Virgil's Aeneid

Interpretation and Influence

Michael C. J. Putnam

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807863947
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire ancienne et classique

In this collection of twelve of his essays, distinguished Virgil scholar Michael Putnam examines the Aeneid from several different interpretive angles. He identifies the themes that permeate the epic, provides detailed interpretations of its individual books, and analyzes the poem's influence on later writers, including Ovid, Lucan, Seneca, and Dante. In addition, a major essay on wrathful Aeneas and the tactics of Pietas is published here for the first time. Putnam first surveys the intellectual development that shaped Virgil's poetry. He then examines several of the poem's recurrent dichotomies and metaphors, including idealism and realism, the line and the circle, and piety and fury. In succeeding chapters, he examines in detail the meaning of particular books of the Aeneid and argues that a close reading of the end of the epic is crucial for understanding the poem as a whole and Virgil's goals in composing it.

CHAPTER 1

THE VIRGILIAN ACHIEVEMENT

Scanning Virgil’s three major works in the search for unity, the critic is struck by an irony in the changes of genre. As the poet advances on his career, his models grow more and more distant in time, and, it could be said, more basic in theme. The Eclogues, modeled often on the Idyls of Theocritus and clearly espousing a Callimachean credo of poetic fineness, look to a Hellenistic background. In the Georgics, in spite of a slender debt to Aratus and other contemporaries, Virgil turns away from Alexandria first toward the more remote Greece of Hesiod, to sing in Roman towns the song of Ascra, second to Roman Lucretius whose “causes of things” will serve as an enriching influence on his own agrarian gods and their world. The Aeneid follows the same pattern—back further in Roman time to Ennius (who had offered direct challenge to Callimachus), in Greek past Apollonius of Rhodes (to whom book 4 is but a passing bow), past an occasional glimpse at the heroes and heroines of tragedy, back to il miglior fabbro, Homer himself, against whose essential insights into humanity Virgil’s own achievements will always be measured. It is easy to find those who deplore such a journey from Alexandria to the shores of Troy, but Virgil’s spiritual diary is worthy of some scrutiny.

Manifestly there are deeper levels to this progress than those which questions of literary influence can plumb, revelatory of taste as the latter often are. There are themes common to all three works. The challenge between idealism and realism, between life as it is often dreamed and life as it ultimately is always led, is an inexorable topic. But in a survey from the pastoral poems to the end of the epic, what is perhaps most striking is the gradual elimination of spiritual distance from the actualities and importunities of existence.

Arcadian setting specifically tends to remove the Eclogues from immediacies. The shepherd as poet is itself an anomalous conceit. Moreover, when so much space seems given over to scrutinizing poetry per se, verging toward an ultimately irresponsible verbalization of art’s dialogue with itself, that reader is blameless who senses himself in turn the play of make-believe. Not only does Virgil at first draw us into a landscape apart, he appears to narrow his horizon still further by enforcing concentration on a poet’s private vision. He orients us to those thoughts which suit or challenge his imagination. The problems of creativity are viewed from a stance of knowing uninvolvement, we could easily assume.

But there are deeper values and more primary concerns to the Eclogues than poetry in or of itself. Along with this apparent estrangement from life there is another whole area of intent in the Eclogues which is only now becoming critically clarified. Its presence is felt idealistically in the fourth poem where VirgiAlong with this apparent estrangement froml, at least in his thoughts, sings a symbolic marriage hymn for the union of Rome’s consul and his own “woods,” of history and paradise, time and timeless, power and poetry. Carmina, the efficacy of “charming” verse, are expected to induce the youthful symbol of an era without ambition’s wars. Virgil would have us ponder a different golden age, beyond Saturn’s facile primitivism and Jupiter’s more realistic economics, to a Rome which could in fact embrace pastoralism within its moral bounds, a pastoralism involving a new Saturnian intellectual as well as social freedom.

But Virgil’s contemporary Rome of the 40s and 30s B.C. is a more realistic entity and Eclogues 1 and 9 dispel any illusions. The position of Eclogue 1 is in itself a warning that any seeming escapism in the poems that follow must not be given undue significance. We may treat, if we choose, the differing positions of the two shepherds as a quasi-allegorical dialogue between happiness and suffering, freedom and slavery, and rejoice that the first also flourishes. But in the background lurks a Rome that might be, facing a Rome that does exist. One Rome possesses a divine youth who in turn fosters a dream shepherd. But the idealized pose of the shepherd Tityrus merely vivifies the immediate truth of a barbaric soldier possessing the power to exile another pastoral being. Eclogue 9 says in addition that the writing of poetry is impossible under conditions such as now prevail in the sylvan landscape. Their creator-poet exposes his shepherds to reality and then, in Eclogue 10, the last of the series, poises himself on the same threshold.

Eclogue 10 makes the transition to the Georgics easy. Verbally we are prepared by two phrases. The poet’s love for Gallus grows hour by hour like a green alder in new spring, vere novo, the exact words with which the land’s primaveral awakening is announced at the start of Georgic 1. Not only this, the poet himself will “spring up,” renouncing the posture of the leisured bard for something more challenging and active:

surgamus: solet esse gravis cantantibus umbra,

iuniperi gravis umbra; nocent et frugibus umbrae.

(Ecl.10.75–76)

Let us rise. Shade is often oppressive to singers, the shade of the

juniper is oppressive. Shade is also harmful to crops.

It comes as a surprise to learn that shade is harmful to a singer; we have so often heard differently in the Eclogues. On the other hand, Virgil warns the practical farmer early on in Georgic 1 of the hurt shade gives crops. But it is the poet’s admission of affection for the soldier-elegist Gallus that is most revealing. Earlier in the Eclogues Virgil, speaking for himself as poet, conjured up a dream existence or pledged a Callimachean allegiance, still within what might be called pastoral convention. Now, by acknowledging a spirited connection with the literal world of the soil and with living humanity (especially with a personage boasting of martial prestige and prowess in a very intimate poetic genre), he renounces his sylvan muse.

His closer look at reality—at nature, which must be seen literally but ultimately is also symbolic—comes in the Georgics. The pattern of the four books is an interesting one, from the cosmological setting in which the natural world finds itself (earth and sky), to the growth of crops and trees, to the more explicit trials of animal life, and finally, to bees, partially human, partially divine, communally minded, instinctively aggressive, ignorant of love, eternal in some eyes but equally the prey of death. And then at the end we have two tales. In the first the culture-hero Aristaeus, to wrest life from death, must be initiated into the sources of existence (in a semidivine, mythical world of water) and grasp the miracula rerum. The second is devoted to Orpheus, poet-lover, mesmerizer of immortal death by song but unable to control his own mortal furor. Finally an eight-line vignette of a still more realistic life concludes the poem—Octavian thundering on the Euphrates and the slothful poet, at his leisure, penning the rhythms of life.

In the Eclogues the natural landscape of breeze and shade tends to blur indissolubly with ideas of poetic creation and intellectual freedom. It becomes in the Georgics a grander, more essential metaphor for existence. Nature is unceasingly symbolized as human and made to reveal paradigms of flowering and decay, youth and old age, spontaneity and resistance, which offer formal comment on the world of man. And, as part of this more explicit intimacy with the human situation on Virgil’s part, there is the same uncordial duality between idealism and realism, between the search for perfected hopes and fallible means. Though the pastoral mode has at first an escapist effect, the actualities of suffering are far from absent in the Eclogues. They are a constant theme in the Georgics, relieved, as in the Eclogues, only by notions which seem deliberately tenuous if momentarily ingratiating.

The first Georgic tells of the signs from heaven which only warn but cannot avert disaster. There are violent harvest storms against which there is no recourse. In the middle of the book man is an oarsman propelling a tiny skiff against a heavy current, in spite of the arms at his disposal, scarcely holding his own by unremitting toil in the battle against degeneration. At the end humanity is seen only as a futile charioteer who has lost control of his horses (life’s brute and brutal forces) during the exactness of a race. We are reminded at the start of the book of the gloria divini ruris, in the end that the plow has lost its honor, that pruning forks are forged into swords, that fields are manured with blood not dung. The initial lines of the book imply that the farmer’s lot is hard (he is styled ignorant, mortal, sick); the concluding intimate that it is virtually impossible.

The second Georgic, on the other hand, has splendidly idealistic moments—the praises of Italy, the bursting vitality of spring’s coming, the concluding eulogy of morality in former rustic days (coupled with Virgil’s own commentary on his inspiration). But this last has clues which undercut any false optimism. Virgil evokes a Sabine life of pre-Jupiter days, before war came and Justice left. The realities of Rome (res Romanae in every sense) are different and, though this rural existence elicits the poet’s approval, it is of time past (olim). More peculiar, it is associated with Romulus and Remus, prototypes of civil war, fit exemplars for the modern Romans who, we have just learned, rejoice in a drenching with brothers’ blood (gaudent perfusi sanguine fratrum). In this manner Etruria grew—and so does Virgil’s irony! Romulus and Remus fought each other, the Romulidae fought the Sabines, the combination overcame the Etruscans, and Rome was walled. And yet Virgil would have us believe in another moment that this was the epoch of golden Saturn, before battle trumpets sounded and swords were forged. Such is the dream he has Jupiter propose in Aeneid 1 as the head of the gods predicts a future moment when Romulus will cooperate with Remus (Remo cum fratre Quirinus / iura dabunt) and Furor is imprisoned. But such a moment never does occur, certainly never in the Aeneid, and Virgil’s poetic impulse tells us so throughout the Georgics.

The third Georgic has no relieving optimism, in spite of an initial urge to glorify militant Octavian. Contemplated epic quickly yields to a more direct appraisal of human life. Even love is essentially bitter and destructive. The best day for pitiable mortals is fleeting; what remains is disease, old age, and hard death. The remainder of the book bears out the maxim, ending in a brutally vivid description of a plague that destroys the animal world and those humans who are unfortunate enough to come in contact with it—strange paradox for a writer of georgica.

The opening of the fourth Georgic is a welcome change. We are to be entertained by watching bees at work, by the spectacle of “light” matters—Virgil’s way of telling us that the truth is far otherwise. Critics veer happily toward allegory in their view of the bees, as if they somehow embodied perfection. Yet their life, as Virgil would see it, is neither ideal nor representative, nor, for that matter, eternal. They cannot symbolize humanity (i.e., Orpheus, Aristaeus, or even us) because they experience neither love nor individuality. The principal preoccupation they share with Rome is a devotion to war and, in some instances, a blind (or, to put it more kindly, selfless) devotion to the “state,” meaning fundamentally hard work and unswerving loyalty to those in power. They are prone to civil war, which makes their passion for patriotic pietas the more bitter. Here fortunately they differ from Rome because their conflicts can be quelled by a handful of dust and death to the leader of lesser value. Such is the power Jupiter exerts over mankind, though from another point of view “divine” force rests in the hands of thundering Octavian (or even Virgil, the leisured imaginer of these words) and who is to control him? The Aeneid responds to the unanswered question.

At the end we have Aristaeus who lost his hive for causing Eurydice’s death (Virgil need only say that she was running away from him praeceps). Orpheus then sought vengeance by destroying his livelihood. The bees were helpless victims of Aristaeus’ impetuosity just as Eurydice will soon be lost again through Orpheus’ lack of control. Different levels of life come vividly, often unpredictably, into contact as the cycle of birth and death continues. There is always a divine side to existence. The bees have it in part (partem divinae mentis). Aristaeus can turn for help to Cyrene and Proteus, and apprehend the exalted lessons of source and variety in nature. Orpheus can charm death itself. But there is always the mortal world of emotion in all its forms. Virgil’s suggestion is not only that life comes out of death, bees born from a slaughtered bullock, or even that death follows life. It is also too limiting to assert that, in spite of individual loss, the universe remains immortal. Rather...