The Aeneid by Robert Fagles Virgil, Bernard Knox Page B
Authors: Robert Fagles Virgil, Bernard Knox
Ads: Link
black- and red-figure vases, which now, as a result of excavations both legal and illegal, adorn the museums of Europe and America.
Excavation has also confirmed that Rome too was for some time under Etruscan occupation or domination, a fact acknowledged by the legends of early Rome and the items of Etruscan origin in Roman religion and especially divination. Among the early kings of Rome, the fifth and the last were called Tarquin, an Etruscan name, the second of whom was expelled and whose reimposition was attempted by Lars Porsenna (an Etruscan name if ever there was one) of Clusium (Chiusi), an important Etruscan city. The attempt was foiled by Horatius’ stand while the bridge over the Tiber was destroyed.
Nonetheless, Virgil (who knew less about the Etruscans than we do) gives us in Book 10 (202-60) a list of the Etruscan chieftains who came “speeding to rescue Troy” (10.259). They all come from cities that we know were Etruscan—Clusium, Cosae, Populonia, the source of the copper from which they made the bronze for weapons and statues, the island of Ilva (Elba), their source of iron, and Pisa, Caere, Pyrgi, and Graviscae. And Virgil includes his own hometown, Mantua. But the catalog of the Etruscans was another opportunity to do what he does so well—to recall in his lines the glories of the Italian countryside, its towns and its history, to celebrate Elba, “the Blacksmiths’ inexhaustible island rife with iron ore” (10.210) or Mantua’s own river, “the Mincius, / son of Father Benacus gowned in gray-green reeds” (10.248-49).
VIRGIL’S AFTERLIFE
Even before it became generally available as a written text, Virgil’s Aeneid was famous. A younger poet, Propertius, wrote in elegiac verse an announcement:
Give way, you Roman writers, give way, Greeks.
Something greater than the Iliad is being born.
(2.34.65-66, trans. Knox)
As copies appeared and multiplied, the Aeneid became the textbook for the Roman school and the medieval school after that. The Roman satyric poet Juvenal, writing in the second century A.D., describes, in Satire 6 (434-35), among the many intolerable wives he catalogs, the one “who as soon as she’s taken her place at dinner is praising Virgil and forgiving [Dido] on her deathbed” (trans. Susanna M. Braund, et seq.). In Satire 7 (226-27) he speaks of schoolboys thumbing a Horace that “gets totally discolored and the soot sticks to your blackened Virgil.” And the poor schoolteacher is liable to be asked questions that eventually a reader of the Aeneid might be able to answer: who was “Anchises’ nurse and . . . the name and birthplace of the stepmother of Anchemolus and how long Acestes lived and how many jars of Sicilian wine he gave to the Trojans” (234-36). And Juvenal is not alone in his knowledge and citation of Virgil. As J. M. Mackail put it in his edition of the Aeneid, published in 1930 (two thousand years after Virgil’s birth; it is dedicated, Principi Poetarum Natalii MM ): “The whole of post-Virgilian Latin literature, in prose as well as in poetry, is saturated with Virgilian quotations, adaptations, and allusions, as much as English literature for the last three hundred years has been with Shakespeare, and even more” (Introduction, p. lxx).
But in addition to its literary supremacy, the Aeneid acquired a semi-religious stature. It became an oracle known as the Sortes Virgilianae, the Virgilian lottery: you took a passage at random and it foretold your future. Often it was consulted in temples, as it was regarded as an oracle; Hadrian and other men who became Roman emperors first learned of their future eminence from this source. And when the English monarch Charles I, barred from London by revolutionary parliamentarians, made Oxford his headquarters during the civil war, he consulted the Virgilian lottery in the Bodleian Library and put his finger by chance on Dido’s curse on Aeneas:
“. . . let him be plagued in war by a nation proud
Excavation has also confirmed that Rome too was for some time under Etruscan occupation or domination, a fact acknowledged by the legends of early Rome and the items of Etruscan origin in Roman religion and especially divination. Among the early kings of Rome, the fifth and the last were called Tarquin, an Etruscan name, the second of whom was expelled and whose reimposition was attempted by Lars Porsenna (an Etruscan name if ever there was one) of Clusium (Chiusi), an important Etruscan city. The attempt was foiled by Horatius’ stand while the bridge over the Tiber was destroyed.
Nonetheless, Virgil (who knew less about the Etruscans than we do) gives us in Book 10 (202-60) a list of the Etruscan chieftains who came “speeding to rescue Troy” (10.259). They all come from cities that we know were Etruscan—Clusium, Cosae, Populonia, the source of the copper from which they made the bronze for weapons and statues, the island of Ilva (Elba), their source of iron, and Pisa, Caere, Pyrgi, and Graviscae. And Virgil includes his own hometown, Mantua. But the catalog of the Etruscans was another opportunity to do what he does so well—to recall in his lines the glories of the Italian countryside, its towns and its history, to celebrate Elba, “the Blacksmiths’ inexhaustible island rife with iron ore” (10.210) or Mantua’s own river, “the Mincius, / son of Father Benacus gowned in gray-green reeds” (10.248-49).
VIRGIL’S AFTERLIFE
Even before it became generally available as a written text, Virgil’s Aeneid was famous. A younger poet, Propertius, wrote in elegiac verse an announcement:
Give way, you Roman writers, give way, Greeks.
Something greater than the Iliad is being born.
(2.34.65-66, trans. Knox)
As copies appeared and multiplied, the Aeneid became the textbook for the Roman school and the medieval school after that. The Roman satyric poet Juvenal, writing in the second century A.D., describes, in Satire 6 (434-35), among the many intolerable wives he catalogs, the one “who as soon as she’s taken her place at dinner is praising Virgil and forgiving [Dido] on her deathbed” (trans. Susanna M. Braund, et seq.). In Satire 7 (226-27) he speaks of schoolboys thumbing a Horace that “gets totally discolored and the soot sticks to your blackened Virgil.” And the poor schoolteacher is liable to be asked questions that eventually a reader of the Aeneid might be able to answer: who was “Anchises’ nurse and . . . the name and birthplace of the stepmother of Anchemolus and how long Acestes lived and how many jars of Sicilian wine he gave to the Trojans” (234-36). And Juvenal is not alone in his knowledge and citation of Virgil. As J. M. Mackail put it in his edition of the Aeneid, published in 1930 (two thousand years after Virgil’s birth; it is dedicated, Principi Poetarum Natalii MM ): “The whole of post-Virgilian Latin literature, in prose as well as in poetry, is saturated with Virgilian quotations, adaptations, and allusions, as much as English literature for the last three hundred years has been with Shakespeare, and even more” (Introduction, p. lxx).
But in addition to its literary supremacy, the Aeneid acquired a semi-religious stature. It became an oracle known as the Sortes Virgilianae, the Virgilian lottery: you took a passage at random and it foretold your future. Often it was consulted in temples, as it was regarded as an oracle; Hadrian and other men who became Roman emperors first learned of their future eminence from this source. And when the English monarch Charles I, barred from London by revolutionary parliamentarians, made Oxford his headquarters during the civil war, he consulted the Virgilian lottery in the Bodleian Library and put his finger by chance on Dido’s curse on Aeneas:
“. . . let him be plagued in war by a nation proud
Similar Books
