This is the text of an article by Mendelsohn in the October 8, 2018
New Yorker: we will go thru it and I will comment on the
bold-faced items. I believe this is "fair use" for educational use.
Since the end of the first century A.D., people have been playing a
game with a certain book. In this game, you open the book to a
random spot and place your finger on the text; the passage you
select will, it is thought, predict your future. If this sounds
silly, the results suggest otherwise. The first person known to have
played the game was a highborn Roman who was fretting about whether
he’d be chosen to follow his cousin, the emperor Trajan, on the
throne; after opening the book to this passage—
I recognize that he is that king of Rome,
Gray headed, gray bearded,
who will formulate
The laws for the early city . . .
—he was confident that he’d succeed. His name was Hadrian.
Through the centuries, others sought to discover their fates in this
book, from the French novelist Rabelais, in the early sixteenth
century (some of whose characters play the game, too), to the
British king Charles I, who, during the Civil War—which culminated
in the loss of his kingdom and his head—visited an Oxford library
and was alarmed to find that he’d placed his finger on a passage
that concluded, “But let him die before his time, and
lie / Somewhere unburied on a lonely beach.” Two and a
half centuries later, as the Germans marched toward Paris at the
beginning of the First World War, a classicist named David Ansell
Slater, who had once viewed the very volume that Charles had
consulted, found himself scouring the same text, hoping for a
portent of good news.
What was the book, and why was it taken so seriously? The answer
lies in the name of the game: sortes vergilianae. The Latin
noun sortes means lots—as in “drawing lots,” a reference to the
game’s element of chance. The adjective vergilianae, which means
“having to do with Vergilius,” identifies the book: the works of the
Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, whom we know as Virgil.
For a long stretch of Western history, few people would have found
it odd to ascribe prophetic power to this collection of Latin verse.
Its author, after all, was the greatest and the most influential
of all Roman poets. A friend and confidant of Augustus, Rome’s
first emperor, Virgil was already considered a classic in his own
lifetime: revered, quoted, imitated, and occasionally parodied
by other writers, taught in schools, and devoured by the general
public. Later generations of Romans considered his works a font
of human knowledge, from rhetoric to ethics to agriculture; by the
Middle Ages, the poet had come to be regarded as a wizard whose
powers included the ability to control Vesuvius’s eruptions and to
cure blindness in sheep.
However fantastical the proportions to which this reverence grew, it
was grounded in a very real achievement represented by one poem in
particular: the Aeneid, a heroic epic in twelve chapters (or
“books”) about the mythic founding of Rome, which some ancient
sources say Augustus commissioned and which was, arguably, the
single most influential literary
work of European civilization for the better part of two
millennia.
Virgil had published other, shorter works before the Aeneid, but
it’s no accident that the epic was a magnet for the fingers of the
great and powerful who played the sortes vergilianae. Its central
themes are leadership, empire, history, and war. In it, an
upstanding Trojan prince named Aeneas, son of Venus, the goddess of
love, flees Troy after its destruction by the Greeks, and, along
with his father, his son, and a band of fellow-survivors, sets out
to establish a new realm across the sea, in Italy, the homeland
that’s been promised to him by divine prophecy. Into that
traditional story Virgil cannily inserted a number of
showstopping glimpses into Rome’s future military and political
triumphs, complete with cameo appearances by
Augustus himself—the implication being that the real-life
empire arose from a god-kissed mythic past.
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The Emperor and his people alike were hooked: within a century of
its author’s death, in 19 B.C., citizens of Pompeii were scrawling
lines from the epic on the walls of shops and houses.
from:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/reading-the-writing-on-pompeiis-walls-1969367/
People haven’t stopped quoting it since. From the moment it
appeared, the Aeneid was the paradigmatic classic in Western art and
education; as one scholar has put it, Virgil “occupied the central
place in the literary canon for the whole of Europe for longer than
any other writer.” (After the Western Roman Empire fell, in the
late fifth century A.D., knowledge of Greek—and, hence, intimacy
with Homer’s epics—virtually disappeared from Western Europe for a
thousand years.) Virgil’s poetry has been indispensable to
everyone from his irreverent younger contemporary Ovid, whose
parodies of the older poet’s gravitas can’t disguise a genuine
admiration, to St. Augustine, who, in his
“Confessions,” recalls weeping over the Aeneid, his favorite book
before he discovered the Bible; from Dante, who chooses
Virgil, l’altissimo poeta, “the highest poet,” as his guide through
Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy, to T. S.
Eliot, who returned repeatedly to Virgil in his critical
essays and pronounced the Aeneid “the classic of all Europe.”
And not only Europe. Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and
Benjamin Franklin liked to quote Virgil in their speeches and
letters. The poet’s idealized vision of honest farmers
and shepherds working in rural simplicity was influential,
some scholars believe, in shaping the Founders’ vision of the new
republic as one in which an agricultural majority should hold power.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Virgil was a central fixture of
American grammar-school education; the ability to translate passages
on sight was a standard entrance requirement at many colleges and
universities. John Adams boasted that his son John Quincy had
translated the entire Aeneid. Ellen Emerson wrote her father, Ralph
Waldo, to say that she was covering a hundred and twenty lines a
day; Helen Keller read it in Braille. Today, traces of the
epic’s cultural authority linger on: a quotation from it
greets visitors to the Memorial Hall of the 9/11 Museum, in New
York City.
from:
https://www.mhpbooks.com/classicist-says-quote-of-virgils-inscribed-on-911-memorial-is-shockingly-inappropriate/
NOTE WELL: the article the image is from says that this was about
Nisus and Euryalus and if we take the context into account, it is
not appropriate: typical of quotations: they get taken out of
context and acquire a life of their own: read on below: Mendelsohn
points this out as well .
Since the turn of the current century, there have been at least five
major translations into English alone, most recently by the American
poet David Ferry (Chicago), in the final installment of his
translation of Virgil’s complete works.
Still, the Aeneid—notoriously—can be hard to love. In part,
this has to do with its aesthetics. In place of the raw archaic
potency of Homer’s epics, which seems to dissolve the millennia
between his heroes and us, Virgil’s densely allusive poem offers an
elaborately self-conscious “literary” suavity. (The critic
and Columbia professor Mark Van Doren remarked that “Homer is a
world; Virgil, a style.”) Then, there’s Aeneas himself—“in some
ways,” as even the Great Courses Web site felt compelled to
acknowledge, “the dullest character in epic literature.” In
the Aeneid’s opening lines, Virgil announces that the hero is famed
above all for his pietas, his “sense of duty”: hardly the
sexiest attribute for a protagonist. If Aeneas was meant to be a
model proto-Roman, he has long struck many readers as a cold fish;
he and his comrades, the philosopher György Lukács once observed,
live “the cool and limited existence of shadows.” Particularly in
comparison with his Homeric predecessors, Aeneas comes up short,
lacking the cruel glamour of Achilles, or Odysseus’s beguiling
smarts.
But the biggest problem by far for modern audiences is the poem’s
subject matter. Today, the themes that made the epic required
reading for generations of emperors and generals, and for the
clerics and teachers who groomed them—the inevitability of
imperial dominance, the responsibilities of authoritarian rule,
the importance of duty and self-abnegation in the service of the
state—are proving to be an embarrassment. If readers of an
earlier era saw the Aeneid as an inspiring advertisement for the
onward march of Rome’s many descendants, from the Holy Roman
Empire to the British one, scholars now see in it a tale of
nationalistic arrogance whose plot is an all too familiar handbook
for repressive violence: once Aeneas and his fellow-Trojans arrive
on the coast of Italy, they find that they must fight a series of
wars with an indigenous population that, eventually, they brutally
subjugate.
The result is that readers today can have a very strange
relationship to this classic: it’s a work we feel we should embrace
but often keep at arm’s length. Take that quote in the 9/11
Museum: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” Whoever
came up with the idea of using it was clearly ignorant of the
context: these high-minded words are addressed to a pair of
nighttime marauders whose bloody ambush of a group of unsuspecting
targets suggests that they have far more in common with the 9/11
terrorists than with their victims. A century ago, many a
college undergrad could have caught the gaffe; today, it was enough
to have an impressive-sounding quote from an acknowledged classic.
Another way of saying all this is that, while our forebears looked
confidently to the text of the Aeneid for answers, today it
raises troubling questions. Who exactly is Aeneas, and why
should we admire him? What is the epic’s political stance? Can we
ignore the parts we dislike and cherish the rest? Should great
poetry serve an authoritarian regime—and just whose side was
Virgil on? Two thousand years after its appearance, we still can’t
decide if his masterpiece is a regressive celebration of power as
a means of political domination or a craftily coded critique of
imperial ideology—a work that still has something useful to tell
us.
Little in Virgil’s background destined him to be the great
poet of empire. He was born on October 15, 70 B.C., in a
village outside Mantua; his father, perhaps a
well-off farmer, had the means to provide him with a good education,
first in Cremona and Milan and then in Rome. The inhabitants of his
native northern region had only recently been granted Roman
citizenship through a decree by Julius Caesar, issued when the poet
was a young man. Hence, even after his first major work, a
collection of pastoral poems called the Eclogues, gained him an
entrée into Roman literary circles, Virgil must have seemed—and
perhaps felt—something of an outsider: a reserved country fellow
with (as his friend the poet Horace teased him) a hick’s haircut,
who spoke so haltingly that he could seem downright uneducated. His
retiring nature, which earned him the nickname parthenias (“little
virgin”), may have been the reason he decided not to remain in
Rome to complete his education. Instead, he settled in Naples,
a city with deep ties to the culture of the Greeks, which he and his
literary contemporaries revered. In the final lines of the Georgics,
a long didactic poem about farming which he finished when he was
around forty, the poet looked back yearningly to the untroubled
leisure he had enjoyed during that period:
And I, the poet Virgil, nurtured by sweet
Parthénopé [Naples], was flourishing in the pleasures
Of idle studies, I, who bold in youth
Played games with shepherds’ songs.
I’m quoting David Ferry’s translation of the poem. But the word that
Ferry translates as “idle” is somewhat stronger in the original:
Virgil says that his leisure time was ignobilis, “ignoble,” a choice
that suggests some guilt about that easygoing Neapolitan idyll. And
with good reason: however “sweet” those times were for Virgil, for
Rome they were anything but. The poet’s lifetime spanned the
harrowing disintegration of the Roman Republic and the fraught
birth of the Empire—by any measure, one of the most traumatic
centuries in European history. Virgil was a schoolchild when the
orator and statesman Cicero foiled a plot by the corrupt
aristocrat Catiline to overthrow the Republic; by the time the
poet was twenty, Julius Caesar, defying the Senate’s orders, had
crossed the Rubicon with his army and set in motion yet another
civil war. It was another two decades before Caesar’s great-nephew
and heir, Octavian, defeated the last of his rivals, the renegade
general Antony and his Egyptian consort, Cleopatra, at the Battle
of Actium, and established the so-called Principate—the rule of
the princeps (“first citizen”), an emperor in everything but name.
Soon afterward, he took the quasi-religious honorific “Augustus.”
The new ruler was a man of refined literary tastes; Virgil and
his patron, Maecenas, the regime’s unofficial minister of
culture, are said to have taken turns reading the Georgics aloud
to the Emperor after his victory at Actium. Augustus no doubt
liked what he heard. In one passage, the poet expresses a fervent
hope that Rome’s young new leader will be able to spare Italy the
wars that have wreaked havoc on the lives of the farmers whose labor
is the subject of the poem; in another, he envisages the erection of
a grand temple honoring the ruler.
Because we like to imagine poets as being free in their political
conscience, such fawning seems distasteful. (Robert Graves, the
author of “I, Claudius,” complained that “few poets have brought
such discredit as Virgil on their sacred calling.”) But Virgil
cannot have been alone among intelligent Romans in welcoming
Augustus’s regime as, at the very least, a stable alternative to
the decades of internecine horrors that had preceded it. If
Augustus did in fact suggest the idea for a national epic, it must
have been while Virgil was still working on the Georgics, which
includes a trailer for his next project: “And soon I’ll gird myself
to tell the tales / Of Caesar’s brilliant battles, and
carry his name / In story across . . . many
future years.” He began work on the Aeneid around 29 B.C. and
was in the final stages of writing when, ten years later, he died
suddenly while returning home from a trip to Greece. He was
buried in his beloved Naples.
The epic’s state of completion continues to be a subject of debate.
There’s little doubt that a number of lines are metrically
incomplete, a fact that dovetails with what we know about the
poet’s working method: he liked to joke that, in order to preserve
his momentum while writing, he’d put in temporary lines to serve as
“struts” until the “finished columns” were ready. According to
one anecdote, the dying Virgil begged his literary executors to
burn the manuscript of the epic, but Augustus intervened, and,
after some light editing, the finished work finally appeared. In the
epitaph he composed for himself, Virgil refers with disarming
modesty to his achievement: “Mantua gave me birth, Calabria took me,
now Naples / holds me fast. I sang of pastures, farms,
leaders.”
Virgil was keenly aware that, in composing an epic that begins at
Troy, describes the wanderings of a great hero, and features book
after book of gory battles, he was working in the long shadow of
Homer. But, instead of being crushed by what Harold Bloom
called “the anxiety of influence,” he found a way to acknowledge
his Greek models while adapting them to Roman themes.
Excerpts of the work in progress were already impressing
fellow-writers by the mid-twenties B.C., when the love poet
Propertius wrote that “something greater than the Iliad is being
born.”
The very structure of the Aeneid is a wink at Homer. The epic is
split between an “Odyssean” first half (Books I through VI recount
Aeneas’s wanderings as he makes his way from Troy to Italy) and an
“Iliadic” second half (Books VII through XII focus on the wars
that the hero and his allies wage in order to take possession of
their new homeland). Virgil signals this appropriation of
the two Greek classics in his work’s famous opening line, “Arms
and a man I sing”: the Iliad is the great epic of war
(“arms”), while the Odyssey begins by announcing that its subject is
“a man”—Odysseus. Virtually every one of the Aeneid’s nine
thousand eight hundred and ninety-six lines is embedded, like that
first one, in an intricate web of literary references, not
only to earlier Greek and Roman literature but to a wide range
of religious, historical, and mythological arcana. This
allusive complexity would have flattered the sophistication of the
original audience, but today it can leave everyone except
specialists flipping to the endnotes. In this way, Virgil’s
Homeric riff prefigures James Joyce’s, twenty centuries later:
whatever the great passages of intense humanity, there are parts
that feel like a treasure hunt designed for graduate students of the
future.
It is, indeed, hardly surprising that readers through the centuries
have found the Aeneid’s first half more engaging. As in the Odyssey,
there are shipwrecks caused by angry deities (Juno, the queen of the
gods, tries to foil Aeneas at every turn) and succor from helpful
ones (Venus intervenes every now and then to help her son). There
are councils of the gods at which the destinies of mortals are
sorted out; at one point, Jupiter, the king of the pantheon, assures
the anxious Venus (and, by implication, the Roman reader) that the
nation her son is about to found will enjoy imperium sine fine,
“rule without end.” As for the mortals, there are melancholy
reunions with old friends and family and hair-raising encounters
with legendary monsters. Virgil has a lot of fun retooling
episodes from the Odyssey: his hero has close calls with Scylla
and Charybdis, lands on the Cyclops’ island just after Odysseus
has left, and—in an amusing moment that does an end run around
Homer—decides to sail right past Circe’s abode.
And, like Odysseus, Aeneas is dangerously distracted from his
mission by a beautiful woman: Dido, the queen of the North
African city of Carthage, where the hero has been welcomed
hospitably after he is shipwrecked. Venus, eager for her son to find
a safe haven there, sends Cupid to make Dido fall in love with
Aeneas in Book I, and throughout Books II and III the queen grows
ever more besotted with her guest, who holds her court spellbound
with tales of his sufferings and adventures. His eyewitness
account of the sack of Troy, in Book II, remains one of the most
powerful depictions of military violence in European literature,
with a disorienting, almost cinematic oscillation between
seething, smoke-filled crowd scenes and claustrophobic moments of
individual panic. At one point, Aeneas, fleeing the smoldering
ruins, somehow loses track of his wife, Creusa; in a chillingly
realistic evocation of war’s chaos, we never learn how she dies.
As for Dido, her affair with the hero reaches a tragic climax in
Book IV. Aeneas, reminded by the gods of his sacred duty, abandons
her, and she commits suicide—the emotional high point of the epic’s
first half. (The curse she calls down on her former lover is the
passage that King Charles selected when he played the sortes
vergilianae.)
The Aeneid’s first part ends, as does the first half of the
Odyssey, with an unsettling visit to the Underworld.
Here, there are confrontations with the dead and the past they
represent—Dido’s ghost doesn’t deign to acknowledge the
apologetic Aeneas’s protestations—and encounters, too, with
the glorious future. One of the spirits that Aeneas meets is
his father, Anchises, whom he’d carried on his back as they
fled Troy, and who has since died; as Anchises guides his son
through the murky landscape, he draws his attention to a
fabulous parade of monarchs, warriors, statesmen, and heroes who
will distinguish the history of the future Roman state, from the
mythic king Romulus to Augustus himself. As they witness this
pageant, the old man imparts a crucial piece of advice. The
Greeks, he observes, excelled at the arts—sculpture, rhetoric—but
Rome has a far greater mission in world history:
“Well, I guess if breathing through your mouth has kept you alive
this far . . .”
Romans, never forget that this will be
Your appointed task: to use your arts
to be the governor of the world, to bring to it peace,
Serenely maintained with order and with justice,
To spare the defeated and to bring an end
To war by vanquishing the proud.
This conception of Rome’s strengths—administration,
governance, jurisprudence, war—in relation to Greece’s will be
familiar to anyone who’s taken a World Civ course. What’s so
confounding is that, after receiving this eloquent advice on
the correct uses of power, Aeneas—as the second half of the
poem shockingly demonstrates—doesn’t take it.
Books VII through XII, with their unrelenting account of the
bella horrida bella (“wars, horrible wars”)
that Aeneas must wage to secure his new homeland, are clearly
meant to recall the Iliad—not least, in the event that sets
them in motion. After the hero arrives in Italy, he favorably
impresses a local king named Latinus, who promises his daughter,
Lavinia, as a wife for Aeneas. The problem is that the
girl has already been chosen for a local chieftain named Turnus,
who, smarting from the insult, goes on to command the forces trying
to repel the Trojan invaders. And so, like the war recounted in
the Iliad, this one is fought over a woman who has been stolen
away from her rightful mate—the difference being that this time
it’s the Trojans, not the Greeks, who invade a foreign country and
ravage a kingdom in order to retrieve her. One challenge
presented by the mythic Trojan origins of the Roman people was that
the Trojans lost their great war; reshaping his source material,
Virgil found a way to transform a story about losers into an epic
about winners.
But what does it mean to be a winner? Anchises instructs his son
that, to be a Roman, he must become (in Ferry’s
translation) “governor of the world.” This rendering of Virgil’s
phrase regere imperio populos is rather mild. John
Dryden’s 1697 translation far better conveys the menace lurking in
the word imperium (“the right to command”): “ ’tis thine
alone, with awful sway, / To rule Mankind; and make the
World obey.”
Just what making the world obey looks like is vividly illustrated
in another vision of the future that the Aeneid provides. In
Book VIII, there is a lengthy description of the sumptuous shield
that Vulcan, the blacksmith god, forges for Aeneas before he
meets Turnus and the Italian hordes in battle. The decorations
on the shield meld moments both mythic and historical, past and
future, from Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf to a
central panel depicting the Battle of Actium, with Augustus and
his brilliant general Agrippa, on one side, facing off against
Antony and Cleopatra, on the other. (She’s backed by her
foreign “monster gods”: that “monster” is a telling bit of Roman
jingoism that Ferry inexplicably omits.) The shield also
includes an image of Augustus marching triumphantly through
the capital as its temples resound with the joyful singing of
mothers, while—that other product of imperium—a host of conquered
peoples are marched through the streets: nomads, Africans,
Germans, Scythians.
Yet one battle into which Aeneas carries his remarkable shield ends
with the hero unaccountably failing to adhere to the second part of
his father’s exhortation: to “spare the defeated.” As the poem
nears its conclusion, the wars gradually narrow to a
single combat between Aeneas and Turnus, who, by that point,
has slain a beautiful youth called Pallas, Aeneas’s ward and the son
of his chief ally. In the closing lines of the poem, Aeneas
fells Turnus with a crippling blow to the thigh. While his
enemy lies prostrate before him, the hero hesitates, sword in hand;
but, just as thoughts of leniency crowd his mind—he is,
after all, famous for his sense of duty, for doing the right thing—he
sees that Turnus is wearing a piece of armor torn from Pallas’s
body. Seized with rage and grief, Aeneas rips open Turnus’s breast
with one blow, and the dead man’s soul “indignant fled away to
the shades below.”
That is the last line of the poem—an ending so disorientingly
abrupt that it has been cited as evidence by those who believe that
Virgil left his magnum opus incomplete when he died. One
fifteenth-century Italian poet went so far as to add an extra book
to the poem (in Latin verse) tying Virgil’s loose ends into a neat
bow: Aeneas marries Lavinia and is eventually deified. This ending
was so popular that it was included in editions of the Aeneid for
centuries afterward.
As recently as the early twentieth century, the Aeneid was
embraced as a justification of the Roman—and, by extension,
any—empire: “a classic vindication of the European world-order,”
as one scholar put it. (This position is known among classicists as
the “optimistic” interpretation.) The marmoreal perfections
of its verse seemed to reflect the grand façades of the Roman state
itself: Augustus boasted that he found Rome a city of brick and left
it a city of marble.
But in the second half of the last century more and more
scholars came to see some of the epic’s most wrenching episodes as
attempts to draw attention to the toll that the exercise of
imperium inevitably takes. This “pessimistic” approach to the text
and its relation to imperial ideology has found its greatest
support in the account of Aeneas’s treatment of Dido. That
passionate, tender, and grandly tragic woman is by far the epic’s
greatest character—and, indeed, the only one to have had a
lasting impact on Western culture past the Middle Ages, memorably
appearing in works by artists ranging from Purcell to Berlioz to
Mark Morris.
After the gods order Aeneas to abandon Dido and leave Carthage—he
mustn’t, after all, end up like Antony, the love slave of an African
queen—he prepares to sneak away. But Dido finds him out and,
in a furious tirade, lambastes the man she considers to be her
husband for his craven evasion of a kind of
responsibility—emotional, ethical—quite unlike the political
dutifulness that has driven him from the start:
What shall I say?
What is there for me to say? . . .
There is nowhere where faith is kept; not anywhere.
He was stranded on the beach, a castaway,
With nothing. I made him welcome.
In uttering these words, Dido becomes the Aeneid’s most eloquent
voice of moral outrage at the promises that always get broken by
men with a mission; in killing herself, she becomes a
heartbreaking symbol of the collateral damage that “empire” leaves
in its wake.
Aeneas’s reaction to her tirade is telling. Unable to bring himself
to look her in the eye, he looks instead “at the
future / He was required to look at”:
Pious Aeneas, groaning and sighing, and shaken
In his very self in his great love for her,
And longing to find the words that might assuage
Her grief over what is being done to her,
Nevertheless obeyed the divine command
And went back to his fleet.
You wish that Ferry hadn’t translated the Latin word pius in the
first line of this passage as the English word it so closely
resembles, “pious”; here more than anywhere else, pius means
“dutiful,” embodying a steadfast obedience to the gods’ plan which
overrides every other consideration. Much of the Aeneid is
fuelled by this torturous conflict between private fulfillment and
public responsibility, which was to become a staple of European
literature and drama, showing up in everything from Corneille
to “The Crown.” (You sometimes get the impression that Virgil
himself would like to be free of his poetic duty to celebrate the
empire. In Book V, a long set piece about a sailing competition that
Aeneas holds for his men, filled with verve and humor, feels like a
vacation for the poet, too.)
When Aeneas does reply to Dido, he’s as cool as a corporate
lawyer, rattling off one talking point after another. (Dido has a
kingdom of her own, so why shouldn’t he?) But how are we to
reconcile this Aeneas with the distraught figure we’re left with
at the end of the poem, a man who goes berserk when he’s reminded
of the loss of his young ward and who brutally slays a captive
supplicant? The contradiction has led to persistent questions
about the coherence of Virgil’s depiction of his hero. When
critics aren’t denouncing Aeneas’s lack of personality (“a stick
who would have contributed to The New Statesman,” Ezra Pound
sniffed), they’re fulminating against his lack of character. “A
cad to the last” was Robert Graves’s summation.
“No wonder you can’t go on. It’s those goddam shoes you’re wearing!”
And as with the hero so, too, with the epic itself: for many
readers, something doesn’t add up. If the Aeneid is an admiring
piece of propaganda for empire triumphant, whose hero emblematizes
the necessity of suppressing individuality in the interest of the
state, what do you do with Dido—or, for that matter, with Turnus,
who could well strike readers today as a heroic native resisting
colonial incursion, an admirable prototype of Sitting Bull? And if
it’s a veiled critique of empire that movingly catalogues the
horrible costs of imperium, what do you do with all the imperial
dazzle—the shield, the parade of future Romans, the apparent
endorsement of the hero’s dogged allegiance to duty?
Latin is a rather chunky language. Unlike Greek, which is far more
supple, it has no definite or indefinite articles; a page of Latin
can look like a wall of bricks. As such, it’s particularly difficult
to adapt to dactylic hexameter, the waltzlike, oom-pah-pah meter of
epic poetry, which the Romans inherited from the Greeks. One of
Virgil’s achievements was to bring Latin hexameter verse to an
unusually high level of flexibility and polish, stretching long
thoughts and sentences over several lines, gracefully balancing
pairs of nouns and adjectives, and finding ways to temper the
natural heaviness of his native tongue. Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
called the result “the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips
of man.”
David Ferry more than succeeds in capturing the stateliness, as
his rendering of the Proem, the epic’s introductory lines, into
English blank verse shows:
I sing of arms and the man whom fate had sent
To exile from the shores of Troy to be
The first to come to Lavinium and the coasts
Of Italy, and who, because of Juno’s
Savage implacable rage, was battered by storms
At sea, and from the heavens above, and also
By tempests of war, until at last he might
Bring his household gods to Latium, and build his town,
From which would come the Alban Fathers and
The lofty walls of Rome.
Alone among recent translators, as far as I am aware, Ferry
has honored the crucial fact that, in the original, this is all
one long flowing sentence and one thought: from Troy to Rome, from
past to present, from defeat to victory.
But there’s more to Virgil than high polish. Because the Aeneid’s
instantaneous status as a classic made its style a standard, it’s
difficult to appreciate how innovative and idiosyncratic
Virgil’s poetry once felt. One favorite device, for
instance, is called “enallage,” in which an
adjective is pointedly displaced from the noun it should,
logically, modify. Take the last line of the Proem, with its
climactic vision of what Ferry renders as “The lofty walls of
Rome.” What Virgil actually wrote was stranger: “the walls of
lofty Rome.” The poet knew what he was doing—“lofty walls” is
about architecture, but “lofty Rome” is about empire.
Ferry’s creamily elegant rendering of the epic, which tries to
“correct” the text’s oddness, is likely to leave you wondering why
critics both ancient and modern have scratched their heads over
Virgil’s verse—his occasionally jarring or archaic diction (mocked
by one Roman littérateur who made his point by writing a parody of
the poet’s early work); his “tasteless striving for effect,” as
Augustus’s friend and general Agrippa complained; his “use of words
too forcible for his thoughts,” as A. E. Housman put it two
millennia later. It’s these arresting qualities that made Virgil
feel modern to his contemporaries—something it’s almost impossible
to feel about him in this translation and so many others.
But perhaps we don’t need a translation to drag the Aeneid into the
modern era. Maybe it’s always been here, and we’re just looking at
it from the wrong angle—or looking for the wrong things. Maybe
the inconsistencies in the hero and his poem that have distressed
readers and critics—the certainties alternating with doubt, the
sudden careening from coolness to high emotion, the poet’s
admiring embrace of an empire whose moral offenses he can’t help
cataloguing, the optimistic portrait of a great nation rising
haunted by a cynical appraisal of Realpolitik at work—aren’t
problems of interpretation that we have to solve but, rather, the
qualities in which this work’s modernity resides.
This, at any rate, is what was going through my mind
one day fifteen years ago, when, I like to think, I finally began to
understand the Aeneid. At the time, I was working on a book about
the Holocaust, and had spent several years interviewing the few
remaining survivors from a small Polish town whose Jewish population
had been obliterated by what you could legitimately call an exercise
of imperium. As I pressed these elderly people for their memories, I
was struck by the similarities in the way they talked: a kind of
resigned fatalism, a forlorn acknowledgment that the world they were
trying to describe was, in the end, impossible to evoke; strange
swings between an almost abnormal detachment when describing
unspeakable atrocities and sudden eruptions of ungovernable rage and
grief triggered by the most trivial memory.
Months later, when I was back home teaching Greek and Roman classics
again, it occurred to me that the difficulties we have with
Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him
not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a
survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he
can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will,
someone who has so little of his history left that the only thing
that gets him through the present is a numbed sense of duty to a
barely discernible future that can justify every kind of
deprivation. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure.
Or, indeed, a more modern story. What is the Aeneid about? It is
about a tiny band of outcasts, the survivors of a terrible
persecution. It is about how these survivors—clinging to a divine
assurance that an unknown and faraway land will become their new
home—arduously cross the seas, determined to refashion themselves
as a new people, a nation of victors rather than victims. It is
about how, when they finally get there, they find their new
homeland inhabited by locals who have no intention of making way
for them. It is about how this geopolitical tragedy generates new
wars, wars that will, in turn, trigger further conflicts: bella
horrida bella. It is about how such conflicts leave
those involved in them morally unrecognizable, even to themselves.
This is a story that both the Old and the New Worlds know too
well; and Virgil was the first to tell it. Whatever it meant in the
past, and however it discomfits the present, the Aeneid has, alas,
always anticipated the future. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the October 15, 2018,
issue, with the headline “Epic Fail?”
• Daniel Mendelsohn is the
author of the memoir “An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.” He
teaches at Bard College.
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