l) Any discussion of Vergil and his poetic output must start by looking
carefully at the Homeric epic poems. Composed around 700 B.C. and committed to
writing just before 500 BC, they stem from a long oral tradition, such as is
found in the early stages of many societies. The mark of Homer in the later
Western world has been profound and pervasive, and hardly needs documenting
here. Homer's antecedents are harder to identify, one can point to the Near
Eastern Gilgamesh text which shows parallels to the eleventh book of the
Odyssey, and other parallels may be forthcoming as we learn more about the
Ancient Near East. The Mycenean-Minoan civilization, dating from about l800 BC
to l200 BC and using at least in part the Greek language, is well attested
through archaeological remains including written tablets, but identification of
Homer's actual knowledge with specific references in Minoan-Mycenean history
remains unproveable. There are certainly Homeric references back to the world
of the Mycenean-Minoan period, but no overall identifications can be made at
this time. Egyptian civilization, dating back to 5000 BC must have had
influence on the rise of the Greek world, there are constant reminders of
Egyptian influences in crafts, sculpture, pottery, and perhaps mathematics, but
there is as much mystery in the exact process of cultural transmission, as
there is fact. Homer's text, itself a model of all that is clear and precise,
stems from a world of deep historical shadows.
2) Homer's writings are clear, precise in speech and thought, and always
perfectly explicit. They say exactly what they want to say, and that is one of
their chief glories. Perhaps for this reason these texts assumed a strong
educational role at an early date in Hellenic civilization, and this lasted
through the ages, actually into Byzantine times.. The best things to introduce
to the young as they learn to read, as the ancients saw it, would be exactness,
directness of word and deed, the very things found throughout the Homeric
corpus. Homes does employ "poetic" dictions, a good many metaphors and figured
structures, but they never dominate the poet's vision, he drags them along in
his wake, like a great river which is going its own course. Poeschl noticed
long ago this "explicitness" of Homer's language, which is not just linguistic
but also a quality of his mind. Things, men and actions in Homer are just what
they are, nothing more and nothing less, and it was in just this light that
the Hellenes saw their national poet. If in our modern world we have cast over
Homer novel shimmerings of theory, based on recent developments in psychology,
on new anthropologies, and each new criticism as it appears. Although this may
not be wrong as a part of human nature, it is not a part of Homer or the
Homeric world.. This discussion is intended to serve as preface to Vergil and
his artistry, therefore it is important at the outset to peel off some of the
encrustations of time which have, like barnacles, grown on the hull of Epic
Poetry.
3) Every educated Roman in Vergil's time knew everything we know about Greece
and a great deal more, since many important books and documents have
disappeared over the years. Since educated men and women spoke Greek as easily
as Russians in the l9th century spoke French, we can assume that Greek thought
was ever-present in the Roman's mind in terms of art, history and literature.
Proposing to write an "epic" about the origins of Rome, Vergil would have
thought of Homer automatically, and since Roman taste prized Greek models,
there would have been no problem in utilizing much of the external appearance
of Homer's writings. The general structure, the scenes of combat, certain
metrical devices, and even imitation of phrases and words would have seemed
acceptable to the Augustan world, not at all derivative or "imitative". But
Vergil apparently wanted to keep some parts of his thought private to himself,
and so devised ways of not being completely submerged in the flow of the
Homeric current. If Homer was "explicit", then he could indulge in being
"implicit", which we see as one of the most characteristic marks of Vergil's
thought Since implicitness is by its nature secretive, it may mot be detected
immediately, and only one who is sensitive and reasonably skilled in the Latin
language can, with some effort, perceive the robes of the implicit poetic
processes unfolding. This quality is often more important than the story-line,
than creation of historical epics, and the even perpetuation of a venerable
Hellenic tradition. It presents to us a new kind of artistic thinking, which
the world has never forgotten since. The Western world in its poetic tradition
has inherited far more from Vergil's inner, implicit vision than from Homer's
visual explicitness. The Western poetic mind took a giant step forward with
Vergil.
4) Homer used sound effects strikingly, but cautiously and with restraint.
Vergil uses sound continually, in a new and virtually contrapuntal manner,
since the sounds are used not merely to form a bridge to the sounds of nature
or men or the sea, but they are used abstractly, to show in their patterning an
endless variety of emotions. Cold anger, fury, sadness, melancholy, remorse and
every other feeling that we know, can be found in Vergil, encoded in the
phonetics of his Latin wording. This is his secret for manifesting his inner
implicitness, which is literally woven into the texture of his words. It often
operates on a level different from the line of the story, and this separation
can, in turn, create its own transcendental effects. Unfortunately a great
deal of penetration into the Latin language is required to draw back the
curtain. To read Homer one needs only a year or so of Greek study, but to read
Vergil you need many years. High school work is the introductory level, college
is intermediate, postgraduate study opens the doors, but only after you have
lived with Vergil for twenty years can you say that you begin to possess him.
This should not be discouraging, on the other hand it is the greatest possible
encouragement: After reading Vergil for a lifetime there will still be
something to receive.
When read years later, Homer offers special rewards, a great sense of what
society is about, and what it means to be a great-spirited human being. Homer
is the finest corrective to a life lived in a dehumanized, worried and insecure
society. But Vergil shows us something different, the world of the inner mind,
sometimes staged against a backdrop of nature, but always cast in the intense
world of human affairs. Sometimes these affairs of men and women are
transparent, hardly comparable with the breathtaking, blinding truth of Greek
Drama or Homer. This act of turning inward, which so marks Vergil's thought, is
not surprising in the wake of the hundred years of Roman history which started
with the brutal murders of the Gracchi and only terminated with Augustus and
his cold imperialism.. There may be in human history times to turn inward and
tend the garden of the inner mind, our twentieth century has shown a great deal
of this trait, for we too follow in the wake of a century of social brutality.
Vergil's treatment of his characters may at times be thin, but this is
understandable in a world of chicanery, double-dealing and manic tyranny.
Achilles, on the other hand, is never thin, he is always amazing and special,
although forever hard to understand, and tragically self-destructive. The
scenario which Vergil loves is the world of half hidden thoughts, suggested
perceptions, evanescent sounds, and the intricate web of words. These are hard
for us to perceive, schooled as we are in plot, structure and "idea", but they
are the things Romans immediately grasped in Vergil's poetry. The art of word
and music comes first, and the incorporation of episodes from Roman pre-history
are secondary. You can no more describe the Aeneid as a poetic version of Roman
origins, than you can call Dante's Divina Commedia an encyclopedia of late
medieval thought. Remember that Dante can be read only in Italian if you are
serious about it, and Vergil must be read in Latin. He is virtually
untranslatable, generation after generation tries it, but nobody succeeds. The
only "translation" that exists is the transfer from the page of Latin into your
consciousness, and this takes place only with much time and effort since it is
an emotional transference, via a special kind of intense poetry.
5) Coming to Vergil, first and foremost, one must approach by the avenue of
FORM.
Form is not the consecutive structure of ideas, the sequencing of episodes, the
tabulation of motifs, or the development of style in a historical framework.
The word "form" is often used thoughtlessly and formlessly, and the special
aspect of literature which most needs interpretation, true FORM, is ignored.
The evil bequest of Longinus' charming little treatise On Style, is the
elevation of "idea" to supreme position, while "form" is seen only as setting,
clothing and decoration. Horace accepted this as doctrine in the Ars Poetica,
although his own case proves the contrary, since it is often the form and not
the idea which confers the literary immortality which he craved. Dionysos of
Halicarnassos' important critical essay on literature and writing (De
Compositione) makes it clear that educated Hellenists of the first century B.C.
did understand his idea of form as "sound interweaving with sound, and
combining with certain natural affinities of the sonorities". The actual
sequencing of sound in words, phrases and echoes, when interwoven with rhythm,
which is itself in Latin a polyphonic combination of meter and stress, defines
Form in basic terms. Form when used musically, serves to illustrate and
amplify meaning. But Vergil often uses form and meaning antithetically,
everything may be serene in the story-line, when an ominous note sounds, or
perhaps a tone of what critics have called "the sound of sweet sadness ". This
often seems mysterious to the reader, he feels it comes like a gust of wind
from nowhere, like the strange pensiveness in Rembrandt's late paintings of his
own face. These magical moments of half- hidden revelation are produced by
subtle, partly cloaked structures of carefully controlled form. A good amount
of phonetic awareness, whether academic or intuitive, is clearly essential for
understanding Vergil.
Briefly, the sounds of Latin are divisible into four general classes.
The vowels, well called in German "bearers of the syllable", are from the
front to the back of the resonating mouth-cavity, -e-,-i-,-a-,-o-,-u-. They
form an oral and aural sequence which is perceivable by speaker and hearer
alike. The tightness and hardness of -i- and -i- soften in mid-mouth into a
relaxed -a-, but as -o- and -u- dip further back into the throat, an ominous,
often hollow sound comes forth..
The (so-called) liquids, -r- and -l-, and the phonetically allied nasals -m-
and -n-, are loud, heavy, and rolling. They suggest powerful, sometimes
dangerous effects, they linger in the ear, and press down on the mind. They are
always striking.
The unvoiced "stop-consonants" are -p-,-c- and -t-, or when voiced -b-, -g-
and -d-. Formed by a buildup of breath against a closure at the lips, teeth or
mid-mouth, these are short sounds, made by releasing air pressure at slightly
different locations. The consonants are important and distinctive sounds in
Latin, but not easy to hear since they are both short and weak. Esthetically
they connote tightness, they are used with abrupt words snapped out at the
front of the mouth. The voiced variants are slightly softer, but still terse.
The last group of sounds, the breath or "air" sounds, is the weakest
acoustically(-h-, -f-, and -s- represent this group). [Note that -v- is -w-, a
semivowel in Classical pronunciation; -z- is Greek only; -ph- and -ch- are
aspirated consonants, but always point to Greek influence. ] In this group, -h-
tends to disappear from pronunciation and writing, -f- and especially -s- have
hissing, threatening, and at times serpentish associations. Since there are so
few sounds in this group, when they do appear, they are likely to have
significant meaning.
This rough and bald phonetic outline may not convince the reader of the
importance of sound in Vergil, without cogent examples of Vergilian usage it
can only serve as a brief, and therefore rememberable, table of things to watch
for in reading. Detailed examples of how the sounds are actually employed will
be found in the commentary to Aeneid Book IV, but in the last analysis, each
reader must make personal associations of his own...
6) Two traits in Vergil's art appear again and again. First, he maintains a
special relationship with Nature (using the word in the modern English, rather
than the Latin sense). This stems from the deep strain of "animism" which
pervades Roman religious thought, and must be kept apart from the use of
literary Olympian figures in the epic tradition. There exist certain linguistic
affinities between the Italic and Celtic subdivisions of the Indo-European
stock, and we may well look for common traits in the handling of the forces of
nature. Mysterious, at times almost elfin beings, appear and disappear in
Vergil's lines, every river and tree houses a minor deity, powerful in his own
realm, Nature is first and last our setting, our agricultural mainstay, and the
world around us. This is no formless, inert world, but a live, continually
changing backdrop to human life. The deities of forest and orchard are not
perceived as abstract forces, but as if actually seen. Behind this may lie the
psychological capacity of the human mind to construct recognizable portraits
from randomized water, rock and tree patterns. We all do this when daydreaming
or looking at the clouds passing, but to the Romans, prepared by their
religious usages for believing in reality in Nature, these visual tricks of the
eye (as we see them) could easily be taken as real. Positing reality is
actually a simpler explanation for shapes seen in nature than citing
recognition patterns in a matrix of perception theory. If you see the old man's
face in the leaves, that may be the very deity your grandfather told you about,
and if changing light makes him disappear, why not say he was displeased and
went away. Vergil's use of such materials is well known, but what he felt and
what they meant to him, is still elusive.
A second trait often observed in Vergil is his use of simple and unadorned
language, which he borrowed from Roman daily speech. He often places ordinary
phrases in passages of high literary style, contrastively. There are many
simple words which hardly occur in poetic diction, Vergil himself may have used
them only once or twice. When these words are used, they have a strong effect,
they stand out in contrast to the grand literariness of the epic and poetic
tradition, representing the world which we find in the Suburra, in the theater,
the shops. We identify these words by our experience with the Latin language,
and by searching the dictionaries and word-index to Vergil. If a word is
"vulgar", and used by poets rarely, then when it is used in a passage in
Vergil, it must be there for a special reason. If we are thinking of Latin
primarily as a vehicle for high literature, we will certainly miss the little,
common words of the people, which bring a sense of immediacy to high-flown
literary contexts. Romans of the Augustan period noticed Vergil's use of common
and ordinary words, and some censured him for this. (Donatus' Life, discussed
below, is the authority for this matter.)
7) The Greek and Latin poets use much more striking and visual imagery, and far
less abstract ideas, than we do in modern poetry. The continual use of color
suggestions, changes of focus and distance, cuts and sutures of scenes,
flashbacks, action-stops, fades and montages that we find in Classical authors,
suggest that in their poetry the ancients sought an effect comparable to what
we expect in cinematic art. If we think of cinema as the outgrowth of a
specific invention, the movie camera, we might consider cinematic vision
applicable only to this century. The history of art from the Renaissance on,
however, points to many regular practices which art has always shared with
modern cinema. Pursuing artistic vision further back into Roman and Hellenic
times, we see in the poets a manifest fascination with every aspect of visual
perception. In fact, if one ignores the many visual cues found in ancient
poetry, one loses a great part of the impact and meaning. Especially in Vergil,
who has what I have no hesitation to call a natural, intuitive cinematic eye,
the cues must be carefully watched. Often when mentally recasting a Vergil ian
scene in pseudo-cinematic terms, one will suddenly find he has come upon the
real setting and the inner meaning of what he is reading.
8) Much of Vergil's vast literary reputation is involved with history, whether
going back from his time to the Greek antecedents, or on through the centuries.
Layer rests upon layer of appreciation and misappreciation. If the strange
Fourth Eclogue produced the rather fantastic notion that Vergil was predicting
the birth of Jesus, and this entitled him to a semi-sanctity among the
Christians, finally turning him in the Middle Ages into a magician, sorcerer
and necromancer, whom Dante finally adopted Vergil as friend and guide....
we must ask if this is of value in reading Vergil's poetry. Or if we turn our
attention to Vergil's influence just since the Renaissance, does this make our
understanding of the poetic quality in a passage any richer? Nostalgia is a
strong force in our society as this century comes toward its end, we seem to
love and prize all kinds of old things, big and small, common and rare. Are we
to value our Classics more, because they are old, because they have the whiff
of stale air from an ancient society?
One of the values of literature is that it brings minds from different ages and
societies together, and lets the men of later days see, from the writings of
former people, what things we have in common, and which things have really
changed. Subtle differences of attitude are informative and precious, since
genuine artistic materials from the past are so rare. It is this contacting of
minds, especially of creative and imaginative minds, from another time that is
valuable, not just the fact of antiquity by itself. When the work you are
dealing with is good, and you are sharp in your perceptions, then the ancient
author will often seem to be in the room with you. This is the wonderful
illusion of the persistence of true genius, perhaps it is less of an illusion
than we think.
9) Very little factual information about the lives of ancient authors is
available, in Vergil's case we know more than we know about many other Latin
authors, such as Lucretius and Catullus. A review of Rose's Handbook of Latin
Literature (p.236 ff, or any literary reference manual) will state the facts of
Vergil 's life succinctly. We see a young man of middle-class background, by
nature shy and retiring, studying the books and courses which were usual for
the time, first trying law which he dislikes, and soon after writing poetry, at
which he succeeds quite well, artistically and in reputation. Skirting the
dangers of troubled times, he meets the Prime Minister and Emperor, wins favor
and funding, writes a national and at times nationalistic Epic, and dies in
Greece at the age of 5l, intending to burn his unfinished Aeneid, which is by
imperial order rescued and lightly edited by friends.
Beside this "conventional" biography, there are curious details to be found
embedded in the ancient Vitae, written by grammarians near the middle of the 4
th century. The general intellectual tone of academicians of this period of not
high, fanciful interpretations are mixed in with stories which could go back
the few hundred years between the commentator's time and the poet's. Nineteenth
and twentieth century scholars have gone over these Vitae carefully, but they
have drawn out only provable, factual materials, by and large. It seems
worthwhile to examine the ancient Vitae carefully and with a fresh point of
view, to see if some of the minor Vermilion anecdotes may have information
which can help to fill in the very sketchy and formal personal history of
Vergil which we possess. The Vitae, since they are late, must be treated with
caution, but overcaution can obliterate worthwhile historical detail. Their
date is some seven times nearer to Vergil's than ours, and caution must take
second place to historical common sense.
Starting with materials drawn from Donatus' rather full Vita, the poet's father
is mentioned by some authorities as a potter (this would be interesting as
possibly providing a sense of form and craft to the son), by others as a viator
mercennarius, which might mean salaried (public?) agent, just possibly
traveling salesman, or as the British say, commercial traveler. More important
would seem to be the story that his father considerably improved the family
finances by purchasing woodlots and tending bees, thus incidentally providing
raw material background for his son's Eclogues and Georgics. The mother's oft
cited dream (producing a laurel branch which grows and bears fruit) is
certainly a back-formation from Vergil 's fruitful, laureate career, and
nothing more. Vergil received the man's toga at l7, on the very day Lucretius
died, surely establishing for him a sense of tradition in poetry; his constant
use of Lucretian words and phrases confirms this notion. Physically Vergil was
described as "big" (grandis), dark in complexion (aquilus), and having a
country-style face (facie rusticana). This last remark is interesting, but one
can only guess exactly what a countrified appearance would be to Roman eyes.
After centuries of formal Roman portrait busts, could this mean a more relaxed
and less mannerismed countenance? If we take the evidence of modern developing,
rural areas into account, we might think of the country type as lean, muscular,
thin from a life of hard work and little extra food, and dark from exposure to
the sun. One thinks of the poet Persius calling himself semipaganus, "some
sort of a country yokel" as he comes before the Muses. Ethnologists concerned
with Italian history have suggested that the Etruscans disappeared from history
not by attrition, but by disappearing underground into the country population,
where they are still recognizable as a separate physical type, tall, thin, dark
skinned, and deep eyed. If Vergil were from Etruscan stock, can traces of
Etruscan culture be found in his work? Many Roman literary figures came from
outside Rome, perhaps this points to a country freshness and an aggressive
talent for succeeding at Rome, traits possibly shared by the youthful poet.
Vergil was noted as sickly, but it is not clear with what ailment or ailments:
he had stomach trouble, tooth pain (jaw trouble), and headaches, and often
threw up blood! He was a fastidious eater and drinker, perhaps in part because
of the above ailments. He was said to have inclined sexually to boys, had two
known slave boyfriends; however this must not be taken as unusual, since the
educated upperclasses could be openly bisexual, and educated Romans at this
time were the very group to which Vergil belonged. More to the point is his
stubborn refusal to have an affaire with a lady named Plotia who was interested
in him, and the fact that at Naples he was nicknamed Parthenias "The Maiden".
Perhaps this referred less to girlish mannerisms than to his asexual bearing,
befitting of the maiden of mythology, Artemis. Girlish shyness was apparently
part of his personality, witness the fact that when famous at Rome as a poet,
he avoided crowds by ducking into nearby buildings.
Following Donatus, we find that Vergil at one period studied medicine, and also
mathematics. One thinks of Duckworth's studies on use of Gold Mean proportion
of 1.6l8034 to 1 in alternative paragraph lengths throughout the Aeneid. He had
studied rhetoric, but plead just one case, apparently disliking the courtroom
scene. This is not surprising since he was described as very slow of speech and
when speaking he sounded (Donatus' sources say) like an uneducated person.
Putting this together with the countrified face, one gets the picture of a
young man far different from the poet laureate as depicted in the famous mosaic
portrait (this can be found in any history of ancient art, and is well worth
examining with care). Vergil was certainly not slick or facile in speech in an
age characterized by the prevalence of the ready word on the tip of the tongue.
Ovid would be a better example of a smooth, educated Roman gentleman.
In beginning the Aeneid, Vergil is stated to have wished to encompass the scope
of both Iliad and Odyssey, to have decided to use both Greek and Latin words
and names mixed in together, while also providing an outline of Roman origins.
His composing methods, mentioned specifically in relation to the Georgics, was
to write many verses early in the day and then spend the rest of the day
reducing them to a very few, which process he himself compared to the habit of
a female bear, constantly licking it's young into shape. He wrote the Aeneid
out in prose first, then turned it into verse. This seems surprising, perhaps
the prose version was not a complete text but just an outline in note-form; in
any case mechanical versification of a full prose version doesn't sound like
Vergil's style. In order not to lose his speed in composing, he is said to have
included parts which were not really finished, other sections admitted shoring
up with temporary verses, using them as "props", as he put it jokingly, until
the permanent columns could be set in place. (This remark, which is quoted as
coming from Vergil himself, is interesting since it shows architectural
awareness, helpful for any author; he probably began composing the Aeneid in 30
B.C., which is quite near the probable date of the publication of Vitruvius'
work De Architectura).
After Actium, at a time when Vergil was trying to recover from "jaw trouble"
(perhaps infection of the bone following tooth extraction), he read aloud to
the Emperor over a three day period, but when Maecenas took turns reading, he
was often interrupted by the poet because of errors in his pronunciation.
Vergil pronounced words with remarkable sweetness and "charm" (the word is
lenocinium, a word of sexual cast, meaning "pimping, enticing, sexual
allurement, charm, blandishment and flattery"). The "Maiden of Naples" is
charming in his speech as well as his manner, it would appear. This careful
attention to speech is important, it accords exactly with the musically and
phonetically aware tenor of Vergil 's language, and warns us never to read in a
terse and frigid manner. (It should go without saying that all reading of
Vergil must be done as the Romans did it, aloud. We know that wealthy Romans
had isolated reading rooms in their villas, because they simply were not able
to read silently as we do. St. Augustine does point to silent reading, but at
a much later period.)
The celebrated "half lines" in the Aeneid were already seen by the author as
impossible to finish. One of his secretaries had a knack for rounding them out,
but apparently Vergil felt under no compulsion to complete them all, and they
stand as he left them, immortally truncated. The story of Vergil 's trip to
Greece while finishing the Aeneid, his death there, and the editorship of the
poem with minimal changes, is too well known to need comment. More interesting
is the fact that even in Vergil 's time there were critics and detractors, who
made specific reference to his off use of words, as in this parody from the
famous line in the Georgics:
In the shorter Life which goes under the name of Probus, there is a curious
remark: "He lived for several years.... (words missing)... in contemplative
leisure, following the school (sectam) of Epicurus... " Place this together
with the comment in Donatus' life, which we have been following :" he decided
to retire to Greece and Asia, and for three years did nothing but polish the
Aeneid, so that the remainder of his life would be free for philosophy.". The
question is "Which Philosophy?" Scholarly opinion casts Vergil as a staunch
Stoic and his epic is so interpreted, largely because of his sympathetic
treatment of Aeneas, who is "stoical" in spirit, but it appears possible from
these statements in the Vitae, that Vergil was privately an Epicurean, and that
the Stoic attitude was merely a part of his external, public-oriented
personality. The standard view that Dido is sexual and Epicurean, whereas
Aeneas, who is destined to prevail, is self-controlled and hence Stoic, is
entirely too simple. Both Stoic and Epicurean philosophies far more to say than
this, and their history cannot be encapsulated in a glib cliche.
Vergil technically became a man on the day the Epicurean Lucretius died, and
Lucretius is the author from whom Vergil borrowed and echoed most after Homer.
We may surely expect to find deep Epicurean roots in Vergil's philosophy.
These citations are from documents which are, although late in date and
stemming from an unperceptive era, fairly close to Vergil and his time. They
have a certain ring of fact and authenticity, and give us a number of details
which point to a poet far from the celebrated laureate enshrined in the Poetic
Hall of Fame. We have at hand a quiet and shy, tongue-tied young man of
retiring, perhaps somewhat effeminate mien, seeming to urbane Romans
countrified in appearance and in manner of speaking. When he speaks, however,
he is highly conscious of intonation and pronunciation, he is exact in the
requirements for reading his poetry, and impatient with bad reading technique.,
even Maecenas'. He associates with the highest level of his society on an easy
basis, is neither more nor less homosexual than his contemporaries, never
enters into deep connections with any woman, and apparently doesn't consider
old-style Republican family life as suitable for himself.
l0) This commentary is intended to be an artistic and esthetic companion to the
Latin text of Vergil 's Aeneid Book IV. Over the years there has grown up such
a vast array of comment on Vergil that the sheer bulk makes it largely
inaccessible to readers. A great deal of the commentary dating from the last
two hundred years is focused on matters of professional scholarship, and
although it constitutes a wealth of useful factual information, the application
of this scholarly material to work of the poets seen as creative artists, has
often been ignored. This stems from a traditional notion that the Classics are
concerned primarily with facts, rather than ideas, and literature has often
been seen as a minor appendage to historical record. Even the history of
ancient ideas is often understood as essentially historical and factual. When
the New Criticism appeared on the American scene years ago, it was felt at
first that this might provide a refusing of attention to the words of Classical
authors taken just as they were, as the carriers of artistic and literary
concepts. This was certainly the idea behind the autotelic approach, to be
concerned only with the text as it stood. In the ancient world, however, so
much is inexplicable without historical and social background, that the
autotelic method never gained a firm footing. Furthermore graduate school
training in the Classics, which focuses heavily on the traditional and
scholarly attitudes of the l9th c. philologists, monitors the door for
professional entry of the teachers and researchers who ultimately determine the
directions of new thinking in the Classics. Students of artistic temperament
tend to choose areas more sympathetic to the study of the creative processes,
and Classics has often been left with the hard core of scholarly fact-finders,
temperamentally unsuited to pursue matters like poets' minds. To understand the
world of poetry, one must know a great deal about the arts, about philosophy,
psychology, anthropology and about the world at large, this is implicit in the
idea of the Humanist. The training of a Humanist can only be begun in the five
or eight years of graduate school, completing the full program is a life's
work, and only the gifted and diligent have any chance of succeeding.
1l) In dealing with major work from a major poet, we want to be as sure as we
can be that we are dealing with the text in an authentic and accurate way. To
be sure, there are many fine points of ancient Roman pronunciation which are
lost forever. Exactly what intonation and what slurring occurred in spoken
speech can only be guessed at, but the detailed work of five generations of
accurate linguistic scholars gives us reasonable assurance that the more
important features of the ancient Latin language are known, and can be
reproduced. There have always been quibbling arguments about "the true Latin
pronunciation", but at this date, the level of the entrenchment of the quibbles
is more a block to proper use of Latin than the level of our knowledge. Taking
the state of knowledge achieved by the Yale scholar Edgar Sturtevant's work on
Latin pronunciation as a base, we can vocalize Latin letters with cautious
confidence. But the written text itself has gone through various
transmutations.
First, in manuscript texts dating from the Roman period, all letters are in
capitals, there is no capital -u-, (it is always -V-), and of course no small
-v- in the event of your reading a minuscule text. Letters were printed large,
almost an inch high, especially in important books like Vergil, as a concession
to chronic eye infections which plagued the populace, and of course it was
impossible to correct defective vision by ground lenses. With such large print
the reading rate was slow, and this was in turn further retarded by the Roman's
inability to read silently. This may seem strange to our culture, in which
children learn not to phonate by the age of eight or nine, but we know from
primary evidence that Romans always read aloud, and so heard their readings
with a remarkable acuity. Furthermore they liked reading aloud, and this made
poets responsible for producing euphonic, acoustically enjoyable texts. Ancient
books are full of music, but until we get completely used to reading them in a
strong and unembarrassed voice, we cannot get their full effect. In the case of
Vergil, whose writing is musical above all others,, we must practice reading
aloud until the process becomes natural to us. Reading the Aeneid silently is
like inspecting Bach's score to the B minor Mass... it is true, you can
perceive absolutely everything, except the sound.
The text is is printed in CAPITAL letters, and intended to be read aloud,
slowly and thoughfully at the rate of less than ten pages an hour. The Romans
used only capital letters in their manuscript texts, with "uncial" letters a
little under and inch high, about like this:
This has great advantage for an age without eyeglasses, reading handwritten and
heavily used copies, on a very wide page of parchment in a codex or book-form.
It suits our sense of readable text even less when written without spacing as
below, the normal Latin usage except for very elementary students, who might
have small red interpunct marks.
Reading a continuous row of letters like this, one would read carefully,
phonating each character and listening to the sound of one's voice for the
"text", which is the way Romans actually read. But since we have been schooled
since third grade to read words as "characters" without phonating out the
sound, we gain far greater reading speed, while losing the directness of the
writer's voice arising from re-sounding the words. The Commentary hopes to
bring us back in some measure to an auditory approach to Vergil's poetry,
without which we miss half of the effect of his language. When you download the
Latin text (from the main menu) you can choose between the minuscule (normal)
or capital letter continuous text for your reading,
Since poetry often has an element of visual display in the individual lines,
the format makes the line visually and artistically clear as a study in design.
Many lines of Vergil are studies in design, and the ancient format makes this
easier to grasp. We are fortunate in being able to imitate an early style of
lettering such as the Romans used with our modern typefaces, you cannot do this
with Greek, which in older MSS is unreadable, as are the papyri. Perhaps at
this point a word about "long marks" is in order. The Romans knew the longs by
knowing how the language sounded, but never wrote them in, nor do modern texts
of any author include them with the one exception of high school textbooks.
Since students seriously studying Latin will never see a long-marked text after
high school, the use of such crutches may well be questioned. It would seem
better to learn to deal with regular printed texts, than learn everything in
"marked" text, and later wonder where the cribbed marks went. A Dutch doctor
named Smets published in l599 a dictionary of regularly used poetic words
illustrated with one verse from a good poet of the Augustan period,which
establishes the natural length of the vowels. But even so there are questions
about length in some words, which the OLD lists at the beginning of each entry.
Note that modern Russians must speak with precise pitch accents, but would
never think of writing them in their books. If students learn the longs and
shorts by hearing Latin spoken by the teacher and speaking it themselves, there
will be no problems later on, that is the long and the short of it.
Two letters in the Latin alphabet and how they are to be pronounced have always
generated more heat than light, the letters -u/v- and -c-. If we use the
capitals alone, we will see only -V-, which must be pronounced -w-. There is no
question about this linguistically, although those favoring "church
pronunciation" will fight on for -v-. The same is true of -c-, which was
always -k-, but the palatalized pronunciation -ch-, which did appear in very
late Latin, is preferred by those whose Latin started in church schools. It
would seem better to alter one's pronunciation in view of linguistic
correctness, and in hopes of getting nearer to the author's sounds, but if the
teacher can't learn new tricks, using the accustomed pronunciation will be
necessary. But at least sound the Latin words out loud and clear, there is no
earthly virtue to whispering and mealy mouthing. The worst sin against the
nature of poetry would be -v- and -c- engrained in the mind as ghostly letters
, forever deprived of sound..
Latin metre has always been a real problem for students. The system of scansion
which traditional grammar books cram into their concluding pages is too slow
and clumsy for use while actually reading. Writing out the longs and shorts
laboriously and then reading back the notes while intoning as if you were on a
creaky rocking horse,is no way to apprehend the musicality of poetry. Having
developed an unusable system of scansion, many teachers treat Latin poetry as
unreadable, and have the students translate verse and parse in class, then scan
a few lines on paper for the sake of discipline. TO do things right, the
teacher must be able to read Vergil at a normal pace, with feeling and good
intonation, getting the longs and shorts right automatically, as easily as in
reading Shakespeare's pentameters. (Just so one sings from sheet music in
church without thinking of quarter and eighth notes all the time.) When the
teacher does this, he can read to the students and let them get a sense of what
the sound of Latin verse is like. Vergil is easy, with only one basic metre and
not a great many variants, but even if it were hard, there would be no excuse
for reading great poetry silently.
When students have absorbed the sound of the dactylic hexameter in their ears,
they can then consider these things:
A line has only dactyls ("fingers" in Greek, which have one long bone and two
shorts) or spondees (in Greek "libations", referring to the slow step at
religious ceremonies). Dactyls are emotionally fast, moving and stirring,
spondees are heavy, weighty, sometimes threatening. or sad.
Lines must begin with a long, after which comes a binary choice: either two
shorts, followed by a long (the beginning of the next foot) or a long, which
also must be followed by a long for the beginning of the following foot.
Getting used to this simplified system, the choices will be found to be
small.
Most lines (say 49 out of 50) end with a two foot sequence, a dactyl followed
by a spondee. If the last syllable of the line is short, it is to be considered
long.
"Long" means of a vowel that l) it is long by its nature, as it were,
genetically, or 2) it is considered long if it occurs before two consonants
(which double-stopping-off demands a longer vowel to start with).
Everything not long is short. Sometimes it is easier to watch the shorts than
the longs.
A vowel at the end of one word combines and fuses with a vowel at the beginning
of the following word, even over -m- which is a weakened nasal-colored and not
a real consonant in this final position.
The longs are somewhat longer, but not intrinsically louder, than the shorts,
like quarter and eighth notes in music, but by Vergil's time the 1:2 ratio
which the Greek maintained was evening out. Try to keep longs and stressed
syllables as separate ideas (below)
We should note at this point that the above statements apply to Latin poetry,
whereas a different system is used in prose and conversational speech:
A word is stressed (not lengthened) on the third syllable from the end, unless
the next-to-last (antepenult) is long by nature, in which case the stress goes
there, on the next-to-last. English uses a similar accentuation by stress in
similar locations, so this system should seem fairly familiar.
However, there does exist a problem of harmonization between the metrical and
stress systems as outlined above. If a poet wrote lines which were metrically
correct, but put the stress, as used in prose, in odd and unusual places, his
work would be laughable. Poets knew that the two should work together, although
they cannot actually cannot work together perfectly. Vergil understood this
well, and rather than make metre and stress as coincident as possible, he
found ways to make them work out of phase with each other here and there. There
are verses in which the metre-stress imbalance creates secondary effects of
great interest, sometimes giving a line an interesting lilt or a lurch. This
is due to the care with which the poet adjusts metre to encompass, but not
completely repress stress. These are subtle effects which will appear
automatically if you read aloud and listen to what you are saying. You will
certainly hear the lilts, just as you will hear the shifts in musical phrasing
in a Bach Unaccompanied Cello Suite, where you will probably hear it sooner by
listening than by poring over the music score. Don't be impatient, this is a
difficult area to understand and it will take time.
l2) This commentary deals, first of all, with the words printed on the page.
Poetry is the art of words, so we must behold their shape, form, associations,
connotations and musicality at the very beginning. Since paying close attention
to the words, as words, that the author uses is often ignored in the study of
Latin authors, a great part of this commentary is devoted to this. As the facts
of ancient life and social organization come up, they enter the commentary,
with one proviso: They are there to serve as illustrations to the ideas of the
poet, but poetry is not a set of illustrations to history. Poetic materials can
be used perfectly well as raw materials for history, especially social history
and the sociology of the "populus minutus", as the Romans called their
populace, but this is an entirely different study from the study of poetic
creativity, it demands different training, a different type of intelligence.,
and it has an entirely different purpose. Poetic sensitivity easily gets lost
in the world of exact scholarship, to restore it to a working method which
explicates poems is one of the aims of this study.
For further reference, some of the following books may be important. The huge
Oxford Latin Dictionary brings together a good selection of citations on every
word used in the Latin language, here the reader can find good information
about the Roman's use of words. Wetmore's complete index to Vergil 's
vocabulary shows how often, and usually exactly how, Vergil used a particular
word. Merguet's German index has the great advantage of citing each line in
full, so one can read the context without going back to the text for each word,
which is a definite advantage; the disadvantages are that the sections are
organized in a confusing manner, and the translations are from Latin into
German. Arthur Stanley Pease's great commentary on Aeneid IV, published in l935
and reflecting many years' assiduous reading, is a useful monument of
pertinent materials, unfortunately gathered primarily as information, and
lacking artistic interpretation. The Roman materials on Vergil's life, which
have been used above, and the Commentaries of Servius date from the 4th c.,
since they reflect the impressions of the last native speakers of Latin who
were in contact with the classic authors, they are most interesting. The Lives
of Vergil are collected in a thin Oxford volume, the commentary of Servius with
additions is to be found in the older edition of Thilo and Hagen from l88l, or
better the Harvard Servius, which in Volume 3 contains about two hundred pages
of Latin text on Book IV. (Donatus' Vergilian Commentaries is preserved, but
it is longwinded, inept and at all costs to be avoided.
OLD= Oxford Latin Dictionary ed. P.G.W. Glare, Oxford Univ Press. l982
Pease= A.S. Pease: Aeneid Book IV Harvard Univ, Press l935, repr. l960
Vitae Vergilianae Antiquae ed. C. Hardie Oxford Univ Press l966 or OCT
M. Merguet: Lexikon zu Vergilius l9l2, Hildesheim reprint l960
Vergil: Opera ed Hirtzel OCT Series Oxford Univ. Press l900 or any modern
text. (MSS alternative readings and three centuries of scholarly
corrections are interesting, but not our primary concern here.)
Servianorum in Vergili Carmina Commentariorum ed. Harvard. Vol III, Oxford
l965, p.247 and following for Aeneid IV.
H.J. Rose: A Handbook of Latin Literature Methuen London l936 (reprinted)
is still useful for general background and selected detailed information.
V. = Vergil
[ ] Square brackets are used for purely grammatical aids to the student, but
only difficult points are noted.
cf.= Lat. confer = compare....
e.g. = exempli gratia = for an example.......
(The Latin text is in capital letters, which may surprise you, but there are
two reasons. First the Romans through the time of the Empire, read their Latin
in Uncial letters, which are capitals of about a 24 point size. Using capitals
gives much more the sense of what Latin looked like, although with most texts
the words were not separated, something I think we are not prepared to deal
with. Second reading the Latin in capitals will make you read more slowly, more
carefully, which is very important (as discussed above) and the unfamiliarity
of the -v/u- characters will also slow you down.
AENEID IV: THE COMMENTARY
l AT REGINA GRAVI IAMDVDVM SAVCIA CVRA
VVLNVS ALIT VENIS ET CAECO CARPITVR IGNI
Starting a book with a word as short as 'at' is arresting, the adversative
meaning of the word 'but, on the other hand' changes the scene abruptly,
which
is precisely what Vergil wanted here.. In cinema this would be a fast snap shot
to another, entirely different scene, with no time for the audience to visually
readjust.. Everything shifts about, from yawn to sleepless attention, from soft
to hard sounds, from long to short words, from Aeneas with company to Dido all
alone. - - - 'Regina' is a stately and queenly word with two long vowels and a
host of royal associations, Dido is will soon be talking and acting like a
woman, but unfortunately she is still a "queen". Having two roles, she chooses
the wrong one for her own survival, as the story unfolds. - - -'Iamdudum" means
specifically "for a long time now ", the question is just how long a time span
is involved. To her the interval between just last night at the party and the
present is "Oh, so long", but it is just one, sleepless night. With this one
word 'at', a rather prosy and even awkward word, Vergil grasps Dido's state of
mind. It is anxiety that makes short time long! - - -'Saucia" is a prophetic
word: Wounds have occurred and will occur again, the wounded deer will soon be
flitting through the poem, hit by an unwitting hunter, Dido will go on a hunt
with Aeneas and herself be invaded in the cave. "Wound" in the next line and
"veins" pick up the motif, which is quickly changed into the licking flames
(carpere) of a fire which sees not what it burns. The wound and the licking
flames are so terrible that we forget for the moment that they both belong to
that lovely little boy, Cupido, who hangs invisible over the scene, laughing.
This is not a casual mythological reference in Ovid's style, it is ghastly and
frightening.
The verb 'alit' means " nourishing, fostering, helping to develop and raising
up (plants or children)", a strange verb to use in the case of a penetrating
wound. Even stranger is the idea of someone "keeping " a wound alive in his
veins. Dido "takes the wound, accepts it, feeds it, keeps it alive by
nourishing it with her blood supply", This is the meaning, but of course Vergil
didn't think it out in logical terms, he just saw flashing: a WOUND - - she
keeps it safe in her - - VEINS. This is good wording for a neurotic phenomenon,
the "treasuring" in one's innermost heart of what hurts the most. Poetic
thoughts can be the same as clinical statements, but the wording is more
elusive. Remember that Vergil had some medical training, and that analysis of
the vascular system was taking place at the hands of Greek researchers just in
these years.- - - 'Cura" is always a difficult word to translate into English,
"anxiety" often seems better than that too friendly term "care", while "worry"
is entirely too nervous and sounds wrong.
Vergil uses alliteration frequently, in these few lines we have already had
'caeco carpitur' as well as 'volnus... venis', here are 'viri virtus' and in
the next line ' voltus/ verbaque'. No special meaning need be sought in these
alliterative pairs, their function is to bind together certain words musically
either because they are natural pairs and belong together (as 'viri virtus,
from the same root), or because they are un-natural pairs (like 'volnus..
.venis) and create a sense of discord. - - - In line 3 the key word is
'recursat', the thoughts of Aeneas's lineage and personal manliness that keep
"rushing" back into Dido's mind. Each of these characteristics of Aeneas has
the same adjective, 'multa - multus ', which grammatically "rush back" in the
sentence structure, creating a pulse or wave which marks Dido's emotional
state. Again, we see the interweaving of form and meaning, inseparably
intertwined. - - - 'Haerent' etc. These four jagged words, with five long
syllables in a row, as well as two syllables in the first and last word and
three in both middle words (thus: 2 3 3 2), are as harsh in sound as they are
surprising in meaning: "His features are stuck, jammed into her breast".
'Haerent' ("sticking, adhering") is soon to be used of the arrow of the hunter
still sticking in the fleeing doe, it is a loaded word. (Note: "breast" in
English is too female and mammary to be used for 'pectus', while "chest" is too
masculine and hairy; perhaps a less accurate but better translation would be
"heart".) Jamming as these four words are, we are not yet done with them,
Vergil continues right across into the next line, which starts with "Verbaque",
and we have changed tone and meaning in a flash. Using this carry-over word
here does something like this : "... (and)... Oh yes, and his words too. ",
this is made real by the dactyl beat of long-short-short in 'verbaque'. One has
to read this aloud carefully to see what this lovely little microtexture is
about.
At this point, the carried-over first word in a new line should be mentioned.
In Epic writing from Homer on, lines are uniform dactylic hexameters and are
read as distinct and separate. The dactyl-spondee sequence which ends most
lines gives a sense of finality, a closing lilt and pause. But Homer had
already seen that if the first word of a new line is grammatically joined with
the previous line, a hesitation in meaning follows, terminating in a distinct
lunge. A fine example is to be seen in Homer Iliad I 5l-2:
autar epeit' autoisi belos echepeukes ephies
ball'(e).
"And then at them, the sharp-pointed arrow aiming,
He fired."
Homer uses this formula again and again, generally with action words signifying
hurling, shooting and crashing. It is a surprisingly effective twist occurring
among the thousands of lines of uniform, winged hexameters. - - - Now Vergil
often uses this borrowed device in the Homeric manner, as at Aeneid I 8l-2 when
Aeolus breaks open the mountain of the incarcerated winds with the dynamic dash
of "Impulit". But Vergil is never content merely to imitate his sources, and in
this passage he puts the words which pulse into Dido's consciousness as an
afterthought, in exactly this dynamic spot. Although they sound a little like
an afterthought, they pulse heavily into her mind, just as much as the hero's
'infixi' facial feature did before. Hot sexual love has a way of jamming the
mind although it seem to lilt lightly and walk on air. - - - And just then,
after all this force, come words of infinite quietude and peacefulness,
'placidam membris dat cura quietem'. You can in the sounds of the words almost
hear a yawn as someone goes to sleep, read it slowly aloud, as it mesmerizes
you.... except for the fact that the phrase is as if algebraically
bracketed and modified by one word, the negative: 'nec". Evoking the aura and
sound of restful sleep, and then exorcising it, Vergil teases with a sweet,
soft feelings, which are immediately withdrawn.. And so with a jerk, the first
scene of Dido's ineffectual dealings with love fades, and night descends upon
the poor lady, NOT enfolded in the arms of Sleep.
POSTERA PHOEBEA LVSTRABAT LAMPADE TERRAS
VMENTEMQVE AVRORA POLO DIMOVERAT VMBRAM
CVM SIC UNANIMAM ADLOQUITVR MALE SANA SOROREM:
After the last scene showing Dido NOT enfolded that night in sweet sleep, the
dawn finally comes, but it is a strange dawn indeed. Every Roman would remember
the five simple words Homer uses for dawn arising:
emos de phane rhodo-daktylos eos "then appeared the
rosy fingered Dawn"
Homer is precise, dawn comes fast, it is red with moisture in the morning
since there are moisture bearing seas to the East, and light returns us to the
world of men and their actions. Knowing this by heart, Vergil goes the other
way. Stealing a line from Homer (as he had said), is no easy matter, it calls
for alteration and reworking, so Vergil throws out on his page a kaleidoscopic
jumble of verbal scenery in fragmented order, but woven together with the
embroidering thread of art. Lines 6-7 defy comprehension at first glance, one
must gaze and squint at them again and again, as one looks at the unfamiliar
and confused world around him in the morning light with bleary eyes. A Roman
literature student would have had trouble with these two lines, as is evidenced
by Servius' detailed interpretation; he even calls it a 'circumlocutio'.
The order of the words is planned: 'postera' is the adjective for a subject not
here yet, and we are grammatically left hanging, while we proceed to Phoebea (
which would be automatically an ablative to the Roman, by ear). Standing poised
at the middle of the line is 'lustrabat', which S. had already noticed as
having three meanings, "looking over, spreading light over, and purifying", all
of which the dawn does. This verb occupies a central position in the line, like
the Dawn centering itself of the horizon, after which comes the "lamp" of the
dawn-light modified on the other side of the verb by its adjective,"Phoebean".
Light stretches over the earth, onto 'terras' as an object, and we have the
basic picture already, but must strain on into the next line for the subject
'Aurora This lady is hiding in second place (in line 7), as befits the not
overly dutiful wife of Tithonos. Dawn now pivots onto her second function, she
removes from the sky (polo) the dew-damp shadows, which bracket the line as
first and last word. This poetic word entanglement is highly wrought, and
certainly would have required the careful attention of an educated Roman
reader. By slowing up the rising of daybreak, in contract to Homer's swift and
clear Dawn, Vergil consciously reworks a familiar scene to his own taste. Homer
had used this Dawn-scene wording over and over again, Vergil throws in one
repeat (recalling Aeneid 3, 589) as a sort of footnoted aside. - - - The
previous passage had showed Dido unable to yield to sleep, the line following
the Dawn couplet (line 8) returns to Dido, sick at heart, as she addresses her
dearest sister. Thus the complex Dawn couplet is sandwiched between two humanly
simple lines about Dido, and we see a balanced structure involving Dido
preceding and following the dawn, just as Dido saw the whole Dawn appear.
9 ANNA SOROR QVAE ME SVSPENSAM INSOMNIA TERRENT
QVIS NOVVS HIC NOSTRIS SVCESSIT SEDIBVS HOSPES
QVEM SESE ORE FERENS, QUAM FORTI PECTORE ET ARMIS
CREDO EQVIDEM, NEC VANA FIDES, GENVS ESSE DEORVM.
DEGENERES ANIMOS TIMOR ARGVIT. HEU, QVIBUS ILLE
IACTATUS FATIS, QVAE BELLA EXHAUSTA CANEBAT
This section, which stretches through line l9, starts off simply. "Dear Anna..
.", (her 'un-anima'), "having a soul like my own, my altera ego".... (How
completely wrong Dido is in her estimate of her sister's mind, we will soon see
in Anna speech after line l9: she is Dido's inverse in psyche, character, and
words, a committed opportunist from the word go). As the passage, which turns
into a tirade, progresses, and the verbal and psychological complications
become complex, Dido spills out all her love, her hangups, guilts and fears..
.. Notice that significant word 'suspensam', itself left hanging, as it were,
near the center of the line! - - - S. already in the fourth century had a
variant reading of 'terret'. He explains that there was an older Latin fem.sg.
noun 'insomnia' meaning the same as our word in English. If you follow the
standard reading with the plural verb, 'insomnia' must be neut. pl. to
'insomnium' "something seen in sleep, dream, portent", but then you have a
problem : Dido is not able to sleep in line 5, but has terrible dreams to tell
her sister about the next morning! For a full account of the arguments see
Pease ad loc.. Probably the safest path is to stay with the plural 'terrent'
and assume that 'insomnia' n.pl. can also mean 'sleeplessness', despite some
scholars' objections. - - -Blind terror is certainly the heading for this
line.
Lines 10 and 11 are constructed rather oddly on the paradigm of the declension
of the interrogative pronoun. We perceive through Dido's series of some
rhetorical questions her wide-eyed wonder at this new man in town. Exclamations
like these would seem more suitable for a girl of seventeen than a woman of
more than twice that age. (Exactly how young girls talked in Latin is difficult
to document, but some support for girl-talk can be found in Plautine comedy,
for example the speech patterns of the two girlies in Plautus' Rudens.) With
'quis.?....quem...... quam!' we have an enthusiastic conflation of words, not
unlike the aactual process of falling in love. Again in line l2: "I do believe
- - - and I'm sure I'm not wrong - - - " Dido picks up the girlish tone again,
exclaiming " he looks like a god = he's just divine!". - - - But just as we get
caught up by in the ingenuous tone of these lines, the tone crashes with four
brutal words:
DEGENERES ANIMOS TIMOR ARGVIT
These four words are in the form of a rule of proverbial wisdom, they state a
truth impersonally. Citing a proverb is unexpected here, just as the sound of
the four strict and unadorned words is unawaited. The logic of this formula
works strangely: He (Aeneas) may be a noble soul, fear does have a way of
revealing craven minds, but he doesn't show fear in his history, therefore he
doesn't have a craven or degenerate mind, and must therefore be a noble soul.
Instead of sensing Aeneas' nobility, she craftily proves it to herself by
inverted syllogism, in a verbal formula which is short, sounds tough, and shows
her suspicions. The brutal contrast which Vergil employs here is a fine poetic
device and delineates Dido's oscillating personality well, since a moment later
she reverts to her gushing girlishness with a theatrical 'Heu', which is more
"My, oh my" than the traditional Classical "alas!"- - - 'Iactatus' takes us
back to Aeneid I, 3 and 613 for an echo of the man tossed about by the Fates. -
- - 'Exhausta' means literally "drained out, drained to the dregs", an odd
expression for wars. S. has a good understanding of this word, he says that
'exhausta' means "finished, terminated", and adds: "Almost anyone can start a
war, it is the very few who can finish it up and conquer." This typically Roman
statement fits the passage well, it seem fair to think of "bella exhausta' as
"wars that have mopped up the enemy, campaigns that wiped out the opposition".
Retaining the "liquid" figure of speech from "haurire" is less important than
pointing to the aim of a military campaign, which must "get every last drop of
fight blotted up". This kind of diligent militarism was of course the Roman's
special field of expertise!
With line l5 we change course, and plunge into a tirade which starts off slowly
but increases speed with each line, as it reveals every aspect of Dido's inner
feelings, every sick and guilty thought, and ends with the prophetic phrase "in
the grave". Taking the passage line by line :
Line l5 "were it not inexorably fixed and seated in my mind... "
l6 that I should not (even) wish to associate myself in (con)jugal
bond(=chain, fetter) with anyone... " (Note the bitter alliteration in the -v-
and -v- pair, pronounced between the lip and teeth, bitterly.
l7 Bitterness and paranoia are now rising fast :"after my first love tricked
me, deceived by his death... " (this is an inverted remark, as if Sychaeus had
gone and died just in order to trick her... an obviously incorrect assumption
since the poor man was murdered).
l8 But paranoia now turns to disgust: "were I not completely tired (turned off
by) of marriage- chamber (sex) and the torch (used in the marriage ceremony,
analogous to bridal veil)... " (the brittle triple -t- { recall Gr. theta is
an aspirated -t-, not English -th-} signalizes disgust, marital and sexual
turn-off)
l8 After the previous hostile buildup, she suddenly changes: "I could (maybe?)
succumb to this one (man!)... " ('Succumbere' means not only "yield" but
specifically "lie down under", with clear has sexual meaning. (Compare
'succuba', the Roman sexually seductive female ghost.) She may say "yield", but
more is connoted! Next, we see 'huic uni' as a dative singular, but since the
masc. fem. and neut. are identical, the first association of the
reader will be that Aeneas is meant and that ' succumbere' is meant
sexually, unless it is taken as a Freudian slip, which would have much of the
same meaning..... Just as she realizes what she is saying, she deftly adds
one word, which agrees grammatically with the dative of 'huic uni', but
disagrees with her statement. She removes Aeneas instantly from her overloaded
and guilty conscience by adding 'culpae". The sentence thus comes out :"I could
just possibly yield (myself) to this ONE.... (no! I mean)... to this one
SIN." Catching herself in the nick of time, she prefers to be guilty of sin in
thought, rather than sinning with a man.... (Scholars have argued for years
whether she is succumbing to Aeneas on the one hand, or on the other hand to
sin, missing the real point: By starting with the one alternative, and
switching to the other at the last moment, she shows how deeply guilty she is
in her own eyes. She can't even say what she means to her unanimous (?) sister,
or to herself..... S. suggests that the words in this line are to be spoken
individually, one at a time, in consideration of her hesitancy, witnessed by
'forsan' "maybe". (An even longer pause before the last word would give the
exact effect I want) We never get reading instructions from Servius himself, so
this suggestion could conceivably come from Vergil's own staging requirements,
which were said in Probus' Life to be very precise.
20 ANNA FATEBOR ENIM MISERI POST FATA SYCHAEI
CONIUGIS ET SPARSOS CRVORE PENATES
SOLVS HIC INFLEXIT SENSVS ANIMVMQVE LABANTEM
IMPVLIT. ADGNOSCO VETERIS VESTIGIA FLAMMAE.
Line 20 starts off gently, with a confession from the heart: "I'll admit, my
dearest Anna, after the sad fate of poor Sychaeus (now forgetting that he had
tricked her by going and getting himself killed as she maintained few lines
before) and the bloody scene of that crime, this is the first man who has
turned around my feelings, and my swerving mind... (new line)... HE HAS
JAMMED." This is overstated in paraphrase, but the emphatic position of the
verb, which is loaded with the meaning of 'impulit', shows incredible force. S.
says of the passage that it could mean either "he has driven my mind so as to
swerve" or " my already swerving mind, he has pushed over", Perhaps the latter
interpretation is more in Dido's style, everything considered..... Line 2l:
"I recognize traces of the old fire", seems an entirely human thought to us,
but to the conservative Romans it would have implied wronging the memory of her
dead husband. Dido softens momentarily, thinking of love, her first love and
her marriage, and the possibility that it could occur again. It could be
happening with this one, and right now... but...
24 SED MIHI VEL TELLVS OPTEM PRIVS IMA DEHISCAT
VEL PATER OMNIPOTENS ADIGAT ME FVLMINE AD VMBRAS
PALLENTIS VMBRAS EREBO NOCTEMQVE PRODVNDAM
ANTE PUDOR QUAM TE VIOLO AVT TVA IVRA RESOLVO.
With line 2l the soft thoughts instantly disappear: " Before this happen, may
Earth open, or lightening strike me dead". Dido lets herself think loving
thoughts, but cancels them with a vengeance. She is clear in her mind and quite
specific: " May Our Father in Heaven drive me down with a thunderbolt to the
shades, (which are ruminatingly repeated in the following line:) those pale
shades in Hell, and the eternal night, before.....
These lines seem so real, written as it were from within a woman's mind, that
one might question what wellspring of human experience or emotion gave Vergil
the capacity of writing thus.. I would like to cite two bits of information
from the short two-page Life of Vergil by Servius, who says that Vergil was shy
and modest, called at Naples Parthenias, "the Little Maiden, the Virgin", and
then he adds that V., although "having a good reputation throughout his life,
labored with just one disease (morbo), which was that he was intolerant of
sexual feelings ("impatiens libidinis" are the exact words)". Some of the
things that Dido says and feels may have been Vergil's own thoughts, perhaps
Dido's disgust with sex was in fact the mirror of the poet's feeling., his
"malady".
Dido concludes (line 27) "Before, Oh my Shame, I violate you, and break your
laws" She has abstracted modesty and shame from herself, giving it almost the
position of a guardian spirit, a 'genius', and she apologizes to "it" guiltily,
but she does go back to Aeneas with love. Just so Vergil's shamefastness may
have been a sickness he couldn't deal with on an intellectual level,, yet he
had relations with his two slave boyfriends, despite his sexual antipathies.
Without belaboring a point which nobody can prove, it seems fair to assume that
a poet's basic attitudes toward life and love are likely to be in some ways
parallel to that of characters he is developing in his work and that poets
write out of their own lives and experience to some degree. [At line 26 we find
the first seven syllables in the line all long, making three spondees, a heavy
effect suitable of the underworld.]
28 ILLE MEOS, PRIMVS QVI ME SIBI IVNXIT, AMORES
ABSTVLIT. ILLE HABEAT SECVM SERVETQUE SEPULCRO.
Of course " he who first... " is Sychaeus, now mentioned a third time After
the formula "who joined me to himself", she follows with "all my love... he
has taken away = stolen". The position of the written-over verb 'abstulit'
contrasts stealing, always a secret process, with emphatic proclaiming of THEFT
at the beginning of a line. [Abstulit is from 'au-fero' basically meaning
'carry away' but regularly used for "deprive, steal, destroy"]. Dido is less
hostile here than before, she still remembers that she was cheated of
something, but her anger collapses in the face of old Roman institutions:
Remarriage was not favored, (as S. remarks) only 'univirae' were permitted to
participate in the rites of numerous deities, and Roman conscience considered a
second marriage a disgrace if not a crime. (How quickly this was all to change,
within a hundred and fifty years a statute could state: 'Post decimum
coniugium, adulterium est.').... One further remark about "all my love
(amores)": Let him have it, and keep it safe, but "in the grave. " As she says
"let him have it", after "he has stolen" all my love, Dido seems bitter but
facts, but adds with a resigned tone : "and let him keep it safe... in the
grave". Keeping his wife's good reputation safe is entirely suitable for
Sychaeus, until we see exactly where he is to keep it. The idea of putting the
"love" of a live woman in the grave, entombed beside her long dead husband's
bones, creates a strange and ghastly image, with an almost Dracula-like
weirdness..... Mixed emotional content would seem to be a good description
of Dido's thoughts, she demonstrates a fast oscillation from love to hate via
guilt. The passage we have been looking at, from line l0 to 29, traces this
unhealthy, wavering path, and ends quite naturally with words of death. This
swerve from life through love to death characterizes the whole of the fourth
book.
30 SIC EFFATA SINVM LACRIMIS IMPLEVIT OBORTIS
In the section before line 30, Dido traverses a wide range of emotional
territories, but manages to maintain control. As she ends, she breaks down and
sobs uncontrollably, with tears which are "welling up" = 'obortis'. This gush
of the tears over her garment and lap is less important than the quality of the
last word, 'obortis'. The tears have welled up, sudden and unannounced. That is
true to the nature of crying., which comes in a gush and always takes the
griever by surprise.
Now it is Anna's turn. Dido had called her sister 'unanima', but in reality
Anna is Dido's exact opposite. As Dido is emotional, guilty, and tantalized by
a love she shouldn't want, Anna is tough-minded, practical, completely aware of
consequences, and above all she sees herself as a winner and survivor. The best
word to use to describe Anna would be "opportunistic", with all the
associations of self-servingness and small-minded self-interest that go with
that sleazy term..
3l ANNA REFERT: O LVCE MAGIS DILECTA SORORI,
SOLANE PERPETVA MAERENS CARPERE IVVENTA
NEC DVLCIS NATOS VENERIS NEC PRAEMIA NORIS?
ID CINEREM AVT MANIS CREDIS CURARE SEPULTOS?
ESTO...
Anna proceed in a hard- hitting and businesslike manner: l) You're so young,
dear, do you want to be the only one to grieve forever (You do feel sorry for
yourself... don't you?) 2) You can have none of the nice things that go with
Venus (indicating children and love, which means sex, covertly mentioned).
Even prosaic Servius sees that something is wrong here, since he notes the
order is backwards, since love comes first and then children follow. But Anna
is smart and puts the acceptable part first, in deference to her knowledge of
Dido's guilty conscience. 3) Do you think that the whole superstructure of our
ancient established religion is concerned with something as small as this? [The
use of a word as short as 'id' at the beginning of the line focuses attention
on a something which is almost nothing, when this "nothing" is compared with
ashes and ghosts and Roman religiosity, the discrepancy between All That and
"this" becomes ludicrous. Do you actually think that the ancestral spirits have
time to spare to think about things like this? Vergil would have early learned
that Epicurean philosophy, especially in Lucretius' formulation, would maintain
that the deities are distant and unconcerned with human concerns. Anna's remark
has a clearly Epicurean flavor. But Anna has no time to quibble: OK (= 'esto')
let's go on....
35 ESTO. AEGRAM NVLLI QVONDAM FLEXERE MARITI,
NON LIBYAE NON ANTE TYRO. DESPECTVS IARBAS
DVCTORES ALII QVOS AFRICA TERRA TRIUMPHIS
DIVES ALIT. PLACITONE ETIAM PUGNABIS AMORI?
['Libyae" is locative, grammatically parallel to the loc. abl. of Tyro.]
Personal taste is now invoked, Anna lists the high and haughty princes who had
defiled before Dido, all distasteful and all unacceptable. But this one is
acceptable, now are you going to reject him too? (Of course fighting against
what she likes is a basic part of Dido's personality, Anna can't understand
this at all ('unanimam'?), she sticks to her argumentative logic and to the
facts:
39 NEC VENIT IN MENTEM QVORVM CONSEDERIS ARVIS?
HINC GAETVLAE VRBES GENVS INSVPERABILE BELLO
ET NVMIDAE INFRENI CINGVNT ET INHOSPTIA SYRTIS
HINC DESERTA SITI REGIO LATEQVE FVRENTES
BARCAEI. QVID BELLA TYRO SVRGENTIA DICAM
GERMANIQVE MINAS?
Anna knows that if she can't get through to her sister by persuasion, she can
always use fear. "Don't you know where you are, in what dangers?", and she
proceeds to outline them in frightening detail. [Using 'hinc' and then again
'hinc', she hems Dido in on one side and the other.] Gaetulians and Numidians
are foreign and savage peoples (especially so to Roman eyes on the other side
of the Mediterranean Sea). Then look at the geography, the north African shoals
which are dangerous to ships, the desert on the other side toward the south,
and the barbarians themselves, riding horses without bridle, and they
themselves are unbridled! (S. sees these consideration about being "unbridled"
as exclusive, but both are certainly meant, and this further increases the
tension). Finally she mentions the Barcaeans as "raging afar", a phrase neatly
twisted out of its Homeric original 'euru kreontes', which is used of kings
"ruling afar". Note the normal phrase 'populum late regem' at Aeneid 1, 2l,
beside which our variant "having gone crazy... afar" seems insanely
dangerous, which is exactly what Anna wants to infer.... As if this were not
enough, what about the dangers from "back East" in Tyre? Anna slips into a neat
rhetorical 'praeteritio' or passing over something which cannot be said, no
doubt a leftover from Vergil's unused legal training, which she cleverly fuses
into one of Vergil's finer uses of the incompleted line.
The incomplete lines in Vergil have been a subject of much discussion even
from Roman times. (For a good statement of the facts, see Sparrow: Half Line
and Repetitions in Vergil l93l; the scholarly literature continues and
multiplies to this day.) Servius notes that one of Vergil's assistants had a
knack for finishing out half lines, and he gives examples, but obviously the
assistant was not encouraged to rework them all. The Daniel Scholiast notes: '
et oratorie finivit ubi vis argumenti constitit", which statement looks simpler
than it is: "when the argument of the story came to a natural stop, Vergil
simply closed off there, (as if) with an oratorical gesture" If the pauses
reflect the natural end of a sequence, that is would be enough., and the
oratorical gesture would be unnecessary for Vergil and certainly inconsistent.
A second view is that the half-lines represent the unfinished state of the poem
at the time of the author's death, and the real question is how Vergil would
have completed these lines. It would be next to impossible to add three or four
words and yet make sense, let alone poetic sense. Many years ago Mackail went
in the opposite direction, and suggested that the half-lines were composed
together with the preceding line, since many of these line-and-a-half units
could be dropped without affecting the meaning. But the question remains, how
did they get in there in the first place, and why would anyone trying to
complete half lines suture on a previous line but neglect filling out the short
one?... A third approach is this: The half-lines have been in Vergil 's
established text for two thousand years, we have learned to accept them as
defective, or in many cases incorporate them into our own view of the poet's
technique. Some seem pathetic, some perfectly attuned to the meaning, like the
case we have been examining. Saying "But why mention....." (praeteritio from
rhetoric or passing over unsaid materials), Anna heads for a break-off
(aposiopesis as used by rhetoricians and poets too). What better place for such
a double headed break than the natural aposiopesis of a half-line?.... In
conclusion, it seems best to leave things the way they are, and consider the
incomplete lines incomplete. One can no more speculate about the half-lines of
Vergil with profit, than he can speculate about the conclusion of the Gospel of
St. Mark, which cuts off abruptly after verse l6.8. But it is the nature of
human beings to fidget with the fringes.
But now Anna, forgetting that she had said the shades wouldn't care about such
going-ons much, turns to Religion as an authority:
45 DIS EQVIDEM AVSPICIBVS REOR ET IVNONE SECUNDA
HVNC CVRSVM ILIACAS VENTO TENUISSE CARINAS
DIVINE PROVIDENCE is always a welcome sound to insecure ears. But we need not
stop here, we can leap with Anna's vision into the future, and imagine in
cinematic montage a distant shot of a major cosmopolitan complex. arising...
47 QVAM TV VRBEM SOROR HANC CERNES, QVAE SVRGERE REGNA
When Romans say 'urbs' they think automatically of Rome, their city par
excellence, just as many American say "The city" when they mean New York. Dido
is supposed to think of her new CITY as another Rome, a city like that flashes
before her eyes, but something is inherently wrong. That great new city is on
the wrong side of the Mediterranean, and in fact it's name is Carthage! After
the terrible Punic Wars the Romans would never forget. But line 47 does not
stop, it merely pauses and the critical pre- condition for all this happening
is inserted (in the emphatic position):
CONIUGIO TALI.
The condition for this city is simple: Marriage. There is however one problem,
"coniugium' is the proper word for legal Roman marriage, that is between
Romans. Another term, 'conubium', is used for marriage between persons of
different states, it is legally binding but falls into a very different legal
category. 'Conubium" is used in writers on agriculture for cross-breeding of
animals and plants, so its basic hybrid meaning is clear. Anna made a mistake,
she used the wrong word. This might seem slight to us, but to the legalistic
and omen-conscious Romans this would have been a grave error. Vergil himself
sees this problem, since later in this book (at line l68), when he pictures
lightening flashing on the mountains and the cognizant heavens serving as
witness to the ceremony, he uses the alternate word "conubiis", intentionally.
Dido herself in the cave seduction scene calls what she has been engaged in,
Marriage (coniugium, of course wrongly). "With this name she cloaks her sin".
Vergil knows the difference, even if Dido doesn't!
48 CONIUGIO TALI. TEVCRVM COMITANTIBVS ARMIS
PUNICA SE QVANTIS ATTOLLET GLORIA REBVS.
Anna wastes no time with sentimentality about marriage. "When we have their
military might, who knows how far we may go...." Line 49 would read to any
Roman citizen as a prophetic program for the Punic Wars, much as a phrase like
"the might and glory of the Third Reich" would sound similar to an American who
had lived through the Second World War, or to his descendants. 'Experientia
docet.'
50 TV MODO POSCE DEOS VENIAM, SACRIS LITATIS
INDVLGE HOSPITIO CAUSASQVE INNECTE MORANDI
DVM PELAGO DESAEVIT HIEMS ET AQVOSVS ORION
QVASSATAEQVE RATES, DVM NON TRACTABILE CAELVM.
Anna proceeds right on course with her argument, never missing a beat. "You
just get down on your knees and pray to God that......" In line 50 the personal
prayer for what Dido herself wants is immediately superimposed on the public
prayer giving at which she, as queen of the country, must officiate. There is
something wrong about the phrase 'indulge hospitio'. The words look harmless,
perhaps the catch is that 'indulgere' implies indulging a personal feeling,
having a desire to bestow and give freely the 'hospitium', which itself must be
given freely and graciously under aegis of Zeus-Iovis the Guest God. Here it is
not given for the sake of the pleasure of giving, nor in respect for God's
command of guestship, but it is given for reasons of profit to self. V..
handles this so subtly that we might easily pass Anna's little formula by
unnoticed, as her sister Dido does..... And now Anna can come out in the
open, saying " weave in (to the fabric of lies) reasons for staying, the storms
of winter, ships wrecked, and a terrible bout of weather". How pure and noble
Dido seems in comparison to her practical and scheming sister.
54 HIS DICTIS INCENSVM ANIMVM FLAMMAVIT AMORE
SPEM DEDIT DVBIAE MENTI SOLVIT PUDOREM
Anna wins. But already there are warnings of what is to come in such words as
'incensum' and 'flammavit'. In line 55 the phrase 'dubiae menti' catches a
major component of Dido's frame of mind, which she sheds only when she realizes
that death is her best escape. One wonders whether some of Dido's feminine
hesitancy was part of the conventionally accepted notion of how a woman should
behave. The great Aphrodites in Greek sculpture have a certain hesitancy in
their stance, the arms strive to cover breasts and body, but without
conviction. Perhaps this was a reflection of how women were expected to behave
in intimate association with men. Dido shows hesitancy when she is involved
with Aeneas, but when she loses him and hope of him forever, she sheds this
doubtfulness of mind and becomes as determined and tough in spirit as Aeneas At
that point, her feminine role doesn't matter, she can't offend her man anymore,
so she becomes determined like a man, working for her own interests, which in
fact means her own destruction.... At this point Dido follows Anna's
religious prescription for success, and proceeds to conduct the holy rites:
56 PRINCIPIO DELVBRA ADEVNT PACEMQUE PER ARAS
EXQVUIRUNT. MACTANT LECTAS DE MORE BIDENTIS
LEGIFERAE CERERI PHOEBOQVE PATRIQVE LYAEO
IVNONI ANTE OMNIS CUI VINCLA IVGALIA CVRAE
The story moves into the strange space in the middle of a Carthaginian temple,
where rites combining foreign and Roman elements are mixed.. Greeks and Romans
alike tended to see universal characteristics in their deities, and often
equated them with the gods of the peoples with whom they came into contact..
There may have originally been a triad of old Carthaginian deities behind the
names Vergil chooses, but scholarly research has not been successful in
identifying them. After the "trinity" of Ceres, Phoebus and Dionysus, Juno
comes immediately as protectress of Carthage, and goddess in charge of marriage
and births, which now attracts Dido, for whom the 'vincla' of marriage seem
suddenly to have lost their distaste. Within this temple setting, we turn to
the queen:
60 IPSA TENENS DEXTRA PATERAM PULCHERRIMA DIDO
CANDENTIS VACCAE MEDIA INTER CORNUA FUNDIT
AVT ANTE ORA DEUM PINGUIS SPATIATVR AD ARAS
INSTAVRATQVE DIEM DONIS, PEDVDVM RECLUSIS
PECTORIBVS INHIANS SPIRANTIA CONSVLIT EXTA.
Dido is shown as a lovely, regal lady, holding in her hand a ritual wine-bowl
in a what is virtually an art nouveau setting. But the scene takes on a
different and unfamiliar appearance, we stare at the white cow about to be
slaughtered, the gods' huge sculptured masks above, the blood and fat stained
altars, before which Dido is standing magically summoning up the day, then
peering into the steaming, still twitching entrails of sacrificial animals,
seeking signs through augury. Much of such a scene would have been familiar to
Romans, but here the tone is different, it is agitated and it is foreign. If
Dido is prime actor in these foreign, hereditary roles, the Roman would ask: Is
such a woman is suitable to be a Latin king's consort?
65 HEV, VATVM IGNARAE MENTES. QUID VOTA FVRENTEM
QUID DELUBRA IVVANT? EST MOLLIS FLAMMA MEDULLAS
INTEREA ET TACITVM VIVIT SVB PECTORE VOLNVS.
[ The verb 'est' is 3 sg. from 'de' "eat, eat at", not from sum, as everybody
thinks at first sight! Romans speak of the marrow, 'medulla', much as we speak
of having something deep in the heart, neither of which is anatomically
correct.] The poet now speaks out in his own persona, with a special clarity
and ring to his voice, talking about atheism or at least some anti-theic
doctrine, an amazing detail in an officially approved "Roman epic" poem. With
shocking speed we careen from the open guts of animals slaughtered in a ritual,
to questioning the very basis of rites and religion, and then we veer back to
the wound in Dido's heart, the living wound which makes no sound. The wound
dominates, and Dido becomes (like) the doe with a deadly arrow stuck in her
side, trying to flee over the Cretan mountains in vain. If we see this scene as
a verbal metaphor, we get a much less vivid impression of its pathos, than if
we imagine it appearing on a cinema screen coming out of a fade, suddenly there
in front of us, clear and alive and agonizing. Since we have cinema and TV to
make such scenes real, we no longer require the art of poetry which the
ancients used for exactly this same purpose. In turn we have lost a great deal
of the ability to correlate vivid imaginative fantasies with the printed word,
saying instead, academically, "Look, students, here is a metaphor!" The
following passage cannot be read properly unless one demands of his inner-sight
the form and color sensations of a visually vivid scene.
68 VRITVR INFELIX DIDO TOTAQVE VAGATVR
VRBE FVRENS, QVALIS CONIECTA CERVA SAGITTA
QVAM PROCVL INCAVTAM NEMORA INTER CRESIA FIXIT
PASTOR AGENS TELIS LIQVITQUE VOLATILE FERRUM
NESCIVS. ILLA FVGA SILVAS SALTVSQVE PERAGRAT
DICTAEOS, HAERET LETALIS HARVNDO.
[Coniecta cerva sagitta: It is perhaps too elementary to mention that the first
and third words are abl., but the deer is n.sg., which a Roman would have known
immediately by reading the verse aloud. Do this now, please.] One of the least
pleasant aspects of hunting, then or now, is the idea of wounding an animal
which escapes to run to its death hours later. Any hunter with a shred of
conscience will spend hours following the blood trail to avoid this
possibility, but worse is the situation in which the hunter does not even know
he has hit the game, marching off with a light heart while the animal goes to
its death. Just so, Aeneas does not seem to have understood that he "wounded"
Dido, the arrow is stuck in her flesh, his heart is free while she suffers...
. Several words in this passage are double-edged, since they apply to Dido as
well as to the deer. Both are "incautious", despite hesitations, and the
shooting verbs 'fixit' and 'haeret' re-echo from line 4 of this book: 'haerent
infixi pectore voltus'. The scene now " dissolves", and when it reappears, we
see Dido in her city, agitated and hunted by her own thoughts:
74 NVNC MEDIA AENEAN SECUM PER MOENIA DVCIT
SIDONIAS OSTENTAT OPES VRBEMQUE PARATAM
INCIPIT EFFARI MEDIAQVE IN VOCE RESISTIT
[The educated Roman would have been sufficiently familiar with Greek not to
balk at the Greek accusative 'Aenean'. Donatus' Vita mentions that Vergil mixed
Greek and Latin names in together, he may be thinking of such grammatical
mixtures as this as well as mythological superimpositions.] In this brief
interlude we see Dido in a silent, mime-like sequence, showing her city under
construction to a person who is not there, explaining and pointing to the works
in progress, to the walls, the towers, suddenly starting to speak as if to her
lover beside her, and then stopping. She is as if at some distance, a middle to
long shot, a pathetic figure gesturing and explaining something to someone - -
-in vain.
77 NVNC EADEM LABENTE DIE CONVIVIA QVAERIT
ILIACOSQVE ITERVM DEMENS AVDIRE LABORES
EXPOSCIT PENDETQVE ITERVM NARRANTIS AB ORE.
POST VBI DIGRESSI LVMENQVE OBSCVRA VICISSIM
LVNA PREMIT SVADENTQVE CADENTIA SIDERA SOMNOS
SOLA DOMO MAERET, VACUA STRATISQVE RELICTIS
INCVBAT....
As day falls, her only thoughts are to get back to the partying atmosphere of
the night before. In line 78, Vergil does an effect that he is specially good
at: All the words in the line are flat and colorless, except one word,
'demens', which stands out in contrast and totally dominates the line. This
device is strikingly imaginative and Vergil uses it often..... Notice how
by saying 'exposcit' (not just 'poscit'), Vergil intensely focuses our
attention on Dido, who aggressively "demands" the story again, but as soon as
it starts she "hangs" on every word that Aeneas says with a starry-eyed stare.
She may not be actually "demented' in English,(which is different from
Vergil's 'demens') but she is certainly well on the way to losing control.
We all recall the pensive thoughts we feel after the party is over, as we look
around the room where life and laughter and talk was present such a short time
before, as we notice the half-empty glasses and dishes and paper napkins, all
those signs of people who are no longer there. The quiet of this afterview
makes the party seem like a dream. Vergil gets this tone perfectly, he notices
the moon which now lights the room differently, thrusting as if with great
effort its weak light down through a thick evening fog which has suddenly
appeared.... Line 80 is intensely mysterious, that cloudy moon seems to have
difficulty "pushing" its light down, and then as we see the stars to one side,
we remember that it is time to go to sleep. But not for Dido, for her it is
just grief in an empty house. She finds the coverlets on which Aeneas has been
so recently reclining, and curls up on them. (Again, all verbs with the root
'cumb-, cub-' have sexual as well as sleeping associations; note incubus beside
succuba.) Poor lady, all she has left from the party is the bedspreads on which
HE was lying!
83 INCVBAT... ILLVM ABSENS ABSENTEM AVDITQVE VIDETQVE
The pulse of the two "absents", followed by two 'que's, is unmistakable, it is
nothing but heartache-beat.
84 AVT GREMIO ASCANIVM, GENITORIS IMAGINE CAPTA
DETINET, INFANDVM SI FALLERE POSSIT AMOREM.
Dido's pathetic substitution of a the son for the man she loves is what
emotionally desperate people do. Overdoing the situation, she "detains" the
boy, who is probably thinking of getting away and back to his games. (We will
see him soon playing like a boy in the hunting scene, his "toy" is a real, live
horse, and he enjoys it like a real boy.) In line 85 we again have a colorless
line with that one strange word: 'nefandum', literally "unspeakable [ne + fari,
fandum], unspeakably evil". It is true, this is something she cannot speak of,
and it is cursing her mind.
86 NON COEPTAE SVRGVNT TVRRES, NON ARMA IVVENTVS
EXERCET, PORTVSVE AVT PROPVGNACVLA BELLO
TVTA PARANT. PENDENT OPERA INTERRVPTA MINAEQUE
MURORVM INGENTES AEQVATAQVE MACHINA CAELO
The city is without activity and without people, everything has stopped just as
it was, deserted and still. In the brief visual tour of the town, activity is
indicated everywhere by the winches (machinae) and half finished construction,
but there is absolutely no motion. Walking through excavated Pompeii one feels
the same kind of staticness, here was a city teeming with human life and
emotion, now as still and silent as the grave, or a museum, which of course is
what it has come to be. The difference is that Pompeii is an ancient city to
modern tourists, whereas ancient Carthage is here seen as a modern city in the
process of being constructed..... [The word 'mina' is used in its original
meaning of "weight, ponderous rock mass, overhanging boulder", the common
meaning "threat", is transferred ]... ['Machina' is the Doric form of the word
(with the long -a- rather than Attic -e- as in "mechanical"), a term borrowed
along with the equipment from South Italian or Sicilian sources. It probably
refers to a construction winch with a tall tower and ropes, like the derrick
winches which we use in city construction to this day. Ancient engineering was
well developed, boatyards produced ships up to 600 feet long, and such winching
equipment would be necessary to move them around.]
The passage from line 90 to l28 is a curious interlude, which shifts our
attention to "heaven". Vergil treats us to a dialogue between Juno, the
champion of Dido and the Carthaginians, and Venus, backer of the Trojan and
hence Latin line. Traces of tales of a Trojan origin for Rome have been found
in Roman storytelling, but they are thin and do not constitute a real religious
system. If anything, Juno is to Romans more of a Roman deity, since she is
concerned with marriage, childbirth and other functions in which womens' role
is important. If we recall that Vergil was in early life deeply interested in
Lucretian-Epicurean thought, we should consider the contrastive portrayal of
Juno and Venus as parallel to Lucretius' depiction of Venus and Mars. These two
deities are "reformed" from the earlier roles of the Greek Olympian gods, and
in a removed and airy way they serve as representatives of two contrasting
forces: that of peace, quiet and generative growth, which Venus represents, as
against the disruptive, divisive and aggressive spirit which Mars stands for.
Lucretius takes these to be basic forces in the real world of nature, and it is
interesting to note how close his philosophical dyad is to the ancient Chinese,
Yin and Yang. As Yang disturbs, disrupts, condenses and hardens, so Yin
pacifies, smoothes, spreads out and softens and diffuses. These functions are
largely the roles of Venus and Mars. If we examine the passage before us in the
Aeneid in a similar light, we will see that the male, aggressive, dominating
force of Juno is offered as a contrast to the gentler, feminine aspects of
Venus' role. Thinking of this passage as philosophical in essence rather than
purely mythological in the Classical vein, Juno's short-term victory as the
passage ends will be doomed to failure by the specifications of her "Martian"
role, while Venus' forces are life-giving and procreative, hence despite
setbacks, they will be the ultimate winner.
Seen from a human and social point of view, the scene represents a contest
between two familiar personality types, the forceful and dominating woman who
operates on a basis of intelligence and conviction, in contrast to the person
with winning wiles, the Lady of Persuasion and sexuality. Although both actors
here are female, they should not be seen as representing specifically female
forces, for Yang Juno and Yin Venus transcend gender. The question is again
philosophical, does drive always prevail, or are there situations in which
softness conquers? Various schools of the Eastern martial arts take this
problem seriously, and usually prescribe some softness along with the hard, not
only as philosophically satisfying, but physically effective.
90 QVAM SIMVL AC TALI PERSENSIT PESTE TENERI
CARA IOVIS CONIVNX NEC FAMAM OBSTARE FVRORI
TALIBVS ADGREDITVR VENEREM SATVRNIA DICTIS:
EGREGIAM VERO LAVDEM ET SPOLIA AMPLIA REFERTIS
TVQVE PVERQVE TVVS. MAGNVM ET MEMORABILE NOMEN
VNA DOLO DIVOM SI FEMINA VICTA DVORVM EST.
NEC ME ADEO FALLIT VERITAM TE MOENIA NOSTRA
SVSPECTAS HABVUISSE DOMOS KARTHAGINIS ALTAE.
98 SED QVIS ERIT MODVS AVT QUO NUNC CERTAMINE TANTO?
QVIN POTIVS PACEM AETERNAM PACTOSQVE HYMENAEOS
EXERCEMUS? HABES TOTA QVOD MENTE PETISTI:
ARDET AMANS DIDO TRAXITQVE PER OSSA FVROREM.
COMMVNEM HVNC POPVLVM PARIBVSQVE REGAMUS
AVSPICIIS. LICEAT PHRYGIO SERVIRE MARITO
DOTALISQVE TVAE TYRIOS PERMITTERE DEXTRAE.
At line 90 Vergil uses the word 'peste', or "disease. plague", for love, which
calls to mind the Servian Life's reference to Vergil's sexual 'morbus'. Love
can be either a plague or a disease, in different circumstances, but only
someone who recognizes from experience the details of amorous pathology, is
able to delineate it vividly in a poem..... In 91 alliteration yokes
together two alliterative words, 'fama' and 'furor', despite their contrary
meanings, in one phrase..... Line 93 and 94 drip sarcasm: " Large praise and
big booty you have, you and that brat of yours...." and Cara Juno continues
with heavy phonetics in nasal mode: 'magnum et memorabile nomen'. This acoustic
rumble, enough to shake mountains elsewhere, is intended to shake Venus'
courage, for Juno never does anything lightly. She drives everything home hard,
but Venus ignores it easily. June rages on: "One woman against two gods.. it's
not fair!" This familiar human argument, which one hears at recess in every
schoolyard, defines sporting chances and a sense of fair play!... Lines
96-97 move us into a political area sensitive to Romans, since Carthage is
still the name for the archtypical enemy. But Vergil pointedly uses the
adjective 'alta' with the "walls of Carthage", although every Roman schoolboy
who had read the first lines of the Aeneid knew that the adjective 'alta' was
the personal property of Rome ['Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae
'(Aeneid !,7)]. It is curious that line 97 begins with the word 'suspectas',
with its root-meaning of "looking up (from under) at... ", but the line ends
with 'altae', the walls of lofty Carthage. Squinting up at the high walls, one
feels (as the pun intimates) something is certainly wrongheaded.
At line 98 Juno makes an appearance of throwing in the towel: "Why fight, why
not work together in peace?" But at line l00, we can see how much she really
despises her pretty adversary: " Now you have everything you always wanted...
. she is madly in love... " Is that all Venus wanted, is Venus nothing more
than crazy passion? We know that Vergil read and valued Lucretius, so we know
that Vergil must have known better.... Under the heading of "our working
together", comes the rubric: "She will serve (sic) a Phrygian husband, and put
the cash-down dowry in your hand". Imagine Queen Dido serving spiced dormice
and Falernan to a recumbent Aeneas on his dining couch! Imagine trying to bribe
a goddess with a promise of cash dowry paid into her hand!..... So ends
Juno's impassioned speech, with lots of force and drive, but absolutely no
finesse.
l05 OLLI (SENSIT ENIM SIMVLATA MENTE LOCVTAM
QVO REGNVM ITALIAE LIBYCAS AVERTERET ORAS)
SIC CONTRA INGRESSA VENVS: QVIS TALIA DEMENS
ABNVAT AVT TECVM MALIT CONTENDERE BELLO?
[' Olli' is an archaic alternate to 'illi' dat. sg. of 'ille'.] That one
important word, 'simula mente', shows that Venus understands everything that is
going on. [Note that in the Romanic languages the adverb comes from this
combination of an adjective with the fem. noun 'mens' in the ablative. Even in
Latin this can sometimes be taken as one word, 'simulatamente'.] In l07, Venus
asks " who would be so 'demens' (the word we have previously used for Dido) as
to fight with Juno; let good luck follow what you suggest" Fair and placating
words are always her style.
l09 SI MODO QVOD MEMORAS FACTVM FORTVNA SEQVATVR!
SED FATIS INCERTA FEROR, SI IVPPITER VNAM
ESSE VELIT TYRIIS VRBEM TROIAQVE PROFECTIS
MISCERIVE PROBET POPVLOS AVT FOEDERA IVNGI.
Venus does have a light sense of humor, she makes fun of Juno's heavy-duty
phrase 'magnum et memorabile nomen' by imitating it phonetically with 'si modo
quod memoras'. She is however not sure what the Fates want, ' fatis incerta
feror', and says "I don't really know about such things (as fate and politics
and miscegenation), alas! " Being unsure, uncertain, hesitant and cautious are
characteristics of both Dido and Venus, not unfittingly... The problems she
mentions are of wider concern than in Aeneas' story. The Roman of the first
century B.C. was concerned with changes in the old Roman population, and a
century later he would see the Tigris flowing up the Tiber in an unprecedented
wave of Near Eastern immigration. Miscigenation would be soon enough a part of
the Roman experience, especially as Christians appeared on the scene, but it
was not going to come naturally or easily. Vergil's line provokes thoughts in
the Roman reader's mind, beyond the framework of the story.... Now Venus
continues:" But you are his wife, you know about these things, it's right for
you to test his will.... (naturally) by entreating." And she closes her
little response in the style of an archtypical Marilyn Monroe, with what she
knows Greco-Roman women are expected to say: "You go on ahead, andI'll follow."
The answer is typically Juno-esque: "Just leave that business to me! "
115 MECVM ERIT ISTE LABOR. NUNC QVA RATIONE QVOD INSTAT
CONFIERI POSSIT, PAVCIS (ADVERTA) DOCEBO.
Assuming the tough role of a Roman-type administrator, Juno goes right to
business: "Now just how/ what remains/ can best be effected / in brief terms /
note this well/ I will explain." It is interesting to note the breaking up of
the message into two word phrases, with a snotty "Pay attention!" inserted into
that last bit of the instructions. Apparently Romans, when giving orders, tried
to make everything perfectly clear and explicit, even to fools, in which
context such speech as we have here would make good sense. we see a certain
amount of this kind of administrative wording in Caesar's remarkable
Commentaries. The statement: "The Army is a system devised by geniuses to be
operated by idiots" is an American notion, but probably applicable to the Roman
administrative world.
ll7 VENATVM AENEAS VNAQVE MISERRIMA DIDO
IN NEMVS IRE PARANT VBI PRIMOS CRASTINVS ORTVS
EXTVLERIT TITAN RADIISQVE RETEXERIT ORBEM.
[Venatum is a supine in -um, one of those forms they mention in passing in the
grammar books. It is "like an infinitive" but with purpose (which the
infinitive never has), so can be best translated : "to hunt".] [In l2l the
'alae' are right and left hand lines of "beaters" who drive the animals out
into the open where they can be killed by the hunters. Hunting in the ancient
world was usually done this way, often with nets to entangle the animals before
killing them. Deer hunting in New England seems to give a much fairer chance to
the animal., especially as the hunters have a way of shooting each other.]
Dido, earlier called 'pulcherrima' is suddenly seen as 'miserrima'. In terms of
the story, this word is prophetic, but it also calls attention to the fact that
Dido, for all her beauty and trappings and fancy retinue, is sick at heart.
Being sad in the middle of festivities is the certainly the saddest state of
all.... The hunt starts early, we see the Dawn come up again. But dawns
associated with Dido seem to be special, they are brocaded, difficult to grasp,
and they have a strange reticence about them, perhaps because they are to be
taken as "Dido's dawns". The mythological key for connecting Dawn with Dido is
the story that Dawn arises each morning fleeing the bed of her husband
Tithonus, to whom Zeus gave immortality but not youth. ['Retexerit' meaning
"uncovers" is a linguistic necessity, since 'in-' can mean "not" but also
"really, intensively", which are opposites. The Romans used 're-' as a
replacement for 'in-' (negative) in a number of compounds.] Dido too is fleeing
the memory of an old love, Sychaeus, who didn't even have to good luck to get
immortality!.... The storm is being prepared with all the effects Juno can
think up, the following lines have the quality of watching a storm gather from
a high-flying plane.
l20 HIS EGO NIGRANTEM COMMIXTA GRANDINE NIMBVM
DVM TREPIDANT ALAE SALTVSQVE INDAGINE CINGVNT
DESVPER INFVNDAM ET TONITRV CAELVM OMNE CIEBO
DIFFVGIENT COMITES ET NOCTE TEGVNTVR OPACA
SPELVNCAM DIDO DVX ET TROIANVS EANDEM
DEVENIENT. ADERO ET, TVA SI MIHI CERTA VOLVNTAS,
CONUBIO IVNGAM STABILI PROPRIAMQVE DICABO.
HIC HYMENAEVS ERIT.... !
At line l25 Juno's real purpose appears, the scene is being staged as
background for a wedding ceremony (of sorts), which is to take place after a
storm and in a cave. Juno uses the same line which she had used when bribing
Aeolus, King of the Winds, (Aeneid Book 1,73) she apparently has her lines down
pat, like many aggressive people.... Her closing remark is ominous: "That
will be the wedding ceremony!"
127... NON ADVERSATA PETENTI
ADNVIT ATQVE DOLIS RISIT CYTHEREA REPERTIS.
Venus agrees, and giggles ('risit') at the scheme which has just been revealed
to her ('dolis... repertis). Every educated person in Rome knew Sappho's
famous epithet of Aphrodite as 'dolo-ploka', "weaver-of-wiles", which
experience in living indicates to contain a certain measure of truth.
Remembering that Venus-Aphrodite is a goddess of procreation first and
foremost, any wiles which aid fecundity are legitimate in her book. Venus is
not blind, just passive for the nonce, and she prefers being agreeable.
129 OCEANVM INTEREA SVRGENS AVRORA RELIQVIT
Again we have a simple, and direct Homeric sunrise, not one of Dido's
complicated, hesitant and uncertain dawns spreading itself over the waking
world. Vergil does know and show the difference.
Now comes the remarkable scene (lines l30-l59) in which the preparation for the
hunt and then the hunt itself are portrayed. The "preparation for the hunt" is
described like a painting, it is static, with few cues to indicate movement
.Everything is seen in great detail, the men, dogs and horses are poised for
action, and this starts with the slow, royal processional as the retinues of
Dido and of Aeneas each in turn move forward. (For anyone who may chance to be
near New York City, a few hours spent observing the late-medieval Unicorn
Tapestries hung in the Cloisters Museum uptown, with Vergil text in hand, will
be a wonderful experience. The tapestries are fascinating in their detail of
craftsmanship, they also illustrate the kind of visual perception which Vergil
employs in this scene, which is a close parallel The text of Vergil would have
been well known to the designers, if not the weavers, of the Unicorn scene,
beyond that there seems to be an inner similarity of outlook and stance.)
l30 IT PORTIS IVBARE EXORTO DELECTA IVVENTUS
RETIA RARA, PLAGAE, LATO VENABVLA FERRO,
MASSYLIQVE RVVNT EQVITES ET ODORA CANVM VIS.
['Iubar' is used for the first gleam of daylight, rather than Dawn ('Aurora')
which is the whole process of sunrise.] The phrase 'it portis' is striking in
its blunt directness, the phrase suggests a great assortment of men, horses,
dogs, and equipment of every sort tumbling madly out of the city gates as they
are opened. [ Vergil starts a number of lines with short words like 'it, id",
he even uses monosyllables as the introductory word in Books 4, 6, 7, 8, and
disyllabic 'atque' in 9;which perhaps was part of what the Donatan Life's
authorities criticized as his "new tastelessness, neither in fancy nor stripped
style, but something in between, which hence escapes notice". To our ears, this
would sound like ordinary speech, which we are used to in our poetry, but
apparently Augustan Romans were not sure about the propriety of daily words in
verse.]... The effect of these two simple words is striking: "There pours
through the gates, at first light, the following: etc." It is almost like the
confused profusion of objects in Picasso's paintings from the Synthetic Cubist
style, these things are thrown pele-mele, the nets, spears, horses, dogs, all
going out of the city in a mixed route, crowding through the city-gates in a
jumble.... ['Retia' are always called 'rara', which we might translate best
as "reticulated", but the Romans can use 'rarus' in ways parallel to the
Elizabethan "rare old Ben Jonson': in fact Propertius does say: 'Rara Cynthia
mea 'st... ]'
l33 REGINAM THALAMO CVNCTANTEM AD LIMINA PRIMI
POENORUM EXPECTANT, OSTROQVE INSIGNIS ET AURO
STAT SONIPES AC FRENA FEROX SPVMANTIA MANDIT
[When a Roman thought of the Poeni, did he subliminally think of the Latin word
'poena' meaning "punishment", such as the Romans meted out to the Poeni. in the
punishing Punic Wars?] ['Soni-pes' means "sounding-footed-one", and as a
traditional poetism going back to the third century authors, it is not Vergil's
invention.] The contrast of the queen high above making up in her royal
chamber, with the restrained activity of men impatiently waiting to be off,
suggests something common in human experience.
The focus shifts to a palace window, = we see the Queen "dallying in her
chamber" while nobly titled and richly garbed Phoenician courtiers await her
descent in the courtyard below. (The Unicorn tapestries do this scene to
perfection.).... Attention shifts, to a magnificent high-strung horse,
decorated with cloth into which are worked mother-of-pearl and gold thread, who
is stamping his feet in impatience, biting the foaming bit.
136 TANDEM PROGREDITVR MAGNA STIPANTE CATERVA
SIDONIAM PICTO CHLAMYDEM CIRCUMDATA LIMBO
CVI PHARETRA EX AVRO, CRINES NODANTVR IN AURUM
AVREA PVRPVREAM SVBNECTIT FIBVLA VESTEM
At long last ('tandem') the Queen has ceased with her toilette, she moves
forward, accompanied by a vast encircling crowd. The motion is slow, a royal
procession rather than a hunting party at this stage, above all it is regal
(line l36), since she is wrapped in a Sidonian chlamys (imported from the Near
Eastern Phoenicians) with an embroidered fringe. [S. remarks the chlamys was of
Asiatic origin, the word itself, with its -ch- and -y-, marks itself as foreign
and Greek] ['Circumdata' is "wrapped around (with), enveloped in..., not just
"dressed in".] Her quiver, the 'pharetra' (again Greek), reminds us that it is
a hunting party, but it is made of pure gold, her hair is pinned up in gold
combs, a gold brooch under her chin secures her cloak of Tyrian purple. [Note
that in the phrase ' in aurum' (in with the accusative) her locks are knotted
"into " the gold threads, like the Vestal Virgins' hair tied into red wool
fillets. Dido hoever, is no Vestal and she is certainly no virgin.] (Tyrian
purple is an inordinately expensive dye, produced at Tyre in droplets from
myriad shellfish, it has an unmistakable, true-purple hue, and automatically
indicates royalty.) The slow motion forward, the mass of attendants, and the
richness of the decoration, mark DIdo as a queen in the Asiatic style. Remember
that to the Romans of the first century B.C., the words king and queen held bad
memories from the period of Etruscan domination four centuries earlier; even in
Horace's boyhood, when playing tag, the one we call "it" was called 'rex', and
Cicero boils with rage when he thinks of rich Cleopatra's great estate outside
Rome,. calling her merely "regina" as a mark of derision. Romans would see this
scene in Book IV as primarily dangerous, and secondly decorative.
Turning now to Aeneas and his group:
140 NECNON ET PHRYGII COMITES ET LAETVS IVLVS
INCEDUNT. IPSE ANTE ALIOS PVLCHERRIMVS OMNIS
INFERT SE SOCIUM AENEAS ATQVE AGMINA IVNGIT.
['Nec-non' is equivalent to "also", two negatives apparently making a
positive.] Iulus is "happy" because he is still a kid, and has a childlike,
natural enthusiasm for going on an outing, especially when it is a hunt....
. "Pulcherrimus" matches Aeneas up with 'pulcherrima Dido" mentioned just
before. If Dido is decked out and dressed out to kill, the Roman must not look
like a country-bred clod (shades of Donatus' criticism of Vergil's personal
manner).... Notice in line 141 how slowly and formally Aeneas moves. ' The
word 'incedere' refers not only to walking forward, but advancing with the
formal Roman "incessus", a gait which the serious and somewhat pretentious
Romans adopted as the mark of civilized man. Perhaps the lengthy robes of the
toga made this to some degree advisable, since tripping on your own garments
would have been seen as a most unfavorable "omen". Now Aeneas slowly brings
himself into position, and the two lines of mounted hunters, the Phoenicians
and Trojans, join and fuse into one hunting procession.
If Aeneas is handsome, then exactly how? The following passage, again to be
taken not as a verbal mythological "aside", but as a montaged scene full of
vivid color and visualness, moves us into that fairer and brighter world of
mythology and imagination, in which Aeneas is seen as an Apollo:
l43 QVALIS VBI HIBERNAM LYCIAM XANTHI FLVENTA
DESERIT AC DELUM MATERNAM INVISIT APOLLO
INSTAVRATQVE CHOROS, MIXTIQVE ALTARIA CIRCVM
CRETESQVE DRYOPESQVE FREMVNT PICTIQVE AGATHYRSI.
IPSE IVGIS CYNTHI GRADITVR MOLLIQVE FLVENTEM
FRONDE PREMIT CRINEM ATQVE IMPLICAT AVRO.
TELA SONANT VMERIS.... HAUD ILLO SEGNIOR IBAT
AENEAS, TANTVM EGREGIO DECVS ENITET ORE.
The passage, rich in visual and associative detail, uses the same series of
motifs which the poet has used just before in describing Dido, so that Aeneas
may not seem in any way a lesser personage. If Dido ritually restores the day,
Aeneas ritually restores the dance, if she has a "painted" (embroidered) border
around her garment, he has painted Agathyrsi all around him. Her hair is bound
back into gold strings, he lightly brushes his locks back with branch, as an
insouciant Greek statue might, and then binds it in gold. She has a gold
pharetra, he does it better since "the arrows clang on his shoulders" in the
quiver, exactly as in Homer (Iliad 1,46). Dido may have Sidonian antecedents,
but she can never cite Homer as part of her royal background. The Roman is
perfectly well aware which, in fact, is better.
Now that they have proceeded to the forest, the scene changes and the hunt
begins in earnest.
151 POSTQVAM ALTOS VENTVM IN MONTIS ATQVE INVIA LVSTRA
ECCE FERAE SAXI DEIECTAE VERTICE CAPRAE
DECVRRERE IUGIS. ALIA DE PARTE PATENTIS
TRANSMITTVNT CVRSV CAMPOS ATQVE AGMINA CERVI
PVLVERVLENTA FVGA GLOMERANT MONTISQVE RELINQVONT
{Three grammatical points may be mentioned here together, for those who are
less experienced in Latin: "ventum" is an impersonal pppl., "when it was come",
a normal and uncolored expression, like Fr. 'on va' or Germ. "man geht',
denoting a general or mass going., with 'est' understood.... 'Montis' is the
alternate form beside -es for acc. pl. 3 rd decl., a form used as often in
poetry as the regularly taught form, perhaps more often... 'Decurrere', which
looks like some sort of infinitive to beginners, is the alternate form in 3 pl.
pf. beside -erunt, used frequently, and a form which it is important to
recognize quickly. ]
The scene has changed, they are coming to the mountains and the pathless
(invia) haunts of wild animals, looking up they see mountain sheep "dashing
themselves' down from high rocks, exactly as bighorn sheep still do in
Yellowstone..... In the open country the deer in a herd are wheeling in
flight, disappearing in clouds of dust. Vergil has indeed watched the
countryside with a careful eye.
156 AT PVER ASCANIVS MEDIIS IN VALLIBVS ACRI
GAVDET EQVO, IAMQVE HOS CVRSV, IAM PRAETERIT ILLOS
SPVMANTEMQVE DARI PECORA INTER INERTIA VOTIS
OPTAT APRVM AVT FVLVVM DESCENDERE MONTE LEONEM.
Again a quick and deft glance at the adolescent boy, behaving with traits of
kiddishness which apparently endure through the centuries. Just as our kids
"horse" a motorcycle or jalopy, Iulus "horses" a horse, zipping now ahead of
this one and then that one. Had equestrian insurance been required for the
ancients, Ascanius would have had high premiums until he was twenty-five, for
apparent reasons. [S. notes correctly that the regular conjunction used twice
would have been 'modo... modo', but Vergil uses 'iam' twice in its place. By
the way, 'iam' is a favorite word with Vergil, Merguet lists more than six
tightly packed columns of its use, more than for any other monosyllabic word of
its type except 'nunc'. Both words show a positive interest in establishing a
"present" context, indicating the reality of the moment. ].... Iulus prays
(optat with dari, a regular formula for a wish) for some "real" animals to
appear, a boar or a lion, as against these "cattle" (tame cattle is what he,
insolently, calls deer and other ungulates). There are only four lines in this
little sequence, yet Vergil captures perfectly the spirit of an adolescent
Roman boy. Since he is not overburdened with historical awareness about a
remote period, as we might well be in his place, he can mix and match the
ancient and contemporary freely, thus creating a sense of life and present-ness
in stories set in the remote past. Vergil often seems to be talking about
someone he has seen and knows well even when writing a story veiled in ancient
myth; Aeolus in Book 1 (lines 55-80) must be the portrait of a minor public
official, who hems and haws and scrapes and bows, and finally gets thoroughly
confused about what his exact responsibilities and duties are. When Vergil's
patrimony and later his farm were in the courts, he must have seen such people
again and again. Studying Vergil's mythical stories, we often get glimpses of
real people, but the poet would have never wanted to work them into the story
in realistic detail as an Ibsen or Arthur Miller did. Only at rare moments
when reading ancient authors, do we get an example of a "slice of life"
writing, as in some of Catullus' experimental poems, or in the Mimes of
Herondas. The man in the street had not yet taken his place in the formal
dramatis personae of literature.
160 INTEREA MAGNO MISCERO MURMURE CAELUM
INCIPIT, INSEQVITVR COMMIXTA GRANDINE NIMBUS
ET TYRII COMITES PASSIM ET TROIANA IVVENTVS
DARDANIUSQVE NEPOS VENERIS DIVERSA PER AGROS
TECTA METU PETIERE. RVVNT DE MONTIBVS AMNES.
SPELUNCAM DIDO DVX ET TROIANVS EANDEM
DEVENIVNT.....
In line 160, Vergil employs the grand sonorities of nature again for a storm,
these are actually the ones he had used before in Book I (lines 53- 63) to such
good effect,. The series [-m-,-n-,--r- and finally -l-+-m- in 'caelum], roars
and rumbles with a thunderous effect which can only presage ill, especially
when the sounds crack suddenly with 'incipit' [three front vowels with the
three ranks of unvoiced stop-consonants, the brittlest possible combination in
the Latin language]. It is interesting that when thunders roars and the hunters
run for shelter, it is in farm-houses (tecta) that they seek to try to get out
of the rain, a homely touch worthy of a minor Dutch master. The streams rush
down from the mountains, then as now, in summer flash floods.... "They find"
('deveniunt')purely by chance the same cave, but, the emphatic position of the
verb shows how really un-chancy this chance meeting is. Vergil delights in
subtle interplays of two threads of thought.. As our eyes and minds lift
upwards to the thunder and lightening, the primordial deities of nature take
over:
156 (DEVENIVNT.)... PRIMA ET TELLVS ET PRONVBA IUNO
DANT SIGNVM. FVLSERE IGNES ET CONSCIVS AETHER
CONUBIIS, SVMMOQVE VLVLARVNT VERTICE NYMPHAE.
The rain-flooded earth and the roaring sky above turn into God Earth while
above stands Marital Juno, who (emphatically) gives the sign (another crack of
Joycean extended thunder). Fires in the sky, and the bowl of heaven itself,
take up their roles as legal witnesses to this unholy marriage. {Vergil
actually calls it 'conubium', a mixed-marriage, which is the correct word.).
Mountain Spirits howl on the ridge. ['Ululare' is used of the hoot of owls and
the howling of dogs and wolves, all these art bad signs for the omen-conscious
Romans.] The nature-scene is brilliantly illuminated by the flash of
lightening, and the poet proceeds with his "third eye" assessment of the
situation, which sounds less like Vergil's poetical persona than the very voice
of God:
169 ILLE DIES PRIMVS LETI PRIMVSQVE MALORVM
CAUSA FVIT, NEQVE ENIM SPECIE FAMAVE MOVETVR
NEC IAM FVRTIVOM DIDO METITATVR AMOREM.
CONIVGIVM VOCAT, HOC PRAETEXIT NOMINE CULPAM.
[Furtivom is the correct Latin orthography of the Augustan period, which
maintained that after -u-, a following -u- must retain the old spelling -o-.
Hence we write 'Septimios' in Catullus 45, 'equos' as n. sg. in our texts, more
correctly EQVOS, although Cicero would have written 'ecus'.] The first line and
a half has an authentic judgmental sound which might come from the hollow chest
of an Old Testament prophet, or we can associate it with the medieval "Dies
Irae, Dies Illa" [despite the changed gender of the noun], or perhaps even with
Berlioz' orchestration for eight trombones at the back of the hall proclaiming
the day of judgment..... Dido knows it is now all out in the open. She
calls it "marriage". She is not the last person in the world to cover a guilty
conscience by saying "we're going to get married anyway, so... ". but as we
suspected, she will use the wrong legal term and thus contradict the very thing
she is trying to effect. The ominous settings, the storm, the howling of beasts
on the heights, and the cave itself, serve as the worst of omens against her
claim, which she further invalidates by mistaking the legal kind of marriage
bond for another. Heaven and Earth were witnesses to a 'conubium' and nothing
more, so Dido, thinking of love and hoping for marriage and children by Aeneas,
loses again.
Lest this legalism seem trivial, recall that the Romans invested the greatest
part of their collective genius in the structure to which we admiringly look
back to as the Roman System of Law. Perhaps this would not have been so
important to them, had not the world at this time found itself expanding
geometrically and involving widespread Mediterranean business and trade.
Business had to be attended to effectively, and the sum total of transactions
of all kinds was taken to be the basic concern of Law. Lacking a real interest
in scientific medicine, in physics and philosophy, and in most of the arts, the
Romans valued Law, along with the military and public administration, as the
areas in which they literally had to shine. They knew they were no equals for
the Greeks in art, music and even poetry, their contribution would have to be
in some other direction if their reputation was to last. That other direction
was destined to be the Law, and in this area their achievement has endured
through the ages. Roman science gave us nothing but some second-rate
hand-me-downs, Roman literature transmitted a great deal, but little of it is
conceivable without the great Greek antecedents. Roman philosophy presents
nothing more than a survey of Greek thinking, in Lucretius' case housed in some
very lovely poetry, in Seneca's in pedestrian prose. But Roman Law gave us
guidelines for what exact thinking and exact wording could be, and it handed
down a basic framework to use in administering the infinitely more complex
transactions of the modern world.
COMMENTARY TO BOOK
IV
(Note: This commentary was written a number of years ago, before we had
the
options of computer editing, cutting and pasting, and the flexibility of
manipulating copy which we now have inherited. I would write the following
Commentary more succinctly now perhaps....)
We start with the last three lines of Book III, since
they establish a startling contrast with the beginning of Book IV :
7l6 SIC PATER AENEAS INTENTIS OMNIBVS VNVS