (2011 especially ch.  4) and Kennedy (2013 especially ch. 2). The basic treatment of the relationship of the Aeneid to the Homeric poems remains Knauer (1964a). See Knauer (1964b) for a summary in English; for literary analyses, see Barchiesi (1984, revised and translated 2015), and Dekel (2012), who discusses how the Aeneid looks back to Homer in the light of how the Odyssey configures itself as an anaplêrôsis of the Iliad. For the relationship of the Aeneid to Hellenistic epic, see Nelis (2001). Goldberg (1995) offers many stimulating observations on Virgil’s Roman epic predecessors; for Virgil’s engagement with Ennius, see Goldschmidt (2013). Feeney (1991 ch. 4)  uses the role of the gods to explore Virgil’s relationship to earlier epic and the mediating role of the ancient exegetical tradition. Harrison (2007a ch. 7) explores the generic inclusivity of the Aeneid. Hardie (2014) explores the reception of the Aeneid both within and beyond the generic confines of epic.

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Closure and the Book of Virgil

When this chapter first appeared in 1997, I  had been struck by Laurence Lipking’s suggestion in The Life of the Poet (1981) that Virgil’s three canonical works, the Eclogues, Georgics and the Aeneid, should be seen as his cursus honorum and that ‘together they complete a wheel or pattern’.1 Two decades later, a whole new branch of literary criticism concerned with poetic careers has grown out of Lipking’s work, and that of Richard Helgerson.2 When Lipking began The Life of the Poet with the words ‘We have heard too much about the lives of the poets’, he was alerting us to the way in which biographical criticism often distracts from the close study of a poet’s work. It is important therefore to note here that career criticism is not biographical criticism. Where the latter views biographical and historical context as the key to understanding an author’s works, career criticism interprets ‘life’ to mean the complete shape of the author’s existence, and then goes about taking a holistic view of the total œuvre. Lipking’s claim is that taking ‘in the full career will also illuminate the details of any particular text’.3 For career critics, the person of the author in his or her historical context is of interest only to the extent that it is shaped into his or her works.4 Taking their lead from Helgerson and Lipking, the two edited volumes on the subject of career criticism both give a central role to Virgil as the poet who, as Lipking had put it, ‘supplied the pattern of a career to so many later poets’.5 1 2

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Lipking (1981: 77). Lipking (1981) and Helgerson (1983). See Cheney and de Armas (2002: 3–14) for a summary of the development of career criticism and discussion of the idea of a literary career; see Hardie and Moore (2010: 1–14) for Roman literary careers. Lipking (2010: 299). See Cheney (2002: 6); Hardie and Moore (2010: 1). Although I write ‘they’ and ‘his or her’, there are serious questions to be asked about the inherently male pattern imposed by the cursus honorum model. See Hardie and Moore (2010: 10 and n. 15). The volumes are Cheney and de Armas (2002) and Hardie and Moore (2010). Quotation from Lipking (1981: xi). In Lipking (2010: 289) there is some qualification of Virgil’s influence: ‘Virgil’s wheel set the pattern for only a tiny number of heroes.’

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The tripartite pattern of Virgil’s career was formalized in the rota Vergilii, or wheel of Virgil, by John of Garland in the thirteenth century – a key image for both poets interested in building careers and modern career critics.6 In the rota, the triadic career is pictured in the form of concentric circles; I think of it as a quasi-cosmic image, in which the texts of Virgil come to stand for all possible forms of human life and expression. But the origins of the triadic structure of the wheel can be found in what might be viewed as an early version of career criticism: the Virgilian biographies and commentaries of late antiquity.7 In these early commentators’ biographies we find the notion that the three styles (low, middle, and high) represented in the three works of Virgil correspond to three stages of human society (shepherds, farmers and warriors). We also find the poet’s life presented as an ascending triad to match his works, along with a more general and persistent tendency towards blurring the lines between Virgil’s life and his work.8 Andrew Laird refers to this early literary criticism as ruled by ‘Emphasis on, or a kind of desire for, the poet’s presence’ which ‘might help to ease the tension between Virgil the author and “Virgil” the body of texts’.9 Two examples of what I now view as a perhaps rather primitive form of career criticism formed a key starting point when I first wrote this chapter: the epitaph and the pre-proemium to the Aeneid, both cited in the Vita attributed to Donatus. Neither passage is now thought to be Virgilian, but they both owe something to the final verses of the Georgics, often referred to as the poet’s sphragis  – his seal or signature.10 Both passages borrow two crucial characteristics from the end of the Georgics:  the first-person voice looking back over past work, and the division of the poet’s life into three parts which map onto his three works. The two passages have received a lot of attention with the growth of

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Cheney (2002: 7–8). On John of Garland, see Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008: 744; for details on the wheel and illustrations, see 745–8). See also Copeland and Sluiter (2012: 639–56). The earliest extant Vita is the one attributed to the fourth-century grammarian Aelius Donatus. It is thought to rely very heavily on the lost Life of Virgil by Suetonius. On the ‘Lives’, see Suerbaum (1981: ii .57–1262); Ziolkowski (1993: 27–56); Horsfall (2000b: 3–4); Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008: 179–403). On how the ancient biographers mine Virgil’s poetry to construe his career, see Farrell (2002: 25–6); Hardie and Powell (2017). See Farrell (2002: 25–6); Laird (2009: 2–3). Laird (2009: 2). See also Peirano (2013: 253–4). See Farrell (2004: 47–8) and appendix for the discussion surrounding the pre-proemium and its status. See Peirano (2013: 269–80) on the ille ego lines as a paradox, both ‘authenticating’ and ‘fake’, and more generally on authorial ‘signatures’. See Laird (2009: 7) on the influence of G. 4.559–66 on both passages.

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career criticism, and much valuable and illuminating work has been done on Ovid’s reception of the Virgilian career pattern.11 In the light of the emphasis placed by career critics on the public role of poets, and on the relationship between poetry and power, the Virgilian career is now almost always read, as Philip Hardie puts it ‘as a progression to an increasing engagement with the extra-literary world’.12 In Joseph Farrell’s reading, the model of the cursus honorum, the standard Roman aristocratic career pattern, underpins Virgil’s career, and makes it necessarily a pattern of progressive approximation to Augustan political ideals. The proem to the third Georgic is key to such readings of the Virgilian career, as it dramatizes the author’s ambitions towards epic in the form of a military triumph. Understood as progression, or ascent, the Virgilian career pattern is difficult to reconcile with the idea of a critical, ambivalent, or somehow melancholy Virgil, which I  advocated in my original chapter. This brings me to my second concern: the end of the Aeneid, the end of Virgil’s book, and the point of thinking about closure. My interest in this was shared by a number of classicists at the time, and closure did become something of a phenomenon of the nineties.13 When it came to the Aeneid, the ending and its interpretation were of course at the heart of the debate between the pessimists, who questioned Virgil’s political commitment, and those readers who viewed the ending as an expression of the triumph of the new order. There has since then been something of a tendency to move away from the pessimism which had perhaps dominated the liberal critical consensus in Anglo-American scholarship, and towards a stronger emphasis on more historicized interpretations which tend to be less doubtful about Virgil’s commitment to the Augustan project. When I wrote the first version of this chapter, I saw in the wheel of Virgil, the epitaph, and the ille ego opening the potential for reading a ‘Book of Virgil’, which was informed by the figure of its author, and by that author’s personal voice. I did not see that author as ambitious to progress towards greater and greater engagement with power. I  was interested in how, by paying close attention to Virgil’s endings, and in particular to the recurring image of shade, we might hear more clearly the notes of regret and pessimism with which the Aeneid resounds. As I return to make the necessary revisions to my original chapter, I  find that, notwithstanding the political overtones of recent career criticism, I have not changed my mind. Virgil’s 11

12

13

See Farrell (2004); Barchiesi and Hardie (2010). See Martelli (2013) for the idea that the ille ego lines are an Ovidian gesture. Hardie and Moore (2010: 5). For the role of patronage and self-fashioning in Roman poetic career patterns, see Farrell (2002). See Fowler (1997).

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book still resonates with the echoes of the long shades cast at the end of the First Eclogue, and that resonance is enhanced by the way in which, as Don Fowler put it in 1997, the shadows of the ‘final farewell’ at Aeneid 12.952 ‘figure the death of its author as well as of Turnus, and finally put to rest the flight from shade begun in the Eclogues’.14 In the meantime, Michael Putnam has written eloquently, in the context of the literary career, about how Virgil educates readers in the ‘cyclic meditation of his three masterpieces en groupe’, drawing proper attention to the ways in which Virgil’s shade takes the reader from the green fields of pastoral to the killing fields of epic.15 If we take Virgil’s career as modelled on the cursus honorum, then we accept the teleology of that model, in which the ultimate achievement is the Aeneid as the epic of Rome and Virgil’s status as ‘national poet’. This would be a linear reading of the Book of Virgil in which there is no call to look back to the beginnings or down into the darkness. Turnus might descend into the shadows, but the poet and his work stay in the sunlight next to Augustus. In my reading, Virgil is less concerned with achieving greater engagement with the Augustan project and more concerned with the cohesion of the world he is creating. In this model, the three works do not form a line but a circle; the motif of shade draws our attention to this and pulls us back to the beginning even as we think we have reached the end. In what follows, I have left my original chapter substantially intact, except to add bibliographical references and at times reorganize or amplify some of my thinking for the sake of greater clarity. In the famous epitaph cited in the Donatan Vita, the speaker ‘Virgil’ sums up his life and his works in three parts, mapping the works onto a topographical biography: Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces. Mantua bore me, the Calabrians took me away, and now Parthenope holds me. I sang of pastures, agriculture, and of leaders. (36)

Outside this triad, there is nothing. My concern in this chapter is not the life of the poet, but the idea that we may be invited by this epitaph to read the three canonical works as one poetic space, in terms of an aesthetic and thematic coherence that unites them. I want to show how the sense of closure that unites the works is achieved, and what role is played by the figure of

14 15

Fowler (1997: 14 and n. 47). Putnam (2010a: 35).

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the author in unifying the works, stylistically or formally, and thematically. In this I follow Lipking’s lead, which is why it is important to highlight the point that the endeavour is literary rather than biographical. Because Virgil’s poetic boundaries are stretched to include his entire life’s work from the Eclogues onwards, and because the Aeneid comes to an end when its author dies, the sense of a totalizing teleology within the œuvre really is stronger here than in any other ancient poet.16 Moreover, the explicitly self-referential passages in which Virgil presents himself as author involved in the shaping of his text may point us towards an understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the poet and his poems, which may indeed be closer than we think to the allegorical and literary biographies of antiquity.17 But the narrative or linear type of closure we find mirrored in the Vitae, and in which the three texts are united in their striving for the generic and political climax of the Aeneid, is not the only way in which Virgil achieves his Book, or his poetic enclosure. The linear and teleological impulse is often fought against throughout the three texts, and especially in the Georgics and in the Aeneid. Both of these texts ostensibly celebrate the achievements of Octavian/Augustus, both therefore ostensibly share a sense of ideological closure. And yet, neither text need be read as ultimately committing itself to the empire. The Aeneid in particular struggles violently against the linear and seemingly inevitable progress of epic teleology, and this struggle may be read also as the poet’s own struggle against the inevitable closure of his Book.18 In delaying and disrupting the closure of the epic, Virgil repeatedly takes his reader back to an alternative poetic space, the imaginary lands of the Eclogues and Georgics, which he appears only reluctantly to have left behind. As the political ambivalence of the Aeneid becomes part of the dynamic of the Book of Virgil, the poet’s resistance to epic and empire also structures his resistance to his own paradigmatic career progress. This anti-teleological struggle may be read as a more circular paradigm of closure to counter the linear structure of the Vitae; the Book of Virgil need not be merely about reading forwards towards the satisfaction of the desire for narrative closure, it may offer the reader the pleasures of rereading, or repetition, which are functions of the internal intertextualities (we could term them ‘intratextualities’) that interweave the three texts.19 Michael Putnam has described this reading around as led by ‘Virgil’s extraordinary, demanding gestures of circularity’ which, he says, keep the reader, 16 17

18 19

On post-Virgilian imitations of this, see Hardie (1993: 102). On the symbiosis of poets and their heroes (and poems), see Hardie (1993: 99 and 101–2); Laird (2009). See Quint (1993: 50–96). See Putnam (2010a: 20). See also Sharrock and Morales (2000: 1–39).

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while moving forwards through the three works, ‘in a continuous present of contemplation’.20 In this circular enclosure the world of the Eclogues, with its small-scale songs of love and exile, becomes part of what Adam Parry referred to as the ‘private voice’ of the Aeneid.21 In the midst of empire and ideology, contemplation of echoes of the Eclogues or Georgics may take us back to an Italian landscape that is not yet part of the public world of epic. So, for instance, the pastoral innocence of Italy evoked in Aeneid 7 and 8, linked as they are to the youth and innocence of the Arcadian boy Pallas and the pastoral huntress Camilla, not only create a universe of grief and sorrow for the victims of empire, but take the reader of the Book of Virgil back to an alternative poetic world. Most famously, perhaps, the pathos around the aptly named Umbro, whose demise is mourned not by human followers, but by the landscape (Aen. 7.759–60), in an apostrophe which takes us straight back to the trees and the rocks weeping for the dying Gallus in Eclogue 10.11–15.22 In other words, the Eclogues and Georgics are not left behind in the author’s poetic progress, but retain a strong presence in the Aeneid, and through this intratextuality they invite the reader repeatedly to look back at those parts of the Book she may consider finished and to integrate them into what she can then perceive as a coherent whole.23 In order, then, to escape from the linear path that the Vitae ask us to take in reading the Book of Virgil, it is important to look closely at the ways in which the texts may offer the reader the sensation of closure, without necessarily coercing her into the end-directedness of the linear narrative of progress. Another aspect of Virgil’s ownership, or authority, involves the intertextuality of his works, which has often served to underline the separateness of the three texts by dividing them as imitations of Theocritus, Hesiod and Homer.24 The tripartition of the models serves to reinforce the sense of hierarchy, which helps to form the teleological narrative of the ‘poetic career’, but which also segregates and categorizes the texts into three separate dialogues with three separate predecessors. However, the recognition of Callimachus’ presence throughout the three texts (and not merely

20 21 22

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Putnam (2010a: 36). Parry (1963). On Umbro, see Parry (1963: 67–69). A further example is Silvia’s tame stag wandering in the woods (errabat silvis, Aen. 7.491), soft garlands woven into his antlers (mollibus intexens ornabat cornua sertis, Aen. 7.488), reminiscent of the soft leaves woven into the pliant spears in Ecl. 5.31 (foliis lentas intexere mollibus hastas). On the presence of the Eclogues and Georgics in the Aeneid, see Briggs (1980). See Servius’ preface to the Georgics, and Farrell in this volume.

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in the explicitly Callimachean Eclogues) has helped to create a better picture of the intricacies of Virgil’s intertextualities.25 We can also see the same models echoing throughout, for instance, Catullus 64 and Apollonius in both Eclogue 4 and Aeneid 8.  The Book of Virgil also creates its own intratextualities, for instance in the pattern of allusions which govern Georgics 4 and Aeneid 2 and 9.26 Richard Thomas has shown how the programmatic Eclogue 6 is linked to the ‘proem in the middle’ of Aeneid 727 in a continuous development of the Callimachean intertext, and he has referred to these intratextualities as a ‘network’ that shapes within the texts a sense of the poetic career.28 Both of these intensely allusive passages are also selfreferential and suggest a preoccupation with authorship and originality.29 In her influential study of poetic closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith shows clearly that, as she puts it, ‘the perception of closure is a function of the perception of structure’.30 This, evidently, is what happens when we look back over the Virgilian œuvre, having reached the end of the Aeneid, and are able to perceive, in retrospect, the three texts as forming the canonical triad. But it might also happen when we merely read ‘around’ in the three texts, perusing the Book of Virgil without adhering to the linearity prescribed by the Vitae. So, while we may experience a sense of closure when the textual end or telos coincides with a sense of structural stability or coherence, it is also possible to experience closure outside a chronological or linear sequence. Smith draws a useful comparison with visual art when she says that closure ‘is not always a matter of endings’. She continues by referring to psychologists’ use of the term ‘closure’ to describe forms that are perceived to be clear or coherent: ‘In such forms no particular point is experienced as the last one; and although one can speak of closure in works of spatial art it is obviously inappropriate to speak of it there as a quality of finality or conclusiveness.’31 In other words, it is important to discover where and how closure is perceived, when it is not at the end of a text, or when it does not offer the ideological and narrative stopping point. We are seeking, then, a sense of completeness or coherence that may hold the three texts of Virgil together,

25

26 27 28 29

30 31

On intertextuality in the Georgics, see Farrell (1991) and his contribution to this volume. See Austin (1964: 285–9); Hardie (1994: 142–4). Thomas (1983) and (1986a). See Conte (1992) for ‘proems in the middle’. Thomas (1986a: 71). But see Putnam (2010a: 19–20) for how the proem to Eclogue 6 should not be read as evidence of early career planning by Virgil. Smith (1968: 2). Fowler (1989) offers a useful survey of classicists’ use of Smith’s work. Smith (1968: 2).

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even as we recognize that the teleological narrative we might have relied on to do this is racked with tensions and ruptures and its linearity crinkled with repetition and digression. Smith’s study shows how we may perceive the completeness and integrity of a poem much as we might perceive that of a piece of music or a picture, through the implicit frame which the artistic expression draws around itself: A passage of music frames itself, so to speak, by being more highly organised than anything else in the environment of sound or silence … Similarly, a painting is framed not so much by the piece of wood around its borders as by the borders implied by its own internal structure.32

The Book of Virgil presents itself so ‘framed’ through its aesthetic coherence. By being more ‘Virgilian’ than anything else around them, the three texts form a sense of coherence by being more like each other than they are like anything else. One way in which this likeness, and the sense of continuity, becomes manifest, is in Virgil’s consistent use of the hexameter. Other Roman poets also organize their work to a model of progress, as has now been discussed in the two edited volumes on poetic careers mentioned above.33 But only Virgil chooses to stay with the hexameter throughout, as if to make it quite clear that all three texts are part of his epos, literally his utterance.34 The Appendix Vergiliana may offer another perspective on the Book of Virgil.35 The unity of the three canonical works, and the way in which it is thematized in the epitaph, in the sphragis from the Georgics, and in the ille ego opening shortly to be discussed which can be contrasted usefully with the non-canonical works of the Appendix, described by Peirano as ‘constructing the young Virgil’.36 This ‘new Virgil’, based on the miscellany of works collected in the Appendix, but especially the Culex and the Catalepton, that emerged with the publication of Franz Skutsch’s Aus Vergils Frühzeit (1901), was welcomed by some who were not keen on the rigidity of the canonical triad, which left no room for experiment and failure: From it all there has been born a new Vergil … a Vergil who, like many another tiro in poetry, tried his prentice hand at parody and skit, wrote rakish verses

32 33

34

35 36

Smith (1968: 23–4). See Zetzel (1983b) and compare Sharrock (1994: 1–2). On Horace, see Porter (1987: 3– 13); Arethusa 13 (1980) no. 1, an entire volume devoted to the ancient poetry book; Martelli (2013). See Zetzel (1983b: 101): ‘all three works taken together create a poetic universe united by the mastery of one poetic voice’. See too Laird (2009) on the poet’s voice. On the Appendix see McGill, Chapter 4 in this volume. Peirano (2012: 74).

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Ironically, however, much of the argument in favour of the authenticity of at least some of the poems in the Catalepton, for instance, rests on the rather circular case of the similarities observed between the ‘autobiographical’ poems and material found in the Vitae.38 Equally ironically, the Culex is structured to mirror the Virgilian career, and thus also must depend on the kind of hindsight shown by the early commentators.39 This brings us to our second passage from the Donatan Vita, and its reflection on how Virgilian self-reference, literary autobiography, and the closure of the Book of Virgil might be linked. This is the so-called ille ego opening of the Aeneid which, according to Servius, was excised by Varius (one of the two men entrusted with Virgil’s literary estate after his death) in favour of the now canonical arma virumque:40 Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena carmen et egressus silvis vicina coegi ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono, gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis arma virumque cano … That man am I who, having once played his song upon a slender reed, emerging from the woods compelled neighbouring fields to submit even to the greediest farmer, a work welcome to husbandmen, but now Mars’s bristling Arms and the Man I sing …

In a short summary of the poetic career we see the clear tripartite division, familiar from the epitaph (quoted above), and we see an attempt, however clumsy, to link the three works together in a narrative of poetic creativity. One important effect of this opening is that it links the Aeneid, at its beginning, to the poet’s literary biography, so that the epic grows out of the two previous works, and not, like the Iliad or the Odyssey, out of silence interrupted by divine inspiration.41 The fake proem emphasizes that 37 38 39 40

41

Stuart (1922: 30). Peirano (2012: 81–2). See Most (1987). See, for instance, Austin (1968); contra Henry (1873–92), who condemns arma virumque as ‘turgid and abrupt’ (5–7), and defends ille ego, interestingly because it is more like the openings of Eclogues 4 and 6 (7–10). For recent bibliography, see above p. 227, n. 10. See Nuttall (1992: ch. 1 and 207–8). Putnam (2010a: 18) writes: ‘the arc from ego to cano implies a unity of imagination behind the whole of Virgil’s corpus’.

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in Virgil’s heroic epic, as in the didactic that precedes it, it is the poet who speaks, in his own right and not as an instrument of god.42 The pre-proemium should be read as form of exegesis, commenting on the most striking and original feature of the opening of the Aeneid: the use of the first-person verb cano (‘I sing’). Viewed as an interpretation of cano, the ille ego lines give us a reading of the Aeneid as a part of a continuous Virgilian utterance in keeping with the emphasis on the author’s voice and presence which, as we have seen, characterizes the early commentators’ and biographers’ stance. The ille ego opening is only grammatically possible because of the presence of cano in line 1 of the Aeneid. In that sense it is an act of interpretation, which draws attention to all the other first-person assertions of the poet’s presence that play a huge part in the shaping of the Book of Virgil. In making the literary autobiography the beginning of the Aeneid, the author of the ille ego lines merely formalizes the narrative of creation and authority set up by the strategic positioning of the first-person verb cano. If we discard the fake proem, we can see more clearly how the presence of cano at Aeneid 1.1 belongs to an intratextual sequence of occurrences of first-person forms of that verb, all of them assertions of authority and personal responsibility at strategic or programmatic points. This sequence is another instance of Virgilian ‘unities’, to use Putnam’s word, which link the poet inextricably to his work and which help to unite the works as one.43 In Eclogues 4, 6, and 10 the poet reflects on his poetic ambitions, and on the limitations of his genre. Eclogue 4 opens with canamus, and Eclogue 6 has canerem in the third line, to begin its reworking of Callimachus’ two Aetia prologues (Ecl. 6.3–5, and 6.64–73).44 In the final Eclogue the poet takes his leave of pastoral by referring one last time to his own authorship at 10.70:  haec sat erit, divae, vestrum cecinisse poetam (‘Goddesses, it will be enough for your poet to have sung these’). The first three books of the Georgics open with such assertions:  canere incipiam (‘I will begin to sing’, G.1.5); canam (‘I shall sing’, G. 2.2); canemus (‘we shall sing’, G. 3.1).45 Most prominently, the sphragis that concludes the Georgics is framed by two first-person forms of the verb cano, at its beginning and end: canebam

42

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44 45

Austin (1968: 109) objects to ille ego because the personal voice of didactic is incompatible with heroic epic. See Laird (2009) on the voice of the author. See the discussion of Smith (1968) by Hamon (1975: 496) with a list of such lieux stratégiques, usually boundaries or transitional passages, all of which are as much connected to the idea of closure as the endings of complete texts. See Clausen (1994: 174–7, 179–80, 199–201). The beginning of Book 4 does not feature cano itself but close equivalents: exsequar (2) and dicam (5).

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(‘I have been singing’) referring to the Georgics at 4.559, and cecini (‘I sang’) referring to the Eclogues in the final line. It is clear that this is the passage which has most directly influenced both the fake proem and the epitaph. It signs off the Georgics with a flourish – inserting the poet’s name at 1.564, and citing the first line of the Eclogues in the final line.46 The difference between this passage and the two fakes we have been discussing is that in these final lines of the Georgics there is no hint of the epic to come (this had been announced at the beginning of Georgics 3). The third part of the canonical triad is hinted at only by the way in which Caesar’s achievements and greatness are framed by the poet’s assertion and signature. Before I move on to Virgil’s other endings and to the intratextual arc they form, I  want to draw attention to one of the rare authorial interventions in the Aeneid, which quite explicitly links a sense of closure and authoritative stability to the self-referential mode. In the address to Nisus and Euryalus in Aeneid 9.446–9 the narrator speaks of the power of his poetry, and compares its longevity with that of the Capitoline rock. Virgil’s pride in his creation and his confidence in its power have two close relations, one in Horace Odes 3.30, the other in Ovid Metamorphoses 15.871–9. Both are explicitly self-referential, both tie the permanence and stability of poetry to the physical and political power of Rome, and both are closural passages, variations on the Alexandrian sphragis, and influenced by the sphragis to the Georgics. But Virgil’s only version of the closural signature motif in the Aeneid is linked to his invention of two minor characters, whose tragedy is their failure as heroes of epic. Perhaps it is not altogether surprising, then, that the authorial intervention, for all its apparent confidence in the stability of the Capitoline rock and the power of the Roman empire, reworks, in the qualified assertion of the power of song (si quid mea carmina possunt, ‘if my songs have any power’, 9.446), one of the most pessimistic passages from the Eclogues (9.11–13) in which the power of poetry in the midst of empire is less than certain.47 As strategic points in the Book of Virgil, we must look also at the endings of the three texts, and at the story of closure they tell. All of Virgil’s endings

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On ‘supertextual closure’, especially on the link between Georgics and Eclogues achieved with the sphragis, see Fowler (1989: 82–4). Peirano (2013: 280) illuminates what is going on very well in writing on Virgil’s signature and self-citation as ‘putting the author back into the text’. She points out that at the end of the Georgics Virgil both cites himself (by referring back to Eclogue 1.1) and names himself (Vergilium, G. 4.563): ‘if the name refers the reader to the physical body of the author, self-citation directs attention to his poetic corpus’. On Nisus and Euryalus, see Hardie (1994: 153–5). On the poet’s command over his text, see also Feeney (1993: 184–7).

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tend to look back to the final line of the First Eclogue, which is a version of the beginning of Virgilian poetry with Tityrus’ leisure in the shade (lentus in umbra, 4). Within its 83 lines Eclogue 1 is a microcosm of the entire Eclogue collection. This first poem contains the transformation of shade from a peaceful enclosure or shelter into a menacing darkness that envelops the landscape completely at line 83:  maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae (‘larger now the shadows are falling from the high mountains’). It contains also the destruction of pastoral innocence and the compensation offered by Rome and civilization. In the figure of Meliboeus, the poem contains exile and the end of poetry, at line 77, carmina nulla canam (‘I will sing no more songs’). As a microcosm of the Eclogue book, Eclogue 1 is also a microcosm of the Book of Virgil, which prefigures the development from light to darkness, the loss of pastoral innocence, and the final goal of Roman civilization. Eclogue 1 is the beginning of the end, and the shadows that fall from its closure reach out over the entire corpus of Virgil’s poetry. When we read the last words of the Aeneid, the death of Turnus and his descent sub umbras (‘under the shadows’), the Book of Virgil has ended in darkness, just as in Eclogue 1.  In the final lines of Eclogue 10 evening falls again, this time to end the collection. Tityrus’ shade is now rejected as harmful to both singers and crops, and so the poet demands that singers (and readers) should rise up from its shelter (surgamus, 75). The rise from the humility and the leisure of the shade towards the didactic toil of the Georgics is well prepared for by the farewell in the preceding lines.48 The exhortation surgamus is striking in a closing passage, where we might expect a downwards movement, to illustrate the sense of an ending, as for instance the First Eclogue gives us cadunt as a closural image.49 Rising up implies quite strongly a beginning, leaving behind the past, and in a sense closing it, but at the same time an awareness of the new opening.50 The end of Eclogue 10 shows how easily an end may become a beginning within a larger intratextual structure.51 The didactic poem is not entirely separate because it shares with its humble predecessor the author’s voice. That voice asserts its presence when the sphragis of Georgics 4 reverts to a notion of the shade as a locus amoenus that the end of Eclogue 10 had abandoned. As we shall now see, within the larger structure of the Book of Virgil, the dynamic of closure and continuation tells of a career and the formation of a

48 49 50 51

See Kennedy (1983). On ‘closural allusions’, see Smith (1968: 172–82). Compare the end of Aeneid 2, with surgebat. See the discussion in Nagle (1983). See Hardie (1993: 13) for epic endings that are also beginnings, and Fowler (1989: 82) for ‘supertextual groupings’.

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coherent and mature authorial voice, which may not be entirely committed to the model of progress offered by the hierarchy of genre. The final line of the Aeneid returns to a different and darker umbra: vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras (‘and life fled with a groan, indignant, to the shadows’, 12.952). On a first reading, umbras here must refer to the ghosts of the dead in the Underworld, not to shadows or darkness. But the ramifications of this word are prepared for not only through the development in the Eclogues, but again in the Aeneid itself, and particularly in Aeneid 6. Here umbra is sometimes used to refer to the shades of the departed, the simulacra which populate the Underworld (e.g. 6.401). But Aeneid 6 covers a range of meanings of umbra, using it to denote the darkness of the Underworld, for instance at line 268, ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram (‘obscured they walked, through the darkness in the desolate night’), or at 340, vix multa maestum cognovit in umbra (‘he hardly recognised him, sorrowful, in the thick shadow’). In some instances the distinction between ghosts and darkness is almost impossible to draw, as indeed the ghosts themselves are almost indiscernible to Aeneas’ eye in the murky darkness of the Underworld. Most poignantly, Aeneas sees, or thinks he sees, Dido in the dark woods of the Grieving Fields (per umbras | obscuram, ‘obscured amongst the shades’ or ‘obscured by darkness’, 452–3). The figure of Dido is obscured by darkness, but she is also one of a crowd of other ghosts who fill the woods, so that Aeneas’ difficulty in seeing her depends precisely on the difficulty of distinguishing between shadows and shades. Dido is like Aeneas when he first entered the Underworld with the Sibyl (6.268), but the sense of confusion and of the erosion of difference between darkness and human shades in the later passage is heightened by the absence of an ‘objective’ narrator’s voice, which might help to determine the differences and to separate the umbra of darkness from the umbra of shades perceived by Aeneas.52 But it is at the end of the Georgics, with Orpheus’ descent, that pastoral shade and its darker versions meet and almost become one. First, umbrae are the ghosts, or images of the dead (4.472). Then, when Orpheus loses Eurydice for the second time, at line 501 (prensantem nequiquam umbras, ‘vainly clasping the shadows’), Eurydice’s image becomes one with the darkness which swallows it. After his loss, Orpheus in his endless grief is compared in a simile, borrowed from Penelope’s account of her sleepless nights in the Odyssey, to the nightingale, singing in the shade of a poplar tree at night. This night-time shade is both the locus amoenus of bucolic song and the cold shades of night, which fall at the end of Eclogues 1 and 10. So, the Georgics ends by reworking the 52

Compare Austin (1964: 277) on a similar use of umbra at Aen. 2.768–72.

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development of umbra from song to silence, from light to darkness, and by introducing the new deathly dimension of the shade which will end the Aeneid with Turnus’ descent. Through the development of shade and darkness, the Book of Virgil tells a story which appears to run entirely opposite to the teleology of both the empire and the career progress of its poet. It is significant that Aeneas, at the last moment, hands over the responsibility for his act of closure to Pallas, the dead Arcadian boy. The killing of Turnus is an act driven by memory, and this memory is not merely that of the character Aeneas, but also that of the reader, and of the poet, who twice repeats the name of the Arcadian (Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas | immolat, 12.848–9), just as, near the end of Eclogue 10, he repeats the name of Gallus, who tried and failed to become an Arcadian (vos haec facietis maxima Gallo, | Gallo, Ecl. 10.72–3). Virgil’s last words, sub umbras, recall at the same time the death of an ideal ‘Arcadian’ Italy and the darkness which puts an end to all singing. Sub umbras is both a version of Tityrus’ shelter under the beech tree and of the shadows of the night which end the First Eclogue. Through the intratextual echoing which shapes the Book of Virgil, the final lines of the Aeneid return to the impossible pastoral of the First and the Tenth Eclogues, at the very moment when we might expect the triumph of epic and empire. FURTHER READING On literary careers, Lipking (1981) is still core reading. The introductions to the edited volumes Hardie and Moore (2010) and Cheney and de Armas (2002) are very good for orientation. Farrell (2002) is important reading on classical careers. Putnam (2010a) makes the case for Virgilian unity beautifully. Peirano (2013) is a key item to read on the ille ego opening. Fowler (1989) is still important and resonant on closure in classical literature. Smith (1968) remains key on the details of how poetic closure works.

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Poetry and Power: Virgil’s Poetry in Contemporary Context

When Virgil began to compose his first collection of poems, the Eclogues, in the late 40s bc , the death throes of the long-ailing Roman Republic had already begun; by the time of Virgil’s own death in 19 bc , Rome had come under the control of a de facto ruler, Augustus. Virgil’s response to the political events of his time, and in particular to the profound transformation of the Roman state, forms the central topic of this chapter. Virgil is at first sight an unlikely prospect as a politically engaged writer. As depicted by his ancient biographers he is a retiring, even reclusive character, of a philosophic rather than an active nature, uncomfortable in Rome and eager to leave it for the Greek-accented culture of Naples. By comparison, his fellow poet Horace, who fought at Philippi and who may have been present at Actium, assumes an almost Hemingwayesque aura of bravado. But the ancient Lives also insist on Virgil’s proximity to figures of power throughout his career, from Asinius Pollio to Maecenas and ultimately to Augustus himself, and repeatedly trace connections between those personal contacts and the prominence of contemporary events in Virgil’s poetry. Thus the First Eclogue, in which the shepherd Tityrus relates how he was forced to give up his property but regained it in Rome through the intervention of a godlike youth, was soon read as a poème à clef with Tityrus representing Virgil and the youth Octavian. We are told that the Georgics, which contains in the proem to Book 3 a clear reference to the triple triumph of 29 bc celebrating victory over the forces of Antony and Cleopatra (3.26– 33), was read by Virgil to Octavian on his return to Italy from the East in the summer of that year. Contemporary events figure even more explicitly in the Aeneid: Actium and its aftermath occupy pride of place on the shield of Aeneas (8.671–713), the title ‘Augustus’ appears twice (6.792 and 8.678), and Aeneas’ journey to his father Anchises in the Underworld ends, unexpectedly, with a lament for the loss of Augustus’ nephew Marcellus, who died young in 23 bc (6.868–86). During the composition of the Aeneid the relationship between poet and princeps as presented in the Lives grows ever 243

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closer: Augustus corresponds with Virgil when away from Rome, inquiring after the progress of the epic; he and his sister Octavia hear selected books read by the poet, to Octavia’s acute distress when the death of Marcellus is touched upon;1 and finally it is Augustus who secures the Aeneid’s survival by overruling Virgil’s dying impulse to have the text burned. Disentangling truth from invention in the biographical accounts is ultimately an impossible task, although one that cannot be entirely avoided.2 For present purposes, though, the ancient Lives may be more helpfully viewed as a sort of myth of Virgil, not in the sense of being fictional, but by analogy with the way myth gives narrative expression to certain fundamental beliefs or experiences. In that light, the two aspects of Virgil highlighted in his biographies can be read as pointing to a dichotomy in his work. Virgil’s poetry is indeed remarkable for the degree to which it engages with the political realities of his time but also, it can be argued, for the distance it maintains from those realities, and for what many recent critics have called the consistently ambivalent or multivocal viewpoint which it adopts toward them. That Virgil wrote poetry with political overtones is not in itself cause for surprise; it would have been astonishing had he not done so, given his literary stature and circumstances. But those same factors also help to explain why he chose not to compose straightforward political panegyrics or invectives. Here some broader literary background will be helpful. The traditional Roman attitude toward poetry, as toward most activities practised with distinction by the Greeks, had been one of tolerance coloured by suspicion; for a poet, the strongest defence against the charge of triviality or waste of talent lay in celebrating the achievements of individual Romans and of the Roman people, of which the most illustrious example before Virgil’s time was Ennius’ historical epic, the Annales, written between about 185 and 169. Cicero’s speech In Defence of Archias, delivered in 62 bc , contains the fullest extant statement of the value of such civically oriented poetry. Cicero’s arguments were, as always, shaped by the circumstances of the case 1

2

This episode proved attractive to later artists. See Ingres’ painting in [Figure 20], and Houghton, Chapter 9 in this volume, pp. 164–7. My own tendency is toward scepticism, see above, pp. 44–5. It might be true that the reading of the Georgics to Octavian was spread out over four days (one book per day), and that Maecenas took over from Virgil when the poet’s voice gave out, but such behind-the-scenes details are just the sort that might be devised to satisfy curiosity about a figure so eminent, yet unforthcoming, as Virgil. Ancient literary biography often exploits elements in an author’s text to yield information about the life; it may not be coincidental that in the proem to Georgics 2 Virgil says that he could not encompass all aspects of his subject ‘even if I had a hundred mouths and a hundred tongues, and a voice of iron’ (non, mihi si linguae centum sint oraque centum, | ferrea vox, 2.42–4), followed immediately by an appeal to Maecenas for assistance.

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he was pleading; here his aim was to counteract xenophobic feelings toward a Greek client poet by playing up the value for Rome and Romans of poetry which Archias had written to flatter his patrons, the Luculli. But for that very reason he is likely to have stressed the considerations that would have been most effective in influencing a Roman jury’s opinion. At the time of Cicero’s speech, however, a very different view of the purpose and form of poetry was gaining currency in Rome. Its only surviving early exponent is Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84–54), but Catullus saw himself as one of a circle of writers with shared tastes and aims, ‘the new poets’, as Cicero called them with more than a touch of disdain.3 These poets consciously cultivated the manner of Hellenistic Greek writers, and in particular that of Callimachus (c. 310/305–240), and accordingly strove to produce work of subtle learning and exquisite refinement, claiming to scorn popular approval and to write only for a discriminating elite. While nothing in the pronouncements of Callimachus or Catullus singled out political poetry for disapproval, and it may be coincidental that one of the butts of Catullus’ abuse was the Annales of a certain Volusius,4 the values espoused by the ‘new poets’ would have made the writing of poetry on public themes more challenging and problematic.5 Virgil probably came to Rome shortly after Catullus’ death, and soon entered this modernist literary milieu:6 the first patron figure in Virgil’s poetry, Asinius Pollio, is mentioned in a poem of Catullus as a young man of refined tastes and in the Eclogues (3.86) as the author of ‘new poems’ (nova carmina), and Virgil himself first appeared in the curriculum of a Roman school as a ‘new poet’.7 The influence of neoteric views of poetry is especially strong in the Eclogues, which contains at its mid-point (6.3–5) a near-translation into pastoral terms of a famous passage of Callimachus’ Aetia that rejects epic in favour of slender, fine-spun verse. Virgil asserts his adherence to Callimachean poetic values for what may have been a new purpose, to justify his refusal to celebrate the military victories of a prominent contemporary, Alfenus Varus; he thus declines to take on the sort of commission that Cicero’s Archias had been only too willing to accept. It is worth emphasizing that from the perspective of Virgil’s early

3 4 5

6 7

Clausen (1986). Poems 36, 95. On the latter, see Courtney (1993: 230–1). It is often said that Callimachus rejected epic-style treatment of political themes, but Cameron (1995) argues that there is little evidence of such poetry from the period immediately preceding Callimachus, and that his criticism was based on judgements of quality rather than genre or topic. Clausen (1987: 1–14). See above, p. 43.

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poetry the writing of the Aeneid – which in hindsight looks so inevitable – would have seemed unlikely if not impossible.8 Catullus’ poetry voiced mocking contempt for contemporary politics and for its leading figures, Julius Caesar and Pompey.9 But Catullus’ attitude may not have been shared by other members of his circle,10 and as the political rivalry of the 50s devolved into open conflict in the next decade, even poets of the new school would have found it difficult to preserve a nonpartisan stance. The effects of these changed conditions can be seen, if dimly, in the work of two prominent writers of the 40s spoken of with admiration in the Eclogues, L. Varius Rufus and Cornelius Gallus. Gallus figures in Eclogue 6 as a writer of learned poetry in the Alexandrian mode and in Eclogue 10 as a love poet mourning the loss of his mistress Lycoris to a soldier rival. On the basis of those appearances – which until recently comprised most of the evidence for the content of Gallus’ poetry – Gallus might seem to have adopted a detached or escapist attitude toward contemporary politics, prefiguring the pose of non-involvement assumed by his elegiac successors Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid in the years after Actium. That impression was proven incorrect, however, when a papyrus containing several previously unknown elegiac verses plausibly attributed to Gallus was published in 1979.11 Alongside reproaches to Lycoris and satisfied reflections on his poetry, the new lines contain a four-line epigram praising a ‘Caesar’ as ‘the greatest part of Roman history’ and predicting his triumphal return from a campaign; the addressee is probably Julius Caesar and the campaign in question the Parthian expedition that Caesar was planning at the time of his assassination. The panegyrical tone appears free of irony (though Gallus’ words were echoed in an ironic spirit by Propertius); Gallus’ persona as a love poet apparently did not prevent him from expressing Caesarian sentiments.12 8 9

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Thomas (1986a). So, for example, in poem 29, which ends ‘father-in-law [Caesar] and son-in-law [Pompey], you have ruined everything’ (socer generque, perdidistis omnia). One ‘new poet’, Furius Bibaculus, composed an epic in eleven books on Caesar’s Gallic campaigns. See Courtney (1993: 199), who comments, ‘we are not to suppose that the “new” poets formed or maintained a united political front’. Anderson, Parsons, and Nisbet (1979). There are other indications that erotic poetry, which in the 20s bc became almost the emblem of an apolitical stance, was previously not thought to be incompatible with political engagement or politically oriented poetry. One of Julius Caesar’s assassins, Cassius of Parma, a supporter of Antony executed after Actium, was the author of poems that Horace teasingly suggests Tibullus might try to surpass (Epist. 1.4.3), probably therefore love elegies. Virgil’s modest characterization of himself vis-à-vis Varius and Cinna as ‘a goose honking amid melodious swans’ (videor … argutos inter strepere anser olores, Ecl. 9.35–6) was explained by Servius as a jibe at a poet named Anser, an adherent and panegyrist of Antony; as Clausen (1994: ad loc.) notes, what

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Gallus’ poetic activity may not have extended much beyond the 40s. He drops out of sight for most of the next decade, reappearing as one of Octavian’s lieutenants in the run-up to Actium; in a brilliant but brief tenure as the first Prefect of Egypt, his self-aggrandizing incurred the displeasure of Augustus and he died by his own hand in 27 or 26. By contrast, Varius had a long and untroubled career as a supporter of Octavian, and lived to be one of Virgil’s literary executors (thus, in all likelihood, the person responsible for the text of the Aeneid in its published form). In the 20s he was highly esteemed as an epic poet and tragedian (his Thyestes was given a lavish production as part of Octavian’s victory celebrations in 29), but he had won recognition a generation earlier with a poem intriguingly entitled De morte, to which Virgil paid the high tribute of allusion or direct quotation in all three of his works. In it Varius seems to have combined an Epicurean denunciation of the fear of death with topical polemic, conspicuously against Antony; in both places where Virgil echoes such passages he characteristically mutes the ad hominem aspect of the description and focuses on moral failing rather than on political invective.13 Against this background the distinctness of Virgil’s handling of political issues becomes all the more striking. Each of his works engages with contemporary political reality in a serious and sustained fashion, rather than constructing a poetic world that excludes or trivializes that reality. Yet each also finds a way to prevent Virgil or his poetry from becoming simply a vehicle of political comment.14 Avoiding the more blatant forms of partisan poetry was surely in part a matter of aesthetic judgement, a means of escaping the poetic limitations of panegyric or invective. But a Callimachean aversion to bombast and banality cannot have been the only motive; Callimachus was, after all, a court poet, and Virgil would have been familiar with his panegyrics on Ptolemy and his wife Berenice. Virgil’s early association with Asinius Pollio may have had some relevance:  Pollio’s political allegiances

13

14

might be suspected of being scholiastic invention is supported by Ovid’s reference to Anser, in company with Cinna, as an author of love poetry (Tr. 2.435), and by Cicero’s mention in the Philippics of ‘Ansers’ (Anseres, 13.11), perhaps brothers, as allies of Antony. Varro of Atax wrote both erotic elegies and an epic treatment of Caesar’s campaign against the Sequani, but probably at different times of his life. See Courtney (1993: 236–7). G. 2.505ff and Aen. 6.621ff are connected to lines of Varius by Macrobius, Sat. 6.1.39–40. Virgil’s closest analogue in this respect is Horace, the other major poet traditionally viewed as an ‘Augustan’ and the other principal member of the circle of Maecenas. One wonders whether their proximity to Augustus gave them added stimulus to devise this kind of artistic strategy. On Horace’s tactics for preserving poetic independence see, for example, Lyne (1995), Oliensis (1998), Thomas (2012).

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were always tempered by a strong sense of his own importance, and in the final struggle between Antony and Octavian he declared neutrality, reportedly describing himself as the prize that would go to the victor.15 But any influence by Pollio on Virgil’s political outlook would only help to account for the Eclogues (and even there only in part), whereas the treatment of political themes in his work shows a remarkable consistency. In the end, allowance must be made for an authorial cast of mind, one that not only shies away from reductively simple attitudes but gravitates toward antithesis and contradiction as a preferred mode of expression.16 The Eclogues are paradoxically both the work in which contemporary events are most pervasively and overtly present and the one in which they are most thoroughly transformed to subordinate them to a poetic context.17 The poems allude to the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 (5)  and his deification the following year (9), to the Italian land confiscations of 41 following the defeat of Caesar’s assassins at Philippi (1, 9), to the consulship of Pollio and the pact of Brundisium between Antony and Octavian in 40 (4), and probably to Pollio’s Illyrian triumph of 39 (8). Yet each of those events is translated into pastoral terms that soften and distance their topical character, and which defeat efforts to see direct equivalents between pastoral figures and historic persons (which is not to say that such efforts were not made by Virgil’s ancient readers).18 The Daphnis whose death is lamented in Eclogue 5 is described in terms that evoke Julius Caesar, but Daphnis is not simply Caesar by another name. Even the Roman contemporaries mentioned by name – Pollio, Varus, Cinna, Varius, above all Gallus – are drawn into the bucolic context and viewed according to its values. One result of this carefully distanced approach is that nothing as clearcut as a political stance can be made out. The poet’s Caesarian allegiance is obvious, but after Philippi that would hardly have been controversial. More noteworthy is the absence of any expression of partisan adherence to Octavian or Antony; the opening Eclogue suggests gratitude and devotion

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Velleius Paterculus 2.86.3. On Virgil’s use of contradiction as an artistic strategy, with specific reference to the Aeneid, see Conte (2007: 150–69). See Martindale above, esp. p. 186: ‘the [Eclogues] do not imitate politics; instead politics are inscribed within poetry that has become its own concern’. The relationship of the Eclogues to political events would become even more oblique on the later dating initiated by Bowersock (1971), with reference to Eclogue 8, and elaborated by Clausen (1972) and (1994), which places their composition in 38–35 rather than 42–40/39, but that view has not won wide acceptance. See, most recently, Cucchiarelli (2012: 15 n. 2).

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to Octavian in the guise of the beneficent iuvenis (Ecl. 1.42),19 and its place at the head of the book hints at the transition Virgil had made during its composition from the sphere of Asinius Pollio (which might have entailed at least qualified support for Antony) to that of Octavian, but nothing is said in disparagement of the other. Instead the book’s clearest political statement  – itself far from explicit  – is the utopian vision of the Fourth Eclogue, embodying the hopes produced by the agreement between Antony and Octavian that Pollio had helped to bring about. Those hopes were soon disappointed, and even if the Eclogues were published as a collection as early as 39, it must have been already apparent that the peace between the two dominant triumvirs was fragile. Virgil allows the optimistic vision of Eclogue 4 to stand, but it is qualified by its position within the book, which is framed by poems (1 and 9) relating to an earlier and less happy state of affairs: the displacement of farmers in northern Italy to accommodate the soldiers of Antony and Octavian after Philippi. Virgil’s treatment of this episode illustrates his capacity for a multivocal response to complex situations. In both poems misfortune falls unevenly and with no clear relation to merit:  Tityrus in Eclogue 1 and Lycidas in Eclogue 9 are allowed to continue their accustomed lives, Tityrus after a successful appeal in Rome and Lycidas, apparently, through sheer luck; on the other hand, their neighbours Meliboeus (Eclogue 1)  and Moeris and Menalcas (Eclogue 9) are forcibly evicted, and not even the poetry of Menalcas can stave off disaster.20 In each case Virgil evokes sympathy for the losers – more so, arguably, than for the somewhat complacent survivors. The placement of the two poems also allows for more than one response from the reader. The mood of Eclogue 9 is noticeably darker than that of Eclogue 1, and its position might suggest that it is the poet’s despairing last word on this theme; but it would be equally possible to conclude that the gloomy tone of Eclogue 9 is offset by the partial optimism of Eclogue 1, and that the godlike young man in Rome offers some reassurance against the feeling that blind chance rules (fors omnia versat, Ecl. 9.5). The absence of a linear ‘plot’ in

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The same term is used explicitly of Octavian at the end of the first Georgic (1.500). Octavian’s youth (he was nineteen when Julius Caesar was killed) was for some time his salient characteristic. In Ecl. 9.10–29 the thought that poetry is powerless in a time of war corresponds to the near-breakdown of Virgil’s own pastoral framework when Mantua and Cremona are mentioned. This self-referential moment does not imply that Menalcas is ‘really’ Virgil, but that through Menalcas Virgil explores the place of his own poetry in relation to political realities. (It is relevant that in return for help in retaining his land, Menalcas promises Varus the kind of praise that Virgil declines to provide in Eclogue 6.)

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the Eclogues permits both readings to coexist and to affect each other, a structurally sustained tension with counterparts in Virgil’s later work.21 If writing a history of the civil wars from the perspective of the 20s was to walk on ashes with fire still smouldering beneath them, as Horace wrote in an ode to Pollio (2.1), then engaged in just such a task, the challenge Virgil faced in writing the Georgics was still more daunting. The poem occupied him for most of the 30s, years of almost constant strife in which the enmity between Antony and Octavian grew ever more embittered and finally took the form of declared war. If contemporary events were to be touched upon at all, a non-partisan position was no longer possible; and as the dedication of the poem shows, Virgil was now firmly in the circle of Maecenas, and thus a de facto adherent of Octavian. Furthermore, while the external world was becoming harder to accommodate, the genre of this poem offered no builtin method of gaining distance from it. In the Eclogues, as later in the Aeneid, the generic framework is predominantly Greek, and therefore provides a setting for Roman material that is itself transformative and distancing. In the Georgics, despite references to Hesiod as the didactic role model and the more pervasive Callimachean-Hellenistic flavour of the writing, the Greek element is much less prominent at the generic level, partly because of the proximity of Lucretius as a Roman predecessor; and since the didactic form requires the content of the poem to be relevant to actual needs, it excludes the sort of removal from the present offered by bucolic or epic. At the level of explicit comment, Virgil meets those challenges by turning away from the recent past:  the poem says nothing specific about events between the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s assassination and the ultimate victory of Octavian. The counterpart to that reticence is an openly panegyrical attitude to Octavian, who is addressed at key points in terms redolent of Hellenistic court poetry (and which are indeed influenced by Callimachus’ praises of Ptolemy and Berenice in the Aetia): he is invoked as a god-to-be in the opening proem (1.24–42) and in the framing passage that ends Book 1 (1.498–9), as the occupant of a temple in the proem to Book 3 (3.16) and as a triumphing victor in the concluding envoi (4.560–2).22 In the latter passages the emphasis falls on victories over foreign opponents, an early example of the Augustan tendency to treat Octavian’s campaign against 21

22

Horace’s Epodes, a collection of seventeen poems published c. 30, creates a similar effect by the placement of poems on the Civil War: poems 1 and 9 are set at the time of Actium, and the latter looks forward to celebrating Octavian’s victory, while 7 and 16 express despair at the continuation of civil conflict. The structural place occupied by Octavian is alone sufficient to disprove the story transmitted by Servius that the fourth book originally ended with a panegyric to Cornelius Gallus, which Virgil replaced with the Aristaeus episode after Gallus’ disgrace.

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Antony and Cleopatra as a struggle between Rome and Egypt rather than as part of a civil conflict. It might appear that Virgil had abandoned the delicate ambiguity of the Eclogues for a much more direct and committed attitude of support for Octavian, but that conclusion takes account of only one aspect of the connection between poem and setting. The Georgics also contains a more implicit and comprehensive mode of comment: in a way that looks forward to the Aeneid, the entire poem can be read as a troubled reflection on its historical context. Even in the framing passages of Book 1, where Octavian is spoken of as a god-to-be, the mood is coloured by uncertainty. In the proem, the ironic indecision which Virgil affects about the precise divine role Octavian will play can be understood as a metaphor for the political situation in the years immediately after Actium, in which it was obvious that Octavian was now the most powerful figure in the state but not yet clear how he would choose to exercise that power. When the notion of Octavian as incipient divinity reappears at the end of the book, it is given an overtly pessimistic gloss. It was thought that in the early days of the world, the gods had mingled freely with mortals, until the growing corruption of human behaviour had driven them in disgust to the heavens. Virgil implies that Octavian, like his fellow deities, may not be able to endure Rome in its present depraved condition. In its professedly didactic passages as well, the Georgics can be seen to respond to contemporary events. The choice of agriculture as a subject offered a poetic setting at once closer to the real world of Italy than the Arcadian landscape of the Eclogues and also more remote from it, since connections made at this level are metaphorical rather than literal. (There is no reason to believe that the topic of the poem was imposed on Virgil by Maecenas to generate support for Octavian’s agricultural policy,23 but even if Maecenas encouraged the project, Virgil’s execution of it was his own.) In this context the most interesting feature of Virgil’s treatment is the extreme contrast built into his depiction of the farmer’s world, which at times appears to be one of spontaneous abundance (e.g. G. 2.458–60, 500– 1) and at others one of unremitting and potentially futile toil (e.g. G. 1.118– 59). The tension between those views remains characteristically unresolved, but the positive elements in the poem are often muted and qualified, while the negative elements are darker than anything Virgil had written before. The gloom generated by the poem’s grimmer passages may reflect the despair over the apparently endless cycle of bloodshed that surfaces elsewhere in these years, for example, in Horace’s Epodes 7 and 16. The latter poem, 23

White (1993: 135–6).

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probably Horace’s disillusioned response to the Fourth Eclogue, places the Golden Age not in Rome but at the ends of the earth.24 Much in the Georgics can be understood as Virgil’s own rewriting of that optimistic vision in the light of bitter experience. In the proem to Georgics 3, Virgil seems to anticipate writing the sort of epic he had refused to compose at the time of the Eclogues, a poem centred on Octavian (in medio mihi Caesar erit, 3.16) and celebrating his victories, with glances back at his legendary Trojan ancestors (3.34–6). The Aeneid fulfilled this promise in a complex and unexpected way. At one level, the poem Virgil actually wrote might seem to be the mirror image of the one he had forecast, an epic focused on the Trojan hero Aeneas and with ‘Caesar’ (in his enhanced position as Augustus) occupying the centre only in the literal sense that one of his explicit appearances occurs near the mid-point of the poem (Aen. 6.791–805). But at another level, the Aeneid more completely carries out the promise made in the Georgics, since the entire poem constitutes an oblique reflection on the great political fact of its time, the creation of the Augustan Principate. The oblique angle of that reflection is primarily secured through the epic’s intricate temporal perspective. The action of the poem is set in the heroic past but is narrated from the viewpoint of the present; in addition, at three points a prophetic vision reveals events that lie far in Aeneas’ future but which belonged to the past or present for Virgil’s audience (Aen. 1.257–96; 6.756–854; 8.626–728). One effect of this interplay of temporal planes is to permit connections to be made between the heroic and the Augustan spheres. Thus the protagonist Aeneas, a youthful hero chosen by the gods to assume the leadership of a people facing ruin, both prefigures his descendant Augustus and confers legitimacy on the position of pre-eminence he had recently acquired in the Roman state. More specific links are suggested in the prophetic passages just mentioned: thus, for example, the climactic place given to Augustus in the parade of republican heroes in the Underworld is the poetic counterpart to the Augustan claim that the Principate had brought about the restoration and fulfilment of the Republic. In this instance Virgil can be said to have fashioned a literary myth to support the political myth of the Principate. These moments of prophecy, however, also illustrate a technique which Virgil employs to incorporate an Augustan outlook without making it appear simply his own. In all three episodes the future is foretold by other voices or seen through other eyes: Jupiter, Anchises, Vulcan. One result, to be sure, 24

Most scholars believe that Virgil’s poem predates Horace’s. For the opposite view, see Clausen (1994: 17–54).

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is to invest the predictions with greater authority: Jupiter as a prophet of peace and unlimited empire carries far more weight than Virgil himself. But another consequence is that these explicitly Augustan passages are marked out as sharing a distinctive outlook and mode of presentation, which are in some respects at odds with those of the poem proper. This effect is most evident in the depiction of Roman history on Vulcan’s shield, which displays the reductive approach typical of a commissioned work of state art.25 It is also significant that all three predictions have a hortatory function within the narrative, being directly or indirectly meant to shore up Aeneas’ confidence in the ultimate success of his mission. That rhetorical purpose helps to account for the partial and selective nature of these visions, which might appear merely propagandistic outside their poetic context.26 In a similar way, the integrity of the heroic narrative and its characters prevents the poem from becoming a straightforward allegory. However strongly Aeneas may at times be assimilated to Augustus, he never becomes simply his heroic equivalent. Virgil therefore remains free to imply connections between them that are more effective for being left implicit. For example, Aeneas’ affair with Dido, in which (as it appears from the divine perspective) he abandons his obligations to his people and subjects himself shamefully to a foreign queen, would inevitably remind some readers of Antony’s involvement with Cleopatra. One might say (in blunter terms than Virgil’s) that Aeneas is tempted to play the part of a reckless Antony, but is at last made to see that his destiny is as a dutiful Octavian.27 Aeneas’ status as an independent character and not just a reflection of his descendant also allows for complex treatment of their shared qualities. Thus Aeneas’ salient virtue, the respect for duty and authority denoted by the term pietas, corresponds to Octavian’s vaunted devotion to his adoptive father Julius; but as we will see, Virgil explores the workings of pietas in ways far removed from the sloganeering of political discourse. A multiple perspective also operates at the larger level of plot, particularly in books 7–12, which, although less familiar to modern readers, were designated by Virgil himself as the weightier half of the poem (maius opus 25

26 27

For example, it is the fullest surviving example of the slanted presentation of Actium as a contest between Rome and Egypt. On the prophetic passages, see also Zetzel below (pp. 271–6), who places more weight than I might do on signs of contradiction or undercutting. See also Gurval (1995). See O’Hara (1990). A parallel can also be suggested between the aspects of Aeneas that have left many readers cold and Octavian’s notorious want of spontaneous feeling – ‘a cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition’, in Gibbons’ phrase (1853: i .94). Whether or not he was aware of the potential comparison, Virgil takes pains to show that Aeneas does not lack courage or feeling but has learned the necessity of self-control.

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moveo, Aen. 7.45). The war between the Trojans and the Latins is explicitly presented in a Homeric light as Virgil’s counterpart to the Iliad, a re-enactment of the Trojan War in which the outcome is reversed and the Trojans are destined to prevail.28 But since the combatants are in future to form a single people, and since the war divides the inhabitants of Italy into opposing camps, the conflict is also portrayed in terms that evoke Rome’s civil wars and imply Virgil’s reflections on that conflict. Those reflections are remarkable for the complete absence of triumphal emotions. Instead the poem is permeated by revulsion at a war that should never have happened, whose cause is placed outside the human sphere and located in the implacable and unreasoning hostility of Juno to the Trojans.29 The losses on both sides, especially of the young, are treated with a sympathy more overtly poignant than the pathos of Homer. Aeneas himself participates to a disturbing degree in the hatred generated by the fighting. When Pallas, a young ally for whom he has assumed quasi-parental responsibility, is killed by the enemy leader Turnus, Aeneas responds with inhuman savagery, collecting captives to be offered as living victims on Pallas’ funeral pyre (Aen. 10.517–20). (Octavian was rumoured to have sacrificed human victims to the shades of Julius Caesar after the siege of Perusia, which might lend the incident an additional chilling resonance.)30 Finally, the last image of the poem is not a victory celebration or peace agreement but the furious rage in which Aeneas exacts vengeance for Pallas’ death, killing Turnus as he kneels before him wounded and pleading for mercy. The compassion with which Virgil depicts the war’s human cost has long been recognized; it has indeed become a staple element in the image of Virgil as the poet of refined melancholy, of ‘the infinite pity of things’. The phrase is that of J. W. Mackail, a prolific Latinist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century whose edition of the Aeneid was published in 1930.31 Mackail’s note on the last lines of the poem is also worth quoting: ‘thus in the final cadence of the Aeneid … Virgil’s perpetual sense of pity is touched with indignation that the Powers who control life should themselves be

28 29

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31

See Tarrant (2012: 5–8). A similar explanation of the civil war as the product of divine hostility to Rome appears in Horace’s ode to Pollio (2.1), arguably his most powerful treatment of the subject. In Cicero’s references to fate and divine compulsion as the causes of war between Caesar and Pompey (Marc. 13; Lig. 17) the exculpatory function of such arguments is more obvious. Suet. Aug. 15, Dio 48.14.4. Some historians do not credit the story (for example Wardle (2014: 137–8); if it is not true, we cannot tell whether it was already circulating in Virgil’s time. Mackail (1930: xxxii).

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so pitiless, and that their purposes are only wrought out through so much human suffering’.32 Since the 1950s, however, that strain in Virgilian criticism has taken on a darker hue. Instead of a bitter but ultimately successful struggle to found a city and an empire, Virgil’s view of Roman history has been interpreted (in the memorable words of Wendell Clausen) as ‘a long Pyrrhic victory of the human spirit’,33 in which the cost is so high and the means so dreadful that success loses its value. Though sometimes loosely described as ‘antiAugustan’, this reading of the poem does not ascribe to Virgil any form of political opposition. Rather what is attributed to him is a sense of quiet despair, a private lack of faith in the positive vision of Rome and its future that the epic’s public voice seems to project.34 In 1976 Ralph Johnson christened this critical position ‘pessimism’, and while the term is disclaimed by many of the scholars to whom it has been applied, in the following decades debate over the import of the Aeneid (and to an increasing degree, that of the Georgics) has often been characterized as an argument between optimists and pessimists.35 While that discussion no longer occupies the central position in criticism of the Aeneid it once held, understanding its consequences is still useful in defining the poem’s relation to its Augustan context. Thanks to the eloquence with which the pessimist viewpoint has been stated, it is no longer possible to read the Aeneid as straightforwardly panegyrical – though a full survey of critical responses would show that it has in fact rarely been so read. At the same time, pessimism in the true sense of the word seems a partial and one-sided reaction to the poem. A more adequate description of Virgil’s outlook might be ‘ambivalence’,36 but only if that term is understood neither as a gentler name for pessimism nor as a diluted compromise between strong positions, but as a powerful and continuing tension of opposites. In the poem’s final scene, for example, a focus of sharp disagreement in recent criticism, it would be reductive to insist either that Aeneas is justified in killing Turnus or that his action violates his father’s precept to ‘spare 32 33 34

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Mackail (1930: 511). Clausen (1964: 146). Thus the ‘two voices’ distinguished by Parry (1963) and the ‘further voices’ of Lyne (1987). Johnson (1976: 1–12). Johnson further qualified the opposing views as ‘the essentially optimistic European school’ (9) and ‘the somewhat pessimistic Harvard school’ (11). The link between pessimism and Harvard proves to be largely coincidental, as Clausen (2000: 313–14) observed, but it is true that most European critics of Virgil have taken an optimistic view of the Aeneid and regarded the pessimist interpretation as something of a curiosity. Thomas (1990).

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the conquered’ and is thus to be condemned.37 In avenging Pallas’ death, Aeneas acts in response to his deepest loyalties, yet the deed is presented as an irruption of fury (Aeneas is ‘ablaze with furious rage and terrible in his anger’, furiis accensus et ira | terribilis, 12.946–7) and a perversion of piety (he claims that Turnus is being ‘immolated’ by the dead Pallas).38 One may conclude that Aeneas did what was required of him (and in that sense, did the ‘right’ thing), but still be appalled at the fact that it was required and at the effect of doing the ‘right’ thing on the one who does it. In so far as Aeneas brings to mind Augustus here, Virgil’s text can be read as a reflection in advance on Augustus’ words in the Res gestae: ‘those who slaughtered my parent I drove into exile, avenging their crime through lawfully established tribunals; and afterwards, when they waged war against the republic, I  defeated them twice in battle’.39 The motive for revenge is the same for both, the pressing claims of pietas. But where the imperial propagandist views crime, bloodshed, and violation of piety as exclusively the work of the enemy, while describing his own actions in antiseptically unemotive terms, such comforting polarities are denied the actors of Virgil’s poem. In philosophical terms – and Virgil was a serious student of philosophy, though not an adherent of any single school – Virgil’s viewpoint combines an Aristotelian acceptance of anger as justified in certain conditions with a Stoic’s horror of the emotion itself and of its effects on the person who acts under its influence.40 Both views can coexist because they are situated within a Platonic conception of human nature as intrinsically divided, a view explicitly set forth by Anchises in speaking to his son in the Underworld: igneus est ollis vigor et caelestis origo seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra. hinc metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque, neque auras dispiciunt clausae tenebris et carcere caeco.41 Fiery energy is in these seeds, their source is heavenly; but they are dulled by harmful bodies, blunted

37 38

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40 41

For a fuller discussion of the scene, see Tarrant (2012: 16–30). The interpretation of these lines is highly controversial. For a judicious study, see Horsfall (2000b: 192–216); for a focus on individual words and phrases, see Tarrant (2012: 337–40). Augustus RG 2: qui parentem meum trucidaverunt [or necaverunt], eos in exilium expuli iudiciis legitimis ultus eorum facinus, et postea bellum inferentis rei publicae vici bis acie. Galinsky (1988) interprets Aeneas’ anger in more strictly Aristotelian terms. Aen. 6.730–4. For another view of the ending in a philosophical perspective, see Braund below, pp. 290–3.

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Poetry and Power by their own earthly limbs, their mortal members. Because of these, they fear and long, and sorrow and joy, they do not see the light of heaven; they are dungeoned in their darkness and blind prison. (trans. A. Mandelbaum)

This doctrine of moral entropy in which the stirrings of the spirit are forever hampered, but not extinguished, by the downward pull of the flesh provides the context for the ambivalent view of human action in Virgil’s poem. For creatures so constituted, all striving will be thwarted to some degree, all victories partial and compromised – though not necessarily Pyrrhic. Even an ambivalent Virgil is so much at odds with his traditional image as a staunch Augustan as to prompt suspicion:  are we not recasting the poet in a form more congenial to modern tastes, specifically to liberal views of the proper attitude of a writer toward autocratic power? The question is legitimate and useful, since attempting to answer it shows that the picture of Virgil as Augustan poet is itself shaped by historically conditioned assumptions, ancient and modern. The most fundamental of those assumptions arises from the circumstantial evidence provided by the poet’s biography. Virgil belonged to the circle of Maecenas; he was also said to have been on close terms with Augustus, and it was reported that on the poet’s death Augustus himself took a hand in bringing out his magnum opus. Whether the latter two items are genuine or invented, they belong to an early image of the poet that coheres seamlessly with the fact that both the Georgics and the Aeneid openly praise the princeps. The poet’s life and his work can thus be construed in a mutually reinforcing way as straightforwardly ‘Augustan’.42 (The lack of nuance in this view is typical of most recorded ancient – and especially Roman – statements about literary texts, which tend to focus on their literal sense and rarely show awareness of irony or of multiple meanings.) Though found in ancient sources, that view represents a misreading of historical conditions in several ways. In particular, the depiction of Virgil as a ‘client’ of Maecenas or Augustus, and as such compelled to say only what accorded with their wishes and interests, employs a model of patronage relationships too simplistic for his situation.43 No doubt when Archias celebrated the victories 42

43

Something similar has happened in the case of Lucan: since he is known to have taken part in a conspiracy against Nero, his epic on the Civil War has often been read as the poetic counterpart of his political activism, and less notice has been taken of elements in the poem that do not fit that interpretation. See above, p. 53. See White (1993), who argues in general terms against the ‘mouthpiece’ view of relations between patrons and writers.

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of Lucullus, he thought mainly (or only) about pleasing his honorand. That style of patron-writer relationship was not dead in the 20s – the attitude of the elegist Tibullus to M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus has a good deal in common with it  – but Maecenas was a literary patron of a different kind. Though hardly averse to flattery from the poets he cultivated, he subordinated his own praise to that of Octavian/Augustus and served a mediating function between poets and the princeps; the effect (and presumably the intention) was to minimize direct pressure and to allow writers the freedom to express their support in ways congenial to them.44 In addition, Augustus wished to be celebrated only by the best writers,45 and both he and Maecenas knew that such talents did not respond well to outright dictation. Maecenas even seems to have been willing to take a chance on politically unsympathetic writers if they showed sufficient promise, as he did in the case of Propertius, the most gifted poet of his generation after Virgil and Horace. Maecenas’ favour utterly failed to turn Propertius into an Augustan panegyrist, but the poet does not appear to have suffered for his nonconformity. Beginning with Propertius, other Roman poets also played a part in the presentation of Virgil as the quintessential Augustan writer. Their statements, however, must be treated with even greater reserve than those of the biographers; poets do not aim at objectivity in portraying eminent predecessors, but react to them as they impinge on their own work, and most of the poets in question found it useful to construct Virgil in an Augustan mould in order to measure their distance from him. So, for example, to the extent that Ovid and Lucan create an ‘anti-Aeneid’ in the Metamorphoses and the Bellum civile, they do so by isolating those aspects of Virgil’s poem – its heroizing and celebratory elements  – that are most at odds with their own outlook. At the same time, poets are likely to be more perceptive than other readers. It is therefore significant that Neronian and Flavian poets seem to have responded with particular intensity to many of the features of the Aeneid singled out by ‘pessimist’ critics.46 Finally, an attempt to view the Aeneid in its historical context would note the fact that ambivalence of the sort that has been found in the poem is hardly absent from other authors of the 20s, and could even be claimed as one of the distinguishing features of that decade. Writing some years after Actium, Livy begins his massive history with strikingly negative remarks about the present, a time in which ‘we can bear neither our vices nor their

44 45 46

Griffin (1984). Suet. DA 89. See above, pp. 57–8.

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remedies’ (haec tempora quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus, Praef. 9).47 The tone recalls the end of Georgics 1, with its fear that Rome may have become too deeply corrupted for the process to be reversed. That fear recurs in the last of Horace’s so-called ‘Roman Odes’, part of the collection of lyric poetry he published in 23, in which reflections on the corrupt state of contemporary morality lead to a chilling final outburst: aetas parentum peior avis tulit nos nequiores, mox daturos progeniem vitiosiorem.48 our fathers’ generation, worse than that of their fathers, has produced us who are more wicked still, and we are doomed to bring forth offspring yet more infected with vice.

These passages fix on the theme, strangely appealing to Roman writers, of debased private morality and consequent civic ruin. More overtly political comments on the price Romans had paid for an end to civil war are not to be found, and may only have been possible in a less explicit medium, such as a mythological epic.49 But what is common is a sense of precariousness and uncertainty, a sense that while one could hope the future would be better, one could not yet feel confident that it would be so. To see signs in Virgil of an ambivalent or pessimistic outlook is thus not to read him anachronistically. In fact, while explicit interpretation of the Aeneid along those lines is a relatively recent development, the aspects of the poem to which an ambivalent or pessimist reading responds can claim to be the most basic and permanent, having their origins in the poem’s conception of human nature. An optimistic or Augustan view, on the other hand, highlights elements of the poem that ultimately depend on a contingent set of historical circumstances, the hopes for renewal and stability raised by the ascent of Augustus. In that light, what calls for explanation is less the fact that critics in the middle and late twentieth century began to articulate a pessimistic view of the Aeneid than that an optimistic consensus prevailed for so long.50 47 48

49

50

On instability persisting late into the 20s, see Syme (1959: 42–3, 49). C. 3.6.46–8. Horace’s second and last collection of lyrics, which appeared ten years later, conveys a far more settled and satisfied view of the present. Or perhaps a tragedy. Varius’ Thyestes, now lost, was regarded by later critics as one of the crowning achievements of Latin tragedy; one would give much to know how Varius treated the archetypal myth of fraternal enmity in a play staged in 29 to celebrate Octavian’s triumph over Antony and Cleopatra. Kallendorf (2007a) argues for a tradition of pessimistic readings extending over much of the early modern period.

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Since Virgil’s optimism is linked to his pride in Rome and his hopes for its future, a positive view of the Aeneid’s import requires a reader who either shares that pride or for whom the concept of Rome carries an equivalently powerful value. In other words, just as the grounds for hope within the poem are historically contingent, so too is the perspective needed to read the poem optimistically. Those conditions were most easily met as long as the Roman Empire itself was still in being, but even after the empire as a political entity had long ceased to exist, Virgil’s vision of Rome under Augustus maintained its hold on the European imagination as a model for the beneficent exercise of power – whether the power in question was that of Charlemagne, the Renaissance papacy, Victorian Britain, or Mussolini’s Italy.51 As recently as the 1960s, in a poem composed to mark the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, Robert Frost could hail the new administration as presaging a ‘next Augustan age’, hopefully described as ‘a golden age of poetry and power’.52 But although Virgil was able to endow Rome and Augustus with a remarkably resilient metaphorical value, the Augustan Principate remains a historical event, and differing assessments of it in historical terms must sooner or later affect reactions to its treatment by Virgil. In particular, the more positively Augustus is judged, the easier it becomes to construe the Aeneid as a celebration of his rule. But if Augustus was in fact nothing more than an especially crafty tyrant (as Gibbon, and to some extent Tacitus, had viewed him), Virgil’s praise of his regime becomes an embarrassment: either the praise is genuine, and damaging to the credit of the poet, or it is feigned to conceal Virgil’s true attitude of disgust or opposition. Both conclusions were drawn, and explicitly in those terms, well before the critical debates of the past three generations. More than a century ago, W. Y. Sellar spoke in Gibbonian accents of Virgil as ‘really the panegyrist of despotism under the delusive disguise of paternal government’,53 and for that reason questioned the Aeneid’s claim to the highest rank as a work of art. The anti-Augustan 51

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This enduring metaphorical power is closely related to the link which Virgil establishes between Rome’s imperial destiny and a divinely sanctioned cosmic order. See Hardie (1986). Frost (1962: 30): ‘It makes the prophet in us all presage | the glory of a next Augustan age, … | a golden age of poetry and power | of which this noonday’s the beginning hour’. (The final lines of the expanded version of ‘For John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Inauguration’ as published in the collection, In the Clearing. On Frost’s contacts with Kennedy before and after the inaugural ceremony, see Thompson and Winnick (1976: 277–83). The text is also of interest as a specimen of the kind of commemorative poetry that Virgil successfully avoided writing.) Sellar (1877: 349).

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reading was urged with passionate intensity in 1935 by the nobly named Francesco Sforza, who attributed to Virgil ‘the almost incredible feat of … reviling the persons connected with the origin of the Eternal City, while purporting, all the time, superlatively to praise them’.54 The fact that Sforza was at the time an exile from Fascist Italy accounts for the virulence of his attitude toward Augustus (referred to as ‘autocrat’, ‘despot’, ‘tyrant’, and ‘the Master’), and also explains his desire to claim the Aeneid as a work of covert resistance.55 Another product of the 1930s, itself strongly influenced by the politics of the period, is more directly relevant to modern interpretation of Augustus:  Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution, published in 1939. Syme’s unforgettable portrait of Octavian as a ruthless party leader and of Augustus as a master manipulator of opinion made belief in the benign pater patriae almost impossible. It seems likely that this starkly unsentimental view of Augustus, combined with post-war revulsion at autocracy as represented by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, laid the foundation for the anti-imperial tendency in criticism of the Aeneid that began to emerge in the 1950s. Nor does it seem coincidental that ambivalence of various kinds has become more prominent in recent Virgilian criticism at the same time as ancient historians have replaced Syme’s dark image of the princeps with more nuanced interpretations.56 It is appropriate that Augustus, as well as Virgil, should now be seen in an ambivalent light, and in terms foreshadowed by Virgil himself. For Virgil was well acquainted with the bloodstained young man that Octavian had been; but he could also respond to the very different figure into which he had chosen to transform himself, and could make of Augustus the instrument of a real, if troubled, hope. As for Augustus, the Aeneid cannot have been the poem he might have hoped for, but one would like to believe that as a master of propaganda he could distinguish between its comfortable half-truths and the untidy confusion of reality, and that he valued Virgil’s praise more highly for the honesty with which it was qualified. Surely he was shrewd enough to know that Virgil’s poem would be a far greater and more enduring monument to him than any panegyric, and that he was serving his own interests, as well as those of posterity, in saving the Aeneid from the flames. 54 55

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Sforza (1935: 102). Sforza was presumably aware that at this time Augustus and Virgil’s portrayal of him were being exploited for propaganda purposes by the Nazi and fascist dictatorships. On Sforza and the reaction to his arguments, see Thomas (2001: 272–5). As represented, for example, by several of the papers in Raaflaub and Toher (1990).

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FURTHER READING On the literary milieu of late republican Rome and its influence on Virgil, see Clausen (1987). Cameron (1995) brings many aspects of Callimachus’ influence on Roman poetry into sharper focus. The political import of Virgil’s work, especially the Aeneid, has generated a substantial (and still growing) bibliography:  Harrison (1990:  1–20) provides a helpful overview, and Horsfall (2000b: 192–216) contributes a penetrating discussion of the issues focused on the last book of the poem. Important statements of the so-called ‘pessimist’ interpretation include Parry (1963), Putnam (1988; first edn 1965)  and (2011), Johnson (1976), and, for the Georgics, Ross (1987) and Thomas (1988). Positive or ‘Augustan’ readings in recent decades have drawn much strength from Hardie (1986). Prominent neo-optimists include Cairns (1989), Galinsky (1996), and, most emphatically, Stahl (2015). Powell (2008) reads Virgil’s entire œuvre as an exercise in apologetics for Octavian. The essays collected in Stahl (1998) scrutinize select passages of the poem from a political viewpoint. The links between the Aeneid and imperial ideology are viewed in a wider context by Quint (1993). From the historical angle, Osgood (2006) offers an excellent overview of the troubled period between Julius Caesar’s assassination and Octavian’s victory at Actium. Eck (2007) is a good brief introduction to the Augustan Principate. The elusive phenomenon of Augustan literary patronage, especially in its political aspect, is the subject of a scintillating paper by Griffin (1984), and is considered more broadly by White (1993). Our understanding of the larger Augustan cultural context has been transformed by Zanker (1988). Finally, some recent scholarship, such as Reed (2007) and Syed (2005), situates Virgil in a less politically oriented contemporary context, as contributing to notions of Roman selfhood and identity.

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Rome and its Traditions

In Book 8 of the Aeneid, when Aeneas visits the Arcadian settlement of Pallanteum, he is led by Evander through the site of the future city of Rome. What greets them is a rustic scene: wooded hills, herds of cattle, a simple village of humble immigrants. As Aeneas’ ship comes up the Tiber, the waves themselves marvel at the unfamiliar sight of armed men on an oared ship. Virgil’s readers might have reacted similarly to the novelty of the scene, a view of Rome before historical Rome existed: a small settlement surrounded by forest near the banks of a river, occupying the place of the buildings and grandeur of Augustan Rome, with the commerce of the Tiber and of the Forum Boarium where Aeneas landed. As the Trojans arrive, the contrast between past and present is made explicit: they see Evander’s small village ‘which Roman power has now raised to the heavens’ (quae nunc Romana potentia caelo | aequavit, Aen. 8.99–100). So too, during Aeneas’ walk through the future city, Evander is described as ‘the founder of the Roman citadel’ (Romanae conditor arcis, Aen. 8.313); they pass the gate ‘which the Romans call Carmentalis’ (Carmentalem Romani nomine portam | quam memorant, Aen. 8.338–9); the Capitoline is ‘golden now, once bristling with wooded thickets’ (aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis, Aen. 8.348). As they reach Evander’s house, they see herds of cattle ‘mooing in the Roman Forum and the fashionable Carinae’ (Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis, Aen. 8.361). Although Book 8 contains Aeneas’ first visit to the site of Rome, the Roman future is present from the very beginning of Book 1: the proem ends with a reference to ‘the walls of lofty Rome’ (altae moenia Romae, Aen. 1.7), and there are frequent reminders of Rome’s history throughout the poem. Even though the action of the Aeneid ends with Aeneas’ killing of Turnus, it is Rome and its destiny that provide the retrospective justification for Aeneas’ actions and sufferings. Although Rome is not founded within the narrative of the poem, the creation of a Roman people and a Roman nation is its goal:  ‘so great was the effort it took to establish the Roman 263

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race’ (tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem, Aen. 1.33). Prophecies and the narrator’s own comments remind the reader of the aetiologies of particular Roman customs or names and of events between the end of the narrative and the poet’s own day: the establishment of a joint settlement of Trojans and Latins at Lavinium, the history of Alba Longa and the foundation of Rome, the deeds of individual Romans and the expansion of Roman power, culminating in the glory of the Augustan age. Book 8 in particular spans the history of Rome, from the ruined cities which Evander shows Aeneas and the thickets on the Capitol, which Evander says are inhabited by an unknown god, to the final scene on the shield of Aeneas at the end of the book, in which Augustus celebrates his triple triumph, in August of 29 bc , after the victory over Antony at Actium. From the tiny settlement of Evander on the Palatine, the reader is drawn upward to the golden Capitol of the Augustan age, the centre of both the Roman Empire and the universe itself. The narrative of the Aeneid is concerned with (and falls chronologically between) the Homeric epics and the history of the Roman people. Much of the structure of the poem and many episodes within it are derived from the Iliad and Odyssey; much of the material within that framework involves Rome. The two major dramatic sections of the Aeneid – the Dido episode in books 1–4 and the war between the Trojans and the Latins in books 9–12 – anticipate the major external and internal crises of Roman history: the Punic Wars of the third and second centuries bc and the civil wars of the first century.1 The central four books are largely static; through scenes marking Aeneas’ gradual approach to the locus of his descendants’ history – Sicily in Book 5, Cumae in Book 6, the Tiber mouth and the city of Latinus in Book 7, and Rome itself in Book 8 – they provide a set of descriptions of Rome and Italy past and present that offers an alternative to the narrative chronicle of Aeneas’ wars and wanderings. These same books, moreover, gradually abandon the framework of the Homeric world (if not of Homer as a literary model) in favour of Italy and Rome, introducing both Aeneas and the reader to a new future and a different past  – to the outcome, in Virgil’s own day, of the crises adumbrated in the first and last portions of the epic, and to the background, both ethnographic and mythological, of the Italy which Aeneas now encounters. Rome and Italy, of course, provide the framework for the entire Aeneid, and some important details (the catalogue of Etruscans in Book 10, for instance) appear outside the central books; but it is the catalogue of the Italian allies of Latinus in Book 7 and Evander’s account of Rome’s prehistory in Book 8 that give texture and specificity to 1

See, for example, Williams (1983: 70–5).

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Virgil’s understanding of Italy, and the catalogue of Romans in Anchises’ speech in the Underworld in Book 6 and the shield of Aeneas at the end of Book 8 that create Virgil’s interpretation of Rome’s history and destiny. The Italy that Aeneas encounters is by no means simple. In the first books of the poem, Jupiter announces (Aen. 1.263–4, 4.229–31) that Aeneas’ destiny is to civilize the warring tribes of Italy, and the Italians are portrayed as fierce, lawless, and savage. The inhabitants seem as primitive as the landscape is uncultivated; but the apparent contrasts between a state of nature and the advanced culture of Augustan Rome, and between civilized Trojans and barbarous Italians, dissolves on closer inspection. In the first place, the Aeneid depicts the Trojans themselves both as heroic warriors and as representatives of a decadent and destroyed eastern civilization; their landing in Italy can be understood as either the destined arrival of law and civilization, as in Jupiter’s prophecies, or the colonizing and destructive invasion of a foreign army (cf. Aen. 7.38–9).2 Nor are the Italians a primitive and autochthonous people. Latinus claims descent from Saturn (Aen. 7.48–9); in his palace is a set of effigies of his ancestors, including both Saturn and Janus (Aen. 7.180). According to Evander’s account of the prehistory of Rome, these same gods had built fortifications on the Capitoline and Janiculum respectively, of which huge ruins remain for Aeneas’ inspection (Aen. 8.355–8). In the catalogue of Italians, Aventinus is a child of Hercules, Caeculus of Vulcan, Messapus of Neptune (Aen. 7.656, 679, 691); Tiburtus and his brothers are Argive, Halaesus is associated with Agamemnon, and Virbius is the son of Hippolytus (Aen. 7.672, 723, 761). Aeneas’ ally Evander too is no aborigine: he is an immigrant from Arcadia, the oldest region of Greece, and had, in his youth, met Priam himself (Aen. 8.158–9). Like Aeneas, the inhabitants of Italy had divine ancestors; like him, they are a part of the world of mythic Greece.3 Conversely, the basis of Aeneas’ claim to settle in Italy is the Italian origin of his ancestor Dardanus (Aen. 3.163–8, 7.205–8, 240–2). By making the Trojans Italian and the Italians Greek, Virgil constructs multiple and overlapping history of the two peoples: they have a shared origin, and neither one is precisely what it seems on first appearance. In the Aeneid, moreover, early Italy has more than one history, more than one truth. In introducing his description of the site of Rome, Evander gives Aeneas a brief history of the populations of Italy (Aen. 8.314–36).4 According to his account, the aboriginal inhabitants, contemporary with 2

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On various aspects of the double presentation of the Trojans, see Anderson (1957); Thomas (1982: 99–100); Lyne (1987: 107–13); O’Hara (1994: 215–17). Contra Otis (1964: 329): ‘They are unsophisticated primitives whose courage is put to a very bad use.’ On this passage, see Thomas (1982: 95–8); Gransden (1984: 63); O’Hara (1994: 222–3).

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fauns and nymphs, were sprung from trees, and were completely uncivilised; they were settled in cities and given laws by Saturn when he arrived in flight from Jupiter, and under the reign of Saturn there was a golden age. Subsequently, the Saturnian civilisation degenerated through war and greed, and the invasions of various other peoples followed, including Ausonians, Sicani and, most recently, Evander himself with his Arcadians. The arrival of Aeneas is thus only the last in a long series of foreign invasions. Evander’s ethnography is an uneasy combination of two standard accounts of the history of civilization: he blends a hard-primitive anthropological account, such as is found, for instance, in Lucretius Book 5, according to which humans have gradually risen from primeval savagery, and a soft-primitive mythological one, as found in Hesiod’s Works and Days or Virgil’s Georgics, in which human behaviour has declined from the ideal simplicity and ease of a golden age. In general, Evander’s account is pessimistic: he views the reign of Saturn as only an intermission from continuous fighting and invasions. His interpretation accords with that suggested by Jupiter’s prophecies, in which the role of Aeneas and the Trojans is to end discord, impose order, and set Italy on the path to civilization and glory. Evander’s is not the only account of early Italy. In Book 7, both in Virgil’s own introduction of Latinus (Aen. 7.45–6) and in Latinus’ description of his people, the Golden Age has not entirely disappeared.5 The old king has ruled in peace for a long time; he describes his nation (as in traditional Golden Age mythology) as being naturally just without the need for laws (Aen. 7.203). According to this version, it is clear that Aeneas and the Trojans are not saviours, but a disruptive influence in a peaceful and harmonious world. At the same time, the version given by the poet and by Latinus is itself undercut:  the effigies of military figures in Latinus’ palace, the military exercises of the population, and the fact that the Latins are at war with Evander’s Arcadians call this idealistic vision into question.6 Virgil does not resolve this difficulty, and the fact that a figure within the poem contradicts the narrator’s voice discourages belief in an omniscient narrator. The Italians are both warlike and peaceful; simple (or savage) tribesmen and figures of heroic myth; both like the Trojans and unlike them. The tidy polarities of civilization and barbarism, of progress and decline, of war and peace are carefully disturbed and redistributed throughout Virgil’s account of Italy: no tidy and schematic distribution of history into antithetical oppositions can do justice to the complexity of human affairs. And, as will be seen below,

5 6

See Horsfall (1981). See Williams (1983: 40–2).

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such contradictions and the resulting uncertainties are central to Virgil’s portrayal of both Italy and Rome.7 In terms of Virgil’s construction of history in general, therefore, the contradictory nature of early Italy makes sense; as noted above, it also provides a suitable mirror for the equally ambivalent portrait of the Trojans themselves. In dramatic terms, moreover, it was also necessary for Virgil to elaborate the history and significance of Italy: it would clearly detract from the significance of the war in the final four books of the poem if Aeneas had no opponent, in Virgil’s adaptation of the Iliad, worthy either of his own stature or of his literary antecedents. The great emphasis that Virgil places on Italy, however, is more important than that; it plays a major role in the poem as a whole, culminating in Juno’s wish, honoured by Jupiter at the end of the poem, that Troy should give way to Rome and to Italy: ‘Let Latium exist, let the Alban kings last for generations, let Roman stock be powerful with Italian strength’ (sit Latium, sint Albani per saecula reges, | sit Romana potens Itala virtute propago, Aen. 12.826–7). In the proem to Book 1, Virgil had outlined the future with the triad of Latium, Alba Longa, and Rome; by the end, that has been expanded to include Italy. Similarly, Augustus at Actium, on the shield in Book 8, is leading not the Romans but the Italians into battle; that verse reflects the ‘Oath of all Italy’ sworn to Augustus before the war of Actium (Aen. 8.678), and both poem and oath correspond to the genuine and growing importance of the Italians in Roman society and ideology in the first century bc .8 The end of the Social War (91–89) between Rome and the Italian confederacy gave Roman citizenship to all Italy south of the Po; members of the local Italian aristocracies became increasingly prominent in Roman society and government. The importance of this stratum of society for the Augustan settlement is exemplified by the career of Publius Ventidius, who as a child was led as a captive in 89 in the triumph of Pompeius Strabo in the Social War, and who lived to celebrate a triumph himself in 38 bc .9 The hardiness, courage, and virtue of the Italian peasantsoldier – Sabine and Volscian, Marsian and Apulian – is a stock theme of 7

8

9

It is worth noting here (although space does not permit elaboration of the subject) that Virgil’s approach to the Roman and Italian pasts is deeply indebted to the narrative techniques of the Alexandrian poets, notably Callimachus, and that the combination of Alexandrian methods and Roman antiquarian learning is central to Virgil’s understanding of the contingency of historical truth. For Virgil’s debt to Callimachus, see Clausen (1987); for the similar combination of Alexandrian method and early Roman materials in Catullus, cf. Zetzel (1983a). See Res gestae 25.2. On the role of the Italians, see Syme (1939: 284–93); Momigliano (1960: 412–15). See Syme (1939: 71, 223–4). Detailed documentation of the rise of the Italians in Wiseman (1971).

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late republican and Augustan literature; the catalogue of Italians stresses those qualities, as does the speech of Numanus Remulus in Book 9.10 Virgil expands on this picture of simple virtue to include dignity, distinction, and mythic ancestry: the Italians are worthy not only of their role in the Aeneid, but of their place in the Augustan order as well. The war between Trojan and Italian in the second half of the poem is both an analogy to and an anticipation of the historical war fought between Roman and Italian at the beginning of the first century, and, given the outcome, both the mythic and the historical wars become, retrospectively, civil wars, between peoples soon to become a single nation. As with the prehistory of Italy, simple polarities become impossible: there is, from the point of view of the Augustan present, no more difference between Roman and Italian than between Trojan and Italian. At the end of the war in the Aeneid, the Trojans are subsumed within the Latin community just as, under Augustus, Rome itself became no more than a part (if a central part) of greater Italy. While the Aeneid as a whole provides an aetiological link between Troy and Rome, countless details in books 7 and 8 connect particular Roman names, customs, buildings and cults to the populations of Italy which Aeneas encounters. Virgil was not the first to write of primitive Italy or to draw connections between early peoples and present customs. The historical epics of Naevius and Ennius, while concentrating on the events of their own lifetimes, had given due attention to the Trojan origins of Rome, and indeed had made Romulus not just the descendant, but the grandson of Aeneas; the chronological difficulties of this reconstruction resulted in the insertion of the kings of Alba into the later tradition.11 Individual Roman aristocrats too were proud of their ancestral traditions: a number of families traced their descent from Troy, and one, the Aemilii, claimed descent from Pythagoras.12 For at least a century before Virgil, Roman writers (and some Greeks) had been interested in Roman antiquities, and in his influential Origines, the elder Cato had reported the foundation legends not just of Rome, but of other Italian communities. Assertions of settlement by figures of Homeric myth were not limited to Rome and the genuinely Greek foundations of southern Italy and Sicily:  many towns attached themselves not only to Aeneas but to Hercules and Odysseus, figures whose western travels were familiar in

10 11 12

Cf. Horsfall (1971); Thomas (1982: 98–9). See, for instance, Ogilvie’s commentary on Livy 1.3.2. Three Roman families (other than the Iulii) are mentioned in Aeneid 5 (Memmii, Sergii, Cluentii); several others are also attested. The Pythagorean ancestry of the Aemilii is found in Plutarch, Aemilius Paullus 1. On family history in this period, see Rawson (1985: 231–2).

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the Greek mythological tradition.13 Roman antiquarians had also sought aetiological explanations for obscure religious, legal, and topographical features of Roman life, and in the decades before Virgil began to write the Aeneid, the antiquarian Varro had collected a huge mass of material on such subjects. Although most of the works of Varro and others on Roman antiquities are now lost, it is clear that Virgil read widely in this area, and knew not only the early epics, but the historical works of Cato and other annalists  – including the early books (which do survive) of the Ab urbe condita of his contemporary Livy – and the many antiquarian collections of Varro.14 But although he was necessarily interested in Roman antiquities, Virgil’s antiquarianism is a means rather than an end:  the Aeneid offers not an uncritical assemblage of archaic lore, but a selection that is clearly and deliberately shaped.15 What is more, Virgil’s picture of early Italy involved invention as well as selection. Several figures in the catalogue of Italians are almost certainly Virgil’s own creations: not merely some with a significant role in the narrative (Lausus and Camilla), but also the lesser figures Ufens and Umbro, both with names of rivers geographically unconnected with the contingents which they lead.16 Messapus, who leads the Faliscans in the catalogue, has no connection with them in any other source, but is elsewhere a Euboean attached to the Messapians of southern Italy. Halaesus, normally connected to the Faliscans, is moved to Campania, as is Oebalus, normally a legendary Spartan king associated with the Tarentines, who claimed Spartan ancestry.17 Among the Etruscan leaders in the catalogue in Book 10, Ocnus and Aulestes, though linked in Virgil with Mantua, are traditionally the founders of Felsina (Bologna) and Perusia, while Massicus, whom Virgil links to Clusium and Cosa, has the name of a mountain in Campania.18 Even Turnus, the Rutulian leader of Latinus’ army, is made the son of Daunus, the eponymous ancestor of the Daunians of Apulia. Two figures in the Italian catalogue, moreover, incorporate elements of early Roman legend. Aventinus, for whom the Aventine hill is named, is normally one of the Alban kings; in Virgil, he is the son by Hercules of a priestess 13

14

15 16

17 18

For local history (indigenous and Hellenized), see Horsfall (1987: 6–9). The connection with Odysseus is as old as Hesiod, Theogony 1011–13, naming Agrios and Latinos as the sons of Kirke and Odysseus. Horsfall (1981) is sceptical about the range of Virgil’s antiquarian studies, but is the most valuable treatment of his methods in the use of antiquarian materials. In addition to Horsfall (1981), see also Rehm (1932: 66). For Camilla see Horsfall (1988); for the others, see Rehm (1932: 92) and Holland (1935: 203, 206). Rehm (1932: 92–5); Holland (1935: 202–6). Rehm (1932: 9); Holland (1935: 203–5).

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named Rhea, anticipating the legend of the birth of Romulus and Remus.19 The Sabine leader in the catalogue, Clausus, is an otherwise unknown homonymous ancestor of the traditional founder of the gens Claudia, Attus Clausus, who came from Cures with his followers in the first year of the Republic  – but who is strangely said by Virgil to have arrived in Rome during the joint reign of Romulus and Titus Tatius.20 Just as in the broader accounts of the peopling of early Italy and the development of civilization, therefore, so too in the details of early Italian history, particularly in the catalogues, Virgil’s version is curiously discordant, and is anything but a scrupulous report of traditional lore. While the geography of the catalogue is for the most part precise and accurate (although there are some invented place names and some which can no longer be identified), it is linked to figures sometimes invented, sometimes transposed from their traditional locations; the detailed ethnographic descriptions in the catalogue of costume and weaponry are often borrowed from accounts of other primitive peoples (including the Germans as described by Julius Caesar) and have little connection with the Roman antiquarian tradition.21 Through the mythological connections of his Italians, Virgil elevates them into worthy antagonists for Aeneas and the Trojans; through the imaginative use of ethnography, he makes them representative of Rome’s contemporary tribal enemies; through the displacement of personal and topographical names, he makes a small war in Latium representative of the length and breadth of Augustan Italy. In terms of what the Romans themselves knew or thought about their national past, it is in no sense an accurate portrait of early Italy; but it is an Italian past that is in complete harmony with the rest of the poem. At the same time, however, the dramatic coherence of Virgil’s Italy is disconcerting, precisely because of the thoroughgoing falseness of its details:  the geographical and historical distortions inevitably create a certain uneasiness about the order and development of Roman history itself. That applies not only to the mythical anachronisms concerning Aventinus and Clausus in the catalogue, but even more to the retrojection into the past of Roman names and customs. When Aeneas promises the Sibyl (Aen. 6.69ff) to build a temple to Apollo and place the Sibylline oracles in it, he is announcing what was not in fact done until the time of Augustus.22 The palace of Latinus (described as augustum, Aen. 7.170) is portrayed in terms that bring to mind many of the public places of Augustan Rome – the Curia, 19 20

21 22

Rehm (1932: 94). The only other clear occurrence of the Romulean date for Clausus’ arrival is in Suetonius, Tiberius 1.1. See Wiseman (1979: 59–60). See Rehm (1932: 66–71). See Zetzel (1989: 279).

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the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, the Forum of Augustus (planned, if not yet built at the time the Aeneid was written), and the speakers’ platform in the Forum itself, decorated with the prows (rostra, Aen. 7.186) of captured ships. In the appeal to the Muses which opens the catalogue as (twice) in the description of the numinous thickets of the Capitoline, Virgil uses the phrase iam tum (‘already at that time’, Aen. 7.643, 8.349, 8.350):  just as in the double vision of Italian prehistory as a golden age or a period of savagery to be ameliorated by Aeneas, one has a sense both of Roman progress from a lesser past and of the immanence and unchanging quality of eternal Rome. The same combination of change with permanence, and of surface clarity with discordant details, marks Virgil’s account of Rome itself, contained primarily in a series of prophecies in which he outlines the course of Roman history, culminating in the Augustan settlement and the Rome of Virgil’s own day. Three passages of the poem are particularly important: Jupiter’s prophecy to Venus at 1.257–96; Anchises’ revelation to Aeneas in the Underworld of the future heroes of Rome at 6.756–886; and the prophetic shield which Vulcan makes for Aeneas at Venus’ request, described at 8.626–728. In terms of their contents, the three prophecies have clear similarities: each draws connections between Romulus and Augustus; each foresees both civil war and its conclusion; each includes a prophecy of Roman universal rule. There are also differences among the three: there is very little overlap in specific content; the focus of each is different; and each is affected by its context within the poem as a whole. Furthermore, although each passage is in some sense panegyrical, each also contains elements that disturb or complicate the smooth course of Roman glory. In this respect, Jupiter’s prophecy to Venus is most striking, as it provides the framework for much that is to appear later on.23 The speech outlines the future of Aeneas’ race: the precise (if mystical) chronology of the 333 years to elapse between the arrival of Aeneas in Italy and the foundation of Rome is followed by Jupiter’s proclamation of the universality and eternity of Roman rule:24 ‘I place no limits on them of time or space:  I have given them power without bound’ (his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono: | imperium sine fine dedi, Aen. 1.278–9). The particulars of this statement follow:  Juno will give up her anger, Rome will triumph over the Greeks who had defeated them (in their Trojan shape) at Troy. A Caesar, descended from Aeneas through Iulus/Ascanius, will extend the empire and become a god, after which eternal peace will return to the world, in which Romulus/ 23

24

See Williams (1983: 138–42); Lyne (1987: 79–81); and particularly O’Hara (1990: 132–63). On the chronology, see Horsfall (1974).

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Quirinus and Remus will jointly preside, while the gates of war are closed on Furor bound and imprisoned within. Jupiter’s account of the Roman future is powerfully simple: the reversal of the result of the Trojan War through Rome’s conquest of Greece, the end of Juno’s hostility in the Punic Wars, the resolution of discord, and universal peace under the leadership of Venus’ Roman descendants. In context, however, the prophecy is designed as a consolation for Venus, who is legitimately worried by Aeneas’ present circumstances, shipwrecked on the coast of Africa; its rhetorical purpose leads to distortion and oversimplification. The Alban kings, we learn from Book 6, are descended not from Ascanius, but from the son of Aeneas and Lavinia; Juno’s wrath will take a very long time – until the Hannibalic War – to subside;25 there is a disturbing uncertainty as to whether the ‘Caesar’ referred to is Julius Caesar or Augustus; and, above all, the idea that Romulus/Quirinus and Remus will rule together in harmony clearly contradicts the accepted legend of Romulus’ murder of Remus. All these details call into question the descriptions of universal rule and universal peace which, from the point of view of Virgil’s own day, still lie in the future. Anchises’ speech in the Underworld similarly combines panegyrical prophecy with discordant historical allusions.26 Here, the avowed purpose is both consolatory and protreptic. Aeneas cannot understand why any soul could wish to return to the travails of life on earth; Anchises displays to him the individual greatness of their descendants ‘so that you may rejoice with me at the discovery of Italy’ (quo magis Italia mecum laetere reperta, Aen. 6.718). The main body of Anchises’ speech contains two basic groups of figures:  on the one hand, the monarchs of Alba Longa and Rome; on the other, the military leaders of the Roman Republic. Each group, however, is interrupted by description of figures of Virgil’s own lifetime: in the first group, Augustus, who is juxtaposed with Romulus, and in the second, unnamed, Julius Caesar and Pompey, placed between the heroes of the early Republic and the military leaders of the third and second centuries bc . The coda of Anchises’ speech similarly juxtaposes early and very recent history: the praise of the third-century Marcellus leads Aeneas to ask about the shadowy young man next to him, who turns out to be Augustus’ nephew, son-in-law, and prospective heir Marcellus, who died suddenly in 23 bc , while Virgil was writing the Aeneid. As with Jupiter’s prophecy, Anchises’ speech combines two broad themes, the external military successes of the Roman people – including his famous 25 26

See Feeney (1984). See Feeney (1986).

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admonition ‘to spare the conquered and subdue the proud’ (parcere subiectis et debellare superbos, Aen. 6.853) – and the importance of Aeneas’ own descendants, particularly Augustus, within the broader framework of Roman achievement. He gives Augustus credit, as in Book 1, for restoring a golden age and extending Roman power throughout the world, with comparison to the territories covered by Hercules and Dionysus. Augustus, as descendant of Aeneas, is equated with the destiny of the Roman people, divinely ordained and divinely justified. But neither the heroes of Rome nor the descendants of Aeneas are presented with unalloyed panegyric. Virgil records the decline of monarchy into tyranny; Ancus is too much the popularis (Aen. 6.816); L.  Junius Brutus, the founder of the Republic, is described as having a ‘haughty spirit’ (animamque superbam, Aen. 6.817).27 Some of the names of military heroes have connotations of turmoil and discord:  the plural Drusos (Aen. 6.824) may include not only the victor over Hasdrubal at the battle of the Metaurus in 209, but the tribune whose actions and death precipitated the Social War in 91; the reference to ‘the race of Gracchus’ (Gracchi genus, Aen. 6.842) must include not only the military leader of the Second Punic War but also the turbulent tribunes of the late second century. The references in the three sections of Anchises’ speech to the three figures who were awarded the spolia opima (Romulus, Cossus, Marcellus) necessarily call to mind the controversial decision of Augustus to deny the same honour to Crassus in 27. Within the family of Aeneas and Augustus itself, the reference to Caesar and Pompey explicitly concerns the Civil War of 49–45, and the final figure of the list, the younger Marcellus, closes the sequence with a reference to failed hopes, early death, and the lack of an obvious successor to Augustus. The third and most elaborate of the prophecies, the shield of Aeneas, extends the panegyrical elements of the first two; in its very form, moreover, it makes more explicit the teleological elements found elsewhere in the poem. The description begins with small vignettes from early Roman history:  the wolf with the twins Romulus and Remus; the abduction of the Sabine women and the settlement with the Sabines; the dismemberment of the treacherous Mettus Fufetius by Tullus Hostilius; and the siege of Rome by Lars Porsenna with the heroic deeds of Horatius Cocles and Cloelia. These four apparently occupy panels on the left and right of the round shield; at the top is the Capitol, being defended by the sacred geese and Manlius from the attack of the Gauls. Corresponding to this, at the bottom of the shield is the Underworld, in which – unlike the description of the actual Underworld 27

The epithet superbam is transferred from the name of the last king, Tarquinius Superbus.

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in Book 6 – the roles of chief judge and chief sinner are taken by two firstcentury Romans, Cato the younger and Catiline. The central portion of the shield contains the battle of Actium and its aftermath, depicted not merely as a military victory, but as a war between the gods and the peoples of East and West; the defeat and flight of Cleopatra (unnamed, as usual in Augustan poetry) is mirrored by the triumph of Augustus with its imposition of order and peace on the cacophonous and unruly barbarians of Asia.28 The portrayal of Augustus’ victory at Actium and subsequent triumph is the most explicit version which Virgil gives of the goal enunciated by Jupiter in Book 1: the establishment of order, peace and empire. It is the victory of order over disorder, of West over East, of male over female, of civilization over barbarism. As the content and organization of the shield show, however, it is more than that:  the Olympian divinities, particularly Augustus’ patron god Apollo, take part in the war, which is thus a victory of cosmic order, reflecting the mythological victory of the gods over the giants. The placement of the Capitol and the Underworld in corresponding positions on the shield equates Rome with Olympus, and thus Roman order with divine order. The location of Catiline and Cato as archetypal figures of sinner and judge in the Underworld makes the equation explicit:  Roman and divine justice are one and the same thing. The victory of Augustus is not merely the achievement of peace, but the achievement of order in the cosmos itself, the restoration of a golden age of harmony on earth and in the universe, the beginning of empire without end.29 And yet this prophecy, designed to celebrate Rome’s military success and expansion, has its disturbing elements too.30 The scene of Romulus under the wolf inevitably recalls his unmentioned – and murdered – twin Remus; the abduction of the Sabine women is a dubious model of military achievement; the execution of Mettus is barbarous, and was singled out for criticism on that score by Livy (1.28). Furthermore, the presence of Catiline reminds the reader of the discord of the late Republic, and the presence of Cato as the emblem of justice recalls that he chose to commit suicide rather than survive the Republic and live under Caesar’s rule. If Augustus embodies Rome’s achievement of mastery over the world, that goal has not been achieved without brutality, discord, and opposition. Most of the emphases in Virgil’s account of pre-Augustan Roman history are traditional: both Livy and Cicero describe the character and successive

28 29

30

For the structure of the shield, see West (1975–6). For the interpretation of the shield, see above all Hardie (1986: 97–110, 346–75); for the scene of Actium in particular, see Quint (1993: 21–31). See Gurval (1995: 209–47).

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contributions of the kings to the creation of Rome; the virtue and courage of the military leaders of the early and middle Republic are constant themes of earlier historiography; the emphasis on Aeneas, Romulus, Camillus and Augustus as successive founders or saviours of Rome is found in Livy; earlier historiography and rhetoric even recorded the occasional exemplary villains of Roman history, and the equation of Roman justice with the divine order was a feature of Cicero’s treatise De republica.31 Where Virgil differs most significantly from earlier historiography and epic in his account is his teleology: in his version, Roman history has a clear and definite goal in the Augustan settlement: in all three prophecies, he links the rule of Augustus with the end of external war and internal discord; he describes the arrival of universal peace under Roman rule, and he heralds the outset of a new golden age. There is, however, another side to this vision of Rome’s glorious destiny. As noted above, all three great prophecies are undercut in one respect or another:  they include false or misleading statements; they contain discordant and disturbing elements – references to civil war and to the early death of Marcellus. If Rome has produced in Cato a worthy judge for the Underworld, it has also produced a Catiline. The history of Rome matches that of primitive Italy, which has both improved and degenerated in the course of time: the most recent period of Roman history has produced both good and evil in a high degree – both Cato and Catiline, both the civil wars and the Augustan peace. And the possibility that peace will endure is by no means a certainty. Golden ages had existed in the past, but they had not lasted. In Evander’s account, the reign of Saturn was merely a pause in the sequence of invasions, and the golden age that is associated with Latinus’ peaceful rule is undercut by our knowledge of the wars in which his people had in fact engaged. Evander’s tour of Rome includes the remnants of the fortifications of Saturn and Janus: golden ages, like cities, do not last for ever, and utopian visions, not just of the Augustan age, but of the mythic Italian past in books 7 and 8, in the Fourth Eclogue, or in the praise of country life in the Georgics, are visions, not reality. W.  H. Auden in ‘Secondary Epic’ imagined Aeneas in looking at the shield asking ‘What next? After this triumph, what portends?’ Virgil’s is a teleology without an end: ‘I have given empire without bound’, Jupiter says in Book 1 (imperium sine fine dedi, Aen. 1.279). Neither time nor history comes to a halt. When Virgil introduces Vulcan’s forging of Aeneas’ shield, he makes two significant comments. First, he describes the shield as a non enarrabile textum (‘a text that cannot fully be described’, Aen. 8.625); he then says that 31

See Zetzel (1996).

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the shield had on it both Italian and Roman history, including in order (in ordine, Aen. 8.629) all the wars fought by Aeneas’ descendants. That he then proceeds to describe it, and to give it an order and pattern that clearly do not match his account of Vulcan’s own plan, draws attention to the selectivity and invention involved in his shaping of Rome.32 Vulcan’s shield is a chronicle, an ordered series of discrete events; Virgil’s has a structure and shape that give Roman history a design, leading from Aeneas to Romulus to Augustus. It is a closed and perfect circle, mirroring the universe in its order and balance; and in the static pattern of time it portrays, it is similar to the central four books of the Aeneid itself. It is perfectly harmonious; and yet, like the whole portrait of Italian and Roman history, it draws attention to its own arbitrariness and invention. From what point of view is one to perceive events, or understand history? Virgil’s audience can read Aeneas’ shield, recognize the events, and interpret what they see; but in concluding Book 8, Virgil makes it clear that interpretation is conditional and sometimes impossible. When Aeneas picks up the shield, ‘the fame and fate of his descendants’ (famamque et fata nepotum, Aen. 8.731), he does not understand what he sees: ‘he admires, and rejoices in the image, though ignorant of its content’ (miratur rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet, Aen. 8.730). As with every ecphrasis in the poem, what the immediate viewer sees is not what the reader sees:  comprehension and understanding require time, distance, interpretation.33 And, Virgil shows in other passages (notably the scenes on the temple of Juno in Book 1), the viewer sees what he or she wants to see. The history of early Italy, it is apparent, is multiple: there is more than one way to understand it; and the same is true of the teleological vision of Rome’s destined greatness in Augustan Rome. That does not mean that it is false, merely that its truth is contingent. Virgil’s is a relativist vision of history: the understanding of what has happened is conditioned by the present, whether that present be of Evander, or Virgil himself, or of the reader. Discussions of Virgil’s view of Rome have tended either to stress the positive and panegyrical elements or to see in the contradictions and discordant undertones a deliberate intention on the poet’s part to undermine and even invalidate the praise of Augustus; at best, the inconsistencies in Virgil’s history become a sign of ambivalence about the events of his own day. That is, of course, possible; and it would be hard to imagine anyone who lived through the civil wars not having a vivid 32

33

West (1975–6) sees the difference between the introduction and the ecphrasis, but does not draw any conclusions from it. On the problem of ecphrasis in general, see Fowler (1991) with copious bibliography; other valuable discussions (particularly of the paintings on Dido’s temple) in Johnson (1976: 104–5, 112–14); Lyne (1987: 207–10); Putnam (1998b).

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sense of the cost of the Augustan peace – a peace the precariousness of which is apparent in the Eclogues and Georgics as well as the Aeneid. But Virgil, by his emphasis throughout the Aeneid on perspective, on uncertainty, on error, discourages drawing a single conclusion either about Roman history itself or about his own interpretation of it. Although he permits the reader to interpret, he lays no claim to omniscience or to truth: he makes the reader aware that Rome has many histories, that what may be seen as the end of the story now will not be so always. The idea that history has an end is a false consolation; wars to end war are a hope, not a reality. The achievement of peace involves brutality and violence, and those do not simply disappear; the retention of stability requires constant effort, and simple polarities of good and evil do not match the real world. Rome’s past, and its future, are what the reader will make of them. FURTHER READING (References to works published since 1997 have been added by the editors.) 1. Antiquarian Italy The numerous works of Nicholas Horsfall (see ‘Works Cited’) are the best introduction to the antiquarian content of the Aeneid; see Horsfall (1981), (2000a) and (2016). For the ethnographic content see also Thomas (1982); Ando (2002); and De Santis and Ames (2011). The most thorough treatment of the details of Italian landscape and ethnography is Rehm (1932), to be supplemented by the articles on particular names and places in the Enciclopedia virgiliana. 2. National identity For the complexity of Roman national identity as constructed in the Aeneid, see Reed (2007) and (2010). For Virgil’s use of Cato the Elder, see Nelsestuen (2016). For the Trojan settlement and the Trojans’ interaction with Italians and Arcadians, see Casali (2010). 3. Specific passages (a) The prophecy of Jupiter in Book 1: O’Hara (1990); Hejduk (2009). (b) The so-called ‘Parade of Heroes’ in Book 6:  Feeney (1986) and Horsfall (2013:  esp. ii .510–19). Norden (1981 [1903]) remains invaluable. (c) The catalogue of Italians in Book 7:  Warde Fowler (1918a); Fraenkel (1945); Horsfall (2000a: ad loc.). (d) The visit to the site of Rome and the shield of Aeneas in Book 8:  Warde Fowler (1918b); Binder (1971); Eden (1975); Hardie (1986: 336–76); Boyle (1999); Rossi (2010). 277

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4. Echoes of history See the items under 3(b) and 3(d) above. For the Punic Wars in the Aeneid see Goldschmidt (2013: 101–48) and Giusti (2018). For the presence of the Social War in the Aeneid, see Barchiesi (forthcoming). For reflections of the Civil Wars, see Powell (2008) and Rossi (2010). 5. General interpretation Every study of the Aeneid that considers its relationship to the Augustan present takes some account of Virgil’s presentation of the Roman past. Works in English include Williams (1983:  132–56); Hardie (1986); O’Hara (1990); Quint (1993:  21–96); Gurval (1995:  209–47); Quint (2010); Seider (2013); Fletcher (2014).

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Virgil and the Cosmos: Religious and Philosophical Ideas

Introduction Virgil’s cosmos comprises gods and humans and nature. These are huge topics. In this chapter I  shall analyse the complex relationships between these elements by taking a broad view of Virgil’s religious and philosophical ideas. His gods – especially in the Aeneid – have always been a major focus of attention for scholars. A crucial contribution to the subject is Denis Feeney’s The Gods in Epic (1991), which devotes considerable attention to the Aeneid and constitutes an advance on earlier rationalizing or allegorizing accounts of Virgil’s gods.1 Feeney insists on the complexities of representation of the gods and explores issues of power in epic as they relate to characters human and divine.2 By contrast, the philosophical flavour of Virgil’s views is not explicitly the subject of any single, entire book on Virgil. Philip Hardie says much of significance about cosmology in Virgil’s Aeneid:  Cosmos and Imperium (1986), but generally critics’ analysis of Virgil’s ethics is subsumed in discussions of Aeneas’ character. This might suggest that religion and philosophy in Virgil are readily separable. Not so. Such a separation would be artificial from any perspective, ancient or modern. When we consider ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ in Virgil, we are always talking about how Virgil grapples with and articulates the origins, workings and telos (purpose) of the world and the way in which human beings fit into that world, in their behaviour as individuals and as members of communities towards other individuals and communities. In other words, gods and morality are inextricably linked. Among recent scholars, it is perhaps Hardie who has made the most impact in bringing the two categories together. I shall build on those foundations and extend the debate to encompass all three of Virgil’s poems.

1 2

See Feeney (1991: 129–87) on the Aeneid, with bibliography at 129 n. 1. Feeney (1998) further refines our understanding of Roman systems of belief.

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There are key texts in any discussion of Virgil’s religious and philosophical views. Crucial passages from the Aeneid include Anchises’ vision in Book 6, Jupiter’s role in the council of the gods in Book 10 and the interplay between the gods and human characters in the story of Aeneas and Dido (Book 4) and in the closing scene of the poem (Book 12). From the Georgics the proem, the justification of toil (labor) in Book 1, the finale to Book 2 with its praise of country life, and the description of the idealized society of the bees in Book 4 are significant. In the Eclogues, the prophecy of the fourth poem and the song of Silenus in the sixth are central. These are the texts which will be scrutinized here. Besides these, religious ritual pervades the Aeneid during Aeneas’ journey from Troy to Italy and on his arrival in Italy, when he has a numinous encounter with the river god Tiberinus; there is not space here to discuss the role of Italian deities, such as Faunus, in Virgil’s world.3 Virgil ‘Claimed’ for Philosophical Schools Virgil has been ‘claimed’ on behalf of various Hellenistic philosophical schools with which Romans of the first century bc were familiar. Virgil’s interest in philosophy is attested by his plans, mentioned by Donatus in his biography, to spend his ‘retirement’ in Greece and Asia devoted to the study of philosophy. Specifically, Virgil has been seen as an Epicurean and/ or Stoic, or as someone who changed philosophical allegiance. He certainly spent some time with the Epicurean teachers Philodemus and Siro at their base near Naples.4 Epicureanism was particularly prominent at this time, probably because it was the first of the schools to present its ideas in Latin.5 Virgil was clearly deeply familiar with Lucretius’ De rerum natura, the earliest (extant) articulation of Epicureanism in Latin and the greatest poem of the previous generation, and with treatises by Philodemus.6 At the same time, he moved in the same circle as Areius Didymus, a Stoic philosopher who was a lifelong friend of Augustus.7 The divine apparatus of the Aeneid

3

4

5 6 7

On the role of Italian gods in Virgil’s poems, see the chapter ‘Virgil’s gods of the land’ in Fantham (2009). G. 4.563–4; Catalepton 5, 8; Gell. 6.20; Sedley (1989: 103); Rawson (1985: 23–4). The essays in Armstrong, Fish, Johnston, and Skinner (2004) make the case for ‘the deep impact of Philodemus’ and Epicurus’ and Lucretius’ thought’ on Virgil (21). For caution see Hardie’s review in JRS 96 (2006: 253–4). Griffin (1989: 9). Hardie (1986: 33–51); Armstrong, Fish, Johnston, and Skinner (2004: 1–21). Cairns (1989: 34), although Areius was ‘concerned with the scholarly propagation of philosophical doctrines from a wide variety of sources’. Gill (2006: 435–61) draws

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can be seen as a manifestation in poetic terms of the Stoic Providence, and Aeneas read as a proto-Stoic, for example in his impassivity towards Dido in Book 4 once he has received his divine orders to depart.8 This picture is complicated by the final scene of the Aeneid. This has stimulated a debate in which Aeneas’ final act of anger in killing Turnus is seen by some as a lapse from the Stoic greatness attained earlier in the poem and by others as a legitimate manifestation of anger, between the extremes of excessive anger and absence of anger, on the Aristotelian model of the Peripatos (discussed below). More broadly, the ‘two voices’ model of interpretation (discussed below) can be linked to a contrast between a Stoic-type advocation of participation in public life involving the shouldering of duty for the state and the quietism often associated with Epicureanism. In terms of Virgil’s cosmology, too, various claims are made. A pseudoAristotelian work, About the Cosmos (c. 40 bc ), presents a similar view of cosmology to Virgil’s and may have influenced him.9 Elsewhere, Virgil appears to incorporate the language of the mysteries, for example, in his celebration of the man who understands the workings of the universe (G. 2.490–2), which may evoke Epicurus, Empedocles and Pythagoras.10 Eclogue 4 offers elements of Neopythagoreanism,11 Stoicism (the conflagration) and Near-Eastern apocalyptic images (resembling Old Testament imagery) of the birth of a child: this poem has been dubbed the ‘Messianic’ Eclogue.12 Then there is the Platonism of Anchises’ speech to Aeneas in Book 6.13 Finally, Virgil has also been claimed for Christianity, probably thanks to Stoicizing readings of the poems (especially Eclogue 4), since so much Stoic ideology fed into Christian thought. In fact, this whole issue of interpreting Virgil as an adherent of particular philosophical or religious views is closely bound up with the reception of Virgil in different places and different eras. These conflicting claims may seem to demand a reconciliation. This is not necessary. To assign crude labels to this most complex of authors is of limited usefulness. Servius, the commentator writing around ad 400, shows that he saw this with his comment about poets and philosophy: sectis philosophorum poetae pro qualitate negotiorum semper utuntur (‘poets

8

9 10 11 12 13

a distinction between Stoic-Epicurean ideas and Platonic-Aristotelian ideas, and sees Aeneas as closer to the former. See Austin (1955) on 4.449, not denying the ambiguity; on Stoic Aeneas and un-Stoic Turnus, see Bowra (1933). Thornton (1976: 31–3). Hardie (1986: 39). Carcopino (1930). See Mayor, Warde Fowler, and Conway (1907); Clausen (1994: 128–9). Norden (1981 [1903]).

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invariably exploit philosophical sects as required by the essence of the context’, on Aen. 10.467).14 Instead, we need to consider the intellectual context of elite Romans in the late Republic, a context heavily influenced by strands of Hellenistic thought, doubtless, but in which these strands were adapted to serve specifically Roman needs, both for the individual and for the collective Roman state with its ideal of Romanitas. The doctrines of the Hellenistic schools were represented by central texts attributed to the founding ‘masters’ and by the pronouncements of subsequent teachers.15 They were articulated in Latin for a wider Roman audience by Cicero and Lucretius and were ultimately absorbed from those sources in what we might call a vernacularized form. Lucretius in particular was hugely important in providing an idiom for philosophical ideas in Latin epic. Ideas from the Hellenistic world are moderated by the quintessentially Roman preoccupation with their practical application. This explains the Roman concern with exemplarity in the education process and in public life, and also the persisting strength of tradition, encapsulated in mos maiorum  – ‘the way our ancestors did things’. Factors like these inform Virgil’s contemporary context and will be our guide in this enquiry. It is intrinsically unlikely that Virgil viewed himself as a card-carrying Stoic or Epicurean, however much he was drawn to Epicurean ideas. Above all, he was a Roman and he was an Italian, from Mantua in north Italy. At the same time, the desire to see Virgil as freed from those philosophical labels typifies his current reception into our world of agnosticism, in which challenges to sects and creeds are in vogue in scholarship as in the wider intellectual life of Western Europeans. So now we turn to Virgil’s religious and philosophical ideas and relate them to their intellectual context, in what we call the late Republic and the beginnings of the Principate, but which for Virgil (without the benefit of hindsight) must have presented countless uncertainties as the series of civil wars concentrated power in the hands of a few men and finally of one man. His ideas fall into three broad categories: issues of physics and cosmology – how the world works, the human place in the world and how gods and humans relate; ethical issues, comprising morality and politics – how humans do and ought to relate to humans; and eschatology, which draws together cosmology and morality in its portrayal of what awaits humans after death. I shall deal with each area separately, paying less attention to the 14

15

See also commentary on Aen. 1.227 and 6.264 regarding Virgil’s inconsistencies. See also Donatus 1.6.1–12 Georgii; variable factors include time, character, place, cause (pro tempore, pro persona, pro loco, pro causa). This does not conflict with Virgil’s later status as a sage. See Sedley (1989) on the tradition of charismatic leadership in the Hellenistic schools.

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narrow questions of Virgil’s sources and consistency and instead examining the function of these ideas within their poetic context. Cosmogony and Cosmology Let’s start at the beginning. Once upon a time, there was a great void (magnum … inane). Through that void, there came together particles (semina) of earth and air and sea and streaming fire and from these elements (primis) came all beginnings (exordia) and the young globe of the world solidified. Then the world took on its shape, with land and sea, under the new sun, and with clouds and rain, woods and mountains and living creatures. That’s how the satyr Silenus begins his song in Eclogue 6 (lines 31–40); he proceeds to evoke the stories of the origin and development of the human race (41–2) and the myths that form the foundations of the history of humankind (43– 81). This is the most explicit cosmogony in Virgil’s poems. It is crucial to consider its context. First, the speaker is Silenus, who is associated with arcane wisdom but is here depicted as a drunken, randy satyr who has to be tricked into singing his song, which may make equivocal Virgil’s allegiance to the ideas expressed. Secondly, the song, like the rest of Eclogue 6, abounds with complex literary allusions. Most obviously it is a tribute to the contemporary poet Gallus, heavily influenced by Hellenistic poetry and author of a (fragmentary) aetiological poem about Apollo. The climax of Silenus’ song (64–73) is a celebration of Gallus’ poetic initiation and achievements, capped by the aetiological poem (72–3). Virgil is also acknowledging the early Greek poet Hesiod and the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, who combine an interest in the origins and workings of the world with the organization and interpretation of mythology.16 Moreover, Silenus’ cosmogony is expressed in language heavily reminiscent of Lucretius’ poem De rerum natura.17 Does this make Silenus’ song Epicurean? Perhaps. Certainly, inane, primis, semina and exordia are words that Lucretius applies to the void, atoms and atomic compounds, and the list of the four primary elements, earth, air, water and fire (32–3), evokes the pluralistic system proposed by the fifth-century philosopher Empedocles, whose philosophy-in-poetry influenced Lucretius. Silenus’ song is evidently a reprise of themes and techniques of recent Latin poetry modelled upon learned Hellenistic poetry and earlier poet-philosophers. Silenus’ cosmogony presents a linear sequence: the creation of the world, animals and humankind, then human ‘history’. This contrasts with the 16 17

On legitimate subjects for the poet, see Hardie (1986: 17, 67). See Macrobius 6.2.22–4 and Farrell (1991: 301–14).

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more complex pattern which emerges from the cosmology of Eclogue 4 and Aeneid 6.  Eclogue 4 opens by celebrating the arrival of ‘the last age of the song of Cumae’ (ultima Cumaei … carminis aetas, 4), referring to the oracles associated with the Sibyl of Cumae. It has been argued that the apocalyptic revelations of Eclogue 4 are derived in form and content from the Sibylline oracles, which were consulted at times of crisis, perhaps as recently as 44 bc at the appearance of the comet soon after Julius Caesar’s assassination. Then, magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo (‘the great sequence of centuries is born anew’, 5) fuses two different views of history. The word saeclorum may evoke the Etruscan doctrine that a nation’s life was ten saecula long; the commentator Servius writes that the Julian comet was interpreted by an Etruscan diviner as heralding Rome’s tenth saeculum (on Ecl. 9.46). The phrase magnus … ordo (combined with magni … menses, ‘great months’, 13) evokes the concept of the ‘great year’ (magnus annus) said to begin again every time the stars returned to the precise position that they occupied at the birth of the universe. This cyclical view of the world was held by the Pythagoreans; the Stoics associated it with the circuit (Greek periodos) between the periodic conflagrations which cleansed the world.18 Next, Virgil throws history into reverse, with the return of the Virgin goddess and the reign of Saturn (6), the Iron Age giving way to the golden race (8– 10), inverting Hesiod’s myth of the races in Works and Days (109–201). It is not clear whether Virgil envisages a cyclical pattern or simply a backwards sequence; and it is not clear that it matters.19 Whatever the origin of the ideas here, it is the political context of the poem which gives them significance. The opening of Eclogue 4 announces that this is political discourse (consule dignae, ‘worthy of a consul’, 3), in antithesis to the opening of Eclogue 6, where the poem is explicitly located in the realm of the agrestem … Musam (‘rustic Muse’, 8). Eclogue 4 celebrates the imminent return of the Golden Age and explicitly connects this with contemporary political events.20 What, precisely, those political events were has stimulated speculation of the widest imaginable range; the date of composition and publication are contested, and there are numerous identifications of the Wunderkind, the mysterious child whose birth is celebrated in the poem. Some are plausible, some crazy.21 What is certain is that such apocalyptic,

18 19 20

21

Cic. ND 2.118. On Virgil’s syncretism, see Nisbet (1978). On the importance of the idea of the return of the Golden Age, see Wallace-Hadrill (1982). Coleman (1977: 150–2) offers seven different suggestions; Clausen (1994: 127) gives fourth- and fifth-century Christian interpretations.

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Golden Age imagery is associated with the start of a new reign throughout classical literature. It is an expression of optimism.22 The idea of the harmony of the world in Eclogue 4 receives fuller expression in Georgics 4 and Aeneid 6. In the final book of the Georgics, Virgil commends bees for their social coherence, which includes voluntary selfsacrifice for the community (G. 4.219–27). This, he says, has given rise to claims that bees participate in the divine intelligence (divinae mentis) that rules the world. Strikingly similar language and ideas recur in Aeneid 6, when Aeneas meets his father Anchises in the Underworld and asks him for an explanation of the souls waiting beside the River Lethe (Aen. 6.703–12). In reply, Anchises describes the cosmic principles of the universe in largely Stoic terms, inspired by Platonism and Pythagoreanism (Aen. 6.724–32).23 Anchises represents the universe in figurative terms familiar from Stoicism as endowed with spiritus (spirit) and mens (intelligence), artus (limbs) and corpus (substance), with fire privileged above the other elements, yet his language is strongly reminiscent of Lucretius, a remarkable combination.24 This reinforces my earlier point:  Virgil is drawing upon the entire range of ideas and expressions available to him. Here these ideas contribute to the articulation of Anchises’ inspiring, patriotic vision of the future race of Rome. The very un-Epicurean Anchises25 is behaving like the quintessential Roman paterfamilias – teaching his son what he needs to know in order to be a Roman. His resoundingly famous lines are thus addressed not directly to Aeneas but to his quintessential descendant, ‘Roman’ (Romane): tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes) pacique imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. (6.851–3) Remember, Roman, to rule the peoples with your power – these shall be your skills – and to combine peace with morality, to spare the conquered and to subdue the proud.

It is tempting to identify the authority of Anchises with that of Virgil speaking as the national poet and producing his patriotic vision for Augustus and the Romans, the ultimate paterfamilias and his ‘sons’. If this is right, politics 22

23 24

25

See Seneca’s praise of Nero at Apoc. 4.1. On the complexities of Virgil’s Golden Age, see Hammer (2014: 186–93). Norden (1981 [1903]: 16–17). Cic. ND 2.39–41; Long and Sedley (1987: 46, A–P). Lucr. 5.68–9: fundarit terram caelum mare sidera solem | lunaique globum (‘established earth, sky, sea, stars, sun and the ball of the moon’); Lucr. 5.92: principio maria ac terras caelumque tuere (‘first of all look upon seas, and lands, and sky’). Contrast Lucr. 5.1127–30.

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trumps the labelling of philosophical ideas in interpretations of Virgil; whatever his inspiration, Virgil weaves his ideas into a fabric laden with significance for his Roman readership. Gods and Humans and Nature What are the roles of gods and humans in this cosmos? The universe as described by Anchises is in motion and is monistic or pantheistic, its movement governed by divine intelligence (mens, Aen. 6.727). Earlier, a pluralistic view of the universe is expressed in Helenus’ prophecy (Aen. 3.375–6), where Jupiter ‘deals out the destinies and rolls the wheel of change; and such is the circling sequence’ (sic fata … | sortitur voluitque vices, is vertitur ordo; for ordo, see also Ecl. 4.5). Is Virgil’s representation of Jupiter’s role in the workings of the universe self-contradictory? ‘He is both the all-comprehending cosmic divinity and the highest divinity ruling over an, at times, unruly group of gods, spirits, and men.’26 And he is more (or less) than those things. Jupiter is no longer the Homeric Zeus, a god standing above interstate faction; he enters the epic as ‘the national god of the Roman state’.27 Moreover, Jupiter is the only one powerful enough to bring about the conclusion, which he finally achieves (12.829–40) by compromising his pro-Venus, pro-Trojan position in order to accommodate Juno in a partial reconciliation. ‘From the beginning Jupiter is associated with the end.’28 Juno is more complex still. She is the Carthaginian goddess Tanit, championing her city against the rival Romans, as portrayed by Ennius in his epic Annals. She is the Greek Hera of the Homeric poems, who hates the Trojans. She is the allegorical representation of aer, the lower air, the realm of storms. And her association with beginnings (as opposed to endings) links her to anarchy and lack of closure.29 Once we accept Feeney’s argument for ‘the ancients’ ability to view deity as a many-sided prism’,30 we are liberated from the stark alternatives often posed in earlier scholarship. Consider, for example, the antithetical interpretations of Jupiter’s role in the council of the gods in Book 10 (1–117). Either this scene is a vindication of Jupiter’s authority and majesty,31 or it is an exhibition of opacity, disingenuousness and mendacity.32 Better, 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Thornton (1976: 71). Feeney (1991: 140). Feeney (1991: 140, 137). Feeney (1991: 131–4, 137–8). Feeney (1991: 127); Feeney (1998: 101–4). Klingner (1967: 566–8). Lyne (1987: 89).

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Jupiter is ‘engaged in a nexus with other characters from which he cannot be extricated’.33 Jupiter’s declaration at the end of the council of the gods – that rex Iuppiter omnibus idem. | fata viam invenient (‘the kingship of Jupiter will be the same for all:  the fates will find a way’, Aen. 10.112–13)  – is, as Feeney says, ‘vague’ and ‘resists quasi-theological exegesis’.34 All we can sensibly say is that it is an assertion of absolute power, without any manifesto of how that power actually operates. In a universe ruled by an autocrat, there seems to be little place for free will. Despite arguments to the contrary, humans seem to be entirely subject to divine will. Take the case of Aeneas’ departure from Carthage. We must resist the temptation to read this naturalistically as Aeneas’ sudden realization that he must leave.35 It is not. A significant part of Book 4 (lines 196– 278) is devoted to the delivery of Jupiter’s command by Mercury, a point which is emphasized by the unusual reiteration of the speech (Aen. 4.223–37 and 265–76) and reinforced later by yet another visit from Mercury (Aen. 4.560–70). Moreover, when Mercury aggressively delivers Jupiter’s message (Aen. 4.265–76), Aeneas is struck dumb with terror (Aen. 4.279–80). There is no monologue of indecision. Aeneas’ reaction is instant: he wants to get away (Aen. 4.281–2). His only hesitation is over how to achieve this. Even when confronted by Dido (Aen. 4.305–30), he experiences no conflict about leaving, only about whether to give expression to the pain he feels (Aen. 4.331–2). This may seem like a novelistic moment of crisis, but Virgil says explicitly that Aeneas suppresses his love or pity for Dido (whatever curam denotes) through his obedience to Jupiter (Iovis monitis). Yet it is not so surprising that we are tempted into a naturalistic interpretation (as were some ancient readers). Virgil often leaves the balance between divine and human agency obfuscated. W. R. Johnson is acute on Dido falling in love: Vergil chooses to create a baffling design in which the supernatural and the natural, the physical and the psychological, divine intervention and psychological realism are merged together implausibly – the pattern is baffling and disturbing because we see the action from without and from within at different times and sometimes at the same time.36

This is typical of Virgil’s narrative technique. His weaving is subtle and complex – and our reading of Virgil brings an overlay derived from novelistic verisimilitude. It takes an effort of will to peel away that layer. 33 34 35 36

Feeney (1991: 145). Feeney (1991: 145). See Feeney (1991: 172–6). Johnson (1976: 44). At Aen. 9.184–5, Virgil explicitly draws attention to the problem.

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The relationship between humans and the autocratic Jupiter identified in the Aeneid has its forerunner in the Georgics, specifically in the so-called ‘theodicy’ (divine justification) of labour in Book 1.  Here, in a passage which evokes both Hesiod and Lucretius, Virgil states that Jupiter brought the Golden Age to an end and imposed ‘hard work’ (labor) on humankind (G. 1.118–46):  pater ipse colendi | haud facilem esse viam voluit (‘The Father himself has willed that the path of cultivation should not be easy’, G. 1.121–2). The words which end the passage, labor omnia vicit | improbus, have provoked hot debate. Against L. P. Wilkinson’s positive view of Virgil’s theodicy of labour, Richard Thomas sees these as the ‘most crucial lines of the poem’,37 reflecting its overall pessimism, and translates: ‘Insatiable toil occupied all areas of existence’;38 Monica Gale unpacks the complexities and ambiguities of Virgil’s reworking of Hesiodic and Lucretian ideas and language.39 Undoubtedly, Virgil emphasizes a negative element of human experience. But is it true that this picture of fallen man condemned to toil all the days of his life (recalling Genesis 3:17) dominates the poem? That is highly debatable. This pessimistic view of Virgil’s portrayal of the human condition has not commanded universal assent. It may even be seen as a phenomenon of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While some stress Virgil’s dark visions and privilege the negative parts of his poems, others emphasize the optimistic material which they see as counterbalancing or outweighing the negative parts. Georgics 2 has two such passages, the celebration of the natural resources of Italy (136–76) and the finale of the book, in which Virgil praises country life and the country dweller (458–542), beginning: o fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint, agricolas! quibus ipsa, procul discordibus armis, fundit humo facilem victum iustissima tellus. (G. 2.458–60) O happy are the farmers! Too happy, if they fully knew their blessings! For them, far from discordant weapons, the most just Earth spontaneously pours out from her soil an easy living.

The subsequent idealization of rustic life, another reminder of Virgil’s rural Italian origins, is a celebration of humans living in harmony with a cooperative Nature and enjoying the leisure and treasure she bestows. This evocation of the Golden Age is followed by a makarismos (celebration) of 37 38 39

Wilkinson (1969: 135–41). Thomas (1988: 145–6). See Gale (2000: 61–7, esp. 62–3 on Virgil’s collapsing of Hesiodic oppositions).

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the man who understands the workings of the universe (felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, G. 2.490). Not only is this couched in terms taken from a fragment of Empedocles probably praising Pythagoras (B 129),40 a passage already echoed by Lucretius in his praise of Epicurus for his universal insight into the nature of things in De rerum natura (1.62–78, with reprises at the start of books 5 and 6). It also seems to be an expression of Virgil’s aspirations for his poem. The strongly Lucretian language here conveys Virgil’s tribute to his predecessor in the genre. After this, the focus returns to the country dweller, this time seen as in tune with the rustic gods, fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes (‘fortunate is the one who knows the country gods’, G. 2.493). Georgics 2, then, ends on a note of cooperation and harmony between the divine, human and natural spheres. And this cooperation and harmony is celebrated in the country dwellers’ rituals, sacra deum (473) and libations to Bacchus (529).41 This harmony between humans and the cosmos is familiar from the vision of the Golden Age in Eclogue 4.  As the miraculous child grows from childhood through adolescence to manhood, the universe grows and matures with him. This harmony is an intense example of the so-called ‘pathetic fallacy’, a feature of pastoral poetry in which animate and inanimate nature reflects the emotions of the human actors. When Virgil presents nature in anthropomorphic terms in the Georgics, as he does frequently,42 this suggests a pantheistic view of the universe, which has common features with the Stoic view of ‘sympathy’ of the different parts of the cosmos.43 If it is possible to draw any conclusion about Virgil’s view of humanity’s place in the universe and of human relationships with divinity, ideas of ‘sympathy’ and ‘harmony’ must be central. This is clearly an ideal – and there are many potential sources of disruptions of that ideal. But Virgil’s optimism comes through. The peace and stability associated with the concentration of power in Augustus’ hands are a necessary precondition of that ideal. Ethical Issues It is clear that in matters of cosmology, Virgil absorbs ideas from a variety of sources and is much less concerned to produce a coherent synthesis than to integrate his material into its immediate context, which is often 40 41

42 43

See also B 132 of Diels and Kranz (1951). Hardie (1986: 34). Ritual recurs throughout Virgil (e.g. Ecl. 5.65–71, Aen. 8.280–369). On ritual and Roman poetry and society generally, see the chapter ‘Ritual’ in Feeney (1998) and the chapter ‘Virgil’s gods of the land’ in Fantham (2009). Wilkinson (1969: 128). Thornton (1976: 30).

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highly politicized. Does the same apply in ethical matters? Here, too, there is always a political dimension, in the broadest sense of the word: morality concerns the individual in the community. One ideal community described by Virgil is that of the bees in Georgics 4, which has been interpreted as a representation of an idealized human society.44 One individual who has been regarded as an ethical ideal is Aeneas. Yet for Virgil there is evidently a tension between individuality and community, between private and public, between the personal and the state.45 I propose to focus upon Aeneas’ duel with Turnus at the end of Book 12. Critics have produced diametrically opposed interpretations of this episode. Aeneas’ killing of Turnus is an act of ‘frenzy’ (furor) or of ‘duty’ (pietas), to be condemned in Stoic terms or approved in Aristotelian, and he is either fulfilling or disregarding Anchises’ instructions in Book 6  ‘to spare the conquered and subdue the proud’ (parcere subiectis et debellare superbos, Aen. 6.853). These disagreements epitomize fluctuations in the interpretation of the Aeneid as a whole. Critics have tended towards either an ‘optimistic’ reading of the poem or a ‘pessimistic’ reading. Those who wish to see Aeneas as unambiguously good rationalize the end of the Aeneid by ‘proving’ the villainy of Turnus; the counter-reaction is crystallized in the ‘two voices’ line, which emphasizes the private voices in the poem and the disturbing nature of the ending.46 This debate has recently been taken into the philosophical arena of ancient ethics:  should we interpret Aeneas’ final act in the light of Epicureanism, Stoicism, or Peripatetic ideas? For ten years the dispute raged hotly between Michael Putnam and Karl Galinsky.47 Putnam argues that ‘Aeneas’ action is morally dubious’:  it is an ‘un-Stoic course of anger and revenge’ and the close is a ‘powerfully inconclusive, brilliantly calculated ending’ which leaves us pondering the ‘open-endedness of anger and hatred’. He relates the Aeneid to Cicero’s ‘intensely Stoic interpretation of anger’ in the Tusculan Disputations, to demonstrate that it is the animal part, not the celestial, which governs Aeneas. Moreover, Putnam insists that Aeneas ‘scorn[s] his father’s command to spare a suppliant’, and interprets Aeneas’ final act as 44 45 46

47

Dahlmann (1954). On tension and balance in Virgil, see Griffin (1979). For the phrase ‘two voices’, see Parry (1963). The debate is summarized succinctly and judiciously by Kallendorf (2007a: v–viii), citing important work including Johnson (1976: see esp. 8–16) and ‘Thomas (2001: xii-xiii; he prefers the term ‘ambivalents’ to ‘pessimists’) before proceeding’ to demonstrate that there is a continuous tradition of ‘pessimistic’ readings through the early modern period. Trace the debate in Galinsky (1988), Putnam (1990), Galinsky (1994), Putnam (1995, 2011). A succinct snapshot of the more complicated picture is given by Gigante (2004: 96–9).

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one of inclementia (failure to show mercy) which ‘adumbrates the negative side of one-man rule’.48 In contrast, Galinsky argues that Aeneas’ anger is a fitting closure which is misread by critics who do not take into account ancient views of anger. He points out that Aeneas was not criticized for his angry killing of Turnus until Christian writers such as Lactantius and Augustine. Galinsky suggests that Aeneas embodies Aristotle’s view of anger: under certain circumstances a good man ought to become angry and exact revenge, when an injustice has been committed. Anger is viewed as something rational, the middle way between excessive anger and a lack of anger. ‘In the Aristotelian sense, then, Aeneas is an example of the morally perfect man.’49 Into this philosophical debate, Hardie injected the political element: while insisting upon the multivalence of the Aeneid’s last scene, he acknowledges Virgil’s exploration of imperialist themes. He argues that the duel between Aeneas and Turnus presents four contradictory types of allusion which coexist in tension: (1) to Gigantomachy (essentially, a positive portrayal of Aeneas defeating the forces of disorder), (2) to the Homeric duel between Achilles and Hector (an allusion which diminishes the significance of Aeneas’ victory by reminding us of its transitory nature), (3) to the conflict between Roman and Gaul (another positive allusion, affirming the rightness of Roman might) and (4) to gladiatorial spectacle (another negative allusion in which the fighter is reduced to non-personhood as a transient spectacle for others).50 In this pluralist reading of the close of the Aeneid, Hardie goes some considerable way to rehabilitating imperialist readings of the poem without sacrificing insights gained from the pessimistic type of reading. The relevance of the political factor is clinched by Francis Cairns, who complements Hardie’s emphasis upon Virgil’s Romanization of his material by introducing ancient political philosophy into the debate. His point is that in the final books Virgil portrays Aeneas as a virtuous king. In On the Good King According to Homer by Philodemus, the first-century bc Epicurean philosopher, Homeric ideas are closely linked with contemporary Roman politics. Cairns argues that Aeneas’ anger (ira) is ‘not an involuntary or uncontrolled passion’51 and he uses Cicero (De officiis 1.34–5) to illuminate the difficulties of the end of the Aeneid. In accordance with Cicero’s precepts, Aeneas preserves the ‘rights of war’ (iura belli) and makes war to achieve peace. The Aeneid, then, can be set in the context of the ancient

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Putnam (1990: 15, 16, 39, 22) and Putnam (1995: 202, 215). Galinsky (1988: 335). For criticism of Aeneas, see Galinsky (1994: 191). Hardie (1986: 153–4). Cairns (1989: 78).

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debate about kingship, focusing upon the qualities of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ rulers. Significantly, the name Turnus comes from the Etruscan form of the Greek tyrannos.52 What emerges is the importance of detaching ourselves from automatic naturalistic readings and of trying instead to reconstruct the intellectual climate in which Virgil was writing. The Roman elite was open to the ideas of the Hellenistic philosophical schools and to the language in which those ideas were beginning to be framed in Latin. Opinion was affected by early Roman history with its ideology of attaining high achievement through emulation of the fine role models of the past. Of supreme importance was Homer, the basis of Roman education  – and it is no coincidence that the Iliad opens with the word ‘anger’, the issue which Virgil tackles at the close of his Aeneid. Rather than label Aeneas a ‘Stoic’ sage, it is more illuminating, then, to see Aeneas as the Homeric ideal of the ‘good king’ and as a protoRoman who sets his duty to the gods and the future Roman state above any personal wishes and desires. Eschatology Finally, we come to eschatology (literally ‘last things’), ideas about what happens after death. The central passage here is Anchises’ speech in Aeneid 6, which forms the climax of Aeneas’ katabasis to the Underworld.53 Anchises explains to Aeneas that the souls beside the River Lethe are waiting for rebirth:  animae, quibus altera fato | corpora debentur, Lethaei ad fluminis undam | securos latices et longa oblivia potant (‘They are spirits, fated for second bodies, and at the water of Lethe’s stream they drink the soothing draught and long forgetfulness’, Aen. 6.713–15; Lethe is Greek for ‘forgetfulness’). He then describes what happens to the soul after death:  a process of purification and reincarnation. After death, each soul undergoes punishments which match the wrongdoings of the body in its lifetime, a process readily seen as equivalent to the Christian Purgatory.54 Once the ‘stain of guilt’ is removed, some or all of the souls are sent to Elysium. Virgil’s language becomes rather elliptical and mysterious at this point, but what is important is the cyclical view of the universe expressed again. Anchises’ language is strongly redolent of Stoicism:  donec longa dies perfecto temporis orbe | concretam exemit labem, purumque relinquit | aetherium sensum 52

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Cairns (1989: esp. ch. 1). Cairns discusses Aeneas the virtuous king on page 78 and Turnus on page 67. On Virgil’s Underworld, see Hardie (2014: 21–49). For comparative material for Aeneas’ descent to the underworld, see Clark (1978). Norden (1981 [1903]: 29). See also Aug. Civ. 21.13.

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atque aurai simplicis ignem (‘till the long day, the sequence of time fulfilled, has worn our stains away, leaving clear the etherial perception and the fire of pure spirit’, Aen. 6.745–7) and mille rotam volvere per annos (‘when they have turned time’s wheel a thousand years’, Aen. 6.748). Beyond Stoicism lie Platonism and Pythagoreanism. Any reading of the close of Aeneid 6 must be informed by Plato’s myth of the afterlife, the ‘Myth of Er’, which closes his Republic (10.614b–621d). Socrates tells the story of a Pamphylian called Er who was found on the battlefield and assumed to be dead. Twelve days later, as he lay on the funeral pyre, he came back to life and described what happens to the soul after death. Plato seems to combine Orphic ideas, such as the image of the body as the carcere caeco (‘dark prison’, Aen. 6.734) of the soul,55 with Pythagorean beliefs, most notably the idea of the transmigration of souls from one body to another in a continuous process of reincarnation. The heavy influence of Plato on Virgil may explain why Eduard Norden, in his classic commentary on Book 6 (1981 [1903]), continually re-expresses Virgil’s thought in this section in Greek and not in German.56 But Plato is not the only influence here. Anchises’ language is strongly reminiscent of Cicero’s reworking of the ‘Myth of Er’ in the ‘Dream of Scipio’ with which he closes his De re publica. This text presents the fictional dream of Scipio Aemilianus in which his adoptive grandfather, Scipio Africanus, appears to him and explains how souls escape from the prison of their bodies into the only true life, life after death. Next Scipio’s natural father, Aemilius Paullus, appears and explains the relative insignificance of the earth, then Africanus explains the arrangement of the planets and the ‘music of the spheres’ and emphasizes the fragility of earthly glory and of Roman activity in the world, before talking about the immortality of the soul. He closes by urging Scipio that the best life for the soul while on earth is one in which one works for the preservation of one’s country. While the cosmology and eschatology are familiar from Plato,57 the tone of the finale is strongly Roman and patriotic. At first sight, this seems to provide a close analogy for Anchises’ speech to Aeneas. Both texts combine cosmology, morality and patriotic exhortation, and in both texts the knowledge is imparted by dead ancestor to living descendant. Yet there is a radical divergence between Cicero and Virgil.58 Where 55 56

57 58

Feeney (1986: n. 13). Norden (1981 [1903]). For example, line 743, quisque suos patimur Manes (‘we each suffer our own spirit’), is more comprehensible when ‘spirit’ is seen as the Latin equivalent of Greek daimon (‘guardian spirit’). Powell (1990: 123). Feeney (1986: 2). For further bibliography, see Feeney (1986: 19 n. 2, 20 n. 11).

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Scipio is told repeatedly that earthly glory is insignificant, Anchises uses the future glory of Rome to inspire Aeneas with patriotic fervour, capping his eschatology with a stirring vision of the future heroes of Rome (Aen. 6.756–886), the climax to Book 6. There is, in fact, a fundamental tension between the Platonic articulation of Anchises’ eschatology and his eulogy of the future Roman state and her statesmen – a future which for Virgil’s audience has become real in the form of their rousing stories of the Roman past. Feeney is right to conclude that the essence of the meeting between Aeneas and his father is not a religious revelation but ‘an image of the nature of Rome and … an image of the life of the Roman statesman’.59 Zetzel goes further in finding a ‘remarkable combination of philosophy, religion, myth, and history’ in Aeneid 6, ‘Virgil’s response to the end of one saeculum and the beginning of another’, looking ahead to Augustus’ Ludi Saeculares in 17 bc .60 There is one aspect common to all three eschatologies: the idea of getting just rewards.61 Eschatology, then, brings together cosmology and morality. In Plato, the ‘Myth of Er’ is Socrates’ response to a question about the rewards of virtue. Cicero has Scipio say, just before the narration of the dream, that because Virtue is divine she longs for rewards of a fresher and more permanent kind than statues and triumphs.62 And in Aeneid 6, before the meeting of Aeneas and his father, Virgil indicates that the groves of the blessed in Elysium are open to any who deserve them (6.664). In this way, he departs significantly from Homer’s depiction of Elysium, where this privilege is confined to those of divine descent (Od. 4.561–9). It is very important that Virgil makes this change. He records as inhabitants of Elysium patriots, priests, prophets, philosophers/scientists and those who deserve a place there, merendo (6.660–5; cf. Aug. Civ. 21.27). This makes imaginable a universe in which the human-divine gulf can be bridged. The person who lives forever in Elysium or in heaven is very close to being a god. Which brings me, finally, to those figures in Virgil’s poems who, by their deserving conduct, are able to cross the boundary to become divine and who represent a strong source of optimism for humankind. The bees of Georgics 4 could do this, but only as a non-individualized community; theirs is a collective form of immortality. Virgil explores this theme for human individuals in Eclogue 5 in the shepherds’ songs about the death and deification of the 59 60 61

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Feeney (1986: 16). Zetzel (1989: 264). On the similarities, see Zetzel (1996: 318): ‘Cicero’s and Virgil’s visions of the ideal governance of Rome and of the universe’ are, like Plato’s, ‘poetic visions of justice as a philosophical myth’. Macrobius, Somnium Scipionis 1.4.2–3.

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mysterious herdsman Daphnis. He adapts the pastoral motif of lament for a herdsman’s death (e.g. Theocritus’ Idyll 1) into a celebration of his deification in terms readily interpreted as allegorical of the assassinated Julius Caesar.63 More explicit is the celebration of Octavian’s future divine status in the proem to the Georgics. Virgil opens this poem with an invocation of twelve deities of the countryside, then devotes a passage of the same length to a request for Octavian’s approval of his poetic task. This, the climax of the catalogue, in effect makes Octavian a god:  ingredere et votis iam nunc adsuesce vocari (‘enter on your worship and learn even now to hearken unto our prayers’, G. 1.42).64 In the poem’s closing words, Octavian is portrayed as fulfilling the terms of Anchises’ exhortation at Aeneid 6.851–3:  great Caesar is described as fulminat Euphraten bello victorque volentes | per populos dat iura viamque adfectat Olympo (‘thundering in war by deep Euphrates and giving victor’s laws to willing nations and venturing the path to Olympus’, G. 4.560–2). His embodiment of Anchises’ ideal sets him on a par with divinity. In presenting the possibility of men becoming gods, Virgil explores issues of absolute power. This is nowhere more explicit than in the portrayal of Hercules in Aeneid 8. Hercules wins divine status by destroying the monster Cacus, but in so doing displays a manic violence and frenzy which seem to put him on the same level as the bestial Cacus (185–275). In this Gigantomachic imagery, is he beast, man, or god?65 And what is the significance of the apparent parallelism between Hercules and Augustus? Between Hercules and Aeneas? The picture of Octavian on the shield of Aeneas with which Aeneid 8 closes reiterates Hercules’ imposition of order on chaos and in both episodes,  ‘Gigantomachic victory [is] followed by religious celebration and thanksgiving’.66 Moreover, in his duel with Turnus in Book 12, Aeneas is cast in a Herculean role of Gigantomachic victor, since he confronts a Turnus who has taken his enmity too far. The figure of Hercules seems to encapsulate the potential of absolute, quasi-divine power, for good and for ill. When the absolutely powerful man behaves like a god, the result is prosperity under his beneficence; when he behaves with the uncontrollable cruelty of a beast, the result is sheer terror. Hercules is a model fraught with ambivalence, for Aeneas and for Augustus alike.

63 64 65 66

Taylor (1934: 227); Weinstock (1971: 370–2) on Ecl. 9.47; Otis (1964: 135). On Roman cult of emperors, see Feeney (1998: 108–14). Hardie (1986: 110–18); Feeney (1991: 158–61). Hardie (1986: 118; see also 147–54, 176–8).

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There is another who crosses that barrier of death to attain a kind of immortality:  Orpheus. Georgics 4 closes with Proteus’ narration of the story of how Orpheus loses his wife Eurydice while rescuing her from the Underworld because he disobeys the command not to look back at her. He is devastated by his grief and for seven whole months laments his loss in song. The ‘reward’ for his devotion is to be attacked by Maenads who tear him to pieces. But as his head floats downstream on the river Hebrus, Orpheus’ voice and tongue survive dismemberment and death to continue his cry for ‘Eurydice!’ (4.453–527). If Hercules is a model (however ambivalent) for Augustus, then Orpheus is a model for Virgil. Where Augustus’ expectation of immortality derives from his military and political achievements, Virgil’s hopes of immortality lie in his songs. Conclusion Virgil was not a doctrinaire member of any particular school of thought. I  have tried to demonstrate the limited usefulness of attempts to label features of Virgil’s poetry as ‘Stoic’ or ‘Epicurean’. He uses different ideas for different purposes in different contexts. Many of the ideas go back to Homer and Hesiod – authors who formed the basis of ancient education, in physics and cosmology as much as ethics. And the moral dimension of the poems is better understood within the broader context of late republican ethical thought. Certainly, Virgil explores issues and dilemmas central to the Hellenistic philosophical schools, but this is where and because they converge with ideological and ethical concerns of the late republican elite. Any inquiry about the sources of Virgil’s ‘philosophy’ is more fruitfully directed towards Homer: the view that philosophy was learned from poetry, starting from Homer, was axiomatic in antiquity. One of the clearest expressions of this view is in Horace, Epistles 1.2, for example (lines 3–4, 6–8, 11–18): The poet shows what is fine and foul, what is advisable, what not, more clearly and better than Chrysippus or Crantor … The story, which tells how Greece because of Paris’ love clashed in weary war with a foreign land, is full of the passions of foolish kings and peoples. … Nestor is anxious to settle the dispute between Peleus’ son and the son of Atreus, the first fired by love and both by anger. For every act of royal folly, the Achaeans pay the penalty. Faction, deceit, crime, lust and anger – it’s a story of wrongdoing inside and outside the walls of Troy. 296

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Similarly significant for our understanding of Virgil is the Roman exemplary mode of thought manifested in the Roman education system, which relied heavily upon the use of positive and negative role models (exempla), such as Ulysses in Horace above.67 Virgil’s poems are illuminated when viewed not in terms of systems of philosophical thought but as reflecting and participating in the exemplarity central to the formation of the Roman man (vir) and Roman manhood (virtus). This in turn corresponds to the function of Roman education, which was not to develop freethinkers but to focus the individual’s thoughts upon his role as an individual in the state. Virgil’s prime allegiance is to Italy and to Rome.68 FURTHER READING Four books stand out as essential reading on Virgil’s treatment of the relationship between humankind and the gods and nature. The first two, Hardie (1986) and Feeney (1991), cover all the important aspects of this enormous topic and provide ample detailed bibliography; Hardie specifically proposes an analogy between the ordered workings of the universe and the functioning of the expanding Roman Empire. The second two deal with more specific religious aspects of the poem: Dyson (2001) argues that the reciprocal sacrificial deaths in the Aeneid reflect the cult of Diana Nemorensis at Aricia, not far from Rome, in which the priest, the ‘King of the Wood’, is challenged and killed by his successor; Miller (2009) explores the role of Apollo in Augustan poetry, especially Virgil’s, in the light of Augustus’ claim to special affiliation with the deity, as marked by his construction and dedication of a brand new temple to Apollo on the Palatine, next door to his own residence. Thornton (1976) deals with matters of cosmology, philosophy and the gods. On eschatology, see Feeney (1986) and Zetzel (1989), especially on the juxtaposition and interpenetration of Homeric and Orphic-Pythagorean ideas. The dispute about the ethical flavour of the end of the Aeneid is found in Galinsky (1988) and (1994) and Putnam (1990), (1995:  201–45) and (2011).

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See also Horace, Sat. 1.4.105–25 and the handbook of 967 exempla by Valerius Maximus, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia (‘Deeds and sayings worthy of record’). To the thanks to Denis Feeney, Monica Gale, Pauline Hire and Charles Martindale expressed in the first edition, I add Jake Mackey.

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On the political dimension of the Aeneid, see Hardie (1986), Cairns (1989) and Hammer (2014). Nisbet (1978) uses the polarities of earlier criticism to illuminate Virgil’s syncretism in the Eclogues. On the tension between ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ readings of the Aeneid, see Johnson (1976) and Kallendorf (2007a). Feeney (1998) provides a broader sociopolitical and cultural context for our appreciation of Virgil’s ideas. For an overview of the influence of Hellenistic ideas in late republican Rome, see Rawson (1985) and, specifically on philosophy, see Griffin (1989).

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17 J OS E P H FA R R E L L

Virgil’s Intertextual Personae

The conceit that a Latin poet not only based his work on that of some principal Greek model, but assumed a literary identity as that poet’s Roman equivalent, is a commonplace of ancient and modern criticism.1 Virgil’s career is traditionally, and famously, defined by successive engagements with three principal models, Theocritus, Hesiod and Homer, but the presence of many other authors is also a hallmark of his work. A useful way of approaching Virgil’s intertextual poetics is therefore through the concept of persona. Allusion to one or another model may be considered the assumption of a different identity by fashioning and wearing the masks of the eclogue poet, the georgic poet and the Aeneid poet, each with reference to the primary Greek models involved; but these intertextual personae are never simple or consistent. The eclogue poet is never merely a Roman Theocritus: from time to time, he assumes the identity of his own rustic characters, which in general are also borrowed from the Theocritean Idylls, but are modified to suit new purposes in a new context; and he occasionally assumes personae borrowed from other writers, as well. The eclogue poet’s refracted and composite persona in turn becomes a model for those of his counterparts, the georgic poet and the Aeneid poet. Furthermore, these three poets are themselves distinct characters, but are also facets of an integrated authorial identity developed over time and satisfyingly whole despite its remarkably

1

Thus Lucilius, according to Jerome (Comm. in Mich. 2.7) calls Ennius ‘a second Homer’ (alter Homerus), a phrase picked up by Horace (Epist. 2.1.50), and Propertius proclaims himself ‘the Roman Callimachus’ (Romani … Callimachi, 4.1.64). An unnamed frenemy hails Horace as Alcaeus, and Horace, logrolling, ironically salutes him, an elegist, as Callimachus or Mimnermus (Epist. 2.2.91–101). Caesar, still less charitably, hailed Terence as ‘half a Menander’ (o dimidiate Menander, fr. 1.1 in Blänsdorf (2011)).

This chapter complements, but does not supersede, its predecessor in the first edition, Farrell (1997), just as that chapter did not and does not repeat or replace Farrell (1991: 3–25). See also Farrell (2005).

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composite nature.2 The issues involved go beyond the formal and the literary. Virgil’s intertextual personae are ethical, both in the sense that they each have their own character, and that they represent different patterns of outlook on and behaviour inside and outside the world of the poems. They are also culturally inflected:  the kinds of individual who populate Virgil’s three major works, the herdsman, the farmer, and the hero, did not mean the same things to Greek and Roman readers. In this brief chapter I can only suggest the outlines of such a broad topic in a way that I hope will provoke others to go further. Syracusan Verse: The Poet in His Poetry A basic design element of the Eclogue book is that all the odd-numbered poems are quasi-dramatic mimes in which only fictional rustic characters speak, while a presumably authorial voice introduces the even-numbered poems in propria persona. Eclogue 6 starts the second half of the collection with a boast about introducing Latin readers to ‘Syracusan’ poetry: Prima Syracosio dignata est ludere versu nostra, neque erubuit silvas habitare, Thalia. (Ecl. 6.1–2) The first Muse who deigned to dabble in Syracusan verse and did not blush to dwell in woodlands was my Thalia.

Who would not assume that the speaker is Virgil, claiming to be the Roman Theocritus?3 But just a few lines later this speaker recalls being addressed – by Apollo, no less – as Tityrus (3–4), a herdsman who also plays a major role in Eclogue 1.4 This gesture provokes a moment of cognitive dissonance. Why would Virgil create this confusion between ‘himself’ and one of his rustic characters? A simple answer is that Theocritus had done the same thing. Idyll 7 begins with a personal reminiscence: Ἦς χρόνος ἁνίκ᾽ ἐγώ τε καὶ Εὔκριτος ἐς τὸν ῞Αλεντα εἵρπομες ἐκ πόλιος, σὺν καὶ τρίτος ἄμμιν Ἀμύντας. (Id. 7.1–2) There was a time when Eucritus and I, and Amyntas with us to make three, were going from town to Haleis.

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4

See Theodorakopoulos, Chapter 13 in this volume. On the poetics of voice in Eclogue 6, see Thomas (1998a) and Breed (2000). For Syracosio versu see too Sicelides Musae 4.1. Tityrus is named in Eclogues 3, 5, 8 and 9, and in Idylls 3.2 and 7.72.

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The reader is not told who ‘I’ might be, though it is easy to infer that the poet himself is speaking.5 But soon, when a mysterious fellow named Lycidas appears (13), he addresses the previous speaker as ‘Simichidas’ (21). This is exactly the effect that Virgil imitates when Apollo addresses Tityrus in Eclogue 6.  Further, the central event of Idyll 7 is the poetic initiation of Simichidas by Lycidas (43–51), who is taken by many as a manifestation of Apollo; and similarly in Eclogue 6, Apollo addresses Tityrus in a context of poetic commissioning (3–5).6 As such, both passages introduce reflections on literary and aesthetic ideals. Later in Idyll 7, Simichidas states that he is already considered an excellent poet, though he modestly insists that he does not yet compare to the best; and in Eclogue 9, a young man named Lycidas – the name of Simichidas’ interlocutor in Idyll 7 – makes a similar declaration to his older companion, Moeris, in a passage that closely follows the Greek original: et me fecere poetam Pierides; sunt et mihi carmina; me quoque dicunt vatem pastores: sed non ego credulus illis; nam neque adhuc Vario videor nec dicere Cinna digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores. (Ecl. 9.32–6) The Muses have made me a poet, too; I have poems of my own; the shepherds call me a bard, too; but I don’t believe them. For as yet, I feel as though I haven’t sung anything that would be worthy of Varius or Cinna, but just squawk like a goose among clear-voiced swans. καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼ Μοισᾶν καπυρὸν στόμα, κἠμὲ λέγοντι πάντες ἀοιδὸν ἄριστον· ἐγὼ δέ τις οὐ ταχυπειθής, οὐ Δᾶν· οὐ γάρ πω κατ᾽ ἐμὸν νόον οὔτε τὸν ἐσθλὸν Σικελίδαν νίκημι τὸν ἐκ Σάμω οὔτε Φιλητᾶν ἀείδων, βάτραχος δὲ ποτ᾽ ἀκρίδας ὥς τις ἐρίσδω. (Id. 7.37–41) For I too have the clear voice of the Muses, everyone says that I, too, am an excellent bard; but I’m not a gullible sort, by Zeus. For as yet, in my opinion I am not a better bard than noble Sicelidas

5 6

On ‘the poet’s voice’ in Idyll 7, see Goldhill (1991: 225–40) and Payne (2007: 146–59). Further connections: Ecl. 6 later recounts the initiation not of a fictional rustic, but of Virgil’s friend, Cornelius Gallus, by the Muses acting in Apollo’s name (64–73); in Idyll 7 Lycidas later (72) mentions Tityrus as a singer known for his version of the Daphnis song, a major theme of Idyll 1; and in Eclogue 10 Gallus sings a version of the Daphnis song (9–69) that is based on that of Idyll 1.

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In Idyll 7, both Sicelidas (i.e. Asclepiades) of Samos and Philetas (of Cos) are accomplished poets who must have been older contemporaries of Theocritus, while in Eclogue 9, L. Varius Rufus and C. Helvius Cinna stand in a similar relationship to Virgil.7 Thus, as in Eclogue 6, a fictional character (Simichidas in the Idylls, Tityrus or Lycidas in the Eclogues) speaks and behaves as if he lived in the same world as actual poets and aspired to be ranked with the best of them. One could say that the Theocritean persona of Simichidas is refracted into that of Virgil’s Tityrus and Lycidas as related aspects of the eclogue poet’s own persona. But that is not the entire story. Theocritus’ treatment of Simichidas is his most nearly explicit invitation to interpret one of his characters as a mask of the poet. Some ancient readers declined the invitation, believing that the charm of the Idylls consisted in their straightforward representation of simple characters with simple concerns and denying that Simichidas or other characters stood for anything besides themselves. Others critics, however, took up the invitation and inferred that not only Simichidas, but other Theocritean characters, are masks of the poet.8 This ‘discovery’ of many similar, sometimes linked associations – especially in the herding poems  – gave rise to readings of the Idylls as a particular kind of biographical allegory. In this approach, the figure of the herdsman (βουκόλος) stands for the poet, and the reader who understands this can draw inferences from these figures about the poet’s life. Most modern critics would locate the truth somewhere between these two extremes. In a general sense, the world of Theocritus’ herdsmen relates to his own experience not as a biographical or historical allegory, but as an imagined world of poetry in its original, mythical form. Virgil grasped this truth as perhaps no other poet ever has.9 But he was undoubtedly familiar with the work of the ‘bucolic’ school and took advantage of it in constructing the persona of the eclogue poet.10

7

8

9 10

Σ Theoc. in Idyll 7.40 identifies Sicelidas as the epigrammatist Asclepiades of Samos. See also Sens (2011). The ancient vita tradition (Σ Theoc. proleg. a), citing Idyll 7.21 (cf. Σ ad loc., Fist. 11– 12), states that his father’s name was Simichus before noting that, according to some, it was Praxagoras (see Theoc. Epigr. 1.3), while Simichidas was a nickname based on the ‘fact’ that Theocritus was ‘snub-nosed’ (σιμός) – this last because the goatherd of Idyll 3, another presumptive avatar of the poet, calls himself snub-nosed (8 with Σ ad loc.). Van Sickle (1976). Farrell (2016). See also Keeline (2017) and Peirano Garrison (2017).

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To Theocritus’ treatment of Simichidas as an authorial mask is added the possibility that Tityrus and Lycidas might represent Virgil not only as a poet, but as a citizen of Rome. The Idylls represent their poet as a rather cosmopolitan figure who is at home in several Hellenistic cultural centres.11 In contrast, the eclogue poet is concerned with only two places, the Italian countryside and Rome, and with the relationship between them. For him, a wider world exists, but the Hellenistic ‘successor states’ have become parts of a Roman Empire, and lands outside of Italy are now places where Virgil’s patrons might win triumphs, or places of exile for his evicted herdsmen.12 Like Simichidas, Tityrus and Lycidas also inhabit an idealized poetic countryside that is identified with a real place; but while Simichidas’ journey from the city takes him into a mythical, sacro-idyllic landscape of rustic song, Tityrus’ and Lycidas’ journeys are to the city, and Tityrus in particular journeys to the city, Rome, in order to save a poetic countryside that is all he has ever known. In contrast, when Lycidas and Moeris travel towards a city in Eclogue 9, they seem to be leaving behind a poetic landscape that is all they have ever known. In an exchange of songs that they can just barely remember, Lycidas offers a snippet addressed to none other than Tityrus (Ecl. 9.23–5, a close rendering of Id. 3.3–5), prompting Moeris to respond with a few lines promising Varus fame as long as Mantua survives (Ecl. 9.26–8).13 Tityrus thus remains linked to the land confiscations, and it is no wonder that ancient critics inferred that Tityrus’ experience was that of Virgil himself, as both poet and landowner.14 Virgil, following Theocritus’ ‘bucolic’ interpreters, actually encourages this inference. But as Simichidas ‘is’ Theocritus, so are Tityrus and Lycidas equally representatives of Virgil; and in terms of the land confiscations, Lycidas with his companion Moeris is clearly aligned not with Tityrus, but with those like Meliboeus in Eclogue 1 who have suffered and have reason to worry about the future. The ambivalent position of the eclogue poet is most clearly summed up in the figure of Menalcas, especially in poems 5 and 9.15 At the end of the 11

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13 14 15

Theocritus addresses Idyll 16 to Hiero of Syracuse and in Idyll 11 calls the Cyclops Polyphemus ‘our [Sicilian] countryman’ (ὁ παρ᾽ ἁμῖν, 7). But Idyll 15 is set in Alexandria and honours Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who is addressed in Idyll 17. It also seems significant that Idyll 7 mentions several prominent members of Coan society, perhaps as patron figures. See Gow (1950: ii .127). The unnamed addressee of Eclogue 8 is praised for his achievements in Illyricum (6–8); Meliboeus in Eclogue 1 foresees exile in Africa, Syria, or Britain (64–6). I leave aside here the question of Virgil’s Arcadia, on which see Schmidt (2008) and Jenkyns (1989), with further references. Moeris, also mentioned in Eclogue 8 (96, 98), is not a Theocritean name. On Mantua and the land confiscations, see Serv. in Buc. 9.10, 28 and VSD 61–63. Payne (2007: 162–6).

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former – and so, immediately before Tityrus’ address to Varus in Eclogue 6 – Menalcas surprisingly reveals himself as the singer of Eclogues 2 and 3 – both widely recognized as hyper-Theocritean poems – which makes him, too, a persona of the eclogue poet.16 Then in Eclogue 9, Moeris reveals that he and Menalcas nearly perished in the land confiscations (2–16), which places them both among those who did not enjoy Tityrus’ good fortune in holding on to their possessions. Here it is of great interest that Menalcas’ song in Eclogue 5 concerns the apotheosis of Daphnis – regarded by most ancient and some modern interpreters as an allegory of Divus Iulius.17 To invite this inference would be a significant extension of the ‘bucolic’ conceit from the poet’s own biography to specific events of recent history. Whether Virgil intended the deified Daphnis as a figure of the deified Julius must remain an open question. Certainly it is not settled when Lycidas addresses Daphnis in Eclogue 9 to ask why he continues to study the old constellations instead of the star of Caesar, the descendant of Venus (Dionaei … Caesaris astrum, 47), which brings with it favourable conditions for the countryside. Logically, if Daphnis has to be urged to notice this star instead of the old constellations, he cannot ‘be’ the deified Caesar. On the other hand, by the flexible standards of ancient allegoresis, this association of Daphnis with Caesar tends to suggest that he is. The larger point, however, is that both Moeris and Lycidas in Eclogue 9 honour not only Varus, but the Julian god as well – thus complicating the persona of the eclogue poet as Tityrus, the beneficiary of the Caesarian land commission, because they are its victims. What seems clear is that Virgil’s attraction to Theocritean poetry had a lot to do with the shimmering nature of the relationship in the Idylls between the poet and his creations. The eclogue poet embraces and, by carefully modulating the exaggerated approach of Theocritus’ ‘bucolic’ critics, greatly complicates that relationship. In the process, he introduces new and urgent concerns to the genre while establishing a notably equivocal perspective on them. In fashioning this persona, Virgil drew heavily on both Theocritus’ ability to suggest so much more than he actually says and Theocritus’ critics’ demonstration of how far readers might go to make specific what the poet merely suggests. By such means, Virgil’s programme of Theocritean intertextuality functions not just as a matter of formal imitation, but as the 16

17

Menalcas appears only in the pseudo-Theocritean Idylls 8 and 9, singing alongside Daphnis, with whom he is linked by some sources for the origins of the pastoral myth. See Gow (1950: ii .1) and Lovatt, Chapter 21 in this volume. Servius reports that some ancient critics thought Daphnis was the Quintilius of Horace’s Odes 1.24.5 (which is addressed to Virgil). See Serv. in Ecl. 5.20, 65. VSD 14 identifies Daphnis as Virgil’s brother Flaccus. For modern assessments, see Coleman (1977: 173– 4), Cucchiarelli (2012: 281–3).

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assumption of a complex poetic and metapoetic, ethical, and transcultural identity. In fashioning this persona, Virgil embarked upon an intertextual voyage that would occupy him for the rest of his career.

Ascraean Song: ‘Higher’ Ambitions18 Conventional wisdom has it that, having finished the Eclogues, Virgil exchanged his Theocritean mask for a Hesiodic one in the Georgics. But he famously ends the Georgics as he began the Eclogues, with an address to Tityrus, just after naming himself: haec super arvorum cultu pecorumque canebam et super arboribus, Caesar dum magnus ad altum fulminat Euphraten bello victorque volentis per populos dat iura viamque adfectat Olympo. illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti, carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuventa, Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi. (G. 4.559–66) This about the care of fields and flocks and about trees was I singing while great Caesar thundered near deep Euphrates and, victorious in war, dispensed justice among willing nations and built his road to Olympus. At that time, as I blossomed in the pursuits of undistinguished leisure, sweet Parthenope [i.e. Naples] was sustaining me, Virgil, who played the songs of herdsmen and, bold in my youth, sang you, Tityrus, beneath the cover of a spreading beech. Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena.19 Tityrus, as you recline beneath the cover of a spreading beech, you practise the woodland Muse on a slender reed of wild oat.

This gesture distinguishes the georgic poet from the eclogue poet while asserting their essential identity under a greatly expanded authorial persona. In contrast to the Eclogues, almost all of the Georgics is spoken by the poet in propria persona. In the earlier work, the author’s persona is

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19

This section builds on arguments first made in Farrell (1991), which hereafter I cite only occasionally; the index locorum of that work may be consulted for details. Ecl. 1.1–2.

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refracted mainly through his rustic characters, but with one literary model primarily in mind; in the later work, relationships with multiple literary predecessors become much more important. Still, it is through contrast that the new work, like its predecessor, generates energy and meaning. Thus the concluding sphragis contrasts the poet, devoted to a life of inconspicuous ease, with Caesar, thundering like the god-to-be that he is. But their relationship is not merely antithetical. To begin the poem, the georgic poet predicts Caesar’s apotheosis, but wonders what kind of god Caesar will become. The possibilities are intertextual in the largest sense, involving phrases and concepts from Greek mythology (the partitioning of the world among Zeus, Poseidon and Hades) and Roman government (the more recent partitioning among Antony, Lepidus and the young Caesar himself, following the precedent of Pompey, Crassus and the previous Caesar). But the result is as yet uncertain, as is the poet’s own fate.20 As eclogue poet, his Theocritean persona allowed him to identify freely with a variety of his characters while reflecting important facets of other poets. In Eclogue 6, Tityrus’ Dichterweihe (‘poetic initiation’) virtually equals that of Callimachus, a foundational ‘event’ in Alexandrian poetics.21 In the Georgics, Virgil’s Callimachean ideals remain essential to his poetic identity.22 At the same time, his expression of these ideals changes with his conception of Hesiod. In Eclogue 6, Hesiod is the Ascraeus senex whose own Dichterweihe was the model for that of Callimachus (and so of Tityrus and Gallus, too), and whose self-representation as a herdsmanpoet fit easily into a neo-Theocritean framework. But the Hesiod of Virgil’s Ascraeum carmen is very much the poet of Works and Days and, to put it simply, more a working farmer than a herdsman-poet.23 This emphasis underwrites a general change of theme and of ethos from the Eclogues to the Georgics. The former work adopts Theocritus’ myth of herdsmen whose world is defined by poetry; the latter turns to farming as a more realistic metaphor of the human condition and, in cultural terms, the single occupation that best defined Roman ethical and civic ideals.24 That said, Virgil’s Hesiodic persona is most obviously relevant in Book 1, whose structure as a whole derives from that of Works and Days.25 By contrast, in books 2–4 there is little to suggest that Hesiod remains the chief model of the Georgics in the way that is true of Theocritus in the Eclogues. 20 21 22 23 24 25

On the theme of uncertainty, see Batstone, Chapter 11 in this volume. Ecl. 6.3–5 ≈ Call. Aet. 1, fr. 1.21–4 Harder (2012). Thomas (1983: 92–101). La Penna (1999); Farrell (1991: 28–33). The locus classicus is Cato’s De agri cultura 1 praef. Further to the question of Hesiod in the Georgics, see Hunter (2014: 20–6).

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In fact, the invocation that opens the poem derives chiefly from no poet, but from Varro’s pointed invocation in his Res rusticae of agricultural divinities rather than the Muses of Homer and Ennius (1.1.4). Here Varro asserts a humorous equivalency between his treatise and a poem; and by wearing a Varronian persona in his own invocation, the georgic poet actualizes this potential while borrowing Varro’s implicitly epic pretentions. Soon after Virgil’s invocation, a passage of ‘instruction’ converts the vehicle of a Homeric simile, which illustrates Achilles’ superhuman battle with the River Scamander in Iliad 21, into a comment on the benefits of irrigation, hinting at the georgic poet’s implicitly heroic, and even Homeric, conception of his ostensibly humble subject.26 Only later will passages like those on the beginning of the Iron Age, on making a plough, and on lucky and unlucky days establish a general congruency with Works and Days.27 Then, once this structure is in place, Virgil sheds his Hesiodic mask for an Aratean one. In formal terms, this is easy:  Aratus’ Phaenomena also borrows its structure from Works and Days, and by the end of Georgics 1, it becomes clear that Virgil has been alluding intermittently to Aratus all along.28 The book’s final major episode (351–464), a thorough reworking of Aratus’ ‘Diosemeiae’ (‘weather signs’, i.e. Phaenomena 733–1154), is the most extensive allusion to that point. In Georgics 2–4, the poet resumes his Hesiodic persona rarely and briefly, presenting himself more often in other guises, as we shall see. Thus in one sense, Virgil’s Ascraeum carmen is focused on a book in which the poet also adopts the personae of Varro, Homer, and Aratus, as well as others. Since it is a book that opens with uncertainty as to what kind of god Caesar will be, perhaps Virgil explores what kind of poet he himself will be by temporarily adopting the personae of different canonical poets, the literary equivalent of exceptional men who have earned divinity. His choice is highly consequential, because the ethical differences among these poets are very real. The dour Hesiod, striving against long odds in a world hostile to his success, casts a dark shadow over the first part of the book; but by the end, he has been replaced by Aratus, his formal imitator but ethical opposite, supremely confident that the universe is providentially designed. The georgic poet embodies these contrasting types convincingly, but he does not resolve the substantial differences between them. As he dons one or another mask, his mood swings back and forth, until he concludes not with a synthesis, but with a most violent shift from one extreme to the other. Approaching the finale of Book 1, he indulges in a crescendo of hyper-Aratean optimism 26 27 28

G. 1.104–10 ≈ Il. 21.257–62. G. 1.125–46 ≈ WD 174–201; 169–75 ≈ 427–34; 275–86 ≈ 765–828. Katz (2008).

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about the sun’s reliability in forecasting the weather – until he remembers that the sun has also predicted political events, including the death of Julius Caesar. The name itself reminds the poet of Caesar’s successor: looking back to the theme of becoming a god, the poet begs that ‘this young man, at least’ (hunc saltem iuvenem, G. 1.500) be permitted to tarry awhile on earth, unlike his father, whose apotheosis was necessitated by his assassination. With this, Aratean optimism gives way to a depth of despair found not even in the book’s darkest Hesiodic episodes. If it were not too facetious, I would be tempted to describe this situation in the language of medical diagnosis: throughout Book 1, the georgic poet is subject to violent mood swings consistent with bipolarism, and exhibits the multiple personalities symptomatic of dissociative identity disorder. Such language is almost justified by the emotional extremes brought by changes between intertextual personae. The pattern continues in later books, where the poet remains subject to manic and despairing episodes. After Book 1, in which the farmer had to work hard and without pause in order to wrest a living from the earth, the poet in Book 2 is rhapsodic in celebrating nature’s providential bounty; but by the end of Book 3, he reverts to near hopelessness in narrating the ‘Plague of Noricum’ (478–566). The contrast between these books is marked by frequent allusion to Lucretius as Virgil exploits the extreme variations of tone and even of apparent meaning in De rerum natura, particularly in books 5 and 6.29 By the end of Georgics 3, in fact, one could easily infer ‘that Virgil’s ambition is not to be a modern Hesiod or Aratus, and that Lucretius is much more important than either as a model to be emulated’.30 Virgil’s final words as eclogue poet had expressed his ambition to ‘rise’ (surgamus, Ecl. 10.75).31 His progress as georgic poet suggests that Lucretius had a great deal to do with that ambition. Approaching the end of Book 2, he aspires to write about nature as a philosopher, but declares himself content with his rustic subject. It is in this connection that he makes his most celebrated reference to Lucretius: felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum 29

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31

Virgil’s most important model in both these books is Lucretius, not least in that he absorbs that poet’s capacity to represent violently contradictory ideas and emotions. See Farrell (1991: 187–206). Gale (2000: 45) considers Book 3 ‘a kind of DRN in miniature’. Martindale per litteras 4 September 2017. He continues: ‘one that had taken on and bent to its purposes the whole epic tradition back to Homer; Virgil also is writing the comprehensive non-narrative epos, the ultimate didactic poem, one that even has a narrative conclusion (neoteric and Homeric)’. On these aspects, see further below. See also Ecl. 1.4: paulo maiora canamus (‘let our songs be a bit bigger’).

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Virgil’s Intertextual Personae subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari; fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestis Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores. (490–4) Happy is he who has been able to learn the causes of things and has cast underfoot all fears, inescapable death, and the din of the greedy Underworld; blessed too is he who knows the rustic gods, Pan and old Silvanus and the sister nymphs.

In the lines that follow, he contrasts the peace of mind that attends these pursuits with the anxieties that come from politics and the false attractions of the city (495–540). Then, at the very end of Book 2, he even admits a measure of satisfaction in his accomplishment so far: sed nos immensum spatiis confecimus aequor, et iam tempus equum fumantia solvere colla. (G. 2.541–2) But we have covered an immense area along our course, and now it is time to release our horses’ steaming necks.

This image of a race, or a stage in a race, successfully concluded contrasts sharply with that of a chariot careering out of control at the end of Book 1 (509–14). There, political order, or lack of it, was the main issue; here, it is the poet’s progress towards his goal. As Book 3 opens, the two motifs come together: the poet, now even more ambitious, seeks a still more elevated theme: temptanda via est, qua me quoque possim tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora. (G. 3.8–9) I must try a way to lift myself myself off the ground, as well, and fly victorious over the lips of men.

The poet alludes to Ennius’ epitaph, whose subject is undying posthumous fame: Nemo me lacrumis decoret neque funera fletu faxit. cur? volito vivos per ora virum. (fr. 46 Courtney) Let no one bedeck me with tears nor bury me with weeping. Why? I fly still living over the lips of men.

In the Annales, Ennius invoked Pythagorean concepts of reincarnation to claim that his soul had once belonged to none other than Homer himself.32

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Ann. 1, frr. ii–x; Skutsch (1985) with commentary.

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This is the original, and the most complete expression of the motif with which I began this chapter. Lucretius began his own poem with a pointed rejection of this Ennian trope.33 Now, the georgic poet, at the midpoint of his two most Lucretian books, briefly assumes the Ennian persona that he implicitly disavowed in the Varronian proem of Book 1.  He goes on to declare that he will repeat Ennius’ greatest achievement by leading the Muses in triumph (G. 3.10–15).34 He will celebrate Caesar’s victories, which have made possible his own, by building a temple in Caesar’s honour; and he emphasizes this theme with references to the victory poems of Pindar and Callimachus (G. 3.16–48). In the poem’s final book, these ambitions are partly realized, but in surprising ways. The book’s first part is a Varronian discourse on beekeeping (G. 4.8–314, interrupted by a mysterious digression on gardening, 116– 48) that is both ethnographic and mock-heroic. The bees are at one point called ‘Roman citizens’ (Quirites, 4.201), a gesture that hints at an allegorical treatment. They are also prone to excessive anger (illis ira modum supra est, 4.236), which proves to be a kind of Iliadic mênis leading to warfare, and even to civil war. Varro himself opens the way to a Homeric treatment of this theme, stating that when bees prepare to swarm, they will hang massed together at the entrance of their hive, making a loud humming sound, ‘just as soldiers do when they break camp’ (proinde ut milites faciunt, cum castra movent, RR 3.16.29–30). The georgic poet, while following Varro closely here, seems to go his own way in comparing the bees’ sound to that of three of the four elements (wind, water and fire) instead of Varro’s army: frigidus ut quondam silvis immurmurat Auster, ut mare sollicitum stridit refluentibus undis, aestuat ut clausis rapidus fornacibus ignis. (G. 4.261–3) as the chilly south wind sometimes murmurs in the woods, as the sea when troubled crashes with its seething waters, as destructive fire rages in the confines of furnaces.

But in fact, the vehicles of this simile, as well as its triple form (including the sonic reminiscence of the Greek οὔτ(ε) in the Latin ut) come from Homer:35

33 34 35

DRN 1.102–35. Ann. 15, fr. i; Skutsch (1985) with commentary. Serv. in G. 4.261: FRIGIDVS VT QVONDAM S. I. A. tres conparationes singulis impletae versiculis de Homero translatae sunt, quas ille binis versibus posuit (‘as the chi lly s [ ou t hw i n d] so m etim es m [ur m urs in th e ] w[oods] three similes occupying one line each have been taken from Homer, who put them in two lines each’).

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Virgil’s Intertextual Personae οὔτε θαλάσσης κῦμα τόσον βοάᾳ ποτὶ χέρσον ποντόθεν ὀρνύμενον πνοιῇ Βορέω ἀλεγεινῇ· οὔτε πυρὸς τόσσός γε ποτὶ βρόμος αἰθομένοιο οὔρεος ἐν βήσσῃς, ὅτε τ᾽ ὤρετο καιέμεν ὕλην· οὔτ᾽ ἄνεμος τόσσόν γε περὶ δρυσὶν ὑψικόμοισι ἠπύει, ὅς τε μάλιστα μέγα βρέμεται χαλεπαίνων. (Il. 14.392–401) Not so great does the wave of the sea sound upon the shore when it is driven from the sea by the grievous gust of Boreas; nor so great is the roar from a blazing fire in the folds of a mountain, when it rushes to burn the forest; nor so great is the sound of baleful wind that roars its worst about the tall-topped trees.

This passage is thus a counterpart of the irrigation passage in Book 1. There, the vehicle of an Iliadic simile was presented surreptitiously as straightforward didactic exposition; here the form of the simile is ostentatiously paraded, though again its martial and heroic tenor is omitted. In both cases, the georgic poet momentarily dons a Homeric mask to hint that his bees, previously Roman citizens, are also comparable to Iliadic heroes. In doing so, he looks forward to the poem’s last extended episode. At the end of his discourse on bees, the poet describes a technique for replacing an entire hive that has died off, the bougonia, a fantasy of ancient science that entails generating new bees from the carcass of an ox (G. 4.281–314). He then narrates the myth of its invention (G. 4.315–558). Any origin tale requires the poet to resume his Callimachean persona, but this one proves to be Homeric as well. Its allegorical character points not to politics or war, as in the ethnography of the bees, but to natural philosophy. The most overt clue to this aspect is the figure of Proteus, whom Homer’s ancient critics regarded as representing the primal substance out of which the entire universe was created.36 His appearance to advise Aristaeus, much as he advises Menelaus in Odyssey 4, is moreover an ‘exceptional and unparalleled’ case, as Llewelyn Morgan justly puts it, of ‘an entire Homeric event  – complete with the main character  – transferred to the Virgilian text’.37 It is delectably and characteristically ironic that the only Homeric character who does not change in any way when he reappears in Virgil is defined, above all, by his capacity to change – to become any and all things. Proteus is, in this sense, the perfect emblem of Homer as a poet, and of the kind of poet that Virgil evidently aims to become.

36 37

Heraclitus, Homeric questions 67.2–4; Buffière (1956: 181). Morgan (1999: 21).

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In this last major episode, the hero Aristaeus  – assisted by his divine mother, like Achilles, and advised by Proteus, like Menelaus  – performs the bougonia and gets himself a new swarm of bees (G. 4.531–58).38 At the same time, the georgic poet realizes, in some measure, his ambition to rise through the literary cursus honorum by writing about natural philosophy and assuming at length the persona of Homer himself.39 The success of both hero and poet are muted, however, by the story that Proteus tells. Aristaeus’ bees have died because he inadvertently caused the death of Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife. Famously, and despite performing a heroic katabasis (‘Underworld descent’) that recalls Odysseus’ nekyia in Odyssey 11 and anticipates both Aeneas’ journey back into Troy in search of Creusa and his journey to the Underworld, Orpheus fails to bring Eurydice back to life.40 In the bougonia aetion, then, heroic achievement contrasts with poetic futility, anticipating the contrast in the poem’s final lines between Caesar’s heroic achievements and Virgil’s undistinguished leisure (G. 4.559–66). But it is evident that, as in the Eclogues, questions about poetry’s relationship to power remain important, while the lowly subject matter of the Georgics is linked to the most exalted subjects, heroic and eschatological as well as political; indeed, these prove to be images of one another. Virgil’s humble and sublime teachings remain timeless in themselves, but tied to the political and the contemporary, to land confiscations and civil wars, and to men who become gods. Finally, the successive personae of the georgic poet culminate in Homer, the source of all poetry, just as Proteus is the source of all matter. But at the end of the Georgics, looking back at the start of the Eclogues, the figure who embraces this universe of poetry names himself not Homer, but Virgil. Arms and a Man: Heroic Paradigms In the first book of Virgil’s final masterpiece, Dido, Queen of Carthage, entertains Aeneas and his Trojans with a lavish banquet, the model of which is Homer’s banquet on Scheria, where Alcinous entertains Odysseus.41 On each occasion, a singer performs. Homer’s Demodocus sings three songs, the second and longest of which concerns a scandalously amusing episode of divine adultery and revenge (Od. 8.266–369); Virgil’s Iopas offers just one song on the more serious subject of celestial mechanics (Aen. 1.740–7). Two

38 39 40 41

Morgan (1999: 17–101, 219–22). On the applicability of the cursus to literary careers, see Farrell (2002). Od. 11.34–43 ≈ G. 4.471–80 ≈ Aen. 5.305–12. See also Briggs (1980: 23–5). Knauer (1964a: 164–5) and (1964b: 68–73).

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familiar kinds of allegory are at work here, the philosophical and the biographical. First, substituting a philosophical subject for a racy myth reflects an ancient interpretation of Aphrodite and Ares in Demodocus’ story as Love and Strife, the forces Empedocles believed to govern the universe.42 Virgil thus signals that his Homeric programme will again be philosophically inflected, as it was in the Georgics. Second, ancient critics regarded the blind Demodocus as Homer’s self-portrait, which suggests that Iopas is both a Homeric and a Virgilian persona. Indeed, his cosmogony reuses language in which the georgic poet had disclosed his own philosophical ambitions.43 It is curious that the poet of Rome’s national epic should wear the mask of a Carthaginian bard; but to express adequately the contradictions inherent in Virgil’s view of history and of the universe, it was necessary that he keep to the approach that he had begun in the Eclogues and developed in the Georgics by crafting a refracted authorial persona and telling the story of Aeneas through a variety of surrogates. Like the Eclogues, the Aeneid is rich in characters who might serve as authorial masks; and like the Georgics, its dynamic intertextual development involves an array of models that combine with or challenge the poet’s ostensible model, Homer in this case, for pride of place. In addition, certain characters who serve as poet figures also have a strong affinity for one or another model, to the point that they seem to promote the primacy of that model against rival claims. It is no wonder that this is so, because even the authorial narrator does not present himself as a simple figure. He begins by announcing a double subject, ‘arms’ and ‘a man’ (arma virumque, Aen. 1.1). Critics have naturally referred the former subject to the Iliad and the latter to the Odyssey, but have sometimes differed over which of these models is paramount. When the poet announces books 7–12, a tale of horrida bella, as his maius opus (Aen. 7.41–5), does he mean in fact that the ‘Odyssean Aeneid’ of books 1–6 represents just the foothills of an Iliadic summit? Or are those critics correct who regard Virgil’s epic as ‘not a bipartite work divided by subject matter (i.e. voyages or battles), but a unitary Odyssey with significant Iliadic episodes’?44 In any case, announcing a double theme is a procedure ridiculed by Horace as characteristic of Homer’s unsuccessful imitators, the poets of the Epic Cycle; and it may be that the voice of the epic narrator quavers just 42 43

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Knauer (1964a: 168 n. 2) and (1964b: 82 n. 4); Hardie (1986: 51–66). Aen. 1.742–3, 745–6 ≈ G. 2.478–9, 481–2. Hunter (1993: 176 n. 26) observes that this self-quotation ‘means that in one sense Dido and Aeneas are entertained by Virgil himself’, an idea that invites comparison of Iopas to the authorial personae of the Eclogues. Cairns (1989: 178). See also Knauer (1964a: 329–31) and (1964b: 68–81); Schmidt (1988); Fowler, Chapter 22a in this volume, Nelis (2001: 385–86); Dekel (2012).

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a bit as he pronounces the third word of the poem, cano (‘I sing’), confessing that he will attempt to tell the story of Aeneas without invoking the Muse – as unsuccessful Cyclic poets had done.45 Soon thereafter, he does resort to the Muse (Aen. 1.8–11), belatedly, and perhaps betraying some fear that without divine assistance he will fail as Homer’s earlier followers had done. In view of the intertextual mood swings that characterize the Georgics, it is reasonable to wonder whether the opening of the Aeneid betrays some anxiety about what kind of poem it will be, by what kind of poet, and how it will be judged against its principal models. Even the poet, let alone the reader, may be less than certain about how the two Homeric poems are relevant to the story of Aeneas. Is this new epic really to be a virtuoso combination of two masterpieces that are so different, whose respective heroes treat one another, and are treated by ancient critics, as fundamentally incompatible and antithetical in ethical terms?46 Can one know, as the story gets underway, whether the Aeneid is ultimately to be (like the Iliad) a tragic tale of a warrior hero who proves himself by visiting death on others, or (like the Odyssey) a comedy that finds resolution in a marriage and in the future promise for which marriage stands? And eventually one must ask, does the end of the poem actually answer these questions? It is not long after the beginning that a series of authorial personae intervene to express their own fears and ambitions. The first of these is Juno, who is also the first character other than the epic narrator to speak. Juno famously launches her introductory monologue on a stridently Iliadic note, as William Levitan and Don Fowler have shown, even to the point of starting it with the first word of the Iliad (men(e) incepto; μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά).47 She follows this speech by bribing Aeolus, king of the winds, to destroy Aeneas’ fleet. Here Juno closely tracks an episode of Iliad 14, ‘The Deception of Zeus’, in which she (i.e. Hera) bribes Hypnos to lull Zeus to sleep, so that the Greeks might have some success against a powerful Trojan onslaught. Since Juno takes this step to prevent Aeneas from completing the final leg of his voyage and arriving in Italy, it is not difficult to see her as trying to prevent the hero from achieving a quasi-Odyssean nostos by repeating a trick that had worked, at least temporarily, in the very centre of the Iliad. To restate this more simply, Juno intervenes to oppose the epic narrator because she fears that the Aeneid might become another Odyssey of ultimately successful homecoming, when she wants it to be an Iliad of continuous Trojan persecution.48

45 46 47 48

See Gärtner (2015: 559); Fantuzzi (2015: 420–4). See note 52 below. Levitan (1993) and Fowler, Chapter 22a in this volume, p. 401. See Mac Góráin, Chapter 24 in this volume and Mac Góráin (2018).

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Juno is not alone in her Iliadic obsession. Aeneas knows almost nothing about the events of the Odyssey; but he lived through the Iliad, knows its events well, and tends to interpret new experiences accordingly. In Book 1, he is on the point of drowning in a storm at sea: extemplo Aeneae solvuntur frigore membra; ingemit et duplicis tendens ad sidera palmas talia voce refert: ‘o terque quaterque beati quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis contigit oppetere!’ (Aen. 1.92–6) Then Aeneas’ limbs go slack with cold; he groans, and lifting his twin palms to the stars, such words he speaks aloud: ‘O, three and four times blessed were you whose fortune was to die before your fathers’ eyes beneath the high walls of Troy!’

Every reader recognizes instantly that this storm is an Odyssean storm and that Aeneas is living the experiences of Homer’s wandering hero, and feeling virtually the same emotions: καὶ τότ’ Ὀδυσσῆος λύτο γούνατα καὶ φίλον ἥτορ ὀχθήσας δ’ ἄρα εἶπε πρὸς ὅν μεγαλήτορα θυμόν· … ‘τρὶς μάκαρες Δαναοὶ καὶ τετράκις, οἳ τότ᾽ ὄλοντο Τροίῃ ἐν εὐρείῃ χάριν Ἀτρεΐδῃσι φέροντες.’ (Od. 5.297–8, 306–7) Then Odysseus’ limbs went slack, and his heart, and in anguish he spoke to his own great-hearted spirit: … ‘Three times and four times blessed were those who died then in broad Troy, gladdening Atreus’ sons.’

Despite this unmistakably Odyssean reference, however, Aeneas cannot comprehend his situation except in terms of his Iliadic past:49 o Danaum fortissime gentis Tydide! mene Iliacis occumbere campis non potuisse, tuaque animam hanc effundere dextra, saevus ubi Aeacidae telo iacet Hector, ubi ingens Sarpedon, ubi tot Simois correpta sub undis scuta virum galeasque et fortia corpora volvit! (Aen. 1.96–101)

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Connolly (2010: 409).

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J os e p h F a r r e l l O son of Tydeus, bravest of the race of Danaans! That I couldn’t have fallen on the plains of Ilium and poured out this spirit by your right arm, where savage Hector lies beneath the spear of Aeacus’ son, where great Sarpedon lies, where Simois rolls so many shields of men and helmets and strong bodies caught in his waves!

Facing a situation like the one that Odysseus confronts in Odyssey 5, Aeneas nevertheless recalls an episode of the Iliad, specifically in Book 21, where the bodies of his comrades are carried away by the Trojan river Simois.50 He also laments that he did not perish long before that, specifically in Iliad 5, where Diomedes almost dispatches him (297–317). Even as he suffers through his own personal Odyssey, it is the Iliad that continues to haunt Aeneas’ memory. It is odd that Aeneas shares an Iliadic obsession with Juno, his divine antagonist. It may suggest that he, too, is an authorial persona. Not only is Aeneas linked to Juno in this way, but he shares with the aforementioned Iopas the narratorial role of the Homeric Demodocus. If Iopas’ song corresponds to the second of Demodocus’ three performances, the third concerns an episode of the Iliupersis (‘Sack of Troy’), which Aeneas narrates fully in Book 2.51 His role as narrator continues in Book 3, where he, like Odysseus, tells his host the story of his own wanderings. Paradoxically, the first half of Aeneas’ performance, for which the ultimate model is the Iliupersis of the Epic Cycle, is one of the most effective books of the Aeneid.52 Conversely, the second half, which is based mainly on the Odyssey, has traditionally been thought to be one of the least effective books. Whether this difference reflects Aeneas’ own preference to have continued to fight and die in an extended Iliad and his unhappiness at being forced to endure an Odyssey of his own, or is better explained with reference to the Aeneid poet’s confidence in dealing with ‘inferior’ Cyclic material and diffidence in handling Homer himself, is an open question. In this and other ways, conflicting, and at times confusing, distribution of authorial aims and interests challenges the traditional assumption that the Aeneid welds the entire Iliad and Odyssey into one grand, internally consistent epic edifice. It suggests instead that self-interested narrative forces vie to make the poem either an Iliad or an Odyssey, but not both at once. This comports with the opinions of those ancient philosophers who 50

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Il. 21.1–16, 205–382. The river in question is actually the Xanthus/Scamander, though the river god appeals in vain to his brother Simois for assistance at 305–27. On Virgil’s imitation, see Lausberg (1983: 205–7). For full discussion of the sources for Aeneas’ narrative in Book 2, see Casali (2017: 7–40). See Kopff (1981: 928–31).

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regarded Homer as a repository of ethical lessons, especially for rulers and involved citizens, while interpreting the Iliad and the Odyssey very differently. Whatever leadership lessons the Iliad has to offer, they argued, are largely negative. The Odyssey instead offers a truly exemplary hero as a pattern for imitation.53 These two perspectives are variously represented by the different narrators of the Aeneid – not only by the epic narrator, whose perspective on this issue is somewhat inscrutable, but especially his unruly rivals, who make their preferences clear. Juno cares nothing about leadership lessons; she simply hates the Trojans, and so embraces the passionate and destructive behaviours on display throughout the Iliad as suitable to her purpose. Aeneas for his part cannot get past the painful memories of Troy’s destruction which are rooted in the Iliad and its sequels. Moreover, in Aeneid Book 2, Ulixes is not the gleaming moral exemplum of ethical philosophers, but the loathsome villain of the tragic stage and author of stratagems unworthy of the straightforward hero that Aeneas still emulates as he attempts to die in defence of his doomed city.54 In the highly Odyssean Book 3, Aeneas’ personal antipathy remains on display: he exposes Ulixes as a bad leader for thoughtlessly abandoning Achaemenides when escaping from the Cyclops (588–691); earlier, he recalls sailing very carefully past Ithaca, still fearing Ulixes’ treachery (270–7), but unaware just how closely his own entire voyage resembles that of Odysseus. But in truth, the narrative and heroic possibilities are not confined to Homer. We have already mentioned the epic narrator’s Cyclic anxieties. Juno, though her entire world view seems to be dominated by Iliadic concerns, shows a willingness to accept other, non- or anti-Odyssean outcomes outside the Homeric binary. Already in her first soliloquy, she furiously contrasts her inability thus far to destroy Aeneas with Minerva’s success in blasting the lesser Ajax with Jupiter’s own thunderbolt (Aen. 1.31–45). With this she alludes to a central event of the Nostoi, a poem of the Epic Cycle that told of the mainly disastrous ‘return voyages’ of the Greek heroes who fought at Troy. Juno would willingly concede such a nostos to Aeneas, but would not grant one like that of Odysseus. As we have seen, though, Juno’s Iliadic habits are difficult to break, and her attempt against Aeneas turns out to be an unsuccessful repetition of an unsuccessful Iliadic stratagem, ‘The

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See, for instance, Horace’s Epist. 1.2.1–31; Taisne (2002); Keane (2011). The ascendency of Odysseus over Achilles involved a reversal of the situation familiar from tragedy. For a lucid account of how this occurred, see Montiglio (2011). For the influence of the villainous tragic Odysseus on Virgil, see the following note. ‘The villainous power politician of Euripides seems to come to life again under Virgil’s hand’, writes Stanford (1963: 131). See his chapter ‘The Stage Villain’ (102–17).

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Deception of Zeus’. Thwarted in this, Juno returns in Book 4 to try to steer the narrative once again in a non-Homeric direction more acceptable to herself. This time she attempts to get the better of Venus by offering to arrange a kind of dynastic marriage between Dido and Aeneas. Intertextually, she tries something ‘new’ while fundamentally remaining in the grip of her old obsessions. When she approaches Venus, she again replays one of her epic star turns, this time an episode of Apollonius’ Argonautica in which Hera convinces Aphrodite to help make Medea fall in love with Jason; and as ancient critics were aware, Aeneid 4 as a whole can be considered an intertextual reworking of Argonautica 3, in which the episode takes place (6–110).55 But Hera’s deceptive behaviour towards Aphrodite in that episode is based once again on the roles these same goddesses had played in ‘The Deception of Zeus’ in Iliad 14.56 It makes sense that Juno’s second attempt to reorient the narrative should focus on the Apollonian episode, which was more successful than the Homeric prototype. Indeed, the plot of the Argonautica as a whole is driven mainly by Hera, and it is in this poem that she plays her most helpful and most flattering role. But again, Juno fails to learn from the epic past. Expecting the same result as before, she does not understand that Venus has learned from Aphrodite’s experience. Thus Juno’s effort to repeat Hera’s Argonautic success results in Dido’s death, and does not prevent Aeneas from achieving his Italian ‘homecoming’. As was the case with Juno’s earlier, Iliadic intervention, this Argonautic effort makes the goddess not just a rival to the Aeneid poet, but also an aspect of his identity; for he too is an Apollonian narrator. In launching the second half of the poem, the Aeneid poet invokes the Muse Erato: Nunc age, qui reges, Erato, quae tempora, rerum quis Latio antiquo fuerit status, advena classem cum primum Ausoniis exercitus appulit oris, expediam, et primae revocabo exordia pugnae. tu vatem, tu, diva, mone. dicam horrida bella, dicam acies actosque animis in funera reges, Tyrrhenamque manum totamque sub arma coactam Hesperiam. maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo, maius opus moveo. (Aen. 7.37–45) Come now, Erato: who were the kings and what were their positions, what was the state of affairs in ancient Latium, when the invading army first drove its fleet to the shores of Ausonia –

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Serv. in Aen. 4 praef. See also Nelis (2001: 125–82). Campbell (1983: 7–18); Nelis (2001: 146–8).

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Virgil’s Intertextual Personae this I shall explain, and I shall recall the very first stages of battle. You, goddess, you, advise your bard. I shall sing dreadful conflicts, I shall sing battle formations and kings driven by passions to their deaths, and the manpower of Etruria and all of Italy marshalled for war. A greater series of events is coming to birth before me, I am setting in motion a greater theme.

In doing so, he repeats a gesture made by Apollonius at a similar point in his poem, just at the opening of the second half: εἰ δ᾽ ἄγε νῦν, Ἐρατώ, παρά θ᾽ ἵστασο, καί μοι ἔνισπε ἔνθεν ὅπως ἐς Ἰωλκὸν ἀνήγαγε κῶας Ἰήσων Μηδείης ὑπ᾽ ἔρωτι. σὺ γὰρ καὶ Κύπριδος αἶσαν ἔμμορες, ἀδμῆτας δὲ τεοῖς μελεδήμασι θέλγεις παρθενικάς· τῶ καί τοι ἐπήρατον οὔνομ᾽ ἀνῆπται. (Arg. 3.1–5) Come now, Erato, stand beside me, and tell to me how Jason took the fleece from that place back to Iolcus by means of Medea’s love. For you too have a share of Cypris’ portion, you enchant inexperienced virgins with your heartaches; thus has a ‘lovely’ name been fastened upon you, too.

It is a distinctive gesture, since Erato’s name, as Apollonius observes, links her to erotic poetry rather than martial epic, which is Virgil’s emphasis (pugnae, bella, acies, arma). But the main point is that Juno and her notional enemy in Book 4, the epic narrator, willingly embrace an Apollonian approach to epic narrative in Book 7.57 Not only the Iliad and Odyssey, then, but the Epic Cycle and the Argonautica, too, are major points of reference for the Aeneid poet. And no wonder, as they are the principal exemplars of Greek heroic narrative. Moreover, each of them is championed or attacked by one or more characters who act as authorial personae. It is therefore not only legitimate, but necessary for the reader to ask what the poet is trying to accomplish, and where in this poem does authority finally reside.58 The question becomes more urgent when we consider various other sources of narrative authority, themselves represented by self-interested characters distributed throughout the poem. If one considers only those models that qualify as formally epic, it is clear that at least two Homeric hymns, those of Aphrodite and Hermes, play crucial roles.

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On the wider Apollonian ramifications of Virgil’s Erato invocation, see Nelis (2001: 267–75). For a still wider focus, see Bocciolini Palagi (2016). See, again, Mac Góráin, Chapter 24 in this volume.

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When in Book 1 Venus remonstrates with Jupiter over Aeneas’ difficulties, he, fulfilling his duty as the ultimate and most authoritative of all narrators, assures her that Aeneas’ story will go exactly as she wants it to; whereupon she appears to her son in a reprise of the episode in which she seduced his father, Anchises, and conceived the hero himself, in the Homeric hymn. In that poem, Aphrodite named her son Αἰνείας because it caused her an αἰνὸν ἄχος (‘a terrible sorrow’) that she had made love to a mortal (Hymn 5.198–9); but the Virgilian Venus evidently considers the entire Aeneid a song of praise in her own honour. Much later, in Book 8, Aeneas will hear sung the praises of Hercules, and will listen to an account of that hero’s exploits in which the central episode is modelled on Mercury’s theft of Apollo’s cattle as told in the fourth Homeric hymn, to Hermes.59 As Sergio Casali has remarked, ‘Evander is, after Aeneas, the character who speaks the most in the Aeneid’.60 Counting the authorial voice, this makes Evander the third most imposing narrator in the poem, and he tells this story in a way that suits his own interests. In particular, his invitation that Aeneas enter his humble ‘palace’ as Hercules had once done and thus ‘make himself equal’ to the deified hero (Aen. 8.364–5), clearly signals the kind of hero he wants Aeneas to become  – although defining precisely what kind of hero was Hercules is itself no simple task. These multiple would-be narrators raise more questions than they answer. The Iliadic and Odyssean values they variously represent are often strategically opposed, but seldom if ever convincingly represented as wholly admirable. Nor is the universe of possibilities confined to Homer. In purely literary terms, the proverbial failure of Homer’s Cyclic imitators constantly stalks Virgil’s project. In contrast, Apollonius’ success in showing how a ‘modern’ poet might imitate Homer offers a more hopeful model; but in both literary and especially ethical terms, Aeneas’ resemblance to Jason, particularly in respect to his affair with Dido, further complicates his status as an epic hero. Some have proposed that Evander’s recommendation of Hercules solves all problems; but the complex intertextual Vorleben of his intervention makes Hercules as difficult a literary or ethical paradigm as any other, and perhaps the most flexibly indeterminate figure of all.61 Not only Greek myth, but also Roman historical literature multiplies the complexity of Virgil’s intertextual narrative. We have Macrobius’ testimony 59 60 61

Casali (2010); Clauss (2016). Casali (2010: 39). On Hercules in the Aeneid, see Galinsky (1966), (1972: 131–49), (1981: 1004–7); Zarker (1972); Hardie (1986: 213–19); Heiden (1987); Morgan (1998); Newman (2002); Labate (2009). Feeney (1993: 155–62) usefully stresses Hercules’ extremely selfcontradictory nature.

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that in Book 1 of Naevius’ Bellum Poenicum, the Trojans were hit by a storm at sea, which caused Venus’ complaint to Jupiter, who comforted her by foretelling the future greatness of her descendants.62 Servius, too, says that Aeneas’ encouraging speech after the storm comes from Naevius, and further mentions that Dido and her sister Anna were at least named in Bellum Poenicum.63 The extremely fragmentary state of Naevius’ poem makes it impossible to be sure how closely the Virgilian narrator follows him, or how explicitly he may have signalled his assumption of a Naevian mask. We have seen, however, that the georgic poet does adopt an explicitly Ennian persona at one point, and there is reason to think that the war between the Trojans and the Italians responds to Ennian patterns.64 Regarding prose sources, the language of battle narrative in books 7–12 borrows freely from historiographical registers.65 In Book 2, a pair of specific historical narrators can be identified.66 The image of Priam’s headless torso lying on the shore comes from the Histories of Asinius Pollio.67 Aeneas is the narrator at this point, but he is ventriloquizing Pollio, who last appeared in Virgil’s poetry (in the Eclogues) as patron, poet and consul, but not historian.68 In the same book, when we learn that Sinon was forced to hide from his enemies in a marsh; the image draws on Sallust’s description of C.  Marius in similar straits.69 Since the Virgilian narrator is telling the reader what Aeneas says that Sinon had said, the question of who exactly is wearing the mask of Sallust is difficult to answer. That Virgil’s contemporaries might be expected to notice how Pollio and Pompey, Sallust and Marius are figured in the poem seems obvious. What they were to make of it is a much more open question. Pascua, Rura, Duces (etc.) In formal terms, Virgil’s basic intertextual technique appears already highly developed in his earliest work. By the time of his death, it had grown significantly in ethical complexity, and one could say that his intertextual persona 62 63 64 65 66 67

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Macrob. Sat. 6.2.31. DServ ad Aen. 1.198, 4.9. Norden (1915); Goldschmidt (2013); Elliott (2013: 75–134). Rossi (2004: 105–24). Delvigo (2013). Serv. in Aen. 2.557. In his note on 506, Servius mentions that the Virgilian passage was imitated by Lucan when he narrated the death of Pompey himself (BC 9.979). Ecl. 3.84–5 (patron), 86–87 (poet), 4.1–3, 11–17 (consul). Scholars debate whether the triumphator and poet addressed but not named in Eclogue 8 is Pollio or the younger Caesar. See Cucchiarelli (2012: 408–9 (bibliography) and 411 ad Ecl. 8.6). Serv. in Aen. 2.135, where reference is made to the passage regarding Priam and Pompey as well.

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was still a work in progress. I mean this not only in the sense that he left the Aeneid splendidly unfinished, but also in that he chose to begin his career as the Roman successor of a Greek poet whose persona is complex and elusive in itself, and became even more so in its ancient critical reception. With time and continued success in ever more ambitious projects, Virgil carefully curated his persona with reference to manifestations of it in his earlier works and in relation to the personae of his intertextual models, an ever-increasing pantheon of Greek and Roman authors, in prose as well as poetry, who together define a kind of literary canon all their own. But defining anything may have been less important than inhabiting multiple intertextual personae in such a way that a single author might create a body of work that is particularly open to dialogue and to polyphony. How much further Virgil would have gone, had he lived, is a question seldom asked, because the poetic corpus that he left behind at the time of his death has seemed so convincingly complete. Even before Virgil’s own canonization, fellow poets (Propertius, Horace) began reacting to it, and especially to the final work in progress, somewhat warily; but Virgil’s posthumous success was so great that his gradual ‘ascent’ from pastoral to didactic to heroic epic, through the tria genera dicendi, and his successive emulation of the recently canonized boukolos, of the old man of Ascra, and of the source of all literature, gave Virgil’s career, and his persona, a completeness and a fixity that belies the dynamism with which the eclogue poet, the georgic poet, and all the rambunctious narrators of the Aeneid actually work.70 In its afterlife, Virgil’s persona as the poet who sang ‘pastures, farmland, and leaders’ continued to grow.71 This figure was energetically celebrated not only by Virgil’s immediate ‘epic successors’, in whatever genre they worked, but also by those who produced the poems now collectively known as the Appendix Vergiliana as well as the scholars who studied and wrote about Virgil, in some cases modelling their own works on those who had studied Virgil’s intertextual models.72 At different times and in different places, legends about Virgil as magician or saint coloured his reception. In intertextual terms, thanks to his influence on poets of comparably vast ambition, especially Dante and Milton, his persona only continued to become more imposing. I  closed my contribution to the previous edition of this Companion by commenting on ‘the scope and character of the great intertext within which Virgil’s poetry inscribes itself’, noting that ‘rather 70 71 72

Again see Theodorakopoulos, Chapter 13 in this volume. According to the epitaph preserved at VSD 34.36. On Virgil’s successors, see Hardie (1993). On the Appendix, see Peirano (2012) and McGill, Chapter 4 in this volume. On the intertextuality among students of Virgil and his models, see Farrell (2008) and (2016).

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than a skeleton key that opens up the secrets of the poem, the intertext presents vistas and possibilities that would otherwise remain unglimpsed and inaccessible’.73 I would now add that the creation of Virgil’s intertextual persona involved a poetic performance of great intricacy, one that is beautiful in itself and a delight to the imagination of readers and scholars alike, but which uses formal relations to open questions of both immediate and perennial concern for Virgil’s contemporaries and for all lovers of literature, in every age. FURTHER READING Exploration of the vast literature on intertextuality in general might begin with Allen (2011). For Latin poets and their Greek (as well as Roman) models, a practical starting point is Hinds (1998) with Edmunds (2001) as a follow-up. Virgilian intertextuality specifically has been a major area of research literally since antiquity, although the critical reception has not always been positive. The poet’s earliest critics composed lists of his furta (a significant number of which survive in Macrobius and Servius), and from the beginning of the Romantic movement until fairly recently this aspect of Virgil’s art was broadly interpreted as evidence of his unoriginality: see Farrell (2010). The sheer amount of attention paid to this aspect of Virgil’s poetry makes him an almost inevitable point of reference for the study of other authors, though it is not clear that his extremely dense intertextual style is at all typical of other Roman poets. In what follows I  emphasize the most comprehensive and otherwise influential works, some of which reflect a mechanical approach to Quellenforschung that long held sway, along with more recent studies that take more imaginative approaches (including ethical, cultural, political, psychological and other considerations) while still giving adequate access to important earlier scholarship. Coffee et al. (2012) discuss the directions that future intertextual studies may take with the increasing availability of powerful digital tools to facilitate research. There is no general monograph on Virgilian intertextuality as a whole. Conte (1986) was influential in moving the field away from mechanical approaches and in stimulating theoretical reflection on intertextual study, and is still worth reading. Thomas (1999) takes a broad approach and offers numerous insights that can readily be extended. A number of metaphors (in addition to that of persona as proposed in this chapter), each situating intertextual transactions within a particular framework (be it thematic, generic, 73

Farrell (1997: 237).

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cultural, or what have you) have been seen as illuminating aspects of Virgil’s intertextual practice. Among these, Ross (1975a:  98), following hints in Norden (1981 [1903]:  122–4), characterized intertextual composition as a form of scholarship in coining the phrase ‘Alexandrian footnote’; Nugent (1992) reads the ship race in Aeneid 5 as being in intertextual competition with the chariot race of Iliad 23; Hardie (1993) applies a Freudian concept of father-son relationships to the matter of epic succession; Farrell (1997) considers various forms of musical and economic exchange (including theft) in the Eclogues as intertextual figures; Hinds (1998) examines the metaphor of silva as raw material or uncultivated land waiting for intertextual development; Deremetz (2009) treats winemaking in Georgics 2 as an intertextual activity; Nelis (2010) reflects on the reality and the metaphorical power of intertextuality as reading and rereading with reference to the idea of ‘Virgil’s library’; Hardie (2012) explores fama as an intertextual being; O’Rourke (2017) reads intertextual hospitality scenes as representing a social practice and enacting a literary practice, both under the rubric of reception. Some of these metaphors are broadly applicable to Virgil’s entire œuvre, while others are more specific to individual works, which in fact have tended to be the focus of most scholars. For the Eclogues, Posch (1969) provides a reasonably full collection of parallel passages. See also Kania (2016a), esp. Chapter 3, ‘The authors of the Eclogues’. For Virgil’s use of Theocritean scholarship, see Farrell (2016) and Keeline (2017). For the Georgics, Thomas (1986b) is helpful on the various forms of poetic intertextuality, while Thomas (1987) illuminates Virgil’s transformation of apparently unpoetic material. For an attempt to discern a pervasive intertextual design in the poem, see Farrell (1991). More attentive, though in different ways, to the ethical implications of intertextuality in the poem are Morgan (1999), particularly in regard to Homer, and Gale (2000), particularly on the didactic tradition. For the Aeneid and Homer, Knauer (1964a) is the sine qua non, featuring detailed discussion (in German) and full comparison of parallel passages in tabular form – he conveniently, if briefly, summarizes his results in English in Knauer (1964b). Schlunk (1974), Schmit-Neuerburg (1999), Barchiesi (1984) and (2015) and Hexter (2010) evoke and reflect upon Virgil’s encounters with Homer through Homeric scholarship. On Virgil and Apollonius, Nelis (2001) stands comparison to Knauer’s work in the breadth and depth of its engagement with the material and in the wealth of questions that it raises and answers. On Callimachus, Hunter (2006) treats Virgil along with other Latin poets, and O’Rourke (2017) considers the Ptolemaic and Augustan contexts of Virgil’s reception of Callimachus, while Clausen (1987), which 324

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is the kernel of the more expansive Clausen (2002), explores Virgil’s engagement with Callimachus and other Hellenistic and especially Alexandrian authors. Regarding the Epic Cycle, see Kopff (1981) and Gärtner (2015). The influence of tragedy is canvassed by Panoussi (2009) and Hardie in this volume (Chapter 18). Questions about Naevius’ and especially Ennius’ influence have recently been revisited, favourably and expansively by Goldschmidt (2013), but more sceptically by Elliott (2013:  75–134). On early Latin poetry more generally, see Wigodsky (1972). Regarding prose historiography, see Rossi (2004) and Delvigo (2013).

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Since antiquity Virgil the epicist has also been viewed as Virgil the tragedian; Martial describes him simply as Maro cothurnatus, ‘Virgil in buskins’ (5.5.8; 7.63.5). The task of collecting the numerous parallels between the Aeneid and tragedies both Attic and Roman was well under way by the time of the late antique commentators Servius and Macrobius. That industry has intensified in recent decades, as ever more allusions are uncovered to extant, fragmentary and lost plays. Tragic intertexts are particularly dense in books 2, 4 and 7, but they are to be found throughout the poem, from the first to the last scene. It would indeed be a service to Virgilian scholarship if someone (or some team) were to undertake a comprehensive study and catalogue of allusions to tragedy, on the model of Georg Knauer’s study of the Aeneid and Homer, and Damien Nelis’ of the Aeneid and Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica.1 The formal study of tragic sources for the Aeneid is inseparable from wider questions of interpretation. Oliver Lyne, for example, exploits an allusion to the Sophoclean Ajax in the characterization of Aeneas to reinforce a prevalent modern reading of the Aeneid as a ‘tragic’ (with a small t) poem:  ‘a further [non-epic] voice naggingly insinuates a quite different message’,2 a message that makes of the poem a pessimistic, even subversive and antiAugustan epic. Here the generic opposition of ‘epic’ and ‘tragic’ implies a conflict between the Aeneid’s function as a public panegyric of Roman history and the valuation to be given to the private experience of loss and grief. Implicit also is a reading of Attic tragedy that emphasizes the psychological experience and moral dilemmas of its characters. But this individualistic approach to tragedy is itself but one of a range of possible responses to that genre. An examination of the tragic elements in the Aeneid within conceptual frameworks developed over the last half century for the analysis of Attic 1 2

Knauer (1964a); for a summary in English, see Knauer (1964b); Nelis (2001). Lyne (1987: 12).

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tragedy leads to two general conclusions: first, that the Aeneid is ‘tragic’ at deeper levels of structure than had previously been realized; and secondly, that the evaluative use of the term ‘tragic’ (or ‘pessimistic’, ‘anti-Augustan’) leads to an over-simplified opposition of two points of view holding out the possibility of a final arbitration. By contrast, studies of Attic tragedy in the second half of the last century argued that the agonistic forms of the genre yield not simple and final judgements, but a dialectic of proliferating complexity. Seen through this lens, the Aeneid emerges as a problematic text, in the sense that has been given to the term ‘problematic’ since Vernant in his classic paper on ‘Tensions and ambiguities in Greek tragedy’ (1969)3 asserted that ‘tragedy turns reality into a problem’. First, a sketch of attempts in the earlier part of the twentieth century to define the tragic in the Aeneid. Richard Heinze used Aristotelian terms in placing the tragic qualities of the Aeneid at the centre of critical attention:  Dido, in the ‘tragic epyllion’4 of Aeneid 4, is for Heinze a tragic protagonist who undergoes a sudden peripeteia (‘reversal’), as she falls from the summit of her dream of bliss to meet her unhappy death. Heinze makes the sudden peripeteia a central structural feature in Virgil’s dramatization of the more even tenor supposed natural to epic narrative; with this is associated the emotional goal of ekplêxis (‘amazement’), traced directly to Aristotle’s definition of the function of tragedy as the arousal of the emotions of pity and fear.5 The emotionality of the Aeneid is undeniable; Heinze looks only to the Greek tragic tradition, but it is important for the Aeneid that Roman adaptations of Greek tragic models accentuated even further the genre’s striving after pathos.6 Heinze inaugurated a line of critics who use the Poetics as a scaffolding for their reading of the Aeneid or of episodes within it.7 Repeated attempts have been made to use Aristotle’s slippery term hamartia to gain a foothold on the problem of attributing guilt or innocence to the major figures of Dido and Turnus;8 this is particularly important for the debate as to whether Turnus is an ‘enemy of the state’ or a tragic hero. Anglo-Saxon criticism in the earlier part of the last century, influenced by Hegelian concepts of the tragic as popularized by A. C. Bradley,9 tended to a more abstract formulation of the conflicts in the Aeneid: thus E. E. Sikes 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1981: ch. 2). Heinze (1993: 96). Heinze (1993: 251–8, 370–3). Argenio (1961: 198–212); Traina (1974: 113–65, 202). On Dido, see Wlosok (1976); on Turnus, see von Albrecht (1970). E.g. Moles (1984); Schenk (1984). Bradley (1909).

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wrote: ‘The Fourth Book is a tragedy, and the essence of tragedy is a conflict, not only of wills but of rights. Both Aeneas and Dido have their points of view, which demand our sympathy, though of course we are not required to sympathize equally.’10 More recently, R. B. Egan has discussed the problem of pietas in the Aeneid, referring to the episode of the mother of Euryalus in Book 9, but with implications for our reaction to the last scene of the poem: ‘The simple tragic truth of the matter is that a heroic act of pietas in the Aeneid may also be an act of the greatest moral repugnance, that one and the same act embodies two antagonistic principles.’11 Egan thinks of the competing family duties in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ Antigone. Gian Biagio Conte has pondered long on the drama and pathos at work within Virgil’s epic; in a recent essay he argues that the Aeneid is constructed according to a ‘strategy of contradiction’ indebted to the dualism of tragedy, a genre that accommodates internal contradictions. A recognition of this allows the critic to transcend the competing claims of pessimistic (or ‘Harvard’) and optimistic (or ‘European’) schools of Virgilian criticism.12 Both Aristotelian and Hegelian versions of ‘tragic’ criticism of the Aeneid tend to place great weight on the experience of the individual actors in the epic: the former through an emphasis on Aristotle’s discussions of the tragic protagonist, the tragic flaw, and the arousal of the tragic emotions; the latter through sympathy with the experience of the individual subject crushed between the clashing rocks of incompatible abstractions. In a generalized sense, the word ‘tragic’ is often used by Virgilians as virtually synonymous with ‘private’, in the standard opposition of ‘private’ and ‘public’ voices, where one may read ‘epic’ for ‘public’. The modern privileging of the ‘private’ over the ‘public’ is a symptom of liberal humanism’s interest in the individual subject and his or her responsibility for exercising personal choice in the face of vast supra-personal forces or institutions. The consequence for readings of the Aeneid is to locate true value in the interior experiences of an Aeneas, a Dido, a Turnus, of suffering parents and children exposed to the impersonal and inhuman structures of militarism and absolutism. The paradigm shift in much recent criticism of Attic tragedy has been away from a focus on individual psychology and morality to a concern with political, social, religious and cultural institutions and relationships. The tragic self is understood not so much as the heroic individual struggling for selfdetermination, but as the locus of contesting roles within the structures of gender, household, and city. The search for solutions to the moral dilemmas 10 11 12

Sikes (1923: 190). Egan (1980). Conte (2007: 150–69).

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thrown up by tragic plots has given way to an analysis of the tensions and problematics that emerge when the structures of the polis are tested to breaking point.13 Tragedy’s fascination with liminality and transgression is given historical context as a discursive engagement with the tensions of the rapidly developing society of fifth-century Athens, as democracy struggles to come to terms with the shifting relationship between the collective and the individual, between mass and elite, and with changing roles in household and city. Furthermore, ritual – sacrifice, the scapegoat, ephebic initiation – and the perversion of ritual have been put at the heart of tragedy’s dramatization of issues of social and political order and disorder. How might we use this kind of criticism in reassessing the presence of the ‘tragic’ in Virgil’s epic? Let us take the end of the Aeneid to see how the narrow focus on the moral and psychological may be widened, with the help of a tragic model, to include the historical and political.14 Aeneas’ killing of Turnus is one of the most ‘personal’ moments in the epic, and readers are under pressure to pass judgement according to their sense of the individual moral worth and humanity of Aeneas and his victim. But although the hero’s vengeful violence is the result of an intensely private passion, the omniscient narrator has inserted it within a more extensive closural structure that determines both human and divine action. In the final scene Aeneas first throws a spear that exceeds even the force of the thunderbolt (Aen. 12.921–3); at the end, the coup de grâce is delivered by a man ‘ablaze with fury [furiis] and terrible in his anger’ (Aen. 12.946–7). Allusion to Jupiter’s weapon, the thunderbolt, is associated with the eruption of a hellish fury (texts of Virgil’s day did not distinguish between furiis (‘fury’) and Furiis ‘the Furies’); this combination unfolds along the temporal axis the contradiction of a single moment a hundred lines before when, in the last divine action of the poem, Jupiter sends down to earth a Fury (here referred to as a Dira, the embodiment of god’s wrath, dei ira). The Fury rushes down with the stormy force later attributed to Aeneas’ spear: with 12.855, ‘she flies and is carried to earth on a swift whirlwind’, compare 12.923, ‘[the spear] flies like a black whirlwind’. Juturna, Turnus’ sister, recognizes that this apparition seals her brother’s fate. Aeneas’ apparently private impulse to kill Turnus is in fact pre-scripted on the divine level. The unsettling use by the supreme Olympian of an agent normally associated with the Underworld, with its reenactment in the Fury-like vengeance of Jupiter’s vicar Aeneas, has a tragic model in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, whose plot is finally resolved by an alliance between the Olympian gods and the Erinyes when the latter are naturalized 13 14

A good survey is in Segal (1986). For further details, see Hardie (1991).

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as honorary citizens of Athens in their cave below the Acropolis. The specifically Roman implication of the finale to the legendary story of Aeneas and Turnus is suggested by the awesome description of the Capitol, the hill of Jupiter at the centre of what will be Rome:  ‘already in those days the dread [dira] religious awe of the place terrified the fearful countryfolk’ (Aen. 8.349–50). Jupiter’s capacity for furious violence has already been revealed to us, when we saw ‘the Father himself’ among the ‘dread [dirae] shapes’ of the Olympian gods busy with the destruction of Troy (Aen. 2.617–23). An etymological pun in the Jupiter and Dira scene in Book 12 imports another Roman overtone (849–50): the Dirae ‘appear’ (apparent) at the throne of Jupiter, like the apparitores, the attendants of Roman magistrates. As agents of official violence, the Dirae may be compared to the lictors, with their rods and axes (and at this point we may well remember the ‘cruel axes’ of that other father, the first consul Brutus, who put love of country and freedom before mercy to his son, 6.817–23). This all adds up to a sociopolitical issue that concerns the structures of state control, rather than (simply) a problem of the behaviour of the individual hero. Important religious themes also manifest themselves in the last scene of the Aeneid. As he kills Turnus, Aeneas exclaims that ‘with this wound Pallas sacrifices you, Pallas’ (Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas | immolat, Aen. 12.948–9). This is the last in a series of images of perverted, human sacrifice that begins with the death of Laocoon in Book 2, signs of a ‘sacrificial crisis’ of a kind that motivates the plots of many Greek tragedies; for example, sacrificial imagery runs through the trilogy of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.15 The ‘sacrifice’ of Turnus foreshadows critical and troubling moments in Roman history:  Romulus’ killing of Remus, the fratricidal ‘foundation sacrifice’ of Rome, and the slaughter of Roman civil war viewed as sacrificial killing (as it is in Horace Odes 2.1 and in Lucan’s Bellum civile). Yet another tragic model for the death of Turnus is the death of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae, an intertext that puts Aeneas in the role of the new god Dionysus, whose coming to Thebes is resisted by Pentheus. This is the culmination of a series of allusions to the plot of the Bacchae that run through the Aeneid.16 Aeneas will become a god after his death; through the analogy with Dionysus, our attention is further directed to the problematic arrival in Augustus’ Rome of the new cult of a deified human being, Julius Caesar, to be followed in the fullness of time by the divinization of Augustus. 15

16

Ritual is at the centre of the analysis of the tragic qualities of the Aeneid in Panoussi (2009). On sacrificial ritual in Greek tragedy, see Goldhill (1997: 332–3, 335). Mac Góráin (2013a).

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In the final scene of the Aeneid Virgil raises the question of the relationship between legitimate power, let us call it the pax Augusta, and arbitrary violence. Put like that, this is hardly a new reading; the point to stress is that this problematization of the end of the poem reflects the structures of Attic tragedy. One may also compare the interminable debate over the meaning of the death of Turnus with the discussion by Aeschylean critics of the way in which the apparently decisive conclusion of the Oresteia works against its own status as a telos (how can the Erinyes both be socialized as the ‘Kindly Ones’ and retain their deterrent efficacy as a principle of fear at the heart of the Athenian democracy?).17 In formal terms, the ending of the Aeneid is very untragic, because of its unforeseen abruptness, but it is highly tragic in the sense of both personal tragedy, and also of the problematization of social, political and religious institutions and structures. Vernant, in an essay entitled ‘The historical moment of tragedy in Greece’ (1968), developed the thesis that fifth-century Attic tragedy is the product of the particular conditions of fifth-century Athenian society, struggling to come to terms with the vast changes involved in the full realization of the city state, as older values collide with the new legal and political systems (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1981: ch. 1). While the changes in Roman society involved in the transition from the Republic to the Principate were not on the scale of those experienced in the fifth-century city state, nevertheless if there is a ‘tragic moment’ (to use Vernant’s phrase) in the history of Rome, it is the years around the Battle of Actium (31 bc ), when Octavian and the Roman people had to negotiate the institutional and ideological gap between the discredited structures of the Republic and the unproven and potentially repugnant alternative. The French school of Vernant and his associates focused on the problem of the relationship between the collective of the city state and the individual, above all the heroic and pre-eminent individual of pre-democratic social organizations. Homer already explores the problem of heroes who are expected to serve the interests of their group altruistically, but are encouraged at the same time (and indeed in the pursuit of the communal good) to strive for a competitive, individualistic superiority. In tragedy this instability within the Homeric system intensifies when it becomes the instability of two different systems, one old and one new, rubbing up against each other. If tragedy examines the problems raised by the survival of an obsolescent heroic individualism, Augustan epic has to confront the inverse problem, the 17

See also Vernant in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1981: 23 n. 3) on the ambivalent balance between Peitho and the Erinyes in the Eumenides. The Zeus of Aeschylus’ Supplices presides over both an Olympian sky and the infernal shadows.

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emergence of a new autocratic individualism out of the collectivity of the res publica. This is already clear from the example of the killing of Turnus: the manifestation of state-sanctioned terror and violence (Jupiter’s Fury-lictor) in the unpredictable behaviour of the single hero Aeneas anticipates the problem, ever-present in the empire, of containing and averting the anger of one man, the emperor; while the course of action notoriously rejected by Aeneas, the sparing of his enemy, images the flip side of that coin in Julius Caesar’s advertisement of the virtue of clemency (the autocrat’s gracious forbearance from venting his anger). And there is the further problem that the one man who rules in Rome is a human with divine pretensions, a problem explored through the intertextuality with the Bacchae. Another passage where a reading of the specifically Roman problems of the relationship between individual and collective yields a ‘tragic’ interpretation of the kind here proposed is the Marcellus episode at the end of Aeneid 6, the premature death of a young man at the end of the first half of the poem, which corresponds to the premature death of Turnus at the end of the second half. The ‘tragedy’ of Marcellus is frequently read in terms of personal loss and grief, often with the further appeal to the familiar opposition of public and private voices, as if the death of Marcellus were somehow the cost of the glorious fulfilment of empire. The passage is indeed one of the most pathos-laden in the poem. But the death of the emperor’s nephew also highlights a structural problem within the Principate; the terms of the problem are set up when Anchises presents the last figure in the main parade of Roman heroes, Fabius Cunctator:  tu Maximus ille es, | unus qui nobis cunctando restituis rem (‘You are that Maximus, the one man who by delaying restores our state’, Aen. 6.845–6). An individual hero, one man, the ‘greatest man’ (maximus), who single-handedly restores the collective, the res [publica], to itself. This is obviously a powerful precedent in a line of heroes that will culminate in the one princeps, Augustus, who claimed to have restored the res publica. Anchises in fact quotes almost verbatim a famous line from Ennius’ second-century bc epic on Roman history. The Marcellus coda reveals one of the dangers in a system where the community is dependent on the presence of the one great man. Anchises first points to an earlier great Marcellus, another version of the republican ‘one man’, a pre-eminent individual (victorque viros supereminet omnis, ‘in victory he towers over all men’, Aen. 6.856) who preserves the republic (rem Romanam … sistet, ‘he will hold fast the Roman state’, Aen. 6.857– 8). The line of Marcellus was to have excelled even itself in the person of the younger Marcellus, snatched prematurely from Rome by the jealous gods; his unrealized potential to be the greatest of all Romans is expressed through a comparison with all others of the Trojan-Romulean race (Aen. 332

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6.857–9). The funeral ritual enacted verbally at the end of Book 6 replaces – perverts – the ritual of triumph that would surely have followed from his irresistible military might (879–81), the triumph whose absence is the more strongly felt through the structural homology between this last scene in the Parade of Heroes and the last scene on the shield of Aeneas at the end of Book 8, the triple triumph of Augustus. The general reference in line 870 to ‘the Roman stock’ lightly veils the real point at issue, that Marcellus was being groomed for the succession; the continuity not so much of the ‘Roman race’, but of the Julian gens (omnis Iuli | progenies Aen. 6.789–90) was threatened by his death, starkly revealing the fragility of a system in which the security of the state depends on the physical survival of one man and his heir. The succession was indeed to prove one of the most intractable problems of the Roman Empire. The endings of books 6 and 12 are equally problematic in their own ways, but grief, private and public, at the death of a potential successor is easier to talk about openly than is the dark necessity of the autocrat’s anger. In dealing with the first, Virgil speaks directly of contemporary events, but in approaching the latter he works through the events of a remote legendary past. At the beginning of Georgics 3 the poet offers us the fantasy of his own sideshow to Octavian’s triple triumph of 29 bc , in a passage that suggestively combines epic and dramatic elements. The imaginary temple to Caesar Octavian contains the sculptural equivalent of a historical epic on the achievements of the contemporary hero (G. 3.26–33); in the two lines immediately preceding, we hear of theatrical performances. Virgil offers us no hint of what as poetic triumphator he will produce on this stage, but we might think of the famous stage work that was actually produced at games in Rome in 29 bc to celebrate the victory at Actium, the tragedy Thyestes by Virgil’s close friend Lucius Varius Rufus, a work that may have used events from the Greek legendary past to comment on the stirring events of the immediate past.18 The contrast between Varius’ legendary tragedy and the historical ‘epic’ embodied in the poetic temple draws our attention to Virgil’s strategic decision to write a legendary rather than a historical epic. There is a metonymical relation of cause and effect between the story of Aeneas and the history of Augustus, a relation that serves the panegyrical and epic function of ‘praising Augustus through his ancestors’ (as Servius describes the ‘intention’ of the poem). But more important is the metaphorical relation between the events of the legendary past and those of more recent history, and this is the relation between legendary past and present 18

For a reading of the possible politico-historical content of Varius’ Thyestes, see Leigh (1996).

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in fifth-century Attic tragedy. Virgil’s decision to write an Aeneid rather than an Augusteid is the crucial point of liberation from the panegyrical straitjacket of historical epic into the freedom to problematize the issues of Roman history and of the Principate. Aeneid 8 offers in microcosm the whole structure of the past-present relationship in the poem, and provides a measure of the difference between legendary problematization and contemporary panegyric. The Roman part of the book begins and ends with narratives of heroic victory and ritual celebration, first the story of Hercules and Cacus with the ensuing hymn of the Salii, and second the scenes on the shield of Aeneas of the Battle of Actium and the triple triumph. It is not easy to deconstruct the panegyrical content of the shield: the scene of Actium presents a stark contrast between, on the one side, the orderly formation of Augustus’ navy attended by Italians and Romans, citizens and gods, and backed up by his admiral Agrippa, and on the other, the disorderly and heterogeneous barbarian rabble of the forces of Antony, accompanied not by an Agrippa but by the unspeakable ‘Egyptian wife’, whose presence confuses categories of gender (a woman on the front line) and of nationality (an Egyptian allied with a Roman). The turning point of the battle itself is narrated through the defeat of the monstrous and hybrid Egyptian gods by the Graeco-Roman Olympians. The distant type of the victory at Actium is the victory of Hercules over Cacus on the site of Rome but, as many have noted, Virgil goes out of his way to blur – to problematize – the simple dichotomy between Olympian hero and chthonic monster: the hero of reason falls prey to a fiery fury that seems the more proper quality of the fire-breathing monster Cacus; the hero of civilization and future god falls below the level of humanity into a semi-bestial passion. Attic tragic treatments of Heracles provide parallels for this destructuring of the categories of beast, man, and god, for example the first stasimon of Sophocles’ Trachiniae describing the fight between Heracles and the river god Achelous in such a way that the son of Zeus almost merges into the bull form of his adversary. The qualitative difference in Aeneid Book 8 between the Actium scene and the Hercules-Cacus narrative reflects the ‘tragic distancing’ operative in the latter episode. Hercules is the extreme example of the transgressive hero, the hero who confuses boundaries, and through whom the tragedians explore liminal situations; but liminality is a constant feature of all tragedy, as the French school with its anthropological and structuralist roots has made abundantly clear.19 The Aeneid lends itself pre-eminently to an analysis in terms of liminality, and tragic models are never far away. The whole plot of the Aeneid is one of 19

See Segal (1986: 38–41).

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transition, of the geographical passage from the sacked Troy to new cities in Italy, during which Aeneas and his people must pass from their old identity to the possibility of a new identity as ancestors of the Roman race. Largescale narratives of passage are ultimately of epic rather than tragic derivation, and there is much to be gained for an understanding of the Aeneid from readings of the Odyssey in terms of the passage of its hero from the masculine world of war at Troy to resocialization in his Ithacan household. In Aeneas the Odyssean liminal roles of outcast and suppliant are yet more completely realized in a hero who is an exile rather than a homecomer. The Aeneid is also full of smaller narratives of passage and liminality that correspond at the level of the history of the individual to the epic’s wider narrative of the passage of a nation over the centuries; the closest models for these individual histories are tragic, particularly in cases of a liminality that ends in catastrophe rather than in successful passage from one status to another. One of the most obviously ‘tragic’ features of the Aeneid is the series of promising young people (including Marcellus) who die before their time. The strong emotional impact of these stories should not be downplayed, but beyond the pathos lie the abstract structures familiar above all from the Greek institution of the ephebeia, the practices and roles associated with the passage from childhood to adulthood, whose patterns, classically analysed in Vidal-Naquet’s essay on ‘The Black Hunter’,20 pervade such tragedies as Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and Euripides’ Bacchae. Aeneid 9 is full of ephebic characters, most of whom fail to make it to adulthood; the one exception is Ascanius, whose killing of Numanus is applauded by Apollo as the act by which the boy realizes virtus (‘manliness, courage’). Ascanius thus fulfils the epic model of the successful ephebe as represented by Odysseus’ son Telemachus. The immediate foil to this success story is the tale of Nisus and Euryalus, in which may be recognized many ephebic motifs. The two youths are ‘black hunters’, operating at night, not killing in open fight but trickily slaughtering the enemy as they sleep. Once discovered, they take refuge in what has become their natural environment during their ‘continual hunting’ (venatu adsiduo, Aen. 9.245) since they arrived in Italy, the dark woods in which the hunters now become the hunted. When Euryalus is captured, Nisus continues to operate from cover, his spear throws as unseen as any non-hoplite arrow, until the death of his beloved Euryalus forces him into the open to fight fair with his flashing sword; but this final burst of light, far from leading to the dawn of adulthood, seals his return to the darkness, this time of death. The cut flower simile of Euryalus’ death (Aen. 9.435–7), with its allusion to the Catullan inversion of the epithalamial motif in poem 20

Vidal-Naquet (1981).

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11 (the flower ‘touched’ by the plough), weaves into the ephebic pattern the corresponding female passage from virginity to womanhood,21 reminding us that the dominant image of marriage in the Aeneid is the tragic one of wedding-as-funeral, the thalamus (wedding chamber) as tomb.22 Similar patterns structure the story of that most liminal of Virgilian characters, the Amazon Camilla, who confuses the boundaries between hunting and war, the pastoral wilderness and the warfare of an urban civilization, feminine and masculine roles,23 as she tries to reverse her passage into the realm of Diana when as a baby she crossed over the raging River Amasenus bound to the spear of her father. Unlike Nisus and Euryalus, she succeeds for a time in entering the adult male world of war, enjoying one of the most spectacular aristeiai in the epic, before she makes the fatal mistake of confusing the battlefield with a hunting ground; the pointed placing of the words venatrix (‘huntress’, Aen. 7.805) and bellatrix (‘warrior-woman’, Aen. 11.780) highlights the source of her tragedy in this confusion of roles. Camilla is in many respects a mirror image of Dido, and an investigation of liminality will usefully supplement the established tragic readings of the Dido episode, and also shift the emphasis somewhat away from the psychologistic towards the social and cultural aspects of Dido’s ‘tragedy’. Like Aeneas, Dido has a history of exile; when we first meet her, she appears successfully to have made the transition from one role (dependent wife) to another (supreme monarch). But the intersection of her story with that of the Trojan exile casts her back into a state of confusion – of liminality – that is resolved only by her death. The emblem of this confusion is the figure who in Book 1 first informs Aeneas (and the reader) about Dido, Venus. The goddess of love is disguised as a virgin, and Aeneas initially takes her for one of Diana’s nymphs, or for the virgin goddess of hunting herself. There is an element of the metatheatrical about Venus’ entrance: in preparation for the drama to unfold, she has put on costume; as E. L. Harrison has shown,24 her account of the earlier history of Dido takes the shape of a Euripidean prologue, and she is appropriately shod in the tragic buskin (cothurno, Aen. 1.337). A combination of Venus and Diana in a tragic context evokes the goddesses whose power struggle mirrors on the divine level the impossible contradictions in which Euripides’ Phaedra is involved; it is as if Virgil has rolled into one the opening and closing epiphanies in the Hippolytus, Aphrodite in the prologue and Artemis as dea ex machina. Dido 21 22 23

24

See Fowler (1987). Seaford (1987); Rehm (1994). Catullus 63 would be an easy object for this kind of analysis in pre-Virgilian Latin poetry. See Griffin (1985) on tragic influence in Catullus 64 and 68. Harrison (1972–3).

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herself combines features of both Hippolytus – she has vowed herself to perpetual chastity after her first husband’s death – and Phaedra, as a woman whose established status is disrupted by an illicit passion that gets the better of her sense of shame and modesty (pudor, aidôs). As in the Hippolytus, the human drama is played out through a polarity of civilization and the wild: it is when Dido goes out into the wilderness in which Aeneas met Venus that she succumbs to her passion, as Venus once again demonstrates her power in what should be the domain of Diana (perhaps partly because Dido fulfils Phaedra’s fantasy of racing over the mountains in the hunt). On her return, Dido figuratively brings back wild nature into the city when she rages through Carthage like a Bacchant on Mount Cithaeron (Aen. 1.300–3). Later in her dreams she once more experiences the sensation of an exile far from civilization, lines followed immediately by the famous simile at 469– 73 comparing Dido to Pentheus and Orestes on the tragic stage, a jarring pointer to the theatricality of the story.25 In her desperate musings on the night before Aeneas’ departure, she fantasizes about a complete escape from a civilization in which social roles and sexuality are irreconcilably opposed (Aen. 1.550–1). Dido is the victim of transgressions of a kind thoroughly at home in Attic tragedy. Dido’s desires, conscious and unconscious, open themselves readily to psychoanalytical interpretation, and this is another area where twentiethcentury approaches to Greek tragedy have fertilized Virgilian criticism.26 Ellen Oliensis uses the simile of the tragic stage applied to Dido’s nightmares at Aeneid 4.469–73 as a point of entry into an analysis of Dido’s repressed desires.27 Alessandro Schiesaro explores the ‘furthest voices’, of a psychoanalytical rather than an ideological kind, in the utterances and desires of Dido, with particular emphasis on perhaps the most important of the many tragic models for the character of Dido, Medea.28 Reflection on recent criticism of Attic tragedy reveals the pervasiveness of tragic patterns in the Aeneid. This may be another answer to Brooks Otis’ question of how Virgil managed to reinvigorate the flagging tradition of Graeco-Roman epic and thus produce the classic Roman text;29 furthermore, the ‘tragic’ quality of the Aeneid was an important condition for the successful production of further imperial epics:  an ‘epic of problematics’ might be a fair label for the continuing line of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 25 26

27 28 29

A searching discussion of this simile can be found in Fernandelli (2002). A brief survey of psychoanalytical criticism of Greek tragedy can be found in Goldhill (1997: 340–3). Oliensis (2001: 47–53). Schiesaro (2008). Otis (1964: ch. 2, ‘The obsolescence of epic’).

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Lucan’s Bellum civile, and Statius’ Thebaid (the influence of specific tragic models is particularly important in the epics of Ovid and Statius). There remains the literary-historical question of the degree of Virgil’s originality in writing a ‘tragic epic’. Heinze saw close parallels to his list of dramatic features in the Aeneid (concentration of dramatic interest, striking reversals, careful psychological motivation) in what we know of the so-called peripatetic school of historiography; he speculates on the possible presence of such features in the lost Hellenistic epic, but thinks it unlikely that the Roman epic poet Ennius was a predecessor of Virgil in this respect.30 One might, on the other hand, press Servius’ comment on Aeneid 2.486ff. that ‘this passage has been taken from the fall of Alba’, probably referring to the account of the sack of Alba Longa in Book 2 of Ennius’ Annals, and ask whether Ennius’ narrative was already characterized by the tragic qualities found in Virgil’s narrative of the destruction of Priam’s palace. Ennius, in fact, was a tragedian as well as an epicist (a combination also seen in Livius Andronicus, Naevius, Varius Rufus, and Ovid – something of a Roman tradition). The surviving Hellenistic epic of Apollonius is a more certain precedent; the use of tragic models, particularly in Book 3 of the Argonautica, is well known and Virgil will have received an impulse to his dramatic presentation of Dido from the Apollonian Medea.31 Richard Hunter has shown the presence in the characterization of Jason of the ephebic patterns of Attic tragedy and other earlier Greek literature,32 and here too Apollonius may be a mediator between tragedy and the Aeneid. There is also the question of Roman tragedy itself. The fragmentary evidence at least allows us to see that Virgil drew extensively on the Roman tragedians, and it is often difficult in particular instances to judge whether a Roman tragedy or its Greek original is the primary model.33 The storm that opens the Aeneid corresponds to the storm in Odyssey Book 5, but is heavily indebted in detail to nostos storms in Roman tragedy (Pacuvius’ Teucer and Accius’ Clytaemestra). This opening salvo of tragic imitations stakes Virgil’s claim to be the continuator of the Roman tragic tradition. Furthermore, the co-presence in the opening episode of pronounced epic and tragic intertexts is programmatic for the combination of epic and tragic models throughout the Aeneid. It also makes a literary-historical point about the rootedness of Greek tragedy (and its Roman incarnation) in the epic tradition. In Aeneid 30 31

32 33

Heinze (1993: 371–3). Hunter (1989: 18–19). On Apollonius and tragedy, see also Nishimura-Jensen (1996). On the pervasive and intensive intertextuality between the Aeneid and Apollonius’ Argonautica, see Nelis (2001). Hunter (1988). Wigodsky (1972: 90ff.); Stabryła (1970); Zorzetti (1990).

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Book 1 there is something of an overdetermination of tragic introductions, first through Juno and then through Venus’ Euripidean ‘prologue’ to the history of Dido. It is no accident that theatres seem to be the most eye-catching feature (Aen. 1.427–9) of the great Hellenistic-Roman city which Aeneas sees rising out of the wastes of Africa. The second half of the Aeneid is Virgil’s Iliad, the ‘greater work’ (Aen. 7.45) compared to the Odyssean first half of the epic, but Virgil chooses to motivate the Iliadic second half through heavy tragic allusion: the Fury Allecto is closely related to the personification of frenzy, Lyssa, in Euripides’ Herakles, and Virgil’s descriptions of the effects of the Fury may draw on Latin tragedies on Dionysiac themes (the centrality of Furies to the plot and of Maenads in the imagery of the Aeneid is itself a mark of the poem’s tragic quality; neither are at all prominent in Homeric epic).34 In both Books 1 and 7 Juno, like an attentive theatregoer, mentally rehearses old plays as examples to imitate in her own behaviour. At 1.39–45 she remembers the death of Oilean Ajax in the version of Accius,35 while at 7.319–22 she tries to use Ennius’ Alexander as the script for the future history of the Trojans in Italy. Although Accius (d. after 86 bc) was the last major Roman writer of new tragedies, there had been regular productions of tragedies through the first century bc. Late republican writers of tragedies, whether for stage performance or recitation, include C. Asinius Pollio, a close literary associate of Virgil and probably the author of the tragedies ‘worthy of Sophocles’ praised at the beginning of Eclogue 8,36 as well as Varius, author of the Thyestes performed in 29 bc. The slender surviving evidence suggests that in their plays Pollio and Varius may have aspired to create a new, ‘classic’ stage in the development of Roman tragedy, challenging directly the great tragedians of fifth-century Athens;37 Virgil perhaps subscribed to this ideal in his own epic rewritings of tragedy. But in the event, the number of tragic productions in Augustan Rome rapidly dwindled, for whatever reasons. Virgil’s use of tragedy needs also to be assessed against the background of the cultural and ideological functions of Roman republican tragedy.38 A line of Italian scholars has sought to find direct reflections of the contemporary class struggle in their reconstructions of third- and secondcentury b c tragedies,39 but criticism of this political criticism has not been 34 35

36 37 38 39

Burzacchini (2002). Pierini (1980: 41 n. 50) suggests that Accius’ picture of the blasted Ajax may be indebted to a Hellenistic gigantomachy; this would yield a ring composition with Aeneas’ final Gigantomachic blasting of Turnus. See Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) on Horace Odes 2.1.9–12. Tarrant (1978: 258–61). On Republican tragedy, see Boyle (2006); Manuwald (2011). Pastorino (1957); Biliński (1958); Lana (1958–9); Argenio (1961).

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lacking.40 Eckard Lefèvre argues that a major difference between Attic tragedy and the Roman adaptations lay in the panegyrical character of the latter, the result of the overpowering pressure of the ideology of a Roman historical destiny which drains the truly tragic from Roman tragedies.41 Another way of putting it would be to say that Roman tragedy tends to the epic, understood as the genre of praise poetry. If so, Virgil’s adaptations of tragic models represent a movement in the opposite direction, producing a ‘tragic epic’, where ‘tragic’ is to be understood in terms of the categories of both Aristotle and Vernant and his school. The closest approximation to an Accian stage tyrant in the Aeneid is Mezentius, but the reader’s response to the Etruscan king is problematized by the paradoxical combination in his person of tyrannical bestiality with heroic virtue and parental piety.42 But whatever our assessment of the nature of republican tragedy, it may be dangerous to underestimate the part played by Virgil himself in forging an amalgam of the commemorative, panegyrical tradition of historical epic with the problematics of Attic legendary tragedy. FURTHER READING For general reading on the tragic qualities of the Aeneid, see:  Heinze (1993: esp. 251–8, 370–3); Quinn (1968: 323–49); Galinsky (2003: 275– 94); Conte (2007: 150–69). Virgil and Greek tragedy: König (1970); Panoussi (2009). Aeschylus: Hardie (1991); Scafoglio (2001). Euripides:  Fenik (1960); Mac Góráin (2009); Baraz (2009); Scafoglio (2010: 77–114). Virgil and Roman tragedy:  Zorzetti (1990) is a convenient summary of known allusions; Wigodsky (1972); ch. 10 of Griffin (1985). Approaches to the political function of republican tragedy: Abbott (1907); Biliński (1958); Boyle (2006); La Penna (2002); Elliott (2008). On Augustan tragedy: Tarrant (1978: 258–61).

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41 42

For a balanced overview of the issues, see La Penna (1979). The ancient sources make it plain that in the later Republic and under the Empire, the theatre was a place for direct political expression on the part of the plebs: Abbott (1907); Tengström (1977); Nicolet (1976: 483–94). Lefèvre (1976: 43). La Penna (1980).

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Individual characters and episodes: Dido: Quinn (1963: 29–58); Collard (1975); Lefèvre (1978); E. L. Harrison (1989); Schiesaro (2008). Aeneas and Ajax: Lyne (1987: 8–12). Mezentius: La Penna (1980).

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Themes

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Virgil as a Poet

Confronted with images of the Trojan War, which he had so recently survived, depicted on the temple of Juno at Carthage, Aeneas asks his companion Achates: ‘quis iam locus’ inquit ‘Achate, quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? en Priamus! sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi; sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.’ sic ait, atque animum pictura pascit inani, multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine vultum. (Aen. 1.459–65)

The epigrammatic line sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt (literally ‘there are tears of things, and mortal matters touch the mind’) is both one of the most quoted lines of Virgil, and one of the most puzzling. Resisting literal translation  – as English prose it seems merely stilted and strange – as verse it has a universal power that we recognize from examples in our own language:  ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’; ‘We are such stuff | As dreams are made on’; perhaps even, ‘There is a crack in everything | That’s how the light gets in.’ Dryden, however, avoids any such generalising force: ‘O friend, e’en here The monuments of Trojan woes appear! Our known disasters fill e’en foreign lands: See there, where old unhappy Priam stands! E’en the mute walls relate the warrior’s fame, And Trojan griefs the Tyrians’ pity claim.’ He said – (his tears a ready passage find) Devouring what he saw so well designed And with an empty picture fed his mind.

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Dryden’s translation of line 462, ‘And Trojan griefs the Tyrians’ pity claim’, is derived more from scholarly explications of the passage than from Virgil himself, and his translation of the following lines obscures the change in mood which is unambiguous in the original:  Aeneas weeps to see these images, but he is also comforted and reassured. A closer translation, on the other hand, offers little sense of the passage’s aesthetic appeal: ‘What place now, Achates, what country in the world isn’t full of our suffering? Look, Priam! Even here he has his reward of praise, There are tears of things and mortality touches the mind. Let go of your fear; this fame will bring you some safety.’ So he spoke, and he feasted his soul on the empty images, Groaning much, and wet his face with a free flow of tears.1

Aeneas takes the fact that the story of Troy is known and told in this new land, and that Priam is depicted respectfully (‘Even here he has his reward of praise’) as signs that Carthage will welcome them:  ‘this fame will bring you some safety’. In this he is both correct – Dido will welcome him  – and gravely wrong:  Juno is an implacable opponent who will attempt to derail Aeneas’ mission by detaining him in North Africa. Dryden limits the scene to the emotional response, and leaves out Aeneas’ act of characteristically half-right interpretation. In Latin, the three lines 461–3 combine elusive profundity (sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt) with a sharply ironic glimpse of Aeneas’ own interpretative limitations. The limits of translation in the face of one of Virgil’s most famous and moving lines suggest why those who cannot read Latin themselves might want to gain some insight into what it is like to read Virgil in the original, with an emphasis upon the aesthetic rather than the narrative experience – or, perhaps more properly, on the links between the style and the narrative. But even readers with good Latin can find it hard to focus upon the style of Virgil’s poetry. This chapter attempts to give some sense of what Virgil’s poetry is like to read, both by offering close readings of selected passages, accompanied by a conscious variety of English translations, and also by setting those passages alongside extracts of English verse, some of which exemplify the feature under discussion, though without reference to Virgil, and some of which are themselves indebted to the Virgilian tradition. English verse translations, drawn from a wide range of authors and periods, are given for all Latin passages. 1

Slightly adapted from the translation offered in Wharton (2008).

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Choice of Words The challenge of aesthetic description is sharpened in the case of Virgil because the most distinctive features of his style are so often modes of restraint:  Virgil uses fewer ‘sound effects’ (such as alliteration and assonance), for instance, and less frequent similes than most subsequent epic poets in Latin.2 Virgil’s diction – that is his choice of words – is marked by moderation, a tendency to avoid colloquial, vulgar, or ‘unpoetic’ words as well as exotic or unusual ones, a feature of his style noted by his contemporaries: Agrippa criticized Virgil as the ‘inventor of a new kind of affected style, neither inflated nor jejune but composed of ordinary words and therefore unobtrusive’.3 This tendency to eschew extravagant effects is a marker of socalled ‘classical’ verse style in many modern languages, associated in English most strongly with the eighteenth-century ‘Augustanism’ of Alexander Pope or the early English hymnodists Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley; but also, for instance, of Fulke Greville in sixteenth-century England, François de Malherbe in early seventeenth-century France, or Robert Frost in twentiethcentury America. Diction is a difficult feature to discuss in a foreign language. Appreciating not just the meaning but the register of a word is a result of long experience; and noticing the ways in which a poet limits his or her register – that is, the words that are not being used – is a still more subtle exercise. To give a sense of what is meant here it is easiest to start with exceptions: indeed, one effect of a general restraint in word choice is that even a quite minor departure from it may be strongly felt, as in this passage early in the Georgics on agricultural pests: inventusque cavis bufo, et quae plurima terrae monstra ferunt: populatque ingentem farris acervum curculio, atque inopi metuens formica senectae. (G. 1.184–6) The toad is found in cavities, and all the manifold pests Earth breeds; the enormous heap of spelt is spoiled by the weevil And the ant that insures against a destitute old age.4

Bufo appears here for the first time in extant Latin literature; it is usually taken to mean ‘toad’ though may in fact mean ‘field-mouse’, a more likely

2

3 4

Statius’ Thebaid has roughly twice as many similes as the Aeneid, for instance. See Dominik (2015: 266). Even word length is moderate: Virgil uses relatively few very long words but also relatively few monosyllables. Quoted by Wilkinson (1959: 183). Day Lewis (1947: 57).

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pillager of grain.5 The weevil does not appear in any other classical Latin poem.6 All three creatures (toad or mouse, weevil and ant) are pests who threaten the farmer’s store of grain; the unpoetic register of bufo and curculio emphasizes the unpleasant surprise of finding one’s grain so infested. Philip Larkin creates a related effect with the emphatically literal ‘wardrobe’, a cumbersome word even to pronounce in verse, looming out of the dawn gloom at the climax of his Aubade: Slowly the light strengthens and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. (Larkin, Aubade, 41–4)

Larkin’s ‘wardrobe’ is the fact and consciousness of death; Virgil’s curculio suggests waste, loss and the futility of labor. In both cases, an unpleasant (if frequently encountered) surprise.7 Effects created by the register of words can work in the opposite direction, as in passages marked by a high concentration of polysyllabic, unusual, or foreign (in Latin, usually Greek) words. There are several particularly extensive examples of such passages in Virgil, such as the ‘catalogue of nymphs’ in Georgics 4, where Aristaeus summons his mother Cyrene: at mater sonitum thalamo sub fluminis alti sensit. eam circum Milesia vellera Nymphae carpebant hyali saturo fucata colore, Drymoque Xanthoque Ligeaque Phyllodoceque, caesariem effusae nitidam per candida colla Nesaee Spioque Thaliaque Cymodoceque, Cydippe et flava Lycorias, altera virgo, altera tum primos Lucinae experta labores, Clioque et Beroe soror, Oceanitides ambae, ambae auro, pictis incinctae pellibus ambae, atque Ephyre atque Opis et Asia Deiopea et tandem positis velox Arethusa sagittis. (G. 4.333–43)

5 6

7

Mynors (1990: 41). Though the character ‘Curculio’ lends his name to the eponymous play of Plautus. The word is found in Persius’ Satires (4.38), though with a metaphorical (and obscene) rather than literal meaning. We might think also of Larkin’s ‘the toad work | Squats on my life’. The only (metaphorical) weevils in English verse of which I am aware appear in Allen Tate’s evocation of the 1940 blitzkrieg on France, in the third stanza of ‘Seasons of the Soul’ (1944): ‘When war’s usurping claws | Shall take the heart escheat – | Green field in burning season | To stain the weevil’s jaws’. See Tate (1977).

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Virgil as a Poet But from her bower his mother heard the sound Under the flood; the nymphs about her round Spun green Milesian wool. Disheveled haire Adorned their ivorie necks, Drymo the faire, Xantho, Ligaea, and Phyllodoce, Nesaee, Spio, and Cymodoce; Cydippe, and bright Licorias, one a maid, Th’other then first had felt Lucina’s aid. Clio, and Berôe sea-borne sisters both, Both girt with gold, in painted mantles both. Ephyre, Opis, Deiopeia too Of Asia, and Arethusa now At last grown swift since she her quiver left.8

In this highly coloured passage, which draws upon similar scenes in Homer and Hesiod, the intensely Greek feel of the nymphs’ names is augmented by the surrounding vocabulary and syntax: thalamo (‘bower’ or ‘bedroom’, 333) and hyali (‘glassy’, 335) are also Greek words, the latter an especially unusual one, here apparently Latinized for the first time, while caesariem effusae (‘having loosened their hair’, 337) is a Greek construction.9 The triple repetition of ambae is uncommon in Virgil, and typically marks strong emotion. Milton probably had the word hyali – as well as the wider passage – in mind in his description of the Severn’s ‘glassy’ wave: Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair. (Comus, 36–40)10

Milton found the poetic effect of Greek names particularly pleasing, as in this song from Arcades: ‘Nymphs and shepherds dance no more | By sandy Ladon’s lillied banks. | On old Lycaeus or Cyllene hoar, | Trip no more in twilight ranks’ (1–4). But the lush pleasure of exotic words for their own sake is of course not confined in English to the use of Greek terms: Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine. (Masefield, Cargoes, 1–2)

8

9 10

May (1628: 127–8, the spelling is partly modernized). Thomas May (1595–1658) also translated Lucan. On hyali, see Mynors (1990: 302). The odd and memorable phrase ‘amber-dropping hair’ perhaps retains an aural echo of Virgil’s three ambae.

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Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, one of the most well-known of all English poems, includes a self-conscious exploration of the emotional effect of markedly ‘poetic’ language: The same [voice – of poetry] that oft-times hath Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! (Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, 68–72)

Keats is ‘tolled back’ from the highly poetic magic casements, foam, perilous seas and faery lands of his imagination to the reality of his ‘sole self’ in the (insistently monosyllabic) line 72. Virgil similarly uses the juxtaposition of evocative foreign words with very ordinary native ones to emotive effect. Part of the beguiling beauty of the infancy scene in Eclogue 4 derives from the juxtaposition of exotic Greek plant names, the colocasia (a kind of large lily), acanthus and amomum with the movingly ordinary pastoral detail of the goats returning home at the end of the day for milking, their udders full (ipsae lacte domum referent distenta capellae | ubera): at tibi prima, puer, nullo munuscula cultu errantis hederas passim cum baccare tellus mixtaque ridenti colocasia fundet acantho. ipsae lacte domum referent distenta capellae ubera nec magnos metuent armenta leones; ipsa tibi blandos fundent cunabula flores. occidet et serpens et fallax herba veneni occidet; Assyrium vulgo nascetur amomum. (Ecl. 4.18–25) To Thee – sweet child – the Earth brings native dowres, The wandring ivy, with fair bacchar’s flowers, And colocasia, sprung from Egypt’s ground, With smiling leaves of green acanthus crowned; The goats their swelling udders home shall bear, The droves no more shall mighty lions fear: For Thee, Thy cradle, pleasing flowers shall bring; Imperious Death shall blunt the serpent’s sting; No herbs shall with deceitful poison flow, And sweet amomum ev’ry where shall grow.11

11

This translation is included in Sir John Beaumont’s (c. 1582–1627) verse collection Bosworth Field (1629), at C8v–D1r. Spelling partly modernized.

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Meaning of Words Poetry does not, however, require the chiaroscuro effect of such marked contrast to be effective:  in the Aeneid, especially, Virgil’s style is marked most often by an impression of ordinary words used in a remarkably full and precise way. This is what the English literary critic Donald Davie called ‘purity of diction’.12 So in the shipwreck scene early in Aeneid 1: apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto, arma virum tabulaeque et Troia gaza per undas. (1.118–19) And lo! things swimming here and there, scant in the unmeasured seas, The arms of men, and painted boards, and Trojan treasuries.13

Here rari – literally, ‘widely spaced’, but also ‘few’ – suggests the wide spaces of ocean between the struggling swimmers, but also how few of them have survived. The word is as it were ‘fully activated’, its complete set of possible meanings brought into focus by the scene: sensitive to this, Morris translates it twice: ‘here and there’ and ‘scant’; and perhaps hints too at ‘widely spaced’ in ‘the unmeasured seas’. Ben Jonson makes a small-scale version of the same point about the word ‘rare’ in his poem to Lucy, Countess of Bedford on her appreciation of Donne’s Satires: ‘Rare poems ask rare friends.’14 ‘Rare’ here means, simultaneously, few, widely spaced and special, even extraordinary. Both Donne’s Satires and Lucy herself exemplify each of these meanings – as, by implication, does Jonson, since he can appreciate both. As with any single example, these two lines of Virgil also work in other ways. The touch of alliteration in tabulaeque et Troia is dramatically effective: it links the very ordinary word tabulae (‘boards’ or ‘planks’) – that is, pieces of the broken ship – with ‘Trojan’, alerting us even before we reach gaza (‘[Trojan] treasure’) that Trojan identity itself is at risk of destruction. The alliteration of tabulae with Troia is much more telling than Morris’ ‘Trojan treasuries’. The first two words of the second line – arma virum – seem to quote and then break off the very first words of the Aeneid, words which indicate indeed the subject of the whole poem: arma virumque cano (‘Arms and the man I  sing’); though as Morris’ translation indicates, this time virum means not ‘a man’ but ‘of men’. Just as this early shipwreck suggests that the entire project of the Aeneid might prove abortive, so this line restarts the poem only to stutter to a halt amid the floating wreckage.15

12 13 14 15

Davie (2006). Morris (1876). From ‘To Lucy, Countess of Bedford, with Mr Donne’s Satires’, Epigrams 94. See Oliensis (2004: 31–2).

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Such precise use of words which are unremarkable in themselves may reanimate expressions or metaphors which have otherwise gone ‘dead’, flat in the language. At the opening of Georgics 2, for instance, Virgil describes the various modes of propagation, beginning with what is  – essentially  – a list of plants and trees known for their tendency to proliferate without assistance, whether by self-seeding, suckers from the tree’s base, or apparently spontaneously: principio arboribus varia est natura creandis namque aliae, nullis hominum cogentibus, ipsae sponte sua veniunt, camposque et flumina late curva tenent: ut molle siler, lentaeque genistae, populus, et glauca canentia fronde salicta. pars autem posito surgunt de semine, ut altae castaneae, nemorumque Iovi quae maxima frondet aesculus, atque habitae Graiis oracula quercus. pullulat ab radice aliis densissima silva: ut cerasis, ulmisque; etiam Parnasia laurus parva sub ingenti matris se subicit umbra. (G. 2.9–19) First, different trees have diverse birth assigned; For some lack no compulsion of mankind, But spring spontaneously in every nook, Peopling the meadows and the mazy brook; Thus osiers lithe, and brooms that gently play, The poplar, and the willow silver-grey. And some arise from seed themselves have shed; For so the chestnut rears its lofty head, The bay-oak, towering monarch of the wood, And oaks with Grecian oracles endued. But others densely stool up from the root, A forest new, as elms and cherries shoot; Nay, even thus the young Parnassian bay, Beneath the mother’s shadow, feels her way.16

The detail of densissima silva seems conventional  – woodland is often dense, dark, deep, or thick in Latin just as in English – but here the obvious phrase gathers specific meaning: woodlands composed of trees which reproduce themselves by suckers from the base are particularly dense because the young trees come up, by definition, close to their parents. The obvious word seems suddenly meaningful. Robert Frost reanimates the same cliché

16

R. D. Blackmore in Gransden (1996: 216).

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of ‘dark and deep’ woods, albeit in a very different way, in the well-known poem, ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’ which concludes with lines which by the end of the poem are heavy with a sense of personal significance: ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep, | But I have promises to keep, | And miles to go before I sleep, | And miles to go before I sleep’ (13–16). Frost’s poem, ‘Mending Wall’ does something similar with the proverbial expression ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ The passage from Georgics 2 is also typical of Virgil in the precision of its description of nature. The willow’s greenness seems to ‘whiten’ (canentia; Blackmore translated as ‘silver-grey’), because the underside of the leaf is grey or silver in colour, and willow leaves are so long and light that the underside is frequently revealed. So Frost again – perhaps the single strongest Englishlanguage rival to Virgil as a poet of trees – gives a comparably precise description: ‘When I see birches bend to left and right | Across the lines of straighter darker trees’ (Birches, 1–2). The last tree in Virgil’s list, Parnassia laurus (‘the Parnassian laurel’) has a grand sound in Latin: the long Greek word Parnassia appears in Virgil only here and at Eclogue 6.29; but the tree turns out, over the line break, to be only parva (‘small’) sheltering in its mother’s mighty shade. Such fleeting touches of personification, here as often in the Georgics applied even to plants, are an important contributor to the peculiar density of Virgilian pathos. It is equally typical, however, that Virgil does not press the moment of moving personification beyond this single line.17 Milton responds to the Greek grandeur and sacredness of Virgil’s laurel and takes this passage as the starting point for his description of the Indian fig tree with whose leaves Adam and Eve cover their nakedness:18 and both together went Into the thickest Wood, there soon they chose The Figtree, not that kind for Fruit renown’d, But such as at this day to Indians known In Malabar or Decan spreads her Arms Branching so broad and long, that in the ground The bended Twigs take root, and Daughters grow About the Mother Tree, a pillar’d shade High overarch’t, and echoing Walks between; There oft the Indian Herdsman shunning heat Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing Herds 17

18

Claudian produces a quite different effect, in his epithalamium for Honorius and Maria, by applying an extended version of the same image to Maria and her mother (Epithalamium de Nuptiis Honorii Augusti, 244–6). Though Milton’s fig tree reproduces by rooting branches rather than suckers from the root.

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V i c to r i a Mo u l At Loopholes cut through thickest shade: Those Leaves They gather’d, broad as Amazonian Targe, And with what skill they had, together sew’d, To gird their waist, vain Covering if to hide Their guilt and dreaded shame; O how unlike To that first naked Glory. (Milton, Paradise Lost 9.1099–115)19

In linking Virgil’s Italian landscape, the ever-receding Ausonian plain (arva Ausoniae … semper cedentia retro, Aen. 3.496), with the lost biblical Eden and the longing for a Promised Land, Milton is responding to the emotional fabric of the whole of Virgil. One of the most moving passages of the Aeneid describes the moment when Aeneas finally reaches the mouth of the Tiber, the gateway to Italy: iamque rubescebat radiis mare, et aethere ab alto Aurora in roseis fulgebat lutea bigis: cum venti posuere, omnisque repente resedit flatus, et in lento luctantur marmore tonsae. atque hic Aeneas ingentem ex aequore lucum prospicit: hunc inter fluvio Tiberinus amoeno, vorticibus rapidis et multa flavus arena, in mare prorumpit: variae circumque supraque assuetae ripis volucres et fluminis alveo, aethera mulcebant cantu, lucoque volabant. flectere iter sociis, terraeque advertere proras imperat: et laetus fluvio succedit opaco. (Aen. 7.25–36) And now the sea was red with sunrays, saffron Aurora shone in her rose chariot; the winds fell off, and from the high air every harsh blast was ended suddenly, the oars beat down against the waters’ sluggish marble. Then from his ship Aeneas spies a spacious forest; and through the trees the Trojan sees the Tiber, gracious river, hurrying to sea, with yellow sands and rapid eddies. And varied birds that knew the river’s channel and banks flew through the grove; and overhead they soothed the air with song. Aeneas orders his men to change their course; the prows are turned to land; he enters, glad, the shadowed river.20 19

20

In a further link in the chain of allusion, Wordsworth takes this passage of Milton as the starting point of his poem Yew-Trees, which borrows from Milton the phrase ‘pillar’d shade’. Mandelbaum (1971: 298–300).

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Line 28 is a particularly good example of word choice ‘revitalising’ latent metaphors. Marmor (literally, ‘marble’) is used elsewhere in Virgil for the intractable surface of a very calm sea (G. 1.254, Aen. 6.729, 7.718) and tonsae (literally, ‘things shorn or cut’) is used by Lucretius (DRN 2.554) as well as Virgil (Aen. 5.774, 10.299) for oars (that is, planks cut from trees); but the combination of both marmor and tonsae is quite unexpected. In a typical blurring, the obvious detail of the sea’s slowness, that is, its calmness (in lento … marmore, 28), suggests the calm movement of the ship as well as the water, and also draws attention to the metaphor of marmor. As we read on into the next line the cut wood or timber grappling in line 28 with sluggish marble suddenly confronts the living wood of an ingentem … lucum (‘a mighty grove’) and the rapid movement of the Tiber, yellow with sand, vivid with the movement and sound of birds. At once human craft and skill (suggested by both marmore and tonsae) seem lifeless in the face of the river and groves of Italy. We have now seen several examples of Virgil’s typically delicate use of sound effects and repetition. These lines on the Tiber are held together by repetitions and links of sound and sense which, though widely spaced and unobtrusive, anchor the reader in the river itself:  fluvio Tiberinus amoeno … multa flavus arena … fluminis alveo … flectere iter … fluvio succedit opaco. Virgil’s use of enjambement adds to the expectant effect. Hexameters have a signature tune, a closing metrical motif (a final dactyl and spondee) which allows us to hear where the line ends, but in Virgil this is set against a tendency to avoid end-stopped lines. This produces, more frequently than in most Latin hexameter verse, a counterpoint between the metrical closure of each line and an enjambement which pulls the sense and often the emphasis of the clause or sentence over the line break. In this passage we are left waiting for a finite verb at the end of all the lines 29–35, postponing the moment of arrival and suggesting the pleasure of anticipation. The poetic power of such an episode is not of course produced only by local effects: its emotional force derives from its place in the larger narrative, the importance of Italy to Aeneas and to the poet. Although the Aeneid has six blood-soaked books to run, these lines mark the moment when Aeneas reaches his final destination and the reader too glimpses Italy as a newcomer, evoking both patriotic pride in, and longing for the idea of, Italy. Perhaps the best parallel in English is found in John Denham’s lines on the Thames from the climax of Cooper’s Hill: My eye descending from the Hill, surveys Where Thames amongst the wanton vallies strays. 355

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V i c to r i a Mo u l Thames, the most lov’d of all the Oceans sons, By his old Sire to his embraces runs, Hasting to pay his tribute to the Sea, Like mortal life to meet Eternity. Though with those streams he no resemblance hold, Whose foam is Amber, and their Gravel Gold; His genuine, and less guilty wealth t’explore, Search not his bottom, but survey his shore; Ore which he kindly spreads his spacious wing, And hatches plenty for th’ensuing Spring. (Denham, Cooper’s Hill, 159–71)21

Sound and Structure One of the most difficult aspects of Virgil’s music for a reader without Latin to appreciate is the musical effect of quantitative metre. Both Latin and English words have both stress and quantity – that is, some syllables take longer to pronounce than others (quantity) and in each word one syllable is usually emphasized (stress). Latin verse, however, is arranged according to the patterning of syllable length whereas English verse is arranged according to the patterning (or counting) of stressed syllables. In English we make sense of a poem’s structure by listening for stress (and often rhyme); in Latin we are listening for the patterns of long and short syllables.22 Even experienced readers of poetry in English can find it hard to hear, to ‘listen for’, the length of syllables instead of stress.23 Nevertheless, something of the expressive possibilities of quantity can be conveyed by listening carefully to experiments with quantitative verse in English – whether whole poems or more isolated quantitative effects:

21

22

23

Sir John Denham (1615–69) is best known for Cooper’s Hill, published first in 1642 and in a revised edition in 1655. It was one of the most popular and influential English poems of the mid-seventeenth century, and stands behind, for instance, Pope’s Windsor Forest. This is a significantly simplified account of Latin metre; the question of the interplay between ictus and accent, for instance, is discussed by O’Hara, Chapter 20 in this volume, p. 372. The question of quantity, or syllable length in English is a very complex one, partly because we are not used to listening for it as a structural device in verse, and partly because in practice the length of a given syllable varies a good deal depending upon context and emphasis. These points are probably linked: there is some evidence that the consistency of syllable length in some Latin poetry is itself partly an artificial convention; the scansion of quantities in comedy, for instance, shows greater variability (e.g. ‘iambic shortening’ of a short and long syllable to two shorts), which may reflect tendencies in the spoken language.

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Virgil as a Poet Dear be still! Time’s start of us lengthens slowly. Bright round plentiful nights ripen and fall for us. (Basil Bunting, Odes 1.9.1–2)24

These lines are not hexameters (they are a sapphic hendecasyllable followed by a lesser asclepiad), but they do exploit the possibilities of syllable length in English verse; this is particularly noticeable in the first line, which contains a large number of long syllables, which are difficult to pronounce quickly (‘Dear’, ‘still’, ‘Time’s’, ‘start’, ‘length-’, ‘slow-’). The sequence ‘still! Time’s start’ is particularly striking, and the poem is of course about the sense of time slowed by erotic expectation. Moreover, the poet resists the temptation to give the reader more to ‘hang on’ to, a clearer and less complex structure, by adding rhyme. Bunting also compresses his poetic language to a considerable degree, which tends to reduce the proportion of short and unstressed monosyllables, naturally quite high in English, towards something closer to that found in Latin. On the other hand, the strength of alliteration in the first line is only quite rarely found in Virgil, and these lines are also strongly endstopped in a way that Virgil typically resists.25 Virgil exploits related metrical effects at a similar moment of self-consciousness about the passing of time: sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore. (G. 3.284–5) But time is lost, which never will renew, Whilst ravish’d, we the pleasing Theme pursue.26

These strangely powerful lines juxtapose a series of dactyls in line 284 – suggesting the swift passage of time  – with a second line in which the speaker, after an initial dactyl (singula) becomes bogged down in seven successive long syllables (dum capti circumvecta-). The verse mimes the poet’s longing to stay with the singula  – the individual topics, the fascinating points  – from which he must now move on. The dum capti circumvectamur works in Virgil’s line rather as ‘still! Time’s start’ does in the English example from Bunting. At this point in the third Georgic, Virgil is about to shift his attention from horses to cattle and the lines are essentially a transitional device, albeit one imbued with emotional force: capti … amore (‘seized by love’) is a strong expression. Virgil – and 24 25

26

Bunting (2000: 105). Though compare, e.g., the end-stopped and heavily alliterated line Aen. 6.833: neu patriae validas in viscera vertite vires. By an anonymous author, published in Examen Poeticum: Miscellany Poems Part Three (1693); reproduced in Gransden (1996: 138).

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with him the reader – is entranced by the detail and complexity of the natural world, by all its individual features (singula), including the curious information about hippomanes that is the subject of the immediately preceding lines. So Browning, voicing the irrepressibly didactic Arab doctor Karshish, also trying and failing to move on: Why write of trivial matters, things of price Calling at every moment for remark? I noticed on the margin of a pool Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort, Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange! (Robert Browning, ‘An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician’, 277–82)

The example from Georgics 3 is an unexpectedly moving moment of personal restraint of an (apparently) quite routine sort: the poet must put aside one set of topics and move to another. But such moments of restraint in the face of willed or accepted loss are a leitmotif of Virgil, from the twin goats Tityrus is forced to abandon in the First Eclogue (12–15) to the leaving of Eurydice, of Creusa, of Dido, and even of Troy itself. One of the most memorable such moments occurs at the end of Book 6, where we both meet and grieve Marcellus, the last of the parade of future Romans whom Aeneas sees in the Underworld, found and lost in the span of 25 lines: heu, miserande puer, si qua fata aspera rumpas, tu Marcellus eris. manibus date lilia plenis purpureos spargam flores animamque nepotis his saltem accumulem donis, et fungar inani munere.’ sic tota passim regione vagantur aëris in campis latis atque omnia lustrant. quae postquam Anchises natum per singula duxit incenditque animum famae venientis amore, exim bella viro memorat quae deinde gerenda, Laurentisque docet populos urbemque Latini, et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem. (Aen. 6.882–92) O sweetest youth o dearest imp of ours if hastened fates shall not thine health entrap thou shalt Marcellus be; o give me flowers to’ adorn that hearse that doth thy limbs enlap t’ adore thy sacred ghost, o give me showers of tears to wail this mischievous mishap. This said, Anchises finish did his talk and in those spacious fields they then did walk Where having caused his son those coasts to view 358

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Virgil as a Poet and set his soul on fire with future fame he showed him then what wars there should ensue in Latian land, and taught him with the same each hard exploit t’effect or else eschew and fully told him all for which he came.27

Aeneas must turn from the sorrow of the lost (and not yet born) Marcellus to the serious business of mastering all the future tasks of Rome: Anchises natum per singula duxit. Here the singula are not enticing pieces of natural lore but the facts of Roman political and military history (which Anchises goes on to outline), and Aeneas, like the narrator of the Georgics, is fired by love (amore) for the subject he must command. This moment of transition shares words – singula and amore – with the transition in Georgics 3, and in its change of mood it is not unlike the passage at Juno’s temple in Aeneid 1, which is also concerned with fama; though now, in Aeneid 6, it is the fama not of Trojan suffering but of future Roman glory. The scattered flowers of the passage link it, however, to the wider fabric of loss in the Aeneid: Anchises uses the same phrase for Marcellus as Aeneas will use for the dead Pallas (miserande puer, Aen. 11.42); Pallas is compared to a cut flower (Aen. 11.67–71) in a simile which recalls that describing the death of Euryalus (Aen. 9.435–7). Aeneas will wrap Pallas in a cloak, stiff with gold and purple, woven for him by Dido, whom he has also lost (Aen. 11.72–7). As we move out from the close reading and appreciation of Virgil’s technique in individual passages, patterns of imagery and association of this kind hold together not only a work as long and varied as the Aeneid, but all three of Virgil’s canonical poems.28 A significant part of what it is ‘like’ to read Virgil as a whole is created by the aesthetic and narrative effect of such linked images. The final section of this chapter is dedicated to tracing a similar nexus of imagery, again related to emotional restraint, beginning this time with the famous lines in which Aeneas stands firm in the face of Anna’s pleas not to abandon Dido. He is compared to a tree buffeted by storms, but withstanding them: mens immota manet (‘his mind remains unmoved’): talibus orabat, talisque miserrima fletus fertque refertque soror. sed nullis ille movetur fletibus aut voces ullas tractabilis audit; 27

28

Sir John Harington (1561–1612) was a poet and courtier, best known for his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1591). His translation of Aeneid VI was made in 1604 but was not published until 1991. This quotation is of stanzas 132–3. Spelling modernized. For this way of reading, see Theodorakopoulos, Chapter 13 in this volume.

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V i c to r i a Mo u l fata obstant placidasque viri deus obstruit auris. ac velut annoso validam cum robore quercum Alpini Boreae nunc hinc nunc flatibus illinc eruere inter se certant; it stridor, et altae consternunt terram concusso stipite frondes; ipsa haeret scopulis et quantum vertice ad auras aetherias, tantum radice in Tartara tendit: haud secus adsiduis hinc atque hinc vocibus heros tunditur, et magno persentit pectore curas; mens immota manet, lacrimae volvuntur inanes. (Aen. 4.437–49) Thus she intreats; such messages with tears Condoling Anne to him, and from him bears: But him no Prayers, no Arguments can move, The Fates resist, his Ears are stopp’d by Jove: As when fierce Northern blasts from th’ Alpes descend, From his firm roots with struggling gusts to rend An aged sturdy Oak, the rattling sound Grows loud, with leaves and scatter’d arms the ground Is over-layd; yet he stands fixed, as high As his proud head is raised towards the Sky, So low towards Hell his roots descend. With Pray’rs And Tears the Hero thus assail’d, great cares He smothers in his Breast, yet keeps his Post, All their addresses and their labour lost.29

Wordsworth incorporates a version of this moment into The Excursion, though to describe a man rejected in love, rather than forced by fate to reject: But the man, Who trembled, trunk and limb, like some huge oak By a fierce tempest shaken, soon resumed The steadfast quiet natural to a mind Of composition gentle and sedate. (The Excursion, 6.143–7)

Virgil’s simile is effective in itself, but it works also by its allusive associations:  standing closely behind it are the tree similes of Homer, typically applied to soldiers as they fall, linking Aeneas to the military heroism of the Iliad.30 But it recalls, too, one of the most memorable similes of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas compares the fall of Troy itself to that of an ancient ash

29 30

Sir John Denham (1668), text from Tomlinson (1980: 159). Compare also the simile of an oak tree resisting the winds at Il. 12.131–4.

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tree (Aen. 2.626–31). By not falling, Aeneas, the Trojan survivor, reverses that collapse. Virgil is also recalling his own earlier description of an actual tree – the vineyard oak, protector of the vines – in the second Georgic. This time it is the tree itself which immota manet: forsitan et scrobibus quae sint fastigia quaeras. ausim vel tenui vitem committere sulco; altior ac penitus terrae defigitur arbos, aesculus in primis, quae quantum vertice ad auras aetherias, tantum radice in Tartara tendit. ergo non hiemes illam, non flabra neque imbres convellunt: immota manet multosque nepotes, multa virum volvens durando saecula vincit, tum fortis late ramos et bracchia tendens huc illuc media ipsa ingentem sustinet umbram. (G. 2.288–97) Perchance how deep to dig thy furrows now Thou’dst learn. Thy Vines in shallow ones, will grow But other trees more deeply digg’d must be; Chiefly th’Aesculean Oake, who still more high He lifts his branches in the air, more low His root doth downward to Avernus go. Therefore no winds, nor winter storms orethrow Those Trees, for many years unmov’d they grow, And many ages of mankind outwear, And spreading their fair branches here and there, Themselves i’th’ midst do make a stately shade.31

Aeneas’ resistance to Dido has a tragic dimension  – Dido’s suffering is real – but it is also heroic and links him both backwards (in terms of the Virgilian canon) to the Georgics and (in historical terms) forwards to the fertile beauty of Italy, the land to which in Aeneid 4 he has not yet come. The effect is compounded by two variations on the immota manet theme in Aeneid 7. The first is when Juno swears that if she cannot prevent Aeneas reaching Italy, and his marriage to Lavinia, she can at least delay it: flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. non dabitur regnis, esto, prohibere Latinis, atque immota manet fatis Lavinia coniunx: at trahere atque moras tantis licet addere rebus, at licet amborum populos exscindere regum. (Aen. 7.310–16)

31

May (1628: 51). Spelling partly modernized.

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V i c to r i a Mo u l But if of no avail My godhead be, I will not spare to pray what is of might, Since Heaven I move not, needs must I let loose the Nether Night. Ah! say it is not fated me the Latin realm to ban, Lavinia must be fated wife of this same Trojan man, Yet may I draw out time at least, and those great things delay; At least may I for either king an host of people slay.32

The recurrence of the phrase immota manet – this time applied not to a tree but to a woman, Lavinia – emphasizes the logical and emotional connection between Aeneas’ resistance to Dido and his eventual marriage to the Latin princess. The second echo in Book 7 occurs when Latinus, the father of Lavinia, is compared to a rock which withstands the assault of the waves, as he tries in vain to stand firm against the fates and the demands of his people for war: ilicet infandum cuncti contra omina bellum, contra fata deum perverso numine poscunt. certatim regis circumstant tecta Latini; ille velut pelago rupes immota resistit, ut pelagi rupes magno veniente fragore, quae sese multis circum latrantibus undis mole tenet; scopuli nequiquam et spumea circum saxa fremunt laterique inlisa refunditur alga. verum ubi nulla datur caecum exsuperare potestas consilium, et saevae nutu Iunonis eunt res, multa deos aurasque pater testatus inanis ‘frangimur heu fatis’ inquit ‘ferimurque procella! (Aen. 7.583–94) With fates averse, the rout in arms resort To force their monarch, and insult the court. But, like a rock unmoved, a rock that braves The raging tempest and the rising waves, Propped on himself he stands: his solid sides Wash off the sea-weeds, and the sounding tides – So stood the pious prince unmoved; and long Sustained the madness of the noisy throng. But, when he found that Juno’s power prevailed, And all the methods of cool counsel failed, He calls the gods to witness their offence; Disclaims the war, asserts his innocence. 32

Morris (1876: 196–7).

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Virgil as a Poet ‘Hurry’d by fate (he cries), and borne before A furious wind, we leave the faithful shore!33

Latinus will fail, and the war between the Trojans and Latins dominates books 8–12 of the Aeneid; but in another sense he will win, since Lavinia will marry Aeneas and his people will become the ancestors of the Romans. The immota similes link Latinus, Lavinia, Aeneas and the Italian vineyard: in this translation, Dryden reflects the link to Aeneas created in Latin by the image and wording of the simile by adding the phrase, ‘So stood the pious prince unmoved.’ Pius is the adjective most strongly associated with Aeneas, not Latinus, and there is no counterpart to this phrase in the Latin text. Dryden’s expansion of the final Latin line also emphasizes the link between Latinus’ description of himself as carried away by a storm, and the shipwreck of Aeneas and his men with which the Aeneid begins. This distinctive combination of pathos and purpose is open to criticism, or even parody, as well as repeated political appropriation. In his early play Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare draws upon Virgil’s similes to emphasize the suffering they describe. The following exchange, perhaps the single most concise deconstruction of the costs of the Aeneid, applies the imagery of Dido as a wounded deer (Aen. 4.68–73) to Titus’ daughter, pointedly named Lavinia, mutilated by her rapists to ensure her silence, and casts Titus himself as Latinus upon his rock: MARCUS ANDRONICUS O, thus I found her [Lavinia], straying in the park, Seeking to hide herself, as doth the deer That hath received some unrecuring wound. TITUS ANDRONICUS It was my deer; and he that wounded her Hath hurt me more than had he killed me dead: For now I stand as one upon a rock Environed with a wilderness of sea, Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave, Expecting ever when some envious surge Will in his brinish bowels swallow him. (Titus Andronicus iii .1.88–97)

By literalizing Virgil’s allusive links between Lavinia and Dido in a single figure, reimagining her fate as rape and mutilation (a version of Ovid’s story of Procne and Philomela in the Metamorphoses), and giving Titus Latinus’ simile, Shakespeare creates an unforgettable critique of Virgil’s ethical and

33

Dryden (1987: v i .597).

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aesthetic admiration for, perhaps even enjoyment of, endurance in the face of suffering.34 The same passage describing Latinus is applied to strikingly different effect to a real king, Charles I , in the frontispiece engraving and accompanying verses of Eikon Basilike (1649) [Figure 22], supposedly the work of Charles I himself before his execution, and the single most widely read piece of royalist propaganda during the English Civil War. Among the emblems in the background of the engraving is a rock amid a stormy sea, with the legend immota triumphans (‘[a rock] triumphing unmoved’). Some versions also printed parallel English and Latin verses in which the allusion to Virgil is even clearer: Ac, velut undarum Fluctûs Ventíque; furorem Irati Populi Rupes immota repello. And as th’unmoved Rock outbraves The boist’rous Windes and raging waves So triumph I. And shine more bright In sad Affliction’s darksom night.

Both Titus Andronicus and Eikon Basilike respond to Virgil’s undertow of suffering and loss, what J. D. McClatchy has called ‘the sfumato effect of sadness’, amplified in the case of Eikon Basilike by Christian associations of martyrdom and an idea of anointed kingship.35 Aeneas repeatedly seems to reach towards an ideal of Stoic kingship, only to fall short, caught out by passion.36 He is fighting for an ethical ideal which – as in the famously abrupt close of the Aeneid – he cannot himself attain; but he is fighting, too, for Italy itself: the combined rural idyll and harsh taskmaster of the Georgics, and the beauty and fertility of the land both longed for and conquered. The oak-like resistance to Dido recalls the vineyard oak of the Georgics but the possibility of that Italian vineyard is at the same time created by Aeneas’ resistance to Dido.37 In his poem, ‘Aeneas at Washington’, the North American setting allows Allen Tate to suggest what might be won, as well as what is lost, by Aeneas. Steeped in Virgil, Tate’s poem touches on many of the passages considered in this chapter:

34

35 36 37

Titus’ speech ends by comparing Lavinia to ‘a gathered lily almost withered’ (113), linking her also to the imagery of cut flowers associated with Pallas, Euryalus and Marcellus. Spence (2001: 185). See Bowra (1933). For the motif of unmovability transferred from Aeneas in Book 4 to Dido in the Underworld of Book 6, see Casali and Stok, Chapter 6b in this volume, pp. 106–7.

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Figure 22. Charles i before his execution. Frontispiece to [John Gauden], Eikon Basilike. The Pourtracture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings. [London: printed by William Bentley], 1648 [i.e. 1649].

I myself saw furious with blood Neoptolemus, at his side the black Atridae, Hecuba and the hundred daughters, Priam Cut down, his filth drenching the holy fires. In that extremity I bore me well, A true gentleman, valorous in arms, Disinterested and honourable. Then fled: That was a time when civilization Run by the few fell to the many, and Crashed to the shout of men, the clang of arms: Cold victualing I seized, I hoisted up The old man my father upon my back, In the smoke made by sea for a new world Saving little – a mind imperishable 365

366

V i c to r i a Mo u l If time is, a love of past things tenuous As the hesitation of receding love. (To the reduction of uncitied littorals We brought chiefly the vigor of prophecy, Our hunger breeding calculation And fixed triumphs.) I saw the thirsty dove In the glowing fields of Troy, hemp ripening And tawny corn, the thickening Blue Grass All lying rich forever in the green sun. I see all things apart, the towers that men Contrive I too contrived long, long ago. Now I demand little. The singular passion Abides its object and consumes desire In the circling shadow of its appetite. There was a time when the young eyes were slow, Their flame steady beyond the firstling fire, I stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water, The city my blood had built I knew no more While the screech-owl whistled his new delight Consecutively dark. Stuck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for. (Allen Tate, ‘Aeneas at Washington’, 1933)38

Tate’s poem is profoundly Virgilian in at least two quite distinct ways. It is a direct response to, almost an interpretative summary of, the Aeneid, evoking particularly Aeneas’ stoicism in the face of personal loss, his only partial comprehension of his mission, and the great longing for a new land that is both a continuation of the old and newly powerful. But it is also a response to several distinct types of Virgilianism found in the English verse tradition. The poem juxtaposes, at some points uneasily, a prosaic plainness of diction (‘That was a time when civilization | Run by the few fell to the many’; ‘Stuck in the wet mire’), a lushly alliterative style indebted in particular to Tennyson (‘In the smoke made by sea for a new world’) and archly ‘learned’ asides (‘To the reduction of uncitied littorals’) which, as Donald Davie has

38

Tate (1977: 68–9).

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pointed out, are almost a pastiche of T. S. Eliot.39 In both these respects, it may stand as a conclusion to this chapter. FURTHER READING On Virgil as a poet, see Medcalf (1972), Spence (2001) and Wilkinson (1959). For English parallels, see Attridge (1974) and Weiner (1982) on quantitative verse, and Davie (2006) for ‘purity of diction’. For English verse translations and imitations of Virgil, see in particular Tomlinson (1980) and Gransden (1996).

39

Davie (2000: 107).

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Coleridge’s famous question ‘If you take from Virgil his language and metre, what do you leave him?’ is often taken to mean there is little but style to praise in Virgil, and Coleridge speaks elsewhere of Virgil’s lack of ‘deep feeling’. But the remark may have been prompted by Coleridge’s reading a month before of Wordsworth’s translation of Aeneid 1, and thus be a comment on how much is lost when Virgil is read only in translation.1 In the twenty-first century, the percentage of readers who encounter Virgil only in translation is much higher than in Coleridge’s day (that specific comment comes from his Table Talk of 8 May 1824). Further, the tendency for those who do read Virgil in Latin to do so after only a few years of study of the language means that his Latin is not so much ‘read’ as translated or even ‘metathesized’, that is to say the Latin words are (at least mentally) rearranged and supplemented to fit some combination of the syntax of the reader’s own language and his or her expectations of how a Latin prose sentence should read. At the same time, however, as fewer and fewer people on the planet can read Virgil’s Latin either at all, or well, a tiny minority can arguably read the poet’s language better than anyone has for several centuries. By ‘better’ I do not mean with the natural responses of one brought up to use Latin as a living language, but with the trained responses of those familiar with extensive scholarly research on metre, vocabulary, syntax, and everything that one might include under the rubric of style, along with digitized texts that enable one to search all of Latin poetry in an instant.

1

For Coleridge’s reading of Wordsworth’s translation, see his letters of April 1824, especially one to Wordsworth himself. I remain indebted to correspondence on this point from Margaret Graver, Joseph Farrell and Charles Weiss. The body of this essay has only been lightly revised since the previous edition, but the bibliographical references have been updated considerably. For comments on 1996 drafts of this essay, I again thank Nicholas Horsfall, Diane Juffras, Joseph Farrell, Michael Roberts and Charles Martindale. For the new version, comments and bibliography from Charles Martindale and Fiachra Mac Góráin were extremely helpful.

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Recently more and more scholars have done excellent work on the language of Latin poetry in both articles and monographs, and numerous new commentaries on Virgil, especially those from Cambridge, Oxford, and Brill, have offered such useful remarks on style that reading with a good commentary is in some ways the best introduction to style. This chapter has both the modest goal of ‘proving’, as many have before, that much is lost when Virgil is read only in translation or with insufficient attention to style, and the more difficult task of giving some sense of the basic issues, and what his style is like, to those who have little or no knowledge of Virgil’s Latin. We must also ask why style matters, and what the consequences are of attention to style – we must ask not how little we leave to Virgil if we take his style and diction away, but how much is gained when we approach the poet with an awareness of nuances of metre, style, diction, syntax and rhetoric. No essay of this size can provide a thorough introduction to Virgil’s style; this chapter will focus on a few ways in which reading Virgil in the original and with significant attention to style can make a difference. I begin with an aspect of poetic style necessarily erased by translation or metathesis: word order. Because Latin and Greek are inflected languages in which words’ functions are indicated more by their endings than by location, they allow greater freedom in word order than uninflected languages. This allows poets, for example, to juxtapose terms that are thematically related or even contrasting, and so to make suggestions that owe nothing to syntax and which are thus impossible to translate (e.g. genitor natum, ‘father … son’, puer, virtutem, ‘boy, … manliness’).2 This freedom also dovetails with poets’ desire to sound otherwise than prose (what Russian formalists, building upon Aristotle, have called ‘defamiliarization’),3 one result of which is their greater tendency to separate nouns from their adjectives (in a type of ‘hyperbaton’ or violation of normal word order; more on hyperbaton below). Noun-adjective placement is part of how Roman poets respond to the twin heritage of Graeco-Roman oratory (oratory came into its own in Rome in Virgil’s youth) and the Alexandrian poetry of those like Callimachus, Theocritus, and the Roman neoteric Catullus, to whom Virgil looked as models and predecessors, and who sought a delicate, highly polished and at times ornately mannered style. Both rhetoric and Alexandrian poetry associated elegance with balance and proportion; thus when Virgil wants a line to sound elegant rather than plain, each of 2 3

See Dainotti (2015: 225–38). Shklovsky (2004 [1917]); Martindale (2005: 72); Conte (2007: 58–122); and Görler (1999: 269, 282), who speaks of the ‘effect of alienation’.

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two nouns may have an adjective, as in ille malum virus serpentibus addidit atris (‘Jupiter added foul poison to dark snakes’, G. 1.129) or Chaoniam pingui glandem mutavit arista (‘replaced Chaonian acorn with juicy grain’, G. 1.7).4 In line 129 the nouns are beside or not far from their adjective; in line 7, more stylized or more poetic, the adjectives come first, with the nouns in the second half of the line, here in the same order as the adjectives, so that the words are interlocked in the pattern ABAB; significant juxtaposition like that mentioned may be one result of such an arrangement. In other lines, as in impius haec tam culta novalia miles habebit (‘Some godless soldier will have these fields I’ve tended so well’, Ecl. 1.70), one noun-adjective pair encloses the other in concentric, or chiastic order (ABBA). An extremely stylized line, called a ‘golden line’ by Dryden (although there is no ancient testimony on such a term),5 will have two adjectives at the start, their nouns coming only at the end, and ‘a verb betwixt to keep the peace’, as in impiaque aeternam timuerunt saecula noctem (‘the wicked age feared eternal night’, G. 1.468). Two noun-adjective pairs may thus dominate the line, and leave the reader or listener in suspense (‘What’, we must ask, ‘will be described as “wicked” and “eternal”?’). Less elaborately, a single pair may frame the line – Actius haec cernens arcum intendebat Apollo (‘seeing this, Actian Apollo drew his bow’, Aen. 8.704)  – or appear at the start or finish of each half of the line: implicat et miseros morsu depascitur artus (‘enfolds and feeds on their pitiful limbs with a bite’, Aen. 2.215). One effect, as Habinek has shown, is to make the unit of thought longer than a few words, and clauses so arranged may be stretched over more than one line:  quae causa indigna serenos | foedavit vultus? (‘What unworthy cause has fouled your peaceful face?’, Aen. 2.285–6; see Aen. 12.473–4, where nigra … hirundo (‘the black swallow’), frames a two-line clause). Highly stylized lines appear more often in the mannered Eclogues, and least in the Aeneid, but are still used effectively in the Georgics and Aeneid, sometimes to round off a section or what modern scholars often refer to as a ‘paragraph’, or to produce pathos or the effect of lush or ornate description. Recognizable variations of such lines appear throughout all the poems; with carefully modulated intensity, the same concern for symmetry, balance and proportion informs all of Virgil’s writing. The lengths of clauses and their deployment over the hexameter are both artfully managed, with frequent parallelism of form, pointed antithesis of thought, and words or clauses often arranged in groups of two, four, or

4

5

On noun-adjective pairs, see Norden (1981 [1903]: 391–400); Conrad (1965); Pearce (1966); Habinek (1985); Thomas (1993); Dainotti (2015: 239–63). Mayer (2002) explores the ancient, medieval, and later evidence. Dryden’s reference to ‘that Verse commonly which they call golden’ is from his Preface to Silvae (1685).

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especially three (the ‘tricolon’ or ‘tricolon crescendo’ in which each element is longer than the last). The concern for symmetry works together with an overriding interest in variety, especially in the Georgics, where material that might be thought intractable is presented with consummate art, and in the Aeneid where Virgil confronts the enormous challenge of maintaining an Alexandrian standard of polish over the length of an epic.6 These hard-won effects of patterning are deployed, as I have mentioned, across the patterns of long and short syllables that make up the dactylic hexameter adapted by Virgil’s predecessors from the Greeks.7 In the hexameter, the first five feet may be dactyls (–∪ ∪) or spondees (– –), though in Latin the fifth foot is most often a dactyl, while the last is a spondee or a trochee (–∪). Latin offers fewer short syllables than Greek, so Roman poets had to work to find enough dactyls, and were happy to exploit the discoveries of predecessors (for example, such metrically convenient devices as the use of poetic neuter plurals, or alternative forms of the perfect verb). Ovid’s quickly flowing hexameters have more dactyls than Virgil’s, but the Eclogues have more than the Aeneid, probably because of the affinities of the Eclogues with Theocritus, and of the Aeneid with the early Roman Annals of Ennius; the Aeneid is therefore also more solemn and ‘stately’, to use Tennyson’s word (actually ‘stateliest’, from the last line of ‘To Virgil’). Both variety and certain expressive effects are achieved in the alternation of spondees and dactyls, as Duckworth’s many charts in the 1960s showed. Long stretches of the Georgics or Aeneid in English may sound monotonous, but the variety of metrical patterns and other factors to be noted below make continuous reading of or listening to the Georgics or even the much longer Aeneid extremely pleasurable. In individual lines, dactyls will be quick and light, and so appropriate, for example, for Diana’s graceful motion:  illa pharetram | fert umero, gradiensque deas supereminet omnis (‘she, with her quiver on her shoulder, as she walks towers over the others’, Aen. 1.500–1). The slower, heavier spondees may suggest solemnity, as in 6

7

On Virgil’s ability to write in every kind of style, see Macrobius, Saturnalia 5.1.7–20, summed up at 19: ‘Maro’s eloquence is a complete whole that responds to the characters of all people – now brief, now abundant, now dry, now colorful, now all at once, sometimes gentle, sometimes turbulent’ (Kaster 2011). Many commentaries have sections or index entries on metre; the discussion of ictus and accent below, for example, is indebted to Thomas (1988); see also Thomas (2014). Many of my examples come from standard works on style cited below in the ‘Further Reading’ section. See especially Norden (1981 [1903]: 413–34); Jackson Knight (1966 [1944]: 230–43); Wilkinson (1963: 89–134); Duckworth (1969); Horsfall (2000b: 222– 4). Morgan (2010) is invaluable on metre but mainly focuses on those other than hexameter. On how ancient practice in teaching metre can be used in a modern classroom, see Becker (2004).

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olli sedato respondit corde Latinus (‘With calm heart Latinus spoke to him in reply’, Aen. 12.18), or sadness, as in Anchises’ reference to the death of Augustus’ nephew Marcellus:  o gnate, ingentem luctum ne quaere tuorum (‘O son, don’t ask about your clan’s great grief’, Aen. 6.868). Variety and special effects also accrue as hexameter patterns interact with Latin’s stress accent. In most Virgilian hexameters, stress accent and the metrical pattern come together in the last two feet (as in ‘shave and a hair-cut’ or ‘Admiral Ackbar’), so we have coincidence of accent with ‘ictus’, ictus being the beat felt in the first long syllable of the foot (some would describe these effects as a product of attention to caesura, a break between words within a foot,8 while others think of caesura in Latin as a product of attention to ictus and accent). The first four feet regularly feature ‘clash’, achieved mainly by avoiding having foot boundaries as word boundaries. Awareness of ictus and accent can produce strikingly emphatic verses, like Meliboeus’ cry, impius haec tam culta novalia miles habebit (‘Some godless soldier will have these fields I’ve tended so well’, Ecl. 1.70), in which each foot begins with a stressed syllable (each foot is ‘homodyne’). Lines with much ‘clash’ (‘heterodyne’ feet)9 may suggest the struggle or effort of men swimming from a shipwreck (Adparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto, ‘Here and there are seen a few men swimming in the vastness of the sea’, Aen. 1.118) or Cyclopes at work in a smithy (illi inter sese multa vi bracchia tollunt, ‘each of them in turn brings up his arms with great force’, Aen. 8.452). Dido’s angry confrontation of Aeneas as he prepares to leave Carthage begins with excited lines with much coincidence, much of it in the fourth foot (Aen. 4.305–13), before shifting into a style that has clash in the last two feet in two of three lines (314, 316). A final single monosyllable produces clash in the preceding word, and so prevents coincidence at line end; final monosyllables10 may mark indignation (Dido tells Aeneas, ‘I beg you by these tears and your right hand’, per ego has lacrimas dextramque tuam te, Aen. 4.313), a crashing sound (a falling bull at Aen. 5.481:  procumbit humi bos), or a recall of Ennius (divum pater atque hominum rex, ‘father of gods and king of men’, Aen. 1.65; magnis dis, ‘great gods’, 3.12 and 8.679). After these glances at some of the devices of word order and metre used by Virgil, we may briefly consider what consequences attention to style may have for one’s approach to the poet. First, the elegance and variety of Virgil’s style means that these are certainly ἡδυσμένοι λόγοι (‘sweetened’ or

8 9 10

Dainotti (2015: 198–206). On the terms ‘homodyne’ and ‘heterodyne’, see Horsfall (2000b: 233); Thomas (2014). Dainotti (2015: 206–16). Throughout his study, Dainotti speaks often of the ‘expressiveness’ or ‘iconicity’ of features of style and of ‘form miming meaning’.

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‘pleasured-up words’) to use the term from Aristotle (Poetics 1449b25), or words with the ability to ‘delight’ (delectare) as much as ‘to be useful’ or ‘teach’ (prodesse or docere), to use the terms contrasted by both Horace (Ars poetica, 333) and Seneca (Epistles 86.15, where he specifically mentions the Georgics). Readers approaching the poet today in English or with rusty or immature Latin must keep in mind the enormous extent to which aesthetic pleasures inaccessible to them figured in the experience of Virgil’s first readers and listeners. Despite the Roman and other thematic content of the Eclogues, and even the Georgics and Aeneid, when listening to or reading Virgil many Romans may have paid more attention to the sound and beauty of the language than to what was being said.11 Analogies with music are not inappropriate; in Virgil’s youth or young adulthood, his friend Philodemus felt compelled to argue against ‘euphonists’ who have argued that sound is all in poetry, and that ‘good poets excel and endure only on account of their sounds’.12 And yet we have learned at least since Adorno not to overlook the ideological impact of music even in the absence of words. How does Virgil’s style interact with content? Both narrow and broader approaches may be mentioned. On the level of the individual line or sentence, remarks can be made about how style contributes to or even determines meaning in numerous passages; a few examples will come below.13 The neophyte scholar or reader approaching Virgil from another field is urged to undertake a complete stylistic analysis of any passage he or she is about to discuss in print, but it must be noted that it is difficult to avoid one’s observations about style confirming one’s notions about the ideology of the poems, which are often set in stone before a young reader has developed sufficient competence to develop ideas about ideology from a stylistically sensitive reading of the poem. More broadly, two contradictory claims might be advanced. One is that the orderliness and ‘classical’ attention to proportion and balance both reflect and endorse the order now being imposed upon the Roman world by Augustus, or upon the whole world by Rome; older analogies between the supposed orderliness of both the Parthenon and Sophocles might suggest 11

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The possibility of an aesthetic rather than (or as well as a) cognitive approach to Latin has been explored in a balanced and cautious way for the Eclogues by Martindale in Chapter 10 in this volume, and for other Latin poems by Martindale (2005). I quote the paraphrase of a damaged portion of Philodemus given by Janko (1995: 92). See the essays by Janko and others in Obbink (1995) for a convenient introduction to Philodemus, whose discussions of style and content still have not been fully exploited by Latinists, even though many texts are now available in fine editions with translation and commentary. See also Obbink’s index s.v. ‘euphony’ for this topic. Both Horsfall (2000b: 237–48) and Hardie (1998: 102–14) offer sample stylistic analysis of Virgilian passages; style, language and diction are major concerns of Horsfall’s five (so far) major commentaries (see ‘Further Reading’).

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similar claims between the Ara Pacis (especially as viewed by Paul Zanker)14 and Virgilian epos, especially in the Georgics and Aeneid. Tennyson’s notion of Virgil’s metre as ‘stately’ perhaps implies that it is state-ly. The other claim is that the melancholy style of the Georgics and Aeneid directs sympathy away from the values that a more tone-deaf reading of the poem would find central and dominant, and so style mirrors what some have seen in other features of the poem.15 Discussion below of style and emotion will return to this point. Consideration must also be given to the way that style suggests generic affiliation or intertextuality.16 I  have noted above that certain metrical features may sound Ennian, and certain noun-adjective pairings Alexandrian and mannered:  style may suggest epic, or pastoral, or the world of Greek or archaic Roman poetry. Above all, features of epic style suggest dialogue with the whole epic tradition, as discussed by Conte, Farrell, Harrison, Goldschmidt, and others.17 I return to specific features of Virgil’s style; further broader comments will be sprinkled throughout the rest of the chapter. The Virgilian sentence is rightly regarded as a considerable achievement and a richly rewarding object of study.18 In Virgil’s youth, Cicero perfected the ‘periodic’ style for prose oratory, with sentences about the length of four hexameters, and information arranged in complex ‘hypotactic’ structures with main and subordinate clauses, and key information held until the end of the sentence. Many of Virgil’s sentences are of similar length, but he prefers a ‘paratactic’ style, in which related clauses are juxtaposed rather than subordinated; he often uses parentheses, connectors meaning ‘and’ rather than subordinating conjunctions, and rhetorical questions or exclamations. Virgil also has many short sentences. In part this produces greater clarity of comprehension, as small syntactical units make an immediate impression on the reader or audience; on the other hand, however, Virgil is less specific about the relationship between different clauses. Lucretius’ hypotactic hexameters require more initial work to construe, but are ultimately clearer in their ability to make an argument: we could perhaps suggest that this means that Lucretius wished to communicate clearly a set of known truths, and Virgil did not.19 Even in 14 15 16

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Zanker (1988). See e.g. Zetzel, Chapter 15 in this volume. See in this volume the chapters on bucolic (Chapter 10), georgic (Chapter 11), epic (Chapter 12), and intertextuality (Chapter 17). The last rightly speaks of an ‘allusive style’. Conte (1986), Farrell (1991), Harrison (2007a), Goldschmidt (2013). See Norden (1981 [1903]: 376–90); Jackson Knight (1966 [1944]: 180–9); Palmer (1961: 115–18); Quinn (1968: 414–40); Horsfall (2000b: 231–2). On didaxis and the Georgics, see Batstone, Chapter 11 in this volume. See also Gale (2000: 273) on how Virgil’s Georgics ‘enters the didactic tradition as a critical response

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English one should be able to see the paratactic style of Aeneid 4.1–6, 6.1– 13, or 12.938–52 (the end of the poem), which offer little subordination, of only the simplest kind (a participle or two, a relative clause, a temporal clause). With sentence structure, too, the question of variety and pleasure is important; in addition to those features just mentioned, we should take note of Virgil’s use of enjambement, which takes place when a thought is not complete at line end but spills over into part of the next line. A poet’s choice of end-stopped lines (favoured by Catullus in poem 64)  or enjambement allows for greater variety and for certain effects, as when a key word is not added until the second line; essentially, enjambement involves the interplay between the metrical unit (the line) and the syntactic unit (the sentence).20 Perhaps more than any other Roman poet, Virgil makes use of what has been called ‘theme and variation’, or interpretatio or dicolon abundans, in Gian Biagio Conte’s words, the ‘combination of two adjacent expressions apparently conveying the same idea, so that the second appears as a variation on the first’.21 At the start of Aeneid Book 2, one finds: ‘to learn about our misfortune, and to hear the final struggle of Troy’ (10–11), ‘they hid men in the horse, and filled the inside with armed soldiers’ (18–20), ‘Troy would now stand, and Priam’s tall citadel would remain’ (56), ‘life in darkness and mourning’ (92), ‘to flee and leave Troy behind, and to withdraw from the long war’ (108–9), ‘punish for my escape, and make pay for my fault’ (139– 40), ‘the gods, and the divinities conscious of truth’ (141) – some of these are paraphrased rather than translated. At times, the clauses look at the matter from differing perspectives; at others, the second expression ‘intensifies and explains the first’ to increase pathos;22 at others still, the goal may seem simply verbal artistry and the reader’s pleasure. The pervasiveness of the poet’s interest in looking at matters from more than one perspective must not be overlooked; alternately, we might say that the reader or listener is challenged to discover what is similar and different in the two formulations. Hyperbaton, discussed above in the context of the separation of noun from adjective, is one of many ways in which Virgil violates the norms of prose, or even of Latin; hyperbaton has been studied in excellent recent commentaries,

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22

to the certainties expressed in earlier poems’, such as those of Hesiod, Aratus and especially Lucretius, ‘and invites the reader to question rather than to accept a particular world-view’. On enjambement, see Dainotti (2015: 19–151). Conte (1993: 209). See also Conte (2007: 30, 91, 100, 111; the whole long third chapter, ‘Anatomy of a style: Enallage and the new sublime’, is also relevant). Henry (1873–92) called particular attention to the figure. See also Williams (1968: 728); Quinn (1968: 423–8); Dainotti (2015: 35–6 and index rerum s.v. dicolon abundans). Conte (1993: 209).

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and especially by Conte and Dainotti.23 Translators, with their understandable desire to make sense, often ‘fix’ such constructions, producing a much tamer text than the original, and classroom translation and many commentaries often suggest that odd constructions are simply fancy equivalents of much blander ones. Virgil is particularly fond of hysteron-proteron (literally, ‘later-sooner’), in which the logical sequence of actions is reversed, as in moriamur et in media arma ruamus (‘let us die, and rush into the thick of battle’, Aen. 2.353). Adjectives may modify not the word to which they logically apply, but another noun in the clause, in ‘enallage’ or ‘transferred epithet’. In clara dedit sonitum tuba (‘the clear horn gave a sound’, Aen. 5.139), it must be the sound that is clear, and in ibant obscuri sola sub nocte (Aen. 6.268), which literally seems to be saying ‘they went, dark on a lone night’ as both adjectives have switched position.24 Jackson Knight wrote that ‘the point is the presence of some quality in the whole complex’, but the poet and reader/audience must have taken pleasure in the inversion, which also determines how this ‘quality’ is to be perceived.25 Conte said that such a Virgilian syntactical inversion may ‘charge [a] phrase with expressive force’, and also ‘compresses a complex thought by leaping over the intermediate articulations through a daring condensation’.26 Analogous syntactic inversion occurs also with the relationship between nouns and verbs:  totumque adlabi classibus aequor (Aen. 10.269) suggests that ‘the whole sea “slides forward” with ships’, when it must be the ships that move forward on the sea, while in plangoribus aedes | femineis ululant (‘the house wails with womanly cries’, Aen. 2.487–8), the personification of the house is produced by the transference of a statement like ‘women filled the house with wailing’. Several aspects of Virgil’s style help to create his celebrated ambiguity. At the simplest level, his words can often be interpreted in more than one way, sometimes in diametrically opposed ways, and he also offers ambiguities or indeterminacies of syntax, some of which parallel larger problems of interpretation.27 I  have noted that Virgil’s paratactic style involves sometimes being less specific about the relationship between clauses; Virgil’s compact 23

24

25 26 27

Williams (1968: 726–30); Habinek (1985); Görler (1985: 265–75) and (1999); Conte (1993: 208–9) and (2007: 58–122); Horsfall (2000b: 225–31); Dainotti (2015: 239–63). See the version of Heaney (2016): ‘On they went then in darkness, through the lonely | Shadowing night’. Jackson Knight (1966 [1944]: 257). Conte (2007: 91) and as cited in earlier notes. See also Görler (1999). On Virgilian ambiguity in general, see Jackson Knight (1966 [1944]: 191–229); Johnson (1976) (difficult but fundamental and underutilized); Williams (1983: 215–31); Lyne (1987); Batstone (1988); Fowler (1990); Thomas (1990) and (2000); Martindale (1993b); Perkell (1994); Horsfall (2000b: 229–30); O’Hara (2007); Conte (2007); Hardie (2009b).

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and concise hexameters also often omit the prepositions or other words or devices that might indicate more clearly the functions of modifiers.28 In Aeneid 6.466, quem fugis? extremum fato quod te adloquor hoc est, Aeneas’ last words to Dido, Jackson Knight has suggested that quem fugis can mean not only, ‘From whom are you turning away?’ but also, ‘What has the man become from whom you turn away?’, that is ‘Don’t you see …?’ or ‘do you think that I am a different man now?’ In the rest of the line it is difficult to pin down the syntax or significance of fato; Jackson Knight suggests not only ‘This is the last thing I speak to you by fate’, but also ‘It is fate’s fault that I am talking to you, but it is the last time’ or ‘It is only by fate that this is the last time I talk to you’, or even ‘This talk to you is the last hope of joy that fate can ever let me have.’ These readings are mostly complementary; other ambiguities suggest more widely divergent possibilities. In Aeneid 9.642–3, iure omnia bella | gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident, Virgil (through Apollo) clearly says that all the wars to come will subside (omnia bella ventura resident) but there are also three adverbial modifiers, iure (‘rightly(?)’), ‘under the race of Assaracus (and Aeneas, Ascanius and Augustus)’, and again fato (‘by fate’).29 So is it ‘rightly all the wars fated to come under the race of Assaracus will subside’ or ‘all the wars to come are (rightly?) fated to subside under the race of Assaracus’? The first seems more natural to me, but connects war and not peace with the race of Aeneas and Augustus, and the second better fits a confident Augustan interpretation of the poem, which predicts a new age of peace under Augustus. If the second is ‘correct’, does the reader (or must all readers) consider the first, and then completely reject it, or does the ambiguity remain, as reader response and similar criticism seems to have established fairly firmly.30 Latinists of recent decades have rightly stressed the role and freedom of the reader in making choices from among possible meanings. At Georgics 2.172, imbellem avertis Romanis arcibus Indum, as the Servian scholia note, Virgil appears to be saying that Augustus is ‘repelling from Roman citadels the unwarlike Easterner’, which seems a paltry feat; Servius suggests that imbellem (‘unwarlike’) is proleptic (‘repel and so make unwarlike’), but if the reader must consider both options, traces of the first must remain, as part of the reader’s or listener’s experience of the line.31 28 29 30

31

See Quinn (1968: 375–84, 394–414); Jackson Knight (1966 [1944] : 214–16). On the frequent ambiguity of the word fatum in Virgil, see Commager (1981). See Fish (1980: 47): the reader’s ‘temporary adoption of … inappropriate strategies is itself a response to the strategy of an author; and the resulting mistakes are part of the experience provided by that author’s language, and therefore part of its meaning’. On Virgil, see Batstone (1988); O’Hara (1993); Perkell (1989); Edwards (2002: 99–10, Virgil and Horace). Thomas (1988: ad loc.).

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At Aeneid 4.165–6, speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem | deveniunt (‘Dido and the Trojan leader arrive at the same cave’), translation cannot convey the way in which the dux seems for a moment to be Dido, until et Troianus and the rhythm of the line specify that Aeneas is the dux Troianus.32 At Aeneid 4.19, huic uni forsan potui succumbere culpae (‘perhaps I  might have yielded to this one – wrong act’), huic seems to mean ‘to him’, ‘to Aeneas’, with a sexual meaning for succumbere (‘lie down under’), until Dido adds the word culpae; the effect is created by the slight hyperbaton. A different kind of temporary ambiguity occurs at Georgics 1.145, with the phrase labor omnia vicit. At first it is not quite clear, in this passage of considerable importance for the interpretation of the Georgics, whether this means the more optimistic ‘toil overcame all obstacles’ or the more pessimistic ‘toil occupied all areas of existence’. Then line 146 begins with the adjective improbus, characterizing labor as ‘insatiable’, ‘cruel’, and then adds a second, clearly negative subject for vicit in egestas (‘poverty’, ‘need’), which seems to remove the possibility of the optimistic interpretation, though some readers still cling to it; the effect is created by hyperbaton and enjambement.33 I close this section with three examples of ambiguous genitives, one each concerning Turnus, Aeneas and Dido, and all involving the limitations of human knowledge. Some may be sceptical of claims of ambiguity here. Aeneid 10.501, nescia mens hominum fati, may suggest either the general, ‘Oh, how human minds are ignorant of fate!’ or, more specifically, ‘Oh, such ignorance [of Turnus, who has just killed Pallas] about the fate of human beings!’, depending on which noun the genitive hominum modifies. What is at stake here is whether Turnus is to be thought of as making a mistake that any human being could make, or as being particularly foolish, in a way that you or I, fortunately, would not be. On Aeneid 8.730, miratur rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet, the comment of Gransden spells out the possibilities: ‘ignarus: if taken absolutely … then “all unawares Aeneas takes pleasure in the pictures of things to come”, if taken with rerum … “though ignorant of the events Aeneas takes pleasure in their representation” ’.34 At 32

33

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Aen. 4.165–6 almost = 4.124–5. Clausen (2002: 43) notes the ambiguity, and the recall of dux femina facti (‘a woman was in charge’, 1.364); he suggests that ‘ambiguity in Latin poetry is circumscribed and tends to be, as here, momentary and evanescent’. My next example is also from Clausen (2002: 43), and is also discussed by Weber (1990: 213) and Edwards (2002: 108); I borrow Clausen’s translation. See Thomas (1988: ad loc.); Perkell (1989: 6, 97); Batstone (1988); Gale (2000: 61–7). See also both Batstone (Chapter 11) and Braund (Chapter 16) in this volume. Gransden (1976). Servius reports criticism of this line as superfluous and modern (neotericus) and lacking in gravity. Clausen (2002: 184) writes that Servius’ comment rightly marks the line as characteristic of post-Homeric poetry, but in a good way: ‘the line is un-Homeric, profoundly so’.

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Aeneid 4.65, when Dido consults omens to learn whether the gods approve of her love for Aeneas, Virgil says heu vatum ignarae mentes.35 I have argued that if vatum here is a possessive genitive with mentes, this can mean ‘alas, ignorant minds of prophets’, which might suggest that prophets know nothing about the future – perhaps because, in this case, the gods will plot against Dido. Or, with vatum as objective genitive with ignarae, it could be ‘minds ignorant of prophets and prophecy’, which might suggest that the haruspices, or Dido and Anna themselves, had performed the rites incorrectly, or that Dido and Anna had misunderstood the haruspices. Here the reader’s difficulty in handling the syntax of the genitive vatum is parallel or analogous to the difficulty both Dido and the reader have in interpreting the language of the entrails. For some reason, Dido does not learn from the sacrifices that her love for Aeneas is going to lead to a bad end. Because of Virgil’s relentlessly ambiguous language, the reader does not learn exactly why this happens. I have neglected so far to mention most of the sound effects and rhetorical devices used by Virgil; analysis of a few short passages will illustrate a few of these. Many involve repetition of a word or sound, just as metre involves repetition of rhythmic patterns; these devices work with metre to create and either fulfil or play with expectations (as do, on the larger level, thematic patterns of repetition36 and responsion in the whole Georgics, Aeneid and Eclogues). ‘Alliteration’ is the repetition of initial consonant sounds, as in Tityre tu (the first words of Eclogue 1); both alliteration and ‘consonance’ (closeness in sound among nearby words) appear in the g’s, c’s, v’s, and m’s in Aeneid 4.1–4: at regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni. multa viri virtus animo multusque recursat gentis honos. But the queen, long pierced by deep desire, feeds the wound in her marrow, consumed by hidden fire. The man’s manly courage37 and his line’s nobility come to her mind again and again. 35

36 37

See O’Hara (1993). Casali argues in his forthcoming commentary on Aeneid 4 that the phrase is not ambiguous, and that the genitive is possessive (‘ignorant minds of prophets’). I still believe it is ambiguous. On repetition, see Moskalew (1982) and Wills (1996). My slightly odd translation here is meant to bring out the etymological connection between vir (‘man’) and virtus (‘manliness’, ‘courage’, ‘virtue’). On etymological wordplay as an important aspect of Virgilian style that is largely ignored in this chapter, see O’Hara (2017).

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Alliteration was important in Rome even before the influence of Greek models and so in high concentration will seem archaic, but gently responsive alliteration is sprinkled throughout Virgil. Attempts to describe the effect of alliteration on the reader, however, seem doomed to conjecture and subjectivity. ‘Assonance’ is like alliteration or consonance but involves the repetition of vowel sounds; it and several other figures appear in lines on Orpheus’ lament at Georgics 4.464–6: ipse cava solans aegrum testudine amorem te, dulcis coniunx, te solo in litore secum, te veniente die, te decedente canebat. To soothe his pained love on the curved lyre, he sings of you, sweet wife, of you when alone on the shore, of you when day comes, of you when it departs.

The first line presents two and perhaps three interlocked noun-adjective pairs, if we count not only cava testudine and aegrum amorem but also ipse solans. Next comes an apostrophe, an address to the absent Eurydice, a figure often used to heighten emotional impact and suggestive of the narrator’s involvement with the character’s suffering. These two lines present a kind of tricolon (on the shore, at dawn, at sunset), but the addition of the apostrophe makes it more like a tetracolon, with the two lines falling into four parts. They also feature anaphora, the repetition of a word (te) at the beginning of successive clauses, and alliteration and assonance in the t’s and s’s of line 465 and finally the ‘e’ sounds of 466. Careful manipulation of vowel sounds is not limited to assonance: elsewhere the patternings of a’s, e’s, and u’s work with the apostrophe, anaphora and varied nominative constructions in the elegant and sad tricolon lamenting the death of Umbro at Aeneid 7.759–60:  te nemus Angitiae, vitrea te Fucinus unda, | te liquidi flevere lacus (‘you the grove of Angitia, you Fucinus with its glassy waters, you the clear lakes lamented’ – more on this passage below). ‘Epanalepsis’ is the rhetorical, syntactically unnecessary repetition of a word or phrase from a previous line, to add emphasis, ornament, or pathos, producing the effect of lingering over a word or idea.38 It is common in the melancholy world of the Eclogues, as in 9.27–8:  superet modo Mantua nobis, | Mantua vae miserae nimium vicina Cremonae (‘if only Mantua survives, Mantua alas too close to poor Cremona’, where the assonance is also noteworthy). It appears in less intense moments simply as ornament, as in Eclogue 6.20–1 – supervenit Aegle, | Aegle Naiadum pulcherrima (‘Aegle

38

Dainotti (2015: 104–5).

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came along too, Aegle most beautiful of nymphs’) – or Georgics 1.297–8: at rubicunda Ceres medio succiditur aestu | et medio tostas aestu terit area fruges (‘but reddening grain is cut in midday heat, in midday heat baked crops beaten on the threshing floor’). Used more sparingly in the Georgics and Aeneid, epanalepsis can suggest great pathos, as at Aeneid 10.820–1:  vultum vidit morientis et ora, | ora modis … pallentia miris (‘[Aeneas] saw the face of the dying boy [Lausus], the face growing pale in a startling way’). As with the elegant noun-adjective patterns and metrical effects discussed above, we may analyse the poet’s deployment of these effects either in terms of aesthetics and their formal qualities, or in terms of their consequences for interpretation. Chief among the latter must be these stylistic features’ potential for producing an emotional response, often one of pathos or sympathy; the link between style and emotion seems critical, but fraught with difficulty for any scholar attempting analysis. Here we can only briefly mention some possible approaches. One study has suggested that ancient readers sought and found nothing but emotion and pathos in a reading of the Aeneid;39 this extreme view is useful mainly as a warning against underestimating the role of pathos. In the passage from Aeneid Book 7 quoted above, stylistic analysis of the pathos attached to the death of the Italian Umbro was the starting point for Parry’s celebrated article ‘Two voices of Virgil’s Aeneid’, in which attention to style and emotion produces considerable ideological consequences.40 Since Heinze, we have also learned to speak of features of Virgil’s style that encourage emotional and other types of identification with points of view other than those of the narrator: Otis popularized a rather different version of Heinze’s idea that spoke of the poet’s ‘subjective’ style.41 In Georgics Book 4, to cite a classic example, Virgil’s story of Orpheus seems more emotionally charged than the framing sections on Aristaeus (I have cited, three paragraphs above, three lines describing Orpheus’ lament for Eurydice). This may tell us something about whether sympathy should lie with the doomed Orpheus or the successful Aristaeus, and the same technique colours the Aeneid’s presentation of the stories of Aeneas, Dido, Turnus and countless minor characters. On this ‘subjective style’, Don Fowler’s essay on ‘deviant focalisation’ offers an excellent discussion that briefly summarizes previous studies, especially by Italian scholars, who reconceptualized the ‘subjective style’ as part of Virgil’s multiple ‘voices’ or ‘points-of-view’, or as ‘deviant 39 40 41

Farron (1993). Parry (1963). Heinze (1993: 361–70); Otis (1964). Concise summary in Boyle (1993: 88).

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focalisation’ or a ‘dramatic’ style.42 Conte later discussed the influence of Greek tragedy, arguing that ‘the great dramatic poets had invented the art of setting free the voices of other men and women. Virgil, the epic poet of pathos, learned from them how to grant space to those individual voices, making himself their witness and their champion’.43 In a later essay in the same volume, he claims that ‘for Virgil … destabilizing the meaning of his text by fuelling it with internal contradictions is a genuine strategy of composition, a strategy by which the “ambiguous” manner of Greek tragedy infects the language of epic’.44 Valuable too for consideration of Virgil’s emotional impact is Christine Perkell’s suggestion that in the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, the poet aims to teach pity. On the Georgics, she writes that ‘this lesson of pity, wherein the poet manipulates the reader’s sympathy and elicits sorrow for loss, is the poet’s mission in the poem’.45 Not all would subscribe to this view as readily as I, but it deserves serious consideration. I began this chapter with Coleridge’s comment on Virgil’s ‘language and metre’, and will close with some remarks on Virgil’s diction, a favourite topic of the modern commentator. Much of Virgil’s vocabulary consists of ordinary Latin words, often in striking combinations (the callida iunctura, ‘clever combination’, of Horace, Ars poetica 47–8), but scholars talk profitably of features of Virgilian diction that are epic, archaic, poetic, or unpoetic. The Greeks had what we may paradoxically call a natural artificial poetic language, developed over time from factors like the dialect spoken in the areas that produced epic or lyric or pastoral. Rome had to create an artificial poetic language in a hurry, and the first epicists Livius Andronicus and Ennius did so in part by the use of archaisms, or Homeric features like compounds, which are rarer in Latin than Greek. Thus ‘epic’ and ‘archaic’ are not easily distinguished, and features may seem at once Homeric and Ennian, or suggest an archaic quality, or even mimic the playful coinages of the Hellenistic or neoteric poet. Pronounced alliteration, and the paratactic style itself (both discussed above), also have an archaic flavour, but on the whole Virgil uses archaic forms sparingly, more in the Aeneid than in the Eclogues and Georgics. It has been suggested that archaisms mark the speech of Virgil’s gods, thus stressing the traditional aspects of Roman religion.46 In the Aeneid as a whole, the use of archaisms suggests both tradition 42 43 44 45 46

Fowler (1997). Conte (2007: 34–5). Conte (2007: 161). Perkell (1989: 20–1). See too Perkell (1990a) and (1997); Conte (2007: 23–57). Palmer (1961: 112–13). On the language of Virgil’s gods, see Harrison (2010). On archaism, see Adams and Mayer (1999: 10–11); Coleman (1999); Goldschmidt (2013: 61–7, especially on evocation of Ennius, with further references).

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and the connotations or ‘epic resonances’ (so Oliver Lyne, see below) that accrue to words from their association with Rome’s earliest epics: as noted above, the suggestion of Ennius (or Homer) can reinforce evocation of or dialogue with the earlier poet. There is ‘epic’ or at least ‘poetic’ resonance also to many words more at home in poetry than prose, just a few of which are ales for avis (‘bird’), aequor for mare (‘sea’), amnis for flumen (‘river’), ensis for gladius (‘sword’), arbusta for the metrically intractable arbores (‘trees’), letum for mors (‘death’), coniunx for uxor (‘wife’). A number of these pairs are not quite synonyms, but there is more difference in tone than in denotation between them, and they add to the grandeur of the Aeneid especially, and to the sense that the poem belongs to ‘a far-off imaginary world’47 or ‘another time and order, distinct from the mundane present’.48 Lyne comments further on the overall effect: ‘poetry’, he suggests, ‘inclines to suggestive vocabulary, to words that are connotative rather than denotative’; he thus describes ‘poetic diction’ as ‘words that are able to introduce into a poet’s text resonances or connotations unavailable in the categories of ordinary language but available in another source’.49 Lyne cites three helpful examples: Infit in Virgil does not mean the same as incipit: its sense of ‘begin (to speak)’ has epic resonance; olli, ollis are dative forms of a pronoun that refers to epic characters, not to Everyman. You and I  have never seen the clipeus of the archaizing poets:  it is the defence of heroes from the epic tradition, of men who are not such as ourselves. Words such as these refer to objects and actions of a fabled world, a world other than our own. That is why they are chosen: to suggest such ‘otherness’.50

The term ‘unpoetic’ appears in the title of Axelson’s short 1945 book Unpoetische Wörter which, though controversial in some respects, has helped sensitize Latinists to the importance of thinking about words’ tone, which may have had a reasonably direct effect on the Romans, but which we must work harder to recover.51 The most basic claim is that words rare in or absent from the ‘higher’ genres of poetry like epic help to define both epic and ‘lower’ genres like satire, and that the appearance of such words in, 47 48 49 50 51

Williams (1983: 748). Lyne (1989: 17). Lyne (1989: 15). Lyne (1989: 16). See the lengthy discussion of ‘Poetic diction, poetic discourse and the poetic register’, in Coleman (1999), as well as the essays on colloquial and literary Latin in Dickey and Chahoud (2010). For one good example, Weber (2014) notes that recognoscit at Aen. 8.721 is a ‘bureaucratic’ word occurring more often in prose, where it describes the actions of magistrates.

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for example, Virgil, can be striking and significant. A tool for the recovery of such effects has been the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, a survey of the usage of Latin words that, as is noted on the De Gruyter website, where it is accessible for a fee, ‘began in 1894 and it is scheduled to be completed around the year 2050’ (they are working now on the letters ‘n’ and ‘r’). Scholars supplement the TLL by searches of particular poets with either traditional concordances (like H. H. Warwick’s for Virgil) or, more often now, digital texts like that offered online by the Packard Humanities Institute, although one must always be wary of being led astray by a digital text that makes no mention of variant manuscript readings or emendations. One extended study of Virgilian diction, Lyne’s, made use of the Packard material using earlier technology, but won more praise for its theoretical introduction than for the plausibility of many of its suggestions about individual words.52 Still, many suggestions convince. We must keep in mind how much Latin has been lost when we call words unpoetic or prosaic, but just as the use of poetic words generally adds a certain ‘other-ness’, the use of ‘prosaic’ or ‘unpoetic’ words may suggest more humble associations, in an eye-catching or striking way. At Aeneid 4.266, Mercury in reminding Aeneas of his mission calls him uxorius, which suggests that he ‘belongs’ to a ‘wife’ like a possession, and is particularly striking because uxor and especially uxorius rarely appear in epic. The use of scutum at Aeneid 10.505–6, when Pallas is brought home on his shield, exploits its prosaic associations: ‘in death, at this point, Pallas is an ordinary soldier’;53 the same claim has been made for the use of the prosaic obitus for Dido’s death at 4.694–5 and the death of chieftains at 12.500–3. Throughout the battle books 9–12, words of epic grandeur sometimes yield to words of prosaic ordinariness; this dovetails with the sense produced by other aspects of the Aeneid that the characters are both unlike us (whoever we are) in their heroic stature, and also more like us as ordinary beings than the heroic figures of Homer. The same type of research reminds us that diminutives, so common in the neoteric poetry of Catullus, appear a dozen times in the neoteric Eclogues, but rarely in the Aeneid, so that there is particular pathos in Dido’s wish that ‘some little [baby] Aeneas’ (parvulus Aeneas, 4.328) would remain with her after he has departed. The end of my 1997 essay noted that much must be omitted from a chapter of this length,54 and that ‘a modern, full-length study of Virgilian style and 52 53 54

Lyne (1989). Lyne (1989: 102). Some reviewers were sceptical here. E.g. consideration of: abstract for concrete, anastrophe of prepositions, apposition (and enclosing apposition), brevity, bucolic diaeresis, caesura, chiasmus, colloquialisms, elision or synaloepha (one of the most significant omissions of this chapter), emphasis, epithets, four-word lines, four-syllable words at line-end, framing, geographical

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poetic usage is needed’. Much work has been done since then, in the articles and commentaries cited above and below, and especially in Dainotti’s ‘fulllength’ but far from exhaustive study. More remains to be done, and the tools available for doing such work are better and more readily available than ever. We will never appreciate Virgil’s style the way his first readers and listeners did, but attention to stylistic matters can lessen the distance that separates us from them, both for the specialist and for the more casual lover of Virgil. FURTHER READING See the general discussions of Latin poetic style by Palmer (1961:  74– 147, 111–18 on Virgil); Wilkinson (1963); Williams (1968:  682–782, 722–43 on Virgil); Wills (1996); several papers in Adams and Mayer (1999) with the helpful review of Zetzel (2001); and Ferri (2011). On Virgil, see Jackson Knight (1966 [1944]:  180–281); Wilkinson (1959); Williams (1982); Gransden (2004: 47–62); Moskalew (1982); Lyne (1989), Horsfall (2000b:  217–48); Conte (2007:  esp. chapters  3, ‘Anatomy of a style: Enallage and the new sublime’, and 8, ‘The meeting of stylistics and textual criticism’); and especially Dainotti (2015), which is in many ways the ‘full-length study of Virgilian style’ called for in my 1997 essay, but still leaves topics to be covered. There is much of value for the reader of Virgil in Kenney (2002) and (2007). The appendices (in German) of Norden (1981 [1903]) are still useful. On the Eclogues, see Nisbet (1991); Lipka (2001); Cucchiarelli (2012) 32–7. On the Georgics, see Wilkinson (1969:  183–222) and Thomas (1988: 24–32). Only moderate skills in Italian are needed to use the sections on ‘lingua’ and ‘metrica’ in the Enciclopedia virgiliana articles on Bucoliche, Georgiche, and Eneide (Görler on the Aeneid is especially helpful). Thomas and Ziolkowski (2014) has entries on ‘style’ (Reinhardt (2014:  1220–22) and on many of the elements of style, as well as a ‘stylistic terms appendix’ (1411–18). Modern commentaries on Virgil tend to concentrate on matters of style; they were crucial in my work in this chapter, and for most of the passages I discuss they provide references to further examples and discussions. See names, Graecisms, half-lines, hendiadys, hiatus, hyperbole, hypermetric lines, inverted cum, kakozelia, lists, lyricism, metaphor, metonymy, mythological names, neologisms, onomatopoeia, parenthesis, periphrasis, personification, pleonasm, polyptoton, postponed connectives or particles, prepositions, punctuation, rhyme or homoioteleuton, simile, spondaic fifth feet, syllepsis, synecdoche, technical language, tenses, tmesis, and zeugma.

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Austin (1955), (1964), (1971) and (1977); Williams (1960) and (1961); Fordyce (1977); Gransden (1976) and (1991); Eden (1975); Hardie (1994); Harrison (1991); Horsfall (2000a), (2003), (2006), (2008), (2013); Tarrant (2012); Coleman (1977); Cucchiarelli (2012); Thomas (1988); Mynors (1990).

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21 H E L E N L OVAT T

Character in Virgil

Characters are central to the ways in which readers engage emotionally with texts, and Virgil’s major works have inspired countless deep emotional engagements: in music, for instance, in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Yet many readers of Virgil, admirers included, do not feel that characterization is a Virgilian strength. Virgil’s characters can be elusive: a good example of this elusiveness is Lavinia in the Aeneid, whose blush in Book 12 (64–71) has been interpreted in many different ways.1 Lavinia does not speak in the poem; she exists to be looked at and won in battle, and yet her blush reveals (or creates) her as a living, feeling human being, demanding that readers puzzle out her emotional state. Does she love Turnus? Is she deeply embarrassed by his love for her? Does she hate her mother? Or her mother’s emotional attachment to Turnus? Or does she actually blush at the name of Aeneas? Is she already beginning to fall in love with him? Is she blushing for modesty at the simple mention of marriage? Or in shame at the feeling that she is the cause of the war? This brief chapter can only raise some of the issues and suggest starting points for further exploration. It will first set out theoretical and conceptual approaches, and then examine in detail one example from each of Virgil’s major works: Menalcas from the Eclogues, Cyrene from the Georgics and Aeneas from the Aeneid. Modern screenwriting lore holds that characters are the key to the emotional engagement of the audience with the story: plots must be characterdriven to succeed.2 Students reading the Aeneid frequently discuss whether I would like to thank the editors for inviting me to contribute to the volume, and for their patience and thoughtful, stimulating comments. 1

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See Tarrant (2012: ad loc.) for a summary. Lyne (1983: 55–64) and (1987: 114–22) sees Lavinia as in love with Turnus; Cairns (2005: 195–203) sees maidenly modesty. Servius reads the blush as reflecting her distress at being the cause of war; compare Aen. 11.479–80. For the currency of the ‘character-driven plot’ in scriptwriting advice, see Truby (2007) and Caldwell (2017).

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or not characters are ‘relatable’ in their essays.3 But ideas about literary characterization and models of mind and the functioning of personalities are all culturally determined. What counts as character and what counts as characterization changes from place to place and age to age. Nevertheless, Aristotle felt that character was central to tragic plots: characters’ actions should be appropriate to their personality traits and the outcome of the play should arise from them (Poetics 1454a).4 As Andrew Laird points out, character is susceptible to many different modes of reading:5 we can associate different character types and traits with different literary genres; we can see character as an aspect of allusion and intertext, created by and forming the poem’s relationships with other texts, both predecessors and successors; we can look at voices, direct, indirect speech and free indirect discourse (representations of the inner workings of the mind); we can explore vision, lines of sight and who looks, how events are focalized through characters; we can dissect bodily gesture and sensory effects; we can see character as an aspect of rhetoric or performance (in different situations, different social modes are appropriate; different behaviour can be used to persuade people); or we can hold that certain aspects of psychological and emotional functioning are biologically determined and essentially the same across time (disgust, maternal love). When authors write about people, or write as if they were other people, they inevitably draw on ideas about what people are, how personality and psychology function. The idea of a single, unified ‘I’, an individual, that gives meaning to the world around, is associated with the philosopher Descartes (the ‘Cartesian’ self). Christopher Gill’s work on ancient ideas of the self has made a strong case that it is anachronistic to conceive of ancient selfhood in this way;6 he distinguishes the ‘subjective-individualist’ self from the ‘objective-participant’ self, and argues that ancient writers thought about characters more as social actors, participants in relationships and social contexts, and as collections of interacting models, processes and ideas rather than a unified individual.7 It is of course challenging and a matter of debate to determine what various different ancient authors 3 4 5 6

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A useful survey of the term can be found in Mead (2014). On Aristotle’s Poetics and psychology, see Rorty (1992). Laird (1997). On subjective-individualist and objective-participant models of personality, see Gill (1996). For further reflections on Hellenistic and Roman ideas about the self, see Gill (2006). Different perspectives on Roman selfhood are presented in Bartsch (2006) and Seo (2013). This approach to mind and personality is not unlike that taken by recent work in behaviourist cognitive psychology. See Chater (2018).

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and philosophers thought about the mind, the soul and the character in any one time or place. In particular, different schools of philosophy took different approaches; for Virgil, Stoic and Epicurean ideas about the self and emotions are especially important.8 There are further challenges: what theorists and philosophers say may not relate closely to what poets do. Diagnosing these different underlying approaches might not in fact lead to much notable difference in an actual reading of the text.9 In ancient thinking, and in Gill’s analysis, ideas of the self are closely intertwined with ethics, and hence moral evaluation. Is Dido mad or bad? Is Aeneas good or flat? The temptation to become entangled in moral evaluations of characters (by whose standards?) is offered by Virgil himself, but for the purposes of this short chapter, I  will focus instead on what happens in the text, what seems to be typically Virgilian about Virgil’s characters, and what techniques are prevalent in Virgil’s portrayal of speech, emotion, behaviour and interaction. I believe that what matters is not just the intention of the poet writing the text or the response of the immediate contemporary audience; different readers in different periods will bring their own psychological and social models to their readings of the text. We need to take account of all these things. A mixture of biological and cultural factors determines the representation and reception of personality, emotion and behaviour. If character is central to plot and the text’s effects on readers, then all elements of Virgil’s poetry can in turn create character: metre, word choice, speech (of the character and of other characters), focalization (seeing the narrative from a particular character’s point of view),10 narrative interjections, and imagery. In order to determine what is distinctively Virgilian about particular modes of characterization or techniques, we need to compare Virgilian characters to those in other literary contexts. In particular, it is useful to compare Virgil with his most important epic predecessors (Homer and Apollonius); for the Eclogues, we have an obvious counterpart in Theocritus.

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On Virgil and philosophy, see Armstrong et al. (2004), Davis (2012) and Braund, Chapter 16 in this volume. For instance, Gill (2004) brings his philosophical approach alongside intertextuality and political analysis to discuss Dido’s death and Aeneas’ killing of Turnus, but the results are not especially surprising. For an introduction to focalization, see De Jong (1987); an important article on focalization in the Aeneid is Fowler (1990). A narratological commentary on the Aeneid, along the lines of that of De Jong (2001) on the Odyssey, would be a very useful addition to scholarship.

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Character as Performance: Menalcas in the Eclogues There is a long-standing debate about the characters of the Eclogues: do the repeated proper names of Virgil’s collection of pastoral poems refer to unified, repeatable characters, or are they more like the different Electras in different Greek dramas? This dilemma of interpretation results partly from the ambiguous nature of a collection of poems, in which the individual poems could form a fragmented narrative, or each be separate dramatic situations featuring different characters, even in different story worlds. How much do the poems build a complete fictional world which can relate to Virgil’s contemporary Rome in various ways, or how much do the poems resemble epigrams, each referring to a particular situation or set of characters that may never be repeated? Martial’s epigrams, for instance, reuse names which sometimes indicate real people, sometimes indicate consistent characters and sometimes seem to be a placeholder for a stereotype or invention. Readers seem less troubled by the inconsistencies of characters than scholars writing on Virgil; a brief discussion with friends (mostly classicists, but not specialists on Virgil) over social media revealed that sixteen people I  know have a favourite character in the Eclogues, twelve different characters. I will briefly discuss Menalcas, who is mentioned in a number of different poems; he is a main character in Eclogues 3, 5, and 9, is mentioned briefly in passing in 2 and 10, and seems to change from poem to poem. The name Menalcas first appears at Eclogue 2.15–16 as an alternative object of desire in Corydon’s love song, dark to Alexis’ fair, presumably a beautiful boy. He then takes centre stage as speaker and poet in Eclogue 3, competing in insults and poetic prowess with Damoetas. Assuming that readers expect to interpret the poems as occurring in chronological order, this already creates a disjuncture: Damoetas at Eclogue 2.36–9 is described as dying and bequeathing his pipes to Corydon, which implies that he is from a previous generation, older than Corydon, while Menalcas is younger. In Eclogue 5 he is courteous and careful in the lament for Daphnis that he shares with Mopsus, and lays a claim to have performed or composed poems 2 and 3. Later, in Eclogue 9, Menalcas is seen as a figure who represents his community, as the poet whose songs were thought to have saved everything in the political turmoil (7–10). Finally, he appears briefly as a representative of the bucolic world that greets Gallus (10.20). From both what others say about him, and his own songs and songs quoted by others, we gain a sense of his character in each poem. There is no guarantee that the name Menalcas is intended to reflect a single character, but readers regularly respond to it in

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this way. T. E. F. Flintoff sees him as a master singer;11 Gregson Davis as a sceptical older man;12 Anton Powell as a cipher for Virgil himself.13 For me, the strongest characterization occurs in Eclogue 3, where Menalcas picks a poetic fight with Damoetas. After an apparently innocuous question about who owns the herd Damoetas is looking after, Menalcas launches into an insulting tirade about hired herdsmen: Infelix o semper, oves, pecus! ipse Neaeram dum fovet ac, ne me sibi praeferat illa, veretur, hic alienus ovis custos bis mulget in hora, et sucus pecori et lac subducitur agnis. (Ecl. 3.3–6) Unlucky always, flock of sheep! While he himself fondles Neaera and fears that she prefers me to him, Here the hired guardian milks the sheep twice hourly, And steals the strength of the flock and the milk from the lambs.

Menalcas is not a hired man: he emphasizes his own superiority, not just in social status, but also as a desired lover, and by condemning the predatory behaviour of hired herdsmen he makes an implicit claim for his own virtue. There follows a list of the vicious actions he has taken to punish thieves, a list partly supplied by Damoetas, partly by Menalcas himself; it becomes clear that the two herdsmen know each other well and are enjoying a game of competitive insults, which becomes a challenge to a poetic competition. Idyll 8 from the Theocritean corpus follows a similar pattern (a poetic competition between Menalcas and Daphnis) but begins by underlining the similarity of the two red-haired boys, followed by a simple challenge.14 As the two discuss what prizes to wager, in both poems Menalcas refuses to wager his father’s flock, doing so in Theocritus’ Idyll 8 with a bare statement that his strict father and mother count all the sheep every evening (15–16), and objects to wagering his father’s goods on principle. In Eclogue 3, he would like to but does not dare (32); his parents are not just strict, his father and unjust stepmother (iniusta noverca, 33)  count the flocks twice a day. The

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Flintoff (1976). Traces of this approach remain in later scholarship (for instance, Davis (2012: 46); Kania (2016a: 59–72), but Kania argues against the idea of Menalcas as ‘master singer’, that Eclogue 5 shows a ‘more cooperative model for song exchange’. Davis (2012: 81). Powell (2008: 198–9). Powell acknowledges, however, that ‘rustic characters carrying the same name in different Eclogues cannot simply be identified [with each other]’ (199). Idyll 8 is likely not the work of Theocritus, but was likely in the collection accessed by Virgil. On Idyll 8, see Fantuzzi (1998).

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intensification creates a more complex picture of Menalcas as a character, both arrogant and rebellious. Through the tact and care with which he interacts with Mopsus, Eclogue 5 suggests a kinder, more mature character, and in Eclogue 9 the thought of his possible death stimulates mourning in the other characters, not unlike his own mourning for Daphnis. Each poem might concern a different Menalcas, the same character at different points in his life, or the same character playing different roles in different situations, or perceived in different ways. Menalcas, then, exemplifies the complexity of character in the Eclogues and the extent to which readers are required to negotiate the tensions and interrelations between them and with Theocritean poems, which both draw them in and leave them puzzled. If we see the characters in the Eclogues as social actors and constructs, rather than unified individuals, ‘objective-participants’ in Gill’s terms, the poems make more sense.15 Current expectations about what character is and how it works make ancient works problematic in ways that they may not have been for an ancient audience. Eurydice and Cyrene: Contrast and Balance We have seen how Virgil uses interactions between different characters and juxtapositions to create a sense of individuality in the Eclogues. The strongest characterizations in the Georgics occur in the concluding epyllion. Two central relationships are contrasted with each other:  those between Orpheus and Eurydice and between the farmer Aristaeus and his divine mother Cyrene. Aristaeus has lost his bees because he is responsible for the death of Eurydice, and so he appeals to Cyrene for help. Poetry is contrasted with power, mortality with divinity: Orpheus and Aristaeus form a fascinating contrast, but Cyrene and Eurydice are also key to the episode. Alison Keith has emphasized the tendency of women in Latin epic to be identified with the landscape over which heroes fight:16 this observation can also be applied indirectly to Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus achieves fame for his journey to the Underworld and back, but Eurydice is characterized primarily in relation to Orpheus, and primarily by her absence as object of desire. She is introduced as coniunx (‘wife’, G. 4.456) then puella (‘girl’, 458), while Orpheus is introduced by name (454). She is the victim of Aristaeus’ attempted rape and fails to see the snake that kills her as she flees. Only in the crucial moment of the second loss, as she follows silently behind and Orpheus is unable to resist looking back, does she speak, to lament her 15 16

Gill (1996). Keith (2000: 36–64).

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own loss through his furor (‘madness’, 495). She is entirely without agency, carried away by forces beyond her control, only able to flee and follow. As she is borne away (feror, 497), she still focuses on Orpheus (tibi tendens, heu! non tua, palmas, ‘to you stretching my hands, but alas not yours’, 498). She could be angry or sweet-tempered, short-sighted or hard-working; we will never know. All we know about her is her significance to Orpheus. In contrast, Cyrene is present, speaks, speaks powerfully, narrates, has agency, and can even be read as a model for Virgil as didactic poet. As a goddess, her access to knowledge and power is beyond that of mortals, both men and women, but even so readers of Virgil have struggled to give Cyrene her due in the story. After she tells Aristaeus to bind Proteus in order to gain information, she accompanies him and remains with him to listen to Proteus’ story and to interpret it; Andrew Wallace has shown that Renaissance readers found this model of female didacticism hard to swallow, even emending the text to remove her from the Proteus scene, replacing resistit (‘remains’, ‘stands firm’) at 424 with recessit (‘recedes’, ‘goes away’).17 Characterization is also importantly related to poetics and narrative: when a character is read as a poet figure, or a version of the narrator, they acquire characteristics associated with the primary narrator; conversely, the narrator can take on aspects of his characters. At the same time, the motivations of characters and their agency and control over actions in the fictional world are crucial in determining the movements of the narrative, both its events and their telling. Cyrene, like Thetis in the Iliad, Venus in the Aeneid and to a certain extent Athene in the Odyssey, creates the circumstances to enable the heroism of her son/protégé and his entry into poetic memory. Unlike her intertextual models, she does not appeal to a higher power, but instead finds the information and interprets it herself. Her greater interventionism leads some readers to find Aristaeus insufficiently masculine. For instance, Joris-Karl Huysmans in his 1884 novel À rebours (translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain) represents his anti-hero the Duc Des Esseintes going against the grain in his tastes in Latin literature and considering Virgil ‘one of the most dismal twaddlers Antiquity ever produced’.18 The terms of this fictional criticism are revealing. The duc particularly dislikes Virgil’s characters and their lachrymose tendencies: ‘his Orpheus whom he compares with a weeping nightingale, his Aristaeus blubbering over bees’.19 The result of Aristaeus’ lament is his transportation into the female space of the sea nymphs’ cave, where the list of nymphs with their ornate Greek names creates a feminine interior. 17 18 19

Wallace (2003). Huysmans (1884: 37); English translation in Ellis (1931: 108). Huysmans (1884: 37); Ellis (1931: 109).

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Ellen Oliensis reads this episode through a Freudian lens, figuring Aristaeus’ immersion as a sort of swallowing up by the feminine, and his angst about the maternal relationship as a paranoid fantasy of destruction and dismemberment by an all-powerful mother, which then forms a sub-text, resurfacing in Orpheus’ dismemberment by spurned mothers (matres, G. 4.520).20 In contrast, Mairéad McAuley points out the recuperative and restorative nature of Cyrene’s intervention, focusing on birth not death, and benefiting the community rather than destroying enemies.21 Both Cyrene and Eurydice can be read in many different ways and with many different emphases; both are enmeshed in a web of intertextual and intratextual references and comparisons that equally create significance and muddy the waters. Flat or Developing? The Character of Aeneas Huysmans’ complaint juxtaposes Virgil’s dense intertextuality with his insufficiently masculine and yet still too wooden characterization: his Aeneas, that weak-kneed, fluent personage who stalks, like a shadow figure at a show, with wooden gestures behind the ill-fitted and badly oiled screen of the poem, set him beside himself with exasperation. He might indeed have put up with the tedious fiddle-faddle these marionettes exchange by way of dialogue as a stage device; he might even have excused the impudent plagiarisms perpetrated on Homer, Theocritus, Ennius, Lucretius …22

Aeneas is not strong enough, too talkative, and yet not expressive or emotional enough. This interpretation of Aeneas as ‘flat’ is not unlike the accusations levelled at the Star Wars movie The Last Jedi (2017), in which online reviewers criticized plot and character as a way of expressing dissatisfaction with the sorts of gender and racial roles on display:23 ultimately, characterization is often only considered effective if it aligns with the moral values and expectations of the reader. The question of whether Aeneas’ character develops in the Aeneid is crucial to the moral evaluation of both character and story, especially the final scene, in which Aeneas kills Turnus in vengeance for the death of Pallas. The penultimate line of the poem (12.951) reuses a phrase from the first appearance of Aeneas in Book 1: solvuntur frigore membra (‘limbs are loosened by the cold’, 1.92). The same phrase is used of Aeneas in the 20 21 22 23

Oliensis (2009: 72–4). McAuley (2016: 94–111). Huysmans (1884: 37); Ellis (1931: 109). For a blog post on characterization and social norms with respect to The Last Jedi, see Hillman (2018).

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storm, potentially about to die, and of Turnus, actually dying at the hands of Aeneas.24 But what are the implications of this ring composition? Does it show how much Aeneas has changed? Instead of suffering, he is inflicting suffering. Has he stopped being Hector and started being Achilles? Or does it link Turnus to Aeneas, showing their essential similarity? Does it suggest that Aeneas is still as lost as he was at the beginning of the poem? The complexity and openness to interpretation of this moment is a hallmark of Virgilian characterization. Readers of Virgil have long disagreed on whether or not Aeneas’ character develops, and if it does, when, how and why. Richard Heinze argued that Aeneas changes in Book 5 to become an ideal hero;25 similarly, Brooks Otis posits a strong change after Book 6, when Aeneas ‘rises above his original nature to a wholly new and quasi-divine heroism’ (219).26 The idea that Aeneas is characterized rather by continuity or appropriate response to the situations he encounters features in the work of Viktor Pöschl and E. Burck.27 Otis’ argument that Aeneas overcomes furor (‘rage’, ‘madness’) internal and external and comes to fully inhabit his pietas (‘sense of duty’, ‘obedience’, ‘love’) remains hugely influential, particularly in British examination syllabuses and marking schemes. Yet the poem ends with Aeneas furiis accensus (‘lit up by rage’, 12.946) as he kills Turnus, and Aeneas introduces himself to Dido in Book 1 with sum pius Aeneas (‘I am dutiful Aeneas’, 1.378); he is pius Aeneas in his very first appearance at 1.220 as he groans for the loss of his men in the storm. Pietas has a tendency to generate conflicting demands and emotions: Aeneas’ desire to uphold his treaty with Latinus is set against his commitment to his guest-friendship with Pallas and Evander. It is not clear, either, with Aeneas moving from one to the other, that we can draw a strong distinction between the assumed rage of ‘Homeric’ heroism and the pietas associated with ‘Roman’ heroism.28 The 24

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Tarrant (2012: 341) sees this moment as ‘a marker of A[eneas]’s transformation’, from Juno’s victim to a Juno-like avenger, citing Lyne (1987: 132–5). But is this really a change of character or a change of circumstances? Looking back to the work of Putnam (1988 [1965]: 200–1), Thomas (1998b: 275–6) talks in terms of circumstances rather than character: ‘In a poem that constantly and powerfully confuses victim and victor, Virgil here gives the most powerful such reversal. Turnus becomes what Aeneas had been when first we saw him, isolated and facing death.’ See Heinze (1993: 271–80). Otis (1964: 219–23). Pöschl (1962), originally published in 1950, and later in an expanded German edition, Pöschl (1977); Burck (1979: 51–119). See further: Stahl (1981); Fuhrer (1989); Seo (2013: 32–65). Both continuity and development are susceptible to Augustan readings: Aeneas can be a symbol who always foreshadows Augustus, or a character who develops towards the Roman hero, of which Augustus is the ultimate example.

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epic climax of the Aeneid in the duel of Book 12 presents Aeneas as a new Achilles, but Homeric heroism was itself already a complex, multifaceted set of ideas: Achilles, Hector and Odysseus all offer very different ways of approaching morality, masculinity and leadership. There is little clear sense that Aeneas understands or remembers the revelations of Book 6, and he explicitly does not understand the images on the shield presented to him by Venus:  rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet (‘without understanding the matters he rejoices in the image’, 8.730). More persuasive is David Quint’s argument that the poem (and Aeneas) moves from regressive repetition and obsession with the past towards the embrace of a new future.29 But one can argue that Aeneas is already forward-looking and unusually resilient even in Book 2, where he must persuade Anchises to leave Troy. In his emotions and behaviour, he does not seem to change: Therese Fuhrer points out that his doubts, hesitations, uncertainties and emotions are represented throughout the poem, roughly in proportion to Aeneas’ presence in the story.30 At Aeneid 8.18–25, for instance, Aeneas lies awake worrying about the imminent war in Latium, and his mind’s confusion and swift movements are compared to light reflecting on water and striking an ornate roof. This simile draws on Apollonius’ description of Medea at Argonautica 3.755–9, in which Medea’s dilemma about Jason keeps her awake. Readers have found this simile difficult because it emphasizes Aeneas’ emotions and instability and links him to a woman suffering from eros rather than a warrior. But his doubts are resolved through a dream of the River Tiber, just as Jason dreams of the heroines when the Argonauts are lost in North Africa (Arg. 4.1312– 14).31 His love seems to be with his future homeland.32 A psychological approach which explores Aeneas’ behaviour and emotional responses to events both in the poem and preceding its action as consistent with (ancient and/or modern) models of response to trauma and bereavement might offer a new approach;33 the aloofness and lack of effective communication could relate to the characteristic withdrawal from emotional engagement of the trauma survivor, as could the extreme anger and violence which surface in books 10 to 12.34 When Aeneas leaves Dido, he does not express a desire to stay with her, but a desire to return to Troy

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Quint (1993). Fuhrer (1989: 66). On the extensive intertextual relationship with Apollonius, see Nelis (2001). As suggested by Reed (2007). On Freudian approaches to the Aeneid, see Oliensis (2001); Quint (1993) reads the poem in terms of regression and repetition. On Aeneas’ taciturnity, see Feeney (1983). Seider (2013: 191) sees Aeneas’ response to Pallas’ sword belt as a ‘flash-bulb memory’.

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(4.340–4); Dido’s death becomes another trauma that crops up later in the poem, particularly in relation to Pallas (for instance, at 11.72–7). Aeneas’ relationship with Ascanius is equally characterized by sadness and distance.35 Unlike Hector, he kisses his son through his helmet and reflects on the hardships that face them both: Ascanium fusis circum complectitur armis summaque per galeam delibans oscula fatur: ‘disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, fortunam ex aliis.’ (12.433–6) He embraces Ascanius with his weapons poured around and snatching brief kisses through the helmet, says: ‘learn, boy, courage from me and true labour, fortune from others.’

The exhortation to Ascanius to learn suffering but not fortune from his father echoes the speech of Sophocles’ Ajax (550–1), which can be taken to imply a self-destructive obsession with honour, as much as Hector’s passionate protection of his city.36 Readers of the Aeneid have tended to see sadness as the cost of power, the isolation of leadership as the price Aeneas pays for founding the Roman Empire. But his restless searching grief and post-traumatic energy could be seen rather to drive his achievements. The killing of Turnus suggests that Aeneas does not reach a state of acceptance of his losses during the poem, and perhaps will never do so. This difficult and complex character is not superficially attractive, but has inspired deep emotional engagement from many later readers and artists; the Aeneas of Berlioz’ Les Troyens, for instance, plays the romantic lead.

Reading Virgil’s Characters In the end, characterization, as with so many other aspects of the text, is created by the interaction between text and reader. Virgil’s characters are peculiarly writable; they are suggestively presented, with a light touch and many potentially ambiguous details. If we come back to Lavinia, the empty space at the heart of the war in Italy, we can see that the different ways of reading go beyond the scholarly traditions of interpreting the text into translation and adaptation. Dryden’s translation of Lavinia’s blush expands the passage, emphasizing her objectification as desired work of art:

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On Ascanius, see Rogerson (2017). See Tarrant (2012: ad loc.); Panoussi (2009: 214–16); Lyne (1987: 9–10).

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H e l e n L ovat t A crimson blush her beauteous face o’erspread Varying her cheeks by turns with white and red. The driving colours, never at a stay, Run here and there, and flush, and fade away. Delightful change!

Dryden’s flames are entirely those of Turnus, while David West, for instance, brings out the tears and the burning vocabulary in Virgil, creating a more emotional Lavinia:  ‘The tears streamed down her cheeks, aflame and feverish from the deep flush spreading quickly over her heated countenance.’ Ursula K. Le Guin, in her acclaimed and influential novel Lavinia (2008), plays extensively with the idea of Lavinia’s blush and the different possible ways of reading it. The first blush comes in ‘shame and anger’, as Lavinia nurses a wounded soldier who has just blamed her directly for causing the war.37 This blush prepares us for the famous scene, where Le Guin specifies that Lavinia blushes at the desperation of her mother’s speech:  ‘Hearing her begging, I blushed with shame’.38 The third blush recapitulates it in a love scene with Aeneas, where she tries to prevent his death by asking him to abdicate in favour of Ascanius, and feels she has gone beyond what is allowed in her attempt to interfere in politics and history (and what was foreordained by the traditions of myth). Just as Turnus is aroused by the blush in Aeneid 12, so Aeneas reacts with strong desire here.39 There is a sense in all three scenes that Lavinia blushes because she has said too much, has dared to have a voice, so that Le Guin adds a metaliterary slant to her interpretation of Lavinia’s blush. But all three scenes also characterize her strongly: she is straightforward, highly conscious of propriety, determined but anxious, and angry when others interpret her wrongly. Le Guin runs with the scholarly consensus on the implications of blushing for Roman women (shame and modesty), and creates her own character which is true to Virgil’s, but goes far beyond it. This brief exploration has shown some of the many different ways of approaching characterization and its importance for interpreting and understanding texts. Various aspects link character and narrative:  unity, focalization, story worlds, space, agency, poetics. Characters are objects of reception and interpretation: they can be changed by textual emendation, translation, adaptation, interpretation. We can approach them through intertextual interplay, the senses, psychology, or the textual subconscious, rhetorical positioning, self-presentation. It is hard to isolate what is particularly 37 38 39

Le Guin (2008: 137). Le Guin (2008: 159). Le Guin (2008: 211).

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Virgilian about Virgilian characters, but perhaps most important is their interpretability and elusiveness, paired with an intensity of emotional engagement. FURTHER READING Characterization has not been much studied in recent years by classicists, but it has started to regain currency: see, for instance, Bexley (2016) on Seneca, and De Temmerman (2017) on Greek literature. The work of Christopher Gill remains important: see Gill (1996) and (2006). For early insight on tragedy, see Easterling (1978). On different modes and aspects of characterization in Virgil: on historical referentiality, see the chapter ‘The creation of characters in the Aeneid’ in Griffin (1985: 183–97); for speech and power, see Laird (1999); on psychoanalysis, see Oliensis (2009); on politics, a useful recent reading is Powell (2008); for fiction in the Eclogues, see Kania (2016a); Davis (2012) looks at philosophy in the Eclogues. Intertextuality: Seo (2013) approaches Aeneas through images of the Trojan Paris; Panoussi (2009) looks at the influence of tragedy. Some characters have received detailed treatment:  Rogerson (2017) explores in depth the figure of Ascanius; Schauer (2007) discusses Aeneas as leader. On reception, I find Thomas (2001: esp. 154–89) particularly useful on translations of Dido. See also Kallendorf (2007a).

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22a D O N FOW L E R (R E V I S E D B Y A L E S SA NDRO BA RC H IESI )

Virgilian Narrative: Storytelling

The Aeneid has a story to tell, of how after the fall of Troy Aeneas reaches Italy with a small group of followers (books 1–6) and there fights a war with some of the native inhabitants that ends in his victory (books 7–12). The plot of the Aeneid is quickly told, and not that long in the enactment, but its temporal outreach is enormous, from the prehistoric past to Virgil’s own day and beyond (a timescale Ovid would extend and parody in the Metamorphoses). Like all good stories, it also has much to say about storytelling itself, and the way we plot our ends in history; and at every point who speaks and who sees admits itself of more than one story.

Narrators The narrator of the poem is a first-century bc Latin poet, whom it is easiest to call ‘Virgil’: he generally retains epic anonymity, but on occasions reveals his hand: Caieta is buried litoribus nostris (‘on our shores’, Aen. 7.1) and Nisus and Euryalus will be famous as long as the Roman father has power: si quid mea carmina possunt (‘if my poems can (do) anything’, 9.446–9). But from the beginning we meet other storytellers within the poem: the Muse who tells Virgil the causes of events (1.8), the anonymous narrator who told Juno of the plot of the poem before it even began (audierat, ‘she had heard’, 1.20); compare Dido’s desperate desire Iliacos iterum demens audire labores (‘to hear again in madness the Trojan labours’, 4.78), the script of the Fates (1.260) based – or is it the other way round? – on a treatment by Jupiter himself, the Master Narrator of all. Virgil has hardly (vix, 1.34) got going with the story when he is interrupted by Juno, complaining at the idea that she has to give up on her tale: mene incepto desistere victam nec posse Italiam Teucrorum avertere regem! quippe vetor fatis. (Aen. 1.37–9) 400

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Virgilian Narrative: Storytelling ‘So I am to cease defeated from my beginning and not be able to turn the Trojan king away from Italy! I suppose I am forbidden by the fates?

Her opening mene incepto echoes in sound1 the opening word of the Iliad, mênin (‘wrath’), which Virgil himself could only translate (1.4, 11, 25): in turn she will be echoed by Aeneas (mene Iliacis occumbere campis | non potuisse, ‘that I  should not have been able to die on the plains of Troy’, 1.97–8). Inceptum is a common word for a literary enterprise (see G. 2.39):  so Aeneas will begin his story in Book 2 with the word incipiam (‘I shall begin’). Juno’s story will come to nothing: at the end of the poem, Jupiter will bid her inceptum frustra summitte furorem (‘submit your fury, begun in vain’, Aen. 12.832). Or rather, it will amount to the Aeneid itself, the poem this vain fury constructs by its obstruction and delay. Jupiter sets himself up as the god of ends in opposition to Juno as the demonic force that starts and restarts the action and will not let it be. He is first introduced with the mysterious words et iam finis erat (‘and already it was the end’, 1.223), referring most obviously to the preceding scene, where Aeneas and his men mourn their lost comrades; just before Aeneas optimistically tells his men dabit deus his quoque finem (‘god will give an end to these [troubles] too’, 1.199), and just after Venus despairingly asks her father quem das finem, rex magne, laborum? (‘What end are you giving, great king, to these labours?’, 1.241). At the other end of the poem, Jupiter will himself echo Juno’s words back to her at the beginning of the ‘reconciliation’ scene of Book 12:  quae iam finis erit, coniunx? quid denique restat? (‘What end will there ever now be, wife? What at last is left?’, 12.793). Aeneas unknowingly echoes Jupiter’s words when he addresses Turnus at 12.889:  quae nunc deinde mora est? aut quid iam, Turne, retractas? (‘What now at last is the delay? Or what now, Turnus, are you rehandling?’), parodying Turnus’ misleading declaration at 12.11, nulla mora in Turno (‘there is no delay in Turnus’).2 Whenever Jupiter tries to bring things to an end, his wife frustrates him and creates a mora (‘delay’); whenever Juno and her allies introduce a delay, the story ultimately moves on. So Anchises in Book 2, having at first delayed, agrees to leave Troy when he sees the god’s portent, with the words iam iam nulla mora est (‘now, now there is no delay’, 2.701); and at another nodal point of departure, Mercury tells Aeneas to leave Carthage with the words, heia age, rumpe moras (‘come now, break all delays’, 4.569). At the end of the Aeneid, that is what Aeneas does:  praecipitatque moras 1 2

See Levitan (1993). Retractare can be a literary term. See Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) on Horace, Odes 2.1.38.

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omnis, opera omnia rumpit (‘and he drives headlong all delays, breaks [off] all [other] works’, 12.699). Right at the end there is a brief hesitation, as Aeneas delays the climactic killing of his enemy, but the poem finally ends with an act of composition, if not of composure: Aeneas ferrum adverso sub pectore condit (‘buries [founds, lays down] the iron in his adversary’s chest’, 12.950), recalling 1.5 (dum conderet urbem, ‘before he could found a city’) and 1.33 (tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem, ‘so weighty a task was it to found the Roman people’). The final killing is at once an end and a beginning, a foundational act for the new Rome, like Romulus’ killing of his brother (compare Jupiter’s prophecy, where Romulus excipiet gentem et Mavortia condet | moenia, Romanosque suo de nomine dicet, ‘Romulus will take over the race and found the martial walls, and call [the people] Romans from his name’, 1.276–7). There Jupiter’s omission of the killing of Remus highlights its presence under his attempted erasure, reinforced by the echo of Ennius’ Annals fr. 63 on the brothers’ enmity:  certabant urbem Romam Remoramne vocarent (‘they were contending as to whether they would call the city Remora or Roma’).3 Oppositions From beginning to end, the Aeneid similarly represents its own ends and beginnings in contention. The contest between Jupiter and Juno is fought on many levels. In the first half of the poem, Aeneas wanders around the Mediterranean trying to discover what the plot is; there are stories to help him, but they are easily misunderstood. After consulting the history books (veterum volvens monimenta virorum, ‘pondering/unrolling the records of ancient men’, 3.102, glossed later in 105 as audita, ‘things heard’), Anchises plausibly suggests Crete as their home, but is proved wrong by a plague. In Book 6, Anchises, now dead, gives Aeneas perhaps more reliable – but even less directly helpful – information about what will happen later in Roman history:  we are also told that he instructed Aeneas in detail about what was to happen in books 8–12 (6.890–2), but the narrator does not share this information with us, and Aeneas shows little sign of remembering it. Nevertheless, the second half of the poem has a stronger teleology as, despite Juno’s efforts, events move towards their conclusion. Some4 have thus seen a move in the poem from an Odyssean concern with repetition as return (‘romance’) to an Iliadic sense of repetition with variation (‘epic’): instead of ‘seeking his mother’ (3.96), Aeneas becomes the new father of the Roman 3 4

Skutsch (1985: fr. 63). E.g. Quint (1993).

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race; instead of going around in circles, the plot spirals on. The Trojan war is replayed in the second half, but this time the Trojans take on the role of the Greeks, and the Latins move from besieging the Trojan camp to themselves being besieged; Turnus becomes Hector, and Aeneas proves the alius … Achilles (‘Achilles 2’) prophesied by the Sibyl (6.89).5 But while an opposition between the plots of the Iliad and the Odyssey is undoubtedly fundamental to the storytelling of the Aeneid, the terms of that opposition are less clear than this view suggests. Of the two Homeric epics, the Odyssey has the stronger teleology:  events move inexorably to their ordained conclusion, and the divine plot outlined at the beginning is finally justified (at Od. 24.351 Laertes exclaims, ‘Father Zeus, you gods still exist in Olympus …’). As many have noted, it is the Odyssey which provides the armature for the structure of the Aeneid, with a heterogeneous first half succeeded by a second half in which time and place become increasingly concentrated and claustrophobic as we move to the final act of vengeance. From the breadth of the Mediterranean we move to Ithaca, and then the palace, and finally the killing field of Book 22: similarly, the Aeneid moves towards the pairing of Turnus and Aeneas, one-on-one outside the city gates. The final meeting in heaven between Athene and Zeus in Odyssey 24 is mirrored by the settlement reached by Juno and Jupiter in Aeneid 12; in both cases we are assured that there will now be peace and justice (compare Od. 24.486, 483 with Aen. 12.821–2), that events have finally reached a resolution. Where Athene descends to earth to avert conflict between Odysseus and the suitors’ relatives, however, Juno mysteriously leaves her cloud (12.842) merely to disappear from the Aeneid, and the resolution at the human level is messier and more disturbing. In contrast, while the Iliad looks to an end in the fall of Troy, within the compass of the poem, it ends only with a mutual recognition of shared pain, and has a much less strong sense of theodicy, for all that Zeus sends Hermes to guide Priam to Achilles. The Iliad is more easily assimilated to the paradigms of tragedy, to the eternal return of human suffering rather than any hope of an end. In so far, therefore, as the opposition between Odyssean and Iliadic plots works itself out in the Aeneid, it is arguably in the opposite sense to that suggested by Quint and others: the Odyssey represents closure, the Iliad the resistance to it formed by human pain. The question of whether the plot of the Aeneid has a tendency to progress linearly or to go round in circles, thus turns out to be another version of the debate over the ideological tendency of the poem; and the question of plot is mirrored again at another level in the history of Virgilian criticism itself. Does criticism get anywhere, make progress, 5

See Chapter 22b below, however.

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resolve issues, reach conclusions, or just eternally return to the same oppositions? Does it ask questions, or give answers? Plot, Story, Book The Aeneid displays the manipulations of order, duration and frequency familiar from narratological theory, and raises the equally familiar problems that surround attempts to make precise what is at the level of plot or fabula or story (‘what happened’) and what at the level of the narration of the events of the plot, the way they are told (and the terms to use for each level). The narrative of the Aeneid begins with Juno seeing Aeneas, making an angry speech, and stirring up a storm; it ends with Aeneas seeing the baldric of Pallas, making an angry speech, and killing Turnus. But as we have noted, the beginning and end of the story is much more problematic. The most notable ruptures of narrative order are Aeneas’ narration to Dido of the fall of Troy and Anchises’ recital of the future history of Rome, itself not ordered by strict chronology, but there are many smaller analepses (flashbacks) and prolepses (anticipations). An opposition is conventionally made in relation to narrative duration between the balanced narration of epic, with a predominance of ‘scenes’ (where the time taken to narrate an event corresponds to its length and importance at the level of plot) over ‘summaries’ and ‘slow-downs’, and the more ‘syncopated’ narrative of elegy, in which major events of the story may be passed over briefly to concentrate on descriptive passages and emotional confrontations or monologues. This is as valid as any of the other markers of the generic opposition between epic and elegy; in fact, there is great variety in respect of the handling of narrative duration within the Aeneid. Devices such as ecphrasis (see Chapter 22b) and simile that tend completely to suspend narration6 are extensively used. The battle narratives of the second half might seem to be the place where one would most expect to find epic-style narrative regularity, but they are typically constructed around death vignettes in which description and analepsis of the victim’s past life tend to predominate over narration of the actual killing, and at the moment of death the focus may be on a bizarre detail rather than the expected narration of the killing. They also frequently contain direct speech. At 9.590–637, for instance, we have the famous death of Numanus Remulus at the hands of Iulus; three lines (590–2) introduce the killing in summary form, two (593–4) describe Numanus, three narrate his taunting of the Trojans (595–7), twenty-three (598–620) give his speech, four narrate Iulus taking aim (621–4), five give his prayer to Jupiter (625–9), five 6

See, however, Lyne (1989: 63–99).

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(630–4) narrate Jupiter’s response and the shooting, two (634–5) give Iulus’ vaunt, and two (636–7) describe the reaction of the Trojans. Although direct speech is sometimes classified as representing a ‘scene’ by narratologists, since it takes just as long to narrate as it does to utter it, its effect is in fact to slow down a narrative, since its content can often be narrated more economically by indirect speech or narrator’s report of a speech act; so in this example very little of the episode is devoted to narrative proper, and much more to comment, reflection, or reaction. Direct speech, one of the great markers of the epic style, is thus ambiguous in its effect on the progress of the narrative. In discussing the Numanus Remulus ‘episode’, I  use the conventional Aristotelian language for narrative segmentation. The section arguably does not conclude at line 637, as Virgil goes on to narrate Apollo’s subsequent reaction and Iulus’ withdrawal from the conflict; a plausible incision for the end of the episode might be made at line 663, though modern editors tend to mark a paragraph break later, at 671. The paragraphing of modern texts is a sometimes haphazard feature of the paratext (the features of a text which are not quite part of the text but affect interpretation),7 but there are some obvious signals of division within the text such as epiphonemata (single-line summations, like tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem, ‘such a task it was to found the Roman race’, 1.33) or other general comments, such as the pause for reflection with which Aeneas concludes his narrative of the death of Priam in Book 2: haec finis Priami fatorum, hic exitus illum sorte tulit Troiam incensam et prolapsa videntem Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum regnatorem Asiae. iacet ingens litore truncus, avulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus. (2.554–8) This was the end of Priam’s fates, this conclusion took hold of him by chance, viewing Troy in flames and Pergamum fallen, once the proud ruler over so many peoples and lands of Asia. He lies a huge trunk on the shore, a head torn from its shoulders, a body without a name.

Aeneas as internal narrator draws attention to the fact that the end of his telling of Priam’s story coincides with the end of Priam, who has exited from story within story to become a corpse without a name (the modern reader may well think of the end of The Name of the Rose). The final detail on which Aeneas had concluded his narration before this reflection was the 7

See Genette (1997).

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plunging of Pyrrhus’ sword into Priam (2.552–3), the (sort of) action that will of course conclude the Aeneid itself (12.950; see also 10.536). At the end of the Aeneid, narration will stop without any pause for reflection, but there is a clear element of mise en abyme (mirroring of the textual process within a text) with mise en abyme signalled by the segmentation: just as Aeneas’ narrative is a story within a story which starts the poem off again (see infandum regina iubes renovare dolorem, ‘unspeakable, queen, is the pain you bid me renew’, 2.3), so the Priam story within it ends the way the whole work will end. And then the story goes on. It is this sort of internal segmentation which generates effects such as the mirroring of scenes between first and second halves; only when the textual continuum is broken up into units can we seek correspondences between those units. The major segmentation of the Aeneid is the division into twelve ‘books’, which have a similar status to the chapters of a modern novel. The Iliad and the Odyssey were each divided into twenty-four books before or during the early Hellenistic period; although some of the divisions do not mark a strong break in the action, most produce a significant pause on some level. Some of the books have a strong sense of individual unity (e.g. Iliad 10 and Odyssey 11, both of which, for this reason, have been held to be additions to the original poems), and the numeration emphasizes correspondences between the two Homeric poems: both the Iliad and the Odyssey, for instance, have climactic moments in their twenty-second book, with the killing of Hector and the suitors respectively. The division of the Aeneid is much more strongly marked, however, and the book predominates as the main structural unit of the poem. The most obvious division is into two halves of six books, with a ‘proem in the middle’ in Book 7, ironically announcing not only a maius opus (‘greater work’), but also a maior ordo (‘greater order or sequence’); throughout the Aeneid more than the order of things enters into the usages of ordo, and this sequence begins immediately after the long order of Roman history outlined by Anchises (6.723, 754). But there is also a sense of three sets of four books (1–4 deal with the ‘digression’ in Carthage, just as Odyssey 1–4 contain the details of Telemachus’ journey), and other divisions are possible. The books in the first half tend to end on a death (that of Creusa in Book 2, Anchises in Book 3, Dido in Book 4, Palinurus in Book 5, Marcellus in Book 6), while in the second half this is true only of books 10 and 12: there is perhaps a particular parallel between books 4 and 10 in this respect, suggesting a division within each half into 4 + 2. One particular aspect of the book structure is the way that some books may be seen as representing a form of mise en abyme of the entire work. This has been argued in particular for 406

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books 3 and 5,8 both of which begin with a sea voyage and end with a death, and in other ways too may be seen as mirroring the larger work. This play with the segmentation and structure of the work is not just a matter of formalist games: the multiple and shifting structures connect different parts of the poem in different ways, and thus correspond to the multiplicity of ends and means at the ideological level. Point of View It is at the level of voice (‘who speaks?’) and especially mood (‘who sees?’, focalization), however, that the storytelling of the Aeneid has seemed to impinge most directly upon the wider questions of its interpretation. As already mentioned, while the narrator of the Aeneid on the whole avoids explicit intervention in the narrative, and pursues epic ‘showing’ rather than the ‘telling’ of discourse, the ‘point of view’ embodied in the poem is by no means always clear (a point which emerges already in comments on persona in the ancient commentary of Servius).9 See, for instance, Aeneas’ reactions to Mercury’s reminder of his mission: ardet abire fuga dulcisque relinquere terras, attonitus tanto monitu imperioque deorum. (Aen. 4.281–2) He blazes to go away in flight and leave the sweet lands, astonished at so great a warning and command of the gods.

The epic narrator speaks but, as Servius notes, it is more plausibly Aeneas who focalizes dulcis: he is eager to depart, but also sees the land of Carthage as sweet because of his love for Dido (we may conjecture). Here the lexical choice of dulcis embeds the point of view of Aeneas: he sees, even though Virgil speaks. The following line too may be held to represent Aeneas’ point of view rather than Virgil’s, but in a less obvious way: while Virgil is not an obvious focalizer for dulcis, the description of the ‘warning and order’ of the gods as ‘so great’ (tanto) could be from the point of view of the primary narrator, but can also be read as a representation of how Aeneas feels about what he has just heard. Similarly, there is nothing about the phrase monitu imperioque deorum (‘by the warning and order of the gods’) which cannot be from the primary narrator’s point of view, but we may also read it as embodying Aeneas’ move from seeing what Mercury said as a warning (this is in fact closest to the tenor of his speech, which contains only one 8 9

Cf. Hershkowitz (1991: 69–76); Galinsky (1968: 157–85). See Chapter 6a above.

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imperative) to a view of it as an order. None of this is unambiguous, however. Although sometimes, therefore, we may be clear that we wish to see a character’s point of view embedded in the text, at other times we may feel less sure about distributing the viewpoint between narrator and characters; it is a matter of interpretative choice. The position of the narrator towards the embedded focalization is also dependent on the reader’s choice: we may see Virgil as merely recording that a character felt in a particular way, or as sharing in that character’s point of view with ‘sympathy’ or ‘empathy’. It is thus possible to draw very different conclusions about the tenor of the poem from Virgil’s famous ‘subjective style’.10 We can see elements as focalized by the characters, or the narrator, or some mixture of the two; and we can use embedded focalization either to ‘solve problems’ in the ideological tendency of the narrative or to introduce discordant notes. In 10.565–70, for instance, Aeneas is compared to the monstrous giant Aegaeon revolting against the gods. Do we see this as a comment by the narrator on the monstrous nature of Aeneas at this point, or merely as the way he seems to his opponents? It is clear that questions like this cannot be solved by appealing to textual elements in themselves but depend on wider views of the poem’s ideology. It has been argued that regardless of whether we see the narrator as sympathizing with the embedded points of view or merely recording them, the coherence of the text is shattered and it becomes impossible to ascribe to it any dominant ideological tendency,11 but this perhaps underestimates the ability of a sufficiently strong-willed critic to produce an overarching interpretation which keeps these other ‘voices’ suitably muted. Singing and Writing In 9.774–7 Turnus in the fury of battle kills a poet: amicum Crethea Musis, Crethea Musarum comitem, cui carmina semper et citharae cordi numerosque intendere nervis, semper equos atque arma virum pugnasque canebat. [Turnus killed] Cretheus the friend of the Muses, Cretheus, companion of the Muses, who loved poems always and lyres, and to stretch metres on strings, who always used to sing of horses and arms of men, and battles. 10

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Cf., e.g., Heinze (1993); Otis (1964); La Penna (1967: 220–44); Conte (1986: 141–84); Bonfanti (1985); Fowler (1990: 42–63). Cf. Conte (1986: 141–84).

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The phrase arma virum – although here virum is genitive plural, ‘of men’ rather than the singular ‘man’ of the opening arma virumque cano (‘arms and the man I sing’) – links Cretheus12 to Virgil himself (variations on the opening two words continually return throughout the Aeneid). If Turnus had at this point opened the gates to his companions, he would have won the war and the poem would have ended prematurely and wrongly (9.757–9). Instead he goes off and kills the poet. The final canebat (‘used to sing’, with a pathetic hint of ‘but no more’) links Cretheus to another singer, Iopas who sings an allegorical cosmic didactic poem at the end of Book 1: hic canit errantem lunam solisque labores, unde hominum genus et pecudes, unde imber et ignes. (Aen. 1.742–3) He sings of the wandering moon and the labours of the sun, the origin of the human race and animals, of rain and fire.

And we must not forget another singer who had a stunning effect on his audience, as Dido remarks to her sister after the end of Aeneas’ story: heu, quibus ille iactatus fatis! quae bella exhausta canebat! (Aen. 4.13–14) Ah, by what fates was he tossed! What wars drained dry he was singing!

Cano means more than ‘sing’ in Latin, however:  it is also the word for ‘prophesy’ (Virgil’s opening prophesies a man as well as singing about one). This aspect of the term’s usage brings in many more narratorial surrogates within the poem. Perhaps the most prominent is the Sibyl of Cumae, whose literary activity is described by Helenus in Book 3: insanam vatem aspicies, quae rupe sub ima fata canit foliisque notas et nomina mandat. quaecumque in foliis descripsit carmina virgo digerit in numerum atque antro seclusa relinquit: illa manent immota locis neque ab ordine cedunt. verum eadem, verso tenuis cum cardine ventus impulit et teneras turbavit ianua frondes, numquam deinde cavo volitantia prendere saxo nec revocare situs aut iungere carmina curat: inconsulti abeunt sedemque odere Sibyllae. (Aen. 3.443–52)

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Note also that a Cretheis is mentioned as Homer’s mother in the tradition of the Homeric Lives. Cf. Barchiesi (1997: 17 n. 7).

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D on F owl e r You will see a mad prophet/poet, who under the hollow crag sings fates and entrusts marks and names to leaves. Whatever the songs the virgin writes down on the leaves she places in order/metre and leaves them set apart in the cave: they stay unmoved in their places, nor depart from their order. But these same songs, when at the turning of the hinge a small wind strikes them, and the door disturbs the tender leaves, fly around the hollow cave, and she has no care to take them or to call them back to their places or join together the songs: without a message the people go away, and hate the site of the Sibyl.

So later in Book 6, when he finally meets the Sibyl, Aeneas begs her to sing herself, and not entrust her prophecies to writing: foliis tantum ne carmina manda, ne turbata volent rapidis ludibria ventis; ipsa canas oro. (Aen. 6.74–6) Only do not entrust your songs to leaves, lest disturbed they fly, a plaything for the swift winds; sing yourself, I beg you.

Entrusted to writing, the prophecies of the Sibyl become unstable in the moment of reading: opening the door disturbs the order of the text beyond recall. Aeneas begs the Sibyl for full presence, in an attempt to avoid these instabilities, but the Sibyl’s response is as ambiguous as all the prophecies of the Aeneid. As song, the Aeneid aspires to transcend the indeterminacies of its nature as text; as written text, it embodies those indeterminacies. Even in the very moment it embraces song at the opening of the poem, however, the narration is ambiguous. The ‘man’ of ‘Arms and the man I sing’ is obviously Aeneas, but equally obviously looks forward to another man, Augustus: hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis, Augustus Caesar, divi genus, aurea condet saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva Saturno quondam. (Aen. 6.791–4) This is the man, this is he whom you hear often promised to you, Augustus Caesar, the stock of god, who will found again the golden centuries in the fields ruled by Latin Saturn once.

Virgil sings Aeneas and prophesies Augustus; the direct presence promised by song and prophecy is illusory from the start. Things as they are are always already changed on Virgil’s guitar. The stress on the indeterminacy of reception implied by the story of the Sibyl’s folia – the implication that whatever fixity a text might possess, it disappears in the very act of reading which is necessary to give it meaning – is 410

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reflected in the other surrogates for the act of reception we find in the poem. Whenever anyone hears someone else’s tale (as the Trojans listen to Sinon, or Dido to Aeneas) or views a work of art (as Aeneas does in books 1 and 8)13 or receives a prophecy, the Aeneid stresses the active role of the audience in the way that the message is taken, the way that the audience’s beliefs and emotions decide how they react to what is set before them. One may build on these internal surrogates to construct readers of the Aeneid who will similarly react in differing ways to its story, who may be reminded of past pain (2.3, 3.710) or stirred on to future glory (6.889), who may be taken in by the tale, or perhaps read with more suspicion. The story of the Aeneid necessarily does not end with the final flight of Turnus’ soul (itself the result of Aeneas’ ‘reading’ of Pallas’ sword belt, which Turnus was wearing), but begins at the point where the work’s first readers pick up the book and start to unroll what Virgil has wrapped in darkness. That is when things really hot up, and start to happen. That is where the action really leads. FURTHER READING The best introductory works on narratology are by its two most celebrated practitioners: Genette (1980) and Bal (1985). Readers interested in the subject of the present chapter would do well to supplement it with some of the essays in Fowler (2000a): the volume represents the Lebenswerk of this fascinating critic, and in particular the famous essay on ‘deviant focalisation’ in Virgil can be seen as complementary to the short section above on point of view. Note also, on mise en abyme and self-reflexivity, Fowler (2000b). It is a limitation for Latin studies that most of the groundbreaking work on narratology and classical studies (mentioned in the next paragraph) is exclusively based on Greek narrative texts. Recent studies of Latin poetry that convincingly develop some of Don Fowler’s concepts are Laird (1999) and Lowrie (2009). There is a bibliography of other introductory works, and of classical analyses influenced by narrative theory, in De Jong and Sullivan (1994). See also Rengakos and Grethlein (2009); De Jong (2014) (note that the Italian edition, De Jong (2017), unlike De Jong (2014), has various examples taken from the Aeneid); Rengakos and Tsitsiou-Chelidoni (2012). De Jong (1987) and (2001) offer between them the most extensive narratological treatment of any classical author to date. The most inspiring single volume on narrative poetics and classical antiquity is probably Lowe (2000), again, in spite of the title, a Greek-only treatment. There is a clear 13

See Chapter 22b.

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need for more discussion of the Aeneid in the context of critical theories of narrative, especially if one considers the importance of the art of narrative in the history of Virgil commentaries, ancient and modern, and the growing interest in comparisons between Virgilian epic and tragedy (see Hardie, Chapter 18 in this volume) as well as historiography (an area where narratological approaches have already offered much of interest). For psychoanalytic narrative theory, see especially Brooks (1984) and the more introductory Brooks (1994). Compare the approach to narrative desire and deferral in Reed (2016). Another growing area of interest is the authority and reliability of internal narrators, with relevance to ideology and the authorial voice of the epic: Ahl (1989); Casali (2010). These papers investigate some of the most prolific narrators and speakers in the poem (Aeneas and the Greeks Evander and Sinon).

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The poetics of narrative described in Chapter  22a concerns the genre of epic. The genre can be very synthetically defined as a presentation of the past, where the events are perceived as belonging to a deep, heroic past but, thanks to their exemplarity and relevance, empower the poet to make them vivid and present.1 Some of the texts discussed by Don Fowler in the previous chapter are of special importance in this context: we know that Virgil performed books 2, 4 and 6 of his epic in progress before Octavian and the imperial family.2 In that particular and famous setting, one can speculate, expressions like ‘this is the man, the very man about whom you hear so often, who is promised to you’ (6.791) and ‘unspeakable grief, o queen, you invite me to reopen’ (2.3) must have taken on a special tension:  the first, with its marked deictic, being performed in front of Octavian, and the second in front of Octavia, who will later collapse under the intense pathos of the Marcellus passage (6.872–86). Beginning and end of this reading performance must also have been heavily accented in situ, the beginning being the simple (but now self-reflexive) statement ‘they all stood silent, their faces and attention turned to the speaker’ (2.1), the end the funeral eulogy of Marcellus, the most recent event alluded to in the entire epic, and presumably with a quotation of Augustus’ own funeral address for his young successor. This is a marked instance of the effect on the audience and, in a live performance, an aural context; but to a certain extent (as Fowler has explained), every reading of a text is a performance. Then we can start from the idea that Virgilian epic is a presentation and ‘presentification’ of a deep past. But what about parts of the epic where the narrator is not so much telling a story as crafting a description? In modern

1 2

For a refinement of this approach to Homeric poetics, see Bakker (1997). Indeed, so famous is this episode in Virgil’s career that it sometimes has a monopoly over the entire issue of the audience of the epic in antiquity, a topic that deserves more discussion, given the impressive amount of evidence.

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criticism the term ‘ecphrasis’ (‘description’) is used specifically to refer to a literary description of a work of art. In ancient criticism, the term belongs to a much wider area of reference, covering both the visual force and the emotional impact of verbal art (not only poetry but historiography and rhetoric).3 Heroic epic, in particular, was held to be a narrative form oriented towards the production of visual effects and the recreation of an eyewitness reaction to events. Virgil is particularly famous as a maker of impressive descriptions, including, for example, a dramatic study of a brook (G. 1.104ff.), a bold vision of monstrous snakes swimming in the Dardanelles (Aen. 2.203ff.), a miniature of a tame stag (Aen. 7.483ff.). Didactic hexameter and heroic epic are similarly very concerned with visual impact, although with divergent emphases: didactic poetry focuses on the typical and repeatable, while heroic poetry is a narrative of striking events, traditionally geared towards the grandiose and the violent. Yet in both forms, the challenge of representation is at stake: how adequate is the verbal medium to convey an impression of what is being described (whether the context requires that this be vivid and fresh, or realistic and typical, or unique and shocking)? More specifically, with regard to ecphrasis in the modern sense of a verbal recreation of a visual work of art, verbal representation tests its own limits through a confrontation between literary description and representations in other media. In this case the verbal message will be measured against both direct perceptions of reality (or visual imagination) and the model of the visual arts. The present essay is concerned only with ecphrasis in the modern sense. The main texts are a series of substantial Virgilian descriptions of artefacts, including engraved cups (Ecl. 3.36–47), a temple in northern Italy (G. 3.16–36), a temple in Carthage (Aen. 1.453–93), a temple in Cumae (Aen. 6.14–34), and a shield (Aen. 8.625–731). The interest of these passages does not lie in any documentary value; there is no reason to suspect that Virgil attempts to describe actual artefacts in any of them, and no Roman reader would have imagined that they could actually go and see these objects. The cup is part of the bucolic world; the Italian temple is a symbolic project, not a real monument; the temples at Cumae and Carthage exist only in a narrative set eleven centuries before the Augustan age, and ten centuries before the total destruction of Carthage; the shield is manufactured by the god of metalwork. The reader can visit these monuments only with the aid of the poet’s voice. The Palatine Temple of Apollo, the most magnificent of then recent Roman monuments, is

3

In general, see Webb (2009).

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only briefly glimpsed in miniature on the surface of an engraved shield (8.720).4 The inclusion in a general Companion to Virgil of a chapter devoted to these relatively brief texts may be justified by the relevance of the topic of ecphrasis to a number of concerns of recent criticism. In ecphrasis the narrative action is frozen; modern Virgilian criticism is very interested in the dynamics of narrative and plot.5 In ecphrasis, art rather than action and character becomes the focus; an interest in artistic self-reflexivity is prominent in the study of classical literature. Finally, ecphrasis functions readily as the site of a confrontation between different ways of representing and imagining the real world. Our topic thus interacts with three major issues: the limits of narrative, the dimension of reflexivity, and the various approaches to realism and representation. Competition One important reason why ecphrasis matters is that Augustan culture placed a strong emphasis on the visual. It has been shown that architecture and figurative art were focal areas for major cultural change in Rome; one cannot discuss issues like the Hellenization of the Roman aristocracy, the formation of an Augustan political discourse, or the link between patronage and intellectuals without realizing that literature, and poetry in particular, could not pretend to the same degree of importance. As a leading verbal artist of this age, Virgil must have felt a pressure to define his art in competition with the claims of other artistic media. His project of a temple in Georgics 3 offers Caesar a centrality and visibility superior even to the sophisticated strategies of public architecture. The reuse of Greek works of art of various styles and provenance, a highly visible feature of Augustan Rome, is paralleled through devices of intertextuality: in the proem to Georgics 3 Virgil takes on the challenge of imported Greek statues (Parii lapides, spirantia signa, ‘Parian marbles, statues that breathe’, 34) and images of the gods (Cynthius, 36) through his own appropriation of the praise poetry of Pindar and Callimachus; a marble temple of words requires the importation of Greek models, poetic instead of sculptural. The Carthaginian temple shows, in the reinvented world of twelfth-century bc Phoenician culture, the foundational role of art and myth in the process of colonization and acculturation, and the iconography inevitably draws on Homeric epic. The shield of 4

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The Caesarian ‘temple’ at the beginning of Georgics 3 may also allude to the Palatine temple of Apollo (a monument already under construction in the late 30s). On narratology, see Fowler, Chapter 22a, in this volume.

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Aeneas mediates between the poetic tradition of the shield of Achilles and the contemporary world of real historical reliefs, honorary shields, victory monuments and imperial cult. Literary Reflexivity The visit to the Carthaginian temple illustrates the link between ecphrasis and artistic self-consciousness. The narrative function motivating the long description is provided in Aeneas’ first reaction to the images:  ‘even here there is fame and pity for our suffering; this will bring salvation to us’ (sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi, | sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. | solve metus: feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem); and the figurative programme of the temple does indeed show that the Trojan War is famous in Carthage. When Aeneas comments on the bellaque iam fama totum vulgata per orbem (‘warfare now famous through the whole world’, 1.457), he has some reason to be surprised  – seven years after the fall of Troy, Phoenician wanderers have brought their repertory of images of the Trojan War to create a new monument in North Africa, but his readers have even more reason to pause. The Virgilian hero is meeting his own past, but this act of recollection through images is inscribed in a literary work where the past is also equivalent to the literary tradition. The temple at Carthage represents famous events narrated in the Iliad and the Epic Cycle; in fact, the events are ‘famous’ through poetry and only secondarily – despite the riches of the Greek figurative tradition – through art. Thus the line could be tendentiously paraphrased ‘wars made known through the whole Epic Cycle’, orbis being the Roman equivalent of the Greek κύκλος, and vulgata meaning ‘trite’, ‘commonplace’, a frequent judgement in ancient criticism on the quality of the Epic Cycle’s predictable rehearsal of its subject matter. So the description of the scenes of the Trojan War acts as a foil for Virgilian poetics. Virgil will invent a new ‘Trojan’ epic, an Aeneid which takes its point of departure from the Epic Cycle and particularly from the narrative tradition of post-war ‘homecomings’, but which then strays to assert a powerfully original project: a ‘Trojan’ epic about the foundation of a new order and the recuperation of the Greek legacy within a different culture; a Roman epic poem which is also a charter myth for Roman epic. Aeneas, the spectator of the Trojan War in the Carthaginian temple, will become the narrator of its final chapter by the end of Aeneid 1. The new poem needs the Cyclic tradition, but it is not simply a Roman continuation; it confronts the Cycle at an oblique angle. The images in the temple are thus represented in the narrative, but also framed and miniaturized by the narrative. Their inclusion through ecphrasis 416

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invites the reader to consider the relevance of this secondary field of reference to the primary narrative; but the included description is compressed in such a way that a limit is established and a hierarchy of importance is reasserted. This is particularly significant given that epic ecphrases have potential to become ‘main stories’ (for example, the pseudo-Hesiodic ‘Shield of Heracles’ starts as heroic narrative but the narrative is then swallowed by a shield description) and that a particular tradition of modern epic (the so-called epyllia, poems like Moschus’ Europa and Catullus 64) had already exemplified the alternative:  narratives that could be sidetracked and even engulfed by digressive descriptions. There are similar implications in the case of the other major ecphrases of the Aeneid, the shield of Aeneas and the doors of the temple of Apollo at Cumae. In the second passage, the Sibyl interrupts the viewing of the mythological scenes with the wry comment, ‘this is not the right time for looking at such things’ (non hoc ista sibi tempus spectacula poscit, 6.37). This is, of course, a self-conscious nod towards the narrative problem of motivation and deferral (see below), but it may also be relevant that the ecphrasis contains allusions to Alexandrian and neoteric models (Catullus 64, Callimachus), texts in which digression, excursus and inset ecphrasis notoriously paralyse or thwart the progress of a ‘natural’ epic narrative.6 The narrator has just paused to disclose what would have been Daedalus’ choice of images  – an untold story behind unseen representations. Virgil gestures towards the power of ecphrasis to branch out in the direction of alternative stories, before intervening to assert control over the progress of the narrative. The shield of Aeneas looks back to the shield of Achilles and to the traditions of Homeric interpretation, but it is also relevant that the diction is often Ennian, and that the subject matter has exactly the same temporal span as Ennius’ Annals, from the birth of Romulus to the Roman triumphs of the present age (the second quarter of the second century bc for Ennius, the 20s bc for Virgil) – and that the structure of the description is chronological or, in other words, annalistic (see pugnataque in ordine bella, ‘the wars fought in chronological sequence’, 8.629). This last feature stands in contrast to the structure of the Aeneid, a new epic centred on a very short and dramatic sequence of events instead of a long, unbroken annalistic narrative. Significantly, the temple in Carthage offers Iliacas ex ordine pugnas (‘battles at Troy in order’, 1.456), but what the narrator in 6

The story of the Minotaur looks back to Catullus 64, and the description of the Labyrinth, a work of Daedalus replicated in the new artwork by the same master, recalls Callimachus’ ‘Hymn to Delos’, 310–15.

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fact gives us looks like a non-chronological and emotional selection of the images, mediated through Aeneas as focalizer;7 in other words, Greek epic is reused in the Carthaginian ecphrasis in accordance with the poetics of the Aeneid, while the appropriation of Ennius and traditional Roman epic in the ecphrasis of the shield reflects a kind of antagonistic poetics, a road not taken. In all three cases, the issue of how to acknowledge influence is inseparable from the issue of how to resist it. Interpretation and the Viewer More than any other ancient poet, Virgil stresses the importance of the viewing subject in the construction of visual meaning. The interpretation of the ornament of the cups in Eclogue 3 is the subject of a question in the text and, like the riddles at the end of the poem, the correct reading of the images presupposes learning and interpretation, setting a challenge to the reader. The scenes of Iliadic themes in the temple at Carthage are related to Aeneas’ experience of them; both a viewer and a part of the representation, Aeneas first marvels (miratur, 1.456), then sees (videt, 456; videbat, 466), and finally recognizes (agnoscit lacrimans, 470; se quoque … agnovit, 488) – the use of agnosco shows that the reception of the images is inseparable from a set of previous experiences. This contrasts sharply with Aeneas’ passive and superficial involvement in the visual disclosures of the shield; this ecphrasis in the future tense allows no personal cooperation on the part of the viewer: oculos per singula volvit, miraturque … et clipei non enarrabile textum … talia per clipeum Volcani, dona parentis, miratur rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet. (Aen. 8.618–19, 625, 729–30) he turns his eyes over each piece, in admiration … and the shield’s indescribable fabric … he admires such things on the shield made by Vulcan, his mother’s gift, rejoicing in their depiction of unknown events.

The centre of the shield is occupied by Caesar Augustus, a man who is a distant but recurring promise to Aeneas (hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis, | Augustus Caesar, 6.791–2). But we are not told whether Aeneas remembers seeing the man’s image in the Underworld. It is therefore striking that the princeps, included in the very centre of the visual artefact,

7

Cf. Chapter 22a, pp. 407–8.

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and displaced one millennium into the future, is represented as performing the act not only of viewing but of recognizing: ipse sedens niveo candentis limine Phoebi dona recognoscit populorum aptatque superbis postibus; incedunt victae longo ordine gentes. (Aen. 8.720–2) He himself, sitting at the snowy threshold of shining Phoebus, reviews the people’s gifts, and hangs them at his proud door; the vanquished races move in long array.

Thus Augustus is both the central figure on and the ideal spectator of the shield; as he watches the bringing of spoils and the triumphal procession, he trespasses over several layers of representation and becomes the privileged observer of the divine shield and of the Virgilian narrative itself. The ‘gifts’ to be affixed to the doorposts were typically shields; the reader can imagine Aeneas watching a shield whose umbilical point is Augustus examining a shield. (In a symmetrical mise en abyme, the artist Vulcan has ‘fashioned shield[s] from heaven’ (lapsa ancilia caelo | extuderat, 8.664–5) and the wording collapses the difference between the two levels of narration and description.) The visibility of the narrative (cernere erat, 8.676) is of course a source of paradoxes. The princeps, represented atop a warship (stans celsa in puppi, 8.680) and seated at the gleaming vantage point of the Palatine temple (sedens … limine Phoebi, 8.720) has a panoramic view of Roman history, a concentric construct in which he is both centre and summit (compare in medio (Aen. 8.675) and in medio mihi Caesar erit templumque tenebit (G. 3.16)), both ultimate protagonist and observer, while the reader is rewarded with a teasing videres (‘you could/might have seen’, Aen. 8.676). The appearance of the Actian leader is also marked by the absence of ecphrastic markers. When he is introduced (Augustus agens … stans … invectus … sacrabat … sedens) he is the active subject in the representation, and the epic ecphrasis at this point eschews two devices that regularly mark images as the products of artifice:  there is no mention of the artist as author of the image (no fecerat or addit or extuderat) and no reminder of the materiality of what is being described. Amid a golden sea (aurea … fluctu, 8.672; auroque … fluctus, 8.677), glittering silver dolphins (argento clari delphines, 8.673) and bronze rostra (classis aeratas, 8.675), Augustus is just himself, a maker of history not an artist-made icon. Ecphrasis and History Yet this political function of ecphrasis is accompanied by a sense of reduction, of containment, of marginalization. The shield of Aeneas is a substitute 419

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for an alternative epic poem, a poem that could have been Ennian, historical, written in tableaux, in sequential order, and focused on praise. We briefly encounter Catiline persecuted by infernal Furies, Agrippa leading his marines in martial alliteration (arduus agmen agens, 8.683); but Virgil offers this concentrated essence of a historical-epic poetics through the miniaturizing device of ecphrasis. Only in the central blazon of the shield is Aeneas able to discover Rome, the future city which has been reshaped by Augustus into a counterpart of the prosperous town immortalized by Homer in the anonymous emblems of the cosmic shield of Achilles.8 Yet, even when the internal viewer is a perfect model reader of the images, Virgil suggests that viewing is a creative activity and that meaning is a matter for negotiation. Nobody can know more about the Trojan battles than Aeneas but even he, the viewer of the temple of Juno in Carthage, can be seen to be a biased focalizer. His interpretation of the images as a sign of compassion and respect for the Trojan catastrophe is indeed reinforced by powerful contextual pointers – his solidarity with Dido; Dido’s tragic view of the conflict; and her source of information, the anti-war Greek/Trojan hero Teucer. But there are also counter-indications which set up a spiral of historical ironies: the ecphrasis is located in a temple of Juno, for whom the extinction of Troy is a triumph; the tale of Trojan empire and Trojan downfall is linked in turn to Greek triumph and Greek disaster (in the Nostoi, this is anticipated by the alarming image of Athena Ilias at 1.482);9 to the rise of Carthage and the fall of the Carthaginian empire; after a span of a thousand years, a war started by Juno’s persecution of the Romans and Dido’s curse on Aeneas will wipe out the citadel of Carthage, and a Roman general, a new and different Aeneas, will find tears of compassion for the mortality of empires (even Rome) at the very moment that his army methodically sacks and razes Carthage to the ground. Scipio will quote a Homeric passage on the destruction of Troy,10 thus completing the cycle of destruction foreshadowed in the Virgilian ecphrasis. His compassion for the Punic 8

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The panels on the shield of Achilles possess a generalizing significance, and therefore prompted attempts at identification or allegorization already in the classical period; when Virgil substitutes a contemporary Rome for the Homeric image of a prosperous and just town, he completes through imitation a process already initiated by the Homeric exegesis of his age. Cf. Hardie (1986). The goddess is represented as hostile to a Trojan supplication, in a precise counterpart to an Iliadic episode (Il. 6.311), but the description of the statue anticipates a prodigy that will announce, on the night of the sack of Troy, that Athena is now going to persecute the Greeks for their impious behaviour. The murder of Troilus, one of the most gruesome images in the temple, is both a precondition for the capture of Troy and the cause of divine retribution against Achilles. See Polybius’ witness in Appian, Punica 1, 32.

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city ironically complements Aeneas’ compassionate reading of the figurative programme. Finally, perhaps (though Rome is still an empire, not a ruin), a Roman poet will write the Carthaginian temple into his poem and recreate – with bitter self-consciousness? – an ur-Carthaginian culture whose central hearth is the charter myth of Roman civilization: Troy. Motivation and Deferral The problems which ecphrasis imposes on a narrative poet are inseparable from its attractions; indeed, ecphrasis is practised by epic poets like Homer, Apollonius, Catullus and Virgil precisely because it poses a challenge for the poetics of narrative. The description of visual artefacts occupies a different level of complexity from description of natural objects within the world of the story. The poet manipulates words in response to images; two semiotic systems partially overlap, and in the process both images and words reveal their communicative potential as well as their limits. As a result of this dynamic, ecphrasis can incorporate its opposite, the retelling of events, sounds and movement. A rhetoric peculiar to ecphrasis suggests (often as a closural device) the paradox of cinematic silhouettes (audetque viris concurrere virgo … regina … incessit, 1.493–7) and sonic tapestries (saevitque canum latratus in auras, ‘the savage barking of dogs rises to the sky’, 5.257). The textual medium explores the limits of visual communication as an indirect way of testing its own material limitations. The economy of epic action is both unsettled and, more subtly, reinstated by ecphrasis. The description freezes the progress of the narrative: Achilles and Aeneas cannot go back to the battlefield – where their aid is urgently needed – before the text has exhausted its verbalization of the figured shield. But epic poetics works precisely through the tension (meaningfully explored in the Goethe-Schiller discussion on ‘epic deferral’)11 between achieving closure and pursuing fullness of detail. The Aeneid is both strongly oriented towards an end, and constituted by the delays, interruptions, and diversions that help to put off that desired end. The immediate effect of the description of the shield is a sense of conspicuous consumption: the practical function of the episode, that of supplying the hero with a divine shield, is disproportionate to the effort expended by the narrator in visualizing the work of art. Virgil wittily comments on this disparity when he shows his Cyclopes labouring at the forge, hammering the huge shield into shape and working in time (illi inter sese multa vi bracchia tollunt | in numerum, ‘with great 11

See Hahn and Schmid (1981: 210–12).

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force they each raise their arms in measured rhythm’, 8.452–3), just as the epic poet is labouring at his rhythmic epic lines to shape the forthcoming verbal artwork. The earliest image on the shield reminds us of this labour of fashioning: the she-wolf licks the twins into shape (corpora fingere lingua, 8.634). In fact, when all is said and done, the shield will only briefly resurface as a talismanic, blazing sign (10.261–2, 271)  and as a very efficient defensive weapon (10.884, 12.739–41) when the human sword of Turnus is shattered by the divine shield. The effort of Vulcan’s team of blacksmiths, who have put off the making of a divine thunderbolt (8.426–32) for this more important task, leads to Aeneas’ heroic achievement; of course the vir will need arma – the challenge is gigantic, in that Virgil must mobilize Vulcan to create a worthy successor to the shield manufactured for Achilles in Iliad 18, the most impressive epic description ever. There is an economic exchange between goal-oriented action and deferral:  deferral, and description in particular, can slow down but also intensify the energy of the plot. On the other hand, the apparent inertia of descriptive inserts can be recuperated as a coded implementation of the main narrative. Turnus kills Pallas and we catch a glimpse of the booty, a sword belt engraved with the slaughter of the Egyptian bridegrooms by their wives, the fifty Danaids, on their wedding night (10.497–9).12 The description interrupts a dramatic moment in which Turnus achieves a success that will ultimately determine his own death, as well as the end of the poem. The image functions as an interlude but it also triggers a search for motivation: a plurality of meaningful associations easily suggests itself. For example – and only by way of example – the image of the slaughter is a nefas (10.497) and Turnus assumes responsibility for his action of slaying Pallas; finally, he will be killed by Aeneas when Aeneas sees the sword belt again. Moreover, the story is an Argive myth: Turnus himself is of Argive descent. It is a story of death disrupting a marriage, as befits the fate of both Pallas and Turnus. And some Roman readers could have seen a link between the first owner Pallas, eponymous hero of the Palatine hill, and the Portico of the Danaids recently inaugurated by Augustus in the precinct of the Palatine temple of Apollo; the figurative programme there was presumably associated with ideas of guilt and infernal expiation. To draw out this last point, Virgil exploits to the full the potential for prefiguration offered by ecphrastic descriptions. The shield is of course a foreshadowing of Roman history, bridging the gap between Aeneas’ family and the triumph of Augustus. The parallel vision of the future in Aeneid 6 itself has ecphrastic qualities, and one readily senses that the parade of 12

On the episode, see Barchiesi (2015).

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Roman heroes, whose visible features are identified by Anchises (aspice …), has something to do with the growing taste for statues and heroic images of the past in Augustan Rome. The ecphrasis in Carthage appears to be merely retrospective, but the context of the poem acts like a powerful spotlight to create effects of foreshadowing. Almost all the images will, in one way or another, be reduplicated or inverted in the second half of the poem. The confrontation of Achilles and Priam (1.487) is a case in point: not only did Aeneas actually see Priam die (Aeneas appears, precisely, in the role of a viewer at 2.499ff.), but the Homeric confrontation of Achilles and Priam will be replayed, with a difference, in the final scene of the Aeneid, when Aeneas, a different Achilles (alius Achilles, 6.89),13 kills Turnus as he reenacts Priam’s supplication (‘in the name of your old father …’). In Virgil’s dense epic narrative every descriptive pause opens itself to similar effects; a description like that of a chlamys embroidered with the abduction of Ganymede (5.250–7) might seem to withstand contextual motivation,14 but even this image’s resistance to narrative functionality yields to rereading:  Trojan mythology is linked to the central preoccupation of Book 5, continuity with the past, and the eroticism of the story of Jupiter and Ganymede prompts an association with the main love story of the poem, that of Nisus and Euryalus (5.294ff., a few lines after the ecphrasis). This whole range of effects is perfectly familiar to a reader who comes to it from the traditions of modern narrative and from contemporary studies of narrative poetics. Finally, the problem of ‘who views the images?’ is intertwined with the problem of ‘who tells the story?’, and helps the reader to realize the importance of point of view and subjectivity. When the description has a focalizer, that is to say, a character in the narrative who views the artefact, the reader needs to be aware that her perception of the images is mediated by the narrative voice, or voices, as well as by the perspective of the focalizer. This complexity cannot be isolated from the more general complexity of Virgilian narrative, and the problem of perceiving individual points of view against the background of a unified authorial vantage point is one familiar to readers and critics of Virgilian epic.

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The language of the Sibyl is, unsurprisingly, ambiguous and teasing. She offers Aeneas a gloomy preview of the second half of the Aeneid as a replay of the Trojan War, and in that context the expected reference is to ‘a new Achilles’ (i.e. Turnus as a powerful enemy of the Trojans), but since the normal Latin for this would be alter Achilles, while alius usually conveys an implication of difference, the prophecy also unfolds a reading of the story as a new but different Iliad. Cf. Traina (1989: 145–51). Yet note the range of implications, especially ideological, teased out by Hardie (2002).

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FURTHER READING General An important work for the critical approach and wide-ranging discussions and for the selection of Greek and Roman materials is Friedlaender (1962 [1912]), which represents the origin of modern engagement with ancient poetry about art. See also, for general orientation, Fantuzzi, Reitz, and Egelhaaf-Gaiser (2017); Bühler (1960); Ravenna (1974); Perutelli (1979); Baxandall (1985); Leach (1988); Hollander (1988); Bartsch (1989); Fowler (1991); Krieger (1992); Goldhill and Osborne (1994); Laird (1993); Heffernan (1993). The most recent and comprehensive treatment of the rhetorical tradition is Webb (2009). The area of interdisciplinary work between visual and verbal is well represented by the innovative work of Jaś Elsner and of Michael Squire: Elsner (1994) and (2007); Squire (2015). See also Bartsch and Elsner (2007). On ecphrastic passages in Virgil, see Barchiesi (1999); Putnam (1998a). On interactions between Virgilian ecphrasis and Augustan monuments, see Barchiesi (2005); Heslin (2015). See also Kania (2016b). For orientation on the poetics of ecphrasis in modern literature, see Hamon (1993).

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23 E L L E N OL I E N S I S

Sons and Lovers: Sexuality and Gender in Virgil’s Poetry

One way or another, sexuality has always been a topic of interest to Virgil’s readers. In his life of the poet, Suetonius reports that Virgil inclined towards the love of boys and that he addressed a favourite named Alexander under the name ‘Alexis’ in the Second Eclogue (VSD 9);1 Martial pretends to believe that it was this beautiful slave (pulcherrimus, Mart. 8.55.13) who excited the poet to compose his Aeneid. But it was only in the 1980s, in tandem with the rise of feminism and the discovery of theory within classics, that scholarly interest in the topic of ‘sexuality and gender’ in antiquity really took off.2 The ‘and’ here covers a whole range of questions: for example, how is sexual difference represented in antiquity; how is it implicated with other kinds of socially constructed differences; is ‘sexuality’ a discrete concept or is it still awaiting its ‘invention’? I will begin this chapter by surveying Virgil’s Eclogues (with side glances at the Aeneid) to see what light they can shed on some of these issues. I will then turn to my central project, which is to sketch some of the ways sexual and gender differences help to articulate Virgil’s poetry. My focus throughout, in keeping with Virgil’s, is skewed towards men and includes women chiefly as their sexuality is viewed and appropriated by men; this means that this chapter includes the desire of men for men but not the desire of women for women. Symmetries and Dissymmetries Virgil’s first full-length portrait of a lover presents a homoerotic attachment. The Corydon of Eclogue 2 is modelled on the Cyclops of Theocritus’ Eleventh Idyll; but where Theocritus’ Cyclops is in love with the nymph Galatea, Virgil’s country bumpkin dotes on the ‘lovely boy’ Alexis (formose 1 2

On the sources and transmission of the Suetonian vita, see Stok (2010). For a good introduction to this history, and the debates within it, see Rabinowitz and Auanger (2002).

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puer, 45), a fellow slave who is his ‘master’s toy’ (delicias domini, 2).3 This portrait, as we have seen, was accorded special authority by ancient readers. Whatever its biographical resonance, it is true that the complaint of Virgil’s passionate shepherd stands at the origin of a rich tradition of homoerotic pastoral.4 Parallel to this tradition there developed readings that seek to circumscribe or erase the homoerotic content of the poem (the Fourth or ‘Messianic’ Eclogue may have helped to assure the survival of Virgil’s works, but the Second Eclogue posed significant problems to Virgil’s Christian readers).5 To this day, the presumption of heteroeroticism is so strong that students of Latin regularly mistake ‘Alexis’ for a girl’s name, even though the very first word of the eclogue, formosum (the masculine form of the erotically charged adjective ‘lovely’), unambiguously signals that Alexis is a boy, a kind of male counterpart to the ‘lovely Amaryllis’ celebrated in the First Eclogue (formosam … Amaryllida, 5). Still, it is worth noting that Virgil’s Corydon (like Suetonius’ Virgil, who was rumoured to have had an affair with a woman named Plotia:  VSD 10) is not exclusively a lover of boys; one of Corydon’s complaints identifies Alexis as the latest episode in an erotic history that includes a girl: ‘wouldn’t it have been better to endure Amaryllis’ bitter temper and proud disdain, better [to love] Menalcas?’ (nonne fuit satius tristis Amaryllidis iras | atque superba pati fastidia? nonne Menalcan?, Ecl. 2.14–15). A  similar impartiality (this time with a heteroerotic amour in the foreground – Gallus is in love with Lycoris) is manifest in Eclogue 10, where the obligatory love interest of Gallus’ Arcadian reverie may be supplied with equal facility by ‘Phyllis or Amyntas’ (sive mihi Phyllis sive esset Amyntas, 37). Again, in the singing contest of Eclogue 3, Damoetas celebrates Galatea, and Menalcas answers with praises of Amyntas; and while the gender of the beloved is not irrelevant here (for example, Amyntas’ passion for hunting would be unseemly in Galatea), this difference is largely submerged in the symmetrical design of the contest, which invites us to compare not couples but couplets. 3

4

5

Alexis is not inappropriately termed a ‘sex-slave’ by Leigh (2016), in an essay exploring Virgil’s mystification of the conditions of slavery in Eclogue 2 in particular. For an important challenge to the comfortable assumption that in erotic contexts the default sense of ‘boy’ is ‘young attractive male’ (not ‘child’), see Richlin (2015). E.g. Walt Whitman’s aptly titled ‘Calamus’ poems (where calamus is at once the pastoral and the sexual instrument). See e.g. Erasmus’ sanitized reading (designed to demonstrate how a clever teacher can make use even of potentially corrupting texts) of Eclogue 2 in De Ratione Studii and Spenser’s ‘correction’ of Virgil (with E. K.’s moralizing commentary) in the The Shepheardes Calender, with Goldberg (1992: 63–6). On the reception of the eclogue see further Fredericksen (2015).

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In this regard, Virgil’s Eclogues conform to the conventions of Latin love poetry and also to the mores (though not necessarily the behaviour) of significant segments of Roman society in the first century bc as far as the sexual behaviour of men is concerned.6 Catullus sends kiss-laden poems to Juventius as well as Lesbia, Tibullus sighs for Marathus as well as Delia, and Horace accuses himself with perfect impartiality of loving ‘a thousand girls, a thousand boys’ (mille puellarum, puerorum mille furores, Sat. 2.3.325); Maecenas is reputed to have been infatuated with the actor Bathyllus, Cicero to have demanded kisses of his slave Tiro, and Catiline to have debauched (among numerous others) one Tongilius – and Maecenas, Cicero, and Catiline were married men.7 In the next century, Quintilian would lament that Roman children learn immorality at home, where they are exposed to ‘our mistresses and our male concubines’ (nostras amicas, nostros concubinos, Inst. 1.2.8); here it is very evidently the father’s sexual indulgence, not his ‘bisexuality’ (a concept without meaning in this context) that Quintilian finds reprehensible. Contemporary Western culture tends to categorize people according to their sexual orientation. But in Virgil’s Rome, what counted was the role a man took in intercourse, insertive or receptive, the former identified as properly ‘active’ and ‘masculine’ and the latter as ‘passive’ and ‘feminine’.8 Sexual intercourse was articulated in terms of social hierarchies, and the ‘senior’ partner (older, higher-status) was expected to maintain and enact his seniority in bed. So long as Gallus played the man’s part, there would be nothing scandalous, and indeed nothing exceptional, about his enjoying an Amyntas as well as a Phyllis. If there was an equivalent to ‘homophobia’ in Rome, it attached to men who failed to act ‘like men’, that is (by definition), men who behaved ‘like women’ (adopted behaviours conventionally ascribed to women); their ‘unmanly’ behaviour might include but was not limited to embracing the sexual ‘passivity’ proper to women (compare the suggestive viri muliebria pati, Sall. Cat. 13.3).9 A  man who succumbed to his passions or devoted 6

7

8 9

The sexual behaviour of women is another story. In Virgil’s poetry, women’s desire for men typically surfaces as a problem, while women’s desire for women is completely erased. On female homoeroticism in antiquity, see Brooten (1998); Rabinowitz and Auanger (2002). Catull. 48, 99; Tibull. 1.4.81–2; Tac. Ann. 1.54 (on Maecenas and Bathyllus); Pliny, Epist. 7.4 (on Cicero and Tiro); Cic. Cat. 2.4 (on Catiline and Tongilius). I adopt the relatively value-free terms ‘insertive’ and ‘receptive’ from Williams (2010). However, while antiquity may have no category corresponding to the modern term ‘homosexual’, that does not mean that there were no people in antiquity whom we might (anachronistically) term ‘homosexual’, that is, men who desired men, women who desired women. On the possible existence (or development) of a (male) ‘homosexual’ subculture in Rome, see Richlin (1993); Taylor (1997); Frier (1999). Contrast CarlàUhink (2017), focusing on the reinforcement of the gender binary via ‘transgender

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himself to satisfying the demands of his body was ‘soft’, like the man who succumbed, in bed or on the battlefield, to another man. Hence the apparently paradoxical figure, to modern eyes, of the effeminate adulterer,10 a figure epitomized in the classical tradition by Paris, the Trojan shepherd whose uncontained passions launched the Trojan War. Within the Aeneid, enraged rivals will often compare the epic’s hero to his effeminate cousin, and with some warrant: both Paris and Aeneas come from the stereotypically luxurious East, steal other men’s brides, and enjoy the special favour of Venus. The dissonance between Aeneas’ manly character and his suspiciously effeminate role contributes to the peculiar texture of his characterization in the Aeneid. The Eclogues dramatize every level of ‘effeminate’ passivity. The Second Eclogue ends when the passionate Corydon masters himself, turning from the absent beloved to a censorious self-apostrophe:  ‘Ah, Corydon, Corydon, what madness has taken hold of you! The half-pruned vine awaits you on the elm’ (a, Corydon, Corydon, quae te dementia cepit! | semiputata tibi frondosa vitis in ulmo, 69–70). Corydon thus furnishes the answer to his purportedly rhetorical question, ‘What limit can be set on love?’ (quis enim modus adsit amori?, 68), by himself setting a limit on his passion and on the poem. In the exchange of rustic insults that precedes the singing contest of Eclogue 3, Menalcas charges Damoetas with theft, and Damoetas replies by accusing Menalcas of being something less than a man: ‘You ought to go easy on insulting men that way, remember! I know who [did] you while the goats looked on sideways’ (parcius ista viris tamen obicienda memento. | novimus qui te transversa tuentibus hircis, 7–8). Grammatical and sexual categories mesh here perfectly. Although Damoetas leaves out the verb, the juxtaposition of subjective qui and objective te makes his jibe sufficiently clear:  Menalcas is not a man but a boy, a puer, the passive object of another man’s desire.11 Let me underscore that what Damoetas’ accusation targets is Menalcas’ adoption of the object-position in sexual intercourse, not his ‘homosexual’ inclinations as manifested in his attachment to Amyntas. Indeed, far from confirming his ‘homosexuality’, Menalcas’ subsequent allusions to Amyntas may be taken to refute Damoetas’ accusation, as if to say, ‘Ask Amyntas if I’m a boy or a man!’ As the two shift from slinging insults to exchanging

10 11

discourse’ in antiquity. On the Roman tendency to equate (biological) sex with (grammatical) gender, see Corbeill (2015). See Edwards (1993: ch. 2). See Cucchiarelli (2012: 206).

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couplets, sexual parity is restored; puella and puer implicitly confirm the virile status of their respective lovers.12 On the other hand, while boys and girls may furnish equivalent erotic objects, they occupy different places in Roman culture. If we wanted to recast the Second Eclogue with a female beloved in place of Corydon’s Alexis, for example, we would have to come up with something to replace the poem’s central lines, where Corydon entices Alexis with the promise of music: ‘Together with me in the forest you’ll sing like Pan’ (mecum una in silvis imitabere Pana canendo, 31). ‘I have a pipe that Damoetas gave me’, Corydon goes on to boast, ‘saying with his dying breath “This now has you for its second [owner]” ’ (Damoetas dono mihi quam dedit olim | et dixit moriens: ‘te nunc habet ista secundum’, 37–8). In this generational model, Corydon proposes to bestow on Alexis the musical and sexual instruction he himself received as a boy from Damoetas.13 But the model is strictly pederastic. Girls are not presented with panpipes, for the good reason that this musical instrument is itself a girl:  a transformation of Syrinx, Pan’s elusive beloved. A formosus puer may grow up to be a pastoral singer who exchanges songs with his fellow shepherds; not so with a formosa puella. In the world of Virgilian pastoral, girls are not singers; they do not perform; and while they are sometimes quoted, we never hear them speak. This pastoral (and thoroughly traditional) bias is encapsulated in Gallus’ genderspecific fantasy of ‘Phyllis weaving garlands, Amyntas singing’ (serta mihi Phyllis legeret, cantaret Amyntas, Ecl. 10.41). When Silenus ransoms himself in the Sixth Eclogue, he offers his captors divergent gifts: for the boys, the knowledge of song; for the nymph Aegle, carnal knowledge (carmina quae vultis cognoscite; carmina vobis, | huic aliud mercedis erit, 25–6). Aegle is not part of the poetic exchange; her ‘payment’ will take place offstage. The exclusion is further illustrated by Virgil’s variation on Theocritus’ Idyll 2 in Eclogue 8: where Theocritus brings the bewitching Simaetha directly before us, Virgil substitutes a masculine singer, the shepherd Alphesiboeus, who impersonates a love-stricken girl for the occasion. The exclusion of women from poetic intercourse might be termed the enabling exclusion of Virgilian pastoral. As the First Eclogue opens, Meliboeus discovers Tityrus ‘reclining beneath the mantle of a spreading beech’ (patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi, 1), ‘teach[ing] the woods to re-echo “lovely Amaryllis” ’ (formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas, 5). The familiar scenario of the male singer celebrating his disembodied, 12

13

In Theoc. Id. 5 (Virgil’s primary model here), parity is less readily restored, since the first singer puts himself in the position of Virgil’s unspecified qui. Klein (1978: 9).

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disempowered female Muse (should we imagine that Tityrus has authored a book of poems entitled Lovely Amaryllis?)14 is soon complicated, however. It turns out that Amaryllis is not only a poetic pretext but a good housekeeper, a marked improvement, according to Tityrus, over the profligate Galatea, under whose regime he never managed to make any money. It was only ‘after Amaryllis took me, and Galatea let me go’ (postquam nos Amaryllis habet, Galatea reliquit, 30), that he succeeded in saving enough to purchase his freedom. Tityrus thus owes his freedom not only to the godlike young man in the city but also to his frugal Amaryllis; it is because she knows how to run a household that Tityrus can spend his time teaching the woods to echo her name. A similar distribution of roles underlies Meliboeus’ dilemma in Eclogue 7: quid facerem? neque ego Alcippen nec Phyllida habebam depulsos a lacte domi quae clauderet agnos, et certamen erat, Corydon cum Thyrside, magnum. (Ecl. 7.14–16) What was I to do? I had no Alcippe or Phyllis to pen the new-weaned lambs at home, and here there was a great contest on, Corydon against Thyrsis.

Meliboeus decides to neglect his duties and attend the contest. But what should interest us here is the role played by women in the shepherds’ domestic economy. Men can enjoy poetry with a clear conscience so long as there are women available to take care of the home. Let us note that the distinction between male and female here has partially displaced the (structurally homologous) distinction between free and slave. The shepherdslaves whose labour supports their masters’ leisure turn themselves into local masters by identifying slave women with the subordinate instrumentality that is their common lot. The paradigm is confirmed by its remarkable inversion in Book 8 of the Aeneid, where Venus seduces her husband Vulcan into supplying armour for her son (her son by her lover Anchises, not by Vulcan!). ‘Chained fast by eternal love’ (aeterno … devinctus amore, Aen. 8.394), Vulcan accedes to her request and then falls into her embrace. He rises early to do her bidding, at the hour, Virgil tells us, when a weaving woman stirs up the fire and rouses her servants to their spinning, all for the purpose of ‘keeping her husband’s bed chaste and rearing her little sons’ (castum ut servare cubile | coniugis et possit parvos educere natos, 412–13). The ironies multiply. The scene most obviously recalls Thetis’ embassy to Hephaestus in Iliad 18, but

14

On this paradigm, see Wyke (1987).

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it also bears traces of another Homeric episode featuring the god of fire: the story of how the lovers Aphrodite and Ares were trapped in the ‘unbreakable chains’ forged by Hephaestus (Od. 8.266–99). But in the Virgilian scene it is the faithful husband, not the adulterous wife, who is ‘chained’. And it is conscientious Vulcan, not inconstant Venus, who plays the part of the dutiful housewife.15 The opposition between masterful leisure and servile labour complicates the opposition between masculine and feminine in the Eclogues and also in Virgil’s Rome. Activity is central to the traditional conception of Roman virtus (‘manly excellence’). Leisure can be construed both as a masculine privilege and as a form of slack and effeminate self-indulgence; the selfdiscipline of a Vulcan is, accordingly, at once servile and manly.16 This complication is illustrated by a parallel grammatical oddity in the First and Second Eclogues. In the first, we might expect Tityrus to say ‘after I took Amaryllis, and abandoned Galatea’; instead, he identifies himself as the passive object of which the women dispose (postquam nos Amaryllis habet, Galatea reliquit, 30). Again, in the Second Eclogue, we might expect the dying Damoetas to say not ‘this pipe has you’ (te nunc habet ista, 38) but ‘this pipe is yours’ (i.e. tu nunc habes istam). In each case, the feminine instrument in some sense ‘possesses’ its masculine master. The Eclogues and Georgics The First Eclogue presents two versions of Amaryllis. The beloved who is celebrated by Tityrus as he ‘teach[es] the woods to re-echo “lovely Amaryllis” ’ is a figure of plenitude; in this foreshortened exchange, the name is no sooner sounded than it is resonantly returned. Amaryllis the prudent housekeeper, by contrast, is bound up with delayed but more tangible returns:  a hand weighed down with coins, the belated achievement of freedom (27–35). These two Amaryllises are emblematic of two strains within Virgilian pastoral, strains that might be termed, somewhat loosely, the pleasurable and the useful, or the pastoral and the georgic. Within the Eclogues, the housekeeper’s world of labour, economy and seasonality is never far from view. The farmer’s fruitful labour provides a contrastive backdrop to Corydon’s flower-laden song in the Second Eclogue; it is the sight of cattle dragging the plough home (aratra iugo referunt suspensa iuvenci, 66) that recalls the forlorn singer to his senses at the poem’s end. 15 16

See further Lada-Richards (2006). On active virtus, see e.g. Sall. Cat. 6.5, 7.5; on the paradoxes of mollitia, see Kennedy (1993: 38–9).

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In the foreground of the Eclogues, however, cattle are not yoked to the plough, drawing the straight lines of georgic verse, but free to wander as they graze. Accordingly, when Tityrus celebrates his benefactor, it is for enabling ‘my cows to wander, as you see, and me to play what I wish on my rustic pipe’ (meas errare boves, ut cernis, et ipsum | ludere quae vellem calamo … agresti, Ecl. 1.9–10). To the undirected activity denoted by verbs such as errare and ludere there seems to correspond a kind of pastoral sexuality: aberrant, unproductive, non-purposive, playful, pre- or extra-marital. Within this world, the perverse passion that makes Pasiphae wander (both in her mind and over the mountains; see Ecl. 6.47, 52) becomes material for a song that makes ‘Fauns and wild animals dance’ (in numerum Faunos ferasque … | ludere, Ecl. 6.27–8). There is little space for this kind of playful errancy within the Georgics. Although pastoral matters take up much of Georgics 3, which deals with animal husbandry (horses and cattle, sheep and goats), the emphasis is now squarely on production, of offspring and marketable goods such as cheese and wool. The roles uneasily conjoined in Tityrus’ Amaryllis, of housekeeper and beloved, are now rigorously separated. With her ugly head, enormous neck, shin-length dewlaps, big feet, and shaggy ears (G. 3.52–5), the cow Virgil recommends for breeding purposes is the very inverse of an erotic object, designed exclusively for use, not pleasure. Love is no longer fuel for communal song-making but a dangerous force threatening communal order. Where Tityrus could hymn ‘lovely Amaryllis’ without provoking the competitive rage of Meliboeus, in the Georgics two bulls lock horns in fierce battle over a ‘lovely heifer’ (formosa iuvenca, G. 3.219, a marked contrast to the breed cow), a passage that will be recalled in a simile that decorates the duel of Aeneas and Turnus, rivals for the hand of Lavinia, near the end of the Aeneid (12.715–24). The excessive heat of sexual passion may produce pastoral poetry, but it is inimical to georgic productivity. The best way to make your animals strong is to keep them chaste (non ulla magis viris industria firmat | quam Venerem et caeci stimulos avertere amoris, G. 3.209–10). Bulls should be isolated, since ‘the sight of a female wears away their strength bit by bit, and burns them’ (carpit enim viris paulatim uritque videndo | femina, 215–16). This devouring passion finds its external equivalent in the fiery plague (aestu, 479; ignea, 482) that supplies Book 3’s grim finale. Virgil’s closing image is of the contaminated hides and rotting fleeces of the plague-ridden animals, a deadly ‘clothing’ (invisos … amictus, 563) that, like the legendary poison-soaked garments wielded by Medea and Deianeira, consumes in fire all those it touches (contactos artus sacer ignis edebat, 566). 432

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This nightmare image of intercourse, contact breeding death, is balanced by the daydream of georgic productivity that concludes Book 2. The scene is notable for the disappearance of women and indeed of sexuality as such, which is displaced by the labour of agriculture. ‘The farmer parts the earth with the curved plough’ (agricola incurvo terram dimovit aratro, G. 2.513), an emblematic gesture that suffices to sustain ‘fatherland, small grandchildren, herds of cattle, and deserving bullocks’ (hinc patriam parvosque nepotes | sustinet, hinc armenta boum meritosque iuvencos, 514–15). It is as if this single seminal gesture completed the farmer’s labour; after this, it is not the farmer but ‘the year’ that is busy ‘without rest’, yielding its various fruits, both vegetable and animal (nec requies, quin aut pomis exuberet annus | aut fetu pecorum, 516–17, etc.). ‘Meanwhile’, the farmer enjoys the pleasures of a well-ordered home: interea dulces pendent circum oscula nati, casta pudicitiam servat domus, ubera vaccae lactea demittunt, pinguesque in gramine laeto inter se adversis luctantur cornibus haedi. (G. 2.523–6) Meanwhile his sweet children cling to his kisses, the chaste home guards its purity, cows let down milky udders, fat kids on plush grass wrestle in pairs with opposed horns.

No desire complicates these harmonies. Effectively absorbed by the ‘chaste house’ and the milk-rich cows, emblems of obedient sexuality and maternal abundance, the wife who produced the farmer’s ‘sweet children’ is nowhere to be seen. Even the animal life is carefully contained. Playful kids displace the vying bulls that will disrupt Book 3, while the multiple cows, diffusing the problem posed by the individual female (whether ‘lovely heifer’ or breed cow), image fecundity without sexuality. Conversely, when the wife does appear, it is neither as a sexual partner nor as a mother. In a vignette in Book 1 (introduced under the suggestive rubric ‘what to do at night’), the farmer cuts torches by firelight while his wife, ‘singing to lighten her long labour, runs the sharp comb across the loom’ (longum cantu solata laborem | arguto coniunx percurrit pectine telas, G. 1.293–4). While the description conjures up figures such as the seductive witch Circe, who likewise sings and weaves by night (compare Aen. 7.11–14), the context subtracts the woman’s sexuality and renders her harmless.17

17

The wife’s other activity, boiling down grape must (G. 1.295–6), provides an innocuous alternative to the drugged concoction the Homeric Circe offers her guests.

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The culmination of this tendency comes in the fourth and final book of the Georgics, where Virgil turns his attention to bees. These marvellous creatures propagate their kind without ‘indulging in intercourse’ (neque concubitu indulgent, G. 4.198); instead the females ‘themselves from leaves and sweet-scented grasses collect their children’ (ipsae e foliis natos, e suavibus herbis | ore legunt, 200–1), in a Golden Age fantasy of propagation as pre-agricultural ‘gathering’. The long mythological excursus on the adventures of Aristaeus (primordial beekeeper) that concludes the book operates according to a kind of poetic and sexual justice. Aristaeus loses his swarm of chaste bees because he fails to control his own sexuality – he pursues Orpheus’ bride Eurydice and causes her death; and he gets his bees back when he initiates the bizarre variation on asexual reproduction known as bougonia, wherein a bullock, its orifices chastely sealed, is pounded to death, producing a new swarm from its devastated but intact body.18 Although it is Aristaeus’ wayward desire for Eurydice that launches his troubles, the focus of mistrust here is not masculine but feminine sexuality.19 When Aristaeus descends into the waters, he returns in two senses to the source: to the home of his mother and to the source of all waters and hence of all life. This source is rewritten, however, as a masculine origin, derived from ‘father Oceanus’ (G. 4.382), to whom Cyrene bids her son pour a libation. Although it is Cyrene who ultimately tells her son what he actually needs to do to get his bees back, the labour of restoration centres on a consultation of the male deity Proteus, who recounts another descent, that of Orpheus into the Underworld in quest of his lost Eurydice. The fate of Orpheus suggests, moreover, that the displacement of Cyrene is essential to Aristaeus’ success. The first shades Orpheus encounters in the Underworld are those of mothers (matres, 475), and in the end he will be torn to pieces by enraged mothers (matres, 520; compare the love-maddened mares who rend Glaucus at G. 3.266–8). Orpheus is punished for ‘looking back’ – both for his inability to endure delay (the condition of agricultural success) and for his orientation towards the maternal source. In this georgic version of pastoral, repetition emerges as a reproductive failure:  Orpheus is a tragic Tityrus, forever sounding the name of his lost beloved. Aristaeus, the master of seasonal time, succeeds in making not words but bees. 18

19

G. 4.295–314. In the event, Aristaeus is instructed to perform a less extreme though still unconventional sacrifice (four bulls and four heifers, throats not sealed but cut, left to decay in a grove, coupled with propitiatory sacrifices to Orpheus and Eurydice; see G. 4.538–58). Agricultural production cannot be divorced, ideologically speaking, from sexual reproduction. For a nuanced discussion of maternity in Georgics 4, countering the masculine/paternal emphasis of readings such as this, see McAuley (2016: 94–111).

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The Aeneid In certain respects, the articulation of gender in the Aeneid proceeds along familiar lines: Virgil associates the feminine with unruly passion, the masculine with reasoned (self-)mastery. In narrative terms, this tends to mean that women make trouble and men restore order. The Aeneid tells repeated versions of this story, most often with the goddess Juno in the role of instigator. In Book 1, Juno incites Aeolus to unleash the winds in a storm that serves as a figurative as well as strategic expression of her rage; this storm is soon quelled by her brother Neptune, who famously checks both his own emotions and the winds’ motions, breaking off in mid-reproach and recalling himself to the business at hand: ‘whom I – but it is more important to compose the riled waves’ (quos ego  – sed motos praestat componere fluctus, Aen. 1.135). In Book 5, Juno stirs the Trojan matrons to set fire to their ships; Jupiter responds, answering Aeneas’ prayers, with a dousing rain. And in Book 7 Juno sends the Fury Allecto to stir up a storm of war, a storm that will finally be stilled by Jupiter, with Juno’s consent, at the epic’s conclusion. Women are ‘primitive’ in the Aeneid in that they are linked to (maternal, material, narrative) origins. Juno’s first words in the epic bespeak this linkage: ‘Am I to give up what I’ve begun?’ (mene incepto desistere, 1.37). Indeed, Juno not only speaks of beginnings here, she actually voices the angry first word of Homer’s Iliad:  mênin (‘wrath’).20 Women tend to be repeaters, ‘mindful’ (memor) of the past and blind or violently resistant to the future (Dido is only a partial exception to this rule, as we will see). The most painful such repeater is Hector’s widow Andromache, whom Aeneas encounters in Book 3 ‘pouring a libation to the ashes and calling upon the Shades’ (the verse surrounds her name with ‘ashes’ and ‘Shades’:  cineri Andromache manisque, 303).21 By contrast, the uncomplicatedly virtuous women of the epic, Aeneas’ first Trojan wife and his destined Italian bride, prove their virtue precisely by submitting to the masculine plot of history: Creusa by accepting her relegation to the past, Lavinia by not resisting her exploitation for the future. Where women tend to cling to origins, men are oriented towards ends. Jupiter makes his first appearance surrounded by the language of ‘ultimacy’:  ‘and now it was the end, when Jupiter from the summit of aether …’ (et iam finis erat, cum Iuppiter aethere summo, Aen. 1.223).22 It is father Anchises who shows Aeneas the grand parade of future Romans in 20

21 22

On Juno and beginnings, see Hershkowitz (1998: 95–105); on Juno’s Iliadic word, see Levitan (1993: 14) and Farrell and Fowler in this volume, pp. 314 and 401. Quint (1993: 58–9). Feeney (1993: 137–8).

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the Underworld of Book 6, and it is the forward-thinking Latinus (and not Amata; the angry queen forms a marked contrast to the gracious Arete of Homer’s Odyssey) who welcomes his prospective son-in-law to the shores of Italy. This gendering of origins and ends is underscored by a curious episode of paternal misinterpretation in Aeneid 3, where the Trojans receive an oracle from ‘father’ Apollo (pater, 89). Aeneas’ descendants are destined to rule in their ancestral land: Dardanidae duri, quae vos a stirpe parentum prima tulit tellus, eadem vos ubere laeto accipiet reduces. antiquam exquirite matrem. (Aen. 3.94–6) Sturdy sons of Dardanus, the land that from the stock of your ancestors first bore you will welcome you returning at her abundant teat. Seek out your ancient mother.

Aeneas’ father takes the ‘ancient mother’ to be Crete, the original home of the Trojan Magna Mater or Great Mother (hinc mater cultrix Cybeli, 3.111). But upon their arrival in Crete, the Trojans are afflicted with plague. A  dream visitation from the household gods corrects the father’s error: Apollo meant not Crete but Italy, the land that begot ‘Dardanus and father Iasius, the origin of our race’ (hinc Dardanus ortus | Iasiusque pater, genus a quo principe nostrum, 3.167–8). Anchises took the maternal figuration of the oracle too literally. Troy’s ‘ancient mother’ is, it turns out, the province not of mothers but of fathers who father sons; the ‘abundant teat’ is not a woman’s breast but the land’s fertility. The disjunction between metonymic origins and metaphoric ends is essential to Virgil’s epic. The new, abstract fatherland cannot accommodate Aeneas’ flesh-and-blood father; Anchises will not live into the epic’s second, Italian half.23 But it is above all mothers who must be left behind. At the end of Aeneid 2, Aeneas describes how he fled the fires of Troy, taking his father on his shoulders and his son by the hand and instructing his wife to ‘follow at a distance’ (longe servet vestigia coniunx, 711). This troubling arrangement produces a beautiful emblem of paternal hierarchy – Anchises above Aeneas above Ascanius  – and also enables Aeneas (or Virgil) to fulfil the promise of the emblem by losing Creusa. In this reworking of the Orpheus story, Aeneas loses his wife because he looks back too late (nec prius amissam respexi, 741).24 When he discovers his loss, he retraces his steps and redescends into the city, where he is met by the shade of his wife, 23 24

Quint (1993: 60–1). Putnam (1988 [1965]: 41–5).

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who explains that her death was willed by ‘the gods’ great mother’ (magna deum genetrix, 788) and admonishes him to look after their son Ascanius (789). Aeneas responds by imitating Odysseus’ triple attempt to embrace the ghost of his mother Anticleia (Od. 11.206–8, Aen. 2.792–4). Troy has become an underworld, a place of dead mothers. But the woman most memorably abandoned as the epic traverses the distance between Troy and Rome is of course Dido. Like Creusa, Dido blends the features of mother and bride. Homerically speaking, she resembles both Arete and Nausicaa (the dominant model for Aeneid 1–4 is Odysseus’ sojourn among the Phaeacians):  she joins the power, influence and regal presence of the mother to the impressionable heart and Diana-like beauty of the daughter. The blend yields an oddly maternal passion. It is Cupid, disguised as Aeneas’ son, who makes Dido fall for his ‘pretend’ father (falsi, Aen. 1.716). Near the start of Book 4, the love-sick queen, ‘captivated by his father’s image, keeps Ascanius in her lap, hoping to cheat her unspeakable love’ (gremio Ascanium genitoris imagine capta | detinet, infandum si fallere possit amorem, 84–5). And to the departing father she laments that she has no ‘little Aeneas playing in the palace, whose face at least would bring you back’ (si quis mihi parvulus aula | luderet Aeneas, qui te tamen ore referret, 328–9). Dido’s preoccupation with Aeneas’ son may be an effect of, or indeed one reason for, her kinship with Euripides’ Phaedra, the queen who killed herself for love of her stepson Hippolytus.25 But the language of delusion that runs through these passages (falsi, imagine, fallere, luderet) also aligns Dido’s cross-generational desire with Andromache’s desire to conflate the future with the past. Unlike Creusa, Dido seeks to detain both son and father by her maternal side. As Book 4 progresses, Dido comes to imagine venting not her love but her rage upon both father and son: non potui abreptum divellere corpus et undis spargere? non socios, non ipsum absumere ferro Ascanium patriisque epulandum ponere mensis? (Aen. 4.600–2) Couldn’t I have caught his body, torn it apart, scattered it over the waves? Put his companions to the sword, Ascanius too, and set him as a dish for his father’s table?

This fantasy of revenge evokes both Medea’s treatment of her brother’s body (scattered over the waves behind her fugitive ship) and Procne’s of her son’s (served to her adulterous husband for dinner); somewhere in the 25

See Hardie, Chapter 18 in this volume, p. 336.

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background, no doubt, is Medea’s murder of her children.26 The theme of the murderous mother certainly colours Dido’s dreams, albeit in a curiously inverted form. In these dreams, Dido is not the pursuer but the pursued; in flight from a savage Aeneas, she wanders dazed and alone – like the crazed Pentheus and fury-ridden Orestes of Greek tragedy, Virgil tells us, in one of his most extraordinary similes (Aen. 4.465–73). Let us recall that Pentheus was torn to pieces by his Bacchant mother, and that Orestes risked the same fate at the jaws of his mother’s Furies. Although Dido is identified with the victimized sons here, she is also akin to their maddened mothers. In the event, Dido will play both roles: she has these dreams the night before she commits suicide. What of Aeneas’ actual mother? Like Dido, the goddess Venus appears before Aeneas at once as a mother and as a potential erotic partner. After her son’s arrival in Libya, she comes to meet him in the guise of a virgin huntress – one so lovely that Aeneas mistakes her for Diana (Virgil thus conflates the antithetical goddesses of sexuality and chastity). This virginal Venus is functionally akin to the Phaeacian princess who is the first person Odysseus encounters after being washed ashore on Scheria. The link between Venus and Nausicaa is mediated by Diana/Artemis, to whom both are compared by their epics’ respective heroes. In an elaborate simile in Book 4, Virgil also compares Dido to Diana; the Homeric role of Nausicaa is shared out between Venus and Dido. The point is that Venus presents herself to her son in the guise of a marriageable girl, offering him a kind of preview of Dido. The incestuous undertones are amplified by the echoes of another famous encounter involving the disguised goddess of love and an awestruck mortal: the meeting of Aphrodite with her future lover Anchises – Aeneas’ father!  – in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite.27 It is as if all heteroerotic desire were incestuous, a retrograde movement in time and space. Women sometimes threaten to arrest not only the plot line but the life line of their child-lover. When Aeneas recognizes the departing goddess, she instantly regains her maternal status. Aeneas’ complaint – ‘Why do you so often mock your son with false images? Why are you cruel too?’ (quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis | ludis imaginibus?, 1.407–8) – is loosely modelled on Odysseus’ speech to his mother when her shade eludes his embrace. But Aeneas’ bitter crudelis tu quoque has a more ominous ring. The phrase derives from Eclogue 8: ‘savage Love taught the mother to

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For a full discussion of Dido’s ‘Medea’ dimension, including detailed commentary on this passage, see Schiesaro (2008). For allusive crosscurrents (Dido aligned with Medea’s victim), see Baraz (2009). See Reckford (1995); Gladhill (2012).

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stain her hands with her children’s blood; you too are cruel, mother’ (saevus Amor docuit natorum sanguine matrem | commaculare manus; crudelis tu quoque, mater, 47–8). The cruel mother of the Eclogue may be the infanticidal Medea or Venus, the mother of ‘savage Love’. But the very fact that the referent is unclear draws the two mothers together. Whatever we make of this tangle of lovers and mothers – Venus, Medea, Creusa, Nausicaa, Dido – we can at least remark that the knot in which they are twined in the first half of the Aeneid is disturbingly tight. One burden of the Aeneid is to disentangle this knot. In so far as incestuous unions come to figure narrative regress, the plot of the epic depends on the separation of maternal origins from marital ends; otherwise, Aeneas will reproduce only the past, not the future. In the epic’s second half, accordingly, Dido splits into the two simpler and more easily contained figures of Amata and Lavinia:  the mad mother who kills herself for love of her quasi-son Turnus, and the chaste daughter who is destined to be the hero’s bride. In this economy, the mother absorbs all of Dido’s passion, preserving the daughter as an almost perfectly cold blank.28 If Virgil takes care not to realize Lavinia as a character, one reason is that she is and must remain – for Aeneas if not for Turnus  – little more than the personification of the ‘Lavinian shores’ (Lavinia … | litora, Aen. 1.2–3) through which Troy must pass en route to becoming Rome. A plausible and more interesting alternative to Lavinia is furnished by the heroic Italian warrior Camilla, another virginal avatar of Dido. Like Dido, Camilla is associated with Penthesileia (compare Aen. 1.491 and 7.662), the Amazon warrior with whom Achilles was fabled to have fallen in love the moment he killed her. But where Dido does indeed die on her lover’s sword, as Penthesileia on Achilles’, Camilla is killed not by Aeneas in hand-to-hand combat (as we might perhaps have expected) but by a minor warrior who strikes with a spear, from a distance, as if to avoid falling a victim to her charms. Virgil does not grant Aeneas an interview with Camilla any more than with Lavinia. Aeneas cannot be allowed the kind of like-minded union that Odysseus praises to Nausicaa in Odyssey 6 (182–4) because Virgil’s epic regularly construes heteroerotic desire as the enemy, never the support, of social order. The only woman Aeneas embraces in the epic’s second half is Venus, who comes to him bearing gifts, rather as Cupid bore gifts to Dido in Book 1. But these gifts are the weapons fashioned by Vulcan; the ardour instilled in her son by this seductive mother29 is for war and for the future. 28

29

Otherwise put, Lavinia inherits the Nausicaa role which Aen. 1–4, with its heavy reliance on the Phaeacian sequence of the Odyssey, had assigned to Dido (along with the role of Arete – and of Alcinous, Calypso, Circe, Medea, etc.). See Putnam (1995: 43).

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So far I have been writing as if passion and reason, past and future, were distributed along strictly gendered lines, but of course this is a drastic simplification. Before the Trojans arrive, Dido looks to be an effective and forward-thinking ruler, overseeing the construction of her ‘future kingdom’ (regnisque futuris, Aen. 1.504). Venus may be the goddess of sexual passion but within the Aeneid she has a plan and it is oriented towards her family’s future.30 It is Venus who instructs Aeneas to abandon Troy, Anchises who initially thwarts his destiny by refusing to leave; it is Aeneas’ mother, not his father, ‘who helps him at every turn’ and ‘actually controls his destiny’.31 Conversely, passion may be gendered female, but it afflicts men as readily as women. We have already seen the ease with which Dido’s erotic passion converts to (ultimately suicidal) violence; the two fires burn with a single heat. Throughout the Aeneid, men too ‘burn’ with various passions: for love, for blood, for glory, for death. We can see the process of translation at work when Turnus departs for battle at the start of Book 12. In this strangely triangulated scene, Turnus and Amata converse in the presence of Lavinia. When Amata tries to dissuade her ‘fiery son-in-law’ (ardentem generum, 55) from joining battle, declaring that she will not ‘be taken prisoner and see Aeneas as my son-in-law’ (nec generum Aenean captiva videbo, 63), a red blush spreads across Lavinia’s ‘flaming cheeks’ (flagrantis … genas, 65), creating an effect, Virgil tells us, of Indian ivory stained with blood-red purple, or lilies mixed with roses.32 The meaning of this corporeal, rubricated text remains controversial. Does it bespeak Lavinia’s modesty, or her love of Turnus, or her love of Aeneas? The staining of white by red certainly suggests a symbolic deflowering, a suggestion underscored by the echoes of Catullus 64, where the marriage bed of Peleus and Thetis is agleam with ‘Indian ivory’ and draped in ‘purple’ (48–9), and Iliad 4.141–7, where Menelaus’ bloodstained thighs are compared to ivory stained with purple. But Lavinia’s blush may be less the external expression of her hidden emotions than a lateral manifestation of the contagion of desire. There is a kind of textual intercourse at work here, a metonymic spreading of fire, from Turnus to Amata to Lavinia and back to Turnus, in whom Lavinia’s blush kindles both sexual desire and battle lust: ‘love riots in him and fastens his face on the virgin; he burns all the more for arms’ (illum turbat amor figitque in virgine vultus; | ardet in arma magis, 70–1). Turnus sallies forth to a battle in which he will be wounded in the thigh, like Homer’s Menelaus, and then killed by Aeneas,

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On Venus’ dynastic ambitions, see Leach (1997). Farrell (1999: 109), an important corrective to Aeneas’ father obsession, which (as Farrell observes) is shared by most readers of the poem. A much-discussed passage; see Tarrant (2012: 105–8).

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in a death that enacts the displaced and inverted consummation of his desire for Lavinia. Martial and marital wounds are consanguineous throughout the epic. This convergence is most fully realized in the ghastly ‘penetration’ of the only female fighter of the epic; the spear that pierces Camilla’s nipple and drinks her blood (sub exsertam donec perlata papillam | haesit virgineumque alte bibit acta cruorem, Aen. 11.803–4) figures a grotesquely accelerated sexual maturation, from virgin to bride to nursing mother.33 But warriors such as Euryalus, Lausus, Pallas and Turnus also die in language that assimilates death to defloration.34 It is not by chance that Pallas’ baldric is decorated with depictions of the ill-fated husbands of the Danaids, slaughtered on their wedding night. Although it is the reluctant brides who commit the murder, Virgil’s description sees only the young men, ‘a band of youths foully murdered, and bloody bedchambers’ (caesa manus iuvenum foede thalamique cruenti, Aen. 10.498), as if to suggest that the battlefield were itself the bloody bedchamber. But there are figurative as well as literalized ‘wounds’ in the epic’s second half. It is after his arrival in Italy that Aeneas himself comes to experience the kind of pain he earlier inflicted on the queen of Carthage. The person who thus ‘wounds’ Aeneas, moreover, is not Lavinia or Camilla but the young warrior Pallas, Evander’s son, who accompanies Aeneas into battle in Latium.35 Like its Homeric counterpart, the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, this relationship is doomed to end tragically. It is altogether fitting that Aeneas veils Pallas’ flowerlike corpse with a robe woven by the hands of Dido.36 It may be worth asking why this erotic relation remains subtextual: why, if Pallas is the true successor of Dido, Virgil does not depict Aeneas and Pallas as lovers. One reason is cultural:  unlike Greece, Rome never sanctioned sexual love between free men. Another reason is generic: like the Homeric epics, and like his own Georgics, Virgil’s foundational epic focuses on familial reproduction. Heteroerotic unions figure alternative futures; Dido and Lavinia embody lands where Aeneas may plant the seed of his new city. Homoeroticism is not rooted in this way in Rome’s master narrative; it contours the plot but remains ultimately extraneous to it. And yet it often seems as if homoeroticism, both here and in the Eclogues, were the more fulfilling choice. In Eclogue 3, Galatea may flirt with her lover (64–5), but Amyntas goes hunting with his (66–7); in Eclogue 10, the pain Lycoris 33 34 35 36

Fowler (1987: 195). Fowler (1987); Mitchell (1991); Reed (2007). See Putnam (1995: 27–49, 40–1 on Aeneas’ ‘wound’). The verb is obnubit (Aen. 11.77), which carries suggestions of bridal veiling; see Putnam (1995: 39–40).

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inflicts on Gallus is answered by the devotion Virgil lavishes on his beloved friend (73–4). Within the Aeneid, Virgil comes closest to representing a homoerotic couple with Nisus and Euryalus, the Trojans who volunteer for a doomed night mission in Aeneid 9.37 We have already met these two in Book 5 (294–6), where Virgil casts Euryalus as a fair beloved and Nisus as his lover, famous for ‘his honourable love for the boy’ (amore pio pueri; the qualifying adjective is crucial). In Book 9, all goes well until they are spotted by the enemy; they flee through the forest, Nisus emerging safely, Euryalus lost and left behind. The scene that follows recalls Aeneas’ search for Creusa at the end of Book 2: like Aeneas, Nisus belatedly looks back, retraces his steps, calls out the name of his beloved, and finally finds him. But unlike Creusa, Euryalus is still alive. In a horrifying scene of displaced, triangulated intercourse, Euryalus’ body is broken open (candida pectora rumpit, 432) before his friend’s eyes; Nisus rushes to take vengeance on the killer and then falls dead in his turn, speared through, over Euryalus’ corpse. Their deaths elicit from Virgil a famously enigmatic epitaph, ‘fortunate pair!’ (fortunati ambo, 446), an apostrophe tinged with irony, perhaps, but also laden with pathos. This dying together is in effect the epic’s most fully consummated mortal union. If masculinity means the ability to harness passions, no character in the Aeneid is fully masculine – not even Jupiter. Near the very end of the epic, Jupiter and Juno come to terms, and Juno finally cedes her rage and accedes to Rome’s destiny. The goddess has hardly nodded her consent when Jupiter initiates the fated destruction of Turnus by dispatching two snaky Furies, daughters of night (Aen. 12.845–8); ‘these attend’, Virgil tells us, in a truly astonishing line, ‘upon the throne of Jupiter and the threshold of the savage king’ (hae Iovis ad solium saevique in limine regis | apparent, 849–50). Virgil is remembering the incorporation of the Furies within Athens at the close of the Oresteia. But the intertext does not account for Virgil’s terrifying hendiadys, ‘the throne of Jupiter and the threshold of the savage king’. Jupiter does not merely deploy Juno’s Furies from a distance; the ‘savage king’ has appropriated the characteristic epithet of his wife.38 Rome is forged in a furious fire, like the shield of Aeneas. And Jupiter, like Vulcan, not only wields but internalizes the instrumental flames. As this chapter attempts to show, gender roles are complicated and crossed throughout Virgil’s poetry, which gives us passionate men, rational women, backward-looking sons, and forward-thinking mothers, as well as 37 38

Makowski (1989). Also his sister: on Jupiter’s invocation of their kinship here, see Hershkowitz (1998: 116–18).

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their more predictable counterparts. Virgil’s representations of gender and sexuality are shaped, moreover, by generic considerations; poetic, agricultural, and national ‘production’ entail corresponding sexual arrangements. Yet each genre places men in the foreground. In the Eclogues, women enable but do not perform pastoral song; in the Georgics, their ideal place is the deep background of the fruitful landscape and household. This relegation is dramatized by the Aeneid, which kills off its most visible and powerful women (Dido, Amata, Camilla) while preserving Lavinia as an instrument of dynastic reproduction.39 This asymmetry may reflect overarching cultural prejudices. And yet we might imagine other configurations. The poetic exchanges of the Eclogues might have featured women as well as men; this heteroerotic model would be fully explored by later pastoral poets.40 The Georgics might have featured an encomium of the resourceful mother and household manager – something like the praise of old-fashioned womanhood delivered by Horace’s second epode and sixth ‘Roman’ ode (Epod. 2.39–48, Carm. 3.6.39–41). And the Aeneid might have celebrated its marriage plot along familiar romantic lines.41 While generic differences allow some varieties to emerge, sexual hierarchies are carefully preserved in a productive dialectic that passes from song to home to nation.42 FURTHER READING There are many studies devoted to sexuality and gender in antiquity. For Rome, a good place to start is chapters  8–10 of Skinner (2014), with some discussion of Virgil specifically. On Roman male homoeroticism, see Williams (2010); on female homoeroticism, Brooten (1998) (Part I on Rome). For a counterstatement to the dominant Foucauldian approach, see, for example, Richlin (1993). The online journal Eugesta is devoted to work on gender studies.

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The dynastic theme is complicated by the existence of Ascanius; see Rogerson (2017). E.g. in dialogue poems such as Andrew Marvell’s ‘Clorinda and Damon’. There is in principle no reason Virgil had to respect the Theocritean precedent of men-only contests; he might have found inspiration in Catullus’ dialogue of Acme and Septimius (Catullus 45). As in the supplementary ‘thirteenth book of the Aeneid’ produced by Maffeo Vegio in 1428. For the text of this curious and influential work (with translation and a valuable introduction), see Putnam (2004). The original version of this chapter benefited from the comments of Alessandro Barchiesi, Charles Martindale, John Shoptaw, Lesley Lundeen (my research assistant at the time), and from the unpublished Virgilian ruminations of Howard Stern of Yale University. For help with the revision, I thank Fiachra Mac Góráin and Rebecca Shoptaw. All translations are my own.

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Most work written on Virgil over the past forty years engages to some degree with sexuality and gender (almost exclusively in the Aeneid). Fundamental works of the last century include Gillis (1983); Fowler (1987); Mitchell (1991); Nugent (1992); and Putnam (1995: 27–49). Two general studies that include the Aeneid are Keith (2000) and Lovatt (2013). On ‘Adonis-figures’ and the (homo)erotic gaze, see Reed (2007). Two especially rich studies of Virgilian mothers are Sharrock (2011) and McAuley (2016: ch. 2 on Aeneid and Georgics). On Virgilian ‘intercestuality’, see Gladhill (2012), building on Reckford (1995) and Hardie (2006).

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24 F I AC H R A M AC GÓR ÁIN

Authority

Rome witnessed a seismic shift in the structuring of authority during Virgil’s lifetime, as Augustus established himself as the new centre of gravity. Augustus himself makes grand claims in the Res gestae (34): after he had transferred the conduct of public affairs from his own power (ex mea potestate) to the control (arbitrium) of the Senate and the Roman people, he exceeded all others in authority (auctoritate omnibus praestiti), although he had no more power (potestas) than his colleagues in magistracy. Cassius Dio found it impossible to give a simple Greek gloss on auctoritas while discussing the auctoritas of the Senate (55.3.5). It is a moral quality rather than a constitutional power, which appeals to tradition and ancestral custom, and usually refers to the ability to drive initiative or influence others. The word is cognate with augere, (‘to increase’), auctor (‘author’ or ‘initiator’), and, of course, Augustus. Augustus’ authority derived from his role in bringing the civil wars to an end, from the magistracies which he had held, from his religious functions, and from his personal prestige; it extended its influence beyond politics to law, religion, social, moral and cultural affairs, and included authority over memory of past events.1 As I shall explore in this chapter, Virgil’s poems – and I focus particularly on the Aeneid – reflect and participate in the Augustan revolution, and are concerned with authority at every level. They address the political, military and religious authority of Augustus in direct and indirect ways, which often involve allusion to the Homeric poems. As a result, Virgil’s poems have become a central reference point in arguments about the authority of 1

On authority and the auctoritas of Augustus, see Béranger (1953: 114–31); Arendt (1954); Hellegouarc’h (1984); Galinsky (1996: 10–41 and 376–89); with Rowe (2013); Galinsky (2015); Wallace-Hadrill (1997), (2005), and (2008); Gowing (2005); Lowrie (2009); Ferrary (2009); Rich (2012); Kienast (2014: 84–5).

For advice and feedback I would like to thank Alessandro Barchiesi, Jefferds Huyck, Aifric Mac Aodha, Charles Martindale, Donncha O’Rourke, Sophia Papaioannou, Valentina Prosperi, Francesco Strocchi, and audiences in London and Cambridge.

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Augustus, whether they emphasize his brutal rise to power or the stability or necessity of his reign.2 At the same time, the poems claim a canonical status by inscribing themselves into the poetic tradition and vying with their models. Virgil channels but also challenges Homer in the Aeneid and, as if to reflect this emulation, Virgil’s characters also compete amongst themselves for control over the force of Homeric allusions within the narrative. The biographical tradition records that the Aeneid was published by imperial fiat (auctore Augusto) even though Virgil had wished to burn the manuscripts.3 In light of Augustus’ act of appropriation, it is difficult to separate the power dynamics within the narrative of the Aeneid from the discourses of power and authority in triumviral and Augustan Rome; and at times it is hard not to see Virgil shining an Orwellian torch on the processes by which authority is established and maintained. Servius saw Virgil’s intention in writing the Aeneid as twofold: to imitate Homer and to praise Augustus through his ancestors. While most readers today would wish to qualify the second part of that formulation, Virgil does often use Homeric allusion to rise to the challenge of writing about the princeps. Panegyric references to Augustus in the Parade of Heroes (6.791– 807) and on the shield of Aeneas (8.678–723) are couched in Homeric sequences from the Underworld of the Odyssey and the Iliadic shield of Achilles respectively. The funeral games in honour of Anchises in Aeneid 5 replay those held for Patroclus in Iliad 23. It happens that the Trojans have been storm-blown to Sicily on the first anniversary of Anchises’ death, and in his speech inaugurating the games Aeneas somewhat opportunistically claims that the coincidence betokens divine favour (5.45–71). His ritual pietas recalls Augustus’ devotion to the memory of his adoptive father Julius Caesar, and the games culminate in the lusus Troiae or Troy Game, a ritual which Augustus especially cultivated (Suet. DA 43). We come full circle from Homer to Augustus when the games conclude with an aetiology that marks the continuity of the Troy Game from Ascanius to Virgil’s present (5.596– 603).4 In these instances it would appear that the Homeric ‘imitation’ works to support the ‘praise’, but this is not the only possible interpretation of the relationship between the two elements. A case in point is the epic’s first simile, which has been invoked in discussions of Augustan ideology.5 Neptune’s calming of the storm is compared to a statesman quelling civil strife.6 For many readers, the simile 2 3 4 5 6

See Giusti (2018). Life of Virgil 39–41. See also Ziogas (2015: 117–19). See Rogerson (2017: 79). Hardie (1986: 204–5); Galinsky (1996: 20–24); Grebe (2004: 56); Beck (2014: 74). For text and translation, see Kennedy, Chapter 2 in this volume, p. 28.

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evokes Augustus’ calming of the civil wars, even as it may also suggest other historical moments or even a Roman ideal. For Servius Danielis (1.151), the statesman has ‘weighty auctoritas’ because of his pietas; and, interestingly, Robert Fitzgerald even imports ‘authority’ into his translation of Aen. 1.153: ‘Then he prevails in speech over their fury, | By his authority, and placates them.’ Virgil has adapted a simile from the Iliad (2.144–52), which might at first glance seem only to harness the strength of the epic tradition for his statesman’s authority. Deceived by a dream from Zeus which assures him that he will capture Troy that very day, Agamemnon decides to test his men’s courage by feigning despair at the state of the war and urging them to make for the ships and flee home.7 To his dismay, they obey. In their boisterous murmuring and tumultuous flight to the ships they are compared to the billowing waves of the Icarian Sea. Hera and Athena must intervene to salvage the expedition, and engage Odysseus to cajole the men back to military discipline. The intertextual reader is faced with an interpretative choice. On the surface the simile appears to set up the poem’s harmony between political and cosmic order,8 a sense which is magnified by Virgil’s inversion of the tenor and vehicle of the Homeric simile. A reader might observe the shift from an embarrassing crisis in Agamemnon’s credibility as Commander-in-Chief to the statesman’s charismatic quelling of the mob and interpret the contrast-imitation in favour of Virgil’s statesman. Alternatively, the context of the model introduces an uncomfortable echo that might imply the precariousness of the statesman’s success. At the very least, the reader’s attention is drawn to Virgil’s intertextual constructions of authority. The absolute authority of Homer’s epics is the starting point for Virgil’s endeavours and can hardly be overstated. By Virgil’s time, Homer had been filtered through earlier Latin poetry; indeed Latin literature ‘begins’ with Livius Andronicus’ translation of the Odyssey, and Ennius had established himself as the Roman Homer in his historical epic, the Annals. Closer to Homer’s own time, Xenophanes of Colophon wrote that ‘from the beginning everyone learned from Homer’, and he was a staple of both Greek and Roman education.9 Ancient sources compared him with Ocean: the source of all literature and a universal poet. An anonymous epigrammatist of the Hellenistic period tells us that Homer ‘once wrote the ageless songs of the 7

8 9

The awkward narrative sequence may result from variations in the oral tradition. See Kirk (1985: 122, 124–5). Hardie (1986: 102–3, 204–5, 333); Feeney (2014). Diels and Kranz (1951: B 9.1). Cf. also Plat. Republic 10.606e. On Homer in education, see Marrou (1956); Beck (1964); Graziosi (2002); Joyal, McDougall, and Yardley (2009: esp. 41). For papyri, see Morgan (1998: 69, 105–9).

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Odyssey and Iliad from his immortal mind’.10 The poems are ageless because of their aesthetic sublimity, but they also have enduring appeal because of the political and ethical complexity of their narratives.11 In turn they were often invoked by orators, statesmen and writers including philosophers such as Philodemus, Virgil’s teacher, to express a political vision.12 Drawing on such traditions, Horace can critique the Homeric poems as political and philosophical treatises in his moral epistles. To Lollius Maximus he writes ‘the most famous example of moralizing interpretation of Homer to survive from antiquity’:13 ‘I’ve been rereading the author of the Trojan War … He gives it to you straighter and better than Chrysippus or Crantor do: what’s proper, what’s dishonourable, what’s advantageous, and what isn’t’ (Troiani belli scriptorem … relegi; | qui, quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non, | plenius ac melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit, Epist. 1.2.1–4). Horace then goes on to give a moralizing summary of both Homeric epics. And later, to Florus, he writes: ‘at Rome it fell to me to be educated and to be taught how much the anger of Achilles had harmed the Greeks’ (Romae nutriri mihi contigit atque doceri | iratus Grais quantum nocuisset Achilles, Epist. 2.2.41–2). More ominously, Plutarch records how the evil counsellor Areius persuaded Octavian to murder Cleopatra’s son Caesarion by adapting an oft-quoted line from the Iliadic Odysseus: ‘too many Caesars is not a good thing’.14 Virgil thus inherited a politically as well as culturally freighted Homer. The Aeneid signals its bid for succession to the Homeric poems by various devices. The most obvious are programmatic and structural allusion, but Virgil also imitates Homer’s formulaic and ‘oral’ style. Arma virumque cano (‘I sing of arms and the man’, 1.1) points to the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Sibyl’s prophecy forecasts a rerun of the Iliad (6.86–94). Virgil inaugurates the second half of the Aeneid with maius opus moveo (‘it’s a greater work I’m 10 11

12

13 14

Lloyd-Jones and Parsons (1983: 979). For politics in Homer see e.g. Haubold (2000); Hammer (2009); Cairns and Allan (2011); Elmer (2013). For the authority of Homer in antiquity, see Buffière (1956); Hunter (2004) and (2018); Graziosi (2002) and (2008); Carey (2007); Efstathiou and Karamanou (2016); Most (2018). On Homer as Ocean, see Williams (1978: 98–9). On the reasons for Homer’s authority, see Graziosi (2002: 251–5). On Homer in political discourse: Murray (1965) with reference to Philodemus; Carey (2007: 140); Brock (2013); for an early modern example, see Bizer (2011). Burbidge (2009: 117). Plutarch, οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκαισαρίη (Antony 81.5), adapting Il. 2.204–5 οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίη· εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω, | εἷς βασιλεύς (‘Lordship for many is no good thing. Let there be one ruler, | one king’, trans. Lattimore (2011)) from Odysseus’ speech to calm unrest in the Greek camp. For another politically resonant Homeric quotation, made by M. Junius Brutus, see Moles (1983).

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setting in motion’, 7.45), suggesting an Iliadic movement. Less obvious are narrative allegories of the Homer-Virgil relationship. The games in Aeneid 5, for example, may reflect on Virgil’s competitive emulation of Homer.15 Virgil has replaced the chariot race in Iliad 23 with a ship race, but as the ships start off their marks, they are compared to speedy chariots: non tam praecipites biiugo certamine campum corripuere ruuntque effusi carcere currus, nec sic immissis aurigae undantia lora concussere iugis pronique in verbera pendent. (5.144–7) Not so swiftly do chariots race headlong to the field in their two-horse contests, rushing on as they pour out of the gates, nor do charioteers flick the loose reins like this at the horses’ backs, or lean so forward with their whips.

Surprisingly, the ships are swifter than chariots, and since both seafaring and charioteering are established metaphors for poetic composition, the simile is just shy of suggesting that Virgil’s games outplay Homer’s in this literary contest. Since Virgil’s ship race is good-humoured, the tone of poetic emulation is probably more ludic than antagonistic.16 By setting himself up as a Roman Homer, Virgil was following the precedent of Latin poets inscribing themselves into the canon by hitching their wagon to an exemplary Greek model.17 Sometimes this involved displacing a Latin epic predecessor, and one obstacle for Virgil was that there was already a ‘Roman Homer’ in Ennius (Horace calls him alter Homerus, ‘a second Homer’, Epist. 2.1.50).18 By the first century bc Ennius’ epic ‘had become both the canonical epic of Rome and a powerful and familiar carrier of Roman memory.’19 Despite the fragmentary survival of Ennius’ Annals, 15

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17 18 19

Nugent (1992: 257–8); Farrell (1997: 231–2) and (1999). Other narrative allegories are discussed by Deremetz (2001); Harrison (2007b); Gasti (2010); Nelis (2010: 13–14); Michalopoulos (2016); O’Rourke (2017). On ‘oral’ poetics, see Papaioannou (2016). There is a long history of Virgil-Homer comparisons which often debate poetic authority and sometimes hinge on evaluating ‘imitative’ versus ‘original’ artistry, or ars versus ingenium. See the Suetonian ‘Life’ 46 with Farrell (2010: 444–6); Propertius 2.34.65–6; Quintilian 10.1.85–6; Juvenal 6.434–7; Gellius 9.9; Macrobius, Saturnalia 5.2–5.17.6; Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008: 12). On Homer-Virgil comparisons in Servius, see Maltby (2016). Renaissance discussants include Vida, Scaliger, and La Cerda, see Wlosok (1990: 476–98) and Vogt-Spira (2002). For the moderns, see Haynes (2010). The comparison also emerges from tracing the fortunes of Homer; see Knauer (1964a: 62–106) on the Renaissance rediscovery of Homer through Virgil commentaries, and Sowerby (1997a) and (1997b). See Citroni (2005) on Latin poets and canons, and Farrell, Chapter 17 in this volume. See Goldberg (1995: 85–6) for Ennius’ Homeric aspects. Goldschmidt (2013: 17).

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we can still tell that its presence in the Aeneid was considerable, and that Virgil looked back through it to Homer. Nora Goldschmidt argues that Virgil competes with Ennius not merely for the title of the Roman Homer, but also for his ‘shaggy crown’, his status as guardian of ancestral Roman memory. Virgil achieves this by presenting himself as an archaic poet, and by writing prequels to Ennian scenarios while using Ennian language, thus assuming priority over Ennius in mythical and historical chronology.20 Since Virgil is in many ways a ‘modern’ poet, the allusions to the Annals are particularly striking. Ennius’ epic was among Virgil’s most ideologically charged allusive conquests. In addition to its Homeric and historical credentials, it contained a line which Suetonius mentions in connection with Octavian’s choice of the name Augustus:  augusto augurio postquam incluta condita Roma est (‘after Rome was founded by an august augury’).21 Virgil, then, extends the tradition of Homer and Ennius down to the Principate of Augustus, scion of a god, who will refound the Golden Age (Augustus Caesar, divi genus, aurea condet | saecula qui rursus, 6.792–3, combining, as Ennius had done in similar positions in the line, Augustus with condere). As Virgil rises to more sustained Iliadic grandeur in the second half of the Aeneid, the power dynamics of Homeric succession are thrashed out within the parameters of reges et proelia (‘kings and battles’, Ecl. 6.3). Authority in the Homeric poems is usually provisional and contested. The beginning of the Iliad dramatizes a three-way power struggle between Agamemnon, the Commander-in-Chief; Achilles, the foremost warrior; and Chryses, the priest of Apollo. Chryses is aggrieved that Agamemnon has dishonoured him by refusing to accept a ransom for his daughter Chryseis, and so he prays to Apollo to punish the Greeks. Achilles is infuriated that Agamemnon gets the lion’s share of the spoils, even when he himself has done most of the fighting, and a quarrel ensues that has repercussions for the whole plot of the Iliad. Virgil avoids precisely this conflict on the Trojan side by gradually conflating the three spheres of authority – political, martial and religious  – in his eponymous hero. Apart from the Aeneid’s war between Trojans and Italians, tensions between spheres of authority tend to centre around Turnus:  he dishonours Allecto, who is disguised as the priestess Calybe (7.435–44), and his resistance to the kingly and sacral authority of King Latinus leads directly to his death (12.48–53). By contrast, Aeneas grows in stature and confidence throughout the epic, despite the events of Book 4 and his vulnerability to figures from his past in the Underworld of Book 6.22 Instead of Homer’s individualistic honour-based ethics, Aeneas 20 21 22

Goldschmidt (2013). See also Elliott (2013). Suet. DA 7.2, quoting Ann. 155 Skutsch (1985). On the character of Aeneas, see Lovatt, Chapter 21 in this volume.

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espouses a public-spirited pietas, a sense of duty to one’s gods, one’s family, and one’s homeland, even at the cost of personal fulfilment. On one view, he establishes himself as a ‘good king’ according to the tenets of ancient kingship theory, and it would be difficult for a contemporary reader not to think of Augustus’ one-man rule. By contrast Turnus, Mezentius and Dido (after she has become infatuated) are represented as ‘bad’ rulers.23 In a similar vein, Aeolus and Latinus are ‘weak’ kings.24 The main difficulty with this approach is that Aeneas too takes on characteristics of the ‘bad’ king in his angry outbursts25 (and Dido is on the whole very sympathetically characterized, as attested by numerous positive responses throughout the ages).26 Beyond kingship, Aeneas is characterized as a Roman imperator or, as Nisbet put it with detailed reference to parallels from Roman historical writing, ‘a proto-Augustus, carrying the destiny of his nation on his shoulders, and prefiguring the political ideology of Virgil’s own patrons’.27 After the death of his father Anchises, he comes to assume the priestly mantle of sacral authority.28 Here too there are contemporary parallels with Augustus, who might as well have been following Aristotle’s observations on the successful tyrant’s public displays of religious devotion.29 But even if Aeneas can be praised as a king and a warrior, as a priest he can be censured. Most criticism of his behaviour focuses on his furious outbursts after the death of Pallas and on his killing of Turnus at the end of the poem. Prompted by a vision of his ties of hospitality and pledges of allegiance to Evander and Pallas (10.515–17), he captures eight youths for live sacrifice (quos immolet umbris, 10.519). In the same aristeia he ‘sacrifices’ (immolat, 10.541) Haemonides, the priest of Apollo. As he kills Turnus he declares that it is Pallas who is ‘sacrificing’ him (immolat, 12.949). These are the only three uses of this technical ritual term in Virgil. The anger of Aeneas can be defended with reference to various ancient ethical frameworks,30 but his figuring of the killing of Turnus as a ritual act is ‘a gross violation of his sacral duties and functions’ and compromises his priestly authority.31 At this climactic moment, Aeneas cannot fulfil the conflicting dictates of pietas 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31

Cairns (1989: 1–84). Cowan (2015). Thomas (2001: 289). See Hardie (2014: 51–76). Nisbet (1978–9: 50). For echoes of Augustus, see also Binder (1971) and Schauer (2007: 26, 263–79). Panoussi (2010). See Politics 1314b39–15a4. See Galinsky (1988); Cairns (1989: 77–84). See also Thomas (2001: 289–92); Horsfall (2000b: 192–211). Panoussi (2010: 63). See also Nisbet (1978–9: 57–8) and Hardie (1993: 19–23, 33–5).

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(which – let us recall – was the basis of the statesman’s auctoritas in the view of Servius Danielis): duty to Pallas and Evander based on their ties of hospitality and Evander’s commendatio (8.514–19), duty to his father’s injunction to spare the defeated (6.853), and whatever clemency was owed to Turnus’ appeal for pity towards his own father Daunus (12.932–6). Of course, Aeneas’ action is psychologically understandable. The irresolvable conflict is perhaps replicated by the experience of the reader. We want Aeneas to kill Turnus in the interests of strong closure and narrative resolution; on the other hand, we find this killing morally bleak.32 As Thomas and Kallendorf have shown, complex and pessimistic responses to the Aeneid have a long history.33 Attempts to justify Aeneas’ vengeful rage in books 10 and 12 generally draw on the argument that he is channelling the wrath of Achilles. Indeed, there is a sense in which Aeneas and Turnus figuratively compete for the role of Achilles in the battle books of the Aeneid.34 Like the arms of Achilles over which Ajax and Odysseus squabble, this role has a symbolic status,35 even if the structural and moral aspects of ‘playing Achilles’ are not always in alignment. It is as though victory in the war in Latium depends on structurally owning the role of Achilles in this modified rerun of the Trojan War in which the Trojans will be victorious, irrespective of the moral calculus which governs how the Achillean wrath is directed. Accordingly, Achilles is often rhetorically invoked in speeches, which, as Andrew Laird reminds us, are prime locations for the discursive negotiation of power and authority.36 The Sibyl’s prophecy of an alius Achilles (Aen. 6.89) in Latium would seem on the face of it to refer to Turnus, especially when followed by natus et ipse dea (‘and he too born of a goddess’). But Venus intervenes to reinstate Aeneas in the role of Achilles which he had played during the games in Book 5, as he oversaw the funeral games: arma rogo genetrix nato, te filia Nerei, te potuit lacrimis Tithonia flectere coniunx. (8.383–4)

32

33 34

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36

On the end of the poem, see Galinsky (1988) and Thomas (2001: 290–3). For Christian condemnation of Aeneas’ behaviour after the death of Pallas, see Lactantius, Inst. div. 5.10 with Wlosok (1990: 437–44). Thomas (2001); Kallendorf (2007a). On the role of Achilles in the Aeneid, see MacKay (1957); Anderson (1957); Galinsky (1981: 999–1001); King (1982); Quint (1993); Barchiesi (2015). On Homer in the Aeneid, in addition to these sources, see Knauer (1964a); Cairns (1989: 177–248); Dekel (2012). On the paradigmatic significance of the contest for the arms of Achilles in Homeric epic, see Dekel (2012: 53–6). Laird (1999).

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Authority I ask for arms, a mother on behalf of her son; the daughter of Nereus was able to sway you with tears, and so was the wife of Tithonus.

In an attempt to redirect the plot, she recalls the tearful pleas of Thetis, the daughter of Nereus, on behalf of Achilles in Iliad 18 and of Eos, the wife of Tithonus, on behalf of Memnon in the less well-known Cyclic epic Aethiopis, and Vulcan’s acquiescence in both cases. This reminds us that Virgil drew on the Epic Cycle as well as the Homeric poems, though not without hierarchical distinction: the structural importance of the Iliad and the Odyssey to the plot of the Aeneid may reflect ancient views on the superiority of Homer to the Cycle.37 By an appeal to august poetic tradition, and specifically to Iliad 18, Venus’ entreaty prepares the reader for a hoplopoia, the fabrication of the hero’s armour, one of the most magnificent set pieces in the epic repertoire. Luckily for Aeneas, he becomes an Achilles rather than a Memnon. There is considerable irony, then, in Turnus’ attempts to style himself as an Achilles in Book 9. In a highly rhetorical speech of encouragement to his men after the Trojan ships have metamorphosed into nymphs, he casts himself in several Greek roles: as Menelaus, whose wife has been stolen by Aeneas, whom he thus casts as Paris; and as Achilles, bereft of his captive bride Briseis. As Hardie notes, Turnus’ words nec solos tangit Atridas | iste dolor (‘it is not only the sons of Atreus who are affected by that grief’, 9.138–9) virtually quote Achilles’ words from Iliad 9.340–1, ‘Do the Atreids alone of mortal men love their wives?’ More explicitly, he exults over the dying Pandarus: hic etiam inventum Priamo narrabis Achillem (‘you will tell Priam that an Achilles has been found here too’, 9.742). With the death of Pallas, a reader alert to echoes of Homeric narrative will sense the Iliadic story pattern of the Patrocleia taking shape, and will expect Aeneas to be the avenger, just as Achilles took vengeance on Hector for killing Patroclus.38 Eventually Turnus concedes the role of Achilles to Aeneas, critically at the moment in which he vows to meet him in single combat: ibo animis contra, vel magnum praestet Achillem | factaque Volcani manibus paria induat arma | ille licet (‘I shall go bravely to fight him, even though he surpasses great Achilles, and even though he bears armour similar to his, made by Vulcan’s hands’, 11.438–40). The contest for the role of Achilles is part of a broader pattern of focalized allusion to the Homeric epics which involves issues of narrative and poetic 37

38

On Homer and the cycle, see Rutherford (1996: 16) and Graziosi (2008). On Virgil and the cycle, see Kopff (1981) and Gärtner (2015). On allusion to both Homer and the cycle in the ecphrasis at Aeneid 1.453–93, see Papaioannou (2016). Barchiesi (2015: 23–30).

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authority. Different characters within the Aeneid attempt to control the direction and import of Homeric intertextuality for their own rhetorical ends.39 Thus, Juno unleashes the storm in Book 1 in the hope of reshaping the plot from a foundation epic or ktisis, which is Jupiter’s vision of the narrative, to a Cyclic nostos (‘return’) with disastrous results for Aeneas (1.39–45).40 Later she will insist that Aeneas is a Paris figure, an adulterous fomenter of war in Latium (7.321). Others too wish to define Aeneas simply as a wifestealing Paris (Iarbas at 4.215, Amata at 7.362, and Turnus at 9.138–9). At the Council of the Gods in Book 10, against the spurious impartiality of Jupiter, Venus and Juno bicker over the course of the war with selective and partisan recollections which place the events of the Iliad and the Aeneid on a mythical continuum (see esp. Aen. 10.2–30, 59–62, 81–3, 91–2). In these and other cases, authority-struggles over the Homeric model have a strong gendered element, which mirrors broader gender dynamics in the epics.41 Virgil’s Diomedes provides a particularly fertile example of inventive reminiscence of the Iliad. As he sends back word to the council of the Latins to decline their request for a military alliance, his version of events distorts the Iliad as we know it: stetimus tela aspera contra contulimusque manus: experto credite quantus in clipeum adsurgat, quo turbine torqueat hastam. … quidquid apud durae cessatum est moenia Troiae, Hectoris Aeneaeque manu victoria Graium haesit et in decimum vestigia rettulit annum. ambo animis, ambo insignes praestantibus armis, hic pietate prior. (Aen. 11.282–4, 288–92) I have fought him hand to hand, Faced his cruel weapons. I know – so believe me – How high he rears behind his shield, how fiercely His spear whirls … All that long siege of stubborn Ilium, Ten years of victory stalling and retreating, We owed to Hector and Aeneas only – Both known for bravery and skill in war, But one more pious.42 39

40 41 42

In this chapter I focus on archaic epic models; consideration of other models (e.g. tragedy, historiography, later epic) would nuance the picture. See also Fowler, Chapter 22a in this volume. See Oliensis, Chapter 23 in this volume. Translation Ruden (2008).

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The divergence from Iliad 5.297–318 is extreme. Aeneas was in fact a ‘negligible opponent’43 for Diomedes in Iliad 5, and somewhat ignominiously needed to be rescued by his mother Aphrodite. Diomedes is one of the few surviving heroes of the Trojan War, and so his testimony has a privileged status which he exploits:  experto credite (‘I know  – so believe me’). His agenda is to stay out of the war and so he plays up his traumatic experience. Finally he advises the Latins to make peace with Aeneas. His speech moves through the whole gamut of archaic epic, touching on the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Nostoi, but converging finally on a note of foundation. We get a sense that Iliadic values must be consigned to the past in favour of the values of the Aeneid. By emphasizing Aeneas’ pietas he signals the shift from Homeric to Virgilian heroism, implying that it is only under the sign of civic values that the Homeric tradition can be continued by an Italian ktistic complement.44 As these examples show, the material is there to be reshaped and manipulated as it becomes rhetorically contested between characters, but the process of creative refashioning was already underway in the Homeric poems. As Edan Dekel has shown, Virgil draws something of his method from Odysseus’ partisan and self-interested use of the Iliad in his own manipulations in the Odyssey.45 To quote Duncan Kennedy, ‘What is called “tradition” … far from being an inheritance “handed down” from the past, is an active, open process intimately connected with the pursuit of particular interests: the selective appropriation of the past to serve a particular vision of the present and to project that vision into the future.’46 Kennedy was referring primarily to modern scholarly traditions, but the statement applies equally to Virgil’s rewriting of Homer, and to Virgil’s characters’ reminiscences of ‘Homeric’ material. I place ‘Homeric’ within quotation marks here because in the mythical chronology of the Aeneid, the Homeric epics have not yet been composed. Even though Homer’s characters look forward to being commemorated in a poetic tradition (e.g. Helen’s words to Hector at Il. 6.357–8), Homer himself looks back an unspecified but very long time to the events which he narrates (e.g. Il. 5.503–4). There is, then, a certain paradox in Virgil’s gods or heroes citing Homeric epic. This puts a different spin on Homer’s authority over the events: are we talking about the Trojan War in general, or about Homer’s versions in particular? Poet’s voice allusions such as Arma virumque cano and those embedded in character speech obviously operate

43 44 45 46

Horsfall (2003: 171). On this episode, see Papaioannou (2000: 212–15); Hardie (2012: 139–40). Dekel (2012). Kennedy (1992: 39–40). See also Kennedy, Chapter 2 in this volume, p. 26.

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at different discursive levels, but these levels interact with one another, as if not only Virgil and his readers, but paradoxically also Virgil’s characters were familiar with the Homeric poems and the Epic Cycle. Virgilian characters’ manipulation of inherited tradition in the interests of their own authority extends far beyond poetic models:  in fact, almost the whole narrative takes an interest in the dynamics of power and control, particularly as far as leaders’ words and deeds are concerned.47 At Aeneid 7.116, Ascanius declares heus etiam mensas consumimus (‘look, we’re even eating our tables’), which looks back to the harpy Celaeno’s prophecy that the Trojans would not be able to found a city until terrible hunger had forced them to eat even their own tables (3.250–7). Aeneas intervenes: he silences the boy and sanctifies the moment as the fulfilment of a prophecy spoken, he says (7.120–7), by his father Anchises (rather than Celaeno; so there is an inconsistency here). Some scholars have argued that Aeneas is being creative with the facts, whether consciously or not. Certainly the distortion serves his advantage as a leader. He manages to turn around a prophecy of doom to one that validates the Trojans’ entitlement to settle on Italian soil, galvanizing his men’s morale; and he creates a neat tableau of three generations of his family who are involved in bringing the prophecy to completion.48 The inconsistency can only draw attention to Aeneas’ manipulation. To take another example, in the following book Aeneas attempts to ingratiate himself with Evander on the basis of shared heritage through Atlas. He begins his speech by telling Evander that he was not troubled by the fact that he was a Greek leader or by his blood connection to the sons of Atreus; rather, he wishes to emphasize their shared genealogy: Dardanus, Iliacae primus pater urbis et auctor, Electra, ut Grai perhibent, Atlantide cretus, advehitur Teucros; Electram maximus Atlas edidit, aetherios umero qui sustinet orbis. vobis Mercurius pater est, quem candida Maia Cyllenae gelido conceptum vertice fudit; at Maiam, auditis si quicquam credimus, Atlas, idem Atlas generat caeli qui sidera tollit. sic genus amborum scindit se sanguine ab uno. (8.134–42) Our founder Dardanus, as fame has sung, And Greeks acknowledge, from Electra sprung: Electra from the loins of Atlas came;

47 48

See also Zetzel, Chapter 15 in this volume. See O’Hara (2007: 82); Seider (2013: 28–31, 40–6); Rogerson (2017: 172–83).

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Authority Atlas, whose head sustains the starry frame. Your sire is Mercury, whom long before On cold Cyllene’s top fair Maia bore. Maia the fair, on fame if we rely, Was Atlas’ daughter, who sustains the sky Thus from one common source our streams divide.49

The genealogy is questionable and opportunistic. Aeneas may be conflating more than one Atlas from the mythological repertoire, and the formulation shows him selecting expedient options while conspicuously marginalizing others. The expressions ut Grai perhibent (‘as the Greeks say’) and auditis si quicquam credimus (‘if we are to put any trust in what we have heard’) allow as much room for scepticism or disbelief as for certainty. As Sharilyn Nakata has put it, ‘What matters are not accurate genealogical facts regarding which Atlas is their common ancestor, or whether there are indeed multiple Atlases at play here. What matters instead are genealogical connections that are clear and plausible enough for establishing ties of kinship.’50 This is just one of many instances of often quite transparent ‘genealogical opportunism’ in the Aeneid which, as Nakata documents in detail, can be paralleled in Roman practice, especially during the late Republic. The mythical and historical past were forms of ‘symbolic capital’ which the Roman elite could appropriate and exploit.51 Indeed, Roman education inculcated the ability to deploy mythical and historical exempla for legal and political advantage. Moreover, the habit of genealogical invention was ‘a deep structural element of Roman political discourse’.52 The Aeneid fits into this cultural matrix and goes one step further by holding up a mirror to the process, and even to its own inner workings. While Virgil always stands back from crude historical allegory, nonetheless his characters’ cunning manoeuvres around the landscape of inherited poetry and myth do suggest the dynamics of late republican and Augustan propaganda. We might think in particular of the mudslinging and derision of the propaganda wars between Antony and Octavian during the triumviral years. Octavian did his best to cast Antony as an easternizing philanderer. Plutarch’s comparison of Antony and Demetrius in the Parallel Lives even compares Antony with Paris (3.4), saying that in fact Antony was worse than the latter, since Paris fled to Helen’s chamber after he had been worsted in the battle (Il. 3.380), while Antony lost the battle because he fled from the battle to Cleopatra’s

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Dryden (1987: v i .614). Nakata (2012: 354). See also Binder (1971: 58–65) and Schauer (2007: 96–9). On this term, see Bourdieu (1977: 171–83). Smith (2006: 34).

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bosom. This may well reflect an invective motif from the ‘war of images’ that raged in the years leading up to Actium.53 The contest for the role of Achilles is reminiscent of nothing so much as the struggle between Caesarians and republicans after the assassination of Julius Caesar over who would control the patronage of Apollo.54 Aeneas’ role as a ‘spin doctor’ and his habit of determining the official version of his own and his people’s history,55 lends itself to comparison with Augustus’ own efforts to shape the memory of his past. As early as 36 bc , Augustus destroyed documents recording the activities of the triumvirs; the Res gestae is a tendentious apologia.56 One might even be tempted to think of his intervention in publishing the Aeneid in terms of co-authorship. Even without looking beyond the text of the Aeneid itself, one can easily see why James Porter concludes that, ‘Insofar as it is “about” anything at all, the Aeneid is, quite simply, about the construction of an ideological edifice.’57 FURTHER READING For a broad-based discussion of authority in Augustan literature and culture, see Lowrie (2009). For the auctoritas of Augustus, see Galinsky (1996), Rowe (2013), and Galinsky (2015). For the authority of Octavian in the Eclogues, see Geue (2013). For Virgil’s creation of an authoritative persona in the Georgics, see Schiesaro (1997). For political authority in the Aeneid, see Nisbet (1978–9), Cairns (1989), Schauer (2007), and Green (2014); for sacral authority, see Panoussi (2010). See also Tarrant, Chapter  14 in this volume. For the authority of Virgil in the afterlife of the Aeneid, see Comparetti (1997), Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008), Wilson-Okamura (2010), and Hardie (2014). For a sophisticated argument on Ovidian characters’ manipulative reception of Homeric characters, see Papaioannou (2007).

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See e.g. Scott (1933); Zanker (1988: 33–78) on the ‘War of Images’; Freyburger-Galland (2009) on the ‘religious propaganda’. Miller (2009: 23–54). Powell (2011). See also Seider (2013). See Gowing (2005: 18), citing Appian BC. 5.132.548 and Suet. DA 36. On the RG, see Cooley (2010: 104–16). Porter (2004: 140).

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The Death of Virgil

In 1930 Europe celebrated the bimillennium of Virgil’s birth. The celebrations fell in the middle of Mussolini’s dictatorship (1922–43), strengthening the links which Mussolini sought to establish between his Italian regime and ancient Rome. The Aeneid, singing of the birth of a new city and a new empire, helped to validate Mussolini’s imperial policies, and in 1936 a new Italian empire was born. In the same year the Austrian writer Hermann Broch began to meditate upon Virgil’s position in the modern world and by 1937 he had conceived the basis of his novel Der Tod des Vergil (published in English as The Death of Virgil) which he would work on until the mid1940s,1 a book obsessed not only with the death of its author, but also the death of civilization. In the words of Lawrence Lipking: ‘Death is its subject: the death of a culture; the death of the artist; the death of art.’2 It is unsurprising that death should have had so firm a hold on the Jewish Broch’s imagination at that time, since he had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1938 and had spent time in prison before friends helped him to secure release and to leave Austria.3 Even before the threats posed to Western civilization during the Second World War, however, Broch was conscious of a sense of loss, as he saw values and culture changing in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the twilight years of the nineteenth century. He was part of the family of writers who ‘devoted themselves to the analysis of a society grown sick and to the search for new values to replace the old. Thus the vision of Broch’s dying Virgil is related to the revelations of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.’4 Broch shared with Rilke  – but also with other modernist writers such as Pound, Eliot and Joyce (on whom he wrote an essay) – an urge to turn to 1

2 3 4

I refer throughout to Jean Starr Untermeyer’s translation of The Death of Virgil in the OUP Twentieth Century Classics collection (1983). It was first published in the UK in 1946. For Broch, see Ziolkowski (1964). Lipking (1981: 131). Ziolkowski (1964: 30–1). Ziolkowski (1964: 4).

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the classical world in an attempt to navigate a course through a culture at a turning point of history. He was, of course, working in a world where opposing political forces were shaping polarized visions of Virgil. The contrast between his own antifascist Virgil and the Virgil lovingly constructed by Mussolini is typical of the starkly different visions of Virgil at the time. A renaissance of interest in Virgil was due not solely to the bimillennium, but more suggestively to the sense of crisis pervading Europe in the entre deux guerres. George Steiner has observed that after the First World War the European ear became more attuned to the Virgilian voice of exile than to the Homeric cry of triumph.5 However sweeping such a polarity may be, the claim is endorsed by the wealth of Virgilian biographies published in the 1920s and 1930s. Amongst the most significant was André Bellessort’s Virgile, son œuvre et son temps (1920), a celebration of a ‘fascist’ Virgil whom Bellessort wished to portray at the head of a new cultural tradition rooted in France. This partisan approach was maintained by Bellessort’s pupil Robert Brasillach, who was eventually executed for Nazi collaboration and whose book Présence de Virgile (1931) strives to portray a modern-day fascist Virgil. Brasillach expressed the wish that his readers should approach the book ‘as if it were telling the story of a young Italian from 1930’.6 But the most influential of these biographies was Theodore Haecker’s Vergil, Vater des Abendlandes (1931, translated into English as Virgil, Father of the West by A. W. Wheen in 1934), which was also written in response to the current situation in Europe, but was politically opposed to the vision of Brasillach and Bellessort. It may seem somewhat paradoxical that the German Haecker also claims Virgil as the father of Western civilization, but his Virgil is no nationalist poet. Rather he is the anima naturaliter Christiana of antiquity who transcends the idea of nation and to whom the Western world owes a great debt.7 Haecker exerted an enormous influence on Broch, not only bestowing a Christianized Virgil upon him but also evoking in similar terms the atmosphere of the age.8 The theme of the masses fascinated Broch to the point that

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Steiner (1990: 10): ‘With the Second World War recognitions seemed to alter. The shattered burnt cities are still perennial Troy. But the desolate light on them is that of Virgilian pathos rather than Argive-Homeric triumph.’ See also Ziolkowski (1993: 6). Brasillach (1931: 250). Haecker (1934: 17). T. S. Eliot also stressed the importance of a Christian Virgil to Western civilization, although his Virgil is one with a noble idea of empire, glorying in civilization despite the cost, and so differs radically from Haecker’s (and Broch’s) vision. See ‘What Is a Classic?’ (pp. 53–71) and ‘Virgil and the Christian World’ (pp. 121–31) in Eliot (1957).

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he wrote a treatise on mass hysteria; he will surely have recognized a kindred spirit when reading Haecker’s depiction of the character of their times: The strong and real sense – it is not knowledge – that every man has today, of a break, a breakthrough, a new dawn, is suddenly converted by the spirit of the time to hysteria, so that he sees not merely a new period but a new era approaching.9

Broch’s description evokes an atmosphere that is ripe for the arrival of an imperial leader to usher the masses into this new era: they screamed out of themselves and to themselves that somewhere in the thicket there must exist an excellent one, a mighty one, an extraordinary voice, the voice of a leader to whom they need only attach themselves so that in his reflected glory, in the reflection of the jubilation, the intoxication, the power of the imperial divinity they might with a gasping, wild, bullish, thundering assault still be able to clear an earthly path for themselves out of the entanglement of their existence.10

The Death of Virgil pivots around Virgil’s eventual realization that he has contributed to this infernal confusion by presenting through the Aeneid a lie which he asks readers to accept as reality, namely the glorious beauty of empire. Unable to bear the guilt, he asks that his epic be burnt. Broch has projected into the legend of Virgil’s demand that the Aeneid should be destroyed his own modernist perception of the inadequacy and dishonesty of art. Lipking observes pertinently that Broch was writing in the same world that drove Curtius to wonder whether any more classics would be born, and prompted Eliot’s fears about whether all his work might end in flames.11 Where once the Aeneid moved from the individual to the universal, by detailing the tribulations undergone by Aeneas in order to lay the foundations of the Roman Empire, Broch’s novel fans the morbid anxieties of an author preoccupied by his own death to the point of forcing him to envisage an entire world in its death throes. Behind the figure of the dying Virgil stands Hermann Broch, writing to Hermann Weigand of his own imagined death at the hands of the Nazis: ‘It was no longer the dying of Vergil, it became the imagining of my own dying.’12 By relating the death of Virgil rather than his own, however, Broch allowed us to glimpse the death knell of Western civilization for, as Lipking hauntingly observes, ‘To burn the Aeneid would be to destroy the thousands of poems, the millions 9 10 11 12

Haecker (1934: 5). Broch (1983: 73). Lipking (1981: 131). Cited by Ziolkowski (1993: 221).

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of lives, that have been built on it – a holocaust devouring the very basis of civilization.’13 Furthermore, such a holocaust would also entail the loss of the works which themselves influenced the Aeneid.14 This sense of the loss of a whole world is strengthened by the titles given to the four sections of the book, each of which refers to one of the elements: ‘Water – The Arrival’, ‘Fire – The Descent’, ‘Earth – The Expectation’ and ‘Air – The Homecoming’. Through its title and prefatory quotations the novel signals the fact that other literary works simply would not exist had Virgil been able to realize his dying wish. Two of the prefatory quotations come from the Aeneid and one from Dante’s Inferno. The first, fato profugus (Aen. 1.2), suggests that Virgil is driven by fate as much as his creation Aeneas. This loss of authority is a leitmotif throughout the work, and exacerbates Virgil’s insecurity and sense of exile: Only at the edge of his fields had he walked, only at the edge of his life had he lived. He had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work … a lodger in his own life.15

This life has gone round in circles, has consisted of flight after flight. The balancing phrases of the chiasmus contribute to the feeling of suspension as Virgil’s life has been spent in the interstices of ‘fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work’. But it is in just such an ephemeral place that poetic inspiration came: ‘Flight, oh, flight! oh, dusk, the hour of poetry … oh poetry was anticipation but not quite departure, yet it was an enduring farewell.’16 The passage expands on ‘no longer, but not yet’, a phrase that recurs constantly throughout the book. The suspension mirrors that which underpins the Aeneid, situated as it is between the past of lost Troy and the glorious future of Rome that stands beyond the text. Only at the point of death does Virgil realize that this twilight hour is the prelude to the final homecoming: ‘never was the earth nearer the heart of light, nor light closer to the earth than in the approaching dusk at the two boundaries of night’.17 Broch’s vision casts new shades of meaning upon umbra, a word which closes not only the Aeneid but also Eclogues 1 and 10. The ambivalence of Virgil’s shade, at times restful, at times harmful to flocks and poets, reinforces the ambivalent power of poetry. Furthermore, Broch’s inheritance of Dante’s Christian Virgil endows umbra with a metaphysical dimension: he follows 13

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Lipking (1981: 135). Blanchot (1971) also points out that the future of Western civilization under the name of the Aeneid is at stake. I am grateful to the editors for this observation. Broch (1983: 5). Broch (1983: 50). Broch (1983: 8).

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the pattern set by Dante, who imprisoned his Virgil within a twilight from which, because of his pagan status, he was unable to emerge into the light of Paradise. The nearer Virgil comes to death, the further he enters into this twilight where the greatest of earthly perceptions are born. Here, all of his past has spilled over into his present. It is a rich past: like Tennyson’s Ulysses, he has become a part of all he has met. Significantly, in the following extract the word used of Virgil’s life in the German is ‘einverwoben’ (‘interwoven’). Since texts are literally ‘woven’ structures, it is the smallest of etymological jumps from ‘interwoven’ to intertextum and to hear Virgil’s voice in all the texts he has ever encountered: interwoven with them all … interwoven and losing himself into happenings and objects, interwoven and losing himself into countries and their cities, how buried all this and yet how immediate … he knew simultaneously his own life, knew it to be carried by the stream and counter-stream of night in which past and future cross each other … he himself in the center of the plaza as if someone had wanted to bring him to the center of his own being, to the crossroads of his worlds, to the center of his world, compliant to fate.18

The passage once again stresses Virgil’s loss of control and his failure to reach a centre, the stability of a present tense despite all his wanderings. To see his life as intertextual opens up the interpretation of fato profugus still further, so that it might also signify ‘driven by what has been said, by literary voices’. It is striking that Broch speaks of a ‘maze of voices’ in which Virgil is imprisoned, assailed by the ‘anarchic voices and their grasping arms … voices of the second, voices of the year, voices of the aeon’.19 Time expands, gesturing towards the plethora of future literary works, rooted in the Aeneid, that he is equally unable to control. Virgil’s fate, which embodies the notion of both past voices and destiny, is unable to restore a centre that has failed to hold. The whole book is devoted to his attempts to recover a mythical circle of completion like that depicted at the end of Dante’s Paradiso, where human beings are united with their final, perfected selves, and all the texts of the world are bound in absolute harmony. Virgil’s distance from such perfection is evidenced by his imprisonment in ‘the enormous cavern of night from which there was no release’,20 where he feels an urgent longing: ‘oh he must again behold the stars’.21 The plea echoes the epigraphs to the novel where Broch has placed the closing lines of the Inferno: 18 19 20 21

Broch (1983: 21). Broch (1983: 71). Broch (1983: 70). Broch (1983: 76).

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F i o n a C ox The Leader and I entered on that hidden road to return into the bright world, and without caring to have any rest we climbed up, he first and I second, so far that I saw through a round opening some of the fair things that Heaven bears; and thence we came forth to see again the stars.22

Virgil’s prefiguring of Dante’s words establishes his suffering in a similar Hell from which he has not yet emerged to see the stars. Although he hopes for the voice of a leader to guide him from his entangled existence, he senses that such a voice would have to stand outside the earthly sphere. He himself is condemned to repeat himself and other people, to turn words over so often that they lose all human meaning. He may have attempted to shore up fragments against his ruin, but he has succeeded only in entering the inhuman circularity of art: constrained to return constantly into its own beginning which was its end, and hence pitiless, pitiless towards human sorrow which meant no more to art than passing existence, no more than a word, a stone, a sound or a color to be used for exploring and revealing beauty in unending repetition.23

The realization that art cannot express the reality of humanity results in the bitterest of cries, as Virgil reaches the horrible but necessary conclusion that all he had sought to achieve through the Aeneid was a failure, a mere simulacrum of achievement. He perceives the Aeneid as a piece of writing as futile as the prophecies which flit around the Sibyl’s cave, disappointing all who come to consult them (Aen 3.443–52): the translucent and glittering pictures of his life’s landscape, once so dazzling, had grown dim, had withered and died away; his verses, which he had twined about them had dried up and fallen away, all this had blown away like faded leaves.24

As if recognizing the failure of his life’s work were not enough, a still more horrifying realization dawns upon Virgil, that the words which he has written will play their part in the barbaric wars that human beings wage against each other; the scope of interpretation is an uncontrollable infinity, allowing for all the possibilities of evil: they read the unspeakable poem behind the poem of words, and what they read consisted no longer of lines, but of an endless immense space stretching out on all sides to infinity, a space in which the sentences did not follow one another in order, but covered each other in infinite crossings and were no

22 23 24

Broch cites the original Italian. The translation here is that of Sinclair (1951: 427). Broch (1983: 101). Broch (1983: 75).

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The Death of Virgil longer sentences … at every spot where the sentence-waves and sentence-cycles crossed one another, there war, treachery and bloody sacrifice showed up also, there warfare, lifeless and callous, conducted by beings essentially dead, came to view, there the feud of the gods could be seen in its godlessness, there too was revealed the nameless murder in a nameless sphere.25

The disorder and autonomy of the sentences depicted here foreshadow the attempts of much modernist literature to depict this very disorder. It is also worth noting the way in which Broch anticipates critical responses to classical literature, such as John Henderson’s essay ‘Lucan/the word at war’, which articulates the terrible prose behind the clashing narrative currents of Lucan’s Pharsalia, a work which itself parodies the Aeneid.26 Broch also anticipates the ways in which the Aeneid and the Pharsalia feature in Claude Simon’s nihilistic La Bataille de Pharsale (1969), where the narrative wages war against itself and descends into ‘la bataille de la phrase’.27 The terror of witnessing the horror that he has furthered creeps over Virgil in an absolute stillness and evidences still further his lack of control. He becomes the Aeneas who gazed mutely over the devastation of his fatherland as a shepherd watching the destruction of the land (Aen. 2.302–17), but the landscape in Broch is as putrefied as Hades – no bird will fly across it (Aen. 6.239–41) – and in desperation he echoes the words of Jupiter (Aen. 12.793) by asking where the end to all this was to be found: And he too was waiting: with uplifted arms he waited with dream and landscape, he gazed over the still pastures on which the cattle were grazing without motion, he perceived the muteness of the motionlessly burning brands, and no bird-flight moved across the pavilion of the air; … oh, when was the end to be? where was the end to be found? when would the desecration be quaffed to the last drop? Was there a nethermost stage to this deepening silence? And then it seemed to him that just such an ultimate silence had been achieved. For he saw the mouths of men gaping at each other full of terror, no sound wrenched itself from the dry clefts and no one understood the other.28

This breakdown of communication is the ultimate realization of the many instances in Virgil’s poetry where human beings are unable to relate to one another. In Broch’s depiction, however, the collapse into silence is unsoftened by melancholy; memories of his former luxury of expression now contribute to Virgil’s realization that he must burn the Aeneid. This realization dawns upon him in the second of the book’s four sections. Although this is the 25 26 27 28

Broch (1983: 160). Henderson (1987). This phrase was coined by Ricardou (1970). Broch (1983: 185).

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bleakest section of the work, its closing chords are sweetened by a ‘voice of such great loneliness that it glowed like a single star in the darkness’.29 Virgil is at last emerging from his Hell, signalled by his citation from the Inferno, and beholding a star. Its solitary status links it to the star over Bethlehem, and like this star it leads the way to Christianity: ‘it revealed itself as the tone-picture of the annunciating deed: “Open your eyes to Love!” ’.30 The journey towards the innocence of the final Christian arrival is a journey back to the innocence of childhood, and so it is unsurprising that figures from Virgil’s distant past should assert their presence. The two most important are Plotia, beloved by Virgil, and the boy Lysanias, Virgil’s other love, who sometimes appears under the name of Alexis in allusion to the Second Eclogue. They are figures sent to guide Virgil, as once Virgil and Beatrice guided Dante. Virgil tells Plotia of his hitherto fruitless search and of the relief he is beginning to glimpse: ‘… then came the voice, then I heard it, and now there is light …’ ‘… and now it is you who are leader.’ ‘Driven by self and by fate, there was no question of leading, scarcely a guide for myself, and still less a guide for the others.’ … ‘Retained, retained … yes, … yes, I thought to hold fast to everything, everything that had happened and that was why nothing could succeed.’31

The passages explain in part another of the prefatory quotations: ‘… Da jungere dextram, da, genitor, teque amplexu ne subtrahe nostro.’ Sic memorans, largo fletu simul ora rigabat. Ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum, ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.32 ‘O Father, give me your hand to hold, give it to me. Do not withdraw from my embrace.’ As he spoke thus his face was wet from his flowing tears. Three times there he tried to throw his arms about his father’s neck, but three times the image, seized in vain, slipped away like thin air and very like winged sleep.

Virgil’s poetry is used to point to the futility of the images that he had tried to posit as firm reality. In his eventual realization that Aeneas also had returned 29 30 31 32

Broch (1983: 186). Broch (1983: 187). Broch (1983: 224, 274). Aen. 6.697–702.

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as ‘an empty symbol’ from the Underworld,33 Virgil acknowledges that only death will clear all the vain metaphors from the path of true perception. The nearer Virgil comes to death, the more insistent becomes the Christian imagery, especially in the form of allusions to Dante. Broch echoes Dante’s Statius, who likened the earthly Virgil to a traveller holding behind his back a lantern to illumine for others the path that had been dark for him, as now Lysanias held ‘the very ring … which sent out this radiance, a mantle of light over his shoulders … the way-showing smile of a star held aloft in the hand of the boy’.34 This smile gains in importance towards the end of the journey. Virgil himself had foreseen it in his Fourth Eclogue, which he closes with an injunction to the child to smile at its mother. This smile becomes the smile binding Madonna and Child, but also a ‘faceless smile at rest in itself’.35 Even here the journey is incomplete – ‘the great human sense of wandering beat on in him’36 – but eventually Virgil comes to a final point and realizes that it is the word which he is still unable to clasp, because its very nature eludes expression: ‘he could not hold fast to it and he might not hold fast to it; incomprehensible and unutterable for him:  it was the word beyond speech’.37 Virgil alone is able to come home to himself. Unlike Dante, he cannot return to earth and describe the final perfection; the text and the reader are left still in an exile of imperfection and metaphor. The loss of control and sense of exile that pervade Broch’s novel anticipate some of the main trends in Virgilian criticism towards the end of the twentieth century. We have seen how the conflicts tormenting the dying hours of Broch’s Virgil opened his eyes to the warring narrative currents within the Aeneid itself. This perception is strengthened not only by the contending Virgilian receptions of Broch’s own time, but also by W.  R. Johnson’s observation that twentieth-century interpreters of Virgil fell into two different camps  – the ‘European school’ and the ‘Harvard school’, the former presenting Aeneas’ achievements in a positive light despite the cost (as does Eliot), the latter highlighting the darker and more disquieting aspects of the poem (Johnson himself, Adam Parry, Wendell Clausen, Michael Putnam). The anxiety of Broch’s Virgil anticipates much of the criticism of the Harvard school, in particular Parry’s highly influential essay ‘The two voices of Virgil’s Aeneid’ (1963), which identifies the ‘public voice of triumph’ and the ‘private voice of regret’,38 as well as Johnson’s remarkable 33 34 35 36 37 38

Broch (1983: 280). Broch (1983: 387). Broch (1983: 398). Broch (1983: 403). Broch (1983: 416). Parry (1963: 79).

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analysis of the Aeneid’s sinister forces, Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid (1976). Denis Feeney demonstrated the difficulty of gaining control over Fama or the narrative currents of the Aeneid in The Gods in Epic (1993), while Philip Hardie has focused attention on the suspended quality of the Aeneid in The Epic Successors to Virgil (1993). More recently, Craig Kallendorf has identified strands of Virgilian pessimism in his reception by early modern writers in The Other Virgil – Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (2007). Through its vigorous yet lyrical depiction of art’s futility, The Death of Virgil has become one of Europe’s most significant modernist novels. Paradoxically, Broch’s condemnation of art has itself served as an inspiration for new art. In France, Jean Barraqué planned a musical meditation longer than Wagner’s Parsifal and Bach’s St Matthew Passion combined, although he completed only a few sections of La Mort de Virgile before his death. In Britain, Gabriel Josipovici has written powerfully of the importance of Broch’s novel to his own play, Vergil Dying.39 Extracts from this play and an essay describing its genesis were published in Charles Martindale’s Virgil and his Influence (1984), which commemorates the bimillennium of Virgil’s death. More recently, in her novel The Seven Sisters (2002) Margaret Drabble depicts a group of seven elderly ladies seeking a new life and raison d’être in the dying years of twentieth-century Britain and travelling to Italy in the footsteps of Aeneas, inspired by artists such as Goethe, Klee and Broch.40 Moreover, the figure of Broch’s dying Virgil haunts the figure of the poet Virgil who appears to Lavinia in Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Lavinia (2008).41 To say that The Death of Virgil is the twentieth century’s most important response to Virgil seems no exaggeration. It is an astonishing piece of literature, but, far more than this, it is a critique of Virgil’s œuvre that anticipates the main trends of subsequent Virgilian criticism. It is a novel which shows in the most chilling terms how a work of art can extend far beyond an author’s control and imaginings, how it can be used to validate the destruction of thousands of lives. There is, however, another more optimistic side to this phenomenon which testifies to Broch’s inability also to control his work. The Death of Virgil was written in a period which seemed to have witnessed the death of culture, when all that was most artistically exquisite seemed to be infested by ghastly possibilities. From these apparent waste

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Josipovici (1980). See Cox (2011). See O’Hara (2010: 106); Cox (2011); Hoyle (2015).

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lands, however, a host of new responses to Virgil has been born. Far from quelling the Virgilian tradition, The Death of Virgil stands at the head of a new tradition of Virgilian studies which are underpinned by a recognition of the Aeneid’s guilty past, but which ultimately testify to Virgil’s ability to help to articulate and survive the twentieth century.

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Virgil: The Future?

How has our perspective on Virgil changed since the Cambridge Companion to Virgil was first published in 1997, and what future directions do current trends suggest? As the economist Paul Samuelson put it, ‘Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions!’1 Nonetheless, I  venture here some tentative thoughts which are obviously contingent on my own horizons.2 Whatever place classic Virgil holds in the public consciousness, within the academy he retains his status as among the most written-about ancient authors.3 In addition to a proliferation of commentaries too numerous to be enumerated, Virgil continues to spawn studies on a wide variety of subjects from text and language to wordplay and rhetorical figures.4 The creative imagination of individual scholars continues to give rise to all manner of themed studies.5 History and politics, broadly defined, retain perennial interest, with gradations of subtlety and originality in treatment.6 Virgil’s relationship with his sources is rarely off the agenda, particularly when the source is a recently discovered text7 or an underexplored For comments on an earlier draft and discussion of the subject matter, I wish to thank Jo-Marie Claassen, Joe Farrell, Tom Geue, Elena Giusti, Charles Martindale, Damien Nelis and Naoko Yamagata. 1 2 3

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6

7

‘Science and stocks’, Newsweek, 19 September 1966. See Porter (2007: 470). See the annual Virgil bibliographies in the journal Vergilius. J. Farrell has pointed out to me that publications on Virgil outpace those on Ovid by about 25 per cent on L’Année philologique. On text, see Conte (2016); Kraggerud (2017). On language, see e.g. Dainotti (2015) and Frizzarin (2017). On wordplay, see Mitsis and Ziogas (2016). Themed monographs include Thibodeau (2011); Stöckinger (2016); Kania (2016a); Rogerson (2017). Collections of essays include Günther (2015); Xinyue and Freer (2019). On politics, see Powell (2008); Weeda (2015); Stahl (2015); Leigh (2016); Geue (2018). See also Tarrant, Chapter 14 in this volume. On Philodemus, see Armstrong et al. (2004). On Posidippus, see Klein (2017).

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model,8 or when the relationship lends itself to a thematic spin.9 Some of the most innovative studies combine literary or formalist approaches with a historical or ideological slant. Chiasmus is never so urgent as when it calls into question the epic’s ideological certainties.10 Aeneas is never as complex as when he responds to both Homeric and Roman values.11 Dido is at her most commanding when she follows tragic scripts to predict the Punic Wars, not to mention the effect on her of the Aeneid’s Augustan layer.12 But some might argue that even the best recent Virgilian scholarship runs along well-rutted tracks, and that although studies respond to current scholarly fashions such as the ‘cultural memory’ turn,13 the conversation could be enriched by addressing a new pressing real-world issues such as gender equality or environmental alarm bells.14 Perhaps the most obvious way in which the Aeneid is a poem for our time is in its concern with the displacement of people and their efforts to establish new homes. It deals fundamentally with colonization, migration, cultural conflict, and relations with one’s new neighbours, a complex of interconnected themes. The reasons that led to the Trojans’ flight from their war-ravaged city and across the perilous Mediterranean are known all over the world (1.459–60; 7.222–7). The xenophobic hostility that greets them on arrival expresses itself in accusations of wife-stealing (7.362) and ‘orientalist’ stereotypes (9.614–20) which still find echoes today.15 But Virgil envisages a twinning of Trojan and Italian such that Florence Dupont calls the Aeneid ‘un grand récit du métissage’.16 Paradoxically, the Trojans have Italian ancestry, and many of the Italians are of Greek stock. Thus Evander, a Greek refugee who has settled in Italy, can say, ‘We Italians’ even as his people assign Greek-sounding names to Italian places (8.331–2).17 Cultural and genetic identities are not always aligned. It is clear that Virgil could 8

9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17

On Apollonius: Nelis (2001). On Ennius: Goldschmidt (2013) and Elliott (2013: 75–134). On Theocritean scholia: Farrell (2016) and Keeline (2017). On Antisthenes: Moles (2017). On tragedy and ritual: Panoussi (2009). For sources and composition: Horsfall (2016). See also Farrell, Chapter 17 in this volume. Quint (2018). Barchiesi (2015); Barchiesi (1984) was ahead of its time. Giusti (2018). See Seider (2013). On Virgil in modern women’s writing, see Cox (2011). Spence (2014) calls for a scholarly equivalent. On motherhood, see McAuley (2016: 55–113). For the environment, see Saunders (2008) and Armstrong (2019). Knox (2017). Dupont (2011). See also Barchiesi (2006) and (2012); Reed (2007); Hardie (2014); Fletcher (2014). Jenkyns (1998: 554).

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be part of the contemporary conversation about national identity, cultural appropriation in all senses, the displacement of people, and living with and without walls, not to mention Trojan horses of various kinds. Sometimes themes within the text are played out in the history of its reception. Since Virgil’s poetry has had a strong presence in colonial and postcolonial contexts all around the world, it has proven fruitful to explore Virgil’s poetry and its cultural interactions with reference to the receiving context, be that Mexico, Ireland, India, Africa, the United States of America, or elsewhere.18 A  line from the Aeneid, ‘No day shall erase you from the memory of time’ (nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo, 9.447), is quoted on the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. Does ‘no day’ hint at 9/11, the day of the terrorist attack, which will fail to obliterate the memory of the deceased loved ones, or does ‘no day’ mean ‘no day in the future: you will never be forgotten’, as in Virgil’s nulla dies? The English translation leaves it ambiguous. Some found the quotation an appropriate and dignified tribute owing to Virgil’s classic status, while for others it proved controversial, among other reasons for the fact that the line’s honorands Nisus and Euryalus were on an aggressive mission that led to their deaths.19 Both the quotation and the ensuing discussion suggest that Virgil does still have a charged resonance in the public consciousness in an increasingly globalized world.20 Since the publication of the first edition of this Companion, an everincreasing number of studies have focused on the reception of Virgil’s work, including reception within scholarship. Indeed Virgilian scholarship is one of the most self-reflexive areas of classical studies, in which scholarly and ‘cultural’ receptions have at times overlapped.21 As Richard Thomas

18

19

20

21

Mexico: Laird (2006), (2007), (2010); Ireland: Mac Góráin (2013b); Pogorzelski (2016); India: Vasunia (2013); Riddiford (2013); Africa: Maritz (1989); Claassen (1999). Field (2017) addresses mostly Greek classics, and a Roman or Virgilian counterpart would be desirable. A section of Farrell and Putnam (2010) is entitled ‘The American Aeneid’. On the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, see Alexander (2011); Sullivan (2014); Dunlap (2014); Seider (2017); Pandey (2017: 24–5). Lines of the Aeneid were also quoted to plangent effect at the Iraq Enquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot to investigate British involvement in the 2003–11 Iraq war. Its report and redacted transcripts were published in July 2016. A member of the intelligence services (unnamed) was asked to respond to the Duelfer report, which found that Iraq had not in fact possessed adequate quantities of weapons of mass destruction to pose a military threat. The reply: ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum, really’ (Aen. 1.462). This elicited from the Chair ‘tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore’ (6.314) or a version thereof. See https://rogueclassicism.com/2011/01/20/latin-intelligence/. See e.g. the recent volume 111 of Classical World, edited by J. Hejduk (2017) on the ‘Harvard School’.

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has shown, Virgilian reception is as old as the genesis of the text itself.22 Moreover, the self-reflexivity begins with Virgil’s own poetry, which is rich in figurations of partisan reading, optimistic, pessimistic, or neither, which are often read as anticipating how the work itself might be or has been interpreted.23 It is just over a decade since Ziolkowski and Putnam’s monumental anthology brought renewed attention to fifteen hundred years’ worth of responses to Virgil, from the poet through his poetry to the myth of Virgil, and from biography to commentary.24 As new studies of Virgilian reception continue to appear, some are explicitly framed as about the afterlife of Virgil,25 while others involve a significant de facto element of Virgilian reception, for example recent works on late antique Latin poetry, in which allusions to Virgil outnumber those to other authors.26 Certainly the conversation between mainstream Virgilians, medievalists and students of the Renaissance could be intensified to advantage. Many receptions are what we might term ‘paratextual’, concerned with physical and other dimensions of the text which mediate between it and the reader. Scholars are focusing increasingly on how paratexts, whether they be features of manuscripts or books, illustrations, commentaries, or even biographical testimonies, affect readers’ interpretation of the work.27 Translations are a highly interpretative kind of literary paratext, as they mediate in language between the original and the receiving context, and important because surely ever more readers will be encountering Virgil in translation than in the original. Beyond George Steiner’s view that translation is the master trope of interpretation,28 translations of Virgil have a virtually limitless reach and, in turn, studies of Virgilian translation have the potential for a truly global scope with interdisciplinary and comparative dimensions.29 Indeed the presence of Virgil (often accessed in translation) 22 23

24 25

26

27

28 29

Thomas (2001). Also a well-trodden path. See e.g. Perkell (2001) on Ecl. 9 and Pillinger (2019) on the Sibyl. Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008). See e.g. Rees (2004); Burkard et al. (2010); Wilson-Okamura (2010); Ziosi (2015); Pugh (2016); Houghton (forthcoming). See e.g. Green (2006); Ware (2012); Pelttari (2014); O’Hogan (2016); Hardie (forthcoming). The essays in McGill and Pucci (2016) involve both explicit and incidental studies of Virgilian reception. See Genette (1997). On Roman paratexts, see Jansen (2014). On Virgilian paratexts, see the recent studies Suerbaum (2008); Scappaticcio (2013); Kallendorf (2015); Powell and Hardie (2017); Schafer (2017); Fressura (2017). On commentaries, see the chapters by Fowler and Casali and Stok, Chapters 6a and 6b in this volume. Steiner (1998). See Brammall (2015); Braund and Torlone (2018); Braund (forthcoming); and Burrow, Chapter 7 in this volume.

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in studies of comparative literature has already broadened the traditionally Eurocentric horizons of Virgilian studies.30 The digital humanities are gathering pace at an exponential rate. In addition to online texts and bibliographies,31 Virgil is well represented in more complex developments which involve collaboration between classicists and information technologists. First and foremost, the Vergil Project provides a digital edition of the Aeneid with a suite of aids to reading, from linguistic and metrical help through textual variants, ancient and modern commentaries, Homeric parallels and a choice of translations.32 Unlike a printed edition, a digital edition has virtually no constraints on space, and so for better or worse it may aspire to be comprehensive under all of its headings.33 As technical horizons widen, and if permission can be obtained from publishers to embed copyrighted material, one can easily imagine a Virgil portal with an even richer offering that would include links to images of manuscripts34 and illustrations,35 more literary models, metrical analysis, commentaries, monographs, translations, maps and recorded readings.36 One website already provides an interface that allows users to search for all quotations of (or references to) any passage of the Aeneid that appears in articles archived on JSTOR, with the added benefit of showing a snippet of the quoting article.37 As many of us spend increasingly more time with screens and less with books, the digital community has an opportunity to make Virgil even more widely accessible than ever before.38 Online editions are just the tip of the digital humanities iceberg. Digital tools now expedite different kinds of analysis from stylometrics to intertextuality.39 With human supervision as necessary, digital tools enable a level of data processing far beyond the ability of a team of Mommsens and 30

31

32 33 34

35 36

37 38

39

For Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman comparisons, see Denecke (2013). For Japan and Virgil, see Ogawa (2013) and Yamagata (2014). For Virgil in China, see Liu (2015). See online texts at www.thelatinlibrary.com and www.perseus.tufts.edu. See online bibliographies at http://oxfordbibliographies.com; www.niklasholzberg.com/Homepage/ Bibliographien.html. See http://vergil.classics.upenn.edu. See Anderson (2016) and Heslin (2016) for considerations on digital editions. See the Vatican Virgil at https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3225 and Catullus Online at www.catullusonline.org/CatullusOnline/index.php Such as those in Suerbaum (2008). See ‘Intertextual Dante’, ‘Sound’, and ‘Image’ on Digital Dante at https://digitaldante .columbia.edu See http://aeneid.citedloci.org. For digital editions with different functionalities, see the Digital Latin Library at http:// digitallatin.org; Musisque Deoque at www.mqdq.it/public/; and the Open Philology Project at www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/open-philology-project/. Coffee et al. (2012); Forstall et al. (2015); Bernstein et al. (2016); Coffee and Bernstein (2016); Chaudhuri et al. (2017); Nelis, Forstall and Galli Milić (2017).

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Wilamowitzes, and as the methods become more refined they may also revolutionize the way in which we search for phrases and collocations across texts. This said, so far, these digital applications have hugged the shore of what classicists have always done anyway: we have yet to see them fulfil the paradigm-shifting promise of ‘macroanalysis’ and ‘distant reading’ as truly radical alternatives to our comfort-zone pursuits, microanalysis and close reading.40 The digital revolution has changed the way we think; how will this affect our understanding of Virgil? Virgilians should certainly watch this space, whether their care is for truth and beauty, ambiguity, the poetics of strength and weakness, rhetoric and ideology, or the place of Virgil in broader cultural conversations.

40

See Musisque Deoque at www.mqdq.it/public/; Tesserae at http://tesserae.caset.buffalo .edu; and Quantitative Criticism Lab at https://qcrit.org/home. For ‘distant reading’, see Moretti (2013); for ‘macroanalysis’, see Jockers (2013).

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Dateline GE NE V I E V E L I V E L EY

Some of these dates are necessarily approximate or speculative. BC 1200 753 750 700 510 270 264–241 218–202 172 152 149–146 106 100 98 87 76 70 69 65 63 62 60

Traditional date of the Trojan War Legendary foundation of Rome Cumae colonized by Greeks Composition of Iliad and Odyssey; Hesiod, Works and Days Traditional date of expulsion of the kings of Rome and foundation of the Republic Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica; Callimachus and Theocritus active First Punic War Second Punic War Ennius, Annales Cato the Elder, Origines Third Punic War; destruction of Carthage Births of Pompey and Cicero Birth of Julius Caesar Birth of Lucretius Birth of Catullus Birth of Pollio Birth of Virgil, 15 October; first consulship of Pompey and Crassus Births of Gallus and Maecenas Birth of Horace Births of Octavian and Agrippa; consulship of Cicero Death of Catiline First triumvirate of Pompey, Crassus and Caesar 479

480

G e n e v i e v e L i v e l ey

59 55

54 53 51 49 48 46 45 44 43 42 41 40 38 37 35 31 30 29

27 26 23

20 19

15 480

Catullus active Virgil in Mediolanum; traditional date of his assumption of the toga virilis. Second consulship of Pompey and Crassus; death of Lucretius Death of Catullus Crassus killed at Carrhae Cicero, De republica Civil War begins Battle of Pharsalus (Thessaly); Pompey killed in Egypt; Caesar in Alexandria Suicide of Cato the Younger at Utica; dictatorship of Caesar Caesar adopts Octavian as heir Assassination of Caesar by Cassius and Brutus, 15 March; Octavian in Rome Birth of Ovid; second triumvirate formed by Antony, Lepidus and Octavian; proscriptions; death of Cicero Battle of Philippi; defeat and deaths of Cassius and Brutus; Virgil begins composition of Eclogues Octavian distributes confiscated land to veterans Consulship of Pollio; reconciliation of Octavian and Antony Virgil and Varius introduce Horace to Maecenas Virgil begins composition of Georgics; Virgil and Horace accompany Maecenas on a diplomatic mission to Brundisium Horace, Satires l Battle of Actium; defeat of Antony and Cleopatra Octavian in Egypt; deaths of Antony and Cleopatra; Horace, Satires 2 and Epodes Virgil completes Georgics and begins composition of Aeneid; Octavian celebrates triple triumph; Propertius and Tibullus active Octavian receives title ‘Augustus’ Propertius extols Virgil’s work on Aeneid Virgil reads extracts from Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia at Nola; effective end of Maecenas’ literary patronage; Horace, Odes 1–3 Horace, Epistles 1; Ovid, Amores, first edition Virgil leaves for Greece to finish the Aeneid, becomes ill and dies on return to Italy at Brundisium, 21 September; buried in Naples; Aeneid published posthumously by Varius and Tucca; death of Tibullus Birth of Germanicus; Ovid, Heroides, first collection

481

Dat e l i n e

13 8

Horace, Odes 4 and Epistles 2 completed Deaths of Maecenas and Horace AD

1 2 4 8 14 17

Ovid, Amores, second edition, Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris completed Ovid begins composition of Metamorphoses and Fasti Death of Pollio; Augustus adopts Tiberius Ovid’s exile Augustus dies; succeeded by Tiberius Ovid dies in exile

Selected Dates in the Reception of Virgil Some of these dates are necessarily approximate or speculative. AD 62 95 384 397 400 426 500 800 1235 1321 1380 1428 1502 1513 1516–32 1517 1572 1579 1581 1590 1596

Calpurnius Siculus, Eclogues Quintilian, Institutio oratoria Servius, commentator on Virgil, active St Augustine, Confessions Macrobius, commentator on Virgil, active St Augustine, City of God Fulgentius, commentator on Virgil, active Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor John of Garland, the ‘rota Vergilii’ in Parisiana Poetria Dante, Divina Commedia Chaucer, House of Fame Maffeo Vegio, Book 13 of the Aeneid Sebastian Brant, illustrated edition of Virgil Gavin Douglas, translation of Aeneid Ariosto, Orlando Furioso Earl of Surrey, translation of Aeneid 2 and 4 Joseph Scaliger, Appendix Vergiliana Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Books 1–3 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Books 4–6 481

482

G e n e v i e v e L i v e l ey

1608–17 1637 1674 1689 1697 1767–75 1903 1930 1944 1945 1951

482

La Cerda, edition of Virgil in 3 volumes Milton, Lycidas Milton, Paradise Lost Purcell, Dido and Aeneas Dryden, Aeneid Christian Gottlob Heyne, edition of Virgil in 4 volumes Richard Heinze, Virgils epische Technik; Eduard Norden, edition of Aeneid 6 Bimillennium celebrations of Virgil’s birth T. S. Eliot, ‘What is a Classic?’ Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil T. S. Eliot, ‘Virgil and the Christian World’

483

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530

531

I N DE X L O C ORU M

Eclogues 1 71, 72, 182, 183, 184, 185, 249 1.1 236n46, 429 1.1–2 305 1.4 308n31 1.5 429, 431 1.9–10 432 1.12–15 358 1.27–35 431 1.30 430, 431 1.37–2.19 98 1.38 431 1.42 249n19 1.48–9 187 1.70 370, 372 1.76 187 1.77 237 1.83 237 2 183, 186, 426 2.2 426 2.14–15 426 2.15–16 390 2.24 186 2.31 429 2.36–9 390 2.38 429 2.45 426 2.66 431 2.68 428 2.69–70 428 3 188 3.3–6 391 3.7–8 428 3.32 391 3.33 391 3.36–47 414 3.64–5 441 3.66–7 441

3.73–4 442 3.79 50 3.84–5 321n68 3.86 245 3.86–7 321n68 4 232 4.1–2 216 4.1 235 4.1–3 321n68 4.4 284 4.4–5 163 4.5 286 4.6 184, 284 4.7 162 4.8–10 284 4.10 52n43, 60 4.11–17 321n68 4.13–14 81n20 4.18–25 350 4.25 81n20 4.60 159 5 184, 294 5.31 231n22 6 178, 232, 246 6.1–2 68n27, 216, 300 6.3 216, 235, 450 6.3–4 300 6.3–5 235, 245 6.11 44n5 6.20–1 380 6.26–6 429 6.27–8 432 6.31–40 283 6.32–3 283 6.37 19n40 6.41–2 283 6.43–81 283 6.47 432

531

532

I N D E X L OC O R U M Eclogues (cont.) 6.52 432 6.64–73 235, 283 6.72–3 283 6.74–7 70n39 6.75–7 70, 71 7 188 7.14–16 430 8.37–41 189 8.47–8 438 9 71, 72, 179–81, 182, 183, 187, 249 9.2–16 304 9.5 249 9.5–6 71 9.7–10 390 9.10–29 249n20 9.11–13 236 9.27–8 380 9.32–6 301 9.35–6 246n12 9.46 284 10 179–81, 184, 187n51, 246 10.11–15 231 10.20 390 10.41 429 10.69 162, 181 10.70 235 10.72–3 239 10.75 216, 237 Georgics 1.5 201, 235 1.6 206 1.7 370 1.10–15 310 1.21 201 1.24–42 250 1.37 206 1.40–2 202 1.42 295 1.43–5 205 1.47–9 206 1.49 207 1.50 206 1.55 206 1.59 206 1.60 206 1.63 206 1.94 206 1.98 206 1.99 206 1.104ff. 414 1.118–146 288

532

1.118–59 251 1.121–2 288 1.129 370 1.134 208 1.137 208 1.141 208 1.142 208 1.145 208, 378 1.145–6 207 1.150 208 1.157 208 1.184–6 347 1.231–4 117 1.254 355 1.276–282 202 1.293–4 433 1.297–8 381 1.406–9 71 1.439–60 207 1.465–6 207 1.468 370 1.489–90 207 1.498–9 250 1.500 249n19 1.509–14 309 1.512–14 209 1.564 236 2 199, 244n2 2.2 235 2.9–19 352 2.39 401 2.41 202 2.50–2 206 2.116–17 118 2.136–76 288 2.156–7 19n40 2.172 377 2.273–87 212 2.288–97 361 2.315–45 205 2.397–419 212 2.458–60 251 2.458–60 288 2.458–542 288 2.473 289 2.478–9 313n43 2.481–2 313n43 2.490–2 281, 289 2.490–4 309 2.493 289 2.495–540 309 2.498 85 2.500–1 251

533

I N D E X L OC O R U M 2.505ff. 247n13 2.513 433 2.514–15 433 2.516–17 433 2.523–526 433 2.529 289 2.541–2 209, 309 3 199, 236 3.1 235 3.8–9 216, 219, 309 3.16 217, 250, 252, 419 3.16–6 414 3.16–48 310 3.24–25 333 3.26–33 243, 333 3.34 415 3.34–6 252 3.36 415 3.41 202 3.42 202 3.46–8 217 3.52–5 432 3.76 209 3.77 209 3.77–8 209 3.79 209 3.83 209 3.88 209 3.90 209 3.91 209 3.94 209 3.209–10 432 3.215–16 432 3.219 432 3.266–8 434 3.284–5 357 3.479 432 3.482 432 3.563 432 3.566 432 4 200, 232, 285, 290, 294 4.4 202 4.6 58 4.8–314 310 4.116–48 310 4.124–38 72 4.134 118 4.198 434 4.200–1 434 4.201 310 4.219–27 285 4.236 310 4.261–3 310

4.281–314 311 4.294–414 434n18 4.315–558 311 4.333–43 348 4.335 349 4.337 349 4.382 434 4.424 393 4.454 392 4.455 196 4.456 196, 392 4.458 392 4.464–6 380 4.472 238 4.475 434 4.475–77 70n40 4.488 196 4.495 393 4.497 393 4.498 393 4.501 238 4.520 394, 434 4.525–7 19n40 4.537 196 4.538–58 434n18 4.545 197 4.559 236 4.559–66 305 4.560–2 250 4.563 236n46 4.564 198 4.565 68n27 Aeneid 1–4 264, 406, 437 1–6 400 1.1 217, 220, 313, 448 1.1–7 54, 217 1.2 101, 464 1.2–3 439 1.4 401 1.5 402 1.7 263 1.8 32, 118, 142, 219, 220, 400 1.8–11 314 1.11 401 1.13–14 82 1.20 400 1.23 91 1.25 401 1.31–45 317 1.33 264, 402, 405 1.34 400

533

534

I N D E X L OC O R U M Aeneid (cont.) 1.37–9 400 1.38 82–3 1.39–45 454 1.47 89 1.65 372 1.72 121 1.92 394 1.92–6 315 1.96–101 315 1.97–8 401 1.107 92n11 1.118 372 1.118–19 351 1.135 146, 435 1.137 435 1.148–56 28 1.185 93 1.199 401 1.203 57 1.216 83n25 1.220 395 1.223 401, 435 1.227 282n14 1.229–30 218 1.241 218, 401 1.256–96 32 1.257–96 220 1.257–96 271–72 1.260 400 1.261 219n5 1.262 34 1.263–4 265 1.276–7 402 1.278–9 30, 217, 271 1.283 219 1.364 378n32 1.365 99 1.378 395 1.407–8 438 1.427–9 339 1.453–93 414 1.456 417, 418 1.457 416 1.459–60 473 1.459–65 345 1.461–3 346 1.462 11, 166, 420, 474n20 1.466 418 1.487 423 1.488 418 1.491 439 1.493–7 421

534

1.500–1 371 1.521 92 1.630 159 1.716 437 1.726 1 1.742–3 313n43, 409 1.745–6 313n43 1.821–2 403 2 232 2.1 413 2.3 406, 411, 413 2.10–11 375 2.18–20 375 2.49 112 2.56 375 2.66 112 2.92 375 2.108–9 375 2.115 92n11 2.139–40 375 2.141 375 2.203ff. 414 2.215 370 2.281–2 19n40 2.285–6 370 2.302–17 467 2.324–6 19n40 2.351–2 84 2.353 376 2.486ff. 338 2.487 376 2.552–3 406 2.554–5 58 2.554–8 405 2.601 44 2.617–23 330 2.626–31 361 2.687–8 122 2.691 101 2.701 401 2.711 436 2.724 47 2.741 436 2.788 437 2.789 437 2.792–4 437 3.12 372 3.88–9 80 3.89 436 3.94–6 436 3.96 218, 402 3.102 402 3.105 402

535

I N D E X L OC O R U M 3.111 436 3.163–8 265 3.167–8 436 3.250–7 456 3.270–7 317 3.303 435 3.358 92 3.375–6 286 3.443–352 466 3.443–52 409 3.490 159 3.496 354 3.570–82 65 3.588–691 317 3.628–9 82n23 3.710 411 4 49 4.1–4 379 4.1–6 375 4.6–110 318 4.13–14 409 4.19 378 4.23 130 4.27 101 4.65 379 4.68–73 363 4.78 400 4.84–5 437 4.92 92 4.124–5 378n32 4.165–6 378 4.196–278 287 4.215 454 4.223–37 287 4.229–31 265 4.265 92 4.265–76 287 4.266 384 4.271 103 4.279–80 287 4.281–2 287, 407 4.300–3 337 4.305–13 372 4.305–30 287 4.313 372 4.314 372 4.316 372 4.317–18 105 4.328 384 4.328–9 437 4.331–2 287 4.336 159 4.337 336

4.340–4 397 4.437–49 360 4.465–73 438 4.467–76 106 4.469–73 337 4.471 106 4.550–1 337 4.560–2 295 4.560–70 287 4.569 401 4.584–5 70n40 4.600–2 437 4.622ff. 57 4.625 159 4.688ff. 50n35 4.694–5 384 5 264 5.45–71 446 5.139 376 5.144–7 449 5.250–7 423 5.257 421 5.294–5 442 5.294ff. 423 5.481 372 5.596–603 446 5.774 355 6 44, 49, 68n27, 238, 264, 285, 286 6.1–13 375 6.14–34 414 6.69ff. 270 6.74–6 410 6.83–97 218 6.86–94 448 6.89 403, 423 6.125–9 19n40 6.129 50 6.239–41 467 6.258 376 6.264 282n14 6.268 238 6.306–8 70n40 6.314 474n20 6.314–15 19n40 6.340 238 6.401 238 6.428–9 126 6.442 58n66 6.452–3 238 6.466 377–8 6.621ff. 247n13 6.664 86, 294 6.697–702 468

535

536

I N D E X L OC O R U M Aeneid (cont.) 6.703–12 285–86 6.713–15 292 6.718 272 6.719–21 85 6.723 406 6.729 355 6.730–4 256n41 6.730–5 85n30 6.745–7 293 6.748 293 6.750–1 85n30 6.754 406 6.756–859 55n52 6.756–886 32, 220, 271, 294 6.789–790 333 6.791 413 6.791–2 418 6.791–4 410 6.791–807 446 6.792 243 6.815–18 273 6.824 273 6.845–6 118, 332 6.851–3 159, 285, 295 6.853 159n32, 290, 452 6.856 332 6.857–8 332 6.857–9 333 6.868 372 6.870 333 6.872–86 413 6.879–81 333 6.882–9 358 6.883 164 6.889 411 6.890–2 402 7 53, 231, 232, 264, 275 7–12 253, 313, 400 7.1 400 7.11–14 433 7.25–36 354 7.28 355 7.29–35 355 7.37–45 318 7.38–9 265 7.41–5 313 7.45 339, 449 7.45–6 266 7.48–9 265 7.53 83 7.66 47n25 7.116 456

536

7.120–7 456 7.180 265 7.203 266 7.205–8 265 7.222–7 473 7.270ff. 53 7.310–16 361 7.321 454 7.362 454, 473 7.412 102 7.435–44 450 7.451 92n11 7.483ff. 414 7.488 231n22 7.491 231n22 7.528–30 158 7.563 101 7.583–94 362 7.643 271 7.656 265 7.662 439 7.672 265 7.679 265 7.691 265 7.718 355 7.723 265 7.759–60 11, 231, 380 7.761 265 7.805 336 8 44, 231, 232, 264, 275 8.18–25 396 8.35 92n11 8.99–100 263 8.134–42 456 8.158–9 265 8.185–275 295 8.240–2 265 8.306–61 6 8.313 263 8.314–36 265 8.331–2 473 8.338–9 263 8.347–348 6 8.348 6, 263 8.349 271 8.349–50 330 8.350 271 8.355–8 265 8.360–1 6 8.361 263 8.364–5 320 8.383–4 452 8.394 430

537

I N D E X L OC O R U M 8.412–13 430 8.426–32 422 8.452 372 8.452–3 422 8.514–19 452 8.618–19 418 8.625 418 8.625–731 414 8.626–728 220, 271 8.629 417 8.630–728 32 8.634 422 8.641 88 8.664–5 419 8.668–9 55n53 8.671–713 243 8.672 419 8.673 419 8.675 419 8.676 419 8.677 419 8.678 243 8.678–723 446 8.679 372 8.680 419 8.683 420 8.704 370 8.720 415, 419 8.720–2 419 8.721 383n51 8.729–30 418 8.730 378, 396 8.731 276 9 232 9–12 264, 384 9.138–9 453, 454 9.245 335 9.432 442 9.435–7 335, 359 9.446 236, 442 9.446–9 56n58, 236, 400 9.447 74 9.459–60 70n40 9.492–3 81 9.590–2 404 9.590–637 404 9.593–4 404 9.595–7 404 9.598–20 404 9.614–20 473 9.621–4 404 9.625–9 404 9.630–4 405

9.634–5 405 9.636–7 405 9.637 405 9.642–3 377 9.663 405 9.671 405 9.742 453 9.757–9 409 9.774–7 408–11 10 264 10.1–17 286–88 10.112–13 287 10.261–2 422 10.269 376 10.271 422 10.299 355 10.467 282n14 10.497–9 422 10.498 441 10.501 378 10.505–6 384 10.515–17 451 10.517–20 254n29 10.519 451 10.536 406 10.541 451 10.565–70 408 10.820–1 381 10.834 103 10.875 79 10.884 422 11.42 359 11.67–71 359 11.72–77 359, 397 11.77 441n36 11.107–10 117 11.282–4 454 11.288–92 454 11.387 92n11 11.438–40 453 11.534 92n11 11.780 336 11.787–788 80 11.803–4 441 12.11 401 12.18 372 12.48–53 450 12.55 440 12.63 440 12.64–72 387 12.65 440 12.70–1 440 12.120 90, 93

537

538

I N D E X L OC O R U M Aeneid (cont.) 12.170 88 12.433–6 397 12.473–4 370 12.500–3 384 12.646 44 12.699 402 12.715–24 432 12.725–7 138 12.739–41 422 12.745 122 12.793 401, 467 12.807 92n11 12.826–7 267 12.829–40 286 12.832 401 12.842 403 12.845–8 442 12.848–9 239 12.849–50 330, 442 12.855 329 12.889 401 12.921–3 329 12.923 329 12.932–6 452 12.938–52 375 12.946 395 12.946–7 329 12.949 451

538

12.950 402, 406 12.951 394 12.952 229, 238 Appendix Vergiliana Aetn 260–269 65 Catalepton 1 65 5 65 7 65 8 65 9 66n18, 70 10 66 13 66, 66n20 14 66 14.1 66 15 65, 66, 66n20, 67 Ciris 1–100 69 42–45 69 59–61 70 538–41 70 Culex 1 68n27 1–41 68 Dirae 103 71 Moretum 102 13n30 104 73

539

I NDE X NOM I NU M E T R ERU M

Accius, 338, 339, 340 Achilles Aeneas as type of, 396, 403, 421, 452–3, 458 shield of Aeneas recalling shield of, 415, 417, 420, 420n8, 422 Turnus styling himself as, 453, 458 Actium, battle of, 49–51, 243, 246n12, 247, 250n21, 251, 253n25, 264, 274, 331, 334 Adamnán, 96 Adorno, Theodor, 373 Aelius Donatus, 44, 46, 59, 63, 72, 74–5, 78, 88, 96, 97, 101, 164, 182, 227, 227n7, 228, 229, 233, 234–5, 280 Aemilius Paullus, 293–4 Aeneas. See also pietas/pius; shield of Aeneas Achilles and, 396, 403, 421, 452–3, 458 anger of, 281, 290–2, 329, 395, 451–2 Augustus identified with, 36, 217, 218, 221, 243, 252, 253 as authorial persona, 316 character of, 394–7 as Christian prototype, 5 Eliot’s characterisation of, 31–2, 36 as Homeric hero, 396 sacrifices by, 451 Aeneid. See also epic; narrative and storytelling; Rome and Italy in Aeneid; shield of Aeneas; tragedy; specific citations in Index of Virgilian Passages Appendix Vergiliana and, 68, 73 assumptions about Virgil as Augustan poet and, 257–8 Augustine quoting, 78 Augustus, Aeneid 2, 4, and 6 performed by Virgil for, 164, 244, 413 authorial personae/masks in, 312–21

books, division into, 406 death of Virgil before completion of, 16, 46 echoes of Eclogues and Georgics in, 230–1 ending of, 238 finality, desire for, 12 gender and sexuality in, 435–42 ille ego opening (pre-proemium), 227, 228, 233, 234–5 intention of dying Virgil to burn unfinished manuscript, 16, 49, 244, 446, 463 intertextuality of, 312–21, 324 metrical patterns of, 371 multiple perspectives in, 253–4 ‘optimist’ view of, 259–60 ‘pessimist’ view of, 9, 254–9, 326 politics of, 252–61 as problematic text, 327, 331 prophetic passages in, 252–3, 271–4, 275 publication after death of Virgil, Augustus’ role in, 257, 261, 446 religious and philosophical ideas, key passages for, 280 successor to Iliad and Odyssey, establishment as, 222–4 time and timelessness in, 6, 27–9, 30–1, 252–3, 263–5 Virgil’s epitaph and, 63, 75, 227 Aeschylus, 328, 329, 330, 331n17, 335, 442 Aetna, 63, 64, 74, 75 Africa Hadrumetum mosaic, 142 Hannibalic War, 272 metre and scansion issues for African hearers, 81

539

540

I N DE X N OMI N U M E T R ERUM Africa (cont.) Punic Wars, 57, 264, 273 views of Aeneid in, 78, 142 afterlife, 89, 292–6. See also Anchises; religious and philosophical ideas Agrippa, 347, 420 Albrecht of Brandenburg, 159 Alexandrian poets and poetic style, 46, 65, 178, 236, 246, 267n7, 306, 369, 371, 374, 417. See also specific poets Alfenus Varus, 245 allegories and allegorisation Aeneid eschewing straightforward allegory, 253–4 Aeneid regarded as allegory of narration and historical understanding, 34, 38 in art related to Virgil, 143, 146, 159, 160, 162 bees in Georgics, 210, 211, 212, 310, 311 in commentaries on Virgil, 89, 97, 98, 99, 101, 128, 131, 146 of Eclogues, 176, 182–4, 187 in English translations, 120 of gods, 89 in romance versus epic models, 224 alliteration and consonance, 351, 379 ambiguity, 376–9, 474 Ambrose of Milan, 61, 81, 83 Amiens Cathedral, 162 analepses and prolepses, 404 anaphora, 380 anaplêrôsis, 222–4 Anchises, 85, 89, 220, 272–3, 285–6, 292, 293 anger of Aeneas, 281, 290–2, 329, 395, 451–2 Anselm of Laon, 99 Anser, 246n12 antiquarianism in Aeneid, 265–71 antiquity, reception of Virgil in, 14, 43–60 Antony, 210, 243, 246n12, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 334, 457 Apelles, painting of War by, 141 Apollo, temple of, at Cumae, 417 Apollonio di Giovanni, 146 Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica, 104, 138, 176n11, 232, 318–19, 320, 326, 338, 389, 396, 421 Appendix Vergiliana, 63–76. See also specific citations in Index of Virgilian Passages Aetna, 63, 64, 74, 75 antiquity, reception in, 73–5 attribution to Virgil, 13, 63–5, 73–5

540

biographical tradition associated with Virgil and, 66, 72 Catalepton, 63, 65–7, 68, 69n32, 71, 72, 73n52, 74, 76, 233 Ciris, 63, 69–71, 73n52, 74, 76, 135 closure and, 233–4 commentaries on, 100, 101, 104 Copa, 63, 64, 76 Culex (‘The gnat’), 13, 45, 63, 67–9, 71, 73, 74, 76, 101, 135, 233 dating of, 73n52 De est et non, 63, 64 De institutione viri boni, 63, 64 De rosis nascentibus, 63, 64 Dirae, 63, 71–2, 72n51, 74, 76, 101 Elegiae in Maecenatem, 63, 64, 76 Lydia, 71 manuscript origins of collection, 45n11 medieval reception of, 128 modern reception of, 75 Moretum, 13, 63, 64, 73, 76 Priapea, 63, 72, 72n51, 74 primary and secondary pseudepigraphy, 64–5 quid hoc novi est?, 72n48 Virgil as unifying theme of works in, 73 Apuleius, 183 Ara Pacis, Rome, 44, 374 Aratus, 48, 202, 307, 308 archaisms, 382 Archias, 244, 245, 257 Areius Didymus, 280 Arendt, Hannah, 204, 219 Ariosto, Ludovico, 132–3, 134, 135, 359n27 Aristaeus, 195–7, 312, 392–4, 434 Aristotle, 90n8, 99, 167, 178, 256, 280n7, 281, 291, 327–8, 340, 369, 373, 388, 405 Arnold, Matthew, 3, 17, 19, 189 art, 141–69. See also ecphrasis Ascensius, Jodocus Badius, 104 Asclepiades of Samos, 302 Asinius Pollio, 173, 243, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 321, 339 assonance, 380 Atticus, 43 Auden, W. H., 275 Augustine of Hippo, 77–86 City of God, 83–5, 86, 89 Confessions, 59n69, 77, 81, 82, 83, 129, 142 Contra academicos, 77, 79

541

I N DE X N OMI N U M E T R E RUM Contra Iulianum, 83 De beata vita, 81 De doctrina Christiana, 82n22, 84n29 De musica, 83n26 De ordine, 79, 83n26 De trinitate, 82n23 Epistulae, 81 Sermones, 85 Augustus (Octavian; emperor). See also authority Aeneas identified with, 36, 217, 218, 221, 243, 252, 253 Aeneid, politics of, 252–61 Aeneid 2, 4, and 6 performed by Virgil for, 164, 244, 413 Aeneid prophesying, 410 association of Virgil with, 52, 53, 243, 257 assumptions about Virgil as Augustan poet, 257–8 character of Aeneas and Augustan readings of Aeneid, 395n28 choice of name echoing line of Ennius, 450 in Culex, 45, 68 divine future status of, 295, 306, 330 Eclogues and, 243, 248, 249 Georgics and, 201, 210, 217, 243, 250, 251, 252 historical assessments of Augustan principate affecting reception of Virgil’s political stance, 260–1 Horace and, 247n14 in Ingres’ Virgil reading the Aeneid to the Emperor Augustus, 166 legendary past of Aeneid and recent history, analogies between, 333–5 Nero heralded as new version of, 52 Palatine House of Augustus, Rome, 53, 297 political significance of Virgilian works and, 10, 12 public discourse under, Virgil’s role in development of, 44 publication of Aeneid after death of Virgil and, 257, 261, 446 Res gestae, 256, 267n8, 445, 458 Rome transformed by, 7 on shield of Aeneas, 274, 418 Aulus Gellius, 4, 52n40, 449n16 Aurelius Symmachus, 88 Ausonius, 47, 61, 64 authority, 445–58, 464 Avienus, 61

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 213, 220, 220n9, 222 Ballista, 74 Barocci, Federico, 153 Basel, Council of, 156 Beaumont, Sir John, 350n11 bees and community, in Georgics, 210–11, 212, 285, 290, 294, 310–12 Benjamin, Walter, 12 Berenice I (queen of Egypt), 247, 250 Beresford, James, 120 Berlioz, Hector, 14n32 Bern scholia, 96–8 Bernardus Silvestris, 99, 107, 146 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 152 bimillennial celebration of birth of Virgil (1930), 461, 462 bimillennium of death of Virgil, 470 biographical criticism, 226 Blake, William, 150 Bloom, Harold, 9, 10 books, division of Aeneid into, 406 Borges, Jorge Luis, 121 Borgia Apartments, Vatican Palace, 163 bougonia, 195, 197, 210, 311, 312, 434 Bowen, Charles, 122, 124 Bramante, Donato, 153 Brexit, 16 Broch, Hermann. See Death of Virgil Browning, Robert, 358 bucolic. See pastoral genre and Eclogues Burne-Jones, Edward, 1 Cacciaguida, 131 Caecilius Epirota, 43 caesura, 372 Callimachus, 176, 176n11, 178, 178n20, 180, 204, 222, 231, 235, 245, 247, 250, 267n7, 283, 299n1, 306, 311, 369, 415, 417 Calpurnius Siculus, 48, 174 Camilla, 231, 336, 439, 441 Camões, Luis Vaz de, Lusiads (1572), 4, 39, 136 cano/canere. See singing and song Capitoline, Rome, 263, 271, 330 career criticism, 226–39 Carracci, Agostino, 162 Cartesian self, 388 Carthage. See Dido and Aeneas; temple of Juno at Carthage Carvilius Pictor, 46 Cassius Dio, 445

541

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I N DE X N OMI N U M E T R ERUM Cassius of Parma, 246n12 Catalepton, 63, 65–67, 68, 69n32, 71, 72, 73n52, 74, 76, 233 Catiline, 55, 274, 275, 420, 427 Cato the Elder, 268, 306n24 Cato the Younger, 55n52, 118, 202, 274, 275 Catullus, 29, 66, 173, 178, 180, 232, 245–6, 335, 369, 375, 417, 421, 427, 440, 443n40 Caxton, William, 110 character, 387–99 Charlemagne, 4, 39, 260 Charles I (king of England), 7, 113, 114, 115, 364 Charles II (king of England), 115, 116, 137, 184 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 110 Chilcot, Sir John, and Chilcot Enquiry, 474n20 Christianity and Christian culture. See also Augustine of Hippo antiquity, early Christian reception of Virgil in, 59–60 Broch’s Death of Virgil and, 462, 462n8, 468, 469 education and, 80, 82 Eliot and, 5, 35, 37–8, 39–40, 462n8 Fourth Eclogue, as Christian prophecy, 5, 37–8, 59, 78, 128, 146, 162, 184 gods, handling of Virgilian references to, 78, 89 medieval view of Virgil as not quite Christian, 129 pagan sacrifices, banning of (391), 89 Philargyrius, as Christian, 97 Servius’ commentary and, 89 Stoicism and, 281 use of Virgil in, 78, 80 Virgil as prefigurement/prophet of, 5, 24, 78, 281, 462 Cicero, 43, 44n5, 52, 56, 59, 77, 244, 246n12, 254n29, 274, 282, 284, 290, 291, 293–4, 374, 427 Academica, 77 De officiis, 291 De republica, 275, 293–4 ‘Dream of Scipio,’ 293–4 Pro Archia, 244, 245 Tusculan Disputations, 290 Cinna (C. Helvius Cinna), 302 Ciris, 63, 69–71, 73n52, 74, 76, 135 clash, as stylistic feature, 372

542

Classic, Virgil as representation of, 4, 17, 27–9, 30–31 Claude Lorrain, 5, 149, 158 Claudian, 61 Cleopatra, 243, 251, 253, 274, 334 closure, 63, 75, 179–81, 184, 227, 228, 229–39 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 368–85 colonialism and colonial/postcolonial studies, 473–4 comet following assassination of Julius Caesar, 187, 284 commentaries, 96, 97–9, 107–8, 131. See also specific commentaries/ commentators Conington, John, 103, 122 consonance and alliteration, 351, 379 Constantine I (emperor), 59–60 Copa, 63, 64, 76 Cornelius Gallus. See Gallus Cornelius Severus, 48n28 cosmology and cosmogony, 281, 283–6 Cromwell, Oliver, 115, 116 Culex (‘The gnat’), 13, 45, 63, 67–9, 71, 73, 74, 76, 101, 135, 233 Cumae, Sibyl at. See Sibyl of Cumae and Sibylline oracles Cumae, temple of Apollo at, 417 Curia, Rome, 271 cursus honorum, 226, 226n4, 228, 229, 312 Cyclic Poets and Epic Cycle, 313, 317, 319, 320, 416, 453 Cyrene and Aristaeus, relationship between, 392–4, 434 dactylic hexameter, 371–2 Dante, Divine Comedy, xvi, 1, 2, 3, 9, 36, 46n14, 129–34, 148, 184, 322, 464, 465, 468, 469 Dares the Phrygian, 65n15 Day Lewis, C., 123, 124 De est et non, 63, 64 de Passe, Crispijn, the Elder, 146 De rosis nascentibus, 63, 64 death of Virgil, 16, 46, 49, 56–8, 63, 75, 227, 229, 244, 257, 261, 446, 463, 470 The Death of Virgil (Broch, 1945), 16, 461–71 defamiliarisation, 369 Denham, Sir John, 115, 116, 118, 355, 356n21, 360n29 Derrida, Jacques, 175 Descartes, René, 388

543

I N DE X N OMI N U M E T R E RUM d’Este, Ippolito, 134 diction/choice of words, 347–50, 382–4 didaxis and Georgics, 193, 198, 202n18, 202–5, 374n19. See also Georgics Dido, 59n69, 78, 129, 142, 287, 327, 328, 336–7, 359–67, 372, 377–8, 437–8, 440 Digges, Dudley, 114 digital Virgilian projects, 476–7 Dio Chrysostom, 47 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 101 Dirae, 63, 71–2, 72n51, 74, 76, 101 displacement, 473–4 divinised humans, 294–5, 306, 330 dollar bill, quoting Virgil, 13 Domitius (Quintilian’s teacher), 46 Donation of Constantine, 130 Donatus. See Aelius Donatus Donne, John, 351 Douglas, Gavin, 110–11, 123 Drabble, Margaret, 470 Dryden, John English translation of Aeneid by, 9, 113, 116–20, 121, 125, 126, 345–6, 363, 397 works of, 116, 118, 119, 184, 193, 345–6, 363, 370, 397 Duelfer Report, 474n20 Dürer, Albrecht, 159 e pluribus unum, 13, 13n30, 73 Eclogues. See also Fourth Eclogue; pastoral genre and Eclogues; specific citations in Index of Virgilian Passages Aeneid, echoes of Eclogues and Georgics in, 230–1 allegorical reading of, 176, 182–4 Appendix Vergiliana and, 65, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75 Augustine quoting, 78 authorial personae/masks in, 300–5 character in, 389, 390–2 classified as epic by Quintilian, 174 ending of, 237 gender and sexuality in, 425–32 intertextual persona, Theocritus as, 300–5, 324 as mature work, 45 metrical patterns of, 371 politics and, 243, 248–50 progressive nature of poetic career, from pastoral to epic, 216–24, 227–8

religious and philosophical ideas, key passages for, 280 as school text, 43 singing contests in, 179, 188 structural unity of, 187 Virgil’s epitaph and, 63 ecphrasis, 413–23 Edgeworth, Maria, 7n16 education, 43–4, 59, 77, 80, 82, 105 Einsiedeln Eclogues, 48, 52 ekplêxis, 327 Elegiae in Maecenatem, 63, 64, 76 Eliot, T. S., 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 14, 23–41, 124, 461, 469 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 112, 135, 154 Elysium, 292–4 emotional response, ability of style to produce, 381–2 Empedocles, 281, 283, 289 English translations, 13, 109–26. See also specific translators enjambment, 355, 375, 378 Ennius, 51, 209, 216, 222, 244, 268, 299n1, 309, 321, 338, 339, 371, 374, 382, 417, 449, 450 Alexander, 339 Annales, 222, 244, 309, 338, 371, 402, 447, 449 epanalepsis, 380 epic, 122, 132, 199, 216–24, 227–8, 326, 382–3, 413. See also Aeneid Epic Cycle and Cyclic Poets, 313, 317, 319, 320, 416, 453 Epicureans and Epicureanism, 280–1, 282, 283, 289, 290, 291, 389 epitaph for Virgil, 63, 75, 227, 229 epyllia, 417 Erasmus, Desiderius, 426n5 eschatology, 292–6 ethics, 279, 289–92, 389 ethnography, 265–71 Etruscans, 264, 284 Euphorion, 179 Euripides, 173, 317n54, 330, 332, 335, 336, 339, 437 Euryalus and Nisus, 133, 335, 423, 442, 474 Eurydice and Orpheus, 195–7, 296, 312, 381, 392–4, 434 exemplary mode of thought in Roman education, 297

543

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I N DE X N OMI N U M E T R ERUM Fabius Cunctator, 332 Fabricius, Georg, 100 family, 72, 111, 140, 152, 223, 328, 422, 437–9, 451, 456 Fanshawe, Richard, 114, 115, 125 fidus Achates, xv Fitzgerald, Robert, 123 focalisation, 389 Forum Boarium, Rome, 263 Forum of Augustus, Rome, 44, 271 Fourth Eclogue, 5, 37–38, 52, 59, 78, 116, 128, 136, 144, 146, 162–4, 184, 249, 252, 275, 277, 280, 281, 284–5, 289, 350. See also specific citations in Index of Virgilian Passages Fracastoro, Girolamo, 136 Frost, Robert, 182, 260, 347, 352 Fulgentius, 99, 128, 146 Furius Bibaculus, 246n10 future of Virgilian studies, 472–7 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 9 Galba (emperor), 58 Galleria Sciarra, Rome, 159 Gallus (Gaius Cornelius Gallus), 43, 44n5, 48, 179–81, 231, 246–7, 250n22, 283, 301n6, 306, 426, 442 Gallus (Titus Gallus), 96 Gandhi, Mohandas, 2 Gaudentius, 96, 98 gender and sexuality, 7, 7n16, 80, 101, 209, 226n4, 334, 392–4, 425–43 genealogical opportunism of Virgilian characters, 456–8 genre and form, 14, 193, 198–9, 202n18, 202–5, 216–24, 227–8, 326, 374n19. See also epic; pastoral genre and Eclogues; tragedy and the Aeneid Georgics, 193–213. See also specific citations in Index of Virgilian Passages addressees and multivalent voice of, 202–5 Aeneid, echoes of Eclogues and Georgics in, 230–1 Aeneid, pre-proemium of, 227 Appendix Vergiliana and, 65, 68, 70, 71, 72 Augustine quoting, 78 Augustus, 295 on bees and community, 210–11, 212, 285, 290, 294, 310–12 beginning statement of subject matter in, 199–200

544

bougonia in, 195, 197, 210, 311, 312, 434 canon-making in, 3 catalogue of nymphs in, 348 Dasein (‘being there’) in, 195, 208 didaxis in, 193, 198–9, 202n18, 202–5, 374n19 ending of, 238 ethnography of, 266 gender and sexuality in, 209, 432–4 interpretation in, 197–8 intertextual personae, multiple, 305–12, 324 invocation, 201–2 on labour, 208–9, 212, 280, 288 Lucan imitating, 56 material organisation and associated metaphors, 211–13 in mediis rebus, situating reader, 205–7 metrical patterns of, 371 military metaphors for farming in, 206, 212 opposition of Aristaeus and Orpheus in, 195–7, 312 Ovid influenced by, 49 ‘pessimist’ reading of, 255 pests, agricultural, 347 politics and, 243, 250–2 progressive view of poetic career, from pastoral to epic, 216–24, 227–8 religious and philosophical ideas, key passages for, 280, 288, 289 as school text, 43 on self-propagation of trees, 352–3 on signs, 207 sphragis in final verses of, 227, 233, 235, 236, 236n46, 237 Virgil’s epitaph and, 63, 227 Germanus (Germain Vaillant de Guélis), 104 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 163 Gibbon, Edward, 253n27, 260 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 421 golden ages, 275 Graves, Robert, 125 Great Seal of United States, quoting Virgil, 13 Greville, Fulke, 347 Guarini, Giovanni Battista, 114 Guarino of Verona, 99 Hadrumetum mosaic, 142, 169n50 hamartia, 327 Harington, Sir John, 114, 359n27 Harrington, James, 114

545

I N DE X N OMI N U M E T R E RUM Harvard School, 9, 109, 119, 255n35, 469 Heaney, Seamus, 2, 3, 110, 124–5, 182, 188 Heidegger, Martin, 193, 194, 195, 199 Heinze, Richard, 15, 327–8, 338, 381, 395 Henry VII (Holy Roman Emperor), 131 Henry VIII (king of England), 112 Heracleid, 48n28 Hercules, 295, 334 Hesiod, 178, 202, 204, 216, 250, 266, 269n13, 283, 284, 288, 299, 305, 307, 308 Theogony, 178, 269n13 Works and Days, 266, 284, 306, 307 Hiero of Syracuse, 303n11 Hilarius of Orléans, 99, 107 Historia Augusta, 61 Homer. See also authority Aeneid as transition from Homeric to Roman world, 264 Batrachomyomachia (attrib.), 46, 68 characterisation in, 389 characterisation of Aeneas and, 396 Cretheis as mother of, 409n12 in Dante’s Inferno, 3 ecphrasis, use of, 421 Eliot on tradition and, 26 epic as genre and, 222 ethics derived from, 291, 292 as Greek model for Virgil, 104, 217 Iliad, 3, 43, 90, 112, 173, 175, 217, 218, 222, 223, 224, 234, 254, 264, 267, 307, 311, 313–20, 360, 393, 403, 406, 446, 448–56 intertextuality and, 299, 307, 310, 311–21 Odyssey, 28, 90, 103, 173, 203, 217, 219, 222–4, 234, 238, 264, 294, 311, 312, 313–20, 393, 403, 406, 437, 446, 448–56 pastoral elements in, 173 successor to Iliad and Odyssey, establishment of Aeneid as, 222–4 Theocritus and, 174 tragedy and, 331–3 tree similes in, 360 Victorian belief in primary epic of, 122 Virgil’s reception in antiquity compared, 46–7 Homeric Hymns to Aphrodite and Hermes, 319–20 homoeroticism. See gender and sexuality

Horace, 3, 29, 48, 61, 66, 105, 119, 179, 181, 243, 246n12, 247n14, 250, 296, 299n1, 313, 322, 427, 449 Ars poetica, 373, 382 Carmen Saeculare, 49 Epistles, 296, 299n1, 317n53 Epodes, 250n21, 251, 443 Odes, 43, 49, 236, 250, 254n29, 259, 330, 401, 443 Satires, 179 Housman, A. E., 17, 120 Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 120 Hyginus, 93 hyperbaton, 369, 375–6 ictus, 372 ille ego opening (pre-proemium) for Aeneid, 227, 228, 233, 234–5 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 166, 244n1 intertextuality, 299–323 Iraq Enquiry, 474n20 Italy. See Rome and Italy in Aeneid James, Henry, 29 James I and VI (king of England and Scotland), 159 James II (king of England), 116, 118 Jerome, 59, 78, 299n1 Jesuit Ratio studiorum, 105 John of Garland, 227 John of Salisbury, 146 Johnson, Samuel, 7, 119, 185n42 Jonson, Ben, 351 Joyce, James, 461 Julian comet, 187, 284 Julius Caesar, 53, 55, 202, 246, 248, 250, 254, 270, 295, 308, 330, 332, 446 Juno, 82–3, 89, 286, 314–19, 400, 401–2, 403, 435, 442, 454. See also temple of Juno at Carthage Jupiter, 30, 32, 89, 141, 217, 219n5, 271–2, 286–8, 400, 401–2, 403, 423, 442 Juvenal, 449n16 Juvencus, 60, 61 Kafka, Franz, 16 Kauffman, Angelica, 164 Keats, John, 58, 350 Kennedy, Rann and Charles Rann, 122 La Cerda, Juan Luis de, 102–7, 449n16 Lactantius, 59, 89, 452n32 Laocoon, 141n2, 330

545

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I N DE X N OMI N U M E T R ERUM Larkin, Philip, 2, 348, 348n7 Lavinia, 119, 361–3, 364, 387, 397, 435, 439, 440 Le Guin, Ursula K., 398, 470 Leo IV (pope), 152 Leo X (pope), 152 Lewis, C. S., 17, 185 Livia, 167 Livius Andronicus, 338, 382, 447 Livy, 61, 101, 258, 269, 274 Logue, Christopher, 123 Lollius Maximus, 448 Lucan, 3, 13, 45, 48n28, 52, 53–6, 57, 58n62, 58n67, 61, 73, 101, 257n42, 258, 321n67, 330, 338, 467 Lucas van Leyden, 167 Lucilius, 299n1 Lucretius, 202, 266, 280, 282, 283, 285, 288, 289, 308, 308n29, 310, 355, 374 Lucullus, 258 Lucy, Countess of Bedford, 351 Ludger tom Ring the Elder, 163 Ludi Saeculares, 49, 294 Lycoris, 44n5, 181, 246, 426, 442 Lydia, and Dirae, 71 Macrobius, 80n16, 88, 247n13, 283n17, 294, 320, 326, 371n6, 449n16 Maecenas, 63, 64, 202, 243, 244n2, 251, 257–8, 427 Malherbe, François de, 347 Mandelbaum, Allen, 125 manuscripts, 61–2 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, 61 codex Mediceus, 101, 102 of commentaries, 88, 96, 99, 100, 102 Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Plut. 39.1, 100 Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana S.P. 10/27, 99 Murbach Catalogue, 45n11, 63, 65n11 Servius Danielis, 88 St. Gall Virgil, 61 Vatican Library, Vergilius Romanus (BAV Vat. lat. 3867), 61, 149 Vatican Library, Vergilius Vaticanus (BAV Vat. lat. 3225), 61, 149 Mapheus Vegius. See Vegius, Mapheus Mark Antony. See Antony Marcellus (nephew of Augustus), 98, 131, 164, 243, 273, 332–3, 335, 358, 372, 413 Marie Antoinette, 185 C. Marius, 321

546

Martial, 45, 56n55, 73, 183, 326, 390, 425 Martini, Simone, 99, 143 Marvell, Andrew, 175, 443n40 Mary I (queen of England), 112 Masefield, John, 349 memory, epic’s appeal to capacity for, 219–20 Menalcas, 97, 183, 187, 303, 390–2, 428 Menander, 299n1 Messalla Corvinus, 70, 258 metempsychosis, 89 metre and metrical patterns, 81, 356–7, 371–2 Metsys, Quentin, the Younger, 154 Michelangelo, 153 migration, 473–4 Milbourne, Luke, 118 Milne, A. A., 210 Milton, John, 18, 120–2, 136–9, 173, 222, 322, 349, 353–4 Mimnermus, 299n1 Monica (mother of Augustine), 77, 80, 81n18, 82, 83 Moretum, 13, 63, 64, 73, 76 Moroni, Giovanni Battista, 159 Morris, William, 122, 351, 351n13 Moschus, 417 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 103 music and Virgil, 14n32, 373. See also singing and song Mussolini, Benito, 461, 462 mystery cults, 281 9/11, 474 Naevius, 268, 321, 338 narrative and storytelling, 400–11 Nascimbeni, Nascimbene, 104, 106 Neoplatonism, 88 Nero (emperor), 44, 52, 56 New Criticism, 12, 15, 15n34 Nicander, 48 Nisus and Euryalus, 133, 335, 423, 442, 474 Norden, Eduard, 293, 482 Nostoi, 317, 455 Numanus Remulus, 404 Octavia, 164, 244, 413 Octavius/Octavian. See Augustus Ogilby, John, 115, 116 Oporinus, Johannes, 100 Orpheus and Eurydice, 195–7, 296, 312, 381, 392–4, 434

547

I N DE X N OMI N U M E T R E RUM Ovid, 3, 48, 48n28, 49–51, 52, 57, 61, 113, 174, 178–9, 224, 228, 236, 246, 246n12, 258, 337, 338, 363, 371, 400 Pacuvius, 338 Palatine House of Augustus, Rome, 53, 297 Palatine Temple of Apollo, Rome, 297, 414, 419, 422 Pallas, 117, 231, 239, 254, 359, 384, 397, 422, 441, 453 Panegyrici, 61 paratexts, 475 parodies, 47 Parry, Adam, 11, 119, 231, 469 pastoral genre and Eclogues, 173–93, 216–24, 227–8 pathetic fallacy, 11, 289 Peripatetics, 281, 290 peripeteia (reversal), 327 Perseid, 48n28 Persius, Satires, 348n6 ‘pessimist’ readings of Aeneid, 9, 254–9, 326, 469 Petrarch, 99, 128, 143 Petronius, 47, 52n42 Phaer, Thomas, 112–13, 121 Philargyrius, 95–9, 101 Philetas of Cos, 302 Philippi, battle of, 248, 249 Phillips, John, 116 Philodemus, 280, 291, 373, 448 philosophy. See religious and philosophical ideas; specific philosophical schools Piccolomini, Enea Silvio (later Pope Pius II), 155 pietas/pius, 132–3, 328, 363, 395, 451, 455 Pindar, 105, 415 Pinturicchio (Bernardio di Betto), 155, 163 Pitt, Christopher, 119 pity, 132–3 pius. See pietas/pius Pius II (pope), 155 Plato and Platonism, 85, 89, 99, 174, 178, 280n7, 281, 285, 293, 294 Plautus, 46, 61, 348n6 Pliny the Elder, 141n2 Pliny the Younger, 56n55, 101 Plutarch, 268n12, 448, 457 point of view, 407–8, 423 Politian (Angelo Poliziano), 128 politics, 243–61. See also Death of Virgil Aeneas, portrayal of, 451 Aeneid, 252–61

in ancient Vitae of Virgil, 243–4 Asinius Pollio, influence of, 243, 245, 247 assumptions about Virgil as Augustan poet and, 257–8 Callimachus, influence of, 245, 247 Catullus on new poets and, 245–6 characteristics of, 247 collective and individual interests, conflict between, 331–3 divinised humans and, 295 Eclogues, 243, 248–50 ethics and politics, 290, 291–2 Fourth Eclogue, 184, 249 Gallus, influence of, 246–7 Georgics, 243, 250–2 historical assessments of Augustan principate affecting reception of, 260–1 ideological impact and style, interaction of, 373 ‘optimist’ view of Aeneid and, 259–60 pastoral genre, politics of, 175–7, 182–3, 184–7 patrons of Virgil, assumptions about, 257–8 ‘pessimist’ view of Aeneid and, 9, 254–9, 326, 469 progressive view of Virgilian career and, 228 Roman attitudes toward poetry and, 244–6 significance of, 10 tradition, politics of, and Eliot’s reception of Virgil, 26, 27–9 Varius influencing, 246, 247 Pompeius Strabo, 267 Pompey, 53, 55, 58, 246, 321, 321n68 Pomponius Laetus, 99–102, 107 Pontanus, Jacobus (Jakob Spanmüller), 105, 106 Pope, Alexander, 347, 356n21 Porphyry, 89 postcolonial/colonial studies and colonialism, 473–4 Posthomerica, 48n28 Pound, Ezra, 123, 461 Priam, 405, 423 Priapea, 63, 72, 72n51, 74 Proba, 47n25, 60, 78 Probus (Marcus Valerius Probus), 93, 100, 101 Propertius, 3, 29, 43, 46, 48, 181, 246, 258, 299n1, 322, 449n16

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I N DE X N OMI N U M E T R ERUM prophet, Virgil viewed as, 5, 7–8, 23, 24, 37–8, 48n26, 59, 78, 128, 146, 162, 184, 221, 252–3, 271–4, 275, 281, 462 Prudentius, 61 pseudepigraphy, 64–5 Ptolemy I Soter, 247, 250 Ptolemy II Philadelphus, 303n11 Publius Ventidius, 267 Punic Wars, 57, 264, 273 Purcell, Henry, 14n32 Puttenham, George, 182 Pythagoras and Pythagoreans, 51n39, 268, 281, 284, 285, 289, 309 quid hoc novi est? in Appendix Vergiliana, 72n48 Quintilian, 4, 46, 52, 174, 183, 427, 449n16 Rabirius, 48n28 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 146 Raphael, 152, 153, 154, 163 religious and philosophical ideas, 279–97. See also Anchises; Christianity and Christian culture; sacrifice repetition, 217–19, 222, 223, 224, 355, 379–81, 396 Ricoeur, Paul, 219 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 461 Roman Forum, 263 Romanitas, 282 Rome and Italy in Aeneid, 6, 131, 263–77, 402, 461, 462 Romulus and Remus, myth of, 268, 272, 273, 274, 275, 330, 402 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 182 Roscommon, Earl of, 118 rota Vergilii (wheel of Virgil), 227, 228, 229 Ruden, Sarah, 126 Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor), 153 Ruskin, John, 11 Sackville-West, Vita, 1 sacrifice, 89, 254, 330, 451 Sallust, 59, 97, 208n26, 321, 427 Saloninus (son of Pollio), 144 San Piedro in Montorio, Rome, 163 Sandys, George, 113, 115 Santa Maria della Pace, Rome, 163 Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome, 153, 162 Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 63, 104 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 13, 104, 174, 449n16 Schiller, Friedrich, 176, 421

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Scipio Aemilianus, 293–4 Scipio Africanus, 293–4 Scylla (daughter of Nisus of Megara), 69 Seneca, 16, 24, 51, 52–3, 57, 61, 373 sentences, Virgilian, 374–5 Servius (Marius or Maurus Servius Honoratus), 14, 44n5, 59, 78, 88–93, 95–9, 101, 105, 143, 180, 181, 182–4, 185, 187, 198n16, 219n5, 234, 246n12, 250n22, 281, 284, 304n17, 310n35, 321, 321n67, 326, 338, 377, 407, 446, 449n16 Servius Danielis/Servius Auctus, 70n37, 88, 93, 98, 105, 184, 447, 452 sexuality. See gender and sexuality Sforza, Francesco, 261 shade in Broch’s Death of Virgil, 464 as recurring image, 228, 237–9 Shakespeare, William, 112, 121, 122, 363, 364 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 121 shield of Aeneas, 32, 55, 141, 173, 220, 243, 253, 264, 267, 273–4, 275–6, 333, 334, 415, 417, 418–20, 420n8, 421, 422 Sibyl of Cumae and Sibylline oracles, 163, 270, 284, 409, 417, 423n13, 452 Sidney, Sir Philip, 182 Sidonius Apollinaris, 96, 97 Siena Cathedral, 155, 162 Silenus, song of, 18, 178–9, 280, 283, 429 Silius Italicus, 52n40, 56–8, 101 Sinclair, Lord Henry, 111 singing and song, 179, 188, 235–6, 408–11 Singleton, Robert, 113, 121 Siro, 280 Sisson, C. H., 124 Snell, Bruno, 7, 175, 177, 186 Social War, 267, 273 song. See singing and song Sophocles, 105, 326, 328, 335, 339, 373, 397 sortes Vergilianae, 7–8, 23, 48n26 Spenser, Edmund, 13, 135–6, 173, 175, 426n5 sphragis, 70, 180, 227, 233, 235, 236, 236n46, 237, 306 Stanyhurst, Richard, 113 Statius, 45, 56–8, 61, 73, 101, 129, 184, 338, 347n2, 469 Stoics and Stoicism, 256, 280–1, 282, 284, 285, 289, 290, 292, 364, 366, 389 story. See narrative and storytelling

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I N DE X N OMI N U M E T R E RUM Stourhead, Hoare garden at, 5 Strahan, Alexander, 120 stress accent and syllable length, 356–7, 371–2 style, 346, 347–50, 355, 356–7, 368–85 Suetonius, 44, 45, 46n19, 73, 164, 227n7, 425, 426, 449n16, 450 Surrey, Earl of, translation of Aeneid 2 and 4, 112 Sweynheym and Pannartz, 1471 Roman edition, 101 syllable length and stress accent, 356–7, 371–2 Symmons, Charles, 120 Tacitus, 52n41, 58–9, 61, 260 temple of Apollo at Cumae, 417 temple of Juno at Carthage, 110, 169, 276, 345–6, 359, 416–17, 418, 420–1, 423 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 17, 36, 37, 366, 371, 374, 465 Terence, 59, 61, 105, 299n1 Tertullian, 5, 24 theme and variation, 375 Theocritus, Idylls, 173–5, 176, 176n11, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 187, 187n51, 188, 216, 231, 295, 299, 300–5, 324, 369, 371, 389, 391, 425, 429, 429n12, 495 Theodosius (emperor), 89 Theophrastus, 101 Thomas, Dylan, 189 Thornhill, Sir James, 162 Tiber, Aeneas’ arrival at mouth of, 354–5 Tiberius (emperor), 167 Tiberius Claudius Donatus, 95, 107–8 Tibullus, 43n1, 48, 246, 258, 427 time, 6, 27–9, 30–1, 252–3, 263–5 Titus Gallus, 96 tomb of Virgil, 56–8 totalitarian regimes, 41 tragedy, 326–40 translatio imperii, 4, 39, 113 translatio studii, 4, 39 translations. See English translations trees and tree imagery, 352–3, 359–67 Trevet, Nicholas, 99, 107 tricolon, 371, 380 Turner, J. M. W., 149

Turnus, 132–3, 138, 229, 237, 239, 254, 255, 281, 290–2, 295, 329–31, 332, 394, 395, 397, 402, 408–11, 422, 450, 451–2, 453, 458 Twyne, Thomas, 112 Ulm Minster, 162 underworld. See afterlife; Anchises; religious and philosophical ideas ‘unpoetic’ diction, 347, 383–4 US dollar bill and Great Seal, quoting Virgil, 13 Vaillant de Guélis, Germain, 104 Valerius Flaccus, 52n40, 56–8 van Eyck brothers, 162n40 Varius (Lucius Varius Rufus), 234, 246, 247, 302, 333, 338, 339 Varro, 200, 203–4, 210, 269, 307, 310–12 Vatican Palace, 152, 153, 154, 163 Vegius, Mapheus (Maffeo Vegio), 128 Venus, 318, 319–20, 336, 430, 438, 439, 440, 454 Vergil, versus Virgil, 8, 128, 173n2 Vergilius Romanus (BAV VAT. lat. 3867), 61, 149 Vergilius Vaticanus (BAV Vat. lat. 3225), 61, 149 Vernant, J.-P., 331, 340 Vicars, John, 114 Vidal-Naquet, P., 335 Virgil Society, 1–2, 28 Volusianus, 81 Volusius, 245 Vomanus, synopsis of, 148 Walsh, William, 116 Warton, Joseph, 11, 119 Whitman, Walt, 207, 426n4 Wilde, Oscar, 179 William III of Orange (king of England), 116, 118 women. See gender and sexuality Wordsworth, William, 121–2, 187, 354n19, 360, 368 Xenophanes of Colophon, 447 Zamora Cathedral, 162 Zoilus of Amphipolis, 46 Zono de’ Magnalis, 99, 107

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