(no subject)

[vaznetti]

This was brought on by a comment lizbee made in her journal, but isn't really aimed at her; she's hardly the first person to find Aeneas an unsympathetic character. But I started to wonder about the problem--why this is so--and this brought on the Aeneid rant.

On the one hand, I do understand why people don't like the Aeneid. For one thing, there's the problem of translation. The Aeneid is a poem that is notorious for its untranslatability, and so the majority of readers are left with no way to appreciate the sheer beauty of Vergil's Latin. And even those who are reading in Latin are often in their first years of the language and are spending so much time on the grammar, and reading so slowly, that the style is lost as well.

And that leads to the second problem with appreciating the Aeneid. We tend to read it too young. Here, though, the fault is not in the poem but in ourselves. Aeneas is a hero who gives up everything he has ever wanted or ever will want for a destiny that he doesn't even understand. The scene in Book 8 where he looks at the shield Vulcan has made for him, with its depictions of Rome's future greatness, and delights in their beauty without understanding them is tragic. Especially when compared with his response to the depictions of the Trojan War which he sees in Carthage. They touch him in a way his destiny just doesn't.

As readers, we prefer heroes whose duties don't interfere with their happiness. We want the big romantic ending. We want individualism and self-actualization. (That's why we prefer the Odyssey and Iliad to the Aeneid. Odysseus and Achilles are very modern heroes.) But we're wrong to want these things. Or at least, to want them for Aeneas. Aeneas' sacrifices are what make the poem work: the struggle to found Rome isn't just a struggle against Juno or against the Italians. It's a struggle within Aeneas himself. If it was easy for him to give up everything--if he never complained about what he had to do--it wouldn't be much of a story. But if he simply gave up he wouldn't be much of a hero.

And I think it's worth overcoming our problems with the Aeneid, because it's an important poem. Now more than ever. It's a story about the foundation of a great nation in turmoil and self-sacrifice. Its final lines expose the darkness that lay at the heart of Rome. They warn of the danger of becoming our enemies, in our struggle to overcome them. It isn't a poem with a happy ending, either: Aeneas sacrifices everything and is overcome by anger, and Juno wins. The Trojans disappear from the face of the earth. And yet there's still optimism in it: Virgil takes a hundred years of civil war and somehow finds hope, that most unexpected thing, in them. Rome does survive. The wounds of civil war can be healed.

The Aeneid is almost a tragedy--not in the Aristotelian sense of a hero undone by a fatal flaw but in a looser sense, of humans subject to the whims of merciless powers. But it's only almost a tragedy, and the almost is all bound up in Aeneas and his increasingly desperate attempts to do what he considers right, to maintain some kind of humanity, to hold on to his people and his family. The almost lies in the lacrimae rerum he finds in Carthage, the understanding of human suffering in the face of destiny. And the almost lies in the possibility--only that--that tomorrow will not be as bad as today.

Comments

[k2daisy.livejournal.com]

Well, damn. It's been almost twenty years, but now I'd like to read the Aeneid again. I wish I could still read Latin, but alas, it's been twenty years since I did that, too.

Whose translation would you recommend? I think the guy I liked the best was Robert Fitzgerald (if that's the right name), but I don't know if he translated the Aeneid.

[vaznetti]

I'd say either Fitzgerald or Allen Mandelbaum. I have Rolfe Humphries' translation, which is just horrible. If you can tolerate heroic couplets, there's always Dryden's version, but anything that rhymes can sound like doggerel in English.

[k2daisy.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info. I'll go with Fitzgerald, then. I liked his version of the Odyssey, and I remember hearing him read from his latest translation (can't recall which it was) when I was in high school. He was quite old, but he had so much passion and affection for the material, it was impossible not to become interested.

Much like it is in reading your comments on various Greek epics. I'm with Spica - I wish I'd had you as my classics instructor when I was in school; I might not have stopped studying them when I did. :)

[spican.livejournal.com]

Wow, Vanzetti. I wish I'd had you as a teacher when we did the classics, that's for sure! I think 'rant' isn't the right word for such an interesting and passionate defense of the work. You actually make me *want* to go back to the Aeneid and approach it from this angle - well done!

I definitely think you're right about reading this (and other classical texts as well) too young. And you have a very good point re. translations. Often (within my linguistic sphere anyway), the Greek and Latin classics are translated by highly acclaimed writers who do not know these languages themselves, but base their translations on verbatim translations of the Latin/Greek text and various well-reputed translations in the more generally accessible languages like French, German, Spanish and English. It's a very roundabout way of getting to the heart and beauty of a piece of fiction.

[maidenjedi]

All I can do is nod with Kristen and Spica. I never liked the Aeneid (we read it as a companion to the Iliad in my senior AP English class, and skipped it in my world lit class last fall), and part of that was because of the history of the time period (I am not Augustus' biggest fan). However, I'd like to reread it and get a better sense of it, because Vergil is so fascinating and the classics in general are so important in fathoming modern literature and myth (imho).

I do have a question, though. It was my understanding that the Emperor commissioned the Aeneid, and when I was first taught the poem there was a lot of class discussion about the characterizations within as a result. Is that true, did Augustus commission Vergil to write the Aeneid as a Roman Iliad, to strengthen the vision he had of his Empire? Or am I way off base and should stick to analyzing fascist propaganda?

[vaznetti]

It's true that Augustus wanted a Latin epic that would reflect his vision of Rome, but he didn't commision the Aeneid in any meaningful sense of the word. Vergil could have refused--Horace, who was even more closely tied to the regime, did so, and the refusal to write an epic became a topos in Latin elegaic poetry. Augustus certainly didn't dictate the subject or treatment of the poem, although Vergil did want Augustus to like it. But it certainly isn't an unrelentingly cheerful view of Roman history and culture. After all, Aeneas is fighting against the Italians, but tota Italia was one of Octavian's slogans. It's a kind of civil war in miniature, and it ends with Aeneas succumbing to furor

(I am not Augustus' biggest fan).

Go you! I'm forever surprised by the number of people who think that Augustus' success means that he must have been right. This is why I prefer Cicero--at least he had some limits.

You might be interested to know that there's a school of interpretation which sees the Aeneid as an anti-Augustan poem, a poem which calls into question the presuppositions on which Augustus' notion of Rome's greatness is based. Part of it is that although the poem does make it clear that founding Rome was a great struggle, it never makes it clear that the struggle was worth the sacrifice. I'm not sure that I buy the full pessimistic reading, because I think that Virgil is essentially optimistic about Rome. But because he doesn't know for sure that everything will work out, a certain amount of doubt creeps in.

Because I'm an academic, I can even give you bibliography: W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible, which just blew me away when I read it.

Or am I way off base and should stick to analyzing fascist propaganda?

Have you ever read Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution? It's about Augustus' (then, Octavian's) rise to power, and it was written in 1939 and the subtext is all about Fascism--it's Octavian as Mussolini, and although Mussolini would have approved Syme doesn't mean it as a compliment. He sees Octavian's rise as the success of a (failry thuggish) faction within the Roman political class. Anyway, no one ever reads the whole thing, but you might check it out of the library and glance at a couple of chapters if you ever get interested in that kind of thing.

[maidenjedi]

Thank you for helping clear that up! I will definitely be looking into the works you recommended in the break between semesters (I'm hopelessly Hermione; when in doubt, go to the library). Haven't read the Syme book, but I've certainly heard of the theory, when people try to prove that fascism was inherent to Italian culture and things like that.

My main problem with the Aeneid was the treatment of women in it, and I think that reflects Augustus more than anything else in the work. I've always thought of his reign as being focused on getting back to a more "conservative" Rome; he viewed Julius Caesar as great for the public's sake, but personally thought that excess brought him down. Same goes for Antony, and like any good Roman Augustus believed that it was outside influence that brought him down. Namely, of course, Cleopatra. When I first read the Aeneid, that's what I saw in Dido. A temptation that would bring Aeneas down if he let her influence him, that would corrupt Rome before it had even been built. I've never thought of that as Vergil's intent, necessarily, but something placed there at the behest of the emperor. Or, at the very least, indicative of Roman sentiment following Antony's demise and defeat. Octavian was all about propaganda and he had to be, because Rome hadn't wanted an empire under Caesar and had no reason to want one after his death; the transition from republic to empire would have had to include strong-arming his dissenters and feeding the public a grand vision of his "Pax Romana". I can see how the correlation between fascism and Octavian is made so often (but only because I think that most of those theories come out of a misapprehension of what fascism truly is).

Now, of course, I have a slightly different opinion on the treatment of women in literature, because I know that literature has to be read with a bit of historical perspective. But its hard to tell people that and get them to agree.

[vaznetti]

You were right to see Dido as a kind of Cleopatra; I think that the equation of Dido with Cleopatra means that Dido seems much more sympathetic to us than she would have to a Roman reader. For them it would be a bit like suggesting a plausible romance with Stalin. If Stalin were sexy, anyway. But I'm not sure that's all down to Augustus; I think Book 4 is the turning point for the poem as a whole, and I don't think that Virgil would have put an episode there, which is so obviously important, if it wasn't something he was committed to. In fact it's a section I like very much, because Dido is sympathetic, despite everything, and Aeneas does love her, although he denies her. And leaving her is one of the hardest things he has to do.

Of course, women in the Aeneid aren't really characters--they're standing in for ideas and notions of home and belonging. So Aeneas has to go from Creusa to Dido, leaving them both behind, and ends up with Lavinia, who remains a complete cipher, and has to be so, because Aeneas never really gets home, at least not within the poem.

I can see how the correlation between fascism and Octavian is made so often (but only because I think that most of those theories come out of a misapprehension of what fascism truly is).

And indeed, of what Octavian was really up to. The modern state and the ancient state are so very different that you can't really compare them. (But it's true that Mussolini was a big classicizer--he was all about restoring Rome's greatness, although Roman themes were used by the opposition to his policies as well).