The Last Trojan Hero

A Cultural History of Virgil's Aeneid

Philip Hardie

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857735065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte antica

"I sing of arms and of a man: his fate had made him fugitive: he was the first to journey from the coasts of Troy as far as Italy and the Lavinian shores." The resonant opening lines of Virgil's Aeneid rank among the most famous and consistently recited verses to have been passed down to later ages by antiquity. And after the Odyssey and the Iliad, Virgil's masterpiece is arguably the greatest classical text in the whole of Western literature. This sinuous and richly characterised epic vitally influenced the poetry of Dante, Petrarch and Milton. The doomed love of Dido and Aeneas inspired Purcell, while for T S Eliot Virgil's poem was 'the classic of all Europe'. The poet's stirring tale of a refugee Trojan prince, 'torn from Libyan waves' to found a new homeland in Italy, has provided much fertile material for writings on colonialism and for discourses of ethnic and national identity. The Aeneid has even been viewed as a template and a source of philosophical justification for British and American imperialism and adventurism. In his major new book Philip Hardie explores the many remarkable afterlives - ancient, medieval and modern - of the Aeneid in literature, music, politics, the visual arts and film.

1

INTRODUCTION

Virgil’s Latin survives in unexpected places. The reverse of the American one-dollar bill displays three Latin phrases based on Virgilian quotations, on images of the Great Seal of the United States (designed by the Founding Fathers in 1782). Nouus ordo saeclorum ‘a new order of ages’ is adapted from Virgil’s fourth Eclogue (line 5). Annuit coeptis ‘[God] looks favourably on our undertakings’ is lightly adapted from a prayer to Jupiter in the mouth of Aeneas’ son Ascanius at a critical moment in the Trojans’ war in Italy in the Aeneid (9.625). E pluribus unum ‘from many [colonies] one [nation]’ is adapted from a pseudo-Virgilian poem, the Moretum, which describes how a rustic blends together the ingredients for a kind of garlic pesto, so that ‘one colour emerges from many’, color est e pluribus unus (Moretum 102). The motto of Oklahoma, labor omnia uincit, ‘hard work overcomes all things’, is the condition of the farmer’s world in the Georgics (1.145). Further afield, the motto of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais is libertas quae sera tamen ‘liberty, which even if late’, commemorating a late eighteenth-century liberation movement. It is an abbreviation of a line in the Eclogues in which a shepherd, formerly a slave, explains the reason why he went to Rome (Ecl. 1.27): libertas, quae sera tamen respexit inertem ‘freedom, which, though late, nevertheless looked the way of an idle man’. The original context of the line is apposite for its Brazilian transplantation, since it is an example of Virgil’s injection of contemporary social and political reality into the timeless pastoral world. Going still further afield, the motto of the Australian city of Melbourne is the Virgilian phrase uires acquirit eundo ‘it gathers strength as it goes’. Here it is perhaps better not to remember that the original subject of these words is the monstrous personification of Rumour (Fama) in the Aeneid (4.175).

For most of the last two millennia Virgil’s poetry, and in particular his epic the Aeneid, was a central monument in the literary and cultural landscape of Europe and, in more recent centuries, of those territories around the world colonized by Europe, as the previous paragraph bears witness. The Aeneid was a core text in education, and, having entered the bloodstream of the educated elite, was the inspiration for countless new works of literature, as well as the visual arts and music. The influence of Virgil’s epic was not limited to the literary and artistic. What might be called the Virgilian ‘myth of history’ has been evoked again and again in support of political programmes and manifestoes, mostly of nationalist and imperialist kinds.

In 1944 T.S. Eliot could still claim that Virgil was ‘the classic of all Europe’, in his presidential address to the newly founded Virgil Society, ‘What is a Classic?’. ‘Virgil acquires the centrality of the unique classic; he is at the centre of European civilization, in a position which no other poet can share or usurp.’¹ The Virgil Society had been set up in the dark days of World War II with the aim of ‘unit[ing] all those who cherish the poetry of Virgil as the symbol of the cultural tradition of Western Europe’.² Eliot had his own agenda when it came to the matter of tradition and the classics, but his assertion of Virgil’s continuing classic status was not absurd. Indeed the earlier part of the twentieth century had seen a reinvigorated attention to Virgil, and the bimillennium of Virgil’s birth in 1930 had been enthusiastically celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic.³ But well before the turn of the twenty-first century Virgil had comprehensively lost this status, largely as a result of the decline of Latin in schools, and partly as a result of a reaction against the ideologies of nation and empire with which the Aeneid is associated, and which have now become deeply unfashionable.

But if Virgil’s poems enjoy a much reduced visibility in the modern world, their presence pervades the literature and art of the nineteen centuries and more during which Virgil was a central author. To write a comprehensive literary and cultural history of the reception of Virgil would be little less than to write a literary and cultural history of western Europe and its former overseas possessions. This short book can attempt only to give an overall sense of the history of Virgil’s reception, together with a more detailed sampling of individual instances of that reception.

Its coverage is partial also in that it focuses on just one of Virgil’s three canonical works, the last and most ambitious. The Aeneid was preceded by the Eclogues, Virgil’s book of pastoral poetry in the line of the Hellenistic bucolic poetry of Theocritus, and the Georgics, composed in a tradition of Greek and Roman didactic poetry going back to the archaic poet Hesiod, a poem which uses the pretext of teaching the reader how to farm in order to raise much larger issues concerning man’s place in the world. In addition there is a collection of poems formerly attributed to the young Virgil, known as the Appendix Vergiliana. Modern scholars believe almost none of these to be by Virgil, but until the Renaissance they were generally regarded as authentic and they play their own part in the reception of Virgil.⁴ The three major works, Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, form what in hindsight seems an almost pre-scripted progression in size, genre and subject-matter: from ten short, recherché poems about shepherds singing in the countryside, to a four-book poem about hard work on the farm, set within a much larger set of temporal and spatial frameworks, to the 12-book epic on the business of warfare and the foundation of cities. In the Middle Ages this tripartite career was given schematic representation in the ‘Wheel of Virgil’, which arranges the ascending analogies of the three poems in concentric circles.⁵ The idea of a ‘Virgilian career’, working its way up from smaller literary exercises to the full-scale epic, was influential in later centuries, a challenge taken up, for example, by Edmund Spenser and John Milton.⁶

As well as forming a progression, the three Virgilian poems are also tightly connected by a dense network of self-allusion. For example, the Eclogues look forward to some of the major themes of the Aeneid: exile, the return of the Golden Age, the disastrous effects of love, apotheosis. The Georgics move on from the Eclogues, but also look back to them, and the epic Aeneid contains both pastoral and didactic passages. The three works can be thought of, in a sense, as ‘one poetic space’.⁷ A consequence of this for the reception of Virgil is that imitation of the Aeneid is often linked to imitation of the earlier works. In particular, allusion to the fourth Eclogue, whose political and cosmic vision could almost be read as a blueprint for the Aeneid, is often found together with allusion to Virgil’s epic.

The Aeneid is a poem of very high quality, but that alone would not have assured it a central place in western culture. It achieved that position by being the particular kind of poem that it is, produced at a particular moment in history. It was written in the decade after the final victory of Octavian over Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31 BC (the ancient Life of Virgil by Aelius Donatus ascribes 11 years to the writing of the Aeneid, down to the death of Virgil in 19 BC).⁸ In 27 BC Octavian took on the name Augustus. This was the decade that saw the institution of the principate and the passage from the Roman Republic to a de facto monarchy under Augustus, the first Roman emperor. At this moment of refoundation and transition Virgil created an epic poem that tells of a hero who flees from the destruction of his native city, Troy, and travels to Italy in order to found a new city. The hero, Aeneas, is also the ancestor of the family (gens) into which Octavian was adopted by Julius Caesar, the gens Iulia, supposedly named after Iulus, the son of Aeneas (also known as Ascanius). Augustus was the first of the Julio-Claudian emperors, the line that came to a violent end with the death of Nero in AD 68. The city that Aeneas will found in Italy, after the end of the main narrative of the Aeneid, is Lavinium, from which his son Ascanius will found the city of Alba Longa, from which in the fullness of time Romulus will found Rome itself. While the action of the Aeneid is set in a remote legendary past, it constantly looks forward, through allusion and prophecy, to the foundation and history of the city of Rome, and to the person and rule of Augustus. Aeneas, forced by circumstance into the role of king of the Trojan refugees from Troy, is also trying out the role of Roman leader that Augustus was in the business of devising for himself in the years after Actium. Aeneas’ journey to Italy, together with the whole history of Rome down to Augustus, is part of the plan of Jupiter or Fate, a way of claiming divine sanction for Augustus as the culmination of the historical process. The hero Aeneas has the added aura of being the son of the goddess Venus (and so grandson of Jupiter). On his death he will become a god, as will, in future centuries, Romulus, Julius Caesar and, in prospect from the point of view of Virgil’s reader, Augustus.

No crude propaganda text, the Aeneid is yet deeply implicated in the construction of the principate. It quickly superseded what had been the national epic of the Romans, the Annals of Ennius (239–169 BC), which narrated Roman history from Romulus down to Ennius’ own day. As the foundational epic of the Roman Empire the Aeneid becomes the central text for the five centuries of that empire’s life, and then for later states and rulers which saw themselves as in some way successors of the Roman Empire.

The Aeneid asserts its canonical status in terms of literary-cultural, as well as political, history. It tells of the foundation of empire, and is itself imperialist in its literary ambition, which is no less than to establish itself as the Latin equivalent of the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. In antiquity Homer was viewed as the first and greatest of Greek poets, superhuman and almost divine, the fountainhead of all later Greek (and subsequently Roman) literature. Within its 12 books the Aeneid concentrates an almost unbelievably extensive and detailed imitation of the 48 books of the two Homeric epics.⁹ Furthermore, as a logical consequence of the view that the Homeric poems contained the seeds of all later literature, the Aeneid contains allusions to a whole range of earlier authors and genres, both Greek and Roman, making it a consciously encyclopedic epic. The ambition – and achievement – of the Aeneid is staggering: it is perhaps not surprising that Virgil is said to have written in a letter to Augustus that he must have been almost mad to undertake such an enormous task.¹⁰

The Aeneid thus completes an important stage in what is known as the ‘Hellenization of Rome’, the complex process whereby the militarily superior Rome negotiated its relationship with the cultural superiority of Greece. Homage to Homer and at the same time an imperialist appropriation of Greek cultural goods, the Aeneid, together with other Roman literature from the end of the Republic and the age of Augustus, by Cicero, Livy, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, goes to form a canon of Latin texts that can claim parity with the classics of Greek literature. One sign of the classic status of these Latin texts is that they become the central point of reference for later Roman authors. After Virgil Roman epic poets continue to allude to Homer, but the intertextual centre of gravity is always the Aeneid.¹¹ The history of imperial Roman epic, and of much post-antique epic in Latin and the vernaculars, is the history of responses to, and rewritings of, the Aeneid.

This is a book about the reception of the Aeneid, in other words the ways in which Virgil’s epic has been commented on, critiqued, and imitated, a literary text that has inspired countless later writers and artists, including many of the greatest names in the western tradition, and a text that has also been enlisted in the service of politics and ideologies. But the story told in this book is part of a longer history stretching back before the composition of the Aeneid. The post-Virgilian reception of the Aeneid may be viewed as a continuation of the reception of pre-Virgilian literature, culture and history that is performed in the Aeneid itself, as Virgil uses the vast canvas of his epic to engage with previous Greco-Roman literary tradition as well as with wider military, political and cultural histories.

Modern criticism of Latin poetry has perhaps been overly obsessed with the hunt for ‘metapoetics’, the attempt to find commentary within texts on their own processes of poetic making, but it is hard not to see in the surface plot of the Aeneid reflections of the poem’s own relationship to literary tradition, in images of transmission and translation, succession and inheritance. The overarching plot is the transfer of a people in the eastern Mediterranean to a new home in the west, in Italy, foreshadowing the later transfer of Greek literary and artistic goods from the eastern Mediterranean to Rome. More specifically, the journey from Troy to Rome reflects Virgil’s own naturalization in Latin of the Greek epics of Homer. That was understood long before the twentieth century: in the early sixteenth century Girolamo Vida, one of the most proficient of the many early modern imitators of Virgil who wrote in Latin, gives advice in his didactic poem on the Art of Poetry (1527) on the successful imitation of the ancient poets, and uses a number of images drawn from Virgil. These are practical examples of what it is that Vida is teaching, for very close verbal imitations of Virgil are put to work in quite different contexts. One of the images refers to the plot of the Aeneid as a whole: the successful imitator will put old material to new use (Art of Poetry 3.234–7), ‘just as the Trojan hero [Aeneas] transferred the kingdom of Asia and the household gods of Troy to Latium, with auspices of better fortune, for all that, at the call of fate, unwillingly, Phoenician lady [Dido], he departed from your shore.’ ‘Transferred’ is my translation of the Latin transtulit; the noun from the verb is translatio, one of whose meanings in classical Latin is indeed ‘translation’. Vida is talking not about imitation across languages but about imitation in Latin of Virgil’s Latin, but this is a useful reminder that translation (in our sense) is an important part of the reception of Virgil, important indeed for the wider literary history of the vernaculars into which the Aeneid has been translated.

There is more to be teased out of the lines quoted above from Vida: ‘unwillingly, Phoenician lady, he departed from your shore’ (inuitus, Phoenissa, tuo de litore cessit) is a light...